First Contact

The armada appeared in the system just past the resonance zone, roughly fifteen light hours from energetic yellow sun. It consisted of over a hundred ships, a third of them troop carriers. The troop carriers were massive, the drop troops in hibernation, the warships nearly a mile long apiece, elegant appearing and carrying massive weapons. nCv weapons were loaded, missile bays were locked in, and the crews were woken up.

The targets were simple: The extraction and refining structures around several gas giants, the structures in the asteroid belt, nearly fifty different emission signals from the five plants, and, of course, the main attack on the two oxygen rich planets in the green zone.

A buoy at the edge of the resonance zone happily provided information on the system.

The one the fleet commander was interested in was one simple line: Population 34.3 million.

The fleet swept in, burning hard toward the planets.

The little VI that ran the buoy was a little offended that the fleet didn't even say hello.

The fleet split into two, half for each planet. Each one orbiting. They didn't respond to hails, did not respond to requests for communication. As soon as they were in position, they delivered their message.

One city on each planet was hit by an nCv shell.

7.8 million people were killed.

The fleet demanded that the planets surrender.

They got silence in return.

They repeated their demands.

They got their reply: Come and take it.

The Unified Military Fleet, one of thirty that had headed deep into Terran Confederate space, orbited the planets, the Fleet Most High looking at the Most High Tactical Officer.

"What was the casualty estimate?" The Fleet Most High asked.

"This planet had twenty million humans on it. The city we destroyed was home to four million humans. We eliminated twenty percent," the Most High Gunnery Officer answered.

"Then why haven't they surrendered?" The Fleet Most High asked. "The Unified Military Council determined that the humans could not withstand more than fourteen percent casualties without it breaking pack bonds and forcing them to surrender."

"What are they doing?" the Most High Tactical Officer asked.

"They are fleeing the cities, obviously fleeing our might, Most High," the Scanner Technician Eighth Class answered. "

"Then they have already surrendered," the Most High Tactical Officer stated. "Send in the ground troops, occupy their cities, use orbital weapons to destroy their cultural sites and industry through bombardment. Destroy the satellite network."

The same conversation took place on board the flag vessel of the ships orbiting the other planet. Shuttles began leaving the troop transports, landing in the fields and plains of the worlds. The ships began striking at the manufacturing sites and any easily identifiable strange looking structures that looked important.

Within four days the planet was covered with a thick layer of ash laden clouds. Lightning struck the surface often. For two days the Lanaktallan troops were unopposed as they moved steadily through the cities.

Then it started.

A shot out of an alley. An improvised explosive next to an abandoned ground car. A thrown bottle of flaming fuel. A knife into the neck of the last man of a patrol. An explosive thrown over the wall of a maintenance depot to blow up the fuel store. A spear thrust in the dark. A rock dropped from a building roof.

But the Lanaktallan were used to that sort of resistance. They had put down rebellions and worker riots on worlds before. The Unified Civilized Races were over ten thousand systems, there was always a rebellion against Corporate authority somewhere.

Except this time there were no surging crowds, no screaming mobs. No apparent leaders.

Just silent Terrans that stared, unspeaking.

Even executing random Terrans did no good.

Of course, it wasn't the way they were used to it.

The Lanaktallan troops were used to a single neural pistol bolt to the face, but the charge that should have lethally disrupted the Terran's nervous system could not penetrate skin or muscle.

The first time, the officer ordered his troops to beat the Terran to death.

The officer and many of his troops were sickened by how much effort it took to beat a Terran to death.

Disgusted the way that the human kept sitting back up, spitting out blood, and staring.

The executions moved to using crew served weapons on vehicles.

Preferably the big ones.

At first it took a Second Most High to authorize executing a human.

A week in and a Fifth Most High could authorize it.

A month in and any trooper could execute a Terran for whatever damn reason they wanted.

Still the deaths kept mounting. Not just for the Terrans, but for the peacekeepers too.

A length of pipe made a mortar tube. Terrans were somehow casting propellant rings and mortar rounds by hand in their homes to drop on the Unified Military Forces bases. A home-made rocket launcher would be fired from an alley and the launcher, built of pipes, was left on the ground. A rifle would be left behind. A radio would be found in an empty house.

When a Lanaktallan picked it up the shape charge under some trash or under a desk or built into a wall blew his legs off.

A Rifle Being Twelfth Class ordered a dozen humans pulled out of the nearest building and executed in the street.

Eight Lanaktallan troops went into the building.

None came out.

Alive.

After fifteen minutes of the Rifle Being Twelfth Class yelling over the com-link for the Lanaktallans to report the pieces began being thrown out of windows.

In orbit the ships did little good. The ash and debris in the air made scans almost useless. The humans were adept at avoiding patrols and getting better every day.

The Lanaktallan were barely holding on in the cities.

Outside the cities, the Terrans ruled the day.

A Lanaktallan patrol was sent out to find out why a farm was burning. It barely set down before a rocket hit the engine, disabling it. The troops spread out, into the hot smoke, looking for the humans. Finding nothing they returned to the shuttle.

One tripped a wire and the jury-rigged explosive charge went off, killing the entire patrol.

The pilots had been shot in the back of the head.

The shuttle was loaded with explosives and sent up to orbit on autopilot.k

The explosion, inside the shuttlebay, gutted a Superiority class troop carrier ship.

Going into the woods? You weren't coming back. The swamp? Nope, might as well give your bunkmate your extra boots and ration card. Into the mountains? Someone might hear your echoing screams as you begged for mercy for hours. Into the ghettos and ruined sections of the cities? Your head will be found, attached to a sharpened stake.

More and more of the Unified Military Forces began suffering extreme stress. Psychotherapy Techs reported that the troops were showing as much stress as a being who had been in a warzone for decades. A few suicides began. Other troops began begging to go home. Still others refused to leave the bases.

The Officers shot a few to remind the troops who gave the orders.

Officers began to find grenades in their tents.

Without the pins.

Patrols started refusing to go into the woods, into the swamps, into the hills. Even the cities became divided up into zones. Even in the safest zone it wasn't uncommon for a trio of mortar rounds to hit. Counterbattery radar would identify the launching point.

Which was, without exception, booby trapped. From roofs that collapsed when weight was put on them with incendiary charges catching the building on fire to simple satchel charges.

The Lanaktallans began to understand quickly that a hundred thousand troops sounds like quite a bit, until you're trying to occupy an entire planet.

Full of hostile beings.

The Fleet Most High was furious. He had inflicted enough casualties that the humans should have given up already. There was no way to win, no way for them to emerge victorious.

Dammit, he held the orbitals. Nobody was coming to help.

He owned this system.

The Terrans didn't care.

They just kept killing.

Then the broadcasts started. The transmitters were the size of a pen, breaking into the encryption on the Unified Military Force's armor channels. Telling them to lay down their weapons, take off their armor, and no harm would come to them.

To walk into the woods, into the swamps, into the empty fields, and they would not be harmed.

Even the Lanaktallans.

The desertions started in little dribs and drabs. A soldier at the back of the patrol here. A being on guard duty there. A mechanic going out to pick up a disabled vehicle over there.

Commanders started making object lessons of their own troops to discourage desertion.

The recordings changed. Voices of those who had deserted, talking about how they had not been harmed. How they were allowed to live as comfortably as possible.

More deserted.

Patrols started to refuse to go out side the walls of the encampments.

When a missile blew the nose off a shuttle many troops began to feel as if they weren't going to get out of the gravity well.

Messages started coming in. A hundred fleets had attacked a hundred systems.

None of the attacks had gone well. They had attacked deep into the Confederacy's territory, at systems that had been settled for hundreds of years.

None of the populations would give up. They kept fighting back. Sometimes only a small fraction of a percentage of a percentage, other times every living being seemed ready to attack any Unified Military Forces they could reach. The Most High of the system heard over and over through hypercom how the Terrans just kept attacking.

One unlucky commander kept lamenting that every Terran on the world he had been assigned to attack seemed to have guns, body armor, explosives, anti-armor and anti-air weapons. How he'd lost a hundred thousand troops just in the first week.

Orders came in from the Unified Military Council.

The Terran worlds would not be abandoned. The Terrans would understand the wrath of the Unified Civilized Council.

And no, they couldn't just glass the planets. The planets would be subdued and the Terrans genetically pacified, as the Lanaktallans and the Unified Civilized Species had always done.

The Fleet Most Highs could only rant and rave about how the primitive stupid arrogant humans just kept throwing away their lives. Kept throwing themselves into battle. Some of them trading their lives for nothing good.

Didn't the humans understand? The Lanaktallan were as inevitable as entropy. For a hundred million worlds Lanaktallan had ruled over the known universe. Why couldn't the stupid primitive Terrans understand.

It was a Lanaktallan reality with no room for arrogant primitive primates who thought a few thousand years of space flight made them important.

But no matter how loudly and how vehemently the Most High in orbit raved.

The humans on the ground kept killing and dying.

The Most High had lost nearly 30% of his ground force.

APC's were rammed with trucks loaded with explosives. Tanks drove across ground that collapsed under them, dropping them into ditches full of fuel that ignited and burned the crew alive inside the tank. Troop transport trucks rolled over improvised explosively forged penetrator explosives. Troops walked into alleyways only to have a wall or dumpster explode.

The Lanaktallan commanders shrunk their area of operations even further.

By two months more sophisticated weapons started showing up. Rifles, anti-tank rockets, anti-air missiles, grenades, body armor, pistols, fuel air explosives.

The Most High raged. He knew they hadn't been brought in from outside, so how were the humans acquiring them. They were all Terran designed weapons.

Caches were found.

Wired.

By the third month the Most High had lost three more ships in orbit and another fifty-thousand troops. His armored units couldn't leave the compounds without exploding.

Enraged, the Most High ordered a weapon used. If the Terrans wanted to play, then by the Twelve Eyed Lords, he would play.

The ships fired the missiles. Big ones, that dropped into the upper atmosphere and slowly moved, releasing their payload into the air.

Patrols started reporting finding sick humans. Feverish, delirious, staggering around confused.

The Most High rubbed all four of his hands together.

If the humans were willing to throw all their lives away, fine, he would just take them.

Pacification Bioweapons would show the Terrans who was boss.

The humans vanished. Some were found dead, as if something had torn them apart. Patrols reported hearing heavy fighting in the cities. Finding barricades homes. Abandoned bases that had been hidden in abandoned apartment or office buildings. Weapons were found, empty and abandoned.

According to the Most High's calculations, only eight million humans remained.

Still, his patrols should have found some alive.

And why had they stopped attacking?

Then a patrol radioed in. They were under heavy attack. Dozens of humans.

Then hundreds.

A relief force was dispatched in fast moving hover vehicles.

There were hundreds of Terrans slowly moving in on the patrol, which had taken cover in a small building with ferrocrete walls. The humans were thumping and scratching at the walls, trying to force their way into the building, and all were making an eerie moan that could be heard over the hoverfans. Still more were staggering down the street, all moving in a jerky, uncoordinated way.

The leader of the relief force stared at the incoming humans. He didn't like how they were moving. They lacked the fluid predatory grace of the humans that he had witnessed moving in for the attack.

Others were gathering below the hover vehicles. Staring up, reaching up, their mouths open as they all let out the same wailing noise.

The relief force Twentieth Most High looked down at the slowly growing crowd and shuddered.

Two vehicles were landed on the roof of the building. The patrol boarded, and the hover vehicles went back to the base.

The Most High watched the Terrans follow. Slowly, stumbling, jerking.

Wailing.

Within two days thousands of Terrans surrounded the base. All of them scraping and thudding on the walls. All of them moaning, wailing, groaning.

A Trooper Ninth Class couldn't take it and began shooting into the crowd.

It didn't seem to matter.

His platoon-mates joined him, firing the lasers into the crowd. Lasers that normally were used to disable light vehicles, shooting for the center of the human torso to try to kill them.

A torso or head shot was the only way to be sure. These beings had seen a Terran missing an arm and a leg keep shooting.

Only the humans outside the wall didn't care. Unless they were hit in the head they got back up or just plain ignored the wound.

A Sixth Most High noticed that the humans weren't leaving. Days had gone by and they hadn't left to eat, hadn't tried to go get food, didn't do anything but claw at the walls and moan.

The Fleet Most High was startled when a ship arrived. An Executor vessel.

He was placed under arrest. The remaining ships boarded by Executor Most Highs.

The fleet left.

The Unified Military Forces on the ground all stared.

They had been abandoned.

Outside the walls, the Terrans just moaned and wailed.

Radio messages were heard. The Terrans still lived. Some of them. Gathered up into enclaves, heavily armed, holding off their former brethren with steel and fire.

The Most High of the Planetary Pacification Forces laughed as he lifted up his pistol and put it in his mouth.

The Most High of the other planet was shot in the face by his own executive officer.

Nobody had won.

The universe itself had looked at the Lanaktallan's favorite mode of pacification, that the Lanaktallan had used for a hundred million years, successful every time.

And made a cosmic joke.

The UMF forces on the ground stared at what they had slowly realized were dead Terrans.

That didn't know they were dead.

Worse, they didn't care that they were dead.

They just knew they wanted into the fortresses where the UMF huddled, holding weapons, watching their rations slowly be depleted.

The UMF forces knew what would happen if the Terran dead got into the fortresses.

The dead would eat the UMF, eat the living.

No plan survives contact with the enemy