Prologue
Prologue
The last of an old family notorious for leveraging wealth accrued from illegal slavery into positions of authority in a complacent military, Commander Argus Voker XIV was ill-equipped to be master of an single seat interplanetary scout ship, let alone a 10,000 crew fighting vessel. To most of the enlisted on board the Instigator, when the G-Class battle cruiser lost its drive engine shortly after the shields fell, it was a minor miracle that everything didn’t go to shit earlier. Voker was a known quantity, and that quantity was an abundance of incompetence.
For the ten years he laid claim to the Instigator, the ship had been known for its aggressive mediocrity. There were few assignments Voker could not accomplish without delay, error, or craven opportunism. When called to assist in the siege of Ular’Dom, Voker made sure to position his craft far enough away from the planet to avoid any serious combat, but close enough so he could lay claim to the victory hard won by the rest of the fleet. At the beginning of the Great Resistance, Voker and The Instigator, a ship equipped with all manner of short- and long-range sensors, stumbled blindly into one of the enemy’s hidden shipyards, and with an officer company comprised almost entirely of sycophants and incompetent relatives angling for their own commands, barely escaped the fate that would fell the ship some two years later.
According to Voker, the discovery of the shipyard was “the beginning of the end of this petty disturbance” and “a master class in how to engage the enemy and lure them into their own demise.”
According to fleet records, there was a spirited debate on whether The Instigator should be retired for scrap. The damage from Voker’s master class was extensive. Many marveled how a G-Class battle cruiser could have taken such a beating and have so little to show for it. In the end, the Voker family name – not to mention the money spent toward the war effort – was enough to patch the ship and send it back out into the fray. The Great Resistance was proving to be great indeed, and every asset – even those run by fools – was needed.
When The Instigator was called to assist what was later known as The Battle of Tyrant’s Fall, Voker proved that there was no error that he was unwilling to learn from. As with Ular’Dom, Voker ordered the ship out of FTL space too close to the enemy. “The Voker Maneuver,” as he imagined it would be heralded in history books, was designed to paralyze the enemy with such a sudden close proximity. The reality was that Voker’s Chief Lieutenant once again failed to properly model the warp path. This time The Instigator managed to clip its sister ship, The Provocateur, weakening both ships’ shields enough that the Resistance’s short-range fighters were able to bring down their remaining defenses in rapid time.
While the failing Provocateur and the rest of the fleet orbiting Iken IV pressed onward towards the enemy, Voker ordered The Instigator away from the battle. The commander was equal parts lazy and dull-minded, but he was a master opportunist. The ship was again ruined and there was no sense in dying a hero’s death when there was always another opportunity on the horizon. It might be time to start anew with a fresh crew, one more likely to appreciate the subtle nuances of his leadership. If Voker himself couldn’t spin his actions here to a new command, he could always rely on the family and its fortune. Given the routing the fleet seemed to be taking, he thought it prudent to push for a position at central command. There had to be enough in the family coffers to grease those particular wheels.
As Voker daydreamed of a better tomorrow, a handful of Resistance short-range fighters followed the lurching Instigator. It was an easy mark and they made short work of the ship. Their sole mistake was destroying the drive engine while the battle cruiser was so close to a planet that could bear witness to its last gasp. Crippled, The Instigator was captured by Iken IV’s gravitation pull and began its ugly descent.
Such was the size of The Instigator that those on board who fled on the escape pods were caught in its wake and dragged back into the nightmare of burning steel and fuel. Voker’s first and final commission hit the ground with so much force that all life within a hundred miles was eradicated. The seismic damage was felt across Iken IV, slowly turning one hemisphere of a planet known for its rich biodiversity into a barren graveyard. The tombstone, half buried in earth that had burned so long that the ground had turned to glass, was what remained of The Instigator.
That tombstone was the first of many for the Dzenghar Empire. Unable to stem the fatal bleeding that many historians agreed started above Iken IV, it collapsed less than a year later.
