Space ArmadaLacuna FrontFleet strategy · Coming to Steam
Thirty-one million people have built lives under an imperfect peace. Beneath their homes, a buried industrial civilization begins to wake.
A federation of human worlds trying to hold an imperfect peace together. Its fleets defend inhabited systems and civilian government. On Aderra, protection becomes a dangerous word when powerful members want the colony’s discovery for themselves.
A civilization of ambitious builders whose great cities compete to undertake work that outlives them. The Ascendancy wants industrial independence and a larger place among the stars. Its citizens disagree about who pays for that ascent.
A powerful civilization whose rulers claim authority through tested knowledge. Ilyr science helped make the peace verifiable. Aderra now exposes the gap between understanding a danger and having the right to decide what others must sacrifice.
Independent artificial persons whose civilization grew from emancipation. The Nacre choose their bodies and negotiate their own commitments. Aderra’s buried population makes their freedom urgent again, while threatening the account they tell of how that freedom was won.
For nineteen years, the four powers have kept their heavy warships away from Aderra. Thirty-one million people live there under a peace their governments do not entirely trust. Children have grown up playing among ancient structures everyone believes are empty.
Then a repair crew hears a voice beneath the Crownless Basin. It asks whether the war is over.
Aderra stands above the Matter Garden, an ancient industrial complex that can grow immense, intricate structures from ordinary minerals. Its capabilities could rebuild worlds scarred by war. They could also give one power a decisive advantage in the next one. There is evidence that some of its original Nacre inhabitants are still alive.
The cities below and the towns above now depend on overlapping water and heat systems. Recovery will require difficult choices about homes, land, power and whose government may make them. An attack at Sable Anchorage breaks the peace before those choices can be negotiated. Fleets arrive to protect people, recover history and secure the discovery. Aderra has to survive all three intentions.
Imani Sen had been told the pressure loss was an instrument fault. Three reports agreed. She brought a lamp anyway.
The bore room had once been a public bath, before the district outgrew its first water system. Tiles survived behind the newer pipework. Someone had painted a fish over a cracked inspection panel, and each maintenance crew since had carefully painted around it. Imani threaded the lamp cable through the damaged service opening while Ress braced two walking limbs against the frame. The Vharuun technician used a palp to guide it past the broken edge.
The lamp descended farther than the plans allowed. Its display showed wet mineral, then a space wide enough that the light no longer found the opposite wall. Imani stopped paying out cable. The room above her was full of familiar sounds: a pump taking load, Ress’s fittings clicking, the district supervisor asking whether she could restore service before the school kitchens opened.
Below, something reflected the lamp. A row of dark rectangles crossed a pale surface. Windows, she thought, then corrected herself. An engineer did not identify a structure from a shadow and a wish.
Ress lowered their sensory crown toward the display. They asked for more light.
Imani turned the lamp carefully. The rectangles continued across the underside of an immense curve. Beyond them stood what looked like the unfinished ribs of a building. Warm water fell through the frame in thin, unbroken lines. Nothing on the district plans described a space remotely this large.
The district’s Nacre technician connected a low-power supply to an isolated rescue interface exposed beside the bore. Its markings were old but readable. A single core returned a coherent diagnostic. The technician steadied the supply and began a local recovery test; the damaged links beyond it remained dark.
The supervisor asked again about the kitchens. Imani told him to call the school and keep the reserve tanks closed. She disliked how calm she sounded.
A vibration passed through the drill string. Ress felt it first and lifted one palp from the frame. The monitoring unit classified the signal as an old service request. It repeated, patient and damaged. Imani opened the available translation channel, expecting a pressure warning.
The first words were uncertain. The second repetition was clearer. Someone wanted to know whether the war had ended.
Imani looked at Ress. Neither had spoken.
On the display, one of the dark windows lit from within. The light was small enough to belong to a room. Imani thought of the school kitchens above them, the children waiting for breakfast, and the person below who had been asking a question into darkness.
She moved the lamp so its beam rested on the window. Then she said that she was there.
Every major civilization operates independent faster-than-light ships. They can choose courses freely in three dimensions. There are no compulsory interstellar lanes, ancient gates or territorial corridors required to reach the wider galaxy.
The things worth defending are particular: an inhabited world, a shipyard built over generations, a biosphere, a family, a military installation or a government’s ability to make its own decisions. A fleet can travel around a hostile system. That does not free prisoners held there or preserve the people who cannot leave.
Distance still matters. Ships need power, supplies, maintenance and a safe arrival. A settlement can have a legal claim on protection without a friendly fleet close enough to answer. News travels aboard couriers rather than arriving instantaneously from every capital. The people making the opening decisions at Aderra are those already near it.
Aderra is a temperate-to-cold terrestrial world orbiting an orange main-sequence star. Dry uplands, ice, oceans, cultivated districts and wild land coexist. Crownless Basin is an inhabited region, not the entire planet. Much of the ancient complex lies below it, with districts extending beyond the areas modern maps treat as a single administrative unit.
Permanent modern settlement began 143 years before the Sable Armistice. A human-founded civil charter gradually accommodated Vharuun industrial communities, Ilyr research settlements and Nacre residents. Their lives became entangled through ordinary work as well as formal concessions. A person’s species stopped being a reliable guide to the government they wanted.
At the time of discovery, roughly 26.7 million residents live on Aderra and its inhabited Flint moon, with another 4.3 million in orbital habitats. Humans form the largest population, alongside substantial Vharuun and Ilyr communities and independent Nacre citizens. These figures describe the recognized Aderran polity. They do not yet count everyone below.
Aderra is self-governing. Its parliament argues about budgets, land, schools and industrial permits. Foreign governments guarantee its neutrality under the Sable Armistice, while retaining disputed claims frozen by that agreement. Neutrality is a daily political achievement, not an absence of history.
The Twelve-Year War began as a struggle over frontier jurisdictions, protection rights and inhabited systems. It broadened into deliberate attacks on industry and civilians. Each power can name a real injury and an action of its own that the injury does not excuse.
The Sable Armistice ended the fighting in Armistice Year zero. It protected Aderra’s local government, excluded heavy combat ships from a defined demilitarized volume and limited the guarantors’ inspection contingents. It did not disarm the civilizations or settle every title dispute. Fleets remained outside the protected region, and powerful people continued to believe they had conceded too much.
The peace nevertheless worked for nineteen years. Families returned, businesses reopened, mixed institutions formed and children reached adulthood without witnessing the bombardments their parents described. Marriages and friendships crossed lines that official histories kept drawing more sharply. Its failure will destroy something real.
The discovery threatens the assumptions beneath the agreement. A protected excavation may become a strategic foundry. An inspection instrument may acquire military uses. A government that has promised not to occupy the colony may call occupation the only way to protect it. The armistice cannot answer these questions by pretending the world has not changed.
The Matter Garden contains sealed mineral seas hundreds of meters deep. Branching supports rise through black process fluid, carrying metal channels, pearl-colored structural ceramic and the internal spaces of things still growing. A modern yard often assembles complicated structures from many manufactured parts. These halls can form immense load-bearing pieces whose coolant and data channels were present from their first layers.
A partly completed habitat hangs over one basin with thousands of empty window openings. Its skin was meant to grow the final surfaces. Articulated service machinery changes the shape of a growth vessel while warm condensation falls from the cavern roof. The sight is astonishing because its purpose can be understood. Someone was making a place to live.
Continuous-growth techniques are not wholly unknown to modern industry. Nacre manufacturers retain smaller-scale methods, and other civilizations understand much of the underlying physics. The Garden offers an extraordinary concentration of mature plant, specialist experience and long-calibrated processes. Its advantage is immediate capacity and complexity at a scale present plants struggle to reproduce, not an eternal monopoly on a magical principle.
It can grow pressure habitats, structural shells, complex heat exchangers and other difficult machinery. It cannot create matter or energy. A hull still needs drives, power, weapons, instruments, testing and a crew. The same manufacturing capacity can build housing or support an arms race. Its purpose will be chosen by people.
The upper ruins were known as Orison Grave. Surveys described the remains of an industrial civilization whose inhabitants had died or departed. Generations of surface engineers connected water and heating systems to ancient circulation works they understood as ownerless machinery. Their plans recorded useful outputs more reliably than the history of what produced them.
A damaged well led a repair crew deeper than the surviving plans. The first communication established that the grave was not entirely a grave. It did not instantly reveal how many people remained, what had happened to them or what they wanted now.
Waking an individual and freeing an inhabited district are different operations. Some Nacre bodies can be moved. Others incorporate workshops or large sensory structures whose loss would change a person’s experience profoundly. Recovering them requires consent as well as engineering.
The systems below now overlap those supporting surface communities. Opening a district carelessly can flood its homes or empty wells above. Cutting the surface away abruptly can endanger people below. An alternative can exist and still require years, new construction, relocation and a political settlement neither population is eager to accept. Empty land elsewhere does not instantly become a home.
The first opened Garden district becomes the subject of a public industrial and safety demonstration called the Crownless Trial. A local pressure emergency exposes disagreements about who may control the old machinery. The argument reaches Sable Anchorage, where the survey expedition has installed its laboratory and control equipment.
A Nacre weapons strike tears through an occupied part of the port. Alliance ships return fire. Heavy forces cross the demilitarized limit, each claiming to protect a threatened population or prevent the discovery from falling into hostile hands. The first reports contradict one another because witnesses have seen different parts of the disaster.
On the surface, families ask whether the arriving ships will protect them or decide their future. Newly recovered people below wonder whether unfamiliar flags mean freedom or another form of ownership. Neither population has the luxury of waiting for every historical argument to be settled before the next damaged system fails.
Game guide updated .