Redemption Ark

But near the core the metallicity was becoming higher than optimum. The new worlds that were forming around new suns were very heavy indeed, their cores laden with heavy elements. Their gravitational fields were stronger and their chemistries more volatile than those of existing worlds. Plate tectonics no longer functioned, since their mantles could no longer support the burden of rigid floating crusts. Without tectonics, topography — and hence changes in elevation — became less pronounced. Comets were tugged into collisions with these worlds, drenching them with water. Vast world-engulfing oceans slumbered beneath oppressive skies. Complex life rarely evolved on these worlds, since there were few suitable niches and little climatic variation. And those cultures that had already achieved starflight found these new core worlds lacking in usefulness or variety. When a pocket of the right metallicity threatened to condense down into a solar system with the prospect of being desirable, the elder cultures often squabbled over property rights. The ensuing catfights were the most awesome displays of energy that the galaxy had seen beyond its own blind processes of stellar evolution. But they were nothing compared with what was to come.

So, avoiding conflict where they could, the elder cultures turned outwards. But even then they were thwarted. In half a billion years the zone of optimum habitability had crept a little further from the galactic core. The lifewave was a single ripple, spreading out from the centre to the galaxy’s edge. Sites of stellar formation that had previously been too metal-poor to form viable solar systems were now sufficiently enriched. Again, squabbles broke out. Some of them lasted ten million years, leaving scars on the galaxy that took another fifty million to heal over.

And still these were nothing compared with the coming Dawn War.

For the galaxy, as much as it was a machine for making metals, and thereby complex chemistry, and thereby life, could also be seen as a machine for making wars. There were no stable niches in the galactic disc. On the kind of timescale that mattered to galactic supercultures, the environment was constantly changing. The wheel of galactic history forced them into eternal conflict with other cultures, new and old.

And so the war to end wars had come, the war that ended the first phase of galactic history, and the one that would yet come to be known as the Dawn War, because it had happened so far in the past.