When the Lankies showed up and took Mars our oldest and biggest colony in space, 20 alien siege ships blowing both the SRA and NAC fleets into debris and landing thousands of colony pods. dozens of lankie settler scouts in each, Lankie nerve gas in the streets dispassionate wholesale extermination. Scraping a nuisance species off the new real estate before moving in. Every ship capable of space flight loading up refugees and leaving the planet at full burn only to get blown to shrapnel by the Lankie blockades and their orbital minefields. Those who could ran and most of them died, those who stayed died just the same. The previous five years were just a warm up for them, they were testing our capabilities, probing our defenses, gauging our reactions, playing with their food.

They say that those who fail to learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them well humanity has definitely learned. we once thought that any life we meet out in space would be too advanced to want to fight us. And that sentiment lasted about thirty seconds when the Lankies arrived, for the first five years we couldn't even come up with a name for them the Xenobiologists came up with an unpronounceable latin designation that no one uses outside of a textbook.

The Infantry grunts known for prosaicness called them Lankies or Big ugly s, the Sino-Russians didn't even have a name for them for the first year of the war. Because they believed the North American Commonwealth was spinning tall tails to cover up terraforming accident and natural disasters. Then the Lankies took SRA settled Soviernosea just passed the 30, one hundred thousand dead colonists later there scientists finally started to compare notes with ours.

Those aliens are 80 feet tall incredible thick skinned and they roam around in groups, it takes heavy anti-armor munitions to put a dent in a Lankie. And there mile high terraforming structure won't budge for anything less than a 10 kiloton tactical nuke. The only way to scrape them off a colony planet is usually to glass all there atmosphere exchangers and settlements with a few hundred megatons from orbit. And that sort of thing makes the place unfit for human resettlement, Once a Lankie siege ship enters the orbit of a colony that place is no longer our one way or another. To us, it might have been a war, to them it was just pest control. That was right up until we were able to really hit back, and when we did we hit them back so hard they stopped attacking us outright.

Now we are in a sort of Cold war with our 80-foot interstellar neighbors we won't fight them they won't fight us, we don't know where their homeworld is and they know where ours is, but they can't get back into SOL without being blown to hell. We do still come into conflict for unsettled worlds, though. And in one or two binary star systems big enough for both stars to have their own solar systems and planets that we both want we split the system, they take one star we take the other. We can't talk to the Lankies and they can't talk to us everything about us is too different, But we both do understand that if it came to all out war it would mean the extinction of us both.

Earth... I never thought I'd miss the place, granted it wasn't much near the end. A little blue ball of dirt, mostly water in a corner of a small galaxy in the ass end of the universe. 5 billion years it's spun around in space, and then we managed to fill it up with 100 billion of our species in just fifty millennia. Spoiled water, lousy air, and mostly dead oceans, what we didn't ruin we fought over incessantly killing each other by the millions over the centuries. As our technology far outpaced our ability to keep the vestigial lizard parts of our brains in check. Now the earth isn't much, but it is home.

Five years in the corps, hopping all over settled space dozens of light years away from my home planet and never once felt homesick. That was because somewhere in the back of my mind I always felt secure that earth was still out there. Back where I left it, still orbiting the sun once every three hundred and sixty-five days, still crawling with humans, still sprawling with cities full of lifeforms who look and act like I do.

The Idea that a human could grow up and not know earth, not even know about it is profoundly wrong. The idea that some new race has shown up on the far side of the 40 and made it happen to almost two generations is unforgivable. At least the Lankies just kill everyone when they want a planet dispassionate nerve gas that will kill you where you stand after taking in just a few microns of the stuff or getting just a minuscule amount on your skin. It's nothing personal they just didn't want humans on their new planet, they take out the native population and settle, the same exact thing we would do if the planets we settle had any native life, At least they didn't use us as slaves.

The relief fleet leaves Earths orbit and begins burning in the direction of the Alcubierre node owned by the North American Commonwealth that will allow us to get to the Trappist-A star system. At its head is the 60-year-old 500 meter Siege breaker class ship the Leathy, escorted by the 400-meter heavy battle cruisers Styx, and Acharon who began construction before the Lankies reached SOL. There are only two ships in the fleet that are less than 30 years old and they are the two 200 meters Indianapolis class ghost ships Defiant and Carson. Who's polychromatic armor make them invisible to sensors, and would make them almost completely invisible to visual scans if someone was stupid enough to put windows on a space ship?

Forming with the siege breaker and her escort are the 300 meters long Hammerhead Cruisers Pollocks, Saber, Wolf, and Sovereign. As we exit Luna's gravity well the Big 450 meter bird farm Manitoba and her escort the space control cruisers Ragnarok and Twilight join us before we continue at full burn towards the node. It will take us 12 days at full burn to reach the alcubierre node, six for the burn and six for the turnaround. Then another 20 hours in transit to travel the over 40 light years to get to Trappist-A. After that marine Force recon, fleet combat controllers and Space air land teams will recon the planet and make contact with the local resistance before marking targets for a strike and paving the way for the land assault.

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"I can't wait to get to the market. I hear they have a new shipment in." a griffin said to her pony friend who yanked on the chain that was holding her human. They were on the train in route to the main colony, one of the monarchs of the Conclave was supposed to arrive via shuttle today. This rebellion was annoying it, made, it almost impossible into town because of all of the checkpoints. With any luck, the execution of that human an almost 2 weeks ago will put an end to that.

"Ya..., What are you doing Stupid human!?" she yelled seeing her that her human seemed to be scratching under his arms constantly.

"Nothing mistress." he replied looking to the floor only to receive a smack in the face. He felt the two hard bumps under his armpits sway as he was smacked. His face stung as he felt her nails dig in and draw blood but he refused to cry out and shame the home world. When she finally stopped smacking him and returned to her conversation with her griffin friend, he looked out of the window and saw that they were close to the crowd of the platform. Damn with all that security the others wouldn't be able to get out, he had to think of something.

When he looked to another human on the train he retrieved a sad smile, and a defiant nod he knew what he had to do. If everything goes well the resistance will finally get into the city. Then with a single hard yank he snapped the chain he had been weakening for weeks, and with a satisfying snap the chain broke and he jumped onto the table.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?" his owner yelled at him attempting to pull him down, and when the guards on the train stepped forward the other humans tackled them.

"For the home world, DO IT!" one of them yelled. Prompting him to grab the bumps under his jacket and yank them out to either side of him. In his hands were a pair of High yield Thermobaric Grenades.

"AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!" He screamed pressing the activation studs and the crowd outside watched as an entire train car exploded sending derbies and shrapnel all over the place, and derailing the train. Some of the bystanders were crushed when the train derailed others used magic to either stop the train from crushing them or pull others out of the way.

"How could this happen." A Conclave soldier said as she walked closer to the burning wreckage. she Raised her rifle as she and her squad could hear the calls for help from one of the cars, she and another soldier stepped forward and levitated the train car to free the survivors. The strange part was that she couldn't feel anything inside but that made no sense why would humans be in a luxury car? That was her last thought because when the car was right side up she and her squad looked up to see 25 humans in the cab 5 of which were leveling strange weapons at them.

"Cut'em down." they heard one of the humans shout before the window exploded in a shower of glass and the air was filled with the horse reports of their strange rifles. Her squad was cut down all around her the armor they all wore doing nothing to stop the storm. She raised a shield and readied her rifle before the shield she had raised exploded, and she felt like she was having a nail shoved into her stomach with a sledgehammer. The shield dissipated as she fell on her back and looked around, there were humans running into the shadows all around her. She tried to push up only to have a boot roughly push her back down and when she looked up she was met with the sight of a large male human.

"This was for Sarah." he said before raising and bring his boot crashing down on her head. Putting a final period on her life story with the stomp of a boot like a bug.

Author's Notes:

sorry for the wait i had to get my eclipse looked at.