Short Story Exodus (Patreon)

Exodus

The battle of Orion was the final battle in the war for the Milky Way, and should have marked the end of Humanity. It should have marked the beginning of the Vortal’s mastery over the galaxy, with the Universe soon to follow. The two species had been the only two sentient races to rise within the harsh, barren, emptiness, of space. And from their very first meeting both races knew that they could not coexist, and that war was inevitable. They kept their distance for a time, both having plenty of space to expand into before things came to a head. But their growing rivalry, competition for habitable planets, and incompatible ideologies meant that war was only a matter of time. And That soon a master of the Milky Way would have to be decided.

In the end the Vortal won, they had eked out just a scant few more worlds than the humans and had a slightly larger pool of resources to pull from. That did not mean the war was by any means easy, the humans refused to go quietly into the night, and the Vortal wouldn’t have had it any other way. Human engineering was pushed to its limits in making the best warships, the deadliest of bioweapons, and the most durable super soldiers. But so did the Vortal.

Neither race was stupid, nor did they have any great flaws the other could exploit. It was an even fight with the greatest of stakes. But eventually the well of Human ingenuity ran dry, they ran out of ways to enhance their preexisting designs, couldn’t imagine new strategies the Vortal hadn’t already seen a hundred times, couldn’t warp their DNA any more than they already had.

And so with the final victory over their last forge world, Orion, and the glassing of their worlds, the Humans lost. And the Vortal claimed mastery over the galaxy.

That battle over Orion should have been the final act of Humanity, a single footnote in the Origins of the Eternal Vortal Empire. But it wasn’t.

There was peace for some thousand years, people living and dying without the threat of war or strife. They restored the glassed worlds to a livable state and claimed them for themselves. Human wreckages were melted down, their stations stripped apart, and the remnants of their civilization were soon built over and sealed beneath pavement. All traces of the race were wiped away and soon the very idea that there had once been another alien race seemed ludicrous. It was only when the Vortal began to expand from the Milky Way that they once again heard the word ‘Human’.

Early forays into the large and small Magellanic clouds had promised bountiful resources and offered the Vortal staging platforms for their further expansion within the local cluster of galaxies. It was only after several colonial convoys made their way to these dwarf galaxies that we soon learned that the Humans were not as extinct as we first thought.

The attack came swiftly and without warning. The colony ships were destroyed, their armed escorts were obliterated, and their freighter convoys were boarded and seized. It was only through the final transmission of one such freighter that we saw the face of our attackers. Humans. But not the kind our forefathers would remember. These ones were all identical, down the most minute feature. The chance of twins was likely, triplets a little less so but not unthinkable, but eighty-six identical siblings? Impossible!

Thus began the Greater Magellanic war. Forges burned with a bright orange glow as millions of tons of steel alloy was cast, shipyards ceased civilian production, and chemical plants converted their fertilizers into munitions. The Vortal had gone many millennia without war, but we had not forgotten the lessons learned in the last war. Armadas armed with the deadliest of weapons soon began the year long journey to the front lines, armed with the same weapons our forefathers had used to smite the Humans. But these were not the same humans.

It would have been one thing if they had learned from their mistakes and adapted their fighting styles. But these humans didn’t fight like the old ones at all. In fact, if it weren’t for DNA confirmation then we wouldn’t have thought them to be humans at all. These humans had made a whole civilization off the back of clone vats and nano-replicators. Their fleets were immense swarms of small identical strike craft, capable of overwhelming our shields with sheer numbers. They flung themselves at us without a care in the world, like their lives were meaningless.

The first Armada was lost, but not without sending back valuable data. We learned from our mistakes and built a new fleet, one capable of handling the human suicide swarms. The second Armada of the Greater Magellanic war faired much better than the first and established a beach head into the dwarf galaxy. The admiralship knew that there would be no quick victories and they settled in for a long war of attrition. The humans could grow entire armies in a matter of months and could print swarms of ships in the same time, they had numbers on their side and were willing to throw everything they had at us. It took half a decade of campaigning before things began to fall in our favor, years spent smashing cloning hubs and auto factories. Years of learning how these new humans fought and how to counter them.

But just as things began to fall in our favor a new threat rose its head. A human invasion into the Milky way from the rough direction of the Andromeda galaxy. Newly built Armadas on training runs turned to face the Human invasion, ready to put their training to the test. But unprepared for what they were about to face. These humans were unlike the first ones, and also unlike the Magellanic Humans. The Andromedins were warped mutants, with a shape resembling the original Humans but features entirely foreign to how they used to be.

Some were plated in an organic titanium exoskeleton which made them completely impervious to conventional weaponry. Matched with enhanced muscles and respiratory systems they were capable of single handedly wielding cannons traditionally equipped on tanks. Others had large multi-faceted eyes that could see 360 degrees around them. While others were capable of reattaching severed limbs. Had their base DNA not had a kernel of what we recognized as human we would have considered these new invaders to be a whole different race of aliens. Even the original humans would have trouble recognizing these mutated monstrosities as human.

Their ships were somewhat unimpressive compared to their warped flesh, and the training Armada was able to competently stall the Andromedin advance. But when a troop ships snuck past our defenses we learned what a nightmare it was to face these mutant humans on the ground. Planets fell within months of invasion; the preexisting ground forces unprepared for the coming swarm. And with there supply points gone the front line armadas were forced to fall back.

Core world weapon factories shifted production to begin countering the new menace. And new military hardware was shipped to the front to hold back the Andromedins. Just in time for a third threat to appear.

The third wave was different from the first two as these were more machine than meat. This new race of humanity was fully augmented and adjusted cyborgs, with replaceable limbs, synthetic nerves, and micro-transistor enhanced neurons. They fought with greater unity than the swarm tactics of the clone humans, like every ship in their fleet was just another limb wielded with dexterous precision. Cyber attacks were effective at stunning them, but never crippling them entirely. When a widespread a cyber-attack was initiated they switched to organic brain power to continue the fight, though with much less efficiency.

It was from these augmented humans that we finally learned what had happened after the first war. These augmented humans lived longer lives and stored the excess memory on storage drives attached to their brains. It was from decrypting these drives that we learned the final battle over Orion was not as it seemed. Orion had given up on building war machines, instead focused its industrial might on creating massive colony ships to escape the Milky way. The final battle had been a means of granting the remaining ships enough time to escape without our notice.

Humanity did not die during the war, instead they scattered like seeds on the wind. They fled the Milky Way in every direction and began to germinate in foreign galaxies, changing with their environment and becoming something new.

When the fourth and fifth wave of humans invaded we knew that our days in the Milky way were numbered. We knew that we could never hold a galaxy under siege from all sides. So we took a page out of their book and built our own escape fleet. But unlike the humans we kept our fleet unified, kept our race together as one people rather than letting us split off and change into something that was no longer Vortal. At the time it had seemed a wise decision, fleeing the Milky way as one united race would offer us greater resources to reestablish the Eternal Vortal Empire. But a unified race cannot adapt as swiftly as a race split fifty different ways.

As we fled from galaxy to galaxy we learned the advantages of cultural drift, the further we went the more humans diversified. Drifting further and further from their origins, and in turn discovering whole new ways to approach a problem. We met human empires that lived entirely on extraterrestrial habitats, they had abandoned planetary living and its challenges and instead embraced the cold vacuum of space. Another race had found sentient symbionts and formed a deep partnership with them. Other humans were embroiled in a unending war, not fighting for any reason in particular, they just fighting because its what they had always done.

The further we traveled the less hostile the humans became, some never even hearing about the Vortal or how we had booted them from their home worlds. We could have made peace with these humans and left the past behind, but like our forefathers before us we knew that there could never be a lasting peace between us. No amount of diversification could ever mend that gap, even if the humans changed into Vortal themselves.

We also learned the further we have traveled just how far the humans have expanded. We have long since left the local cluster behind, but still we find more humans. In the Sculpture galaxy we found humans obsessed with carving small moons into misshapen human heads, micing those once found on Easter Island. Further away in the Whirlpool galaxy we found humans who had begun building worlds from scratch, turning every system they came to into a life bearing paradise.

We upgraded our FTL engines to their limit and in desperation flew to the greatest patch of empty space we could find, a place where there were no galaxies for many millions of lightyears. And still we found humans. These had begun pulling energy from dimensions unknown and had somehow spun that energy into matter, slowly building a new galaxy were previously there was none.

It is with great sorrow that I Admiral Brotesh Vanis, 442ndcaptain of the Exodus fleet, have come to a disturbing conclusion. We will never find a place untouched by humans, not in this universe, or any other. We could turn our weapons on a weaker human empire, go out in a blaze of glory. But after so much time spent searching I fear that our warrior spirit has been extinguished. Our quest for a part of the universe untouched by humanity has failed, and with its failure the last of our morale has withered away.

One by one the last Vortal have gone to sleep, never to wake. And I am all that’s left. I record this eulogy in hopes that one day the humans will remember that there was once another species in this universe, and know the painful lengths we went to in order to escape them.