THE FIRE IN THE SKY
A Dragonriders of Pern FanFic
By Mr. Mercenary
BEGINNING
The fleet of seven starships fled through space, away from the slaughter behind them. But, unknown to them, one more followed.
They were moving in a flying V formation, standard practice of CTS battle groups. This particular fleet, however, was far from a battle group. Or rather, what was left of one.
Four of the vessels were somewhat larger than the others, these were fairly large cargo freighters that had been drafted for the purpose of supplying distant fleets with fresh supplies of fuel and food. The other three were warships, their sleek, graceful appearance almost disguising their true purpose: to wage war against the enemies of the C.T.S.
Though the ships were all in almost perfect condition, the same could not be said for their crews. Their morale was in tatters, after seeing their Starbase, as well as most of the people they had ever known, go up in smoke. All they knew was that the base Self-Destruct had taken out most, if not all of, the Cross-Eyes' ships.
Now their current path of flight took them into previously uncharted regions of deep space, right to the edge of their world.
Or so they had thought.
The Confederated Terran States was one of several new space nations that formed the remnants of the old FSP. The Federated Sentient Planets, as the old empire had been called, or at least to history books, had collapsed under its own weight from industrial decay, rampant corruption, and the inability to shift back to a peacetime economy after the war with the Nathis had ended. It had happened in a fashion similar to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 20th Century.
Various provinces had decided to secede, or in more radical cases, rebel, from the FSP and its Militaristic government well before the war had even ended. The FSP hardly had the starships or resources to keep one planet from rebelling, let alone the entire FSP. Within decades, the great Terran Republic had crumbled into a state of near constant civil war. And a second so-called Dark Age had begun.
It had been like that for nearly a millennium, technological advancement and exploration had slowed to a trickle. Dictators and Emperors came and went almost yearly. There was widespread chaos and slaughter across the known galaxy. It would take another threat of galactic proportions, another threat to the whole of Mankind, to bring these warring fragments called nations back together, back to order. To end the darkness.
This new threat introduced itself in the form of a malevolent race that would soon come to be known as the Crosseyes.
They had taken Mankind by surprise. Those two states that had first encountered them, New Japan and the Democratic American Republic (DAR), took them as a new tactic by the other, as the nations had been at war with each other for some time. Their mistake cost them their lives, as the seemingly blitzkrieg tactics of the T'Hranii erased any existence of both nations, firing huge beam cannons at their planets, turning them into instant asteroid belts.
They poured into known Terran space like a tsunami, relentless, their unyielding want of the total annihilation of Mankind visible in their X-slitted eyes. The remaining nation-states quickly signed peace treaties and cease-fires with each other to face such a murderous new enemy.
The Second Galactic War lasted just twelve years. Those years had been suspenseful ones, humanity reduced to a mere third of its numbers before the war. And the alien threat was not yet finished. The remnants of their vast armada retreated back to their distant home galaxy where the valiant fighters and champions of Terran kind could not reach them.
One thing was for sure: The Terran Race would have to regroup.
Another millennium passed, in that time the nation-states formed federations, splintered, and rebelled, but another Dark Age never descended. Though memory of the FSP, as well as much of the lore from those times, faded first into myth, then into legend, these new Terrans had remembered the last war that nearly drove their race to the brink. The T'Hranii would be back.
By the year 4912 A.D., nearly two and a half millennium, twenty-five hundred years, after the collapse of the FSP, many of the nation-states fad formed into several large superpowers: the Vegan Empire, The Tau Border Worlds (TBW), And the Confederated Terran States (CTS). Although there were many separate nation-states, it was these three superpowers that would dominate the galaxy and continue to do so, right up to the present day.
Unfortunately for them, nothing lasts forever, least of all peace. It would end in 4923 A.D. when the Ancient T'Hranii struck again at last.
-The Poor Spacefarer's Guide to Human History, 4955 Edition
Oh hey, an edit here.