Stars of Steel

• 4807-4882 - The Arrival

They came out of the stormy skies, aliens from beyond the stars. The term they called themselves translated to Chandlers, the "merchants of light", and they had a simple offer; they were here to trade. They offered physical goods, knowledge and travel, all for often unusual prices such as (most notoriously) a small number of humans "Of an unusual sort and psyche." All these were prices that the kings and leaders of the 49th century were quite ready to pay. Many of the goods the Chandlers sold were ultimately believed to have originated elsewhere, built by unknown other alien races; the Chandlers themselves being characteristically mute on this subject. Overall in retrospect the Chandlers demonstrated a notable, almost reckless lack of concern for the end-use of their goods, though they did completely reject the prospect of selling arms or anything that could be easily weaponized. Other technologies theat they sold proved relatively easy to understand and replicate; by the middle of the 49th century humanity had a crude grasp of electricity and levitation engines trailed by its collective theoretical understanding.

As a general rule the goods sold by the Chandlers came 'as-is' with no documentation beyond that required to operate them. They were mostly used intensively and to the point of disrepair long before their operating principles were understood - in many cases, even before relevant analytical technologies and techniques were invented. Consequently while the Chandler's goods gave humanity a leg up in many fields, it was only a temporary one with humanity left to puzzle out how to copy or replace them with its own collective ingenuity. Many of the most sophisticated and powerful items were ultimately found on the colonies and it seems likely that the Chandlers were even less concerned than usual about long-term effects on worlds with populations of only a few million. In a number of (in)famous cases, these long-term effects didn't manifest until generations after the departure of the Chandlers.

This is not to say that the Chandlers were amoral and uncaring in all their dealings; they responded to a series of severe famines during the mid-49th century in a typically Chandler way, by transporting those suffering off Gaia to habitable worlds. Many of these settlements both large and small were placed in the outer edges of what was colloquially called 'known space' if not beyond. Some, such as Tempest, were isolated for a century or more; as the Chandler-supplied heighliners only went to predefined locations and human-directed exploration during the 49th and 50th centuries was a slow, fumbling affair it was easy for these 'unknown' colonies to be completely missed. It was not until the Reconnection-era survey of accessible star systems that humanity had a thorough catalogue of human-settled systems and worlds, including a few settlements on otherwise inhabited worlds that had simply never been identified (typically due to being on different continents) until the widespread arrival of orbital remote imaging in the exocolonies. The legacy of these population movements was that by the sudden departure of the Chandlers in 4882, roughly one in ten humans lived outside of Gaea's atmosphere; fifty million on the sky islands, Nergal or Inanna and at least a hundred million spread over dozens of exocolonies in other solar systems.

• 4885-5030 - The Long Absence and the end of the Heroic Age of Space Exploration

The departure of the Chandlers had a very rapid effect on human space travel as it was soon discovered that without the Chandlers providing regular navigational updates, the automated heighliners could no longer find a way to their destinations. By 4885, only two years since the Chandlers' departure, half of all destinations were inaccessible and by the end of the decade the number of extrasolar worlds that the heighliners could still path to had fallen to roughly a half-dozen with several more that could only be visited intermittently, a number that stayed essentially static for the next century. As most of the collective Gaean merchant skyfleet consisted of heighliners, this meant that most of the human-settled worlds were economically isolated; these navigational limits also concentrated heighliner activity in both the solar system proper and what would late become known as the 'core worlds'.

By 4890 the Long Absence was in full swing; outside of the half-dozen systems still regularly accessible by heighliners the excolonies were effectively on their own. The occasional storm-blown levidrive tramp or mail ship that made it to the outer systems brought news from Gaea - and most critically, books and technical volumes - but plantations rotted and mines went unworked as exocommerce withered. In most colonies life slowed and lacking many of the industrial advancements of the homeworld they settled into a rustic existence with a low level of urbanization. Ironically at this same time Gaea was going through a period of rapid development, urbanization and widespread industrialization.

Human-built leviships were woefully incapable of making up for the collapsed heighliner trade; with the exception of a few behemoths like the Great Northern none were remotely comparable in size or cargo capacity to the heighliners and even those that were suffered due to simply being slower and less efficient in various respects. Most were much smaller, meant for moving relatively small cargos or non-mercantile activities such as exploration. While they could continue to deliver mail, some passengers and high-value items this was a highly limited substitute, particularly given the limits of Gaean navigational abilities in the 50th century. Furthermore over the decades the black-box levidrives and related machinery slowly began to fail, further reducing humanity's ability to travel outside the Solar system. By the Great War a quarter of all long-range levidrive ships (including heighliners in this total) were inoperable or unsafe for planetary landings. By the World War two decades later this number had risen to half and finally by 4982, the centennial of the Chandler's departure, exactly one dozen individual levidrive ships still operated, all of them too much valuable to be used for mundane cargo travel. Intermediate-range leviships built during the latter half of the 50th century could replace - and even improve upon - the aging heighliners, but only in the core systems. More problematic from a social perspective, the pressure valve of departure for the exocolonies was greatly reduced and the 50th century seemed to make up for all the intercine violence and political upheavals that the 49th had avoided.

The century and a half of the Long Absence also saw the propagation of various ethos, ideologies and even in several colonies, genetic changes. One of the most well known of the last was Cliona, where a "eugenics" modification purchased off the Chandlers spread through the population via what was later recognized as (and formed much of the late 50th century understanding of) a gene drive. By the time this gene drive burnt itself out a century and a half later less than one in five Clionans was still a 'classic' human. Even more unusual changes happened on the isolated colony of Tempest where no men had existed for almost two centuries. Unusual technology was all but left behind by the Chandlers on more than a dozen colony worlds.

It is notable that until the latter half of the 50th century even the idea of battles between spacecraft was seen as fantastical. It was only the development of electronic detection system and guided missiles that made it worthy of consideration; until then ships were effectively unfindable with just the simple telescopes that existed and weapon ranges were all but nonexistent. The security situation of the tripartite cold war pushed theory into praxis and by the turn of the millenia there were a half-dozen embryonic space fleets patrolling the Solar System. These early fleets were made up small and not particularly numerous deep-sky ships; by the Peneleos Incident some four decades after the first armed deep-sky ship was launched a single wet-navy supercarrier still outmassed every deep-sky warship from Gaea combined. That would soon change.

• 5030-5080 - Second Contact

The great advances in electronics that ushered in the information age during the latter half of the 50th century revolutionized deep sky navigation during the early 51st century; navigational capabilities doubled (in terms of reliably accessible systems) between 5000 and 5010 and doubled again during the following decade. Various other technologies likewise matured and the great renaissance of space travel and a return to the halcyon days of the late 49th century seemed to be dawning. Then the Nureeg attacked.

The Nureeg were an offshoot of another alien race, the Hinsivaal. Several centuries in advance of humanity, across distant stars their star-spanning mutual civilization had fallen upon hard times with the accidental ecocide of their homeworld. One group, the Ylgaric Conclave, had made its way to human space in a hunt for, to put it simply, loot. While their interest was in technic artifacts from the Chandlers, being able to get resources from now entirely isolated human exocolonies was a boon as well. Having arrived in human space in the last decade or so of the 50th century they slowly expanded their raids and pseudo-imperial domain. The intersection of their expanding territories and the expanding frontiers of Gaean re-exploration was inevitable and it happened in 5027. It was a scuffle that would only end one way, the Ylgaric raiders pouncing on the Jaian Imperial scout ship Peneleos which barely managed to squawk a distress call about 'alien attackers' before being seized - it was the third scout ship to be lost in as many months but the first to do so within receiving range of a nearby station.

At first this was seen as a trick and rhetoric began to escalate sharply, but several months later, an entirely unrelated Ylgaric convoy arrived in the Maeve system and forced the surrender of a set of colonies that had little more than gendarmeries and whom the vague rumors of space pirates were treated as entertaining falsehoods. The Lemurian ship Monitor was destroyed on the ground by some form of energy weapon, recorded by dozens of viewpoints. Weeks later, the core world of Antillia was raided; with a population of over a hundred million it was a brazen attack and one that brushed aside all resistance. The nation-states of Gaea and the core worlds were stunned. Public panic set in and was then brought under control while a tectonic realignment took place in the halls of power; the cold war powers warily stared at each other but this was a threat bigger than any of them. By the start of the 4th decade of the 51st century, Gaea and the core worlds were reorganizing themselves under the aegis of the Human Alliance.

During its first fifty years the Alliance achieved precious few victories, all of them on the ground. Hampered by generational gaps in technology the only answer was sustained militarization and a dedication to defensive wars on the ground and to that end much of the energies of the cold war were redirected to defensive preparation and planning. A seemingly endless series of regular and irregular weapons were designed, built and shipped to the core worlds and the colonies not currently under 'xenothreat'. Parallel efforts were made to capture alien technology to be investigated and reverse-engineered.

The militarism of this period overshadowed the expansion of civilian interests out of the Gaean core. The Nureeg were never the 'space raiders' that Gaean propaganda rapidly portrayed them as; boarding and ransacking random civilian ships was vanishingly rare. Much more commonly they would impose a toll, often in valuable metals or other refined substances and otherwise let traffic proceed. Individual human-inhabited worlds would have a larger-scale but similar extractive relationship. So long as the Conclave was paid, they mostly ignored the human goings-on. This led to extensive private-sector development outside of patrolled Gaean space along with a steady exodus of individuals from 'safe' space into 'alien' space. While still a small fraction of the population movements that naturally happened in core worlds, between 5030 and 5080 more than ten million people left Alliance-controlled space.

For their part much of the Ylgaric Conclave were slow to recognize just what the human homeworld sector had mutated into; actual conflict was intermittent (in truth, enough to feed Gaean paranoia but nowhere near a meaningfully threat to the core worlds) and captured human weapons were taken as trophies, not for analysis. Too, the Ylgarics were not much of a state; they had few of what were considered 'conventional' apparati of state and were more concerned by their own internal politicking between their cliques to pay attention to the distant military antics of the humans they still held in mild disregard. The Gaean preparation for an offensive to push back the front lines thus came as a surprise, one the Nureeg of the Ylgaric Conclave took poorly.

• 5080-5100 - The Long War

The end of the 51st century saw the Alliance finally move onto the offense. While still far behind the Nureeg, a half-century of militarism and reverse-engineering had given the Gaeans a large and well-organized military. The Alliance's strategy was simple; recognizing that they continued to be comprehensively outclassed in space they would advance progressively and install a significant garrison on each 'liberated' world which would then act as a logistics base and launching-off point for the next advance. Even with the major blocs each spearheading individual offenses it was a fundamentally slow, measured process.

Early Nureeg responses were mostly to just scatter a few munitions packs as they departed but a kinetic reaction was inevitable. The Ylgarics had a handful of true warships but most had been maintained in mothballs for many decades. The more common 'raider' was essentially an armed transport, carrying troops and 'payments' with a light arsenal to protect itself or enforce the will of its captain on recalcitrant locals. While Nureeg technical superiority was such that even a militarized transport could fight and win against a cutting-edge Gaean warship, each advance fleet could number up to a hundred and landing zones rapidly became thickets of defensive systems.

The two decades of war saw a stiffening of Ylgaric defenses and the introduction of new weapon on both sides, but despite the various advantages the Ylgaric Conclave had begun with they could never get into a position of being able to put a halt to the Alliance's plodding advances. The industrial might of eight billion humans was simply not something less than one-hundredth that in Nureeg could match and Alliance technology was catching up far faster than the scattershot, amateurish Ylgaric R&D could invent new counters.

While Alliance propaganda painted a picture of a liberation struggle, many of the human-settled worlds that underwent the so-called liberation saw it as nothing of the sort. The Alliance could often be zealous and overbearing and a common sentiment was that the 'liberation' had simply traded one overlord for another. This friction continued to poison relations between the Gaeans and the exocolonies.

• 5100-5148 - The Long Peace

With the Ylgaric Conclave broken and surrendered, humanity was finally preeminent in its space. Within a decade the Alliance had achieved de facto control over all remaining human exocolonies and settlements; under this aegis the various major Alliance member-states established their own informal empires and webs of influence while core world based megacorps flourished.

The postwar peace was hardly peaceful though. While there was a great deal of inertia in a seventy year alliance, the major blocs in the Alliance were already jockeying for strategic and political positions before the war was even concluded - as they had before, but at a much accelerated pace. The lack of external threat allowed for all manner of quiet disputes to go loud and fundamental differences in ideologies to start coming between different human polities and corruption to take root. Various local insurgencies also smouldered in the periphery as distant settlements - most of which had long deviated from their Gaean origins over two or three centuries of isolation - chafed under distant Gaean rule. Some of these were spurred on by core world rivals or by megacorps angling for favorable contracts.

The discovery and activation of the Fargate leading to the Vaal sector and subsequent contact with the Nureeg and Hinsivaal therein spurred a new generation of weapons but did little to revitalize the Alliance. Thousands of warships large and small, tens of thousands of fighters and hundreds of thousands of armored vehicles were built in preparation for a war that never came. Human and Vaali diplomats struck deals, found peace and forged relations. And in doing so, put the final poison into the Alliance's body politic.

The war and the peace had been long and exhausting for the core worlds and with a massive multilateral treaty signed with the Vaali, the perceived threat dwindled and the massive military budgets were seen as a wasteful drain. The long habits of alliance were difficult to shake however, and it took two decades for reforms to percolate though - and then only two years for the Alliance to unravel. Millions of soldiers returned home as innumerable pieces of weaponry were left in local hands.

• 5148-5165 - Chaos in the Periphery

The dissolution of the Alliance had two noteworthy political effects. The first was that the major blocs were now free to scheme openly against one another as core world politics went through a tectonic evolution. While already reluctant allies for one, perhaps two generations by this point, the end of the Alliance meant that they were allies no more. The second was that dozens of exocolonies and settlements (re)gained their autonomy. This was fertile ground for both proxy and genuine conflicts.

• 5165-5190 - Rebalance and Realignment

The last twenty-five years have seen a slow but steady rebalance as the periphery settlements develop and their politics mature. Many were benificiaries of Alliance largess decades previously and now they were increasingly able to engage the distant core world blocs if not as equals, at least as counterparts.