The following interview took place 2 cycles after the disappearance of the 3rd fleet. Under direct orders from high elder Zetax, this transcript will be excluded from the official incident report. All personnel are reminded that disclosure of this document is punishable by death.

(A Pryddohx sat down in the chair. Its eyes glowed yellow as the camera focused on its scarred face.)

Interviewer: Tell me your name and rank.

Interviewee: Ugeht Eoheo, senior lieutenant.

Interviewer: Which ship were you serving on?

Eoheo: I was the chief communications officer onboard battlecruiser Scimita.

Interviewer: The flag ship of the 3rd fleet?

Eoheo: That is correct. (claws clicked in agreement)

Interviewer: Let’s talk about your last deployment. According to our records, the 3rd fleet was dispatched to the Sol system. Is that correct?

Eoheo: Yes. We detected a constant stream of radio signal originating from Sol, about 200 light-cycles away from our Forward Operating Base. These signals appeared to be radio broadcasts from a primitive species who called themselves “humans”. We were sent to the Sol system to investigate and if possible, “recruit” another slave race for our mines back on BK-908.

Interviewer: What happened when you arrived in Sol?

Eoheo: Our fleet’s commanding officer, Admiral Koxal, drafted a message to the humans, “requesting” their immediate “cooperation”. We tried to broadcast his message with our comms array but the humans did not respond.

Interviewer: Were they ignoring the message?

Eoheo: We thought so too. However, our chief engineer suggested that their equipment might be too primitive to even sort out our signal from the background noise. He suggested us to move closer to the humans’ home planet so that their obsolete antennas could acquire our broadcasts.

Interviewer: Did Admiral Koxal agree to the proposal?

Eoheo: Yes… (claws clicked a few times in confirmation) One of the destroyer captains argued that we should keep a safe distance away from the human homeworld. Admiral Koxal shot him down, saying that the primitives couldn’t possibly have the technology necessary to construct any orbital defenses. Besides, our sensors only detected 2 very small space stations around the planet, both were unarmed and posed no threat to our fleet.

Interviewer: So when you approached this…Dirt…?

Eoheo: The humans call their homeworld Earth. (chuckle)

Interviewer: Right. (clears throat) Earth. What happened when you approached the planet?

Eoheo: The humans sent us a message, stating that they were willing to negotiate “with mutual respect”.

Interviewer: How did the Admiral react to this request?

Eoheo: Admiral Koxal was rightfully furious. These savages dared to ask for our “mutal respect”?! Admiral Koxal smashed the holo-projector to pieces and sliced a Vyob officer in half with his claws. At least that blue blob had the honor of being killed by a Pryddohx. He should be grateful that someone of our knightly species would even touch its slimy body with our claws, let alone feasting on its heart…

Interviewer: (coughed) Did the Admiral issue any orders after that…outburst?

Eoheo: He authorized an indiscriminate orbital strike on Earth. As Scimita’s strike cannons were being heated up, Admiral Koxal ordered me to fire up the comms again. The humans insulted him so he wanted to show them some…mutual disrespect as their homeworld burnt around them. He even ordered the engineers to supercharge the comms systems so that all humans with a radio could tremble before his words as they die a painful death. He was just starting to mock the human military when our guns fired the first salvo.

Interviewer: What were the guns aiming at?

Eoheo: Human settlements. Those humans installed millions of artificial lights in their cities to keep the streets illuminated. These lights made their cities stood out at night… Our gunners enjoyed the target practice until the alarm started blaring.

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Interviewer: (looked up from notebook) What went wrong?

Eoheo: Our sensors picked up hundreds of chemical rocket launches near the North Pole of the planet. Admiral Koxal laughed at the seemingly pathetic attack and ordered our corvettes to intercept those missiles with their particle beam cannons. He then ordered all capital ships to focus fire at the missile launch sites. However, those launch sites were too far north and we couldn’t hit them directly in our orbit. To increase accuracy, our fleet moved closer to the polar region and entered a new orbit above the ice cap.

Interviewer: Standard procedures so far. Did you encounter any additional resistance?

Eoheo: (laughed humorlessly) Additional resistance? The humans lured us there!

Interviewer: An ambush? I thought…

Eoheo: As soon as we entered the new orbit, a projectile slammed into our ship in great speed, tearing the engine room open. A few engineers were sucked out to the vacuum of space before damage control team could seal the room. Admiral Koxal struggled to stand up but as soon as he did, another explosion rocked the bridge. A shell had penetrated our deck armor and the sensor array was destroyed.

Interviewer: Where did those shells come from?

Eoheo: We had no idea. The sensors were badly damaged by the second blast so we were unable to locate the human guns. Worse still, the humans started using some sort of ground-based laser weapon against us. They knew they couldn’t penetrate our heavy armor with their lasers so they focused fire on our gun sights. Our gunners were blinded and our automatic targeting systems were destroyed. Admiral Koxal cursed at the humans angrily and ordered all ships to report in.

Interviewer: How bad was the situation?

Eoheo: Our corvettes took heavy casualties. All 20 of them were badly damaged, 8 of them had to be abandoned. I looked out the window and saw our last combat-effective corvette, Myrmidonia, banking hard left to dodge an incoming projectile, only to be penetrated by another shell. The round tore through Myrmidonia’s thin armor with ease and buried itself in the reactor compartment of the ship. Seconds later, Myrmidonia’s antimatter reactor exploded. Chunks of flying debris ripped our jammers apart. By that point, I finally realized that we were trouble. With the corvettes disabled, we were defenseless against the human missiles.

Interviewer: (looked up from notepad) … I thought those chemical rockets had been intercepted already?

Eoheo: No. The humans had launched a second wave of them! (tapped his shell in frustration) This time, the rockets came from the south, we turned to face them in time but with no functioning sights, the gunners could only fire wildly in the hopes of scoring hit. Most of the warheads zipped past the hail of gunfire intact and slammed into our fleet. We could only watch as nuclear explosions engulfed most of our cruisers, leaving no survivors behind.

Interviewer: According to the logs, the humans established communications with your fleet soon after the nuclear explosions. Is that true?

Eoheo: They did. A human general laughed at Admiral Koxal’s message, asking him if he liked the taste of their “railguns”. Another human claimed that they still had thousands of nuclear warheads stored underground and were more than willing to launch them at our fleet unless we surrender immediately.

Interviewer: According to some reports, Admiral Koxal ordered a general retreat at this point. Is that correct?

Eoheo: No! (waved his claws in dismissal) He ordered us to stay and fight. I tried to reason with him, telling him that our fleet was combat ineffective. He wouldn’t listen. The captain onboard destroyer Stormiren decided that he had had enough. He fired up the warp engines and tried to disengage. Admiral Koxal was furious, he ordered our gunners to open fire at the Stormiren. A few salvos later, the ship was reduced to a flaming wreck. We all stared in shock as the twisted hull drifted pass us a few thousand standard units away. Its bridge was incinerated and its torpedo tubes were dislodged from the hull. Only a few escape pods were launched before the hull got torn apart by the unstable warp engines.

Interviewer: (started jotting notes) What happened next?

Eoheo: Admiral Koxal kept barking orders until another shell crash right through the left window, sending shards of glass into my face. Before I could feel any pain, the bridge began to depressurize as air escaped into space. My seatbelt held me in place but most of my colleagues weren’t so lucky. I saw the electronic warfare officer fly out of the broken window, his cries echo in my head till this day.

Interviewer: You are lucky to be alive.

Eoheo: That will be an understatement. (sigh)When the emergency bulkhead finally closed, I got up and realized that nearly everyone was sucked out of the bridge. Admiral Koxal was nowhere to be found. I looked up and saw the wall behind his command podium was replaced by a gaping hole big enough for me to walk through. I think you can call this… a direct hit?

Interviewer: (stared in disbelief) That’s when you took over command?

Eoheo: Yes. As the only surviving officer on the bridge, I took over command and ordered engineering to get us out of there. The warp engines charged up and we jumped out the system immediately.

Interviewer: What about the rest of the fleet?

Eoheo: Before we left the system, the comms array intercepted a message from a destroyer captain. He reported that his warp engines were destroyed and he was in no shape to fight.

Interviewer: Wait…Intercepted?

Eoheo: The message was directed to Earth. He was trying to surrender.

Addendum: It is believed that the human vessels that destroyed outpost 322-5 were in fact, destroyers Espiegle and Vespira. Their main batteries had been replaced by large electromagnetic cannons, dubbed “railguns”. Civilian vessels have been ordered to stay away from Sol and any nearby systems. Military vessels may only enter this exclusion zone with explicit authorization from the elder council.