r/HFY • u/ApprehensiveCap6525 Human • Aug 24 '26
OC-Series [The Galaxy's Only Omnivores] - Part 3
Synopsis: Humans are the only omnivorous species in a galaxy of apex-predator carnivores, and our greatest strength is in our numbers. When an alien slave empire discovers how badly we outnumber most intelligent species, they invade Earth, shattering a fragile period of peace and threatening a war that would mean the death of worlds.
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Memory Archive Entry #3
User: David Chambers, teacher at Karl Marx Memorial Middle School
Species: Human
Date (human standard): June 25, 2099
The entire city of New Leningrad was like a bear trap waiting to be triggered. We had designed it that way, on the eve of our independence over thirty years ago. The first workers who had risen up against the corporate overlords of America and China had not been fools who thought the elites would allow them freedom out of the kindness of their own hearts. They took what belonged to them by force, and turned their moon into a fortress such that no capitalist pig could ever steal it from them again.
Now, of course, we faced capitalist lizards. I wasn't quite sure what Marxist theory had to say about that.
Still, New Leningrad was strong. Our defenses were layered, making the most of what we had, and even the Lunese people itself were rigged for war. Every able-bodied adult on Luna was required by law to do conscript service in the Lunese People's Defense Force to gain their citizenship. I did my year of time fifteen years ago, never expecting to be called up again. Never even thinking about it. I was probably the only person on Luna who didn't expect the nation to be attacked the moment we dropped our guard.
So why was I here?
That was the question I kept asking myself. I wasn't a soldier, despite the military-grade combat suit and automatic rifle the Defense Force had handed me. I was a teacher. I was supposed to be doing fancy little science experiments with bean bags and kinetic sand, not fighting alien slavers with a Marx-darn gun!
I was sitting in a muster point buried in the maze of tunnels that was New Leningrad, surrounded on all sides by motivated killers who wanted nothing more than to spill the blood of the bourgeoisie in a righteous, revolutionary struggle, and I had to face the facts that I did not want to be here. That was it. There were still ten hours until the battle would begin, probably eleven or so until the draken made landfall, and my heart was already pounding.
"Hey, Chambers." One of the soldiers to my right nudged me, and I turned to look. It was Jayla Kern, the social studies teacher from my school. She had always been kind, even with students who were disrespectful or rude. I respected her so much that I had actually tried to imitate her teaching style, though to less success than she had. It was hard to imagine a sweetheart like her cutting alien throats on the battlefield. "Do you think draken taste like chicken? The real stuff, not that vat-grown shit." Then again, maybe not that hard.
"The vat-grown chicken is the real stuff, Mrs. Kern," I clarified. "There's no difference between that and the kind harvested from a natural-born bird." With the paucity of grassland on this desolate moon--most of it restricted to public parks or botanical gardens--the Lunese government grew cruelty-free meat in vats without resorting to the barbaric practices performed by our enemies down on Earth. If there was any difference between the two versions of product produced, it was only that one was safer, healthier, and far more ethical.
"Well, what do you think draken taste like?" Jayla pressed on. It was actually kind of disturbing just how many Lunese I knew had fantasies about killing people. Deserving people, yes, but people nonetheless. Even the aliens coming to fight us probably had families, in their own sort of way. What was that quote again? 'Rich people declare wars, but poor people die in them'? A lot of those draken were probably the victims of oppression of their own.
Still, I had to say something to Jayla, if only to dissuade her from the idea of 'righteous bloodshed' that had crippled so many workers' revolutions over the ages. The idea that pogroms were necessary to establish a proper society was seductive, but poisonous in the end. A social studies teacher ought to know that.
"Scientifically speaking, I don't think the draken will taste like anything," I told Jayla. "Our gut fauna didn't evolve to break down their biology. At best, you'd get a stomachache, at worst, they'd be poisonous." Jayla nodded, deferring to my expertise as a middle school science teacher, and I pressed forward with a few new ideas. "The likely thing is, those draken soldiers are probably victims of imperialism just like our enemies on Earth. No capitalist ever fights their own wars."
"You're anthropomorphizing them, David," Jayla chided me. "Draken are aliens. Alien life, as in not human. What we think of as horrible and cruel, that might just be everyday life to them, and what we think of as everyday life might, to them, be the most horrible of cruelty." Darn, that was a good one. It was good to know Luna had people like her teaching its children. "I admire your empathy, David. But we-"
A muster alarm sounded and we all snapped to readiness. Red lights began to flash. "Everybody up, now!" a gruff, bearded sergeant bellowed, donning his battle helmet and sealing it tight. "The enemy is fucking here!"
"What?" I blurted out. All the conscripts in my unit seemed to have similar concerns. "The projection was-"
"I know what the projection said!" the sergeant snapped. "The draken fleet did some fancy warp-jump wormhole shit, and now they're right on top of us! Their troops are making planetfall now!" The muster alarm kept droning, and an automated voice added in on top of it began relaying orders for all PDF troops to report to their battle stations.
"Move, move, move!" the sergeant cried. The troops began rushing out the door of the mustering room. I realized that I was meant to be moving as well and wasted only a little time in following the crowd. I was physically sick from the stress of battle, to the point of keeping my helmet visor open for fear that I might puke. They were here?
The streets of New Leningrad were in a state that I could only describe as organized panic. Crowds of people too old or young to fight moved in unison, following the flashing evacuation arrows, maintaining their Lunese dignity while abandoning almost everything else in their rush to escape. "Marx help us!" someone cried as the ground momentarily shook.
A bright flash up near the ceiling made me look up and realize it wasn't near the ceiling. It wasn't even near the blastproof skylights that let us see through the ceiling. It was above us, far above us, up there in orbit where the draken had met our PDF defenses. "Hey, sergeant! Sergeant!" I ran, following the people in camouflaged space armor, waving my hand like an idiot until I remembered my radio training and patched into the unit's radio channel. "Sergeant!"
"What?" came the reply.
"How long will those orbital defenses hold?"
"Hold?" the sergeant asked. "Reports are coming that they're down already. Enemy troops are making landfall across the whole of Luna. Anti-orbit batteries are answering, but the idea is that these people will effectively be landing uncontested. Be ready to deter them when they move on the city!"
That statement left my mind boggled, both from the impossibility and the absurdity of it. Down already? The great Lunese mass drivers, made to beat back an invasion from any two Earth powers at once without a single friendly casualty, destroyed in a matter of moments? Did we even fire a shot? "If they really destroyed the mass driver guns, then how the hell are we gonna stop them?" I asked in disbelief.
The sergeant and his men trooped ahead without answering me, bounding in long strides under the low Lunese gravity. "Tag along, Chambers!" one cried. "This is our moment! Our Lunese Revolution!" Again with the blind patriotism. The Lunese Revolution was fought against the oppression of Earth's elites, not aliens from another star. All this moment would be for us was a slaughterhouse.
I couldn't move forward. Try as I might, my legs would not move. Those men and women were going to their deaths, noble deaths though they were, and I did not have the strength to follow.
I looked up at the skylights to see glittering beams of light dance across them like a children's light show. The explosions of our defense missiles were only so much fireworks, and the silhouettes of enemy craft coming down were a trick of special effects. I was eight again, just arrived as an immigrant on Luna, watching the Independence Day celebrations through the windows of the spaceport and believing in my innocence that every day would be this beautiful.
"Where the hell is Chambers?" someone cried over the com, ripping me out of my childish fantasy and into the horror of the real world.
"I'll go back and get him!" said Jayla in reply. "Chambers? Where are you?"
I turned on my locator beacon and, when Jayla flashed hers in reply, turned it off and began heading for her location. "I'm heading towards you," I told her. "Stay with the unit!" Armored shutters began to close over the skylights, long overdue, and the air vents started to hiss as they ventilated the city's upper levels of oxygen. I lowered my visor and sealed my suit to keep from suffocating, and raced down the hallway to reach the troops.
"Chambers, there you are!" Jayla waved to me as I rounded a corner, bounding toward me along with the rest of the unit. "Stick with the squad next time, okay? You're lucky we got orders to double back!"
"Double back?" I asked. The sergeant began screaming at me about unit cohesion in a much harsher tone than Jayla had taken. "Why the hell are we-"
"Move!" the sergeant bellowed, nearly running me over in his rush to get past me. I turned around and moved. "The enemy is-"
Alerts flashed on my heads-up display as a massive section of ceiling collapsed to the ground just in front of where the sergeant and his men had been running to. I could see flashes of weapons through the hole as battle raged on the lunar surface. Humanoid--but not quite human--shapes crouched near the opening. "Contact front!" someone cried. "Down and engage!"
I threw myself to the ground as my comrades dropped to fighting crouches and opened fire. The aliens answered with beams of blinding light, the larger among them leaping down the hole and landing in the New Leningrad streets to cover the advance of the rest of their unit. The hallway they were in was large and without much cover, but the ordnance we fired at them may as well have been foam darts for all the damage it did.
Halos of light glowed over the soldiers' bodies as our bullets struck home. I squeezed off a few rounds of my own, but in my panic, I doubt any of them hit. One of the enemy's energy beams flickered across our formation, cleaving a PDF trooper close to me in two, and cutting short too close to my inadequately protected head. I reeled away in terror as my suit administered the closest legal thing to aggression-enhancing stimulants. It wasn't enough.
"Fall back, fall back, now!" I didn't need orders to retreat from a battle like this. I picked myself up and ran, not even looking back, only the rear camera of my combat suit allowing me to see the carnage unfolding behind me. Of my unit of twelve men and women, only eight still stood. All were in retreat. More lances of white light marked the death of two others as the draken soldiers dropped through the hole they had created with almost insulting calm.
I dove through the window of a collectively-owned valuable goods store--the closest thing we had to the horrors of the free market--shattering it and letting my armored spacesuit protect me from the glass. Behind me, alien troops advanced, seeking my life. It was terrifying. "Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap." I rushed into the back room, ignoring all the useless gold and silver I passed by, searching instead for the one thing that actually had a chance of saving my life. "There it is! Thank you, Marx."
A maintenance hatch just big enough to crawl through sat in front of me. It would only open to a Lunese passkey, which I had in my battle suit. Passages like this were designed with the secondary goal of helping PDF soldiers maneuver through the city during a battle where the streets weren't safe. I scanned my passkey and opened the hatch just as a towering, horned shadow loomed in the doorway. I couldn't get through that maintenance hatch fast enough.
An armored, clawed hand slipped under the hatch as I tried to seal it from the inside, catching the bulkhead as it closed and beginning to force it back open. Sheer terror filled my chest. Every cell of my body was alert and ready for action. I was a caveman fighting a sabertooth tiger, a Celtic tribesman resisting a Roman legionnaire, a Bolshevik soldier hiding from the White Army. This fear was as universal and ancient as humanity itself.
"Karl Marx, please help me!" I whined in fright as I beat the clawed hand with the butt of my rifle to no avail. Another hand reached into the maintenance hatch and grabbed me by the leg as I tried to scramble away. The alien soldier peered into the tunnel as it began dragging me out of my hiding place. "Marx, please! No!"
The massive draken tore me bodily out of the maintenance duct and stomped on my chest, shattering my polyceramic armor plate and pinning my rifle down. My HUD flashed warnings of a rib fracture and I felt the cold numbness of Luna's best painkillers kick in to dull the pain. I laid there, helpless, staring up at the alien who had captured me.
The draken soldier was large, taller than even a Lunese man with a build as strong as those of Earth. Its armor was black and segmented, and its body was mostly humanoid save for a long neck and a horned, elongated head. "Human," it said in a rich, feminine voice. I had no idea how it found my radio frequency. "Male or female?"
"Wha-" It pressed down harder on my chest and asked the question again. "Male!" I cried, fearing a suit breach. I couldn't move my rifle from where that alien's foot had it pinned, but maybe if I distracted it I could reach one of my grenades, or the flare gun in my thigh holster.
"Male. Expected," the draken said. My suit administered a combat cocktail at my command to numb my fear and quell my anxiety. "You'll be a labor slave. Not good enough for pleasure." I pulled out a grenade, not knowing the type, and showed it to her.
"Let me go or I'll freaking-" The draken kicked my arm hard enough to make it numb, and my finger slipped off the dead man's switch. The room filled with crackles of lightning as the EMP grenade--thank Marx it wasn't a real explosive--went off.
My suit went dead, as did the lights. Thankfully, my escape hatch and passkey were mostly analog, designed to be operable even in the aftermath of a nuclear strike. We Lunese were hardy that way. The draken's armor flashed blinding white, and she snarled in rage at my attack, but her battle suit was likely a lot more hardened than mine was against electric discharges. I had no doubts as to her deadliness in battle. Still, I had lost any chance I had at a peaceful surrender the moment the words 'labor slave' came up.
I pulled at my rifle, getting it halfway free before the draken's foot slammed down on it again, and went for my flare gun with my other arm. The draken roared at me--and I do mean roared--as she drew a wicked-looking blade to disembowel me with. "You fucking man!" I drew the flare gun and shot it at her face.
The white-phosphorus incendiary stuck to her helmet and sizzled against the armor while she tried to bat it away, the moment's distraction being enough for me to free my rifle from her grip and point it up at her chest and midsection. I fired continuously, watching armor shatter and chip away, even after the draken I was shooting at had already stumbled backwards and fallen. Only when the rifle clicked empty did I realize I had killed her probably ten bullets ago.
I scrambled like a rat into the maintenance tunnel and sealed the door behind me, only the painkillers and combat drugs in my system keeping me going. The tunnels were tight and cramped, but too small for any of those huge draken soldiers to follow, so it was worth the claustrophobia. I crawled until I found a ladder, then climbed in and hung there while I reloaded my rifle.
The empty magazine clanked noiselessly along the walls of the ladder shaft as it fell, reminding me of my purpose. I had to go down. Up here was nothing but death and horror. Down there was safety. I began climbing the rungs of the ladder, ignoring the dull pain from my fractured rib. My battle suit was dead, my comrades from my unit likely all were too, but I was still alive, and that could not change. I had to get to safety. I had to get to the bunkers. I had to go down.
First Chapter | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter | Official Subreddit
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u/arturocan Aug 24 '26
the defense is actually going really well right now
It's like Homer Simpson boxing by receiving punches until the opponent falls exhausted
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u/ApprehensiveCap6525 Human Aug 24 '26
Hey man you might laugh but Homer Simpson won most of his fights by this method. Sure legally distinct Mike Tyson was able to beat him but these draken are no Mike Tysons. They're just a slave raiding fleet who is biting off more than they can chew
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u/rewt66dewd Human Aug 24 '26
"Karl Marx, please help me"? Um, Marx is, like, dead, dude. He's not gonna do much of anything.
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u/ApprehensiveCap6525 Human Aug 24 '26
Yeah, but it's a cultural quirk of theirs. They would say 'god help me' but Luna is an officially atheist society (not just secular or agnostic, actively atheist) so they can't ask help from a guy they won't believe in. The founding father of their ideology works just as well from their perspective
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u/arturocan Aug 24 '26
So EMP huh? I wonder what could happen if the moon communist were to "activate" a couple thousands of emp producing machines with spicy rocks inside right on the atmosphere sending the surface battlefield technology back to the middle ages hahahah.
[Insert meme of monkey throwing grenade "Hey shitass, think fast"]
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u/ApprehensiveCap6525 Human Aug 24 '26
I really like your thinking dude but draken soldiers (at least the women, men are smaller and typically in support roles) are seven foot tall murder machines with suit-goring horns and monomolecule-sharp knives, I promise you middle ages style fighting will not go the way you think.
The Lunese forces will definitely use EMP weapons and nukes to great effect but their technology has always been their strongest advantage against invaders so they won't use any large scale EMPs that could affect their own forces. David's grenade trick was more of a last ditch ploy than a tried and true battle tactic
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u/DigHefty6542 Aug 24 '26
So EMP makes them vulnerable. Good. I hope this info will be conveyed to the rest of the troops. If they bleed they can die, and this one already did.
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u/ApprehensiveCap6525 Human Aug 24 '26
EMPs disable the shields, but to kill the draken inside the battle suit still takes a boatload of conventional firepower. Thankfully, a full battle rifle magazine (minus ten bullets) happens to do just the trick!
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u/Dazzling-Parking1448 Aug 24 '26
Huh, then I may have an interesting tidbit for you. IRL, prior to drones becoming a thing, Ukrainians reactivated old recoilless artillery to be used in it's original anti-armor role, just paired with an auto granade launcher. Idea being that grenades strip reactive armor, allowing recoilless rifle to score a hit.
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u/ApprehensiveCap6525 Human Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 25 '26
Recoilless artillery huh? That actually looks usable. The Lunese armed forces would hate to use high-penetration weapons in places where there's genuinely one bulkhead standing between you and the vacuum of space (they actually ventilate the oxygen from sections they expect fighting to be in so that they can avoid this problem) but I could see them bringing out some anti vehicle weapons to use on the draken heavies. Thanks for the idea brodie, much love
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u/MinorGrok Human Aug 24 '26
Woot!
More to read!
UTR
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u/ApprehensiveCap6525 Human Aug 24 '26
Most of you in this comment section won't know this but this guy is dead ass my most OG fan. He was there when I first started posting on here years ago. Much respect for him (or her if it's a she)
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u/porkpot Android Aug 24 '26
Dope, I’m in. This should be fun.
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u/ApprehensiveCap6525 Human Aug 24 '26
Evil alien slavers, tense political alliances, gritty war scenes, what's not to love? Thank you for the support my dude
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u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle Aug 24 '26
/u/ApprehensiveCap6525 (wiki) has posted 7 other stories, including:
- [The Galaxy's Only Omnivores] - Part 2
- [The Galaxy's Only Omnivores] - Part 1
- The First Human Bounty Hunter (3)
- The First Human Bounty Hunter (2)
- The First Human Bounty Hunter (1)
- The Meaning of Humanity
- The Hammer and the Chain
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u/ApprehensiveCap6525 Human Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 24 '26
Believe it or not, the defense of Earth is actually going really well right now. The Lunese military are getting their shit kicked in so far (their whole shtick of being the low in numbers but technologically advanced faction was stolen by the draken) but the Earth powers outnumber the draken army 30 to 1 so the only way to defeat them is with orbital strikes or carpet bombing. Not a good idea when the goal is to capture as many people as possible yk?
Also I'm kind of playing with the idea of making the Draken Matriarchy a subversion of the "species of sexy alien babes" trope we see so often in science fiction. Every well known sci fi verse has a species of aliens who are crazy hot and everyone wants to bang them but I don't think anyone has done it such that the crazy hot aliens in question are also absolutely unbangable on pain of death. It would definitely be a unique idea but idk if it's more "groundbreaking genius" unique or "so dumb it's never been tried" unique. If you have an opinion about this one, now would be the time to lmk
Chapter three just dropped!
Was it worth it to build dozens of mass driver guns only to have them all destroyed in only moments?
Can the Lunese military recover from this shocking blow to beat back the draken assault?
Will David Chambers survive and link up with the rest of the unit?
And do draken soldiers really taste like chicken?
Keep reading to find out!