Space crusaders

Chapter 1: Texting with the Princess

Minister Taureas passed many defenders as he walked towards the command center. The enemy's powerful blows kept shaking the ceiling and causing the lighting to vibrate, but their bunker still stood.

At least for now.

But no matter how much of a good face Taureas was putting on to keep the morale of his people, the minister knew that their days were numbered and sooner or later they were all doomed. Taureas saw in the tired faces of his men that many of them understood this too. However, no one wanted to say it directly, not when their loved ones, their partners, or their children were with them in the hive bunker.

The vast majority of the bunker's inhabitants were civilians.

Hell, even Taureas was technically just a civilian.

Just a few months ago, Taureas was still simply the Minister of Education in the government of the Fey Republic.

The Fey Republic wasn't some major player on the galactic stage; it wasn't even a regional power. But their statehood was not entirely unimportant and was part of a larger galactic organization, The Mankind's Domain.

The Mankind's Domain was currently only a loose formation, bringing together planetary systems still inhabited today by species descended from the mythical race of Men.

The ancient Men spread their influence over entire galaxies. Their now-forgotten technology was godlike. Men terraformed countless worlds, and using the art of gene-craft, they engineered new races of mankind.

Nowadays, numerous civilizations of Beastmen, as well as more unified species like the Squatmen or the Feymen living in the Fey Republic, have claimed descent from Men.

The Fey Republic occupied only one planetary system, the central star of which was Ilios.

The system had three planets that supported life, where most of the Feymen lived before the war. Of these three planets, Aphrodite was closest to Ilios, so its climate was the warmest. This tropical globe had the largest population before the war. It was also Taureas's home planet.

A little further from the star was Gaia, still warm but with a more balanced climate, and the last numerously inhabited planet was Ares, where it was always cold. There were, of course, thousands of settlements in the system on more extreme planets, orbital stations, or moons, but only on these three globes could you breathe real air and watch birds fly in the sky.

Of course, before the war.

The galaxy had always been a dark forest full of lurking dangers, and Taureas was aware that the Feymen had simply been very lucky so far. If their civilization had been more expansionist, they would probably have encountered real horrors much earlier.

The Feymen, of course, knew the space wars before and the Fey Republic had to always maintain a reasonable starfleet and armed forces to repel attacks by Beastmen pirates and slavers. Even their civilized galactic neighbors, like the Squatmen, could be incredibly greedy and stubborn about their rights to exploit certain cosmic resources, which sometimes led to armed escalation.

Fortunately, not all interactions with the aliens were bloody, and for most of their shared history, the Squatmen were more often their trading partners than their enemies. Many varieties of Beastmen were quite peaceful and had lived in peace with the Feymen for centuries. Even representatives of the truly aggressive Beastmen varieties were sometimes genuine merchants, so-called Rogue Traders, who, instead of pirating, engaged in trade.

It was from them that the Feymen first heard about non-man life forms, about monsters that lived in the further reaches of the galaxy or in the darkness between the stars.