House of Steel The Honorverse Companion

The Honorverse Companion

1921 PD





Letter from the Editor



For centuries, Jayne’s has been the recognized authority on the ships, equipment, and personnel of navies across the explored galaxy. We at Jayne’s have been proud to present the most accurate and comprehensive analyses of deployed military technology available. This is no mean task when one considers the sheer number of navies, breadth of technology, and volume of inhabited space. These difficulties are further compounded by the necessity of reliance on unclassified sources of information for the weapons, systems, and even hull features of combatants.

Due to the issues noted above as well as the constraints imposed by publication dates and production deadlines, some small errors are unavoidable. As our long-time readers are well aware, every new edition contains errata from the previous year as new information becomes available. Despite external appearances, units within a given class are rarely as homogeneous as the layman might imagine. Visual similarities across a class may conceal upgraded capabilities and shipyard inconsistencies and design changes can create vast differences between the first and last ship produced. Refits are common and ships still in service may not reflect the new realities of ships recently out of space-dock. Normally, these errors are minimal and we correct them without any additional commentary. Occasionally, however, significant errors creep in and we at Jayne’s feel an obligation to call these to the attention of our readers.

Covering the wars in the Haven Sector has proven to be a particular challenge for our group. Nothing spurs the development and change of military technology like war. Therefore, keeping track of the many and rapid changes in the deployed systems occasioned by operational necessities is particularly challenging. Given the remoteness of the Haven Sector and the exigencies of military secrecy, obtaining up-to-date and accurate information is often difficult.

Haven, especially the People’s Republic but even the newly restored Republic, has always kept information on its shipbuilding and warship classes classified. Hull numbers are randomized among classes and shipyards and are even subject to occasional changes throughout the life of the ship. This purposeful randomization of these identifiers serves to obscure their build numbers, as readers will recall from editorials in our 1907 PD annex.

By comparison, information on the Royal Manticoran Navy has always been easier to collect. Although not entirely an open book, their construction programs, especially prewar, have largely been a matter of public record, often resulting from vicious debates in their Parliament. Other than their newest construction, many of their warships were regularly docked at their major space stations prior to the outbreak of open hostilities and thus subject to physical observation. Since the beginning of active operations, the RMN has drawn a very deliberate veil of secrecy over its new designs and construction, but that was not the case prior to 1905. This earlier ease of access may, in fact, have led to a degree of complacency on the part of our researchers, who have discovered, to our chagrin, that the Royal Manticoran Navy was not above exploiting that complacency, resulting in our most notable error: the Star Knight-class heavy cruiser.

When the Star Knight was commissioned in 1893 PD, it was believed to be an unremarkable design, merely a modern extension of their older heavy cruiser classes. Its weaponry was a matter of public record and was noted in our 1896 edition. This belief remained unquestioned for some years. It was not until a small skirmish in a fourth-tier star system where a Star Knight clashed with a Havenite Sultan-class battlecruiser that anyone realized there was anything special about the class.

Far from an evolutionary design of known parentage, the Star Knight was the first of a wave of revolutionary new Manticoran heavy cruisers. It was not only the first true two-deck heavy cruiser, it was also the first step taken by the Royal Manticoran Navy to build a heavy cruiser capable of surviving in the combat environment created by the rise of the laser head as the primary shipkiller.

Our failure to recognize this significant departure from established design philosophies stemmed from no mere clerical error. It was an intentional campaign of misdirection by the RMN to hide the capabilities of their new design. We at Jayne’s had become so accustomed to the public availability of information about new Manticoran designs that, with only a small dose of deception on their part, they were able to “hide in plain sight” a specification that bore little resemblance to the actual design information transmitted by requests for information from the public. The RMN had announced that they were mounting some experimental sensors and were therefore obscuring the upper sections of hull with a combination of smart paint and shrouding during port calls. While there were unconfirmed reports of a heavier-than-expected broadside, they were dismissed as inconsistent with known observations or even confirmation of a new sensor suite.

As a civilian publication, Jayne’s is limited to open source research, without the benefits of dedicated intelligence agencies of the Solarian League Navy. It would be a reasonable assumption that ONI has been aware of the true nature of the Star Knight for far longer than we have.

While perhaps not as extreme an error as the one we made on the Star Knight, the published data in our 1920 edition on the new Nike-class battlecruiser also appears to have been in error in one significant respect. Our artist’s conception of the class was correct in most respects. All reports that the Nike class carried a “larger than average” decoy system, however, significantly understated the issue. The new Mk20 “Keyhole” system appears to be far more than a simple decoy. From analysis of visual records, it appears to be virtually a parasite craft in its own right.

If the platform is indeed unmanned, it may well be more massive than even a light attack craft, and the obvious sensor and point defense installations indicate that it is far more than a simple decoy. Exactly why the RMN has decided to build a decoy and defensive installation so much larger than their previous platforms remains unclear, and the purpose of the array panels on the sides of the platform remains a mystery.

We at Jayne’s feel a responsibility to you, our readers, to provide information that is as accurate as possible. In the rare cases where later access to information establishes that our earlier analysis was incorrect, we feel it is our obligation to correct these analyses, even at the expense of admitting our fallibility. Our pledge of accuracy has always been the touchstone of our editorial policy. Our analysts continue to gather as much information as possible on these and other new warships to come out of the Haven Sector. We pledge to continue to work to provide the most accurate, up-to-date information for those whose lives depend on it.



Annette Konduru, Senior Editor

Jayne’s Information Group

April 17, 1921 PD





The Star Empire of Manticore





7/24/1920 PD

Hamilton Hall,

Saganami Island



John—

I wish you could have been here to hear Duchess Harrington’s address at Last View last month! There are so many things I’ve tried—we’ve all tried—so hard to teach them, impress upon them, but they’re so damned young. They’re so damned full of their own immortality, they still find it so hard to believe the universe could exist just fine without them in it. I know—I know! We were all like that once, and maybe it’s just as well we were. If we’d known then what we know now, how many of us would have stuck it out? Worn the uniform? Seen so many of our friends die?

Sorry. I don’t mean to be all doom-and-gloom or rain all over your parade. You know the score as well as I do, after all. One of the things I hate most about being Commandant—or even a Queen’s officer, sometimes—is the way I have to keep my mouth shut, especially in front of the middies, about the sort of things that “undermine respect for civilian authority.” When I think about the systematic way High Ridge and those other bastards threw away everything—everything, John!—that you and I and everyone else fought and died for. About the way we were right on the brink of outright military victory. We had them—we had them, and there wasn’t a single damned thing they could do about it, and High Ridge and those other bastards decided to play politics instead. Damn it, you know as well as I do who was really behind the Cromarty Assassination. Hell, without Duchess Harrington, they’d have killed Her Majesty as well! Don’t tell me for one stinking second High Ridge didn’t know that just as well as you and I do. The son-of-a-bitch knew Saint-Just ordered it, and he still insisted on “negotiating” with the Peeps. He let them wiggle off the hook, when we could’ve dictated terms to Saint-Just in Nouveau Paris itself, because it was more important to him to break Her Majesty’s kneecaps in the House of Lords to protect his own precious ass and political power, and God knows how many men and women in uniform have been killed because that was more important to him than winning the damned war. I don’t know, anyway, and when the nightmares are especially bad, I try not to know how many of my midshipmen and midshipwomen are going to die for the same frigging reason. Kids, John—good kids, my kids—and they’re going to be killed because a clutch of self-serving, conniving politicians didn’t care what their actions were going to cost anybody else.

And I can’t say a word about it in public without violating the Articles of War and my own oath as an officer of the Queen.

Sorry. There I go again. I’ll try to behave better.

Look, they’re supposed to be pulling me out of the Academy, sending me back to the Fleet sometime in the next few months. I don’t know where yet, although there’s some talk about a task force in Home Fleet that needs looking after. Can’t say I really like the thought of going up against the Peeps now that they’ve duplicated the MDM and built pod-layers of their own, but we’re still better than they are, and we’ll still kick their asses in the end. In fact, I think Duchess Harrington’s on her way to do a little preliminary ass-kicking of her own right now, and the truth is, I wish I was with her. But remember what Mom always said, “If wishes were fishes, we never want food.”

Anyway, I’ll be seeing you and her and the kids next month, once I get the semester shut down and I can grab a little time for myself. I’ll bring along a chip of Duchess Harrington’s address. If you’re still as much like me as you’ve always been before, it’ll send a shiver down your spine, I promise. But they’ll do good, my kids. It won’t matter to them whose fault it is, or why so many of them are going to die. They believe, John. They believe in duty, and honor, and responsibility. They believe there are things in this universe worth dying for. And they believe in those things strongly enough to go out and do the dying for the people they love and the things they care about. That’s what Last View is all about, really, and it’s what Duchess Harrington put into words for them so well. She touched that belief of theirs because she believes, too.

And when you come down to it, John, so do I.

Gotta go. Kiss Martha for me, hug those kids, and tell Mom to get the grill fired up. I’ll see you all in a couple of weeks, little brother.

Love,

Betty



—excerpt from a letter from Vice Admiral Lady Beatrice McDermott, Baroness Alb, Commandant, Naval Academy, Saganami Island, to her younger brother, Commodore John McDermott, one year before her death in the Battle of Manticore.





Introduction



The Star Empire of Manticore is a constitutional monarchy comprising twenty-one member star systems, thirty-four protectorate star systems, and a wormhole junction with seven mapped termini. The capital planet, Manticore, shares a binary star system with the planets of Sphinx and Gryphon.

Combined, the fifty-four star systems of the Star Empire of Manticore are ethnically diverse, the product of large-scale diaspora immigration from Old Earth and other Core Worlds. Manticore is also a xeno-diverse star nation, home to two sapient nonhuman species: the Treecats of Sphinx and the Medusans of the Basilisk System.

Humans migrated to the Manticore binary system in 1416 PD (Post Diaspora) aboard the sublight hibernation ship Jason and colonized three planets: Manticore (Manticore-A III), Sphinx (Manticore-A IV), and Gryphon (Manticore-B V). The colony’s founder, the Manticore Colony Trust, consisted of shareholders primarily from Old Earth Western Europe, with a small number from the Ukraine and the North American Federation.

Following the death by plague of sixty percent of the original colonists, more colonists needed to be recruited and were subsidized heavily. Before inviting the second wave of colonists, Planetary Administrator Roger Winton and the Manticore Colony, Ltd., Board of Directors adopted the current Constitution of Manticore, which established a constitutional monarchy and ennobled the original colonists and their descendants. The Constitution of Manticore includes a Declaration of Fundamental Rights applicable to all citizens, although franchise is limited to those who have paid taxes for at least five consecutive years. With the offer of Manticoran nobility also available to those second wave emigrants who purchased sufficient land credits, the Kingdom of Manticore grew quickly in population and economy.

Manticoran territorial expansion was limited before the Second Havenite War. However, due to the discovery of the seventh terminus of the Manticore Wormhole Junction in 1919 PD, the admission of the Talbott Quadrant to the Kingdom, and the resumption of the War with Haven later that same year, the Star Kingdom of Manticore needed to adapt to be able to manage the wildly disparate star systems and populations that had come under its control. The Star Kingdom of Manticore formally became the Star Empire of Manticore (SEM) in 1921, forming an Imperial government that provided greater flexibility and increased ability to meet the needs of all member and protectorate star systems under their new government.





Astrography



The Manticoran Wormhole Junction has had a significant effect on the Star Kingdom of Manticore and, more recently, on the formation of the Star Empire. Due to the far-flung coverage of the Junction, the Star Empire has not followed any of the traditional models of expansion adopted by other star nations. While the Star Empire’s borders stretch almost nine hundred light-years between its farthest systems, all of its members systems are clustered around the termini of the Junction.

The formal borders of the Star Empire include twenty-one member star systems, thirty-four protectorate star systems, and the wormhole junction, with seven mapped termini. The capital planet, Manticore, shares a binary star system with the planets of Sphinx and Gryphon.

With twenty-two habitable planets and over twenty-seven billion people, the Star Empire of Manticore is the largest by total area and, including the populations of the protectorate star systems, boasts the second largest population of the Verge star nations.

The Star Kingdom’s transformation into the Star Empire began with the annexation of the Basilisk system in 1865 PD. Following the first phase of the Havenite Wars, Trevor’s Star sought annexation in 1914, and the Lynx System sought membership in 1919 following the discovery of the Lynx Terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. These star systems, all of which share access to the Junction, are collectively referred to as the “Old Star Kingdom” and form a single territorial unit within the Star Empire.





The Silesian protectorate systems became territories of the Star Kingdom in 1920 PD, following intense negotiations with the then Silesian government and the Andermani Empire. At this time, the protectorate systems do not hold voting membership in the Star Empire, although that may change in the future. The Star Empire actually came into existence in 1921 following the admission of the Talbott Quadrant, which was organized into a separate, federated territorial unit at the Constitutional Convention in the Split System.

Finally, a number of single system star nations are treaty signatories in the Manticoran Alliance. Some of these systems, such as the Marsh system just outside the borders of the old Silesian Confederacy, while not considered Manticoran territory, still have a significant Manticoran presence.



The Manticore Binary System



The Manticore System consists of a G0 star of 1.12 solar masses with a G2 binary companion of 0.92 solar masses. Both stars orbit a common center of gravity 333 light-minutes from the A component and 406 light-minutes from the B component. The apparent eccentricity of the pair approaches twelve percent, and results in distances between the stars that range from 650 light-minutes at periastron to 827 light-minutes at apastron.

The total system population is close to three billion, spread among its three Earth-like worlds and its main asteroid belt. The majority of the population resides in the Manticore-A subsystem, although the Manticore-B subsystem’s Unicorn Belt’s asteroid extraction operations produce the lion’s share of the kingdom’s raw ores. Perhaps because of this space-going orientation, Gryphon provides a quite disproportionate percentage of the Star Kingdom’s merchant spacers and of the Royal Manticoran Navy’s and Marines’ personnel.





Manticore (Manticore-A III)

Radius: 6,496 km

Gravity: 1.01 G

Orbit Period: 629.83 T-days

Sidereal Day: 22.45 hours

Hydrosphere: 76%



Of the three worlds in the Manticore Binary System, Manticore was clearly the one with the most desirable real estate. Slightly larger than Earth but with a lower density, its surface gravity is almost exactly Earth standard. Manticore’s climatic zones and regions are comparable to Earth, but cover a larger temperate zone, due to favorable ocean currents and a lower axial tilt. It has a single moon, Thorson, which is much smaller than Earth’s moon, resulting in negligible tidal activity. Internal processes make Manticore moderately tectonically active. Like all life in the Manticore Binary System, Manticore’s protein chirality is right-handed, making it digestible to humans. Manticoran life is similar enough to Terrestrial life that only minimal engineered adaptations were required for crops and livestock.

Manticore is the breadbasket of the Manticore Binary System and the most heavily populated planet in the system. It is also the seat of government and the capital city of Landing is home to Mount Royal Palace as well as the Hall of Parliament, Admiralty House, and Burke Tower, the home of the Queen’s Bench Court. The University of Manticore, which is ranked in the top five percent of all university systems, galaxy wide, also maintains its primary campus in Landing. Major Manticoran industries include agriculture, aquaculture, mining, and a well-diversified industrial sector and research and development base. In addition, the corporate headquarters of over seventy-five percent of the financial houses and banks involved in the Star Kingdom’s enormous investment and banking industry are located in Landing. The total planetary population is just under 1.5 billion people as of 1921 PD.

Her Majesty’s Space Station Hephaestus serves as a combination shipyard, transfer station and living facility for nearly one million workers (both permanent and transient) and their families.



Sphinx (Manticore-A IV)

Radius: 6,953 km

Gravity: 1.35 G

Orbit Period: 1,903.65 T-days

Sidereal Day: 25.62 hours

Hydrosphere: 68%



Sphinx is a larger planet, with roughly a third again the mass of Earth and a denser atmosphere that can cause some adaptation sickness. It is tectonically less active than is typical of a planet of its mass but is more active than Earth. In recent geological times, it had a volcanic eruption at the Stubleford Traps that increased the CO2 levels considerably.

Sphinx is blessed with extensive mineral resources. Utilizing those resources, however, is complicated by long seasons and a climate that starts out chilly at the equator and gets markedly colder from there. It is only by dint of its extremely active CO2 cycle that Sphinx remains shirtsleeve-habitable to humans.

All major Sphinxian fauna are hexapeds, of which the most notable are the treecats, one of the few alien species thus far discovered that have approached human-level sentience. By the Ninth Amendment to the Star Kingdom’s Constitution, approximately one-third of the planetary surface belongs to the treecat clans in perpetuity.

Sphinx’s major industries are mining, forestry, and animal husbandry. Industry has been slow to develop but is now beginning to make considerable ground. Planetary population as of the 1920 PD census (291 AL) is approximately 1.1 billion humans and twelve million treecats.

Sphinx is orbited by Her Majesty’s Space Station Vulcan, the second largest construction and commerce node in the home system, as well as two small moons, Perseus and Bellerophon.





Gryphon (Manticore-B V)

Radius: 5,939 km

Gravity: 1.05 G

Orbit Period: 615.51 T-days

Sidereal Day: 22.71 hours

Hydrosphere: 51%



Of the three habitable planets in the Manticore Binary System, Gryphon’s diameter, mass and planetary density are the closest to Earth’s. It is only borderline habitable, however, due to the slight hydrosphere and parts of its continental interiors are nearly Martian in their arid beauty.

Gryphon is a world of extremes. While the hydrosphere covers a relatively small percentage of its surface, its oceans are comparatively deep, providing the thermal reservoir that makes Gryphon habitable even with the combination of extreme axial tilt and large orbital radius. The end result is a rugged “continental” climate with extremely cold winters and, relatively speaking, scorching summers.

Gryphon has trade-worthy concentrations of rare earth elements and fissionable materials, but is otherwise mineral-poor. More than two hundred kilometers from the coasts, the land is dry for half the local year, then drenched as the fall rains come, which are followed by a hard freeze. Gryphon’s stark beauty, mountainous terrain, and excellent skiing make the recreation industry a primary contributor to the planetary economy. The planet is also home to a disproportionately robust planetary industrial infrastructure, partly because of ease of access to the Unicorn Belt and the Royal Manticoran Navy’s policy of basing much of its primary R&D complex there and producing many of its prototypes in Gryphon’s shipyards. As of 1920 PD, Gryphon had a planetary population of no more than six hundred million.

Her Majesty’s Space Station Weyland orbits Gryphon. It is significantly smaller than both Hephaestus and Vulcan, with an average population of just over three hundred thousand. Since the beginning of the war it has been closed to all civilian traffic. Gryphon has a single large moon, named Egg, which produces extreme tides on its deep, narrow oceans.



Unicorn Belt

The Unicorn Belt is the primary resource extraction location in the Manticore Binary System, being both the innermost and richest of the three asteroid belts in the Manticore-B subsystem. Just outside the hyper limit, at any given time there are at least twenty resource extraction motherships working their way around the belt, each with dozens of ore boats serving its needs.

Total Belter population as of 1920 PD was approximately three hundred million.



The Manticore Wormhole Junction



The Manticore Wormhole Junction, the largest wormhole junction so far discovered, has secondary termini at no less than seven other star systems. The “reach” of those termini give the Junction a critical location in the wormhole network, which has made it indispensable to the Manticore System’s thriving economy. A trip from the Core to the Verge via the wormhole, for example, could reduce travel time by upwards of six months as compared to making the same voyage through hyper-space. This generates substantial savings in operating costs and permits carriers to make many more voyages in the same time window.

Those advantages have allowed a star system with less than one-fifth the population of the Sol System to grow to a Gross System Product equal to seventy-eight percent that of the Sol System by 1900 PD and to exceed it comfortably by 1920, despite the strain of a major war against a far larger adversary. This is possible in no small part because the combined termini of the Junction directly cover an irregular volume of space over a thousand light-years across its widest point. The proximity to other wormholes and their warp bridges extends the Junction’s “reach” still further, however. For example, it would take 18.5 T-months for a freighter in the delta bands to make the 1,680-light-year voyage from Basilisk to the system of Mullins on the far side of the Solarian League. By way of the Junction and the warp bridge connecting Mullins to the Titania System, 116 light-years from Beowulf, the same ship can make the same trip in only thirty-eight days, or less than seven percent of the longer time. The implications for the transport of freight and passengers are apparent, and those same implications apply to the transportation of information, helping to explain Manticore’s emergence as the explored galaxy’s premier banking and financial markets center.

The wormhole nexus lies 412 light-minutes from Manticore A. First transit was made in 1585 PD, to Beowulf, followed within a few years by Trevor’s Star and Hennesy, and, over the years since by Gregor, Matapan, Basilisk, and most recently, Lynx.





Substantial levels of Crown revenue are directly derived from Junction usage fees and service fees from infrastructure usage, but the Junction also underpins a banking and financial market, dependent upon information flow through the Junction, which constitutes a very significant percentage of the total Manticoran economy. Junction fees are computed based on a fixed base transit fee, applicable to all vessels and modified by type of ship, size of ship, cargo carried or passengers embarked, and the normal-space distance between the termini used. Maritime law currently recognizes three types of commercial vessels: courier, passenger carrier, and freighter. Couriers are charged the base fee at a small multiplier. Freighters and passenger carriers pay an additional fee based on the “empty” tonnage of the ship, plus a surcharge per ton of cargo or passenger embarked, and all vessels are assessed an additional fee equal to 2.5 percent per light-century of normal-space distance covered in the transit. (That is, for the four hundred seventy-five light-years between Manticore and Beowulf, the total fee multiplier would be roughly 15 percent.)

Even with the increase in usage fees due to the Star Empire’s need to fund a war, the savings are still sufficiently compelling that traffic through the Junction has done nothing but increase. The expansion of the Junction’s “reach” through its newly discovered termini, plus the opening of additional hyper bridges in several spots around the Solarian League’s periphery, helps to account for much of the increased usage. At the same time, the sixty-percent discount on transit fees for Manticoran-owned and -registered vessels has simultaneously forced Solarian shipping houses to cut prices to remain competitive and driven more and more of the galaxy’s shipping under the Manticoran flag, increasing Manticore’s share of the galactic merchant marine. This has fanned long-standing resentment on the part of many Solarians, who feel that the Star Kingdom of Manticore has long used the Junction’s leverage to increase the size of its own merchant fleet at the expense of other star nations, including the Solarian League.

In addition to usage fees, an entire sub-economy has sprung up specifically to service the activity tied to Junction traffic. While not flowing directly into the Crown’s coffers, revenue is still generated indirectly via various taxes. A large number of platforms providing warehousing and transshipment stations, maintenance and refueling facilities, and financial offices are located in the vicinity of the Junction. The majority of these platforms (which must be equipped with station keeping drive capability in order to maintain position with the Junction) are owned by one or more of the Manticoran cartels, sometimes with participation by one or more of the Solarian transstellars, although the Star Kingdom has pursued a deliberate policy to discourage outright non-Manticoran ownership of such facilities. Despite that, there is room for smaller players who tend to specialized markets, such as the foodstuffs trade or environmentally controlled storage. In addition, the Junction makes the Manticore Binary System a logical shipbuilding hub, and the Star Kingdom’s commercial shipyards are among the largest and most efficient in the known galaxy. Indeed, a sobering percentage of humanity’s total merchant fleet, and especially of its more modern units, is the product of Manticoran builders.

The sheer volume of traffic through the Junction also means that even though emergencies are low-probability events, they nonetheless happen on a frequent basis. Junction search-and-rescue capabilities are among the galaxy’s best, and its service platforms can handle virtually any urgent refit. For those without a pressing issue, the stations can provide environmental replenishment, and a large number of “rest and recreation” platforms offer temporary lodging and entertainment facilities for crews and passengers on layover.

Physical goods are not the only thing shipped through the wormhole. As already noted, the Junction is also a natural focal point for the galaxy’s financial institutions. A number of banks and financial firms have major branches located on stations around the Junction, on one or more of the major inner-system habitats, or on the planet Manticore itself. A large fleet of dispatch vessels, many owned by the firms themselves, stand ready to carry encrypted fund transfers rapidly anywhere in the galaxy, via the wormhole network. The banks also facilitate credit voucher redemptions and currency exchanges. If money is the lifeblood of the galaxy, then the Manticoran Wormhole Junction could be considered its heart.

Management of the wormhole is provided by the Manticoran Astro Control Service (ACS). While responsible for all traffic in the Manticore System and its termini-connected systems, ACS is primarily concentrated around the Junction due to the high volume of traffic. While ACS is a civilian service, it does coordinate with the Royal Manticoran Navy in order to track traffic in the system, with the RMN enforcing ACS’s traffic control and conducting customs inspections. As a secondary responsibility, ACS also controls intrasystem civilian search-and-rescue craft for any space-based emergency response.



The Old Star Kingdom



The Old Star Kingdom consists of the Manticore Binary System along with the Basilisk System, Trevor’s Star System and Lynx System. All three secondary members anchor their respective ends of the Manticore Wormhole Junction and were added before the Star Kingdom formally became the Star Empire of Manticore.

The Basilisk System was annexed by Manticore in 1865 PD after the terminus was fully surveyed, but a vicious political squabble over the rights of the native sentient species of the planet Medusa delayed the formal declaration of sovereignty over the entire system. The political fallout after the Havenite attempt to seize the system in 1901 allowed the Cromarty Government to formally annex Basilisk as a member system, with the provision that formal admission of Medusans as full citizens of the Star Kingdom would occur after a fifty-year period. At that time they would be allowed to vote on whether to accept or refuse membership.

San Martin, in the Trevor’s Star System, was a longtime ally of the Star Kingdom until it was conquered by the expanding People’s Republic of Haven in 1883 PD. The system was liberated in 1911 during the First Havenite War and formally requested membership into the Star Kingdom in 1914.

Lynx was the fourth and final member of the Old Star Kingdom, having requested membership in 1919 PD, shortly after the first survey transit of what was eventually called the Lynx Terminus of the Manticore Wormhole Junction. The terminus is anchored near MQ-L-1792-46A, a planetless M8 star approximately four light-years from the Lynx System.



Silesian Confederacy



The decision to partition the Silesian Confederacy was, essentially, an understanding between Queen Elizabeth III and Emperor Gustav XI which recognized the ultimate failure of the Silesian Confederacy as a government.

Arguably, the annexations by the then-Star Kingdom and the Andermani were territory grabs. In the context of their individual and mutual experiences in the Confederacy, however, it is an understandable reaction to the chaos that has reigned almost since the Confederacy was founded. Manticore and the Andermani had provided most of what little stability was present in the area for many decades prior to the partition, expending a great deal of money and many lives in fighting piracy and “privateers” licensed by various breakaway governments. Moreover, the region remained a dangerous potential flashpoint for both star nations. While both have both profited enormously from trade and shipping, the Andermani have long coveted control of Silesia, in no small part because of the way in which Silesian instability tended to spill over onto the Andermani Empire, whose borders lie much closer to the Confederacy. Manticore, with the greater insulation provided by distance but only a single transit away via the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, has traditionally been less than sympathetic to that aspect of the Andermani’s Silesian policy. This has been a source of considerable tension over the years as the Royal Manticoran Navy has traditionally served as the primary counterbalance to Andermani ambitions. Ultimately, Elizabeth realized that agreeing to a division which permitted Emperor Gustav to address those “spillover” issues once and for all was in the interest of the Star Kingdom, given its need to retain the Andermani as an ally. The Silesian government consented to the annexation in 1920 PD and assigned its powers to the respective star nations, although individual system governments were left in place.

The Andermani-administered portion of the former confederation has been subjected to typical Andermani policy. Using the Imperial Andermani Navy (IAN) as the steel fist inside the velvet glove, the Andermani have put an efficient, if not unduly gentle, stop to the piratic depredations and insurrectionary movements. While planetary governments have been left largely in place, the Empire has made it clear to them that membership in the Empire is a privilege they would do best to accept gracefully. Faced with Andermani firmness and the gratitude of system populations no longer subject to cronyism, corruption, and bloodshed, only the most foolish of system governments would dare disagree.

By contrast, the SEM-administered areas have been treated somewhat more gently. By and large, the Star Empire has allowed local governments to continue functioning, subject to the adoption of personal liberties laws matching those of the Manticoran constitution and monitoring by Manticoran Foreign Office advisors. A small number, however, have been placed under direct Manticoran control, with appointive governors, due to special local circumstances, generally related to residual corruption, cronyism, human rights violations, and support for local brigandage. Each star system will be allowed an individual plebiscite on the decision to become full, permanent members of the Star Empire, on approximately the same terms as the Talbott Cluster, pending the completion of certain specifically defined milestones related to human rights, electoral participation, and government and law enforcement transparency. Under the Silesian Protectorate Act as adopted by Parliament, systems which decline to seek admission or fail to meet the required milestone will be retained permanently in protectorate status, although there is provision under the Act for this to be amended.

The occupation is under the jurisdiction of Royal Manticoran Navy (RMN) Admiral Mark Sarnow, serving as Queen Elizabeth’s appointed civilian governor as well as the commanding officer of all RMN units in Silesian space, assisted by Lieutenant Governor Lord James Bannion, Baron Jurgenson, a career Foreign Office diplomat. Accounting for every Confederacy Navy hull has proved difficult due to a combination of the chaotic way in which records were kept and a tendency for Silesian “naval officers” with pre-partition connections to Silesian criminal enterprises to disappear with their ships into the ranks of pirates, smugglers, and other criminal actors. Sarnow has also met some passive resistance in decommissioning obsolescent units, yet the effort continues and has recently begun gathering speed under his skillful direction.

Both the RMN and IAN have been granted the right of hot pursuit into the other’s respective jurisdictions in case of piracy or other military action. The Andermani have also fully recognized the treaty between the Sidemore Republic and the SEM as well as the RMN’s Sidemore Station.



Talbott Quadrant



The Talbott Cluster was long regarded as a galactic backwater which must inevitably be incorporated into the Solarian League. League expansion was predicted to reach the Cluster sometime in the 1930s, and the League had considered it within its sphere of interest for well over half a century, since the Office of Frontier Security’s (OFS’s) establishment of the neighboring Madras Sector in 1862 PD. Due to its location, the Cluster was also of some immediate concern to Mesa, which had interests in the area if only because of simple proximity. Much to the irritation of both Mesa and the OFS, however, a terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction was discovered near the Lynx System in 1919 PD.

This discovery quickly led to Lynx’s successful application for inclusion into the Star Kingdom, followed shortly by plebiscites from each government in the Cluster to decide whether their star nation would also seek Manticoran annexation. Not all star systems within the volume of the Cluster voted to join the Star Kingdom, but representatives of those which did gather in the Spindle System in 1920 to draft a Clusterwide constitution. Although not without controversy or violence, the Talbott Constitutional Convention was relatively straightforward, despite alleged Mesan and OFS attempts to destabilize the cluster to prevent it joining the Manticoran system, and the new constitution was ratified in January 1921.

Because of the astrography and the distances involved (the Lynx Terminus is 612 light-years from the Manticore Binary System) the Cluster’s annexation (as the Talbott Quadrant) prompted the change of the Star Kingdom of Manticore into the Star Empire and the introduction of a federal model of government. The Quadrant is administered by an Imperial Governor (in the person of Lady Dame Estelle Matsuko, Baroness Medusa) as the Crown’s direct representative. It has its own Parliament and executive branch with the Spindle System as Quadrant capital and the location of the RMN’s Talbott Station. By the standards of Manticore, the star nations in the Quadrant are somewhat backward, and income inequality is a problem in several of them. Local governmental forms range from democracies to nations controlled by ruling oligarchies, although most nations have democratically elected governments.



Other Systems



During the buildup and maneuvering preceding the Havenite Wars, the Star Kingdom constructed a number of military bases in both uninhabited and member systems of the Manticoran Alliance. In addition, a number of star systems liberated from the People’s Republic of Haven were occupied, some changing hands several times during the course of the conflicts.

Hancock and Grendelsbane bases are the most notable for their size and importance, though many smaller bases were also established along the front. These bases provide support structure and repair and resupply points as well as a nodal concentration of forces. Other bases, such as Sun-Yat, were captured Havenite forward bases, repurposed for Manticoran use.

Aside from purely military bases in uninhabited star systems, a number of other systems have their own unique treaty arrangements with Manticore, despite not being formal members of the Alliance. Marsh is one such system, with a Manticoran fleet base established originally to keep an eye on the Silesian Confederacy and Anderman Empire.





History



The original colony expedition to Manticore departed Old Earth on October 24, 775 PD, aboard the sublight hibernation ship Jason bound for the Manticore Binary System. Manticore, which lies approximately 512 light-years from Earth, was first confirmed to have planets in 562 PD by the astronomer Sir Frederick Clarke. Its distance was such that the voyage would take 640 years (just over 384 subjective years allowing for relativistic effects), requiring that each colonist be waked from cryosleep for exercise seven times. Accordingly, the colonists were investing about four and a half years of their lives and all their money in the voyage.

Sixty percent of the colonists were Western Europeans, with most of the remainder drawn from the North American Federation, the Caribbean, and a very small minority of ethnic Ukrainians. The total expedition consisted of ninety-three thousand adults and thirty-two thousand minor children.

The “rights” to the system had been purchased at auction from the survey firm of Franchot et Fils, Paris, France, Old Earth. FF, as the firm was known, had an excellent reputation, and its survey ship Suffren had made the same voyage in just twenty years. Suffren’s crew had done FF’s usual professional job, although all data was accompanied by the caution that it would be 650 years out of date when the colonists arrived. FF sold its rights in the Manticore System to the Manticore Colony, Ltd., (MC) for approximately 5.75 billion EuroDollars. As part of the transfer of rights, FF expunged all data on the system from its memory banks, transferring the information to the Solarian International Data Bank’s maximum security files. This was a standard safeguard to protect MC against the occupation of the planet by later expeditions with faster ships, as it was already apparent that advances in hyper travel might well make such protection necessary. It was also recognized that there was no way to guarantee that faster, more capable hyperships would not beat the colonists to Manticore anyway. Accordingly, Roger Winton, President and CEO of MC (who had already been elected Planetary Administrator) opted to establish the Manticore Colony Trust of Zurich (MCT).

The MCT’s purpose was to invest all capital remaining to the MC after mounting the expedition (something under one billion EuroDollars) and use the accrued interest to watch over the colonists’ rights to their new home. It was a wise precaution.





Landing and Early History

1416–1453 PD



When Jason finally arrived in the Manticore System on March 21, 1416 PD, her crew discovered a modest settlement on the planet Manticore, staffed by MCT personnel who also manned the four small Earth-built frigates that protected the system against claim-jumpers. Indeed, so well had the Trust done in the last six centuries, that Manticore found itself with a very favorable bank balance on Old Terra, and the frigates became the first units of the Manticoran System Navy. Moreover, the small MCT presence on Manticore included data banks and carefully selected and trained instructors assigned to update the colonists on the technical advances of the last six centuries. This last was a feature even Winton had not anticipated and he had very good reason to be pleased with his own decisions and the diligence, foresight, and imagination with which he and a succession of MCT managers had discharged their duties.

Two centuries later, the MCT funds on Old Terra provided the initial capitalization of the Royal Bank of Manticore, and it has been argued that the initial experience with the MCT had a great deal to do with the Star Kingdom of Manticore’s farsighted enlightened self-interest where management of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction is concerned. Despite occasional detours, the Star Kingdom has always had a tradition of long-term, forward-looking economic and fiscal policies. The MCT remains in existence even today, managing Manticoran economic and governmental affairs on Old Terra, although it is no longer the financial mega-giant it once was.

A notable side effect of the emergence of the impeller drive and Warshawski sail was the emergence of both interstellar piracy and warfare. The region in which Manticore was settled had few close neighbors, and the colony government used some of their bank balance to purchase a squadron of Solarian-built destroyers, and hire the personnel to crew them.

It was well that they had that foresight. Less than two decades later, the nascent Manticore System Navy fought its first battle against advanced units of the Free Brotherhood, a wandering band of nomads and raiders that had begun migrating through the galaxy aboard a fleet of huge hyper transports accompanied by a veritable horde of light warships. Although no match for a well-organized multi-star imperium, the Free Brotherhood had wreaked havoc with many single-system polities and made the error of thinking it could do the same thing to Manticore.

The first battle occurred in the uninhabited Megan System, 8.4 light-years from Manticore, when two Manticoran frigates on a survey mission were attacked by advance scouts for the Brotherhood. MSNS Triumph was destroyed with all hands, but her gallant resistance bought time for the badly damaged MSNS Defiant to escape back to Manticore. When an aroused Manticore proved to be a much tougher customer than their normal victims, the Brotherhood moved towards the Haven Sector in search of easier prey.





The Plague Years

1464–1496 PD



The initial bid for Manticore had been so high for two reasons. One was that the G0/G2 binary was highly unusual—indeed, unique—in having no less than three planets suitable for human life. The second was that Manticore and Sphinx, the two habitable planets orbiting the G0 stellar component, were extremely Earth-like. Although each had its own unique biosphere, survey reports indicated that terrestrial life forms would find it unusually easy to adapt, and so it proved. Terran food crops did well and while the local flora and fauna could not provide all essential dietary elements, much of it was digestible by terrestrial life forms. Thus, terraforming requirements were extraordinarily modest, consisting of little more than the need to seed food crops and selected terrestrial grasses to support imported herbivores. Unfortunately, that very ease of adaptation had a darker side and Manticore proved one of the very few extra-terrestrial systems to possess microorganisms which could prey on humans.

The culprit was a pathogen—or, rather, a small family of pathogens—that were similar to human coronaviruses and had been missed by the original survey team. Some virologists argue that it was not, in fact, missed but evolved in the six centuries between the initial survey and the arrival of the colonists. Whatever the truth of the matter, the pathogen, when it combined with human coronaviruses, was deadly, producing a condition analogous to simultaneous virulent influenza and pneumonia in its victims. Worse, it proved resistant to all existing medical technology and over thirty years were to pass before a successful vaccine was found.

In those three decades, almost sixty percent of the original colonists died. Their Manticore-born children fared better against the disease, experiencing a generally less severe manifestation of it. Without the cushion provided by the MCT funds on Old Earth and the evolution of the Warshawski sail hypership, the entire expedition would almost certainly have come to grief.

The Plague was initially restricted to Manticore itself. Colonization of Sphinx continued but under rigorously applied quarantine conditions as a “fallback” position for the colony as a whole. Sphinx was seen as a “citadel” from which the star system might be resettled, should worse come to worst, after the Plague was finally defeated. Unfortunately, the quarantine procedures failed, and in 1463 PD, the Plague “jumped” to Sphinx with equally catastrophic consequences for the colonists living there.





Founding of the Star Kingdom

1471–1542 PD



Under the circumstances, the colony found itself in urgent need of additional homesteaders. These were recruited from Old Earth, another process made much easier by the existence of the MCT, but the original colonists, concerned about retaining control of their own colony, adopted a radically new constitution before opening their doors to immigration.

Roger Winton had been reelected continuously to the post of Planetary Administrator and served superbly throughout the early settlement period and the Plague crisis. He was now an elderly man whose wife and two Terran-born sons had died of the Plague but he remained vigorous and his Manticore-born daughter Elizabeth showed promise at least equal to his. At fifty-three, she was President of the Board of Directors, making her effectively vice-president of the colony, and one of the young colony’s preeminent jurists. Because she had a large and thriving brood of second-generation Manticoran children and her family had served so outstandingly, a convention of colony shareholders converted the Corporation’s elective board into a constitutional monarchy and crowned Roger Winton King Roger I of Manticore on August 1, 1471 PD.

It was a post he was to enjoy for only three years before his death in one of the secondary outbreaks of the Plague, but his daughter succeeded him as Queen Elizabeth I in a smooth and popular transfer of power. The House of Winton has ruled the Manticore System ever since. Simultaneously, the surviving “First Shareholders” and their descendants, who held title to vast tracts of land, acquired patents of nobility to go with their wealth and the hereditary aristocracy of Manticore was born. (It should be noted that the term “lands,” under the original colonial charter—and, indeed, under current Manticoran law—refers to much more than actual land on the surface of one of the Manticore Binary System’s habitable planets. It also references mineral rights in the system’s asteroid belts, portions of the broadcast spectrum, etc.)

The new wave of immigrants arriving in the wake of the Plague comprised three distinct classes of citizens. Each immigrant received a land rights credit, the value of which precisely equaled the cost of a second-class passenger ticket from his planet of origin to Manticore. Any individual capable of paying his own passage received the full credit upon arrival. Those unable to pay their passages could draw upon MCT for a dollar amount equal to their land rights credit to cover the difference between their own resources and the cost of passage. An immigrant whose resources exceeded the cost of his passage could invest the surplus, paying fifty percent of the “book” price for additional land. The most affluent immigrants thus became “Second Shareholders,” with estates which, in some cases, rivaled those of the original shareholders and entitled them to patents of nobility junior only to those of the existing aristocracy. Those immigrants who were able to retain their base land right or perhaps enlarge upon it slightly became “yeomen,” free landholders with voting rights beginning one Manticoran year (1.73 T-years) after their arrival. Those who completely exhausted their land rights credit to buy passage to Manticore were known as “zero-balance” immigrants and did not become full citizens until such time as they had become well-enough established to pay taxes for five consecutive Manticoran years (8.7 T-years). While all Manticoran subjects were equal in the eyes of the law, whether enfranchised or not, there were distinct social differences between shareholders, yeomen, and zero-balancers. Even today there is greater prestige in claiming a yeoman as a first ancestor than in claiming a zero-balance ancestor. And, of course, direct descent from a full shareholder is considered by many to be the most prestigious of all.

Despite the apparent stratification of the Star Kingdom’s social classes, life was for the most part quiet, peaceful and productive. Nearly every member of society was dedicated to rebuilding the personnel infrastructure laid waste by the Plague. The physical plant was essentially untouched, and the massive holes left in the workforce by the disease allowed and encouraged people to rise to their highest skill levels, thus creating a self-reinforcing meritocracy for the young star nation. This growth in the civilian side of the economy was not matched with growth on the military side, however, as the Star Kingdom attempted to avoid many of the ills of other star nations. Parliament was more willing to spend money on education then on weapons. For many years this was not a problem as the Star Kingdom was able to grow unmolested due to the absence of hostile neighbors. This idyllic state, however, would not last forever.





Birth of the Royal Manticoran Navy

1543–1584 PD



The Navy’s losses to the Plague, especially among shipboard personnel, were even higher than among the population at large and making those losses good was a long, hard task, even with the assisted immigration programs. Moreover, a time of relative peace and concentration on other priorities left the Manticoran public ambivalent, at best, about the Navy, and the first of what would be many bitter debates in Parliament concerning the fate of the post-Plague Navy began.

The Manticoran System Navy’s strength was at its nadir due to lack of personnel when it formally became the Royal Manticoran Navy in 1504 PD. Half of the newly reorganized RMN’s ships were in mothballs, those on active service were severely undermanned, and the Navy had to fight both to demonstrate its relevance and for the funding to train an entirely new core of officers and enlisted personnel.

At the end of the aided immigration period, many of the service’s remaining warships were almost a century old. With no local shipbuilding programs to replace aging units as they were withdrawn from service, a decline in ship strength was inevitable, and the Navy’s total effective strength was less than two dozen ships and falling. Even authorized construction was often delayed, as in the case of the laydown of the new Burgundy class of system defense destroyers originally scheduled for 1536 PD. Given the Navy’s parlous state, Parliament granted the last six Triumph-class battlecruisers (later reclassified as heavy cruisers) a last-minute reprieve by allowing the service to retain them for an additional decade beyond their originally scheduled decommissioning date in light of the Burgundy’s delayed delivery.

That reprieve proved extremely fortunate barely two years later when a force of mercenaries hired by Axelrod of Terra attacked the Manticore home system. The attack came without warning and the Navy was hard pressed to mount an effective defense. The RMN’s officer corps, hobbled by inexperience and a pre-attack sense of apathy, managed to drive off the attackers in a short, bloody engagement, but losses were high. Indeed, the defense probably would have failed had Axelrod’s mercenaries not expected to meet a far weaker force.

Examination of one of the ships captured after the battle demonstrated that Axelrod had been unaware of the delayed disposal of the battlecruisers, and the surprise of finding six battlecruisers still in commission proved fatal to their plans. The same examination also revealed the true reason for the attack: Axelrod had realized the Manticore Binary System was almost certainly home to a major wormhole junction. Nobody in Manticore had ever anticipated that possibility, but the Navy grasped both the potential benefits (and drawbacks) almost immediately. It took somewhat longer for Parliament and the general public to realize the same things, but the attack proved the need for a strong Navy and reawakened public support for the fleet. Enlistment rates exploded almost overnight and the first major naval buildup in over a century began only a few years later.





The Manticore Wormhole Junction

1585–1723 PD



While the possible presence of a wormhole had been public knowledge ever since the Battle of Manticore, actually locating it and charting it took many years. Although the existence of wormholes had been theorized as early as 1391 PD, the possibility that they might be used as a means of effectively instantaneous faster-than-light (FTL) travel had not been realized until 1429 and the first successful manned transit had not occurred until 1447. Despite the century of research between their discovery and Axelrod’s attack on the Star Kingdom in 1543 PD, no other multi-terminus wormhole had ever been discovered. Wormhole theory and astrogation were still in the early stages of formulation, and most theoreticians had dismissed the possibility of such phenomena as possessing a very low order of probability. Even after the Manticore Wormhole Junction’s discovery had forced a reconsideration of that belief, its sheer size and strength made the task of properly surveying it a formidable one.

As a result, the first transit did not occur until 1585 PD, when the survey ship Pathfinder successfully passed through the Junction and emerged from its terminus in the Beowulf System. This direct link into the very heart of the Solarian League provided an almost overnight boost to the Manticoran economy. Discovery of the Trevor’s Star and Hennesy termini followed shortly thereafter, expanding the reach of the Star Kingdom’s merchant marine far in excess of its own import requirements. Within a few years Manticore went from relying on Solarian hulls to bring it the most basic of necessities to building its own ships and establishing a dominant position in the galaxy’s carrying trade, transporting finished goods and passengers from the Core Worlds to the Verge—especially to the rapidly growing Haven Sector—and raw materials back to the core worlds. The Junction fees, while small per ship, quickly accumulated. Because they were virtually pure profit, the Star Kingdom’s economy rapidly improved.

In 1647, the survey ship Artemis made a first transit through the Gregor Terminus, opening up yet another shipping route, this one providing access to both the Andermani Empire and the Silesian Confederacy. Four T-years later, in 1651 PD, King Roger II signed the Cherwell Anti-Slavery Convention, pledging the Star Kingdom, along with the Republic of Haven and other signatories, to cooperate in suppressing the genetic slave trade and the RMN added that obligation to its missions. The Navy had been in the process of steady expansion over the last century in response to the need to protect the growing merchant fleet as well as the home system. The opportunities and the threats posed by the existence of the Junction were being analyzed, understood and incorporated into naval thinking and planning, and it was just as well that was true.

In 1660 PD, Manticore became embroiled with the Ranier System near the Hennesy Terminus of the Manticore Junction. Ranier was little more than a pirate enclave which had been raiding commerce around the relatively unsettled Phoenix Cluster. No local star system had the power to deal with the Ranierians—indeed, Phoenix itself had been forced to pay tribute to them—and the pirates saw no reason they should not extort the same payments from Manticoran merchantmen. Faced with this situation, the RMN deployed heavy escort forces and fought numerous cruiser actions against Ranierian pirates between 1660 and 1662 PD. This effort culminated in Commodore Edward Saganami’s punitive expedition against Ranier itself with the first five modern Manticoran battlecruisers under his command, which ended the Ranier War by terminating the government of the Ranier System later that same year.

In 1669 PD, Manticore began amassing evidence of governmental connivance in the growing piracy problem in Silesia. At this time, the RMN still thought of itself as primarily a system defense fleet and Saganami’s Ranier expedition as something of a flash in the pan that was unlikely to be repeated. Queen Adrienne felt differently, however, and attacks by those pirates on trade with that region via the Gregor Terminus were costing not simply ships but the lives of her subjects, as well. In 1670 PD, she directed her Admiralty to take steps to protect the Star Kingdom’s commerce in Silesia.

At the time, the involvement of Solarian interests with the region’s pirates and their targeted attacks on Manticoran shipping was not suspected. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) would learn only later that Manpower Incorporated, apparently out of an awareness of how the RMN’s enforcement of the Cherwell Convention would hamper its slave-trading (and other illegal) activities in Silesia, had begun providing covert support through its Solarian transtellar associates in an effort to drive Manticoran trade out of the Confederacy. Should the pirates fail to fully accomplish that task, they might at least keep the still small RMN too preoccupied convoying merchant ships to go slaver-hunting.

Unaware of Solarian involvement, Saganami, the hero of the Ranier War, was ordered to assemble a force for the purpose of proactive, search-and-destroy operations against pirates in the Silesian Sector. His operations were an unqualified success, destroying dozens of pirate ships and many bases before the Silesian government—with heavy technical support from Manpower—made a covert attempt to either destroy or discredit him. These efforts resulted in the Battle of Trautman’s Star and then in the Battle of Carson, in which Saganami and the entire crew of his flagship were lost in the successful defense of a convoy against overwhelming odds.

The SKM’s response to the Battle of Carson, unfortunately for the Silesians (and Manpower), was the exact opposite of the one they had anticipated. Instead of being horrified and convinced Silesia was simply too dangerous an area for Manticoran trade, the public—and the Royal Manticoran Navy—had been given an iconic hero. HMS Nike’s last action became a rallying point which galvanized the entire Star Kingdom into wholehearted support for the Silesia mission. In the end, the RMN dispatched a complete squadron of battleships to systematically locate and destroy pirate bases throughout the entire eastern portion of the Confederacy. Following the successful eradication of piracy in the region, the battleships—supported by two divisions of dreadnoughts—made a “courtesy call” on the Confederacy’s capital system to escort the new Manticoran ambassador to Silesia. In the face of that visit, the Confederacy signed a most-favored star nation trade agreement with the SKM—and the Cherwell Convention—in 1674.

Even as Manticore’s economy expanded following the discovery of the Junction, the Star Kingdom’s constitutional system of government prospered, blessed by a series of strong monarchs and a steadily growing population base. The constitution contained a strong “Declaration of Fundamental Rights,” but the franchise remained limited to citizens who had paid taxes for at least five consecutive Manticoran years. The policies encouraging immigration with land rights credits were ended after a period of fifty years, having served their purpose most effectively, and it was no longer possible for an immigrant to become an instant shareholder or gain the franchise immediately upon arrival. The steadily expanding economy and one of the best educational systems in the explored galaxy continued to offer vast opportunity for the talented and the hardworking, however, and the SKM had become a bustling meritocracy which welcomed those eager to take advantage of the opportunities it offered. The result was a remarkably stable society, despite the rapid growth of its economy and the upswing in immigration following the discovery of the Junction.

The only real challenge to the Manticoran monarchy came in 1721 PD with the so-called “Gryphon Uprising,” which remains the most serious internal dissent the Star Kingdom has been forced to confront. Gryphon, the least congenial of the three habitable planets of the Manticore System, had, by far, the smallest share of First Shareholder families. The bulk of its aristocracy came from the Second Shareholders, who, for the most part, had substantially less credit than First Shareholders and so received smaller “Clear Grants” (that is, land to which clear title was granted prior to improvements by the owner/tenant). The Crown, however, had established the principle of “Crown Range” (land in the public domain and free for the use of any individual) to encourage emigration to Gryphon. By 1715 PD, the population of Gryphon had grown to the level set under the Crown Range Charter of 1490, so the Crown began phasing out the Crown Range, granting title on the basis of improvements made. That’s when the trouble began. Yeomen who hoped to become independent ranchers, farmers, or miners claimed that the planetary nobility was using strong-arm tactics to force them off the land. Something very like a shooting war erupted between these “squatters” and “the children of shareholders.” After two years of increasingly bloody unrest, the Gryphon Range Commission was established in 1717 with extraordinary police powers and a mandate to suppress open violence and reach a settlement. Its final finding was that there was a sound foundation to the yeomen’s original complaints and the Manticoran Army, having pacified and stabilized the situation, then oversaw a closely regulated privatization of the Crown Range. There remains some hostility between small landholders and certain of the noble families, although it has become something of a tradition rather than a source of active hostility for the majority of the population.





The Calm Before the Storm

1723–1857 PD



The period from 1723 to 1857 was a time of relative peace for the Star Kingdom although events beyond its borders were later to have profound consequences for the House of Winton and all its subjects. In particular, the Republic of Haven’s official transformation into the People’s Republic of Haven, although of little apparent concern to Manticore, would eventually present the SKM with a fundamental threat to its very existence.

For two centuries, the RMN’s attention was directed primarily to commerce protection and anti-slavery operations. As the power that claimed sovereignty over the Manticore Junction, the Star Kingdom felt a degree of responsibility to protect the trade of other systems as well as its own, and the RMN found itself involved in several punitive expeditions (none on the scale of the Silesia Mission). Although some of the weaker star nations in Manticore’s growing sphere of interest resented the SKM’s “interference” in their affairs, most also recognized how much their own peace and prosperity during this period owed to Manticore’s protection against outside threats.

In 1752 PD Manticore fought a brief, almost bloodless, war with Trevor’s Star over the punitive tariffs the near-bankrupt San Martin government had decided to impose on all traffic through its terminus of the Junction in violation of The Treaty of 1590 PD. The RMN followed a deep-space approach with half its battle fleet rather than using the wormhole route the Trevor’s Star government on San Martin had assumed it would use. The war ended with a single, sharp engagement around the planet. As part of the peace terms, Manticore, recognizing the fiscal extremity which had driven San Martin to levy its tariffs, negotiated a “most favored star system” trade agreement with them. Shaken by its experience, the war government of San Martin brought the Trevor’s Star budget under control and greatly reduced welfare payments, and the system became one of the few systems of the Haven Sector that had a sound, thriving economy.

Following the “war” with Trevor’s Star, Manticore returned to the normal affairs of expanding and protecting its commerce and the Junction’s ever-growing traffic. Over the course of the next century, the Manticoran shipbuilding industry became the most efficient and productive in the known galaxy, and the advantages of the Junction also transformed the Star Kingdom into one of the galaxy’s largest and most important financial hubs. The resulting prosperity raised Manticoran per-capita income to a level unsurpassed even by the Sol System itself, and in 1829, first-generation prolong reached the Star Kingdom, with all its promises and implications for the future.

In many ways, this period was the “Golden Age” of Manticore, yet clouds were gathering on the horizon. In 1793 the People’s Republic of Haven issued a new constitution which made the Legislaturalists its hereditary rulers, and in 1794 the PRH, despite a huge and growing national debt, began a systematic, sustained military expansion. Initially described as a “public works project,” the enlarged People’s Navy’s actual purpose became clear in 1846, with the PRH’s first forcible conquests of neighboring star systems.





King Roger’s Buildup

1857–1883 PD



In early 1856 PD, survey ships successfully charted the Junction terminus in what became known as the Basilisk System, 210 light-years to galactic north of Manticore, and about the same distance from Havenite space. The following year the aging Queen Samantha II passed away in her sleep leaving her son Crown Prince Roger to ascend to the throne as King Roger III, the first prolong recipient to take the crown, on September 24, 1857 PD.

King Roger III was an astute student of galactic history and politics and it had been clear to him even before 1846 that the PRH posed a threat not only to its immediate neighbors but to Manticore as well. The SKM’s wealth must make it an attractive target, and as the only star nation in the Haven Sector with the potential to match its military power it was a threat which must be neutralized. With two termini (Trevor’s Star and Basilisk) already within reach of the PRH’s expanding military the Star Kingdom’s vulnerability was obvious to him, as was its need to build up its ability to protect not only its commerce and the Home System, but also to defend the Junction itself.

Roger, a gifted politician as well as an experienced naval officer, realized the Conservative Association and the alliance of the Liberals and Progressives in both houses of Parliament would oppose any rapid and massive expansion of the fleet. Queen Samantha had begun a gradual buildup, largely on Roger’s advice, despite that opposition, and following his own coronation, he immediately began building on that foundation. Aware that Manticore would never be able to match the sheer tonnage the far larger PRH could produce and unwilling to accept the plateaued, virtually stagnant state of galactic naval technology and doctrine, he adopted a two-pronged approach.

The first prong was an open, public increase in the Navy’s size, expanding the capacity of the major naval yards aboard the space stations Hephaestus, Vulcan and Weyland and slowly growing the number of ships available to it despite a number of often ugly confrontations with the Opposition. The second, highly secret prong was what became known as “Project Gram,” a highly covert R&D program designed to overcome the Star Kingdom’s quantitative disadvantage by providing it with a decisive qualitative superiority.

Thus began a fifty-year “cold war” between Manticore and the People’s Republic. Roger’s strategy for winning that cold war largely depended on three of the Star Kingdom’s greatest strengths: the quality of its educational system and the innovative R&D it supported; its enormous, far-reaching merchant marine (with ties to both the Navy and to various industrial cartels throughout the Star Kingdom); and the vast wealth generated by Manticoran economy and from the transit fees from the Junction. Despite those advantages and his own role as head of government, as well as head of state, Roger was never able to move as quickly and decisively as he would truly have preferred. He was a powerful and effective monarch, but it took him almost twenty T-years to build the decisive political majority he required in Parliament, and especially in the House of Lords. It is a testimonial to his abilities as statesman and politician that he did achieve it and that he passed it intact to his daughter upon his own untimely death.

Despite opposition from some members of the aristocracy, King Roger’s buildup increased the RMN from a mere twelve ships of the wall at the time of his coronation to nearly eighty ships of the wall by his death.





Queen Elizabeth III

1883–1905 PD



Roger III was killed in a grav ski accident on August 24, 1883 PD. His daughter was crowned Queen Elizabeth III, supported by a regency until she reached the majority age of twenty-one T-years in 1886. Contrary to the expectations of many members of Parliament, Queen Elizabeth not only continued but accelerated her father’s naval expansion programs.

Over the next twenty T-years, hostility between Manticore and Haven deepened, especially after the Havenite conquest of Trevor’s Star gave the PRH control of that system’s Junction terminus. During the same time period, as the stakes and the inevitability of an eventual military confrontation became ever clearer, the SKM’s internal political struggles intensified. The isolationism of the Conservative Association, which had initially generated at least grudging support for the Navy’s buildup, turned into a sense of profound alarm as the Conservatives recognized Elizabeth’s grim determination to continue her father’s work, further strengthen the Navy, and expand the anti-Haven Manticoran Alliance Roger had envisioned and begun. They came to view her efforts and her obvious readiness to confront the PRH openly as a dangerous and provocative eagerness to do so. Their alarm brought them into alliance with the Liberals and Progressives in their efforts to block or slow military appropriations. Fortunately, Elizabeth proved as skilled a politician as her father had been. She and her prime minister, the Duke of Cromarty, maintained and strengthened the partnership, based on Cromarty’s own Centrists and the Crown Loyalists, which Roger had forged and continued their war preparations despite the Opposition’s vociferous resistance.

The first shooting incident between Manticoran and Havenite forces occurred in the Basilisk System in 1900 PD with the destruction of the armed merchant ship PMSS Sirius by the light cruiser HMS Fearless (Commander Honor Harrington, commanding) following a failed attempt by Havenite operatives to incite a general native uprising on the planet of Medusa. A second incident occurred two T-years later in the Yeltsin’s Star System, when RMN forces (once again under Captain Honor Harrington’s command) successfully stymied a Havenite-backed attack on the planet Grayson by the planet of Masada in the neighboring Endicott System. These incidents further increased the tensions between the two star nations.

The next few years saw a hardening of positions as Haven expanded into neighboring systems while Manticore continued to consolidate its alliance of smaller single-system star nations along the front. Both sides built a number of fleet bases and established nodal concentrations of warships and both realized it was only a matter of time before a shooting war began.





The First Havenite War

1905–1918 PD



The long-awaited catastrophe began in 1905 when the People’s Republic launched a deliberate, widespread, undeclared series of attacks on the Star Kingdom designed to draw the RMN into dispersing its strength in response. The initial attacks were followed with a two-pronged offensive directed against Yeltsin’s Star and the RMN fleet station in the Hancock System. The intention was to strike both of these nodal points in overwhelming strength in order to defeat the forces stationed there in detail, destroying them and substantially weakening the Navy before the decisive campaign. Both attacks were thrown back with heavy Havenite casualties, however, and the shock of the PRH’s first serious military defeats had profound consequences. Acting quickly and decisively in the wake of the disastrous news from the front, Rob S. Pierre and his Committee of Public Safety were able to assassinate Hereditary President Sydney Harris and overthrow the Legislaturalist regime in a bloody coup.

For the next ten years, the war raged. Initially the RMN won battle after battle against the demoralized Havenite Navy, which had lost the bulk of its experienced senior officers to the Pierre Coup and was badly hampered by the control of “people’s commissioners” who had little or no understanding of naval warfare. The RMN made deep inroads into Havenite territory, but the People’s Republic gradually recovered and the Manticoran advances began to slow. Finally in 1910 PD, the RMN’s Sixth Fleet under the command of Admiral White Haven was able to liberate the Trevor’s Star System, thus regaining control of all of the termini of the Junction. Three T-years later, in 1913, a new president, Jesus Ramirez, was elected under the restored, prewar San Martin Constitution following his escape from the prison planet of Cerberus in company with Admiral Honor Harrington, and in June of 1914, Trevor’s Star sought annexation by the Star Kingdom of Manticore.

In the meantime, however, a brief period of stability in the otherwise volatile political situation in the PRH resulted in the nomination of Admiral Esther McQueen to the post of Secretary of War. Under McQueen’s guidance, the PN scored its first offensive victories of the war, unsettling the Alliance and throwing its military plans into chaos.

The momentum shifted once again, however, when White Haven’s Eighth Fleet moved on Barnett in the final push towards the Haven System itself. A new generation of weapons, the fruit of Roger III’s Project Gram and the much later Project Ghost Rider, heralded the final turning point of the war, and McQueen’s death after a failed coup attempt threw the PN once again into disarray.

Following these successes Queen Elizabeth made a state visit to Grayson. During the visit, she survived an assassination attempt that claimed the life of Prime Minister Cromarty. With his death, the Centrists’ alliance with the non-aligned peers in the House of Lords (which had depended in no small part on Cromarty’s personal relationships) fell apart amid fears that Elizabeth planned to reduce and restrict the power of the Lords. Baron High Ridge was able to form a government of Conservatives, Liberals, and Progressives who were hostile to the Crown, and the new government immediately accepted a Havenite offer of a ceasefire in place. Shortly after the ceasefire has been signed, a second coup against the Committee of Public Safety, this one led by Admiral Thomas Theismann, succeeded. Theismann restored the old, pre-Legislaturalist Constitution and proclaimed the restoration of the old Republic, but fighting between forces loyal to the Constitution and State Security warlords asserting their loyalty to the Pierre Revolution continued for several years.

For the next five T-years the High Ridge Government deliberately failed to reach a formal peace agreement with the newly restored Republic. More fearful of Elizabeth’s reported plans to reform Parliament than of a technologically outclassed and still divided Haven, High Ridge and his allies preferred to maintain a technical state of war in order to avoid a general parliamentary election and to justify the maintenance of wartime taxation rates. Taking advantage of that revenue stream, High Ridge and his allies diverted funding from the military into their “Building the Peace” initiative, which was intended to bolster the voting strength of their own parties when elections were finally held.

In 1917, a new Junction terminus was located and surveyed, linking the Manticore Binary System to the Talbott Cluster on the far side of the Solarian League.





Birth of an Empire and the Second Havenite War

1918 PD–present



The almost immediate request by the residents of most of the star nations in the Cluster to join the Star Kingdom, mirroring that of the San Martinos after the Trevor’s Star’s liberation, necessitated a modification of the Star Kingdom into the Star Empire. The process has been neither simple nor peaceful, however, and may well pose an existential threat to Manticore’s very existence.

High Ridge and Edward Janacek, his First Lord of the Admiralty, had believed that Manticore’s unchallengeable military lead meant they could not only negotiate in bad faith with Haven but simultaneously draw down the military to fund their efforts to buy public support at the polls.

They were incorrect.

Their fundamental misjudgment was made infinitely worse by a massive intelligence failure which permitted the Republic of Haven to secretly build an entirely new navy, with weapons which largely closed the gap between its own capabilities and those of Manticore. Faced with the evidence of the Republic’s new military capability when that navy’s existence was finally revealed, the High Ridge Government and Janacek Admiralty scrambled desperately to retrieve the situation, but events had taken on a momentum of their own. Following an acrimonious diplomatic exchange in which each side accused the other of negotiating in bad faith and of falsifying diplomatic correspondence, Haven renewed hostilities. Operation Thunderbolt, the Republic of Haven Navy’s initial series of attacks, was devastatingly effective, allowing Haven to recover virtually every system—except Trevor’s Star—which Manticore had taken in the First Havenite War. The same offensive destroyed hundreds of ships being built for the RMN, inflicted heavy losses on many of Manticore’s alliance partners, and brought down the High Ridge Government in disgrace.

Following High Ridge’s fall, the new Grantville Government under William Alexander (newly created Baron Grantville and current leader of the Centrist Party) took up the heartbreaking task of rebuilding the fleet and its technological edge. In an attempt to even the odds, the Star Empire entered into an agreement for the Andermani Empire to join the Alliance and to end the ongoing piracy, civil unrest, and loss of life in Silesia by partitioning the Confederacy between Manticore and the Empire.

In the three years since the resumption of hostilities, the war has shown no sign of abating. Indeed, it has become even more threatening with the Star Empire’s discovery of direct Solarian interference in the annexation of the Talbott Cluster. Captain Aivars Terekhov’s preemptive attack on the Republic of Monica, a Solarian ally, in February 1921 PD, prevented a Monican attempt to seize the entire Cluster and the Lynx Terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction as a Solarian proxy, but only at the risk of open hostilities with the Solarian League, as well as the Republic. The thought of confronting the enormous power of the Solarian League Navy is somewhat mitigated by the evidence that the SLN has lagged far behind the navies of the Haven Sector in terms of weapons technology, but the League remains the largest and most powerful star nation ever to have existed.

Within the Haven Sector itself, however, the pace and scale of combat has only grown still more intense. While Haven held a huge initial quantitative edge at the time it launched Thunderbolt, the technological edge still belonged to Manticore. Although the gap had become far narrower than it had been at the time of Earl White Haven’s offensive in Operation Buttercup, it began to widen once more as weapons research and production which had been stifled under High Ridge and Janacek was urgently resumed. The results of that resumption became manifest in the RMN’s Cutworm Offensives and, especially, the introduction of the Apollo FTL missile control systems.





Government



Constitutional monarchies come in many varieties, with both written and unwritten constitutions, and with monarchs which possess widely varying degrees of actual power. For its part, the constitution of the Star Empire grants its empress very broad authority indeed.





For example, the Constitution grants the Monarch the power to function as both head of state and head of government. Although the written Constitution enshrines a cabinet form of government, headed by a Prime Minister, the unwritten portion of the Constitution established during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign (1489–1521 PD) holds that the Cabinet is the Monarch’s servant and serves at his or her pleasure. The written Constitution provided her with several weapons which aided significantly in her ability to establish that point. Among those weapons, the Constitution specifically provides that when Parliament is hung and no party in the House of Lords can form a majority or coalition government, the Monarch may choose the Prime Minister and instruct him to form a minority government. In fact, under a strict interpretation of the written Constitution, the Monarch is not required to accept a Prime Minister even if he commands a majority in the Lords. In practice, that majority could refuse to support any other candidate for the office, creating an impasse which would paralyze government completely.

The supreme legislative body of the Star Empire will be the Imperial Parliament, which will meet in a new Imperial Hall of Parliament in Landing on Manticore. Based closely on the structure of the original Parliament of the Star Kingdom, but with membership drawn from the entire Empire, the Imperial Parliament is still in the early stages of formation. In the meantime, the Parliament of the Old Star Kingdom continues to act in a caretaker role for the Empire as a whole.

Parliament is bicameral, with an upper house (the House of Lords) and a lower house (the House of Commons). The Constitution requires the Prime Minister to be a member of the House of Lords (and hence a peer) who must receive the endorsement of a majority of his fellow peers to hold the office. This provides him with a base of political power which a wise Monarch does not challenge, since the Crown can accomplish little without the support of Parliament. As a consequence, despite the Monarch’s status as head of government and despite the Crown’s power to dismiss a Prime Minister at will, successful governance requires a partnership between Monarch and Prime Minister. The consequences when the Crown finds itself at odds with a Prime Minister not of its choosing, backed by a powerful majority in the Lords, can be disastrous, as demonstrated by the recent High Ridge Government.





Monarch



The present Monarch is Elizabeth III. Until late 1921 PD, Manticore was officially a kingdom and the Monarch was King or Queen. After the incorporation of the Talbott Quadrant and the formation of the Star Empire, the monarchy adopted the new title of Empress or Emperor while retaining the title of Queen or King of the Old Star Kingdom.

The constitution acknowledges a wide range of executive powers the Monarch may exercise without regard to elected government, collectively referred to as the “Royal Prerogative.” Royal Prerogative is concerned with several areas critical to the government of the Star Empire, including the conduct of foreign affairs, defense, and national security. Most monarchs maintain the tradition of soliciting advice from the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, however, and rarely exercise Royal Prerogative in direct opposition to the will of the government.





Parliament



The Star Kingdom’s House of Lords is the senior and upper house of Parliament. Membership is attained by appointment or letters patent. Membership is composed of three groups: the senior ranked hereditary peers, their immediate heirs, and life peers upon whom voting rights have been bestowed. All three groups may also designate a representative, of their choice, if they are unable to fulfill their rights and duty to the house. (The precise basis upon which peers in the new, Imperial House of Lords will be selected by previously independent star nations with no preexisting hereditary aristocracy is in the process of resolution at this time.) Membership of the Lords as of 1921 PD is 587, and the total membership may be increased by a maximum of only ten percent between general elections of the House of Commons, no newly created peer may assume his or her seat until after the first general election following his elevation, and grants of peerages may be confirmed only by the House of Commons. (Note, however, that the majority of these peerages are also granted “cadet” seats, held by the heir apparent to the peerage. Holders of cadet seats have no vote in their own right in the Lords but act as proxies for the actual peer in his or her absence.) The peers may vote to exclude any peer for any reason and at their own discretion, however.

The Prime Minister must come from among the peers in the House of Lords and command a majority within it. Arguably, an exception was made to this rule when William Alexander became Prime Minister, since although he had been named Baron Grantville he had not yet taken his seat in the Lords as Baron Grantville. The Queen, however, argued that since he had held the cadet seat in the Lords for his brother, Earl White Haven, for many years, he was de facto a member of the Lords and so eligible on that basis until he assumed his seat in his own right. Under the circumstances, no one was inclined to dispute her on this point.

When the Constitution was adopted, converting shareholders into peers of the realm, the membership of the House of Lords was fixed at fifty, with seats granted based on the order in which the original colonists had invested in the expedition. That is, a “baron” who had been among the very early investors (or whose parent or grandparent had been) would be seated in the Lords in preference to a “duke” whose investment had come later. This rule of seniority within the Lords continues to this day, which helps to explain the influence of Michael Janvier, who was “merely” Baron of High Ridge but whose direct ancestor had been only the sixth individual to invest in the colony expedition. In the years since the founding, the number of seats in both the Lords and the Commons have been adjusted several times to reflect the SKM’s growing population base, but even today, not all peers hold seats in the House of Lords, by any means.

The old colonial territorial and administrative districts were also transformed at the time the Constitution was ratified. The existing geographically defined units were retained, but they became duchies, rather than the previous “districts” and the senior noble in each county became its hereditary governor. This created some problems, since the senior peer in one existing “duchy” might be an earl or even a baron, rather than a duke. The constitutional solution adopted was to create the title of “magister,” which applies to the senior peer (and governor) of any duchy, regardless of his hereditary rank. Although one magister may take precedence over another when seated in the House of Lords, all magisters are equal before the law when acting as the administrators of their duchies.

The House of Commons is the junior and lower house of Parliament. Unlike the House of Lords, members of the House of Commons must sit for reelection every four T-years, although the ruling government may call an election anytime earlier. General elections may also be suspended in declared times of emergency, supported by a two-thirds majority in each house, or in time of war, at the discretion of the Government. For elections to the Commons, the planets of the Star Kingdom are divided into constituencies known as boroughs, with one Member of Parliament representing each borough. Membership in the House of Commons is limited to no more than eight hundred, apportioned on a population basis, and fights over boundaries when reapportionment requires boroughs to be redrawn have been among the most bitter of the Star Kingdom’s domestic political battles. Peers cannot stand in elections in the House of Commons, although they may resign their titles of nobility in order to seek election.

Prior to 1919 PD, the House of Lords had the power of the purse, meaning that only it could introduce a finance or budget bill. The House of Commons could propose and pass amendments to the bill, but the House of Lords was empowered to strip them out again without the need for reconciliation, effectively relegating the House of Commons to an advisory role on budgetary matters. The House of Lords would then conduct a vote on the final bill which, if passed, would become law (subject to negation by royal prerogative). This constitutional provision was part of the deliberate effort to see to it that the original colonists and their descendants retained effective political control of the Star Kingdom and, in the view of many Manticorans (including the House of Winton) had long outlived its usefulness by the twentieth century PD. After 1919, the Lords lost the right to create budget or financial bills, which was transferred to the House of Commons, although the Lords have the right to amend and the upper house’s assent is necessary to the final passage of any such bill introduced by the Commons.