The Last War: Akula Kosmicheskiye--Prologue

Eternal peace only lasts until the next war.

--Russian proverb

Van Maanen?s Star barely qualified as one. A white dwarf, it was smaller in diameter than the Earth, yet its mass was packed so densely that its gravity was immense. Van Maanen?s Star had died violently ages ago-the dwarf was all that remained of the former sun it had been. Because of this, the system was not attractive to settlement. No one wanted it, no one wanted to bother exploring it, no one ever came here. And that?s exactly why they were here.

Polkovnik Kosmicheskiye Vasily Pavlovitch Shaposhnikov floated weightlessly by a window, studying the fiery white orb. The Soviet shipyard orbited Van Maanen?s Star from a safe distance, clear of the gravitational effects of the white dwarf. It was the perfect place for a shipyard that you didn?t want people to find. Space around Earth was too crowded-you couldn?t sneeze without someone knowing about it. Even the Jovian and Saturn systems were too congested. And vulnerable-the French had found that out the hard way before the Xeh?dethan War when their yards at Titan were crippled.

Shaposhnikov thought back to that time, before the Xeh?dethans came out of nowhere. Only a decade ago, it had been. He had been much younger then, even if chronologically he had aged only ten years. He had commanded the Maly Raketny Korabl Kronstadt against the Germans, during their uprising against the French-dominated European Union. He even got into a few scraps with the Amerikanskiis and their British lap dogs. Those were the good old days, back when there were many great powers, instead of one, and the only problems aliens ever gave mankind were on back water worlds populated by savages.

But the Xeh?dethans have been savages, too. Savages with technology hundreds of years in advance of anything human science could envision. They had started out as mercenaries, barbarians given toys beyond their understanding and a thirst for war and conquest that was not easily quenched. How fortunate for humanity, that they loved to kill each other as much as they loved killing other species. A united humanity had defeated them in Earth orbit once, but how long could man hold out against an enemy whose vastness was still unknown? Even after their blood lust turned inward, the fighting to regain the colonies was fierce. They held out on Mars alone for two years without supply, refusing to surrender even when their fortress in Olympus Mons was being obliterated by nuclear weapons.

Now, with them gone, we?re back to the old games.It didn?t take long for man to return to his previous ways when the threat of alien invasion subsided. The United Nations had emerged victorious from a war against a technologically superior enemy. It stood poised to unite all mankind-except mankind didn?t want to be united.

The Soviet Commonwealth, a nation long obsessed with its past greatness, was the first voice of dissent. Look at the power of the UN, the Soviets said, no one government can be allowed to have so much. What did so many fight and die for, if we allow a tyrant to rule the world? That the Soviet Commonwealth was a dictatorship itself did not even register in the minds of the UN?s critics. The words of Dmitri Timoshenko, the dictator himself, still rang in Shaposhnikov?s mind.

Russia is the graveyard of all foreign tyrants.