Contents
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
EPILOGUE
In brief, then, human history can be split into two parts: the period occurring before the destruction of all life on Earth in the year 2235 C.E., and that following those terrible, final days.
At the time, a network of wormhole connections or ‘transfer gates’ linked Earth via its moon to its interstellar colonies, though few were aware that secret exploratory missions had uncovered the existence of a second, incomparably vast wormhole network, created by aliens we now call the Founders. Certain Founder artefacts were brought back to Earth with devastating results when one was somehow activated, leading to the sterilization of the Earth within days. If not for the deliberate destruction of the Lunar Gate Array, the same fate might also have been visited upon the colonies. It is this period we now call the Abandonment. The Western Coalition, as it was then known, having recognized that the Earth was doomed, initiated a rapid and successful military takeover of every colony apart from Galileo.
The decades following the Abandonment were hard, lean times, but barely half a century later starships carrying new, retro-engineered transfer gates were already being sent out to reconnect the colonies one to another. It is in this period that the template for the modern political order was laid down.
Although the Western Coalition – by this time, simply the Coalition – had seized political and military control of the colonial governments, the general populations of those worlds had been predominantly drawn from member nations of the former Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Coalition– Sphere relations were already deeply antagonistic prior to the Abandonment, and became more so, inevitably flowering into a full-fledged revolt a century after the Coalition’s takeover.
The uprising proved to be bitter and protracted, but ended with several worlds finally achieving autonomy from Coalition rule. These worlds – Da Vinci (now Benares), Newton (now New Samarkand), Franklin (now Temur), Galileo (now Novaya Zvezda), Yue Shijie, and Acamar – became known collectively as the Tian Di, and were ruled from Temur by a council of revolutionary leaders numbering nearly a thousand. Although far from being a democracy, this Temur Council provided much- needed stability in the post-revolutionary period.
While the Tian Di and the Coalition co-existed in relative peace over the next several decades, they rapidly diverged both culturally and technologically. The Coalition first renewed and then stepped up its exploration of the Founder Network, despite increasingly alarmed protests from the Temur Council, whose members were afraid of a repeat of the events leading to the Abandonment.
