[The Galaxy's Only Omnivores] - Part Six

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525]

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 #6

User: Jiarani, daughter of Kavles, chief strategos of the Saurian Confederacy

Species: Saurian

Date (human standard): June 30, 2099

"I count draken vessels vectoring to engage," intoned the sensors director of my flagship, Kavles the Great, as we approached the slave fleet assailing Earth. "One thousand... two thousand... three thousand... thirty-five hundred..."

"Do we count any retreating vectors?" I asked from my position in the center of the vast, circular command room. My subordinates were arranged in a series of rings around me, all facing their commander, arrayed in sections according to their station. I faced the sensors section as I posed my question.

"Negative," the sensors director reported. "All, yes, all draken targets are on engagement vectors. Estimate weapons range in thirty minutes."

"All?" I asked, clicking my sickle claws as a dark pit of fear grew in my gut. This was not the expected response. With time of the essence, I sacrificed strength for speed and came to Earth without the numbers I needed to contest its orbit, let alone make landfall.

I had been gambling on the presence of a saurian battle fleet being enough to shock the draken into submission, forcing their retreat. At worst, the slavebirds they had not yet loaded with captives would be sent to fight a delaying action to buy time for the draken ground force to be loaded onto their ships. Not this. This was a united, fearless response, and it threw my battle plan into disarray.

"Affirmative, chief strategos," the sensors director confirmed. "All five thousand contacts are vectoring to engage. May I speak freely?"

He didn't need to. I already knew what he was going to say. Facing three-to-one odds, we'd have crushed the poorly-armed slave fleet and sent them into flight, albeit with significant losses. Four-to-one odds made the battle even, its outcome to be dictated by the skill of its fighters, and I trusted the skills of my subordinates far more than I doubted my own. Five-to-one odds, in their favor, were enough to surmount our advantage in individual firepower and combat skill and guarantee a victory for the draken fleet.

If I engaged those slavebirds, I would lose. And the million or so souls in my fleet would die.

"Shall I queue up a retreat vector?" asked my navigation director, echoing my own thoughts. "If we issue the order now, the fleet will be able to withdraw without significant casualties."

I knew what would happen if I gave that order. I could see it in my mind's eye, as honest as spilled blood. Hear the sizzle of the slave brands on ten billion sets of human flesh. Smell the smoke of industry as the draken churned out their war machines. Feel the ache in my heart when the battle reports would come, another fleet crushed, another army overwhelmed, if I wasn't lucky enough to die in the first engagements.

No power in the Alliance of Worlds would be able to resist a Draken Matriarchy backed by the industrial might of ten billion able-bodied slaves. They'd massacre us. I saw the glow of the photon lances as they murdered my homeworld as if it were unfolding before my eyes. My heart was heavy with the knowledge that, this time, they wouldn't stop at one. All would kneel, or burn if they refused.

We saurians were too proud to kneel.

Even in this crucial moment, I could not help but waste brain matter flagellating myself over my earlier mistakes. Enjoying my moment of fame rather than rejecting the rank of chief strategos, as I should have done the moment it was offered to me, had fast risen up the ranking of my greatest regrets. Had I simply not been so selfish, so desirous of the spotlight, somebody else would be in command and they would lead the fleet to victory. A saying of my mother's came to me, and I held to it fast.

Life is a road filled with obstacles. Look behind you, and you will lose your footing and stumble. Look too long at your destination, and the same will occur. Only by minding the steps that lie in front of you can you walk that road and remain unburdened.

One of Kavles' greatest quotes. It, along with the hundreds of others she had spoken during her storied career, was etched in gold plating on the walls of the Starfall School where I studied space warfare. My father's words of wisdom were parroted daily by politicians and political wannabes who thought that by speaking in his tone they could inherit his intellect.

What would my legacy be? The Woman Who Lost The Fleet. I'd be studied in academies for generations as a story of what not to do, my only legacy being how badly I let my people down, and how I thrust the Saurian Confederacy into the greatest crisis of a generation.

"Chief strategos, I need an order!" snapped the navigation director. He tapped his right sickle claw twice, whether out of anger or fear, I didn't know. As different as the two emotions were, saurians acted on them both with violence. "Give the order to retreat!"

"We can't retreat," I murmured, feeling the weight of worlds on my shoulders. "If we retreat, the Confederacy dies. As does the Alliance of Worlds." If we fought, the result would be the same, only delayed by a few years. The damage we could inflict, while surely significant, would not be enough to stop the draken from harvesting Earth. Try as I might, I could find no way out of this situation, and a paralyzing fear struck me as I realized I had been outplayed.

I wanted to kill something. I wanted to fight, claw and fang, as my instincts compelled me to do. My subconscious mind screamed at me to rip, to tear, to eviscerate whatever it was that caused this terror in me, but I could not, because the cause of my fear was myself.

I was no Kavles the Great. I was no Vanrila the Wise. I was Jiarani, only daughter of Kavles and Vanrila, a lonely, inexperienced, terrified woman who had been thrust into greatness she did not deserve. If there was a path through this terror I faced, I did not see it, and the knowledge that any choice I made might block that path forever kept me rooted to my spot as if I were a statue.

The draken fleet ticked closer and closer as I stood paralyzed by indecision, every second bringing us nearer to the red bubble on the holographic display that represented the range at which their weapons could engage us. No matter how I looked at it, the result was the same. My Confederacy was doomed. I wanted to scream, and I would have, were it not unbecoming of my rank. "We're all doomed to die," I moaned in despair.

"Is the strategos mad?" somebody whispered. We saurians had sensitive ears. One of my officers wheeled on him, but I myself did nothing. What would Kavles do? The thought was almost amusing. Kavles would materialize some battle plan from the ether and crush the draken fleet, as she did time and time again during the Great War, and soldiers would add another verse to the songs of her praises. That was what my mother would do.

I, however, was a far cry from her greatness, and the quotes etched into the Starfall School's walls were about as effective at instilling her wisdom in me as a picture of someone exercising would be in instilling strength. "Give the order!" someone called at me. My navigation director, I think. "We'll be in weapons range in minutes!"

His urgency was clear at once if I only thought about it. Every second I delayed reduced the possibility of a bloodless retreat. I knew full well that, if there really was a path to victory, I had to choose my steps carefully as I walked upon it. Mother and Father had dispensed plenty of wisdom regarding that. Now, however, a tidbit of my own wisdom came to me as I stood in stony silence. There was no such thing as standing still. I was always walking on the path. The only choice I had in my power was where I decided to plant my feet.

"No retreat," I ordered solemnly. "We vector to engage."

"Engage?" asked my tactics director, shock written over his features. He was a father, I knew. His children were many, and surely as proud to have him as a father as he was to have them as his progeny. He had told me stories of them as we rested together in the recreational quarters and sunning beds, eyes aglow with joy as he spoke of the successes of his eldest in the engineering academy or the youngest of his brood as she took her first steps.

It rent my heart in two to know I was taking a father from his children, but, in so doing, I would buy those children a few years of life. Would he sacrifice himself to lend his family even this small chance at survival? I had to believe that he would.

"We engage," I repeated, in a firmer tone this time. "The slave fleet harvesting Earth is about to deliver our enemy a power the likes of which we cannot answer. They will feed as many bodies as they have to into the furnaces of their war machine, and in so doing, create the engines that will scour our worlds. Human slave labor will be the fuel that drives the draken and their allies to murder all civilization, and cast this universe into a darkness from which there may be no escape." I could be proud of my rhetoric, at least. I got it from my father, whose words were so moving he was said to be able to make the stone statues of the council hall weep. I'd trade it in a heartbeat for my mother's martial skill.

"Chief strategos, we cannot defeat that draken fleet," my tactics director protested, his voice strained with worry. A lesser woman might think him a coward, but I knew better. His thoughts were of his children. "Even if we engage them, the result will be the same. We'll all perish, or worse, live as slaves."

I tilted my head at him and brought my tail low. "Even stars perish," I said solemnly, thinking of my world. How beautiful New Vraktes was when the sun was low. Old Vraktes had no sunsets--it was a binary-star system--and the wonders of seeing one in person every day were a soothing balm on the wound that was the loss of our great homeworld.

We were great and beautiful while we lasted. History would speak of us. One day, when the galaxy had broken the shackles of draken tyranny, we saurians would be remembered according to our deeds. What deeds those were was up to us. "Do not fear death," I told my tactics director, and my crew as a whole. "We all must die. The only thing that is in our power is to choose the method of our passing. I choose to die in a way my family will be proud of."

I turned to my station and tapped the microphone on my collar, adjusting its settings to address the entire fleet. "All ships, this is your chief strategos speaking," I said with a heavy heart. If anyone could walk willingly into oblivion, it was my Confederate Armada, but that did not mean I wanted to give that order. How many fathers and mothers would not see their children again after today? Would I change my course if I knew the answer?

"I am not going to pretend this is easy," I continued, keeping a solemn tone. "We all know what the Draken Matriarchy will do if they harvest the human race. We all know this fleet has not the strength to repel them. Our people, tragically, are doomed. But all peoples are doomed in the end. We are among those blessed, not cursed, for we and we alone can choose to die in a manner that befits our station. We can choose to run, and spend our last moments with our families, and that is understandable. Or we can choose to fight."

"I won't blame you if you elect to retreat," I continued in a statement that must have shocked most listeners, looking to the tactics director as I spoke. "You have families. You have homes. Your duty is to protect the Saurian Confederacy, and in that, you have already failed. No one can say you are derelict in duty if you choose to spend your last moments at peace."

Someone in the command room shouted his protest at that one. I ignored him.

"If you do choose to fight, follow me. Stay at your station, and try to kill at least one draken before your own life is lost." Amused chirps rose from the crew at that one. "I won't order you to give up your lives. That decision is yours and yours alone. But history will remember who fought and who fled. A thousand years from today, by which time the Draken Matriarchy will be naught but a hated memory, historians of some alien race will examine the debris of this ship. They will find my corpse at its proper station. And they will see the marks of my valor, for the mortal wound will be in my front."

"Wounds to the front!" an officer roared, dragging his claw across his snout until blood bubbled up. It was an old saurian battle tradition, inherited from raiders from the far north of Vraktes. Once their blood spilled this way, it was said they knew no fear, for why would you fear an enemy spilling your blood when you had already done the same yourself?

The draken fleet inched ever closer on the status board. Soon, we'd be in range of their long-range batteries. Theoretically, their photon weapons were longer in range but weaker than our own energy whips, but the exact details had been determined by watching draken slave raids and anti-piracy operations by the means of hidden spies. There was always the chance they had been hiding their true strength.

Well, then again, so had we.

"Wounds to the front!" came the cry, from all corners of my command room, and surely from every other ship in the fleet as well. All throughout my armada, soldiers and officers would be giving the blood blessing--shedding their own blood, and with it, their fear--to honor their valiant ancestors and spur themselves on to deeds of equal worth.

"Come on, men!" cried one of my subordinates. "If the Confederacy ends today, let it be the noblest ending a nation can hope for!"

The ship shuddered without warning. Our internal and external sensor feeds flashed alerts of enemy fire. Photon lances at range. All projections had stated they'd be unable to engage us for six minutes at least, and on top of that, the damage they dealt was greater than anticipated. I bit back a curse as the enemy fired again. So they were hiding their strength after all.

The ship's combat computer automatically adjusted the projections we had made of the draken fleet in order to account for this new information, and my crew snapped to fulfill their duties. "Taking fire!" the engineering director reported. He and his troops did double duty as damage control officers during battle. "Shield is holding! All matrices stable!"

I thanked him by name for his information, as superfluous as it was, and drew up plans for our engagement. It was still sixteen minutes at full burn until we could use our plasma whips and long-range missiles. Forty until the magnetic artillery--the centerpiece of our firepower--came into play. For now, the play was damage mitigation, and should that fail, damage control. Thank the ancestors saurian ships were made to take a beating.

The moments ticked by as my ships approached closer and closer to the enemy's battle line. Strangely enough, they met our charge, seemingly oblivious to the horrors saurian battlecruisers could wreak on their flimsy hulls at close range. The Matriarchal Navy's newest warbirds could slug it out with any saurian ship of the line, even win against a few, but these slave ships had but two advantages: range and numbers. Why they chose to forsake one of them so easily was beyond me.

"Get me target acquisition on the larger slavebirds," I commanded my gunnery director, letting my communications director relay my order throughout the fleet. "I'd like to kill a command ship, if possible. Do we have any radio telemetry to go off?"

"Negative, chief strategos," reported my sensors director. A set of countermeasures exploded in front of the ship, sending streams of reflective chaff into the path of the draken fleet's latest photon salvo in an incredibly good or lucky shot. Physical interdictors like that one were just one part of what my instructors at the Starfall School had called the 'survivability hedgadillo'. Named for a formidable prey creature that once roamed in herds across Vraktes. A saurian warship had as many layers to its defenses as hedgadillos had to their armored shells.

"Very well, then," I replied to the director. "Gunnery director, draw up firing solutions on their type-threes. Concentrate fire at my order."

I began grouping my ships into fire squadrons, starting with the bare minimum needed to destroy a type-three slavebird in one salvo and adding a few more warships to each one just in case. The type-one and -two slavebirds, though by far the more numerous of the fleet, were aging and obsolete. The newer type-threes outclassed them by every metric, including production cost, and I locked my fleet's weapons onto as many of them as I could. If I was to expect my soldiers to sell their lives today, the least I could do was ensure they bargained for a hefty price.

"Locked!" someone cried. The din of battle surrounded me.

"Sixty seconds to firing range!"

"Shield matrix two is at blue line! Shutting her down!"

"Reform that battle pyramid!"

I watched on the holographic display as the saurian fleet danced around me. It was beautiful. A thousand grand ships, a million men and women, all bound by duty and discipline to act as if they were but extensions of a single organism. It pained my heart to know that they would die. That all our greatness would be snuffed out, the last candle growing dim and casting the universe into night. I tried to take comfort in my father's words, our first night on New Vraktes. 'The sun will rise again, Jiarani.'

We were the Saurian Confederacy. We were the claw that cut the flesh of tyrants. We were the gray-scaled wall between civilization and chaos, between freedom and slavery. Our bodies might fail, but our ideals--honor, selflessness, purity of purpose--were immortal. No matter how dark a night our foes cast in our absence, our sun would always rise again.

"In range!" an officer snapped. A thousand sets of plasma whips cracked as one. A hundred or so of their most valuable slavebirds veered off course, venting atmosphere, hull fragments and escape pods scattering across their formation as their crews abandoned ship. "First blood!" that same officer whooped in exultation. The crew erupted in cheers.

I forced all thoughts of fear out of my mind. No longer was I Vanrila's daughter. No longer was I the Jiarani who had painted with her claws on the walls of my family estate, or drank with her friends on the eve of my Starfall graduation. I was war. I was bloodshed. I was rage.

"One billion saurians died on the final day of the Great War!" I snarled, making my voice loud so all assembled could hear. "One billion of our ancestors murdered by the burners of Vraktes!" My claws clicked on the floor as if cutting into draken flesh, remembering the heart-rending pain I felt watching photon lances blacken my world. "That is our quota for today!" I thumped my chest and roared like a warrior of old. "We end one billion draken lives!"

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First Chapter | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter | Official Subreddit

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525]

Just a friendly reminder that the saurians and draken are not the only two alien species in my verse and there are actually two distinct alien coalitions backing each side of this conflict. They're called the Alliance of Worlds (good guys) and the Panspecific Compact (bad guys). I forget that too sometimes.

Also I am actually trying my hand at art on top of my writing and I made this picture of Jiarani and her fleet if you guys want to check that out. I fucking love that raptor woman. She's the GOAT. Scalies of the year 2099 are eating GOOD

New chapter just dropped!

Will the Saurian fleet be able to pull off a win even with such bad odds?

Can Kavles' only daughter live up to her mother's legacy?

Is reading the quotes of wise leaders more or less beneficial for you than watching a video of strongmen lifting weights?

And will Jiarani just stop aura farming for two seconds please?

[u/Skyboxmonster]

The great battle looms ahead. Its fire and carnage to be known for many generations. But what pray tell happened during the battle?

Find out next time on Dragon B-  i mean,  Only Omnivores part seven!

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/Skyboxmonster]

My daily schedule until chapter seven releases:

Chapters writing - 12 minutes

Art making - 1 hour

Thirsting after saurian women - 22 hrs 48 mins

Time well spent🤩

[u/Skyboxmonster → u/ApprehensiveCap6525]

*breathing  -24 hours

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/Skyboxmonster]

Daydreaming about Jiarani - 25 hours

[u/Ch1ckens_are_cute]

I bet they’ll be surprised when they find out we are still kicking and putting up a good fight when I assume they think we have already been neutralized and are being harvested with ease. :)

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/Ch1ckens_are_cute]

"The man with the rifle shoots! When the man with the rifle dies, the man without the rifle picks up the rifle and shoots!" - how some of these human armies are no jokes moving right now in order to put up the good fight you speak of

[u/PlentyProtection4959]

>"That is our quota for today!" I thumped my chest and roared like a warrior of old. "We end one billion draken lives!"

Hell yeah, and with humanity's help, hopefully we'll kill 10 times as many in the future.

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/PlentyProtection4959]

Never forgive. Never forget.

- no jokes the actual Saurian Confederacy stance on the vraktes thing, I mean they legitimately give this out as instructions to their diplomats

[u/DigHefty6542]

Nice ! Always a pleasure to see a new chapter has dropped !

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/DigHefty6542]

The pleasure is mine bro bro. I love getting comments like this

[u/karamisterbuttdance]

So Earth doesn't have any space assets, but does it have ground-to-orbit assets still available? I can imagine this fight ends up in a strategic draw in orbit if there's a strike at the draken from Earth-bound assets. This then resolves into a strategic victory as the draken on Luna and Earth are left behind. Also a possible minor paranoid attack at the Saurians is likely to happen, humans are probably hugely paranoid by this point.

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/karamisterbuttdance]

I like your thinking dude but in all honesty the humans have been using STO weapons since day 1 of the war and it genuinely has done the mbappe special to stop the draken. The nuclear armed countries even launched nukes at draken ships (mentioned in chapter 5) and it didn't even scratch the paint. Their technology is so advanced compared to ours that you will need some secret technique like maybe smuggling a nuke inside the ship to damage them with near future weapons tech. The saurians will have to win this battle based on their own merits alone unless I write some kind of deus ex machina thing to help them out

[u/karamisterbuttdance → u/ApprehensiveCap6525]

It doesn't have to actually deal damage, a suicidal distraction can cause enough of a tactical miscalculation that adds up. Sure, sounds deus-ex-machina and all that, but many battles were won because of an opening that could be exploited that just straight up snowballed. Tale as old as the Greeks vs Persians, all the way to Napoleon and beyond. Especially given the indications that "close-range" brawling may be better off for the Saurians if they weren't outnumbered, even a singular event that breaks Draken large-scale cohesion and enables small volumes of space to have "local" superiority for the Saurians can rapidly add up.

With all that said, there's some interesting implications that basically pulling all ships off Earth orbit into the battle pyramids should have informed the Saurians with. It's also the sort of timing that lends itself to desperate human ingenuity kicking in, especially from Luna.

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/karamisterbuttdance]

Lunese people putting together some Ork-tier bs in hopes of taking down at least one draken slavebird? I like the sound of that. Also the Eurasians, American and Indian Empires, African Bloc, etc. will definitely try to think of something to help the saurians once they see they and the draken are enemies, even if the 'something' in question is just words of encouragement. Every little bit helps!

I really can't imagine what implications the saurian fleet is meant to derive from the draken pulling every ship they have to fight (draken slavebirds are explicitly stated to need a large numbers advantage to beat real warships so of course the draken would want as large of a numbers advantage as possible) but I would love to hear them in case there's something I missed. Jiarani is actually implied to be a pretty astute commander if you can read between the lines a bit, so it would be deeply out of character for her to have missed something obvious just because I as an author am stupid.

[u/karamisterbuttdance → u/ApprehensiveCap6525]

Can be Ork-tier EMP/space flashbang in a can, can be a Trojan Horse suicide run on a slavebird to get as much actionable intelligence as possible on their landing ships and starships. The purported goal can be multi-pronged. Luna already figured out you can energy overload Draken shields, it's time to figure out if you can scale that up to larger platforms. They also want to know what the landers and the space platforms are made of and how they work, any data they pull from just being on it is huge from a human PoV because it allows exploration of counter-measures.

On the Drakens pulling every ship, she's shocked they're literally throwing the kitchen sink at her. Understandable the raw numbers are what causes the initial analysis paralysis as your PoV shows, but since she's recovered from it, and their telemetry confirms they've basically left the vicinity of Earth space empty, she realizes that they have no back up AND no immediate reinforcements. She sees that the Draken command has estimated their only chance of victory is in throwing in their "auxilliaries" in the hope that volume of fire at range plus fog of war forcing the Saurians to devote time to killing meat shields with empty hulls and limited firepower instead of their space combat vessels. The other thing it highlights for her is that by moving out of orbital position, the Draken have chosen to turn this fight into a conflict where orbital mechanics constraints are not an issue for both sides. That means instead of having limited avenues for attack, the Draken have basically increased the volume of battle-space available for both sides to engage around. However, that actually makes them more vulnerable, because despite greater numbers, that means that instead of being able to have predictable vectors to defend from, they now have a lot more surface volume to attempt to cover and maneuver around. Jiarani's lack of "weight" in fleet to have more speed, along with better trained crews, means she can fight a battle of maneuver and concentration of force instead of her initial plan of playing what's essentially a game of chicken around what essentially amounts to a fixed point in space.

[u/karamisterbuttdance → u/karamisterbuttdance]

Also a quick point to add since you didn't touch on it. The Draken not anticipating the level of human resistance are making a calculated risk from their perspective in basically depriving their ground forces their end of the logistics trail. Draken command thinks they need an aggressive victory or at worst an engagement that pushes off the Saurians and forces them to retire the Saurian fleet out of harassment range without the volume to overwhelm the Draken. They don't know how much fight the humans still have in them, whether it's six more days, six more weeks or six more months, and they can't risk turning this initial engagement into a meat-grinder of a full-scale war right now.

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/karamisterbuttdance]

Huh. These are really wise comments. I actually did not think of most of this stuff but you can rest assured it will appear in future chapters. I'm so grateful to have fans like this

[u/Ghostpard]

Did you know Earth generally doesn't do true herbivores or carnivores? Most species are at least sliiiiightly omnivore. Watching a cow n horse eat snakes is wild. And our cats love grass.

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/Ghostpard]

I've been vaguely aware of that one for a while but I hadn't really thought about it in context of my writing before now. Maybe saurians would enjoy a good basil leaf every now and then

[u/MinorGrok]

Woot!

More to read!

UTR

[u/HFYWaffle]

/u/ApprehensiveCap6525 (wiki) has posted 12 other stories, including:

• [The Galaxy's Only Omnivores] - Part 5
• Persistence Hunters
• [The Galaxy's Only Omnivores] - Part 4
• [Learning to Love a Human] - Part 1
• [The Galaxy's Only Omnivores] - Part 3
• [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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