Thirty-eight years after the Accord, the Frontier is at war with itself. Frontier Command calls it, without irony, the Long War.
The powers fight over what the Frontier has always fought over: resources. Mineral deposits and rare ore veins in the asteroid fields. Helium-3 vents on the gas giants. Crystal formations on the ice worlds, which the Technocrat Union quietly suspects are the fossilised remains of the lattice-cities of a harvested precursor race. And above all antimatter, the fuel of dreadnoughts and warp gates, which is rare, volatile and worth killing for.
Commanders build fortified bases around a command Bridge, raise fleets, and fight for sectors in a war where alliances last exactly as long as they are useful. Ion storms, gravity anomalies and meteor showers tear through contested systems. Convoys run the lanes, and raiders run after them. When an excavation crew breaks into a precursor vault, an artifact is unearthed, and every power within jump range comes to take it.
And at the edge of every map, the Tide waits. Its Harvester swarms strip isolated mining operations. Its Guardians coil around the precursor sites, as if they were keeping something in, or keeping something for later. On worlds that were thought to be clear, the ground splits open and the Hive spawns from beneath. Frontier Command rates every sighting on a single scale, from Low to Apocalyptic. The ratings have been rising for six years.
“You will spend most of your career fighting other humans. Try to remember that you have more in common with them than with the thing on the other side of the Rim.”
— Fleet Admiral Selene Voss, "The Long War" briefing