A Legacy of War

by Revan

Preface: Such a Quiet Thing

In the 34th, 35th, and 36th centuries of the 4th millennium after the coming of Christ, a war was waged between Humanity and a race of canine humanoids known as Melconians.

The war itself had arisen from a series of misunderstandings between the Concordiat of Man and the Melconian Empire. The Melconians had kept humanity under observation before the first official contact, had indeed fought a three-way war with Humanity and Humanities' traditional opponent, the Deng, in the 30th century, before the time of first contact - a feat only possible because A) they focused on the Deng, B) the human systems they did hit were outlier worlds, and C) those worlds wound up depopulated, with no survivors, records, or witnesses.

The Deng were nearly wiped out, and the Concordiat, aware from second-hand intelligence from the Deng theater of the war that something calling itself 'Melconian' was out there, eventually reached out and made first official contact.

Unfortunately, the Melconian Empire, per its standard operating procedure, slammed down an interdict on all contact and trade after six months until the new power could be evaluated. Despite the warnings of xenologists, humanity as a whole didn't understand this, and they angrily demanded the reopening of trade, and they grew more strident, not less, as the Melconians resisted all attempts at overturning the interdict. The Melconian Emperor's advisers misread it as a fear response of a weaker power insisting on dialogue because it knew it was weaker.

Imperial Intelligence should have reported otherwise, but molding one's reports to suit the view of one's superiors was not limited to humanity. Even if that had been the case, Imperial Intelligence found it nearly impossible to believe how far humanity's tech outclassed theirs. The evidence was there, but it was reported as disinformation, a cunning human ploy meant to misrepresent themselves as more powerful than they truly were, and hence yet more proof that humanity feared Melcon.

And humanity should have feared them, for it was as much a product of human hubris as Melcon's that produced the tragedy that sprung forth. Both sides had traditions of victory, and though they had lost battles, they had never lost a war - and neither truly believed that they could. Even worse, the Concordiat's intelligence organs knew that Melcon's technology didn't match theirs, and that made them arrogant. By any rational computation of the odds, the Human tech edge should have been decisive, assuming that the Concordiat had gotten its sums right. However, the non-intercourse edict succeeded in at least one of its objectives, and the Empire was over twice as large as the Concordiat believed - with more than four times the naval strength.

Despite all the warnings that admirals and generals gave over the decades-long slide towards war that followed, one reversible step at a time but with increasing speed, about how all their information was ultimately based on assumptions that could not be confirmed, they didn't really believe their own warnings, for how could decades of espionage, analysis, and centuries of computer simulations all be wrong? Even those who continued to pay it lip service forgot the truth of the ancient cliche "Garbage In, Garbage Out", and both sides approached the final decisions with fatal confidence in their massive, painstakingly honest - and totally wrong - analyses of the situation.

Though skirmishing between Melconian "rogues" and human fringe worlds had begun as early as 3308, the first real engagement between the two sides occurred in the Trellis System in 3343. Both sides suffered heavy losses, and no one ever knew for sure which fired the first shot, as each navy reported that - honestly, as far as it knew - that the other navy had attacked it.

Not that it really mattered in the long run. All that mattered was that the shot was fired - and both sides discovered the magnitude of their errors. The Concordiat contemptuously crushed the Empire's frontier fleets, only to discover that they were only frontier fleets, a screen for the true ponderous might of the Melconian Navy. Meanwhile, the Empire, shocked by the real superiority of Humanity's war machines, panicked. The Emperor himself declared that His navy would seek immediate and crushing victory by any means required. Nor was the panic one-sided, as the actual strength of the Imperial Navy, combined with the terror tactics it adapted from the outset, sparked the same desperation in the Concordiat's leadership.

And so what could have been merely a border incident triggered something worse than the galaxy had ever envisioned or darkly dreamt of. The Concordiat never produced enough of its superior weaponry to defeat Melcon outright, but it produced more than enough to prevent the Melconian Empire from defeating it. And despite the deep strikes that prevented the full reserves of Melcon from being mobilized against Humanity's worlds, that didn't stop the Melconian Navy from amassing numerical advantages that nullified its individual technical inferiorities. War filled the light-centuries as the two mightiest militaries in the history of the galaxy lunged at each other, each clash worse than the last, each side convinced that the other was the aggressor and that the only options left were victory or annihilation. The door to madness was opened by desperation, and the human case study from over a century earlier, back when no one believed that there would be a war at all, that was supposed to prove the infeasibility of the Concordiat and the Empire engaging in a fight to the finish, was converted into something very different. The Melconians might also have made a similar study - their operations certainly suggested that they had - but no one will ever know, for if the Melconian records ever existed, they certainly do no longer.

But the Human records do, and they allow no self-deception. Operation Ragnarok was only launched after the Melconians, after six years of increasingly bloody warfare, launched a "demonstration strike' on New Vermont that killed every one of the planet's billion inhabitants, but it was a deliberately planned strategy developed at least twelve years earlier. It began at the orders of the Concordiat Senate... and ended one hundred and seventy-two years later, under the orders of what fragments of local authority God alone knew.

There are few records of Ragnarok's final battles, because in far too many cases there were no survivors... on either side. The ghastly mistakes of the diplomats who misread their own importance and their adversaries' will to fight, the analysts who underestimated their enemies' ability to fight, and the Emperors and Presidents who ultimately sought "simple" solutions to their problems, might have caused the Final War, but it was the soldiers who ended it. But then again, the soldiers always ended the wars - and fought them, and died in them, and slaughtered their way through them, and desperately tried to survive them - and in that respect, the Final War was no different than any other war.

But in one respect, it was different. This time, the soldiers didn't just finish the war; this time the war finished them, as well.

Author's Note:

New opening chapter.

Comments

[Robot Sparky]

hmmm... Interesting