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My father grew up on Earth. I was born there, but I never really called it home. The lima beans shipped me out when I hit 10 for basic training on some satellite world of a satellite world. My dad was too old to fight, and anyway, he never did trust the damn Loloth.

Nevermind that the lima beans had spent over 900 hundred years helping to expand the human race into the galaxy. Nevermind that they provided us with incredible technology and new, ripe worlds in droves. My dad simply didn’t trust the damn things.

“You watch,” he used to write me, before I was deployed to the front, “after this war is done, those lima beans are gonna turn around on us. Mark my words.”

My daddy was a smart man. Too bad he was just a soybean farmer. If he had been High Admiral, maybe things would have turned out differently.

For my part, I bought the Loloth’s story, hook, line, and sinker. I even remember the very first time I saw a Loloth. I don’t know the lima bean’s name, didn’t speak to it, didn’t even get close. It was standing behind some brass one day at roll call, just watching, as they often did.

It wasn’t literally standing of course. The Loloth have no legs, or arms, or anything really. They’re just pale, white blobs rolling around like giant sacks of pus. That’s why we called them lima beans – when they really wanted to get somewhere, they’d flatten out so they had more surface area in contact with the ground, and when they did that, they looked just like giant, white lima beans.

That day, when I first saw a Loloth, I held my head up real high and pushed my chest forward as if the High Admiral himself was watching. I think I must have been 12 years old.

Back then, I didn’t know anything about the war with the Gorax, not really. I didn’t know what it was like to watch a nuclear missile you fired explode in a city center, or on top of a remote village. I hadn’t yet felt the mental pressure of a Loloth’s psychic attention – that subtle, irresistible urging which our species would, in time, become uniquely familiar with.

All I knew – all that any of us really knew – was that 900 years ago, the human race was an endangered species, trapped on a dying world, waiting for the clock to run out. From my perspective, the Loloth were our saviors, and believe me, I was not alone in feeling that way. The Loloth were humanity’s miracle from the stars. Our guardian angels, pulling us up out of the muck of our own making and unlocking our true potential.

It pains me now, in ways words cannot express to tell you that, standing there that day, looking at my first Loloth, I felt an emotion so engrossing, so total – which filled me with such zealous warmth – that I can only refer to it now as a kind of love.

As time goes on, it will be easy for historians to criticize my generation. They’ll sit there in their ivory towers and their research libraries, writing their magnum opuses on the First War for Galactic Supremacy and the “War Dogs”. They’ll call us short-sighted and selfish. They’ll say we were blinded by greed and bloodlust.

Well, the hell with them. They weren’t there. I was.

My name is Charles Taylor Howell. I was a “War Dogs” missile squad leader on gunboat 83742, sub-fleet 26154, and this is the truth, as best as I can remember it.

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