///From the author: although the zharans are more important in the grand scheme of Spacers Saga history, and the Alliance of Free Worlds was a bigger threat, the Draconist front represents one of the most influential factions in Spacers Saga lore. The Draconists date back to a time before the lore was contained to within only our solar system, and were originally named after the major stars in the constellation Draco. Within the current lore, they are a force of chaos, serving to upend the status quo and usher in the era of violence which ultimately leads to the Frontier Wars. This is the first part of their story.
[The original FRC flag designed by Luis Pedreira and Nouri al-Fahad in 2319]
Statistics:
Official name of the Party: Divisão Revolucionária da Assembleia de Callisto (translation from the Portuguese: Revolutionary Division of the Callisto Assembly)
Unofficial names: DRAC, Draconists, Dracks, the Horde
Founded: 11 June 2317 (founders: Pavel Kucharski, Nouri al-Fahad, and Luis Pedreira)
Maximum membership (circa 2335): estimated to be between 9 and 10 million
Total membership (2317-2362): estimated to be between 40 and 50 million
Ultimate fate: defunct (DRAC military forces defeated in the field during the Draconist Wars, political apparatus dismantled by the ICA as part of the Alexandria Accords)
Historical Details:
The Shadow of the Past
To understand the scourge of Draconism as it emerged in the early 24th century on Callisto, we must first jump back over fifty years to the height of the Wayfarer Insurrection. As the ICA funneled trillions of dollars worth of federal taxes into the Interstellar Consortium’s plan to colonize the nearby star systems, long-standing and deep-seated anger among the population of the colonial frontier boiled over into a series of violent uprisings. Chief among these was the Brotherhood of Antares, which led a bloody guerrilla campaign against the Interplanetary Cooperative Administration and its allies from 2257 to 2276.
After the Brotherhood was neutralized by the Spacer Corps, and the discovery of ancient alien technology buried on Titan exacerbated the situation, tensions between the United Nations of Mars and the oligarchs who controlled the Commonwealth of Titan moved rapidly toward a boiling point. This led to the Mars-Titan War, which upended the status quo in Solar Space and ushered in the Era of Mars.
After the Mars-Titan War, the Harrison Accords standardized a new status quo, one in which the mercantile barons of Ceres and the industrial overlords of Mars would be the undisputed masters of the solar system. To safeguard their new empire, they deployed the Spacer Corps and the new Outer System Security Forces to occupy former members of the Titan Pact. As nationalist fervor surged amid the people of the frontier, the occupation forces cracked down, leading to a series of bloody police actions.
This culminated in the 2314 nationalization of the Callisto Assembly, which was originally installed as a puppet government of the ICA in 2299 as part of the occupation. The next three years were marked with violent social and political upheaval on Callisto, a period the locals refer to as the Burning Years.
Then, in July 2317, the bill for six decades of unrest came due. On Callisto, in the industrial town of Koryak, three militant ultranationalists came together to found a new political organization called the Frente Revolucionária de Calisto (FRC). This political movement initially had the singular goal of removing ICA influence from Callisto, but from those humble beginnings sprang a political firestorm.
As new members flocked to the FRC (its membership was estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands by 2320), the original intentions of the founding trio were subsumed by increasingly radical and violent schemes on the part of their more ardent followers. Chief among these were the quasi-anarchist and neo-Marxist ideologies of Valeri Dragovan and Costanzo Nuñez. Dragovan in particular favored the use of draconian methods to enforce the agenda of the FRC, which was renamed the Divisão Revolucionária da Assembleia de Callisto in 2321 as part of a reorganization intended to attain real political power.
Between 2322 and 2324, the OSSF enforced a crackdown on Callisto in an attempt to rein in violent outbursts of political aggression sparked by DRAC cadres as they jostled for power. Their attempt backfired, as the unrest already churning intensified to the point that, by August 2324, DRAC was able to bully their way onto the ticket in a general election in the Callisto Assembly. Some say the results of that election were a surprise, but given the number of DRAC thugs at the polls, they probably should not be.
The outcome, surprising or not, was certainly unprecedented. DRAC cadres swept into power on Callisto, and swiftly initiated a campaign of political reprisals against any vestiges of ICA control they identified there. Martian diplomats, OSSF officers, merchants and bankers with ties to the Confederation of the Main Belt, and more were extrajudicially punished for perceived crimes against the people of the frontier.
At this point, the ICA made its first great mistake of the era by stepping back to allow the situation on Callisto to sort itself out. Aldrin City was determined not to be pulled into what they saw as a local squabble, and instead sent FLEETCOM to blockade Callisto and wait for the DRAC scourge to turn inward and eat itself alive. They had no way of knowing that by bottling up the madmen of Callisto, they were simply allowing them to metastasize. As rationing increased, local anger at the ICA grew, setting the stage for what was to come.
The Callistan Affliction
The colloquial term “Draconists” was tacked onto the DRAC movement in 2324, inspired as much by their acronym as by the brutal, draconian methods they deployed against their enemies. Through the dark years of their rise to power and the Blockade of Callisto which followed, these enemies were often found disemboweled, beheaded, or otherwise mutilated by DRAC cadres as a warning against opposition.
The period from 2324-2331 stands as one of the most grim in Solar history, and is spoken of in hushed tones by Callistans who lived through it. Brothers fought brothers and parents were denounced by their own children, all as violence slowly spread beyond their gravity well. As the OSSF clamped down in an effort to secure the sector, the Draconists dialed up their efforts to export their ideology to other worlds, and did everything in their power to smuggle cadres aboard the few vessels allowed off Callisto.
Even though Callisto was nominally bottled up by the ICA from 2325-2331, this period still saw a substantial amount of violence spill over onto other worlds in the Jovian system. From Ganymede and Europa to the small outer moons which were home to a myriad of small-time shipyards and industrial centers, the Jovian Civil War was felt by almost every population in the sector by the time the Draconist Wars spread to other regions of Solar Space. Ganymede, a vital port for fusion energy fuel, was especially hard-hit, with littoral pirates and other bandits flocking to DRAC’s cause in pursuit of a bigger portion of the resources there.
For much of this period, when the IDC only showed up to crack their batons down on the heads of people who tried to raid the supply shipments, it was easy for the locals to believe Draconist propaganda which claimed the average spacer was a bullish brute grown fat on riches stolen from the frontier. Even though the average Callistan citizen had roughly a hundred times greater chance of being killed or maimed by Draconist-led violence, the fear of the devil they didn’t know allowed the DRAC to maintain power.
As with the civil war on Callisto, the violence exported to the rest of the Jovian system was centered on the Draconist urge to overthrow the ICA-backed Galilean Union and establish an anarcho-communist utopia in the region. As on Callisto, Draconists were excessively brutal, leading to the deaths of those whom they deemed to be enemies of the revolution. Yet new followers still flocked to their cause by the week.
All of this unrest was slowly building toward a showdown with the ICA, which still sought to avoid becoming embroiled in the violence. Their leaders’ willingness to look the other way as Callisto and its neighbors were soaked with blood is perhaps an even greater crime than the actions of the Draconists themselves, since this failure to act when time was of the essence not only led to all the horrors which followed but was perpetrated by a government which at least had a marginal claim to the moral high ground.
The Martian Incident
13 July 2331 began like any other day on Mars. Aldrin City, home to almost three million people, was enjoying the first month of northern Spring. A few hundred kilometers to the south, the staff of the Spacer Corps HQ at the Martian Military Complex buried beneath the Solis Planum was busy monitoring the progress of the Draconist Conflict on Callisto and elsewhere, as well as a handful of other local squabbles. In between the two, Edwin Aldrin Memorial Spaceport conducted busy shuttle traffic. The staff and patrons hurried from place to place, intent on completing their business and getting on to their final destinations.
What none of them knew was that fifteen Draconist foot soldiers had infiltrated the spaceport over the previous two years and embedded themselves in positions at the spaceport and across its surroundings. They had smuggled in explosives obtained or, in many cases, provided wholesale by unscrupulous offworld military contractors with less interest in Martian security than they had in cold hard cash.
The exact details of the plan they enacted are lost to the redactions of the military intelligence officers whose reports summarized the interrogation of captured plotters, but the results are well known. At 09:47 Aldrin City Standard Time, the spaceport suffered a series of violent explosions which tore open the main terminal and killed more than thirty-seven hundred people. Even before the dust settled, the perpetrators made themselves known. The ICA had taken a shot across its bow. Their retribution would be swift.
[An example of Draconist propaganda: the virtual leaflet distributed on 13 July 2331, less than four hours after the attack on the Edwin Aldrin Space Tether on Mars]
The Spacers Intervene
The ICA Council convened two days after the 13-7 Attacks to discuss the best response to the Draconist provocation. Mars was baying for blood, but in the end, it took three days of deliberation to determine the proper level of response, mainly due to disagreements on the level to which the Spacer Corps should be loosed against the Jovian sector. Many of the representatives from the outer system were survivors of the Mars-Titan War, and they were hesitant to call down the hammer upon their citizens without setting ground rules.
On 18 July, the Council passed a resolution enabling the deployment of Spacer Corps combat forces to enforce Article 10 of the ICA Charter. Many legal scholars argue that this article was originally intended only to ensure cooperation between spacefaring nations in defending the peaceful use of space, but by 2331, it had come to be interpreted as a justification for movements against dangerous actors and rogue states.
On 19 July, the Spacer Corps mobilized against the Draconists. The first blow came at 1300 local time in Alexandria, Ganymede, when ICA forces which had been garrisoned in the Galileo archipelago launched missile strikes against Draconist strongholds across the islands therein. By 0800 the next morning, elements of IDC SOCOM and the 7th & 11th Aerospace Expeditionary Force were deployed to secure ICA-friendly settlements on Ganymede. These were the opening shots of Operation Sudden Lightning, the ICA intervention in the Jovian Civil War. By the start of 2332, nearly half a million IDC spacers were active in Jovian space.
What the generals who orchestrated this massive intervention did not know was that they were playing right into the Draconists' plan. The fifteen cadres who had carried out the attacks on Mars sacrificed their lives not simply out of a desire to get back at Mars for decades of injustice, but because they knew that their actions would draw the ICA into a long, drawn-out war with their comrades on Callisto and elsewhere.
The secret those fifteen men took to their graves, some of them after torture at the hands of Martian interrogators, was that the real goal of the 13-7 attacks had been long-term victory instead of short-term vengeance. They knew their sacrifice would bait the ICA into a guerilla war in the outer system, one which would allow the Draconist militias active there to bleed the inner system military dry. The Spacer Corps was in for the long haul whether they liked it or not, and the Draconist Wars had well and truly begun.
The Long Haul
The Draconist Wars were unlike most conflicts, in that they revolved more around guerrilla violence and political unrest than combat between uniformed armies. Even though the DRAC fielded militias numbering in the hundreds of thousands, they went to ground soon after the Spacer Corps moved into the outer system to hunt them down. Even as the ICA sought the Draconists’ leaders, their movement splintered into hundreds of cells, each of which jostled for control of a specific territory on Callisto, Ganymede, or elsewhere.
Still, life for the average Draconist footsoldier was arduous at best. The movement was never a viable long-term career plan, after all, even for the higher-ups in the organization. Of the three founders, only Luis Pedreira was still alive by 2331. He had long since been pushed to the sidelines of the party by his more radical followers, but was still eliminated in a SOCOM raid in 2332. An early casualty of Sudden Lightning.
Still, the Draconists remained a force to be reckoned with throughout much of the war in Jovian space. The cellular nature of their movement was a great asset against the Spacer Corps and the OSSF. No matter how many Draconist foot soldiers were shot down in SOCOM raids or killed by missile strikes, the cadres had no trouble filling the ranks with fresh recruits ready to die, and to kill, for the glorious revolution.
And kill they did. Week after week, Draconist cells carried out bold hit-and-run attacks against the ICA, its allies, and their infrastructure. Between January 2332 and December 2334 alone, roughly thirteen hundred instances of mass casualty events occurred on Callisto and the other Jovian moons. All told, over two hundred thousand civilians died during just this early period of Operation Sudden Lightning. The fears of the outer system councilors were coming true. As the ICA’s dogs of war loosed their awful lightning against the Draconist threat, the civilians caught in the middle of the fight were paying most of the cost in blood.
The IDC deployed three more AEFs to the outer system between 2332 and 2335, bringing the total in the region to eight, and mobilized two new AEFs in anticipation of further widening of the crisis. But no matter how much effort the Spacer Corps invested to bottle up the Draconists in their home system, they met with steadily diminishing returns. The Draconist scourge was spreading, and it was spreading rapidly.
By 2334, the Draconists had exported their ideology to at least one other major region beyond the Jovian system. They had sent cadres to Titan as early as 2329 with the goal of installing a friendly revolutionary movement in the legislative body of the Commonwealth. In June 2334, their affiliate organization, the Partido Popular Unido (United People’s Party, aka PPU) stormed the halls of power on Titan, leading to a near repeat of the situation a decade earlier on Callisto. The difference was that this time, it was ten times as complex.
Unlike on Callisto, where the Draconists swept into power more or less unopposed, the UPP on Titan faced pushback not only from the other political factions already wrestling for control of the Commonwealth when they emerged there but also from the Spacer Corps, which deployed in September 2334 to defeat them and drive them off Titan altogether. This intervention soon dovetailed into the First Titan Civil War.
By the start of 2335, there were major conflicts playing out on three big worlds, a host of smaller ones, and an ongoing terror campaign conducted by the Draconists and their allies against any vestiges of ICA power in the colonial frontier. There was also a range war between IDC FLEETCOM and the Draconists’ armada of captured, stolen, or otherwise “donated” space warships in the Asteroid Belt and the outer system. Parts of the Main Belt were entangled in an ideological struggle between Ceres and Vesta, while other strife was tied to the Draconists’ attempts to infiltrate and overthrow ICA control of the Uranus and Neptune sectors.
The period between 2332 and 2335 is referred to by former Draconists as the heyday of the movement. Despite facing an incursion of ICA forces in all regions they considered friendly territory, they had succeeded in exporting their ideology to most of the outer system, had drawn their enemies into a drawn-out brushfire war across the region, and were meting out sizable casualties against the IDC and its allies. By 2335, INTELCOM intelligence estimated that the DRAC and its affiliates had a membership greater than nine million.
The Artificial Element
Another undercurrent in this early period of the Crisis was the Purges. In 2328, the Draconists kicked off a massive assault against the artificials. As much as the DRAC saw the ICA as its greatest enemy, they also loathed artificial humans, which provided a convenient scapegoat for the problems of the frontier since many people (Draconists included) interpreted their presence as a destabilizing factor in frontier space.
The backlash against artificials had two primary motivators. First, artificial humans represented the newest link in a chain minted as far back as the late 20th century, when A.I. and robotics began to force normal humans out of everyday career fields. By the early 24th century, they had graduated from purely menial and dangerous tasks like the construction of offworld settlements and the maintenance of their creators’ intricate interplanetary infrastructure, and as a result they were seen as a direct threat to human livelihoods.
The second reason for the suspicion leveled against artificials was the fact that they were blamed for much of the bloodshed in the latter half of the Mars-Titan War. Beginning in early 2296, the increasingly desperate leaders of the Titan Pact unleashed the captured military intelligence construct HORUS against its enemies in MARSCOM and the Spacer Corps, leading to some of the bloodiest events of the war.
Chief among these was a disastrous attempt to knock Phobos out of orbit and drop it on Aldrin City, an event only averted by the emergency detonation of an antimatter weapon which fractured the oblong moon into tiny pieces. With two hundred thousand lives sacrificed to save tens of millions on the ground, the Phobos Incident has gone down in history as one of the worst atrocities in military history. Given that the HORUS A.I. had orchestrated this near cataclysm and succeeded in causing dozens of smaller calamities through the last years of the war, many people in Solar Space have harbored a deep-seated mistrust of them ever since.
Fast forward to 2328, and the Draconist movement acted upon this impulse by organizing a pogrom against them in the frontier. From 2328 to 2341, somewhere between twenty and thirty million artificials were killed by Draconist militiamen. Many of those killed received the “hammer cure,” which saw their attackers smash in their skulls with hand tools. These weren’t always hammers, but the name stuck.
But the artificial population quickly organized itself for mutual defense. Between 2329 and 2338, somewhere north of three million million artificials were killed fighting an uphill battle against both the Draconists and the IDC forces deployed to reign in their impromptu revolution. In 2338, the movement largely fell apart after its chief leaders were captured or killed at the Battle of Syracuse on Ganymede. From then on, the Draconists were more interested in fighting the ICA, so the Purges slipped from relevance.
One notable side effect of this era was that it became the trial by fire for the artificial who would eventually take up the mantle of V’Ran (“liberator”) and lead his people during the Second Zharan Revolution which was kicked off by the Uprising in 2356. After witnessing every other artificial denizen of his secluded settlement on Ganymede killed by Draconists in 2334, he fought with artificial revolutionaries there for four years before falling off the radar when his unit was wiped out during the Battle of Syracuse.
The Secret Soldiers
The Titan Civil War was at its darkest in 2337. The UPP installed a puppet government (the Democratic Republic of Titan) in the territory they controlled in 2336 and set up a new uniformed military force (the Titan People’s Army) to carry the fight against the enemies of Draconist ideology. Civilians were dying at a rate greater than five hundred per day, and the Commonwealth Defense Forces were retreating all over.
It was in those dark days that the Spacer Corps, which had already sunk 1.2 million spacers into the War on Draconism, instituted the first phase of the two-part answer to the DRAC threat, which AEROCOM referred to as Operation Thunder Echo. The first phase involved a massive surge in IDC forces on Titan (two more AEFs would be deployed there by 2338, for a total of five) and an increase in the strength of the Spacer Corps in general, to be accomplished by fully remobilizing the Martian Command. This latter move alienated a number of outer system councilors, setting the stage for the eventual rise of the Alliance of Free Worlds.
The second phase was more esoteric. Task Force SPIRE (short for Special Purpose Infiltration, Reconnaissance, and Execution) force was the brainchild of Colonel Miles Cavanaugh, a SOCOM veteran who saw action in the Mars-Titan War and the police actions that followed. His experiences in that era shaped his plans for a new unit of IDC SOCOM which would be specifically designed to infiltrate enemy forces, recon their positions, numbers, capabilities, and execute close-in operations aimed at neutralizing their leaders.
The first class of SPIRE commandos graduated from Miles Cavanaugh’s grueling boot camp in February 2338 after nearly two full years of training and were deployed against the Draconists throughout the year. They quickly inserted themselves in and among the civilian population of the frontier and reported back to their handlers in INTELCOM using the latest in cutting-edge covert communications technology.
The results were concrete, to say the least. From August 2338 to March 2339 alone, somewhere around three thousand Draconist cell leaders were either apprehended or neutralized by raids, missile strikes, and other operations planned and executed largely thanks to intelligence gathered by SPIRE commandos. One of these commandos was Captain Khalid Wastani, whose participation in SPIRE operations in the latter years of the First Titan Civil War played a major role in influencing his plans for the infamous Project ALPHA.
The Rise of the Alliance
As Operation Thunder Echo continued over top of Operation Sudden Lightning, the Draconists were being forced back from their strongholds on Callisto, Ganymede, and Titan, and suffered setback after setback in the other regions they sought to liberate from ICA control. By 2339, however, a new political movement had coalesced and was rising to fill the void they were leaving behind. This new organization traded in the Draconists’ violently radical nationalism for a much more pragmatic revolutionary ideology.
On 26 March, representatives from Callisto, Ganymede, Titan, and a handful of other war-torn frontier worlds signed the Pact of Allegiance in Syrené, the once pristine capital of Callisto. This document established a new legal framework by which the denizens of the outer solar system could redress grievances, seek protection from interstate violence, insure their commerce, and defend their mutual culture.
The political entity the Pact established was called the Alliance of Free Worlds, and while it was not expressly intended to be a counterbalance to the ICA, its founders certainly meant it to offer an alternative forum for people left disenfranchised by the ICA’s crackdown on Draconist-inspired violence. In order to curtail that violence within their borders, the Alliance entered into a number of agreements with the remaining leaders of DRAC and its affiliates. Among these were offers of clemency for Draconist war criminals, assurances of non-extradition to ICA judicial proceedings following the cessation of hostilities, and so on.
After two years of negotiations, the Jovian Civil War ended in August 2341. The First Titan Civil War ended a year later, a time lag caused by lingering violence between the DRT and the Commonwealth. After the Alliance negotiated the ICA’s withdrawal in exchange for Draconist assurances to disarm and demobilize, it seemed that the madness might finally be at an end. But all good things cannot last forever, and in the case of peace with the Draconists, the possibility of a relapse into madness was not a question of if but of when.