Prologue: Transgressions
I am no stranger to tragedy. If anything, the two of us are like friends, meeting up with each other once in a while in a little cabin perched on a decrepit countryside to share a cup of coffee. The visits are always different, the most common being insidiously slow and sharp and stinging. The slow kind always does the most damage, twisting the knife in your gut like an enemy relishing your long-awaited death. I am no stranger to people trying to kill me. It's funny how quickly the world can burn around you, consuming everything dear to you, slowly but surely. The ashes remain like a perfect memory, a song once put it so eloquently.
Someone always told me that stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. This time was no different. I am no stranger to animosity, given unto and received. That was my inevitable downfall. In the biology of all species, we're hard-wired to remember fear the most and fear we must . . . but it doesn't stop us from making the same mistakes.
Each government puts up their walls while outwardly smiling like an idiot over the ramparts. A show of cooperation is put out and the public consumes it. Politicians use this like their bread and butter for their own insidious version of McCarthyism. To their credit, the Alliance holds it at bay . . . if only to conceal the cracks in their foundation. Cerberus eliminated politics but they were subject to the same fatal flaw like the rest. They didn't understand. I did. The clashes told me they were limited to one side of a coin: heads. I know the other side is no stranger to it. That fear and hatred . . . I felt that once.
Every soldier I served with fought so hard, sacrificing what I once called humanity. They were true patriots, regardless of the legacy people thought they knew. Our choices come to hunt us in the dark like demons, leaving grunts like me forever fearing its resonance in time because there are no heroes in war. It creates beasts out of the ordinary, levelling and re-shaping the world as it sees fit like a toddler playing god.
There is no such thing as peace. Not in the constant celestial bombardment occurring throughout the vast expanse of the universe and certainly not in our brief existences. There is only blindness, information abandoned to the dusty recesses of our minds.
History honors our transgressions as a species. Nobody knows for sure why anyone of us were the ones to receive these gifts of self-awareness, this ability to do good and cause terrible harm. As we surged ever further into the unknown, the answer still lies out of-reach, now more than ever. Our actions are etched in the stone of the world regardless, squandered and bickered over by people who can do nothing more than bark at the moon, or however that human saying goes.
Sound like the rant of a typical villain? You're probably right. Like I said, there are no heroes in war.
And this is the story of one such war.
The First-Contact War.