Gather around my children and you shall hear of the most terrible, most
implacable, most improbable friends ever met by our people. They came from
the third planet of a tiny system, surrounded by desolate space. Not one sentient
species for hundreds of light-years, and they managed to propel themselves into
space.
We watched from afar as they developed slowly. We watched as they warred
among themselves, brutal and savage. We watched as they rendered regions of
their planet uninhabitable to themselves, a hardy species able to adapt to even
the most hostile of environments. We watched as suddenly and without warning
they united under four banners, the rest falling by the wayside. We watched as
they expanded into what we had begun to use as a buffer zone, to allow these
humans to burn themselves out in.
But they did not burn themselves out. Despite their warring among themselves.
Harsh people. Humankind is a race of warriors, do not be fooled by the
eloquence of their diplomats. In their own words, "All diplomacy is a continuation
of war by other means". Their greatest artists and philosophers were born from
blood and conflict. I had the privilege once to view a painting by one Pablo
Picasso, entitled Guernica. It was a savage piece, with not a drop of colour. It
showed the horrors of war, and the irony of it all was that the painting hung in the
office of one of humankind's generals.
It was sudden, when they burst from the containment zone. When they realized
they were not alone. And we, with heavy hearts, prepared to fight them bitterly
and to the last. Imagine then, our surprise when humanity embraced us among
the stars as long-lost brothers. They were overjoyed to discover they were not
alone in the darkness. Despite their brutal and warlike culture, despite their
glorification of death and violence, their people do not seek out combat. An
ancient general of theirs once put it thusly "Although a soldier by profession, I
have never felt any sort of fondness for war, and I have never advocated it,
except as a means of peace".
For centuries, humanity worked to better itself. They unified under a single
Interstellar Empire, the Empire of Man, the Human Empire, however you called
it. They enjoyed art and music. They became leisurely at home, exploratory in
the field. Their weapons of war were long gone, beaten into ploughshares as they
say. Humanity was finally at peace. There was no conflict among them, a few
border skirmishes for certain, and they kept a small standing military, but nothing
more than that. We considered them domesticated.
At first, we were surprised at their transformation, then overjoyed. We welcomed
them into the fold of the cosmos, embraced them as they would embrace us. We
thought we knew humanity then, that we had seen them at their best and their
worst. We were wrong, so very wrong. We did not truly understand humanity
until the Texar-Hakara came into the void between the stars.
Seemingly more brutal, more bloodthirsty than even the humans, they swept into
our region of space like conquerors. They smashed whatever feeble resistance
the Yungling managed to put up, took their planets, enslaved the survivors, and
pressed on. The Junti were next, utterly destroyed. The four great races left,
ourselves, the Itaxa, the Kukrama, and the Illnaa, banded together to try and
stop them. In our arrogance, we did not include the humans in our pact. Too few
in number, too weak in frame, too backwards in technology, we thought.
The Texar-Hakara hit our borders like the great wave that sweeps life from the
beach. We hardened our hearts and prepared for the worst. Seeming without
pause, they crushed our border defences. They obliterated the first fleets we sent
to them. The Itaxa fell to the Texar-Hakara, enslaved, killed, scattered to the
corners of the galaxy. Then the humans sent us an offer, a request really. They
asked to fight alongside us.
Bemused, we accepted. What else could we do? Deny them the right to fight
with us for their very survival? We thought to assign them as rearguards, to ferry
our people to safety after our fleets fell. We thought wrong.
Humanity swept into the stars with a fury unmatched by any other. Their fleets
were not the heaviest. Their guns, not the most accurate. Their soldiers however.
Their sailors. Their warriors were unmatched by any others in the cosmos. I
remember the first battle in which the humans fought the Texar-Hakara like it
was but a single solar cycle ago. Our forces were on the brink of breaking and
fleeing. Our ships were gutted ruins. Our fighters exhausted and out of missiles.
Then humanity fell upon the flank of the enemy, and the full force of the Human
Empire was unleashed in a single moment of utter fury. Landing craft spat
across the distance in an instant, slamming into enemy hulls and disgorging
humanity's greatest weapon, their Marines. In close combat humanity is
unstoppable, and so they took the vast distances of space combat out of the
equation.
Their ships belched fire and plasma. Lasers crossed the vast distances in the
blink of an eye. Half the Texar-Hakaran fleet was obliterated in minutes. The
other half turned to face this new enemy, only to be wracked by internal
explosions as the Marines did their work. Their greatest ships turned on the rest
of the fleet, a handful of humans holding the bridge against waves of enemy
attackers to turn the tide of battle.
The Interstellar War came to a screeching turnaround. The advance of the
Texar-Hakara halted, like it had hit an immovable wall. In many ways that is what
humanity is, an immovable, implacable wall. Then, with the ferocity humanity is
alone capable of, they routed the Texar-Hakara. Not from that lone battle. They
pushed them out of Itaxa space, liberating the slaves. The space of the Junti and
the Yungling was swept clear of invaders. Then the Texar-Hakara committed the
gravest of sins in humanity's eyes. They warped a fleet to Earth, jewel of
humanity's empire. They burned that blue and green world. They destroyed it,
and the trillion people it housed.
Humanity is a forgiving race, my children. Even their most terrible of wars have
resulted in lasting friendships between nations. When they left millions dead and
broken on the muddy fields of their world, they rebuilt the aggressors. They
raised them from the mud, dusted them off, and welcomed them back into the
fold. But there is one thing that humanity cannot, will not, tolerate. It is abhorrent
to them, my children. To strike at their home, to strike where they raise their
young ones. Where they leave their mates and non-combatants. To strike there
is to raise the ire of the human race, truly.
Humanity raged. Their attempts at obtaining the surrender of the Texar-Hakara
halted. The war turned from a righteous war of liberation to a furious and hateful
war of retribution. We begged the humans to stop, to leave what few planets the
Texar-Hakara had alone. Our pleas went unanswered for months, until a single
human ambassador came to us. His face was cold and emotionless. He told us,
in no uncertain terms, that the Texar-Hakara had doomed themselves and that
any trying to aid them would suffer the same fate. Quietly we watched then, as
humanity wiped the Texar-Hakara from the stars. The Texar-Hakara pleaded for
mercy. They offered their unconditional surrender. They came to us and begged
on bent knee for us to reign in the mad dogs we had unwittingly unleashed into
the universe. Humanity had for so long repressed their warrior culture. Tried to
become better. Then we had given them back into the fires of war, and humanity
had awakened its warrior past.
The Texar-Hakara ambassadors were taken from our halls by grim human
Marines and thrust out airlocks. Finally, there was but one planet left, and we
came to the humans, we pointed to our own losses, our own dead friends some
of whom had lived for longer than humanity had been among the stars, and we
begged the humans not to take the last of the Texar-Hakara's lives.
I watched, children, I watched as the Texar-Hakara's world burned. As humanity
left but one of their planets alive, a simple backwater colony of no more than ten
million. Ten million, out of the trillions. Then the leader of the human military
turned to me, and with no emotion in his voice, told me that humanity accepted
the unconditional surrender of the Texar-Hakara, and walked off the bridge of my
ship.
My children, the lesson here is that a warrior past is never truly gone. Only
buried, mayhaps even wiped from living memory. But gone? Never. Humanity
showed us that.