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The Slave Fleet amassed in System One two weeks before the much slower Mad Dogs arrived. By then that’s what the Galaxy was calling them – the Mad Dogs.

Despite Federation’s assurances of safety, billions of civilians evacuated System One in advance of the battle. Most of the Federation apparatchik remained planet-side on the city world called One – but the Federation Council quietly left the system to watch from safer climes.

After it was over, the Federation would quickly christen the combat in System One as the Battle Of The Humans. I submit for the reader’s consideration a new moniker, one more in line with the horrendous discoveries from Patok-9: The Battle of the Enslaved.

I cannot overstate how the heroes of Patok-9 changed my view of this conflict. Even in the aftermath of the bloodletting on Mylex – consumed as we were with renewed hatred for the Loloth and mourning friends and family – we still shared at least one thing with the rest of the Federation: we hated the Mad Dogs.

If we were the low end of the totem pole in Federation space, at least that despicable group of traitors was below us. At the time we still blamed the Mad Dogs for all our suffering. Most humans still firmly believed in the delusion that if only the Mad Dogs had not betrayed us on Palthurian the Human Race would have made it onto the Council and peace would have reigned across the galaxy.

Our shared hatred of those betrayers was the last thread by which we hung onto our collective sanity. It is yet another dark reality to confront, but there is a certain solace – one which cannot be discounted in the most difficult of times – in knowing others are hated more than yourself. Perhaps this is one of those vestigial traits humanity must struggle to overcome before we’re really ready for the stars.

But, for us, – for me – hating the Mad Dogs, and knowing the rest of the galaxy hated the Mad Dogs, was the difference between getting up in the morning and eating a bullet. Had I known the truth then, I don’t know that I would be alive now to write this brief history.

When the first video streams came into Mylex of the unfolding battle in the Galaxy’s central system – we took solace in the fact that the Mad Dogs were outnumbered two to one. We waited, with bated breath, as their stolen ships began popping out of FTL space and into existence several A.U.s from Planet One. We cheered like the raving mad when the Slave Fleet’s missiles exploded in pinpricks of nuclear firelight, consuming hordes of Mad Dog ships.

At first, the Mad Dogs arrived too sporadically to be able to pick a target and fire. The first hour of the battle looked like it would be an easy victory for the Slave Fleet as they wiped out thousands of Mad Dog ships, picking them off as they arrived in system.

But then the first of the large Mad Dog contingents began to arrive. First a fleet of at least 20,000 ships, then another of 30,000 or more, and then another, and another. The numbers were bad enough, but soon these large masses of Mad Dogs began arriving on all sides of the Slave Fleet.

The Loloth, not giving a good damn about human casualties and simply relying on strength of numbers, bunched the Slave Fleet into three combat groups. The ships were densely packed in a formation just wide enough for each ship to safely fire their FTL missiles, and not an inch wider.

Moreover, unlike during the Gorax war, the Loloth did not even attempt to assist the human fleet in dodging incoming missile attacks. In fact, not a single Loloth was present in any of the Slave Fleet ships – instead, the Beans issued psychic commands from the surface of the planet.

As a result, once the Mad Dogs began arriving in earnest, and several thousand Mad Dog ships were able to actually choose targets and launch, the devastation was epic.

I remember watching as the first barrage of Mad Dog missiles struck. The Mad Dog ships that had fired them were vaporized by nuclear fire before their payloads hit home and so the men and women aboard did not bear witness to the damage they caused.

In the center of the video feed was the second combat group of the Slave Fleet, amassed like a horde of angry bees, hundreds of thousands of ships in close proximity to one another. They looked like a homogeneous cloud more than individual ships, launching hordes of missiles visible only as countless small flashes of light.

You’ll remember that these were the same nuclear payloads designed for the Gorax war. There were no chemical missile trails, allowing a viewer to see the arc of an incoming attack from start to finish. Instead, the missiles traveled through FTL space and came back into normal space-time at the moment of their detonation.

As a result, one second the second fleet group was there, unmolested and whole, the next a sphere of pure fusion energy blossomed in the group’s center, consuming thousands of ships at once.

But this was only the start. The immense heat of thousands of Mad Dog nuclear missiles ignited the armed payloads of the ships they hit. This caused a chain reaction of nuclear explosions, spreading from the center of the fleet group, out to its distant edges.

During the war with the Gorax, this was our worst nightmare – but one we never had to face up to. The original War Dog fleets remained purposely spread out to avoid just such an eventuality. Our loose formations, combined with Loloth assisted movement and greater individual autonomy, all but assured we would not be caught with our pants down.

But the Slave Fleet was had none of those advantages. Fully 1/3 of the fleet, the entire second fleet group, was reduced to slag in that first Mad Dog barrage.

If I had to guess, at that point the Lima Beans realized it was one thing to control a million ships just lobbing missiles, but a whole other thing to individually pilot a million ships through evasive maneuvers. Whatever the reason, after the second fleet group was wiped out, the Loloth ceded back a modicum of psychic control, at least to the Slave Fleet’s human pilots.

The effects were immediate. All at once fleet group one and fleet group three dispersed in every direction at the same time. Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of Mad Dogs ships continued to pour into the system every minute, everyone lobbing missiles at everyone else, even as the Slave ships and Mad Dog ships began to intermingle, hardly distinguishable one from the other.

Before long everything devolved into abject chaos. Watching from a hundred light-years away on Mylex, on a flickering video feed, it was impossible to make heads or tails of it all.

The video feed survived for six hours before being caught in the expanding bubble of nuclear violence. For the bulk of those six hours, after the destruction of the second fleet, the feed showed only an unbroken string of nuclear flashes – millions upon millions of fusion detonations.

There have been countless descriptions of the Battle of the Enslaved – but most poetically fitting to me are the recountings of witnesses from the surface of Planet One.

So much nuclear firepower was expended during the Battle that people looking up from the planet could see the conflagration with the naked eye, even in broad daylight.

It appeared to them as if a second sun had spontaneously erupted into existence in Planet One’s sky and, due to some quirk of the planet’s atmosphere, the fusion light of that new sun glowed bright red.

They called it a Blood Sun, and it burned bright and hot for two days. When the battle was over and its light finally passed, the last of our hopes went with it. Humanity had burned itself out in one last blaze and all that remained for the Federation to do was smother the dying coals.

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