Бpoнeпeхoтa/A Brief History of Humanity

Early Humanity

Over the course of history, humans looked up to the stars, hoping to reach them one day. None of them, however, thought that reaching the stars would be not merely a dream achieved, but the only way to save humanity.
But that's exactly how it went.

By the end of the 24th century, Earth's population numbered over 20 billion human beings. The biosphere struggled to support the terrible amount, despite the oceanic expansion. What was left of forests and jungles - mostly those in Siberia and the Amazon Basin - were under the strictest UN control as the most important oxygen recyclers on the planet; the oceanic expansion was also artificially slowed to preserve the plankton phytobacteria responsible for half the oxygen.
Like most cities, Moscow had grown enormously, almost merging with Saint-Petersburg and housing about 80 million. The Sol system colonization was an ongoing success, with multiple millions inhabiting Mars and Venus - yet this was still not enough to solve the issue of overpopulation.

The solution was found in an unexpected place. In year 2398, an unknown object, shattered into pieces, was discovered by foresters patrolling the Siberian taiga preserves near the Podkamennaya Tunguska river. The strange item, very old and undeniably nonfunctional, had been transferred to the scientific organizations. Few remembered the 1908 Tunguska incident; however, the very first research results have proven the object to have an extraterrestrial origin.
A thorough examination had yielded phenomenal results: the "Tunguska meteor" happened to be an alien ship engine component. Reverse-engineered, it gave a colossal push to Earth understanding of physics; antigravity, force fields, and - most importantly - a surprisingly simple and cheap way of FTL travel, were now in the humanity's hands.

The dream of reaching the stars came true.

Vanishing of Earth

The first experimental ships were quite unreliable; the jumps so inaccurate that it was possible to reemerge in hundreds of lightyears from the initial target. Most scouting missions of the early waves never returned, having most likely had their energy reserves depleted by frantic attempts to get back home, every single one of them unsuccessful.
Creating the hyperspace beacon net (years 2420-2440) was the first step of galactic exploration; unmanned probes, intended to reemerge somewhere far away and transmit signals, became the basis for manned ship triangulation.
Mass expansion started in 2437, with UN transformed into the United Government of Earth, and former militaries into the Scouting Corps - a half-military, half-scientific organization with the mission to discover and study habitable planets. Colony transports, each carrying 70-80 cold-sleeping thousand humans of similar nations and languages, followed the scouts; the relatively inexpensive nature of FTL ships allowed Earth to launch about 500 such "passenger ships" yearly.

Over the following 500 years, the human population of Earth became four times smaller, with hundreds of thousands of planets turned into new homes for millions of ex-earthers. With centuries passing, the colonies were gradually stopping to communicate with the ancestral planet; despite the beacons being a cheap and reliable communication solution, it was far from everyone who wanted to be reminded of their past. There were even instances of planetary governments disabling their own beacons to start their lives and histories from scratch - and the UGE, of course, had neither the ability nor the desire to monitor thousands of worlds and beacons themselves.

And the humanity has turned into a patchwork, with every piece unlike its neighbours.

In year 2862, the first crisis occurred, dividing the humanity further. Hundreds of years of exploration had turned the Scouting Corps from an amorphous international amalgamation into a self-sustaining organization. Seeing the failure of the UGE to control the expansion, the Corps leaders decided to separate themselves from the rest of civilization; joined by their relatives and anyone willing, they took a remote star cluster on the outer rim of inhabited space for themselves and turned all neighbouring beacons off. The UGE couldn't do anything with such a desertion (and didn't try too hard anyway); a desertion that costed them hundreds of best scout ships and crews - and therefore the ability to inspect and keep most beacons in check.
And in deep space, even the most reliable devices eventually cease to function.

In an attempt to restore control over the colonies, the rulers of Earth ordered to develop an entirely new interstellar drive with utmost haste.
According to theory, it was entirely possible to build an engine able to move a whole planet. The benefits seemed obvious: why build thousands of FTL ships, if you can instead move Earth itself to a suitable world and colonize it directly? Such a "Traveling Earth" would even prove itself the master of the galaxy once more - imagine a remote corner, not supporting beacons and not paying taxes for three or four hundred years, to suddenly have Earth with all its space forces appear in!

It took almost a century to build a planet-scale FTL drive; the road included testing the tech on Mars, Venus, and several Jupiter satellites to change their orbits and terraform them - and devoting all resources to it, putting all other colonization attempts to an end (and it's not like the Scouting Corps could've been replaced anyway).

Year 2960. The long-awaited day of the launch of Earth has come.
With a press of the button, Earth has disappeared from the Sol system...
...and was nowhere else in the galaxy to be found.

Following the initial shock, various explanations appeared. Some said that Earth was destroyed in a drive malfunction; some said that it was transported into a parallel universe; some said that it was just lost somewhere in the unknown space, like the beaconless scouts of old. None of these hypotheses were proved, there was now only the fact - the ancestral planet of all humans was no more. With generations, Old Earth became a legend - and Mars and Venus, not having the resources to support Sol beacons, left them to stop working.
From that moment, the entire Sol system was now off-limits for the rest of humanity.

Year 3001 A.D. The Human Dominion - the entire space inhabited by them - has no center, no unifying force.
Earth has disappeared, Sol is unreachable, the Scouting Corps have isolated themselves long ago, and there are still no known nonhuman civilizations, so you can't even unite against the xenos.
As it commonly happens, an absence of reasons to unite became a reason to argue. Small-scale wars were roaring all over the Dominion - "small-scale" in terms of the entire galaxy, of course; continents were turned into radioactive glass lakes, planets were made hostile to all life. Empires, federations, reach's appeared and disappeared over the same centuries during which the hyperbeacons decayed, making interstellar communications less... and less... and less reliable.

Dominion Dark Age

Most colonies have stopped communicating and traveling to other planets, and, as it is known, isolation always leads to regress.

Almost the entire fourth millennium (about 3050-3990) is considered to be Dominion-wide Dark Ages of sorts, with thousands of planets retreating to quasi-medieval ways of life, swords and horse- or local fauna-drawn plowshares existing alongside hypercomms and plasma weaponry. With the beacons dilapidated, interstellar trade was a risky endeavour - with ships, like during the old times again, disappearing with no trace. The most civilized planets, buying rare metals and other resources for "barbarians" in exchange for ready-made high-tech, were the first to feel the impact of the issue.

On year 3998, twenty-four most advanced planets of the Dominion decided to form the Trade League, aiming to support and possibly restore what was left of the interstellar travel. The League created a standing repair fleet, so that every willing planet in its sphere of influence (about a million cubic parsecs) could ask to repair its beacons.

Of course, the services provided by the League were not free. The League members got double benefit from such deals - by restoring access to resource planets for their own merchants, and by charging these very planets for that! Many planets asking the League to help soon found themselves in what amounted to bondage, resulting in armed conflicts.
Nonetheless, such "cooperation" was fruitful to an extent; the League stopped the inhabited space from fracturing once again and reminded its inhabitants that they were not, in fact, alone in this galaxy.

In 70 years after the League was formed, representatives of developed planets met once again to revise the treaties - it now was more than a hundred worlds as full-fledged League members, with more than a third of the entire Dominion interconnected with the League-restored beacons. There was, however, a side effect to the booming trade - piracy; it was not unknown for self-styled "isolated" planets to keep an unregistered beacon and sustain themselves with plunder; small yet well-armed ships ambushing League caravans.

A reasonable response to the threat of piracy was to create a united fleet, tasked with peacekeeping duties within League space - including finding and neutralizing pirate beacons, if not the pirate havens themselves. The renewed agreement incorporated clauses for cooperation in case of external treats; the alliance was no longer purely trade-focused anymore, and on year 4102, the League was renamed into the Trade Protectorate Treaty, with the last word omitted in common parlance.

Two hundred years of rule made the positions of a hundred planets - the full members of the Treaty - much stronger, yet the relationships of that hundred and the unnamed thousands were still strained. Many underdeveloped worlds found themselves to be mere suppliers of raw materials for the Golden Hundred, the beacon tariffs grew higher and higher, and the fact that the Protectorate makes the backwards planets to pay for trade lines serving the Protectorate's own enrichment was a secret to none.
The planets started to refuse the services, thirsting for independence even at the cost of isolation - especially that the centuries of the Protectorate's rule meant that most planets could now support the beacons on their own. More so, they started organizing their own trade fleets, threating the monopoly of the Golden Hundred.

Imperial Rule

Years 4360-4370 saw the beginning of Trade Wars (later dubbed Pre-Empire Military Conflicts). Not being able to use its standing military fleet against the separatists (who weren't in any breach of any actual law by doing what they did), the Protectorate found another option - inspiring and sponsoring "independent" militaries who could attack the unruly planets, allowing the Protectorate to racket them. A century of such treatment turned the situation into a powder keg: by year 4450, thousands of Dominion planets were ready and willing to rise up in arms against the Golden Hundred's predatory policies; underground unions and alliances were formed to prepare for the rebellion.

That's when a third side appeared. On year 4451, about 30 Protectorate-controlled inhabited systems in the Ursa Major cluster were attacked by hundreds of well-armed ships, with hundreds of thousands identical human men acting as planetary invasion troops.
This was the Dominion's first encounter with the Polaris Empire.

No one in the Dominion had a hint on how did the Scout Corps, who had previously isolated themselves for 1600 years, turn into a fearsome Empire; but it was absolutely true that they preserved and enhanced the old tech, that they knew the "secret" Protectorate beacon passcodes, and that they prepared the Protectorate space for an invasion by seeding it with beacons of their own.
During the First Wave of Invasion (years 4451-4461), the Empire triumphed, and the Protectorate panicked - having had controlled approximately eight thousand systems, it lost three thousands to the ten years of the Empire's victorious march.

Many separatists initially welcome the Empire in hopes that it would end the age of the Golden Hundred's yoke. Very soon, their hopes were dashed, as the supposed cure turned out to be much worse than the presumed disease. The Empire preached the belief of an ideal human - a warrior human; with the role prepared for the rest being that of slaves.

During the initial years of the war, the Protectorate was effectively unable to foster any resistance due to its rather loose structure and internal conflicts. It took the Second Wave (years 4478-4495) to end as another imperial victory for the Protectorate leaders to invent a method to strike back.
More than five thousand systems in the galactic north were now under the Emperor's control. To counteract that, the Protectorate, unused to direct action, created the institute of Advisors - agents able to infiltrate the imperial planets and organize insurrections from within. Numerous smugglers, grown much stronger during the Trade Wars, offered their services in arming the rebellions as well. On year 4522, when the Third Wave started, more than a thousand planets of the Empire rose up in flames, the riots guided and supported by Protectorate advisors. The Empire now had to fight a war on a thousand fronts, and even the biggest clone soldier factories weren't intended to replenish losses of a scale inevitable for such a war - or, rather, hundreds of guerrilla wars.
Furthermore, this was the first time when the Empire met fierce resistance on the planets singled out for conquest. Mercenaries, Trade Wars veterans, and Protectorate cyberinfantry fought with fury and tenacity. Robots, unable to fear death, perished by hundreds, but did not back down. Thousands of beacon probes were sent into imperial space, allowing Protectorate special forces to strike deep and destroy numerous strategically important targets, including two of the largest biofactories. The invasion started to choke, and internal intrigues did not help.

The last, the most desperate, effort of the Empire was the assault of the city-planet of Velian (years 4527-4528), which got to a stalemate. Soon, the Third Wave was to end due to certain events.

Vigilant Peace

Early on year 4528, the Imperial Legion Fleet infiltrated the Protectorate space and, with one precise blow, struck its enemy into the very heart. It was the Star Rapier, a secret weapon of the Empire; the star orbited by Jamiria, one of the oldest Protectorate planets, has suddenly gone supernova, seemingly without a reason, and the entire system with thousands of years of history had been burned into nothingness over the course of a couple hours. At the same time, the Emperor has issued an ultimatum to the entire Dominion; accept his rule, or else.
Numerous worlds were seized by fear.

The Protectorate had an ace in their sleeve as well.
During the last century, Protectorate scientists have managed to reestablish communications with Earth; as it turned out, Earth was neither destroyed nor sent somewhere far, but shifted out of phase, making it into a ghost planet of sorts. Its researchers tried for many centuries to invent a way to bring Earth back into phase and were eager to cooperate with the Protectorate, sharing long-lost technologies with their newfound allies. Among these technologies was a method for beaconless large-body FTL travel.

This tech became the basis for the Cloud - an immense force-field-held conglomeration of microscopic machines able to gather energy to be released in a singular burst later. Combat-ready, the Cloud's volume was that of an average asteroid - with much less mass, but with the ability to destroy an entire planet with its energy shot.

In a month after the system of Jamiria had been destroyed with the Star Rapier, the Cloud appeared on the orbit of Polaris Prime, the Empire's capital world. With a singular strike, the planet's nearest moon was shattered into asteroids; only the excellent counterspace defenses of the capital prevented it from being made into a crater-covered desert, yet victims still numbered in the millions. Now, it was the Empire fearing total annihilation.

After exchanging such blows, it was clear that a war of such totality can make the entire Dominion into a space hell and destroy the spacefaring civilization. Based on that, the two sides have made an unofficial pact not to oppose each other directly from now on - the Vigilant Peace, a peace treaty in name only.

The only actual treaty was made regarding the city-planet of Velian, and it was still war-torn until the news reached it; with advisor Pyriel relentlessly pursuing lord Cross and clashing seven times, none of them able to strike the foe down once and for all.
The meeting of Protectorate and Empire ambassadors on the planet of Locust-Di made Velian into a neutral planet, a transit point for trade between the planets of the sides.

Year 4530 A.D., also known as year 532 since the creation of the League.
The Empire still conquers Dominion planets, using conventional weaponry.
The Protectorate still supports rebellions and guerrillas, but doesn't use the Cloud either.

A galactic stalemate is here.

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