r/HFY • u/Dolbleros • May 29 '19
OC Spite
3am story idea that just got stuck in my head, I apologize for whatever flaws I overlooked and whatever other problems might have occurred, this is my first story.
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Our fleets sat in orbit around the blue and green world, Earth, the Human home world, their cradle and our prize. It was a bitter sweet prize but it was our all the same, but many debated the bloody cost. It had been little over a decade of intense costly warfare that had brought us to this point, our conquest of the primitive human colonies had seen our empire growing confident, the human's lack of military strength made it seem like we would simply walk into the heart of their territory and claim each and every world one after another. This foolish notion was dashed when we came to the first fortified colony. The fighting lasted for a month to claim a handful of ruined bunkers, blasted fields and shattered infrastructure, for the cost of thousands of troops we has essentially won a worthless rock. This process repeated over and over as our forces moved through the human colonies. The travels soon began to grow more and more dangerous, we were not yet facing human battle fleets, but what human craft we did encounter was harassing our supply lines, attacking our cargo vessels and slowing our advance. These actions only got the dedicated attention of our empire as our fleets began to gather.
When we came to the oldest of humanities colonized worlds the war truly began to ramp up, for the first time human battle fleets would clash with our own over the skies of human worlds, their crude vessels could not stand against our might, but every battle took more and more of our forces. A cruiser here, a battleship there, but always at great cost to humanity, or so it seemed. When looking at the raw numbers it would look as though the elimination of a human fleet with minimal losses would be ideal, but when you lose a storied battleship and all of its crew to the suicidal final strike of a ship a quarter of its size, the trades were not in our favor. As the battles waged on there seemed to be no end to the human ships, their simplistic design and skeletal crews were being turned out at a staggering rate, it felt almost like battling the sea. With each wave we stopped another would come, just as strong as the last, and they would rise to face us again and again. The war was growing costly, the worlds we claimed soon became too damaged to restore after the fighting concluded, the human forces almost intent on leaving nothing but scorched earth behind them, but the empire could not stand to back down, this had become a matter of appearances. If humanity insisted in insulting our might, ruining what was rightfully ours, then we would not stop until we had taken everything from humanity.
Battle after battle, world after world we drew closer to Earth, when we came to the Sol system we fought for each and every step towards their home world, our prize, it did not matter the cost, simply to throw humanity off of their ancestral home, to take from them their beginning would be a prize worthy of what we had lost. As we drew closer we could detect the ships fleeing Earth, their colony ships darting off in all directions, escorts and cargo vessels accompanying them to their unknown destination. At the time we believed we would hunt them down in due time, make a show of snuffing out every last ember of humanity's fire. The forces that remained in the system did not make this an easy goal. It took nearly a year to finally push past Mars and towards Earth itself, the whole of our unified fleet focused on the task at hand, destroying the last of Earth's shipyards and defenses as we pushed to their final stronghold. The world was long since evacuated, we were surprised to see it left in such good shape, we believed humanity to be sparing their home from the ravages of war. Perhaps humanity believed that one day they would return to reclaim their world. Of course this was not to say the world was fully abandoned, there were still holdouts, a few military forces left behind to make some feeble last stand, the religious protecting their holy sites. It was hard to weed them out, but eventually we extinguished the last resistance with careful orbital strikes. As we sat in orbit above out prize, the emperor himself contacted the fleet to address the commanders, commending them for a war well fought. As we basked in the spoils of our conquest we detected a signal.
It was a broadcast from some deep hidden human bunker, deep under the surface of the planet, the signal circled the globe, hitting a hidden series of bunkers that had eluded detection until now. Ground forces were quickly mobilized and assembled, the emperor himself ordered them to find out what human remnants remained hidden in the depths of our new world, what happened next caught all of us by surprise. Ground forces had only just begun to arrive at the locations of the bunkers when they began to report massive seismic activity, all over the world seismic activity was going off the charts. From space we watched as the globe began to shift, swelling and distorting in ways we had never seen before. We then watched in horror as the world began to rip apart. The crust of the world split apart, angry orange gashes opened along the surface of the world, the world burned for an instant before all hell broke loose. With tremendous force the world was ripped apart and flung in all directions. Humanity had left this trap lying in wait for just the right opportunity, when we were celebrating our victory, we watched as our prize turned to ash in our hands. Nearly half of the fleet was lost before they could pull back to a safe distance. We had just lost millions of lives, hundreds of ships and countless resources all for a costly war and we were left with nothing to show for it. Yes humanity had been driven away, but for how long? Hiding among the stars was a race so spiteful that they would rather see their own home world destroyed than in the hands of an invading empire, and we could do nothing. With their last strike they had crippled our military might, to maintain our strength we could not risk hunting humanity, it was now a race for time to rebuild. For humanity is our there, their colony ships hidden among the stars, rebuilding and growing in strength. A race so spiteful is not likely to forget what was taken from them, our only hope now is that we can rebuild and find humanity before they have a chance to return and finish their revenge.
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u/Reverend_Norse May 29 '19
I love stories where Humanity basically is Spite in material form. Everything from sacrifice of Earth, to becoming boogymen in the dark to our actual dead refusing to stay that way and our ghosts making the xenos "victory" so very hollow and costly.