Independent Nations

Most of the Cluster is actually governed by smaller planetary and interplanetary nations: states large enough to tax people, field armies, start wars, sign treaties, and develop very elaborate opinions about their neighbours, but too small to dominate the political picture. That does not make them harmless. “Minor power” is a term usually used by people standing somewhere outside artillery range.

These nations are also where most Armournauts actually work. Planetary governments hire us because maintaining a full military is expensive and enemies are inconsiderate enough to keep existing. Interplanetary states hire less often, but when they do it is usually because the job is too dirty or awkward for their own forces. 

Just remember that independence is relative. Most of these states sit inside somebody’s economic or military shadow, and nearly all of them are capable of making your life extremely short if you mistake “small” for “weak.”

The Lagrange Nations Assembly

The Lagrange Nations Assembly is an independent Frontier state founded as a homeland for gravity-affected peoples unable to live safely in planetary gravity. It grew out of decades of orbital-worker organising, especially through the OWL movement, and from the recognition that station-born populations faced problems planetsiders rarely had to think about: housing scarcity, life-support costs, station closure, forced relocation, and the simple fact that the next viable home might be light-years away.

The LNA was ultimately assembled around former Lunar Union defence infrastructure and Frontier orbital communities, with Union and Venti backing. Its constitution guarantees food, water, air, healthcare, and housing, while citizenship is broadly open to gravity-affected people across the Cluster. National service can substitute for taxation, and its representative system is formally non-partisan. Formally is doing some work there. Gunnar Hollister has been chairperson for nearly five consecutive terms, which I am sure is entirely because everyone keeps independently having the same excellent idea.

From Sophia Station in Torbanner, the LNA controls sixty-eight orbital habitat clusters and maintains major carrier fleets at the gateway to the Frontier. Its navy provides much of the region’s policing and effectively acts as a judiciary in open space. That has made the Assembly far more influential than its age suggests, especially as new orbital infrastructure gives it leverage over planetary colonies below.

For Armournauts, the LNA is steady work. Its gravity-affected law enforcement cannot always pursue targets planetside, so pirates, fugitives, and other problems regularly get contracted out. The pay is decent, the jobs are usually clear, and Hollister’s political theatre has the annoying quality of being attached to something that actually works.

Triemirate

The Triemirate was once the dominant trade power of the Jambles, founded by the worlds of Nayr, Semaj, and Rednaz under three Emira and shaped by Yazatist belief. Its population included large numbers of self-replicating androids, whose reproduction covens and long lifespans forced the state to regulate security, inheritance, and population in ways most human governments never had to consider. Despite its top-heavy structure, colonies otherwise enjoyed considerable autonomy.

Its golden age ended during war with the Venti Republic. The decisive betrayal came from Mythra Yhaddam, a celebrated android captain who smuggled self-replicating Mullebachem factories into the Triemirate’s core worlds. Those machines spread, built command towers, fought one another for resources, and turned Nayr, Semaj, and Rednaz into vast automated war zones. Mythra escaped with a reproduction coven and became synonymous with treachery. The Triemirate survived, but never recovered its former strength.

With Union and Temple support, it remains the largest power in the Jambles and now controls routes feeding into the Frontier. Android Emira Asma Arwa Lina has declared the Frontier a promised land and dispatched reproduction covens to establish new colonies, while the old core worlds are being slowly reclaimed from the machines.

For Armournauts, Triemirate space is excellent business. It is stable enough to use as a base, close to the Frontier, and full of scavenging work on the ruined worlds. Mullebachem components fetch absurd prices, intact towers even more. The Triemirate wants those worlds back within seventy years and pay a premium for every inch. 

Vakil Confederation

The Vakil Confederation grew out of the Temple’s conquest of Aquilmendi and the Eight Years War that followed. The Vakil remember that period as the birth of their national identity: the banning of their law, the dismantling of their political autonomy, and the eventual diaspora. At the centre of that memory is E-Ra’aayaa, originally an oyster diver whose protest at the Godwien Straits became a mass blockade, then a war, then the first unified Vakil military command.

After defeat, Vakil communities scattered across the Cluster. Golvakil settled planetside among other populations, while Asuvakil became largely nomadic, gravity-affected spacefarers. What they retained was language, faith, tribal identity, and the belief that they had been dispossessed rather than assimilated. Restoration movements eventually converged after the Temple raid on the Lemonwind, leading to the Cinnamonsun summit and the founding of the modern Confederation at Tosa Binkano.

The Confederation is still young, quarrelsome, and politically divided between traditionalists and progressives, but it has expanded rapidly in the Frontier and built a reputation for unusually determined military resistance. The Temple still regards it as a terrorist organisation, while Vakil supporters see it as the first legitimate restoration of their sovereignty in centuries. Political killings, insurgency, and open fighting continue wherever those two interpretations collide.

I have a hard time pretending the Temple is the misunderstood party here. The Vakil lost their homeland, their laws, and nearly their political identity, then spent generations rebuilding all three from exile. That does not make everything the Confederation does wise or clean. It does explain why they fight like people who think losing once was already one time too many.

Yscenics

The Yscenics are a linguo-nationalist, oligarchic caste society on Arcadia, obsessed with preserving reconstructed Old Earth languages, cultures, and bloodlines. At the top sit the Earthly Genera, dynasties claiming inherited authority through ancestry and cultural pedigree. Beneath them are the Tribute Cladites, Paean Haploids, and finally Criminaloids: people treated as inherently subversive and denied meaningful agency unless they submit to expiation and re-education.

Their great houses wrap themselves in the names and symbols of dead Earth nations and enforce loyalty through surveillance, repression, and a military apparatus built as much for population control as external war. Religious and ideological beliefs that do not affirm Earthly Genera supremacy are criminalised. Occupied populations have faced deportation, incarceration, pogroms, and worse, while the regime publicly disavows atrocities as the work of fringe elements.

The system is also coming apart. Revolutions, secession movements, and wars on Odelke, Idris, and elsewhere have steadily reduced Yscenic control, while even the Superpowers now seem more interested in managing the aftermath than preserving the regime. House New Zealand and House Canada are already trying to break away. The question is less whether the Yscenics collapse than how much blood they spill before they do.

They still hire Armournauts for policing, counterinsurgency, and private protection, and their house forces are well equipped and usually vicious. I would avoid the work. The Yscenics inherited all the worst instincts of Old Earth and decided those were the parts worth preserving. Their empire should have died with it.

Xianics

The Xianics began as isolated Yscenic colonies that spent so long neglected by the empire they became something else. When peace negotiations returned them to Yscenic control, the empire blamed them for its decline and tried to strip away the autonomy they had developed. The Xianics saw where that was going and flipped sides. Very Armournaut of them.

They abandoned the Yscenic caste system, formally renounced slavery, adopted the Venti language, and rebuilt themselves as a constitutional monarchy tied to elected government. That sounds cleaner than it is. Indentured labour remains heavily regulated rather than abolished, and marrying hereditary royalty into elected leadership is not exactly a revolutionary break with the past. Still, their are elections, the caste system is gone, and they at least appear willing to admit that changing the label does not automatically fix the underlying problem.

The Yscenics responded with war. It has remained a long, ugly conflict of raids, sabotage, assassinations, and border fighting rather than grand campaigns. The Xianics know they cannot win a straight contest, so they rely heavily on Armournauts to break incursions, protect infrastructure, and make every Yscenic advance too expensive to sustain.

They have since become serious Frontier colonisers, especially around Iolar, and are richer and more secure than their origins suggested they had any right to become. They are still paranoid, still too close to the Venti for comfort, and still carrying more of the old system than they like to admit. But these bastard children of the Yscenics turned out better than their parents, and apparently that did not take much effort.

New Monaco

New Monaco began as a collection of failing orbital communities around Adria that survived the collapse of the original flotilla through scavenging, cooperation, and increasingly desperate measures. Their fortunes changed when Biandra Speciovich used the orbitals as staging grounds for strikes during the wars that created the Venti Republic. In return for their support, the orbitals secured new habitats, jurisdiction over Adrian space, and the foundation of an independent state.

From fewer than five thousand people, New Monaco grew into a vast interconnected habitat complex supporting millions. Industry and refining gave way to casinos, resorts, universities, media, fashion, and entertainment. Today it is one of the Cluster’s great cultural exporters, with enough influence over Venti politics and public taste that most people consuming New Monaco culture barely notice where it came from.

I have never actually been there. I have been to enough of its franchised casino orbitals to get the idea. Bright lights, free drinks among other comps, smiling staff, and an environment painstakingly engineered to convince you that losing money is a form of leisure. I prefer gambling with my life. At least in a firefight you can shoot back.

New Monaco rarely needs freelance Armournauts close to home, relying on old Venti contracts and Senate protection. The Frontier is different. There it expands through finance, backing colonies and governments in exchange for resources, trade rights, and corporate access. It is very good at making other people’s expansion profitable.