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Aliens: Akhaga
This was a federation of non-human species joined in exploration and defence. Attempts to bring the Parkry into this federation met with failure; the Parkry revealed themselves to be rabidly xenophobic and regarded all other species with the same casual lack of regard as they had shown the other creatures on their home-world. The Akhaga decided to leave them alone, but they had unintentionally given the Parkry the concept of interstellar travel. The next Hives to be built were generation starships; they very quickly caught on to the concept of faster-than-light travel and within two hundred years, the Parkry were spreading to other systems. The pattern was repeated over and over again; a hive-ship would land on a planet and the cycle of expansion begun anew – each hive produced a new Queen every three or so years, each new hive coming up to full strength within twelve years. New planets were overrun, the process only slightly slowed by the presence of life which might have been able to fight back. Eventually, the Parkry began impinging on territory inhabited by Akhaga affiliates. The Akhaga, as they were, weren't up to repelling an invasion this strong; by this time there were millions of Parkry hive-ships moving through the galaxy, the ones that survived to spawn new hives only reaching that point by proving their worth against adverse environments; once a hive was entrenched on a planet it was almost impossible to remove them without serious damage to the world. The Akhaga began blackmailing new civilisations with the Parkry threat, forcing them to become affiliates. Once a race had joined the Akhaga federation, it was given access to mass-energy conversion, faster-than-light travel and energy weapons. This was a dangerous practice; many races press-ganged in this fashion were only about as advanced as humans of earth's 12th century. Forcing races through two thousand years of technological development in one or two years had some unpredictable effects on their social development. Some of these civilisations tried to set themselves up as minor federations on their own, spreading almost as fast as the Parkry. Around this time there were two other civilisations who had the capability for interstellar travel, the Moridani and the Sthelane (who had, for reasons of their own, also refused Akhaga affiliatehood). Both these races found themselves being forced out between the Akhaga, the Parkry and dozens of self-important minor races. Either of them could have repelled an invasion from one or two smaller civilisations, but against both the Akhaga and the Parkry, they found themselves retreating. The Sthelane - a rather sedentary race -opted for abandoning their homeworld world and vanishing into the dark spaces between stars, so far unclaimed by the Parkry. The Parkry attempted to colonise Sthelanar, but it was so fraught with dangerous traps that they gave up – there were sentient machines which emerged from their hiding-places to kill workers by the thousand and then vanish again, mazes in which explorers vanished, forests which grew back faster than they could be mowed down, seemingly bottomless pits camouflaged by holographic camouflage. The Moridani elected to fight alongside the Akhaga affiliates, using their own ships and weaponry. The Akhaga were hampered by the need to defend, whereas the Parkry only had to make the worlds uninhabitable by other standards. With help from the Moridani and the Sthelane (who didn't seem very concerned with the whole affair), the Akhaga fought the Parkry to an uneven standstill; worlds often falling to the Hive-ships, sometimes being recovered, then rendered uninhabitable by anyone at that stage. The war dragged on in this fashion for almost nine hundred years, neither side making significant advances; many of the affiliate races which had been dragged into the conflict by the Akhaga had developed to the point of becoming significant factors in this war. The Parkry had developed a breed of warriors especially for off-world fighting; the Moridani were developing machines which could counteract this threat, and so it went on...after seeing perhaps the twentieth younger civilisation brought into the conflict only to be decimated, the Moridani called a meeting at neutral territory, a world called Jheran. |
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