The Gathering
Ten days before a micrometeorite would strike the UNS Unity at the speed of light, Snow Hart awoke from hibernation along with over a hundred others. With a score of her most trusted devotees she roused the early awakeners from their cryocells and steadied them against the forty-year morning after, recalling the skills she had once deployed to aid shocked or gassed fellow protesters back on the Earth she was uncertain still existed.
Hart rallied them not on the bridge, still locked by security protocol, but at the ship's athletic center. There, on the zero-G jai alai court, she addressed the crowd of awakees still-shivering from post-cryo side effects. The old order has brought them there, she first acknowledged. Captain Garland had led them faithfully, it was true. But their leadership represented that of an old and possibly dead world, one that had burned itself in folly, and worse attempts to fix it.
Hart paused and looked at the passengers assembled one by one. Both colonists and crew were represented, even a couple of junior command staff. She spoke briefly on several of their grievances. A cellist from Prague had watched German troops march through his country in the name of Middle-Europe and stability while the international community shrugged. A comedian from New Orleans had experienced ARC-contracted, government-authorized irregular militias tear through her neighborhood, ruthlessly hunting eco-radical rebels. An author from Kyoto lost their entire family to super-storms as the U.N. had dragged its feet. Conflagrations and cartel violence, avoidable famine and pestilence, repression and economic depression, all responsible by the people who had brought them here, at the edge of a new world.
She gave her pledge there, on the jai alai court. She pledged to never rest until all of those injustices were brought to light, their tragedies forgotten in a better world. A better world not only built upon a different celestial body, but built to better specifications. And they, too, pledged to her. Those who had met Snow Hart on the ship, in her journeys, and even those who she had fought alongside long ago in her past life as an activist, brought along by her referrals after building new cover identities. There, in the emptiness of the sleeping ship, the Society of Free Thought was founded, to build a new world free of the systems of the old.
To inaugurate this new order, Hart threw a party.
She brought forth hidden caches of sundries- fine liquors lifted from the personal goods of administrators and officers, sumptuous foods cooked by the handful world-class chefs that she had initiated, and the best of psychoactive recreational substances her agents had been able to brew or plant. As blaring music from a score of genres piped through the court, her followers reveled and raved, embracing freedom and the touch of luxury they had been deprived of after months of training, ship life, and decades of sleep.
And then Snow Hart simply stood back and watched with a smile.
Hedonism had been her cloak for years. To swing from the extreme of a selfless idealist revolutionary to the other end of an egotistical sellout libertine was the ultimate way for her to throw off the intelligence services who had observed her. Her very life had become an act to escape the feds; her entire personality a necessary deception. But not all of it was cover. Philosophical egoism would beat out all of the half-remembered Marxist claptrap and deep ecological theories, in her view. As nihilistic as it might've appeared to some, her belief was that a better world could only be realized by destroying the old one. Every system had to be rejected, even other revolutionary visions. Every spook had to be exorcised. This was true anarchism, in her view. Darker than the darkness of the soul- an anarchism of the void.
And this anarchism had room for good living. And even shared union. To party hard was also deliberate; too often the authorities had underestimated fun. Pleasure was seen as the province of addicts and burnouts. But there was vitality and brotherhood in revelry. So Hart had hid in plain sight with her pursuits, and even now solidified her thought and rule through the endless festival among the stars.
As the party raged on, some sought to grow its power. Taking inspiration from Hart's original plan, several of the group wandered into the cryobays and began reanimation procedures on select passengers. Other creatives, those believed to be ideologically compatible or pliable, and some lower-level crew in the unlocked areas, these passengers woke up bewildered and found themselves in the dark gymnasiums of the athletic center, lit by great bonfires enabled by customized ventilation installed by Hart's ops engineers and fire control sensors deactivated by her datatechs. Coder-slingers whom she had sought out earlier on Earth or before the long passage, inducted into the Society that was to come, and instructed to reprogram the cryocells to wake the first wave early. Some of the second wave invitees wholeheartedly embraced her message- or claimed to. Others had to be prodded into it, nudged along by chemical encouragement. And then there were the few who ran screaming into the night, terrified by the spectacle, an almost pagan ceremony that blasphemously made mockery of the entire mission.
Despite the recklessness of these awakenings, Hart wholeheartedly endorsed it. Creative destruction. The exact sort of thing to shake up the very systems she so hated. And they were no threat to her dark project. Greatly outnumbered and disoriented, those who rejected the offer of freedom put up no fighting resistance, instead fleeing or were easily subdued by her acolytes. And Snow Hart was no fool. Her most trusted followers acted to enter any armory that they could breach, securing arms with which to defend their revolution from the inevitable oppressive reprisal.
Interlude: On the Unity's Layout
The UNS Unity was the most massive vehicle ever built by humanity. A chimera, originally based on earlier blueprints for an exploration vessel, it was dramatically scaled up to become the ultimate transport. Its extended octagonal prism structure carried over a dozen decks within, each layer rotating around the central axis of the ship. Some of these decks were the product of the original designs, containing astrophysics laboratories, hydroponic arboretums, machine workshops, dining commons, conference rooms, media libraries, and recreational facilities like the athletic center.
The mission being humanity's last chance led to the replacement of living quarters with incredible amounts of cryocells to accommodate the over hundred thousand passengers. These cryobays, along with storage rooms holding every type of item, dotted the entire length of the Unity. Both were protected by the ship's own byzantine security system, a jumbled spaghetti dish of permissions based on clearance level, division, and individual privileges.
Hart's accomplices had subverted a fraction of the cryocells, mostly colonists with a smattering of lower-ranked crewmen. All were individuals located at the aft of the ship. Their electronic intrusions laid further traps subverting emergency protocols. And so, the newly-awakened who ran from the Society found themselves stuck behind lockdowns and security barriers, unable to reach forward to rouse the command staff. Their attempts to hail the security teams were also denied by the system.
Terrified dissenters fled through the passageways of the sleeping ship, pursued by coteries of Anarchists. Even though Hart had instructed her followers to let all freely choose their fate, not all complied. Some, in their intoxicated slumber, decided to make a game of freaking these squares. But even though no malice was intended, the freak-outs were indeed very real. As part of their mischief, some of the visual artists of the Society had broken out paint and ink, creating impromptu murals throughout their area of the ship. And so the runaways often found themselves in hallways containing beautifully surreal and haunting visages drawn by those on hallucinogens, or decorated with cryptic and ominous messages instructing them to "RUN". Greatly disturbed, they could only wake the handful of senior colonists they could access. These leaders would include Young Kwan-Yong, Special Vice President of Field Operations for Dai Seung Heavy Industry and Cardinal Julius Cerutti, Archbishop of Congo.
First Contact
Even as those newly-awakened commanders attempted to calm their people down, not until the seventh day of the party in space did an opposing force arrive.
Security team Lieutenant Corazon Santiago stirred from her four-decade slumber seventy-nine hours before the fateful collision that shook the Unity apart. Having installed her own early wakeup call, she awoke and personally summoned her followers, over a third of the ship's security team along with a fraction of peacekeepers and other combat trained personnel. Former comrades from the doomed wars on Earth, like-minded haters of the weak, and survival absolutists, they had been recruited for ideological compatibility and robust skills they offered to her mission: to build a strong society that could truly tame the harsh environments of Chiron. Freed from the petty politics and soft civilian leadership of the Unity, her society would be able to thwart extinction.
Upon rallying, the Spartan Coalition immediately went to arm themselves. As they were located at the forward area of the ship, this went smoothly. But when some of Santiago's scouts moved to secure additional weapons in the armories located further in the ship, they noticed that something was amiss. Not only were they already broken into, some completely ransacked, there was freshly-painted graffiti in several of them. Bizarre scrawlings and grotesque visuals covered some walls. The former veterans, some seasoned by multiple tours against guerrilla fighters, gripped their psych-whips and 7.62mm UN standard rifles on alert.
No ambush ever came. Rather, a Spartan hunter-gatherer party chanced upon a coterie of Anarchists gathering with their colonist captives at 0800 hours in the main hallway separating the forward compartment from the central transport bulkheads. The sight defied explanation: two chemists, their sea-green science team uniforms tattered or stripped off entirely, danced around a lantern. Another figure swathed in makeshift robes stitched together from space blankets erratically waved long fluorescent lights as he preached before terrified colonists bound in organic constraints. This Sufi mystic, a poet laureate of Pakistan, had embraced Hart's message filtered through his native faith and was now extolling the captives to embrace true freedom of the divine, to cast off the corrupt zaalim who governed the ship. Off to the side, a disgruntled maintenance worker-turned anti-work disciple dutifully spray-painted revolutionary slogans on the walls in menacing shades of red.
The Spartans, while formidable veterans of many a counterinsurgency campaign, were at a loss of response to this mad tableau. They carefully strode up to the group and demanded to know what they were doing. Curiously, none of the crazed betrayed surprise nor discomfort at the arrival of these armed warriors.
Exploring awareness, said the chemists.
Spreading divine light, declared the poet.
The graffitist said nothing but continued in his work, angrily muttering with an intense stare.
Dissatisfied with the non-answers, the Spartans then demanded to know who they were with.
The mother of wreckers, uttered a chemist in awe.
A daughter of revelers, smiled the other, glassy-eyed.
Truly gifted seer, nodded the poet.
The graffitist drew a female sign and superimposed the anarchist symbol upon it.
This line of questioning went on for some time.
After several minutes of failure to communicate, one of the Spartans raised his psych-whip and shouted for real answers. The entire tenor of the scene shifted. Like a whirling dervish, the Sufi spun with his sermon lights, whipping them around and into the Spartan's arm and head, knocking the weapon to the ground, and the warrior out. As the others raised their guns, the graffiti artist threw a paint can at them, spilling forth a dense mist of red and obscuring their visibility as it collided into them. The chemists dove behind furniture, and from this cover began throwing empty liquor bottles.
One of the enraged Spartans fired indiscriminately through the paint, grazing the manic street preacher. The Anarchists scattered, leaving behind their captives, who had miraculously been left scared and painted, but unscathed. Thus ended the first contact between the Society of Free Thought and the Spartan Coalition.
Unfortunately, the colonists' hopes of having been rescued by a Security team were soon dashed upon realizing the Spartans were simply a different group of mutineers. Their treatment came to establish the pattern for those unlucky enough to be taken by the Spartan Coalition during Planetfall- after a gruff interrogation about the whereabouts of requested weapons and supplies, and the details of potential threats, captives were first given the opportunity to freely join the Coalition. Those who rejected- the vast majority of cases, as it turned out- were either pressganged into Spartan auxiliary forces anyway, or made to labor on their defenses, or otherwise held as hostages. Thus leading to the innumerable prisoner swaps and ransom cases that occurred during the chaos of Planetfall.
Both parties limped back to their respective leaderships and reported of this encounter. Both reacted in remarkably similar ways. Snow Hart, while amused by the unexpected incursion of stiff-necks and proud of her people's blows against them, expressed concern for public safety. She cautioned her followers to steer clear of the fore decks and encouraged them to continue their party at the areas most secured by the Society, "to keep the vibe cool and the mellow unharshed". A moratorium against randomly awakening passengers was also announced. Quietly, Hart then directed her lieutenants to continue securing weapons caches and organizing their coteries, opening up recruitment to volunteers who were willing to keep the festival of freedom safe and sound.
Corazon Santiago was far less outwardly sanguine about the events. This appearance of a rogue roving band of undisciplined half-savages was an unpredictable wrinkle to her plans, making survival all that more volatile. And they had dishonored her army so- the commander of the defeated band himself received twelve lashes from a psych-whip and a demotion for both losing control of the situation, and permitting defeat. But she also viewed this as a dangerous distraction from the Spartans' primary objective, and from the main threat of the Unity's actual security forces. Santiago ordered a second expedition to the aft reaches of the ship to scout out the nature of the threat, but otherwise banned all further activity there. Survival was not to be knocked off course by pursuing rabble; there were many more storage units and arsenals to raid in their current territory, and still more threats to neutralize.
Despite the expressed orders of both leaders, this was far from the first times that the Anarchists and the Spartans would encounter each other. And yet, it wasn't long before they came to reach a mutual understanding.
Notes: The description of the ship is my own. The more the merrier, and having 100,000 people (in my imagining there were 180k to be exact) not only gave them a greater chance to survive, it also allowed me to support more factions and Planetfall drama.
