During the first days of the Prelude, Rhett Orkhan formed a raiding party out of more than twenty of his most trustworthy and battle experienced followers, before committing a heist at one of District 6’s armories, resulting in the deaths of ten human fighters and all eight of the cetaceans present. By the time cetacean reinforcements arrived, Orkhan and what was left of his band got away with 200 units of minornova grenades, 400 units of laser pulse blasters, and 500 rechargeable cartridges of blaster chargers. The assault became known as Rhett Orkhan’s Raid on AY21556. Afterwards, the group kept a portion of the stolen weapons, modified them for human usage, then equally divided the rest to be smuggled to select armed resistance groups of the other reservations.

With an informant’s collaboration two days after the raid, Reservation 6’s law enforcers made their way to the neighborhood Orkhan and his group were located, with orders to apprehend or eliminate them. However, the neighborhood was notoriously anti-Apiary – with its residents aiding in the expulsion of pro-Apiary elements of adjacent neighborhoods during the colony’s escalation in strife – repelled the law enforcers, and erected barricades in the streets around all allied areas to create a consolidated defensive position. This led to a five-day siege against the rebelling residents.

Little did most humans know at the time, Colonial Overseer Va ordered the Cetaceans to quash what was being recognized as a planet-wide native uprising. On the fifth night of the siege, cetacean squadrons bombed reservation and non-reservation human communities, razing complete neighborhoods and towns to the ground. Many suspected participants involved in the uprising were captured or killed during the next two days, thus as far as anyone was concerned at the time the Prelude had ended.

By its conclusion, the colonial authority reported that 4,376 humans were apprehended across the colony. Accurate total casualties of the Apiary’s colonial subjects and those declared as domestic foreigns are harder to determine, due to various factors like lack of resources, bias, and unidentifiable remains. On average – combining official and unofficial reported data – there are estimated totals of around 2,000 missing, nearly 10,000 injuries, and over 21,000 were dead. Though his body could not be found, it is highly likely that Rhett Orkhan was among the deceased from the initial cetacean bombing run.