The Churzon Invasion of 1897

Churzon Invasion of Sol, local date 1897 – from ‘The Churzons, a History‘ by Ihlirian scholar Kuth Baxklopengi

The Churzons were an extra-terrestrial group of outlaws who were fleeing prosecution by the Ihlirian Dominion after their failed attempt of raiding one of the Dominion’s outer colonies. While they may have been an unwilling pawn in the machinations of the Troq’iel Empire, the fact remains that the Churzons were for all intents and purposes pirates and universally hated by every civilized society. Their habit of ‘molding’ other sentient beings they conquered into docile slaves through the use of specifically tailored mutagenic bio-plagues was especially repugnant. It is thought that the group that attacked the Sol system was the last remnants of their kind in this arm of the galaxy.

One of the great mysteries of the universe is why so many of the sentient races have the same basic form and physiology. Agreed, there are enough differences between some races to cause them to be environmentally incompatible – you would never find a Bosian serving on a Wo’ots starship, whose atmosphere contained enough methane to kill an unprotected Bosian in less than an hour – but the vast majority of races are endothermic, bilaterally symmetrical, require oxygen as their primary respiration gas, and come from worlds with a surface gravity of between 1 and 25 meters per second squared. Even more fascinating is that nearly all sentient life use DNA in some form or variation to propagate racial traits. It’s these facts that allowed the Churzons to develop the technology to craft their bio-plagues so quickly, and why they preferred certain physical forms in their conquests.

The invasion began with a month of surreptitious ‘sample gathering’ followed by a week of orbital kinetic bombardment of the thirty largest population centers. The United States lost New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston. South America saw the destruction of Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City. Great Britain lost London, Liverpool, and Glasgow. Europe lost Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Naples, Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, and Budapest. Istanbul and Cairo were leveled. The Tsar was killed when St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw were struck. India lost Bombay and Calcutta, China lost Beijing, Shanghai, and Canton, and Japan’s Emperor was killed when Tokyo and Osaka were flattened.

The Churzons’ bio-plague was released in conjunction with the orbital strikes. This pattern of conquest was a long standing technique that had always been successful if allowed to proceed without outside interference. However, in humanity’s case things didn’t exactly go to plan. For one, the Churzons had never attempted this on a world that would be classified as a Class 14 Deathworld by most galactic civilizations. Second, the Churzons in their haste had completely misunderstood the relationship that humans had with their domesticated animals. Third, the bio-plague, in addition to creating several new subspecies of humans with specific animal features and personalities, also reactivated a hidden and long-dormant sequence in the human genome in a small but significant portion of the human population, which was the ability to use and direct a source of sub-spacial energy to affect the world around them through mental efforts alone. In other words, ‘magic’. The results were catastrophic as far as the Churzons were concerned.

The Churzons had estimated that it would take half a planetary orbit (year) for the bio-plague to convert 90% of the remaining population into their desired docile slave subjects. The remaining 10% would be used for forced labor in asteroid mining and other high risk tasks. They were so certain of the success of their techniques (especially when used on such a primitive world as this) that they planned on spending the interim period performing extensive surveys of the Sol system to identify and locate any valuable resources as well as setting up detection and warning grids – just in case the Ihlirians somehow managed to trace their hyperspacial jumps that lead them to this system. They calculated the risk of being followed as ‘extremely low but just barely possible’ due to the deliberately random nature of their jump trail. Better to be safe than sorry as far as the Ihlirians are concerned, after all. Once the extensive survey was completed and the outer Ort cloud was seeded with self-replicating detection drones, the Churzons returned to Earth to finalize their conquest of this new and resource-rich world.

Metahee Va’jan was the leader of the Churzon fleet which consisted of thirty seven ships in various states of disrepair. While all of his ships were still spaceworthy and they had managed to enact critical repairs and gather raw materials during the six month survey pass, most of the ships required major overhauls that could only be accomplished with repair facilities that this system didn’t have – yet. Creating those facilities was beyond the small scale manufacturing capabilities the ships carried, these would have to be created on planet and then boosted into orbit. Fortunately there was already a large infrastructure of metal smelting and manufacturing concentrated in one sector of one of the larger continents and the largest population centers (which undoubtedly had contained their centralized government) had already been eliminated in the previous bombardment. This was yet another major mistake made by the Churzons, since while they had bombed New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston, the central government of the United States was actually located in the District of Columbia, which was over 130 miles from Philadelphia and had managed to escape the bombardment relatively intact. Worse, they chose to make their primary landing in the United States, and more specifically the North Eastern US, where the Krag carbine had been introduced the previous year and where a large percentage of the households owned firearms of varying capabilities, including rifles, carbines, revolvers, and double-barreled shotguns (notably the Winchester 1894 lever action rifle was especially popular at the time).

Va’jan landed all but two of his ships near Bethlehem Pennsylvania, intending on using the extensive steel manufacturing facilities there to start his shipyard construction. The two ships he left in orbit weren’t capable of atmospheric entry, but he made sure to only leave a skeletal crew of confirmed loyalists on board to prevent any of his less-trusted sub-commanders from ‘getting any ideas’. He didn’t expect that the locals would provide any difficulties to his plans since the bio-plague had made everyone docile and eager to be commanded by their new overlords, right? He did briefly wonder why the number of animal hybrids was so relatively low from their predictions, but that was really an unimportant detail – or so he thought. The initial landing and subsequent takeover of Bethlehem and its industries went smoothly for the first month or so. The Churzons rounded up the local cat-human hybrids for ‘enjoyment’ since they most closely resembled a favored species from their long-lost homeworld and put the rest to work under Churzon direction to begin manufacturing the tools needed to manufacture the required shipyard structures. Things appeared to be going smoothly.

To the humans, however, it appeared that they had been invaded by a group of demons straight from hell, since the Churzons just happened to closely match some of the more fanciful depictions of Christian devils – seven foot tall slender bipeds with red skin, black horns, red eyes, long fingernails, and a slender whip tail capped by black spade-shaped bone structure. It has to be noted that the Churzon homeworld’s gravity was only 7.1 m/s^, so they were laboring in gravity that was 40% higher than their norm – uncomfortable but just bearable. Fortunately for humanity, and extremely unfortunately for the Churzons, the bio-plague did not completely change their base personality. While the hybrids did lose a significant portion of human aggression, this was partially offset by the assumption of the instincts provided by the species they had merged with. Dog-hybrids and became pack-oriented who became extremely attached to their alpha, cat-hybrids retained their hunting instincts … in fact the only hybrids who actually fit the Churzons’ desired psychological profile were the female cow-hybrids, for even the male cow-hybrids retained their historic aggression. The rest of humanity did suffer consequences, of course. Males became less aggressive and more willing to co-operate with each other, and females became extremely submissive under certain circumstances they discovered later to their detriment. This was all according to plan, although the amount of change in baseline behavior was far less than expected. The wildcard was the creation of mages in a small percentage of the human population. Nearly all mages are female because the genetic sequence required is scattered in the ‘junk DNA’ sections of Y chromosomes. The first mages were relatively weak and untrained, but they still managed to manifest personal shields, energy swords, enhanced strength and durability, and other ‘base abilities’ that are still common to most modern mages.

The newly inaugurated President, William McKinley, came into office just before the bombardments destroyed a significant portion of the East Coast population and infrastructure. Martial Law had been invoked to deal with the crisis which included the sudden transformation of some of the populous into Animal Humans. The recovery efforts were just beginning to have an effect when news of the ‘Demonic Invasion’ reached his desk. This gave him an obvious target to point at for being the ones responsible, and for once this was the truth instead of just political necessity. McKinley did not have a large military to draw from, but he did have a citizenry who was well armed and willing to volunteer to Defend America. The United States lost a significant portion of their military-grade armaments and manufacturing ability with the destruction of New York, Boston, and especially Philadelphia, but enough remained hidden in the decommissioned Washington Arsenal in Fort McNair to be useful, and the Baltimore & Ohio linked the Capitol to Allegheny by rail where one of the remaining Army arsenals was located. Actual combat units were scarce around the Capitol, which housed mostly ceremonial and administrative staff, but the 1st Artillery Battalion was stationed at Fort McNair. Additional troops were mustered from Forts McHenry, Washington, Meyer, Monroe, and Delaware in addition to the State Guards who had already been mobilized to help with the disaster relief. Additional units were created from volunteer militia units and several specialized unit comprised of groups of dog-hybrids and cat-hybrids were formed and trained for infiltration and intelligence gathering. Finally, the Daughters of Liberty company was created from the mage volunteers, and while McKinley was uncomfortable in allowing the young women to serve in direct combat, their demonstrated abilities were too potent to be ignored.

It wasn’t until the middle of November that McKinley was able to dispatch his forces to Pennsylvania to begin the operations. The operation relied on stealth to stage his forces which was woefully light on artillery. To counter this the local population were eager to co-operate and provided badly needed intelligence on the invaders. One particular fact in the human’s favor was that the cat-hybrids being abused as ‘comfort girls’ were more than willing to express their displeasure of their treatment at the hands of their hated ‘masters’, and most of the demons appeared to keep one or more dog or cat hybrids for this specific purpose. The actual number of ‘demons’ appeared to be around a thousand at the best estimates of the locals and there appeared to be little cooperation among them. In fact, there had been several incidents where a demon had suddenly attacked and killed one of his fellows in order to seize the other’s possessions, proving that the demons were actually mortal and could be killed. Most of the demons were using local housing, with a few of them appearing to remain in the strange ships parked around the western outskirts of the small city. Major William Roberts, the commander in charge of the operation, had just set the timetable for a series of additional reconnaissance missions before the primary attack scheduled in two days time when everything suddenly went to hell.

It was later determined that Sub-Commander V’etti was the one responsible for the Bethlehem Uprising. A particularly unpleasant individual, he decided for whatever reason to publicly ‘chastise’ a young female dog-hybrid who for whatever reason had invoked his ire. This consisted of nearly beating the poor girl to death in the middle of a residential street where Strike Group Theta, a group of dog-hybrids with strong Doberman traits, had been trying to quietly extract themselves after scouting the local neighborhood. The beating caught the attention of the Strike Group when the young dog-girl gave a piteous moan while laying bleeding in the street. When the team rushed around the corner and saw the grizzly tableau their new instincts took over. The Strike Group tore the Churzonian apart with their bare hands, after which the entire ‘pack’ howled in triumph – which bought the attention of the local citizens. Rumors of relief had already been quietly spreading through the city, so it really shouldn’t have been a surprise when the locals started yelling “To Arms! To Arms! The Demons are killing our children! To Arms!”. The word quickly spread and the Churzons were suddenly attacked by nearly every being around them. The surprise was nearly absolute since the Churzons hadn’t even considered the local ‘primitives’ as any sort of threat because the bio-plague had made them all non-aggressive and compliant, right? The riots/uprising lasted a whole day, at which point the only Churzons left alive were the few in the ships parked outside of the city.

Major Roberts was faced with a dilemma. Not a single demon remained alive in the city, which was good. What was bad was that their leader, someone apparently named Commander Va’jan, was holed up in the largest of three ships which had their hatches closed. They had rescued nearly a hundred hybrids, nearly all young cat-girls, from the other ships, which gave the Major a decent idea as to the number of remaining demons, but initial tests using available explosives showed that the ship hulls were basically impervious to damage, and he couldn’t make any of the captured equipment from the ships which remained open operate in any manner. Even that option was taken out of his hands when all of his forces were suddenly ejected from the various ship interiors and their hatches sealed. Approximately thirty minutes later a loud voice boomed from the central ship.

“Human leader, you will explain to me how you have resisted our commands!”

When Major Roberts emerged from his command tent, he was astonished to see what appeared to be a projected image of the ship’s interior, with what had to be Commander Va’Jan standing in the middle of a room. It looked remarkably similar to a ship’s cabin, complete with what had to be personal mementos and three younger cat-girls huddled in a corner on an obvious sleeping surface.

“I am Major William Roberts, United States Army Third Division. You have invaded the Sovereign Territory of the United States of America, and it is my solemn duty to protect our country and its citizens. Why on earth do you expect that we would agree to anything you say?”

“We engineered your species to obey us, and yet here you stand in defiance! This is unprecedented. Explain how you accomplished such an impossibility.”

The Major was about to reply when he noticed the cat-girls eyes widen then narrow in obvious rage. He suddenly had a good idea on what was about to occur.

“So it WAS you who was responsible for all of the recent changes and attacks on our cities! You made a big mistake invading America, and obviously didn’t do your homework regarding how humans react to being attacked, did you?”

“Irrelevant! The bio engineering process was tailored to your specific genome, it should be impossible for you to resist our GRRRRRK!!!!“

Major took great pleasure in watching the three cat-girls tear the demon apart, even if it was a bit gruesome. When the image started to strobe blue and then suddenly cut off he had a premonition that things were about to turn even uglier. He quickly turned to the mage group and directed them to see if they could somehow cut through the ship hull with their abilities to allow the three hybrids to escape. Unfortunately, when the mages got to the ship the hull was already radiating heat and it quickly became apparent that all of the ships were in the process of self-destructing. Cursing, he pulled everyone back as far away from the ships as he could and watched them slowly subside into slag.

In the end, total casualties in the Bethlehem encounter were 1097 Churzons and 7,472 civilians, including three cat-girls whose statue still exists in the center of the city to this day. Worldwide casualties are estimated to be nearly 30 million which, while severe, still only accounted for a little over 2% of the total population at the time of the attack. Its influence on world politics, however, was severe and long reaching. The rebuilding saw considerable consolidation of several nations into larger confederations and the physical and psychological changes to humanity still affects things in ways that are still being determined.