We arrived to be told that the war was over.
It wasn’t unheard of, but it was jarring to have it happen to us, personally. To watch the great Vishian Third Sociocide Fleet drop out of the subspace corridor and into real space, to see them assemble into the battle formation that would let us screen for our planetkillers in the two hours it would take to line up shots, to witness in *awe* the majestic level of power on display. And then, to receive a message in our own language, on a private band, informing us that it really would be just a horrible waste of time and resources to bomb a planet we now owned a share of since the resolution of our conflict.
Subjective time was about a tenth-span. By this point, I, the captain, was at half-span, and looking forward to a promising retirement after this operation. Objective time was more along the lines of five-span. Generations had lived and died after firing us off like ammunition.
It was the way of the galaxy. But it wasn’t intolerable, just difficult to get the numbers into your claws sometimes. And then you mostly just had to trust to the ship’s mind, and hope that you never got sent on a dead mission.
Dead missions meant no loot. No chance for glory. No superiors dying and making way for promotion. And also, because you hadn't fought, no shore leave after.
So we hovered there, just past the orbit of the massive gas giant with its swarm of mining installations around it, looking at the garden world that we were supposed to have been conquering, and wondered what the point was. How swiftly awe and battlelight turn to despair and resentment.
We could, of course, have bombed them anyway. But our government and our people had been honorable when we’d left, and we wouldn’t besmirch the names of our ancestors, no matter what we were like now. So instead, we settled in to wait for new orders over the subspace network; to pretend everything was fine, while we whiled away the clawspans.
It was two clawspans in when one of the technicians realized we were still receiving in-system information. Not a broadcast or a direct transmission, but something more like the subspace network. Except we were swimming in it. More technicians, nothing else to do, joined in on the work of decoding the protocols and exploring this system’s weaknesses. Just in case it turned out we needed to bomb them after all, of course. Not in any way for recreational purposes, or to burn time.
It took them a halfclaw to crack it. And somehow, every sailor, attendant, and officer in the fleet ended up with the codec on their personal devices almost right away. A mystery. Truly.
But what was more mysterious than our casual insubordination was the wealth of information on the other end. Speeches, documents, even videos. Most of them in languages we didn’t understand. But it didn’t take long of perusing file lists to find that some of these were familiar to us. Here was a video of a Grakki Joining Ceremony. Here was an essay written in Old Op-Nu about the dangers of closed borders. Here was a digital class on Trawn cooking.
Where had this come from? Did this planet collect archives? There were more than a few librarian species out there, but none of them had ever ended a war before their deaths.
It took another dozen clawspans before some brilliant fool realized the connection was two way, and left a comment on one of the files. It didn’t take but a heartbeat after that before they received a response, in our own language. It wasn’t even related to the fleet hanging overhead; it was just a discussion about the finer points of Grakki knife design. But it was a discussion we were having with a race we hadn’t ever actually met.
It was the first conversation. It was not the last.
Across our warships, dialogues with the planet below opened up. Sometimes the ones on the other side were obviously using translation programatics, but occasionally there was a poetry and fluency that could only have been trained over tenth-spans. I tried, as captain, to stay neutral to all of this. But it wasn’t long before I found myself in a private discussion myself, with a military leader from the world we were meant to be fighting.
It was during that conversation, sequestered in my quarters, that it was learned by the crew that our transmissions were violating the transmission maximum barrier. Library species or not, these people had a technology that marveled, and an open society that both puzzled and delighted.
It was a hundredth-span in when the first request came.
“Come down and visit!” It said. Delivered to my own device after a comment on the beauty of one of the tropical islands. “I’ve got a place on the beach, I’d love some company. It’s beautiful in person.”
The technicians began reporting it at once. I would have, officially, needed to reprimand them, and myself, for consorting with an unknown force. But orders from home were still forthcoming, and the unknown force was currently our sole supplier of novel entertainment. There are only so many games of Iss you can play before one goes mad.
Once again, it was the first request. And once again, it was not the last.
By the time their planet had made another three revolutions, half the crew had gotten invitations to visit. All of the officers had already received theirs, in much more diplomatically official ways. And here, the punch landed; they were ready for us whenever we wanted to come down.
Facilities built to our people’s specifications. Areas cleared of harmful substances. Residences built for us, safety devices prepared, food on the table and doors left open.
Nothing from home. We were forgotten.
We began to accept.
By the time the truth was uncovered by some of our more paranoid crew members, it was far too late. We had landed en masse, to find a world with not one, but twelve species from over fifty civilizations living together. We had made friends, sometimes lovers, in a way that was unnerving to the elders and feather-shivering exciting to the young crew. We had homes now. And still no word from home.
So when it came to light that the humans had lied to us? Told us the war was over, when in reality the battle was yet to be fought? Used their impossibly fast transmissions to build us the perfect trap, just as they did to all those that came before us?
Well. It’s hard to be angry when the trap treats us better than the homeworld ever did.
Our warships, the pride of our government’s military, the Third Sociocide Fleet, is now parked in the shadow of Jupiter, next to the Grakkhuli 29th Expedition, the Community of Trawn’s Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth battlefleets, and humanity’s own Solar Defense Fleet. They are manned, all of them, by mixed crews, both of peoples, and ideologies, ready to step in if the next invader doesn’t fall for the trap.
I served for another quarter-span as captain, though with the human’s life extension technology, that term isn’t as harsh as it once might have been. My daughter now climbs the ranks, looking to follow in my path. And in my retirement, I’ve finally found the time to visit that old friend off the Internet.
He was right. Hawaii really is beautiful.