“A profound love between two people
involves, after all, the power and chance
of doing profound hurt.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, —The Left Hand of Darkness
Step in to the ocean and compare yourself to a shark.
A predator, sleek and hydrodynamic. Shaped by millions of years of evolution, every gram accounted for, every sense honed to the bleeding edge in pursuit of the simple maxims of survival and dominance. Time and trial have shaped them into the undisputed masters of the waves, red in tooth and claw. Next to a shark, a human diver is little more than a poorly-formed bag of flesh, blood, and bone, hopelessly dependent on technological aid to so much as breathe.
Now imagine a predator shaped not by the blind madness of evolution but selective, scientific process. Free of the genetic junk, the natural, random idiosyncrasies and failings that have plagued biological life since the first cells drifted across the vast oceans of old Earth. Imagine a perfect, undisputed apex predator, engineered for dominance down to the last base pair. Imagine an organism with mastery of energies capable of boiling away a planet’s atmosphere literally etched upon its DNA. Then, perhaps, you begin to understand the alien race known as the nomads.
As organisms, the nomads outclass space-borne humanity in every significant way. They are the sharks, and we shared the stellar ocean with them only for so long as we remained insignificant enough to escape notice. A state of happy ignorance that changed permanently with the outbreak of the Nomad War. As the sector teetered on the brink of the bloodiest war in human history, the Order stepped up and tore the veil from the nomad’s machinations. In so doing, they declared the human race a lasting and vehement enemy of the aliens.
Suddenly, we were swimming with the sharks.
Individually, nomad morphs are more than a match for humanity’s makeshift steel equivalents. Where the link between a human pilot and his fighter is a lengthy, faulty conglomeration of electronic and sensory inputs, the flaws of biology heaped atop those of machinery, every alien craft; from the smallest shielding microbe to dreadnoughts that can snuff out stars, possesses an instant, intuitive understanding of their position and capabilities. A nomad has no need for a damage readout. It feels the microbes in its shields dying beneath the fire of guns. Trajectories and courses that take hours of work for a human navigator are simply, immediately obvious to a nomad morph.
A nomad performs complex orbital calculations the same way a human being might catch a ball on reflex. For an individual craft, there is no chain of sensory input to thought to action. There is simply input and immediate, certain, action. Consciousness is a burden for others to carry. Alien fighters can see a threat, engage, and reduce it to scrap before a human pilot finishes arming his torpedoes.
Few civilian ships are lucky enough to survive an encounter with a nomad.
Brute force is but one road among many; however, and the nomad’s mastery of war extends far beyond mere firepower. Given time, a mindnode can reduce even the most determined individual to a delusional maniac, intent on sabotaging the very cause she once fought for. Such subversion is usually slow and subtle, save the immediate mind-wrenching effects of incubus implantation, and a targeted individual may not realise the foreign source of their rage until they find themselves standing over the body of their commanding officer, months after the first whispers of his disregard, blood soaking their hands. Mercifully, fine manipulation is difficult among crowds, and NRI teams maintain a deep distrust of solitary operators for this very reason. Larger nomads display increasingly prominent abilities, and rumours persist of the oldest and largest alien dreadnoughts trapping a fleet of attackers in a mindless stupor while smaller craft rip their way through the airlocks.
Human strength was cited in the past as the key factor determining a direct attack by the aliens. That was not strictly true. Individually a human being, even with all the advantages granted by nearly a millennia of spacefaring civilisation, poses no more threat to the nomads than an earthworm does an elephant. While attractive, the illusion of defence by raw might was and is just that. An illusion.
Humanity’s greatest defence against the aliens remains that of herd animals faced with a wolf. Nothing more or less than cold, dumb, numbers. No predator, no matter how well adapted, can hope to exterminate a prey population the size of interstellar humanity alone.
Instead the nomads seek to turn human nature against us. War, politicking, and infighting are their tools, wielded by a shadowy army of puppets, collaborators, and catspaws. Popular media smugly claims that the Nomad War ended with Orillion and Edison Trent. It is a tantalising falsehood, but a falsehood nonetheless. What a jubilant humanity blindly termed victory was just one failed strategy among hundreds. A major strategy, perhaps, but far from a solitary one. The alien machinery of war yet grinds on, and the colonies of Sirius pit their strength against one another.
Liberty, Bretonia, and Gallia struggle to drive the knife into one another’s throats. In Rheinland and Kusari brother turns on brother. Even the Order, once a bastion of purpose, finds its foundations battered by the ceaseless tide of the Core’s ambitions, resources already stretched thin by the Toledo massacre squandered fighting human enemies. Only a handful remain watchful for the true foe.
The battle was won but the campaign continues, and the NRI stands lonely vigil over a human race tearing itself apart at the seams.
![[Image: 7mmhyIl.png]](http://i.imgur.com/7mmhyIl.png)