The Great War, Propaganda And The People
When we analyse the changes in the GTVA, it is important to remember the differences between the two wars and more importantly, how they could be painted to the populace.
The cost of the Great War had been great. Before the war, the loss of an Orion was considered a terrifying defeat. The immense vessels were symbols of Terran power and their very existence as a species seemed to hinge upon their immense frames. At two kilometres long, an Orion in a non-geosync orbit could be seen from the ground. For the millions that lived in space based installations, their dark metal shadow represented stability and the guardian of the bright future of Earth. The loss of the Galatea made the GTA aware of how feeble even the greatest of material science could be as a source of inspiration. A fierce propaganda effort had swiftly silenced the loss of the Galatea. Her wings were remembered as martyrs, her crew as heroes and her final battle as a last stand.
No one wanted the horrifying truth of the Galatea's annihilation at the hands of the Shivans to ever settle in the consciousness of its people. Guncam footage and the accounts of her survivors were classified to the highest degree possible. In a way, it was almost fortunate that the destruction of the Lucifer had diverted the attention of the Lost Generation so completely away from just how close they came to utter annihilation. Reports from Vasuda Prime had been scarce. The GTVA had yet to be formalised and the only real co-operation between the two governments was through the military. Only years after the event did the GTA's fledgling interstellar paparazi finally air the footage taken from the orbital platforms moments before the Lucifer's main beam cannons began their thirteen hour bombardment.
The Vasudans never looked back home for inspiration. As the humans reeled from the loss of Earth, the Vasudans took to the stars and made the void their own. Their militaries began to trade tech. The first beam cannons came to fruition in a Vasudan lab using Terran research staff. The first Sobek class corvette used blended materials science derived from the remarkable Reinstrom Institute, the first truly great interstellar physics research institution. The Vasudan penchant for reactor technology merged with Terran materials science and advanced weapons tech. Piece by piece, the GTVA became a force that in the eyes of its populace, could contain and defeat the threat that had all but wiped them out years before. They became confidence. They became safety.
What made the Second Incursion so much worse than the first was the civilians.
The evacuation of Capella had come soon, but not soon enough. As they poured through the node, the civilians brought stories with them. Not the stories of what might have been or what could have been as had existed in the Great War, but documentary evidence. They came with tales of heroic pilots dooming themselves against vast Shivan hordes. They spoke in hushed, terrified tones of the destruction of the Colossus, once feted as the end solution to all war. They passed by dead cruisers and corvettes, through debris clouds. They witnessed flak and beam fire up close. They saw the shadow of the Sathani, the oscillating subspace field and the vibration of Capella's outer layers as it turned the star they once called home into a traitor.
The one image that stood out above all else was surprisingly deceptive, however. It defined how the public saw the war.
One civilian contractor piloting a small Elysium captured the moment a Deimos class corvette was torn apart by a lance of Shivan beam fire. Though the footage has been analysed frame by frame by network journalists, experts and columnists alike, it painted an unmistakable picture. The Shivans were death incarnate. It was even possible to see the photon discharges of flash vapourising GTVA officers within the decks of the ignited corvette.
Fear spread like a cancer throughout the populace. The GTVA had been founded on a military pact and the military industrial complex behind it. It owed its very existence to the Shivan threat. Now, with less than a third of its fleet remaining intact and half of them in dry dock undergoing desperate repair efforts, the GTVA's power base upon which it had relied so much as broken.
Politics flared on both sides of the divide. Old hatreds reignited amongst conservatives who remembered the war with the Vasudans with hatred and derision. How dare the GTA gamble the lives of humans in an unproven alliance with them? Liberals took hold of a chance to finally attack the military industrial complex they despised while venting bile at the "bigoted Neo-Terrans". The loss of so much military power resulted in a greatly reduced interstellar patrol fleet. Crime spread with the fear in great waves. Whole settlements went dark as wide spread looting cut power to communications.
There was no sense of heroism or of relief. To the estranged people of Earth, they were living on borrowed time. Nihilism began to take hold in the cultural attitudes of the populace. Food riots on starved stations wracked by piracy resulted in over a million deaths in under two months as organised saboteurs vented entire habitats into space. Their perpetrators were old world religious fanatics who saw the Shivans as the agents of the apocalypse.
The change was more subtle amongst Vasudans. The Vasudan parliament found itself under both cultural and political siege - how had the Vasudan Imperium changed in thirty years? Was the GTVA truly worth the loss of autonomy? A people drowning in artists and philosophers had lost its spirit. It had become savage warriors as befit a universe dripping with blood. Was this their fate? Were they to forever avenge their fallen homeworld, only to die defending a graveyard? Vasuda, they argued, had died with the planet that bore their name.
Any GTVA response was sluggish at best. Unlike the Great War, both the GTA and the PVN had born virtually equal losses fighting a defensive war in a nebula. While their economies remained intact, their ability to project power had greatly diminished. Worse still, agitator members of the NTF still lurked in the shadows and when the first Vasudan settlement was destroyed by a briefcase nuke, a new war loomed which the GTVA was ill prepared for. Out of every hole poured the opportunists and vultures that pick clean all battlefields. Pirates, mercs and criminals emerged from boltholes and struck civilian and megacorp stations in every system. Vasudan piracy, almost unheard of prior to the Great War, became common place as civilian stations commandeered what few military grade transports they could and set about raiding nearby stations for food and water.
The greatest military alliance in the history of either species balanced on a knife edge. With threat boards lighting up red across Terran-Vasudan space, a coherent response was needed and quickly.