llanite_slith
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UNITY
While historians and modern fiction writers prefer to focus on the later Bug and Machine Wars, no treatment of the rise of humanity to the galactic stage would be complete without a discussion of the Early Empire's fall and the interregnum that gave rise to a Humanity united to face the threat of the first Bug migrations across their arm of the Milky Way.
While the First Empire and the Dark Age that followed may seem as remote to the modern reader as, say, the Roman Empire must have seemed to a student in the early 21st Century of Old Earth, it was this period that gave rise to many of our modern concepts of government, technology, and philosophy. It was a dark age - an age of conflict where nation, corporation, ideology, and religion all fought to be the dominant organizational structure for Humanity's starward migration.
Many regard the First Empire to be a monolithic block, directing the population of Earth to a unified exploration of Sol's nearest neighbors in an organized fashion. It was no such thing. The late 21st and early 22nd Centuries saw the emergence of a world government, but it was a coalition of the willing, barely even a confederacy. The early steps out into interstellar space were made by a wide variety of organizations - official World Government expeditions with a mix of participants, individual efforts by the remaining superpowers of China, the European Union, the North American Union, Azania, India, the Caliphate, and others, as well as various Transnational Corporate efforts to find and produce strategic resources. Each took a unique approach to their colonies - ranging from high-end, technological utopias to penal colonies and mining outposts that were just a little this side of hell.
By the 2250s, the availability of relatively inexpensive warp bubble technology led to more than 100 worlds being colonized, with many more catalogued for future efforts. It was an amazing boom time for the nations of Old Earth - with the resources of 100 new worlds flowing in to their tax base, new outlets for colonization removing the burden of overpopulation, and technical advances promising an even brighter future, it must have seemed like a paradise. That the end happened so suddenly, or would come from the very void of interstellar space that gave birth to this opportunity, is simultaneously ironic and tragic.
It had been known that Sol system had a companion star - a dim, brown dwarf - since its discovery in 2074. Apparently planetless, the star had been disregarded since its discovery and early visitation by first generation warp exploration ships. That its irregular orbit of Sol coincided so well with mass extinction events in the planet's history was noted by many, but without a mechanism for the extinctions, without even a cometary Oort cloud (presumed to have been stripped away in earlier visits) the star's correlative relationship with previous extinction events was mostly ignored by the consensus-driven scientific community of the time.
The coming of Nemesis, when it happened, must have been a terrible shock to the populations of Earth that had grown up in a time of unprecedented prosperity. Like myths of Thera, the Noachian inundation of the Black Sea peoples, and even Pompeii, the Fall has left a deep and permanent impact on Man's psyche. Astromechanically, it was merely a rogue planetoid captured by Sol's companion star in a highly unstable orbit. Coming in cold, and dark, from high above the plane of the ecliptic, it wasn't noted until a few short months before its impact with Earth. At 60% the mass of Pluto, it was barely even a planetoid, allowing it to approach closely before its gravitational footprint perturbed the orbits of the other planets. It was massive enough, however, that no arsenal of nuclear weapons could alter its inevitable orbit and final impact with the cradle of Humanity.
What those final days and hours must have been like, with every ship that could space struggling to rescue one last soul, one last disc of literature or engineering or medical data, must have been a nightmare on a scale not seen again until the first Bug Migration. But while this was the crash, the long slide into barbarism suffered by the colonies was perhaps a worse fate. Without the agricultural, medical, industrial, and scientific support of Earth, the Colonies were thrown on their own resources. Many perished of disease, famine, or natural disaster. Many lost all technology and became essentially agrarian societies - some without even the hydrocarbons to support internal combustion engines. Most lost all access to space, and all lost the ability to build and maintain the warp bubble engines that tied Earth's former colonies together.
For the first 30 years or so, the remnants of the UE space navies, freighters, and other warp-capable ships kept contact and some trade going between planets, but their ships were slowly failing. Many fell back on piracy - extorting and looting worlds to take what they needed to keep their old First Empire ships running. Rather than helping humanity back together, it was these remnant navies that were the biggest threat to re-emergent humanity when the most advanced colonies took their first steps into interstellar space a half century later. By that time, all the colonies had lost contact, some even lost the knowledge that there were other worlds. Many retained the cultural and racial imprint of their original colonial source country, but all had deviated and become something unique. By the time of those first tentative contacts, none could be called colonies any more. All were potential star nations battling against the impact of the Fall, their alien home, and the stars themselves to once more unify Humanity.
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