[hider=A Speculators Guide to the Pegasus Trade] [b]Companies:[/b] [i][b]Solar Winds Trading Company[/b][/i] Headquarters: New Batvia, Venus, Sol Employees: 925 Registered Hulls: 8 League Scepters: 1 (provisional) [b]Planets[/b] [i][b] Lionel[/b][/i] System: Kappa 121-G Star Class: G (Orange/White) Inhabitants: 10 million autochthons. Assorted Iron Age societies. Exports: None to date League Presence: Class D repair base. A-Pow Presence: None. [/hider] [hider=A Brief History of Human Expansion Volume 627 Part D] [b]The Ancient and Honorable League of Neo-Hanseatic Merchants[/b] [i]“Not ancient, not honorable, and only in league to bilk the rest of the galaxy.”[/i] Charles Brandle – My Life and Times The League as is commonly referred to is an organized group of merchants based in Sol. The League holds a technical monopoly on star faring trade beyond the Sol System, a right for which individual companies pay annual dues. Originally viewed by the Associated Powers as a way to organize the gold rush resulting from the development of the Wellerman-Kashogi drive and supra-luminal travel it rapidly developed into the real economic power in the human galaxy. The League is theoretically a democracy in which each member company can cast a number of votes proportional to its earnings, though as a practical matter diets are only called to settle the thorniest trade disputes or as an arbitrator of last resort between rival companies. [b]The Associated Powers of Federated Sol[/b] [i]Join the navy they said, see the galaxy they said, pursuant to fiscal constraints and compliance with sub clause 222-AC-3 they said[/i]. Charles Brandle – My Life and Times A-Pow is the governing political and military body of the Sol system. Formed of a union of Earth, Mars, Venus, and a score or so of well established colonies in the Solar only after the pressures of extra solar expansion made it increasingly dangerous to resist. Bureaucratic in the extreme, its complicated constitution, set up to appease a dozen mutual exclusive factions means that A-Pow rarely manages to move any issue past the debate stage. It does possess a powerful fleet and several armies, largely as a way to enrich defense contractors. While some of the larger extra solar colonies are members, they are very much poor relations to the Solar core, with correspondingly less constitutional power. A-Pow is too riddled with internal divisions to have a coherent position on the League, indeed the endlessly political cycle is yet another arena for those members of the League with money to spend to attempt to buy influence. A-Pow can and does act to defend Sol and its extra solar member worlds, at least after every opportunity to dither has been exhausted. [b]Independent Human Colonies[/b] [i] Everything that can be tried will be tried, everything that will be tried will be fucked up.[/i] Charles Brandle – My Life and Times Independent settlements not part of A-Pow have been established on hundreds, perhaps thousands of worlds, asteroid belts, and deep space stations. These range from small industrial operations, to League trading posts, to collectives of political dissidents, cults, utopians, and every segment of solar society that, for one reason or another, wanted to hop a starship and get the hell out of dodge. [/hider] __________________________________________________________________ On any planet visited by the descendants of Earth, the first building to be constructed was, without exception, a bar. After that came a brothel, though often enough the two were in combination. In her year and a half of indentured service to the League, and contract to the Solar Winds Trading Company specifically, Inez had been in plenty of both. This one was better than most, at least the walls weren’t sealed with stinking insect saliva the way they had been in the Miserable Mossie on Caldacot, or upwind of a sulfur processing plant like ‘The Stink of It’ on Mosul’s World. It had all the common characteristic denizens, the tag rag and bobtail sweepings of three centuries of human interstellar travel: Merchants, adventurers, scoundrels, thieves, cut throats and every combination of those categories. Inez walked over and bellied up to the bar, leaning gratefully to take the stress off her injured core. She held up a hand to the alien bartender who paused from his somewhat desultory attempts to swab out glass with a rag to pull a bottle of beer from an icebox concealed beneath the bar. The bartender struck the cap off the beer against the bar with casual skill and set it down in front of her, dripping with ice melt and condensate. The green and gold check on the can identified it as Zap, a high quantity low quality brew from Earth, underscored by the surprisingly realistic motto Zap beer, all you can get out here. Inez licked the foam beginning to spill from the top of the bottle and took a long pull. Well, at least it is cold, she thought charitably as she set the half empty bottle down on the bar. The bartender grunted when she didn’t produce any currency, then reached into a pouch, produced a debit pad, and tossed it down beside her. Inez sighed and looked out over the vista that was visible through the window behind the racked bottles of human and alien liquors. The bar was set inside one of the local pyramids, either abandoned with disuse or granted as a trade concession to the League. It formed one corner of a rectangular temple complex perhaps a kilometer wide and half again as long with a pyramid at each corner. The space in between must have started life as a paved plaza, but starship landings had reduced it to a crushed mass of gravel. Only two starships were on the ground at the moment, the Arxregnum and a tramp whose name Inez hadn’t bothered to learn. Differences in design aside, they were both long rectangular tubes of metal with secondary hull sections attached like ancient outriggers. Both vessels bristled with antennae, sensors and the various other avionics that allowed men to travel between the stars. Local vehicles, simple diesel powered haulers, moved around the two ships on their own errands, bringing supplies or people from the workshops and warehouses that had been built around the base of the largest of the four pyramids. A low stone wall, grown through with greenish orange lichen, surrounded the whole establishment, probably ceremonial as it was too low to provide an effective defensive barrier. Roads ran off into the jungle at a strange variety of angles, vanishing quickly in the greenery. Inez knew from the landing that several large local settlements were only a few kilometers distant, though the jungle was thick enough that no sign was visible from here. Judging by the muddy disrepair of the roads, there wasn’t much truck with the locals. Sometimes the best you could say about a place was that it was breathable, and that it kept the rad level manageable. That wasn’t nothing in a wide and hostile galaxy. Inez drew in a long breath that smelled of the tavern, the landing field, and the alien biochemistry beyond. “What a shit hole,” she sighed philosophically, swallowing the rest of her beer and waving for another. The debit pad clinked up the charge, which would eventually be settled by Alrik Maynard as the operator of the Arxregnum. Maynard might or might not get on her case about charging drinks to the company but she figured after the incident with the kraken she had earned a little grace. Provided she didn’t turn up drunk off her face of course, which, to be fair, would be a job of work on nothing but Zap. As though sensing her thoughts the portable computer she wore at her wrist beeped. “The Black Lady damn it,” Inez muttered as she opened the message with a few quick keystrokes. Please collect local contractor for security duty. Ident and particulars attached. AM. Inez sighed again and turned to scan the bar. Sure enough, a man matching the hologram was just concluding an arm wrestling contest with an alien. The various spectators were hooting and hollering as they exchanged credit chips to settle whatever bets they had placed on the combatants. She slid herself into the vacated seat as the group broke up, flashing a holographic copy of the contract by way of an icebreaker. “Badrek? Is that a real name? It sounds like something you stepped in and have to scrape off your boot,” she asked, as diplomatically as she could manage. She wondered what hair brained scheme Maynard had in mind that he wanted an additional thug along. History did not suggest that the answer to this question would please her. [@POOHEAD189]