The Sol Invasion (Lagrange Trilogy)

Prologue

     Earth had one rule when life appeared on it: Compete or die. Conflict and Competition were bred into even the smallest life form, and they evolved with the organisms that they nurtured. Hunters, self-destructive defenses, arguments, alliances, cannibals, raiding, wars, politics...

     Earth might have had one rule, but Humanity had one as well: Expand or die. Hand-in-hand, we fought and we died and we grew and we died. So much living, so much dying, and yet we still could not change. Kill each other and grow as a species, stop killing each other and grow as an organism.

     It worked, at least partially. We developed newer and faster ways to kill one another, and soon we expanded to doing it in orbit. Then we moved to fighting over the tiny ball of rock I call home. Luna. It wasn't long before we took it even further. Nine wars, two terraformation projects, and six hundred years after my little moon unified and conquered the irradiated ball of water it orbited, we learned that we weren't exclusive to eliminating competition.

     They only ever delivered one message before they started to exterminate us. Then their ships started to destroy us. The first campaign lost twelve colonies, and after we drove them off the first time they came back in a systematic order. One orbit at a time, first the moons, then the colonies, then the planet.

     Maybe what they said was right. Maybe we had wasted our chance to explore the stars, maybe we weren't worthy to join the rest of the universe. The Sol Alliance didn't believe it. They came together from the five major powers. The Independent Core, The Terra-Luna Federation, The Mars Union, The Exo-Zion, & The Jupiter Assembly. They pushed the enemy back, and then followed them back to Alpha Centauri.

     When the war began, Sol was full of various warring factions, bloated and squabbling. By the time it was over, there were two stars under the command of a unified human race, and one flag was waving over all the others, uniting them, rather than conquering them. We followed the rules. We died. We moved on. And today... we look back on those we lost.

     Twelve years later, on the eve of our loss, our victory, and the turning point of the war. There is no doubt that these dates were planned by our enemy, but that does not mean we will fail to mourn them. Rather, we mourn their loss all the deeper. They were not the casualties of war, but the casualties of genocide.

     And so on this day, we stand on the first planet to be colonized with neither a terraforming engine nor artificial tunnels, but instead with the blood of our brothers and sisters. We stand here on the spoils of our own hubris being brought down upon our own heads, and the might of our passing beyond that injury.

     -Speech given at the opening ceremony to the Trinary Monument on Wreath, by Fleet Admiral Vasiliev.