Interplanetary War (Labyrinth)

When you think about it, there have been no wars. All conflicts have their origins in their predecessors. Take the Cold War. A layman will tell you that it started because the Soviet Union and United States, the last two superpowers after the Second World War, began to vie for power, but that is only partially true. The Cold War started as soon as Germany invaded Russia, even if nobody knew it yet. Responding to the attack, Russia invaded Nazi-occupied Europe, and carved up Germany along east/west lines. After the war, there was no way that Russia could be satisfied with just these gains – and Britain and America would never allow this to happen either. It wasn’t just about strength, either – it was about ideology. Communism vs. capitalism. Autocracy vs. democracy. East vs. west. And so we had the United Nations vs. North Korea/China stalemate in the Korea Peninsula, the US catastrophe in Vietnam, and the shorter but no less catastrophic defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. And even the Second World War had its origins directly in its predecessor – the fall of the Russian empire and the rise of the Soviet Union, the embarrassing defeat of Germany and the increasing balkanisation that had begun to occur, that would continue to occur even after the Cold War – which in turn has its own roots in the. And even after the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, it didn’t end – the nations of Earth would feel the aftershocks of the Cold War long after those who had fought it had died off.

It is here, then, that we find the earliest roots of the Interplanetary War. The war itself was enormously devastating, lasting an entire decade, longer than the First or Second World Wars, and saw more deaths than either conflict combined. But it was far from spontaneous – each of its supposedly separate aspects has its own roots, some going back all the way to the Cold War two centuries earlier. With the Russian-based Koslovics, we find neo-communist hardliners who look back on the decades of Soviet oppression as glory days, and look upon the end of the Cold War as a defeat of their ideals against the burgeoning and increasing corruption of the capitalist west; with the Frieden, we see a growing resentment of colonial populations towards rule by a governing body that will probably never set foot on their home worlds; and with the UNSC, we finally begin to see the beginnings of the world government that conspiracy theorists had predicted would spell the doom of mankind. Turning their claims on their heads, the UNSC would save mankind from itself, not once, not twice, but three times – from its solar brethren, from its interstellar expansion, and from an external threat that was the first truly unforeseeable war in human history. Three hundred years before the Insurrection, the Interplanetary War would lay the groundwork for almost the entire later conflict – the paramilitary Frieden and Koslovic, the importance of naval assets, the use of terrorist tactics and first deployment of weapons of mass destruction since the Second World War, and the unification of Earth under one banner, one of peace and prosperity, even if that peace and prosperity would never come to it.

Strictly speaking, the term “Interplanetary War” covers only the crushing of Frieden and Koslovic forces and sympathisers on Earth, Mars, and the various solar colonies between 2140 and 2170, a period of six years, still not inconsiderable. But the wider conflict begins in 2160 with the Jovian Moons campaign, sparked by Frieden unrest at growing colonial bureaucracy, and continued with the Koslovics and Frieden taking the fight to Earth itself in 2462, and the subsequent Mars Campaign of 2163 to control Earth’s largest, most heavily populated and most symbolic colony. The conflict would claim millions of lives, both on and off Earth, the highest death count since the Second World War, and possibly in human history, and would be the first true space war – while prototypes had occurred throughout the 21st and earlier 22nd centuries, the Interplanetary War would thoroughly earn its name. Concluding with the signing of the Callisto Treaty in 2170 between UN, Koslovic and Frieden representatives, the Interplanetary War is perhaps best used as a marker of humanity’s next cultural phase – the beginning of the Great Age of Colonialism, expanding out into space and past all previous boundaries.

Remarks

 * "You can already see the next war, even three hundred years early - colonial bureaucracy causing interplnaetary tension. The UNSC was lucky at this point in time that they were just fighting for one star system, and not hundreds. You'd think we'd have learnt our lesson after that, but history repeats more often than we care to think."