Insurgencies

Every insurgency has a reason. A lost homeland. A crushed reform movement. A defeated nation. A government that stopped listening. Sometimes the grievance is obvious enough that you can understand exactly why people picked up weapons.

The Cluster is full of restoration movements in particular. Peoples displaced by war, conquest, or the Scattering itself have spent centuries polishing memories of what was taken from them. Sometimes those memories are accurate. Sometimes the homeland becomes better with every generation that never had to live there. Nothing recruits like a country remembered better than it ever existed.

Armournauts end up on both sides. Insurgents need transport, heavy weapons, training, and people capable of hurting governments. Governments need deniable specialists willing to hunt them across borders. Counterinsurgency and insurgency have remarkably similar invoices.

The Aebryhems

The Aebryhems believe humanity’s Scattering was divine punishment for abandoning Old Earth and trying to escape the design of creation. Their faith emerged on Syn, where the first Aebryhem taught that suffering, repentance, and absolute submission to the Earthly Lord were necessary to avoid a fourth punishment. Their dead are commended with the prayer God return them, while the faithful undergo Homeward baptism so their own souls may one day reach the restored garden of Earth.

The modern insurgency began centuries later around Tillia Franoiric, a stranded trader taken in by an Aebryhem parish after a debt-enforcement raid turned bloody. Tillia became a religious leader, built the settlement of Grace, and helped transform the faith into a wider political movement. Attempts to reconcile Aebryhem teachings with surviving Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions failed, and later Throneheads increasingly presented the Cluster itself as humanity’s tribulation and Old Earth as the only promised salvation.

Under the current Thronehead, that belief has become an armed programme. The Council of the Wise has been dissolved, dissenters imprisoned or expelled, and Aebryhem militias ordered to build a flotilla capable of returning humanity to Earth. Cells raid orbital communities, seize habitats, and repurpose them into vessels, using extortion, insurrection, and terror where persuasion fails. Whether Earth is habitable scarcely enters into it anymore.

Armournauts are common among Aebryhem forces because the movement pays in captured equipment it cannot use for the flotilla. That makes them disturbingly attractive employers if you do not care where the hardware came from. I would. Anyone who believes salvation requires stealing someone else’s home tends to become very flexible about who qualifies as wicked.

Phoenix Court

The Phoenix Court is the most prominent Averi insurgent movement, devoted to restoring Averi sovereignty and ultimately the authority of the secluded Yellow Peahen Empress. The Empress and her line have remained sealed inside Magnasanti since the Recrudescence, unseen even by most Averi, but their political and religious importance has only grown. To believers, the Line are not merely monarchs but custodians of secret knowledge and cosmic order.

Outside Magnasanti, Averi society has changed. Traditionalists cling to the old monarchy and theology, while wealthy magnates have built new fortunes across the Cluster through medicine, cloning, trade, and less reputable enterprises. Many of those magnates now fund restorationist causes in the Frontier, where Averi colonies are expanding and Magnasanti itself is reportedly moving towards them.

The Phoenix Court is less a single organisation than a collection of competing restorationist cells united by loyalty to the Empress. Its methods include bombings, political killings, suicide attacks, and increasingly large assaults on Union colonies. There is no clear central command, only overlapping factions, wealthy patrons, and a monarch who has never publicly issued them an order.

As Armournauts, we understand the power of plausible deniability, and that’s what makes the Phoenix Court so difficult to deal with.

Stragovi 111

Stragovi 111 is an anti-Union insurgent movement named for Malenkev Stragovi and the 110 co-conspirators executed with him for treason. The group calls for dissolution of the Plenum, the restoration of older national structures, and greater autonomy for Obriossian, Averi, and Enazcan populations. Whatever legitimacy those grievances once had was largely buried beneath the Ossion Calamity.

That attack began with the seizure of Polermo Station and ended with it being deorbited onto Castigor. Nearly ten thousand people were killed outright, tens of thousands more injured, and hundreds of thousands displaced. The destruction of Pillarite stores contributed to ecological collapse and long-term depopulation. Stragovi 111 has since favoured bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, hostage-taking, and heavily armed kill teams built around power armour, super-heavy mechs, and infiltrators.

Its leadership remains unclear. The organisation issues statements through computer-generated versions of Stragovi and his executed conspirators, while cells operate with little visible central control. Union pressure has pushed much of the movement into the Jambles, while the LNA increasingly denies it room in the Frontier. Other Superpowers are usually happy to pay for Stragovi members brought in alive or dead.

They pay well too, apparently. Every so often some perfectly ordinary-looking bastard offers you an absurd amount of scrip to kidnap a family, move nerve gas, or shoot up a parade, all while carefully not saying who employs them. Then the rhetoric slips out and you know. Whatever Stragovi 111 claims to be fighting for, I have yet to see how murdering civilians gets them there.

The Guild

The old Obriossians survived through autonomous factories, drones, and nearly self-sufficient enclaves, but that independence never prevented larger coalitions from dominating smaller ones. By the Recrudescence, those coalitions had hardened into the Consortium, which ultimately destroyed itself in civil war and nuclear exchange while fighting the Lunar Union.

After the war, many Obriossians integrated into the Union. Others scattered across the Cluster, rebuilding the old dronesteader model in isolated households and enclaves. The Guild recruits from the most radical of these communities, presenting itself as the seed of a restored Obriossian nation while funding itself through piracy, raiding, and the resale of stolen goods into Obriossian networks.

Plenty of Guild supporters sincerely believe they are preserving a people and way of life erased by the Union. In practice, its cells attack Union interests, raid Frontier colonies, and exploit the same isolated settlements they claim to defend. The most successful Obriossian households look less like homes than fortresses, buried underground, sunk beneath oceans, or hidden in deep space behind automated defences and hired guns.