Epilogue - Year 18: The Rest of the Story

So, that’s about it for Beerat’s part of saving Earth for Humanity. Eventually I ran out of places to go visit in Sol System and the AIs let me come home again. About the only place in the whole system that I didn’t visit was Governor Edelmann’s colony way out in the Oort Cloud, and it was a secret anyway.

I did pull rank and go sight-seeing some, down on Earth. Of course they used me as a political prize. Wherever I went, the locals played up how nice it would be to be a colony and have a Governor and get all the benefits of being Confederacy citizens. Like, medical care far beyond what Earth had. And warfighting tools far beyond what Earth had.

Was it Guam, then American Samoa, and only then Iceland? No, Iceland was second. It was Guam, then Iceland, then Samoa. Iceland should have been first by all rights, but the Einherjar high command was too stiff-necked to bow down to the Confederacy. Once Guam did it, though, Iceland joined and after that the Confederacy started taking Earth over piece-meal. It was Tasmania that organized it and got everyone to agree to the rules, but Tasmania wasn’t eligible so they had to wait.

If you’re a Confederacy Marine, you can get sent anywhere the CMC needs you, but you can request a particular duty station when you volunteer. If everyone over 6.5 in an isolated area -like an island- volunteers and asks for “Here on Earth, fighting the dickheads”, and every adult under 6.5 in that same isolated area agrees to be a concubine if extracted, then all you have to do is bring in some infrastructure, anoint someone as Governor, and call that isolated area a Confederacy Colony. And set up immigration controls, because the Confederacy will NOT allow non-citizens to visit Confed soil. Simple, in theory.

Almost impossible, in practice. Guam ended up kicking some people out, sending them to Hawaii, California, Japan, the Philippines, wherever seemed appropriate. Anyone agreeing to be a Volunteer or a Concubine could stay. Anyone who wouldn’t agree to that had to go. Guam was a sort of retirement haven for US Army people, and there were a lot of 70- and 80-year old ‘concubines’ with combat experience running around the island. A lot of them ended up taking the test again once they’d been run through the med-tubes, and suddenly we had a whole bunch more volunteers for the Marines.

About the only traditional pickup rule that really got bent out of shape was the one about females and menopause. Since the people in this huge ‘pickup’ weren’t all getting shipped out to a colony somewhere out on the back side of Orion’s ass where they needed to have a high birth rate, there was no point in getting all worked up about whether Joe’s 80-year-old wife could still have kids or not. This colony had been invaded by the Sa’arm, and worrying about resources that took 15 years to mature was senseless. These extractees were staying right there on Earth, or at least the wife was, so what difference did it make?

Still, Rules Are Rules, and there was a good theoretic reason for that one. What they did was relax the requirement to ‘at least half’ of Joe’s conks had to be capable of pregnancy. That let good old G.I. Joe keep his wife (if he wanted to) but also pick up a stunningly gorgeous 18-year-old fuck-bunny from all the refugees clogging up all the Moonbase med-tubes. As long as Georgina the Grandma was willing to help raise the kids, G.I. Joe could keep Renee the Refugee pregnant all year-round.

Guam was a clusterfuck, but eventually they got it all sorted out. Everyone who was staying had strong incentive to behave, like another 50 years of life if the Sa’arm didn’t get them. It took a while, but eventually Guam became Sol System’s first “Confederacy Colony”.

Yeah, Backup was really first, but they couldn’t admit it at the time. They were still worried about things going wrong. They still are, really. It’s no longer a secret, no one worries any more about the Sa’arm reading our message traffic, but we do still worry about a ship getting followed to the base so their location is still secret and only their own ships go to it.

Once they got all the kinks worked out, Iceland and American Samoa went much more smoothly. I understand that Madagascar was an even worse clusterfuck than Guam had been, and they didn’t convince the AIs to accept them for years. Sol also got a couple places out in the system like the Mars research station redesignated as colonies.

Tasmania had to resort to the draft to get their refugees to cooperate. Any Australian refugee who got over 6.5 on the test WOULD go to the Confederacy embassy in Hobart and volunteer for Confederacy service. If they did it voluntarily, they had some say in their assignment. Like, in many cases, their first assignment was “Go back home and collect your concubines before reporting to Artemis Base up on the Moon for training”.

It got uglier for those Australian refugees who didn’t get 6.5 on their tests, and even worse for those who got 6.5 but hadn’t volunteered. Of course, most of the Australians had taken the test a decade before, so they had to re-test. During the test they were evaluated, and if they failed the test and weren’t a single parent they got drafted into EDF service. Tasmania sent a lot of Australian soldiers across Bass Strait to go bother the dickheads.

They weren’t Confederacy Marines, but human ingenuity coupled to Confed technology had made even unenhanced EDF soldiers a lot more effective than otherwise. A lot of them died, but the survivors learned from their mistakes, then went back to Tasmania and taught the next wave everything they knew. Their learning process may have been slower than the Sa’arm gestalt, but it had the same effect.

Every expedition Tasmania sent to Australia learned something about fighting the Sa’arm. We’re pretty sure the Sa’arm learned, too. One of the things they learned was that these humans didn’t give up after a couple of landing forces were wiped out. They kept coming back, and eventually the Sa’arm had to start avoiding combat unless they were protecting something important, simply because they were running out of units.

We had never gotten a peek inside any of their colonizer ships, so we didn’t really have any idea how many Sa’arm they could carry. Assuming that the hive ship had held roughly a hundred thousand dickheads, and the accompanying scouts and escorts added another ten thousand, there shouldn’t be more than 110 thousand dickheads in Australia, right?

They were pretty sure this estimate was too high, but we didn’t really know. Anyway, the thinking was that if everyone else kept the dickheads from reinforcing Australia, and Tasmania could send all of its adult refugees back with weapons and training, they should be able to wipe the dickheads out and re-take Australia for Humanity as long as they took no more than 500 or so casualties per kill.

That sounds horrible, but that’s a leader’s job, to look at the really ugly stuff and come up with the best -or least bad- answer. In this case, the Premier was merely arming the adult Australian refugees and sending them back home again. At least he was allowing the children and one parent to stay safe in Tasmania.

As we all know now, their numbers were way off. First, the Sa’arm packed a LOT of dickheads into those ships, in suspended animation. Much of the space in their colony ships was basically a meat-locker, stuffed full of dickheads that could be thawed out as needed. We figured out later that their numbers were about right, for the earliest landing, the one in Africa. And the later landing in North America. All the other landings, though, including the one in Australia, were by much larger ships carrying something like a million Dicksickles.

Plus the already-thawed crews.

Plus all the crews of all the escorting smaller ships.

Plus all the new dickheads that hatched soon after the landing.

The guys in North America found eggs. In Africa, South America, Australia, and Asia, the dickheads were never forced to retreat during the initial landings. Any land they took, they held. The fight in North America was far more fluid than everywhere else, and that meant that in many cases we had humans holding ground -at least temporarily- that the dickheads had held only days before.

Apparently every dickhead carries several eggs ready to be laid as needed. After their six landing sites were all taken out by our ships, the Sa’arm had no safe bases to raise their young. People on the ground found ostrich eggs wherever the Sa’arm had passed.

Once people knew to look for them, they found them everywhere that the Sa’arm had been when their bases were destroyed. The brains finally decided that losing all of their bases must have triggered an instinct to increase their numbers. Wherever they were, each Sa’arm had dropped an egg.

Each one. Not some of them, not “the adult females”. Each one. If a patrol was following a gaggle of 30 dickheads when those bases were destroyed, they would find a pile of 30 eggs in a ravine.

Once we realized what the ostrich eggs really were, most were destroyed, but some were taken to safe places to be watched. It was very, very important to learn how fast dickhead eggs grew.

That led to some unexpected knowledge. A captured egg could be taken anywhere on Earth to be studied. If taken off Earth, though, it died just like that dickhead we’d captured on Tulak had when we took it away from the planet and all the others we’d captured since then. It took several experiments, but eventually it was determined that a single egg would die soon after leaving Earth while a group of eggs would live longer. A dozen or so kept together would eventually hatch.

They were able to narrow the distance down to somewhere close to our transporter range. That meant that we could have used the Moon for all this research, but I think that everyone smarter than a potato agreed to keep them away from there. If the Sa’arm didn’t know about our moonbases, why give that knowledge away? We ended up with labs all through Sol’s asteroid belt, growing, killing, and dissecting feral dickheads.

Most of what the researchers learned was depressing, but we needed to know what we were up against. Basically, every adult Sa’arm grew three eggs. When each was fully-formed and ready, they could be held or dropped at any time. Or maybe when the unit was told to by their group-mind. Or even when a sudden trauma took their group-mind offline for a moment and reflexes or instincts told them to. And a new egg started growing as soon as one was dropped.

Worse, it took less than two years for an egg to become an adult Sa’arm, ready to build, fight, or lay more eggs. As long as it got enough food, it fully matured in less than two years. Which meant that, whatever number of Sa’arm was available to their colony, there could be three times that many more available in two years.

That was an ugly truth. It took us fifteen years for two adult humans to produce a third adult human. It only took them two years for one adult dickhead to make three more adult dickheads. On the other hand, we’d started this fight with roughly 7 billion humans. If we could get any sort of kill ratio, we’d run out of dickheads long before we ran out of people.

As long as we kept the fight up, that was. We couldn’t let them just sit back and breed, or they would outnumber us in no time at all.

So, Australia became an experiment in attrition. While everyone else was simply trying to hold the Sa’arm back, the human forces surrounding Australia ignored territory and went for maximum kills. And tried to count them, but that was mostly estimates.

Tasmania sent forces ashore from the south. New Zealand did it from the east. Malaysia and New Guinea did it from the north. Japan and the Philippines sent troops wherever they appeared useful. And, landings were easy to reinforce after the Confederacy started putting transporters at their service.

In fact, soon after the first landings, they stopped being ‘landings’ at all. A remote-control drone, a ‘kitten’, would drop some pads in an out-of-the-way place, perhaps in a valley, and after you blinked a few times there would be a stream of soldiers walking out of each one, looking for dickheads to kill.

If -when- conditions changed so that the soldiers wanted to bug out again, more pads were used to make evacuation quick and painless. As long as the pads self-destructed before the dickheads could investigate them, they learned nothing.

By the time the Australian dickheads started changing tactics to minimize their losses, the human forces had killed several million dickheads in Australia alone. That they knew about, of course. There was no way of knowing how many more had been killed in their landing-site warrens, or in other tunnels we destroyed.

We tried to simply hold our lines in Asia, northern Europe, and South America, concentrating our efforts in places where we thought we could cut off reinforcements. It helps a lot that we control orbital space, they don’t have any more flight-capable vehicles, and they don’t do water. They shoot at our orbital forts because they can see them, and we destroy whatever shot at them.

Any place they can’t march to is safe. Their senses end at the horizon, so anything more than 20 klicks offshore is completely safe. A shoreline is a barrier to them, but not to us. We have ships, we have submarines, we have underwater cities, bases, refugee camps. The water seems to be a blind area for the Sa’arm and they don’t use automated sensor systems so unless they actually have a Swarmtrooper on the shore looking out, they don’t see the ships and have no idea where the soldiers came from.

We could land troops on any shore any time we wanted. That made any peninsula an opportunity for a quick raid. We could attack and reinforce from three sides while they could only reinforce from one. If we could block the base of the peninsula, we could isolate the Sa’arm within and wipe them out. Whether we tried to stay for good, or just kill as many Sa’arm as possible before leaving was often a real-time decision, with the higher-ups looking at the big picture and saying ‘Stay, we need this land’ while the boots on the ground saw the land they were fighting over and saying ‘Go, it’s not worth the casualties’.

England and Sweden, of course, had a water barrier around them and still had a civilian population to protect, so we put more effort into staying there than, say, Denmark and Iberia where the locals were long gone and the Sa’arm could easily reinforce anyway. Southern England and southern Sweden were the first Sa’arm-held places we were able to isolate and clear. They were followed a few years later by North America and then Australia.

Not that any of those areas were considered ‘safe’, not for a long time. The Sa’arm left eggs behind everywhere, often hidden in a tunnel somewhere that we didn’t find in time. It took us a LONG time to clean out all the re-infections. We didn’t ever really get them under control until we started using AI-controlled drones equipped with chemical sensors to seek out the eggs.

Once found, we had to send soldiers to destroy them, but destroying eggs before they hatched was a whole lot safer and easier than killing dickheads after they hatched. Then, once we’d cleaned out all the eggs, we could somewhat trust the area as clean.

After that, they started pushing the Sa’arm back wherever we had contact. Siberia, northern Europe, southern South America, a toehold in southern Africa. They’re still at it, they’ll be at it for generations unless we come up with something better than teams of armored infantry going down into the tunnels and fighting it out with the dickheads.

I still think that remote-control armed vehicles are the right answer but the AIs won’t support that. All the violence has to be done by us. I don’t understand that. How is a remote-control mech or drone in a tunnel less direct than a homing missile that we fire from a warship and forget about? We’ve been using them from the very beginning.

We should have men and women safe in an air-conditioned control room, either operating remotes themselves or monitoring the video feed from AI-controlled remotes. Once someone finds a cache of eggs, they shouldn’t have to do anything more than lift a red cover and push a button to activate the drone’s weapons. Plasma beam? Simple flamethrower? Armor-piercing grenade that explodes as soon as it penetrates the shell? Anything that works, right?

They are slowly making progress, though. I think they are about to declare Iberia, what used to be Spain and Portugal, to be dickhead-free again. They’ve done it a couple of times before, but between the tunnels from France and Morocco and all the eggs it’s hard to make it stick.

Still, we have it all over the dickheads for mobility. They can’t move on the surface in any kind of group or we’ll hit them from orbit, so they have to move through tunnels. Their tunnels take time to dig and they only have exits where they dug them, while we can use transporters and surface vehicles to go anywhere. And air transport, as long as we are away from any dickheads.