Racing the Darkness - An Alpha Centauri Photologue

[MysticWind]

The Smacer subculture

From the beginning of the settlement of Planet, there were renegades. Warden J.T. Marsh first records of a five-man band of his hunters breaking off from the Forward Contact Team no more than a fortnight after their landing ahead of the Unity. Their cause of departure was unknown. Some say their leader’s rejection of technology had disturbed and alienated them sufficiently to head towards the secondary landing zone where the rest of the ship’s party was to arrive. Others simply assert that these mavericks were no more than treasure hunters seeking to illegally stake their own fortunes outside of the purview of the almighty Mission Charter. Still others claim that wormsong and fungus scent had bewitched these errant hunters, leading them to certain death at the bottom of a boil.

Their fate was unknown, but their story was not. And from the remnants of the FCT to the early post-Planetfall societies, stories abounded of those who had “gone native” not to forge their own breakaway factions, but to simply live off the desolate, uncompromising land of Chiron. Each faction had its own share of the disturbed and the discontent, those who wanted to bail at the first order to dig latrines or prune xenofungus. Not all were able to muster the means and the followings to leave with the makings of a new colony. Many simply had to flee with little more than the suit on their backs and the breather masks on their face, some stolen rations, and a shredder pistol or two. Outside of their habitat walls laid the endless wild.

A former Children of the Atom scoutbird pilot abandons his vehicle and cause for a life of the wild

Yet, even after early colonies were established, leaving one’s base was not always a death sentence. Those who absconded with enough supplies- at least weeks, days were utterly insufficient- may yet have the chance to live out in the wild enough to make it to an abandoned Cargo Pod, or even better, an automated Landing Pod. Indeed, in the early days, there still remained pods containing vital stores left untouched in the wild, and even dozens to hundreds of cryosleep tubes holding crew members still in hibernation. Such unclaimed vehicles made excellent shelters for lone wanderers of the Planetary wastes, and a place to restock both dwindling supplies and numbers. While these pods were tempting targets to be captured by any faction, most retrieval teams simply took the most important loot and left the bare chasses intact, leaving behind metal skeletons littering the still-unterraformed landscape. Thus, they often still remained decent refuges from worms or from storms for those who had abandoned their homes. In time, some small-scale communities of no more than a few dozen individuals would gather around abandoned pods, building shantytowns forgotten by the highborn factions.

Free Scouts, Nomads, Amblers, Fungal Rangers, Pink-Striders, Hardboilers, Wandering Kingdoms, Wormfood- there was no end to the nicknames given to the folk who had emancipated themselves from the civilizations of Planet. A magistrate from the Watchers of Chiron, perhaps facetiously, gave the subculture the classification of S.M.A.C.E.R.: Scroungers, Malcontents, Antisocialites, Criminals, Exiles, Rogues. And despite the unwieldy acronym, this name stuck, becoming the general appellation for any who left base society to pursue small-time life on the frontier.

Smacers explore the Upland Wastes shortly after a sandstorm

Socioeconomic profile

As humans discovered the resource-rich, yet ecologically sound, practice of planting Old Earth-origin trees and flora upon Chiron’s nitrate-wealthy soil, forests sprouted across entire continents. These vast and murky expanses too became a destination for the willingly lost. Of course, the woods are dangerous, full of hostile creatures and human interlopers. Though newly-grown, the thick weald of Planet came to resemble the outlaw-haunted forests of Old Europe fairy tales. The socially maladjusted who left the stable comfort of base life were often those the most desperate to survive at all costs, including their own humanity. And amongst the pines of the northern latitudes, or between the newly-introduced cacao, açaí, and cupuaçu groves in the sweltering monsoon rainforests at the equator, dwelled untold numbers of rapacious smacers with allegiance to no faction nor ideology, ready to steal from their fellow man. Banditry remained rife even at the sub-factional scale: not only would small gangs of hardy smacer thugs (the “true survivalists”, they sneered at Spartan and Hunter presumptions) often attack trade convoys or understaffed patrols from factions, they had a tendency to prey upon their fellow exiles. That was because the development of smacer culture progressed over time from pure survival to one of the acquisition of alien artifacts.

Two smacers of unidentified tendency in a forest near Academgorodok

Smacer lifestyle always revolved around extractive modes of production. The earliest proto-smacer exiles hunted for supply pods and gathered the scraps of abandoned bases, burned out rovers from worm attacks, planetpearls missed by scout patrols. Over time, smacers would attempt unsanctioned mining, hazardous folk study of mindworms and other xenoforms, poaching of said rare species, distilling or synthesizing fungal intoxicants, logging (punishable by hard labor in a ‘Former workgang by the Shapers, and outright execution by the rarely-vengeful Gaians), battlefield salvage, psi-divining (usually staged), land surveying, and acting as guides and field medical providers to basers for exorbitant fees. And depending on the region or former faction of origin, running gambling halls and other pleasure houses, or selling “wildland” arts and crafts at high markup.

None of these cottage industries could match the vast wealth involved in plundering the enigmatic alien archeological sites that littered Planet. The Ruins might be the greatest collection of such specimens of Chiron, but there are significantly more monoliths, temples, towers, and mounds scattered across the globe. And endless more alien artifacts that can be found at more mundane landscapes in the wilds, sometimes helpfully at the landing zones of automated Unity Pods drawn to these locations of interest. These artifacts were not of only immense research curiosity- they were worth considerable amounts of energy credits up to hundreds if not thousands of ¤. Multiple factions ordered their scouts to prioritize such relics over Pods or even damaged units. To Zakharov, it was one thing to lose yet another group of hapless doctoral candidates and mere bachelors-holding University Enforcement in the field- quite another to allow an irreplaceable artifact from some unknown progenitor race to be destroyed by mindworms, or worse yet, stolen by another faction who knew not what to do with it. And thus, acquiring, fencing, and reselling alien artifacts became the major economic activity of smacers. Many factions gladly contracted out artifact gathering to the feral frontier folk, despite their reputation.

An alien “observatory”-type ruin. Such sites were prized for the presence of artifacts that scientific-focused factions believed could be used for levitation or even flight

Political-Ideological analysis

Alongside alien ruins with questionable means of structural support and of dubious origin, disavowed and adventurous scions of the basekind, there were Gaian extremists, Conclave apostates, Labyrinth escapees, Spartan deserters, Monopolist layoffs, Peacekeeper renouncers, University dropouts, Ascendancy undesirables, Watcher incorrigibles, Dreamer freethinkers, Tomorrow rogue scholars, Atomic anti-Singularitarians, Pilgrim claim jumpers, Tribal iconoclasts, Shaper deep ecologists, Hunter addicts, Memory skeptics, Restoration Kurtzes, Pirate landlubbers, New State knights-errant, Holnist petty warlords, Kavithan cultists, roving mercenary bands, treasure hunters, independent scientists, wildcatters, freed drones, black marketeers servicing all of the above; in short, the entirely undefined, disintegrating mass, thrown hither and yon, which the factions call smacers.

The smacer subculture was a mishmash of the expelled and the escaped, the very misfits from colonial base society. And of course, this heterogeneous mess boasted endless amounts of tendencies. Despite popular misconception, not all smacers were simply antisocial loners seeking artifacts, though by far this tendency- the default choice of becoming a frontiersmen- was a substantial motivation. It would be more accurate to say that smacers often embodied anti-ideologies. As those who abandoned their factions, they had a tendency to dismiss the motivations and the social agendas of their former home bases. Or alternatively, embrace the minor ideologies too extremist and widely detested for forming viable new factions.

Recon footage of Holnist warband raiding abandoned ‘Forming site. Few of the original stowaways escaped Planetfall, or remained free of Spartan conscription and Peacekeeper detention. Most persisted as common bandits

The Schreiber Project, an Outpost-class sub-faction of breakaway University researchers led by former Togra Labs employees, have had relatively extensive dealings with smacers in their effort to amass alien artifacts. Schreiber polisoc scientists have determined the common characteristic of smacers, economic mode aside, is the rejection of major factions’ ideologies, finding them hypocritical, unworkable, or otherwise too constraining for their lifestyle. For instance, the all-encompassing environmentalism of the Stepdaughters of Gaia is denounced as detached nature fetishism, decoupled from the difficult lived-in experience of actually facing the rigors of Planet’s ravenous, conquering ecosystem from day to day. According to Schreiber interviews, while smacers of ecological-motivated tendencies find Lady Skye to be a fellow traveler, they consider her view of Planet to be a quaint, cute garden safely walled by her barricades, autoguns, and flamers. Quite a far cry from waking up in blood-red forests enveloped by fungus, only to find that the darker hue is not from a seasonal blooming, but a crimson mindworm swarm encroaching.

The Spartan Federation was also a frequent target of ridicule among the smacers. Many were escaped helots or departed legionnaires themselves who bristled against the iron discipline of Sparta. All found her exhortation of the will to power and ultimate survival to be little more than playacting- if the colonel had truly wanted to embrace a life of hardship and grim survivalism, then what was she doing having her followers hold up in impregnable fortress cities protected by layers upon layers of ultra-advanced military technology? Safe in their steel walls, their bodies and minds safe from the beasts of the earth and air, their main challenge was only other humans with their rival crafty weapons. And so it really was all contrived games of skill, waging war for the sake of it, and not even proving who had the biggest brawn or cunning, but simply the biggest guns.

Nor were the Hunters of Chiron immune from smacer derision. While many of the wilders admired the warden’s abilities, those who had originated from the faction found him to be yet another tyrant, simply a hardier one. They considered his bloviating about the nature of man to be hoary and essentialist. They saw a Hunter’s duty as full of aimless wandering and toil, when the whole point of facing the rigors of Planet should really be for one’s profit- and pleasure. (More than one deserter had been lashed for illicitly brewing or consuming fungal spirits.) Ex-Hunter dissenters also found its wilderness democracy to be easily stacked by senior veterans of the Forward Landing Teams, whose judgments often became law as they had the trust and favor of the warden. And so, the self-centered nature of smacer subculture denounced both the sedentary Spartans and the nomadic Hunters.

A smacer pauses amongst the dunes of Nessus Canyon

Ultimately, to be a smacer is to be negation- to reject base life and factional society. Nomadic factions like the Hunters of Chiron, rogue outposts like the Darwin Raiders, and former outposts-turned-factions like Advocate Vivian Gardinier’s Ecological Malcontents have all existed. But the smacer subculture exists outside of this framework of polities and proto-polities. They are the unrecognized of Planet, lacking true diplomatic status or sovereignty. And it is a status they embrace for themselves. What is sovereignty but the creation of yet another faction, rule by another charismatic gasbag, imposition of yet another bunch of pretty words? Smacer tendencies come in all shapes, from strictly hierarchical local despotates to flat organizations by anarchic collectives. But they have a tendency to cap out at Dunbar’s number at max, owing to both their limited socioeconomic development and the high attrition rates of their lifestyle.

Civilization disregarded smacers in return. From indifference to hostility, the established factions saw their freewheeling experience as an irritant to their respective social projects. Van de Graaf and Yang found rare agreement when each demanded smacers be dragged off by psi-whips and thrown into punishment spheres. Both saw them as the worst kind of cattle rustler inimical to his visions for civilizing the Planet. Perhaps ol’ Jean-Baptiste would have taken an eccentric soft likening to their self-organizing close-knit social structures, but Landers’ Human Tribe immediately saw them as hypersurvivalists reborn, intent on taking the work of good honest folk- and that wasn’t even counting the remaining Holnists among them.

A smacer guards the rear entrance to the deserted University Elektrichestvokupol. Hive aerial reconnaissance determined that the former power plant was often occupied by passing bands of smacer scavengers. Hivemen sentinels dispatched to eliminate the interlopers faced fierce but futile resistance

While Lal’s Peacekeeper emissaries introduced a working paper at the Planetary Council entitled “Developing a Schema for Recognizing Non-Factional Actors”, it was quickly tabled indefinitely in committee, and the faction soon found itself working with its former Watcher colleagues to instead develop anti-smacer crime initiatives against new bandit and alien artifact black market activity. The Centauri Monopoly and similar profit-driven entities like the Schreiber Project entreat with smacers for various wilderness contract work, but they continue to be regarded as a capricious and mistrusted presence on the Planetary frontier. Minor but invasive, they remain a social pressure valve to be rid of societal liabilities, an opportunity to do xenoform research without risking one’s own citizens, and an ambiguous threat to expeditions.

[Trenacker]

Sublieutenant Ajax Jarquín in CMC-340 Powered Combat Suit.

In the halcyon days of the Chiron Interstellar Probe, mission commander and recently-inaugurated planetary governor Joralamon Hardacre ordered the founding of a second settlement to supply Pathfinder Base with additional water.

Responsibility for the new expedition fell to one of Hardacre's protégés, twenty-nine-year-old Tin Star mining vice president, Narolo Vesh. One of the few members of the expedition who had not spent a majority of his lifetime in Earth's gravity well, Vesh had been his company's Site Lead for asteroid mining operations in the Main Belt. To wit, this experience, which had frequently required the miners and their leadership to shelter in place for months on end in the aftermath of a supply ship reactor malfunction, fitted him well for a crisis situation. Alongside Vesh's roughnecks and the 'Rover pilots to carry their windfall back home, Hardacre packed off the colony's senior hydrologist and some five dozen would-be Jeremiahs whom he hoped to sever from the main body politic. SolarEx Company Armed Security Police (ASP) under a junior officer, Ajax Róger Jarquín, were also assigned in case of misfortune.

Volcanic activity caused long-range communications interference that put the settlers on edge. Drilling to the aquifer provoked a mindworm boil. Most of the drilling crew and half the ASPs perished before the remainder of the expedition could be evacuated. Worse news awaited them when radio contact with Pathfinder Base was restored. Red Flu had broken out. Vesh led his command back into the field.

Member's of Vesh's Column investigate the drilling site during an ashfall.

Less than forty-eight hours later, the first of Vesh's party presented with symptoms of Red Flu. Vesh ordered them abandoned. Four hundred had departed Pathfinder Base three weeks earlier. On the eight day after their exile, only forty-seven were still upright and asymptomatic.

Eventually, the survivors reached a botanical testing station where they made permanent camp. There they remained. Fifty years on, most were still alive to bear witness to the arrival of a Spartan hoverbike patrol at the home they now called "Forward Support Base Danger." The Spartans' commander, Sergeant Boque LaSalle, explained to general derision that the site now belonged to a "Colonel Santiago."

Spartan hoverbikes bear down on Land Stand under heavy defensive fire.

Sublieutenant Jarquín explained that "the Honored Dead can neither abandon the graves of our fallen, nor those who continue to depend on us for protection today." He therefore greeted the Spartans in the spirit with which they had come. With a 20mm Oerlikon autocannon mount, SolarEx knocked LaSalle's troopers from the sky with a methodical efficiency.

A SolarEx ASP in CMC-020 Powered Combat Suit. His impact rifle could only have been obtained through trade or plunder from the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri.

The SMACER Atakan Marcos recorded his impressions of a visit to FSB Danger in M.Y. 13.

If you can avoid the mantraps and bring something of value, it is just possible to enjoy some of Vesh's legendary hospitality. He is now decrepit, of course, but still lays an exemplary table sourced from the Interstellar Probe's extraordinary seed bank and pours a stock of world-class wines--"liberated," he says, from a New Stater who decided "he would rather stay at the bottom of the sea." Unfortunately, my host spiced our otherwise perfect meal with dyspeptic tirades on peace and war, the latter being his favorite topic.

Vesh relishes his people's underdog status. Now ninety-two, he has never stopped fighting, having refused reintegration with Hardacre's colony over insistence that he depart FSB Danger. One gathers that, for Vesh, it was the final straw: he will no longer insist that his people make sacrifices for the Greater Good, he says.

Guns, severed ears, and fatalism aside, this is a simply colony of rustic people and citizen-soldiers, well-motivated and ably led, but few in number and rich only in spirit. Here, comfortable living means some tobacco, a bit of fungal liquor, and prisoners enough to serve them. Abundant harvests have banished hunger and most disease. There is no technological development to speak of, but the Pathfinder Probe's standards remain at least two generations ahead of Unity's, and so it is not yet a problem. Vesh well knows, of course, that the standard of living here must inevitably decline if he cannot at least tap an industrial economy for talent and supplies. Indeed, perhaps because the enormity of their circumstance is only now sinking in, the whole settlement is characterized by a perverse fatalism that makes time itself seem to slow and unwind.

[Trenacker]

A New State sloop-of-war in the Slowwind Delta. Launch canisters for two huge anti-ship missiles are between the 30mm gun mounts at centerline: if she can find a Spartan battleship, there will be trouble. Prominent close-in weapons systems (the port-side pair are visible here) provide her answer to both micromissile swarms and Isles of the Deep. Even alone, she is more than a match for the Spartan fast attack craft moored within the great cothon at Xerxion.

We surfaced about three hundred yards off the rocks, close enough to spot the men on deck struggling with their survival suits. An orange life raft blossomed as it hit the water and a dozen desperate sailors piled in. We could see the New State warship order what we knew was general quarters. I eagerly anticipated a rescue operation. Instead, two crewmen emerged from the hatch, lugging a machine gun. Without a word, they set up and hosed down the foundered Morganites, taking care to leave no survivors. The deflated raft sank faster than their Foil, which we were made to take under tow. St. Germaine's sailing master signaled that I should cross over to him, which I did to avoid a similar fate.  That captain, who did not give his name, recorded it all in his logbook, calling the dead men "trespassers," and bade me promise to "tell the story of their tragic, but avoidable, end." - A Recollection of the Sea

[Trenacker]

Jean-Baptiste Keller. Date unknown.

Man's the ultimate social animal, you know. Every species defends its young, its nest, its pack. We are the only one that will defend a neighbor, too. The same ones with whom we fight over placement of a fence, or whether their son will date our daughter. We probably think they'd make a terrible mayor. Wouldn't even want them on the PTA. But we wouldn't dream of watching the Super Bowl without 'em. I watch my History Channel. Somebody--I forget who--said that our ability to use tools made us the undisputed masters of the Earth. I say, it's because we can practice community with the people next door that makes this mastery worthwhile, and keeps us worthy. - The Annotated Broadcasts

Coming in a close second to Nathan Holn, Jean Baptiste Keller is today remembered as one of the men most responsible for the Second American Civil War. Yet even when critical of his own government, which he accused of moral cowardice on any number of occasions, Keller never shared Holn's desire to overthrow any government; rather, he wished to bridge the growing partisan divide in the United States through new forms of civic participation.

On his radio program, Keller lamented the great ideological sorting enabled by social media. Instead of providing solutions, he said, politicians were delivering "bad performance art," while citizens were learning to jump at ghosts. But since a majority of people had long since stopped believing that their problems were soluble, they accepted the entertainment as emotional numbing agent. Keller read this as an indictment of America's party system, and indeed of ideological purity more broadly. For a time, he was hopeful that popular referendums would demonstrate that the average Democrat and Republican had more in common than either one might suspect, but statehouses were jealous of their power and the call went unheard.

Keller was a reluctant survivalist. He explicitly disavowed Nathan Holn as both a racist and a terrorist, urging listeners to heed the federal government's call for vaccination against Red Flu and singing FEMA's praises. His calls for a home-grow kibbutz movement started only after he concluded that law enforcement and military resources were insufficient to counteract the Home Rule movement. Keller's pitch was simple: geography, not philosophy, was the driving factor in most peoples' lives. Their lifelines were literally within twenty or forty miles of home. Rather than seek to be part of something aspirational, citizens who believed themselves to be at-risk of war or pestilence should make arrangements to give and receive help from family and friends if they were close, and neighbors if they were not.

Shocked by the violence spreading out from the American heartland like a bleed, Keller assembled a manifesto that was part sermon, part reference manual for the prophesied political apocalypse. Sandwiched between chapters on the selfless example of Jesus Christ, Keller explained how to repair a Ford tractor, where to collect seed stock for a future planting season, how to brew moonshine, and how to manufacture homemade explosives. The two thousand-page monstrosity, which adherents usually carried in huge three-ring binders, with no two alike, went so far as to contain sample pictures of an ideal "self-defense community," with school, workshops, and truck gardens neatly circumscribed by sheet-metal walls.

Keller's problem was that he made too many powerful enemies too quickly. Americans were intolerant of "experiments in communal living," and so Keller was easily tarred a Communist in the popular imagination. Faith leaders aligning around Nathan Holn or closely wedded to partisan causes declared Keller a heretic in retaliation for his critique. And rather than admit its inability to deliver on promises to the American people, official Washington reacted with outrage that Keller should apparently compound the problem of local secession by tacitly encouraging it. Holnists delighted in repeating the rumor that Kellerite townships were dens of incest, playing on Keller's fascination with blood relation as the basis for durable settlements in crisis. In M.Y. 2022, Keller was forced into hiding after an attempt on his life. His broadcasts never resumed.

The tragedy of Kellerism is that belief made his followers more vulnerable. When Holnists were unsure of their odds against police or even part-time soldiers, Kellerites were an enticing alternative. After all, Kellerite communities were highly functional. Where they could get it, they accepted government assistance and so had improved health profiles when compared to surrounding communities. Bonds of blood and long-standing familiarity kept crime to a minimum. And Keller's book did stand the test of practical use. "His people" found worthwhile salvage, built sturdy structures, and achieve the organizational coherence necessary to produce food and sustain a tolerable standard of living. All of this, the Holnists wanted.

Keller urged his followers to resort to arms only for purposes of self-defense. Unfortunately, his self-restraint was not always shared by those who took his message to heart. On average, the "lieutenants" who led communities operating in his name were deeply troubled young people suffering from post-traumatic stress. They resorted readily, even enthusiastically, to violence. Pogroms against Tribes in Des Moines and San Francisco provided convenient pretext to carry the war to other fronts.

A Kellerite community built around a train siding near Cerro Gordo, California. Like a medieval fortress, the entrance is defended by murder holes and a vertical portcullis. Keller's writings described how to rig cargo containers like this one with explosives so that they could be detonated if breached. The promise of water to passing travelers is brazen, if true to form. The exterior sign's reference to slaves probably refers to Holnists or intolerant locals taken prisoner in battle and put to work in nearby mines but illustrate how Kellerites sometimes lived down to their foes' worst stereotypes.

The Stars and Stripes Resurgent. Officers of the Oregon State Police stand guard over a Safe Zone in downtown Portland during the final months of the Second Civil War.

A Tribal armored personnel carrier suffers a crippling malfunction to its turret-mounted gauss armament during night fighting below Xerxion. Turret positioning suggests that the vehicle was trying to repel attack from the rear quarter. Anyone inside would almost certainly have evacuated moments later. To help with scaling the fortress inclines, the hull has been stripped of all non-essential armor and kit. The gold-washed plate indicates where an enterprising technician tried to add laser-reflective coating with hopes of improving crew survivability.

[Trenacker]

The cause of the very first murder on our little expedition to the stars? Light. Two crewmen argued over possession of a headlamp. Gripped by avarice—and, no doubt, by fear—one stove the other’s head in with a sonic hammer. Over light. Even then, in our first hours above this new world, energy was the thing. For what is light but its herald? - The Centauri Monopoly

A Tomorrow Initiative technician lies dead after an encounter with Morgan SafeHaven contractors seeking access to the Unity Data Laboratory.

Ideological unity within factions was an elusive, some would say illusory, prize. There were many good reasons that this should be so.

First, crew members were rarely sorted according to nationality, ideology, mission area, or even contract type. The piecemeal recruitment process and imperatives of shipboard emergency duties were the primary considerations for placement within the hull. Senior officers were likewise located the length and breadth of the ship, the better to assist with orderly landing operations. Some exceptions were made for armed security, both U.N. and private, but the populations impacted were quite small. To be sure, the U.N. Marine garrison, like its historical forbears, was situated with defense in mind: at the approaches to the ship's bridge and armory. Famously, Roshann Cobb awoke surrounded by his company praetorians, but even these were paid retainers who had counted on a two-way trip, not necessarily fellow-travelers interested in abetting Cobb’s flight from beneath the thumb of a temperamental father.

Firefighters attempt to quell a cryobay flare-up caused by Dreamer vandals. When the shipboard crisis rose to a fever pitch, competition for nearby passengers and cargo increased until some leaders ordered a “slash-and-burn” policy, destroying anyone and anything they did not keep for themselves as insurance against tomorrow’s competition.

Second, the survivors awakened aboard Unity were overwhelmingly likely to have been awakened in an attempt to match problems with skills, rather than to further a social experiment that the expedition’s leaders did not yet themselves necessarily foresee. Most of the Unity command staff acquired their initial followers due to rank and charisma. The origins of the Peacekeeping Forces lay in a series of accidental encounters between Pravin Lal and those who crossed his path on his errand to Hydroponics. Even in the twilight of the evacuation, newly-coalescing “factions” chose who to take and who to abandon based almost entirely on primary and secondary function. Leaders with overwhelmingly monofunctional parties, such as Prokhor Zakharov, who had intentionally sought out engineers and stayed too long in Reactor Control, were rare.

Once on the ground, there was a natural grace period during which water, food, and shelter were the common obsession. Disagreement over government, leisure, and self-determination came later. Leaders were forced to move slowly to avoid disorder. Every incoming refugee and recovered colony pod was another infusion of uncertainty. Many factions, the Peacekeepers included, experimented with temporary processing stations for new arrivals, justified ostensibly on grounds that they required special medical care or nutrition that was better delivered in spaces dedicated to their needs, but really done to buy time for titration of “disruptive elements.”

The identity that others give us is much more important than the one we give ourselves. Nobody cares about the second one. They probably wouldn't believe it if you told them. They know only what was stenciled on your cryopod. A poet who was mislabeled a doctor? He is only a bad doctor. – Records of an Honest Man

For obvious reasons, groups of stowaways who managed to get aboard in large number enjoyed a tremendous advantage in political cohesion. Landers's Kellerites were secreted behind false bulkheads in two groups of roughly two hundred each. Both were situated forward of damage control but aft of the bridge, and they united at a prearranged rally point before it was even clear that the ship was lost. The Spartans were in a similar position. Shock hardly describes Santiago's reaction to learning that a large majority of the Holnists she had brought along had no intention of leaving Unity alive, but her claims to ultimate authority over the survivalist movement on Planet were much-strengthened by the six hundred odd fellow travelers in her extended command. Each such stowaway knew precisely what the nature of life would be when they hit dirt.

Factions with high ideological cohesion manifested disturbing pathologies. Once bitten by the unfriendly Spartans, and with a long memory of persecution by the Evangelical Fire, Pete Landers was twice shy. A Herkimker Battle Jitney similar to the one seen in this Reno, NV scrap yard was used by Tribal Minutemen to burst the gate at New Eden, where, without provocation, they put to the sword every last congregant and called it preemptive self-defense.

Pilgrim Regulators work to shut down an Amirani Base Management System at a captured Children's outpost. Use of national symbols such as the American flag shoulder patch, strictly prohibited by the U.N., was common for Charter colonists, especially those with ARC provenance. Oscar van de Graaf obsessed over the fate of his "stakeholders" and practiced a version of latter-day impressment to claw back "restitution" from other factions.

A University academician being taken into custody by the Chiron Guard. Commander Kleisel Mercator calculated that the best way to amass Progenitor artifacts was to seize rather than seek. As his collection grew in size, so too did the number of willing recruits to the cause of a global defense initiative.

Sources:

The Herimker Battle Jitney was a vehicle used in the 1999 movie Mystery Men.

The Global Defense Initiative is a faction in Westwood Studio's long-running Command & Conquer series.

[Trenacker]

The leader is the one who can think of next morning’s meal when tonight’s is not yet assured. - The Institutes of Leadership

When the basins were pumped dry, Zakharov was told he had to abandon the rigs. He conferred with his Committee on Industrial Robotics and abandoned the basins instead.

Enemy soldiers dreaded the brutal tunnel work required to root out Hive bases. Specialist units of the Regulators and Peacekeeping Forces trained for months in close-quarters combat and confined-space rescue to make ready for assaults. After the Hive expanded west into the Nessus Canyon, liaison officers of the Human Restoration approached Nwabudike Morgan, promising to train for him a corps of elite sappers. Morgan instead sought the council of Johann Anhaldt. A Coeus supercomputer rejected the conventional wisdom. Morgan deployed a drilling rig as instructed, and Yang lost contact with the offending branch.

Rovers belonging to the Chiron Probe cross the Neyanza Valley, the largest contiguous terraformed space on Chiron, en route to High Hide. Joralamon Hardacre was keen to trade with the Unity survivors, whom he provided with inoculation against Red Flu and the benefit of his fields notes on the Mind Worms. It was from Hardacre that Marsh learned about their vulnerability to fire.

[MysticWind]

U.N. Temple of Sol

The Sons of Centauri-Ra narrowly escaped the destruction of the Unity via Landing Pod. Their core consisted of most of the ship’s solar sailer team: powertechs, solartechs, laborers, most adherents of the neopagan cult that was of minor popularity during the latter days of Old Earth. Along with them were any survivors they swept up along the way to the nearest hangar bay. Cuzco Sol, once named Lucero Eztli Salvador, led the motley crew, boldly extolling the Centauri suns and exhorting all who they came across to join them, so long as they renounced darkness and shadow. Their landing was hastily done under frightfully uncertain circumstances- emergency protocols had to be run, then instrumentation burnout had required the use of an actual pilot. Throughout the descent, Sol called upon Centauri-Ra to shine his faithful rays upon his children, so they may live to grow strong and powerful on this new mudball they were so gifted. Along that harrowing passage, new converts were born, and existing faith was forged and reforged in the heat of the pod’s chassis upon reentry. Shortly after, Sol would unilaterally declare himself the spiritual and mission leader of the lost flock, giving himself the title of Heliophant.

They landed on gentle foothills surrounded by dense fields of xenofungus. The elevation was heralded by Sol as a good omen, “closer to Ra”, with the potential for solar collector development. He called this new base the Temple of Sol as both tribute to the sun cult and to his own humble zeal. So began the hardscrabble life of the Sons. It was a theocratic society but not excessively so. The cult stressed vigorous activity and striving for perfection in the martial arts, which lent itself well to the building and defense of the colony. Sun worship was encouraged but not mandated. The macho attitude of the cult stressed one’s own journey towards solar enlightenment, and so believers often tried to outdo each other in their defense against the local megafauna, the erection of more solar collectors above quota, the more time spent outside in the sun. Those who were weaker in faith were mocked as effete, secret Earth-loving pansies, but not persecuted. So in their chauvinistic, yet open-natured way, the Sons eked out a passable society.

Temple of Sol was a functional base from its start, but survival was difficult and fraught with danger

Not long after its founding, Temple of Sol unexpectedly welcomed its first set of human visitors. Fortunately, they were non-hostile, unlike the bugs of the air and the beasts of the field. A corporate convoy of heavy equipment under the command of Dai Seung Heavy Industries passed through the territory of the Sons, and enquired who lived here. These fellow survivors had landed quite some distance away, in desolate wasteland. Only with great difficulty and trepidation- and the best navigation that the company survival scouts could rustle up- did they narrowly dodge worm attacks to arrive at this place. A mining and construction civilian contractor attached to the Unity mission, this former chaebol had been looking for a better location to set up shop, and hopefully, customers to sell to. Even if the mission was technically dissolved, the surviving executives reasoned, work could still be done to make use of the place. They were open to clients, and, taking note at the rather shabby and under-equipped nature of the Heliophant’s faithful, potential coworkers as well.

Dai Seung, of Gangnam District, Seoul, was particularly well-positioned as a company to form unlikely partnerships. The firm had been the first to operate in the north following the 2053 ROK-DSRK Detente that opened up the Jucheist regime to outside business. With a corporate culture stressing adaptability, flexibility and pragmatism as its highest values, Dai Seung would go on to operate contracts as disparate and far-flung as constructing nuclear power plants in the Vietnamese Soviet Republic to exploring offshore natural gas fields off the coast of French Indochina, building facilities for the post-Six Minute War Indian government to laying infrastructure for the Empire of Neo Japan’s disputed IOEZ naval holdings on Netaji Bose Island. While company field execs were at first apprehensive about working with a batch of fanatically hypermasculine cultists, they quickly and cooly analyzed the situation.

Vice President of Field Operations- Labor Relations Young Kwan-Yong surmised that the Centauri-Ra cult, while pugnacious and prone to atavistic flights of fancy (one of Heliophant Cuzco Sol’s first pronouncements had been the desire to climb one of the nearby alien monoliths himself and carve the twin-sun sigil onto its capstone personally - he was only dissuaded from doing so when Dai Seung reps proposed building their own obelisk for the cult’s ceremonial use, rather than disrupting the ancient priceless artifact), did indeed possess valuable technical expertise in solar power generation, and that their bravado could be yet harnessed under the chaebol’s steady guiding hand. She further determined that for all of their fighting ability, most, unlike their leader, were engineer techs and workers, without actual experience, and the amount of actual weaponry they held was paltry. While Dai Seung Security Services did not possess firepower at any level akin to that held by Sabre, SafeHaven, ARC, and others, they did have more equipment than the surviving solartechs had salvaged from the ship.

Young Kwan-Yong was one of a dozen Dai Seung VPs who survived Planetfall. Expert at creating deals with workforces from multiple regional markets, her pre-Chiron claim to fame was reaching an accord with striking North Korean miners at Komdok in 2061

The Sons were not simpletons- they had long since abandoned their initial infamous tactic of attacking mindworm swarms in melee combat, swinging sledge hammers as clubs and old broken photovoltaic cells as shields. And their insistence on periodic exposure to the elements to ritually sunbathe in the light of Alpha Centauri A and Hercules did appear to provide salutary effects- Dai Seung Human Asset Management psych chaplains discovered that observant Centauri-Ra acolytes performed ably in battle against psi-wielding xenoforms, able to resist hallucinatory effects for precious minutes longer than non-observant practitioners and non-members without extensive off-base experience. Young asserted that this personnel resource could not be disregarded, and her plan to establish the working relationship between the chaebol and the cult was quickly adopted by the Field Operations Working Board.

The working relationship was rocky upon inception, with the Sons of Centauri-Ra scoffing at the end of listening to corporate suits, but this was smoothed over as Dai Seung offered its modest armories of shredder rifles, field HUD scouters, even several prototype exo-frames mostly used for heavy loading. Not to mention, the entire Agriculture and Food Synthesis Divisions upscaled to accommodate feeding the doubled population. While the Sons had a store of survival rations, the specter of starvation was not fully banished until Dai Seung graciously offered its food supply. In return, the Sons got to work building out a full state-of-the-art (by pre-launch standards) electrical infrastructure. The Heliophant’s daily messages gave succor to the faithful, who rallied to the difficulties of frontier settlement. Dai Seung’s managers found that the sun worshippers were more up to the task of building out a settlement. They were particularly capable of defending against both mindworms and raids from hostile factions. While professional, the Security Services were unaccustomed to the sort of savage irregular attacks from Holnists, smacers, and mindworms. In exchange, the corporation allocated excess work cycles towards constructing shrines to appease their partners.

Dai Seung construction crews built the Shining Face, a massive idol of Helios placed in the Chamber of Initiates

Vendetta and Absorption

After several mission years of independent existence, the Temple of Sol finally met its greatest existential threat by Spartan aggression. While the colonel expressed amusement towards the mob of half-crazed sun lovers, and held their fighting spirit in some esteem, she had no patience for their corporate fellows. Denouncing the pursuit of wealth as decadent, Santiago charged Dai Seung as another horde of capitalist monopolists leeching off the truly productive protectors of society (there was a sop to the remaining Holnists left in the Federation) and accused Cuzco Sol of falling prey to the lies of weak-willed energy worshippers. Indeed, the energy stores generated by the vast solar collectors built by the cult indicated that the base had the makings of a future Merchant Exchange. To Young Kwan-Yong and her staff, she and the heliocentric brotherhood were after the same thing. Far from accepting the claims of this provocateur, the Heliophant upheld the cult’s honor and declared that no Son of Ra may betray his friends to any outsider.

While brave, the base came under swift attack by an overwhelming force that both outnumbered and militarily out-organized the defenders. Deployed to the passes leading to the city, in the gaps of the xenofungus fields under the shade of Cuzco’s obelisk, the Saulė calpulli and the 2nd Field Security Team ‘Chungmu’ saw their positions overrun by an army of helots. Though low in morale, these meatgrinder captives taken from prior conquests were force-marched by their Spartan officers straight into the joint Sons-Dai Seung force’s firing lines. Some crawled through the dense xenofungus themselves- company PR officers would later decry that as evidence of nerve-stapling on the part of the Spartans. Even as some from the corporate security service would shamefully break and flee from the onslaught, the Ra acolytes, their bloodthirst triggered, would break ranks and run towards the enemy, taking out their industrial-forged ceremonial Huitzauhqui spiked bats and 3D-printed Champi star-shaped maces and bludgeoned at the flood. For a shining instant, the gambit worked as the stunned Spartans’ momentum was thrown back by this vanguard, and the other defenders fired upon them with shredder rifles. But this instant too passed, as Myrmidons outfitted in combat laser rovers and attack hoverbikes blew past the defensive lines.

The Spartans had arrived at the perimeter walls of the colony. A variety of weapons were unleashed upon them- anti-mindworm flamer guns, hot water pressure washers, even an experimental high-speed excavator arm. But these efforts were fruitless. Colonel Santiago had wanted the corporation as helots, the cultists as janissaries, and the city as her prize. Already her military communiques referred to the base as War Outpost. Former PMC operator Arturo Quiepo, the Spartan commander in charge of the operation, had the Myrmidons deploy explosives to punch through the defensive perimeter. After several blasts and fending off a counterattack by the Aruna calpulli with fire support from the 7th Base Security Division ‘Gasin’, Quiepo and his forces dove into Temple of Sol, ready to slay or enslave all who was within.

It was then that a U.N. Peacekeeping Forces division miraculously emerged upon the scene. Having been tracking Spartan troop movements closely for over a week as part of a long-simmering pseudo-vendetta, Major Steven Howard, the leader of the blue berets, invoked Article 5 of the Joint Signatory Framework, declaring that the Spartan Federation had attacked a neutral party and was guilty of violating interfactional laws. Armed with the latest impact weaponry, the Peacekeepers made use of the situation and blasted the Spartan forces in the field before attacking their rearguard at the city’s walls. The invasion force had been caught by the hammer of Lal and the anvil of the Temple. Quiepo, no stranger to lost causes, ordered a speedy retreat and spat threats of true vendetta upon the Peacekeepers before withdrawing the battered Myrmidons from the base’s gates.

And so did the Temple of Sol make first contact with the Peacekeeping Forces. Major Howard was bemused to discover an independent settlement co-ruled by a religious organization and a private corporation. He would later describe the arrangement as “a distant echo of those weird big business-loving Midwest theocracies from the civil war.” Regardless of the unusualness of the arrangement, Howard quickly recognized Sol and Young as the leaders of the city. The division stayed to see to the care of the wounded and the reconstruction of the defenses, proper emissaries were exchanged, and the base was inducted into the Peacekeepers’ protective orbit.

Major Steven Howard and a Peacekeeper anthropologist granted an audience before Heliophant Cuzco Sol, flanked by the cult's Medjay elites

Fast forward several mission years later, and the base expanded and grew under Peacekeeper military aid and support. While they continued to train vigorously and ritualistically, the diminishment of outside threats meant that the Sons of Centauri-Ra were able to focus fully on solar collector construction. The settlement became renowned as the “City of Ten Thousand Mirrors,” its vast solar arrays surrounding the countryside where xenofungus fields used to be, now plucked clean by Peacekeeper-provided ‘formers leased to the Dai Seung construction teams. Following no shortage of polite prodding from Lal’s diplomats, the Heliophant and the CEO gradually acceded to entrance into the Peacekeeping Forces. Thus was the community renamed to U.N. Temple of Sol, an oddball among the faction’s bases.

The commissioner and his advisors would later rue giving the place more than associate status: while the governors were democratically elected, they tended to fiercely advocate for cult and corporate interests. This ranged from the irritatingly monomaniacal (designating the Heliophant’s corporate-built shrines as UNESCO Planet Heritage Sites) to the alarmingly unhinged (later on, favoring the widespread adoption of hydrocarbon-producing vehicles and MULEs, both for cost-cutting reasons and for immanentizing Amun-Ra’s eschaton). But between the fervor of the cult and the professionalism of the corporation, U.N. Temple of Sol had a very low population of drones. And even as both organizations realized that there was much more to Planet beyond the base walls, their steadfast stewardship has made the City of Ten Thousand Mirrors truly shine.

U.N. Temple of Sol at the cusp of the Pre-Sentience Age

Coda and Implications

In time the story of both the Sons and Dai Seung diverged beyond their first city. Cuzco Sol’s departure for the south, the following succession struggles, the rise of the Proxima-Aten heresy, the various exoduses and pilgrimages that ensued, and the faith’s experiences living among other societies is beyond the scope of this account. (Of particular interest is the curious case of the small Centauri-Ra community within the Lord’s Conclave at Mount Sanctuary- like the Dharmic-based Kavithans, non-Abrahamic religions have always had an uneasy, often antagonistic existence within the the Conclave despite Sister Godwinson’s official credo of “life of religious worship.” Even more precarious is the state of the Solarus sect among the Stepdaughters of Gaia- a sororal offshoot originally welcomed by the Gaians as fellow nature-loving neopagans, they quickly drew the ire of the Lady herself for their belligerence and tendency to light entire groves on fire in devotion to the Heliades. Fortunately for both the Gaian hosts and the Solarii at their mercy, Chiron’s low oxygen makes forest fires difficult to spread.)

And as contact with ever more civilizations (and potential clients) increased, Dai Seung perpetual Acting Field CEO Young took up more contracts and forged additional working relationships beyond their first base. Eventually, the company would rebrand itself as Unicorp (“the Only Answer to Tomorrow“) and become a second-party developer to the Shapers of Chiron. Providing the engineering muscle and know-how to some of the movement’s most audacious mass terraforming projects, the company also began to run into limits of its cultural adaptability. Even as Dai Seung had rebuilt itself on Planet and become an industrial giant, Young and her executives grew more assured in their own vision for how to run their operations, often locking horns with the Coordinator. And the chaebol often pursued its own agenda independent of Nagao’s mystic quest, as it had done from the Sons. Unicorp often deviated from the main Shaper mission to wage its own trade wars and industrial espionage campaigns against the likes of Morgan and ARC, fighting for the hearts and wallets of Planet.

Regardless, the story of the Temple of Sol illustrates how sub-factional societies could exist and coexist on Planet, at least during the early days of development. Religious, cultural, even ideological identities did not always have to belong solely to a single faction or outpost. Private entities, whether corporate or otherwise, could work with multiple factions or even a single sub-factional society. The settlement of Chiron continues to be a multivariate affair hosting a diverse array of radically different groups.

Notes:

Unicorp, née Dai Seung Heavy Industries, are from the custom mod faction set SMACFacPack by @nweismuller and Adam Gieseler. Unicorp is rather like a honest version of Morgan Industries, in that the corporation is self-aware that Planetary monopoly requires Planned economics, and the Free Market is an impediment to that. In this version, I’ve made the CEO female, portrayed by Kim Hye-soo from the South Korean film Default, a historical drama about the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

The Solarii are a hero unit in Majesty: the Fantasy Kingdom Sim, worshippers of the sun goddess Helia.

The original picture of the base is the box art from the Sierra On-Line game Outpost.

The modern depiction of U.N. Temple of Sol is a Solarpunk rendition by Steven Wong.

[Trenacker]

A soldier learns quickly that the best position from which to fight is protected, or else they don't soldier long. - Planet: A Survivalist's Guide

Forewarned is forearmed. In the short time before loss of contact with the Chiron Interstellar Probe, Mission Analysis identified animal attack as the second most-common official cause of death on Chiron. Only Red Flu was a worse killer, and the numbers were close indeed. (At the time, mindworm casualties were calculated separately, as U.N. Medical disagreed with Governor Joralemon Hardacre's assessment that the worms were responsible for the psychosis widely reported by his people.)

Planet’s biodiversity was limited, but the best-known life form to the Pathfinder colonists was the subrid, similar to enormous crustaceans in appearance, and highly aggressive. These semi-aquatic invertebrates preferred the places where Chiron’s plant life had rioted into its waterways. Their bodies were wide, flat, and squat, topped by hard, chitinous exoskeletons with the same chemical composition as the xenofungus. A subrid's fungal shell sometimes exceeded eight feet in height. Subrids were bilaterally symmetrical, with two grasping claws and two pairs of very long, highly articulated walking legs, each ending in four hooked “toes." The legs were remarkably strong. Like those of a waterbug, they could stretch almost perpendicular to the main body, helping the animal to negotiate the toadstool-like nitrate floats found in the lakes and river deltas where they laid their eggs. A flat head bore two eye stalks; a pair of animated, whip-like antennae; matching antennules; and one set of large, vertical mandibles. Naturalist Phillipe Nguyen called them “a perfect child of crab and snail.” Successful domestication efforts were begun after finding that the meat of the subrid was both palatable and nutritious, but the venture was high-risk, high-reward.

Subrids were naturally aggressive. Male and female alike fought to the death for mating privileges, and both participated in vigorous patrols to protect their spawning grounds. When seasonal reproduction cycles ended, the subrids indulged an intense innate curiosity, wandering the land in all weather, seizing items of interest between claws that applied pressure of 4,900 pounds per square inch. Available information showed that vehicles in the Probe's motor pool were not durable enough to withstand this scrutiny.

To help workshop a solution for its second expedition, the U.N. canvassed donor nations for surplus armored vehicles. They also approached Three Days to Decision, a private military services provider that had received high marks for improving combat survivability within the small Gathi Army during the final phases of its war with Shiloh. With little delay, the consultants sent back the design for an air-deployable bunker. Venter-Serison Defense Products manufactured the final product, which test crews on the Sea of Tranquility called the "Trouble Bubble." A lot of forty-three shipped as under-slung cargo for the Unity's Sky Cranes. Every faction on Planet learned to make many more.

The "Bubble" was just that. Comfortable space for up to twenty-four, well-insulated, fully sealed from the external environment with on-board tank-supplied atmosphere for up to thirty-six standard Terran hours. From within, colonists could attempt satellite communication with rescuers, monitor the vicinity on in-built cameras, or perform emergency surgery in a collapsible theater that was better-equipped than most early field ambulances. When inclined to fight, occupants opened gun ports to use their small arms or fired defensive canister munitions from dispensers on each of the bunker's four faces.

Sources:

The picture is taken from the StarCraft Field Manual, by Rick Barba, with art from Robert Rose.

Subrids are just chull, creatures from Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives literary universe. For more on chull, see: Carl Engle-Laird, A Field Guide to Roshar: The Ecology of The Way of Kings, 12 June 2013.

Gath and Shiloh are fictional kingdoms from the NBC sci-fi drama, Kings.

The "Trouble Bubble" is a vehicle from GI JOE used by COBRA, "a ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world."

[Trenacker]

To celebrate the centennial of Planetfall, Librarian Sékou Tangara compiled his list of the most advanced societies on Chiron.

More than half the residents of University bases pursued a graduate-level education, with predictable effects on total research output per capita. The cult of learning claimed its adherents as children. From ablution to meal preparation, no domestic task was performed without audiovisual accompaniment. Floor-to-ceiling panels retracted to entice questions about the natural world beyond. Speaking from overhead telecasters, chemists explained why certain food items on a cutting board paired well and others did not. Dynamic pop-ups turned even the most banal entertainments into opportunities for incidental learning. University smart homes adjusted the nature of this passive instruction to suit the demonstrated preferences and aptitudes of each user. The University Academy of Child Development was justifiably proud of the dramatically reduced incidence of learning disabilities among children raised in these environments.

St. Germaine's sailors pushed to the very limits of their boats' endurance, yielding crucial first insights about the tidal, tectonic, thermal, and mineralogical characteristics of Chiron. New State base design demonstrated a well-informed respect for the planet's natural rhythms of calm and calamity. Caged construction and rubber shock absorbers beneath Rock Island Refuge spared its twenty thousand inhabitants the same unhappy fate as the Nautilus Pirates at New Atlantis during the furious M.Y. 71 eruptions of Mount Krentz.

It was easy enough for the possessors of the mission's generic library to grow an a reliably intelligent, athletically-predisposed specimen in a petri dish. The Human Ascendancy struggled with lower rates of success when actually attempting to parent its perfect offspring to greatness as adults. Pahlavi complained that her social scientists agreed less often than her geneticists. What made one a good soldier or a profoundly insightful mathematician seemed at times to be mutually exclusive with the minimum attainments of competency in the civil service. Some wanted to emphasize creativity, others physicality. Some wanted to prescribe propaganda, while others insisted that affection for the Ascendancy agenda should develop naturally, if at all. How to raise a polymath? At her lowest point, thinking that the juveniles' common tendency toward emotional instability was a sign of weak character, Pahlavi yielded to Chairman Sheng-ji Yang's blandishments and allowed him to make disciples of six, whom he never returned. She had better results working with Dr. Aleigha Cohen, who suggested that the Ascendancy's system of communal child-rearing was too antiseptic. Cohen demanded to know: whither the family unit? She also suggested another improvement: collection and analysis of each Augment's dream data. While the Ascendancy hesitated before the brute expediency of "mental rewiring"--a machine-assisted intervention that Pahlavi didn't trust to produce purely human results--her faction realized its greatest success when it began treating its newest members as individuals in their own right, using personalized insights into each child's subconscious to tailor their development even more finely. No two geniuses were alike.

When his consumers demanded, Morgan delivered. "Red Charlie" was the first in the Lifecycle Series, a line of robotic valets designed to serve an owner from cradle to grave. By day, polymorphic software helped Charlies draft new routines to supplement their original programming. By night, mind-machine interface served as the cutting room floor, where the sleeping creator unconsciously helped their servant to edit that which had been created in the preceding few hours. Morganite compilers braced for sacking when base networks first flooded with stories about Charlies adopting the prejudices and even the speech cadences of their owners, but Morgan knew they had struck paydirt.

Certainly, your computer is the faster. But mine thinks you are an idiot, and he is right. - MorganQuote of the Day

[Trenacker]

The Master Control Station, just above Central Drilling at The People's Teeming. Labyrinth bases were constantly expanding. Hive populations were limited only by the available supplies of nutrient paste (there was never enough), the pace of faction excavators (slow), and, of course, the number of bullets in possession of adjacent colonies. The Chairman's territorial ambitions were whetted in proportion to the urgency of warnings from Base Operations that the Drones were too many in number.

Heliophant Cuzco Sol's price for suspending his vendetta against Sheng-ji Yang in M.Y. 74 was Order's Bulkwark. Not the populace; just the heavily reinforced main drift, where the slow-moving waters of the River Markab, abundant in all seasons, provided the cooling element that made possible another of Dai Seung's miracles.

Named in honor of the Ilocano sun god, the Eye of Amman was a photovoltaic power station that concentrated the solar radiation from Alpha Centauri A through lenses ground from large planetpearls. The intake cell stood 110 feet above Planet's surface on a needle-shaped tower, but all the real action took place below ground, where a spectacular golden laser played a continuous feed to banks of industrial-scale batteries.

Huge trunk cables wheeled the project's huge power output first to the Son's grid, then onto the Morganite exchange, from which the corporation earned a tidy profit, at least until M.Y. 136. In that year, amidst another of the short, sharp trade wars between the Dynamic Enterprise and the newly-rebranded Unicorp, Triax Corporation battle ogres blinded the Eye by shelling the tower to collapse.

Economies of scale might elude a faction for any number of reasons. Arguably the worst contributing factor was lack of access to adequate natural resources, a chronic condition that, by the middle of the first century M.Y., experts agreed could be outlived only if the afflicted society had resort to war, trade, or expansion.

Oscar van de Graaf was no stranger to taking what he wanted by threat or application of main force, and he saw no reason that his lack of an industrial base, or the already-crowded conditions on Shamash, should stop him. If his ancestors had taken other mens' cattle, he reasoned, then perhaps the Pilgrims could take other factions' minerals.

The Governor approached one hundred of his top minds and issued each one stock in a new enterprise, the Chiron Mining and Recovery Corporation, soon known as C-MARCO. In their genius, his collaborators produced another acronym: SAMMS, short for semi-autonomous mobile mining station. Viral morphology provided the now-infamous design: that of a bacteriophage. Six or eight articulated walking legs were affixed to the business end of a drill rig, above which sat, in ascending order, a small ore cylinder, a control cabin, engine, exhaust, and radio mast. Put to it, the SAMMS could lurch along, or away from pursuers at 32 km/h. They were rugged and cheap to build, using parts mostly sourced from common Grumman Aerospace pods, and so equally cheap to repair. Hydrofoils and hovercraft ferried whole squadrons of SAMMS to enemy territory known for its mineralogical potential. Pilgrim surveyors then made best efforts to find and fix rich veins of ore before the SAMMS were put out to pasture under the watchful eyes of Regulator militia. Progress was painstaking, but the concept was sound and the income steady.


Sources:
The first picture is credited to Mr. Nobody on Pinterest.

The second picture is the Automatic Mantle Harvester Division Processing by serg4d.deviantart.com on @deviantART.

[Trenacker]

The conventional model of geneology is a tree bearing fruit at the terminus of each branch. Such a model implies that all branches are created equal, but this is not the case. Some are weak, others diseased. Orchardists solve this problem by pruning unhealthy branches, conserving nutrients for the choicest blossoms. Without this care, the tree produces nothing remarkable, and certainly nothing they would care to use as root stock to perpetuate the breed. - Homo Sapien Superior

An Ascendancy genetailor makes final adjustments to a new profile.

Geriatric medicine was an unavoidable lure for the immensely strong egos that had collectively destroyed the United Nations Mission to Alpha Centauri.

Early forays into the science of longevity were ordered up by faction leaders with prior experience in the field. Academician Prokhor Zakharov chased a so-called "clinical" immortality. The aging patient received lab-grown organs to replace ailing originals, along with immunotherapies like cancer-stalking white blood cells. This was a popular and largely successful scheme, adding an average of 61 years to the lifespan of a reasonably fit person, with even better outcomes for women.

Morganite physicians went in a similar direction. The work required loading a viable sample of the patient's own organ into biological scaffolds. Through the magic of protein accretion and generous injections of growth medium, a new and complete organ would eventually take shape, fully operational and ready to be surgically swapped. University scientists mastered the technique fairly quickly, but Morganite doctors struggled. The faction bought itself time by creating a public exchange for "medical inputs"--in short, a virtual marketplace for live organs. Bureaucrats at the Planetary Council screamed murder, and they were right, but the trade was a popular one, especially once cybernetics could provide adequate replacement for original biology. Hence the proliferation of contracts that gave Morganite employers final rights to the amputated limbs of injured workers, or even the bodies of the dead.

High up in The Pinnacle, Acscendancy researchers came at the same problem of aging from another direction. Director Tamineh Pahlavi wanted not only the benefits of long life, but the fruits of youth as well. Her 'jacks tracked the expression of genes of interest, such as MC1R (youthful appearance) and COL5A1 (collagen production, linked to flexibility) within the Ascendancy population and had them edited into test subjects (usually prisoners purchased from the Dreamers or the Hive). Pahlavi's research was sped considerably by her exclusive possession of the data from the aging studies carried out on the Unity passengers subjected to Wespe-Quinn-Vagner Hibernation, which was virtually all of them.

Unity Cryobay L-21, Bank 8, at final loading. After validation of vitals, colonists and crew not expected to be subject to rapid recall were placed in shock-absorbing canisters that could mitigate the potential malfunction of primary life support. Those with emergency response training were provided with fewer safeguards.

Success brought an increased number of aged followers, not least of which was Pahlavi herself. This brought both opportunities and challenges for one of Planet's most unforgiving societies. Pahlavi was a supremacist, believing that a person's birth was their destiny. In the Ascendancy, past performance at first mattered less than predicted aptitude. Children were literally bred to their tasks. Miners, short and squat with excellent vision. Sailors, tall, with very high metabolism and improved oxygen conservation. Diplomats were always tall, and had a conventionally pleasing appearance. Only repeated disappointment at being unable to "manufacture" consistently excellent leaders led Pahlavi to reassess her original values.

Experiments in close parenting had produced good results. Augments no less than natural-born children were less susceptible to negative influences when they had access to more individualized attention. Some parents were also better than others, a discovery that dovetailed fortuitously with the increasing lifespan of faction members who otherwise lacked for purpose in a brutally task-driven setting. Guardianship was soon counted no less important than the laboratory study behind Ascendancy breeding programs. The more experienced the guardian, the more consistently predictable the child's developmental trajectory.

Recognition of the value of experience changed Ascendancy life for the better overall. Pahlavi reversed her original policy of moving freshborns directly into command positions, requiring instead that they understudy with proven incumbents who were given the power to withhold promotion in cases where it was not merited, which proved to be many. Older citizens, to whom Pahlavi herself had a well-known aversion, were increasingly brought together to crowdsource ideas about how the Ascendancy should handle its troubled diplomacy, the history of which was now complicated enough to afford careful study and benefit from firsthand exposure.

The fullest possibilities for longevity required the weighing in of the Dreamers of Chiron, or at least the descendants thereof. Dr. Aleigha Cohen explored the role that a regimen of mental stimulus might play in staving off degenerative conditions. Insights from the studies she shared on the Planetary Networks were picked up and embraced by virtually all factions. In the Hive Assembly Bays, the Chairman bade his Prefects play Socratic mind games during calisthenics. Octogenarian owners of a Red Charlie competed to name that tune every morning over bowls of Gold Doubloons. The consequences for Gaian society were most profound of all: a near-total elimination of dementia for all age cohorts, which the Lady Skye and her physicians felt must be linked to the faction's domesticated mindworms.

Sources:

On the novel type of white blood cell therapy discussed above, see this article.

For tissue engineering, see this interesting article from the website Drug Target Review.

On gene expression, see this article in Scientific American.

[Trenacker]

In times of strife, we are wont to speak the words, 'God, deliver us from evil.' But I tell you: this is not prayer--it is incantation. God has given us the means to effect our own salvation, material as much as spiritual. We worship God's Creation by living correctly. Do not wish for intervention. Let us make personal action our prayer. - Admonishment to the Faithful

A Human Relief Initiative 'Rover, fancifully dubbed "The Devil's Arrow," carries life-saving potable water up the Caisson Trail to thirsty Observers at avalanche-afflicted Watchpoint.

There was peril in charity, to hear General Marcel Salan tell it. He thought the concerned parishoners of Loaves and Fishes did more harm than good by turning the other cheek and turning out their larders in the name of love for the brethren.

Countless drones, rendered "the least among us" in typically unflattering Conclave speech, owed their salvation from war and famine to the sublimating impulses of Sister Miriam Godwinson. White-helmeted crisis wardens of the HRI had complete freedom of Planet. This, because they were absurdly apolitical. No outrage, not even slaughter perpetrated against the faithful themselves, could place a faction totally beyond the possibility of their assistance. "Ask," Miriam told the Planetary Council, "and ye shall be answered."

So the Conclave famously dispensed soup to the freshly-stapled. Hive sentries had standing orders to let them pass without so much as a visual inspection of cargoes. Morganite project planners supposedly made their seasonal bonuses by shaving orders of food, water, and medical supplies since the HRI could be trusted to make up any shortfall with alacrity, and free of charge.

For Miriam, service to an enemy was prayerful obedience to the principle that all Unity's survivors were bound to a single, common fate. Since she was prohibited from proselytizing under most circumstances, the HRI served her as an ambassadorial corps, bringing to the beleaguered everywhere a clear sense of what it meant to follow the Lord's Commandments.

Sources:

The sci-fi vehicle in the picture is "Truck," by Robert Ryminiecki on Pinterest.

The Human Relief Initiative is an homage to the Global Defense Initiative, or GDI, a faction in Command & Conquer.

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Battle lines drawn on Earth were rarely subject to change after Planetfall. The Unity Crisis inflamed existing passions more than it altered them. By the third generation of settlement, opportunistic raiding, once an accepted remedy in which all partook, had settled into predictable patterns involving a limited number of usual suspects. Only Hivemen, Observers, Dreamers, Pirates, and Pilgrims were desperate enough, or maintained military capabilities appropriate to practice plunder as a way of life. Most military conflict between factions, which was still common enough, had crossed into the realm of vendetta, persistent armed rivalry arising from historical tensions or ideological disagreements.

As forces mustered for the Battle of Amphalion, Sergeant Pete Landers revealed to his astonished Observer allies that the stowaways had brought with them an unlikely legacy of their decades-long fight against persecution: elderly Foundry 4 Powered Combat Suits. Left behind in the rubble of Las Vegas by the departing U.S. Army, which knew it would be resupplied by air, lightly-damaged examples were soon put back into service by Tribal mechanics swarming from hidden shelters. The Kellerites bribed Comprehensive Transport to put several racks of Foundry 4s in one of Unity's abandoned compartments sometime during the 2060s. Time had not been kind to the much-patched relics: their anti-tank warheads were as dangerous to themselves as the enemy; most were reduced to dependence upon their suit's integral rotary cannon, for which there was little suitable ammunition. The allies suffered a rare, costly bloodletting in one of the few victories for the University of Planet during the war to prevent activation of the Interstellar Communications Array, repulsed by Zakharov's attack hovercraft.

Captain Trung Thi Hoang instructs the occupants of her Landing Pod to pressurize their survival suits. Overcrowded conditions prevented everyone's being properly secured in a crash couch. Instead, they relied on overhead handholds that probably caused as many injuries as they prevented.

Despite the unsuccessful prosecution of Struan's overseer Dole Yudikon, Commissioner Pravin Lal faced loud calls for a wave of similar actions, including two members of his own command staff against whom the evidence was felt to be more certain. Former King of Carmel Vesper Abaddon stood accused of war crimes for executions of Danite francs-tireurs, while three-time American cabinet secretary Tell Stillwell, was said to have made possible the abusive labor practices of the American Reclamation Corporation. Lal was also urged to use the Council as his instrument of retributive justice. Sergeant Pete Landers condescended to explain to the Planetary Council that his chosen solution for Spartans was summary execution under "Rule .303," a reference to the story of Australian folk hero Breaker Morant. A more frequent appellate before the Council, Governor Oscar van de Graaf, unselfconsciously sought the assistance of Lal’s blue helmets to effect forcible “transfers” of people and property that he alleged were being wrongly withheld from him, in clear contravention of undertakings made by the United Nations. Most of what was van de Graaf’s legally had come into the possession of Nwabudike Morgan and Shoichiro Nagao, but the Pilgrim leader also began to nurse a quarrel against Lal, the man who kept staying his hand, an agony that could only be endured so long without rebuke. Privately, Lady Deirdre Skye floated the idea of arresting CEO Nwabudike Morgan and Coordinator Shoichiro Nagao under what amounted to a writ of attainder for what she termed "planetary despoilation." Captain Trung Thi Hoang demanded similar action be taken against Santiago and other survivalists, as well as Zelphon Company contract troops with whom her survivors had skirmishes over watering holes. The mercenaries had subsequently been picked up by Roshann Cobb, who was always happy to bolster the size of his security retinue.

Tell Farraday Stillwell, twice American Secretary of the Navy, once American Secretary of Defense, helped to articulate and execute the Renssaeler Administration's policy of personal disarmament. To achieve its goal, the White House first expelled from Congress all representatives from states determined to be "in rebellion," had congressional allies ram through the statehood of overseas territories on a party-line vote, then called a Constitutional Convention, all attendees of which were north of the Mason-Dixon Line, west of the Sierra Nevadas, or dependent on federal assistance. Disagreement about which states ought to be punished in this manner led most of Renssaeler's cabinet to resign. According to both Colonel Corazon Santiago and Sergeant Pete Landers, this decision, which supposedly prolonged the Holnist insurrection by years, destroyed any possibility for true democracy in post-bellum America.

For reasons he little cared to explored, but could not seem to live down, Lal found it difficult to use the law as he might have wished, even when he presided over the Councils that wrote it. In his diary, Lal recorded a tongue-lashing he received from Marcel Salan. In public, the Canadian warrior was fully behind enforcement of the newly-promulgated Planetary Charter from which Lal claimed to derive the authority to punish misrule such as was perpetrated by the Dreamers of Chiron. Privately, he made clear his personal belief that Lal himself had played no small role in the unwinding of modern Canada, and owed a debt greater than it was possible to repay. Prokhor Zakharov joined his abrupt expulsion of the Council's Genetic Inspectors with a stern speech to his peers in which he reminded them of Lal's historical "indulgence of ignorance." By Zakharov's count, the Commissioner bore indirect responsibility for tens of millions of deaths from starvation and disease, all of which would have been avoidable had the U.N. not knuckled under when confronted with popular aversion to genetically-modified foods and vaccine immunization.

All science is discomfort. Take, for instance, a life-saving procedure that offends your deeply-held convictions. Which inflicts the greater injury to you and others: a surgery you do not wish to have, or the doctor's inaction that causes your death? - For I Have Tasted the Fruit

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In M.Y. 172, Kleisel Mercator's Chiron Guard attacked the University of Planet's satellite uplinks at Baranov Outpost sixteen times. Zakharov repaired the superstructure with workmanlike predictability. Mercator, in turn, kept assigning some of his best units to renewed strikes. In fact, Baranov Outpost was a Potemkin village manned only by the Men of Harlech mercenary force. The University was building two replacement facilities on the Issus moon.

Among the many peoples of Chiron, opinion varied regarding both the wisdom and feasibility of restoring contact with Planet Earth.

A minority of three, the University of Planet, the Dynamic Enterprise, and the Dreamers of Chiron, were largely indifferent to the idea. Let it be one happy outcome of the future growth in radiotelescopy, Zakharov said, but as a goal in itself, "re-contact" left something to be desired. Even if the Unity survivors did discover that human civilization on Earth had survived, it would be decades between transmissions. Any help that Earth could provide would therefore be negligible. Similar problems of distance convinced the Morganite boardroom that their energies, too, were better spent on problems closer to home. Distracted by the contemplation of other frontiers, Roshann Cobb and Aleigha Cohen failed to register any opinion one way or the other. Cobb had been sent to Chiron to lay the stakes for follow-on business by his father's corporation, and was himself reasonably certain that his Struan's connections could blunt any threat of criminal prosecution, but re-contact appealed to him less than any of a series of other projects. Aleigha Cohen imagined that she could impress what might remain of the Terran medical community with the research data she was generating on Chiron, but the Planetary Datalinks were a nearer target for making her mark.

The Nessus Tower sent Chiron's first transmission back to the Sol System in October, M.Y. 175. It read simply, "UNITY."

A much larger block stood in strong, even violent opposition to re-contact. Deirdre Skye warned the Planetary Council that the result would surely be invasion. It was widely assumed that a planetary nuclear holocaust must have followed hot on the heels of Unity's departure. Any successor regimes must therefore treat evidence of the Unity Mission's success as an invitation to demand assistance, which they would take if denied. Her theme, the "Rape of Chiron," was taken up by both Rear Admiral Raoul André St. Germaine and the Warden J.T. Marsh. Chiron was not to be shared with those who had already proved themselves unreliable custodians of a planet far more tractable than the only one left to the survivors of the Alpha Centauri Mission.

Many faction leaders worried about the possibility that the U.N. would return to haunt them by providing Pravin Lal with the power he needed to carry out his project of ideological hegemony. Spartans and Tribals both expected to be prosecuted for war crimes, real and imagined. Director Tamineh Pahlavi knew that she would fare no better in a court of intersteller law. She might like a larger gene pool for her experiments, but doubted that Earth had any worthy lines left to contribute. If expectations bore out, they would be irradiated to the point of uselessness. Deep in his underground fastness, Sheng-ji Yang was daily at war with pretenders to the U.N. legacy and thought he should welcome no others. Acting on the instructions of his digital master, Dr. Johann Anhalt, too, joined the dissenting chorus. Terran connections would mean Terran inquiries about how, exactly, Chiron's leaders, elected or self-appointed, were meeting the needs of the mission survivors, and Anhaldt intended to answer no questions.

Some opposed re-contact for purely philosophical reasons. Miriam Godwinson had preached that the Unity was as much an ark as that of the Biblical patriarch Noah, its passengers delivered from God's well-earned judgement. It was sacrilege to reach backwards, the Judges said--a failure to acknowledge the gift of Salvation. And even if there had been survivors of God's wrath, that did not mean the unfortunates of Earth were in any sense equals to the Elect on Chiron. The former were surely experiencing a unique kind of punishment, best uninterrupted. Kleisel Mercator confided to Landers that, though he longed for reassurance that the cradle of their species was still intact, he lived in terror of attracting "alien intelligences" by demonstrating the capability for communication at near-light speeds.

For Pravin Lal, re-contact was not as obvious a path as others imagined. Personal admiration for the United Nations and its founding ideals aside, he had joined the Unity mission as a disfavored exile. Jonathan Garland had practiced a kind of nepotism by insisting on his inclusion. Lal was not even certain his was the strongest claim to leadership after Garland's death. Marcel Salan and Prokhor Zakharov both had plausible claims of their own, and the silence that each had kept previously would surely be abandoned once push came to shove.

The set of factions that actively sought re-contact included the Restoration, led by Marcel Salan, which saw no future for itself in a fractured political environment; the Tomorrow Institute, now believing the Unity Data Core was missing certain information that could only be obtained from Earth's surviving inhabitants; the Chiron Interstellar Probe, which longed for evacuation; the Watchers of Chiron, desperately in need of replacements for its beleaguered constabulary; the New Two Thousand (entrepreneurs with significantly more appetite for risk than mere Morganites); and the Shapers of Chiron, who fully intended an interstellar rescue mission.

Sources:

The communications base is credited to Piotr Kupsc and titled "Research Facility" on Pinterest.

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On November 37, M.Y. 109, stakeholder Tallivaire Corall departed Fort Enterprise at the head of an expedition numbering 1,421 souls. Sealed orders handed down from the Viceroy himself sent them north across the Kuragin Salt Flats into the foothills of the New Superstition Mountains beyond. Fifteen days into their journey, Corall's column ceased all transmissions. A brace of Radnor hoverbikes dispatched to investigate likewise disappeared. Three days later, an overflying University needlejet made visual contact with the column, still on-course and in formation. It was the last evidence of the Pilgrim colonists, of whom no further trace was ever found.

The Corall Expedition was a crippling loss for the New Two Thousand. A sixth of the SAMM fleet and a generation's worth of colonists were lost a single stroke. The blow intensified Oscar van de Graaf's hostility toward other factions and pushed him finally into an open alliance of convenience with the Dreamers of Chiron.

The Superstitions were notoriously hard on men and machines. This T-187 лавина research tank belonging to the University of Planet wrecked when it broke the floor of the salt pan. Evacuation of the wounded is underway. Soviet contributions to the Alpha Centauri mission appeared generous so long as one did not inquire about the quality of the material being offered. Maintenance had been an afterthought, and the U.N. timeline was tight enough that the old Soviet markings were never painted over. Most of the donated equipment turned out to be wartime salvage. It was not uncommon for colonists taking possession of their vehicles to hose the mortal remains of previous occupants out of the control spaces.

What could destroy an entire Colony Pod guarded by a reinforced Impact Patrol without so much as a distress flare going off? The metal content of wrecks alone should have shown up clearly on magnetometers.

When his Regulators came up empty-handed, van de Graaf engaged Struan's Strategic Services to conduct an independent inquiry. One million ¤ later, their "inescapable conclusion" was that the Human Labyrinth had probably intercepted the Corall Party and absorbed them into the Hive. Yang's sensor array was judged to extend far enough that he could have seen the column's approach. Fifty years later, Pilgrim Thinkers were flabbergasted to discover in records taken during the capture of the Unseen World that Sheng-ji Yang had searched with some fervor for the Pilgrims, but without success.

A Kersarge Industries welldriver undergoes final inspection before departure. Sixteen welldrivers were lost along with Corall. Crews across Planet preferred for their vehicles to have big personality, a tendency encouraged by the need to treat them as homes for much of the work cycle. Workshops hardly had to be asked to turn out vehicles with tie-down points by the dozen. This jacked-up welldriver had plenty of crew storage. Note the signals dome above the forward cabin. Every vehicle was tracked individually by Base Operations. Corall's all cut out at the same instant.

Heavy haulers like this one contained most of the Hab Pods for the civilian colonists looking to homestead with Corall. The vertical module between cab and cargo container is a mid-scale 3D printer, which the settlers expected to use to provide household items and basic hardware.

An American Federal Disaster Service (FDS) Hazardous Environment Cargo Tractor, better known as a Hector. The FDS was the second incarnation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the heir of the American civil defense tradition. The ARC donated tens of thousands of FDS surplus vehicles to the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri, leading Morgan Industries to sue the United States Government for unfair business practices after van de Graaf was named a factor. The FDS was authorized to defend itself with deadly force. Smoke launchers are visible above the third axle. The protrusion forward is a retracted self-defense weapons system. The plow is mine-rated. Van de Graaf committed seven Hectors to Corall.

Source:
The first picture is credited to artist Nick Gindraux.

The second picture is "Underground Investigation" by DM33 on DeviantArt.

The third picture is credited to ca designs on www.this-is-cool.co.uk. It is the work of Arnaud Caubel.

The fourth picture is the Solaris Medium Truck from Creative Uncut's Warframe Art Gallery.

The final vehicle is from ArtStation.