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nats-other-archive · 5 hours ago

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The Free City of Chirital – The City of Fire and Light

Inara had, duels and demonolgy aside, proven far less alien than my peers had warned me before I set out on this voyage. This, I must admit, led me to lower my guard as I took ship to the Rhalokian mainland and the Free City’s second star. I can only hope the shock I endured was just penance for my presumption.

Chirital is a city of workshops and foundries, fueled by rivers of coal and stoked by oceans of daemonfire. Some generations past, this left the air so heavy with smoke and rancid with poison that it was becoming quite uninhabitable, at least for the teeming wretches without the wealth to purchase a safely elevated hilltop estate. Its leading warlocks, rather than heeding the lesson Nature had attempted to impart, conjured a greater demon of wind and miasma to sweep the city clean, and confine all such filth to its boundaries.

The result is that approaching the city calls to mind nothing so much as plunging into a lower circle of hell. A great mantle of roiling, toxic smoke surrounds it like a wall, black as pitch and rancid as the plague. I cannot truly say how high it rose, but from my vantage it seemed at least half a league. The crew of the vessel I travelled upon seemed quite inured to the horror, though all were careful to batten hatches and hide below deck as we plunged through the barrier.

Emerging onto the deck as we entered the city’s harbour was another shock altogether. With the horizon bounded by walls of pitch in every direction, even the eternally pleasant and mild weather the warlocks had contrived for themselves was nothing like enough light to preserve one’s mind or soul. The city’s artificers evidently rose to the challenge with all the skill and hubris they are known for, and so my first vision of the city will forever by the titanic idols rising from its citadel, and in particular the seven-winged wyrm glowing with such unearthly radiance as to bathe the city in its light. There were, I would learn, six such idols, the light shifting between them and varying in its intensity like some arcane clocktower.

The effect would be dramatic enough on its own. Combined with the trails of smoke rising from ten dozen workshops and tenements and swirling together as they streamed toward the mantle behind us, and I must admit I nearly lost my nerve entirely. It was only when I recovered that I could lower my eyes and truly meet the city I had arrived at.

Inara was, certainly, grander in scale than any of the Lusellan communes which I had been hosted within, but it was a beast of the same fundamental kind. Chirital is something else entirely, a great hive of humanity, built over itself and spilling outward until what I must assume are the most wretched of slums brush up against the eldritch wall marking the city’s edge. I have been told a million souls call this place their home, and I cannot help but believe it.

The city sprawls across a deepwater bay, its citadel and oldest buildings filling a short peninsula that juts into the water. There are two great harbours, one on each side of the peninsula’s base. One, the captain’s port, is walled off and sealed to foreigners, containing the city’s famed arsenals and the infamous ‘Federal Fleet’ that raised such havoc in the last war. The other, the merchant’s port, is far more welcoming, host to ships from every port under the sun, and all the obscenities and vices one could possibly imagine selling to sailors from any one of them. It is an assault on the senses simply to travel through, all the moreso given the uncanny freshness and clarity of the city’s air.

The Empire itself is not one of the city’s largest trading partners, but there are enough merchants and expatriates to support a comfortable and well-established, if small, Illyrin Quarter. After my journey I felt rather blessed to discover it quite close to the port, nestled at the base of the hills that dominate the inland city. Doubly so, that I was welcomed into the household of the Viscountess Bariel herself, Her Majesty’s ambassadress to the city for the past decade. She proved a truly gracious host and, though I have no idea how she possibly arranged for it, her habit of heating her halls with wood rather than coal or more exotic substances provided a welcome respite from the otherwise alien city.

Her hospitality also allowed me an excellent vantage point to observe all the politics with which she inevitable became entangled, both as a diplomat and a leader of the local Illyrin community. Not just the trueborn, in the later case, as there were a number of Belthayans and Marchers among our number, and a rumour that there were those of them with ties to the Society of Echoes was a persistent scandal during my stay.

The politics of the Chiralese were, I admit, rather more interesting than such pedestrian social manoeuvring, though they involved several men I’m far more confident have connections to some manner of syndicate than any of my Belthayan dinner partners. The city is a republic, but a positively monarchical one. It elects a ruling triumvirate, a Chancellor to rule, and a High Priest and Captain-General to support or restrain him, and entrusts the Chancellor with the authority to staff all subsidiary magistrates and govern, with a few significant exceptions, as he sees fit. Each serves for half a decade, and may not be reelected. It should go quite without saying that these three offices are some of the most viciously fought over in all the Free Cities, and that to someday be Chancellor of Chirital is the driving ambition of many a magnate and warlord.

Given the city’s legendary wealth and industry, it is no surprise that the current Chancellor reigns in a truly regal style. Unlike in Inara, the high office is often awarded to parvenus or even foreigners, and it is only through fantastical spectacle and regular displays of generosity that they maintain their rule. Chancellor Rasad has reigned for four years now, and the old city abounds with fountains and plazas full of fantastical artifice commissioned in his name, from animate mechanical idols to channels in the grand streets through which radiant demon-blooded eels swim to illuminate the night. His inner court was even more full of spectacle, peopled as it was by warlocks and artificers vying for his patronage.

The city’s magnates and patricians are as green-eyed and rapacious as their reputation portrays them, their fortunes wrung anew from the blood and breath of the wretches who fill their workshops and factories each day. The artificers and demonologists performing in the Chancellor’s court are seeking their patronage as much as their lieges, and each is eternally on the lookout for some new innovation to spur themselves to even greater wealth. Whatever demonic techniques allow them to produce such volumes of textiles and finished goods at such passable quality is a secret too closely guarded for me to hear more than a whisper of, but the I can only hope it does not taint the final results, else a hundred ships set out each day with holds full of chaos and ruin for every port that has been bribed or forced to accept it.

Just as in civil government, the city’s religion is more organized and unified than Inara, or, according to the rumours I have heard, its other sister cities, though the institution of a formal priesthood hardly makes it less blasphemous or obscene. The city honours a pantheon of six, numbering two demons, a dragon, a legendary and long-dead Tyrant, and two actual gods, one of whom might very well be dead as well. The only one whose presence in the city I saw any evidence of was, thankfully, the city’s actual gods. He is a potent and hopelessly corrupt thing, a giant of gilt and coalsmoke who is said to have cannibalized all other gods within the city’s boundaries, and now rests in slothful decadence atop a grand throne in the city’s temple, savouring the sweet smoke of offerings which must never cease.

The current High Priest (High Priestess, properly, though neither the Balamite language nor the Chiralese themselves make any distinction between the spiritual duties of each sex) is a mystic of the new school, and has gathered a court of her own, misappropriating the wealth of her favourites and her office to offer refuge to scoundrels and fugitives who bring some scrap of occult knowledge or skill to entertain her with. As this court included at the time a disgraced scion of a prominent necromantic house and a traitorous former Hellknight, she was during my stay something of a nemesis to my hostess, and proved more than capable of ensuring that none of her followers ever faced justice. I can only hope that she will be struck down soon, if not for her true sins than at least for the lack of diligence with which she is universally known to approach her duties with.

The Chiralese do possess a standing army, one largely consisting of convicts and debtors pardoned by the Captain-General in exchange for a decade of service. At peace they serve to keep the high streets clear of criminals and beggars on most days, and the crowds under control during festivals and civic rituals. The better part of their work is, I’m told, keeping brawls between drunken sailors from spiralling into riots, and feuds between rival inventors and artificers from escalating to vendettas. In war they are passable musketeers, and better drilled than most militias, but hardly why Chirital is feared.

That is their navy. Most of the Free Cities rely upon privateers, merchant marines or conjured monstrosities to supplement their fleet in war, but within the walled Captain’s Port is a navy that can rival any other on the Inner Sea, each of its grand ships host to some unique horror its artificer-captain works upon endlessly in competition with his fellows. The sailors and marines of the fleet are the greatest fighting men the city has to call upon, and it is rare, though not unheard, for a Captain-General to not be elevated from among their number.

The Captain-General was not in the city during my stay, according to the Viscountess he had led the better part of the fleet to level some city which had executed a Chiralese merchant for smuggling, but rumours abounded. That he is the grandson of a devil, or one himself, or a former pirate, or a sorcerer, or has the wings of a dragon. He has spent little time in the city, finding every excuse to go out and win prizes and glory, and the mob follows his adventures quite rabidly. My hostess found him quite intolerable when he was in the city and being feted at the Chancellor's court, and preferred not speak of him beyond dark musings of where he might turn should there be no new easy sources of glory to strike at.

I would, I think, have liked to watch the navy’s glorious return after their latest victory, but alas I found myself leaving the city in some haste. My honorable hostess asked a favour of me in pursuit of returning a fugitive to justice, and while I was successful in the aftermath it was made quite clear to me that I should leave the city post-haste. And so I took the first ship down the coast and out of the Inner Sea to Celmy itself, the beating heart of the League.

-Sir Nathaniel Gillray, Recollections Of A Young Man’s Voyages Across The Lands Of Celmy, Or, A Discourse On The Constitutions Of The Free Cities And Their Dominions

#i want her

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nats-other-archive · 8 hours ago

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Whalefall - Imperial Glory

Congratulations. You don’t hear that enough, and saints and spirits know you’ve earned it. You, your parents, your nations, and the entire Caste. Idealizing a species is the work of generations, and that will be as true of Sol as anywhere else – but you are the vanguard of it! Five hundred million Hunters in only twenty-five years! You parents and seniors took to the Republic like no species in centuries and you – your natural virtues honed and clarified, your natures purified and perfected – are the first cohort to come of age with the advantage of their wisdom.

But I do not speak in generalities. Each of every one of you standing before me has earned your place here, and in the journey ahead. Your blood and sweat has brought peace and order to the lives of the billions of primals beneath you, and ensured that their children might be born with a brighter future. You, more than anyone alive, won your people and your worlds civil government and the right to practice your traditions and your culture. You have claimed a destiny for your caste.

Pride is a privilege and you, soldiers, have earned it.

There are those who would look back on what they have already done and be content with their lives, be ready to curl up by a fire and relax for the rest of their days. They are not in this room. Your caste is hungry, is ambitious, and every one of you feels that hunger in your heart. You fought for every opportunity, you are vicious to your enemies but loyal to your friends, you are the heirs to ten thousand years of warfare. You are humanity distilled.

Now, you are Legionaries.

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The Hykaeri Invasion of Terra (also known as the Fall of Earth or by the Hykaeri as the First Human War) was an Interstellar War of Aggression between the Hykaeri Imperial Republic and a coalition of Terran states whose conventional phase lasted from 802 to 806 Commonwealth Standard. It ended in complete Hykaeri victory and the occupation of the terran homeworld.

Following the final resolution of the Lupran Question with the ratification of the New London Accords in 748, the loss of their extrasolar colonies left the fractured terran governments in mutually reinforcing political and economic crises. Enticed by their vulnerability and diplomatic isolation from the Commonwealth, the Hykaeri began searching for a causis beli. In 802, Prelate Niun Oel led an invasion force in a surprise attack on the outer system.

Hykaeri military doctrine has no concept of noncombatants, and the terrestrial phase of the war led to tens of millions of deaths and the destruction of many major cities (especially on the heavily populated worlds of Terra and Mars). The resulting exodus of refugees to the Commonwealth States created by the New London Accords is the generally agreed upon beginning of the Terran Diaspora.

Does this answer your question? Select a highlighted term for further context, or enter your next query below.

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Is Red Planet anti-Hykaeri edutainment propaganda thinly disguised as a splatterpunk action sim? Absolutely. Does it seem like anyone involved did a single bit of research in Martian geography, culture, or politics? Not a chance. Is it even the genre this site is theoretically dedicated to reviewing? Ehhhh. But look, I’m getting a real kick out of a mainstream studio releasing something you can technically call a ‘historical terrorism simulator’. More importantly, it’s actually really good?

Technically it’s set during the Desaedo Rebellion a couple years after the Fall of Earth but like, don’t worry about it. The actual question to ask is: do you want a full-sense sim actually designed for a Terran nervous system where you sneak (or rampage) around a fully rendered Martian city and jury-rig/scavenge/loot your arsenal while dealing a one-terran reign of terror on imperial soldiers? Yes, right? Obviously. So the fact that the final boss is a 3 meter long psychic snake who throws buildings at you is actually a selling point, not a ‘problem’.

If you’re a regular reader then you’re obviously going to want to turn on survival mode and legionary difficulty when you start. In which case – if you piss off more than one catrophract at once, my only advice is to Just. Start. Running.

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The Imperial Republic’s destiny is nothing less than the righteous organization of the galaxy’s intelligent life. Evolution’s knife has carved each species into its own unique shape, left them with their own capacities and requirements, their own virtues and destinies. Each can be generalists, can do whatever is required to avoid extinction – otherwise they would be extinct. But expecting everyone to do everything is cruel and, frankly, a fucking waste. The Republic ensures each has a place and a role, and is able to fully live up to the virtues that Nature has written into their essence.

Putting a gun in a Scribal’s hand is a sick joke. Putting an Immaculate on a factory floor is an obscenity. You are Hunters, bred for chase and pursuit, for guarding and harrying, for risking everything for the good of your family or pack or tribe. You, legionnaires, have earned the exclusive privilege of a career spent living up to the highest calling of your caste. That Scribal’s best life is spent drowning in code and ink. Yours will be spent defending her, and every other citizen who depends upon the fleets and legions to live up to their own calling. If you are truly, cosmically lucky, a chunk of it will be spent planting banners on worlds yet unclaimed. The mission you’re embarking on today will be a good start to that.

It’s just about poetry that your first mission will be guarding and protecting the first step of your species’ new history among the stars. The Arkship Aeneas carries aboard it two thousand helpless lives, and the genetic material to grow and birth a million more. It is the seed that will turn a planet into a world. You are its guardians and watchers, its first line of defense against anything and everything that might contaminate it until its set down roots on Eden, and the patriarch and civil militia are thawed out and ready to be handed off responsibility for the place.

Oh don’t look so panicked. Not just you. The crew and kosmoi could manage one of these boats in their sleep. Which means they’ll have plenty of time to keep an eye on all of you. You’re legionnaires now, but you’re still on probation. And if I hear from anyone that my handpicked best and brightest are embarrassing me, I’m not going to rest until I hunt you down and cut your back into wrapping paper myself. Understood?

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Hykaeri Hunters (or Hykaeri-Kel) are a quasi-terran engineered species created by the Augurs of the Hykaeri Imperial Republic after the Conquest of Terra. Bred as light infantry and auxiliaries for the Hykaeri Military, they are noticeably taller and more athletic than the average natural terran, with particularly reinforced cardiovascular systems and intuitive spatial reasoning capabilities. According to Hykaeri propaganda, the terran tendency to form small, tight group bonds in stressful circumstances and sacrifice themselves for the sake of close relations was also isolated and enhanced.

Given how recently the species was engineered, it is not yet clear how stable it will be, or the natural life expectancy of a member. However, after physical examination of defectors, experts from the University of Centinati estimate most will not live past their mid-fifties.

While technically capable of reproducing with natural humans, medical experts strongly advice against this and consider the child surviving without significant and lifelong health issues very unlikely. Even two Kel breeding together is considered unlikely to result in healthy offspring with the oversight of an Augur.

Does this answer your question? Select a highlighted term for further context, or enter your next query below.

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BE PART OF THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY!

Ideal genetics? Physically fit and healthy? Clean record? Practical skills in resource extraction, agriculture, construction or engineering?

You may be eligible for a berth aboard the Arkship Aeneas!

Build a life and start a family on a lush, pristine new world! Be part of the first wholly Idealized human culture! Guaranteed employment for up to ten years, with land titles distributed on completion!

We’re look for brave, committed patriots willing to get their hands dirty and carve a place for themselves out of the untamed wilderness. If that sounds like you, then there are up to 1,000 unclaimed cryobeds aboard the Ark, and one of them could be yours!

APPLY NOW

Depending on their behavioral, cognitive and physical results, rejected applicants may instead be asked to provide genetic material to ensure genetic diversity among the next generations of colonists.

Crew, colony administration and militia nominate colonists for their reserved berths through a separate process, personal connections will not provide an advantage for applications through this track.

Successful applicants on this track will be entitled to 25KG of personal effects. Applicants on this track are not allocated space for wives, children or pets.

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Draw your knife across your palm and repeat after me.

I am a spear in the hand of my captain

An arrow in the quiver of my lord

I am the vengeance of the stars upon the earth

And the light that guards through the endless dark

My family is the Legion, and I shall treasure nothing above it

My life is the chattel of the state, to spend however it might choose

Upon the blood of my heart and the fire of my soul

I pledge fealty to the Hykaeri Senates and the Peoples of the Republic

Let all I love be reduced to ash before I falter

Good. Take the vial and save a bit of your blood before you bandage the wound. You’re going to be the dedicated compliment of the Aeneas, which means you’ll need a few drops of it to offer up during the embankment ceremony. Not that I doubt any of you are willing to bleed for your duty, but there isn’t an apothecary alive who appreciates dealing with some idiot who didn’t clean their knife properly and got an infection ten seconds before the airlock sealed. So smashing the vials is the Fleet-approved comprise.

Alright, I’m blabbering. And all of your have forty-four hours to finish up any business before you’re mustering for embarkation. Enjoy it – homeworlds always have the freshest air and the friendliest civies, and if you don’t fuck this up you won’t be coming back for a long, long time.

Legionaries, dismissed!

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nats-other-archive · 10 hours ago

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Whalefall – The Kirik Empire

Or, On Being So Evil it Makes You Stupid

The fun thing about real xenophobic politics – about believing that your species has some special mandate or divine blessing that makes it the most important, specialist, most brilliant and courageous and strong bunch of little guys in the entire history of the universe, and that you are preordained to spread across the galaxy and conquer or enslave or exterminate every bunch of filthy aliens you come across is:

Literally every species has done it at some point, at least a little bit

It’s an ideological dead end that will doom your whole civilization to irrelevance if it doesn’t get it bombed into rubble by someone who understands the incredible strategic value of not being a dick and making friends.

There’s an enjoyable sort of dramatic irony to a supercut of a dozen different genocidal maniacs from as many species giving basically the same speech with the names swapped out, right?

It’s also more or less a Commonwealth propaganda reel, or possibly a children’s edutainment vid, so probably shouldn’t take it entirely seriously. But there’s a reason known space is divided between two different incredibly cosmopolitan societies and all the pathological chauvinists and genocidaires are marginal or dead, right?

Not to say the Commonwealth is perfect about these things – obviously. I’m terran, I’m aware – let alone the Hykaeri. But a brutal, genetically encoded caste system is still a civilization that can incorporate and make good use of all its member species and motivate them to work, fight and die for it (and, less dramatically, a civilization that’s reliably going to get more out of incorporating new subjects than it will lose managing and policing them, at least once the initial turbulence has settled down – just look at how quickly Terra’s moving along). The same really can’t be said for tributary empires, let alone genocidal expansionists.

The latter are usually just more depressing than interesting to talk about, but I did promise you all something with a bit more substance than another wannabe pirate-king carving out an iron-age empire this time. So let’s go all the way back to what’s now mostly remembered as ‘the most successful exercise in large-scale nation building in Commonwealth history’.

The Kirik Empire

Not it’s name, of course – only the most tiresome and tedious megalomaniacs actually call their empire ‘the Me empire’. But ‘The Krin-Tcho Compact’ doesn’t look nearly so menacing scrawled across a star map in the opening minutes of some war-vid, does it? (Actually, on the infinitesimal chance any kirik read these – how do the translation protocols handle that sort of thing for you if you dig up some old serial?)

Anyway, on paper it was a nice, decentralized system with allied-but-autonomous governments answerable to the popular will. In practice it was a nasty little number, with just barely informal alliances between the confederate space force, leading industrial conglomerates, and powerful religious institutions running the show (you’re all clever enough that with that list I don’t need to waste any time going over the particular ways it was unpleasant for its own citizens, right? Splendid.)

Kirik reproduce quickly, have a talent for engineering and optimization, and have a tendency to get really invested in tribal identities. All that was an order of magnitude more obvious during the Confederate era – instead of being famously rowdy sports fans, it was university dueling societies nearly killing each other over every slight any student of one had done to the other. Which was already the domesticated, civilized version of what had been rampant honor feuds and vendettas that half of kirik civilization was built around (that parts that survived, anyway).

Now, let it never be said that I told you all that racists are necessarily stupid. They cracked FTL all on their own, which is more than most Commonwealth members can say. Established a few extrasolar colonies and spent a frankly concerning amount of time wargaming how space combat would work for a species with no actual history of it, just in case they needed to keep them in line – which is where the military that would grow to basically become the government got its start. Things went along like that for a generation or two, and then some brave prospectors stumbled onto an already inhabited system. Not an incredibly primitive one, but one that was only just messing around with the basics of satellites and chemical rocketry.

First contact led to threats and grandstanding led to executed explorers led to gunboat diplomacy led to war. A war that ended up with the Confederate Space Force as the occupying force over hundreds of millions and auctioning off concessions to exploit the new world to all its favorite contractors. Which is about when kirik society fully succumbed to that lethal madness known as Manifest Destiny.

Over the next generations Krin-Tcho Compact laid claim to over three hundred star systems – of which six ended up being home to significant kirik populations, and another eight were inhabited by subject species reduced to some kind of tributary, protectorate, or other colonial status. Every single one of them laboring for the benefit of the oligarchs and voting public of the homeworld, with the sharp stick of collective punishment liberally applied should their enthusiasm ever waver. The imperial class believe themselves to be divinely ordained conquerors of the cosmos, and the most advanced civilization to ever exist. The subject populations believed them invincible and inevitable, resistance both futile and self-destructive.

Then a Polri Wof surveyor arrived to chart what was quickly dubbed the Kirik Expanse, and the Compact officially made contact with the All Systems Commonwealth.

The Commonwealth’s Favorite Monster

In popular histories and primary school curricula, making contact with the kirik is usually marked as the end of the ‘Founding Era’ of the Commonwealth (the other options are either making contact with (happened before) or the full ascension to membership of (after) the Serene Verinsoan State and incorporation of kyrians into the body politic. Some outliers say its the first run-in with the Hykaeri, but they’re cranks). If you’d asked them, the selein and azt of the time wouldn’t have said that they were the only species in the universe to have discovered FTL travel, but reading the records everyone but the mystics and philosophers kind of believed it. The Commonwealth was the work of generations of economic integration and decades of careful diplomacy between the only interstellar governments in the cosmos, and the rest of history would be its encountering and slow, consensual, mutually beneficial incorporation of each new species it would uplift to the stars.

So yeah, the alien scout force chasing a surveyor back into Commonwealth space and bloodily seizing a supply depot was a bit of a shock.

Neither side was even slightly prepared to deal with a hostile interstellar state of unclear size or capabilities – but even more than now, the Commonwealth’s frontier was scientific and commercial, while the Krin-Tcho’s was as militarized as it could possibly be. The only reason they only took over three (very lightly) inhabited systems before communication were figured out and the Confederate High Command sent someone out from the home world to take control of the situation is because they couldn’t figure out Commonwealth coordinate systems or star charts any more than they could our offers of surrender.

The Commonwealth was a much less tightly bound thing back then, and so it was specifically the selenic republic whose borders were being invaded – the Ablane Union, for anyone training for a quiz show – that handled those initial negotiations. Which led to a lot of confusion during the initial negotiations – or at least, left the kirik convinced that they were dealing with a few hundreds of millions of aliens scattered across a couple of half-empty moons, rather than anything grander.

The initial negotiations for a truce turned into threats and grandstanding, and the carefully timed arrival of a detachment of kirik frigates in-system did its job forcing the selein to cede the systems that had been occupied and send the kirik diplomats home with enough ‘gifts’ to seriously hurt the local economy. Archival records show they were hoping the demands would be refused to create a justification for a real campaign of conquest, and it was only a matter of time until a different one was discovered. If the Commonwealth didn’t start something first – because wider galactic culture was not responding well to these less-than-friendly new neighbors.

There was some initial blind panic, paranoia, hoarding of supplies and doomsaying on street corners (even on planets literally dozens of jumps away from anywhere the kirik had been seen) – there always is. But mostly, there was a lot of anxious conferring by worryingly practical people about how to deal with the threat. Which most of all meant understanding it – and this is where every spy agency you should be terrified of knocking on your door in the middle of the night really got its start.

Once you knew the language, it was pretty easy to figure out what poor grunts and low-level administrators on shitty border postings wanted – and it became increasingly obvious just how cheap it was to bribe people who spent half their careers shipping more riches than they’d ever touch back ‘home’ for their betters. Every bit of information was massaged and framed before it ‘leaked’, making the Krin-Tcho government seem as horrible and horrifying as possible, and as opposed to anything your average selein or azt considers right and good and beautiful. There’s nothing like a looming threat to define yourself against, and when war finally came the Commonwealth was more united than ever, ready to struggle against the terrifying, brutal imperialists who wanted to reduce them all to poverty and serfdom.

Ideologically and culturally I mean. They were still years from being actually prepared.

The Aleal Incident

There were two years of peace between the official opening of diplomatic relations between the Compact and Ablane. The time was filled with an endless series of provocations on one side, and an absolutely desperate attempt to work out how to defend worlds from interstellar invasion from first principles, on the other. If you’d given them twenty, they might have even figured something out.

The war came, as things often do, before anyone at the top really wanted it. Aleal was the Ablane asteroid colony nearest to the jump-point leading to the kirik-occupied systems. After however many interstellar joyrides and harassment raids, a whole array of what were at the time cutting edge defensive systems were shipped out to scare off the next provocation. Which arrived while they were in the middle of being installed. The kirik squadron responded to getting ineffectually shot at by the batteries that were working by jumping from provocation to invasion. The colony was bombarded, breached and seized, and every selein within was dead within a week. The kirik commander, either worried about being punished for going beyond their orders or surprised at how easy the attack had been and dreaming of glory, sent word back requesting reinforcements and then kept going.

The Confederate Space Command had been planning on an invasion, of course – the homeworld was absolutely abuzz with dreams of all those decadent alien kingdoms and the riches they would provide in tribute – but interstellar logistics were even more a bitch back then than they are now, and they’d have preferred to take some more time getting all of their ducks in a row. Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for probably a few billion selein), news of the ‘glorious victory’ leaked as soon as they received it and any chance of doing anything but backing the attack to the hilt became political suicide.

The war was on.

Now, if you are the sort of reader who wants the blow-by-blow of interstellar warfare and enjoys the challenge of keeping all the theaters’ timelines in your head without developing a migraine, good on you. Go have fun with that somewhere else. For the purposes of this barely-edited ramble, all you really need to know is that the war initially went very poorly for the Commonwealth – the Ablane Republic was occupied entirely, and so were continents and colonies of several other selenic states. It’s the last time enemy soldiers ever landed on several different planets, actually. People were panicking. Also dying. Many, many people dying.

But things didn’t stay that dire for too long – the Confederate Space Force could cut through the pretty rudimentary voidborn defenses that were set up anywhere, but the kirik empire was built on either threatening a planet with orbital bombardment or delivering a few thousand soldiers with modern weaponry to a world that fought by shoving bits of metal into each other. Trying to invade three different planets with populations in the billions and the industrial base to shoot back at any ships in orbit (as they were at their high-point) was just beyond them. And once things bogged down, the problems really started.

The Compact was built on easy wins in more ways than one. Most of their space force was old, because making new spacecraft is expensive and why bother when patching up any issues is so much easier? The R&D and manufacturing systems they had were halfway to being entirely graft and patronage networks, eating the plunder of empire as any part of them doing real work atrophied. Which was an issue, once they started taking actual losses and needed to quintuple the previous production rates.

But that was a solvable issue – was being solved, really. The actual crippling weakness was that, by and large, all the selenic colonies they invaded fought back on whatever level they were capable and all the Commonwealth states they weren’t currently invading (at that point basically just the other selenic republics, whatever you call what the azt had going on back then, and a few uplift cases) were enthusiastically contributing their share to the war effort.

Beyond the kirik homeworld, this was...not the case for the Krin-Tcho Compact. As soon as rumors of the war going badly spread and space force patrols became less frequent, just about every colony and tributary with a local government started coming up with excuses about why their taxes would be late, and the directly occupied ones discovered very good reasons to keep all the cash and guns they had close at hand. Even before the first Commonwealth incursions into kirik space, production issues were everywhere. And once they did, well-

Just about every Commonwealth world would ignore demands to surrender and fight. The first time the reverse occurred, it caused a coup and the colony’s new government welcomed their ‘conquerors’ with open arms. The Commonwealth couldn’t economically transport army groups worth of troops across space any better than the Krin-Tcho – with one exception, they just didn’t need to.

Ruin and Rebirth

Soon enough, the grand, star-spanning empire was reduced to nothing but Triklun – the homeworld – itself. Which was hardly nothing – 6 billion and change kirik spread across three densely populated continents, if maybe a bit light on the military-aged and physically fit compared to what you’d hope for. The terrestrial armies and air forces the different Compact member states could muster up were at least as well-armed as anything the Commonwealth could throw at them, and outnumbered then hundreds to one. Actual orbital invasion was simply not going to happen.

But Triklun wasn’t built for autarky – even before a proper orbital blockade was established, the planetary industrial base was already starting to cannibalize itself to make up for lost taxes and tribute shipments. When it was – and when Commonwealth ships dipped into low enough orbit to start hitting logistics hubs and extraction chokepoints – things started to get dire quickly. Well, ‘dire’ – the chance of anything except exhaustion back home making the Commonwealth break the blockade was gone within a few months. It still took more than a local year before the first Compact member state went behind the General Staff’s back and opened incredibly secret negotiations. Once those leaked, then things came to a big bloody finish, and fast.

The ruling elites and the great mass of Krin-Tcho citizens had been gung-ho and enthusiastic about planetary unity and racial glory when it was full of heroic victories and shipments of luxuries and getting told they were the most important and blessed people in the whole wide universe. Less so after years of siege and promises of eventual victory becoming more and more delusional. They’d still fight to defend their home and country, of course – but they remembered that, technically speaking, they were independent governments whose greatest commitment was to their own citizens, not the alliance that had dragged them into all this shit.

Once the selling each other out started – and the Commonwealth brass in orbit had brought along plenty of spies and diplomats to help it along – it turned into a frenzy. The mixture of bread riots and the thought that the guys over the next hill might get a sweetheart deal under the new regime instead of you proved pretty motivating, and once the first state was officially welcomed as a Commonwealth ally – well, world wars are pretty easy to win when you have friends with increasingly total orbital superiority dropping presents down on enemy formations. The aid packages giving your soldiers and specialists a taste of the life they used to have didn’t hurt, either.

The Compact was dissolved, of course. The colonies and conquered worlds that had rebelled in support of the Commonwealth were showered with aid and support to join as Commonwealth members (with blew up in everyone’s face a decade down the line, but that’s a different story), while on Triklun itself the enthusiastic traitors and collaborators all got to dig through old nationalist fantasies and realize their most absurd expansionist dreams as the map got redrawn. They – let alone the rest of the planet – then got a much more involved period of tutelage before getting past probationary status.

But plus or minus a few planetary uprisings, attempted coups, and still incredibly-politically-suspect religious traditions, a couple hundred years latter and it’s all worked out. The baby Commonwealth more than doubled the number of member species within it, and for all but one of them it was just an absolute strict upgrade in circumstance. Not that kirik aren’t doing fine now – depending on which census you trust, they’re either the fifth, fourth or even third most populous species around, with almost-but-not-quite commensurate representation in galactic institutions and decision-making bodies.

The experience taught the Commonwealth a lot of good lessons, too. And one incredibly, ruinously, planet-destroyingly bad one about how easy winning an interstellar war against an ideologically unpalatable peer-society would be, but first contact with the Hykaeri Imperial Republic was still a while away.

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