After War

It’s not always the same in the movies. Most of the plot in Science Fiction books were always like this: An unsuspecting humanity was caught off-guard when aliens with incredible technology attacks Earth, for one reason and another. And in most of these cases, it was only after sacrificing so much that, through grit and determination, the human race turns the battle around and wins in the end. In a few other stories, it is the aliens who win, but the entire point of these stories was that humanity was always outgunned due to the fact that alien technology was ultimately more superior to our own. To me, those stories had always been fascinating; I especially loved reading stories about how these unknown, bloodthirsty monsters just flew in from the sky and nearly slaughtered Earth’s inhabitants, or how an evil race set out to e*****e humans through infiltrating its society and slowly taking over behind the scenes, only to be caught by that unlikely hero in the end, which triggers a great cultural change. In all of these stories, humanity was always affected in the end and would never be the same. It was these kinds of books that fueled crazy conspiracy theories about the U.S. government, the most famous of which was the far-fetched conspiracy where alien reptiles ruled the upper levels of the most powerful country in the world. Yet, that was not what happened when we had our first encounter. It was true that when they invaded, the world was taken completely off guard. They had the first advantage: surprise, a major factor in strategic warfare. But the question begs to ask itself: how do you fight a prolonged battle on a world so hell bent on developing weapons for war? When we first encountered the aliens, they did not even bother to hide their tracks at all. NASA was able to track them as far as Mars, giving all the time the world’s most powerful governments to arm and prepare themselves for war. So confident were the aliens that they allowed us, a war mongering species, time and the advantage to entrench ourselves for war. Of course, this was done secretly, as a worldwide mass panic would tear the world apart by itself. Never mind the aliens, we’d be doing their job for them. Back then, Earth did not have the advantage against the aliens when it came to every day technology, but the planet’s technological breakthroughs always came from the arms race. We invented the internet because there was a need to have constant communication between military outposts. We have cellphones capable of tracking our location via the GPS – based from the technology made for spy satellites. We even have the luxury of cooking popcorn on microwave oven because a guy operating a radar machine had his chocolate bar melt on it! The United States alone have several contingency plans trying to counter every possible scenario that would exist; from a nuclear apocalypse to a virus outbreak that may or may not cause a zombie invasion. Hell, alien invasion was even their very first obsession – ever heard of Area 51? The aliens lost because they tried to fight against Humanity, a paranoid, war-mongering, innovative, and violent species capable of inflicting mass destruction. Its favorite hobbies? Making bombs, testing new weapons, finding new ways to kill. We’ve got Subs, Ships, Tanks, planes – you name it; humanity had every single fighting machine ready to wage war in every environment inside the Earth. When they arrived, they at least knew that the standard weapon in the field of war was either the AK-47, or the ever famous M-16 of the Marines. Gas operated, spitting out lead that can move faster than the speed of sound – those were weapons to be reckoned with. True enough, they could’ve just bombarded our planet from space, and scoured it clean of life, but that was not what they wanted. They wanted control, stabilization, a colony. So, the only logical way to get about it was through an invasion. Oh yes, they had advanced weapons, armor, tech, and even the supposed element of surprise. Somehow, that didn’t matter because when they first arrived, it was they who were unprepared for Earth’s full military might, so confident were they in their own technology that it became their own downfall. Hubris, their greatest downfall. As basic warfare goes, the most successful way to invade a planet (As far as their rulebook for war went anyway), was to create a strategic foothold in nearly every corner of the world. Begin with impoverished, poor countries that are militarily weak, but close enough to the big countries to land an invasion once they had found a proper foothold. So as the choices went, the Enemy’s alien forces decided to land on three choice countries: Mexico (Location unknown), Mongolia, and, just close to the coast of Japan, the Philippines. It was supposed to be a quick and easy invasion: smooth, planned, easy. They were wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong. The aliens were so excited about battling an unprepared foe that they forgot the Intelligence agencies that existed to make note and track their enemies: The CIA for the americans, the SVR RF, or Sluzhba vneshney razvedki from the Russian federation, the Ministry of State Security from China, heck, even the north Koreans helped along with their Reconnaissance General Bureau). The first few weeks after they made landfall, they subdued their host countries governments quickly enough, but they forgot about planted moles, secret agents… spies. The United States and China, finding out that an invasion had happened, immediately, but quietly moved in on their positions, with China and Russia taking the Mongolian beach head while Mexico (at least the remainder of it anyway), Canada, America and the United South American States took on the Mexican front. The battle lasted a short three weeks on both fronts, despite the enemy having the upper hand in technology. The humans did everything they could to win: Subterfuge, guerilla warfare, and of course, the ever so famous drone strikes being the most favorite tactics being used. They focused on dealing highest amount of damage with the least amount of casualties. I mean, if the Americans had enough money to bomb a 10-dollar tent on Afghan soil, how much more for a well-guarded alien base? After causing so much chaos, it was just a simple matter of sending out snipers to clean up the stragglers, and capture weakly guarded base camps. The Chinese and the Russians waged war in the dirtiest way they could. They threw gas bombs, poisoned wells, released sick animals. The aliens never stood a chance. What’s more, there was very little collateral damage because of it. In a matter of weeks, the two largest Alien strategic points, meant to take on the most powerful countries on Earth, was wiped in out three weeks of battle – if you could call it one. An overwhelming victory from a race with underwhelming technology, by utilizing underhanded means. As for the mother-ship, it threw a revenge bombardment in America, which pissed only served to piss them off.  After the bombardment, they tracked the ship and launched a hundred nukes at it, crippling its defense systems, and removing its camouflage. It winked out before we could do any more damage. The Philippines though… that was a completely different story. The aliens here weren’t so… conservative as they tried to be in the other places. They just simply marched up and took Manila straight up just like that. We had guns, yes, but compared to what they had it was like bringing a knife to a gunfight. We could hurt, but only if we got lucky. Manila fell down quite easily. Luckily, the president was on a political campaign down south, so despite killing a lot of big-wig politicians, the government remained stable from the South, in the Mindanao region. So what were they supposed to do? The aliens had to move down south to cut the head of the snake, but they were so far away… eventually they had to surrender to the incoming rescue, a united government made up of all the winning countries, made stronger by the technologies they mimicked from the invaders. The winners took scientists, tortured information and reversed engineered ships, to make even more powerful weapons of their own. And that’s how the first man-made space faring ships were created; through the spoils of war. So naturally, where did we go? Human technology, combined with the alien technology of the invaders, made up for an even more powerful ship. What did humanity do next? We mined resources. Large ships, outfitted with mining technology combined from the invaders and ours alike made it easy to mine in the harsh conditions of the other planets. We mined all that we needed in the other eight planets of the solar system – although it simply amounted to taking a few of the natural metals and gases abundant in each world. Nearly all of the minerals and metals we collected were directed to the construction of a gigantic warship in outer space, until we finally built our very first Battlecruiser; a human mothership capable of housing and holding 300,000  men, twenty-two thousand Space-capable jet fighters, fifty-six thousand, five hundred tanks and an assortment of other ground support vehicles, and eight medium-class space cruiser ships, each as large as an aircraft carrier with their own set of three hundred smaller-class jet fighters into space. This battlecruiser was aptly named: the Behemoth. The ship’s crew to board this ship were ordinary people conscripted to fight an unknown enemy – simply the survivors of a nation that was victim to Earth’s first war, a test sent out by the leaders of earth to gauge the strength of the invaders, and cannon fodder to keep the attacking aliens busy while the planet prepares its transformation for interstellar war.  Yes, the Behemoth, despite being built with the best of man’s technology, was a probe to test the enemy’s strength. Despite that, the men and women of the Behemoth, the first of its kind, were to create legendary stories, told and retold by many others, each one unique and amazing. This is our story.