Backstory of SMAC Fac Pack
The Unity mission was doomed to sabotage and fragmentation before it ever left Earth. The woman now only known as Snow Hart, the Dame of the Society of Free Thought's Militia, spearheaded the Society's plan to infiltrate the colonists bound for Chiron, playing down her prior anarchist writings as she got herself assigned as a psychologist involved in personnel screenings. Along with a few other Society members in key positions in personnel selection, she managed to ensure a significant fraction of the Unity colonists and some of the crew were members of the Society of Free Thought- a radical coalition of revolutionaries and punks, who saw in the establishment of an offworld colony the opportunity to finally break the chains of tradition, authority, and conformity that had bound humanity for countless generations. Amongst the Society members infiltrated onto the Unity were a number of hackers, who programmed the cryo-sleep capsules to release the Society members in the mission early before the Unity's arrival at Chiron.
Once the Society members were awake, the Dame and her closest followers acted quickly, working to break open one of the Unity's armories and place key sections of the ship under guard while other members of the Society revelled in the lack of authority. Then, with the Society prepared for what was to come, the remainder of the Unity colonists were awakened by Society computer experts- leaving only command staff and security personnel still in cryo-sleep. The Society did this in the hope of causing the Unity colonists to lose faith in the mission authorities when shown they were powerless next to the Society. The colonists, awake early on a ship which was never intended to support this number of people for such a period, were thrown into chaos, with some people resorting to the most desperate acts to survive and with people attempting to wake mission authorities warned off, beaten, or killed by armed Society guards.
Under the crisis conditions now in play on the Unity, colonists banding together in armed factions for self-protection was almost inevitable. The first two factions to form on the ship, beyond the Society of Free Thought itself, were centered around the employees of Dai Seung Heavy Industries and the Catholic colonists amongst the mission, as both had natural leaders that were not directly amongst the command staff itself. Dai Seung Heavy Industries, a South Korean mining and construction contractor, had been selected as a contractor to help rapidly establish infrastructure on Chiron, with a Dai Seung Vice-President of Operations, Young Kwan-Yong, assigned as the head of the Dai Seung contingent. Vice-President Young immediately organised his employees and other colonists who turned to Dai Seung into a regimented hierarchy, seizing control of a portion of the ship, grabbing supplies, and instituting a rationing regime. Similarly, the significant Catholic contingent amongst the Unity colonists from Southern Europe, Latin America, and Africa had been assigned the former Archbishop of the Congo, promoted to the rank of Cardinal as de facto head of the Centauri Church, Julius Cerutti, an Italian priest with extensive missionary experience in Africa. Between the Society, Dai Seung, and the Catholic contingent, the Unity was soon largely split into armed camps, with sporadic fighting and banditry punctuated by minor acts of sabotage performed by Society members to shake the morale of outsiders.
The factions that would, on Chiron, grow to be known as the Chiron Cartel and the Preservers of Terra were slower to form and more informal in structure. Many of the colonists did not feel comfortable with either the strict regimentation of Dai Seung or the Catholics or the terrorist tactics of the Society, and, with it becoming increasingly clear that the eight landing pods used to make planetfall on Chiron would belong to whoever could hold them, many of these colonists began to coalesce into their own loosely-organised factions rallied behind charismatic leaders. Nathan Weismuller, a former economist, venture capitalist, and investor who had helped finance the Unity mission in exchange for a colonist's berth in the mission, drew together the faction that would eventually become known as the 'Cartel' on Chiron with the promise of a society on Chiron that would unite freedom for its members to try and build the life and prosperity they wanted with the protection of law, helping organise basic security patrols for a hardscrabble on-ship bazaar where the modest treasures and supplies scraped together by scavenging, salvaging, and raiding ship's stores were exchanged. The group that would become the 'Preservers', for their part, were united by a very simple principle articulated by Adam Gieseler, a historian and sociologist with a position on the Unity's science staff- that without efforts to preserve as much of the knowledge base and principles of Earth as they could, the colonists on this new world risked losing all the progress humanity had made up until this point. Both of these more informal factions likewise began to arm themselves as more armories were broken open, leaving the unaffiliated colonists increasingly desperate as more and more of the Unity came under factional control and as border skirmishes became increasingly common.
Finally, one of the colonists aboard succeeded in triggering a wakeup sequence for the command staff and security personnel, who awakened to a ship in chaos under the functional control of mutineers. Security personnel were organised to attempt to seize weapons and put down the mutiny, with a ship-wide announcement of martial law declared. As the command staff attempted to reclaim the ship, combat intensified, with mission security fighting corridor to corridor against Society of Free Thought fighters and the impromptu militias of other factions. Captain Garland died early in the fighting, leaving the mission loyalists under the command of his executive officer, Marie du Lac, a Frenchwoman with prior military experience. Her temperament, already authoritarian, was deeply affected by the chaos on the Unity, and she resolved that it was necessary to restore order to the mission- no matter the cost. In the final days of the ship, the fighting inflicted heavy internal damage, entirely depressurising one of the eight landing pods, with fighting only coming to a halt when factional leaders desperately called a ceasefire as the dying ship approached close enough to Chiron to jettison the landing pods and make planetfall. Six of the seven remaining pods were claimed by the six factions that had formed on the ship, while the seventh was packed with desperate, leaderless colonists hoping to escape from the doomed ship with their lives. While the landing pods claimed by the six factions had managed to salvage enough tools and supplies to ensure that the factions would survive the first few years on Chiron, the supply situation on the seventh pod was far more marginal, and the colonists of this group suffered massive deaths in their early time on Chiron.
In desperation, the unaffiliated colonists developed workarounds to set up pressure tents, produce new pressure masks, find native life that could have usable nutrients extracted, and scavenge the strange xenofungal forests of Chiron for trace metals drawn into the stalks to use in building materials. Unlike the other colonies, which largely avoided direct interaction with the xenofungal forests at first, early camps and villages of the survivors of the seventh pod clustered at the very eaves of the xenofungal forests. What the colonists did not fully appreciate was that this rendered them open to constant psionic influence from the fragmented and confused intelligence still inhabiting the xenofungus, which attempted to integrate these foreign invaders into the ecology it oversaw. Within ten mission years, the survivors of the seventh landing pod had begun to take the form they would later be recognised as- organised into clannish family groups, making use of survival techniques honed under the harshest conditions, and living in encampments that were little more than clusters of pressure tents, supported by hand-crafted technology and with a growing mystical religion spearheaded by those members of the new tribes most sensitive to the psionic influence of the xenofungus. Joseph Gilpin, a xenobiologist who had helped develop a number of the survival techniques now in use by the tribes, grew to be recognised as a High Chief to whom the assorted clan heads would listen and submit disputes to. The nucleus of the Confederation of Tribes was born.
Dai Seung Heavy Industries, upon landing on Chiron, found itself in complete control of the personnel in its colony, with a virgin world ripe for the taking. In recognition of the fundamental break with Dai Seung's past history, Vice President Young soon renamed Dai Seung to 'New Unity Industries', with himself as chief executive officer, putting every aspect of the new colony's economy under New Unity administration. New Unity Industries, which almost immediately earned the informal nickname of 'Unicorp' on all levels of New Unity society, immediately set to building the infrastructure of survival. Every citizen of Unicorp was an employee, and every employee had a job assigned, whether they liked it or not. Unicorp rapidly developed the industries needed to survive- but many of Unicorp's workers suffered greatly in the process of ensuring the collective survival of their colony.
With no recourse to the mission authorities and with the chaos of the Unity convincing many of the Catholic colonists that secularism had convincingly failed, the de facto leadership of Cardinal Julius was soon formalised into a theocratic state, with political and spiritual power united in the same leaders, and with the Cardinal occupying a new Holy See in place of the Pope on Earth. One of the Church's first priorities on Chiron was to establish a system of humane support to ease the difficulties of the least fortunate members of its society, and a cultural emphasis on the value of the family helped encourage burgeoning populations as the Church began to settle Chiron. Although the Church was relatively economically and technologically stagnant, it had many hands to turn to the tasks of survival, and, although not the colony with the fewest members of the drone class, it was a colony where the lot of the drones was relatively mild.
The colonists led by Nathan Weismuller established their own infant colony guided by libertarian principles, with new business enterprises rapidly growing as colonists began to make their place on Chiron. The central colonial government was organised as an 'insurance company' named the 'Chiron Cartel' headed by a Board of Directors guaranteeing protection to citizens who paid their fees, which were fixed at a low rate by the Cartel's corporate charter. Although payment of fees was technically optional for residents, non-payment excluded residents from property registries and the court system, which ensured a high rate of uptake save amongst the relatively small drone class. The Cartel soon grew to enjoy the most prosperous economy on Chiron with high standards of living, but its weak government rendered it dangerously vulnerable to infiltration and military aggression- whether it could survive the harsh arena of intercolonial politics and war was, in those early years, an open question.
Adam Gieseler and the colonists he organised, once they landed on Chiron, set to work to tame the area surrounding their initial point of settlement. They were aided in these efforts by the data archives they had focused on salvaging from the Unity, which left them with the most complete surviving corpus of information on Chiron of the history, culture, art, and literature of Earth, as well as a fairly complete set of reference materials for basic sciences. An ad hoc government was swiftly organised, which, as well as providing basic security for the colonists, almost immediately focused on establishing support for extensive educational programs and backup archival of the databases of the colony. The initial government, a self-appointed council calling itself the 'Preservation Committee', was organised as a provisional body until a more permanent governing structure could be debated and implemented. The Preserver emphasis on education helped develop a remarkably strong talent class, skilled, educated, and dedicated to Preserver ideals of preservation of knowledge and open access to information. The infant colony struggled with the expense of these ambitious programs and with recurring issues with weak leadership in security units defending against the native mindworms, but nonetheless they met these challenges from a position of remarkable social stability for a Chironian colony.
The mission loyalists, on landing, had their state of martial law reconfirmed by Commander du Lac, who declared herself head of mission 'for the duration of the crisis'. Commander du Lac rapidly moved to quash any dissent, placing the colony under her command on a permanent war footing until all the human colonies on Chiron were once again brought under United Nations authority. Every aspect of life under du Lac was monitored and subject to the strictest penalties, while the infrastructure for a permanent totalitarian state was laid in place. Commander du Lac had declared war against 'chaos'- and any hint of dissent soon grew to be synonymous with chaos in her eyes. The United Nations Colony, the Mission Loyalists, became an engine that would help bring war to Chiron, its Commander and her apparatus of war and control ready to crush enemies within and without the colony.
The Society of Free Thought, whose sabotage had doomed the mission to fragmentation, fared better on the new world than some would expect. Although they were chaotic and unruly, they had a strong sense of community spirit and a willingness to form democratic organising bodies to coordinate necessary work. Those colonists who made it through the selections process, even with their compatriots corrupting this process, had a wide array of practical skills, and the Dame's Militia served as a de facto police force. The Dame, for her part, served as a unifying figurehead for the Anarchists of the Society. The rejection of tradition and conformity amongst the Society led to a widespread current of whimsy in their society that could easily be mistaken for stupidity- but, as any Anarchist would be willing to tell you, just because you named a base 'Spork' didn't mean that you didn't have engineers checking pressure seals and power conduits in the base. Although the Anarchist lifestyle was relatively austere on a material level, creativity, art, and invention flourished amongst them. Their chaotic society was marked by many talents and many drones, with a particularly violent drone class that rejected any standards of morality or reason. Although nobody was forced to join the Militia and many Anarchists lacked the predisposition to work well within it, those who did join the Dame's Militia were utterly dedicated to the Society's mission to finally smash the oppressive structures still holding sway in other colonies.
Given this volatile mix of young societies, it was perhaps inevitable that war would eventually erupt as the growing colonies came into contact with each other...
