Planetary Relations

The people of Glace and Darse have cooperated for as long as they've known each other. It started before they even achieved spaceflight, when astronomers were just excited to have found proof of alien life. The first radio signals Darse received were old broadcasts from Earth. Then there was this thing called "television". Darsites were masters of electricity. When the broadcasts had been deciphered and translated, efforts were made to respond in kind using the common language of the broadcasts, English. The response wouldn't reach Earth for decades, but it caught the attention of a much closer neighbour.

The powerful local signal was enough to be picked up by metal sheets on Glace and produce a sound. The Glacians were thus made aware that they were not the sole inhabitants of the universe. They too learned this new "radio language" called English. It didn't take long to figure out how to create radio transmitters, and technology as well as culture soon flourished thanks to the open exchange of information with Darse.

With the rich metal resources of Glace, they were the ones that built the first space ship, helped along by the technical minds of Darse. Glacians knew metalworking, but Darse knew electricity and therefore electronics and technology. Glacians helped advance Darsite technology by pointing out more efficient metals to use and how to form the few metals they had on the inhabited moon.

It was a momentous day when the two peoples finally met in person, heralding in a new era of coexistence. But it was not to last, because only a few years later a third race of this shared system revealed itself. Isolated by the dense field of asteroids that surrounded them, the people of Nean had been able to listen in on the reflected and garbled communications of the Glace-Darse alliance, but not respond. They grew to hate their privileged neighbours, and that hate festered even as they used the information they had intercepted to design their own ships.

And when they stepped out of the shadows, they did so with a vengeance. Though their ships were a clumsy imitation of those built on Glace and Darse, the Neanderthals were armed and the others were not. They had destroyed scores of vessels by the time anyone knew what was happening, and captured dozens more before disappearing back into their belt.

That marked the start of the three-species war. Darsites soon created weapons of their own, but Glace didn't have the technology to manufacture them en masse. Add the fact that the blue planet is closer to Nean, and it's obvious why that was the Neanderthals' preferred target. Not that they didn't attack Darse too, but they always lost more than they gained when they did so. Rocket fuel is expensive.

The Darsites could have abandoned their alliance and put everything into defence to prevent any more of their own from being kidnapped to Nean, but instead they grew fiercely protective of their Glacian friends. They launched themselves into the fight, always coming to Glace's aid and slowly pushing the Neanderthals back between their asteroids.

That's when the Humans arrived. The planetary system was about to meet the speakers of the radio language.