Tales From the Terran Republic

Chapter Stankworld 7: The Unlubed "Rod" of Consequences

The shuttle bug let out a long gurgling fart into the passenger compartment (ironically where farts usually go).

“Making food was a weapon?” GuruG asked incredulously, unintentionally translating the shuttle bug’s question as well.

“Worse,” Alan replied. “You gentle and enlightened beings probably aren’t as intrinsically tied to supply and demand as the rest of us. You do know that scarcity is a large factor when the value of something is determined. When that something is a commodity that is essential for life, this principle is even more keenly felt. With the development of Jovian rice, a completely synthetic foodstuff, Zeus Industries was once again the richest organization in the solar system… and the most powerful.”

“Powerful?”

“They now had an essentially infinite amount of food. Of course, being the goody-two-shoes bitch that he was,” Alan smirked, “Tak Nakamura started just handing that garbage out to anyone and everyone and had the ships to do so. Overnight, fully laden gas miners with escorts started making regular runs to Terra, Luna, Mars, and the rest of the inner solar system. That food could have been used to establish order and stabilize civilization. Instead, he just started dumping it on all of the thousands of factions warring with each other. This did have the immediate result of establishing some sort of ‘peace,’ but it was inherently flawed.”

“It also had the entire inner solar system kissing his ass,” Grace added.

“Well put,” Alan agreed, “The flow of food from Zeus had the whole of the inner solar system utterly dependent upon him, and the promise of food security even had some of our allies negotiating their defections to his banner.”

“So why didn’t this Jessica Morgan do the same?” GuruG asked, “For that matter, why didn’t your Same?”

“We couldn’t,” Grace laughed, “Think about it. We were the ‘bad guys.’ We had been kicking the shit out of everyone for years. There was no way they would let us into their buffet.”

“And with the food finally flowing again,” Alan said, “The dynamics of the situation shifted. Our siege of the inner solar system had been broken. Of course, we still had the men and the weapons. Or raids continued, but now they only had the effect of inflicting casualties, not starvation.”

“Your Sames kind of sucked,” GuruG said. “You are aware of this, correct?”

“Dude,” Grace laughed, “You have no idea.”

“The food was power,” Alan said, “And whoever controlled that food source controlled the solar system. We had to act. Our first move was a diplomatic one. Jessica Morgan offered an alliance with Zeus Industries, including a quite reasonable plan for governance and reconstruction.”

“And Tak told us to get fucked,” Grace snerked.

“And in about as many words,” Alan chuckled. “He told us, and perhaps accurately so, that nobody would accept us and that the best we could hope for was exile among the Kuipers… Considering what happened next, perhaps we should have taken that deal.”

“What happened?” GuruG (and the entire solar system) asked excitedly.

“War,” Alan said grimly. “Unconditional war, the greatest one in human history. Until now, Jessica had held back. She wanted to preserve as much of her forces and her supplies as possible. Now, that was no longer an option. We collected the full might of our houses and launched a full-bore attack on the inner solar system with the purpose of wiping out all vulnerable settlements and blockading Zeus. Their gas miners could run the blockade, but that’s where they took most of their losses. We never destroyed one, but we took a decent number of them out of action, enough to cause Zeus to drastically reduce food shipments. In addition, she finally unleashed her actual military forces and the remainder of her combat fleet. The actual Sol Wars had finally begun. And it was ugly. No quarter was given or received. Both sides descended into true savagery.”

“As opposed to everything you have already described?” GuruG asked incredulously.

“Yep,” Grace replied, “That was just the opening act for the real show.”

“There were two sides to the fight,” Alan said, “You had thousands of small groups of people rallying behind the banner of Zeus Industries, and you had the Confederacy of Sol, the remaining raider gangs, now quite large, and Jessica Morgan herself… I guess you could add Mars as a third side, but they did what they always did, hunker down behind their blockade of armed merchantmen and watched us kill each other while they feasted on bugs and fresh produce, the assholes.”

“They aren’t our favorite people,” Grace sneered, “And they are terrible in bed, like really bad.”

“I dislike an unpleasant bedmate as well,” GuruG said, “We often live together, and an inconsiderate roommate or even worse, bedmate, can be…”

“It’s a euphemism for being bad at sex,” Alan said. “Grace is also intentionally ‘needling’ me since she cannot elaborate further concerning this at this time.”

“Is this because of jealousy?” GuruG asked. “We have seen on the othernet that this can be an issue.”

“Not at all,” Alan said, “We were not betrothed at birth, nor were we exclusive for a great deal of our relationship. I’m just extremely curious concerning the details of this particular ‘dis-Grace.’ I’d be more than a little put out if she, as we put it, ‘fucked around’ at this point in our relationship, though.”

“So, she could have other partners then, but not now?”

“Goddamn right!” Grace exclaimed. “I’ll give Alan and whatever slag he screws a Dragon high colonic if I catch them. You don’t want one of those.”

“I can assure you that you will never catch me, darling,” Alan smirked.

“Don’t make me unstick myself,” Grace laughed as she pulled an arm free from the adhesive embrace of the shuttle bug’s colon and swatted him on the leg.

A rumbling roar shook the chamber for several seconds.

“That was our final retrograde burn,” GrurG said. “We will be entering the atmosphere soon.”

“Lovely,” Grace said dubiously.

“We still do have some time, though,” GuruG said hopefully.

“We’re approaching the end of the story,” Alan said. “War raged for several years laying waste to millions of people and hundreds of space stations and ships that had somehow managed to survive everything else. However, station by blasted station, inch by bloody inch, we were winning. While outnumbered, we still outgunned our enemies and the skill and experience of our warriors outshone theirs by many orders of magnitude.”

“And then everything went to shit,” Grace said.

“How?” GuruG asked. “You still had the advantage.”

“Had, dear GuruG,” Alan replied, “The operative word there is had. Zeus was desperate for weapons but as we have said, they lost the supply chains needed to make our weapons. Then someone decided to look back in history to the last global conflict in our people’s history, World War Three.”

“Wait. Do you mean your people have done something like this before?!?”

“Oh yeah,” Grace grinned, “Plenty of times. We hadn’t had a big one for almost a thousand years, but we did have some ugly ones. The ugliest before the Sol Wars was World War Three. Over a billion people bit the big one during that.”

“And that war was fought with much more primitive weapons,” Alan said, “The weapons of that era were little more than metal tubes in which a fast burning propellent, first gunpowder and then nitrocellulose was ignited, and the pressure accelerated a dense metal projectile, usually lead, to high velocities.”

“I know these!” GuruG said happily. “Flash roots! We still use them!”

“Of course, you would,” Alan chuckled.

“We use them for hunting… and for messing about. We make these geometric patterns on thin membranes and try to hit the center! It’s great fun.”

“They are also great for hunting people!” Grace enthused.

“They… would be…” GuruG said reluctantly, as if it was something that had never occurred to him before.

“But you use something else for that, right?” Grace asked.

“…Yes?”

“Same here,” Grace said, “And we were using ‘something else’. But I bet that it’s a lot easier to make(?) flash roots isn’t it?”

“Significantly so,” GuruG said. “We just grow them. And what we fire them out of…”

GuruG trailed off.

“Are simple devices easily made from iron alloys?” Alan asked.

“Yes. We usually use cupric alloys but yes, you could easily make them from iron.”

“Which is very abundant in any solar system, and as far as the propellent goes, they had an entire gas giant to mine for chemicals,” Alan continued, “Nobody except for primitive hunters, enthusiasts, and historical reenactors used them then, and they mostly preferred even more primitive examples than what was used for warfare at the end of our first gunpowder era. Not knowing exactly what one to use the Terrans just picked a popular one that would be easy to make, a weapon known as the AK-47. They were very simple to make. Any ship had the ability to make them. Hell, you can even make them by hand if you want. And Zeus had… has truly titanic industrial capacity. Once they made the first working prototypes, they were able to make them by the millions and the bullets by the billions. Soon, they were handing them out the same way they were handing out food… and that was the beginning of the end for us. We had better weapons and better warriors, but we didn’t have the means to replenish either. For every one of our soldiers that fell, we lost years of training, maybe even a lifetime of it, and weapons that were truly irreplaceable. When one of their fighters fell, another hundred took their place. Every ‘soft target’ we used to raid suddenly had people all armed with primitive, but very effective weapons. Our numbers fell and theirs increased by the thousands every single day.”

“And that wasn’t the worst part,” Grace said. “The ancient rifles were a big hit. So why not look at the rest of the goodies from that era? They started making guns big ones as well as guided missiles more than capable of taking down any ship we had and started putting those motherfuckers on everything.”

“A tactic they use to this very day,” Alan said. “Every one of their ‘civilian’ merchant fleet can turn into a missile boat within an hour. They’ve used this to very good effect. Attacking anywhere in the Republic, especially Sol, is a death sentence.”

“We had some brilliant military leaders,” Grace said, “But they had General Attrition leading them and he is a bitch.”

“The dynamic shifted,” Alan said grimly. “Even though they would lose a hundred fighters to each one of ours, they still would win. If they lost ten fighters to each one of ours, they would call it a tactical triumph. We literally could not win. So, once again, inch by bloody inch, they took the system back. And they weren’t taking prisoners. At first, they would board a ship or a station and take it. After a while, they just used missiles and wiped us out by the thousands, by the hundreds of thousands.”

“And not all of them were combatants,” Grace said sourly. “They didn’t care. Then again we didn’t care either, so I guess we had it comin’.”

“Even we have to admit this,” Alan said ruefully, “We definitely reaped what we sowed. We would have been completely wiped out as a people if it wasn’t for the intervention of the Juon Empire.”

“How did they get involved?”

“There is a very old red dwarf near Sol that we call Bernard’s Star,” Alan said. “It’s old enough to be of scientific interest, and the Juon sent a scientific expedition to it. It was close enough to where the instruments and scanners they brought to study the star were sufficient to detect radio transmissions from Sol. Their first reaction was to not get involved. We were a bit farther out than they wanted to expand and the situation was far too chaotic. There were tentative plans to establish contact once things settled down, but they never did. Ultimately, they decided that if they wanted to establish contact with our species, they had better do so while there was a species left to contact.”

“So they rolled in,” Grace said, “With real warships. They also brought ship after ship filled with good food, supplies, consumer goods… you know, the whole beads and blankets thing.”

“Beads and blankets?”

“Yeah, you didn’t have colonialism either,” Grace replied, “Cheap presents for savages. For a few loads of cheap crap, they were able to basically buy the Terrans. They are kind of whores like that.”

“Now whores we have!”

“You have to get me a video!” Grace exclaimed. “Anyway, the Empire showed up and annexed the system without so much as a single shot being fired. They tried to broker a peace, but when they realized that they couldn’t even get us in the same room without us trying to kill each other they split us up. They sent us into the cold dark of the outer solar system and gave the Terrans all the good spots.”

“Which they had already won,” Alan added.

“Whatever,” Grace huffed. “So that’s how it was for a few decades…”

“Thirty-four years.”

“Whatever! Jesus!” Grace snapped, “That’s how it was. We were stuck on these big stations that were basically prisons where we got fed scraps and were just left to rot.”

“We were actually treated very…”

“Goddamit, Alan…” Grace grumbled, “Anyway, we were stuck out there for thirty-four years until the Terrans decided they didn’t want to be in the Empire anymore and rebelled. We knew the second they stopped shooting at the Juon, they would come for us, so we got the fuck out of there and went to the Federation.”

“And we formed one of the three major populations of humanity,” Alan said. “Where everything was pretty good until…”

A rumbling started to shake the entire shuttle bug.

“We are starting the re-entry process,” GuruG said. “Sonic communication will soon be impossible. The rest of your story will have to wait.”

“Meh,” Grace shrugged, “We’re pretty much done, anyway.”