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How it began…


The Great Eastern War, sparked by the Taiwan Crisis of 2057, kills 43,000,000 people. Deserted by all but a handful of its allies/client states, the Communist Party loses its internal mandate and is replaced with a façade democracy, which the rest of the world refuses to accept as a genuinely representative government.

In 2059, the Federated Government of Earth is created, intended as a multi-continental federal system, not a consultative body. As a major, deliberately unifying project recalling the twentieth century “race to the Moon,” the FGE commits to achieving interstellar flight. China, which sees the invitation to join the FGE as an effort to further subordinate it, rejects membership but commits to its own, independent interstellar flight program as part of its assertion of continued political, scientific, and economic power.

In 2082, the first FGE-sponsored Bussard RAIR (Ram Augmented Interstellar Rocket) departs the Solar System for the stars. Additional state and privately sponsored expeditions follow.

In 2086, China launches its first state-sponsored generation colony ship. Whereas FGE-sponsored expeditions are deliberately multi-ethnic, Chinese colony expeditions (like many privately sponsored FGE expeditions), are not. Chinese colony expeditions represent just under thirty percent of all sublight colonization flights and are deliberately sent to star systems well separated from those being colonized by the rest of humanity in a conscious effort to create an interstellar “Chinese sphere.”

In 2109, faced with a progressively shrinking share of the international and system economy (and access to the scientific community), China finally (and grudgingly) joins the FGE on its fiftieth anniversary. China-sponsored colony flights continue, however. There is some concern about this among other nation state members of the FGE, but given that the colonies will be light-years (and decades—or centuries—of travel) away from Earth (or any of the other colonies), no formal objections are raised.

The situation changes radically in 2149, when the Fasset drive (originally tested in an extremely unreliable form in 2137) becomes a reliable means of propulsion, allowing an effective velocity three hundred times that of light.

For the next 165 years, Fasset drive-powered colonies spread out not just from Earth but from some of the older daughter colonies, as well. The sphere of human occupied (or at least explored) space expands radically. The FGE assumes responsibility for interstellar survey but sends out fewer state-sponsored colony ships. In partial compensation, private colony expeditions multiply, but the Chinese government continues sponsoring ships which are now predominantly Chinese-crewed but also include non-Chinese Asians who desire to preserve their “traditional cultures” in the face of the Western influence which has inundated them for the last two or three centuries. They continue to seek destination stars well separated from colonies of other ethnicities.

In 2231, the Terran Federation is formally founded, tying its member systems together into a single government. Ominously, despite the fact that all human settled planets are invited to join it, not one of the China-sponsored colonies attends its constitutional convention or ratifies that Constitution as a member.

In 2237, the majority of the Chinese/Asian sponsored colonies create the Tè Lā Lián Méng (Terran League), which is democratic in terms of individual enfranchisement but also highly corporatist and dominated by consensus-building within elite power groups.

For the next hundred years or so, the Federation and the League expand separately. The Federation is more successful in building industrial infrastructure and expands more rapidly. A handful of Asian-sponsored colonies closer to the Federation than to the League become Federation member systems, and a handful of FGE colonies closer to the League than to the heart of the Federation become League members. Other systems, which refuse to join either star nation and instead remain independent, are known as “feral worlds.” Initially this is because their citizens refuse to be “domesticated” by either of the interstellar superpowers; ultimately, the term becomes a derogatory pejorative applied to all of them by the League and Federation alike.

In 2340, humanity encounters the Rish, reptilelike, extremely militant aliens whose interstellar empire—the “Rishathan Sphere”—is larger than either of the human star nations, but substantially smaller than their combined volume and, especially, population. The Federation establishes its first embassy on Rishatha Prime in 2347. The Sphere establishes its first embassy on Old Earth simultaneously. The League, which is slightly farther from the Sphere than the Federation, does not establish formal diplomatic relations until 2350.

What neither human star nation realizes is that the Rish perceive humanity as a threat. Humans appear to advance technologically at a faster rate, their populations grow much more rapidly, and they prefer lower population densities, all of which means that the human-occupied sphere is expanding much more quickly than the Rishathan Sphere. Faced by that unpalatable realization, the Great Council of Clan Mothers determines that a strategy to prevent human dominance must be developed and implemented.

For the next fifty-odd years, the Sphere deliberately fosters economic and trade links with both the Federation and the League. They encourage cultural exchanges with humanity, although neither the League nor the Federation is aware that the planets to which human study teams are admitted are “Potemkin villages,” carefully designed façades intended to prevent the humans from understanding the true nature of the Sphere.

In their study of their human competitors, the Rish become aware of the original, long-standing animosity which led to the creation of the two independent interstellar human powers they confront. That animosity has died back to little more than a tradition of dislike, but the Rish decide to resurrect it. From 2384, the Sphere’s diplomats (and human propaganda efforts financed by the Sphere) play slowly and subtly upon that lingering animosity, and it grows steadily more intense.

In 2475, Rishathan efforts move to active covert operations with the destruction of the League passenger liner Shao Shi (and all 7,800 of its passengers and crew) in Federation space in what the League insists was an act of deliberate sabotage. The Federation investigates but can find no evidence of any Federation involvement and rules the ship’s destruction an accident. It was, however, carried out by human agents of the Sphere (who had no idea for whom they were actually working). They were then eliminated by the Sphere…but not until it had anonymously provided entirely genuine evidence of their actions to the League, which thus has “proof” of a deliberate mass murder which the Federation insists was merely “an accident of navigation.”

Three years later, the Federation-flagged passenger ship Sargasso is destroyed in League space in a mirror image of the Shao Shi incident. The similarity is not lost upon the Federation, especially when evidence (anonymously provided) indicates that Sargasso’s destruction was a reprisal attack by League citizens who lost loved ones aboard Shao Shi.

Relations between the Federation and League become increasingly acrimonious. Trade declines, there are other incidents, and while only a few are on the scale of the Shao Shi or Sargasso disasters, they multiply and accelerate. Many of the more spectacular incidents are orchestrated by the Sphere, but the animosity the Rish are stoking provides ample opportunity for genuine, purely human-on-human acts of violence. And as they continue to increase, both the Federation and the League begin building genuine interstellar navies for the first time in their histories.

In 2565, the League, in response to pirate raids originating from the “feral world” of Cabochon in the Crestwell System, forcibly incorporates Crestwell into the Tè Lā Lián Méng. This is a move of genuine (and justified) self-defense, but the “Crestwell System Government in Exile,” operating from the Federation’s Heart Worlds, mounts an aggressive publicity campaign portraying itself as an innocent victim. The League designates the Government in Exile as a terrorist organization and demands the Federation suppress it; the Federation cites freedom of speech and refuses to do so. Both sides’ naval buildups accelerate.

By 2580, the League and Federation are engaged in a massive naval building race. The huge sums being poured into the effort provide opportunities for enormous enrichment, and the Federation finds its economy increasingly dominated by “the Five Hundred,” a collective label for the wealthiest four or five percent of its total population. There are far more than simply five hundred families involved, but the most powerful of all are those within the Sol System itself, where they begin asserting ever increasing influence in the Federation’s government.

In 2594, a multi-carrier strike force of the Rénzú Liánméng Hǎijūn (the Terran League Navy) enters the Minotaur System, a member system of the Terran Federation, in “hot pursuit” of pirates who have carried out a particularly bloody raid on a League planet. Neither the pirates nor the League know that the raid in question was sponsored by the Sphere, which has fed both sides carefully tailored intelligence to create precisely this situation. Nor are the League, the pirates, or the Federation aware that the Sphere has inserted a Rish-crewed Q ship under a false Federation registry into the Minotaur System. The League CO has no intention of attacking any Federation planet or ships; he is simply pursuing the pirates. The local Federation Navy senior officer orders him to stay clear of the system’s inhabited planet while he investigates the purportedly pirate vessel which has already entered orbit around it. At which point the Q ship launches a devastating strike on the planet, killing almost three-quarters of its total population, destroys the pirate ship, and blows itself up.

The Federation CO believes the League is responsible and opens fire. The League CO knows he didn’t do it, but returns fire and destroys or cripples the much lighter Federation naval presence in the system.

Neither side wants to charge into the abyss, but both blame the other for the disaster. When the Rish, as neutral third-parties, offer to conduct an inquiry into what happened, they accept. Both sides believe (since the Rish have been at some lengths to convince them) that the “impartial” investigators are their friends and so, at the very least, won’t shade the evidence against them. But after a several-months investigation, the Sphere declares that it is unfortunately unable to determine who actually did what first and to whom in Minotaur. The evidence is simply insufficient to draw positive conclusions, a fact for which it apologizes to both the Federation and the League.

In private, the Sphere suggests to each side that while it can’t find conclusive evidence—and so, as an impartial and honest investigator, cannot announce a conclusion one way or the other—it believes the preponderance of circumstantial evidence suggests the other side is lying. The Federation declares the Minotaur strike an atrocity and a war crime and demands the surrender of the carrier group commander, his staff, and his squadron commanders for trial. It also demands reparations. The implication is that the demands are backed by the threat of open war. The numerically weaker League responds with a preemptive attack as a self-defense option designed to cripple the Terran Federation Navy before the Federation can attack it. The preemptive strike inflicts heavy casualties and damage but is unable to prevent the TFN from counterattacking in turn.

The war between the Federation and the League begins in 2595.

Fifty-six years later, in 2651, newly promoted Admiral Terrence Murphy, grandson of the Terran Federation Navy’s greatest war hero, is named Governor for the Fringe System of New Dublin. Murphy’s wife is a member of one of the most powerful families of the Five Hundred, whose dominance of the Federation’s government is now complete. The half-century of war against the League has only increased the Five Hundred’s enormous wealth, and the Heart Worlds—the heavily populated, heavily industrialized, enormously wealthy planets near the heart of the Federation—are largely insulated from the human cost of the war, which falls far more heavily on the sparsely populated planets of the Fringe, whose children do most of the dying. The Five Hundred has also used its power to concentrate the vast majority of all heavy industry in the Heart Worlds, on the grounds that it will be safer there from League attacks than it would be in the more exposed star systems of the Fringe. The practical consequence is to turn the Fringe Worlds into the abused and impoverished subjects of a system in which they have no effective voice. Even worse, they are considered less valuable than the starships which might be lost defending them in the face of heavy attack. The hatred and resentment the Five Hundred’s policies have stoked in the Fringe is attaining critical mass, but the Five Hundred don’t care, because they control all the levers of power, including punitive expeditions against star systems which “go out of compliance.”

Unfortunately for the Five Hundred, all of that is about to change.



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Framed