The Beginning of the End

By early xxxx, the Confederation was regularly sending covert surveillance ships into Hegemonic systems and monitoring fleet and political operations. The dearth of intelligence that this generated proved highly valuable.

One such surveillance ship was monitoring the construction of a prototype ship of the line, code-named 'Bully'. Bully was an extremely large Battleship that carried a frightening amount of firepower, including two squadrons of fighters, 10 gauge plasma cannons and enough small arms to stand-off just about anything any single Confederate militia could throw at it.

The black-fleet's surveillance ship SC-1355 was monitoring the launch of Bully from the yards and was confident that the ship was going to go through trials in an adjacent and unoccupied star system. When the ship instead made way for the nearest Confederate system, it became clear that the intention was to put the ship through trials in an incursion.

SC-1355 then quickly began to make ready to return home (in the hopes of preventing Bully from surprising Confederate forces) when it's presence was detected and the ship was forced to send it's report via a data probe while sacrificing itself, in order to give Hegemonic forces the satisfaction that they had stopped any leak of the coming attack.

The probe arrived in the Confederate system of Galph just hours ahead of the Bully. But those crucial hours proved invaluable in evacuating civilians and rallying forces to prevent a slaughter.

Bully (now commissioned and officially called the HNV Obligator) entered Galph and began to systematically destroy any Confederate asset it encountered. All the while, civilian ships were being vectored away from the Obligator. Soon however, the Obligator came to the primary colony world of New Spokane and Obligator began to open fire with it's heavy weapons. The orbiting control station was destroyed with no resistance, and most of the surface of the colony was rendered uninhabitable. Tens of thousands were killed but hundreds of thousands escaped, and warning was transmitted to neighboring star systems (as well as to the Confederate government) in enough time to begin to activate the different elements of the fleet.

However, what was not known to any elements of CDCA is that this was a precursor to the full scale invasion of the Confederacy. At about the same time that the Obligator was wrapping up it's operations in Galph, several agents placed aboard the Confederate Colony Ships went into action and managed to either disable or destroy them.

Soon entire task forces were entering Confederate space and initiating open conflict. Spearheaded by the Obligator, they seemed almost unstoppable.