The Great Pilgrimage

The Great Pilgrimage is the massive interstellar exodus of Terran Confederate loyalists led by the future Emperor of Sidhae. These exodites would in time become the ancestors of contemporary Sidhae.

## Background

At the end of WWIV in late 2039, Terra was in a sorry state. With the two of the world's powerhouse economies of India and China decimated by war and the Harvester plague, Confederate own economy also suffering from the aftermath of total war, and the world's ecosystems devastated, things were looking anything but bright. Even as the remaining free nations of Earth surrendered to Confed dominance, enabling the proclamation of Terran Confederacy as the first world-state in human history, the war was hardly over. The new government was faced with massive unemployment, crime, insurgencies sprawling up everywhere. Along with violence, drought and famine of biblical proportions caused yet unseen mass migrations, tens of millions of desperate people fleeing towards the core areas of the Confederacy only to find there was only more death and violence awaiting them in store.

Even the well-off Confed areas in Europe and North America had been hard-hit by the previous two world wars. Much of North America was still recovering from the aftermath of the Confed invasion in WWIII, while Europe had taken significant damage from the retaliatory nuclear strikes of China and India during WWIV. Although anti-ballistic defenses had defeated the majority of the incoming ordnance, sparing most major cities from destruction, the warheads that had made it through had still caused massive destruction and environmental damage. Much of Europe was now dealing with radioactive contamination, the whole world suffering from a mild nuclear winter, one that offered a small taste of things to come in the following years.

Now being the unchallenged supreme ruler of all Mankind, the future Emperor nonetheless redirected all resources to the Confederate space program as an absolute priority despite protests even from formerly loyal followers. He recognized better than anyone that it was only a matter of time until the Skargh realized the vulnerability of Mankind and struck, and that time was coming fast. The Skargh merchants had left shortly before WWIII with a promise to return in a decade or so, and during their exchange with the Confederacy, the Emperor had gleaned enough about their culture to understand that this next time would most probably involve a sizable armed contingent. For this reason, scattering Humanity into space before the return of the Skargh was the only realistic solution.

The investments in space technology bore fruits, the first practical interstellar drive being tested in 2041, a jump-capable ship making the round trip from Terra to Mars and back in 6 days, an effort that would have taken 2 years under existing sub-light propulsion, most of those 6 days being spent charging the drive. Construction of a massive colonization fleet commenced immediately afterward.

Although the event itself did indeed raise spirits around the world, giving many hope to maybe find a new home under the distant stars now that Mankind was no longer shackled to her dying cradle, there were many more who were downright outraged by the continued redirection of resources towards the space program rather than addressing the ever-increasing problems at hand. The Emperor would suffer no such malcontents, ordering Confederate authorities to crack down on any rebels and protesters hard, using any means necessary to keep the productivity at peak rates. The heavy-handed Confederate rule obviously earned him few friends, even many in his own administration beginning to doubt his rationality.

Although the space program was making good progress, over a hundred large colony ships being complete or close to completion in orbit, the worsening climate conditions with the accompanying consequences and insurgencies were stretching Confederate military and police forces thin to maintain at least some semblance of order. Worse still, whistleblowers within Confederate military leaked files on top secret human augmentation experiments in 2044, many of which were cruel and carried out on unwilling subjects including imprisoned insurgents and dissidents. Although the Confed government's sympathies for transhumanism had never been secret, and many Confederate supporters would voluntarily take to augmenting themselves with cyber-implants and genetic enhancements that had at this point become fairly common, such news outraged even many formerly loyal to the Confederacy. The following massive upsurge of riot and rebellion finally overwhelmed the Confederate military and police forces, many units outright defecting to rebel side. Within months, the Emperor and a few million of his remaining loyalists were on the brink of losing the last semblance of control. Faced with the bleak perspective of trial and most probable execution for crimes against humanity at best, it didn't take them long to recognize the only viable option - to use the colony ships built for Mankind's future as escape vessels.

Thus the ancestors of Sidhae would depart Earth on November 18, 2044, setting out to a 20-year-long journey in search of a new homeworld.

## The Great Pilgrimage

Unlike the founding fathers of the Federation who followed in Sidh footsteps two decades later, the first Sidhae had only a vague idea of where they were headed. Interstellar travel and navigation technologies were at their infancy at the time, it often taking over a week just to charge the fleet's star drives and plot course, then several weeks at sub-light to reassemble the invariably-scattered fleet and get a rough bearing on their new whereabouts before plotting a new course and making a new jump, quite possibly after spending another couple weeks of sub-light travel outside major gravitational influences. Where contemporary ships can cover several hundred light-years in a single jump, recharge in the span of a few hours and plot their exit coordinates with an accuracy of about a thousand meters even well inside a planet's gravity well, the first generation of human/Sidh starships had the jump margin of error in the millions of kilometers, recharges alone taking a week and jump ranges being a fraction of the contemporary, further cut down by safety protocols. While a jump of a few dozen AU could be plotted with reasonable accuracy, anything beyond that was purely theoretical science, the influences of gravity fields and fluctuations even as minute as the ships' own mass still being very poorly understood. Consequently, it took over a dozen jumps over a span of several months for the Exodus fleet to even get out of the Solar system proper.

The absolute lack of knowledge about potential navigation hazards in the way was also slowing the journey down, something as basic as a dust cloud representing a potentially lethal threat to the early starships. While the larger modern starships with powerful energy shields and armor tens of meters thick can comfortably shrug off even small asteroids, the same wasn't the case for the thin-skinned exodite ships, which risked being vaporized by a collision even with a handful of sand-grain-sized dust particles while exiting a jump at relativistic velocities. The fleet thus often remaind stationary for many weeks while the next planned destination was thoroughly explored by the ship navigation observatories and advance scouts.

The Confed space program had accounted for these difficulties beforehand. In order to conserve the extremely limited resources, the majority of colonists would therefore be kept in cryogenic stasis, the ships being manned by skeleton crews on six-month rotations. Even with such measures in place, the crews would still have to go to extreme lengths to conserve resources. The space aboard the ships was cramped, leading to little if any privacy. These two factors would come to define the later Sidh culture, namely it's emphasis on efficient use of resources and a lack of importance placed on privacy.

It was in this time that the early Sidh language began to form. Coming from very diverse ethnic backgrounds, the crewmembers quickly found a common language to be necessary. For the time being, English served it conveniently enough. However, with the prevalent bitterness about Humanity's rejection of the Confederate vision and the profound moral crisis that being cast out into space with no way back had caused, it became evident that a new identity and purpose had to be developed for the exodites. The Emperor personally hoped to restore morale by presenting the exodus to his followers as a new opportunity, a chance to start a whole new civilization with a clean slate. Consequently, after much debate, it was decided to adopt Latin as the basis of the new language, seeing how many of the crewmembers were scientists and understood the language to at least some degree. The whole exodus was presented not as a forced exile, but rather a voluntary Pilgrimage, a quest for knowledge and atonement for Mankind's past failures. This narrative would eventually become central to the emergent Sidh culture.

Although a number potentially-habitable worlds had been discovered by astronomers in the first decades of the 21st century, many were rejected as potential end destinations out of hand for simply being too far to reach within a practical timespan on the available resources. Closer examinations of others also revealed them to be uninhabitable without terraforming or prolonged off-world support, both being out of question for obvious reasons. What the fleet needed was an Earth-like world with conditions that could support human life without outside assistance, and as the early Sidhae realized, such worlds were in fact a precious rarity.

Years passed, by now the early Sidhae had travelled over 10 thousand light-years from Terra, and picked up considerable expertise at interstellar navigation, but still no suitable world was found. The original Exodus fleet of around 120 ships had dwindled to just 80, a number being lost over the years to misjumps and other accidents. The conditions were becoming even more cramped and the resources even scarcer, as the colonists rescued from some of these accidents found themselves aboard other vessels, without cryopods to house them in stasis and forcing them to operate and consume resources full-time. The fleet began to grow restless, increasingly more voices calling to turn back while it was still possible and take their chances back on Terra. The Emperor was effectively faced with a mutiny.

Legend has that the Emperor begged his crews for three additional days, agreeing to turn the fleet back to Terra if no suitable homeworld was found. He would spend the consequent days in his ship's observatory without sleep, looking for traces of a nearby habitable world, and detected one just hours before the expiration of the agreed term. Although many were initially skeptical about this new planet, their hopes having been frustrated a number of times before by various almost-inhabitable worlds that had come just short of habitable, the captains of the fleet unanimously agreed to set course for this world. At the Emperor's suggestion, the planet was named Aedun.

Mere weeks later, the first Sidhae rejoiced, setting foot on a planetary surface without enviro-suits for the first time in 20 years. For some youngsters born during the Pilgrimage, these were the first steps on a planet's soil ever, them having grown up in space and only knowing of their old homeworld from textbooks and images. The colonists would immediately proceed to set up, working ceaselessly to build up the infrastructure and industry necessary to create a new spacefaring civilization. Several other habitable worlds were discovered in close proximity to Aedun shortly afterwards, colony ships being dispatched there and founding what would become the first core worlds of the Old Imperium.