You think you've seen it all, don't you? You think that your thousands of years of warfare against those around you to make them your servants or your food ans that you have seen, experienced, and done it all, don't you?
You have no idea what Hell you have unleashed. You have no idea just what is now lunging up out of its grave at you. A grave forty-thousand years old, in a graveyard that was long ago turned into a parking lot where the bodies weren't moved because the developnt company embezzled the money and was crooked in ways your species can't understand.
A red eyed skull visaged thing that has crawled from a forgotten grave in a forgotten graveyard will grasp your by your hearing organs, pull you close and whisper one thing to you in the dark.
"There is room in this grave for you." - Falls Into Darkness, Mantid Diplomat addressing the Noocracy in a formal declaration.
It's easy for all of us. The Lanaktallan/Confederacy War was so long ago that the light from the stars that was emitted during that ti has passed beyond the Orion Spur, past the Galactic Core, and past the opposing galactic arms. Wreckage is found infrequently now, starships drifting in space have largely been recovered, and even on worlds where nobody dwells any more, weather and ti have erased the scars of that war.
But that is for us. Those who dwelt in the outside universe.
Inside The Bag, was the universe's most aggressive intelligent primate, wounded, threatened, and uncertain of what the future, when The Bag opened, would hold.
Would it be fire and blood or a universe where they were not at war.
They hoped for the latter and frantically prepared for the first.
We had them mostly at ease. The Mar-gite are not sothing personal. It was not a personal attack upon TerraSol, upon humanity. Make no mistake, these are not Terrans, not even Earthlings. These are humans. A bag of fluids and organs that all hate each other but just hate you more.
We had them willing to pause, willing to hold back the vast war machine they had built in the intervening five decades of monomaniacal military buildup.
The Hellspace Fence, the Mar-gite, they were troubles that had no visible origins and did not threaten TerraSol itself.
After all, the humans were down to one stellar system.
And humans understand that the only way to survive is to be multi-stellar, multiplanetary.
So, with their backs against the wall already, we had almost convinced them to set down the trigger of the planet cracker they were cradling to their chest.
And you had to hit TerraSol. In an amusing to the malevolent universe coincidence, you hit BrightFlash City. The sa city the Mantid hit. The sa city another race whose na we have forgotten struck at as an opening gambit to their desired interstellar war.
Then you attacked diplomats.
That act says you aren't interested in talking. Not now. Not in the future. That is a profound statent.
It says: We are in this to the end.
We Mantid tried to reach out, tried to use diplomacy in regards to the planets you have taken, in regards to the belligerent pose you have taken, in regards to your insatiable appetite for the flesh and psychic emantations of sapient beings.
But so n, you just can't reach.
Well, that's the way you want it.
So that's how it's going to happen.
You attacked Hiveho. You attacked Smokey Cone. You tried to attack Rigel-7. You tried to attack Pubvia.
That was enough. While your scientific and engineering advancents put you on a rough parity, militarily and industrially, with the Confederacy, aning that the Confederacy would be facing a near peer conflict, you made the Pri Miscalculation.
You attacked TerraSol.
You attacked the fleet you requested assist you with a military incursion.
Do not bother to reach out to us, to ask us to try to reign in the humans.
The Confederacy was not built to protect them in those lost past days.
It was built to protect us.
Thou hast sowed the breeze.
Now reap the whirlwind.
For I have co with a righteous and terrible wrath.
Guns.
You may fire when ready.- Admiral of the Warsteel (Upper Decks) Ky'le'rmo'o, to the Ornislarp Noocracy.
"...the fact that the war is against three different opponents, widely spaced, with differing capabilities may put undue strain upon the Solarian Iron Dominion's military forces," the representative from the United Governnts of Terra was saying to the assembled mbers of the Hamburger Kingdom Congress.
He was standing on the podium in front of the Speaker of the House, a fearso individual known only as "The Annoyed
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