First Galactic War
Adversaries: Twis'rin; alliance of Balorim, Captab, and Doggei
Began: October 16, 2441, at Kilac VI?
Ended: January 8, 2591, with the Treaty of Pekka?
Casualties: 854 million Twis'rin dead, 1.2 billion allied dead
The First Galactic War was the galaxy's first experience of interstellar warfare, between the well-established Twis'rin empire on one side and the Balorim, later joined by the Captab and Doggei, on the other.
Though all sides initially thought it would be an insignificant conflict, the war proved one of the pivotal events of galactic history, lasting for almost one hundred and fifty years and leading to, among other things, the invention of faster-than-light space travel.
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1. Origins of the war
From their first trip into the stars, the Twis'rin had always concentrated on exterminating any other sentient species they discovered, lest that species develop into a threat to them. Xenophobia had always been the name of the game for the Twis'rin, and beginning with their atomic bombing in the Pekka? system the Twis'rin began to expand through the galaxy over the period of thousands of years. Travelling labouriously by slower-than-light engines, generations elapsed between a ships' departing and its' arrival, the crew cyrogenically frozen in the meantime.
A handful of colonies were started up, sometimes on the ruins of a civilization that had just been destroyed. Until the Galactic War, the Twis'rin had never encountered anything that was even a vague threat to them, and they had begun to feel themselves invulnerable.
However, the very nature of slower-than-light travel meant that only a very small portion of the galaxy could be explored. Many Twis'rin colonies were very near Balorim space but ships simply couldn't be sent in that direction at the time. Therefore, the Balorim were left to begin their own empire unmolested. Unlike the Twis'rin, they were motivated as well as intelligent, and had already made peaceful contact with the Captab, who knew of the Twis'rins' existence and were at pains to remain unnoticed.
2. Initial campaigns
Beginning as an ordinary Twis'rin genocidal campaign, the War kicked off on October 16, 2441 when a Twis'rin fleet stumbled upon the Balorim colony of Kilac VI? and, mistaking the frontier world for the centre of Balorim civilization, attempted to eradicate it with nuclear weapons as they did with all such worlds. The Twis'rin had developed interstellar colonies before the Balorim had even developed gunpowder, but the little Balorim colony, seeing an overconfident enemy and fighting for their very existance, managed to defeat the small Twis'rin force.
Though they had been in space for millenia, the Twis'rin had never faced any serious competition before. Eleven years later, reports of the battle reached the nearby (in galactic terms) Balorim homeworld of Shyaloum, where the Balorim were soon worked up into a martial frenzy. While the Twis'rin prepared another attack on Kilac VI, the Balorim scoured astronomical data and used every observation they could get to try and find planets likely to have Twis'rin inhabitation. Precious little was known about the Twis'rin at the time but the Balorim stuck at nothing. A fleet of warships was commissioned with atomic weapons. The crews were cyrogenically frozen and sent on a mission of revenge to a nearby Twis'rin colony. Fifteen years later, the fleet arrived and the crew awakened, laying waste to the world and killing over a hundred thousand Twis'rin citizens. A few short years later, Kilac VI was destroyed in a similar attack, its defenders unable to resist the newly-strengthened Twis'rin fleet.
2.1 A century of stalemate
Without faster-than-light travel, galactic warfare is an impractical business. A direct attack on the centre of the enemy civilization was impossible: the most valuable worlds would always be protected by the most advanced ships they could construct, but any war fleet that made the trip would be decades out of date before it arrived and would be turned into mincemeat by the new cruisers. Initially, the Twis'rin were confident that their technological edge would prevail and sent a fleet of twenty-eight ships to Shyaloum, arriving in 2485?. The Balorim defense forces eradicated the Twis'rin threat, and no further expedition of the like was attempted.
Unable to end the war in a single blow, each side resorted to picking around the edges. Small, underdefended colonies were wiped out on both sides, but through casualties soon rose into the millions the industrial base of each warring power was largely unaffected.
2.2 The solitary struggle
Initially believing the Balorim would be summarily wiped out, the Captab reacted to the declaration of war with alarm, pulling all their citizens from Balorim space by force and hoping that the Twis'rin would find no indication that the Captab had ever existed when the attack came.
Decades later, when the Balorim were holding their own, the Captab returned to Balorim space. A trade alliance developed, and Captab raw materials were shipped to Balorim shipyards to make up for those lost with the fall of each Balorim colony. Despite encouragement from the Balorim Imperium?, the Captab refused to take a more active role in the conflict.
Other cargos of raw materials also arrived on robotic freighters. The Captab claimed they were not responsible, and some investigation revealed the existence of the Doggei, who had been monitoring the conflict and wanted a Balorim victory as much as anyone. They, too, eventually gained representation on Shyaloum, but they, too, stayed out of an actual armed struggle.
3. Paradigm shift
Throughout the first century of the war, each species was fully aware that, if one power or the other could develop faster-than-light travel, everything would change. Research in this direction was the largest single research expenditure for both the Twis'rin and Balorim governments during this period, taking precedence even over the more immediately practical arms programmes. However, the Twis'rin had over a thousand years worth of experimental and theoretical data that the Balorim lacked, and the advantage would prove decisive.
In the 2540s, the Twis'rin mastered the art of sending transmissions, sensor signals, and the like through the near-infinite number of subatomic conduits linking almost every point in space to almost every other. This was a major breakthrough, but it had nothing on the one that was to come: in 2566, the Twis'rin finally found the secret of the jump gates? and gained the ability to send ships faster than the speed of light.
Ship-for-ship, each Twis'rin vessel was better than each Balorim vessel in the year it was built. It was only over three decades of slow travel that the Balorim gained a technological edge. Moreover, as jump gates were built to connect their many worlds, the Twis'rin were able to combine production between their colonies and muster a larger fleet than had previously been possible. Moving as quickly as possible, the Twis'rin were soon constructing a line of jump gates aimed straight at Shyaloum: though faster-than-light travel was very new and still extremely dangerous, no loss was considered too high.
In their haste, though, the Twis'rin were overlooking basic security precautions. Balorim agents had long been at work on Matul'it - as had Twis'rin agents on Shyaloum - and these agents were able to get hold of information on how to build and use these jump gates. In a remarkable feat of espionage, the agents used a Twis'rin faster-than-light transmitter to flash a signal to Shyaloum in time, using a primitive Morse-style code that they hoped could be deciphered by the scientists looking for exactly those sorts of signals as evidence of the Twis'rin programme.
By 2568, the Twis'rin were ready, and the attack came. But the Balorim were ready as well, and everything the Balorim had that could fly was called in to defend the capital. In an epic battle in the Qualstreit system?, the initial Twis'rin attack was repulsed with fantastic casualties on both sides.
3.1 The war heats up
For the first time, the very survival of the Twis'rin and Balorim people were at stake in the war. What had once been a colonial skirmish that had drawn little but exciting newspaper headlines for the average citizen turned into a real battle of life and death, and both economies were put onto a total war footing.
The Twis'rin had the advantage back and wasted no time pressing it. The two powers threw fleets at each other: with so few jump gates built, the warships of each power clashed frequently and inevitably with large numbers of casualties before one side retreated to try and prevent total defeat. Fleet admirals lived in a world where every move had the potential to lose the entire war in an afternoon. But for the Balorim, defeat seemed to be only a matter of time.
With no other choice, the Balorim made their last appeal to the Captab and the Doggei. The military situation was laid out to their ambassadors in the frankest terms. The increasingly horrifying statistics were laid before them. And the Balorim made it very, very clear that, once the Twis'rin had killed them, they would turn on the Captab and the Doggei. Without faster-than-light travel, the Twis'rin would destroy them easily and the galaxy would certainly fall entirely under Twis'rin domination. If, on the other hand, the two powers agreed to join the war on the Balorim side, Balorim scientists would teach them to travel faster than light themselves.
It was a sensible offer, and the triple alliance was formed.
3.2 The bloodiest years
The alliance soon managed to grind the Twis'rin to a stalemate. Gradually, victories began to accumulate. A Twis'rin border colony was seized by the Doggei, and a combined war fleet attacked Pekka II?, the second planet of the Twis'rin after Matul'it. It was the first attack on a core Twis'rin world of the war, and ships were called in from every corner of the empire to add to the defense. Even the Periodice system was almost abandoned. Many of Pekka's vaunted defense stations were destroyed and the allied fleet was able to briefly bombard Pekka II's surface before reinforcements arrived, and though they were forced to withdraw they had made their point. Millions of Twis'rin civilians, who just the previous day had thought themselves completely safe, were dead.
The following year, the Twis'rin tried one more time to seize Shyaloum?. The new series of Twis'rin battleships were terrifying foes, but even more dangerous was their plan to send cruisers on suicide runs through the Balorim defenses to bombard Shyaloum's surface as much as possible before they were destroyed. The fleet was repulsed and tens of thousands of Twis'rin spacemen died, but, despite a massive network of shelters and a highly advanced defense grid, over twenty million Balorim were killed and hundreds of millions more injured or maimed for life. Neither side could afford more than a token garrison for many of their worlds and as a result many of these were bombarded or destroyed, the civillian death toll rising still higher.
None of the species involved had the stomach to continue the struggle any further. Starting in 2590, a ceasefire was declared between the two warring parties while a peace treaty was negotiated. Finally, on January 8, 2591, the Treaty of Pekka? was signed, bringing an end to the First Galactic War.
4. Aftermath
All four species soon withdrew to their own borders to lick their wounds and rebuild their civilizations, each of which had been strained almost to the breaking point. But the legacy of the war lived on. As soon as each species was capable of it, new colonial expeditions with faster-than-light drives were in search of unexplored planets upon which to plant a flag.
Many more species, including the Humans, were discovered as a result of this spurt of expansion. The Twis'rin lost their primacy in the galaxy and gained a dangerous new competitor in the Balorim. Every species tried to win the loyalty of the smaller species, each looking suspiciously at the other and preparing for the seemingly-inevitable second war.