After initial landfall, settlement, and state coalescence under the Shamran Triumvirate, a long

period of peace and exploration built a clearer map of the world and its natural satellites.
Colonial expeditions departed monthly for new sites ID’d along the circumglobal river-sea,
populating the world as Ras Shamra’s initial settlement grew exponentially. Uplift teams
scouted locations on the day and night side of the world to begin work on a spaceport.
Meanwhile, grounded science teams and surveyors struck out to the harsh edges of the world
to set up monitoring stations, observatories, long-range communication stations, and other
necessary global/local system command installations.

Animated by colonial fervor, Ras Shamra was explored, settled, and exploited. The world found
its viability point as its population expanded to the millions. Long-range/long-delay
communications sent to Cradle were finally returned, a century after settlement.

Ras Shamra seemed a sure thing: a stable and promising colony on a resource-rich world, with
a healthy and growing population, nascent local industry, and nearby viable worlds in orbit
around the same star.

This stability would not last: the plague years were just ahead.

In the second century of colonial occupation, around 3350U, an agricultural installation in the
equatorial band reported a rash of illness burning through their laborers. Within days, the
illness had reached Ras Shamra’s largest city; some combination of population density,
infection vectors, and limited habitable land all contributed to the growth of the pandemic.

The pandemic hit its peak, burning through the towns outside the capital. Following an
established protocol, one of the three Triums — chosen by drawing straws — fled to a
contingency settlement along with a slow but steady stream of citizens not afflicted by the
plague.

The other two remained in the capital to coordinate the response to pandemic and the
mounting unrest; they both succumbed to the illness, but managed to buy enough time for the
evacuation to complete.

The capital on Ras Shamra fell silent. The equatorial band fell silent. The remaining Trium
ordered a hard quarantine of the Equator and fired an aid request packet to Cradle.

Equatorial survivors attempting to escape via shuttle were shot down by automated systems.
Checkpoints set up at mountain passes interdicted the rest, killing them before they could
escape. The crackdown was absolute and unforgiving; there was not yet a cure.

A decade passed. The capital was moved to a large day-side contingency habitat where
hundreds of thousands of the immune lived and work in exile. By the second decade of exile,

7
the survivors began to overtax the contingency habitat, and the new Triumvirate came to a
decision: retake the habitable zone.

A small expedition was dispatched into the equatorial band in order to gather samples and
report back. The journey took around a year, and their findings were grim: the dead choked the
city, and the plague lingered dormant on every surface.

Acting on orders from the Triumvirate, the expedition triggered the capital’s nuclear reactors,
melting down block by block the infected city. Large sections of the habitable band — roughly
40% of the surface area — was lost, irradiated to kill the pandemic.

The surviving Ras Shamrans began a new project: survive, and in time, rebuild.

The Temperate Silence

In the wake of the plague years, the remaining communes unified once more around the
day-side contingency settlement. Regular expeditions ventured back into the habitable zone,
testing along the band for areas free of the plague or radiation.

Finding none, work continued on expanding the contingency settlement and its waystations
that allowed for safe transit across the day side of the world.

This pre-Armory period of Ras Shamra’s history is marked by a quiet expansion of habitats on
the day side of the world, expeditions into the equator, and building out a landing site for the
relief nearlighter en-route to the world.

At this time in Union’s history —the 3500’s— the Second Committee was at the peak of its
power, and would stand for another thousand years (realtime) before its overthrow by the Third
Committee in the 4500’s. When their relief ships arrived in orbit above Ras Shamra, they
brought an entire colonial mission with them, outnumbering the planetary population down
below.

The Trium, seeing no real option, ceded control of the world to Union, who landed and began
work to convert the equatorial band into a controlled system — an arcology, a combination of
natural and built environments that act in concert with one another to make a perfect,
self-contained system.

The Second Committee also deemed Ras Shamra an ideal site for a GMS special facility: a
massive installation to convert the world into one of GMS’s global foundries, one of only a
handful of such production facilities across the galaxy.

8
What followed was another long period of development, as the far field team sent by the Union
Science Bureau quickly developed a vaccine for the Ras Shamran Plague that allowed for
people to head back into non-irradiated areas of the equator free of cumbersome environment
suits. Construction of the arcology became the work of generations; construction of the
foundries and mines likewise.

The reconstruction era concluded with the completion of the first foundary’s initial test run: a
proof order of hardened environment suits made for GMS’s new line of long-range, all-theater
exploration equipment. Distributed as a flagship product by GMS — the GMS Hardsuit RS 1 —
these suits quickly became popular across the galaxy, and Ras Shamra’s engineers, foundries,
and designers were soon overwhelmed by requests for products, designs, and particular
adaptations.

The foundry bosses and colonial governor could see the writing on the wall: Ras Shamra’s
destiny was set. Once a loose collection of communes content to make a modest living in a
temperate band, the new Ras Shamra -- under the guidance of the Second Committee --
would be armorer to the galaxy.

The Guns of Ras Shamra

Out from the irradiated, plague years of the first half of the 3rd Union millennium, Ras Shamra
entered the 4the Union millennium a world united under the banner of industry. Great factories
and fabricators churned out more and more models of the Hardsuit, lines of weapons for
Union’s ships, flyers, and armored vehicles, weapons and armor for soldiers the galaxy over.

The day and night side of Ras Shamra grew thick with facilities and installations, research and
development campuses, uplift ports — the processing plants that drove the global arms
industry in accordance with the Second Committee’s planning.

GMS’s Special Facility by this point had grown to encompass roughly 60% of Ras Shamra’s
habitable band, slowly converting the temperate equatorial strip into a single unified arcology.
The irradiated zones they built around, containing them behind massive walls of thick concrete
and lead, themselves isolated from the rest of the arcology by cold moats of circulating water.

The Armories of Ras Shamra alone supplied fully 30% of all infantry, terrestrial armored vehicle,
aerial, and orbital weaponry used by the Second Committee’s Union Navy — following their
prescripts and planning, the GMS officers and governors in charge of the world had converted
it over the course of fifteen hundred years from a dying plague world to the galaxy’s single
largest supplier.

9
And yet, they were not done. Despite the ubiquity of their mark — their stamp, “Proven on Ras
Shamra” was hammered into every hard good made (or designed) on the planet (or on one of
its satellites) — Ras Shamra’s notoriety as Union’s armorer had not yet been marked. That
would come with the introduction of the mechanized chassis; specifically, with the introduction
of the ​Genghis​, and the colonial world, Hercynia.

Hercynia was a rich colonial prospect: carbon based flora, a stable and healthy atmosphere,
40% terrestrial with the rest given over to temperate saltwater oceans thick with life, it was as
perfect a candidate for colonization as one could ask for.

Save for a revelation that would shock the Second Committee: Hercynia was home to sapient,
sentient alien life. A communal race of sentient aviarthropodal beings, quickly coded as
Egregorians by the Union Science Bureau due to their unique hive-mind-esq
co-consciousness, spanned the world at a pre-industrial development level.

Humanity was not alone; despite what our fictions and dramas told us, we would not be
encountered by a fantastic, magical alien race. ​We​ were the ones to come down from on high
in glittering ships, to show off our wonders, and to begin the work of uplift. Work that would
prove unsustainable and, within a century, collapse under the weight of Egregorian politics and
human hubris.

The project on Hercynia failed. Union’s Second Committee, acting on counsel from IPS-N
logisticians and Ras Shamran strategists, to send in the marines and begin a campaign of
escalating war on the world. To supply the war effort, they drew from all of GMS’s Special
Project worlds — to ​end​ the war, they tapped Ras Shamra’s top engineers to design them a
weapon based off of their Hardsuit RS series, which by then was the premier powered armor
platform in the galaxy.

Codenamed GENGHIS, the project developed the first mass-designed military-role armored
mechanized chassis — the first mech — and began testing it in Ras Shamra’s day/night
proving grounds. The chassis, after a number of iterations, cleared the proving grounds within
optimal parameters and was shipped in bulk orders to the front.

The GENGHIS, due both to leaked combat footage and sanitized Second Committee
propaganda broadcasts, became both the face of the Hercynian Crisis and the face of Ras
Shamra. The mechanized chassis displayed its incredible combat power and competing firms,
GMS Special Projects, and fabricators began working on their own models, their own variants.

At the conclusion of the Hercynian Crisis and the beginning of the backlash on Cradle, Ras
Shamra continued its war posture, churning out chassis for the Second Committee’s home
guard. However, by the time the first non-prototype run of GENGHIS chassis and their variants
was completed and en-route to Cradle, the Second Committee had been dissolved, the
majority of their senior party members arrested and on trial for crimes against humanity and

10
nature. The shipment was re-routed and intercepted by a contingent of fleeing Second
Committee loyalists, and returned to Ras Shamra.

To fanfare and counter revolutionary fervor, the anthrochauvanists made landfall on Ras
Shamra, a world that remained loyal to the Second Committee through the length of the short
revolution. At their head was a party majordomo, John Creighton Harrison -- at the time the
most senior member of the Second Committee not in the nascent Third Committee’s custody.
Harrison was welcomed by Ras Shamra as the de-facto leader of a new resistance, and in a
ceremony at the base of his shuttle’s gangway was anointed Director-General of the Ras
Shamran Special Facility.

In the following days, Harrison declared Ras Shamra the true and legitimate seat of Union,
opened the world to any and all loyal party members seeking refuge, and forced out all
high-profile counter-chauv adherents and activists. Street violence erupted across the arcology
and throughout R&D facilities on the day and night side of the world as loyalists named names
and rooted out the revolutionaries among them.

Over the tumult, John Creighton Harrison announced that the Ras Shamran Special Facility
would no longer be managed by GMS. Instead, all facilities aimed at the production of any
good, service, product, or resource was to be organized under a single charter, under a single
name: Harrison Armory.

To solidify his absolute control over the newly named state, he took a new name: John
Creighton Harrison I, Director-General of Harrison Armory. He named himself, his loyal
followers from Cradle, and his most fervent supporters on Ras Shamra to the noble class of
Harrison Armory, and recruited from the pilots, soldiers, and police of Ras Shamra a corps of
royal guard, all mounted in the final production line of GENGHIS chassis.

Ras Shamra became a beacon for all anthrochauvanist and Second Committee loyalists, who
flocked to the world as the newly formed Third Committee struggled to secure control of
Cradle and all of Union’s bureaus. For years, a steady stream of loyalists arrived in Ras
Shamra, crowding its arcology and uplift ports as the Armory’s new bureaucrats worked to
process them into best-fit roles. The Armory’s armed forces, the Royal Legion, grew
exponentially, and the world’s fabricators burned night and day with the heat of production.

A mere handful of years after its establishment, the Armory’s legions prepared to retake Cradle
with Harrison I himself at their head. However, before the Armory fleet could launch, elements
of the Third Committee’s UIB that infiltrated Ras Shamra were able to get warning to Cradle.
Informed ahead of the attack, the Third Committee killed Ras Shamra’s local gate, isolating the
world and preventing anything but conventional relativistic travel. Unwilling to abandon his new
world so soon for the void of interstellar space, Harrison I called off the attack.

11
Instead, Harrison I turned back, to return once more to Ras Shamra, where in his absence his
nobility had begun working to fully unify the nominally unified world. Under their guidance, the
Home Legions put their GENGHIS chassis to work. All resistance was stamped out within the
decade.

Isolated from the rest of the galaxy by conventional travel, but connected via loyalists
everywhere, Harrison Armory sought its next great project.

It found it right next door, in a proximal colonial development system: the Interest.

The Interest was a hub of GMS Special Project world-factories and claim-stake colonial
settlements, eleven worlds of varying development level with a total population in the hundreds
of thousands. There were considered off-limits to annexation under the laws of the Second
Committee, officially properties under the protection of the Union Colonial Mission. No other
nation could make overtures to the Interest until they were judged of significant development
level by the UCM.

However, the Armory was not alone in their desire to annex the Interest. Another galactic
power had its finger to the wind, and picked this moment to make its move.

The Karrakin Trade Baronies, long hemmed in by the First and Second Committees, turned
their pendulous, ancient federation and its massed clone armies to the Interest. Here they saw
their prize: three fat GMS Special Project worlds, and eight fine worlds besides with all the
labor and potential value they could desire.

With great fanfare the Baronies launched their fleets, ignoring the pleadings of the newly
empowered Third Committee. What could the upstart revolutionaries do to them, with the
Union Navy in open civil war, the Colonial Mission dissolved, and blink gates going dark from
the outside in?

Ras Shamra stood alone before the old crown, numerically outmatched.

But they had something the Karrakins had yet to encounter: the mechanized chassis, and the
last of the GENGHIS-1 world-killers.

12
Fearkiller
The years of political turmoil and revolution in Cradle did not go unnoticed by the rest of the
galaxy. While most states and worlds could only observe and hold for a final decision, one
state had the will and power to attempt to affect a significant shift in galactic political polarity.

Some of the Karrakin Trade Barons saw in the fall of the Second Committee and the unification
struggles of the Third a chance to unify and claim sovereignty over their ancestral stellar
holdings — and maybe scoop up some new holdings in the process.

Under the rule of their then-leader, Prime Baron Degarrote Bem Karraka, the Baronies
collected their nobility and devised a plan: while making an overt diplomatic appeal to the Third
Committee, the Royal Navies would strike deep into the Interest, gathering up as many worlds
as they could before the Third Committee could stop them.

This would assure them a twofold victory: First, their diplomatic overtures would secure them
political favor and continued economic dominance under the Third Committee, while leaving
them free of the headache of administering the galaxy at large.

Second, the Interest had long been off-limits to the Baronies under treaties they signed with
the Second Committee. Taking the Interest would be, arguably, within their rights as the
Second Committee had been dissolved, and would be difficult-to-impossible for the Third to
contest materially — all the Baronies had to worry about was the loyalist remnants of the
Second Committee on Ras Shamra, a world inside the Interest.

So the Baronies gathered up their fleets, their infantry, and their armor, and began the long
burn out towards the Interest. Their first target was formerly a Ras Shamran contingency world,
now an early Harrison Armory holding: Creighton, a colony renamed after the Director General,
where Second Committee Cosmopolitans and refugee nobles came to retire.

Creighton was a small, verdant moon, the largest of a few dozen that orbited a massive gas
giant in the stellar neighborhood of Ptah’s Star — a ripe target for the Baronies to take and
hold as a beachhead into Interest space.

The Third Committee made diplomatic moves to try and stop the attack, but with their navy at
reduced strength and ground forces committed across Cradle, they could not make any
physical imposition beyond peacekeeping and, in time, refugee resettlement. Furthermore, the
Interest was close enough to the Baronies that the federation made no use of the Blink: all
exploitation could be managed with sublight travel.

Creighton fell with little resistance, as the ground forces didn’t amount to more than a militia
tasked with operating anti-aircraft guns and anti-orbital missile installations. After a six-hour

13
assault, the Baronic Warhost had its beachhead. From Creighton, they could rearm and
resupply their Warhost and begin their annexation campaign in earnest.

And begin that campaign they did. Within the first year, the Baronic Warhost had taken five of
the eleven populated worlds in the Interest. By this time, their Warhost was spread thin, so they
halted their advance and dug in: new levies and clones were needed, warships were in need of
resupply, and tribute already taken needed to be shipped back.

Ras Shamra remained a rock against which the Baronic Warhost broke: their attacks were
light, just scout ships skimming the world’s atmosphere and dropping small kinetics into the
ocean or the empty day or night side of the world, but it allowed both sides to test the other’s
ability.

Ras Shamra only needed to hold for Harrison I and his fleet to return. He did so in a thunderous
way, attacking not the outlying Baronic garrisons but their main beachhead at Creighton.

Abandoning his light and medium draft ships, Harrison I converted them instead into missiles,
driving them directly at the main corps of the Baronic fleet at near-​c ​speeds, their reactors
timed to complete their catastrophic meltdown in the middle of the Warhost.

Behind, Harrison I and a hundred thousand pilots in field-modified mechanized chassis — early
Saladin models — and GENGHIS-1 platforms rode RAMROD kinetic clusters into the rest of
the fleet, leaping off at the last moment to move in and board any Baronic ship that remained.
Behind all this, Harrison I’s capital ships drove petajoule kinetic after petajoule kinetic into
Creighton’s surface, shattering the moon under massive impact and tectonic destruction.

The entirety of the Baronic Warhost’s senior command, including the Prime Baron Degarrote
Ben Karraka and his first heir, were killed in the attack. Three other major houses were
beheaded in the attack: the houses of Stone, Glass, and Smoke.

Harrison I sacrificed his namesake world to save his new throne. The rest of the Interest War
played out quickly, with the surviving Baronic forces surrendering to Harrison’s legions. Most
took Harrison’s offer of conversion, swearing to uphold his throne and crown — to them, he
was simply another ruler.

After suffering such a dramatic defeat, the Baronic Warhost surrendered, and the Interest War
concluded.

Once more, and for the final time, Harrison I returned to Ras Shamra. This time he descended
from his shuttle armored in his own Saladin, to a capital untouched by war, a population of
millions thronging the main concourse of the arcology as Harrison I, his captured Barons, and
his victorious legions marched on parade. The population chanted his name, the call sign
painted on the side of his Saladin, the hero’s title broadcast throughout the Interest worlds:

14