3 years after the Armistice

POV: Sjulzulp, Free Znosian Marines (Rank: Six Whiskers)

Sjulzulp got lucky.

Five centimeters to the left, and the 4.8mm Dominion standard round would have taken off quite a bit more than his right ear.

Five centimeters to the right, and he might not have been pulled off that defense line for R&R with his unit. Their replacement platoon ate a tactical nuclear strike when the Loyalists ended up abandoning the entire front. As the war continued, every side resorted to uglier and uglier forms of war.

Well, it was mostly two sides now.

In their infinite predator wisdom (a phrase that was being used in the Free Znosian Marines with less and less irony as time went on), the predator coalition finally decided to resume their fighting against the Dominion. It was an odd war. They were still content to let the Free Znosians do much of the fighting, but a few of their stealth ships penetrated the outer Dominion perimeter and launched a few orbital strikes against the targets of their choice. Then, they returned home again.

With six hundred planets at war and millions dying every week, this act seemed inconsequential, almost a signal of their inadequacy or unwillingness to fight. But in hindsight, the strikes were surgical enough.

This time, the Republic Navy targeted not ships nor production facilities. This time, they were going after people. In the Dominion, lost leaders would have been replaced by a simple exercise of going down the succession charts and finding the next one still breathing. But they weren't targeting the Dominion. No, their strikes weren't against the Loyalists, mostly.

They took out the leadership of the other outlier factions. There were many of them. The Unaligned Znosians — an alliance of supposedly self-declared neutral worlds and regions that were having secret back channel discussions with the authorities on Znos-4 — were hit the hardest, but they weren't the only ones. The supposed victims cried foul about predator aggression and betrayal of interests, but the damage was done. These were the outlier groups who had neither the strict hierarchy of the Dominion nor the ideology of the Free Znosian Navy. Their surviving subordinates — some of whom were rumored to be predator plants, others who actually were — fought each other over the scraps. As they splintered, their influence faded.

The Loyalists and the Free Znosian Navy snatched up the pieces they could, using everything at their disposal from propaganda to threats to convince the rest to join. The Loyalists had the Prophecy on their side, somewhat. And the Free Znosian Navy had something similar. A civic religion, some called it. It was the belief that inside every Znosian, no matter where they were or how they were bred, there was a Free Znosian waiting to break out. An unshakeable faith in the ideology of freedom.

But it didn't require that much faith. After all, the predators seemed to make it work. Every year, as more Dominion worlds poured into the raging wildfire, to most thinking Znosians, what had looked like a complete joke fit only for abominations and primitives just a few years ago was suddenly the hypothesized end state of all political development. Some of the Free Znosian worlds even started having what they called snout-counting contests. The elections didn't all go smoothly, and some resulted in acrimonious accusations of cheating or scandals, but oddly enough, few new splinters or actual conflicts arose in those areas.

By the third year of the Great Schism, the situation had stabilized to the two major Znosian powers vying for control.

Sjulzulp learned all this while recuperating in a field hospital and then a real hospital far from the frontline. That was also where he learned who saved his life on Tatolm-4. He'd been carried to safety by a predator. It was one of those odd predators who'd volunteered to fight in the Free Znosian Marines.

A human, no less.

There were more of those now. Some were adventurers who wore their expensive gray market gear like decoration, mostly bought in Bunnyland with receipts masquerading as shady establishments on Titan for tax purposes. Others were true believers. Some were both.

The other predator species also sent their volunteer legions into the Free Znosian worlds. Sjulzulp met, for the first time, one of those Schprissians who showed no more fear in battle than troopers of any other species. It truly was a force of outliers.

They were all crazy, all of them.

Then again, Sjulzulp reflected, so was he.

There were also some rumors a few humans were now helping the Loyalists. It was also rumored that those people didn't live long, but those rumors disagreed on whether they were targeted by zealous State Security operatives themselves, by collaborators of the Free Znosian Navy, or — according to some conspiracy theories — by Great Predator spies.

Sjulzulp didn't get to meet the human medic who carried six of his platoon to safety. He never got her name, but predator volunteers getting killed was a fairly big deal and he didn't hear about losing any of them in the sector on the radio; he assumed she survived the battle too.

He got some other bad news though. A few weeks into his hospital stay, he was told he'd been selected. He, and a few from his unit, were pulled off the front. For remedial training, they said. The Free Znosian Navy had a facility far away.

"Go! Go! Go!"

It was way too loud to hear anything, but that was what he thought the mouth shapes were saying. The green light in the cabin confirmed his guess.

Sjulzulp grabbed the rope hanging out the side of the hovering rotary wing carefully with his thick gloves, and with only a brief moment's hesitation, hopped off the side into the empty air below them.

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Hssssssssssssssssssssst.

He could almost feel his gloves sizzle with the friction as he approached the ground rapidly. There was something exhilarating about the activity, jumping out of a perfectly good helicopter, hanging on to a literal lifeline as he fell.

Thud.

To his relief, he landed right this time, without twisting or injuring his feet paws. That was something that happened surprisingly often.

Not that surprising, though, if you think about it.

Sjulzulp tried not to think about it too much and checked his equipment, making sure it'd all come down with him. If it didn't — if he forgot, again — he'd need to radio up for them to drop them down to him—

Hssssssssssss—

As he looked up, he saw a growing shadow loom over him. The next trooper on the fast-rope. He scrambled to get out of the way, his eyes wide in—

Crunch.

The screen on his virtual reality headset went black.

"Again!"

They ran several other scenarios. House-clearing was his favorite, by certain definitions of favorite. There were a billion ways the simulation machines could layout the inside of a house, most of them with very unpleasant implications for him and his unit of virtual operators.

This time, his unit had barely walked five steps into a house before a snarling Loyalist hatchling jumped out of a utility shelf at them. The hatchling wasn't the problem; he weighed barely thirty kilograms and one stomp from his powered armor took permanent care of the problem. But the twenty kilogram claymore mine strapped to the hatchling's chest was a scenario-ending issue.

"Too slow. Too slow!"

Sjulzulp whined as he stripped off his headset, "It's— that's not even fair! How are we supposed to anticipate—"

"If war was fair, it wouldn't be any fun. Go faster next time, Grass Eater. You hop slower than a human!"

"That's not— We— They're like half a meter taller than us!"

"I guess that explains the low bar you set for yourselves. Run it again."

"Again?!" Sjulzulp groaned. "But my unit's exhausted! I can barely lift my left paw!"

His instructor smiled at him with her not-so-gentle smile. "Good. Now, that's what I call a realistic simulation."

"When will we ever need to run multiple full missions back-to-back?!" he asked, wiping away sweat around the base of his ears.

His instructor looked up as she thought. "Hm… Well, there was this one time we had to defend an objective landing zone with just a battalion, for a whole week, against a dozen divisions of Dominion Marines…"

"With a single battalion? I don't believe you," Sjulzulp scoffed.

"It's true! Here, Slurp, I've got the suit videos."

"Anyone can fake those—"

A new voice interjected from the training announcer system. "Enough war stories for the trainees, Spommu. We've only got so much time before we have to cycle this batch back to the front."

"Well, you heard him, my little Grass Eaters. Run it again. And this time, don't bunch up so much… Remember, your Prophecy only helps those who help themselves."

Sjulzulp rolled his eyes. "We don't all believe in the Prophecy anymore, silly predator. That's why it's a false Prophecy."

"Your false Prophecy only helps those who help themselves, whatever. And Slurp, since you have enough energy to argue with me, surely you have enough energy for my favorite breaching scenario."

He groaned as he put his headset back on.

"Hey, ears up, Slurp," Instructor Spommu continued. "The virtual Grass Eaters aren't going to kill themselves, well— some of them might— you know what I mean."

The training facility on Malgeiru was new. It was, according to Sjulzulp's instructors, almost a one-for-one copy of the original one they were trained at in Sol.

There were public protests outside the base every other weekend. Some of the residents of the Malgeir planet were unhappy about their presence. After all, Sjulzulp's people had killed a lot of Malgeir during the war and the following extermination campaigns. It was an animosity that didn't go away overnight, even if his people weren't personally responsible and they were now claiming to fight for the same cause the Malgeir identified with. Still, attitudes were changing. Just not all at once.

There was one major difference with Charon: the food court back in Serenity Base did not have six ice cream booths.

SIx. Not one less.

In fact, when the well-connected official that controlled the food court schedule had the bright idea of accepting bribes to allow in one of the local restaurants in place of a beloved ice cream vendor for just a weekend, the entire base rallied against him. Just a few hours later, evidence of his other corrupt dealings mysteriously appeared on the base's public messaging system, and he was quickly promoted out of his position by the base commanders in fear of inciting a riot.

No one ever tried taking those away again.

So when one of the first batches of Free Znosian trainees — Sjulzulp and his platoon — "graduated", it was only natural that they celebrated it with a full three-scoop cone of strawberry ice cream.

Sjulzulp licked his dessert gingerly, pretending not to recognize as his instructors struggled to hide their mix of pride and sadness. Pride that they were able to raise their standards up to the predators' satisfaction. Sadness that they now must return to the war.

"I'm going to miss this," Sjulzulp declared as he took a large bite out of the cone with a crunch.

Spommu shook her ears sadly. "No, I imagine there's not a lot of good ice cream in— where are you guys being deployed anyway?"

Sjulzulp shrugged. "We go where we're needed."

That was mostly the case. A few planets were fully liberated, under the total control of the Free Znosian Navy. Some were still fully in control by the Loyalists in the Dominion. But the majority of Znosian planets were mixed. The character of the fighting varied as much as their numbers. In some, there were continental powers that aligned themselves with either faction. In others, warlords with flexible allegiances controlled fragmented territory. Insurgencies raged on both sides.

Sometimes, the fight was in cities. Divisions of troops were poured into bombed out urban areas, clashing from street to street, house to house, and block to block. Neither side gave a meter, and it showed in the increasing number of Znosian cities whose skylines were now a shortened husk of their former selves. Unique to the Znosian species were their impressive underground cities. Those, too, became fierce battlegrounds. Burrow collapses were common, and more than once, the losing side would choose to flood them before they retreated, leaving nothing for the enemy.

On other fronts, opposing forces were deployed in layers and layers of trench lines separated by kilometers of barren no-one's land, now so thoroughly inundated with unexploded ordnance that no one would be able to live there for decades after.

"And where is that?" Spommu asked.

"It could be anywhere."

She winked. "Somewhere with a nice beach, maybe."

"Yeah." He snorted. "I wish. The Loyalists and us, we'll fight anywhere, except where it's nice, apparently. Most likely they'll just put us back on Tatolm-4."

"Or… maybe somewhere more important?" Spommu suggested. She thought for a while. "Maybe they're putting a special team of special operators."

"For what?"

"For invading Znos, of course!"

Sjulzulp snorted again. "Yeah. Right."

"Hey, you know what your people say?"

"Next year in Znos?"

"Exactly. To next year in Znos. Maybe this time next year, you'd all be on a nice beach in Znos!"

Sjulzulp shook his head. "There are no nice beaches in Znos. Some State Security initiative to clear the wildlife a few thousand years back. Destroyed them completely, and it was deemed too resource inefficient to restore them."

"None at all?" Spommu arched an eyebrow incredulously.

"None."

Spommu grinned as she wiped ice cream from her own snout. "Well, like you said, anywhere except where it's nice, right?"

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