. ____      _                     _    ____
/ ___|__ _| |_    __ _ _ __   __| |  / ___|__ _ _ __   __ _ _ __ _   _
| |   / _` | __|  / _` | '_ \ / _` | | |   / _` | '_ \ / _` | '__| | | |
| |__| (_| | |_  | (_| | | | | (_| | | |__| (_| | | | | (_| | |  | |_| |
\____\__,_|\__|  \__,_|_| |_|\__,_|  \____\__,_|_| |_|\__,_|_|   \__, |
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Early history

In the 24th century humanity had colonised the solar system: Mars, the Asteroids, moons of the gas giants. At that time states didn’t exist anymore, Earth was governed by the UN. Mars was a “public” terraforming project. Asteroids and moons were mined for resources. Two facts are notable:

1. Mars was technologically advanced. A Martian invented the “Epstein drive”: a propulsion system that could accelerate spaceships almost infinitely and with only very little need for fuel. Mars gained independence from earth forming the Martian Congressional Republic. Solomon Epstein’s invention became the base for colonizing the Belt.
2. The “Belt” became new “Third World”. People then were living in poverty and even suffered from physical degeneration permanent exposure to low gravity and radiation. Belters were descendants of different origin - often from countries that had their colonial history still very well in mind although they hoped for a better future.

The protomolecule

In 2345 a strange substance was discovered and later called the protomolecule. At least one sample was found in the solar system and the Mao-Kwikowski corporation conducted a lot of experiments with it. They found out that it became active when provided sufficient energy, e. g. in the form of radiation.

Eventually they wanted to see how the human body reacted to the protomolecule, infected the colony on the asteroid Eros and exposed the human beings there to hard radiation. The result was terrible: People started to behave like zombies and eventually took control of the asteroid, accelerating it towards earth. No means of defense could stop it since it defied the laws of physics and it is only thanks to two men - Jim Holden and Josephus Miller - that earth survived. They convinced Eros to change course and it eventually crashed into the planet Venus.

But humanity was not prepared the next events: After several months a structure launched from Venus’ surface and targeted an orbit outside of Uranus’ orbit. There it formed a ring: Earth’s gate.

Towards the transport union

The gate gave way to a space called the slow zone - movement there is limited to a maximum velocity. Arranged spherically around the center of the slow zone there are about 1300 additional gates leading to other worlds. Again, Jim Holden and Josephus Miller (or rather a ghost representation of the former Miller) played an important role. They convinced an alien artifact at the center of the slow zone that humans were not aggressors and, hence, gave humanity access to the gates and the world beyond the rings.

Some other things happened:

• With the availability of fertile worlds the terraforming of Mars became stale. Lots of Martians started migrating to the new colonies. Also, a significant part of the Martian military defected and stole a lot of their equipment.
• A militant faction of the Belters under the lead of Marcos Inaros attacked earth by throwing rocks at high velocity onto earth. The number of human losses went into the millions and earth could not act as the food supplier for humanity anymore.
• First worlds beyond the rings were examined. Some contained habitable planets and very often artifacts of the builders, the ones that also created the protomolecule, were found.
• Medina station, a huge space station, originally meant as a generation ships for the Mormon sect, was established within the slow zone.

At this point Belters founded the “Transport Union” to organize food transport and migration. This was also the first time that Belters could face Mars and Earth at an almost equal level.

Since then some years have passed and things kind of smoothed out. But still there are a lot of things to do for people that know how to control a spaceship.