HUMANITY UNLEASHED
Part 6: The Void
Space warfare is no simple thing.
Compare a spaceborne conflict to a war on the ground, where two or more armies approach one another restrained, in effect, by the orientation of gravity and the contours of the planet upon which they battle. Although the height, depth, and structure of a ground-based battlefield can play an integral strategic role in combat, in general, such a battlefield can and is considered as a two-dimensional plane upon which armies are situated in a fairly linear way, one against the other.
For ages, to use human history as an example, military leaders have attempted to circumvent the two-dimensionality of ground-based combat, with each side eager to exert control over the y-axis.
As far back as ancient times an army raiding a castle would send its sappers digging into the earth, even as the battle raged overhead, all in an effort to undermine the castle walls at their foundation. In more recent times control of the air had been paramount in human conflicts, or in battles of the sea, control of the ocean depths. On an effectively two dimensional battlefield, control of the fleeting third dimension can make all the difference.
In space combat, both the Y and Z axes are no longer tangential factors, to be controlled whenever possible, but unavoidable realities, to be disregarded only at extreme peril. Gravity continues to play a role at sub-light speeds, especially during battles fought in a solar system or in orbit around a planet. But, with FTL engines being the norm, traditional sub-light navigational techniques are almost entirely eschewed for medium and long-distance travel. The result is the freedom of fleet commanders to enter battle with little warning and from almost any orientation.
Space is, first and foremost, extraordinarily large. As a result, the “front line” of the ongoing war with the Gorax was largely metaphorical. Indeed, the whole concept of a “line” being drawn in a three-dimensional theater of war and nonetheless having some tactical significance is, of course, absurd. The Galaxy is so vast that the idea of maintaining a literal, unbroken defensive grid entirely across any one of its planes was impossible.
Instead, the war had stalled on ten thousand or so systems of strategic importance, each bolstered by its own Federation or Gorax garrison, each at risk, at any given moment, of being the site of the next wildly destructive battle. One month the pendulum of these planets would swing in the direction of the Gorax, the next it would swing back in the direction of the Federation. All the while, both sides plotted and schemed about how to break into the other side’s core systems.
The Gorax had the numbers and could spare the ships for a mass FTL deep dive into Federation territory. However, common FTL drives – dependent on the creation of an expanding and contracting spacetime bubble within which a ship “rides” – also created highly detectable waveforms in the spacetime medium. Federation early detection systems would have several days, or even weeks, notice of an incoming Gorax war fleet. The result, using the Federation’s primary tactical advantage – the Loloth’s control of Ultra-luminal space travel – would be a Federation fleet mass warped to the precise location of the Gorax’s impending arrival.
On the other hand, the Federation had long plotted a series of stabbing maneuvers dependent on Ultra-Luminal travel, the Loloths’ unique methodology for “bending” spacetime and opening a much shorter bridge – a “wormhole” – between two previously distant points in the galaxy. No Federation fleet was ever without several Loloth cruisers, always ready to be whisked away, en masse, by the Loloth’s intensive manipulation of gravity and the fabric of spacetime itself.
Ultra-luminal travel was not easily detectable. Only a trace hint of the soon to form bridge at the exit point could be scanned for, and that only a few minutes before it opened wide and spilled out a Federation Armada. In theory, this advantage should have allowed the Federation, at any point, to send a massive fleet directly to the Gorax homeworld and slag the place to molten ash.
However, where the Gorax had ships to spare, the Federation was always struggling to maintain their numbers. Though a Federation cruiser could easily destroy the enemy at the rate of 20 to 1, every Federation lose was a true blow to the overall military effort. Federation tacticians, considering this numerical imbalance, postulated that any Ultra-luminal deep strike into Gorax territory would be a zero-sum game, the requisition of ships for the strike opening up numerous defensive gaps which the Gorax would quickly take advantage of. Moreover, the Gorax religious fervor all but ensured that any attempt at a decapitating blow, far from disarming the Gorax threat, would only further fuel the species’ zeal for war.
In the end, the two sides were left at a tactical stalemate, one that seemed poised to last forever, awaiting some outside intervention to enter the fray and tip the balance.
The Federation hoped War Dogs would be that intervening force.
By leaving the Federation cruisers in full force to defend against any Gorax counterstrike, Federation tacticians were freed to throw caution to the wind. The battle plans they drew up were as vicious as they were methodical.
On the 920th year of the war, the plan was put into action.
The Ignoble Ones had been broken up into 100,000 individual fleets, each accompanied by a single Loloth cruiser, absent the numerous redundancies which would normally accompany a true Federation fleet. A crew of Loloth on each cruiser Ultra-luminally traversed the galaxy, with 100,000 ships in tow, arriving a 2-4 A.U. out from one of 100,000 central Gorax planets and space stations.
At that distance, The Ignoble Ones were simply allowed to do one of the only two things they were bred to do – destroy.
As anticipated, it was difficult to control the inefficiencies inherent in the augmented human combat instinct. Where, perhaps, 10,000 nuclear missiles might have been sufficient, the fleets, when ordered to fire, would release nearly ten times that many.
An FTL weapon, in and of itself, was a difficult weapon to use effectively. Unlike a kinetic weapon, which brought small objects to near light speed, an FTL weapon didn’t accelerate at all. Conventional rocket engines were used to move the missile far enough away from the firing ship to safely stabilize the spacetime bubble, but once inside the bubble, the missile itself could not be said to “move” in the traditional conception of the word. Indeed, the missile was brought to a halt completely, by design, before the FTL drive was activated. Like all FTL travel, it was spacetime itself that moved, carrying the missile on the crest of a spacetime wave.
This limitation of FTL ordinance – the failure to gain the force of momentum – limited the effective use of the system in conventional space warfare.
However, with nuclear weapons, it proved to be the ideal destructive combination.
A nuclear weapon exploded in an atmosphere is tremendously destructive, primarily because of the heat and shockwave transmitted through the surrounding medium of the air. A nuclear blast in space, on the other hand, was quite different. Without any atmosphere to heat or expand, the “blast” portion of a nuclear explosion was minimized to near zero, as was the heat. Much larger quantities of radiation were transmitted than during an atmospheric blast, but with modern cruiser shielding, this had a negligible effect in space battles.
For planetary bombardments, therefore, nuclear missiles remained a powerful tool. But, in order to make a nuclear weapon equally powerful in space combat, it was the FTL missile casing which was essential.
Although it appeared to the outside viewer that the withering hail of nuclear missiles fired by the Ignoble Ones exploded on or near external portion of a ship, thereby disintegrated it, in fact, this was an optical illusion. It was true that, due to the inaccuracy of the augmented humans, and poor craftsmanship of the FTL missile casings, a majority of the missiles launched did explode in the vacuum of space. And it is also true that these explosions created quite an impressive light show. However, they were not the cause of any significant damage.
Instead, it was the few missiles which hit their targets, the ones carried on their bubble of space-time and deposited directly inside an enemy craft, which did the real damage. The atmosphere maintained inside a ship responded with extreme violence to a nuclear explosion. In the tight, pressure sealed confines of a space-faring cruiser, a single, relatively low yield nuclear detonation could cause devastating results.
Never were these results on fuller display than in the six months it took for phase 1 of the War Dogs plan to complete. One by one, sometimes hundreds at a time across the great span of the galaxy, Gorax worlds and their protective fleets disappeared in the flash of hundreds of millions of nuclear fireballs. The missiles hit all at once, transported into space stations, the air over cities, the deeps of oceans, the cores of planets – penetrating salvos of nuclear doom, eradicating Gorax life wholesale.
Of course, the casualties were not limited to the Gorax, although they bore the brunt. Wherever a Gorax lived, so to lived his slaves – a class in Gorax society which now consisted almost entirely of non-Gorax species, culled from the war spoils of the Gorax military. The Federation tacticians calculated for these non-Gorax casualties, estimating that they would easily number into the trillions themselves. However, this was considered an acceptable degree of collateral damage in order to ensure total victory.
And so everyone and everything in Gorax space were annihilated. By the time phase 1 of War Dogs was complete, only the weakest smattering of Gorax planetary systems still existed, most of them points of lesser tactical interest. The Gorax were said to be taken so much by surprise that even months after Goradax was reduced to ash Federation scouts recorded hapless communications being sent back from various Gorax fleets on the front, asking for orders from a government – an entire civilization – which had been wiped out.
The Federation Council was overjoyed by the immense success of the war effort. Voices of discontent were few and far between and all involved were eager to initiate phase 2 and be done.
On the 921st year of the First War for Galactic Supremacy, having already carved out the beating heart of the Gorax species, the Federation forces closed the vise. The front line worlds, mostly left untouched by Phase 1, were assaulted by conventional Federation forces, and the Gorax there, alone and disconnected from a now dead central command, fell quickly. No quarter was taken, and no Gorax ship spared. Once the space in a system was secured, the Federation took no chances and the planets, already ravaged by centuries of war, were turned to ash.
Meanwhile, one by one, the Ignoble Ones were ferried from system to system, planet to planet, to unleash their nuclear death upon whatever small remnants of Gorax culture thrived in those faraway places. The Federation treated the Gorax people as one might treat a viral scourge, destroying every stronghold, every town, down to the individual.
On its 922nd year, of First War for Galactic Supremacy ended. The Federation was victorious, though it would be another century before the complete extinction of the Gorax species was confirmed. Operation War Dogs had won the day, albeit at a terrible cost. It is estimated that within two years of initiating War Dogs, the Federation forces were responsible for almost one hundred, quadrillion deaths – a number so large and so impossible to conceive of as to be functionally meaningless.
Fully an eighth of the habitable worlds in the Galaxy were destroyed, utterly, in the frenzy of violence. This lifeless expanse of the Galaxy, which had been known as the Gorax Imperium, soon took on a new name: The Void.
The war effort over, at last, the Federation began to consolidate its power and lick its long-festering wounds. Soon enough it would set its eye to one final task, phase 3, after which true peace would finally reign supreme in the galaxy.
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