Chapter 0: Before the stars

Napoleon the First, with all his disdain for men, bowed to one power that he was pleased to regard as greater than himself. In the heart of an atheistic age he replied to the smattering theorists of his day, "Your arguments gentlemen, are very fine. But who," pointing up to the evening sky, "who made all these?" And even the godless science of our times, while rejecting the scriptural answer to this question, still confesses that it has no other to give. "The phenomena of matter and force," says Tyndall, "lie within our intellectual range; and as far as they reach we will, at all hazard, push our inquiries. But behind, and above, and around all, the real mystery of the universe lies unsolved, and as far as we are concerned, is incapable of solution." But why incapable of solution? Why not already solved, so far as we are concerned, in this "simple, unequivocal, exhaustive, majestic" alpha of the Bible — "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth"?
– (J. B. Clark.)

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INCOMING TRANSMISSION

PRE-SUBSPACE INTERFACE

ESTIMATED TIME IN TRANSMISSION: 54.9 YEARS

TYPE: DISTRESS CALL

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This isn’t as much a distress call as it is a confession and a warning. Don’t make the same mistake we did. Don’t underestimate them.

We though that we were better than them. That we’d be able to conquer then in less than a week. Before reaching the planet, our last pre-jump scouting showed that, due to time dilation and our speed, we’d be there in less than 300 years from their point of view. The planet had everything we needed to establish a new outward colony. Oxygen, water, life. It was perfect.

The only downside was the intelligent lifeforms that had emerged on the planet. There had been no traces of them as late as 10 000 years ago. Now they were building cities, utilising steam engines and ravaging the planet with endless wars. They also seemed like a non-issue at the moment. We had encountered many lesser civilisations in our earlier endeavours. Show up in a flying city and they’d think of you as Gods. And we knew how to act as such.

They were different tho. When we arrived at the planet just a bit less than 300 years later they had already discovered electricity, computers, advanced rocket science. Their planet had formed an artificial ring made up of satellites and their cities at land spewed out a staggering amount of radio waves.

They had somehow managed to do in 300 years what took us eons. Their technology should not have been this good so soon. We cared little of their computers and cars though. A quick scan revealed that they were lacking both warpdrives or space fleets. They had seemingly nothing that could hurt us as long as we were in space. So we proceeded with our plan. Our ships descended over all their major cities. We deployed ground troops and proclaimed that this planet was now ours. We did not expect much of a fight if any.

Oh how we were wrong. These creatures was rather accustomed to war. Hell, they almost seemed to enjoy it. Our ground troops were decimated in a matter of hours. Their weapons were crude ballistic weapons made up of iron. But they were effective.

So we retreated to high orbit. Bombarded a couple of their largest cities by dropping meteorites on them. Millions died. But this only seemed to aggravate them further. And that’s when we saw the full might of the human race.

Nuclear armament missiles. Fifty of them would have been enough to send their whole world into a nuclear winter. But they sent not dozens, or hundreds, but thousands. Tens of thousands. The effect of a nuclear reaction does little to one self when your enemy is in high orbit. Our ships fell down to earth in a fiery rain of hellfire. We were defeated.

I’m writing this as I’m watching the last missiles head towards me. This is not a distress call, but a warning. Do not underestimate the humans.

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END OF TRANSMISSION
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