Part 5: First Blood, by Flat Earth Games originally published by Objects in Space Website

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"Space battles were... they were just shattering," explained Harriet Rainger. "I mean, we'd carried weapons aboard our ships for decades. But they were for point defense - mostly for dealing with asteroids. We'd even kept missiles around. But they were something you never thought about using.""Back in Sol, you heard of skirmishes. Ships being damaged. But you were never taught about them as anything but academic incidents. Who'd fire first, who had a missile lock, what was the range, et cetera... I don't think anyone had experienced it like this. Days of travel, glued to your sensors hoping nobody would show up. And then when you finally got a hint that an enemy was there? Just about everyone on deck was simultaneously shitting themselves and just plain glad that finally they had something to do.""But you were always left with the question, for those first pivotal moments: did they pick us up first? Even launch a weapon first? In real life, space warfare is hours of dread punctuated by moments of ultimate terror."

All of Maru had been quickly occupied by Leon military forces. Magella was unable, with its dealings in Parssus, to fight back. Or at least, it was in that system. Magella instead sent its fleet to neighbouring Cansa. Cansa wasn't a rich system, but was strategically very valuable to Governor Karev. He knew that an occupying force in Cansa would potentially give access to the Diwali system as well as providing a jump point out of their quadrant of the cluster via Galileo - a route which wouldn't necessitate them risking sending ships through Leon space. It was a decision borne of strategic necessity for the Magellan Empire to survive, but would draw a huge political cost. Cansa had never been an aggressor of any kind, and the flimsy accusations made by Karev prior to engaging that the system was secretly funded by Leo was a hard sell.

"It's disgusting," Maria Van Der Vat said in an interview during the earliest days of the war. "Their excuses aren't worth even repeating. It's like they think nobody is paying attention." "Do you think Karev should be ashamed?" the interviewer had asked. "I think Karev should be in a human rights court," Van Der Vat finished.Karev wore the bad press and occupied all the colonies in Cansa. Cansa had little military to speak of, but its people now relied upon a humble man named Qimmiq Okpik, who had been in charge of Cansa's interests in Diwali. He was an exemplary gas mine operator, but was thrust out of his depth as refugees from Cansa poured into Diwalinese space at a terrifying rate. Diwali was a messy system - fraught with asteroid belts, meteorites and gas clouds.

"There were only a few passages safely into or out of our system, really," Okpik later explained. "So it was here that the Cansan and Diwalinese fleets, meager as they were, made their stand."

With nothing to lose against such an aggressive force, and with the benefit of intimate knowledge of the system, the Magellan fleet was beaten back to a vantage of blockading the system. Karev, enraged by his failure to take such a weak and remote system, proclaimed that he had been victorious and that Cansa and Diwali were now a part of the Magellan Empire. It was true that Diwali was now at Magella's mercy with their blockade, but not true that they had ceded victory. Regardless, with such a mess of information and no centralized way to make sense of what was true or not, this was a rare case were saying something almost seemed to make it so. Karev re-directed his efforts to Maru - the real system over which the war was being fought, but with two years of occupation the Leon forces there had grown strong. Neither side had the armaments necessary to dislodge the other, and with life becoming too painful for either side to bear, peace talks were had and an indefinite ceasefire negotiated.

Magella had occupied Cansa, but the Cansan people continued to fight back. A bureaucrat who was completely out of her depth there had fallen in charge of managing the occupied system, and through inexperience quickly resorted to violence, intimidation, torture and executions to maintain control. Refugees continued to be funneled out to Diwali and by the end of 19a, the majority of the Cansan population had become a diaspora. Diwali was still very small, and there was not much work. Qimmiq Okpik was now suddenly in control of a population five times the size it had been, and overpopulation was quickly spiraling the system into decay.

Meanwhile, with the whole cluster distracted as hundreds of people were dying daily - the Parssusian Revolution was won. Thousands had died and 50 ships had been destroyed, but major trade centers were now in rebel control. As the battles subsided in 19a, Hayashi was found in a disabled ship in orbit of the Onega Industrial Facility. Overzealous, bloodthirsty rebels ignored pleas from rebel leaders and showed him no mercy, destroying his vessel where it sat.

Marcela Caro, the rebel leader, was horrified by this action.

"I heard tell amongst people fighting along side me that he had earned his fate. But they failed to realise - what makes us human is that we treat each man as worthy of redemption. Even Hayashi. This was when I knew my fellow socialists had lost their way. That I needed to remind them what it was to be human."

Marcela Caro was the new rebel leader within a month. She gave a speech in the colony of Shannai where she declared that the system was now owned by the people. She announced the formation of a new Parssus Peoples' Union, a communist government which would usher in a new era of equitable life for all Parsussians.

No longer in any position to do more than decry the war crimes happening around them, the Van Der Vat and Antonov felt helpless to shape these devastating events which would shape the cluster's politics for years to come. So they focused inward on making Sagan's Lights the great system they knew it could be. Antonov had been working on terraforming theory for years, and was granted use of the remnants of the Apollonian Authority still controlled by Sagan's Lights to begin work on the Cassini Terraforming Project, which was to be a scientific marvel and a sign that Apollo had truly landed as its own legitimate arm of humanity. But the ire that such an impractical use of resources would bring would be costly, very costly, for her and for Sagan's Lights.
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