The League of Allied Worlds is a human government founded on Calysto in 2162. Its founding population were refugees - Americans who fled Earth during World War III, settled on Mars, then fled again in 2112 when the Terrans came for them.
The seeds of the war were planted decades earlier. US-Soviet tensions during the Cold War, followed by US-China economic conflicts in the 2020s and 2030s, created fault lines that never fully healed. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrated that the United States no longer had the political will for sustained military engagement abroad, a lesson that was not lost on its rivals.
By the 2080s, the United States was in serious trouble. Economic mismanagement, political polarization, and infrastructure decay had taken their toll. In 2089, the US defaulted on its debt - not for the first time, but this default was different. The economy didn't recover. It kept falling.
On August 19th, 2090, the People's Republic of China and the Russian Federation declared war on the United States and, by treaty, all NATO countries. The official justification was the establishment of a second US colony on Mars, which China and Russia characterized as American military expansion. The real reason was simpler: the US was weak, and it was unlikely to get weaker.
The war went badly for the United States from the start. European NATO members, exhausted from decades of their own economic struggles, provided limited support. On February 2nd, 2092, Chinese and Russian forces landed on both American coasts in a coordinated invasion. The fighting was intense, but Chinese manpower proved overwhelming. As enemy forces advanced on Washington D.C., the US government made the decision to evacuate to Freedom Colony on Mars.
NATO surrendered on July 7th, 2094. The United Nations was dissolved, and in its place rose the People's Republic of Terra - Earth's first unified world government.
Freedom Colony had been established in 2068 as a scientific outpost - ten people in a handful of pressurized modules. By 2072, it had opened residency to NATO citizens, and private partnerships accelerated its growth. A second colony, New Washington, was founded in 2090. By the time the US government arrived in 2092, Freedom Colony had grown to roughly half a million people.
The sudden influx of refugees nearly overwhelmed the colony. The government had evacuated with little warning, and thousands of civilians followed. Housing construction couldn't keep pace. Oxygen production systems, designed for a stable population, struggled with the surge. Food had to be rationed. For the first few years, survival was genuinely uncertain.
But the Martians adapted. They threw everything at the problem - expanding hydroponics, building new habitat modules, rationing resources with brutal efficiency. By 2098, the situation had stabilized enough that Mars formally declared independence from Earth. A third colony was established in 2103. By 2110, the Mars colonies had become a functioning society - cramped and resource-strapped, but viable.
The problem was that Earth hadn't forgotten about them.
The Terran government considered Mars to be composed of traitors and war criminals. The fact that the Martians had declared independence only made things worse. Throughout the 2100s, both sides watched each other and built up their capabilities.
In 2107, the first commercial fusion reactor came online, making large-scale space travel practical. In 2110, the Terrans launched their first intrastellar military spacecraft. The Martians watched these developments with growing alarm. They had neither the population nor the industrial base to match Terran military production.
In 2112, the Terran government issued an ultimatum: surrender and reintegration, or face military action. The Martians knew what "reintegration" would mean for their leadership - trials, executions, or simply disappearances. They also knew they couldn't win a conventional war.
So they chose a third option.
The decision to abandon Mars was not made lightly. A significant portion of the population had been born there; Mars was the only home they'd ever known. But the math was simple. The Terrans had more people, more resources, and more industrial capacity. The Martians could fight and lose, or they could run.
They chose to run.
The challenge was building ships capable of interstellar travel with limited resources and less time. The solution was brutal but practical: they would use the colonies themselves. Habitat modules were torn out of the Martian soil and launched into orbit, where they were assembled into ship frameworks. The largest vessel incorporated most of the original Freedom Colony, including the historic first modules from 2068. Nothing was wasted because nothing could be spared.
The fleet consisted of three ships, named after Columbus's vessels:
Their destination was Proxima Centauri - chosen simply because it was the closest star. They had no way of knowing if habitable planets existed there, or anywhere. They only knew they couldn't stay.
The fleet launched in 2112, just ahead of the Terran deadline. When the Terran First Fleet arrived in 2113, they found empty colonies and nuclear mines left in Mars orbit. The Terrans call what happened next "The Coward's Trap." The entire First Fleet was destroyed.
The mines bought the Perseverance Fleet the time they needed. It would be over a century before the Terrans caught up.
The Perseverance Fleet spent fifty years in transit. Their target was Proxima Centauri, roughly four light-years from Sol - an inconceivably short distance by modern standards, but an impossible gulf with pre-subspace technology.
The ships were never designed for a fifty-year voyage. They had been assembled from colony modules built for stationary use on Mars, held together by improvised frameworks and the determination of their crews. Systems failed constantly. Spare parts were manufactured from whatever could be scrapped or recycled. The engineers who kept the ships running became some of the most important people in the fleet.
Resources were always tight. Food production relied on hydroponics bays that had to be carefully maintained. Water was recycled endlessly. Power was rationed. Every calorie, every watt, every gram of material had to be accounted for.
Children were born during the voyage. They grew up knowing nothing but the ships - the hum of the recyclers, the cramped corridors, the artificial lighting. Some of these children grew old and died before the journey ended. An entire generation lived and passed away in transit, never setting foot on solid ground.
The three ships maintained regular communication and rendezvoused when their trajectories allowed, exchanging personnel and supplies. Over the decades, a shared culture emerged. It drew on American democratic traditions - the only political framework most of the original refugees knew - but adapted to the harsh realities of life in space.
Resources had to be managed collectively, which pushed the fleet toward cooperation whether people wanted it or not. Disputes between ships had to be resolved without anyone being able to simply leave. A framework for unified governance evolved out of necessity: representatives from each ship meeting to coordinate resource allocation, resolve conflicts, and make decisions that affected everyone.
Religious communities consolidated as well. The Catholic Church, which had fled Earth alongside the colonists, maintained its structure and traveled with the fleet for years. Various Protestant denominations, finding their small individual congregations unsustainable, merged into a pragmatic coalition called the Flock of the Shepherd. Both groups provided community structure and moral framework during the long years of uncertainty.
By the time the fleet reached its destination, the foundations of what would become the League government were already in place.
The Perseverance Fleet never made it to Proxima Centauri.
In 2162, fifty years into their voyage, NorAellian vessels intercepted them. The NorAellians had been observing humanity for some time. They had watched World War III, witnessed the flight from Mars, and tracked the Perseverance Fleet as it crawled between stars. What they saw was a species tearing itself apart - and a small group of survivors who had chosen flight over annihilation.
First Contact was peaceful. The NorAellians had no interest in conquest; they were concerned about what a species as aggressive as humanity might do if left unchecked. Helping the refugees seemed like a reasonable way to stabilize the situation. They provided the fleet with subspace technology, which allowed faster-than-light travel and communication, and they guided the humans to Calysto - a habitable world in a system far from Sol.
After fifty years of recycled air, artificial gravity, and metal walls, the colonists stepped onto a planet with a sky.
The transition from shipboard life to planetary settlement was not seamless. An entire generation had never lived on a planet. Simple things - weather, open spaces, unfiltered sunlight - took adjustment. But the colonists had fifty years of practice adapting to difficult circumstances.
The NorAellians provided technology and guidance, but they deliberately avoided doing the work for the humans. They had seen what happened when less advanced species became dependent on outside help, and they had no intention of creating a client state. The colonists would build their own civilization or fail trying.
They built.
With a permanent home, the colonists formalized their shipboard government into something more permanent. The League of Allied Worlds was established in 2162, modeled heavily on the former United States government.
The structure included three branches:
The name "League of Allied Worlds" was deliberately aspirational. At founding, there was only one world. But the founders intended to expand, and they wanted a governmental structure that could scale.
The original Perseverance Fleet vessels were preserved rather than scrapped. They remain on Calysto as museums, with the historic Freedom Colony modules maintained as a reminder of where the League came from. They're considered something of a pilgrimage site for League citizens.
The first century on Calysto was dedicated to construction. Cities, industry, agriculture, educational institutions, transportation networks - everything had to be built from scratch. The NorAellians had provided technology, but the labor and organization were entirely human.
The population grew steadily. Families that had delayed having children during the uncertain years of the voyage now had space to expand. Immigration from Calysto was obviously impossible, so growth was entirely organic. By the mid-2200s, multiple generations had been born on Calysto, knowing Earth and Mars only through history lessons and the museum ships.
But the past wasn't forgotten.
Many in the League - particularly among the older generations who remembered Earth - never stopped thinking about what they'd lost. The Terrans had taken their homes, killed their families, driven them across the galaxy. Now the League had advanced technology and a growing population. The question of what to do with those resources was never far from political discussion.
League engineers had been studying NorAellian subspace technology since First Contact. They took the drives apart, figured out how they worked, and improved on them. Within a decade, they'd developed drives capable of making the trip from Calysto to Sol in three years. The NorAellians could make the journey in months, but three years seemed acceptable for a people who had spent fifty years crawling to Proxima Centauri.
The NorAellians opposed these developments. They had helped the League survive, not wage a war of revenge. But as the League became more self-sufficient, NorAellian leverage diminished. Worse, some NorAellians sympathized with the League's grievances and quietly sold them technology that the NorAellian government had forbidden.
By the 2250s, the League was preparing a fleet to retake Earth.
The NorAellians realized they couldn't stop the League. So they tried something else.
In 2262, NorAellian ambassadors made contact with the People's Republic of Terra and offered them the same technology they had given the League. Their reasoning was straightforward: if neither side had a technological advantage, they would be forced to negotiate rather than fight. The NorAellians would host diplomatic talks, broker a peace agreement, and humanity would settle into a stable balance.
This is what the NorAellians now call their "second greatest mistake."
The Terrans accepted the technology gratefully. They also accepted the diplomatic talks. What they didn't accept was the premise that they should coexist with the League. From the Terran perspective, the League was composed of traitors and rebels who had murdered an entire fleet with nuclear weapons. The technology the NorAellians provided wasn't an opportunity for peace - it was a chance to finish what they'd started.
The League felt similarly. Two years of diplomatic theater followed while both sides built warships as fast as they could. By the time war was formally declared, the NorAellians had realized their error.
Without NorAellian intervention, the League could have forced Terran surrender within days. Instead, centuries of war followed.
The conflict between the League and the People's Republic of Terra has shaped both civilizations for four hundred years. Six declared wars, punctuated by cease-fires that everyone knew were temporary, have defined the political landscape of human space.
The first war began the same year as Second Contact. Neither side was truly ready for interstellar warfare - they had ships and weapons, but no experience using them at these scales and distances. The result was 27 years of border skirmishes, raids, and small engagements. Casualties were relatively light compared to what would come later.
The war ended in 2288 when a Terran strike team penetrated deep into League space and detonated a nuclear device inside the League's primary shipyard at Calysto. An entire fleet under construction - the most advanced ships humanity had built to date - was destroyed or irradiated. League military development was set back a decade.
This strike brought the League to the negotiating table. The resulting cease-fire agreement restricted nuclear weapons to ship-to-ship combat only, banning their use against fixed installations. The Terrans considered themselves the victors, having declared the war and ended it on their terms.
The peace lasted 61 years - the longest period without declared war between the League and Terrans since both became interstellar powers.
TBD.
TBD.
The century between the Third and Fourth Interstellar Wars saw significant changes in human space. Colonists from both the League and the Terran Republic - along with people who wanted nothing to do with either government - had been settling independent worlds in the unclaimed regions between the two powers. These "freelance worlds" attracted dissidents, pacifists, opportunists, and anyone else looking to escape the ongoing conflict.
Both the League and the Terrans viewed these colonies as potential assets. Throughout the early 2400s, both governments ran shadow operations in freelance space, funding militias and trying to bring colonies into their respective spheres of influence. The Terrans were making more headway, which concerned the League considerably.
In 2448, the League made a move that historians generally regard as either brilliant or underhanded, depending on who's telling the story. League diplomats convinced several freelance worlds to form a unified government, and the League immediately recognized this new Confederacy of Freelance States by unanimous vote - only the third unanimous vote in League history.
The Terrans were furious. They viewed the freelance worlds as rebellious Terran citizens who needed to be brought back into the fold. They issued the Renlei Zhimindi Xuanyan (Declaration of Human Colonies), claiming all of freelance space as Terran territory in revolt.
The war lasted 45 years. It ended in 2493 when the NorAellians intervened, backing the Confederacy as a legitimate independent government and making it clear that further conflict would not be tolerated. The Confederacy declared itself neutral in future League-Terran conflicts, and both sides grudgingly accepted the new status quo.
TBD.
The sixth war ended not through negotiation or exhaustion, but through catastrophe. In 2651, something went wrong at the Battle of Charlemagne - catastrophically wrong. The Charlemagne Disaster cut the entire Carolingian system off from the rest of the galaxy and killed thousands on both sides.
The details of what happened remain partially classified, but the result was clear: both the League and the Terrans were shaken enough to stop fighting. The Charlemagne Accords were signed in 2652, banning subspace weapons and establishing the current cease-fire.
The Charlemagne Accords brought peace, but not reconciliation. Unlike previous cease-fires, neither side reduced their military forces. Both the League and the Terran Republic pulled back to their 2652 borders, but both continued building ships and training soldiers. The breakneck pace of wartime production slowed to a sustained buildup, but it never stopped.
Everyone understood that another war was coming. Four centuries of conflict had taught both sides that cease-fires were temporary. The only questions were when the next war would start and what would trigger it.
On May 31st, 2695, the question became irrelevant.
The Sooni - a race that most humans didn't even know existed - assassinated nearly every high-ranking government official across all of human space simultaneously. Presidents, admirals, generals, ministers, judges - leadership at every level was targeted and eliminated in a single coordinated strike.
The League's government was decapitated in a day. The chain of command collapsed. The military, trained to follow orders, suddenly had no one qualified to give them.
What comes next is still being determined.