Turn 41 - The Moon Comes Up
The
Scout departs, although not without some amusing, albeit a bit concerning, repartee. In response to the captain of HMS Devastation making a rather snarky comment about SLDF standard IFF broadcast frequencies, the captain of the jumpship had responded with a calmly dignified “We make use of ComStar standard frequencies, Devastation. We shall make a note to set our systems to SLDF standard broadcast in the future.”
You’d known the bloody phone company was powerful, from the debriefing of Dagny, you hadn’t quite internalized just how powerful it was until you realize that their comm standards had replaced those of the most powerful military in human history.
Several weeks later the Free Folk return, bringing dispatches and an ambassador from what you now know is called the Novi Romani Imperii, your Latin is a bit rusty but it looks like these jokers are calling themselves the New Roman Empire, which seems a trifle ambitious for a two system polity.
Granted, you are a one-system polity, so perhaps it’s all a matter of perspective.
Julia Severina is a rather imposing black woman wearing a deceptively simple blue silk
stola, albeit one with an elaborate contrasting red limbus, and an elaborately embroidered (and incredibly long)
palla which has an ivory base with a riot of colors making up the embroidery.
She is attended by a pair of bodyguards wearing what appear to be much heavier versions of the Power Armor that you are issuing to your own soldiers, but done in a somewhat stylized manner that harkens back to Roman armor.
She also has a small entourage, also dressed in distinctly Roman fashions.
While the shuttle is en-route from the Free Folk jumpship you take the time to read the initial briefing packet prepared by the embassy you’d sent.
First of all, much of what you’d presumed to know has turned out to be misleading at best. The Free Folk had minimal contact with these people, and had gleaned just about all they knew from the rare interactions with merchants and monitoring communications bands.
There were actually four classes of inhabitants of the New Roman Empire, and two political factions that appeared to be formalized. The political system was highly complex and, frankly, a bit baffling.
The highest class were the Patricians, however it appears that membership in this class is not purely by birth, although it helps. A young person, male or female, who wishes to be a Patrician needs to complete officer training in the military, or the equivalent in one of the Publicum Ministerium, serve a ‘satisfactory’ term of service, and be recommended to become a Patrician by acclamation of at least a dozen current Patricians. Only Patricians can serve as Senators, or most other of the senior political ranks.
The second class, of lower social rank, were the Plebeians. It was quite common, however, for a Plebeian to be wealthier than a Patrician, as Patricians were expected to spend most of their wealth in charitable and governmental endeavors while the Plebeians were free to accumulate wealth on their own terms. Any person of the Romans who completed a term of service of any sort in the military or one of the Publicum Ministerium were automatically considered Plebeians.
The third class were the Militaris. These comprised all of those serving in the military or the Publicum Ministerium, and also all of those too young to have served. Even the sons and daughters of Patricians were, until they completed their term of service, considered Militaris, not Patricians.
The final and smallest class were the Vulgares. These were adults who willfully refused to serve in the military or any of the Publicum Ministerium in any capacity. They paid no taxes or fees, had no obligations of any kind to the state, and were not required to do anything at all for anybody at any time. They were totally and utterly free to live their lives as they chose with a single caveat. The Vulgares were completely and totally outside the protections of the state that they contributed nothing to. They received no services of any kind. There was an unofficial second caveat, any Vulgares seen with anything even vaguely resembling a weapon would be killed on sight.
In many ways the system appears similar to what you read in an ancient pre-KF ‘science fiction’ novel you’d been required to read for your Ancient Literature class. All the way down to the fact that one of the Publicum Ministerium appears to all intents and purposes to be the Roman’s equivalent of your Department of Periphery Studies, only extended to include all of those too disabled in any way to reasonably serve in any other capacity. Evidently all that matters is the willingness to serve, not the ability.
The two political factions were the Optimates and the Populares, both of which had supporters throughout the three main classes of Roman citizens. The respective political philosophies can be summed up rather simplistically as the Optimates represented the interests of the wealthy and the Populares represented the interests of the poor. Where things got interesting is how the two factions divided power.
The New Roman Empire is actually more of the Roman Republic in many ways, with a triumvirate rulership of two consuls, both senators of the Patrician class and always of opposite parties, and one Demarchus, or Tribune of the People, from the Plebeian class. Every decade the Demarchus is required to step down, and is replaced by a member of the opposite faction.
You would think that such a system would lead to a great deal of strife, however it is a firm principle of the Romans that no member of the Patrician or Plebeian class may shed the blood of any other Patrician or Plebeian. The worst that ever happens, at least as far as the delegation has been able to discover, in the last two hundred years or so are spirited shouting matches that often devolve into the two sides ‘fighting out their differences’... via spirited gymnastics competitions.
Yes, it appears that these Romans are utterly addicted to gymnastics, to the point that one of the single most prestigious Publicum Ministeria is actually the Haec Curricula Mentis Ludum, which is the premier gymnastics school in the Roman Empire and only graduates a single student in any given year. Indeed, the embassy had been greeted with a massive synchronized gymnastics display making use of trampolines to put on some incredible aerial acrobatics.
It appears you might need to be a bit grateful for the Roman Empire as well, as they’ve inadvertently shielded Griffin’s Roost from a nearby bandit kingdom that regularly raids their planets, only to be beaten back by a combination of their power armored infantry and fairly potent tanks. The imagery has been analyzed by
SARAH and the main armament appears to be gauss rifles, with almost no sign of any energy based weapons at all to be seen.
In fact, it appears that the Romans are possibly as obsessed with gauss weaponry as they are with gymnastics, as far as
SARAH can tell they use gauss weapons on every single platform she’s been able to analyze. Even their infantry weapons appear to be miniature gauss rifles.
You do get confirmation that slavery does, in fact, exist, however it is extremely limited and serves a purely judicial function as the second highest punishment possible for the absolute worst crimes. A simple murderer would be either executed (if capital murder) or imprisoned, but a serial killer who’d killed dozens of victims? Their case would be reviewed by the Senate which could, by unanimous vote, condemn the criminal to either a life of ‘slavery’ in a massive salt mine set aside purely for the purpose, or far more rarely to be ‘publically executed so as to provide edification to the People’, which seems to be reserved for the absolute worst of the worst and has only happened, as far as your embassy could glean, a single time in their history to a serial killer who lured young children, raped them to death, then ate them.
You read the excerpt about his execution and throw up.
Regardless, if the Senate failed to come to a unanimous agreement, even the worst criminals would simply be executed cleanly.
Regardless, the embassy will be arriving in several days, how will you greet them?
[] | Maximum Formality | Put on all the Pomp and Circumstances! |
[] | Raceday at the Palace! | They greeted your embassy with tons of gymnasts, greet theirs with tons of horsepower |
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