Apsic Empire

The Apsic Empire, often simply referred to as "The Sovereignty" or "Apsu", is a human majority Interstellar state in the Orion and Perseus arms of the Milky Way Galaxy. While formed as a colonial republic, severe strife and civil unrest caused by the unexpectedly poor living conditions on Rece early in its history caused a military dictatorship to arise and prevent their deaths so far from home. That system of governance has never dissolved to allow the republic to return. 
It was established in the year 2344 after traveling for over 70 years using early warp technology, and has expanded to govern five stars, each with one colony.
== Government ==
The Apsic Empire has used a dictatorial government since only sixteen years after its establishment, with the Livestaff wielding the military to maintain authority, and appointing their own successors. Dissent is silenced violently, and they maintain a number of "puppet colonies" in rimward wild space, charging tributes for their allegiance and pseudo-independent governance. 
=== Citizenry Tiers ===
Apsic society is stratified into a number of castes. The lowest of which is the worker caste. Workers perform low-skill labor in exchange for housing and food, but do not receive much payment. Mirroring this is the soldier caste, who perform military service. These positions begin at the equivalent Earth age of seventeen, and last for six Earth years. 
When entering the next tier, one may enter the Officer caste, where you become the leader of a group of soldiers, or the citizen caste, where you are eligible to work for payment rather than simply housing. Both officers and citizens are provided with housing and food by the government. Schooling to learn skills required for higher-level positions are provided for free to people of these castes. If an officer or citizen is found to be incompetent or non-productive, they can have their status as a citizen revoked, and return to the worker or soldier caste. 
The highest caste is the Livestaff, those in charge of the state as a whole. They and their families make up the entirety of the caste, and new leaders are chosen as their replacements from among the small number of well-connected citizen families, or the families of those already in office. While the members of this caste are known to the masses, the exact identities and number of those in leadership positions is not. Instead, all official declarations have been relayed through the various iterations of the Cartographer AI since its creation. 
== History ==
Departing from Earth in the year 2272, twenty-five thousand individuals from the United States, the Arab League, Eastern Europe, and refugees from the ecologically devastated Mars spent 67 years and five months in cryogenic stasis before being awoken by the Livestaff, a much smaller number of individuals who lived and reproduced on the vessel during its voyage, who assisted in their recovery during the final five years of travel. 
Around 9.6 thousand people of the 25 thousand were deemed nonviable, and were abandoned. This caused a significant portion of individuals aboard to become upset at the loss of friends and family members, a small minority of which became violent. These small rebellions were easily put down by the Livestaff and security androids. This would later be seen as the first in a series of misfortunes that would befall the colony. 
=== Dead Haven ===
In 2344, landfall was made on Rece, a Romanian word meaning cold, chosen for its short and simple description of the planet's environment. Spectroscopic observations made from Sol projected the planet's atmosphere would be thicker, thus they thought the planet would be warmer. Upon arrival, the colonists were surprised and disappointed to learn that the planet's atmosphere was thin and the surface was dry, making its surface dominated by its ice caps, with a band of deserts and rock with some coastal taiga and tundra the only options for habitation. 
Rece's bleakness caused many to accept the failure of the colony before it had even been established. Colonists withdrew from their duties and into their dormitories on the ship, sinking into consumption and decadence. As the population of the colony increased, the reserved supplies began to run low and crop yields were not as high as projected, even when adjusted for the planet's environment. The population of the settlement, now called Deadhaven, had increased threefold within ten years in addition to low labor participation, putting further stress on their limited supplies. 
A dichotomy between the Livestaff and the general populace was beginning to emerge as they starved. Livestaff authorities began using food as an incentive to work, giving the population of Deadhaven only the bare minimum to survive unless they worked, leaving many malnourished. This worked for a time, but the amount of food available was still too low to support the population. 
=== Military Takeover ===
The famine rampant in the colony of Deadhaven by 2360 led the Livestaff to push employment further, now threatening to detain individuals not working at least nine hours a day. This was later increased to a minimum of 12 hours. The discovery that the onboard hydroponic farms were being used exclusively to feed the Livestaff sparked some resistance organizations to form, causing them to begin using the security androids and armed guards to ensure peace. 
Over time, scouts failing to return weapons upon their return and raids on armories created enough armed civilians that they felt confident enough to openly attack the interior offices of the colony ship, which was repurposed to serve as the capitol building of Deadhaven. Security androids, armed human guards, and turrets that had been deployed in case of just such an emergency ensured the failure of the rebellion and capture of their stolen weapons. 
This event led to further crackdowns on participation and expulsion of dissenting elements, leading to the creation of a second settlement a number of kilometers south known as Underland. 
=== Stabilization ===
Underland was moderately successful due to high labor participation, later attributed to a sense of self preservation due to lacking the safety net of the colony ship's supplies, however small they might have been. Deadhaven managed to construct large greenhouses and irrigation channels filled with water from ice mined from the planet's moon, allowing crop yields to increase. 
The initial decline of the colony was attributed to a diffusion of responsibility, an inability or unwillingness to act based solely on the fact that there are others that could perform the same job, combined with low morale. 
These settlements expanded until they came into conflict, with Deadhaven coming out on top due to their superior arms manufacturing capabilities, placing their own puppet government in charge of the city. They continued their slow expansion across the world mostly uneventfully, with a small exception. Alien ruins were discovered on the planet in the 2430s. Small structures with simple ballistic armor and firearms on par with human technology of the day, but much smaller, built for humanoids roughly two-thirds the size of fully grown humans.
Nearby, small military starships were found as well, but they still revealed technologies that humanity already had access to. Railguns, firearms using a propellant similar to cordite, and warp-ring drive technology. How long they were buried underground was not known. Its technologies were used to improve the speed of their warp drives. 
=== Second Generation Colonies ===
In 2439, the colony of Asphodel was established in the Hope system. It was a system with only two planets. The outermost was a massive rocky planet with an incredibly dense nitrogen atmosphere, making its surface temperature a blistering 203 degrees Celsius. 
The other was a comfortable world, mostly arid or deserts with tropical biomes areas on the coasts, The two extremes separated by vast grasslands or mountain ranges. Negatives included a solar day of almost 115 hours, a lack of any moons leading to its axial tilt being unpredictable in the long term, and a high level of ionizing radiation as a result of its proximity to its small red sun and a relatively weak magnetosphere. This necessitated magnetic shielding on all structures and common areas of settlements to prevent cancerous growths and radiation poisoning. 
The second Apsic colony was established in 2458, and would be called Tartarus. It orbits Aldaw, a star 11% more massive than Sol, but at only 89% the distance that Earth does. The planet was extremely hot, with an average surface temperature of over 53 degrees Celsius, similarly to the planet Clesti in the Rangel 3 system. This made colonies restricted to areas either north or south of the tropics, but the planet was otherwise the best they had found thus far. 
Their third colony was founded in 2477, on a pristine target for low-level terraformation. A cool world with near 70% ocean coverage with slightly high radiation levels and short days. The star would be called Termina, and the world would be called Mara, a Hebrew term meaning "bitter strength" to signify the hardships they went through to reach it, and they would have to make a display of bitter strength to keep it as well. 
=== First Contacts ===
Seven years after the establishment of Mara's colony, alien vessels "...resembling those found on Rece..." were spotted at the edge of the Termina system. Unlike the first contact situation between the Orion Confederation and these aliens much later, the Sovereignty would have no peaceful resolution. A similar situation played out at the beginning. Stations in the area reported the vessels, Apsu military vessels responded by entering the systems, and a standoff ensued for several hours until one side fired warning shots before a battle ensued. 
When the authiik fleet emergency jumped out of the system to preserve their numbers, the survivors were taken captive and placed in the lowest strata of Apsic society on Mara, workers who perform their jobs in exchange for food and housing rather than payment. Any future vessels of the same types were authorized to be destroyed on sight. 
After their fourth attempt, authiik scouting parties stopped returning to the planet, leaving the Sovereignty to their own devices until they happened across the New Sol system in 2566, along with the colonies of Ares and Aphrodite. The leadership felt a tinge of elation to make contact with other humans for the first time in almost 700 years, and devastated to learn what had become of Earth.
A number of humans migrated between Apsu and, at the time, the United Solar Colonies. They brought news of what had been happening rimward of them for the last centuries. While not as expansionist as they once were now that they had adequate living space to expand into, they are still an authoritarian state fond of crushing dissent with an iron fist. This put fear in the heart of the Solar government until Revant proposed to form the Orion Confederation in 2572. 
This was quickly accepted by both the Sol and New Sol systems, creating a new interstellar state to contend with Apsu, should they ever feel up to attacking their home system. 
=== Ancient Mega-Engineering ===
In 2633, Apsic scouts discovered an abandoned megastructure. An approximately 5200 kilometer wide Orbital-Class ringworld habitat they named Alpha. The materials used were completely foreign to them, as were whatever methods were used to build it. It was not questioned much further, and the ring was colonized in short order. 
=== Demihumans ===
For the next several centuries, the Apsic Empire preferred inward perfection, expanding their infrastructure rather than their borders, if such a thing can even exist in space. In 3017 however, first contact was made between Demetian explorers and an Apsic mining colony. Their scout ship was no match for Apsic military vessels, and it was quickly captured. Their technologies were primitive and the location of their home system was in their navigation systems, so they moved to control the system.
=== Client Worlds ===
The Apsic Empire established many client states through military might whenever the opportunity presented itself. Not all of their attempts proved successful, however, as their attempt to subjugate Demet, Elain, and the in-system colonies established by both proves. A notable example of a world that they had successfully puppeted is that of Fool's Enlightenment, or Oświecenie Głupców in the original Polish. An old independent colony sponsored by the Neo-Eastern block on Earth before the second interplanetary war. 
==== Fool's Enlightenment ====
The world was cold and distant from its parent body, much like the world of Rece. It was home to a small number of rather technologically simple people who had hoped to escape conflict altogether, but in the year 3044, they would be rediscovered and made into a client people of the Apsic Empire. An order of knights wielding swords was the only security force that the settlements had, as they had been isolated for nearly a millennia, and did not produce firearms, and as such could not put up a meaningful defense against the Apsic Empire, five worlds strong. 
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