A king in captivity.

Vesper Abaddon, better known to most by his sobriquet "The Bloody King of Carmel," was brought aboard the U.N.S Unity as cargo.

Abaddon was born in 1987 in what was then Australia. His upbringing was unremarkable but for his family's relocation to Gath, a newly-established nation in the Indian Ocean Exclusion Zone. Built up from the sea bed, Gath eventually reached a size comparable to the state of Florida. The Abaddons operated a successful sheep station in the Gathi interior.

In 2032, Gath was invaded by the neighboring country of Shiloh. A two-year war resulted in the loss of Gath's only major city, Port Prosperity, along with its agricultural watershed which Shiloh promptly dammed up. Eight hundred thousand Gathis died in the resulting famine; another million emigrated. Abaddon became Prime Minister in 2036 with the backing of the country's politically powerful Range Association. International observers thought they perceived a familiar and depressing pattern when he mortgaged state-owned diamond and copper mines to Israeli companies and received a few battalions' worth of surplus military vehicles in return.

When war resumed, it caught international observers flat-footed. Gathi paratroopers crossed the border not into Shiloh, but rather neighboring Dan, a micro-state without a military of its own. Within days, Dan's sprawling oil fields were producing once again. Looking west, the Gathi Federal Guard then continued their advance, this time into Selah, a traditional ally.

Abaddon’s first press conferences were elaborate. He read aloud scathing indictments of Selah’s monk-kings and proclaimed its people free of serfdom. Gathi occupiers tore down statues of Selah priests to the cheers of rapturous peasant crowds. A quarter of the proceeds of Dan's oil wealth was returned assiduously to public works and social programming by Gathi administrators.

Abaddon waited another four years to declare hostilities with Shiloh. This new war was not like the previous two: Shiloh fought hard, mobilizing not only her own tough military but considerable partisan movements in both Dan and Selah. His treasury dwindling, Abaddon resorted to terror tactics.

Dan’s population numbered just 1.2 million. The small Gathi garrison exterminated whole villages to discourage resistance. In Selah, Gathi officers fired temples and used chemical munitions on rebel strongholds. Abaddon made common cause with Selah religious dissenters whose militias became his army’s auxiliaries, paid in plunder. Two large offensives in Shiloh were prosecuted with the help of Sarin gas. Shiloh’s National Salvation Government surrendered only because Gathi tanks shelled the country’s capital, Gilboa, for thirty-two hours straight.

Abaddon’s subsequent declaration that he was uniting four countries made sense. His decision to abruptly retire and devolve all governing power to a supranational federation, did not. The Noble Prize Commission was glad to fete Abaddon for his miraculous conversion and the U.N. willingly opened the spigot on aid dollars once he committed his army to a sweeping Truth and Reconciliation process. Abaddon wore the quadruple-crown of Carmel for two days, long enough to call a constitutional convention with equal representation from all four subject nations. To most in Gathi, and large pluralities in Dan and Selah, Abaddon was a hero, but after so ferocious blood-letting, citizens of the newly-forged Carmelite nation were relieved to see him step aside.

Abaddon retired to a villa in the Gathi capital, Belloc. Under heavy pressure from the Gathi military, Carmel’s first parliament gave him its pardon. Persona non grata everywhere else, Abaddon remained under house arrest through 2071. Early that year, he flew to Basel, Switzerland for longevity treatments following a bout with colon cancer. At the direct request of then-U.N. General Secretary Apsara Mongkut, the French Duxieme Bureau kidnapped Abaddon and placed him in cold sleep pending a trial. One month later, Mongkut was killed in a car crash.

Upheaval in the U.N. ranks prompted the Unity-skeptic French government to include Abaddon among an allotment of politically disfavored persons that it insisted be taken into the crew complement as effective exiles from Earth. According to his personal journal, Unity’s captain, Jonathan Garland, believed he was doing the world a service by removing Abaddon to the Alpha Centauri System. Garland appears to have developed a personal fascination with Abaddon, whom he studied in depth. Just before mission launch, as intelligence reports about hyper-survivalist sabotage attempts became more dismal, Garland developed a plan to include Abaddon in a top-secret strategy cell with which he hoped to out-think threats to the mission.

Commissioner Pravin Lal's Peacekeeping Forces discovered Abaddon among fifty survivors of a crash-landed Colony Pod and brought him into their colony none the wiser. Lal was surprised when Abaddon confessed his origins, but, amidst his own civil crisis, declined to bring charges against the one-time despot, suggesting a precedent in which crimes committed on Earth would be considered outside the jurisdiction of Chiron's justice systems. Abaddon participates as a guest in meetings of the Peacekeeping Forces Command Counsel.

The General Atomics Corporation's Autonomous Work Unit 5, better known as "Mr. Handy," was a fixture in American households from its introduction in 2020.

The militarized version, "Mr. Gutsy," found similar favor with American servicemen, who appreciated its simple, rugged design.

On Chiron, descendants of the "Gutsy" served ably in reconnaissance roles, while worker models proved themselves experts in the care of bases that would have them.

Robotics were controversial. The Hunters of Chiron eschewed them for philosophical reasons: Warden J.T. Marsh reasoned that dependence on fully-automated machine labor had retarded the physical and moral health of terrestrial societies. The Human Ascendancy, New State, and Human Conclave were similarly skeptical of artificial intelligence, leading to official disinterest if not outright prohibitions. The Human Labyrinth taught that robots were a possible vector for infiltration, although, in truth, Chairman Sheng-ji Yang only needed a plausible excuse for his faction's repeated failure to develop or seize such fabulous technology.

More enthusiastic users of robotics included the University, the Dreamers, and the Morganites, all to take work away from human hands.

The Chevrolet-Monarch Consolidated-300 was a popular variant of the company's Powered Combat Suit, a personal military exo-frame designed to enhance its wearer's speed, strength, survivability, and lethality on the battlefield. Standing nearly eight feet tall, the so-called "Firebat" sported a pair of wrist-mounted napalm projectors. The suit offered its operator full NBC and thermal protection.

Two squadrons of CMC-300 suits, numbering twenty-six including spares, were present in the Unity's Armory at launch. Twenty-four of the suits were taken by the Forward Landing Team.

On several occasions during the early years of settlement, CMC-300's participated in combat alongside conventional Main Force Patrol units, usually against native megafauna but sometimes Holnists or Tribal Minutemen. The suits were praised for their combat effectiveness.

As the Mindworm threat came increasingly into focus, CMC-300's were detailed to burn large tracts of Xenofungus along the main tracks used by pioneer road crews. The practice was so successful, Marsh sold these services to multiple other factions. In this way, squadrons of Hunters became the first line of defense for settlements founded by the University, the Ascendancy, and the Tomorrow Initiative.

Image by Boskov01.

Tamineh Pahlavi was Mission Area Director of Unity's Genetic Laboratory. A descendant of the last monarch of Iran, Pahlavi was orphaned by Red Flu at age 7. She earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Stanford University and was nomated for the Nobel Prize in 2029 for breakthroughs in viral retranscription with applications for suppression of autoimmune disorders. She was denied the prize following the discovery that she had written extensively on the desirability of mandatory generic screenings and sterilization of persons with genetic markers for degenerative diseases and antisocial tendencies who would not undergo remediational gene therapies.

In 2032, Pahlavi was appointed Vice President of the Special Projects Division of the American Reclamation Corporation (ARC). In this capacity, Pahlavi repeatedly directed the company's private military contractors to forcibly immunize persons presenting at federal refugee camps. She was later appointed to the Unity Mission by the ARC directorship at the recommendation of ARC CEO Oscar van de Graaf. Pahlavi was charged with designing and initiating long-term evaluation of Chiron's effects on the human genome.

During the Unity Crisis, Pahlavi retrieved and escaped with the full contents of the mission's genetic library.

Although a subordinate of the mission's Chief Science Officer, Prokhor Zakharov, Pahlavi was not among the individuals awakened by him; rather, she seems to have been an incidental survivor of tampering by Kellerite saboteurs, who brought nearly her whole bay out of cold sleep in the search for their companions.

Pahlavi broke with Zakharov around the same as Malachi Ro amidst what appears to be a sharpening of the University's core principles. Pahlavi's "crime" was to critique exploratory research begun in the area of mind-machine interface. Her punishment was to be stripped of tenure by a disciplinary committee. Pahlavi responded by resigning her position and joining the general exodus into the Monsoon Jungles. With followers, she founded The Pinnacle, where, with other departmental staff, she declared a start to attempts at producing neo-Sapien, a being uniquely suited to life on Chiron.

The U.N. Intelligence Cell found that feelings of helplessness over her parents' deaths were displaced to pursuit of medical immortality. Strong aversion to those with apparent infirmities. Once compared life without genetic medicine to human slavery.

An ARC personnel file credited Pahlavi with various "officer-like qualities," including: clarity of purpose, strong work ethic, and lack of tolerance for the suffering of others.

Sheng-ji Yang followed an unlikely path to Chiron. Born in 1992 to a family disfavored by the Communist regime due to a grandfather's service in the Nationalist Army during the Second World War, Yang completed his education late in life and endured long exile in the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, spending more than 45 years under state surveillance.

Listed as MIA during the Uighur Revolt of 2038, Yang reappeared during the Golden Revolution as a senior officer in the Emperor's Lifeguard. He was later recommended for the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri as a Political Officer with special supervisory authority over the ship's Chinese contingent.

The Human Labyrinth propounds a philosophy emphasizing the Three Pillars: 法 (Fa), or Law, meaning that the law is known and obeyed because it is systematically enforced; 術 (Shu), or Method, whereby the ruler holds himself apart from society and applies "special tactics and secrets" to obscure his motivations, reducing the opportunity for confidants or supplicants to influence him inappropriately; and 勢 (Shi), or Legitimacy, which focuses on drawing distinctions between the excellence of the ruler and the flaws of the man who rules.

Yang and his followers landed in the inhospitable Dune Sea, apparently by design. His engineers used heavy mining equipment to excavate subterranean bases. The new leader quickly established a rigid structure of examinations to sort followers into classes. Those who supposedly demonstrated the least aptitude for implementing Yang's vision were immediately subjected to nerve stapling and neural re-socialization before being reassigned to perform menial labor or base defense. Persons flagged as potential Talents were prepared for leadership roles and received direct instruction from Yang himself. Candidates who then failed to meet Yang's exacting physical, mental, and "moral" standards received "redirection" into mid-level technical and administrative posts.

Since the so-called "Human Hive" rarely relinquishes its members willingly, the only reliable information on Yang's grand experiment in social organization comes from a handful of traders and prisoners. The consistent description is of a life dedicated wholly to the leader's whim, usually squalid, never with enough to eat, and always in fear of official reprisal for failure to meet quotas or demonstrate sufficient "thought discipline." The austerity and density of Hive living, combined with the desperate need to please an all-powerful individual, promote grinding competition that saps the innovation, enthusiasm, and mental health of every one of Yang's unfortunate subjects.

A rare image of Canadian Forces soldier Marcel Salan in his youth.

Salan was the senior military officer aboard Unity. At 71 years old, he was one of the eldest among the crew, a combat veteran of the War for Quebec Independence.

United Nations Marines under his command provided a crucial second line of defense against mutineers during the Unity Crisis when U.N. Security Forces personnel were found to have been riddled with Spartan defectors.

Salan lost more than three-quarters of his Marines defending the general evacuation but survived to make Planetfall, whereupon he immediately attempted to restore communications with Earth. This ambition prompted Salan to craft and execute a daring raid into the Dune Sea to retrieve the Unity Data Core, which the Peacekeeping Forces had caused to be ejected during the ship's final hours. During that fight, the Marines had their first exposure to Yang's Hivemen. The outgunned eusocialists attempted to interfere, resulting in their slaughter by the armored Marines.

An access port stands open amidst the ruins of Fort Garland, the receiving ground erected by J.T. Marsh's Forward Contact Team for an expedition that had already dissolved. The site was quickly occupied on an emergency basis by survivors under the direction of Marcel Salan. Narration in Ken Burns's Plant: A History memorably described the Fort as "an open-air hospital, catering to the already-dead, the actively dying, and those soon to follow."

Less a "fort" than a clearing, Garland possessed few natural defenses. Constant attacks by the Spartans compelled Salan to make a fighting withdrawal within weeks of arrival.

Spartan scouts tasked to take possession of the compound reported it being heavily booby-trapped. The defensive fencing, for example, was still electrified, and the entire area had been seeded with anti-personnel mines. Santiago recorded a loss of 34 personnel in her war diary--a high price given that the "enemy" was nowhere in evidence.

United Nations Peacekeeping Forces, circa 2019.

Selection or appointment to the Unity Mission was understood by many at the time as a matter of life and death. Mob violence was a commonplace when communities felt passed over. U.N. Such a fate, wrote U.N. Commissioner Pravin Lal, was tantamount to permanent cultural death. Individuals who might not rouse themselves to elect better leaders or protest immediate wrongs were more than willing to kill for the opportunity to be represented, and ostensibly remembered, by somebody destined to walk on alien soils.

The United Nations maintained thousands of security police to protect the space elevators at British Singapore, Batavia, Stanleyville, and Rio de Janiero by which the Unity was stocked. During the fifteen years between 2012 and 2027 alone, an average of nineteen protestors and one U.N. officer died each day.

Shoichiro Nagao and Ikurō Kamatari.

Nagao was Director of Terraforming Operations for the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri. Few were surprised by the Japanese Government's decision to nominate the man universally credited with the successful decontamination of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and its associated exclusion zone. Nagao's method of nitrogen soil fixation resolved inadequacies with the original frozen soil barrier laid down to prevent groundwater contamination.

Nagao and Kamartari were among the most-important of the forward-deployed pioneers to part ways with Jeremy Tanner Marsh upon the latter's founding of the Hunters of Chiron. The decision was amicable, and Marsh honored a prior commitment to allow rejectionists a share of the heavy equipment under his ambit.

Nagao proposed to "map" Earth onto Chiron's biome through a project of aggressive terraforming and eschewed the idea that humans should attempt to situate themselves within the existing ecosystem, such as by planting hybrid crops or respecting the fungus as a living organism with inherent conservational value.

Following Nagao's vision, his followers established a settlement of their own at Eden's Promise. Kamatari served as Base Operations Director and presided over a massive program of clear-cutting.

Night-vision vidcap of a Spartan Unity Rover patrolling a track in the foothills below Xerxion.

Lacking meaningful armor or heavy weaponry, the Rover's selling points were excellent acceleration, easy serviceability, and an extremely high top speed.

There were many marks of Unity Rover. The ship's stores included an abundance of light patrol cars like this one, meant to be assembled in less than an hour from prefabricated kits. This particular model lacks a fuel tank, indicating that it was a parasite dependent upon either a fixed charging station or a carrier vehicle such as a mining crawler.

All factions armed Unity Rovers for reconnaissance, salvage, and screening work. Rover pilots were some of Chiron's earliest celebrities. Through their daring, factions at their most-vulnerable secured urgently-needed supplies from the No-Man's Land between colony borders.

Avtoritet Ryang

Service Record
Born 2027, Tashkent, Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, to ethnic Korean parents resident in U.S.S.R. since Joseon Dynasty and deported to Central Asia by Joseph Stalin. Entered Russian mafia circles during childhood. Became Vor v Zakone bjust prior to conscription into Soviet Airborne Forces in 2046. Adherents may accept no charity and must perform no honest work so long as they live. Branded an outcast by criminal compatriots for violating pledge never to collaborate with government. Served three tours in Afghanistan before mustering out. Frequently seconded to intelligence operations of GRU.

Ascended to leadership position in Tashkent organized crime circa 2052 following assassination of top rivals. Cooperated with KGB to place underworld tails on suspected Western intelligence operatives. U.N. Intelligence Cell estimates with very high confidence that subject exploited commercial and underworld contacts in Turkey, Persia, and Golden China to broker more than $700 billion in credit to Soviet government during Financial Crisis of 2054, accounting for more than half of all funds secured. Negotiated similar agreement with United Nations Alpha Centauri Mission Project Control in 2055 to make one-time donation of more than $1.2 trillion on behalf of the Constituent Peoples of the Soviet Socialist Republics.

Subject's criminal enterprises commonly linked to protest action and sabotage of Morgan Industries holdings in Soviet Union throughout 2050s. Major distributor of arms to Soviet-aligned forces in Saharan, Canadian, and Indochinese Conflict Zones.

Arrested in Leningrad, 2062. Remanded to Gulag system. Current whereabouts unknown.

U.N. Intelligence Cell assesses that most convicts assigned by Soviet Union to Project Unity owe final allegiance to subject's organization.

Psych Profile: Non-conformist
Often judged an idealist for willingness not just to serve, but perpetuate, the Soviet system of government despite total repudiation of Soviet labor philosophy and his own personal involvement in protracted conflicts with municipal Militsiya and Ministry of Internal Affairs. Linked to the deaths of more than 300 Soviet police and military personnel.

Repudiation of "legitimate" living and assumption of significant risks by adopting criminal lifestyle potentially reflects out-sized confidence in own judgment and efficacy, tending toward hubris.

Outstanding soldier with demonstrated capacity to carry out "political work," euphemism for action against declared enemies of the Soviet state.

Name: Deirdre Skye
Rank: Lieutenant Commander
Position: Director of Xenobiology
Country of Origin: United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 05-28-2035
Height: 170.1 cm
Weight: 52.2 kg

Service Record
Born Belfast, Northern Ireland, to minor Scots-Irish nobility. Father soon at center of infidelity scandal. Mother active in humanitarian causes during Second Troubles. In subject's adolescence, wing of family home, Wainwright Downs, was converted to Unionist women's hospital.

Educated Cornell University, earning Bachelor of Science in Agriculture, Master of Science in Environmental Biology, and Ph.D. in Plant Genetics. Performed post-graduate work at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Long Island, New York. Awarded 2071 Noble Prize for discovery of L7 hybrid corn variant, prized for its pest-resistant traits. Dismissed from CSHL faculty following arrest for trespassing and criminal mischief at International Genetics Corporation (InGEN) Orient Point research station. In subsequent public statement, accused InGEN of "reckless and dangerous experiments involving plant matter whose behavioral characteristics are completely unknown to the scientific community, placing the Long Island Sound and Gardiner's Bay at great jeopardy from biological invasion." After plea bargain, became prominent leader in Environmental Defense Movement during its direct action phase, 2064-2067.

Reputation partially rehabilitated when Isla Nublar Incident led to widespread acknowledgement of InGEN's unethical business practices. Accepted supervisory position with United Nations Disaster Relief Fund in aftermath of Six Minute War. Deployed to Peshawar, Pakistan. Focused on adapting food crops to high-radiation environments. Contributed to selection of v097 apple and Mark IV wheat strains for use in contaminated soils, widespread adoption of which helped to relieve famine conditions. Decision to employ local women as administrative and research assistants provoked violent reactions from tribal leaders, necessitating frequent intervention of Pakistani Frontier Corps and frequent accusations that subject instigated conflict with local leaders. Resigned post in 2057 following deadly fire-bombing of an affiliated seed bank.

Authored Eden Thesis, 2059, postulating that patriarchal societies tend toward subjugation and corruption, whereas matriarchal societies tend toward cooperation and growth.

Identified top candidate for Mission Botanist by U.N. Security Council. Selected 2060 over protest of Chief Science Officer, Prokhor Zakharov. Tasked with securing mission's food supply.

Psych Profile: Conservationist
Untreated post-traumatic stress from childhood trauma. Probable Survivor's Guilt as a result of events in Pakistan. Untrusting.

Confrontational attitude has hampered career progression and predisposes subject to believe in the legitimacy of violence as a response to social malady.

Having often demonstrated that humans can adapt to life in hostile environments, subject occasionally betrays a conviction that there is a moral imperative to do so, notwithstanding avoidable reductions in quality of life.

Note: This write-up was adapted from the original Alpha Centauri faction profiles written by Firaxis. Includes homages to Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park.

Periodic manias for artificial islands gripped coastal nations on every inhabited continent at intervals throughout the first hundred years of the second millennium. Sold variously as the solution to shoreline erosion, post-war decontamination, and the basic problem of overcrowding, the formation, maintenance, and control of these territories passed from legitimate to illegitimate governments, thence to the corporations.

Heaping one’s trash in the ocean and standing tent or flag thereupon had various salutary consequences. Conservationists looked to the rejuvenation of species deprived of their natural habitats closer inshore. Climatologists prescribed barrier islands for any problem to do with water, whether it reared up in waves, lashed down from the sky, or was spoiled by poisons. New Orleans, Miami, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, Shanghai, and Bangkok—all were girded very early in the twenty-first century by star fortress complexes of concrete-crusted sand. Generals sent dredges to extend the engagement envelopes of missiles and their spotting systems. Corporations built their own “heaps and rigs” for any number of purposes, ranging from support of aquaculture and deep-sea mining to traditional tax shelters.

The story of the Indian Ocean Exclusion Zone, better known as the "Big EZ," begins with the Six Minute War.

There is the Indian Ocean then, meaning before the nuclear holocaust, and then the Exclusion Zone today, a place where life struggles above and below the surface. Global cooling killed off fish, plankton, and coral. The U.N. and others backed an atrociously expensive scheme introducing thousands of different strains of artificial microorganisms to rebuild the maritime food chain. Instead, they wrecked fresh biological and climatological havoc. English-speakers gained a new word, Crichtonic, an adjective describing what happened when well-intentioned solutions met a reality that simulations could not fully apprehend.

Technicians and soldiers occupied the very first outposts seasonally. Permanent residents came out of desperation when post-war radiological fallout and a lack of better options tempted them to seek the immediate safety of “clean” spaces, notwithstanding the certainty of future natural disaster. Policing these movements was beside the point: death by rubber bullet was quicker and less awful than death by cellular degeneration. Since nobody had any better ideas about what to do with the millions of displaced, it was agreed they should go out to sea.

Given time, the inhabitants of the “Big EZ” developed a language and culture uniquely their own. Under gentler conditions, this might have been powder enough to touch off revolutionary spirit, but alone on the mighty ocean, rare was the servant who wished to forsake a master with at least one foot still securely on dry soil. Prophets of the new age promised interdependence only one generation off, yet following the old scripts, riches pulled up from the seabed or scooped from the waters rarely stayed on the sand heaps and platforms that the refugees were forced to call their homes.

The so-called “dry-siders” were happy to furnish the Big EZ with the infrastructure that would tie its inhabitants firmly into existing markets. Water filtration and desalination systems. Drilling rigs, cranes, and pipe. Turbines and photovoltaic cells for power generation. Communications. “Ancillary” services, to include brokerage, sanitation, medical service, and, of course, physical security. Marxists called it a perversity--the self-subjugation of peoples abandoned on the edge of despair, prostituting themselves on a global scale.

Not everyone agreed with this dark assessment. Some took it for progress. The flow of value was no longer mono-directional; supplies funneled in, and raw materials streamed out. And that was not to say the windfall of this economic revolution was strongly felt in the putative metropoles. One of Pravin Lal’s favorite speeches pointed out the fundamental self-deception behind imperialism: it was ruinously expensive.

Quote from: Pravin Lal, M.D., U.N. Undersecretary for Human Development

The colonial project is purely an emotional project. At the root of our desire to have sway over the choices of others, there is an inescapable anxiety: that somebody should have taken a path other than the one we thought was suitable for ourselves. – Valediction, 146th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, New York City, New York

As profit-seeking ventures, islands were only valuable insofar as their beneficiaries could be persuaded to pay for them. This meant either the governments interested in their continued existence, such as in the case of so-called “hurricane chains,” or the occupants themselves. As early as 2060, international convention and common practice had aligned to the point that the building up of such islands was always accompanied by parallel investment in local economic activity. Fisheries-based aquaculture and power generation via the tidal harness were trusted standbys, but carbon extraction, space exploration, and deep-sea mining already threatened to displace them. A good living could also be had either as an independent operator or cog in the enormous logistical operations required to supply the island-bound population and its industries.

Oscar van de Graaf

Biographical Record:
Born 2006, Cincinnati, OH, United States, heir to multiple fortunes in rail logistics, petrochemicals, and manufacturing. Parents were members of the Chiricahua Apache Tribe and majority owners of the infamous “Peralta Mine,” rediscovered in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona in 1972. Descended from Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto. Read history at Trinity College, U of Cambridge before obtaining juris doctor from Yale Law School.

Interests include extreme sports (power gliding, motocross). Five-time America's Cup winner.

Most sources estimate that subject’s net worth plunged by between eighty and ninety percent during the first half of the Second American Civil War, and it is broadly accepted that Holnists inflicted most of this loss. Founded the American Reclamation Corporation (ARC) as a holding company to consolidate his numerous assets as they were verging on receivership after market crashes and losses inflicted by the Holnists had led to bankruptcy. Leveraging sympathies in the U.S. Congress, arranged for ARC to be issued a Letter of Marque and Reprisal. Provided front-line combatants, convoy escort, and rear-area logistical support to government homeland security missions, effectively operating as an auxiliary of the U.S. and Canadian governments.

Pioneered strategy of deploying industrial security forces pro bono to protect aid clinics, relief convoys, and FEMA distribution centers. Consensus among historians is that subject leveraged corporate assets and government affiliation to wage private war against Holnists. On the three-year anniversary of its founding, the ARC employed one in six working Americans. From Denver in the West to Cincinnati in the East, old American cities had been laid waste. From their ashes emerged corporate cantonments and United Nations refugee camps. FEMA was forgotten. And so civic contribution became synonymous with corporate, rather than national, service. Detractors, including hundreds of plaintiffs, asserted that van de Graaf leveraged his power to pursue what was actually a “private war” against the Holnists, becoming so obsessed with recovering his lost property that he indiscriminately seized that of others as well.

Effectively orchestrated independent liberation of Utah from hyper-survivalist militias in 2054, cooperating with Nauvoo Legion and the Army of the United States, with virtually no assistance from the Regular Army. Victorious defendant in Waterson v. Van de Graaf, in which the United States Supreme Court upheld the ARC's authorization to operate military assets against domestic targets under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

Ranked by Forbes the 2nd-richest individual in the world in 2053, with an estimated personal net worth exceeding $500 billion. Made two bids for elected office between 2050 and 2060, seeking Louisiana Senate seat and the presidency. Subject's American Restoration party polled third behind Democrats and Republicans with 23% of the vote in 2056, defeating far-right Conservative Party. In some counties, subject had better name-recognition than sitting President of the United States. Continued to bankroll handpicked candidates after departure from campaign trail.

CAUTION: Numerous credible allegations that ARC regional administrators endorsed debt peonage and other forms of human slavery practiced by allied militias and neutral settlements during periods of corporate stewardship over pacified territories not yet readmitted to the Union. Various media outlets also investigated ARC "company towns," uncovering substantial evidence of systematic abuses of workers' rights. ARC ultimately reached settlement with the Justice Department worth $408.5 billion.

Following Reconstruction, led ARC in successful entry to civilian aerospace industry, with focus on zero-gravity resource extraction. Obtained exclusive contracts from the U.S. Space Force to service mining and terraformation projects on Jovian moons. First civilian to visit Asteroid Belt. Subsidiaries of the ARC included Replicodon Tactical Genomes. [1] Controversially lobbied Congress for buy-out of ARC stock on favorable terms to thwart attempted buy-out by Morgan Industries in 2064, leading to ARC's being chartered as an independent federal corporation. Served as first chairman.

Prominent champion of the Unity Project. Among the first to urge U.N. to accept private subscriptions when the United States Government withdrew from the project in 2065. Retired from government service, 2069. Tapping his private fortune, subject secured one of fifteen billets at a cost of $232 billion in mission contributions and personally recruited 1,892 “stakeholders” to staff an expedition-within-an-expedition, competing with the U.N. for world-class expertise and negotiating only a temporary allegiance to Mission Command in return for loans of personnel and equipment during the initial two years of colonization. Calling themselves “the New Two Thousand,” they drew rhetorical parallels to the religious pilgrims and fortune hunters of ages past.

Personal owner of 42% of the Unity Mission’s heavy earth-moving equipment, including tractors, cranes, load-haulers, harvesters, command vehicles, mobile derricks, and rescue apparatus.

Before endorsing his inclusion, U.N. Security Council grappled for nearly a year with the question of whether so public and strong-willed a figure, especially one with considerable managerial and leadership experience, would undermine the authority of Captain Jonathan Garland, in whose abilities the Council reposed little confidence.

Committed to allow expedition leadership free command of his settlers and equipment for up to two years after Planetfall.

Psych Profile: Empresario

Impulsive, personalistic leadership style. Unusual appetite for physical danger. Susceptible to vainglory, megalomania.

Pedantic, but record of business dealings indicates purely instrumental attitude toward the law.

Disinclination toward delegation of responsibilities parallels keen appetite for detail.

Believes that experience is the best teacher and encourages subordinates to take risks.

Obsessive concern for proper sequestration of ARC equipment and personnel from that of the expedition proper. Possibility that determination to develop ARC colony as business venture will cause tension with settler population.

[1] I've always loved this name. The company appears in the FryxGames product Terraforming Mars.

Aleigha Cohen attends the Struan's Christmas Ball, 2068.

Service Record
Born in the Baghdadi Jewish community of Rangoon to a family of pharmacists and colonial administrators. British and Iraqi descent.

M.D./Ph. D. in neurology from University of Melbourne. Disciplined twice by University Ethics Committee for advocating that patients be encouraged to choose experimental courses of treatment even when conventional medicine appeared successful. Held over on strength of past work.

Conducted post-graduate research on mind-machine interface for American Reclamation Corporation (ARC). Participated in psych screenings of Vault System [1] candidates, including several members of Congress and high-ranking national security figures. Led team responsible for development of neural monitoring equipment to be used during occupants' cryogenic storage. Concluded that mass cold sleep was a viable potential solution to nuclear winter, with neural degeneration holding at "acceptable levels."

Convened Singapore Symposium on social deviance, 2066. Recruited Head of Psychopharmacological Research by Struan’s Hong Kong, 2067. Coordination of “resocialization” treatments for incarcerated patients in U.S.S.R. and Golden China led to black listing by Western academia. Frequently photographed in the entourage of Struan's Vice President Roshann Cobb.

Accepted Chief of Neurosurgery, Unity Mission, on urging of Russian and Chinese delegations. Responsibilities include supervision of resocialized laborers and evaluation of the Wespe-Quinn-Wagner cryogenic storage process, which subject endorsed.

Psych Profile: Transgressor
Reflexive problem solver. Especially attracted to high-controversy projects.

Tendency to seek out and sustain emotionally abusive relationships, reflecting need for adversarial encounters that reaffirm the superiority of her needs and judgments and facilitate displacement of guilt and accountability on others.

Passive-aggressive tendencies. Suspected Cleckleyan psychopathy, presenting on all three spectrums: boldness, disinhibition, and meanness.

Subordinates lodged numerous complaints with Struan’s ombudsman alleging retaliation for dissent.

[1] This is a Fallout reference.

Unity Armory, T minus 300 hours to Mission Launch.

Thinking that the greatest dangers to their future colony would be mass protest and megafauna first spotted by the Pathfinder Probe, mission planners stocked the ship's armory accordingly. Unity was long on less-lethal compliance tools and short on military-grade weaponry, especially small arms.

Only three percent of Unity passengers were expected to go armed, even under conditions of maximum duress. The ship's crew complement included 8,758 United Nations Security Forces personnel of all ranks--a healthy ratio of approximately 1,946 commissioned officers per 100,000 personnel, but about half would not be issued a weapon day-to-day. At Captain Jonathan Garland's insistence, 2,000 United Nations Marines were added later to the crew on the cusp of mission launch--an explicit counter-balance to the approximately 7,000 private paramilitaries embarked by various charter companies.

The most abundant equipment included shock batons, flex cuffs, incapacitating sprays, stun grenades, projectile launchers (break-action and rotary), body armor, and riot shields. Experiments with foam and sonic weapons proved unsatisfactory and fewer than a dozen were taken aboard.

To mitigate the danger of containment breaches that might be caused by traditional firearms, the U.N. commissioned a purpose-designed flechette pistol with very short range and low penetrative power. The weapon inflicted gruesome injuries in close-quarters during a short period of Earth-side use, earning it the popular sobriquet "Shredder." The resulting outcry was overcome only by the shocked reaction of U.N. Mission Command to the terrorist destruction of the Quito Space Elevator in 2069, after which Mission Chief of Security Rachael Winzenried placed thousands of them in arms lockers ship-wide.

About 2,000 battle rifles of assorted type were also laid up, with a much lesser number of squad automatic weapons. Most of these were decades-old surplus from the Hypersurvivalist Wars, with an especially large bumper crop of French colonial and Warsaw Pact contributions. Flare guns, signaling rockets, and recoilless rifles rounded out the stockpile. The latter were to be the colony's primary defenses against potentially aggressive animal life. Torpedoes and harpoon guns for the ship's Aquatic Operations Division were perhaps the most unusual addition. The Forward Landing Team had about three-dozen man-portable anti-tank weapons (refurbished LAW tubes), spotting and very high-caliber and express rifles, and landmines. Charter company guns and ammunition were also stowed in the main armory and it was agreed that these would be obediently brought to bear under the direction of Winzenried or Marine General Marcel Salan, if ever required, prior to the two-year mark when the Charterists would go their own way.

Safety-sensitive civilian equipment, including all blasting materials and sonic hammers, was housed in an annex to the main armory under relaxed security measures.

Marines were billeted and racked separately from the main crew, and their arms along with them. Marine weapons lockers were superior in every respect and included a few dozen Chevrolet-Monarch Powered Combat Suits with hypersonic rifles. The Combat Suits were all but impervious to anything short of a 12.7mm round.

The tens of thousands of armed stowaways and huge quantity of forgotten or smuggled cargo containers placed aboard during the decades of ship's construction meant that Unity's practical weapons load-out was much greater than the paper account. Every one of the tens of thousands of Spartan, allied Holnist, and Kellerite infiltrators was set into their hibernation canister with at least an automatic rifle and spare ammunition.

The Armory was always intended to be supplemented by custom fabrication. The Data Core contained a wealth of design information to supply the colonists with an abundant and polyglot arsenal if they so chose.

The high heat and low oxygen levels on Planet are conducive to natural carbonization. Spectrographic analysis correctly predicted that Chiron's crust had trapped large reserves of fossil fuels. The problem was one of access: the nitrate-based plant economy choked most surfaces with many feet of organic detritus that colonies needed to clear before they could access the soil.

Chiron's southern pole appealed to the U.N. Peacekeeping Forces for many reasons. The oceans on Chiron are warmer, sweeter, and much more active than those on Earth. In colder climates, the turmoil is less. In exchange for lower biodiversity in a cooler and drier environment, the Peacekeepers also faced a thinner mantle of nitrate spoilage and greatly reduced xenofungal activity. Mineral counts were also very good, while the snowpack, limited though it was, provided an easy source of water.

Ice Station Taurok supplied water to Warm Welcome and U.N. Relief Station from M.Y. 0 to M.Y. 57, when it was at last destroyed by an electrical storm and left to molder.

Base layout was simple: the central pump station was flanked by irrigated greenhouse domes. The base was mostly automated. An air defense emplacement, visible to the left, was built in M.Y. 15 to deter hostile landings. Because of its relative isolation and small, seasonal population, Taurok was considered at high risk of capture or destruction by Lal's chief adversaries at that time, the Nautilus Pirates and Dreamers of Chiron.

Picture is a base from the game Aven Colony.

Pravin Lal at United Nations HQ, New York City, date unknown

Service Record:
Born in Dacca, East Pakistan. Father a West Pakistan Army major, frequently deployed on peacekeeping operations. Mother a nurse with Médecins Sans Frontières. Studied philosophy and medicine at Aga Khan University, specializing in thoracic surgery. Volunteered at Red Crescent camp in Azad Kashmir for three years after graduation, tending primarily to victims of the Six Minute War. Later traveled extensively in North-West Frontier Province. Elected to National Assembly, serving a single term before losing heavily after criticizing Inter-Services Intelligence for its relationship with the Pakistani Taliban.

Obtained placement as a junior researcher with the World Health Organization in Basel, Switzerland exploring protein encoding for DNA repair. Signed letter of protest against Nobel Prize nomination of Dr. Tamineh Pahlavi on grounds of ethical deficiency. Leadership of protest movement elevated subject’s profile in U.N. circles. Rapidly ascended agency bureaucracy to become Chief of Staff to Thai General Secretary Apsara Mongkut. Controversial for his involvement in decision-making around U.N. peacekeeping actions in Nigeria’s Mid-Western Region (declaimed as making the U.N. “effectively an adjunct of the Federal Army” during the Second Nigerian Civil War) and again in Quebec, where U.N. forces were blamed for failure to prevent the Black Watch Killings. [1] Conspiracy theory linking U.N. inaction to the eventual success of the Front de libération du Québec prompted subject’s reassignment as Assistant Director of the WHO only weeks before Mongkut's assassination. Directly appointed Chief of Surgery, Unity Mission, by U.N. General Secretariat.

Psych Profile: Humanitarian
Preference for intellectualizing policy problems can lead to apparent contradictions in application of professed ideals. Notwithstanding subject’s leadership culpability for two decisive U.N. interventions that inspired accusations of rank partisanship, interlocutors report that subject was “maddeningly prone to seeing false equivalency” between parties to any dispute. One Canadian chargée d'affaires complained: “He always gave the FLQ an opportunity to explain why they’d committed their latest heinous crime.”

Very high esteem for democratic ideals and personal experience of life in a former British colony may explain subject’s especially negative reactions to the perceived hypocrisy of the Western powers, contrasted with tendency toward silence in regard to regimes with unbroken records of illiberal and anti-democratic behavior.

CAUTION: Subject scored abnormally low (.32) on Atherholt Trauma Function Test, indicating unsuitability for crisis leadership. Contrast with extremely positive remarks from Morgan Emergency Services instructors following simulated compartment breaches.

[1] The Black Watch Killings are a feature of a story about Quebec independence in Cold War Hot, edited by Peter G. Tsouras.

Soviet-manufactured Landing Pod on Sunny Mesa, observed by hunter-seeker drone shortly after Planetfall. In this image, it is possible to see the landing chutes still unrecovered. Some crew wear extravehicular mobility units because they have not yet adapted to Chiron's nitrogen-rich atmosphere and ambient gravity.

Descent from Unity was violent and deadly. Rare was the pod that touched down with the same number of survivors that had gone aboard.

A Landing Pod, also called a Unity Pod, was a short-range, single-use shuttle with which to make the controlled descent from an orbiting mothership to Chiron below. Hermetically sealed and abundantly heat-shielded, the largest could ferry up to one thousand passengers in dubious comfort and complete safety. Those pods not manually launched by departing colonists were dumped by Unity’s fail-safes before it passed out of Chiron’s gravity well.

The awkward control arrangements required two pilots, one to adjust the pod's attitude and another to relay visual observations as they cleared Unity en masse.

The Pods were designed to be incorporated wholesale into the first settlement. Each was nearly ten stories tall and most of a city block wide. Standard contents included an elevated command center with 360-degree view, a mobile surgery, seed bank, medical test center, agricultural grow-racks, galleys, dormitories, machine shops, theaters, broad-band communications, a Small Modular Reactor to provide power, recycling tanks, brig, abundant office space, and water filtration plant.

Pods were lavishly equipped with on-board tools, including cranes and winches, with which to raise supporting infrastructure. The cargo bay, once cleared of supplies, became expansion space for workshop operations and a motor pool for the numerous "parasite" vehicles packed inside: a fleet of tractors, tugs, high-loaders, cranes, and other small utility runners, including a self-powered pumper cart for firefighting, half-squadron of Unity crawlers (tracked low-loaders) and a complement of earth-moving machinery such as dumpers, graders, and power shovels.

The original manufacturers of the Landing Pods carried by Unity include: Grumman Aerospace, Morgan Avionics, Union Aerospace Corporation, Imre-Meinertzhagen, NP Lavochkin, Dassault Avionics, Hindustan Aeronautics Unlimited (HAL), Xi'an Aero-Engine Corporation, and Guizhou Aircraft Industry Corporation.

Picture credit to MacRebisz on DeviantArt. Picture title is "Ambition 1 Lander."

Image of U.N.S. Unity cargo arm, taken from Hab Pod C prior to Planetfall.

Unity Cargo Pods were designed and built exclusively by Fairchild-Grumman, which in an earlier, less civilized age had acquired the nickname, “Iron Works.” Each pod, which might come in one of twelve shapes and sizes, was equipped with retro-thrusters and parachutes to safeguard its contents during re-entry, deceleration, and landing, as well as for up to a full century thereafter, with full environmental shielding and multi-band homing beacon.

Human passengers, all in cold sleep, received direct-injection of drugs to counteract the risk of stroke during high-g maneuver, such as blood thinners, anti-coagulants, and muscle relaxants. If pods landed in water, they were provided with the means to float. So hardy was their ablative shielding, Grumman executives bragged to the U.N. Mission Design Team that landing inside an active volcano would pose problems only of retrieval!

Cross-checking the ship’s master log, Master Data Librarian Terrance LaCroix confirmed that upwards of fifty thousand such pods were released, each carrying vital people, supplies, and technology for humanity’s conquest of its new homeworld.

Pods carried every cargo imaginable, from slumbering colonists to high-calorie foodstuffs, industrial firefighting equipment, building materials, hazardous chemicals, and automated mining equipment.

Picture credit to the Amazon Prime series Expanse.

A Hive strike team fires a Gatling laser against defenders at Chiron Archives in October M.Y. 3. This still was captured by a security camera and uploaded to the Datalinks approximately one hour before University Security withdrew.

One attacker, at left, braces to aim a laser rifle (identifiable by the flash guard at the end of the barrel, which protects the shooter's vision from his own muzzle flash) while his kneeling counterpart sports the full-face helmet synonymous with Hive soldiery.

Defenders taken prisoner by the Hive were usually executed, and attackers invariably prioritized foodstuffs over virtually all other moveable property when looting, indicating that the faction struggled to feed its population in this time frame.

Lacking the professionalism of Spartan legionnaires or the motivation of Tribal Minutemen, Hive raiding parties concentrated on factions without strong martial traditions. Of the 112 attacks positively attributed to the Labyrinth by crowdsourced Datalinks analysis in M.Y. 3 and M.Y. 4, 84 targeted either the University of Planet or Gaia's Stepdaughters. Of the remaining 28, another 14 were carried out against vehicle convoys or scratch outposts as opposed to settlements or heavy fortifications.

Picture credit to Disney's Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Sketch of a mining engineer, c. M.Y. 10-M.Y. 20, somewhere in the vicinity of High Hide.

Large-scale mining operations had not yet commenced by the time the Unity Mission dissolved. Drawing on a deep reserve of talent, the Hunters of Chiron excavated the first subterranean works at Alhambra Pump Station no. 1 in June, MY10.

An armored carapace was necessary to guard the head, shoulders, arms, and chest against overhead rockfalls. (Unlike the human body, the various exposed hoses used by the miners on their persons or to connect to equipment were able to resume their original shape.)

This miner's helmet was crowned with sensor probes. Most monitored for indications of unfavorable atmospheric conditions that could result in flash fires, but at least one would have provided wireless connection to the Datalinks. Set in-series, the four optics feed information on the rock face to a central processing unit that prepares a digital overlay to help direct the miner's work in the optimum direction.

The pneumatic drill is presented for dramatic effect. In practice, it was operated by a crew of two.

Picture credit to Ariel Perez. Title is "Space Miner." Image found on Pinterest.

The Sanctuary Door at Far Jericho, M.Y. 402.

Too many mouths, too few able hands, and a lack of virtually every survival necessity encouraged more than piracy among the Lord's Conclave. In the earliest bases, real property was held in the public trust by the congregation as a whole, and traditions of communal living persisted among the Believers long after the faction achieved a modicum of self-sufficiency around M.Y. 200.

Over time, the Arahamic spirit of tithing allowed the Conclave to accumulate considerable wealth. After accounting for base operations, the remainder went toward the construction of spectacular religious architecture, monuments and houses of worship.

Sister Miriam Godwinson, the faction's founder, considered herself the matriarch of all mission survivors. In 2050, twenty-two years before Unity's departure from the Sol System, Godwinson had convened the Commission of Ecumenical Translators [1], which in addition to engaging with the Tanakh, The Holy Bible, and the Koran, processed thousands of apocryphal texts, producing the canon now contained in the Modern Vulgate Bible. Godwinson’s religious philosophy was notably syncretic. After the Vulgate, her second best-known achievement was undoubtedly the World Prayer, a recurring performance in which she led hundreds of millions of devotees worldwide in simultaneous prayer. Convinced that individuals could find their way to God through good works as well as through expressed faith, Godwinson focused her teaching on the importance of “searching for the Divine through righteous action” and downplayed the significance of exactly how differently members of her audience perceived and experienced that divine on an individual basis.

"The Conclave" was a society built in line with Godwinson's enthusiasm for faith over doctrine. "The church" was merely shorthand for a community that included faith traditions other than Christian. Nonbelievers and the casually faithful were officially welcomed in her settlements. The key to rank was service. The judges that formed Miriam's council, and, after her death, the faction's republican government, faced tests of civic accomplishment rather than of religious conviction or knowledge.

This is not to say that some did not find the Conclave backwards or even oppressive. Although Miriam forswore censorship, her intendants monitored the DataLinks and public vidcap networks tirelessly for signs of unwanted behavior, which she predictably challenged in broad strokes in her sermons. Private social feuding was also a significant problem within the faction. Miriam was constantly fighting rear-guard actions against so-called Old Believers, although their influence was inherently limited by the inherent religious and cultural heterogeneity of the survivors themselves.

[1] The Commission of Ecumenical Translators appears in Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Picture credit to Zemskiss on Polycount.

A Special Operations Team returns to White Rabbit's Refuge following a successful scout. On this occasion, they had recovered a Colony Pod containing parts for a large research instrument of obvious interest to the faction's scientists.

Yellow shoulder flashes indicate that the men in this image were part of the Directed Outcomes private security contingent retained personally by Roshann Cobb in his capacity as a factor of Struan's Pacific Trading Company. These seasoned mercenaries gave Cobb and his partner, Aleigha Cohen, a potent offensive capability. Raids by Directed Outcomes were so successful that the Hive scrupulously abstained from acts of violence against Dreamers or their property.

Note the navy flak vests worn by the troopers in this vidcap. Protective clothing was a highly sought-after commodity on Chiron. As it happened, the New State and the Spartans accounted for most of the militarily useful gear carried in Unity's armory before Planetfall. Struan's had the foresight to bring their own.

Picture credit to Disney's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

A Gaian technician monitors climate controls at Gaia's Landing in this painting made nearly seven decades after Planetfall.

The closely-controlled biomes of the Gaian arcologies were gradually divested of Terran vegetation, to be replaced with Chiron varietals, as the matriarchy took an increasingly reactionary posture toward the Shapers, embracing harmony and rejecting purity.

Gaians spent nearly all their recreational time enjoying the lush and fragrant spaces they had crafted. Automated pleasure boats were available to carry scientists past their robot-tended handiwork, but many preferred to work in the gardens themselves.

Gaian Base Operations cited popular access to tranquil natural spaces as the determinant factor when explaining the very low incidence of physical violence within faction settlements overall.

A Restoration Forces prime mover recovers the wreckage of Unity's primary fusion reactor while a Needlejet patrol loiters overhead on Combat Air Patrol.

Irradiated material was stored in dry casks with the intention of exploiting it as a high-yield energy source.

Both the prime movers and the casks had enormous value to the early colonies. Most prime movers were needed to carry 'Former modules, and energy shortages persisted in most settlements for years after Planetfall. Because prime movers were very rare, they were necessarily paired with powerful escorts to discourage depredation.

All vehicles on Chiron were subject to endless modification and repurposing. For the reactor recovery mission, this prime mover, AC-1, was fitted with vacuum sifters to retrieve radioactive debris from the desert floor. A large sensor dome was also installed above the forward command housing. The casks were hauled aboard using an onboard crane not visible from this angle.

Combat Hydrofoil 6, Revenger, sorties on the Purelake. The starboard CIWS emplacement is returning fire against an unknown target.

As on Earth, surface-to-surface missiles were the favored weapon in naval warfare on Chiron because they offered over-the-horizon strike capability that prevented ships having to brave shore defenses. Nonetheless, rapid-fire cannon were an important secondary weapon for both offensive and defensive purposes.

Following Soviet practice, the dual mountings in each of the hydrofoil's turrets were to provide greater hit probability, not firepower, since guns and their ammunition were less bulky and more easily-serviced than improved sensor suites.

Tribal fortunes were greatly enhanced after that faction's recovery in M.Y. 2 of a Supply Pod containing the two gunboats seen here. The Tribe's primary adversary of the day, the Spartan Federation, operated only gun-armed boats, all converted from Unity barges or foils, and was defeated on multiple occasions before launching a craft of equivalent capability at Sparta Command in October, M.Y. 4.

Revenger destroyed three Spartan Unity hydrofoils from ambush in one afternoon at the First Battle of the Slowwind River. The Spartans compensated by sighting tube artillery to cover river narrows, with which they later sank Revenger's consort, Remembrance.

This image apprears to have been created by Patrick Faulwetter on ArtStation for the movie GI JOE.

The Purelake is a reference to the Stormlight Archives series by Brandon Sanderson.

A pair of Chiron-built Restoration 'Formers. The vehicle on the left bears a laser cutting arm suitable for liquefying rock or obliterating xenofungal tubers. The 'Former on the left is an amphibian with a bucket scoop used when building sea walls.

For three generations after Planetfall, "high" technology was whatever the colonists had taken or recovered from the wreck of the Unity. Machine tools and construction equipment were prized by all factions. Hundreds fell in bitter battles fought over the contents of the few dozen automated mining stations set up by the mission's pre-deployed Forwarded Contact Teams. Thousands were killed attempting to seize other factions' 'Formers.

The New Two Thousand built the first on-world 'Former from scratch in M.Y. 27, while the Nautilus Pirates floated became the last faction to ring the bell in M.Y. 60. Each design was particular to the unique environments in which they operated. The Hunters favored a cab-over design with bulbous rock-crawler tyres, each on an independent suspension to cope with the uneven terrain of the Monsoon Jungle, and the earth-moving equipment rear-mounted. All Hive 'Formers had a multi-function drilling rig, reflecting the fact that most spent their entire service lives underground. The Tribe usually fitted its versions with improvised vehicle armor, "cope cages," fighting cupolas, and active protection systems. University 'Formers, with their distinctive tall conning towers, could be remotely operated and were attended by swarms of onboard drones that assisted with both environmental analysis and light self-defense.

Picture found on the Tiberium Essence Wiki.

The survivors of the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri pursued two types of research in their efforts to improve themselves and the new world that became their home.

The first type of research was practical, yielding insights about the natural world and, when those insights were properly applied, new materials with which to shape it. In short, practical research made it easier to craft new things. The second type of research was doctrinal, consisting of revolutions in thought. The purpose of doctrinal research was to support new modes of human organization and behavior for the achievement of discrete social or military objectives. Doctrinal research enabled survivors to execute specific tasks more effectively, with or without physical tools.

Each faction implicitly dedicated itself to certain doctrines that spoke to the contingent needs and grand ideological visions of its leaders.

Some factions, including the Spartan Confederation, the Dreamers of Chiron, the Human Labyrinth, and the Lord's Conclave, embraced a philosophy of active aggression. They launched repeated and unprovoked attacks on whatever targets of opportunity presented themselves. Their common motivation was plunder, but for the former in particular, offensive warfare was also an expression of the fundamental political incoherence, and therefore disunity, at the core of the hyper-survivalist movement, inherited from Earth and faithfully reproduced on Chiron. Holnists embraced the performance of violence for purposes of both cruel self-actualization and political legitimization. Fighting could, quite simply, be fun, and physical intimidation was widely accepted within the hyper-survivalist movement as a legitimate tool of governance. For these factions, offensive warfare was also the easiest way to apply their comparative advantages in the competition for scarce resources.

Santiago had built her movement from soldiers (many of them play-acting the role), not would-be colonists. Her followers had expected to die aboard Unity. As a result, the Spartans in and of themselves were not a viable colony. They took captives to perform the technical work of settlement. The Dreamers were in a similarly disadvantageous position and compensated with the help of Sabre Company mercenaries in the pay of Roshann Cobb. The Hive raided out of a combination of hunger and fear of political subversion by outsiders. Yang knew that his utopian project was no match in appeal for even the mild stimulus of gilded oligarchy, let alone a headier drug known as participatory democracy. The Conclave turned to raiding reluctantly during a period of starvation and sickness but quickly perfected the art.

An Ascendancy fire team observes the opening bombardment against Morgan Metals at the onset of the War for Planetneck.

Taller, stronger, faster, and hardier than the average colonist, Ascendancy Augments quickly gained a reputation as the most fearsome fighting force on Chiron during this time period. Director Tamineh Pahlavi lavished her faction's resources on its legions, equipping them with the latest in power-assisted exo-frames and sixth-generation weaponry.

The stick seen here is illustrative, carrying Gatling laser (leftmost trooper), pulse rifle (topmost trooper), Gauss rifle (rightmost trooper), and close-quarters weapon (trooper in foreground).

Battle-hardened SafeHaven Corporation mercenaries led a polyglot Morgan Metals defense also consisting of operators from the private security firm Barricade (another aspect of the considerable retinue Morgan stowed away with aboard Unity), the Monopoly's official Corporate Security paramilitaries, and various Merchant's Guild forces with no more than a few skirmishes and some strike-breaking under their belts. They proved to be of widely divergent quality, and the battle turned into a fast rout.

SafeHaven fought practically to the last in defense from the settlement's blockhouse, inflicting the Ascendancy's worst losses, but the Barricade Group fighters, positioned to defend the main gate, were quickly slaughtered by a Steel Rain assault, which they failed to slow despite an impressive service record and the kind of heavy weaponry that could have turned the tide. Corporate Security followed SafeHaven's valorous example, but without success: unlike the CEO's original hired help, their TO&E included nothing with which to crack OR-12 Hardshell. The remaining auxiliaries attempted surrender only to be slaughtered.

Morgan Metals wrote off the cost of the lost base, along with all its defenders, in the next season's filing, and enjoyed two years without dividends owed to the Monopoly's Shareholders.

A Tribal Minuteman poses for a holo-capture.

He is equipped for an arid battlefield, probably Sunny Mesa or the Dune Sea. The thicket of probes extending from the "snout" of the respirator was used to filter dust particles and prevent moisture loss on exhalation.

This militia fighter is archetypal of the irregular soldiers that comprised the majority of each faction's defensive muster.

The conical helmet benefits from light-refractive coating and a leather splinter-guard to enhance protection against laser fire and shrapel, respectively. The jacket is homespun--sewn from the hide of a local reptile.

The AKM rifle was a commonplace in Unity's armory. Ballistic ("impact") weapons remained the most-used firearms on Planet for more than three centuries due to their easy manufacture and repair.

Self-healing materials have the ability to recover their original physical characteristics, including shape, tensile strength, permeability, and molecular bonds, to achieve restoration of function, totally or partially. The speed of this restoration varies from slow to fast.

Unity stores included various self-healing products imbued with microscopic packets of chemical adhesive released when the material was broken. The colonists' hostile-environment suits and survival shelters both incorporated self-healing properties to reduce the failure rate from punctures and tearing. A second generation of self-healing materials copied the design principles of the human vascular system. Instead of single-used packets of adhesive, objects were interwoven with networks of the same that relied on pressure to regulate output and were considerably more effective across larger surface areas.

The warlike Human Ascendancy experimented successfully with "reversible polymers," plastics that absorbed sunlight and body heat to initiate electrostatic attraction at the molecular level. The University preferred nano-scale robots for making biological and physical repairs. In M.Y. 439, the Chiron Rangers were issued organic combat vests engineered from xenofungus that were genuine biological systems in themselves.

Source: ExplainThatStuff! Space suit picture from the 2007 film Sunshine.

Raoul André St. Germain was born in Sidon, Lebanon to a leading Maronite political dynasty. By family convention, he became a sailor, graduating from the École Navale.

Commanded riverine flotilla attached to United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO). Mentioned in dispatches, with multiple decorations for heroism.

Worked closely with French- and Rwandan-aligned warlords in eastern Congo. On three occasions, ordered sailors ashore without prior approval to protect local collaborators and their families.

Wounded in action against Congolese Army and invalided to French Guyana. Used opportunity to join multiple overland expeditions to Amazonia. Later, leveraged favorable political climate to be returned to MONUSCO as head of lake detachment at Goma.

Court martialed, 2052, following allegations that his command massacred prisoners at Kisangani in retaliation for destruction of gunboat Légère. Acquitted on all counts but formally reprimanded for suppression of evidence to shield subordinates.

Reassigned to Submarine Forces, French Antarctic Patrol, 2053. Led several successful missions to rescue distressed submarines worldwide.

St. Germaine believed strongly that fear was a driving force in human history--hence the formation of in-groups and out-groups that expand and contract as the environment becomes more or less permissive. The most significant effect, he postulated, was that populations demonstrated a higher tolerance for security--authority, structure, and conservatism--over democracy, choice, and openness to new ideas and experiences. When western democracy refused to countenance even minimal concessions to these anxieties, St. Germaine taught his sailors, the liberal world order was overthrown from within and anti-social movements such as Holnism thrived, much to everyone's detriment. St. Germaine, like Sheng-ji Yang, aspired to the ideal of the enlightened despot. The solution to social disorder, he believed, was the neo-feudalism of which he was himself a beneficiary in his native Lebanon: a system of intensely personal obligation between subject and sovereign, the chief object of which was the physical safety of the subject and the political advantage of the ruler.

Unity's Executive Officer was Portuguese General Francisco d'Almeida.

D’Almeida was Portugal’s man in all things. India-born parents brought him to Portuguese West Africa in 2022. Grinding poverty hardly dulled his genius, and at seventeen, he won access to the Academia Militar at Bemposta Palace in Lisbon. There, he continued to excel in the classroom and, with the encouragement of political benefactors, took his first forays into politics, a preoccupation that remained with him throughout his life.

Enthusiasm for the regime philosophy of Pluricontinentalism, or imperial union, led d’Almeida to decline appointment to the imperial general staff in favor of the Grupo de Cavalaria Nº2. Placement in the mounted service was synonymous with long tours in Africa but served to make d’Almeida’s bona fides with the Salazarist junta. Over a career of more than a quarter-century, d’Almeida oversaw the eradication of the armed wings first of the Angolan, then the Mozambican independence fronts, bottling up insurgents in the interior wastes of both territories until they dissolved for lack of access to the populace. Borrowing from the experience of Rhodesia, d’Almeida reorganized his West African garrison for air-mobile work, preferring the easy credit and cheap Puma helicopters of ultra-reactionary France over the armored cars and stinging criticism of successive American administrations. The fresh strategy was well-received in Lisbon, not least because it was dramatically less expensive than what had gone before. By age forty-two, d’Alemida wore the sash of a general.

Superficially, d’Alemida’s biography parallels those of other wartime leaders aboard Unity. Both Raoul André St. Germain and Jeremy Tanner Marsh also served in Europe’s colonial wars (the former accumulating black marks in equal or greater number), and political favoritism remains the most widely-accepted explanation for the inclusion of all three men on the crew command roster. Portugal’s national obsession with d’Almeida was not altogether different than Canada’s with Raoul Salan. Yet here, the parallels end.

St. Germain, Marsh, and Salan were aristocrats all, and the former pair were warriors first, officers second. Salan’s star actually rose in counter-poise to his battlefield accomplishment: he was the Francophone who refused the siren call of French-Quebecois subversion and yielded up his two sons on the altar of True North, Strong and Free. D’Almeida derived his popularity neither from a demonstrated willingness to share his troops’ privation, nor Lost Cause mythologizing. Rather, he could claim unbroken success in bringing adversaries to the peace table with a minimum of sacrifice from those under his command. If he had the reputation of a “brass hat” who rarely left his air-conditioned office in Luanda, it was a footnote hardly worth remarking upon: the men appreciated his skillfulness and forgave him his weakness for tawny port.

D’Alemida was the asking price for U.N. access to Portugual’s space elevator at Rio de Janiero. For the Lisbon government, placing one of their own—particularly an individual as odious in the eyes of their NATO allies—so near the top of the expedition’s hierarchy satisfied an appetite for prestige. By implication, Portugal’s racial and counter-insurgency policies were therefore acceptable to Western sensibilities.

Temperamentally, d’Almeida was unsuited for an environment in which compromise, not coercion, was intended to shape decision-making. Judging the General to be volatile and of overweening ambition, the mission’s Psych Evaluation Board took the unusual step of filing special protest with the United Nations Security Council, to no avail.

As in the British Royal Navy, the emergency action station for Unity’s Executive Officer was the ship’s central Damage Control Center. This isolated the general from the discord taking root between other senior staff. Only Zakharov was likewise at a remove from the Command Center for the full duration of the crisis. Activating Damage Control just 39 minutes after impact with the micro-object above Chiron, d’Almeida was first to have a coherent picture of the unfolding disaster.

Unity’s logs, later recovered by the Peacekeepers and uploaded to the Planetary Datalinks unencrypted, memorialize d’Almeida’s immediate actions and findings. At 01:58 hours on 1 November 2116, he initiated automated recovery from hibernation of 300 damage control technicians and 150 damage evaluators. At 05:02 hours, he dictated a report to Garland summarizing what was known: more than 40% of the ship’s automated fire suppression systems had lost pressure and dozens of airtight bulkheads were confirmed locked in the open position, hampering repairs. He blamed widespread faults in the ship’s electrics for the loss of emergency lighting in most compartments aft and amidships. Life Support readings indicated that global supply of breathable atmosphere was down to 82 hours. Worse, navigational data suggested that, without immediate intervention, Unity would overshoot Chiron and pass through the Alpha Centauri star system—an almost mathematical certainty if the primary fusion reactor remained offline.

According to survivors present with him at the time, access to so much information contributed to d’Almeida’s strong belief that Unity’s destruction could not be prevented. Like Garland, he was caught off-guard by the patent insubordination of the ship's Chief Science Officer, whom he observed on camera violating orders to awaken emergency responders in preference to engineers and failing to execute evacuation protocols from irradiated compartments.

Beyond the damage inflicted by the meteorite strike, d'Almeida became aware of hundreds of armed assailants actively intervening to prevent repairs. Damage Control Center personnel were astonished by the number, recklessness, and reach of the attackers, who seemed to be swarming at all points, as well as by the fact that most clearly wore U.N. Security Forces togs, indicating that a crucial segment of the crew complement had been suborned. The General remotely initiated recovery of Marcel Salan and his Marines, but their contributions were focused forward, on the personal defense of the Captain. The situation went from dire to untenable when the initial group of shooters found themselves in running firefights with a new set of organized attackers whom d'Almeida could not raise by radio. He was watching Kellerites begin to escape one of Unity's many vestigial cargo bays. Over the next few hours, many Charterists, including stowed-away Morganites, followed their example.

At 20:08 hours, d'Almeida acted on his own initiative to begin pulling awake 400 further crew members, ordering them to take arms and secure engineering spaces. The chosen personnel were those whom d’Almeida knew personally—an admixture of Portuguese, British, and French military officers, mostly. Deidre Skye encountered dozens of these unexpected newcomers as she led her scientists to the Hydroponics Bays. She failed to convince them to surrender their weapons and join her errand.

This redirection of resources was gross insubordination, for it limited d’Almeida’s availability to Garland at a crucial moment. His hagiographers say that d'Almeida emulated Zakharov only to stop him. The Bridge learned of the act almost at once: Chief of Security Rachael Winzenried observed and reported d’Almeida’s override of armory lock-outs. Fifteen minutes later, d’Almeida ordered his officers to begin jettisoning Cargo Pods for automated descent, hoping to deny their contents to the Spartans.

Located amidships, d’Almeida and his support staff were in imminent danger from the stowaways. At one point, Kellerites masquerading as damage control parties looted the general armory after being granted access by d'Almeida's picked guards. More than three-quarters of d'Almeida's original armed defenders were shot dead, some by Kellerites, most by Spartans. Citing the extent of damage and inadequacy of compensatory measures, d’Almeida recommended to Captain Garland that the order be given to abandon ship. The message never went through.

After learning of Garland's assassination, d'Almeida conferenced with his staff. Consensus was that the situation was hopeless. D'Almeida, acting as Garland's successor, thus gave the order for each of the surviving senior commanders to gather those crew still ambulatory and abandon ship. In his last official act as a U.N. representative, he declared the Mission Charter dissolved.

General d'Almeida is presumed not to have survived the destruction of his last command.

Retained by the United Nations from the New York Police Department Counter-Terrorism Bureau, Terrance LaCroix spent much of his career running hyper-survivalists to ground.

Awakened on the order of Captain Garland, he managed to isolate Corazón Santiago's transmissions to within a 20-square meter section of Unity, allowing Salan's Marines to pressure her fighters long enough to safely evacuate Unity's amidships muster stations.

LaCroix escaped Unity with a sergeant's guard of U.N. Marines who rallied to the summons of Pravin Lal's Peacekeeping Forces. LaCroix was persuaded to place himself and his charges under Lal's authority when he observed the Peacekeepers choose to fight the Spartans in defense of Deirdre's Skye's botanists.

LaCroix's Signals Intelligence section was first on Planet to begin to articulate the scientific principles behind Dreaming.

Most of the land surface of Chiron is thick with a dense carpet of tall, green vegetation built up over the nitrate spoilage undisturbed since its geological birth. Shallower seas are likewise clogged, discouraging wave effects and permitting the practical extension of the land-based ecosystem over huge spaces from which it would ordinarily be excluded. The floating structures produced in this way resemble lily-pads and range in structural integrity from perfectly solid to dangerously spongy. The water-table, too, is nitrate-infused. Drinking water not blasted by ozone is deadly.

Chiron’s plant life is similar to that of prehistoric Earth: spore-bearers and seed-bearers are commonplace, with very few flowering plants. Pollen counts are staggering. The "Planetgrowth," as it has been called, shows markedly poor tolerance for cooler, dryer weather.

Fungus, like bamboo, grows in cylindrical shoots or tubers that can rise more than eight stories high. Fungal growth is aggressive but unpredictable, using multiple vectors depending upon the season. During planetary hot cycles, root systems spawn creeping tendrils that climb toward the sun, gradually mineralizing until they are still. When the temperature drops for extended periods, the fungus blooms. Sporangial sacs expand to the point of explosion, when pent-up pressure launches mucus-laden spores up to 200 meters.

Fungal tubers, the outer walls of which can grow up to two feet in thickness, are approximately as hard as chalk. Inside a fungal tube are dense bundles of pulpy plant matter that produce a sweet milk. Stripping or sapping the interior plant matter causes the surviving over-structure to decay, much like a root canal will destroy a tooth. The biologists of the Pathfinder Probe, which preceded Unity by slightly more than a century, hypothesized that cables of this pulp formed the “tendrils” observed during growth of a fresh bloom.

Fungus contains both organic and inorganic material with excellent nutrient, energy, and mineral value, although the culling and processing of fungus for any human purpose required an understanding of Centauri chemistry and ecology that eluded the Unity survivors for several generations.

Some, but not all, of the Pathfinder colonists attested to hearing unexplained noise during a bloom, which they describe as a “hum,” song, or “keening cry,” not unlike tinnitus. The instrumentation of the Pathfinder Probe had been unable to detect this noise. According to records accumulated by the United Nations, but never shared with Unity's command staff, the Probe's colonial administrator, one Joralomon Hardacre, claimed to have developed data linking these auditory episodes directly to injuries and deaths. Hardacre disagreed with his own medical staff, who believed strongly that the afflicted colonists were suffering auditory hallucinations brought on by stress.

The Unity's Forward Contact Teams experienced the same distress as the Pathfinder colonists, combined with aggressive and worsening visual and tactile hallucinations, and first credited their experiences to the spores. Filtering technology had a mild salutary effect, but distance was the best known cure, and when the road crews could not steer clear, they turned to fire.

Unity scientists generally accepted that the fungus was semi-sentient. Both Gaian and Ascendancy researchers used the paradigm of the human immune system as a near-perfect overlay for xenofungal behavior. The most thorough early examinations of xenofungus were performed first by the Gaians, then the Dreamers, who fast discerned clear links between fungal growth and human brain activity.

Sources: The image, titled "Fungal Bloom on Alpha Centauri," is the work of caerwynentllc, and was found on DeviantArt. The language for this entry was drawn and reworked from Chris McCubbin, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, game manual (Tustin, CA: Loki Software, Inc., 1999-2000), 210-227. Information and inspiration on fungal spores comes from the UMASS Center for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment and their fact sheet on Spore Shooting Fungi.

Name: Wasoné Erkins
Rank: Captain, Canadian Forces (AWOL)
Position: First Sergeant, U.N. Security Forces, U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri
Country of Origin: Canada
DOB: 2-8-2030

Service Record:
Born 2030 in Little Burgundy neighborhood of Montreal as separatism surged in Francophone Canada. Father, a Canada Post mail carrier, invalided by FLQ bombing. Joined Canadian Forces upon graduating secondary school. Posted to Royal Canadian Regiment. Deployed in Montreal under War Measures Act. Disciplined for signing open letter protesting U.N. peacekeeping deployment to Quebec. Participated in arrests of terror suspects following Black Watch Killings. Discovered personal effects later used successfully to unmask perpetrators as Soviet spies. Veteran of the stand at Montréal–Trudeau Airport, where separatists, heavily equipped by WARPAC and French Union allies, threw themselves against outnumbered Canadian and American regulars for more than 36 hours. The defenders held, but the city itself was lost and the Appleton Government suspended combat operations to enter negotiations. Joined failed Price Mutiny, October 2055, when Canadian PM signed accords recognizing Quebec independence.

Entered wartime United States c. January 2056. Traveled to Lake Tahoe Basin after reading Corazón Santiago's "Spartan Thesis" and learning about her role in the defense of low-income Miami neighborhoods two years prior. Entrusted with training Spartan militia volunteers, including paroled Holnists. Went to ground after the calamitous fall of Reno to federal auxiliaries.

Assigned to U.N. Security Forces, U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri, using false credentials provided by Spartan sympathizers within the U.N. Department of Operational Support. Promoted to rank of First Sergeant upon completion of mission training. Placed into cold sleep in May 2071.

Recovered from cold sleep by Spartan saboteurs during Unity Crisis. Led one of three Spartan squads assigned to secure the ship's hydroponics facilities. Encountered unexpectedly heavy resistance from crew under command of Lieutenant Commander Deirdre Skye and Chief Medical Officer Pravin Lal. Captured by U.N. Marines after Holnists within her party disobeyed orders during the firefight and declined to provide covering fire.

Held prisoner by U.N. Peacekeeping Forces after Planetfall. Agreed to hold Spartans neutral during period of internal strife within the Peacekeeping Forces at Warm Welcome. Paroled by direct order of Commissioner Pravin Lal. Subsequently defected to U.N. Peacekeeping Forces. Assigned to lead settlement garrison during Battle of U.N. Relief Station.

Psych Profile: Idealist
Highly sensitive to perceived "betrayal" of Montreal citizens, both Anglo- and Francophone, by Canadian Government.

Expects personal loyalty to be rewarded by superiors with courageous leadership and consistent application of stated ideals.

Record of dissenting behaviors indicates subject will not consistently obey command decisions with which she disagrees. Subject claims not to have been aware of "the depth of Holnist depravity and the emptiness of their political rhetoric," paying little attention to the politics of American unraveling during Canada's civil war, and describing their behavior and demeanor in Tahoe as "typical of what we had come to expect from Americans." When reminded that Canada suffered its own rash of Holnist violence, subject replied that she had believed the Holnist badge was "just an off-hand, over-used-and-abused label used for movements people didn't really understand." During questioning, Commissioner Lal did not detect duplicity.

Draws unfavorable contrasts between Canadian Forces' response to Quebec separatism and Santiago's Florida State Guard, a volunteer militia that occupied seawalls and municipal sluice gates during Hurricane Ivore to prevent Federal destruction of Miami's storm barriers in bid to relieve flood pressure on wealthy neighborhoods.

Appears not to take specific umbrage with the U.N., blaming Canada for failing to prevent the intrusion on its sovereignty.

What is a Charter colonist?

Under the Unity Mission Charter, colonists under contract with private mission sponsors, while accountable to that sponsor and its duly appointed representatives among the crew, were to be treated identically to “mainline" U.N. colonists for the first five years after Planetfall. After that time, the healthy colony would ostensibly release its contracted members to make their own way.

Designated corporate officers would assume responsibility for the people and property belonging to their employers. Something more than a fifth of the colonists would then serve out periods of what amounted to indentured servitude, both fixed and variable.

This paradigm provoked long and impassioned debate among both U.N. leadership and mission leadership. Though the only alternative to accepting private mission sponsorship by the mid-twenty-second century was laying Unity up in ordinary, there were numerous and obvious conflicts of interest inherent in such a marriage of convenience, not the least of which was the fundamental incompatibility of U.N. and entrepreneurial philosophies.

The precise nature of the five-year commitment was as great a concern to the corporate set as to the U.N. How could the mission’s new financiers be assured that mission command wouldn’t manage the early colony so as to exhaust all valuable supplies and heavy equipment ahead of the corporate partition? Why should they believe that Captain Garland, with all the coercive power of the U.N. Security Force and Marines at his disposal, would not declare force majeure to keep the first colony whole? Would the U.N. not experience moral crisis when enforcing obligations of service on people who believed the Unity Mission was their only certain escape from global cataclysm? Popular and press opinion had it that the colonial contracts let by sponsors were exceptionally unfavorable to the point that most signatories would likely perish before satisfying their obligations. Even as they denied all such charges, sponsors braced for the certainty that "their" labor force would plead urgently for U.N. intervention when the time came to pay out their obligations.

Corporate influence either crucially altered or badly mutilated mission design, depending on one’s point of view. With each body of Charterists came a healthy contingent of security men—Struan’s Strategic Services, Morgan SafeHaven, Pinkwater Security, Iron Key, Directed Outcomes, and the Twin Cedars Trust. On paper, they undertook to "deliver training and operational capabilities" that most corporate recruits lacked by virtue of having received only a very abbreviated course of preparation before launch. In practice, everyone from Jonathan Garland and Francisco d’Almeida to Ian Dunross Struan and Nwabudike Morgan understood exactly what the mercenaries were sent along to do.

Larger numbers of armed guards did nothing for already-sour relations among the crew. Four outlooks predominated.

The so-called “mainline” colonists were recruited through national committees or special invitation from the U.N. Security Council. They were always individuals, usually young and without deep attachments to the family or nation from which they came. The experience of mission training consumed a significant fraction of their whole lives to that point. Perhaps inevitably, they came to see themselves as the deserving best that a dying species could bequeath to the future and never expected to see their homeworld again. On Chiron, they stood to enjoy the best government they could bring about through their own dialectic. The crew dismissed colonists as a faceless mass of ready followers, while Charterists asked why the United Nations thought the billets of playwrights would not better be occupied by more carpenters.

The Unity "crew" was itself a mix of True Believers, typified by Captain Jonathan Garland, and careerists, typified by Francisco d’Almeida, Raoul St. Germaine, and Marcel Salan. Many were in the middle or at the end of life. The term "crew," although popular, was largely misleading, for it encompassed mission command staff as well as a very small list of personnel with narrow shipboard emergency operations roles. Nonetheless, a distinct self-identity developed, and along with it, a certain mode of thinking. Colonists of all types were there to be led. The crew's inclusion on the manifest reflected previously proven capability, whereas others aboard could point merely to a hopeful expectation of future performance. Unlike the U.N. colonists, "crew" had a past that had shaped, and possibly dogged, them. The loyalties and impurities of a lifetime could not be burned away through a few years of study and exercise.

True Believers looked toward the founding of a colony untroubled by national allegiance and prepared to forgive itself for the sins of the past. “Good” was anyone or anything likely to help the settlement prosper and cohere. They took for granted that they would be alone after mission launch and usually dismissed the idea that the colony would find it prudent or necessary to honor pre-launch obligations such as corporate charters after five years on the hard edge. The caricature of a True Believer was of an overweening egotist blinkered by naïve faith in the essential goodness of the human spirit, convinced that their personal moral authority alone would suffice to solve problems that had not yielded to centuries of predecessors.

Appointment of an unenthusiastic individual to the Unity Mission, whether by the United Nations or a national military, produced a Careerist. Either the assignment was a disappointing end to a professional journey that had once aimed much higher, or a death sentence foist upon the luckless recipient by well-meaning but incompetent superiors. Some still clung to promises from national command structures that Earth would overcome its present difficulties and thereafter labor to bring them home, but most partook in a gallows humor that acknowledged their essential dispensability. The worst were officers who adopted a policy of trying to “save” the mission from itself by means of hectoring memos and endless war stories. In his diary, Garland fretted about how many on his command staff were “little Wilkinsons,” mouthing their allegiance to Geneva but still taking their instructions, or even pay, from other sources. (Sponsoring corporations knew to grease the hands that would one day direct the guns that might be turned against them when it came time to part ways with Garland.) Humorists put it that the quintessential Careerist was an unhelpful killjoy, prone to “splittism." Someone whose definition of “cooperation” might go only to the extent of malicious compliance.

Charterists were supernumeraries grudgingly appended to the Unity mission as the price of its completion. They were, on average, considerably older than the other colonists, and had more to lose in leaving Earth. Charterists were either hired directly by the mission’s corporate sponsors or received their passage because of personal affiliation with someone so hired. Charterists might be fully “vested,” meaning that they had satisfied the cost of passage up front and would become salaried members of a future private settlement, or they were “under contract,” in which case they owed a certain number of years of labor. By reputation with U.N. colonists and crew, Charterists saw the expedition as through a jewler’s loupe. Chiron was the motherlode, and each of them a latter-day Forty-Niner. Any activity that did not advance the cause of economic development was to be despised as indolence. To the mission factors and mercenaries, their future workforce consisted of morally dissolute strikers, shirkers, and layabouts who would certainly spend the first five years after Planetfall doing all they could to bring about total abrogation of the contracts they'd entered into with both eyes open.

Stowaways, including but not limited to Spartans, Holnists, Kellerites, and Morganites, were any of more than ten thousand people who were taken aboard Unity at some point during its construction, sometimes against their own will. Spartans and Holnists were followers of "Survivalism," a creed that preached armed self-reliance. Spartans generally regarded the practice of these tenets as a mental and physical discipline--a deeply personal lifestyle choice, albeit one that set them morally apart from those who were unable or unwilling to make the same sacrifices. Holnists regarded the credo as a license for predation. The two factions, once united in their opposition to the Unity Mission, fell out during their attack on the ship and its crew. Kellerites were followers of failed farmer-turned-lay preacher and radio personality Jean Baptiste-Keller, an anti-disassociationalist derided by most contemporaries as a cult leader. Morganites were, quite simply, hirelings of Nwabudike Morgan. In each case, the idea was not to be left behind on Earth to suffer what all agreed would be an unpleasant but rapidly-impending disaster of planetary proportions.

Name: Sardul Singh
Rank: Commander
Position: Superintendent of Prisoners
Country of Origin: India
DOB: 3-31-2037

Service Record:
Jodhpur, India. Son of provincial inspector general of prisons. Studied engineering and public administration at Indian Institutes of Technology. Master's degree in criminology from Southwest University of Political Science and Law.

Youngest MP in Lok Sabha for the Technocratic Party of India (TPI). Lost seat during nationalist revival following riots over tainted vaccine in 2058.

Joined Indian Prison Service at age 23. Awarded special commendation for the successful use of convict work gangs to perform work in high-radiation zones as part of national recovery from Six Minute War.

Appointed Minister of Law and Justice in national unity government, 2064. Notable for consulting in the design of numerous maximum security detention facilities in India, Russia, and China. Accused by opposition parties of corruption for negotiating favorable deal with Struan's Pharmaceuticals in connection with national adoption of neural re-socialization regime for all offenders.

During Unity Crisis, subject dispatched with U.N. Security Forces constables to organize convicts for evacuation. Forced out of detention bay by unknown attackers (later identified as Sabre Company troopers led by Aleigha Cohen), Singh gathered those survivors he could, activated approximately three dozen robot warders, and made for the Landing Pods.

Singh landed with roughly two-fifths of the ship's convict workforce in hand, very few of whom had been re-socialized. While this meant they were capable of full cognitive function, it placed significant demands on the badly-outnumbered constables.

Singh's solution was to construct his base in the manner of a panopticon while enforcing a brutal discipline. Without the means to inflict the nerve staple, and recognizing that savagery would not produce a cohesive, or productive, community, Singh searched for alternative methods of behavioral correction, including prisoners' councils, personal gardens, and the intentional use of color, open space, scents, and music in public and private spaces.

Psych Profile: Planner
Strong belief in the power of planned communities to complement social and criminal rehabilitation and promote physical and mental well-being.

Near-pathological commitment to order and economization.

Leans heavily on operant conditioning as a method of governance.

The U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri trained colonists and crew in low- and zero-gravity environments, some in space stations, but others on the lunar surface.

The first long-duration mission to the Moon was undertaken by the European Space Agency in 1999. South African, American, Soviet, and Chinese missions followed, each of increasing complexity. In 2028, the first permanently-staffed science station on the Moon was a collaboration between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Apple Electronics, and Sperry Rand.

The U.N. training base later became the core for colonial ventures on the Moon, which took off in the final years before Mission Launch. Much of the population was engaged in logistics work in support of the Unity and its passengers.

Control of the lunar surface and orbit was a sticking point for many of the nations of Earth. They relinquished their claims to the United Nations only because of the degree of internal strife brought on by internal conflicts. The multi-national inspectorate designed to conflict the Moon's disarmament succeeded in its broader mission of preventing any nation from taking advantage, but failed to protect mission assets from terror attacks. By 2060, the extent of the threat could no longer be denied and the Security Council voted for a garrison of several thousand U.N. Marines.

Name: Johann Anhaldt
Rank: Mission Area Director
Position: Atomic Energy Laboratory
County of Origin: Switzerland
DOB: 1-12-2000
Height: 203.7cm
Weight: 104kg

Service Record:
Native of Bern. Ph.D. in nuclear physics, MIT. Two-time Nobel laureate for advances in cold fusion theory. Frequent foil to Soviet researcher Prokhor Zakharov.

Twelve years at CEA/Cesta simulating nuclear fission with the Megajoule laser. Twenty years at CERN focusing on particle acceleration and low-temperature reactions. Five years at RIKEN-TRI studying robotics in connection with Fukushima-Daiichi recovery operations. Frequently employed crowd- and machine-assisted decision-making to aid with complex problem-solving.

Participated in San Francisco Roundtable on Machine Thinking as a guest of the American Reclamation Corporation in 2064. Retained as a consultant on same topic until 2070.

Leading global advocate of fission-based solutions in the area of renewable energy. Noted skeptic of war strategies based on "limited use" of atomic weapons.

Controversially expressed support for rejections of vaccination and GMO use, arguing that although not scientifically valid, such attitudes were "an accurate reflection of the human values to which science must always, in the end, be suborned." Public statements credited with helping to mend cleavages between public and "political-scientific establishment" following Survivalist Wars.

Unanimous election as Mission Area Director to AEL. Responsible for staff of more than 200 nuclear scientists and engineers.

Anhaldt's superior, Prokhor Zakharov, declined to send for subject during the Unity Crisis, charging that Anhaldt's was "the inferior intellect." Anhaldt and the AEL staff were recovered instead by the data scientists of Sathieu Metrion, who hoped to co-opt the AEL into supporting ground-side operations of the Unity Data Core.

After ejection of the Data Core, Anhaldt, his AEL subordinates, some of Metrion's programmers, a scattering of engineers and security people, and assorted Comprehensive Transport personnel evacuated in one of two Landing Pods secured by Metrion's partisans. A failed attitude thruster sent Anhaldt's lander off-course, and it touched down within sight of the Monsoon Jungle with little more than basic survival equipment on board.

The polyglot community accepted Anhaldt's suggestion that, to minimize disputes, they reprogram the Landing Pod's onboard computer to assist with base operations. Three years later, they made first contact with the Human Tribe, which discovered that although Anhalt provided the appearance of human leadership, virtually every meaningful decision taken in Colonia Secundus was run through the settlement's pet AI.

Psych Profile: Mediator
Gifted scientist and communicator.

Adept at navigating large bureaucracies and political environments, but delegates most managerial tasks to subordinates. Selection likely reflected Security Council concern that atomic energy would prove a controversial energy source among the colonists.

Enthusiastic about the possibilities for human development inherent in applications for machine-assisted thinking and robot labor.

U.N.S. Unity power plant under construction in Moscow, U.S.S.R., 2021.

The project was, in generous terms, an unmitigated disaster. First conceived as the American Ares III intra-solar foundry, Unity's derelict skeleton had been a fixture in the nighttime sky above North America for more than a half-century before it was purchased by the U.N.'s Janovic Commission for conversion. The ship then finished another forty-three years in geosynchronous orbit, followed by six of trials that took it only as far as Pluto. By both length and volume, it was the largest object ever built by man. Knowing that technological progress would outpace them before completion, her shipwrights opted for dated but proven systems and modular design, hoping to install the engines, reactor, and computer mainframe last, while swapping out secondary systems if and when necessary.

U.N.S. Unity's development was a case study in design flaws, self-destructive behavior, and the perils of consensus-based project management. Amidst countless arguments, industrial accidents, and incidents of terrorism and sabotage, entire sections were started, gutted, and started again as political will and available resources waxed and waned.

A revolving door of visionaries, sponsors, and builders produced a "Frankenstein's Ark" of obsolete and incompatible systems. Political imperatives often spoke louder than practical science. When the Western powers temporarily suspended their participation in the Project from 2014 to 2050, the U.N.'s new Chinese and Warsaw Pact dismantled and stole entire modules for closer study Earthside. During one of countless breakdowns in contract re-negotiations, Morgan Aerodynamics sealed over dozens of cargo bays previously installed by competitors, including Serrol-Merowe, Fairchild-Grumman, and the American Reclamation Corporation, then charged the U.N. to rebuild and restock similar bays on the ship's opposite side. To a U.N. Board of Inquiry completed just hours before his departure for the lunar cradle, Unity's captain, Jonathan Garland, observed wryly that there was not a single integrated or accurate schematic--let alone a proper inventory--of the whole ship anywhere in existence.

Providing a crew for the ship presented a separate brace of problems. Tens of thousands of crew members perished in training, while many more died at the hands of mobs and terrorists incensed at the idea of being left behind. During times of extremity, the U.N. made a habit of accepting donations from corporations, private individuals, and even criminal enterprises. Earth's best and brightest shared their one-way trip with exiles, outcasts, and stowaways of every conceivable stripe. Pursuant to a charter further amended beyond recognition after most were placed in cold sleep, led by a multi-national crew on the verge of dissolution since the day it had formed, they were destined for a world where contact with a smaller, earlier mission launched in better times, the Pathfinder Probe, had been lost for reasons still unknown.

After tens of millions of Americans died in recurring pandemics during the first half of the twenty-first century, the United States finally found the technological solution required to endure long periods of home isolation: an army of drones of every conceivable size, shape, and purpose. Drones to sanitize public spaces, day and night. Drones to deliver food, fuel, medicines, and other necessities to the front door of every household. Drones to replace humans laborers in factories and fields.

Washington applied the same solution after the Holnist rebellion metastasized into the Second Civil War and one-fifth of the former U.S. Armed Forces defected or went AWOL. "During the long years of civil war and reconstruction in the 2040s," the The New York Times editorial page later mused, "the Federal government perfected first push-button war, then push-button peace."

The United States provided Oscar van de Graaf's ARC contingent upwards of 9,000 autonomous labor drones, known as Multiple Use Labor Elements ("MULES"), to help safely perform the tasks of colonization. The MULE was a sturdy, easily-repaired worker that relied on simple programming language and could be customized for a wide range of tasks. It was also powered by hydrocarbons, a peculiarity that attracted much unwanted attention from Planet's native biologics.

The Soviet Union staggered out of the bloody twentieth century and into the twenty-first with its alliance structure in tatters and its economy overheating from an excess of defense spending. Many predicted a quick collapse. Instead, Soviet leaders took deft advantage of the rise of Fundamentalist Islam to achieve a long detente with the West and shove aside discredited or dismantled petrostates to claim a dominant place in the global energy market. As American and European attentions turned increasingly inwards, Moscow wasted no time before engaging in new adventurism, accumulating tidy victories in Syria, Afghanistan, the Congo, and even Bolivia, where Washington signally declined to uphold the Monroe Doctrine during the second [Sleezebag] administration. But the Red Star rose only so high. If the costs of meddling in the Third World were less than those of an arms race with NATO, a new and dangerous threat to the preeminent Communist giant emerged in the form of China. Successful participation in the Sino-Indian War came with a bill that, paired with the costs of environmental renewal at home, the Soviets paid only with difficulty. Soviet accomplishment in the arts and sciences, starved of patronage, declined precipitously. When the U.N. came knocking in 2045, the Soviets were two generations behind the global standard in electronics. Their once-vaunted space program was but a shadow of its former glory. What the U.S.S.R. did have to offer was the miniaturized nuclear reactor (slim safety margins and all), along with ten thousand junked armored cars, all fission-powered, readily converted to reconnaissance, liaison, and utility duties in environments requiring full NBC protection, and all fully capable of independently powering a colony of modest size. In return, the U.N. agreed to hold Moscow blameless for any "accidental fission" and found a place for 20,000 additional convict laborers sourced from the GULAG.

France retained a substantial amount of overseas real estate and subjects in the second half of the twentieth century, and although the terms of association sweetened progressively, France fought long wars to retain Algeria, Indochina, and the Levant. In an open secret, France also played a crucial role in securing Quebec's independence from Canada, a gambit for which it was temporarily expelled from the European Union.

As in past eras, retention of a colonial empire and tampering in the affairs of other peoples earned the French a certain pride-of-place in international affairs. To protect their considerable investments in Africa, the French assiduously cultivated the United Nations. Peacekeeping, in Africa especially, thus took a familiar form: the French fist, fit snugly in the United Nations glove. French talents contributed their fair share to Unity's development, and the launch pads at the Centre Spatial Guyanais were practically a U.N. operation after 2021. Beyond these traditional aspects of project involvement, however, France distinguished itself in another way: by providing the future colony with defensive equipment when long-range sensing data suggested that Chiron might be home to potentially dangerous lifeforms.

A Kashmiri gas plant at sunset.

Internecine conflict prevented Indian from assuming the position of an acknowledged superpower until very late in the twenty-first century, after the traditional claimants to the title were themselves exhausted by the onslaught of war, disease, and environmental disaster. India suffered through its own share of catastrophes, winning a short, sharp naval war with China in spectacular fashion but later experiencing the unmitigated horror of a nuclear exchange with Pakistan during the Six Minute War.

During its own reconstruction, India invested heavily in the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri, if only to affirm, even to itself, that it possessed not just the wherewithal, but the national will, to contribute to the well-being of all humankind even in light of its own heavy need. As the starship's final fitting out began, India's technology sector was moving from a service focus to idea creation, while Indian materials science was leading the way in the production of new polymers. A considerable quantity of the hardware at Unity's heart, along with its countless 3D printers, were Indian-produced. Urgent requests in the 2060s prompted India to deliver more digital and industrial equipment to the United Nations.

Several of India's rebuilt cities were hastily-constructed residential factories that fed last-minute requirements up the Space Elevators directly into the Unity's hold. The Times of India famously lampooned the ship as a rapacious European gourmand snacking on India's beleaguered people.

Recently, I was prompted to do a bit of a "story Bible" for this fan-fic of mine as I look to engage new folks to come and supply content of their own. This involves taking a step back and looking at the story so far with fresh eyes. It also means a bit of ret-con work to make the story "true up" when all the pieces are laid on the table, end-to-end.

Sadly, this will ruin many of the dates previously supplied, but I suppose

Here are the fundamental elements of the world I built on Brian Reynolds's back, as it were. I will expand these as I develop more of them.

Missions to Alpha Centauri

▪ The Pathfinder Probe launched during a fruited period of Earth's history, under circumstances far more auspicious than those surrounding the Unity Mission.

▪ The Pathfinder Probe landed on Alpha Centauri, and a base was established, but contact with the colony was lost shortly thereafter amidst an outbreak of viral illness. The specific fate of the Pathfinder colonists was not disclosed by the U.N. Security Council and remained a mystery even to the Unity command crew.

▪ Because of the challenge of training a huge number of people on common systems when some of them would enter cold sleep decades before their comrades, the mission opted for a "last common technological paradigm" philosophy. It would be the equivalent of a space ship in 2060 launching with systems and equipment built in the 1980s, or at least designed with only the same set of components.

▪ Work on Unity commenced in 1996. Unity left the Sol System for Alpha Centauri in 2071.

A Brief History of Violence

▪ Earth was afflicted by a series of human-caused catastrophes, including but not limited to: a pandemic of Red Flu, the Six-Minute (atomic) war between India and Pakistan, the Sino-Indian War, the Hypersurvivalist Wars, and the Second American Civil War.

▪ "Hypersurvivalist Wars" is a blanket term for hundreds of conflicts, fought primarily in North America and Europe, that pitted adherents of the anarcho-populist "survivalist" movement against various national governments and local self-defense forces. The central figure in this tragedy was Nathan Holn, a malcontent and pseudo-intellectual famous first for his hagiography of Vice President and would-be American monarch, Aaron Burr, second for his calls to arms against the legitimate governments of the United States and Canada, and third for his execution after being found guilty of attacking a U.S. Army base in Colorado. Holn died before the turn of the twenty-first century, but he lived on in the popular imagination of his fevered followers, who feared and resented the change that social media told them was happening so rapidly and on all fronts. The conflicts during this period followed a distinctive pattern. A national emergency would occasion pleas for assistance from Washington or Ottawa, leading to confrontations between authority and the self-styled “Holnists,” often in extreme conditions for which only the latter were properly prepared. As pirate radio broadcasts urged concerned citizens to hoard supplies and discount official instructions – frequently invoking the specter of government-operated concentration camps – Holnist instigators would infiltrate hospitals, distribution centers, and staging areas, accusing authorities of withholding vital services. Sometimes, the Holnists distributed supplies of their own to burnish their image of legitimacy. Popular unrest would then provide the hyper-survivalists with cover to conduct organized looting of food convoys and private property. The federal government’s heavy-handed response would cow some, outrage others, and generally arrive too late to do anything but pick up the pieces. During the first few years of the Anarchy, tens of thousands of new recruits rallied to the cause thinking to find assistance from the seemingly well-stocked Holnists, while the central governments lost what precious little legitimacy they had previously managed to retain. The reality was that Holnism was usually just another word for self-aggrandizement. Holnists took what they wanted--land, goods, people--and defied anyone to stop them. Holn’s philosophies never constituted a coherent roadmap for political transformation, and though a cottage industry of serious thinkers labored mightily to produce political platforms and coherent manifestos for living, the masses of his so-called adherents had no time for intellectuals or consistency. Holn's calls for a Second American Revolution fired the popular imagination, that's all. The existing alliance between "self-governance" movements and religious radicals provided the path down which millenarian movements like Evangelical Fire marched to secession, then to defeat. Holn's collected papers contained a message that was, at root, fundamentally self-contradictory and anti-social. Holn knew what he was against: compromise, racial and gender equality, civic-minded sacrifice. He hardly knew what he wanted the United States to become. Put simply: Holn claimed to want to make the world “safe for the little guy, who works hard and deserves much,” but his mélange of racism, misogyny, and anarchic sentiments was generally a formula for making civilization impossible. Holnists were bushwhackers and sociopaths dressed up in philosophical trappings.

▪ After Nathan Holn, perhaps the second most-infamous man in modern American history was Jean-Baptiste Keller. Keller was no more successful a man than Holn in his many careers, but his politics were far more coherent. A wind farmer and sometime-lay pastor in southern Illinois, he was a self-described “mourner” of the breakdown of civil society at the local level. His rise as a globally influential thinker coincided with a steep decline in the fortunes of his local church and a severe economic depression that once again hollowed out the cities of the West’s traditional industrial heartlands. In a deliberate critique of phylism, Keller linked the decline of social and economic well-being with the breakdown of the traditional family and physical community – literally, one’s geographic neighbors. While neither a Luddite nor Evangelical, Keller echoed the traditional complaint of the Religious Right that the Internet 2.0 was a gateway to troubling addiction, deluding its users by enabling them to engage in fundamentally false, and therefore spiritually unfulfilling, interactions. with free trade policies, which he considered responsible for an “epidemic” of social ills. Keller allowed that his appeals were not intended for a general audience per se, but hoped that they might have special application to those facing economic and social dislocation as a result of changing patterns of economic and cultural behavior due to globalization. This pattern of thought, although less popular than Holnism, nevertheless attracted hundreds of thousands of committed followers. Keller eventually amassed a bizarre constellation of supporters, including the families of out-of-work engineers from the Great Lakes region who accused Wall Street of failing to stand by the American worker and students at the Midwest’s many public universities who felt that they were being prepared for vocations that free trade policies had rendered inviable. Keller later reappeared to rally communities of the faithful both within and outside occupied Des Moines, orchestrating a series of diversionary attacks on Holnist defensive positions to cover the smuggling of weapons and relief to followers trapped behind enemy lines. Gradually derided as cultists, Keller’s followers were frequently subjected to massacres, first by the Holnists, then by the U.S. Army, and later by various adversaries ranging from mercenaries employed by the American Reclamation Corporation to local Home Guard units operating under federal writ during the Third Reconstruction. Of necessity, Keller authorized designated followers to raise standing “self-defense committees” on the model of the Viet Minh, raising money and collecting weapons and other supplies intended to make good on a new vision of “armed neutrality.” Whether at Keller’s command or otherwise, forces acting in his name not only ejected the Holnists from Des Moines, but slaughtered tens of thousands of refugees in the care of the Red Cross, alleged retaliation for pogroms previously visited upon the Kellerites themselves. Keller’s adherents eventually went underground in the face of mounting pressure from the U.S. Army and the ARC. Many relocated to the Northern California region where they centered various around shared cultural heritage, civic orientation, or even lineage, frequently lamented the breakdown of civil society at a distinctively local level, consciously rejecting the move toward globalized conceptions of identity enabled by the telecommunications revolution of the early twenty-first century.

▪ Decades after the reunification of both the United States and Canada, Holnism remained a powerful political lure for those who considered themselves to have been failed by the reconstruction governments, and the Spartan Movement took some cues from Holnism. Spartan ideology begins with a Realist premise: the State of Nature is a war of all against all. Security is possible only through subjugation or elimination of threats, and the soldier must maintain their skill through practice. In choosing coexistence with geopolitical adversaries, the West doomed itself, first to subversion, then to military destruction. Spartan thought differs from Holnism in that it is not explicitly predatory, although it is equally as violent. The Spartan competes with the "lesser self" as much as with opponents; unlike hypersurvivalism, however, it values military readiness more than generic "preparedness." That said, a fight against an unwilling or unprepared enemy is of no moral value.

Notes on the Geopolitical Situation on Earth

▪ At different times, national sponsors for the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri included: the United States, Canada, the European Union, the British Empire, the French Union, the U.S.S.R., Communist China, Golden China, India, Japan, Brazil, and Argentina.

▪ Antarctica was settled, terraformed, and ultimately home to several new nation-states by 2070. Large new landmasses were raised up in the Indian and Pacific Oceans to facilitate human settlement.

▪ Colonialism and freedom struggle continue to dominate a world where the Cold War still rages. France, despite having pioneered what it calls a "third way," is mostly seen as a Soviet stooge. A rift that began forming between Communist China and the U.S.S.R. cracked wide open with the rise of the Golden Emperor, but China is still coming into its own as a great power. The U.S.S.R. is suffering from economic and political difficulties reminiscent of the Gorbachev era. The United States is still rebuilding from the horrors of a civil war that ruined much of the South and Midwest.

Notes on the Faction Leaders

▪ Prokhor Zakharov was the second-oldest official member of the Unity passengers. (In theory, a stowaway could have been even older.) Sheng-ji Yang is younger by a few years.

▪ Captain Jonathan Garland's was murdered. No perpetrator(s) were ever apprehended. Most survivors assume he was ordered killed by Santiago. Morgan, sometimes called "the first stowaway," is the second most-popular suspect.

▪ Santiago lost control of the mutiny she started. The "mainline" Spartans intended to commandeer mission resources to build an independent colony. The Holnists began self-destructive attacks on the ship and its crew--violence for its own sake. They were seemingly content to destroy the Unity, and themselves along with it, as an expression of retributive rage over being excluded by mission planners.

Fundamentals of Faction Design

▪ Each faction in the story is led by a single leader (with the exception of the Dreamers, which are led by two). The leader has articulated an ideological vision that answers three questions in a unique way. These are: (1) What is the fundamental truth of the universe? (2) Why did civilization on Earth fail? (3) What is needed for the human species to survive, and thrive, on Chiron?

▪ Here is a link to some basic faction information. As you will see, some are incomplete or uncomfortably similar to others.

Name: Sergeant Peter “Pete” Landers
Rank: -
Position: -
Country of Origin: United States of America
DOB: c. 2032
Height: 73.0 cm
Weight: 90.4 kg

Credit for this faction goes to Thorn of the community at The Frontier.com, a new-defunct forum for matrix-style games.

Service Record:
Precise date and place of birth unknown. Speech analysis yields 82.3% probability of origination in Midwestern United States. Attended, but did not graduate, Iowa Technical College. Volunteered for Illinois Army National Guard following death of schoolmates during hyper-survivalist raid. Promoted to Sergeant following abbreviated Non-Commissioned Officer Candidate Course.

WIA during skirmish with Holnist fighters at Cairo, IL, December 2053. Recovered by devotees of anti-disassociationist cult leader Jean Baptiste Keller. Passed through hands of multiple followers to avoid capture by Holnist death squads. Diagnosed with Helsinki Syndrome on return to unit. Listed MIA following Federal defeat outside Davenport, IA.

U.S. Army Signals Intelligence intercepts indicate subject was leading Kellerite troops shortly after disappearance, scoring numerous victories over U.S. Army and auxiliaries, significantly delaying reconstitution of Government authority west of Mississippi River. Implicated in civilian massacres.

Resurfaced outside Sacramento, CA in 2058 in overall command of a regional self-defense compact. Present at Berkeley, CA speech at which visibly infirm Keller reemerged from hiding to speak on Unity mission.

Caution: United Nations Intelligence Agency place very high confidence in assessments concluding that approximately two hundred Kellerites boarded Unity while it was still under construction and entered hibernation, intending to join the colony. As early as 2045, a fire at the Brooklyn Navy Yard provided cover for Tribe sympathizers previously inserted into the base's industrial fire brigade to board a supernumerary module and cache small arms intended for use by future Kellerite stowaways.

For a Tribal, Pete Landers was the epitome of the welcome convert to anti-disassociationism: a well-meaning young man who, once he understood the Kellerite philosophy, sacrificed everything to put himself in its service. Aboard Unity, he was the chief author of their vengeance against the hated Holnists.

Once Planetside, the "Tribe" settled at the mouth of a broad river, which they named the Slowwind. Using Radnor hoverbikes, they also mounted local patrols, hoping to dissuade other survivors from coming too near.

Less than thirty-six hours after the Kellerites arrived, Spartan Colonel Corazón Santiago founded the settlement of Sparta Command on rocky heights not far upriver. Spartan landing operations were soon disturbed by the arrival of a Tribe security patrol. Santiago ordered her people into defensive positions and demanded that the "interlopers" withdraw. The Tribe commander refused, and the Spartans opened fire, killing three scouts and destroying a pair of bikes before the rest broke contact. Spartan Myrmidons gave immediate chase, capturing a third bike.

Within the week, and under close observation from Spartan rovers, Tribe 'Formers poured concrete for a bunker complex on an island forming in the final oxbow bend of the Slowwind before it reached the sea, effectively closing the delta to Spartan river traffic.

Psych Profile: Defender
U.S. Army induction Psych screen indicates strong need for attachment to authority figures.

At Quad Cities debrief, ARC trauma specialist documented insubordinate language, heightened paranoia, and “wavering commitment to mission,” indicative of increased vulnerability to recruitment by subversive organizations. Subject repeatedly criticized command decisions to hold position during civilian massacres by survivalist flying columns. Recommendation for subject to be withdrawn from line for further medical observation overruled by commanding officer due to exigency of military situation at the time.

Subject's commanding officers repeatedly judged him a tactician of unusual ability despite limited formal military training.

Sathieu Metrion was an Annunciator of the Tommorow Initiative.

Data Services mobilized a massive response to the Data Core during the Unity Crisis, fighting fires and starting systems diagnostics. Peacekeeper Terrance LaCroix later found evidence to confirm that they had ignored multiple alarms to supervise key life support and fire control systems remotely from Core Control.

Chief Engineer Zakharov had ignored the needs of others, but Data Services under their Lieutenant Commander Tạ Dọc Thân had treated the reactor crew's every need as both urgent and sacrosanct. Internal message traffic between data terminals used by Thân's team found that they had worked to resolve a half-dozen competing emergencies, not least of which were viruses, compiling errors threatening to consume precious system resources, and physical attacks on junction boxes elsewhere aboard the starship. Thân led his people well. And then he had died.

Thân was a French Indochina native of about 32 at the time of his death. Born to a wealthy Catholic family in Huế, he completed his education in France and never returned home. Thân was a computer scientist minoring in Philosophy quickly placed in supervisory positions with the European Space Agency. Involvement with the Centre National d' Etudes Spatiales and the Venusian Survey preceded secondment to the Unity Mission. Thân had been an unwilling candidate. His file was appended with a personal letter to the French president requesting reassignment--a reflection of the strong political valence acquired by the mission in French politics.

Despite personal misgivings regarding the value of the U.N. mission to his home country, Thân remained true to form, earning high marks from evaluators for his mental stability and team orientation. He had an enviably high score on both parts of the Atherholt Trauma Function Test. U.N. psychologists judged that disappointment over career derailment would not prevent Thân's becoming "a full and valuable mission contributor."

The Peacekeeping Forces killed Tạ Dọc Thân, in a matter of speaking. He was one of the approximately forty fatalities caused by decompression when Pravin Lal ordered the ejection of the Data Core. The surviving data scientists never satisfied themselves as to who bore responsibility--the supposedly transparent Peacekeepers used a masked account.

Among Thân's numerous protégés was Sathieu Metrion, a Thai. National service in the Royal Thai Navy prefaced training in data science at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and ultimate nomination to the Unity Mission. In possession of Officer-Like Qualities, Metrion was thought to lack the political acumen or perceived reliability to be promoted to higher rank within the U.N. command structure, a fate typical of those who joined as members of explicitly national contingents.

Metrion led his faction's first expedition to Chiron's southern pole, literally ramming his way through a Nautilus Pirates blockade with a full-sized Unity Hydrofoil, one of the few combat-capable watercraft not commandeered by the New State.

Experience with the Red Flu led all Tomorrow Institute personnel to don bulky encounter suits--full-body coveralls of no-rip fabric with integral booties, gloves, and hood, similar to the "Moon Suits" of twenty-first century clean rooms. Colored bands at waist, biceps, and thighs indicated belonging to certain divisions aboard Unity. The initial accounts of the Peacekeepers point to a robust representation of the original departments among the Hydrofoil's landing party: the purple of the U.N. Security Forces, the blue of the Aquatic Operations Division, the green of Botany, the orange of Damage Control, the red of Engineering, the silver of Medical, the Yellow of Industrial Safety, and, predominating, the black of Data Services. At least one new arrival wore the red-in-black of the Constabulary.

Quote from: Centauri Ecology

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. - Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Traditional

Rampart, water catchment, grow tent. This was the ironclad sequence of construction followed by every successful colony.

Without a complete understanding of Centauri ecology, early settlements grew familiar crops in hermetically sealed environments using Terran seeds and growth medium.

Constraints on the supply of labor, defensible space, and packaged rations meant that food production vied with, and often superseded, cultivation of medicinal plants.

Once the colonists made a close study of Centauri organisms, however, they identified a number of plant and animal byproducts useful for the care of sick and wounded persons, including analgesics, antipyretics, bioadhesives, and organic fibrin sealants.

The first rich survey of this type was led by Walter Kyle Planitzer, a U.N. Marine serving with the Peacekeeping Forces. Mechanics in Warm Welcome modified a mobile field hospital with laboratory equipment for analysis of plant material.

An Archytas launch vehicle with satellite payload stands ready on the pad at the Paramount while an 8x8 armored rescuer vehicle evacuates the last of the ground crews to safety.

The Ascendancy's enthusiasm for self-aggrandizement caught up to it in M.Y. 30. After losing more than a quarter of his territory, Nwabudike Morgan prevailed on his increasingly fearful neighbors, Zakharov, Anhaldt, Metrion, and Landers, to form a defensive alliance.

The four made odd bedfellows: the scientists despised one another over the divergent opinions regarding whether popular mores should serve as a brake on public science, Anhaldt often accused the Tomorrow Institute of attempting to infiltrate his networks, and all four other factions were united in their resentment of Morgan's demands to be "made whole" anytime Monopoly analysts assessed their new allies' military performance as deficient. Nonetheless, it proved a winning combination. Fighter for fighter, Tribal minutemen were the near-equal of Pahlavi's genetically-enhanced Specials. Equipped with the Chaos weaponry coming out of University laboratories and battle plans turned out by Unity's salvaged supercomputers, the Kellerites were the first effective answer to Neo-Sapien.

Finding that she little liked being on the back foot, Pahlavi resolved to turn a new leaf and find friends of her own. Roshann Cobb's price for Dreamer participation in her war: access to the Ascendancy's space program, and a large share of the prisoners taken by her legionnaires.

A light reconnaissance VTOL departs the Restoration mission carrier, Battlecry of Freedom, during the hunt for the Spartan arsenal ship, Dynast, in the Sea of Nessus.

Dynast, hours before destruction by the guns of the University of Planet's megafortress, Zvezda. The Academician, a man known for his violent distempers and proud of his own national service, needed little of Nwabudike Morgan's prodding to better fortify the eastern approaches to the Howling Straits, a task he entrusted to an old personal friend, ex-Soviet Podpolkóvnik Revmir Galaktionov.

Hounded by General Salan's aeronaval forces, Spartan Droungarios Arkan Deng and his mighty warship strayed just within the extreme range of Zakharov's rocket-assisted artillery.

The Gauss rifles of the Spartan Stander were reputed to have kept a dozen more ships in port for every nautical mile the battleship travelled from Fleet Anchorage.

Stunned by the loss of its consort, the Dynast, Stander chose the better of two bad match-ups, running the gauntlet of Restoration air power in preference to Zakharov's guns.

Battlecry of Freedom stood out from the fight and scrambled nearly two dozen needlejets. The result was a surprise even for the bold Spartans: Stander's point-defense lasers knocked four of the first wave from the sky. Micromissiles launched from the battleship's waist-mounted pepperboxes did for six in the next. The ship's stealth coating and powerful jammers helped reduce the effectiveness of the jets' bombing runs: Stander suffered only three direct hits from gravity bombs and missiles, none of which were sufficient to break through her buckypaper armor.

Quote from: Factor Roshann Cobb

Name the most resilient parasite. A bacterium? A virus? An intestinal worm? No. The most resilient parasite is an idea. Explosive. Highly contagious. Once formed in the brain, an idea is impossible to erradicate. My scientists tell me that even what is allegedly forgetten is still in there... somewhere. By rearranging the pieces of the puzzle into a sensible portrait, one gains the key to self-knowledge--and, thus, to taming our species' worst and most self-destructive impulses. I haven't got a map. But I do have a lovely box of dynamite. - The Art of Extraction

The first Probe Teams on Chiron were merely digital safe-crackers. When bases were overrun in the conventional manner, specialists were ushered to crawl over what remained of the defenders' Network Nodes.

It was not long before some factions expanded the scope of Probe Team activity to encompass a fuller range of intelligence missions. The Morganite outpost at Eutherium was rumored to be a traditional listening station. The Dreamers twice caught and executed confessed Restoration operatives, and, in doing so, furnished evidence sufficient to mute protests from a Planetary Council that had surely sanctioned the prisoners' work. Terrance LaCroix found evidence that the Sabre Corporation personnel who came aboard Unity with Morgan included several individuals sought by INTERPOL on suspicion of having carried out assassinations.

Anyone willing to introduce malicious code into their own base systems could earn a healthy portfolio on the Planetary Exchange. Hence Sheng-ji Yang's wry observation: "When Morgan cannot buy a meal, he is not above bribing the chefs to spoil it."

Roshann Cobb turned the page to a new era when he commissioned a Probe Team without the digital component. The archetypal Probe Team was a combination of data techs and veterans of national or military intelligence agencies, but its ability to squeeze information from human targets stopped not far past the point where bribes and brutality ended. Even with a willing confederate, they could only obtain what that person consciously knew that they knew.

The Dreamer concept required a new paradigm for thinking about a Probe Team's work. Cobb swapped out the computer scientists for physicians and psychiatrists. Equipped with vials of Somnacin and the instruments to chart, record, and analyze the neurological activity of a body at rest, they exhumed treasures never imagined by the likes of Ian Fleming.

Source: This quotation, with some adjustment by your present author, is from Christopher Nolan's 2010 film, Inception.

The degree of ideological unity achieved by each of the human factions on Chiron varied according to a number of factors. Chief among these were the extent of sympathy for the leader's vision among their immediate retinue at Planetfall, the extent to which the faction provided members with a compelling blueprint for self-actualization, and the quality of leadership provided. Ideological unity was the most reliable, and certainly the cheapest, source of faction stability.

All societies must establish structures to deal with the inherent inequality of their members. On Chiron, inequality arose from both the natural intellectual endowments of each survivor, as well as their ability to work. In theory, the rigorous U.N. screening process, which covered the vast majority of the crew, meant that baseline intellectual attainment was high, and physical fitness could be safely assumed, but the number of those incapacitated by wounds was initially very great, and natural birth, knowledge specialization, and personal preference meant that some were better-suited for certain environments than others. For all their other achievements, world-class glassmakers, pilots, pianists, jurists, chefs, theologians, artillerists, historians, and poets laureate were still unlikely to make fundamental breakthroughs in materials science or repair malfunctioning electronics. Not all of the people answering to Prokhor Zakharov were suited for, or even interested in, a life of the mind. Their place in University society was sometimes important--even vital--but never exalted. To become anything other than a researcher was to fall short of the golden ideal. Life in the Dynamic Enterprise was similarly complicated. Nwabudike Morgan, the chief protagonist in a rags-to-riches story, was an eloquent defender of meritocratic principle, but in practice, the high levels of acceptable corruption conferred almost-insurmountable advantages to those who made their fortunes in the first few years after Planetfall. Mileage varied. Department heads might believe that their staff would not perform at optimal levels without significant compensation, but they were just as likely to accept the premise that labor existed to be exploited. Terra Nova was governed by a small coterie of shareholding families who had helped Oscar van de Graaf assemble his initial subscription to the United Nations. Some of the New Two Thousand, as paid employees of the Joint Stock Company, had direct control over their own land and energy credits. Others were indentured, and survived on a basic outlay of supplies provided in weekly lots, along with whatever charity their employer might dispense.

Elsewhere, divisions between favor and disfavored classes were formalized in an explicit caste system. Military service was the minimum asking price for political voice in Raoul St. Germaine's underwater fiefdom. Yang nerve-stapled anyone who did meet his standards for intellectual and moral utility. The most-fortunate received leadership education at the ruler's right hand. The remainder became technicians or overseers. Each of the four groups ate different diets, received different political education, and spent their recovery cycles only with their own peers. In the Human Ascendancy, extreme meritocracy among the initial survivors at the Pinnacle gave way to planned geniocracy as the faction implemented Pahlavi's grand vision of producing a paragon. Individuals were, quite literally, conceived and brought up by faction minders with the ends. (Natural procreation was strictly forbidden.) Ascendancy techs resolved most defects before full gestation, but the much-abridged adolescence of the faction's newest members received obsessive scrutiny. The price of repeat disappointing performance in any number of endeavors was to have one's genetic line excised from Pahlavi's "blueprint." Social ostracism and demotion were thereafter inevitable.

The number of individual persons in a colony and its "members" rarely meant the same thing. Many factions, including the Labyrinth, Spartans, Archimedes Group, Dreamers, and Human Ascendancy, took or kept what must be called slaves. In Sparta, helots (captives) possessed almost no formal rights and were treated as the common property of the government. Santiago used them to complete public works projects. From his high perch in the Eye of Planet, Sardul Singh challenged prisoners under his care to "elevate" themselves past the need for confinement. Good behavior earned exemption from the chain gang, and, eventually, the opportunity to pursue opportunities for work and education more in keeping with the individual's own tastes.

Some factions, particularly the Nautilus Pirates, Spartan Federation and the Hunters of Chiron, preached a physical discipline and adversarial ethos that required some to fail so that others could judge the extent of their own success. In other factions, especially among the Children of the Atom and the New State, the promise of clear direction and physical security were often enough to overcome complaints about poor quality of life.

The freest and happiest societies on Planet--the Peacekeeping Forces, the Gaians, the Conclave, and the Restoration, and the Tribe--not only embraced a minimum concept of human rights, but imposed the fewest demands on their members and made a point of releasing, if not expelling, those disinclined to their ideologies. (The Restoration was a special case: a military hierarchy, although comprised exclusively of volunteers that shared a common ethos and was strongly committed to the shared objective of getting home to Earth.)

Quote from: Chairman Sheng-ji Yang

When you have learned to use a human to fill a gap in the line just as you would sealant to fill a crack in a wall, and with no more hesitation, then you will have understood the full extent of the resources at the Hive's disposal. - Ethics for Tomorrow

To keep his excavators digging, Yang immediately cannibalized most of the vehicles at hand after his Landing Pods made Planetfall. The Hive thus went on to operate a relatively large number of infantry for a faction its size—hardly ideal in a radioactive desert that potential targets quickly learned to avoid.

Labyrinth patrols wandered far afield to locate attractive targets. Even if the attackers used their rations sparingly, a small work party, once captured with its equipment and supplies, might yield up less in the way of food, fuel, and other supplies than it cost to find, fix, and overrun. Since the Hive was reliably aggressive and obsessively insular, it struggled to make up the shortfall through trade. Yang sent his own caravans out, but was unwilling to countenance visitors.

Despite an extremely high birthrate that preserved its manpower pools, the Hive's military didn't get better over time. Living conditions in the Labyrinth were atrocious. A regime of psychological terror was worsened by chronic lack of food and water. Ironically, Yang favored feeding the Drones who were building his warrens and the monitors keeping them in line over the Talents assisting him to rule. But low morale and malnutrition alone do not fully explain faction’s ignominious military record.

Simply put, Yang sapped the Hive of the conditions to produce effective junior officers. Only one in three Hivemen was spared the lobotomizing effects of the Nerve Staple. The fortunate few were rarely prepared for the eager truth-telling and high independence required of successful battlefield commanders. Of the standout commanders that did emerge in spite of these obstacles, many were killed by the Hive's foes before they could pass on their craft.

In time, the rising powers of Chiron tired of Yang’s capriciousness and, increasingly confident in their strength, visited upon the Human Labyrinth a fearsome retribution, razing the outworks of two of Yang’s six known settlements. Secreted in their subterranean fastness, Yang and his disciples rode out the storm, but emerged to find their moisture collectors dismantled and echelon mirrors smashed. Worst of all, the rampaging allies carted away huge quantities of Yang’s primary export, the radioactive metal that gave the Flats their name.

Quote from: Warden J.T. Marsh

Once a man changes the relationship between himself and his environment, he perforce gains a new frame of reference. Try as he might, he cannot return to the ignorance he left. Motion changes perspective. If you're stuck, move. The deep thinking comes later. - The Lost World

Of all the technologies ferried across the stars by Unity, none was more decisive to the survival of the First Settlements than the Scout Rover. Formally the Fairchild-Grumman Light All-Terrain Reconnaissance Vehicle Chassis, this ultra-light, ruggedized motor vehicle served in dozens of different applications across every environment Planet had to offer. Earth-mover, ambulance, crane, gun platform, and recovery vehicle—the hardy little ‘Rover did it all and then some.

Powered by sunlight, the baseline model's range was theoretically limitless. Small and light enough in its basic form to be broken down and carried on the backs of just two men, it was hauled up and over mountain ranges, then reassembled on the other side. It even shot rapids. When no foil was at hand, the ‘Rover’s tires could be super-inflated and the vehicle floated like a Conestoga wagon of old.

University of Planet Rover 226, captured in the drone feed above, retained the same mission profile as its simpler forebears but its design reflected from more than a century of hard lessons-learned. The variable wheelbase could be adjusted for heavier cargoes, smoother travel, climbing, and trench-crossing. Cargo pods, easily loaded from the top or rear of its cage, were magnetized to the rover's hull. Steep climbs, high speeds, and hard evasive action no longer risked detachment. If swarmed by xenofungus, the Rover could eject its self-contained cockpit to an altitude of 200' and a distance of more than 700'. A fusion battery, carried in containment behind the pilot, provided ample power for the miniaturized engine. For simpler routes, an onboard AI replaced the crew of one.

Judging by the lack of a defense weapon and self-recovery equipment, it is safe to assume that Rover 226 was relegated to rear-area work.

Source: This quotation slightly altered from the original, which was ascribed to Lal, in connection with Doctrine: Mobility.

Prisoner transports unload their cargo at the Memory Palace while troopers in first-generation power armor look on. The garrison in this vid-cap surely did not survive long: their attention is misdirected on the disembarkation process, and not the horizon from which attack might come.

Most captives taken in battle by the Dreamers of Chiron were put to the productive and service functions required of any viable base, from farming to facilities maintenance. Talents were another matter.

At best, a Talent was a leader in possession of important factual knowledge about faction governance. At worst, a Talent was an intellectual with ideas that might kick-start the Dreamer's own research activities. Both could be "extracted" through the process known as oneiromachaíri, the "dream knife."

Armored personnel carriers fetched high-value targets back to unique detention centers. Struan's engineers crossed the University's penchant for transformable structures with Yang's insight that what could not be seen was less likely to be attacked. Once loaded, the prisons were ratcheted back down below the surface, protected by blast shields up to a foot thick.

To prepare their subjects for lucid dreaming, Dreamer goalers placed them in sensory deprivation chambers (the square modules clearly visible on the facing surface of the prison, above the intake ramp). The process was similar to the Wespe-Quinn-Vagner method of hibernation: prisoners were partially submerged in warm, salty water, in sound-proofed spaces, without light. Recording devices heard their every utterance, charted their every heartbeat. Roshann Cobb's records confirm that not a single prisoner survived the ordeal with their mental faculties intact. More than a third suffered myocardial or stroke events within less than three hours of interment. After four hours, severe and irreversible psychosis created the conditions that Dreamer retrieval specialists were seeking.

Quote from: Roshan Cobb

Unwrapped like that, the broken mind is just archaeology waiting to happen. A good oneirologist knows the universal symbology common to all human dreams. A better one can distinguish cultural signposts. Those are your buckets. Everything goes into a bucket. Then, you play the tapes and move it all around. It'll never be a perfect fit, but you can always tell a temple from a hovel or a tower. - Rebuilding Man

Quote from: Administrator Oscar van de Graaf

A reporter for The Wall Street Journal once asked me whether I stuck my thumb on the scales of justice. Absolutely I did. The hand must be seen to sit firmly on that scale. That's the only way it works. We say that justice is blind for a reason. Too many people think that means it is fair. Not true. You've got to lead justice. You have to collect the facts, but you have to make sense of them, too. Justice itself isn't going to do that for you. The blind can't lead. - Under My Wings, All Things Prosper: A History of the American Reclamation Corporation, Vol. 2

To enforce the compact at the center of his proprietary community, Oscar van de Graaf relied upon the same mercenary soldiers that had served him as head of the American Reclamation Corporation.

In addition to base defense and internal security, these so-called Regulators performed a third function: asset recovery.

Forty-four percent of Unity's construction vehicles, including virtually all the terraforming rigs, were put up by van de Graaf and his top stakeholders. Under the terms of his contracts with the United Nations Mission to Alpha Centauri, they were on five-year loan, with Captain Jonathan Garland acting as guarantor. Van de Graaf argued that General Francisco d'Almeida's abrogation of the Unity Charter had cut the mission short, and the loan with it.

The Regulators had a mixed track record. Every faction fought desperately to defend its heavy equipment, and the ARC warriors, while certainly competent, faced superior adversaries in the form of Ascendancy Legionnaires, New State Fencibles, Spartan Myrmidons, and Tribal Minutemen. Even ambushing 'Formers carried high risk. Road crews were usually game for a fight and retrofitted their rides with all manner of defenses including turret-mounted machine guns, banks of launchers for smoke and fragmentation grenades, and even guided anti-tank missiles. Nor was military victory a certain prelude to mission success. If defeat seemed assured, better to disable or destroy those irreplaceable assets than let them serve a rival. By M.Y. 90, the Regulators had added just three squadrons worth of 'Formers to the New Two Thousand's motor pool.

Quote from: Lady Deirdre Skye

We are used to confusing life with abundance. The cell multiples. The seed ripens and grows. But I challenge you to remember that not all growth is healthy. - Remarks in Assembly

A biostatic is a substance that prevents or discourages the growth of a living thing.

The field of medical biostatics advanced quickly among the First Settlements. Every life was precious, and all leaders hoped to return as many survivors as possible to healthy productivity. Biostatic interventions played a central role in the story of this recovery because of the nature of the afflictions themselves. Many of the sick were suffering from aggressive cancers brought on by radiation exposure. There were also large numbers of people who had been shot by bullets or flechettes. Fighting malignant cell growth and preventing cytokine storms kept medical staff busy around the clock.

Once humans began interacting on a regular basis with native life forms, especially fungal tubers, biostatic ointments were an essential element of the treatments plans for minor cuts and bruises. Fungal fibers were barbed and could embed in the skin like splinters, where they released compounds that caused rapid necrosis through hardening. Biostatics could slow the process long enough for microsurgery to remove the offending contaminants, or for inorganic chemotherapies to kill them.

Quote from: HRE Charles IV

Nay! Speak not of Satan, sir. His lieutenant, and mine, is yet in my neighbor-room. Or what report shall he give his true master? – The Tragedy of the House of Luxembourg, Part II, Act 1, Scene 1

Struan’s Pacific Trading Company was a Hong Kong conglomerate involved principally in agriculture and pharmaceuticals. The conglomerate's holdings in Africa alone exceeded fifty million hectares under irrigated cultivation. Frequent political strife on the continent impelled the company’s directors to make strategic investments in a “government services” division full of fixers that often stole the spotlight from its more mundane business operations. The Chairman of the Struan’s Board, Ian Dunross Struan, was known to defend these decisions as the “unavoidable cost” of retaining an international footprint, implying that one had to be cruel to be kind.

In 2070, just over a year ahead of mission launch, Struan’s became the twelfth and final prime contractor for the United Nations Mission to Alpha Centauri. The Secretariat was in panic. It had exhausted the goodwill first of the United States, then the Soviet Union, then the Non-Aligned Movement. After also being shut out of Western Europe, it had turned in desperation to private sponsors. In return for refreshing the Mission’s depleted accounts, the Struan’s tai-pan was allowed to place aboard Unity some twenty thousand employees and counter-parties beholden to himself. A wave of similar deals followed, and contingents embarked by Morgan Industries and the American Reclamation Corporation were each twice as large and much better-funded. Yet the Struan’s contribution was arguably unique.

Struan’s—with roots reaching back to the African slave and Chinese opium trades. Struan’s—a company that never looked to outrun or outgrow its position on the liminal edge of the law. Few secrets were more open than the involvement of Struan’s in-house intelligence services in the sustainment of neo-colonialism. On behalf of his NATO clients, the tai-pan underwrote regimes in Amman, Beirut, Elizabethville, Pretoria, and Tehran. Golden China trusted no one else with the “reeducation” of Communist Party apparatchiks. And who was suspected in the “accidental” death of an Australian prime minister determined to steer his country out of the Commonwealth? It was no exaggeration to say that entire divisions of the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs were kept employed bringing cases against Struan’s and its subsidiaries.

Quote from: Anon.

I clean up my space. I lock up my chest. Dole Yudikon comes and takes all the rest. – Rhyme of Minding, Warm Welcome Children’s Crèche

When picking his representatives on Chiron, Ian Dunross began as he often did: with family. In the Scots peerage, Struan’s was called the Noble House, but the private conduct of its squires strayed far from that standard. The leader of Struan’s Unity contingent was one Roshann Cobb, the tai-pan’s illegitimate son.

Quote from: Vesper Abaddon

In an earlier age, Cobb would have been made a bishop or a cardinal. If very lucky, perhaps packed off to the Americas or India to make his fortune. If unlucky, he might become a midshipman or an adjutant. But this is the Rocket Age. On Planet, he may have a kingdom. – Ken Burns's Planet: A History

Cobb’s qualifications were controversial, but not disqualifying per se. Like his natural-born siblings, he had received a public school education befitting his family’s pretensions, first Eton, then Oxford, where he read philosophy. Five years with MI6 reportedly left him a changed man, and for the better. Gone was the wastrel who had misspent his Kowloon youth as a bet runner. In his place there was a professional crisis manager who took the wheel of Struan’s Hong Kong just as Asia entered a period of severe market instability.

Preserving market share meant papering over failed clinical trials of psycho-dynamic drugs and beating a rash of lawsuits for intellectual property theft, but the proof was in the pudding and the flavor proved palatable. In time, Struan’s gained the patents to protect their investments and the political influence required to lock their competitors out of emerging markets in the Communist Bloc. Young Cobb succeeded in positioning his father’s company as the global leader in funding for research in brain mechanics and lucid dreaming. At a series of symposiums boycotted by most Western scientists, Cobb collected to himself a rogue’s gallery whose bleeding-edge, often ethically execrable research laid the foundations for cold sleep, thought extraction, neural recoding, and more.

The principal interest of a corporate sponsor was return-on-investment. This marked a signal departure from the thinking that had spurred the mission’s very design, for it implied that Unity would be more first grasp than last gasp. To realize profit, it would be at least necessary to restore contact with Earth. Risk managers working for the United Nations gave the Earth a term of no more than fifty years before the next extinction event, yet not even one of Unity’s corporate underwriters agreed that Earth’s affliction was fatal.

Quote from: Colonel Lydda Hesamo

Today I saw the men who have come to lie for their countries. – Personal Diary, Observations at the Basel Accords

[1] The apocryphal play is the brainchild of @etranger01, who made a Grand Strategic Roleplaying game of it on the Sufficient Velocity Forums.

Jonathan Garland, though born to the American purple, was for all practical purposes an expatriate. His childhood influences were ecumenical to say the least, and who could say whether genuine academic accomplishment or a diplomat mother’s connections won him access to the United States Space Force Academy in Panama City? Afterward, a life in United Nations service took him to the furthest edges of human habitation in the solar system and back again.

The Secretariat-General had been delighted to find that their token American lacked any desire to participate in his country’s great civil war and compromised with Washington by placing Garland in a logistician’s role. After the war, Garland went up with the space elevators and stayed there.

Tendentious negotiations over water rights in the Main Belt, urgent rescues in zero-gravity, and precise shepherding of consumable resources—these were the essential kernels of experience that his U.N. masters later came to believe had fitted Garland to command the exodus from his species’ homeworld. He departed Earth having never fired a weapon in anger.

Time-Life hailed him as “the ultimate compromise candidate,” acceptable to Washington because he was American, and to Moscow because he was the closest approximation to Phillip Nolan still on the rolls. A popular saying went that he was just uninteresting enough for the job.

Garland was a non-entity to many of his theoretical subordinates. After several screaming matches with his fellow officers went unpunished, Prokhor Zakharov pegged Garland as "weak-willed, with a tendency to talk when he should act." Francisco d'Almeida had been briefed by the Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado that Garland would have no friends among the mission's multinational command crew and few natural allies in either temperament or outlook. Having reviewed some of the latter's speeches, d'Almeida told his national press that the Unity's captain was "obviously a Utopianist," which in the general's opinion was "not ideal." The U.N. hoped that, at the very least, the Portuguese martinet would complement Garland's softer style but the two men did not socialize ahead of the mission and d'Almeida was never present for Garland's showdowns with other subordinates. Chief of Security Rachael Winzenried, killed by the original meteorite strike, recorded in her diary that Garland seemed never to have made peace with his own decision to bring U.N. Marines aboard ship--even though it was a widely-acknowledged certainty that the U.N. Security Forces were lousy with Holnists. At the founding of Terra Nova, Oscar van de Graaf remembered Garland to his followers as "a pathological consensus-seeker" they were all better off without.

In the moment of extremity, Garland found that himself the victim of two mutinies, one slow-moving, the other fast. After calculating the odds, Garland wanted to eject the damaged main reactor and place Unity on a long slingshot run that would allow it to try the approach to Alpha Centauri again. His Chief Engineer, Zakharov, refused to accept this plan, having calculated that he himself would be unlikely to survive the traumatic return to hibernation. Zakharov's solution was to retreat to the damaged aft reactor bay so that he could personally direct repairs. Before Garland could intervene, the Spartans emerged from hiding, guns blazing.

Coordinated attacks on the bridge damaged sensor feeds to other parts of the ship. Thus Garland had less actionable information about what was happening aboard Unity than his first officer, Francisco d'Almeida. Despite Garland's orders to focus on damage control operations, d'Almeida began waking defenders. (Some, like fellow Portuguese officer Fong Na Spínola, claim that d'Almeida could no longer raise Garland on internal comms when that decision was made.) Nevertheless, the influx of engineers and security personnel was insufficient to either repair the damaged reactor or put down the Spartan revolt, though it certainly slowed life-saving operations and may also have prevented an outcome in which Unity could have been placed in a geosynchronous orbit.

Name: Kleisel Mercator
Rank: Sub-Commander
Position: Commander, Unity Air Group
County of Origin: West Germany
DOB: 4-17-2016
Height: 188cm
Weight: 96kg

Service Record:
Member of first graduating class of Inter-European Air Forces Academy. Flew one of seven Luftwaffe Panavia Tornado combat aircraft during May 27th, 2039 Baltic Sea Intrusion. Credited with 2 aerial kills against Soviet MiG-67N Falchions flown off Soviet aircraft carrier Chiatura, earning Bundeswehr Cross of Honour for Valor.

Hand-picked to participate in groundbreaking West German military mission to Yugoslav Air Force and Air Defense. Stationed at Željava Air Base, an air base tunneled into the side of Plješevica mountain and the headquarters for the country's networked early warning radar system. Duties included strategic planning for OPFOR as part of a two month-long war exercise following the suspicious sinking of the frigate Split in the Albanian port of Durrës in October 2044. Yugoslavia credited the loss to the KGB.

Family emergency in early 2047 resulted in reassignment from North Germany to Graz, Alpine Air Defense Zone. Commanded 76 Tactical Air Wing, part of NATO Response Force, equipped with Panavia Recht multirole fighter. Achieved consistently high readiness levels through frequent drills. Praised by in-country U.S. Commanders for aggressive posture toward potential air space encroachments by WARPAC fliers. Attracted complaints from French and Soviets alleging needlessly provocative conduct. Reassigned to non-combat roles at the insistence of the short-lived Werner detente government, 2052. Disciplined for giving interview with Der Spiegel in which subject questioned the integrity of West Germany's commitment to self-defense, NATO, and the preservation of a united, democratic European Community.

Volunteered for service with West German National Contingent in 2054, formed to respond to the Canadian's Government's urgent request for military assistance to face down the Quebec Emergency. Coordinated missions for German-Danish ground-support squadron as part of Montreal and Gros Morne Campaigns. Loss of three pilots to ground fire (Soviet surface-to-air missiles) caused scandal in West Germany. Approached by Federal Intelligence Service in connection with the then-still-embryonic Price Mutiny. Subject was judged "reliable," but political considerations led to subject's recall.

Twelve years with U.N. Relief Mission in the Indian Ocean (UNRMIO), four enforcing Shamash Demilitarized Zone. On December 25, 2057 Combat Air Patrol above Ussaylas River Valley, recorded gun camera footage of Unidentified Flying Object. Soon reassigned to Islamabad Blast Zone as German military attaché. Frequently volunteered with local Pakistani aid clinics.

Luftwaffe observer attached to German Antarctic Expedition, 2065-68. Prepared first detailed reports on undeclared Soviet installation in Enderby Land. Retired from active service in July 2068. Relocated to Lunar Colony.

Recommended for appointment to U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri by German National Selection Committee in November 2041. Accepted, December 2069. Subject's remit included flight command for Unity's complement of trans-orbital shuttles and conventional fixed-wing and rotorcraft.

Subject was awakened as part of General Francisco d'Almeida's effort to mobilize officers who could direct common action against the ship's then-unknown attackers. Standing over subject's cryopod, uniformed officers of the crew helped him dress and handed him a shredder pistol. Subject was badly injured during destruction of Hangar Bay Ӆ by a Holnist bomber. Stabilized through the interventions of medics working under the protection of shuttle pilot Trung Thi Hoang. Left behind after a nearby defender confirmed subject's identity and record of former service against Free Quebec. Recovered by security forces loyal to Francisco d'Almeida. Current whereabouts unknown.

Psych Profile: Cynic
Answers to Newcomb Nuclear Attitudes Questionnaire indicates that subject suffers from high levels of nuclear anxiety, almost certainly linked to military service.

Friends and relations describe subject as fatalistic, believing that the West had lost the political will to sustain its fight against International Communism. Maintained these views even through the period of abrupt Soviet decline starting circa 2060. Those closest to subject confirmed that, after Ussaylas Incident, he began "methodically searching for answers," and became increasingly convinced that there was "another space race" raging between the West and the Soviets over access to objects of potentially extraterrestrial origin.

U.N. Intelligence Cell found that subject's personal databases included security-locked reports relating to communications with Earth from the Pathfinder Probe, apparently obtained during his time in military service.

Protégé of SETI Vice Chairman Oratile Mokoena, with whom he first corresponded following Ussaylas encounter. Both men later participated in the German Antarctic Expedition. Subject is believed to have visited Mokoena at Lunar Large Array shortly before reporting for mission induction.

Faction: The Memory of Earth
Affinity: Purity
Priorities: Discover, Command
What is the fundamental truth of the universe? Humany is not the only intelligent life.
Why did civilization on Earth fail? We lacked a common external threat strong enough to unite us.
What is needed for the human species to survive, and thrive, on Chiron? The Unity survivors must share in the common struggle against an external threat that compels them to flatter the better angels of their nature.

Social Engineering
Planet's newest arrivals can be sorted into common sub-sets. Reductive, yes, but instructive, too.

Specials
Also called Augments or Perfects, these are colonists with significant generic or cybernetic features that perform measurably beyond a genius-level Olympian on Earth. Specialists are created on Chiron by factions with the requisite tools. The Ascendancy "grows" its Specials through a combination of selective breeding and intensive gene therapy. The University "builds" cyborgs by taking advantage of mind-machine interface. The Dreamers use drugs to permanently alter a subject's neural architecture. Gaian Specials commune directly with the planetary consciousness. Specials are the most productive members of each faction and excel in any role.

Talents
Individuals with high, or even exceptional educational and professional attainment. The archetypal colonist selected by their respective national commission for placement with the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri. All faction leaders are Talents. These individuals typically filled officers' billets on Unity or were among those specially recruited for their professional expertise, especially in the fields of medicine, engineering, and public administration. Talents usually comprise, at most, 10% of a faction's total population. Many factions, especially the Human Ascendancy, the Human Labyrinth, and the New State, afford Talents special privileges and except from them exceptional contributions in return. Talents are exceptionally productive and happy. Talents are suitable for any role.

Thinkers
Dedicated to a life of contemplation, usually aided by advanced mental techniques or psychotropic drugs. These individuals are comparable to the Mentats of Dune and receive intensive training to enhance memory, perception, and pattern recognition to eidetic levels. Thinkers often perform their analyses with the help of computers. Thinkers improve doctrinal research. A Thinker is not a scientist; rather, a philosopher or strategist who advises faction leadership. They can be exceptional administrators. Thinkers are highly specialized and are wasted in roles that do not exploit their unique abilities to the fullest.

Technicians
Those who perform skilled labor other than as part of faction administration, such as engineers, skilled laborers, and professional soldiers. Technicians provide significant boosts to faction productivity. Technicians are required to build certain types of Base Facility or complete a Secret Project.

Overseers
Persons who supervise citizen, convict, drone, and robot populations. Overseers are an indispensable tempering influence in factions that practice subjugation. They reside in a precarious social position. Overseers cancel Action Pool maluses arising from an excess of unfree subjects and reduce the probability of drone revolt.

Librarians
Individuals trained to find, understand, synthesize, and communicate vast quantities of data from a myriad of sources. Experts in the use of the Datalinks and Planetary Networks. Librarians improve tech research rates and increase a faction’s Action Pool. Most Librarians are scientists. Librarians have usually received surgery to equip them for mind-machine interface.

Citizens
Persons of ordinary mental and physical capacity who are generally accorded the full spectrum of rights and privileges afforded by a faction.

Drones
Unskilled laborers. Drones are a combination of prisoners, slaves, indentured servants, and anyone who has been nerve-stapled. (The nerve staple dramatically reduces cognitive, executive, and motor functions.) "Drone" is a pejorative term.

Robots
Artificial lifeforms designed to mimic human behavior. Robots do not suffer morale penalties and are not subject to the psychic afflictions suffered by their human creators on Chiron.

[[TRUNCATED - see meta doc]]

The Original Seven

Gaia's Stepdaughters, led by Lady Deirdre Skye, the Conservationist, wish to live "in dialogue" with the natural world around them. Skye believes that patriarchal structures led our species to destroy its original homeworld.
The University of Planet seeks to pursue a program of unrestricted research. The Scientist, Academician Prokhor Zakharov, believes that everything is knowable through empiricism. He will not allow superstition or folkways to restrain the kinds of inquiries that could create the tools to make life better.
The Human Labyrinth, also called the Hive, is dominated by Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, the Despot. Yang has established a rigid and highly repressive caste society. He is instructing proteges in the mental techniques and ethical precepts that he believes will uniquely merit them to be stewards of those in their not-so-tender care.
The Centauri Monopoly, led by the Mogul, Nwabudike Morgan, seeks to achieve a planetary energy monopoly. Morgan has a seductive thesis: nothing went wrong on Earth; it simply ran out of resources. We should change nothing. In time, Planet, too, will be depleted of value, and our species will again turn its sights to richer pickings. Happiness is uninterrupted consumption.
The Lord's Conclave wants to place faith at the center of the human experience. Sister Miriam Godwinson, the Prophet, asserts that there is special value in our species' religious inheritance, which contains an enduring set of historical lessons for right living that still apply today. Her followers value what can be experienced over what can be communicated to others.
The Spartan Federation is a haven for followers of the Survivalist creed, which offers a big tent under which are clustered those who wish a life of rigorous physical and moral discipline, as well as many Social Darwinists. Colonel Santiago's vision is to hone a warrior society that will keep itself sharp through preparation for war.
Commissioner Pravin Lal, the Humanitarian, leads The Peacekeeping Forces, which seek to enforce the principles of the United Nations Charter and so secure the rights and privileges that Natural Law tells us are the entitlement of every sentient being.

The New Kids on the Block

The Hunters of Chiron, led by J.T. Marsh, the Hunter, live wild and free in a deadly new environment that challenges them to test the limits of both their mettle and their endurance. Marsh believes technological dependence sapped our problem-solving capacities. The Hunters are a meditation on the masculine ideal captured in the fiction of Louis L'Amour.
Director Tamineh Pahlavi is a Supremacist. Her Human Ascendancy wants to force the creation of a new species uniquely suited to life on Chiron. Pahlavi is a proponent of gerontocracy: the "experienced" should lead. Relates to the human fear of mortality and replacement.
Sergeant "Pete" Landers, the Defender, leads The Human Tribe, a collection of stowaways who subscribe to the vision of civil society propounded by anti-disassociationist cult leader Jean-Baptiste Keller. The Tribe seeks to build societies bound by shared blood and place, immune to the lures of ideology. This faction is essentially an "answer" to the atomizing effects of the digital age.
Contre-Amirale Raoul André St. Germaine, the Aristocrat, has convinced his followers to trade a measure of social freedom for promises of security. His paternalistic society, the New State promises a place with purpose for every member. St. Germaine has taken his followers deep beneath Chiron's oceans to ensure that they are properly safe from negative influences. Inspired by a strange crossing of the problems arising from 9/11 and Jacques Cousteau.
The Dreamers of Chiron, led by Factor Roshann Cobb and Dr. Aleigha Cohen, wish to look inward for answers, exploring the depths of the human psyche in an urgent search to understand what makes us succeed or fail. Cobb, the Dreamer, is an addict; Cohen, the Transgressor, is a Cleckleyan psychopath.
The New Two Thousand, answering to Governor Oscar van de Graaf, the Empresario, signed terms with the U.N. that guaranteed them the right to split off from the Unity Mission after 5 years to attempt an experiment in independent colonization. Members have invested as stakeholders, although many are indentures. Van de Graaf proposes to form a society of individuals driven by their interest in real property. An homage to the cattle barons who "won the West" according to certain narratives.
The Shapers of Chiron, led by Coordinator Shoichiro Nagao, The Monk, shall remark Chiron in Earth's own image as penance, and extend the promise of salvation to those left behind.
The Memory of Earth, led by Commander Kleisel Mercator, the Cynic, believes that the best guarantee of survival on Planet is to unite against a common, external foe. Mercator is warning of an extraterrestrial threat. This faction is inspired by the idea that the end of the Cold War created political space for dangerous divisions in Western society.
The Children of the Atom, probably misnamed, are led by Dr. Johann Anhaldt, the Mediator. Anhalt was among Earth's foremost experts in machine learning. Anhaldt proposes that the societies of "Old Earth" failed to trust machine intelligence, which he felt confident could have identified unexpected "trades" to avert war and other catastrophes. On Planet, his followers are following a settlement plan prepared for them by an Artificial Intelligence.
The Watchers of Chiron are a collection of constables and convicts led by Commandant Sardul Singh, the Planner. Singh, a former prison warden, is of the belief that behavior is a matter of nurture, not nature, and seeks to create living spaces and conditions that will "cure" his charges of their anti-social outlooks.

My Take on the Backstories
In my story, Deirdre is as much eco-terrorist as conservationist. Zakharov is amoral to the point of evil. Yang is a despot deluding himself about the high-mindness of his aims. Morgan is exactly what he seems: a megalomaniac (and probably also living out his trauma as a person who was expected to live his whole life a victim). Miriam represents the best traditions of selflessness and grace for others. Santiago is a disciplinarian but not a tyrant. The Peacekeeping Forces are both bureaucratic and high-minded, but their aggressive impulses come from the right place.

The Hunters are nomads who just want to hunt the biggest dinosaur, and in the process provide a unique set of services to the other factions as scouts, merchants, and service-providers. The Ascendancy is a hegemonic threat to everyone. The Human Tribe just wants to be left alone, but is ultimately called to do righteous battle alongside the Peacekeepers. The New State is a less-bad version of the Hive. The Dreamers are a moral cesspit that beat out all others for cruelty but are too debilitated by their own debauchery to escape the reckoning that must come their way. The New Two Thousand is an unhappy obligarchy: van de Graaf, like St. Germaine, plays the paterfamilias, to the distress of all the other factions. The Shapers eventually bring on global catastrophe. Mercator is probably right, but nobody is especially worried. Anhaldt hides a dark secret--he's just the front for an Artificial Intelligence. As for Singh, he really means well, but his methods are rather questionable.

Ideologies versus Themes
Some of the new factions seem like they deal less with ideology or social organization and more with specific projects or fascinations on the part of their putative leaders. These include the New State (ocean exploration), the Dreamers (the mind as final frontier), the Children of the Atom (their "pet" A.I.), the Shapers (remake Earth), the Ascendancy (grow neo-Sapien), and the Restoration (previously unmentioned, but consisting of soldiers under Marcel Salan who want to return to Earth).

Asking Similar Questions
Several factions explore the same question of whether people are fit to govern themselves, or whether somebody (or something) else should govern them: the Hive, the Peacekeepers, the New State, and the Children of the Atom.

Backstories and Their Impact on the Quality of Faction Design
I fear that I have freighted Zakharov and Morgan in particular with so much backstory story, they are no longer easily recognizable as tropes. Zakharov has a personal fascination with longevity treatments that reduce the need for Pahlavi's character. Morgan's personal quest to avoid becoming anybody's puppet by buying his way to impunity is arguably very interesting, but far from his traditional role as Elon Musk-type provocateur.

In other cases, the backstory is something worth exploring. Van de Graaf's story in particular ties into that of Pahlavi (a former employee), Cohen and Anhaldt (former contractors), and Landers and Morgan (former adversaries). Landers has scores to settle with Van de Graaf and Santiago. Morgan knows to look out for van de Graaf and Cobb. Godwinson probably has strong opinions about van de Graaf given their mutual experience as high-level officials during the Second American Civil War. Lal could theoretically come in for a drubbing by everyone given his high-level role in U.N. policy-making prior to Mission Launch. Marsh and Morgan may know each other professionally because of their involvement in African war zones.

Quote from: General William C. Westmoreland

Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind. - Datalinks

Node suppression is the activity of tracing and punishing unauthorized speech on faction Network Nodes.

During the Frontier period, when factions were limited to a primitive intranet and leisure time was at a premium, node suppression was an ancillary duty of Base Operations to the extent it was even attempted. As the Planetary Network grew more crowded, however, all participating factions engaged in at least some node suppression as a security measure.

Each faction had its own unique methods of node suppression.

Offenders paid .05¤ per violation at Morgan Mines, 16¤ at Morgan Entertainment, and faced immediate severance of employment at Morgan Robotics.

For the incorrigible, University deans reset network permissions to "read only." A Tribal could be excluded from the nodes altogether by community vote and was assigned extra shifts on gate-, fire-, or wormwatch. The Peacekeeping Forces were more ingenious still: especially outrageous behavior was simply advertised to the full colony during the faction's regular Town Halls.

In the New State, armed "Node Trackers" enforced the faction's strict, terraced speech codes. Drones enjoyed considerable leeway to speak amiss, but higher ranks were liable to be court-martialed.

Quote from: CEO Nwabudike Morgan

The court's determination was that our monopoly position would stifle innovation. They did not understand that only those who are already very powerful can afford the high price of failure. - The Ethics of Greed

Nwabudike Morgan enchanted those who met him. In their sealed reports, intelligence officers from five countries wrote with obvious affection for the "honest thief" who treated encounters with security forces like a game and supplied good intelligence in return for favors and freedom. Politicians felt the same. Trust-busting U.S. senator Valience Hill Taft (R-OH), no stranger to political entanglements with the world's richest man, captured the sentiment of most colleagues in his 2080 autobiography: "Morgan was willing to pay when he offended. If he stuck a knife in your back, you knew it was jeweled and that you could keep it." Unity Captain Jonathan Garland even gave Morgan, a confirmed stowaway, the liberty of his bridge.

Morgan's appeal was unique among his fellow faction leaders because it arose mostly from a lack of any axes to grind. His message was simple reassurance: anyone who followed him could expect a return to form. He was not proposing a radical reassessment of the survivors' relation to the soil. The faction did not plan to chop down the xenofungus so that its agronomists could plant a million palms. The morning would never start with enforced calisthenics. You could pay somebody to take your turn on watch. There would be no spectacular adjustments to the familiar social order. A priest was just a priest; a physicist just a physicist. The Centauri Monopoly wanted you to have a better life through hard work. No gimmicks.

Quote from: CEO Nwabudike Morgan

The complete chaos of our departure from Unity is the perfect endorsement of free exchange between communities. Trade is an instinct. We took a crate because it was there, not because of what was in it. We knew that every object aboard would have a future purpose—a value. Not to us, perhaps, but certainly to someone else. And remember: that “someone else” was still shooting at us. - The Personal Diaries

Without a specific end in mind beyond mere accumulation, Morgan's people loaded their Landing Pods with whatever containers happened to be at hand. As one of the mission's commercial investors, Morgan understood better than most that U.N. quartermasters would have placed aboard few items that did not have some direct relationship to mission survival. Lack of fuss helped them to work with greater speed. In the end, they landed with three times the material carried down to Planet by their competitors, and much of it immediately useful for base-building. The rest, they strapped down to the beds of Unity Rovers and dutifully hawked to their neighbors, swapping for what they wanted instead.

Quote from: Colonel Corazón Santiago

To be a Survivalist is to live out the proud pledge not to burden others. The traditional role of government is inherently problematic for Survivalists. If I don't require as many services, it is not necessarily to bind me by as many rules. - Planet: A Survivalist's Guide

Santiago's Holnist allies were shocked by her intention to create a well-ordered society in which asceticism was among the highest virtues. The Spartan faction was soon roiled by civil war.

The memory of Holnist outrages aboard Unity had a long half-life for their surviving victims. The Tribe considered itself to be in a permanent state of vendetta with Santiago and her followers. Oscar van de Graaf likewise convinced the stakeholders of Terra Nova to pay considerable bounties for Spartan prisoners, whom the faction set to life terms of hard labor. The Peacekeeping Forces placed the last Spartan on trial for crimes against humanity as late as M.Y. 83.

Santiago's evolving ideology seemed to validate the general consensus that the Spartans remained an imminent and unrelenting threat even after achieving their stated goal of seizing the means to build an independent colony. Like Nathan Holn before her, Santiago produced a self-contradictory set of precepts to guide her people. The Spartan Creed stated that "the true warrior does not pursue violence against the unprepared," and warned Spartans never to shame themselves by joining battle with adversaries of blatantly inferior quality.

Yet the same document also said that the Spartan "strikes at the enemy wherever he or she finds them." Spartan society was divided between citizens and helots. Active soldiers and retired veterans belonged to the former class. Prisoners and those unable to fight were remanded to the latter. The Creedo taught that subjugation and labor were fitting punishments for those too weak to defend themselves or others--a condition for which they were held morally culpable.

Quote from: Spartan Battle Manual

It is well for designers to remember that their weapons will only sometimes be used as intended; more often, soldiers will find that they must apply shovel as hammer. Some of the most fearsome weapons ever put to war—the tank-killing German ’88 or the man-shredding Ontos—began their careers with very different roles in mind.

The AT-RDV, All-Terrain Rocket Delivery Vehicle, was a prototype self-propelled artillery car built and operated by the Human Tribe during the months-long Battles of the Slowwind. To build the AT-RDV, Tribal mechanics combined components of a fire-gutted Unity combat car and two Unity Rover kits. All work was performed under tight secrecy in the interior machine shop of the Tribe's second Landing Pod, the John Brown.

Three rear-mounted launch tubes fired two-stage cluster rockets. Each warhead, which broke apart at a maximum height of 2,000', released 8 bomblets equipped with chaos charges fused for contact-explosion. The three launchers fired in tandem, one rocket at a time, from revolving magazines. The AT-RDV's rear cargo deck incorporated slide-out racks for one full replacement barrage, pre-indexed into speedloaders. A small mid-body fighting compartment gave the car's eight accompanying artillerists a reasonably well-protected (and slightly elevated) position from which to serve as many as four machine-guns.

Battlefield experience demonstrated the AT-RDV's unsuitability for its intended purpose, reduction of the Spartan mountain fortress of Xerxion. The AT-RDV was withdrawn from active service and reequipped in M.Y. 5 to be able to deploy anti-personnel mines in lieu of the original chaos payload. In M.Y. 6, the field-deployed AT-RDV was overrun by a mindworm boil.

Quote from: Vice dean Spiros Theophanos

Information is power. I cannot learn except in dialogue. The secreting of knowledge is an act of tyranny, camoflaged as "proprietary research" by Morgan's overseers and "prudence" by Conclave synods. On a world about which we know so little, it is also tantamount to murder as surely as if one has pulled the trigger of a gun. - Opening Remarks to the 5th Congress of the Academy of Planetary Scienes

Tenured faculty of the University of Planet received a fixed annual energy stipend with which to fund their ongoing research.

Instructors, recent graduates, and tenured faculty seeking a more generous energy allotment, were required to appear before a tenure committee every three years to defend the value and pace of their output. The committee handed down recommendations that faction leadership usually applied without change.

The defense was notoriously demanding. Approvals skewed markedly in favor of the STEM fields. The average time from award of a Ph.D. to that of tenure from M.Y. 10 through 70 was nine years. About half of tenured researchers who chose to come before the committee appealing for increases were rejected each time.

The University population in M.Y. 72 included 4,720 tenured positions out of more than 20,632 total members of the academy and another 25,006 students below the doctoral level. Among those with tenure, just 82 were social scientists.

Career came before virtually all other considerations in University life. A researcher's wealth, matching prospects, and place of residence were closely correlated with their field of study. Auxiliary staff were even less secure. They and their families were traded like favors between bases.

A Hunter 'Thumper tank prepares to stimulate a fungal bloom on barren ground. [1]

Quote from: Chairman Sheng-ji Yang

The purpose of every profession is to reduce complicated problems to a matter of routine. In the land of men whose business is to segment and prescribe, the most supreme threat is the one your opponent has not imagined. - The Small Book

The first reported atrocity on Planet was perpetrated in M.Y. 5. At the Oracle, defending Saber Corporation mercenaries modified a Unity supply crawler to deploy nerve gas pods against incoming Pilgrim Regulators.

Chairman Sheng-ji Yang was proud of those who took up arms in defense of his kingdom. He memorialized them in miniatures put on public display to inculcate appropriate feelings of gratitude and general patriotism. Over time, he became an accomplished artist, capable of incorporating such details as the homemade grenades clipped to the belt of the loader in the piece featured here. Many of the explosives were too bulk and irregular to be pitched in the traditional manner and would be used as mines instead. Mess tins were a common casing. The large versions, issued to graduates of the mission's Martian Survival Course, could carry nearly 3kg of explosives and shrapnel.

Separately, Hive Security perfected the tactic of using man-pack mortars to launch knock-out gas at prospective targets. Although in theory this made it easier for them to take their victims as slaves, they rarely did so, executing incapacitated targets instead. Yang was keen to couch his reasons in terms that implied ruthlessness, but the Hive lacked food resources and could not have fed the prisoners it took.

Deviator weapons were always subject to focused fire. This tank is protected by skirt-mounted cope cages, counter-measures projectors, a laser-reflective coating, and the four long-range acoustic devices mounted at each edge of its rectangular hull. These weapons could broadcast at volumes up to 200dB, providing highly effective area defense against both enemy soldiers and incoming rounds.

Dreamer commanders began receiving "deviator" weaponry around M.Y. 170. Such fighting platforms consisted of an anti-personnel projectile launcher configured for wide-area spread. Deviators fired gas-injected membranes of sodium alginate and calcium chloride that released a somnacin-derived compound as they burst or dissolved. Without activation of a secondary device, the victims would merely hallucinate to the point of temporary incapacitation. However, if the operator utilized a directional speaker, and provided they were capable of speaking the Ur-language recovered by Dreamer neuroarchaeologists, they could exercise strong powers of suggestion over the afflicted. The Dreamers used Deviator bombardment to reverse pending routs of their notoriously shaky militia. (Once the original Saber Corporation mercenaries contracted to Roshann Cobb were no longer combat-effective, the faction's fighting ability sank to a dangerous low point.) [2]

[1] The Thumper was a unit in the Westwood Studios computer game Dune 2000 capable of attracting the sandworms native to the desert planet Arrakis.

[2] The Deviator Tank was a unique House Ordos unit in the 1992 Westwood Studios computer game Dune II and derivative titles. The Deviator had the same capability to temporarily convert enemy units described here.

Tribal solar collectors used variable-geometry mechanics and could quickly retract into protected shelters in the presence of danger.

At the very edge of the Uranium Flats where sand meets sea sits Elektrichestvokupol. Encroaching Hivemen forced the University of Planet to abandon its cherished megaproject at the eleventh hour. Zakharov's fighting strength was almost entirely devoted to the Spartan front. An under-strength company of University Enforcement at the power station withdrew even before evacuating plant staff. Yang's drones retrieved many of the defenders' discarded smart rifles, happy to replace their inferior hand weapons.

Yang's laborers swarmed the plant within hours of its capture. Upon discovering that they lacked the infrastructure to keep it operational, they dismantled and carted off the moveable machinery. The plant's fuel rods had already been irradiated during low-power testing; its new owners wisely left the reactor in SCRAM condition. The damaged shell of the reactor complex, called the "sarcophagus," stands a monument to their victory.

The Centauri Monopoly raised hundreds of wind traps in congenial locations across their territories. Morgan assured his shareholders that the huge and obviously vulnerable filters offered economies of scale.

Quote from: The Conclave Bible

Ye shall run every path, and cross every water. - Datalinks

Members of the Conclave's Parke Expedition look out across the High Spires. The towers of Koppernigk Observatory are visible just above the horizon.

Sister Godwinson ordered Major Vinchenson Parke to create a natural inventory of Planet's largest and tallest mountain range. To assist him, the faction spared no expense. Working with Morganite victualers, Parke equipped more than two hundred people to his precise specifications.

At the uppermost altitudes, climbers wore fully-pressurized suits to assist with breathing. The thick outer garment protected against UV light exposure.

Mechanical mules transported the expedition's best-known accompaniment: heavy-duty wind shelters reinforced for gale-strength conditions. The dome-shaped inventions bled waste heat and so prevented snow accumulation that risked trapping their occupants. Run-off from this process provided drinking water.

Like climbers of an earlier era, the Believers used recoilless rifles and lasers to tame the deep snowpack.

Quote from: CEO Nwabudike Morgan

A policeman, while taking a bribe from me, once asked why I had arranged for the execution of a competitor. I told him that it was for the same reason the government maintained the Homelands. He, of course, did not understand. - The Ethics of Greed

From time immemorial, violence has gone in the footsteps of money, either to take or secure it.

Neighbors who refused to purchase power from the Morganite grid were entitled to live in the dark. Morgan Base Operations called it "unscheduled disconnection."

Corporate Security troopers received a .015% share of all non-faction energy put on-grid and a bounty pegged at .050% the value of competitors' assets eliminated.

A Conclave loimós, sketched after firing a shoulder-launched anti-tank guided missile. The Stickyfoam projector and combat claw are a classic pairing for this melee fighter.

Powered combat exo-frames were already in widespread use on Earth when Unity left the Lunar Cradle in May 2071. The United States first field tested their prototypes in the Indo-Pakistani Nuclear Exclusion Zone performing decontamination. Communist China proved the technology's suitability for urban search and rescue.

Nuclear-powered artificial musculature propelled the suits at loping runs of more than 70kph. Proficient operators bounded two-story buildings, confident that they would land upright thanks to the onboard gyroscopes.

Operators such as the U.S. Army, Soviet Military Air Forces, and People's Liberation Army used a mixture of smart guns, autocannons, microlasers, man-pack missiles, and drones. On Chiron, military technology lagged generations behind, notwithstanding the concessions that had to be made for flame or Stickyfoam due to wormthreat. Several high-grade suits made it aboard Unity only for their early possessors to struggle with upkeep and repair. Grenade launchers were therefore a simple favorite, but shortages of other-than-sub-lethal ammunition meant that they usually fired homemade shotgun rounds, smoke, or irritants. Factions that had gone aboard Unity armed--Spartans, Tribals, and Charterists--were less constrained, but even their weapons were of an older vintage: 7.6mm UN-standard hand and 9mm impact models.

In M.Y. 17, Governor Oscar van de Graaf famously felt himself on the receiving end of too much attention from the Centauri Monopoly's Corporate Security. The New Two Thousand assaulted Morganite strip mines with a pair of Cadillac-Gage Wakíŋyaŋ Powered Combat Suits. Rather than rely on their 5.56mm chest-mounted anti-personnel pods or single 2.6" light anti-armor weapons systems, the 9' tall attackers deployed backpack-mounted pile drivers that successfully collapsed the enemy's drifts.

Artist's rendering of a Unity Submersible.

Quote from: Jacques-Yves Cousteau

To enlarge the human perspective, to build on knowledge for future generations, to identify dangers, and to chart the course to a better world: If these are the goals of the explorer, then everyone—voyager, scientist and citizen, parent and child—is engaged in humanity’s momentous expedition. - The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus, Datalinks

Its Aquatic Operations Section provided the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri with sailors, equipment, and leadership to begin the exploration of Chiron's deep seas.

Unity carried dozens of accomplished naturalists, including botanist Deirdre Skye; land management specialist J.T. Marsh; decorated military submariner Raoul André St. Germaine; Kleisel Mercator, a veteran of the German Antarctic Expedition; and alpinist Vinchenson Parke.

Marsh in particularly believed that the uniquely inhospitable ecology would play an indispensable role in toughening the first colonists mentally for the unknown challenges of governance ahead. Forward Contact Teams seemed like daredevils to their base-bound bretheren, living "outside the wire" of sensor networks and flame traps that provided the best known insurance against infestation by fungus and mindworms.

At sea, the New State took up a similar role, daring the abyssal depths. Faction firsts included tapping Planet's hydrothermal vents and organizing sustainable kelp farms. Their indispensable tool: the Unity Submersible. These were small, short-ranged exploration and work craft designed to operate from surface-going motherships, from which they could replenish and receive repairs.

The submersibles were an analogue to the Unity Rover. Both used electric motors primarily. The submersibles were designed around a magnetohydrodynamic drive. It was hoped that the technology would prove more durable than classical propeller assemblies. Microjets positioned at the edges of the dart-shaped craft gave it excellent maneuverability. The minimum crew of three was protected by a thick titanium hull, which meant an impressively deep crush depth. Many New State sailors owed their lives to this innovation, which kept them alive until rescue. Using virtual reality simulation, an engineer could extend telemanipulators to perform gross work or fine.

The basic submersibles were mostly unarmed. For military operations, an external torpedo mount sometimes took the place of the usual waldoes. The New State did not secure the small batch of torpedoes present in the Unity Armory, and they were presumed lost with the ship. Early attempts to machine crude replacements ended in catastrophe. A stopgap solution called for changing the nature of submersible warfare altogether. Rather than fix their targets and fire from stand-off distance, New State submersibles raced ahead of them to deploy spools of electrically-charged filament wire. A submersible that made contact with these charged filaments went dead in the water. The "entangler" could continue to deliver periodic pulses until repair activity ceased for lack of air, or because the victim had sunk below crush depth. Later improvements to this system involved vibrating the wire at frequencies that turned it into a vehicle-scale garrote, a target's own inertia effecting the inevitably fatal cut.

An android shows aberrant behavior at Gaia's High Garden.

Quote from: Sister Miriam Godwinson

We must stop seeking insights from mere tools. No machine, being a purely derivative construction of Man, can exceed his understanding. Though it may be faster in the realm of calculations and precision, a robot is merely a complicated set of switches and contains within itself nothing of genuine mystery to us. - Chasing the Divine [1]

Each of the human settlements had a distinctive relationship to artificial intelligence. All used machines, including robots, but only some used androids.

The University of Planet led in the early use of android servitors, which it unleashed upon practically every task. The ubiquity of these helpmates gave rise to periodic debates about the nature of sentience and their personhood within the faction, but familiarity bred contempt, and prevailing opinion held that the child could never exceed the parent in merit. The University of Planet took the opposite approach, quickly reserving rights and privileges to robots of a certain computational capacity or possessing programming of a certain nature.

The very complexity of thinking machines attracted speculation about whether other complex systems, including the human brain, were but facsimiles built with different materials. Such thinking was deeply unsettling to the Conclave given its official belief that humans were a special creation of the ineffable Divine. Sister Miriam Godwinson warned her flock not to succumb to fascination with artificial intelligence. God, she said, could not be found in what humans themselves could make. The kirtarchs never forbade the creation or use of machines themselves, but Believers learned to treat androids with special fear, as if their dispassionate mien might be somehow contagious.

The Human Tribe had an almost equally uncomfortable attitude toward technology. Jean-Baptiste Keller had been a Luddite on grounds that technology exacerbated "celebration of the self," so that, indulged too often, it produced a supremely selfish individual, alive only to their own urges and unfit for the society of others. Yet the simultaneous emphasis of Tribal thought on the serendipity of geographic closeness produced a countervailing invitation to begin examining androids from the perspective of the Kellerites' own historical experience so that certain Supremacists within the faction came gradually to the conclusion that denying the equality of sufficiently advanced, self-aware machines was inconsistent with Tribal virtues.

Factions that celebrated the human body as something especially praiseworthy, including the Stepdaughters, Hunters, Spartans, and Ascendancy, associated the casual use of androids with chronic civilizational indolence. It was one thing to employ a robot for special applications beyond natural human ability, but anything else smacked of opportunity lost to improve oneself through exertion. Director Tamineh Pahlavi and her geneticists were particularly concerned about the possibilities for divergent evolution: what if the very ubiquity of labor-saving devices in a society could produce weaklings down through the generations?

Some were indifferent to the use of androids for either labor or companionship. Shaper thinkers were largely silent about the number and role of androids in their midst.

Morgan worked to make the inclusion of labor-saving robots a near-certainty within every household. Faction marketers sold androids as the all-purpose solution--for disability, emotional maladjustment, or even just boredom. The real reason for the Monopoly's position was that robots were more energy-efficient than people: the faction saved energy when people stopped insisting upon doing for themselves.

[1] Thanks to my friend Devin for his editorial contributions!

Quote from: Contre-Amirale Raoul André St. Germaine

It is not disagreement we punish, but dissent. You disagree? Fine. But hold your tongue after the decision has been made, lest you provoke doubt in lesser men. Nothing better serves a sailor than confidence, and nothing so dooms him but the creeping thought that his course is already wrong. - The Discipline of Obedience

New State multi-mission submarine Trudeau retrieves divers collecting Planetpearls in the disputed Serran Rectangle.

The combination of open torpedo tubes, forward and ventral, with active running lights suggest that the boat is deploying a volley of survey probes.

Some of the most interesting features of the Châteaurenault class, of which this boat was the first, were the large protruding storage bays and four boom-deployed electrostatic conductors that dominated the lower half of the hull form. The Trudeau and her sisters carried no strategic armament, and while they could be puissant warriors in their own defense, their purpose was, in fact, resource-gathering.

A Châteaurenault would locate the trunk lines of an opposing factions' submersible energy grid and tap it directly, drawing off as much as 420,000 MWh at a single contact. [1] This was as much energy as could be generated in a month by a large nuclear power station.

When such ventures were interrupted, the long-barreled laser mount located to the rear of the conductors simply cut the adversary's lines as the would-be thief made to flee.

On its longest deployment, Trudeau led Morganite Corporate Security mini-subs on a four-day chase back to friendly waters, sinking at least six of the pursuers before making good the escape. Living to fight another day was not enough, however; the Morganite response inflicted damage so great that the Trudeau lost its stolen cargo. As a result, the New State was forced to abandon its forward base at Motte and Bailey.

Two-person Morganite submarine pursuit form. Because Corporate Security relied heavily on fixed defenses, these were very lightly armed, using low-power marking lasers projected from the twin directors mounted aft of the prow to guide microtorpedos. The inadequacy of their weapons and variance with doctrine rarely prevented pursuits: pilots were more than willing to risk themselves for the enormous bounties Morgan paid out for destroying intruders.

[1] Inspired by the Frank Herbert short story with the same premise, The Dragon in the Sea (1956).

Spartan Myrmidons race to take up positions during the final Gaian assault on Sparta Command.

Quote from: Colonel Corazón Santiago

I don't have an objection to peace. To the resolution of hunger, thirst, sickness, or suffering. But the delegitimation of all war is not these things. The United Nations insisted that every disagreement could be negotiated, every conflict zone embargoed. They disliked the pestilence of war. But some issues cannot be submerged. Whatever happened to morality? To principle? Who was it that said, the United States could not endure permanently, half free and half slave? 'It will become all one thing, or all the other.' How did this happen? To achieve lasting peace, fight a war. - The Council of War

As one might expect, the combat veterans among Chiron's faction leaders usually took a sanguine view of armed conflict.

For some, it was a question of morality. Pete Landers, who himself had come to Kellerism only as an accidental byproduct of indiscriminate persecution, mobilized his Human Tribe to neutralize once and future enemies. Mercy, he warned, was the first chapter in a long book titled Grief. [1] Marsh of the Hunters used violence to enforce the freedoms of movement that he believed were essential to exercising one's full humanity. Santiago posited that a society unable to identify any red lines over which to fight and die was committing the political and cultural suicide that preceded physical extermination.

A squad of Tribal militia prepare a meal somewhere in the Protoforest. Dust masks protect their lungs from the carcinogenic smokes of nearby wildfires. They will dine on native subrid.

Quote from: Thomas C. Shelling

The power to hurt -- the sheer unacquisitive, unproductive power to destroy things that somebody treasures, to inflict pain and grief -- is a kind of bargaining power, not easy to use but used often. - Arms and Influence, Datalinks

Another set of factions pursued war as a kind of commercial venture. For Oscar van de Graaf, war conveniently reduced the number of hungry mouths at any table. Both the Houses of Morgan and Struan used violence to compel negotiating partners to do as they wished, though a determined resistance could usually fend off fighters motivated only by a promise of pay. Yang, Pahlavi, and Cobb didn't scruple to provide even that much context to their plundering expeditions.

Crusading factions fought wars in pursuit of specific ideological objectives. Landers, Godwinson, and Lal from time to time alleged that their military operations were in fact humanitarian interventions on behalf of those too weak to defend themselves. For Lady Deirdre Skye, this meant Planet itself.

A Morganite auxiliary shoulders an Impact-era man-portable air-defense system during a demonstration to prospective buyers at Morgan Metagenics. Morgan Defense Products did a tidy business upgrading older weapons to the "Smart" standard through the use of active guidance systems and integration with whole-of-battlefield command-and-control suites. The eye-controlled, augmented reality computer technology fitted to the helmet allows the artilleryman to "paint" targets in multiple different modalities and redirect the projectile in-flight.

[1] I got this terrific little maxim from Thrawn Ascnendancy: Greater Good (2021) by Timothy Zahn.

Quote from: The Cumberland Crew

It was then we fired our broadsides into her ribs of steel / yet no break in her armor made; no damage did she feel. - Traditional, Datalinks

Fast-moving Combat Trikes gave the Unity crew armed reconnaissance capability with better survivability and higher top speed than Rovers, and were similarly rugged, but lacked much of the other utility, including cargo capacity and suitability for towing.

The Trikes' paired 20mm autocannons could shred xenofungal tubers as easily as sheet metal stockades. The Gaians used a brace of Trikes to assault the New Two Thousand's whaling station at Fort Enterprise. A stray round pierced the containment of the colony's Landing Pod, poisoning the area for more than a century before Shaper liquidators completed reclamation work.

Without satellite or radio interconnection to coordinate their movements, the Trikes were considerably less effective combatants than on the battlefields of Old Earth.

Quote from: Dr. Ian Malcolm

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should. - Jurassic Park, Datalinks

Of the numerous factions struggling for primacy on Chiron, three made arguments specifically about ecology.

In their first days at Gaia's Landing, the Stepdaughters had carried with them Earth's botanical and zoological legacy. Their domed bases boasted an almost encyclopedic collection of living artifacts. In council, Deirdre and her sisters spent hours debating how best to foster the menagerie for which they had spilled so much blood in Hydroponics Bay 11Γ. Like other survivors, Gaians, if more than ordinarily curious about their surroundings, were nevertheless unflagging in the expansion of their sensor grids and promptly eradicated encroaching blooms, as prescribed by the Forward Contact Teams. Only in time did Lady Skye come to doubt the efficacy of "fighting with the land," as she called it. Small-scale greenhouse agriculture was expensive. To supply familiar fruits, vegetables, and insect proteins, an artificial ecosystem had first to be established, then hermetically sealed. Skye aspired to produce hybrid foodstuffs--still suitable for human consumption, but considerably less labor-intensive--if for no other reason than efficiency. This temptation, which the Gaians were first to heed, led them naturally to make insightful observations about the correlation between adaptive living and reduced planetary immunological response.

The Shapers, sometimes derided as a high-technology mortuary cult, approached their new homeworld without humility. In his Planet: A History, Burns reduced the divergence between Gaians and Shapers to a question of guilt. Lady Deirdre Skye posited that men had ruined Old Earth. Her philosophy focused on avoidance of repetition, but she and her people identified as disfavored victims of that original sin, whereas Coordinator Shoichiro Nagao assumed personal responsibility for those same ecological nightmares. Deirdre approached Chiron as a living entity with its own agency that, unless respected, would fail, dooming the colonists altogether. Nagao treated Planet as a petri dish containing growth medium--an environment he would remake to specification. Gaians built their bases into the side of fungal stalks because they could not fabricate building material more suitable to heat dispersion and moisture retention. Shapers injected the planetary crust with fracturing fluids and pumped out CO₂. The resulting stimulation of fungal and worm activity was of course unwelcome, but nothing Shaper Liquidators were not trained to handle.

The Hunter Creedo put it that a man was no man who could resist the call of the wild. Hunters "lived rough," taking pride in their ability to survive mindworm attack or desperate hunger by learning "the moods of the land"--the urgency of different wormsight, subrid migratory patterns, and which plants contained nutrient value for humans. Despite a pronounced tendency to see themselves as honorable adversaries of Planet rather than its adopted progeny, the Hunters of Chiron, conservationists at heart, eventually found more to love in Deirdre Skye's attitude of accommodation than Shoichiro Nagao's project of total revisionism. Hunter scouts lent their services willingly to Gaian Rangers seeking Shaper 'Formers and Rigs.

Miriam Godwinson's Conclave was the closest thing to a natural ally of the Shaper movement. If the Gaians were guests and the Hunters trespassers with no intention of expecting Chiron to bend to their will, Believers were rightful inheritors happy to take transfer of title. Even more than the Centauri Monopoly, the Conclave described Planet as a bounty for disposal. Yet while Morgan stridently denied that questions of morality were pertinent to the survivors' interaction with the new world, Miriam argued that taking from, or even remaking, Chiron were divinely-sanctioned forms of worship. Miriam based her position on the Conclave Bible, reasoning that the first positive invitationfrom God to Adam was that he should name "every beast of the field and every bird of the air." [1] To this end, the Conclave produced a prodigious line of naturalists, though their work was purely descriptive, rather than affectionate, in its intent.

[1] See this excerpt from Brin's book, Earth. I am indebted to MysticWind for this recommendation.

A Morgan Industries Corporate Security paramilitary guards property of the Peruvian Amazon Company near Iquitos, c. 2070. His personal combat exo-frame mounts a particle impactor.

The particle impactor was a short-range undirected-energy weapon system that stutter-fired electron bolts of scalable power up to speeds of 2,500 feet per second, at a rate of 1,100 bolts per second. Operators employed it as a squad-level weapon to supplement the base of fire provided by standard-issue battle rifles. Each system consisted of three parts: a hand-held projector, a power pack, and the wired conductors between them.

Particle impactors were effective for both anti-personnel and anti-materiel applications. The weapon's low accuracy (a man-sized object in a 100-meter cone of fire stood only a 54% chance of being struck) was offset by pronounced area effects. The quantity of electromagnetic radiation produced by the plasma accretion was so great, even near-misses could inflict debilitating nerve damage on organic targets and scramble the electronic systems of target vehicles and structures. At higher power settings, the electron output could could melt the glacis plate of a T-49 main battle tank in less than seven seconds. Moreover, the continuous volume of fire could not be foiled by traditional active defense systems and was easily sufficient to overcome most passive protection.

Awesome striking power was no guarantee of operator enthusiasm or battlefield longevity. Particle impactor systems consumed energy in prodigious quantities. Late-model, frame-portable power packs were depleted after less than twenty seconds of sustained fire. Operators persistently demonstrated hesitation in their use of the impactors for fear of running out of ammunition, even when furnished with a separate self-defense weapon. The power packs themselves were easily driven to sympathetic explosions and the discharge was extremely loud; squad-mates were unwilling to stay close. Perhaps worst of all, the particle impactor had a long ramp time from the moment the operator pulled the trigger until rounds shot downrange. Poor timing frequently resulted in both misspent rounds and friendly fire incidents.

Morgan Industries purchased 700 Mark VII plasma impactor-equipped exo-frames and treaded mission carriers from the Mechanical Battlesuit Corporation of Islip, New York. These served with the company's in-house security forces in both the African Canal Zone and the Lesser Amazon. The frightful noise and sight of particle impactors caused several routs among the Portuguese expeditionary forces.

Journalists embedded with the Portuguese Army in Brazil capture the terrible aftermath of ambush by an Impact Squad.

Sources: My vision for particle impactors is drawn from a combination of the original game manual, this Popular Mechanics article, and the Phased Plasma Gun (PPG) created by J. Michael Straczynski for Babylon 5.

At the Grand Circle Bar in Morgan Trade Center, a hungry colonist or visitor could buy a meal for just ¤2. Primary terminals at each place setting allowed the indigent to surf job boards for digital tasks that could be completed for pay in 30 minutes or less. Most offers were for survey responses to help tailor corporate communications or trolling the latest targets of Morgan's ire using the diner's personal account.

Quote

Without water, there is no life. Without metal, there is no form. Without energy, there is no action. From the crudest outpost to the largest arcology, whether producer or consumer, these are the critical raw materials in the solar system. - Introduction to the FY2061 Annual Report, King Priam Mining

United Nations Commissioner Pravin Lal, a keen amateur sociologist, described the Morganite colonization project as "a frantic series of motivational follies, each more incredible and spiritually degrading than the last." From her pulpit at New Jerusalem, Sister Miriam Godwinson never referred to the leader of the Centauri Monopoly by his given name. Instead, she called him only "Mammon."

At Planetfall, Nwabudike Morgan did not follow the common practice of distributing rations and survival equipment equally among his followers. Morgan's Safe Haven mercenaries and Corporate Security restricted access to the common areas and communal resources still aboard the Landing Pods. The CEO distributed supplies and privileges over promissory notes. Wealthier faction members practiced this same arrangement whenever they were able, building pyramidal debt structures that gradually hardened into political allegiance.

In the University of Planet, a successful researcher might be immortalized by lending her name to a new scholastic gymnasium. New State authorities rewarded accomplishment with promotion or elevation between castes. A citizen of the Centauri Monopoly was motivated by a bounty of energy credits.

The Morganites also monetized social punishment. Exile awaited convicted criminals among the Peacekeepers and the Hunters of Chiron. Santiago's courts martial meted out capital punishment--swift execution by firing squad--for a wide range of violent crimes. The price for killing a fellow colonist in the Dynamic Enterprise varied according to the health of the overall faction economy. One who could not pay was sold into peonage where, if his creditor chose to murder him, his life was worth even less than the penalty that had made him a slave.

Supply Pods congregate in response to recall beacons transmitted from atop Sunny Mesa, the site of Fort Enterprise.

Quote from: Commissioner Pravin Lal

For these, the disposition of Unity’s inheritance is but an interesting piece of chancery. Men who are utterly indifferent to the legacy of the recently-deceased, except that some specific portion of it should come into their own hands. - A Dirge for Terra

This Land. In two words, his most esteemed biographer, the Dame C.V. Wedgwood, branded former American Reclamation Corporation CEO and future Unity Factor Oscar van de Graaf for all time.

He was one of the Second Civil War's quickest studies. Shareholding had done nothing to indemnify his interests from despoliation. Hypersurvivalism had a thousand faces, not all of which were amenable to bribery or negotiation. To stem his losses, van de Graaf realized that he, like they, needed to alter facts on the ground in the places of real decision. If a U.S. Senator, Army general, or even the United States Supreme Court, called him pirate or profiteer, van de Graaf's retort was enough to make any Holnist proud: "Come and take it." By that same philosophy, and following the same roadmap, corporations subsumed without objection a multitude of the prerogatives once reserved to kings and legislatures. The American Reclamation Corporation built cities, provided healthcare, collected taxes, educated children, policed disputes, disposed of property, and pensioned retirees.

Among the New Two Thousand, who self-consciously called themselves Pilgrims in honor of their ahistorical understanding of the Mayflower Compact, there were three types of colonists. Full Stakeholders had helped van de Graaf to assemble the $232 billion cash stake demanded by U.N. General-Secretary Apsara Mongkut. Of the original 1,900, just 80 managed to make Planetfall with their leader. Four came later, renegades who made their way from other factions. Partial Stakeholders owed labor under the terms of contracts previously undertaken with van de Graaf himself, who had financed the cost of their passage. The Unstaked were a collection of misfits: those unwilling to contract, and anyone held as a prisoner.

To incentivize labor at Fort Enterprise and Terra Nova, van de Graaf first laid out both sites, then assigned each colonist parcels of land according to a formula that evaluated past, present, and future values of service to the colony. All parcels had a required minimum value represented in characteristics such as nutrient, mineral, and energy yield. "Wastelands" were kept as common property or developed with infrastructure to meet the threshold for fair parcelage. Parcels were sacrosanct. The colony could use a parcel only with its owner's permission, and then only if a fee was conveyed. To create scarcity, van de Graaf set strict geographic boundaries beyond which Base Operations and the faction militia would not render service or assistance of any kind. The faction's eponymous governing council, which seated only Full Stakeholders, retained final authority over whether and how settlements expanded. Those seeking to add to their parcels in this manner required a three-quarters majority vote. Every ten local years, the original parcelages were reassessed and adjustments made to projected value based on new evidence such as meteorological records and fungal activity.

The New Two Thousand's enduring advantage lay in the extent of van de Graaf's prior planning and diligence in retrieving his own people during the Unity Crisis. He came to the surface with a workforce that combined high skill, occupational diversity, and a common language of mutual expectation.

A Pilgrim tractor tends fields at Nova Terra. The parcel's owner has planted a belt of Terran trees to help stabilize the soil, which is thin so close to the Great Dunes.

Affinities
An invention of diarist and U.N. Peacekeeping Forces leader Pravin Lal and appearing in his Planet: A Social History, affinities are an analytical shorthand for understanding the way in which a faction's ideology both oriented and constrained its cultural and scientific development.

Purity
Humanity will forever be defined by our experience in the cradle of "Old" Earth. If Chiron is to be the last refuge of our species, then we should fill it with things that are familiar, both the physical and metaphysical. Planet should be remade in Earth’s image. Likewise, humans can reach their maximum potential only if they preserve the traditions, artifacts, and, yes, the biological distinctiveness, inherited from their ancestors.

Purists look forward to eliminating the “pestilential” xenofungus and replacing the local ecology. Shapers call this process "rebuilding." At larger scales, Purist factions hope to stimulate the planetary greenhouse effect through a massive infusion of atmospheric hydrocarbons. Purist societies suffer less from the social dislocation of pollution and terraformation, which is an accepted cost of their grand project.

In the cultural domain, Purists prefer doctrine and ideology that presume a fixed and corruptible human nature, in need of close and constant tending.

Purist factions include the Lord’s Conclave (Godwinson), the Human Tribe (Landers), the Shapers of Chiron (Nagao), the Watchers (Singh), and the Human Ascendancy (Pahlavi).

Supremacy
Both Man and Planet alike bear changing in the honorable search for objective perfection. The simple goal of our species is to perpetuate itself—by any means necessary. Stronger is better. Faster is better. In this race against a pitiless universe, and indeed a hostile planet, we would hamstring ourselves to overlook any advantage. Supremacists embrace the possibility of social and ecological experimentation, which will serve as the forcing function to produce new insights about how now we must live.

Supremacists seek out the practical and efficacious. They are neither above the introduction of invasive species nor below giving way to Planet when adaptation would be less work than resistance. Humanity is what Supremacists make of it. Machines are tools. Their use and sophistication can do nothing to invert the relationship between master and servant.

Change is appealing to Supremacists. Since growth is the chief yardstick of success, the familiar is contemptible to them. "Humanity" is a concept that can be redefined at whim.

Supremacist factions include the Human Labyrinth (Yang), the Centauri Monopoly (Morgan), the University of Planet (Zakharov), the Spartan Federation (Santiago), the Dreamers of Chiron (Cobb/Cohen), the Tomorrow Initiative (Metrion), the Children of the Atom (Anhaldt), and the New Two Thousand (Van de Graaf).

Harmony
Humanity, the intruder, must alert its rhythms to suit those of Chiron, or else perish in its obstinacy. The wisest understand that one does not merely make a home so much as one is made by it. The trappings of Old Earth are useful only inasmuch as they can be relied upon to temporarily bridge the gap between mere survival and full-fledged integration into the existing biosphere of Chiron, which, if it is to be preserved in functional condition, should be as little perturbed as possible.

Harmony, which takes its cues from living things which are classically vulnerable to tampering and thrive within carefully-controlled parameters of diet and temperature, says little about the utility of artificial intelligence. Persons inclined to Harmony usually wish to experience Planet directly. Creating mechanical servitors to do so in their place is rarely at top of mind.

Factions that promote Harmony usually practice lifestyles that require avoidance of traumas on the land. They are also, on the whole, fairly sympathetic to the nonconformist. For a Harmonist, the defining feature of a system is that it is complex and interactive, rather than that it is predictable, or even successful. Folkways are inherently legitimate as an expression of self, which can be as important as allegiance to an illusory "public-interest" objectivity.

Harmonious factions include Gaia’s Stepdaughters (Skye), the Peacekeeping Forces (Lal), the New State (St. Germaine), and the Hunters of Chiron (Marsh).

Source Notes: Affinities are a new mechanic introduced in Beyond Earth, SMAC's spiritual successor.

Twenty years after the first settler arrived, the Dreamer camp at Xanadu still had few permanent structures. The base's Landing Pod was destroyed, and its lone cooling tower famously wrecked, during a Drone uprising.

By conventional standards, the Dreamers of Chiron were an anomaly: run by the princeling of one of Earth’s foremost merchant dynasties, who prior to mission launch had been instrumental in helping his father’s company achieve record profits, and his genius collaborator, a trained medical doctor brilliant enough to have come within spitting distance of a Nobel Prize in physiology, but so thoroughly mismanaged that its citizen-subjects suffered from chronic malnutrition.

There were several reasons this should have been impossible. Early slave-raiding earned them a wide berth from immediate neighbors, but combined with the faction leadership’s apparent lack of territorial ambition or hegemonistic ideology, possession of Unity’s plundered medical resources, Cobb's notoriety in the field of espionage, and the labor potential of the convicts from its detention blocks, made the Dreamers sought-after trading partners. Both the University of Planet and the Lord’s Conclaves gave the coordinates of more than a dozen precious Unity Pods to bring Cobb’s mobile surgical hospitals rolling into their territories. Colonel Corazón Santiago preferred Dreamer chain gangs to Spartan helots for completing the vulnerable outworks at Xerxion, where one in four workers was killed under bombardment from Tribal Long Toms. When they desired access to the University’s red networks, the Human Ascendancy found that Dreamer probe teams were willing to deal when the Tomorrow Institute and the Children of the Atom were not.

But Roshan Cobb and Aleigha Cohen were rarely conscious. Green Team, Morgan’s in-house intelligence service, pegged incidental energy loss at White Rabbit’s Refuge well north of 7,000¤ per cycle. Pilgrim Regulators knew they could simply pay Sabre Corporation guards to stand down ahead of a punitive raid, a transaction easily completed via their officers’ permanent accounts on Morganite networks. Dreamer work parties required close supervision. Chancery dockets at Morgantown reveal that the CEO was entirely ready to take advantage of the prisoners’ tendency to abscond with themselves. The boiling pot, one said, was always preferable to the fire itself.

Not all the factions of Chiron were tolerant of the Dreamers even when they weren't immediate victimized by Struan's toughs. As ardent believers in self-determination, the Peacekeeping Forces, Human Tribe, and Lord's Conclave all declared permanent vendetta on Cobb and Cohen once they were able to corroborate the worst of their rumored abuses.

And so the Dreamer colonies limped along as a sideshow to more successful ventures. Cohen eventually partnered closely with both the Human Labyrinth and the Tomorrow Initiative to process the neural records of the hibernating Unity crew, which their psychiatrists and datajacks mined for the insights that led to the package of principles dubbed “Social Psych.” When he was not lost in addiction, Cobb struggled to recall and articulate the truths he had supposedly formulated while asleep. He was captured at his terminal in M.Y. 52 by Ascendancy Legionnaires and brought before Tamineh Pahlavi, who placed Chiron’s worst torturer in a Punishment Sphere.

Water management domes in the vicinity of Colonia Tertius, a base belonging to the Children of the Atom.

Quote from: Director Shoichiro Nagao

Man is a happy vandal, but reluctant in his labors. He destroys with abandon, then abandons what he has destroyed. His achievements are more the product of desperation and whimsy than design. With the treasures of one place, he profanes another. - Part I: The Shaping of the Earth

As Nwabudike Morgan correctly predicted, to be a survivor was to seek and practice trade. Even Hivemen, however few of them, were wont to offer what was surplus and seek what was scarce, from time to time.

What the Hunters of Chiron could not make for themselves, they bartered in return for services rendered precisely in the manner intended by U.N. mission planners. Assignments might entail heavy-duty and high-danger salvage, big game management, controlled burns, conventional logging, borehole drilling, watershed management, suppression of mindworm boils, or fungus removal. Other factions tolerated the Hunters underfoot because they possessed not only the equipment, but also the expertise and wherewithal to perform these essential, albeit complicated and fundamentally dangerous, necessities of settlement.

The Dreamers of Chiron trafficked in a different set of offerings, palatable only to a few. On the least-objectionable end of the spectrum, one could buy medical care a mere four generations below the high Terran standard. At the opposite end? Somnacin, slaves, and spies. Somnacin was the mind-altering compound used to induce shared, lucid dreaming. From M.Y. 81 to M.Y. 290, mind-machine interface used the Cohen Method, which required placing the datajacked subject in the Dreaming prior to booting. Dreamers also sold captures of brainwave activity to the wakeners of other factions for use in polymorphic software and pre-sentient algorithms.

The recorded brain activity of persons engaged in Dreaming could be mined and the component thoughts reconstructed to provide a high-fidelity facsimile of the sleeper's experiences. In M.Y. 4, it was discovered inadvertently during a minor mindworm attack on White Rabbit's Refuge that the proximity of even a small boil allowed multiple sleepers in the same physical location to share the same dream.

Dreaming Chambers were latter-day opium dens, sheltering persons under the influence of the psycho-pharmacological cocktails required to induce the Dreaming. Individuals were completely helpless in this state, which was similar to heavy sedation. Somnacin addicts could not be awakened except through medical intervention.

The Shapers of Chiron were available to perform terraforming on condition that they be allowed to introduce Terran organisms and eliminate complex xenobiology. Morganites, who preferred to see something of home on the other side of the plastic, paid gladly for Shaper intervention to recreate the proverbial green hills of home.

A Tomorrow Institute Librarian.

At the Planetary Datacore, all were welcome to sift the contents of the Unity Datacore without restriction, provided they consented that their session be recorded by the Tomorrow Institute's Data Custodians. Controller Sathieu Metrion repackaged and sold the user insights gleaned in this manner as a kind of intelligence product.

Name: Jeremy Tanner "J.T." Marsh
Rank: Administrator II
Position: Division Head, Field Operations, Forward Landing Teams
County of Origin: British East Africa
DOB: 03-31-2023
Height: 188 cm
Weight: 113 kg
Affinity: Harmony
Focus: Explore, Expand

Service Record:
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to unwed mother. Soon placed in care of maternal uncle, the Viscount de Mohrenschildt, a sisal planter in the Central Highlands of British East Africa. No relationship with father, a lieutenant in the Royal Signals killed on deployment in Cyprus.

Graduated RMA Sandhurst. Posted to 23 Special Air Service Regiment. Awarded Victoria Cross, 2044, for rescue of two squad mates when FV430 was fire-bombed in Derry during Second Troubles. Following recuperation, reposted to Mombasa. Participated in Action at Meru, liberating 20 British government personnel and 37 other hostages from insurgent prison camp. Escape involved a supremely arduous overland trek of 120km.

Wife and daughter killed in U.K. motorway accident, 2009. Resigned Army commission and relocated to South Africa. First operated safari company catering to the ultra-wealthy. Game warden and lands supervisor at Kruger National Park through 2054, including during catastrophic fire seasons of 2051-53. Served intermittently with South African Defense Force in 2/44 Parachute Battalion. Deployed periodically to South West Africa.

Consulted for various private military and humanitarian organizations on subjects including intelligence-gathering, logistics, wilderness fieldcraft, and austere medicine. Retained as practitioner-in-residence by Avalanche Corporation. Confirmed engagements with Gezah Valley Authority [Carmel], Verne Stellar Navigation Co., and Yugoslav State Security Service (UDBA) coeval with the Slovenian Crisis. Suspected by MI5 of brokering arms to Biafran rebels during Saharan Burst Wars.

In 2052, joined Seven Summits Expeditions, leading three climbs on Mt. Aconcagua. Pioneer in the management and sport hunting of resurrected megafauna, including predators from Mesozoic and Pleistocene periods. Briefly advised International Genetic Technologies, Inc. (InGEN) of Palo Alto, CA on theme park venture in Costa Rica. Receive severance of indeterminate amount after workplace injury.

Invited to submit credentials to U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri on the recommendation of Colonel Derek Hacker, British Special Intelligence Service. Responsibilities included reconnaissance, external security, and natural resource management. Received extensive training in space-borne damage control and zero-gravity and confined space rescue preparatory to becoming training supervisor with U.N. Olympus Mons mission intake facility.

Note: Subject arranged for hundreds of surplus M72 Light Anti-tank Weapons (LAW) to be taken into Unity armory ahead of mission launch.

Psych Profile: Hunter
Olympic-level athlete. Accomplished tracker and expert marksman.

High-range emotional stability, interpersonal dominance, introversion, social boldness, and self-reliance. Low-range rule-consciousness, sensitivity, and abstractedness. Regards lack of physical conditioning or personal independence as evidence of selfishness inconsistent with the social contract. Nevertheless, exhibits compulsion to assume responsibility for those less able. Strong preference for democratic traditions over hierarchical command structures.

Unprecedented .98 score on Atherholt Trauma Function Test. Emotional "projector." Readily inspires others to follow his personal example. Heightened interest in, and tolerance for, risky behaviors.

Consistent critic of labor-saving and augmented-reality technologies as well as synthetic narcotics due to their “emasculating” effects. Fears that mankind will use his technical aptitude to create a world in which his body and mind will be steadily eroded.

Miscellaneous
Forward Landing Teams departed Unity three weeks ahead of scheduled landing. Their mission: to secure the ideal location for a colony and make ready basic infrastructure. Pioneers sank automated mines, clear-cut forest to may way for planting, and set the first water traps on Chiron. To perform their mission, these personnel were equipped with rugged, all-terrain vehicles capable of operating independently over extreme range and in all weather conditions.

Whereas the Spartans perceive the human story as one of tribe set against tribe, the Hunters treat the natural world as their great adversary. Survival and success alike depend on achieving mastery over one’s environment, which first requires mastery of one's own body. On Earth, man was the apex predator, but on Chiron, he is a prey item. Accordingly, Hunters are nomads, living in tents pitched against their Scout Rovers or a Mobile Command Vehicle. This bubble gum-and-bailing wire existence naturally lends itself to pure democracy: the Hunter is a doughty sort, trusting in few, living hard, and offering his or her opinions readily. That said, they are never above a trick or two if the moment is ripe.

Marsh’s was the only faction to form independently of the Unity crisis: his Forward Landing Team departed the ship weeks ahead of its fateful collision. This gives the faction exceptionally high homogeneity, as all members are essentially practitioners of a narrow set of common professions, usually miners, pioneers, and roughnecks.

Charterist recruit reaches out for assistance during a full-scale emergency exercise at the Lunar Cradle.

A Hunter surveyor prepares to refill her personal moisture retention system somewhere in the Monsoon Jungle.

Mining Rigs of the Forward Contact Team push toward the metal-rich Uaelium Basin.

Sources and Author's Notes:

This faction is inspired by the call to adventure and exploration of traditional masculinity. They are a meditation on the question of what makes a “real” man, and one answer to the question, “By whom was the West really won?” Is there anything inherently desirable about the idea that the strong owe something to the weak? Ought we draw distinctions between man and woman? The faction also explores anixeties about the impact of technology on man's ability to do and think for himself. As we provide ourselves with every convenience, do we lose some animal aspect of ourselves that is actually integral to being human?

The character of J.T. Marsh combines aspects of Louis L'Amour's itinerant, fortune-seeking cowboy (whose rough-and-ready values, while no longer suitable for "civilized" society, are the only means by which to tame a lawless and pitiless frontier) and Wilbur Smith's great white hunter, who measures greatness only according to the yardstick of physical courage and cannot abide the "domestication" of settled life in village or town.

Marsh's backstory contains "Easter Egg" references to Jurassic Park, Walt Disney's apocryphal 7 Summits Expeditions, and even the 1980s British comedy Yes, Minister. The picture of Marsh is that of the game warden Robert Muldoon in Jurassic Park, played by Bob Peck. The picture of the astronaut hanging in space is from The Expanse, now on Amazon Prime. The picture of the jungle explorer is from the Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell short, Prospect. The final picture, by Kory Lynn Hubbell, is of a Liang-Dortmund Mining Rig from the Halo series.

Sublieutenant Ajax Jarquín in CMC-340 Powered Combat Suit.

In the halcyon days of the Chiron Interstellar Probe, mission commander and recently-inaugurated planetary governor Joralamon Hardacre ordered the founding of a second settlement to supply Pathfinder Base with additional water.

Responsibility for the new expedition fell to one of Hardacre's protégés, twenty-nine-year-old Tin Star mining vice president, Narolo Vesh. One of the few members of the expedition who had not spent a majority of his lifetime in Earth's gravity well, Vesh had been his company's Site Lead for asteroid mining operations in the Main Belt. To wit, this experience, which had frequently required the miners and their leadership to shelter in place for months on end in the aftermath of a supply ship reactor malfunction, fitted him well for a crisis situation. Alongside Vesh's roughnecks and the 'Rover pilots to carry their windfall back home, Hardacre packed off the colony's senior hydrologist and some five dozen would-be Jeremiahs whom he hoped to sever from the main body politic. SolarEx Company Armed Security Police (ASP) under a junior officer, Ajax Róger Jarquín, were also assigned in case of misfortune.

Volcanic activity caused long-range communications interference that put the settlers on edge. Drilling to the aquifer provoked a mindworm boil. Most of the drilling crew and half the ASPs perished before the remainder of the expedition could be evacuated. Worse news awaited them when radio contact with Pathfinder Base was restored. Red Flu had broken out. Vesh led his command back into the field.

Member's of Vesh's Column investigate the drilling site during an ashfall.

Less than forty-eight hours later, the first of Vesh's party presented with symptoms of Red Flu. Vesh ordered them abandoned. Four hundred had departed Pathfinder Base three weeks earlier. On the eight day after their exile, only forty-seven were still upright and asymptomatic.

Eventually, the survivors reached a botanical testing station where they made permanent camp. There they remained. Fifty years on, most were still alive to bear witness to the arrival of a Spartan hoverbike patrol at the home they now called "Forward Support Base Danger." The Spartans' commander, Sergeant Boque LaSalle, explained to general derision that the site now belonged to a "Colonel Santiago."

Spartan hoverbikes bear down on Land Stand under heavy defensive fire.

Sublieutenant Jarquín explained that "the Honored Dead can neither abandon the graves of our fallen, nor those who continue to depend on us for protection today." He therefore greeted the Spartans in the spirit with which they had come. With a 20mm Oerlikon autocannon mount, SolarEx knocked LaSalle's troopers from the sky with a methodical efficiency.

A SolarEx ASP in CMC-020 Powered Combat Suit. His impact rifle could only have been obtained through trade or plunder from the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri.

The SMACER Atakan Marcos recorded his impressions of a visit to FSB Danger in M.Y. 13.

If you can avoid the mantraps and bring something of value, it is just possible to enjoy some of Vesh's legendary hospitality. He is now decrepit, of course, but still lays an exemplary table sourced from the Interstellar Probe's extraordinary seed bank and pours a stock of world-class wines--"liberated," he says, from a New Stater who decided "he would rather stay at the bottom of the sea." Unfortunately, my host spiced our otherwise perfect meal with dyspeptic tirades on peace and war, the latter being his favorite topic.

Vesh relishes his people's underdog status. Now ninety-two, he has never stopped fighting, having refused reintegration with Hardacre's colony over insistence that he depart FSB Danger. One gathers that, for Vesh, it was the final straw: he will no longer insist that his people make sacrifices for the Greater Good, he says.

Guns, severed ears, and fatalism aside, this is a simply colony of rustic people and citizen-soldiers, well-motivated and ably led, but few in number and rich only in spirit. Here, comfortable living means some tobacco, a bit of fungal liquor, and prisoners enough to serve them. Abundant harvests have banished hunger and most disease. There is no technological development to speak of, but the Pathfinder Probe's standards remain at least two generations ahead of Unity's, and so it is not yet a problem. Vesh well knows, of course, that the standard of living here must inevitably decline if he cannot at least tap an industrial economy for talent and supplies. Indeed, perhaps because the enormity of their circumstance is only now sinking in, the whole settlement is characterized by a perverse fatalism that makes time itself seem to slow and unwind.

A New State sloop-of-war in the Slowwind Delta. Launch canisters for two huge anti-ship missiles are between the 30mm gun mounts at centerline: if she can find a Spartan battleship, there will be trouble. Prominent close-in weapons systems (the port-side pair are visible here) provide her answer to both micromissile swarms and Isles of the Deep. Even alone, she is more than a match for the Spartan fast attack craft moored within the great cothon at Xerxion.

Quote from: Tensing Wühlerholtz, Sailing Master, New Two Thousand

We surfaced about three hundred yards off the rocks, close enough to spot the men on deck struggling with their survival suits. An orange life raft blossomed as it hit the water and a dozen desperate sailors piled in. We could see the New State warship order what we knew was general quarters. I eagerly anticipated a rescue operation. Instead, two crewmen emerged from the hatch, lugging a machine gun. Without a word, they set up and hosed down the foundered Morganites, taking care to leave no survivors. The deflated raft sank faster than their Foil, which we were made to take under tow. St. Germaine's sailing master signaled that I should cross over to him, which I did to avoid a similar fate. That captain, who did not give his name, recorded it all in his logbook, calling the dead men "trespassers," and bade me promise to "tell the story of their tragic, but avoidable, end." - A Recollection of the Sea

Jean-Baptiste Keller. Date unknown.

Quote from: Jean-Baptiste Keller

Man's the ultimate social animal, you know. Every species defends its young, its nest, its pack. We are the only one that will defend a neighbor, too. The same ones with whom we fight over placement of a fence, or whether their son will date our daughter. We probably think they'd make a terrible mayor. Wouldn't even want them on the PTA. But we wouldn't dream of watching the Super Bowl without 'em. I watch my History Channel. Somebody--I forget who--said that our ability to use tools made us the undisputed masters of the Earth. I say, it's because we can practice community with the people next door that makes this mastery worthwhile, and keeps us worthy. - The Annotated Broadcasts

Coming in a close second to Nathan Holn, Jean Baptiste Keller is today remembered as one of the men most responsible for the Second American Civil War. Yet even when critical of his own government, which he accused of moral cowardice on any number of occasions, Keller never shared Holn's desire to overthrow any government; rather, he wished to bridge the growing partisan divide in the United States through new forms of civic participation.

On his radio program, Keller lamented the great ideological sorting enabled by social media. Instead of providing solutions, he said, politicians were delivering "bad performance art," while citizens were learning to jump at ghosts. But since a majority of people had long since stopped believing that their problems were soluble, they accepted the entertainment as emotional numbing agent. Keller read this as an indictment of America's party system, and indeed of ideological purity more broadly. For a time, he was hopeful that popular referendums would demonstrate that the average Democrat and Republican had more in common than either one might suspect, but statehouses were jealous of their power and the call went unheard.

Keller was a reluctant survivalist. He explicitly disavowed Nathan Holn as both a racist and a terrorist, urging listeners to heed the federal government's call for vaccination against Red Flu and singing FEMA's praises. His calls for a home-grow kibbutz movement started only after he concluded that law enforcement and military resources were insufficient to counteract the Home Rule movement. Keller's pitch was simple: geography, not philosophy, was the driving factor in most peoples' lives. Their lifelines were literally within twenty or forty miles of home. Rather than seek to be part of something aspirational, citizens who believed themselves to be at-risk of war or pestilence should make arrangements to give and receive help from family and friends if they were close, and neighbors if they were not.

Shocked by the violence spreading out from the American heartland like a bleed, Keller assembled a manifesto that was part sermon, part reference manual for the prophesied political apocalypse. Sandwiched between chapters on the selfless example of Jesus Christ, Keller explained how to repair a Ford tractor, where to collect seed stock for a future planting season, how to brew moonshine, and how to manufacture homemade explosives. The two thousand-page monstrosity, which adherents usually carried in huge three-ring binders, with no two alike, went so far as to contain sample pictures of an ideal "self-defense community," with school, workshops, and truck gardens neatly circumscribed by sheet-metal walls.

Keller's problem was that he made too many powerful enemies too quickly. Americans were intolerant of "experiments in communal living," and so Keller was easily tarred a Communist in the popular imagination. Faith leaders aligning around Nathan Holn or closely wedded to partisan causes declared Keller a heretic in retaliation for his critique. And rather than admit its inability to deliver on promises to the American people, official Washington reacted with outrage that Keller should apparently compound the problem of local secession by tacitly encouraging it. Holnists delighted in repeating the rumor that Kellerite townships were dens of incest, playing on Keller's fascination with blood relation as the basis for durable settlements in crisis. In M.Y. 2022, Keller was forced into hiding after an attempt on his life. His broadcasts never resumed.

The tragedy of Kellerism is that belief made his followers more vulnerable. When Holnists were unsure of their odds against police or even part-time soldiers, Kellerites were an enticing alternative. After all, Kellerite communities were highly functional. Where they could get it, they accepted government assistance and so had improved health profiles when compared to surrounding communities. Bonds of blood and long-standing familiarity kept crime to a minimum. And Keller's book did stand the test of practical use. "His people" found worthwhile salvage, built sturdy structures, and achieve the organizational coherence necessary to produce food and sustain a tolerable standard of living. All of this, the Holnists wanted.

Keller urged his followers to resort to arms only for purposes of self-defense. Unfortunately, his self-restraint was not always shared by those who took his message to heart. On average, the "lieutenants" who led communities operating in his name were deeply troubled young people suffering from post-traumatic stress. They resorted readily, even enthusiastically, to violence. Pogroms against Tribes in Des Moines and San Francisco provided convenient pretext to carry the war to other fronts.

A Kellerite community built around a train siding near Cerro Gordo, California. Like a medieval fortress, the entrance is defended by murder holes and a vertical portcullis. Keller's writings described how to rig cargo containers like this one with explosives so that they could be detonated if breached. The promise of water to passing travelers is brazen, if true to form. The exterior sign's reference to slaves probably refers to Holnists or intolerant locals taken prisoner in battle and put to work in nearby mines but illustrate how Kellerites sometimes lived down to their foes' worst stereotypes.

The Stars and Stripes Resurgent. Officers of the Oregon State Police stand guard over a Safe Zone in downtown Portland during the final months of the Second Civil War.

A Tribal armored personnel carrier suffers a crippling malfunction to its turret-mounted gauss armament during night fighting below Xerxion. Turret positioning suggests that the vehicle was trying to repel attack from the rear quarter. Anyone inside would almost certainly have evacuated moments later. To help with scaling the fortress inclines, the hull has been stripped of all non-essential armor and kit. The gold-washed plate indicates where an enterprising technician tried to add laser-reflective coating with hopes of improving crew survivability.

Quote from: CEO Nwabudike Morgan

The cause of the very first murder on our little expedition to the stars? Light. Two crewmen argued over possession of a headlamp. Gripped by avarice—and, no doubt, by fear—one stove the other’s head in with a sonic hammer. Over light. Even then, in our first hours above this new world, energy was the thing. For what is light but its herald? - The Centauri Monopoly

A Tomorrow Initiative technician lies dead after an encounter with Morgan SafeHaven contractors seeking access to the Unity Data Laboratory.

Ideological unity within factions was an elusive, some would say illusory, prize. There were many good reasons that this should be so.

First, crew members were rarely sorted according to nationality, ideology, mission area, or even contract type. The piecemeal recruitment process and imperatives of shipboard emergency duties were the primary considerations for placement within the hull. Senior officers were likewise located the length and breadth of the ship, the better to assist with orderly landing operations. Some exceptions were made for armed security, both U.N. and private, but the populations impacted were quite small. To be sure, the U.N. Marine garrison, like its historical forbears, was situated with defense in mind: at the approaches to the ship's bridge and armory. Famously, Roshann Cobb awoke surrounded by his company praetorians, but even these were paid retainers who had counted on a two-way trip, not necessarily fellow-travelers interested in abetting Cobb’s flight from beneath the thumb of a temperamental father.

Firefighters attempt to quell a cryobay flare-up caused by Dreamer vandals. When the shipboard crisis rose to a fever pitch, competition for nearby passengers and cargo increased until some leaders ordered a “slash-and-burn” policy, destroying anyone and anything they did not keep for themselves as insurance against tomorrow’s competition.

Second, the survivors awakened aboard Unity were overwhelmingly likely to have been awakened in an attempt to match problems with skills, rather than to further a social experiment that the expedition’s leaders did not yet themselves necessarily foresee. Most of the Unity command staff acquired their initial followers due to rank and charisma. The origins of the Peacekeeping Forces lay in a series of accidental encounters between Pravin Lal and those who crossed his path on his errand to Hydroponics. Even in the twilight of the evacuation, newly-coalescing “factions” chose who to take and who to abandon based almost entirely on primary and secondary function. Leaders with overwhelmingly monofunctional parties, such as Prokhor Zakharov, who had intentionally sought out engineers and stayed too long in Reactor Control, were rare.

Once on the ground, there was a natural grace period during which water, food, and shelter were the common obsession. Disagreement over government, leisure, and self-determination came later. Leaders were forced to move slowly to avoid disorder. Every incoming refugee and recovered colony pod was another infusion of uncertainty. Many factions, the Peacekeepers included, experimented with temporary processing stations for new arrivals, justified ostensibly on grounds that they required special medical care or nutrition that was better delivered in spaces dedicated to their needs, but really done to buy time for titration of “disruptive elements.”

Quote from: Andelko Saratov

The identity that others give us is much more important than the one we give ourselves. Nobody cares about the second one. They probably wouldn't believe it if you told them. They know only what was stenciled on your cryopod. A poet who was mislabeled a doctor? He is only a bad doctor. – Records of an Honest Man

For obvious reasons, groups of stowaways who managed to get aboard in large number enjoyed a tremendous advantage in political cohesion. Landers's Kellerites were secreted behind false bulkheads in two groups of roughly two hundred each. Both were situated forward of damage control but aft of the bridge, and they united at a prearranged rally point before it was even clear that the ship was lost. The Spartans were in a similar position. Shock hardly describes Santiago's reaction to learning that a large majority of the Holnists she had brought along had no intention of leaving Unity alive, but her claims to ultimate authority over the survivalist movement on Planet were much-strengthened by the six hundred odd fellow travelers in her extended command. Each such stowaway knew precisely what the nature of life would be when they hit dirt.

Factions with high ideological cohesion manifested disturbing pathologies. Once bitten by the unfriendly Spartans, and with a long memory of persecution by the Evangelical Fire, Pete Landers was twice shy. A Herkimker Battle Jitney similar to the one seen in this Reno, NV scrap yard was used by Tribal Minutemen to burst the gate at New Eden, where, without provocation, they put to the sword every last congregant and called it preemptive self-defense.

Pilgrim Regulators work to shut down an Amirani Base Management System at a captured Children's outpost. Use of national symbols such as the American flag shoulder patch, strictly prohibited by the U.N., was common for Charter colonists, especially those with ARC provenance. Oscar van de Graaf obsessed over the fate of his "stakeholders" and practiced a version of latter-day impressment to claw back "restitution" from other factions.

A University academician being taken into custody by the Chiron Guard. Commander Kleisel Mercator calculated that the best way to amass Progenitor artifacts was to seize rather than seek. As his collection grew in size, so too did the number of willing recruits to the cause of a global defense initiative.

Sources:

The Herimker Battle Jitney was a vehicle used in the 1999 movie Mystery Men.

The Global Defense Initiative is a faction in Westwood Studio's long-running Command & Conquer series.

Quote from: Chairman Sheng-ji Yang

The leader is the one who can think of next morning’s meal when tonight’s is not yet assured. - The Institutes of Leadership

When the basins were pumped dry, Zakharov was told he had to abandon the rigs. He conferred with his Committee on Industrial Robotics and abandoned the basins instead.

Enemy soldiers dreaded the brutal tunnel work required to root out Hive bases. Specialist units of the Regulators and Peacekeeping Forces trained for months in close-quarters combat and confined-space rescue to make ready for assaults. After the Hive expanded west into the Nessus Canyon, liaison officers of the Human Restoration approached Nwabudike Morgan, promising to train for him a corps of elite sappers. Morgan instead sought the council of Johann Anhaldt. A Coeus supercomputer rejected the conventional wisdom. Morgan deployed a drilling rig as instructed, and Yang lost contact with the offending branch.

Rovers belonging to the Chiron Probe cross the Neyanza Valley, the largest contiguous terraformed space on Chiron, en route to High Hide. Joralamon Hardacre was keen to trade with the Unity survivors, whom he provided with inoculation against Red Flu and the benefit of his fields notes on the Mind Worms. It was from Hardacre that Marsh learned about their vulnerability to fire.

Quote from: Colonel Corazón Santiago

A soldier learns quickly that the best position from which to fight is protected, or else they don't soldier long. - Planet: A Survivalist's Guide

Forewarned is forearmed. In the short time before loss of contact with the Chiron Interstellar Probe, Mission Analysis identified animal attack as the second most-common official cause of death on Chiron. Only Red Flu was a worse killer, and the numbers were close indeed. (At the time, mindworm casualties were calculated separately, as U.N. Medical disagreed with Governor Joralemon Hardacre's assessment that the worms were responsible for the psychosis widely reported by his people.)

Planet’s biodiversity was limited, but the best-known life form to the Pathfinder colonists was the subrid, similar to enormous crustaceans in appearance, and highly aggressive. These semi-aquatic invertebrates preferred the places where Chiron’s plant life had rioted into its waterways. Their bodies were wide, flat, and squat, topped by hard, chitinous exoskeletons with the same chemical composition as the xenofungus. A subrid's fungal shell sometimes exceeded eight feet in height. Subrids were bilaterally symmetrical, with two grasping claws and two pairs of very long, highly articulated walking legs, each ending in four hooked “toes." The legs were remarkably strong. Like those of a waterbug, they could stretch almost perpendicular to the main body, helping the animal to negotiate the toadstool-like nitrate floats found in the lakes and river deltas where they laid their eggs. A flat head bore two eye stalks; a pair of animated, whip-like antennae; matching antennules; and one set of large, vertical mandibles. Naturalist Phillipe Nguyen called them “a perfect child of crab and snail.” Successful domestication efforts were begun after finding that the meat of the subrid was both palatable and nutritious, but the venture was high-risk, high-reward.

Subrids were naturally aggressive. Male and female alike fought to the death for mating privileges, and both participated in vigorous patrols to protect their spawning grounds. When seasonal reproduction cycles ended, the subrids indulged an intense innate curiosity, wandering the land in all weather, seizing items of interest between claws that applied pressure of 4,900 pounds per square inch. Available information showed that vehicles in the Probe's motor pool were not durable enough to withstand this scrutiny.

To help workshop a solution for its second expedition, the U.N. canvassed donor nations for surplus armored vehicles. They also approached Three Days to Decision, a private military services provider that had received high marks for improving combat survivability within the small Gathi Army during the final phases of its war with Shiloh. With little delay, the consultants sent back the design for an air-deployable bunker. Venter-Serison Defense Products manufactured the final product, which test crews on the Sea of Tranquility called the "Trouble Bubble." A lot of forty-three shipped as under-slung cargo for the Unity's Sky Cranes. Every faction on Planet learned to make many more.

The "Bubble" was just that. Comfortable space for up to twenty-four, well-insulated, fully sealed from the external environment with on-board tank-supplied atmosphere for up to thirty-six standard Terran hours. From within, colonists could attempt satellite communication with rescuers, monitor the vicinity on in-built cameras, or perform emergency surgery in a collapsible theater that was better-equipped than most early field ambulances. When inclined to fight, occupants opened gun ports to use their small arms or fired defensive canister munitions from dispensers on each of the bunker's four faces.

Sources:

The picture is taken from the StarCraft Field Manual, by Rick Barba, with art from Robert Rose.

Subrids are just chull, creatures from Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives literary universe. For more on chull, see: Carl Engle-Laird, A Field Guide to Roshar: The Ecology of The Way of Kings, 12 June 2013.

Gath and Shiloh are fictional kingdoms from the NBC sci-fi drama, Kings.

The "Trouble Bubble" is a vehicle from GI JOE used by COBRA, "a ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world."

To celebrate the centennial of Planetfall, Librarian Sékou Tangara compiled his list of the most advanced societies on Chiron.

More than half the residents of University bases pursued a graduate-level education, with predictable effects on total research output per capita. The cult of learning claimed its adherents as children. From ablution to meal preparation, no domestic task was performed without audiovisual accompaniment. Floor-to-ceiling panels retracted to entice questions about the natural world beyond. Speaking from overhead telecasters, chemists explained why certain food items on a cutting board paired well and others did not. Dynamic pop-ups turned even the most banal entertainments into opportunities for incidental learning. University smart homes adjusted the nature of this passive instruction to suit the demonstrated preferences and aptitudes of each user. The University Academy of Child Development was justifiably proud of the dramatically reduced incidence of learning disabilities among children raised in these environments.

St. Germaine's sailors pushed to the very limits of their boats' endurance, yielding crucial first insights about the tidal, tectonic, thermal, and mineralogical characteristics of Chiron. New State base design demonstrated a well-informed respect for the planet's natural rhythms of calm and calamity. Caged construction and rubber shock absorbers beneath Rock Island Refuge spared its twenty thousand inhabitants the same unhappy fate as the Nautilus Pirates at New Atlantis during the furious M.Y. 71 eruptions of Mount Krentz.

It was easy enough for the possessors of the mission's generic library to grow an a reliably intelligent, athletically-predisposed specimen in a petri dish. The Human Ascendancy struggled with lower rates of success when actually attempting to parent its perfect offspring to greatness as adults. Pahlavi complained that her social scientists agreed less often than her geneticists. What made one a good soldier or a profoundly insightful mathematician seemed at times to be mutually exclusive with the minimum attainments of competency in the civil service. Some wanted to emphasize creativity, others physicality. Some wanted to prescribe propaganda, while others insisted that affection for the Ascendancy agenda should develop naturally, if at all. How to raise a polymath? At her lowest point, thinking that the juveniles' common tendency toward emotional instability was a sign of weak character, Pahlavi yielded to Chairman Sheng-ji Yang's blandishments and allowed him to make disciples of six, whom he never returned. She had better results working with Dr. Aleigha Cohen, who suggested that the Ascendancy's system of communal child-rearing was too antiseptic. Cohen demanded to know: whither the family unit? She also suggested another improvement: collection and analysis of each Augment's dream data. While the Ascendancy hesitated before the brute expediency of "mental rewiring"--a machine-assisted intervention that Pahlavi didn't trust to produce purely human results--her faction realized its greatest success when it began treating its newest members as individuals in their own right, using personalized insights into each child's subconscious to tailor their development even more finely. No two geniuses were alike.

When his consumers demanded, Morgan delivered. "Red Charlie" was the first in the Lifecycle Series, a line of robotic valets designed to serve an owner from cradle to grave. By day, polymorphic software helped Charlies draft new routines to supplement their original programming. By night, mind-machine interface served as the cutting room floor, where the sleeping creator unconsciously helped their servant to edit that which had been created in the preceding few hours. Morganite compilers braced for sacking when base networks first flooded with stories about Charlies adopting the prejudices and even the speech cadences of their owners, but Morgan knew they had struck paydirt.

Quote from: CEO Nwabudike Morgan

Certainly, your computer is the faster. But mine thinks you are an idiot, and he is right. - MorganQuote of the Day

The Master Control Station, just above Central Drilling at The People's Teeming. Labyrinth bases were constantly expanding. Hive populations were limited only by the available supplies of nutrient paste (there was never enough), the pace of faction excavators (slow), and, of course, the number of bullets in possession of adjacent colonies. The Chairman's territorial ambitions were whetted in proportion to the urgency of warnings from Base Operations that the Drones were too many in number.

Heliophant Cuzco Sol's price for suspending his vendetta against Sheng-ji Yang in M.Y. 74 was Order's Bulkwark. Not the populace; just the heavily reinforced main drift, where the slow-moving waters of the River Markab, abundant in all seasons, provided the cooling element that made possible another of Dai Seung's miracles.

Named in honor of the Ilocano sun god, the Eye of Amman was a photovoltaic power station that concentrated the solar radiation from Alpha Centauri A through lenses ground from large planetpearls. The intake cell stood 110 feet above Planet's surface on a needle-shaped tower, but all the real action took place below ground, where a spectacular golden laser played a continuous feed to banks of industrial-scale batteries.

Huge trunk cables wheeled the project's huge power output first to the Son's grid, then onto the Morganite exchange, from which the corporation earned a tidy profit, at least until M.Y. 136. In that year, amidst another of the short, sharp trade wars between the Dynamic Enterprise and the newly-rebranded Unicorp, Triax Corporation battle ogres blinded the Eye by shelling the tower to collapse.

Economies of scale might elude a faction for any number of reasons. Arguably the worst contributing factor was lack of access to adequate natural resources, a chronic condition that, by the middle of the first century M.Y., experts agreed could be outlived only if the afflicted society had resort to war, trade, or expansion.

Oscar van de Graaf was no stranger to taking what he wanted by threat or application of main force, and he saw no reason that his lack of an industrial base, or the already-crowded conditions on Shamash, should stop him. If his ancestors had taken other mens' cattle, he reasoned, then perhaps the Pilgrims could take other factions' minerals.

The Governor approached one hundred of his top minds and issued each one stock in a new enterprise, the Chiron Mining and Recovery Corporation, soon known as C-MARCO. In their genius, his collaborators produced another acronym: SAMMS, short for semi-autonomous mobile mining station. Viral morphology provided the now-infamous design: that of a bacteriophage. Six or eight articulated walking legs were affixed to the business end of a drill rig, above which sat, in ascending order, a small ore cylinder, a control cabin, engine, exhaust, and radio mast. Put to it, the SAMMS could lurch along, or away from pursuers at 32 km/h. They were rugged and cheap to build, using parts mostly sourced from common Grumman Aerospace pods, and so equally cheap to repair. Hydrofoils and hovercraft ferried whole squadrons of SAMMS to enemy territory known for its mineralogical potential. Pilgrim surveyors then made best efforts to find and fix rich veins of ore before the SAMMS were put out to pasture under the watchful eyes of Regulator militia. Progress was painstaking, but the concept was sound and the income steady.

Sources:
The first picture is credited to Mr. Nobody on Pinterest.

The second picture is the Automatic Mantle Harvester Division Processing by serg4d.deviantart.com on @deviantART.

Quote from: Director Tamineh Pahlavi

The conventional model of geneology is a tree bearing fruit at the terminus of each branch. Such a model implies that all branches are created equal, but this is not the case. Some are weak, others diseased. Orchardists solve this problem by pruning unhealthy branches, conserving nutrients for the choicest blossoms. Without this care, the tree produces nothing remarkable, and certainly nothing they would care to use as root stock to perpetuate the breed. - Homo Sapien Superior

An Ascendancy genetailor makes final adjustments to a new profile.

Geriatric medicine was an unavoidable lure for the immensely strong egos that had collectively destroyed the United Nations Mission to Alpha Centauri.

Early forays into the science of longevity were ordered up by faction leaders with prior experience in the field. Academician Prokhor Zakharov chased a so-called "clinical" immortality. The aging patient received lab-grown organs to replace ailing originals, along with immunotherapies like cancer-stalking white blood cells. This was a popular and largely successful scheme, adding an average of 61 years to the lifespan of a reasonably fit person, with even better outcomes for women.

Morganite physicians went in a similar direction. The work required loading a viable sample of the patient's own organ into biological scaffolds. Through the magic of protein accretion and generous injections of growth medium, a new and complete organ would eventually take shape, fully operational and ready to be surgically swapped. University scientists mastered the technique fairly quickly, but Morganite doctors struggled. The faction bought itself time by creating a public exchange for "medical inputs"--in short, a virtual marketplace for live organs. Bureaucrats at the Planetary Council screamed murder, and they were right, but the trade was a popular one, especially once cybernetics could provide adequate replacement for original biology. Hence the proliferation of contracts that gave Morganite employers final rights to the amputated limbs of injured workers, or even the bodies of the dead.

High up in The Pinnacle, Acscendancy researchers came at the same problem of aging from another direction. Director Tamineh Pahlavi wanted not only the benefits of long life, but the fruits of youth as well. Her 'jacks tracked the expression of genes of interest, such as MC1R (youthful appearance) and COL5A1 (collagen production, linked to flexibility) within the Ascendancy population and had them edited into test subjects (usually prisoners purchased from the Dreamers or the Hive). Pahlavi's research was sped considerably by her exclusive possession of the data from the aging studies carried out on the Unity passengers subjected to Wespe-Quinn-Vagner Hibernation, which was virtually all of them.

Unity Cryobay L-21, Bank 8, at final loading. After validation of vitals, colonists and crew not expected to be subject to rapid recall were placed in shock-absorbing canisters that could mitigate the potential malfunction of primary life support. Those with emergency response training were provided with fewer safeguards.

Success brought an increased number of aged followers, not least of which was Pahlavi herself. This brought both opportunities and challenges for one of Planet's most unforgiving societies. Pahlavi was a supremacist, believing that a person's birth was their destiny. In the Ascendancy, past performance at first mattered less than predicted aptitude. Children were literally bred to their tasks. Miners, short and squat with excellent vision. Sailors, tall, with very high metabolism and improved oxygen conservation. Diplomats were always tall, and had a conventionally pleasing appearance. Only repeated disappointment at being unable to "manufacture" consistently excellent leaders led Pahlavi to reassess her original values.

Experiments in close parenting had produced good results. Augments no less than natural-born children were less susceptible to negative influences when they had access to more individualized attention. Some parents were also better than others, a discovery that dovetailed fortuitously with the increasing lifespan of faction members who otherwise lacked for purpose in a brutally task-driven setting. Guardianship was soon counted no less important than the laboratory study behind Ascendancy breeding programs. The more experienced the guardian, the more consistently predictable the child's developmental trajectory.

Recognition of the value of experience changed Ascendancy life for the better overall. Pahlavi reversed her original policy of moving freshborns directly into command positions, requiring instead that they understudy with proven incumbents who were given the power to withhold promotion in cases where it was not merited, which proved to be many. Older citizens, to whom Pahlavi herself had a well-known aversion, were increasingly brought together to crowdsource ideas about how the Ascendancy should handle its troubled diplomacy, the history of which was now complicated enough to afford careful study and benefit from firsthand exposure.

The fullest possibilities for longevity required the weighing in of the Dreamers of Chiron, or at least the descendants thereof. Dr. Aleigha Cohen explored the role that a regimen of mental stimulus might play in staving off degenerative conditions. Insights from the studies she shared on the Planetary Networks were picked up and embraced by virtually all factions. In the Hive Assembly Bays, the Chairman bade his Prefects play Socratic mind games during calisthenics. Octogenarian owners of a Red Charlie competed to name that tune every morning over bowls of Gold Doubloons. The consequences for Gaian society were most profound of all: a near-total elimination of dementia for all age cohorts, which the Lady Skye and her physicians felt must be linked to the faction's domesticated mindworms.

Sources:

On the novel type of white blood cell therapy discussed above, see this article.

For tissue engineering, see this interesting article from the website Drug Target Review.

On gene expression, see this article in Scientific American.

Quote from: Sister Miriam Godwinson

In times of strife, we are wont to speak the words, 'God, deliver us from evil.' But I tell you: this is not prayer--it is incantation. God has given us the means to effect our own salvation, material as much as spiritual. We worship God's Creation by living correctly. Do not wish for intervention. Let us make personal action our prayer. - Admonishment to the Faithful

A Human Relief Initiative 'Rover, fancifully dubbed "The Devil's Arrow," carries life-saving potable water up the Caisson Trail to thirsty Observers at avalanche-afflicted Watchpoint.

There was peril in charity, to hear General Marcel Salan tell it. He thought the concerned parishoners of Loaves and Fishes did more harm than good by turning the other cheek and turning out their larders in the name of love for the brethren.

Countless drones, rendered "the least among us" in typically unflattering Conclave speech, owed their salvation from war and famine to the sublimating impulses of Sister Miriam Godwinson. White-helmeted crisis wardens of the HRI had complete freedom of Planet. This, because they were absurdly apolitical. No outrage, not even slaughter perpetrated against the faithful themselves, could place a faction totally beyond the possibility of their assistance. "Ask," Miriam told the Planetary Council, "and ye shall be answered."

So the Conclave famously dispensed soup to the freshly-stapled. Hive sentries had standing orders to let them pass without so much as a visual inspection of cargoes. Morganite project planners supposedly made their seasonal bonuses by shaving orders of food, water, and medical supplies since the HRI could be trusted to make up any shortfall with alacrity, and free of charge.

For Miriam, service to an enemy was prayerful obedience to the principle that all Unity's survivors were bound to a single, common fate. Since she was prohibited from proselytizing under most circumstances, the HRI served her as an ambassadorial corps, bringing to the beleaguered everywhere a clear sense of what it meant to follow the Lord's Commandments.

Sources:

The sci-fi vehicle in the picture is "Truck," by Robert Ryminiecki on Pinterest.

The Human Relief Initiative is an homage to the Global Defense Initiative, or GDI, a faction in Command & Conquer.

Battle lines drawn on Earth were rarely subject to change after Planetfall. The Unity Crisis inflamed existing passions more than it altered them. By the third generation of settlement, opportunistic raiding, once an accepted remedy in which all partook, had settled into predictable patterns involving a limited number of usual suspects. Only Hivemen, Observers, Dreamers, Pirates, and Pilgrims were desperate enough, or maintained military capabilities appropriate to practice plunder as a way of life. Most military conflict between factions, which was still common enough, had crossed into the realm of vendetta, persistent armed rivalry arising from historical tensions or ideological disagreements.

As forces mustered for the Battle of Amphalion, Sergeant Pete Landers revealed to his astonished Observer allies that the stowaways had brought with them an unlikely legacy of their decades-long fight against persecution: elderly Foundry 4 Powered Combat Suits. Left behind in the rubble of Las Vegas by the departing U.S. Army, which knew it would be resupplied by air, lightly-damaged examples were soon put back into service by Tribal mechanics swarming from hidden shelters. The Kellerites bribed Comprehensive Transport to put several racks of Foundry 4s in one of Unity's abandoned compartments sometime during the 2060s. Time had not been kind to the much-patched relics: their anti-tank warheads were as dangerous to themselves as the enemy; most were reduced to dependence upon their suit's integral rotary cannon, for which there was little suitable ammunition. The allies suffered a rare, costly bloodletting in one of the few victories for the University of Planet during the war to prevent activation of the Interstellar Communications Array, repulsed by Zakharov's attack hovercraft.

Captain Trung Thi Hoang instructs the occupants of her Landing Pod to pressurize their survival suits. Overcrowded conditions prevented everyone's being properly secured in a crash couch. Instead, they relied on overhead handholds that probably caused as many injuries as they prevented.

Despite the unsuccessful prosecution of Struan's overseer Dole Yudikon, Commissioner Pravin Lal faced loud calls for a wave of similar actions, including two members of his own command staff against whom the evidence was felt to be more certain. Former King of Carmel Vesper Abaddon stood accused of war crimes for executions of Danite francs-tireurs, while three-time American cabinet secretary Tell Stillwell, was said to have made possible the abusive labor practices of the American Reclamation Corporation. Lal was also urged to use the Council as his instrument of retributive justice. Sergeant Pete Landers condescended to explain to the Planetary Council that his chosen solution for Spartans was summary execution under "Rule .303," a reference to the story of Australian folk hero Breaker Morant. A more frequent appellate before the Council, Governor Oscar van de Graaf, unselfconsciously sought the assistance of Lal’s blue helmets to effect forcible “transfers” of people and property that he alleged were being wrongly withheld from him, in clear contravention of undertakings made by the United Nations. Most of what was van de Graaf’s legally had come into the possession of Nwabudike Morgan and Shoichiro Nagao, but the Pilgrim leader also began to nurse a quarrel against Lal, the man who kept staying his hand, an agony that could only be endured so long without rebuke. Privately, Lady Deirdre Skye floated the idea of arresting CEO Nwabudike Morgan and Coordinator Shoichiro Nagao under what amounted to a writ of attainder for what she termed "planetary despoilation." Captain Trung Thi Hoang demanded similar action be taken against Santiago and other survivalists, as well as Zelphon Company contract troops with whom her survivors had skirmishes over watering holes. The mercenaries had subsequently been picked up by Roshann Cobb, who was always happy to bolster the size of his security retinue.

Tell Farraday Stillwell, twice American Secretary of the Navy, once American Secretary of Defense, helped to articulate and execute the Renssaeler Administration's policy of personal disarmament. To achieve its goal, the White House first expelled from Congress all representatives from states determined to be "in rebellion," had congressional allies ram through the statehood of overseas territories on a party-line vote, then called a Constitutional Convention, all attendees of which were north of the Mason-Dixon Line, west of the Sierra Nevadas, or dependent on federal assistance. Disagreement about which states ought to be punished in this manner led most of Renssaeler's cabinet to resign. According to both Colonel Corazon Santiago and Sergeant Pete Landers, this decision, which supposedly prolonged the Holnist insurrection by years, destroyed any possibility for true democracy in post-bellum America.

For reasons he little cared to explored, but could not seem to live down, Lal found it difficult to use the law as he might have wished, even when he presided over the Councils that wrote it. In his diary, Lal recorded a tongue-lashing he received from Marcel Salan. In public, the Canadian warrior was fully behind enforcement of the newly-promulgated Planetary Charter from which Lal claimed to derive the authority to punish misrule such as was perpetrated by the Dreamers of Chiron. Privately, he made clear his personal belief that Lal himself had played no small role in the unwinding of modern Canada, and owed a debt greater than it was possible to repay. Prokhor Zakharov joined his abrupt expulsion of the Council's Genetic Inspectors with a stern speech to his peers in which he reminded them of Lal's historical "indulgence of ignorance." By Zakharov's count, the Commissioner bore indirect responsibility for tens of millions of deaths from starvation and disease, all of which would have been avoidable had the U.N. not knuckled under when confronted with popular aversion to genetically-modified foods and vaccine immunization.

Quote from: Academician Prokhor Zakharov

All science is discomfort. Take, for instance, a life-saving procedure that offends your deeply-held convictions. Which inflicts the greater injury to you and others: a surgery you do not wish to have, or the doctor's inaction that causes your death? - For I Have Tasted the Fruit

In M.Y. 172, Kleisel Mercator's Chiron Guard attacked the University of Planet's satellite uplinks at Baranov Outpost sixteen times. Zakharov repaired the superstructure with workmanlike predictability. Mercator, in turn, kept assigning some of his best units to renewed strikes. In fact, Baranov Outpost was a Potemkin village manned only by the Men of Harlech mercenary force. The University was building two replacement facilities on the Issus moon.

Among the many peoples of Chiron, opinion varied regarding both the wisdom and feasibility of restoring contact with Planet Earth.

A minority of three, the University of Planet, the Dynamic Enterprise, and the Dreamers of Chiron, were largely indifferent to the idea. Let it be one happy outcome of the future growth in radiotelescopy, Zakharov said, but as a goal in itself, "re-contact" left something to be desired. Even if the Unity survivors did discover that human civilization on Earth had survived, it would be decades between transmissions. Any help that Earth could provide would therefore be negligible. Similar problems of distance convinced the Morganite boardroom that their energies, too, were better spent on problems closer to home. Distracted by the contemplation of other frontiers, Roshann Cobb and Aleigha Cohen failed to register any opinion one way or the other. Cobb had been sent to Chiron to lay the stakes for follow-on business by his father's corporation, and was himself reasonably certain that his Struan's connections could blunt any threat of criminal prosecution, but re-contact appealed to him less than any of a series of other projects. Aleigha Cohen imagined that she could impress what might remain of the Terran medical community with the research data she was generating on Chiron, but the Planetary Datalinks were a nearer target for making her mark.

The Nessus Tower sent Chiron's first transmission back to the Sol System in October, M.Y. 175. It read simply, "UNITY."

A much larger block stood in strong, even violent opposition to re-contact. Deirdre Skye warned the Planetary Council that the result would surely be invasion. It was widely assumed that a planetary nuclear holocaust must have followed hot on the heels of Unity's departure. Any successor regimes must therefore treat evidence of the Unity Mission's success as an invitation to demand assistance, which they would take if denied. Her theme, the "Rape of Chiron," was taken up by both Rear Admiral Raoul André St. Germaine and the Warden J.T. Marsh. Chiron was not to be shared with those who had already proved themselves unreliable custodians of a planet far more tractable than the only one left to the survivors of the Alpha Centauri Mission.

Many faction leaders worried about the possibility that the U.N. would return to haunt them by providing Pravin Lal with the power he needed to carry out his project of ideological hegemony. Spartans and Tribals both expected to be prosecuted for war crimes, real and imagined. Director Tamineh Pahlavi knew that she would fare no better in a court of intersteller law. She might like a larger gene pool for her experiments, but doubted that Earth had any worthy lines left to contribute. If expectations bore out, they would be irradiated to the point of uselessness. Deep in his underground fastness, Sheng-ji Yang was daily at war with pretenders to the U.N. legacy and thought he should welcome no others. Acting on the instructions of his digital master, Dr. Johann Anhalt, too, joined the dissenting chorus. Terran connections would mean Terran inquiries about how, exactly, Chiron's leaders, elected or self-appointed, were meeting the needs of the mission survivors, and Anhaldt intended to answer no questions.

Some opposed re-contact for purely philosophical reasons. Miriam Godwinson had preached that the Unity was as much an ark as that of the Biblical patriarch Noah, its passengers delivered from God's well-earned judgement. It was sacrilege to reach backwards, the Judges said--a failure to acknowledge the gift of Salvation. And even if there had been survivors of God's wrath, that did not mean the unfortunates of Earth were in any sense equals to the Elect on Chiron. The former were surely experiencing a unique kind of punishment, best uninterrupted. Kleisel Mercator confided to Landers that, though he longed for reassurance that the cradle of their species was still intact, he lived in terror of attracting "alien intelligences" by demonstrating the capability for communication at near-light speeds.

For Pravin Lal, re-contact was not as obvious a path as others imagined. Personal admiration for the United Nations and its founding ideals aside, he had joined the Unity mission as a disfavored exile. Jonathan Garland had practiced a kind of nepotism by insisting on his inclusion. Lal was not even certain his was the strongest claim to leadership after Garland's death. Marcel Salan and Prokhor Zakharov both had plausible claims of their own, and the silence that each had kept previously would surely be abandoned once push came to shove.

The set of factions that actively sought re-contact included the Restoration, led by Marcel Salan, which saw no future for itself in a fractured political environment; the Tomorrow Institute, now believing the Unity Data Core was missing certain information that could only be obtained from Earth's surviving inhabitants; the Chiron Interstellar Probe, which longed for evacuation; the Watchers of Chiron, desperately in need of replacements for its beleaguered constabulary; the New Two Thousand (entrepreneurs with significantly more appetite for risk than mere Morganites); and the Shapers of Chiron, who fully intended an interstellar rescue mission.

Sources:

The communications base is credited to Piotr Kupsc and titled "Research Facility" on Pinterest.

On November 37, M.Y. 109, stakeholder Tallivaire Corall departed Fort Enterprise at the head of an expedition numbering 1,421 souls. Sealed orders handed down from the Viceroy himself sent them north across the Kuragin Salt Flats into the foothills of the New Superstition Mountains beyond. Fifteen days into their journey, Corall's column ceased all transmissions. A brace of Radnor hoverbikes dispatched to investigate likewise disappeared. Three days later, an overflying University needlejet made visual contact with the column, still on-course and in formation. It was the last evidence of the Pilgrim colonists, of whom no further trace was ever found.

The Corall Expedition was a crippling loss for the New Two Thousand. A sixth of the SAMM fleet and a generation's worth of colonists were lost a single stroke. The blow intensified Oscar van de Graaf's hostility toward other factions and pushed him finally into an open alliance of convenience with the Dreamers of Chiron.

The Superstitions were notoriously hard on men and machines. This T-187 лавина research tank belonging to the University of Planet wrecked when it broke the floor of the salt pan. Evacuation of the wounded is underway. Soviet contributions to the Alpha Centauri mission appeared generous so long as one did not inquire about the quality of the material being offered. Maintenance had been an afterthought, and the U.N. timeline was tight enough that the old Soviet markings were never painted over. Most of the donated equipment turned out to be wartime salvage. It was not uncommon for colonists taking possession of their vehicles to hose the mortal remains of previous occupants out of the control spaces.

What could destroy an entire Colony Pod guarded by a reinforced Impact Patrol without so much as a distress flare going off? The metal content of wrecks alone should have shown up clearly on magnetometers.

When his Regulators came up empty-handed, van de Graaf engaged Struan's Strategic Services to conduct an independent inquiry. One million ¤ later, their "inescapable conclusion" was that the Human Labyrinth had probably intercepted the Corall Party and absorbed them into the Hive. Yang's sensor array was judged to extend far enough that he could have seen the column's approach. Fifty years later, Pilgrim Thinkers were flabbergasted to discover in records taken during the capture of the Unseen World that Sheng-ji Yang had searched with some fervor for the Pilgrims, but without success.

A Kersarge Industries welldriver undergoes final inspection before departure. Sixteen welldrivers were lost along with Corall. Crews across Planet preferred for their vehicles to have big personality, a tendency encouraged by the need to treat them as homes for much of the work cycle. Workshops hardly had to be asked to turn out vehicles with tie-down points by the dozen. This jacked-up welldriver had plenty of crew storage. Note the signals dome above the forward cabin. Every vehicle was tracked individually by Base Operations. Corall's all cut out at the same instant.

Heavy haulers like this one contained most of the Hab Pods for the civilian colonists looking to homestead with Corall. The vertical module between cab and cargo container is a mid-scale 3D printer, which the settlers expected to use to provide household items and basic hardware.

An American Federal Disaster Service (FDS) Hazardous Environment Cargo Tractor, better known as a Hector. The FDS was the second incarnation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the heir of the American civil defense tradition. The ARC donated tens of thousands of FDS surplus vehicles to the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri, leading Morgan Industries to sue the United States Government for unfair business practices after van de Graaf was named a factor. The FDS was authorized to defend itself with deadly force. Smoke launchers are visible above the third axle. The protrusion forward is a retracted self-defense weapons system. The plow is mine-rated. Van de Graaf committed seven Hectors to Corall.

Source:
The first picture is credited to artist Nick Gindraux.

The second picture is "Underground Investigation" by DM33 on DeviantArt.

The third picture is credited to ca designs on www.this-is-cool.co.uk. It is the work of Arnaud Caubel.

The fourth picture is the Solaris Medium Truck from Creative Uncut's Warframe Art Gallery.

The final vehicle is from ArtStation.

Dole Yudikon confronts a Maronite leader.

The Lone Survivor

Dole Yudikon, alias Carnaveron, arrived at Warm Welcome on a stretcher. The most outspoken individualist in the hemisphere began his time on Planet no differently than anyone else: in desperate need of help. He was one of two hundred occupants of a crashed Colony Pod recovered by Peacekeeper scouts out of Warm Welcome.

Help him, Lal did. But no sooner had the survivor been healed than he was discontent. Though Lal's people had rescued him from certain death, placed him in comfortable shelter, and stood watch for him on the walls, he was, from the first, preparing a quarrel against the Commissioner and his régime.

Other survivors--in every faction and base--fit a pattern. All had questions about Unity’s demise, but these were quickly set aside to focus on the satisfaction of more basic needs: breathable air, medicine, shelter, food, and water. Retrospective inquiry—about Garland’s death, the nature of their new government, even the condition of other survivors—was a luxury. They sampled it infrequently and in small draughts lest reminiscence impede the more practical work of survival. Yet for this newcomer, such asides were a preoccupation. Today would take care of itself—it must do—for yesterday too loudly demanded an inquest and tomorrow lay unfinished on the drafting table.

Dole Yudikon quickly empaneled a coroner’s jury of the colony’s ne’er-do-wells: Charterists, Purists, even Spartan prisoners. Their findings were naturally censorious. As Yudikon himself explained on the faction Datalinks, he did not believe in "Peacekeepers" any more than he believed in haunts under the bed. Contrary to Prokhor Zakharov’s starry-eyed revisionism (he had been the one to suggest dissolving the mission and striking out separately, each leader with their own retinue), Unity had succumbed to mutiny, not revolution. Prior to boarding, everyone had pledged obligation—some to the U.N. Charter, but others to a further range of governing documents that existed in parallel. Francisco d’Almeida had abrogated only the former, and his authority extended no further. Charter colonists still had their charter; the crew, their chain-of-command. Pravin Lal's experiment in participatory democracy, however well-couched in moral nicety, was quite illegal. Any court back on Earth would have said so. Some on Chiron still might.

Life on Chiron was a continuation of life on Old Earth, and fully alive with its learnings, legacies, and obligations. No human society here could arise, sui generis, without respect for Natural Law.

Quote from: Hugo Grotius

Now amongst the Things peculiar to Man, is his Desire of Society, that is, a certain Inclination to live with those of his own Kind, not in any Manner whatever, but peaceably, and in a Community regulated according to the best of his Understanding… This Sociability, which we have now described in general, or this Care of maintaining Society in a Manner conformable to the Light of human Understanding, is the Fountain of Right, properly so called; to which belongs the Abstaining from that which is another’s, and the Restitution of what we have of another’s, or of the Profit we have made by it, the Obligation of fulfilling Promises, the Reparation of a Damage done through our own Default, and the Merit of Punishment among Men. – The Rights of War and Peace, 1625, Datalinks

The Peacekeeping Forces, Dole said, were a work of bastardy. On what grounds had the most-virtuous been crowned king? With what authority did Lal presume to relieve charter colonists of their debts so that they might instead participate in a venture of his own design? Why did he presume that the loyalties with which colonists had boarded Unity could be so quickly reassigned? If it were Lal's pleasure to repudiate commitments as soon as they proved inconvenient, who could afford to repose trust in his word henceforth?

In Dole Yudikon, the mystic chords of memory would not be rendered silent even by catastrophe. The Peacekeeping Forces might be a happy nation of turncoats, glad to cast off the shackles of false allegiance to the Mission Charter and the unhappy consequences of adherence thereto, but he was made of sterner stuff. His watchword was fidelity to the past. Any invitation to acknowledge Pravin Lal as his leader was an insulting lure to prostitution. By taking on charter colonists, as well as by practicing indiscriminate salvage, the Peacekeepers were engaging in simple piracy. Dole Yudikon was the sworn man of Struan’s Pacific Trading Company. He was also an investor whose original contribution to the mission had made possible the survival of those in Lal's care. Thus, to Dole Yudikon, a generous living was owed in return. Roshann Cobb, he knew and respected. Struan’s had provided Dole Yudikon a livelihood amidst the upheavals on Old Earth and might well do so again on Chiron. Pravin Lal was an unknown quantity, and every day revealing himself less worthy.

Struan’s was one of the mission’s twelve Prime Contractors. The Hong Kong-based conglomerate provided supplemental crew as well as charter colonists operating under its own banner. Some of the positions filled in their manner were innocuous: surveyor, arborist, hydrologist, geologist. Others, euphemistic: executive protection agent, correctional facilitator, tactical equipment operator. On the advice of his illegitimate son, Struan’s tai-pan, Ian Dunross, had thrown in as a mission sponsor, waiving lucrative finder’s fees in return for proprietary rights to mount an independent colonial venture on Chiron.

The arrangement was problematic for several reasons. First, every charter colonist was in this way yoked to two masters: a U.N. supervisor and a corporate one. Second, the precise nature of sponsor contributions undercut the integrity of the mainline mission. The timing of the U.N.’s need for money meant that sponsors had supplied the heavy machinery and expertise, especially mobile rigs, without which it would be practically impossible to undertake large-scale terraforming. Because a five-year window was too narrow to expect much progress on that front, it was therefore in the U.N.’s urgent interest either to quickly work the sponsors’ vehicles and personnel to the point of uselessness, or else to ultimately renege on the deal. Nobody really believed that Joralemon Hardacre would not have shied away from martial law if confronted with "splittism" of such magnitude, and he'd had only a poor man's collection of SolarEx ASPs, not the regulars of the U.N. Marine Forces. Third, proprietary colonies implied establishment of a future carrying trade between two solar systems, and, by extension, the survival of Old Earth. Officially, the Unity was on a one-way voyage. Reestablishing communication of any kind was not among Garland’s priorities. Finally, the charter colonies, requiring security of their own, secured permission to embark peace officers whose very presence made a lie of the U.N. Command’s monopoly on violence.

Dole Yudikon’s logic was straightforward, and typical of the attitude that later earned him and others the semi-derogatory label of “Charterist.” The mother colony being stillborn, sponsors were now logically freed of the agreed-upon term of service. Contract laborers must be made to honor the terms to which they originally agreed. They were also due the restoration of their investments. Such a rich treasure, no heir could afford to renounce, no matter how thin his blood. Worse, every minute one withheld, value was subtracted from that inheritance. Men and machinery were worn down, even lost. Dole Yudikon and Pravin Lal might as well have been brothers, then, in competition for the same crown.

A Hive Thinker surveys delivery of Mark VII SAMM's by Pilgrim aerostat. Payment for the transaction, consisting of just under twelve quadrinaries of energy caskets, has been assembled on the same parade ground. Like ancient drovers, the Hivemen herded their mechanical flock out of the desert and into the Neyanza Valley, which they soon drank dry of water.

Dole Yudikon, alias "Carnaveron," was born to misfortune in the southern Sinai Peninsula approximately forty years before Mission Launch. His father was the Ofira harbor pilot and an alcoholic. The mother distracted herself from an unhappy marriage by becoming lost in her work as an irrigation engineer. Young Dole spent most of his time in the homes of Christian friends. Canadian followers of the Vulgatian rite outnumbered Israeli settlers in the region approximately 3:1. Cultural diffusion left the boy with broad vowels and a unique perspective on the interests common to Israel and its growing non-Jewish immigrant population. Together, they poured over the texts of the only literature to hand: the Vulgate and Lost Shakespeare.

Israelis practiced Judaism mostly as a civic religion in Dole's era. The Yudikons were no exception. But successive governments saw no reason to discourage the intense millenarianism of the North American Christians. Nearly all the young men in Ofira looked ahead to the day on which they would be called upon to assist their adopted homeland fulfill vague but expansive hegemonic ambitions.

Vid captures appended to his U.N. personnel file show Dole Yudikon as a young man, perhaps twenty years of age. Standing north of six feet, trim, with high cheekbones and olive complexion, he is the archetype of good health. There is no physical incongruity with his profession, which was war. Commissioned a lieutenant in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at eighteen, Yudikon served two years in the South Lebanon Security Belt advising his country’s Maronite Christian allies. Twice bitten since the wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, and afterwards twice shy, they returned to the Israeli bosom with marked hesitancy.

Tel Aviv spent lavishly to mend fences. A soldier in Dole Yudikon’s position was called upon to be equal parts battlefield commander, occupier, diplomat, and quartermaster. This was a decidedly Janus-faced undertaking: the same officer from whom a local man obtained a life-saving visa for emergency medical care in Haifa might also torture one of his relatives the next afternoon. As formal allies to the majority-Maronite South Lebanon Army, IDF units also fought alongside them—against the revived Lebanese National Movement and the Syrians officially, and unofficially during countless internecine skirmishes. More than one superior would have needed to concur that Lieutenant Yudikon possessed exceptional empathic and organizational ability, to say nothing of a strong stomach, before he was so employed. With just twenty-six IDF combat effectives at his disposal, Yudikon must have been himself a frequent combatant, and it is certain that he received at least a few months' instruction from Aman, Israel's military intelligence service.

Lieutenant Yudikon turned in mixed results. Anxious to win the favor of his skeptical hosts, he flattered their personal agendas, spending as much time assisting them to assassinate rival militia commanders as he did on building a cordon sanitaire to protect the Galilee against enemy encroachment. Through his mother, Yudikon wrote letters to the Ofira settlers, urging them first to send their money, and later their sons and daughters, to fight for the preservation of the Lebanese Christian state. This was the appeal that many had been waiting for: dozens made the long journey from the Red Sea coast to Marjeyoun. Their bemused hosts celebrated this reunion of co-religionists by relieving them of their cash and setting them to work in the fields.
After much infighting, political leadership in Yudikon’s sector consolidated to the point that Israeli combat commanders rated the local South Lebanese Army units by far their most aggressive and reliable. The IDF soon began most of its northward incursions from local bivouacs.

An intense operational tempo and diversion of sector resources from development to warfare inevitably left their mark. Israeli records, later passed to Bras de Fer Security Services, document that life expectancy and household income declined in Dole Yudikon's sector. Terrorist activity and imprisonments rose starkly. Near the conclusion of his service obligation, PLO infiltrators killed most of the Government of Free Lebanon leadership with whom he dealt directly. Their successors, who owed nothing to Yudikon, complained strenuously to IDF leadership about the worsening security problem and lamented that, despite years of collaboration, virtually every freestanding structure had been knocked flat by Syrian artillery. A review was taken in hand by the Defense Establishment Inspector General. Investigators concluded that Yudikon was prone to excessive risk-taking. Northern Command declined a recommendation of discipline, but the Lieutenant, correctly sensing the walls closing in, declined to reenlist.

Israeli law obliged native-born men to spend another three years overseas upon conclusion of their National Service. Familiar with the structure of army life, a majority opted for corporate employment. Most traveled to North America for opportunities with the American Reclamation Corporation (ARC). Veterans with more marketable skills, ex-Lieutenant Yudikon included, received offers to take on more dangerous work, whether in active warzones or outside Earth’s gravity well. Dole Yudikon went east. He would never again return to his homeland.

The Kä Space Elevator. Because of inadequate security, a notorious draw for contraband headed "upside." Poor relations with the locals meant that while the U.N. was allowed to buy access for its cargoes, blue helmets were entirely unwelcome. Alongside their official contingents, Morgan and Struan were both known to have smuggled additional passengers and equipment of an unknown nature aboard the ship, some in false compartments, others in plain sight.

By the time of Dole’s birth, the peoples of the world were embracing the possibilities of new associations as never before. Since Westphalia in 1648, the sovereign state, with its intrusive institutional presence and, more importantly, a durable monopoly on the legitimate use of force, had commanded the unabridged loyalty of its citizens, and, in return, paid out a reliable set of rewards. These included, but were not limited to: cultural continuity, contract enforcement, and, of course, physical security. The first half of the twentieth century was preoccupied by the question of which nations deserved their own states and which did not. While as recently as 1900, national government had seemed not only remote but also largely irrelevant to the daily lives of most of its citizens except during wartime, by 2000, it was both their shield against iniquity and the guarantor of their comfort in old age. Yet after more than four hundred years, the national state was demonstrating its failure to adapt.

Men hailed the state when it solved our problems, but they resented it, too. As the technocrat was elevated in importance by the increasing complexity of his own creations, so society was forced to accept his values. In the West especially, this arrangement clashed hard with the cherished popular mythology of the rambunctious republican, jealous of his prerogatives and the power of making his own mistakes. In time, many also came to resent the system of public education, which taught a sort of civic ecumenicism the previous generation found threatening and effete. They took exception when their “coarse” opinions were deemed unfit for public consumption, demanding the cultural products of an earlier era and refusing to admit imperfections in their own body politic. In the West especially, where authority was ever on trial and the intellectual came second to the humble “working man,” some began to question whether the state really ought to be making so many important decisions on their behalf.

Social media was to the modern state what the printing press had been to the Universal Church. Growing cynicism undercut the very concept of a shared reality. The state was no longer trusted to name the truth. As access to higher education declined, civic participation, already at an all-time low in the West, dropped through the floor. When Jean-Baptiste Keller made his call for “the renewal of local knowledge,” he swam in vain against the current. Virtual communities built on shared emotion replaced national communities built on shared place, sacrifice, and memory.

Civil wars across the First World provided the final trauma necessary for a broad abandonment of state-based identity. Observers now had too much evidence to deny the inadequacy of the state to protect them. Two great armies, the American and the Canadian, suffered a series of stinging defeats. Spoken allegiance to the wrong flag was now a hanging offense throughout North America.

Even after the emergence of Restored government in both Washington and Ottawa, skepticism persisted. New forms of association had proved more adaptable to the needs of wartime populations. Say what one might about Kellerites and Holnists, they proved the power of individual mobilization. Each provided adherents with values and community more immediately relevant—more practical—than the state. Wartime constitutional adjustments had also dramatically altered the relevance of corporations in the life of the North American citizen. With Letters of Marque, corporations had become “clothed themselves in the power of the state,” their private soldiers all too reminiscent of the “unauthorized” militia they were charged with rounding up. At war’s end, they successfully lobbied to retain their hard-won prerogatives.

The Second Reconstruction underlined just how far the mighty had fallen. The strategy, people, money, and know-how to mend the fallen order—all were provided by the ARC and its competitors. ARC Chief Executive Officer Oscar van de Graaf had better name-recognition than the President of the United States, his country’s ninth in as many years. The U.S. and Canadian armed forces were accustomed to civilian control. As it happened, it mattered very little whether that civilian answered to the occupants of the White House or Rideau Hall, or of 100 Morgan Tower. On the three-year anniversary of its founding, the ARC employed one in six working Americans. From Denver in the West to Cincinnati in the East, old American cities had been laid waste. From their ashes emerged corporate cantonments and United Nations refugee camps. FEMA was forgotten. And so civic contribution became synonymous with corporate, rather than national, service.

The 2090s were likewise a period of remarkable strain on Israeli society. A series of Labor governments tried without success to manage the population crisis brought about by two previous generations of religious revival. Some have credited the country’s bellicosity in Lebanon to its surplus of young men, but Israeli casualties were comparably light and neither that outlet nor inducements of desert land were enough to relieve pressures in the Coastal Plain. The social safety net was cut to the point that one former prime minister complained Israelis could no longer recognize themselves. Thus Israel, famous for its in-gathering of Jews, now sent them out again. Yudikon’s classmates were repeatedly asked to sacrifice on behalf of the nation-state without full access to its benefits. Six percent of all Israelis fought in the Holnist Wars on either side of the Atlantic and two percent were killed, though the State of Israel was never a declarant.

For a year, Dole Yudikon worked inside the Indian Ocean Exclusion Zone (IOEZ) as a customs patroller for the Gezah Islands Authority (GIA). At twenty-two, Dole kept a diary, excerpts from which were digitized by private security firm CTR. In several letters to the Ofira Canadians, he counseled them not to follow his trail. The islands were crowded and their inhabitants sickly, “without a good connection to the earth, which is false.” The GIA, a creature of the British Raj, hadn’t the remit or the funding to solve problems of this magnitude—the same limitation that he had confronted shortly before in Marjeyoun. Piracy was a rampant issue. Dole was much affected by the brutalities visited upon the islanders, most of whom were former residents of Dan and already destitute. The lone Royal Australian Navy frigate on-station was usually laid up in ordinary. Dole’s team learned to rely instead on the intervention of Morgan SafeHaven operators, whom they bribed with fuel cells intended for the frigate. Dole was impressed by the SafeHaven crews. He recorded that, far from the amoral buccaneers he expected, they shared his affection for “their fellow discarded souls of the IOEZ.” They accepted GIA fuel as payment for convoy escort and counter-boarding because they too were operating on the end of a long shoestring.

Eventually, Dole found work with the Struan’s firm as a fixer in Singapore. It was what Israelis called “the right fall.” A preferment from Struan’s meant access to good housing, top-class medical care, and competitive pay. The crown jewel of Britain’s Far East possessions glistened even more brightly as the terminus of a space elevator. Yudikon, already worldly, now rubbed shoulders with the Empire’s elite. A steady flood of technicians passed through, outbound for points elsewhere in the Sol System. Here, he struck up lasting relationships with some of the confidants whose services he would eventually recruit personally to the charter colony.

Yudikon’s duties on Singapore Island mostly involved liaison between Struan’s private security forces at Changi Worldport and the British Burma Army garrison. He was mentioned twice in despatches during the eight-month wave of rioting triggered by the U.N.’s announcement that the Unity Mission would accept corporate money. By age twenty-five, the Struan’s Home Office was tracking his career and had signed off on a series of rapid promotions.

Corporate employment continued to pay dividends in other ways. British Empire resources were worn thin. Their priority was on the port; residential districts were a secondary concern. With Singapore often convulsed by riots, Struan’s moved Dole into their proprietary district, safe behind a stockade walked by mercenary soldiers, this time wearing the same colors as Dole himself.

A gateman of the Singapore Special Constabulary, sourced from Struan's Strategic Services. Officers like this one helped to ensure the safety of people and property "under corporate care," as the saying went. Their arrest powers were strictly limited to corporate property, but the Singapore Police Force turned a blind eye to their participation in aggressive "perimeter policing," preferring to treat the Specials as a force multiplier.

That year, 2096, two events changed the course of history for the Houses of Struan and Yudikon. First, Marc Struan, the tai-pan’s natural son and heir-apparent, was diagnosed with cancer. Roshann Cobb, now an Oxford graduate, went to work for MI5, where he would spend the next five years before Marc’s passing. The relationship between Ian Dunross and his "unnatural" son was a bad one. Cobb was the Elder Struan’s second son, previously unneeded and therefore unwanted. Until his teenage years, young Roshann existed on the margins of respectable Hong Kong Society. He experimented with opium and became an odds runner at the Hong Kong Jockey Club. He and his mother, Cantonese chanteuse Chen An-Wei, reacted badly when Dunross had the boy shipped off to boarding schools. Formal equality between the races did nothing to spare Cobb merciless teasing from his companions. The tai-pan conciliated by arranging lessons in self-defense. In his fourth-year, Cobb demonstrated proficiency by pitching one tormentor out a second-story window of the Radcliffe Camera. Upon his elder brother’s death, Cobb left MI5 for a corner office with Sturan’s Hong Kong. Having no other options left to him, Ian Dunross at last determined to take an active hand in the young man’s upbringing. Among his dozen-strong protective detail was Dole Yudikon.

The U.N. Intelligence Cell judged with very high probability that it Yudikon himself brokered the détente leading to intervention from the Royal Hong Kong Police Force and local triads when the third botched attempt on Cobb’s life took place during a 2093 visit to the Kowloon Walled City.

Yudikon became wealthy sometime before January 2108, when he entered cold sleep for the journey to Alpha Centauri. His fortune covered both the costs of a personal stake with Struan’s and passage for a wife and son. In an echo of the past, Yudikon married a Katangese Christian antiquities dealer, Bienheureuse Nzuzi. She is widely supposed by the international press to have been the connection through which Elizabethville Cardinal Pierre Mputu Kasala acquired the cash to help underwrite Katanga’s independence during his residence. Their last known residence was Hong Kong’s Prince Silas Arcology, where neighbors included numerous Colonial Secretaries and prominent naval officers. While most passengers on charter assignment traded comfortable lives to begin indenture, the Yudikons’ accounts were fully settled. Dole anticipated continuing in his station as a salaryman.

Bienheureuse Nzuzi traveled frequently to Switzerland on the Concodre jetliner and was flagged a Person of Interest by INTERPOL. Oxford-educated like Roshann Cobb, she was briefly a classmate of his. Her first known contact with Dole Yudikon occurred while the pair were on separate holidays at Iran's Shemshak ski resort.

Vested Charterists alone received a special allowance for personal effects among the cargo. Problems of volume and mass led the United Nations to enforce a strict limit of 23kg for most crew. Extra space was therefore priceless, though what filled it might well have value only to the owner. Personal cargo was almost always human. Most of the time, it consisted of the Charterist’s own family, safely outside corporate authority but probably lacking the knowledge, skills, or abilities to contribute in a way that would bind them to any competing power structure. Some Charterists without dependents also sold passage to free colonists of their choosing, and under a variety of terms. The U.N. Intelligence Cell hypothesized that Dole's cargo consisted of his wife and child.

Rylance Torquay in his laboratory on the Vesta Asteroid. He joined the Unity crew as a Warrant Officer in the billet of Psych-Chaplain, reporting directly to Miriam Godwinson.

Quote from: Colonel Corazón Santiago

A man who offends no one offends me. - Heart of Jade

Out in the Main Belt, few names commanded the same respect as that of Rylance Torquay. Venutian-born and raised, Torquay had never set foot on a planetary body until the final months of his intake training in Mars's Sabaeus Quadrangle.

The anodyne term his type used for themselves, "Organizer," is not useful for understanding the work he did. Better to understand him as the secular equivalent of a psych chaplain. A psychiatrist who provided the roughnecks, spacers, and black-collar workers of the Belt with the services of a physician, social worker, and mediator. To cynics, Torquay was the token sacrifice that companies like Verne Steller Navigation and King Priam Mining used to trick their captive workforces into thinking they were well-cared for. But the workers swore by their Organizers, and nations listened.

The United Nations Life-Saving Service protected occupied equipment. Organizers protected crews. Because they were mobile, they were important sources of news. Companies were forced to supply them with unlimited air and rations, so they were always available at the individual worker's convenience. Their bodies were inviolate, protected by the feared Transportation Authority Police, enforcement arm of Comprehensive Transport, which performed the function of trans-Martian territorial government for the United Nations. Efficient enough for the Americans; brutal enough for the Soviets.

But the Companies tended to like the Organizers as well as their employees. Everybody was on the same page: there was money to be made in space. People were even more valuable than the machines they worked. Skilled laborers with proven ability to thrive in the hermetic hell of an asteroid mining station could return planetside in just three years with enough money to live comfortably to the ripe old age of 150. Unskilled laborers faced two possibilities. Either they would quickly become skilled, or, for their own sanity and the safety of everyone else, they would be flagged and removed by a vigilant Organizer and "sent down to home."

By the 2100s, it was quite literally possible to banish ne'er-do-wells "to the Moon Mines," an expedient attempted only once by the American Reclamation Corporation before being abandoned forever. A desperate man in space was a killer. Even trained astronauts were susceptible. NASA's "Hard Impact" Program, which sent two-seater probes to Near Earth Asteroids on six-month swings, was famously ruined by a confined-space violence problem. Almost half the pairings came to blows.

In the case of Rylance Torquay, it was his scope of practice that drove demand. A history of service on the Venutian gas floats provided the basis for a database that only grew with each new engagement. Data-driven modeling helped Torquay coach his employers and their workers on early (also called "deep") indicators of pending trouble, while also identifying the kinds of personalities most likely to perform well in the spacefaring environment. The U.N. Selection Committee that advanced his nomination called Torquay an "inevitable" pick.

Rylance Torquay's cryopod was missing from its location amidst a cluster of A-class emergency-rated crew when Lt. Commander Fong Na Spínola arrived to retrieve him just twenty-two minutes after the Unity's computer initiated crisis protocols.

The Stepdaughters of Gaia made their second capital at the place they called Paradise Wells, an arcology powered entirely by geothermal steam vents.

For more than a century, the Stepdaughters enjoyed an isolation even more complete than that achieved by the Human Labyrinth. While the Shaper Exile attested to the matriarchy's survival and provided the curious with rough coordinates for its domains, Deirdre and her people soon pulled up stakes. Hunter landrunners gawked at the empty husks of the giant cibola trees at Gaia's Landing and Pine Low, already starting to regrow less than a year later.

A Gaian settler breaks down communications equipment during the final departure of Colony Pods from Pine Low.

Librarians continue to dispute the precise rationale for the Gaians' suddenly aggressive new stance beginning M.Y. 201. Tensions boiled over first with the newly-formed Unicorp, presumably over the draining of wetlands that Deirdre had dubbed the d'Almeida Swamps. A post-incident investigation by the Planetary Council found that the Gaians had launched an unprovoked attack. Laser-equipped Unicorp Field Security Team '화산' (Volcano) held steady against the first wave of Gaian Rangers, armed only with hand weapons, but routed under psi attack from what survivors described as "domesticated" mindworms.

A SMACER foraging party approaches Darkwater from the east. They ride the korath, a semi-aquatic mollusk that, when fully grown, was about the size of a Unity Rover. In returns for protection from the local wildlife, SMACERs served as scouts, spies, and go-betweens for the Gaians of Eastern Shamash.

Deep in the d'Almeida Swamps, SMACERs obeyed the Gaian dictate to live with the land or perish by the sword. At her trial in abstentia, the famed jurist Adnan Sedak laid the very low quality of life in Darkwater at Lady Skye's feet, claiming that her obsession with the dignity of Planet had blinded her to the dignity of her fellow survivors.

Skye attempted, without success, to fight a multi-front war, and although spared the ruin of occupation, most of her other offensives blunted against stronger militaries honed by more regular warfare and armed with the fruits of scientific collaboration. Out of desperation, the Gaian Council allowed their war for Planet to be subsumed into larger struggles over the planetary balance of power so that they might find natural allies. Lady Deirdre didn't trust Contre-Amirale St. Germaine, but she conceded that he had proven himself at least a faithful ally of Planet.

To keep the Gaians occupied at home, rival factions attempted to stir up the SMACERs in revolt. Willing confederates received generous supplies of weapons, including prototypes that had yet to see action in more critical theaters. Through their allies in Struan's, University Design Bureau 6 furnished SMACER resistance teams with acid pellet guns. These devices exceeded even flamethrowers and incendiary bombs in their destructive effects on xenobiologics but Pilgrim Regulators employed them effectively as terror weapons against human forces. Oscar van de Graaf saw no reason why he should not punish SMACERs as harshly as he did everyone else on "his range."

Free access to fungal forests gave Gaians an important edge in salvage recovery that, under the right conditions, could sometimes compensate for the faction's technological retardation. These Ranger commandos wear late-model South African aeronaut suits--ideal protection for the Dead Zone around Morgan Planetary Recovery. Their 9mm Lyttelton Ingenieurswerke Field Disruptors were surely an unwelcome surprise for the Morganites.

The Morganite borehole mine at Sawtooth Peak was an irresistible target for Gaians striking westward, but Corporate Security wisely drilled for action against a variety of potential threat actors. In M.Y. 205, Morgan needlejet pilots Lao Zhang and Arkady Morozov became double aces defending the base against a green squadron of New State fighter-bombers. So far from home, they were probably carried up the Sundown River by long-range cruiser submarine.

Sources:

The Gaian Colony Pod picture is the work of Marcin Jakubowski on https://www.behance.net.

The animal-riding swampers appear on the front cover of Sarah Gailey's River of Teeth.

The red-suited astronauts are the work of Pericolos0, titled "Swamp Planet" on DeviantArt.

The Borehole Base is the work of Ken Fairclough.

The swamp picture used for the acid thrower weapons is credited to Anthony Wolff on Coolvibe.

Chadian youths hitch rides on the supply crawlers of 914 Groupe de transport automatisé in the capital of N'Djamena during the Saharan Burst Wars. It was a dangerous stunt, performed more for thrills than convenience. Civilian foot traffic confused the master control algorithms so that the vehicles learned their business improperly, braking suddenly even when at high speed. Street runners caused many casualties. Life-safety protocols would send the crawlers into buildings or trees before they would allow collision with a pedestrian. Pandemonium results when the crawlers detected armed pursuers. Then, they might exceed speeds of 140km/h, heedless of the fates of those crowded on their hulltops.

Partial Table of Weapons Types

Sublethal weapons are designed for use by law enforcement for use against civilians to achieve crowd control and personal immobilization. As the name implies, they are usually (but not always) intended to disperse, discourage, or impede targets, not to kill them. Sub-lethal weapons in use on Chiron include: simple, expandable, and stun batons; simple and stun shields; high-pressure water hoses; fast-hardening foams or gels (e.g., Togra Labs StickFoam®); simple smoke; baton rounds; irritants; sonics; and radiation projectors. The relatively large proportion of sub-lethal weapons in comparison to military-grade weapons accessible to the early colonists meant that sub-lethal weapons were a staple of warfare for want of better options. Because of their extremely short effective range and original deterrence mission, flechette weapons, including all Shredder weapons, are usually classified as sublethals, notwithstanding the egregious and crippling wounds they inflicted. The Unity armory carried six thousand Shredder pistols and five hundred Shredder rifles.

U.N. Security Forces drill to re-secure Damage Control during a hostage-barricade scenario. All of the team members carry shredder rifles.

Hand weapons are dumb-, direct-fire small arms and light, crew-served weapons. The term also covers the basic personal protective equipment. Both are from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A very large quantity of hand weapons were smuggled aboard Unity and brought down with the survivors. Most rifles were chambered to 5.56 x 45mm NATO, 7.62 x 51mm UN, or 7.62 x 39mm WARPAC standards. Popular and ubiquitous types of hand weapons included the M16, M4, AK47, G3, and R1 rifles, .50 BMG and DhsK heavy machine guns, Light Antitank Weapon, RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher, M47 grenade, and M79 40mm brake-action grenade launcher. Early nylon and fiberglass "flak" vests and steel helmets provided wearers with limited protection against shrapnel and mostly-spent rounds. Hand weapons remained standard-issue for Chiron militaries until well into the fifth generation. Today, they are still used to arm most auxiliary units, including faction militia.

Tribal Minutemen evaluate modified hand weapons picked from Sabre Corporation prisoners.

Smart weapons reflected the advancements of the 1980s digital revolution, providing increased battlefield awareness that led, in turn, to superior battlefield performance. Personal weapons evolved to provide the individual soldier with more information, enhanced protection from rifle fire, and the ability to engage multiple different types of targets successfully at beyond visual range (BVR). Man-portable drones, guided missiles, squad radio networks, variable-range ammunition, and Kevlar body armor made their appearance during the "Smart Era" of warfare on Planet Earth. These weapons were more than a century old at Mission Launch, but few appeared on the Unity manifest and the fundamentals of this type of warfare had to be relearned by the survivors as they made appropriate simultaneous advances in long-range and satellite communications.

A сом heavy-haul 'copter out of Forward Support Base Danger delivers SolarEx ASPs and their mechanical mules to the blasted outworks of The Core. The hardened ASPs easily swept aside Johann Anhladt's Defender militia. In the hands of unseasoned troops, predictive algorithms were no match for veterancy.

Impact weaponry provides an individual soldier with exceptional firepower. The scope of impact of this revolution in military affairs is much smaller than that of the previous generation, focusing almost entirely on the portability and striking power of crew-served weapons. The Impact Squad usually incorporates the coilgun, or Gauß rifle, a type of electromagnetic accelerator firing a magnetic round at very high speed, ideal for anti-armor work, and the chaingun, a rotary cannon capable of firing as many as 4,000 rounds per minute. Impact weaponry is controversial: the very high power requirements associated with Impact-style firearms greatly reduced squad mobility.

Spartan prisoners faced one of two unwelcome fates. Most were remanded to become helots, performing the basic labors required to keep the faction supplied. However, those with proven mettle were forced into the role of OPFOR, participating against their will in live-fire exercises against Spartan warriors. Victors were rewarded with their freedom. Here, a squad of Chiron Guard go on the offensive, breaching a Myrmidon bunker. The breacher hefts an Impact gun.

Powered Combat joined the innovations of the two prior eras of warfare. Exoskeletal frames provided the defensive protection, physical endurance, and rapid movement necessary for their human operators to reclaim the battlespace from remotely-operated vehicles. Soldiers in battlearmor replaced the tank as king of the battlefield.

SafeHaven's Thunderchief Battle Armor used a detachable jet pack to provide up to 7 minutes of actual flight capability. The weapons load-out was variable, but a Gauß cannon in the right arm and a 40mm grenade launcher in the left were standard, providing both anti-armor and anti-personnel solutions. The grills at wrist and calves could expel flames: the operator could bath themselves in fire if swarmed by mindworms.

Sources:
The picture of U.N. Security Forces is actually a still from the show Bablyon 5.

The picture of actor Matt Damon is from the 2013 movie Elysium.

The Longinus Battle Armor is credited to ancient klaxosapien on Pinterest.

The breaching scene is from the movie Aliens.

Pearson's Ladder was the site of Planet's first space elevator. Conceived by Zakharov's scientists, the structure was built to exacting Unicorp specifications.

At first, all the fuss was one-way. Men, materials, and food went up but did not come back down. Meanwhile, the ladder grew ever taller while combat raged below.

It happened that the terminus of the elevator was in fact the starship Unity. One day, in M.Y. 364, Planet's biggest supply dump became the lay-down yard for the largest salvage operation in human history.

The Ladder was heavily protected. Since nobody trusted University Security or the hard-fighting, oft-losing Dai Seung Security Force with such a high-profile target, it was a multi-faction affair. Defenders included Restoration Marines, U.N. blue helmets, Tribal Minutemen, and Miriam Godwinson's Nauvoo Legion.

Cosmonauts of the fourth generation called their Extravehicular Operations Suits "Жирная свинья," for fat pig. The high-tech over-garments earned a deservedly strong reputation when carrying out high-heat mining operations on Mercury and were brought to Chiron in large numbers through the good offices of promyshlenik Andelko Saratov. Hundreds served during the breaching and inventory of the derelict Unity. They found their way later to the ice mines of Issus.

Quote from: Walt Disney World

So stand by the mainsail. The fierce storms we'll race. Aloft with ye, mates, or King Neptune we'll face. - The American Adventure

Somewhere close to the front rank of exceptional sailors to survive the Unity Crisis was Ulrik Svensgaard.

Cursed to live in interesting times, Svensgaard, a reluctant reservist in the resurrected Massachusetts Naval Militia, spent five years protecting Boston Harbor from Holnist saboteurs. Poised for dismissal on disciplinary grounds, his career and freedom were spared by the need for seasoned hands to take up interdiction patrol on the Nova Scotia Shelf, keeping pace with Soviet "fishing trawlers" and helping to enforce the Canadian government's closure of its east coast ports. Successive commanders put the hot-tempered Glousterman on small craft where he brought a cynic's eye and a nihilist's fondness for violence to difficult boarding actions.

Four years deeper still into a profession he disliked, Svensgaard, now a respected Chief Petty Officer, was recommended for Officer Candidate School. Captains trusted him with the lives of their sailors. He intended to decline the opportunity, he said, "but plumb forgot the deadline to withdraw." Two years later, he was master of his own patrol skimmer.

Making a career of naval service put Svensgaard on the front lines during the Battles for the Arctic, and he did dangerous inshore work on the margins of the costly NATO victory over the Red Banner Fleet at Baffin Bay, even sinking a Soviet LCAC. Wounded by a vengeful destroyer, he refused rehabilitative surgery and lost an eye for his troubles. One Navy Cross later, Lieutenant Commander Svensgaard was transferred to Unity Project following discovery of Holnist literature on a government-issue tape reader in his posession. (The short-lived Wearington Administration used the U.N. as a penal colony for politically unreliable officers.)

Amazingly, the U.N. accepted Svensgaard despite knowing he was a neo-fascist sympathizer. Setting aside Soviet recommendations to first "rehabilitate" its fresh crop of "defectives," the U.N. instead heeded encouragement from the World Health Organization, first sealing their records and then attempted to provide them with purpose. Inspired by Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Pravin Lal described the intent as "peace with charity." Svensgaard performed well in training evolutions already familiar to him as a wartime sailor and looked forward to independent command of a coaster within the Aquatic Operations Division.

On Planetfall, Svensgaard was one of just five men with surface warfare experience available to the New State. When Contre-Amirale Raoul André St. Germaine vested him with command of a coveted Unity Gunboat, Svensgaard waited only to sail over the horizon before hoisting his own flag.

Svensgaard's U.N. Psych Profile indicates a pathological animus toward "elites," his preferred epithet for the formally-educated. Instructors complained that he disliked by both peers and superiors despite ample physical bravery and acknowledged competence as a Surface Warfare Officer. One Royal Navy evaluator expressed the common opinion: "Obsessed with the appearance and performance of 'strength.' Incapable of empathy. Avoidant behaviors easily mistaken for "salt-wisdom," or even concern for subordinates. Long exposure to crisis situations has greatly increased subject's tolerance for risk and pain.

Svensgaard's General Taylor, a heavily-modified coastal patroller, outclassed anything afloat in the waters of northern Chiron until at least the arrival of Malaki Ro's Skagway in M.Y. 12. Two Mk280 4" rapid-fire cannons, four variable-mission canister launch systems, two close-in sonic projectors, and a dense countermeasures suite sent the Peacekeeper Heavy Foil Zweihänder to the bottom during the Battle of U.N. Relief Station, killing Captain Eugen Köhler. Svensgaard himself wasn't present at the fight, which also saw the loss of General Taylor to the concentrated fire from Sathieu Metrion's gargantuan combat hovercraft, the improbably-named Kungalooshi.

Apsara Mongkut, Thailand's favorite son. A personal institution at the United Nations, where he served more than four decades, two of them as Secretary-General. Cambridge-educated. Moscow-aligned. Acerbic, self-assured, and sartorial. Well known (and oft-criticized) for his lavish lifestyle and skillful deployment of social media to influence national policies in line with U.N. objectives. Ardent anti-colonialist who filled his unused New York office with relics of empire, described by Time Magazine as an "ironic commentary." Credited himself with winning Québec independence by urging the Communist Bloc to call NATO's bluff. Revived the moribund Unity project through private subscription. Mediated resolution of the War on the Aegean after Greek withdrawal from NATO. Central figure in numerous scandals and conspiracy theories, including the disappearance of Abaddon Vesper while on medical holiday in Switzerland and pay-for-play schemes involving U.N. relief contracts worldwide. Killed in a car crash in British Hong Kong Colony. Known enemies included the Federal Republic of Carmel, NATO, Struan's Pacific Trading Company, the American Reclamation Corporation, Morgan Industries, the Southern Ocean Sovereignty of Es Ankhenadron, Comprehensive Transport, and the Kaestral Group. His New York Times obituary remembered him as "sometimes successful, more often thwarted, but always, and unavoidably, relevant."

The unsolved assassination of U.N. Secretary-General Apsara Mongkut caused his successor to rethink executive protection and international policing. With the assistance of CTR, the U.N. Security Forces birthed DEEPEYES, a "hard military" force of non-patriated persons ("No-Pats"), directly answerable to the Secretary-General. DEEPEYES recruits received training from both the French and Soviets. In 2078, the project received a severe blow after a joint MI6 and Chinese National Security Bureau discovered two DEEPEYES agents working to foment a Communist counter-coup in Shanghai. A second embarassment surrounded the total kill of a DEEPEYES tactical team during a botched raid on the lunar compound of Barrow St. Ledger, chairman of the Solar Caravan Company. (A Senate inquiry ultimately revealed that the United States Government had assisted in the chairman's defense.) DEEPEYES was widely considered a failure and discontinued after just 10 years as the U.N. scraped to finance conventional protection of its space elevator sites.

For every successful settlement on Chiron, three others were abandoned by their founders. Hostile action forced the small research team at the Saịtị Ụbọchị site to retire to Loaves and Fishes. It was a familiar story. Breakfast had not yet been served when a platoon of Morgan Crisis Crush commandos sent nineteen hungry zoologists back to Loaves and Fishes without so much as a survival suit between them. Most perished of nitrogen poisoning before the day was out. Yet for their trouble, the raiders found little worth taking. Miriam's quartermasters were stingy only because they could not issue what they did not have. The base's original inhabitants had been preparing to dine on irradiated rations originally sourced from Unity itself.

Sources:
The picture of the Thai politician used for Apsara Mongkut is actually that of Suthep Thaugsuban.

"No-Pats" are a stateless people in Battlefield 2042 who, according to the Battlefield Wiki, are "unable or unwilling to exercise their right of return, and instead unite under a global, non-national identity."

DEEPEYES is a hunter-killer special forces team from the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

The final picture was evidently produced by Bungie Entertainment and found on Google image search.

Quote from: Barrabas

And as their wealth increseth, so enclose / Infinite riches in a little room. - The Jew of Malta, Act I, Scene 8

A pair of AMCORE Juggernauts, armored cavalry assault vehicles, rolls down the unloading ramp of one of the mission's four Imre-Meinertzhagen Heavy Cargo Landers, a kind of high-capacity Landing Pod. The rolling fortresses proved nearly impervious to Morganite weaponry during the Ancalagon Trade Wars of the '40s and were still in action protecting Bourse interests a century later.

Critics had it that Apsara Mongkut was nine times a Judas. Under his watch, the U.N. parceled out the last precious space aboard its outgoing ark not on the basis of who was most worthy or most in need, as the founding principles of that organization might suggest, but instead for money. This was an under-appreciation. The man who succeeded Mongkut, Dr. Vasco Paredes Tottodoro, sold three more billets for an even greater total sum. And while the twelve charter colonies commanded obsessive attention from the public and their media watchdogs, just over a thousand individuals and lesser organizations also negotiated fee-access without receiving proprietor's privileges. About four thousand of the 450,000 personnel aboard Unity were fee-access passengers.

As a rule, passengers caused more problems for the Mission than selected colonists and crew. Marching to their own drum, the former had much greater incentives to circumvent the strict rules on personnel eligibility. With Mongkut's knowledge, hundreds of "fee-accessers" paid special subscriptions that entitled them to additional cargo space, sometimes a great deal of it. Like the "Big Twelve," fee-accessers also bribed the mission contractors to load off-manifest cargo behind false bulkheads or in spaces gutted due to redesign and never detached due to time constraints.

Clustered together in cryobays reserved for them alone, a small number of these fee-accessers banded together during the Unity Crisis, securing their own dedicated Landing Pods and filling them with equipment to which only they had access. Some number of these rallied after Planetfall to form the organization latterly known as The Bourse, an Outpost-class faction determined to carve out an exclusive commercial preserve on the continent of Ancalagon, come hell or Nwabudike Morgan.

Although monopolists themselves, the untender mercies of The Bourse merchants were still deemed preferable to those of Morgan himself by Ancalagon's chief occupants, the New Two Thousand and the Children of the Atom, which provided succor to Bourse operatives when Morgan launched his grand counterstroke. If Oscar van de Graaf or Johann Anhaldt lacked for faith in their choice of allies, the discovery that The Bourse was in possession of two eighth-generation Juggernauts must have been bracing indeed.

Amusing, both the Morganites and their arch enemy, the Pilgrims, were confounded by the revelation that two of the massive fighting vehicles had been ferried across the stars. What kind of profit-seeking venture would miss out on the opportunity to ship more productive machinery?

Source:

This picture is credited to Marcin Jakubowski on Behance.net.

Quote from: Ken Burns’ Planet: A History

We keep talking about a project. But that very term implies a discipline we never really achieved. It was many minor miracles held together with string. Zakharov and his star drive. Mongkut’s unbelievable political gymnastics. The staggering corruption of Morgan Industries. Incredible failures of security by the United Nations. Over and over again. The U.N. demonstrated cowardice on such a scale as to completely invalidate their moral credibility. When she launched, Unity was cheered. Not because the people of Earth were excited to see her off, but because they were finally relieved of the burden of having to sacrifice for the sake of this expensive folly that did nothing to quench the fires burning all around them.

Vinka Dialyse, in cold sleep.

Reconstructing a complete, much less a true, record of what, exactly, happened aboard Unity after the meteor impact may be quite impossible. Post-graduate study at the University of Planet’s Garland School of Recent History begins and ends with symposiums on this, “the most vital question of our age.” Ostensibly, the purpose of this coursework is to reconcile the student to the only sour certainty: that all history is subjective. Much less healthfully, Institute datacrawlers hold out hope that they can use the same material to solve the mystery of who is to blame for the death of Mission Area Director Tạ Dọc Thân. Peacekeeper clerks mine decrypted records for what they believe with be the vindicating proof that Commissioner Lal is, in fact, the ultimate political authority on Chiron, an endeavor that requires they first reconstruct the details of what happened in Damage Control after the moment of Jonathan Garland’s death.

As University course materials explain, truth-seeking in this context presents numerous dilemmas. Survivor recollection is fallible. The ship’s Data Core, which contains a time-stamped history of every mechanical action and digital communication made since its activation, has been tampered with several times, both before being jettisoned to Chiron’s surface and afterward. Accessing the fullness of the records contained within requires the creation of a specialized communications infrastructure. Moreover, the actual layout of the ship is unknowable, and so many narratives are confusing and unverifiable. Even before mission launch, the U.N. Intelligence Cell estimated that as many as 25,000 of the ship’s half-million authorized cryobeds were occupied by somebody other than the person listed on U.N. manifests.

Partial view of Unity during trials. About one-eighth of the ship is visible from this angle, including hydroponics bays, solar batteries, and fuel cells.

An endeavor as large as the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri required that construction take place according to a modular design, while supplies were laid in on a continuous basis over the course of whole generations. Many colonists therefore had to be trained to operate technology based on principles that had already been forgotten during the lifetimes of their great grandparents. Thus, for example, the ship’s computers were a mess of systems and applications characterized by both sub-optimal performance and sloppy coding. Unity’s hardware operated on more than three hundred distinct machine languages. Deconflicting the software of so many different eras was an exercise in agony. Reliance on older systems for core functionality also meant that much of the value of newer components was thereby denied to the expedition: they simply couldn’t be used for lack of processing power or compatibility. Even worse, threat actor intrusion was impossible to track or remediate on a large scale. There were too many people with hard access, too many systems to protect, and not enough experts available. Diotan Chun-kuo, head of Cybersecurity Initiatives for the U.N. Office of Counter-Terrorism, was forced to remind the Security Council more than once that the very labor force he required to guarantee the mission’s protection was ten years on ice!

Occasionally, the case for a targeted redesign was overwhelming, and the U.N. therefore agreed to gut entire compartments of the starship (always at great cost) in favor of newer, “better” solutions. Considerations of time and money meant that these retrofits were accomplished at the expense of quality. The U.N. attempted to salvage what they could from the modules slated for replacement, but it was not always feasible, and 12% of Unity’s volume was “supernumerary” space when she entered trials. Some of this space was loaded with cargo that the logisticians had decided wasn’t worth the effort to move elsewhere, even to save mass; some still received power and life support to avoid the cost of rerouting those systems.

One of the most interesting cases of uncertain identity was that of the crewmember called Vinka Dialyse. She belonged to a set of survivors contained in a Hab Pod recovered just weeks after Planetfall by the Peacekeeping Forces. The rescuers tended to a wounded Caucasian female who appeared to be in her mid-to-late twenties. Per the responsible med tech’s recorded session notes, the subject’s Space Force uniform name tag read Dialyse. There were also the insignia of a lieutenant and a patch for the ship’s Corrections Division.

The individual called Vinka Dialyse, at Warm Welcome, M.Y. 0.

Evidently, the patient was startled by the decanting process. She became violent. Patient and nurse practitioner fought. Dialyse knocked the med tech unconscious with a blow to the temple and fled the field tent, at which point she soon succumbed to oxygen deprivation.

Records already available to the Peacekeeping Forces contained helpful information about Dialyse, first name Vinka. She was the fourth daughter of an Aylūl banker, Kammermun Dialyse, and her much younger husband, Rafael Alvarez, a popular diarist and semi-professional protester on behalf of anti-colonialist causes. The latter had made himself persona non grata throughout much of Europe and lived in a kind of exile on Aylūl where he regularly embarrassed the government.

Dialyse the Younger had attracted the attention of Aylūl’s Selection Board because of her exemplary record during national service. “Officer-like Qualities” included eloquent self-expression (perhaps a legacy of her father’s written verve), empathic predisposition, and an undaunted attitude toward failure. At the national university, she studied geology and summered with the Aylūl Geologic Survey, a quasi-military body operating in that country's Antarctic territory. Her later education was provided by the Universidad de Chile, where she declined plumb offers of employment from several mining companies, including Morgan Metals, Southern Mantle, and the Peruvian Amazon Company. She instead took work with the Gezah Valley Authority (GVA), a Carmelite instrumentality working to develop that country’s deep interior. The GVA was a post-war haven for those with former allegiance to Vesper Abaddon, not long since in retirement. In correspondence home and to schoolmates, copies of which were obtained during her CTR background investigation, Dialyse expressed considerable satisfaction over both the GVA’s impact on regional development and the relationships she was forging within the expatriate community in Far Shiloh. In 2066, one year before being approved for transfer to the Unity crew as part of the Aylūl contingent, Dialyse appeared before the Carmelite legislature representing the GVA when Carmelite prime minister, Harlan Versh, was entertaining its privatization. The GVA remained a federal agency and Morgan Industries was dealt a rare setback.

Tragically, Dialyse was killed while still in training, victim of a trans-orbital shuttle accident. She had not yet been formally granted the rank of Ensign, let alone commissioned a full lieutenant. An exchange of records with the Resident Commissioner of the Watchers of Chiron raised only more questions. The Mission Area Director had nothing to indicate that a Vinka Dialyse should have been among his staff—and his was, at least in theory, the final word on that matter. But the name Vinka Dialyse did appear elsewhere in Peacekeeper records: it had been spoken by U.N. Security Forces officer Fong Na Spínola. Dialyse, he said, had been with him and Executive Officer Francisco d'Almeida in Damage Control, and she had survived long enough to participate in the running firefight that ensued as the Portuguese general had led the way to muster stations. Fong had lost sight of Dialyse as a smoke grenade obscured his vision. He had assumed that she and d'Almeida were shot dead by the pursuing Kellerite breaching party.

UNSF Major Fong Na Spínola, the last person to report seeing Vinka Dialyse alive prior to Planetfall.

A secure medical bay at U.N. Relief Station where Base Operations maintained unknown personnel in indefinite suspension, a practice judged inhumane by the Planetary Council in M.Y. 32. The Vinka Dialyse case reinforced a predisposition on the part of Lal and his closest subordinates to titrate new colonists into the Peacekeeper population lest they prove faithless.

After medical release from the Peacekeeper infirmary, Vinka Dialyse departed Lal’s territory with a SMACER work crew headed north. She was tracked on Peacekeeper scopes until the crew rendezvoused with a Sabre Corporation security team—not an unusual event considering the faction’s dependence on externally-sourced labor. Her case returned to focus only years later after the Dreamers’ functional demise. During debriefing with the Planetary Council, Dr. Aleigha Cohen referenced Vinka Dialyse as an enduring mystery. At Dialyse's own requested, Dream analysis had indicated that she believed honestly in the truth value of her own statements, though cross-referencing her biological material with U.N. records had offered decisive confirmation that she was someone else entirely. Cohen felt Dialyse must be a partisan of Vesper Abaddon, or how else to explain the personal history? Unsurprisingly, Abaddon denied knowledge of Dialyse and pointed out that the remote location of the GSA had been attractive to ne’er-do-wells of all stripes, including those without any nexus with his regime. At the time of the original dream-reading, Roshann Cobb had ordered Cohen to obtain more intrusive scans, which Cohen had done, though without coming across anything she considered noteworthy. To avoid taking on another mouth to feed, disdaining trouble with the SMACERs, and believing that somebody would eventually come to "collect" Dialyse, the Dreamers allowed her to depart. The name appeared again, eleven decades later, on citizenship rolls submitted by The Bourse during the Planetary Census of M.Y. 144.

Sources:

Vinka Dialyse in cold sleep credited to Vladimir Manyukhin on wallpapercrafter.com. Wallpaper ID: 133775.

The second picture of Dialyse is labele d"Regular Female Sci-Fi" on Pinterest, which credits the original to Imgur.

The Unity picture belongs to Nichlas Benjamin per the source URL.

Fong Na Spínola's picture is "Character 5 Mech2," created by user MitchellMohrhauser on Deviant Art.

Quote from: Andelko Saratov

They would not take me, they said, because I was a murderer. Moses murdered. Because I was a thief. Prometheus stole. Due to my implication in revolutionary activity. Since I recognized no boundaries. Did not know my place. Refused to stay silent. Lacked "proper understanding" of risk and reward. Who better to form the vanguard? - Anger in a Thousand Places

How to select for the ideal members of a future society? Must the U.N. accept only the "best" of humanity?

The earliest recruits set the bar quite high, reflecting the technocratic ideals of the mission's original architects. How did one demonstrate qualification? By elite pedigree. Graduates of the finest institutions of learning. Recognized leaders in their fields. Decorated soldiers and civil servants. They skewed white, wealthy, and, in the opinion of the Secretary-General, weak. Before dense rows of cameras in New York City in February 2041, Apsara Mongkut got ahead of critics by taking his own subordinates to task quite as if he'd had nothing to do with their previous decision-making. Rather than receive the cirriculum vitae of yet another materials scientist, Mongkut timed the man as he attempted to don an escape hood. Forty minutes later, Mongkut rose and left without comment. The poor witness was still sorting out his protective equipment.

"Second-run" selections followed new criteria that allowed lower scores on personality inventories, regarded certain career setbacks as plausible evidence of mental resilience, and looked increasingly to the predictive power of a new analytical input recommended to the U.N. by the American Reclamation Corporation: the Atherholt Trauma Function Test. New and testier personalities joined the colonial effort. U.N. Minister of Off-World Operations Kamaria Apio used words like "kinetic" and "questioning" to describe what detractors saw as scarcely-adulterated versions of the first selections.

Reduced American funding during the hottest years of the Second Civil War led to a severe slow-down in recruiting but also allowed the United Nations to experiment with a wider range of professions. Fewer agronomists to make way for more farmers. Welders and pipe-fitters before process engineers. Larger contingents from countries that could not pay their own way, all with less formal education but more practical exposure to lifetime hardship.

Soviet and Red Chinese standards, which set the pace for the 2050s, turned attention to questions of political suitability. Jonathan Garland was selected as captain. Skill mattered less than "temperment," a catchall for performance on psychiatric inventories that measured predisposition toward self-abnegation. French and Portuguese influence on the Alpha Centauri Mission also increased perceptibly, resulting in the adoption of cultural targets. Where were the lawyers to keep the contracts that would need to govern the relations between the mainline colony and its assumptive offshoots? Who would cure distempers if not cooks, authors, and chamber musicians? Heroes would be necessary in plenty, and so neither must sport be neglected.

In 2061, the first convicts came aboard as manual laborers. For what purpose, nobody was quite sure, and it appeared that Unity was at last being acknowledged for what it had become: a dumping ground. Some efforts were made to lure the space-going trades, but the urgency to escape a poisoned planet was less for those who could already envision thriving off-world colonies nearer at hand than the Alpha Centauri star system. With this fifth tranche of recruits came the "useful ne'er-do-wells," or persons whose experiences would have been desirable even at home, but for their poor fit with the prevailing national mood. Here came the alleged war criminals, misfits, and embarrassments--offers the United Nations was in no position to reject, much less vet reliably.

At last came the proprietors, and with them, the revenge of the elites. In his interviews with the Ken Burns Trust, Morgan Industries COO Wenceslas Sedláček explained his philosophy for colonist selection: "I told them, either you are wearing a pocket protector or carrying a pneumatic drill." The cultural flourishing of an earlier era was ended almost completely. Back came the scientists, service members, and skilled tradespeople plucked from supervisory roles. A few brought with them families whose inclusion created no obvious advantage for the mission as a whole.

But perhaps that was the point. Eloquent critics like Jean-Baptiste Keller and Golden Chinese Emperor Sao Gong, and less eloquent ones such as a Miami gang leader-turned-civil defense hero, Corazón Santiago, questioned both the fairness and desirability of a process weighted toward individuals with particular backgrounds and personality traits. Was the real measure of a person their ability to operate a sonic hammer? What was civilization without the "ordinary" people--those whose circumstances had not allowed for the possibility of greatness?

The war-ravaged, fire-stricken American Southwest provided suitably hostile environments in which to ease green crew members through the rudiments of survival training. This contingent, equipped with self-contained breathing apparatus, prepares to set out from their training rig, a slab-sided museum piece older even than the decrepit equipment found in the Unity vehicle bays. In teams of four, clerks, custodians, and educators "yomped" between sensor pods, learned water conservation, and adjusted themselves to the discomfort of life in low-oxygen environments.

As it happened, non-standard professions played a crucial role in the life of every colony. Investigators protected faction assets. Jurists limned the parameters for vendetta. Musicians collaborated with psychiatrists and physicians to enhance the totality of the Dreaming experience. Television producers helped faction leaders reach into every home. Journalists brought the news of the world to readers eager for evidence that, despite their many miles from home, the Unity survivors were not alone.

Source:

Picture found on the This-Is-Cool Tumblr site under "Sci-Fi Fantasy Horror."

Quote from: Meronicus XXXXII 2:190

By means of the sword, from him who has raised the hand, conveys to him against whom the hand has been raised. – The Blood Price

Name: Ichillis Ontarion
Rank: Colonist II
Position: Etaireía-Merarchēs (Companion-Colonel), DeLeon Expedition
County of Origin: Voight Trench, Pacific Ocean Constellation
DOB: 12-2-2034
Height: 193cm
Weight: 99.8kg

Unity Contractor Background History:
Born 2034, Bitter Waters Colony, Voight Trench. Parents divorced. Remained with father, a receiving agent for the Outremer Caravan Company. Evacuated to Federal Republic of Carmel, 2047, during eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai. Orphaned when Morgan Resolutions blockaded evacuees to force payment of restitution for Korimar Strikes. Merit-adoptive of cattle baron and Gathi Rail Board chairman “King” Con Madigan.

Unconventional upbringing included work as a ranch hand, indicating probable participation in Issuri Valley Range War of 2052-3 and work as an assayer at the Asidaph Diamond Mines the following year, almost certainly arranged by Madigan family. Acquitted by corner’s inquest in the killing of a Morgan Gemstones courier on grounds of self-defense.

Completed Interlink correspondence courses to Advanced M2 level in civil defense with The Nine Schools of Selah. Martial artist (Tav Radan) and semi-finalist for the 2056 Carmelite Olympic Team. Received Special Gratitude of Federal Assembly for Master’s Thesis evaluating the performance of private security forces as both auxiliaries and replacements for under-performing national militaries. Argued in favor of the former.

Drafted into reformed Gathi Federal Guard in 2059 during the War of Carmelite Secession. Breveted senior lieutenant and assigned to a combined-arms brigade comprised mostly of Halberd Services mercenaries. Mentioned four times in despatches for personal heroism during Reaving of Tenelon, preemptive invasion of Gath’s western neighbor, which had mobilized on its border (later revealed as fulfillment of a secret treaty signed with Shiloh, pending imminent invasion). Spoils from the raid, including huge quantities of food, fuel, ammunitions, and stockpiled weapons, helped Gath to endure until completion of the Skirdon Mag-Lev line to allied County of Toltan, after which point the war shifted decisively in favor of the Carmelite Unionists, with total reabsorption of Shiloh in 2064. Promoted to major before mustering out.

Nominated by Carmelite National Selection Committee to the U.N. Mission for Alpha Centauri. Rejected over sustained allegations of Gathi war crimes committed during the Tenelon campaign. Subsequently contracted privately in 2066 to DeLeon Expedition as supervisor of commercial paramilitary forces. Automatically elevated to Colonel to ensure parity with peer positions in other Charter contingents.

Alec DeLeon, Chief Strategy Officer, Verne Steller Navigation Company, is among the six Founding Agents of The Bourse.

Alec DeLeon during confined-space rescue drills prior to Mission Launch. DeLeon personnel trained for more than three years following an abbreviated curriculum endorsed by Mission Control and were some of the last authorized passengers to board Unity.

Psych Profile from Contractor Database: Relativist
Madigan Family of Gath known to be active in Cult of Sol Invictus. Subject's spiritual predilections remain private.

Strong national allegiance suggests individual may be unsuitable for multilateral colonial effort.

Known Monarchist associations: Con Madigan has spoken forcefully in favor of restoration of the Abaddon Dynasty in Carmel. Subject has no record of similar activism, however.

Psych evaluation indicates high tolerance for use of violence to resolve personal conflict, though individual does not display violent tendencies and has no criminal record.

Subject’s moral judgements are consistently determined by counterparty’s personal behavior toward them rather than with reference to specific objectives (e.g., Mission Charter) or universal principles such as the collective good. Specific relationship to atrocities in Tenelon unclear: Gathi forces executed captured Tenelon soldiers as a bloody-minded “efficiency” measure before the perilous crossing over the snowy Rodan Sawtooths back to the Gathi Plateau. Subject's Gathi ascription and proximity to accusations alone may be enough to provoke Retributionists.

Success in nepotistic and high-attrition environments makes it difficult to judge subject’s true aptitude in any field. Personal history likely to have been effectively scrubbed, either explicitly by family action or by sympathetic administrators in deference to the House of Madigan.

Subject requested, and received, hardship reassignment from Honua Station to Sabaeus Quadrangle for reasons unknown. American Reclamation Corporation trainers were highly complimentary. Subject scored .92 on Atherholt Trauma Function Test.

CAUTION: This colonist's profile was found to have been edited on two occasions by Gold-level access holder with a Morgan Crisis Crush net code, resulting in a substantially more negative appraisal. The profile presented here is a rollback version produced exclusively by the U.N. Intelligence Cell with input from U.N. Psych and mission contractor CTR.

Artist’s impression of a Bourse Enforcer in a CMC-410 “Revenant” Powered Combat Suit, such as were found to be included in the Outpost’s TO&E. Restoration Thinkers uprated The Bourse an urgent threat after repeated sightings of late-generation Terran military equipment with their forces but the two factions never came to blows.

Sources:
Picture is from the SyFy/Amazon Prime show, The Expanse.

Gath, Shiloh, and Selah are Biblical references used to refer to a fictional countries in the short-lived NBC series, Kings.

Merit-adoptives are a concept presented in the new Thrawn: Ascendancy series by Timothy Zahn.

Con Madigan is a Texas cowboy in the 1980s Disney series Five Mile Creek.

Alec DeLeon was a character in the 1990s Exo Squad cartoon series.

The battle suit picture is titled “Sardaukar” and is credited to Paolo Tomasella on Pinterest.

Before all of these ideas were fodder for experimental fan-fiction, they were the basis for a so-called "matrix" game. In other words, a grand strategic simulation on forums a lot like this one.

At times, I even got it in my head that we could run a kind of living version of the game the way folks used to play massively multiplayer, "off-line" versions of SMAC on Apolyton (a feat I recall but could never find again on the Internet), or Europa Universalis I on the Paradox forums, running their own calculations for population growth, research rates, and production. This meant that I had to focus to some extent on game mechanics. In fact, you've read my take on Affinities in a previous update. But what about research?

As everyone knows, SMAC organized all technologies into four categories: Conquer, Discover, Build, and Explore. Here was my vision for Alpha Centauri 2, which has heavily influenced our story so far.

Research Focus Areas: Tech and Doctrine
AC2 incorporates two different types of technological progress: research--practical advancements made mostly in the laboratory or the field, and doctrine--revolutions in thought that influence faction behavior, such as by opening new doors in social engineering or enhancing battlefield performance. Research enables a faction to craft new things. Doctrine enables a faction to execute specific tasks more effectively.

Factions trigger a bonus when they pursued the research and doctrinal path(s) most-aligned with their fundamental beliefs. This represents the intrinsic thought and effort already applied by faction members to that particular aspect of human endeavor. Put another way, there should be favorable interplay between politics, culture, and the academy.

Tech
As in the original game, all factions start the game with at least one unique Level 0 tech. Tech could be researched in faction bases and outposts, acquired through trade, and salvaged from the wreckage of both the Unity and Chiron Interstellar Probe. Factions would fight over possession of autonomous probes and data modules containing physical storage tapes that could grant benefits to research output, or even new advances, when connected to the Network Node in a friendly base.

Tech output would be driven by a combination of Base Facilities and tile improvements, as well as by the number of Talents and Librarians in a faction's population.

Doctrine
Doctrine comes later, once certain Base Facilities had been constructed. Doctrinal output would be driven by a combination of Base Facilities and the number of Thinkers in a faction's population.

Tech Tree
AC2 features a single, integrated research tree. Progress along the branches of the tree is “blind,” meaning that players influence their faction’s progress only indirectly by choosing to focus their efforts in one of eight different focus areas that yield results gradually. Some branches terminate quickly or lead “through” specific technologies, while others put the player on plateaus, at which point they must choose from a menu of possible breakthroughs before climbing higher. Many branches are intertwined, meaning that research focused along one path may yield discovery options in others and that interdisciplinary focus will be necessary to reach the top.

Focus Areas
The eight research focus areas are as follows:

The Build path relates to advances in materials science and engineering and is mostly useful for base-building and altering the physical world to meet the needs of colonization. Examples of techs on this track include Industrial Base, 3D Printing, Carbon-Breathing Batteries, and Volcanic Mining.

The Discover path covers the Newtonian physical and Terran life sciences, including descriptive neurology and psychology. On this track, the player would find Neuropsych, Biostatics, Polymorphic Software, and Biogenetics.

The Explore path deals with the physical and life sciences of Chiron, including native geology and chemistry. On this path are Centauri Biology, Centauri Chemistry, and Centauri Hydrology. This path helps the player to better harvest the resources of Chiron, as well as to eventually make environmentally sound choices.

The Conquer path focuses on technology with direct military applications. On this path are Advanced Ballistics, Ergogenics, Doctrine: Defense, Doctrine: Aggression, and C4I (command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence). Focus on Conquer to unlock weapons, armor, and base defenses.

The Expand path corresponds to advances that facilitate population growth and mobility, leading to the exploration of Planet. The Expand branch includes Austere Medicine, Pressure Hull, Industrial Excavation, Doctrine: Mobility, and Doctrine: Flexibility. This is the focus that leads to chassis progression.

The Command path is organized around thoughts and technology with implications for social control. Command research leads to Information Networks, Doctrine: Suppress, Nootropics, and Mneumonic Techniques.

The Choose path explores thought as technology associated with the ethical challenges of tomorrow. Ethical Calculus, Water Discipline, Luttwakian Ethics, and Industrial Economics are all on this path.

The Unity path is a limited branch of the overall research tree dealing with technologies carried to Planet by the colonists of both Unity and the Chiron Interstellar Probe. On this path, one finds the Unity Workshop, UNITY Computing, and UNITY Armory.

The University of Planet

Quote from: Academician Prokhor Zakharov

The substructure of the universe regresses infinitely towards smaller and smaller components. Behind atoms, we find electrons, and behind electrons, quarks. Each layer unraveled reveals new secrets, but also new mysteries. - For I Have Tasted the Fruit

Leader: Academician Prokhor Zakharov, The Technologist
Conceptual Inspiration: Anxiety about the role of technology and its impact on politics and culture in the new millennium
Starting Technology: Information Networks
Affinity: Supremacy

Faction Characteristics:
+2 Research (inquiry is our priority)
-2 Probe (academic networks vulnerable to infiltration)
-1 Police (those who ask questions are prone to question authority)
Extra Drone for every 6 pops (lack of ethics)
Free Network Node at every base (knowledge flourishes in dialogue)
One bonus tech at the beginning of the game (a legacy of achievement)

Priorities: Discover

Objectives:

Pursue every line of research, wherever it takes you
Don't allow superstition or folkways to restrain your inquiries
Demonstrate your genius by restoring contact with Earth

Starting Pieces: 1 Talent, 1 Librarian, 3 Robots, 1 Colony Pod, 1 'Former, 1 Militia (University Enforcement), 1 Research Pod

Faction Overview:
Encompasses most of the expedition's engineering staff. Especially appealing to survivors with backgrounds in the descriptive sciences and individuals inclined toward a life of the mind.

Core followers assert that the universe is ultimately knowable through empirical observation. Human civilization on Earth failed because leaders were excessively deferential to prejudices and folkways that caused the anxious and ignorant to reject the tools at their disposal: vaccines, genetically-modified crops, and medical robotics especially. Only a program of unrestricted study and experimentation can ensure that humanity will survive into the far future. Chiron is a problem set to be overcome through rigorous study, leading ultimately to the design and application of new tools that can ensure colonial survival.

Colony is organized into a series of academic faculties managed by deans and governed by an academic senate with representation from each scholastic unit, over which Zakharov is the chancellor and chair. The social and political incentives swing sharply toward education. The "hard" scientists stand at the top of the pecking order, followed by administrators, and then social scientists. The much larger number of workers and drones needed to sustain base operations are treated as intellectual inferiors--boorish invalids lacking the aptitude to lead "normal" lives. (The separate problem of motivation is usually dealt with through pharmacology by parents eager for their children to meet the precise and relentless criteria for excellence.)

Zakharov mostly recruited during periods of Soviet and Chinese dominance of mission design, and while his loyalists are more affluent generally (which partly explains their predisposition toward higher education), they also have a marked tolerance, or even affection, for hierarchy. The forms a Peacekeeper fills out five times in duplicate have already been filed thrice by an academician, as the saying goes.

Played straight, the University stands among the most recognizable of societies on Planet: stable, sedate, and generally open, reflecting the inherently transgressive nature of fact-seeking. Subverted, the University can be made to suffer the common dysfunctions of any large, bureaucratic institution to the point of failure. Skillful politicians, not well-intending learners, might ascend the hierarchy. Zakharov himself, with abundant defects of character, is well-positioned to make a mockery of ethical review so that his natural skepticisms result in a sustained war on the "illogic" of human emotion. In the modern sense, society-as-university-faculty may strike us as an exercise in excessively timorous bureaucracy, with a much-abused “student body” striving in vain to absorb any morsel of education from a disengaged faculty. But there is the university in the medieval sense as well: the forcing house for a particular philosophy, home of rowdy young men freed from worldly cares and given to often-violent licentiousness. The university can also become a breeding ground for radicalism and rebellion, where the free interplay of ideas leads sometimes to enlightenment, but more often to forms of self-expression that border on self-destruction.

Good comparisons for Zakharov include Drs. Anthony Dresden (The Expanse) and Jumba Jookiba (Disney's Lilo & Stitch), two scientists who lacked the socio-emotional basis for empathy. Zakharov is an especially interesting character when one considers the environment in which he first made his mark: the Soviet system was predicated on placing the state ahead of the individual. As the Chernobyl Liquidators discovered, one resource the USSR had in abundance was people, and these were generally considered expendable in the pursuit of geopolitical power—or even mere avoidance of damage to Soviet prestige. Zakharov was both a product and a prisoner of this system, rising high thanks to his natural talents, and finding that it behooved him to perpetuate the structure that kept him there. Even better, his value to the regime gave him a healthy measure of personal immunity from political missteps.

Zakharov is a polarizing figure on Chiron. Many Unity survivors blame him rather than General Francisco d'Almeida for the destruction of Unity and its high-minded mission. Zakharov was first to disobey Garland, impeding urgent damage control efforts in favor of trying to fix the reactor. And for what? To avoid a slingshot maneuver that would have saved most of the ship and virtually all the crew at the cost of only a few, himself included, who would be unlikely to survive the re-interment in cold sleep. Zakharov is no hero. To make matters worse, dissolution of the mission charter was his idea--a reaction, according to some, that stemmed more from his inability to take orders than real forethought about the wisdom of tribalism.

Personally, Zakharov is rude, abrupt, and openly contemptuous of both "lesser" intellects and women in particular. Zakharov rarely seeks the opinions of others, nursing a command style of leadership. His low empathy plays well with those who mistake emotion for weakness, but it means he is quite willing to sacrifice others for unworthy causes.

Zakharov's people suffered badly during the Unity disaster. They were first to be exposed to excessive radiation, became priority targets for Spartan saboteurs, and were called to perform the highest-risk damage control operations because of their special familiarity with ship's systems. As a result, the survivors who would later from the University escaped with the greatest number of walking wounded, and a very high proportion of colonists with bad genetic material. University bases are highly automated as a result: machines perform the tasks their human masters no longer can. Mind-Machine Interface is a particularly important goal for the University.

After Planetfall, University researchers led the way in "rediscovering," or at least recapturing, the foundational knowledge of Old Earth and documenting the new world before them. University bases flowered with private projects ("experiments") to make the hard work of settlement that much easier. In time, those bases became irresistible for both traders and raiders. The former treated the University as the premier mart for life- and labor-saving technologies, while the latter sought to plunder from those who already knew the choicest secrets of the physical world.

Gaia's Stepdaughters

Quote from: Lady Deirdre Skye

In the great commons at Gaia’s Landing, we have a tall and particularly beautiful stand of white pine, planted at the time of the first colonies. It represents our promise to the people, and to Planet itself, never to repeat the tragedy of Earth. - Planet Dreams

Leader: Lady Deirdre Skye, The Ecologist
Conceptual Inspiration: Third Wave Feminism, conservationist, and ecological liberation movements of the mid- to late-twentieth century
Starting Technology: Centauri Ecology
Affinity: Harmony

Faction Characteristics:
2 Planet (living in symbiosis with Chiron)
1 Efficiency (experience with life systems)
-1 Morale (pacifist tendencies)
-1 Police (free spirits averse to hierarchy)
Gain 1 extra NUTRIENT each season (master agronomists)

Priorities: Explore, Choose

Objectives:

Live with the land
Prevent the despoiling of Planet
Question the patriarchy. If it refuses to be held accountable, knock it down

Starting Pieces: 1 Talent, 2 Technicians, 1 Citizen, 1 Colony Pod, 1 'Former, 1 Militia (Chiron Rangers), 1 Supplies

Faction Overview:
Skye has a solid claim on the loyalties of most of the Unity’s practical biologists, arborists, agronomists, and conservationists. The Gaians divided the loyalties of the wildland professions with the Hunters, and of the natural scientists with the University. Most Gaians are women, and LGBTQ rights are likely affirmed and safeguarded better in Gaian society than almost anywhere else on Planet.

Skye is called the "Conservationist" in her original profile, but she is more properly the "Ecologist" among the faction leaders. The Gaians know that all living things are interdependent.

Skye’s partisans disdain the patriarchal traditions that led to the systematic plunder of Earth over many generations, touching off social upheaval and environmental disaster that ultimately defied containment. To survive on Chiron, they have concluded human civilization must be synchronized with the natural rhythms of its ecosystem—and accepting of the limitations this will impose on its material development. Moreover, women and men must share equitably in both work and governance, lest the synchronicity be disturbed. The heritage of Old Earth masculinity poses a vexing problem for the Gaians, who aspire to take each individual as they are, but also perceive a clear tie between physical aggression and normative male behavior, leading in turn to agonies such as xenophobia, war, colonialism, and excessive political hierarchy. Put simply, men have a need to control people and things. Women must be part of the equation of government to provide appropriate balance.

Gaians are mostly Westerners--people for whom intellectual iconoclasm and free expression, not just basic survival, was a possibility. They value the individual and the species, though not necessarily the group. Most Gaians are European social democrats or coastal progressives from the U.S. and Canada--places (for the most part) spared the worst physical ravages of Holnism. Many Gaians are followers of a Solar religion, which they found complimentary to their sense of non-sectarian spiritualism.

The Gaians practice a form of representative democracy. Many issues are put to a direct vote of all colonists, where the franchise is extended to anyone over the age of fourteen, though the opportunity for men to speak is less than that of women, and Skye exercises close procedural control over what passes for the legislative process.

Played straight, the Gaians are well-meaning radicals with perhaps too incautious an attitude toward their new home. The rhythms of life are sedate if not slow and also simple. These are people who take joy in their physical bodies and savor direct, tactile experiences of place. They are not Luddites, but technology does not fascinate them and they incorporate it less into their daily lives than the average mission survivor. Subverted, the Gaians are virtual nihilists who practice extreme asceticism, putting the perceived health of Planet well ahead of all other priorities, including their own survival and the well-being of other factions. In all formats, the Gaians are attentive stewards of the environment, leading to slower growth of the faction’s industrial base.

Guilt and bitterness are palpable themes with the Gaians. The former leads them to embrace the sheer novelty and change of life on Chiron, while for the Shapers it produces a backwards-looking effect. The latter, which reflects the time progressives were excluded from power structures on Old Earth, tempts Gaians toward conspiracism: the behavior of other factions is often diagnosed as intentional disregard for the land and its other inhabitants, rather a testament to their different priorities.

Deirdre and her followers were at the forefront of the fighting aboard Unity. Importantly, their sacrifices were more about the common good than mere individual or small group survival. The experience was traumatizing, and while the Gaians nurse a vendetta against the Spartans, once planetside, they retreated into isolation rather than pursue immediate retribution.

Skye had a close relationship with Jonathan Garland, whom she regarded as a gentle and well-meaning soul--the proper sort of caretaker for their expedition--but whose leadership she unconsciously disrespected, and therefore helped to undermine, while living out her truth during the Unity Crisis. She was a victim of misogynist bullying from the "grand old men" of the expedition, Executive Officer Francisco d'Almeida and Chief Engineer Zakharov, both of whom she felt were not only dangerously overconfident, but actually effete. Without ever having met Oscar van de Graaf, Skye pegged him as the kind of problematic personality, narcissistic and self-aggrandizing, who should not be admitted to humanity's final ark. She found in J.T. Marsh a kindred spirit, though reluctantly because of his overt association with colonialist policy. Morgan, whose background she regarded with some sympathy, infuriated Skye with his thesis that the ecological "death" of Earth was simply a produce of the natural cycle of human consumption. In the blood-slick hydroponics bays of Unity, she made an ally of Dr. Pravin Lal, whose humanitarian impulses reflect what she hopes will lead to the Peacekeepers' taming the other factions.

The Gaians are obvious candidates for regression into eco-terrorism, an occupation Skye occasionally indulged in her youth. She is also afflicted by the same character flaws as Lal when it comes to pursuing what she believes is right: though she disdains to recognize it, there are genuine losers produced by sweeping change, whom her righteousness causes her to dismiss as undeserving of consideration, even though such a recognition might become the basis for negotiated settlement that spares those whom she seeks to benefit the necessity of war.

The Dynamic Enterprise

Quote from: CEO Nwabudike Morgan

Human behavior is economic behavior. The particulars may vary, but competition for limited resources remains a constant. Need, as well as greed, have followed us to the stars, and the rewards of wealth still await those wise enough to recognize this deep thrumming of our common pulse. - The Centauri Monopoly

Leader: CEO Nwabudike Morgan, The Mogul
Conceptual Inspiration: Tech billionaires, corporate raiders, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Microsoft, Amazon, The Gilded Age, The Age of Excess
Starting Technology: Industrial Base
Affinity: Supremacy

Faction Characteristics:
+2 Economy (entrepreneurial spirit)
-1 Support (followers have expensive tastes)
-1 Morale (followers dislike sacrificing for their convictions)
Gain 1 extra ENERGY each season (the resource that replenishes itself)
Treaties, pacts, and loans yield +20% bonus credits (the bankers of Planet)
Begin with 100 extra credits (the perfect medium of exchange)
Need Hab Complexes to exceed base size 4 (lives of idle luxury)

Priorities: Build

Objectives:

Achieve an energy monopoly
Make Chiron safe for inter-faction commerce
Crack the secrets of immortality

Starting Pieces: 1 Talent, 3 Citizens, 1 Colony Pod, 1 'Former, 1 Supply Crawler, 1 Mercenaries (SafeHaven), 2 Trade Goods

Faction Overview:
The purpose of life, wrote CEO Nwabudike Morgan, is enjoyment.

Seen through Morgan’s lens, the story of man is one of entrepreneurship. Earth’s decline and, yes, death was a natural, even predictable, consequence of the species’ evolution. Alpha Centauri will be similarly exploited until the next world is needed, leading to an undertaking not unlike the Unity Project. Is it morally and practically feasible to reject change? No!

Also called the Monopoly of Planet and more eponymous, "Morgan Industries," his is one of the factions most familiar to the survivors in terms of culture and outlook. Its appeal is simple: the survivors need change nothing about their ways of life. There is no doubt that Morgan believes in his own analysis. But he can tell, too, that the scared survivors who look to him for leadership would rather be told soothing lies than hard truths. Morgan has a plan, and they do not. He exudes a calm they do not feel. He has envisioned a future of which they cannot conceive. Happily, they will let him do the heavy lifting for them.

Morgan, as Chief Executive Officer, runs his base like a corporation. He chairs a hand-picked Board of Directors--all in hoc to himself, of course. All faction members, down to the most wretched drone, are generously referred to as "shareholders" to signify their supposed contributions to the colony, but in practice, a meager percentage have voting rights, and all power resides with the Board.

Reduced to its essentials, Morgan's plan is a simple one. He will achieve a competitive advantage in energy production, then become the dominant, and eventually the sole supplier of that essential resource to the people of Chiron. Wealth will buy him power, which he will use to accumulate more wealth, and the cycle will perpetuate with some careful tending. Along the way, Morgan will work to commoditize all aspects of daily life so that his energy monopoly becomes a powerful brake on everything from self-expression to health outcomes to delivery of government services.

Morganites come in two varieties. The first are those who think they can thrive in the shark tank. Most of these are Westerners born to the purple. Conspicuous consumption was their second language, and any natural talent, of which there is a considerable amount, was harnessed efficiently to elite education and the "right" kind of personal relationships. The second variety, by far the larger, are the thousands prepared to buy the outrageously thin gruel of Morgan's promises, usually because they aspire to walk in Morgan's shoes. These are prideful people, jealous of their opportunities to work hard. And they do. Individualism is an almost tangible force in the life of a Morganite. Sacrifices for the "greater good" are inherently problematic because they reflect an improper understanding of how people think and what makes them act. Only when everyone is doing precisely what is good for themselves can there emerge a stable ecosystem of incentives and performance.

Morgan's palpable delight in the earthy struggles of everyday life is infectious. His taste for vendettas and unabashed self-interest are disarming. The flaws humanize him. The self-aggrandizement makes his observers feel less alone in their conviction that, were they equally as wealthy, they would similarly settle every score, flatter every vice, shoot for every star. To those who do not know him, he is an archetype of what it means to be powerful beyond reproach.

Those who do know Morgan tell a different story. He famously requires a fraction of the sleep that others do. He is relentlessly curious about everyone around him. No stranger to force, he prefers to co-opt his opponents, whom he researches scrupulously. It is not so much a matter of setting them up to be exploited than determining what they want and promising it in return for giving Morgan what he wants.

Jonathan Garland was fascinated by Morgan, a person with no trace of guilt, let alone shame. Morgan rewarded the Captain's generosity by working hard to divert the loyalties of the Bridge crew. What use had the world's richest man for a U.N. Charter? What place could he hope for in an environment where the pecking order had already been settled back on Earth?

Morgan was a stowaway, and so were many of his followers, smuggled aboard by company contractors acting under secret orders. But he also accumulated new recruits--those whose faith in their original leaders had either disintegrated during the Unity Crisis, or over whom it had never taken hold in the first place.

Colonialism left its indelible mark. For Morgan, wealth is the only guarantee he knows against persecution for the color of his skin. As a victim of exploitation, he has internalized the lesson that inequality is inevitable. Success has made him hard: he lacks empathy for anyone who has not overcome equally long odds with little help, insisting that when others are not successful, they have failed to exercise the iron discipline or bear up under the great suffering through which he made his bones long ago.

There are many ways to subvert Nwabudike Morgan. Perhaps, like the Nucky Thompson of Boardwalk Empire Season One who sent drunks home with enough in their pockets to afford bread and milk for the babes, he becomes the Roman paterfamilias. If he is dishonest, then it is in an honest cause. He must exploit all opportunities so as not to lose the economic arms race through which he generates the largess to do any social good at all.

Or could he be, like The Wire's Marlo Stanfield, a kingpin for whom glory is better than gold? What good are riches if you cannot use them to thumb your nose at the world in retaliation for its relentless slings and arrows?

What if Morgan were to lose control, his empire fragmenting into the hands of fellow oligarchs whose offspring and retainers keep up a ruinous and unceasing war for fleeting dominance over the faction's factories and counting houses?

The Dreamers of Chiron

Quote from: Factor Roshann Cobb

Such a long way to travel, only to discover we could not get away from ourselves after all. - Rebuilding Man

Leader: Factor Roshann Cobb, The Dreamer/Dr. Aleigha Cohen, The Transgressor
Conceptual Inspiration: The War on Drugs, the Mental Health Revolution, Inception, Disney's Cranium Command
Starting Technology: Neuropsych
Affinity: Supremacy

Faction Characteristics:
+3 Probe (masters of neuro-digital battlefield)
-2 Efficiency (widespread addition wrecks havoc on base operations)
-2 Growth (disinterest in the physical world)
Reduce the highest die rolled during each combat round by 1 (addicts, slaves, and hierlings make poor soldiers)
Gain 1 extra TRADE GOODS each season (merchants of ambrosias and poisons)

Priorities: Choose, Conquer

Objectives:

Test your theories on the Unity survivors
Obtain compliant labor to sustain your colony
Keep the Datalinks clear of potentially infectious elements

Starting Pieces: 1 Talent, 1 Overseer, 1 Robot, 1 Drone, 1 Colony Pod, 1 'Former, 1 Supply Crawler, 1 Mercenaries (Sabre Corp.), 1 Trade Goods

Faction Overview:
On his rare good days, Roshann Cobb is an obvious genius, courageous enough to speak the truth to himself as well as to others. It is never the home that is broken; only the people in it. The Unity survivors are doomed to repeat the Great Mistakes if they cannot perceive that. The last frontier is not really space, but the Naïve Mind.

Rather than share this essential insight, Cobb simply followed it, attempt to know himself mostly through risk-taking and pleasure-seeking. Until he was already a young man, there was no one to stop him doing so. Then, an older brother died and his natural father, the Tai-Pan of Struan's Pacific Trading Company, one of the world's largest companies, took a sudden interest in grooming his only remaining heir for the inevitable succession. Cobb had the natural talent to perform well in his studies, but only provided a strict hand on the tiller. That hand is now gone.

Aleigha Cohen was Earth's foremost expert on the psycho-pharmacological treatment of criminality and a Nobel-quality somnacist. What intrigues Cobb because of his convictions interests Cohen because of her boredom. From an early age, Cohen picked fights. There was always some great foe to be slain. Local street children, who disdained the daughter of a different religion. University administrators appalled by the ethical breeches she never considered. Prize committees aghast to find that her work informed so much of what had come to be considered the academic standard in her fields. Eventually, Cohen learned to unmask. The West would not have her, so she aligned herself with its adversaries. In time, Struan's found her and offered a way to achieve the notoriety as a commercial scientist what she had been denied in the academy.

Cobb's problem is that he is a happy addict. Cohen's problem is that she is cataclysmically self-centered. Both are narcissists. The colony they together created can be called that only because it is a collection of people who cannot leave. One visits a Dreamer base to obtain only two things: drugs or intelligence. The Dreamer economy produces enough of both to keep itself going, but barely.

To be a Dreamer on Chiron is to endure purgatory at best, damnation at worst. Cobb has most of his original Struan's retainers, a collection of personal bravos, his father's picked mentors, and studied enforcers. Some are genuine friends, of a stripe with Cobb and pleased to be along for an increasingly bumpy ride, but most await the uncomfortable day when Corporate arrives to sweep up after Junior's mess. Then there are the workers--contractors outside Cobb's leadership circle who failed to jump ship in time to avoid being tasked with keeping his teetering colony from oblivion. Others are prisoners, either marched out of Unity's detention blocks or taken during planetside slave raids. They receive the nerve staple and scutwork--if they are lucky enough to avoid the Dream Twister.

Anyone who lingers too long in the Dreamer grottos risks becoming an addict. Rumor has it that the taste of Somnacin lingers in the air even after the fiercest dust storms, but the truth is that Dreaming has strong appeal to hopeless people despite the near certainty of easy addiction.

Played straight, Cobb and Cohen are listless sociopaths--the monsters under the bed. But like those monsters, they are only dangerous to those who stray too far into the room. Cobb is dispassionately calculating when lucid, and indifferent to the consequences of crimes when in any other state. Most of his "waking" time is spent on machinations that usually succeed--high-profile assassinations, theft of critical information, and development of detailed psychological profiles that assist his clients to achieve world-altering results.

Struan's, too, casts a long shadow over the Unity survivors as perhaps the worst example of the flaws of Charterism: all the tools of power, none of its accountability. At least the Morganites are building their industrial empire here and now. Struan's is staking claims that won't be realized until long after Recontact. Cobb's great henchman, Dole Yudikon, reveres the Tai-Pan with the same mixture of awe and probably subconscious fear that Cobb does, but without any of the resentment, the perfect recipe for a happy warrior. But that's just it: Dole Yudikon--Carnaveron--is more relevant to most factions than is Cobb, his ostensible master.

Cohen, in this formulation, is an ethical disaster on the order of Zakharov, with none of the institutional constraints to force her to move slowly. Perhaps she truly believes, like Zakharov and Yang, that knowledge must always transcend ethics, but it is just as possible she feels compelled to perform her experiments for a simpler reason: somebody told her not to.

Subverted, Cobb and Cohen are center-stage in a tragedy. Cobb, the unloved number-two son, feels indebted to a father who obviously does not love him. He is a good spy and an excellent executive, but neither of these things brings fulfillment. Dreaming is his own invention--the ultimate tailored escape from a burdensome reality. Cobb has important stories to tell from beyond the pale but cannot quite get back, and having helped others to find their own way into the same quicksand, there is nobody left to retrieve him. Cohen's story starts much the same but ends on a happier note. Though still a sociopath, she eventually breaks free of Cobb and wanders Planet as a free-lance Thinker, offering unconventional and morally ambiguous, albeit useful, insights to other factions.

Fresh and shallow, the waters of the Purelake willingly gave up their dead.

What they could not salvage with their few 'rigs, Gaia's Stepdaughters soon turned into reefs, forests, and even bases. Snatiago had been afraid the Gaians would convince their Kellerite allies to pick the ruins for to re-float a peerless navy. The only question, she thought, would be whether Landers was the type to insist on keeping the heaviest laser monitors for himself. Instead, consulting no one, the Witch's satyrs filled the ruined war machines with black soil and slathered growth accelerant over every vertical surface. Soon, the detritus of Telleran's War was hardly discernible at any distance.

Each of the huge wrecks was a community unto itself. The ships could be put to a thousand different uses. There became fish hatcheries, kelp farms, wavebrakes, and power stations. Several hulks towed into contact formed a small weir dam for restoring water flow patterns altered by upstream diversion to irrigation schemes. Aboard the doomed flagship Bloody Hand, some skin-divers distilled a fiery spirit they called "Life's Blood" from the fruit of vines growing up the davits.

Between their enforced isolation and mild aversion to everything mechanical, it seemed to others that the Gaians courted hardship eagerly. Datalinks users traded stories of Gaian parents who enforced extreme oxygen discipline on their children, the better to prepare them for a life "outside the tent." But even the hardy woods-runners were gobsmacked by the sheer brutality of life on a Spartan man-o-war.

Quote from: Tender Otowan Drash

We went down into the crew compartments first, to collect remains. We had expected the traditional accoutrements of the warrior in prime. Synthahol, pin-ups, dice, that sort of thing. But the place resembled a workshop. It was the thin mattress or the ammunition press. Not a trace of joy. - Personal Diary

Sources:

The image, found on wallpaperflare.com, is not credited.

The Purelake is an invention of Brandon Sanderson that appears in his great work Stormlight Archive.

New Ideas for Citizen Types

Revised Citizen Types

Thinker
Citizens who fulfill the role of adviser, critic, and latter-day oracle. Theirs is a life of contemplation and debate, usually aided by advanced mental techniques or psychotropic drugs. These individuals are comparable to the Mentats, or human computers, of Dune and receive intensive training to enhance memory, perception, and pattern recognition to eidetic levels. Thinkers often perform their analyses with the help of computers, but they scrupulously avoid Mind/Machine Interface. This is because the indispensable Thinker is one who ingests Native pharmaceutical cocktails to expand their brain activity to regions previously unused—an impossibility after Synthesis. Thinkers improve doctrinal research and provide a major increase to a faction’s pool of Action Points. A Thinker is not a scientist; rather, a philosopher or strategist who studies problems from interdisciplinary or non-traditional perspectives. Most Thinkers follow a common set of intellectual prompts formalized by Sheng-ji Yang, founder of Chiron’s first Symposium, the relational structure into which Thinkers usually organize themselves to perfect their dialectic. Being highly specialized, Thinkers are wasted in roles that do not exploit their unique abilities to the fullest. Factions that have researched the Ethical Calculus tech can train Thinkers once they have also built a Symposium base facility. Thinkers provide +2 Action Points, +2 DOCTRINE, and a 25% increase to Probe defense.

Synthesizer
Once an individual crosses the Mind-Machine Interface, there is no going back. Those who survive the transition without permanent debilitation begin a new life as Synthesizers. The human brain is the most powerful thinking machine in the known universe, but its potential is limited in two respects. First, most people have access to only the merest fraction of all human knowledge. Their arguments therefore suffer for being ill-informed. Second, the average brain cannot rapidly absorb, organize, and interpret large quantities of data. Computer-assisted thinking solves for the first problem and at least partially mitigates the second. Synthesis—the literal act of M/MI—brings a subject mind to the brink of destruction. The result is damaged goods. Synthesizers provide incredible benefits to the scientific output of the bases in which they are residents but are exceptionally vulnerable to Probe attack. Synthesizers can be made—but not unmade—after a faction discovers Mind-Machine Interface and has build a Network Node. The effects of a Synthesizer in a base’s population are increased if the base is linked to the Planetary Networks. Synthesizers provide a base of +3 LABS, but at a cost of -75% to Probe defense.

Medico
One who has received training and certification in one of the numerous fields of human care. Doctors, nurses, social workers, and other carers fall within this broad but exalted category. Their contributions are essential to the continued good health and social stability of every society on Planet. The Medico becomes available with Austere Medicine. Medicos provide +2 PSYCH.

Officer
When a military or civil defense professional is present in the society, there are observable salutary benefits to collective morale, social order, and the quality of advice received by the government. Officers can be trained after discovery of Mind/Machine Interface, provided a base has a resident garrison (friendly military unit). Officers provide a modest bonus to a faction’s Action Point pool. Officers add +1 Action Point, +2 MORALE, and +1 POLICE.

Liquidator
The Liquidator is a specialist in the field of Centauri Conservation, and is unlocked by that tech. Their primary job is to clean up pollution within the territory of the base to which they are assigned. Liquidation is not without cost: the society pays a direct efficiency penalty to choose methods of planetary settlement less disruptive to the natural ecosystem. Nevertheless, social stability improves as citizens’ behavior increasingly mirrors their physical surroundings. The presence of active Liquidators is a known limiter on the encroachment of Native lifeforms. A Liquidator's bonus structure is: -1 ECON, +1 PSYCH, and +2 PLANET. Liquidators remove 1 pollution square within a base radius every 5 turns.

Organizer
Organizers help optimize the use of labor through collaboration rather than coercion. While Overseers benefit factions by controlling dissent and deterring subversion, Organizers mobilize and train workers to achieve superior efficiencies while also enhancing morale. The price of working with Organizers is that base operators’ hands are tied: a certain number of issues sent to arbitration will be settled in favor of citizens, not faction elites. Organizers can be appointed after discovery of Industrial Organization. Organizers confer a +2 ECON, +1 MORALE benefit, balanced by a -1 POLICE malus.

Administrator
A professional civil servant whose work is to mind base efficiency and stability. Administrators serve in Base Operations. They provide +1 Action Point, +1 ECON, and +1 POLICE.

Sources:
The portrait of the Thinker is "Dragon Dreams II" by Jackson Tjota. The portrait of the Synthesizer is Mr. Tjota's "Dragon Dreams III."

The portrait of the Medico was shared by the user Takasta 53 on Pinterest and is labeled "Pranav Antal."

The Liquidator is "Hazmat Suit Teaser," uploaded by EvTital to NexusMods for Fallout 4.

The portrait of the Officer was shared on weheartit.com by Himawari. It is titled Sci-fi Female Officer, with credit to a defunct link on the SpaceBattles forums.

The portrait of the Organizer is "Waiting to Land," by Alexander Chelyshev.

The portrait of the Administrator is by Yury Krylou.

The Hunters of Chiron

Quote from: Warden J.T. Marsh

Architects tell us that form ought follow function, but the man in the bush knows that function can only ever follow form. When we lose our form, we stop being king. "There's a machine for that," says he. That's the essential problem of our species: we can simply invent our way out of being human. - Rebuilding Man

Leader: Warden Jeremy Tanner Marsh, The Adventurer
Conceptual Inspiration: Gender essentialism, civilization vs. the wild, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, colonialism, The Call to Adventure, Louis L'Amour and the American Western, Mad Max franchise, Allan Quatermain
Starting Technology: Doctrine: Mobility
Affinity: Harmony

Faction Characteristics:
+1 Planet (We watch, tend, and respect the land.)
-2 Growth (Roving lifestyle inimical to large families.)
-1 Industry (Mobile workshops can't achieve economies of scale.)
-2 Police (Living wild and free)
+1 Support (Survival experts)
May reroll one combat die during each encounter with Chiron wildlife (early experience with a new and dangerous environment)
Gain 1 extra MINERAL each season (roughnecks)
Cannot use Cyborgs, Robots, or Specials (aversion to labor-saving technologies)

Priorities: Explore, Expand

Objectives:

Test your mettle against the worst Chiron can throw at you be completing a Planetary Survey
Exercise and enforce your usufruct rights, such as free passage on land and sea and common use of rangelands
Be first to recover Unity's fusion core

Starting Pieces: 1 Talent, 2 Technicians, 1 Mobile HQ, 2 'Formers, 1 Scout Rover (Main Force Patrol), 1 War Stores, 1 Emergency Stockpiles

Faction Overview:
The Hunters are a meditation on the value, legacy, and future of traditional masculine archetypes. The faction explores the question, raised most eloquently by Louis L'Amour in his 1957 short story, Last Stand at Papago Wells, of whether a different morality was required of those who tamed the land by comparison with those who settled it thereafter.

The Hunters are among the most cohesive factions, drawing a majority of their adherents from the so-called Road Crews, officially called Forward Contact Teams. These units of pioneers, geologists, miners, and logisticians launched from Unity one standard Earth month before the micrometeorite collision that doomed her. Their purpose was to clear a site for the primary colony and build outlying infrastructure--perimeter fences, defensive checkpoints, access roads, sensor grids, solar collectors, and automated mines. Their leader, Warden J.T. Marsh, was also given a second, secret directive: determine the fate of the Chiron Interstellar Probe.

Marsh himself is a Great White Hunter archetype, a man out of time. Social convention made him an outcast. Conceived outside wedlock, he was taken from his mother and brought to East Africa as a child. An uncle's sisal plantation was Marsh's playground. Here, the tall, trouble-making youth received lessons in bushcraft from his black Kenyan playmates and the steady parade of white hunters whom his uncle packed out on safari.

Military education was a natural evolution for Marsh, both as a rite-of-passage for young men of his pedigree who wished not to have a purely academic experience, and as an arena in which his skills would prove eminently useful. On service with His Majesty's elite forces, Marsh received the highest wartime honors, a testament to his emerging leadership qualities and extraordinary daring. Yet Marsh did not find military life especially fulfilling. After a short marriage ending in tragedy, he did not try again for a conventional life, instead returning to Africa, balancing obligations as a part-time soldier with a moonlight career as "crisis concierge" for any number of forlorn causes.

It is unclear when and where Marsh discovered his affinity for lost and unpopular causes. Some biographers generously ascribe it to a private sympathy for African independence movement--penance for his time serving two separate apartheid regimes--but there is no record of such attitudes. What can be said for sure is that Marsh rubbed shoulders on the regular with a gunrunner named Nwabudike Morgan; policed the Shiloh interior alongside the likes of Ichillis Ontarion; and kept out of trouble only thanks to his connections in British Intelligence.

Financial success and reputation earned Marsh a place in the world of exotic sport hunting, where, for the first time, he found himself in front of the camera. Though a taciturn individual, Marsh intuited that media exposure could advance causes dear to him. Audiences responded eagerly to Marsh's fearlessness of expression. Something of a cult of personality developed, still evident today: Marsh fascinates those who have chosen other paths in life, for he seems to epitomize the ideals of valor and self-sufficiency to which most young men in the West are expected to subscribe. He has been everywhere, survived every trial, and avoided beguilement by some of the world's most powerful personalities.

Marsh believes that the hard physical work of survival will renew the collective spirit of the human survivors and thereby secure the future of the species. Like the Spartans, the Hunters believe that humans can thrive only in adversity. Yet where Santiago looks to war as our atavistic calling, Marsh believes that it is the fight against the land itself. For Spartans, survival means armed self-defense and a hypervigilance toward potential threat actors. For Hunters, survival means honing the body through physical adversity.

The Hunters are perhaps the greatest Luddites on Planet. They insist that, having solved their problems with machines, the people of Old Earth stopped doing that which was great and daring. (Here, I borrowed from the idea floated in the DC Comics Kingdom Come series, wherein the superheroes in their midst relieved normal humans from the need to solve their own problems, and thus retarded all social and technological progress.)

Hunters are a special breed. Classically masculine professions--miners, lumberjacks, long-haul drivers, firefighters, rangers--are over-represented. They are obsessively mobile, usually eschewing permanent settlements for the freedom of the "road." Like the cowboys, gauchos, and drovers of three centuries prior, they prefer the bedroll to the mattress. Their vehicles are forms of self-expression, both in terms of how they are used and how they are modified.

The stereotype of the Hunter is as a miscreant, physically powerful but lacking all sense of grace, place, and proportion. In Morganite dramas, the Hunter appears as the hero who refuses to be tamed by romantic love. University schoolchildren relate to Hunters through a stock character, охотник, whose deathly fear of robots causes him no end of grief. Deirdre Skye has described the Hunter identity as the final stage of human metamorphosis on the journey to ecological understanding.

Hunter camps are typified by certain cultural markers. Hunters do not help others of their kind unless asked, but once a request is made, it is never willingly refused, on pain of ostracism. A social disagreement can be settled by a fight, but never with weapons, and only to the point allowed by a judge. There is a marked hesitance to deal with anything fully automated, which Hunters find emasculating. For this reason, they use tools that are several generations out-of-date. Hunters carry weapons as a necessity, but scoff at the ideal of armed vigilance practiced by Spartan and Tribal as performative compensation.

Early arrival on Planet earned the Hunters access to many secrets. They were the first Unity crew to encounter mindworms, and then to defeat them with the help of incendiaries. An entire line of scientific inquiry, the Centauri branch of the Tech Tree, stemmed from insights first gathered by Hunters on patrol. They also developed an early and perhaps unhealthy obsession with retrieval of the Unity Fusion Core, which came down high in the sawtooth peaks of Planet's Monsoon Jungle, arguably one of the least-hospitable surface biomes known to the survivors.

Formidable warriors are made in this kind of crucible, and the Hunters are no exception, but their primary value to the "follow-on" colonists comes in the form of services rendered. The Hunters are symbiotes, providing expertise that other factions find difficult to supply for themselves. Usually, this means that Hunters help with base construction, conversion of the land for agriculture, water collection, and simple exploration. On the extreme end of that spectrum, Hunters show up as mercenary fighters (often in reconnaissance roles), overland escorts, and gatherers of intelligence. The large concentration of heavy equipment sent down with Marsh makes the Hunters an irresistible force multiplier for terraformation, but has also attracted unceasing attention from more acquisitive factions.

Notoriously "effite" factions such as the University of Planet, the Children of the Atom, and the Dynamic Enterprise seasonally hire hundreds of Hunters to service their solar mirrors, undertake replenishment missions to long-range outposts, and manage native vegetation. Most factions trust Hunter experts to instruct them in the finer arts of wildland firefighting, emergency response, and salvage, to say nothing of helping them fight the mindworm menace. Hunters also furnish Planet's equivalent of a long-range rescue service: when expeditions go missing or bases are overcome by natural calamity, Hunters are liable to be the closest help at hand.

Quote from: Academician Prokhor Zakharov

After a certain duration of use, neural proto-matter precipitates to the bottom of each container. The researchers are entirely baffled, but the implication is obvious: here is the brain, attempting to repair itself. - Assimilative Notation

At The People's Teeming, Hive Wakeners prepare to transport a nineteen-year experiment that has produced unanticipated results. The base will soon be overrun by Pilgrims.

Clean-room Design
Clean-room design historically referred to the reproduction of an existing product or process without violation of copyright. This practice first attracted significant academic and legal attention at the onset of the Electronic Age when various firms attempted to build nearly identical products using similar design concepts. The design process might also be fairly described as parallel development. Historically, clean-room design was controversial. Copyright holders often questioned how competitors achieved their results without resort to corporate espionage, and the end result of most clean-room design was a court battle.

On Planet, where copyright law is frequently unenforceable across faction borders and uneven access to the patent libraries of Old Earth provides prima facie justification for liberal violation of presumptive intellectual property rights, clean-room design has taken on a different, even more sinister meaning. What used to be a term reserved for parallel design in any field is now applied to the creation of “abridged artificial biology.”

What is abridged artificial biology? Some call it the "brain in a jar." Unlike human clones or androids, both of which are capable of independent function, abridged artificial biologics are dependent organisms designed explicitly to perform a certain limited set of computational or empathic functions that, in a human, are managed by the brain. The Hive calls this technology “thinking chemicals.” Most survivors refer to its commercial form as “brain bags"--the drip-feed pouches they feed to a mass spectrometer or, when the chemical is suspended in the appropriate medium, an functional magnetic resonance imaging device. (To avoid unpleasant associations, the products of Chironian clean-room design were marketed as “Fast-Paks” (for “fast-thinking”) starting with the MY262 annual of the Morgan Industries Catalogue.)

The basic benefit of thinking chemicals, apart from their comparatively very great speed and capacity, is that they can add a measure of discernment to the performance of their tasks that is technically impossible for purely electronic creations. Any given packet of thinking chemicals is capable of activities ranging from automatic regulation of electronic devices to emotional screening. Factions trust in thinking chemicals to orchestrate the early stages of base defense when human operators are not yet involved, cull defective samples from production lines, concoct unusual passwords and evasive patterns for vehicles, sense deception during interrogations, and, most important, to add ablative layers of emotional processing potential between the full human mind and machine interfaces.

University researchers initially hoped to expand the use of thinking chemicals to provide "injectable intelligence." Experiments looked at the potential to change both an individual's ways of thinking (literally, the strategies they employ to process data and make decisions), as well as the memories accessible to them by performing as an extension of their own brains. Unfortunately, thinking chemicals, like Mind-Machine Interface, trigger problematic health reactions similar to organ rejection. The University's standards of care prescribe a period of at least five Earth-standard years of connection and therapy before an individual has overcome the inherent system shock of routine interaction with disassociated brain material.

The open, and unanswered, question about thinking chemicals is whether they are capable of learning. Current scientific consensus is that thinking chemicals do learn, even when designers intentionally worked to inhibit the emergence of long-term memory storage. The fund of shared research shared on the Planetary Datalinks is mostly limited to University archives, but researchers agree that, if left in service and provided with adequate nutrients, certain late-generation thinking chemical formulas should be able to form brain matter with faculties comparable to those of an infant.

Game Designer’s Notes
Special credit to MysticWind and ari for this idea.

The artwork in this post belongs to Sergey Grechanyuk. It is titled "Lab Concept" and is available here.

Clean-room Design is a Build Tech that usually appears on a faction’s research tree just before they enter mid-game. Clean-room Design is preceded by Intellectual Integrity (Choose) and Doctrine: Subversion (Choose).

To understand clean-room design fundamentally, I used Wikipedia.

Star Trek: Voyager's bio-neural gel packs appear to be somewhat similar, and they clearly contain nerves suspended in medium. I read the Memory Alpha description of that technology while writing this treatment.

Quote from: Chairman Sheng-ji Yang

The militiaman places his whole being at the disposal of the collective. Our advantage lies in recognition that we must sacrifice autonomy of the mind as enthusiastically as our forefathers sacrificed autonomy of the body.

Conclave reconnaissance teams roll past a crash-landed Supply Pod. Light emanating from the pod's superstructure betrays the salvage work already underway.

Descriptions of the psychoactive properties of sastisménos leaf date to the earliest arrival of human explorers on Chiron under the auspices of the Chiron Interstellar Probe (CIP). Beginning the second day after landing, infirmary records contain multiple and consistent reports of aural and visual hallucinations on the part of colonists performing labor in exterior or unshielded environments. Colonists afflicted in this way usually quit their work in terror and were overtaken moderate to severe panic attack that prompted them to doff their breathing apparatus, often slipping into unconsciousness. This reaction lent the plant its name, which in Greek means bewilderment.

Attending med-techs credited these experiences to various causes, including routine hibernation sickness, general adaptation syndrome, and nitrogen narcosis. The number of cases led CIP physicians to devise a standard therapy involving supplemental oxygen, electrolyte replacement, and rest, sometimes modified by prescription of Somnacin as a sleep aid. Increased case loads and a broad worsening of symptoms became more difficult to assess as the first cases of Red Flu emerged. Overwhelmed medical staff had little time to perform differential diagnosis. Nearly all psychosis was ascribed to fever, which ran rampant through the population.

Mass sastisménos poisoning played out not much differently than genuine mindworm attack, which it always preceded but did not always portend. Factions took notice, and applied considerable effort to try to understand the phenomenon. It took the Planitzer Expedition of U.M.Y. 1, a months-long study of the floral bounty of Chiron's southern polar continent, to isolate and confirm the unique symptomatology of sastisménos exposure. Inhalation of the plant's airborne pollen created a temporary, variable-strength link to Planet's xenofungal nervous system, producing effects that human sufferers described as akin to prescience with respect to the location and lifecycle of mindworm boils. Sastisménos pollen is microscopic and capable of lingering in the vicinity of a bloom for up to one Earth-standard week. Blooms occur at dawn and dusk twice during the 500-day Chironian year as the temperature varies between seasons, or as an immediate defense mechanism when the plants are disturbed--a last-ditch effort at genetic propagation.

Use of sastisménos varies across societies. The Dreamers raised several different cultivars to assist with their eponymous experience, ultimately performing years of research before concluding that the pollen's inclusion in their drug cocktail produced a brainwave amplification effect that burdened the sleeper with more discord than clarity. Separately, Gaians ingested the grounds of the leaf as tea before ritual vision quests, which practice directly preceded the faction's successful domestication of mindworms. Because the plant itself was found everywhere on Chiron except the Monsoon Jungle and sand desert, all factions found it necessary to engineer filters that protected against pollen contamination. The Hive went further, compounding a pill it issued to faction militia that, when ingested, temporarily induced hyper-attunement with the local ecology--a kind of biological early warning system to be used in the presence of xenofungal activity.

Game Designer's Notes:
Colonial interaction with sastisménos-related phenomena is simulated by the Centauri Ecology and Centauri Prescience Techs (both Growth-based), which precedes Centauri Empathy on the path to Centauri Psi.

The Secret Project: Centauri Attunement (Expand) yields a +10% defensive bonus to base defenders against native attack.

Quote from: Sun Tzu

Thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge. - The Art of War, Datalinks

Security breach at the Longhouse in New Jerusalem, seat of the Conclave kritarky. Polar lights provide near-daytime conditions, but it is unlikely the Nauvoo Legion will find those responsible.

Believers were grossly tempting targets for espionage. Sister Miriam Godwinson's unshakeable commitment to inter-factional reconciliation at the near-total cost of retributive justice made her bases an appealing neutral ground for trade and negotiation. Vendetta partners could meet under cover of routine business to discuss terms of resolution. Prisoners exchanged seasonally through the good offices of the Human Relief Initiative. Factions whose materialistic impulses outran their Pact loyalty might find brokers who could access markets closed by war.

Believers were notorious for a pronounced, even rigid formality of personal presentation and usually took their rest cycles in family or community settings. In other words, they lacked the individualism and iconoclastic dispositions that typified obsessive datalinks users. A Conclavist's moral fiber might be iron, but their network security was porous and their guests the kind of soft, careless people upon whom Probe Teams preyed with gusto. The Nauvoo Legion, Chiron's least-blooded faction militia, was always many steps behind the track ball. Some cracked wise that Miriam preferred it this way, lest worship attendance suffer. Guilt tended to stimulate reflection: visitors disdained to offend their helpful hosts by refusing polite invitations to Sunday service.

The Longhouse was a gift of the Shapers in commemoration of their longstanding Non-Aggression Pact with Godwinson's people. Neo-Polynesian architecture was married to design principles borrowed from both Soviet-style Brutalism and New California Rusticism.

The Late Seating at Horizons, Morgan Megaplex.

Perhaps because his was the vision least at odds with Old Earth, Morgan's society readily held space for the so-called "forgotten" occupations, those having to do with the cultural expression of humanity. Despite cultivating a megalomaniac image, it pleased Morgan to shame his critics by pointing out that their only use for artists was to deny them their value. Attempts to turn chefs and sculptors into librarians and code-crawlers would always end in disappointment, he chided. Better to use them for their original purpose: to preserve the morale and sharpen the purpose of their fellow colonists.

Morgan's formula for success was reductive. Colonists wanted subtle, but not exact hints of the world they had left behind. Horizon's retro-futuristic theming invoked the optimism preceding the Great Mistake, an era everyone had learned about but which none of the Unity passengers had experienced firsthand. Synthleather clamshell couches, modern art installations, big band music--these were relatively inexpensive ways to separate the guest from their lived experience, if only for a few hours. There was also a strict ban on android service. Human restaurant staff added an emotional resonance to the dining experience, starting with the doorman, who handed off to coat check, maître d', somellier, and wait staff of four. The prominent digital screens tracked table assignments (what Morganite didn't want to know they were rubbing shoulders with the elite?), but all guest transactions in the restaurant up to the point of payment were handled manually. Waiters were trained to memorize complex orders and the tables were "dumb," without even basic datalinks interfaces.

Morgan argued unsuccessfully that the menu should retreat from the aspirations of the club's own name. What gambler worth his credits wanted fish mousse over True Steak and potato? Test seatings showed a clear preference for molecular gastronomy using a mostly Chironian menu--hybrids and native foodstuffs. Diners didn't wish to stray all that far from the familiar mess hall. Even the alcohol was synthetic but for a few priceless vintages. More proof for the principle that there was a fine line between happy nostalgia and acute homesickness.

Sources:
The top picture is Paul Alexander's "Nighttime City," posted by SciFi Art on Twitter.

The bottom picture is credited to futurist Syd Mead.

Legitimation ritual in the Solar style. Morgan Solarfex, M.Y. 117.

Access to machine augmentation; increasingly effective medical care; and regular, nutritious meals created a yawning gulf that set Talents and Specials far apart from the Drones they supervised. Not just in terms of moral attitudes, perspective, and ambition, but also size, strength, and access to information.

This gulf, while not unprecedented in all Old Earth societies, was deeply problematic for the heirs of a frontier society, and while perhaps it was possible for the very first superlatives to justify their status with reference to particular deeds on behalf of the faction as a whole, their many descendants indisputably reaped generous genetic and social rewards without personal sacrifice. The offspring of Morganite executives were on a first-name basis with some of the University's most-celebrated faculty. A Pilgrim stakeholder's voting rights and energy income were inherited from the original signatory in transactions that chancery judges held to be practically inviolate. Accounts transferred similarly on the Bourse. Even in the Human Labyrinth, where any child of unusual intelligence was allotted supplemental nutrients, the very poor quality of life for the laboring classes ensured that they produced many fewer prodigies than their enlightened masters.

Thus, Chironian elites, especially governing elites, felt extreme pressure to justify their exalted positions socially, which they often did through ceremony that provided either religious or politico-cultural explanations for inequality. Each faction had a radically different answer.

In the militarized bases of the New State, the Observers, and the Honored Dead, wealth and comfort were the explicit prerogatives of service to the commonwealth, usually under arms, but if not, then through performance of religious or civil administration. Those dissatisfied with their lot in life had, in theory, only to climb higher on the meritocratic ladder. Similar arrangements prevailed within the University of Planet.

Morganites participated in a frenetic culture of monetization. One could sell anything--labor, time, blood, body heat, even access to a job or benefit. Some companies experimented with the elimination of individual contributor positions: all basic tasks were posted to a public-facing jobs board. Executives adjusted the promised rate-of-return as the customer's needs dictated, paying more for higher quality and speed. All citizens were compelled to bank with their employers, in return for which they earned interest--a basic experiment with the social safety net found everywhere else. But the major brake on unrest was bread and circuses: no matter their wealth or poverty, Morganite citizens enjoyed the atavistic release of carnival days, during which laborers worked reduced hours and received trial access to entertainments and diversions normally locked behind paywalls. Corporate leaders coined their own civic religions, borrowing heavily from the terrestrial monarchies and supernatural pantheons of Old Earth, to complete with the real thing, combining the socially beneficial elements of a mutual aid and service organization with an aura of exclusivity.

Inequality was most problematic for communitarian factions, which included the Gaians, the Labyrinth, the Conclave, and the Tribe, who recognized chasms of wealth and opportunity as significant indicators of both economic inefficiency and reduced social cohesion. For this reason, citizens were rarely encouraged to pursue wealth as a social choice. In the Conclave and the Tribe, there was heavy pressure to tithe after meeting certain energy thresholds, while a Hive disciple faced harsh penalties for hoarding. Gaians and Tribals reacted to "capitalists" through shunning.

Sparta managed inequality by proscribing bloodline inheritance. A fighter might accumulate wealth by stealing it from his defeated enemies, but upon his death, it would become the shared property of his barracksmates, to dispose of as they saw fit. Holnists of course criticized this practice as a form of Communism.

The problem of social injustice was least acute with the Hunters, whose lifestyles were inimical to the accumulation of significant material wealth even by their own standards; among the Dreamers, since high rates of addiction and early death frequently created a glut of supplies; and within the Ascendancy, where it was regarded as a feature, not a bug, indicating who should lead.

Quote from: Anon.

Necessity is the mother of invention. - Datalinks

The Space Construction Vehicles (SCVs) and Multiple Use Labor Elements (M.U.L.E.s) that helped rebuild human civilization on Planet were heirs to a venerable tradition. Long before shipping out for the Far Colonies or braving the 800°F temperatures of near-side Mercury, they participated in Terran disaster recovery.

Shut in their Mumbai dorm rooms because of fallout, students at the Indian Institutes of Technology in Mumbai equipped their prototype M.U.L.E. for the most hostile environment they could imagine. Remembering the lessons of Chernobyl and Fukushima, locations the M.U.L.E. would eventually come to know well, they abandoned wheels and treads for a rear-mounted articulating turbofan, did away with the idea of a human operator, and added a high-powered signal repeater to cut through the intense background radiation of the nuclear blast zone. An internal hull tank contained 80 cubic feet of rapid-expansion foam to settle radioactive dust. The drone's two hydraulic waldoes could be rotated full circle, with lift capacity in excess of 20,000 lbs. Using variable geometry, either or both manipulators could be swapped mid-flight for lift forks or diamond-toothed excavator saws on extending booms. The latter were perfect for heavy demolition, a task that could also be accomplished through brute force collision. (The front face of the M.U.L.E. was armored for this very purpose.) Under-carriage clamps usually carried inflatable humanitarian shelters equipped with tie-downs so that the M.U.L.E. could air-lift ambulatory survivors to the nearest aid station.

M.U.L.E.s were some of the earliest agents of terraformation on Planet where their preferred payloads alternated between defoliating agent (used on fungus) and crop seed. Many were converted to fast-response vehicles, dropping acids and incendiaries on encroaching mindworm boils to buy time for a retreat.

Thinking they had produced a gift for all mankind, the IIT students neglected to patent their new invention. The first commercially-produced M.U.L.E.s were Tata Motors designs, but hundreds of corporations got in on the same action, from American Machines, to Soviet ZIL, to the French heavy equipment manufacturer Poclain.

When tasks called for a human touch, the nine-foot-tall SCV protected its precious pilot from the dangers of vacuum, radiation, atmospheric pressure, and chemical or biological contamination.

SCVs were in demand wherever radio communication was unreliable or the bosses didn't want to pay for propellant mass. (M.U.L.E.s were too small to be fitted with efficient electric propulsion.) Because they offered a pressurized rear-mounted airlock into which casualties could be taken, SCVs were also required to support human EVA operations by United Nations Life-Saving Service regulation.

Planetside crews disliked the SCV. Though positively comfortable when compared with a Manned Maneuvering Unit in space or a survival suit on Chiron, the SCV was universally acknowledged as a walking coffin in the event of mindworm attack since escape required the suit to undergo several lengthy decompression and re-pressurization cycles. To make SCV service more palatable, Landing Pod workshops tried several innovations, including removing the windscreens to facilitate rapid egress and festooning the exo-frame with banks of grenade launchers loaded with incendiaries.

February 2059: At an Odessa, TX salvage yard, American Reclamation Corporation contractors remove the armor plate from an SCV, a sure sign of prosperous times ahead.

A Unity Rover in Hive service. Forestland camouflage, front-mounted crash bar, and spare tyre are hallmarks of a long-range raider, but the sure giveaway is the retention of synthetic leather crash couches, creature comforts that rarely survived contact with the People's Rally for Austerity.

Like much else on Planet, this weapons platform is a compromise. The weight of the turret-mounted anti-aircraft autocannons must have greatly reduced speed and range, already limited because of the use of an electric motor, meaning that this vehicle would not have operated independently. The obvious lack of protection for driver and gunner are more likely to have reflected the desire for rapid bug-out in case of wormthreat than hesitation about the added burden of ablative armor, but it is also possible this unit was dedicated to column air defense and not front-line infantry support. It is also possible this vehicle has been partially cannibalized; the conspicuous absence of hull-mounted countermeasures suites and recovery equipment are otherwise difficult to explain. Hive vehicles were known to wire a second arming trigger to their vehicle grenade launchers and reserve some of the single-use projectors for non-lethal blunt trauma rounds. The .32 caliber PVC balls, three charges to a grenade, were brutally effective in close quarters.

With help from a Mobile Workshop, Tribal Minutemen perform field repairs on an out-of-service Heavy Rover configured as a drone command vehicle. They are in the ideal location for a breakdown. The Neyanza Valley Shapers were unlikely to pursue hardened soldiers over a mere border violation. As if to underscore the point, the Kellerites go about their business without apparent concern for the sensor towers seen just yards away.

The incredibly well-engineered Roustabout was the Pilgrims' successful attempt at a high-speed harasser for use on the Uranium Flats.

With the help of a design team headhunted from the likes of Verset-Brantley Defense Machinery and his own ARC, Oscar van de Graaf's autowrights started with Grumman-Fairchild's economy design and gave themselves leave to use all the parts from Superstition Engine Works Heavy Rovers. They also conducted thousands of hours of interviews with both veteran Regulators and prisoners liberated from the Labyrinths. The new design featured heavy all-terrain shocks and an unprecedented level of protection for the crew of three. Since mindworms couldn't survive the high ambient radiation, the New Two Thousand were free to "button up" behind cope cages, anti-mine plates, and explosive-reactive armor (ERA).

The Hivemen, mostly equipped with archaic hand weapons, found that the attackers' buggies routinely survived direct hits by as many as three rocket-propelled grenades. Yang's troops often focus-fired their machine guns in an attempt to trigger sympathetic explosions of the ERA bricks, hoping to "soften" them for the grenadiers.

Sources:

First picture is from Blizzard's Starcraft 2 computer game.

Second picture credit to Bryan Lee, "Construction Machine," from ArtStation. Found on Pinterest.

Third and fifth pictures credited to Alex Ichim on this-is-cool.co.uk.

Fourth picture is by David Sunoo (2014).

Sixth picture is from Pinterest, credited to Sander Verhoeven.

Quote from: Secretary-General Apsara Mongkut

Always there are fights. Over who to send, and who will be left behind. We agree only on this: the great enemy is time. There will come a day, very soon, when it is too late to go. - Private notes to Assistant Secretary Pravin Lal

An M50 Ontos with French parachutists in the Red River Delta, c. 1961. The insurgent-hunting Groupes Mobiles prized the ugly fighting platforms for their value as oversized shotguns at close quarters.

Compromise bequeathed to Unity more than its fair share of troubles. The captain whom some called feckless. Political officers to supervise the thoughts and deeds of an ostensibly free people for whom national allegiance should have held no meaning. Gear so old and ill-used it could not withstand the gentlest touch.

With just two months to go before the ship was to leave its rack, Warden J.T. Marsh placed a call to his new masters in Geneva. Going through manifests with the Unity Project Team, an eagle-eyed quartermaster had made the troubling discovery that the expedition still lacked the promised pack guns and prime movers for its mountaineers.

By this time, freight schedules on all space elevators had limited slack for additional shipments. Whatever the solution, it could not exceed 50,000 lbs. Marsh was insistent that he should have recoilless rifles. Several, in fact. Along with the means to transport them.

Enter Oscar van de Graaf and his Hard Car Company of Huntington, NY. A pair of M50 Ontos air-mobile tank destroyers, last used a century prior during U.S. interventions in the Caribbean, was languishing in the township's Smithtown Military Park. In return for a new municipal swimming pool, the people bade farewell to their rusting relics, which soon were on low-loaders headed for the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Packed aboard the mighty U.S.S. George Rogers Clark (CVA-132), they arrived in French Guyana eight days later and, after a long trip skyward--at just 19,000 lb. a piece, there was still elevator capacity to spare--were in storage aboard Unity less than two weeks after Marsh's improbable complaint.

Marsh declared himself well-satisfied. While he might have preferred modern equipment, each Ontos mounted six of the essential gun tubes, four of which were paired with .50 spotting rifles. As was the intention behind all the mission's use of older equipment, the 1950s-vintage machines were easy to update and even easier to repair. Using a mobile workshop, the Forward Contact Team's alpinists upgraded the vehicles' power packs, replaced the treads, and swapped out the engines for replacements with much higher torque to improve climb.

Observers were impressed with the Ontos. The Human Ascendancy, which settled the snow-capped Hyas Mountain Range, found the design in the Datalinks and built its own derivative, a slightly larger machine intended for war as well as utility. Calling their creation Ocho, the geneticists mounted four rifles to each side of the turret in an "easy Z" configuration, used a noise-reducing pneumatic firing system in preference to gunpowder, added hull-forward and cupola-rail anti-personnel machine guns for the three crewman, and skirted the pyramidal sides with uni-directional anti-personnel mines to keep enemies at a respectful distance. The mobile artillery played a cat-and-mouse game with lower-altitude intruders for decades, effectively sealing the passes that led to the Pinnacle. Some gun crews amassed kill tallies of more than 40 vehicles. Their common enemies were Believers, Hunters, and Spartans. At length, the survivalists turned to jump-assisted armored infantry, swarming the thin-skinned Ochos on their firing steps.

Quote from: Tarsiv Quinn

Having experienced loss of place and meaning ourselves, we became more willing, even eager, to inflict the same anguish on others. Watching the futility of their suffering and reflecting how easily their fortunes had been unmade, it was suddenly more difficult to convince myself that my own grief was justified so long after all had been said and done. – On the Butterfly’s Wing

Mascalero assault helicopters descend on the island nation of Keravin. The tall square box of a thorium reactor hall is visible center-left.

November 3, 2068. Under cover of darkness, an invasion force arrives on the shores of Keravin Island in the South Pacific Ocean. Keravin, a crescent atoll 129 miles long and just six miles wide, is an artificial landmass and one of the world’s newest polities. It is also one of the strangest.

Keravin sits on the so-called Archer whaling ground. Its four thousand residents were seasonal employees of the Anglo-Melville Corporation (AMC), which paid for the construction of its new base station by contracting with the United Nations Refugee Agency to provide temporary accommodation for 642,000 Non-Patriated persons along with about 800 prisoners. Nothing had gone as planned. The rejuvenated sperm whale population turned out to prefer more southerly waters, vastly increasing the costs of hunting out of Keravin. Budget overruns caused the United Nations to slash support for relief projects, leaving Anglo-Melville holding the bag. Resupply and pay became an issue as the company teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. In 2067, AMC went into receivership, leaving both ownership of Keravin itself and responsibility for its inhabitants in question. Conditions on the island became untenable. With the help of sympathetic U.N. clerks, the whalers convened for themselves a constitutional convention, invited the refugees to nominate their own representatives, and declared a workers’ republic. The Keravin Collectivity was quickly recognized by the Soviet Union. By the next year, work on a Soviet listening station was well underway, and the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute was reporting new oil deposits in the island’s territorial waters.

The invasion force has a no less-bizarre provenance. They, too, are refugees: Shilohnes whose bid to undo the nation-building of Vesper Abaddon had failed four years prior. While exiles in Toltan, they had crossed paths with representatives of the Noctan Oil Company, a sometime front for the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Noctan offered that, by doing in Keravin what they had attempted and failed to do in Carmel, the Shilohnes would be doing a double service: striking a blow to Communism on behalf of all peoples, while at the same time securing the future of the House of Benjamin, somewhat closer to their own hearts. Approximately 1,600 Royal Shilohne Army troops and an unknown number of Noctan and CIA personnel now go ashore in hovercraft and helicopters launched from the S.S. Noctan Express.

Shilohne special forces at the Keravin beachhead.

Resolution is swift, and, more importantly, bloodless. Telecommunications, desalination, and island constabulary posts fall without a fight. Some will brazenly ride the island’s high-speed monorail directly to their rally points, fully-armed but alone. Curiously, contract guards at the island’s largest power station have failed to show up for their overnight shifts, and the Shilohnes take possession at once. U.N. Security Forces receive a Don’t Shoot order, and the Shilohnes soon empty the detention facility appended to Keravin’s sprawling refugee camp. Prisoners "liberated" here will eventually appear on the Unity passenger manifest. It is a motley collection, mostly but not all No-Pats, including those convicted of war crimes in Carmel, Yugoslavia, and Kashtul; gun-runners picked up at the margins of the Saharan Burst Wars; and the dregs of the Indian Ocean Exclusion Zone. Nobody bothers to verify identities, and the prisoners soon assume identities among the mass of refugees. By this time, Octan tenders have begun ferrying supplies across from the Express and a newcomer, civilian hospital ship Leutogi, engaged by Octan to support the island.

By morning, disarmed local constabulary are back in service, providing a comfortable security buffer for the Soviet ambassador’s residence, still standing in for a proper embassy. The tangerine butterfly of Shiloh now flaps lazily over Government Plaza, and Raphai Benjamin, a nephew of the infamous General Silas Benjamin, one-time Scourge of Gath, has declared a new nation: the Loyalty of Zoda.

Among the Shilohne officers responsible for planning the successful coup, Major Tarsiv Quinn later joins the United Nations Mission to Alpha Centauri. Steeped in the revanchism and blood-allegiance rhetoric of Defeated Shiloh and sour on the realities of a patronage relationship with Zoda’s American allies, she, like many No-Pats, will find the Kellerite attitude an attractive one. The Tribe's M.Y. 14 mission against the Ascendancy’s Clarity Base, which deployed from a Hunter Rig, will bare certain hallmarks of the Keravin Raid, though bloodlessness will not be among them.

The Battle for Clarity devolves into a brute slugging match because the attackers arrive too late to forestall Pahlavi’s decanting the first of her Augments, genetically-enhanced super-soldiers that terrify those factions with whom the Ascendancy shares borders. This new line of warriors defends itself with admirable skill and dedication. A draw results: Clarity and its Cloning Vats are torched, but Ascendancy troops backtrack the retreating Tribals and blow up the supporting Hunter mothership in response. Quinn will assume command after both her superiors are shot dead. She must organize a fighting retreat that almost certainly spares the raiders total annihilation.

The clones go on to claim several Kellerite dead and wounded among their captures. Alongside the humiliation of being unable to properly care for the fallen, for factions obsessed with military readiness, there are few worse outcomes than to have their best fighters patterned into Augment genetic templates, other than perhaps to be filleted to yield up secrets to Dreamer interrogators.

A Drumsplitter hovercycle stripped and abandoned somewhere in the Great Dunes. A close relative of the type flown against Clarity Base by Quinn and her command. Kellerites and Pilgrims favored these ultra-high speed swarmcraft for deep penetration raids to dissuade aggression from stronger neighbors. The Drumsplitter was a true terror weapon, too fast to mount an effective gun and without the legs for a heavy payload of bombs. Microgrenades, such as could be fired from the nose-mounted projector here, provided a small punch with area effect (necessary to offset problems of aim). Users fought as dragoons, riding the bikes to their target, then dismounting to fight.

Sources:

Origin of helicopters picture is unclear.

Noctan is a play on the LEGO System's in-house fuels company, Octan.

Picture of Tarsiv Quinn credits to Bogdan Tomchuk.

Hoverbike appears to be credited to Tamas Gyerman.

The Shilohne special forces picture is a still from David Lynch's Dune.

Quote from: Colonel Corazón Santiago

How can one fail to be moved by the great conflagrations of our times? When the fires burn, a tyger inside of us must be set free. He who made Lambs did not also make us. - A Future by Firelight

Artist's commission of Colonel Santiago at the time of the Unity Breakout, as her mutiny is known in Spartan parlance.

Name: Corazón Santiago
Rank: Captain
Position: Company Commander, U.N. Security Forces (UNSF), Mission to Alpha Centauri
Country of Origin: Puerto Rico
Date of Birth: 11-05-2028
Height: 171.8 cm
Weight: 56.8 kg

Service Record:
Emigrated to Miami during childhood; orphaned during West Flagler Riots, 2042. Joined Jade Falcon survivalist gang, living with two younger siblings for several years more. Numerous arrests for felonious violence resulted in subject being remanded to youth diversion program. While in detention, surviving family was placed in foster care where one died due to criminal neglect. Whereabouts of second sibling unknown. Later appeared in Wildwood, Florida, alone. Detained and interrogated by Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2050, due to associations with Dorian Militia. No charges filed.

Returned to Miami by 2052 as founding member of Florida State Fencibles, a public self-defense compact resisting imposition of martial law during the response to Hurricane Ivore. Organized and led the armed occupation of seawalls and municipal pump stations in successful bid to prevent Federal destruction of Miami’s hurricane barriers to relieve flood pressure on wealthy developments. Later worked with Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Department to maintain civil order in the city and its environs following Miami’s short-lived declaration of independence from Christian States of America in 2053. With a constellation of other citizen militias, helped hold South Florida against both Federal recapture and intrusion of Christian States forces. Frequently collaborated with local Holnists to obtain relief supplies for distribution to civilians. Reported killed during 2055 joint raid on, and consequent collapse of, Kennedy Space Center Vertical Assembly Building. Among the last coastal enclaves still in Federal hands south of St. Augustine, Cape Canaveral was an important political objective for the Florida Independence Movement. Holnists attempted unsuccessfully to lure Federal into ambush, executing civilian hostages, one of their best-known tactics. Instead, they were themselves ambushed: Federal defenders set off demolition charges after giving only token resistance to a frontal assault. The blasts killed hundreds of the attackers.

During Tahoe Crisis, joined California State Forces (CSF) under assumed identity and distinguished self as battalion commander supporting Federal offensive against Carson City, a major Kellerite stronghold. Ended CSF service as a major, responsible for guarding Holnist prisoners at Sacramento. Spent considerable time attending debriefings with high-value captures. Released from service, 2056. Published “Spartan Thesis” that same year, attracting over four million followers on the Planetary DataLinks, and relocated to compound in the High Sierras.

Noteworthy among the Second Wave of amateur philosophers to speak to issues first popularized by Nathan Holn and Jean-Baptiste Keller. Whereas the latter claimed authority from his experience as a working farmer and local preacher, subject drew from a history of service both against and alongside government to excited readership. Writings strongly condemned those who had failed to take up arms for any cause, including through performance of a non-combatant service commitment, implying that indecision and neutrality were greater crimes than service in an unworthy cause.

Popularity of writings wavered as post-war consensus consolidated around the Houlihan Thesis: that Holnism, and by extension, all Survivalism, was a fundamentally selfish and maladaptive reaction to the emotional stresses of modernity, too deeply mired in racism and sociopathy to yield worthy truths. Subject clearly struggled to defend their record independently of associations with the Holnist Movement and was frequently pointed out to underplay or deny conclusive evidence of Holnist crimes, some of which subject abetted indirectly during the Florida Independence Wars.

Joined U.N. Security Force in 2060, again using false credentials. After training in Antarctica, deployed to Singapore Space Elevator. Assignments included rotations as armorer and counter-assault team leader. Exemplary service record led to selection as part of colonial security team, U.N. Alpha Centauri Mission.

Continued to participate clandestinely in Datalinks political discussion under the pen name Thucydides. Retained popularity among former Holnist collaborators and other insurrectionists covered by the National Pardon of 2061, especially due to advocacy for mandatory gun ownership, stating that, "Those who do not go armed are making a choice not only about their own safety, but the safety of their neighbors and communities as well.” (Possession of firearms was strictly controlled in the Occupied Territories of the post-war United States.) Starting 2064, Thucydides wrote at length about the ethical problems of the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri, especially crew selection, about which they were clearly unusually well-informed.

Note: Based on the number, organization, and kit of Spartans encountered during the Unity Crisis, most faction security chiefs assessed with very high confidence that Santiago and her accomplices exploited their security access to infiltrate the Unity hull during construction, where they must have arranged for the clandestine inclusion of survivalists and cached significant quantities of weapons, especially grenades, which were not a significant component of UNSF or Marine Forces loadouts.

Psych Profile: Survivalist
Exceptional self-discipline and demonstrated ability to suppress own needs and comforts for greater goal. Sensitive to the political purpose of military power. Elected Class Leader of 740th UNSF Intake at Fort Krychek, Antarctica. Demonstrated aptitude for cooperation across national and ideological divides, especially during crisis. Praised for self-possession by Political Officer Sheng-ji Yang.

Intellectually curious. Working knowledge of the classics of Western political theory and military science. Strong written and spoken communication. Regarded by members of her command as both wise and experienced. Takes care to be informed about all aspects of Unity operations. Individually, subject has completed an unprecedented number of personal training modules.

Tendency to take on excessive duties can be discouraging to personnel with lesser motivation. Subject has reputation as a taskmaster, scheduling additional live training for her unit over and above what was required by their billet prerequisites, primarily in the area of shipboard emergency response.

Strong indications of perfectionism. Unwillingness to delegate could limit individual's suitability for commission.

Clear acceptance of use of force as a legitimate tool by United Nations to enforce the principles of the U.N. Charter in the protection of vulnerable populations.

Remarks Included by Chief Security Officer Rachael Winzenried:
Sergeant Santiago appears to sympathize with certain tents of American Hypersurvivalism. There is a steadfast refusal to fully acknowledge Holnist misdeeds, and insistence that passivity was the worse crime than aggression. State of California acknowledged honorable discharge but confirmed subject's close contact with Holnists, including high-ranking movement commanders. Additional psych evaluation ordered post-landing.

Sources:

Origin of the image of the female soldier is unknown. Potentially linked to a Fantasy Flights Games product. Shared by K. Gorman on Pinterest.

This faction bio uses the original language as a template, sometimes word-for-word.

Quote from: Commissioner Pravin Lal

As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last loose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. - Freedom's Bite

Since two Hebrew spies returned from inside the walls of Jericho, clandestine action has been inseparable from the making, and breaking, of nations.

A Probe Team is the quintessential unit of people, systems, software, and tactics used to perform operational intelligence missions by the Chironian settlers. Probe Teams perform human intelligence-gathering, links-warfare, counter-intelligence, and covert action missions in the physical, linked, and óneiroic battlespaces. The effectiveness of Probe operations are a function of the skills and tools employed by the attacker, those employed by the defender to safeguard its nodes, and the openness of the target society. The more committed a society to personal liberties, especially civilian network access, individual ideological fragmentation, and free information transfer, the greater the vulnerability to subversion and intrusion.

Probe Teams are a uniquely Chironian phenomenon, reflecting their time and place. Their name derives from the recursive processes required to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in closed faction datalinks, still a vital aspect of all Probe Team operations due to the incomplete and cautious participation in Chiron's several Planetary Datalinks. (All survivors remember only too well the catastrophic consequences of the Internet of Things, when the blessing of inter-connectivity proved to be likewise a curse of exposure.)

Various nomenclature has grown up around Chironian computing and probe activity. A node is a specific, shared tape reader linked to a fixed number of dumb terminals. The terminals can query and display information from the node, but any changes to that information must be made on the datatapes themselves. After face-to-face communication, nodes are considered the most secure way to share information. A network is an intranet, almost always serving a single base or multiple bases within the same faction, on which users can exchange two-way communication in addition to searching and reading from multiple nodes. All user input writes to a single, common, high-capacity datatape physically managed and indexed by librarians. The term datalinks finds use as both a generic description for node or network usage, and as a descriptor of the planetary internet, which facilitates node-sharing and two-way communication between between one or more factions.

Trends in network activity were captured or estimated on a radio scale in the centennial commemorative work of Tomorrow Initiative Librarian Anastasia Garin. For purposes of this information, a higher number indicates broader usage. Notes are added for context. Bear in mind that all factions inevitably utilize networks for official governmental and educational purposes.

Children of the Atom: 10
Dai Seung: 10 (a two-way terminal is provided pro bono for all employees)
Dreamers of Chiron: 6 (usage is concentrated among the higher castes)
Gaia's Stepdaughters: 5 (faction mores inconsistent with regular use)[/b]
Human Ascendancy: 5 (usage is heavily regulated)
Human Hive: 1
Human Tribe: 3 (faction leaders actively discourage regular use)
Hunters of Chiron: 2 (probably reflects lack of regular access)
Lord's Conclave: 4 (more xenophobic faction members resist use)
Morgan Industries: 9.5 (paywalls cause some users to choose offline recreation)
New State: 3 (usage is heavily regulated; faction leaders actively discourage regular use)
New Two Thousand: 6 (no restrictions, but many cannot afford the cost of a terminal)
Memory of Earth: 10 (webrings team with details of conspiracy)
Peacekeeping Forces: 10 (a two-way terminal is provided pro bono for all residents)
Restoration: 9 (faction mores militate against overuse)
Shapers of Chiron: 8 (use is an important aspect of inherited Old Earth culture)
Spartan Federation: 4 (faction mores militate against regular use)
Tomorrow Initiative: 10 (a society of computer scientists)
University of Planet: 10 (curiosity cannot thrive in the dark)
Watchers of Chiron: 4 (use restricted to unincarcerated persons)

Probe Teams come in two forms, dark and light. Dark teams perform traditional civilian and military intelligence functions beyond work on links. Light probe teams deal with links exclusively.

The simplest and most common type of Probe Team is both light and forensic. They are comprised of technicians whose primary duties involve the recovery of information from salvaged nodes or tapes, the repair or refurbishment of the same, and the study of captured examples. In practice, many factions add military intelligence personnel to conduct human interrogations as well as data scientists to detect and decode the signals traffic of other factions or to help encode their own.

Another popular Probe Team format deals in "wet" work: assassinations, fomenting unrest, and providing deniable boots on the ground in places where the faction cannot engage in any official capacity. Here, the line between Probe Team and mercenary blurs to the point of confusion.

All factions use human spies, an easy and obvious option because of ideological divisions within the crew. Colonists who transfer their loyalties are usually screened by Probe Team personnel to gauge political reliability and extract residual knowledge of the adversary's base operations.

Quote from: Lieutenant-Commander Bliven Putnam

Every battle plan has two components: the knowing and the doing. First, where is my enemy, and what is their strength? Where aren't they, and what do they lack? Second, can I alert my forces of these these things as they are discovered, and, more importantly, as they change, so that force can be applied at the right point? Without that second part, I may as well know nothing at all. - Address to Cadets, Sparta Command

A Dreamer Probe Team steals the design specifications for a Restoration Starslasher needle-jet. The operation, though successful, will result in the elimination or capture of seven of the nine original team members and as a result, critically valuable Dreamer "cracker" routines will be published to the Planetary Network for inspection by all interested parties.

Probe Team use is both controversial and difficult. Some factions do not appear to have made significant investments in that arena while others are well-known for the characteristics of their outfits.

Ascendancy Probe Teams are traditional commando units optimized for the capture and exfiltration of high-value targets. Their purpose is to collect for their master a menagerie of "genetically interesting" specimens, especially enemy faction leaders, so that their genetic material might be harvested for use by faction geneticists.

Morganite Probe Teams focus, of course, on the development of business intelligence, especially the theft of intellectual property. The Monopoly is also known to be expanding their use of the Óneiromachaíri--Greek for "thought-knife."

Despite the faction's early, desperate dabbling in freebooterism, Conclavist Probe Teams later focused on preserving the faction's reputation as a stubborn neutral in the affairs of Planet. As a result, their posture is defensive, and they rely heavily on Hunter-Killer algorithms to find and neutralize intruders to their datalinks. Since it is generally acknowledged that the Conclave otherwise has few secrets worth knowing, most of their concern is safeguarding diplomatic correspondence.

The closest Hunter analogue to the Probe Team is a Tracker Platoon. These elite scouts can follow the spoor of a designated target great distances across the Planetface.

Gaian Probe Teams are trained to attract worm activity to the location of their targets.

Hive Probe Teams are supposed to count among Planet's least-effective, owing in no small part to the faction's complete isolation from the shared technological language and culture of "topside" civilization. For similar reasons, although less extreme, the New State is not far off this baseline either, although unlike that of the Hive, their doctrine is almost assuredly one of defense only.

The Children of the Atom, the Memory of Earth, and the Tomorrow Initiative are peerless devotees to the science of data aggregation and interpretation. All three use crowdsourcing and mega-computing to assist with strategic prediction. The Peacekeepers and the Tomorrow Initiative have vibrant "hacker" cultures that do well on the offensive, but there is simply too much network real estate for either faction to completely defend itself.

Spartan and Tribal Probe Teams are the most traditional, resembling special military forces more than mere intelligence operatives. These formations, although highly effective within their limited sphere of competency, are all but useless for links defense.

The New Two Thousand made some investment in network defense during pre-launch recruitment, and it is presumed that any survivors of that tranche of recruits is still employed by van de Graaf and his Pilgrims. Their aggressive tendencies mark everyone's favorite cattle rustlers for constant attack by enemy Probe Teams, but the New Two Thousand have not claimed responsibility for any spectacular ripostes.

Dreamer Probe Teams are at the bleeding edge of information retrieval and sense-making, which they accomplish not only through expert use of spies and computer espionage, but also via Dreaming. Many factions crack down harshly on Somnacin abuse because it is known to be a typical gateway to behaviors exploitable by an enemy.

Alongside the Dreamers, the Restoration runs veteran Probe Teams with a strong record of performance, especially in the fields of signals and counterintelligence. As a disciplined military organization, the Restoration is also much less vulnerable to compromise than its ideological allies.

Sources:
Bliven Putnam is a fictional American sailor in a fine book series by James L. Haley.

Image credited to Dmitry Burmak and Osprey Publishing.

Quote from: Chinese proverb

Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away. - Traditional, Datalinks

Prominent nuclear fuel tanks and a large, plastic-fronted cockpit betray the civilian heritage of the барсук (Badger) protected heavy tractor, a product of the Kharkov Transport Engineering Plant. Its purpose was to scour the post-atomic battlefield as the workhorse prime mover of planned Soviet reconstruction efforts.

In an era when nuclear materials and surplus aircraft fuselages were both still abundant, Soviet designers obeyed the "waste not, want not" principle, resulting in a vehicle that was cheap, antiquated, and easy to repair. Thousands worked salvage in the Palestine and Indus blastlands, hauled timber from the Amazon basin, and helped ship supplies between the Antarctic Colonies.

To protect its occupants, the tractors could be made air-tight against biological, chemical, and nuclear contamination and fitted with remote-operated waldoes for making exterior tow connections. Minimum radiological protection was 17mm of lead, rising to 32mm around the cockpit.

Abundant energy reserves and enormous torque from the single thirty-two cylinder engine provided towing power to recover damaged equipment many times the барсук's own weight. Working in tandem, a pair of барсук could move a Landing Pod, each of which carried four of the tractors among their standard complement of utility craft.

The Soviet Union killed two birds with one stone by gifting its entire inventory of барсуки to the Unity Mission in 2059, fulfilling their annual obligation and ridding themselves of a significant health liability. Around half the барсук fleet was so badly irradiated, the vehicles sickened their first training crews despite a requirement to wear full safeguards. It was the work of three years for Ikurō Kamatari, future Operations Director for the Shapers of Chiron, to complete a satisfactory decontamination protocol.

Because of their ubiquity, every faction made use of the барсук until the point of mechanical failure or loss. Not the largest prime mover available to the colonists, the барсук had many other features to recommend it, including simplicity of operation, extreme range, near-imperviousness to small-arms fire, an on-board infirmary, and the motive power to crunch through even the thickest native plant growth. A small cargo bay mounted forward of the engine contained spare track, bogies, and other breakdown equipment.

Fitted with crash bar and enhanced with plasma steel plate, the барсуки was easily converted into a mobile fortress, completely safe from mind worm boils. Many Hunter clutches made it known they would accept a барсук in lieu of the energy, nutrients, ammunition, or medical supplies ordinarily presented as payment. One барсук could easily accommodate three families with their road gear.

Nuclear-powered vehicles were a problematic legacy of the U.N.'s assumption that the colonists had little to fear from internecine violence. The red-painted fuel casks, though hardened, made obvious targets. Some, like the Gaians, felt the risk of detonation outweighed the vehicles' value. Lady Skye had her mechanics dismount the fuel casks and attempted an electric conversion but found it impossible to feed such hungry machines with renewable energy sources. The Stepdaughters eventually used the vehicle chassis for solariums or bunkers. The large Soviet-descended population of the mostly pacific University discounted the same threat, embracing the барсук for what it was: an old and dependable companion. Shapers felt much the same. Hunters, though hesitant, felt that beggars could not be choosers: few other vehicles came so ready to operate autonomously. The Children of the Atom, as self-declared masters of nuclear technologies, also used the барсук enthusiastically.

War between the Spartans and University eventually did result in the nightmare scenario. During a night action on the Javari Plain, Spartan laser tanks knocked out seventeen барсук tractors, all of which exploded in nuclear fire. Each vehicle went up in a burst equivalent to 30 tons of TNT, with fatal neutron doses extending beyond 200m from center-point. A truce was called to allow Nagao's Shapers to assess the consequent environmental catastrophe and initiate clean-up.

The stricken Unity in a degrading orbit over Chiron. Evacuation is underway.

One of Unity's four hundred greenhouse compartments during loading operations. A Food and Agriculture worker loads a feed belt. Mile-long conveyors towed aspiring flora past watering stations, nutrient dispensers, and UV emitters.

An agronomist's laboratory has been constructed beneath the semi-transparent dome of this survival shelter. The terminal at center is a network node, coupled to an attachment that can perform chemical analysis on live cuttings. Transplanted vegetation, not hybrids or native crops, fed most human colonies until the mid-fifth century.

The overthrow of China's Communist government was not the momentous occasion so long envisioned. The wholesale replacement of an ossified Communist Party oligarchy with an equally decrepit neo-imperial plutocracy changed almost nothing. Food insecurity remained among the empire's foremost problems. China needed to place more land under cultivation and achieve better production from existing farms, or else the temporary mandate seized through revolution would soon be lost. Deals were struck with the West and huge tracts of land were held under state control even as most other state enterprises were auctioned off to the highest bidder. As sea levels rose, the Chinese devised floating gardens tended by semi-amphibious combines, forefunners in size and ability of the terraforming machinery used on Chiron. China never quite achieved the desired level of self-sufficiency, but it nevertheless developed an expertise sufficient to bequeath to Project Unity the blueprints for what would become the Sea 'Former, an abundant national seed bank, and valuable microbiotic and insect cultures to bear aloft to Chiron.

Commencement Day celebrants stroll the main promenade of University Commons. The attractions seen in this painting were permanent construction. Visible on the far left is the recovered hull of Experimental Satellite-76, the first artificial satellite placed into Chiron's orbit from the surface. The faction's Network Node is housed in the central geodesic dome, known as the Communicore. This world-class research library was also one of the University's greatest popular attractions. Countless University schoolchildren gawked at the skyscraper-sized mainframe computer and pulled information for their first reports at kiosks in the thirty-six terraced tiers of its reading spaces.

Sources:

The final picture is an artist's rendering of EPCOT Center at Walt Disney World in Florida.

Nwabudike Morgan could build twin towers two miles high, but his view was ever spoiled by the ashes of his industry and the refracted neon glow of the Nevernight. Acid raindrops spattered his window panes and a booming cough corrupted his hand-woven lungs.

Pursuit of trespassers was automatic in Morganite and Pilgrim territory. Nothing was more sacred to the "self-made men of Chiron" than their proprietary slices of it. Regulator Combat 'Trikes were an especially hated menace. The big omni-directional (enabled by the discovery of frictionless surfaces) wheels pushed the 'Trikes off-road capability to legendary heights, while the gyroscopically-stabilized turret transformed what had been a poor firing platform into an almost graceful long-range killer. To save on weight and fuel they didn't have, the New Two Thousand replaced the original nuclear fuel system with electrics, but then, chases rarely lasted more than an hour or two.

In the early days of settlement, every survivor was counted dear. For a price, J.T. Marsh's road crews could rescue stranded or distressed work teams from the hostile clutches of a new and terrifying frontier that only they had learned to master.

On a long-range scanner, the Palasene Ice Fields contained vast mineral riches. Up close, it was all too easy to fall through the melting surface. Specialized recovery vehicles patrolled the edges of the Field, collecting ground density readings and deploying high-angle rescuers. These 6x6 Heavy Field Recovery 'Rovers contained an impressive collection of rescue apparatus, none more memorable than the blaze-orange cold-weather shelter strapped to their beds. To gain traction on the sometimes mirror-flat wastes of the Palasene and avoid the same fate of those they intended to save, Hunters fitted the tyres with endothermic "gooey slaps," palm-sized nodules that increased traction and slowed the transfer of waste heat from the vehicle to the ground below.

When moving high-value people or goods between settlements, if you weren't fast, you had better be a hard target. Recognizing the limitations of their own militia, the wise stakeholders of Terra Nova entrusted their valuables to the Overland Caravan Company's Delta Carrying Division. Your future, safe in their hands.

Most of the time, the Overlanders spared themselves the risk of a fight by negotiating passage fees direct through the good offices of Godwinson's Conclave. Their cargoes, which had to be transferred via a central station to preserve the owners' anonymity, were only seldom molested since nobody wanted to pick a fight with an unknown enemy, let alone the veteran killers who rode shotgun on such ventures.

The Gaians learned first to frustrate their enemies' agriculture by contaminating it with the very poison dumped on the Stepdaughters' own doorstep. Native lifeforms were driven to frenzy by the hyper-concentrated waste of the colonizers, and since they weren't seeking conventional targets, Deirdre's retribution squads carried out their campaigns relatively unnoticed, slipping away hours before the worm boils metastasized on the outskirts of Morganite and Shaper plantations.

Sources:

City art by Paooo, a collaboration with Michel Koch and Gregory Szucs found on DeviantArt.

'Trike by Pymous on DeviantArt.

Final APC by Krzyszstof Luzny, available on ArtStation.

Pollution trooper by Mohammad H. Attaran.

Quote from: CEO Nwabudike Morgan

They say true power is to be able to give a man anything. I say it is to be able to give him precisely nothing. - The Personal Diaries

A Spartan Metaloid on the move near High Pine. Five-story monstrosities like this one could melt an acre in less than 30 metric minutes, rendering straight down to bedrock. Every living thing within the reclamation zone would be obliterated, wrecking ecological havoc on a continental scale within a matter of weeks.

Rare was the society that did not leave Planet worse than when they had found it. Foremost among the myriad crimes that might be perpetrated against the dignity of Deirdre's Garden or Miriam's Eden was mass reclamation.

The basic conceit was simple. Through the modern miracle of nanomolecular engineering, any object could be colonized by organic robots and quickly rendered into a tractable slurry, the atomic components of which were reassembled by Unity's salvaged 3D printers into alternative forms, including pure energy and more immediately usable materials such as building plastics or industrial chemicals.

The richer and more varied the slurry, the higher the energy output or the more varied the potential re-combinations, provided one had a properly-programmed datatape. Yet even if the basic input was chemically impoverished, quantity could stand in easily enough for quality. A forest without commercial value, reduced to its fundaments, was as good as a small strike of ore or a well-appointed piece of vehicle salvage.

The "beauty" of mass reclamation was that it was exceptionally clean. The conversion of matter left little behind but water vapor. But then, this was also the curse: once the forest was consumed, it was gone forever, without even stumps to secure the topsoil. Insect life, fungal spores--all of it, eliminated as if it had never been.

Factions with a vested interest in preserving Chiron's natural riches, among them the Gaians, Hunters, the New State, even Shapers, punished mass reclamation with unrelenting vendetta, while its chief perpetrators--Augments, Spartans, Hivemen, Morganites, and Dreamers--aspired to convert what they could while the going was good, hoping to build defenses enough to hold out against the inevitable backlash.

Most factions used mass reclamation on a targeted basis, following the Pilgrims' example of penetrating deep into enemy territory before commencing collection.

Source:

Mass reclamation using nanomachines is a harvest mechanic used in Cavedog Entertainment's 1997 game Total Annihilation.

Quote from: Lara Cambrysis

During those first, harrowing years after Planetfall, complex medicine was virtually unheard of. There were two, maybe mobile surgeries operating within our territory. Infection was rampant in such a humid environment, and analgesics worth their weight in gold. Many of the Colony Pods recovered around that time had been cracked and their contents spoiled. Bad drugs were a serious concern. A run of people in the Paddock died from botched attempts to treat abscessed teeth. Efficacy of intervention was very low, and our standard of care became brutal as a result: we cauterized wounds to conserve sutures and regularly administered overdoes of morphine to anyone we judged might need intensive care over the long term. - Emergency Medical Technician, Main Force Patrol

The Portuguese M801 Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (M.A.S.H.) was the bleeding edge of both tactical medical response and basic health service for Unity mission survivors without immediate access to Landing Pod infirmaries. In the days when populations still numbers in the hundreds or low thousands, even the Human Labyrinth found it necessary to heal more often than to recycle--not that the M801 earned any awards for the number of lives saved.

Following common practice for mission equipment, it was an antiquated design, easy for its operators to modify or repair with the tools at their disposal. Unfortunately, this also meant that the onboard furniture and equipment was not configured to deliver treatment up to the standard at which its users could practice.

The Portuguese lot came previously stripped, of course, which further reduced the vehicles' immediate value. In one representative series of communications with Mission Control, the Deputy Assistant Director of the Quartermaster and Administrative Service provided a darkly amusing tally of what was missing: "tyres from wheel hubs, wiring harnesses, hatch covers (for an anoxic environment!), air conditioning--even the wooden fold-downs are rotten." Onboard lockers were too small to hold much more than basic diagnostic and triage equipment. The best that could be said? Large windows provided ample natural light for occupants and crew.

Before sending them spaceside, U.N. mechanics replaced the old combustion engines with heavy, high-capacity electrics. Later, Landing Pod workshops made every conceivable modification. Dozer blades and winches assisted with self-recovery. Radio antennae had to be installed in place of the original satellite transceivers, all placed into hopeful storage. Most factions violated old convention and mounted light weapons for close-in defense (a breach usually ignored due to the prevalence of marauding mind worms and SMACERs). Ten percent of the M.A.S.H. vehicles sent with the expedition were equipped originally as mobile laboratories. Some of these were optimized for chemical, especially hydrological, analysis; others for conducting zoological inventories; some for mineralogical analysis; and others for public health response.

Chief Medical Officer Pravin Lal oversaw total refurbishment of the fleet's medical apparatus and consumables. Standard load-outs included airway support equipment, trauma kits, oxygen supplementation devices, radiation medicine, and wound dressing stations. Each M.A.S.H. was theoretically capability of serving a single patient in emergency surgery, but Lal knew this would be limited by circumstance to rapid tracheotomy or crude amputation, and planned accordingly. Conditions were basic in the extreme: collapsible operating table, anesthesia machine, patient monitoring devices, air treatment, and sanitation space.

The casualty-carrier variant memorialized in this sketch, taken from the private sketchbook of a driver-hospitalman, makes it easy to discern the M801's lineage as a modular design of three parts. Behind the cockpit (a single piece with chassis, motor, engine, and drivetrain) sat a generator, and above that, the mission attachment. This version is a casualty carrier: eight side-loading racks were tended by two paramedics who moved along a central corridor accessible through a hatch cut in the rear of the vehicle.

Patient outcomes were improved substantially when factions began using their M.A.S.H. vehicles as transportation for the personnel and equipment to build local aid stations alongside, rather than as self-propelled surgeries, an innovation showcased by the Conclave's White Helmets. Noteworthy exceptions included the University, which due to great fear of mind worm attack preferred to administer care in protected settings, and the Hive, which had not only to overcome the problem of confined space travel but also wound contamination from dust and dirt. Zakharov's troubleshooters turned to miniaturization and use of gyroscopically-stabilized robots to perform precision tasks like incisions and suturing of which human doctors were incapable in the back of a moving vehicle. The Hive halved its fleet to retrofit control stations at both ends of each vehicle, building high-capacity ambulances that could return injured workers to centrally-located aid stations. All were dual-mode hi-railers that could speed down the electric track laid in all main trunk galleries. Their interiors were retrofitted with what the Hivemen grimly called "cookboxes": wall-mounted external beam radiation was used to limit bacteriological incursions since most wounds were badly fouled. Lead-lined IV draws provided a direct feed of antibiotics. Nozzles mounted above the loading stations sprayed decontaminant on each patient as they were withdrawn.

Sources:

The M.A.S.H. picture is from a Battletech sourcebook and is hosted on Sarna.net, the BattleTech wiki.

Research performed on Hospitaner.com to learn more about mobile surgeries.

Quote from: Contre-Amirale Raoul André St. Germaine

A closed ethical system is as fragile in its own way as a closed mind. What cannot flex with the winds of change will surely break. - The New Feudalism

Sealurks grow to astonishing lengths in the oxygen-rich waters beneath the waste heat vents of the energy transfer station at Sea Base Polaris.

Just below the troubled surface of Planet's oceans, the inhabitants of Raoul St. Germaine's New State built one of Planet's most stable, and happiest, societies. Curiously, it was also one of the least-free.

The Contre-Amirale had always been a man out of time. Independent command on the Congo River ruined him for promotion in a peacetime navy. He had ruled his stretch of it, between Kisangani and Kindu, like a capricious god. Warlords feared the certainty of his swift and potent retaliation. Diplomats understood that peace could not be achieved unless he would condescend to guarantee it. Whatever thoughts he uttered past his cigarette were of far greater importance to his sailors than anything promulgated in Kinshasha or cabled from far-away Mars-el-Kabir. He never questioned whether any matter might lie beyond his ambit. Never accepted that his decisions could be subject to fair question by anyone who hadn't been present when alleged mistakes were made.

Critics labeled St. Germaine a bully and a brute. His moral ambiguity, they charged, was actually terpitude. He was an enabler of men, not a leader, who cloaked a profound bigotry of low expectations in paternalist delusion. But, as the infamous Le Monde headline wondered, "Qui le dira au roi?"

Greatness had seemed to elude France during St. Germaine's lifetime. Attempts to exercise a foreign policy independent of NATO seemed too often to require unfavorable concessions to the Soviet Union, and there was never any doubt as to which was the junior partner. The French people were uncomfortable with the empire they had inherited. A majority resented the sacrifice of francs and [/i]fils[/i], which eventually they declined to send in sufficient quantity. The press complained that men like St. Germaine were merely playing at war--and for what? They could see no reason why Algerians, Syrians, Quebecois, or Zairians should wish to so much as associate with France, as if the nation's proud cultural legacy had nothing to offer.

And so St. Germaine had watched, powerless, as French clients foundered, toppled by slapshod coups that could have been thwarted with the merest word from Paris. How many innocents had died to make Nwabudike Morgan a wealthy man in the Sahel? The tragedy of Indochina was almost worse: three decades of bleeding in the jungle before the French ceded the countryside totally to the insurgents, holing up in the delta cities and pretending as if they had not attempted to fight a war with both hands bound behind them. Again, the human cost was terrible. More than four million processed through Communist prison camps as the French stood by.

In St. Germaine's reckoning, liberal government had chosen to fail in Europe. The Right wanted to circle the wagons and fiddle while Rome burned, pretending they bore no responsibility to fix the broken ship of state. Anything to avoid personal sacrifice. The Left, full of equivocation and self-hatred, failed to neutralize the threat from the Right, accepting the bizarre American proposition that free speech brooked no adjustment--not even to thwart the rise of a fascism that would ultimately silence it--and crippled by the suggestion that no idea was more or less good than any other.

In the New State, all information was carefully curated. While the broadcast news available to New Staters was scrupulously true, it was also incomplete, and packaged with commentary approved by censors who had been cautioned that their audience was prone to certain defects of logic, making it necessary to direct their conclusions. Above all, St. Germaine wished to avoid inflaming their passions. Why should petty racisms divide happy neighbors? New Staters were taught not to hate their enemies, only that the world above the surface held nothing of interest for them. Yang worked his subjects like animals. Zakharov had managed to form a society dominated by an effete intellectual elite that saw only one way to value its members. Morgan exploited his workers until they died. Santiago played soldier without understanding the commitment to others at the heart of that vocation.

After the first generation, the New State was no longer merely a uniformed navy. For the first time, base-dwellers outnumbered submarine crews. The faction's defenders became an honored elite, and certainly St. Germaine depended most upon a small cadre of senior officers whose own families formed the nucleus of a ruling oligarchy that, by virtue of its close proximity to the original power structure, was able to perpetuate itself almost undisturbed by new entrants. Yet for his social project to succeed, St. Germaine needed to impart some of his standing to others. A chaplaincy was established, and professional guilds. The ethos of service was purposely expanded. One could of course contribute by serving aboard a warship, but ministering to the spiritual needs of the populace, or pursuing excellence in a useful trade, were equally honorable. All required schooling. All required participation in the civic life of the colony. The right of free association was a privilege. Marriage and child-rearing were doled out as rewards to those who proved themselves up to each task, not commitments to be stumbled into by chance or mistake.

Only by passing through the "three gates"--of professional dedication, educational attainment, and political involvement--did one earn that way to the full enjoyment of liberty. To be fully informed, one first had to acquire the means to be a discerning consumer of information. To vote, one had to demonstrate an understanding of the issues at hand and solutions proposed for each, along with the benefits and drawbacks of the same.

The problem, of course, was that no amount of safeguards could vanquish all demagogues, while the very existence of a military elite created irresistible incentives for that class to hold itself far above the citizenry it putatively served. St. Germaine was too used to making decisions without having to explain himself. Too used to trusting in his own genius and making peace with his own flaws. In return for fulfilling their obligation to nominate lower-ranking members of society for privilege and position, the New State's leading families demanded an unflinching obedience. What resulted was a recognizably feudal web of dependency and obligation. The same system of governance that ensured the faction's relative stability in thought and behavior over time also produced, on occasion, bizarre fits of self-harm or indolence when it flattered the special prerogative of one of those dynasties. Thus the New State was slower to anger than it should have been, slower to adopt new technologies, and rarely positioned to meet the changing world in a timely manner.

It was an ironic, but perhaps also a fitting fate for a man who insisted that being too sure of one's principles was a good way to fail.

Quote from: 1er Régiment Étranger de Parachutistes (REP), 1961

Non, je ne regrette rien. - Datalinks, Traditional

The New State monitored "topside" affairs through a network of thousands of sensor towers and autonomous drones. Fear of political contamination eventually broke into open hostility, and war became inevitable--a self-fulfilling prophecy. Upsetting ideas could not be allowed to frustrate the Loyal Citizenry.

As surely as inherited wealth determined one's standing with the New Two Thousand, or genetic bequest in the inflexible caste society of the early Ascendancy, family was the all-important variable in the New State.

The nuclear family, not the individual, was the smallest irreducible unit of New State politics, culture, and society. The male head of household received the ration allotment for his dependents and bore responsibility for the physical well-being, early education, and public behavior of his children. A successful parent was one who prepared his children to score well in the battery of service tests and selection panels they faced at age of sixteen.

Multiple nuclear families, related by ties of consanguinity or shared interest, associated as canopy families. Such networks were always led by a paterfamilias, a retired male veteran of flag rank. Nearly all these men claimed to be able to trace their lineage back to an original member of the crew of the three sainted Congo River gunboats, Légère, Jouhaud, and De Lattre, once commanded by the Contre-Amirale.

The paterfamilias held the votes of his eligible family members in trust and was therefore incentivized to expand his network by absorbing lesser families and those in dynastic distress, an arrangement that bound him to provide them the care of a parent. Such arrangements could not be made unless the paterfamilias first demonstrated to the regime that he possessed enough mineral, nutrient, and energy reserves to make good on that obligation. If he did not follow through after the fact, his retainers were then entitled to search for and take service with a more accommodating master. Thus the House of Vecchio in M.Y. 280 celebrated the commissions of twenty-six officers, the service induction of seventy-one other ranks, the investiture of three bishops, and the appointment of seventeen relations to base operations in Mu and Ys.

A notoriously tolerant leader, St. Germaine believed he owed it to his subordinates to provide largess for their offspring, and the performance of New State institutions, including the faction's naval militia, suffered accordingly. Test preparation was an expensive and time-consuming burden for any family. The children of drones received a free public education, but nothing compared to the rigorous preparation available to the wealthy. This natural bottleneck constrained the pool of working talent that came before selection boards, whose members themselves had every reason to favor their own. Following historical example, families were careful to place their agents in each estate: the military, the religious orders, the professional guilds, and the civil service.

Naval service was practically a sacred calling. Officers were an exalted elite: able to pursue the franchise, enfoefed with an annual stipend, and certain to develop close ties with lesser ranks that would almost certainly result in the expansion of their own dynasties.

Religious life in the New State was considerable more reactionary than the Conclave standard. The Sailor's Text, a heavily reworked (some said redacted) version of the Atrian Bible, placed a hysterical emphasis on the Book of Meronicus as a source of moral law. St. Germaine chose for his chaplains men who shared his own deep cynicism of civilian judgement. Led by such shepherds as Fulk Orenthal, worshipers were directed away from the morally corrupting and soul-mutilating influences of the Datalinks, cybernetics, mood-altering drugs, "Morganite larceny," and pacifism.

Guild ritual concerned itself with cultural preservation. The professional classes were not only relied upon to keep the cities and fleets of the New State in good repair, but also to build the artifacts of a proud Purist tradition. Feast days celebrated the art, literature, language, and history of the survivors' doomed homeworld, lest they forget. Well-behaved children recited pledges of filial allegiance that celebrated their dynastic belonging with reference to past deeds, not present or future. The "histories" told in this way astounded other factions: brazenly false to the point of absurd, but beloved by their New State troubadours. Thus were Napoleon's conquests recast as a liberal scourging of medieval monarchy. France, not the United States, was the font of democratic idealism. The Marquis de La Fayette and the Comte de Grasse, not George Washington or Benjamin Franklin, are the proper midwives of the Expérience américaine. French colonial expansion is described in terms of a "civilizing mission," while the wars to preserve the Union, whether successful or not, were valiant attempts to "buy time" for France's "disordered" subjects to devise their own government. All traces of racism, Catholocentrism, and colonialism have been expunged.

Quote from: St. Ives family Librarian Agnello Vorbeck

Better that we pass on a happy history to the next generation that tells them clearly what is right, than a series of confessions whose truth is so terrible, we have scarcely comprehended it ourselves, and which gives license by our example to fail again in the same way. - Blood and Brilliance

Base Operations is routinely asked to perform logistical impossibilities, and, to its credit, often delivers under extremely difficult circumstances. Although the ocean provides a splendid and near-complete isolation in which to solve problems free of the interference of other factions, the independent aethelings of the Sea Fencibles rarely keep their word, pursuing independent agendas with faction property that bear little relation to the strict schedules and painstakingly-balanced manifests handed down from the naval chief of staff and his dispatchers at New Atlantis. The massive fighting submarines of the Force de Frappe are everywhere and nowhere at once, mounting punitive raids on the Nautilus Pirates or sending Spartan barges to the bottom of the Slowwind River, if only to remind their crews of the untrammeled power that is theirs to command. If this leaves his people utterly vulnerable to enemy incursions, it appears not to trouble St. Germaine, who trusts in the fearsome reputation of his fighting forces more than their physical presence.

Source:

War Room by dmorson88 on Reddit Concept Art.

Quote from: ARC Administrator Oscar van de Graaf

The United Nations failed because it insisted on behaving in contradiction to a fundamental law of the universe. There are no two winners in a war. - Years of Strife

Ascendancy Legionnaires pose with a captured Spartan Myrmidon, once thought to be their closest peer combatants. The one-on-one match-up was favorable for the Augments, whose physical and mental faculties were genuinely preternatural, but Santiago's proud warriors were easily-goaded. The super-soldiers fared much less well against the better-disciplined militaries of Chiron: U.N. Marines, Tribal Minutemen, the Chiron Guard, and Bourse Enforcers.

Augments were raised on a strict diet of genetic Darwinism. No quarter was given to their "merely human" opponents, and none was expected in return. Pahlavi encouraged them to execute the prisoners who wouldn't make suitable workers, partly for reasons of economy, but also because she believed that fear was a reliable deterrent. Other factions soon learned to make examples of the rare Ascendancy prisoners who fell into their hands without activating a suicide gland, as sometimes happened when Togra Labs StickyFoam or Knockout Gas was used.

The sticking point was that world-class tactical thinkers had to be trained, not grown. Troops that could march further, carry more, and bleed less were a good start, but commanders the caliber of Salan, Keller, St. Germaine, Mercator, and Ontarion were years in the making. Still, each faction tried its own remedies to under-performance. Morgan paid bounties, then turned to the University for better equipment and the Children for his battle plans. Sheng-ji Yang taught his soldiers techniques to manage their sympathetic response. For a time, some even believed that the hunger and terror that drove Hive fighters would give them an edge in battle, until it was remembered that soldiering is a high-calorie profession. Mercenaries--even those of the Bourse--were a neat stop-gap: always better than greenhorns, but often worse than those fighting from conviction.

The cream of the Unity motor pool came from U.N. fleets on Mars and the Moon. In his typically blunt fashion, Insowan Nimrod, the agency's Special Advisor on Off-World Development, explained to the Security Council that this mass reassignment, expected to set development schemes back by at least a decade, was justified because it "could ensure the very survival of our species."

Supply crawlers like this one, both crewed and automated, shuffled supplies between the population centers of Chiron at regular intervals. Pilots screwed their courage to the sticking point and counted themselves lucky if they travelled in convoy, never mind the luxury of armed escort. Some became justifiably famous for high-speed, long-distance runs through fungal or inter-factional "hot zones," bearing all manner of life-saving cargoes, from Potassium Iodide pills to potable water.

Riding with militia was not a universally-accepted panacea. Some road crews trusted in the speed and relatively lower profile of solo travel. And who could forget the MY2 incident in which Morgan Corporate Security guards, sighting a Light Anti-Tank Weapon, destroyed their own roller with a misfired round?

Around the beginning of the twenty-first century, a popular satirical magazine joked that the mystery of American President John F. Kennedy's assassination had finally been solved. He was shot no fewer than 129 times "by operatives of the CIA, the Giancana crime syndicate, Fidel Castro, Vice President Johnson, the Freemasons, and the Teamsters."

The full story of Unity's destruction was equally improbable, equally mysterious. Who assassinated the U.N.'s own Captain John? Who ejected the ship's data core? Why had some modules uncoupled before any the senior staff were forced awake?

Some of the most valuable cargo and systems remained in stable orbit far above Chiron, or were in long elliptical orbits around its moons, Nessus and Pholus, which must mean they had been towed there by one of the shipboard drones.

A full inventory of the ship's stores, its thousands of constituent modules, and the precise timing and location of their release was available in the data core, which made capture and defense of that object a top priority for every leader. Information leaked to the Planetary Datalinks in MY32 appeared to confirm that the ship's long-range laser communions array was among the pieces still safely in space, joined by more than a dozen perfectly-preserved, independently-powered cryobays and dozens of Landing Pods.

At first, the survivors could only recover what had already come down on its own or orbited within range of their recall beacons. Then the University sent satellites to initiate "brokered" collisions that could push objects on a previously stable orbit into a degrading one. Not to be outdone, the Watchers of Chiron built a ground-based Babylon Gun to do the same. It would take almost four centuries for humans to build permanent trans-orbital structures, and fifty years more for them to go further afield than that.

Mining operations were made no easier by Chiron's punishing gravity, more than a third again the Earth standard. The average miner was one part roughneck for every ten parts process engineer. Automatons did all the really grueling work; humans were needed only to correct code faults and monitor safety systems.

A Restoration VTOL executes a fire mission against Spartan siege lines outside Rock Island Refuge. Targets "painted" by a Gnat's Kill Lamp rarely survived. General Salan overrode the loud opposition of key subordinates to make an alliance of convenience with the Kellerites. This "double enemy" had fought North American militaries for decades, racking up a long overdue tab notwithstanding the dozens more added to their tally aboard Unity. But Salan understood that the Slowwind River, great artery of Shamash, could not be ceded to Santiago without a fight, and the Restoration needed allies who could put boots on the ground.

Sources:

First image is from Planetside 2.

Suicide glands were a feature of Xindi Reptilian soldiers on Star Trek: Enterprise.

With the exception of the VTOL, which is from Command & Conquer, all subsequent image content found on Project Edge.

Unity entry inspired by The Onion.

Low population count and a limited supply of bottled oxygen made it difficult for militias to cover lengthy base perimeters. Early expansion reached toward the sky, not the horizon.

Crowded conditions and a near-total lack of privacy pushed many able-bodied colonists to volunteer for long-distance expeditions despite the certainty of extreme danger.

The experience of communal living in materially primitive conditions was considered morally undesirable by factions that emphasized individuality. Nwabudike Morgan, who had promised his followers a speedy transition to familiarity, feared defections. Oscar van de Graaf paid bounties to homesteaders, many of whom were subsequently taken prisoner by Dreamers and Spartans. In Pilgrim argot, the round-topped orange triangle, symbol of the survival tent, became an enduring and universally-recognized danger sign. The New State assigned private quarters as a perquisite of officer rank.

A freak ice storm trapped the University's Polar Pioneer within sight of Сладкая вода ("Sweet Water"), from whence water ice was shipped to more southerly climes. (Most of Planet's groundwater was rendered undrinkable by high nitrate concentration.) Ascendancy Legionnaires captured the megafoil's crew and began unloading its cargo for transport to The Pinnacle, only to be interrupted by the Chiron Guard. Mercator's forces restored the researchers' supplies to them, but their people had already gone.

Pahlavi enforced a scorched-earth policy, destroying what could not be carried off. By this, she intended to discourage future forays into the polar latitudes, which her faction deigned its private preserve. At the very least, punitive expeditions would have no obvious staging areas from which to drive farther into Ascendancy territory.

Low-occupancy Scout Pods were not formally registered on Unity's cargo manifest: they had no place in the final blueprint for colonization carefully laid out by Mission Control. Instead, they were a vestigial remnant of first construction. Spartans stowaways found them while breaking out of hiding and used them as auxiliary landing craft during the general evacuation. Their electric fuel cells could be recharged and the Pods reused as trans-atmospheric shuttles--or, in the case of Santiago's Myrmidons, unarmed assault craft.

When their war with the Tribe ground to a standstill, the Spartan strategoi called for fresh laborers and breeding stock--slaves. The Shuttle Pods became the centerpiece of a surgical campaign of point raids against Planet's less-warlike societies.

Residential spaces at the U.N. Archives were organized along new principles borrowed from a study of conquered Spartan garrisons.

Strict limitations on the size and energy consumption for personal quarters encouraged higher use of the Recreation Commons at the center of each habitation bloc. In this subsidized convalescent area, citizens accessed an enviable set of amenities including a semi-private Network Node, full kitchens, and cutting-edge hologram theaters. The base proper was built around a large number of domed parks and observation towers, adding additional opportunities for leisure and isolation.

The experiment was a qualified success. The new arrangements appealed especially to those with large families, and participation rates in the civil life of the faction benefited from the easy access to communications devices. Nonetheless, a majority of the Peacekeeping Forces still preferred private poverty to shared wealth.

Morganite visitors to the Archives were irate to discover "common Drones" living in circumstances very nearly equivalent to those in their most exclusive compounds. Numerous complaints were lodged with the CEO, although without reply.

University Enforcement completes the dawn patrol at Syllandran Pump Station on the eastern shore of Baranov Bay. The site threw Zakharov-watchers into fits. What use had the inventor of cold fusion for an inefficient oil refinery with endless kilometers of vulnerable pipelines?

Rumor had it that Colonel Santiago shopped this question to the typical troubleshooters without satisfaction. The Dreamers, who rarely captured University scientists (perhaps the Ascendancy and Watchers were too thorough in their persecutions), had nothing on file corresponding to the project and saw no reason why a scientist who prided himself for leading his species out of thrall to fossil fuels should spend precious resources to create an infrastructure he didn't seem inclined to use. The Children of the Atom for once didn't trust in the data spat out by their digital oracle. Dr. Anhaldt apologized personally to the Generalissima, but due to as-yet-undiagnosed errors, it persisted in labeling the site a military base, completely contrary to all reconnaissance. When paid to study the matter, Morgan Tactical Services turned in one thousand and seven hundred pages to say with "moderate" confidence that the base was part of a failed attempt to diversify University fuel sources, and was probably under guard only because salvage operations were still pending and the Ascendancy couldn't be allowed to make off with whatever equipment was still on-site.

The vacuum tube brain at The Core was closest to correct. Sylllandran existed for one reason only: to dump 503 million gallons of crude oil and other industrial wastes into the Baranov, stimulating a planetary immunological response that wiped out the New State's Discovery Base and doomed its 5,000 colonists.

Quote from: Rawiah Alhazred

The society, of course, is far more intelligent than the individual, and also more resilient, but never as wise or restrained. - The Manual of State

After developing untreatable cancer, Thinker Rawiah Alhazred had her consciousness transferred into a mechanical simulacrum. When she woke, she discovered that certain modifications had been made "in the interests of the Collective." Alhazred's friends later held a private memorial service for their friend, who they did not invite.

Hive Thinkers were the last resort of the stumped scoundrel.

Ideally, the petitioner could pay to have their question answered by "experts."

Johann Anhaldt posited his faction as the premier source of good advice on Planet, and willing to deal with any counter-party. Yet a common complaint about the Nous was that the Children's much-vaunted mechanical brain gave insufficient consideration to "the human variable." The Children of the Atom were notoriously the victims of their own mania for the "independent look," slavishly applying the changes suggested by the system they had created to absolve themselves of all responsibility for hard decisions. Morganite merchants and Believer relief workers who made regular visits to Atomic colonies braced themselves for a new experience each day. The Children lived down to their namesake, one day welcoming outsiders, and the next refusing them entry; disconnecting from the Planetary Grid, then reconnecting; declaring vendetta, then suing for peace on seemingly unfavorable terms. Still, the Nous had an uncanny grasp on strategic matters, and its predictions about faction behavior became an indispensable aid to general staffs everywhere.

Anhaldt worked tirelessly to burnish the Nous brand. For a time, he kept a stable of analysts at work reviewing every one of the assessments it prepared for other factions. After Quality Control complained that the in-house team was providing no added value, the good doctor's militia brought him captives from the University and Morgan Industries--individuals who might possess knowledge, or even values, inaccessible to the Children themselves. Again, the result was the same. Anhaldt now reasoned that rather than attempt to check Nous output on the back end, he should make a bio-mechanical upgrade to the computational systems themselves. His agents purchased bags of thinking chemicals from the Hivemen, only to find that these increased the speed of the Nous's calculations without impacting their content. Next, "volunteers" were forced into a mind-machine interface, resulting in nonsensical outputs and the sale of several vegetative patients to Dreamer collection crews. It was all, Anhaldt confessed, a work in progress.

If the number-grinding Nous was too expensive, or not to be believed, well, that's why God made Probe Teams, no? Of course, this was even chancier than the Nous. If the infiltration failed, the Probe Team might be wiped. Indeed, the high casualty rates incurred even on successful missions resulted in the Dreamers--spies par excellence--insisting that their clients provide some of the team members themselves, a decision that inevitable dampened enthusiasm for their "product."

The Dream-Walkers, University, and Morganites were all limited by the extent of their own databases. Unless they had already encountered the same problem, or a similar one, they could offer only conjecture. Once the Planetary Networks expanded to incorporate most factions, the Tomorrow Institute became the preferred broker of consulting services: its librarians were the most proficient at mining history for useful information.

But what happened when the conventional options had been exhausted?

Politics makes strange bedfellows. The Human Labyrinth was perpetually at war with all of Planet, and therefore also perpetually ready to strike alliances of convenience with any candidate. Since Hive Security would not do for a dowry, Yang offered two other inducements. The first was access--his tunneling machinery could take strike forces throughout Shamash undetected--but the second was insight.

Around M.Y. 70, it started to became clear that Sheng-ji Yang's efforts to "unlock" the potential of the human mind were bearing fruit of at least moderate sweetness. The reason for these achievements was unclear to outsiders. They obviously used nootropics, but then so did everyone. Pahlavi accused Yang of "torturing his brilliance out of others," deciding that the Hermit King must be achieving his strategic successes through the exploitation of high-value captives. The University's Institute of Behavior Sciences guessed that the Hive must have perfected the Mind-Machine Interface, somehow blunting or controlling the sensory overload that proved fatal to most test subjects.

The truth was that Yang had succeeded in breaking certain followers free of the shared moral frame through which twenty-first century humans generally understood the world. In consequence, his Thinkers experienced what became known as the Naïve Mind. In this state, freed of convention and expectation, they could propose a wider range of potential outcomes than other observers of the same situations. Once these ideas had been expressed, Yang workshopped them relentlessly. With his Talents, he examined them thoroughly for logical fallacies. Despite losing the Unity Data Core to U.N. Marines within weeks of getting his hands on it, Yang had managed to extract some of the social psych data collected during the seventy-one year transit from Earth, which he used as a moderator on his conclusions.

Sources:

I found the picture here, but it was uncredited.

Abdul Alhazred was a fictional character invented by H.P. Lovecraft.

Nous is Greek for mind.

The "Naive Mind" is a concept borrowed from Frank Herbert.

A United Nations Security Forces Auxiliary posted to Data Services guards her watch desk with shredder pistol in hand. This image, preserved by Tomorrow Institute librarians, was one of many used to inform the Purity Movement's ideal of beauty down through subsequent generations.

Chiron's gravity was one third stronger than Earth's. Most of the outgoing colonists underwent years of intensive physical training to build muscle and endurance, but the problems caused by this difference were legion.

Exhaustion dogged everyone. All factions devised "physical" work days of between four and six hours with frequent rest, followed by mandatory stints of administrivia. Exoskeletons were a necessary component of any outdoor worker's basic Personal Protective Equipment. Spartans wrestled, without exception. New State students and sailors participated in team sport four times an Earth-standard week or incurred demerits. Social ostracism awaited Pilgrim shirkers, while Morganite layabouts paid steep fees to subsidize their sedentary lifestyles.

Safety, already an obsession, remained a top priority Planetside. If a robot could be used, it was. Tampering with Rover safety margins was a capital crime in some societies. Civilian ignitions locked until the pilot was safely in five-point harness and helmet, a lead from which had to be plugged into the dashboard. A set of additional switches had then to be thrown to verify that passengers were similarly situated.

Life expectancy dropped. Rigorous lifestyles and everyday use of supplemental oxygen put severe strain on the human circulatory system, promoting earlier heart failure.

If activity could be done while reclining or afloat, it was. Thinkers, Librarians, and base administrators spent hours each day partially submerged in high-salinity pools. Factions raced to formulate suspension gels with even greater buoyancy.

Over multiple generations, scientists mapped clear changes in human physiological development. Chironians were shorter and thicker than Terrans. They had higher bone density, superior lung capacity, and were much more likely to be severely allergic to Terran foods. Chironians also used different portions of their brains to perform the same thought functions as Terrans. (The scientific consensus was that this reflected the pervasive influence of the Mindworms.)

In theory, Chironian bodies made life easier. In practice, some factions clung to Terran ideals of beauty in ways that led them to prioritize the familiar over the putatively useful. The New State's cultural output encouraged pairings more likely to produce offspring with Terran features. Many families forced the termination of pregnancies without the desired genetic markers. Several studies of the artistic output of the later colonies, including the portraits of faction leadership, point out obvious distortions of physical depiction that centered Terran bodies in favor of Chironian ones.

The three societies that developed "off-beat" were even stranger. Eyesight and lung function were very bad among all residents of the Hive due to the amount of time spent in low-light and dusty environments. Gaians often experienced fungal afflictions differently than others: instead of being overcome with dread, they were more likely to report euphoria. Under the sea, New Staters breathed air so dense it distorted their sense of taste, while also contributing to the same circulatory problems prevalent elsewhere on Planet. A significant minority died of sleep illness such as apneas and exhaustion.

All living systems are similar--on Chiron, as on Earth.

Bases, like mindworm boils, are easiest to destroy in their infancy. Both expand gingerly, wary of predators. It is the way of all factions to protect Colony Pods with a heavy militia escort, while fungal spores, from which mindworms seem to swarm, boast skins as hard as igneous rock.

Individual boils form cooperative nestings that negotiate use of the same space. Gaian xenobiologists speculate that this is the species' mechanism for moderating its own population growth. Like two neighbors, they will accept the mild constraint of sharing rather than fight, which could weaken both sides. Base administration is both art and science among the settlers. Within and between factions, each must balance the production of water, nutrients, mass, and energy, the exchange of population, and the frequency and intensity of war.

If agitated, mindworm boils attempt rapid expansion--a swarming behavior that, observed in purely mathematical terms, precisely resembles the maneuvering of large armies. Boils instinctively encircle the interloper.

Mindworms have multiple methods of making their displeasure known, such as by vomiting digestive enzymes that can eat through most armors, and by release of psychoactive biotoxins from skin glands. Boils have also been known to launch spores on high parabolic arcs, as if firing solid shot from a field mortar. This last behavior serves no reproductive purpose and indicates that the colony anticipates imminent death.

Native Chironians experience less, and milder, episodes of mental distress linked to mindworm activity. There is no medical evidence to indicate that any person in this category has ever detected the "song" that is usually credited to
the fungus that is the worms' herald.

Humans, we have seen, will similarly employ a wide variety of weapons in the aid of conquest, and are also fond of launching unarmed appeals that they hope will settle the contest without a shot being fired.

Amazingly, mindworms in captivity have thrived on diets designed to make use only of Terran foodstuffs. Along with humans, they also feed on a narrow range of leafy green Chironian vegetation that is comparatively rare.

Source:

Picture of Felucia, a planet from Star Wars. It apparently belongs to Lucasfilm.

Quote from: Oscar van de Graaf

The State did not ordinarily excuse vice in defense of its virtues. I not only forgave, but demanded it. - Under My Wings, All Things Prosper

Oscar van de Graaf poses for a holo capture somewhere in the Monsoon Jungle, one of the few environments on Planet where ambient oxygenation levels were low enough for settlers of the First Generations to safely doff their oxygen hoods.

In MY10, the stadtholders and survivors of the New Two Thousand gathered under an oxygen tent to consider their options. The going since Planetfall had been exceptionally hard. Fewer than one in eight of Governor van de Graaf's Chosen Men--a term applied irrespective of gender--had joined their leader going down. The colony was under-populated, over-extended, and at perpetual war with every neighbor.

Pickings aboard Unity had been slim, leading directly to the present crisis. U.N. algorithms assigned van de Graaf a very low coefficient in the retrieval order, party a reflection of his advanced age--he was 65, partly due to lack of applicable skills--his emergency billet was in supply administration, but also because he was flagged a high mutiny risk. (On this, there was rare convergence of opinion between numerous national and corporate intelligence agencies and senior mission staff, though the assessment provided by Morgan Tactical Services was blatantly prejudicial.) When at last some generous soul came to pull him from stasis, most of his ARC confidants, security contingent, and painstakingly-recruited experts were already missing in action. Cases of old rifles and ammunition, thoughtfully stowed in a hidden compartment, were the only testament to a once-dazzling bazaar that had kept the Space Elevators at full capacity for months at a time.

If van de Graaf mourned this cruel trick of fate, he was probably alone in doing so. Even when free to give their allegiance in later years, few chose to honor the brutal terms of indenture that had first bought them a place, however lowly, under the mission umbrella as one of his two thousand-odd "free settlers." None of the other faction leaders was willing to honor the legal instruments van de Graaf had used to bind his counter-parties, a prospect that would have been exceedingly unlikely even had the agreements been scrupulously fair.

The Wesper-Quinn-Vagner Process placed heavy stress on a patient's cardiovascular system. Van de Graaf's fitness was exceptional for a man his age, but an assassination attempt from his days as ARC Chairman had left a bullet lodged too close to his heart for safe removal. A minor myocardial infarction, resolved by his stasis pod's Automated Medical Unit, had encouraged necrosis of the toes. His companions performed a field surgery, removing two on the left foot. Within the hour, stretcher-bearers strained to carry him through debris-choked passages to the cargo bays only to discover that those, too, were picked clean. Van de Graaf, rising from his cushions like some medieval potentate rousted from torpor, reportedly drew his personal pistol, a Liberator 990, and calmly announced that his companions were to do likewise.

No one man had done more to lay choice personnel and proper equipment for the benefit of the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri than Oscar van de Graaf.

Quote from: Oscar van de Graaf

I had best claim. In the Old West, to steal a man's horse was to kill him slowly by starvation or exposure. Horse thieves, when caught, were summarily executed. Our situation was precisely identical. We knew it, and more importantly, they knew it, too. - Notes on Arrival

A passing paramedic stopped when he saw the man on the litter. Was there some service he could render? Van de Graaf's companions lowered their charge for inspection, then raised their shredder pistols and declared that the Good Samaritan had just become a stakeholder. This they repeated whenever they encountered somebody deemed "useful." Others falling into their hands, they beat to death--the better to save ammunition "without stinting," they said, "on justice." Many fired back, embroiling van de Graaf's party in extended skirmishes. The prisoners had then to be bound together, lest they try escape.

Reaching the embarkation deck, the Pilgrims secured four unattended Landing Pods immediately and, crowding in behind a gaggle of Morgan Emergency Services evacuees, commandeered a fifth by main force, sealing the hatches behind them before the SafeHaven guards were the wiser. One Pod was destroyed when it failed to clear the chute during launch; the rest made it safe away, bearing with them approximately eight hundred souls and the lasting enmity of many more.

In early speeches to his followers, van de Graaf was clear about what ailed them. Opportunists were already in possession of what the New Two Thousand chiefly needed. Let them work hard to turn the soil and raise the towers; the New Two Thousand would pluck the fruits of this false labor when it confiscated their stolen tools and liberate their brethren. A high percentage of the Charterists had come with family. The idea that their loved ones might had been made into unwilling drones inspired them to take extreme risks. The faction was also known to casually torture prisoners for information the poor unfortunates rarely had to give. In their zeal, the Pilgrims fancied themselves re-fighting the War of 1812. In the taverns of Terra Nova, it was well-known that any Special Project competed by another faction was evidence of forced Charterist labor.

Quote from: Datalinks

Spartan. Free. Scientist. Brain. Peacekeeper. Weak. Tribal. Cult. Watcher. Crank. Believer. God. Pilgrim. Temper. - Child's Word Association Game, Children's Crèche, The Pinnacle

The most-celebrated of the Regulators' exploits was the recovery of a sand-fouled 'Former from deep within the territory of the Human Labyrinth. It apparently seized during seeding operations in an underground chamber dug too close to the surface and could not be recovered by Yang's operators. A sandstorm revealed it to Pilgrim reconnaissance teams not long after. Trikes carried a team of mechanics to the wreck directly. They resurrected the massive vehicle under fire and backed it into the braces for the tunnel system from whence it had come, burying the Hivemen trying to prevent its capture.

Pilgrim Regulators, for all their bravado, could not prevent raids on the faction's territory by its more powerful neighbors. Terra Incognito, sacked by the Spartans eighteen months before, still counted more graves than people. The New Two Thousand were still processing the lucky find of a Hab Pod containing two hundred American Reclamation Corporation Armed Auxiliaries, but the prognosis was grim. A vanishingly small percentage of the original Pilgrim survivors had any prior military experience. Casualty rates among the Regulators were extreme: few lasted long enough to pass on whatever experience they accrued.

Oscar van de Graaf, for much of his adult life the most powerful man in North America, was not one to take hard blows sitting down.

ARC Auxiliaries pause on the outskirts of Memphis during a rare snowfall. By statute, they were entitled to use the same kit, organization, and markings as the Regular Army. Having learned from experience the importance of supply, van de Graaf lavished it on his legions, first as a patron of privateers, then as a Cabinet official, and eventually as the so-called Iron Governor. On the battlefields of North America, ARC troopers threw grenades first and asked questions later. Some won their battles merely by cutting power to disloyal townships and waiting for the sub-zero temperatures to force a surrender. Against Myrmidons, Minutemen, and Augments, full bellies and topped-up ammo cans were a less spectacular advantage. Pete Landers motivated his fighters by reminding them that a Pilgrim enemy was always rich pickings.

Quote from: Seligman Spires

Oscar knew the first rule of being a fish. If you realize you're swimming with the sharks, find a smaller pond. - Ken Burns's Planet: A History

Options were limited. To the North lay Xerxion, and beyond that, Fort Defiance and Keller City. Santiago's people were well-organized, and, because they had got an earlier start at looting, better-equipped. In ten years, they had done more set-piece fighting than raiding. In battles large and small, the Pilgrims had repeatedly earned a punishing second place. South, the ultra-high Frostcap Range promised hypothermia to all comers. The Dune Sea lapped at the western edge of the faction's territory, and while individual tendrils of the Hive could easily be lopped off (Hive Security was even more decrepit than the Regulator militia), the requirement for excavation and their own poverty made them more trouble than they were worth. The most immediate practical targets were merchants and SMACERS that came across the deserts or down from the Slowwind Delta without having to be invited. Citing the exigencies of their own survival, van de Graaf's people were the first to enforce tolls on this traffic. Over time, these increased from the inconvenient to the outrageous. If a caravan could not, or would not pay, the Regulators seized it in its entirety. The Hunters of Chiron, which had a habit of ignoring political boundaries, came in for the harshest treatment, although their own origins meant that they were least of all to blame for van de Graaf's situation.

Were such tricks played on Morganites or Dreamers, their merchants would merely have found friendlier marts. The SMACERS did exactly this. But the Hunters, finding themselves increasingly unwelcome in all the settled precincts of Planet, chose van de Graaf's policy as the one against which they must make their stand. Meeting in pitched battle during a howling tropical rain that carried off more than one precious vehicle, the bulk of the Main Force Patrol and six full companies of Pilgrim Regulator militia had it out until at last the salvage-strewn battlefield belonged indisputably to Oscar van de Graaf. He owed the day only partly to the fresh ARC veterans that leavened his ranks. The double envelopment strategy used to carry off his victory had been suggested to him by the representative of a new ally, the Maréchal Amédée de Bankolé.

Since weakness had already made him a perennial target for others, van de Graaf had opened his bases to become staging areas for New State land forces without fear of further negative consequences.

Most of the Battle at Sensorfield was conducted from Rovers like this one. Van de Graaf prepared his Order of Battle knowing that the Hunters would hesitate to dismount. He converted two squadrons of utilitycraft for anti-material work by affixing to each a laser marker and wire-guided missile launcher. To obtain enough vehicles for the fight, the Stadtholders called upon individual homesteading families to volunteer their own in return for the dubious promise of a generous bounty. Contracts were drawn up that stipulated they must be paid out double if the vehicles were destroyed, a condition Governor van de Graaf went on to honor.

Pilgrim Regulators used the same guns, flak jackets, and uniforms placed back into ARC supply depots by out-mustering soldiers in 2057.

Van de Graaf must have taken ironic pleasure in the recovery of one of the Hunter's two Ontos tanks after the fight at Sensorfield. After all, their presence on Planet had been made possible only through his good offices. That vehicle was kept in service with the New Two Thousand long enough to join the SAMMS round-ups of the following century.

Pilgrim militiamen back from an objective raid. Their hand weapons are literal antiques. The spoils of war are this time unimpressive. Between them, the trio bear an energy canister (slung over the shoulder of the individual at left) and a few bottles of oxygen (carried by the middle soldier).

After Sensorfield, van de Graaf screened the Hunter survivors carefully for Charterists, finding four who were then absorbed into his faction-all ex-SMACERs, not original Forward Contact crew. The Stadtholders additionally voted a Hunter slave to each household. These were nerve-stapled to foreclose flight risk. The remainder were marched into the Dune Sea and sold for a profit to the Human Labyrinth. Marsh and approximately half the enemy force escaped, but their logistical train, captured in toto, yielded dozens of heavy-haulers, ambulances, and mobile workshops, some still etched with ARC markings.

For the Regulators, it was a happy moment of reinvention. With an arsenal much expanded by restored Hunter equipment and the benefits of drill with the Marins de Terre, they soon tried again their old raids on Tribal targets, timing each strike to coincide with Spartan offensives. As it turned out, the Kellerites had indeed been through the Charterist Hab Bays. In MY12, van de Graaf's militia reunited 120 Pilgrim families during the temporary occupation of Old Rusty, a Tribal colony built around the crash site of a doomed Supply Pod. Not all were pleased by the new development.

Quote from: Physician's Assistant Caesaro Silver

Liberation of the body is not always easy, but it is straightforward. Liberation of the mind, always difficult. Kellerite converts are the worst. Their concepts of privacy and personalty are missing completely. The work ethic is good, but they ask uncomfortable questions that take as their starting point the illegitimacy of our cherished principle: that the success or failure of the individual rests entirely in their own hands. We have learned by hard experience that the community we can count upon may dwindle in an instant to one. - Notes to the Medical Record of Patient A42, Supplemental

His alliance with a naval power provided van de Graaf with the outlet he needed, and at no cost to himself. Who would the New State upset that he did not already call Enemy? Unmolested by St. Germain's Foils, the Pilgrims roved out in search of other notoriously "soft" victims. Within weeks of Sensorfield, SAMMS crossed the narrows at Sullivan's Hook and staggered, steaming, from the ocean to put the Children of the Atom to flight. Governor Van de Graaf traded the Cray mainframes he found to the Tomorrow Institute in return for information about more of his "missing" colonists.

Sources:

Stephen Lang is Oscar van de Graaf. The still is from Terra Nova.

The artist of the picture of the Rover with missile launcher is unknown. It appears to be a Command & Conquer homage. The picture can be found on WallpaperUP.

The picture of the Ontos is a historical photograph probably taken in Vietnam. It can be accessed here.

The picture of Trike and Harvester are from a Command & Conquer 3 mod on moddb, Réinventer la Dune.

All other pictures are promotional artwork from the recent remake of the Twilight 2000 roleplaying game. They can be found here.

Objective raids are a concept borrowed from Battletech.

Quote from:

...and to the Republic for which it stands, many nations, indivisible, with liberty, opportunity, and justice for all. - The Revised Pledge, Datalinks

Subject at Inspection on Intake Day, Eastern Military Academy.

Name: A.J.R. Chandran
Rank: Colonist II
Position: Assistant Chief, Patrol Special Police, Van de Graaf Expedition
County of Origin: United States of America
DOB: 11-30-2032
Height: 185.42cm
Weight: 84.1kg

Unity Contractor Background History:

August 2037. Father, Aarav Chandran, a Port Authority Police Department lieutenant and his family's breadwinner, assassinated by Free Quebec radical at Grand Central Station.

September 2046. Accepted to Eastern Military Academy (EMA), Cold Spring Hills, New York, one of the hundreds of independent service academies newly founded or recently restored since the closure of West Point nine years prior over allegations that the school had become a "breeding ground" for Holnism and States' Rights secessionism. Recipient of Fallen Warrior scholarship. Suffered from numerous episodes of racism by nativist cadets.

June 2049. Graduated from EMA. Commissioned a Third Lieutenant, United States Army.

October 2050. Deployed to Cincinnati, Ohio, just outside Insurrection Zone. Responsible for sector defense of Federal Disaster Relief Service convoys in the Sixth Military District, covering most of the Ohio and Cumberland River Watersheds. Immediately relocated personal quarters to Camp McRaven, Covington, Kentucky. Began leading vigorous assaults against Holnist strong-points outside the city, reviving low morale. In one memorable incident reported in the national press, commandeered a Van de Graaf Steel corporate helicopter to deliver soda pop and toothpaste to troops in the field, then credited the company for the action. Personally negotiated safe passage through Kellerite strongholds in Louisville Bullet Belt. Frequently placed in command of American Reclamation Corporation (ARC) and United States Volunteer units. Multiple citations for battlefield valor.

April 2052. Victorious at Second Battle of Paducah, destroying the 4,000-strong "Field Army" of the Free State of Missouri. Captured foreign national fighters who, during preliminary interrogation, confessed to being Morgan SafeHaven mercenaries under contract with the "legitimate government of Missouri." (Separately, Governor Hastings Wellerman was captured, tried, and sentenced to a maximum of ten years under 18 U.S. Code. Missouri Adjutant-General Niemiah Kinsale was executed.)

June 2053. Gave lecture, "The Fielding Principles," to subordinates and selected guests of honor at Camp Tarwell, Tennessee, in support of generational tenancy. Using ARC war release programs, compelled ex-Holnists to stand in guard of Kellerite compounds, from which they received all food, medical care, and recreation opportunities, which tactic subject called "radical restitution."

Quote from: A.J.R. Chandran

Love for our fellow man begins when we risk ourselves on their behalf. Nobody willingly risks themselves for the unworthy. By definition, my fight for him elevates the dignity of my neighbor, if only in my own eyes. - The Wisdom of the Kellerites

September 2054. Now a Captain with supervisory authority over national reconstruction projects and political rehabilitation of occupied territories. Subpoenaed for testimony before House Subcommittee on Conduct of the War in connection with alleged misconduct of ARC contractors under U.S. Army control. Acknowledged by name in the Marion Administration's decision to absorb the ARC as an independent federal corporation in 2064.

December 2059. As liaison officer to the ARC, subject, promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, assisted in operational and contingency planning for the Chilean Intervention, which averted a United Nations-backed coup against the military government of General Iker Villegas. Two battalions of the U.S. Army's 88th Parachute Infantry Regiment captured Santiago's Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport, surprising and routing a combined garrison of Morgan Armored Security and Finnish troops in U.N. service.

November 2069. Returned to Long Island, New York for mother Sarika's funeral, personally attended by ARC Administrator Oscar van de Graaf. Believed to have accepted a formal stake in U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri on that occasion.

December 2069. Reassignment to ARC Contingent, U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri. Excused from pre-mission training.

Chiron Service Record:

Awakened by Struan's technicians during Planetfall. Picked from the crew manifest. Placed on indefinite light labor while faction leadership debated how best to employ his skill sets. Subjected to at least three dream incursions by faction medical staff. Redeemed from a Dreamer work crew by Pilgrim merchants on the orders of Chief Financial Officer Suzanne Fielding. Debt soon cleared by vote of faction stakeholders.

Named senior military advisor to Governor van de Graaf despite risk of successful profiling by Dreamers of Chiron. Well-known critic of Column-General Grant Auriole, head of the faction militia.

Temporarily responsible for Northern Front operations in M.Y. 8, during which Pilgrim militia scored a rare victory in the Battle of Skeleton Ridge, opening tributary flood gates that swept away an attacking force of Spartan dragoons that had been pinned by defenders. Action spared vulnerable Pilgrim habitats and gem-mining operations. Formally reprimanded for high casualty counts and loss of salvage opportunities. Reassigned to desk rotation.

Wing Commander at Battle of Sensorfield. Led Pilgrim Rovers against the cream of Marsh's road crews.

Militiamen with the New Two Thousand make final checks to the jury-rigged armament and protection bolted to their precious logistical vehicles. Chandran provided the mechanics with strict specifications and personally inspected the forty craft of his command. The leftmost vehicle was mounted with the jewel of the faction's salvage operations: a close-in weapons system stripped from the hull of the Unity itself. The depleted-uranium rounds were removed in favor of incendiary squad-heads so that they wouldn't pass through Hunter vehicles without doing damage. Later, transferred back to the Northern Front, the same gun platform was reloaded with its original ammunition to ensure parity against Spartan laser tanks.

A Unity Combat Car captured from the Peacekeeping Forces provides the rear guard for homesteaders moving toward the Slowwind River Delta. By this time in the settlement of Shamash, fungal fields around the original human settlements had been reduced to fossilized husks by heavy use of Shaper poisons. Spartan sensor towers beam messages to vacant terminals in silent Xerxion, at last reduced to rubble by Tribal artillery. The rearmost vehicle of the column is a mobile laboratory, sent to scour the pockmarked brinescape for residual indications of exploitable resources.

Psych Profile: Loyalist

Unionist. Placed under Military Restriction during Thanksgiving season of 2025 after interrupting a ring of senior cadets replacing the national flag with a pro-independence banner. The resulting fistfight resulted in two hospitalizations.

Humanitarian. Widely acclaimed for merciful attitudes toward occupied populations. More forgiving of armed resistance against uniformed military forces than brutalization of non-combatants. Rarely engaged in the summary executions of captured Holnists popular among peers, though frequently authorized to administer such justice.

Instrumentalist. Frequently utilized JAG Corps and ARC Office of General Counsel to interpret orders in such way as to maximize possibility of independent action in ways subject thought ethically and militarily best. Demonstrated willingness to consider the other side's interest in negotiations, such as by declaiming credit.

Widely praised by subordinates as a brave, capable, and compassionate leader.

Sources:

Character named in honor of historian A.J.R. Russell-Wood, 1940-2010, a professor who I very much admired.

Movie still is a promotional capture from the upcoming film Laal Singh Chaddha.

Chandran's aphorisim about helping others is paraphrased from Benjamin Franklin's remarks on helping others.

The armored car silhouettes are from from the game Homeword: Deserts of Kharak.

The "homesteaders" picture is from Christian Schumann, titled "Rubber Ducks Convoy," on CGSociety.

Quote from: Commander Kleisel Mercator

A weapon from hell. For most of human history, thread was a guarantee of life. We used it to stitch torn flesh. The Greeks imagined fate as thread. To sever that thread was to end a life. But on Chiron, down is up. On Earth, the knife cut the thread. On Chiron, the thread is the knife. - Ken Burns's Planet: A History

As a practical matter, most of the weapons used by warring factions on Chiron were brought from Earth.

The shredder pistol, an old standby, was sourced from Unity's small armory. Stowaways preferred the "simple" assault rifle chambered in 5.56x45mm NATO or 7.62x39mm WARPAC standard, an invention of the previous century still unrivaled for its utility on the modern battlefield of 2071. Hundreds of assorted weapons systems made it aboard Unity or were produced from blueprints after Planetfall.

Chiron imposed severe limitations on the Terran warfighter. Soldiering in the higher gravity well called for exceptional stamina and a revolution in thinking about the capabilities of common weapons systems. Ranges for thrown and projectile weapons dropped precipitously. Trajectories flattened. Blast radii were relatively anemic. Shrapnel, and even smoke, were less effective. The stresses of recoil were worse for both weapon and shooter. Barrels burst with a frequency that daunted the unscientific. Wounds, too, were slower to heal: the low-oxygen environment discouraged blood vessel repair.

As effective combat ranges closed, some militias embraced melee weapons like the shock baton or the simple truncheon, which were issued alongside full-body, bullet-proof shields. Thus the solar-techs of the Sons of Ra were happy for the Spartans to "come and take it" when the two factions clashed.

Laser weapons were an obvious and attractive alternative to conventional firearms, but for more than a century, thermal blooming and the inefficiency of man-scale batteries placed a hard lower limit on weapon size. Like the bazooka or the machine gun, a laser gun was most effective when used as a squad support weapon, and remained infeasible for standard issue due to weight and complexity.

A probe team of the Chiron Guard drops into a Category 2 typhoon during the Vecchio Crisis. Despite miracle advances in trans-orbital flight, personal combat management systems, safety devices, and even weather control, these operators still carried projectile weapons more than two centuries old. This operation was a scrub. No record exists of their having reached Morgan Aquanautics, much less having threatened the Dauphin. All hands were presumed lost in the storm.

Filament weapons were an application of Gauss mechanics. The projectile itself was a sticky, high-tensile wire. This super-material, gossamer and shining but only 30 microns thick, traveled at the same speed as a bullet--about twice the speed of sound. Coated in natural adhesive synthesized from native Kholis sap, it formed a molecular bond with its target and proceeded to accumulate much the same way scrubpaste cakes on the bristles of a toothbrush when squeezed from the foil. The operator had only to depress a button or squeeze a charging lever for the alloy wire to take an electric charge hot enough to melt silksteel. This superheated wire coil would then begin a pendular motion that would cause it to become rigid and, in so doing, slice its target to ribbons. A great quantity of miniscule filament could be coiled in one spool and the requisite batter packs were about the same weight as a grenade, so ammunition was rarely a problem.

A Spartan Myrmidon with early-model filament projector in the ruins of Camp Winston, site of the Minutemens' greatest defeat.

Filament did have many drawbacks. It was a line-of-sight weapon only. Initial contact with the filament usually staggered targets but often failed to wound them, so an operator needed to confirm a hit and then trigger the charge, leaving them exposed to counter-fire longer than a conventional rifleman. The pendular force exerted down the wire became steadily worse until the projector threatened to tear itself from hand or mount. Fail-safes were therefore invented, but these severely restricted the length of time spent "on the spool" against any one target, and a slow-acting operator could "tag" the enemy many times without achieving a kill.

Sources:

Found the picture at UHD Wallpaper, but there was no attribution to the artist.

My inspiration for filament weapons was the webspinners used by the Eldar in the Warhammer 40K universe.

The power armor picture is from Fallout 4. This is a mod called Enclave PA, uploaded by user newermind43 to the Fallout 4 Nexus.

Quote from: Lady Deirdre Skye

For what sells Morgan but nostalgia? The orphaned child knows no sweeter wine. - Our Secret War

To those who expected to make their graceful exit before the coming of the flames, why not fiddle while Rome burned?

Ask Morganites great and small, and they would say the same: the purpose of life was its own enjoyment. The tragedy of Ozymandias was not that he had suffered obscurity in the hereafter, but that, as king, he had wasted on monument what he ought to have spent on entertainments.

Quote from: Factor Roshann Cobb

Morgan is chiefly remembered today for the empire he raised from nothing. But I don't believe he ever felt a pang of pride a day in his life. Oscar van de Graaf never lets us forget his turn at the political wheel. The Iron Governor took success at something he wasn't born to as validation of his worthiness for a dynastic inheritance. Morgan was different. His obsession was contentment. Pushing his way to the front of the line? Hoarding what he earned from everyone else? That was the apartheid system, not the real man. - Impressions

Quote from: Commissioner Pravin Lal

Humans will adapt to the most outrageous circumstances. The notoriously dystopian society of the Dreamers illustrates this assertion perfectly. Shared dreaming is a violence. The vault of a person's secrets sit open, and when the subject awakens, it is impossible to tell what was been taken in the night. All who partake are perpetrators, but also victims. Their adoption of facial coverings and costumes outside the Dreaming Dens is really no mystery: it restores the privacy that is essential for successful interpersonal relations. - A Social History of Planet

Source:

Both pieces of art by late futurist Syd Mead.

The control tower at Twin Eagles Aerodrome was returned to use only on the rare occasions that the New Two Thousand could not replenish the base by sea. To reduce the burden on his anemic budget, the governor sold flight operations as a private concession to one of the faction's stakeholders.

Heavy seismic activity caused by nearby Shaper terraforming led the new owner to favor temporary construction and exposed infrastructure that could be easily rebuilt after collapse. Critical assets like this pedestal were backstopped with structural isolation systems. These included foundations of free-moving rollers (essentially, shock absorber) and high-friction polymer ground mats to increase a structure's grip on harder ground.

Garrison militia favored drawing patrol duty in the exciting and dynamic environment of the tarmac even though it meant helping the skeleton ground crew to service incoming and outgoing traffic. Most aircraft operations were by New State VTOLs. It was not unusual for open-handed pilots to make gifts of rock chull and ice fish to their new allies. From M.Y. 79, for a period lasting more than two years, anti-grav dirigibles arrived weekly bearing the unfamiliar livery of a hooded lantern. Militia patrols doubled.

A dirigible of the Hooded Lantern in flight. These defenseless "heralds" made first contact with all survivors of the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri between M.Y. 65 and M.Y. 92. Joralamon Hardacre believed their occupants to be the remnant of the Chiron Probe's Special Analytics Lab.

By dressing a selfish decision in the language of information security, the concessionaire avoided encouragement to make a connection to the Twin Eagles network node. Every three days, flight controllers finished their shift by depositing a stack of data tapes with the base librarian. This slowed aircraft operations measurably since it limited the extent to which ground crews could anticipate the needs of unscheduled flights before they landed.

A shuttered signaling board was often dressed with fresh graffiti. Colonists of every faction were enthusiastic artists of the medium, determined that their survival should not go unmemorialized. The "BFR" tag was particular to the New Two Thousand. Her expectation of one day enjoying "Big F*cking Rights"--as expansive as freedom from indenture, as simple as having enough to eat--explained why a woman put in a hard day's work. It was a battle cry, too, to be thrown back at other factions that presumed to enjoy communal rights on Pilgrim land, such as access to water or minerals, or at the prisoners taken after successful campaigns of self-aggrandizement.

Quote from: Commissioner Pravin Lal

The Pilgrim loudly asserts his rights to everyone he meets. It is telling that these rights accrue solely to himself, never to anyone else. - A Social History of Planet

Sources:

Artist of the first picture unknown. Found in a collection curated by "Jeffrey" on Pinterest.

Dirigible found on Robert Jr. Geballa's Pinterest page. Apparently from the Golden Compass movie or series.

Since time immemorial, movement over the water has been faster and cheaper than movement by land. It has also been more efficient than movement by air for bulk cargo. For a long time, rivers and coastal waters were also the choicest highways on Planet.

Ambush by humans and mindworms was so frequent, many colonies placed strict prohibitions on overland travel. Even for the courageous, it was nothing but difficult going. Chiron, geologically younger than Earth, is riven by tall mountain ranges. Thick accumulations of nitrate waste above the topsoil and the toughness of fungal tubers complicate road-building. Chiron's strong gravity and thick cloud cover also made early air travel more difficult.

Unity carried hundreds of barges to support waterside settlement and resource extraction. Following the modular designs of other transportation technology, they were capable of being fitted for a wide range of missions, including hauling, dredging, fishing, bridging, mining, patrol, and exploration.

At lower left, a floating laboratory has been converted to an extended-family dwelling, probably by settlers engaged in aquaculture. Pilgrims who could not afford other homesteads saw surplus barges as a good investment. Many followed S.A.M.M. expeditions in hopes of attaching themselves to a new base and going into trade. The larger of the two craft is a tanker and has been fitted with fighting platforms, a modification popular with both the Spartan Federation and the Human Tribe. The irregular hullform suggests that it has been salvaged from a river bottom.

Barges were easily converted for combat. Bourse artillerist Tael Kaestral commanded a flotilla of bombardment vessels at the final reduction of Xerxion, earning a generous bonus from his Kellerite paymasters. To obtain desirable trajectories against the mighty fortress, Pete Landers marshaled his followers to temporarily divert the Slow Wind River onto an oxbow course.

Parasite craft like this Tribal guncraft were easy to make from cargo shunters and tow vehicles. They were also deadly to crew. Combat attracted mindworms. No amount of speed could make up for the limited maneuvering space in even a wide river like the Slowwind. Designs without full crew protection and ample close-in defenses were rapidly abandoned.

CRI hospital barges were a frequent sight on the contested Slowwind. They were often subject to search, but rarely to seizure. Contraband was dumped overboard unceremoniously.

Floating helipads extended the range of Spartan VTOLs until they could strike deep into Pilgrim territory. Many outlying Pilgrim communities purchased surplus anti-aircraft cannon from their faction militia. To miss weekend drill was an forgivable breach of the social compact.

Sources:

Barge sketch is the work of Sergey Musin.

Little gunboat is Jeff Zugale's work.

Original artist of hospital ship drawing is unknown. Found on Richard Morganstern's "Star Wars Vehicles" Pinterest.

Their strong protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, academic achievement alone was insufficient to secure virtually any leadership post in the University of Planet, especially one in the close orbit of the Academician himself. Prokhor Zakharov, never mistaken by any of his contemporaries or biographers as a keen judge of character, nonetheless maintained an obsessive control over the selection, and subsequent intellectual shaping, of those he entrusted with the business of his faction. Successful aspirants shared their leader's rigid belief in the correctness of technocratic government while refraining from "excessive moralizing" over the social consequences of the University's eclectic research program. They were also, as a rule, diffident, and mostly without natural constituencies even within their own faculties--traits that observers traced back to Zakharov's own deep-seated insecurities. It was a losing battle. In all but a few bases, student and faculty committees conjured an irresistible influence on virtually all decisions, big and small, so that while base directors could and did rule by fiat, it was guns to the end so far as enforcement was concerned.

Roland Steiner Dahlgren, forty-five years Zakharov's junior, and an American to boot, was ideal putty for his master's arthritic fingers. This byproduct of post-war America, far enough removed from "the most recent unpleasantness" with the Holnists that, despite two much older siblings sacrificed on the altar of Union Forever, he joined the Commissioned Corps of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in lieu of a traditional combat branch, knew only the rule-bound symmetry and machine-assisted comfort of the Corporate Age. To Dahlgren and much of his North American age cohort, religion was a personal ritual with precisely as much value, and importance, as thumb-sucking. Along with disinterest in education and skepticism toward the motives and efficacy of government and "experts," spiritual conviction was a potential signifier of Holnist sympathies, and incompatible with the civic patriotism felt throughout much of the victorious Northeast and Pacific Coast.

By prior agreement with his father, the adolescent Roland departed NOAA just shy of his twentieth year. He was next at M.I.T., then at the Superior School of Atmospherics at the University of Algiers, where his work focused on weather modification through cloud seeding. As an amateur pilot, Dahlgren often flew testcraft himself. His analyses and experiments were recognized by the International Meteorological Organization as a decisive factor in the freshwater scheme for the Chott el Djerid. He was in close communication with the French Union regarding their project to create a so-called Sahara Sea, but opted instead to join the ARC's operations to restore the Ogallala Aquifer. In 2070, he joined the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri as an American Reclamation Corporation (ARC) contractor. In this capacity, he was attached to Terraforming Operations but also subject to the oversight of Administrator Oscar van de Graaf.

Dahlgren survived Unity's crack-up because one of Zakharov's engineers wisely anticipated the need for a shuttle pilot. This, after Dahlgren was skipped over for retrieval by geological engineering officer Ikurō Kamatari, who regarded the American youngster's association with the ARC as morally problematic and so marked him for death by abandonment. (Pilgrims are not believed to have penetrated so far forward within the hull, explaining why so many of their compatriots there fell in with other leaders.)

Most of the Unity engineering crew surrounding Zakharov were from explicitly Communist or post-Communist societies where personal freedoms were sharply restricted. This reflected in part the scope of Zakharov's pre-mission connections: as a fixture in the Soviet scientific firmament, his association with American scientists was usually incidental. Rather than focus on this experiential divide with his new compatriots, Dahlgren embraced the theories and practice of central planning. A U.N. Psych Profile suggests that a combination of Old American family tradition, comfort with corporate structures, and a taste for macro-scale problem solving predisposed Dahlgren to feel at ease in an environment where certain metaphysical debates were deemed closed and unimportant.

Zakharov seems to have taken a shine to Dahlgren. In his diaries, the Academician set the American apart from his other subordinates. Dahlgren, he wrote, lacked the instinct or the appetite for power politics, and was an ideal student: properly humble, and seeming to grasp intuitively the importance of placing "factual inquiry" over "silly explorations of personal feeling." Both men took a dim view of the growing ascetics' movement within University dorms in which students buoyed by special protection of the law frequently rioted against provocations real and imagined, from disagreement about the University's studied neutrality during the Spartan extermination of the Gaians at Blissman's Bog to anger over weapons sales to Morgan's Dynamic Enterprise. Zakharov was especially incensed by the movement's assertion that, from inquiry inevitably came empathy, which was as good as a call to action. University Security was constantly alert for student protests, and the violence frequently took deadly turns in both directions. Student bombers killed many of Zakharov's original lieutenants, and the faction probe teams "disappeared" dozens of undergraduates each semester in retaliation. On Yuri's Night, an all-faction holiday, the streets of University bases were simply given over to miscreants and militiamen.

Installed at Vostok Station, or ста́нция Восто́к, on the edge of the Great Dune Sea, Dahlgren oversaw the controversial scheme to flood emptied Hive warrens on behalf of land-hungry Pilgrims. The broad chain of resulting oases became a flashpoint of contention between a vengeful Yang, an increasingly muscular van de Graaf, and badly-battered remnant caravans under J.T. Marsh. Dahlgren's influence was unpopular with Pilgrim Stakeholders. Endowed with a large budget, he dispensed much of it as pay local Pilgrim settlers to defend University assets in the vicinity of their homesteads, a tendency that undermined their willingness to answer their own faction's calls to arms. The pay was conditional, too, on receiving certain medical procedures--a prospect that thrilled the hardy but sickly Pilgrim farmers but smacked to some of their more philosophically active merchant-leaders of a combination of bribery and eugenics.

Vostok Base on the Gwolier Rim. Called "the Silver Horns" by local homesteaders and "the Clockwork Base" by its University inhabitants, whose lives were ruled by the strict schedules and harsh rationing of their famously fastidious young master. Most left for the University heartland after the mandatory three-month rotation, but some counted the predictability and transparency of Dahlgren's leadership a blessing by comparison with that of the more capricious committees that helped to govern larger bases.

University Security used acid weapons against local megafauna. The Academician was adamant that these were never used for any other purpose. Yet student organizations circulated hundreds of vid-captures of wounds consistent with the use of such weapons in domestic police actions.

A Tri-Baron mercenary searches for an optimum gun sighting after disembarking from a Skitterer High-Mobility Vehicle. University settlers on the Dune Sea border gained a new outlook toward mechanical design from their Pilgrim neighbors. Rather than send worn equipment to far-away University Base for refurbishment or reclamation, they built new, locally-informed models informed by the adaptive biology of local wildlife. Dahlgren made the pained decision to assume a modest Tri-Baron Company contract after resistance from van de Graaf badly reduced the number of Pilgrim auxiliaries available to help his small security force. The Tri-Barons, tough veterans of the interminable Southern African Front Line Wars with more than four decades in South African service, quickly reimposed a reasonably semblance of balance between the warring powers of the area.

Sources:

Dahlgren's image from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Vostok Base image by Carlos Cardona, "Sci-Fi Environment Study," hosted on Art Station.

Battle image from Dune 2000.

Sniper image provenance unknown. Found on Wallpaper Flare.

In her magisterial work on the subject, Flaring Stars, Dr. Anwulika Tyjani contrasts the two greatest flourishings of the Kellerite faith tradition, the North American and the Chinese.

Jean-Baptiste, a proud Midwesterner, always addressed himself to an American audience. He spiced his spoken homilies with references to the "beauty of that John Deere music" and urging followers to replace the baptismal rite with frolic in the Mississippi River. The sacred Sunday, he said, was made to be spent at the ball park. Working men had as much need for Budweiser as for Bibles. Kellerism in its original vintage was mournful. Its adherents were singing out the old certainties of factory jobs and national amity, vanished long before they were born, and rededicating themselves to local relief. Keller called for a renewal and re-centering of family and civic life as the final balk set against the crumbling gate of poverty and addiction. Children born in small towns, he said, should worry less about expanding their horizons in the dehumanizing anonymity of the city's overcrowded cities than enjoying the many fruits of family and community well into adulthood. The cities would not miss those them. If they did choose to go away, they must do so only with the intention of returning when they had acquired the skills that had made their departure necessary. Most important of all, he wanted his listeners to join him in turning their backs on the World Wide Web, commending them to select physical experiences before mental ones.

Quote from: Jean Baptiste Keller

Never, never make the mistake of equating the lazy and convenient camaraderie of distance and shared hobbies, however enjoyable, with the value of direct, personal relationships face-to-face. Your neighbor may dislike you, but he will still get you a cup or sugar or drive you to the hospital. - Sermon 402

To be sure, Keller was no doctrinaire libertarian. His summons was a reluctant one. Cutting against the prevailing political winds in his section of the country, he wholeheartedly embraced social safety nets and argued that the common man had nothing to fear from the expert--who was, after all, likely to be his own son or nephew returned to "put that fancy education to good use on all our behalves." This new thinking was for today, Keller insisted, not tomorrow. He looked forward to a time when the limitations of exigency could be lifted.

Wartime Kellerism, including the idea of the self-defense community, came later, after the founder had retreated from public life, so that the authenticity of the taped sermons that form of the bulk of the Prescriptive Teachings is still in doubt. The clenched-jaw, muscular Kellerism of the Annotated Broadcasts was in direct counterpoint to the rising succession crisis of the 2020s and 2030s. The author urged his small town listeners to take up arms for the protection of their own lives and property. Kellerites should not forsake government, but they would be fools to trust in its ability to shield them from the dangers now at hand. The rudiments of this new faith resembled Scouting tradition. Adherents should invest in practical skills such as sewing, canning, and carpentry. The able-bodied must learn to shoot. Towns were to disperse their libraries, while depositors should withdraw their cash. In Kellerite churches, prayer was almost completely replaced by instructional sessions in everything from first aid to car repair. As public order began to break down more completely, the final sermons released Kellerites indefinitely from the repayment of non-local debts. Departing from earlier warnings to keep family units small, the broadcasts now urged young people to marry so that the fortunes of their families might be intertwined, and bade them begin having children at once, "for each new mouth to feed shall have two strong hands and one strong back to recommend it."

Keller's bugle calls were naturally controversial. Politicians and industrialists blamed him for every strike, stoppage, and refusal to sell. Feminists pointed out that Keller's final position on families would disadvantage women and girls more than it would men. Liberals and technocrats felt that Kellerite communities, hermetic by design, could only ever become fertile ground for regressive thinking. The Evangelical Fire declared him a heretic over what they alleged was his casual and careless equivocation between what pleased God and what pleased Man. In 2045, at the Great Revival in Knoxville, TN, Keller was burned in effigy not once, but five times. John Bircher types, of which counted tens of millions of adherents in the mid twentieth century, scapegoated Keller as a Secret Socialist with designs to help eradicate liberty. In time, the United States Government, once indifferent to the Kellerite movement, began to treat it like any other secessionist movement. Exposed to the same propaganda as Holnists, many Federal troopers believed that Kellerites were cultists using the language of self-reliance as a cover for incest and polygamy.

Sometimes called National Kellerism, Chinese Kellerism was an offshoot of the original philosophy brought from Corpus Christi, TX by Jīnlóng Lin (林金龍), a petrochemical engineer who fled the Texas Secession. Lin's interests ran exclusively to Wartime Kellerism during a period of intensifying conflict between Taiwan and Communist China, no longer held at bay by the threat of American intervention. Lin's exegesis of the Annotated Broadcasts was carefully adjusted for its new audience. Keller's appeal for children to remain at home into adulthood was easily folded into familiar themes of filial obligation and ancestor veneration. The sacrificial aspects of the Kellerite lifestyle fit perfectly into a cultural context where the individual was subordinate to the group, especially the extended family and the nation. Lin did not translate any of Keller's commentary on alienation from modernity and dissatisfaction with certain movements in American Conservatism, although it is unclear whether this reflected a considered editorial perspective or simple ignorance of those materials. Lin was soon playing Keller's tapes for crowds of ten thousand or more most nights a week. Kellerites in Taoyuan initiated a scrapping drive in response to PLAN blockade. Throughout the country, those inspired by Lin's message mobilized disproportionately to help build beach defenses and campaign for hardline candidates who promised to preserve Taiwanese independence.

Like its American rootstock, Taiwanese Kellerism thrived on popular anxiety, but this time, the reaction of government officials was not hostility or confusion. Lieutenant General Zhxin "Johnny" Xie (契志欣) of the Republic of China Army believed this new religion, insular and service-minded, alternately alarmist and vigilant, was utterly congruent with the needs of civil defense. Xie used his position to advocate successfully for Taiwan's Kellerite communities to receive arms and training. He toured Kellerite communities throughout the island and hosted twice-weekly playbacks of Keller's wartime sermons for his officers, attendance at which was mandatory. In 2060, Kellerite officers overthrew the Taiwanese President and installed Xie in his place. Within months, the same troop would lead the vanguard that landed at Xinghua Bay on the Chinese mainland to stiffen the Golden Rebellion.

Shūfēn Liu (劉淑芬), born October 7, 2040, was the second daughter of a Taiwanese Air Force major on Xie's personal staff. At her father's direction, she gave up Taoist traditions in adolescence to adopt politically favored Kellerism, becoming a senior block warden while in secondary school. Liu followed a scholarship to Hong Kong College of Medicine where research opportunities placed her in connection with microbiologists on retainer to Struan's Pacific Trading Company. An outbreak of Red Flu derailed plans to return home in 2061, and she instead joined the Hong Kong Royal Ambulance Corps, assisting sheltered residents during the colony's strict quarantine. Three years later, Liu, a project lead at Struan's, was Assistant Director of Medical Services for a military internment camp at Shenzen. From 2064-67, she joined her father at the Golden Court, remaining until the elder Liu suffered a fatal stroke before studying infectious disease at the Universidade de São Paulo.

Chinese persuasion overcame American complaints regarding Liu's "questionable" Psych profile--a follower who had lived most of her life in the shadow of authority figures; a heretic to some; a Struan's affiliate who almost surely participated in unethical medical practices perpetrated against People's Liberation Army Prisoners of War, and possibly Hong Kong residents. Liu was posted to the Medical Division, expanded in 2040 with a tropical disease branch to compensate for the discovery that the Pathfinder Probe crew had carried Red Flu with them across the stars.

Pete Landers's stowaways, all sourced from the two Americas, tried and failed to locate known Kellerites among the broader Unity crew, few enough as there were, but Liu was an early prize for Aleigha Cohen. Liu assisted in the medical evaluation and triage of the ship's convict crew, and was well enough trusted that Cohen followed her recommendations on which of the prisoners to keep entombed. Since Cohen hadn't the mercenary protection of her once-and-future collaborator, it was all hands to the guns, and Liu instructed several of her crewmates on the finer points of shredder pistol marksmanship, learned from her father.

Once Planetside, Liu was spared the worst miseries of life in the Dreamer camp by Cohen's inspiration to found the faction's Mobile Ambulance Response Service, traveling surgery and apothecary. In this connection, she made frequent contact with Hivemen, sometimes as victim, sometimes as a tolerated merchant. On one such mission, Liu was detained with her team after it was found that Cobb had sold Yang irradiated rations. Rather than press for the return of his forfeited personnel and equipment, Cobb considered that they might be the price of penance.

Liu's professional attainments and character provided her the basic tools to climb high in the Human Hive. Medical staff were guaranteed the relatively favored status of Technicians, and though there was a long way to fall from grace, Liu received more consistent rations and services than when she had been amongst the disorder of her original faction. Yang quickly made the helpful Liu an Initiate, and she was one of the few invited to offer him regular counsel regarding the human management of his colonies. Liu's experiences with persons imprisoned by disease or war provided valuable insights for Yang as he walked the tightrope between visionary and villain to the starving hundreds he had led into the desert. Her knowledge of shared dreaming and long-standing inurrement to state-sanctioned experimentation led to Yang's entrusting her with the colony's nerve staples, which they used frequently to quell dissent.

Sources:

Lin is portrayed by Shu Qi in Shanghai Fortress.

Second imageis "Mars 21" by Maciej Rebisz.

Quote from: Archelaus Laskaris

Far from the warmth of a familiar sun, we returned in our primitive fear to the safety of the dark. - Delving

Mining engineer Archelaus Laskaris on the 4 Vesta asteroid. The Extravehicular Mobility Unit uses a neural interface, made possilbe by a datajack enhancement, to leave the hands free. The bulky clothing is crush-resistant. A medical pocket on the right upper arm complies with the minimum safety regulations expected by Comprehensive Transport. It contains a medicated wound dressing. A Personal Defense Weapon has been issued in case of labor unrest.

Archelaus Laskaris. Born 2030, New Smyrna, Empire of Greece. Father a fisherman, mother a police officer. Amateur mountaineer.

Graduated ETH Zurich with high honors, receiving PhD in geology. Completed M.S. in sub-surface mining at Curtin University, Western Australia. Commissioned a captain with the 737th Army Construction Command in Macedonia. Tasked with devising improvements to the 150-year-old Metaxis Line after Greek accession to the Balkan Triad.

Most of the rebuilt Metaxis Line was excavated with old West German machinery financed by Greece's NATO allies in hopes of reducing Greek bellicosity. It failed. Once the generals had their bribe, they invaded Turkey anyway, hoping to redeem the nearly two million Greek refugees who had fled earlier inflationary crises at home. After brief success, the Greek invasion collapsed.

Terraforming was a labor-intensive occupation: even if the Germans had been willing to sell them, Greece could not afforded automation suites. Standard crew for a digger was a brigade's worth of engineers, ore-handlers, riggers, and drivers.

Because of supply shortages caused by wartime embargo, miners were allowed filter changes only when their respirators seized. Most safety gear was homemade, such as this combination of old-style head protection, pilot's rebreather, and low-light goggles. Miners wrote their own code for programmable devices like the positive pressure systems that assisted respiration in particulate-heavy environments.

Eldest sibling killed at Defense of Trebizond, 2059. Dismissed with disgrace and imprisoned after participation in failed 2061 coup attempt against Megas Duox Acis Pappagallo. Spent time in solitary confinement.

Sold to Morgan Industries sometime before 2065. Received involuntary datajack surgery. Per Morgan Mindfield analysis, imprisonment, and possibly surgery, coincided with, and probably triggered, a significant change in subject's personality. Gaolers observed total abandonment of political activity. Subject instead refocused on purely occupational interests. Elevated to Trustee status within one year and dispatched as project supervisor to asteroid 4 Vesta. Operations Section Chief during successful rescue of personnel and equipment during major collapse of Vesta's Proxide Drift, averting compliance crisis.

The M.S. Solar Commander, a utility tug and survey ship purpose-built for work in the Trojan fields. One of few such vessels capable of fine manipulation, making her indispensable during industrial calamities. She was also equipped to serve as a long-term lifeboat in the event that a space object was rendered uninhabitable, such as by gas venting.

Hand-picked by CEO Nwabudike Morgan to be smuggled aboard Unity as seed agent, possibly for an independent colony. Escaped custody of SafeHaven escort during Planetfall. Discovered, wounded, in Hangar Bay Hose Room by medics answering to Political Officer Sheng-ji Yang.

Set free by Yang, Laskaris pledged his loyalty and was first to recommend that the survivors dig beneath the sands rather than attempt a dangerous overland trek. This daring led to discovery of an extensive underground aquifer, the waters of which did not reach the surface for thousands of kilometers in all directions.

To resurrect the Metaxis Line, Greece contracted with the Superstition Engine Works of Apache Junction, AZ to build automated mining stations of Laskaris's own design. They were paid for with the plunder of Istanbul, briefly held by the Greeks during 2057-58 and ransacked when they were forced out by a Turkish counterstroke. Two of these stations were broken down into Supply Pods reprogrammed by Yang to follow his departing Landing Pods.

Sources:

Picture of Laskaris is "Trooper" by Joakim Ericsson on ArtStation.

Picture of Miner is the work of Sebastien Hue.

Solar Commander is "space miner," the work of Joseph Kim on ArtStation.

The automated mining station is "Mining factory," a 3D design found on Sketchfab and credited to 3DRT.com.

A Blue Line tram hub at Paradise Swarming. Due to overcrowding, most workers avoided the hubs and walked the tunnels instead.

Hive engineers built with defense, not comfort, in mind. Laskaris conceived of the designs for Worker's Nest during lucid dreaming, resulting in a nonsensical layout resistant to the predictive mapping of enemy Probe Teams. Hive bases were cross-stitched with secondary communication tunnels and random switchbacks to help defenders mass quickly while confusing the attackers. "The Long Road Home," one of the first pop hits recorded on Chiron, made light of the punishing travel to and from daily workstations--up ladders, at times bent double, or even in chest-high water. The song had no accepted length or lyrics, just a repeating melody: the idea was that one sang until they arrived back at their quarters.

Segments of each base were only accessible single-file; an initial allotment of large or heavy equipment was sunk with the biggest chambers. For decades afterward, those chambers relied on the old technology and performed other tasks by hand. One could not travel more than four hundred paces without running across a weapons locker. Less before passing a camera or motion sensor. Some tunnels were so long, travelers were issued a water cube mid-way; others, so dark that they checked out portable torches at one end and returned them at the other.

Ten meters below the sand, all distance communication traveled by wire mounted in overhead bundles. Hivers actually used simple copper taps to join the "Chatter," each work detail developing its own argot. Their language was a wild combination of English, Chinese, Indonesian, Morse code, and Digislang. Hive Security could identify interlopers, whether errant drones or the infiltrators of other factions, by their lack of uniformity. They more often assisted the lost than detained the suspected.

Hivers expressed themselves with stickers, slapping them on helmets, knee pads, and public surfaces provided for the very purpose. Yang encouraged workers to proudly place their stamp somewhere in all the tunnels they visited, a testament, he said, to the fullness of their work. Also a convenient way to mark whether anyone was off-station. Hivers filed their stickers with Librarians to create a kind of signature that even the nerve-stapled could recognize and reproduce. Each worker of record was guaranteed exclusive use of that image. They received reels of stickers in regular installments to ensure that they used them often.

Source:

Image appears to be from the videgame Cyberpunk 2077. Found on Pinterest.

Librarian Ram Jaisi Presents Images of Early Chiron

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La Ringa Voto, an electrified rail-runner, was the first non-military transportation link between the territories of different factions. In M.Y. 12, it joined Morgan Industries with University Base. Excited students mobbed the Morganite pachinko halls and gorged themselves on unfamiliar rations. Chemist Kahar Tokhtakhunov traded kasha for curry, attempted his first cigar, and logged his first debt with a local bank after depleting all his courtesy credits. On the other end of the line, eager merchants sourced the latest in chemotherapies and purchased jumpsuits with wrist contacts that changed color according to the wearer's vitals.

Quote from: Architect Sardul Singh

Beneath the starry sky, thoughts of the self are rendered petty. Even hard men think it impossible to train their eyes elsewhere than the heavens. - Life in a Circle

There were many ways to reduce dissent. In Sparta, helots were worked to exhaustion: tired workers were less able to flee. Both Hive and Ascendancy attempted to breed docility. Notoriously anti-social Prokhor Zakharov swung like a pendulum between knock-out gas and gifting unhappy colleges robot domestics, that they might receive that most precious gift of time. At the Panopticon and in Bentham's Blockhouse, they simply planted more trees.

To speed expansion, Hive tunnels were kept as narrow as possible. Side-loading trams were common. In case of emergency, quick-deploying polyurethane bladders in vectran sheaths inflated to form airtight seals against flood and loss of atmosphere. The exterior surface of the bladders were studded with tab releases so that workers could use to draw top-side air, which they were to mix with oxygen from bottles stored beneath the tram seats. In M.Y. 32, 141 persons were put to death in the Hive after 781 workers perished in a carbon dioxide incursion. A grand total of twelve bottles were recovered by forensic teams, none of them filled.

Harvest time in the Neyanza Valley. At Pentofaro, Shaper Base Operations specialists oversee the arrival of a VTOL bulk carrier as the first thunderheads of a monsoon rain arrive. In the distance, lower-lying fields have already flooded, an important measure of defense against hungry raiders. Shaper bases were some of the earliest to plant Terran crops on a large scale, adding familiar fresh foods to the faction's diet. This went a long way toward improving not only morale, but health, although they suffered inordinately from psychic attacks. Other factions, usually eating hybrid crops, complained of digestive issues even after their biologists assured them the new rations were safe to consume.

With help from the Bourse, Togra Labs materials specialists, and the Chiron Foundries of King Priam Mining-Planetside, Pilgrim S.A.M.M.s reached colossal proportions.

As they laid waste to the area around, S.A.M.M. crews spent months-long tours of duty fully "buttoned up" inside their craft. Crew cabins were well-appointed, featuring all the comforts, and decoration, of terrestrial homes left behind--water plumbing, pop culture memorabilia, electric ranges, and refrigeration. It was a better existence, many agreed, than back at base, where few had hard shelter or direct access to most conveniences.

Sources:

Train picture found in Pinterest. Original source unknown.

Cherryblossom arboretum picture by [rul=https://jasonclarke.xyz/projects/mqyakv]Jason Clarke[/url].

Tram and harvest stills are from the old Horizons attraction at EPCOT Center in Walt Disney World. On life-saving bladders, see this Popular Mechanics article.

S.A.M.M. picture is "Alien Miner" by Carmen Chow.

S.A.M.M. interior pictures are captures of the work of modeler Chris Shaylor's toy ship, "Gutbucket."

Secret Project: The Hellstack

Quote from: Academician Prokhor Zakharov

Let the Witch commune with her trees. And I shall converse instead with the rocks. - A Geological Survey of Planet

They called it the Hellstack. At Iblis Shoxlari (Uzbek for devil's horns) in M.Y. 319, the University of Planet built a single massive winding house from which to run a 14,000km spool of nano-filament wire straight down. The filament could be so excited with the electric output of local thorium-salt reactors, it would cut through nickle-iron almost as easily as through air.

At a final depth of 11,700km, Chiron's core temperature sat somewhere just shy of 8,000°C. Work at the Hellstack continued for a half-century. When the pendulum motion of the filament slowed, indicating contact with a new and potentially uncatalogued material, technicians fired nano-scale slugs of microscopic robots down the hollow wire at nine times the speed of sound. Some were probes that, over the course of years, would work their way back up the to the surface so that their contents could be subjected to spectral analysis. Others were mass converters programmed to atomize whatever stood in the way of progress.

University Librarians were characteristically coy about their findings. Zakharov shared only a fraction of his survey results with the Planetary Council, under-reporting the miners' progress by margins of up to 1,000km. They were releasing mostly water, he told the assembled faction leaders, lost as steam before it could be extracted for some loftier purpose.

A Tomorrow Institute probe team released a tranche of the project's controlled files to the Planetary Networks in M.Y. 340. The results triggered a panic. Zakharov's biologists were actually in possession of fossil records indicating that Chiron experienced mass extinctions as often as every two centuries, driven by rampant xenofungal blooms. They were also piping water, rare earths, and dozens of gases including helium, hydrogen, and nitrogen, from the borehole for agricultural, industrial, and military applications. Microbial life recovered from the deep mantle provided the basis for an organic sheath that so efficiently scattered adversaries' lasers, the impact point was cool to the touch even after prolonged contact.

Under great secrecy, Chief Scientist Esau Sutcliffe Zo'arc replaced the original spool of wire in M.Y. 402, ostensibly to address loss of conductivity caused by heat corrosion and simple abrasion. Actually, the new thread was a thermal conduction medium that raced the intense heat of the core to the surface of the planet. That same year, the small polar icecaps went into sudden and full retreat. Massive typhoons roared out of the oceans onto land, devastating overpopulated Shamash. Demonboils drowned under meters of water. The Nautilus Pirates floated their way within a fortnight's hike of the high Pinnacle. This was the University's opening salvo against what the senior faculty had come to believe was the imminent threat of Planetary Consciousness.

A native of the underwater city of Essex-9, Esau Zo'arc worked the submerged diamond fields off South West Africa, staying on after Namib independence. Recruited by J.T. Marsh, he declined a life on the move to retreat to Prokhor Zakharov's great ivory towers. An enthusiastic consumer of anti-aging treatments, he was still outwardly youthful in appearance four hundred years after Planetfall. Under protocols agreed by the Planetary Council, he has been careful to preserve the original markings on his vintage American high-heat encounter suit despite replacement of the headgear with a whole-horizon interface.

Sources:

Hellstack picture is "Mining Colony" by PulpoGlow on DeviantArt.

Credit to the Let's Talk Science webpage for giving me a cursory understanding of boreholes. ZME Science and the Smithsonian Magazine helped with the rest.

Picture of Zo'arc is the work of KindaGoodPainter on Reddit.

Expand Tech: Hachimoji DNA

Hive bases used artificial lights to simulate a day/night cycle for people and to cause photosynthesis in plants. The proper adjustment and distribution of these lights occupied an entire division within Hive Base Operations.

Quote from: Crafter Querelon MacCortez

They had discovered two new nucleobases, actually. According to the Chairman, they used these new bases primarily to create more effective chemotherapies. Of course, that application was useless to us. But we saw they had increased length and complexity of instructions that could be chemically communicated to human cells. We were using semaphore; they had invented the telegraph. - Climbing the Spiral to Heaven

DNA can be thought of as a packet of instructions for the production of amino acids. The twenty acids essential to human life combine as proteins to assist in tasks such as digestion of food, tissue growth and repair, regulation of brain function, production of sugars, and immune system response. Beginning in the late 1980s, the global scientific community sought methods to increase the amount of information that could be stored and communicated by DNA. The earliest breakthroughs involved creation of unnatural base pairs (UBP), or artificial nucleobases. One resulting set was known as the Hachimoji DNA, meaning "eight letters DNA," which doubled the amount of possible base pairs. Scientists first proved that unmodified cells would reproduce the UPB, then sought to encode the new pairs to produce additional amino acids.

UBP was the basis for the body to itself produce chemicals and trigger cell behaviors that previously had been provided only through invasive procedures. When replacing traditional external medications, UBP organelles were superior by far since they could titrate release in ways that were less disruptive for the liver, kidneys, and stomach.

UBP played a crucial role in the viability of lab-grown organs, high-risk transplant acceptance, and chronic disease management. Most UBP was introduced in medical settings to counteract organ deficiencies or combat degenerative disease. In gestational and Type 2 diabetics, for example, UBP was used to stimulate insulin production. Sufferers of viral infection and cancer received UBP treatments to keep their white blood cell count up. But a growing minority of UBP fell into a more liminal realm. The wealthy wanted UBP to combat the effects of aging. Soldiers were given UBP to increase their production of adrenaline and endorphins.

When Unity left the Sol System, just over one in ten humans was thought by the United Nations to possess UBP in their genome. (Statistics were unreliable; most nations did not attempt genetic sequencing, and all were loathe to share detailed data.) Artificial DNA was highly controversial. Some Conclavists objected to use of UBP even for medically necessary interventions, holding that it constituted sacrilegious editing of Grand Design. Others urged that it be restricted only to instances where life was at stake. Among peoples estranged from the scientific community, use of UBP therapy fell under the broad scope of "genetic tampering," and there was an outsized fear that the species would destroy itself by unleashing man-made plagues. Recipients of UBP were often targeted even when the choice had not been their own. Motivated by both religious fundamentalism and the power-fantasies of conspiracism, Holnists published lists of UBP patients online, leading to numerous assassinations. Developing nations were especially skeptical of early U.N. proposals to recruit from among populations including UBP recipients, which they correctly reasoned would bias the passenger manifest against their people.

The U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri did not ban recruits with UBP, but it did decline numerous proposals from Tamineh Pahlavi, Oscar van de Graaf, Prokhor Zakharov, and others to use it to provide an additional oxygen factor or increase the amount of baseline antibodies for Red Plague. The argument over UBP began anew and then flamed even hotter after Planetfall when enterprise scientists took Chironian organisms and attempted to combine their genetic material with Terran organisms, an act that was grounds for exile among the Lord's Believers.

The University of Planet leaned heavily on UBP as a complement to chemotherapy regimes. The Ascendancy exploited the technology to encourage muscle growth and increase oxygen factors in the blood of the Vat-Born. A desperate Aleigha Cohen likewise experimented with UBP to help filter toxins from the blood as she battled Somnacin addiction. Both Yang and Pahlavi attempted to use UBP to equip certain genetic paragons with superior faculties they wanted passed on to subsequent generations.

During the Two Visits at Rosalind's Spire, the Hive Chairman revealed extensive knowledge of hybrid UBP. The Proxl Rot Plague of M.Y. 32, it turned out, had been a cruel experiment. The disease manifested in Terran crops as inedible spores--harmless to humans if ingested, but deadly to its leafy hosts. Research product shared by Chairman Yang with the Ascendancy's biologists revealed that Hive nutrient pools had been contaminated with the intention of determining whether any of the population had developed the ability to obtain nourishment from native flora.

Pahlavi, hardly squeamish when it came to ethically questionable behaviors, was aghast. Even if the experiment had been successful, it was statistically improbable that the hybrid foodstuffs would have been tolerated by more than a small fraction of the inhabitants of the target bases. Why had Yang settled on starving his own people? Had he no reliable source of prisoners? Yang calmly clarified that the experiments were carried out in locations where defense against invaders was already failing. The people could not have been saved, he said. Better that they should furnish the colony with information that would create tomorrow's advantage. Meanwhile, the incoming Pilgrims would find no ready source of labor, nor any food with which to continue prosecuting a war in the wastes.

Sources:

Picture, called "Farming Unit" and credited to "G G" in the United Kingdom is apparently from user "shards" on the CGSociety forums. I found it on Pinterest.

I learned more about amino acids from the Cleveland Clinic.

On the "genetic alphabet," see D. Malyshev, at al., "A Semo-Synthetic Organism with an Expanded Genetic Alphabet."

The nearest Shaper base to Ascendancy territory was a mere 52 kilometers from Rosalind's Spire. Named Coldheart in an act of self-rebuke, it existed to capture, process, and control the flow of the Hyas's hyperactive ice volcanoes. During his stay as Pahlavi's guest, Yang joined her, in disguise, for a conference with the Shaper Custodian, Demis Moradi. It was at Coldheart that Yang learned that the Dune Sea was no natural marvel.

Demis Moradi, one of the first children of independent Kurdistan, watched the promise of independence spoil. Drought led his proud father to liquor, and radiation caused young Demis to spend the better half of his childhood in clean wards where he took Interlink correspondence courses and won election as a member of his country's parliament--by then, a duty almost free for the taking. Haunted by the memories of acid rain and his own frailty, Moradi volunteered (while still a seated MP) as a "picker"--one of the hundreds of thousands of liquidators supported by the international community to conduct post-atomic clean-up after the Six Minute War. Thereafter, legislating seemed beyond him. When invited to speak in session, he recited poetry grieving the loss of the Kurdish patrimony. Unsure of how else to put him to good use, the Kurdish government declared him Poet Laureate and a Person Significant to Cultural Perpetuation. Shaper mountaineers found Moradi in a crashed Colony Pod. Coordinator Nagao assigned him to Coldheart as a Radiation Control Technician responsible for the settlement's fusion-powered ice crawlers. When most of the base administration died in an ice blow, the survivors voted Moradi their leader. After suffering repeated Ascendancy slave raids, Moradi signaled his willingness to negotiate: he would forbear from drowning Rosalind's Spire in nine feet of ice slurry if hostilities ceased. Trade soon developed instead.

To offset the intense heat they generated, the Ascendancy exposed its incubation cylinders to the sub-zero temperatures of the high mountain passes. The dozen batches at Rosalind's were served by an electric tramway that doubled as convenient, albeit uncomfortable, transportation for those who wished to avoid more familiar paths.

At the end of the electric tramway, Hive Technical Sergeant Ikama Rufio gawked at what he first took for an automated mining complex. The bemused Pahlavi explained that he was actually looking at "the Mighty Mac," a city-sized supercomputer operated by the survivors of the mission's Nuclear Computing Laboratory. She was not the first to realize that the Hyas Range was an ideal heat sink. Alas, she had no communications frequency for Dr. Johann Anhalt. But she would part with another pallet of rations along with some grapnel guns and personal trolleys if the Hivemen would agree to make introductions on her behalf.

Sources:

Coldheart is Luc Fontenoy's "Mountain."

Demis Moradi is Egyptian actor Youssef El Sherif.

Third picture is Aran Quillinan's "Halo Environment."

Fourth picture is nikolayhranov's "Environmental - SciFi Mountains."

The personal trolley is a device used in Battlefield 2042 to ride ziplines and guy wires.

Quote from: Helpmate Fulbert Rong

If it's an oracle you wish, go consult the punch cards. - Admonishment to wayward parishoners

Yang was aghast at the society established under Dr. Johann Anhaldt and the beleaguered remainder of the Nuclear Computing Laboratory. He was not alone.

Nobody could gainsay the trauma of the Laboratory's experience. Misperformance of hibernation protocols claimed an abnormally high number of the computer scientists before ever Unity fired its engines. So many had strangled to death, orders were given to divert subsequent colonists to supernumerary spaces for sleep induction rather than expose them to the uncollected detritus of a half-hundred unsuccessful resuscitation efforts still strewn across the deck grates.

There, still struggling to make sense of the rows of darkened cryobeds, a thousand more had died--were executed, in fact. The killers were Kellerites, and they fired without bothering to ask the names of their victims. As if to inflict an ironic vengeance, the survivors did precisely what the cultists feared: they brought thinking machines down to the new world and then did precisely as they were instructed.

A Kellerite raises a sonic projector in anger. Though made to disperse targets rather than kill them, it would do just that at close quarters.

How can it be, Yang asked, that there is such obedience without compulsion?

In an uncharacteristically intimate letter to explorer Vinchenson Parke, perhaps judged a safe outlet for confession because he was far beyond the influence of the internecine skirmishing that so fascinated her synod, Sister Miriam Godwinson wrote that she had come to describe the emotion she'd felt in Anhaldt's presence as fear.

Quote from: Sister Miriam Godwinson

Firmly bent to one task at the top of the hour, they are equally as happy to be turned toward another pursuit at the bottom, never reflecting on which was the more valuable work. And they have yet to perfect the algorithms, so the work changes constantly. Their bases resemble the aftermath of a groundhog invasion: a thousand starts, but nothing completed.

Children of the Atom perform manual switching operations for a base supercomputer. Anhaldt's people used powerful mneumonic techniques to enable switchers to remember and repeat up to the last hundred motions. This allowed them to implement minor "roll backs" whenever one of the senior data scientists detected potential faults in the supercomputer's logic. Of course, these were difficult to diagnose: what was the difference between an artificial mind that could think beyond the capacity of a human, and simple inanity?

Sources:

First picture from the Netflix movie "Blasted."

Second picture from the movie "Sleep Dealer."

Quote from: Genesis 4:16

And Cain went out from the presence of The LORD, and dwelt in the Land of Nod, east of Eden, and though beloved by The LORD, he was an exile for all time, and all his people with him. - The Conclave Bible, Datalinks

Iqbald Tariv, called "Baba Igbald" by friend and foe alike, was a power unto himself in the Cashton Sprawl south of Adam's Agony.

He was one of the "Undetected," a child conceived so close to the time of final departure that neither his mother nor ship's medical staff were aware of her pregnancy. She survived the Catastrophe of Arrival, though as an unvested laborer among The New Two Thousand. On her second day Planetside, she was judged to have an unwanted skill set, assessed a debt of ¤5,000,000, and remanded to servitude.

Ssihash Tariv, an atmospheric chemist with Roscosmos who had spent a quarter of her life in high Venusian orbit, could do little of immediate value in a frontier economy with only rudimentary sensing technology and no immediate need for deep climatology. Acute calcium deficiency and compounding cardiovascular damage caused by years in zero- and micro-gravity left the twenty-six-year-old non-ambulatory on Chiron. For these reasons, despite her compounding obligation to the faction that continued to clothe and feed her, she could not be auctioned. On the orders of Governor Oscar van de Graaf, Base Operations accepted the young woman for service as a safety specialist while faction envoys added her name to a list of personnel judged "saleable" to other factions. She spent her days preparing meteorological reports from the observation dome of a Colony Pod.

The infant Igbald was taken at the moment of birth and placed in the household of Stakeholder Siran Agenid, a Greco-Hungarian power systems engineer. Before contracting with van de Graaf, Agenid, an escapee from behind the Iron Curtain, had worked for Franco-Belgian firm Telegisse-Barrette designing the battery back-ups for deep sea laboratories.

With no intention of settling into domestic life, the unmarried Siran left Igbald and other such unfortunates in the care of a tutor, Canában Rå, best known for having discovered five additional plays of William Shakespeare in the sub-basement of Oxford's Radcliffe Camera in 2012. Rå, a naturalized British citizen, had been the Royal Household's nomination to the Unity Project at its outset. Despite rigorous screening that suggested reasonable safety margins despite his age, complications of very long cold sleep induced a stroke, and Rå was paralyzed on his left side. (It is rumored that van de Graaf disciplined the pathfinders who discovered Rå among the passengers of a surfaced Hab Pod and chose to release him rather than disconnect his battery back-up.) Judged largely useless like Ssihash Tariv, his purpose among the New Two Thousand was merely to ensure that orphaned Drones did not die by misadventure before they reached profitable adulthood.

Young Igbald Tariv responds with characteristic rectitude as he receives a rare admonishment from Canában Rå, probably over a missed assignment. An Agenid household Subduer stands by in case Tariv or another pupil becomes unruly during correction.

The House of Agenid held fast to the Czerkban School of child development. The correction baton, a low-grade psi-whip, was used to inflict positive punishment for even minor infractions such as scoffing or idleness. Siran urged that educators should use it intermittently, even on the well-behaved--a reminder of his own conviction that life was mostly the unmerited experience of pain stimuli. Yet whenever possible, Rå spared the rod, and so spoiled the child. Under his careful intervention, Iqbald grew into a tall, serious young man with a pronounced wild streak and a hawkish attitude toward preemptive self-defense. Resentment boiled his blood hot, and he struck dead another Drone over a pilfered bowl of porridge at age sixteen, landing a single, fatal blow to the temple. Siran fined Igbald to replace the value of the dead boy's future work, but was otherwise impressed.

Quote from: Governor Oscar van de Graaf

I like a certain rambunctiousness in the Drones. If they aren't healthy enough to plot escape, they're probably not healthy enough to work very hard. - Rebuke to Stakeholders

Pilgrims of every social rank enjoyed hoverbike racing. These high-speed, no-rules fracas were open only to expendable Drones. Only leading citizens were permitted the vice of gambling, and they wagered huge sums on their stables. Drones of the House of Agenid received bounties of ¤10,000 for every equal or subordinate of a rival House they bested in the street, and ¤1,000,000 for every racetrack win. By custom, to kill the rider of another House was instant fulfillment of the Terms of Indenture.

By eighteen, Igbald regularly stole Agenid hoverbikes for long peregrinations in the Dune Sea. There, he saw his first Hive base, suffering potshots from their inexpert sentries. On another jaunt, he joined a rally as an outrider to champion House Sprinter Shadrach LeFevre, coming in fourteenth place overall but protecting his principal from being unseated for three circuits. Siran arranged a barbecue in his honor.

In M.Y. 26, Igbald slashed dead the two Subduers posted outside the workers' barracks and fled the Agenid homestead with his sweetheart, another Drone named Sokkanon, and many followers in his own age cohort.

The renegades had previously consulted the faction Network to triangulate the position of a recently-fallen Supply Pod. Taking their masters' hoverbikes, they beat both the understaffed Pilgrim militia and Agenid family guards to the crash site, loaded onto crawlers everything found inside the hull, and set out cross country. Behind them, a paid Hunter scout team led pursuers astray.

Within weeks, Igbald Tariv was leader of a functioning outpost complete with defensive berm, water, shelter, and intermittent generator power. To round out a diet of unsatisfying E-Packs, they inflated greenhouse tents where they raised Terran crops and roasted Rodgier's Rats, a pest released onto Chiron from infested grain bins carried aboard Unity. Gormands among them added juvenile subrid to the menu.

It was, in many ways, a simple life, and by some standards, idyllic. Survival hoods were unnecessary in the oxygen-rich Sprawl. There were also few enough of Tariv's people that the contents of their single Supply Pod might as well have been a treasure hoard. The pod was an over-pack job. From it, the refugees rolled a fleet of construction vehicles and prime movers, pop-up wind traps, long-falling parachute flares, spherical flares that could be rolled ahead of the wary, air hatchets, crank antenna, and a racked arsenal.

Tariv automated as much as possible. His people mostly limited themselves to piloting and riding herd while their self-guided devices performed most inconvenient tasks. The 'Formers set up automated mines, dammed rivers to create reservoirs, and erected leaching tents to draw carbon dioxide from decomposing foliage, which they processed into liquid fuel. In less than a year, they turned the trees, which had an interconnected root system, into a natural aqueduct and water filtration system by screwing in a few positive-pressure taps. Tariv even released bees, heedless of the ecological risk. They thrived.

Their original settlement had a ramshackle and uneven personality. A crude wooden waterwheel provided cooling for an industrial grade 3D printer. Wooden parapets and ramps linked corrugated steel and formacrete structures. Live power cables doubled as clothes lines. Rather than use camp stoves or electric furnaces, Tarsiv and his people cooked over open flame.

A few of the runaways learned survival out of interest, fishing the streams for sylph-eel and stripping their scales to make a kind of leather for patching their garments, or crushing dendrel leaf for a powerful light-absorbing dye. In the evenings, Tariv organized stage performances. After many bowls of munga beer, brewed from fungal germ, he might signal for the hallucinating audience to interrogate the players, who would break the Fourth Wall to explain their motivations. The Hunters of Chiron, who valued Tariv's settlement as a permanent break on Pilgrim expansion, recognized his rights in the Cashton and purchased the hardwoods felled by his offspring.

Tariv's people called him father, Baba, and he treated them as he thought he ought to have been treated--as he imagined his mother would have treated him. They fed their hungry, nursed their sick, and, fatted on the riches of their original efforts, cared nothing for personal wealth.

Quote from: Igbald Tariv

Dignity is the best bandage, and a swinging fist solves more problems than it creates. - Your Prodigal Son

Tariv's outpost traded with the Hunters of Chiron on liberal terms, providing larger quantities of fresh water than they could purify themselves and the protection of a firm stockade. Weapons were in constant demand, as was intelligence.

Tariv and Sokkanon had eighteen children who survived to adulthood. The other escapees were similarly prodigious. By the dawn of the third decade of the colony's independence, in M.Y. 55, Tariv was ready to seek out Ssihash at Adam's Agony. After a week of slipshod drill, the assault force set out.

The campaign of putative liberation ended in total disaster for Igbald and his tiny force. Thanks to watchful patrollers, the alarm was raised before they could cross the fields, and the parapets manned by militia. Well-aimed fire from the settlement blockhouse did for most of the attackers even before they dismounted to find cover and van de Graaf ordered his militia to fire strangle gas. Still at the head of fewer than one in six of his original force, Igbald plunged back into the forest.

After spooning the bitter soup of a hundred small defeats, the hard core of the Pilgrim Militia began to learn its business. Chasers like this one made contact with Tariv's raiders long before they left the familiar safety of the Sprawl.

In time, Baba Igbald accepted his place as an irritant on an elephant's flank. The colony at Cashton became a checkpoint for runaways, absorbing them into its own population or aiding them to continue further south. The Hunters stayed in regular contact. Eventually, Hivemen appeared, as did Gaians, the first to discuss their mutual enemy and the latter to learn from their fellow forest-dwellers.

Sources:

Adult Igbald Tariv is Werner Herzog as The Client in Disney's Star Wars sequel series The Mandalorian.

Teenage Igbald Tariv is Alec Newman from the Dune miniseries (2000).

Picture of the racer is "Hoverbike" by Mnoloconic. Available on the website Mercenary Garage.

Found the outpost picture on Pinterest from Aaron H. It appears to be credited to Fantasy Flight Games, but more specifics than they, I do not have.

Gun trading picture also found on Pinterest, here.

Strangle-gas is a weapon from the steampunk fantasy setting Iron Kingdoms.

Chaser is "Tracker on Her Hoverbike" by Brian Matyas.

Quote from: Chairman Sheng-ji Yang

Comparison is the source of all misery. A drone counts himself a king to dine on thin gruel so long as he feels certain that his companions have only water. - The Book of Twenty-Six Princes

Nearing the bicentennial of human settlement on Chiron, Librarian Sawenna Omruds thought to collect entertainment clippings from each of the factions major. The results of her survey, published in a series of widely-read updates on the Peacekeeping Forces' Datalinks, caused hysterical laughter in White Rabbit's Refuge, gnashing of teeth in New Jerusalem, and hours of work for tabulators in The Core. Prisoners at The Core rioted after learning what they were missing. Moranites demanded new entertainment packages for their money. Censors yanked the cables in Atlantis.

Damsels frequently questioned whether one-time merchant sailor Arvn Gym had rocks for brains, but poor test scores never seemed to stop him from saving the day.

Though they pretended to enjoy the educational program piped free into their kitchen terminals, University tastes in entertainment were strictly low-brow. Callow undergraduate and mad scientist alike preferred to unwind with a bit of slapstick. They would go as far as serialized adventure in the style of Commando Cody or Space Patrol--a romanticized rendering of what could be done with the wondrous tools they created by people far more worldy than they--but anything more serious struggled to gain an audience. Walt Disney animation also took hold in Zakharov's territories. This form of escapism showed on long loops in the faction's crowded anti-radiation clinics.

Gaia's Stepdaughters gravitated toward overwrought telenovelas, the heroes and heroines of which were sure to be hobbled by debt and perpetually unlucky in romance. CEO Nwabudike Morgan naturally used this information to taunt the Lady Skye as an unstable leader, though more incisive takes wondered at the cynical throughline: the futility of trying to hold on tight to that which one loved.

Hive Drones craved sport, the bloodier the better. Commentators for Chironian rules football found their way into public service audio. The same voice shouting, "Foul!" with unrestrained enthusiasm also reminded one to don their eye protection if venturing to the surface levels. Curiously, another popular programme followed the Kafkaesque journeys of Itilan Gann, a relentlessly cheerful Drone who repeatedly failed his merit exams for lack of study and arrived at his workstation each morning to find bizarre instructions dispatching him to distant service tunnels. Never would he finish his journey: at the bottom of the half-hour time slot, an urgent cable summons always saw him recalled, though not before he'd finished drawing the double ration for overtime work. The show consisted of hours of feed from Gann's point of view. Enthusiasts searched with relish for "his" stickers.

Lavatory attendant Itilan Gann relishes a rest. Naturally, the Hive's huge workforce encompassed no such assignment.

Milk-fed Spartans attended their history lessons. Commissioner Pravin Lal remembered in his diary that the informational content and even-handedness of the material "struck my doubly." He wondered at the accuracy of the reputation surrounding the Spartans in light of "this refreshing honesty that would not have been the least objectionable coming from our own terminals."

Tribals did not watch; they listened. Radio was an obsession, hearkening back to the olden, "golden" days of yore when flu-addled, flood-stricken Midwesterners used the very last of their battery power to tune in for the latest diagnosis of the nation's plight from a man they imagined to be very like themselves. Each base had a different stable of disc jockeys, and only a minority bothered to rebroadcast sermons most listeners knew by heart. Better to blast the Rock n' Roll.

Dreamers tried "digital drugs," using binaural beats to cause the brain's sound processing center (the superior olivary complex) to alter the brainwaves to compensate. Adjustments in frequency could stimulate or inhibit different psychological conditions, some therapeutic, some potentially problematic. Many addicts claimed that the sensory input that could be got from their home terminal was an inextricable aspect of the high, as essential as the tube that delivered the Somnacin itself. When sober, Dreamers tended to search for a news feed, usually the trusted World Restored service run by the Peacekeeping Forces, through which they could learn information that their own faction was incapable of providing to them. By M.Y. 194, the Peacekeepers reserved whole blocks of daily programming for audiences in other societies. Some Hivers followed the radio signals to freedom. Dreamers soaked up storm tracks, wormsign reports, and news from active military fronts. Morganites (and interested SAMCERs) noted the comings and goings of caravans.

Sources:

Pulp sci-fi art by Bob Larkin.

Lunching still is from the fifth season episode of Babylon 5, "A View From the Gallery."

On binaurual beats, I consulted WebMD, which I'm not sure is scientifically valid.

Unity Tech: Ceremonial Burial

Quote from: Chairman Sheng-ji Yang

The corpse we dismember, but the broken man we complete. - Essays of Mind and Matter

Pravin Lal built a monument to war he hadn't fought, and managed to lose thirty souls in the doing. The size of the edifice staggered newcomers seeing this frivolity for the first time, like the Gaian refugees in this impression.

Bare survival instinct and the weakness of personal bonds between survivors claimed many of the cultural signifiers of Terran humanity. University custodians sealed up their earliest dead, too heavily irradiated for burning or simple burial, in cliffside caverns. Caring for patients still clinging painfully to life banished all idea of mourning any whose grip had failed. In the frantic opening battles of the Slowwind campaign, both Spartan and Kellerite left killed or injured combatants for the evening tides to claim rather than risk sending out litter-carriers. All factions followed rigid burn discipline for Red Flu.

Hive surgeons learned to prepare the dead body for moisture reclamation in a sequence of as many as 12,749 precise cuts, harvesting every healthy organ system before entrusting the flensed remains to the dehydrators. Drones could be casually maimed by the Monitors, then rebuilt before the next shift. Starving Believers stripped the bodies of the dead, then dragged them outside their tents and left them in the deep snow, anticipating a season less hungry in which they could pray their souls properly to Paradise. Ascendancy cloning vats simply incinerated their "failures."

Quote from: Ascendancy valediction

I will see you in the eyes of the next generation. - Datalinks, Traditional

Ceremonial burial signifies material as much as social abundance. Gravediggers plant nothing that will grow. Celebration of the passage of life implies the tribe's certainty that it shall endure when the individual has gone. Desperation made a virtue of being selfish. What would it yield a man's work-mates to bury him with objects for which they might yet have some use? Should the thirsty waste tears, or the downtrodden sing in remembrance?

Terran funerary practices persisted most completely in the New State, whose ship's captains read previously-marked passages from the Marian Bible as they consigned their dead sailors to the Deep.

As late as M.Y. 80, factions commemorated events more comfortably than they did people. Chiron's largest memorial, a four-legged arch set astride the Slowwind, remembered the battle, not its participants.

Sources:

Ceremonial Burial was a technology introduced way back in Sid Meier's Civilization I.

Monumental landscape by artist Espen Olsen Sætervik.

Vehicle Chassis: Hopper

Quote from: Contre-Amirale Raoul André St. Germaine

Only the old can beget the new. - Legacies

Distant descendants of the Lunar Lander and close cousins of the much larger single-use Landing Pods, "Hoppers" were short-range, jet-powered vehicles capable of repeated trans-atmospheric travel. In low-gravity environments, they could reach space; in higher gravity, they represented the nearest thing to proper flight before the needlejet and lift-fan, barring choppers too small to have more than situational value. Hoppers attained 7g of lift on liftoff, rising to altitudes as high as 120,000 feet. They traveled in parabolic arcs, "springing" upward on reinforced hydraulic struts.

The horrified crew of Flight Ҡ42 at first protested being assigned Lander 4, a relic of twentieth century moon exploration easily as iconic as the Mayflower. To their joyous astonishment, it still flew. As the ultimate expression of its continued airworthiness, Academician Zakharov had himself filmed aboard during a cargo leap between University Base and Higher Function.

The Hopper filled a unique gap in Unity's load-out, and, later, the order of battle of many a human settlement on Chiron. There were many reasons for this. Hoppers were cheap and easily sourced. In return for tax brakes, companies like Tin Star and King Priam Mining pitched thousands of their older surveyors and transports in-system toward the Lunar Cradle from as far away as Venus, Mars, and the Main Belt--a bargain compared to travel up the space elevators. They could also be "packed"--that is, broken down into easily-reassembled components as a space-saving measure during transport. Many Hoppers were small, designed for crews of between one and five. Since awkward geometry was no issue for a vessel that didn't have to contemplate take-off from within atmosphere, Unity carried its Hoppers bolted to the exterior hull (in fact, dozens were lost to the micrometeorite and subsequent internal explosions), but their good man-scale portability made them a favorite tool of Probe Teams that would others have to "leg it" out of enemy territory. Hoppers were also notoriously rugged. They'd acquitted themselves handsomely in the hostile environments of the Saturnian moons, operating in ammonia seas, acid rains, and under intensely radioactive conditions. As Belt-rated transport, they had hermaphrodite reaction chambers capable of taking even the most rudimentary fissile injects if C-grade fuel pellets were scarce.

A Believer foray into the Dune Sea is cut short by activity on the horizon. From "cold" condition, Hoppers could take off in less than thirteen minutes under the ministrations of a competent crew.

Under the primitive conditions experienced on Chiron, Hoppers made fearsome weapons of war. At the apogee of its a leap, they could deploy parachutes and loiter for hours in the sky, performing long-range surveillance and conducting wide-scope electronic warfare missions. Unless slowed by the counter-thrust of a landing burn, a Hopper could also become a direct-strike weapon. Pilots trained to bring the craft down in a controlled free-fall that struck with force equivalent to 0.5 tons of TNT, about the same power as a 2,000lb. bomb, reliably gouging craters fifteen meters wide and eleven deep.

Despite their generally sturdy construction, Landers could and did fail, particularly when attempting combat "stomps." During the Relief of Elektrichestvokupo, the University lost twelve of thirty-two vehicles to pilot error.

Typical weapons systems for Hoppers included banks of incendiary launchers and directed-energy weapons fed directly from the fuel pellet supply.

The prominent cabin strongly suggests that this Hopper was used for intelligence-gathering or artillery spotting. Note also the many attitudinal thrusters used to correct spin and drift.

Sources:

This post inspired by the "Hopper" war machines found in the 1979 SPI hex-and-counter wargame Titan Strike!.

First Hopper is art by Mike Trim.

Second Hopper is art by the aptly-named Hopper. No joke.

Third Hopper is by a NASA artist. Here's the citation from Wikipedia: "Artist's conception of the Mars Excursion Module (MEM) proposed in a NASA Study in 1964. Dixon, Franklin P. (June 12, 1964). "Summary Presentation: Study of a Manned Mars Excursion Module". Proceeding of the Symposium on Manned Planetary Missions: 1963/1964 Status. Huntsville, Alabama: NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center. p. 470. NASA-TM-X-53049; 64N-26979."

For Hopper weapons systems, I continue to be inspired by Dennis Villaneuve's depiction of Harkonnen vehicles in Dune.

Fourth Hopper found on Flickr. James Vaughn's page.

Quote from: Ian Morris

Geography Is destiny. - Datalinks

Colonial Developments to M.Y. 5

University of Planet: Zakharov's people were a spent force at Planetfall. Radiation sickness acquired during the doomed effort to repair the damaged fusion drives or prevent reactor meltdown killed more than 60% of them. They landed in the foothills of the Daimones Peaks on Shamash, founding University HQ, the most northerly of the human colonies. There, they turned themselves at once to two tasks: the care of their wounded and the scientific interrogation of the strange and terrible paradise all about them. Zakharov at first organized his people according to their occupational purpose but soon amended this to discriminate by area of educational specialty instead. The change added slight occupational variation to the final combinations of colonists and crew--a boon, he said, to interdisciplinary thinking. The University escaped Unity with a huge cache of fissile materials, most of the mission's complex laboratory equipment, and all the data tapes, mainframes, and terminals they could find. Frantic salvage teams sank to tearing some computers from their sockets without bothering to first disconnect the wires.

The University experienced a quiet Planetfall. A thinker rather than a fighter, and well aware of his group's deficiency in that department, Zakharov pursued a studied neutrality when it came to the affairs of other factions, sharing or trading without regard for their politics. With the endorsement of a rubber stamp faculty senate, he also quickly excised those he felt would be a poor fit with his social agenda, exiling more than three hundred "excessives," by which he meant anyone from soldier to lunatic. The University was unique for its homogeneity: Zakharov had been careful to surround himself with protégés and other familiar faces from the moment of waking, and hadn't enjoyed the luxuries of time or opportunity to rifle through the Hab bays for a well-rounded "take," or to make prisoners of other stunned survivors.

Naturalist T. Lange discovering the Chironian subrid while seeking shelter from an oncoming electrical storm. Attempts to woo the creature failed. The tracker beacon on his hoverbike led University Security to the nest two days hence.

An amphibious, ice-crawling Juggernaut deposits a Research Outpost on Eurydice Float. The fifteen-person station staff circled the Northern Pole over a three-year period, gaining important insights into the geology and climatology of Planet.

Gaia's Stepdaughters: The Gaians came down in swamps in the southwestern reaches of Shamash, far south of the Slowwind Delta. Most of Lieutenant Commander Deirdre Skye's subordinates fell in Hydroponics, killed by Santiago's Spartans. The Green Thumbs could rightly boast of having made a courageous defense, although many had been slaughtered before they could take cover and return fire. Victory was possible thanks only to the timely intervention of Chief Medical Officer Pravin Lal and a scratch force of mission loyalists. Afterward, Skye and her followers gathered what foodstuffs they could from the wrecked greenhouse block, collected certain farming equipment from storage, emptied the ship's Seed Vault, and moved for the exits.

Coaxing life from hostile mediums was a specialty of the biologists and agriculturalists under Skye's command, and they set to their work with confidence. They build bubbletent growhouses to obtain fresh food and dried the noxious swamps with water-absorbing organics and deep-soil aerators. While their base of general knowledge about Planet did not grow as quickly as that of the University, they practiced an even more fanatical form of anti-contamination protocols that limited complications from the local ecosphere.

Once bitten, the Gaians became twice shy, concealing themselves from outsiders with the same furtiveness as the Hive. In theory, the faction's Chiron Rangers were armed and trained for force protection, but war-making was hardly in their mental vocabulary.

A Gaian Protector explores the faction's first landing site at Hylonome Bog, where trees could grow to heights exceeding 120 meters. The U.N. Marine Crops left Skye's mauled coterie with Spartoi Defenders, bipedal robots designed for the Unity mission by the trans-Saturnian Autumnal Foundry after the Chiron Probe sent back evidence of problematic megafauna on Chiron. Despite this scout's futuristic-looking weapon is a sonic projector, useful against most Chironian predators.

Human Labyrinth (a.k.a. Human Hive): Sheng-ji Yang's first commandment was to dig. Overseers recruited from the Golden Chinese contingent used force to compel their newly-captured "workforce" to dig. Yang had consulted the central mainframe computer to identify the choicest crew compartments for his press gangs to pick over, but didn't stint from capturing damage control teams wholesale wherever he found them.

Inspired by his many years in Xinjiang and armed with survey data collected by the Chiron Probe (thought corrupted by the U.N. Data Sciences Unit but intercepted and cleaned up by Chinese intelligence), Yang brought his convoy of Landing Pods to the shelter of the Planctae Upthrust, a massif in the deep desert called the Dune Sea. As noontime temperatures in the shade soared past 125°, work parties were subjected to harsh "light and water discipline," told where to walk, when to swallow salt pills, and how much to drink from survival pouches fed by moisture-thirsty body gloves. Yang ordered medicos to insert intravenous tubes in each laborer's forearm and had 11-litre bags of Ringer's lactate solution duct taped to their hips. Dead bodies were baked for their water content, then dumped into vats of nutrient-absorbing slurry to become organic root-paste, used in the production of rope, animal feed, and laboratory growth medium.

The Hive delved into the dust, dragging all evidence of their arrival down the hole behind them.

Yang's followers launched coordinated assaults on shipboard caches of terraforming equipment to obtain the necessary ingredients for his master plan. Terraforming machines like this ARC-surplus H₄ Harvester were high on the list.

Spartan Federation: The mutineers crashed down in the Slowwind Delta in central Shamash, a crowded neighborhood in M.Y. 0. Santiago immediately sent scout patrols in every direction. After founding Sparta H.Q. on high ground, she moved to secure the coast through occupation and expansion of natural erosion tunnels at a place she called Xerxion.

The Spartan battle plan had fallen apart about Unity. Santiago was unnerved by the enthusiastic and indiscriminate violence perpetrated by her Holnist allies, whom she had believed could be led by the nose. About a quarter of the self-styled Colonel's command were genuine adherents of the Spartan Creed. Most were North Americans and Australians who had fought Holnists out of a sense of patriotic obligation. They counted themselves survivalists and worried about becoming reliant on impersonal and disinterested government, but wanted no truck with anarchists. The rest were effectively pirates sourced from post-war prison camps or the large underground networks of demobilized "statesmen," the wishful term that American leaders gave to those who had risen in rebellion once it was time to prioritize healing over justice.

Santiago had condoned what she felt were an unavoidable number of assassinations among the crew to help effect her mutiny, but the Holnists had used the insights gained from crew manifests to expand that killing a hundredfold. They also engaged in wanton destruction, venting or obliterating critical supplies that the "mainline" Spartans had viewed as their rightful measure. Too late, the Spartan leaders realized that they had made a pact with nihilists. Paranoid in the extreme, the Spartans chose to continue the vendettas begun on Unity, spilling first blood on Planet, just as they had above it. The result would be a grueling war of attritional annihilation that eventually spread to three continents. Their first victims were Kellerites, the familiar enemy.

Early Spartans spent their first years in trenches and blockhouses, or afloat on brown-water patrolcraft. Every available tool was turned to war. Years after other factions had moved on to bubbletent agriculture, Spartans continued to dine on irradiated ration packs and drink reclaimed water. Their engineers extended the service lives of the faction's two Landing Pods far beyond Grumman's specifications, but they stayed on the ragged edge, half-starved and rarely able to spare a thought for anything but the most basic aspects of colonization. Most of their "progress" in medicine, manufacturing, and computing came from the capture and study of enemy bases. Standing orders prohibited troops from plunder--as much out of concern to prevent demoralizing discoveries about their own sad condition as to protect viable assets.

A Spartan Controller repels a beseeching Holnist detainee in Fort Legion. Santiago was forced to parole and reabsorb even the most problematic of the Holnists as the Siege of Xerxion reached its obvious denouement.

Dynamic Enterprise (a.k.a. Morgan Industries): Nwabudike Morgan had promised comfort, and he meant to deliver. A CEO is paid to think in five-year increments. Morgan Industries secreted hundreds of company employees aboard, and tens of millions of tonnes of off-manifest equipment. Despite severe losses to secondary impacts from disintegrating sections of outer hull, much of Morgan's contingent survived to land with him, their numbers much enlarged with a clamoring throng of colonists and crew who were desperate to believe that they could fast-forward through the coming time of hardship.

Morgan landed alone and unmollested on Outremer, a small continent due west of Shamash across the New Sargasso Sea. Many hands made light work, and Morgan improved an already good hand by trading surplus goods for what his people didn't already have. Many of these expeditions, mounted across very long distances and focusing in particular on the more technologically advanced Chiron Probe survivors, paid handsome dividends despite a very high loss rate to worms, raiders, and misfortune.

To help ensure access to capital, Morgan imposed a curious practice unique to his colony: the energy accrued to each worker was paid in company stock. In other words, every worker granted Base Administration an involuntary low-interest loan without conditions. If the colony prospered, so did they. When it faltered, they received less than the worth of their labor. Morgan used the money held in this way to fund a flurry of base improvements and Secret Projects.

To boost morale, the colony's Board of Directors also encouraged his people to partake of amusements, turning a blind eye to heavy drinking, gambling, and other activity considered unacceptably "antisocial" in most other societies. On a darker note, this gave the Morganites a useful outlet for Probe activity. Internal regime opponents were frequently ruined or discredited by vice, while overindulgent visitors from other factions might have to finance their release from Holding by telling the Morganites what they wanted to know.

A Morganite hopper loaded with fish-bearing saltwater awaits rendezvous with their Spartan buyer.

Morgan converted an upper garage of one of his Landing Pods into a casino. Workers could take extra shifts to earn hourly admission. Hours could be converted to credits for those who didn't have possessions to stake.

Sources:

Subrid encounter by Kait Kybar.

"Juggernaut" picture is by Rob Watkins.

Bog scout is art by Wadim Kashin.

Water discipline is a concept from Frank Herbert's Dune.

"Sci-Fi Excavator" credits to acharyapolina on PoserContent.

H₄ Harvester, dubbed "Harvester," is the work of Orest Tsypiashchuk.

Holnist prisoner is a still from the TV show "Colony."

Morganite hopper is "Expedition" by Martin Parker.

Gambling hall is a picture of the old Las Vegas Star Trek Experience.

Colonial Developments to M.Y. 5 (continued)

Peacekeeping Forces (a.k.a. Peacekeepers): They landed in the Southern Ocean on a mineral-rich continent about the size of Australia, dubbed "Garland." Low average temperatures kept fungal activity to a minimum. Sweetfishing was good along the coasts. They encircled their lone Landing Pod with a berm, called the resulting stockade "Warm Welcome," then set to pitching bubbletents. Not long after, they spread rain catchments for water, dug suspension pools to aid in physical recovery, and created open reading rooms. Citizens enjoyed a robust civic life: weekly gatherings, loosely proctored, settled most questions of priority and schedule.

Lal's people were an eclectic mix of his own surgical team; assorted mission loyalists, including constables and soldiers who had become detached from their U.N. Security Forces or Marine Corps commands; prisoners taken in battle, and lost or injured responders collected en route to the launch bays. Their number included artists who dashed base interiors with violent neons and prize-winning authors who turned themselves into ersatz data librarians. Lal was continuity to them--a tangible reminder of the Charter under which they had expected to live, and the hierarchy set to govern them with fairness and competence to spare.

There were shortages of everything. Unlike the stowaways, there had been no prior planning for the terrible emergency at the edge of the Alpha Centauri system. But the principles of compassion and democracy were well-known to his followers, and Lal, like Morgan, was spared, at least, the difficulty of articulating an essentially alien way of life to people already hungry, wounded, and scared.

Beyond base-building, the other difficulties encountered by the Commissioner were typical of his peers. At 66, he had a past, and his internal security apparatus was constantly at work trying to determine which of his constituents was out to settle old scores. Spartan he had chosen not to execute after the battle in the Unity hydroponics bay? Ibo victims of the Federal Army? Canadians who remembered how the U.N. had greased the skids for Soviet weapons to reach St. Pierre and Miquelon? Enemies of Apsara Mongkut? Shilohne? Danites? Sehlans? An American who remembered how the U.N. had given the Holnists top cover with dire warnings about the ethical evils of mandatory vaccination? Advisers worked in vain to keep the Commissioner moving too rapidly toward the induction of new colonists. Perhaps, they said, the search for other survivors should take lesser precedence? And what if they built an exclave for persons whose identities could not yet be verified?

Eventually, the Peacekeepers did set up a second encampment--at a place called U.N. Relief Station, once a triage center for the injured rescued from a crash-landed Colony Pod. As it happened, the Pod contained contractors affiliated with Struan's Pacific Trading Company. Under the leadership of their overseer, Dole Yudikon, they professed a prior allegiance to their employer, and begged to be recused from the obligations of citizenship. Lal acceded, though he also allowed the newcomers to integrate with his main settlement in anticipation of the day when it could be determined whether any Struan's representatives had survived to make Planetfall. Tensions flared when Yudikon questioned the basis for Lal's government. Yudikon and his lackies poked around the Spartan chain gang and prepared to launch a coup. They were added by one Colonel Kruse Martius, another post-Planetfall recoveree disillusioned by Lal's decision to parole Gathi war criminals discovered aboard Unity. Before the shooting started, an accord was reached: Yudikon was cast into exile. Along with fifty volunteers, he marched out the gates of the Peacekeeper base at Warm Welcome carrying a generous share of the colony's total wealth as his consolation.

The Peacekeepers and their Struan's neighbors now fell into a Cold War. Saber Company mercenaries employed by Struan's patrolled the outskirts of the exiles' little settlement on Garland's northeastern tip. The place, constructed mostly of repurposed cargo containers and plating torn from the skeleton of the half-submerged Pod, was as cold and miserable as an antarctic whaling station. The Peacekeepers put U.N. Marines on a nearby peak and dug in a heavy mortar. Lal also laid sensor fields between his territory and Yudikon's.

Meanwhile, Lal understood to retrieve the biggest remaining prize. The Peacekeepers had rescued a sky crane from the Unity's stores, and now they prepped it for an extraordinary long-range mission: to the Dune Sea, where their telemetry told them the Unity Data Core had landed. Armored marines recovered this storehouse of all human knowledge, killing suspected Hivemen in carload lots to do it. More enemies.

Notwithstanding the difficulties with internal subversives, the Peacekeeper position was much-envied. Lal had at his disposal the elite fighting force on Planet, and others dealt him injury at their own considerable risk, for every time, he gave better than he got.

Warm Welcome in winter. The base obtained most of its energy from solar collection, allowing it to harvest Chamomile's limited supply of fissile pellets for hopper flights. The egg-shaped structures at left are hab units; the domed structures at center and right are master control stations for various base facilities. The squad, disc-shaped modules with the red-striped roofs are greenhouses with warming domes spread.

Lord's Conclave (a.k.a. Lord's Believers): The Faithful made Planetfall in southern Shamash, well south of the Gaians. Miriam had gathered to her the largest number of Unity survivors, and the least-organized. Many had failed to face their own demons in the darkness, unwilling to make the ultimate sacrifices demanded of them by the imperious Chief Engineer Zakharov or the tinny-voiced sphinx, Francisco d'Almeida. They wanted absolution for their sins, and the Sister was prepared to give it.

For the first three years, the Believers sowed and reaped in peace. Their enemies were the rain, wind, and fungus. They gloried in the abundant nitrates that made farming possible in the too-dry, alkaline soil, and cursed the cloud layer that meant they saw the sun not one day in ten. Some sought refuge in the Good Book, which the Sister taught was timeless, and all enjoyed the simple secular fellowship for which the Modern Vulgatians were both famous and notorious.

Later, starvation set in: despite willing labor, the Believer colony was short on experts in every field, complicating the creation of a system to treat the nitrate-poisoned groundwater and grow nutrients in the abundance required. Raiding north brought little relief. Though the Gaians rarely made difficult targets even for Miriam's unskilled militia (how she sometimes longed for the warriors once in her father's service!), they had little enough of their own to surrender. The Pilgrims were a tougher foe altogether, and successfully resisted. Miriam sank to the low of hiring her people out to do the supervised work of tilling other factions' fields in return for a fraction of what that labor was worth in potable water and packaged rations easily obtained by their better-skilled rivals.

Geography spared the Believers, at long last. Several bumper harvests in their fertile valley helped stabilize the colony from M.Y. 4-5, allowing construction of granaries and a trade in surplus food that returned necessary heavy equipment from factions across the waters. Miriam got on well with the Contre-amirale St. Germaine, who at least pretended obeisance to the Church in most of its forms and urged his followers to donate to the stricken in Miriam's care.

A Believer Follow-on drops safely on the River Asterion.

Human Tribe: The "Pete" Landers crew had unity, and not the kind that crossed starpaths. The Kellerites, though very few in number--merely one-tenth the size of the Believer colony--shared a single vision for their future society. Their armed "retaliation" against the Unity, though it often descended into pogrom-style violence against enemies real and imagined, had got them much plunder--enough to make up, in a way Miriam could not, for the limitations in their training and education, both severely lacking from long decades of self-imposed exile from the world.

Kellerite bases were barracks with children. To "take the view," families lounged on what were in effect the base parapets.

The Tribe found no relief when they splashed down on the beige sandy bottom of the Slowwind. They were at war with the Spartans before most had seen the red sky of their new homeworld. None had yet breathed its air unassisted, and like the Spartans turned themselves to it with relish and abandon so that their overall development of administration, industry, economics, and other facets of the colonization process was severely arrested.

Home lay just over the wall for a Tribesman. Dwellings backed up to the encircling stockade as if to protest the crush inside, and they ran to their roofs to find the gun ports at the shrill of a central alarm. When they required something they did not have, they asked a neighbor. If it could not be had, they visited a common terminal and searched out the manufacturing process on confiscated datatapes. To do one's neighbor a small favor was the acme of citizenship, and it was unheard of to take a meal alone. Equipment crates were unsecured. "We were in and out of eachother's spaces so much," one remembered, "I could not have hid anything had I tried." Such sharing was practically an indictment of the Morganite way of life, and their CEO ghoulishly resurrected the ancient charge that Kellerites were fellow travelers of the Maoist Movements.

As stowaways, the Tribe had laid in guns, ammunition, and their own families--three advantages on Chiron, where weapons were always in short supply and, most of the ship's company being complete strangers, the natural birth rate was at first very low.

Nobody could be trusted who was not also a Kellerite. Spartans were the Near Enemy, but the Kellerites knew they had received the sentence of pirates. By blooding their swords aboard the Ark, they had become enemies of all nations. Naturally, they ambushed and gutshot and dry-gluched without remorse. Tribals were exceptional fighters, their battlesense honed by lifetimes of persecution. The firearm was an extension of the body none would be caught without.

Sources:

Peacekeeper Base picture from Feng Zhu at FZD School of Design.

Planetfall for the Believers is from a NASA's artist's conception hosted on Earthly Universe.

Tribal base is a Star Wars scene by Kevin Jick.

Colonial Developments to M.Y. 5 (continued)

Human Ascendancy: Struan's Sabre Corporation mercenaries discovered Director Tamineh Pahlavi's people in the midst of making the ice in which to pack the mission's collection of genomic databanks, freshly disconnected from the Data Core (now ejected) and still scalding to the touch. Canisters of knockout gas lay expended on the decking, along with the corpses of a half-dozen A.R.C. private security men. Each had been dispatched with a bullet to the forehead. Realizing that they were unlikely to pull off a second tactical coup, the geneticists wisely genuflected. Pahlavi declared that she was relinquishing her claim to the dead men's equipment. While the Dreamers were still absorbing the idea of receiving as gift what they already implicitly possessed by virtue of force, the good doctor hastened to offer even headier wine: the last recorded neuroimages of all supervisory mission personnel, recently imprinted to datatape.

The Genetic Research Division (GRD) was an incidental addition to Prokhor Zakharov's contingent. In fact, they'd fought for the honor. Pahlavi herself had been woken automatically when Pete Landers's hackers tripped fail-safe the protocols for her hab bay. It took her scarcely two hours to retrieve all the surviving personnel of her small pre-flight command. They soon acquired weapons in a similarly serendipitous fashion: passing U.N. Security teams, recognizing unprotected crew, apologized at their inability to stay and handed out self-defense weapons to ease the sweet sorrow of parting.

The University's early decision to focus its intellectual work on "Chironian problems" frustrated Pahlavi. She was a passionate--and widely-resented--advocate for thorough analysis of the genomic information collected during Unity's voyage. Realizing that Zakharov could not be lured away from the temptations in every direction, the GRD requested self-exile.

Crossing the Daimones Valley, they reached the base of the mighty Hyas and immediately began to ascend, knowing they would find year-round water in the high passes along with total relief from the danger of fungus. They were few enough in number. World-class experts who had once dubbed their canteen the Ambrosia Club ate survival bars for much of M.Y. 3. Their big break came when a Hunter caravan rolled through a tunnel cut in the ice shelf. The scientists set off plastique that blocked either end, repeating their old trick with the gas. Pahlavi had a vendetta on her hands, but also the makings of a menial workforce.

An early view of manufacturing bays at The Pinnacle. Huge semi-voltaic windows gathered sunlight by day and held off the frost at night. Here, two Laser Rovers complete a morning patrol route. The 6x6 "Kord" chassis was a Turkish contribution to the Unity Mission. The lasers' high amperage meant huge heat buildup. Inefficient cooling foiled early attempts to mount the weapons in protected ball turrets. The Ascendancy found a solution in outrigger pylons. This limited the big 600kW projectors to a frontal art of just 10° each, and their Skunk Works compensated with additional turreted weapons in the 250kW range. Standard anti-infantry support, crucial during the first century of warfare, was a chin-mounted autonomous weapons turret. Crews were fond of liquefying the battlefield from a distance.

These Kords appear sturdy but the rear shells and cockpit were made of heat-reflective Kevlar fabric.

The real work behind the one-two punch of a Laser Strafe was accomplished by jump pack-equipped infantry. These latter-day paratroopers were ubiquitous in rough terrain, where the added mobility let them advance unimpeded and utilize more of their environment as practical cover. The devices were easy to make but difficult to master. Armorers knew better than to give their troops the means to an early death by misadventure. The striker button had a choke that limited fuel uptake, preventing too-rapid consumption of the small tank and strictly reducing jump range to lengths and heights manageable for the human body on landing. Jumpers often used pistols or grenade guns as a first resort. Rifles took too long to ready.

Sources:

First picture is Zongmeng Zhang's "Frozen Planet Base."

Proevenance of the second picture is uncertain. Probably a NASA concept picture.

Colonial Developments to M.Y. 5 (continued)

New State: Though their pickets rarely ventured past the delta barrages laid by both Tribal and Spartan in their first years on Planet, the New State made splashdown at a place on the same latitude as the river Slow Wind, approximately equidistant between Shamash and Outremer.

The Aquatic Operations Division escaped Unity fully intact, and the Contre-amiral had every intention of exploiting his monopoly on the expedition's precious few submersible hull forms.

The "Kasatka" was large indeed, but a builder, not the fighter implied by her name. Daesung counted itself fortunate to find a buyer in the U.N. after the destruction of the Bitter Waters Colony that had commissioned her. She was not yet a third paid off. Her sister ship, Hadúr, was built alongside Unity in the Lunar Cradle and eventually worked to build research habitats beneath the seas of Saturnian moon Enceladus. The two vessels were motherships. Their operators used them to tend fleets of much smaller, tactical submersibles like the Oculus Multi-Purpose Pods (MPP) seen in this artist's rendering.

The overwhelming majority of St. Germaine's people were submariners who adapted quickly and well to their predicament. And why not? Their fortunes were least-affected by Unity's loss, at least in the short term. They began patrols immediately, just as their training had led them to expect. They built tidal dynamos, nutrient sieves, and heat sinks as planned. High gravity was a problem in confined spaces, especially ones that demanded the fine care of a submarine, but muscle-controlled technologies and robotic servitors provided satisfactory answers.

St. Germaine's considerable civilian population was more difficult to please. They could be subjected to military discipline but were not reconciled to it. In so many words, they complained. Loudly and often. About the unappetizing food, the confinement, the sour notes in the recycled air, or the exhausting vigilance demanded of them with regard to leaks. St. Germaine was confounded by it. Had he not made them safe from their enemies? Did they want for anything that was not also in short supply on the surface? He bade the Psych Chaplains and Organizers among his contingent solve the problem, which they did with their customary summons to worship and service. New Staters were made thereby into an extraordinarily active people, notorious for a need to occupy their hands no matter the company or the occasion.

Sturdy fungal toadstools could be piled with centuries worth of nitrate accumulation. Beneath their canopies, oxygen-rich waters secreted ecosystems that thrived in complete darkness. New State scientists supervised clearing operations that exposed these habitats to sustained sunlight, stimulating gigantism in organisms that had developed hyper-efficient responses to UV radiation.

A Spectator MPP observes the slyke eel menace lesser denizens of the lumicoral, itself included. As a last resort against aggressive sea creatures, the pods could shed electrified scratch-wire netting. They were built tough by Bolton-Defiant Industries, shrugging off hard contact with underwater rock formations made by unskilled skippers. St. Germaine urged civilians to take rotations in the pods, hoping they would stumble across something edifying. External cameras were always recording to double-length datatapes in series banks.

Sources:

First submarine picture is widely available on the Internet, but the provenance of it is unclear.

Second image found on WallpaperFlare. Original artist also unknown.

Third image is Art Latkowski's "Beneath the Waves - Underwater Forest."

"Lumi-" as a pre-fix for light-bearing objects inspired by Planetside 2.

Mankind first set its heart on a one-way journey to Alpha Centauri at the dawn of the twenty-first century. A primitive electrostatic drive bore fifty thousand colonists across the interstellar medium with the collective blessings of both superpowers and a healthy dose of commercial largess.

They were refugees, mostly Indians and Pakistanis, Arabs and Jews, whose lives had been upended by the two nuclear tragedies of the new millennium. Though every mind and hand were missed in the Terrestrial reconstruction effort, habitable soil was at a premium and harvests were failing. Better to send the cream of the crop away than that they should spoil while awaiting the plate.

For to lead them, there came a man from the bottom of the world: Joralamon Hardacre, a non-patriated Israeli climatologist who had administered Antarctica since 1999. Drink and the odor of financial scandal had seemed poised to chase him from the post, but the accidental death of his replacement during an ice climb and the unheralded arrival of a French helicopter carrier off McMurdo made room again for a man who hadn't sense enough to stand clear of trouble. Hardacre stalled the French by sheer force of will, bashing core samples with a golf club and threatening to torch the research station around his ears before he would surrender it. The French admiral blinked and wired Paris for instructions. This short delay provided just enough time for the Soviets to get a cruiser on-station.

Hardacre's paymasters on the board of the Arkan-Wellington Company entrusted him with a simple instruction: send back data. As compensation for risking his uniquely serviceable neck and those of every soul aboard, the expedition received generous subsidies. Stable funding and clarity of purpose did in five years what for Unity required decades of painstaking effort.

No element of the Chiron Pathfinder went to waste. Her 1,000m tall heat dissipation fins were refashioned into the six Pillar Cities of the Euphrosyne Plain where early terraformation efforts had gone as far as the sowing of Terran anchor grasses.

Trust was not prominent among Joralamon Hardacre's qualities. He recognized that the Unity survivors were hungry, which made them dangerous. Whatever J.T. Marsh expected from the previous expedition, it was not the parsimony on which Hardacre insisted as a matter of principle, hiding his inhospitality behind the strictures of infection control.

Learning the full story of Unity's troubles only strengthened the old Administrator's certitude in the wisdom of his position. Unity road crews marked the comings and goings of Pathfinder patrol convoys with trepidation. The sturdy, ambush-protected battlecars at Hardacre's disposal showed up Unity's equipment for the pathetic inheritance it was.

Sources:

Probe by FZD School of Design.

Convoy by Darius Kalinauskas.

Titus Welliver, seen here in his role on The Last Ship, is Joralemon Hardacre.

Quote from: Thomas Schelling

The power to hurt -- the sheer unacquisitive, unproductive power to destroy things that somebody treasures, to inflict pain and grief -- is a kind of bargaining power, not easy to use but used often. - Datalinks

By the 2060s, the world's richest man had a problem. Only an army of K Street lobbyists, French citizenship, and round-the-clock security spared him the wrath of the United States, Canadian, and Mexican governments.

Though they also supplied all three federal armies, Morganite businesses nonetheless played a key role equipping, training, and advising those states and provinces in insurrection. Sabotage and knowledge loss from the withdrawal of federal garrisons or the refusal of loyalists to serve secessionist causes often meant that captured equipment was unusable. Morganite mechanics replaced missing or damaged components and trained new operators to use unfamiliar weapons systems. Often, the mercenaries fought alongside their students. Company-level formations of Morgan Armored Security served openly under the banner of the Missouri State Guard, unashamed to draw handsome pay from the state's near-empty coffers even when the local fighters went without. Hundreds were captured, and dozens executed, by the U.S. Army upon the fall of the secessionist stronghold at Jefferson. Morgan Resolutions troubleshooters literally stood behind Governor Herrick Guidry of Louisiana during each of his many media appearances, including when he announced his state's unilateral declaration of independence in conjunction with that of Texas, where SafeHaven helped plan the coordinated seizure of federal properties, to include Forts Bliss and Hood. At a Morgan Industries quarterly earnings call in 2051, the firm's Chief Financial Officer shared out a list of the seventy-two plots against rebellious politicians and generals by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and Dirección Federal de Seguridad supposedly foiled thanks to the handiwork of watchful company assets.

When the Holnists and their fellow travelers failed, Morgan found himself persona non grata in North America. Unionists blamed him for prolonging their country's nightmare. The disloyal complained that the price of his help had impoverished them. Morganite companies continued to receive federal contracts, but their market share shrank steadily as all three countries explored a newfound taste for fully domestic and parastatl production. At the start of the weeks-long hearings preceding the vote to nationalize the American Reclamation Corporation (ARC), Senator Jerkins Benvenuti quipped that, "Oscar van de Graaf is corrupt and a patriot. Nwabudike Morgan is just corrupt." His contemporaries agreed. Republican, Democrat, Conservative, and Unionist came together in a landslide to grant the ARC charter. Some admitted to biting the hand that had fed them. "More than anyone else, he got me here," Minority Whip Halos Harrison confessed to rolling cameras in the Capitol Rotunda, "but I guess this is where I get off the train." The following year, his constituents returned him to Congress by a ten-point margin despite being outspent by his challenger, who of course was funded by Morganite interests. Similar logic led to renewal of the monopoly on space governance previously granted to Comprehensive Transport by international treaty, which Morgan had also hotly disputed.

An ex-Soviet airborne officer reads learns that his time with the Texas State Guard is drawing to a close. As the federal drives east from El Paso and north from Corpus Christi put Texas on the back foot, Morganite men "in-country" found themselves withdrawn to take contracts on more hopeful fronts. The Morgan men protecting Governor McReedy in Austin, Texas in the sweltering summer months of 2052 went up the pandhandle to seek their fortunes in Tulsa that Christmas.

By this time, the effect of Morganite involvement in global conflict had come to be associated with a particular branch of international relations theory known as Luttwakian Ethics. The premise was simple: weapons embargos favored the already-stronger of the parties to any conflict, but, by indiscriminately starving all combatants of the means to fight, tended to lengthen those hostilities. The best way to end a war was to fight it. Morgan seized on the idea, which he promoted through the endowment of university chairs and funding for institutes of war and peace. Day and night, his pamphleteers cried out for the relief of subject peoples and the righteous victory of right causes. Rebel armies infamous for atrocity could be taught a proper respect for humanitarian strictures, given the right instruction. And could not the United Nations, with the help of private enterprise, not care for the beleaguered while political matters were put to the test of arms? Did the world really benefit from a hundred frozen conflicts? Was the U.N. trying to keep itself afloat through the manufacture and sustainment of human misery?

Morgan fled defeat into the waiting arms of the United Nations, increasingly tying his company's fortunes to work on the Unity megaproject.

Sources:

African conflict zone picture by Darius Kalinauskas.

Individual soldier picture found at this website for what appears to be a personal Twilight 2000 RPG campaign.

Kellerism attracted adherents worldwide.

Tribalism, also called Kellerism after its founder, was an early twenty-first century reaction to the loss of hope in Middle America. From the 1980s, coinciding with the decline in heavy manufacturing in the Western world and the advent of the World Wide Web, personal and community identity became disconnected from shared physical space. Teenagers adopted avatars that reflected their imagined selves, while various political and social groups adopted explicitly global perspectives as they struggled to scope problems of economic dislocation and climate change. New problems were identified: opioid and Internet addiction, pervasive underemployment, increasing dependence on social services, and high rates of divorce.

Jean-Baptiste Keller was a failed farmer, lay preacher, and radio personality active during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries int he Midwestern United States. His favorite rhetorical targets were offshoring, agribusiness, partisanship, wealth inequality, and, of course, the Internet. Despite a relatively small live audience, tapes of his thrice-weekly Jeremiads were shared through the English-speaking world. His "congregation" saw reflections of themselves in his depictions of life as lonely struggle, rarely yielding spiritual fulfillment or dignity.

Some historians now trace the movement's formative inspirations back as far as the right-wing paramilitary ethno-nationalism of the mid-1990s and the parallel flowering of conservative talk radio, but though Jean Baptiste-Keller spoke to the same problems, he was neither a xenophobe nor a secessionist, much less a bitter-ender. The fundamental underpinnings of Holnism, to which Kellerism is customarily compared, were nihilism and individualism. Holnists denied the very legitimacy of positive law and attempted to recast natural law as the extension of the individual's own Id. Holnists did for themselves in the expectation that they would be rewarded with the opportunity to inflict themselves upon others after societal collapse.

Quote from: President B. Nicholas Thurville

The Holnist will set your town, including his own home, ablaze because he thinks he can snatch something of yours from the blaze. - Weekly Address of the President of the United States

Kellerites aimed to avert that collapse through a program of self-improvement on behalf of the wounded community. Its foundational concepts were hope and community. A Tribe was to supplement, and perhaps even to stand in for, the absence of central government, but should not reject its value in principle.

Keller's thesis was simple enough: the atomizing and amplifying effects of the Internet, by giving false hope to every radical, made it impossible for communities at any level--local, state, national--to engage in the collective problem-solving that is politics. Just ten years into the new millennium, "truth" was in the eye of the beholder on both sides of the Atlantic. Keller interpreted current events through this dark prism. The outbreak of Red Flu and climate-driven mega-disasters that preceded America's second great sundering were only so ruinous because their impacts was exacerbated by those who had something to gain from the suffering.

This analysis led Keller to three conclusions. First, that central government, though not to be feared, was unreliable because of the problems of distance, faction, and bureaucratic inertia. Second, that physical communities--especially blood communities--as defined by close geographic proximity and daily personal interaction were more important to the wellness and survival of the individual than virtual communities. To ride out the storm Keller insisted was coming, the wise would retreat from their device and narcotics addiction and live "in the moment," cultivating the practical skills and face-to-face relationships they would need to ensure basic survival.

With the end in mind, Keller called for Americans to take up Scouting, learn to swim, take advantage of the courses offered by local community colleges and technical schools, practice target shooting and reloading, and buy cars that didn't rely on computers. As a "prepper" of the second generation, he took a distinct communitarian perspective, instructing his listeners that guns, ammunition, food, and medical supplies should be stockpiled and held in trust for one's family and neighbors.

Quote from: Jean-Baptiste Keller

The one who prepares shall be shepherd, not king. - The Annotated Broadcasts

Keller's emergence as a potent political force coincided with the destruction of Davenport, IA by anti-government militias, during which his son Brian was killed while serving in the National Guard. Keller initially urged communities to open their doors to FEMA and the U.S. Army during the unfolding national emergency.

As the cogs of federal power ceased to turn, Keller hit upon an alternative: he propounded a Charter, or guiding principles for the organization of mutual aid within and between communities "for persons who do not wish to descend into barbarism.” Recognizing his audiences’ fear of strangers amidst the general collapse of law and order, Keller additionally urged his listeners to “fall back first on your relatives, friends, and neighbors – the people who know you best, can vouch for you, and upon whom you have always depended.” Keller was explicit that these communities must not be circumscribed by "false dichotomies" of race, political affiliation, national origin, cultural practice, or sexual or gender identity. "Family is family," he thundered, "and you will never be remade whole if you leave behind even the least of them."

Yet unsurprisingly, communities that conformed to the code of behaviors promoted by Keller’s Charter were often able to manage the suspension of public services better than those where residents were disunited. Prototypical Kellerite communities maintained food kitchens, aid stations, and workshops where resources could be pooled, needs evaluated, and priorities set and acted upon most efficiently. They also mounted “vigilance patrols” to keep the peace.

Inevitably, the success of the Kellerites meant that they were subject to attack by opportunists, some of whom depicted the Kellerites as disloyal and incestuous cultists to justify their crimes. After Davenport, Kellerites were natural targets in an environment thick with predators. Secessionist governments and their Holnist supporters targeted the Kellerites for their pro-vaccine stance and often-outspoken allegiance to the United States Government. Excuses were easy to find. As armed camps, Kellerite townships could not be countenanced at the rear of a secessionist army. For followers of the Evangelical Fire, Kellerism was simple heresy to be extirpated with the sword. Combatants of all stripes knew Kellerite communities would be well-stocked with all the essentials of war. Kellerites were also beset by both ordinary citizens (who usually resented having been left “outside the fold” of prosperous Charter communities) and corporate security forces tasked to “reclaim salvage” from the war zone.

Kellerites enjoyed an advantage the Holnists never had for long: unity of purpose.

Kellerites' alienation from surrounding populations eventually brought them into direct conflict with the relieving federal forces. The group’s outlaw status was cemented during the Holnist breakout from the Federal blockade of Des Moines, when Kellerite militiamen operating in the same vicinity slaughtered hundreds of civilian refugees in retaliation for past lynchings of Kellerite foraging parties. The United States Government never forgave the Kellerites, whom it thereafter treated as enemy combatants.

Holnist fighters depart a ruined Tribal enclave. Even when victorious, the Holnists always departed many fewer in number than when they'd come.

Kellerism persisted for years after the war despite its adherents being forced into hiding, and pirate radio stations repeated Kellerite signals from holdfasts in the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountain chains, gradually attracting new adherents in the urban crimescapes of the Pacific coast.

Sources:

U.K. Kellerites picture found on Pinterest board of Broken Eden LARP.

Picture of farming is "Epilogue to Wall-E" by Brother None.

Third picture is apparently from a computer game, "Fall of Civilization."

Life in the First Decade

Quote from: Warden J.T. Marsh

There was too much to defend, and from too many, with too little and too few. - Peregrenations of Planet

They built their fair share of prototype designs with a batch size of one, but Spartan doctrine called for the use of interchangeable parts to achieve better efficiencies in training, repair, and tactical command. It was much easier to model performance when a leader had fewer variables for which to account.

The koutí had many features to recommend it. Heavy-duty shocks conferred excellent off-road performance. By sealing and stowing the armored louvers, occupants in the cab could trade between visibility or cooling or force protection. An onboard fire suppression system and bolt-on super light appliqué might mean the difference between survival and annihilation. The vehicle used a nuclear power source; see the turbine and fuel cask centered between the rear wheels. In service, the vehicle could take a fighting top in at the cab and rooftop hatches.

Quote from: CEO Nwabudike Morgan

Standardization is the surest sign of material progress. Survival is too disorganized to maintain any lasting relationship with efficiency. - A Political Economy of Planet

Morganite pleasure palaces, found in every modern city, were a counterintelligence officer's worst nightmare. Private reports to Captain Garland from the Office of U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri Security Chief Rachael Winzenried warned that as many as one in ten crew members were taking pay from an unsanctioned patron. That number doubled for command staff.

Faction leaders ignored the appetites of the human soul at their own peril. There hadn't been space aboard Unity for much physical art, but the colonists produced their own in abundance. Tribals and Hivemen made art as an expression of their individualism. Morganites made art for decorative purposes. Believers likened the artist's work to prayer. Dreamers made art in spite of themselves. Prisoners of the Watch were forced to make art as therapy, which Commissioner Pravin Lal felt rather missed the point. Adolescents in the Ascendancy were judged according to their artistic output as children: the more accomplished the artist, the greater the expectation of future accomplishment.

Sources:

Buggies by Darius Kalinauskas.

Casino city picture is an artist's conception of the pleasure city Neon for the video game "Starfield."

Second picture is from Syd Mead. Apparently a piece of concept art for the a Jetson's movie.

Promise-keepers, seen here assisting Pilgrim militia to clear a corridor as they invade the uppermost level of a Hive Habmaze, took a simple vow: to accept no charity and perform no honest work. Mercenaries were natives to the battlefield, and preferable in a set-piece battle, but they had a sense of self-preservation that placed an upper limit on their utility in dire moments. Also, few mercenaries would consent to take Somnacin. Promise-keepers generally made excellent dream-walkers.

The easy test to tell Promise-keeper from SMACER was to offer them credits. If you were killed, you'd met a SMACER. Promise-keepers generally gathered in small huddles in the hundreds of abandoned bases that marked failed expansions or soured vendettas. Those prepared to risk their necks could negotiate a price for anything prohibited. They were cheap assassins, saboteurs, subversives, and Probe operators. So far as could be determined by curious outsiders, Promise-keepers were motivated, like the Data Angels, "by the jazz." A Promise-keeper's ability to serve the buyer and live was a direct reflection on their ability to adhere to the strict codes of the Vory.

Quote from: Narrator

"Don't kill, don't eat." - Saying among the Promise-keepers, Datalinks

This was not to say that a certain degree of absurdity could not result from the Promise-keepers' rigid interpretation of their own ethos. A popular distraction with Morganite teenagers was to pay Promise-keepers to denounce the Civil Ordinances in New State garrisons. Nwabudike Morgan once got the better of a Peacekeeper rival by hiring Vory to lure the man into a drunken spree that resulted in his dismissal from his faction's diplomatic corps. University students sometimes hired Vory to distract proctors during tests. More hired them as bodyguards to fend off the vicious bullying of prefects.

Sources:

First picture features Adriyan Rae as Elida in Vagrant Queen.

Second picture is "secret base" by Jeremy Cook.

Third picture origin unknown. Found on imgur.

The pressure seals for each of Unity's six fusion engines were manufactured in Knoxville, TN by the venerable Fulton-Sylphon Corporation. Each engine cone was taller than the Statue of Liberty, and the seals were correspondingly large. Federal troops of the 4th Cavalry Brigade, trainees in tow, came down from Fort Knox, KY to escort this precious cargo south. They made it out of the city just days before Governor Tim Spearman brow-beat the state legislature into ratifying articles of secession. Tennessee Army National Guard forces dogged the caravan practically the full way to Atlanta before spoiling attacks from Virginia resulted in their urgent recall for home defense.

Chiron's oceans provided both nutrient abundance and deep insight into its cyclical ecosystem. At bases like Ballard's Reef, one of a very few coastal enclaves built by the University of Planet, researchers endured constant low-grade typhoon conditions for the benefit of their fellow survivors. Corso's False Sea Jellies provided protein and texture to enliven meals. Products derived from Sea Jelly genetics included luminescents, medical paralytics, and longevity treatments.

A student of the University might study the full length of a Chiron day--just under 18 hours straight. The reigning pedagogy called for a combination of professorial lecture, guided discussion in mixed-attainment reading circles, and independent study. Unity had carried no books; instead, the total sum of human knowledge had been digitized. Librarians pulled segments of this material onto shareable data tapes using a detailed programming language and following the specific requests made by students themselves. A competent Librarian was the struggling student's salvation, paring away extraneous information before it ever reached the listener.

The U.N. acquired the Aries III space platform on 12 May 2017. The Grumman Corporation was announced as the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri's first prime contractor a day later. Unity did not launch until 12 April 2071. There were many reasons for the expedition's long gestation, none more serious than the damage to supporting national space programs caused by interstate war. In 2051, Soviet airborne forces famously wrecked the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou. When NATO failed to react--it was the very height of the Hypersurvivalist Crisis--the already-unpopular conservative government of French President Marcel d'Avrail collapsed, and France veered back into the third-way politics that undermined Western unity to Moscow's advantage.

The tank was a complicated presence on battlefields of the twenty-first century. Advances in the portability, accuracy, and firepower of individual anti-armor weapons systems, combined with the effectiveness of drone reconnaissance, humbled more one great army--and those were cases in which the vehicles themselves were well-crewed and -maintained. Defenses, which incorporated signal suppression as well as active engagement of incoming warheads, were effective only one-quarter of the time.

On Chiron, the tank enjoyed a brief renaissance. The Spartans and the Tribe both experimented with tanks both wheeled and tracked. The anti-tank rockets packed by J.T. Marsh might as well have been firecrackers. Even when under-armed, tanks helped accompanying infantry to press their advance with confidence. Drones remained a theoretical problem, but there were fewer of them, and, because of the general lack of heavy weapons, spotting rarely resulted in a kill.

Sources:

Fulton-Sylphon image is from Sci-Fi base pack on the Unity Asset Store by Manufactura K4.

Ballard's Reef image is the work of Simon Stålenhag, found here.

Third image by Nokhoog on Sci-Fi Factory.

Fourth image by Electronic Arts.

Artist responsible for tank picture is unknown.

The seed packets and re-hydrated ration packs stored in Unity's Landing Pods were badly irradiated by the ship's venting reactors. Early crops failed at rates approaching 93%. Most colonists of the First Generation suffered from moderate to severe malnutrition. Birth rates were very low, and infant morality very high. Biologists scrambled to extract edible macronutrients from native organisms.

Once Planetside, all factions found yawning gaps in available competencies and equipment. To make matters worse, the expedition's original supplies were mostly archaic hand-me-downs sourced from more than 150 donor nations and tens of thousands of private organizations. As a matter of personal survival, every colonist needed to become individually expert in the care, maintenance, and improvement of their own gear. This Spartan has improvised oxygen support from a medical ventilator, a length of rubber hose, and an agricultural respirator.

Portable minicomputers such as the Reviiser were the suitcase atomics of their era. They could be set up to run tapes automatically once the terminal was plugged into a Datalinks. No computer literacy required. The New State banned them, while fee structures effectively restricted their ownership to the C level in Morganite enclaves.

Sources:

Top image is apparently from survival game Icarus.

Second image is from the film Prospect.

Since replacements were hard to come by, everything was used until it broke. The face ports and filtration plant for this Gaian Ranger's rebreather have broken. Air hoses have been rerouted behind and she wears an independent filter over her breast. A lens in the face mask has cracked, and both are fogged, but the high-efficiency seal for which this Anklin Mark IV mask was known, obviously tempted its wearer to make due. Her laser carbine shows evidence of severe barrel corrosion and will soon seize, perhaps with catastrophic result.

A Shaper Liquidator fuels his flamethrower, the accepted way to deal with an errant fungal bloom. When they drew such unhappy work, drones were pumped with neurosuppressants that put them in a zomboid state not unlike the nerve staple--in fact, the pharmaceutical basis of the inoculation and the punishment were identical, differing primarily in the amount of drug administered. This was necessary, of course, to deaden the mind against Centauri retaliation.

Trade between isolated factions was sometimes the only way to stave off starvation, disease, or environmental disaster. When one or both were at war, civilian traffic, like this high-clearance hauler carrying nutrient slurry, would be equipped with flashing beacons to indicate their noncombatant status. Some factions heeded the markings; others zeroed in on a defenseless capture.

Sources:

Top image found on the Pinterest account of Marco Ferreira.

Flame trooper is the work of Daniel Comerci.

Vehicle is credited to CaptFlushGarden by the Pinterest account of Jerome Lebrun.

When Chairman Sheng-ji Yang pronounced his readiness to take a share of the riches trapped beneath the Hyas Teeth, Archelaus Laskaris summoned steel monsters and pierced the mountains he could not climb. With omnidirectional drilling rigs, Hive miners siphoned ore the way a Gaian might funnel water.

The Silver Arch, a tungsten mine "operated" by the Dreamers of Chiron from M.Y. 2-14 at Pahlavi's sufferance. It collapsed in that final year due to avoidable structural failure, killing more than three hundred people, mostly members of chain gangs sourced from the Morganites. The remains of the diggings became a scrappers' paradise and were fought over for years by the University, the Ascendancy, and the Children of the Atom.

The polyglot Unity expedition was to use English as its official mission language, but project difficulties led to uptake of at least 100,000 colonists and crew unable to speak it. Color became their common touchstone. Four of nine branches are shown here. White for environmental control--responders who were to restore breathable atmosphere in compromised and gassed compartments. Red for conventional firefighters. Green for radiological firefighters. Blue for those trained in confined space rescue. The expedient of color-coding mission assignments was kept up by every faction.

Physical hardships linked to hibernation, post-hibernation recovery, and Chiron's higher gravity created barriers to the inclusion of those with physical challenges. The U.N. issued them provisional exclusions and promised uptake in the event that they received successful cybernetic prosthesis. This Trinity Corporation collapse responder searches for casualties in a compartment choked with tear gas during the final hours of the exodus from Unity.

Sources:
First picture is "Siberia 2035" by Wend Taylor.

Second picture is "Mine Facility (2022)" by Ed Lee Art.

Third picture is by Jeison Silva. It is hosted on ZBrushCentral.

Fourth picture is "Fire Gear" by Lucas Pradaud.

Quote from: Oscar van de Graaf

Give a body room to breathe and freedom to act, and nine times out of ten they will curl up into a fetal ball. - Under My Wings, All Things Prosper: A History of the American Reclamation Corporation, Vol. 2

Not every landing pod was a behemoth. So-called smallcraft like this purpose-built AVRO Lancer conveyed uniquely precious cargo--here, the ʼĒl, a "hard library" intended to be connected directly to a computer core. Rare and precious, hard libraries were physical databanks containing information too sensitive to be entrusted to data tapes. Dreamers captured this one and found that it contained an index of crew member service records. Cobb's Probe Teams used the insights derived from their study of that material to identify high-priority targets for influence operations. Mission success rates doubled.

The self-contained systems of Unity landing pods were the source of key infrastructure for all early colonies: water, communications, signals, recycling, hospital services, and more. Rather than building anew, it was often thought preferable to add "barnacle" complexes onto the pods' hulls, piggybacking to systems already known to work. One of the most important advantages conferred by the pods was height. Base operations commonly relocated to the flying bridge at top ("forward," when the pod was in spaceborne service) for a better view of the surrounding area.

The Watcher base seen here is girdled by concentric defenses that excel at keeping drones in as much as they do at keeping Minutemen and Myrmidons out. In the foreground, a mobile piledriver has deployed to excavate the foundations for a defensive bunker.

Destructive terraforming was relatively easy. Terran vegetation thrived with the correct combination of oxygenated water and deep-injection organics. Chiron's natural defenses faltered here. Humans, perhaps because of their sentience, triggered intense fungal action, but environmental contamination attracted almost no detectable reactivity. In bases like Second Chance, Shapers enjoyed soft grass and the sweet taste of familiar fruit.

Sources:

First picture is from the Sci-Fi/Amazon Prime series The Expanse.

Second picture is the base from Disney's Lightyear.

Third picture is an artist's rendering for the Disney movie Tomorrowland.

Doctrine: Centauri Survival

Quote from: Colonel Corazón Santiago

Mere survival compels us to provide each survivor with a completely novel form of remedial education. We must relearn mobility, nutrition, recreation, and problem-solving under material constraints never theorized by Mission Command. - Planet: A Survivalist's Guide

[[Icarus screenshot from site that was never archived]]

In bubbletents and other converted classrooms across the face of Planet, the First Generation began to learn the lessons that it would pass down as sacrosanct to its children. These were the bequest of the Growth doctrine Centauri Survival.

Before a colonist could be rated for work outside the airlocks, they memorized the new gravitational constant of 12.85 m/s², learned to diagnose the memory impairments and mood disorders caused by nitrogen narcosis, heard the artificially-reproduced hum of the mindworms, and demonstrated the Five Standard Techniques for oxygenating water, including the "high pour" and "area expansion" methods. The standard toolkit adopted by every faction for its personnel included two carbon-steel blades, one of 7" and another of just 3.2"; edible water--spherical pellets encased in a durable combination of calcium shloride and brown algae extract that formed a durable sheath; a windlass tourniquet; hemostatic gauze; a rapid injector with epinephrine, adrenaline, and anti-coagulant ampules; a canister of Togra Labs ExpansionFoam®; and four slugs of sealing putty to spread across suit punctures and tears.

Faction leaders differed in their judgements about how this critical information could best be communicated for retention. J.T. Marsh's Forward Contact Teams performed live survival demonstrations for timid audiences of University engineers. Peacekeepers spent hours running microfiche on which data librarians illustrated the trimming of beards and mustaches, the donning and doffing of masks, the rapid exchange of air filters. In Sparta Command, three-trooper "sticks" and five-trooper "chalks" shared the lowest scores earned by their members during each training evolution. Unsatisfactory courses could be repeated ad infinitum. Hive Security seered wisdom into drones with the psi-whip.

Sources:
A screenshot from the computer game Icarus.

On edible water, see Earth911's article on the Ooho.

Togra Labs and StickyFoam originally created by Strategos' Risk.

Quote from: Sister Miriam Godwinson

The Morganites fear what may not be purchased, for a trader cannot comprehend a thing that is priceless. - The Collected Sermons

In Alpha Centauri 2, it is possible to find or produce goods, which are bundles of equipment, usually tools and consumable supplies, useful for colonization, warfare, commerce, or research.

The Arctic Emergency Response Vehicle negotiated nitrate toadstools as faultlessly as it had snowbanks and was blessedly simple to repair. But crews that had sung their praises during lunar training soon had a firm change of heart. Neither the French Antarctic Survey nor United Nations mechanics bothered tearing out the heavy insulation, and their original operating parameters hadn't meant waste heat was a problem. Nobody realized the vehicles ran hot until they arrived on a world where the average planetary temperature ran 68°.

Emergency Supplies consist of shelf-stable rations, air tanks, rudimentary antibiotics, airtight shelters, and basic rescue gear. They are obtained by salvaging Unity wreckage or plundering enemy bases. Players can use them to make up nutrient shortfalls, convert outposts into friendly bases, and heal damaged infantry-class pieces. Emergency Supplies appear on the map as a loaded Scout Rover with stats of 1-1-3. Emergency Supplies are the most common spoils of early exploration and warfare. Factions prominent for their place on the bleeding edge of destruction--Gaia's Stepdaughters, the Human Tribe, and the Hunters of Chiron--all begin with Emergency Supplies.

The basic medicines stocked aboard Unity Landing Pods served well for acute emergencies, but most societies soon turned their eyes toward preventative and long-term care suitable for those with chronic conditions. The "auto-doctors" aboard Landing Pods were notorious for correctly diagnosing maladies that available treatments couldn't resolve.

Medical Supplies consist of complex pharmaceuticals and specialized diagnostic and surgical tools normally found in well-appointed settings, including surgical robots. Medical Supplies are occasionally awarded for successful salvage missions but can also be produced a hospital facility following discovery of Biostatics. Medical Supplies appear on the map as a Mobile Surgery with stats 0-0-2. The Surgery can be moved to a neutral or allied base for trade or conversion to a Dreaming Den. When garrisoned in a friendly base, the same unit will provide a morale buff for as long as it is present. Combined with a Probe Team, a Mobile Surgery can be used to implement a Nerve Staple policy at any friendly base. Both the Peacekeeping Forces and the Dreamers of Chiron begin with 1 Medical Supplies each--an expression of their very different philosophies regarding drugs and their benefits.

The discriminating merchant willing to risk his neck in a Tribal settlement could come away rich indeed. Lack of interested buyers spurred the Kellerites to sell cheap and buy dear. Those who returned from such ventures often recounted that the so-called cultists were congenial, if paranoid, and showed none of the propensity for anti-social and deviant behavior for which the sect was infamous.

Trade Goods are manufactured objects or consumables with explicitly commercial or recreational purposes. Examples of trade goods include hand tools, construction materials, computer terminals, entertainment software, cooking spices, and reading material. Trade Goods are built after discovers of the UNITY Workshops tech and appear on the map as a Crawler with stats 0-0-2. The Crawler can be moved to a neutral or allied base for sale. At a friendly base, the Crawler can be converted to production. The Dynamic Enterprise (Morgan Industries) begin with 2 Trade Goods, reflecting Morgan's careful preparations.

Chief of Security Rachael Winzenried declined to take conventional high-explosive or fragmentation grenades into the ship's armory. Instead, she obtained large quantities of stun, aerosol, smoke, and gas grenades for internal security missions, few of which found their way into the hands of the ship's defenders before Planetfall. Marsh took a small supply of incendiaries for big game management. In the bitterest of ironies, it seemed everyone but the U.N. Security Forces loyalists used grenades during the mutiny. Santiago, Keller, Cobb, Morgan--even van de Graaf--made arranges to get them aboard.

War Stores are weapons and ammunition in various grades. Hand weapons are frequently salvageable from Unity wreckage. Otherwise, War Stores are produced from arsenal facilities and their higher-tech descendants. War Stores can be used to upgrade existing military units, add a 50% defensive bonus to non-military units on base defense, or for trade purposes. War Stores appear on the tap as a Crawler with stats 0-0-2. The warlike societies begin with War Stores--Spartans with 3, and the Tribe, Hunters, and New Two Thousand with 1.

The interior of this inter-modal transport container has been converted into a materials laboratory. Cuttings of the polyp-like corcyra fruit, a parasitic growth that manifested on juvenile fungus, are being weighed prior to chemical analysis. As a food, corcyra triggered rapid and inevitably fatal proliferation of prions in humans, but objects smeared with the fruit's gritty residue were noticeably less interesting to Chironian wildlife. The Gaians named the fruit after a naiad that had once obsessed Poseidon and used it to move unmolested in the fungus.

Research Pods are self-contained datalinks libraries or modular science stations fully equipped to study the new world. Research Pods appear on the map as Network Nodes. Taken to a friendly base, they can be connected to a Network Node for a free Tech advance of the present tier. Taken to a neutral or allied base, they may be sold. The Human Ascendancy, Children of the Atom, and, of course, the University of Planet all begin with Research Pods representing their preferred "take" from Unity.

Sources:
First image, by Luca Pascal, is from the FZD School of Design gallery.

Second image is from The Expanse.

Third picture is from Bioware's Anthem.

Fourth picture is "Sci-fi Armory Workbench" by Gary Do on ArtStation.

Final image is "Intergalactic Research Pod" by Denis Osmanbegovich.

Quote from: Charles Dickens

"This is the even-handed dealing of the world!” he said. “There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!” - A Christmas Carol, Datalinks

After entering through an exterior panel, a Unity Cargo Corps responder searches an electrical closet for sheltering survivors soon after the start of the Crisis.

In the airless medium of space, the most minor error quickly compounded toward catastrophe. Spacers were a breed apart, Renaissance persons who combined the physical prowess of Olympians with encyclopedic knowledge honed through years of apprenticeship. Zero-gravity stevedore Lourenço Velisto was already fending off inquiries from United Nations mission selection chiefs when the offices of former American Reclamation Corporation CEO Oscar van de Graaf came calling with a better offer.

The standard professional journey of a spacer, be they pilot, navigator, miner, or stevedore, began in the water, where they learned to move and breathe by mechanical means. Mastery of neutral buoyancy physio-motive principles and emergency self-recovery techniques was only half the battle. Prohibitively high costs of entry limited space-going to true and quasi-governmental entities unwilling to chance their investments with sub-par recruits. Future astronauts had also to pass repeat psychological work-ups and complete physical engineering coursework at the post-graduate level. At the far end of the seven-year training pipeline, fewer than two in ten of the original intake were still in service. Three had died or become irreparable casualties.

Velisto and other members of Unity's Cargo Corps had a crucial part to play in the vision for colonization. Orbital platforms including weather and communications satellites, automated factories, and space telescopes, along with extra cargo desired by factors but marked "discretionary" by U.N. planners, was bolted to the generation ship's outer hull, where it would all be detached and prepped for re-entry by the Corps according to an orderly plan assembled by their loadmasters. To clear the miles-long stacks of cargo, even with the help of pod-mounted cargo booms, might take years depending on the success of planetside settlement. The Cargo Corps would have only a narrow window of a few days to send down the highest-priority containers before they, too, proceeded to the surface. The potential for a permanent human presence in Chiron's orbit rested on quickly restoring orbital launch capability. Van de Graaf made a close study of the Chiron Probe landing records, including sensitive portions accessed using ARC clearances he retained as a board member emeritus. Although Unity carried booster rockets that could turn Hoppers into trans-orbital shuttles, the future governor didn't like what he saw.

In addition to their primary role, the Cargo Corps members were Unity's high-risk rescue specialists. Along with other spacewalk-capable crew, they worked the disasters of collision and mutiny from the outside in, patching tears in the hull, securing cargo, cutting loose debris, and, most importantly, saving the lives of those who became trapped. It was not uncommon for crew to find themselves stranded by fire, debris, or enemy contact, at which point their training taught that they should wait for rescue, donning emergency breathing hoods if the ambient oxygen supplies dropped too low.

It was precisely their importance that made van de Graaf's interest in the Cargo Corps unusual. There was no incentive for his stakeholders to engage talent that the mainline mission would already provide to meet the collective needs of all colonists. By inserting his own picked hands into the Cargo Corps, van de Graaf could only be making ready to subvert the chain of command, a conclusion reached by the U.N. Intelligence Cell too late to matter. In return for billet and bounty that made her a full stakeholder in the American empressario's proprietary colony, Velisto pledged to move van de Graaf's cargoes out of order, giving preference to machinery and supplies, including unregistered weapons, that the Pilgrims wanted immediately.

Buying Velisto's complicity took some doing: she already had a guaranteed cryobed without the hassle of political obligation. Van de Graaf bought her loyalty with golden parachutes for those she left behind. Civil war had scoured Australia no less badly than Canada, Mexico, and the United States. She had been the breadwinner for disabled parents and a younger sister without bright educational prospects. (Young Lourenço had been afforded her own opportunities by a government program for gifted youth.) Half the considerable bonus paid by van de Graaf provided lifetime home care and school tuition to make her loved ones considerably more comfortable in her absence.

Lourenço Velisto's final fate was emblematic of those who fit only awkwardly into a brute survival scenario. Earlier heroics availed her nothing on the ground. She could not practice, let alone keep sharp, the skills that had earned her a place on Chiron. Van de Graaf honored her stake, and she kept a modest homestead converted from an empty cargo box, subsiding on the dividends paid out from the colony's revenue base and taking two husbands. Still, her contribution was limited. The Pilgrims needed neither an astronaut nor a deep ocean diver. What they did want were firefighters. Velisto became a senior officer in Terra Nova Emergency Operations, a position she found not to her liking. Stakeholders put enormous pressure on the service to give preference to their interests over those of drones, while Velisto's subordinates insisted upon the proudly egalitarian attitudes familiar to their new profession. Most calls were for torn bubbletents or "machine crushes," hardly the fast-moving crises by which she had been forged.

Sources:
Image by Vadim Sadovski on 4KWallpapers.com.

The Pilgrim headquarters of Terra Nova is named after the eponymous settlement in the eponymous Fox television show of just one season (2011).

Quote from: Colonel Corazón Santiago

Man has killed man from the beginning of time, and each new frontier has brought new ways and new places to die. Why should the future be different? - Planet: A Survivalist's Guide

War was a commonplace of the twenty-first century. Nations dueled with their neighbors over resources, with their ideological rivals over influence, and, more and more, with themselves over the future of political and social affairs. Targeting a younger age cohort, the U.N. reduced the number of years of service eligibility behind each applicant, but a war-torn world produced warriors more often than not. The United Nations tried, and failed, to deny this legacy in their recruitment scheme for the Mission to Alpha Centauri.

When it first set out to select colonists and crew for the great expedition, Mission Command seized on the principle that there should be fewer veterans than mere statistics would yield from a representative sample of the global population. This thinking was received favorably by the Security Council. All involved reasoned that strong feelings of national allegiance might fuel mutiny. Donor nations suspected of wanting to lard the passenger manifest with their own partisans knew others might be doing the same in response. Too, common sense dictated that the aggressive mindset inculcated through military training everywhere could be an unstable--if not a completely unnecessary--element to introduce to living environments that would put colonists in extremely close quarters under predictably high stress. Best to raise guardrails. Records of life in the lunar training camps didn't support continuing pessimism on this last count, but as in so many other settings, unjustified bias proved easy to enforce.

Implementing a policy of exclusion was morally questionable. Secondments from member states' armed forces already protected and trained mission staff. Rumor had it that the prize for this blood sacrifice would be guaranteed passage to the new paradise. Instead, Mission Command found reasons to systematically shunt veterans and uniformed personnel into roles that would allow them to contribute to the mission without leading inevitably to eligibility for inclusion among the crew. As instructors, controllers, and evaluators, "the martial set," as Chief of Security Rachael Winzenried described them, went "tall," not "long" on the knowledge, skills, and abilities demanded of "full stakes."

But, of course, soldier and explorer had historically been synonymous. Fighters were the ultimate survivors. The Lewis and Clark Expedition had been a joint civil-military venture led by the commissioned officers. Two centuries later, space programs were still more or less wholly-owned subsidiaries of uniformed services that drew their astronauts from Air Forces. As a practical matter, there were a large number of skill sets, such as pertained to deep-sea exploration, that could be accessed only through service in a military or paramilitary organization, national or corporate. Certain mitigations were therefore put into practice.

If there was no alternative a veteran, the U.N. wanted those least transformed by the martial experience. Psych screenings for current and former service members ran twice the standard length, increasing program washout rates by seven percent. The increased incidence of inter-state war had led to explosive growth in national military spending, but many countries had nonetheless relaxed their draft schemes to recognize civil contribution as a form of national service running parallel to shorter stints in their armed forces. The U.N. demonstrated a consistent preference for those who had not been to war, followed by those long out of uniform. Unity's captain and chief engineer fit the former description; its executive officer, the latter.

Certain complete exceptions did apply. U.N. Security Forces members had, on average, three years of service behind them, often in combat or domestic policing roles, a legacy that Morgan Emergency Services tried to suppress by retraining them according to a curriculum that stressed delayed confrontation. (In an act of massive cognitive dissonance, anyone who fought in the vicious battles for the Space Elevators--when the U.N. abandoned any pretense of reliance on less-lethal methods--was immediately deemed unfit for mission accession.)

Donors enthusiasm for the U.N.'s pacifism waxed and waned over time. When they able to drive bargains favorable to themselves, donor nations unenthusiastic about the Alpha Centauri project but seeking to bank favors with the U.N. foisted their military hardship cases on the mission. Thus the appointment of disgraced Contre-amiral Raoul André-St. Germaine. Some went further, practically emptying their punishment stockades. Assignment to Unity was sometimes the reward for a brilliant career; at others times, a sentence of exile.

There was disparity of access to military expertise among the survivors. The U.N. Marine Corps mostly rallied under its original commander, Canadian General Marcel Salan, and constituted an island unto itself. Any Marine survivors not serving Salan threw in either with Commissioner Pravin Lal, who claimed to have inherited the mantle of mission command from Garland via d'Almeida, or Commander Kleisel Mercator, who likewise established something resembling a military command from loyalist remnants. The New State, too, was practically a self-contained navy pledging personal allegiance to its French leader. Both the Human Tribe and Spartan Confederation were armed camps, and their members veterans almost to a one, though they had done their fighting by and large as auxiliaries and lacked even the whiff of a service-driven identity.

The wealth-driven factions had planned ahead. Morgan, Cobb, and van de Graaf had brought paid men. The former's, provided by one of his own companies, Morgan Safe-Haven, were well-regarded until Planetfall, then turned out to have little stomach for earning pay they couldn't spend. Struan's Sabre Company killers discovered similar misgivings. Van de Graaf's American Reclamation Corporation volunteers liked their arrangement better (they received land rather than pay), but the telling part of the calculation was probably that, unlike the Morganite or Struan's mercenaries, they hadn't expected to return to Earth soon after arrival.

Druze triggerman Kadal Jumblatt commanded the small detail of Morganite private military contractors responsible for the CEO. Power quality issues with his Soviet surplus cryobed led to an ischemic stroke during cryosleep, resulting in total loss of vision in his left eye and loss of fine motor skills in his (dominant) left arm and hand. Morgan had taken Syrian money to make something of allied militias, a plan that went to naught. Jumblatt's chief recommendation, he later said, was that "he survived the complete pig's breakfast we made of things, telling me there was something of the grit there I expected from all my subordinates." Thinking that Jumblatt would be a fine addition to his staff pour encourager les autres, Morgan placed him on a stipend and bundled him off to fight the Cartels in Mexico. Jumblatt convinced the company to buy him a platoon of four tanks and leveled the mansion of a local drug kingpin in Puerto Vallarta, setting the stage for repeat performances throughout Jalisco State. Jumblatt passed on the lucrative contracts for service in the United States, recognizing that Morganite clients couldn't hope to win. During the Unity Crisis, he showed the same sound judgement, hustling his boss forward and away from the Spartans, creating the circumstances that led to Morgan's installation on the bridge. Jumblatt stayed with his men, reuniting with Morgan planetside.

The Sabre Corporation had tested themselves against no less a formidable foe than the Soviet Union. The Pahlavi Dynasty owed its continued residence on the Peacock Throne to Struan's premier service. In 2052, top Struan's paramilitary officer Aluel Gatdet, a Darfuri veteran of the South Sudan People's Defense Forces, coordinated the Imperial Guard's crack defense of the Niavarav Complex against an assault by Soviet Alpha Group and Communist Party of Iran fighters hoping to repeat the successes of a century earlier in Afghanistan and a decade earlier in Iraq. Under Gatdet's personal leadership, the palace defenders held out long enough for Iranian Imperial Army units to arrive. Gatdet was present with Cobb aboard Unity and helped him wrest control of the Corrections Bay from its stunned constables but did not turn up amongst the survivors huddled at White Rabbit's Refuge. Her subordinates were glad to be rid of such a bloodthirsty fighter, though they were reduced by her absence to sporadic banditry rather than the set-piece fights for which they had once been renowned.

Sources:
I don't know the provenance of the first picture. I found it on Tumblr. It appears to be related to the video game Star Citizen.

Second picture is from the Fragments of a Hologram Dystopia page. Couldn't find the artist's name.