The next morning Captain Zzuural and Sheila were lounging against the side of the Paper Tiger sipping Terran coffee while some of Kolvac’’ksa’s workers were transferring cargo between their ships.

“Ugh, this shit is as nasty as I remember… and every bit as effective,” The captain said as he slurped.

“What do you mean? This is Kona,” Sheila replied groggily. “Ugh, hell of a party last night. The lieutenant get to bed ok?”

The captain just laughed and shook his head.

“Eventually. She spent a few unhappy hours ‘jettisoning her cargo’ but she survived,” the captain laughed. “While she will be feeling that today I think as her memory clears that will be the least of her concerns.”

“Ah, yes,” Sheila said with a grin, “the fair maiden… You should really take care of that. The way she was ogling you it shouldn’t be too much of a problem. She was flashing those colors.”

“We will just pretend that didn’t happen,” the captain laughed.

He turned to watch pallet after pallet of produce leaving the class twelve.

“Are you sure this is ok?” he asked.

“Oh please,” Sheila said dismissively, “You saved my ass at least twice. A few pounds of goodies is nothing. Besides,” she said as she gestured to the pallets of ammunition, “you are a paying customer after all even if you are going to use these premium mark fifteens in those sorry rifles of yours.”

“The Harbinger assault rifle is superior to your antiquated AK’s in every parameter that can be measured,” the captain said pointing a tentacle at her. “Better recoil management, light weight, superior optics...”

“Recoil management because you can’t handle a real gun and optics because you Juon can’t shoot.”

“Care to have a little competition?”

“Not against Nightguard,” Sheila laughed.

She turned and looked towards his ship.

“Um, are you guys supposed to be shaped that way?” she asked as she pointed towards Lieutenant Guzzala who was miserably crawling towards them.

“Good morning lieutenant,” the captain said with a chuckle, “how are we feeling today?”

“I… I’m well, sir,” the lieutenant said miserably barely able to look him in the eyes. “I have the payment prepared as instructed.”

She handed him a data crystal carefully so as not to touch him. The captain took it with great amusement.

“Are you sure this is permissible?” she asked.

“It is if I say it is,” the captain said as he handed the crystal over to Sheila. “This pittance for a mountain of premium Terran ammunition is a bargain.

“I don’t suppose you have some spare gyrojet slugs laying around do you?” Sheila asked as she pocketed the crystal.

“Now that is definitely not permissible,” the captain said with a laugh. “Besides the new gyrojet rounds no longer chamber in a Terran shotgun. We have the new prototype launchers.”

“Oooo! Can I see? Can I see?” Sheila exclaimed as she jumped up and down excitedly.

“I see no reason why you can’t,” the captain replied.

As they were setting out some targets a Z’uush approached them.

“Excuse me,” the female Z’uush hesitantly asked, “have you seen T’sunk’al?”

“No… Can’t say that I have,” Sheila said with a grin. “Last I saw him was at the party.”

“Oh… Thank you,” the Z’uush said and scuttled away stiffly.

Sheila watched her leave with a huge grin on her face.

“Well, you go T,” she laughed.

The captain looked at her slightly confused.

“What?”

“Zzu, you freaks do things differently,” Sheila said with a laugh. “For the rest of us there are certain things we have in common and that, my friend, was a pissed off mom.”

***

By the time lunch rolled around everybody was finally up and moving even if they were a little red eyed or misshapened depending on the species. As everyone was gathering for a communal meal the leader of the Z’uush approached the Terrans.

“I must apologize,” he said.

“What for?” Jacob asked.

“The meat we purchased was not chicken as we were told. Human-friend Jessie showed me an image of a chicken and it is a bird, not a six legged reptile.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jacob laughed. “It’s the thought that counts. It was good no matter how many legs it had.”

As everyone was sitting down and eating, one of the Z’uush, barely able to contain herself asked,

“So what happened next?”

“Ah yes, where were we?” The captain asked.

“The Terrans had just driven all of you out of the system.”

“Yes, well, the military high command was beside itself,” the captain continued, “The fact that so many high ranking positions had been replaced by incompetents certainly didn’t help. It took weeks to put together an expeditionary force. They gave the Terrans weeks to dig in.” He shook his head. “Weeks. One doesn’t give the Terrans weeks to prepare. It probably wouldn’t have made all that much difference but it certainly didn’t help.”

“No it didn’t,” said an old Juon first sergeant.

“You were in that first group weren’t you old man?” the captain asked.

“Old man? You are just as close to your one and fifty as I am,” the Juon laughed.

“A full Juon military career is one hundred and fifty years,” Sheila explained to the Z’uush. They consider one-hundred and fifty years ‘lifetime service’.”

“Yeah, and I’m getting close,” the old Juon said proudly. “Not many make the full stretch. Anyhow, I was just regular infantry back then and just a kid at that. Hadn’t even seen combat, not that there was much combat to see back in those days, just rogue outposts or pirates. We didn’t get much but overconfident shit from official channels but our commander gave us the real scoop so we knew it wasn’t going to be a fish dinner,” he said as his chromatophores flashed in wry amusement. “We knew about as much as anyone but that wasn’t much. All we knew for sure is that they utterly destroyed the household troops and that they used ancient weapons but that those ancient weapons worked. At least we were somewhat prepared, unlike a lot of others.”

He stopped to eat a few mouthfuls.

“Those first few days went well,” the captain said while the other Juon ate. “There was no real opposition in space except for mines and drones. That being said both the mines, which were missiles set to target anything within range and those damned drones were both very dangerous and while no ship was destroyed several had to leave the system after getting too close. The first place they targeted both for tactical and pride reasons was Zeus. When they got there they encountered their first real fight. The place was bristling with missiles and several ships were lost but we claimed our first victory… sort of. Once they started taking the stations they found out that they were deserted. There was nothing there but traps and auto-turrets, no people. We fought a battle against nothing but AI’s.”

“Yeah, I heard from the marines that taking those stations was hellish. No people, like the captain said but those empty halls killed a lot of Juon,” the old first sergeant said. “We were starting to see the pure evil cunning that we were up against.” He paused while he sipped on some kelph tea. “When we finally took the place it was… weird. It looked gutted. You could see where they had just torn stuff off the walls, the deck, wherever. It’s like they ripped out parts of the factories and took them. We didn’t know what happened or where they went but all of the gas miners were missing. We found out pretty quick that they took what they could and retreated into Jupiter itself. They modified those miners and turned them into flying factories and ship building plants and went down where we couldn’t reach them. They turned Jupiter itself into a fortress.”

“Yeah,” Sheila said. “In case anyone was wondering exactly how long one of those leviathans can stay down in Jupiter the answer is forever. They were, in classic Terran fashion, over designed so that they could stay down as long as they needed. In this case, they were down there the whole time.”

“What did they eat?” one of the Z’uush asked.

“Jovian rice, the one thing they would never run out of.”

“Oh I love that stuff!” one of the Juon enthused. “It makes the best sushi.”

“Well it should,” Sheila said as she ate. “Jovian sushi rice is designed to do just that.”

“It’s genetically engineered?” the Juon asked. Sheila just laughed.

“I didn’t say that it was genetically engineered. I said that it was designed. Jovian rice is a synthetic edible polymer.”

“It’s plastic ?!”

“Yep but it’s an easily digested nutritionally complete plastic,” Sheila said. “It’s what really ended the Sol Wars. Once they got production up and running they could produce an unlimited amount. It ended the famine. The guns were secondary. So, you had gigantic flying factories with unlimited food in a place that couldn’t be reached by the Imperial forces. You might guess that would cause some problems later on.”

“That they did,” the first sergeant said, “but that was later on in the story. At this point things were going ok. Zeus was neutralized, or so we thought, and we took the surface of Mars and Luna. The fighting was pretty heavy and we took a lot of casualties but we, in the end won, that battle. What we didn’t know was that the Terrans expected to lose. They didn’t commit a lot to keeping the surface of either. They knew that it was a losing fight. They just wanted us to pay a price in blood before they retreated underground.” He sighed heavily. “We thought we had the upper hand until we fucked up and tried to go into the tunnels. Those warrens… It was like chasing a venom eel into its den. We didn’t get a hundred yards before we started dying in droves. We had been issued heavy combat armor and it did hold up well against their small arms… for the first couple of months… but it wasn’t small arms in those tunnels. We had our first introductions to Terran heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mines, and all the other assorted nastiness that you guys know, love, and have occasionally been issued.” The old Juon laughed ruefully. “Needless to say our first encounter with that shit did not go well. In every case our forces were driven out of the tunnels. In the end all we could do was hold the surface to keep them down and even that sucked… the fuckers...” He waved his tentacles around angrily. “Standing guard around those eel holes just opened us up to raids from below. They would boil up out of the ground somewhere, usually someplace we hadn’t found yet because it wasn’t there yesterday, hit us hard, dive back down a hole, then blow up the passage,” he snarled. “Then, a couple of days later the whole thing would happen again.” He flashed anger. “Holding those positions was just an exercise in attrition, just like the whole ground war. Those goddamn idiots in charge had no idea what they were doing.” He stopped to sip more tea. “At least I wasn’t on Terra… poor fucklings… They didn’t have a chance.”

He started to mutter and sip tea.

“Yeah, we knew that holding the surface of Mars and Luna was a lost cause but Terra, we decided we were going to hold that shit,” Sheila said almost sympathetically. “That is where we decided to really fight. Mars and Luna were just places to hide people and factories below ground, purely a defensive fight. Terra, on the other hand...”

“Was hell,” the old Juon continued. “We thought we were warriors,” he said shaking his head. “Just because we could march in a parade or that our uniforms were perfect we thought we were good soldiers.” He flashed his chromatophores in a wry smile. “Our drills and war games were pathetic, nothing like what we do today. Maybe a unit had participated in attacking a pirate outpost with ten times the forces that were needed because units were desperate for a ribbon on their pennant. We weren’t warriors, not like you kids. The Terrans, back then, were warriors. They were if anything even harder than their grandchildren today. Those fighters, they had a decade of fighting in unimaginable horror. They didn’t blink. They didn’t flinch. They didn’t miss. We had a very rude awakening pretty damn quickly.” He paused for another sip of tea. “They were like ghosts, vengeful spirits. One second they were there, pelting you with fire and the second they were gone without a trace. They would even take their dead, if they had any.”

“You couldn’t scan for them?” one of the Juon asked.

“If anyone turned on an active scanner they would likely be beaten to death,” the first sergeant said with a rueful laugh. “Scanning with the crap we were issued back then was the absolute last thing you wanted to do. We made the mistake of thinking of the Terrans as a primitive backward people but they weren’t. They never were. They were a sophisticated technologically advanced race and had thirty years to study our tech. They knew exactly what they were doing. With their scanner camouflage we were lucky to pick up anything at 500 meters. Usually we had to be within 200 meters to pick them up and by then we were well within range. What made matters worse was that they could detect our active scanner signals from well over a kilometer away, just perfect for their mortars. They would have a mortar team behind their skirmish line. Turn on a scanner and get a shell on your head. Thank the lineage that they weren’t like the ones they have now. Mostly it was just frag… until we fucked up.”

“Fucked up?”

“Yeah, we did the one thing you should never, ever do. We got into an atrocity contest with the Terrans.”