The story begins decades after a massive orgy of authoritarianism, in which the Federation had fought an interstellar war to suppress the secession of a number of human-settled star systems, inflicting upon its remaining member populations (as well as the conquered worlds) enormous devastation, both military and economic. The people of one loyalist star system had enjoyed the heated artificial "prosperity" of serving as the logistic hinge of the Federation offensive, followed now by a dismal and long-sustained interplanetary postwar "bust."

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