What we today refer to as the Galactic War ran from the Earth year 2441 to 2590 and was waged between the Twis'rin and the Balorim, although the latter side expanded into a triple alliance of the Balorim, the Captab, and the Doggeid before the end of the war. Fought during the dying years of slower-than-light space travel and during the birth of faster-than-light starships, the war began as a slow, ultimately futile series of strikes between distant powers and evolved into the deadliest conflict in galactic history.

It began, as so many things do, with simple aggression. In the mid-25th century the Twis'rin had been well established in space for over a thousand years, whereas the Balorim were relative minnows, having been introduced to the spacelanes only recently by the Captab. But over the centuries the Twis'rin had grown decadent and complacent: so used to being the biggest bully in the playground, they failed to heed the meaning of the children constantly growing up around them. Therefore, when the Twis'rin made first contact with the Balorim on their extra-solar colony of Kilac VI, there were no niceties and no bandying around with translators and first contact scenarios. The Twis'rin simply did what they always did and tried to obliterate the colony from orbit. But by one of the most fortunate coincidences imaginable, as part of a diplomatic initiative to the Captab, a Balorim fleet was refueling in the Kilac system at the time. This fleet faced an enemy who had been cruising through space while the Balorim were still trying to figure out gunpowder. The Twis'rin were certain of victory, so naturally the Balorim waxed the floor with them.

It took eleven years for news of the battle to reach the Balorim homeworld of Shyaloum and eleven seconds for the proud Balorim to work themselves into a frenzy. The Twis'rin, having lost a fleet already, were too shocked to do more than sit back and prepare a second attack on the same target. But the Balorim scoured space for signs of Twis'rin inhabitation. Slight variances in observable planets were discussed and a list of planets were drawn up most likely to bear Twis'rin inhabitants. Warships were hastily built and equipped with the best weapons available, their crews cryogenically frozen and sent on their mission of revenge. When they arrived fifteen years later, they found the Twis'rin colony entirely undefended and entirely unprepared for what followed: a rain of nuclear death from above and a Twis'rin colony removed from the galaxy.

All of a sudden, there was a war on.

When the Twis'rin learned what had happened, 'shocked' would be a gross understatement of their reaction. So used to destroying those either concentrated on one planet or lacking either the power or the will to retaliate, it had simply never occured to them that their victims might fight back. For once, the Twis'rin war machine was mobilised, improvements that had been put off for decades were ordered, and complacent commanders who got their posts from good connections found themselves unemployed. The habits of a thousand years, however, were not easily broken.

However, the most daunting challenge confronted both belligerants: the laws of time and space were not easily broken. A Twis'rin war fleet sent directly from Matul'it to Shyaloum took over thirty years to make the trip, with the obvious result that when the war fleet arrived it was thirty years out of date and turned into mincemeat by the defense forces. Major planets and systems were simply invulnerable, and so both sides were limited to fighting over patches of rock on the outskirts of each other's territory that could draw little or no defense. It was a war with few battles: a handful of ships would arrive near a planet, exchange shots with hastily-built planetary missile batteries and shield systems, and head home win, lose, or draw when they ran out of ammunition. For over a hundred years the war was fought in this manner, with there being no prospect of victory for either side.

The conflict escalated at the same ponderous pace that it unfolded. The Balorim tried to enlist the cooperation of their traditional friends the Captab as well as the enigmatic Doggeid, but neither power was yet ready to go toe-to-tentacle with the infuriated Twis'rin. But both lent significant strategic and logistical support, doing much to even the balance between the two powers.

In 2566, however, everything changed. It had been clear to generals and admirals from both powers that, if the mysteries of faster-than-light travel could be cracked, victory would be within reach. The Balorim worked like demons but the Twis'rin had a head start of a thousand years of scientific theory. It was they who first discovered the conduits running through space that allowed things to, in realspace terms, break the light barrier - first merely scans and transmissions but, starting in 2566, starships as well.

This was the ultimate weapon. The Twis'rin immediately began constructing a new fleet of warships as well as a line of the new jump gates needed for faster-than-light travel pointed directly at Shyaloum. It wouldn't matter how stalwart the Balorim defenders were: their previous battles had been against Twis'rin warships that were necessarily decades out of date before they even fought their battles. Faster-than-light drive meant that the Twis'rin could attack the Balorim with their front-line warships as well as applying their full advantage in numbers and in industry, while without faster-than-light travel of their own the Balorim would be helpless to do anything but withdraw into the Qualstreit system and hope for a miracle.

Luckily for the future of the galaxy, a miracle came. The Spymaster-General to the Balorim government was ambitious and energetic, and when he got some intelligence on the new faster-than-light system he moved quickly. In their haste the Twis'rin were neglecting precautions, their old arrogance reasserting itself as they assumed that nobody could possibly infilitrate the project - so that's just what the Balorim did, and by the time the Twis'rin warfleet arrived, they faced an enemy prepared for the attack and with a full knowledge of the technology used to launch it.

The result of this sudden technological advancement was a war that got much, much bloodier and much, much more difficult. No longer were the warring species limited to flickering assaults against mediocre worlds: ships now roared through space and fought pitched battles with fleets gathered in response. Both the Balorim and the Twis'rin economies fell onto a footing of total war as each power desperately tried to build more jump gates and more jump-capable warships to try and get the drop on their opponents. The Twis'rin, especially, had built up a large fleet of pre-faster-than-light warships, but the advent of jump gates had made them strategically almost worthless. As a result, both foes were starting out on an equal footing.

Jump gate technology also finally got the reluctant Captab and Doggeid onto the Balorim side. The Balorim sales pitch was simple: "you know that if they get us, they're coming after you next. Better that you have jump gates too if that ever happens." A simple swap of technology led to the war becoming a three against one affair, and the gap between the Twis'rin and the Balorim was narrowed still further.

For many members of both species, the war had been essentially an abstract affair, one that had been taking place before they were born and that would probably continue after they died. Jump gates very quickly managed to bring it home, as both combatants now had the power to directly attack core enemy planets. The result was a series of space battles on a scale never before seen, a raging two-month long battle in the Qualstreit system when both sides simply kept sending in ships to replace those lost, stories of Balorim battleships being constructed, equipped with a motley crew, and flown directly into battle without being so much as named, and some devestating aerial bombardments. During the 2584 Battle of Pekka, Balorim war cruisers managed to strike the second-largest Twis'rin planet with a handful of missiles from orbit as the battle raged, killing millions. The next year, Twis'rin ships returned the favour to the Balorim capital planet of Shyaloum, killing over twenty million Balorim civillians but taking tens of thousands of casualties themselves as their ships were cut to pieces by the defense grid.

The pace was simply unsustainable. There were reports of starvation on the worlds of all four powers as every resource was taxed to the limit to gain victory, and the open frontier colonies which had been traditional food exporters found themselves razed from orbit by war fleets at the cost of millions of dead. The Twis'rin had enough of a numerical, industrial, and technological advantage that they would likely prevail - eventually. But the cost of the war had already exceeded anything they had ever dared to imagine and victory was still far off. It had been over a thousand years since the Twis'rin had been seriously challenged by anything, and even many of their leaders found that the unparalleled carnage made them sick to their stomachs. The Triple Alliance, meanwhile, found themselves in a new crisis every day, had to deal with unprecedented catastrophe on dozens of worlds and faced fighting a war in which victory was almost impossible, with only the certainty of their species' extinction preventing them from surrendering.

Like two heavyweights trading blows in the middle of the ring, the combatants simply punched themselves out. Nobody had a taste for more massive orbital battles, where the cities were attacked as often as the ships and chucks of wreckage with bodies strapped inside plummetted through the atmosphere and ruined the surface. And with the combined toll over two billion dead sentients (the immense bulk of them civilian) and no end in sight, an armistice was finally reached between the exhausted powers. In 2591, the official peace treaty was signed, including a guarantee of non-aggression from the freshly blooded Twis'rin, and for the first time in a century and a half peace came to the galaxy. For the time being: after all, the peace treaty did not heal the wounds of the war, nor did it make any of the species whose worlds had burned under foreign attack forget the crimes against them.