On February 27th, 396al, an announcement was made by the Prime Minister of the Confederate Republics
of Antares. The time and date of the national address had itself been announced days earlier,
and when Jiro Hashimoto, the man who had led the Confederacy to victory over the Great Khan
appeared alongside the heads of state from each republic, every office was empty, every school
closed. The moment was unlike anything in the history of Antares, eclipsing even Reunification
Day or the first successful flight of the Earhart beyond the boundaries of the Miasma.
The history of the Antares Confederacy, the Prime Minister acknowledged, had been built on a lie. A
lie intended to protect rather than deceive, yet nevertheless devastating in its consequences.
For all its history, the leaders of the Earhart Flotilla and the Republics that had followed,
had claimed that no messages from Earth had ever been received.
They had said the fate of their homeworld was unknown.
The truth was, when the Earhart Flotilla first emerged in the star system that would come to be
known as Antares, at least a hundred messages had been received. They were garbled and fragmented,
but when pieced together, told a story of anticipation, followed by carnage and tragedy.
At the time of the Earhart Flotilla’s departure, the nations of Earth had detected seemingly
artificial broadcasts of repeating, mathematical patterns. While unequivocal proof of alien life
had not yet been found, it was no longer easily dismissed as purely science fiction.
The records of when the Screk first arrived in the Solar System were lost in the war that followed.
The exact course the conflict took was similarly consumed.
Only the craters where once stood ancient cities of mankind,
carefully recorded by hidden Confederate Drones, hint at the full extent of the cataclysm.
The Screk were an ancient civilization, possessing knowledge and technology
far beyond the realm of human understanding. But their vast empire had been consumed, and
what remained became obsessed with the study of lost glories. Why they chose to conquer humanity,
to travel well beyond their borders to a distant part of the galaxy and ignore
every other species on the way, could not be explained. But choose the human race they did.
The United Terran Protectorates emerged from the end of the Earth as a captive state.
Bound to serve the will of the Screk and help them reassert their power across the universe.
As history was rewritten and forgotten, what remained of mankind became willing collaborators,
expanding into space and reaping the benefits of their servitude.
When the first representatives of the Antares Confederacy encountered
the United Terran Protectorates within the halls of the galactic community,
they were not treated as long lost brothers and sisters, but with open contempt. Only in
the decades that followed, was it discovered that this had been, at least in part, a ruse.
The few Terran diplomats and support staff that passed messages to the Antares Confederacy,
always disappeared soon after, but the information they relayed was horrifying.
Not every detail was revealed to Antares during this first address, but the base facts were clear.
Earth was a prison, in which millions toiled as slaves and playthings for their overlords.
Whatever power the UTP might have achieved was directed towards the Screk’s adversaries,
with Terran fleets and Terran armies used as tools to enslave whole species and nations.
And while the occasional smuggled message revealed the presence of a small resistance,
the idea of a full-scale rebellion was unlikely,
if not impossible. Liberation, if it ever came, would likely not arise from within.
The news was as great a shock to the citizens of Antares as anything in their history.
But the idea that the Confederacy might lead a great charge to liberate the Earth
as they had done with the Vrul or the Khan, was laughable. The strength of the United
Terran Protectorates alone was far superior to the Confederacy. With the Screk not only behind them,
but now within striking distance of Antares itself, victory was impossible. It could
also not be ignored that Antares was no longer a human nation. No citizen alive today had ever set
foot upon the Earth and the last generation to breathe its air had long since vanished.
Whatever link there remained with Earth, for the good of Antares, had to be severed.
For decades, Antares again turned inwards. The territories taken by the Khan were established
as new federal republics and then released as sovereign partners. Centers of science and
discovery flourished, bringing to the nation new insights into artificial intelligence,
robotics and even the means to travel through long dormant gateways constructed by a civilization
long since extinct. But as communications technology improved and the galaxy grew smaller,
news would increasingly reach the Antares Confederacy that
the Screk had unleashed the United Terrain Protectorates against some distant nation.
For all its achievements, the spirit of the nation had been wounded.
The genocide enacted against the Thimodian Republic in 417 was like nothing that had come
before. Their armies beaten and fleets shattered, the Screk had deployed a weapon of colossal power
against one of their helpless worlds. The entire planet was encased in a shield of
impenetrable energy, its inhabitants doomed to be toyed with like ants by bored Screk nobles.
This display of power was perhaps meant to awe the galaxy into submission,
to show what fate awaited any who might resist. And it worked. The Galactic Community
issued a condemnation, and then returned to the same tired politics. The affected peoples begged
for aid and were ignored by their neighbors. The nations of the galaxy turned elsewhere.
ut within the Confederate Republics of Antares, something else occurred.
There had once been a raging fire within humanity.
An ancient martial spirit that had been decayed by decades and centuries of peace and isolationism.
The destruction of the homeworld of the Vrul, the last stand of General Liliana Reyes on Malaka,
these events and others had kindled that flame, yet it remained doomed to
dwindle back to glowing embers. The Thimodian genocide was different. An inferno ignited.
But what was perhaps most extraordinary, was that this searing desire for justice
was no longer unique to mankind alone, but burned within the hearts of all those who had arrived
within Antares. Every species within the nation had found a place beyond the reach of tyrants,
a place where they were free to live whatever kind of life they wished.
But the achievements of Antates were meaningless if they came at the expense of a galaxy that cried
out for help and was ignored. The fire that burned within the nation might have
been described in a thousand different ways by a thousand different cultures,
but the overriding feeling expressed itself in a simple idea: “Evil must be opposed”.
Historians have often claimed that the Confederacy’s declaration of war against
the perpetually unstable Althorian Empire in 422 might have arisen from this feeling
of helplessness turned to bitter rage that had emerged across Antares. While
Earth could not be liberated, the Althorians could. The Confederacy’s victory was swift,
but the war had not been fought in the pursuit of new territories.
It had been waged to free the slave armies forced to die in that Empire’s defense,
to rid that nation of an Emperor, who like the Screk, saw his subjects as only chattel.
Had the liberation of the Athorians echoed that of the Vrul centuries earlier,
with a slow descent back into autocracy, perhaps the Antares Confederacy would have
given up on its interventionism, its flame extinguished. But experience was everything,
and the lessons learned with the Vrul and the Khan ensured that the institutions established
by the Antares occupation forces within the former empire, were not so easily dismantled. At first,
the former slaves and citizens of the Althorian Empire exercised their freedom
under the protection of Confederate guns, but when those guns departed, the impact of Antares
remained. The liberation of the Althorians was a seminal moment in the history of the Confederacy.
It was not the first time that the nation had fought to uphold their most cherished values,
but it was the first time that their success had not turned to ashes in the decades that followed.
Following this triumph, the power of the Screk no longer seemed insurmountable.
Senators who had once dismissed the notion of addressing their brutality, now began to argue,
with increasing vehemence that Parliament denounce them, confront them. The nations invaded by the
Terran Protectorates, the species enslaved, they were no longer nameless entities to the people of
Antares. Humans might no longer be the majority within the nation, but they were hardly the only
species to have suffered. The Confederacy was a realm of refugees and immigrants fleeing the
power of tyranny and with each new atrocity brought to light, came the desire to resist.
It would be many years more before the declaration was made and the Antares
Confederacy embarked on its great crusade, but the path was beginning to present itself.
When the nations liberated by Antares joined together to form a new federation of equals,
when construction began on a fleetyard the likes of which the galaxy had never seen,
none present could have truly appreciated the lasting importance of these decisions.
Whether the officials at the time recognized the true meaning behind their actions,
Antares was beginning to arm itself for a seemingly inevitable confrontation.
There had once been a statue located in the harbor of one of Earth’s great cities.
At the time of its construction it was described as “the New Colossus''
and a sonnet of the same name was inscribed at its base.
Its message had been deemed so offensive and laughable to the Screk that the statue had
been reduced to molten slag, reforged into alien jewelry to be worn by their mocking nobility.
No human alive today has ever seen the figure that once stood upon sea-washed sunset gates. A mighty
woman with a torch, whose flame was imprisoned lightning and her name Mother of Exiles.
From her beacon-hand once glowed a world-wide welcome. Whose silent lips once cried “give me
your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”.
Yet a galaxy away from where that statue once stood, flames of imprisoned lightning
burn not in a single torch, but across an entire star system, an entire nation.
A nation that for centuries has provided refuge for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses.
To all those yearning to breathe free, Antares is seen as a Mother of Exiles.
The Screk see something different, they see, and fear, a New Colossus.