Saito sighed as he stood up. His knees ached. Time was finally catching up with him. He stretched his back, which was stiff, sore. Age isn’t just a number. Now in his early sixties, he was in great shape, but six decades of life took a toll.

How the hell did we get here?

For twenty years the UEF had been at war with the AIC. They hadn’t always been enemies, though. The conflict had started, like virtually all others, over rare minerals and metals in uncharted space.

At first, mankind was limited by the inability to travel the immense distances between stars. Habitable planets were few and far between. The United Earth Federation—UEF—was formed to help tackle the challenges humanity faced. Governments from all over the world pooled their resources to find a solution to their space travel problem.

And it worked.

A breakthrough was made when a scientist with radical beliefs, Henri DePaul, discovered a way to fold time and space to allow travel between billions of light years in a matter of minutes. Most of the details of his breathtaking discovery remained a mystery. Partly, that was down to DePaul’s eccentricities. He was initially celebrated for his contribution to science and humanity, but it took less than a decade for all that goodwill to burn off and his unorthodox beliefs to get him ostracized. He’d founded a religion, called “The Oblivion,” that grew more and more radical every year, though it was fair to say their methods only turned violent after he passed.

Generations came and went. Some of those were born and raised on a recovering Earth; others only knew space, and planets far from humanity’s cradle. Feeling disconnected from the species’ home, they grew resentful of having to follow the same laws, pay the same taxes, fall under a government so far away.

The creation of the Alliance of Independent Civilizations, or AIC, was bloodless. An agreement was made between them and the UEF. As long as the AIC continued to provide a steady stream of raw rare materials from the edge of charted space and beyond, they stayed independent, governed themselves. That peace held for almost two hundred years.

Henri DePaul’s religion, the Oblivion, grew. But as the AIC forged their own identity in the cosmos, the Oblivion, now designated a cult, pursued their own goals. They began to destroy mining facilities on the edges of unknown space. The supply of rare metals and materials started to dry up, thanks to a combination of mismanagement and Oblivion attacks.

The UEF saw the AIC’s inability to deal with the Oblivion threat as an attack on themselves. Right or wrong, they’d insisted on sending their own formidable military to take care of the situation for them.

AIC member planets rebelled against the foreign invasion. Guerrilla-style attacks became the norm. Somewhere along the line, the Oblivion receded. The attacks stopped, but the damage was already done. The UEF was convinced the AIC had aided the attacks. Soon, the UEF and AIC were in open hostilities with each other. What the AIC lacked in firepower, they made up for in tenacity. After two decades and hundreds of millions of deaths and even more resentment between the two sides, a stalemate of a sort had been reached. The Oblivion reemerged as a shell of its former self, renouncing violence and embracing peace. That seemed to be the signal for all sides to come to the table.

And now it was time to formalize it. The Atlas was headed to Vassar-1 to broker peace.

Or bring the AIC to its knees, Saito thought as he walked out of his quarters.