Children of Woe

To start off, I suppose nobody ever really told us that genetic uplift of a species had never been attempted on a large scale. But on the other hand, we're the Lords of War, and we have this bad habit of not learning lessons unless it involves a world war or three.

Hell, we even enjoyed our reputation as insane warriors. We still do, honestly.

However, finding aliens literally fleeing from your visage out of fear that you will mount their skull on a war mech (that only happened during the Intervention War, why is this stereotype so hard to shake?) gets old after a while. It got to the point where large numbers of us started to seriously ask if being known as the galaxy's biker gang was a liability.

So, some...movements emerged. I think most of pacifist stuff started with the snakes-

-what?

You know, the snakes. The Haas Suul. The other Lords of War. God, I haven't heard anyone call them their old name in forever.

Anyway, the snakes were the first to start the pacifist stuff what with the Order of Tranquility and Reformers. Then out of Earth came the Co-existers and the Interstellar Sapient Fund.

But those were respectable organizations, with all of them having the basic message of murder and war=bad. Sure, we could all get behind that.

Then it started to get weird. Freaky.

Cult-y.

I think we should have noticed a pattern by the time the Clearblood Massacre went down.

The Church of Clearblood was founded one of us, a human named Ivan de Mons. He starts this little religious community on Earth, with the main dogma being that being a Lord of War is inherently wrong and only through his doctrine could we escape our “sinful” bodies and be reborn as one of the less violently-inclined aliens.

To make a long story short, he eventually barricades himself in the main compound and whole cult downs a few dozen gallons of cyanide.

“Lord Escapist” movements cropped up everywhere after Clearblood. Most just disbanded after the leaders went to jail for tax fraud or infighting, but then there arrived this one little group. They were something special.

They called themselves the Society of Innocence. The only difference being that this particular cult was founded and funded by everyone's favorite crazy-ass snake billionaire, Hilsiin Mraa. Mraa having made his fortune starting up a pharmaceutical company, and he already had a reputation for being a bit unstable.

People got...nervous when he announced he was pouring his entire fortune into his new start-up to “discover true innocence”. He places their HQ at Gran Costa, and on the whole they pretty much kept to themselves, with Mraa pretty much withdrawing from the public eye entirely.

Fast forward a few years.

Big news story erupts when half of the orca pods on Earth just straight-up vanish. People think its illegal whalers at first, but no carcasses show up. Then the emperor died, and the whole thing was forgotten during the funeral and Vanhi X's coronation.

About a decade after that, rumors started spreading about orca sightings on Gran Costa. Other cetaceans had been transplanted to Gran Costa before, but no orcas.

Another decade passes, and the grand HQ Mraa built up falls behind on its property taxes. Things snowball from there.

The colonial government sends officers to inspect said property. Said officers find said property completely empty. A local investigation is launched and before long they discover that Society had made some secret “installations” to the main building, in the form of elaborate, underwater labs way below the base, but they'd apparently been flooded for some time.

So they get into some diving mechs, swim down below, and open the doors to the labs.

And they find a bloodbath.

Hilsiin Mraa and all of his inner circle are dead, ripped to shreds, floating about ruined experimental equipment and torn electronics. Something from inside the labs escaped somehow managed to breach the walls, but not before chewing on everyone around.

Word gets out. The Emperor himself orders a full-scale Imperial Investigation.

After a few weeks, a picture starts to emerge.

He kept a journal, and kept going on and on about how dolphins (particularly the killer whales) were innocent and pure, and how they were to be his 'children' and 'legacy' and his 'gift to the galaxy' and his 'woe to the barbarians'. And he confessed everything.

Hilsiin Mraa was the one responsible for the orca disappearances. He had apparently spent a majority of his wealth setting up dummy corporations, which officially were for oceanic research, where in reality they set about the task of capturing orca pods whole and alive, in the span of just a few weeks.

He'd brought them to Gran Costa, and discreetly deposited them into the ocean. Since Gran Costa was a backwater, I guess he figured any sightings of orcas would be brushed off as some fisherman getting drunk and making up stories.

Then, he'd routinely re-capture one of the orcas, bring it to the labs, and run gene-therapy on it.

That crazy son of a bitch was trying to uplift the killer whales. Evidently one of them escaped while he was doing tests and killed the lot of them.

The next step was to locate all the pods he'd abducted. We didn't have to look for very long.

One day a boat spots a pod swimming around close to an island. So he moves closer to confirm the sighting. The bull orca broke away from the pod, surfaced right next to the boat, and started clicking.

Everyone on board just thought it was a killer whale doing killer whale stuff, until one of them realized it was clicking in Morse.

It was talking to them.

The orca's translated words were pure poetry:

“Top people have fish?”

Mraa had got his wish. He'd introduced most pods to a genome that made sapience a dominant trait. And then one killed them all. So much for innocence.

The Children of Woe; that's what they called themselves. Probably something Mraa had said at some point that caught on before they decided he was better off dead.

I think you can figure out what happened when the full extent of Mraa's experiments were realized. There were riots. A hovercar or a thousand were set on fire. Usual Lord of War stuff. The Imperial Assembly convenes an emergency session and retroactively grants them all citizenship, and about every animal activist group you can name convened on Gran Costa to protest because of reasons.

Then the story gets out to the rest of the galaxy. The Lords of War had produced a child.

And when it was all said and done, I think the best quote about the whole thing was by President Smith. He'd just given a very flowery appeal that all the orcas we'd accidently uplifted be given citizenship. And then he turned away from the mic and spoke to the Vice-President, thinking he wasn't still recording.

“I just said 'welcome to the fucking madhouse' in the nicest way possible.”