The Secrets' Crusade

Covering the full detail of the Battle of the Burning Line would take historians decades. Suffice to say that it began a full century and a quarter before it was ended, inflicted a cost in lives numbering in the hundreds of millions, and reduced forty of the seventy-three Shiplord border systems to burnt-out shells of their former glory. It was high intensity warfare on a scale that had never been conducted before and has never been matched since, fuelled by dozens of stellar converters on both sides.

It ended with the destruction of the Hjivin's local logistical base, at the hands of a series of strikes by the entire War Fleet strength of the Shiplord-led coalition and the first predecessors to the Lumen class stellar disruptor. The decision to employ these weapons was one that consumed Shiplord society for decades even as the Hjivin pressed hard on their defences, threatening more than once to breach the wall of fortress systems and rampage deeper into the Shiplord core worlds.

Although many would sometimes attempt to argue otherwise, the final word in that decision was a brutal mathematical analysis that outlined the full probable cost to the Shiplords if they attempted to force the Hjivin back using only conventional forces.

It could have been done. Despite all the attempts of the Sphere to level the technological playing field, the Shiplords held a solid edge that would have eventually proven decisive. But it would have cost tens of billions of lives across millennia of war, and faced with such an outcome, a heartsick Shiplord population approved the deployment of these new and terrible weapons. Five cycles later, the Shiplords intensified their defensive operations in a move calculated to provoke a response from the Sphere.

They paid a bloody price to open the door for their counterattack, but it was a sacrifice that had to be made to draw the Hjivin's War Fleets into battle across the Burning Line. With their deployment confirmed, and thousands of Shiplords and their allies dying every minute to keep them there, the Shiplords committed the full strength of their own War Fleets. Not to the Burning Line, but to eight key logistical bases beyond it that allowed the Sphere to swiftly replenish its forces, and maintain the brutal intensity of their assault.

Even with total surprise, the War Fleets of the Shiplords' coalition did not prevail unscathed. War Fleets are impossibly quick to any who do not possess them, and the Hjivin commanders realised what their enemies were attempting very swiftly. They'd never constructed stellar disruptors, but they could recognise the physics involved, and they reacted appropriately. Of the twenty-four stellar disruptors deployed by the Shiplord in this assault, only ten managed to escape, and their War Fleet escorts suffered significant losses to protect them. Yet as terrible as those losses were, the consequences for the Sphere were endlessly worse. Eight stellar shipyards burned across the space of hours, and the Hjivin attacks screeched to a deafening halt as the number of jumps to their nearest source of reinforcements increased by a factor of two.

Faced with the ruin of their supply base, the Sphere withdrew those forces they could from the Burning Line in good order, retreating back into easy logistical range of their next line of converters. And brilliant, pitiless minds turned to the task of replicating the Shiplord weapons.

It would take two centuries more for the Hjivin to be driven from the intermediate space between their initial borders and those of the Shiplords, and more than twenty stars would burn in the process. Some, most even, proved to be Hjivin shipyards or supply bases. Some, however, were not. As the Shiplords pushed back, they were forced to mimic the Hjivin strategic playbook, establishing their own converters to support their advance. And this provided the rapidly developed Hjivin starkillers with targets of their own.

It remains unclear exactly when the Hjivin started experimenting with creating an Uninvolved, but what is known to the Shiplords makes for brief reading. The process likely began as the true nature of the war asserted itself. The Hjivin had believed the Shiplords incapable of matching their industrial strength, and this proved an ultimately terminal error in their strategy. The Shiplords did not just expand their own forces with wild abandon, but once their industry had pivoted, armed their allies with War and Regular Fleet craft of their own, too. It is in the realisation of this miscalculation that many analysts believe the Hjivin's insanity was born.

Whatever the truth of the matter might be, the Shiplords and their allies were still in the process of breaching deeper into Hjivin space when the Uninvolved acted. Sensor data shows entire fleets wiped from the skies, worlds cleansed in moments of Hjivin life, along with every other member of their species. The original biomes of those planets were strangely untouched, except in those places where Second Secret manipulation had been applied to elements of it for the Sphere's benefit. In those places, these modifications and the strains resulting from it were also annihilated without a trace.

It is telling that the Shiplords' response to the Uninvolved's action was a silence so absolute that none attempted to breach it. A coalition War Fleet made its way at max drive into the heart of Hjivin space, to be met by an incarnation of the Uninvolved. The entity's explanations were accepted, but the Shiplords are known to have conducted several private interactions with the being before it departed. The content of these discussions are not included within the simulation data.

In the cycles that followed, the Shiplords and their allies would conduct full investigations of all previously inhabited Hjivin worlds. They would disassemble the vast battery of Stellar Convertors that had fuelled their enemy's invasion, and delve deep into the Second Secret to heal the scattered survivors of the Hjivin's conquests. Not all of these attempts would prove successful, but they were pursued nonetheless, and with the full sweep of the Shiplords' mastery of the Secrets.

Their vast, stellar-scale construction ships would be deployed again, to rebuild the shattered star systems of the races that had once called them home. A full third of those species would never return home except aboard burial ships. But they would return to the worlds that they had known, the Shiplords made sure of that.

Finally, the Shiplords embarked on a then-secret development program. Their goal was simple, and inevitably successful: to create weapons capable of attacking and destroying an Uninvolved. If the program was begun on the basis of defence or offence is impossible to determine, but its success is one of the pillars upon which modern Shiplord dominance of the galaxy is built. If escaping the material world isn't enough to outrun the threat of oblivion at Shiplord hands, what could be?