It is 2100. Mankind has colonized nearly every corner of the solar system.

Sixteen billion humans now live throughout an increasingly industrialized Solar System; 15 billion on a dying Earth, and the last billion on the Moon, a half-terraformed Mars, and spread across the rest of the system. Four major political blocs dominate human civilization: the socialist Fifth International, the liberal Pacific Defense Accord, the social-darwinist Federation of Earth, and the profit-driven spectators of the Corporate Triad.

Ever since the disastrous Climate War, Earth's environment has rapidly decayed. An ever-growing human population, centuries of exploitation, and deliberate climate sabotage by the Federation of Earth have driven the planet toward ecological collapse. Mass desertification has consumed enormous portions of the world's land, while global sea levels have risen by an unprecedented fifteen meters. Almost every major ecosystem on the planet has collapsed, causing mass extinction on a scale mankind once thought impossible to inflict upon the planet as a civilization.

But humankind prevailed, by going interplanetary. The Space Rush of the mid-to-late 21st century saw aerospace engineering and interplanetary colonization advance at a pace few could have imagined. Technologies once believed to be the domain of the late 22nd century were realized decades ahead of schedule: ships measuring multiple kilometers in length, cheap and practical mass fusion, the first stages of a Mars terraforming project, and much, much more.

In the 2060s, life was discovered beneath the ice of Europa, life that possessed DNA, and not merely DNA, but DNA remarkably similar to that of life on Earth. The traditional Goldilocks Zone model was shattered, tearing open doors to theories of alien life that the butchered scientific orthodoxy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries had left firmly locked. Scientists from a multitude of fields later concluded that the asteroid responsible for the Vredefort Crater was the most likely culprit behind the panspermia event that carried life from Earth to Europa's vast subsurface ocean.

And hiding in plain sight: an Empire.

Konigsberg Raumwerke, the Prussian Giant, had seen the future long before most of humanity did. Born from the ashes of the Climate War, and a beneficiary of Prussia's lunar gains after the deadly German Civil War, KRW transformed itself from an aerospace manufacturer into the industrial backbone of humanity's expansion beyond Earth. It constructed the first commercially available interplanetary spacecraft, built vast orbital stations around the Solar System's most important destinations, and established the infrastructure through which people, cargo, and resources could move between worlds. By the 2060s, there was scarcely a corner of human space that KRW could not profit from; by the 2090s, it had grown powerful enough to effectively operate as a faction of its own, but instead chose to work with their oldest corporate allies: NEUBIOCAL, a Californian biotech-centered government contractor turned megacorporation, and Konigsberg Robotik der Hohenzollern, a robotics corporation owned by the old Prussian noble house. Together, these 3 form the geopolitical entity known as the Corporate Triad.

But now, in the 22nd century, humanity is looking to the stars, specifically the closest three worlds of the trinary Alpha Centauri system. The Mars L1 Shield, an unfinished megastructure primarily built to protect Mars from atmospheric stripping and solar flares, now decorated with thousands of observatories, has imaged the two warm planets of Alpha Centauri Ac ("Phalanx") and Alpha Centauri Bb ("Shuiguan"), as well as the cold eyeball planet of Proxima Centauri b ("Prox Terminus"), and found clear evidence of life on all three, as well as breathable atmospheres, something most scientists once thought to be impossible until they were confronted with the raw statistics and low-resolution imagery themselves. Now, the three great powers of Earth (of course excluding the Triad as neither of the other 3 factions recognize it as a legitimate equal) fight through their representatives in televised meetings over who gets what part of each planet, while the Raumwerke builds the ships that will support the decades-long interstellar voyage. Humanity has spent the last century escaping a dying world; now, it is preparing to claim three more. But little do they know, two of these three worlds are already inhabited by other sophonts.