Jaguars

This was in the early days of the war, when we hadn't reverse-engineered all of their weapons; they were still blowing us out of the skies like piks. We'd just come back from a patrol from the Scattered Seas Nebula to resupply and the closest refueling station was a relatively small tebit colony by the name of New Transvaal. Apparently it was called that because it was settled by people that called themselves "Affikuners", if I'm pronouncing that right.

New Transvaal was mostly just a loose gathering of big hydrogen-3 plants and farming communities, but there were a few cities in the mix.

Our patrol fleet, which consisted of the Great Forest, Palika III, and the Mystic were supposed to link up with a tebit carrier named the Waldheim and head to Halshaa to merge with the 3rd Counter-Invasion Force.

Didn't quite work out that way.

While we were refueling, an insect super-destroyer jumped out of hyperspace right in front of the orbital docks and started firing. The Palika III was obliterated right then and there and the Great Forest only lasted a few minutes until she took a hit to the sides and was blown in half.

I was on the Mystic. When the Great Forest got destroyed, the insect ship turned all its weapons on us. Within about thirty seconds most of our engines were gone and we had fires on eight decks. In all the chaos, we'd completely forgot about the Waldheim.

I don't know why the insect ship didn't target the carrier first; maybe they saw it didn't have many actual guns on it and didn't consider it a threat.

We saw the tebit ship headed right for the super-destroyer on a collision course; while she was speeding right at the insects, the ship was also releasing every escape pod it had.

Boom.

For all the technology the insects had, I really doubt they were expecting to get rammed by a carrier with full ordinance. The blast must have knocked off their generators, because then the insects started to get pulled in by New Transvaal's gravity well. And so were we. Our little scratchfight have left us in no better shape.

The fighting had destroyed most of our escape pods, so the Ship-Commander gave the order that we would crash-land on the planet. In the little window of time we had, we aimed for a large plain in the northern continent. I'd tell you how bad the landing was, but the last thing I remember was the red-hot glow around the bridge as we entered the atmosphere. Then something jolted the entire ship, and I got knocked out.

When I came to, I was being tended by a tebit medic. He told me his name was Walt and he was going to help.

By pure chance, our ship had crashed where one of the escape pods from the Waldheim had touched down.

Walt told me what had happened up in orbit: When the bug ship jumped out of orbit, their Ship-Commander knew that couldn't take them in a straight fight. So he ordered all crew to the escape pods, and to take as much weaponry as they could with them.

Our ship was an attack vessel we didn't have much in the way of small arms beyond the basic armory for our garrison. But the Waldheim was a carrier and had all kinds of treasures. The escape pod that Walt was from carried a few disassembled wheeled (and armed) transports and a very generous helping of medical supplies. Then, it was just a matter of finding the other pods and establishing some chain of command.

After about a day, we managed to restore some power to the ship, and sensors indicated that the bug ship had crashed on the other side of the continent more or less in one piece, and we had confirmed bio-signatures. Since we had shot each other down, that meant that would should have just been a batter of the super-destroyer vaporizing New Transvaal's atmosphere from afar had now placed them in a very unpleasant ground war.

We and the tebit know a thing or two about a ground war.

Our long-range communications were shot, though. We couldn't signal for help, so we were stuck until either we or the insects were beat, and we didn't intend to lose. It wouldn't be easy, though. Even if we managed to salvage all the pods and crew from them, the insects still outnumbered out 10:1.

When we got short-range comms back up, the news was bad. The insects had taken over most of the western half of the continent and were rolling right toward us, and at some point they had killed the tebit Ship-Commander after finding his pod. There was no way we could have organized an effective resistance in time.

Ship-Commander Timaal gave us a very simple order: disband. We'd fight a kal-vin against the insects until Command noticed we were late and sent someone to investigate. And so we did. We split into cells, each of us going into hiding in one of the nearby farms or small towns.

But before we did, we left a little surprise for the bugs: about 100 tons of high explosives we salvaged from our torpedoes, laced through every corridor and crevice of the ship, rigged to blow when enough of them stepped inside.

I heard they lost most of their engineers in the blast.

In the first months, it was everyone for themselves. My cell was on the run constantly, we almost got caught outside Gregorysville. Call it luck or fate, we were saved when another cell saved us by popping out of nowhere and driving off the insects.

They were much-better informed than we were, and they gave us the basic outline of the situation:

The Helbin had taken most of the big cities and were using their populations for slave labor, mass-producing parts they could use to repair their ship. And if they got back into orbit, we were all dead. We had to stop them before they could produce enough material, which meant we had to liberate city by city.

Farmers and those who escaped the city were flocking to the resistance. I don't know exactly how it happened, but the resistance became known as the Jaguars, and we used codenames that apparently borrowed from tebit history for anyone important.

Ship-Commander Timaal was nominally in charge of the Jaguars, and as a result was only ever referred to as Quetzalcoatl in our transmissions. Sgt. Muhammad Essa coordinated sabotage cells and was the one who originally floated the idea to turn the Mystic into a trap, and he ended up being called Tlaloc. There was also Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli, and Ixchel, although I never knew who they actually were, which was probably for the best. Still didn't like how hard the names were to remember, though.

My cell operated out of a small farm in the middle of nowhere, owned by a tebit and his family. Before the Jaguars, I'd never really interacted with the tebit outside of the military, but they treated me like I was one of their own. The farmer's own son had left to join the Jaguars somewhere in the East, where the fighting was the worst.

I still don't know what happened to his son, after all these years. I like to think he made it.

Our first really big win was the Battle of Plant 7. The Jaguars had staged a revolt in a nearby city that the Helbin couldn't put down without pulling extra personnel, and had to draw away some of ones guarding a hydrogen-3 storage facility, as my scouting cell had done enough searching to know they were spread pretty thin.

We overran them and captured the facility and broadcasted our little skirmish to Helbin. They had to make a choice to either lose the city, or lose the fuel station. The main bulk came rushing back and we retreated, just as planned.

Didn't even need to use a lot of explosives. Some of the plant technicians we freed were kind enough to disable the safety features and let the hyrdogen start leaking enough where a small spark could set the whole thing off. When the insects returned, they found an empty facility with a time bomb hidden in one of the tanks. It did not go well for them.

After that, things started going our way. We started getting bolder every day; a bombing there, a hit-and-run there. I remember one time we kidnapped one of their officers (I think? That's what my cell leader told me) and we twisted its head off. Left it in front of an office building the insects had turned into a barracks as a message.

Eventually, they started to pull back to their ship.

I suppose they wanted to just stay in their ship until help arrived on its own, figuring we at least didn't have any weapons on the ground that could punch through their hull. We didn't. There were few holes in the ship, but those had been covered by the super-destroyer's auto-shields.

But “Quetzalcoatl” got an idea, a way to sneak inside. The insects, as much as they were willing to glass entire planets, were complete cowards when you you had a blaster aimed at their abdomen. We...“convinced” one of the ones we had captured to commandeer one of their hover-transports we had stolen, carrying “prisoners”, in actuality our best soldiers in handcuffs that they could take off at any time. Timaal went onboard too, to make it too tempting to turn the transport away. We pulled back and watched from afar as they inspected the transport, and held our breath as one of their airlocks slowly opened and invited them inside.

The next few minutes were deathly quiet. Then, shots. An explosion sounded somewhere in the ship and the shields went down, and all at once we flooded back to the ship and into its hold. After an hour or so of going deck to deck, the insects eventually dropped their weapons and surrendered. We didn't let them. And I will tell you one thing: nothing's scarier than a tebit fighting for his home.

Once the ship was cleared, you'd thought we'd won the war. Every city was a huge party, but we couldn't really relax until we re-established contact with Imperial or United Command. The insects' were literally just a few days away from fixing their long-range communications, which we finished the repairs on and sent a brief message towards Halshaa to send a rescue.

Well, you know the rest. The Victory jumps out over New Transvaal and finds a wreck of a shipyard, and story of our insurgency. Timaal became an instant celebrity for her role in liberating New Transvaal, and it gave both our species the desperate boost of morale we needed. The Jaguars are now the textbook example of how to run an insurgency and New Transvaal became Earth's primary place to train troops.

I'm proud of the role I played, mostly just unscrambling the insects' transmission out of a little basement of that farmhouse. I've been all over the galaxy and my military years are still probably the best years of my life, fighting alongside those crazy apes. Honestly, I think they're the only ones who understand us.

- Interview with Keless Zaas, 12th Liberation Flotilla

[Excerpt from Burning Skies: Accounts of the Intervention War]

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES:

pik : small animal that levitates via gas bags

tebit : word for humans. Translates to 'legs'.

Halshaa : Haas Suul homeworld

kratted : translates roughly to 'damned'

kal-vin : guerilla war, literal translation 'low war'.