The Compact-Confederacy War

The Compact-Confederacy War was a war between the United Earth Confederacy and the Compact of Species. Lasting from first contact in 2782 CE (4236 ACF), and ending in 2792, the conflict was caused by the refusal of the UEC to join the Compact, and resulted in the destruction of the Confederacy as well as the near-extinction of the human race as a whole.

Background
The United Earth Confederacy had been formed in the 2400s, based on the prevention of large-scale suffering (such as pandemics, mass poverty, large-scale war and famines) that had occured during the Red Death and the enduring freedom of its citizens. Its politicians were democratically elected, and colonies within the Confederacy were free to make their own laws and govern themselves (within reason). Much of its governmental and military structure was very similar to that of modern free nations, although its military itself was much smaller in comparison to its overall population due to both a lack of need (the most the United Earth Confederacy Navy had fought since the unification were small pirate clans) and the public's wish to minimise or remove the "military-industrial complex" that had plagued many nations in the past.

The Compact of Species, while originally founded on similar principles, had (with the loss of two of its three founding races and over the course of several thousand years) lost sight of its original goals of protecting those who could not protect themselves and ensuring the freedom and survival of all those it protected. At the time of the Compact-Confederacy War, it was an oppressive, oligarchical society in which those species it decided were not "worthy" of being ruling species were slowly indoctrinated over thousands of years until they wholeheartedly believed in the Compact's systemic speciesism, at which point they could join the ranks of the ruling species. In several "ages of expansion," it had pushed out of its own territory, claiming hundreds of thousands of star systems and subjugating many species that did not have the technology to defend themselves. In doing this, it had encountered and declared war on the Askanj Principality, who valued freedom in a similar way the the Confederacy, allowing their member species to preserve their own culture and expand under the aegis of the Principality Argosy.

First Contact
The initial meeting of the Compact and Confederacy took place between the UECSS Alaskan Dawn and CSSS Flickering Light. Initially excited to have contacted another interstellar nation, the human crew of the Alaskan Dawn slowly became horrified as the crew of the Compact ship recounted their doctrine towards other species (a harsh reminder of the old "white man's burden" line of thinking many expansionist empires had used on ancient Earth). With the realisation that, as an FTL-capable species, humanity would be inducted as a ruling species and be directly involved in the preservation of a system as oppressive as those the Confederacy had been created to prevent the creation of, the crew of the Alaskan Dawn decided to open fire on the Flickering Light before it could report their position. However, unaware of the technology disparity between the Confederacy and the Compact, the element of surprise did not carry the human ship to victory, and it was destroyed. The Compact ship reported back to the expansion fleets that there was an advanced, treacherous nation nearby, and the beginning of the war followed.

First Phase
At the opening of the war, the United Earth Confederacy Navy was operating using limited resources, with most of its larger ships being out of date and with small numbers. Likewise, the Compact was fighting using whatever it could spare from the ongoing expansion effort, with ad-hoc task forces being assembled and sent into combat as more ships were rerouted. Both sides underestimated the overall size of their opponent, although the Confederacy did this to a much larger degree, assuming the Compact was roughly their size but relatively far away. The Admiralty believed they could hold on through attrition and eventually prove they were more trouble than they were worth, as the largest ships they were seeing of the Compact Space Force were various classes of cruiser. Public opinion in the Confederacy was mostly against the war, with increases in funding and recruitment for the Navy existing but not taking place on a large scale.

Second Phase
As the war progressed, the Compact began to realise that the dribs and drabs they had been sending would not be enough to grind down the Confederacy, and began to properly organise. The second phase of the war saw the arrival of Compact battleships in properly organised strike groups, which was a nasty shock for humanity. The Confederacy shifted to a Fabian strategy of attacking supply lines, forward bases and isolated ships rather than fleet engagements, as the Compact's superior firepower would result in too many losses. The build-up of the Confederacy's naval forces rapidly expanded and humanity was- barely- holding, but territory was still being lost.

Third Phase
The final phase of the war began as the Compact deployed the Chariots CSFWV Bringer of Light, CSFWV Matchless Praetor and CSFWV Illumination of Valthus. Compact Force Command had got tired of the local expansion force leader's repeated failures to bring humanity to heel, and sent several Triarchs along with their chariots and attendant fleets to oversee the conquest. The previous goal of "subjugation" became "brutal subjugation," and human worlds fell at a truly astounding rate, with some populations being decimated by the occupiers. The arrival of a Chariot in any battle meant a loss of the Navy. At this point, the Admiralty began assembling their last-ditch measures; presidential archives were unsealed containing all that humanity had ever planned to develop but had been deemed "too destructive" or "too dangerous" in the last several hundred years. Charles Sansbury described this as "like every pipe dream R&D ever had got funded." These contingencies resulted in the design of the Kalki- and Nemesis-class deep space fleet engagement vessels, with the construction of the UECNS Nemesis and her sister ships UECNS Hekate and UECNS Athena following shortly after. The construction of exodus fleets was also planned, with the hasty conversion of incomplete civilian and military ships, such as the UECSS Nyx.

It was hoped by the Confederate Admiralty that the Compact could be kept in the dark about the Nemesis-class until the first three were completed, at which point the UEC stood much more of a chance of survival than without them. However, the recovery of the location of Sol meant this could not happen. The resulting battle between Task Force 97 and Expansion Fleet Bankala very nearly prevented the information reaching Compact command, with all but one ship among the Expansion Fleet being destroyed (including CSFWV Bringer of Light), in return for the total destruction of Task Force 97 and crippling of (and total crew casualties aboard) UECNS Nemesis. Only Red One was left aboard the ship, but the shock drive was so badly damaged she would not make it back to Earth before the end of the war.

The death of a Triarch, destruction of a Chariot and construction of an AI led Force Command to conclude that humanity was too much of a threat to be kept alive in any form. Total genocide of the entire human race was authorised, under the pretense that humans were infected by "racial madness" and were incapable of being peaceful towards other species. The remaining two Chariots as well as every Compact ship that could be mustered headed straight for Sol, and eradicated every human in the system in the First Battle of Sol. What remained of the Confederacy's naval assets in other systems mostly lashed out in an attempt to take as many Compact invaders with them as possible, while others began running.

Aftermath
After the war ended, the Compact sent out Extermination Fleets and flotillas to hunt down any remaining hidden human colonies or exodus fleets. With time, numbers, and the surviving captured data of most officially sanctioned contingencies on their side, the Compact destroyed all but one known exodus fleet.

Human Survivors
One exodus fleet headed for a Rally Point at a temperate world with remarkably similar characteristics to Earth, so far from human-inhabited space that it had been the descendants of the original discoverers that relayed its location back to the Confederacy. The Compact assumed that, with inferior drive technology and far from top-of-the-line ships, this group would inevitably die before they got there. Indeed, many ships of the fleet never made it, especially after Extermination Flotilla Anselm found them and destroyed their remaining military escort, although they in turn were found by UECNS Nemesis before the destruction of the entire fleet could be completed. Eventually, the colony of Rally would be formed by the crews of the exodus ships, but it would be discovered by a Compact civilian explorer several hundred years later. Humanity was then forcefully integrated into the Compact as the Broken, and all knowledge of humanity's prior defiance was erased from the cultural memory of Rally. They believed humanity had arrived at Rally in ships so dangerous they routinely killed their own crewmembers through radiation leaks and malfunctions, and that they had run from Earth because of environmental collapse induced by human mismanagement of the planet.

The Long War
Red One developed a deep hatred for the Compact after the end of the war, and would hunt them in for the next two thousand years.