Interstellar Pursuit Predators

The first Varanii fleet was spotted creeping into the system Ignominious Salamander—​a human possession on "paper" only. It sat in one of the coreward distal arms of human-controlled space, occupied only by a small listening post crewed by a handful of unfortunate souls. Unfortunate, because within moments of broadcasting a IFF message to the Varanii fleet and a notification back home, the outpost and all aboard were reduced to atoms—​and then, for good measure, reduced again into subatomic particles.

This was not humanity’s first rodeo: In the millennia since they’d first invented the snap drive that took them outside the Metropole humans had come across other species, with wildly varying outcomes for all involved, but the Varanii were different. Through an accident of evolution, some undiscovered universal constant, or the interference over eons and lightyears of some heretofore undiscovered progenitor race, all the space-faring civilizations in local space were mammalian, or close enough, and nearly all of them appeared to have evolved from largely herbivorous herd animals. Although there had been plenty of conflict between humanity and her neighbors, it was largely mundane conflict—​if interstellar war can be considered such a thing—​over things like resources, or territory, or miscommunication.

The Varanii did not fit this mold. Wherever they had come from they had evolved from some kind of apex predator, and judging from what evolution had produced it must have been a very, very high apex. The closest analog to a Varanii familiar to a human might be some kind of semi-warm-blooded reptile, but that would only be the barest of approximations. For one, even the smallest of the hexapedal Varanii stood nearly 6' tall at the shoulder, and specimens that reached all the way to 10' were measured during the later phases of the war, with length ranging between 20' and 30', depending on various factors. A mature Varanii weighed several tons, but despite their incredible size and weight they were extremely fast—​much faster than an individual human. Their body was covered in scales that developed a layer of osteoderms as they aged and engaged in combat, and with the help of technology and medicine an individual could live nearly two centuries, meaning that the oldest of the Varanii society were encased in nearly impenetrable natural armor. The mouth had two rows of sharp, jagged teeth and several glands excreted poisonous saliva that could render most creatures paralyzed within seconds, in addition a series biological mechanism similar to that of a bombardier beetle that allows them to spray boiling liquid at attackers. Naturally, the liquid is also poisonous. Around the mouth, especially below the chin, each Varanii had a bundle of prehensile tentacles colloquially known by humans as a "beard." This was their primary mechanism for final manipulation, although the digits at the ends of their appendages could also be used to manipulate larger, cruder items. Most of the Varanii internal organs were redundant or shielded behind bony internal and external plates—​or both—​and they were capable of regenerating digits and, on some occasions, even limbs. In the words of an anonymous survivor of an early engagement, "It’s a fucking dragon flying a goddamn spaceship."

At first, humanity assumed that, like other conflicts, this one was ultimately about resources, or posturing, and after a period of war the diplomats would come out and some kind of agreement would be reached. It took the capture of human world to illuminate that while the Varanii were after resources, they would have phrased it different: They were after cattle.

To them, this arm of the galaxy was populated with slow, weak, mammals perfect for eating, and they saw no more need for negotiation that a human might with a cow. They had come to domesticate, to farm, and to slaughter.

As this realization sunk it, terror began to spread across human and human-proximal—​because the Varanii had not limited their predations to humanity—​space: These unkillable monsters from the echoing dark had descended upon on worlds to consume us, and nothing could be done to fight them. Everything about the Varanii seemed to reinforce this: Their ships and all of their war machines were massive, on a scale unfamiliar to the largely human-sized sophonts that had become their victims, and draped in great banners announcing their supremacy, adorning with the spoils and remains of conquest. To be anywhere within miles of a Varanii Warhulk descending into a terrestrial atmosphere was to feel like you would hear nothing for the rest of your life but the titanic roar of engine exhaust—​assuming you weren’t shaken apart with the rest of the planet. A single Varanii warrior could kill a dozen humans in seconds, and their Hierophants—​giant, ancient individuals of unimpeachable honor and tremendous violence—​seemed more like biological war machines than living creatures.

But once humanity and its allies had notched a few bloody battles into their collective belt, they started to notice something—​something that, had they not been held in the grip of terror, they might have noticed before. There was no doubt that the Varanii were apex predators of the highest order, but because of that status they had a great deal in common with the Metropole’s greatest killers: They were engines of incredible, unstoppable violence…​for a time. The amount of energy required to animate a create the size of a Varanii is tremendous, and for all their vicious natural weapons they had evolved from creatures that were ambush predators: Built not for the long fight but for the quick, brutal, sudden kill. An organic body can only store so much energy, and that energy has to be replenished and used wisely. After the explosion of violence for which they were so well known, Varanii had to to sleep, and eat, and do a lot of both. This had gone unnoticed in the early days, when most engagements involved a Varanii battlegroup snapping into a system, making planetfall, ravaging populated areas, and then retreating with captives, but as soon as circumstances lead to longer battles it became clear that Varanii troops had extremely limited periods of efficacy. Their doctrine for longer engagements appeared to revolved around establishing a heavily fortified operations base from which to project regular raiding parties which would make lightning strikes to kill defenders and capture food before returning to base. At the Battle of Paladin Gorge, these weaknesses were finally laid bare.

Paladin Gorge was a natural formation equidistant to the pole and equator of the planet Grosseteste in the system Antediluvian Pakora. The gorge had formed in a mountain range as a river assembled itself from several tributaries and tumbled down the mountain, carving a path between neighboring peaks. The mountains contained useful deposits of several minerals valuable to near-Type-II civilizations, so a settlement had sprung up around the orbital elevator constructed to move harvest ore to waiting interstellar haulers. A large Varanii battlegroup had taken the orbital end of the elevator, eliminating all other ships in the system and fortifying the station. In a still-unexplained departure from standard doctrine, the battlegroup’s First Lord of War decided to deploy troops via the captured elevator instead of through dropships or HALO insertion. The residents of Paladin Gorge, not insensible to the danger they were in, had hurried to take the only action they felt might buy them some time and frustrate their attackers: destroy the orbital elevator. Unfortunately the elevator had been well-design to resist destruction, and the Varanii ground troops landed successfully. They spread out through the city, inflicting tremendous casualties, but the heroic efforts of a small group of humans finally succeeded in destroying the elevator, snapping the nanofiber tether that held it to the Grosseteste. Suddenly released from its task, the tether realized the titanic energy stored within it and rebounded into the atmosphere in mere seconds, slamming in the orbital station with force comprable to a near-relativistic warhead, instantly obliterating the First Lord of War and their guard and damaging or destroying nearly all the Varanii ships docked at the station. It would take several minutes before the message was relayed to them, but the Varanii soldiers on the ground were now completely isolated.

The Varanii had abandoned the elevator base as indefensible once the tether was severed, and this had rallied the human defenders of Paladin Gorge. Urban warfare negated some of the natural Varanii advantages but the human forces still found it difficult to inflict casualties while avoiding losses themselves, so a strange balance between stalemate and running street battle wound its way through Paladin Gorge as the day wore on. Eventually the Varanii Blood Prefect in charge of the ground forces made the fateful decision to retreat outside of the city, where they hoped the their could regain some advantage against the humans. By this point, however, a number of engineers had jury-rigged the stationary mining lasers used in the mountain to make them, at least technically, portable. Although never intended as weapons, at the end of the day a mining laser was still a 5 gigawatt beam of a focused energy, and when it hits something—​whether that thing is a wall of ancient rock or a violent space dragon—​the effect is going to be pronounced. Because they were not intended as weapons, though, the lasers had limited effective range—​no more than several hundred yards—​required enormous power packs carried by assistants to the actual gunner, and created enough electromagnetic interference when fired that they couldn’t be mounted on drift-sleds or hover-trucks—​the delicate hover machinery would fail as soon as the laser was fired.

This makeshift division—​who would later refer to themselves as the Paladin Gorge 23rd Miners Auxiliary—​advanced down the gorge, keeping the Varanii troops on the move at the edge of their effective range. Varanii doctrine largely dismissed ranged weapons for both cultural and practical reasons—​one of the reasons for the general practice of short sorties and raids where they could quickly insert close-quarters troops—​which left them without many effective tools to resist the Miners Auxiliary. The initial strategy for the Miners Auxiliary, such as any existed, was to push the Varanii several miles down the gorge—​the sheet sides of which were impossible to scale—​until they reached Fisker’s Gap, where the gorge narrowed down to the width of the river, which then immediately thundered down several hundred feet of waterfall. It only took two miles of marching before they started to see the corpses. Two miles later they found the Blood Prefect and a few of their guard collapsed and barely alive. They were the first Varanii ever taken into custody—​they had been too exhausted to even attempt ritual suicide.

The implications of the Battle of Paladin Gorge were grasped almost immediately by human high command: Unable to call for extraction, and with nowhere to establish a defensible base, the Varanii force had been run down by the Miner’s Auxiliary—​literally chased to death. Their bodies, so heavily optimized for powerful bursts of violence, couldn’t handle extended exertion that left a company of humans carrying repurposed heavy mining equipment tired but still perfectly capable. Maybe humans and our extraterrestrial mammalian cousins couldn’t outfight the Varanii, but we could outlast them.

After Paladin Gorge, anti-Varanii doctrine took on a much different tone. Where it had previously focused on avoiding conflict, now it pivoted to targeting anything that improved Varanii mobility—​ships, transports, etc—​and denying them supplies—​especially food. Whenever possible, Varanii ground forces were isolated, prevented from extracting, and slowly hounded to exhaustion and death. Slowly, forward progress of the Varanii invasion was arrested…​and reversed. A coalition of humans and other local species pursued the Varanii fleets back all the way to their homeworld in a decades long campaign that saw the liberation of dozens of former Varanii "stockworlds" inhabited by other species that had fallen to their earlier advance. Even with their empire destroyed and their entire species blockaded on a crowded home planet, the Varanii refused any form of diplomacy. After a great deal of discussion between the coalition forces—​where genocide was many times suggested but never decided one—​the choice was made to blanket the planet in Lester-Madorin radiation, which had the effect of preventing the specific electrical interactions that make microprocessors possible. Just the be safe, a coalition interdiction fleet was also station permanently around the Varanii home system.

They would be allowed to live, but not to leave.