I’m not a historian, so bear with me here. Quick recap of how we came to be here, you know, all that.

Let’s see… okay, I’ll start way back. Way back when, on our homeworld, which we called Earth, they invented chemical rockets and fusion power, then combined them. Everyone went blasting off into space for national, cultural or personal glory. Things were kind of slow until someone discovered a way of teleporting matter (like ships) across huge distances – I don’t have any idea how this works, mind you, but I heard it has something to do with the local geometries of space-time or something.

Basically, we were flitting around all over the place, and pretty soon fights started to break out. Often they were arguments over trade, but they got pretty violent, and when you have spacecraft, well… we’re talking cities flattened from orbit, you know? I’ve been in a city as it was being taken apart by orbital fire. It’s really, really nasty.

Mind you, the colonies were typically centrally controlled – they had all different sorts of governments, ranging from absolute dictatorship to anarcho-communism (these tended to be small and poor, but fun to visit), so it was relatively easy for all the colonies to come back to Earth and tell all the governments of the old countries that it was time to team up together and get some law and order around the place. That was how the Confederation was formed. As a government, pretty much all it used to do was take taxes, police the galactic highways, and enforce a certain level of decency in planetary governance. It also had a law about dealing with other sentient species, which was “Don’t have anything to do with them”. They didn’t want the bother, they didn’t want to have to deal with the ethical issues. The standard was pretty much upheld.

Things kind of changed, when the archaeologists showed up. See, back on Earth – and a few other worlds too, some of which had clearly once been inhabited – there were these curious relics that nobody could really explain. There were at least two sites back on Earth, city ruins where no known city had ever been – mountaintops, icy deserts, that kind of thing. And it was clear these cities weren’t built by anything we would recognize as human. People started getting antsy about our purpose in life, and what are we doing, and how did we get here, blah blah blah, like they have been since forever. The thing is, at a certain point it gained critical mass and became a religion.

Some people started actually worshipping the things that had built these cities, you know, and they proselytized a lot, but nobody really cared until they started killing people for not living the way the “star gods” wanted them to.

Well, the shit hit the fan when the cultists bombed a Confederate Navy orbital station called Polaris, off Jubal. The attack killed loads of sailors and wrecked a few cutters, but Polaris was divided up between the military and a popular resort – if you had money, you spent a week at Haven at least once in your life. A fair number of rich and famous people, including actors and politicians, died in the fire that swept through the resort levels. Everyone started calling for blood.

The Confederation had been trying to work behind the scenes, but with only limited success. This spurred them on to make several stupid decisions, among which was the decision to use the Marines to bust star-cult shrines. I won’t say a bad word about the Marines – they’re some of the bravest fighters in existence, and unswervingly loyal – but a company of Marines is a very blunt instrument. This started to raise local sympathy for the star cult, and the Confederate answer to that was escalation. First more Marines, but eventually they brought out the naval ordnance.

Remember I said I was once in a city being bombarded? Yeah, I used to be recon. I was sent ahead into Thule – in disguise, of course, with other recon types – and I was supposed to guide the Marines to the target. Turns out the Marines got bogged down in a firefight with the cultists, and Naval command decided to pull the Marines out and burn the city from orbit. They didn’t give us recon folks any orders, or any warning. We just found ourselves in the middle of a city being torched. I don’t recommend the experience.

Seriously, I haven’t been the same since. Can’t focus as much, I’m more jumpy than I used to be.

Anyway, where was I? Right. See, Admiral Wilson, the guy who’s our nominal head of government here, used to be a big-time officer in the Confederate Navy. He seems to be pretty much the golden boy, the perfect paladin of justice – he used to say he joined up to protect and to serve mankind. Well, he got fed up with the way the Confederation was fighting its war on the cultists, but he wasn’t about to defect to their side either. So he offered to resign and go home. The Navy actually refused his resignation, and handed him another series of wrecking missions.

So he left.

I’m not entirely sure how he did it without getting caught, but… he rounded up everyone he could find who was dissatisfied with the war, including a lot of veteran soldiers (like me) and their families. We all packed up into a few ships – Wilson’s own flagship, a few light combatants, and a colony craft – and followed the star-chart out to this world. When his navigators looked into the historical archives, they dug up something to suggest it had a HILF restriction notice, but by then it was too late. We were on our way. Wilson’s a good man, I believe, but very stiff and stubborn.

And here we are.