///From the author: although the zharans are more important in the grand scheme of Spacers Saga history, and the Alliance of Free Worlds was certainly a bigger and more unified threat, the Draconist front represents one of the most influential enemy factions in the lore of The Spacers Saga. The Draconists date back to a time before the lore was contained to within only our solar system, and were originally named after the major stars in the constellation Draco. Within the context of the lore, they played a major role as a force of chaos, serving to upend the status quo and usher in the era of violence which ultimately led to the Frontier Wars. This is the first part of their story.
[The original FRC flag designed by Luis Pedreira and Nouri al-Fahad in 2319]
Statistics:
Official name of the Party: Divisão Revolucionária da Assembleia de Callisto (translation from the Portuguese: Revolutionary Division of the Callisto Assembly)
Unofficial names: DRAC, Draconists, Dracks, the Horde
Founded: 13 July 2317 (founders: Pavel Kucharski, Nouri al-Fahad, and Luis Pedreira)
Note: this led to the joke, “What do you get when you put together a Cossacks, an Arab, and a Brazilian?” “The worst headache in three hundred years”
Maximum membership (circa 2337): estimated to be between 8 and 9 million
Total membership (2317-2362): estimated to be between 30 and 40 million
Ultimate fate: defunct (DRAC military forces were defeated in the field during the Draconist Wars and the Party was outlawed by the ICA as part of the Alexandria Accords)
Historical Details:
The Shadow of the Past
To understand the scourge of Draconism as it emerged in the early 24th century on Callisto, we must first jump back over fifty years to the Wayfarer Insurrection. As the ICA funneled trillions of dollars worth of federal tax credit into the Interstellar Consortium’s plan to colonize the Alpha Centauri system, long-standing and deep-seated anger among the population of the colonial frontier boiled over into a series of violent uprisings. Chief among these was the Brotherhood of Antares, which led a bloody guerrilla campaign against the Interplanetary Cooperative Administration and its allies from 2257 to 2276.
After the Brotherhood was neutralized by the Spacer Corps, and the discovery of ancient alien technology buried on Titan exacerbated the situation, tensions between the United Nations of Mars and the oligarchs who controlled the Commonwealth of Titan moved rapidly toward a boiling point. This led to the Mars-Titan War, which upended the status quo in Solar Space and ushered in the Era of Mars.
After the Mars-Titan War, the Harrison Accords standardized a new status quo, one in which the mercantile barons of Ceres and the military-industrial magnates of Mars would be the undisputed lords of the solar system. To safeguard their new empire, they deployed the Spacer Corps and the new Coalition Security Forces to occupy the former members of the Titan Pact. As the people of the frontier pulsed with nationalist fervor, the occupation forces cracked down, sparking a series of bloody police actions.
This culminated in the 2314 nationalization of the Callisto Assembly, which was originally installed as a puppet government of the ICA in 2299 as part of the occupation. The next three years were marked with violent social and political upheaval on Callisto, a period now referred to as the Days of Blood.
Then, in July 2317, the bill for six decades of unrest came due. On Callisto, in the industrial town of Koryak, four militant ultranationalists came together to form a new political organization called the Frente Revolucionária de Calisto (FRC). This political movement initially had the singular goal of removing Martian and ICA influence from Callisto. But from those humble beginnings sprang a wildfire.
As new members flocked to the FRC (its membership was estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands by 2320), the original intentions of the founding trio were subsumed by increasingly radical and violent schemes on the part of their more ardent followers. Chief among these were the quasi-anarchist and neo-Marxist ideologies of Valeri Dragovan and Costanzo Nuñez. Dragovan in particular favored the use of draconian methods to enforce the agenda of the FRC, which was renamed the Divisão Revolucionária da Assembleia de Callisto in 2322 as part of a reorganization intended to attain real political power.
Between 2322 and 2324, the CSF enforced a crackdown on Callisto in an attempt to rein in violent outbursts of political aggression sparked by DRAC cadres as they jostled for power. Their attempt backfired, as the unrest already churning intensified to the point that, by August 2324, DRAC was able to bully their way onto the ticket in a general election in the Callisto Assembly. Some say the results of that election came as a surprise, but given the number of DRAC foot soldiers at the polls, they probably should not.
The outcome, surprising or not, was certainly unprecedented. DRAC cadres swept into the halls of power on Callisto, and swiftly initiated a campaign of political reprisals against any vestiges of ICA control they identified there. Martian diplomats, CSF officers, merchants and bankers with ties to the Confederation of the Main Belt, all of them were extrajudicially punished for their crimes against the people of the frontier.
The ICA made its first great mistake of the era by deciding to stand back and allow the situation on Callisto to sort itself out. The Councilors in power in Nereidum and Aldrin City were determined not to be pulled into what they saw as a local squabble, and instead decided to blockade Callisto and wait for the DRAC scourge to run out of steam. They had no way of knowing that by bottling up the madmen of Callisto, they were simply allowing them to metastasize among the local population. As shortages of everyday items increased, local anger at the ICA grew in intensity, setting the stage for what was to come.
The Callistan Affliction
By 2325, the term “Draconists” had been tacked onto the DRAC movement, inspired as much by their acronym as by the draconian tactics which they deployed against perceived enemies. Through the dark years of their rise to power and the Blockade of Callisto which followed, these enemies were often found disemboweled, beheaded, or otherwise mutilated by DRAC cadres as a warning against opposition.
Brothers fought brothers on Callisto and parents were denounced by their own children, and the violence was slowly leaking beyond their gravity well. As the Coalition Security Force moved in to secure the sector, the Draconists dialed up their efforts to export their ideology to other worlds.
Even though Callisto was nominally bottled up by the ICA from 2325-2331, this period still saw a substantial amount of violence spill over onto other worlds in the Jovian system. From Ganymede and Europa to the small outer moons which were home to a myriad of small-time shipyards and ore processing plants, the Jovian Civil War was felt by almost every population in the sector by the time the Draconist conflict spread to other regions of Solar Space. Ganymede, a vital port for fusion energy fuel, was especially hard-hit.
For much of this period, the only sight of Spacer Corps forces that the people of Jovian space ever got was when they entered the ports on the head of an aid convoy. For this reason, it was easy enough to believe Draconist propaganda which claimed the average IDC soldier was fat on riches stolen from the frontier and more than willing to crack the skulls of colonial citizens who dared to raise a voice against the ICA regime. Even though the average Callistan citizen had at least a hundred times greater chance of being killed or maimed by Draconist-led violence, the fear of the unseen federal forces allowed them to maintain power.
On Europa, the Draconists sought to initiate a guerrilla war against the wealthy, ICA-backed corporations which nominally controlled the moon and used its water resources to fuel spacecraft bound for all corners of the solar system. Their campaign met with less success than it had on Ganymede and Callisto, but the violence they unleashed there still led to a reign of terror among the local population.
As with the ongoing civil war on Callisto, the violence exported to Ganymede, Europa, and the outlying moons of the Jovian system was mostly centered around the Draconist urge to overthrow the ICA-backed Galilean Union and establish an anarcho-communist utopia in the region. As on Callisto, their tactics in these new battlefields were nothing if not brutal, and led to the bloody deaths of thousands of locals whom they deemed to be enemies of the revolution. Yet new followers still flocked to their cause by the week.
All of this unrest was slowly building toward a confrontation with the ICA, which had, as mentioned, sought to remain untethered to the violence spawned on Callisto. As later pundits would declare, the ICA Council’s willingness to turn the other way as Callisto and its neighbors spasmed with violence is perhaps an even greater crime than the actions of the Draconists themselves, since this failure to act both led to all the horrors which followed and was perpetrated by a government which at least had a marginal claim to the moral high ground. In any case, the next phase of the crisis caught almost everyone by surprise.
The Martian Incident
13 July 2331 began like any other day on Mars. Aldrin City, home to over four million people, was enjoying the first month of Spring. To the south, the staff of the Spacer Corps HQ at the Martian Military Complex, buried seven hundred meters beneath the surface of the Solis Planum, was busy monitoring the progress of the Draconist Conflict on Callisto and elsewhere, as well as a handful of other local squabbles.
In between these two regions, the bustling Edwin Aldrin Memorial Spaceport was busily conducting the shuttle traffic in and out of the central Republic of Marineris and Chryse. The staff and patrons hurried from place to place, intent on completing their business and getting on to their final destinations.
What none of them knew was that fifteen Draconist foot soldiers had infiltrated the Martian capital region over the previous two and a half years and embedded themselves in positions at the spaceport and across its surroundings. They had smuggled in weapons illegally obtained and, in many cases, provided and stored by unscrupulous corporations with less interest in Martian security than they had in cold hard cash. These fifteen diehard Draconist commandos had chosen the morning of 13 July as their moment to strike.
The exact details of the plan they enacted are lost to history (or at least to the redactions of the military intelligence officers whose reports summarized the interrogation of captured plotters), but the results are more than well-known. At approximately 09:47 Aldrin City Standard Time, right at the busiest part of the morning commute, the spaceport suffered a series of quick, violent explosions which tore open the main terminal and killed more than thirty-seven hundred people. Even before the dust settled, the perpetrators made themselves known. The ICA had taken a shot across its bow. Their retribution would be swift.
[An example of Draconist propaganda: the virtual leaflet distributed on 13 July 2331, less than four hours after the attack on the Edwin Aldrin Spaceport on Mars]
The Spacers Intervene
The ICA Council convened two days after the 13/7 Attacks to discuss the best response to the Draconist provocation. The Generals from Mars were baying for blood, and many of their colleagues concurred, at least insofar as they thought that smashing the Draconist movement was the only tenable option.
In the end, it took four days of deliberation to determine the proper level of response, mainly due to disagreements between Martian councilors and those from the outer system on the level to which the Spacer Corps should be loosed against the Jovian sector. Many of the representatives from the Jovian and Saturn sectors were survivors or veterans of the Mars-Titan War, and they were understandably hesitant to call down the Martian hammer upon their fellow citizens without first setting some ground rules.
On 19 July, the Council passed a resolution enabling the deployment of Spacer Corps combat forces to enforce Article 10 of the ICA Charter. Many legal scholars argue that this article was originally intended only to ensure cooperation between spacefaring nations in defending the peaceful use of space, but by 2331, it had come to be interpreted as a justification for movements against dangerous actors and rogue states.
On 20 July, the Spacer Corps mobilized against the Draconists. The first blow came at 1300 local time in Alexandria, Ganymede, when ICA forces which had been garrisoned in the Galileo Regio launched a series of missile strikes against Draconist strongholds on the periphery of the continent. By 0800 the next morning, elements of IDC SOCOM and the 11th Aerospace Expeditionary Force were deployed to secure ICA-friendly settlements on Ganymede. These were the opening shots of Operation Sudden Lightning.
What the generals who orchestrated this operation did not know was that they were playing right into the Draconists' plan. The fifteen cadres who had carried out the attacks on Mars sacrificed their lives not simply out of a desire to get back at Mars for decades of injustice, but because they knew that their actions would draw the ICA into a long, drawn-out war with their comrades on Callisto and elsewhere.
The secret those fifteen men took to their graves, some of them only after extended torture at the hands of the Martian security police in search of information on their handlers, was that the real goal of the 13/7 attacks had not been to achieve any short-term military or political goal, but to score an ideological victory in the long term. They knew their sacrifice would bait the ICA into a war of attrition, one which the well-fed and laid-back peoples of the inner system could ill afford to see through. As such, the Spacer Corps was in for the long haul whether they liked it or not. The Draconist Wars had well and truly begun.
The Long Haul
The Draconist Wars were unlike most conflicts, in that they revolved more around guerrilla violence and political unrest than combat between uniformed armies. Even though DRAC fielded militias numbering in the hundreds of thousands, they quickly went to ground after the Spacer Corps moved into the Jovian sector to hunt them down. Even as the ICA sought out the Draconists’ leaders, their movement splintered into hundreds of cells, each of which jostled for control of a specific territory on Callisto, Ganymede, or elsewhere.
The movement was never a viable long-term career plan. Of the three founders, only Luis Pedreira was still alive by 2331. He had long since been pushed to the sidelines of the party by his more radical followers, but was still eliminated by a SOCOM raid in 2332, an early casualty of Sudden Lightning.
The cellular nature of DRAC was its greatest strength against the onslaught of the Spacer Corps and its allies in the Coalition Security Force. Even as ever greater numbers of Draconist foot soldiers were shot down in raids, or killed by targeted missile strikes, or otherwise targeted for extrajudicial killing by special forces, the cadres kept the ranks filled with fresh recruits ready to die, and to kill, for the glorious revolution.
And kill they did. Week after week, Draconist cells carried out bolder and bolder attacks against the ICA, its allies, and their infrastructure. Between 2331 and 2335 alone, roughly nine hundred instances of mass casualty events occurred on Callisto and the other Jovian moons. All told, over two hundred thousand civilians died during just this early four-year period of Operation Sudden Lightning. The fears of the outer system councilors were coming true: as the ICA’s dogs of war let loose their awful lightning against the Draconist threat, the civilians caught in the middle were paying the lion’s share of the cost in blood.
Even then, the bloodshed was far from over. The IDC deployed three more Aerospace Expeditionary Forces to the outer solar system between 2331 and 2334, bringing the total in the region to eight. At the same time, they were mobilizing two entirely new AEFs (the 19th and 20th in total) to hold on standby at Mars in the event that the Draconist Crisis continued to spill over to new sectors beyond the Jovian system.
But no matter how much effort the Spacer Corps invested to bottle up the Draconists in their home system, they met with only about as much success as could be expected in any attempt to sweep back the tide with a broom. Or to hold a virulent nationalistic ideology at bay with nothing more than military force.
By 2334, the Draconists had managed to export their ideology to at least one other major region beyond the Jovian system. Beginning as early as 2329, they had sent cadres to Titan with the goal of installing a friendly revolutionary movement in the legislative body of the Commonwealth. In June 2334, their affiliates in the Partido Popular Unido (PPU, or United People’s Party) stormed the halls of power on Titan, leading to a near repeat of the situation a decade earlier on Callisto. Only this time, it was ten times as complex.
Unlike on Callisto, where the Draconists swept into power more or less unopposed, the UPP on Titan faced pushback not only from the other political factions already wrestling for control of the Commonwealth when they emerged there but also from the Spacer Corps, which deployed in September 2334 to defeat them and drive them off Titan altogether. This intervention led quickly to the First Titan Civil War.
By the dawn of 2335, there were major conflicts playing out on three big worlds, a host of smaller ones, and an ongoing terror campaign conducted by the Draconists and their allies against any vestiges of ICA power in the colonial frontier. There was also a range war between IDC FLEETCOM and the Draconists’ armada of captured, stolen, or otherwise “donated” space warships in the Asteroid Belt and the outer system. Parts of these were entangled in an ongoing ideological struggle between Ceres and Vesta, and others were tied to the Draconists’ attempts to infiltrate and overthrow ICA control of the Uranus and Neptune sectors.
The period between 2334 and 2337 is often referred to by former Draconists as the heyday of the movement. Despite facing an incursion of ICA forces in all regions they considered friendly territory, they had succeeded in exporting their ideology to most of the outer system, had drawn their enemies into a drawn-out brushfire war across the region, and were meting out sizable casualties against the IDC and its allies. By 2337, more than eight million people considered themselves members of the Draconist party.
The Artificial Element
Another undercurrent in this early period of the Crisis was the Purges. In 2328, the Draconists kicked off a massive assault against the artificials. As much as DRAC saw the ICA as its greatest enemy, they also loathed artificial humans, whose presence they saw as the greatest destabilizing factor in colonial space.
The backlash against artificials had two primary motivators. First, artificial humans represented the newest link in a chain minted as far back as the late 20th century, when A.I. and robotics began to force normal humans out of everyday career fields. By the early 24th century, they had graduated from purely menial and dangerous tasks like the construction of offworld settlements and the maintenance of their creators’ intricate interplanetary infrastructure, and as a result they were seen as a direct threat to human livelihoods.
The second reason for the suspicion leveled against artificials was the fact that they were blamed for much of the bloodshed in the latter half of the Mars-Titan War. Beginning in early 2295, the increasingly desperate leaders of the Titan Pact unleashed the captured intelligence construct HORUS against its enemies in MARSCOM and the Spacer Corps, leading to some of the bloodiest events of the war.
Chief among these was the October 2296 attempt to knock Phobos out of orbit and drop it on Aldrin City, an event only averted by the emergency detonation of an antimatter weapon which fractured the oblong moon. As hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed to save tens of millions on the ground, the Phobos Incident has gone down in history as one of the worst atrocities ever committed. Given that the HORUS A.I. carried out this near catastrophe and succeeded in dozens of others through the last two and a half years of the war, many people in Solar Space have harbored a deep-seated mistrust of them ever since.
Fast forward to 2328 and the Draconist movement acted upon this impulse by organizing a pogrom against them in the frontier. From 2328 to 2338, somewhere between twenty and thirty million artificials were hunted down and killed by Draconist militiamen. Many of those killed received the “hammer cure,” which saw their attackers smash in their skulls with work tools (sometimes but not always hammers).
Soon thereafter, the artificial population organized itself for popular resistance and mutual defense, leading to what was later called the First Zharan Revolution. Between 2329 and 2337, somewhere north of three million million artificials were killed fighting an uphill battle against both the Draconist hordes and the ICA security forces which deployed to reign in their attempted revolution. In 2337, however, the movement largely fell apart after its chief leaders were captured or killed at the Battle of Syracuse. From then on, the Draconists were more interested in fighting the ICA, so the Purges gradually slipped from relevance.
One notable side effect of this era was that it became the trial by fire for the artificial who would eventually take up the mantle of V’Ran (“liberator”) and lead his people during the Second Zharan Revolution which was kicked off by the Uprising in October 2356. After witnessing every other artificial denizen of his settlement killed by Draconists on Ganymede in 2332, he fought with artificial revolutionaries there for five years, only falling off the radar when his unit was wiped out during the Battle of Syracuse.
The Secret Soldiers
The Titan Civil War was at its worst in 2336. That year, the UPP installed a puppet government (the Democratic Republic of Titan) in the territory they controlled there, and set up a new uniformed military force (the Titan People’s Army) to advance the fight against the enemies of Draconist ideology. Civilians were dying at a rate of between six and seven hundred per day, and the CSF was retreating in many districts.
It was in those dark days that the Spacer Corps, which had sunk nearly half a million spacers into the fight to liberate Titan, instituted the first phase of the two-part solution to the Draconist question there. AEROCOM referred to it as Operation Uppercut. The first phase involved a sizable surge in IDC forces on Titan (two more AEFs would be deployed there by 2338, for a total of five) and an increase in the strength of the Spacer Corps in general, to be accomplished by fully remobilizing the Martian Command.
The second phase would be more esoteric. A new strategy had been in the works within the halls of AEROCOM and its shadowy brother INTELCOM since even before the 13/7 attacks ushered in the age of ICA intervention against Draconism. This strategy boiled down to two words: infiltration and reconnaissance.
The SPIRE (Special Purpose Infiltration, Reconnaissance, and Execution) force was the brainchild of Colonel Miles Cavanaugh, a veteran of the special forces community who saw action throughout the Mars- Titan War and the police actions which followed. His experiences in both of these eras (the latter of which he often declared was the more difficult to train for as a result of its moral complexity) shaped his plans for a new unit of IDC SOCOM which would be specifically designed to infiltrate enemy forces, recon their positions, numbers, capabilities, and execute close-in operations aimed at neutralizing their effectiveness.
The first class of SPIRE commandos graduated from Miles Cavanaugh’s grueling boot camp in February 2337 after nearly two full years of training and were deployed against the Draconists throughout the following year. They quickly inserted themselves in and among their opponents’ number and reported back to their handlers in INTELCOM using the latest in cutting-edge covert communications technology.
The results of this second phase of Operation Uppercut came slow at first, but once they began to roll in they came in quick succession. From August 2338 to February 2339 alone, more than three thousand mid- and upper-level Draconist leaders were either apprehended or outright neutralized by raids, missile strikes, and other operations targeted and planned almost exclusively with intelligence gathered by SPIRE commandos. One of these commandos was Captain Khalid Wastani, whose participation in SPIRE operations in the last years of the First Titan Civil War played a major role in influencing his scheme for Project ALPHA.
The Churning Years
As Operation Uppercut continued over top of Operation Sudden Lightning, the Draconists were being forced back from their strongholds on Callisto, Ganymede, and Titan, and suffered setback after setback in the other regions they sought to liberate from ICA control. By early 2339, however, a new political movement had coalesced and was rising to fill the void they were leaving behind. This new organization traded in the Draconists’ violent radicalism for stoic asceticism, and tempered their nationalism with reason.
On 29 March, representatives from Callisto, Ganymede, Titan, and a handful of other war-torn frontier worlds signed the Allied Worlds Pact in Syrené, the bombed-out capital of Callisto. This document established a new legal framework by which the denizens of the outer solar system could redress grievances, seek protection from interstate violence, insure their commerce, and other vital functions.
The political entity the Pact established was called the Alliance of Free Worlds, and while it was not expressly intended to be a counterbalance to the ICA, its founders certainly meant it to offer an alternative forum for people left disenfranchised by the ICA’s crackdown on Draconist-inspired violence. In order to curtail that violence within their borders, the Alliance entered into a number of agreements with the remaining leaders of DRAC and its affiliates. Among these were offers of clemency for Draconist war criminals, assurances of non-extradition to ICA judicial proceedings following the cessation of hostilities, and so on.
In November 2341, the Jovian Civil War came to an end. The First Titan Civil War followed suit just under a year later, a discrepancy caused by lingering violence between the DROT and the Commonwealth of Titan. After the Alliance negotiated the ICA’s withdrawal in exchange for Draconist assurances to disarm, it seemed that the madness might finally be at an end. But all good things cannot last forever, and in the case of peace with the Draconists, the possibility of a relapse into madness is not a question of if but of when.
More to come, when it's ready...