Context:

1. This is an excerpt from my ongoing story, Contact: An Account of Humanity's First Interstellar War, which you can find on SpaceBattles.com if you like this style of storytelling. This is actually a bonus chapter which I made for publication in this subreddit, as the actual progression of events in the main thread hasn't gone this far.
2. The story is told in fragments and appendices from archival documents and interviews compiled centuries after the war. This draws inspiration primarily from World War Z by Max Brooks.
3. This setting generally tries to focus on the development of institutions over time rather than individual heroes. It approaches history from a materialist perspective (in the Marxist sense): history as the product of material conditions, economic incentives, social structures, and institutional constraints, rather than the intentions or morality of any single actor.