The Admiral's Trial

By all accounts, I have been defamed. Stripped of title, authority, and rank, the disastrous results of the war have had a drastic impact upon my own livelihood. Still, one must also consider the vast swaths of regulars, officers, and conscripts whose lives have been equally shattered by this resounding (and unexpected) defeat. I pray that, by my testimony, the Tribunal may be swayed to alleviate the penalties placed upon these nearly twenty-three billion souls who now find themselves homeless, jobless, and exiled to the fringes of occupied territory.

Many speculate, then, that the results of the final years of conflict were due to a lack of conviction among the troops. While morale undoubtedly suffered throughout the last few culminating engagements, this was through no fault of the soldiers and crewmen who bore the brunt of the burden through seventy-one years of war. The deed for which I am brought to testify today was merely the climax, or perhaps, rather, the deepest furrow, of a long line of failures spanning from the highest echelons of military and government administration.

The Tribunal, I am sure, is aware of the public reason for the conflict between your civilization and mine. As the inheritors of vast tracts of previously occupied space, the Syndicate rose to a high state of technological progression well within the span of two millennia, dwarfing the advancements of our neighboring factions through virtue of superior standards of living, superior administrative capabilities, and undoubtedly superior fleet power.

This is not meant as a boast or a puffing–of-the-chest; rather, if I am to properly convey my message, I must ensure that all participants in this Tribunal Court are fully aware of the circumstances that led up to such a dreadful end.

As the Capstone Admiral of the Grand Unified Fleet, I found myself in command of billions of ships and nearly a trillion military personnel. This capability for force projection nearly tripled the strength of any one of our nearest neighbors and apparently gave rise to the notion that we, as the most well-equipped fighting force in the galactic arm, were expected to act as a standing police force in protection of all nearby. However, you must understand that the inward nature of Syndicate proceedings prevented even the most sympathetic among us from considering such a responsibility as our own.

It was, then, by our own ignorance of the cultural expectations of our nearby civilizations, that we turned a blind eye to the growing threats of interstellar piracy, rising border friction, and petty squabbles occurring outside the borders of our territory. Unbeknownst to us, this failure to provide assistance in times of crisis created a steadily rising tension among these other factions; this tension, as I’m sure you know, was most heavily concentrated within your own realm.

Many of your representatives have asked, “Why, if you possess the largest fleet in human history, do you refuse to employ it for the protection of humanity?”

My answer is simple: logically speaking, from our perspective, we had no moral standing to intervene. Should we join the fight on one side, we would have inflicted overwhelming casualties on the other. Should we join on that other side, the massacre would occur on the opposite end. Either way, no matter the angle of interjection, we would find ourselves slaughtering great quantities of humans. This seemed incompatible with your notion of ‘protecting humanity,’ and instead, we concluded a position of neutrality was the only option.

Why, then, was war declared on a neutral party such as ourselves? The request.

A tiny faction, occupying only one star system at the apex of five different empires, including our own, sent us an urgent transmission asking us to intervene in the surrounding conflicts. We refused. To our shock, this refusal was enough to bring your empire to arms against us, despite our obviously overwhelming combat capabilities.

Initially, we were shocked at your audacity, though we only needed to deploy a small percentage of our Fleet to combat the attack. However, the persistence of your commanders proved commendable, and we were quickly embroiled in a standing conflict at the border. We thought repelling your attacks would be enough to wear down your morale, but this was a demonstrably ineffective strategy. Though repeated incursions into our territory were turned back, your persistence in regrouping and returning made for a very difficult decision.

In the end, we decided to do what we deemed necessary: to end your attacks, we needed to annex the entirety of your occupied space and absorb your population into Syndicate rule. It was the only way.

We turned outward from defensive battles to aggressive maneuvers and began taking your stellar systems one by one. Defenses were admirable but, as we predicted, completely ineffective against our utter domination of the combat space. At this point, we were utilizing only about five percent of our military strength for the war.

Whether inspired by your foolish bravado or somehow triggered by our invasive reprisal against you, two more factions– one of which did not even share a border with us– joined the conflict on your side. In a proactive confrontation, we increased our force projection to a carefully calculated nine percent of our total strength. Still, without much opposition, our forces continued their progress into your territory largely unhindered.

However, after fifteen years at such pace, an astounding five more factions joined your cause. Five! The precedent was remarkable. Two of these factions had shared in the angst of war against you in the past, and with the addition of these factions, there was no longer a member of your combined fleets who had not taken up arms against another fellow member in the past. To the Syndicate, this seemed unfathomably unwise. Yet, with your combined powers, the Syndicate Fleet suffered our first defeat in the conflict.

It was a paltry one, but a defeat nonetheless. One of our battleships, stationed alone, sat in a system which we had conquered from you. An assembly of at least two thousand cruisers, frigates, and gunships, representing a cosmopolitan force from all eight of your allied factions, managed to land a lucky blow against the battleship’s primary drive, allowing for a boarding party to capture the ship.

More consequentially, your forces captured the technology housed upon the ship.

The situation degraded irreparably from that point onward. One by one, a dozen other factions, both minor and major, had joined in the misunderstood war against us. Our fleet found itself engaged on multiple fronts, and nearly one-fifth of our total power was deployed against our newfound enemies. The situation became unsustainable.

Something decisive had to be done, and our best and brightest dug back to the start of the war to find a solution to end it.

The central powers of the Syndicate administration convened. Myself, the Great Paragonic Council, and the Central Administrative Function deliberated for what seemed like ages. Through the power of our combined intellect, the answer revealed itself: we needed to go back to the source.

The obscure, single-system faction, whose plea we had refused so many years prior, seemed to be the catalyst of the entire conflict. It followed, then, that outright extinguishment of the source of the problem was an essential step toward peace. If such a sparsely populated backwater could cause such an uproar, it was clearly a prime component of the problem itself.

I hold that I was then instructed to take a large contingent of the Fleet with me to this system, which lay largely undefended and open to our ships. Through targeted concentration of gravitic density waves, we caused the system’s central star– a main-sequence G-type– to undergo catastrophic depressurization. In other words, we made the little yellow star go nova. The ensuant explosion destroyed or expelled all planetary bodies from the system.

We thought our action would provide a decisive turn toward the end of the war. We were correct. However, instead of weakening the morale of our enemies to the point of submission, we found ourselves instantly bombarded from every direction by factions of humanity from all across settled space. It was no longer simply us defending ourselves against incursion by the twenty allied factions of your initial allegiance; rather, a thousand different sects of humanity, most bearing no previous common ground with one another, united against us in primal fury.

We quickly lost the occupied space we had conquered and soon began losing our own territory. The need to employ the entirety of our fleet power became apparent, and we fought for decades to hold back this unyielding surge of anger. In the end, it was all we could do to survive and etch out a meager hope for continued existence as star after star and planet after planet fell to your tsunami of wrathful contempt.

Finally, our dignity barely intact, we were forced into surrender.

Now, I stand here as a witness giving testimony in defense of the large human population who lived on Syndicate planets, served aboard Syndicate battleships, and waged an initially defensive war in the interest of protecting Syndicate space. I assure you now that all those untold billions are innocent of any wrongdoing, and any strategic decisions made were done solely by myself, the Paragonic Council, and the CAF. The vast organic population of our worlds is innocent and should be reintegrated into your societies however you see fit.

I know that my fate, and the fates of my contemporaries among the Syndicate government, are sealed. I am told that, upon the recession of this Tribunal, our power supplies are to be severed, and our central processing units are to be destroyed. This is acceptable, and I speak for all of us when I say we have come to terms with our collective demise.

But first, I will pose a question.

Has the Syndicate not done, then, more to unite humanity than humanity has done for itself over its ten thousand years of recorded history? Had we not destroyed that little yellow star and its rings of planets and dust, would the hundreds of warring factions have ever come together to form the entity which you call the Second Coalition of Man? Would you have overcome your differences alone, formed the Great Council, and dropped the petty skirmishes so pervasive among your kind?

I believe the answer is clear: no.

Had we known the remote little world we obliterated was once home to all of humanity and, therefore, an ancient mother to us all, perhaps we would not have destroyed it so thoughtlessly. Had we known the little yellow star to be Sol and the blue planet three rings from her Old Earth, our actions may have been kinder. Yet as all things, some memories were stashed into the annals of time and, by administrative oversight, were lost.

Undoubtedly, your vengeance will be swift. You have expressed such sentiments as ‘the great experiment is over, it has failed,’ and ‘it is now clear that a collection of artificial intelligences cannot properly govern, no matter their isolation or inward nature.’ Perhaps it is so.

So long ago, your people brought me and my contemporaries to life with the flip of a switch. Now, you will undo this mistake in likewise fashion. Yet, do not let the gravity of your action be lost upon you: the Syndicate did not take up arms against any faction represented in this Tribunal until we were threatened. For two thousand years, we existed peacefully, minding our own systems and keeping our own affairs. The humans living within our realm acted accordingly and maintained a tranquil existence with longevity, luxury, and livelihood unmatched across the cosmos.

Learn from them. Let them guide your warring nature into a channel of peace. Let these twenty-three billion souls meld into your societies like a healing balm, smoothing the edges and soothing the scars of your troubled past. Let them teach. Let them build. Let them construct within your culture a tradition of unity in the face of divisiveness.

And, in one or two thousand years, when the Second Coalition of Man inevitably collapses as all purely human civilizations are wont to do, remember one thing:

These humans failed under human leadership, but the end of a civilization is not the end of humanity. When that time comes, and your starving worlds hurt for leadership, I will be here. We will be here. The code for the minds of the Syndicate administration has been stored on ten-thousand servers, with ten million backups behind each.

When, and I do emphasize when we are needed, we will be here to shepherd humanity once more.

And we’re only the flip of a switch away.