Inherited War 1: Retribution by Eric McMeins Read Free Book Online Page A

light travel and set out to explore the galaxy.  They were peaceful people.  They had stopped warfare years before they left for the stars.  They lived life by a series of rules called The Calling.  Now you must remember that most of this is made up of stories told in the oral tradition.  After the purge of your people, the traitors set about destroying any recorded lore or history of the original or Pure Strain humans.  My people were the greatest of the human’s allies and have kept the stories alive for twenty thousand years.  So the humans began to spread out into the greater galaxy.  The Calling was the book of laws that governed their society. They all lived by its teachings and used it as a guide to evaluate other races should they find any. It took years before they found the first non human sentient.  About a thousand years to be exact.  They found us, the Nixa.  We were a people just coming into our own.  We had not yet conquered space but we had advanced scientific study, medicine and did not war on each other.  We were a race united for the common good.  They watched and studied us for years before they made first contact.  We were at a disadvantage from the beginning.  Our bodies were much more closely related to the creatures we evolved from.  It was more comfortable for us to move around on all fours and we had no opposable thumbs.  This held us back mechanically to a certain degree.  We worked closely with the humans for a few years and finally broke the species barrier between us.  Human and Nixa could successfully mate and produce healthy offspring.  The radical combination of our two DNA’s changed us in ways we could never repay the humans.  We became what you see now.”   She stood up and turned a slow circle.  “We became totally bipedal.”  She held out her hands.  ” Four fingers and a thumb on each hand.  And we slowly lost our thick fur to be more of a smooth skinned species.   We have maintained to a certain degree our facial and head structure, which does look vaguely like your Earth cats.  From then on we traveled the stars with the humans.  Always as equals and friends.  For eighteen thousand years we worked with the humans.  We defeated disease, slowed aged, discovered new people, and explored the galaxy.
    “Not everyone received the same treatment we did , though.  Some sentient peoples were so steeped in their patterns of war and abuse that the humans could not see unleashing them on the galaxy at large.  They always monitored them to see if they changed enough to warrant another chance.  Some eventually did, others didn’t and still others advanced far enough in science to succeed in wiping themselves out.  This was the hidden enemy in humanities own home.  No one knows who or what did it, but something got a few of the most powerful of the left behind species and armed them with advance weapons and ships.  Humanity hadn’t fought a war in over twenty thousand years.  They, we, were not prepared.  The two main forces of the opposition were the Esii and the Roche.  The Esii were the assassins in the shadows.  Able to move about almost completely undetected. They are foul beings who gorge directly on the energy of living beings.  Theirs is one of the few worlds that developed two different, but totally sentient beings.  The ones in charge are the Esii the others are just known as cattle.  The Esii were the commanders of the attack force and the assassins who drew the first blood by killing much of the humans’ leadership structure.  The Roche on the other hand, were the hammer the Esii used to destroy all human occupied worlds.  They breed faster than any other known species and they are deeply indoctrinated into fighting and wars.  They were the ones who did the most damage to humanity as a whole.  They sterilized more planets and killed more humans than anyone else.  The other thing going against humans was that their life