#M#B6À6ÀÀÀ P  P  P  P  P  P  P  P  ÈINVASIONÈ P  P È È I can still remember when the human race took to the stars, not just set up a colony around one of the LaGrange points or on the moon, but actually left our solar system to explore "strange new worlds and seek out new life and new civilizations" as my Grandfather used to say before bursting out laughing, but then I had always suspected he was going senile. The ship, with it's crew of hopeful explorers was bound for the belt of Orion. Everyone watched the lift-off and President Quayle had actually managed to give an impressive speech without ending up looking like a bozo, that is how miracleous this event was. P  P  At first everyone hung on every report sent back from the UNSS Odyseuss, but after a few months the excitement died down, then they discovered a star near Orion that had three planets in almost syncronous orbit, and more importantly three inhabited planets. It would be two more weeks till the Odyseuss would be close enough to make contact and theories and suspicions ran wild. Would they look like us or be so alien we could not even communicate with them. WOuld they be warlike or so far beyond us in technology that they would be like benificial gods. Long range scanners showed that they had interplanetery travel and that all their heavy industy was on the moons orbiting the planets, leaving the planets themselves clean and unscarred. P  Finally, the day arrived when the Odyseuss put into orbit around the largest of the planet and sent down a scout ship with a landing party made up of the captain, the UN representative and several of the scientists and a crew-member to record and broadcast back to the ship the event. Imagine the surprise when the shuttle door opened up and the human race met the humanimal race. As the picture of the welcoming comittee was beamed back to Earth and all it's colonies, most peoples first reaction was their jaw dropping and staring at the screen in wide eyed amazement, to be followed by a hysterical giggling. P  The welcoming comittee was three in number, the largest being a large feline humanimal. He looked like a upright siberian tiger in a three peice suit. He stood about seven feet tall and weighed in around 300 pounds. His tail twitched nervously as he waited a few yards away from the shuttle. To his right stood a rabbit, dressed primly in a grey striped business dress that look comical as her nose and ears twitched. The final member was an otter, dressed more stylish than his counterparts in a light blue jumpsuit and white turtleneck sweater. Behind them and all around the shuttle were walking talking thinking animals of every size and shape. Leopards, tigers, otters, rabbits, cats and dogs of all shapes and species, to every member of the rodent and almost every other type of mammal you could think of. P  P  P  P  P  ÈIIÈ P  P  That is how humanity's first contact went, and we were surprised to find they had been monitoring earth's transmissions for ages and were fascinated with us as we were with them. Most of the humans were comfortable with the "Furries" as they can to be known and scientists and scholars from both races travelled back and forth, learning all they could about each other. Theologians had trouble at accepting the Furries at first, but when the Roman Catholic Church announced that the Furries had souls like anyone else, all reservations melted away. P  Since the Furries had three clean, almost empty planets to themselves, the Furry population only numbering a couple million, they opened their planets to any humans wishing to colonize there. They set up quotas and each human could only bring what he could carry on his back. At first the migrations was a few individuals and most of them meshed very well with the Furrys, to the point of taking or being taken as lovers with their closer friends. Most humans were uncomfortable with the idea of sex with a talking animal but the ones that weren't seemed to walk around with a permanent smile stitched on their faces. P  You would think that with such a wonderful deal, the humans would be happy to settle down. I mean they had a whole new race to study, more living room than they would need for hundreds of years to come and they and their new found friends were hitting it off fabulously. Most people would have been happy with their position, but you know humans. P  So fifteen years after discovering the Furries, the UNSS Odyseuss lifted off again, but this time with a mixed Furry/Human crew. Most people (Furries included) say now if they knew what would transpire because of this voyage, they would have lynched the crew and blew the Odyseuss to kingdom come. P  P  We did not know where the Queesh came from, but our first encounter with them did not go nearly as well as it did with the Furries. Where the Furries with their almost cartoonish look, generated feelings of friendliness, the Queesh with their human/insect bodies installed a fear and an alieness in even the most open minded Human/Humanimal. P We were still full of hope when we contacted them, after all look how well our first contact with an alien race went. Unfortunately, the Queesh where xenophobic to the Nth degree and regarde themselfs as the only intelligent race and all others as food. After they killed the entire crew of the Odyseuss they faded back between the stars. We searched frantically for them and some of the more martial humans and humanimals tried to get support for a defense force, screaming alien invasion. But, with the third world war going so badly for the humans and the Furries never being involved in more than a few clan disputes, the more warlike were ignored. Till the Queesh returned in an armada bent on wiping the entire human/humanimal races from the stars. In the time they were gone we had explored more of the local space and found more planets, twelve in all, that both the Furries and we could colonize with little or no terraforming. It was on one of these planets the Queesh struck first. They landed and attacked the small community on the farthest planet. A vid-reporter who was there for a small documentary captured the entire attack and beamed it out for the entire combined races to view. The Queesh it seemed were  P  P  P worse than we thought. They regarded us as food and the camera showed them feasting on our dead. What they did with the living was far worse. It seemed that they needed warm-blooded hosts to implant their eggs in, and what happened when these eggs hatched, well, it was enough to make even the most die-hard pacifist look for the nearest weapon he could use to destroy the Queesh. P  So battle was joined, on one side was the Human/Furry Alliance struggling to get a military capable of dealing with the Queesh, formed and on the other the Queesh, with their numbers and striking from some secret location amongst the stars. P  The Alliance dove into to setting up a wartime production with a vigor that was almost inhuman. Within months we had battleships, cruisers, carriers in orbit around the Furry worlds and on Earth they were even experimenting with a prototype human-controlled robot. The press dubbed it a Battlemech after some obscure game in the early 1992. It was not know if the Queesh had artillary or tanks but we figured the more and heavier firepower we had on are side the better we liked it. P  Thus battle with the Queesh was joined and both sides seemed to realized that it was to the death. We fought them in space when we could and on the ground when we had to. Heroes were born on died on battlefields on dozens of planets and aces racked up victories in the vacuumn of space. At first we drove the Queesh off of whatever planets we found them on, but they turned out to be a tenacious and ingenious foe. After the first battle in which a Battlemech was used, reports came in of the Queesh having their own battlemechs. More and various weapons were creatred, and the combined forces of humans and furries were an even match for the bigger stronger Queesh warriors. P   P  Even today, the stories told by the veterans of the Alliance-Queesh War have not lost their luster. P  P È(HERE, IS WHERE I AM ENDING THE STORY....I HAVE GIVEN YOU THE BACKGROUND. WHAT I AM HOPING FOR IS THAT SOME OF YOU MORE EXPERIENCED WRITERS [OR EVEN SOME OF YOU BARELY LITERATE PEOPLE LIKE ME] WILL TAKE WHAT I HAVE GIVEN AND BUILD SOME FICTION FROM IT. IF YOU DO AND SEND IT TO ME; BADGER@PHOENIX.ENGIN.UMICH.EDU, I WILL COLLECT THEM AND PIECE THEM TOGETHER AND WHEN I HAVE SUFFICIENT CONTRIBUTIONS I WILL POST IT AS ONE COLLABORATED WORK OF ART. ANY COMMENTS IDEAS OR EVEN CRITISICMS WILL BE ACCEPTED EAGERLY)È P  P