HUMANITY RISING
Part 5: Eradication
By the time the Grand Flotilla was completed, nearly half of the Galaxy had been conquered by the intergalactic invader, yet scarcely little was known about them.
They referred to themselves as the Kra. Rare visual accounts of Kra, from boarded ships mostly, reported a bi-pedal species, ill-evolved for planetary gravity, preferring to remain in the zero-g of their ships, using planets only as resource nodes to be harvested from orbit, without a thought for the well being of terrestrial populations.
Tactically, this freed the Flotilla from treacherous land based combat. Human Admirals demanded control over the tactics of the advance. The Loloth made testing efforts to exert direct control over human fleets, through psychic connection, but found their learned methodologies no longer had any effect.
Eventually, a deal was struck wherein the Loloth command would connect psychically with their assigned human Commander, and her subordinate Captains, and effectuate commands almost instantaneously across all ships at once. Cruisers were broken into groups of 40 human ships and one Loloth vessel – with countless tens of thousands of such groups making up the Galactic forces.
A sweeping, simultaneous strike was planned. 90% of the Flotilla would fan out in a plane across the Galaxy. Systematically, the Flotilla would appear at every habitable planet in Kra space, one by one – eliminate the Kra completely – and then continue on to the next such planet – so on and so forth, until either the threat was eliminated or the Flotilla itself was destroyed. 10% would remain behind, spread at the habitable worlds nearest the front, to pick off Kra stragglers.
The order to attack was given 994 years to the day after the Battle of Broken Pride, sending The Grand Flotilla out on its genocidal mission. The first contact between a Kra fleet and a Galactic Force was in orbit around a recently conquered Hiddrell planet. The Galactic ships caught the Kra off guard, as they so often would in the coming centuries of fighting, immediately loosing a salvo of nuclear missiles. The Kra managed to respond with a few of their own warheads, but by the time the Kra missiles occupied the space where the human fleet had been, the Loloth had already moved all forty ships 5 A.U. away.
It was from this distance the Human forces watched as the Kra ships were consumed by forty orbs of scorching white light which coalesced into one single, atom destroying sphere of energy. All but a few of the Kra’s ships were utterly destroyed and the three which remained were quickly dispatched before the fleet moved on.
It went this way each time – an unexpected barrage of ultra nukes, a sudden juke from the Loloth navigator, and then the galaxy’s most horrific light show, followed by cleanup.
Quickly, again and again, sometimes multiple times in a day, the Human’s carried out these kinds of assaults. Once in a while something would go wrong, and there would be small numbers of casualties, but by and large, the combination of human brute force and Loloth flexibility was devastating and nearly 100% efficient as a killing machine.
The final Kra stronghold, the space around the very Red Dwarf where the Battle of Broken Pride had taken place, was conquered two hundred and three years after the start of the Great Purge, twelve hundred years after the Federation had sought out Humanity in its darkest hour.
The Federation celebrated the defeat of the invaders, with Commander KyuTanLol being hailed a hero of the Galaxy.
But the celebrations would be short lived.
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