Red Sun

What is the Red Sun? Where exactly did the movement often called the Red Sun Martyrs Brigade have its beginning? More importantly, where are they now? These are questions that have gone unanswered since the apparent demise of the Red Sun's inner circle nearly eighteen years ago during the final death throws of the Martian Failed Insurrection.

It is 2097, and for nearly three-and-a-half decades, the Red Sun has been known among corporate and government circles for widespread acts of terrorism throughout all of the Offworld colonies. At the height of the Failed Insurrection, the Red Sun's reach extended as far in as Venus, and as far out as Charon, but their strength was concentrated on Mars and out in the Kuiper Belt where anti-corporate sentiments were felt strongest and old angers ran deepest. Officially, the Red Sun constituted the militant arm of what was then called the Free Space Movement, a large conglomeration of natural-born and immigrant Offworld citizens who felt that Terran interests should not hold sway in the growth and direction of the Offworld colonies. Unofficially, they were hardened resistance fighters trained in all major forms of guerilla warfare waging an overt battle against UN, ION, and corporate forces for control of the Offworld infrastructure. Their primary goal was the complete emancipation of Martian homeworld from what they deemed Terran control followed by emancipation of all other major Offworld interests with special emphasis on the Jovian and Belter industrial colonies.

The catastrophic decompression of the Tharsis colony in 2070 sidetracked the Red Sun's plans for interplanetary dominion, killing an estimated fifty-thousand colonists and putting the Free Space Movement and the Red Sun directly in the cross-hairs of every major government and corporation with interests on Mars. The act was labelled an act of war by the UN Security council, and was in fact a botched raid on the colony's environmental control facility by Red Sun insurgents. Within months hard-vac marines were shuttled in from all parts of the Offworld colonies, bringing the fight for the Sol system to the Red Sun's front door. IP cruisers blockaded Mars, bombing suspected insurgent strongholds from high orbit with precision-guided bombs and heavy weaponry while on the ground hard-vac marines led by the toughest marine battalion--the 33rd Expeditionary Force, nicknamed the Angels of Death--engaged in street-to-street and enclave-to-enclave battles with Red Sun warfighters.

By 2075, the battle for Mars--historically named the Failed Insurrection--had left the Red Sun and its parent group the Free Space Movement a broken shell of its former power. Constant battles with corporate-backed UN forces tore through the ranks that at its greatest were an estimated twenty thousand-strong. The blockade of Martian aerospace left Red Sun field operatives marooned, stranded across a hundred score settlements while the main fight dragged on to its bloody end on the Red Sun homeworld. Attrition through capture, death, and desertion devastated the ranks of the Red Sun's insurgent armies, while the daily destruction of provisions and weaponry depleted the materials which kept the insurgent war machine going.

It wasn't until 2079, when a group of what were called the Final Thousand--the last Martyrs who remained at large throughout the fighting of the last nine years and presumably the remaining leaders of the Martian insurgency--were finally hunted down and cornered on a remote Kuiper asteroid. After three intense days of fighting, the Final Thousand committed mass suicide as UN forces hard breached the Red Sun's last active stronghold, destroying themselves and a large contingent of UN hard-vac troops in what can only be described as the explosion of a tactical nuclear weapon.

An extensive sweep of the Offworld colonies yielded poor results in the hunt for any remaining survivors of the Red Sun insurgency. In the course of the three years following the conclusion of the Failed Insurrection and the death of the Final Thousand, only two purported Red Sun Martyrs were discovered--one in hiding on Europa, and another among the mining colonies of the asteroids. Surprisingly, the investigation yielded hundreds of mothballed outposts hidden--some in plain sight, others more stealthily--throughout the whole of the Sol system. Several in particular caught the attention of those sent to root out the remaining Red Sun threat, including no less than three orbital cloning facilities, each housing the latest in proscribed Lone Star cloning technologies. This finally leads one to question whether some if not many of the Red Sun's top leaders and guerillas may still be alive--whether stored as clone data, frozen in deep cryo, or in hiding--and poised for the opportunity to once again rekindle the struggle to free the Offworld colonies.