"The Terrans had these villages," the old first sergeant continued, "They were these small settlements all over mostly populated with the young, the old, and people who didn't want to or couldn't fight for one reason or another. These places were clearly marked as non-combatant and just kept to themselves, growing food and trying to survive as best as they could," the old Juon said. "We had them under surveillance and could confirm that the only contact that took place between them and the fighters was when the fighters dropped off people too wounded to fight anymore and supplies. That's right, the fighters supplied them, not the other way around. They were one hundred percent not involved."

"I don't like where this is heading." one of the troopers said grimly.

"You would be right. After over a year of getting absolutely nowhere anywhere, the leaders decided that those villages just had to be helping the fighters. They were making food after all," the old Juon spat. "That was their official reason. Actually, they were just pissed off that they were getting their asses handed to them. They also really didn't get the Terrans. They figured that if they started reprisal attacks that it would damage morale and force them to surrender." The old Juon smiled grimly. "Of course, that wasn't what happened at all. Never get into an atrocity contest with Terrans. Speaking of," he said as he turned to the Terrans, "I am proud to be your ally and will always remember what you did during the Great War but what you did to the Feds… That was just wrong."

"Hey, they pissed us off," Sheila said matter of factly, "Besides, we couldn't fight a conventional war. We would have lost. If we let them mass their entire fleet against us even, we wouldn't have been able to hold the line." She said, then flashed the evilest grin. "So, we figured that since they had no problems with surprise attacks, they would be ok with us returning the favor. If we started just popping into random systems and proceeded to fuck some shit up, they would have to guard everywhere and still fight us. A few Moray missile boats zip in and nuke a few space stations here. A few Stilettos pop in and wipe out some shipping there. A fucking carrier group or a Sovngarde class battleship pop in and just keep destroying until they can mass enough of a force to try to stop them. Each strike diverted forces and had every system in the Federation screaming for ships to protect them in case they were next. It also made it very personal. It would be one thing if the war was a distant thing. They could ignore it, saying that they were probably in the right. It was completely another thing when they woke up every morning wondering if that day was the day they were going to get a visit. It got people asking questions." Sheila shrugged. "It was fucked up, but it worked. They weren't Terrans. They weren't used to the idea of everything burning like we are. It wasn't long before they didn't want to play anymore. Operation Fuck Some Shit Up was a success. Personally, I think we should have kept at it."

"Yeah, but blowing up schools? Libraries? Universities? Hospitals? Cultural landmarks?"

"Hey, we told them to evacuate in plenty of time and yes, cultural landmarks. That fifteen thousand year old temple?… gone. That ancient palace?… bye-bye. Anything and everything that allowed a planet to operate on a daily basis or defined the species as a people was systematically destroyed. We got that shit down to a science. Give the Retribution a couple of days, and there would be nothing left. A light strike group could do tremendous damage in a few hours. It was fucked up, but so was going for our throat when we were in the state that we were in. Fuck 'em."

"See," the old Juon said as he gestured to Sheila. "They don't even feel bad about it. This is the game we started with these evil fucks." He shook his head. "It had what was perhaps an even worse effect as well." He sighed heavily. "I am an Imperial soldier. I will fight and die on command. Tell me to attack a collective warrior unarmed, and I will do it without hesitation," he said and then paused, "I am not, however, part of a death squad. I am not a murderer. I am not a terrorist. Telling Imperial soldiers to wipe out unarmed children did not work. Hell, Terrans won't do that."

He paused again and looked at the Terrans.

"Right?" He asked with just a touch of uncertainty in his voice.

"Not even porkie kids," Sheila said firmly. "Not even the piglets. Even during the Federation war, when we burned down the schools, we made damn sure they were empty, and that was us at our most pissed off."

"Right," the old first sergeant said, "a lot of us flat out refused. So they called it a mutiny and arrested entire companies of soldiers who refused en-masse. Other Juon would go to one of the targets, and as soon as the first Terran fired a shot, they would surrender."

The old Juon laughed for the first time during the story.

"It was fucking hilarious. One old Terran would capture twenty Juon troopers at once. Fighter pilots would suddenly 'lose control' of their ships and crash. It was a complete shit show… The 'Great Mutiny' as we called it."

He laughed some more and then stopped.

"Unfortunately, some soldiers followed their orders." He sighed and looked at his crew. "We didn't know something very, very important. Long ago in ancient times, a war was waged which was so horrible that after it had ended, the nations of Terra met in order to make some rules to at least try to prevent the worst of the horrors they created. When the Terran war chiefs and generals met to plan the war, they decided to follow this convention. They were treating us as a legitimate foe and were following those rules."

He stopped and took a sip.

"Once we started hitting civilian targets, those rules went straight out the window."

He shook his head.

"It was like they started having a competition on who could be the most fucked up, and each week there was some new horror coming out of their underground factories. Most of them you know, white phosphorous, aerosol rounds packed with all sorts of Hell, fragmenting toxic bullets, chemical and biological weapons, and all the rest of the forty Hells we now have in our arsenals as well. Almost everything that we used on the bugs was used on us. Then, they perfected the art of fucked up with the red-tip and red-mist."

A collective moan issued from the Juon.

"What's a red-tip and red-mist?" T'sunk'al asked.

"One of the few things I can't get my hands on and wouldn't sell if I did," Sheila replied. "Those are kept under lock and key in the vault of fucked up toys with the rest of the fucked up toys. It's nano-tech, thousands of nano-machines designed to tear apart a target from the inside… starting with the nerves just to be nasty. Once hit by a red-tip round, there is nothing anyone can do to help a victim except euthanasia. I have five. I used to have six. I am never doing that to someone again."

She shuddered.

"They work great on bugs, though," she said cheerfully. "It's fun to watch them twitch."

"Red-mist is the same thing in grenade or mortar form." the old Juon said quietly. "It drills in from the outside..."

"Yeah, got to see an airstrike with that stuff on some bugs once," Jacob said with a smile. "It's the only time I felt sorry for them."

"Fortunately for the whole galaxy, they are expensive as Hell to make, and even we Terrans have some limits… unless you are a bug," Sheila said while smiling entirely too much.

"Yeah, we thought we had it bad before. Now, we were going through a living Hell," the first sergeant said grimly. "Each day, another unit got hit with something right from the depths of the abyss, and often it was something brand new. Casualties were heavy, very heavy as we somehow tried to adapt."

He paused.

"Thank the Empress I was on Mars. Terra had turned into the fires of Hell."

"Yeah, I heard about it from my grandmother," Sheila said. "She was part of one of the surface strike teams. Even that old monster felt bad about everything that went down, and she has human skulls in her house as decorations."

"Sheesh," the old Juon said. "She have any beaks?"

"Um…" Sheila said, looking away.

"Figures. Back in the day, Terrans were about ten times worse than they are now. They were fucking monsters," the old Juon said without malice. "Speaking of ten times worse," he said, "our brass was entirely made up of the Emperor's hole lickers eager for glory. They kept throwing Juon and resources at Terra. We were almost grateful when the long-range attack drones started flying out of Jupiter and hunting anything that moved. It meant that they couldn't throw reinforcements around as freely, and even they weren't safe in their comfy ships and station anymore. It's fucked up, but we took great satisfaction in the fact that they started getting hit. A general even got eaten by red mist in his own ship."

The Juon laughed grimly.

"I hated that hole licker," he said as he laughed even more. "It was about that time that the Emperor was getting tired of no progress and replaced his buddies with officers that were worth a fuck."

The old juon flashed colors of relief.

"The first thing they did was stop the reprisal attacks and pulled everyone off of Terra. The ground forces there had turned into nothing but moist targets by that point," he said with a shrug. "We never set foot on Terra again. The only thing we did was blockade the planet and do long-range bombardment and airstrikes to keep them in their holes, and even that was risky. Their drones were getting better each month. We were losing good pilots to AI's. It wasn't good for morale, I will tell you that."

"Yeah," the captain said. "It was about then that the next big expeditionary force was sent. I was a Lancer pilot and had the dubious honor of being a 'drone dancer'. Our job was to engage the drones and take them out. You had to be pretty good to do the job and not get nailed, especially after they started arming those squids. It's funny, a missile with its own missiles. I remember when they started shooting back. It was quite the surprise."

The captain chuckled as he looked off into space.

"AI or not, fighting those bastards was the most fun I have ever had."

"Well, I'm glad that at least one of us was enjoying themselves," the old trooper said, making a rude gesture.

The captain laughed.

"Sorry, I forgot myself there for a moment." He continued. "Things stayed like that for almost another year. We were at a stalemate. We got better at dealing with the drones, and they got better at defending their holes. They did eventually lose Luna. We did achieve that small victory. We didn't manage to dig all of them out, but they had to cease operations and just hide deep under the surface… for a while. Mars was mostly neutralized. There would still be attacks, but the casualty rate was down even if we still couldn't take the tunnels."

"No, we couldn't," the old Juon said. "If we managed to get too far, they would just blow the tunnel, collapsing it on top of us. So we took advantage of that by using AI-controlled attack bots. With them, we could force them to blow their own tunnels, keeping them at bay at least a little bit."

"We seemed to be making progress, slow, expensive progress but definite progress," the captain said, "morale was high, casualties were down, the Terrans were reduced to hiding in their holes… or so we thought."

He paused to take a sip of coffee and winced at the taste.

"Gods, this stuff is awful. Then, things took a definite turn for the worse. From Jupiter and Terra, spacecraft launched. The Terrans had finally built their first fleet," he said as he shook his head, "We weren't too worried at first. The first thing that started popping up is something you guys would recognize today. They haven't changed all that much, the humble Turtle light cargo vessel."

He laughed ruefully.

"We thought it wasn't that big of a deal. Sure they made things a little difficult. They could jump between Terra and Jupiter and go deep enough into Jupiter's atmosphere that one of the miners could come up and get them without being exposed for too long. Big deal, right? Wrong. That meant that Zeus got metal and other resources that greatly increased their production capacity, which meant more ships. We also thought that the Turtles just had interplanetary capacity. Wrong again. Every now and then, a Turtle would go… somewhere else."

The captain chuckled.

"They went to what is now the secret Terran shipyard which is Empress knows where. They were now free to set up big high capacity factories and huge shipyards, and we all know exactly how industrious Terrans can be when they want to, and they wanted to believe me."

The captain refilled his coffee dish.

"I seriously don't know why I drink this shit."

"Caffeine is one hell of a drug," Sheila said, raising her own mug.

"Bleagh," The captain said as he took another sip. "Things went downhill and downhill quickly after that. There was now no limit to the Terran's production capacity. We were now fighting Terran industry, a fight nobody wants. A few ships became dozens and not just Turtles. The first spacecraft that are now the Moray patrol craft appeared, and we had to contend with fast missile boats with real jump drives that could effectively raid our shipping not just on Terra but on our supply routes. Then, the fun really started. The Shrike mark ones appeared. They don't have interstellar drives, but a modified Turtle can haul one. Those early Shrikes weren't anywhere as deadly as the Mark Twelves, thank the lineage, but they were still nasty. We now had a real fight on our hands," the captain said as he sipped his coffee. "Then, the first Stiletto corvettes popped up, and those fuckers were every bit as nasty as they are now. Combined Stiletto, Moray, and Shrike attack groups started to prowl the inner solar system engaging anything that got too close. We were knocking them around pretty good, but as soon as we took one out, two more jumped into the system. There was no end to them. Then… We got the shock of our lives." the captain said as he took a sip and looked at his crew. "The first nukes. Suddenly even a little Shrike was a threat to anything we had. To use my favorite Terran phrase, 'shit got real'. We had a very real battle now. Not only were we trying to hold space against an enemy with a seemingly endless supply of spacecraft, but with space superiority contested, our surface forces once again were being attacked and attacked for real. The Terrans had just been buying time, and now… they were attacking in force with an army much larger and well equipped than we could imagine."

"Yeah," the old first sergeant said. "Mars became a real battleground. Those bastards had built armored vehicles, Shrikes, heavy weapons, the whole thing and boiled up out of the ground like flesh flies. We didn't know what hit us." The old Juon said as he sipped his tea. "Thank the creators that they had calmed down a bit from our stupid reprisal attacks. They actually took prisoners and treated them according to the Convention of Geneva. Even with reinforcements, we ultimately lost Mars. Luna was getting invaded as well as the survivors there were counterattacking, so the surviving Mars forces were transferred there in an attempt to somehow hold it, but space superiority that close to Terra was iffy at best. We couldn't keep Terran forces from landing. We did give them Hell, though. We were on Luna for the whole war. They never could take it."

"It was around year three that things came to a head," the captain said. "Terra wasn't the only system that was suffering under the new Emperor, and several planets had gone from civil unrest to full bore resistance groups. Suddenly, Terran weapons and equipment started appearing in other systems. The Kalesh system, suddenly very well equipped with both arms and spacecraft, exploded into full revolt, and the Mux soon followed. The Terrans had started reaching out to other Imperial systems and were handing out an unending fountain of arms, spacecraft, supplies, rations, you name it. Turtles were swarming like karga all over, and Stilettos and Morays were being handed out like party favors. It was like a hundred Sheilas were dancing around the Empire," the captain said with a hearty laugh. "Things were going downhill fast and not just in Sol anymore. The problems were starting to spread, and Turtles were spotted in over a dozen systems. We were looking at a real problem."

"A hundred Sheilas," T'sunk'al said with a laugh. "Now there's an image."

"Right?" the captain laughed. "Well, the Emperor was losing it. Everyone was blaming everyone. The military high command was freaking out. Terra was bad enough, but now three systems were in full revolt, and AKs were starting to go bang in a dozen more. The Emperor then gave the order to turn Terra into glass. Talk about a complete and utter waste of time! Massive bombardment of Terra, Luna, and Mars did take place, but what the Hell did they hit? There was nothing on the surface! It was a complete and total waste of time. They were shelling two lifeless worlds and a planet that was mostly ash and dead scrubland. Any remaining civilians had been relocated out of the system or moved underground into an ever-expanding deep tunnel network. There was nothing on the surface left to hit! In return, they placed ship after ship in range of surface drones, and Terran attack craft were jumping in and out of the system constantly. Losses were mounting, and Terran weapons and ships were still being exported en-masse. The real target worth hitting was not in Sol, and we had and still have no idea where it is."

"Yeah, the whole Empire was being shaken," the old first sergeant said. "There were only three systems where there was any real revolt and a few more where there was now an armed resistance. It was just a little smudge compared to the entirety of the Empire, but this had never happened before. The Emperor was now nearly insane and was making genocidal orders left and right. Terra was pretty much immune, but Kalesh and Mux were vulnerable, and the loss of life was getting serious."

"The murderous orders from the Emperor did quell a lot of systems, but the Mux and the Kalesh were damn near Terran, and it just made them more violent and just like on Terra, a lot of the Imperial forces balked at genocide," the captain said. "In fact, reports of Imperial forces turning on the death squads and defending the civilians were starting to become more and more frequent. The Great Mutiny was spreading just like Terran arms, but this mutiny wasn't just quitting or surrendering. The soldiers were actively engaging the death squads. The Great Houses were starting to become very uncomfortable, and there were rumblings that something was afoot. Imperial forces were already starting to turn, and the Great Houses were starting to mobilize their soldiers. We were looking down the barrel of a full bore civil war."

"Damn, Jessie said, "I had no idea it got that bad."

"Oh, it did," the captain said. "Sol was becoming an Imperial scrapyard. Mux and Kalesh were in complete revolt, and several other systems were starting to fall apart. Imperial forces started shooting other Imperial forces, and the Great Houses were getting concerned to the point that their private armies were mobilized. The Empire, which had stood for two thousand years, was in more peril than it had been in centuries, perhaps longer."

The captain sipped some more coffee, and ripples of revulsion danced across his hide.

"And thus," he said, "We come to the rise of the Cyan Empress. The Empire was falling apart, Terra was a complete shit-show with Kalesh and Mux catching up quick, her brother had completely lost it, and the Great Houses were starting to really consider a coup. One night she decided that enough was enough. That night she went to the Royal Museum and took Keralx, the moraxel wielded by the Black Emperor fifteen hundred years ago. The next day she traveled to Esteria, the location of the Golden Palace, and summoned the heads of the Great Houses. They arrived, and she had a little chat with them. Nobody knows for certain what was said, but in the end, they ceased their mobilization and pledged fealty to her. A few days later, she returned to the royal palace."

The captain looked over at his crew.

"You guys probably know what happened next. The next morning the Emperor, who often slept until noon, was awakened by his servants and was told that he should go to the throne room. He, with some annoyance, eventually showed up. To his shock, his sister was sitting on the throne in a pretty cyan dress, Keralx in hand and their father behind her. He was then told that his reign was over, his bags packed, and a ship was waiting. He laughed and told her that there was no way that this would happen. He had too many lords behind him. The Empress had a long table carried in covered with a cyan-dappled sheet. She then said, 'Oh, you mean them?' and had the sheet removed, revealing the severed faces of all of his supporters. 'Don't look so surprised, brother dear,' she said as he vomited. 'You wanted the grand old days back. This is what we did back then.' He then realized why her gown was cyan. That was the last anyone saw or heard of him."

The captain paused and smiled.

"There are plenty of rumors, but all anyone knows for sure is that neither color nor tentacle of him has even been seen again."

"I've always liked her," Sheila said with a laugh. "She has style."

"That she does," the captain said with a laugh. "In keeping with the 'You wanted the old days back.' theme, what happened next was one of the bloodiest purges in recent history with a lot of it done by her hand. Turns out that she is a 'blade dancer' and studied the martial art as part of her royal education. It isn't a true combat style, but she is a walking food processor. She went from system to system, planet to planet, and on each one that suffered, she had the Juon responsible hauled before her, and she sliced them apart always wearing the same cyan stained gown." The captain chuckled, "She wasn't fucking around either. That little golden age cult? Most fell to her blade as she sardonically quoted their philosophy back to them."

"Nice," T'sunk'al said, rubbing his mandibles in a chuckle. "I like her."

"The shooting on Terra, Kalesh, Mux, and the other systems in conflict stopped immediately, and all troops were withdrawn," the captain said as he gagged on another sip of coffee. "She personally showed up in Terra and called for the leader of the Terrans to come forth. It should come as no surprise that Tak Nakamura was selected to speak for Terra. She landed on Hentai Island with no real notice," the captain said, giggling. "Remember when we said that many of us had stopped wearing clothes?"

"No!" one of the troopers exclaimed.

"Yes!" the captain replied. "She landed on the beach and beheld dozens of naked Juon, myself included," he said while laughing so hard he was shaking. "We didn't know what to do. Half of us ran for the water, and the other half of us bowed."

"What did you do?"

"Well, I did a combination of bowing and trying to bury my naughty bits in the sand as fast as I could."

"What did the Empress do?" one of his crew asked as they were all laughing and gasping for breath.

"Well, at first, she was furious," the captain said, still laughing. "She thought we had been stripped. Then she saw piles of clothes on the beach, and she laughed her beak off. While laughing nearly uncontrollably, she announced that she would debark again in ten minutes and then, giggling like a hatchling, went back into the ship."

It took a while for the Juon, the captain included, to stop laughing.

"Remember that the next time you are so embarrassed that you feel like throwing yourself out of an airlock. The Empress saw me naked," Captain Zzuural said with a laugh. "Well, after ten minutes passed and we had fled, she once again debarked and toured the camp. She was quite pleasantly surprised at how nice our accommodations were, and after getting a pina colada, she settled herself down into a tide pool and drank while she nibbled on starfish and sea urchins. Tak showed up pretty quickly, and once he did, she had the new Lord Chancellor and the first military commanders hauled out, and she said, 'These people do not represent the Empire nor our values.' She then hacked them into pieces in front of him."

The captain chuckled.

"You have to admit. That is one Hell of a way to start negotiations. She and Tak hammered out a treaty over the afternoon. She started things off with, and I quote, 'You fuckers are not worth the trouble. You want out. You are out.' the rest of the time was stuff like possession of dead systems and the like. She made the same pronouncement across the entire Empire saying that she promised change, but if any system wanted to leave the protection of the Empire, the Empire had better things to do than stop them."

The captain paused to refill his dish.

"Why am I still drinking this?" he said. "In the end, only the Kalesh system chose to leave. The Mux voted to remain. Kalesh and Sol are conveniently close, so a new treaty was drawn up to include territory between them, and the new entity was recognized as the Terran Republic." The captain said with a thump of his tentacle. "And the rest is history."

"I still don't understand why you are allies." a Z'uush said.

"Well," Sheila responded, "there are two big reasons. The first is what happened after the shooting stopped. The porkies had wormed their way into the Federation, and no sooner than we had the Empire out of our hair, the Federation showed up with a fleet and 'invited' us to join. They then presented us with a long list of bullshit requirements like disarming and a maximum size to our defense forces and last not but not least, 'the restoration of property unlawfully taken from its original owners'. Needless to say we told them in no uncertain terms to go and fuck themselves. While they were trying to negotiate terms that we would accept, the Imperial companies we used to do business with started getting back in touch, wondering if we could do business again. On one hand, we had a lot of bullshit, and on the other, we had multi-billion credit contracts."

Sheila shrugged.

"It went without saying that we turned our backs on the Feds and started making those sweet, sweet credits. Business ties grew into social and cultural ties, and in a few years, we all decided to let things slide, and in a few more, we actually did. The other big reason is that we are culturally much more similar to the Empire than the Federation. We have a lot of the same cultural values. It's weird but true. We do. The Juon and Terrans eat the same things, find the same things funny, we even curse the same. Once we got past the whole 'we tried to kill each other' thing, we found out how alike we were, including our ability to get past the whole 'we tried to kill each other' thing."

Sheila paused to drink some coffee.

"We were on very good terms, but we weren't true 'allies' until the Great War. Project lifeline turned to direct military involvement pretty quickly."

"I'll tell you one thing," the captain said with a smile. "I will never forget the Japura system. We were fighting a losing battle about to lose yet another world, and suddenly the Terrans tore into the system guns blazing." The captain smiled. "It was the first time I actually felt hope in a long while."

"I guess it does make sense, everything considered." one of the Z'uush said.

"Well, as much as anything involving the Terrans does anyhow," the captain said. He then turned to his crew. "Ok, guys, you have the rest of the day to get yourselves into something resembling fighting condition, then we have an actual job to do." He turned to Sheila and, in a much quieter voice, asked, "So what's next for you guys, or do I want to know?"

"There are some jobs we have been thinking about but haven't done because we didn't want to draw too much heat," Sheila said with a smile. "Now that we are Federation enemy number one and can't really get any more heat than we already have, we are going to step things up a bit." She smiled impishly. "I don't want to give away the surprise, but you will see it on the news."