Racing the Darkness - An Alpha Centauri Photologue

[Trenacker]

A settlement of "Dry Gaians" at Asopus's Bend in the Tséyi Bowl. Manufactured components of the original colony pods have been fashioned into durable shelters, but working infrastructure--the windmill at bottom left and the scuttles and docks at center--is of locally-sourced Chironian flutewood, highly resistant to the planet's acidic hydrology.

Scale-punchers have arrived on the opposite bank pushing slakes of desperately-needed remounts. Synoe's Four-Toed Monitors were adept swimmers and even better climbers, taking their Gaian riders up vertical rock faces where no Unity ground vehicle could hope to follow.

Gaia's Stepdaughters stubbornly maintained a handicraft economy--partly out of concern for Planet's natural ecology, and partly because heavy equipment was largely diverted to the militia after First Contact with other factions.

Because of their advanced techniques, nutrients, water, and (considering their low draw) energy were often plentiful, but minerals were harder to come by. Production and technological progress were painstakingly slow. Mechanical and electronic devices were kept in good order, but significant repairs or replacement were possible only with the help of sympathetic Hunter Lodges or visiting New State shipping--both rarities. A half-dozen supercomputers scavenged from recovered Supply Pods were remanded to Gaia's Landing for weather forecasting and gene sequencing. Heavy equipment not converted for war-making was pooled and apportioned under the supervision of a council answerable to the Lady herself, but almost always found it way to agricultural use.[/center]

For resupply, Gaian fighters depended on battlefield salvage. Standard practice was to let mindworms incapacitate enemy patrols before stripping them of their equipment. The prisoners, treated with scrupulous care, could then be traded back as the price of a temporary truce.

This powered combat suit, a Norinco-made Jiànkè (剑客) originally supplied to the expedition by Golden China and once used by Spartans for base security, was more than 110 years old when it stood in defense of The Autumn Clade.

Cranberries, which favored acidic soils, were a popular early transplant.

Here, Gaian drones harvest the fruits from a bog with the help of jury-rigged safety equipment. The shells are clearly spacesuits, while the hoods are bladders sewn from hab-tent scraps and the re-breathers have been converted from water filtration devices. Although similar, the suits are not identical, pointing to the all-important role of improvisation in frontier living.

Sources:
First image is from the beauty render in the portfolio "Canyon Civilization Rural Village" by jordi van hees on ArtStation.

Second image is "The Rot begins" by DustBye-Fantasies on DeviantArt.

Third image is "Harvest" by Eteriv on DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

Holnist paramilitaries block a Michigan road with the help of an old M939 5-ton.

When Jean Baptiste-Keller, then a failing soybean farmer with access to an old 1150 kHz radio tower, described Holnism as "a refusal of this modernity," he was somewhere in the vanguard of countless subsequent thinkers trying to answer the question, "Why now?" Why were so many mid-century Americans clamoring for "home rule" and forsaking national unity?

Colonel Corazón Santiago never publicly grieved her decision to using the movement's veterans to claim her spot in what she called "the New Order," a not-so-subtle dig at the original vision for a single, unitary colony governed under U.N. auspices. Nevertheless, in bringing Holnists from Earth to Chiron, she forced her contemporaries to speak to the same problem that confronted Jean Baptiste.

The standard history of Holnism, Strong Men, by Christophe Mitre, spends 200-odd pages distinguishing Nathan Holn the man--"misshapen in appearance and disposition," dead long before the conflicts that would take his name--and the disparate bodies of thought later ascribed to him. Holnists engaged in what Interior Secretary Oscar van de Graaf memorably called "radical contradictions," holding their neighbors as slaves while denying the jurisdiction of federal and state law on grounds of "Nullification by Conscience." According to their actions, most Holnist leaders were actually proponents of political anarchy, preferring conditions that afforded them maximum autonomy, even at the expense of the political projects (such as state secession) to which they sometimes became attached. To the extent that they recognized any form of government as desirable, it was petty despotism, with themselves in the starring role.

Mitre ventured that Holnists and "supporters of Holnism" were actually two distinct groups. The former were more akin to the right-wing militias of the 1990s: armed to the teeth, already sequestered from the world at large, preparing themselves for a fatal (and inevitable) clash with authority. Many were engaged in illegal activities. The latter were typical political malcontents who had seized on provincialism as a way to manage change, and mistook militants for muscular allies who could defeat the dark forces of their partisan fantasies. They were also early adopters of the World Wide Web, building national and international connections, becoming "people out of place." A decade earlier, said Mitre, and they would have been shunned into hermitage, but in the late 2030s, they felt vindicated by the support of people they had never met.

Environmental activist Deirdre Skye diagnosed Holnism as "a civic fungus"--the predictable condition of any people who would forsake environmental stewardship, "for a disordered home breeds every malady in the search for relief, and an unhealthy organ poisons or starves the rest." Mitre called it the "Broken Windows Theory of conservationism."

Raoul Andre St. Germainé told colleagues in the Marine nationale that Holnism arose at the intersection of the dangerous relationship between constitutional democracy and the World Wide Web. Forms of government invented during periods of pensée lente and grosse pensée--literally, "slow thought" and "fat thought," meaning elite control over mass print communication--should be modified or abandoned in the presence of pensée rapide. Without censorship to protect the boring and complicated government by the competent, people would elevate an incompetent alternative--the first one prepared to flatter their many prejudices and misconceptions.

J.T. Marsh wrote that Holnism was an attempt by humans to reassert themselves in the presence of something they recognized attavistically as a mortal threat: the machine. The movement's notorious violence was being deployed, he said, to recapture a sense of personal efficacy. Santiago's own take was not very far off from that of the Game Warden. Planet: A Survivalist's Guide contains clear traces of the Holnists' paranoia: for the Colonel, the only way to avoid political irrelevance--the calamity of being subject to the whims of another--was to accumulate so much latent military power that no decision could be made without without her.

The good bureaucrat, Dr. Lal, ascribed Holnism to failures of the American educational system, curiously overlooking its strong appeal among Canadians. As Lal would have it, Holnism was the misbegotten child of refusal to reckon with uncomfortable aspects of national history. "The Americans made for themselves a false ideal, and were surprised when it stepped off the pages of textbooks and into their parlors, guns in hand." Sathieu Metrion and Johann Anhaldt agreed. In dialogue at a symposium on youth education at University Park, they warned that "a falsified historical experience" would produce an intemperate people without the common fund of historical memory--data--required to develop correct solutions to their shared problems.

In her final years, Santiago wrote extensively to try to separate Holnism and Survivalism, but try as she might, the two could not be easily distinguished. Central to both philosophies was a presumptive entitlement: followers became convinced that something good was being denied them, hidden away in the halls of government, the shipyards of the Moon, or the root cellars of neighboring homes, and that it could, and should, be taken by force.

It was left to Pete Landers to describe a Survivialism without predatory features in the shape of Kellerism, with its monomaniacal focus on the immediacy of human relationships and a call to become genuinely useful to one's fellows. Keller was himself an Evangelical Protestant, but he asserted that God was in "the Fellowship of This World," rather than awaiting His Children in the next world. Church was the grill or the firepit, the post office or the general store or the bowling alley--wherever a brother or cousin or neighbor was waiting with a kind word and a cold beer. Holnists replaced the nation and its myriad obligations of citizenship with kingdoms of cruelty and excess they carved for themselves, but Kellerites put family and community front-and-center, gathering together the makings of functional clan groups long before trapped residents of cities like Miami and Los Angeles fell back on criminal gangs as a replacement for foundering governments, absent utilities, and disbanded police departments. There was some astonishment within the Federal Bureau of Investigation after agents described The Complete Jean-Baptiste Keller as "an encyclopedic primer on everything from Robert's Rules of Order to the proper filling of sandbags." The U.S. Army estimated that one in three of its non-commissioned officers carried contraband editions of Keller's tapes as "indispensable leadership aids," a behavior that persisted among many Unity recruits to the great chagrin of U.N. Security Forces.

Somewhere in Kansas, a U.S. National Guard M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tank levels its cannon at a municipal building where Holnists have gathered in surrender.

Sources:
Both images are stills from the television show Jericho depicting Ravenwood mercenaries, courtesy of the Internet Movie Firearms Database.

[Trenacker]

Disk Obedience is capitalism for a new age. The programmer assumes the rule of the industrialist, and we are assured that only his talents are adequate to the avoidance of doom. - For I Have Tasted The Fruit

"The Meeting in Moscow." Vidcap presented by the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the trial of American spy Rayman Slathers. Found guilty of treason in 1999, he was executed by firing squad the following year. Soviet Premier Garayev celebrated the deceased as Father of Soviet Robotics.

Not every Probe job demanded violence. University researchers frustrated by their leader's long distractions with personal projects or undercut by faculty and student politics were forever bringing their ideas to market with the help of the Morganites or the Bourse. Nor was it unheard of for entire project teams to make the trek high into the Sawtooths in search of that "true scientist," Tamineh Pahlavi, and never mind the nervous rumors of what happened to those who displeased her.

A full division of Morgan Strategic Services did nothing with its generous budget and plentiful human resources but harvest the good ideas from Zakharov's leaking sieve and the notoriously security-deficient Dreamer clinics.

The central assumptions of Disk Obedience were two. First, that the probability of inadvertent emergence of malignant A.I. increased with every post-production change in a thinking machine's code. Second, that the most-impactful change was likely to occur when more than one individual contributed to a single code legacy. The best legacies were short and simple. Idosyncracies in style and the mistakes inevitable in larger legacies created the "liminal spaces" where sentience could supposedly form--the spaces that haunted Sathieu Metrion's sleep. In the most Obedient societies, robots that exceeded the lives of their creators were destroyed.

Where Obedience was weaker, upgrades would be conducted primarily through "practical machine learning," which meant teaching robots in the same manner as humans: by use of reason. A robot could therefore learn in the manner intended by its creator, but (so it was said) no other way. Here, a New State Thinker instructs medical androids to assemble new medications.

The pilot of a crash-landed Hopper awaits rescue in a fungal patch. He is lucky to have survived this long. Such craft were small enough that loss of containment was a common problem after hard landings.

Our subject is conspicuously without a robot guardian. The School of Disk Obedience believed that thinking machines, like humans, would grow most through adversity, and limited their use to a narrow set of roles.

Sources:
First image is "Negotiations" by Alexander Mandradjiev on ArtStation.

Second image is "Wisdom vs. Tech" by iamrudja on DeviantArt.

Third image is "Crash Landing" by iamrudja on DeviantArt.

[MysticWind]

And it was so (pt. 4.6)

Our wonderful Lord,
Gives a home as reward,
’Cause there will come a payday someday.

His work cleanly shows,
He’ll never foreclose,
He promised a payday that day.

When the door opens wide,
There is beauty inside,
Oh what a grand payday that day.

With a handshake and then,
Brother come right on in,
Hallelujah, what a payday that day.

There will come a payday,
Hallelujah, what a payday,
There will come a payday someday, someday.

- “There'll Come A Payday”, performed by Baby Billy Freeman, Datalinks

The Fall of New Amnesty

Hector Voorhees, chief of the MacGrudder Bastion security consultants at U.N. Amnesty Town, made his move after seeing the dilapidated state of the Peacekeeper survivors

The destruction of the seven-faction army on the Plains of Isaac brought grim irony. Hutama and the survivors of the battle limped back towards home, his Peacekeepers finally attaining the command he so craved, in the worst way possible. They found themselves no warm welcome but a stony reception of shock and dismay. The front’s partners were perplexed at how a dissolute rabble could have so utterly defeated all of their forces. The other factional representatives accused Hutama of rank incompetence and of self-sabotage. Attempts to clear his name through recordings of the battle were shut down by the continued vendetta hysteria on the plateau, dismissing the fragmentary nature of the footage that had been broken up by the gestalts’ electro-psionic interference. And so, he was consigned to quarters by the very own home garrison of U.N. Amnesty Town. Mercenary captain Hector Voorhees, a Rhodesian native of Afrikaaner extraction, and veteran adventurer of one of the various Portuguese West African conflicts, seized control of the base, citing the local factional leadership’s inability to maintain security. He swiftly linked up with Anto Kankaras and the Morgan High Spirits c-suite, seeking to claim the bones of the Peacekeeping Forces’ presence upon Silenus.

The Ever United Front may have failed as a conquering army abroad, but it worked as an ad hoc security pact at home. Enraged by defeat, the six bases of New Amnesty readied themselves for a secondary expedition. This was abruptly cut short as proximity alerts from sensor towers sounded mere days later. A large mass, larger in number than the observed Confederation of the Land exiled pioneers who had fled Lone Pine, was detected approaching the plateau. An initial response squad was dispatched to scout out the threat, and immediately flattened by artillery fire of unknown nature. A subsequent University UAV revealed that the scout team’s last known location was a crater filled with organic fungal matter. It then sighted the enemy host: the Landsmen had returned in force, but not them alone: accompanying them were swarms of mindworms, and strange, tall tube-like organisms that the pioneers had mounted upon subrid-pulled wagons, like the tachanka of the Russian Civil War. Indeed, the last sight the drone caught was the telltale flash from one such group of tubes, as it flittered too closely. A second later, it too was destroyed, crushed by a dense biohazardous projectile flying at supersonic speeds. This was the Unity colonists’ very first encounter with a spore launcher.

Onlookers witness burst from fully matured Warwolf-class spore launcher. Lightning caused by triboelectrification from constant motion within propellant xenospore plume

The plateau’s defenses were readied and yet one more mixed force was raised to destroy the Landsmen once and for all. Shaper liquidators moved to the frontlines, and University techs imposed a strict media blackout to prevent the morale-shattering revelation that the neobarbarian devils were somehow summoning the very monsters of Planet. But rumors ran rife. As the army approached, a great wave of waking nightmares swept over the plateau. The telltale sign of worms was here, and the populace panicked. At first, authorities found this salubrious to their cause, allowing them to recruit more to man the battlements and crew the monobike packs. But the inexperienced citizens who joined the assaults were soon a liability.

The Landsmen had come to confront their oppressors, but now they did not do the bulk of the fighting, save for Prince Abel and his Archer Clan sharpshooters. Any approach from the plateau was quickly battered by spore launchers, then met by the mindworm boil that shielded the pioneers. Veteran Shaper Liquidators blasted chemical annelicides and spat flame out of their suits. But their numbers proved wanting and their attacks were distracted by panicking, berserking green troops crazed by worm-psychosis, quickly cut down.

The mixed Terran-Chironian army had finally arrived at the foot of Silenus. Instead of attacking, they laid siege to the plateau. Spore launchers and rockets lifted from the fallen forces fired regularly, destroying base improvements. At night, an endless cacophony of eerie alien sounds blared outside New Amnesty’s gates. And inside its airwaves, too- having commandeered the University mobile listening post that had watched the last battle, the Landsmen tech-shaman now piped in recordings of the Confederation’s attempts to reproduce fungal song with human instruments and voices. This psych warfare proved increasingly harrowing for the base citizens, cracking their morale further. Early attempts to evacuate with the remaining ‘copters were felled by swarms of Locusts of Chiron. As desperation set in, alternative tactics were pursued.

Footage of failed armistice negotiations at the Mount Mar Elias Center

As interim leader of the largest settlement on the plateau, Hector Voorhees had no particular inclination towards playing warlord. He had simply found the Peacekeeping Forces’ methods insubstantial, likely dooming to defeat. Allowing the rump secretariat of the base to continue its administration, he authorized an attempt at peace talks via the last Landsmen presence on New Amnesty: the former mission at Mount Mar Elias, then made a prisoner of war internment center, now finally a refugee hab for dissidents and the discarded. Flanked by a group of veteran UNSOC operatives, a special representative was dispatched to entreat with Rayan Archer, now the leader of the local Terokredo faithful.

The shaman-to-be had taken the cold metal walls of the hab and made it a haven for all of those who opposed the vendetta, both Confederation and the civilized alike. Voorhees’ instructions to the Knight Killers were clear- use the princess of Clan Archer as a go-between with the Landsmen army to broker a truce, or otherwise seize all who lived in the center as hostages. He had even ordered gallows be built upon the cliffs of the plateau in anticipation of “enhanced negotiation” tactics to force the Landsmen to consider the safety of their brethren. Additionally, any New Amnesty citizens, whether peace-lover or spirit-simp, were to be dragged out of the center and to the front.

Survivors of the peace talks would report that Rayan Archer had smiled sweetly at their presence, seemingly receptive towards the talk of peace. Yet they all felt a chill that crept through their armor, an almost unholy energy resonating through the halls. She seemed to divine their very intentions. Within moments, mindworms materialized within the hab, crawling through the walls, choking, crushing, crazing, and consuming the delegation. The few who lived only did so by blacking out from fear, perhaps momentarily escaping the notice of the worms. Having obliterated her captors, the Haliurunas uttered a prayer of thanks to the world-spirit and led her flock back to her people.

Hunter miners of the Durin's Folk Lodge and Shaper diggers attempt to bore their way to freedom

The masters of New Amnesty were in too deep. Any further attempts at negotiation were rejected. Hector Voorhees sent any Peacekeeper dissident who questioned the vendetta to the front itself. Meanwhile, every man, woman, and fight-worthy child was given shredder pistols, taught the Mozambique Drill, and told that the only alternative was death at the hands of those who fraternized with the very beasts of Planet. Anto Kankaras’ Tribal fighters were brought in to help enforce order, giving their reserves some respite.

The Human Tribe was, at heart, a simple people. All they wanted was to live in peace with kith and kin. They had supported the special police operation to ensure the safety of their loved ones, against an age-old foe who had followed them from Earth. Revenge was a blood-red blindfold pulled over their eyes. But there were some who remembered the words of Keller, reminding them of Christ’s greatest commandment, and the need to “turn the other cheek, seventy-seven times, even at the hour of death.” While their fellows who bore blood grudges continued to volunteer to crew the artillery counter-barrages or to put their boot upon Peacekeeper reluctants, others crept away to private meetings hidden as sewing circles and Bible study, whispering messages of comfort, and dissension.

Morgan High Spirits, having spent untold blood and treasure upon the Plains of Isaac, now turned inwards, towards technological solutions to dig them out of the mess. Their product divisions struck up an impromptu research pact with the local University scientists of Biotic Survey, attempting to devise more potent weapons against the terrors who lurked beneath the rock. Their corporate security and mercenary forces had been decimated in the last battle (the entire Plainswalker detachment was wiped out, and M.H.S. declined to wire the Emporium the remainder of their fee), so they sought to devise manpower-saving methods to fight the foe. Meanwhile, a joint Morganite-University commtech team attempted to phone home to their respective faction headquarters, begging for reinforcements.

As the skies had been blanketed from non-stop swarms of Locusts, sending nightmares both psi-induced and from simply rational phobias to any citizen who looked up, the Hunters of Chiron had finally seen the elephant. Though normally ready to tame nature’s critters, they took the loss of their brothers particularly poorly. Deep under another old crumbling hab complex, the rustic Peachtrees apartment block of Vista La Salle, Hunter excavation experts and Shaper advisors worked around the clock to dig an escape route. All manner of citizens, even the youth, were drafted to this great work. If they could not leave by air, they would dig to the other side of Planet if need be.

Tetra Vaal FC-3 Vaas bipedal drones suppress anti-emergency regime rioters at Vines of Ararat

As the siege dragged on for decurns, spore launchers striking solar arrays and wind farms, recycling tanks and robotics factories, tempers finally came to a head. The populace had finally had enough of the authoritarian military emergency regime of the Kankaras-M.H.S.-Voorhees coalition. Shortly at the strike of midnight, Hercsday of the seventh decurn after Earth Day, the conscientious objectors finally struck with a massive wave of protests. Civilians tired of eating ration goo and being brutalized by mercenaries and Tribals marched before faction headquarters, shaming their overseers into letting them through, calling for the release of last battle survivors and restoration of civilian government.

While Anto Kankaras suggested responding with live fire, Hector Voorhees leaned on the Rhodesian government’s pre-ZAPNRA old standby of divide and conquer. MacGrudder Bastion plainclothes probes infiltrated the mobs of rioting citizens, spreading rumors of peace. Some said that the Committee for a Free Amnesty Town hoarded stores of impact guns that they were keeping from the rest of the resistance; others claimed the Prometheus Lodge had been infected by world-spiritualism and were suspect. Any Morganite protester was derided as a luxury slacktivist, and it was no difficulty to turn all against the drones. And so, like crabs fighting inside a burning bucket, the resistance fell apart within days. Tetra Vaal bipedal autonomous weapons platforms, otherwise weak against the EM-disrupting psi enemy, neatly mopped up the mobs. In the end, the only credible resistance remained with Keller’s Own, whose Human Tribe sense of deep community and fraternity withstood PMC psyops. Hector Voorhees had indeed revealed himself to be a peacemaker, even if the crushing silence he imposed was very different from the peace his former Peacekeeper hirers’ had envisioned.

Footage from Hutama’s investigation into the Peachtrees

Even as Keller’s Own disappeared into the parks and sewers of New Amnesty, the lone holdout appeared to be Peachtrees, where the massive drills operated. The facade of the building had been struck by repeated spore bombardment, but it sheltered- and hid- New Amnesty’s attempted escape route beneath a dozen levels of deep sub-basements. During the (officially-claimed) drone riots, all word had gone from the Hunter-Shaper teams. Not wishing to spare any of his own troops, Hector Voorhees sought to kill two razorbeaks with a single stone. Approaching the indefinitely-detained Hutama, the mercenary captain offered him and his handful of survivors a chance to do good under the military occupation. They would be sent to determine what had gone wrong, flush out any drone rioters, and ensure that the drilling could continue. It was a chance to do right, to save the lives of all on New Amnesty.

Hutama needed no additional prompting. Wracked with guilt over what had become of his project for inter-factional peace, he gladly led his investigators into the bowels of the hab complex-mine. Armed only with assault rifles, they wandered the subterranean passages, whose power was mysteriously cut. Upon the sixth sublevel, they encountered the first sign of life: a band of gunmen ambushed his team in the central stairway shaft. Fighting valiantly, Hutama led them to retreat into the seemingly-unoccupied apartments of the complex, only to find more assailants. In the glow of the undersun lighting system, they appeared not to be drone vendetta resisters, but a wild lot that were not of New Amnesty at all! As the Peacekeepers slew the waves upon waves of attackers, many of whom wielded machetes and dove at the investigators at close range, Hutama realized these were Landsmen. Indeed, they were members of the Ruhian Clan, another war band who they had faced not long ago.

The investigators were trapped in Peachtrees for hours, but gradually made their way through. Under Hutama’s cautious leadership, they dispatched the Ruhian ruffians and
discovered what awaited them at the bottom: the ruins of the mining operation. It had succeeded far too well: their way out from the plateau led them directly to the Landsmen army, who had sent these warriors to invade the Silenus. Fighting with guns, tactical axes, and their fists, Hutama and the investigators were able to hold the invaders at bay and discharge several tons of explosives, destroying the bottom levels of the complex and hopefully sealing off the enemy’s path. As they slowly climbed back to the surface, they grimly reflected that this might have also sealed the only way out for the people of New Amnesty.

Left - Peacekeeping Forces UN-35 Dove transports at Patrick Quinlan Airbase take off for Operation: Jadot. Right - taking heavy fire over New Amnesty

In the end, all it took was a little humility and the promise of a lot of energy. While the Landsmen were preoccupied by their failed invasion that ran into Hutama’s investigation, the Morgan-University commtechs were able to break the communications blockade imposed by the mindworm gestalts. Dialed into corporate headquarters, the board of High Spirits pleaded for help. They were met with a curt request for a detailed quarterly report about what exactly had happened. A tense hour later, the report was dispatched and corporate responded in minutes that while the spending was extravagant, the promise latent in the discovery of a new faction of unknown provenance, and a revolutionary breakthrough in human-Chironian interactions, would be worth a rescue.

But with typical corporate cost-cutting, the Morgan conglomerate was not about to launch a massive mission to save six bases’ worth of citizens. Instead, they brought their case before the Planetary Council, presenting a redacted narrative about smacer attacks and mindworm swarms. For once, the besieged denizens of the Silenus Plateau finally caught a break. The others were all quite interested in what had happened to their lost outposts, and agreed to a relief mission. This multinational rescue, as it was done through the Council, was to lean heavily on the Peacekeeping Forces to offset the expense. Commissioner Pravin Lal was ill-disposed towards this presumption, even as it unintentionally once against fulfilled his subordinate Hutama’s dream of peace through business.

Thus, a veritable aerial armada of UN-35 Dove VTOL troop transports was sent to the frontier, escorted by early era prototype needlejets and University Langemak missile UAVs. What they discovered once they reached the plateau was absolute carnage. Spore launchers and clan rockets shot at the transports, downing many, but the proto-needlejets blew them out of the sky. That is, until the Locusts of Chiron, praised by the Landsmen as the very Steeds of the Yellow Knight, descended upon the planes. Sorties between the ‘jets and the Locusts were a bloody mess. While the aerial impact blasts were mighty, the psi-disruptive force tore the very minds of many a pilot apart, causing them to fire upon their own, or crash into one another, even the plateau itself.

The ensuing evacuation contained scenes straight out of the Fall of Salisbury. Dozens upon dozens of citizens boarded the Doves while the Landsmen, finally emboldened to break the siege, scaled the rock walls to attack, supported by mindworms. Liquidators and Tribal militiamen, seeking to avenge their fallen one last time, launched themselves into the fray. Having captured the outlying base facilities, including the defensive turrets that had been set up by the emergency regime, Kanata turned them upon the subsonic ‘jets themselves, downing dozens of University UAVs with micro-rockets. The slaughter went both ways, and the battle ran for nine days, nearly a decurn. But in the end, the airlift saved much of the pre-vendetta population of New Amnesty. As the final transports fled, the refugees saw both humans and worms crawling onto the plateau, and a great conflagration breaking out across the bases that they once called home.

A huddle of Human Tribe refugees receive ration distributions en route to the safety of Arlen Hill

The end to the Silenus settlements shook Chironian society. The Planet, which had been enjoying a period of unusual peace and prosperity at the time, reeled like a man getting mugged in a meadow. The factions all understood each other thoroughly, but had found the clans to be an Outside Context Problem. Their seeming mastery over the creatures of the land was the subject of holovids and datalinks screeds. Most of all, New Amnesty, a cross-factional community formed in placid prosperity, was now gone.

But as the dust settled and the testimonies were published, the Planetary Council deigned to commence yet another punitive campaign against the Landsmen pioneers. For one thing, the losses already suffered by the Ever United Front and the emergency regime were enough to convince the home regions not to bother with some foolhardy avenging mission against an uncertain threat. Not to mention, as accounts from the embattled plateau citizens emerged, scandal upon scandal befell the former administrators and commanders of the lost bases. Criticism particularly surrounded Morgan High Spirits, whose brazen startup attitudes, excesses in abusing a business partner, and departures from internal corporate regulations was criticized. The c-suite was stripped of their roles, their stock options, and some even had their wages garnished. Several members of the executive team fled to the Chiron Cartel to begin their careers anew, far from the eyes of Morgan.

Not all deals are certain. Some fall through, whether from the fault of either party, or simply nature of the business. When it happens, it’s best not to overly blame your partners. But there’s no harm in carrying a keris under your belt to the closing talks. Maybe the other guy will be the first to strike. - Necessary Negotiations

On the other end of the spectrum, former Peacekeeping Forces community leader Hutama received a Roméo Dallaire Medal for courage under fire throughout the Ever United Front’s vendetta with the Landsmen pioneers, not to mention commendations for attempting to strike peace between the factions. Underlings of Annunciator Sathieu Metrion even suggested he be nominated for a Nya Nobel Peace Prize for his attempts to prevent atrocities from the other factions’ forces during the conflict, though they quickly and quietly withdrew such a notion when it was pointed out that his attempts had utterly failed, despite good intentions. Despite this, Hutama was promoted to Secretary of Economic and Peacecrafting Efforts, reassigned to the safety of U.N. Commerce Committee, where the most damage he could inflict was slightly disfavorable trade agreement terns with friendly factions and pact siblings. Ultimately, he was seen as another victim of not only the strange invaders, but of mercenary putschists run amok.

Hector Voorhees and the remnants of MacGrudder Bastion, already dwindled from their exodus to Alpha Centauri, swiftly signed up with the first set of high-paying clients they could find. Thus, the PMC became a subsidiary of Sabre Corporation serving the Dreamers of Chiron, under the diplomatic protection of Colonel Artagan John "Joiner" Banes himself. He and his contractors became a probe unit within the Irregular Warfare and Psychological Operations department of Sabre. While Voorhees’ role in inciting a garrison coup and number of accused human rights violations were certainly manifold, he managed to beat the rap by claiming the necessity of his actions from a strategic perspective, as well as his relatively limited role towards the end of the conflict. The fact that many of the victims were killed in the chaos of the conflict or driven insane by worm madness, made prosecution of either malevolence or incompetence tricky, certainly for a faction as procedural-obsessed as the Peacekeepers.

Anto Kankaras, on the other hand, could not escape his faction’s infamy as a rabble-rouser tyrant. Denounced as the one who lit the flames of blind, suicidal hatred, he was tried in abstentia and cursed by every Tribal from Keller City to Slowwind. Though for a long time, it was unclear whether he had perished in the fighting during the fall of New Denver- the Tribals had suffered the worst casualties of all the factions of the plateau. He would later reemerge at Fort Enterprise, having reverted to freelancing and taken his talents of duplicity and brutality to Governor Oscar van de Graaf. When asked about his experiences, he simply laughed at “that stupid herd of ljakse” and refused to elaborate further.

As to the actual faction pushed into Kankaras’ crusade, the few survivors of the Human Tribe were a sad microcosm of the fate of all New Amnesty exiles. Sympathized at first by their brethren, forgotten in a mission year: While the communal compassion of the Tribals consoled the vendetta victims to a greater degree, it was inevitable that those in the home territories felt estrangement towards the losers of the frontier. Like former imperial settlers forced back to the metropolitan after decolonization, there was a certain reluctance from core dwellers towards continued subsidization of a people whose actions on the periphery seemed vaguely suspicious and distasteful. The uncharacteristic brutality of the New Amnesty Tribals was particularly scandalizing to their home kin.

Even when receiving aid at home, the exiles could not quite shake the psychological scars of extended wormsong exposure. Sudden amnesia to outright psychosis was common. As with exiles from other factions, many Tribals who found it difficult to reintegrate sought out extra-factional identities. The AXIS, with its purgative attitudes towards the alien and the traitor, was particularly popular. On the other hand, the cause of Keller’s Own survived Silenus, even if no one was certain if the actual people behind the resistance movement did. Rumors ranged that they now dwelled among the home Tribals as a covert sub-faction, preaching a message of pure hearts and defiant tolerance, even in the face of annihilation; to that the original Keller’s Own had joined the Landsmen of the Confederation, becoming a Keller Clan. Certainly, there were those who, unable to return to civilization, dispensed with it altogether to return to the wild, discarding all factional identities to become smacers.

A scout explores the Lost Amnesty Jungle

The exile University, Shapers, and Hunters, having taken a backseat to the machinations of the other factions, suffered similarly but with less drama towards their leadership. At most, Academician Prokhor Zakharov thundered at the plateau administrators for letting their distaste towards superstition get the better of them, leading them to commit emotional errors rather than seeking the truth behind the Landsmen. (This, of course, elided his own fierce hatred of all faiths, even as it led to mistakes and needless misunderstandings during Planetfall.) But after a mission year’s time, they had licked their respective wounds, their psych chaplains having tried their best to heal the brains of those broken by the vendetta. They were ready to return  to the Silenus Plateau.

The Planetary Council had deigned to seek further hostilities, claiming that “insufficient contact” had been made with the Confederation of the Land. Perhaps because those at home were not expecting to be living next to the Landsmen anytime soon, they lacked the same level of fear or revulsion that the New Amnesty colonists had. Instead, factional leaders made future plans to greet the subrid riders and worm-tamers with the best of smiles, seeking their secrets. And so, the expedition carried not only guns but butter, bread, and Gaian-revived roses, seeking to trade with the Landsmen properly this time. As they flew, the scouts, scientists, survival experts, and terrain specialists- few who had actually been to the outposts, let alone lived during its existential failure- excitedly chattered at the prospect of meeting an actual Landsman, those savages of Morgan holos.

What they discovered as they approached was a massive fungal forest atop the rock that once was New Amnesty. Vast mats of xenofungus and Chironian plants enveloped Silenus like a technicolor coat. As they bravely ventured into the thicket, they saw alien species of every kind, crawling and creeping and flying through the forest as if the ecosystem had existed for centuries. There was no sign of the Landsmen. Only the barest foundations of the old base buildings could be detected easily within the thicket. While there were some dangerous fauna present, neither mindworm nor spore launcher could be seen.

Further scouting revealed the remnants of the army’s camps, gone in the wind. Some tracks, hidden after a mission year’s worth of erosion and weather, led away towards the wastes. Perhaps back to the Riven Valley. Back to home.

The explorers named the new jungle Lost Amnesty. The Shapers’ natural terraforming inclinations were stymied by the discovery of cross-Terran-Chironian plant life miraculously growing below the sporeline. Upon return, all three factions persuaded the Planetary Council to declare the entire region a Centauri Preserve. Re-contact with the clans would not occur for mission years hence. But even after, Lost Amnesty would become a neutral ground, a trucial territory where none could make vendetta against one another. Those snug at home would praise it as the Landsmen’s first gift to the peoples of Planet.

Design Notes

Thus ends the saga of New Amnesty. The entire idea of the Confederation of the Land emerging suddenly to devastate the rest of Chironian humanity comes from the “getting mugged in a meadow” line from Life, the Universe, and Everything. Over time, I did see some similarities between the story of the Krikkit from that Douglas Adams novel, and the Landsmen/SMAC Fac Pack Tribals. Even the concept of the Hactar dust cloud influencing the Krikkit is analogous to the subtle unseen influences governing the Tribes according to nweismuller, which I will cover in one more final segment on the Landsmen. From this seed came this epic vendetta of creeping fanaticism from all sides. I've invoked the Waco siege but in reverse, and a nod to the Mountain Meadows Massacre. It's a story of how mutual distrust on the frontier and ideological, tribal blindness can lead to the most unnecessary of conflicts.

Notes

More notes about Walton Goggins’ performance of “They’ll Come a Payday” on The Righteous Gemstones found here and here.

Hector Voorhees is from Far Cry 2.

The Ruhian Clan is not from the Confederation of Tribes’ base list, but rather the namesake of Yayan Ruhian, who plays “Mad Dog” in The Raid: Redemption.

Image Notes

The spore launcher is a carbonic acid gas laser cannon from Yukinobu Hoshino’s sci-fi classic 2001 Nights, specifically “Night 18: Odyssey in Green”

Worms attack from the execrable Paramount Halo TV series, which I have not watched but did learn about from a comprehensive review of season one by Elvis the Alien

Peachtrees escape mine is “Miners” by 5ofnovember, made for Broken Contract miniatures board game

Tetra Vaal robot sentinels are from Chappie

Stairway ambush in darkness is from The Raid: Redemption

VTOL craft are “Hind” Vertibirds from Fallout: New Vegas mod The Frontier, as coined and captured by Warlockracy in his informative video

Tribal refugees is from The Expanse episode “Pyre”

Lost Amnesty forest is the Toxic Jungle from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

[Trenacker]

A Chosen Companion of the Spartan Federation. They are armed with a late-model hand weapon, the Heckler & Koch G97 automatic rifle. Santiago paid premiums to traders for the long-barrel variant, the better to advertise the saw-toothed bayonets issued to all non-commissioned ranks. Along with nineteenth-century military theorists, Santiago believed they encouraged élan, communicating that Spartan warriors were fully prepared for the grueling trial of close-quarters battle even in high gravity.

This mimetic fabrics of this soldier's fatigues have taken on the red shade of the fires at her back. The bulky helmet contains a point-to-point radio set while the torso is protected by bulletproof ceramic plate.

Gaian Patroller in civic duty uniform. The white shoulder boards and sun helmet indicate assignment to Gaia's Landing. Other noteworthy features of his kit include the tall gaiters--Gaians disdained to cut more brush than was strictly necessary for walkways--and collapsible Sarsilmaz machine pistol, typical of the faction's mostly unimpressive armory. Rebreathing equipment is stowed in the pouch at the small of the back: Gaian soldiers practiced endurance drills to accustom themselves to the nitrogen-rich environment. This trooper will go thirty minutes before donning a mask.

Ensign of the Temple Guard, dress uniform. What little wealth the Conclave amassed was spent in two ways: on grand architecture and even grander missions of exploration. Believers guarded their houses of worship in a manner no less fastidious than Miriam guarded their souls. Security was posted at all exterior access points and again outside the mausoleums of the movement's saints, to which only the faithful could gain admittance. Successful colonists were obliged to first make offerings, while all others were accepted on the basis of tithes. Because no "implements of war" were permitted within the Sanctuary, Temple Guard were skilled hand-to-hand combatants.

Sources:
First image is Imperial Guard battle uniform by FiloBeche on DeviantArt.

Second image is Palladian Regular Infantry by FiloBeche on DeviantArt.

Third image is Imperial Guard of Galileo - AI version by FiloBeche on DeviantArt.

[MysticWind]

And it was so (pt. 4.7)

Return to Riven Valley

High Chief Joseph commemorates the fallen of Lone Pine at a Dusting

The peculiar preternatural occurrences on the Silenus Plateau resulted in a great spontaneous xenofungal blooming, and the sudden creation of an entire hospitable ecosystem upon the elevated rock. The Confederation of the Land pioneers viewed it as a sign of the world-spirit. Shamans preached that it was the very spirits themselves springing forth new life to counteract all the death that had been inflicted in the vendetta with the basers of New Amnesty. While Chief Allsaints Abacha suggested building a new settlement there, the spirit-speakers among the clans, especially the the shamans of Clan Mokhelhe and the newly vine-spoken Rayan Archer decried the idea of trespassing against this freshly consecrated ground. And so, the Lone Pine pioneers inscribed a runestone with a plasma torch in memory of the fallen, and their great feats against the demons of so-called civilization, and turned for home.

At Council Lodge the returnees relayed the travails and marvels they had experienced to the elders of the Confederation. Joseph Gilpin listened wordlessly as the clan chiefs bickered over what to do to the depraved basers who so persecuted their kin. After several impassioned speeches by ancestral voices prophesying war, the High Chief finally raised a hand for quiet. The audience listened in rapt attention as he decided that as terrible as the the plateau people must have been, for the Landsmen to wage war against all of mankind was not in the will of the world-spirit. This conflict, stemming from mutual misunderstanding, was a caution against further bloodshed, not an invitation for it. While they would guard their camps against further aggression, and gird their loins for future struggle, the magnificent victory, gifted by the world-spirit herself, was clearly sufficient for now.

Psi-recording of a Landsman shaman’s subjective perceptions of a pair of canopic horn-enclosed mindworm larval masses during Close Encounter ceremony

The abundance of spirits is no mistake. Just as we proceeded from the dead earth-spirit, so does the world-spirit birth innumerable lesser spirits, breathing, twitching, grasping, living. What our explorers saw on the fields and above the mound proves that the world-song reverberates across spirits from every kind of womb. And all are in harmony when defending her, the mother who dwells among the stars and in the wind between the stars. - Awaken, All!

Of more immediate concern was the direct intervention of the spirits upon the Plains of Isaac, and their accompanying the pioneers to the Great Siege of Silenus. Later historians would identify that the New Amnesty Vendetta was the very first recorded occurrence of the Landsmen actually encountering mindworms. Despite the Riven Valley’s dense ecosystems and wealth of Planetary species, no mindworms had been directly sighted by its inhabitants for the first mission decade of their settlement. But the descriptions of their heavenly deliverers - winged beings of pure light and comfort - seem to corroborate earlier half-sightings by early colonists in the valley. Dubbed “the Angels of the Mound,” (0) these living spirits became a new creature to worship by the Landsmen, who viewed them as luminous shapes instead of the hellish hideous monsters that all others plainly saw. Even untamed mindworms, appeared to the Landsmen as clouds of living smoke.

For now, the High Chief gave his citizens a grand commission: to seek out and find these Angels, to see if they may once again accompany the clans, as they did at the gates of Silenus. Neither the Confederation nor the other factions realized at the time, but these survivors, so callously derided as barbaric primitives, had unknowingly discovered Centauri Meditation, unconsciously mastering the deadly art of mindworm taming.

The Cross

So often you hear of the faithful Christian, who chancing upon his fallen neighbor, exclaims, ‘I’ve left my coin purse at home!’ and journeys on. God save our seminaries if the priests we produce are unable to move their flocks to go and do likewise. And God bless the virtuous pagans who do. - Stellae Cognitae

The Cardinalate Palace, also known as Julian Hall, residence of Cardinal Cerutti, containing libraries, museums, and chapels hosting artifacts rescued from Earth

For several mission years, the Confederation of the Land and the northern factions they had encountered remained separated by distance and studious disengagement. The wounds of betrayal and vendetta remained too fresh, even if most of the vendetta refugees had been dismissed and shuffled off into obscurity by their home factions. But over time, more and more of the High Chief’s pioneer parties drifted from the valley, seeking new campsites, worshiping alien spirits, and preaching what outsiders termed the Terokredo faith. And slowly they encountered new examples of civilization.

A pioneer party headed east of Riven discovered the theocracy of the Holy See of Centauri. Founded by the Neapolitan Cardinal Julius Cerutti, the Holy See was a Roman Catholic attempt to deliver the faithful and the lost aboard the sinking Unity. Roma Nova was a far cry from its long-gone predecessor back on Earth, but it remained a shining beacon of that ancient legacy- its halls contained vast troves of papal treasures and data tape copies duplicating every jot or tittle contained in the Vatican Apostolic Library and, it was claimed, the Vatican Secret Archive as well. Guarded by legions of the Knights of St. Michael, the base hosted not only valuables within the Cardinalate Palace, but large tracts of tent settlements staffed by clergy and laymen of all kinds ministering to the forsaken of Planet. Since Planetfall, the Cardinal had sought to reach those left behind by the stampeding crowds, to better bring them the Bread of Life after bread to live. In those refugee camps dwelled scores of the faction banished, second-thought smacers, former outlaws, survivors of pods and bases lost to aliens and the elements. While their presence were closely watched by the knights, they received rations and fresh water, hydroponic produce and medical care, recreation through sport and song (1), and counsel- via the Church’s psych chaplains, of course.

The Centauri Catholics welcomed the party, mistaking the pioneers’ threadbare clothes and re-recycled gear as a mark of refugees. The Landsmen had interpreted it as an invitation to a great feast, the clustered pressure tents being the dwellings of fellow unknown tribes. They pitched their custom yurts, brought forth bespoke imitation fungal song musical instruments, and began cooking razorbeak meat and brewing sporeline stew. The travelers then shared a hearty laugh with the slightly nervous Catholic Charities refugee services workers who came to entreat with them, all realizing the nature of their misunderstanding. Emissaries were exchanged, information traded. It was here that the Confederation of the Land established an embassy with the Holy See.

A friar of St. Columba evangelizes to druidic warriors of the Collins Clan at the Picturesque Glen, an oxygen-rich “Edenic” region

Rather unexpectedly, a fruitful relationship developed between the two spiritual societies of incredibly different creeds. Unlike the factions at New Amnesty, the Holy See cared most importantly about winning souls, and rebuilding the moral authority of the Catholic Church. Having only had limited contact with other factions, Cardinal Cerutti decided the future of the Holy See was to very much act like its Vatican City predecessor in the 21st century, a neutral arbiter above the fray of inter-factional conflicts, providing spiritual guidance. As important as it would be to expand and gather fishes to populate its growing bases, he rejected the accumulation of converts through force of arms and military expansion. (Despite the Cardinal’s preeminence, he has so far deigned to convene a papal conclave, even if such a move might solidify his own position as head of the church not only on Chiron, but perhaps all of remaining humanity. When interviewed by gadfly Argyle Media about the possibility of being elected, Cerutti drolly replied that he would not select for his pontifical name Julius IV, wishing to distance his rule from namesake Julius II, the Renaissance era “Warrior Pope.”)

And so, even while the fervently animist-pantheist beliefs of the Landsmen were completely in contrast to the traditionalist monotheism of the Catholics of Centauri, holy vendetta did not ensue between the two. The Cardinal oversaw exacting theocratic rule within the walls of the Holy See, more in line with the Madrid Catholicism of the last known pope, Eglantine, than the New Papacy of his reformist predecessor Zachary II. Outside the perimeter defense, his missionaries carried out the Word in the most universalist of ways possible, speaking of the need to rebuild brotherhood upon a hostile alien planet, and ensure each human being is well-cared for. The particulars of theology remained stolidly conservative, in contrast to the pluralistic “path of conciliation” popularized by Bishop Pierre Mputu Kasala (2). But the soft, gentle tones of the Cardinal’s missionaries won them respect from the Landsmen, who called the curious robed figures “followers of the three-spirit.”

Cardinal Julius Cerutti samples the spring waters at Starfall Village prior to baptism of new Landsmen converts

Initial interaction between the two inchoate factions was in the form of exchange of basic foodstuffs and living technologies- salvaged medications, discovered herbs, mineral ores. As the Landsmen settled in tent villages not far from the borders of the Holy See, however, deeper cultural exchange took place. After their past experiences, the tribal ritualists were heartened to find outsiders who seemed to take a genuine interest in the will of the spirits. It was refreshing for the shamans to speak for hours about how they channeled the world-spirit’s minions, on the precise esoteric interactions between the various wind-spirits and the winged-spirits. How the great spore cannons were driven by different humors and qi to target and attack foes of the world-spirit. The Catholic evangelists, for their part, listened politely and silently logged all information to their quicklinks and ClipComs, to be digested by Holy See scholars. Jesuit librarian priests trained in memetic engineering, tapping into millennia’s worth of anthropological reference, assembled apologetics and theological arguments crafted from the neopagans’ own frames of reference, to be used by the evangelists to bring them towards the light of the Gospel.

While most of the Landsmen remained solid worshippers of the will of the world-spirit, a few did gradually gravitate towards the new three-spirit belief. Some of them were, after all, colonists of Catholic cultures or even convictions who had reverted to the faith they held before their time in the Riven Valley. It was certainly observed by both shamans and clerics alike that those who had spent extended periods away from the Valley were more willing to consider different beliefs. But the relative low number of conversions, and the generally agreeable relations between the two, did not upset most of the Confederation of the Land. In fact, most shamans, especially those of the Mokhelhe Clan, actively encouraged their fellows to incorporate aspects of Catholic teaching into their practice, venerating the three-spirit alongside their tree spirits.

The amity between the factions’ citizens matched that of its leaders. The two began a correspondence, recorded via 8-track tape and delivered by courier. While Cardinal Cerutti was disappointed that so many of the Landsmen remained heathen, he found their chief of chiefs to be a curiously intelligent figure. How such a young man of such humble origins had managed to unite all of the disparate clans, leading his faction to flourish despite their backwards development, was impressive indeed. From the other side, High Chief Joseph considered the Cardinal to be a wise and judicious great shaman of his own people. To have spent so much time teaching three-spirit wisdom to so many different peoples, remaining steadfast in his knowledge despite learning of alternate paths, was a most clever balancing act. And to eschew war-preaching in favor of charity to all- that was a feat of faith most rare upon the world, as seen in the tragedy of New Amnesty. Surely this goodwill would result in a bless-full future for the Holy See.

A probe operative of the Eleventh Hour Tollmen, a Spring Catholic secret society, prepares to commit eco-terror for God and Gaia

Interactions with the Landsmen would leave a lasting positive effect on the Centauri Catholics. Even as the Cardinal disappeared beneath the waves for Babylonian Captivity, many of the sheep who did not abscond with him, nor submit themselves to be another denomination among the Lord’s Conclave, instead became the unlikeliest minority within the Confederation of the Land. While they resisted the label of “Cerutti Clan,” the three-spirit followers were a legacy that had started when the earliest missionaries from the Holy See had visited the villages of the Riven Valley.

While proto-Gaian neopagan ideologies ran rife on late great planet Earth, spawning offshoots of established religions such as the pseudo-Christian First Conversants, the reign of Pope Eglantine and the influence of Madrid Catholicism had managed to keep such “idolatry” out of most of the Church, save for among the Franciscans and some Jesuits. But the interactions with the clans of the Landsmen would shake the very foundations of many a committed Catholic, lay and clergy alike. The way these seemingly primitive people had taken to Planet, thriving among the thorny xenofungus and the crawling creatures of the earth, was a thrilling sight indeed. And for some reason, the great resounding spaces of the Riven Valley seemed to echo their haunting testaments to the millions of invisible spirits that dwelt within the thickets, behind the rocks, up in the air, beneath the rivers. More than one believer had their true faith shaken when visiting that place, sitting at Landsmen campfires, listening to their mimicry of the fungal song.

Those who resettled among the Landsmen were a vengeful lot, even when warned that was the province of the almighty. Many channeled their righteous fury not only against those who had burned Roma Nova, but those who would do harm to their Planet itself. These “Catholics of Spring” would become crusaders not only for the cross, but for Planet itself. Initially this was attributed to the reverence the Landsmen held for the world-spirit managing to rub off on the shell-shocked Spring Catholics. Then it was theorized to be a mechanism of mourning for home, projecting an attachment for the lost Holy See onto Chiron as a whole, taking up the cross of the Confederation in the stead of the captive Church. Later findings would clarify all.

But in the meantime, Spring Catholics formed church militant societies such as the Good Stewards and the Avenging Sisters of St. Hildegard. They fought alongside Landsmen warriors in campaigns against those who despoiled the environment, who inflicted the sins of gluttony and avarice upon the innocent species living on this virgin world. Upon the accession of the Confederation of the Land into the Stepdaughters of Gaia, these Vatican assassins and warlocks would bring their zeal to guarding Creation to their new mother faction. They would soon join Gaian Patrollers in protecting old-growth fungal fields and newly-planted forests. Avenging Sisters fought alongside Gaian Environmental Police and Landsmen warrior clans alike against polluters and looters. And the most fanatical of Spring clerics became probes of the House of Leaves, operating deep in hostile enemy territory as simple psych chaplains and preachers, ready to wreak eco-warfare at a moment’s notice on behalf of Lady Deirdre.

Casting

High Chief Joseph is portrayed by Barry Keoghan as Druig in Eternals

Cardinal Julius Cerutti is portrayed by Silvio Orlando as Cardinal Angelo Voiello from The Young Pope

Eleventh Hour Tollman is portrayed by Ethan Hawke as Reverend Ernst Toller from First Reformed

Image Credits

Two angelic beings are Vorlon true forms outside of their Encounter Suits in Babylon 5

Futuristic Catholic building is from “Vatican Vibes” by Fatima Al Qadiri, video by Tabor Robak. Artist’s explanation

Evangelist scene is “The Mission of St Columba to the Picts A.D. 563,” depicting the Irish missionary in Scotland

Notes

The idea of the Confederation and the Catholics having good relations, despite both being more or less Fundamentalist about their differing respective religions, is from correspondence with nweismuller, and the canonical interpretation of the SMAC Fac Pack’s tech quotes.

I first introduced Cardinal Cerutti and the Holy See to this project exactly a year ago, which is fun timing.

(0) Dumb pun for Angels of Mons

(1) Was tempted to use footage of the Portuguese DJ priest at World Youth Day 2023.

(2) My Roman Catholic prelate character from my own Second Ship project.

[Trenacker]

The below content is written according to the template of the 1999 SMAC game manual. It follows the same style and reproduces, then builds on the language and formats thereof. Those familiar with the game should see many hints of new game mechanics that are nevertheless in keeping with the original themes.

Getting Started
Introduction
Welcome to Racing the Darkness, a portfolio of multimedia projects set in the universe of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, a 1999 computer game developed by FIRAXIS Games™.

These creative, not-for-profit works, like the game by which they were inspired and on which they remain predicated, offer perspectives on a question that has preoccupied members of our species since time immemorial: how now shall we live?

Ideology is the driving force of politics, economics, and conflict in this setting, and we strive to tell stories that will speak to where we have been, where we are, and where we may be going as a global, human community.

The Story
Soon after the new millennium begins, humankind’s oldest enemies—war, famine, and disease—are winning the battle on planet Earth. The United Nations decides to attempt the mission that has been the dream of countless science fiction writer sand fans for generations: the colonization of a new world, before it is too late. The establishment of a new outpost for mankind as an alternative to the decaying situation on our mother planet seems to be the last and best hope for the continued existence of our species.

Codenamed “Unity,” the plan is simple: send an expedition to the nearest Earth-like planet, Chiron, in the Alpha Centauri system. Furnish the people, equipment, and supplies necessary to build a new and prosperous society. Ensure that the mission stays on-track by carefully monitoring its progress from Earth. Then, when the time is right, and if the need still exists, begin shuttling others to this New World.

But space travel is a difficult undertaking. It is hard to reach our own moon. Nuclear pulse propulsion can achieve only a fraction of the speed of light, meaning the journey to Chiron will be decades long. During that time, the colonists will be placed in suspended animation—cold sleep—to arrest the natural aging process and reduce the logistical complexities of travel. (It is not yet feasible to supply enough food, water, and other necessities to produce a viable generation ship.)

As Unity ​reaches the Alpha Centauri system, it is beset by multiple crises: a micrometeorite collision leading to the catastrophic, cascading failure of multiple ship's systems, compounded by a general mutiny that culminates in the assassination of the expedition's leader, Captain Jonathan Garland, and its ultimate dissolution.

Factions
The human factions of Planet are not divided by race, language, or place of ancestral origin. Rather, the survivors organize themselves according to ideological preferences. Each faction is guided by the vision of its leader. These visions, in turn, give each faction a unique set of advantages and disadvantages. By comparing the strengths of your faction to the parameters of a customized planet, you can either give yourself an edge against the other factions or set yourself a unique challenge to overcome.

You are likely to find the game more enjoyable if you pick a faction you can empathize with (even if you don’t necessarily agree with everything they profess).

University of Planet (led by Academician Prokhor Zakharov)
The University is completely dedicated to research and the creation of technologies to solve the problems of mankind. They are rumored to sometimes put the pursuit of knowledge ahead of ethics. They start the game with the Unity Computing technology and one bonus technology of their choice (a nod to data tapes they have salvaged) and must pursue the Discover research path. As befits their interest in tools, the University’s affinity is for Supremacy. Each University base receives a free Network Node at founding. The University’s research progresses quickly, but their open-access philosophy makes them susceptible to attacks by covert “Probe Teams,” and their natural curiosity causes them to question the authorities that provide security and defense, undermining internal stability and power projection. The University cannot make Romantic or Enlightened social choices. The University builds a new Robot for every 6 citizens. Three of the University’s five starting populations are Robots, placing an early cap on their economy. A Librarian helps add to their already-impressive edge in technological research.

Gaian Stepdaughters (led by Lady Deirdre Skye)
The Gaians are determined not to repeat the environmental mistakes of Old Earth. They seek to limit the impact of human settlement on Planet. They start out with the Centauri Ecology technology and advanced abilities to interact with native life, including the ability to move freely through xenofungus squares and gather extra nutrients from the fungus. Their empathy with Planet gives them the ability to place ravaging mindworms directly under their control. Their experience with life systems makes their bases more efficient and confers significant bonuses to food production but their pacifist leanings undermine the abilities of their military units and they resent police control in times of crisis. Because of negative environmental consequences, Gaians cannot choose the Free Market economic modality. Gaians may prioritize either the Explore or Choose research paths. The Gaian affinity is for Harmony, following from their desire to live “in dialogue” (symbiosis) with Planet. The Gaians begin the game with Emergency Supplies representing Unity’s seed bank. Their starting population includes both a Technician and an Artist, allowing them to get head starts on culture and production.

Human Labyrinth (led by Chairman Sheng-ji Yang)
This faction is ruled under harsh collectivist/authoritarian principles. The good of the individual is totally subordinate to the interests of the state as defined by its ruler. The Labyrinth seeks to radically redefine what it means to be human, trampling preconceived notions about right and wrong. These so-called “Hivemen” are isolationist and militaristic. The Labyrinth begins with the Doctrine: Loyalty technology and may choose two bonus doctrines at game start. Their bases are built underground for security, and befitting their hermitically closed society, each base receives a free Resocialization Chamber facility to convert citizens to drones. The Labyrinth’s population growth, social engineering multipliers, and production output are all above average, but their economy is weakened by isolation and they suffer from inefficiency caused by repression. There is a 50% chance that new populations will be Drones. The Labyrinth cannot make Democratic social choices. The Hive’s starting population is divided between simple laborers and the ruling castes, consisting of one Overseer, one Talent, and a Thinker. The faction’s Colony Pod and ‘Former both use the drill rig chassis and can burrow beneath Planet’s surface. The Labyrinth’s Affinity is for Supremacy and it may pursue either Expand or Command research priorities, in line with the Chairman’s philosophy. The Labyrinth cannot make social choices except on the Frontier and Classical spectrums.

Morgan Industries (led by CEO Nwabudike Morgan)
The Morganites are organized along corporate lines and dedicated (at least in theory) to laissez-faire capitalist economic principles. Everyone and everything are presumed to be in competition for material wealth and comfort. The Morganites start the game with 100 energy credits and the Industrial Base technology. This faction prioritizes the Build research lane. Reflecting their entrepreneurial endeavors, Morganites receive a percentage of bonus income based on the total amount of commerce between factions and generate additional energy and trade goods. Because citizens have expensive tastes, it is difficult for them to support units in the field and they must build Hab Complex facilities before the population of any of their bases can exceed four citizens. The Morganites have limited options on the Economics spectrum. Despite starting the game with a unit of mercenary soldiers that is generally superior to basic militia, Morganite citizens lack the interest to sacrifice for their convictions, reducing the quality of their armies. The Morganites begin with the game with a mixed bag of two Citizens, one Drone, and one Overseer to join their Talent. Morganites are Supremacists who see no reason not to modify self or Planet. Morganites may not choose the Equity value. The second of the Morganites’ unique starting units is a crawler, which can be used for trade or resource-ferrying missions.

Spartan Federation (led by Colonel Corazón Santiago)
Spartans are paramilitary survivalists. They believe that people have both a right and a duty to bear arms—and to use them when tyranny threatens. The Spartans begin the game locked in a Vendetta with all other factions for 40 turns. It is in a permanent Vendetta with the Tribe. The Spartans start the game with the Doctrine: Initiative technology and a powerful Impact Squad. As befits their focus on preparations for war, they do not pay the added cost for developing new unit prototypes. Spartan research follows the Conquer tree. The morale of Spartan units is exceptionally high and their seasoned officer cadre imparts a substantial combat bonus, but their extravagant military spending weighs down economic operations. The availability of three War Stores can help the Spartans turn out a large army in the early game. Because of the presence of certain malcontents in Spartan society—those who take the call for armed vigilance to a bullying extreme--overall faction cohesion is poor. The Spartans may not make the “Wealth” social choice. The Spartan population is small, but an Officer adds to their punch. Spartans are Purists who romanticize the past.

The Lord’s Conclave (led by Sister Miriam Godwinson)
The believers of the Conclave devote themselves to pursuit of higher truth and seek to persuade other societies of the correctness of their beliefs. They start the game with the Social Psych technology and follow the Choose research path. Believers are resistant to probe brainwashing but their suspicion of the mind-machine interface and reduced attention to secular affairs retards their research efforts, while their belief that Planet is their Promised Land sometimes interferes with their ecological sensibilities. The Believers cannot adopt Eudaimonia as a social choice. Believers are Purists when it comes to affinity. Also, this faction will not make Cyborgs or Specials. The Labyrinth grows at a fearsome rate and is already the largest faction by population size at game start. An Artist and a Thinker provide opportunities to focus on cultural expansion or doctrinal advances. Believers pursue research on the Choose tree. The Believers also begin the game with a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital once used to treat the sick and dying aboard Unity, later repurposed as a ranging vehicle to survey their new inheritance.

The Peacekeeping Forces (led by Commissioner Pravin Lal)
The Peacekeepers continue to advance the humanitarian principles embodied in the Unity Mission Charter and are officially committed to the reunification of the factions under their own democratic leadership. They start the game with the Information Networks technology, reflecting their commitment to the free and vigorous exchange of ideas. The idealism of this faction attracts an intellectual elite, but their society tends toward bureaucratic inefficiency. Peacekeepers have an aversion to the Classical social choices. They follow the Build and Choose research trees and hold the affinity of Purity. Peacekeeper bases can exceed normal population limits by 2. Due to their experience with parliamentary maneuvering, Peacekeeper votes count as double when the Planetary Council convenes for an election. Peacekeeper societies have little slack: they begin with the game with an Administrator, Artist, Librarian, and Talent, allowing the player to make early headway on Secret Projects. The Peacekeepers begin the game with a squad of Power Armor, reflecting their association with what remains of the elite United Nations Marine Corps.

The Human Tribe (led by Selectman Pete Landers)
The Human Tribe is a network of communities (some would say, a cult) founded in the United States during the last civil war. Members believe that the ideal society resembles a neighborhood: small, intimate, and determinedly parochial. Tribal forces stowed away aboard Unity and helped contribute to the ship’s destruction. They begin with the game with Doctrine: Defense. The Tribe’s veteran soldiers are highly effective, especially when on defense, and its suspicious society is hard to infiltrate or subvert. Each base also receives a free Bunker facility. However, the faction suffers significant penalties to production and research because of its emphasis on informal relationships and suspicion of centralized government. Tribals are Purists, hearkening back to an imagined ideal of social amity and civic engagement. This faction must make social choices from the Frontier or Romantic spectrums. Tribals may explore the Build and Conquer research trees. The Tribe is the smallest faction at game start. Reflecting their status as violent stowaways that participated in the fighting that led to Unity’s destruction, the Tribe begins the game locked in Vendetta with all other factions for 20 turns. It is in a permanent Vendetta with the Spartans.

The New Two Thousand (led by Governor Oscar van de Graaf)
The New Two Thousand are investors in a joint-stock company that helped to finance the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri. They agreed to be compensated with land after a brief period of service to the “main” mission. Faction members hope to carve out their own slices of paradise with as little interference from others as can be managed. Their affinity of Supremacy matches a belief that Chiron should be the oyster of anyone with enough courage to place it under the plow or the lash. The New Two Thousand begin the game with the Doctrine: Expansion and may pursue the Build and Expand research pathways. The faction’s values lend themselves to higher efficiency and industrial output but reduced morale and cohesion due to the enforcement of contracts that are not always favorable for their signatories. The faction starts with one War Stores and two ‘Formers that represent assets of the American Reclamation Corporation, a federal corporation once run by the governor himself. The New Two Thousand begin the game with two Talents and two Technicians, a reflection of the Governor’s success at recruiting “the best of the best.” This faction is Supremacist; it may not make the Planned or Post-Scarcity social choices.

Sources:
Chris McCubbin, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (Redwood City, CA: Electronic Arts, 1999), pp. 11-13.

[MysticWind]

The Resurrection Vendetta

Overture

Never forget that the terrible swift sword is all too often brandished to distract from evil fruit. - The Collected Sermons

The true origins of the Watch Tower are obscure. Unlike the Lord’s Conclave, the Holy See of Centauri, the Kavithans, or many of the other theocracies that emerged post-Planetfall, the Jonadab Watch Tower Bible Studies Society (0) did not have any preexisting prominent religious leaders as passengers aboard the Unity. Instead, scattered adherents of disparate national-cultural origins commandeered a colony pod, forming the first congregation and narrowly escaping the exploding ship. Narrowly avoiding destruction, they managed to found the base of Victory of Truth in a region they named the Resurrection River Valley. There, the Jonadabs promulgated the worship of Jehovah God as their founding creed and source of strength in the wilderness. Prone to constant mindworm attacks, the once-pacifist sect, previously persecuted in Earth wars for refusing military service, slowly became hardened by constant combat against a hostile planet.

After the initial starting mission years, the Jonadabs had encountered other early settlements. As was their ministry, they sent their publishers to knock on their neighbors’ doors, but soon found the reception hardly friendlier than the fungus. The Human Tribe, while welcoming to all those lost and in need of community, politely refused offers to listen to any preacher save Jean-Baptiste Keller. The Lord’s Conclave at first attempted to welcome their form of worship into the greater faction body as part of a brotherhood of all believers, but the Jonadabs refused. As on Earth, they recognized no government save the Kingdom of God; indeed, this rejection of all politics caused interfactional studies scholars to eventually label them an Ecclesiastical proto-faction. Not to mention, they found Conclave theology to be another fallen false doctrine, worldly and not in the Truth. After constant attempts to convert the Conclavists to their own doctrine, even Godwinson had to turn them away from her door. However, the Watch Tower did manage to gain some crucial contacts within both flocks.

“The Anointed Return at Armageddon,” mural at Rutherford’s Mystery

Ultimately, the dangers of the Resurrection River region radicalized the Watch Tower. Post-deprogramming accounts indicate that in a mission decade’s time, much of the Governing Body of the Jonadabs had perished, either from psychological trauma from mindworm attacks, injury from the sect’s rejection of blood transfusions, or simply malnutrition. As time went on, the survivors increasingly embraced more extreme doctrines, interpreting and reinterpreting all of the traumas afflicting them since leaving Earth. Dates for the end times were calculated and recalculated, eventually landing upon the decision of mission year 2114 as the start of the road to the Great Tribulation. When that time had come and gone, with no eschatological significance, civil disorder struck the Watch Tower. Brother and sister marked, gave reproof, and inflicted disfellowship on one another. Elders were accused of worldliness by their own ministerial servants. The shunned were ejected from the colony to perish in the wild.

After the dust had settled, the new Governing Body declared their non-faction was no longer part of the “great crowd” who would merely survive Armageddon. They were not simply assistants to the chosen 144,000 who would reign alongside Christ in heaven, they were the anointed. No longer identifying as part of the Jonadab class of assistants, they declared themselves as the final chosen. Chiron was not another part of the Satan-ruled world as Earth was. It was Jehovah’s kingdom- whether it was the new heavens or the new earth written of in Revelation, the theogeographers were unclear- either way, during the long journey to Centauri, the Tribulation times must have already been happening on fallen Earth. The world they arrived on was paradise for the Anointed.

“Traitor Kings Bowing to the Red Dragon”

Of course, the problem of evil becomes even more pronounced in heaven. If this truly was the blessed time after Armageddon, the day of judgment, and the defeat of Satan, why was this kingdom so far from perfection? Deadly beasts, scoffing disbelievers, bandits of every type: why was the Anointed still beset on all sides by peril?

Two movements rose in response. The Perpetualists, the more pugnacious, believed that just as the Devil and his demons were once perfect angels who arose in rebellion against Jehovah, the hostile creatures and peoples on Chiron were no less than demonic spirits defying the current heavenly order. Therefore they were witnessing a new time when a latter-day Lucifer was stirring up trouble, threatening the heaven they had come to. Thus all so-called humans encountered outside of the Watch Tower were suspect- they were possibly demons, or those in league with demons, and would need to be cast out and annihilated. If not by Jehovah, then by the Anointed. The hoary old injunctions against military service or allegiance to government were now by over: the Watch Tower was the visible manifestation of the kingdom of heaven, and the Anointed were its soldiers, engaged in perpetual struggle against the enemies of God.

“Eternal Springtime in the Kingdom of God,” painting at New Gilead School (1)

The Perpetualists’ militancy would normalize the use of violence and vendetta by the Anointed. But before they converted the Watch Tower into a crusading not-faction, something unexpected happened. A true miracle would temper their belligerence.

After countless attacks and endless souls claimed, the swarming pests that dwelt in the toxic fields suddenly ceased their aggression. Instead, when a party of Anointed publishers rode forth from Victory of Truth to witness in vain to a smacer encampment that had sprung up in the vicinity, they found that the swarm approached them slowly, cautiously, “as in deference to the laws of Jehovah.” The publishers, clutching the tracts, discovered they experienced no telltale signs of creeping insanity, nor demonic visions. In fact, some felt a touch of divine ecstasy, of connection to a higher power, assuredness in their blessedness.

The smacers, a band of renegade New State Land Legion mutineers who had gone AWOL the moment they had stepped foot on dry land, did not care for more religiosity in their life. After first welcoming the Watch Tower party with the prospect of trade and maps, they immediately grew hostile when the publishers began offering their literature and speaking of the Truth. As they drew their water-cooled particle rifles to order the publishers out of their newly-claimed territory, the worms that had followed the Anointed to the camp suddenly came forth, interceding on behalf of the publishers and intercepting the energy blasts. The mutineers shrieked and grasped their heads as blood poured forth from their ears, turning their guns upon each other before themselves. Shaken, the publishers returned to Anointed headquarters, but not before salvaging the advanced weaponry of the unconverted.

This would not be the first intervention from the worms. They would appear again when the publishers went on witnessing trips. They even approached Watch Tower bases in peace. This stunning change in behavior was seen as no less than a sign that they were truly in paradise. For so long, they had believed that the lion would lay with the lamb, that the wild monstrous animals would become sedate and submissive after the end had come. And here it was. This second movement, the New Worlders, declared that the Anointed were truly in the promised land. But this land was not like the old, fallen world. It held many mysteries to be continuously studied and reexamined in light of Scripture. The Anointed may at times have to fight for the Truth against new rebellions by demons and apostates. But in time, all hearts could be won over, even the ferocious beasts of this land.

Interlude

We are all custodes of this new garden. Let us be fruitful.

Just as with the original Crusades, it all came down to prime geography, not differences in theology. Not at first, anyway. The fertile soil of the Resurrection River Valley was worthy of covetousness, but factions adjacent to the Watch Tower wisely avoided the area, not wishing to deal with the Anointed nor their newfound mindworm companions. Those new to the scene, however, were ignorant of such cautions. The iridescent brilliant coloring of the land hearkened eager settlers.

The Centauri Catholics of the Holy See arrived in a colony pod not too long after the Jonadabs became Anointed. Seeking to bring the light of Roma Nova, they saw the temperate nature and the fecundity of its plant life and immediately began work on a new base. The settlement was named San Isidro Labrador, after the farmer saint whose patronage over agricultural abundance evoked the namesake of their settlement program. They built on one far end of the river valley; in fact, it took over a mission fortnight for Harvest scouts to discover Plan of the Ages, the closest Watch Tower base, an outpost little larger than San Isidro. From the word go, relations were fraught. The Anointed, for all of their outward geniality, were less than enthused by others infringing upon their holy valley. They sent publishers to spread their version of Truth to the Centauri Catholics, who quickly rebuffed them. Soon after, defenses in the form of automated turrets and even makeshift bunkers appeared along the perimeter of the territory around the base.

When a second pod containing more colonists appeared in the valley and built the hilltop base of Hierosolyma Nova, the Watch Tower had had enough of the interlopers. Not suffering from SASA, the witnesses remembered the old dogma and rhetoric from Earth that excoriated the Catholic Church as not just any ordinary member of false Christendom, but as Babylon itself. With great fury and despising, they prepared to drive out the apostates and demons once and for all.

An Anointed captain in Proclaimer armor flanked by two Eighthers in Advent suits

Though with virtually no martial tradition, the Anointed assembled what they called the Army of 144,000. The number, in reference to their own status as the saved, was more aspirational than actual as their real population was far lower, never mind their military size (2). For their self-confident bluster, the Watch Tower knew they needed allies with which to chase out the false teachers of Christendom. Ironically, they did so by reaching out to apostates that happened to align closer to their beliefs.

From their time witnessing to the Lord’s Conclave, they had discovered congregations with minority fringe theologies. The Eighth-Day Adventists, with their obsession with the Second Coming, were more similar to the Watch Tower than to their own Sister Miriam, who generally frowned upon millenarianism as a harmful distraction from present-day worries. Publishers visited The Holy Fire and, promising not to overly preach, secretly made contact with the Eighthers, inviting them to see “living miracles” back home. Upon visiting the Watch Tower base of Printers of Zion, they were amazed to see the Anointed touching live swarms of mindworms, picking them up and commanding them to move with no ill effect towards anyone. All around them buzzed an unearthly choir resounding through their very minds. While Adventists were not much for charismatic gifts of serpent handling nor speaking in tongues, this was a clear miracle never before seen since the prophecies of Ellen G. White herself. So the Eighthers joined their distant cousins at the Watch Tower.

Their numbers were not great, and Adventism traditionally supported noncombatancy, so they sought a force multiplier in addition to the tame worms. They did so through the unlikely use of technology: the Eighthers, being Conclavists, were skilled in the probe arts. (3) A reconnaissance operation to Hierosolyma Nova uncovered that it was a research base under the scholastics of the Order of Saint Thomas. From its physics labs the Eighther probes stole designs for an experimental field battery which, when applied to the New State gear that the Anointed had taken from the mutineers, created new particle rifles and even rudimentary power armor. (4) Swords sharpened and armor shielded, the One Forty-Four Thousand were closer to battle.

Stone Statues, having undergone the soul-scabbing procedure, rally before deploying from Printers of Zion base

The last leg of the tripod that was the Anointed Army of 144,000 was in the normally isolationist Human Tribe. The Tribals had no interest in the holy wars of other denominations. But when told that the Holy See of Centauri had a friend in the Confederation of the Land, the normally sedate and jovial Kellerites were enraged. At least, a segment of the faction was- those who had survived the events of the Silenus Plateau or had kinfolk who had lived there. While the faction officially entered into an anti-Centauri Catholic pact, the Human Tribe took great pains to limit its involvement in the conflict, seeking only to push back Landsmen-lovers away from its territory. Furthermore, it only contributed a single, albeit considerable, militia: the Stone Statues.

Formed around a core of veterans who had fought under the liar war criminal Kankaras, these were militiamen who had faced the worst horrors of the first human-directed mindworm campaign. In those early years of adaptation, they responded both to their traumas and the possibility of future revenge conflicts with self-mutilation. Leveraging not-yet closed loopholes in Planetary Council interfactional law, they inflicted a modified form of nerve stapling upon themselves, dulling the pathways that reacted to fear responses and deadening the telltale hallucinatory abilities induced by mindworms. This practice would be banned not too long after, considered an atrocity that was prosecutable on a personal rather than a factional level. But for now, the Stone Statues used this practice of “soul-scabbing” to develop a partial resistance of sorts towards psi, at the cost of their own humanity and morality. So when the Watch Tower asked for their help, they enlisted the ranks of the One Forty-Four Thousand with glee, undeterred by the “lamb worms” of the Anointed and itching to fight the Landsmen.

Sister Aurelia of Nueva Barcelona prays during the Battle of St. Jude, shortly before martyrdom

The ensuing campaign was swift and crushing. The Watch Tower-Eigther-Kellerite force narrowly outnumbered the Centauri Catholics. While superior training and planning on the part of the Holy See’s troops were able to keep the Anointed Army at bay for the first dozen decurns of battle, their fanatical, often self-abnegating tactics thwarted the careful strategies concocted by the Cardinal’s Guards. Certainly, they were no less ferocious in battle. The Knights of St. Michael rode gallantly to attack the Watch Tower heretics, some of whom claimed the same mantle of Michael the Archangel under questionable Christology (5). But having little historical experience in chivalry or military honor, the power armored Anointed fired Door Knocker rockets and sicced the very abominations of Planet against the cardinalate host. Used to fighting a less desperate and savage foe, the Centauri Catholics were stymied.

For a tripod, the Anointed Army was a surprisingly stable coalition. The Watch Tower might have considered the others apostates, but they were decent enough soldiers. Aside from refusing to fight or do any sort of work on Motarday (6), the Eighthers learned to fight quite readily, and ably. Their Conclavist zeal carried them through battle, just as the Stone Statues' close-knit cohesion, lust for revenge, and near-sociopathic inability to fear did the same for themselves. The Proclaimer suits, while experimental and few in number, provided a boost to nearby troops in any battle. And finally, when the lamb worms appeared, not even the fiercest militant orders of the Holy See could stand up to them for long.

The Anointed did not stop after expelling the Centauri Catholics from their valley. They marched on Holy See base after base, conquering and annihilating. Despite protests from Godwinson and Landers alike, neither of their constituent forces agreed to turn back. The Eighthers had already defected to the Watch Tower, despite holding ultimately incompatible beliefs. The Stone Statues just didn't care. They had no further plan beyond battle, even if it resulted in self-destruction. Ignoring threats of expulsion, they fought on even when the Human Tribe officially declared mission accomplished. (7)

High Chief Joseph, seeing his friend in danger, sent Landsmen warrior clans to stem the tide of the One Hundred Forty-Four Thousand. What resulted was the first mindworm conflict between warring humanity. The Confederation soon found that pitting their winged-spirit allies against smoke-spirits serving another group of people was a far cry from the slaughter of New Amnesty. The Anointed ordered their lamb worms to battle the Landsmen's demonic winged-spirits, and the resulting psi waves and psych blasts caused a horrendous resonance cascade that produced nightmares as far as the Riven Valley. The Anointed might have been newer at taming mindworms, but they made up for it with the righteous fury of self-proclaimed protectors of heaven. And with the Stone Statues. While soul-scabbing was a crude and barbaric practice, sometimes resulting in militiamen who were half-lobotomized yet still susceptible to psionic interference, their massed attacks in support of the Watch Tower ran roughshod over the Landsmen expeditionary force.

An Albertian monk approaches the Abbey of Saint Gerard to rescue holy relics and Earth-era documents as Roma Nova burns in the distance

The vendetta began near the start of the year. By the cold season, the Anointed Army had leapfrogged over multiple bases and fought off several Landsmen formations to besiege Roma Nova itself. It was a snowy season, and the Watch Tower was impatient as its forces shivered outside the walls of the capital base. Inside the gates, Centauri Catholics attempted to make the most of the holiday, visiting each other, exchanging gifts, feasting on seven species of cloned seafood, and engaging in every type of Christmas tradition half-remembered from Earth and reconstructed. But most of all, they prayed. Prayed for deliverance from the cultists' pet mindworms, prayed for the agri-domes to grow enough to fill their bellies, prayed for peace.

Outside, the Stone Statues gathered in rover circles and observed Tribal traditions of simple passion plays based upon Kellerite parables. They strummed their guitars around campfires and recalled tales from a lost land called the Midwest. The Eighthers treated the holiday as an extra Sabbath and rested in spiritual contemplation.

The Watch Tower recognized no holiday save one. They were unmoved by their allies and their enemies' repose. Instead, a group of Anointed undertook a daring raid to infiltrate the great base. Slipping past distracted sentinels, they uploaded an Awakening Tract infobomb onto the local datalinks, subverting door controls. The probes threw open the gates and in marched the Anointed, slaying everyone they could see. The Midnight Mass Massacre was the subject of multiple Planetary Council human rights inquiries. The bones of combatant defenders and fleeing civilians were intermingled with planetpearls of exterminated mindworms. The Anointed, disbelieving in hell, preached annihilation of Jehovah's enemies. By the time the tertiary internal defenses had gone up, two-thirds of the base had been overrun.

News of what had happened to Roma Nova was terrible enough for Miriam Godwinson to finally step in. As her faction dwarfed these others combined, her intervention was enough to give pause even for the most Christendom-hating member of the Watch Tower. Brokering a peace through the strength of her legions, it nonetheless recognized that the Holy See had been utterly defeated. Its defensive capabilities had gone out; with the Magisterium's inability to protect its own faithful, it must cede its authority. Its bases were now in the hands of the Anointed and allies. Its people were given free passage to go wherever they like. Many chose resettlement in the Rapture Hills and a life of religious worship as citizens of the Lord’s Conclave; a third could not leave and were forced to become unbaptized publishers of the Watch Tower. A fifth entered into the Confederation of the Land to live among virtuous pagans. A sliver remnant remained true to Cardinal Cerutti despite his military failure. They would accompany their spiritual leader twenty thousand leagues below to Nouvelle Avignon, the rump Holy See-in-Exile controlled by the New State, yet another band of heretics.

Outro

The former capital had been renamed to High Kingdom Hall, and was vying with Victory of Truth to be the most well-populated and advanced base of the not-faction. The Holy See apostates themselves had departed from their land. Their former allies found themselves at the mercy of Anointed rule. The vendetta had affirmed their chosen nature. It had even allowed the Perpetualists and the New Worlders to combine between both philosophies about paradise.

Even so, the excesses of conquest had marked the Watch Tower as a threat to all others in the region. The Confederation of the Land still smarted from the defeats its new mindworm tamers had received from the smoke spirit sorcerers. They would redouble their efforts in channeling the winged-spirits, training newer boils of different species and strains. Analysts would term this a "mindworm gap," inspiring the very first alien arms race on Planet. And as the former bases of the Centauri Catholics seethed and groaned from its zealous new owners, resistance movements spark up, yearning to rejoin the mother church.

Casting

Power armored Anointed and Eighther soldiers are portrayed by ADVENT troopers from XCOM 2

Kellerite Stone Statues portrayed by the Brothers of Tomorrow’s Fires from The Righteous Gemstones

Image Credits

Lush alien valley is “Angel’s Valley” by Angela Harburn

Battle nun is “Warbirds, Bird of Pray” by Simon Palmér

Mindworms swarming soldier is from Alpha Centauri: Power of the Mind Worms graphic novel

Priest approaching abbey while city burns in distance is cover art for A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, painted by Peter Andrew Jones in Solar Wind collection

Design Notes

I first learned that there is a minor Jehovah’s Witnesses train station in the Metro universe by Dmitry Glukhovsky from this old forum post which predates the games. The idea of a historical (and heretical) Christian sect surviving in the post-apocalypse but aren’t the inevitable Mormons is entertaining to me, which is why I had the JWs and a radical Seventh Day Adventist offshoot I made up (It’s Millerite Time!) attack the Holy See in RTD.

Watchtower emblem taken from Metro 2033 wiki article. An ex-JW’s take on the Metro 2033 novel’s portrayal of the sect found here. Watchtower section in book begins here (pg. 150-160).

Notes

(0) The Jonadabs, or the Jehonadabs, are a JW phrase for the great crowd of assistants to the anointed, which I picked up from the Jehovah's Witnesses vs Christianity doctrine comparison video (#101) by Ready to Harvest. Basically, a class of the saved but not the class. The economy class remnant.

(1) Not a The Handmaid’s Tale reference. There actually is a Watchtower Bible School of Gilead in New York.

(2) Though hardly the first time a group has named themselves after inflated numbers in fictional history.

(3) I wonder if research penalties can be offset by more capable research-stealing probes.

(4) Since both JWs and Seventh-Day Adventists have been historically pacifistic sects, there’s really no battle imagery for them outside of Hacksaw Ridge. Hence I had to go with the lame ADVENT pun.

(5) Probably my favorite weird bit of JW theological belief is that they consider Jesus and Michael to be the same.

(6) Day of the decurn (ten-day Chironian week) named for Motaro, the Centaurian from Mortal Kombat.

(7) And that’s why you shouldn’t transfer your elite units to a pact brother.

Information about Sturgill Simpson’s cover of “All the Gold in California” on The Righteous Gemstones here in Rolling Stone.

Further Reading

Jehovah’s Witnesses: A Case Study in Viral Marketing, Pricenomics

[Trenacker]

Believers carve new tracks in the Troilus Hills as twin suns burn through the gloaming overhead.

Territorial disputes were a leading cause of vendetta. Hopes of putting an end to serial violations of its "sovereign range" by Hunter overlanders and Conclavist expeditions finally tempted even the proud Two Thousand to participate in Pravin Lal's planetary government.

Godwinson refused to abandon the Naming Project, notwithstanding the very limited resources available to her faction for warfare, especially by unsupported flying columns.

Curiously, the first Believer expeditions reported almost no untoward encounters with xenofauna, a finding that confounded their less-fortunate opponents. Lady Deirdre Skye later hypothesized that the "almost respectful quality of the surveys" must have been apparent to the Living Planet.

The Believers, of course, were later notorious for their proprietary attitude towards the new world and its resources, using the knowledge gained through early roaming to support the Shaping wrought by Chief Liquidator Nagao.

Unity Scout Choppers combined all the most desirable features sought by Mission Control: collapsible, portable, easy to fly, and simple to maintain, with exceptionally long range and an impressive payload considering their weight. Even better, they were cheap: U.N. logisticians sourced them from the Mil Moscow Helicopter Plant, which supplied 164 units that had been previously rejected for service in Afghanistan. (Slow and lightly-armored, they were tempting and easy targets for mujahedin fighters, but neither limitation was judged relevant to flying conditions on Chiron.) Refurbished, fitted with larger power plants and broader rotor blades to handle the much stronger gravity, Scout Choppers took pride of place in J.T. Marsh's blueprint for early reconnaissance.

After accounting for the full squadron of twelve on loan to the Forward Contact Teams, Kleisel Mercator's Air Operations Directorate survivors are believed to have hoarded most of the remaining air-frames. Others were loaded aboard Supply Pods since observed operators by M.Y. 15 included Gaia's Stepdaughters and the Human Ascendancy, and at least six were in the hands of the Lord's Conclave from very early on.

Automatics were as varied as the beasts of the Earth. Many survivors grew to fear cyborgs and robots--"things" that appeared to be facsimiles or caricatures of themselves--without giving a second thought of the use of self-driving vehicles that, equipped with polymorphic software, were often better at avoiding or outrunning danger than organic pilots.

The Forward Contact Teams put thousands of radio-dispatched Unity Crawlers to work. They spread quickly and silently across the face of Shamash and beyond with configurations for every biome: self-righting capsules for the wine-dark seas; wheeled platforms for broken grounds; tracked haulers for fungal toadstools and nitrate heaps; and ski-mounted variants the permanent ice.

Each Landing Pod carried a fleet of micro-vehicles. Provision included at least one emergency tug to perform incipient medical transport and firefighting duties either aboard the Pod itself or in the tight confines of early settlements.

The dearth of atmospheric oxygen meant that most fires would be fueled by whatever the colonists brought with them--industrial gases, and radiological or conventional fuels. Most tugs used expansion foams in lieu of water.

Experience taught that the most common base emergency was loss of life support, and many crews dismantled the firefighting apparatus altogether in favor of conserving onboard storage space for self-contained breathing apparatus and quick-assembling oxygen shelters.

Sources:
First image is "Scout the Danger Zone 3 - Hill" by lhlclllx97 on DeviantArt.

Inspiration for Believer expedition's is Strategos' Risk's recommendation of Earth by David Brin, in which it is suggested that God's first positive commandment to Man was to name the beasts of the Earth.

Helicopter is Mil Mi-8 Ink Drawing [IV] by Rooivalk1 on DeviantArt.

Third image is AF-44 'Autonomous Fuel Transport' by moth3R on DeviantArt.

Fourth image is an MD-33 Navy Tractor firefighting apparatus by Mick Evans.

[Trenacker]

How Now Shall We Live?

Late twenty-first century scholars of international relations need not have searched far or long for indictments of the modern nation-state. Scarcely four hundred years after Peace of Westphalia, and less than one hundred-and-fifty years after the founding of the United Nations, the gross failures of “commonwealth government”—“political community founded for the common good”—prompted broad and decisive reassessment of how the societies of Planet Earth should live henceforth.

Of the many inquests performed on the carcass of commonwealth government, those carried out by French military officer Raoul André St. Germaine and World Health Organization Director-General Pravin Lal were most influential outside academia. St. Germaine's popular history, written for the lay reader, traced the decline of what he called “the American project,” or multi-ethnic, participatory democracy, to its roots in the pre-modern era. Using data supplied by the Tomorrow Institute’s World Wide Web Watch, St. Germaine showed that, starting from the year 1990, the dispositive content of digital speech was overwhelmingly lies. Without a shared truth to anchor debate, the political amity necessary to hold together heterogeneous societies simply disintegrated. Confronted with a dizzying array of ideas, citizens declined even to seek information that was not pleasing to them, much less to accept it. Political battle lines hardened progressively until the disputants became convinced of the fundamental moral illegitimacy of their opponents, leading predictably to increased tolerance for anti-democratic behavior. Democratic societies therefore experienced a rash of coups d’etats and regional secessionist crises in the search for conditions under which single-party rule could be asserted.

Lal’s assessment was incompatible with St. Germaine’s, but his conclusions were essentially the same. St. Germaine represented central governments as flat-footed and naively idealistic. Lal wrote that they had become infected with the same manias as their constituents, promulgating mass political fantasies that were such a poor fit for objective reality, public administration became impossible. In essence, governments opportunistically sold their voters lies to the point that they were forced to govern as if those lies were true. Under conditions of state-sanctioned censorship, attempts to define national identity in ways that served the state became corrupted by chauvanism. Eventually, civic fires burned out of control as bad-faith actors tired of compromise and despaired of the sacrifices they were being asked to make on behalf of government in spite of its clear incompetence.

Commonwealth government endured as of 2071, but in a much-diminished capacity. Fewer nations attempted it, and fewer people demanded it compared to the previous century. In the words of Survivalist provocateur Corazon Santiago, “Democracy was for the poor and the downtrodden--those who still lack a voice.” Those whose fundamental needs were met usually tried to choose something else.

One of the earliest replacements for commonwealth government was oligarchy—government delivered with many of the same stylings as before, but which did not even pretend to serve the interests of disfavored groups. Instead, these were explicitly persecuted under the pretext that they represented a threat to political order. The distinction between a troubled commonwealth government and a “full” oligarchy was always in dispute, but the non-profit Freedom House identified just fifteen free governments worldwide in 2060, down from a high of forty-three in 2023, whereas the number of partly free and not-free governments rose sharply over the same time period. [1] Microgovernments presiding over populations of less than 20,000 were excluded from this count. On Chiron, participatory democracy was preserved in numerous societies, while multi-party democracy was most associated with the Peacekeepers, the Shapers, and the Hunters of Chiron.

Some wished to dispense with democracy altogether. Monarchists demanded simplification of politics by selection of an enlightened despot who would provide the wise discernment of which a democratic body politic was incapable, and the perpetuation of their dynasty according to hereditary principles. Interest in this form of government was greatest among those steeped in paternalistic, meritocratic, and deterministic institutions that taught obedience and suggested the possibility of closely grooming monarchs-in-waiting to perform their role well. Thus monarchy was most appealing to military officers, technocrats, and geneticists. Monarchy, distinct from simple despotism, was regarded with widespread suspicion and practiced only in a few places in 2071: in Golden China, imperial Iran, and most notably, on the artificial continent of Shamash during periods of national emergency. On Chiron, monarchy in stratocratic (military) trappings became the dominant government type of the New State. 

Another transformative answer to perceived failures of commonwealth government was corporate rule, sometimes called corporatocracy. Its chief exponent, entrepreneur Nwabudike Morgan, called it “the antidote for stability.” The purpose of a corporation was to generate profit for its shareholders. Whereas commonwealth government aspired to deliver aspirational goods such as culture and purpose, corporatocratic governments confined their promises to (in Morgan’s words) “measurable, material benefits: food, lodging, entertainments, and physical security.” From 2050 to 2070, roughly ten percent of the Earth’s surface and fourteen percent of its population was managed by for-profit corporations under charter or contract to national governments. The success of corporatocracy as a full replacement for commonwealth government is hotly debated. Biafran PhD candidate Osa Bamidele, who stratified survey respondents according to title and income levels from 2064 to 2066, reported strong satisfaction with corporatocracy as a replacement for commonwealth government among elites, but felt that his results for drone workers must reflect tampering. Corporatocratic governments on Chiron emerged among the Morganites and was also practiced by the Bourse and Unicorp.

St. Louis, MO. The Lucinda P. Shaw Government Building, more commonly known as the ARC Pyramid, is left of center. In the background, the Malcolm Baldrige Suspension Bridge spans the Mississippi River, made four miles wide by the 2039 New Madrid Megaquake.

Shaw was the third African-American to serve as U.S. Attorney General, a position she occupied for fourteen years across five administrations. She survived two assassination attempts unscathed and, upon her retirement, was honored with appointment to the Unity Mission as an adviser to Captain Garland. Her fate is unknown.

Popular impressions of the corporation-as-government were favorably influenced by the American space program. Every American president from Eisenhower to Shanden claimed that private entrepreneurship was the best guarantee of keeping pace with, or maintaining America’s lead over, the Soviets in Space Race. The credibility of these claims seemed manifest in the success of Project Orion, as well as the more than fifty human recovery missions launched under the auspices of Comprehensive Transport, Liberty Bell Astro, and Kryad Synergies in support of the U.S. Air Force beginning in 1970.

It was widely accepted that the cost of space development outside Earth’s orbit required that profit motive, not civilian science, drive decision-making. Corporations had their own reasons for investing heavily in the skills and welfare of space workers, who almost always reported strong satisfaction with their favorable circumstances.

A fourth answer to dissatisfaction with commonwealth government was self-separation, distinct from secession in that self-separation was always only a temporary measure reflecting objective state failure, not alienation from the very premise of commonwealth government itself. “Classic” secessionism as practiced by the Christian States of America or the governors of Free Missouri, Alberta, Lone Star Texas, North Florida, and Chiapas, wanted permanent estrangement because of irreconcilable differences over the laws and political structures of the states from which they attempted to divorce. Advocates of self-separation, including but not limited to Kellerites, Proto-Survivalists (a blanket term for those who explicitly disavowed the tents of Holnism), and some Vaulters, claimed to have been first abandoned by their national governments, and thereby thrown on what Jean-Baptiste Keller called “the mercy of our own means.” The most generous estimates of the number of self-separated communities approached two percent of global population in 2050 but dropped below a half-percent two decades later. Most were Americans later reabsorbed into Unionist society. [2] Self-separatist communities usually lacked the diversity to achieve democratic pluralism, but did make decisions under a one-person, one-vote principle. On Chiron, this form of government defined the Tribe and the Neo-Spartans.

Corporatocracy and self-separation withstood tampering over time. Joint-stock entrepreneurialism was a form of corporatocracy distinctive for the small number of participants, which meant flatter organizational structures and more opportunity for direct experience of risks and rewards. Echoes of self-separation were evident in the almost hostile attitude that joint-stock entrepreneurs directed toward government. Unlike more traditional corporatocrats, whose wealth was synonymous with power in whatever government system persisted, joint-stock entrepreneurs saw themselves carving out wholly new spaces, merging the lust for wealth with a desire for total self-actualization. Members of the New Two Thousand carried this tradition to Chiron, where they looked to alienate land and practice a radical individualism that some felt was indistinguishable from Holnism.

Some believed that the best salve for loss of commonwealth government was organized religion. The Great Reawakening coincided with the Crisis of the Twenty-First Century. Archaeological recovery of ancient texts brought more than 120 apocryphal texts into consideration for inclusion into the Judeo-Christian biblical canons. Radiological incidents were almost always attended by eschatological claims. Debate around the legitimacy of this new information attracted keen attention from a global readership grappling with the traditional maladies of war, famine, scarcity, and disease.

As civil authorities became less able to meet the physical and spiritual requirements of their subjects, faith-based actors answered the unmet calls, mobilizing charity on an unprecedented scale. Faith movements sometimes allied themselves to secular political causes, as in the case of Miriam Godwinson, whose initial analysis of Scripture led her to the conclusion that civil and religious leadership should be held carefully distinct, or they could become estranged from them. Hundreds of “petty” religions were made and unmade in the liminal spaces of the Indian Ocean Exclusion Zone. Revivalism was especially hot in space habitats: disconnection from the familiar and the very high rate of fatal accidents focused cultural development on the question of life after death.

So Marian Christianity, Catholic Christianity, New Judaism, Sunni Islam, and Confucian thought experienced booming growth. Marian Christians, who comprised most of Miriam Godwinson's followers, incorporated eighty new texts into their canon and were heavily influenced by the belief that works, not faith alone, would come to define their eligibility for salvation. These included charity as well as a new concept, called stewardship, which defined their relationship to Earth, and, for Unity mission survivors, Chiron, which they sometimes called New Earth. Although influenced by the Green movements of the 1990s, the Stewardship movement rejected conservationist values in favor of practical human interests. This put the Believers more in tune with the Morganites than the Gaians with respect to the disposal of planetary resources, but it also suggested the possibility that faction members could have a spiritual relationship with the Planet that was not so much a meeting of equal minds as the acknowledgement between master and subject. Unlike the relatively new innovation of Marian Christianity, other revivalisms tended to be concerned with the engagement of long-standing tradition and thought with the ethical quandries posed by modern technology.

A last noteworthy solution to problems of good government was automation. Some called for humans to submit their common problems to computers that would supposedly strip away any agenda when calculating viable options and balancing competing interests. While Johann Anhaldt would not go so far as to eliminate the human element in governance, he and Prokhor Zakharov undeniably attempted to divest certain aspects of base and social administration in ways they called "scientific."

[1] Colonial governments and minority-rule states usually practiced a form of limited (“closed”) democracy in which only certain privileged classes were permitted to participate officially in national decision-making. Freedom House’s policy was to classify colonial governments as partly free or not free. This included Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Israel, South Africa, Rhodesia, Katanga, Australia, and Thailand.

[2] Per Xolo-Boaz, enduring estrangement between self-separated populations and commonwealth governments should not be regarded as evidence of abandonment of commonwealth principles by the former. Indeed, it is best understood as reaction to the belief that self-separated persons were treated, unfairly, as traitors.


Sources:
For the definition of a commonwealth, I used Wikipedia.

First image is “The Pyramid” by Bogdan-MRK on DeviantArt.

Second image is “Colony Ship Launched” by Fondrin on DeviantArt.

[MysticWind]

And it was so (pt. 4.8 )

Many hurt men wondered, many struck men bled
Magic never faltered, magic always led
Many stones were rolled but God would not lie down
Many wild men lied, many fat men listened
Though they offered stones, magic still was fed
Though they locked their coffers, God was always served
- “God is Alive, Magic is Afoot”, words by Leonard Cohen, Datalinks

A chewa of the Zenawi Clan binds cyber-zār killing spirits into her polearm. Through incantations and gestures, she unlocks the voice-motion controls of her pendant, a Unity nanobrace, activating microconstructors that reinforce and sharpen the blade (0)

Gradual contact with the so-called civilized world brought greater focus upon the peculiarities of the Confederation of the Land. Scouts cautiously visited the base camps, nodding along to spirit-sermons while observing the curious artifacts devised by the locals. Kiln-fired, silica-glazed, Super-Dense Micro-Ceramic pottery. Intricate idols and fetishes molded by the Self-Malleable Die-Casting process- but where Planetary civilization used molten metals from industrial foundries, these were heated in the very fires of Mount Cloudtop. Natural pesticides in the form of selective breeding of whisperwasps to produce Antigen Inhibitors, reducing entire prey species of root vermin. And the great University mathematician Yohanan Malakoff swore that he once saw inscribed on a wall at Great Encampment a vividly complex multidimensional pattern that illustrated the carver’s understanding of McGuffey’s Theorem. (1) All signified that despite their seeming cultural regression into superstition and loss of the scientific method, the clans of the Confederation had managed to progress technologically. Somehow they walked boldly through the darkness without a candle, yet emerged with the basic necessities for surviving a hostile alien biosphere.

Techno Shaman Enlil, master techsmith of Council Lodge, grasps a nodecrystal crafted from an open-air forge

Between slow but steady research advancement made under a demon-haunted worldview, and the spontaneous discovery of mindworm taming, the Landsmen had become of increased interest from outside factions.

The New State’s Madame Secretary of Cultural Life ​​Élodie was infamously a connoisseur of the creative products of humanity’s multitudes, but uninterested in actually meeting those she deemed beneath her notice. So she contented herself by collecting Landsmen “wildman” art and musical recordings of mock fungal song, bought via amphibious hydrofoil merchants from smacer traders and Schreiber Project searchprobes. All the while, she ignored the pleas from Cardinal Julius Cerutti to dispatch her Calliope Squadron to secure a pact with the Confederation. Contre-Amirale St. Germaine was as dismissive of landbound indigènes as his cultural secretary was, declaring “neoprimitive ideas the exact opposite of what the New State stands for.” Both ignored the priest’s ambitions to restore the Holy See of Centauri with their arms.

The Human Ascendancy was enthralled with the idea that the Landsmen carried the mythical “psi gene” that allowed them to talk to the worms, and the implications of unlocking such inborn power. But they were too far from the Confederation to investigate the hypothesis.

The Scope and the Saucer

University-Preservationist Prof. Mikaela Ellton in the Gloomy Grove on the outskirts of the Riven Valley, en route to the Confederation

The University of Planet was a glaring exception in the field of Landsmen studies. The memory of lost Biotic Survey and the drubbing in the New Amnesty Vendetta lingered too bitterly, not to mention continued prejudice against the rampant faith the Landsmen bred like a petri dish. But Dean Adam Gieseler of the Preservationists of Terra research unit at Planetary Archives managed to finagle funding for a Centauri Anthropology department, arguing the need to keep abreast with the emerging cultures of Chiron, especially when they were built upon long-lost traditions of Earth. While he would not meet Joseph Gilpin for some time, Gieseler’s anthropologists established a small research post in defiance of Zakharov’s theophobic sensibilities. A veritable college town in the wild, Monrovia was chaired by Professor Mikaela Ellton, whose countless visits to the Landsmen made her the foremost surface expert on their ways.

The Memory of Earth was positively abuzz with theories and pseudohistory connecting the Landsmen to the hypothesized Progenitor race who had lived on Chiron, built its monoliths, and left its ruins. Extraterrestrial contact became the leading hypothesis among the Observers, as was de rigeur among the faction culture. Observers who subscribed to the Wanter theory believed that the neo-primitive clans had been visited by the still-surviving Progenitors, operating either from Gamma One, a dense iron-core asteroid orbiting Eurytion (3) and alleged to be the source of mysterious transmissions, or the hollow Planet. The Wanters claimed that as with the Dogon of West Africa and Sirius B, the Landsmen had been granted eldritch wisdom about the stars that they had no possible way of acquiring with their limited technological base, having foreknowledge that somehow stumped the University themselves. (Hence, the supposed conspiracy between the devilish Zakharov and Human Tribe dupes to deny the Landsmen’s basic humanity).

Wanter aficionados yearned to make pilgrimage to the site they believed the Progenitors had visited the clans. After great expense, a group of xenophiles made the long trek to Monrovia, swarming the little base on their way to the alien-touched land of Riven. Over a hundred cheering Observers appeared at the gates, bedecked in environmental suits modded with multispectral sensors and outlandish alien-themed accouterments such as synth-rubber tentacles and oversized optical lenses. While Ellton at first attempted to welcome them the best her staff could- the Wanters in turn proclaimed their admiration for Gieseler’s Preservationists as “the only honest scholars of the entire University”- the unexpected guests overwhelmed the outpost’s facilities, interfered with Ellton’s studies by asking to accompany her, and dumped metric tonnes of electronic refuse and ration wrappers outside their base, attracting the attention of mindworms.

They were finally evicted when the local University Security captain notified the anthropologists that not all of the Wanters were mere Fortean fans of the unknown, but probes with hidden agendas. Though disguised by Grey-chic temporary face tattoos and handmade xenoform masks, over two dozen of the little green men were ID’d by University Leibniz machines as officers of the Memory of Earth Chiron Guard, the internal ministry, the Ministry of External Intelligence, and even Deputy Minister Han Jae-Moon’s Project Cheongsu. To avoid an interfactional incident, Ellton politely asked the Observers- both Wanters and the disguised spies- to leave, as was the diplomatic custom granted to probes. (4) When they attempted to continue to the Landsmen homeland, they were turned back by a guard band of Rackham Clan mounted warriors on armored subrids.

Image Credits

Warrior shaman/sorceress with nano-magic is “Techno Shaman” by Jayna Pavlin

Techno Shaman Enlil is Enki Technoshaman of Burning Man

Astronaut in forest is “astronaut” by Roman Avseyenko

Notes

(0) Chewa regiments were the feudal noble warrior class of Ethiopia, perhaps comparable to knights or samurai. Zār are evil spirits or demons of the Horn of Africa, subject to cults that practice exorcism rituals.

(1) Technologies named here are from Sierra On-Line sci-fi strategy game Alien Legacy.

(2) Professor Mikaela Ellton of Monrovia is the Preserver anthropologist who studies the Confederation of Tribes in the SMAC Fac Pack tech quotes.

(3) Eurytion is the Mercury-type planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A (Preliminary Report on the Alpha Centauri System). Gamma One is a location from Alien Legacy, though based in the Beta Caeli system.

(4) The Memory of Earth, demonym the Observers, are basically the X-COM military-intelligence complex ruling a citizenry of X-Files watchers. Their whole shtick is believing in the existence of advanced alien life and working to unite humanity to combat it, or leveraging alien threats to end petty squabbles and unite humanity. A chicken or egg situation. Wanters (“I want to believe”) is the sub-factional theory most keen on alien theories, and so they would be invested in ancient astronauts type theories such as The Sirius Mystery about the Dogon people. Given how physical gatherings are a big thing in ufology culture, you could imagine Observer-Wanters trying to Storm Riven, and military officers taking advantage of the enthusiasm to embed spies.

[Trenacker]

Hive sand dredges begin construction of Visionary's Bolthole as a rare storm brews. Moisture will aid the digging process, but, more importantly, the violent winds and rain will suppress Neo-Spartan air patrols.

With few Talents to spare for viceregal duties, Chairman Yang preferred to build outposts in lieu of additional bases after MY35. The Bolthole would serve as just that--a relatively small and inelegant strong-point capable of providing convenient shelter to Hive raiding parties caught out on the far dunes.

Half the tank for half the cost. The Ghazal was a prototype light tank built by the Neo-Spartan Column sometime before MY39.

Its configuration was deceptive: the gyro-stabilized turret contained a highly sensitive television camera used to guide the flight of micro-missiles carried in launch tubes on the hull. For close-in defense, there were pairs of coaxial weapons in recessed mounts to either side of the camera pod: two 7.62mm machine guns firing NATO-standard rounds, each one set below a grenade launcher fed with hard-kill countermeasures. This active defense was guided by the tank's large monodirectional radio crests.

Because there were few better options, Santiago found herself emulating the Hermet King with which she shared a sandy exile, poaching off those foolhardy enough to risk a desert crossing.

Believing that kings must conduct affairs in the open, Contre-Amirale St. Germaine spent jubilee years on land in La Tropicana, a pleasure palace abutting the Promenade Ligne Haute, a resort city reserved for his faction's elite--those trusted not to abuse the privilege.

The "CO" often solved political problems either by entrapping unwary members of "problem" families to undermine their standing in his court or rewarding them with extended furlough at the government's expense.

Though considered a moral obscenity by Miriam Godwinson and a blatant threat to the competing interests of Nwabudike Morgan, La Tropicana famously lured Lady Deirdre Skye into compact with St. Germaine after she discovered he had ordered his gardeners to preserve examples of Chironian flora pushed to extinction elsewhere on Shamash.

Sources:
First image is "Harvesters of Dune" by Constantin Simion on ArtStation.

Second image is "Sci-fi tank" by Sergey Shinkevich on ArtStation.

Third image is "Abdotupe 0004" by DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

The cell blocks of Unity's correctional facilities were accessible only by a trunk-line tramway that traversed the open space between the end of one of the vessel's heat dissipation fins and the forward-most Hab Bay. That gulf was the location of a battery farm, residual light from which is visible through the tramway aperture at the top right of this picture.

Occupying the lowest rung of any Chironian society was the prisoner.

This position was potentially accessible in three ways. Some portion of this population consisted of people made prisoner before 2071. These were convicts placed aboard Unity as unfree laborers by various donor nations. Most were inmates of the Soviet or Chinese penal systems, all were selected on the basis of good health and fitness for hard labor, and the U.N. suspected that a majority were guilty only of political crimes. A very high proportion of these individuals survived hibernation to fall into the hands of Aleigha Cohen. The second population of prisoners were captives, usually taken during vendetta, but also during informal skirmishing or in raids. A third set of prisoners was created through the normal operation of criminal justice when individuals violated the laws of their respective factions or committed trespass while on the territory of another faction.

An image from the Unity Crisis. Two members of a heavy rescue team drag an injured convict to a temporary holding area on the orders of Commandant Sardul Singh, the officer responsible for the mission's correctional functions.

Prisoners presented serious ethical problems for early colonies especially. They demanded food, water, shelter, medical care, and warding. If they did not receive these minimum interventions, there would be trouble: either the prisoners would sicken and die, or they would become violent. For this reason, the Conclave immediately attempted to ransom any prisoners that fell into their hands. Others took a harder line. Spartans, Pilgrims, Gaians, and Tribals shot most surrendering enemies so as to avoid the imposition of care, keeping only a few higher-ranking individuals alive for interrogation. Hunters stripped their victims, consigning them to narcosis. The New State similarly set the occasional prisoner adrift in inflatable rafts. Taking prisoners appealed only to factions eager for labor: the Hive, the University, the Dreamers, the Ascendancy, and the Morganites.

Unruly prisoners could be nerve-stapled into dumb docility, but only at the cost of much of their intellectual and even physical utility, and this strategy was embraced only by the Labyrinth. Some were also made into soldiers, but prior to the advent of reliable neural re-patterning, the reliability of these forces was too low to make the prospect at all tempting. Conversation was possible, but expensive--and controversial, for one's own citizens were sure to object when their enemies were welcomed at table. To create incentives that redounded to the benefit of the faction that possessed them, prisoners were often indentured for lengthy terms of servitude. The Morganites and Pilgrims both practiced this form of coerced labor in lieu of slavery.

Rumors abounded that prisoners of the University could expect prolonged suffering as victims of gruesome experimentation, a fate actually more likely to be befall them in the hands of the Morganites or the Dreamers. With so few able-bodied citizens, Zakharov was more interested in laboratory assistants and medical orderlies than test subjects, at least for the first thirty years of settlement. In a warped reflection of the cruelties visited upon them by their neighbors, the Gaian Sisterhood drove their prisoners into the fungus, a strategy defended by the Lady Skye as her people's best deterrent against future abuse. Spartans were equally infamous for their brutalities to the servile class.

Terms were best from the Children of the Atom, who lacking martial inclination, were usually pleased to release prisoners on their own recognizance; the Peacekeeping Forces; the Memory of Earth; and the Lord's Conclave. Both Lal and Mercator promulgated codes of law that accorded prisoners specific protections from exploitation and guaranteed them the a basic living, albeit in semi-permanent captivity. Conclave theologians produced the Captive's Book, a collection of extracts from the voluminous Books of Meronicus, with an even larger component of theological and sociological analysis. This text, provided as a sequence of data tapes, purported to speak to the spiritual aspects of the prisoner's plight. It was mandatory reading for those convicted of civil offenses.

University Security escorts a proud scientist to his lecture hall at Budushii Dvor. The Academician did not deign to become involved in the affairs of his proctors and rarely considered a colleague's disciplinary status when assigning projects.

Captives were treated far worse than civil offenders, especially those of higher rank or caste--individuals that had already consumed a significant proportion of their factions' resources and so were judged worthy of fast rehabilitation, usually on easy terms. Morganites could buy their way out of trouble, even to the point of arranging their own contracts of indenture before the authorities could do so on their behalf. Spartans were pardoned on the condition that they volunteer for temporary assignment to penal battalions where they would serve as shock troops. Tribals remanded civil offenders to the care of their families. Repeat offenders were simply exiled.

Sources:
Source of the first image is unknown. I found it on Ben Austin's Pinterest site where it is labeled "Sci Fi Prison." A TinEye reverse image search suggested several possibilities for original provenance, including an artist with the handle of Azure_Dragon and Fantasy Flight Games.

Second image is from the 2012 film Lockout.

Third image is from the Peacock series Intergalactic.

[Trenacker]

Gaian artisans excavated the conservatory at Titania's Rest from the stem and cap of a mushroom more than 900 meters in length. The still-living myconid's husk proved fertile growth medium for fragrant ferns and bioluminescent bulbs.

In the words of concert pianist Cristopham Westover, who played Titania twice, the performer experienced "a transcendental peace." Sathieu Metrion agreed. Supposing that recollections like Westover's indicated Deirdre had successfully tapped into the planetary overmind, Metrion organized the capture of Titania's Rest in MY40. The Gaian defenders gave their lives dearly, refusing their lady's repeated orders to withdraw.

Members of the Unity crew assemble in the ship's hangar bays to await final departure. Anguish is evident on the face of the nearest survivor.

These evacuees have been directed to don rescue hard-shells with the intent of mitigating injuries during descent.

Tribal Minutemen plant the stakes for a sensor field somewhere in Gaian territory. When it came to the mindworm menace, time--forewarning--was an even better defense than fire.

Sources:
First image is "ComfyUI 01513" by Dralles on DeviantArt.

Second image is "EVA passage way" by helot on DeviantArt.

Third image is "Warzone art" by VentulArt on DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

The baton strikes haphazardly. Among the more fortunate, this may impart an unwanted sense of immunity. You will find that gas punishes more equitably. - Instructions to the Acolytes

The Chiron Guard reach Objective Crimson during a rapid-reactor drill in the ruins of Post 87, a Morganite trading post abandoned the year before.

Because of their obvious practical utility, but also the exceptional ease with which they could be manufactured and employed, tactical smokes were used in nearly every recorded engagement fought between the human factions of Chiron, usually by all combatants.

As an obscurant, smoke grenades were the blessed relief of every soldier crossing open ground, and often the only counter to TV-guided, laser, and other direct-fire weapons for factions that had fallen behind in the planetary arms race. For those with stronger research programs, metallic and other "additive" smoke offered protection against an even wider range of sensing platforms and smart weapons. Many a commander earned infamy (and some, a subsequent fragging) for "popping smoke" when in the presence of mindworms, reasoning--incorrectly--that some monsters were easier to fight when unseen.

Knock-out and irritant gasses were equally effective against rioting drones, barricaded Probe Teams, and coup plotters of all stripes. Faction leaders extolled the virtues of "push-button" police actions--far more humane, they said, than bullets or batons. Besides: direct action placed security forces at risk. Chairman Sheng-ji Yang celebrated smoke for its "democratizing qualities."

The Stokes Report, commissioned by the Planetary Council in MY14 to provide all survivors with an authoritative history of the Unity Crisis, named Australian engineering firm Del-Ray negligent over failures of the ship-wide dispersal system for Agent 15.

Many Purist and Supremacist factions issued defoliants to virtually all personnel going "outside the wire," with the admonishment that they should be used liberally to suppress "problem vegetation."

Marking smoke was essential for calling down artillery fire and guiding hoppers to a safe landing: most base defenders carried at least three canisters as part of their standard kit, following the guidelines recorded by Colonel Santiago in her Spartan Battle Manual.

Source:
Image is "110" by CanDemirbag on DeviantArt.