Uintrei and Beth

As the executive officer of a ship that launched nuclear and strategic weapons, it was probably a good thing for everyone involved that Uintrei never saw combat again. Eventually, her captain Bert retired, and she was promoted into his place. A few years later, she too retired at the rank of rear admiral, after the Federation military integrated with the Republic's and the rank systems were unified.

On the other hand, Beth accepted early retirement in the drawdown. She went back to school to study acting and graduated just in time to play herself in a movie about the Battle of Znos. The movie was critically well-received. Her performance, however, received mixed reviews. Critics praised her passion and energy, and Znosian reviewers gave her props for voicing herself in the Znosian language version of the film, but they questioned whether her portrayal was realistic. One online critic loudly complained that no real person would act like she did under continued stress.

Beth and Uintrei moved to a resort town in Gruccud. Federation law had no issues with inter-species marriage. Some Malgeir had been marrying their Granti and Schprissian neighbors for centuries. It was a simple administrative matter to add their new Terran friends to the list.

For a couple of years, they campaigned to make inter-species marriage legal in the Terran Republic as well. There wasn't that much actual political opposition to that, but with the war over and all emergency powers returned to their rightful place, the lawmaking apparatus of the Republic went back to moving at its regular glacial pace.

Their friends from their Staff College days would visit from time to time: Kaja, Durnio, Maurice, and Speinfoent.

Uintrei and Beth adopted four children: one Granti, one Malgeir, one Znosian, and one human. They were all loved equally, though when asked privately, the new parents would admit that the Znosian hatchling speed-running through puberty in four months was a major relief.

Eupprio

Eupprio became the richest person in the known galaxy. Eupprio Tech itself became a massive conglomeration of hundreds of horizontally integrated industries, many of which were highly successful in their own fields.

A few years later, at the urging of some Senators in the Republic, the Federation underwent serious economic reforms to overhaul antitrust regulation and combat corruption. This lobbying was, of course, completely altruistic and had nothing to do with the growing number of Republic corporations that ran into… "regulatory difficulties" as they expanded into massive new Federation markets.

Eupprio Tech was legally broken up as part of a settlement agreement, but each of the pieces still did very well.

Eventually, it seemed impolite for Eupprio to continue to hold on to that much money while not doing anything with them, so she invested almost all of her accumulated credits into the reconstruction efforts of the Malgeir and Granti worlds that had been occupied by the Znosians. Unsurprisingly, when those colonies recovered from the devastation of the war, the ensuing economic boom made her investments more returns than she put into them. Far more.

Even with a responsible amount of donations to various worthy causes, her bank accounts kept filling up faster than she could empty them. It truly was a hard life for Eupprio.

She also considered running for public office, but Fleguipu — who remained her loyal friend and advisor — managed to talk her (and the galaxy) off the ledge.

Torsad

When High Councilor Guinspiu passed to old age, she was buried next to her mate. That was never in question. And neither was who her successor should be.

Grantor City Mayor Torsad was near-unanimously nominated and voted to the position of High Councilor. She served four three-year terms. During her terms, she rebuilt the Granti military before it was fully absorbed into the Coalition Navy. She oversaw twelve straight years of unprecedented economic growth, a result of her listening to good advisors… but really mostly because the Granti had been so utterly devastated by the war that any recovery looked like miraculous growth.

She was present at the signing of the Znosian instruments of unconditional surrender.

Publicly, as the head of the Granti people, she endorsed a plan that would result in the Znosians being forcibly divided into six competing states, and that certain social policies be enacted which simulation computers predicted would fuel a multi-century blood feud between each of the resulting rump states with no end in sight. Her people wanted blood; the more, the better.

In the backrooms where real diplomacy was done, she accepted total demilitarization as a compromise.

And by the end of her terms, she'd had enough of politics and administration. She stated in a clear and succinct speech, "If drafted again, I will not run; if nominated again, I will not accept; if elected again, I will resign."

They mostly left her alone after that. Contrary to her morbid predictions that she would never survive the war, Torsad outlived most of her age peers to the age of 150. Rarely, every few years, she would make an off-paw comment about current events or pop culture to journalists, and all of the New Granti Alliance would treat it like gospel. For the last fifty or so years of her life, the running joke in Granti political society was that this was going to be the year she would pass, and when it finally did happen, almost the entire civilization showed up to bid her farewell.

Her former lieutenant, Insunt, on the other paw, became a teacher. A high school chemistry teacher. All that he learned during the war, and all that time he spent working under Torsad (who was herself a former chemistry teacher) — he never thought it would come in so handy. Insunt brought his love of chemistry to high school students.

Of course, there were some inevitable accidents here and there, and he was often reprimanded for encouraging some of his students' more reckless impulses, but nobody got seriously injured.

Insunt himself lived to be quite old. Old enough to see five generations of his adopted Znosian hatchlings, gifted every single one of them, become productive members of Granti society despite the prejudices created by war.

Felix

"Ace? Did you hear me, Ace?"

I hate this job.

Felix smacked his face with his own open palm repeatedly. He had inherited the position as head of the SRN when the former Ace of Clubs died four years ago.

Heart attack.

Horrible tragedy.

His people whispered that the Reps might have been involved. Some kind of conspiracy. The Terran Reconnaissance Office back at their old, dirty tricks again, probably. The inconclusive autopsy results fueled the suspicions.

But Felix knew the truth.

He was the one who slipped the nerve agent into her drink.

He just did it because the Ace was going insane, giving paranoid orders that didn't make sense and dictating random, delusional projects on a whim while killing her own people without reason. Felix didn't seek power. He was just a radio man. A maintenance tech. A lieutenant. He didn't want the responsibility of leading a former terrorist group that was now the actual government of Bunnyland, or Spofke — as the locals called it.

The regular bureaucratic nightmare was boring enough. This— this was way worse.

Now, he'd never regretted killing the former Ace more. She'd have known exactly what to do in this situation; it would have been something utterly insane, sure, but at least she'd have something.

"How many people did the assholes get this time?" he asked his lieutenant.

"Sixteen fatalities, Ace," she reported. "Sixteen of ours. Twelve kids, four of the staff. The attackers never planned on getting out. They just detonated the homemade explosives as soon as we surrounded the building."

"How many attackers?"

"Four."

"All four of them are Buns?"

"All Buns," she confirmed.

"Any group claim it yet?"

"Yeah, the Free Bunnyland Cult took full responsibility this morning."

They called themselves the Free Spofke Gang, but it was close enough.

"They sent it on the radio with their propaganda. We couldn't figure out how to jam them for two hours," she continued. "But we found the source, one of their old industrial cities. They abandoned the radio station before our terminators got there. We're still trying to find the big shots, but… we think they've gone underground."

Stolen story; please report.

"Didn't we agree with Farce that civilians can't be the target of attack?" Felix sighed hard. "A children's daycare center? How could they?! This is so completely out of line!"

"Yes, that was clearly prohibited in the status normalization agreement with Governor Farsot last year. She sent her condolences this morning, by the way. But the Free Bunnyland Cult doesn't care about those rules! They're— they're like a totally separate group. Znosian rogues and outliers."

"Damn terrorists! I knew we should have deported all those damn Buns… years ago!" Felix said in exasperation. Of course, he knew that would have cost them far more in lives and resources, but that didn't stop him from fantasizing about an alternate universe where everything just went according to plan and nothing else.

"Should we begin preparations for another cult crackdown campaign?" she asked earnestly. "We can crank up our production rate to sixteen thousand clankers next month. Once we stockpile enough, we can hit all four continents simultaneously. They won't even see us coming."

He considered the possibility for another minute, then shook his head. "No, we'll piss too many of the other Buns off, and they'll just— that will just turn more of them against us. We can't risk another Bunnyland mass uprising. Last time was expensive enough, and if we get another… our tourism industries will never recover! The Schprissian developmental loans— if this keeps up, we won't be able to afford even just the interest payments! Get Governor Farce, and ask her what they want to— to fix this. More inclusivity training for our frontline officers, perhaps? Or do they want us to increase our Bun employment quotas? At this point, if they really want our robots out of their northern coastal plains, I'm tempted to take the deal if she can provide ironclad security guarantees."

"What about the—"

"We're keeping the Red Tar Sands though. That part's not negotiable."

"Yes, sir. I'll talk to Farce this evening. What about the stock markets—"

"Monitor trading on the day side when it opens. If we can leak rumors of a potential agreement, maybe it'll calm things down enough before Malgeirgam wakes up. And if the futures market dips too much, increase our positions there. If we can't stop the bleeding, at least we can shore up our budgets."

"Understood. And there was just one more thing, Ace…"

"What is it?"

"The leased Rep Navy base around Bunnyland-11, their nosy base commander— they called this morning to express condolences and to see if we needed… security assistance with the matter. They say— they added they have extensive experience in counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations. I think— I think they're talking about us back when we—"

Felix understood the subtext instantly without her unnecessary elaboration. And he knew the base commander over there; they probably thought this was all just a major cosmic joke. He'd be surprised if they managed to record the entire message in one take without pausing to giggle.

"Tell them to fuck off and mind their own damn business. This isn't funny at all!"

Speinfoent

After dating for another two years, Speinfoent and Kaja got married.

Speinfoent transferred to the Coalition Navy when the Malgeir and Terran militaries unified years later, and he retired shortly after at the rank of Admiral. A building at Charon's Staff College was named after him. There, several tactical maneuvers taught by the Coalition Navy were credited to him, and "The Sphinx Maneuver" referred to at least seven different ways to set an orbital ambush.

Speinfoent started a podcast to talk to lost young adult Znosians about their purpose in life now that their Prophecy had been widely discredited as an obvious lie. It went way better than he expected. As it turned out, six hundred star systems were a pretty big audience. He toured the galaxy, giving speeches and interviews to adoring fans wherever he went. A former State Security holdout group attempted to assassinate him on tour, but the assassin was torn apart by a fluffle of his rabid fans before they could get the shot off.

For about a decade, the most popular name for new hatchlings in the Free Znosian State was Sphinks.

Amelia

Amelia Waters was the last Fleet Admiral of the Republic Navy.

She went on to serve another five years in the new Coalition Navy before the Senate forced her to retire.

Amelia went back to Ganymede, living comfortably on the pension she'd earned for the rest of her days with her husband. She helped rebuild the colony she was from, whose surface facilities had mostly been destroyed in the Battle of Sol. The Jovian and Saturnian colonies saw a major burst of emigration as their colonists left Sol to more habitable alien worlds. But enough remained that her colony survived.

For decades after, historians and tourists traveled to a specific location outside the mining colony near Oettro. Several light years out. It was said that if your ship blinked to the exact right spot, and you listened carefully to the light speed radio with a certain, declassified old Republic Navy decryption key, you could hear Amelia's voice the moment she kicked off a chain of events that saved four species:

"All ships, weapons free. Waste the bastards!"

Despite several attempts by various organizations to draft her into running for Senate, she mostly stayed away from politics. It would be unfair. She did, however, occasionally appear on news segments as a guest expert. She tried her best to correct misinformation and educate the watchers on the nuances of naval grand strategy, and she was even occasionally successful.

When hostilities flared up between the Bunnyland government and a Znosian terrorist group a couple of decades later, she was called upon to mediate the conflict and broker a ceasefire. Some diplomacy commentators claimed that the rumors of Amelia showing up to the peace talks with a comically large bag of popcorn indicated a lack of professionalism on her part; others credited her unconventional approach for helping forge a lasting peace agreement between the two sides.

One of Amelia's last public appearances was at a war gaming event sponsored by the Naval Staff College. In an exhibition game, she defeated the reigning galactic champion soundly, to everyone's surprise. After the competition, the salty loser found discrepancies and demanded a review. The event organizers discovered Amelia had cheated, using her administrative access to the simulation computers (which they'd forgotten to revoke when she retired) and her prior rapport with the simulation digital intelligence to spy on her opponent's secret positions during the game.

When called upon to apologize, she refused, demanding her critics cite the specific portions of the Republic Navy Code of Justice that prohibited cyber reconnaissance. Many did not find her excuse acceptable, but this did not tar Amelia's overall legacy or affect her popularity much. She was not invited back the next year though.

Grionc

Grionc was the last High Fleet Commander of the Federation Navy.

She went on to serve another fifteen years in the new Coalition Navy before the High Council tried to force her to retire. She paid off the right High Councilors, and she continued to serve for another ten years until she no longer could.

When the elderly Fleet Commander Loenda passed away, she left behind a will that gave everything she had to Grionc, who she called "my commander, and the cub I never had".

And it was a substantial inheritance. Loenda had been in the Federation Navy for decades, before any of the accountability and corruption reforms. She'd gathered quite an enormous pile of loot. Some questions of propriety were asked, but nobody resented Grionc for accepting it. After all, she had saved the Federation. Possibly the Republic too, depending on which people you asked.

Grionc ended up donating most of it to various charities, but one purchase she did splurge on was a cozy fishing boat. She became an avid fisher, even participating in tournaments a few times.

She wasn't very good at it. She discovered she was a much better fisher of enemy fleet commanders than she was of fish.

Ditvish

Ditvish gingerly traced the spine of the freshly printed book in his paws and sniffed at it twice.

"It smells nice," he commented.

"Yeah? Well, here's hoping people find it reads nice too," his agent said. "Though… no offense, I think most people would be buying it for the author, not the contents."

"But I'm retired! I'm no longer an eleven whiskers of the Free Znosian Navy! And this isn't a history book. It's a novel. A fictional novel!"

His human agent perked up. "Have you considered writing a history book? Something about the war, perhaps? I'm sure people will buy that in droves too."

"I don't know enough about our history to write about it!"

She shrugged. "Ah well, this one will be in the romance section of the bookstore, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of your people bought it thinking it's real."

"I hadn't considered that," Ditvish confessed. "Most of them might not know what fiction is, not to mention the paranormal romance subgenre."

"Eh. They'll learn. I'm fine with it either way, as long as you get paid."

He harrumphed. "I guess such is the nature of things given what I've done. Maybe one day, I'll be known for being the guy who writes the best and steamiest romance stories, and not the guy whose fleets ended the Dominion."

"Yeah, okay, good luck with that. Just… look over it. Make sure there are no errors or anything you'd like to change—"

"Hang on, let me go get another drink first."

He stood up, walked to the coffee shop counter, and stood in line. Znosians still weren't that common here on Earth, but there were enough of them for people to not be too weird about it when they saw one — except for a few who still harbored hate from the war, but he tried not to worry about them. The barista flashed him a practiced smile over the counter-top. "What can I get for you today, hon?"

"Hot chocolate. Extra large. Add carrot juice."

Not a regular order, but he knew the dispensing machines here were capable of that.

"Nice and healthy, I dig it." She beamed at him as she took down the order. "And what's your name?"

"Ditvish."

"That'll be fifteen credits, sir. Thank you."

He swiped his credit chip, and the machine beeped its confirmation of his identity. Two minutes later, he grabbed the hot cup on the counter and headed back to the table.

As he sat down, his agent looked at the furious frown on his face with some concern. Like most humans who he worked with, she'd learned to detect the subtleties of Znosian body language, and it wasn't that different to begin with…

"Is something wrong, Ditvish?" she asked with a low voice. "Did we make a mistake with your book? We can still make some last-minute adjustments before it goes into print next week—"

"Can you believe it?! This— this— They made an error on my name! Again!" he harrumphed exasperatingly as he pointed a shivering claw at the egregious misspelling scratched on his hot chocolate cup. "Davish? Davish? Who is Davish? Not me! Oh, why can't they allow me to enter it electronically… or simply get it right?! It is a very simple name!"

"Oh, come on Ditvish, I'm sure it's a simple error—"

"We are never coming back here again!"

Sol

"Pax Galactica", Coalition Armed Forces Recruiting Commercial, June 2135

Why is the Republic buying new missile destroyers?

Alligator squadrons, two of them. And a whole new generation of planetary assault carriers.

What is the point of endless drills? Day and night. In rain and snow. Through stormy seas and harsh vacuum.

Why must we send the best of us into the dark void?

To faraway planets with names we can't pronounce, on secret missions we can't talk about.

What do we, as a people, wish to achieve with all this?

What is our goal?

What do we want to happen?

The answer is…

(The Blue Marble. Silence.)

Nothing.

Absolutely… nothing.

End Grass Eaters

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.