A Lesson Learned

Lesson 1: The only true failure is in a lesson unlearned.

The Asveyan Martial Lessons are the cornerstone upon which their entire interplanetary kingdom is built. There are two hundred and twenty four lessons, and it is claimed they contain all the wisdom an Asveyan need know to succeed in the art of war. A cheap copy of the thin book is given to every would-be officer at the start of their training; while some quickly replace theirs with a more extravagant copy, many of the highest ranking officers take pride in still using their original, careworn book. Still others disdain a copy at all, having committed all two hundred twenty four passages to memory.

The Lessons may be amended, but such an event has not happened in over a thousand years. All seven noble houses and the three Great Intelligences must convene in the Militant Chapel of Asveya’s capital city, and the debates can last decades. They are deciding the fate of their race’s future, after all.

It is the result of the Martial Lessons, and their intense familiarity with them, that has made the relatively small kingdom of Asveya a force to be reckoned with. Their soldiers are respected for their discipline, their commanders renowned for their tactical genius.

They are not, however, a merciful race.

Lesson 94: A blow half-delivered leaves evil to breed.

By the year 65,875 of the 4th Grand Galactic Calendar, the Asveyans had been at war against the Plone race for nearly a century. Though the Plone had a larger empire and could bring more resources to bear, their bloated bureaucracy was ill-suited for war, and they had lost more and more ground at the edge of Asveyan blades.

One more such conquest arrived on Artemo: a Plone-settled moon orbiting the great ringed gas planet Edremon. In a graceful lightning strike, the Asveyan cruiser Adherence fell upon the colony, opening fire and knocking out the moon’s defenses as soon as it dropped out of hyperspace. Artemo was hardly a fortified stronghold; at the edge of the empire, the best they could do against such overwhelming firepower was a distress call to the nearest Plone planet, over a week’s travel away.

Asveyan shuttles began to descend from the orbiting Adherence. Once ground troops had secured Artemo, they would begin making the moon’s facilities fit for their species. When good, proper Asveyan citizens could be shipped in, Artemo would be a productive colony once more, and a valuable foothold further into the Plone Empire.

But it was just after the first dropships had launched that the Adherence received a surprising hail; from Captain Frederick MacLaird, of the Terran mining ship Sevenfold.

Lesson 113: Devotion to trade is a weakness of the spirit.

Captain MacLaird had arrived in the system just two weeks earlier, to mine the rings of Edremon for valuable metals and gases. In that time the entirety of his contact with the Plones on Artemo had consisted of terse authorization codes and brief clearance requests. They knew him only as a gruff, humorless voice and a lonely blue blip on their sensors.

MacLaird hailed the Adherence requesting permission to land on Artemo, to take in the Plone refugees. Even with his storage bays half full, he said, there was room and supply enough aboard the Sevenfold to hold the entire colony.

The Asveyans denied the request, of course. They had their own plans for the colonists. When the settlement was under complete control, the Plones were to be shuttled up to the Adherence and placed into stasis. When the cruiser returned home, they would be distributed across Asveyan space as slave labor.

MacLaird cited the Titan Concordat and its subsection regarding the ethical treatment of noncombatants. The Asveyans countered that the Concordat’s rulings did not extend beyond humanity’s borders.

MacLaird offered the resources he had mined so far in exchange for the Plones. It was pointed out that the colonists would fetch a far higher price as slaves than his stores were worth.

MacLaird appealed to basic common decency. The Adherence responded with a warning shot across his stern.

Only then did the mining ship back off, reversing thrusters and retreating to the safety of the gas giant’s rings. The Asveyans, confident that the Terran was no longer a concern, returned to the more important matter of securing the moon.

Lesson 34: Leave no weapon unwielded, no resource unstripped.

The colonists had little in the way of weaponry, and whatever fighting spirit they might have had was extinguished by the sight of the massive battlecruiser hanging overhead. They were fringe settlers, as well, unfamiliar with the standard Asveyan protocols upon seizing a conquered world. It was not until the soldiers began to divide the families up that they grasped the extent of their situation.

There was resistance, then, but not enough. The Asveyans had enslaved over a dozen Plone planets by that point, and the procedure had become more and more efficient with practice. The children were torn from their parents and herded into the center of the town square. At any adult’s attempt to rebel or escape, the children would be punished with shock goads. Only after every other shuttle had been loaded and made ready would they be packed into the last one.

Eleven hours in. Eleven hours of shrieking and wailing, of desperate begging and outraged cries, of the thudding march of combat boots and the crackle of arcing goads. Eleven hours, and less than halfway done.

It was then that MacLaird returned.

Lesson 202: The tide’s slow rolls make fearsome waves.

A Class 3 Terran mining ship is equipped with a low-pulse reactionless drive, heavy titanium plating, a D-class excavation laser, a Bussard ramjet, and, of particular note, a wide-spectrum tractor beam cannon.

With a tractor beam, a miner can pull promising asteroids to the ship for ease of harvesting. The wide-spectrum model allows a variety of masses to be controlled simultaneously; theoretically, the only upper limit on how many objects can be controlled at once are the pilot’s skill and the beam’s power output.

The low-pulse drive is slow to get going, and could never match an actual warship for maneuverability. Its power comes from Newton of old- once the ship gets started, it’ll keep on going. Over a long enough span of time, the low-pulse reactionless drive will slowly accelerate to a speed that any ship of the line can respect.

Captain MacLaird had retreated to Edremon’s ring system, yes, but from there he had kept going. Gradually building speed, the Sevenfold skimmed the outer disc edge, bleeding hydrogen gas off the ring for fuel, in a slingshot orbit that would take it far off the Asveyan’s sensors, all the way around the gas giant and back to Artemo once more.

But not alone.

While the shipboard computer calculated his maneuver, MacLaird manned the tractor beam. He had mined fields for twenty-nine years and could wield the tool like a scalpel. A decently sized asteroid, a gentle nudge, then it was locked into his wake. Then another. And another. It slowed the ship down, sure, but he had a steady flow of fuel and a generous window.

And then he had friends.

Lesson 6: Blessed is he whose death brings victory.

By the time the Sevenfold left the cover of Edremon’s rings, it was moving at roughly one-fifth the speed of light, trawling seventeen asteroids of varying sizes at the same speed. The Adherence detected it almost immediately, but by then it was too late to coordinate an evasive maneuver.

It was too late to do anything at all.

Captain MacLaird’s ship struck the Asveyan ship broadside, very nearly cleaving the Adherence in two with its impact. Less than a millisecond later, the seventeen asteroids followed suit, whereupon it effectively ceased to exist in any sense of the word.

To the Asveyan troops on the ground, the disappearance of their proud cruiser in a sudden near-supernova was devastating on their morale. Their military command, with absolute confidence, had not felt it necessary to send more than a single cruiser to Artemo. With the Adherence now a ball of expanding plasma, they were completely stranded. Many simply stood in shock, struggling to grasp exactly what had happened.

In this moment of confusion, the Plone colonists seized the initiative. The soldiers outside the shuttles found themselves surrounded by furious settlers armed with a crude arsenal of farming tools. Those within the shuttles found that force of numbers count much higher in such confined space. The pressing mob quickly swarmed and overwhelmed them. When the Plone reinforcements arrived three weeks later, they found their citizens guarding the largest force of Asveyans ever captured in war.

No salvageable remnant of the Adherence, or the Sevenfold, or Captain MacLaird, was ever found.

Lesson 76: A sleeping giant is best left undisturbed.

Five years after the death of Frederick MacLaird, the Terran Alliance extended its military protection over the Plone Empire, citing a concern for the safety of human merchants and tradesmen in such war-torn territory.

Two years after that, the Kingdom of Asveya announced the end of their hundred year war with the Plone. Implicit in their peace treaty was the condition that all slaves of the Asveyan be returned to their respective families and homes.

And twenty-three years after that, the seven noble houses and three Great Intelligences quietly amended the Asveyan Martial Lessons to include a new lesson:

Lesson 225: Sometimes, when they back away, it’s just to get a good run up.