Reports RE: The Dawnline Shore

The seeds for this latest iteration of an old conflict were planted well before the present day – in the 4600s, when a young Harrison Armory clashed with the expanding Karrakin Trade Baronies. This was the First Interest War: a colonial expansion rush triggered by Union’s growing blink network that turned into open conflict between the two powers in the early years of the Third Committee’s administration. The war was quick and brutal, ending in a settlement negotiated by Union – negotiations the modern committee views as a misstep, a hurried series of concessions and mollifications made to end a war and enter a peace-through-gritted-teeth, not a just end.

With the First Interest War concluded and Union’s attention focused on the inner rings, a second war began, quieter and longer than the first. The Armory and the Baronies, not content with the modest holdings awarded to them by a hegemon whose authority they did not yet recognize, carved up the Dawnline Shore between them. They annexed whole worlds with little more than pledges and assurances made to ThirdComm that they would be stewards, comporting to the standards of this new Union, rather than colonial masters. While their representatives on Cradle negotiated terms of incorporation, both Harrison Armory and the Baronies oversaw proxy conflicts across the Shore; their diplomatic overtures did not match the reality. To guarantee claims over the worlds they desired, the two powers identified sympathetic local factions and cultivated them as allies using common colonial manipulation tactics: exploitation of local power divisions, massaging of existing factional interests, cultural conditioning through favoritism, granting material rewards to collaborators and sympathizers, and so on.

Union, for its part, was not ignorant of these events for long. Reports from forward-observation probes across the human-inhabited galaxy flowed into the Central Committee, proving what the corpropessimists among the revolutionaries feared: across the galaxy, their utopian revolution had failed. Like a king tide raging inland and then receding, their revolution made a utopia only of the Galactic Core. The Diaspora – the vast majority of humanity – was not yet liberated. Even worse, the Core enjoyed the fruits of Union’s labor and gave nothing back. This had to change. Motivated and clear-eyed, ThirdComm began the long, attritional work of reconnecting the galaxy, building a new practice of liberation from the inside out.

In the Dawnline Shore, the Union Administrative Department, acting on orders from CentComm, embarked on a massive infrastructure and administrative integration plan, seeding the populated worlds of the Shore with Union personnel. At first, this was limited to administrative attaches, auxiliary trainers, and various engineering and bureaucratic personnel, then later representatives of the Department of Justice and Human Rights, staff and engineers from the Union Omninet Bureau, and so on. The tide, once recessed, was now creeping back in. The ocean would soon follow.

However, the sudden explosion of hostilities in 5019u threaten everything that ThirdComm has worked so long to repair. Turning from its ancestors in the Second Committee, ThirdComm built a connected galaxy on the back of strict non-interventionist practices and the slow work of offering something better than what came before. Though its beginning was bloody, the ideologues of ThirdComm prioritized stubborn adherence to a distanced approach to reconnection with the rest of the galaxy, assured that the Utopian Pillars would see worlds returned to the fold when they were ready. It has been a long and imperfect process, but one that CentComm’s leading parties believe has worked.

The Dawnline Incident threatens to upend that largely peaceful work of integration-by-acceptance. Seeing thing, the Union Navy was dispatched following a contentious, narrow vote orchestrated by a coalition opposed to CentComm’s core non-interventionist wing. Union ground, air, and orbital elements in the Dawnline Shore engaged Armory and Baronic targets in combat almost immediately. Union’s mandate – to be the "good" tyrant, the kind hegemony, the utopia – is chipped away with each bullet fired. The Central Committee must find an end to this crisis in the Dawnline Shore, and fast: war, horrible though it is, may not be the worst outcome of this conflict.

The Dawnline Shore is a colonial expanse home to a dozen close-knit colony worlds, first seeded thousands of years ago by a series of colonial operations launched during the First Expansion Period. Long a priority of both the Karrakin Trade Baronies and Harrison Armory due to their relative proximity, the Dawnline Shore is a ripe target that both states are eager to exploit.

Under Harrison II, a number of Armory Legions were dispatched to contest the Karrakin Trade Baronies’ claim to the worlds in the Dawnline Shore, but in the tumult of the Think Tank’s collapse, second manifestation of M-1 ("RA"), and death of Harrison II, their oversight and administration has lapsed. These legions, their ships, their armor, and their supplies have all, over the course of hundreds of years, filtered into the local cultures and economies to varying degrees: some maintain loyalty to the Armory, while others have integrated entirely.

Now, under Harrison III, the Armory has sent new waves of eager Acquisitions and Management teams into the Shore, with the goal of re-contacting old Armory legionnaires and establishing colonial footholds on the populated worlds. The first of these AMTs have made beachheads on the few worlds with a strong Armory presence, and are attempting diplomatic overtures to the rest.

The Baronies, meanwhile, have their own loyal worlds in the Shore -- to the rest, they have sent tens of thousands of civilians, subjects, bureaucrats, and engineers to focus on infrastructure and cultural creation; additionally, clandestine elements have begun to foment and fund a local branch of Ungratefuls on Armory-aligned worlds.

Union, its forces thin on account of the growing Aunic conflict in Boundary Garden, but cognizant of the potential for terrible conflict, has demanded both sides moderate their approach. Furthermore, they have inserted a number of DoJ/HR emancipation teams into the heart of the Shore with a peacekeeping mandate: these forces, while outnumbered, operate as a neutral arbiter between the two sides.

The dozen worlds of the Dawnline Shore, designated DS1 - DS12 by the Armory, are rich with rare and valuable metals that the Think Tank has identified as useful for expansion into paracausal research and development. The worlds are thick with the usual suite of tremendous mineral, floral, and faunal wealth that perpetuates the Armory’s growth. On all levels, from the mundane-but-necessary to the fantastic and rare, these worlds in the Dawnline Shore are jewels to gild the Armory’s throne -- and meat to feed its never-ending appetite.

The Armory expects their AMTs to encounter hostile resistance: communication over the past few hundred years indicates that the colonies are animated by a series of colonial independence movements, aware of their position in space and potential wealth in their land. These movements are on the cusp of unifying into a system-wide resistance to the Armory, and with the news of a fresh wave of colonial troops inbound, the call for unification only grows louder.

Meanwhile, the descendants of the initial wave of AMT legionnaires have been activated across the twelve worlds. Old colonial NHPs are rising from dormancy, sounding the call to post. Families are torn between two loyalties: their ancestral duty to the Armory, and their lived home.

Union agreed to help expand Karrakin infrastructure in exchange for a halt to the construction of the Federal Karrakin Monarchy’s fleet. The Second Committee further guaranteed that the barons would remain heads of their houses and state – so long as they agreed to keep Union in supply from their vast material wealth. As a bonus, the Second Committee offered the twelve worlds of the Dawnline Shore (a colonial expansion area settled by Union). The barons found this agreement worthwhile: they and their descendants would remain in power, Union would foot the bill of rebuilding, and all the barons would need to do is produce raw materials and resources to feed Union’s shipyards, blink station production, and other galactic infrastructure projects.

War, for the Karrakins, made them appear powerful, but was costly and less profitable than peace and trade. To win without death by capturing markets was the ultimate coup. Especially considering that the terms of this peace would enrich and protect Karrakis – to them, the ultimate prize. Earth, or "Cradle", as the Unionites called it, was never the goal. So, the barons signed the New Prosperity Agreement, a white peace that left both sides alive and enriched. Under the terms of the New Prosperity Agreement, the Karrakins would formally become part of Union.

They would not rule the galaxy, but that was never what they wanted. They would leave that trouble to the scheming denizens of Cradle, since they seemed to want it so much. The barons saw that their worlds were their own prize – Union, after all, came to secure them. What more evidence could they want than the self-styled masters of the galaxy attempting to claim their homeworld by force? No, they decided, let Union wear that crown and wrestle with its implications, tragedies, and crimes. The barons would own the only land that mattered: Karrakis, and all her colonies. With the gift-worlds of the Dawnline Shore added to the barons’ territory – following the formal establishment of colonial dominion (or, "administration" as the Second Committee’s treaty language put it) over the populated ones – Karrakis’ majesty would only grow more evident.

In the 4600s u, as revolutionary elements in Cradle and across Union’s capital worlds put an end to the Second Committee, the Federal Karrakin Monarchy decided it would make its own play on the galaxy: it would firm its grip on the worlds of the Interest – the Dawnline Shore Colonial Expansion Zone – and simultaneously deal a nose-breaking blow to the upstart Harrison Armory. The Armory, a rising power made of breakaway elements from the Second Committee, was young and vulnerable, though possessing of a great deal of military expertise, and had its hand on valuable colonial assets it had portioned aside for itself. The FKM saw a perfect opportunity to test the limits of its arrangement with Union and gain ground at the same time.

This campaign would be a limited action despite its scale: on one front, an expeditionary effort into the Armory space to secure Ras Shamra – a former GMS Special Projects world – and on the other, a broad, civilian-led expansion into the Dawnline Shore to make firm the Baronies’ legal claims to the worlds there. The Armory had been busy making diplomatic overtures to win favor and, presumably, protectorate agreements. The purpose of this, as Karrakis saw it, was to "steal" a number of the Dawnline worlds out from under the Baronies; such maneuvers could not stand. The war that followed this decision pitted the imperial aims of Karrakis against those of Ras Shamra, for as the Karrakins planned their two-frontmission, so too did Ras Shamra plan its own effort.

Sensing the weakness of the newly minted Third Committee – and bolstered by a steady stream of defectors and Anthrochauvinist Party members, diasporan worlds, and naval units – Harrison Armory, then under the leadership of its founding directorgeneral, John Creighton Harrison I, organized its own fleet to strike out for Cradle. Baronic intelligence monitoring the situation mistakenly believed this fleet to be a weapon aimed for Karrakis, and advocated for an immediate preemptive strike on Ras Shamra. But for this interpretation of the Armory’s maneuvers, the Third Committee may not have survived its earliest days.

Early combat between the Karrakin Trade Baronies and Harrison Armory heavily favored the Baronies, but over time the Armory’s terrestrial superiority and adoption of mechs as a primary fighting force overwhelmed Baronic forces and led to a stunning defeat.

By 4620u a tenuous peace had been brokered, with direct involvement from Union’s nascent Third Committee. The outcome was so unexpected by Baronic forces that it led to the complete overhaul of combat doctrine and the wholesale adoption of chassis in Karrakin space, as well as the creation of Baronic Unified Command, the cavalry college, the royal academies, and the house and free companies.