Part 4: Humanity, by Flat Earth Games originally published by Objects in Space Website

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"The time has come for the colonies to take their future seriously," said Maria Van Der Vat in 12a as she made the announcement that the AEA would become an official government, with representation in both a lower and upper house, giving each system the ability to have proper representation. The lower house would get one representative per hundred thousand people in a colony; the upper house would get one representative per colony. As Maria Van Der Vat began her first term as the elected head of the whole Apollo Cluster, one thing started becoming clear to many who followed current events through the various news feeds that had sprung up over the years: the opening of the stock market had resulted in a brutal battle between people of drive and, it is said, self-interest. Dozens of people with some combination of money or power (taken honestly or not as a result of the lowering of martial law) pooled their resources to expand every system which had the resources to make the effort worthwhile. A gold rush mentality was in effect. Gas mines were opened, under-world mining colonies formed, and planets which could - with even a small amount of effort - become agricultural power-houses were settled.

Van Der Vat had a reputation internally for being shrewd and arrogant - but fair. The reputation hadn't spread far beyond the corridors of Meier at this point, and wouldn't for a few years. As a result, when she stood up a month into her tenure to announce a sweeping reform of the economy, almost nobody believed that she was actually doing it.

"We are here, in the Apollo Cluster. That has not changed. We must survive. That has not changed. And yet something has changed; something we have for some reason refused to state... we are an economy now. We have industry. We need infrastructure. Must Earth Gate be completed? Yes. Certainly. But in order to function, we need infrastructure; we need to ensure food is plentiful all across the cluster, even in places far from agricultural powerhouses like Kepler."It was simple - taxes would be taken to bolster the economy, but they could be offset by sending resources - at a rate declared quarterly - to Sagan's Lights, so work could continue on Earth Gate, and the various other aspects of the jumpgate network yet to be built. However, Sagan's Lights itself still had no jumpgate connection to another system. And so, with a system of taxation in place to keep the jumpgate networks being built, expansion continued. Most colonial expansions were run by diverse groups now; Van Der Vat was well aware that her newly-renamed Apollonian Authority lacked the resources to do any real colonization now; they had ceded that when they opened the APSX. And so, colonies and further industrial ventures continued, but these were usually complicated efforts by businesses. Often but not always subsidized by the AA, these colonies were usually run by organisations of people whose only similarity was the systems they hailed from - Tegan and Leonian conglomerates were common, rarely inter-mixing, but always with multiple investors, making the expansion de-centralized. With one major exception: Parssus. A businessman named Sakio Hayashi was almost single-handedly the owner of all the holdings and space platforms in Parssus, and seemed to be pursuing profits above all else at the expense of the people. His detractors were many... and the system was to become the first one to be violently overthrown.

"We had to do it," explained Charleton Vega, a veteran of the Parsussian Rebellion. "People don't seem to get that. They think we had some kind of choice. That fucker had us by the balls. I was barely old enough to reach a door and I was put to work. My mother was beaten by cops. Daily. My uncle vanished - a 'mining accident'. But we all knew. Hayashi? He had no care for us. We figured he earned what was coming to him. Am I sorry? Heck no. Not about what I did, anyway. The only thing I'm sorry about is that we failed."

Encouraged by how hated Hayashi had become, a group of outsiders led by a gas miner from Pylos named Marcela Caro pooled the resources of miners throughout the system to launch an attack and oust Hayashi from power. Hayashi used his influence and wealth to hire a fleet directly from the Apollonian Authority, and the rebellion was scattered, creating a temporary home base on an unknown moon.Taxation and the perception of power aside, the Apollonian Authority under Maria Van Der Vat remained the largest single military force in the cluster. Whatever else it had won or lost, the AA still controlled an actual military, albeit a small one relative to the other systems' combined forces, built from the remains of the support fleet which once accompanied the Cassandra. The threat of colonists banding together against it limited the AA Military's power severely. Van Der Vat understood her role as the object of ire for the now majority of people who favoured self-sustainability over EarthGate, and took it upon herself to use her position to maintain peace above all else. Tensions between the Magellan and Leon people over the burgeoning system of Maru made adjudication essential. Her attempt to imply that 'infrastructure' was the goal didn't seem that honest to most people - many assumed it was a sentiment to placate the cluster in order to renew EarthGate construction, and many now questioned whether or not it was needed at all.

Van Der Vat did indeed feel that Earth Gate was a requirement - a goal which, if nothing else, bound people together. She wasn't alone in this belief. Professor Katya Antonov was elected as the governor of Sagan's Lights for two terms during Van Der Vat's years as Administrator, and the pair worked tirelessly together to realise the educational and technological aspirations of the system.

As expansion quickened, the power of the Apollonian Authority waned. Polls began to show that people were far more interested in territorial disputes and social progress within their own systems than they were about the affairs of Sagan's Lights and the Earth Gate project. It was often pointed out that of the jumpgates built to connect the sectors so far, only one had been specifically funded by the AA - the rest had been built by private investors. Maru and Cansa grew, with the latter even expanding to create the first settlement in the gas-rich system of Diwali, and the former quickly descending into a political nightmare of territorial disputes between Magella and Leo.

Six years later, half way through her second term, Van Der Vat appeared to have finally had enough. Criticized, blamed and finding herself fighting argument after argument about economics and logistics which she had little interest in, she stepped down. Elections for a new head of the Apollonian Authority were held in 18a and voter turnout was so low that it was agreed that the cluster's confidence in a unified government was lost. Self-sufficiency had worn out. Van Der Vat, far from being crushed by the decision to remove the Apollonian Authority entirely in favor of individual systems' governments, instead gave a rousing speech on Meier about the needs of the people being vastly different in each corner of the cluster; this would later be known as the Van Der Vat Testimony.

Many underestimated the role the Apollonian Authority had in keeping peace at bay. With the AA disbanded and its fleet either merged into merchant fleets from Tega, Leo or Sagan's Lights, the system was left at the mercy of its individual Governors and their patron corporations to maintain peace. A highly successful mining magnate, Herschel Markowitz, had been consolidating power in Tega through corporate takeovers and manipulating the working class there into thinking that he was the cure for, rather than the cause of, their own oppression. With all opponents vanquished, he created himself as the head of the Tegan Empire, promising a new era of prosperity both within Tega and in other systems.

"Empires endure - they withstand tests of time that no elected government will," Markowitz famously explained years later. "People trust in stability."Meanwhile, in Parssus, the rebels - who knew that Sakio Hayashi's main support was coming from the Apollonian Authority - chose that moment to strike. Needing to turn to someone, Hayashi beckoned to Anton Karev, Governor of Magella, to provide him with military support. Magella was small, but their ships were stronger than those of Leo or Tega, because no jumpgates had yet been built to Magella. Karev used the opportunity to extort Hayashi for significant amounts of money, but delivered the ships he needed to fight his civil war. Leo saw the temporary weakening of the Magellan fleet with this exchange as an opportunity to solve its territory disputes around Maru once and for all, and invaded the Magellan colonies there. The first Leo-Magella war began...
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