When the emperor Zhakirov succeeded Arbellatra in 666, the Solomani’s success at court lost some of its lustre. The economic and political stability that had come to the Imperium with the end of the Civil Wars strengthened the megacorporations. Their
power increased relative to both the nobility and to individual worlds. In 679, Zhakirov recognised this when he married Antiama Shiishuginsa, whose family controlled the powerful Vilani megacorporation Zirunkariish. Previous emperors of the Third Imperium had all been Solomani. This marriage broke the power of Solomani aristocracy at court and ensured that future lines would be of mixed Vilani-Solomani blood. This marriage cemented an alliance between the Imperium and the megacorporations. It may have stabilised the Imperium by ensuring Vilani support. It certainly added greatly to both the personal wealth of the emperor and to the political power of the resurgent Vilani industrialists.
This new alliance alienated believers in the Solomani Movement. From this point onward, they took an increasingly anti-Imperial tone, combining the appeal of Solomani exceptionalism with the Confederationist desire to create an alternative system of interstellar government no longer be subject to the dictates of a single emperor.
The power base of the Solomani Movement was in the rimward sectors of the Imperium, especially in the Solomani Rim, Alpha Crucis, Magyar and Aldebaran sectors, which had become a hotbed of Confederationist political views. Solomani Parties espousing the Movement’s philosophy began to achieve political power on worlds in this region. At first local affairs, they developed interstellar political networks that existed outside of the normal channels of Imperial power. Solomani corporate interests in these sectors helped fund them, as they also favoured an aggressive policy of rimward expansion. With the emperor’s court and Vilani megacorporations preferring consolidation and stable borders to frontier development, such policies got little Imperial support. Solomani corporations and planetary governments in the rimward sectors increasingly found they could no longer rely on the Imperial Navy and Scout Service’s assistance in opening up new territories and markets or taking their part over non-Human states such as the Vegans. Despite Solomani allegations to the contrary, the reigns of Zhakirov and his successor Margaret I did not openly favour Zirunkariish or other Vilani megacorporations. However, they did promote economic, legal and regulatory policies that strongly supported every Imperial megacorporation. This policy strengthened the economy of the Imperium as a whole but there were losers as well as winners. In the post-Civil War era, individual worlds and subsector or planetary businesses increasingly lost both political power and market share to the ever-expanding tentacles of huge Imperium-wide conglomerates. Although many of these companies were of Solomani origin, their interests were increasingly aligned with the entire Imperium rather than particular regions or cultures. Senior managers of companies like Ling-Standard Products or SuSAG had neither sympathy nor interest in the Solomani Movement, which from their perspective was a reactionary and provincial ideology that could undermine hard-won stability.
Subsector-wide and planetary business interests held different attitudes. In the sectors surrounding Terra, their customers often shared a pro-Solomani worldview and they themselves had increasing difficulties competing with megacorporations, especially when these leviathans were closely aligned with both the Imperial Family and a resurgent Vilani nobility. To balance the power of the megacorporations, worlds that elected Solomani Party governments found it in their interests to court sector-wide and subsector-level Solomani-owned corporations and shut out megacorporations. Imperial regulations prohibited protectionist practices in interstellar trade but this was not necessarily the case at the planetary level. In exchange for favourable treatment, these regional and planetary companies began to provide financial support for the nascent Solomani Movement. One of the leaders of this approach was Transstar, a subsector-sized transport line that would use Solomani Movement patronage to significantly expand its influence. In 685, delegates representing Solomani Movement political parties that had achieved power on various worlds in the Solomani Rim and neighbouring sectors gathered on Terra in the first great Solomani Party Congress. They were accompanied by representatives from many pro-Solomani non-governmental organisations. These interests included such groups as the Solomani Students Society, the Rim Coalition for Social and Racial Justice, the Near Boötes Business Association, the Church of the First Cross, Alpha Crucis Committee for a Solomani Society, Citizens for a New Terran Union, the Confederation Study Group, the Rim Traders Alliance and the League of Solomani Veterans. Additional support and funding for the Congress came from pro-Solomani businesses, chief among them the rising merchant corporation Transstar, which had offered discounted travel arrangements for many delegates. This first Party Congress, which lasted just over a year, resulted in the formal establishment of a set of Solomani Party principals and political objectives.
Although the Solomani Party’s official platform itself was somewhat conservative, racist and militant tendencies were also on the rise. Over the next few decades, the organised Solomani Party became increasingly involved on an interstellar level in planetary conflicts. It used its resources to support the struggles of pro-Solomani political groups, either directly by providing militant volunteers and hiring mercenaries or through its own allied corporations. Solomani Party money and ideology increasingly injected itself into conflicts between rival local regimes and corporations. Mercenaries funded by Solomani Party-controlled worlds or their corporate surrogates sometimes came into conflict with those hired by non-Solomani governments and the megacorporations that supported them. Imperial forces were sometimes drawn into these conflicts, especially when fighting impinged on the extrality zones of starports within the Solomani Rim. As the region fractured on racial lines, the extrality zones of starports often became
fortresses or ghettos where non-Solomani minorities and megacorporation employees were increasingly concentrated under the armed protection of mercenaries or Imperial troops. The Solomani Party increasingly portrayed starports as bastions of megacorporate imperialism and noble privilege and referred to them as ‘zones of Imperial occupation.’
How to handle ‘the Solomani problem’ became a perennial issue in noble circles, which only served to feed the growing anti- Imperial sentiment on the Rim. Corporate military intervention through hired mercenaries was nothing unusual in the Imperium but an interstellar political party supporting such actions across multiple sectors was unprecedented. It could be seen as violating the spirit if not the letter of the Imperial Rules of War, which sought to outlaw warfare between member worlds of the Imperium. The Imperial court began to take notice of this strain of Solomani activism and loyalist nobles and anti-Solomani megacorporations began throwing money and mercenaries at the problem.
the soloMani autonoMous
region
The Solomani Movement was out of favour in court and its ideas seemed radical to many Imperial citizens. It was also a powerful force that could no longer be ignored. In 702, Empress Margaret I agreed to meet with moderate leaders of the Solomani Party Congress in order to diffuse tensions and placate the more vocal spokesmen for the Solomani Cause. Then in 704, in what was widely perceived as capitulation to Solomani demands, the Empress granted an Imperial charter creating the Solomani Autonomous Region. This was a sphere of space 100 parsecs in diameter that was centred on Terra, giving the region its popular name, the Solomani Sphere. The creation of the Solomani Sphere was intended as a sop to the Solomani Movement, who’s political and business leaders became the new rulers of the region. The Imperium retained theoretical sovereignty but real power within the region was placed in the hands of the Solomani Party and its political allies. Hereditary noble titles were not abolished, nor were fiefs of Solomani nobles who supported the Movement confiscated. However, the nobility in the Solomani Autonomous Region quickly lost their status as representatives of the interstellar level of government. These positions were taken over by various committees, initially by regional, subsector- and sector- level Solomani Party congresses and later by more formal bodies. However, many Solomani nobles did use their wealth and influence to achieve early positions of leadership within the Party; others discovered the growing anti-Imperial bias of the Solomani Movement translated into anti-aristocratic prejudice and chose exile. Those noble houses that actively resisted the growth of the Movement were often subject to persecution by Solomani Party militants.
The Imperium ceded its formal jurisdiction over the region’s starports but Imperial Navy and Scout bases remained under sovereign control. As a result, the Autonomous Region was not entirely autonomous, at least not to begin with. Trade relations and technological exchanges continued. The Imperium still claimed formal sovereignty over the space between its stars. It reserved the right to send Imperial military forces into the region and manage foreign policy, even in conflicts between alien client states and its Solomani citizens. The Imperial Treasury taxed the citizens of the Solomani Sphere, despite the Imperium having turned its back on its rimward frontier. Friction was inevitable.
The nativist movement in the Solomani Sphere did not come into being in isolation. In fact, the period from 800-850 saw the rise of xenophobia throughout the entire Imperium. In the spinward and coreward regions, it manifested in the Psionics Suppressions and the fear of Zhodani infiltration. To rimward, in the Solomani Autonomous District, it took the form of increasing nationalist and racist sentiment. Solomani did not share the psi-inspired panic over Zhodani spies – indeed Terra’s psionic institute largely escaped any persecution – but they grew suspicious of other aliens amongst them. As Solomani corporations and settlers expanded through their own efforts into the rimward frontier, they resisted opening these worlds up Imperial settlement by non-Solomani humans or aliens. The inhabitants of the Magyar and Dark Nebula sectors remembered how the Imperium had refused to press its advantage to regain the worlds that had fallen to the Aslan, accepting peace instead. The Solomani were determined not to allow any frontier worlds in Canopus, Aldebaran and Neworld sectors to fall into the orbits of either the Aslan or Hivers or be carved up for the benefit of Imperial megacorporations or nobles.
This was symptomatic of the growing disdain that the Solomani felt toward the Imperium and Imperial institutions. The Charter of the Solomani Autonomous Region limited the influence of the Imperial Bureaucracy and in particular the Imperial Colonial Office. However, both the Imperial Navy and the Scout Service continued to operate in the Autonomous Region. The Scout Service’s operation of the Xboat network was appreciated but its practice of interdicting new worlds to protect developing cultures, primitive minor races or fragile ecosystems was seen as getting in the way of the pro-expansion ideology of the Solomani Movement. In particular, Solomani businesses and colonists claimed the Scout Service bureaucracy’s interdiction process was subject to manipulation by Imperial megacorporations, who could get certain worlds exempted from Red Zone status. This dispute came to a head in the Red Zone Affair.
Left to itself, Solomani political theory had grown more chauvinistic; in part, this served to justify their colonial policies on the rimward, spinward and trailing frontiers, where they were directly competing with the Aslan and Hive Federation.
This was combined with a cavalier attitude toward the rights of those minor non-Human races that Solomani settlers were encountering on the rimward frontier. These primitive indigenous races or ‘prindigs’ as Solomani colonial offices classified them were species that never been contacted by the Vilani Empire or the Rule of Man and which existed outside the bounds of the Imperium. They also tended to occupy valuable planetary real estate. This led to direct conflict between polices of the Imperium and the Solomani Autonomous Region.
The Imperial Scout Service had no formal control over the territories beyond the Imperial frontier but nevertheless maintained a presence there. It recommended that Red Zone interdictions be imposed on a number of garden worlds in Aldebaran, Canopus, Neworld and Alpha Crucis sectors, notably the homeworld of the Kwaz (or ‘Chuckies’), a threatened minor prindig race. The Solomani Colonial Office ignored these recommendations and the Kwaz homeworld was fully opened to Solomani settlement. Next year, in 857, the Imperial Scout Service’s Communications Office opposed on budgetary grounds a popular and well-funded initiative to extend high-speed Xboat lines into frontier districts in Aldebaran sector. Solomani Party politicians and their media supporters denounced this as Imperial sabotage of the Sphere’s aspirations, implying it was retaliation for the Solomani Colonial Office’s unwillingness to accede to its interdiction polices.
The Red Zone Affair was just one example of the many jurisdictional clashes that occurred in the 800s. Potentially more serious was the situation developing on the ‘Lion’s Mane’ – the Aslan border region that abutted on the Solomani Autonomous region’s spinward frontier. Subsector governments dominated by Solomani Party regimes began using their new autonomy to forge alliances with and then absorb independent Solomani states in Dark Nebula and Ustral Quadrant. These newly- strengthened polities began ‘liberating’ worlds in the Aslan buffer zone in violation of Peace of Ftahalr and other long-standing agreements. Solomani Autonomous Region forces fought over three dozen border skirmishes with Aslan clans between 705 and 870 including the year-long War of Kimson’s Stand (832) that redrew the borders in Dark Nebula in Solomani favour. The Solomani Autonomous Region’s quasi-independent status created friction due to differing interpretations of its duties and privileges. In theory, the Solomani were not supposed to exercise their own foreign policy. In practice, the Imperium wanted to keep the peace on the Aslan border while the Solomani sought to provided military aid to their brethren outside the Imperium and in so doing expand the reach of the Solomani Movement. Imperial Naval forces in the region found themselves ordered not to intervene as Solomani colonial navy squadrons struck into Aslan space, only to be called into action to defend Imperial worlds against Aslan retaliatory raids. The situation was becoming untenable. In 835 empress Paula II ordered the
Imperial Navy to pull back entirely from Dark Nebula, Canopus and Ustral sectors leaving defence there entirely to Solomani colonial fleets.
Similar conflicts occurred on the domestic friend. Most Solomani worlds had by 850 replaced much of the Imperial structure of government with their own Party-run institutions yet still paid revenues into the Imperial treasury. Much of this went to support Imperial services they no longer trusted. If agencies like the Scout Service or the Navy did not serve the Solomani Cause, what good were they?
During the mid 850s, leading intellectuals and politicians in the Solomani Party argued that their Autonomous Region was paying Imperial taxes without receiving useful Imperial services. On the other hand, the Imperial court was unwilling to extend benefits to a restive region whose population rejected its sovereignty and whose philosophy now challenged its very legitimacy. Radical Solomani leaders and Party-dominated media charged that Solomani worlds, once the bedrock of the Imperium, were being treated as if they were client states, of no more account than minor alien races like the Vegans. In 860 a delegation of moderate Solomani leaders travelled to the Imperial court, where they failed to secure further concessions and indeed were refused any direct meetings with emperor Tomutova II. Negotiations sputtered on at the sector level for a few more years, but by then popular sentiment in the rim had turned increasingly anti-Imperial. In 864, the Solomani Party Congress voted to begin preparations for possible unilateral secession, including the drafting of a constitution and the creation of various national institutions. Many believed this to be a bluff intended to force an Imperial concessions; however, when these concessions never materialised, the process had too much momentum to stop.
Birth
of
the soloMani
Confederation
On 45–871 on Terra, the Solomani Party Congress of the Solomani Autonomous Region met and formally announced that its member worlds would be reorganising into the Solomani Confederation. Its capital would be Terra. This was effectively a declaration of independence and recognised as such through the Solomani Sphere. The Solomani Movement chose that name in an attempt to strengthen its claims to the heritage of the old Terran Confederation. They also adopted many of the old Terran Confederation and Old Earth Union’s governmental forms: worlds sent representatives to a governing council, the Secretariat and they elected a Secretary General and cabinet to hold executive power. The first Secretary General of the Confederation was the respected political scientist and Solomani Party activist Noah Kwan, president of the highly- politicised University of Terra.
The Solomani Confederation was not recognised by the government of the Imperium but nor did the Imperium oppose its creation with anything more substantive than diplomatic protest. The Imperium’s position was that government of the Solomani Autonomous Region was merely engaging in an administration reorganisation and bureaucratic overreach, which, for political reasons, the Imperium did not intend to contest at this time. For their part, Secretary General Kwan and the other Confederation’s leaders were at first unwilling to openly challenge the Imperium and gave assurances that they still respected Imperial sovereignty in matters such as mutual defence. Nevertheless, the creation of the Solomani Confederation resulted in the formal replacement of all sector and subsector levels of the Imperial bureaucracy with government ministries controlled by the Solomani. The transition was relatively smooth. Often the very same offices continued to run, just under Confederation jurisdiction. Solomani Party loyalists, all of who were of Solomani extraction, typically replaced senior management.
Yet there were obvious changes. Over time, non-Solomani throughout all levels of the bureaucracy was removed, mainly through early retirement, normal attrition or biased hiring practices. In 875, a visitor could still often find a Bwap or
Vilani working as a record clerk or manager; by 925 the new Confederation bureaucracy was entirely made up of Solomani Humans – and they were all members of the Solomani Party. The formal creation of the Solomani Confederation also stripped the last remaining subsector nobility of their powers. The Secretariat claimed it assumed the powers of the vacant high nobility positions and that this also gave it executive control over Imperial Armed Forces operating within the Solomani Autonomous Region. This was disputed by the Imperium, which held that the Confederation did not legally exist. Tumotova II simply ordered all Naval and Scout Bases closed on worlds controlled by the Solomani Confederation. To fill the resulting power vacuum, Solomani Sphere’s colonial navies took over interstellar patrols, messenger service and garrison duties