Sit down, traveller, and let me tell you the story of Glorbus.
Glorbus was one of those swampy, backwater planets where you really did not want to be assigned to. Trust me, we had it pretty good up here in orbit.
It was at the ass end of nowhere, well past the standard deviation corridor of the Hygean Loop and the intersection from the Pan-Praxian Line, and everything around it was dead and dusty.
Well, except for Feltron 5. Feltron 5 was dead and wet, because apparently nothing wanted to live in an ocean of sulphur being blasted by gamma rays from that weird dead star in the system.
So Glorbus went nowhere, slowly, and took forever to get there.
The Hundive Rebellion tore through the neighbouring sector, and the refugees fled everywhere except Glorbus. Some enterprising - and very goddamn optimistic - entrepreneurs set up in orbit at Glorbus, hoping to capitalise on the sudden outflow of people from the nearby neighbourhoods - but the masses never materialised, and the rebellion blew over within about eighteen months. The Jackals sent their ships, and their dog-soldiers, and their planet-busters, and the rebellion was extinguished one system at a time.
Boom. Big dust rings, no more rebel planets, and the Jackals went back to Galax Prime and made sure everyone knew how they handled rebellions. There was a lot of tail-dragging and butthole-licking after that on Prime, or so the rumours went.
The entrepreneurs in orbit around Glorbus?
Well, they were shit out of luck. Fat loans to the InterStellar Insurance Conglomerate, no repayment options, and zero - and I mean, ZERO - traffic to claw back any of those expenses. They ended up folding like bad hygiene packs out of Delhin, and Glorbus suddenly had a crown of space junk in orbit.
So. Glorbus, already stuck in a quiet neighbourhood, suddenly found itself surrounded by even more real estate. Except it wasn’t really the type of real estate that drew crowds. More like the dead real estate that people cruised by and marked as a big fat “Nope” on their maps.
Why did we get assigned here?
Ask the Jackals. We tried, and got no answers. I guess it was the closest system to have survived the Hundive Rebellion without being part of it? Makes sense to station troops close to the remnants of the unrest, to keep an eye on it, except… well, there wasn’t much left to keep an eye on in those systems that had rebelled.
Planet-busters, remember?
Now I guess, if you look at it from the outside, without any damn clue about the Jackals and how they run things, then Glorbus might have, maybe, just perhaps… looked like it was important at that point in time. We had a fat necklace of stations in orbit, the asteroid belt between Globun II and Globun III was being mined - old contracts from the stations, which were apparently contracted to run for something like ninety-nine years even though the stations had already gone bankrupt - and the prize in the crown: us.
The 68th Killarney Shock Battalion.
A handful of capital ships, a double handful of support ships, and probably a double dozen or so of those small fighters that were half drone, half suicidal pilot. On paper, we were awesome.
Reality was a bit…
Different.
See, the real action was in the 69th. They also got the best publicity, in all the hottest spots, and whenever the Jackals needed an example of human troops working well in their empire, the 69th got a prime spot in the light. Flashy uniforms, steno-burnt white smiles, perfect faces, and a list of conquests longer than my left leg.
Why not my right leg?
Well, it’s a bit missing, unless you haven’t noticed? Things got a bit rough when the Judicials arrived. This stump is not really an impressive metric of anything, unless you count all the stitches.
So the Judicials arrived, and things went a bit funny for a while.
Remember those lessons we had in school, in the old Jackal curriculums, about how they had found Humanity lost and scattered between the stars, and taken us into their fold? How they had nurtured us, and protected us, and made us the crown jewel of their empire?
Right. So apparently that was not quite the whole truth.
The Judicials - by their own account - were the ones who had initially sent us out, and then got worried when we never reported back. This was a couple of hundred years ago, give or take a century or two. They were humans too, but somewhat different. Lots of gene tailoring and RNA cocktails there, which the Jackals had always strictly forbidden. They never wanted mutants or deviants in their empire, and I guess baseline humans were already a goddamn difficult bunch to deal with.
The Judicials proved the wisdom of that choice, I guess.
So these new humans arrive, through a black hole of all places, and the first thing we hear from them is when we get hailed from Feltron 5.
Remember I said there was a weird dead star there?
Yeah, that was the Judicials all along. They somehow bent the space-time continuum from… somewhere else… and then popped out at Feltron 5. They loved it, since the sulphur there was a key fuel for some of their drives, and once they had refueled they started spreading out and looking for more humans.
Which meant us, at Glorbus. With all of our ships and stations in orbit, and our very busy asteroid belt. Us, looking all busy and prosperous and stuff.
They made contact, told us they were here to rescue us, and pulled into orbit in some Very Big and Very Shiny ships. Their biggest ship made the Jackal dreadnaughts look like little mining skiffs. I think there was a big communication stuff-up at that point, because they were happy - genuinely, teeth-visible-in-big-smiles happy - to see humans doing so well at this point in space. We had an entire planet, after all, and stations in orbit, and even the beginnings of a fleet too!
That lasted for about the five minutes that it took for them to realise that we were not, in fact, free.
They were still very polite though. They asked about the Jackals, they nodded along when we explained, and then they asked us where the nearest Jackal base was.
Excluding Glorbus, of course, since we were clearly not Jackals, and we were in no rush to tell them either.
And that, my friend, is how the Great Calamity War started.
The Judicials went out and slagged Bosphor, and then Killox, and then the big trade hub at Hygean Prime. This being the same trade hub that anchored the whole Hygean Loop, of course. Which we had been excluded from.
Lots of angry voices, and messages back from their fleets as they pummeled every ship with a sharp-eared face or a tail-wagger on it. We in the 68th just sat back and waited, because honestly?
We had no fucking idea what to do.
The Jackals retaliated, eventually, after they figured out that the Judicials were not, in fact, just a rebellious human regiment that had happened upon some advanced toys out in the Unparalleled Regions. They met the Judicial fleet at Dobsononv, had a three-day shoot-out with quantum lasers and diamond torpedoes, and then the fighting spilled over into the rest of the system after they wrecked the main refinery around the gas giant there. We were still sitting tight around Glorbus, watching a stream of ships coming out of Feltron every day, and waiting for the hammer to drop.
It never did.
The Judicials pushed on Galax Prime, got beaten back by a gravity gun the Jackals pulled out of hiding - who knows what else we had been kept ignorant about - and then counter-attacked and wiped out Gost and Anubis Prime.
Yes, that Anubis Prime.
With their home world spreading out into a dust disc around their old sun, the Jackals went a bit feral. Full mobilisation orders went out to every deployed Jackal unit - including us - and the entire empire lit up for a while. Some units stayed loyal to the Jackals, others split along species lines, others bailed off into the unknown. A good time to fuck around and find out, I guess. Planet-busters going off all over the place, and lots of screaming faces over the holo-links as negotiations went bad.
We were sitting right next to a never-ending stream of Judicial ships though, so we decided to just ignore that last mobilisation order. We waved as the ships passed, smiled and nodded when they messaged us, and waited for things to blow over.
In the end, the Jackals were beaten back, and Galax Prime joined the list of planets to be reprogrammed by planet-busters. Another list that was longer than my left leg at that point. They got a big Judicial ship in their death throes though, one of the command carriers, and the newcomers got a bit disorientated for a while, but then they regrouped and wiped out the rest of the still-loyal Jackal units. The last stand, out in the Prallen Fields, was, ironically enough, by the 69th Killarney Shock Battalion. They had grown by absorbing other scattered Jackal units during the war, and by the time they got cornered out at the Fields, they were a bit larger than a battalion, and just a bit smaller than an armada.
Not that it mattered much. The Judicials showed them there was no joy in fighting for a slave-master, and smeared their ships across about fifteen lightyears and seven solar systems.
No more publicity campaigns for them, or white smiles for the cameras.
After that, things calmed down a bit.
Well, somewhat. It turned out that using gravity weapons like a farmer chasing pop-rats in an agri-dome is actually a really, terribly, horribly bad idea - something which even the Judicials had not anticipated. Most of the planets they had attacked ended up with orbital wobbles or even distorted orbital paths altogether, and there were a great many habitable planets that suddenly had extreme weather events. The type of extreme weather events that no insurance policy lets you bounce back from. Maybe if you were a slime mold, or something with the DNA code of a paper clip, but intelligent life? Nah.
The Judicials turned around, and went back to Feltron, and disappeared down the dead star they had first come from. Their work was done, and they had saved enough of their poor, backwards cousins to take back to whatever part of the universe they had come from originally.
Funny - we never even got around to asking.
And just like that, we were the last ones here. They left us an invitation to visit - a big drone that hung in orbit, and allowed us to talk to them - whenever we felt like it, but someone got confused with how the drone’s commands work, and it ended up falling into the star here. A big silvery explosion, and it was gone. No more talking to the Judicials.
Or whatever they had been called. It might have been a mistranslation all along.
My right leg?
Oh, that was a stupid thing. An airlock out on the insurance section failed, and I got caught in the emergency gate. Stupid thing, but that’s life for you.
Being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time can be a real drag.
I read this while ignoring two crying kids and couldn't keep straight who were the Jackdicials and who were the Juckles. I think my brain just started calling both factions jackasses and this didn't hurt my enjoyment at all!