After a long winter of positioning and maneuvering, the vast fleets of the Empire and the Commonwealth on the front lines had finally driven the last remnants of the marauder fleet into a corner of the Dawnstar system.
Don't think everyone was moving too slowly. Don't forget that the marauders had another nickname: "the nomads of the universe." Their work ships and residential ships were their flocks, while their warships were like mounted raiders galloping through the grass. In fact, when the two narrow passages into this region had finally been breached, many of the more sensible marauder warlords had already herded all the supplies and slaves they could take aboard their ships and abandoned the planets they had spent just a few months building.
They had finally endured a great expedition spanning two million light-years. They had finally found a home they could cultivate, and had finally prepared to settle down and live in peace. But fate was cruel in the end. Some couldn't accept it and didn't want to keep wandering, so they gritted their teeth and stayed behind—only to be reduced to dust beneath the relentless bombardment.
Others had begun wandering again, just as they had for a thousand years in the Galactic Core.
It was nothing more than having no fixed home, playing hide-and-seek, and waging guerrilla warfare. In the past thousand years, the Empire and the Alliance had tried more than once to send great armies into the Galactic Core and wipe them out completely, but they had never managed to finish the job, had they?
It was just like the wars between the great agrarian dynasties at their height and the nomadic tribes of the northern steppes in the age of cold weapons. The hard part had never been the tactics of a direct