///From the author: this story is presented as if it were a section in a history textbook - a favorite narrative device of mine for these sorts of expositional pieces - and I intend it to reflect the basic foundational history of the Interplanetary Cooperative Administration (ICA), which is the main protagonist faction in The Spacers Saga. This allows for a deep dive into the backstory of the ICA with respect to our next book, The Erebus Effect, and an upcoming novel, The Petrichor Conspiracy. Look for them both here soon!
Second Sunrise Over Phoenix:
The day after Valentine’s Day, 2013, a meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere and exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk in southern Russia. Fifteen hundred people suffered injuries as a result of the airburst this created, and there were thirty million dollars in total damages. Sixteen hours later, a larger asteroid slid by the Earth, passing within thirty thousand kilometers of an impact that would have caused calamity.
This near catastrophe, however, was only the preamble to the greatest humanitarian crisis in modern history. On the late afternoon of 26 June of the same year, the asteroid 2062 Aten impacted just north of Phoenix, Arizona. The resulting fireball killed over two million people in the southwestern U.S., with millions more injured by secondary effects. The ensuing impact winter led to a period of cold which lasted more than two years, killing at least a million more people worldwide due to famine and disease. All told, roughly 3.5 million people died across the globe, leading to an outpouring of humanitarian aid and support for the victims.
In spite of the horror of the so-called Phoenix Event, a new era of productivity emerged in the aftermath. Intensive studies of the debris ejected from 2062 Aten as it disintegrated found that the material had unique properties, making everything from fusion energy to room temperature superconductors seem close at hand. As the new Bureau of Special Investigations took up the task of managing this research, the tech giant Larsen Industries began to corner the market on new tech based upon its findings.
Larsen's Gambit:
The 2020s were a dynamic and volatile time in world history. In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in an attempt to reincorporate its land into a new Russian Empire, leading to a brutal conflict later referred to as the first of the 21st century's resource wars. The following year, unrest in Iran led to a general revolution, which then inspired the U.S. and NATO to invade and occupy the country. Both of these conflicts, as well as others in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America became proxy conflicts in the so-called New Cold War.
But even as these conflicts gripped the world, research into the fallout from the Phoenix Event continued at a breakneck pace. The covert Special Intelligence Directorate, formed in secret less than a year after Phoenix was destroyed with the stated goal of minimizing long-term damage from the Event and ensuring that the United States maintained its place of dominance in world affairs, headed up a program that aimed to establish American hegemony in space, by any means necessary. Launched in 2028, it was called Project Petrichor.
The first phase of their long-term plan was to trot maverick aerospace magnate David Larsen out with the revelation of fusion energy in August 2029, a disclosure commonly referred to as Larsen’s Gambit. The gambit paid off: within four years, the paradigm had shifted away from fossil fuels, with fusion becoming the new dominant force in geopolitics. Larsen had even bigger plans for the technology, envisioning it as a way to power spacecraft that could cross the solar system, and those beyond.
What almost no one on Earth understood, including Larsen himself, was that this fusion technology had been made possible by the study of debris left over from 2062 Aten. The anomalous properties of an unknown metal found in this debris opened the door to commercial fusion, making David Larsen the richest man on Earth and paving the way to the opening of deep space as a new avenue for human exploration. But the story was still very far from over.
A Very Cold War:
Throughout the early 2040s, NATO began moving its elite space forces to bases on and in orbit of the moon. The reason given was that China and the Shanghai Pact had been conducting a similar buildup in forces since at least 2037. In 2045, Brussels passed the Emergency Mobilization Act to standardize force deployment, leading many to fear an eventual confrontation between the two superpowers over cislunar resources. Between 2045 and 2048, the Joint Space Command of NATO oversaw the construction of more than fifty space combat vessels.
What not even the Special Intelligence Directorate could predict, however, was that Charles Larsen, son of the late David Larsen and incumbent CEO of Larsen Aerospace, learned the horrific truth of the Phoenix Event: that a secretive cabal of U.S. officials had learned of the special properties of 2062 Aten and launched a mission in the early 2000s to redirect it towards the Earth for the purpose of harvesting its uniquely useful compositional material.
After being clued in to this terrible secret by a former SID operative turned information broker named Vernon "Thoth" Morrow, Larsen revealed the truth to his millions of social media followers in an attempt to call attention off of his company's financial troubles in the wake of the Helium Crisis. He had hoped to alleviate his crisis and the shortage in vital helium-3 fusion fuel by showing the world a bigger problem, but ended up causing a firestorm.
Within days of Larsen's Disclosure, riots broke out across the United States as demands for recompense for the dead of the Phoenix Event spread like wildfire. Tensions rose between NATO and the Shanghai Pact until they both withdrew ambassadors from the UN and declared a unilateral state of emergency. As American cities burned, the first orders were issued for the military forces already on Luna to standby for combat.
The Guns of October:
As the United States struggled with internal strife, China seized on the opportunity to claim dominion over Lunar resources by way of military action. It had long suspected that America’s interest in the moon was due to the discovery of material similar to that found in Aten debris buried in the regolith, and after Larsen's Disclosure made this fact plain, the Shanghai Pact drew plans to seize the lead in the race for these materials. In early October, they launched an attack on NATO positions at the lunar south pole.
Within hours of this first strike, both sides had mobilized their full strength in the Lunar sphere of influence. This period of the conflict was dubbed Operation Firestorm by the U.S. Space Force, and lasted about three weeks. After this initial violence, tensions on the Moon settled into a stalemate that lasted for another six months. This period was marked with constant fear that the war in cislunar space would spill over into a terrestrial conflict - one that would likely end with a worldwide nuclear exchange.
In the end, this was was only prevented thanks to backroom wheeling and dealing on the part of the same politicians whose activities had caused it in the first place. The U.S. extended a peace offering to the Shanghai Pact, in the form of equal partnership in the fusion project which Phoenix Artifact research had initiated. Facing an ecological disaster of their own, the Chinese agreed to this peace, and the conflict referred to as the Lunar War came to an end on 13 November 2049. Roughly two thousand international military personnel died in the conflict.
New Beginnings:
Over the next two years, the nations involved in the Lunar War met at the United Nations to conduct talks aimed at standardizing the new status quo in the wake of this first extraplanetary War. The most major result of this lengthy peacemaking process was the adoption of the Tyndall Treaty in December 2051, a legislative end run which established the Interplanetary Cooperative Administration to oversee affairs of governance and commerce beyond Earth.
This organization was founded with the intent of preserving peace and ensuring prosperity for all nations taking part in the exploration and development of space. Two years after it was established, the ICA Council passed the Nakhimov-Herrington Act, an enabling measure which provided a legal basis by which elements of participant nations’ space forces would be combined and reorganized into a new joint force, the Interplanetary Defense Corps, which would fulfill a peacekeeping and security role in Solar Space.
The decade after the adoption of the Tyndall Accords should have been marked by growth, given the framework put in place by the laws it made possible. The reality was more complicated, however, as nations rushed into the gap opened by the deep space frontier, causing a steady rise in geopolitical tensions. Some pundits pointed to the similarities in this period and that which existed in the decade before the Lunar War, leading to fears of a repeat.
Then, in October 2061, activity on Mars broke these tensions. The Scientific Advancement and Development Initiative, founded to oversee research bases on Mars, was rocked by a scandal at one of its outposts it oversaw in the Arabia Terra. An investigation of this incident as revealed that it was orchestrated by terrestrial business interests intending to carve up Mars to increase their own wealth. This led to the passage of the Brookenden Act in 2064. This Act remains the standard for interplanetary settlement and resource exploitation more than three hundred years later, and a major sticking point for denizens of the outer solar system.
To be continued…
I am shocked I haven't read this yet. It's fantastic and fascinating!