New Colonial Alliance

The (NCA) or "Admiral Drake's Insurrection" was a post-Covenant war union created by former UNSC Admiral , a decorated naval officer and war hero. Once a casual network of affiliates within the defense industry, , and connected to Drake during the , Drake radicalized his relations against the UNSC and in in the chaos and panic of Covenant forces breaching deep into human space, and later following cessation of hostilities with the . The the supercarrier revealed Drake's treachery but marked the New Colonial Alliance's emergence as a major rebel power in the post-war era mostly on appearance.
Drake and the NCA retreated to the , reforming into smaller independent cells and front organizations throughout human space to further his anti-alien, antigovernmental agenda. Drake's history as a fighting admiral and knowledge of frontier logistics allowed the New Colonial Alliance to quickly bankroll their war effort with and resources of prior-established sympathizers, and from allied rebel and criminal elements in the Outer Colonies, including among "free" colonies. Spurned by the resulting UNSC assassination campaign of senior leadership after the Kafkian Uprising, NCA ranks and territory swelled with displaced URF recruits and resources even as a turf war continued between the rebel power players. However in , the NCA and other more tech-savvy factions like the UNSC military and suffered debilitating blows from the . The NCA began to recover in the and re-emerged onto the colonial frontier following the defeat of the . Consequences from the Created uprising remain unclear, but the New Colonial Alliance like other remnant factions turned to larger patron organizations to continue their agendas. It is believed Drake's protégé, Captain , formed an alliance with the warmaster and his organization, taking on the name "New Colonial Alliance, Second Chapter."
==History==
===Radicalization of an Admiral===
Mattius Drake, a captain of the UNSC Navy's Outer Colonial defense fleets, was between forward deployments when news arrived from the Battle of Psi Serpentis with the death of Vice Admiral Preston Cole in July 2543. Following a period of mourning, Drake accepted a more permanent transfer to Naval Logistics Command (NAVLOGCOM) on Reach and soon followed by promotion to Rear Admiral. While Covenant penetration of the UEG Inner Colonies was declared with a second major invasion thrust in 2536, Cole's death marked a particular shift in Drake's outlook on the Covenant War as the loss of the highly-decorated military commander meant the Covenant was closing in on defeating humanity. Conflicted by personal fear of returning to fighting the Covenant navy directly and frustration at much of the UNSC admiralty's abandoning of the Outer Colonies, Drake used his position to focus more resources and troops to the UNSC Navy's frontline to the appreciation of the embattled, remaining UNSC naval commanders and local Inner Colonial security forces.
ONI assessments of Drake's behavior considered the new rear admiral's actions as emboldened and reasonable in the face of Vice Admiral Cole's death even as Inner Colony worlds continue to fall to Covenant onslaught slowly but steadily. Underneath the increased involvement and personal agenda of support, Drake built
comradery and good faith with the frontline officer corps, finding shared sympathy in perceived mishandlings of the war effort by Earth-and-Reach-based UNSC High Command (HIGHCOM). The dissatisfaction increased...
===Raid on UNSC Infinity===
===Clayton's Pursuit of Lord Hood===
===Created Uprising===
==Alliance Second Chapter==
===Allied with the Banished===
With the status of pre-Created logistics and resources uncertain inside human territory, a new independent command was structured for the New Colonial Alliance's dealings, called the "Alliance, Second Chapter" on the frontier where alien and human territory intersect. However, with the defeat/retreat of Cortana and her fellow Created, Atriox's Banished sought to fill the power vacuum. The destruction of Dosiac radicalized many of the Jiralhanae core colonies and primary political unions under Atriox's banner and any who did not pay tribute or swear allegiance met a gruesome fate. Despite the dire circumstances, the rumored, Daniel Clayton-led Second Chapter began to operate in this new political theater. To the former Covenant client species, this strange human faction was known more so as the "Human Alliance, Second Chapter" or the "Second Chapter Reclaimants" with implied religious or iconographic vocabulary.
Their Jiralhanae liaison was a seasoned logistics officer and tradesman from the Helm Prominence, a well-kept Brute with a signature fedora known as "Atticus II" though his real name remains undetermined. His skillset speaks to several past lives: a Syndicate enforcer, private investigator (High Charity?), intelligence operative...
==Ideology==
*Anti-Earth/SolCore
*Anti-ONI/UNSC
*Human-centric
*Possible limited Reclaimer-cultist interests
*Sympathetic to colonies/Insurrectionist plight
*Manipulative of followership, coercion of lower ranks/uninitiated
*Collaborates with alien mercenaries
*Subversive to ideology: not limited by sectionalism/narrow ideology, less-ideological, primarily means-to-an-end
*Might = Right
==Notable Members==
* 
* 
* 
* 
*Felix Costel 
*[REDACTED] 
**"Zero" 
===Admiral Mattius Drake===
A former UNSC Navy admiral before the New Colonial Alliance, Mattius Drake established himself like many UNSC flag officers by maneuvering within bureaucracy with a little luck over his wartime career hopping between the battlespace to administration and back again. He served in the shadows of Preston Cole's Outer Colonial campaigns, surviving his deployments but merely delaying the advance of the unstoppable Covenant Navy as they pushed into humanity's interior space. Drake made friends and leveraged locals, intelligence, and naval communities for his own missions but to the point he was everywhere, acting as a "fixer" of complex problems. Among those who knew Drake, he was called "charismatic, boastful, and overconfident;" someone who took advantage of others but cared enough to fulfill his promises and debts in full.
ONI called on Drake in the later Covenant War to bring external managerial expertise to the research efforts of Section Three, including the Spartan-IV program where he met Ilsa Zane. However, his continued exposure to ONI's deep-state apparatus soured his feelings for the Earth power structures and left him feeling further disenfranchised following the return of civilian governance to the Unified Earth Government and diplomatic headwinds shifting towards clemency for former Covenant client species. Radicalized by his worldview of dangerous bureaucratic overcomplexity, and the abandonment or betrayal of colonial suffrage, Drake called on and transformed his connections and remaining military jurisdictions to create a "New Colonial Alliance." At first he sought to critique and undermine the UNSC Navy, but his organization quickly turned to open warfare with the UNSC and took up the rebellious Insurrectionist cause. Now commanding the NCA, he continued to use his former rank, calling himself "Admiral Drake." It remains unclear in 2560 if Drake still leads the recovering NCA after the Created uprising or if he died during the AI-driven conflict.
===Ilsa Zane===
Ilsa Zane’s military service prior to the Spartan-IV program is highly classified, but she spent the Covenant War as the ONI Section 3 - Black Ops division’s rising star and a select agent of Captain Aaron Gibson who she privately shared a romance and child with leading to a scandal. The parents cut ties as the child vanished, continuing their careers in grief. Becoming the lone survivor of new test augmentations for the Spartan-IV program, Zane was deemed mentally unfit and transferred into the care of Admiral Mattius Drake, the secret leader of the rebel New Colonial Alliance, where she changed her allegiance to the Insurrection. As Drake’s personal enforcer, Zane traveled the Outer Colonies expanding the Alliance’s reach. She vanished during the Created conflict only to emerge once more in the vacuum left by the fallen UNSC and Created collapse.
===Daniel Clayton===
Captain Daniel Clayton was born to James Cutter’s mistress on Tribute in 2525 but never knew the famed captain of the UNSC Spirit of Fire. After Cutter vanished in the first Battle of Arcadia, the Clayton family received alimony from a secret benefactor on Cutter’s behalf. Clayton spent many years following the funds, eventually joining the UNSC Navy and UEG diplomatic corps where he experienced a fast ascent in the ranks to Ambassador’s Aide for the Sanghelios UNSC diplomatic mission. Thanks to the ONI resources available to his mentor Admiral Mattius Drake, Clayton uncovered Fleet Admiral Terrence Hood as his benefactor, enraging the young captain and turning his loyalty to Drake’s New Colonial Alliance. Following several failed assassination plots on Hood, Clayton was incarcerated in ONI Midnight Facility. It's unclear of Clayton's activities or whereabouts during the Created conflict, however, his name later re-appeared in association with Atriox's Banished leading a NCA organ referred to as the "Alliance, Second Chapter."
===Felix Costel===
Following the decline of the URF and the failure of the Draco III invasion, biologist and insurrectionist Felix Costel (known to ONI as "GENESTEALER" and to the Theban Defence Forces as "ZALMOXIS") defected to the rising NCA, bringing with him some significant laboratorial resources and his most loyal staff. In the NCA, Costel encountered far fewer moral qualms about his research involving flash cloned soldiers. Scarred by the failures of his past attempts, Costel and the NCA leadership agreed to settle on a smaller and more realistic target for his new testing grounds: the socialist Olduvai Republic. Cooperating with agents embedded within Olduvai's territory, Costel would establish a number of small facilities managed from a compound located in Olduvai's vast Olduwan Jungle. It would be here that Costel and his associates would be killed in a raid carried out by a joint Theban-Olduvai special force in December 2557.