Vesperion III
System: Vesperion
World: Vesperion III
Population: Terraxians
Political Structure: Independent fortified city-states
Confederation Status: Outside the Human Confederation; Sarginian quarantine
Environment: Arid terrestrial world / extreme cyclical climate
Primary Cultural Trait: Perpetual warfare
There has not been peace on Vesperion III within living memory. There may never have been peace at all.
The Terraxians insist their ancestors were Terrans – colonists of the old Terran Empire stranded on Vesperion III during the upheavals surrounding its collapse. Their name reflects that claim. Terraxian is not merely what outsiders call them – it is what they call themselves, distinguishing the people who survived Vesperion from the Terrans who abandoned it. Their histories say their ancestors inherited a difficult world. They made it worse.
The World of Two Suns
Vesperion III circles within a complicated binary system. Its two suns dominate virtually every aspect of Terraxian life. There is no simple division between summer and winter, nor even between day and night as most humans understand them. Depending upon Vesperion III’s position relative to both stars, one sun may rise before the other has completely set. At other times, brief periods of genuine darkness return.
Terraxians therefore distinguish between different kinds of day rather than simply day and night.
- High Day occurs when both suns dominate the sky. Temperatures soar, travel becomes dangerous, and armies often shelter beneath armor, stone, or earth.
- Long Day describes periods when the staggered passage of the suns stretches daylight far beyond its normal duration.
- Darkfall is true night, when both suns finally disappear below the horizon. Depending upon the season, it may be frustratingly brief or last long enough for temperatures to plummet.
But every five years comes something far worse.
The Long Winter.
The geometry of the binary system produces a recurring period during which Vesperion III receives dramatically less solar energy. A world accustomed to relentless heat suddenly freezes. Deserts harden beneath frost. Water systems fail. Snow blows against fortress walls built to withstand artillery. Animals migrate or die. And Terraxian armies keep fighting. Their wars are older than many of their cities.
The Fortress States
There is no Terraxian nation. There are city-states. Each is centered upon a fortified urban complex controlling whatever makes permanent habitation possible in its region: aquifers, underground rivers, geothermal systems, agricultural caverns, mineral deposits, ancient Terran infrastructure, or defensible transportation corridors. A Terraxian city isn’t surrounded by a fortress. The city is the fortress.
Its outer districts form defensive works. Towers serve simultaneously as residences, observation posts, communications stations, and weapons platforms. Roads approaching the gates are deliberately exposed to overlapping fields of fire. Underground passages allow defenders to move between sectors without exposing themselves to bombardment.
Even civilian architecture reflects generations of warfare. A family home has reinforced shutters. A marketplace has firing positions. Schools have shelters. Water reservoirs are buried beneath meters of stone. Every Terraxian grows up knowing where to go when the alarms sound. The city-states form alliances, break them, conquer one another’s outposts, raid livestock, seize wells, contest borders, exchange prisoners, negotiate ceasefires—and eventually begin shooting again.
Ask a Terraxian why two cities are fighting and they can usually give you an answer. Ask when the war began and the answer becomes considerably less reliable.
A People Who Forgot Peace
This is where I think the Terraxians become more interesting than simply warlike humans. They aren’t fighting because they love violence. They fight because warfare has become the organizing principle of their civilization. A Terraxian understands a ceasefire. They understand truce, surrender, alliance, neutral ground, negotiation, and armistice. But peace, as outsiders mean permanent normalized relations between political powers, is almost alien.
What happens after you make peace? Who guards the wells? Who controls the passes? Why would your neighbor maintain an army if they weren’t eventually planning to use it? Why wouldn’t you attack while their defenses are weak? To a Terraxian strategist, permanent peace can sound less like enlightened politics than voluntarily abandoning deterrence.
Terraxian are a very a tragic people. They are perfectly capable of cooperation, affection, generosity, scholarship, art and family life. Terraxians can even be extraordinarily loyal friends. They simply inherited a civilization in which trusting another state has repeatedly gotten people killed.
The Warbeasts
The Terraxians maintain sophisticated vehicles, but vehicles aren’t always ideal for Vesperion III. Dust destroys machinery. Extreme heat strains cooling systems. Winter freezes lubricants and power systems. Electromagnetic disturbances associated with the binary stars can disrupt sophisticated electronics. Broken terrain makes conventional ground vehicles predictable.
So Terraxians domesticated native warbeasts – the Kharak. Kharaks are large, warm-blooded reptiloid predators native to Vesperion III’s high deserts. They can regulate their body temperature across the planet’s enormous thermal extremes, travel for long periods without water, negotiate broken terrain, and survive conditions that immobilize vehicles.
Terraxians did what Terraxians inevitably do with something useful. They armored them. Then they put guns on them. A modern Kharak cavalryman might therefore look almost anachronistic to a Confederation observer – armored human, sword at the hip, reins in hand, riding a giant reptile.
Then the observer notices the stabilized energy weapons mounted to the harness, battlefield communications built into the rider’s helmet, smart optics, composite armor, and sensor package integrated into the saddle. Terraxian technology isn’t primitive. It is brutally practical. If something survives the desert, the winter, and enemy fire, they keep using it.
The Sarginian Quarantine
Eventually, the outside galaxy found them. That did not go particularly well.
The Sarginian quarantine of Vesperion III is one of the great unanswered controversies surrounding the world. The Sarginians attempted contact. Confederation observers followed. Aid, diplomacy, technological exchange, and perhaps eventual integration into the Expanse seemed possible. The Terraxian city-states interpreted outside intervention through the only political framework they understood. A new power had entered the war. Some wanted its weapons. Some wanted an alliance. Some feared conquest.
Others concluded that whoever controlled access to the aliens would gain an insurmountable advantage over every rival. Violence followed. And when the Sarginians attempted to impose restrictions, they discovered another deeply rooted Terraxian characteristic – They hate being ruled by anyone they haven’t personally agreed has the strength and right to rule them. Eventually the Sarginians stopped trying. Vesperion III was quarantined. Not destroyed. Not conquered. Contained.
Traffic entering the system is restricted. Weapons shipments are forbidden. Contact is monitored. The Human Confederation officially discourages travel. The Terraxians naturally interpret the quarantine as a blockade. Which means, from their perspective, the Sarginians are simply another enemy.
That could make Terraxians encountered elsewhere in Shattered Expanse particularly interesting. Smugglers occasionally get people off Vesperion III. Mercenaries escape aboard illicit transports. Refugees flee the endless wars. Perhaps some city-states secretly maintain offworld contacts.
For the first time, those Terraxians encounter societies where two neighboring powers can disagree for decades without eventually shelling each other’s cities. Some find the concept fascinating. Some find it naïve. Some simply don’t believe it. And this leads to a central question for the species:
What happens when you take someone whose civilization has spent centuries teaching them that peace is merely the interval in which your enemy prepares for the next war—and show them that it doesn’t have to be?