The Battle of Titan

After The Purge it took years for those who lost their homes and families to find a place to put down roots and start building new lives. It was a long time in teh making, but eventually these people etablished a true community based in the asteroid belt.

Being outcasts meant they could be harrassed without consequence or recourse by Conglomerate troops and personnel, so these outcasts, known as dissidents, did everythign they could to keep themselves from being found. They built their homes in asteroids and carefully timed their comings and goings so as to avoid detection by the military power of The Conglomerate. Over the course of scores of years, these people built new lives, new families, and discovered new and inovative ways of doing things for themselves. They learned to live in adversity and produce everything they needed inside their own community.

The innovations and independant spirit that this new life fostered was even attractive to some, drawing more people out of the Conglomerate skyscrapers and archologies to a life of potential hardship, all in the name of making something of themselves. As is wont to happen within the human condition, innovations compiled and new ideas took root. Before long, the dissidents had banded together to form larger communities and, eventually, an entire new ‘city’ of sorts took shape in teh form of several asteroids that had been tunneled through, strapped together and turned into a clandestine mega-city of its own.

Still, it was only a matter of time before they were noticed. The dissidents’ need to fend for themselves caused them to develop many new technologies that the Conglomerate had no need to create, but could find many uses for. Additionally, the dissidents’ manufacturing facilities and resource collection methods allowed them efficiencies that the Conglomerate could not replicate even with robotic labor forces and their best minds on teh problems. This created an unsteady symbiotic relationship between the two parties where the Conglomerate would allow a certain amount of goods to be smuggled out of their facilities in exchange for deliveries of raw materials, new technologies, and sub-components that they could produce themselves as efficiently as the dissidents did.

However, being a dissident meant a person had no rights, or standing. Essentially they were non-entities and could be treated with compete disregard by Conglomerate citizens. It was the military, in particular, that took special advantage of this fact. Using it to harry dissident ships and facilities, steal goods, hurt and take advantage of people, and generally do and take whatever they wanted.

Over time, the dissidents began to fight back. It was mostly just a few outspoken individuals who took matters into their own hands, turning to piracy and preying upon Conglomerate ships, returning in kind the same treatments they had been given. This caused immidiate excallation by Conglomerate forces and before long, there were open skirmishes happening all over the Sol system. As tensions mounted and hostilities showed no signs of lessening, dissident guerrillas began organizing into true fighting forces, seeking out and attacking Conglomerate military vessels, ambushing civilian transports and cargo vessels and even, occasionally, turning their ire upon civilian population centers.

Eventually, the only possible outcome of all of these activities came to pass. A Conglomerate military patrol came across a dissident gas mining operation on Titan and set about harrassing and threatening them. The dissidents made a call for help and one of the larger and more organized dissident fighting forces happened to be in Saturn orbit to receive the panicked shout. Within an hour, the dissidents were on top of the Conglomerate forces, who also called for help, drawing in all nearby military forces. Less than a day later, a full scale war had broken out, with forces pouring in from all over the system to bolster both sides with regular reinforcements.

The Battle of Titan raged for several days before the fighting slowed to a crawl, then petered out entirely. All told, more than 250,000 souls were consumed in that blaze of hatred and it left both sides forever scarred, but finally willing to come to more formal diplomatic relations with the establishment of The Astraeus Accord.

Interestingly enough, whenever hostilities break our between Conglomerate and Dissident forces, even to this day, both sides use the battle cry, “remember Titan.”