The Great Chaos of the Eastern Bus (1)
No—more precisely…
The scale of the chaos erupting across the galactic east far exceeded anything I had anticipated.
First and foremost was the Mekt-Fux Corporate Union, the faction that could fairly claim the greatest credit for victory in the Warlord War. Barely had the fighting ended before a revolution overturned their entire system of government.
“The corporations showed nothing but incompetence throughout the war!”
“Exactly! Drag those useless bastards down and found a new nation with a new army!!”
“···?”
Had it been the early days of the conflict, the accusation might have held water. But for the corporate leaders who had spent the latter half of the war desperately trying to preserve their state, the charge was pure absurdity. They had poured so much money and manpower into the fighting that they no longer possessed the strength to control public opinion. In the end, demagogues seized the narrative and forced them from power.
Thus the Mekt-Fux Corporate Union became a corporate union without corporations. In the vacuum, militarists who had grown powerful during the war raised their voices.
“Prepare for war!”
“We must break free of old Kerzin hegemony and establish our own!”
Layered atop that were the laborers who had been ground down under the old corporate-state system, plus every other political grievance imaginable. The whole mess fused together like molten metal in a crucible.
“The nation once called the Mekt-Fux Corporate Union no longer exists. As of today, please refer to our state as the Fuxviet Union.”
“What.”
A thoroughly capitalist corporate state had, overnight, transformed into a red-flavored hard-candy nation—an unmitigated disaster. And they were not finished.
“Every treaty signed by the previous incompetent capitalists is hereby null and void.”
“Is this for real?”
“Everything will be renegotiated from scratch by the People’s Military Committee of Fuxviet. Those who wish to deal with us may come of their own accord.”
“Wh-what.”
They treated international covenants and agreements as if they were none of their concern.
“Are you joking right now?”
“Ignoring interstate trade and treaties? If you behave like this we cannot recognize you as the successor state to Mekt-Fux!”
Neighboring powers erupted in irritation and fury. The militarists and the equality-obsessed idealists whose heads had turned into flower gardens simply shrugged.
“We have done nothing wrong. Everything is the fault of the previous incompetent leaders.”
“···.”
Their blank-faced stonewalling only poured more fuel onto the already chaotic eastern situation.
And the problems of the east did not end there.
“This is far too harsh.”
“If you hadn’t knelt to the Warlord, this whole affair could have been nipped in the bud!”
With impeccable timing the Uko’Praknar Interstellar Union had stabbed everyone in the back, hoping to ride the Warlord’s coattails into a second golden age. Instead the Warlord himself was carved into a star-shaped corpse and detonated along with his flagship. The price for choosing the wrong rope to hang onto proved excruciating.
“How are we supposed to pay a sum like this?!”
“Should’ve thought of that before you sold us out to the Warlord.”
The Galactic League imposed a fine so astronomical that forced collection left Uko’Praknar reeling. Even after liquidating every asset they possessed—selling off fleet tonnage, auctioning technological patents, scraping together every last credit—they still could not cover the penalty.
“Aaaaaaagh!”
“W-we’re beggars now…”
For the first time in interstellar history a sovereign state declared national default. Under the watchful eye of a Galactic League oversight commission, the bulk of their monthly resource intake was seized thereafter.
Meanwhile Ikh Nur Bal—once independent of Uko’Praknar, then forcibly reabsorbed—found itself in a very different position.
“We’re free at last!”
“Of course we are. How could it be otherwise?”
Outwardly, resistance fighters who had opposed the Warlord’s oppression formed the core of a successful revival. The countless exclaves that had once been grotesque cartographic abominations were handed over to them as partial compensation for Uko’Praknar’s punitive fine. By any measure they had become the single greatest success story of the galactic east.
Accordingly they discarded the old name that had emphasized mere independence and proudly rebranded themselves the Nurbal Republic, a proper nation standing on its own two feet.
Of course the reality was rather different.
“We shall never forget the aid Your Excellency rendered to the Nurbal Republic.”
“Henceforth the Nurbal Republic pledges its loyalty to the Holy Sevelian Empire.”
It was nothing more than one of Arto’s “minor” pranks, combined with a puppet ruler installed by the Empire’s foreign intelligence network. Publicly they proclaimed that no more oppressors remained and that they were a thoroughly independent state. Privately they had bowed their heads and become a protectorate, trading security guarantees from the Sevelian Empire for their own submission.
The Loyrakan Republic, by contrast, found itself in rather different circumstances from its neighbors.
Fleet losses during the war had been severe, yet unlike the eastern powers Loyrakan had only ever been an expeditionary force operating far from home.
“Loyrakan Republic—loyalty, loyalty.”
Their homeland had suffered not a single scratch. In exchange for heavy casualties they had secured enormous influence across the galactic south. Almost overnight the Loyrakan hegemony was complete.
“We may not be able to look after everyone, but we believe we ought to secure certain interests from you at the very least.”
“Oh?”
From the newly rebranded Fuxviet Union—still thrashing about after changing its national identity—they extracted every concession and favorable treaty imaginable.
“This should be sufficient.”
“A number of planets formerly under Uko’Praknar are contacting us, expressing a desire to naturalize under our flag. Shall we accept?”
They even absorbed several worlds from Uko’Praknar’s former sphere of influence. By every metric they had emerged as the war’s greatest beneficiaries.
“Let’s stop while we’re ahead. Fleet reconstruction is urgent; forcing further territorial expansion will only give us indigestion.”
“Wise words indeed.”
By deliberately refusing overreach they avoided the stomach-ache that usually accompanied sudden growth. All in all, their conduct was remarkably prudent.
As for Zeltec, which had once submitted to the Warlord…
“We built all these ships, and now the client who ordered them is gone.”
Under the Warlord’s orders their shipyards had worked around the clock. Then the man who was supposed to crew those vessels died, leaving Zeltec suddenly in possession of an enormous fleet—far larger than anything they had fielded before the war. Better still, the ships had been constructed not with their own resources but with materials requisitioned from occupied territories on the Warlord’s authority. In short, free ships. Including battleships.
“Looks like we won’t need a fleet reconstruction plan after all.”
Of course, once the civil war raging inside the former Warlord’s domain ended, the victors might well demand ownership of those vessels. Zeltec, however, already possessed a free fleet and had apparently absorbed the spirit of the old British Empire.
“Why should we bow to a bunch of pirates who no longer even have a Warlord?”
Whether anyone claimed the ships or not was, to them, entirely irrelevant.
And the Sir Citizen League—the first power crushed beneath the Warlord’s heel—had managed, through a massive uprising, to drive the Warlord’s remnants from their original territory.
“Get the hell out, you damned pirate scum!”
“You lot who once submitted to us dare—!”
Yet success came at a terrible price.
“All that’s left is ruins and garbage.”
“Mommy, I’m hungry…”
“···.”
Because they had been the most thoroughly plundered—stripped bare to sustain the Warlord’s armies and fuel the war’s expansion—the newly resurrected Sir Citizen League possessed neither fleet, nor capital, nor even basic resources. Nothing remained.
Well, a handful of ships seized from pirates and mercenaries still floated in their yards, but those vessels amounted to little more than a weak patrol flotilla capable of fighting only the most ragtag raiders.
“We lost far too much in this war.”
“So let’s squeeze whatever we can out of the neighbors.”
There was the thoroughly blackened Fuxviet Union, for one.
“These damned former slaves…”
“Boys! Go loot their cities!”
Pirates and raiders who, no sooner driven out, crossed the border again to plunder planets and habitats.
“···.”
“···What are you looking at?”
Uko’Praknar, gutted by the Galactic League’s enormous fine, now sought to recoup its losses by preying on the weakened League.
“Our fleet’s all rebuilt, you know. Want to be secret friends with uncle…?”
“What? Get lost.”
Even Zeltec, swaggering about after swallowing the Warlord’s fleet, kept making unwanted advances.
Surrounded by enemies on every side, the Sir Citizen League saw no other path.
“···Ambassador of the Kerzin Federation. We formally request admission into the Federation.”
The interstellar state that had once struggled to escape Kerzin’s shadow now chose to step directly into that same shadow for its final act. Yet that very choice would become the spark that ignited yet another round of chaos…