This was a time of stagnation. From the end of the African Crisis to The Flight civilization progressed less than it had in the twentieth century alone. I myself spent half a century in the regular Atlantic Federation forces before being promoted out of the Marines. I became a Captain in the Navy, the real navy, the one that drifted through the asteroid belt and orbited the planets. The transition took a long time, there was a lot to learn and a lot my commanders wanted done to me before giving me a ship. I served as a lieutenant aboard the Mini-Carrier Montgomery in orbit around Mars for a few years to get the hang of things and then they sent me to the Belt. The Belt was the focus of the Atlantic Federations operations off Earth. The Alliance was starting a terraforming project for Venus and had colonies on Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa, as well as a little one on mars. The Coalition had developed colonies on Mars and her two moons were the industrial centers of her fleets. Of course, Earths moon, Luna, had been divided between the three powers nearly a century before and its population was in the tens of millions by 2150.
Ships crews were always taken from Earth. Seems backward doesn't it? Why not take crews from the asteroid belt were they're used to low-g? Because a belter'd have a hell of a time even breathing during high-g operations. The strength in a ship lies in its maneuverability as its useless if you don't put it in the right place at the right time. You can only accelerate a ship as hard as the crew is capable of surviving. A four-g thruster with a belter crew aboard will lose to a similar ship with a Terran crew everytime. Terrans can handle four-g's of sustained acceleration, Belters'd only be able to operate at about two-g's tops, even less if they're from a low spin rock.
I was placed in a space station to harden me up to high-g. The stations daily number of rotations increased constantly and after two years of genetic modification, cybernetic modification and brutal exercise I was ready for deployment. They used those stations much more intensively later on. Expectant mothers from Earth would live in a Terran Plus gravity station so that their children would be naturally able to handle greater strain. You're probably wondering why they didn't just use AI ships in such a militarized system. The answer: they feared AI. They knew how to control people, they were afraid to hand the systems strongest ships over to non-human minds.
I was in on the Outer System revolutions. I developed a horrible case of cynicism in my first centuries in space from seeing the utter pointlessness of everything that was going on in the system. I was brought around by some friends later on. I'm not naturally cynical and they tapped into my underlying idealism. The Belt threw off the Atlantic Federation in the late 24th century. The uprising was led by something of a cult personality on Ceres. He was an enhanced soldier, like I'd once been, but he and his forces had been trained to fight in extreme low-g. They did it quite well. They turned on their own garrison and spaced the soldiers who refused to swear allegiance to the Belt Confederation. Within a week most of the major asteroids were under rebel hands and I joined them. My ship, the Battle Cruiser Dresden, helped fend off the late coming Atlantic Federation assault. They must have been horrified at their loss. The Belt was their only holding beyond the moon.
We lent our help to another group of revolutionaries. They established what would later be named The Jovian Republic. They would have certainly failed in their attempt had the Coalition and Atlantic Federation not become involved. Seeing a chance to limit the only power that had colonies left in the outer system, the AF and Coalition attacked the Alliance reinforcements. The Alliance didn't stay that way though. They quickly colonized Titan and claimed the rest of the moons of Saturn as their own. And me, once I helped train and organize the new Belt Confederation and Jovian Republic militaries I retired. For the first time in four centuries I was out of the military and trying to enjoy civilian life.
As you can see, the only way I'm able to tell the story of those years is to tell their military history. There was nothing else. No cultural development, no change in art forms, or technology. The three powers clamped down tighter on their populations than ever after the rebellions and I can't really say that the two outer system civilizations were tremendously better. We had a lot more freedom out there, but we were so consumed by our need to establish a defense strong enough to hold off any potential inner system attack that we became thoroughly militarized and somewhat authoritarian.
To tell my story I must also tell another which I did not learn until later. In 2714 the Atlantic Federation sent Captain Joseph Bellamy and his Heavy Cruiser Churchill out near the orbit of Neptune. When Bellamy arrived he discovered a small messenger ship containing a dead pilot. The messenger ships were equipped with an FTL (Faster Than Light) drive and were used to make communications between the ruler of the Atlantic Federation and the two new interstellar colonies they possessed possible. He, following orders, took the dead pilot and computer data storage system from the ship and slagged it with fusion flame. He concluded that the pilot had been killed by sustained high acceleration, and that extreme velocity had caused solar particles to strip away the great patches of missing super conductor of heat from the nose. He came to suspect that revolution had occurred on Apollo, the colony the ship had last left, and that the pilot died trying to outrun hostile ships.
After the information and evidence had been turned over to the authorities the Churchill was integrated into one of the nine fleets that patrolled between Saturn and Uranus. The fleets were huge. Hundreds of warships the size of an old nuclear aircraft carrier, thousands smaller, and several dreadnaughts kilometers long made up each fleet. Bellamy was worried. One, or even both colonies could not scare the Atlantic Federation so badly. I knew nothing of all this at this point.
A young destroyer Captain came to me at Tarsus Station and wanted to speak in private. He had been monitoring the positions of the three major powers fleets and he'd noticed something odd. He thought they were arranged to far out in the system, and all the ships which had been in dock had returned to their fleets. I'd never seen a configuration like that in the centuries since I'd left the Atlantic Federation Navy and come to the belt. He had a hypothesis. The Alderson drive had been in use for at least a century by the major powers and he thought they were defending against aggression originating from outsystem. He thought they were watching the jump points. The Belt Confederation military and that of the Jovian Republic had only recently begun retrofitting ships with faster than light drives and we hadn't yet been willing to weaken our defenses by sending ships out of the system. I was certain they weren't defending against colonies. With FTL travel only a century old it seemed unlikely that any colony could have attained a level of industrialization and technology to scare the major powers so badly. There was the possibility that they had had FTL travel for longer than they admitted to and the colonies had had much longer to develop. Or perhaps they had run into something else out there and it had scared them.
Seeing the reports got me pretty nervous. Fleets of Atlantic Federation, and Coalition, and Alliance ships were hardly protecting their own holdings. All of these fleets contained tens to hundreds of ships, from small destroyers to dreadnoughts a kilometer long. It would take a lot to scare them this bad. I have always felt a need to take action in times of danger. It's probably whats kept me alive for so long. I couldn't just sit back. I asked to be recomissioned and the Confederation did so quickly. I captained an old Ceres class Battleship, like I had centuries before, and I kept close tabs on the young Captain and some friends of his he had aroused concern in.
I saw all of the powers putting together the greatest forces they could muster and preparing to fight and I thought that if such a war came to pass civilization would not likely survive. Friends of mine worked with me to create contingency plans for such a war, including several for running from the solar system while civilization died within it. I wondered if maybe all of the colonies could have revolted together.
Meanwhile, I was moved into a patrol group near Jupiter’s orbit and I was angry as hell about it. How could I protect the belt from out there?
The enemy was detected out beyond Pluto approaching Sol at ten thousand kilometers per second. It was a huge force, dwarfing the fleet Captain Bellamy was part of, but the solar system was now defended by astounding force. We figured it had to be alien. A few of the ships were fifteen kilometers in length. The Fourth Fleet, Bellamy’s fleet now that the Churchill’d been ordered out here, came head on at them. Small particles, a huge chaff field spanning thousands of square kilometers, had been flung forward of the intruders and impacted the Fourth Fleet at a combined speed of fourteen thousand kilometers per second, ripping them apart, just disabling a lucky few. Bellamy was at the edge and his ship was damaged, but not destroyed. The rest of the damaged ships and destroyed ones coasted straight into the enemy. The biggest ships force the material around them with electromagnetic fields, but much of it still impacts smaller ships. The intruders suffer some damage, but that is the only fleet they had to face head on, it won’t be repeated. Some of Churchill’s fins and weapons were stripped by the chaff. The enemy is past the reach of weapons in seconds. They next meet human resistance almost seventy days later.
Four Alliance fleets, two Belt, one Coalition and one Jovian matched vectors with the intruders inside the orbit of Jupiter. I was among them. The fleets agreed not to shoot at one another ahead of time. It had been hundreds of years since any of us had approached this close to a non-allied powers forces. The standoff was momentarily forgotten. As the intruders passed Jupiter, Callisto and Ganymede both detected several large three hundred meter diameter spheres, dense objects, coming at them at approximately the intruders speed. On impact over two thirds of the people inhabiting the two moons were killed instantly. Nearly a day later the defending forces detected a group of dense objects headed toward Earth, Mars, and the Belt. We hadn’t heard from Titan for nearly a week.
We attacked. The fighting was brutal, but I think I already knew Earth was doomed and so I fought cautiously and lost few ships. We did some damage to them, but they shattered us. Many ships rammed, the rest of the survivors fell back.
I regrouped and swung around toward the belt. I radioed the broken forces nearby and offered them the opportunity to join us and escape so that some of the human race might survive this. Some did join us. We became a force of limping Alliance ships and Belt Confederation ships which had avoided the heavy fighting. We headed to Guval Station. It took just a mild threat of force to get the Terran Plus gravity station to hand over the supplies we needed. We couldn’t go home to get them, Ceres, the center of belt government had been shattered by one of their giant marbles and everything was in chaos. We left the station transmitting the jump coordinates we would eventually use to any ship they could reach.
We repaired and stockpiled ammunition, armor plating, superconductive plating and anything else we could find a use for. Then we accelerated toward the Galilean moons and several more joined us and we forced a few others. We needed the big hydroponics and fuel support ships to sustain operations away from home and the mobile repair facilities could gather resources and tool replacement parts for damaged ships. I heard that a science vessel, the Sagan, was out in the area too and I volunteered them for the trip. The ship was a giant sensor platform and lab that would be useful in our travels.
Before we jumped we saw Mars’ atmosphere flare red with the dust flung from its dry deserts by impact, and in the last hours Earths surface was obscured as vaporized oceans turned to clouds.