Imperial History - The Great War

Expansion and Conflict

At the start of the Great War, the Human Federation had expanded into several different "spheres," volumes of territory centered on C-tunnels and (in the case of the Terran Sphere) on Sol itself. Two C-tunnels connected the Terran Sphere, the first discovered (named "Tunnel") leading to the Far Eyries and another (named "Sentinel") leading to a sphere known as the New Lands. Beyond the New Lands settlement had begun in two more spheres, the Frontier Zone and Inward Frontier. The Federation would soon expand into the Far Frontier as well.

At each of the C-tunnels connecting these spheres were special message relay stations, which would receive messages beamed as tight-band laser signals, store them and periodically forward them on probes launched through the C-tunnel. Upon arrival (the occurrence of which was verified through elaborate protocols), the messages from the probes would be recovered and beamed onwards in all directions. A similar system is used to relay messages through major spacefolds today. This system allowed message transmissions at nearly the speed of light and is an important element in understanding the progress of the Great War: speed-of-light messages would arrive months before fleeing ships could. While the difference in time was never enough to allow any kind of returning action, it could occasionally leave time to organize a defence, and when mapped against the likely progress of the war through several systems, could allow for future planning of the war. In addition, the C-tunnels came to serve as central administration hubs, facilitating survey work and business. Since C-tunnel travel always causes some degree of damage, these hubs also contained complete starship production facilities.

First contact with the Crucians came in IY -7099 at Iliad, in the Frontier Zone. A human settlement party landing on the planet found an existing Crucian settlement. Despite tremendous difficulties communicating, the Crucians made clear that they considered the planet theirs and were unwilling to coexist. The human settlers stayed long enough to refurbish and refuel then abandoned their claim. The Crucians even assisted with this effort, and the episode ended with general hopes that this first alien contact would go peacefully. Later, in IY -7065, human settlers encountered the Crucians again at Blast Mountain. This time the Crucians left without debate, communicating with humans only to get practical help in the way they'd given it previously. These settlers returned to Frontier Gate, the C-tunnel connecting the Frontier Zone and New Lands. Their beamed reports led to the impression that trade could be maintained with the Crucians. Under this impression an outward-bound group of settlers landed on the planet of Five Canal in IY -7039 and decided to stay despite the presence of a Crucian settlement on another continent of that planet.

Crucian reaction to this was both swift and different from previous encounters. During one night in IY -7038, the human settlement was bombed from space, and immediately after a wave of Crucians attacked on the ground. As far as is known, the destruction was total; the only record we have of the battle is a series of frantic emergency broadcasts intercepted years later. At the same time, the Spacer ship in orbit was attacked and destroyed by something never seen before by humans: an interstellar warship. Within a day the Crucians had taken total control of the planet. Seen from the perspective of history, what is most striking about this attack is what its timing implies. The existence of a Crucian warship at Five Canal suggests they had an existing military fleet. Although never proven, it is widely believed they developed this in an earlier war destroying some unknown civilization. No warship was observed at Iliad or Blast Mountain, however, so it was likely not standard practice to send military escorts. The generally-agreed conclusion is that the Crucians messaged their own C-tunnel gateway upon first encountering humans at Iliad, and immediately began military preparations. The timing of the events tells us a maximum and minimum range at which this gateway could have existed, which was later confirmed to match the location of a known Crucian C-tunnel. It appears that immediately upon meeting humans, Crucians began mounting their war machine, and that the first two encounters only went peacefully so they could spy and stall for time.

After the initial battle, human settlers continued to arrive sporadically over the next couple years, all in Spacer ships. They were likewise attacked and destroyed, but some managed to beam messages back along the flight path from Frontier Gate. These were received by incoming ships, some of which had enough fuel left to divert or reverse their course. The messages also reached Frontier Gate and gradually the news spread to the rest of the Federation. As early as IY -7020, the Spacers had begun constructing warships, at Frontier Gate and elsewhere. Complete news on the battle was passed on to every known settlement in the New Lands and on further to the Terran Sphere itself, as well as the Far Frontier and Inward Frontier. While this happened, the Crucians attacked further. Perhaps using intelligence gathered from Five Canal, they had located all the known human settlements in the Frontier Zone, and began attacking immediately. The Crucians achieved maximum surprise by separating their forces and sending smaller fleets to attack each of the human worlds. Since humans had no warships of their own yet at these planets, no great force was needed and they achieved one nearly effortless victory after another, wiping human settlement off every planet they found. Laconia, New Jutland, Tranquility and more simply disappeared from history. Frontier Gate itself fell in IY -6994. The Spacers made initial attempts to defend it with their new war fleet but took heavy losses and abandoned the hub to the Crucians, destroying their records and equipment as they left. Blast Mountain was the last human settlement in Frontier Zone to fall.

During the destruction, human leaders messaged each other and mobilized their individual war efforts as quickly as possible. While this amounted to nothing in Frontier Zone, New Lands and the Far Frontier had time to prepare. The Spartans and Spacers agreed their historic alliance in the New Lands in IY -6972 and other groups joined in various semi-formal arrangements. The Great Alliance was only officially signed on Earth in IY -6906, but by that time the actual agreement was only a formality and the whole human population of the affected spheres was already preparing for war.

Invasion

For some years after the fall of Frontier Gate, Crucian forces transitted to New Lands and began consolidating their presence. The bulk of their fleet crossed the tunnel, taking the usual heavy losses (approximately 20% of their ships) along the way, and it was assumed they would spend decades rebuilding the shipyards and their fleets on the incoming side.

Meanwhile, in Frontier Zone a small counterattack had begun. The Crucians had largely ignored the Far Frontier in their war, leaving time for the humans there to build a war fleet of their own. This smaller fleet attacked as a unit, achieving small success at first when they attacked and regained Five Canal in IY -6945. From there the main bulk of the fleet proceeded on to Frontier Gate, leading to a military disaster in which they were wiped out by the Crucian garrison, the size of which they had drastically underestimated.

The humans had left behind a garrison of their own at Five Canal, commanded by an officer named Walker who was descended from the Terran aristocracy. Some two years after the reconquest of Five Canal, Crucian reinforcements arrived there, in sufficient strength to drive Walker out. He drove straight for Frontier Gate, arriving in IY -6927 to discover a huge massing Crucian fleet which dwarfed the most outrageous previous estimates of human planners. Quickly deciding not to fight, Walker managed to dodge patrols and fly through the C-tunnel back to New Lands. Walker's exploits on the other side were equally impressive, as he raided the Crucian shipyard and stole enough fuel to power his flagship. Unfortunately, this tactical skill was accompanied neither by strategic ability nor great bravery. He immediately drove straight for Sentinel, the C-tunnel to the Terran Sphere itself, beaming news straight ahead of him as he went. At a stroke he had undone the efforts of the Spacers to keep this route secret, and handed the Crucians a tremendous advantage.

The Crucians were quick to take advantage of this. Their arriving fleet, thousands of warships, began to gradually cross to New Lands and resupply using the fuel stocks they had built up after their conquest. When they launched a few years later, they struck not at New Lands itself but proceeded directly to Sentinel. The job of conquering New Lands was left to yet more Crucian ships, which arrived in a continual stream for decades after. The battle of Sentinel began in IY -6882. Unlike Frontier Gate, Sentinel had had time to build significant defences and was able to endure. A human fleet had been massing at Sentinel for a few years, with warships just beginning to arrive from as far away as Sol itself. The New Lands side of Sentinel fell after six years but the gate in the Terran Sphere was defended by the entire fleet and held out for another seven years. However, when it finally did fall, virtually the entire fleet of the Human Federation had been spent in its defence and the Crucians kept arriving in greater and greater numbers in the Terran Sphere.

The Crucians' willingness to spend repeated large fractions of their forces on C-tunnel jumps was unexpected, almost as much as the sheer size of their military. Although the Terran Sphere had years of warning from the length of the battle at Sentinel, it availed little. The settled worlds of the Sphere were too distant to respond in time to save Sentinel. By the time they had built new fleets to fight on, Sentinel was already lost and they tried to organize defences within the sphere. When the sheer size of the Crucian fleet overwhelmed those defences, they tried to regroup with no success. Retreat turned to rout, which quickly turned to destruction. From the trajectories of arriving warships, the Crucians were easily able to map out the settled worlds in the Terran Sphere and to gauge their military capabilities. They repeated their strategy from the Frontier Zone with variations, sending smaller fleets to neutralize the newer-settled worlds while the main bulk of the fleet drove on to Sol. They arrived in -6815, quickly dispatching the outer colonies and laying siege to Earth. The Battle of Earth lasted less than a year, as the Pilgrims made their escape and left the Crucians to bog themselves down in an impossible land conquest. Who won this battle is infinitely arguable. The Crucians lost significant force here, slowing their advance and neither achieving total control of earth nor total destruction of its people. However, they did effectively smash Terran civilization, eliminating it as a power forever.

One of the mysteries of the Great War is why the Crucians never resorted to the mass destruction tactics that humans later used against them. They had orbital bombing capabilities and had used them in every engagement from the destruction of Five Canal to the siege of Earth. They had fusion warheads, and used them repeatedly in both space and ground encounters. They had a large industrial base, as is evident from the sheer size of their fleet. Given all this, they could have carpet-bombed Earth and other planets from space, never laying foot on them - yet they never did so. Instead, they repeated the same attack pattern over and over; destroy heavy defences from space, then attack the population on the ground. Our best theory is that Crucian society must have depended, in some fundamental psychological way, on the need for personal combat or the need to gain territory at all costs.

Total War

The Crucian campaign carried on through the Terran Sphere, finally grinding to a halt at Tunnel. Settlers survived in the Far Frontier and Inward Frontier, and in outer worlds of the Terran Sphere (the most famous of which was Juba). They had the population and resources to fight a guerilla war which, while hopeless, forced the Crucians to spend effort holding their new territories in the three conquered spheres. The Inward Frontier held out for two or three hundred years, its C-tunnel falling early on and the remaining survival of its people being only a question of how long any one settlement could hide from the Crucians. The Far Frontier finally fell to the Crucians much later, the last significant human settlement there being destroyed in IY -5704.

While the Crucians were slowly consolidating their hold on the rest of the Federation, human fleets regrouped in the Far Eyries and at Tunnel, both sides of which remained in human hands. They made numerous attempts to reconquer historic worlds in the Terran Sphere, sending large fleets on single missions with little success. After one particularly severe defeat in -5179, some eighteen centuries into the war, a minor coup d'etat within the ranks of the Spartans led to the "light" subfaction taking control and changing the direction of the war effort. The new war leadership chose to abandon these attempts at direct reconquest, instead spending resources on the guerilla war with the ultimate goal of holding Tunnel and allowing human expansion from the Far Eyries. This phase of the war lasted for more than two thousand years, with little active conflict but nonetheless continual effort which affected almost every human in the Federation to some degree. Within the Far Eyries and its daughter spheres, settlement and exploration were severely restricted in an effort to ensure the Crucians gained no new information about human positions, or back routes into human space. Settlement eventually extended to a network extending through chains of up to five C-tunnels, none of which ever intersected with Crucian space. Every planet capable of building starships (ie almost all planets other than new colonies) contributed a regular quota of materiel and soldiers to the war effort. Over time the war became a more and more distant concern in people's minds, with no imminent fear of conquest and an ever-shrinking minority of military figures trying desperately to keep people aware of the need to fight on. Occasionally contact was made with the Crucians at unexpected points, small groups of ships arriving in new spheres after long direct drives. With the light war ethic still prevailing, these conflicts were quickly ended. This helped keep alive the willingness to fight but nevertheless it dwindled with time and defences suffered.

Resurgence

All this changed in IY -2804 when the Crucians, for unknown reasons, mounted a sudden and violent assault which finally won control of Tunnel. Paradoxically, this was a decisive turning point in the war — in favour of humanity. Behind Tunnel, human society had restructured itself into the neo-feudal structure that still characterizes the Empire now. Worlds were organized into networks with clear clan dependencies and obligations, and while they may not have been concerned about the Crucians all were aware of the history of the war to that point and knew that distributed organization was their best defence against any threat they might meet. The leaders of the various worlds found it profitable in many other ways to keep up their clan and Federation ties, and so they kept up their connections and trade routes and support of a war fleet.

When Tunnel was lost, the news spread quickly and this time there were no mistakes or cowardly Walkers to ruin plans. The Crucians gained little information about the worlds connected to Tunnel, since the Spartan forces there beamed alarm warnings out at first contact and then stayed to fight to the death. Executing long-prepared plans, the "first responding" systems passed on warnings everywhere they could, and hundreds of long-settled worlds began to ramp up production of new warships and munitions, meeting at key points while launching well-thought-out reconnaisance missions to gauge Crucian strength. The Crucians, meanwhile, had been forced to send out probing expeditions looking for their targets. These met with mixed success, occasionally finding human worlds to attack and occasionally finding only unsettled barren rocks. Spartan war leaders declined to take this bait, leaving the victim worlds to their own defences while they prepared and then launched their counter-strike on Tunnel. This came in IY -2615, by which time the Federation had been comprehensively cured of war apathy. The human counter-attack succeeded very quickly and, taking a page from the Crucian war book, the bulk of the fleet swarmed through Tunnel, accepting the large losses as they went. After the reconquest of Tunnel, the war turned into almost a reverse of the original Crucian conquest. Newly-built subsidiary fleets met the Crucians within the Far Eyries, gradually tracking down and destroying all of them and the worlds they had settled or conquered. By IY -2203 they had wiped out all known Crucian incursions into the Far Eyries.

Invigorated by this success, the Spartans led the war effort back into the Terran Sphere and onwards. In the millenia since the start of the Great War, the population of the Human Federation had grown much more than that of the Crucians, and now it was we who could mount vast fleets which dwarfed theirs. This difference in growth and expansion rates means the reconquest would have been possible more than a thousand years earlier, had the political willpower been there. It has been theorized by more than one historian that the loss of Tunnel was allowed to happen in order to galvanize the war effort, but this has never been proven.

In any case, the reconquest was a great success. Leading fleets travelled ahead to seize control of Sentinel and Frontier Gate, winning and holding them while larger fleets followed behind, mopping up Crucian settlements. In the Terran Sphere this happened in a wave of conquests; Crucian locations were well known from all the data collected at Tunnel, so it was possible to hit the majority of their worlds all at once.

In most cases these worlds were sacrificed for the bigger goal of eliminating the Crucians; warships orbited and carpet-bombed them with fusion warheads, rather than spend effort on ground battles. Earth was the most notable exception; while humanity had been reduced to tribes fighting occupying Crucians there, even the hardest Spartan leader would not have been willing to pay the political cost of totally destroying it. Instead a massive invasion force was assembled and invaded, fighting a ground war which lasted a few decades. The tactical lessons from this conflict were of some value at other ground battles later in the war, mostly raids to gain intelligence. This is thought to be another reason why Earth was spared the carpet-bombing solution.

As systems were regained and garrisoned, unneeded forces were sent on to Sentinel to strengthen the foothold in the New Lands. In IY -1852 the reconquest spread into the New Lands as well. This was a harder effort, proceeding world by world in the face of active and aware Crucian resistance. Size proved decisive here; human forces wore down the Crucian fleets by weight of numbers. The tunnels to Inward Frontier and Far Frontier were breached, and by IY -1205 the Crucians had been driven out or exterminated everywhere that Humans had ever settled. The Crucian colonies in Frontier Zone had been taken as well, although all the force we could muster was still not enough to take the tunnel connecting Frontier Zone to Crucian space. This remained in Crucian hands until the very end of the war, many centuries later.

Thus the reconquest also ended in a near-stalemate. Just as the Crucians had been unable to penetrate well-defended gateway worlds earlier, human forces reached a point where they could not progress farther; Crucian space intersected with human space at only one c-tunnel, and since that tunnel was heavily defended no further progress was made possible; while we knew the general location of the Crucian home world, not enough was known to permit a direct-drive attack bypassing the C-tunnels.

Victory

The invention of the Spacefold Drive in IY -562 immediately changed the face of the war, and at once made the old structure of the Human Federation irrelevant. In theory, any two points in space fold back upon each other with some degree of overlap. In practice this means that between any two systems there is some chance of finding an overlap big enough to allow a starship to pass through. The process of surveying spacefolds is very long and difficult, requiring months of astrometry and repeated trial-and-efforts, investigating the best theoretical predictions for an overlap "resonance" until found. These yield spacefolds which might or might not be usable depending on their size. There are known "scale distances" near which spacefolds are known to be more likely to occur; 34 ly, 503 ly, 1610 ly, 8500 ly, and more, although the longer spacefolds are progressively more difficult to locate and use. Despite the survey difficulties and necessity for ultra-precise piloting to use them, spacefolds revolutionized star travel, because spacefold networks intersected the C-tunnel centered spheres, allowing many more and shorter connections between systems. They were also almost totally safe to use, unlike C-tunnels. Best of all, spacefolds often exist relatively close to stars, so journeys that previously took years or decades now uniformly took 3-6 months. The political structure of the Federation changed overnight as well, since the new drive had been invented by a different group outside of Spartan and Spacer control.

During the entire course of the Great War till then, little had been learned about the extent of Crucian territory except that it must clearly have been very large given the size of their invasion fleet. Thus, the first job in this new era was to locate the Crucians. For a couple hundred years, the spacefold drive was installed in very small spy ships, manned with crews of two people and designed to be very hard to detect. These would spy out likely systems, jumping into them and scanning for signs of civilization while they surveyed the return spacefold. In the few instances when these ships were found, they would destroy themselves; all were equipped with redundant deadman switches to make sure Crucians never gained a working Spacefold drive, and using human crews instead of robot ships added an extra layer of failsafes to the system. The existence of the spacefold drive was kept secret from most of the Federation until this process had been completed, as a further security measure. There was significant concern that self-important local officials might jump the gun and attack right away, alerting the Crucians to the new strategic situation. Indeed, even in the few worlds which did participate in the spacefold program, there were several occasions where officials were tried and executed for attempting to misuse or sell the technology of the drive.

By IY -316, the locations of Crucian worlds were known adequately and Founder shipyards had stockpiled enough equipment to simultaneously outfit thousands of new ships. The existence of the drive was revealed across the Federation at once, along with offers to convert ships and train crew. Within only five years, we had an entire spacefold-capable fleet ready to strike, and the last phase of the war began. The first targetted systems were Crucian C-tunnels. Although of no direct use to humans, they remained the major strategic grounds of the war. Controlling the C-tunnels meant the Crucians were trapped within their individual spheres. It also effectively stopped communications, and as Crucian ships continued to arrive at the hubs they inadvertently provided the locations of the remaining unsurveyed Crucian worlds.

At the level of individual star systems the war was fought much as it always had been. The new technology of the spacefold drive was not accompanied by any great leap forward in weapons technology. However, it did give the advantage of surprise for a long while, and made it possible to bypass the c-tunnels even while conquering them. As has been noted, humans outnumbered Crucians bu this stage of the war, and the only impediment to human victory until then had been our inability to force through the c-tunnels. Where possible, worlds were raided for intelligence (Crucians cared nothing about prisoners or hostages), and where not possible they were carpet-bombed.

The ultimate strategic goals of the war had not been totally decided at that point. While all were agreed that Crucian military power needed to be forever destroyed, the disposition of the Crucian worlds remained open to debate. Some, mostly those factions who had been most involved in the war effort, wanted to exterminate all Crucians everywhere and render their worlds uninhabitable. Others, with slightly less extreme views, wanted to eradicate the Crucians but keep their worlds. A much larger group was weary of the war and wanted to bring it to the most direct end possible, settling for control of the Crucians. They argued, with significant success, that it would be better to leave the Crucians the chance to surrender rather than have to spend centuries or millenia more hunting them down in ever more remote systems. The generally-accepted view of xenopsychologists now and then was that the Crucians would never have surrendered, but there was never significant opportunity for debate.

In IY -224 the Pilgrims re-appeared. Because of their peculiar journey, the fall of Earth was not yet ancient history to them and they sided with the extreme anti-Crucian factions. The Pilgrims themselves were legendary by then, and as the news of their return spread it invoked strong feelings everywhere, bringing the citizens of the then-Federation face to face with the great destruction their ancestors had endured in the early war. Political opinion shifted decisively to the side of extermination, and the existing tactics became the ultimate policy: smaller Crucian outpusts were seized and larger settlements flattened, in all cases killing every single Crucian who could be located. The Great War officially ended with the destruction of the Crucian home world, Pyre, a date which the Founder leadership took to mark the beginning of the new human Empire.

Aftermath

Although the war had practically ended by the time of the destruction of Pyre, fighting was far from over. The secret of the spacefold drive had successfully been kept from the Crucians, and so we had a good idea where all their worlds were. Paradoxically, this also meant we had little idea where their remaining starships might be. Several times over the next few centuries, Crucian fleets arrived at their targets in settled space, decelerating from relativistic trajectories after having driven directly across the gulf between spheres. The spacefold network meant reinforcements could quickly be called upon to fight these intrusions, and so they never spread beyond single systems. Settlement ships also spread at relativistic speeds through space, however, and for millenia after humans encountered the occasional Crucian colonies, all of which were destroyed. To this day we can never quite be sure if the Crucians are totally gone; they may have built ships with insanely large fuel supplies and driven clear out of known space, there rebuilding even now.

The major effect of the Great War on humanity was its total remake of human society. The original rulers of human space, the Terran Sphere, were long since destroyed, and the Spartans who led the war effort had ended their turn in power as well. They were rewarded with Spartan Hold, a network of systems all their own but incorporated within the feudal structure of the new Empire. Had there been no need for inter-system cooperation to fight the war, it is doubtful that the Empire or any other such large organization would ever have come to exist. Certainly, anything that did arise would have been markedly different from the shape of human society now.