TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
As best we can tell, the Alexandrian Covenant began in the 2580s as a confluence of two distinct cultural groups. To flee the coming ravages of the Reunification War, a group of civilian refugees from the Magistracy of Canopus headed rimward in search of a home where they hoped to escape the SLDF. Likewise, a similarly sized band of Taurian Concordat émigrés fled to uncharted space, rather than witness their nation become a Star League vassal state. Several failed colonial attempts later, both groups found themselves on neighboring planets in the same solar system, approximately 270 light-years from the Concordat's rimward border. This serendipity led to an uneasy alliance between the worlds of Eros III (the Taurian settlement) and Phaeton IV (the Canopian enclave). During their original emigration from the Periphery, both the Canopian and Taurian refugees had brought vast stores of knowledge and technology with them. The ex-Canopians believed the Reunification War would ultimately result in the wanton destruction of unrecoverable knowledge, history and technology. These colonists wished to safeguard some measure of civilization in case the whole Inner Sphere caught fire and descended into barbarism. The Taurians, however, initially planned to establish a Deep Periphery redoubt for the Concordat, a world where they could build up military assets without Star League interference. The people of Eros III had one day planned to strike back at the SLDF while their collective back was turned and retake the Concordat. This dream would never come to fruition.
We have not yet been able to nail down the exact date, but fragmentary Covenant records show that at some point Eros III suffered some manner of catastrophe that cost the former Taurians most of their fledgling military industry and a large portion of their population. Preliminary archaeological analysis of Eros III shows definitive evidence of a mass meteor shower that laid waste to several population centers. Rather than allow the Taurian expatriates to perish, the Canopians sent DropShips to evacuate as many people to Phaeton IV as they could. At first the transplanted Taurians maintained separate enclaves on Phaeton IV and lived their lives without much contact with their Canopian neighbors. However, before an indeterminate number of years had passed, the two cultures started to mix, and the lines between Canopian and Taurian blurred.
Before long, the leaders of the separate nations chose to formally pool their resources and join forces. Rather than having two disparate polities on the same planet, the two governments chose to meld into one single body politic by the signing of the Covenant Pact. This new government's first edict changed the name of the planet to reflect this spirit of collaboration. Thus, Phaeton IV became Pharos, a portmanteau of the two original colony worlds and an homage to the storied Lighthouse of Alexandria in ancient Egypt on Terra. With caches of Canopian history and Taurian technology nestled in safe places across the planet, the emergent Alexandrian Covenant hoped to one day light a path through the rocks for a troubled Inner Sphere. This new government modeled itself upon extant Canopian and Taurian politics, and the established legislative body comprised a bicameral assembly. The all-female House of Dames represented traditional Canopian issues, and the all-male House of Lords championed formerly Taurian ideals. The elected leaders of these two chambers, the protectrix and magister, formed the Covenant's executive branch and acted as heads of state. With the blessing of this new government, nearby worlds were colonized, each one vowing to uphold the Covenant by sending legislators to Pharos and establishing repositories to safeguard learning and technology. These colonies flourished, and a steady stream of trade between the Covenant capital and its neighboring systems afforded the people a measure of prosperity. This newfound security allowed the small dissident nation to sit back and covertly watch the realms of the rimward Periphery labor beneath their Star League shackles.
DAY AND NIGHT
Here is where Covenant history starts to get a bit hazy. Surviving records from this period are incomplete, but our team was able to extract enough fragments to assemble a rough picture of what transpired between the Covenant's formation and what is known as the First Upheaval. Our best guess places the First Upheaval sometime in the early 2700s, during which the Alexandrian Covenant transformed nearly overnight. Pharos erupted into war, turning the whole planet inside out. Although no weapons of mass destruction were employed—despite rumors that the original contingent of Taurian expatriates had fled from the Concordat with a stockpile of nuclear weapons—this conflict rendered the planet nearly unrecognizable. The capital city of Rhakotis lay in ruins. Whole cities burned. Hundreds of thousands fled into the wilds and were forced to live off the land. The other Covenant worlds likewise devolved into horrific violence once word of the war reached them. Research estimates perhaps a quarter of the nation's population perished during the tragedy. While Pharos and its neighbors burned, a new government seized the reins of power. The Alexandrian Covenant mutated from a bicameral republic into a veritable dictatorship led by a new Protectrix and an all-female advisory council culled from the surviving ranks of the House of Dames. The current administration of the Covenant attests that the Covenant Pact document has remained unchanged since their nation's founding, but probing beneath the surface revealed this new Protectrix shredded the existing Pact after the First Upheaval and rewrote it to fit her own ends. Under this new Pact, only women were allowed to own property, helm a business enterprise or hold positions of high rank in the military. The most tragic loss of the First Upheaval, however, was the accidental destruction of several library archives and technology caches. The lighthouse flames behind the Covenant Pact started to diminish, threatening to plunge the nation into darkness.
A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF
We have been able to reliably place the Second Upheaval during the 2800s. Available documents only allude to a mass political insurrection, but references to the actual cause have either been lost in the wars since or have been purposely excised from Alexandrian history. The result of this insurrection, however, is well known: revolutionaries overthrew the Protectrix-led matriarchy and raised a new government loosely based on the original House of Lords. The self-proclaimed magister redrafted the Pact, which permanently deposed all female Alexandrians from positions of power. The Second Upheaval was ultimately more destructive and tragic than the First. In addition to the loss of further caches during the war, hate crimes ran rampant until the new patriarchal government stabilized matters within the Covenant. Thousands upon thousands of women were brutally murdered; newborn girls were often left out to the elements.
Over the next 250 years, at least two more coups occurred for unknown reasons, each revolution more devastating and brutal than the last. The coup of 3042—what we have tentatively termed the Fifth Upheaval—was blamed on a magister-led government that supposedly allowed a horrific plague to run rampant. In 3075, the Sixth Upheaval replaced the sitting protectrix government for allegedly allowing a tragic meteor strike to destroy a significant population center. Over the past few hundred years, war and the loss of technology have led to a marked devolution in religious belief amongst the Alexandrians. Sometime after the Second Upheaval, the people of the Covenant had lost the capability for interstellar travel, and the idea of the nation's mothballed JumpShip fleet eventually developed into the belief that Pharos was under the protection of a sky god. The people became highly superstitious, believing that they were not meant to leave the planet. Any pirate bands that occasionally tried to land on Pharos were seen as deceiving demons, and the Covenant military destroyed them with extreme prejudice.
THE TIP OF THE SPEAR
Although the Alexandrians are a traumatized, broken, and paranoid people, the Alexandrian Armed Forces remain strong and are always ready for "demonic incursions" or the next inevitable coup. Despite the Covenant's warring and political dichotomies, the nation's military displays remarkable patriotism and morale when massed against an exterior threat. The smallest unit of AAF organization is known as the chariot, which is roughly equivalent to a standard armor company and is led by a lieutenant. Five chariots denote a squadron, headed by a captain. Five squadrons form a division, led by a charioteer. Among all chariot divisions, the foremost charioteer holds the title of first charioteer and reports directly to the Protectrix (or Magister, during patriarchal reigns). Under the current matriarchal government, all AAF officers are women, but men—both volunteer and conscripted troops—still form the bulk of the enlisted ranks.
Due to the rapid decline of technology, the AAF's non-infantry assets are composed solely of light to heavy tanks, conventional fighters and support vehicles. Aside from a few surviving relics, internal combustion engines have replaced fusion engines in nearly all chasses. Ballistic munitions, predominantly light- to medium-caliber autocannon, dominate nearly every offensive profile due to the Covenant's inability to manufacture most energy-based weapons.
To guard against external threats, the AAF maintains firebases housing crude but effective surface-to-orbit missile silos. Since hese installations form a vital component of Covenant security, they are the only military target that both the ruling and dissident factions have always agreed are completely off limits.
Since the worlds of the Covenant cannot communicate with each other due to a lack of courier ships, the AAF appears in a similar yet different form on each planet. Subtle variations exist between each system's AAF iteration—such as differing rank titles or the number of chariots per squadron—but such differences are largely cosmetic.
The biggest mystery surrounding the Alexandrian Covenant is what ultimately triggered the First Upheaval. History is, of course, written by the victors, so what few records are available from that period shed very little light on the subject. Our only real method of divining the truth lies in piecing together the fragments we do have and extrapolating a subtext based on the historical shape of the negative space left behind. Thus far, we have developed several working hypotheses as to the nature of the catalyst.
The most probable cause is that the sitting Magister and several Taurian expatriates heading the House of Lords were convicted of supreme corruption. The Protectrix ordered the entire body to be purged and reconstituted after each new member underwent a ruthless vetting process. The House of Lords, exerting the strongest control over Covenant military assets, retaliated and led the nation into all-out war.
Another equally plausible theory posits that the House of Lords uncovered corruption running deep within the House of Dames. When confronted with these allegations, the Protectrix launched a preemptive military strike against the House of Lords and nearly wiped them out. By this point, the allegations were already made public, and those who publicly backed the defunct Lords took the war to the Protectrix's doorstep.
A thesis with less physical evidence is that a terrorist organization within the Covenant triggered the war by destroying one government House and blaming the attack on the other. Some undated accounts mention the House of Dames being destroyed by a massive explosion, whereas others from the same time period speak of the House of Lords being the victim of the bombing instead. There is enough evidence to show some political unrest on either side of the fence, but not enough to prove the existence of any underground movement, let alone establish a motive. The newest theory to come to light is perhaps the most farfetched, but it still retains enough credibility to remain plausible.
Our orbital surveys and archaeological investigation of Eros III's southern continent have uncovered a small, anachronistic settlement that dates back to the 24th or 25th century.
Either the Taurians colonized Eros III far earlier than any extant Covenant records claim—which would invalidate most of their reasons for fleeing the Concordat—or the Taurian settlers had no knowledge of this settlement. The most obvious conclusion is that a third group had colonized the planet and was small enough to escape
notice when the Taurian refugees arrived. The overriding theory is this out-of-place settlement belonged to the scions of the Tikonov Galactic Rangers. After the formation of the Capellan Confederation in 2367, Chancellor Franco Liao purged private armies from his new realm, and the Capellan armed forces chased the Rangers through the Taurian Concordat and the Federated Suns.
The Rangers eventually headed toward the Periphery in stolen Taurian vessels and disappeared, last seen in the Davion system
Sanurcha. If this Eros III settlement did indeed belong to the Galactic Rangers remnant, they might have hidden themselves amongst the Taurian expatriates upon the evacuation of the planet. It is then entirely possible these erstwhile Capellans formed an unacknowledged third voice amongst the population and ultimately subverted the Covenant's political structure for their own ends. —Anthropology Today: The Alexandrian Covenant, Interstellar Expeditions Press, 3095
CONCLUSION
The Alexandrian Covenant was formed with two noble goals. Its spectacular failure in both of these aims has turned the nation into a bitter and belligerent collection of isolated systems without the means to contact other worlds. The insular nature and primitive technology level of these people would make them poor allies at best. A suitable invasion force might be capable of wresting these systems from Covenant control, but the AAF's tenacity and defensive capabilities might render an invasion far costlier than any potential gains. If we can maneuver the political and religious waters, we might be able to reconnect the detached systems of the Covenant with its immediate neighbors and reignite the fires of communication and commerce. If the Covenant eventually reunites, this wayward nation might someday become a worthy ally state.
Tikonov Galactic Rangers/Eros III
Regardless of whether the descendants of the Tikonov Galactic Rangers caused the First Upheaval is moot. Recent archaeological investigation into the mysterious settlement on Eros III has found conclusive evidence that some of the Rangers' progeny did indeed put down roots there. Due to the Upheavals destroying census data and other sociological records, it is impossible to know which current Alexandrians descended from the Rangers. Thus, archaeologists and historians can only speculate as to what place these ex- Capellans might have in the Covenant's delicate power structure.
Snuffing out the Lighthouse
IE believes only a small portion of the Covenant's original library and technology caches have been found. Several have been destroyed across the Covenant worlds during the various Upheavals, but evidence points to a great many more, their locations lost to history. Just one of these as-yet-undiscovered caches would be enough to tip the political balance against the sitting matriarchy. Also, since there are no signs that nuclear weapons were deployed during any recorded coup, IE believes one or more of these caches contains nukes from the Taurian Concordat. If such a cache were found, the Alexandrian Covenant could very well transform itself into a radioactive wasteland.
Lost Worlds
At least two currently uninhabited planets have been verified as previous members of the Covenant. The system identified as Cyrene shows signs of past habitation and an extinction-scale level of destruction, yet the estimated date of depopulation does not correspond to any known Upheaval. The deserted planet of Sophos shows extensive Covenant civilization but no overt signs of warfare. Archaeologists are still attempting to determine how and why the people of Sophos vanished and where they could
have gone.
Another matter under investigation is the concurrence of events across the Covenant. Despite Pharos being out of communication with other Alexandrian worlds due to lack of interstellar travel, the conflicts and political turnovers on Pharos also occurred near the same time on these neighboring planets. Most working theories involve an underground information trade—such as a black market or secret society—that covertly travels between Covenant worlds by launching DropShips into orbit from uninhabited continents. Thus far, no concrete proof of any such group has been found.
ALEXANDRIAN COVENANT: ALEXANDRIAN ARMED FORCES
The following provides detail on the use of the military forces in the Alexandrian Covenant Assigning Units The Alexandrian Armed Forces operate in armored companies
called chariots by the locals, though each Alexandrian world typically possesses up to 25 such formations (Pharos and Ptolemy each possess 50), with conventional infantry support. The AAF may field Star League or Reunification War-era vehicles appropriate for the Taurian Concordat or Magistracy of Canopus, but no unit may be fielded that weighs more than 75 tons.
Due to lack of hardware and training, the AAF is strictly limited to combat vehicles and conventional infantry. The AAF cannot field 'Mechs, DropShips, battle armor, or aerospace fighters.
SDS FIREBASES
Each planet in the Alexandrian Covenant maintains at least one firebase capable of Surface-to-Orbit attacks (see pp. 109-110, Strategic Operations).
These surface-to-orbit batteries are derived from older technology, but perform in gameplay in the same manner as a Barracuda capital missile. Each installation may house
up to two capital missile launchers, equipped with 2 missiles each. Alexandrian firebases are considered Hardened Fortresses (see p. 117, Tactical Operations) that occupy 3 hexes and stand 10 levels in elevation. Each firebase has a CF of 150 and an Armor Factor of 150. All firebase crews have a Gunnery Skill of 4 for all Surface-to-Orbit attacks.
drive.google.com
