The end of all things...

We wanted to explore, to see what lay beyond our own star system. So we built ship's, slow one's at first, and sent out high speed probes, looking for worlds that had air we could breath, water we could drink, somewhere we could one day call home. They started to report back about worlds lush with all kinds of life, their messages taking many cycles to reach home, but we had been busy.

Vast starship’s, built from asteroids captured and towed in to orbit, then hollowed out, where loaded with everything we would need to build a colony on these new found worlds. Volunteer crews, numbering in the thousands, where placed in suspended animation, for the journey would take many lifetimes. These mighty ships set sail across the cold dark sea of interstellar space, carrying our hopes and dreams, our very future as a species.

Then came the great breakthrough of hyper-space, and new starship's, no longer the slow but steady Pulsed Fusion giants of earlier generations, set out into the deep night of space. More worlds where found, and fleets of hyper-drive carrying ships started to make their way across the local star cluster.

We didn't think that maybe others had already laid claim to the worlds we had found.

At first we were hopeful when reports of strange, unknown star ships started to reach home system: we had finally made contact with another intelligent species, someone we could share the mysteries of the cosmos with.

It was the deep-range colonies that went dark first, then the hyper-space currier ships failed to return from mission after mission. At first we thought it was just bad luck, that maybe there was a problem with the latest line of hyper-drive's. The one of the currier's came back, its crew dead at the controls, the data in its log telling the shocking truth.

The visual log showed the total and systematic destruction of one of our colonies: vast starships in orbit raided down death, stabbing laser and partial beams smashing what little defences we had. Then the ground forces landed and slaughtered every living being they found. The offers of full and unconditional surrender that the colony had transmitted had fallen on deaf ears: over 150,000 lay dead at the feet of the invaders.

We were shocked and scared, paralyzed by fear as more and more worlds fell. New ships where built, armed with every weapon at our disposal, while a diplomatic mission was sent to try and find a way to end the senseless war.

This too ended in death and destruction.

We sent out fleets of warship's to try and hold back the advance while we came up with something, anything, but they we were out numbered and out gunned: the enemy could afford to fight a war of attrition, we couldn't. Every ship we lost left our colonies and Home System more and more vulnerable to attack.

Then one of our probes returned with the coordinates of the enemy's home system.

Our defences crumbling around us, we assembled a huge war fleet to take the fight to the very heart of the enemy.

But they discovered our plans, and lunched a devastating attack on our staging area, destroying everything there.

In one move they had taken out half our combat fleet, and found our home system.

We knew that the final attack would come: we had planed to destroy their home world, and now they would come after us. All we could do is hope that we could fight them to a standstill in one final battle, and then negotiate for peace. We recalled every ship we had left, and turned the entire industrial strength of Home System to build more ships. These new vessels lacked the complicated hyper-drive systems, but bristled with weapons.

The remains of our fleet, along with the new Dreadnoughts, assembled in orbit of the Home World, waiting.

When the attack finally came, it caught as by surprise: the enemy had found a way to build hyper-drive's small enough to fit in fighters. Thousands of small attack ship's exited hyper-space in the upper atmosphere, the shock waves levelling cities, the Fusion-bombs they carried did the rest.

Our Home Wold in ruins, our race all but extinct, we prepared for the end.

The enemy fleet exited hyper-space before us, the vast number of them seeming to eclipse the sun.

And then they where upon us.

We fought back with every fibre of our being, selling our lives dearly, seeking some revenge against our dead love ones. And we sold ourselves oh so dearly: we didn't try and hide, didn't try and avoid them, we just opened up with everything we had, filling the void with laser and particle fire, missiles tracking after nimble fighters that would slip into hyper-space to avoid destruction, then reappeared behind our lines to attack again and again. Our flag ship powered up its hyper-drive as it charged the main enemy formation, overloading its reactors, taking more than a hundred opponents with it.

It was a grand gesture, one worthy of remembrance, but the enemy didn't even seem to notice the loss.

In the end, we where forced closer and closer to the smoking ruin of our home, deeper and deeper into the gravity well, were our ship's where less manoeuvrable.

We knew this was the end, that we would soon meet our deaths under the guns of our enemy, so we loaded a complete history of our race, up to this moment, into 100 hyper-space probes and sent them off into the void, carrying a warning to any who may find them, to save others our fate:

Beware the humans...

The End