Out Of The Ashes

My name is Derac Corman.  I’m a second generation human colonist – one of the first children born on the planet Foreas after the Corman Exodus of the 1980s. 

My parents, like most of the colonists, took their surname and their pacifist philosophy from our leader, Alan Corman.  They settled not far from our original landing site, on the shores of Crater Lake in the Concordia Wilderness.  I was born six months later. 

The following spring an unusually prolific bacterium contaminated the water supply.  My parents contracted dysentery and died.  I never got to know them, or learn my real surname.  I became a child of the clan; one of several dozen.  Just after my sixth birthday we left the Concordia Wilderness and made the long journey to Palisades, settling in the Cumbria Valley.  Ours was a peaceful existence.  Until the Bane arrived.

In the intervening years Cumbria became our home.  Out of necessity, we were an agrarian clan, growing the food and medicines we needed in climate-controlled geodesic greenhouses.  When the AFS troops arrived, we greeted them as kin, but we refused to fight their battles, as our kind preferred non-violent solutions over bloodshed. 

Our naivety would be our downfall.

The first attack wave was unexpected and brutal, but nothing prepared us for what was to follow.  They hit the outlying areas first, hard and fast.  When the smoke cleared our medics ran in and dragged the wounded back to the dome buildings and started triage. 

By the time someone noticed the incisions on the victims, it was already too late.

The Thrax troops had implanted explosive micro-charges inside the bodies of our wounded.  Once they were inside the structures these charges detonated, leaving nothing but smoldering, twisted wreckage and charred flesh.  In that first hour we lost close to fifty colonists, and another thirty AFS soldiers.

When AFS reinforcements arrived, some of us armed ourselves and joined the fight.  I’d never even considered what it might feel like to kill a living creature, but that day I killed dozens. 

Now, from the ashes of Cumbria, the AFS is constructing a fortified settlement and setting up a permanent presence here.  They call it “New Cumbria.”

Some of the colonists still refuse to give up their pacifist philosophy, but this experience has changed me forever.  I’ve decided to create a new society of Corman Reformists.  We’ll take up arms and fight alongside the AFS if they’ll have us. 

Today we fight for the only world I’ve ever known, and for the memory of a world I may never know.  I don’t know how this will end, but I do know this:  If we don’t end this war, this war will end us.