Faction:Interstellar Shipping and Mercantile Guild
A Brief (and spotty) History of the Merchant's Guild
A latecomer to the great sowing of Earth's seeds, a too-small planet, previously passed over, became the new home for a group of colonists united more by a desire to leave behind their varied existences in Sol than by any common ethos. The colonists struck out from their settlements in the deep canyons and valleys where the air was thicker, clearing out the simple layers of native life, ever so slowly etching humanity's presence indelibly into the planet's crust. However, the future of their efforts did not lie on the surface of a world, but in the cold of space surrounding it.
No too-small world can hope to passively hold on to the sort of atmosphere that gives rise to sunny, green meadows alight with frolicking schoolchildren. The release from the domes, from the deep places, would be a Herculean task, but the insights bestowed by modern science had given mere mortal men more abilities than the authors of the ancient demigod had foreseen. In a common goal, the residents of Bantam found new unity and identity. They labored together tirelessly to construct the centerpiece of their terraforming effort: a colossal station that would serve as both the shipyard producing and maintaining the resource gathering fleet and the processing center that would amalgamate the offerings of the entire system into sustenance for Bantam's development.
It would likely have worked.
The nano-plague struck without warning, long before the first human FTL ship would visit the system. Only the near-paranoid levels of over-engineering with which Rainbow station had been constructed saved it from the fate of many of Bantam's residents, too reliant on cheap and plentiful nanites. It was far too early in the terraforming effort to live in the open, and suddenly overstrained environmental systems caused entire cities to suffocate. Bantam was devastated, losing all vibrancy and vitality in a matter of weeks. What before had been a growing planet-wide civilization was now a collection of frightened outposts of inhabitation. Thus were Rainbow station and its infant fleet of resource gatherers nearly orphaned, the mother planet an invalid. With the station barely able to sustain itself, the stationers were left with the unenviable role of deciding whom amongst Bantam's survivors they could afford to save.
As the Diamond Dust Age progressed, and Bantam continued to wither away to a pale shadow of its brief heyday, Rainbow station endured, growing throughout the period of isolation, if at a glacial pace. Warning messages, lazily arriving at the speed of light from their neighbors, came in one after the other, followed sometimes by descriptions of chaos, and sometimes by silence. There was no official expectation of assistance, but humans are renowned for their counter-empirical optimism.
Thus, it was with great surprise and anticipation that the arrival of the first FTL ship was greeted, and numbing disappointment the feeling that swept the stationers when they learned that it was not a portend of any mission of mercy. All, however, did not look grim. The visitors were High-Born explorers, but from a family of lower standing. The Marcos family realized that they had much to gain from control of Rainbow station once it began producing jump capable vessels. With FTL technology and the silent threat of a second abandonment for leverage, the Marcos family gained a large stake in Rainbow station.
Luck had indeed changed for the better for the people of Bantam and Rainbow. Not only were much needed resources flowing in from High-Born space, payments for an ever increasing list of ship construction orders, but Rainbow soon proved itself to occupy a prime location in the jump network, a hub on what would remain for many decades the only practical routes connecting several populous systems to each other – including Sol.
Some colonies had fallen far and some had not had far to fall. The lone merchant was a valuable target in a starved land. Neither were the financial benefits of collusion upon profit margins lost upon the increasing number of traders operating out of or, less commonly at the time, passing through Rainbow. The first of the great mercantile cartels was formed, again under the leadership of the Marcos clan, a silent, nameless cartel that worked to establish a near monopoly on interstellar trade in much of human space during the Reconstruction period. Coercion, cooption, and even the occasional assassination were all valid tools to grow the blossoming financial empire centered on Rainbow and the slowly awakening Bantam. The Rainbow station cartel was one of a few groups to capitalize upon the realization that, in the absence of any overarching authorities, whomsoever dominated the trade lanes now could well be able to do so for centuries to come, barring fantastic advances in interstellar travel.
Generations passed. Competitors fell as they came, though some struggled valiantly, and only the governments of the larger meme-groups were sufficiently imposing to hold their own at the bargaining tables. Shares of control of Rainbow station changed hands, and it became wholly an instrument of the cartel, although Bantam and Stationer descendants still held a plurality of control of the cartel, a sizeable majority if one included the increasingly integrated Marcos clan. The name of the station changed then as well, and the cartel gained a name, rechristened Cherryh Station and the Cherryh Mercantile Trust, respectively.
Though flagrantly in bed with High-Born interests, the CMT maintained a resolute official neutrality, even going so far as to make a point of hiring other parties for anti-piracy protection rather than building their own combat fleets. While many at the time took this to be a purely political maneuver, those more informed knew that it was actually a necessity. Cherryh Station had been a vital trump card for the CMT in the early portions of the Reconstruction period, but mankind had recovered somewhat, and was once more advancing, and the age of the station was beginning to show. Bulk freighters are in many ways much easier to build than the tiny craft that protect them and avoid obsolescence much longer, and Cherryh Station was only up to the task of constructing the first, and not the latter.
More modern shipyards, though not on the scale of the CMT's aging beauty, were being constructed all over, and the competitive advantage the CMT had enjoyed due to their production capacity was waning. There was, however, little feared by the CMT at this point, as there was no longer any competition of note to gain upon them. All other transport of goods was in-system, governmental, or doomed to obscurity or absorption. The CMT used this time to increase its wealth, strengthen and modernize its infrastructure, and deepen its influence on various governments. The resettlement of Bantam was in full swing.
The CMT's opportunity to rest did not last as long as they would have preferred. The development of the SPEC drive dramatically changed the landscape of trade routes, altered latencies, and made runs by smaller vessels much more practical. Rapidly expanding borders made for new regions for local competitors to exploit more rapidly than the CMT might be able to react. However, like the age itself, the CMT had matured. There would be no massive wave of assassinations or stream of engineered third-party blockades. Rather, there would be the ultimate buy-out – the largest recruitment effort ever mounted, a clarion call summoning all traders to a common banner with the offer of common profits. What could have been the death knell for the CMT merely announced the birth of the Interstellar Shipping and Mercantile Guild, which if it still had the CMT at its core, was, by the nature of its creation, intended to be a beast with a very different public face.
The emergence of the Confederation only served to strengthen the position of the Guild, being included in the Confederation Senate's Committees despite technically only owning a single star system (the plethora of commerce stations and trading outposts in the star systems of other powers not counting as seats of population) – an important technicality, as it would otherwise be difficult to pretend they were a governmental entity in the same sense as the other Senate members. The newly formed Confederation Navy and Homeland Security forces served to decrease piracy along standard trade routes, even if the decline of several independent powers in the face of enforcing new Confederation regulations gave rise to a whole new breed of paramilitary forces. While in matters internal to the Confederation the Guild was still maintaining an increasingly less fictitious neutrality on matters not of self-interest, there was no love lost between the Forsaken and the Guild, the much lower profit margins available on return trips never having enticed much Guild investment, and Guild price fixing long having raised the ire of the Forsaken. Guild presence in Forsaken space is thus limited to border stations, much like the trade relations with the Uln and Rlaan.
Contact with alien trading partners was a great boon to the Guild, as Guild political clout ensured that all major alien traffic would pass through Guild trading stations, that Guild shipping would be awarded nearly all lucrative inter-government contracts calling for human merchants, and so forth. Moreover, no independent trader could so easily call upon the shared resources of the Guild in obtaining appropriate permissions from the Uln and Rlaan governments to conduct business within their borders, or the expertise of a cultural specialist in determining the likely intentions of an alien customer.
Though the upper echelons of the Guild are still plentifully stocked with CMT personnel, the Guild favored success over nepotism, and many rose through the ranks to positions of power – unlike the larger meme-groups, no grand conversion of belief system is required for acceptance, merely the conviction that profit conquers all, and timely payment of portions thereof. The lower tiers of the Guild are full of all sort and manner of small time traders who were willing to trade a fraction of their profits for protection, access, and opportunity. Unlike the pre-SPEC period, the smaller independent traders are not actively squashed, and those who achieve success are always initially courted rather than destroyed outright, but this is largely because any emerging independent group which appeared to offer a real threat would be rapidly legislated out of existence by calling in favors in the Confederation Senate. The current Guild is rivaled only by the logistical corps of some major meme-groups that did not desire to give up the independence of their internal supply chains, but even these entities are dwarfish by comparison. Though still not a military power, nor aspiring to become one, the Guild's numerous shipyards, kept modernized under lucrative Confederation contracts now churn out capital and sub-capital military vessels for the Confederation Navy alongside their freight bearing kin. With the renovation of Cherryh Station over the last few decades further boosting production, the Guild shipyards maintain a distinct lead, by tonnage, as the largest suppliers of Confederation military vessels.
