30-07-2000 15:37									#1
	New SMAC story Support Apolyton, buy Alpha Centauri

Here's the first few lines of my new SMAC story. The rest will follow when I get chance to type it up )

Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri: First Speaker

Data Entry Received and Validated. Personal Memoirs, First Speaker, Gaia’s Landing.

I have finally completed my personal memoirs, written at the request of my friend Lady Deirdre Skye. I now prepare to go my way to the Shining One, since my life upon this globe some call Planet is now drawing to a close. Not all Lady Deirdre’s empathic gifts, nor all today’s rejuvenation and longevity technology, can keep me upon Planet forever.


Prologue

Lady Deirdre Skye sighed as she wandered through the famous White Pine Plantation in the courtyard of Gaia’s Landing. In the years since Planetfall, Planet had never seen a conflict like this. Every faction save the Gaians had taken a side. Ranged against the alliance of the Human Hive, the Lord’s Believers and the Morganites was the University of Planet, the Spartan Federation and the UN Peacekeepers. The Stepdaughters of Planet could be the deciding force behind this conflict - but their pacifistic tendencies decreed that they would take a side only when every other option had been explored. Currently, Lady Deirdre was engaged in an attempt to reconcile both sides, but it now seemed unlikely. A Spartan X Tachyon Rover had met a Hive Missile Artillery unit and had armed its chemical weapons before destroying the paralysed Artillery. Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang had walked out of the peace talks in disgust when this news reached him, and it now seemed unlikely that the Hive and the Spartans would ever reconcile. However, progress had been seen with the Morganites and the University/Peacekeeper alliance, although the Morganites’ strong affiliation with the Lord’s Believers (and above all the fact that the Believers had an outstanding loan of 400 energy credits from the Morganites!) prevented them from talking Truce at the moment.
Deirdre knew she was walking through a potential minefield. Currently the Gaian faction was not at war with any other, and Deirdre had been careful to maintain only two Pacts of Sister/Brotherhood - one with the Morganites and one with the Peacekeepers (the two least violent and least antagonistic factions next to the Gaians) - in the hope that this would be a bridge between the two sides.

* * * * *

Commissioner Pravin Lal was at that moment overseeing the military preparations for the latest Peacekeeper offensive against the Human Hive. The two factions were the first to exchange communications frequencies, and from the start there had been mutual distrust and dislike. Lal abhorred Sheng-ji Yang’s social experiments and his vicious and brutal dictatorship, and Yang in his turn was horrified by Lal’s democratic policies and his trust in diplomacy to right all wrongs.