Lunar Free State

"War" is a dirty word on Ragnarok. For the past hundred years, the planet's human inhabitants have been trying to rebuild their civilization after a self-inflicted nuclear holocaust. The event-which they call the "Great Destruction"-was so traumatic they've destroyed all the records and refuse to talk about it, other than to swear it will never ever happen again. At least, that's what they tell the Lunar Free State's contact team. Unfortunately, not all the inhabitants agree on what that peaceful society should look like, and their disagreement has reached the level of an armed conflict between two groups, one of which is supported by a covert ops team from the Confederated Nations of Earth. The locals may not be willing to call it a war… but the LFS ends up in the middle of it, just the same. When a Confed Navy task force arrives to take over the planet, the LFS is forced to respond, taking the war that was never supposed to happen to the interstellar level.

What do you do when one of your deep space survey ships discovers a fertile, Earth-like planet that isn't currently occupied by humans or any other intelligent species? If you're the Lunar Free State, you make plans to put a colony there-and try to keep it secret so the Confederated Nations of Earth don't do the same. Unfortunately, though, the secret gets out, and the CNE scrambles to launch their own colony project, starting a race by both nations to make their claim to the planet. But when exobiologist Kim Jin Li discovers that the planet does, in fact, have native intelligent life-a race of feline predators that communicate telepathically-the discovery sets up a confrontation between LFS and CNE warships in orbit, and the LFS Marines and CNE Peacekeepers on the ground. Is this the beginning of the long-expected final war between the Lunar Free State and the Confederated Nations of Earth?

The Confederated Nations of Earth and the Lunar Free State have fought each other for decades in the Sol system and out among the stars. They've never had an open declaration of war, but there have been battles in space at Odin, Sacagawea, and Rothstein's star. Lunar Marines have clashed with Confed Peacekeepers on Ragnarok and Xanadu. When the British battlecruiser Prince of Wales suddenly shows up at Ragnarok, the LFS and CNE realize there's a new player in the game-not just the Brits, but a consortium of seven previously unaligned Earth nations who are making their presence felt at Xanadu as well. The two major powers adopt a wait-and-see policy toward the newcomers, but a few CNE operatives don't get the word. Will the consortium upset the balance of power between the Moonies and Confeds, or will they simply get caught in the grinder between the two? Time will tell, but for the moment, it's a three player game.