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Securing the Stars
In a move that breaks several inter-stellar precedents and treaties, the 4th Fleet of the Helios Assembly has been spotted assembling what appears to be a new shipyard on the edge of the Proxima Star System. Helian crafts have been imaged transporting cargo hauls of building materials and construction craft to and from a nearby FTL point, where the Helians appear to also be building a large mining station on a nearby asteroid.
Despite continued questioning from reporters, Helian Military Command has refused to comment on the discovery and appears to have suspended military press briefings indefinitely. What is the purpose of this base and the nearby mining operations could be, is unknown.
Lines in the Cosmos
You would've had to be blind to miss the telltale trails of large masses of spacecraft. From hours after receiving detections of a spike in radio noise and light plumes in an otherwise uninteresting part of the Proxima star system's outer edges, an emergency meeting of the Centaurian Navy's top brass has agreed to send out preliminary scouting parties before continuing with a response.
Two frigates, the Anadyr and the Latakia, make a pass within one light minute of the uninvited fleet, taking count of their numbers, approximate sizes, and a guess as to what they are doing here. Frequent in-and-out jumps from a nearby FTL point and the lack of armament on many of the vessels present suggests they're building something, and it didn't take long to figure out that these visitors are from the nearby UHA, not even a light year away in neighboring Alpha Centauri. Having had the occasional communique with them in the past, the CEN didn't hesitate to send a message.
"To the United Helios Assembly and its Armed Forces
We, representing the UCSR and the sole inhabitants of Proxima Centauri, demand to know the meaning of this sudden buildup. Failure to respond will result in an unfortunate confrontation."
The message, while received, seemed to fall on deaf ears. For several days the tense situation would remain as Helian ships continued to transport construction supplies to the shipyard. About a week after the message was sent, finally a response came, but not in the form of another message back. Suddenly and without warning, Helian crafts boarded several Centurian mining stations on the outskirts of the system, taking full control of both their mining operations and ore production.
It was at this point the Assembly would issue an official statement, but it only seemed to inflame the confrontation. The official spokesperson for the Assembly Navy would take a stand in front of dozens of reporters and state in a sure voice that the asteroids at the edge of the Proxima system were not and could not be claimed to be in the influence of the star. By this logic, they could thus could not be claimed by the Centurians as their territory.
The logic was flimsy at best, being based on the claim that "because the asteroids have been known to 'change hands' when the stars pass close in their orbit, they technically belong to the Assembly"
How the Cenurians will respond to this provocation, will determine the future of the uneasy peace between the nations of humanity.
An Abbreviated History of the Solar Unity League Pt. 1
The 21st century was an era of progress to the stars and beyond for the young human race. As technology improved at an exponential rate and nations staked their claim in the heavens, the Sol system became the main battleground of geopolitics and international affairs. The United States of America was the first to build a permanent settlement on Luna and Mars while the People's Republic of China took aim at the asteroid belt, seeking to consolidate its near-monopoly on rare earth minerals. Other states quickly followed, with British and Japanese colonies established soon after and even a number of Arab states combined resources to establish extraterrestrial resource extraction programs to help diversify their economies. However, these early colonies were small, relatively undefended, and wholly reliant on the beneficence of their mother countries.
However, while nations began to spread themselves out among the stars above, tensions began to rise to a boiling point below. As the effects of climate change began taking its iron grip on countries across the globe, two races began side-by-side: a race for solutions, and a race for resources to replenish the depleted mines, fields, and refineries of Earth. While the first was sure to bring nations together, the second was sure to drive them apart. Many politicians and political theorists began to champion the idea of "Terran Utopianism," an idea of a united humanity dedicated to creating a near-perfect society for all humans. While a popular idea, it never gained enough traction among the general public, and so states began taking positions instead around sectarian boundaries, ideological alliances, and old relationships.
The first casualty of this arms race was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). While originally solely focused on the Atlantic Ocean, the growing belligerence of other, more hostile powers caused a rush for membership from nonaligned states, resulting in a ballooning number of nations aligning themselves with the West. By unanimous vote, NATO was reorganized into the Democratic Union of Nations Association (DUNA). In response, the People's Republic of China, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the flagging Russian Federation (what remained of it after its embarrassing military performance in several preceding conflicts) chose to form the Eurasian CoDependency Organization (ECDO). Just like that, a new cold war had started.
Later branded the Second Cold War, the numerous conflicts between DUNA and the ECDO both hot and cold soon engulfed the whole world. With the increasing global polarization and exponentially growing magnitude of the war, it became almost impossible to stay neutral. Major power plays were made for Africa, India, Anatolia, Central Europe, and more, with the world split roughly equally between the two supranational organizations. After running out of room on Earth, each side turned to the stars, placing colonies directly under the control of their respective organizations, streamlining production and resource extraction, and sending missions far out to the Kuiper Belt to learn more about the planets beyond the asteroid belt. As colonization reached a fevered pitch, DUNA ships landed on the surface of Pluto in 2074, and the arms race came to an end. However, tensions remained high, and it would only take a small push to shove both states into a full-blown intersystem war.
The UHA statement was replayed in the halls of government and military of Pacifica, to much amusement. "Do they not know what 'changing hands' mean?". The diplomatic response was formatted to be less informal, but critique the fallacy nonetheless: "If the asteroids alter between orbiting Proxima and Alpha Centauri, then they can be considered to not be under the control of either governments, or they fall under jurisdiction of whichever star system they happen to be in at a given moment.
The Helian justification is entirely unsubstantiated and only brings further provocation.
In addition, the seizure of UCSR mining stations and their personnel is a brazen attack on Centaurian territory and will be answered in kind.
However, in a final gesture to preserve peace, we will not respond with force if the UHA returns the captured property and evacuate entirely from Proxima Centauri, including the asteroids that they claim to be theirs."
While the diplomats and spokespeople are hard at work finding avenues to prevent war, the generals and admirals are already busy drawing up plans. The Centaurian Navy is heavily defense-oriented, the largest overseas deployment in the past few decades had been the coalition victory at Pluto in the Solar system. In addition, the objective of this war is strictly to forcibly evict the Helians out of Proxima, and maybe construct a presence in the asteroids to solidify our claim. In the meantime, the Navy enters its highest alarm rating, with crewmen on home leave recalled back to postings and the start of "showcase patrols", units of cruisers and frigates in shifts, making passes and loitering near the Helian buildup to shore up the words with visible force.
Their captains cannot fire on the Helians without tangible evidence of first strike or direct orders from Navy headquarters, but they keep their weapons loaded and stations manned regardless.
An Abbreviated History of the Solar Unity League, Pt. 2
With the DUNA touchdown on Pluto, the end of the Solar Race was finally in sight, though with no clear winner. Across DUNA member nations, celebrations were held to mark a DUNA victory in the conquest of the Sol system. Meanwhile, the ECDO sat smugly in their half of Earth, telling its citizens that the only thing DUNA had won was a bit of rock and ice too far away to be of use to anyone on Earth. The victory, if it is right to call it such was indeed largely symbolic: Pluto was a relatively worthless planet as far as resources went, and the only colonists who would settle it were those that were forced to, either as penal workers or corporate miners. Both factions had secured large swathes of new land in the scramble, and even after years of innovation, colonization, and subterfuge, both factions once again stood on roughly equal footing - a major frustration to leaders of both. Content to reap the benefits of their new colonies, preparations were made for new, extrasolar adventures, potentially using a new form of near-light speed travel that would allow colony ships to speed cryogenically frozen humans to new destinations.
However, the settlers of these new celestial bodies were not content to wait on the actions of their Terran overlords. Unrest was growing as generations went by and the descendants of the original colonists began associating themselves more with their planet of origin than with a common faction or the planet of their forefathers. For the first time in history, humans began defining themselves by macro-demonyms other than "Terran." First were the Martians, followed quickly after by the Jovians and Saturnians. The Mercurians and Cythereans (a cleaner demonym for a resident of Venus) soon came after, and sooner or later every major astronomical body in the Sol system had its own people that called it home before any other.
This sectionalism, however, proved disastrous for the tenuously-united Solar System. A major economic recession, string of terror attacks, and uptick in piracy fomented more discontent that many on Earth feared would boil over into outright rebellion. As each faction began to deal with unrest on their own colonies, a gradual normalization of relations followed, and a policy of détente would guide the leaders of the DUNA and the ECDO all the way up until 2091.
2091 was the year when Earth's hold over its interplanetary colonies would finally shatter. Sol, formerly the collective guiding light of humanity, began to enter an era of extreme activity. This massive increase in solar activity led to all interplanetary travel between Earth and its colonies to cease, cutting off Earth from all other planets in the Solar system. Almost immediately, citizens of the Outer Colonies gathered in colonial assemblies and, one after another, declared independence from the decadent ECDO and DUNA,. The era of Terran domination was finally at its end, or so it seemed. However, despite the difficulty of traveling due to the Great Storm, the Terran old guard refused to let the pre-Storm status quo perish, and, as the Great Storm began to recede slowly over the next several years, began a lengthy campaign to reunite the system. For the first time, the ECDO and DUNA chose to combine their armed forces in the United Forces of Earth - a coalition designed to bring the Colonies to heel once more and reestablish the hegemony Earth held over its sister planets.
The fighting soon went from a quick, intense affair between skirmishing fleets to a grinding slog across battlefields all across the Solar System. The UFE threw millons of men and thousands of tons of war materiel into a war that gradually began to be seen as unwinnable. From the ashes of the old system of alliances, the Outer Colonies united into an ad hoc organization called the Confederation of Independent Planets that mounted the desperate defense of the Colonies. The UFE, which had previously launched a daring advance to Saturn to hold the strategic port and refueling station of Titan, was slowly pushed back to Jupiter, and from there flung back across the Asteroid Belt to Mars. While the CIP's goals turned from defending their newfound independence to liberating the Inner Colonies, the war of attrition in the Belt soon became too much to bear for many of the constituent polities, and a treaty was signed: the Treaty of Luna.
By the time the Treaty of Luna was signed, 223 million humans were killed in the fighting, the UFE was totally exhausted of all resources, and many nations in the CIP saw their industries ruined and their finances on the verge of bankruptcy. The treaty stipulated that the Inner Colonies remained the domain of the newly-founded Solar Unity League (founded in the latter half of the war as a means to fully centralize the wartime bureaucracies of the ECDO and DUNA), while the Outer Colonies were left to their own devices. The Asteroid Belt, the collection of rocks that separated the bipolar world of the Solar System, was divided roughly equally between the SUL and the Jovian Commonwealth - the closest nationstate to the SUL.
Almost half a century has passed since the Treaty of Luna was first signed, and in the interim, new states have reconnected with Sol, founded by those colonists and refugees that fled the system during the Great Solar War, new technologies such as the jump-engine and FTL have become commonplace, and the system once again teeters on the brink of instability. The Solar Unity League, once the peak and pride of human progress, has degenerated, held back by its aging bureaucracy, outdated military, and slow-paced economy. Only time will tell whether or not the SUL will manage to return triumphant, or if the light of Earth will be snuffed out forever.
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