Alliance History, part 3: Galaxy Alliance

Negotiations between the Alliance of Five Powers and United Alliance were swift and intense. Each side could see the importance of the other to their survival. Ultimately, the Galaxy Alliance was first formed as something of a framework to be filled in later: the Drules were an immediate concern, trade and settlement agreements much less so. AFP forces flooded into human space, reinforcing the main manufacturing worlds. A science council was formed to begin transitioning some shipyards to integrate new technology, but as a first step, simply being able to replenish their numbers was seen as the priority.

Like the Alliance of Five Powers, the name Galaxy Alliance had more than one layer: the original proposal had used the Glis word galik-sah, translating roughly to 'good fortune'. Human negotiators immediately noted the linguistic coincidence.

Most Earthlings, especially those on colonies hit hard by the collapse of supply lines, celebrated the GA's formation. A vocal few on worlds far from the front lines questioned why humanity should give up its hard-earned resources to strange aliens who hadn't even been able to save their own civilizations. Human authorities moved quickly to stifle these complaints, but only a successful campaign would truly silence the criticism. Eager for a true victory and recognizing the tactical benefits, the other races agreed when the Earthlings proposed an ambitious new goal: to push all Drule forces out of the Atlantis Sector entirely.

The GA was formed in the year 2151, by the human calendar. For the next two years they would maintain a stalemate with the Fourth Kingdom. Many of the recently designed Earthling cruisers, dubbed the Atlantis-class, began to make their way into defensive fleets. But the real key to the war effort was being quietly constructed in Earth's own shipyards. In the early days of 2154, the GA's first cooperative battleship was launched: the AWS Avatar of Alliance. Dubbed the Avenger-class, the descendents of this vessel remain one of the Alliance's most iconic warships to this day.

With the launch of the new ship came the official beginning of Operation Entente. All involved knew it would be a tall order. Though the resource and production gap had lessened, the Drules still had long-established infrastructure and supply lines that the Alliance was scrambling to build. High Command determined they had only two strategic advantages: firstly, the Fourth Kingdom did not know how far Earthling space extended, and might believe the resource gap to be even more closed than it really was. Secondly, and most crucially, the Alliance did not need to win. They only had to convince the enemy they weren't worth the losses to conquer.

Alliance History, part 2: Alliance of Five Powers

The Alliance of Five Powers began with the Glis. Much of the origin of this ancient race is long since lost to time; in their own records, history seems to begin roughly 30,000 years ago, at the peak of the Glis Empire. The Glis were never conquerors, but built their empire through trade and alliances. Acting as science brokers among their allies, they were able to build a powerful warfleet that kept pirates at bay and kept their borders safe, but their battles were won through superior technology and firepower rather than tactics or training. This lack of skill in war would continue until the Fall: some 20,000 years ago, the Glis Empire collapsed under its own weight. Glis civilization had not been built to endure the collapse of central authority. The empire was thrown into confused panic, and former allies and neighbors rushed to devour the corpse.

Since the Glis had not been accustomed to wars of conquest, most of the myriad factions left after the Fall attempted cutthroat diplomacy as a first option, and were easy pickings for enemies using sheer force. Among those were thousands of Glis merchant-warlords who recognized the vulnerability of their own people; over millennia of fighting, these many militant enclaves consolidated though alliance and conquest into eight. The Eight Remnants eventually settled into an uneasy detente when it became clear they could not conquer each other—at least, not without leaving both the victor and victim vulnerable to any third faction. Pirates and external foes remained constantly testing the Glis borders, reduced to less than a quarter of the Empire's territory at its peak.

After over two thousand years of cold war stasis, the Kiliak Remnant made a bold grab for power. Rather than military, the move was symbolic: they renamed their capital to Gliris-Sha (or Gliris II), invoking the fallen near-mythical capital of the Empire. The response was immediate: the other seven Remnants united and fell upon the Kiliak for their presumption. To their own shock, they found cooperation much more satisfying than hostility and fear; after fully dismantling the Kiliak as a political entity, the remaining seven laid unified claim to Gliris II and, over the course of several more decades, slowly consolidated into a single Glis Remnant.

Unlike the former Empire, the Remnant would remain warlike. Though wholly uninterested in conquest, it was still fighting a nearly endless defensive war; in fact, the Remnant constantly refused offers of peace, seeing its struggle as integral to its unity and identity. This besieged mindset led to a sort of complacency in itself. When the Fourth Kingdom of the Drule Supremacy arrived, the Glis rejected their diplomatic overtures. They were seen as just another vulture to be driven from the Empire's carcass… until they obliterated the defenses of the border world of Sikril and claimed it for their own.

The infuriated Glis dispatched an assault fleet to Sikril, which swiftly became a brutal meat grinder for both sides, yet the battle there failed to stop the Drules from launching their next wave of conquest. It soon became apparent to Glis analysts that the unknown invaders had far greater resources than the Remnant possessed; while their ships were equal to the Drule vessels one on one, the Drules could field greater numbers faster. Compounding the issue was the fact that the technology and facilities to build the most powerful Glis warships had been long since lost in the Fall, despite efforts to rediscover their secrets. Their leadership was still debating the proper response to this realization when the Drules raided Gliris II and decapitated the Remnant's war effort. (To add insult to injury, they would much later learn this had been a coincidence. The Drules were wholly unaware that they had raided the capital.)

Much like what was recorded in the Fall, the Annihilation caused the rest of the Glis to collapse into panic and anarchy. Planets, fleets, and even individual ships took whatever action they saw fit to save whatever could be saved. Rushed evacuations occurred throughout the Remnant, while others opted for a last stand that would severely bloody the Drules. A few even surrendered, though no official Glis source will acknowledge this  A call was sent out for survivors to rally at the original Gliris, and ultimately four waves of refugees aboard hundreds of ships arrived there.

In orbit over their original homeworld—once a jewel of the galaxy, now a long-ruined pirate haven—the survivors made a pact that the Glis would never again be complacent victims. Instead, they would become the aggressors. Nearly every Glis soldier took an oath that so long as a single weapon remained in a single Glis' paws, the Drules would never again know peace. And thus launched what was originally known as the Glirian Crusade. Their first action was to bombard the surface of Gliris to glass, purging it of the pirates they had once feared and any hope of future habitation as a symbol of their new path.

The Glis fleet organized into four Grand Convoys: Alitra, Shiriki, Varesi, and Ka-glira. Each of them would develop a distinct culture, becoming akin to four new nations, united by spiteful rage. Each operated independently but stayed in close contact, attacking Drule forces wherever they found them, destroying as much as possible and fleeing before reinforcements could punish them. It was the Ka-glira Convoy which, some thirty years after the beginning of the Crusade, detected a large Drule fleet and arrived to find a new planet holding out against conquest.

Alliance History, part 1: United Alliance

The United Alliance was the government of Earth and its eventual colonies. Earthlings, or humans, are a young civilization best characterized by curiosity, imagination, and ambition. Historically fractious and warlike, their homeworld played host to hundreds of cultures before a single Earthling ever set foot on another world. It took two cataclysmic World Wars to bring humanity together in the most nominal of alliances, and even that was almost immediately undermined by a Cold War. Despite (or perhaps because of) their violent history, Earthlings aspiring to peace and enlightenment among the stars has long been a common theme in art and culture.

Historical Overview: Galaxy Alliance

Starmap: Historical Context, Alliance of Five Powers

The Galaxy Alliance, at its heart, is a mutual defense pact between native civilizations of the Orion Spur to resist the onslaught of the Drule Supremacy, particularly the Fourth Kingdom. It was formed from the merger of two other alliances: the Alliance of Five Powers, a military alliance forged by survivors of Drule attacks, and the United Alliance, a government designed to keep its own race's warlike tendencies in check. The original six races were the Glis, the Hydrans, the Kolaliri, the Biboh, the Quasnot, and the Earthlings.

Glis*: The regal, mouselike Glis are an ancient race, whose original empire had risen and fallen before most of the other founding races had a civilization. At their height they explored vast stretches of the Orion Spur, providing the basis for the navigational charts the Alliance still uses today. But the Glis Empire became decadent and shortsighted, and collapsed into internal warfare as thousands of merchant-warlords began squabbling for power. A rump state called the Glis Remnant eventually formed, its perceived weakness forcing it to be far more militaristic than its predecessor. It was this warlike remnant that was overrun by the Fourth Kingdom, but several of the strongest enclaves were able to evacuate. From that point on Glis civilization consisted of little more than large military convoys bent on vengeance, shadowing the Drule advance; they were the driving force behind the Alliance of Five Powers.

Hydrans: A navigational error led an unsupported Drule colony ship to become stranded over an inhospitable world they named Hydros, or 'Crucible'. Forced to go back to basics to survive and build a civilization, the Hydrans developed a new humility and a very different spirituality than their ancestors. Those ancestors were not impressed when they rediscovered their lost kin. Having retained their cultural emphasis on strength and discipline, as well as great knowledge of Drule tactics, the Hydrans were able to resist conquest or destruction easily enough. They were, however, pinned down on Hydros, with no ability to break free of the endless siege until a Glis convoy arrived.

Kolaliri: The Kolaliri, pale bipedal creatures with crystalline bones, have always been somewhat reluctant allies. They held a small empire until the Fourth Kingdom arrived; believing themselves to be greater than any other race, they had no real cultural capacity for dealing with adversity, making their early setbacks unrecoverable. After losing the bulk of their territory, they learned just enough humility to accept some other races as "also superior"—a designation gifted mostly to those they find useful. First among these were the Glis and the Hydrans, who aided their last stand on their capital of Kolair and thus earned their grudging respect.

Biboh: Resembling long, flexible sticks with near-vestigial limbs, the Biboh are believed to have been genetically engineered to serve aboard spacecraft. Whatever race created them is long since lost to time. Alone among the AFP, they were not a warlike society; tribes of Biboh wandered space as merchants and entertainers. When they found more and more of their usual planetary stops conquered by a race with no interest in peaceful overtures, they retreated to their few fixed supply outposts. There the Fourth Kingdom found and routed them. The survivors regrouped and fled, soon reaching the Quasnot homeworld of Quariot.

Quasnot: The Quasnot are huge, flightless avians, technologically primitive but socially and culturally complex. Like the Biboh they lived in a tribal society, but theirs was heavily centered on ritualized intimidation and honor duels. They had no form of spaceflight when the Biboh arrived, bearing dire warnings of alien invaders and offering to evacuate their planet. The Quasnot chose instead to fight. When the Glis-Hydran-Kolaliri coalition arrived they would become, in essence, the shock troops of the AFP, with contingents of Quasnot warriors being used as boarding parties against Drule vessels. Quariot itself became the capital and primary staging point for the AFP for over a century, as the Fourth Kingdom slightly changed the direction of its main thrust and ended up missing the planet.

Earthlings**: These clever bipedal primates were less than two centuries into their starfaring when they encountered the Drule juggernaut. Had the AFP not intervened, they would have met the same fate as so many other young interstellar civilizations before them. But the Earthlings were in the right place at the right time, and quickly proved to also be the right people: as a particularly fractious race not long removed from their latest internal conflicts, they had skills in mediation and diplomacy that the often-quarrelsome AFP sorely needed. Just as importantly, they had a sprawling network of colonies, offering an established administrative structure and vast resources. The Earthling government, the United Alliance, would become the bureaucratic framework the Galaxy Alliance was built upon.

After its founding, the GA would see success against the Fourth Kingdom and gain a large new membership, ultimately becoming a worthy enough foe for the Supremacy Council to engage in diplomacy. As the foremost native power of the Orion Spur, the GA quickly evolved into a formidable force for exploration, research, and trade, moving far beyond its original desperate roots. A future report will go into more depth on these topics.

*Contemporary records from the GA's founding sometimes refer to the Glis as the Glirians, owing to early translation errors. Glirian is a Glis word for 'survivor' or 'avenger', and while they frequently use it to describe themselves it is not the name of their race.

**Earthling is the official demonym for interstellar communication, but Earthlings rarely use it among themselves; 'human' is the most common domestic term.