The Flame

The Flame is the mythic designation for Operation: Ragnarok. This final Terran offensive against the Scourge was to be the last battle of the war, and succeeded in destroying the attacking xenoi...at an extremely high cost.

The war takes an ill turn...
In the fourth year of the Scourge War, nearly all organized resistance had been effectively crushed. The Aduuni Empire was rendered down to a single hidden world, its technologically advanced Titan-class warships destroyed or set adrift. The Askari, stubborn to the end, scrambled to use new tactics against the aggressor, but this adaptation came too late. Terra's vast industrial complex was reaching the ends of its production capabilities, and its civilian and military cores were running drier as months went by and further violence exacted a toll on the Directorate's warmaking ability. It soon became brutally clear, with the Core periphery aflame or devastated, that even the grand war-fleets of humanity would be laughably insufficient to avert the extinction of carbon-based life in the known galaxy.

Human superweapons still relied on local destruction to achieve their best ends; the likelihood of luring all Scourge, an alien armada so vast it could attack all of known space almost simultaneously, into a single defined solar space was quickly discounted by High Command. Something more widespread, however horrifically damaging, would be required. It was then that the Director noted the existence, in blueprint, of a Progenitor superweapon which might fit the bill. At the end of the Xenomachy, the Progenitors began work on a hyperspatial bomb designed to temporarily fiddle with the fabric of relativistic reality, much as a supermass might; the withering blasts of radiation, catastrophic upsetting of gravitational equilibriums and critical stress on baryonic masses would cause complete destruction on a wide scale. The Progenitors had not managed to finish it, lacking the resources at that time, but few or perhaps arguably no stellar powers could claim a greater knowledge of Progenitor technology than humanity, their self-proclaimed successors. The plan was set in motion immediately.

Battle of the Belt
The modern astrographic space called The Sundered Belt gets its name from this battlespace. The central portion, today the most badly affected regions, was so thoroughly devastated by Scourge raids that it was an ideal choice for the epicenter of the blast. Terra scraped together every shipworthy hull- pre-existing, repaired or newly built- and used its absolute best officer and non-com cadres to compensate for the large number of inexperienced crewmen hastily conscripted to fill their positions. A short but very intense drilling regimen was required to knit these troops into an effective naval force, and they soon received their trial by fire upon entering the belt. The Scourge, while resource-hungry, were in no terribly great hurry to strip every world they came upon, as there would be plenty of time to do so when resistance was disposed of. As such, only small detachments were left behind in many such areas. Home Fleet, the last intact battlefleet in the Terran Navy, was to be commanded by the Director, and it turned aside an assault force penetrating past the Core periphery before 'turning' to arrive at the belt.

Three other fleets, designated 1st, 2nd and 3rd under the commands of Admirals D. du Clare, M. Ferro and G.F. Breitenfeld moved out across the astrographic space and swept aside weak resistance. This alone merely drew slight attention, but as it is recorded by White Legion curator DRD-JM-02 "Vipsanius", when a single Scourge ship was allowed to escape and carry word of the Director's presence in her gleaming, Prog-tech derived flagship Apep, the alien marauders went into a psychotic rage and began streaming for the battlefield from across the galaxy, in many cases sparing the survivors of the war from total annihilation. At first the attacks were sporadic as the less strategically inclined xenoi simply threw themselves into naval gunfire. Three days after the first wave, however, a vast number of vessels moved under tactical concentrations indicative of a full scale Scourge attack, and the battle was joined in earnest. Despite shocking losses, the four fleets acquitted themselves heroically and threw back six waves of alien attackers. Disturbed, enraged and perhaps even frightened, the alien forces marshalled every hull they could take and piled into the assault, screaming for blood; this was, however, as High Command had hoped it would go, and a fighting retreat on the Terran part ended with a transition into Shift...and the nearer galaxy erupting in violent light.

Aftermath
The battle, though costly in terms of manpower, was effective to the point of annihilating the Scourge attack fleets. Rumors that some escaped or had not arrived to the battlespace and thus were not directly struck by the Flame were discounted, as no conclusive sightings were found nor attacks reported. The galaxy was free from the Scourge threat.

Terra was forced to retreat long beforehand. All links to it and the Core Worlds- all astrogation databases, all gates save for the Breitenfeld Gate, even library records with hints- were purged completely and the Core itself locked within a closed loop, a pocket universe of sorts. This spared it from the Flame, which had wide-reaching consequences even without world-shattering levels of radiological activity, but sabotage locked it deep inside of its Veil, turning the pocket universe into something of a prison for the formerly premier human empire.

Home Fleet retreated, but was separated from the Director, who in all evidence sacrificed herself to activate the bomb when further sabotage prevented the detonator from activating on its own. For this reason, even to CE 2520/Galactic Reckoning 4522, the Home Fleet inside of the bubble wears a black band at the neck and has eschewed all of its former prestiged privileges.

The other three fleets founded successor states, such as du Clare's Six-Worlds Republic, the Breitenfeld coalition soon to be allied and partially absorbed into the Black Legion, and the Reclamation Society, a mobile seed-ship based nation-state descended from the original Ferro Fleet survivors.