[ WP ] You are not alone

We are not alone. 
 
 It was one of the fundamental questions of mankind, answered in a way that only the hopelessly paranoid had expected. The question had launched countless thousands of rockets, sent humanity clawing for a way upwards, out of our pathetic gravity well. It propelled us to the stars. 
 
 And among the stars, we found our answer. No, we are not alone in the universe. There are others. 
 
 And we are hopelessly outgunned. 
 
 Ninety years ago, in the culminating effort of human science, NASA and JAXA collaborated to launch a starship that bent the laws of physics to its will, created a bubble in the fabric of spacetime, and travelled faster than light. It took fifteen years for the ship to reach its destination. 
 
 It took a week to come home. The ship had been flung through a parallel space our science had never predicted, never even speculated. None of the crew was on board, and every instrument was dead. 
 
 Even then, we did not know. We speculated, conspiracy theorists had a field day with the news. But even as we mourned our dead, we prepared to try again. 
 
 We learned. We studied data from the emergence, figured out the inversion of space that would fling a starship into another subspace, learned the physics of this new plane, and determined how to rip a hole back into our own space. It took twenty years, but we were ready to try again. 
 
 We launched a ship, an accomplishment to make our last look like a candle beside a bonfire. It ripped a hole into subspace, and took a week to journey the fifty light years to its destination. 
 
 We were not foolish. We armed the ship with every weapon we could devise, guns that could rip a planet to shreds. Permutations of subspace technology created the largest advancement in weapons technology since the atomic bomb. We were prepared to greet whatever waited in the void as equals, to stand on equal footing and fight toe to toe if need be. 
 
 Or so we thought. Our envoy to the stars, our warship never returned. 
 
 But something else did, something great and terrible. And we learned the brutal truth. We were allowed to live only because we had nothing of worth, and posed no threat. 
 
 The war was brutal, short. A fraction of a fraction survived. They razed our planet, destroyed our pitiful guns, our ships, everything we had accomplished. Then, when they were satisfied that we were once more trapped at the bottom of our gravity well, they left. They took what resources they wanted, and they left. 
 
 The human race was broken, beaten. We were scattered across our solar system as a dozen disconnected tribes, each destined to die with our broken, ruined planet, orbiting a star that had been damaged and almost entirely destroyed in the war. 
 
 We can not fix our home. It is far too late for that, the damage dealt is irreparable. Our once-blue marble is brown and black with ash and scorched earth. 
 
 But we are not dead yet. 
 
 You see, we are a race of toolmakers. Ever since the first ape killed his food with a rock, we have done one thing with surpassing skill. We *learn*. 
 
 Cold fury at the destruction of our birthright united humanity for the first time in history. And we learned. They shattered our dreams, but we made a new one out of scraps of steel, forged it in the fires of our wounded star. Made a knife for the heart of our enemy. Once, humankind dreamed of exploration. Now, our dreams are of vengence for what is eternally lost. 
 
 There is an old saying that insanity is doing the same thing again and again, and expecting a different result. And perhaps, the destruction of our home has made us insane. But in the years since our defeat, we have found weaknesses in our enemy. Cracks in the armor. And we learned how to exploit them. 
 
 We built a ship. Mined every last scrap of metal we could find from our entire system. We loaded every remaining man, woman, and child on board. A week ago, we launched it, the ultimate sucker punch. We arrive in their space today. Perhaps our efforts were in vain. Perhaps they have something else we've never seen. But this ship, this shard of mother Earth is all we have left, and we have hurled it at our foe, fueled by cold anger. Perhaps we will all die. But we mean to make them *pay*.
