IMPERIAL INTELLIGENCE SERVICE BRIEFING DOSSIER
CHILDREN OF EARTH DEPARTMENT
DOSSIER: PROMISE COALITION
The Promise Coalition is a fierce society built around three principles: The Promise (to defend the Children of Earth from all Pirates, Raiders and Marauders), the Oath (To never permit a Pirate, Raider or Marauder to live) and the Service - to be willing and able to fight and die for your neighbors is what makes you a part of a community. In the Promise Coalition, all who are able must serve the state to achieve their citizenship - the Navy and Army absorb most of this manpower, but so too do other arms of the government, especially for those who lack the physical ability or proper temperament for military service. The key, though, is service. Even a logistics tech on Promise itself serves an ultimately vital role, an essential cog in the vast machine that uses Service in defense of the Community.
While a military must obviously have hierarchy for command purposes and the maintenance of discipline, ultimately, all who serve are Brothers and Sisters, all equal. Thus, undergirding everything the Promisers believe is a fierce egalitarianism, though that egalitarianism beliefs that equality must be earned first and foremost.
The Origins of the Promise and the Oath
The planet Promise was once called Dosi. It was settled 750 years ago after a generation ship sent by the planet Dosi - cut off from the hyperlanes after the fall of the First Empire - sent them away some four hundred and ten years earlier. The ship was well equipped and well able to survive, which is hardly surprising. In the First Empire, the heavily urbanized world of Dosi was a major staging point for colonizing the northern rim of Known Space. It seems, according to the information that survives, that Dosi did quite well for itself after the fall of the First Empire, and had, at least as of 1160 years ago, set up a small little pocket empire running on massive - if technically unimpressive, in most ways - ships built around cryosleep for the crews or generations living and dying on space, a surprisingly large and surprisingly well-managed STL empire covering some fifty light years and nearly thirty systems as of 1160 years ago, operating entirely without hyperlanes. With the coordinates of Dosi in the Promiser databanks, should we recover them intact, it is possible that the world could be someday brought back into the fold, if the Jump Drive is ever recovered or reinvented.
The colonists that settled the Gerima system were not originally to be sent there - their target was much closer, the trip should have merely taken seventy-five years or so, rather than four hundred and ten. But a misfired thruster sent the generation ship veering off course, and continuing on with inertia until the scanners detected a system with a livable world for them to settle in.
It speaks to the careful planning that went into the design of the generation ship, it's recycling capacities, it's ability to extract resources from asteroids as it stopped occasionally in star systems and its food generation bays - mostly hydroponics and various algae-based foods grown in vast tanks of wastewater - that the vessel and its cargo of settlers survived the unexpectedly long journey comparatively well. Granted, by the end of it, the ship had maybe another fifty or sixty years left, at most, which meant their arrival in the Germia system was quite fortunate, but compared to say, the Deadrosiers, the settlers did quite well for themselves - that the ship was designed for STL certainly helped, of course.
But they did reach the system they called the Gerima system, and indeed found that it had a habitable world for them to settle and claim as their own. The original plan had been to eventually send the colony ship back to Dosi with a skeleton crew in cryo and with vast quantities of food grown, with other resources to be sent to them in exchange... that of course was not possible, given the new distances involved.
Regardless, when the 10,000 colonists settled on Gerima, they spread out across the world quickly, setting up ten communities of a thousand each. But there was little conflict between them - what there was was quickly - if informally - regularized in a form that, while not called such, would be similar to the
counting coup or ritualized warfare of some ancient cultures on old Earth. It was about the competition and contest, and to use lethal force was to escalate matters far too much - though when it did happen, things could get very bloody indeed.
Still, the Gerimans stuck to being mostly farmers - as that had been what their ship had been equipped to do - settle another agricultural world to ship vast quantities of food to Dosi and its other colonies - and that was what the ship had. Vast seed banks, farming equipment of all types, and extensive training and resources to genetically adapt crops to suit the world they found themselves on, or the wildlife of the world to be adapted to serve the needs of humans. The Gerimans were forced to reinvent other things for other purposes, such as mining and other high-technology items, but the people found themselves mostly content to do without them, on a large scale, their technology akin to pre-FTL earth, in many ways, but no more, and certainly not in its full industrial glory.
There was no real central government between all the various communities, though various informal regional and even planetwide meetings occurred, and there was a limited planetwide network for communication by average citizens. Still, they all preferred to handle most things at the local level.
The Gerimans had never heard of the Second Empire, the Kishrath or anything else. They were used to a galaxy wherein there was no more FTL. They knew Hyperlanes had been a thing, but in the first empire, it had only been some three thousand systems connected. The odds of them ever having external visitors via hyperlane seemed quite slim...
Unfortunately, in 2165, they were proven quite wrong.
The Bandar Invasion
It was assumed that the Hyperlanes all over the galaxy began to stabilize around 2200, and not much before or after, but following the discovery of Bandar and Promise, that has had to be reevaluated - and further analysis of the data now available to the Ministry of Science suggests that while the general stabilization began 2200, other parts of the galaxy did also begin to have more stabilized hyperlanes in the decades before 2200, though the Bandar-Promise region appears to have been the earliest.
Regardless, the people of Promise were, overall, peaceful, and had little use for weaponry beyond that used for sport and hunting. They had little significant orbital presence, no assets in space beyond the orbit of their world, and no organized militaries. Some small scale banditry did occur - the Children of Earth, unfortunately, by their nature, are incapable of being entirely free of deviants who will act as criminals if given the opportunity - but it was dealt with by largely ad hoc militias, with little structure or organization.
In many ways, Promise was quite the idyllic and almost ideal world, by some standards/
In 2165, that changed.
A fleet of raiding vessels from Bandar, including three ancient Corvettes, on the hunt for targets, arrived in the Gerima system. They had found no targets at all during their search, but a determination to not leave empty-handed had kept them going. Gerima with it's lush, undefended world, seemed the perfect choice.
A decision was made, once the sheer vulnerability of Gerima was realized, to not just raid the planet, but stay for an extended period - a few years, perhaps - and completely stock up on everything the planet had to offer, including slave labor. Their landing was utterly uncontested, and within weeks, every major settlement had been occupied by a small team of Bandarian Raiders - with modern weapons and battle armor, and with weapons in orbit ready to destroy any planet that resisted, it took only one town destroyed by an orbital drop to cow the rest, and thus only small teams of twenty to thirty pirates could hold most settlements for most needs. The Gerimans were at the mercy of the Bandarians, and it was a poor mercy at best.
Men and women were raped, forced into labor even more stringent than their farm work had been, and left starved as most food was either taken by the raiders to eat in grand feasts - sometimes they were permitted the scraps, but often not - or sent up to the fleet for storage to be taken back to Bandar, in time.
For six months, there was no organized resistance, and with a harsh policy of collective punishment, individual acts swiftly became quite uncommon as well. The Bandarians appeared to have every intention of staying forever, in the eyes of the locals.
That all changed in the town of Dosha - the pirates there were, all things said and done, much better than the rest - not one person was raped, the exactions were much less than in other regions, and the 'brutality' of their presence quite simply wasn't. Of course, that much is cold comfort to a formerly free people under occupation, and it was that laxness that allowed a small group of young men and women, calling themselves the 'Free Daggers' to organize, arm themselves with a handful of stolen weapons and then plan and launch a surprisingly well executed raid on the armed landing craft of their occupiers, taking them - and with their intuitive and user-friendly controls, forcing the pirates to surrender or be killed.
However, once they disarmed themselves, the pirates were all executed by firing squad. The Free Daggers immediately fled into the countryside, as did most of the settlers, and this sparked off a guerilla conflict across the planet - a dozen more settlements were destroyed, countless civilians were executed and fields burned to try to starve the rebels out, but the actions of the Free Daggers had proven to the people of Gerima that they could fight back.
It was a long, bloody five year struggle to finally expel the pirates - who initially considered fleeing once the world started to fight back, but ended up falling prey to the sin of pride. They were
Bandarians, heirs to a legacy of crime and piracy dating back to before the Second Empire. They had stood up to the League of Argoss for decades, and retained their criminal activities even after the conquest. Some backwoods yokels who had never even heard of the Second Empire would not beat them.
Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened. The rebellion ended after five years not because the Bandarians left, but because they were killed - the people of Gerima managed to finally sneak personnel aboard one of the Corvettes, in the guise of captured slaves and prisoners, and in a brilliantly executed maneuver, they seized control of the ship, preprogrammed a flight course and sent it crashing into the other two, all three vessels exploding in a conflagration visible on the surface, the brave volunteers who had undertaken the effort honored to this day as beloved martyrs on Promise.
But without their warships to provide orbital support, the pirates on the ground were taken by massed rebellion, sometimes dragged out of their beds and literally beaten to death or ripped to pieces (or both, in the case of the particularly vicious) - and without hyper capable warships to defend, the other pirate vessels in orbit were quickly taken by all the captured landing-craft and shuttles.
These ships would eventually serve as the core of the space-capability of the new Promise Coalition. The repair ship, for example, would be repurposed onto a construction facility designed to make use of the resources of the out-system and construct shipyard facilities that could be used to make more vessels.
In 2171, with the pirates, to a man, dead, representatives of the various guerrilla groups met and realized that they truly had one choice, if they wanted to save themselves from another raid.
Because for all that they had, to a man, killed the pirates attacking them, those same pirates had had constant communication with Bandar. Sooner or later, more ships could come. And other threats could lurk on the stellar horizon. They had to come together, under the common banner of survival, of defeating the enemies that threatened them.
And so they crafted the Charter of the Coalition, with its foundational policies, ideas and goals - and the Promise and the Oath. Gerima was renamed to Promise, in the case of the planet, and the star renamed to Oath.
Modern Promise
The Coalition started to actively claim territory beyond their system in 2198, having built up their system infrastructure and a system defense fleet quite quickly. Bandar never did come after them, despite their fears - the rest of the pirates back in the home system found viable targets elsewhere, including a system that had several still-intact orbital habitats, though with the population all dead - the habitats were stripped bare, of course, even their frames eventually ripped to scrap.
But they never sought revenge on the Promisers for the simple fact that the pirates that remained on Bandar were far less prideful - the most prideful of the lot had been on the fleet that reached what had then been Gerima. The rest - sure, they were eager to raid, but they wanted to raid easy targets, fight easy fights. They wanted to seize and win, far more than they wanted to achieve some nebulous sense of payback.
It gave the coalition vital breathing room, - but their neglect has come back to haunt them, as the Promise Coalition has been in a constant state of war against Bandar's pirates, even when not 'formally' at war with the so-called government that unites the various pirate fleets. Pirate-hunters cross the border with impunity, hitting Bandarian shipping, destroying small outlying facilities and defense platforms, even critical mining stations. The Promisers have set upon Bandar as their first target.
There will, of course be more.
The Promise Coalition has little in the way of plans beyond the destruction of Bandar and the total fulfillment of their Promise and Oath. They have already, having been made aware of the Despoiling Horde, that their next target will be those modern day would-be heirs of Genghis Khan. Beyond that, and the constant effort to fight all similar such forces, it is hard to say if the Promisers have any vision at all, really.
Promiser Culture
The brutal and forced transformation of Promiser Society has reflected in their art and cultural output. In the old days, Geriman culture was heavily influenced by that of Dosi, which was itself Middle First Imperial in style. The art was realistic, the music classical*, the architecture efficient and simple, with the beauty to be found in that very simplicity.
Of course, there were deviations, but that had remained the general trend line. Fiction tended to be adventure stories, often in the style of First Imperial planetary romances, though less so in actual setting.
Author's Note said:
"Classical" Middle First Empire music is more akin to modern Heavy Metal, at least in terms of how the music sounds, rather than actual modern 'classical; music
Today, Adventure stories remain a popular form of fiction - but instead they are often set on fictionalized versions of Old Earth's "Golden Age of Piracy" or "Wild West", or other times and places when banditry, piracy or the like were common, and popular imagination would hold that the criminals were held back only by individual, truly singular men and women.
Fiction set during the Bandar Invasion is surprisingly unpopular - but the most popular art tends to depict important moments in the invasion.
IIS Recommendation
Aid them in the destruction of the Bandar Fleets, the Despoiling Horde and any other marauder forces. Convince them that the Unity we provide will be the best long-term solution to the problem of Pirates and Marauders. Annex them into the Empire... though allow their democratic governance to remain on the local level for at least a century until they can be fully brought around to more appropriate sensibilities. Erosion of their 'democratic ideals' must be done slowly and carefully, as more direct action is extremely unlikely to go well.[/B]
seems to not be happening here much yet.
