The Mammoth Book of SF Wars Read Online Free PDF Page B

conditions where nothing should live. Their shapes made no sense to human eyes, to human aesthetics. They were nightmares given shape and form, our darkest fears made flesh. We called them the Medusae, because wherever they looked, things died.
    They destroyed the first colonized planets they came to, without hesitation, without warning. They paused in orbit just long enough to look down on the civilizations we had built there, and just their terrible gaze was enough to kill everything that lived. We still have recorded images from that time, of the dead worlds. Cities full of corpses, towns where nothing moved. Wildlife lying unmoving, rotting in the open, and fish of all kinds bobbing unseeing on the surfaces of the oceans. The Medusae moved on, from planet to planet, system to system, leaving only dead worlds in their wake.
    We sent the Fleet out to meet them, hundreds and hundreds of our marvellous and mighty Dreadnaughts, armed to the teeth with disrupters and force shields, planet-buster bombs and reality invertors. The Fleet closed with the Medusae, singing our songs of glory, ravening energies flashing across open Space, and all of it was for nothing. We could not touch the Medusae. They passed over the Fleet like a storm in the night, and left behind them mile-long starships cracked open from stem to stern, with streams of dead bodies issuing out of broken hulls, scattering slowly across the dark. Occasionally some would tumble down through the atmosphere of a dead world, like so many shooting stars with no one to see them.
    The Medusae moved on through the colonized systems, wiping clean every world we’d colonized or changed, as though just our presence on their planets had contaminated those beyond saving. One by one, the planetary comm systems fell silent, voices crying out for help that never came, fading into static ghosts. Some colonists got away, fleeing ahead of the Medusae on desperate, overcrowded ships; most didn’t. There is no number big enough that the human mind can accept to sum up our losses. All the men, women and children lost in those long months of silent slaughter. All the proudly named cities, all the wonders and marvels we built out of nothing; gone, all gone. And finally, when they’d run out of planets to cleanse, and people to kill, the Medusae came looking for us. All that great swarm, hideous beyond bearing, complex beyond our comprehension, beyond reason or reasoning with … they followed the fleeing ships back to us, back to the home of Mankind.
    Back to Old Earth.
    We sent up every ship we had, everything that would fly, loaded with every weapon we had, and we met the Medusae at the very edge of our solar system. And there, we stopped them. The aliens looked upon our worlds, but came no closer. And for a while we rejoiced, because we thought we had won a great victory. We should have known better. The Medusae had stopped because they didn’t need to come any closer. Hanging there in open Space, silent and huge and monstrous, out beyond the great gas-giant planets, they looked on Old Earth, and reached out with their incomprehensible energies to touch our world. They poisoned our planet. Changed her essential nature, so that our world would no longer support human life. They turned our home against Humanity. A fitting punishment, from the Medusae; they terraformed us.
    And that … that was when we got really angry, and contemplated revenge.
    The Lords and Ladies of Old Earth came together in Convocation, for the first time in centuries. They met at Siege Perilous, that wonderful ancient monument to past glories, shaped like a massive hourglass, towering high and high over the bustling starport of New Damascus. Immortal and powerful, relentless and implacable, the Lords and Ladies represented Concepts, not Countries. They spoke for all the various aspects of Humanity, and their word was Law. Made immortal, so that they could take the long view. Denied peace or rest, because they