Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer

Nineteen hundred tomorrows, and of them, only I got to see a dawn.
The world below is still burning in places: unfortunate for the natives that their home arrived at the same strategically important position as the main battle fleets of two conflicting interstellar empires.
I’ve tuned into their broadcasts. While I can only grasp the meaning of a word here and there of any language they transmit in, the colours are wonderfully vivid. Some of their feeds seem to be dedicated to landscapes, and they were truly beautiful.
Live feeds just show fields of seared ruins littered with the remains of Coleandi and Drutteln warships. The recordings of those wrecks descending like gargantuan bolts of fury are as terrifying as they are awe-inspiring.
What puzzles me the most is the tone of the live reports: they really seem to believe themselves to be the targets of this! As if any of us would bother with a race still engaged in local wars. They haven’t even got orbital colonies yet. How could they possibly consider themselves worthy of invasion?
I’m sure the clumsy white vessels that have risen on gigantic columns of flame are not here to succour anything, either. They’re scavengers, and military-aspected ones at that. While looking for secrets, they’ll be equally happy to find survivors to interrogate.
I’m also sure their ways are as primitive as their cultures, and those cultures are about to get a massive skip-ahead in warfare and spacefaring technologies.
Which is why I’ve recorded this. The nowhere planet I’m orbiting in an escape pod is the third from the Sun in the Nactenid 34 system. The natives call it Earth, and they’re going to be a threat if they don’t exterminate themselves while learning to misuse our technologies. I recommend a watch be placed on them as soon as possible.
As for me, it doesn’t matter if I was Coleandi or Drutteln. I’m not going to let myself be taken and tortured. By the time you see this, I’ll have joined the remains of my nineteen hundred orbiting above a planet gearing up to commit atrocities during a war they can’t win, but very likely will be convinced they can.
This will be transmitted outbound on the emergency channels of both empires.

Forgive me as I close with the blessing of my clade, that has ridden with us from the shallow valleys of our homeland to every place we find our rest: ‘Find you glory in peace, that war never lure you into folly.’
Live fair, ride free, sleep well.

Teldan Hanvu.