Del'Var was a N'Kar. He hailed from a small little world firmly in the green zone with a single tiny moon, many islands dotting the rolling gentle warm ocean, and cities scattered here and there across the larger islands. His people had been part of the Unified Near-Civilized Council for nearly fifty thousand years after being discovered soon after the invention of radio.
N'Kar's were relatively peaceful, standing almost as tall as a Lanaktallan, with long legs and arms, flat faces, with wide eyes and broad mouths full of plant chewing teeth. They had a line of hair that went down their backs but were hairless everywhere else. They were relatively high endurance, able to work for several hours before needing to rest, and good strength.
Which is why millions of them had been drafted into the Unified Military Forces, pushed through minimal training, draped in thin plasteel armor, and handed a neural rifle, ion rifle, or law wattage plasma rifle.
Del'Var had found himself, along with several other thousand N'Kar, guarding a set of research stations on a dusty dry planet orbiting a red giant star. The gravity was almost 1.25 standard gravities, which was close to what Del'Var was used to, but the atmosphere was a high mix of nitrogen and carbon dioxide with a low oxygen content of barely 8%. Despite that, the planet had a thick atmosphere and the CO2 kept the planet hot but dry.
To be honest, Del'Var wasn't sure what the Unified Science Council was even researching at the gleaming armored domes that could be important enough that it would need placed on a reddish dusty boring place.
He missed his native N'Karoo. He missed the oceans, the beaches, and ocean breeze.
Del'Var shivered inside his armor. It was fully environmental, it kept the heat down but kept making him cold. He was sitting in a tracked vehicle, the cab and back open for troop transporting, his ion rifle in his hands, as the vehicle drove along the mag-lev line to make sure that none of the iron heavy dust had covered the track. He was with five other N'Kar in the back, with two Lanaktallan Overseers in the front cab. The Lanaktallan were in full environmental armor and were obviously talking to one another on a different channel than Del'Var could hear.
The half-track slowed to a stop and one of the Lanaktallan twisted at the waist to look into the back.
"The track is covered," the Overseer said. "Get the brooms and shovels, sweep the track clean."
"Yes, Overseer," all six of them answered.
Del'Var jumped out of the truck, grabbed one of the shovels from the side of the half-truck and moved over to the mag-lev line. He knew better than to use a broom.
The wear on the broom was deducted from his pay. He and the rest of the N'Kar were already in debt from the cost of transportation, their training, their room and board, their equipment, and the cost of having them overwatched.
They had all been reassured that once they had put in sufficent time in the Unified Armed Forces they would have enough rank that they would be able to pay off their mounting debts. That was why conscription was a mandatory twenty years. By that time a being should have paid all their debts and be near enough to zero to afford passage back to their world of origin.
Del'Var just wanted to go home. Twenty years mandatory conscription seemed like forever.
The red sun, massive in the sky, seemed to paint everything red as the six N'Kar squad worked to clear the tracks. It took nearly two hours before they were done and were moving over to the half-track when it happened.
The whole planet seemed to rumble. Fines lifted up out of the sand, making the ground look fuzzy. The sun seemed to flicker.
HEAVY METAL INCOMING MAKE WAY! roared out from every flat surface, every speaker, even implants.
Before the six N'Kar could get their feet under them, the roar having staggered them, one of the Overseers, squealing in fear, threw the half-track into motion, the treads sinking into the sand, spraying up red powdery rooster-trails before the treads bit deep and the vehicle took off with a roar.
Leaving behind the whole squad.
Del'Var turned and looked at his fellow N'Kar infantrymen.
"What was that all about?" Tre'Vur asked, looking around. "What yelled that?"
HEAVY METAL IS HERE! roared out, making all six N'Kar stagger. They all looked up at the sky.
"Are the Overseers giving us a test?" Ne'Var asked. He raised his scoped high focus plasma rifle to his shoulder and looked through the scope, shifting it so he could see through the clear armaplas visor of his helmet.
"I don't know. Do you see anything?" Kle'Var asked.
"No. Just the sky," Ne'Var said, shrugging his shoulders.
"Should we wait here?" Gul'Par wondered, looking around. He shifted the sling of his rifle on his shoulder and looked back the way they'd come.
The light wind had erased the half-track's track tracks.
"Maybe?" Del'Var said. He had no idea what to do.
"Should we just sit down and wait?" Jo'Kar asked, looking around. His helmet thumped against the butt of his neural rifle.
The six infantrymen all looked around.
"It takes forever to clean the dust away if you sit in it," Kle'Var said. He shifted his wide-bore plasma rifle on his shoulder.
Del'Var looked back the way they'd came. He frowned, bringing up a memory from when he'd been being yelled at while sweeping dust from the back of the half-track.
The vehicle is rated for sixty miles an hour, he thought to himself. He looked at the chronometer in his upper right section of his visor. We drove for three hours before we had to stop to clean off the track, so it's... um... one hundred and eighty miles back.
Del'Var looked at his fellow N'Kar. We can walk, from what we learned at our end of military training march, that we can walk twelve miles in a day. That means we are... um... fifteen days from getting back.
He glanced at his water. Three green dots. A glance at his nutripaste level showed three green dots. Power was three green dots.
"Should we try to walk back?" Ne'Var asked, shouldering his rifle again.
"It's fifteen days," Del'Var answered.
"I don't want to sleep outside. It gets really cold," Kle'Var said.
Del'Var just shrugged at his cousin. "What else should we do?"
"We can wait here for a mag-lev to go by and signal them," Jo'Kar suggested.
"Let's walk along the tracks," Del'Var said. He started walking, keeping far enough that he wouldn't get hit by a train or sucked under the mag-lev it one went flying by at eight hundred miles an hour.
The others followed him, complaining, but there wasn't anything left to do and nobody wanted to sit in the dusty sand.
Almost three hours passed before the group saw a cluster of rocks. They hurried a little faster, climbing up and sitting on the rocks.
"Everyone take a couple of drinks of water and a pull or two of nutripaste," Del'Var said.
"Who put you in charge," Gul'Par asked.
"Do you want to be in charge?" Del'Var asked, hoping for a moment.
"No," Gul'Par said.
"Anyone?" Del'Var asked, looking at each of the other N'Kar. They all refused and Del'Var sighed. "Then I'm in charge."
They sat silently for a while, watching the sun go down. The moon slowly rose in the sky, big and reddish.
"Great, now it's going to be cold," Ne'Var grumbled.
HEAVY METAL INCOMING! MAKE WAY! roared out again. All of the N'Kar flinched and put their gloves to their heads as blaring music filled their helmets and their radios screamed out the tune and shrill feedback.
HEAVY METAL IS HERE, BROTHERS! rang out before the music ended.
"What do you think that noise is?" Gul'Par asked, looking up.
"Who knows? Probably something wrong with the communication satellite," Jo'Kar said.
It happened again. Then twice more, almost overlapping. Their radios screamed with feedback and all of them flinched and held their heads as it happened one last time.
"That satellite is messed up," Kle'Var said. "It's just putting out hash."
"No, it sounds like words. That's some kind of repeating signal," Ne'Var said.
"Don't be stupid. It's obviously gibberish," Tre'Vur scoffed.
"I don't know. It makes me really anxious for some reason," Del'Var said, looking around.
"Look!" Jo'Kar said, pointing up.
In the night sky pinpoints of light were appearing and disappearing.
"Ne'Var, can you see anything?" Del'Var asked.
"Lemme check," the N'Kar said, bringing his rifle up to his shoulder and looking. He scanned the sky and then suddenly gasped. "Oh... oh no..."
"What?" they all asked together.
"Look," Ne'Var said, sharing a window with what he could see through his scope.
Ships. Massive ships, moving across the night sky. Flashes were appearing a few inches from them, what had to be a huge distance across space. They couldn't make out details, the ships the size of a grain, but they were still obviously ships.
"Think it's the Terrans?" Jo'Kar asked.
"Here? No way. There's like a half million combat spaceships in this system. There's millions of troops on the three planets. The Terrans would never dare come here," Gul'Par said.
"The Overseers left in a hurry," Kle'Var mused.
"The Terrans scare them," Tre'Vur said. "Maybe that's why they ran away and left us out here."
'Well, until we can get back, it won't matter," Del'Var said. "We need to focus on surviving."
That god nods and murmurs of assent.
"All right, we sleep in shifts, just like in training. Four off, two on," Del'Var said. "We'll do random numbers. Low to high as to when we take shifts."
Del'Var drew a low number and ended up staying up for two more hours with his cousin Kle'Var.
"Psst, cousin," Kle'Var said, pressing his helmet against Del'Var's so they didn't have to use radio.
"What?" Del'Var asked.
"What are you going to do if the Terrans show up?" the male asked.
"I'm not sure. I hear they can't fight but then we've heard the horror stories," Del'Var admitted.
"I think we should surrender. I hear they give you the choice to surrender or be destroyed," Kle'Var said. "I think the only way to survive is to surrender and hope they treat us all right."
"I'd like to go home to N'Karoo," Del'Var admitted. "I miss the Sunlit Seas," he said.
"I didn't want to be a soldier. I was supposed to get married. She sang beautifully. I wanted to be a farmer."
Del'Var remembered. Kle'Var was supposed to marry a girl from one of the bigger islands who's family were sugar-weed farmers. Del'Var had met her a few times. She had been a nice N'Karrian female.
"I want to go back to fishing," Del'Var said. "I'd finally saved up enough to buy my own boat when they conscripted all of us."
"That money's gone," Kle'Var said, sighing. "What are you going to do now?"
Del'Var sighed and leaned back, looking up. The night sky had been full of pinprick flashes that had been slowly getting bigger as well as streaks of light that were as long as his thumb.
The fact he looked up is how he saw it.
Dots, flashes of light on the large round face of the moon. A few at first, which made Del'Var blink. Then more and more.
"Wake up!" Del'Var called out over the channel. "Look! Look at the moon!"
The others bolted up, confused babble sounding out over the channel for a moment. More and more bright flashes were erupted on the left side of the face of the moon. Faster and faster, more and more.
They were all looking right at the moon when is suddenly seemed to soften, then bulge, then just...
...fell apart.
Still bright flashes appeared, hitting the larger chunks, which in turn broke apart. Streaks began appearing in the night sky as larger chunks that had not been hit tumbled into the atmosphere and began to burn up on reentry.
"In the rocks! Take cover!" Del'Var yelled, following his own advice.
The six man lost squad crawled into the shelter of the tumbled rocks, all hiding together as the streaks got closer and closer.
The first impact made the earth shudder. The next made it heave.
Del'Var was aware he was screaming as the ground was hammered by debris from the broken up moon. It seemed to go on forever. Twice he and the others had to hold one of their squad down from tearing their helmet off as they screamed that they couldn't take it.
Finally, it was over.
"Is everyone all right? Still alive?" Del'Var asked. The rocks had shifted during the impacts but there was still one space large enough to climb out if they needed to.
One by one the other five admitted that even though they'd lost control of their bladder and bowels during the bombardment, they were all alive and intact.
Del'Var climbed out of the rocks and looked up.
The debris was starting to streak to the right, the turning of the planet in one direction and the orbit of the moon in the other making the debris funnel into a narrow point.
"It's going to be a ring," Kle'Var said.
Del'Var almost screamed. He hadn't heard his cousin coming up behind him.
"By the wind and tides," Jo'Kar breathed. "They blew up a moon!"
"They're still fighting," Ne'Var said, looking up into the sky with his scope. "Woah, there's some big ships up there, looks like they've got other ships coming off of them."
"Troop transports," Del'Var said. He looked around. "We don't have anything but the jumble of rocks to..."
"LOOK OUT!" Tre'Vur yelled. Del'Var looked at him and saw he was pointing down the mag-lev tracks the way they had been going.
Del'Var grabbed his second cousin Ne'Var and yanked him away from the tracks with a shout.
The mag-lev train sped by, the tortured magnetic levitation system screaming in agony as the train went by at over a hundred miles an hour.
The engine was on fire, completely engulfed, the fire spreading back across the other cars. More than a few cars were missing huge chunks and were burning wildly.
The train seemed to go forever until it whipped by, vanishing into the darkness.
"They're on the planet," Jo'Kar breathed.
Gul'Par nodded, climbing up on the rocks. "We're in trouble."
"Look," Tre'Var said, pointing into the sky. "They're coming."
Streaks were dropping out of the sky, bright sparks that didn't go out as they got closer to the ground. Dozens, hundreds of them falling out of the sky. More and more were touching down as even more appeared as bright slashes through the night sky.
"But... but... there's millions of soldiers here," Ne'Var said. "The Overseers said there's no way the Terrans would dare to come here."
"Tell them that," Del'Var said, watching as some of the bright sparks began to get closer. "I think we've got incoming."
"Where?" Ne'Var looked at them with his scope, still letting everyone else look by passing the image to their visors.
The vehicles were massive troop transports, slamming to the ground. According to the scope they fifteen miles away, the sides slamming down. Tiny dots streamed out of the ships, spreading out around the ships in a mass of tiny dots.
"There's thousands of them," Gul'Par breathed.
"It's not a scouting probe, it's an army," Tre'Var said.
"I think they're mad," Jo'Kar said softly.
"Think it's the Terrans?" Ne'Var wondered again.
The ships seemed to break into multiple parts and suddenly stand up, revealing themselves to be bipedal robots that, according to the scope, stood a whopping hundred and ten meters high. Each ship broke into ten or fifteen of them while other parts seemed to move on their own.
There looked like sparks at the upper right torso of one of the massive bipedal robots.
"What is..." Jo'Kar started to say.
"INCOMING MISSILES!" Del'Var said. He ran for the rocks, pulling the others with him.
They barely managed to get into cover when the missiles started pounding the ground, hitting the rocks hard enough to fracture them, screaming close then arcing up into the air to explode and rake the ground with shrapnel.
The six N'Kar huddled in the rocks, holding onto each other, screaming as nearly a hundred light missiles pounded into the ground.
After a moment it stopped.
Del'Var looked at the other N'Kar. "Definitely the Terrans."
They sat in the darkness for a long time.
"Think we can come out yet?" Kle'Var wondered.
"Why don't you peek out and check?" Ne'Var suggested.
"Just be quiet," Del'Var said.
After a few minutes the ground started to tremble, the red microfines that had covered the six N'Kar trembling and dancing on the surface of the sand. It was interspersed with heavier thuds, but the trembling kept the sand shifting to the thudding sound making the fines jump and plink like droplets of water.
"I'll look," Del'Var said. "Stay in here."
The others all agreed as Del'Var crawled through the half-collapsed tunnel. He looked out and saw that the sand had covered any blast craters except for the ones on the faces of the rocks.
That wasn't what had his attention.
It was the approaching horde.
They stretched for miles to each side and from only a few hundred feet away out to the horizon.
It wasn't the gigantic robots that made Del'Var gasp in fear.
It was the soldiers running at his poor little cluster of rocks.
Tens of thousands of them.
Four legged insects, two arms beneath heavy bladearms, armored in jet black armor, weapons held in their hands, on their lower abdomens, across their backs. They ran in perfect time, in perfect unison, rushing forward faster than some ground cars that Del'Var had seen. Giant insects in black armor, taller even then the Overseers.
Del'Var squealed in fear, crawled back around, and bolted into the shelter between the rocks.
"What is it, cousin?" Ne'Var asked.
"Insects. Mantids. Millions of them. Billions of them!" Del'Var said, feeling himself cover with sweat.
"Mantids? Big bugs?" Gul'Par asked. "Here? I thought it was Terrans!"
"Just be quiet," Del'Var snapped.
The rumbling of tens of thousands of feet seemed to go on forever. Heavy stomping footsteps impacted the ground on either side of the cluster of iron heavy red rocks then faded away.
Finally it was silent.
"We're still alive," Kle'Var breathed.
There was a sharp, hollow, knocking sound from outside the rocks.
"You can either come out or we can roll some grenades in there to keep you company," A voice said, synthesized Unified Standard. "Surrender or die."
"We surrender!" Del'Var said. He looked at the others. "There's thousands of them and I'm not dying for Overseers who ran off and left us here."
"Throw your weapons out," the voice ordered. "Don't get clever."
"Give them to me, I'll toss them out," Del'Var said.
One by one his squad-mates handed him their weapons and Del'Var tossed them out.
"OK, come on out. Six weapons, six of you, and any more or any less and we toss grenades in there and count the pieces," the voice said.
Del'Var crawled out, shivering in his armor. He slowly got up and stared at the beings around him.
Four legs on a long abdomen, a long torso, two arms ending in hands under two arms with long blades, a triangular helmet with two bubbled eyes.
"We give up," Del'Var said.
"Good plan," one of the insects said. It lifted a bladearm up and tapped the side of its helmet. "Dust-off Six Two Alpha Two, this is Captain Tilkatak, I've got six EPOW's. We need transport for them."
"Get down on your knees, hands behind your head," another big insect said.
"Easy with them, Sergeant. Don't frighten them," another insect said.
"What will happen to us?" Del'Var asked.
The big warrior insect in front of him made a non-commital noise.
"You'll go to the EPOW Camp, get a medical check, fed, in-processed, and a safe place to stay," the insect said.
"You will not hurt us?" Kle'Var asked, his voice trembling.
"No. That's against the law. Terran Confederacy Law states that all enemy prisoners of war are non-combatants and must be treated with respect and dignity," another insect said.
Del'Var wasn't sure what respect and dignity they could be given.
----------------
TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS
GOD DAMN IT'S GOOD TO BE BACK IN THE FIGHT!
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
MANTID FREE WORLDS
You don't have to be so joyous about it.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS
Don't be a killjoy.
You're just jealous that we won 28.84% of all combat engagements with the Terrans.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
BIOLOGICAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS
Man, you're going to ride that statistic to the end of time, aren't you?
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS
You're goddamn right.
Raise your hand if you beat that score!
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Keep wishing, suckers.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
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