# The Business of Interstellar Warfare,

#### How the Inter-Corporate War lasted for a Century

As we stand today under the 25th anniversary of the end of the Inter-Corporate War, and the ratification of the SolGov Mega-Corporate Charter, we are celebrating not just the first generation raised to adulthood that has known a life free of the perils of galaxy-spanning conflict, but also the first steps to healing the wounds it causes, as White Sands, Kallisti Prime, Vosk's Colony, and other formerly inhabited worlds begin the slow process of recolonization. Any celebration of victory is tempered by the lessons of what it cost to achieve, and by the failures that led to the need for violence to solve our differences. And any other time that would be plain as day, either by ideology, by greed, or by necessity, an explanation would be plain. But the ICW has layers of complexity leading up to the first shot, and an orchestral composition that allowed it to continue for a century unabated. It's these details that we will investigate herein.

To explain the circumstances of the Inter-Corporate War, we must understand two of its principles, one the favored combatant, the other the enabler, and their symbiotic relationship in the twilight years of the 24th Millennium. Nanotrasen's early history is well understood: The discovery of the energy-rich fuel dubbed "plasma", and the patents for its early exploitation built the corporation from a frontier prospecting firm into the greatest corporate entities to date in the colonized galaxy. But the early exploits have an undercurrent of the same malpractice that set up the ICW. Court records detail a sordid history of patent-infringement lawsuits against any entity that attempted to design, make, or sell equipment, ships, or technology exploiting the newly discovered material, and in many cases the circumstances of the company's legal victory were far short of legitimate. Bribes, Blackmail, Intimidation, and in one case, the Assassination of a court clerk, occurred over the early years of "space mercantilism", as it has been dubbed. And what's more, this period of mercantilism across the settled worlds was not uncommon, and had led to several border skirmishes among the major space-fairing polities, as the Russian Federation's reformation into the Russian Space Federation (RSF) had also spawned their own corporate darlings, who had many of the same conflicts of interest with Nanotrasen. But mercantilism requires state authority and backing, and that's where SolGov comes in.

Founded by the North American Economic Zone in 2321, then known as TerraGov, SolGov started as an trans-orbital economic partnership, not unlike the European Solar Union of the 2100s. Unlike the ESU, SolGov had matched their ambitions to their capacity to project force across the solar system, and beyond. SolGov was only matched by the RSF in their expansionary ambitions, not only funding colonies, but ensuring their survival with subsidies to companies willing to make the trek across space to the budding orbitals and planetary installations across inhabited space. It was this habit of subsidy that built NT and SolGov's relationship, as NT regularly stretched the definition of what qualified for subsidy, even though SolGov was more than happy to pay for the privilege. It was this bureaucratic brinksmanship that built the reputation of NT's tight relationship with SolGov. In the eyes of the now burgeoning Sol Government, one thing was clear: the winner of all future conflicts would be the ones with the greatest economic machine to bear down on their opponents. And as the RSF grew at a commensurate pace, so did they.

What exactly happened to the RSF is still not clear to this day, but in 2350, all communication and traffic in and out of the RSF was brought to a grinding halt. In an era where FTL communications were reserved for high-level government functionaries and special military units, information was carried by the ships that moved between stations, anchorages, and planets. When the RSF stopped sending ships out and allowing ships in, so too did the information stop flowing. What didn't stop however, were their licensing contracts, and to this day, dead drop deliveries to RSF agents and corporate representatives still make up the bulk, and by some estimates even all, of the trade between all outside bodies with the insular RSF. Some say they were attacked from within, others that Artificial Intelligences had gamed out the future and convinced the government to drastically change course, but the most sober reasoning points to the installation of a military junta, and a closed-country policy hearkening back to the terrestrial history of Japan.

This sudden closing of the door left huge question marks in SolGov's game plan. With no great enemy to expand against, funding dried up for colonial operations. Worse still, when the butchers bill came due for economic obligations almost every form, the government came up short. Incredibly short. Over 780 Trillion in adjusted dollars were left marked as unfunded obligations. SolGov all but capitulated in the face of this, with austerity shutting down aid programs, government institutions, and military units across the territories. It was called The Holkins Disaster, after the economist who had predicted it decades before, but had died before he could be proven correct. SolGov was brought to the brink of extinction, as old terrestrial polities geared up to fill the void that was rapidly growing, and colonies across the sector geared up for a war of independence.

All that ground to a halt however when Nanotrasen, now an incredibly successful energy, transport, and R&D company, made their transition to Mega-Corporate status. By buying up the unfunded obligations held by SolGov, swapping the SolGov notes for lucrative NT stock, bonds, and other securities backed by the company itself, they single-handedly saved the political organization that had helped make them a powerhouse. With this massive cash influx into the government organization, SolGov met their immediate needs for money, and kept afloat. It was clear however that while there was a light at the end of a tunnel, it could not be reached with the price tag required to keep all the colonial lights on. Some of the massive colonial enterprises needed to be sold and salvaged to even out the cash-flow. But governments in space were no different than their terrestrial counterparts. Inefficiencies, cost-overruns, and failures to meet deadlines were the name of the game. So SolGov did what any downsizing government does: they sold everything that had value anywhere they decided to strike camp. NT, being the darling child that saved the proverbial bacon of trillions, got first dibs, at prices many contemporary commentators called "highway robbery". NT of course took the deal, and spent the next 40 years dismantling colonies across the periphery of the settled worlds.

This dismantling had unintended consequences however. Colonial enterprises are huge machines, with hundreds of component pieces, in hardware, personnel, but most importantly corporations themselves. By the 2390s, more than half of the enterprises that had colonial interests prior to the Holkins Disaster had collapsed, not due to their own actions or even that of SolGov, but by their markets drying up underneath them as colonies were razed in firesale. This left billions of dollars of investment up in smoke, and the investors left with no recourse. From their perspective, monopolization of colonial markets by a crony capitalist conglomerate, the likes of which had never even been imagined in the worst nightmares of the socialist bloc, had come to pass. And in the periphery, like all frontiers of antiquity, justice made, not given. And it was these interests that would form the war chest of what would become the Syndicate.

2395 started with an uproar in the SolGov Parliament. A 3 billion member class-action lawsuit was put before the SolGov judiciary, seeking damages for the destruction of trillions of dollars of markets on 20 planets, and in 35 solar systems. The Parliament was outraged, not because they were liable for the damages, as it was levied against Nanotrasen, but because the grounds for the liability was based on the pretense that SolGov and NT had colluded to create the Holkins Disaster in the first place. Overnight, the names of the lawsuit plaintiffs became a list of pariahs, with bank accounts being frozen, assets seized, and in one particularly egregious case, the home of a sympathetic politician raided under suspicion of aiding and abetting terrorists. These acts by governors, parliamentary parties, and federal agencies were the last straw. Not only was Nanotrasen complicit in cronyism, but SolGov itself was defending it with force. It was that first month of 2395 that turned transformed the Syndicate from an idea into a reality.

By the turn of the millennia, the Syndicate had managed to raise an unexpectedly powerful army. The use of corporate designed, recruited, and trained armies and armadas proved an enormously capable force, and with the cutting edge technologies at their disposal, a grave threat to any foe. But there was a sober reality in the Syndicate's reckoning as to what their objectives were: it was no good to remove the competition and, at the same time, destroy the market. Their war had to be focused and direct. So it began as a naval campaign, where NT shipping between worlds ground to a halt. SolGov at this point was still recovering economically from the Holkins Disaster, and while they committed forces to the defense of critical convoys between the core worlds of SolGov, the vast majority of shipping was left to its own defense. Many scholars agree that this was the moment when the die was finally cast, and the war became a reality.

Nanotrasen did what it did best in response: expanded faster, spent more effectively, and operated with impunity. NT had one distinct advantage over the Syndicate, in that they were squarely on the defensive, and had untouchable moral authority in the public eye. Using this to their advantage, they successfully secured independent license to several classified government designs for weapons, armor, early energy shields, and Command and Control (C2) systems. These systems were immediately put into production, with designs to retrofit existing freight and transport ships with the new equipment. While this wasn't enough to match a dedicated warship platform, the added and improved armament allowed NT to rapidly bootstrap their way to the level of fighting that had taken five years for the Syndicate to prepare for. By 2402, Nanotrasen was beginning to hold their own in defending their assets across known space, with trade resuming in earnest to the core worlds, and supplies outbound to colonies in the warzone. However, NT could never gain a significant enough advantage to press and attack, and would spend the next fifty years on a constant back-foot, responding to, rather than creating for the enemy, existential threats to their economic interests.

By 2450, NT has suffered several major defeats, and has lost nearly 30% of their operational markets to Syndicate assault. By destroying infrastructure, manufacturing, R&D labs, and even whole colonial enterprises, the Syndicate has stifled growth for Nanotrasen to the point where revenues from existing colonial enterprises, untouched by war, could no longer offset the losses incurred. After many attempts to devise an accounting method to correct for the inevitable, Nanotrasen posts their first negative fiscal year since the discovery of Plasma, marking a high-point in the war for the Syndicate. Almost immediately, a shift in NT's strategy occurs. They begin designing and building highly capable, dedicated warship platforms, and training new crews to fly them. In addition, Marine units are created and filled with everyone willing to apply. The wounded Mega-Corp shifts from a company bent on staying afloat, to one that's willing to kill to stay alive.

It was this shift in the 2450s that would build the foundation for the Megacorporate Charter. Nanotrasen developed a war plan that blurred the line between corporation and civilian populations, adopting scorched earth tactics on the offensive, and even more devastation when retreating. The double-layered salting of the earth left the Syndicate with hollow victories and millions of refugees on their hands. Worst of all, Nanotrasen recognized how the PR on these involvements would look, and took things a step further. Much like the RSF, NT began blockading conquered systems until the Syndicate extracted the refugee civilian population, stifling the flow of credible information to the rest of the galaxy. While no information blackout is perfect, the low fidelity and quantity of information was enough to cast doubt on the horrifying stories of war-crimes committed by NT forces, all against worlds they formerly supplied with everything from high-efficiency generators to diapers. What's more, the salvaged material they brought back to the core worlds was enough to give steep discounts on traditional products they supplied, and almost overnight the Holkins Disaster was turned into a Golden Age of prosperity in the more highly focused and restrained economic markets of the core worlds.

Nanotrasen's strategy however was a net-negative. Syndicate forces would always be capable of taking one more orbital, one more planet, one more system from Nanotrasen. Moreover, the closer the fighting got to the core worlds, the harder information blackouts became. At a certain point, NT made the decision to cease the scorched earth campaigns, and almost immediately regretted that decision, as the newly emboldened Syndicate redoubled their efforts, and smashed through the remaining periphery holdings of NT. It was at this point they could no longer hide how poorly things were going for them, and a formal letter was sent to the sitting Prime Minster of SolGov. Over the next month, NT and SolGov officials quietly met on Earth, discussing the key strategies during the conflict, and how to turn failures into successes. SolGov officials at this time began to learn hard truths about what their inward focus had cost the periphery worlds, and there was a point at which the Parliamentary Committee on Economic Affairs considered completely rescinding the NT corporate charter. With hard lobbying against it, and a sober economic analysis of the destruction such an action would cause, SolGov instead took the unpopular move of throwing their weight behind NT, just as the fighting reached the first major planet in the war, Hephaestus, in the Rigel system. By tasking the solar system's defensive networks to ambush the Syndicate forces, softening them for NT's fleets to deliver a killing blow, they would in effect kneecap the main Syndicate fleet. Being that the Syndicate had very little terrestrial or orbital support infrastructure so far from their homes in the periphery, many in NT and SolGov correctly assumed that losing their fleet in Rigel would be enough to bring the Syndicate to the negotiation table.

And so in 2504, after over a century of conflict, the Rigellian Orbital Defense Corps, under the command of an NT Admiral, and supported by a fleet of NT warships, decapitated the Syndicate fleet within the first 10 minutes of Syndicate forces entering the system. The sudden loss of their command and control infrastructure crippled the massive fleet, and in the ensuing fight, NT and Rigellian ships were averaging 12 destroyed ships to a single loss of their own. The Syndicate fleet was decimated, and before long, SolGov had managed to broker a cease fire while they hashed out a peace agreement. It was this diplomatic involvement that gave SolGov the evidence they needed to bring Nanotrasen to heel. The destruction of viable colonies, particularly of White Sands, was justification enough for a coalition of political parties within the Parliament to put forth the Megacorporate Charter, which banned corporate entities from operating large scale standing armies for the express purpose of conflict. In addition, it set clear rules governing the interdependence of government and corporation, and systems for preventing the rampant crony policies of the 2300s and beyond. Moreover, it defined exactly how corporations would act in the service of colonial interests, preventing the demolishing of colonies for the benefit of established worlds. By removing transport and supply subsidy, and penalizing colonial razing for profit, the two major levers that had propelled NT from successful to omnipotent had been eliminated. The Syndicate, seeing the opportunity to strike lasting damage at their enemy, and a chance to reorganize and recoup their losses, signed the agreement, and by the end over 50 interplanetary companies, co-ops, non-profits, and conglomerates had signed the Charter, each gaining the now official, legally defined title of Mega-Corporation.

So how did Nanotrasen, after all that restriction, end up with colonies in their own name as a reward for fighting a dirty war? The answer lies squarely with the organization of the Syndicate. Syndicate members had always been a fundamentally piecemeal conglomerate of mutual interest, rather than a truly united front. From Gorlex Marauders perpetual piracy, to Tiger Corp's insurgent tactics, to Donk Co. and their business model of selling to both sides, the Megacorporate charter was viewed from hundreds of different perspectives. Some viewed it as victory, others a bitter defeat, and more still a half measure. But it was that infighting that prevented the Syndicate from organizing the funds and hierarchy needed to purchase the colonies up for sale. Worse still, the colonies would remain in disuse well into the 2550s, as NT rebuilt after the decades of devastation in the latter half of the war. This disuse almost sparked a second war, with splinter-factions of the Syndicate attempting to claim jump Nanotrasen, before being put down by SolGov Special Operations units.

Critics of the Inter-Corporate War lambast the outright insanity of the corporate military conflict as a medium of dispute resolution. They can see no profit in the act of destroying countless orbitals, terrestrial installations, and turning successful colonies into ruin. But these ultimately miss the status quo that created the Inter-Corporate War: Nanotrasen was already turning colonies into ruin, and under the authority of a government they had paid for the privilege. The simple conversion of outgoing expenditure to incoming cash flow was so enormously successful for SolGov, that they would not entertain the idea that those same colonial enterprises were merely years, or even months from solvency and positive cash flow. Everything must go in a firesale, and when that includes jobs, homes, and livelihoods on worlds promising freedom, the victims will always be the people living on those worlds. The formation of the Syndicate, the fight for those worlds right to exist, and the subsequent War of Nanotrasen Oppression, as Syndicate regulars call it, were inevitabilities created by the destructions of colonies at the hands of an over-expansive, overambitious government, and their new paymasters in the corporate sphere.