The Shadow of the Moon-Lydia's Tale

Chapter Two

I am Faulke. I am the sixth son of Alder of the House of Geron. 

I am Chief Aide to Aiexsky Waite-Kidd the Commander of the human fleet. 

I am also an Empathe.  

I met Waite-Kidd during the Wars of Regeneration. The Gerons were on the losing side. After many years bitter fighting we prepared to be subjugated and humiliated by the humans. We and our allies had suffered terrible losses and so had the humans. It was a war of losers not of winners, a war of attrition, retreats, regroups and indecisive re-engagements. It was a conflict of eternal suffering for all of its combatants.

I had known war since I was young, the burials of the dead, the tributes to the missing, the despair, the hope. The stupid futility of believing we could conquer our enemy, our arrogance in assuming that it was they that were at breaking point when in fact it was us. Like most wars it had begun over a number of trivial events that managed to turn each sides simmering resentment for each other into an unquenchable rage. I was never sure exactly how it had started. 

But I knew exactly how it had ended. When Waite-Kidd took command of the human forces things began to shift in their favour. He was a brilliant tactician, strong, decisive, a great leader. He constantly outwitted our leaders; where his tactics were astounding, ours appeared flawed almost childlike in comparison. In the end he prevailed and ended the suffering. For us all. 

When the peace treaty was signed on Geron I was there. I had wanted to see this human, the one that had risen to prominence in our great struggle and finally had beaten our best. Waite-Kidd took our surrender humbly and paid tribute to our fallen. He spoke proudly of the dead and the madness that had gripped us all. He was a man of honour he argued fervently with Earth that there should be no retribution; we should be allowed to return to things as they were before. We should all live in peace together. 

At first I was suspicious of him. But when I read him I could see his mind was true. He bore no grudge and had no other agenda than to stop the suffering and allow us to return to our home planets and rebuild our lives. His thoughts were clear and decisive, his mind brilliantly agile. I'd never encountered a human like him. He was strong willed almost to the point of arrogance. Over the countless hours, over many days as the parties agreed terms and he pacified his masters back on Earth, I got to know him. When the Treaty was signed I made my decision. I joined him and became his aide and then as the years trickled past, his friend.  

An odd pair, a human and a Geron. 

And then after so many years of peace a new threat appeared. It started as a rumour, from far off beyond the Hestiold Belt, way beyond the most distant of the human colonies. Of an unstoppable enemy fleet, vast and acquisitive, bent on crushing all that lay before it.

Then slowly, fiction became fact as the outer most human colonies went off line and straggling ships began to appear, their crews telling terrible tales of planetary invasion and total annihilation of populaces.We could only guess the nature of the coming storm.

The Regeneration Wars had ensured all the allies that Waite-Kidd had beaten would not enter another conflict, not if it meant siding with their old foes, the humans.

This was to be a human fight and theirs alone.

We met The Swarm at Rama 5. Rama 5 was home to a mixed population of five billion. It was a captivating planet. The people were tall, elegant with a calmness and an inner peace I'd not felt in any people I'd encountered before. They'd built astoundingly beautiful cities on Rama. Glistening spires that fired the imagination reached into the amber sky, majestic gardens holding long pools of cascading blue waters stunned the senses, palisades graced with moss hung Jawdem trees took the breath away. I'd never seen sunsets like the ones I'd seen sitting in the park overlooking the lake at Ellerander. 

We spread our fleet in a flat circle, like a saucer, with our flag ship The Revenge at its centre and waited in trepidation for them. Below us on the planet's surface we could see the long chains of lights that lit the elegant parks and lakes glowing in the night like a multitude of nesting summer glowflys. 

The Swarm approached us from deep space. As it closed we could see it was a vast ball of shimmering blackness, a great void of darkness barely distinguishable from the chasm of space beyond. As we prepared ourselves the outer skin of this strange festering monstrosity peeled off leaving an identical smaller swirling black mass beneath it. The skin that had been shed broke into a multitude of small ships, the colour of the deepest jet, spherical with spiked shells. As they approached our fleet their numbers were so numerous they blocked out the light of the stars. 

Their ships were small compared to ours, tiny things to our behemoths. As they approached us our guns spat torrents of light at them opening up great ragged tears in their numbers revealing the stars of faraway universes. 

They came on directly at us in numbers too huge to contemplate like a host of insects. Before we knew it, it was too late. They had enveloped us. Holes began to appear in our ships as they flew directly into us. Their numbers were far too great for our guns to bring down. One by one, ship after ship they ploughed into us. 

I tried to reach out to read the minds of those that piloted those strange spiked craft, to see those that would give their lives in such numbers and for what purpose. I read nothing but the emptiness of space. Whatever piloted those ships were soulless empty vessels. 

As the numbers began to overwhelm us and our ships began to fall away broken, battered, wrecked we watched in disbelief as another skin peeled off the enemy sphere and reached out to us.  

Standing alone on the main deck Waite-Kidd had rolled his hand into fist so tight I could see his fingers had turned white. I could feel the raging anger in his head.  

He ordered the fleets retreat. 

Slowly the ships of The Swarm fell away and turned back to Rama 5 to begin their invasion. 

We watched as one by one the city lights flickered and went out.  

Turning my thoughts back to Rama I could hear the minds of five billion people calling out in mass of confusion, desperation and then terror. I pressed my hands over my ears and closed my eyes as tightly as I could but it was not enough to keep out their wretched cries out of my head.

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