Jack of Harts

Historical dramas say that the Western Alliance assembled at Sunnydale and then breached the Hyades Cluster. They say we fought the Chinese and their Shang allies to exhaustion and forced their complete surrender. They are right, but they are incomplete. Rarely do they address what the New England Federation truly did to make the Shang stand down. In a war between civilizations, there are times when no fleet or army can bring an end to the fighting. There is no end to it until the will of one or another is broken. The Great Families of New England had the will to do whatever it took to end the threat to their way of life. It will be up to future generations to decide if what they did was right or wrong, but those of us who lived through it experienced only relief that it ended a two decade-old war and brought peace to our corner of the galaxy.

For every world the Shang bombarded into new dark or ice ages, the New England Federation answered with a dozen secret fabrication plants. Some resided on the outskirts of populated systems, while others operated in truly dark systems where no human lived. Even Post War accounting cannot calculate exactly how many freighters, destroyers, smaller escorts, or fighters they built. The Shang found and destroyed too many of those secret bases for a full accounting to ever be completed. We do not even know how many secret factories existed, since many launched from systems seeking to save as many of their people as possible while Shang bombardment fleets smashed their planets into rubble or worse. The Shang thought they could beat the Federation by hammering it until it broke. They were wrong, and they paid for it.

The Great Families pushed through numerous wartime emergency measures to streamline their economy and push their population towards greater productivity. In just one change, the social credit earned by helping build the new Victory Ships or volunteering to fight could be passed on to family. They even sent recruiters to Rikers Planet in the New New York system to look for those willing to improve their social credit by serving against the alien threat. It may have been a hive of scum and villainy, but the Great Families would go to any effort to protect their way of life. They even volunteered many of their best and brightest, in grand public ceremonies of course. These and other measures made the New England Federation’s contribution to The War Effort the single greatest economic and manufacturing drive in the history of Earthborn humanity.