“Can we talk about the Frontiersmen?”

Classroom student

They’re an anomaly from the Old World. We don’t know if those ark ships are on autopilot or controlled by our ancestors. What’s known with certainty is that, based on design and Titan tech from deep space imagery, they’re from our past. Frontiersmen travel on a random grid-by-grid search pattern across charted and uncharted space. It appears that they spend most of their time in FTL, which we’re unable to track or predict when they’ll show up, but when they do, it‘s usually above an air-breathing planet.

Mrs. Toro, relations station secondary school teacher

Discovery

Two thousand years BGI, one hundred years into Civil Earth’s Age of Innovation, Doctor Laura Haddon discovered the “ping,” which became forever known as a sign for Frontiersmen ark ship’s rediscovery of air-breathing worlds. Dr. Haddon had been studying planetary rotations around stars and compared them to Earth’s stellar system when her instruments alerted her of the massive signal in a nearby system. Using Lunar One’s high-resolution video and still digital photo lens, she captured a fleet of ark ships above a blue planet with an atmosphere. This discovery excited and frightened all caste tiers in their megacities and led Tier One authorities to focus on space exploration.

Frontiersmen are a name given to possible occupants of Old World ark ships that travel through the stars. These vessels move in a fleet and periodically break off while conducting their scans. Free Worlds of Humanity representatives inside the Capitol Forum have made numerous attempts without success through the last seven hundred and forty years (station calendar.) All communications go unanswered, and the ark ships continue to travel in a grid by grid patterns while spending most of their time in FTL travel. For this reason, most educated minds believe that these ships are fully automated without crews of any kind other than artificial intelligence. When a ping is detected, the power signature is greater than the energy levels emitting from most common stars. This power signifies a higher intellect with technology far beyond fusion capacities compared to the Free Worlds.

The last attempt at communication was conducted in secrecy when representatives of the five walls sent a probe intended to strike one of the ark ships after exiting FTL. Ark ship defenses destroyed the probe as it left faster than light travel. This astonished representatives because it showed that the ark’s navigational systems could track the probe in FTL, which is impossible with current Free Worlds technologies. Moreover, representatives from the Capitol Forum questioned how the ark ships knew their intension. Dozens of probes that were not on intercept courses had come out of FTL near the ark fleet before and never met with hostility. It seemed to some that they had known the Free Worlds’ intentions before the vessel arrived.

Even if they destroy our probe, it would be a sign of interaction. Send a hundred probes to smack them in the face. Let’s get something from these deaf-mutes!

Right Seat Representative Guth, supreme general of Force Command Tacoma

Occupied space is vast, stretching over two hundred light-years across. Free Worlds’ governments have never dedicated resources to investigating all stars within this zone. They’ve never felt the need because of frontiersmen ark ships. Since Civil Earth left the Great Darkness before all other societies, many planets had been pinged by ark ships. The first Franchise War between Dolrinion Offensive and Federate Corporation forces occurred after discovering Dol’Arem by frontiersmen or whatever dwells inside those massive vessels.

Current timeline

It's been several years since any sightings of frontiersmen ark ships, and while this might be one of the longest periods in Free Worlds collective histories that such a gap without seeing them, there isn't concern regarding their reemergence at some point.

Do you think we will ever see them again? It’s been what, nine years?

Center Seat Representative Mia Stavish, Civil Earth

There are a few constants we can depend on for the Free Worlds of Humanity: war, death, famine, pain, Androsians, and the Frontiersmen. We’ll see them again.

Center Seat Representative Henry McWright, Colonial Accord