Gotta introduce you to the Koraxians. The collective villains of the piece, even if they aren't the villain.
Who is "the" villain, then?
That's in another chapter.
You're so fucking annoying. Fine, Joejaxians. What about them?
Koraxians, thank you.
We have to go way back. How far back isn't easy to determine. But I'll lay out the following dates:
That's not a date.
You try figuring out when extremely ancient shit happened. I'm talking about events contemporaneous with Earth having nothing more complex than amoeba.
Well, I hope the rest of this stuff has dates.
Good for them! Fuck slavers.
That's the spirit. Yeah, nobody liked the Overlords, obviously. They probably didn't even like each other.
Things snowballed from there. The aliens who had the successful rebellion were later called Oolians, after Oolar, the one who led the revolt. Because of that success, they ended up leading the overall movement to free the galaxy from the Overlords.
You can imagine that an empire spanning half the galaxy wouldn't fall overnight. Best we can tell, it took at least 10,000 years for the Overlord empire to fracture sufficiently that you could no longer call it a sovereign political unit. They still controlled some territory, but breaking up their supply lines, depriving them of unlimited slave labor, and constantly beating on their morale led to gradual contractions of their space. After about 20,000 years of rebellion, decline, and civil war, the Overlords were truly done. In their place were six splinters of Overlord civilization:
By this point, the Oolians had built themselves a considerable sphere of influence. Culturally, they were chain-breakers. This went deep into their identity. They saw it as their duty to help other species, combat piracy, confront would-be empires, stuff like that. A truly benevolent force, even if they went overboard at times, or were at times paternalistic.
The Vencilli, Tandashi, and Komala all "went away" in due time. By 22,000 years ago, the Vencilli were fighting a losing battle against Oolian encroachment. The Oolians were engaged in a protracted war with the Dor'Tel, too, which made the whole endeavor take longer than it should've.
So, things played out like this: the Oolians needed to free up resources to crush the Vencilli definitively. To do that, they needed some of the Dor'Tel heat taken off. Ultimately, they cut a deal with the Salmaxians. If the Salmaxians helped in the Dor'Tel conflict, they would gain access to Oolian trade markets. This is what those in the world of commerce would call a "huge fucking deal." The Salmaxians were embroiled in a war with the Alaxians and Pa'rians, too--the Overlord splinters were always fighting each other. A shot in the arm from the Oolians promised them the edge they needed.
The Oolians also did something rather unusual: they armed a backwater species called the Vorchons, which were deep in Dor'Tel space, but on the opposite end from the Oolian front. The Vorchons are not an especially martial people, but with Oolian training and technology they kicked the Dor'Tel's teeth in and avoided getting genocided. Good for them, you know? Shame about everything later on, but that was their moment of glory.
So, the Oolians stomped all over the Vencilli, trashed their infrastructure, pretty much turned every last survivor into refugees. They fucked off to parts unknown and that was good enough for the Oolians. The Vencilli were gone and had no warmaking capability left.
The Oolians then turned back toward the Dor'Tel, and it turns out that fighting on three fronts generally sucks even if you are ancient machines that don't get tired. Between the Salmaxians, Vorchons, and the Oolians, the Dor'Tel were contained and pushed back to their pre-expansion borders, with the exception of what the Vorchons carved out. That was out on the coreward frontier so it's possible they weren't too vexed about it. Plus, they could bide their time indefinitely. That was always the thing about the Dor'Tel: they had time. They could plan for millennia or longer.
The Oolians also helped wrap up the three-way war between the remaining Overlord remnants. The Alaxians got the short end of the stick. The Oolians recognized that the Alaxians were easily the most warlike and least amenable to negotiation, so they put their efforts into trouncing them. This made the Pa'rians and Salmaxians happy, and led to a status quo where they agreed not to fight with the Oolians as long as it meant mutual protection from the Alaxians.
The thing to know about the Alaxians is that they are very long-lived, even longer than the other Overlord splinters. They went nuts with genetic engineering and figured out how to extend their lives out to millennia, possibly longer. Best anyone can tell, they're clinically immortal if they want to be.
Alaxians were so named because of their ruler, Alax. That then became the tradition: their entire civilization would be renamed to signify the current ruler, since a given ruler might reign for a very, very long time. By the 21st century, they were the Koraxians and had been ruled by Korath for a couple thousand years.
You ever meet guys who are obsessed with the Roman Empire?
Sure. Obnoxious. Often racist.
Imagine a whole civilization based on deepthroating the legacy of your ancestors, and that's the Koraxians. They looked back fondly on the Overlord era and were extremely bitter toward the Oolians, a bit less so toward the Salmaxians and Pa'rians.
I could have done without the mental picture.
I keep it colorful.
By the time of Korath's reign, it wasn't unusual for the Koraxians to make war on their neighbors every couple decades. It was a way of keeping their blades sharp, so to speak. This happened so much that the Oolians enforced a demilitarized zone where their space adjoined Koraxian territory. It was a large buffer with no official settlements, that way the Koraxians wouldn't have easy pickings right on their doorstep.
Wouldn't they just immediately conquer that "empty" space?
The Oolians made it clear that if the Koraxians encroached, they would show up in force to maintain the DMZ. Now, it's a big galaxy. The Koraxians had a whole separate frontier they could exploit going coreward on the Cygnus and Perseus arms.
Going what to the where, now?
Ah, right, cartography.
The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy. Our solar system sits on the edge of the Orion arm, within reach of the Saggitarius arm. If you follow one of the spiral arms inward toward the core, that's "coreward." If you go the other way, that's "downspin."
Got it. So, the Koraxians have been busy conquering stuff on the other side of their territory, far away from the Oolians and all?
Pretty much. Nobody is sure what they conquered, exactly, since we're talking about an enormous distance. Long-range recon is dicey, to say the least. But whenever they aren't raising tensions with the Oolians, everybody is certain the Koraxians are just flipping over and messing with their neighbors on the opposite side.
Sounds like everybody needs to band together to stop them for good.
You'd think, but their space is difficult to penetrate. A lot of that is down to their ships.
Koraxians are... little ooze monsters, let's say. They secrete various liquids, and one of them is like a fast-setting translucent cement, except it has a bit of flex to it so it doesn't immediately shatter if you hit it. They build their ships as gigantic spiky balls of this stuff. Each one is about the size of... hm, the United Center. A group of Koraxian shipbuilders can put one together in about a single Earth day. It's spaceworthy and everything.
That's terrifying. How do they get their spiky murder balls into space? How do they travel to different solar systems? I assume they can.
Woven throughout the structure of each ship are tiny filaments which can interact with Koraxian physiology in a bunch of fun ways. They can use this to generate antigravity fields, the energy waves required to activate a fold vector, not to mention link up a bunch of their ships and blow up a planet with a Derris Cascade.
Oh, come on. Nobody can do that. That sounds like some propaganda they'd make up.
I wish it was, but I've seen two of those Cascades. They're no joke.
Is that what the Oolians are afraid of, then? Their planets getting blown up?
That's the least of their problems with these ships. Remember I said it's hard to penetrate Koraxian space? It's because they have ungodly numbers of these things. While they can project energy beams and those are pretty fearsome on their own, the real danger of them is just... ramming. They will just ram into other ships. They break off a bunch of spikes every time they do it, but they can regenerate those. Most Koraxian space warfare is just their ships ramming everybody else. They'll turn enemy fleets into graveyards of ship bits.
Jesus Christ.
All isn't lost, of course. The Oolians hold their own. They can quickly detect the resonance frequency of each ship and latch of bunch of, uh, giant vibrators onto them.
It's OK, you can laugh.
Oh, I am.
I'm making it sound sillier than it is.
No, it's extremely silly. Extremely.
War is silly in general. These giant vibrating... things... latch onto the Koraxian ships and, as you probably guessed, just vibrate really hard at the resonant frequency until the ship breaks apart.
The reason the Oolians can't just overwhelm the Koraxians with these things is that they're kind of expensive and complex to build. An Oolian fleet could take out several dozen Koraxian ships, sure. But Koraxian space is crawling with thousands of ships. You'd burn through every last vibe-missile before you got close to their homeworld or any other sensitive installation. And even if you did manage to wreck a bunch of their ships, they'll have them all replaced in a few weeks.
What we've learned is that they have a command limit of some kind. We suspect it's a maintenance requirement. They build as many ships as they can reliably field, and no more. So if you blow some up, they replace them, but they don't exceed that rough limit. When they send an invasion force, it's always a detachment of ships that would otherwise be patrolling Koraxian space. We've never figured out exactly why they have this ceiling. If we did, maybe we could find a way to lower it to a better number, like... zero.
All that's to say, at best the situation between the Oolians and the Koraxians is perpetually stalemated. One of the reasons the Koraxians go after Earth sometimes is to make the Oolians burn resources defending us while the Koraxians expend a very small part of their fleet. Assholes.
I assume now you'll tell me how you ultimately beat them?
We beat them in a couple wars, yeah. But as far into the future as I've gone, they're always there. Even in the 500th century, there's a fragment of them hanging around, being a fucking nuisance.
They are persistent little slimes, I guess.
Did I mention they smell like cherries? I hate cherries now.