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Origins
How a dying Earth handed itself to the megacorps, and how their boardrooms carried humanity into the Black — from the Corporate Belt to life in the Aftermath.
Contents
- Nemesis History: The Rise of Corporate Interstellar Civilization — From Earth to the Corporate Belt (2050–2250)
- From the Crash to the Corporate Collective (2251–2300)
- The Golden Egg and the Frontier Boom (2300–2350)
- The Revolt and the Xenonid Outbreak (2350–2400)
- The New Normal: Factions and Infestation (2400–2450)
- The Horror Becomes Normal: Life in the Aftermath (2450–2500)
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Nemesis History: The Rise of Corporate Interstellar Civilization — From Earth to the Corporate Belt (2050–2250)
By the 2080s, Earth was choking. Decades of economic collapse and resource scarcity had triggered famine, supply chain failures, and resource wars that governments could no longer control. The old nation-states fractured under debt and chaos. In their place rose the megacorps — resource giants, tech conglomerates, and logistics empires that had spent generations buying influence.
By the 2120s the United Earth Council was a rubber stamp. Real power sat in corporate boardrooms. Off-world rush began not as exploration, but as asset acquisition. Luna became the property of Helios Dynamics, its helium-3 mines feeding fusion reactors on Earth. Mars, with its rare metals and usable soil, was claimed by the Ares Combine in the 2150s. Their charter granted them full planetary sovereignty in exchange for shipping ore and minerals to the home world.
The next thirty years were a pure corporate gold rush. Smaller firms scrambled for asteroids and moons. Ceres went to the highest bidder — Vanguard Extraction. Eros became a fueling depot run by the Nakajima Group. Venus got atmospheric processing stations from three competing firms racing to crack the hellish clouds. Every rock with ice or metal carried a corporate flag.
Tensions boiled over in the Corporate Resource Wars of the 2190s. Three massive conglomerates fought proxy battles across the Belt. Thousands died in the dark, their bodies left spinning in vacuum as “operational losses.” The fighting only ended when the megacorps realized mutual destruction was bad for quarterly earnings. In 2203 they formed the Sol Corporate Concord — a cartel that carved up the system like a boardroom pie. Earth kept Luna and the inner system, Ares Combine kept Mars, and the Belt was declared open territory for any licensed operator.
Then came an innovative breakthrough. In 2228, a brilliant engineer named Solomon Agarus, working under contract for Ares Combine, cracked continuous-thrust fusion. His drive turned months-long hauls into weeks. The Concord tried to lock it down, but Agarus’s research had already leaked. Within two years every major corp had the tech.
The sub-light drive supercharged the corporatocracy. Mining fleets could now chase profitable rocks across the entire system. The Belt exploded with stations, refineries, and company towns. Workers signed “lifetime contracts” for oxygen, water, and a bunk. Belter crews became company property in everything but name. You were born on a Vanguard rock, you died on a Vanguard rock, and every breath in between came out of your paycheck.
The real power players settled into an uneasy balance. Ares Combine dominated Mars and became the system’s breadbasket. Helios Dynamics controlled Earth’s orbit and Luna, feeding the homeworld’s appetite for energy. The Belt was sliced up between a dozen mid-tier corps — Vanguard, Nakajima, Red Star Logistics, and others — each running their own stations, their own security forces, and their own rules.
By 2245 the Sol Corporate Concord had become the only government that mattered. Earth’s nations were relics, their flags replaced by corporate logos. Every ship carried a transponder that told the Concord exactly who owned it. Every station paid protection fees to whichever corp claimed that sector. Step out of line and your license got revoked, your crew blacklisted, and your assets seized.
Yet cracks were showing. On the outer Belt, smaller independent crews began forming loose alliances, smuggling water, spare parts, and sometimes people between corporate territories. They called themselves “free haulers,” but the megacorps labeled them pirates. These crews became legends in the dark — tight-knit families who ran black-market routes, patched together ancient ships, and lived by their own code. Some hauled contraband for rival corps; others smuggled desperate workers out of failing stations. They formed hidden waystations in unclaimed rocks and engaged in skirmishes within the shipping lanes. The free haulers were a constant thorn in the Concord's side, a reminder that not every soul was willing to live and die on a corporate ledger.
A dangerous development was on Mars itself. After decades of terraforming, the Ares Combine’s own employees started to see Mars as theirs, not the corporation’s. Whispers of “Martian independence” spread through the domes. Corporate security cracked down hard, but the idea refused to die.
Meanwhile, deep in the Belt, the first corporate black sites began appearing — secret stations running experiments with genetic mods, cybertech, and things no boardroom would ever admit to on paper. Rumors said some corps were already testing prototypes for black-budget military tech.
By 2250, Sol wasn’t a system of nations anymore. It was a machine built for profit, oiled with blood and vacuum. The corporations ruled everything, yet their grip was slipping in ways none of their spreadsheets could predict.
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From the Crash to the Corporate Collective (2251–2300)
In 2251, everything changed.
A colossal alien vessel tore out of subspace and smashed into a dense asteroid cluster in the Belt. Before most corporations could even react, The Company†, originally a military contractor, had already locked the site down with overwhelming force. Their gunships and elite security teams formed an impenetrable blockade while the rest of Sol screamed for access.
What followed was eighteen brutal months of corporate warfare. Proxy fleets clashed across the Belt, stations were seized and retaken in bloody boarding actions, and thousands of workers died as “operational losses.” Despite the chaos, no corporation could break The Company†’s iron grip on the wreck. The fighting nearly bankrupted half the system.
The Company†, with overwhelming martial capabilities had almost no research division, moved with cold precision. While the wars raged around them, they were determined not to repeat the mistake of the Agarus Drive being leaked to their competitors. They quietly isolated the single piece of technology they would never relinquish: the Golden Egg — the fused power source and subspace navigation core. Only once they had absolute control over that black-boxed module did The Company† offer to auction off access to the rest of the vessel.
In 2259, the ten most powerful companies formally created the CC10 — the Corporate Collective. It wasn’t out of trust. The ten biggest kept each other in check, knowing that lesser companies were always watching for any slip, ready to seize market share and force their way into the cartel. Historians cite The Company†’s auction of the wreck as its first true act of corporate generosity — proof that sharing alien tech benefited every major player. Profits soared across the entire system.
In 2274 the first successful subspace jump occurred — a short hop from Jupiter to Saturn that took seventeen minutes instead of seventeen weeks. The CC10 immediately classified the drive itself, but allowed a controlled demonstration of the results. A small taskforce of corporate observers was permitted to witness the jump, proving the technology worked. While every major corporation now understood that interstellar travel was possible, only The Company† possessed the actual drive technology.
By 2298, the first true interstellar expedition left the system. A small flotilla of heavily armed research ships, escorted by FourthTM cruisers, jumped toward Proxima Centauri, in the Beith Octant. When they returned fourteen months later with samples of an alien biosphere, every boardroom in Sol understood the next gold rush had begun.
The corporatocracy that had ruled the solar system for two centuries was no longer enough. The age of interstellar corporate empires had arrived.
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The Golden Egg and the Frontier Boom (2300–2350)
By 2305, The Company† had perfected its two greatest secrets: subspace communication and true interstellar travel. At the heart of every jump-capable ship sat the Golden Egg — a black-boxed module containing the power source and navigation core. The Company† deliberately engineered it so any attempt to reverse-engineer the device would trigger total destruction.
By now the Agarus Drive had become so commonplace it was treated like any other engine — something every mechanic in the Belt could service without a second thought. The real power was in what only The Company† controlled.
To mass-produce these ships, The Company† partnered with automated-station specialists and began churning out vessels at an astonishing rate. A new Nemesis-class starship rolled off the lines nearly every week. They were cheap, versatile, and auctioned to anyone who wanted to traverse the stars. Dozens of subsidiaries would then install their speciality components - hibernation chambers, cockpits, science labs, the possibilities were massive. The Belt was strip-mined to feed this frenzy.
The CC10 adapted. Understanding that a content workforce was more productive than a desperate one, the Collective dramatically improved corporate living standards. Workers celebrated their first profit-sharing bonuses and mandatory planet-side leave. Station born families got to spend weeks breathing fresh air and enjoying real sunrises. Generational contracts not only meant a breadwinner could provide, but their children were guaranteed to also thrive. The brutal “lifetime contracts” of the early Belt slowly gave way to calculated corporate benevolence.
By 2350 the transformation was complete. Humanity had spread from one struggling solar system into nine — the Core plus the eight new systems called the Octants. The Company†’s iron grip on the Golden Egg ensured that every jump-capable ship still paid them tribute. The CC10 wrote the laws, the FourthTM kept the peace, and the frontier kept expanding.
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The Revolt and the Xenonid Outbreak (2350–2400)
The frontier was never meant to be easy, but the speed of expansion made it deadly.
Terraforming efforts failed as often as they succeeded. Entire colonies went dark for years at a time. Supply lines snapped. People who had grown up with Core System comforts found themselves fighting for every breath of air, every liter of water. Costly mistakes piled up.
Frustration turned to fury. In 2362 a widespread revolt erupted across the Octant. Frontier colonists, feeling abandoned and lied to, rose up against the Corporate Collective. They called themselves the Free Belt Alliance. For six years they fought a brutal guerrilla war, ambushing corporate convoys and seizing remote stations.
The war’s turning point came in 2368. The Free Belt Alliance launched a daring surprise attack on what they believed was simply The Company†’s main corporate headquarters — a massive central station that housed both the senior leadership and the core AI network.
What the rebels didn’t know was that this single station had become the central nervous system for The Company†’s entire automated production network. Every Nemesis-class shipyard across the galaxy was slaved to this one hub.
When the rebels destroyed the station, they wiped out The Company†’s leadership and shattered the central AI in one blow. With no further instructions or authorization coming from the core, every automated production facility interpreted the total loss of contact as a catastrophic security breach. The entire network triggered its kill-switch and self-destructed.
The rebels had not just decapitated The Company† — they had accidentally destroyed the only source of new Nemesis-class ships in existence. Over time and propaganda, The Company†s original name vanished from records. The Company† became something closer to myth. Belt workers still spoke its name in low tones, half in reverence, half in disdain.
The CC10 ultimately crushed the revolt, but the victory tasted like ash. The Collective tightened its grip and improved conditions for those who remained, yet the damage was done. The frontier was now a fractured, angry place.
Then came the true horror.
In the Beith Octant, a routine terraforming operation on a lush but uncharted world went catastrophically wrong. The survey teams accidentally awakened something ancient. The creatures the board logs simply labeled Xenonids had been dormant in the planet’s ecosystem. Human activity shattered that dormancy.
Within months the entire colony was overrun. The Xenonids spread like a virus. They infested space stations, stowed away on supply shuttles, and slipped aboard Nemesis ships. By 2381 confirmed sightings had been reported in three different Octants. Entire stations went silent. Colonies stopped transmitting. Rescue teams sent to investigate never returned.
The CC10 tried to contain the outbreak with brutal quarantines and orbital strikes, but it was too late. The Xenonids adapted. They learned. They evolved. And every time a Nemesis ship jumped, it risked carrying the infection to another system.
By 2400 the frontier had become something else entirely. Some worlds still thrived — new asteroid bases, successful terraforming projects, self-sufficient stations — but they were islands of light in a growing sea of darkness. The horror had arrived, and it was spreading.
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The New Normal: Factions and Infestation (2400–2450)
By 2400, the destruction of The Company†’s production network had left humanity with a finite fleet of Nemesis-class ships. Every lost vessel was irreplaceable. Against this backdrop, four major powers emerged to shape the fractured galaxy.
The CC10 retained control of interstellar trade. With so few ships remaining, they became brutally efficient logisticians — their priority was no longer keeping employees comfortable, but keeping them alive.
The IPA — Independent Planet Association — was created as a means to avoid repeating history like the Free Belt Alliance revolt or the Martian independence. Having learned the hard way how dangerous it was to leave frontier colonies with no legal path to independence, the CC10 established the IPA as a formal mechanism.
Once a planet proved it could sustain itself without corporate support, it was granted the legal right to govern independently. This gave successful colonies a peaceful way to break away, turning potential rebels into legitimate independent governments and preventing future violent uprisings.
The SUBs (and Synners) — Syndicate of Unincorporated Businesses — grew out of the old free hauler networks. What began as loose alliances of independent crews smuggling goods and people between corporate territories evolved into a sprawling web of small operators. The CC10 quietly allowed the Synners to exist, understanding they filled countless gaps the megacorps could not. In response, the CC10 developed the Aftermath Logistics Network, using these small operators to handle local runs and distribution while still maintaining overall control of interstellar trade.
The FourthTM, originally created as The Company† 's military arm, split into two distinct branches. One remained with the CC10 as the human-facing police and enforcement arm. The second was completely separated and restructured into the N.A.C.S.S. — Naval and Colonial Security Service — an autonomous military force tasked solely with confronting alien threats.
Because infestations spread with terrifying speed, there was no time for boardroom votes or CC10 approval. After the Xenonids reached Earth twice and were only barely repelled both times, the lesson became brutally clear: hesitation kills. The Collective therefore granted the N.A.C.S.S. total operational authority with zero oversight. If any colony or station showed confirmed signs of Xenonid activity, N.A.C.S.S. commanders could order immediate orbital strikes or glass entire settlements without waiting for permission.
Their motto was simple, and final: “Twice is enough.” The terrifying simplicity and efficiency of this, ships, stations, and planets adapted to new daily infestation protocols, spore scans, and purge procedures became part of everyday life across the systems.
With the frontier now locked in a desperate fight for survival, staying informed could mean the difference between life and death. A new local network was created so ships and stations could easily exchange large amounts of data when they came within range. Every ship carried a Motherbox, and every major station housed a Father Node.
To bridge the gap between these machines and human crews, the CC10 introduced the KIND — Kindred Interface Node Devices. These androids served as living translators, turning cold system data into plain language and handling manual tasks. Over time, they developed distinct personalities, and any crew that could afford one quickly came to treat their KIND as a trusted and valued member of the crew.
This was also the age of the Aftermath Shuttle. These tough sub-light crafts became the lifeblood of the settled galaxy. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of them swarmed around every planet and station. When a Nemesis-class vessel jumped into a system, it didn’t stop at every world. It arrived at a central hub and was immediately descended upon by a flock of Aftermath Shuttles like hungry birds.
These shuttles did everything. They hauled cargo, delivered colonists, transported emergency supplies, and moved critical personnel. Aftermath crews became the galaxy’s ultimate troubleshooters.
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The Horror Becomes Normal: Life in the Aftermath (2450–2500)
The Xenonids completely overran the Beith Octant. The entire sector was declared off-limits without N.A.C.S.S. permit. Travel through it became a death sentence. Despite N.A.C.S.S.’s brutal containment efforts, the creatures continued to spread.
Worse, human mistakes created new nightmares.
On one frontier world, human settlers accidentally introduced Xenonids to a native mammalian nocturnal predator species. The local creatures absorbed Xenonid DNA and transformed into the Night Stalkers — faster, smarter, and just as vicious. On another planet, the same tragedy occurred with a rapid-molting reptilian ambush predator, birthing the Prime Bloods. Both new races now spread through the same parasitic method as the Xenonids.
Humanity had not only failed to contain one monster — it had accidentally created two more.
While humans were causing their own problems, new intruders continued to emerge. The Carnomorphs were grotesque, zombie-like horrors that devoured corpses and absorbed their biomass to grow stronger and more dangerous. The Chytrids were sentient fungal growths that spread like a plague, turning entire decks into grotesque, pulsating gardens of death. The Voidseeders were invisible psychic predators that could drive an entire crew to paranoia, terror, and self-destruction long before any crew member ever physically saw them.
Every station and ship drilled constantly. “Twice is enough” was no longer a warning — it was law. Infestation drills were as common as fire drills. Entire sections of stations were regularly vented into space at the first sign of trouble. No one argued. No one hesitated.
By 2450 the galaxy had settled into a grim new equilibrium. Ships were precious. Planets lived in constant fear. N.A.C.S.S. patrols were both hated and desperately needed. The CC10 counted every Nemesis subspace jump like it was their last.
Somewhere in the dark, the intruders continued to grow, adapt, and wait… and who knows what else might still be out there. Humanity had learned to live with Monsters – not by defeating them, by surviving them.
Yet on the little Aftermath shuttles that still kept the galaxy running, life went on. A crew would pour some recycled coffee, sit down at the console, lose a game of cards, and quietly remind themselves of the only rule that mattered:
“If I keep providing, my ship keeps flying.”