RolePlay onLine

Songline

"Early in the 21st Century we first colonised Mars, Callisto and even Venus and Ganymede - 'we' being the species, with these new worlds being claimed by the African Union, the Sino-Indus Protectorate, the Ruso-European Free State and the Indo-Brazilian Bloc. Luna had been claimed by the United American States, but with their collapse it fell back to their commercial partners, who were primarily conglomerates from the European half of the Free State. By mid- to late- in that century we saw the construction of tens of arkships, citizens eager to claim worlds beyond our own, or escape oppression within their own nations. Few were heard from, but colonies were established and a handful thrived. Historians called this the First Diaspora"

"If I recall correctly, the Terran Alliance formed in the early 22nd century, when Dr Edward Nyerere first theorised the principles of the spike drive. It was at first a clearing house to prevent claim-jumpers and colonial wars. And, perhaps, so that the mother nations might retain control in a manner they had not with the arkships."

"In 2119 AD the first flight took Dr Nyerere to Alpha Centuari, and shortly after the Alliance reestablished control over the colony there. Over the next decade we saw the Second Diaspora, with hundreds of colonial sleepers sent out, with careful charters and administrators whose loyalty to the Alliance was clear. At the same time the Sino-Indus Protectorate fractured - the Cathay-Indus separating from the Hong Hai - and the former aligned themselves with the Lys, who had emerged within the Indo-Brazilian Bloc. Between those two power structures the Songline programme came into being, with vessels sent both trailing and spinward - and most concentrated on the near systems"

"With the First Diaspora the home systems of the Naxos-Elk Republic were among those settled, as were the Omayyad Caliphate and Benjamin League spinward. With the second the seeds of the Seven Nations were laid. And the seeds of collapse. Pressures around colonisation and the rights of colonists brought down the Cathay-Indus, with the militant Kujaku-Mayura claiming worlds like New Osaka, Mangalore and Kadiri. Others within the Cathay-Indus settled in the Core Worlds, or fled trailing to Deni or Pataliputra or spinward to the Lysian Fiefs before the Terran Alliance itself collapsed. But it was much the same elsewhere. You can see the influence of the African Union on the Nejem or the Free States on Ruthenia and Ilmarinen. Even of the UAS in Mercia and the freeports like Chaeblis and Washburn"