Butcher of Boettia

#***** The following contains copyright material from "A memoir of my travels throughout the galaxy" written by Lord Wayne and published by the Emure publishing company in London ****#

"...Some men are born to be heroes. To be held above our shoulders as an ideal and replicated in future generations, while some men are born to be villains, only needed temporarily to accomplish a specific task and be discarded in the annals of history never to be seen or heard from again.

Lord Commander Herman Wrath, fourth supreme commander of the United Nations of Earth Star Fleet is the latter.

The year is 3254, during the third war against the Akkadians that had dragged on for almost a decade. The people of Earth were beginning to get fearful and desperate when newly elected UN President Zhao appointed the prodigious student of the legendary Admiral Oleksandr Usyk to the position of Lord Commander of the entire UN Star Fleet. He was given just one mandate: Break the stalemate and end the longest-running war since the formalisation of the Treaty of Shanghai that cemented the place of the UN as the world governing body.

To be fair, he was wildly successful. Brutal but effective.

The Akkadian Empire were a formidable foe. They possessed technological and industrial superiority. Rumours spread that Commander Wrath was only appointed so that no one important would need to be sacrificed for losing the war but he proved them all wrong.

He replaced the doctrine of avoiding direct confrontation and safeguarding convoys with one of ultra offensive clinical strikes using small and fast vessels against key Akkadian infrastructure. Every vital Akkadian world became a target. They scrambled their fleet to protect their supply lines but this only stretched their forces thin and exacerbated the impact of Commander Wrath's deadly incursions.

The war was over in less than a year.

He was hailed as a hero until the incident at Boettia. After that, he lost public opinion and became a reviled figure. Once the war was won, no one who thought that it was un-winnable came to his defence. He was arrested for war crimes, sentenced to death for genocide and taken to the prison world of Dra'as Gormud.

Commander Wrath is both a testament to human cunning and a condemnation of a win at all costs mentality.

Personally, I am glad that he was there when we needed at and I am even happier now that the butcher of Boettia is gone..."