Sovereign Colonies

The Sovereign Colonies was the first global government to unite Earth and its early off-world settlements, the regime that took custody of the Black Marker and secretly built the first Red Marker copies. In its drive to harness the Marker and solve humanity's resource crisis, the Sovereign Colonies seeded the disaster that would haunt the colonies for centuries, and its discovery of the Brethren Moons led it to purge all Marker knowledge before collapsing into the regime that became EarthGov.

A united Earth#

By the 23rd century, Earth was divided into numerous semi-independent nation-states called Sectors, bound together under a single global government known as the Sovereign Colonies. It was in this era that, fleeing the environmental collapse and deprivations of a resource-starved Earth, bold pioneers and wealthy corporations turned to the stars and began settling new worlds under military supervision. The Sovereign Colonies governed both Earth and these early off-world territories, with the Sovereign Colonies Armed Forces enforcing its authority across the expanding frontier.

Custodian of the Black Marker#

In 2214 the Sovereign Colonies took possession of the Black Marker after researchers, including Michael Altman, recovered it from the Chicxulub crater in the Gulf of Mexico. The government hid the discovery and the disaster that followed in cover-ups and conspiracies, studying the artifact in secret over the following decades. As the danger of the research grew, the Sovereign Colonies decided to move all Marker experiments away from Earth to avoid the risk of a larger outbreak.

The government's true ambition was to harness the Marker signal as a source of limitless energy and solve humanity's deepening resource crisis. After decades of research, the Sovereign Colonies' Science Division reverse-engineered the Black Marker in the 2290s and successfully constructed several Red Markers based on it, placing them on classified distant planets such as Aegis VII, Aspera and Kreemar. The experiment failed: outbreaks eventually commenced around the facilities and forced them to shut down.

Tau Volantis and Scenario Five#

In 2311, seeking the source of the energy the Markers received, the Sovereign Colonies and Dr. Earl Serrano traced the signal to Tau Volantis. The expedition there uncovered thousands of Markers built by the planet's long-dead native species and brought another outbreak upon the humans, and Serrano discovered the Brethren Moons behind the Marker signal. After receiving his reports, the Sovereign Colonies Council and General Spencer Mahad invoked Scenario Five, an emergency directive reserved for an extinction-level outbreak arising from a first-contact scenario.

Scenario Five ordered all related equipment disabled and all personnel with knowledge of the Black Marker and the Red Marker test sites sought out for termination, with the goal of severing every trace of the technology. The directive saved humanity from the Markers' influence for a time, but it also became the death knell of the government that issued it.

Collapse#

The discoveries on Tau Volantis and the drastic purge of Scenario Five, combined with dwindling resources and public dissatisfaction, broke the Sovereign Colonies. The Secession War, a civil conflict fought amid the wider Resource Wars, gave rise to a Secessionist faction determined to dissolve the world government in favor of an entirely Earth-centric regime. In 2314 the Sovereign Colonies were dissolved, and the Secessionists seized power in the vacuum to establish the Earth Government Colonial Alliance. The legacy of the Sovereign Colonies endured in the buried Red Marker that the USG Ishimura would rediscover on Aegis VII two centuries later, reawakening the very danger the government had tried to erase.