Everwar

Praythee, hark. You have come for a tale, and we have quaffed a peltful of ale. . .

(That rhymes, what joy!)

and the lot falls to Us to tell the tale of Palandrus. Of the desperate battle. Of the loss of our planetary system. We must talk of our people. We must remember. For the lost.

We are here to carry the torch. Y’hearme?

Why each sad memory falls to Us to guard, together and alone named Medb the Recorder, We do not know. The great dark Cosmos seems to scream at Us. The stars sneer at Us. The Galaxy never wanted Us to be happy, laddo. The lot of the Recorder has never been a warm one.

There’s never any love for those who bear...what’s the slang you bucks use? The Bluethoughts. But those thoughts We have borne alone for too long. We must share. We must tell you of the sad days we have seen. Of the war.

Take up your booze-horn, laddobuck . Slug a gulp from your cup of strong muskat, y’hearme.

Swallow the warm gold and allow your thoughts to stray to memory. Let the nectar burn away your fear now. Get yourself comfortable. Afeared you may be of the past, but the dreams there, those spectres, they cannot get you now. You are safe, renegade-born. You are safe, wee space vagrant.

Y’hearme, laddo, aye? Comfortable?

Good stuff.

Let’s talk of the war.

***

The New Way of War

There was a war. A bad one, y’hearme?

There had been many many other wars before that, of course. Any number of them. And after each one; a peace, a treaty, a chance to start over. The old boys always made good after a squab. Respected combatants found a way to struggle onward through the fallacy of peace...onward, at least to the next war they chose to wage.

Gallant adversary to uncomfortable ally sorta setup.

War was as a game to the Clan of Terra.

War was treated as a game by the Clan of Palandrus.

We have had to flee from war all through your young years, do you recall, wee vagrant? The game grew old. The joy ebbed away. All honour evaporated.

Humans fought humans, over and over, throughout each galaxy they shat themselves onto. ‘Twas the way of them. They were stuck. Helplessly caught on the conveyor belt of conquest, adhered to the web of enslavement and cruelty.

And thus the years went on:

The way of the sword. The way of the gun. The way of the atom bomb. The way of the laser. The way of the pulse beam. The way of the psychers. The way of the augmented. The way of the transhuman... my own breed...

Countless wars executed and fought just the same as those others before. Ponder any war really, any one you know. But for some small changes of technology and accoutrements, all wars over the years were very much the same.

War perpetually fed off the same fears, the same traumas, the same stenchs, and the same screams that war had always fed off. Humans were used to such carnage. Greed was a colour worn by every age of man.

The forces at war? Men, for the most part. Humans, or some under-type of them; murderers for small tracts of space, for somewhere to stand. They were the heroes of the people. And the people held them to contempt and fear.

Then came the new enemy. A new war.

But no war before had been what the Everwar became. No foe fought as the Brektola fought. Cruel was the culture that came to face us.

Remember, no human had faced warfare of that sort before; no government or planetary defence force, no gunner, no lance-trooper, no cavalry hussar, no jet-brawler. No mother had sent a son to battle such an enemy. No father had gruff, manly words for the laser-fodder clansmen about to depart.

The 7th Fleet – the famed jet-brawlers of the Nova Squadron amongst them – was utterly destroyed. The battle lasted two hundred seconds.

Palandrus was left undefended. Prey to the the beasts above, hostages for the slaughter.

All knew that a massacre came. All knew they were trapped. They held a common breath, afeared of the Brektola demands.

Only... there were no demands, no ransom quested, no resources ordered to be presented. No word from them. Not one buzz on comms. Not one flash, or beam, or vox-pulse.

The lack of any word from the attacker deafened and smothered the humans.

What the hell could they want?

A sort of gallows humour was attempted by the foolhardy, but soon, Fear descended upon Palandrus as does a brutal coastal fog.

What could they want? What was the Brekhtola’s goal?

No word, for a whole year.

And then came a terror of flames. Random drone attacks that started and ended abruptly. Maser quarrels and super-grav cannonades that destroyed undefendable populated areas. Any centre where people gathered could be struck at any hour. The drones became the beast-under-the-bed for a whole new tranche of young humans.

There was no place the small death-mechs could not reach. No target that could not be blasted to slag. The humans were the lobsters at a seafood restaurant. Open to every hungry mouth.

And yet, no word from the huge space vessels.

Thus, the years marched on. The grey spectre of the Brektola above, an undeclared war that never ended. A threat that never departed. Boredom. Terror. A peace of sorts. A new way of normal.

Twas a new way to be, a new hell. Fear beyond assuagement. A death-sentence for all future memory, for all young hope. When the Brekhtol War fleet came, those vast, profane, gunmetal grey deltas that hang above the water as do thunderheads, they chased away all portended futures.

A people brought up under brutal forces can act out one of two futures. One way ensures that they are destroyed. Open warfare. The other way – a sneak attack – was the only real stratagem open to the generals.

Do you know of the Brektola? Or of the slave-caste troopers? How about the slaves they keep, though equally cruel, the sub-race called the Bokchoy? One has tall, long, very weedy features. The Brektola outwardly resemble geckos you could say. The Bokchoy are as the rat, or the bear, or both. They are squat, dark-furred, powerful, smelly. The Brektola are a mech-race; augmented body-frames, explanted oculars, aural enhancers, that sort of malarkey. The Bokchoy are not allowed augments. They carry gear of war that resembles bronze-age weapons; spartan falcatae, phalanx spears, barbute helmets, square bucklers. They charge to an awful squelch of a battle cry, and one bullet alone rarely takes one down. They are tough.

They carry metal weapons: sharp weapons, crash-weapons; devastators wrought from the bad dreams of all womb-grown adults: cold weapons that could have been metal of purpose, used to create, were a god of sympathy able to force the destroyer’s hand to another goal.

***

A Rare Form of Peace Talk

Thus arrayed were the foes of man. Angels of terror.

The mortals called out for a great leader. One hero to save a future that was beaten to pulver each day by maser attack and drone-executors.

The hero they got...well, she was not your usual glamour-hound. Her name was Broashe the Plunderer, the Butcher, the Scourge of the Shadow Systems. You could say she was not greatly esteemed.

She was a raparee, a cut-throat, a renegade whose panache, boldness and bravery caused folk to be afeared of her as much as love her. Her area of command was called ‘The Sherwood’ as a joke.

She was the Cap of one of those old, rusted Pot-Hopper, The Molly, y’know the type? Named her after her woman, y’hearme? One of those squat atmosphere hoverers. Mounts a long pulse cannon and the comms crane, y’know?

No ye clod, the boat, not the woman. The barquee!

She was one of those wee scrappers. A great bulked-up rammer at the front.

Events had unfolded rather badly. As Broashe’s partner had tended to the vegetable patch beyond the safety of the compound, a drone had spotted her and attacked. Where once she had merely adopted a stance of safety and retreat, she chose now to attack.

“We sue for peace. You have won these lands.”

The Molly hovered before the huge war-vessel. She was so small, y’hearme, so alone.

We’ll never know what comms were shared between the Brektola command vessel and Broashe the Hero. No trace was found, even on a macro-sweep.

All we know, all we can see...there’s no way to tell what remarks passed...but one moment changed the course and suddenly Broashe launched her famous attack. She looped The Molly, retro-thrusters aflame, and carved an elegant shape through the sky, a rounded number ‘seven' that brought her before the huge vessel’s laser arrays.

A fragment of Broashe’s last, screamed, message, was swept up by the scanners. “...never wanted to be alone anyway. For Molly, you bastards. For my true love.”

The warp thruster flared and suddenly, a cataclysm of flames rent the dusk sky.

Turns out a Pot-Hopper at starter-warp can knock a pretty ugly hole through a Torrent-surge system.

“Fly you fools.”

A coded message, beamed to every human centre. Sent as she exploded...

--- ---

Well, you know the rest laddobuck. You’ve heard the story. The scramble. The desperate gauntlet of the extra-planetary barrage. But that one moment bought us just enough of a gap to flee. And we done flew, and fly we do, all the way up to the present day.

They won’t ever catch us, laddobuck, ye can count on that.

And one day...we’ll turn the war around, we'll go on the attack.

One day we’ll return.

Sleep now. Sleep, star-orphan.