Dissidence - Prologue

Tue Sep 29 2020 (Updated: Tue Dec 15 2020) - 2 min read

A lot of good people died today. Commander Aliyah Khan, my first officer, trapped in engineering as the plasma fires raged. Marrat Acharya, chief engineer, blown into space as the docking bay breached. 22 others at last count. Given my own injury report, I might soon be joining them.

How many others, on how many ships? No one reaches admiral without having to make hard choices along the way, but even so, today was different. Today the scope of human tragedy was revealed to me. Every generation repeats the sins of the past. We never seem to learn. We just go on, numbly rolling that same rock up the hill.

When humanity first made it into space, it was the dawn of a new era. Those first explorers looked back on the pale blue dot we called home and were changed by the sight. They understood that we are one species, a lone spark glowing in the dark.

Together we colonized the system, bent space to our will, and built the Dyson Sphere that gave us the stars. The Directorate did that. That was our work, ushering mankind into the future. For more than 200 years the Directorate tended to the human spark, fanning it into a flame.

Then the Martians bolted. Soon after, the upstarts from Earth began their ‘glorious revolution’ and inside a generation humanity fractured into three blocs. A part of me always hoped that given time, we would find our way back. That we would realize survival depends on unity. But we’ve run out of time.

We arrived at Tau Scorpii to investigate reports of strange gravitational waves, only to find that the Martians and Terrans were already here. Given its proximity to the border-regions of each bloc and the bounty of habitable planets, maybe it was inevitable that we’d all find our way to Scorpius. Call it fate. We’d hardly entered the sector before the first shots started firing. It’s a miracle any of us survived.

The Union of Sol, the Martian Commonwealth and the Lunar Directorate are now in open war. Tau Scorpii is where the dream of a united humanity came to die. There are no monsters in space save those we bring with us. Dissidence is in our nature.

End recording.