When our newly-established Star Force made contact with what the news called ‘parallel earth’, we thought we’d finally be able to escape our dying planet. Centuries of human exploitation had left our air too toxic to breathe and our soil too depleted to feed our populations. Every year, new mutations of common diseases cut huge swathes through humanity. Yet our numbers never seemed to decrease enough to allow our ecosystems to recover.

The new planet was the same size as ours, had an atmosphere only slightly heavy in oxygen, and was well within reach of earth once we’d invented travel three times faster than the old shuttles from the twenty-twenties ever managed.

What came as a surprise after the first furor had died down was that there was a native population of animals similar to our wolves and wild-cats. Our surprise turned to astonishment when the first scientists landed on the new world. Because what we had initially thought of as animals turned out to be humanoid shapeshifters.

Somebody named the planet ‘Lycantra’ and the name stuck. The Lycantrans were intelligent, living in closely-knit family units, with a powerful alpha leading each unit. Once we had calibrated our universal translators, we tried to negotiate the move from our doomed Earth to Lycantra.

A delegation of Lycantrans traveled back with us to meet our president. That’s when everything changed. I was there when the alphas stepped onto Earth’s surface for the first time. Their eyes widened as they inhaled our air, contaminated with man-made gases. One of them coughed so hard, he needed an oxygen mask.

We tried our hardest to show them that the destruction of our planet wasn’t our fault. That there had always been cycles of global warming and cooling in our planet’s history. Maybe we expected too much of them.

On Lycantra, wolf-shifters lived in packs no larger than fifty members. There were small squirmishes if packland borders were violated, but conflicts were resolved in wolf-to-wolf fights, governed by strict rules of honor.

The idea of humans packed into mega-cities of 50 million and up was so foreign to them, they couldn’t conceal their horror and astonishment.

They were diplomatic enough to not tell us to fuck off straight away, but I could see it in their eyes. No way would they let us near Lycantra. Not after witnessing what we’d done to our own habitat.

And that’s how the war started. We tried to force our way in, because frankly, we had no choice. We were a few years away from running out of food to feed ourselves. Water wars were spreading to every country on the planet. We needed to get off if we wanted to survive as a species.

Our president thought the Lycantrans would be easy prey. So we sent a few shuttles with a few thousand soldiers to our new home. They were slaughtered to the last man within hours. What we didn’t know that although the Lycantrans were living in a low-tech world, they had something we didn’t have. Magic.

The moment our soldiers opened fire on the first pack of wolf-shifters, their shaman sent a blast of green light towards them. They screamed in agony as the unholy fire consumed them within seconds. Earth got to watch because the government had
decided to stream the invasion live.

And since then, we’ve been at war with Lycantra. We’ve learnt that their magic is fired by the strength of the pack. Take out the weak members of the pack, women and children, and the shaman would be weakened enough to be taken out by snipers.

Yet our losses have been hundred-fold of theirs. And we’re running out of time. A new super-virus has emerged with a mortality rate of 90%. It’s spreading at an incredible rate. Maybe this is Earth’s revenge on us. It would certainly solve the problem of overpopulation.

Sian and Kerry are home-schooled to avoid infection. But our neighbor’s son last night was coughing so loudly, he woke me up in the middle of the night. Sian and Kerry played with him only two days ago. Maybe it’s a cold. I hope it’s a cold. Because if it isn’t? Then it doesn’t matter if we migrate to Lycantra or not.

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