Racing the Darkness - An Alpha Centauri Photologue

[MysticWind]

 

Chironian rules football is the premier post-Planetfall sport. Loosely based upon FIFA regulation soccer, it mutated into sharply divergent forms, mostly owing to the dangerously unstable nature of Planet's surface. Played on rough and uneven terrain, often overlapping with xenofungus fields, footballs of secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and so on importance were introduced to swiftly sub in lost primary balls. Tomorrow Institute historians would introduce the use of multiple types of goals for the multiple assortment of balls into the game, as a rough reconstruction of the ancient imperial Chinese game of cuju.

Because Chiron's mass is a full 30% greater than Earth's, players outfitted themselves in augmented bodysuits for greater speed and maneuverability, overcoming the "subrids bashing into each other" nature of earlier iterations of the game. After Pilgrim player Martin Klaus outfitted his footsuit with hidden personal vernier thrusters in M.Y. 38, the nascent FPFC narrowly ruled in favor of the practice, and thus the "turkey" player position was enshrined into the game.

The ever-present threat of mindworms and other dangerous fauna normalized the weapons carry by spectators, and even players alike. As Chironian football absorbed and blended in numerous sporting traditions from Earth into itself, χ-ballers have adopted melee sections into their matches, imitating the indirectly-sanctioned enforcer fights in ice hockey. Such combat may be undertaken unarmed, as favored by Spartan athletes and Ascendancy episkyros-players, or with light staves or clubs, as preferred by solar faith adherents such as the Sons of Centauri-Ra and Morganite SolarFexers. Because players were operating under high-stress environments with ambient psychosomatic effects, χ-ball began to resemble the mob football of medieval Europe.

Over time, the FPFC has ruled more stringently against such fights, and encouraged the separation of such activities into separate events, ranging from Tribal triathlons where Radnor hoverbike racing and shredder rifle shooting were the two activities that accompanied a Landers rules brawling match, to cosmo golf, where combat clubs were beaten into putting irons. This urge to separate out and disperse violent urges from one sport gave birth to many more, and thus did Chironian rules football lead to the founding of the Space Olympics.

Notes:

All images generated with Craiyon, formerly DALL·E mini

[Trenacker]

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.

[Trenacker]

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.

[Trenacker]

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.

[Trenacker]

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.

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.

[MysticWind]

The Duel of the Fates (pt. 1)

The second century in the history of the Children of the Atom was dominated by a fierce ideological debate between a trio of prominent public philosophes. Human civilization on Chiron was invigorated by the University's breakthroughs in the field of mind-machine interface, and when coupled with the Dreamers’ unexpected discovery of Secrets of the Deep Mind, it seemed like widespread M/MI was soon to come. The Children, the greatest enthusiasts of cybernetics outside of Zakharov’s enhanced matriculation training facilities and Santiago’s Next Gen Warrior skunkworks, were similarly swept up in the craze. Discussion and dissent poured forth from the faction’s innumerable human augmentation test sites, machine intelligence breeding chambers, high energy hot labs, public cybercafés, and technocultural galleries. Even in the dark, cyclopean, server rooms housing the Children’s most cherished factional treasure, the sysadmins and devoperators lifted up their TrueVu data goggles and whispered of the coming day when they could directly commune with the artificial intelligence under their watch.

The Principals

Left- as U.N. Alpha Centauri Mission candidate, grilled by Secretary-General Mongkut himself. Right- as Administrator of L-PACE hot lab

Why should we bind ourselves to brain cells instead of silicon? To build a truly cooperative society, all must speak with the same clarity of thought. Electronics alone deliver fidelity and speed a hair breadth away from that of wetware. Optical photonics perform exponentially better. Quantum circuits, immeasurably so. How many more simple facts must I recite before you can comprehend the future at hand? - Transcript from the Delphi Debates

Even as the faction suffused in ecstasy at the thought of the inevitable Rapture of the Nerds, cooler heads with cogent visions came to rule the debate. The first thought leader to arise was Daoming Sochua, the imperious genius Administrator of the Lightman Plasma Accretion Center for Experiments at Colonia Primus. A consummate polymath holding no fewer than four doctorates and hero scientist of multiple Interkosmos missions, it is said that the madame administrator could very well have upstaged Prokhor Zakharov himself for the title of Unity Chief Engineer. Only mere political misfortune had shuffled Sochua off to a lesser post at the ship’s Atomic Energy Laboratory, where again she was given a subordinate role, this time by Mission Area Director Dr. Johann Anhaldt. (The child of a Golden Chinese national and a former French Indochinese subject of Khmer extraction, both university professor exiles who had met, then married, in the neutral territory of Soviet Outer Mongolia, Sochua found her appointment to the mission alternatively claimed and questioned by her parents’ rival governments.) Her steely-eyed handling of the AEL’s evacuation dodging crossfire between Spartan and Kellerite guns, her meticulous management of the early colony’s scarce supplies, her personal leadership on resource hunt missions into the Monsoon Jungle, all led to a meteoric rise within the faction.

At L-PACE she was known for her resolute and pitiless administration, delivering a drumbeat of breakthroughs each mission half-decade, increasing the faction’s energy output to surplus levels. For all of her brilliant drive, Sochua was known to be often irascible and easily-frustrated with her colleagues and subordinates alike. She was insistent upon the perfection of her assessments, though open to being proven wrong if presented with sufficient evidence. She rarely ever was. Her mental speed led to pronouncements of stunning conclusions, provably right, but her listeners required more time to understand those proofs. For the Lightman Center physicists, the prestigious post was often a difficult one, and Sochua’s tendency to talk down to them as intellectual lessers only exacerbated the misery.

So perhaps it was her track record of being misunderstood by her fellows, going as far back, per her psych profile, to her childhood as a prodigy, that led Daoming Sochua to become the flagbearer of the Uplift thesis. Also named Instrumentalists, after the ancient speculative fiction of TwenCen author Cordwainer Smith, as well as their own leader’s arch-pragmatic instrumentalist ethos, Uplifters believe that radical cybernetic technologies ranging from M/MI all the way to brain uploading are the natural evolutionary path for mankind. Furthermore, they are necessary prerequisites for any viable, sustainable civilization. Such technologies would bridge the gap in understanding between different intelligences, allowing instantaneous consensus. And when applied across all of society, these advances would harden the weakest link in the great chain of being, raising the baseline to stratospheric heights.

For an apex brain such as Sochua, the possibility of infinite clarity proves too dazzling to be deferred. Throughout the debate she advanced her thesis of uplift treatments to all, embracing cybernetics as the ultimate tool towards mental and intellectual perfection. Whether this means simply issuing cyber modules implanted into the brain and body and nootropics to the entire faction population, or one day uploading all of humanity’s minds into a fully-rendered virtual reality in an act of mass digital ascension, nothing was out of the question. Sochua and her Instrumentalists believe in a carefully managed, rationally-administered rapture. No limit to human augmentation should be imposed. Indeed, she has even offered her own neural topography as a base for the construction of a superior cybernetic brain, outraging her detractors.

Left- as Unity Chief Roboticist shortly after Defense of the Primary Aft Machine Shop, Planetfall. Right- as chairwoman of the Drexler Foundation

Science and industry go hand in hand, reshaping all societies. But it is not sufficient to discover simply for pure research, nor to build for something as small-minded as wealth. Instead, the sciences of the physical should merge with the social to create an order of true ability. With these specks of dust, gentlemen, I intend to do just that. - Pronouncement of the Technate

On the other side of the question of human augmentation stands Sylvia Gauss, chair of the Drexler Foundation, three-term Director of Industrial Mechanization, and former Chief Roboticist of the late Unity. Born of a patent clerk and a Reform Rabbi in Switzerland when the Vitalists renamed it to Novus Helvetia, she gravitated towards engineering from an early age, disassembling family cuckoo clocks and quicklinks alike. Led the national team to victory in the Eurasian Robotics Grand Tournament at age fourteen. Shortly after graduating from ETH Zurich with degrees in Mechatronics Engineering and Systems Analysis, started a boutique industrial design firm specializing in domestic robotics. Her standout product was the Ive Award-winning Futura Artficis Barbegazi, a machine servitor that could perform household duties as well as traverse snowy terrain, capable of both frolicking with skiing children and rescuing them from avalanches alike. It soon became a major hit in the country and throughout the Alpine states. Initially rejecting buyout offers from Togra Labs, Gauss eventually acceded to only selling the Barbegazi patents to the research giant. A ruggedized model was quickly developed, and the Togra Krampus became the rival to General Atomics Corporation's snow-capable militarized edition of Autonomous Work Unit 5 (the “Mr. Frosty”), ironically becoming sold to the Helvetian Armee. Meanwhile, Gauss was appointed to the Unity mission as Chief Roboticist, overseeing the ship’s expansive fleet of mechanical servitors and scientific probes. She ably navigated the Planetfall crisis, saving vital machine parts and irreplaceable equipment with the B-9 Robby Rambler-Crane roller warbots under her steadfast command, taking out mutineer threats with ease.

As her countryman and fellow robotics enthusiast, Anhaldt welcomed Gauss and her robotics team into the Children of the Atom upon the end of Planetfall. From the beginning she maintained close ties to the Mediator’s inner circle, applying her mechatronics expertise to the desperate survival on the frontier. Whether reprogramming Togra Starcatcher drones to serve as both resource surveyors and anti-mindworm weapons, or repairing the logic boards of Apple Electronics iSeek rovers herself, Gauss cut a prominent profile within the young faction. With hologenic charisma and opinionated effervescence, she naturally floated into management with extensive plans for how to best use the colony’s robotics fleet in the absence of an established Industrial Base. She maintained a cool but correct working relationship with Daoming Sochua, whose grandiosity and confrontational attitude alienated many fellow Central Resources Board members. Gauss proved to be a light-hearted foil.

As the Children of the Atom’s societal infrastructure developed and its government scaled up, Gauss would come to preside over the faction’s entire mechanical workforce as a Director. Gradually becoming bored of governance, she saw that the meta-processes of the faction, indeed for all modern post-industrial civilization, could be further refined and optimized with technologies right beyond the horizon. Gauss started the Drexler Foundation, dedicated to the advocacy of nanotechnology R&D and social engineering the state to properly handle the implications. Trusting that revolutionary nanomachines were soon to come, Gauss tirelessly spread her message throughout the faction and beyond, even directing the foundation to undertake several promising molecular assembler experiments with the help of Schreiber Project contractors. Thus she was well-positioned to be a critic of “neural apocalypticism” when the M/MI hype cycle began.

Having risen from a less-than-privileged childhood by her own abilities after the loss of her father to cancer, and after seeing gender discrimination shut out her mother, Sylvia Gauss proclaimed that society must advance into the Nanotech Age in a fair, equitable manner. Once near-unlimited manufacturing capabilities were available, human civilization would no longer be the same. It was vital now to begin necessary reforms in anticipation of that future. The Post-Scarcity thesis focuses on dealing with the imminent end to resource constraints and the dawn of fully luxurious automation. With the adequate engineering and systems in place, run by the best of the best, nanotech could produce riches beyond the dreams of the ancient alchemists, and fears of Gray Goo scenarios would be carefully dispelled. How to determine who was the best? Pure merit. Gauss’s Meritocrats call for the radical restructuring of civilization into a technocratic meritocracy. Both people and assistive A.I. would work hand to hand to determine which individuals would be fit to administer and rule, just as a technician chooses the best tools. A faction built around the perfect tool of nanotechnology could have none other than the best technicians to wield it. Far more concrete and less religious than fretting about A.I. salvationism, the Post-Scarcity Meritocrats claim: No need to put stock in the M/MI bubble when the world was about to change before their eyes- no need to worry about ethical dilemmas about mind uploading and forced cyborging when human minds were sufficient. It was fine to be aided by A.I., but as with every advancement in human history, no need to allow our inventions to rule us: humanity alone could manage the future.

Left- as Annikki Luttinen, inspecting Unity datacore integrity shortly before succumbing to post-hibernation rheumatic fever. Right- as Aki Zeta-5, Prime Function

Those within the Consciousness rightfully see that there is no undefined future yet to come. All among our number already walk in the presence of the Singularity. - One Future

The most enigmatic of the three seeresses manifested in the physical shell of Prime Function Aki Zeta-5, née Annikki Luttinen, one-time Subroutine Specialist of the late UNS Unity. From impromptu de-escalator of the New Kola Crisis between the Unified Norden Realm and the Soviet Union, to principal researcher of the Zakharov Research Institute’s landmark project BlueBook, the personality that was once Luttinen has been seemingly subsumed by the entity known as Aki Zeta-5. Since her mysterious appearance at the University of Planet, Luttinen has claimed that she is in the possession of a mysterious algorithm, the child task spawned from a decades-long experiment conducted while the ship had been in transit to Alpha Centauri. Boasting apparent advanced computer implants wired directly into her cerebral cortex, Luttinen insists that she is the first shell of a new race of cybernetic beings she designated the Consciousness. Inviting all to join the Consciousness, she won over a small segment of the University’s population intrigued by her singularitarian message, but was ultimately cast out by the provost himself for creating a Bayesian cult of personality and for advocating dangerous pseudoscientific body modifications.

Welcomed to the Children of the Atom for their faith in artificial intelligence and the technical expertise that they carried (the entire undergraduate Applied Cybernetics class of University Base had joined Aki Zeta-5 in her exile), the Consciousness found themselves a new home. Their community was permitted to limited self-rule, and members distributed themselves throughout the faction, with the largest partitions located at Primus and Colonia Quartus. Initially inspiring as much fear and discomfort among the majority population as they did among the University, the Consciousness has found a patron from the Mediator himself: Dr. Johann Anhaldt has explicitly guaranteed the cyborgs equal protection before the Children’s code. They are permitted to live, proselytize, and even engage in conversion.

Indeed, the last is perhaps their greatest cause for xenophobia: those who are inducted into the Consciousness must undergo a secretive procedure in which they are augmented with the same mysterious computerized implants adorning the Prime Function. While the cyborgs are transparent in most ways, they have not provided technical schematics on the precise nature of these devices, which they claim are a means to directly interface with the Unity algorithm. Thus are members of the Consciousness resistant to any sort of extensive inspection by outsiders; indeed, their customary implants include a killswitch which upon the shell process’s termination, or the activation of a personalized killphrase, completely annihilates the shell via either plastique explosives or a bioelectric overload. The rationale for such a drastic self-destruct mechanism has not been given by Aki Zeta-5, nor any member of the Consciousness. Lavish bounties have been issued for the reclamation of an intact cyborg cadaver; from Morgan Robotics corpos, Cartel imagineers, Schreiber Project rogue scholars, and most interestingly, the highest offer from the Tomorrow Initiative’s Core Leadership itself. Though infamously mum on the matter, Controller Metrion has made statements indicating that the Consciousness is withholding invaluable data lost with the Unity. Certainly, the community has not authorized a full code review of the algorithm they claim to embody.

But despite heavy criticism of his sheltering of “Borgy freaks”, Anhaldt has continued to protect them, as his nature to stomach scientific heterodoxy and counterscientific subcultures. The majority of the Children of Atom do not truly believe that the Consciousness are actually in possession of an actual Mind-Machine Interface. Most believe their implants are simply modified versions of the same prosthetics given to war veterans suffering from severe mental damage, or even full-immersion VR recreation modules. The algorithm? Just a failed experiment in safely pre-sentient code, terminated mere weeks into the mission. As for Luttinen herself? Clearly an individual completely disturbed from a severe case of rheumatic fever during Planet’s traumatic founding myth. Or more darkly, yet another self-proclaimed prophet among the many charlatans of Chiron.

On the other side, the minority of believer-xenophobes claim that the algorithm is clearly a Skynet-in-gestation, an A.I. that has escaped its box and doubtlessly intent on supplanting or destroying humanity- and is allowed to do so by the faction! Theories of its origin include that it was created by Prokhor Zakharov himself and bears his personality rendered in digital sentience, that it was based on Luttinen’s neural patterns and thus explains how it had captured her, or that it was uplifted by an alien monolith and the Consciousness’s implants are alien artifact-derived M/MI…

By the second century, as actual human-invented M/MI seemed inevitable, the Consciousness broke from its usual quiet messaging to declare that the Convergence was upon all of Planetkind. Aki Zeta-5 appeared on the datalinks to speak of her thesis: the Consciousness had labored for centuries to describe the nature of their hybrid existence. Now that the science of the “Biologicals” has caught up, they were soon to be free to interface directly with the algorithm itself. Soon M/MI would be available to the masses, and all would have the opportunity to speak directly with the Singularity. There was no further reason to putter around with experimental A.I. generations inferior and decades older than the child of BlueBook and the Unity datacore. No logic to rejecting the offer: you may keep your flesh and your feelings, but you will embrace the left-brained path into true sentience.

As she spoke of her techno-messianic message, hordes of Convergers flocked to her side, even if most of these new followers were still too squeamish to undergo the procedures to join the Consciousness. But yet, despite Luttinen’s new triumphant tone, the cyborg community remained as non-confrontational and as docile as always. Careful to keep their message as non-commanding as possible, they continued to extend open arms to outsiders to join, but refrained from any insistence. Many of the new Convergers were not so passive, some agitating that this was the sign that the algorithm must be shared with the world. Some advanced the Wintermancer Hypothesis, claiming that the future of the Children of the Atom would be the merging of the faction’s algorithm with that of the Consciousness. Aki Zeta-5 has remained quiet on such a possibility, but continues to advocate that the future of all sentience is unification under the algorithm, where each entity would remain as distinct nodes within the great computer gestalt intelligence.

Thus, did the three Fates inspire one of the greatest ideological battles of the Children of the Atom.

Casting

Daoming Sochua is portrayed by Ming-Na Wen as Camile Wray from Stargate Universe.

Sylvia Gauss is portrayed by Heather Graham as Dr. Judy Robinson from Lost in Space (1998), and Dr. Molly Clock from Scrubs.

Annikki Luttinen is portrayed by Alicia Vikander as Ava from Ex Machina.

Notes:

The concept of Civilization: Beyond Earth’s Sochua as an alternate leader of the Cybernetic Consciousness is courtesy of ari.

Sochua’s science center is named after MIT physicist Alan Lightman.

Sylvia Gauss is another original custom faction leader from the Second Ship.

Wintermancer refers to the marriage of Neuromancer and Wintermute.

[Trenacker]

Hi, all. Just a quick note to let folks know that I'm recovering from some illness at the moment. Unfortunately, I don't have an ETA on when I will be back in action. I hope next week, at the latest.

Contributions, ideas, questions, requests--all welcome!

[Trenacker]

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.

[Trenacker]

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.

[Trenacker]

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.

[Trenacker]

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.

[Trenacker]

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.

[Trenacker]

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.

[Trenacker]

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.

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.

[Trenacker]

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.