Montezuma – A Planetary Overview
A bit of background for the next The Empire’s Corps …
Montezuma – A Planetary Overview
Montezuma was discovered six hundred years prior to the Fall of Earth, but remained unsettled for nearly a hundred years before settlement rights were finally sold to the Aztec Revival Movement for a song, relatively speaking, at least partly to get the movement’s followers off Earth. The system appeared to be effectively worthless, by most standards; four rocky planets, only one even remotely close to habitable, lacking a gas giant or asteroids that could support a modern industry. The brief attempt to terraform Montezuma via the introduction of an Earth-typical biological package produced very mixed results, crafting a biosphere that was technically habitable, but requiring much hard work before the world could be formally opened for settlement. There was no reason to think the system would ever prove important, let alone profitable.
The ARM proceeded to draw up plans for colonisation. Prospective settlers were divided into three groups: investors, who received shares in the planetary consortium; freemen, who had no debt to the consortium; debtors, who would have to repay their debts before they became freemen in their own right. The first settlements were hastily erected around Landing City – renamed Tenochtitlán – and expanded rapidly. The prospect of a life free of the overbearing imperial state was very attractive to many, and the ARM had little trouble recruiting colonists willing to work for land and rights of their own. There were some rough patches – many debtors were abused by the investors who’d bought their debts, a common problem in the late imperial era, and chose to become bandits instead of working towards a futile goal – but four hundred years after settlement Montezuma was a reasonably functional society. The government had no illusions about its lack of importance on the galactic stage, but it also figured it had little reason to worry about the stresses and strains that would eventually tear the empire apart. It was so isolated that it was rare for more than two starships to visit every month.
This only lasted until a planetary geological survey discovered large deposits of various rare minerals buried under the surface. The government made the mistake of admitting what they’d found, which drew attention from a number of interstellar corporations, including the Isabella Interstellar Corporation. When the government proved balky about signing over complete mining rights, which would have left the planetary settlers with nothing, the IIC went to the Imperial Supreme Court and claimed dominance over the planet, on the grounds the settlement rights had been improperly sold. This argument had little validity, objectively speaking, but the IIC had plenty of supporters within the Grand Senate and they ensured the Supreme Court ruled the right way. Montezuma was signed over to the corporation, and the settlers – being trespassers – became legal serfs.
If the corporation had expected this legal enslavement to go unchallenged, they were wrong. The locals regarded – and still regard – their planet as having been stolen by legal chicanery. Resistance, active and passive, sprang up immediately. The planetary geography made it difficult for the corporation’s security forces to protect their mining installations, let alone hunt down the insurgents, and the lack of a high-tech society ensured that even when they did force the locals to work for the corporation there were limits to how effective they could be. The first decade of corporate occupation proved to be very cost-ineffective indeed.
The IIC’s solution to this problem was very simply. It brought in workers from off-world, recruiting hundreds of thousands, and offering them land and rights in exchange for their service. The new arrivals, who would become known – insultingly – as the Huéspeds – had no common culture, as they’d been recruited from all over the empire, but they rapidly found themselves forced to work together by pressure from the original settlers. They set up homes and settlements of their own, almost always under the corporation’s control. Intentionally or not, the IIC had created a situation in which the Huéspeds were dependent on the corporation. The insurgents made sure of it.
This situation persisted for nearly a hundred years, with bursts of fighting being followed by long periods of uneasy peace, until Earthfall heralded the collapse of the empire itself, along with most of the interstellar corporations and banking systems. The corporate system was no longer sustainable, not least because the insurgency was gaining steam again, leaving the planet teetering on the brink of a renewed civil war …
Montezuma is popularly referred to as a desert world, although that is not entirely true. There are vast deserts, true, but also patches of terraformed land that are surprisingly habitable. The local ecology digs deep, with roots going all the way down to underground aquifers, and while much of the surface looks dead to the untrained eye it is actually very lively. The majority of the planet’s indigenous life is poisonous to humans, but some small creatures make good eating, if prepared properly. The weather can be very dangerous, with vast sandstorms sweeping out of nowhere to sweep across the lands and force everyone to keep their heads down. The two seas – the Dead Sea and the Poison Sea – are so salty it is impossible to drink the water, at least without desalination. In recent years, both have become heavily polluted by the mining program and much of the watery ecosystem has been destroyed.
The majority of cities are based around oasis, which form above the aquifers. Water is heavily rationed, even after five hundred years of settlement; the farms and smaller towns, surrounding the cities, are carefully designed to use as little water as possible. Farmers and settlers dig wells of their own, naturally, but not all manage to secure a permanent footing before it is too late. The landscape is littered with the remains of settlements that didn’t make it. It is, of course, possible to extract water from the air, but the process is expensive and often unreliable.
The Aztec Revival Movement, like many others from that period, had only a hazy idea of what life was really like in the pre-unification period on Earth and the society they developed, while drawing deeply on Latin America, would be unrecognisable to the ancestors they sought to emulate. The planetary culture can be said to be one of grim resilience; the settlers are very aware their planet will try to kill them if they give it a chance, and they see themselves as fighting to secure a better life for their children. The corporation’s takeover only made that harder, spurring both resistance and a determination to survive long enough to outlast the corporation and its stooges.
In most places, society is heavily communal, with everyone expected to work together for the common good. (Those who refuse to work for the community are often ‘encouraged’ to leave.) Most local leaders are older people; the young, both male and female, are often regarded as too hot-headed to be trusted with real power. The planet originally had a global education system, but it didn’t survive the invasion; now, education is very varied and higher education almost unknown, at least outside the church.
The original planetary government didn’t survive the corporate takeover. The last President was never seen again, and most of the city government’s dismantled themselves rather than take orders from the corporation. Government has fallen back on a very tribal structure, outside regions directly dominated by the corporation, and precise standards of law and order vary widely. (Generally speaking, you can do whatever you like as long as it doesn’t harm the community: premarital sex is fine as long as everyone consents, adultery is a serious offense and everyone involved will face severe punishment.) Low-level criminals will be forced to do hard labour; high-level criminals will generally be executed.
The planet was never very technologically advanced, and much tech is around 1930s-level. Cars and trucks are powered by oil and gas, rather than fusion cells or anything more modern; communications and medical technology isn’t much better. The IIC did make an attempt to set up a modern datanet, but the system never became popular outside the core mining facilities. This isn’t a bad thing, as far as the locals are concerned. They can repair most of their tech, or improve upon it, without being forced to rely on off-world industrial nodes.
The corporation dominates the region surrounding Mictlan, a city on the edge of the Dead Sea, and operates most of the mining facilities there, as well as a number of other towns and settlements. The region is heavily polluted, with large swathes completely uninhabitable, and bitterly divided between the original settlers and the Huéspeds. The region is, at least in theory, ruled directly by the corporation, but in practice the Huéspeds have a great deal of autonomy and their own defence force. They need it.
The Huéspeds have no unifying culture, being composed of immigrants from right across the empire. They are forced to hang together, however, because they have two sets of enemies: the IIC, which regards them as interchangeable widgets and the locals, who regard them as unwanted interlopers. This has produced a society that is both composed of a number of different groups and yet capable of working together as a unified whole, when the cause is right. They work hard to remain useful to the corporation, without submitting themselves completely. The smarter ones worry about what will happen when – if – the IIC pulls out. They are right to worry. With the empire coming apart, affairs on Montezuma are the last thing on the corporation’s mind …
