"The humans arriving was like a bomb going off. Locked in war for thousands of years, with entire species being wiped out by all sides, the arrival of the humans was at first looked at as just another pack of interlopers that would be enslaved or destroyed quickly. The humans established a single colony and, to our eyes, simply set about ensuring population diversity and expansion with agriculture and minor industry. Within ten standard galactic years they reached out to all of us in hopes of friendship.

"Then they were, like everyone else, attacked despite their desire for friendship and cooperation.

"It was the last mistake the Wapricoth Empire ever made."

- Excerpt from Atomic Sunrise, Professor Zingat Ulugawa, New Cretalia Press, 22,845 Galactic Standard Date

Mortan stood at the window of his office, staring down at the city below. It was shrouded in darkness, the lights of the urban center trying, and failing, to push back the night. There were not as many vehicles on the street as there had been two years ago, less than a tenth of the windows were lit compared to a year ago, and the city felt, to Mortan, dead and still.

He sipped at the snifter of alcohol in his hand as he looked over the luxury apartment skyraker only ten miles away, noting that the windows were all dark. The skyraker had been the home to two million beings.

Now it was a carnal house that had barely been cleaned up.

Mortan reached up and slicked back the fur on the top of his head, able to faintly see his reflection in the smart glass, then tapped the side of the crystal snifter with one fingernail, the slightly curved black claw making the crystal ring.

From the great height of his office, nine hundred stories up, he could see the grav-strikers slowly patrolling the suburb of Genshooza, lights searching the streets and open spaces.

Mortan knew that the grav-strikers were full of heavily armored troops, armed with heavy weapons, with air support on call and reinforcements in the slowly moving specks in the sky.

At least the bulk of the fighting is over, he thought to himself. He took another sip, this one longer, and then shook his head as he swallowed the fifty year old whiskey. One minute, everything was fine, the next, the Grand Unity was on fire and a tenth of the citizens were dead.

What happened? he asked the night.

It didn't answer, and after a moment he turned away, moving over to his desk and sitting down.

He knew it was late, that he should return home to his wives, return home to his four infants, but instead he opened up his terminal and brought up the relevant files again.

Seeing it in cold clear numbers chilled his soul.

Hundreds of billions of dead bodies. Hundreds of millions of enraged psychopaths rampaging through peaceful areas. Sixty-two planets devoid of life. Nineteen planets just... gone as someone living on the surface had planet-cracked it. Eleven stellar systems now nothing more than a memory after being nova-sparked by the inhabitants of the system.

One hundreds and twenty-two L-Gates, warp gates, and wormhole gates, gone. Of the sixteen left, twenty were mined and waiting to blow. Two were randomly opening onto now-dead planets, the atmosphere sucked away by insane people. Those two were still heavily defended by the remaining crew and were under heavy attack by what was left of the Unity's naval forces before they opened the gate onto another inhabited planet.

The Grand Unity's military forces were gutted. Half of them dying between one step and the next.

Then the other half rabidly attacking the rest of the military.

The military was, for all intents and purposes, gone.

One minute everything had been fine.

He looked at the numbers.

At the exact same time as 99.975% of the initial casualties died, 99.9994% of the remaining had gone stark raving mad.

Mortan shuddered at the memory of his one close call.

How the crazed being had ripped the door off of his armored limo with one hand. How Mortan had flinched away and the being had missed, grabbing the bottom of the seat and ripping it out of the limo in one yank. The being, who Mortan had known for thirty years, had been screaming the entire time, bleeding from his eyes, nose, ears, and mouth.

The being had killed all of Mortan's security detail. The last one, scooped up into those powerful arms and crushed in a 'bear hug', the security detail had shoved his short barreled submachinegun into the being's mouth and clamped down on the firing stud, decapitating the being.

A being that Mortan had sat down to dinner with less than a day before.

A being of wisdom, statesmanship, kindness, and thoughtfullness.

A being that Mortan would have sworn before the High Court was incapable of violence toward anything, living or not.

A being devoted to statesmanship and maintaining our five thousand years of peace tore apart my armored limousine like it was paper, Mortan thought to himself. How horrible it must of been for those who were forced to face off against the beings of that species who had done nothing but gobble down steroids, pump iron, cram their bodies full of combat cyber and bioware mods, and punch each other in the face for fun.

Even the passage of a year still left him in enough distress that he reached for the whiskey and took a long drink straight from the bottle before refilling his snifter. He knew that it was normally used for such things as cognac, but the whiskey was as smooth as gear lubricant.

Mortan could still remember the way his secbeing's armor had crumpled when the statesman had been decapitated. How the death nerve reflex had tightened the statesman's arms with incredible strength, to the point that the armor had collapsed, kinetic gel had sprayed from rents in the armor like blood.

How the secbeing's intestines were forced out of his screaming mouth by the pressure.

Mortan took another long drink.

Five thousand years of peace, gone.

The complex interweb of stellar gates destroyed.

The Grand Unity in disarray.

A year had gone by and the danger still wasn't past. Every day reports came in that the maddened beings had begun to cluster up in groups, indulging in body paint, body disfiguring, body piercing. Committing acts of senseless violence before vanishing again.

Worse, as a high ranking government official, Mortan knew that beyond the borders of the Grand Unity were the Shattered Systems, which had only been held back by the night of the Unity Armed Forces.

It wouldn't take long for the Shattered Systems to realize that the peaceful bubble formerly protected by the hypersteel fist of the Unity military was now helpless and ripe for the picking.

He sighed and closed the files. Staring at the numbers would be no help. They would only change for the worse. He logged out and shut down his system, standing up and moving toward the door.

His wives were probably asleep, but he still looked forward to seeing them.

If I hadn't flinched back, he thought to himself as the door closed.

----------

"Put it onscreen," Captain Yvwerklim ordered.

"Aye, sir," Ensign Hreggleti answered.

Yvwerklim stared at the massive 2.5D screen at the front of the bridge as it flickered and changed focus to what the scanning arrays were getting a close look at.

A massive ultramax battlewagon sitting dead, cold, dark, and silent only a half light-second off the Guardian's Shield's port side.

Relative to the nearby stars it was slowly moving toward Kfrelt-119 at a little over .25C and would be there in roughly sixteen years.

From Yvwerklim's point of view, it was sitting dead in the water.

He glanced at the data popping up.

No power sources detected. No life signs. Heavy damage to the hull. No response to communications.

The massive warship was identified as The Stoic Grasp of Duty, a warship weighing in the thousands of gigatons, capable of cracking a planet's continental plates. Crew of sixteen thousand, not counting four thousand shipboard combat forces capable of making orbital drops.

Registered out of New Mars, the Sol-2 System.

It was less than thirty years old.

"Where was its last location?" Captain Yvwerklim asked.

"Sintre-Nine," Commander Rlguet said, not looking up from his console. "It performed orbital bombardment on the primary cities, made directed energy weapon hits on the major oceans, destroyed the system defense forces, then vanished."

"How long ago?" Captain Yvwerklim asked.

"Eight months ago," the Commander answered. He swallowed. "Standard Unity crew numbers were at less than eight percent of the ship's crew and troops."

Captain Yvwerklim nodded slowly. "They were all dead within an hour, Commander."

"Probe's coming onlline," Ensign Hreggleti said.

"Put it on the left half of the screen," Captain Yvwerklim ordered.

The image came in. It had the too-slick feel of computer enhancement, as there was no star close enough to provide light.

A cold chill moved through the bridge and more than a few of the crew showed silent signs of distress.

"That is not promising," Commander Uulimuu said softly.

Crude spikes had been welded to the hull and bodies impaled upon them. All of them were twisted and frozen. Some had been dismembered, either partially or fully. In some cases they were missing from the waist or bottom of the rib cage down. The probe clearly showed nearly fifty severed heads on spikes with chains linking them together, the chains pushed through the bottom of the jaw and out of the mouth.

"They killed each other too," Ensign Cirrtump said softly, shivering in her armored vac-suit.

"Look at the pitting on the hull, the streaked gouges," Commander Rlguet said. "The ship virtual intelligence isn't sure what caused it. It doesn't match any known battle damage."

"I've seen that before," Captain Yvwerklim said. "The ship bypassed jumpspace and moved into the inferno band between jumpspace and hyperspace."

"That explains why there isn't any life signs," Midshipman Draisti said. "Nothing can survive there, not even electronic systems."

"Guns," Captain Yvwerklim said.

"Aye, sir?" Commander Htrekup said.

"Bring up the port guns, lock that ship up," Captain Yvwerklim said softly. "Load the nCV cannons with warshot. Have the local targeting array come up as backup."

"Aye, sir," the Jeftrit officer said, flicking his four armored ears twice in acknowledgement.

"Tell the gunnery crews that at any sign of activity from that ship, they have authorization for full fire on my authority whether or not the Gun Crew Commander has authorized it," Captain Yvwerklim. "Tell the Gun Crew Commander that all nCV cannons on the port side are under local control."

"Aye, sir," the Jeftrit said.

The probe kept sliding down the massive 10 km long vessel.

"Civilians," Ensign Cirrtump pointed out as the frozen twisted bodies pierced with chain and cruel spikes appeared. The bodies were layered so thickly the hull was hidden for nearly two hundred meters along the length.

"Looks like it wraps around the hull," Commander Rlguet said. "Computer estimates nearly a million civilian bodies are present."

Captain Yvwerklim just tapped the arm of his command chair, nodding slowly.

"Message from the Admiralty, sir," Lieutenant Orperin said.

"Tell them I'm busy," Captain Yvwerklim said.

"They're responding to our message that we discovered the ship," the Lieutenant looked startled. "They want you to get a boarding party and take command of the vessel to bring it back to Unity space."

Captain Yvwerklim raised an eyebrow. "Tell them in no uncertain terms I will not send any crew members onto that vessel."

The Lieutenant relayed the words and looked up. "They remind you that the ship represents hundreds of trillions of credits provided by the Unity taxpayers."

"Then they can board it," Captain Yvwerklim snapped. He opened his mouth when he felt the curious 'thudding' in his bone marrow.

"ENERGY SOURCE! UNKNOWN ENERGY SIGNATURE!" Ensign Hreggleti called out.

"MAT-TRANS BEACON, DECK ELEVEN, BULKHEAD NINETEEN!" Commander Htrekup called out.

At the word "Energy" Commander Rlguet slapped the emergency button, firing off the streamline macro to bring the shields up to full power across the entire shielding spectrum.

Before he was even done speaking the huge 1200cm nCV shells, omnisteel jacketed with an antimatter core, were slamming into the ultramax battlewagon.

Four hit before the craft seemed to burst into flame. Debris plumed up from the impact points and the massive vessel rolled.

From the engines of the huge ship a sullen red glow appeared.

Captain Yvwerklim's marrow shuddered from light taps again. This time the entire port side volley of thirty guns fired instead of the half-dozen hair trigger reflexed gunners.

The flaming shield rippled even as the massive ultramax battlewagon fired back.

The lights flickered, the hull rang like a gong, and for a second Yvwerklim could see his own ship's battlescreens as they took the brunt of whatever it was the massive warship had fired.

The volley from the Guardian Shield hit the massive twisted form of the Stoic Grasp of Duty and found something good. Fireballs erupted from the ship and for a crazy second it looked to Yvwerklim that the leading edge of the fireballs were the screaming faces of women.

A burning hole of pure fire tore open in front of the massive Stoic and the ship started to lunge forward.

Lieutenant Arprel rolled the Shield and the starboard gunners fired as soon as their gun sights caught a glimpse of the massive Stoic.

Two of the heavy nCV rounds hit the massive engines of the burning ship.

The burning rip in space suddenly collapsed with the sound of iron gates slamming shut as the Stoic Grasp of Duty exploded.

"Shields max, get us out of the debris field!" Captain Yvwerklim snapped.

Lieutenant Arpel didn't answer, just rolled the ship again even as he adjusted heading and went to max acceleration.

"The Admiralty wants to know what's happening," Lieutenant Orperin said.

"Close channel. We've got to get clear and I want full EMCON running," Captain Yvwerklim said.

"Aye aye, sir, running silent running deep," Commander Rlguet said.

The lights suddenly dimmed and flashed amber even as the acceleration dropped far enough the stealth systems could cover for it. Lieutenant Arpel changed course twice, then looped the Shield through a slow curving spiral pattern then cut the engines completely.

"Was there any mat-trans?" Captain Yvwerklim asked.

"None that we picked up. Looks like the Stoic broke up before they could send a boarding party," Commander Rlguet answered.

"Have security sweep the decks. Keep track of everyone's comlinks and biometrics," Captain Yvwerklim said. He shook his head. "Damn, that was close."

"At least the Stoic is accounted for now," Commander Rlquet said.

Yvwerklim nodded. "Now we just have to inform the Admiralty that boarding one of these vessels is how you lose both ships."

The Commander nodded.

Yvwerklim leaned back in his command chair.

Only a fool would board a Human Hulk, he thought as he stared at the viewscreen, where the stars of the Scutum-Centaurus Galactic Arm as they streaked by.