Barron was a bit of an amateur historian, and he indulged his hobby whenever possible. He tended to spend his free time prowling the data systems of planets he visited, searching for rare histories and memoirs he’d never seen before…like the one on the screen now. He’d downloaded the massive file before Dauntless had deployed to the Union border, intending to read it during the deployment. But it was a heavy, academic work, not an easy read, and he’d found himself too on edge to make much progress. He’d had trouble concentrating on the thick wording and massive lists of statistics, at least with the threat of Union attack weighing on him every moment.

That is something I plan to correct here on Archellia. I should have plenty of time to polish this off here.

The text was yet another account of the Confederation-Union conflicts, but it had some perspectives he’d never seen in any other work, and he found it thought-provoking, at least from what little he’d read. He wasn’t sure he’d agree with the author on many of his conclusions, but he was certain they’d be worth analyzing.

Our lives, at least as we know them, depend on finding a way to defeat the Union. If the Confederation is conquered by the Union, a hundred worlds and billions of free people—more or less free, at least—will fall into slavery…

Barron had his criticisms with the Confederation government, with the corruption and the deceit of its politicians. But he had seen the intel reports from the Union, and they had awakened him to how much of a nightmare government could become. The standard of living in the Union was appalling, at least by Confederation standards, and most of the people lived at bare sustenance levels, in constant fear of the authorities, while the masters, the ministers and commissars and party officials, lived lives of obscene luxury. He knew the Confederation had lost millions of people in the wars with the Union, but he was sure of one thing. None of them had died in vain. The Confederation was a spark of light in the post-Cataclysm universe, and even if that illumination sometimes appeared dim and faltering, it was vastly preferable to any of the alternatives.

The first conflict between the powers was still called the War of Shame, and it had cost the Confederation ten border systems, a swath of planets still called the Lost Worlds…and all still claimed by the Confederation, despite three generations of inhabitants born under Union rule.