Expanse History

Expanse History

Beginnings

As the Twentieth Century was marked by major wars, the twenty first was scarred by the impact of industrialization and technology. Increased automation and the failure to move onto a new economic system led to increasing economic depression and uncertainty. Climate change, resource shortages and ecological degradation where even worse. Both almost inevitably led to resource wars and brush fire conflicts in which what new technology was being developed was extensively and often disastrously deployed.

A major component of this technology was genetic and cybernetic augmentation. The use of (often untested) modified soldiers, biological weapons and ecological modification led to a backlash more severe than that against nuclear power. Face with green goo replicators, berserk cyborgs and conscripts suffering from a host of cancers due to their gene-therapy, it was only natural the world's horrified public would attempt to put the genie back in the bottle.

The resource wars reached their crescendos in the twenty sixties, as limited nuclear wars took place in several parts of the world. These strikes included both attacks against enemy populations but also widespread use of nukes to prevent out of control green goo replication and destroy areas of out of control altered wildlife from spreading. The effect at least prevented further temperature rises but rendered the climate even more volatile, causing more disasters.

The widespread chaos caused by these events panicked many elites and in most major nations they threw their weight behind authoritarian movements who promised to restore order to society. These authoritarian groups general looked backwards for their ideologies, and sought "traditional", pre-industral solutions to solve the problems of the day. Some were religious, others nationalistic or fascistic ideologies. One of their chief targets was the imbedded egalitarianism of the late twentieth and early twenty first century, both at home and abroad. Most of those states which did not fall to revolution fell to invasion.

With the authoritarian revolutions, loss of gender rights was even more severe than the loss of general rights, with women exiled from the workplace in order to lower the number of people seeking jobs and prevent the pressure of automation from causing mass unemployment. The irony of this policy was apparently lost on those who enacted it.

By the twenty eighties technological development was beginning to slow down. Lack of resources and the increasing complexity of science prevented many new discoveries from behind made. However there was one last discovery of great significance: In twenty eighty six a research team at the University of Shanghai discovered a way to access another space time. Called Otherspace, traveling through this other realm allowed vast distances to be covered quickly and bypassed the usual Einsteinian restrictions of the speed of light.

Widely regarded as the final great achievement of science, Shanghai Engines gave humanity back some hope. With it, humankind could take the stars.

Moving out from earth several garden worlds and worlds capable of being teraformed where discovered. Work begun on creating new colonies around them. The vast demands for labour on these colonies created had many social effects, one of which being the emergence of the new feminist movement, the umbrella term for various movements seeking to recapture and expand rights for women. While the movement did have some success it was subject to a fierce backlash on earth and by colonial governments and corporations. While many new feminist groups where closed down, that of the movement that was left was radicalized.

While initially expanding in all directions, human space was now mostly expanding anti-spinward along Orion's Spur, and through a series of garden worlds found there. In January of twenty one oh five AD, humans made first contact with an alien race. Inhabiting a cold, two gravity garden world the Limtis had advanced about to the level humans had in the late twentieth century. They had plateaued earlier than humanity, as their tech had not measurably changed in hundreds of years. First contact was made but communication proved difficult. It seemed the aliens had a cognition quite different to humanities.

First contact only re-affirmed many human's conviction they where the masters of the universe. The Limtis where more primitive than humans, and the two species would not compete with humans for planets, as they required different environments. Many religious and scientific groups claimed humans where most likely the most advanced race in the universe, with the limits of possible technology.

It was in these conditions that the Noah's Dove made its flight. A small independent survey ship based on the colony of Mill's End at the coreward edge of human space, the [i]Noah's Dove[/i] (Usually just called the Dove in Expanse records) had a two women crew: Pilot Susala Toshkhani and surveyor Jéssica Kalil. Susala, a widow, had inherited the [i]Dove[/i] from her husband and with no other assets decided to put it to work, hiring Kalil to avoid being alone with a man for the length of time a survey ship needed to operate. For her part Kalil had found little work for a female surveyor, and her past as a student radical had black listed her from most employment.

The two women were often unable to find well paying work, and where generally only able to perform the lowest paying and most boring jobs other survey crews didn't want. In this capacity they were sent coreward, towards a group of systems which telescopes had already shown had no viable planets.

During transit the [i]Dove[/i] encountered a storm in FTL space and was forced to drop into normal space outside any solar system. It was here they found the object. The device was a disk some fifty meters wide made of unknown substance. The Dove approached and probing the device with radar somehow activated the ring. Instantly the stars around the survey system changed. Kalil and Toshkhani found themselves in a star system. Framed by a vast nebula the star system with a garden world and filled with a fleet of vast alien ships.

It soon became clear that the alien ships and the cities observed on the planet where abandoned. Many of the ships were essentially empty hulls. Kalil calculated their position and judged they were almost two decade's travel away from Earth by even the fastest human FTL drives.

After several days searching the [i]Dove[/i] located another disk, this one linked to some kind of control centre. Boarding they found the control centre was quite different than the disk. It's technology was less advanced and its construction notably different. Both sets of technology where however far in advance of Earth.

Toshkhani was initially excited by the find, believing this could make their fortune but Kalil believed otherwise. She reminded her Captain of the times the pair had been forced to go without payment before, and the many legal angles that corporations might take in order to prevent them from gaining what this priceless find was worth. Instead she suggested they keep it to themselves and alert only certain trustworthy parties of the find. By this she meant several of the activist groups she knew.

Reluctantly Toshkhani agreed. The pair made their way back through the disk and completed their survey mission finding nothing else of consequence. When they returned to Mill's End, Kalil got in touch with several of her old friends and the group began to plan what to do with the system which Toshkhani had named Kadesh.

Setting up a system to secretly transfer personnel and equipment to Kadesh did not prove much of a problem. Few people cared about the Coreward boarder, much less the activities of a few women moving from colony to colony. The group where able to find machines that allowed them to construct much of what they needed on Kadesh, and while they would not sell the technology they found at Kadesh there where considerable natural resources available which could be anonymously sold. Similarly the group anonymously purchased various old ships to transport crews to Kadesh.

A much larger problem was finding enough recruits with the right skill set. Many of the group set about trying to train themselves in needed specialities with mixed results. It was decided that in order to reduce opportunity for the secret to slip, most recruits would stay on Kadesh once they got there, with few heading back to recruit more. This might well have spelled the colonies doom if it had not been for the discovery made beneath the planet's surface.

Months after the initial landing, a group exploring the surface found something extraordinary. Beneath vast building they believed to be a temple, the explorers found a series of tunnels down into the planet's crust. These tunnels led down to a point near the planet's core, where several more structures created of invincible black material where discovered.

It was the first time a human had laid eyes on the works of the precursors. The expedition's leader a young archaeologist called Chen Lijuan led the group inside the structure and found the map room. Drawn on a series of cloth scrolls, the maps showed the galaxy, along with a series of gateways that linked Kadesh and another area on the other side of the galaxy. Many of the gates had special activation codes, also shown on the map, though others, like the one to Kadesha were uncoded.

Chen journeyed back to the surface and described what she had found. Taken by inspiration she told the assembly that eventually their haven on Kadesh would be discovered. Instead she argued they should construct a fleet and leave, following the precursor map across the galaxy. The group's scientists already believed that they could derive drives far faster than those in use on earth from the principles and machines of Kadesh. With these and the precursor maps and codes they could cross the galaxy, going too far for the oppressive earth government to ever find them.

Chen spoke not just in temporal but religious terms. It had not just been luck that had bought them there she said, but fate. They were walking a path behind angelic beings. One day it would let them too become angels. It was Chen's speech, in many ways that laid the ground work for the modern religious life of the Expanse.

The investigation of the Precursors, combined with the discovery about the other species that had once called Kadesh their home created an ideological shift in the area. It appeared the Kadeshi had used cybernetics, AI and genetic engineering extensively. After a while two camps developed. The first, led by Chen, believed that humans should eventually become precursors in mind and body. The other, led by Kalil believed they should instead become as powerful, and moral as the precursors while remaining humans.

Both camps where essentially transhuman but their methods and ideology where from the start quite different. Kalil's group believed that while the human mind could be augmented and even changed humanity's basic ethics and thought processes where more or less sound. Meantime Chen's camp believed the Precursors would have a very different and superior form of cognition which humans should eventually adopt. The split also had practical effects, even on Kadesh, with Chen's faction also believed most advancement would come from studying precursor ruins, while Kalil's preferred general science and investigation.

On Kadesh the two sides worked together with little disunity on the Pilgrimage across the galaxy to escape human space. However the ideological divide that would later begin in the Expanse was laid right from it's very start.

While events on Kadesh transpired the rest of human space was not quiet. Had things been different perhaps the Pilgrimage would have been detected earlier. Instead humanities governments where preoccupied with evolving threat of the Imoxi aliens.

Six limbed lizards with ten eyes each of different sizes, first contact with the Imoxi presented a huge spiritual and temporal challenge to humanity. It begun with first contact which was not on humanities terms. Instead an Imoxi explorer force of five ships entered the space around New Rio colony and after a short interval, initiated first contact by radio.

The Imoxi proved just as hard to understand as Limtis. However while the Limtis where low technology and limited to a single inhospitable world the Imoxi liked planets in much the same zone humans did. Further their technology was advanced, in some areas exceeding that of humans. They had plateaued, but never the less represented what most human governments thought of as a dire threat. Special attention was paid to territorial claims beyond Hunters Notch, an area of empty space that separated the two species spheres. Many human governments and corporations coveted the garden worlds beyond the Notch, and where determined that the Imoxi would not have sole claim.

With the Imoxi empire sitting astride the chain of garden worlds running down the Orion spur, most human governments efforts were occupied in attempting to find a reliable means to communicate with them, and preparing for possible military action. It is little wonder that activates of what where dismissed as a few new age cults where dismissed as unworthy of attention. A few stories ran in the press, but received little interest. Some rumours of Kadesh circulated, but they were generally treated as completely unbelievable by serious intelligence agencies. With the Imoxi threat looming and decades of intelligence gathering against one another the human sphere's intelligence agencies where neither structured nor concerned to chase wild rumours on the coreward fringes of human space. On the other hand Kalil and her associates ran a relatively advanced counter intelligence and information control operation to keep the rumours at only the level of rumours. The widespread social suppression of new feminism in earlier decades had instilled a wary streak and a concern about talking for fear of the consequences which ultimately crippled it's activism but proved an asset here.

In August 2154 relations with the Imoxi reached a new low. Imoxi ships landed on Darius, a world which had been claimed by the Greater Central Asian Bloc and began colonizing it. The human fleet sent to colonize the world was unmolested by the aliens but the GCAB government panicked. Unable to gain a satisfactory diplomatic solution, they called on its treaty arrangements to supply a military one. It proposed to send a fleet to the Imoxi boarder in a show of force, hoping to force them to abandon their colony and withdraw. Darius was far from earth and actually quite distant from any other colony, with the human fleet a minimum of a month's travel from the limits of the human empire, three months from home.

With little else for military force to do the majority of Earth's home fleet and colonial guard fleets where drawn into the venture, stripping Earth and most colony worlds almost bare of military forces. It was the opportunity the Pilgrims had been waiting for.

Over the last five years on Kadesh the Pilgrims had reconditioned twenty four interstellar vessels. The two largest of these were equipped with experimental long jump drives and would fulfil duties of central colony ships. These where the Theia and the Nyx. The other twenty two would act as evacuation transports and secondary vessels. The Pilgrims had also stockpiled a number of weapons and war machines, including antimatter powered parasite gunships and a large arsenal of nuclear weapons to defend the fleet on its long journey.

It was expected however that those weapons might be more use in the evacuation. With military force absent, the Pilgrims fleet moved into the colonies. On April the First, the sixth anniversary of the discovery of Kadesh, the fleets arrived. Using the faster FTL drives they had sourced from Kadesh, the Pilgrimage ships pre-empted Earth's early warning systems and appeared above it and the colonies almost simultaneously.

Speaking for the fleet, Jessica Kalil cut across all channels, announcing the Pilgrimage and offering a slot to any woman who wanted it. She made no mention of the precise destination or anything that could have allowed others to follow. As antimatter powered auxiliaries dropped away from the evacuation ships to take up patrol patterns Kalil threatened dire consequences if the evacuation was interfered with. At the end of the pre-recorded message evacuation drop ships fell towards Earth and the other colonies, landing near each major city and opening their doors to allow Pilgrims through.

A surprising number arrived. While not as great as the fleets wildest projections it was never the less far more than their worst estimates. Under the guns and missiles of the fleet Earth's militaries dithered, and in the end failed to seal off the evacuation sites. Many individual women were unable to board, and far more chose not to, content with their life, or at least, not willing to throw it away for a chance to fly into the unknown.

After a month of evacuation, and before any warships could return from the Imoxi front, the Pilgrimage fleet took on its last passengers and departed. On board where over half a million Pilgrims from Earth, with perhaps a hundred thousand from the colonies. The fleet left human space then turned back around and moved back to Kadesh. Once they where through the gate and the various support craft deployed to the Pilgrimage had returned the gate was placed in a looping diagnostic cycle, expected to shut it down for around two hundred years.

For the next year the Pilgrims prepared. They initiated and trained their new recruits, and policed the surface to remove as many signs they had been there as possible. Several intelligence agents where found among the Pilgrims who had boarded, and where confined for the duration. In general the newly recruited Pilgrims were kept in orbital structures to prevent them laying message capsules for any pursuers.

With their own surface works deconstructed, the Pilgrims collapsed the tunnels leading to the precursor chambers, sealing them deep in the core. With the maps removed it would be unlikely anyone would know where the Pilgrims had gone anyway, however no chances where to be taken.

After over a year of preparation, the last orbital structures where de-orbited and the Pilgrimage fleet docked with it's motherships. On May First 2156, the two vast ships spun up their engines and made their first long jump into the beyond.

The Pilgrimage

The atmosphere for the first two months after the long jump was celebratory. The jump, driving the vessels into another, higher level of otherspace had been highly successful, taking the two colony ships almost as far again as they'd come from Earth.

The celebration began to wane however when the first battle was detected in the near distance. A course change was made to avoid the combat zone, but not before several more skirmishes had been detected.

It quickly became clear that the fleet had stumbled into an alien warzone. The fleet deployed several scouts and began to seek to move out of it while gaining information on what was going on. The results were extremely surprising. Despite being almost a century from human space on normal drive, and travelling coreward, not anti-spinward, one of the hostile parties where the Imoxi. They were engaged with a second species, of centauriod creatures who called themselves the Dyme.

The fleet skirted the combat zone where it could, and negotiated where it could not. Due to their advanced technology neither species wished to confront the Pilgrims. Despite this the Pilgrimage faced many difficulties. Negotiating passage was difficult when faced with the alien minds of the Dyme and Imoxi. Four times the fleet was forced to fight. In otherspace a Dyme fleet attacked them, apparently thinking they were Imoxi. The Pilgrimage was able to flee in the confusion after the Dyme realized their mistake.

A second battle took place when the Imoxi attempted to hijack one of the colony ships during a real space stop. This time the Pilgrims where ready, and the auxiliaries blasted apart several Imoxi vessels. The third battle followed, as a Dyme fleet and Imoxi reinforcements caught the Pilgrimage in their battle. The Pilgrimage negotated passage through Imoxi space and began to head away from the war, but their trials were not done as a large Dyme fleet followed them. Deciding they could not risk the aliens presence the Pilgrimage retreated into a nebula and ambushed the aliens, forcing them to retreat before continuing.

Battles where not the only problems. Otherspace was often stirred up by the battles, and the fleet was occasionally attacked by strange, otherspace life forms.

Despite its trials, trip through the war zone did allow the Expanse to learn more of the Imoxi. Apparently several Imoxi tribes had fled some great disaster that had overwhelmed their homeworlds, using long jump technology much like the Pilgrims where now employing. The Imoxi traded technology for charts of the regions of space that they had crossed, including several dangerous areas of otherspace to be avoided.

With these charts in hand, the Pilgrimage moved on, making its second long jump and passing through another precursor gate, leaving the warzone behind. On the advice of the Imoxi charts, they began to skirt the galactic core and move spinward towards a slightly more distant precursor gate, planning to use it to bypass several otherspace shoals that would otherwise have blocked their passage.

Unfortunately they hit a snag. After two long jumps and significant street and battle damage in the warzone the Theia and Nyx had a number of increasingly serious problems with their drives. Unable to make it to the next gate, the Pilgrimage sought to find a safe port to make repairs. An alien civilization was detected nearby, and the decision was made to begin contact with them. This proved a fruitful decision, and a fateful one. It was here that the Pilgrimage would split.

Expanse Timeline

Build Up

21st Century AD: Climate change, resource wars and wide spread economic failure leads to retrenchment. Gender and genetic rights suffer as women are increasingly pushed out of the work place by automation and overproduction.

AD 2086: Invention of the Shanghai Otherspace FTL Drive by a Chinese team.

AD 2086-2120: End of the age of technological development and the beginning of the technological plateau. The beginning of human space colonization.

2105: First Contact with an Alien race, the Limtis. Communication proves a problem.

AD 2110: Beginning of the New Feminist movement in the colonies.

AD 2149: April first, discovery of the precursor passageway to Kadesh by the small explorer Dove.

2151: March Eighth, First contact with the Imoxi

AD 2150-55: The [i]Noah's Dove's[/i] crew and the various others recruited by them begin secret exploration and colonization of Kadesh. The plans for the pilgrimage are laid based on star maps found in the precursor vaults.

Relations with the Imoxi begin to break down.

AD 2155 August: Darius Incident. Imoxi fleet colonizes a human claimed world. September: Earth's home fleet dispatched to the Imoxi boarder as a show of force together with most warships from the colonies.

AD 2155

Late January/Early February: Pilgrimage fleet departs Kadesh

February Eighteenth: the Pilgrimage fleet arrive at Earth. The evacuation of volunteers begins.

February Twentieth: Pilgrimage fleet arrives at the last colonies

April: The Pilgrimage fleet departs earth on April the first, other fleets rejoin and transit back to Kadesh to prepare for the next stage of the expedition. The passage is set into a two hundred year diagnostic cycle

AD 2156 May First: The Pilgrimage departs Kadesh.

The Pilgrimage

The Expanse