War Canto - Earth Authority

A Future History of Earth

What future historians would call first the Earth and then later the Solarian Hegemony has its’ roots in the peculiar way that the Earth Authority arose from the unexpected joining together of the former belligerent powers of the Second Cold War that quietly began in AD 2004. The United Nations, NATO, World Trade Organization, CSTO, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and BRICS alliance systems, unexpectedly stepped back from the brink of open war, amidst the chaos and passions unleashed by the ongoing Third Syrian Crisis and Antarctic ‘Pabodie’ Incident, both in AD 2055; to all outside appearances simply a happy accident of history, a miracle even. Later historians, with access to newly declassified materials could only marvel at how close the world came to nuclear exchange, if but the efforts of a small band of extra-legal mercenaries, some unusually forward thinking agents of both The Company as well as their Russian SVU and GRU counterparts, and either fate or fortune, depending on your point of view.

Buried under the glacial ice sheets of Antarctica lay a long forgotten and hidden secret that would lead mankind to the stars. A terrible discovery of ancient horror and madness that nonetheless united man against the baleful stars as never before; the mere whispered revelation of which united foes and drew the Western and Eastern alliance systems back from the precipice of open conflict, the long feared Third, perhaps Final, World War.

In the year AD 2020, below a series of suspicious impact craters, later found to be the deliberate result of kinetic and directed energy bombardment, Antarctic oil and gas prospectors working for Haliburton had stumbled upon a crumbling facility, belonging to an ancient race of man, codenamed ADAM, genetically related to ‘modern’ man, yet distinct, and highly advanced, material culture finds pointed to a space-faring civilization. Worse, when translated, records found on site indicated that these ancient astronaut ancestors of man were themselves the created servants, warriors to be precise, a gene-caste of soldiers fighting for even more elder things of immense power and remote unknown alieness.  Yet the Elder-Things had, once victory was claimed and their enemies cast down, retired beyond, leaving the known cosmos in the care of their children, our Ancestors.

Our Ancestors enjoyed a Golden Aeon then, what we now refer to as the First Empire, but it wasn’t to last. The civilization of our Ancestors died in a vast interstellar plague, brought low by a bio-weapon of extermination unleashed by omnicidal enemies known only as the DESTROYERS. Worse yet, their Stellar Empire had fallen into the possession of a race of parasites, the ZHAN, who possessed the bodies of the younger Children of the Ancestors, and posed as their ‘gods’. The Corporate-States of Earth found themselves all alone in the night, surrounded by a nightmarish stellar empire built on the literal bodily possession and slavery of all Mankind.

Imagine for a moment Earth of the late 21st Century, armed to the teeth, locked in a new cold war, sliding seemingly inevitably, step by step, to perhaps a final hot war of extinction, economies stuck in a boom bust cycle driven by too much production chasing not enough demand. Lost. Divided. Hopeless. Helpless. But now threaten this fragile blue-green sphere and all its inhabitants with death, destruction, and slavery with equal opportunity to all. The treaty establishing the first provisional Earth Authority was inked in Venice mere weeks after the initial groundwork was laid by diplomats of the great power alliances. Mere months after the fabled Saxon Teams of Walker’s Weremen fought side by side with a GRU Alpha Team to secure the common inheritance of Man from those what would use it for private gain.

Planetary elites were faced with two simple options; cooperate and hang together, or assuredly hang separately as fire and death rained down from the stars above, and thus the masses were mobilized as never before. The ink on the formal Instrument of Allied Authority was not even dry before the first brute force nuclear saltwater rockets established the first of hundreds of orbital battle stations, suspended in low Earth orbit, a crown of thorns for the world. The world's stockpiles of tactical and theatre thermonuclear weapons were simply relocated from underground silos and mobile launchers to orbital ones.

This was but one step of many on a long road of infrastructure building. Man returned to the moon, establishing fortresses beneath her surface and in her orbit. Mankind then reached Mars, promptly digging in there as well. Another set of ruins was found, as well as the shell of what was believed to be a DESTROYER, and the shape of the ancient enemy was at last revealed. But our initial unquiet and greedy fumblings in the inner system awoke something ancient and evil deep in the outer system, beyond Pluto. In the year AD 2119, Carter Dome One, the first permanent pressure dome on Mars is destroyed in a surprise attack by Yuggothim forces.

The first space war should have been a disaster for the Earth Authority’s Spacy forces, and started out poorly. Earthmen were old hands at war, but space-war was new to them, doctrines and equipment were shiny, new, and untested. In a seeming miracle, nearly the entire war fleet of the Fungus from Yuggoth defected to Earth. Their ‘Nephilim’ war clones, manufactured from abducted men of Earth, decided en-mass that their interests were with kith and kin, no matter what their psycho-conditioning told them, it seemed there was something in deep in the blood, in the spirit that was irreducible, that could not abide making war on what they found as beautiful.

At this time, as recovered information from the Antarctic and Martian codexes continued to be translated, new light was shed on the work of early 21st Century physicists Takayoshi Kajita and Thomas Holtzman. The first Earth made jumpship, FAR HORIZON leaves the Solar System behind in the year AD 2129.

Surprisingly, first contact, when it comes, is peaceful. No one is more shocked than the Adamlings. Of course the first ‘aliens’ mankind encounters in AD 2151 are the green-blooded Rhomulani, descendants of Earthling slaves kidnapped from the Roman world and extensively genetically adapted thrive in particularly hot and arid worlds orbiting blue-white stars by the ZHAN. Earth finds its first allies amongst the stars, and gains its first intelligence about the state of interstellar affairs.

The ZHAN do still control a vast empire of slaves and God-Kings, but it is ancient, indolent, fat and slow moving. The Zhanu’Siru Zirka is a vast feudal patchwork of stellar realms, largely treated as simply a source of satisfaction for hedonistic diversion, idle amusement and malevolently deviant appetites for a thoroughly insulated and self-referential elite of Zhan God-Kings. Day to day operations are controlled by specially bred and engineered classes of ex-human slaves, eugenically cleansed and selected for loyalty and allowed some small initiative, the VILLEIN. Untold billions of lower caste slaves live and die in grinding poverty, in backward subsistence level pre-industrial slavery, as essentially cattle living at the whim of their overlords and gods, little more than playthings. But the system was crumbling.

The Rhomulani themselves had stopped paying tribute when they found their masters unable or unwilling to effectively fight them in their high radiation stellar terrain of choice. Whereas the strange Centaurian League of post-human merchant republics had simply fought the Zhan Lords to a bloody stalemate; tenacious, deadly, and too advanced to simply bull through and intimidate, and willing to fight to the very last vat cloned Human janissary. Meanwhile, the various Black Cartels enjoyed autonomy by one very expedient trick, they had simply bribed and blackmailed their way into position as the God-Kings favorite suppliers of choice diversions.

Now Earthmen had the intelligence, and he could plan for the future, for his brethren, for war. Behind gravitic barriers of dark energy, clad in layers of ablative armor of titanium-duranium-carbon ‘tritanium’, armed with particle projector cannon, high energy laser, rail-gun, nuclear auto-cannon, and enough missiles to blot out the stars; the starships of the Earth Authority Space Forces (or EA Spacy for short) eventually overpower the much more advanced CHEOPS, KHUFU, KHAFRE reporting class temple-ships of the Zhan with sheer weight of fire, thanks to the inability of the Shan to take the new ‘Dirt Worlders’ seriously enough to amass fleets, until it was too late.

The young Earth Authority; progressive, expansive, dynamic, wolfpack of the galaxy, exploded across the stars, striking where the old order was weak, fading away where it was strong, liberating their brethren held as slaves by the Zhan, the Villein, the Centaurians, and others, incorporating master and slave alike into a vast multi-cultural interstellar democracy. First the Centaurian League crumbled, then the Siru Zirka itself. Although not without cost, the centuries long campaign would see Earth herself attacked and bombarded not once but twice.

But the outcome was never really in doubt. The Earth Authority, incorporating the worlds of Earth and Rhomulanus and their colonies, had enough depth, population, and bloody-mindedness to simply take all the killing that the disorganized, incoherent, and drug addled Siru Zirka could dish out. And possessed enough cunning, skill, and luck to take their opponents apart at the seams. Soon enough compared to the ages of the stars, the Authority found itself virtually unchallenged in the Alpha Octant of the Milky Way Galaxy as the Great and Bountiful Stellar Dynasty of the Zhan simply fell apart in an orgy of fratricidal civil war beginning in AD 2257.