Ezra's First

Part 1

Five Hundred miles above the surface of Mars, Ezra sat at the back of the transit carrier and sulked.

He was torn between disbelief and outright rage at his posting.

He had been in the top three in every single one of his classes at the academy and had a personal recommendation from the Admiral.

With that track record he had been confident that he going to be posted to a ship with purpose. A posting that reflected his ability and his status as an emerging leader. Something like First Fleet, the Raiding Nine, or even Home Guard.

Instead, he had been given a posting that was going to take him away from the war effort, and more importantly career progression.

He had been given scout duty; a punishment usually reserved for ageing mustangs, washouts, troublemakers, and uninspired non-coms.

The look his classmates had given him when he told them, reinforced his sadness. Kavitha had tried to jokingly suggest he was being sent over there to 'clean it all up' - a suggestion he wished he could believe, but the truth is that once his transit carrier docks with Mars Orbital Station Eleven, he will not be taking command of the entire station and the duties within. He will, instead, be getting in a light scout craft with a crew of exactly one other person and will fly towards the Trappist quadrant for an five-month round trip of surveying uncharted space.

He checked the electronic signage above the door and noted that the carrier would be making a few more stops before getting to his station and so he resigned himself to wallowing in his misery some more while staring out the window.

The vista was littered with hundreds of ships under various forms of construction, thousands of crafts could be seen flying between them like an ant colony in space.

The people of earth had been caught by surprise the first time the Preshk raided. The confirmation that we are not alone brought to the blue planet by three Preshk warships. Earth, who had no ships with any combat ability, narrowly defeated the intruders using every single space capable ship, primarily mining vessels, due to their thick hulls.

The lack of combat tested weaponry meant that the fighting wasn't elegant, after some failed attempts to launch rocks and various projectiles at the intruders, a cohort of the ships captains spoke in secret and decided the only way to defeat their new foe was to overload their generators and perform suicide runs. It took a hundred and seven vessels to take out the three warships.

Victory cost over 500 lives and nearly 90% of earths space capable ships. The heroes were immortalised around the world with tributes and statues, their families compensated generously and as a side product, the mining and transport unions never again had a request turned down.

Learning its lesson, Earth mobilised, and quickly.

The second raid arrived nine years later and didn't make it past Jupiter, the gas giants size made it a predictable path for the ships to use to accelerate inward. The first ever Earth Defence Fleet sat there waiting amongst a battery of weapons platforms and the ambush successfully eliminated the aggressors without much return damage.

The Preshk attacked eight more times over the following thirty years, and one occasion got so close to earth that several countries sustained damage and some cities wiped off the map.

At no point have the Preshk communicated, let alone established cause for their aggression.

The human race aggressively sought to expand outside of the solar system as to create a buffer and to colonise other planets, spreading the human race out, no longer at risk of being eliminated in one go.

The EDF was quickly joined by the Mars Defence Fleet, the Venusian Navy and the Ceres Defence Command.

However, twenty years ago, the Preshk began attacking more frequently and in larger numbers and the system underwent 'the unification' and became the Orion Collective united under a central government and more importantly a central navy.

As the navy grew and the reverse engineering of how the Preshk moved between systems was achieved, the Collective began to explore the surrounding star systems and the front line grew.

Outposts on Alpha Centauri, Lacaille 9352, Groombrudge 34, and Wolf 1061 were established and the Collective continued to explore the surrounding stars in search of new worlds and the potential source of their aggressors.

The navy's scout division plays a core part in mapping of these new worlds and on the rare occasions where they locate Preshk ships, they report back. Occasionally the Raiding Nine has been dispatched as a pre-emptive attack.