Multiple planets threatened to revolt at the first hint of SLDF forces, which put the Successor States on edge, feeding more resentment at the sorry state of affairs in the Inner Sphere and maintaining the cycle of fear and anger. The next rumor, again as inevitable as the galaxy’s spin, held forth that this was a reconnoiter by the long-missing Star League Defense Force. But those who believed this were swiftly disabused the mystery spacecraft were too small, too fast and appeared in places where ordinary jumpships and dropships couldn’t go by themselves. Some secret project or chunk of lost Star League technology recovered and put to work in the endless game for the Cameron throne. Initial suspicion fell, as it inevitably did, on a secret project of the Successor Lords. These sightings happened everywhere in the Inner Sphere and Periphery over major and minor worlds alike. Starting, appropriately enough, on April Fool’s Day 3022 verifiable sightings of unidentified spacecraft, backed up by sensor readings and telescopic images, increased fifty-fold. In the spring and summer of 3022 people stopped rolling their eyes and began, just a little, believing in the impossible. No matter how often the tellers swore their particular story was the truth the sensible and rational among the peoples of the Inner Sphere rolled their eyes and dismissed them as entertaining lies. Very few people believed in these stories, of course. Alien civilizations became the stock and trade of storytellers every spacer had a story about the alien ruins on some desolate rock, the nonhumans he saw walking around a few jumps off the periphery’s edge. When the frontier moved up and away from Mother Terra the stories followed. Our distant ancestors told tales of the mythical tribes and strange beasts living beyond the mountains, or across deserts and oceans.
Often fanciful, sometimes fabricated stories of what lies over the horizon have enthralled humanity for the entirety of recorded civilization. “As long as there have been travelers, there have been traveler’s tales. Excerpt from “ The Sixth World” by Sun-Tzu Liao (Capella Union University Press, Sian, 3085):
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