HUMANITY UNLEASHED
Part 4: War Dogs
In a contentious, but ultimately unanimous decision the Federation Council chose to foster an alliance with the human race.
The first plan was to engender the trust of the humans, feeding them powerful technologies which would then enable them to join Federation society. Once contact was established, the Trylixians would provide FTL engines and energy advancements which would jump start Human technological evolution. Once the human’s took to the stars the Loloth would exert powerful psychic influence on humanity’s elite, funneling their colonization efforts to pre-selected planets, where the quick breeding species would be allowed to flourish. Eventually, the Human’s would be given Federation membership and drafted into the war effort, where their ferocity would, the Council hoped, turn the tide.
All parties were leery from the start of allowing the humans full autonomy. But in the end, it was one human man who convinced the Council to scrap their plan entirely and instead carry out something far more nefarious.
That man was Patrick Joyce, the final human survivor of the Heart of Loll fiasco. In all iterations of the Council’s plan, Joyce was centrally important. Joyce would make the perfect emissary between humanity and the Federation.
There was only one problem – Joyce refused to agree to it.
The Council was faced with a fateful choice – win Joyce over to their side, or force him to capitulate. Ultimately, in the spirit of haste and superiority, the latter option was chosen.
It was Joyce’s titanic struggle to retain his selfdom that proved man’s mind altogether more resilient than any Council species was comfortable with. After weeks of constant Loloth psychic prodding, Joyce still refused to cooperate. Eventually, they succeeded in shattering his mind. But the unexpected difficulty of what should have been a simple chore so unnerved the Council that the entire human operation was scuttled and hastily re-conceived. The new plan was no longer about fostering a new, equal partner – no, that was far too dangerous with a species as resilient as humanity. Rather humanity would be sown, as a crop is for harvest.
The new operation had no official name, but the Hiddrell took to calling it “War Dog” in their mother tongue. War Dog took the outline of the original operation and embedded at its core a darkness whose stain upon the Federation would never wash out.
As the human race expanded at a rapid pace, the plan was for the Hiddrell to harvest isolated human communities for genetic analysis. The Loloth would take these specimens and experiment on them relentlessly, altering their DNA in search of a genetically stable, artificially augmented human species. By selecting for the right traits – reproductive health, suggestibility, extreme violence – the Loloth would create a new race, creatures which reproduced with the same ferocity with which they waged brutal war. A simpler organism, controllable by Loloth mental suggestion, with only two overriding drives: birth and death. War Dogs.
Once the planning phase was completed, the operation was swiftly put into effect. By far the most dangerous part was the initial interaction with humanity. One false move and the whole endeavor would be over before it began. A choice was made to begin communications from a distance and escalate slowly over the course of two decades, a substantial time scale for a human being, but for most Federation species, only a drop in the bucket of unnaturally lengthened lives.
The human’s progressed far faster than anyone expected. They soaked up technological data like sponges, and quickly began iterating on the specifications they were sent. Within a decade they had a faster than light ship in orbit. A decade later, fueled by the astounding increase in available energy provided by fusion and anti-matter reactors, the human’s home system was fully colonized, littered with space stations and mining rigs.
On the first day of the 25 year after contact, the first meeting took place. A member of each Council race, ostensibly led by Patrick Joyce, looking far older than he was and little more than a smiling figurehead, met the human’s on board the farthest outpost in their solar system, a shimmering new military base in orbit around a dwarf planet the human’s called Pluto.
The meeting was a great success, and the human leadership expressed immense interest in expanding the footprint of their species as quickly as practicable. The Federation made public overtures of overwhelming support for the human expansive endeavor, even going so far as to offer up a dozen ideal starter worlds.
Within 60 years of first contact, Humanity had spread itself to over 100 planets in their quadrant of the galaxy. Birthrates skyrocketed as the species stretched its proverbial arms, freed of the constraining carbon cycle, loosed of the shackles of fossil fuels, able for the first time to treat outer space as they had once treated their oceans – no longer an impassable chasm, but a great unknown, calling to be explored.
The planners behind the operation were astonished. Harvesting was originally scheduled to begin a century after contact. The human’s had achieved the desired expansion in half that time. A green light was given to begin harvesting human colonists. Hiddrell special forces were sent under cover of night and marched several miles through the dark, armed with stunners and batons. They only chose the farthest outliers of the human diaspora – planets on the very fringes of human influence. The Hiddrell could not leave witnesses, and so everyone was taken – man, woman, and child. Later they were sorted by the Loloth based on genetic analysis – the suitable candidates kept, the lacking ones destroyed, like lab mice. The Federation covered their tracks on every planet they harvested, dragging asteroids into collisions or fomenting artificial seismic upheavals. Each time the human elite chalked it up to fickle nature and sent more colonists on their way.
All the while, the Trylixians worked tirelessly to control information. It was imperative in the view of the Council that Humanity remain ignorant: of the Federation’s plot to use them; of the true extent and structure of Galactic civilization; and of the Federation’s greatest weakness, the war with the Gorax.
As the operation progressed, at great expense, the Loloth seeded their altered humans a thousand abandoned worlds. Soon the Hiddrell harvests were no longer necessary. As operation War Dogs entered its 100th year, the Council was heartened to to know that their mutant army was growing at nearly exponential rates.
All the while, the Council never forgot what they viewed as the six savages aboard the Heart of Loll, nor Patrick Joyce’s stubborn will. The Federation could not trust humanity with full membership, nor could they currently spare the strength of arms necessary achieve subjugation. Which meant, for now, the Council needed humanity peaceable.
But in the end, once the army was grown and loosed upon the Gorax, once the war was over and the galaxy firmly in Federation control, then the plan became simple. Even rudimentary.
They would all be put down, the war dogs and the lab mice alike.
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