EDIT: Stories are less fun when they lack the first page.
Oh, I dunno. I can see a Höchstadtler Central Customs/Border Guard (Heavy Response) unit driving around in one of those.
And who doesn't want a UD-4L?!
So, no one asked for this but people always want to know more about the Fringe, so have some light reading about a smaller world called Pravadan:
Borrowed and condensed from the Socio-Political Overview Section of Sailing Instructions of the Settled Worlds, 2514 Edition, Intergalax Free Press:
Pravadan is a sleepy world that is nearly average in every regard. The world is second in orbit around its primary, just over one AU from its G2 primary. At just under Earth-normal mass, the planet yields almost human-normal gravity. The surface of the planet is covered with roughly 60% oceans separating three primary continents, only one (Maghada) of which is inhabited. The comparatively small oceans can yield some serious storms, but they lack the breadth to develop the cyclones that can threaten coastal habitations. The inhabited continent also lacks significant volcanic activity (which manages to keep one—Khedi—of the continents from being safely habitable). The remaining continent, Chedi, does have some small coastal habitations, but they generally lack intercourse with the rest of the world other than functioning as vacation and trade destinations for each other. The world is noted for its human-normal climate and prominent mammalian species which were similar enough to human-consciousness as to receive names from history, like Biharan Rhinos, Yellow Leopards, Muntjacs, and Aurochs.
Pravadan was settled in the middle of the Second Wave (Landing Date 2300) by an open consortium of immigrants marshalled by a Mansfield colonization initiative. For nearly a century, the world boasted little more than a planetary gendarmery that itself was the world-wide network of emergency services bulked out with reservists. It managed to eke its way through the Great Interstellar War with little more than the scorch marks of troopships that landed and the stories of the troopers they had carried as they transited across the stars to get at their unseen foes.
Since Pravadan’s inception, it has functioned as an agricultural world. Once it passed its growing pains of the initial settlement and matured into a functional colony and world, it began to export bulk cargos on passing starships (mainly grains in the form of rice, wheat, and corn, but later certain mined minerals that had some amount of value to others in need). Most of these hulls were Mansfield-flagged, but not all were, and the Pravadanians felt secure in their idyllic world, providing the basic sustenance to whoever would keep the tariffs low.
The planet inherited its basic governing structure from Mansfield, with a parliamentary republic featuring no less than twelve recognized parties, resulting in a dizzying election and governing process. The settled area of Pravadan is centered on the capital of Bihar and is broken into six similarly sized union-territories which have local representation and centrtalized municipal services, but no actual local governments. The outlying lands away from the main settlement of the Basmati River Valley and on Maghada form delegations that travel to Bihar for the governing season during local Fall (roughly June to November Standard Calendar). Other than the normal friction of any human society, Pravadan has never had an internal dispute or episode of serious discontent.
As the world grew, so did its culture and industrial base. The world itself is apparently a corruption of a Hindi word, ‘pravdhan’ meaning provisions, or sustenance. Its capital, Bihar, lies at the center of the Basmati River Valley which drain three continental river systems (together referred to as the Trishula). Like many colonies and worlds, Pravadan developed into a system of urban primacy, where Bihar is the sole major city on the planet. Indeed, the colony itself has generally not departed far from the massive Basmati River Valley. This has led to a highly concentrated center of human settlement that is focused on the massive hive of Bihar lessening in almost oblong, concentric rings outwards toward the Devalik Range to the southwest and the Uttaran Forest to the northeast.
As farming grew in scale and intensity, Pravadan quickly took over local production of the infrastructure it needed. This meant that its industrial, chemical, and automotive sectors (fueled by ethanol-burning engines) grew at an accelerated pace. By the coming of the Second Troubles, Pravadan was just coming into the teenage-years of its third generation. The near-sudden halt of offworld trade nearly crushed the planetary economy: food could still be grown, fertilizer and fuel still produced, and farm equipment made, but none of it had any place to go, so it rotted in warehouses, went rancid in holding tanks, or rusted in plant yards.
Once again, Mansfield came to the rescue. Pravadan’s godparent-world managed to work with the planetary government to introduce austerity measures and procure what goods they could before the starlanes nearly shut down entirely as the full implications of the disastrous war that just ended began to come clear. As the Second Troubles plodded forwards, Pravadanians once again forced themselves to become accustomed to the sober realities that their grandparents had faced when they arrived on-world. They did not, perhaps, have the crushing danger of starting a new world from the settling dust of a colony ship, but they now knew no new starships would be coming to land at their starport, either.
The Pravadanians survived the Troubles in good shape. The world was never in any danger, and the gentle temperate/subtropical climate did not impart any specific stress on a society that was in good order by any measure past fiscal. When the starliners did begin to return—Pravadanians dating the start of the Resumption in 2452—on Mansfield hulls, it did not take long at all for the two worlds to reestablish official ties. By 2455, the two worlds (plus the brand-new Mansfielder colony of Moravia) had entered into an official pact for mutual support which would, in 2468, become the Dominion of Free Stars with the inclusion of Jakarta and then Karach (2472).
Pravadan’s return to the interstellar stage happened gradually, as it did the first time. The society itself is widely considered to be openly genial but guarded, willing to take a risk but preferring to act with directed, even muted, purpose. Still, by 2482, Pravadanian goods were once again gracing the shelves from Höchstadt to Nouvelle Normandy to New Berkeley and even well into the Fringe at Longways and Montelimar. Indeed, its Basmati rice is considered a delicacy of the highest order, one of the rare foodstuffs that is worth shipping over interstellar distances other than hold-filler from one drop to the next.
The planetary population presently stands at approximately 40 million, much of which was from immigrants arriving from various worlds to work in the expanding manufacturing plants or eke out a living on a plot of land in the vast Basmati’s periphery. Other than the vast municipal services attending to Bihar (which holds about 60% in its greater unincorporated area), the colony itself did not have a standing military force until 2475. For a decade more, this consisted of armored cars and truck-mounted infantry, all riding locally produced, quasi-military vehicles. By 2485, the military, facing gentle pressure from Mansfield, began to take their military more seriously. They began to practice in the shadow of the small bare-bones planetary defensive array that Mansfield was beginning to erect at strategic points across the globe and in the high orbitals.
By increasing the pay and benefits of the soldiery and enticing an upper percentage with educational vouchers and grants, the Pravadanians were able to produce a professional military in a remarkably short time. It did help that they had advisors from the Mansfield Royal Land Forces at every level, but the Pravadnians proved to be quick studies for something they had little previous experience with. They had better soldiers now, but nothing to give them.
During this time, Pravadan agricultural companies were shipping more food off world than they could seem to harvest comfortably. It was not long before those companies began to actively recruit off-worlders, which gave outsiders their first real glimpse of a world that many had never given a second thought—but were quick to remember for all its virtues.
In 2486, the military began to reequip with gear that had been provided at excellent terms from Mansfield. The Pravadanians were clear that this was only a stop-gap measure, to be used until they could stand their own productions line up. And so they did, beginning the long process of designing an armored vehicle from a blank sheet.
That vehicle arrived just in time, for the opening of the new century. In that year, 2500, Pravadan was invaded by forces from the neighboring world of Anadolu. The invading expeditionary force entered orbit in coopted civilian freighter hulls and landed directly at the Biharan star ports.
The fighting was initially muted. The Anadolans, themselves in their first interstellar war, found they had possession of a massive city after they had seized the key points during the initial probes. The Pravadanian Defence Force had little practiced war in their own capital city; the very notion if it would distress the average officer and private-soldier alike.
But when the Anadolan occupiers began to move out of the city and into the outlying areas, they began to encounter problems. Their laser tanks and armored infantry were individually effective, but swiftly began to become constrained by an enemy who knew the local terrain and its conditions, using vehicles that were suited to the area and able to destroy them once they were sighted. The invading forces failed to take over the planetary defense nodes before a relief force from Mansfield made it on-world.
The relief force were not Mansfield Royal forces, but star-mercenaries hired on that were able to deploy faster than a lead-footed planet-tied army brigade. The newly arrived mercenaries—the Free Lancers armored battalion—made quick work of the Anadolans they could catch before the rest made it back to Bihar. Unfortunately, the Pravadanians could barely congratulate themselves before another mercenary force blew their way into orbit and made landfall straight from the deceleration burn.
That outfit was the Höchstadtler Foreign Service Regiment, under an ostensible contract to the government of Anadolu. The problem the Anadolans were facing was that they were bound by a Treaty of Friendship with Höchstadt, that had its own official delegations on Mansfield. While Höchstadt could not throw such a treaty away, they had little desire to torpedo their standing with a fellow Core World and a state of affairs that benefited them insofar as the DFS occupied a shoulder of space pinning Novosibirsk (and it’s “People’s Party”, the HPK) with whom was building a developing mutual resentment between the two—then three—powers. While Mansfield was distracted by Pravadan, Jakarta was invaded by HPK forces following a “popular revolution” led by the Jakartan Free Determination Front. Mansfield was able to lend only token (and ultimately ineffective) support.
The FSR was under orders to bring the fighting to a swift conclusion, which they did in under a month. The Free Lancers and local allies were shattered in a climactic engagement on the outskirts of Bihar, breaking their line of circumvallation, leaving Pravadan to accept Anadolan suzerainty.
Luckily, that state of affairs did not last long. As soon as the star-mercenaries boosted for the black, Mansfield was preparing its own riposte. The hammerfall did not take long to land, nor its shockwaves be felt. By late 2501, the Mansfield-led DFS coalition relief forces had forced the Anadolans offworld, but it would take another three years for the world to rebuild itself back to a semblance of pre-invasion normalcy.
During this time, however, the Pravadanians began to seriously reconsider their flippancy about martial prowess and the need for a strong defense. Debates raged weekly, daily, and eventually hourly at dinner tables and withing parliamentary chambers about the viability of a large standing force—and what to do with it, if one became a part of Pravadanian society. In the end, the choice was given to them by the rest of the DFS.
The Dominion of Free Stars was glad to have gentle Pravadan—a founding mother to Mansfield’s father figure—back in the fold. But it could not happen again. So, Pravadan would contribute to its own defense, with none of the early desires to restrict its usage solely to planetary defense (lest they be unable to assist fellow DFS members as they themselves had so recently benefited).
As part of the rebuilding effort, Pravadanian military-industrial conglomerates began to coalesce and produce the necessary equipment for a full-time, possibly expeditionary, army. The new force gots its chance, sooner than anyone believed. Pravadan was tapped by Mansfield to assist it in its takeover of the Fringe world of Juneau. What followed was eighteen months of fighting on glaciers and tundra under midnight suns and sunless noons, in snowstorms and clouds of moonflies. Through it all, the Pravadanian First National Brigade provided exemplary service, even though it was a Mansfield adjunct regiment (Marlborough’s Dragoons) that finally secured the world in 2506.
By 2507, Pravadanian food exports had returned to almost normal pre-invasion levels. Its automotive industry was still holding on against an increasingly saturated market. And it was providing covert advisors paid for by Mansfield special-services funds to Jakartan loyalists.
The road for these shadow warriors would be long indeed. It would not be until 2512 that the Jakartan fifth columnists felt able to challenge the HPK security forces, transhumanist New Berkeleyans, over the imposition of heavy taxes on their coastal fishing fleets and processing plants. These fiercely independent areas had largely managed to play off everyone else against each other and form a de-facto independent state within the cloak of HPK control. It took a Cherkasian expeditionary security-force (the so-called Black Suits or “Skull Crushers”) to stamp out the budding insurrection over the next three years. As of this writing, the Cherkasians have departed Jakarta, and tensions are even now beginning to flare back up.
At present, Pravadan is much the same as it has always been: growing food and selling it wherever they can land a market. Socially and politically, its people are trying to find their way in the new order. The shadow war against the HPK (and, to a much lesser extent with Anadolu) has gone largely unnoticed by the populace at large. Moreover, because Mansfield has been underwriting the adventures, it has been little-remarked in political discourse. It has provided the Pravadanians with a growing core of martial professionals, and this steel-core has started to interact with increasing frequency with its similar numbers on Mansfield, solidifying the Dominion of Free Stars as more than an alliance of convenience into something more solid and purposeful.
Only time will tell what part Pravadan will play as events continue to unfold across the Settled Worlds, but there is little doubt it will arise to whatever occasion presents itself.
As an added bonus (well, it may all be naff to you, but, hey, I tried...), I am attaching some old-school Fringe goodies. The second attachment is an old gaming magazine with a scenario (pp. 9-10) and short story (pp. 14-20) involving Pravadan, the FSR, and the Free Lancers. It was written a long time ago, and while I might do things differently from a technical or craftmanship perspective, I believe in the truth behind it. (I had to break it down individually IOT post it. Apoloigies in advance)
My personal thanks to Jason Weiser for taking a chance on an untried author. While that magazine didn't take off for long, he went on to bigger and better things. That makes me glad.
People go to war for a lot of reasons, and when they get there, they do a lot of things they might not like. But at the end of the day, they really go there because they are told to, and they do what they have to because they follow orders, and that's the best way to see tomorrow: do what you have to do.
Sometimes the reasons why they are there don't make any sense to the men and women on the ground, but that doesn't matter to them. Not really. And that doesn't matter to the men and women who sent them there in the first place.
