Battle For Earth

## Prologue

### A New Hope

*Alor Pelean sat in their ship. They looked down at the planet, they had seen devastated worlds before, but the reaction to the wasteland that was now their homeworld evoked a strong madness in them. The craters that were once cities only made her angrier. The familiar red and green landscape was now dull blood red and radioactive green. Only one thing could do this damage: a cobalt bomb. She knew the culprit: Ekars. Probably dead by now. Shame i couldnt kill them myself. This crisis, for the first time, wasnt ended peacefully, but by violence.*
*Of course, the Onyxar still had tens of thousands of stars, and hundreds of thousands of planets. They didnt belive in terraforming, so no artifical habitable planets for them…*

***What if we just take an unclaimed habitable planet that already exists?***

### Green Planet

*It was a bright day on N9, at the center of the galaxy. You could see the other side of the UESS from here. Hathor looked out their window, at the lake. They saw a group of juvenile Kalon running around on the sand. They looked up at the wormhole that their ring orbited, watching ships depart for different parts of the galaxy. Everything was peaceful.*

*Hathor thought about the insane scale of the system. 7 Habitable Planets, 1 suited to each galactic empires needs and habitability. All of these orbiting a Anomaly Star, which burned its fuel extremely slowly, lasting possibly Quadrillions of years into the future. This was a red dwarf star.. Everyone had called it “UESS” meaning “Ultimate Engineered Solar System”, but more recently some started calling it “Wess” instead of using the acronym.*

*They noticed a flurry of spacecraft with bright yellow trails fly away from Apolaen, the Onyxar planet. Heading up, towards a bright star in the sky. Probably a colony mission. That was nice.*

*Everything is going to be just fine.*

## Chapter 1

This is some really good coffee. Like *really* good. So good that I keep checking the label on the packaging. Why? I can’t really answer that either, I already read it when I bought the espresso (and the 3 times I picked it up and read it again after sipping some). It’s from Comoros, and of course I had the machine make it my favorite kind: Galão. Addison walked in again. “Hey, this is some *really* good coffee.” I tell her, gesturing to the cup. “Point being?” “Make some for yourself…?” I slide the bag of coffee beans over to her side of the table.

”Uh.. alright.” She said, pouring the beans into the machine. We kind of just stared at each other while the coffee brewed and dripped into the mug. “What are you doing on that laptop?” Addison asked, trying to break the cycle of awkwardness. “Orbital calculations for *Artemis 7*.”, “Jesus, Ive been processing site images for the ALBC all morning.”, She said, grabbing the cup and taking a sip. From what I saw, she made it a Macchiato. “This is some really good coffee!” “I know, right!?”

———

I watched the ALBC launch today.

From what I saw, it was super uneventful. It used a bit less fuel than It should have, but that’s it. This means I get to manage the Trans-Lunar injection burn. You might think controlling a rocket would be fun, but when it’s a non-symmetrical payload, like the ALBC, it makes you want to die inside because of stress.

The ALBC is the Artemis Lunar Base Camp, by the way. No crew members yet, just the habitation and solar panel units.