Departure: 2155
Travel Time: Approximately 71 years
Arrival: 2226
The Harmony Fleet had originally expected to reach Epsilon in approximately fifty-eight years.
It did not.
Eleven years into the crossing, Greenward suffered a cascading fungal contamination inside several agricultural environments.
The infection itself was survivable.
The political consequences were not.
Food production dropped.
Rationing began.
Greenward's administrators demanded additional electrical allocation from the convoy to sterilize and rebuild damaged agricultural chambers.
Foundry Grace refused.
Its engineers argued that shutting down fabrication lines would create an even greater long-term danger.
Fair Common attempted to impose mandatory resource transfers.
Two ships rejected its authority.
Then somebody falsified fuel-consumption records.
Nobody now knows who did it.
The accusations were enough.
The First Taking
In 2168, security personnel from Fair Common attempted to seize stored nutrient reserves aboard the cargo vessel CSV Harridan.
Harridan's crew resisted.
Gunfire erupted inside the docking structure.
Twenty-three people died.
Harridan sealed the docking collar and detached while several Fair Common personnel were still inside it.
The incident became known as the First Taking.
After that, agreements stopped being agreements.
They became calculations.
Ships began concealing inventories.
Maintenance crews sabotaged competing vessels.
Families bribed quartermasters.
Security departments became private armed forces.
Convoy communications were monitored, spoofed, and occasionally jammed.
By the twentieth year of the crossing, the Harmony Cooperative existed largely on paper.
The Black Years
The next eighteen years are remembered simply as the Black Years.
Three ships formed one alliance.
Two formed another.
The remaining vessels negotiated with whoever appeared strongest.
Boarding actions became common.
Water was stolen.
Machine components were stripped from inhabited sections.
One reactor was deliberately disabled to force its ship to surrender fabrication equipment.
Approximately 6,000 people died from violence, accidents, malnutrition, untreated illness, or life-support failures during this period.
One ship, CSV Mercy Road, was abandoned completely after its cooling system failed.
Several hundred survivors were distributed among the remaining vessels.
Nobody wanted them.
Everyone needed their labor.
The first compulsory labor agreements appeared soon afterward.
Officially, survivors were exchanging labor for food, air, shelter, and transportation.
In reality, refusal meant death.
The contracts survived.
So did the people who wrote them.
The First Black Banner
During a siege aboard Foundry Grace, surrendering compartments began hanging sheets of black thermal insulation across their access hatches.
The improvised signal meant:
We surrender the compartment. Do not vent it.
Boarding crews eventually began carrying strips of the same material.
A black banner displayed beside a hatch meant that the occupants had accepted the boarders' authority and would be spared if they obeyed.
The symbol spread between ships.
Over time, it gained another meaning.
To be under the Banner meant that someone stronger had claimed responsibility for you.
Protection and ownership became difficult to distinguish.
The Articles of Necessity
In 2191, with four of the surviving vessels facing simultaneous reactor and food-production failures, the major captains signed an agreement aboard Foundry Grace.
It was called the Articles of Necessity.
The Articles remain the foundation of Black Banner law.
They recognize the right to seize resources necessary for survival.
They recognize labor debt.
They recognize conquest.
They recognize negotiated surrender.
They require that surrender terms be honored.
They forbid killing useful captives without cause.
They allow property to change ownership through force.
Most importantly, they reject the idea that possession alone creates permanent rights.
The convoy stabilized.
It also became something very different from what had left Sol.
When the surviving ships finally reached Epsilon Eridani in 2226, only five of the original eight vessels remained operational.
Approximately 21,000 people arrived.
They no longer called themselves the Harmony Fleet.
Their hulls carried black surrender markings that had become symbols of authority.
Other humans gave them the name they now proudly use.
The Black Banner Fleet.
