Working Title

A Smuggler’s Tale

The Shigothe-Human War:

Six centuries ago, as humanity was first entering upon the interstellar stage, they were initially seen by the greater galactic community as an inventive, industrious, and rather optimistic species. They had their faults, of course. They came off as fairly arrogant, assuming other species and societies to conform to the values and beliefs the humans themselves adhered to, even when those values and beliefs themselves were explicitly contradictory. Humans were often called hypocrites because of their refusal to stick to one value system as a species.

Part of the reason for this, of course, was their inability to form a single governing body with the authority to negotiate on behalf of the entire planet. Various nation-states within the human political sphere continued to insist they were completely separate sovereign entities. The lack of consistency was particularly vexing to various bureaucratic agencies and greatly hampered human integration into the greater galactic community.

Another thing that set them apart was the sheer speed of development they achieved in an astonishingly short time. A mere decade after first contact, the upstarts had already begun building colony ships, and trade delegations from the various nation-states were plying the jump lanes, generally making a nuisance of themselves as they attempted to compete with anyone and everyone, especially each other.

Their interstellar neighbors did not appreciate this, of course. Several systems banned human traders outright, while others placed ruinous tariffs on human goods, but the humans were undaunted. Their economy was so geared towards mass production they could easily undercut the prices of established trade guilds, and treated the tariffs as a badge of honor, reveling in the idea that they posed such a threat to their competitors' bottom lines. For the systems in which human traders were banned, they found loopholes, dodges, or just turned to outright smuggling. They quickly developed quite a list of enemies for such a young species. And some of those enemies saw humans as more than just an economic threat.

The Shigothe Protectorate was one of those who saw the industrious and inventive humans as a threat to their dominance over the local sector. The human home world was only a few jumps from the vast “Expansion Zone” which the Protectorate had been slowly devouring over the last several hundred years. The idea that humans might beat them to the potentially enormous resources was apparently more than their group consciousness could bear. By the end of the second decade, human colony ships were setting out for worlds the Shigothe already considered “theirs”, regardless of whether or not they had actually even surveyed the systems in which those planets resided. To the humans, if there wasn’t a flag planted in the ground, it was fair game.

Thirty-seven skirmishes occurred between various human nation’s colony ships and Shigothe hive ships before the Protectorate finally had enough. The war which followed would later become known as “The End” by both humanity and the Protectorate. For humanity, it was “The End of Innocence”. To the Shigothe Protectorate, it was just “The End”.

A Protectorate fleet, numbering in the hundreds, was sent to subjugate the human homeworld and finally put the upstarts in their place. The first battle was severely lopsided in favor of the Protectorate, with over seventy percent of the human naval forces being utterly annihilated. The rest, mostly damaged, retreated out of the system towards the safety of neutral stars, where they were often impounded for endangering those planets with their presence. The victorious Shigothe fleet then orbited the human homeworld and demanded that humanity submit and join the Protectorate as a client race, or face utter destruction of their cities and industry. They gave the humans ten planetary rotations to comply. It was their first mistake.

The four most technologically advanced human nation-states, China, Russia, the United States of America, and the British Commonwealth, refused outright. They evacuated their leadership into networks of underground bunkers, a legacy of the constant threat of global warfare the strange species had inflicted upon itself during its pre-jump history, and dared the protectorate to do their worst. Several of the less powerful nations, most notably India and the European Union, attempted to negotiate, but the Shigothe refused to adjust their position for just a portion of the planet. It was all or nothing, and the smaller, weaker nations were powerless to influence their larger neighbors. This decision was the Protectorate’s second mistake.

The threat of orbital bombardment was not a bluff and the Shigothe had no concept of “civilian” casualties versus “military” ones. Sixty-three of Terra’s largest cities were utterly destroyed by kinetic strikes. Deaths were later estimated to be over one billion just in the initial bombardment, a full twelfth of the planet’s population. Secondary effects from the fires and ecological disasters which followed claimed nearly double that number. This was their third, and most egregious mistake.

This was because, in spite of all the destruction, the various military forces of the major human powers were relatively untouched. The ten day long delay allowed them to scatter to remote staging areas which were still maintained as the advent of stellar travel had only lessened tensions between the human superpowers, not eliminated them. Worse, the Protectorate’s attacks made no adjustments for targeting the actual nation-states which were refusing to comply. Only twenty-four of the cities targeted were within those four borders. China was the worst hit by far, with seventeen cities flattened, losing nearly two thirds of its citizens, with only 750 million remaining. The British and Russia lost London and Moscow, respectively, but were untouched otherwise. The United States, being the most vociferous of the nation-states to refuse, lost New York and Los Angeles, along with Chigago, Houston and Dallas. While painful, the strikes left the heartland and southeastern portions of the country almost untouched.

When the Protectorate ground forces landed expecting to find a demoralized and tractable population, they were met with the full force of the four largest human nations, for the first time in two hundred years fully united in common cause. Alongside them were the remnants of every single surviving unit on the planet. It was a slaughter. Only a single assault ship survived to escape the surface.

When planetary bombardment and invasion failed to subdue the humans, the Shigothe resorted to biological warfare. A virus was created, a bioweapon based on data collected from captured survivors of the naval battle and tailored to the human genome. The attack would nearly end the human species.

When scouts reported an enormous fleet approaching the planet from the other side of the system, the Shigothe were greatly alarmed. Fearing a counterattack, and still suffering from battle damage which had yet to be repaired, the Shigothe released the virus into Terra’s atmosphere and retreated from the system, leaving the planet below to its gruesome fate.

The rescue fleet was not entirely a bluff. The scratched together mishmash of modified mining ships, cargo vessels, and other ships of all sizes and types, along with the few surviving human navy, outnumbered the Protectorate fleet by a factor of three, but most only had improvised weaponry cobbled together from anything they could get their hands on. Some of the ships were entirely unarmed. But it worked.

Sadly, it was too late. Had they arrived a mere five days earlier, they may have been able to prevent the massive casualties from the bio-attack. Another fifth of the remaining population died in the first wave of infection. After a herculean effort, relying on not-well-understood alien technology, Terra’s scientists were able to come up with a proto-vaccine, essentially a retro-virus, which altered the human gene pool, removing the vulnerability to the bioweapon. Of the original twelve billion people on Terra, only three billion survived. As the retro-virus was highly contagious to facilitate its dissemination, it quickly spread to the colonies, and by the end of the year, not a single human could be identified who still retained the old, vulnerable genes. Humanity was saved, or so they thought.

The solution had a flaw that didn’t show up until many years later in the form of increasingly reduced fertility, and fetal deaths soared. Only one in six pregnancies survived to term. Human birth rates continued to stagnate for nearly three centuries until artificial gestation techniques were finally developed that allowed humans to reach barely sustainable birth rates. Even now, six centuries later, humans have still not recovered to their pre-war population of ten trillion across six colonies and the Home World, Terra.

Meanwhile, desperate to maintain their industrial base, humanity turned to an alien cloning and genetic engineering technology. By combining human and animal DNA, they managed to create the workforce they needed to survive. They were called, “The Kin”.

Various Terran nations used different animals in their hybrids, with some, like the Old United States who pioneered the process, using several different ones. Intelligent and resourceful, these Kin quickly took over the dangerous and tedious jobs to protect the steadily dwindling human population. Factories and farms were filled with Kin workers, ramping up productivity to untold heights. They quickly filled the human military forces with easily trained and effective soldiers, pilots and technicians, enabling the humans to defeat the Shigothe Protectorate with a veritable flood of ships and soldiers after a mere fifty years of conflict. After nearly a thousand years of dominance, the Protectorate crumbled in the face of Kin-wave attacks featuring literally millions of primitively equipped but highly capable Kin soldiers. The once-great star-spanning empire was forced to surrender, losing not only the contested Expansion Zone, but nearly a third of its pre-war systems to the terms of their capitulation.

The caste-based society collapsed in on itself as their general population finally learned of the massive losses. A vicious civil war broke out against the political-caste which had ruled the Protectorate for hundreds of years by playing one faction against the other in a constant, precarious balance of influence and prestige-peddling. The Protectorate political caste did not survive the purge which followed, and the empire itself shattered into a multitude of warring factions as each sub-caste struggled to grasp control in the massive power vacuum created by the downfall of the defeated and discredited ruling caste. Merchant-caste fought scientist-caste, servant-caste fought worker-caste, and so on for two hundred years until the military-caste, backed by a loose coalition of several sub-castes were finally able to gain a measure of control. By then it was almost too late, as the in-fighting had reduced the population to a mere shadow of its former glory. Only the core worlds were still viable, as most of the infrastructure on and around their colonies were either destroyed in the war, or demolished in the infighting which followed. The Protectorate was no more.

The Terran Kin came home victorious. Yet they were still essentially slaves. Nearly half of them lost their lives in the fifty-year war or returned so grievously injured as to be unfit for general labor. A relative few Kin soldiers and marines had performed so effectively, and were so touted by the military propagandists, that they were hailed as heroes and freed from their bondage.

But like many times in the past, peace proves difficult. The healthy Kin not freed for valor were returned to the farms and factories for which they were originally designed. Of the surviving soldiers and marines who were too damaged to continue in service, some measure of mercy was given, but it was but a tithe of what they deserved. No longer needed to fight an alien threat, the war-weary Kin were mostly discharged from their service and left to make their own way in the world, with little concern for their future well being. After all, no one actually wanted to pay broken soldiers when they could just manufacture new ones which were healthy, able, and more importantly, wholly owned. As none had the ability to reproduce, so none were ever born free. Throughout the war, and the minor conflicts of next couple centuries, the broken “war heroes” were released from their bondage in “thanks”, then discharged and replaced with fresh, undamaged, and encumbered Kin.

Several highly vocal abolitionist groups, led by a coalition of Veterans Associations, finally forced the newly established Human Confederation to abolish outright slavery and recognize them as people, though they never managed to have the same rights as full, or even half humans. The outright slaves instead became debtors, responsible for the cost of their own creation to become free. But like many times before, greed reared its ugly head. The many loopholes and exemptions forced into the law by military and corporate interests turned the hope into a sham, where the Kin had only the illusion of the chance to buy their own freedom.

Then total war came again, this time against Imperial Serpentia. Production of the Kin was ramped, and this time, the scientists decided to leverage the biological process into future production, finally giving the manufactured Kin a limited ability to reproduce themselves through natural birth. The still-vocal abolitionists were able to, with a great deal of effort, force the Confederation to allow natural-born Kin to be to be born “free”

The decades-long war continued until nearly the sixth century Ante Diaspora, when an armistice was finally negotiated between the two polities. However, hostile feelings between both groups still run high, as those soldiers who fought in the war still hold grudges.