Another Galactic Day passed, and another string of victories over the paltry UGN policing forces meant that more UGN worlds were at the mercy of the Arcadian Galactic Commonwealth. Once again, Arcadia stood triumphant, and once again the UGN and OCS forces either fled or were summarily crushed. However, the patrol boats and masses on the ground were doing their job. Every second that they delayed the AGC’s forces was a second that the UGN and OCS had time to prepare their final defenses. Every minute that Arcadia was held back was another minute that the construction crews to upgrade, refit, refurbish and construct more purpose-built warships.

In fact, for the first time in ages, autonomous droids were being used to help expedite the construction of the military vessels, weapons, armor and ammunition that was to be used in defense of the Core Worlds. To the current UGN leadership (which, if you don’t remember, was made up of the children and teenage relatives of OCS leadership) the loss of a few dozen systems was a small price to pay for victory. Like the spoiled rich little brats that they were, they did not seem to notice that with every world taken and every system occupied by the AGC, less resources made it to their shipyards, factories and armories.

Arkhan and Arcadia were slowly cutting of sources of supplies one by one, and the spoiled little rich kids failed to realize that their loss of more and more systems continuously lowered their odds of any meaningful victory. Of course, they were not the ones doing all the paperwork and duties of their offices, having delegated it all to those who were ‘beneath them’, who in turn delegated it further. So, by now there were several layers of ‘delegation of duties’ and since no one above the lowest ranks wanted to hear anything, the lowest rung of the totem pole had to deal with shit that was way above their pay grade and qualifications on a near-hourly basis.

The people at the top did not care, the people below them also did not care, and those at the bottom were the ones that suffered. No one in the current leadership of the UGN was remotely qualified for the positions that they held, and not a single soul had the will or want to try and salvage the situation. It was would have been comical, the levels of imbecilic mismanagement and utter ineptitude that infected the whole of the current UGN, had they not been dooming their own nation.

Despite this, the people who actually got shit done still existed and acted purely on their own. The UGN was effectively split between the leadership, who were absolute numbskulls, and the people who were not at the top who were the ones that actually seemed to be keeping floundering the UGN afloat. Still, even these people had to acquiesce to the demands of the UGN leadership, which certainly threw a spanner in the works every time they (the UGN leadership) ‘made things better’.

With all that said, even those who did not have their heads up their asses could not stop the juggernaut that was Arcadia. All they needed was a little bit more time; time enough to shore up their final defenses and finish building, refitting and refurbishing their ships. All they needed were a few more weeks, enough resources and a whole lot of luck and maybe, just maybe, they could avoid the total destruction of the UGN. Those with any sense could see that defeat was inevitable, but they hoped beyond hope that they could deal enough damage to at least get a peace that only took a couple systems. If they managed to do enough damage to get a White Peace, that would be a miracle and if they somehow managed to turn the tides of the war then they would have to admit (even if only to themselves) that there was a God or some higher power playing with fate.

…

An Arcadian fleet jumped into another UGN system and began combat operations. It was assumed that things would be the same as before and an easy victory would let them push further into UGN space with either negligible or zero losses. The fleet advanced towards one of the inhabited planets orbiting the yellow sun that stood at the center of the system, preparing to put down yet another planetwide riot. They dealt with the same old patrol boats and blasted the same old space stations to scrap metal before collectively sighing as they found that the planets were indeed in the middle of mass riots, just as they expected.

“Seriously,” moaned the fleet admiral, “the UGN was even more fragile than we thought. For its planets to devolve into anarchy the moment the police and planetary defense forces leave; just what was it like on these worlds beforehand?”

Taking stock of the situation on the ground from the safety of low orbit, the fleet deployed its dropships and other space-to-ground transports. This time, however, there was a change. The second the dropships and transports entered the atmosphere alarms blared wildly as hundreds of ancient, obsolete weapons deployed from storage silos that had long since been forgotten by the public.

Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles tipped with Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicle fusion warheads rocketed out of their silos and began to fly towards the AGC ships.

“Fucking Hell! All ships; Evasive maneuvers! Don’t get caught by one of those!”

The explosive force from the nukes on its own would not have made much of a difference; in space it is quite hard to get an explosive force to do damage unless the target is hit at near point-blank or directly. No, what scared the Arcadians was the fact that the nukes carried MIRV warheads and that there would be no atmosphere to slow and stop the EMP that the nukes gave off. Depending on how those nukes were used and which ship(s) they struck they could theoretically take out dozens of the summonable ships that still made up the bulk of the Arcadian fleets.

Both fortunately and unfortunately for the Arcadian forces, the nukes were not aimed at the ships. No, they were aimed at the surface of each one of the planets in the system. As both the transports and naval vessels scrambled to avoid what was not aimed at them, the nukes passed them by and deployed its warheads. The warheads began their final descent, to the shock and horror of not only the AGC personnel but also the civilians on the ground. The planets had no defenses to stop what was coming, and the Arcadians had, in their panic, forgotten that they could just shoot the nukes out of the sky.

The bombs fell and atomic hellfire erupted in almost every civilian center. Every major city was hit with at least one fusion bomb, and the destruction that had been unleased was more than either the AGC forces or the surviving UGN citizens could believe. As the fires and mushroom clouds began to rise, yet more nukes were launched and then more after that. The shock of the situation had worn off by this point, and the AGC military sprang into action and managed to shoot down more than 87% of the nukes that were launched in the second and third salvos together.

Some did manage to slip through the cracks, and more cities and population centers were engulfed by radioactive flames.

“Dear Arkhan,” the fleet admiral whispered, “did they seriously just nuke themselves to deny us the planet?”

Sadly, this was not an isolated incident. The leadership of the UGN had managed to actually decide on a policy to be used against the AGC. They would deny their foe even a single solitary civilian, a single factory, a single farm and a single structure. This was a scorched earth tactic on a scale that neither side had ever seen before, and it would come back to bite the ones that implemented it before long. Not just the systems the AGC was entering were being destroyed, but all the systems up to the very Core of the UGN itself. Everything that could be taken in the escape from the AGC had been stripped from the planets, and soon after the long dormant weapons of mass destruction were used one final time.

The AGC would be left only wastelands to claim as their own, or at least that was the plan.

Boy, were they going to be in for a shock when it came time to engage in peace talks.