The United Planets Federation
An interstellar federation approximately 10,000 years old, made up of humans and multiple alien races. Before the Federation, sustained inter-species conflict was ongoing. Peace became possible only after the Vaeli invented universal translation.
The Federation's core principle is self-determination: civilisations are left to succeed or fail on their own terms. Intervention requires overwhelming evidence of an extinction-level threat. The threshold is deliberately high; lower thresholds would produce more interventions, more resentment, and more conflict.
Earth received an exception on the grounds of its incalculable cultural and scientific value as the progenitor world for both humanity and the Chelva.
An observation post watched Earth for approximately 381 years before the invasion. The decision to invade was made by the UPF Military and Civilian Council on the recommendation of Lead Analyst Augur Taveth ka Del'an.
The Federation currently has a Proconsul on Earth and is transferring technology to New Zealand as the first step in a broader programme.
The Federation is also at war, and has been for generations. It fights the Agglomerate on the far side of its own systems in a conflict it calls the Endless War. The force sent to Earth was the 16th UPF expeditionary force, code named Quasar Force, under Exarch Canidilla.
The Invasion of Earth
Earth first saw the Federation as a fleet at Mars: a mothership roughly ten kilometres long and half that in height and width, surrounded by twenty other ships, ten of about four kilometres and ten of about one. Machines were attached to Phobos and were shifting its orbit, on a track that would bring the moon to rest above Olympus Mons. The fleet moved through the solar system impossibly fast and with no visible thrust, and it did not communicate.
The first UPF face Earth saw belonged to Exarch Canidilla, fleet commander of Quasar Force, authorised to assume governance of Earth under UPF Council order XG3459865. A middle-aged human woman in uniform, green eyes, a smattering of freckles, a stern mouth. She was undeniably human, which was the larger shock.
Her terms were simple. Nations were to cede control: lay down all arms, hand over nuclear launch codes, prepare for UPF governance. Those that ceded at the request of their citizens would benefit from Federation technology. Those that refused would be taken by force. Earth was given seven days.
One nation held a digital referendum and returned 94.42 per cent in favour of ceding. No other nation followed it. The UPF then took control of Earth's internet infrastructure, shutting down social media and leaving only sites carrying factual news and information.
The mothership took station at the Moon-Earth Lagrange point and a dozen of the larger ships entered orbit, half of them above the United States. Canidilla appeared a second time on every screen on the planet: hostilities were to cease, armed forces were to return to the borders they held on 1 January 2014, and any use of nuclear or biological weapons would be met with overwhelming force. The United States was given twelve hours to cede or be disarmed. Its President promised a rain of fire instead. A set of secret orbital missiles fired, stopped in clear space, and self-destructed.
Then the drop. Phones across Florida caught thousands of fiery streaks falling from orbit.
The First-in Drop
Sealed pods fired from orbit into unsecured ground, with no support below. It is the most lethal phase of any Federation deployment, carrying an average mortality of thirty per cent.
The Cape Canaveral drop was projected at seventeen per cent, lower than average because of Earth's technical inferiority, and the after action reports put it at nineteen. Most of those deaths were caused by the drop itself rather than by anyone shooting. Roughly ten thousand people came out of orbit over Florida that night.
The failure modes are known and listed without drama: sensor failure leaving the one-shot grav chute unfired, so the pod cannonballs into the ground; landing in deep water; being shot down; burning up on entry.
Drops are made in rings, because it is not possible to plot an exact landing point. The outer ring goes furthest out and first, behind the enemy's lines, to destroy, disrupt and disable military, communications and physical infrastructure. It is mostly scout armour with assault and heavy support, and it is the most dangerous place to be. The middle ring holds the line, captures and holds ground, and secures the perimeter, and this is where the fighting is most intense. The inner ring drops last and secures the landing zone, the bridgehead.
Calan's carrier was the UPF Interstellar Lightning Rod, which slipped into the upper atmosphere to launch. That option is not usually available, since a carrier that low can be shot down, and it makes the drop considerably less uncomfortable and less risky.
Earth
The progenitor world for both humanity and the Chelva, and the cultural and scientific heart of the Federation even before formal membership.
By 2026, Earth faced converging catastrophes: runaway climate change on track for biosphere collapse by end of century; a Russian war of territorial aggression against Ukraine in its fourth year; US bombing of Iran, which created a nuclear target; and the near-total collapse of the rules-based international order that had briefly stabilised after the Second World War.
The UPF modelled the combined probability of complete biosphere destruction at 99.5%. Deaths from war, terrorism, and conflict before the invasion ran at approximately 657 per day; global homicide added approximately 440,000 per year.
Since the invasion and cession of sovereignty by most nations, deaths from armed conflict have dropped to near zero.
Sofiya Moroz
Ukrainian war journalist and documentary-maker. She negotiated three conditions before accepting the project: access to anyone she wanted to interview; filming in Kyiv; and full editorial control. The UPF agreed to all three.
Young for the weight she carries. A gold cross at her throat she sometimes reaches for and sometimes stops herself reaching for. Stillness under pressure. Short questions. Comfortable with silence. She challenged every pillar of the doctrine across the first interview and landed no blow that dislodged any of it.
Kyiv is not a neutral choice. Something happened during the war. The full cost of it she has not yet named.
In Episode 02 she discloses one thing about her own life, in voice-over and unelaborated: "People have told me they loved me using many more words than that." She is read twice by her subject, and the only question he asks her in four hours is one she does not answer. Through the interview she reaches for the cross and takes her hand away. In the last scene she reaches for it and leaves it there.
She is also visibly editing. She is asked to keep two contradictory answers in, and does. She finds footage nobody flagged and keeps it. She says she has cut the episode four times.
Augur Taveth ka Del'an
Lead Analyst at the UPF observation post UPSS X3750, which has monitored Earth from a repurposed asteroid in Earth's Trojan points since 1645. He recommended the invasion to the UPF Military and Civilian Council after thirteen years of direct observation.
A Deilian: two metres tall, built for lower gravity than Earth's, the frame stretched and slender in a way no Earth body is slender. Pale blue-tinted skin. Large amber eyes. Ears that come to a point. His arms carry biographical tattoos: family and clan history on the left; his personal life record on the right.
He spent six months in physical conditioning before he could walk on Earth unaided.
Measured, patient, honest. He does not claim more certainty than he has. When he says "maybe" he means it, and he will not trade a true answer for a certain one. He gave Sofiya a clear account of the doctrine, the statistics, and the cost, and held his position under sustained challenge without hardening it.
After the invasion he took leave. He went to Hawaii and stood on Diamond Head and watched the sun traverse the sky for the first time.
Deil
A human colonial world settled approximately 30,000 years ago. Lower gravity than Earth: the population has grown taller and more slender over generations, with larger amber eyes, pointed ears, and pale blue-tinted skin.
An orange sun, vast forests, cities built in and among trees large enough to dwarf anything on Earth. From within the cities, watching the sun set over the horizon is rare.
A gas giant called Liordac periodically eclipses the sun for sixteen standard weeks: the dark season. Deilians call it the Heart of Darkness. The Taveth flower blooms only then. Taveth ka Del'an was born in it, and was named for the flower.
Deilians tend to learn other languages rather than relying solely on the universal translator. Taveth learned both English and Ukrainian before the interview.
Star Warrior Calan
Exemplar Vanguard Prime Star Warrior Calan, of the Star Legion. Heavy-set: 1.76 metres and 110 kilograms of solid muscle, bald, jade-eyed, with the long fingers common to his people. He moves with a predatory grace he appears entirely unaware of. His English is fluent and carries a strange cadence, the emphasis falling on the wrong syllables.
He has survived sixteen first-in drops. The probability of surviving all sixteen is 0.33 per cent. A trooper who survives five may rotate out of first-in missions permanently. He has not, and does not intend to. His reason is not complicated: people still need saving, they have no chance of saving themselves, and someone has to.
Across his first fifteen deployments his confirmed count averaged two hundred and thirteen. On Earth he killed nobody at all, and lost part of a leg doing it. Offered a cybernetic replacement that would have had him back on the line in two days, he chose an eleven-day regrowth instead, on the grounds that he already has enough technology inside him. What technology that is, he will not say.
He is Duravanhi and worships Arneth. His lifemate is Soranthi, who is also his commanding officer. He prays with her before every drop, forehead to forehead, in a prayer room sited outside the armoury. The prayer asks for faithfulness, not for safety.
He is going back on Thursday.
The Duravanhi
Calan's people. The reader is given their name, their language and their faith, and nothing at all about their world.
Their religious tradition centres on Arneth: Maker, Master and Sustainer, who made what there is and holds it in existence continuously. The distinction matters to them. If Arneth stopped, there would not be a universe running badly. There would be nothing at all.
The theology holds two accounts of the same event as completely true at the same time, contingency and divine sustaining, and refuses to choose between them. It is a sin to kill a sentient being, and equally a sin to allow one to be killed, and the two are not ranked against each other. Sin is reckoned per individual rather than in aggregate, which is why a soldier of this faith carries an exact count rather than a total, and repents of each.
There is a Duravanhi word for what happens after death that Calan cannot translate. It is not resurrection. The nearest rendering is being read back: something written down, then written out again, with nothing lost in the copying.
The tradition does not accept that war can be religiously justified. Calan was appalled to be asked. "My faith makes it cost more. That is what it is for."
Veteran Tribune Seventh Star Warrior Soranthi
Called Sorra by Calan, who is her lifemate: wife, in Earth parlance. The reader meets her entirely through his account and one piece of archive footage. She is not interviewed.
She is on the Tribune track, the leadership track, and is expected to go far. She holds its entry grade and is nonetheless Calan's commanding officer, which he states without any apparent friction. Cape Canaveral was her sixth drop. They met ten standard years earlier on her first, breaching an Agglomerate Reef, when she pulled him off the spike that had impaled him.
Fair, and lightly built. Sofiya notes she could walk down Khreshchatyk unremarked.
At Cape Canaveral she wore heavy armour in an artillery configuration. She fired forty-six micro missiles into twenty-three aircraft and nothing else all night. Over the pilot who had just taken her husband's leg she held a heavy drone for nineteen seconds, until his aircraft was wings level and climbing and he could eject and live. She then carried Calan a hundred and seventy kilometres through the night and walked into the Cape Canaveral bridgehead a little after six in the morning with him over one shoulder. A medical lift was available. She declined it.
The Star Legion
The Federation's special forces. Calan's own analogy is Marines, but in space: they serve with the fleet and train for ship-to-ship combat and first-in insertion. Its members are called Star Warriors.
There are two career tracks. Vanguard is the operator track, the ones who go first, the ones who do the work. Tribune is the leadership track. Prime is as far as either track goes. Exemplar is a rare distinction that sits above rank entirely, and comes with extra pay.
Command rests with the Tribune track regardless of grade. A Tribune at the entry grade commands a Vanguard Prime with twenty years of service, and does so unremarkably.
Bonded pairs may serve and deploy together. The Legion knows exactly what this costs: its training material carries after action reports of objectives lost and positions overrun because somebody went back for a lifemate. It accepts the risk deliberately. In Calan's words: "A trooper with nothing waiting for him will take the objective. A trooper with someone waiting for him will take the objective and then come home."
Communications discipline is tight beam and the lowest power that will carry, a habit learned against an enemy that hunts by listening. The coded pulse is a fixed pattern of two hundred milliseconds carrying position and status and nothing else, relayed through the sender's own drone. The pattern is fixed so that anything added to it is itself a signal.
Doctrine on the Ground
Federation ground doctrine is built around a graduated response, and it is applied down to the level of the individual shot.
Before anything is fired, a surrender demand is broadcast on the target's own frequency, which deliberately gives away surprise. A second broadcast follows with a count. Then a demonstration strike on a building confirmed empty. Then a final warning with an evacuation window before command infrastructure is destroyed. The air base outside Jacksonville surrendered twenty-seven minutes after the first broadcast.
The reasoning is Calan's: "You cannot offer a man the chance to surrender after you have shot him. So you offer it first and you accept what that costs."
A warning is owed to a person. It is not owed to a truck. Vehicles are disabled without warning; personnel never are.
Where people have to be shot, they are shot to be disabled rather than killed. Through-and-through placements are chosen by anatomy: the outer thigh five to six centimetres clear of the femoral artery, the upper arm outside the bone. At four hundred metres, at night, against running men. The secondary effect is the point of it. People beside the wounded put their weapons down.
Weapons are selected the same way. Fragmentation warheads are for people, and none were fired all night. The heavy plasma gun could have removed a reinforced column and everyone inside it, and doctrine forbids turning it on people.
Enemy communications are left working even where the capability to jam them exists, because a base that cannot talk cannot surrender. The cost is accepted and it is real: calls for help get through. The aircraft that took Calan's leg came because he let the base call it.
A medical phase follows the fighting, and troopers track what became of every person they wounded. Calan gave his fourteen without looking anything up: four through the thigh, all walking within a month; ten through the upper arm, one needing nerve regeneration; nobody dead.
The Races
The Federation is home to humans and multiple alien races. The following have been named so far. The Duravanhi, Calan's people, have their own entry above.
Chelva: uplifted from Earth octopi. They are aware of their origin and are still adjusting to the knowledge of it. They prefer the name Chelva; "octopi" belongs to Earth now. They gravitate toward scouting roles in the UPF, though they are present throughout the Federation. The Proconsul of Earth is Chelva. Episode 02 adds one thing to this: of all the Federation's races, only the Chelva match the Agglomerate unaided.
Vaeli: invented universal translation, which made lasting peace between races possible. No further description yet.
Yulsa: members of the first scientific survey crew sent to Earth. No further description yet.
Arxcronix: members of the first scientific survey crew sent to Earth. A joint human and Arxcronix colony appears in Episode 02 as the site of an Agglomerate Reef. No further description yet.
The Agglomerate
The species the Federation has been fighting for generations, in the conflict it calls the Endless War. Episode 02 is the reader's first sight of the enemy the UPF actually fights, and it is given entirely at second hand.
Calan is precise about them. They are merciless "not in the sense that they lack mercy they should have, but that they are completely without mercy even as a concept." Unit for unit they are bigger, tougher and stronger than any Federation species. Powered armour and drop pods were developed specifically to close that gap. Only the Chelva match them unaided.
They hunt by listening, which has shaped Federation communications discipline for generations.
A Reef is an Agglomerate structure that grows. One developed in secret on a remote island of a new joint human and Arxcronix colony, well inside Federation space, before anyone detected it. Reefs are extremely hard to breach without weapons of mass destruction and have to be taken room by room, and their warriors die hard. Assaulting one is understood as a suicide mission. A buster is a very small plasma bomb designed to break a Reef from the inside.
The Federation does not usually arrive in time. In Calan's account, it arrives at worlds that are already burning.
Federation Technology
The Federation's technology vastly exceeds Earth's. Episode 01 established very little of it. Episode 02 shows a great deal, mostly by using it.
Nano hives: implanted nanobots carried by UPF troopers that sustain the body through injury and accelerate recovery. Civilian versions, capable of curing practically any disease, are among the first things being deployed to New Zealand. Sofiya challenged Taveth directly on this: if the technology exists, why wasn't it given to Earth sooner? His answer: without an enforcement framework, it would have been captured and weaponised. The invasion created the framework that makes equitable distribution possible. In combat, a hive keeps a wounded trooper conscious, because unconsciousness is a leading indicator of death, and can seal a severed limb in about two seconds.
Reactionless drives: the UPF fleet reached Earth from Mars without propellant trails visible to Earth observers. The James Webb Space Telescope recorded it passing Mars.
Clean energy: mentioned as part of the New Zealand technology transfer. Not yet described.
Powered armour: three kinds are named, scout, assault and heavy. Scout armour is a powered exoskeleton linked cybernetically to the wearer's nervous system, with light armour that stops most Earth small-arms fire, mirage circuits that blend it into the background, and gravity manipulation giving limited flight and enhanced jump at a heavy cost in power. Heavy armour is much larger and stronger, around eight hundred kilograms, and can withstand a close-range tank shot, although the concussive force would likely kill the trooper inside. It carries no mirage circuits. Both multiply the body: a trooper in scout armour can lift a truck, one in heavy armour can push a tank, and either can hold about forty kilometres an hour across open country for as long as the power lasts. Earth's best marathon runners manage twenty-one, for two hours, and then they stop. The armour opens along seams invisible when closed, and the trooper steps out in a contact undersuit.
Weapons: the magnetic rail gun fires solid shots, singly or very rapidly, silent except for the crack as the shot breaks the sound barrier, and accurate to the horizon. A wrist-mounted stunner works only at close range, emitting a pulse that causes a minor seizure and temporary paralysis, calibrated for humans. A heavy plasma gun is carried for vehicles and structures, and doctrine forbids turning it on people. A wrist-mounted rail gun is carried for personnel.
Micro assets: a micro drone is the length of a finger, moves on gravity manipulation with no rotors and no sound, and is built of a superdense composite that returns almost nothing to sight or radar. A densiometer will find one; nothing on Earth would. A scout suit carries around fifty, heavy armour carries hundreds. Their roles are software rather than hardware, so the same object can relay a coded pulse and broadcast a surrender demand minutes apart. A micro missile is the same size with a warhead in place of the sensor package, in high explosive, armour piercing or fragmentation, and is used as indirect fire, so the trooper needs overhead clearance, a drone feed and cover rather than line of sight. A heavy drone is about the length of a human arm, carried roughly ten to a back-mounted unit, and used against vehicles and buildings. It leaves at over twice the speed of sound and either strikes with a laser and returns, or flies in and detonates. Heavy drones accept conditions, not only targets.
Drop pods: fired by magnetic linear acceleration from interlinking magazines, the same technology as the rail gun. The pods are deliberately primitive, simple aerodynamic heat shells with no piloting and no controls. The Federation could build guided pods and does not, because a captured pod teaches the enemy something. The one-shot grav chute fires at two hundred metres and takes the pod from terminal velocity to a landing. On the ground the pod is consumed by a nano swarm that then consumes itself, leaving nothing. Pods carry drones that surface and open a radio link, a modification made after early troopers drowned or were crushed in deep water.
Medicine: a lost limb can be regrown in eleven days, or replaced with a cybernetic that is stronger, does not tire, and has the trooper back on the line in two. The trooper chooses.