...After a viral pandemic which threw the entire world into major economic recession, pugnacious elements in many of the world's political circles decided that it was the time to launch their aggressions for either land and material gain, or to force entire populations to submit to their religions. The virus had not been a very lethal one, but it was debilitating enough to generate dangerous turmoil in many already fragile political systems. This new worldwide conflict which almost saw the use nuclear arms suddenly reached a dramatic turning point when an attempted mass civilian disarmament campaign in the United States led to a full blown civil war. Within months, the progressive leftist administration which instigated the original attempt to seize guns from civilian hands had been destroyed by a population fed up with plague, economic woes, lies, and false promises. The results of this civil war inspired many other groups also fed up with their predicaments all over the world to revolt, brutally slaughtering their socialistic or theocratic autocracies. A new group of paramilitary operatives, crewed by armed civilians, partisan fighters, tough old military veterans, and former outlaws and led by the reformed US Army, quickly destroyed the rest of the cults and smaller terrorist groups who tried to continue fighting, bringing swift justice to their leaders and those who they coerced or rewarded to do their biddings. After a year of global peace and economic regrowth, what was originally intended as a cyber warfare program under a previous American administration called the "Space Force", had been refitted with elements from the US Marines and former Chinese PLA Phoenix, Dragon, and Poseidon special forces groups who had been instrumental in toppling the world's last hardline communist hegemony. This new global branch of peacekeepers, first responders to all critical situations, and front line asskickers became officially known as the Terran Federation Mobile Infantry. This move came directly on the heels of several major technological breakthroughs achieved by global scientific institutions which had received massive funding from infectious disease research in the wake of the pandemic. Among those breakthroughs was powered exoskeletal armored suits that enabled their wearers to generate 20 times their body energy as well as shield them from radiation and vacuum, advanced long term hibernation and cryostasis protocols which had initially been used to successfully treat organ failure in the most severe cases of the disease, and most significantly, a form of spacecraft propulsion powered by the amplification and 'lasering' of the radiation output of sustained thermonuclear fusion that researchers dubbed the "Cherenkov drive", which would truly open up the stars for the human civilization in the following decades...
