War Metal – Beginnings

Peaceful days are few and far between. We watch the vids sometimes, our link to how it was before, to how it used to be, and we understand that what we see, the blue skys, the lush vegetation, the happy smiling people can never be again, but we know that we can be better than we are, that we can make a difference, that we can learn to smile again….

I’m no student of history, certainly not on a par with Sirius or Natasha. If you want the full story you’ll have to talk to them, but from what I have pieced together it began a couple of hundred years ago in 1947, July if you want to get picky about it, at a place called Roswell, in what used to be America. For years before that there had been rumours and news stories and books and stories about flying saucers and aliens and life in distant galaxies, other Worlds, and those in charge had always poured scorn on anyone who made claims of contact with such beings. It was all nonsense or disinformation or conspiracy. We were alone in Gods Universe and even if we weren’t the distances of interstellar space were simply too vast for other beings to cross them.

Even after 1947 we were told that there was no story, that aliens didn’t exist, but we know now that what came down in the desert outside Roswell was just a foretaste of the nightmare that was to come. Maybe if our governments had been straight with us, maybe if our scientists had been let in on the secret earlier, maybe if we had had time to prepare things would have been different, but that’s a lot of maybes, and maybes don’t feed the family baby so lets move right along. The long and the short of it is that our leaders lied to us. There were aliens out there, and they were visiting us, and they had made contact. Fact. Period. What isn’t so clear is that it appears there isn’t just one alien species but thousands, some peaceful, some not. We met the peaceful ones first, they tried to warn us but we didn’t get a chance to listen. It wasn’t long before the other sort showed up….

Timeslip here, we’ve left 1947 behind by a hundred years or so. The history is a bit messed up and that’s our fault pretty much but it turns out that we were a pretty messed up species ourselves. As a species we’d been squabbling over bits of land since we were developed enough to bang two rocks together but as things started to get real tough, as the water and the oil and the food started to run out things got pretty nasty for a while. See, we’d developed some pretty badass weapons, at least we thought we had, but more of that later, We had these nukes and stuff that could big time mess up your day and when things got ugly it turns out that the threat of mutually assured destruction was not such a deterrent after all. I guess some people just get so desperate that they can’t see another way. Anyhoo, no-one really knows how it kicked off, some say the Russians, some the Chinese, so say it was a rogue state, doesn’t matter I guess ‘cause what was left made picking up the pieces something of a challenge.

Turns out nukes have three effects. The initial blast wave is pretty devastating to anyone within a handful of miles of the detonation. The radiation is a bit more problematic over a wider area, but what was the real killer was the electromagnetic pulse that fried most of the electronics. We’d taken it for granted that we had all these machines that monitored the planet, satellites and what not, I ain’t that technical, so ‘scuse me for not knowing all about it, but it looks like there were things lurking about out in space that were just waiting for an opportunity to come have a look at a prime piece of real estate called planet Earth. The fact that it was fire damaged only made it more attractive I guess. Maybe they were looking for a fixer upper? I don’t know. Whatever, it was three weeks after the big blast as I understand it that the tremors started. Wherever folks had banded together in group they started to feel these like earthquakes. I guess they must have assumed they were aftershocks, that old Mother Earth was shaking her good self like a dog with fleas after the mess we had made.

That wasn’t it at all though. Not being able to communicate effectively over any distance was the real bitch. No-one knew that an encampment had been attacked until long after it had happened, but I’ve seen the drawing that the few messengers who did make it out made. They come in the night mostly. The ground shakes gradually worse and worse then tears open right under the centre of the camp and this thing emerges, maybe a hundred feet long, maybe bigger, I guess no-one ever bothered to measure one. I guess the name comes from the ground shaking before they appear but whatever they ended up with a name that doesn’t really do justice to them but hey, I’m just a grunt, what to I know. Anyway, good name or not just pray you never have to face a Tremor Wyrm……They can be defeated, we kill ‘em when we can, and we’re getting better at it, but that’s a story for another day…..