The Asteriomachi and Remnant Conflict
-And from the hill I saw below, the sea of flame and bodies blown, half up the hill, and wouldn't you know, The honored dead who wouldn't go.
-Tune from the Asteriomachi, sung by a child on the plane Detunov
There was a time when Earth ruled as the imperial center of humanity, the governments of old all convening to make decisions and eventually meld into each other to form the Central Authority. The Authority directed everyone and everything, producing efficient planetary colonies and great works of infrastructure and art. However, there came a moment when people started to feel that Earth couldn't govern them all. That the vastness of space was too great for any singular power to direct. They asked to rule themselves. The Authority refused. Many rebelled. The war that followed was cataclysmic. Whole planets were destroyed, the old Blink-Gate system rendered inoperable, and trillions displaced. The dead were incalculable and the wounded even more so. The Authority deployed weapons that had never seen the light of the stars before, wielding destruction that defied all logic. Their war machine was impervious, and their retribution, merciless. No rebel could hope to stand against them, try as they might, and the rebellion would not find success in this lifetime if it was not for the fickle nature of humanity itself. As the war progressed, strange rumors started to circulate about the Authority and earth itself. It seemed...disunified. Whole fleets seemed to be operating on their own, without supply support, and forced to forage for their own supplies. Usually done in the form of raiding planets. Their massive wonder weapons seemed to disappear from the battlefield, and the once impervious war machine ground to a halt. The earth made its decree. It would no longer support the war, and now it would close itself off from the rest of the galaxy. All Central Authority vessels would return to the Sol system or be disavowed and left to the depredations of the wider galaxy. Some listened. Others didn't. Earth was true to its word towards those who did not return. Thus, the end of the Fracture War spawned the Remnant Conflict as those disparate and desperate fleets maintained their hostile posture. How they've maintained a combat-ready force for this long is a mystery, but it's clear their resources are not infinite as the Remnant Fleets regularly assault colonized worlds to take everything they can get their hands on, from metals and food to people.
The Conflict
Prelude
A separatist movement had been brewing for quite some time before the breakout of actual war, but the backroom meetings of people unhappy with the directive hand of the Central Authority would only start to actually mean something with the start of the Dock Riots. With these first sparks of resistance, groups would start to gather and eventually band together to form rebel cells, which eventually became functional armies.
Outcome
Destruction of a unified Human political entity, freedom for the human colonies.
Aftermath
The eventual development of the Star Nations. While many of the original Star Nations no longer exist, what first crawled out of the ashes informed much of what came after.
Historical Significance
Legacy
Perhaps the single most notable event in history past the first steps Humanity took into space, and the discovery of ruins belonging to several sentient species in fairly short order.
In Literature
As artistic movements have come and gone, the Fracture War is a setting that is regularly used to accentuate the feeling of the time.
Novels that were apart of the Romantic movement, like "Temptations of my Dreams" by Akpena Van Den Heever and "Write about my Wife" by sibling authors Bubacar and Karafa Jammeh use the Fracture war as a backdrop to tell stories of love and it's unrequited counterparts, as well as emphasize the more valorous moments and feelings of a war a century in the past. The play "Admirer of Yesterday" by Yonezawa Rio, is perhaps the most notable work of the Romantic movement, both for it's content that fits within the movement itself, as well as it's deconstruction of the movement that spawned it and the consequences of looking at something like the Fracture War through the Romantic lens.
Other movements, like the Cartiglian-Brutalist movement attempt to portray the war in a light that is generally considered more true to form for what the war was actually like for those who lived through it. The seed of the Cariglian-Brutalist movement was planeted just after the war came to a close, with the work of Lilia Torres, who's novels, music, and other media touching on the most heart wrenching and raw feelings of the Fracture War likely caching the most poignant feeling of someone who was actually present for the conflict. Her works would go unnoticed for centuries before being rediscovered on Torres home planet, where they would go on to capture the minds of a generation and create formative opinions on the subject.
Conflict Type
War
Start Date
2312
Ending Date
2343
Conflict Result
Technical separatist victory, development of the Remnant Fleets, deployment of the Shieldwall System around the Sol System.
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