JJ,

I hope this note finds you well. I’ve been thinking about what you said in your last message, about what life would be like once the fighting ends. I could read the subtext without you having to telegraph anything, and that subtext worries me. I’m beginning to question everything I thought I knew.

Almost everything. I bought the ring. We’re supposed to spend some time together next week—I have some leave slotted and she’s made arrangements to rent a sailboat so we can sail up the coast and enjoy the quiet. She doesn’t think I know about the cottage and I don’t have it in me to ruin the surprise. I just hope that it feels like the right time to do it while we’re out there.

Life’s too short to keep waiting for the perfect moment, right? Especially if what you didn’t say is true. Why waste what we have?

Docket is routine for the next few weeks on my end. I imagine it’s a lot of the same on yours. Heard about the new flagship—good luck with the shakedown cruise. Hopefully the luck’s not needed, but you never know when the ship’s on her maiden. There’s always a few kinks to work through, right?

I’ll let you know how the trip goes one way or another. Cross your fingers that I don’t chicken out again.

Step lightly out there,

Ben

I was not supposed to be at Beta Centauri when it happened. It was only a short visit, a chance to see my sister before I left for the fringes of human-held space. I was still nominally a civilian then, signed on as a translator and recorder for a diplomatic mission on faraway Robinsworld. We didn’t know then that the settlement there had already been obliterated and the survivors scattered. We didn’t know then that the people I was set to meet had been lost.

We didn’t know then that Irin and I were about to be the last survivors of the Collins line. Our brother had been killed the year before under mysterious circumstances, circumstances even Irin couldn’t get to the bottom of with her meager security clearance and the power of her name. Dad had tried, too, but even he came up empty. He often said if Granddad was still alive, maybe he’d have gotten farther, but I don’t think he would have. My grandfather was well-respected and well-known, but in those days when the government was scrambling to keep the volume of the mysterious losses a secret, I doubt anyone not already in the know could have found out much. Not even him, for all his storied history and lifetime of service, both in and out of uniform.

I never intended to join the armed forces, but when the Preytax hit Beta Centauri, there weren’t any choices left.

Of course, she wasn’t the one to recruit me or to swear me in—that was done by the base commander at Beta Centauri, about ten hours before he was killed. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have ended up assigned to her unit—if you could call my assignment anything formal at all. But things were different when the war broke out, when Beta Centauri was hit as the Preytax made their first major push on Earth-held worlds. The attacks were designed to cripple and demoralize, to wipe out as much resistance as possible.

In a lot of ways, it was successful. It just didn’t do the whole job. They didn’t finish us off. It was probably a mistake on their part, but I don’t know if they ever realized it or if that was part of some greater plan. Short of talking to one of them—and I have had more than enough firsthand experience with them already to last me the rest of my life—and asking the question, I have no way of knowing.

I do not think I want to know.

The day Beta Centauri fell and we fled was also the first time I almost got myself killed. It’s never auspicious to that it was the first time that happened, because it implies it happened again. But it did, and that’s something I can’t deny, nor would I exactly want to. Scars and experiences are part of what make us who we are. After Beta Centauri, I started being more afraid for my sister than I was for myself. The why is a long story that I still can’t quite bring myself to tell—at least not yet. Maybe someday, but not today.

Maybe not ever.

I say we fled from Beta Centauri though I know that isn’t the way I should talk about it or write about it—once I get the account down on paper, so to speak, I imagine I’ll couch it in much more neutral language, but the truth of it is that we really did flee. It wasn’t a retreat, it was an escape. We should have died there. It was a miracle that Irin managed to get the 19th off that planet alive.

A week later, we picked up the survivors from Luke Ross’s support detachment out of Io while we were looking for anyone else to had survived that blitz attack. Their escape had been even more narrow than ours, successful only thanks to one really good pilot-navigator pairing and a timely wave of solar radiation that wasn’t blocked by Jupiter or anything else. From what I understand based on talking to the navigator, the radiation temporarily blinded the sensors the Preytax were using to monitor the debris in orbit of the moon—and there was a lot of debris of various sizes and shapes because the Preytax had basically blown everything they could to kingdom come—long enough for them to make their run for it.

Really, that’s where the actual story that’s fascinated so many people starts—the Stormers’ escape from Beta Centauri, the rescue of the 15th Support Detachment. Circumstances and chance threw us all together and out of it came something that ended up working better than any of us ever expected. My sister turned out to be smarter than anyone had ever given her credit for, ruthless and compassionate in turns, and in those weeks and months when the structures of the military and the government were scrambling to reestablish themselves in the strange and devastating new normal we’d found ourselves in. It was both terrifying and exhilarating.

A lot changed in those months after Beta Centauri, after Earth was hit and occupied. Some of it, at least, was for the better.

It’s November, and that means it’s once again NaNoWriMo season!

This year’s project is a little unconventional for me but I think it should be fun.  Here’s a little taste for you.

The Preytax represent perhaps the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced—save ourselves. That is a truth that will of course be debated in the decades to come, as that is the way of these things. There is no doubt in my mind, however, having faced them in many engagements on many battlefields, that there is no greater external threat to humanity than the race that attacked us in the first decades of the twenty-second century.

Our allies were never able to quite warn us of what we would face when they came, though I think that they maybe hoped that we never would encounter them. This was a vain hope, though I doubt that warning would have served us as well as they would have hoped. Humanity is nothing if not overconfident in most, if not all things—another universal truth, in some ways.

There will come a time when these wars have become a distant memory, barely remembered and spoken of with an air of mystery. I do not know when that day will come, but I fear that it will come prematurely. Everything that I have observed recently suggests that will be the case.

In this, I pray that I am wrong, for there is also no doubt in my mind that this is an enemy that will return again to try to finish the job that they started decades ago.

These pages contain a fraction of the story, but at least that fraction is true.

— Justin Joseph Collins, Jr., Manchester, Aradine, October 27, 2189

Draft preface to the third edition of The History of the Preytax Wars