///From the author: this will be another one of the lore documents written as if by a historian from within the universe itself, Ã la the earlier post about The Origins of the ICA - this one will deal with the backstory of the Alliance of Free Worlds, which is the ICA's chief ideological and military nemesis in the mid- to late 24th century setting of The Spacers Saga.
The Rise and Fall of the Titan Pact:
The story of the Alliance begins not in the War on Draconism, where many lesser historians would trace its origins. Nor does it begin in the fires of the Mars-Titan War, though this is certainly an important milestone on the path which led to the signing of the Pact of Allegiance. Instead, we must venture back to the middle of the 23rd century, when the Brotherhood of Antares began its ill-fated crusade against the perceived excesses of ICA governance.
When the Brotherhood attacked the 200th anniversary celebration of the signing of the Tyndall Accords, they set in motion a sequence of events which has run downhill with ever more catastrophic consequences ever since. Even now, more than a century after the last devotees of the Brotherhood were captured or killed on Ganymede, the aftershocks of their abortive insurrection can be felt across the outer system.
The central reason for this is because the Wayfarer Insurrection led directly to the ICA's increase in military spending during the second half of the 23rd century, which, when considered in parallel with the discovery of the Ramayana Site in 2281, set the stage for the rise of the Titan Pact in 2284. The Pact arose from a deal between the warlords of Titan and the plutocrats of the other large outer system worlds to defend their interests against ICA meddling, and the Mars-Titan War was its inevitable result.
But the War thus spawned had only one inevitable outcome. The industrial might of Mars and its allies would not be denied, even if it did take five years of warfare to produce the final result. But victory against Titan was only the beginning. The reparations meted out by the victors at the Harrison Accords two years later was the true catalyst of what was to come.
Through the Dark Years:
The long shadow of the Harrison Accords fell across the outer system for twenty years before it bore fruit. That fruit was the Divisão Revolucionário Armado de Callisto, which rose to power on the world whose name it bore in the mid-2320s on the crest of a wave of violent nationalism that surged in opposition to the Accords. The chief outgrowth of the Draconist movement was brutality aimed at anyone accused of allegiance to the ICA.
Over the years which followed the rise of DRAC, the aggression they spawned spread far and wide, first to the rest of the Jovian system and then to other sectors of Solar Space. For the first ten years of this conflict, the Draconists maintained a slight advantage thanks to their ability to fade away into the local populations of the regions they sought to control, while the ICA-aligned forces sent to hunt them down were relegated to easily targeted outposts near the major settlements. All of that began to change in 2334.
By 2334, as the Spacer Corps and its allies responded to the civil war in Jovian space, they devised a new strategy to turn the Draconists' ersatz supporters against them. By feigning their enemy into conducting acts of barbarity against civilian populations, the ICA was able to gradually shatter the DRAC's public image, and by 2336 the civilians in Jovian space were beginning to turn against them.
It was also in 2336 that the image of the future came into view. A band of former Draconists and other frontier rebels who sought to end the Crisis on their own terms founded the Jovian Revolutionary Council in 2334, and in 2336 they established the Joint Commission for Public Security. This benignly-named organization, which in truth more closely resembled the Marxist guerrilla factions of the 20th century on Earth, was the predecessor to the Alliance.
A Golden Opportunity:
Between 2336 and 2338, the JRC and its militant arm, the JCPS, carried out a stringently planned counterinsurgency campaign against the Draconist front still infecting the outer solar system. By using the Draconists' own networks of spies and informants, as well as funding from the ICA, they were able to seek out and eliminate the DRAC's leadership one by one.
But even as they carried out this crusade, the JRC's leaders were laying the groundwork for a new government to fill the gap left behind after the DRAC tide receded. After all, the ICA was still persona non grata, and an independent form of leadership was widely sought after by the people of the frontier. As such, a political drama played out within the larger drama of the Draconist Wars, with the power players of the JRC as its chief players.
The two most powerful of these early leaders were Josiah Lasky, a former Draconist commando leader from Callisto, and Inmar Candiru, an up-and-coming cadre from Ganymede. These two ideologues jockeyed for power for two years between 2335 and 2337, before a dark horse emerged. Ansel Gandara had started his career as a political science professor from a small university on Callisto, but by the end of 2337, he would be the most powerful member of a JRC triumvirate with Lasky and Candiru.
But Gandara was a shrewd politician. By the end of 2338, his machinations had pitted Candiru and Lasky against one another for first position in the triumvirate, even though that was the position he sought for himself. When he introduced the Pact of Allegiance to the JRC's fifteenth congress in October 2338, it was the master stroke in a plan to force them to the sidelines. As the commissioners debated the measure as a means to solve the problem of outer system leadership, Gandara consolidated his power.
The Alliance Rises:
By the time the Pact of Allegiance was introduced as a public measure in early March 2339, there was a general sea change in the outer solar system. For starters, the Jovian Revolutionary Council had merged with the Central Committee of the United People's Party on Titan and the People's Assembly of Ganymede to form a new body, the United Frontier Assembly. It was in this interplanetary legislative body that the Pact of Assembly was signed on 26 March 2339.
Secondly, Ansel Gandara had finalized his ascent to sole leadership of the UFA, a position which was fittingly titled Premier. Much as with the Premiers of socialist one-party states on Old Earth, Gandara's role was invested with great powers to direct the burgeoning military and economic power of his state, even if that state still lacked a formal foundation at the time.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the Draconists were on the retreat across Jovian space and the rest of the outer system as the ICA steamroller gradually wore down their ability to replenish their forces. As the Draconist wave receded, a new wave was surging in to take its place. This wave came in the form of the Alliance of Free Worlds, a new interplanetary federation proposed by Gandara's Pact of Allegiance. Between 26 March and 7 July 2339, nearly a dozen governments in the outer system signed this Pact.
The new Alliance was officially born on 2 April 2339, when the first meeting of the Alliance Central Commission was held in the basement of a disused meeting house in Syrené on Callisto. Over the coming months, its leaders, with Gandara as their chief minister, conducted the business of establishing a new society. It was contentious work, with political infighting between the various leaders frequent as they sought their own agendas.
This first congress of the ACC did however still produce a number of very important political outcomes. Chief among these was the establishment of the Armada of the Free Worlds (AML), a military organization which was the Alliance's answer to the Spacer Corps. By 2341, the ACC had also successfully negotiated an end to the Jovian Civil War by promising to reign in the Draconists in Jovian space.
An Era of Promise:
Between 2341 and 2343, the Alliance brought another sixteen constituent nation-states from the outer solar system. Chief among these were the new Democratic Republics of Ganymede and Titan, each of which had been founded as rebel states by Draconist-aligned factions before turning legitimate under Alliance jurisdiction. From 2342 on, with the end of the First Titan Civil War, the new Alliance focused its efforts on rebuilding the frontier.
For a time, things were good. Reconstruction efforts met with great success as long dormant industries flourished and people sought to sometimes literally dig themselves out of the ruins of nearly twenty years of unrest. For Syrené, for example, the ACC established a state-run enterprise to revitalize the two century-old capital they had chosen as their crown jewel. By 2348, the revolution-shattered city once again resembled the future-classical image of glory that it had attained during the golden days of the 23rd century.
But this prosperity was not to last. If there is to be one great cardinal sin of the Alliance, especially of its early years under Gandara, it must surely be the failure to negotiate a true end to the scourge of Draconism. This virus, though driven from its heartland and forced into the shadows in 2341 and '42, had not been utterly eradicated, and if anything, it was only all the more dangerous for having festered in the hinterlands of the solar frontier.
In 2347, the ICA responded to this threat with a sweeping military initiative called Operation Lightning Dagger, which sought to hunt down the remaining Draconist leaders in the frontier and eliminate their movement once and for all. It was there that the seeds of DRAC's destruction were sown, but not before a final drama in parallel to Alliance's own played out.
A Sunset Always Begets a Sunrise:
It must be said that the only reason the Draconist Wars lasted so long after the initiation of Operation Lightning Dagger was because the Alliance Central Commission was persuaded by their Premier to channel funding and weaponry into Draconist hands. Gandara believed that the Draconists offered an intermediary with which to fight the ICA while his own military force grew in size. In short, he believed that by holding up the Draconists as a kind of shield, he could safeguard his own long-term ambitions.
As a result, from 2348 on, Gandara forced the ACC to fund and arm Draconists on Titan and elsewhere, even as the AML conducted goodwill operations in tandem with the Spacer Corps. By the time the zharans rose up against humanity in 2356, however, even this tactic was falling out of favor. The Draconists were falling back everywhere, and with the zharans now emerging to full the rug out from under them, it was clear their days were numbered.
By 2361, the last few Draconist leaders agreed to a ceasefire in exchange for clemency for the worst of their crimes. As they slunk off into the outer reaches of the solar system to rule over a handful of icy worlds relegated to them by the ICA, and the ICA tightened its belt to deal with the aftermath of their violent revolution, the Alliance enjoyed another period of prosperity.
This prosperity was shaken in 2362 with the sudden death of Premier Ansel Gandara, who suffered a heart attack at the age of 74 despite no prior signs of ill-health. The power vacuum caused by his death, along with the controversies surrounding its possible causes, led to a period of unrest that lasted nearly two years. When the Alliance celebrated its 25th birthday in 2364, it did so with a new Premier, and Anatoly Veracruz was no Ansel Gandara.
In the end, after a first Premiership which lasted nearly a quarter century, not a single Alliance Premier since Gandara has lasted more than ten years before being ousted by his party. With the Frontier Wars now a thing of the past, and the rebellion of the Colonial Liberation Front testing its mettle, the AML has proven itself more or less capable of meeting any military challenge set for it.
But as the 50th anniversary of the Alliance's founding nears, it may be their partnership with the Zharan Collective which defines the future more than anything else. When the First Premier signed the Treaty of Jiuquan in 2359, he never could have anticipated the degree of control they would one day exercise over the ACC. By 2389, it seems clear that the only thing preventing another Frontier War, and indeed the one thing that may spark its beginning, is the whim of the Zharan Collective, for good or ill.
End Transmission\\\
