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The Insectoid Invasion

By Steve Gordon, All rights reserved. Feel free to
save this at any time in your hard drive (click on "file" on your
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reading it at your leisure.


First Forward

From the log of War Admiral Norman North, Commander, 7th
fleet:

I always blamed myself for letting it happen.
But in reality, it was society's fault. Society, our
society, which had rotted to the very core.
I had roused them once before, to face the menace which
now threatened to utterly wipe us out as a free society. But
when a chance came for peace, any chance, no matter how
unrealistic, no matter how risky, they grasped it in an
unbreakable bear hug, and there was nothing I or anyone could
do to separate them from it. For our society not only had
lost the will to fight, but even worse, had lost even the
will to enable us, the warrior class, to defend it.
Our advancements in technology had regretfully eliminated the
need for workers. Rohelpers took over what little that still
needed to be done manually, and most citizens became a
passive bunch of consumers, interested only in consumption,
focused on their next vid, their next meal, their next bit of
entertainment. And war was inconvenient for them, not because
they had to fight it (most of them didn't), but the prospect
of conflict threatened to distract them from their all-
important pursuit of pleasure. So when the enemy proposed
their deceitful peace, they didn't have to make much of an
effort to deceive us.
And now we've lost everything, and almost everyone. I
keep thinking there was something I could have done,
something I should have done. Maybe I could have saved us all
by staging a coup and taking over, before the armistice was
signed and the ambush had taken place. Maybe. And if I had,
maybe I and my sailors would be sitting in some brig, waiting
for the enemy to come and take over from our current
jailors.... Or maybe we would have saved the day.
Now, we'll never know. All we can be concerned with is
saving the tiny group of humanity that's left, keeping our
task force together long enough to regroup and one day
reclaim what's ours. But the memory of what "might have been"
continues to and always will be with me, wherever I go.