♪ He's got a real nice contract, signed and sealed. And if you want a job, there's work in the field. The guards're armed, so keep both eyes peeled. / With a wild-eyed stare and a quivering lip, he's off again on a rhetorical kick. Life's real hard, 'cause the soil is sand. 'Former's broke again so we dig by hand. / Pay's real poor, but I got some shares. Now I'll be the boss in fifty-one years. - The Ballad of Relief, Hunters of Planet Traditional, sung to the tune of "Hot Rod Lincoln" by Commander Cody and his List Planet Airmen ♫
Carnaveron, the Man
Johann Fugger said:
How is it he knows always my will, though unexpressed? Call it fortune or misfortune when mere servant knows his master best? Having no son, I rely instead on the man, Carnaveron. – The Tragedy of the House of Luxembourg, Part I, Act 1, Scene 3
While allowing that extralegal methods are of course more reliable, it seemed to you both prudent and necessary that, if a trial was to be held, inquiries should be taken in hand to more fully understand the defendant. And so, after many sleepless nights, Terrance LaCroix and Sathieu Metrion broke the encryption on Dole Yudikon's U.N. personnel file. To your surprise, with the notable exception of its pro-forma Psych Profile, the contents were both voluminous and informative.
Exactly who in U.N. leadership Dole Yudikon had once vexed remains a mystery, but it is clear that the Intelligence Cell went to considerable trouble to compile a thorough dossier. The crown jewel of the collection is the biographical workup prepared for Struan's by private security firm CTR. It was apparently part of the deep background check performed before Dole Yudikon's elevation to management. In keeping with standard company practice, the dossier was then updated every two years thereafter.
Dole Yudikon was born to not a little misfortune in the southern Sinai Peninsula approximately forty years before Mission Launch. His father was the Ofira harbor pilot and an alcoholic. The mother distracted herself from an unhappy marriage by becoming lost in her work as an irrigation engineer. When her son was just shy of two years old, she left Israel for a multi-year assignment in the Atacama Desert of Chile and promptly died of fever. Young Dole spent most of his time in the homes of Christian friends. Canadian followers of the Orange-Catholic rite outnumbered Israeli settlers in the region approximately three-to-one. Cultural diffusion left the boy with broad vowels and a unique perspective on the interests and outlooks held in common between Israel and its new boarders.
Most Israelis during the era of Dole's adolescence practiced Judaism only as civic religion. The Yudikons were no exception. But successive Israeli governments encouraged millenarianism among the growing population of Christian immigrants from North America. It was hardly necessary. As Dole himself discovered, nearly all the young men produced by these communities looked ahead to the day on which they would be called upon to assist their adopted homeland to fulfill vague but expansive hegemonic ambitions.
In vid captures appended to his U.N. personnel file, Dole Yudikon is still a young man, perhaps twenty years of age. Standing north of six feet, trim, with high cheekbones and olive complexion, he is the archetype of good health. There is no apparent physical incongruity with his profession, which is war. Commissioned a lieutenant in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at eighteen, he served two years in the South Lebanon Security Belt advising his country's Maronite Christian allies. Twice bitten by abrupt Israeli withdrawals since the first invasion of Lebanon in 1979, the Maronites had grown shy, and they returned to the Israeli bosom with great hesitancy.
To mend fences, Tel Aviv spent lavishly and gave its local commanders sweeping discretionary powers to flatter local appetites, whatever their nature. A soldier in Dole Yudikon's position was called upon to be equal parts viceroy, diplomat, soldier, and quartermaster. (Here again you found yourself thinking that the fictional Carnaveron really was a fine comparison.) The same Israeli interlocutor from whom a local Arab obtained the life-saving visa for emergency medical care in Haifa might also be subjecting one of his close relatives to detention and torture. As formal allies to the majority-Maronite South Lebanon Army, IDF units fought alongside them, including during countless internecine skirmishes that targeted not Israel's old adversaries in the Lebanese National Movement or the Syrian Army, but its other Lebanese Christian allies. More than one superior would have necessarily concurred that Lieutenant Yudikon possessed exceptional empathic and organizational ability, to say nothing of a strong stomach, before he was so employed. King believes with certainty that Yudikon is also practiced in the fundamentals of military intelligence.
Yudikon turned in mixed results. To better secure the favor of his skeptical hosts, he flattered their personal agendas, spending as much time assisting them to assassinate rival militia commanders as building a working
cordon sanitaire to protect the Galilee against encroachment by the Syrian Army and Palestine Liberation Organization. CTR obtained more than a hundred copies of letters that Yudikon posted to the Ofira settlers, urging them first to send their money, and later their sons and daughters, to fight for the preservation of the Lebanese Christian state. This was the appeal that many had been waiting for: dozens made the long journey from the Red Sea coast to Marjeyoun. Their bemused hosts celebrated this reunion of coreligionists by relieving the newcomers of their cash and setting them to work in the fields. Most never returned home unless after being maimed by landmines. After much infighting, political leadership in Yudikon's sector consolidated to the point that Israeli combat commanders rated the local South Lebanese Army units by far their most aggressive and reliable. The IDF soon began most of its northward incursions from local bivouacs.
Dole Yudikon said:
The key to a man's heart is through his prejudices. Raise a hand against his enemies and he will count himself gladly in your debt. The abnegation of haste in fulfillment of one's own ambitions is the starting point for a steady accumulation of power that will all but assure future satisfaction. - Dole Yudikon, quoted in the personal diaries of Ratár Pelek Silverman
However hard-nosed and bloody-handed, Yudikon's involvement in Lebanese affairs apparently did result in his emotional capture. IDF contemporaries filed complaints that he subordinated fulfillment of military objectives to political. Near the mid-point of his tenure, Yudikon was returned home to give a lecture series in Eilat. He used the opportunity to stridently question IDF strategy in Lebanon, which he claimed could not be won unless the Israelis were willing to become the "hatchetmen" of the Maronites, a term he used without shame. In 1989's
From Beirut to Jerusalem, the
Times commentator Thomas Friedman had drawn parallels between the ethnic militias and organized crime. Yudikon agreed. And if they expected Al Capone to win the Windy City, why then were the Israelis so hesitant to clear a path for him by shooting down the North Side Gang?
The intense operational tempo and diversion of sector resources from development to warfare inevitably left their mark. Israeli archives document that life expectancy and household income declined in precipitously in Yudikon's sector during the time of his posting. Terrorist activity and imprisonments rose starkly. Near the conclusion of his service obligation, PLO infiltrators killed most of the Government of Free Lebanon leadership with whom Yudikon dealt directly. Their successors, who owed nothing to the Israelis, complained strenuously to IDF leadership about the worsening security problem and lamented that, despite years of collaboration, virtually every freestanding structure in the sector had been knocked flat by Syrian artillery.
Ex-IDF Artilleryman said:
Dole used to say that he was the SLA's favorite Israeli. I think that was true. But the SLA didn't speak for everyone in Marjeyoun. - CTR interview file LRM94.b
A review was started by the Defense Establishment Inspector General, which concluded that Yudikon was prone to excessive risk-taking. Northern Command declined a recommendation of discipline, but Lieutenant Yudikon, correctly sensing disfavor, declined to reenlist.
CTR psychologists found it noteworthy that Yudikon does not appear to have become despondent over being all but cashiered. Not without reason, his correspondence suggested that he blamed the chance change in Lebanese leadership, not personal error, for the setback.
Due to overpopulation, Israeli law obliged native-born men to spend another three years overseas upon conclusion of their National Service. If the rigid structure of army life suited them but killing did not, young men usually sought out corporate employment. Most travelled to North America for opportunities with the American Reclamation Corporation (ARC). Veterans with more "marketable" skills, ex-lieutenant Yudikon included, received offers to take on more dangerous work, whether in active warzones or outside Earth's gravity well. Dole Yudikon went east. He would never again return to his homeland.
Stranger in a Strange Land
John F. Kennedy said:
Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was 'civis Romanus sum.' – Datalinks
The story of the "corporate citizen" begins around the time of Dole's birth when, the peoples of the world were embracing the possibilities of new associations as never before. Since Westphalia in 1648, the sovereign state, with its intrusive institutional presence and, more importantly, a durable monopoly on the legitimate use of force, had commanded the unabridged loyalty of its citizens, and, in return, paid out a reliable set of rewards. These included, but were not limited to: cultural continuity, contract enforcement, and, of course, physical security. The first half of the twentieth century was preoccupied by the question of which nations deserved their own states and which did not. While as recently as 1900, national government had seemed not only remote but also largely irrelevant to the daily lives of most of its citizens except during wartime, by 2000, it was both their shield against iniquity and the guarantor of their comfort in old age. Yet, after more than four hundred years, the national state was demonstrating its first crisis of function.
Men hailed the state when it solved their problems, but they resented it, too. As the technocrat was elevated in importance by the increasing complexity of his own creations, so society was forced to accept his values. In the West especially, this arrangement clashed hard with the cherished popular mythology of the rambunctious republican, jealous of his prerogatives and the power of making his own mistakes. In time, many also came to resent the system of public education, which taught a sort of civic ecumenicism the previous generation found threatening and effete. Eventually, the seed of continuous improvement at the heart of deliberative self-government sprouted too many tendrils. Unable to water so complicated a garden, the small-minded reached for the axe. They took exception when their "coarse" opinions were deemed unfit for public consumption, demanding the cultural products of an earlier era and refusing to admit imperfections in their own body politic. In the West especially, where authority was ever on trial and the intellectual came second to the humble "working man," some began to question whether important decisions really should be subject to majority opinion.
Social media was to the modern state what the printing press had been to the Universal Church. Growing cynicism undercut the very concept of a shared reality. The state was no longer trusted to name the truth, and an "expert" was anyone who said what was appealing. As access to higher education declined, civic participation, already at an all-time low in the West, dropped through the floor. When Jean-Baptiste Keller made his call for "the renewal of local knowledge," he was correctly reading the temperature of the water but not the direction of its current. Virtual communities built on shared emotion replaced national communities built on shared place, sacrifice, and memory.
Cynicism and reaction were by no means purely Western phenomenon. In the developing world, where certain ideas were apt to be accused of a colonial connection, millions starved after rejecting food aid produced from genetically modified organisms. Pandemics of preventable diseases raged worldwide after prominent commentators questioned the wisdom of vaccination schedules endorsed by the World Health Organization. In 1776, American colonists had refused taxation without representation. In 1797, they had shouted to spend millions on defense, but not a ha'penny for tribute. Three hundred years later, it was give me convenience, or give me death. Nathan Holn preached that the very institution of "national" government was unacceptable, for how could a bureaucrat at far remove understand the problems unique to a particular place or community?
Civil wars across the First World provided the final trauma necessary for a broad abandonment of state-based identity. Observers now had too much evidence to deny the inadequacy of the state to protect them. Two great armies, the American and the Canadian, suffered a series of stinging defeats at home. Spoken allegiance to the wrong flag, even the wrong television commentator, became a hanging offense throughout North America.
Any Port in a Storm
Major Quintus Damaris said:
There was too much to defend, and from too many, with too little and too few. – Memories of a Danite Soldier, Datalinks
Even after the emergence of Restored government in both Washington and Ottawa, skepticism persisted. New forms of association had proved more adaptable to the needs of wartime populations. Say what one might about Kellerites and Holnists, they had proved the power of individual mobilization. Each provided adherents with values and community more immediately relevant—more practical—than the weakened central authority. Wartime constitutional adjustments had also dramatically altered the relevance of corporations in the life of the North American citizen. With Letters of Marque, corporations had become "clothed themselves in the power of the state," their private soldiers all too reminiscent of the "unauthorized" militia they were charged with rounding up. At war's end, they successfully lobbied to retain their hard-won prerogatives.
The Second Reconstruction underlined just how far the mighty had fallen. The strategy, people, money, and know-how to mend the fallen order—all were provided by the American Reclamation Corporation (ARC) and its competitors. ARC Chief Executive Officer Oscar van de Graaf had better name-recognition than the President of the United States. On the three-year anniversary of its founding, the ARC employed one in six working Americans. From Denver in the West to Cincinnati in the East, old American cities had been laid waste. From their ashes emerged corporate cantonments and United Nations refugee camps. FEMA was forgotten. And so civic contribution became synonymous with corporate, rather than national, service.
For a year, Dole Yudikon worked inside the Indian Ocean Exclusion Zone (IOEZ) as a customs patroller for the Gezah Islands Authority (GIA). Periodic manias for artificial islands gripped coastal nations on every inhabited continent at intervals throughout the first hundred years of the second millennium. Sold variously as the solution to shoreline erosion, post-war decontamination, and the basic problem of overcrowding, the formation, maintenance, and control of these territories passed from legitimate to illegitimate governments, thence to the corporations.
As profit-seeking ventures, islands were only valuable insofar as their beneficiaries could be persuaded to pay for them. This meant either the governments interested in their continued existence, such as in the case of so-called "hurricane chains," or the occupants themselves. As early as 2060, international convention and common practice had aligned to the point that the building up of such islands was always accompanied by parallel investment in local economic activity. Fisheries-based aquaculture and power generation via the tidal harness were trusted standbys, but carbon extraction, space exploration, and deep-sea mining already threatened to displace them. A good living could also be had either as an independent operator or cog in the enormous logistical operations required to supply the island-bound population and its industries.
At twenty-two, Dole kept a diary, excerpts from which were digitized by CTR. The islands were crowded and their inhabitants sickly, "without a good connection to the earth, which is false." The GIA, a creature of the British Raj, hadn't the remit or the funding to solve problems of this magnitude—the same limitation that he had confronted shortly before in Marjeyoun. Piracy was a rampant issue. Dole was much affected by the brutalities visited upon the islanders, most of whom were former residents of Dan and already destitute. The lone Royal Australian Navy frigate on-station was usually laid up in ordinary. Dole's team learned to rely instead on the intervention of Morgan SafeHaven operators, whom they bribed with fuel cells intended for their own use. Dole was impressed by the SafeHaven crews. He recorded that, far from the amoral buccaneers he expected, they shared his affection for "our fellow discarded souls of the IOEZ." They accepted GIA fuel as payment for convoy escort and counter-boarding because they too were operating on the end of a long and precarious shoestring.
Eventually, Dole found work with the Struan's firm as a fixer in Singapore. It was what Israelis called "the right fall." A preferment from Struan's meant access to good housing, top-class medical care, and competitive pay. The crown jewel of Britain's Far East possessions glistened even more brightly as the terminus of a space elevator. Yudikon, already worldly, now rubbed shoulders with the Empire's elite. A steady flood of technicians passed through, outbound for points elsewhere in the Sol System. Here, he struck up lasting relationships with some of the confidants whose services he would eventually recruit to the Struan's charter colony.
Yudikon's duties on Singapore Island mostly involved liaison between Struan's private security forces at Changi Worldport and the British Burma Army garrison. He was mentioned twice in despatches during the eight-month wave of rioting triggered by Secretary-General Claudia Alfaro's announcement that the
Unity Mission would accept corporate money. By age twenty-five, the Struan's Home Office was tracking his career and had signed off on a series of rapid promotions.
Corporate employment continued to pay dividends in other ways. British Empire resources were worn thin. Their priority was on the port; residential districts were a secondary concern. With Singapore often convulsed by riots, Struan's moved Dole into their proprietary district, safe behind a perimeter walked by mercenary soldiers, this time wearing the same colors as Dole himself.
That year, 2096, two events changed the course of history for the Houses of Struan and Yudikon. First, Marc Struan, the
tai-pan's natural son and heir-apparent, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Next, the Tai-pan's younger and illegitimate son, Roshann Cobb, now an Oxford graduate, went to work for MI5.
The relationship between Ian Dunross and his bastard was a bad one. At birth, Cobb was unneeded and therefore unwanted. Until his teenage years, Roshann existed on the margins of respectable Hong Kong Society. He experimented with opium and became an odds runner at the Hong Kong Jockey Club. He and his mother, Cantonese chanteuse Chen An-Wei, reacted badly when Dunross had the boy shipped off to boarding schools. Formal equality between the races did nothing to spare Cobb merciless teasing from his companions. The
tai-pan conciliated by arranging lessons in self-defense. In his fourth-year, Cobb demonstrated proficiency by pitching one tormentor out a second-story window of the Radcliffe Camera. Upon his elder brother's death, Cobb left MI5 for Sturan's Hong Kong offices, then the most suitable place for a family exile. Having no other options left to him, Dunross had at last determined to take an active hand in the young man's upbringing. Among his dozen-strong protective detail was Dole Yudikon.
The foundation of Cobb's rise to Struan's leadership was misdirection. He spent his first year in corporate employment determinedly acquiring a reputation for debauchery. Low expectations helped Cobb to distance himself from the prevailing wisdom of the firm's C-suite. When they fell from favor, Cobb was determined that he not be counted amidst their ranks. In a series of dire warnings to the
Tai-pan himself, Cobb warned that the company was over-leveraged and had laid poor bets on the future direction of IEOZ expansion.
South China Morning Post editors dubbed the youthful-appearing Cobb "Schoolboy" and, with an army of stringers, catalogued his every beer, brawl, and bedmate. No society event was complete until he had disgraced it. Cobb's alienation from Struan's HK directorship proved prescient and he was rewarded by the opportunity to install allies of his own on the Struan's Board of Directors.
Yudikon became wealthy sometime before January 2108, when he entered cold sleep for the journey to Alpha Centauri. His fortune covered both the costs of a personal stake with Struan's and passage for a wife and son. In an echo of the past, Yudikon had married a Katangese Christian antiquities dealer, Bienheureuse Nzuzi. She is widely supposed by the international press to have been the connection through which Elizabethville's Cardinal, Pierre Mputu Kasala, acquired the cash to help underwrite Katanga's successful bid for independence. The Dole family's last known residence was Hong Kong's Prince Andrew Arcology, where neighbors included numerous Colonial Secretaries and prominent naval officers. While most passengers on charter assignment traded comfortable lives to begin indenture, the Yudikons' accounts were fully settled. Dole anticipated continuing in his station as a salaryman.
Records from U.N. Relief Station's Data Node confirm that Yudikon picked through the nearby Colony Pod wreckage enough to be satisfied that neither his loved ones nor Cobb were among its casualties.
Four Typologies of Colonist
The so-called
"mainline" colonists were recruited through national committees or special invitation from the United Nations Security Council. They were always individuals, usually young and without deep attachments to the family or nation left behind them, especially after the shared experience of mission training, which consumed a significant fraction of their whole lives to that point. Perhaps inevitably, they came to see themselves as the deserving best that a dying species could bequeath to the future and never expected to see their homeworld again. On Chiron, they stood to enjoy the best government they could bring about through their own dialectic. The crew dismissed colonists as a faceless mass of ready followers, while Charterists asked why the United Nations thought the billets of judges, potters, preachers, and flautists would not better be occupied by more carpenters.
The United Nations
crew was itself a mix of True Believers, typified by Garland, and careerists, typified by d'Almeida, St. Germaine, and Salan. Many were in the middle or at the end of life. Their inclusion on the manifest reflected proven capability, not merely hopeful expectation. The loyalties and impurities of a lifetime could not be burned out of them. Colonists were expected to do; crew were chosen to lead. In general, crew saw mainline colonists as subordinate to them, and Charterists as potentially insubordinate because of their lack of formal integration during mission prep.
- True Believers looked toward the founding of a colony untroubled by national allegiance and prepared to forgive itself for the sins of the past. "Good" was anyone or anything likely to help the settlement prosper and cohere. They took for granted that they would be alone after mission launch. The caricature of a True Believer is of an overweening egotist blinkered by naïve faith in the essential goodness of the human spirit, convinced that their personal moral authority alone would suffice to solve problems that had not yielded to centuries of predecessors.
- Appointment of an unenthusiastic individual to the Unity Mission, whether by the United Nations, corporate bounty, or a national military, produced a Careerist. The sliding scale of quality ran from those sent along against their will because the U.N. regarded them as indispensible and could dispose of its uniformed servants as it saw fit, and without consideration for their personal preferences, to those who were going only because it meant a million-dollar windfall for the loved ones they must leave behind. Either the assignment was a disappointing end to a career that had once aimed much higher, or a death sentence foist upon them by debt or alienation from their superiors. Some still clung to promises from national command structures that Earth would overcome its present difficulties and thereafter labor to bring them home, but most fell prey to a gallows humor that acknowledged their essential dispensability. The worst were officers who adopted a policy of trying to "save" the mission from itself by means of hectoring memos and drilling the crew to exhaustion. In his diary, Garland fretted about how many on his command staff were "little Wilkinsons," mouthing their allegiance to Geneva but still taking their instructions from other sources. Humorists put it that the quintessential Careerist was an unhelpful killjoy, prone to "splittism," whose definition of "cooperation" might go only to the extent of malicious compliance. Golden China and the USSR went as far as installing political officers to mind the crop, the most famous of which was Sheng-ji Yang.
Charterists were appended to the mission as the price of its completion. They were, on average, considerably older than the other colonists, and had more to lose. Charterists were either hired directly by the mission's corporate sponsors or received their passage because of personal affiliation with someone so hired. They might be fully "vested," like Yudikon, meaning that they had satisfied the cost of passage up front, or "under contract," in which case they owed a certain number of years of labor once commercial colonies split away from the main colony. By reputation, Charterists saw the expedition as through a jewler's loupe. Chiron was the motherlode, and each of them a latter-day Forty-Niner. Any activity that did not advance the cause of economic development was to be despised as indolence. But how else could the indentured afford to think?
- A problematic subset of Charterists were actually prisoners brought along to fill billets originally reserved for military and civilian appointees of particular nations, especially East Bloc powers or states that, once democratic (or at least stable), were latterly fallen. Prisoners were unwilling human cargo. Many were forced into participating in experiments that deprived them of bodily autonomy. A special penal code applied to prisoners that was considered frank anathema by most members of the crew. Garland confided in you his intention to scrap it outright upon Planetfall--under cover of Salan's rifles, if needs be.
Stowaways accounted for perhaps four or five thousand extra mouths to feed. Most were Spartans or Kellerites, but the intelligence agencies of two dozen nations and corporations were thought almost certainly to have inserted people aboard at one point or another in the ship's lengthy construction. Their motivations were as many and varied as the stars in the sky.
Struan's Pacific Trading Company
On the stage, Carnaveron sold his loyalties to the German family Fugger, pledged them in solemnity to the Emperor of All Romans, and kept his true master shrouded in secrecy. Your Carnaveron is less circumspect. He also answers to money men, but Scots.
His avowed loyalty is to Struan's.
Struan's Pacific Trading Company is (or was, depending upon the fate of Old Earth) a Hong Kong conglomerate involved principally in agriculture and pharmaceuticals. Struan's holdings in Africa alone exceeded fifty million hectares under irrigated cultivation. Frequent political strife on the continent impelled the company's directors to make strategic investments in a "government services" division that often stole the spotlight from its more mundane business operations. Chairman of the Struan's Board, Ian Dunross, was known to defend these decisions as the "unavoidable cost" of retaining what he called "an international footprint," implying that one had to be cruel to be kind, or at least to be profitable.
In 2105, Struan's became the twelfth and final prime contractor for the United Nations Mission to Alpha Centauri. With both superpowers hobbled by domestic crises, the financial goodwill of Third World benefactors thoroughly depleted, and shut out of Western European exchequers, the Secretary-General turned in desperation to commercial sponsorship. For refreshing the Mission's depleted accounts, the Struan's
tai-pan was allowed to place aboard
Unity some twenty thousand colonists answerable to a charter of his own devising. A wave of similar deals followed, and contingents embarked by Morgan Industries and the American Reclamation Corporation were each twice as large and much better-funded. Yet the Struan's contribution was arguably unique.
Struan's—with roots reaching back to the African slave and Chinese opium trades. Struan's—a company that never looked to outrun or outgrow its position on the liminal edge of the law. Few secrets were more open than the involvement of Struan's in-house intelligence services in the sustainment of neo-colonialism. On behalf of his NATO clients, the
tai-pan underwrote regimes in Amman, Beirut, Elizabethville, Pretoria, and Tehran. Golden China trusted no one else with the "reeducation" of Communist Party
apparatchiks. And who was suspected in the "accidental" death of an Australian prime minister determined to steer his country out of the Commonwealth? Throughout your career, entire divisions of the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs were kept employed bringing cases against Struan's and its subsidiaries.
Anon. said:
To duel with Morgan, make your second Struan's. - Datalinks
When picking his representatives on Chiron, Ian Dunross began as he often did: with family. In the Scots peerage, Struan's was called the Noble House, but the private conduct of its squires strayed far from that standard. The leader of Struan's
Unity contingent was Roshann Cobb.
Vesper Abaddon said:
In an earlier age, Cobb would have been made a bishop or a cardinal. If very lucky, perhaps packed off to the Americas or India to make his fortune. If unlucky, he might have become a midshipman or an adjutant. But this is the Rocket Age. On Planet, he can have a kingdom. – Spoken in Council
Cobb's qualifications were controversial, but not fanciful. Like his sibling, he received a public school education befitting his family's pretentions: first Eton, then Oxford, where he read philosophy. His years with MI5 reportedly left him a changed man, and for the better. Gone was the wastrel who had misspent his Kowloon youth as a bet runner. In his place was a professional crisis manager who took the wheel of Struan's Hong Kong just as Asia entered a period of severe market instability. Preserving market share meant papering over failed clinical trials of psychodynamic drugs and a rash of lawsuits for intellectual property theft, but the proof was in the pudding and the flavor proved palatable. In time, Struan's gained the patents to protect their investments and the accolades to confirm them efficacious. Young Cobb succeeded in positioning his father's company as the global leader in funding for research in brain mechanics and lucid dreaming. At a series of symposiums boycotted by most Western scientists, Cobb collected to himself a rogue's gallery whose independent, often ethically execrable research laid the foundations for what eventually became the Wespe-Quinn-Wagner process.
Supernumerary berths obtained from the United Nations for pennies on the dollar could be resold and reapportioned at a much dearer price to those who could pay. Morgan Industries invited bidding without discrimination, but Cobb considered that this was no lottery for the rabble. The privilege of a Struan's berth was closed to anyone who did not meet standards of education and achievement at least as rigorous as those initially tendered by the United Nations Security Council. Of course, the exorbitant prices could rarely be paid up front. To secure passage, most Struan's colonists undertook a period of contracted indenture.
Today I saw the men who have come to lie for their countries. – Personal Diary of Colonel Lydda Hesamo, Observer at the Basel Accords
But who is he?
In rank, Dole Yudikon was a junior manager; merely one of hundreds so engaged by the Noble House. It is unlikely he was a true collaborator of Cobb's, for the physical separation aboard Unity attested that Yudikon was not among Cobb's closest retainers.
Vesper Abaddon said:
The disposition of Unity's inheritance is but an interesting piece of chancery for Mr. Carnaveron, who is utterly indifferent to the legacy of the recently-deceased except that some specific portion of it should come into his own hands.
CTR wasn't competent to perform a Psych Profile to replace the shoddy work of Morgan Industries (probably explained by a bribe), and so you commissioned an
ersatz work-up from Dr. Singh.
The subject is not altogether an unsympathetic one. He makes high marks for paranoia and sense of self. Carnaveron neither asks for, nor seems to expect any of the milk of human kindness. The essential positivity of the Peacekeeping creed is lost to him. After his final surgery, Med-Tech Karimov recorded that the patient inquired with remarkable strenuousness about any resulting debt. Carnaveron's mincing appetite and difficulty coming to terms with Warm Welcome's communitarian approach to property are probably inalienable aspects of his character. "The man is an auditor at heart," Singh said, and terrified that the satisfaction of his individual needs by someone in a position of relative superiority might one day be tallied against him.
Ebenezer Scrooge said:
This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!" – Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Yet he is also a bully. Blood must be squeezed from the stone because otherwise it will not be forthcoming.
Until the
Unity Crisis, Carnaveron had claim to a double helping of rights and privileges. He was both a colonist under the United Nations flag
and a mission stakeholder—one who had loaned a considerable sum of personal wealth to the mission, with Struan's as intermediary. He could, and did, boast that his was the greater honor for having helped set the table. Little wonder that he expected his just desserts. One of these was to be seated upon an advisory council providing non-binding input to Captain Garland in his role as planetary governor. Assuming he survived the first five years on Chiron, Carnaveron was also to become one of only a few voting members of the Struan's charter colony. Members of management were furthermore exempted from certain "fatigue" duties reserved for the lesser-skilled and enjoyed special license to trade outside the corporate colony. How frustrating for Carnaveron to find his best-laid plans in ruins!
Miscalculations aside, Carnaveron's attitude may well be honestly come by. Discourses on the ethics of work and contribution filled many a volume on Old Earth. When searching for explanations to help them understand civil wars and other maladies of state failure, social scientists visited these themes again and again. Nathan Holn inveighed against those "who have lived high on other's men's work by asking the tax man to bring them what they would deny themselves through honest labor." Kellerites explicitly preferred kinship community because their founder believed family members and physical neighbors were more likely to honor their commitments to one another than mere strangers. For millions like Dole Yudikon, corporate employment provided a reliable buffer against personal as well as national and global catastrophe. Covenants between worker and employer recognized mutuality, and as the state retreated, a natural space emerged for corporations to provide services that governments had not. Even the fattest cat knew to tend the pride. A reordering of allegiances followed. The more generous the terms, the more fervent the follower.
Inhabitants of corporate pseudo-states sometimes came to take pride in the arrangement. The very name of the American Reclamation Corporation attested to unselfish ambitions. Unlike a state or a nation, membership in which was usually incidental, a corporation's workers were selected, implying that they had met a standard it was also possible to under-perform. It was natural that those participating in such exchanges should ultimately valorize them as morally correct. Properly kept, the neat columns and narrow focus of a ledger seemed akin to transparency. The terms of a contract are hidden only to those who cannot read. Exploitation is the punishment of the unwary. For every colonist drawn by the promise of high adventure is another who longs for the familiar. And what more familiar than a pecking order, at the top of which sit leisure and conspicuous consumption?
There is also another theory that could account for Carnaveron's personal inquisition. Vested Charterists alone received a special allowance for personal effects among the cargo. Problems of volume and mass led the United Nations to enforce a strict limit of 23kg for most crew. Extra space was therefore priceless, though what filled it might well have value only to the owner. Personal cargo was almost always human. Most of the time, it consisted of the Charterist's own family, safely outside corporate authority but probably lacking the knowledge, skills, or abilities to contribute in a way that would bind them to any competing power structure. Some Charterists without dependents also sold passage to free colonists of their choosing, and under a variety of terms. It is possible Carnaveron has a personal connection to the still-slumbering occupant of one of the unopened cryotubes in your supply depots.
Carnaveron's Argument
He of the ominous sobriquet laid out his main charges comprehensively in a now-infamous Datalinks post filed just two weeks to the day after his original release from your sick bay. There were six:
- That because the Mission Charter had been abrogated but no election held, you ruled in Warm Welcome only as a popular autocrat.
- That he and his fellow survivors could not join "your" colony because they were still tied by contract to Roshann Cobb, Mission Factor for Struan's Pacific Trading Company, current whereabouts unknown. This included persons still indentured to Struan's who may have also incorrectly claimed the right to self-determination. These contracts were enforceable not just under the laws of Old Earth, but because they had been meant from the very start of have validity on Chiron, where they would have been considered valid even if Earth were never heard from again. Indeed, the very inclusion of an explicit five-year sunset clause demonstrated that the agreement's architects were uninterested in the fate of the mother colony. Struan's was intended to have its worth in labor whether or not Garland and his people survived.
- That because Unity's cargo was paid for in part by Struan's subscriptions, the company's representatives retained rights to a share of any and all salvage collected and consumed by Warm Welcome or any other group of survivors. Deprivation of these rights on any grounds would constitute theft.
- That even if the Mission Charter were still valid, your interpretation was invalid because it unfairly discounted the rights and privileges of mission sponsors who were its original signatories.
- That, having claimed legitimacy on the basis of your (supposed) morality, guilt on the foregoing charges made you a hypocrite unworthy of leadership.
- That your clear hesitation in waking additional survivors at Relief Station demonstrated the falsity of your professed humanitarianism and was nought but a nakedly political calculation designed to prevent your being voted out.
Dole Yudikon later rounded out his great accusations with additional material gleaned from his study of your Datalinks. For instance, he is aware of the shootout between your Peacekeeping Forces and his master's men in the
Unity's utility corridors. He used catchvid footage of the incident to press home his point during a Town Hall meeting shortly before being exiled. How unhappy to learn that you looked so like the ransacking villain of his fevered mind's construction! Although the vid was without sound, you believe it is more than likely that the Peacekeepers, not Struan's defenders, instigated that firefight.
Perhaps even worse, you are unsure whether Yudikon is aware of the role you actually played in the death of Sathieu Metrion's compatriots when you ejected
Unity's computer core into degrading orbit. Metrion claimed to have lost fifty of his fellows in the tragedy, which to him is still unexplained.
Most of this formula, you rejected outright. What was Dole Yudikon but a Johnny-come-lately full of ideas about how best to appropriate resources he had done nothing himself to secure? He took handouts, then harangued against the evils of generosity. Arguments about contract law intentionally missed the point: you would not be party to any agreement that placed others in compulsory servitude. If they refused to live up to agreements signed with a corporation that might no longer exist, that was a problem beyond your solving. Nor would you be condemned for doing simple math. Quite aside from the political liabilities of such a plan, bringing a hundred-and-a-half badly-injured personnel out of the confirmed safety of cold sleep would have overwhelmed your rudimentary medical capacity, ruined your rationing program, and created a hygienic disaster.
Vesper Abaddon said:
The disposition of Unity's inheritance is but an interesting piece of chancery for Mr. Carnaveron, who is utterly indifferent to the legacy of the recently-deceased except that some specific portion of it should come into his own hands.
Carnaveron of Planet's questions were always about consequential matters in the life of the young colony, meaning that the answers interested all its residents. The newcomer gained considerable goodwill for this reason, and you began to feel obliged to communicate in the style he preferred, if only because you found it unseemly for the chief executive of a democratic society to dodge his constituents. One might even argue that his attentiveness to the quality of his government and the fate of fellow survivors were to be accounted in his favor.
What so concerned you about Carnaveron were the tone in which his questions were asked, the frankly theatrical manner in which he chose to ask them, and perhaps most of all, the fact that you felt unable to give honest answers. The three made a vicious circle: the more strident his inquest, the more interested the audience, and the more evasive your reaction. He came to you directly and paid none of the deference to which you had grown embarrassingly accustomed. Sad to say, Carnaveron was no fool, and you were quickly on the defensive.
But the real problem was that you chose to lie.
When he asked what had happened aboard
Unity, you were surprised. Those who had been there had never pursued such a line of questioning for obvious reasons, but a chilling effect had obviously set in so that Carnaveron was first to broad the subject.
Escape had come narrowly. You had taken losses, but inflicted some also, including on private security guards belonging to Struan's. While pursuing a course of action that could—would?—ungenerously be called looting by someone who thought of himself as having stocked the storerooms in contention. Deciding that a confession could only prompt cries for recompense (if not vengeance), your recollections covered the collision and mutiny while omitting the encounter with Cobb's gunmen and your own suspicions that you might be indirectly responsible for the death of Editor Tạ Dọc Thân and fifty U.N. Librarians. You also reframed your frantic search of the cargo bays just before departure as a directed quest for "emergency equipment," which had been supplied largely by the United Nations itself. You could not do much to alter the contours of your encounter with the Spartans, some of whom you still kept under lock and key. How grave a sin, to withhold in the confessional! But Dole Yudikon was no priest!
Vesper Abaddon said:
The problem, Pravin, is not that he asks the questions. It's that you feel compelled—absolutely compelled—to answer them. As if you have something to answer for. – Advice recorded in the private journal of Pravin Lal, Commissioner, United Nations, Warm Welcome
Questions about Warm Welcome, you answered truthfully, yet with rising disquiet. Why would someone mount an inquest within hours of their integration into an unfamiliar community?
Carnaveron said:
I see into dark hearts, and make light feet. The admiral without a fleet, he is fleetest of all! – The Tragedy of the House of Luxembourg, Part 2, Act 9, Scene 2
A Forensic Analysis of What Really Happened at U.N. Relief Station
Dole Yudikon shall be put to trial. Major Bruce King shall have the prosecutorial brief. Dole Yudikon is under house arrest in the Colony Pod. He has requested representation by Colonel Martius, with whom he has been allowed to speak as often as he likes.
The Struan's exiles included most of the surviving charter colony Overseers, of whom there were something like fifty, and an equal number of engineering personnel also under contract. As more of the crash casualties became ambulatory in subsequent months, approximately a dozen more struck out to join their brethren.
The departing column carried with them a large supply of rations and basic building materials, both raw and finished, as well as ammunition, abundant medical supplies, and numerous vehicles, some of which were fission-powered. Battlefield inventory has now revealed that little of this bounty remains useable. Warm Welcome had a depleted granary and a decrepit motor pool. Peacekeeper mechanics blame a lack of maintenance, which they think no one in the offshoot colony was equipped to perform. (The "engineers" whom Carnaveron seduced to his cause were actually trained in civil workers, not vehicle repair, and they made a poor show of moonlighting.)
The colony was Warm Welcome in miniature, applying many of the same lessons-learned. Their priority was, appropriately, clean water and vegementary foods. As befit their smaller population, they fished more, herded less, and devoted surplus energy to the search for more of their own kind. To this end, they build a radio transmitter that LaCroix blames for attracting pirate attention. Defense had been an early preoccupation. In addition to a bounding stockade, the settlers dug a network of bunkers shored up with Xenofungal tubers. A half-dozen were finished. One collapsed after a direct hit from a 3" shell. Led by Sun Shao, your engineers assessed that the surviving examples were all well-built.
Debriefings of the refugees and interrogation of Struan's Sabre Corporation mercenaries confirmed that Dole Yudikon was
not the bloody-minded tyrant you feared he must become. There is no record of cruel of unusual punishment; holding cells discovered in his colony do not appear to have been used. You did have your medical team look closely into whether the Relief Station survivors were malnourished, but the worst they turned up was the popular complaint that Dole Yudikon hoarded luxuries--which he does not actually appear to have consumed, but rather held for future trade. Everyone had enough to eat and all were still cared for if injured. (Warm Welcome's lone medic, a Saber Corporation employee, kept a record of debts owed by people who sought care but dispensed it without prejudice to their ability to pay. Two settlers' debts were considered satisfied after they suffered catastrophic injuries that the medic felt entitled them to compensation, decisions on which Yudikon signed off the same day they were made.) Nobody reported having been coerced to work. In fact, the Charterists seem to consider it a point of pride that they worked longer hours under worse conditions than those at Warm Welcome.
This is not to say that Dole Yudikon was well-respected. He was a poor administrator, perhaps because he was so poor a leader. Under no circumstances does he seem to have been prepared to share the privations endured by the average colonist. He had given more at the office, he said, and was therefore entitled to more, even under terrible conditions.
Still, home was home, and the Charterists fled their stockade only after Sabre Corporation men threatened to shoot them for staying in shelter. For all that, the colony was coming under increasingly heavy artillery bombardment. Dole is sure to point out that the fission rovers were a huge liability that made flight all the more appealing.
Dole Yudikon personally commanded the defense of U.N. Relief Station. Sabre Corporation mercenaries executed a defensive strategy of his design after the settlement fell under blockade by the Nautilus Pirates. Although it is unclear whether U.N. Relief Station operated any shipping, the blockade was, at first, without incident. The opening shots of the battle for U.N. Relief Station were actually fired by Sabre Corporation defenders after a pirate Foil beached itself and armed crew began to disembark. The colony subsequently fell under bombardment from the blockading squadron.
Their experiences during the battle shattered the loyalty of the Sabre Corporation mercenaries. When, having scattered the blockade, Malachi Ro came ashore, the remaining defenders, including Yudikon, went meekly into her custody. He (Yudikon) had remained in his command bunker and did not go out of the colony before the battle ended. Ro advised you that Yudikon explicitly asked for a guarantee of his personal safety against possible assault by the other Struan's personnel.
Prior to the pirate attack, there were approximately 50 souls at U.N. Relief Station, about a dozen of whom were Sabre Company gunmen. A total of 14 perished of wounds during or after the attack, while another 23 sustained non-life-threatening injuries and are convalescing in Warm Welcome. Your investigators turned up 5 Charterist settlers who claim they were either beaten by Sabre Corporation mercenaries or wounded while leaving their bunkers en route to the supply dumps. Dole Yudikon has been accused of moral cowardice for remaining in a place of relative safety as others fled, though he has insisted that it was his obligation to remain in his "command center" to orchestrate the transition from battle to flight. Some Sabre Corporation personnel did remain on the walls to cover the settlers' retreat in case more pirates came ashore.
According to Stillwell and Sadak, Yudikon can be prosecuted on three potential charges:
- He can be charged with endangering civilians. In this case, the arguments will probably turn on whether the blast shelters were in imminent danger of collapse. His defense would probably unfold as follows: (1) he had neither the engineering basis to rely on the bunkers' integrity, nor any reason to suppose the bombardment might not worsen; (2) by remaining in place, his people were at-risk of being massacred by a landing force since the mercenaries couldn't hold the walls; (3) the only delay to escape was because, in a hostile environment, the colonists wouldn't survive very long without their equipment; (4) that even if he had wished to dismiss the risk of amphibious assault, total destruction of the colony's supplies represented an unacceptable risk to personal survival for everyone at U.N. Relief Station. The evacuees were encouraged to take whatever they could and then board whatever vehicles were still operational--an astounding concession for a for-profit colony. Dole Yudikon may also argue that he could not be confident you would have shared supplies if, having survived bombardment only to discover their own colony totally razed, they had come to Warm Welcome as petitioners of charity. What if you had nothing yourselves?
- He can be charged with negligence, assuming you want to try to make the argument that he owed it to his followers to govern differently.
- He can be charged with conspiracy for misdeeds against the security of Warm Welcome prior to his exile. There is considerable evidence that he completed the partial set-up for a coup. His defense will be that this is a victor's justice: by making a deal with him previously, you were recognizing the correctness of his moral arguments.
Carnaveron's advocate, Kruse Martius, was awakened from a cryobeds apparently smuggled aboard
Unity and, as such, occupies a place even more ambiguous than Dole Yudikon in the mission hierarchy. A citizen and senior soldier of Selah, one of the nations overrun by Vesper Abbadon, Kruse aligned himself openly with the Struan's faction during the height of antagonism within Warm Welcome prior to the Charterist's departure. In fact, Kruse drilled both the Sabre Corporation mercenaries and some of King's Marines (all Charterists) in close-quarters assault tactics at the same time that civil war seemed most likely. Tell Stillwall was calling for Martius's arrest when the latter refused medical treatment and literally disappeared, turning up again only to be counted among Yudikon's group on the day of their going out.
The Hooded Lantern
With so much combat power on the board, you count it a minor miracle that a second combat was not inadvertantly joined against the enigmatic (but scrupulously polite) tresspassers.
A few minutes in the Datalinks revealed to you why those VTOL haulers were so hauntingly familiar: they are probably the self-same models carried by Joralamon Hardacre's crew aboard the Pathfinder Probe. Thirty-six made the journey, so it is not implausible that two, at least, have survived. As for the beetle-backed steamrollers, those are the terraforming vehicles of an earlier, higher age, or at least their descendents. Now, they look like somebody's attempt to build Frankenstein's Monster in the motor pool rather than the surgery.
Pereira says he met some of the Lanternmen, whom he confirmed are "human, like us" when their helmets come off. The proof of their good intentions, he says, were the excellent cigarettes they offered without expectation of anything in return. He is less worried than Sun Shao or Guan Biao about the environmental damage inflicted to what amounts to more than fifteen square miles in a period of less than three days. All that remains is smouldering carbon. All natural life was stripped away. Some say it must have been obliterated by the onslaught of fire and chemical, but others, including many Purists, speculate that it was stolen.
Your survey crews report that the ecological damage is extreme. That portion of the island might as well have fallen into the sea, they say, for all the good it will do you now, and the dislocation of animal and insect life has meant havoc on the local ecosystems of the areas surrounding. King wondered what is to stop them practicing such obliteration on a larger scale, until "they don't even need bullets to put us out of our misery."
It made you no happier to receive a very large burst of com traffic from the same Wyle Enogra who, despite your silence, for some reason decided to be forthcoming with an explanation for their behavior. Reminding you of your own long-distance mission to rescue the
Unity's Data Core--and revealing the extent of their remote viewing capabilities at the same time--the Lanternmen say they were doing much the same. Their purpose: to eliminate the xenofungus, which they say is hostile to, not complementary of, Chiron's ecosystem. Biomedical analyses provided in their message fixes certain psychotropic qualities to the fungal blooms that are consistent with the speculation floated by your own Planitzer Expedition. Better to erradicate the fungus in a series of aggressive "cuttings" than allow it to accumulate in what the Lanternmen eupamistically refer to as "medically significant quantities." The alleged consequences of a fungal "flowering" are alarming, to say the least. Notwithstanding its energy value or potential utility as a building material, the fungus has psychoreactive properties that the Lanternmen say causes mass psychosis in susceptible populations, culminating in a shockingly high frequency of self-harm and incapacitation among those afflicted, which can be as many as nine in ten persons.
As further proof of their good intentions, the Lanternmen included an update on one of the other factions of survivors, along with com-link frequency.
Vote 1: The Law – What law governs life on Chiron now?
- The U.N. Charter and accompanying international law governing the conduct of war and bounding the power of state actors. Dole Yudikon can be tried as a sovereign head of government who violated the Responsibility to Protect.
- Expect Dole Yudikon to argue that compelling his citizens to obtain life-safety equipment before fleeing U.N. Relief Station cannot be construed as a violation of their Natural Rights because the purpose of that compulsion was to secure their continued enjoyment of life and limb.
- The Unity Mission Charter. The Charter granted the mission commander no authority of unilateral abrogation. As the senior surviving member of the mission command staff with whom Dole Yudikon has been in contact, Pravin Lal was entitled to be obeyed in his legal orders. Dole Yudikon is guilty of mutiny.
- Expect Dole Yudikon to argue that the Mission Charter explicitly authorizes him to exercise paramilitary authorities in extremis and, furthermore, that Pravin Lal's previous endorsement of his autonomy immunizes him from any ex-post facto claim of mutiny.
- Natural law proscribes Dole Yudikon's actions. He violated the personal autonomy of those in his care.
- Expect Dole Yudikon to argue that it is neither within Pravin Lal's authority, not his privilege, to independently make law on Chiron. Conviction would be a victor's justice.
- Something new. Once, faced with crimes of an entirely new nature and scale, the Nuremburg tribunal was forced to create new legal principles to try the worst of the Nazis, setting aside the prohibition against ex post facto laws on the principle that even though no law against genocide then existed, the perpetrators knew full well that what they were doing was nevertheless abominable. Chiron is far from Earth and the UN, and the idea of a collaborative Unity Mission is clearly dead. It is time to build a new legal framework for a new world. Inspired by the lessons and traditions of Earth, but innovative. [1]
- Expect Dole Yudikon to argue that it is neither within Pravin Lal's authority, not his privilege, to independently make law on Chiron. Conviction would be a victor's justice.
Vote 2: Who will judge Dole Yudikon?
- A jury of his peers, half from the Peacekeeping Forces and half from Charterists. The countervailing attitudes of the jurors might produce something approaching balance.
- A jury of his peers, selected exclusively from the Peacekeeping Forces--the body against which Yudikon originally sinned. Such a jury would probably be hostile to Dole Yudikon since he is widely regarded as having wrung the colonists for all he could bear off with him when re-founding U.N. Relief Station. This option makes the most sense if you will argue that Yuidkon is guilty of conspiracy.
- A jury of his peers, selected only from the Charterists. These were, after all, the final victims. Such a jury is expected to be compromised by feelings of obligation and fear of future retaliation. Many are literally in debt to the defendant and would not meet the qualifications to be a juror. This option makes the most sense if you will focus on Dole Yudikon's term of govenorship at U.N. Relief Station.
- A tribunal of U.N. Space Force personnel, including yourself, King, Planitzer, Pereira, Karimov, Takiwara, Tomatuk, Biao, and Shao. Many of these perceive Yudikon as a deadly threat to the security of your colony, but if you plan to invoke the Mission Charter, this option would be most consistent with the spirit of the legal framework outlines therein.
- A neutral party, in the person of Sathieu Metrion, Wyle Enogra, or the individual labeled Vinka Dialyse. Let someone unaffected by Yudikon's behaviors decide his fate.
- Do it yourself as the governing authority in Warm Welcome and the heir to Captain Garland's legacy.
Vote 3: About which faction did the Lanternmen tell us?
- The University of Planet, Dr. Prokhor Zakharov's community of the insatiably curious. Secreted away in their mountain fastness, cared for by robot servitors because their bodies lie ravaged by radiation sickness, his faculty works day and night to catalogue every aspect of this new and deadly world.
- The Human Labyrinth, buried deep beneath the deserts of the planet's largest continent. Here, the one-eyed lead the blind in a relentless quest for enlightenment, which has become synonymous with survival. At the top of this edifice sits Sheng-ji Yang, who is contemplating how best we all should be ruled. The Hive is a true meritocracy, they say, where aptitude and capability are a ticket to service, not greatness. The reward for failure is to be... repurposed, a term you are sure cannot mean anything good. As it happens, most don't survive their first encounter with this notoriously isolationist bunch, who are prone to shooting first. Your Marines seem to have scored the odd victory against them.
- The Human Ascendancy has been founded by Tamineh Pahlavi, who survived. Can this mean that mankind's genetic legacy was likewise preserved? You are told that Pahlavi expelled most of the crew who made it down to the surface with her, though her definition of triage encompassed not only the medical hard cases, but also the "insufficiently skilled" and the "biologically unfit," whatever that means.
- The New State are the remains of the mission's Underwater Operations Section, led by the Frenchman, Raoul André St. Germain. Apparently, they have gone down deep in the polar seas not far from your island, where they have found it convenient to remain. It is a hard life, they say, with as many rules as Yang has imposed on his people, though the price of failure is, ironically, more freedom and less responsibility, not the nerve-staple.
- The Human Tribe are a cult of Kellerites who have finally got the opportunity to practice their iconoclastic lifestyle without the interference of disapproving governments. The Lanternmen assure you that these followers of Jean-Baptiste are nothing like the Holnist stereotypes, and rather deserve high marks for their generosity and amiability. Then again, how much of that is a reflection of the Lanternmen's own power and the Kellerites' probable weakness? They are led by--get this--a former sergeant in the U.S. Army.
- The Lord's Conclave are Old Believers, Orange-Catholics, Marians, Muslims, Jews--anyone for whom the name of God is still sacred. The mission's Psych Chaplain, Miriam Godwinson, seems to have survived her rumored death aboard Unity, and is credited with saving many hundreds in the Unity's denouement. That said, their road has been a harder one than most, and, like the Hive, they have reportedly restorted to theft in their final extremity.
[1]
@TaliesinSkye deserves enormous credit for discussing with me the legal questions at play here. To him goes the idea for "a new canon of law" affirming that Yudikon's example is not to be repeated. The wonderful language for that option is his also.
