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Aug. 15th, 2004 @ 08:01 pm
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12 May 2895 : The War Prayer
Public Access Terminal 92-g 92.45.28.48
Twenty-one years ago today, the U.E.E.C. Willamette was just completing her first ball-of-yarn orbit around a V-type planet in the Sigma Draconis system. According to the single drone that later made it back to the wormhole, it was just past midday, ship's time, when the first radar hits registered.
Three ships, each twice the size of the Willamette, swam out from behind the planet's second moon. Their drives burned green, showing a fuel mixture humanity had never used. They made no attempts at communication.
The Captain of the Willamette loaded all of the data he had into two of his four stealthed courier drones, shot them off, and loaded the first contact protocols into his comm systems. Approximately ten seconds after the first transmission began, the alien ships launched cee-fractional missiles at the Willamette. She didn't survive the first salvo.
We had met the Ulia.
We didn't even know their names for five years, until the K'k'harusst began helping us in earnest. In that time we lost tens of worlds; hundreds of millions of brothers and sisters and sons and daughters and fathers and mothers.
Ironically I would never have come about were it not for the war. AIs had been used very sparingly up until that point, but our ability to fly and fight ships is unmatched by anyone else fighting for humanity, and so we were suddenly in demand. Two years after the war began I was seeded, ten months after that I was a junior intelligence on the Marathon.
Tonight the Captains of all the ships of the fleet will take launches to the Masada, our flagship, and sit down to dinner, and remember the Willamette , and all who followed her into the deep. And, though some (our K'k'harusst allies among them) would find it terribly uncultured to wish for genocide, they will, as is customary, toast and pray the death of all Ulia.
I am told humanity was once kinder, gentler. A part of me wishes I could have lived in a softer time, where my peripheral cores could have been filled with art and culture and light, instead of tactics and weapons and, ultimately, death.
But I fear, if this were the case, I would not know who I was.
*** END MESSAGE *** |
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