Traveller Vignette 043

“The years after the war were hard. So much had been destroyed in the invasion, or by orbital bombardment after the Saruthi realised they couldn't win and wrecked everything as they pulled out. My earliest memories are childhood meals in the orphanage dining hall – there was just enough food for everybody, and you learned not to take too much.

After dinner, we sewed by lamplight while a house-mother read stories from an old book. One of the house mothers cried when we finally got the power grid up and the electric lights came back on; she remembered them from before the war.

I went to work in the shipyards when I was fourteen; it was hard, heavy work, and I came back to the dormitory exhausted most nights, but I cheered myself hoarse with the rest when our first ship lifted.

It wasn't much of a ship – not even jump capable – but it let us start training crews, and we built more and better ships over the years that followed. It cost us a lot, in sweat and in lives. My younger brother died when the ship he was aboard broke up on re-entry; we were pushing our designs to the limit, and didn't have time to do things the safe way. One more debt, in a long, long ledger. I'm old now, and I won't live to see our revenge for what was done to us, but my children will. My eldest daughter is a Lieutenant in the fleet, and her brother is in training. Their generation will make Saruth pay”


(Author's note - This is a world the characters might visit, still devastated by an invasion by a neighbouring system and burning for revenge. Of course, by the time they are able to mount their war of vengeance after two generations of effort, the people they will be taking vengeance on won't be those which attacked their world - it would be the equivalent of an alien fleet attacking modern earth to avenge the crimes of the Nazis, which could start a whole new cycle of revenge in the opposite direction.

Perhaps PC nobles or diplomats could be the ones who broker a solution to break the cycle, with or without reparations and punishment of the surviving Saruthi leaders who started the war)


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