Once inside, the medic was first to voice a reaction. “Oh, fuck me.” He later described what he saw:

“The bridge was completely destroyed. Panels, wiring, insulation, aluminum, plastic were all torn to pieces as though someone had bombed the place. I spotted two bodies. Or at least it took me a moment to understand that they were bodies. Each was so ripped apart I could barely tell what I was looking at - just pulverized meat in a room that looked like a horror movie snow globe from all the frozen blood floating about. We found the shoulder and arm of the ship’s First Officer. That was it. We only knew that because of the epaulets on his uniform.”

Ten meters away in a small galley off the bridge, McKenna’s team found two more victims. Unlike the violence inflicted on the bridge, these two crew members were left completely untouched, as was the galley itself. “It’s like those tornados you hear about on Earth,” said McKenna. “It’ll wipe out half a house but leave the dishes still on the table.” Seeing the floating dead, eyes open, arms outstretched, McKenna thought they almost looked alive, as if they were underwater, swimming. Likely they had died within seconds during the sudden decompression. 

McKenna soon got word from the second team, who had cut and cleared their way to the engine room, that they had found the fifth and final victim. Of all those who died aboard the Karagandy, it would be this last victim that stuck with McKenna for years after. “The way he died is just fucking horrific,” he later told a friend. “It’s the scenario you don’t like to think about when you’re out in deep space.”

Twenty-three year-old Technical Engineer Anton Daea had been working near the rear of the ship when the object had struck. Unlike his crewmates, he’d had time to don a survival suit when the ship lost air and power. Trapped alone with little oxygen, fading heat and the knowledge that there would be no chance of a rescue in time, he wrote a final note to his mother: ‘All the time I was growing up, you drilled into me about how not to be afraid of things. Just know that I’m using all those tricks now. Whatever comes, I’m OK. I’m not letting fear win. I love you, Mom.’ He died of asphyxiation. The team would find his note neatly folded and tucked into the breast pocket of his survival suit.

McKenna and his team spent a full day collecting all the human remains they could find, and another two days tarping off exposed areas of the hull to ensure nothing was lost when the ship would later be towed for inspection. With the rescue and recovery part of the operation complete, the Kobet prepared to leave the Karagandy for a flight to Callisto Station where the bodies would be examined and then turned over to families. Before departing, McKenna released a series of autonomous drones to continue the investigation until the ship and the wreckage could be gathered up by a salvage ship and transported to Titan for a more in-depth analysis. Days later, the drones zeroed in on what had struck the Karagandy. Instead of finding the pulverized remains of a small asteroid – what McKenna had theorized had hit the ship – the drones instead found traces of human DNA not matching anyone who had been aboard the ship. The object that hit the Karagandy was not a rock. It was a human being. 

Her name was Patricia Ann Goodale. The 39-year-old from New Cardiff was the Deputy Director of Commerce and Trade on Callisto Station when war first broke out between Earth and the Sol Republic on October 6, 2243. She had been a wife and mother to a 4-year-old son. Tragically, like thousands of others from Callisto to Ceres, Mars to Titan, she would be rounded up for the crime of being affiliated or sympathetic with Earth and sentenced to what the Sol Republic’s dictatorial self-proclaimed ruler, Nolan Shaw, called “permanent exile.” To this day, eight years after the end of the war and the writing of this book, it’s unknown the precise number of civilians who were packed into cargo ships across the outer worlds for what they were told was an exile’s journey to Earth. Estimates range from as low as sixty thousand, to as many as ninety thousand. What is known is that none would be delivered to Earth, and none would survive. By the hundreds, huddled in cold, darkened cargo holds aboard ships traveling purposefully off the main navigation routes, men, women and children deemed enemies of the Sol Republic would first hear a klaxon alarm, then the whine of a motor as the sealed outer container doors opened to the vacuum of space. Within seconds of sheer panic, all would be rendered unconscious. Within a minute-and-half, all would be dead. Regardless of their age, wealth or status, their bodies were discarded like trash into the void. Since the end of the war, thousands of bodies have been located and recovered but thousands more remain lost. After the destruction of the Karagandy, Patricia Goodale’s status within a vast database of missing persons created after the war was updated to recovered. As of the writing of this book, her husband and child remain missing.

- - - - - 

Historian Andrea Clarke called the time between October 6, 2243 and May 4, 2245, “modern mankind’s brief, violent embrace of de-evolution.” Others, like Edward Jenkins, father to Ensign Brandon Jenkins who was killed in Earth orbit aboard the STOS New Delhi on the first day of the war, called the time, “heartbreaking madness.” Historically, it will come to be known as The Sol War. Over the course of five hundred and seventy-six days, mankind’s first interplanetary war in space reached across the solar system and ended the lives of an estimated seven hundred thousand people. As is often the case in war, the deaths were mostly civilian. In ways negligently unexpected and in others coldly premeditated, the tools of war were used to lay waste to ships, stations, a city on Earth and another on Mars. In orbit and in deep space, thirty-eight warships and twenty-two commercial ships were destroyed, their shattered remains creating new constellations in the night sky, their crews dead or missing.

Whether combatant or civilian, the war touched nearly every life from Earth to Saturn. STO Private Justin Carr, who along with his unit were overrun on Phobos after the battle of Weber Station, described the horror and fear. “Everything was trying to kill you. Drones. Soldiers. Space. Even friendly fire. One of our defense drones accidently opened up on us, blowing apart our CO, who was standing right next to me. I got a shrapnel wound from his skull.” Emory University Professor Maria Cabrera was one of the fortunate to have survived the horrific destruction wrought upon Atlanta, Georgia on the first day of the war. “For an hour I crawled over the burned and smashed bodies of people I knew, trying to get out of my building. It was the most maddeningly random thing that defined who lived and who died.” Marcus Little, a father of two, continues to be tormented and haunted by the death of his wife in the Martian city of Gagarin. “Three minutes would have made the difference. If I could have gotten to her three minutes sooner, she’d be alive today.” A sailor aboard a missile cruiser summarized the war in space, writing to his parents that “meat sacks (humans) aren’t built for this kind of job out here.”

The effects of the war touched every aspect of life, from the personal to the economic to the absurd. Interplanetary commerce and transport ground to a halt. On Juno, coffee was banned, restaurants closed and bathing allowed only once a week to conserve water. On Ceres, citizens were issued ration IDs that covered everything from cheese to batteries. There was a black market on Callisto for vegetables. A warehouse security manager was stabbed to death in a robbery of two-hundred-fifty kilograms of potatoes. On Earth, halted production and shipments of critical pharmaceuticals from off-Earth manufacturing facilities led to a global health crisis. The average adult living in the outer worlds lost eight kilograms of weight from food rationing – only half-jokingly called “The Shaw Diet.” On Earth, parents were furious they were unable to buy the popular “Mi Puppy” toy -- all because of a palladium shortage that disrupted the electronic manufacturing industry. Meanwhile, on Christmas day 2243, debris from shattered ships and stations continued to rain down on Earth as smoke rose from what remained of the American city of Atlanta. 

In a modern age where advanced societies and dependent, interconnected economies were thought to have rendered large-scale war a thing of antiquity, how did this tragedy happen? And how did the thin veneer of humanity get stripped away so quickly and utterly across such vast distances? Historian Frederick Hipkins writes that the cause of the war can broadly be traced back to the earliest beginnings of colonization, “that the creation of two competing Earth alliances -- the Sol Treaty Organization (STO) and the Colonial Defense Union (CDU), each vying for influence and control over colonial expansion and vast potential wealth -- ultimately laid the foundation for colonial mismanagement, negligence, corruption and greed, fueling the eventual revolt.” Historian Megan Braun argued that the seeds of war were planted in the year 2229, when the STO privatized colonial security of its allied settlements, handing it over to a corporation that would have tragic results and inflame the anger of millions across the outer worlds. Others, like Louis Waugh, took a more near-term view that the catalyst that eventually lead to war began on February 12, 2240, when a distraught 18-year-old named Petteri Rehm sat down at the entrance to the STO regional headquarters on Callisto Station, poured a container of turpentine over his head, struck a match and in front of a gathering crowd, burned to death in protest to the STO and Earth over his family’s economic plight. Carefully placed a few meters away, Rhem left a note whose message was picked up by the media and, with wide resonance, quickly served as a rallying cry for millions across the outer worlds. The note read:

To the government that fails to protect us and the corporations that rule us: you have made it impossible for us to be human beings anymore. 

His death ignited protests, then riots that swept the outer worlds for weeks. Waugh continued, writing, “without Petteri Rehm, you don’t have the riots on Callisto Station. You don’t have the rise of Nolan Shaw and his political movement. Without Nolan Shaw, you don’t have Commander Dermot Coughlan and his traitorous fleet of warships. Without his fleet, you don’t have a war between Earth and the Sol Republic that killed scores and altered the course of mankind.”

Perhaps Nell Simpson said it the most succinctly, writing, “none of this would have happened if Earth had treated the people of the outer worlds as equals.” 

As for myself, I am not a historian but simply a fan of history, fascinated by how little we as human beings have changed despite all of our advances and so-called enlightenment. As the saying goes, history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. The Sol War is not on a grand scale of the Second World War, but it does share traits of mankind’s historic ability to inflict unspeakable cruelty. It might surpass the scope of the Falklands War, but there are parallels as to the dangers of waging a war over vast distances with limited resources to defend a colony. In countless ways, we’ve been down this road before. My greatest hope is that this book will honor those who lived and died during the Sol War and serve as a cautionary tale as we humans continue our celestial expansion.