Tratamiento farmacológico de los códigos Z a los 6-12 meses

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HISTORY

To understand the origins of the Axumite Providence, one must understand the political turmoil of the Outer Reaches Rebellion that raged between 2236 and 2237. The rapid rate at which humanity was spreading out to the stars meant that corruption was becoming easy to hide on the outer edge of the expansion.

Money and material were often lost or misappropriated for personal gain. Many colonists thought the Terran government was complicit in the corruption, or even the root cause. A protest on Freedom about corruption and taxation spread quickly to Denebola and beyond, causing the Terran government to crack down hard. Whole systems were interdicted by blockades at their jump points, and Terran troops ensured that weapons were taken away from the colonists and taxes paid.

A large group of settlers had just arrived at the newly opened colony Uhuru when reports of the massacre of nearly 10,000 civilians on Summit reached them. Uhuru Settlement Group Gamma, as that group was known, originated from the northern areas of Terra’s African continent, and consisted of several colonial JumpShips and shuttles carrying all the supplies and equipment the 150,000 settlers in the group needed to survive on their new world.

Fearing that the Terran Alliance wouldn’t stop in its oppression, the settlers convinced the crews of their vessels to join them in moving farther away from Terra. Pausing only long enough to trade supplies designed specifically for Uhuru’s soil and native life for more rations and spare parts, the newly christened Axumite Settlement Group—named after an ancient North African empire—jumped anti-spinward. Records show that these colonists were last sighted at Dixie, where Terran officials attempted to intercept them to reclaim their valuable equipment.

The Axumite Settlement Group continued its journey for nearly a year. Passing through what would become the Circinus Federation, the navigators in the group detected a small star cluster visibly in near alignment with the brilliant super giant Wezen. In Arabic, Wezen means “the third virgin,” and one of the imams of the group’s Islamic faithful, Hasan ibn al-Thala took it as a sign from Allah that their new home should be in the star cluster.

(To many faithful, Terra was seen as the first virgin, and Uhuru was to be the second, so the connection with Wezen completed the trinity from a spiritual perspective.)

It took another year of travel before the Axumite Settlement Group arrived in a system with a habitable planet on the outer edge of the globular cluster in late 2239. They named this world Thala, to honor the imam who convinced them to go there. Thala was a lush world with many small continents and old mountain ranges that had been worn down by time. The settlers quickly took to setting up large-scale agriculture using seeds brought with them from Terra and some of the local varieties of maize and meat animals.

As the colonists were building a new home, two of the flotilla’s remaining JumpShips were detailed to conduct a stellar survey of nearby solar systems, while one of the remaining three ships—

which had suffered critical damage during the journey—was stripped for parts and converted it into a small orbital drydock.

When the survey teams returned a year later, they found the welcoming sight of a functional space station in low orbit of Thala, now a successful colony.

The initial survey by Axumite JumpShips returned the same findings that a later Interstellar Expeditions survey showed: the systems of the Providence Cluster were teeming with life. When some of Thalans chose to relocate to one of these other star systems (Kefya, circling a K2V star), the Thalan leadership chose to form its own interstellar realm in 2245. They named it the Axumite Providence, its name implying the claim to all of the worlds of the cluster.

The original government was based on a Council of Elders, with a councilperson elected from each of Thala’s major settlements.

This eventually changed as the Axumite Providence expanded, so that the new colonies would not be underrepresented. The modern Council now consists of a single member from each settled Axumite world, but with the Council member representing Thala able to break ties in any vote.

The Axumite Providence expanded slowly, and not without great cost. The initial group of settlers and the crews of the flotilla were sorely lacking in specialists in heavy industry and K-F theory. While capable of basic maintenance on their JumpShips, any damage to the vessels’ K-F drives fell beyond the Axumites’

ability to repair. This came to a head during the colonization effort of Illizi in 2701, when a jump error sent one of the flotilla’s three remaining JumpShips too far into Illizi’s gravity well, and tore the vessel apart, killing all 4,000 Axumite colonists on board. Colonial efforts on Illizi eventually continued, but with only two JumpShips left for the entire Providence, the Council of Elders unanimously decreed that no new worlds would be settled afterward unless failing to do so would present a clear and present danger to the entire Providence.

The lack of specialists in heavy industry also caused problems.

Only small amounts of advanced machinery or parts could be manufactured each year, and the advanced technologies used by the initial settlers were used and gone before the twenty-third century was out. While it was still possible to build small industrial fusion plants, it was much easier and cost effective to build coal-fired power plants. While the Inner Sphere knew a golden age of technology during the Star League, the average citizen of the Axumite Providence never saw technology much more advanced than the early to mid-twentieth century.

The lack of heavy machinery and mechanized agriculture led the Axumite Providence to grow slowly when compared with other agrarian societies of the past. In the 2890s this caused a small schism, when Ahmed Al-Hasar, the councilman of Shahhat, campaigned for a large-scale return to Terran space, in a bid

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to return with more JumpShips and technology. He ignored the concerns of the other councilors about the possibility that humanity could be extinct, or that the descendants of the Terran Alliance they fled would be hostile to the descendants of runaway colonists from beyond their periphery. The Council denied his request to use one of the Providence’s remaining ancient JumpShips and cited recent progress in automated manufacturing had been made on Thala.

This automated manufacturing was a major step forward, but Al-Hasar refused to be denied his return to Terra. He and his followers commandeered the JumpShip located in his home system and led its back toward Terran space. While it is clear that this JumpShip ever made it to the anti-spinward borders of the Inner Sphere, its remains are what brought the Axumite Providence to the attention of Interstellar Expeditions.

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

Interstellar Expeditions was the first Inner Sphere agency to become aware of the Axumite Providence when the JumpShip Montpelier discovered the hulk of Al-Hasar’s JumpShip in 3029, adrift near the zenith jump point of a worldless star approximately 150 light-years anti-spinward of Circinus. Recognizing the ship’s ancient design, immediate salvage operations were undertaken, enabling IE to backtrack the ship’s jump route.

IE began anthropological observation of the Axumites in 3035, entering their systems via non-standard jump points. The Axumite people still relied heavily on radio communication and used only rudimentary encryption on their secure transmissions. IE monitor ships were able to quickly learn the dialect of Arabic that they had developed over the centuries.

By the time Interstellar Expeditions arrived in the Providence Cluster, most mention of what they referred to as the Shahhat Journey was made during late night radio shows. Most of the population determined (correctly) that the lost JumpShip had likely malfunctioned on the journey back toward Terra due to the heavy strain of repeated hyperspace jumps, and the vessel and crew were considered little more than a lesson in hubris.

Citing the unspoiled nature of the Axumite culture (the Axumites clearly knew nothing of the rise and fall of the Star League, nor even that the Inner Sphere as such even existed), IE determined that making first contact would wait until an imminent external threat to the society presented itself or the culture become somehow contaminated by the observers’ presence.

The former became a real concern in the closing years of the Word of Blake Jihad. Not knowing how far the allied forces—and specifically the Regulans—would push into the anti-spinward Periphery to exterminate the Blakist threat, IE put first contact teams on standby. The possible arrival of hostile military forces from beyond their space, armed with BattleMechs and enough weapons of mass destruction to level whole planets, were deemed a clear and present danger to the Axumites’ survival.

Official contact was finally made in 3085 when the IE observation ship in the Thala system initiated an enthusiastic conversation via tightbeam radio signal to the Thala councilman’s DropShip. While the knowledge of IE’s presence in the Axumite Providence is known currently to only the Council of Elders, IE is under the impression that public knowledge of our presence will not be authorized in the near future.

SOCIETY AND POLITICS

Unlike most of the major interstellar realms of the Inner Sphere and the Periphery, the Axumite Providence is one where the majority of its population is Muslim. While each world in the Providence is allowed to govern itself as long as it elects a councilperson, only one world—Ksabi—is governed as a theocracy. Religion is an important aspect of life in the Providence, and IE has monitored thousands of religious broadcasts on each of its worlds so that citizens that are too far away from places of worship can still take part.

Seven hundred years of isolation has produced a distinct and difficult dialect of Arabic that stems from the Libyan and Sa’idi dialects on Terra, and is the official language spoken on all of its worlds. This language is taught in each major settlement’s primary schools, funded by the planetary governments and free to all citizens. This free primary education has produced a population with a literacy rate higher than many worlds in the Inner Sphere, rivaling the literacy of the Taurian Concordat.

The government is centered around the Council of Elders, with the councilperson from Thala acting as a tie-breaker. Since the halt of colonial efforts, the Council of Elders has consisted of twelve members that gather on Thala once every two Thalan years (512 standard days) for between twenty to thirty local days to pass laws and oversee the functioning of their small interstellar realm.

Technological development and the growth of industry have always been high on their list of priorities, but since first contact the Council of Elders has been discussing possibility of raising a small militia to attempt to defend their worlds in the event of an invasion.

MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

The heavy industry of the Axumite Providence has always been seriously limited both by the lack of people skilled in the knowledge of how to build refineries and factories from the ground up and a relative scarcity of germanium, titanium, and rare earths in the settled section of the Providence Cluster. Those conditions caused the average technological development of the Axumite Providence to backslide to an almost pre-industrial level in its early years. At the time of first contact, the Axumites had finally begun to push ahead. Manufacturing capabilities were generally limited to technology equivalent to the early twenty-first century, with very limited amounts of high-tech goods, such as fusion power plants, produced at great cost and time.

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The Axumite Providence has no standing military and relies on a volunteer police force to keep the peace on its worlds. Equipped with ballistic sidearms and simple body armor, the police forces can barely be compared to the infantry of the Inner Sphere. This may change in the near future, as the Council of Elders debates the need to raise a militia to protect itself from threats similar to the Word of Blake. At the moment this militia would be limited to infantry and rudimentary tanks and hovercraft that can be produced in the Axumite factories.

PERSONALITY: ALEMU MENGITSU Rank/Title: Councilman of Thala Born: 3032 (63 in 3095)

The Mengitsu family has represented the world of Thala in the Council of Elders since the twenty-sixth century. Powerful and wealthy, the Mengitsu family ensures that at least one son and one daughter in each generation is given the best education in order to prepare themselves to represent their world. While there have been serious contenders to unseat the Mengitsu family, the wisdom that is passed between a ruling father and son or a mother and daughter in the family has ensured that the strongest candidates are always Mengitsu.

Alemu, son of Councilman Alagar, was a disappointment to the family when he was growing up. Expecting to latch onto the idea of power, Alemu shunned it. He saw the Council of Elders as just another way for a small group of men and women to control the millions of the Providence, much like what they knew of the Terran Alliance. Instead, he put his education to use in the art of poetry.

Published by twenty-four, his epic poem, “Restless Dreaming,”

shoved him back into the spotlight. That first poem and his later epics, “A Forest with no Trees,” and “Love” were made into televised dramas that were shown across the Providence.

His popularity shoved his brother to the sidelines as his large fan base put his name on the Council of Elders ballot as a write-in candidate during the election of 3070. He won without campaigning in a run-off election against his opponent as the generally dissatisfied electorate hardly turned up in numbers to equal his fan base. Thankfully, his popularity has helped him on the Council of Elders. His presence has made many heated arguments end when he recites a piece of his own poetry that is relevant to the discussion, or he recites a tale from the Koran as a way to show them all forward.

Alemu Mengitsu was the Councilperson IE contacted when first making our presence apparent to the Axumite people. His strong grasp of the Axumite dialect and his strong education has helped IE understand the Axumite culture much more quickly than it normally would have, and his support of IE on the Council of Elders has helped quiet any paranoia that normally would arise.