The Beyond Subsector M: Spinward Drift

The Beyond Subsector M: Spinward Drift

System Data

Hex  Name                 UWP       Remarks                  {Ix}   (Ex)    [Cx]   N B  Z PBG W  A    Stellar                

---- -------------------- --------- ------------------------ ------ ------- ------ - -- - --- -- ---- ----------

0135 Khiiszarbi           B775684-A Ag Ni                    { 2 }  (958+1) [585B] - K  - 310 8  HeCo K3 V                   

0136 Trend                B562489-9 Ni Ho                    { 0 }  (635-2) [6485] - -  - 410 8  HeCo K1 V                   

0232 Zydoquir             D522363-8 Lo Po Fz He Sa O:0630    { -3 } (C21-1) [4158] - -  - 124 14 ZyCo G2 V D                 

0238 Deata Chi            D323240-6 Lo Po                    { -3 } (911+1) [1155] - -  - 812 12 NaHu K8 V                   

0335 Efflung              CAC7100-C Lo Fl Ht Bo Cx           { 0 }  (B01+2) [113E] - -  - 723 15 HeCo M8 V BD                

0336 Teldarra             C8A8313-C Lo Fl Ht                 { 0 }  (921-1) [432B] - -  - 413 13 HeCo F4 V M1 V              

0337 Eromnek              B4025A9-8 Ni Ic Va Sa              { -1 } (642+2) [4436] - -  - 511 14 HeCo M3 V M6 V              

0340 Gonzo                E872000-0 Ba He                    { -3 } (800+2) [0000] - -  - 014 14 NaXX K1 V                   

0431 Zydanar              B442555-A Ni Po He                 { 1 }  (743-4) [5658] - -  - 512 10 ZyCo M3 V M0 V              

0432 Zydexnar             B852326-B Lo Po Ho                 { 1 }  (C21+1) [8459] - -  - 323 17 ZyCo F8 V                   

0434 Kuuna                D000225-9 As Lo Va                 { -2 } (911+3) [117B] - -  - 321 14 HeCo M2 V                   

0435 Bartinil             DA57147-6 Lo                       { -3 } (701+2) [1163] - -  - 610 5  HeCo K2 V                   

0537 Hactor               D434339-7 Lo                       { -3 } (921+1) [1147] - -  - 631 13 NaHu G3 V                   

0636 Homeward             C100212-A Lo Va Fz Sa              { 0 }  (A11-1) [3217] - -  - 413 13 NaHu M5 V                   

0639 Hornent              XDB1000-0 Ba Fl Bo                 { -3 } (500-2) [0000] - -  - 031 12 NaXX M1 V M8 V              

0735 Haes                 E533561-6 Ni Po Ho Mr              { -3 } (A42-1) [4245] - -  - 310 10 NaHu G5 V                   

0738 Nubb                 XCCA000-0 Ba Fl Bo                 { -3 } (B00+1) [0000] - -  - 022 12 NaXX A0 V                   

0739 Apparos              B976753-9 Ag Pi                    { 2 }  (A6B+1) [7966] - -  - 811 15 NaHu K0 IV                  

The Spinward Drift subsector consists of 18 worlds with a total population of 84.35 million sophonts, ninety-five percent of which reside on Apparos. Of the rest, 3.54 million are citizens of the Hefrin Colony's seven systems and half a million live on the three Zydar Codominium worlds, nearly all on Zydanar. Besides Apparos, there are four other independent systems of little note; only Haes has a significant population. Three systems are uninhabited. This sparsely populated subsector represents a frontier of Humaniti's advancement in the spin-rim direction.

Worlds

Apparos (0739 B976753-9)

Despite being the most populous world by far in its subsector, Apparos is not particularly noteworthy. It sits in the habitable zone of its aging star. Once it was a cold barren world, but in this late stage of its sun's life, the world has come to life, ices melting, seas teaming with life, though none but simple flora has colonized the land. The atmospheric taint is from a slight tinge of ammonia from vanished slushy polar caps of the foul substance that still lingers in the air, adding an unpleasant odor rather than any real hazard. The residents are used to it. It helps with soil fertility so they can grow crops enough to support a growing population. They even export food when the rare ship visits. Settled in -603 by a group of Halifaxian refugees, the population of 80 million has low genetic diversity and has exhibited enough genetic drift to make white and red hair, with subsequent pale skin, a trait for much of the population. The government is efficient and reasonable, its defense forces consisting of little more than a police force and missile defenses that discourage the occasional corsair, or Star Legion ship, if that is any different, from approaching the world.

Efflung (0335 CAC7100-C)

A large world with a crushingly dense atmosphere laden with fluorine and carbon monoxide, Efflung is uninhabited except for a handful of wildcat miners using corrosion-resistant vehicles and drones to harvest unique minerals from the surface.

In orbit is the official capital of the United Spinward Worlds, which even its own inhabitants refer to as the Hefrin Colony. The capital is an orbital Class C starport with one module acting as an effectively powerless congressional chamber. The Jarnac Pashalic maintains a small garrison, officially hired out as starport security, to insure the "independence" of the USW.

The Efflung system consists of a dim red dwarf orbited by a distant brown dwarf. Two gas giants orbit the star and one the dwarf. The Pashalic Navy's patrol craft maintain security across the red dwarf system, deterring corsair activity around those gas giants and the asteroid belt between them, but the 80 AU distant brown dwarf's planetary system is unpatrolled and rumored to contain a forward outpost of the Zydarian Star Legion.

Eromnek (0337 B4025A9-8)

Ruled by Jordan II, King of Eromnek, a direct descendant of Joachim Hefrin, Eromnek is the second outermost moon of a large gas giant, heated to near 0 C by its infrared heat and the orbital tugs of its neighboring moons. The gas giant orbits a pair of red dwarf stars at a distance just outside their jump shadow, making it an ideal location for a starport refueling station. Unfortunately, little traffic passes its way.

Eromnek began its history with settlement in 747 by Joachim Hefrin in the hope of building an industrial center for the Hefrin Colony. Underinvestment and Joachim's accidental death in 754 curtailed the effort, with Joachim's less capable daughter Janna struggling to maintain control of the remote outpost. Janna's son Jordan overthrew his mother in 759 and declared himself King Jordan I the following year, nearly severing the bonds of the Hefrin Colony, officially named the United Spinward Worlds, until he repaired his relationship with his great-aunt Jennifer, who was the effective ruler of Khiiszarbi.

In the years since the establishment of the monarchy, Eromnek has suffered from chronic underinvestment, oppression cumulating in the departure of thousands during the rule of Queen Jasmine, and slowly decaying infrastructure. As with many Hefrin worlds, contractors seconded from the Jarnac Pashalic provide security at the starport and in the case of Eromnek, provide most of the staffing for the personal security forces of the king.

Gonzo (0340 E872000-0)

Gonzo was named for its orbit. Its semi-major axis, the average distance from its K0 V sun, places it squarely in the habitable zone. Unfortunately, its orbit is far from average, with an eccentricity of 0.75 and an orbital inclination, from the plane occupied by the system's four gas giants, is nearly 80 degrees, or actually 280 degrees, since it orbits retrograde. Initial surveyors assumed it was a captured rouge world, but this turns out not to be the case, instead, resonance between the system's gas giants kicked Gonzo into its current orbit, which also drives it through the orbital plane in the outskirts of a torus of asteroids, also pushed around by the gas giants. The outer region of the Gonzo system contains nine rockball planetary bodies, some of which circle their star in orbits more extreme than Gonzo.

Despite an extreme environment, where temperatures could swing from 120 C to -80 C and where hardly a year goes by without at least a small crater forming from an asteroid impact, Gonzo has life. It is an unpleasant ecology and the most notable life form is a fast growing slime mold-like organism with a proficiency for corroding metals and, in one species, according the IISS report, a penchant for eating the seals used in standard scout service protective gear.

Nobody lives on Gonzo. Nobody has claimed the system. Nobody has bothered to interdict it.

Haes (0735 E533561-6)

Orbiting near the inner edge of its G5 V star's habitable range, Haes is the eighth planet of a compact star system. Beyond its orbit lies a sparse asteroid belt and a lonely rockball. The world's surface is mostly covered by desert and salt flats from an evaporating sea. The atmosphere has been leaking into space for billions of years, destroying what was once a thriving ecosystem. Currently the most prevalent surface vegetation is a yellow lichen-like crust. The shallow sea is tinged with the colors of the rainbow from mats of anaerobic bacteria. But there is a sea, and it is the most convenient source of hydrogen for those few ships that venture into this corner of space.

Haes was settled in 840 by prospectors looking to scrape some mineral wealth from the world and by entrepreneurs intent on building a starport that never had enough traffic to justify its existence. In 990, a group of dissidents from Eromnek settled in the shantytown next to the near-derelict port. Surprisingly, the population of Haes grew over the years, reaching 300,000 people. The original settlers and the Eromnekis never truly integrated, but kept their differences to a usually non-violent antipathy.

Then in 1087 Renata the Heretic arrived. Renata was a deserter from the Zydarian Star Legion and she came with three ships and eighty heavily armed followers. The Star Legion was almost piratical in its practices and Renata took it a step further, establishing Haes as a base to raid the worlds of the Hefrin Colony. The Eromnekis backed her efforts, seeing it as revenge for their exile; the original settlers took an opposite view. In 1090 tensions broke into open warfare. After six days of fighting that destroyed the ramshackle starport and one of Renata's ships, the pirate and her forces defeated their enemies and established themselves as rulers of the Heretic Free State of Haes. After five years of sporadic resistance, the ruling junta of pirates and Eromneki militia leaders established a rough order on the planet. Having acquired two new ships, though nothing more than armed merchants, Renata established herself as Grand Admiral. She is careful not to cause enough disruption to trigger intervention from Jarnac or Nakris, and Zydar seems to have forgotten her sins, but the worlds within a few jumps of Haes, are often witness or victim to her corsair activities, curtailed mainly by the scarcity of any starship traffic at all.

Khiiszarbi (0135 B775684-A)

With a population of just three million, Khiiszarbi is still the most populous world in the Hefrin Colony. Effectively ruled by the Hefrin family since its founding, it is also the most hospitable world in the small interstellar state.

Physical Characteristics

While more than half its land area is covered in desert, Khiiszarbi still has pockets of temperate, well-watered land suitable for habitation. The Hefrin River Valley, which drains into the larger of the world's two oceans is the prime example of this and home to nearly the entire population. The atmosphere of Khiiszarbi is essentially breathable, though oxygen levels are near the lower limit of human comfort and dust storms are common even in the inhabited region. Khiiszarbi citizens have been treated with retroviruses that increase their tolerance for low oxygen atmospheres and improves the function of their mucous membranes in dusty conditions; this treatment is available to anyone applying for Khiiszarbi citizenship, though there is currently a waiting list at the only local government-operated facility that performs the procedure.

History

Khiiszarbi was settled in 745 by the Hefrin family and their followers after the failure of the Federal Constitution of the Corellan League. After establishing an initial settlement, Joachim Hefrin departed for Eromnek, leaving his sister Jennifer in charge of what they hoped would become the breadbasket of a growing interstellar state.

After her brother's death in 754, Jennifer Hefrin became in effect the sole ruler of what was officially the United Spinward Worlds, but she concentrated her authority on building up Khiiszarbi with what few resources she could muster. The effort met with some success. Khiiszarbi is a reasonably prosperous agricultural world with a stable government. In the centuries since Jennifer's death in 848, her many descendants have continued to occupy most positions of power in the many ministries that regulate their citizen's lives.

The current Prime Minister of the Khiiszarbi Free State is Jordan Hefrin, a direct descendent of the Hefrin line.

Social Characteristics

Khiiszarbi culture is fairly laid back. The government does not operate quickly and neither do most of its citizens. Automation takes care of most heavy agricultural labor, and basic social services, including a very basic income is available to all citizens. The Federalist zeal of the original settlers is long gone, subsided in more practical matters of ensuring a good harvest and enjoying the recreational use of public lands.

While immigration is encouraged, few people choose to move to this remote world, despite excellent ski resorts in the mountains and opportunities to claim range land where modified cattle roam among the multicolored bird-like native life. Khiiszarbi is too remote to matter and too provincial to care. Besides, the Jarnac Pashalic has provided security for decades, so life has been peaceful on this backwater world.

Articles

Hefrin Colony

The Hefrin Colony is officially the United Spinward Worlds, but no one, not even its government officials normally refer it as anything other than the Hefrin Colony. Founded by Joachim and Jennifer Hefrin in 745 after the failure of the Corellan League Federal Constitution, the Hefrin Colony was supposed to be a showcase of a functioning interstellar federation, but Joachim's early death and chronic underfunding undermined the effort.

The Hefrin Colony still exists after more than three centuries, but it is a pale reflection of its ideals and not particularly persuasive in its demonstration of effective federal government.

History

Siblings Joachim and Jennifer Hefrin were leading proponents of the Corellan Federal movement of the early eight century. He was Chairman of the Shalukin Consortium, she was a Corellan Senator. House Hefrin was one of the Great Houses of Corella and though neither were ever titular heads of the House, they were its most influential members. When the Federalist movement collapsed and the Federal Constitution was repealed in 742, the two Hefrin siblings voluntarily exiled themselves to the world of Khiiszarbi. They arrived on their new world in 745, bringing along a few thousand hard-core Federalists and their families. In a quixotic attempt to show the League how a Federal government should work, the Hefrins set up additional colonies on Trend, Teldara, Eromnek, Bartinil and Kunna and built a small station in orbit around Efflung to serve as their seat of government.

The effort never gained the followers they hoped would come and the starter colonies on the other worlds numbered only in the hundreds of settlers. Besides the fairly clement world of Khiiszarbi, only the gas giant moon colony on Eromnek ever gained any traction.

The United Spinward Worlds Congress met at Efflung Station for the first time in 754 for the occasion of Joachim Hefrin's funeral. It has continued to meet every year, with delegates from all seven worlds attending in theory, though Kuuna and Bartinil which don't have 400 residents between them are usually represented by proxies from Eromnek.

After the Zydarian Star Legion began to extort "tithes" from shipping in the late tenth century, commerce to the Hefrin Colony worlds dropped to near zero. The Zydar-Nakris War of 1032-1034 did not improve the situation as the Star Legion found it easier to prey on commercial ships than to confront the Nakris Confederation Star Force. After a Zydarian "tithe collection" at Kuuna in 1036, the USW Congress voted to sign a defense treaty with the Jarnac Pashalic, trading the right to establish a naval base at Khiiszarbi for protection against Zydarian extortion. This led to a severing of diplomatic relations with Zydar, which the Congress did not regret.

In recent years the Hefrin Colony has fallen further into the Pashalic's sphere of influence, becoming in effect a client state of Jarnac. Thus far, this has not had any effect on domestic politics or policy, but a growing number of Khiiszarbi citizens are at least acknowledging that this may cause future concern.

Structure

Officially, the United Spinward Worlds is a Federal government, with foreign policy, defense, and starport services under control of the federal government at Efflung and local policies under individual system control. In practice, the Congress has little real budget, security has been traded to the Pashalic, and starport regulation consists of a set of vague guidelines mostly copied from the Imperium's Starport Authority Handbook, Abridged 735 Edition. Foreign policy consists of being nice to the Jarnac Pashalic and Nakris Confederation and being wary of the Zydarian Codominium.

Military

The federal government of the United Spinward Worlds spends its entire defense budget on hiring Jarnaci contractors as security officers and paying subsidies to the Class B Starports at Khiiszarbi, Trend, and Eromnek to cover the theoretically lost revenue from granting docking privileges to Jarnaci patrol corvettes. Each member world is authorized to raise a militia and close orbit defense force, but other that than the Khiiszarbi Rangers that act as police and emergency services across their world's outback and the paramilitary police forces of the King of Eromnek, no semblance of militia forces exists.

Relations

The United Spinward Worlds has a defense treaty with the Jarnac Pashalic. Although relations between the two states are cordial, it would hardly matter if they weren't, as Jarnac's Navy and seconded mercenaries provide the bulk of the Hefrin Colony's security. The USW has a treaty of friendship with the Nakris Confederation, which mainly lowers tariff barriers, but trade between the two states is hampered by the intermediary location of the Zydarian Codominium. The Hefrin Colony has no diplomatic relations with the Codominium and hasn't for the nearly eighty years.

Relations with the Corellan League are cool, but rather than showing the League it was mistaken to discard Federalist policies, the Hefrin Colony has persuaded many that they had made the correct decision. As a result, the Corellans hold no grudge, but neither do they place much significance in a tiny distant state. Trade is nearly nonexistent, and the Corellans have not bothered to establish an embassy at Efflung, though they maintain a small consulate on Khiiszarbi, staffed almost entirely by locals.

Pegasus

The converted 1000-ton freighter Pegasus, ex-Horizon Nestor, is the flagship of the Star Navy of the Heretic Free State of Haes. It is also half the tonnage of the fleet.

Launched in 1030, it was originally a trading vessel built by Zydar's Duality Prime Shipyards with an imported jump-2 drive. After the Zydar-Nakris War, it was converted to military use to make up for the heavy loses suffered by the Zydarian Star Legion. In 1087, Captain Renata Venirii and her crew mutinied, taking Pegasus and two other vessels to Haes, where it served as her flagship in corsair raids. During the Six Days of Strife in 1090, she used the vessel as supporting firepower in the uprising that brought her to power as the leading member of the Troika that leads Haes's military government.

The ship has been heavily modified during its service life, first by Zydar to give it upgraded sensors, weapons and the large reaction engines that give it mobility in a fight, and then by Grand Admiral Reneta the Heretic to support her corsair operations.

It is a ramshackle ship. The ship's cutter-sized transport was lost during Haes's civil war and its bay is used for cargo. Pegasus is the shape of a slightly tapered block, but even without true landing gear, it operates off the surface of Haes and has endured enough rough landing to batter its outer hull and damage its structural integrity. The seemingly random addition of cargo handling and towing equipment, weapons lockers, an extra power plant, troop barracks, and an admiral's suite has degraded its cargo capacity, but in a pinch, it can use its jump net and collapsible tanks to drag along a captured ship or cargo of its own displacement to a point in deep space and return for it later.

Pegasus rarely operates more than four parsecs from Haes, partially because it suffers air quality problems after more than a few weeks into an excursion, but mostly because Renata does not want to return to Haes to find herself overthrown.

Given its large mass and reaction engine capability, Pegasus should be able to defeat a Jarnaci Horus-class patrol corvette in a fair fight. It is unfortunate that the Horus corvettes patrol in pairs, but then again, Renata rarely fights fair.

Horus-class Patrol Corvette

Based on the specifications of the standard Imperial Type-T patrol corvette, the Jarnac Pashalic Navy's Horus-class corvette is the durable standard patrol craft of its Navy. Slightly more expensive than its Imperial kin, the Horus is shaped more like a bird of prey, its reinforced hull shielded against radiation. Internally, barracks for a small squad of ships troops, along with a brig, medical bay, and armory to support them, is the major deviation from the Imperial standard, although the Horus also carries an upgraded computer and more optimized maneuver drives.

Normally deployed in pairs, Horus anti-piracy patrols and pickets represent the vast majority of assets deployed by Jarnac to meet its defense treaty obligations to the Hefrin Colony.