The year is 245 CE.  After 20 years of germination the seeds of insurrection finally bore fruit.  Nearly every colonized world in the solar system was at war with each other, with Terra and the Collective at the center.  Heedless of the warnings of their statesmen or, in some cases, what their eyes and ears told them, the leaders of the Colonies allowed their personal differences and petty agendas to destroy what little solidarity there was against the Collective Tyranny.  Feeling that, after Ragnarok, the Collective was nothing more than a paper tiger, one government after another reacted to Collective deceit by accepting Collective financial and material support in war with their colonial brothers.

While the free states of the solar system had settled into destroying each other bit by bit, the Collective Military machine was not idle.  COLLCENTCOM planned for two decades in anticipation of just the right moment and opportunity.  Carefully husbanded armies and fleets were brought up to strength and trained for the day when they would stream forth from Terra and reclaim the Solar System once and for all.

However, few realized how utterly exhausted the Earth had become during all those decades of war.  Many districts and counties of the planet had been on war footing for so long that generations had known nothing but factories or a military boot camp.  Yet in other districts, those areas where money and power had accumulated, a separate world existed, quite unaware or blissfully ignorant of the state of the less well off of their fellow members of the Collective.  Many disparate forces, totally unaware of each other, labored for years in order to work up to the last dying gasp.

Many should have foreseen what was coming.  Unfortunately nothing was done that should have been in order to save what could have been.  The Collective Era, the great experiment of equality and unity that evolved into mass tyranny would come to its final, convulsive conclusion.

On March 12th, 244 CE the end began…


Operation “Open Arms” commenced with a string of massive offensives all along the asteroid belt.  Every Asteroid colony, every station, every outpost was met with the ultimatum: unconditional surrender or destruction.  Prisoners were not taken, any resistance was thoroughly crushed with overwhelming force. Where there was submission, chaos reigned.  Depending on the local commander, a capitulated settlement could find themselves treated courteously with local self rule and a minor garrison, or could see themselves governed by martial law with all leaders and intelligentsia ejected to vacuum. Any attempt at partisan resistance was met with atrocity after atrocity, culminating in the massacre of the entire population of Telpar Station by explosive decompression in the primary ship bay.

After ruthlessly overrunning most of the Belt Settlements and destroying all that resisted, the Collective Forces moved outward.  At this time all the outer colonies became effectively cutoff from the asteroid belt and each other. Simultaneous invasion groups blockaded Titan, Io, Ganymede, Europa and Tethys. Various military and militia units were cut off from their home worlds and forced to group together and fight or go to ground, on their own. Wave after wave of Collective landing forces invaded after only trivial resistance in space.  So severely weakened after 2 decades of war, there was almost no space forces left for resistance and almost no logistics left to support what was there. Despite the most fanatical efforts by colonial space forces the results were always the same: complete annihilation.

What certainly looked like the end of the sovereignty for the outer colonies turned out to be the undoing of their conqueror.  Finally, after so many years of exploitation, the pressure of existence finally proved too much and the exploited rose in massive civil war.  In three weeks several regional conflicts became a global conflict as one Regional Guard force after another either rose against or was destroyed defending the Collective Era.  The Collective Military, pared to the bone for “Open Arms” resorted to all means necessary to restore order, and in the process, destroyed themselves. Weapons, long unused on Terra were brought out of retirement in a last ditch attempt to hold back the armed partisan masses.  Neutron weapons decimated billions as escalation followed escalation because no one recognized an authority who could say “stop”.

At first the news off planet was treated with disbelief, then with anxiety and finally with cold terror as reality struck home in the form of discontinued logistics shipments and empty depots and finally, by the static on all communications coming from Earth. By January 245 the colonies had lost all order, all regular social systems and almost all economic and energy infrastructures had broken down. All military cohesion and discipline had completely dissolved with commanders turning into regional warlords, fighting over whatever could be salvaged in order to bring back some semblance of the security of the past.

From Earth, there is no contact at all…
