HUMANITY RISING
Part 1: The Battle Of Broken Pride
They came from beyond the galactic rim, past the chaotic energies which bound the Milky Way, denizens of true emptiness, the noplace in the cracks between nowhere.
The Galactic council sent an overwhelming force to destroy them. Ships of the three dominant races in the galaxy: Trylixian Spheres brimming with antimatter cannons; tactical cruisers of the Loloth people, lithe and studded with gravity well generators; and the fell war machines of the Hiddrell race, each larger than a small moon, each unique and grown on a biogrid on the Hiddrell homeworld, covered in every manner of non-nucleic weaponry.
A galactic war fleet, thousands upon thousands of ships, met the alien invaders at the far edge of the galaxy.
The two fleets met in orbit around an unnamed red dwarf star, where the enemy had begun mobilizing their forces after their initial assault on outlying worlds.
A battle ensued, known now as the First Battle of the Great War, or the Battle Of Broken Pride. It was a slaughter. The ships of the Federation fell in droves to a class of nucleic weapons long since banned from the galaxy by the Galactic Council, who deemed them unecessary and overly dangerous, never considering that a force beyond the council’s control would ever appear again.
Fusion weapons of epic scale and overwhelming power wiped out dozens of Federation vessels at a time, vaporizing them in concurrent wave after wave of nuclear detonation. When the galactic ships could fire, their weapons caused damage, but the fierce, ceaseless nuclear barrage of the alien enemy was too much. Their radiation scarred and mishapen ships spewed missiles with machinegun speed.
It is said of the Battle of Broken Pride that for the 34 hours of fighting, it appeared as though a second star had exploded into existence beside the red dwarf, consuming the Federation fleet in an unbroken blaze of light.
By battle’s end, fewer than a dozen Federation ships hobbled from the star system. The enemy hunted down 11 of them, and only the final ship, “Glory of Loll”, a Loloth cruiser propelled to ultra-luminal speed by the folding of spacetime – a technology mastered only by the Loloths – survived the battle.
The Loloth Commander learned from their escape. It appeared the invaders did not have the capacity for ultra-luminal speeds, which meant the Galactic Core systems would have just over a millenium before the enemy arrived, almost no time at all.
Faced with an impossible choice, the Loloth Commander followed her instinct and, instead of setting a course for the Galactic Core, she aimed for a little known system on the spiral arm of the galaxy.
The place was home to the most dangerous species previously known to the Galactic Council – a species so fearsome, so bloodthirsty, that the council had ordered them wiped from the face of the galaxy.
In secret defiance of the Federation, the Loloth trapped a small contingent of the species within their original solar system, contained by a sphere of impassable black holes, created at impossible cost by the Loloth.
No member of the Federation had entered the system, or communicated with its occupants, in tens of thousands of years. For all but the genetic hive mind of the Loloth, humans were less than a myth, less even than a rumor. Only the Loloth remembered the species and their raw, destructive power.
Which was why, in the face of an unbeatable foe, Glory of Loll rode a wave of spacetime straight toward the planet Earth.
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