Hwee

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   This article discusses a subject with undecided "Canon".  The Swarm Cycle writers need to discuss this on the email list, come to a decision, and then update this article to let readers know what Swarm Cycle "true canon" is.

The Hwee race first appeared in "Family Values" by "Quantum Mechanic" (available here)

The Hwee were battling the Sa'arm in the 1940's.

The Hwee are recognizably non-human, but their biochemistry and physiology, as well as their social structures are not dissimilar to our own. They breathed an oxygen-rich atmosphere. They used sound to communicate. They were even dioecious, gave live birth, and had recognizable family groupings.

Like humanity, somehow the Hwee managed to survive the discovery of nuclear power, as well as many other technologies with which they could have destroyed themselves. Unlike humanity, they kept their priorities straight.

Whereas human societies turned their vision inwards, commandeering science and technology so that a few privileged individuals could sequester the limited resources of the birth planet, the Hwee turned their eyes and their societal energies to the sky. They escaped the gravity well of their birthplace, and by the time of their first contact with the Sa'arm, they already had colonies in at least five star systems.

Being more like us than like the Confederacy, the Hwee did not assume that the nature of the cosmos was benign; unlike us, neither did they ignore it. They maintained a military, as well as very effective space-borne surveillance systems in all the systems they inhabited, and when the Sa’arm showed up, they were not surprised. When the destruction began, they were able to fight back. Unfortunately the outcome was never in question.

Both Hwee colonies in the first system the Sa’arm encountered were ultimately overrun, before the futility of fighting became clear. Fortunately, the remaining industrial base was adequate to provide ships to evacuate most of the population of the surviving colonies, and the home world.

By the time the Hwee evacuation fleet assembled at the rendezvous point, the Sa’arm front had already swept well beyond their home world, and the fleet found itself completely surrounded by enemy forces.

For a little while, the fleet puttered around, dodging the Sa’arm, while their scientists and engineers tried to figure out a likely destination. To be viable, a potential destination had to have habitable planets, of course, but also, at least for the foreseeable future, it had to be out of reach to the Sa’arm fleet. Using these criteria, the only viable destinations, obviously, lay in distant galaxies.

Four such destinations were identified, and after much deliberation, it was decided that part of the fleet would be sent to each destination, in order to maximize the probability of success for the whole race.

The Hwee, unaware that the Sa’arm had no means to detect them in hyperspace, included evasive tactics in their escape plans. Each fleet hopped around the galaxy at random for a while, before making the final jump to their destination. If a random stop offered an opportunity to augment their stocks of provisions, they took the time to do so.

Sometimes, while they were looking over a pre-space-flight society, they got a bit sloppy. A pilot with minimal experience would make a mistake and crash; and even an experienced pilot could misjudge the range and accuracy of a tactical missile, and take a hit. This didn’t happen often, but when it did, the wreckage fell to the planet, unrecovered.

The Hwee weren’t particularly worried; they didn’t plan on being in the neighborhood long enough for the inhabitants to develop and use any technology they might salvage.

On one such occasion, they came upon a small, blue planet circling a nondescript yellow star. The planet’s inhabitants were not yet a space-faring society, but had developed technology sufficient for self-annihilation. They were fragmented into numerous factions, based on economic, philosophical, and religious beliefs, and the Hwee were fascinated. They decided to hang around and observe for a while.

Unfortunately for the observers, the inhabitants were also actively engaged in killing each other off in a global conflict, and were very alert and suspicious of strange activities. The Hwee lost a number of scouts, and in one case, a small, hyper drive-equipped cargo vessel that had been engaged in the reprovisioning effort. At length, reprovisioning was fully accomplished; and it was decided that further observation was too costly in lives and resources, so the Hwee moved on.

That planet was Earth.

The US military recovered many of the atmospheric capable craft the Hwee lost, the Cosca, recovered the rest; including the only hyper drive-capable vessel that was lost on Earth.

Story Usage

A textal analysis of the story repository, current as of 2018 and performed on 2019-09-06 identified the following usage counts for Hwee:

• The Cosca Family Values by Quantum Mechanic 25 instances.

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