Arshia Kishk: the Crusader Wars all but destroyed the Middle East, turning vast stretches of the former Holy Lands into nuclear ash. The survivors who could flee the region did so, those left behind were cared for by U.N. Re-integration Forces, and the remainder who healthy but not wealthy gathered arrived at both coasts of the Arabian peninsula. While the House of Saud was gone with the fallout, the lesser monarchies surged, welcoming these new arrivals if they were deemed of use, shutting the gates to those who weren't. But of course, even if refugees can't be picky houseguests, they take exception at being turned into a slave labor force. And so these megalopolises were soon dealing with assimilation issues and destabilization. When the Unity project appeared, they banded together and concocted a devious plan.
The Rashidi Al Falah Group was the major civilian contractor for Unity based in the Middle East. It was also a front for dozens of shell-companies coordinated by regional intelligence services of the Hashemites, the Shammar, the Emiratis, the Al Thani, the Aramcons, and others. Owing to their sizable contract and access to the ship, they were able to engage in an operation that would impress Nwabudike Morgan. Through clever architecture and advanced engineering, an entire subsection of the ship was walled off from the rest, housing hundreds of secondhand cryocells drawing from local power undetectable by the rest of the network. Project Al Falah was capped off by the disappearance of the same number of dissidents, those identified as persons of interest by these city-states' governments. Perhaps it would have been easy enough to leave them in the desert or in the Gulf, but the cataclysm of the Crusader Wars gave even the most heartless of tyrants a gram of compassion.
So it was only a decade into the voyage that these hundreds of shanghaied refugees awoke. The power on many of the cryocells had already flickered out, stranding them in limbo. Without any idea of what happened, they found that they were trapped in an immense industrial prison. As nightmarish and hellish as it was, there was the silver-lining that Al Falah had been thorough with their purges, exiling entire families to the catacomb within Unity. So they were at least united with the loved ones. And perhaps due to the mercy of the most beneficent, or maybe just the sympathy of the workers who had built the sarcophagus, they found that their subsection was disguised as an excess cargo bay. Thus the cryocell chambers were surrounded by store rooms bearing food, water, medical supplies, and most notably- seeds.
And so, the Al Falah developed a mutualist society, distributing the supplies among them, creating divisions of labor based on those who would till the hydroponic soil, others who would construct shelters and structures out of cargo containers, those who could heal the body and soul, and others who would perform maintenance on the electrical and water systems. Perhaps it was just as well that this society would be born of kidnapped clans of refugees and malcontents. Their number included former rebels and survivalists, intelligentsia and engineers, migrant foreign workers and indentured servants. All were united by their hatred of those who had exiled them from Earth, and who had persecuted them while they were there. The packed bay became a symphony of tongues, chattering, bartering, praying, singing, living. Élodie would later marvel at how their number included minority sects and cultures thought lost forever in the homeworld: Samaritans, Karaites, Alawites, Yarsanis, Yezidi, even a Shaykh al-'Aql of the Druze. Perhaps the megalopolis monarchs' loss would be Chiron's gain.
Arshia Kishk was born in the second generation of the involuntary colony. It was in her youth that they would make their first great discovery- the cryocells could be re-powered, allowing those who chose to go back to sleep in bliss, lightening resource consumption. The community, one part Santa Cruz del Islote and one part Kowloon Walled City, had strained their space to the breaking point, and their supplies were slowly dwindling as material fabricators went out of service. So she had the luxury of living at a higher level of comfort compared to her exiled grandparents.
The second discovery she partook in her late teens. Since she was young, it was common for the children of Al Falah to crawl in the vents above and under the rooms, exploring the tunnels in the barrier between their world and whatever was out there. For decades they had searched, and just found more ducts, more service tunnels, more space. But on one fateful day, when she was already nearly too big to fit through some of the smaller tunnels, she came across one mysterious passageway graffitied by cryptic symbols, later revealed to be intermediary markings by Unity contractors. But as she turned back, the weight of her age led her to fall through the ceiling, landing in an entirely new room never before seen by her people.
It was an observation chamber, one of the many that dotted the length of the Unity, to be used both for astronomers and lounging crewmen. And as she dusted herself off and stood up, Arshia became the first of Al Falah to see what was beyond her world.
Absolutely nothing. It was space. But there were stars. The ones her father would tell stories of in the cargo bay square, the ones she had seen in the few media devices that had been kept in storage. The little points of light shone, like inverted dust motes floating above a lit ventilator vent. And from then on she knew the extent of her world.
She hurried back and reported her discovery. Subsequent teams of the young and the short followed, gathering at the observatory. For the first time in their history, these exiles could see the extent of their prison, where they had been hidden away for so long.
The exploration teams had scrounged up some fresh supplies from the areas outside of the Al Falah subsection. There was interest of moving out of the bay and into these new territories, but ultimately most chose to remain in the bay that was their home. Besides, more corridors dotted by some lounges, empty medical facilities, laboratories were none to attractive to settle in, so far from their communities. So they took what they needed and left. But it soon became an initiation for all in that generation to find their way out of Al Falah to see the space they were suspended in.
Planetfall came a decade later.
The klaxons awoke the pioneers who had camped out in empty observatories. Pretty soon, the years-long hibernation chambers which was out of their access had come unsealed, and at last, the crew of their prison ship awoke. Most Al Falah natives ran away, but some remained. They were to be memorialized as martyrs for suffering first contact with the Spartans. Throughout the days to come, brave scouts, Arshia being one of them, infiltrated into the main body of Unity as lockdowns that had been shut since the voyage began suddenly came loose and entire decks were now available for access. After their original disastrous meeting, the scouts would attempt to remain as hidden as possible, as tempting as it was to seek out these new humans. The temptations all went away when the awakened started killing each other. Never having see such violent death before, the scouts fled back to Al Falah. Arshia remained after she was separated from the group. Then, on the seventh day, she found her way to the Unity command staff.
It was shortly after a firefight where a Spartan hunting party and a squad of Bolivar's peacekeepers destroyed each other, after finishing off a third pack of Anarchists which had stumbled upon them. As traumatizing as it was to see such barbarity, Arshia was curiously fixated on the killing, such horrors she had never seen before, and could not imagine. Clutching her pack of scavenged materials, she found her way to the lone peacekeeper survivor, bleeding out on the floor. Taught to heal from an early age, Arshia dressed his wounds and gave him water. Grateful, the peacekeeper asked for her help in returning to the bridge, and was surprised when she told him in broken English with an unplaceable accent that she didn't know what that was.
Along the way they dodged Spartans and Anarchists and other agents of chaos. They assisted a team of loyal security guards in putting out a fire and repairing a length of wall to prevent a hull breach. They went through an arboretum and Arshia was instantly entranced. To the peacekeeper's surprise, she told him she had never seen such large plants before. They saw other parts of the ship in worse condition, and it became clear to her that all was not well. And then they finally reached where the command staff had set up their emergency committee.
Arshia could hardly communicate with this motley crew. She found Skye and Zakharov to both be cold, apathetic at her existence and in a hurry to get to elsewhere, even if the lady botanist did look at her with pity. Morgan smiled sinister smiles and Hutama was too unnervingly friendly, though she was able to return some phrases of Indonesian. Élodie treated her like a specimen, a prized piece of fruit ready to be harvested from the hydroponic tanks, marveling as her unfamiliar clothing and tattoos and knowledge of long-gone traditions. Lal spoke to her courteously but she could not follow. Finally, it was Godwinson who finally was able to break through. Speaking to Arshia in strangely accented Falahbic, she asked where she came from. Her soothing tones and understanding eyes won over their strange guest.
The revelation of Al Falah would later be immortalized as a Paradise Lost-type fable in the midst of the Planetfall disaster, probably because of Believer hagiography of their leader. The Al Falah captives' role in unknowingly exacerbating the crisis through "harvesting" crucial supplies prior to Planetfall, and the rumor that Al Falah revenge killing teams had targeted cryocells containing crewmen from the nations that had kidnappend them, are not discussed in these narratives.
There was no time for formal diplomatic relations. Kozlov's team was too preoccupied with saving the ship to punch a hole in it to reach the subsection. So they would have to arrive through the tunnels. A small team of security staff, technical specialists, and the young peacekeeper she had saved volunteered to go with Arshia, bringing tech to establish commlinks between the two groups. The trip back was even more perilous. Du Lac's gendarmerie were now attacking anyone on sight as a mutineer, even the peacekeepers themselves were seen as potential traitors. Self-proclaimed Admiral Heid's mercenaries had awoken and began to join in on what they called fun. Sections of the vessel were beginning to fall apart. Hazardous chemicals leaked and hissed out of broken pipes. Fire-retardant foam obstructed some hallways, and bakelite had flooded others.
But the team, minus a few red-jackets lost to a mysterious force of black-clad men identified only by a green symbol, reached the walls that had separated Al Falah from the ship at large. Crawling through the tubes they arrived to the other side, and for the first time, the exiles met Unity. They were saddened to hear of the calamities that gripped the outside world, and dismayed to hear of their impending doom. In another stroke of fortune, the peacekeeper discovered that the giant metal egg that had been in the center of Al Falah for decades and used as ceremonial decoration was actually a landing pod, and that while the subsection didn't directly connect to the ship at large, and one seemingly-solid ceiling was actually a cargo bay door.
Loading as much as they could carry with the precious memories of their community, and relics of their ancestry on Earth, the citizens of Al Falah entered the landing pod. Hours later, they would receive the Abandon Ship signal from Acting-Captain Pravin Lal and the vessel, hastily dubbed the Golden Shah, took off for Planet, leaving behind their home for half a century.
On the surface, Al Falah, with the help of the few Unity members, survived under incredibly harsh conditions. Arshia assumed their leadership thanks to her heroic acts, standing on solid ground for the first time in her life. Her marriage to the peacekeeper would become the union that linked the generational exiles to the cryosleep colonists. They would later be reunited with the Peacekeeping Forces who would sign a protective Pact over the wayward colony of untrained refugees. Having finally learned the tongues of the U.N., Arshia finds Lal to be harmless enough, but disbelieves that he will be able to guarantee her people's safety, just as no one had protected them on Earth. Even as they build bigger and bigger bases filled with both their people and those who have been otherwise exiled from other factions, Al Falah seeks a homeland, truly free and able to plot its own journey.