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The Norrilgans have not been treated kindly by the galaxy and a scarred world will take time to return to some appearance of normalcy.
With so many species now in the governance, I wonder how long it will take for a non-vailon to be elected as Director-General.
Fern’uni was in for a tough time even just for the subject matter but the guerrilla warfare won't do anything to make their research easier.
As always, I very much enjoy how you write these interludes as it's really interesting to see how the galaxy is developing at ground level.
Also congratulation on your partner for the editing and their artwork. Looking forward to seeing more of it!
With so many species now in the governance, I wonder how long it will take for a non-vailon to be elected as Director-General.
Fern’uni was in for a tough time even just for the subject matter but the guerrilla warfare won't do anything to make their research easier.
As always, I very much enjoy how you write these interludes as it's really interesting to see how the galaxy is developing at ground level.
Also congratulation on your partner for the editing and their artwork. Looking forward to seeing more of it!
Interlude - Coming Home, Part II
Sergeant Pathir had waited for me outside the major’s door. He directed me to the motor pool, adjacent to the main gate of the base, and said he would meet me there. I slid on alone, now preoccupied with the thought that an angry mob of saathid civilians, left behind by their government, angry and afraid and cut off from the only beings they considered to be full persons. I had never before imagined their predicament, or even that there might be saathids left on the planet at all. In my mind, it had always been a landscape devoid of any life, inhabited only by the ruins of dead civilizations. Instead it was a vibrant place, thrumming with tension.
Thirty minutes later, I was sitting in a passenger seat in the rear of a four-wheeled transport vehicle, humming along an empty road. Sergeant Pathir sat in the front passenger seat; Private Wun, a tezhnid, was driving from the seat directly in front of me, and Corporal Schieee, a mith-fell, occupied the seat next to me. Sergeant Pathir had given me a brief lecture before we departed. He had three rules for me: don’t speak to any locals without his approval, don’t walk in front of any of the squadmembers and block their sight lines, and always listen to his orders. I acknowledged them while we stood in the motor pool – it seemed unlikely we would head out if I didn’t – but I had no intention of paying them any mind once we were in the field, and I fully expected Major Vakor to back me up when we found her.
We drove in silence as I stared out the window at the jungle, which grew up to and in some place over the road. It felt different than the landscapes back home on Kampira. Thicker, heavier somehow.
Private Wun broke the quiet. “So, Fern, what’re you working on that’s important enough to get us out here on escort duty in a Delta zone?” I turned to look at her; her eyes were glued to the road. I would have much preferred that she use my full name.
“Hey.” That was Corporal Schieee, next to me. She didn’t look away from her rifle sights, pointed out her window, either. “Be nice to the civvie. He might write bad shit about us.”
“At least we’ll be famous,” Private Wun cracked in return.
“Yeah, and busted onto latrine duty.”
“That might be good for you. Disciplining. You’ll learn you don’t need to do so much preening every morning.”
“You know what, Wun? You’ll probably enjoy it. Your ancestors crawled out of that muck. It’ll be like going home for you.”
I swiveled my head back and forth during the exchange, half-expecting one to jump the other. But nothing. They barely flinched as they hurled insults, and I even thought a hint of smile played on Sergeant Pathir’s face. “Cut it out,” he ordered, but without much enthusiasm.
They did, in fact, stay silent for a moment. Private Wun, however, proved unable to sustain it for long. “But Fern didn’t answer my question! Hasn’t even said a word this whole time.” With no rebuke coming, she continued. “So how about it, Fern?” Now she glanced over, mandibles clicking.
Before I could respond, Corporal Schieee jumped in again. “That’s a fair point! What’s your deal, Fern?”
“I’m here researching the destruction of norillgan society. My thesis deals with apocalyptic trauma and the inherent contradictions of annihilation and rebirth.” They asked for it.
It was met with another silence, though this one seemed to be more stupefied than anything. Private Wun recovered first. “None of us mudsuckers know what any of those words mean. Can you dumb it down for the idiots in the car?”
“I’m trying to document the facts of the original saathid invasion and compare it to the pilgrims’ memory of the event.”
Private Wun’s mandibles clacked in rapid succession. “Well why didn’t you just say so? Makes perfect sense when you put it that way.”
Corporal Schieee let out a small shriek of annoyance. “That’s how they get trained in higher learning. Complicated words for complicated ideas.” She was defending me, maybe. “Me, I grew up on an algae farm. Not saying there weren’t smart individuals in my cohort, but it was definitely clear the types of postings we were being prepared for.”
Private Wun cut her off. “That’s some kind of bullshit! We all know you joined up because you couldn’t stand the stench of the hatcheries back home.”
“Now, now,” Sergeant Pathir chided her. “Let’s not get all personal and offensive. I’m sure Corporal Schieee doesn’t think her own broodmates stink, do you, Corporal?”
“No, sir, I don’t.” Her tone of voice was eager, as if she was anticipating wherever it was the sergeant was headed.
“That’s right, because the corporal knows that there are only two reasons any individual would choose to join the UGF.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Reason number one: navy brats think they are the supreme form of intellectual and physical achievement and are completely insufferable.”
“One hundred percent, sir.”
“Reason number two: if you’re like the good private here, and you can’t find any lovers back home, you might think the lack of options at an army base would make some individuals desperate.”
“Private Wun might certainly have thought so, sir.”
“Unfortunately for our friend, her fellow soldiers are not that desperate. We all feel bad for you, we do. But we’re discriminating enough to know better than to jump into bed with you.”
Private Wun had taken this abuse with levity. “You’ve got me there, sir. I live a very sad life. But I want to get back to Fern here. What exactly are you expecting to get out of the ‘nids?”
“I don’t expect to get anything from the saathids.” I chose not to use the derogatory word for them. “I didn’t come here for that.”
“So what’s the deal then? We’re out here protecting you for, what? A nice walk in the countryside?”
“I’m here to gather evidence and document it for further research. Things like death camps, mass grave sites, abandoned towns. Hopefully all very far away from saathid population centers, to be honest. I don’t want to have to deal with them.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Private Wun’s mandibles clacked again. “But we’re heading to a saathid town right now. We’ll see how well we can keep them away from you, eh?”
“Leave the civvie alone, Private,” the sergeant ordered. And she did.
--------------
We arrived in Skom about twenty minutes later. Private Wun was apparently constitutionally incapable of keeping quiet for more than a few minutes; shortly after she left off interrogating me, she had started up a new conversation, ostensibly with Corporal Schieee but actually very one-sided, about the meal regulations at the base’s mess hall, which I came to understand required all foodstuffs to have pre-approval from Central Command and thus forbade the serving of any local fauna that might have otherwise made for good game meat. The private knew about that bit because she had herself gone out hunting with some friends from another platoon and had personally bagged a big six-legged ungulate, only for the head chef to shove the animal straight into the incinerator. This had been very upsetting for Private Wun, who had filed a formal complaint to the lieutenant who oversaw the mess hall and spent thirty minutes of our trip alternatively boring us to death (with detailed descriptions of the biochemical differences between the life found on this planet and some of the animals she raised back on Varba) and making us laugh uproariously (with stories of the travails of the hunting party).
Once we arrived in Skom, though, she quieted down. Even in broad daylight, the glittering carapaces of the saathid residents were eerily reminiscent of the horrifying stories of destructive cleansing and xenocide that we had all seen in holos. The locals – or should I call them newcomers, since they had usurped this land within living memory – were emerging on the streets, staring at our vehicle as if calculating their odds of survival if they all rushed us simultaneously. As we rolled through town, Sergeant Pathir kept muttering, “Stay frosty,” to the others; the air in the vehicle was very tense. None of the locals made a move, however, and no weapons appeared, thankfully. I learned later that scout platoons from the base made regular searches of homes and community centers, which at least reduced the likelihood that any individual civilian might still have a gun. Instead, they remained in passive hostility.
We found Major Vakor near the eastern edge of the town, a lone vailon in the midst of a crowd of saathids. We stopped the vehicle at a nearby intersection and slid (or walked, as the case may be) over to the group. She towered over them – saathids averaged a little under one meter “tall”, and typically measured themselves by their lengths instead. As we approached, I heard her saying, “Look, I know this is hard for you. The way to make it easier for yourselves is by cooperating. All the captain knew was that his unit was attacked by some type of insurgents, and they escaped into town that way” – and here she pointed over their heads, in the direction we had come from – “and there’s little I can do to protect you when you don’t give him intel he wants.”
“So it’s okay that they just came around and beat us for it,” one of the saathids wanted to know.
“Hell yeah!” Private Wun shouted, causing the crowd to scuttle around to see who was there. Sergeant Pathir gave her a withering look, as if to say, not helpful.
Major Vakor did what she could to calm the increasingly restless locals, shouting over their muttering. “Hey, hey! What Captain Khaww subjected you to last night is illegal! It is against regs, and I will see to it myself that he is disciplined for it.” Her job must be very lonely, I thought, if she was filing reports on every incident of over-eager commanders being too aggressive with the civilian population. I felt a twinge of sympathy for her doomed cause – until I remembered the crimes of the very same saathids that Major Vakor was trying to protect. “But you need to look out for yourselves. Hostile action against Governance forces will create the circumstances for reprisals. I am in no position to prevent something like that.”
From what I could tell, the major’s words were having an effect. Some of the individuals appeared to be nodding along, resigned to their circumstances and hoping to make the best of it. But the tension was rising anyway. Voices were being raised. I sensed the squad tightening their grips on their rifles as the threat of violence intensified. Sergeant Pathir muttered to the others, “I think we may have to go get her.”
A few more saathids were now crawling up to the group, their eight legs skittering over the pavement. Private Wun tracked them with her rifle.
Major Vakor continued reasoning with the civilians, but increasingly she was just being ignored and shouted down. Things seemed to be degenerating quickly.
“We gotta do something here, boss,” Corporal Schieee said with some urgency, or creeping alarm. “There’s a whole bunch of spiders over who look like they’re spoiling for a fight.” She was covering the north road from one knee; I looked over her head, and saw numerous saathids emerging from buildings, looking at the commotion with curiosity and growing hostility.
Sergeant Pathir kept calm, but the squad was now outnumbered twenty to one. I was very nervous at the idea of a battle breaking out with me at its center, but I also felt a curious sense of arousal. I tried to prepare myself for if the shooting started, but my mind was buzzing and I was struggling to form coherent thoughts. The thing the sergeant told me was stuck in my head on repeat: “Stay out of their lines of fire. Stay out of their lines of fire.” I looked at him, hoping for reassurance, but he was focused on the crowd.
The next thirty seconds felt like an hour. Sergeant Pathir finally came to a decision. “Alright, let’s go get her. Private, on me. Corporal, stay with our friend.”
“Got it.” Corporal Schieee moved to my side, rifle raised, as the other two pushed their way into the crowd. I squished down next to her, which seemed like it would be a good idea but actually probably made little difference. It did mean that I couldn’t see what was going on with the rescue attempt, so I tried to count my breaths to stay calm.
More angry shouts were coming from the crowd. I looked up; Sergeant Pathir was pushing Major Vakor in front of him; the major was visibly upset. Some of the saathids kicked at their shins. Others threw rocks. One large stone connected with the major’s head. Sergeant Pathir shouted at us, “Get to the vehicle!” I scurried over as fast as I could. Corporal Schieee followed, muttering under her breath, “Why didn’t he have Wun get the vehicle ready while we went to get the major?” Once we reached the car, she turned around and trained her gun on the crowd as we waited for the others, still being pelted with projectiles by the saathids, to catch up. But, finally, we all piled in, Major Vakor having been practically thrown in by the sergeant before he jumped into the front seat and slammed the door. “Go!” he shouted, and we zoomed backwards, away from the impending riot.
“That went well,” Private Wun observed, sarcastic cheer in her voice.
Major Vakor was sprawled across the back row, her horn squishing into my side. She righted herself before laying into Sergeant Pathir. “What the hell were you thinking? You could have set them off! There could have been a riot!”
The sergeant replied, “There might still be a riot.” The vehicle sped away from the town, towards the north.
“You need to take me back,” the major stated flat out. “I need to defuse the situation before it gets out of control.”
“It seemed like it was getting out of control in spite of your presence,” Sergeant Pathir growled in return.
“Well it would be a lot easier if grunts like you weren’t undermining my work every time you stepped outside the fence!”
“Nice,” Corporal Schieee interjected. “Right in front of the civvie.”
Major Vakor seemed to finally register my presence.
“You’re Fern’uni?” She knew how to pronounce my name.
“Yes.”
“Okay.” The major stroked her right horn apologetically. “Sorry about this mess. And sorry about…” she trailed off and gestured at my midsection, which still had a horn-shaped indent.
“It’s okay,” I reassured her. “It’ll reshape itself soon.”
“Fuck!” Major Vakor shouted, presumably not in response to my assurance. She was touching the back of her head, now matted with blood.
Corporal Schieee took notice. “You alright, major? I’ve got bandages in my pack.” She reached up to feel the wound.
“Ouch!” The major whirled instinctively, forcing the corporal to duck her head out of the way of the onrushing horn. “Don’t do that!”
“You’re gonna need a concussion check, too,” Corporal Schieee noted as she straightened.
“Later,” Major Vakor spat, turning back to Sergeant Pathir. “That little stunt of yours ruined an entire morning’s work. They were almost ready to move on.”
The sergeant turned towards the back seat. We were in the open countryside now, miles away from Skom. “I heard the end of the meeting, major. With respect, you were not calming the crowd. They were getting more agitated.” His observations, delivered in a calm, matter-of-fact voice, as if it were patently impossible to disagree, only heightened Major Vakor’s frustration.
“If you don’t let me do my job, if you’re constantly focused on the immediate danger, they will never trust us. They will never live peacefully alongside us.”
“Sorry, major, but that is not my concern,” Sergeant Pathir retorted.
“I wish you would make it more of your concern,” the major snarled. “You might actually save some lives instead of taking them.”
“If you want to go over the line every day in a foolish attempt to change hearts and minds, that’s your business. But it makes it my business to go extract you before you get yourself killed.”
Major Vakor snorted, but didn’t say anything. After a moment, she began to fidget with her vest, trying to straighten it, but she only managed to bang her head against the ceiling. “Fuck!” she shouted again, once more holding the back of her head, which had been jarred by the bump.
“Stop the vehicle,” Corporal Schieee called out. “I need to patch up the major.”
We pulled over into a field and piled out. Soon the corporal was dabbing at Major Vakor’s injury with a salve; the officer, on one knee so the mith-fell could reach her wound, was wincing with each touch but no longer crying out with pain.
“Fern’uni,” the major said, beckoning me over. “I’m sorry about all of this. Being on the front lines isn’t like what they show in the holos back home, eh?”
“I suppose so,” I replied. I’d seen more than a few “realistic” portrayals of militaries in war, but those holos weren’t exactly popular and I thought it easier not to have to explain.
“There’s just so many absolute idiots. So many patrols running around, thinking they can just rough up civilians whenever they feel like it because we won and they lost. They act like there are no consequences because they have guns and locals don’t.” I nodded along, as it seemed like she was building up a head of steam. “Then I have to come along and clean up their mess. I’m trying to build relationships with the population, but every trip over the line I hear, ‘This squad stole my food,’ and ‘Some vailons started a bar fight.’ And we need these individuals! If we don’t want to be an occupying force, if we don’t want to be colonial masters to a repressed minority, then we need to find ways to show them the benefits of life in the Governance. Otherwise it will just be rebellions followed by reprisals followed by more rebellions forever.”
There was a ripping sound. Corporal Schieee, preparing the bandage. “Don’t mind me,” she said, as we had both swung our eyes around. “Just a worthless mudsucker here, fixing you up before getting back to beating on some ‘nids.”
The major grunted and shook her head. “Present company excepted, I guess.” She paused for a moment, then sighed. “Truth is, Sergeant Pathir is one of the good ones. And he was probably right about earlier. That’s between you and me, Corporal,” she said sharply, turning to the mith-fell.
“Sure, major,” she responded, turning the officer’s head back around so she could access the wound. “Now hold steady for a sec.”
Major Vakor drew a sharp breath but successfully held her head still. “The saathids are not our enemy,” she continued. “Sorry if that upsets you, but it’s true. We’re not going to expel them from the planet, and we’re not going to make them second-class citizens permanently. Either would be a major violation of the Accord of Governing.” I didn’t need the civics lesson, but I let her speak anyway. I wondered briefly if there was some part of the officer curriculum that encouraged speechifying. “Whatever political settlement Tebazed eventually imposes, it is going to involve some path to citizenship.”
“For these xenocide fuckers?” Corporal Schieee burst out as she smoothed the edges of the bandage around the major’s wound.
Yes, even for these xenocide fuckers, I thought. I said, “Well, it only makes sense. The Governance has few ironclad principles at its heart but one of them is the fundamental equality of all sentient lifeforms. If we excluded them, we wouldn’t be ourselves anymore.”
Corporal Schieee scoffed. “Even for a civvie you are naïve. They were taking advantage of your misfortune. They murdered your friends and stole your land, and you want to let them keep it.”
The major stood, gingerly touching the back of her head. “This one’s a true believer,” she said, waving towards me. “Like all converts, inevitably the most zealous in any group.”
Slightly embarrassed, I shifted my body around. “I grew up in the Governance. I don’t remember any other way of life. This is what I know.”
The corporal laughed again. “My family immigrated when I was young. Came up in a cohort, went through the indoctrination process just like you, and you,” she said, pointing at the major and me in turn. “But I can see the practicalities of the situation anyway. What I don’t understand is, doesn’t some part of your brain, buried in all that fat and flesh, isn’t there some corner of it that just wants to kidnap a couple of ‘nids, take them somewhere dark, and flay them, just like they did to your grannies?”
It was a valid question, I supposed, though not exactly how it was phrased by my friends on back Tebazed. “I grew up with people like that,” I replied, cautiously. “But they were too angry for me.”
“I’d be angry!” The corporal flapped her wings in emphasis. “Hell, I am angry!”
“Well, that’s not me,” I said in return. “And from a more political orientation, I would say we shouldn’t stoop to their level.”
That earned renewed laughter, this time from both my companions. I looked around; Private Wun was inspecting one of the tires on the vehicle, while Sergeant Pathir was talking into his headset a few meters away.
Major Vakor was saying, “If only more individuals thought that way,” with a hint of mockery. Corporal Schieee continued, “That’s like me saying, when Wun steals my wing ointment to lubricate his mandibles, eh it’s fine, take as much as you want, instead of swapping out the actual ointment bottle with a decoy filled with glue.” Now it was the major and I who reacted as one, looking at the corporal with concern. She shrugged. “What do you want? The stuff is really hard to get out here! I had to teach her a lesson. And the medics set her right within a few hours anyway.”
“Alright,” the major said, with a chuckle.
Sergeant Pathir took the brief pause that ensued as an opportunity to rejoin us. “I just got off the hook with base; they gave us the go-ahead to continue.”
Major Vakor nodded. “Good.” She turned in my direction. “So, where would you like to go first?”
I was not prepared for this question. I had anticipated a fight, from either the sergeant or the major; I had a whole speech rehearsed, extolling the virtues of research and understanding and public awareness. “Uh,” I responded, stalling for time. “Where are we?”
Sergeant Pathir tapped out instructions on his wristband and called up a map projection. “Here,” he said, pointing. “About twenty klicks north of Skom. Do you have your site coordinates? I can overlay them.”
“Uh, it’s in my bag, I think.” I heard snickers as I slid over to the vehicle. I rummaged through my pack, very conscious of the several sets of eyes watching and waiting. Finally, I found the data disk I was looking for. “Got it!” I called, waving the disk unnecessarily as I came back to the group, followed by Private Wun.
The sergeant took the disk and tapped his wristband with it. Several locations on the projection were highlighted, descriptive text hovering above each. I touched one, and the projection zoomed in for details. It was incredibly seamless, much more so than anything I’d seen in the civilian world.
“It’s mith-fell,” Major Vakor explained, sensing my admiration. Made sense – the projection had a green glow I was familiar with from my stay on Tripitit. “Part of our latest round of trade negotiations, I believe.”
Sergeant Pathir wrenched us back on topic. Tapping some more on his wristband, he scrolled the projection to the region around Skom, and highlighted three locations. “These are closest to us,” he said.
I pointed to one, pretty much at random. “This one.” It was a suspected mass grave site. As good a place to start as any.
“Okay.” The sergeant turned around. “Hey, Wun! How’s it looking?
“All set boss! We can head out whenever.”
The sergeant looked at the major, who nodded. “Alright, let’s pack it up,” he said.
Thirty minutes later, I was sitting in a passenger seat in the rear of a four-wheeled transport vehicle, humming along an empty road. Sergeant Pathir sat in the front passenger seat; Private Wun, a tezhnid, was driving from the seat directly in front of me, and Corporal Schieee, a mith-fell, occupied the seat next to me. Sergeant Pathir had given me a brief lecture before we departed. He had three rules for me: don’t speak to any locals without his approval, don’t walk in front of any of the squadmembers and block their sight lines, and always listen to his orders. I acknowledged them while we stood in the motor pool – it seemed unlikely we would head out if I didn’t – but I had no intention of paying them any mind once we were in the field, and I fully expected Major Vakor to back me up when we found her.
We drove in silence as I stared out the window at the jungle, which grew up to and in some place over the road. It felt different than the landscapes back home on Kampira. Thicker, heavier somehow.
Private Wun broke the quiet. “So, Fern, what’re you working on that’s important enough to get us out here on escort duty in a Delta zone?” I turned to look at her; her eyes were glued to the road. I would have much preferred that she use my full name.
“Hey.” That was Corporal Schieee, next to me. She didn’t look away from her rifle sights, pointed out her window, either. “Be nice to the civvie. He might write bad shit about us.”
“At least we’ll be famous,” Private Wun cracked in return.
“Yeah, and busted onto latrine duty.”
“That might be good for you. Disciplining. You’ll learn you don’t need to do so much preening every morning.”
“You know what, Wun? You’ll probably enjoy it. Your ancestors crawled out of that muck. It’ll be like going home for you.”
I swiveled my head back and forth during the exchange, half-expecting one to jump the other. But nothing. They barely flinched as they hurled insults, and I even thought a hint of smile played on Sergeant Pathir’s face. “Cut it out,” he ordered, but without much enthusiasm.
They did, in fact, stay silent for a moment. Private Wun, however, proved unable to sustain it for long. “But Fern didn’t answer my question! Hasn’t even said a word this whole time.” With no rebuke coming, she continued. “So how about it, Fern?” Now she glanced over, mandibles clicking.
Before I could respond, Corporal Schieee jumped in again. “That’s a fair point! What’s your deal, Fern?”
“I’m here researching the destruction of norillgan society. My thesis deals with apocalyptic trauma and the inherent contradictions of annihilation and rebirth.” They asked for it.
It was met with another silence, though this one seemed to be more stupefied than anything. Private Wun recovered first. “None of us mudsuckers know what any of those words mean. Can you dumb it down for the idiots in the car?”
“I’m trying to document the facts of the original saathid invasion and compare it to the pilgrims’ memory of the event.”
Private Wun’s mandibles clacked in rapid succession. “Well why didn’t you just say so? Makes perfect sense when you put it that way.”
Corporal Schieee let out a small shriek of annoyance. “That’s how they get trained in higher learning. Complicated words for complicated ideas.” She was defending me, maybe. “Me, I grew up on an algae farm. Not saying there weren’t smart individuals in my cohort, but it was definitely clear the types of postings we were being prepared for.”
Private Wun cut her off. “That’s some kind of bullshit! We all know you joined up because you couldn’t stand the stench of the hatcheries back home.”
“Now, now,” Sergeant Pathir chided her. “Let’s not get all personal and offensive. I’m sure Corporal Schieee doesn’t think her own broodmates stink, do you, Corporal?”
“No, sir, I don’t.” Her tone of voice was eager, as if she was anticipating wherever it was the sergeant was headed.
“That’s right, because the corporal knows that there are only two reasons any individual would choose to join the UGF.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Reason number one: navy brats think they are the supreme form of intellectual and physical achievement and are completely insufferable.”
“One hundred percent, sir.”
“Reason number two: if you’re like the good private here, and you can’t find any lovers back home, you might think the lack of options at an army base would make some individuals desperate.”
“Private Wun might certainly have thought so, sir.”
“Unfortunately for our friend, her fellow soldiers are not that desperate. We all feel bad for you, we do. But we’re discriminating enough to know better than to jump into bed with you.”
Private Wun had taken this abuse with levity. “You’ve got me there, sir. I live a very sad life. But I want to get back to Fern here. What exactly are you expecting to get out of the ‘nids?”
“I don’t expect to get anything from the saathids.” I chose not to use the derogatory word for them. “I didn’t come here for that.”
“So what’s the deal then? We’re out here protecting you for, what? A nice walk in the countryside?”
“I’m here to gather evidence and document it for further research. Things like death camps, mass grave sites, abandoned towns. Hopefully all very far away from saathid population centers, to be honest. I don’t want to have to deal with them.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Private Wun’s mandibles clacked again. “But we’re heading to a saathid town right now. We’ll see how well we can keep them away from you, eh?”
“Leave the civvie alone, Private,” the sergeant ordered. And she did.
--------------
We arrived in Skom about twenty minutes later. Private Wun was apparently constitutionally incapable of keeping quiet for more than a few minutes; shortly after she left off interrogating me, she had started up a new conversation, ostensibly with Corporal Schieee but actually very one-sided, about the meal regulations at the base’s mess hall, which I came to understand required all foodstuffs to have pre-approval from Central Command and thus forbade the serving of any local fauna that might have otherwise made for good game meat. The private knew about that bit because she had herself gone out hunting with some friends from another platoon and had personally bagged a big six-legged ungulate, only for the head chef to shove the animal straight into the incinerator. This had been very upsetting for Private Wun, who had filed a formal complaint to the lieutenant who oversaw the mess hall and spent thirty minutes of our trip alternatively boring us to death (with detailed descriptions of the biochemical differences between the life found on this planet and some of the animals she raised back on Varba) and making us laugh uproariously (with stories of the travails of the hunting party).
Once we arrived in Skom, though, she quieted down. Even in broad daylight, the glittering carapaces of the saathid residents were eerily reminiscent of the horrifying stories of destructive cleansing and xenocide that we had all seen in holos. The locals – or should I call them newcomers, since they had usurped this land within living memory – were emerging on the streets, staring at our vehicle as if calculating their odds of survival if they all rushed us simultaneously. As we rolled through town, Sergeant Pathir kept muttering, “Stay frosty,” to the others; the air in the vehicle was very tense. None of the locals made a move, however, and no weapons appeared, thankfully. I learned later that scout platoons from the base made regular searches of homes and community centers, which at least reduced the likelihood that any individual civilian might still have a gun. Instead, they remained in passive hostility.
We found Major Vakor near the eastern edge of the town, a lone vailon in the midst of a crowd of saathids. We stopped the vehicle at a nearby intersection and slid (or walked, as the case may be) over to the group. She towered over them – saathids averaged a little under one meter “tall”, and typically measured themselves by their lengths instead. As we approached, I heard her saying, “Look, I know this is hard for you. The way to make it easier for yourselves is by cooperating. All the captain knew was that his unit was attacked by some type of insurgents, and they escaped into town that way” – and here she pointed over their heads, in the direction we had come from – “and there’s little I can do to protect you when you don’t give him intel he wants.”
“So it’s okay that they just came around and beat us for it,” one of the saathids wanted to know.
“Hell yeah!” Private Wun shouted, causing the crowd to scuttle around to see who was there. Sergeant Pathir gave her a withering look, as if to say, not helpful.
Major Vakor did what she could to calm the increasingly restless locals, shouting over their muttering. “Hey, hey! What Captain Khaww subjected you to last night is illegal! It is against regs, and I will see to it myself that he is disciplined for it.” Her job must be very lonely, I thought, if she was filing reports on every incident of over-eager commanders being too aggressive with the civilian population. I felt a twinge of sympathy for her doomed cause – until I remembered the crimes of the very same saathids that Major Vakor was trying to protect. “But you need to look out for yourselves. Hostile action against Governance forces will create the circumstances for reprisals. I am in no position to prevent something like that.”
From what I could tell, the major’s words were having an effect. Some of the individuals appeared to be nodding along, resigned to their circumstances and hoping to make the best of it. But the tension was rising anyway. Voices were being raised. I sensed the squad tightening their grips on their rifles as the threat of violence intensified. Sergeant Pathir muttered to the others, “I think we may have to go get her.”
A few more saathids were now crawling up to the group, their eight legs skittering over the pavement. Private Wun tracked them with her rifle.
Major Vakor continued reasoning with the civilians, but increasingly she was just being ignored and shouted down. Things seemed to be degenerating quickly.
“We gotta do something here, boss,” Corporal Schieee said with some urgency, or creeping alarm. “There’s a whole bunch of spiders over who look like they’re spoiling for a fight.” She was covering the north road from one knee; I looked over her head, and saw numerous saathids emerging from buildings, looking at the commotion with curiosity and growing hostility.
Sergeant Pathir kept calm, but the squad was now outnumbered twenty to one. I was very nervous at the idea of a battle breaking out with me at its center, but I also felt a curious sense of arousal. I tried to prepare myself for if the shooting started, but my mind was buzzing and I was struggling to form coherent thoughts. The thing the sergeant told me was stuck in my head on repeat: “Stay out of their lines of fire. Stay out of their lines of fire.” I looked at him, hoping for reassurance, but he was focused on the crowd.
The next thirty seconds felt like an hour. Sergeant Pathir finally came to a decision. “Alright, let’s go get her. Private, on me. Corporal, stay with our friend.”
“Got it.” Corporal Schieee moved to my side, rifle raised, as the other two pushed their way into the crowd. I squished down next to her, which seemed like it would be a good idea but actually probably made little difference. It did mean that I couldn’t see what was going on with the rescue attempt, so I tried to count my breaths to stay calm.
More angry shouts were coming from the crowd. I looked up; Sergeant Pathir was pushing Major Vakor in front of him; the major was visibly upset. Some of the saathids kicked at their shins. Others threw rocks. One large stone connected with the major’s head. Sergeant Pathir shouted at us, “Get to the vehicle!” I scurried over as fast as I could. Corporal Schieee followed, muttering under her breath, “Why didn’t he have Wun get the vehicle ready while we went to get the major?” Once we reached the car, she turned around and trained her gun on the crowd as we waited for the others, still being pelted with projectiles by the saathids, to catch up. But, finally, we all piled in, Major Vakor having been practically thrown in by the sergeant before he jumped into the front seat and slammed the door. “Go!” he shouted, and we zoomed backwards, away from the impending riot.
“That went well,” Private Wun observed, sarcastic cheer in her voice.
Major Vakor was sprawled across the back row, her horn squishing into my side. She righted herself before laying into Sergeant Pathir. “What the hell were you thinking? You could have set them off! There could have been a riot!”
The sergeant replied, “There might still be a riot.” The vehicle sped away from the town, towards the north.
“You need to take me back,” the major stated flat out. “I need to defuse the situation before it gets out of control.”
“It seemed like it was getting out of control in spite of your presence,” Sergeant Pathir growled in return.
“Well it would be a lot easier if grunts like you weren’t undermining my work every time you stepped outside the fence!”
“Nice,” Corporal Schieee interjected. “Right in front of the civvie.”
Major Vakor seemed to finally register my presence.
“You’re Fern’uni?” She knew how to pronounce my name.
“Yes.”
“Okay.” The major stroked her right horn apologetically. “Sorry about this mess. And sorry about…” she trailed off and gestured at my midsection, which still had a horn-shaped indent.
“It’s okay,” I reassured her. “It’ll reshape itself soon.”
“Fuck!” Major Vakor shouted, presumably not in response to my assurance. She was touching the back of her head, now matted with blood.
Corporal Schieee took notice. “You alright, major? I’ve got bandages in my pack.” She reached up to feel the wound.
“Ouch!” The major whirled instinctively, forcing the corporal to duck her head out of the way of the onrushing horn. “Don’t do that!”
“You’re gonna need a concussion check, too,” Corporal Schieee noted as she straightened.
“Later,” Major Vakor spat, turning back to Sergeant Pathir. “That little stunt of yours ruined an entire morning’s work. They were almost ready to move on.”
The sergeant turned towards the back seat. We were in the open countryside now, miles away from Skom. “I heard the end of the meeting, major. With respect, you were not calming the crowd. They were getting more agitated.” His observations, delivered in a calm, matter-of-fact voice, as if it were patently impossible to disagree, only heightened Major Vakor’s frustration.
“If you don’t let me do my job, if you’re constantly focused on the immediate danger, they will never trust us. They will never live peacefully alongside us.”
“Sorry, major, but that is not my concern,” Sergeant Pathir retorted.
“I wish you would make it more of your concern,” the major snarled. “You might actually save some lives instead of taking them.”
“If you want to go over the line every day in a foolish attempt to change hearts and minds, that’s your business. But it makes it my business to go extract you before you get yourself killed.”
Major Vakor snorted, but didn’t say anything. After a moment, she began to fidget with her vest, trying to straighten it, but she only managed to bang her head against the ceiling. “Fuck!” she shouted again, once more holding the back of her head, which had been jarred by the bump.
“Stop the vehicle,” Corporal Schieee called out. “I need to patch up the major.”
We pulled over into a field and piled out. Soon the corporal was dabbing at Major Vakor’s injury with a salve; the officer, on one knee so the mith-fell could reach her wound, was wincing with each touch but no longer crying out with pain.
“Fern’uni,” the major said, beckoning me over. “I’m sorry about all of this. Being on the front lines isn’t like what they show in the holos back home, eh?”
“I suppose so,” I replied. I’d seen more than a few “realistic” portrayals of militaries in war, but those holos weren’t exactly popular and I thought it easier not to have to explain.
“There’s just so many absolute idiots. So many patrols running around, thinking they can just rough up civilians whenever they feel like it because we won and they lost. They act like there are no consequences because they have guns and locals don’t.” I nodded along, as it seemed like she was building up a head of steam. “Then I have to come along and clean up their mess. I’m trying to build relationships with the population, but every trip over the line I hear, ‘This squad stole my food,’ and ‘Some vailons started a bar fight.’ And we need these individuals! If we don’t want to be an occupying force, if we don’t want to be colonial masters to a repressed minority, then we need to find ways to show them the benefits of life in the Governance. Otherwise it will just be rebellions followed by reprisals followed by more rebellions forever.”
There was a ripping sound. Corporal Schieee, preparing the bandage. “Don’t mind me,” she said, as we had both swung our eyes around. “Just a worthless mudsucker here, fixing you up before getting back to beating on some ‘nids.”
The major grunted and shook her head. “Present company excepted, I guess.” She paused for a moment, then sighed. “Truth is, Sergeant Pathir is one of the good ones. And he was probably right about earlier. That’s between you and me, Corporal,” she said sharply, turning to the mith-fell.
“Sure, major,” she responded, turning the officer’s head back around so she could access the wound. “Now hold steady for a sec.”
Major Vakor drew a sharp breath but successfully held her head still. “The saathids are not our enemy,” she continued. “Sorry if that upsets you, but it’s true. We’re not going to expel them from the planet, and we’re not going to make them second-class citizens permanently. Either would be a major violation of the Accord of Governing.” I didn’t need the civics lesson, but I let her speak anyway. I wondered briefly if there was some part of the officer curriculum that encouraged speechifying. “Whatever political settlement Tebazed eventually imposes, it is going to involve some path to citizenship.”
“For these xenocide fuckers?” Corporal Schieee burst out as she smoothed the edges of the bandage around the major’s wound.
Yes, even for these xenocide fuckers, I thought. I said, “Well, it only makes sense. The Governance has few ironclad principles at its heart but one of them is the fundamental equality of all sentient lifeforms. If we excluded them, we wouldn’t be ourselves anymore.”
Corporal Schieee scoffed. “Even for a civvie you are naïve. They were taking advantage of your misfortune. They murdered your friends and stole your land, and you want to let them keep it.”
The major stood, gingerly touching the back of her head. “This one’s a true believer,” she said, waving towards me. “Like all converts, inevitably the most zealous in any group.”
Slightly embarrassed, I shifted my body around. “I grew up in the Governance. I don’t remember any other way of life. This is what I know.”
The corporal laughed again. “My family immigrated when I was young. Came up in a cohort, went through the indoctrination process just like you, and you,” she said, pointing at the major and me in turn. “But I can see the practicalities of the situation anyway. What I don’t understand is, doesn’t some part of your brain, buried in all that fat and flesh, isn’t there some corner of it that just wants to kidnap a couple of ‘nids, take them somewhere dark, and flay them, just like they did to your grannies?”
It was a valid question, I supposed, though not exactly how it was phrased by my friends on back Tebazed. “I grew up with people like that,” I replied, cautiously. “But they were too angry for me.”
“I’d be angry!” The corporal flapped her wings in emphasis. “Hell, I am angry!”
“Well, that’s not me,” I said in return. “And from a more political orientation, I would say we shouldn’t stoop to their level.”
That earned renewed laughter, this time from both my companions. I looked around; Private Wun was inspecting one of the tires on the vehicle, while Sergeant Pathir was talking into his headset a few meters away.
Major Vakor was saying, “If only more individuals thought that way,” with a hint of mockery. Corporal Schieee continued, “That’s like me saying, when Wun steals my wing ointment to lubricate his mandibles, eh it’s fine, take as much as you want, instead of swapping out the actual ointment bottle with a decoy filled with glue.” Now it was the major and I who reacted as one, looking at the corporal with concern. She shrugged. “What do you want? The stuff is really hard to get out here! I had to teach her a lesson. And the medics set her right within a few hours anyway.”
“Alright,” the major said, with a chuckle.
Sergeant Pathir took the brief pause that ensued as an opportunity to rejoin us. “I just got off the hook with base; they gave us the go-ahead to continue.”
Major Vakor nodded. “Good.” She turned in my direction. “So, where would you like to go first?”
I was not prepared for this question. I had anticipated a fight, from either the sergeant or the major; I had a whole speech rehearsed, extolling the virtues of research and understanding and public awareness. “Uh,” I responded, stalling for time. “Where are we?”
Sergeant Pathir tapped out instructions on his wristband and called up a map projection. “Here,” he said, pointing. “About twenty klicks north of Skom. Do you have your site coordinates? I can overlay them.”
“Uh, it’s in my bag, I think.” I heard snickers as I slid over to the vehicle. I rummaged through my pack, very conscious of the several sets of eyes watching and waiting. Finally, I found the data disk I was looking for. “Got it!” I called, waving the disk unnecessarily as I came back to the group, followed by Private Wun.
The sergeant took the disk and tapped his wristband with it. Several locations on the projection were highlighted, descriptive text hovering above each. I touched one, and the projection zoomed in for details. It was incredibly seamless, much more so than anything I’d seen in the civilian world.
“It’s mith-fell,” Major Vakor explained, sensing my admiration. Made sense – the projection had a green glow I was familiar with from my stay on Tripitit. “Part of our latest round of trade negotiations, I believe.”
Sergeant Pathir wrenched us back on topic. Tapping some more on his wristband, he scrolled the projection to the region around Skom, and highlighted three locations. “These are closest to us,” he said.
I pointed to one, pretty much at random. “This one.” It was a suspected mass grave site. As good a place to start as any.
“Okay.” The sergeant turned around. “Hey, Wun! How’s it looking?
“All set boss! We can head out whenever.”
The sergeant looked at the major, who nodded. “Alright, let’s pack it up,” he said.
Depends on what kind of peace you are going for.
One might wonder what kind of normality could exist on their homeworld if they have to live alongside members of the very species that tried to wipe them out. On the other hand, it is unclear how many active insurgent groups are left planetside. I think the activity we see and hear about is merely the death rattle of a true rebellion. Despite the experience of the characters here, it is tapering off, not ramping up. But a pattern like that is really hard to pick up on when you are so close to it.
Very nice one! Give my (and I’m sure others’) compliments on the excellent artwork.
Interlude - Coming Home, Part III
Back on the road, heading northwest. It was only a short trip to the first site, a mass grave near an abandoned farmstead. According to eyewitness testimony, there had once been a small village, a few klicks away, with around two thousand residents. The saathid invasion had come early to this part of the plane; atmospheric strikecraft had bombed the village to rubble on the second day of the war. Still, most of the residents, with nowhere else to go, had remained in the ruins of their homes. For two weeks, they waited and hoped in vain, until a saathid regiment rolled through. At first, they fired at the villagers sporadically and randomly, while the unit set up camp on the outskirts of town. Once darkness fell, the roundups began.
I know even this much about the fate of the village thanks to a norillgan survivor, wounded instead of killed by his would-be executioner. He hid beneath the bodies of his friends and family for eight hours of consistent gunfire, until dawn came and the saathid regiment rolled out. He fled, just ahead of a second unit, this one presumably tasked with burying the thousand or so corpses, judging by the heavy digging equipment it carried. Gabb, I remembered, was the name of the survivor, this brave soul who stowed away on a garbage scow to escape offworld, who spent weeks in the stinking refuse until the ship was captured by a passing mith-fell patrol. I met Gabb on Tripitit Station. He had made the pilgrimage back from Governance space in order to find any surviving records of his siblings, who had all left the little village to make their ways in the big city in the years prior to the invasion. His recollection, decades after the fact, was one story of a million identical-but-for-the-details stories, only a handful of which I was able to hear during my time at Tripitit.
As we approached the farmstead, I saw that most of the buildings were still standing, though the main house had partially collapsed. We left the vehicle there and proceeded on foot. Gabb had remembered scrambling up and down a small hill after he escaped, before stumbling on the farmstead, where he was able to scrounge up some food to carry with him on his journey. Based on his story and some time with scans of the area generously provided by the Labor Directory (who were evaluating disused agricultural land for reconversion to food production), I thought I had been able to pinpoint the likely location of the executions. I had some hope that the mass grave or graves would be near that spot, as it would have been a tremendous waste of resources to transport the bodies elsewhere before burying them. A waste of resources, I chuckled to myself as we moved in silence over the abandoned field, long gone to seed, towards the woods. What part of the death and destruction hadn’t been a tremendous waste of resources? I’d heard stories from a few soldiers that the saathids had actually taken units off the front lines during the Governance invasion of 288 in order to finish off the few norillgans still living in the labor camps, hampering the defense of the planet but ensuring that the vailons would not be liberators.
We crested the hill and looked down on a clearing. “We’d better stop here,” I said to the group. “Don’t want to accidentally trample the site.” I continued down the slope, Major Vakor behind me, while the others dropped their packs and scouted the area with their scopes. At the foot of the hill, I too put down my bag and paused to look around. The major stood next to me, respectful of my quiet. The clearing was roughly rectangular, about fifty meters by one hundred. A sparse forest spread out in front of me; the village, though not visible, was located on the other side of the woods.
I fished out the N-Dimensional scanner from my bag. I had it on loan from the Archaeology Section; getting approval from them for field use had been a nightmare. Apparently they were very fragile, one administrator had sternly informed me as he rejected my application. When I asked him why they had made a general scanning device that couldn’t be used to scan things outside of a lab, he kicked me out of his office. The eventual permission I gained was only under the condition that I share my research data and co-publish a paper with one of the Section’s top archaeologists (which actually meant allowing him, a notoriously self-important figure, to be the lead author).
I had been able to use the scanner a few times at Tripitit Station, as a dry run, but out in the field it proved to be as good as advertised. Every type of scan or material analysis I could want – topographical, soil, atmosphere, chemical composition, DNA, magnetic, and on and on – I could call up in less than a minute. All the more impressive that it had been developed by a team of vailon researchers, rather than relying on secondhand mith-fell or mirovandian tech. Major Vakor was as amazed as I was at its capabilities, at least at the beginning. After a while, though, she grew bored watching me slide around the clearing hitting different buttons on the scanner, announced she had some reports to file, and sat down a little ways up the slope with her portable computer.
We spent much of the afternoon like that: Major Vakor, sitting on the hill and working through reports, the rest of the squad camped out on the hilltop keeping a lazy watch, and me, exploring and mapping the site. With the sun dipping towards the horizon, I finally powered down the scanner and closed my notebook. The major looked at me as I let out a loud breath of relief, slid over to her perch, and plopped down next to her. “So, what did you find?” she asked.
I pointed to our left. “Edge of the field. All the way to the treeline, and twelve meters wide. Big enough for a thousand bodies.”
She nodded gravely, and I continued. “They were held here, in the middle of the clearing. Maybe a dozen at a time marched off into the woods to face the execution squads. Bang. Bang. Single shots to the head, one at a time. That’s all they would have heard while they waited. It was night, so there was little to see. Just the warmth of each other’s bodies, dwindling over the hours.”
The major was looking at me now. “Are you alright?”
“Yes,” I said, though I wasn’t certain that was true. “I knew it would be like this.”
“What will happen to the gravesite?”
“For now, nothing. I’m going to leave a marker for future researchers. Tonight, I’ll assemble my notes into a file to transmit back to Tebazed.”
“And later?”
“Later there will be more, many more researchers. Probably there will be specialized academic institutions established on the planet. Perhaps they will want to excavate this site. But there are many other mass graves. Perhaps these folks will be able to rest in peace.”
“What about you?”
“Tomorrow I go to another suspected mass grave, or a labor camp, or a city ruin. I’m planning on being here for eighteen months. I have a lot to see.”
We sat in silence for a moment, watching the sun setting over the horizon. “It’s getting late,” the major eventually said, unnecessarily. “I’ll talk to the sergeant about returning to base.”
“Okay,” I said. I was staying in civilian accommodations in Jalin, a short walk from the base. A question occurred to me. “Are they going to wind up accompanying me every day on my field trips?”
Major Vakor shrugged and stood up. “Probably you’ll want them to.”
I thought back to the scene in Skom. “True.”
With that, she trudged up the hill, leaving me alone with my thoughts.
I know even this much about the fate of the village thanks to a norillgan survivor, wounded instead of killed by his would-be executioner. He hid beneath the bodies of his friends and family for eight hours of consistent gunfire, until dawn came and the saathid regiment rolled out. He fled, just ahead of a second unit, this one presumably tasked with burying the thousand or so corpses, judging by the heavy digging equipment it carried. Gabb, I remembered, was the name of the survivor, this brave soul who stowed away on a garbage scow to escape offworld, who spent weeks in the stinking refuse until the ship was captured by a passing mith-fell patrol. I met Gabb on Tripitit Station. He had made the pilgrimage back from Governance space in order to find any surviving records of his siblings, who had all left the little village to make their ways in the big city in the years prior to the invasion. His recollection, decades after the fact, was one story of a million identical-but-for-the-details stories, only a handful of which I was able to hear during my time at Tripitit.
As we approached the farmstead, I saw that most of the buildings were still standing, though the main house had partially collapsed. We left the vehicle there and proceeded on foot. Gabb had remembered scrambling up and down a small hill after he escaped, before stumbling on the farmstead, where he was able to scrounge up some food to carry with him on his journey. Based on his story and some time with scans of the area generously provided by the Labor Directory (who were evaluating disused agricultural land for reconversion to food production), I thought I had been able to pinpoint the likely location of the executions. I had some hope that the mass grave or graves would be near that spot, as it would have been a tremendous waste of resources to transport the bodies elsewhere before burying them. A waste of resources, I chuckled to myself as we moved in silence over the abandoned field, long gone to seed, towards the woods. What part of the death and destruction hadn’t been a tremendous waste of resources? I’d heard stories from a few soldiers that the saathids had actually taken units off the front lines during the Governance invasion of 288 in order to finish off the few norillgans still living in the labor camps, hampering the defense of the planet but ensuring that the vailons would not be liberators.
We crested the hill and looked down on a clearing. “We’d better stop here,” I said to the group. “Don’t want to accidentally trample the site.” I continued down the slope, Major Vakor behind me, while the others dropped their packs and scouted the area with their scopes. At the foot of the hill, I too put down my bag and paused to look around. The major stood next to me, respectful of my quiet. The clearing was roughly rectangular, about fifty meters by one hundred. A sparse forest spread out in front of me; the village, though not visible, was located on the other side of the woods.
I fished out the N-Dimensional scanner from my bag. I had it on loan from the Archaeology Section; getting approval from them for field use had been a nightmare. Apparently they were very fragile, one administrator had sternly informed me as he rejected my application. When I asked him why they had made a general scanning device that couldn’t be used to scan things outside of a lab, he kicked me out of his office. The eventual permission I gained was only under the condition that I share my research data and co-publish a paper with one of the Section’s top archaeologists (which actually meant allowing him, a notoriously self-important figure, to be the lead author).
I had been able to use the scanner a few times at Tripitit Station, as a dry run, but out in the field it proved to be as good as advertised. Every type of scan or material analysis I could want – topographical, soil, atmosphere, chemical composition, DNA, magnetic, and on and on – I could call up in less than a minute. All the more impressive that it had been developed by a team of vailon researchers, rather than relying on secondhand mith-fell or mirovandian tech. Major Vakor was as amazed as I was at its capabilities, at least at the beginning. After a while, though, she grew bored watching me slide around the clearing hitting different buttons on the scanner, announced she had some reports to file, and sat down a little ways up the slope with her portable computer.
We spent much of the afternoon like that: Major Vakor, sitting on the hill and working through reports, the rest of the squad camped out on the hilltop keeping a lazy watch, and me, exploring and mapping the site. With the sun dipping towards the horizon, I finally powered down the scanner and closed my notebook. The major looked at me as I let out a loud breath of relief, slid over to her perch, and plopped down next to her. “So, what did you find?” she asked.
I pointed to our left. “Edge of the field. All the way to the treeline, and twelve meters wide. Big enough for a thousand bodies.”
She nodded gravely, and I continued. “They were held here, in the middle of the clearing. Maybe a dozen at a time marched off into the woods to face the execution squads. Bang. Bang. Single shots to the head, one at a time. That’s all they would have heard while they waited. It was night, so there was little to see. Just the warmth of each other’s bodies, dwindling over the hours.”
The major was looking at me now. “Are you alright?”
“Yes,” I said, though I wasn’t certain that was true. “I knew it would be like this.”
“What will happen to the gravesite?”
“For now, nothing. I’m going to leave a marker for future researchers. Tonight, I’ll assemble my notes into a file to transmit back to Tebazed.”
“And later?”
“Later there will be more, many more researchers. Probably there will be specialized academic institutions established on the planet. Perhaps they will want to excavate this site. But there are many other mass graves. Perhaps these folks will be able to rest in peace.”
“What about you?”
“Tomorrow I go to another suspected mass grave, or a labor camp, or a city ruin. I’m planning on being here for eighteen months. I have a lot to see.”
We sat in silence for a moment, watching the sun setting over the horizon. “It’s getting late,” the major eventually said, unnecessarily. “I’ll talk to the sergeant about returning to base.”
“Okay,” I said. I was staying in civilian accommodations in Jalin, a short walk from the base. A question occurred to me. “Are they going to wind up accompanying me every day on my field trips?”
Major Vakor shrugged and stood up. “Probably you’ll want them to.”
I thought back to the scene in Skom. “True.”
With that, she trudged up the hill, leaving me alone with my thoughts.
As always, this was an excellent interlude and a detailed look at the problems and horrors at ground level.
I have a feeling that Fern’uni will require some time to be really ok but it's important work and a Norrilgan would be the best person to start it, hopefully the future will be more kind to this scarred planet.
Also.
I have a feeling that Fern’uni will require some time to be really ok but it's important work and a Norrilgan would be the best person to start it, hopefully the future will be more kind to this scarred planet.
Also.
It's good to see that every galaxy has valiant et al.s doing most of the research.
We are back, finally! In this update we arrive at the end of the century, with the vailon state reaching a major turning point.
Though this is a shorter chapter, I found it quite difficult to write. I've been feeling a little burned out on this project, and itching to turn my attention to other creative ideas bouncing around in my head. So I'm going to be taking a hiatus from this story, for at least a few months; I hope to be back in the fall. When we return, I have planned a wider look at vailon society that will serve as a little bit of a reset, before we (hopefully) sprint to the finish, now less than 60 in-game years away.
Though this is a shorter chapter, I found it quite difficult to write. I've been feeling a little burned out on this project, and itching to turn my attention to other creative ideas bouncing around in my head. So I'm going to be taking a hiatus from this story, for at least a few months; I hope to be back in the fall. When we return, I have planned a wider look at vailon society that will serve as a little bit of a reset, before we (hopefully) sprint to the finish, now less than 60 in-game years away.
Chapter Twenty-Three - Auspicious Days
The Auspicious Entente, the treaty organization formed to represent the Tebazed Unified Governance and the Pithok Confederacy in matters of mutual concern, was born on May 8, 298, in a grand ceremony held in Sedrin, but its roots could be traced back decades. Some scholarship even held that the unification of Tebazed over the course of the 1st and 2nd centuries was itself a continuous, incremental process of federation-building, much like the agreements that brought the Entente between the vailons and pithoks into being. However, the first proposals for a specifically interstellar federation appeared in the early 210s. The early scholars in the budding field of interstellar relations had many novel ideas for galactic governance, ranging from loose anti-piracy confederations to strong, centralized, multi-species states or empires. These were distant visions, however. Vailon ambassadors were focused on the practical diplomacy that followed first contacts with the Mith-Fell Independent Commonwealth, the Hissma Union, and the Varelviv Interplanetary Sovereignty.
In the 220s, the early work on federation took on a new urgency, with the signing of a mutual defense treaty with the hissma and the thawing of relations with the mith-fell. As varelvivi slaving raids increased in frequency and strength, the other three species began to work closely to counter the threat. Raldirm den Vakor, then in her second term as Director-General, pushed hard to expand the terms of their agreements, from a focus on military cooperation to a broader alignment on economic, migration, and social policies, with an eye towards eventually establishing a unified governing structure similar to that of the TUG. These efforts culminated at the Hissom Summit in January of 224, where Vakor was unable to find mutually agreeable terms for a broad pact. Instead, her fellow heads of state formed their own looser version of military confederation, leaving the vailons out in the cold. This new organization, dubbed the Glorious Axis, promptly invited the vailons to join as associate members, which they grudgingly accepted. Critically, acceding to the Glorious Axis as associate members did not confer mutual defense obligations on either party. A varelvivi invasion of the TUG followed within a year, and plans for a grand federation were shelved, not to reemerge for over half a century.
In 220, vailon knowledge of the galaxy was limited to their three immediate neighbors. Seven decades on, the Milky Way was a much busier place: 32 major empires, along with sundry other enclaves, statelets, and vassals, filled the hyperlane network of the known galaxy. The TUG, as associate members of the Glorious Axis, remained close with its hissma and mith-fell neighbors. [1] As the Saathid War drew to a close, the Governance also maintained defensive alliances with a pair of middle-rank military powers: the Cyggan Empire and the Pithok Confederacy. Twenty years of war, however, had only emphasized the shortcomings of its current diplomatic arrangements. By picking its fights carefully, and leveraging its diplomatic prowess to the utmost, the Governance had just managed to topple the tiny and outgunned slaving empire of the varelvivi while holding the Seban Commonwealth at bay in the border regions of cyggan territory; in the galactic east, it proved unable to prevent the xenocide of their ragerian allies at the hands of the saathids even after launching a full-scale invasion of saathid territory.
Moreover, the friendly powers that ostensibly protected the hyperlanes to vailon territory were not necessarily the most reliable allies. To the galactic west, the authoritarian Cyggan Empire had been allies of convenience since the 260s. But the empire was avowedly xenophobic and imperialistic, and the new emperor Malungord was unwilling to be restrained from aggressive actions. In 287, the cyggans invaded the nearly defenseless Irenic Varelviv Mandate, once again taking advantage of varelvivi weakness in the aftermath of a defeat at the hands of the Governance in order to annex several systems, this time including the varelvivi homeworld of Viverva. The vailon administration was angered by the invasion, so recently having installed a friendly government on Viverva, but there was little they could do against a treaty ally beyond delivering a formal protest. Instead, the incident only served to underline the dangers of having an imperialist power as a neighbor.
To the northeast, the large region controlled by the friendly powers of Glorious Axis sheltered Governance space, notably denying the saathids the opportunity to launch a counter-invasion of vailon territory. This was not a permanent guarantee of peace, however. While the saathid xenociders might have been a threat to all civilized species, the mith-fell and the hissma were apt to make hard-nosed choices when lower-stakes threats materialized, prioritizing their own ambitions in the quadrant over regional security. The navies of the Glorious Axis launched successive invasions of their own against the saathids and the Mandasura Prime hive mind across the 280s and 290s, but their governments made no effort to prevent a yeon raiding fleet from passing through their territory en route to the vailon world of Varba in 288. [2] With the Unified Navy deep in saathid space at the time, and few ships available in reserve, the attack resulted in thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of captured civilians, and a permanent cooling of relations between the Governance and its neighbors.
The Yeon fleet orbited Varba for three weeks, raining down fire indiscriminately before landing and capturing the inhabitants of isolated and undefended villages.
Surrounded by unreliable allies of various stripes, the Governance’s strongest partners would be found further abroad. The southwest quadrant had for decades been split amongst a coterie of medium-sized powers. In recent years, however, many smaller states had been absorbed by the relentlessly expanding Jess’Inax Hive, while an unlikely alliance between the sebans and the interstellar revolutionaries of the Dabbax Solidarity threatened to dominate the quadrant before long. In response, the remaining independent empires were eager to find friends from outside the region. The cyggans, trapped between the sebans and the dabbax, had already become reliant on the vailons, and by extension the pithoks, to maintain their territorial integrity; the Pobelin Stellar Hegemony hoped to build its own relationship with Tebazed to accomplish the same ends for themselves. The pobelins controlled no more than a dozen systems in the early 290s, but they were fierce and fearsome warriors, fanatically devoted to the defense of the Holy Shrines of Ephemerality that dotted the surface of their homeworld. On several occasions the pobelin navy had resolutely stood its ground against the heathen communists, but they recognized that they would be overrun by the combined forces of the sebans and the dabbax in the long run. They were quick to sign a defensive treaty with the Governance following the conclusion of the Saathid War in 295. When the negotiations over the terms of the Auspicious Entente began a few years later, however, the pobelins declined an invitation to participate, citing their focus on the “divine calling” to protect the Shrines. Instead, they would become the first of the treaty organization’s associate members.
The Pelx-Cradonian Confederacy, meanwhile, had been ejected from the cradonian homeworld of Cradon in the 270s, retreating to a wide swath of sparsely inhabited space along the outer rim of the galaxy. Vailon entreaties at the time were rebuffed, floundering in the face of the reality that Governance support would take over five years to reach the new cradonian territory in the event of war. In the next twenty years, the cradonian political-military establishment experienced a series of coups that led to the state continuously reversing its policies from year to year. For most of the 280s, the regime used mild tensions with the Governance over a small cluster of unclaimed stars between the two states to cast the vailons as an imperialist power bent on hegemony; [3] by the early 290s, a new clique had come to power and lent overt material support to the TUG in its war against the saathid menace. When Director-General Birm den Boknar reopened strategic talks in 295, with an eye towards hammering out a settlement on the disputed territory and an agreement on mutual defense, she was met with a haughty denunciation of the vailon commitment to diplomatic means of settling conflicts. Simultaneously, the incumbent generalissimo signaled through back channels that the cradonians would be willing to accede to vailon control of the disputed systems, provided the Governance agreed to favorable trade terms for operations in the sector.
Commissary-General Nikat Makhan often spoke out of both sides of his mouth.
The Pithok Confederacy straddled the northwest and southwest quadrants of the galaxy, but it had long focused its attention on the latter. [4] An alliance had been formed with the Governance in the waning days of the Telnik administration, with terms that included cooperation on anti-piracy and anti-slavery patrols as well as exclusive trading pacts and a scientific exchange program. The two states had grown closer following the Confederacy’s democratic revival in the early 280s. [5] The pithoks had agreed to intervene in the long-running conflict between the cyggans and the sebans, freeing up TUG resources to be redeployed against the saathids. Wartime coordination necessitated a deeper, more embedded form of cooperation; in addition to mid-ranking naval attaches that were assigned to each other’s admiralty staffs, the two navies established a Joint Planning Commission, comprised of three admirals from each side as well as a civilian administrator from each government. Very quickly, the JPC became the locus of efforts to develop and implement a unified strategy for the quadrant; its staff ballooned into the thousands, and its remit grew to include not only military coordination but also the anti-piracy and anti-slavery initiatives as well as the organization and defense of refugee convoys.
In the decade of the JPC’s existence, it made significant strides in maintaining regional security: interdicting smuggler rings, breaking up an organized crime operation on Vurl-Palod, a new standard for deep space patrol routines. But, as an independent commission, it existed outside the naval chain of command. It was not assigned any units directly, instead relying on requests to the formal military structures of the respective states when operations were planned. These requests were frequently delayed or went unfulfilled entirely; many commanders resented losing control of their forces, and they especially hated handing them over for humanitarian missions conducted by foreign powers. Frustrated by the consistent inability to obtain forces for their operations, the members of the JPC returned to their respective governments and pleaded for more authorities, including a subset of military units that would report directly to the commission.
Boknar was enthusiastic about the idea, particularly after the cease-fire with the saathids freed up many units from wartime duties, but her counterpart on the pithok side, High Commissioner Unipak Xankikin, expressed only lukewarm support. His objections were primarily political in nature, not substantive; if he had the unilateral authority to do so, he told Boknar privately at one meeting, he would sign whatever document she put in front of him. But the democratization of the pithok government was not universally popular, and a number of influential families still exerted significant control over the military establishment. To break their power, he needed to wrest control away from those families; but the easiest way to do that, a major reshuffling that involved reassigning some units to the JPC, couldn’t be done without the families’ agreement. Boknar, ever the pragmatist, suggested to the pithok that he might use his upcoming elections to win a mandate on the question. Campaigning on a populist, anti-elite and anti-corruption platform in 297, he did just that, paving the way for him to oust a few key admirals in top posts and strengthen his own control over the military.
Xankikin and Boknar immediately agreed to transfer a number of units over to the JPC, bolstering its ability to carry out its missions. But the commission’s deliberative nature, with eight members of equal voting power, lacked the decisiveness of a traditional military hierarchy. Now that the commission could intervene in critical situations with the force of arms, competing priorities among the commissioners bogged down the decision-making process and prevented those forces from ever being deployed. Boknar seized the opportunity to push for far-reaching reforms, hoping to refashion the joint commission into an independent force entirely separated from the existing navies of the two states. Moreover, she proposed to subsume this new navy within a treaty-based organization, similar in structure to the Glorious Axis of the mith-fell and hissma, which would oversee all military and civilian efforts in the southwest quadrant.
Negotiations over the terms of the Auspicious Entente were completed quickly.
When all the negotiations were completed, the paperwork finalized, and the signing ceremony held, the Auspicious Entente largely held to the original structure proposed by Boknar. A “federation” like the Glorious Axis in all but name, the Entente would feature a permanent co-presidency, shared by the two elected heads of state. The chief executive of the civilian branch and the grand admiral leading the military branch would be appointed to coterminous ten-year terms, with the power to appoint rotating between the two presidents – a Governance-selected executive would serve with a Confederacy-selected admiral, and vice versa. Both states committed to providing the Entente 8.5% of their annual revenues for its operating costs, as well as a quota of ships, hardware, infrastructure, and personnel to constitute the new polity. Important decisions, including the application of economic sanctions and the deployment of “major” forces, required the support of both presidents. Neither state would be permitted to sign separate treaties with third parties in the quadrant without the approval of the other. And, critically, a set of mutual defense clauses continued the obligation of each state to defend the other from outside aggression, regardless of the source. Third parties would be allowed to align themselves with the new organization by signing Articles of Association, which committed those states to the mutual defense clauses of the Entente treaty and granted them favorable trading terms with the members but did not allow them to participate in the cooperative decision-making elements of the treaty. Within a month of the treaty going into effect, two states had signed up for association status: the other regional allies of the Governance, the Cyggan Empire and the Pobelin Stellar Hegemony.
The day after the formal signing ceremony, the two co-presidents of the Entente announced their selections for the chief executive and grand admiral positions. Director-General Boknar chose Virpim den Iridar, a 48-year-old native of Eldetha with ten years’ experience overseeing refugee efforts, to run the civilian operations, while High Commissioner Xankikin tapped Zaox Vartinaca, a veteran flag officer who had commanded a flotilla during the seban intervention, to head the joint military. These two figures would be the face of Entente decision-making for a decade, and for two years they busied themselves with building out the bureaucratic apparatus or the new organization and conducting goodwill missions to various colonies throughout the quadrant. The real test of the new Entente would only come with its first crisis, however, which arrived in due course: in August of 300, the Jess’Inax Hive declared war on the Auspicious Entente, ushering in a new century that promised to be as violent as the one before.
In the 220s, the early work on federation took on a new urgency, with the signing of a mutual defense treaty with the hissma and the thawing of relations with the mith-fell. As varelvivi slaving raids increased in frequency and strength, the other three species began to work closely to counter the threat. Raldirm den Vakor, then in her second term as Director-General, pushed hard to expand the terms of their agreements, from a focus on military cooperation to a broader alignment on economic, migration, and social policies, with an eye towards eventually establishing a unified governing structure similar to that of the TUG. These efforts culminated at the Hissom Summit in January of 224, where Vakor was unable to find mutually agreeable terms for a broad pact. Instead, her fellow heads of state formed their own looser version of military confederation, leaving the vailons out in the cold. This new organization, dubbed the Glorious Axis, promptly invited the vailons to join as associate members, which they grudgingly accepted. Critically, acceding to the Glorious Axis as associate members did not confer mutual defense obligations on either party. A varelvivi invasion of the TUG followed within a year, and plans for a grand federation were shelved, not to reemerge for over half a century.
In 220, vailon knowledge of the galaxy was limited to their three immediate neighbors. Seven decades on, the Milky Way was a much busier place: 32 major empires, along with sundry other enclaves, statelets, and vassals, filled the hyperlane network of the known galaxy. The TUG, as associate members of the Glorious Axis, remained close with its hissma and mith-fell neighbors. [1] As the Saathid War drew to a close, the Governance also maintained defensive alliances with a pair of middle-rank military powers: the Cyggan Empire and the Pithok Confederacy. Twenty years of war, however, had only emphasized the shortcomings of its current diplomatic arrangements. By picking its fights carefully, and leveraging its diplomatic prowess to the utmost, the Governance had just managed to topple the tiny and outgunned slaving empire of the varelvivi while holding the Seban Commonwealth at bay in the border regions of cyggan territory; in the galactic east, it proved unable to prevent the xenocide of their ragerian allies at the hands of the saathids even after launching a full-scale invasion of saathid territory.
Moreover, the friendly powers that ostensibly protected the hyperlanes to vailon territory were not necessarily the most reliable allies. To the galactic west, the authoritarian Cyggan Empire had been allies of convenience since the 260s. But the empire was avowedly xenophobic and imperialistic, and the new emperor Malungord was unwilling to be restrained from aggressive actions. In 287, the cyggans invaded the nearly defenseless Irenic Varelviv Mandate, once again taking advantage of varelvivi weakness in the aftermath of a defeat at the hands of the Governance in order to annex several systems, this time including the varelvivi homeworld of Viverva. The vailon administration was angered by the invasion, so recently having installed a friendly government on Viverva, but there was little they could do against a treaty ally beyond delivering a formal protest. Instead, the incident only served to underline the dangers of having an imperialist power as a neighbor.
To the northeast, the large region controlled by the friendly powers of Glorious Axis sheltered Governance space, notably denying the saathids the opportunity to launch a counter-invasion of vailon territory. This was not a permanent guarantee of peace, however. While the saathid xenociders might have been a threat to all civilized species, the mith-fell and the hissma were apt to make hard-nosed choices when lower-stakes threats materialized, prioritizing their own ambitions in the quadrant over regional security. The navies of the Glorious Axis launched successive invasions of their own against the saathids and the Mandasura Prime hive mind across the 280s and 290s, but their governments made no effort to prevent a yeon raiding fleet from passing through their territory en route to the vailon world of Varba in 288. [2] With the Unified Navy deep in saathid space at the time, and few ships available in reserve, the attack resulted in thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of captured civilians, and a permanent cooling of relations between the Governance and its neighbors.
The Yeon fleet orbited Varba for three weeks, raining down fire indiscriminately before landing and capturing the inhabitants of isolated and undefended villages.
Surrounded by unreliable allies of various stripes, the Governance’s strongest partners would be found further abroad. The southwest quadrant had for decades been split amongst a coterie of medium-sized powers. In recent years, however, many smaller states had been absorbed by the relentlessly expanding Jess’Inax Hive, while an unlikely alliance between the sebans and the interstellar revolutionaries of the Dabbax Solidarity threatened to dominate the quadrant before long. In response, the remaining independent empires were eager to find friends from outside the region. The cyggans, trapped between the sebans and the dabbax, had already become reliant on the vailons, and by extension the pithoks, to maintain their territorial integrity; the Pobelin Stellar Hegemony hoped to build its own relationship with Tebazed to accomplish the same ends for themselves. The pobelins controlled no more than a dozen systems in the early 290s, but they were fierce and fearsome warriors, fanatically devoted to the defense of the Holy Shrines of Ephemerality that dotted the surface of their homeworld. On several occasions the pobelin navy had resolutely stood its ground against the heathen communists, but they recognized that they would be overrun by the combined forces of the sebans and the dabbax in the long run. They were quick to sign a defensive treaty with the Governance following the conclusion of the Saathid War in 295. When the negotiations over the terms of the Auspicious Entente began a few years later, however, the pobelins declined an invitation to participate, citing their focus on the “divine calling” to protect the Shrines. Instead, they would become the first of the treaty organization’s associate members.
The Pelx-Cradonian Confederacy, meanwhile, had been ejected from the cradonian homeworld of Cradon in the 270s, retreating to a wide swath of sparsely inhabited space along the outer rim of the galaxy. Vailon entreaties at the time were rebuffed, floundering in the face of the reality that Governance support would take over five years to reach the new cradonian territory in the event of war. In the next twenty years, the cradonian political-military establishment experienced a series of coups that led to the state continuously reversing its policies from year to year. For most of the 280s, the regime used mild tensions with the Governance over a small cluster of unclaimed stars between the two states to cast the vailons as an imperialist power bent on hegemony; [3] by the early 290s, a new clique had come to power and lent overt material support to the TUG in its war against the saathid menace. When Director-General Birm den Boknar reopened strategic talks in 295, with an eye towards hammering out a settlement on the disputed territory and an agreement on mutual defense, she was met with a haughty denunciation of the vailon commitment to diplomatic means of settling conflicts. Simultaneously, the incumbent generalissimo signaled through back channels that the cradonians would be willing to accede to vailon control of the disputed systems, provided the Governance agreed to favorable trade terms for operations in the sector.
Commissary-General Nikat Makhan often spoke out of both sides of his mouth.
The Pithok Confederacy straddled the northwest and southwest quadrants of the galaxy, but it had long focused its attention on the latter. [4] An alliance had been formed with the Governance in the waning days of the Telnik administration, with terms that included cooperation on anti-piracy and anti-slavery patrols as well as exclusive trading pacts and a scientific exchange program. The two states had grown closer following the Confederacy’s democratic revival in the early 280s. [5] The pithoks had agreed to intervene in the long-running conflict between the cyggans and the sebans, freeing up TUG resources to be redeployed against the saathids. Wartime coordination necessitated a deeper, more embedded form of cooperation; in addition to mid-ranking naval attaches that were assigned to each other’s admiralty staffs, the two navies established a Joint Planning Commission, comprised of three admirals from each side as well as a civilian administrator from each government. Very quickly, the JPC became the locus of efforts to develop and implement a unified strategy for the quadrant; its staff ballooned into the thousands, and its remit grew to include not only military coordination but also the anti-piracy and anti-slavery initiatives as well as the organization and defense of refugee convoys.
In the decade of the JPC’s existence, it made significant strides in maintaining regional security: interdicting smuggler rings, breaking up an organized crime operation on Vurl-Palod, a new standard for deep space patrol routines. But, as an independent commission, it existed outside the naval chain of command. It was not assigned any units directly, instead relying on requests to the formal military structures of the respective states when operations were planned. These requests were frequently delayed or went unfulfilled entirely; many commanders resented losing control of their forces, and they especially hated handing them over for humanitarian missions conducted by foreign powers. Frustrated by the consistent inability to obtain forces for their operations, the members of the JPC returned to their respective governments and pleaded for more authorities, including a subset of military units that would report directly to the commission.
Boknar was enthusiastic about the idea, particularly after the cease-fire with the saathids freed up many units from wartime duties, but her counterpart on the pithok side, High Commissioner Unipak Xankikin, expressed only lukewarm support. His objections were primarily political in nature, not substantive; if he had the unilateral authority to do so, he told Boknar privately at one meeting, he would sign whatever document she put in front of him. But the democratization of the pithok government was not universally popular, and a number of influential families still exerted significant control over the military establishment. To break their power, he needed to wrest control away from those families; but the easiest way to do that, a major reshuffling that involved reassigning some units to the JPC, couldn’t be done without the families’ agreement. Boknar, ever the pragmatist, suggested to the pithok that he might use his upcoming elections to win a mandate on the question. Campaigning on a populist, anti-elite and anti-corruption platform in 297, he did just that, paving the way for him to oust a few key admirals in top posts and strengthen his own control over the military.
Xankikin and Boknar immediately agreed to transfer a number of units over to the JPC, bolstering its ability to carry out its missions. But the commission’s deliberative nature, with eight members of equal voting power, lacked the decisiveness of a traditional military hierarchy. Now that the commission could intervene in critical situations with the force of arms, competing priorities among the commissioners bogged down the decision-making process and prevented those forces from ever being deployed. Boknar seized the opportunity to push for far-reaching reforms, hoping to refashion the joint commission into an independent force entirely separated from the existing navies of the two states. Moreover, she proposed to subsume this new navy within a treaty-based organization, similar in structure to the Glorious Axis of the mith-fell and hissma, which would oversee all military and civilian efforts in the southwest quadrant.
Negotiations over the terms of the Auspicious Entente were completed quickly.
When all the negotiations were completed, the paperwork finalized, and the signing ceremony held, the Auspicious Entente largely held to the original structure proposed by Boknar. A “federation” like the Glorious Axis in all but name, the Entente would feature a permanent co-presidency, shared by the two elected heads of state. The chief executive of the civilian branch and the grand admiral leading the military branch would be appointed to coterminous ten-year terms, with the power to appoint rotating between the two presidents – a Governance-selected executive would serve with a Confederacy-selected admiral, and vice versa. Both states committed to providing the Entente 8.5% of their annual revenues for its operating costs, as well as a quota of ships, hardware, infrastructure, and personnel to constitute the new polity. Important decisions, including the application of economic sanctions and the deployment of “major” forces, required the support of both presidents. Neither state would be permitted to sign separate treaties with third parties in the quadrant without the approval of the other. And, critically, a set of mutual defense clauses continued the obligation of each state to defend the other from outside aggression, regardless of the source. Third parties would be allowed to align themselves with the new organization by signing Articles of Association, which committed those states to the mutual defense clauses of the Entente treaty and granted them favorable trading terms with the members but did not allow them to participate in the cooperative decision-making elements of the treaty. Within a month of the treaty going into effect, two states had signed up for association status: the other regional allies of the Governance, the Cyggan Empire and the Pobelin Stellar Hegemony.
The day after the formal signing ceremony, the two co-presidents of the Entente announced their selections for the chief executive and grand admiral positions. Director-General Boknar chose Virpim den Iridar, a 48-year-old native of Eldetha with ten years’ experience overseeing refugee efforts, to run the civilian operations, while High Commissioner Xankikin tapped Zaox Vartinaca, a veteran flag officer who had commanded a flotilla during the seban intervention, to head the joint military. These two figures would be the face of Entente decision-making for a decade, and for two years they busied themselves with building out the bureaucratic apparatus or the new organization and conducting goodwill missions to various colonies throughout the quadrant. The real test of the new Entente would only come with its first crisis, however, which arrived in due course: in August of 300, the Jess’Inax Hive declared war on the Auspicious Entente, ushering in a new century that promised to be as violent as the one before.
[1] This went beyond diplomatic agreements; over the decades, billions had migrated in one direction or the other across the mutually open borders, creating strong cultural ties, and they were each other’s largest trading partner.
[2] The Yeon Braves, much like the Qvefoz, were a collection of disorganized clans inhabiting a series of deep space habitats. Worshippers of a deity they referred to as “She of the Void,” they had long been a nuisance in the northeast quadrant of the galaxy. Before the raid on Varba, their ships had never before been spotted in the southeast.
[3] This cluster of systems had only two hyperlane entrances, one through Qvefoz space and the other through the silent stars controlled by the enigmatic machine intelligence known only as the Prime Continuity. The nine star systems were claimed by both the cradonians and the Governance, though effective control remained out of reach of either as long as access was limited to lone ships sneaking past marauder patrols. Recent breakthroughs in hyperlane breaching and jump drive technology, however, augured the possibility of exerting actual control – and development – irrespective of the status of the surrounding hyperlanes.
[4] To the north of pithok territory lay the powerful alliance between the Belmacosa Empire and the Khell’Zen Kingdom. While not exactly secure allies, the pithoks had been able to maintain cordial relations with the pair even as they conquered the other states in the region.
[5] Lertrak Aspinaca, the young scion of the ruling Aspinaca family, rose to power in 281 and revealed his previously hidden reformist instincts and democratic ideology. Before his assassination three years later, he was able to install a series of reforms to root power in individual citizens rather than family units, and inspired a generation of pithok leaders to follow in his footsteps.
[2] The Yeon Braves, much like the Qvefoz, were a collection of disorganized clans inhabiting a series of deep space habitats. Worshippers of a deity they referred to as “She of the Void,” they had long been a nuisance in the northeast quadrant of the galaxy. Before the raid on Varba, their ships had never before been spotted in the southeast.
[3] This cluster of systems had only two hyperlane entrances, one through Qvefoz space and the other through the silent stars controlled by the enigmatic machine intelligence known only as the Prime Continuity. The nine star systems were claimed by both the cradonians and the Governance, though effective control remained out of reach of either as long as access was limited to lone ships sneaking past marauder patrols. Recent breakthroughs in hyperlane breaching and jump drive technology, however, augured the possibility of exerting actual control – and development – irrespective of the status of the surrounding hyperlanes.
[4] To the north of pithok territory lay the powerful alliance between the Belmacosa Empire and the Khell’Zen Kingdom. While not exactly secure allies, the pithoks had been able to maintain cordial relations with the pair even as they conquered the other states in the region.
[5] Lertrak Aspinaca, the young scion of the ruling Aspinaca family, rose to power in 281 and revealed his previously hidden reformist instincts and democratic ideology. Before his assassination three years later, he was able to install a series of reforms to root power in individual citizens rather than family units, and inspired a generation of pithok leaders to follow in his footsteps.
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That was a great overview of the Galactic neighborhood and an auspicious start for the new federation.
The mention of a century of war isn't too promising but one hopes it will at least stabilize things somewhat.
No worries about the break and good luck with your other creative endeavors! I'm also in a state of juggling different creative projects so I know the struggle. I'll be looking forward to the next update whenever it may come
The mention of a century of war isn't too promising but one hopes it will at least stabilize things somewhat.
No worries about the break and good luck with your other creative endeavors! I'm also in a state of juggling different creative projects so I know the struggle. I'll be looking forward to the next update whenever it may come
Q3 ACAs!
Nuff said! [1]
Footnotes
Nuff said! [1]
Footnotes
[1] Almost true! It should be said, once again, that the tireless @Nikolai runs these for us, for which we are all incredibly grateful. Additionally, I do intend on posting new chapters of this story before the end of the year, so you've got that to look forward to!
- 1
Chapter Twenty-Four - The Year 300: A Census
January 1, 300 marked the 100th anniversary of the launching of the ISS Jhunustarion, the lead ship of the Windur-class of exploratory science vessels and the first vailon ship with a fully capable interstellar jump drive. Birm den Boknar, the incumbent Director-General, declared a Governance-wide holiday to commemorate the event, with festivities in nearly every town and city on every colony in the vailon-dominated, if no longer vailon-majority, state.
Birm den Boknar, Director-General from 285.
By the beginning of the fourth century, approximately 260 billion individuals called the TUG home. Vailons still accounted for a significant plurality of the population, though the gap between the founders and the second-largest demographic group had been shrinking for several decades. From 65% in 280, the vailon percentage of the population had fallen to 49% in 290 and 39% in 300. The state was growing ever more diverse: no other single species comprised even 10% of the population, with tezhnids, the second-most-common species, checking in at 9.6%. Other minority populations of note included pobelins (8.8% of the population), pithoks (7.6%), sathori (6.0%), and mith-fell (5.2%).
Here follows a survey of the demographics and economic situation of the nine colonies of the Tebazed Unified Governance in 300.
Core
Tebazed
Vailon homeworld
The capital and namesake of the Tebazed Unified Governance persisted as the economic and political center of the state. Over 60 billion individuals lived across its surface, roughly two-thirds of whom were concentrated in major urban agglomerations. While the capital city, Sedrin, remained relatively small, with only 70 million inhabitants, by 300 two dozen separate cities had surpassed 500 million in population, with the Lopinira megalopolis home to ten billion individuals by itself. Though xenos now outnumbered vailons on most of the colonies, on the homeworld the founders still predominated, accounting for 91% of the population.
Tebazed was not only home to the largest population in the Governance; the planet was also the leading producer of most advanced industrial goods. Factories on Tebazed manufactured highly complex secondary and tertiary products, including high-value consumer electronics; plants in Lopinira produced precision machine tools and scientific instruments on par with the skilled artisans of Mirovandia Prime. These products found their way into the laboratories and research institutes that made the vailon homeworld a galactic hub for biochemical and physical research.
Eldetha
Founded 205
The first vailon interstellar colony had grown to a population of 38 billion and still considered itself to be the second planet of the Governance. The population was more diverse than the homeworld, with vailons accounting for 57% of individuals living on the surface. Tezhnids formed a substantial minority, as they did across the core worlds; on Eldetha, they numbered eight and a half billion. Mith-fell, norillgans, pobelins, and varelvivi also comprised populations in excess of one billion on the world.
The mining industry was the beating heart of the Eldethan economy. For decades, the second world of the Governance had been its leading producer of raw ore; in 260, two out of every three workers on the planet were posted in a mining or mining-related job. Since then, even though gross production continued to increase, as a percentage of total output the Eldethan mining sector lost ground as peripheral colonies became more important to the economy. However, the Eldethan administration had offset this decline by investing in secondary industries, which could rely on local sources of cheap ore to out-compete older, more established factories on the homeworld.
Varba
Founded 210
In a century of vailon stellar exploration, Varba remained the only colony to suffer an attack by a hostile fleet. Though the Yeon Raid of 288 had killed tens of thousands and permanently scarred the landscape in the picturesque Arbeth region, the colony continued to grow and thrive. Twelve years on, vailons comprised 53% of the roughly 30 billion inhabitants, while tezhnids formed the only sizable minority group, accounting for a quarter of the individuals on the planet.
At the turn of the century, Varba remained a center of heavy industry and military production. Vast foundries formed the heart of most urban areas, while a steady stream of freighters carried the output to the massive civilian shipyards in orbit as well as the main naval drydocks located at the Con Viab starbase. [1] Varba was also a major center of trade, owing chiefly to its location on the border with, and status as gateway to, the Mith-Fell Independent Commonwealth.
Polosch Arm
Firintarogga
Founded 244
Mith-fell migrants famously settled Firintarogga in 244, and the earliest settlers still dominate much of political, economic, and social life on the planet. Though the mith-fell were, in 300, (temporarily) no longer the most populous species on the planet — for a brief period, the sathori community surpassed the size of the mith-fell community, due to an influx of refugees from the collapsing Sathori Union — they still held an overwhelming majority of top positions in the colonial government, as well as most key industrial postings. Mith-fell accounted for roughly 40% of the inhabitants but well over 70% of administrative and upper-level management positions on the planet.
Wrbli, official name Beak of Indigo, [2] governed Firintarogga from 272 to 312.
Civilian industries dominated the economy of Firintarogga. Most settlements were centered around factories producing mass-market goods ranging from clothing to personal electronic devices. While many workers lived in semi-rural towns near their places of work, a few major cities dotted the surface. Taking advantage of mith-fell techniques, large parts of these urban areas were constructed on floating islands just offshore of the settled landmasses, forming a unique land-sea living arrangement.
Ferdera
Founded 244
Ferdera lay at the extreme end of the Polosch arm; it was the furthest colony, save the occupied norillgan homeworld in the Uiafladus system, from Tebazed. Nevertheless, it remained a vailon-plurality world, with 38% of the 25 billion individuals on the planet being the founder species. 29% of the population were tezhnids, 13% pobelins, and the remainder a scattering of xeno species including pithoks, varelvivi, and the lone djunn [3] community of any significance in the Governance.
At the turn of the century, Ferdera remained the “breadbasket” of the TUG, responsible for producing around 40% of its agricultural output every year. While most of this output was consumed in the heavily urbanized colonies of Firintarogga and The Veil, [4] a growing proportion was exported to external trading partners, primarily the Hissma Union and the Mith-Fell Independent Commonwealth, both of which lay just a few hyperlane jumps away from Ferdera.
Kampira
Founded 267
Kampira was a relative backwater. With only fifteen billion inhabitants living in a primarily rural society, Kampira was an insignificant component of the wider Governance economy. The jungle planet was home to significant populations of xenos, with pithoks accounting for two-fifths of the total, pobelins one-third, and norillgans one-fifth. About the only other thing of note was the colony’s large-scale experimentation with a robotic workforce, the first of its kind in the TUG. Almost half of its farm labor was comprised of fully autonomous robots; it was this segment of the economy that supplied Kampira’s meager export business.
Nagrama
Founded 269
If Kampira was considered a backwater in 300, then Nagrama barely rated a mention at all. Few vailons lived on either of these twin colonies, separated by only a single hyperlane jump. Approximately fourteen billion individuals lived alongside Nagrama’s dense jungles, a similar proportion of pithoks, norillgans, and pobelins to its slightly older sister colony, differing only in adding a significant number of zaydrans to the mix.
Despite its low profile, Nagrama was growing in importance in the TUG economy. Early surveys had indicated that the planet featured significant deposits of raw ores located across several mountain ranges; the first prospectors planetside discovered that the raw material reserves actually outstripped the mineral-rich Eldetha by a factor of three. By 300, massive investment had lifted the Nagraman mining sector to number one in the Governance - beating out even the legacy producers on the first vailon colony.
The Veil
The Veil
Founded 267
In the thirty-plus years since its settling, The Veil had grown at an astonishing rate. By the end of the century, it had surpassed the original vailon core colonies of Eldetha and Varba to become the second-most-populated planet in Governance space. The idyllic planet had become the leading destination for migration to the TUG; species from all regions of the galaxy and of all habitation preferences lived on the surface, in some cases spread out across the vastly different biomes but also side-by-side in massive and growing urban agglomerations. No single species dominated: the largest migrant communities were ragerian, rontor, and obevni, each checking in at around fifteen percent of the 39 billion that called the Gaia world home.
The Veil hosted dozens of distinct biomes across its surface; no species yet encountered could fail to find a suitable place to live on the planet.
The urban centers of The Veil naturally attracted industries that benefited from close exchange of goods, individuals, and ideas. Mass production of consumer goods, entertainment and cultural groups, and research programs were all widespread. These sectors were the beneficiaries not just of network effects, but also the positive externalities of demographic diversity itself. With such a wide variety of cultural output, The Veil became a celebrated — and more-than-occasionally derided — taste-maker for the wider Governance economy.
Under Military Administration
Uiafladus II
Though martial law was formally ended in 297, the second planet orbiting the star Uiafladus remained under military administration. A steady stream of norillgans had returned to their homeworld, encouraged by generous Governance promises to undertake a massive infrastructure building program and recapitalize the economy. After twelve years of control and five years of peace, however, saathids remained in the majority on the planet. The Foundation Accords banned discrimination in all forms, extending equal protection to all lawful inhabitants of Governance territory. Moreover, the nascent body of galactic law built on the principle of respect for individual rights, and though the genocidal saathid state was not a party to any of the relevant interstellar agreements, the Boknar administration made a determination that the rules applied in these circumstances.
Despite the influx of individuals and investment, war had taken a toll on the planet from which it had yet to recover. The colony was deficient in agricultural production and energy generation, depending on imports to feed its population and power its electrical grid. Meanwhile, the only hyperlane to the beleaguered planet passed through saathid space; with no guarantee of safe transit forthcoming from the saathid government, trade remained hazardous and every convoy headed to or from the colony required a naval escort. In such a precarious situation, the administration shelved plans to spin off the planet as a self-sufficient, quasi-independent political entity for the time being.
Footnotes
Birm den Boknar, Director-General from 285.
By the beginning of the fourth century, approximately 260 billion individuals called the TUG home. Vailons still accounted for a significant plurality of the population, though the gap between the founders and the second-largest demographic group had been shrinking for several decades. From 65% in 280, the vailon percentage of the population had fallen to 49% in 290 and 39% in 300. The state was growing ever more diverse: no other single species comprised even 10% of the population, with tezhnids, the second-most-common species, checking in at 9.6%. Other minority populations of note included pobelins (8.8% of the population), pithoks (7.6%), sathori (6.0%), and mith-fell (5.2%).
Here follows a survey of the demographics and economic situation of the nine colonies of the Tebazed Unified Governance in 300.
Core
Tebazed
Vailon homeworld
The capital and namesake of the Tebazed Unified Governance persisted as the economic and political center of the state. Over 60 billion individuals lived across its surface, roughly two-thirds of whom were concentrated in major urban agglomerations. While the capital city, Sedrin, remained relatively small, with only 70 million inhabitants, by 300 two dozen separate cities had surpassed 500 million in population, with the Lopinira megalopolis home to ten billion individuals by itself. Though xenos now outnumbered vailons on most of the colonies, on the homeworld the founders still predominated, accounting for 91% of the population.
Tebazed was not only home to the largest population in the Governance; the planet was also the leading producer of most advanced industrial goods. Factories on Tebazed manufactured highly complex secondary and tertiary products, including high-value consumer electronics; plants in Lopinira produced precision machine tools and scientific instruments on par with the skilled artisans of Mirovandia Prime. These products found their way into the laboratories and research institutes that made the vailon homeworld a galactic hub for biochemical and physical research.
Eldetha
Founded 205
The first vailon interstellar colony had grown to a population of 38 billion and still considered itself to be the second planet of the Governance. The population was more diverse than the homeworld, with vailons accounting for 57% of individuals living on the surface. Tezhnids formed a substantial minority, as they did across the core worlds; on Eldetha, they numbered eight and a half billion. Mith-fell, norillgans, pobelins, and varelvivi also comprised populations in excess of one billion on the world.
The mining industry was the beating heart of the Eldethan economy. For decades, the second world of the Governance had been its leading producer of raw ore; in 260, two out of every three workers on the planet were posted in a mining or mining-related job. Since then, even though gross production continued to increase, as a percentage of total output the Eldethan mining sector lost ground as peripheral colonies became more important to the economy. However, the Eldethan administration had offset this decline by investing in secondary industries, which could rely on local sources of cheap ore to out-compete older, more established factories on the homeworld.
Varba
Founded 210
In a century of vailon stellar exploration, Varba remained the only colony to suffer an attack by a hostile fleet. Though the Yeon Raid of 288 had killed tens of thousands and permanently scarred the landscape in the picturesque Arbeth region, the colony continued to grow and thrive. Twelve years on, vailons comprised 53% of the roughly 30 billion inhabitants, while tezhnids formed the only sizable minority group, accounting for a quarter of the individuals on the planet.
At the turn of the century, Varba remained a center of heavy industry and military production. Vast foundries formed the heart of most urban areas, while a steady stream of freighters carried the output to the massive civilian shipyards in orbit as well as the main naval drydocks located at the Con Viab starbase. [1] Varba was also a major center of trade, owing chiefly to its location on the border with, and status as gateway to, the Mith-Fell Independent Commonwealth.
Polosch Arm
Firintarogga
Founded 244
Mith-fell migrants famously settled Firintarogga in 244, and the earliest settlers still dominate much of political, economic, and social life on the planet. Though the mith-fell were, in 300, (temporarily) no longer the most populous species on the planet — for a brief period, the sathori community surpassed the size of the mith-fell community, due to an influx of refugees from the collapsing Sathori Union — they still held an overwhelming majority of top positions in the colonial government, as well as most key industrial postings. Mith-fell accounted for roughly 40% of the inhabitants but well over 70% of administrative and upper-level management positions on the planet.
Wrbli, official name Beak of Indigo, [2] governed Firintarogga from 272 to 312.
Civilian industries dominated the economy of Firintarogga. Most settlements were centered around factories producing mass-market goods ranging from clothing to personal electronic devices. While many workers lived in semi-rural towns near their places of work, a few major cities dotted the surface. Taking advantage of mith-fell techniques, large parts of these urban areas were constructed on floating islands just offshore of the settled landmasses, forming a unique land-sea living arrangement.
Ferdera
Founded 244
Ferdera lay at the extreme end of the Polosch arm; it was the furthest colony, save the occupied norillgan homeworld in the Uiafladus system, from Tebazed. Nevertheless, it remained a vailon-plurality world, with 38% of the 25 billion individuals on the planet being the founder species. 29% of the population were tezhnids, 13% pobelins, and the remainder a scattering of xeno species including pithoks, varelvivi, and the lone djunn [3] community of any significance in the Governance.
At the turn of the century, Ferdera remained the “breadbasket” of the TUG, responsible for producing around 40% of its agricultural output every year. While most of this output was consumed in the heavily urbanized colonies of Firintarogga and The Veil, [4] a growing proportion was exported to external trading partners, primarily the Hissma Union and the Mith-Fell Independent Commonwealth, both of which lay just a few hyperlane jumps away from Ferdera.
Kampira
Founded 267
Kampira was a relative backwater. With only fifteen billion inhabitants living in a primarily rural society, Kampira was an insignificant component of the wider Governance economy. The jungle planet was home to significant populations of xenos, with pithoks accounting for two-fifths of the total, pobelins one-third, and norillgans one-fifth. About the only other thing of note was the colony’s large-scale experimentation with a robotic workforce, the first of its kind in the TUG. Almost half of its farm labor was comprised of fully autonomous robots; it was this segment of the economy that supplied Kampira’s meager export business.
Nagrama
Founded 269
If Kampira was considered a backwater in 300, then Nagrama barely rated a mention at all. Few vailons lived on either of these twin colonies, separated by only a single hyperlane jump. Approximately fourteen billion individuals lived alongside Nagrama’s dense jungles, a similar proportion of pithoks, norillgans, and pobelins to its slightly older sister colony, differing only in adding a significant number of zaydrans to the mix.
Despite its low profile, Nagrama was growing in importance in the TUG economy. Early surveys had indicated that the planet featured significant deposits of raw ores located across several mountain ranges; the first prospectors planetside discovered that the raw material reserves actually outstripped the mineral-rich Eldetha by a factor of three. By 300, massive investment had lifted the Nagraman mining sector to number one in the Governance - beating out even the legacy producers on the first vailon colony.
The Veil
The Veil
Founded 267
In the thirty-plus years since its settling, The Veil had grown at an astonishing rate. By the end of the century, it had surpassed the original vailon core colonies of Eldetha and Varba to become the second-most-populated planet in Governance space. The idyllic planet had become the leading destination for migration to the TUG; species from all regions of the galaxy and of all habitation preferences lived on the surface, in some cases spread out across the vastly different biomes but also side-by-side in massive and growing urban agglomerations. No single species dominated: the largest migrant communities were ragerian, rontor, and obevni, each checking in at around fifteen percent of the 39 billion that called the Gaia world home.
The Veil hosted dozens of distinct biomes across its surface; no species yet encountered could fail to find a suitable place to live on the planet.
The urban centers of The Veil naturally attracted industries that benefited from close exchange of goods, individuals, and ideas. Mass production of consumer goods, entertainment and cultural groups, and research programs were all widespread. These sectors were the beneficiaries not just of network effects, but also the positive externalities of demographic diversity itself. With such a wide variety of cultural output, The Veil became a celebrated — and more-than-occasionally derided — taste-maker for the wider Governance economy.
Under Military Administration
Uiafladus II
Though martial law was formally ended in 297, the second planet orbiting the star Uiafladus remained under military administration. A steady stream of norillgans had returned to their homeworld, encouraged by generous Governance promises to undertake a massive infrastructure building program and recapitalize the economy. After twelve years of control and five years of peace, however, saathids remained in the majority on the planet. The Foundation Accords banned discrimination in all forms, extending equal protection to all lawful inhabitants of Governance territory. Moreover, the nascent body of galactic law built on the principle of respect for individual rights, and though the genocidal saathid state was not a party to any of the relevant interstellar agreements, the Boknar administration made a determination that the rules applied in these circumstances.
Despite the influx of individuals and investment, war had taken a toll on the planet from which it had yet to recover. The colony was deficient in agricultural production and energy generation, depending on imports to feed its population and power its electrical grid. Meanwhile, the only hyperlane to the beleaguered planet passed through saathid space; with no guarantee of safe transit forthcoming from the saathid government, trade remained hazardous and every convoy headed to or from the colony required a naval escort. In such a precarious situation, the administration shelved plans to spin off the planet as a self-sufficient, quasi-independent political entity for the time being.
Footnotes
[1] Once the centerpiece of the defensive strategy employed by Admiral Sarim den Piriam during the First Varelviv War, the massive military installation, now deep inside Governance space instead of on the outskirts, had been converted into the main shipyards of the Unified Navy.
[2] Mith-fell custom dictated that government officials and others in positions of power take "official" names to reflect the dignity of their offices.
[3] The djunn were extra-galactic invaders along the northern rim of the galaxy. After contributing to the downfall of the hythean-sathori federation, they had themselves been conquered by the wealthy mirovandian empire.
[4] Tebazed was largely self-sufficient in food products, and in fact was able to supply the other core worlds with its modest surplus.
[2] Mith-fell custom dictated that government officials and others in positions of power take "official" names to reflect the dignity of their offices.
[3] The djunn were extra-galactic invaders along the northern rim of the galaxy. After contributing to the downfall of the hythean-sathori federation, they had themselves been conquered by the wealthy mirovandian empire.
[4] Tebazed was largely self-sufficient in food products, and in fact was able to supply the other core worlds with its modest surplus.
Hello everyone, and thank you for your patience during this project's hiatus! I am back now, and I am committed to wrapping this up over the course of the year, come hell or high water.
A few announcements:
This post was, as you can tell, a survey of the state of the TUG as we wrap up the first century of the game. We will have two more posts along similar lines, one covering social and cultural topics and another on science and the military, before returning to the narrative proper. I have fourteen more chapters of narrative planned (not including any interludes), so that translates to a little more than one update a month if I am to hit my goal.
Quarterly ACAs are back, once again shepherded by the unequaled @Nikolai. Please go vote!
And finally, The 2021 Yearly AARland Year-end AwAARds are here! These are run by the incomparable @coz1. Also go vote for these!
If you're a writAAR yourself, you already know, but if you're just a reader, the community greatly appreciates your participation!
A few announcements:
This post was, as you can tell, a survey of the state of the TUG as we wrap up the first century of the game. We will have two more posts along similar lines, one covering social and cultural topics and another on science and the military, before returning to the narrative proper. I have fourteen more chapters of narrative planned (not including any interludes), so that translates to a little more than one update a month if I am to hit my goal.
Quarterly ACAs are back, once again shepherded by the unequaled @Nikolai. Please go vote!
And finally, The 2021 Yearly AARland Year-end AwAARds are here! These are run by the incomparable @coz1. Also go vote for these!
If you're a writAAR yourself, you already know, but if you're just a reader, the community greatly appreciates your participation!
I don't remember the djunn much from the previous history but that's an interesting note!
Also, welcome back! This was a great overview to start the year off with.
Chapter Twenty-Five - Social Trends
Demonym
Though many external sources continued to use “vailon” as a valid demonym for the Governance or its citizens, the term had fallen out of use inside the TUG over the second half of the third century. With the proportion of actual vailons falling steadily every year, dipping below 40% for the first time in 298, many new terms came into use. The administration of Birm den Boknar made it a priority to adopt a new official demonym in time for the centennial celebrations. After extensive surveys of its citizens, attempting to analyze the population across as many dimensions as possible in order to select a broadly acceptable world, the administration settled on the term “Tebazeder,” already in wide use across large swathes of the polity. The term was also occasionally employed to refer to any resident of the vailon homeworld; to avoid any official confusion, the Directory adopted another word, “Zedder,” as the proper demonym of an individual from Tebazed.
Social Hierarchies
As the founders of the Tebazed Unified Governance, vailons were in many ways still the primary species of the polity in 300. Vailons still occupied the upper echelons of most institutions, partly for historical reasons (more vailons had more experience in more roles with more responsibilities) and partly due to the implicit biases that still permeated society. The Accord, the founding document of the TUG and the main constitutional arrangement for the polity, enshrined formal equality for all citizens as a key pillar of the law; subsequent legal cases and practices repeatedly concluded that this applied to vailons and non-vailons alike. This was traditionally understood to strive for equality of opportunity, wherein all individuals have equal access to resources and jobs and career advancement should be based solely on the merit of one’s abilities.
However, even the Directory’s own social scientists consistently found that the posting system favors the founder species. Vailons remained in the majority at the upper echelons of society — in the Directory, among political appointees of the administration, and of course at the very top, where no non-vailon had ever been selected, or even been considered a major candidate, for Director-General. Moreover, statistical analysis demonstrated that vailons applicants were more likely to be selected than those of other species with similar resumes and testing aptitudes. This remained a sensitive topic for the founder species, who still espoused the notion that the Governance was a true meritocracy. One notorious incident in 296 was a stark illustration of the problem: when a researcher in the Sociology Section of the Science Directory published a study that developed a hierarchy of species based on the results of posting applications, the Boknar administration was roundly criticized in the Assembly and across the homeworld. Eventually, the administration denounced the results and disowned the work, transferring the scientist out of the department and into the obscure Loop Section, where her work would attract less attention. There was a limit to even the vailons’ capacity for dispassionate consideration of the facts.
There were, however, well-structured aspects of Governance society that lived up to the lofty aspirations contained in the Accords. The cohort system remained a great leveler. Native xenos who were educated in a cohort were more likely to be chosen for postings than citizens of the same species who were educated in independent schooling programs and much more likely than immigrants or refugees of the same species. With each passing decade, the disparity in outcomes between cohort xenos and non-cohort xenos increased, and the gap between cohort xenos and vailons decreased.
Most cohorts were mono-species. For various physio-socio-cultural reasons, members of the same species often chose to live in communities of their own making, even while adopting, or keeping to, vailon modes of social organization. This was especially true on Tebazed, home to nearly a quarter of the population of the Governance, where nine out of ten residents were of the founder species. On the homeworld, outside of the few cities that had seen significant xeno inflows, most cohorts were exclusively vailon. But even on the colonies, where no single species was nearly as dominant a majority, cohorts outside of the few major cities reflected the existing segregated populations.
Only on The Veil was the story substantially different. There, streams of refugees had intermixed and overwhelmed the early administrators who might have wanted to keep the process of resettlement more organized and segregated, if only so that they could guarantee each individual would have access to adequate housing in a suitable climate. As it was, while most refugees were able to move to a biome that suited their physiological needs, the dense neighborhoods and cities that sprouted up around migrant settlements had significantly mixed populations. These agglomerations of individuals from many species, congregating and living together in a fabric of urban life, provided a further attraction to incoming migrants, drawn to both the inter-planetary and the inter-species economic and cultural opportunities, which were then passed on to the local cohorts.
Among the several species that now made up the fabric of the TUG there emerged an informal hierarchy. [1] At the bottom were xenos like saathids, universally reviled for the genocidal actions of their government even though the saathids who chose to live in the Governance proper had all left their society behind for good. Scarcely better off were the varelvivi; a century of hostility between the two polities had led the few varelvivi who lived in Governance space to be treated as enemy citizens, inherently subject to mistrust. As a result, these xenos tended to live in insular communities, avoiding contact as much as possible with most Governance citizens.
A sathori migrant in traditional robes waits at a refugee processing center on The Veil.
Other xenos were afforded something approaching social equality. The vast majority of non-vailons were not discriminated against on account of the actions of their societies of origin. Most of the largest xeno communities — tezhnids, pobelins, pithoks, mith-fell — experienced life in the Governance essentially as equals. The sathori, the largest refugee community, were overwhelmingly among the poorest citizens of the TUG. As their state faced successive invasions from their more powerful neighbors in the Northwest Quadrant, more and more sathoris fled the region with no more than the clothes on their back, hoping to find a place of safety and security. The Governance welcomed them all with open arms, but some of the wealthier immigrant communities came to resent their status. They felt that they had worked to earn their equality while the sathori had been handed it, betraying the continuing presence of old, non-vailon biases against the undeserving poor.
Certain smaller minorities had distinct experiences. Due to differences in preferred habitats (mirovandians hailed from a cold, dry planet; aside from a small region on The Veil, no vailon colony adequately recreated the tundra conditions of their home), few mirovandians immigrated to the Governance. Those that did were often assumed to have come under the auspices of expanding markets for businesses back home, and they were generally treated with all the suspicion due to predatory capitalists. Djunn, meanwhile, were rare enough to be considered a novelty by most Tebazeders. Their extra-galactic origin, from somewhere off the northern rim of the galaxy, lent them a particular aura of mystery, as if they might not be as corporeal as everyone else, a feeling that was reinforced by a palpable sense of fear that seemed to permeate the air around them. That their species-mates had committed mass bloodlettings across a dozen planets, including the sathori homeworld of Sathoria, only served to encourage more rumors of supernatural powers. It was the ragerians, however, who had perhaps the most distinctive experience. Their physiological similarities to vailons meant that they often blended in with the founder species, at least in the eyes of the non-vailon majority. As a result, their socio-economic status was on par with the founder species throughout the TUG. However, many ragerians felt a sense of unease with their unearned position in society; they were in fact non-native citizens of the Governance and often felt more solidarity with their xeno neighbors than the founders.
Djunn were all the more disconcerting for their apparent lack of facial features.
Crime
Crime rates on Governance colonies were much lower than the galactic average. This would typically go unnoticed among vailon observers, for whom this was not just a contemporary trend. Historical data series demonstrated that, at comparable levels of development, vailon societies had almost always been in the lowest tier of crime rates relative to their peers across the galaxy. It was, however, a very salient fact for immigrants. Many migrants left their homes precisely because crime was so high and they were looking for a better, safer life. Though polling demonstrated that second-generation xenos — the children of migrants — did not rate crime highly among the benefits of living in the TUG, new migrant cohorts continued to emphasize low crime rates as a primary motivation for coming to the Governance and as a particular benefit of living in vailon space.
As a result, Tebazeder researchers who investigated crime and its causes were overwhelmingly non-vailon, whether immigrants themselves or the children of the same. A naturally intense debate developed over the causes of the disparity between the Governance and other interstellar polities. The fight eventually coalesced around two competing theories. On one side, social theorists argued that vailon culture had adopted debate as its preferred form of conflict resolution, channeling negative emotions and instincts away from the types of impulsive aggressive behavior that characterize most criminal activities in other species. Economic realists, on the other hand, focused on the generous social welfare system of the Governance, which prevented poverty and therefore most of the reasons an individual might have to turn to crime. Both camps, however, agreed in their rejection of biological determinism theories, which held some sway in certain pockets but were thoroughly belied by the reduced crime rates across all xeno groups in the TUG.
Food
While some sociocultural phenomena translated easily across physiologies, biological differences between species had proven to be a major hurdle for the development of a shared culture of food. Among vailons, eating remained a social activity; a vailon would be truly sad indeed to take a meal alone. Food was a critical element of most gatherings, whether formal and ritualistic or a casual get-together among friends. Cuisines had diverged and multiplied across the several colonies, as different communities incorporated local ingredients or influences from various xeno cultures. But the communal aspects remained in common, and public eateries, where anyone could dine and find dining partners, continued to be a mainstay across the Governance.
Of course, vailons were no longer a majority community in the Governance. Food cultures varied widely among the different xeno populations; and, much as the vailon pre-interstellar tradition persisted, most species retained decades or centuries-old food practices. A few examples will suffice to demonstrate:
Tezhnids eat an entirely non-animal diet, typically dining in small-to-medium sized groups. A few friends might take meals together on social occasions, or an extended family of forty or more might gather for important rituals, but most meals for tezhnids in the Governance would be eaten in public communal settings, in this way adapting to the dominant vailon culture.
Tebazeder pithoks were divided into two distinct groups. For families [2] that migrated to the TUG, pithok traditions continued to dominate their lifestyles, including taking meals in thousand-plus-individual gatherings. However, many pithoks broke with their families to travel to vailon territory, and these individuals often proved to be the most adaptable of the various xeno groups. These pithoks adopted vailon customs and seamlessly assimilated into the dominant culture. Pithoks were thus a common sight at eateries run by nearly every xeno group in the Governance.
As new partners in federation, pithoks were looked upon favorably by most Tebazeders.
Mith-fell eating customs had been subordinated to business interests on their homeworld for centuries, and migrants from Kan Jukla and its colonies often recreated what they knew after they came to the Governance. Networks of small restaurants sprang up wherever a mith-fell community developed, often coexisting side-by-side with several large chains that followed the migrants to their new homes. Individual mate pairings, however, would often cook in their homes for their meals, especially if they were too poor to afford local restaurants. [3]
Mirovandians valued food only insofar as it provided the necessary nutrients for a day’s activities. Their traditional cultures placed very little emphasis on dietary intake, and the latter-day entrepreneurial spirit of the Galactic Mirovandian Commonwealth only relegated food further away from the center of mirovandian life. Mirovandians typically consumed foodstuffs alone, in small snacks spread throughout the day; a mirovandian would typically carry with them copious amounts of small edible items, so that they were never deprived when the need for food struck.
Earth’s humans only recently joined the ranks of the interstellar community as clients of the Governance, and the bipedal mammals had not yet been greatly influenced by xeno cultures. They tended to eat alone or in small groups; only for important life-cycle rituals did humans gather in large numbers for meals. The small community of humans residing in the Governance, primarily diplomatic personnel and associated persons living in Sedrin, were proof of the Earthers’ natural capacity for adaptation: the humans almost uniformly adopted vailon foods and customs, taking all of their meals in the public cafeterias of the capital and showing a marked preference for sampling the many available xeno cuisines over eating the foods of their homeworld.
Transportation
In one sense, the Interstellar Age was nothing more than a simple advancement of transportation technology to a new paradigm. With a wider view, this technological development was a revolution, a profound and fundamental break with previous limits on vailon existence. The advent of hyperlane breaching technology annihilated the unfathomable distances between stars; journeying between systems, visiting alien planets, became something that most vailons were able to experience over the course of their lifetimes.
But the distances remained large, and non-FTL travel remained slow, with breakthroughs in direct propulsion technology providing incremental speed advantages instead of radical leaps. Even at the end of the century, casual travel between colonies was severely limited; unless the planets happened to be in neighboring systems, the journey from one colony to another could take weeks or months in most cases, years for destinations like Ferdera, out in the farthest reaches of the Polosch Arm. As a result, most residents of the Governance were local creatures, rarely traveling more than one hyperspace jump away from their home.
Deep-space travel remained expensive for individuals for most of the third century. But start-up costs were astronomical, and few private entrepreneurs directed their efforts towards breaking into the commercial passenger market. As a result, the administration operated a virtual monopoly in interstellar transit. Service followed a hub-and-spoke model; big passenger liners, large enough to carry tens of thousands of individuals, ran frequently between major colonies, while smaller vessels handled routes to smaller frontier colonies, or from colonies to nearby systems.
Interplanetary trade accounted for the majority of ships traveling along space lanes at any given time. Historically, small-scale traders, owning their own ships and making one-off arrangements with manufacturers and wholesalers, dominated the field. In the latter decades of the century, however, groups of traders banded together to pool their risk, forming joint-stock ventures to manage their efforts. Eventually these JSVs attracted investment from outside principals. While vailons had very little tradition of financial capitalism, other species in the galaxy were active practitioners of the dark arts, and funds flowed into this nascent market from mith-fell and especially mirovandian sources. As investment grew, the JSVs were able to build and operate larger and larger ships and consolidate the market; by 300 nearly 40% of interplanetary shipping was managed by foreign-owned ventures.
A Hasar-class bulk freighter, a typical JSV-owned ship, had four hundred times the cargo space of the most common freelancing trade vessels.
Tebazeders had more options for intraplanetary travel, with the densest planets being the most transit-rich. For residents of the core worlds, The Veil, and the built-up areas of Ferdera and Firintarogga, small individual vehicles for short-distance travel were easy to rent, while travel over medium and long distances could be accomplished through high-speed fixed-path rail networks. Only the longest trips required flight of some sort, whether space planes that just breached the outer atmosphere or low-orbiter rockets that connected points on opposite sides of the planet.
Small personal vehicles were much more common in the peripheral areas of the Governance, where transit systems were less developed. These vehicles were often shared among members of a small community; a rural town or a small city neighborhood might collectively own a number of options for its residents to use. Larger cities in the periphery often built their own mass transit systems for public use; however, in contrast to the planet-wide networks of the core worlds, these were for local trips only. Inter-city transportation systems were anchored on the major spaceports that provided each planet with its lifeline to the wider TUG.
Sex
In contrast with many areas of vailon culture, sexuality had changed very little for the founder species over the Interstellar Age. Most sexual relationships entered into by vailons were short-term, pleasure-seeking arrangements between social equals. The majority of vailons were bisexual, an uncommon trait among the other species in the galaxy. Monogamous relationships between vailons were rare.
For most other gendered species, monogamous, long-term relationships were the norm. Inter-species relationships did remain a rarity throughout the Governance however, as biological constraints on procreation limited the desire of most individuals to form long-term committed relationships with xenos. Moreover, just as the primarily mono-species communities of the colonies structured the experiences of the cohort system, it also limited the scope of potential sexual partners for most individuals. In mixed species areas, however, sexual partnerings tended to represent most possible permutations of xeno pairs; vailons were particularly noted in these contexts for their eagerness to initiate cross-species encounters. Though these relationships were infertile, they represented the polyglot, cosmopolitan ideal of society that the founders had dreamed of creating.
Footnotes
Though many external sources continued to use “vailon” as a valid demonym for the Governance or its citizens, the term had fallen out of use inside the TUG over the second half of the third century. With the proportion of actual vailons falling steadily every year, dipping below 40% for the first time in 298, many new terms came into use. The administration of Birm den Boknar made it a priority to adopt a new official demonym in time for the centennial celebrations. After extensive surveys of its citizens, attempting to analyze the population across as many dimensions as possible in order to select a broadly acceptable world, the administration settled on the term “Tebazeder,” already in wide use across large swathes of the polity. The term was also occasionally employed to refer to any resident of the vailon homeworld; to avoid any official confusion, the Directory adopted another word, “Zedder,” as the proper demonym of an individual from Tebazed.
Social Hierarchies
As the founders of the Tebazed Unified Governance, vailons were in many ways still the primary species of the polity in 300. Vailons still occupied the upper echelons of most institutions, partly for historical reasons (more vailons had more experience in more roles with more responsibilities) and partly due to the implicit biases that still permeated society. The Accord, the founding document of the TUG and the main constitutional arrangement for the polity, enshrined formal equality for all citizens as a key pillar of the law; subsequent legal cases and practices repeatedly concluded that this applied to vailons and non-vailons alike. This was traditionally understood to strive for equality of opportunity, wherein all individuals have equal access to resources and jobs and career advancement should be based solely on the merit of one’s abilities.
However, even the Directory’s own social scientists consistently found that the posting system favors the founder species. Vailons remained in the majority at the upper echelons of society — in the Directory, among political appointees of the administration, and of course at the very top, where no non-vailon had ever been selected, or even been considered a major candidate, for Director-General. Moreover, statistical analysis demonstrated that vailons applicants were more likely to be selected than those of other species with similar resumes and testing aptitudes. This remained a sensitive topic for the founder species, who still espoused the notion that the Governance was a true meritocracy. One notorious incident in 296 was a stark illustration of the problem: when a researcher in the Sociology Section of the Science Directory published a study that developed a hierarchy of species based on the results of posting applications, the Boknar administration was roundly criticized in the Assembly and across the homeworld. Eventually, the administration denounced the results and disowned the work, transferring the scientist out of the department and into the obscure Loop Section, where her work would attract less attention. There was a limit to even the vailons’ capacity for dispassionate consideration of the facts.
There were, however, well-structured aspects of Governance society that lived up to the lofty aspirations contained in the Accords. The cohort system remained a great leveler. Native xenos who were educated in a cohort were more likely to be chosen for postings than citizens of the same species who were educated in independent schooling programs and much more likely than immigrants or refugees of the same species. With each passing decade, the disparity in outcomes between cohort xenos and non-cohort xenos increased, and the gap between cohort xenos and vailons decreased.
Most cohorts were mono-species. For various physio-socio-cultural reasons, members of the same species often chose to live in communities of their own making, even while adopting, or keeping to, vailon modes of social organization. This was especially true on Tebazed, home to nearly a quarter of the population of the Governance, where nine out of ten residents were of the founder species. On the homeworld, outside of the few cities that had seen significant xeno inflows, most cohorts were exclusively vailon. But even on the colonies, where no single species was nearly as dominant a majority, cohorts outside of the few major cities reflected the existing segregated populations.
Only on The Veil was the story substantially different. There, streams of refugees had intermixed and overwhelmed the early administrators who might have wanted to keep the process of resettlement more organized and segregated, if only so that they could guarantee each individual would have access to adequate housing in a suitable climate. As it was, while most refugees were able to move to a biome that suited their physiological needs, the dense neighborhoods and cities that sprouted up around migrant settlements had significantly mixed populations. These agglomerations of individuals from many species, congregating and living together in a fabric of urban life, provided a further attraction to incoming migrants, drawn to both the inter-planetary and the inter-species economic and cultural opportunities, which were then passed on to the local cohorts.
Among the several species that now made up the fabric of the TUG there emerged an informal hierarchy. [1] At the bottom were xenos like saathids, universally reviled for the genocidal actions of their government even though the saathids who chose to live in the Governance proper had all left their society behind for good. Scarcely better off were the varelvivi; a century of hostility between the two polities had led the few varelvivi who lived in Governance space to be treated as enemy citizens, inherently subject to mistrust. As a result, these xenos tended to live in insular communities, avoiding contact as much as possible with most Governance citizens.
A sathori migrant in traditional robes waits at a refugee processing center on The Veil.
Other xenos were afforded something approaching social equality. The vast majority of non-vailons were not discriminated against on account of the actions of their societies of origin. Most of the largest xeno communities — tezhnids, pobelins, pithoks, mith-fell — experienced life in the Governance essentially as equals. The sathori, the largest refugee community, were overwhelmingly among the poorest citizens of the TUG. As their state faced successive invasions from their more powerful neighbors in the Northwest Quadrant, more and more sathoris fled the region with no more than the clothes on their back, hoping to find a place of safety and security. The Governance welcomed them all with open arms, but some of the wealthier immigrant communities came to resent their status. They felt that they had worked to earn their equality while the sathori had been handed it, betraying the continuing presence of old, non-vailon biases against the undeserving poor.
Certain smaller minorities had distinct experiences. Due to differences in preferred habitats (mirovandians hailed from a cold, dry planet; aside from a small region on The Veil, no vailon colony adequately recreated the tundra conditions of their home), few mirovandians immigrated to the Governance. Those that did were often assumed to have come under the auspices of expanding markets for businesses back home, and they were generally treated with all the suspicion due to predatory capitalists. Djunn, meanwhile, were rare enough to be considered a novelty by most Tebazeders. Their extra-galactic origin, from somewhere off the northern rim of the galaxy, lent them a particular aura of mystery, as if they might not be as corporeal as everyone else, a feeling that was reinforced by a palpable sense of fear that seemed to permeate the air around them. That their species-mates had committed mass bloodlettings across a dozen planets, including the sathori homeworld of Sathoria, only served to encourage more rumors of supernatural powers. It was the ragerians, however, who had perhaps the most distinctive experience. Their physiological similarities to vailons meant that they often blended in with the founder species, at least in the eyes of the non-vailon majority. As a result, their socio-economic status was on par with the founder species throughout the TUG. However, many ragerians felt a sense of unease with their unearned position in society; they were in fact non-native citizens of the Governance and often felt more solidarity with their xeno neighbors than the founders.
Djunn were all the more disconcerting for their apparent lack of facial features.
Crime
Crime rates on Governance colonies were much lower than the galactic average. This would typically go unnoticed among vailon observers, for whom this was not just a contemporary trend. Historical data series demonstrated that, at comparable levels of development, vailon societies had almost always been in the lowest tier of crime rates relative to their peers across the galaxy. It was, however, a very salient fact for immigrants. Many migrants left their homes precisely because crime was so high and they were looking for a better, safer life. Though polling demonstrated that second-generation xenos — the children of migrants — did not rate crime highly among the benefits of living in the TUG, new migrant cohorts continued to emphasize low crime rates as a primary motivation for coming to the Governance and as a particular benefit of living in vailon space.
As a result, Tebazeder researchers who investigated crime and its causes were overwhelmingly non-vailon, whether immigrants themselves or the children of the same. A naturally intense debate developed over the causes of the disparity between the Governance and other interstellar polities. The fight eventually coalesced around two competing theories. On one side, social theorists argued that vailon culture had adopted debate as its preferred form of conflict resolution, channeling negative emotions and instincts away from the types of impulsive aggressive behavior that characterize most criminal activities in other species. Economic realists, on the other hand, focused on the generous social welfare system of the Governance, which prevented poverty and therefore most of the reasons an individual might have to turn to crime. Both camps, however, agreed in their rejection of biological determinism theories, which held some sway in certain pockets but were thoroughly belied by the reduced crime rates across all xeno groups in the TUG.
Food
While some sociocultural phenomena translated easily across physiologies, biological differences between species had proven to be a major hurdle for the development of a shared culture of food. Among vailons, eating remained a social activity; a vailon would be truly sad indeed to take a meal alone. Food was a critical element of most gatherings, whether formal and ritualistic or a casual get-together among friends. Cuisines had diverged and multiplied across the several colonies, as different communities incorporated local ingredients or influences from various xeno cultures. But the communal aspects remained in common, and public eateries, where anyone could dine and find dining partners, continued to be a mainstay across the Governance.
Of course, vailons were no longer a majority community in the Governance. Food cultures varied widely among the different xeno populations; and, much as the vailon pre-interstellar tradition persisted, most species retained decades or centuries-old food practices. A few examples will suffice to demonstrate:
Tezhnids eat an entirely non-animal diet, typically dining in small-to-medium sized groups. A few friends might take meals together on social occasions, or an extended family of forty or more might gather for important rituals, but most meals for tezhnids in the Governance would be eaten in public communal settings, in this way adapting to the dominant vailon culture.
Tebazeder pithoks were divided into two distinct groups. For families [2] that migrated to the TUG, pithok traditions continued to dominate their lifestyles, including taking meals in thousand-plus-individual gatherings. However, many pithoks broke with their families to travel to vailon territory, and these individuals often proved to be the most adaptable of the various xeno groups. These pithoks adopted vailon customs and seamlessly assimilated into the dominant culture. Pithoks were thus a common sight at eateries run by nearly every xeno group in the Governance.
As new partners in federation, pithoks were looked upon favorably by most Tebazeders.
Mith-fell eating customs had been subordinated to business interests on their homeworld for centuries, and migrants from Kan Jukla and its colonies often recreated what they knew after they came to the Governance. Networks of small restaurants sprang up wherever a mith-fell community developed, often coexisting side-by-side with several large chains that followed the migrants to their new homes. Individual mate pairings, however, would often cook in their homes for their meals, especially if they were too poor to afford local restaurants. [3]
Mirovandians valued food only insofar as it provided the necessary nutrients for a day’s activities. Their traditional cultures placed very little emphasis on dietary intake, and the latter-day entrepreneurial spirit of the Galactic Mirovandian Commonwealth only relegated food further away from the center of mirovandian life. Mirovandians typically consumed foodstuffs alone, in small snacks spread throughout the day; a mirovandian would typically carry with them copious amounts of small edible items, so that they were never deprived when the need for food struck.
Earth’s humans only recently joined the ranks of the interstellar community as clients of the Governance, and the bipedal mammals had not yet been greatly influenced by xeno cultures. They tended to eat alone or in small groups; only for important life-cycle rituals did humans gather in large numbers for meals. The small community of humans residing in the Governance, primarily diplomatic personnel and associated persons living in Sedrin, were proof of the Earthers’ natural capacity for adaptation: the humans almost uniformly adopted vailon foods and customs, taking all of their meals in the public cafeterias of the capital and showing a marked preference for sampling the many available xeno cuisines over eating the foods of their homeworld.
Transportation
In one sense, the Interstellar Age was nothing more than a simple advancement of transportation technology to a new paradigm. With a wider view, this technological development was a revolution, a profound and fundamental break with previous limits on vailon existence. The advent of hyperlane breaching technology annihilated the unfathomable distances between stars; journeying between systems, visiting alien planets, became something that most vailons were able to experience over the course of their lifetimes.
But the distances remained large, and non-FTL travel remained slow, with breakthroughs in direct propulsion technology providing incremental speed advantages instead of radical leaps. Even at the end of the century, casual travel between colonies was severely limited; unless the planets happened to be in neighboring systems, the journey from one colony to another could take weeks or months in most cases, years for destinations like Ferdera, out in the farthest reaches of the Polosch Arm. As a result, most residents of the Governance were local creatures, rarely traveling more than one hyperspace jump away from their home.
Deep-space travel remained expensive for individuals for most of the third century. But start-up costs were astronomical, and few private entrepreneurs directed their efforts towards breaking into the commercial passenger market. As a result, the administration operated a virtual monopoly in interstellar transit. Service followed a hub-and-spoke model; big passenger liners, large enough to carry tens of thousands of individuals, ran frequently between major colonies, while smaller vessels handled routes to smaller frontier colonies, or from colonies to nearby systems.
Interplanetary trade accounted for the majority of ships traveling along space lanes at any given time. Historically, small-scale traders, owning their own ships and making one-off arrangements with manufacturers and wholesalers, dominated the field. In the latter decades of the century, however, groups of traders banded together to pool their risk, forming joint-stock ventures to manage their efforts. Eventually these JSVs attracted investment from outside principals. While vailons had very little tradition of financial capitalism, other species in the galaxy were active practitioners of the dark arts, and funds flowed into this nascent market from mith-fell and especially mirovandian sources. As investment grew, the JSVs were able to build and operate larger and larger ships and consolidate the market; by 300 nearly 40% of interplanetary shipping was managed by foreign-owned ventures.
A Hasar-class bulk freighter, a typical JSV-owned ship, had four hundred times the cargo space of the most common freelancing trade vessels.
Tebazeders had more options for intraplanetary travel, with the densest planets being the most transit-rich. For residents of the core worlds, The Veil, and the built-up areas of Ferdera and Firintarogga, small individual vehicles for short-distance travel were easy to rent, while travel over medium and long distances could be accomplished through high-speed fixed-path rail networks. Only the longest trips required flight of some sort, whether space planes that just breached the outer atmosphere or low-orbiter rockets that connected points on opposite sides of the planet.
Small personal vehicles were much more common in the peripheral areas of the Governance, where transit systems were less developed. These vehicles were often shared among members of a small community; a rural town or a small city neighborhood might collectively own a number of options for its residents to use. Larger cities in the periphery often built their own mass transit systems for public use; however, in contrast to the planet-wide networks of the core worlds, these were for local trips only. Inter-city transportation systems were anchored on the major spaceports that provided each planet with its lifeline to the wider TUG.
Sex
In contrast with many areas of vailon culture, sexuality had changed very little for the founder species over the Interstellar Age. Most sexual relationships entered into by vailons were short-term, pleasure-seeking arrangements between social equals. The majority of vailons were bisexual, an uncommon trait among the other species in the galaxy. Monogamous relationships between vailons were rare.
For most other gendered species, monogamous, long-term relationships were the norm. Inter-species relationships did remain a rarity throughout the Governance however, as biological constraints on procreation limited the desire of most individuals to form long-term committed relationships with xenos. Moreover, just as the primarily mono-species communities of the colonies structured the experiences of the cohort system, it also limited the scope of potential sexual partners for most individuals. In mixed species areas, however, sexual partnerings tended to represent most possible permutations of xeno pairs; vailons were particularly noted in these contexts for their eagerness to initiate cross-species encounters. Though these relationships were infertile, they represented the polyglot, cosmopolitan ideal of society that the founders had dreamed of creating.
Footnotes
[1] The 296 incident was all the more embarrassing for how accurately it demonstrated that this socio-cultural hierarchy was reified by the state apparatus of the Directory.
[2] Pithok families consisted of dense networks of related individuals numbering in the millions; they constituted the primary unit of society in the Pithok Confederacy. These families usually did not migrate as a whole, instead sending sub-units to live in the Governance, though there were a few instances of lower-status families migrating in their entirety to look for better prospects.
[3] This problem, of being too poor to eat out, was largely alleviated by the recent social reforms of the Boknar administration, but many mate pairs continued their habit of “eating in” anyway.
[2] Pithok families consisted of dense networks of related individuals numbering in the millions; they constituted the primary unit of society in the Pithok Confederacy. These families usually did not migrate as a whole, instead sending sub-units to live in the Governance, though there were a few instances of lower-status families migrating in their entirety to look for better prospects.
[3] This problem, of being too poor to eat out, was largely alleviated by the recent social reforms of the Boknar administration, but many mate pairs continued their habit of “eating in” anyway.
This made me chuckle, dark arts indeed.
As always a great overview of Tebazeder society. It seems like a solid foundation with the promise of improvement, especially in interspecies relations