Faction:Pirates
 Factions
|
| Pirate Factions | |
|---|---|
| Species | Various |
| Homeworld (Origin) | Various, generally regions with histories of economic or political sub-optimality. |
| Capital | None |
Contents
On various Pirate Groups and their origins
The history of many of the pirates seen in the UTCS era is closely tied to the history of the Sundered and the fates of numerous fallen and less prosperous civilizations. Roughly classed, there are three tiers of groups generally deemed pirates and one that, though rarely called as such, are: ‘organized’ ‘criminal enterprises’ (as is common knowledge, organized crime is generally only somewhat organized and somewhat about crime) such as House Blythe and the Tribe of Eliana, the economically downtrodden seeking to leech from the more wealthy or willing to be used as pawns or intermediaries by groups looking for some level of deniability such as may be found on various LIHW and Forsaken worlds, and finally, the odd Neo-Barbarians who’ve been gifted or sold spacecraft in generally less than above-board transactions. Finally, there are the kleptocracies, degenerate governments where corruption, bribery and extortion are so the norm as to find the committing of what amounts to highway robbery by the local police or military forces to be commonplace – while the actions of the latter are sometimes acts of piracy, they would assuredly bristle at being called pirates.
The first grouping are both the least and most dangerous, as they are uninterested in random acts of violence – just economic gain – and their visible position requires some modicum of discretion. They are arms dealers, loan sharks, extorionists, traffickers in forbidden goods, and not above killing the odd fellow, but only if he’s proven bad for business. They are, most importantly, reasonable in that they can be dealt with via credits more often than guns.
The second class number the most numerous of pirates, those, as persons or as groups, seeking to profit from theft, destruction, or illegal activities, the lattermost often as subsidiaries to a member of the first tier. They are local phenomena, cropping up in places of poverty or insufficient oversight. They are, in effect, the most well-to-do of some system or systems’ gangs, rich enough to outfit themselves with spacecraft in the first place, insufficiently wealthy or powerful to become organized competitors to the first tier, and existing in systems welcoming, tolerant, or impotent to act concerning their presence. Especially in Forsaken space, such groups rarely attack local vessels, and are sometimes more akin to local militias “enforcing tolls” than the true pirate groups operating out of LIHW worlds (the major powers being rather better at scrubbing bases of operation out of their own systems). These should not be confused, however, with the paramilitary groups operating in Forsaken space, for though the line is blurry, there is a distinct non-locality and size to the paramilitary groups that is lacking in amongst the local armed rabble. Unfortunately, pirate groups rarely confine themselves to their systems of origin. Thus, problems with local sources become pandemic scourges. Fortunately, those groups with an eye toward continued existence tend to extract cargo rather than lives or vessels – attracting too much of the wrong attention can lead to Confederation crackdowns, or worse.
Finally, there are the (so-called) Neo-Barbarian groups, much more rare than the second tier, and actually sharing a more similar initial origin with the first tier, though their origin as Sundered colonies tends to limit their range to areas much closer to Sol sector. To understand the existence of the NeoBarbs, one must recall that only a small fraction of all systems are connected via the jump network. A fair number of colonies settled and colony missions in-flight at the time of FTL’s discovery and the ensuing nano-plague were of systems not on the jump network. This did not spare them from the nano-plague, but did greatly hinder their recovery, as SPEC travel was not invented for several hundred years after the development of the jump drive and has remained inconvenient (albeit decreasingly so) for interstellar travel through into the UTCS era. Many of these colonies never recovered. A fair fraction of them were completely lost, including such formidable notables as the Great Mormon Mission. Some, in a dark sense lucky, produced so few survivors by the time exploratory SPEC craft arrived that rescue operations were affordable, and resettlement often occurred in Forsaken space. Those living on more innately human habitable worlds met a variety of fates, each living through the nano-plague in their own ways. Of tangential, but important, note is the fate of some worlds that bear evidence the colonists attempted to fight the nano-plague directly: Their civilizations were razed to the ground when it fought back, although exactly how remains unclear. Returning the point at hand, however, of those that survived the nano-plague, many did not survive as anything resembling their initial civilizations.
It is, of course, a bit of a misnomer to call them Neo-Barbarians, as they are not so much barabaric or savage as merely culturally and economically divergent from the rest of humanity (far more so than even the Forsaken). Of course, taking the original meaning of barbarian, it is perhaps an accurate moniker. Those who continued on in their existence outside of the jump network were not privy to centuries of advancements or cross-cultural pollination. This made many of these groups of particular interest for Luddite recruiters, seeking both isolated bases of operation and untainted samples of humanity. Thus, through Luddite and the odd profiteer, robber baron, or fool, did the isolated and technologically backwards Sundered (as those off the jump network had come to be called) gain access to more modern craft and resources. This gave rise, among those civilizations that had become more aggressive during their isolated survival struggle, to the use of their newfound toys to prey upon their neighbors for anything they could not produce or otherwise acquire. Neo-Barbs are the most unpleasant of pirate encounters because they are generally more interested in acquiring one’s ship than one’s cargo.
It is interesting to note that, alone among the human groups, those more prosperous among the Sundered continue to colonize systems off the jump network. However, due to the impracticality of scaling SPEC travel to trading routes beyond astronomically adjacent systems, the overhead of even that, and the impossibility of swift communication, there are no empires as such, with each system or at most cluster of systems being given to its own governance, and development is greatly slowed due to the trickle of interaction with other groups. The particular interest the Luddites have placed in a subset of the Sundered has led to significant tensions between those Sundered groups receptive to the Luddites and all other Sundered polities.
Specific “Pirate” groups
House Blythe
House Blythe’s origins lie with the Sundered colony of Sheltersky, which happened to be very close, only a couple of light-years, from a far less successful colony (Gorky) actually on the jump network. As the latter colony failed during the nano-plague, they sent out distress messages, which, arriving some few years later at Sheltersky, spurred an expeditionary force to be sent. The commander of this expedition, one Nidhi Blythe, upon finding the residents of the nearby system already nearly expired (in large part due to overadaptation to their current tech base rather than anything truly insurmountable) upon her arrival, with only a few dozen survivors, set about turning the remains of the former colony into her personal fiefdom. The system had abundant natural resources and viable orbital infrastructure, but no planets with admirable living conditions. Acquiring, through murky, but generally believed thieving means, jump drive technology, Blythe maneuvered her way into leveraging the support of Sheltersky for her own benefit, being their only gateway to the outside universe. With this support (a decade long pipeline exchanging personell and luxury resources from Sheltersky for information and external access), remote as it was, Blythe, her lackeys and their lineage were able to control an entire star system against the minor threats of predation present in the pre-SPEC era. Gorky came to prosperity during this era as a smuggler’s capital, a port so free as to be thought lawless, except that it was always under martial law – it just so happened that as long as the people being affected weren’t of House Blythe, it likely didn’t happen to be illegal within Gorky’s borders – although there were some standards of behavior that fell beneath what House Blythe considered civilized (such as slavery). Following in their mother’s aggressive tradition, the scions of House Blythe set up operations, in a mix of above and below board trades, on an expanding number of worlds. As they had no interest in bulk goods and that manner of market control, they managed to co-exist with the CMT, rising to its own power in the same time period. With the advent of SPEC, Sheltersky became once more somewhat accessible, but by this time, it had been sufficiently infiltrated by House Blythe that it was Sheltersky that was consumed by Gorky and not the other way around.
As the SPEC era continued, and power consolidation ramped up, the sort of activities for which Gorky was famous became less acceptable. By the time of their joining the LIHW, most of the less reputable operations had been shifted from Gorky to the less accessible Sheltersky. Along with the arms dealers of Tribe of Eliana, House Blythe is considered to be one of the most respectable of the criminal groups operating within human space, with a public face, a reputation for honesty in deals that it makes (albeit a keen, hungry, and ruthless eye for advantage in anything not covered by agreement), and an avoidance of more objectionable forms of illicit activities which stems in part from their belief that they are far superior to any common pirates – that they are a civilized organization that happens to operate under their own code of laws, and not those of the Confederation.
The Tribe of Eliana
An odd tale to be sure – the tribe of Eliana is so called because every member of the group is a clone of the sole survivor, the eponymous Eliana, of an otherwise failed colony. Their homeworld rendered uninhabitable by the internal conflicts that broke out during the nano-plague, the Elianas took up sparse residence on the other worlds, moons, and worldlets of their system. While there had been significant orbital infrastructure surrounding their colony, produced on grand scale before the nano-plague, much of it had been damaged or destroyed. Significant portions of the Elianas’ efforts for several generations focused entirely upon salvage operations performed on the remnants of the orbital infrastructure so that items of value could be retrieved before the chunks in question decayed in orbit and burned up in the atmosphere. Their salvage expertise would eventually become their trademark, as their post FTL acquisition undertakings were primarily of the salvage variety. They became involved in many Ancient artifact hunts, but became truly notorious for their “valkyrie” role in stripping wrecks of all valuable systems and subunits. Their criminal tinge comes from their willingness to sell what was formerly anyone’s to whomsoever is willing to pay for it (species notwithstanding), whether it be insured cargo or military grade weaponry. It is the weaponry trade that has proved to be the most profitable for the impoverished Elianas, with many disreputable groups finding them the only, if very expensive, potential suppliers of arms generally not available to civilians. Policing of the Elianas have proved of limited utility, as, while deals may be brokered in their home system, such deals are made by individuals, not the government of the Elianas, so responsibility is more difficult to sanction in accordance with the gravity of offense. Moreover, while the deals may or may not take place in their home system, the actual transfer of goods rarely does, so concentrating efforts at policing the home system of the Elianas (though not originally known as such, the Elianas came to call it Gehenna, but, as there already existed another system of that name in Confederation, the official name became Yesteryear) has not proved remarkably fruitful.
Elianas outside of Yesteryear often have a quasi-nomadic existence, moving from salvage operation to artifact dig to mining operation, etc. There are no permenant Elianas settlements larger than outposts outside of Yesteryear. However, there are a number of Elianas outposts in otherwise lawless or unpatrolled systems, as local aggressive groups tend to leave them alone, as they are often a source of business partners for either the acquisition of, or disposal of, goods of questionably transferred ownership. The Elianas themselves, however, are not generally considered dangerous unless provoked or interrupted, and the Elianas’ government receives such a substancial portion of its revenue from kickbacks and taxation of questionable earnings that it has no practical choice but to decline to enforce all aspects of LIHW law on its citizens. Such enforcement would be all the more difficult due to the culture of sisterhood which defines their unique existence.
The Order of the Dynast Shrub
The origins of the name of this group are lost to history but generally believed to stem from a mistranslation of some older parable or idiom. Starting out as a local family of robber-barons expanding from a business selling fusionable fuels and antimatter to passing starships, upon expanding outward from their home system, one branch of the family took to collaborating with elements of various criminal organizations with roots centuries old. The influx of new blood and even murkier ethics moved the investment strategies out of fuels and into the sorts of operations that wouldn’t put them into direct competition with House Blythe or the CMT – namely, operations considered too disreputable for the merely greedy, such as human slavery, vendetta by proxy, kidnapping, etc. The Order thus overlaps the first and second tiers of pirates, being at heart a group of violent thugs, but being in practice a group of very wealthy thugs hiding behind their shell corporations. The Order is known to have engaged in gang-wars with other smaller criminal enterprises, absorbing them, or making them its vassals. Thus, the Order, along with subordinate groups, though it is internally fragmented, through luck and sheer callous brutality, has become one of the larger and more powerful criminal enterprises in humans space, large enough to negotiate with the Ulnish pirate cartels for “gentlemen’s agreements” as to what constitutes “invasions of territory.”
Uln Pirate Cartels
Though there are several of them, they are loosly organized and fight internally more as violent siblings than as bitter rivals, coming to actual exchanges of fire only when major assumptions need to be revisited or on the demise of a powerful leader. They can thus be treated as one entity, as they will consider the actions of any outsider in similar fashion even if the actions did not take place in their particular territory.
The Uln pirate cartels are part and parcel of Uln culture. Uln culture expects corruption. It is deemed natural and appropriate that laws will be circumvented, and a sign of personal power that one is in a position to do so without being punished. The Uln pirate cartels intermix their shipping with that of the Ulnish merchants trading with all of their allies as well as within the Uln borders themselves. Membership in merchant or pirate groups is fluid, and the same Uln may pass back and forth easily between the low ranks of both groups, albeit the loyalty required for the nepotistic cronyism inherent in Uln leadership succession requires few such flip-flops if one wishes to advance. Be that as it may, the fluid low-level membership makes interdicting “known” members of the pirate cartels at the border nearly impossible without squeezing trade to a standstill – which none of the major powers is willing to do, as it would prelude their access to the Ancient artifacts on the Uln homeworld.
Oddly enough, those at the most risk of Uln pirate attack are those seeking to trade with the Uln, as the Cartels believe they have been disrespected and slighted of their traditional cut of commerce by the arrangements made between non-Uln traders and the Ingatwa and ranks of royals. Fortunately, if they are particularly well armed for a pirate group, they are not, in the grand scheme of things, a decided menace outside the Uln borders, as they are generally outmatched by Confederation, Aeran, or Rlaan responses. The Ulnish Cartels have proved more problematic for the less well-off Shmrn, but remain an aggravation and annoyance rather than a threat.
