Re: ESN 1002 FUJI ( #5)
Roy gave a crooked grin, and nodded. "Yeah, well...some of the earliest Angels that arrived at Earth made mention that it had been intended as kind of a penal colony? I guess we got the best fighting instincts they had or something..."
He shrugged. "But humans have been fighting each other since before we knew how to write down anything about the battles. In fact, left to our own devices, a lot of us will end up picking fights with each other, sometimes over some of the stupidest shit you can imagine." He chuckled, recalling some of the various fist-fights he'd seen and how they originated.
"But when you give a group of us some outside threat?" He shook his head slowly, and grinned darkly. "That's when you really see just how good we are at fighting. And I don't mean how rapidly we innovate technology, or how smoothly we develop tactics. I'm talking about just plain old, down-and-dirty, blood-and-guts fighting. I don't know if you saw the broadcast where I responded to the Demon envoy that wanted to try and start peacetalks with Earth?"
He didn't pause more than a breath or two for an answer, before continuing, "I wasn't kidding when I said that we scare the Demons. I think we probably scare everybody. The Demons talk big, and they like to throw a lot of numbers at problems...but they don't adapt well. And they're so used to everyone running scared that they don't know what to do when they smack a guy in the face and he just spits out the blood and smiles at them, crazy-like. Everyone else has been like that, too...they lose to the Demons, they get scared, they fall back."
His grin took on an edge of ferocity. "We lose, we get pissed off, and we go looking to even the score. Luckily for us, the craziest of the vengeful types lack the leadership qualities to rally folks around them, so calmer heads end up prevailing, or we'd have blown ourselves up a few dozen times before anyone got to the planet to let us know that there were other races out here. But even the calm, rational leaders among us still have that edge of crazy in them. Hack talks meaner than he walks, most of the time...but he's fought the Demons. He's lost a lot of people to them. And every so often, those losses add up to a heap of pain and anger that he's going to re-direct at whoever's causing the most pain around him at the moment. The Battle of the Black? If the Demons had left the colony ships alone, if the EVOLs hadn't sold out the medical transports, that battle might never have happened. Hack wanted to get rid of the Demon forces in that region, yes...but we went looking for the nest ships, because that's where all the captured colonists had been taken. The rest of the battle was buying time for us to take apart the Avians and get our people back...but, again, by the time we found them, Hack had a full mad on...pissed as hell and ready to burn anyone who got in his way to ash...and he had a crew full of people who felt the same way."
Roy nodded, and settled into a seat. "Delta Quadrant's been sorted...we know who's with us, and who's against us...and those who are against us aren't strong enough, anymore, to do much damage here. But people are getting hurt somewhere else...and some of them are our people. So Hack's going to go do to those hurting them what he's done here in the Delta Quadrant. And that's probably a good thing for Earth, because if we went back there right now to deal with Ge-Fi, there's enough pent-up anger in the human part of the Delta Fleet that I could see some really catastrophic collateral damage coming out of that fight." He got a thoughtful look on his face, and added, "Yep...better to let Olympus starve itself lean...Earth, too...and come back with a massive force that won't have to rely on desperate actions by angry crazy humans to win the war there. Show up with enough force, and a surrender from the Demons, and Ge-Fi is going to have to choose between sustaining his bloated ego, and dying in battle, or admitting that he's become worse than redundant, and withdrawing."
He snorted again. "Not that leaving Earth would help him that much. Between what we've found on him, acting against the ESN and Earth in general, and what the Angels have on him with regards to the treaties around the moons, he better hope that an awful lot of us die in battle...because if we make it back, there's gonna be hell to pay, for him."
This message was lightly edited by the player at 19:31, Sun 10 Jan 2016.