Exactly what happened on the fateful day of the first operational use of the "Gate to infinity" is unknown - even the Forerunners were evidently never able to determine the exact course of events, so what hope have we - coming some 1,000,000 after their final destruction - of ever knowing the truth? Whatever did happen, we can be sure of only one thing, the project must have succeeded in doing SOMETHING, as, within a few minutes of the powering up of the Gate, there were a series of massive explosions (observed by a ship just leaving the system on FTL drive) on the surface of the major planet. According to the Duty Watch, they were almost certainly the result of the use of SCORES of PLANETBUSTERS (or, to be more accurate, the Forerunner equivalent of them - which seem likely to make OUR versions seem like peas from a Peashooter) - the planet literally disintegrated under their impact! There were also some long-range scans that indicated the emergence of THOUSANDS of vessels from the now operative "Gate to Infinity"!

Within a few days, the Merchant vessel had reached the nearest Confederate planet - and had alerted the Confederate police Forces there of what had happened (the Forerunners had not needed a true military force in something like 200,000 years!) before continuing on their journeys. Several Police vessels where dispatch to investigate, but NONE returned. The Police Commissioner despatched request for more vessels, nothing further was heard from him or his Planetary base until three weeks later when an almost destroyed Scoutship limped into a major Confederate member world, one at the entry/exit point of a Stargate, with a single survivor aboard.

His report was that, within only a few days of the despatch of the investigatory patrol, a massive fleet of FTL vessels began to enter the System. When hailed by System Defence forces and Police vessels sent to intercept them, they opened fire without warning - destroying Confederate forces by sheer weight of fire. This gave the Planet enough time to activate their Xenon Damper fields and other Planetary defences - but the sheer weight of the attack enabled the defences to be overwhelmed. The attacking forces dropped tens of thousands of troops onto the major defence centres where they fought like madmen - giving and asking no quarter - taking massive casualties, but taking their objectives. Once these where in their hands, the Thermonuclear, Hellburner and Omega bombs (or their equivalent) began to fall on all major population centres. At no time did Confederate forces give any provocation for the attack, and numerous attempts to ask for surrender terms were ignored. The Scoutship was launched by the last intact Police facility, which expended its entire stock of offensive and defensive weapons to enable it some chance of escaping. Even so, it was almost destroyed, and had to make several short FTL jumps before they were sure they had lost all pursuit.

Despatches were immediately sent to the Provincial, Subsector, and Sector Capitals, as well as to Home - via the system's Stargate. However before significant reinforcements could be shipped in, reports from scores of nearby worlds of similar and equally vicious and unprovoked attacks were flooding in.

The major problem the Confederacy faced was that it had virtually no armed forces beyond the vessels of the Exploration Service (the "Far Scouts") and the Confederate Police; even the individuals Planets were relatively defenceless, having only limited local defence capabilities - after all, they hadn't fought anything that could be termed a "war" in almost 200,000 years! The attackers - who came to be termed "The Enemy" or "The Foe" - expanded their bridgehead rapidly - and within months they had taken a nearby Star Gate - opening up the whole of the Confederacy to their attacks.

There was little the Phoenix Confederacy's forces (such as they were) could do in the early years of the War (The Forerunners never seem to have given it a nome beyond "The War") beyond attempting to defend the vital Star Gates and some of the more exposed Manufacturing and Population centres. No attempts made to communicate with their attackers were ever successful - and, as far as we can tell, none were ever captured alive, either.

All this was to little effect, within only a few years of the initial invasion, the Foe had attacked and destroyed scores of thousands of worlds. More importantly, a mysterious Plague suddenly began to strike - virtually simultaneously - throughout widely scattered areas of the Confederacy. This Plague had no discernible symptoms until only minutes before the death of the victim - and proved to be totally incurable. Forerunner researchers never did find a cure - or even exactly what the cause or method of transmission was. The only explanation that seemed to make any sense was that it was a product of "The Foe" - as all initial outbreaks were in areas which had been attacked by light Enemy forces that had been beaten off, though nobody had any suspicion that actual physical destruction wasn't the aim until later.

The Plague proved to be the death blow of the Phoenix Confederacy - it killed something like 90% of those who contracted it, and no method of quarantine tried stopped its spread. The result was, within less than a thousand years, a decimation of the entire Confederacy's population. The only "good" result was it was relatively slow (if inexorable) in its spread, and, because of this, Confederate Industry and society in general was able to be put on a proper war footing. On top of this, those who never contracted the Plague were almost certainly immune - and passed this immunity on their offspring, making further use of Bioagents of a similar nature futile.

The initial and continuing success of the Foe was due more to overwhelming numbers than to technological superiority. Unfortunately, with so much of their population killed, the Phoenix Confederacy found that, though much of their Industrial Base was still intact, they had no-one to man it! Not only was this a problem, but so many sentients had died that it proved impossible to train replacements for vital scientists and technicians on the scale their complex and highly interlinked industries required. The result was that, though it took thousands of years to become a Deciding factor, Forerunner Technology went into a definite decline. The high-tech factories gradually decayed, as they were insufficient trained personnel to maintain them in repair - and even lower tech level facilities proved to be beyond the capabilities of the drastically reduced population to maintain. Eventually, Forerunner forces were reduced to using obsolete weapons, stiffened by millennia old high tech weapons kept in service by cannibalisation. The principle of operation of such weapons (and related High-Tech systems) behind the operation of which were literally like "magic" to the Soldiers who used them or the Techs who repaired them.

Even so, the Forerunners were more than able to hold their own in what became, pure and simple, a war of attrition. Evidently, relatively early in the piece, a "Hunter Team" managed to destroy (it is presumed) the "Gate to Infinity" - and thus cut off any possibility of reinforcements for the "Foe". The trouble was that, over the next several Cycles the remnants of both sides forces fought a vicious war of mutual extermination. We cannot be certain when this struggle ended - the last date in the records available to us (from the Algol site) is in the early years of the Fiftieth Cycle. The only thing we CAN be sure of is that the results of the War were so devastating that it has taken well over a million years for the descendants of the Forerunner races (ourselves!) to work themselves back up to even the reduced levels of technology that we have managed to reach.