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Description
A somewhat modified take of John Ringo's Earth Vs the Posleen.

First, the Very Long background...

The Aldenata were great and powerful, and great and powerful dicks. Not only did they conquer and enslave their enemies (and those they suspected would eventually be their enemies) but also genetically reengineered them to be incapable of violence, incapable of violent rebellion in the future.

The Darhel were slender humanoid beings, vaguely elf-like and somewhat smaller than humans, but rather stronger per pound, and with empathic abilities that made them masters of manipulation. Their sharp teeth reveal their past as a predatory species (the Darhel were omnivores, but preferred meat). Their civilization was a mighty one, and they resisted the Aldenata more strongly and cleverly than any other race they encountered. The Aldenata were never able to entirely remove the capacity for hatred from the Darhel, and for their stubbornness they were made into obligate vegetarians to whom any deliberate commission of violence against animal life and intelligence would bring brain death.

The crab-like Tchpth were brilliant scientists, but had not developed far enough to save themselves. The Aldenata were fully successful in removing their capacity for violence, and narrowed their mental focus to create a race of usefully obsessive nerds. The Indowy, short teddy-bear like, blue-skinned creatures covered with green fuzz (actually a plant symbiote rather than fur) were another success as a galactic labor force, although they never were as unskilled in plotting as the Aldenata, and later the Darhel, believed.

Over time, the Aldenata embarked on a larger scale project, to create a galactic “perfect” society, with themselves at the top. The technically skilled and creative Indowy would be the builders and manufacturers, and the brains of their best would serve as organic computing elements in the nanotech assembly plants. The Tchpth would be philosophers and doctors [1] and scientists (the Aldenata were of course superior technologically, but didn’t have the sheer enthusiasm of the Tchpth: they were happy enough to let properly tamed races handle the tedious bits), and the Posleen – a race of tough omnivores with a hive-like social structure – would be the warriors, to fight off any outside threats not needing the Aldenata’s personal attention. The Darhel would be, essentially, middle management – handling all the details of day-to-day planetary management without actually holding any real power, which would always remain in the manipulatory appendages of the Aldenata.

The “perfect society” was still very much a work in progress (the Posleen even more so – not ready to interact with other subject races, for one thing) when the Aldenata stopped answering their phone calls. Upon investigation, their planets (the Aldenata did not mix with their subject races at home) were abandoned, their great cities mere shells, all of their more advanced technology deliberately broken down by nanomachines, and the Aldenata themselves were nowhere to be found. What had happened to them remains a mystery till today: some claim the Aldenata had fled in funk and shame at all the damage they had done to other races, but most consider that wishful thinking. Others think the Aldenata had found some way to transcend to a non-physical or at least non-biological form and abandoned their planets (and their subject races) as no longer useful to them. Still others, parsing certain obscure research topics assigned to the Tchpth not long before their departure, think they discovered something amazing in distant galaxies, and left to seek it out – or in another version, discovered something so terrifying that even a hundred thousand year plus head start [2] wasn’t enough to prevent them from fleeing at top speed in the opposite direction.

As a result of the massive disruptions arising from the disappearance of the galaxy’s absolute rulers, the Darhel were able to take over the financial and legal systems of the galactic society, and combined with their control of much of the managerial functions of the galaxy [3], became effectively the new ruling class. Stability and steady growth (through colonization and multiplication of inputs rather than increase in individual output) became the watchword for the new “Galactic Federation” for the next hundred thousand years: technological growth was carefully kept to a minimum to avoid disruption, and an utterly hierarchical and top-down social structure was encouraged for all other species, with the aid of elitist “1/10 of 1%” collaborators. Not everyone was happy, of course, but Darhel rule was less crushingly arrogant and casually ruthless than that of the Aldenata, and eventually things became Just the Way Things Are, even as the majority of the Indowy race descended to essentially the status of slave labor. [4] A couple races died out as Surplus to Requirement: for instance, the Toloren, which the Aldenata had created as a race of priests to preach the glories of submission, the superior nature of Aldenata morality, and the holy nature of Aldenata rule found themselves without employment, and in the “work or starve” society that the Darhel created, most of them did the latter. (A few reportedly survive on Tchpth worlds as combination research subjects and sources of entertainment).

Things were slightly shaken when the Himmit, a race of chameleons resembling frogs with heads at both ends, made themselves know to Galactic leaderhsip, claiming to be a race that the Aldenata had engineered for their purposes not just as pacifists but also paranoid experts on concealment. [5] With their own internal economy and the location of their home planets carefully concealed, they never really came under Darhel control, but they did various services in return for certain payments, and were useful enough to the Darhel for their presence to be tolerated. (Not that the Darhel were likely to be able to keep them from sneaking around if they decided otherwise).

Meanwhile the Posleen, six-limbed crocodile-centaurs, remained confined to the worlds they had been placed for experimentation, a crude and unfinished project, a race where a tiny percentage of “officers” as intelligent as humans (Kessentai among themselves, to be known to humans as “God-Kings”) ruled over vast hordes of barely sapient troops (the Oolt’os). In some ways they were a remarkable achievement: successfully reengineered to live off almost anything organic and shake off any poison or chemical toxin, successfully made fearless, capable of genetically passing on useful learned knowledge, and automatically obedient to the commands of Aldenata minds. On the other hand, they were a race with their previous complex hive hierarchy brutally simplified, their capacity for common sense mutilated in the name of fearlessness and aggressiveness, and with minimal capacity for technological progress. A race so compulsively fertile and incapable of solving that issue that on long settled planets most of the young were either allowed to eat each other or eaten by the Kessentai simply to keep the population under control. Unfortunately for everyone else, one of those worlds happened to have an overlooked Aldenata automated war machine factory buried under a mountain range, and eventually an earthquake uncovered an entrance. It took thousands of years for the Posleen to figure out how to talk to it and command it, and even then they never really understood how it worked. But what they learned was good enough for them – and bad enough for everyone else. A hundred thousand years after the Aldenata departed and abandoned their experiments, and about 150-175 years B.I. (Before Internet) the Posleen exploded across the galaxy.

Not every intelligent race in the galaxy had been re-engineered by the Aldenata, of course. A few fought to extinction rather than be modified, some were let be since for physical and environmental reasons they were extremely unlikely to ever become technologically advanced space travelers, and in a couple cases aliens were so biologically strange that the Aldenata ended up exterminating them due to being unable to figure out how to change them. And of course, with so very, very, very many stars and planets, the occasional species yet to advance beyond “pointed stick” in the arms race were just overlooked. Humanity was in fact discovered about 3000 B.I. by the Darhel, who carried out a slow and cautious mapping of the unknown parts of the galaxy through the beautifully stealthy Himmit. There might be emerging space-travelling races _not_ genetically conditioned to pacifism, after all. Humanity alarmed the Darhel – they were almost as fierce as the Darhel themselves had used to be, and making steady, if pre-scientific, technological progress. But they were also potentially very useful if the Darhel found a race that could fight back – so from before the rise of the Roman Empire on, humans in positions of authority found voices speaking to them from the darkness, promising great things in exchange for small favors…

Fighting the Posleen was fundamentally difficult for a civilization composed of species genetically engineered for non-violence: even “push-button warfare” tended to kill the Darhel, would only be done by the Himmit if the Posleen would have no way of knowing where the button-pusher was, and was in any case very hard under any circumstances for their peaceful natures (COUGH COUGH),and was so profoundly repulsive to Indowy and Tchpth as to require deep conditioning to detach the user from an understanding what they were doing, which did not exactly lead to combat efficiency, or "sanity". Artificial intelligences were not workable either: not because (as humanity was told) A.I. will inevitably swing into Destroy All Biologicals mode, but because AI designed to defend the Galactic Federation and smart enough to win wars with the Posleen would invariably come to the conclusion that the worst enemies of the Galactic Federation were internal ones.

There was also the problem that the Aldenata machine factories of the Posleen operated on a full scale automated mass production principle, while the fine quality machines of the Galactic were assembled piece by piece with slow-acting nanotech in such a specialized and precise manner that they were essentially “hand-made” by innumerable Indowy specialists. Mass production as a concept was not something that the Galactics could not grasp – indeed, it was in use for the simple galactic equivalents of bricks and mortar and underwear - and when the mature principle was introduced to them from Earth the Tchpth could easily work out how it might be adopted to Galactic technology, but aside from the resistance to changing their way of doing things by the conservative elite of the Indowy, there was the fact that the adoption of such techniques would fundamentally change the galactic economy, and quite possibly destroy the Darhel’s control of the Galactic Federation.

Humanity would have to be the solution, the warrior race the Aldenata had planned for their galactic society but never managed to complete. Of course, not too many humans; just enough to stop the Posleen advance, which in time would lead to the collapse of Posleen society as the rulers of overcrowded and resource-depleted worlds turned their guns on eachother. A whole planet of them was seriously surplus to requirements. A whole planet of them, armed with technology nearly up to Galactic levels, would be even more dangerous than the Posleen. Humans would have to lose their home planet.
Of course, making sure that humanity lost the battle for their home planet while making it look like the Galactic Federation was doing its fumble-fingered [6] best to help would be tricky. But the Darhel had by this point considerable experience in manipulating humans, and humans were well known for their ability to rationalize the most chuckleheaded actions if personal ego, defense of identity, greed, religion, or nationalism were involved. It really wouldn’t take very much to get the humans to make all the wrong choices, all the while thinking they were doing the Right Thing and It Was Someone Else’s Fault – certainly never coming within leagues of thinking they were betraying humanity.

Unfortunately, some of the Indowy had been on to the Darhel for a very long time. And they - along with some of the Tchpth, and certain sub-groups of the Himmit - weren’t going to let an opportunity like this pass.

************************************************** *****

2015: a bit over five years after the return of the Fleet and it smashing the Posleen forces to scrap.

The five years of the Battle of Earth had killed off more than 2/3 of humanity, but had failed in its objective from both Posleen and Darhel points of view. Over a billion and a half survived.

Some 20 billion Posleen had died. (Only 2 billion had actually _landed_ on Earth, but Posleen breed – and mature – fast). Some tens of millions survive, now the ones hiding in the hills and the forests of those nations they successfully depopulated: reduced to little more than smart animals in the case of the troops, to Crazed Survivalists in the case of the few surviving ruling or “God-King” class Posleen.

Aside from behind the scenes intelligence help and tech transfer from Galactics quite fed up with Darhel rule (working with some very old anti-Darhel secret human organizations, some existing from well before any Indowy conspirators were sneaked to Earth on Himmit spaceships), humanity had also benefitted from various natural weaknesses of thePosleen – their lack of experience in fighting skilled opponents, the low intelligence of the bulk of the species, and their poor adaptability to certain climates and terrains.

One would think the four-legged Posleen would be better, not worse, than humans on mountains, but their centauroidal build actually made them top heavy and prone to going ass-over kettle on steep slopes. They also tended to sink in swamps and were very unhappy with cold weather – “clothes” other than combat harnesses and gear was essentially an alien concept to the Posleen, and while warmblooded their at best improvisational efforts to deal with northern hemisphere winters tended to lead to a lot of frozen to death Posleen. Indeed, the Posleen were very reluctant to try and invade such areas as Canada and northern Russia, and avoided invading the Scandinavian Peninsula entirely, on the basis of it being too cold and lacking in useful resources while being too thinly populated to ever become a lethal threat to the Posleen hold on the rest of the planet. (Sure, it would be cleared of its human population eventually, but not until after the more vital parts of the planet were conquered. )

The United States came out of the mess the best, with “only” something more than one third of its population killed, having managed to create a fairly secure series of redoubts out of the rocky mountains in the west and the Mississippi-Tennessee river- Appalachian line in the east, combined with manufacturing and high tech advantages that made up for the fairly nugatory trickle of Galactic supplies being sneaked by the Himmit past Posleen defenses to island bases in the Pacific. Of course, the very fact that it was the strongest opponent also meant that in the later years of the Battle it received more thorough and personal attention from the most powerful Posleen leaders than anywhere else. The US northern plains were also never permanently secured by the Posleen due to their horrid winters, but the flat country’s vulnerability to attack made much of the area a no-man’s land rather than a place safe for refugees. Canada survived as “America’s backstop”, the difficulties of pushing through the Coastal Range and across the St. Lawrence, combined with the need to concentrate on the US and the fact that Canada was such a frozen hell sparing most of the country from occupation.

The Chinese seriously pissed off the Darhel by figuring out how to force them to pay for a rather larger share of the world’s defense budget than they had planned (the Darhel’s influence in China, after a century of radical political change, was rather less than they would have liked). The Darhel in turn made a special effort to make sure Chinese military strategy was misinformed and based on incorrect assumptions: for one thing, the Chinese were caught by surprise when rather than landing right on the coasts as expected, the initial Posleen landing was right smack in the middle of the north Chinese lowland plain near the Grand Canal. The mass use of nuclear weapons [7] to try and slow down their advance wasn’t helpful, either: planes and missiles both were easy meat to Posleen air defenses, with only miniscule percentages getting through: a great swathe of China was left contaminated by a fine powder of plutonium from bombs destroyed mid-air, through which the cancer-proof and cockroach-radiation-resistant Posleen marched on. But China’s very rugged geography, and a principle of “deep defense” going back to Mao’s day, came to the rescue: the Chinese were finally able to stop the Posleen advance in the rugged borders of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou and points west, and in the surprisingly hard to get into interior of Manchuria, where they were able to hook up with the Russians and the Koreans, albeit at the loss of more than two thirds of their population.

The so-called “Asian block”, although due to many historically irreconcilable differences never a truly unified Bastion of Humanity, can be seen as the largest continuous area of human survival on the planet, including Russians, Indians, Chinese, and Koreans, and in many cases assistance given by one or another of the major powers was able to save another’s bacon. Korea benefitted geographically, being in constant geographical contact with the Chinese holdouts in Manchuria and with Russia, and geographically in being small, rugged, and cold enough that no efforts were made to invade until near the very end of the war. It also benefitted from the fact that Kim-Jong-Il took the whole “alien invasion” thing very seriously, and scrabbled for every bit of alien and foreign aid he could get to make his fortress state into an even better fortress. North Korean troops died in huge numbers on the Manchurian border to make sure that the Posleen would not reach the Yalu: in the end, the fact that those who returned alive, including a lot of rejuvenated Korean war veterans [8] looking for 50 years of progress, all noted that a rump Manchuria under alien monster siege was still much better off than North Korea was perhaps a major reason in Kim beginning serious reunification talks in 2007, leading to the reunion of 2011.

(The Posleen finally tried an invasion of Korea in 2009: their forces were contained in the rugged countryside and successfully destroyed with some Russian and Chinese help, although at the cost of turning nearly a fifth of South Korea into an irradiated wasteland. Thanks to years of tunnel-digging and training, only about 3.5 million South Koreans died in the process.)

It is to be noted that the Chinese were the first nation to successfully employ chemical warfare against the Posleen: the Posleen being immune to pussy stuff like nerve gas, the Chinese raised the stakes by producing the sort of chemicals that make concrete burn and remove your hand bones and all if you are careless enough to dip it in a bucket. Difficulties of the “all our production staff died and the building is still burning after three days” , plus the whole “poison your farmland for the next century” thing prevented them from ever using these on a scale sufficient to deal with the Space Centaur problem, but in those cases where they were employed often proved useful, Posleen soldiers with their skins and eyeballs melted off being of limited combat utility. The Russians, the British and the Indians would later duplicate these methods, the US preferring to stick with tried and true Ridiculously Wanked Artillery.

Russia as historically was protected by sheer size and General Winter, withdrawing as much of their population as possible beyond the Volga and creating defenses along the rivers and the mountain ranges, and rebuilding the industrial centers of the east. Russia also gained some time thanks to the Posleen simply not bothering to invade northern Russia at first, simply pushing west across the Ukraine to join up with their landings in Western Europe. Northern Russia (and, by implication, Siberia) really only were invaded at all because the Russians were proving a serious Threat in Being, not as bad as the Americans, but being a pain over a line of thousands of miles, supporting forces in the mountainous bits of Central Asia, and backing the Chinese and Koreans in the east. Not until a little over a year before the return of the Fleet would the Posleen break the Volga line, only to be unable to follow up on their victory as a brutally cold winter moved in and forced the Posleen forces back south. By the time they returned next late spring, the line had been rebuilt and reinforced with Chinese help, and of course there were still thousands of miles of Russia beyond the line: the “invade Russia north through central Asia and split Siberia in two” project didn’t work too well, either.

(One might note that the borders on the map are as at war’s end: the Russians held more of European Russia before the 2008 offensive).

Russia “only” lost a bit under half of its population, not counting refugees, a large percentage to food shortages in the third and fourth years of the war: the corruption and incompetence (to be fair, heavily Darhel-engineered incompetence) of the Russian leadership led to certain violent political changes spearheaded by rejuvenated veterans of the Red army. The present Russian Socialist Republic isn’t exactly the USSR, but it _has_ reoccupied the mostly depopulated Ukraine and Belorus, and has made something of a client state of the new “central Asian federation” arising from the mountain holdouts. (Russia’s total population is somewhat inflated by the refugees from Ukraine and Belorus which made it to Russia territory ahead of the Posleen hordes: they grumble about the direct incorporation of their homelands into Russia, but quietly).

India, invaded along its coasts in the second year of the war, suffered terribly, in part due to inability to create an effective joint defense plan with hostile neighbors. (The Taliban rulers of Afghanistan kept shifting between claiming they would fight off any invaders with Allah’s help and claiming the whole thing was a lie created by the international Jewish conspiracy to fully subjugate Islam to a world government). In the end only rumps of Pakistan and Afghanistan would survive within the common defense zone, and nearly thirty million Indian conscripts would die to buy the time to build defenses along the Ganges to save a vital strip of agricultural land. More than three quarters of the population of India would die: years later, India is still a nation in mourning.

Europe put up quite a fight in spite of all Darhel efforts to sabotage them, and for three years bled them terribly for every foot of ground, but lacked extra territory to swap for time, and much of its population and industry lay in lands stretching mostly flat to the sea. France’s efforts to hold the Masif Central proved unavailing in the face of the endless numbers of Posleen troops. The Ukraine and most of Poland fell to landings north of the Black Sea. For a remarkable time German, French, Polish and other troops held along the Rhine and the Vistula, but central Europe did not have the vast manpower of Asia to burn nor the vast continental resources of North America to drawn on, and they were slowly worn down no matter how many rejuvenated Nazis they sent to die horribly. The great agricultural basin of Hungary fell when the
Carpathian defensive ring was breached: and in 2008, the Rhine and Vistula frontiers were breached. There was an evacuation to the south and north into Scandinavia, and a rump European defensive sphere struggled on till the Fleet returned in the knotty alpine core of Europe, with a stubbornly held “tail” in the rugged Balkans, still repelling whatever the Posleen could throw at them, but no longer able to seriously affect the course of global battle. Denmark managed to survive on some of its islands, with the aid of the Swedes, Danes, Finns, and German refugees. Scandinavia took in so many refugees the most stringent rationing was needed to get through the winter of ‘08 and many later estimated that if the fleet had not returned in the fall of 2009, mass starvation could not have been avoided in the following winter. Over 30 million Germans, 35 million Frenchmen, and 45 million Italians died: the death tolls among Belgians, Dutch, Poles, and some of the Balkan peoples do not bear mentioning. The Pyrenees Bastion’s mere survival is considered a miracle.

A rump Britain survived in the north through a combination of technical skill, heroism, bloody dumb luck, and godawful British weather. A large percentage of the population was successfully evacuated to Ireland, which had some food production to spare, allowing losses to be kept to under 60% of the population.

The Goddamn Swiss, of course, got out fine, although they grumbled about the short rations and all the refugees crowding up their country.

Another curious little survival was the Caucuses. Initially meant to anchor the southern end of Russia’s defenses, the Caucuses were cut off when the Posleen in the Ukraine linked up with those in Central Asia. Joining forces with the Turks and the Persians, this land of mountains managed to survive even as the Turkish and Persian territories were ground down to almost nothing, having managed to reach the “more trouble than it’s worth/too small to be a real threat/nasty in winter” sweet spot. The long siege by man-eating monsters actually has managed to create enough of a sense of closeness to create a Federation, perhaps aided by so many Azeris dying horribly in the lowlands around the Kur river, which has made the Armenians much more forgiving. Currently their many foreign policy problem is a conflict with the Russians over their dubious talk about “previous borders” in reference to a number of northern mountain areas the Caucasians kept out of Posleen claws.

Japan took a strictly defensive/let’s wait for the fleet to come back approach, and with an extraordinary national effort including the development of massive hydroponic systems, clever use of alien antimatter power sources, adaptation of alien nanotech [9] managed to create a food production infrastructure which could operate entirely underground: rather than face the Posleen in open battle, the aliens would face an endless network of heavily defended underground bunkers, where even if they made it through the formidable outer defenses and broke in would have to fight their way through layers and layers of lethal traps before encountering Japanese citizen one, choking access with their own bodies, while hidden “sally ports” would allow violent surprise attacks by power-armored troops. [10] It worked: although the islands were overrun, the majority of the bunker system survived the war, although some parts of it were wrecked by Big Rocks From Space (see below) and since projections about the food supply situation had been somewhat optimistic (the Darhel had their fingers in that too) the last two years had a lot of Japanese (slowly, politely) starving. In the end, though, more than two thirds of the population of Japan would survive, although almost all children born in the last two years of the war would suffer long-term damage from infantile malnutrition.

Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East were hit the hardest, with horrendous zombie-apocalypse-type death tolls, and there remains much bitter debate on what else could have been done. The share of alien hardware given to the poorer parts of the globe was definitely not allocated on a per capita basis, and in spite of some foreign efforts to build up their capacities, when war came most of these nations had very little ability to build their own high-tech equipment or repair what they had received. They did get a lot of obsolescent first world equipment which would slow the Posleen but little, and (often under the table) a number of nuclear weapons which could really only be used as a sort of giant-scale suicide bomber. Nor was the first world willing to open wide the gates of immigration: resettling the poorest and the weakest was usually nixed on the basis of being largely unable to feed their own population if the Posleen did take the coastal lands. At best extra immigrants with vital skills or high level combat experience were allowed in with their immediate family: the Chinese and Indians took in a few million extra immigrants because they were relatively speaking a drop in the bucket. (The Chinese tended to rather strongly discriminate in favor of overseas Chinese, though).

(The story of those who escaped from the Posleen across trackless wilderness or by entirely inadequate boat across stormy seas, is an epic in of itself. The surprising number of people who escaped death in Latin America, Africa and SE Asia after the invasion and somehow made it to human-held territory is, depending on how one looks on it, either a triumph of the human spirit or so cripplingly sad.)

The things which happened along the US-Mexican border between the first landings in October of 2004 and the invasion of North Mexico by Posleen forces in April 2006 became at the end extremely ugly, and are generally swiftly glided past in the self-wanking accounts of the north American theatre by produced by the bulk of US historians. It remains unclear whether the attempt to create a unified Mexican-US defense line connecting the Rockies and the Sierra Madre was ever meant to succeed or was mostly propaganda to delay Mexican efforts to decamp north en masse.

It is certain that the Mexican remnant based out of the Yucatan jungle feels Mexico was betrayed by the US, and wants both the US out of its “reconstruction” mission in Northern Mexico and the (US-dominated) United Nations “stabilization” effort in central Mexico gone, as of right now.

Huge areas of the world are now under the control, more or less, of international forces under the somewhat vague aegis of the UN, looking for survivors and important human relics (art, etc), hunting down Posleen God-Kings in hiding and Posleen “regulars” gone feral, exterminating Posleen-imported plants and animals (see below), taking Posleencities apart for useful materials, and trying to adjudicate the claims of the various “survivor” regimes – those states which have emerged in hard-to-reach areas where humans held out more due to the Posleen not being interested in taking the trouble than their remaining combat abilities. Many of these states do not get along at all well either with each other or the representatives of those asshole big powers which left them to sink or swim on their own.

The eastern lowlands of Latin America were overrun, with some remnant states surviving in the mountains and jungles on the basis of being no threat and a pain in the ass to actually get to. These remnant regimes are now attempting to reestablish control over the former area of their states, often with only a fraction of their former population, and often with more than one regime claiming to be the “proper” successor, or in some cases claiming to be the successor of multiple states, such as the Central American jungle remnants who have joined forces to claim to be the proper inheritors of most of central America. The Brazilians at least have a clear enough grasp of their limitations to let the international forces manage most of their formerly enormous country.

Africa is also a charnel house, although a surprising number of nomadic people managed to survive in the Saharan wastes, where the Posleen found little to eat or loot after the few cities of any size were destroyed. The Alliance of the Sands has perhaps the most chutzpah in terms of territorial claims of any people on earth, claiming all of north Africa as their “heritage.” A few warlord states are causing headaches for UN forces in the central jungles, while a surprisingly functional remnant of south Africa survived in the mountains in and around around Lesotho, and has expanded its influence across much of old South Africa. (Leaving most of the Cape region be: it’s mostly desert, after all). The New Holy Empire of Ethiopia, which ascribes its survival to possession of the Ark of the Covenant as well as mountainous inaccessibility, is pushing for its pre-1991 borders and perhaps beyond. In the meantime, some members of the larger US and European African diasporas have started a colonization effort to reconstruct their shattered and depopulated homelands.
As in the case of the Sahara, some Arabs managed to avoid the Posleen and survive by holing up in the most desolate areas of the peninsula, although the smaller size of the peninsular desert means that there are fewer of them. Quite a few of these people are in fact Jewish. The surviving international Muslim community is rebuilding Mecca and Medina, and the Holy Kaaba stone has been recovered from where the faithful hid it (although there are the nay-saying jerks who claim it is a duplicate).

The former territory of Israel is under international control, and given the way the last time went, most the remaining world powers would really prefer if it stayed that way.

SE Asia and the islands are a somewhat intermediate case, with successful holdout regimes in the mountains and jungles of the north backed by the Chinese and the Indians, but utter devastation further south. There are a few holdout regimes in parts of Indonesia, and one in the mountain-circled north of the Philippines, where the Japanese, perhaps feeling a touch of historical guilt and wondering if concentrating entirely on saving their own skins made them look bad, dispatched forces to help. (They also offered to send some to Vietnam and its neighbors, but were turned down).

Australia was overrun, although the deserts of the west were never really occupied due to a lack of edibles, and Tasmania was simply overlooked.

It is at this point I must introduce the Lucky Bastard category of surviving nation, those that through sheer insignificance and geographical isolation the Posleen never bothered to invade. The feudal-type society of the Posleen requires land for status, both for the local Top God-King and the lesser ones who are his allies and dependents. Fiefs must be distributed, so to speak. Small islands not next to something valuable are not going to contribute much to ones status. As a result, a number of small islands, and some bigger ones, simply lucked out and were never conquered by the Posleen, the most notable cases being Tasmania, New Zealand (middle of nowhere, no real industry to loot, thinly populated, looks wet and miserable) and Ireland (claimed by the Posleen God-King heading up the invasion of Britain. Bled his forces white trying to take the big island, never got around to conquering the small one. Eventually he was killed and his conquests became an appanage of a God-King centered in France, who concentrated his efforts in Central Europe and generally neglected further conquests in the isles). A lot of Pacific islands belong in this category, although in a few cases a Posleen God-King observed a satellite shot of one of those lovely Pacific land-and-sea-scapes and said “I want that.” Hawaii avoided conquest for a while, but sometime after the Posleen came to really hate the Americans they found out that Hawaii belonged to them, and leveled the place out of sheer spite.

The Lucky Bastard category should be distinguished from the Too Bloody Cold category, which includes Iceland and the south polar continent. There remains some debate as to whether the Scandinavian countries belong in Too Bloody Cold or Lucky Bastards, so to prevent angry debate they are merged in one category on the map.

The planetary environment has been somewhat negatively impacted by a Posleen population peaking at over 12 billion: during expansion stages the Posleen tend to forage for their meals, and are not picky. Most of the larger African mammals are now extinct outside of zoos in the better off human nations, and similar conditions prevail in Latin America and much of SE Asia, although the skill of jungle life in Not Being Seen means that canopy species at least have survived. Large areas of forest have been cut down to make more farmland, although the fact that Posleen can live off grass at a pinch, combined with their ability to go essentially sessile and live while eating very little when there is no fighting, planting, or building to do means that they have not converted quite as much of the occupied planet to farmland as you would expect.

After settling in, Posleen tend to take over local agricultural practices, supplemented by fast-growing edible “weed species” from their home planet and food animals which breed with little Posleen supervision, including such charming creatures as the omnivorous Abats, which look like a rabbit-sized cross between a rat and a pillbug, hop along on a single rear foot, and attack en masse with savage rat-teeth anyone who gets too close to their eight-twelve foot high nest-mounds. Or the Grat, an Abat predator brought along to keep the Abat population in control, which resembles a three-inch long wasp and combines a sting more lethal than a black widow spider with an even more protective attitude towards its nests. Or the Wub, or as humans call it, the “Crocohog.” Displacement and competition from these species have done further damage to the environment, and some despair of ever fully restoring Earth’s ecosystem to normal, at least in the tropics.

The world was colder for a while, although temperatures are now beginning to rebound: the various atomic detonations and the many burned cities contributed their bit, but the biggest contributor was kinetic bombardment: the Posleen do not use atomics, since it poisons the land they intend to feed off, but on occasion have used guided Big Rocks [11] From Space as weapons, Posleen God-Kings, in spite of cultural similarities, being more imaginative than Race commanders. Fortunately for human defenders, the Posleennever got very good at _aiming_, the Aldenata ships lacking an easily used app for that sort of thing, and the Posleen eventually gave up on the practice, but not before kicking enough crap into the atmosphere to ensure the winter of 2008 was particularly nasty, probably sabotaging their effort to kick the Russians east of the Urals.

Then the Fleet came and used a shitload of kinetic weapons against the Posleen forces on Earth. 2009-2010 was a _nasty_ winter.

There is a tremendous lot to do. Most of the planet needs reconstruction. New technologies to be put to the uses of peace rather than war. Further wars to plan for: there are still trillions of Posleen out there, and they are not unaware of what has happened on Earth. And the ongoing war, the secret war, the one against the internal enemy and their Darhel puppeteers, is just starting to heat up.

[1] Not genetic engineers, of course.

[2] Something Unspeakable hasn’t shown up yet…

[3] The lower level stuff was mostly outsourced to the Tchpth

[4] And the Tchpth who didn’t wander off into the vague immensity of philosophy became glorified catalogers, as funds for truly innovative research dried up. The Darhel expended a fair amount of effort in keeping the Tchpth equivalent of deeply conservative Professors Emeritus buttered up, and were always happy to fund research into the fine details of effects of environmental conditions on sand formation on a random sample of ten thousand or so water-ocean worlds.

[5] They were lying

[6] Humans were meant to think fumble-fingered, rather than actively malevolent.

[7] Rather a lot more than China had in 2000. But then pretty much everyone increased their nuclear arsenals with the run-up to the invasion, and often smuggled atomic weapons to third-world nations in hopes they would kill a lot of Posleen with them (hey, if they become radioactive wastelands, mores the pity, but better them then us, right?)

[8] One of the ways the Galactics helped out was with a limited supply of rejuvenation medication [a] which would allow experienced veterans from former wars to return to combat rather than "assisting" with long rambling stories from wheelchairs. The return to active duty of tens of millions of men (and some women) with political ideals sometimes decades out of date had a variety of effects, not all good.
a. A weaker form of which has been in use for centuries as the ultimate bribe.

[9] Galactic nanotech food-making machines proved curiously hard to maintain and keep operational on Earth. We’re not sure why, but we’re working on the problem, the Darhel kept reassuring.

[10] Yes, the Americans have them too.

[11] Not “Impact” big, just ones capable of making big-ass-nuclear-explosion level blasts without all the fallout

Description
A somewhat modified take of John Ringo's Earth Vs the Posleen.

First, the Very Long background...

The Aldenata were great and powerful, and great and powerful dicks. Not only did they conquer and enslave their enemies (and those they suspected would eventually be their enemies) but also genetically reengineered them to be incapable of violence, incapable of violent rebellion in the future.

The Darhel were slender humanoid beings, vaguely elf-like and somewhat smaller than humans, but rather stronger per pound, and with empathic abilities that made them masters of manipulation. Their sharp teeth reveal their past as a predatory species (the Darhel were omnivores, but preferred meat). Their civilization was a mighty one, and they resisted the Aldenata more strongly and cleverly than any other race they encountered. The Aldenata were never able to entirely remove the capacity for hatred from the Darhel, and for their stubbornness they were made into obligate vegetarians to whom any deliberate commission of violence against animal life and intelligence would bring brain death.

The crab-like Tchpth were brilliant scientists, but had not developed far enough to save themselves. The Aldenata were fully successful in removing their capacity for violence, and narrowed their mental focus to create a race of usefully obsessive nerds. The Indowy, short teddy-bear like, blue-skinned creatures covered with green fuzz (actually a plant symbiote rather than fur) were another success as a galactic labor force, although they never were as unskilled in plotting as the Aldenata, and later the Darhel, believed.

Over time, the Aldenata embarked on a larger scale project, to create a galactic “perfect” society, with themselves at the top. The technically skilled and creative Indowy would be the builders and manufacturers, and the brains of their best would serve as organic computing elements in the nanotech assembly plants. The Tchpth would be philosophers and doctors [1] and scientists (the Aldenata were of course superior technologically, but didn’t have the sheer enthusiasm of the Tchpth: they were happy enough to let properly tamed races handle the tedious bits), and the Posleen – a race of tough omnivores with a hive-like social structure – would be the warriors, to fight off any outside threats not needing the Aldenata’s personal attention. The Darhel would be, essentially, middle management – handling all the details of day-to-day planetary management without actually holding any real power, which would always remain in the manipulatory appendages of the Aldenata.

The “perfect society” was still very much a work in progress (the Posleen even more so – not ready to interact with other subject races, for one thing) when the Aldenata stopped answering their phone calls. Upon investigation, their planets (the Aldenata did not mix with their subject races at home) were abandoned, their great cities mere shells, all of their more advanced technology deliberately broken down by nanomachines, and the Aldenata themselves were nowhere to be found. What had happened to them remains a mystery till today: some claim the Aldenata had fled in funk and shame at all the damage they had done to other races, but most consider that wishful thinking. Others think the Aldenata had found some way to transcend to a non-physical or at least non-biological form and abandoned their planets (and their subject races) as no longer useful to them. Still others, parsing certain obscure research topics assigned to the Tchpth not long before their departure, think they discovered something amazing in distant galaxies, and left to seek it out – or in another version, discovered something so terrifying that even a hundred thousand year plus head start [2] wasn’t enough to prevent them from fleeing at top speed in the opposite direction.

As a result of the massive disruptions arising from the disappearance of the galaxy’s absolute rulers, the Darhel were able to take over the financial and legal systems of the galactic society, and combined with their control of much of the managerial functions of the galaxy [3], became effectively the new ruling class. Stability and steady growth (through colonization and multiplication of inputs rather than increase in individual output) became the watchword for the new “Galactic Federation” for the next hundred thousand years: technological growth was carefully kept to a minimum to avoid disruption, and an utterly hierarchical and top-down social structure was encouraged for all other species, with the aid of elitist “1/10 of 1%” collaborators. Not everyone was happy, of course, but Darhel rule was less crushingly arrogant and casually ruthless than that of the Aldenata, and eventually things became Just the Way Things Are, even as the majority of the Indowy race descended to essentially the status of slave labor. [4] A couple races died out as Surplus to Requirement: for instance, the Toloren, which the Aldenata had created as a race of priests to preach the glories of submission, the superior nature of Aldenata morality, and the holy nature of Aldenata rule found themselves without employment, and in the “work or starve” society that the Darhel created, most of them did the latter. (A few reportedly survive on Tchpth worlds as combination research subjects and sources of entertainment).

Things were slightly shaken when the Himmit, a race of chameleons resembling frogs with heads at both ends, made themselves know to Galactic leaderhsip, claiming to be a race that the Aldenata had engineered for their purposes not just as pacifists but also paranoid experts on concealment. [5] With their own internal economy and the location of their home planets carefully concealed, they never really came under Darhel control, but they did various services in return for certain payments, and were useful enough to the Darhel for their presence to be tolerated. (Not that the Darhel were likely to be able to keep them from sneaking around if they decided otherwise).

Meanwhile the Posleen, six-limbed crocodile-centaurs, remained confined to the worlds they had been placed for experimentation, a crude and unfinished project, a race where a tiny percentage of “officers” as intelligent as humans (Kessentai among themselves, to be known to humans as “God-Kings”) ruled over vast hordes of barely sapient troops (the Oolt’os). In some ways they were a remarkable achievement: successfully reengineered to live off almost anything organic and shake off any poison or chemical toxin, successfully made fearless, capable of genetically passing on useful learned knowledge, and automatically obedient to the commands of Aldenata minds. On the other hand, they were a race with their previous complex hive hierarchy brutally simplified, their capacity for common sense mutilated in the name of fearlessness and aggressiveness, and with minimal capacity for technological progress. A race so compulsively fertile and incapable of solving that issue that on long settled planets most of the young were either allowed to eat each other or eaten by the Kessentai simply to keep the population under control. Unfortunately for everyone else, one of those worlds happened to have an overlooked Aldenata automated war machine factory buried under a mountain range, and eventually an earthquake uncovered an entrance. It took thousands of years for the Posleen to figure out how to talk to it and command it, and even then they never really understood how it worked. But what they learned was good enough for them – and bad enough for everyone else. A hundred thousand years after the Aldenata departed and abandoned their experiments, and about 150-175 years B.I. (Before Internet) the Posleen exploded across the galaxy.

Not every intelligent race in the galaxy had been re-engineered by the Aldenata, of course. A few fought to extinction rather than be modified, some were let be since for physical and environmental reasons they were extremely unlikely to ever become technologically advanced space travelers, and in a couple cases aliens were so biologically strange that the Aldenata ended up exterminating them due to being unable to figure out how to change them. And of course, with so very, very, very many stars and planets, the occasional species yet to advance beyond “pointed stick” in the arms race were just overlooked. Humanity was in fact discovered about 3000 B.I. by the Darhel, who carried out a slow and cautious mapping of the unknown parts of the galaxy through the beautifully stealthy Himmit. There might be emerging space-travelling races _not_ genetically conditioned to pacifism, after all. Humanity alarmed the Darhel – they were almost as fierce as the Darhel themselves had used to be, and making steady, if pre-scientific, technological progress. But they were also potentially very useful if the Darhel found a race that could fight back – so from before the rise of the Roman Empire on, humans in positions of authority found voices speaking to them from the darkness, promising great things in exchange for small favors…

Fighting the Posleen was fundamentally difficult for a civilization composed of species genetically engineered for non-violence: even “push-button warfare” tended to kill the Darhel, would only be done by the Himmit if the Posleen would have no way of knowing where the button-pusher was, and was in any case very hard under any circumstances for their peaceful natures (COUGH COUGH),and was so profoundly repulsive to Indowy and Tchpth as to require deep conditioning to detach the user from an understanding what they were doing, which did not exactly lead to combat efficiency, or "sanity". Artificial intelligences were not workable either: not because (as humanity was told) A.I. will inevitably swing into Destroy All Biologicals mode, but because AI designed to defend the Galactic Federation and smart enough to win wars with the Posleen would invariably come to the conclusion that the worst enemies of the Galactic Federation were internal ones.

There was also the problem that the Aldenata machine factories of the Posleen operated on a full scale automated mass production principle, while the fine quality machines of the Galactic were assembled piece by piece with slow-acting nanotech in such a specialized and precise manner that they were essentially “hand-made” by innumerable Indowy specialists. Mass production as a concept was not something that the Galactics could not grasp – indeed, it was in use for the simple galactic equivalents of bricks and mortar and underwear - and when the mature principle was introduced to them from Earth the Tchpth could easily work out how it might be adopted to Galactic technology, but aside from the resistance to changing their way of doing things by the conservative elite of the Indowy, there was the fact that the adoption of such techniques would fundamentally change the galactic economy, and quite possibly destroy the Darhel’s control of the Galactic Federation.

Humanity would have to be the solution, the warrior race the Aldenata had planned for their galactic society but never managed to complete. Of course, not too many humans; just enough to stop the Posleen advance, which in time would lead to the collapse of Posleen society as the rulers of overcrowded and resource-depleted worlds turned their guns on eachother. A whole planet of them was seriously surplus to requirements. A whole planet of them, armed with technology nearly up to Galactic levels, would be even more dangerous than the Posleen. Humans would have to lose their home planet.
Of course, making sure that humanity lost the battle for their home planet while making it look like the Galactic Federation was doing its fumble-fingered [6] best to help would be tricky. But the Darhel had by this point considerable experience in manipulating humans, and humans were well known for their ability to rationalize the most chuckleheaded actions if personal ego, defense of identity, greed, religion, or nationalism were involved. It really wouldn’t take very much to get the humans to make all the wrong choices, all the while thinking they were doing the Right Thing and It Was Someone Else’s Fault – certainly never coming within leagues of thinking they were betraying humanity.

Unfortunately, some of the Indowy had been on to the Darhel for a very long time. And they - along with some of the Tchpth, and certain sub-groups of the Himmit - weren’t going to let an opportunity like this pass.

************************************************** *****

2015: a bit over five years after the return of the Fleet and it smashing the Posleen forces to scrap.

The five years of the Battle of Earth had killed off more than 2/3 of humanity, but had failed in its objective from both Posleen and Darhel points of view. Over a billion and a half survived.

Some 20 billion Posleen had died. (Only 2 billion had actually _landed_ on Earth, but Posleen breed – and mature – fast). Some tens of millions survive, now the ones hiding in the hills and the forests of those nations they successfully depopulated: reduced to little more than smart animals in the case of the troops, to Crazed Survivalists in the case of the few surviving ruling or “God-King” class Posleen.

Aside from behind the scenes intelligence help and tech transfer from Galactics quite fed up with Darhel rule (working with some very old anti-Darhel secret human organizations, some existing from well before any Indowy conspirators were sneaked to Earth on Himmit spaceships), humanity had also benefitted from various natural weaknesses of thePosleen – their lack of experience in fighting skilled opponents, the low intelligence of the bulk of the species, and their poor adaptability to certain climates and terrains.

One would think the four-legged Posleen would be better, not worse, than humans on mountains, but their centauroidal build actually made them top heavy and prone to going ass-over kettle on steep slopes. They also tended to sink in swamps and were very unhappy with cold weather – “clothes” other than combat harnesses and gear was essentially an alien concept to the Posleen, and while warmblooded their at best improvisational efforts to deal with northern hemisphere winters tended to lead to a lot of frozen to death Posleen. Indeed, the Posleen were very reluctant to try and invade such areas as Canada and northern Russia, and avoided invading the Scandinavian Peninsula entirely, on the basis of it being too cold and lacking in useful resources while being too thinly populated to ever become a lethal threat to the Posleen hold on the rest of the planet. (Sure, it would be cleared of its human population eventually, but not until after the more vital parts of the planet were conquered. )

The United States came out of the mess the best, with “only” something more than one third of its population killed, having managed to create a fairly secure series of redoubts out of the rocky mountains in the west and the Mississippi-Tennessee river- Appalachian line in the east, combined with manufacturing and high tech advantages that made up for the fairly nugatory trickle of Galactic supplies being sneaked by the Himmit past Posleen defenses to island bases in the Pacific. Of course, the very fact that it was the strongest opponent also meant that in the later years of the Battle it received more thorough and personal attention from the most powerful Posleen leaders than anywhere else. The US northern plains were also never permanently secured by the Posleen due to their horrid winters, but the flat country’s vulnerability to attack made much of the area a no-man’s land rather than a place safe for refugees. Canada survived as “America’s backstop”, the difficulties of pushing through the Coastal Range and across the St. Lawrence, combined with the need to concentrate on the US and the fact that Canada was such a frozen hell sparing most of the country from occupation.

The Chinese seriously pissed off the Darhel by figuring out how to force them to pay for a rather larger share of the world’s defense budget than they had planned (the Darhel’s influence in China, after a century of radical political change, was rather less than they would have liked). The Darhel in turn made a special effort to make sure Chinese military strategy was misinformed and based on incorrect assumptions: for one thing, the Chinese were caught by surprise when rather than landing right on the coasts as expected, the initial Posleen landing was right smack in the middle of the north Chinese lowland plain near the Grand Canal. The mass use of nuclear weapons [7] to try and slow down their advance wasn’t helpful, either: planes and missiles both were easy meat to Posleen air defenses, with only miniscule percentages getting through: a great swathe of China was left contaminated by a fine powder of plutonium from bombs destroyed mid-air, through which the cancer-proof and cockroach-radiation-resistant Posleen marched on. But China’s very rugged geography, and a principle of “deep defense” going back to Mao’s day, came to the rescue: the Chinese were finally able to stop the Posleen advance in the rugged borders of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou and points west, and in the surprisingly hard to get into interior of Manchuria, where they were able to hook up with the Russians and the Koreans, albeit at the loss of more than two thirds of their population.

The so-called “Asian block”, although due to many historically irreconcilable differences never a truly unified Bastion of Humanity, can be seen as the largest continuous area of human survival on the planet, including Russians, Indians, Chinese, and Koreans, and in many cases assistance given by one or another of the major powers was able to save another’s bacon. Korea benefitted geographically, being in constant geographical contact with the Chinese holdouts in Manchuria and with Russia, and geographically in being small, rugged, and cold enough that no efforts were made to invade until near the very end of the war. It also benefitted from the fact that Kim-Jong-Il took the whole “alien invasion” thing very seriously, and scrabbled for every bit of alien and foreign aid he could get to make his fortress state into an even better fortress. North Korean troops died in huge numbers on the Manchurian border to make sure that the Posleen would not reach the Yalu: in the end, the fact that those who returned alive, including a lot of rejuvenated Korean war veterans [8] looking for 50 years of progress, all noted that a rump Manchuria under alien monster siege was still much better off than North Korea was perhaps a major reason in Kim beginning serious reunification talks in 2007, leading to the reunion of 2011.

(The Posleen finally tried an invasion of Korea in 2009: their forces were contained in the rugged countryside and successfully destroyed with some Russian and Chinese help, although at the cost of turning nearly a fifth of South Korea into an irradiated wasteland. Thanks to years of tunnel-digging and training, only about 3.5 million South Koreans died in the process.)

It is to be noted that the Chinese were the first nation to successfully employ chemical warfare against the Posleen: the Posleen being immune to pussy stuff like nerve gas, the Chinese raised the stakes by producing the sort of chemicals that make concrete burn and remove your hand bones and all if you are careless enough to dip it in a bucket. Difficulties of the “all our production staff died and the building is still burning after three days” , plus the whole “poison your farmland for the next century” thing prevented them from ever using these on a scale sufficient to deal with the Space Centaur problem, but in those cases where they were employed often proved useful, Posleen soldiers with their skins and eyeballs melted off being of limited combat utility. The Russians, the British and the Indians would later duplicate these methods, the US preferring to stick with tried and true Ridiculously Wanked Artillery.

Russia as historically was protected by sheer size and General Winter, withdrawing as much of their population as possible beyond the Volga and creating defenses along the rivers and the mountain ranges, and rebuilding the industrial centers of the east. Russia also gained some time thanks to the Posleen simply not bothering to invade northern Russia at first, simply pushing west across the Ukraine to join up with their landings in Western Europe. Northern Russia (and, by implication, Siberia) really only were invaded at all because the Russians were proving a serious Threat in Being, not as bad as the Americans, but being a pain over a line of thousands of miles, supporting forces in the mountainous bits of Central Asia, and backing the Chinese and Koreans in the east. Not until a little over a year before the return of the Fleet would the Posleen break the Volga line, only to be unable to follow up on their victory as a brutally cold winter moved in and forced the Posleen forces back south. By the time they returned next late spring, the line had been rebuilt and reinforced with Chinese help, and of course there were still thousands of miles of Russia beyond the line: the “invade Russia north through central Asia and split Siberia in two” project didn’t work too well, either.

(One might note that the borders on the map are as at war’s end: the Russians held more of European Russia before the 2008 offensive).

Russia “only” lost a bit under half of its population, not counting refugees, a large percentage to food shortages in the third and fourth years of the war: the corruption and incompetence (to be fair, heavily Darhel-engineered incompetence) of the Russian leadership led to certain violent political changes spearheaded by rejuvenated veterans of the Red army. The present Russian Socialist Republic isn’t exactly the USSR, but it _has_ reoccupied the mostly depopulated Ukraine and Belorus, and has made something of a client state of the new “central Asian federation” arising from the mountain holdouts. (Russia’s total population is somewhat inflated by the refugees from Ukraine and Belorus which made it to Russia territory ahead of the Posleen hordes: they grumble about the direct incorporation of their homelands into Russia, but quietly).

India, invaded along its coasts in the second year of the war, suffered terribly, in part due to inability to create an effective joint defense plan with hostile neighbors. (The Taliban rulers of Afghanistan kept shifting between claiming they would fight off any invaders with Allah’s help and claiming the whole thing was a lie created by the international Jewish conspiracy to fully subjugate Islam to a world government). In the end only rumps of Pakistan and Afghanistan would survive within the common defense zone, and nearly thirty million Indian conscripts would die to buy the time to build defenses along the Ganges to save a vital strip of agricultural land. More than three quarters of the population of India would die: years later, India is still a nation in mourning.

Europe put up quite a fight in spite of all Darhel efforts to sabotage them, and for three years bled them terribly for every foot of ground, but lacked extra territory to swap for time, and much of its population and industry lay in lands stretching mostly flat to the sea. France’s efforts to hold the Masif Central proved unavailing in the face of the endless numbers of Posleen troops. The Ukraine and most of Poland fell to landings north of the Black Sea. For a remarkable time German, French, Polish and other troops held along the Rhine and the Vistula, but central Europe did not have the vast manpower of Asia to burn nor the vast continental resources of North America to drawn on, and they were slowly worn down no matter how many rejuvenated Nazis they sent to die horribly. The great agricultural basin of Hungary fell when the
Carpathian defensive ring was breached: and in 2008, the Rhine and Vistula frontiers were breached. There was an evacuation to the south and north into Scandinavia, and a rump European defensive sphere struggled on till the Fleet returned in the knotty alpine core of Europe, with a stubbornly held “tail” in the rugged Balkans, still repelling whatever the Posleen could throw at them, but no longer able to seriously affect the course of global battle. Denmark managed to survive on some of its islands, with the aid of the Swedes, Danes, Finns, and German refugees. Scandinavia took in so many refugees the most stringent rationing was needed to get through the winter of ‘08 and many later estimated that if the fleet had not returned in the fall of 2009, mass starvation could not have been avoided in the following winter. Over 30 million Germans, 35 million Frenchmen, and 45 million Italians died: the death tolls among Belgians, Dutch, Poles, and some of the Balkan peoples do not bear mentioning. The Pyrenees Bastion’s mere survival is considered a miracle.

A rump Britain survived in the north through a combination of technical skill, heroism, bloody dumb luck, and godawful British weather. A large percentage of the population was successfully evacuated to Ireland, which had some food production to spare, allowing losses to be kept to under 60% of the population.

The Goddamn Swiss, of course, got out fine, although they grumbled about the short rations and all the refugees crowding up their country.

Another curious little survival was the Caucuses. Initially meant to anchor the southern end of Russia’s defenses, the Caucuses were cut off when the Posleen in the Ukraine linked up with those in Central Asia. Joining forces with the Turks and the Persians, this land of mountains managed to survive even as the Turkish and Persian territories were ground down to almost nothing, having managed to reach the “more trouble than it’s worth/too small to be a real threat/nasty in winter” sweet spot. The long siege by man-eating monsters actually has managed to create enough of a sense of closeness to create a Federation, perhaps aided by so many Azeris dying horribly in the lowlands around the Kur river, which has made the Armenians much more forgiving. Currently their many foreign policy problem is a conflict with the Russians over their dubious talk about “previous borders” in reference to a number of northern mountain areas the Caucasians kept out of Posleen claws.

Japan took a strictly defensive/let’s wait for the fleet to come back approach, and with an extraordinary national effort including the development of massive hydroponic systems, clever use of alien antimatter power sources, adaptation of alien nanotech [9] managed to create a food production infrastructure which could operate entirely underground: rather than face the Posleen in open battle, the aliens would face an endless network of heavily defended underground bunkers, where even if they made it through the formidable outer defenses and broke in would have to fight their way through layers and layers of lethal traps before encountering Japanese citizen one, choking access with their own bodies, while hidden “sally ports” would allow violent surprise attacks by power-armored troops. [10] It worked: although the islands were overrun, the majority of the bunker system survived the war, although some parts of it were wrecked by Big Rocks From Space (see below) and since projections about the food supply situation had been somewhat optimistic (the Darhel had their fingers in that too) the last two years had a lot of Japanese (slowly, politely) starving. In the end, though, more than two thirds of the population of Japan would survive, although almost all children born in the last two years of the war would suffer long-term damage from infantile malnutrition.

Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East were hit the hardest, with horrendous zombie-apocalypse-type death tolls, and there remains much bitter debate on what else could have been done. The share of alien hardware given to the poorer parts of the globe was definitely not allocated on a per capita basis, and in spite of some foreign efforts to build up their capacities, when war came most of these nations had very little ability to build their own high-tech equipment or repair what they had received. They did get a lot of obsolescent first world equipment which would slow the Posleen but little, and (often under the table) a number of nuclear weapons which could really only be used as a sort of giant-scale suicide bomber. Nor was the first world willing to open wide the gates of immigration: resettling the poorest and the weakest was usually nixed on the basis of being largely unable to feed their own population if the Posleen did take the coastal lands. At best extra immigrants with vital skills or high level combat experience were allowed in with their immediate family: the Chinese and Indians took in a few million extra immigrants because they were relatively speaking a drop in the bucket. (The Chinese tended to rather strongly discriminate in favor of overseas Chinese, though).

(The story of those who escaped from the Posleen across trackless wilderness or by entirely inadequate boat across stormy seas, is an epic in of itself. The surprising number of people who escaped death in Latin America, Africa and SE Asia after the invasion and somehow made it to human-held territory is, depending on how one looks on it, either a triumph of the human spirit or so cripplingly sad.)

The things which happened along the US-Mexican border between the first landings in October of 2004 and the invasion of North Mexico by Posleen forces in April 2006 became at the end extremely ugly, and are generally swiftly glided past in the self-wanking accounts of the north American theatre by produced by the bulk of US historians. It remains unclear whether the attempt to create a unified Mexican-US defense line connecting the Rockies and the Sierra Madre was ever meant to succeed or was mostly propaganda to delay Mexican efforts to decamp north en masse.

It is certain that the Mexican remnant based out of the Yucatan jungle feels Mexico was betrayed by the US, and wants both the US out of its “reconstruction” mission in Northern Mexico and the (US-dominated) United Nations “stabilization” effort in central Mexico gone, as of right now.

Huge areas of the world are now under the control, more or less, of international forces under the somewhat vague aegis of the UN, looking for survivors and important human relics (art, etc), hunting down Posleen God-Kings in hiding and Posleen “regulars” gone feral, exterminating Posleen-imported plants and animals (see below), taking Posleencities apart for useful materials, and trying to adjudicate the claims of the various “survivor” regimes – those states which have emerged in hard-to-reach areas where humans held out more due to the Posleen not being interested in taking the trouble than their remaining combat abilities. Many of these states do not get along at all well either with each other or the representatives of those asshole big powers which left them to sink or swim on their own.

The eastern lowlands of Latin America were overrun, with some remnant states surviving in the mountains and jungles on the basis of being no threat and a pain in the ass to actually get to. These remnant regimes are now attempting to reestablish control over the former area of their states, often with only a fraction of their former population, and often with more than one regime claiming to be the “proper” successor, or in some cases claiming to be the successor of multiple states, such as the Central American jungle remnants who have joined forces to claim to be the proper inheritors of most of central America. The Brazilians at least have a clear enough grasp of their limitations to let the international forces manage most of their formerly enormous country.

Africa is also a charnel house, although a surprising number of nomadic people managed to survive in the Saharan wastes, where the Posleen found little to eat or loot after the few cities of any size were destroyed. The Alliance of the Sands has perhaps the most chutzpah in terms of territorial claims of any people on earth, claiming all of north Africa as their “heritage.” A few warlord states are causing headaches for UN forces in the central jungles, while a surprisingly functional remnant of south Africa survived in the mountains in and around around Lesotho, and has expanded its influence across much of old South Africa. (Leaving most of the Cape region be: it’s mostly desert, after all). The New Holy Empire of Ethiopia, which ascribes its survival to possession of the Ark of the Covenant as well as mountainous inaccessibility, is pushing for its pre-1991 borders and perhaps beyond. In the meantime, some members of the larger US and European African diasporas have started a colonization effort to reconstruct their shattered and depopulated homelands.
As in the case of the Sahara, some Arabs managed to avoid the Posleen and survive by holing up in the most desolate areas of the peninsula, although the smaller size of the peninsular desert means that there are fewer of them. Quite a few of these people are in fact Jewish. The surviving international Muslim community is rebuilding Mecca and Medina, and the Holy Kaaba stone has been recovered from where the faithful hid it (although there are the nay-saying jerks who claim it is a duplicate).

The former territory of Israel is under international control, and given the way the last time went, most the remaining world powers would really prefer if it stayed that way.

SE Asia and the islands are a somewhat intermediate case, with successful holdout regimes in the mountains and jungles of the north backed by the Chinese and the Indians, but utter devastation further south. There are a few holdout regimes in parts of Indonesia, and one in the mountain-circled north of the Philippines, where the Japanese, perhaps feeling a touch of historical guilt and wondering if concentrating entirely on saving their own skins made them look bad, dispatched forces to help. (They also offered to send some to Vietnam and its neighbors, but were turned down).

Australia was overrun, although the deserts of the west were never really occupied due to a lack of edibles, and Tasmania was simply overlooked.

It is at this point I must introduce the Lucky Bastard category of surviving nation, those that through sheer insignificance and geographical isolation the Posleen never bothered to invade. The feudal-type society of the Posleen requires land for status, both for the local Top God-King and the lesser ones who are his allies and dependents. Fiefs must be distributed, so to speak. Small islands not next to something valuable are not going to contribute much to ones status. As a result, a number of small islands, and some bigger ones, simply lucked out and were never conquered by the Posleen, the most notable cases being Tasmania, New Zealand (middle of nowhere, no real industry to loot, thinly populated, looks wet and miserable) and Ireland (claimed by the Posleen God-King heading up the invasion of Britain. Bled his forces white trying to take the big island, never got around to conquering the small one. Eventually he was killed and his conquests became an appanage of a God-King centered in France, who concentrated his efforts in Central Europe and generally neglected further conquests in the isles). A lot of Pacific islands belong in this category, although in a few cases a Posleen God-King observed a satellite shot of one of those lovely Pacific land-and-sea-scapes and said “I want that.” Hawaii avoided conquest for a while, but sometime after the Posleen came to really hate the Americans they found out that Hawaii belonged to them, and leveled the place out of sheer spite.

The Lucky Bastard category should be distinguished from the Too Bloody Cold category, which includes Iceland and the south polar continent. There remains some debate as to whether the Scandinavian countries belong in Too Bloody Cold or Lucky Bastards, so to prevent angry debate they are merged in one category on the map.

The planetary environment has been somewhat negatively impacted by a Posleen population peaking at over 12 billion: during expansion stages the Posleen tend to forage for their meals, and are not picky. Most of the larger African mammals are now extinct outside of zoos in the better off human nations, and similar conditions prevail in Latin America and much of SE Asia, although the skill of jungle life in Not Being Seen means that canopy species at least have survived. Large areas of forest have been cut down to make more farmland, although the fact that Posleen can live off grass at a pinch, combined with their ability to go essentially sessile and live while eating very little when there is no fighting, planting, or building to do means that they have not converted quite as much of the occupied planet to farmland as you would expect.

After settling in, Posleen tend to take over local agricultural practices, supplemented by fast-growing edible “weed species” from their home planet and food animals which breed with little Posleen supervision, including such charming creatures as the omnivorous Abats, which look like a rabbit-sized cross between a rat and a pillbug, hop along on a single rear foot, and attack en masse with savage rat-teeth anyone who gets too close to their eight-twelve foot high nest-mounds. Or the Grat, an Abat predator brought along to keep the Abat population in control, which resembles a three-inch long wasp and combines a sting more lethal than a black widow spider with an even more protective attitude towards its nests. Or the Wub, or as humans call it, the “Crocohog.” Displacement and competition from these species have done further damage to the environment, and some despair of ever fully restoring Earth’s ecosystem to normal, at least in the tropics.

The world was colder for a while, although temperatures are now beginning to rebound: the various atomic detonations and the many burned cities contributed their bit, but the biggest contributor was kinetic bombardment: the Posleen do not use atomics, since it poisons the land they intend to feed off, but on occasion have used guided Big Rocks [11] From Space as weapons, Posleen God-Kings, in spite of cultural similarities, being more imaginative than Race commanders. Fortunately for human defenders, the Posleennever got very good at _aiming_, the Aldenata ships lacking an easily used app for that sort of thing, and the Posleen eventually gave up on the practice, but not before kicking enough crap into the atmosphere to ensure the winter of 2008 was particularly nasty, probably sabotaging their effort to kick the Russians east of the Urals.

Then the Fleet came and used a shitload of kinetic weapons against the Posleen forces on Earth. 2009-2010 was a _nasty_ winter.

There is a tremendous lot to do. Most of the planet needs reconstruction. New technologies to be put to the uses of peace rather than war. Further wars to plan for: there are still trillions of Posleen out there, and they are not unaware of what has happened on Earth. And the ongoing war, the secret war, the one against the internal enemy and their Darhel puppeteers, is just starting to heat up.

[1] Not genetic engineers, of course.

[2] Something Unspeakable hasn’t shown up yet…

[3] The lower level stuff was mostly outsourced to the Tchpth

[4] And the Tchpth who didn’t wander off into the vague immensity of philosophy became glorified catalogers, as funds for truly innovative research dried up. The Darhel expended a fair amount of effort in keeping the Tchpth equivalent of deeply conservative Professors Emeritus buttered up, and were always happy to fund research into the fine details of effects of environmental conditions on sand formation on a random sample of ten thousand or so water-ocean worlds.

[5] They were lying

[6] Humans were meant to think fumble-fingered, rather than actively malevolent.

[7] Rather a lot more than China had in 2000. But then pretty much everyone increased their nuclear arsenals with the run-up to the invasion, and often smuggled atomic weapons to third-world nations in hopes they would kill a lot of Posleen with them (hey, if they become radioactive wastelands, mores the pity, but better them then us, right?)

[8] One of the ways the Galactics helped out was with a limited supply of rejuvenation medication [a] which would allow experienced veterans from former wars to return to combat rather than "assisting" with long rambling stories from wheelchairs. The return to active duty of tens of millions of men (and some women) with political ideals sometimes decades out of date had a variety of effects, not all good.
a. A weaker form of which has been in use for centuries as the ultimate bribe.

[9] Galactic nanotech food-making machines proved curiously hard to maintain and keep operational on Earth. We’re not sure why, but we’re working on the problem, the Darhel kept reassuring.

[10] Yes, the Americans have them too.

[11] Not “Impact” big, just ones capable of making big-ass-nuclear-explosion level blasts without all the fallout