Champions, Craftsmen, Campaigns and Catastrophes
Copyright© 2026 by FozzieBare
Chapter 7: Two sides to the same coin
It cost a lot of money to hire a general. It cost even more to hire a grand strategist.
William Robinson was a certified Grand Strategist.
It was generally accepted that you called him William. Never Bill. Gods forbid you called him Billy.
Most people played Universe at War to be front-line pilots in a galaxy-spanning conflict with none of the risk. Few dreamed of becoming military planners. Fewer still became generals. Grand Strategists were rarer than either.
If you wanted to win a battle, you hired a general.
If you wanted to win a campaign, you hired a strategist.
If you wanted to stop a war before it started, you hired William Robinson.
And that’s what he had just been hired to do.
Not by the coalition currently under threat of Tortin IV. They could barely keep the theoretical lights on, all the while looking at each other with eyes that were simultaneously hungry and fearful.
It was a coalition of larger guilds who saw Everloathing’s coalition encroaching closer and closer to their territory, and decided an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure.
William Robinson had forgotten more about fighting wars in Universe at War than most commanders would ever learn. He had spies in just about every guild that passed on anything they thought he should know. Ninety-nine-point nine percent of it got filed away, to be discarded when proven untrue or no longer useful. In his more bombastic moments, he imagined himself a great spider, sitting at the center of the web called Universe at War. Nothing moved that he wouldn’t know about if he wanted to know.
He had learned about the attack on Tortin IV hours after it was proposed, but since no one was paying him to care, he had just filed it away. Then someone paid him to care. Sixty Million Credits. Not to mention a healthy gratuity that skipped WarMac’s servers and landed directly in his bank account.
STOP COALITION EVERLOATHING’S ATTACK ON TORTIN IV
Was the mission goal. He considered how to do that, at the cheapest possible cost to him. Hire a large merc army? No ... that would unnecessarily raise the stakes and risked pulling more guilds in. While it would certainly delay the coalition’s advance, it would make Tortin IV a battleground that lasted for weeks or even months. Once two mercenary guilds had fought a war expected to be over in 12 hours. It tuned into a six month battle with more than 50 guilds taking part. People were still writing little-read wiki articles about it today.
So, a large army was out. Besides, if he did his job right, the enemy would hand him the tools he needed to break them.
A single guild was a familiar environment. William had never understood why people joined them. His thoughts generally ended at, Why would I spend my evenings pretending strangers were my friends?
Understanding them, however, was different from valuing them. Every guild had its own culture. Its own unwritten rules. Its own fault lines. Finding them took work, but every guild had them.
Not impossible. Just difficult.
But a coalition? From a distance, a coalition looked like an unbreakable chain.
But if you looked really closely, the chains were linked with string, not metal. Break the string, and the metal falls away
A coalition was a mesh of different guild cultures. Conflict wasn’t an accident; it was inevitable. You were dealing with people. People came with egos. Every guild leader believed their guild mattered more than everyone else’s. They simply found more diplomatic ways of saying it.
So.
Find the bits of string.
Once they came undone, breaking the metal was easy.
He had noted the rivalry between MACSlam and Thunderdome within minutes of accepting the contract and beginning his research on the coalition he had been paid to destroy.
Putting them in the same coalition was a mistake. Putting them next to each other during a planetary invasion?
That wasn’t a deployment. It was a fracture point.
Tennis was one of the few physical sports William watched. It had a term he rather liked.
Unforced error.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.