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It started as a rumor. A bloodbath on a distant world no one had ever heard of at the very edge of Federation star charts. The place didn’t even have a name, just an alphanumeric label – JX23-19. It was a trumped-up mining colony with aspirations of eventual Federation recognition as a developed planet. The backwater was run by some Federation super-conglomerate, one of the countless private-public enterprises that kept the red-tape lifeblood of galactic governance flowing smoothly across the stars.

Rumor had it that a small group of War Dogs – no more than a hundred – had come out of retirement, in a manner of speaking, stealing several of their decommissioned ships from the tiny Federation Naval Yard on JX23-19. Then, if rumor was to be believed, these mad men and women had flown into orbit around the planet and rained nuclear hellfire onto the single human city, killing every living colonist and leaving JX23-19 a dust-bowl of ash and vaporized dreams.

No one knew what to make of it. On Mylex tensions ran high. It was not hard for anyone to believe that a few of the billions of War Dog veterans were capable of losing their marbles and going on a killing spree. Nonetheless, no one wanted to believe that such a thing had actually happened. Security at the local Naval Yard was tripled and suspicion, both of and among War Dog veterans, skyrocketed.

In an effort to calm everyone down, the local governor made an announcement that the information from JX23-19 was uncorroborated and likely apocryphal. It was, I have to admit, a well delivered and pacifying speech. It actually worked – for a couple of days. Then Palthurean happened.

Palthurean was the second of four Earth-like worlds orbiting a young star the locals called “Palth.” All four planets were heavily populated, but Palthurean was the most densely packed, the economic powerhouse of the system.

Five hundred years earlier, Palthurean had been a desolate hothouse, the remnants of a long dead indigenous population royally screwing the planet’s carbon cycle. No Federation species was willing to endure the difficult process of Geo-engineering the place back into shape.

Enter the War Dogs initiative. When the lima beans escorted humanity into the stars, they initially ignored Palthurean. But halfway through the Seeding, when the pickings were getting slimmer, Palthurean came up as a second tier option for resettlement. The beans built a settlement at the poles and deposited 10,000 intrepid human settlers, fully expecting that Palthurean would remain widely unlivable for another millennium at least.

Joke was on the beans. Those 10,000 settlers, like all homo sapiens, were hungry for expansion. They worked generations to the bone expediting carbon capture and sequestration, and got over the finish line with a regiment of aerosol releasing flights. Within a few centuries over one hundred million people lived all over the planet’s surface and the average temperature on Palthurean had gone from a balmy 76 degrees celsius in the shade to a downright comfortable 38 degrees. A combination of fungal, plant, and entomological reseeding projects was quickly restoring the biosphere and Palthurean’s economy was beginning to rumble. By the end of the war with the Gorax, Palthurean was a densely packed urban wonder-scape and the economic powerhouse of the system. It was considered the crowning achievement of human expansionism, and it was a household name across the human diaspora.

Palthurean was no isolated fringe world. It was spitting distance from the galactic core and surrounded by three other Federation planets, in a Federation system, protected by a local Federation garrison. This meant that (1) a local War Dogs insurrection should have been a non-starter and (2) if anything ever happened on Palthurean there would be a hell of a lot more than rumors to show for it.

On the first day of the second month of the 5th year after the end of the First War for Galactic Supremacy, datastreams across the galaxy exploded with hundreds of videos, some shot from the surface, others captured by satellites orbiting Palthurean’s neighboring worlds, and one from a local military vessel.

A fleet of at least ten thousand War Dog ships, had arrayed itself in orbit around bustling Palthurean. The War Dogs held steady in a set of wide formations. The videos from the planet’s surface, on the night side of the world, showed the distant ships as bright new stars speckling the dark sky. Video from a local Federation cruiser, a Trylixian scout sphere, showed the War Dog ships hovering around the planet like boxy birds of prey. The Trylixian captain attempted to hail them but received no response.

Without warning the War Dogs fire their payloads. From neighboring satellites the missiles appeared like a sudden, buzzing horde of flies. From the scout sphere, the video showed the missile deployment with greater accuracy.

Upon firing, the transwarp missiles were expelled from the War Dog ships using a conventional rocket engines. They flew just far enough not to damage the deploying ship. Then the missiles disappeared in thousands of small flashes of light, as they stabilized their space-time bubbles and warped forward a preset distance.

Planetside, no one saw the missiles coming. From their perspective, in the blink of an eye, Palthurean society was replaced by a flash brighter than the center of a sun and the deafening roar of radioactive fire.

Truthfully, watching the videos, a part of me could not help but be impressed by the skill and efficiency on display. From a purely tactical perspective, the razing of Palthurean was no small feat. It took both precision in terms of target acquisition, bombardment density and payload warp depth. Palthurean’s multi-tiered main cities could not be destroyed by air-blast alone – they required missiles coming out of warp-space at a set number of depth intervals.

For example, the capital city, New Palthur, home to 1 billion human beings, stretched from nearly two miles into the sky down to fully a mile beneath the planet’s surface. Only a highly trained and experienced nuclear bombardment could have achieved total destruction of such a city, let alone every other major population center on Palthurean.

With the skill one might expect from a fleet well-practiced in that unique art of planetary nuclear obliteration, The War Dogs did just that. The planetary feeds went dead, and the cumulative radiological energy of the explosions blinded the highly sensitive astronomical equipment capturing video from neighboring planets.

Only the scout sphere kept streaming, the Trylixian crew watching in horrified silence as the War Dog fleet held steady over burning Palthurean.

Then, in unison, the rabid War Dogs spun toward a shared heading and jumped out of the system. From that point on, just about everywhere, all hell broke loose.

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