---

It took another century for the work of the Loloth genetic engineers to pay dividends, but by the end of the 902nd year of the First War for Galactic Supremacy, the augmented human force was fully ripened, it’s population burgeoning into the trillions. Upon their myriad abandoned planets, the augmented humans lived in a crude homeostasis of violence and depravity. The Loloth maintained bases on each world, ensuring that they were prepared, when the time came, to effectuate the immense logistical feat of psychically corralling an entire species worth of soldiers onto billions of ships.

Those ships, meanwhile, had proven to be their own complex problem. The operation called for ships of “simple, utilitarian design,” mass-produced using the cheapest materials and sent into battle in numbers so numerous as to totally overwhelm the enemy. On paper, this sounded like an excellent plan. In practice, the scope of the project was simply too large.

By restricting themselves to non-capital warship materials – primarily aluminum and steel, as opposed to atomically designed metals – the Federation was able to keep pace on building rudimentary ship hulls, decking the interiors plainly, providing only the basic supplies necessary for long-term self-sustainability, but skimping on almost all traditional safety mechanisms. A redesigned gravity well generator could be built en masse. The artificial gravity would not last longer than a millennium, but more than enough time for the whole endeavor to either sink or swim. The engines were dirty fusion, easily maintained and durable – and also technically illegal under Federation environmental laws.

The big problems were weapons and shields. Shields were expensive and energy-intensive – there was no way the entire augmented human fleet could be outfitted with shielding. This was not, in itself, a catastrophic problem. Weapons, however, were proving to be a more difficult dilemma.

In all of Galactic history, few things were as universally accepted among higher intelligences than the ban on explosive nucleics. Over the countless millennia of Galactic civilization, as treaties rose and fell, social and cultural norms ebbed and flowed, and through countless multi-racial wars, even genocides, the only real constant was the refusal of any combatant to use nucleics. Once in a while a new race, first achieving space travel, would threaten their use, and the response from the rest of the Galaxy was swift annihilation. There was simply an understanding, both explicit in countless treaties between countless species, and implicit in the hearts and minds of every advanced race in the galaxy, that the introduction of explosive nuclear weapons into galactic warfare was tantamount to everyone signing their own death warrants.

As a result of this ban – in some places official, in most unspoken – galactic weaponry had evolved in a wide variety of other directions. The Trylixians preferred fusion beams, nuclear-derived energy beams that carried with them a certain potentiality for atomic destabilization, depending on the size and energy requirements of the cannon. A hand-held fusion beam might have enough such potential to destabilize an individual assailant’s worth of atoms, whereas the largest Trylixian spheres bore cannons capable of disintegrating small moons.

The Hiddrell preferred to adorn their hulking war machines with hundreds of thousands of rail guns, each firing individual projectiles no larger than a human fist, at nearly relativistic speeds. A single war machine barrage could devastate an entire enemy fleet if they found themselves out of position. There are legends in the Hiddrell war books of great admirals successfully “Striking From The Past” – firing salvos from their war machines at distant planets, months or even years before the start of a campaign. By calculating for the planet’s orbit, and jumping in at the right angle, location, and time, these legendary Hiddrell apparently lured whole enemy fleets into the oncoming clouds of flotsam, winning entire battles long after the first salvo was fired, and without firing a second.

Other examples abounded – lasers and mass destabilizers, FTL rammers, Ion cannons for system damage, neutron cannons as anti-personnel, nanobots and vicious poisons, bioengineered diseases and chemicals, even plain old bombs and bullets. If you can conceive of it, someone in the Galaxy had tried to kill someone else with it.

Unless it was a nuclear bomb. Which leads to the Federation’s dilemma. The ships were lightly armored, slow, and unshielded. Fusion beams and other energy weapons, aside from being too expensive to mass produce, took far more electricity than the ships had to spare. Railguns were wildly inaccurate in space battles and required the kind of precision and planning even the famously coordinated Hiddrell navy had trouble executing. Some considered mounting an FTL rammer onto each ship, but aside from the prohibitive cost, that would make every ship a one trick pony, after which they would be totally unarmed. Briefly, engineers even considered turning the ships themselves into FTL weapons, priming the anti-matter cores to explode upon impact. Indeed, this was favored by some as it appeared to kill two birds with one stone. In the end, however, it was not implemented, as Federation tacticians calculated the damage done in relation to per ship costs would not be favorable.

About halfway through the most audacious military enterprise in Galactic history, it seemed the Federation had critically miscalculated.

No one knows anymore who first suggested it, but undoubtedly it was the Council who signed off on the idea. Several long forgotten and abandoned planetoids, not suitable for even the most rudimentary life, were surrounded and mined hollow. Their radioactive materials were processed in extreme secrecy, and with extreme haste. Compared to fusion beams and neutron cannons, nuclear bombs were neither difficult to produce, nor expensive. Relative to the size of their payloads, they were highly efficient dealers of destruction. The Trylixians jerry-rigged a highly unstable, but extraordinarily cheap to make FTL missile casing. It was estimated that fully 10 percent of the missiles would fail mid launch, never reaching their target.

Even in the distant future, when the war with the Gorax was over, stories abounded of unlucky junk haulers having violent encounters in deep space with armed nuclear warheads, floating on malfunctioned Trylixian missiles from the First War for Galactic Supremacy.

In the end, the augmented human race was said to have numbered 2.5 Trillion, of which 2.1 Trillion were deemed combat ready. The ships of the fleet varied in size, from as small as a crew of 20 up to a crew of 200. In total, the final fleet exceeded 50 billions ships. It took the Loloth five straight years to coax the ships full of their new permanent occupants. Thankfully, the ships’ simplified operations were already hardlined into the augmented humans’ genetic memory.

Federation tacticians calculated how many nuclear weapons of a certain megatonnage would be necessary to completely eradicate the Gorax species. They estimated that using 100% reliable weapons administered with perfect, sparing accuracy, the entire species, every ship and every planet, could be eradicated using only 120 billion warheads. However, that did not account for the immense 10% failure rate or moving targets. Moreover, it was believed that the augmented human’s heightened levels of violence and reduced levels of impulse control would result in widespread inefficiencies.

In the end, they settled on 2.4 trillion, a number large enough that, with perfect usage, not only the Gorax but every creature in the galaxy, could theoretically be destroyed. Twice.

Armed, guided by Loloth minders, the fleet was ready for war. It was given some heady name or another, some belying, clean and heroic title. But whatever the Federation called it has been lost to history and, as time went on, the fleet developed a more organic moniker, different in every language, but all the same in spirit:

“The Ignoble Ones.”

---

---

If You Enjoyed This Story – Or Any Of The Hundreds Of Other Legends From The Multiverse – And Want To Give A Dollar To The Madman Behind The Curtain Who Writes Them All:

Subscribe to the RSS feed or leave a comment anywhere on the r/LFTM subreddit with “!subscribeme” or “subscribeme!”, and you’ll receive a notification whenever a new story or continuation is posted.

---

READ MORE FLASH FICTION

ACTION	APOCALYPTIC	DARK	ESTABLISHED UNIVERSE	FANTASY
FUNNY MAYBE	HORROR	MISC	WTF IS THIS?	SAD
SCIENCE FICTION	SCIENCE FANTASY	TWIST ENDING	RANDOM

READ LONGER STORIES

THE DEMON’S CANTOS	INCIDENTAL SUPERHERO
BENEATH	THE HUMANITY SAGA
THE TRAVELER	I, LYCANTHROPE