The Otherwar

They’d been found in a parallel universe of sorts. While working towards wormhole generation, scientists had accidentally punched a hole into a universe that was almost indistinguishable from ours.

The creatures they found traversing the stars there were unimaginable horrors. Smaller ships, but far more numerous, crewed by behemoth abominations.

The science ship had been seen, and one of the ships of the Other followed it through from their universe. Had it not been for the Navy standing by, no one knows what kind of hell they could’ve unleashed on us.

As it was, that one small ship took out nine vessels of our fleet before it was disabled and opened to vacuum. Crewed by only three of the giants, it boasted more armament than a standard destroyer.

The huge, misshapen bodies were secreted away by Military Intelligence for dissection and some insight into what we faced. The ship, itself, was crude in design with the exception of its weapon systems.

It could easily be outrun by anything in our fleet. The most telling, though, was the lack of any way to generate faster-than-light travel. It was decided that with a crew of only three, the ship was a fighter. Although a small ship, it was far larger than would be expected of a light fighter, likely due to the size of its occupants. As a fighter, it undoubtedly had a mothership to return to, and the search for it would expand as time went on.

The argument between the military and government came soon after. The next actions we would take depended on the answer to a few questions.

Did they have the capability to cross into our universe as we had accidentally crossed into theirs? If that ship was a simple fighter craft, what chance did we have against a fleet? Do we build up our fleet while hoping that they stay in their own universe and leave us alone — or do we attempt to bring the fight to them?

In the end, the military minds won out, and we declared war on the Others. Fleets from everywhere joined in, while production ramped up in every star system to build new fleets made up of whole new classes of ships.

The first sortie we made into their universe was a textbook success. Using the intelligence we’d taken from the fighter, we sent fast, nimble ships to outrun them and their weapons. Short FTL hops were a key maneuver that kept our losses to a minimum while we wore down and destroyed dozens of their ships.

The Other was a ragtag fleet of patchwork ships; crude but deadly. They all carried far more weapons than reasonable, but none seemed to have their ammo or other stores full, as most had large, empty compartments.

After that first victory, the next mission was meant to be for gathering intelligence. Still, four fleets were dispatched to guard the gate and keep any of the Other from crossing into our universe again.

None of the four fleets boasted any of the new class of ships designed to stand up to what we imagined the Other capable of. That on its own wouldn’t have been a problem, except that the gateway opened in the middle of a system swarmed with the Other.

No sooner had they passed into the “normal space” of the other universe than the firefight started. Whatever we’d imagined their motherships to be, what we encountered was so far beyond that as to make our imaginings laughable.

This was not the ragtag fleet we’d destroyed in our first mission. These monstrous creations were, for lack of a better term, eldritch horrors. In visible light, radio, and microwave, they disappeared, more detectable by the absence of light and their gravitational signature. The fighters that swarmed out of them by the hundreds were smaller, faster, more maneuverable, and better coordinated. On top of that, they were every bit as ephemeral as the big ships, detectable most by their slight gravity.

The biggest of the ships outmassed an entire fleet, and yet were so maneuverable as to keep withering fire aimed at our ships even through our short FTL hops. When the flagship of the first fleet — the pride of the Navy and command center for the mission — was ripped in half by a ship that was more like a giant gun with engines, the order to retreat was called.

Four fleets went into their universe, and two partial fleets came back. We gathered intelligence, but not of the sort we’d hoped for. Whatever we first encountered must’ve been far on their frontiers, manned by only a token force of scrap.

In addition to that, we learned that where the gate opened in their universe was more to chance than expected. The fleets had been expected to appear in a space between star clusters. Instead, the gate opened a few thousand light years distant of the selected point.

Attempts to open a gate to the other universe in other locations failed. Some quirk of the local fabric of spacetime in the original gate’s position left it best suited for that. It was not long before the new fleets came online and gathered at what became the most heavily guarded spot in the galaxy at least, if not the entire universe.

While the politicians were still busy trying to spin the defeat as anything but, and the military was still licking its wounds, the first incursion into our universe by the Other happened. From the gate, a single drone emerged and was vaporized by one of the new destroyers in fractions of a second.

That was all the impetus needed for the politicians to back another attack, and for the Admirals to set forth against the Other again. Nine fleets, composed of whole new classes of destroyers and battle cruisers and carriers, poured through the rip in the fabric of spacetime into the other universe.

This time, they emerged somewhere unpopulated. They found themselves in a void between stars and star clusters. There, in a relative nowhere, someone voiced the opinion that they were lucky they hadn’t appeared inside a star or a black hole.

While that crew member was still being dressed down by their Captain, gravity alarms went off throughout the fleets. The Other had arrived in moments from wormholes that appeared for only a fraction of a second. The Other had the wormhole technology our own scientists had been trying to achieve.

The massive ships of the Other had nine fleets surrounded in a sphere of death. Any ship that fired or moved was obliterated. When the Admirals finally stood down to accept their fate, a transmission was sent to all the remaining ships before they were forced back through the rift into our own universe.

The war effort ground to a halt while the message was deciphered. Not that production slowed any, as six more fleets were completed in that time.

The new argument between the politicians and military became what to do with the message. Share it with the populace? Bury it in the deepest vault? Call their bluff — assuming it is a bluff?

One of the creatures stood, hideous to the point it triggered some deep, primal part of the brain that makes one want to evacuate their bowels and flee. It spoke their eldritch language, all gurgles and gasps.

“We’ve been looking for intelligent life for a while, and it would be nice to have a friend. We see that you cannot be that friend to us — you’re not ready.

“When your home planet has orbited your home star 100 more times, you may come back and try again in peace. Until then, any intrusion into our space with more than an unarmed, goodwill delegation of twelve individuals, maximum, will be met with swift retribution, including the take-over of your worlds and the total disarmament of your military. This is your first and only warning.

“Your first incursions into our space, we were willing to forgive and forget. Hunting pirates is a time-honored tradition, after all.

“Your actions during our annual Naval exercise, however, are unforgivable at this point. Any further armed entrance to our space will be taken as an explicit declaration of war against the Terran Alliance. Vice-Admiral Grace Evans, TA Navy, signing off.”