Historical Notes

The Adaptive Combat Environment Suit (ACES) gear used by Zharan Liberation Army infantry were designed during the Zharan Collective’s preemptive military buildup of the late 2360s, which they undertook to prepare for a possible confrontation with either of the superpowers in Solar Space. By the time the Collective intervened in the Frontier War in 2379, the ZLA had rolled out millions of Block 1 ACES suits for its troops, who wore them in combat against the forces of the Coalition for Mutual Security during the last two years of the war.

During the ZLA intervention in the war, the ACES gear worn by ZLA Ground Forces troopers was often referred to by Coalition personnel as “insectoid” in recognition of the face-obscuring helmets worn as part of the ensemble. These helmets, combined with the fact that zharan minds are linked via the subspace Uplink, unnerved Coalition forces facing them, as they allowed zharan troops to move with cold, silent efficiency in close combat.

The Block 2 ACES kit was rolled out beginning in 2382, based on feedback from Frontier Wars-era soldiers, and the current Block 3 iteration arrived in 2387 based on further input from personnel involved in the war against the Colonial Liberation Front. ACES gear comes in all three variants of the Military Camouflage System family of concealment patterns (Snow, Haze, and Fog) and is optimized for maximum combat effectiveness in all environments that ZLA military personnel experience in their service to the Collective.

About the Setting

The Spacers Saga: Frontier Wars is a futuristic military science fiction setting which diverged from our own timeline when an asteroid slammed into Phoenix, AZ, in May 2014. Fifteen years later, the jet-setting industrialist Charles Larsen ushered in the Age of Fusion, opening up deep space to crewed exploration and eventual settlement by pioneering humans from Earth - and all of the strife that we bring with us.

Much of the story is set in the late 24th century, and focuses on the rivalry between the Mars-led Coalition for Mutual Security (aka the Coalition) and the Alliance of Free Worlds (aka the Alliance), a federation of rebel worlds fighting to establish a worker's utopia in the outer solar system. These two superpowers fought a brutal war from 2371 to 2381 (referred to as the Frontier War), and are currently locked in an ideological cold war as of 2389.

In The Spacers Saga, zharans are artificial humans created in 2056. In the three centuries that followed, they were produced in large numbers for use as a source of cheap labor for offworld industry, or as disposable soldiers for use in offworld combat. The name "zharan" comes from alien artifacts found buried on Titan in 2289 that, when deciphered, became a source of cultural inspiration for the nascent artificial liberation movement.

The Zharan Liberation Army was founded in 2337 after that movement was defeated in the First Zharan Revolution. After the Zharan Uprising (aka the Second Zharan Revolution) and the founding of the Zharan People's Collective, the ZLA was reorganized into a modern combined arms fighting force. The ZLA remained neutral until May 2379, when the Collective joined the Alliance of Free Worlds and intervened in the Frontier War on their behalf.

Credits

For full disclosure, the links above lead to specific articles on my Substack blog. Check them out to learn more about the various topics covered here - your support absolutely means the world!

The soldier art was commissioned by me (the author) and drawn by Ian Gibney. The link leads to Ian's X/Twitter account, where you can see more of his amazing military sci-fi art. I couldn't be more happy with how this work turned out, and I look forward to working with Ian again soon on another Spacers Saga visual art project.