(24 May 3049)

On the cold, cold day of the fifth of November, in the year of our Lord two-thousand, seven-hundred and eighty-four, a Kuritan officer turned ambassador faced a threat the likes of which none alive might imagine. Tasked with the operation of a recharge station at New Samarkand (the backend of no where if truth be told), Raymond Sainze never imagined that for a moment—a mere snap of the fingers against the fabric of history—all of our existence would centre on him.

At that moment, Raymond, along with the rest of the Draconis Combine, was paralyzed with fear. Of the knowledge that for long months, tendrils of troops across a thousand light years had snaked toward that one system, until the jump sails of nearly two thousand JumpShips and WarShips blotted out the sun from New Samarkand’s sky.

And not merely a navy the likes of which none of us can imagine, but a military as well. Our records tell us almost two million soldiers, and double that in civilians, followed the Great General to New Samarkand. An army that could have crushed Raymond’s Combine if that were the intent.

And where was the Great General going? The hero of humankind? The man who deposed the worst monster since humans first stepped into the heavens, who freed Mother Terra from the blood-drenched manacles of depravity…he was…running away.

Members of the One Star Faith have filed a defamation of character claim against the author of the recently published Hero or Traitor?: The Kerensky Legacy. As a person of faith, I understand, deeply, the wounds inflicted by those that disparage the things we hold sacred. As a lifelong member of the New Avalon Catholic Church, and as a public figure, such wounds have been frequent and deep. Yet if there is one shining light worth any pain, it is freedom of speech. Freedom of expression. Freedom to start a dialogue and express your opinions. I have read this treatise thrice already, and I must concur with most of its findings.

While the Star League era was not heaven-in-the-Inner Sphere, as it is too often portrayed in lurid history-fantasy holovids, it was indeed the Golden Age of humankind. After the Star League fell and Kerensky turned tail and ran, the governing brake was stripped from the baser instincts of humanity and the nobility that ruled us.

So began centuries of warfare that drove us practically back to the Stone Age… a time of entire planets dying off, of horrific and prodigious use of weapons of mass destruction… of genocides on every side. Even my beloved House Davion has skeletons in its closet from those dark, dark times we wish to ignore.

General Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kerensky may not have been able to stop the wars. Perhaps after so long without large-scale conflict, humanity needed to remember what it was like. Yet he might have limited them to a single Succession War. While I cannot paste the label of traitor on the greatest general humanity has ever known, I must conclude that despite the protestations of the One Star Faith, the blood of millions soaks him to the bone.

And I will always fight for the right to state as much.

—Olivia Daver, Commonwealth Press