The First and Final War

Long, long ago.

It had started over territory, as it nearly always did when Toothfire was involved. What territory exactly, which worlds or systems, was as Flashtease had already stated lost to time. The ravages of the First and Final War had left only the barest scraps by way of official record. Even the dates and duration of this evil epoch were a matter of estimate.

Not that the two factions hadn’t been spoiling for a fight before there was any issue of a contested claim. Toothfire’s galactic empire was in the early days of its first great expansion, and the ruling Vernderernders had not been thrilled to cross paths with the Verandas, another machine-race of physiology somewhat akin to their own. It was true they differed from the Vernderernders on a number of key ideological points, but the warmongering way in which the Verandas defended their views was likewise all too similar.

These many resemblances, and even names that clearly shared the same derivation, yet no-one then so much as suspected the Vernderernders and Verandas were relatives sprung from the same brand of life-giving oil. The First and Final War was how they had found out, in the process stripping their galaxy to its frames and bringing all those who dwelled there to the brink of oblivion.

Joe knew a little of the Verandas. They had joined the Solidity when Toothfire did not, and although our hero witnessed only the frontline advance of the onslaught on Earth he remembered his first glimpse of gleaming swooping metallic raptors equipped with high-tech laser-guided weaponry. Where the Vernderernders were like stylized scavengers sculpted from motorcycle parts, the Verandas suggested clockwork birds of prey, their every gilded pinion and lethal talon-tip a meticulously hand-crafted component. They were literal golden eagles. Since the armistice Joe had also heard tell of the Verandas’ fearsome combat potential, not to mention the everlasting enmity they and their Vernderernder cousins upheld. Both of which being universally acknowledged, it had remained a mystery to Joe why the ancient adversaries never seemed to fight. Toothfire maintained its empire and the Verandas their own comparable hegemony, each a safe solar stretch apart, and for reasons which up until now our hero had never been able to fathom observed an eternal armed neutrality.

The First and Final War was why. Its revelation that the Vernderernders and Verandas were of the same ilk had also supplied a sound enough argument that they must never do battle again. The distinctive name that this galaxy’s annals had conferred on the conflict was meant as more than a chronological or political marker. It also served as an agreement, and a warning.

Military journals which survived in sparse number identified bleak skies, icy wastes and dark forbidding oceans as the geographical features of whatever unlucky chain of worlds The First and Final War had been about. It was upon such a lifeless landscape that the Verandas and Vernderernders set to like the machines they were, first hacking and raking with claw and beak in precisely-programmed mutilation-raids upon enemy camps, then presently carving out wider battle-lines through the use of artillery. Toothfire’s gunmetal-grey Vernderernders with their circling green heat-ray pods on the one front, and gold and silver missile-spitting Verandas on the other, redecorated continents of frigid floes with gritty red explosions. There were wheeled things that cracked and ground their way along the blasted plains, things with jets that rained destruction from the sky, and metal monsters that prowled the stygian seas. Soon faceless figures were trudging through sheets of hail and sleet in never-ending number, non-sentient automata mass-produced by each faction. Toothfire Spinbots whipped up hurricanes of rock-hard tundra as they marched, while Veranda Warriorbots were built to weather these tempests and plunge into close-quarters with the circular saws they wielded. Millions were mashed by Spinbot cyclones or cloven by Warriorbot blades, their inanimate bodies dropping unmourned to heap up where they fell, but this ongoing massacre worked no cessation in the identical ranks which ever advanced and advanced. Then fighting spread from planetside to interstitial cosmos, whereat Toothfire warp-gates and equivalent Veranda technology spilled battleships and dreadnoughts into the warring void. Diabolic devices which resembled giant wings hanging in orbit leeched ambient blackness from the vacuum surrounding them and silently beamed desolation down upon entire spheres.

Evidently some or all of the untested weapons here so lustily put to use were either pumping something out or leaving something behind them, for soon the blank nights of this inhospitable cluster were replaced by lurid aurorae of horrid yellow and unclean pink. These witch-fires raced restlessly round and round the epicentre, ever swelling in scale and mounting in momentum. For such was the motion of the First and Final War, a savage unrelenting dance in a ring, from Spinbot tornados and Warriorbot buzzsaws to the interminable encirclements of Vernderernder and Veranda with all their death-dealing apparatuses, culminating in that ghastly glow which raved revolving by night. The war-zone had become a whirlpool, its emanations of violence fanning steadily out into what would not for very much longer be called the uninvolved galaxy.

Flashtease as a new Mini-Flash attending history seminars at the archive had watched hologrammatic reconstructions of this carnage, which he dug up to play for Joe. They were Grindo-made films, which meant the highest production-values and greatest sense of spectacle the quadrant’s cinema had to offer, but not even these could capture the true horror of the First and Final War. That, from the point in the story where our hero stood, was only just about to begin.

For even as the two tribes of killing-machines strove relentlessly on in their one small quarter, all the rest of the galaxy started to sicken and die.

NEXT: 'ECHOES OF THE FUTURE'