Part Five: Small Wars, Part Two: the Karabnar War
The Karabnar War
Fig 5.1. The Karabnar War.
Thought-Record Diary of the Finity's End
The people who fought in the Kadeshi and Drull wars all said that those were incredibly militaristic peoples who were eager for a fight, and went down swinging. That may have been true: I don't know, I wasn't in those wars. But nobody was as up for a fight as the Karabnar. Nobody. It wasn't that they were hopeful of victory or anything; they just really seemed to enjoy the process of fighting, even when they lost.
The diplomats must have seen them next to our other vassal states and thought of them as a natural next spot to expand into, you know? But that doesn't make sense when you look at a hyperlane map. There were no routes between them and the Qlorvinserians, so we had to take a long roundabout route through an unsettled part of space. Theoretically it was called the Northern Exclusion Zone but in later years it got called the Sorrow Road. We didn't call it that at the time, of course.
When we entered Karabnar space it was with a limited force: Treasury was leaning on Fleet to not overstrain the energy budget, so half the ships stayed docked. Still, we had sixteen ships plus ground forces, which was a bigger force than they could rally against us. Plus, we had left the carriers at home, which made everyone happier. The first few systems we jumped into were ones that later became famous: Yodd Bem and Hizar. There wasn't any resistance there, just empty systems and a few mining stations. We didn't attack those; Fleet still had the whole "clean war" doctrine going on. We pushed on until we hit resistance, in Karabon.
Thought-Record Diary of the Friedrich der Grosse
After the Drull war, the Fleet got crowded with new recruits, but they were a different kind. Previously a lot of Navy people had been fuckups of one sort of another, and who enjoyed the discipline of military life. The fact that we didn't take any losses against the Drull but looked like heroes meant that we got a lot of people who wanted the glory but also liked comfort and safety. Our ship refits ended up reflecting that. As miniaturisation and psionic tech freed up space, we ended up having luxury quarters, recreation decks, spas, all that sort of thing.
Friedrich der Grosse was the Old Man of the Fleet, one of the very first two ships the Republic had, and the first one to fire a shot in anger. I put my foot down. We weren't having any of that nonsense aboard. It was going to look like a warship and it was going to fight like one.
When we got to Karabon, I was glad I'd done that. The system looked empty at first, like most of those we'd seen. As we came in we noticed that they had just finished building a battleship in their orbital shipyards. It was the first enemy battleship we'd seen.
Naturally, we destroyed it.
Fig 5.2. The Kuarregg II
, shortly after construction and shortly before destruction.
Thought-Record Diary of the Yamato
Kuarregg II was a good ship, tough and modern, but she couldn't withstand the firepower of sixteen modern battleships. She went down whilst not even scratching us. We thought we'd won. But then we found out just what sort of people the Karabnar were. I have never met anyone as violent as them. They are absolutely unbreakable.
It was their flagship and their newest, largest ship, but they were using it as bait. Even as we engaged, our subspace sensors started picking up fleet after fleet coming into the system. Some were large, some were small. They converged on us. Karabon turned out to be the largest battle we'd fought. It took months, turning to face attack wave after attack wave. The Karabnar just did not give up, ever. We were confident at first but as the ammunition started to wear down and the damage piled up, morale went down.
Thought-Record Diary of the Stefan cel Mare
We were a laser-armed ship, bristling with small guns to fight close-range battles. It turned out incredibly useful. The Karabnar were aggressive pilots. They knew that as long as we remained in a single formation, supporting one another, their disorganised attacks couldn't break us. In order to break our formation, they pushed as hard and as close as they could. Ships got destroyed making charges against us, but they just kept coming. Eventually they crossed that open space. The long-range weapons on
Loom of Fate did terrible damage, but up close it was different.
After a few days, we fell back on a two-hours-on, four-hours-off schedule. Everyone was bleary-eyed and whimpering. I remember walking down the corridor to Engineering and seeing a shift of people heading down to the spa deck. Their eyes told me everything I needed to know. They weren't frightened of death any more. Death meant we could sleep.
Fig 5.3. Karabnar fleets pour in to the Karabon system.
Thought-Record Diary of the Matilda of Tuscany
People ask me why I joined the Fleet. At the time it's because I was young and stupid and the Drull war had made me feel like I could be a hero. Nowadays I look back at all we've done and I think, no matter what happened afterwards and how famous our ship got, Karabon was the battle I'm most proud of.
It was the way we all pulled together. When the port plasma thrower took a direct hit, all the coffee shop staff on that deck went down and worked with the repair crews. When the crew quarters on Deck Nineteen got damaged, we turned the aft nightclubs into emergency housing. The old-school Fleet people always used to complain about how the Fleet had gotten civilianised and how the onboard comforts would be the end of us, but I think it did the opposite: it showed us that we weren't just machines that crewed other machines, but were living creatures fighting for our own dignity as well as our country.
The Karabnar were doing terrible damage to us. Bit by bit, the entire fleet got more and more beaten out of shape. As it happened, we saw people really dig deep into themselves and achieve some extraordinary things.
Thought-Record Diary of the Tyrant
On the ninety-first day of the battle, the inevitable happened. Our formation broke completely. We had gone from being surrounded with our backs to one another, to being a gaggle of disunited ships each fighting on their own. It could have caused disaster. It didn't, for two reasons:
Stefan cel Mare and
Friedrich der Grosse.
Stefan cel Mare was loaded down with short-range weapons, and she was in her element. She broke formation too and just turned headfirst into the attack waves, zapping everything that came along. They weren't expecting it, and it disrupted the Karabnar destroyer formations enough to let us recover.
If she was the hammer, however,
Friedrich der Grosse was the anvil. The Old Man of the Fleet was an absolute rock. Her captain was a real old-school Fleet sort, and he had encouraged the other old-school types to transfer aboard his ship. We made jokes about them sometimes, but at Karabon they showed their quality.
Friedrich der Grosse fought a two-on-one duel with two enemy battleships, even though she was as damaged as the rest of us, and gave the rest of the fleet time to reorder. When she couldn't hold out any more, the captain ordered everyone into lifeboats and sent her towards them on autopilot. We broke formation and moved in to cover them and recover everyone we could.
I think everyone was sort of expecting that the captain died a hero's death as his ship was destroyed, but no, he was fine. Tired and banged up, but fine. We took him aboard and had to sedate him heavily to prevent him from trying to take part once more.
Fig 5.4. Friedrich der Grosse
, the Old Man of the Fleet, is destroyed.
Thought-Record Diary of the Majestic
Everything ends, including the battle of Karabon, although that only happened when there was no piece of metal they had left to send against us. We thought the Karabnar would surrender after the space battle; after all, that's what the others had done before them, right? But no. They were the fightingest bastards we ever met. We had to bombard the planet's defences away, and land ground troops to clean it up.
We sat in orbit for two months, one shift working on repairs while the other shift manned the weapons and bombarded. They had lots of ground troops, and had built huge underground fortresses to protect them. Our bombardment could only do so much against them. Eventually everything that could be destroyed was destroyed, and we had to land the ground pounders.
Thought-Record Diary of the 9th Psi-Assault Brigade, 1st Army, Army Group C
The planet of Karab had been bombarded for months. The Fleet probably thought they were doing us a favour, making all that rubble for them to hide in. Assholes. They'd done their share of the dying but had only lost one ship and got the others banged up a little. We took over fifty percent casualties in that long, painful, drawn-out bloodbath on the surface, and some Army Groups had it worse.
We were pretty confident going in, you know? We had hovertanks, shield-generators, clairvoyant-guided artillery, all of that. Our conventional assault divisions had brigades of psi-warriors like myself attached, who were trained in disciplines like eclipsing, sending and thought-travel. Plus, our battalion had just gotten a consignment of the new MkVII Witch-Spears delivered which are... well, they're amazing if you're a telekinetic, which I'm not, but they're just a really nice piece of kit all around. On top of that, we had two whole army groups of psionic specialists who worked in choirs to cause telepathic domination on a planetary scale. We'd seen them work a little before and it was terrifying: they could take control of individual soldiers or entire companies and turn them against one another, or spread panic. Honestly, we thought we had this one sorted.
The Karabnar showed us how wrong we were. They'd mass produced small arms and explosives so that every civilian had as many as they wanted, and when we landed they came out of their tunnels and their ruins and tore into us. We might win each individual battle but we'd come off a little more beaten up and a little worse looking each time, and they never seemed to quit. There would always be another town to storm, or another river to assault, and one by one I saw all my friends get hospitalised. That was the worst bit, in a way. We tried to set up safe areas behind the lines, where we could put hospitals and supply dumps; but the Karabnar fought partisan attacks and came out of their tunnels, and they showed us just how fragile those safe areas really were. After a while we had to evacuate the wounded back up into orbit.
The psionic units tried to find their leadership to knock them out, but that was part of the problem. They weren't a top-down hierarchical society like the Qlor or the Drull, who got ordered into battle. The Karabnar were a warrior society whose leadership was more about coordination and strategy. When we took that out, they just kept fighting as individuals or as small bands. After a year of war there was a Republic flag flying over every city on the planet, but did that mean it was ours? No, of course not. We'd destroyed the economy and the transport links, and that meant that all they did all day was kill us.
Eventually the peace came from the weirdest place. Our diplomats talked to theirs, and agreed to let them hold an election. The Army was strongly against this - don't let the enemy organise, you know - but for some reason we not only agreed, but we agreed to let them us our telepathic thought-relays for it. Hundreds of military and naval telepaths got sent into the caverns and ruins where the Karabnar had been organising resistance against us and mind-linked with them.
They held an election. Back home, if it was us, the Pacifist Party would have been advocating asking for foreign intervention, the Individualist Party would have been advocating surrender, and the Spiritualist Party would have been demanding to fight to the bitter end. But no, not the Karabnar. They were different from us. The election winner ran on a platform of "These Republic people are actually quite tough, we think they deserve peace with us." This narrowly edged out the opposition, who ran on the "The Republic are a bunch of wimps and we need to fight them some more" ticket. May the Ancestor preserve us from ever meeting people like them ever again.
After that, we made peace. They signed a document of vassalisation and all was well.
Funny thing though. When we left and they started to rebuild, they didn't curse our names as you'd think. On the contrary, they built a monument to us. The Karabnar thought we were awesome. They had finally found people as hard as they themselves were. A lot of old Army and Fleet people started to go on holiday to their planets; even if the desert climate didn't feel good it was amazing to see how much they loved us. Children would greet us in the streets and demand to arm-wrestle, or play with swords. The veterans of the war would greet us in their own way and buy us drinks. Compared to the consumerism and devoutness of home, it felt... I dunno. I felt bad about visiting the first time because I kept seeing partially-destroyed towns that I'd taken part in the destruction of, but I felt worse about it than the locals did.
Weird people. But considering what happened later, exactly the right people.
Fig 5.5. The new Friedrich der Grosse
.
Thought-Record Diary of the Shallow Hope
After the war was over, we settled down to a period of rebuilding and modernisation. One of the first ships we rebuilt was a new
Friedrich der Grosse. It wasn't like the old one, though, and that ended up being a very influential decision. The captain got bumped up to Admiral, and his hand-picked crew of old-school Fleet people got dispersed, many of us getting commands of our own. This made our ideas and our culture very influential throughout the fleet.
I'm a good example. I served on
Friedrich der Grosse as a young officer, and made it onto the lifeboats when the Old Man of the Fleet went down. Afterwards I was given command of the brand-new
Shallow Hope. She was an amazing ship, absolutely bristling with fast-firing small weapons. She was a comfortable ship, which the old Captain wouldn't have liked, but it made the crew feel good about themselves. I felt I had to pretend to be aloof and dismissive of it so as to uphold the reputation of the Old School, but the truth is that I liked being on a ship that you could get good coffee and a pedicure on.
Existing Battleships: 32
New Battleships: 11
Battleships Lost: 1
Current Battleships: 42
. I guess the men on the ships are going to change their attitude soon enough 
