Another day down, but still keeping up my writing streak, which I am excited about! Now let’s see if I can keep it to a reasonable length of time.
Please leave your feedback, I would really appreciate it, and your own responses to the prompt. If you like what you are reading here, check out my other writing exercises and my books!
Prompt: Imagine a future where humans have colonized multiple planets, but an ancient alien race threatens their existence—how do people respond?
Genre: Science Fiction
Source: 2,500 Writing Prompts to Ignite Your Creativity – Writing Beginner
Time Spent: 30 minutes
Word Count: 1040
Prompt: Imagine a future where humans have colonized multiple planets, but an ancient alien race threatens their existence—how do people respond?
The Akkenar System was wholly unremarkable. A red dwarf star, small even by red dwarf standards, with a loose cloud of dust and rocks around it. It was a rare dead end in the Warp Web that knit the galaxy together. It was so small and so out of the way it didn’t even appear on the majority of human made Warp Maps, and so it remained for the thousands of years of the Human Expansion Era.
It had not been long after Humanity began exploring and navigating the Warp Web that they encountered a race they would call the Antaeans. The Antaeans were a telepathically power, technologically advance, but reclusive race that were the dominant power in the Galaxy. The Human Republic, as it came to be called, submitted to the Antaeans overwhelming advantages and became their clients, and as they swarmed across the Galaxy, establishing thousands upon thousands of colonies, they rose to become the largest, most powerful, and most trusted of their clients and the one entrusted most widely for policing and enforcing their will across the stars.
This all changed as the Human Expansion Era came to an end. The Human Senate ever more struggled to controlled the far flung systems, and in many cases, planetary governors, rulers, corporations, and others things held far more sway. Many of these powerful entities had come to resent the Antaeans and their government for still being subservient to them. An attack, failed though it was, on an Antaean Ring Ship by a loose alliance of systems and planets ignited the Great Human Civil War.
The Rebels, as they would come to be called by history, saw themselves as fighting to free themselves from the yoke of the Antaeans and only fought their fellow humans that were still subservient to them. The Human Senate, which eventually evolved into a Military Junta fighting to maintain, and in many cases establish, full control of the far-flung human settlements.
The Rebels, sometime in the early days of the war, established an outpost at Akkenar in their attempts to develop a weapon, eventually dubbed the Mass Driver Cannon, to pierce the nearly impenetrable Psi-Shields that protected the Antaean Ring Ships, the single factor that kept the vastly more numerous human fleets under their thumb.
The Great Human Civil War lasted centuries, growing more bitter, more entrenched, and more destructive as it went on. In the end, the stalemate was broken by Admiral Jaeksol Wan-Singh. After winning the most decisive victory in nearly a century, at a young age, Admiral Wan-Singh embarked on the most ambitious project in Human History, the massive re-fit, re-organization, and re-training of the Human Republic Starfleet.
It took nearly fifty years, but the resulting High Fleet of the Republic quickly began overwhelming the Rebel Fleets, seizing planets and star systems long beyond their control, and capturing thousands. The Rebels, a major power in the Galaxy for nearly half a millennium, crumbled apart in a decade. Left with increasingly few options, the hardline Rebels who refused to surrender soon began to gather at Akkenar, with their last hope, the Mass Driver Cannon.
The Battle of Akkenar was, and remains, the largest single battle between Humans on record. The remains of the Rebel Fleets, thousands upon thousands of ships formed around their three completed M.D.C.’s and the research station they had been developed at. Warp Sensors blared for hours on end as the entire massed power of the High Fleet of the Republic, as well as half a dozen Antaean Ring Ships, come to see the job done.
For half a day, the two immense fleets faced each other down, outside of their effective firing ranges, until the Antaeans broke the tension. The powerful aliens, perhaps overconfident in their mental powers and technology, moved their ships forward. In an event that would echo across the galaxy, the M.D.C.’s opened fire the metals bolts, which fragmented on impact, accelerated by a complex array of magnets to an appreciable percentage of the Speed of Light, tore through the Antaeans vaunted shields and the shrapnel ripped apart three of their Ring Ships before the rest withdrew and fled from the system.
Admiral Wan-Singh, having seen what the Rebels were planning, ordered his fleet forward. The Rebels fought with ferocity, and most refused to surrender, but the slow, methodical advance of the High Fleet, with its larger and better protected ships and coordinated tactics, wore down the Rebels, ship by ship, formation by formation until the Akkenar system became a vast field of the destroyed remnants of vessels beyond count. The Great Human Civil War was, at last, over.
Three years after the war ended, the Military Junta that controlled the Human Senate, swore its fealty to the victorious admiral. The seizure of power in this case proved to be totally painless, although it is possible the exhaustion of centuries of war and recriminations, merely deadened the response. Within another decade, the admiral was widely recognized as Jaeksol I, First Emperor of the Wan-Singh Dynasty. The ever reform minded Emperor made it the work of the remaining 70 years of his life, and reign, to transform the state into something more effective. And thus, his ascension as emperor marked the beginning of what is now called The Human Imperium.
Jaeksol I’s other contribution to humanity, which would not be known for thousands of years, was secretly saving both the remnants of the Mass Driver Cannons and the centuries of research that went into them. With the utmost secrecy, the First Emperor setup a program to make the all but immobile, and slow firing, cannons and make it into something far more mobile and effective.
At last, millennia and several whole dynasties of the Human Imperium later, the project was finally reaching completion. Soon, the first half dozen of perhaps the greatest achievement of human engineering, the Dreadnought, enormous vessels, the size of a small city, built around its Mass Driver Cannon, but also equipped with vastly heavier armor and armaments. At last humanity would have the edge and their long eons of subservience to the Antaeans would soon be avenged and made right. The Human-Antaean War or The War of Human Ascendancy was about to begin.
Another fun prompt where I decided to write up a bit of the lore I’ve had swimming around my head for a Science Fiction series that I have in mind. Hope you enjoy!
Hope you enjoyed and that you are having a wonderful day and get to do, or experience, something creative.
– Jon
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