The official history of the Federated Suns reads like a noble epic. Brave Davions defending liberty against tyranny. The Six Liberties enshrined in law. Citizens standing proud and free while their neighbors grovel under despots.
It makes for excellent propaganda.
The reality is more complicated. The Federated Suns has, at various points in its history, been genuinely more free than its neighbors. It has also, at various points, been an expansionist military state that abandoned its own citizens when they became inconvenient. Both things are true. The New Avalon press prefers to mention only the first.
The Federated Suns began as the Crucis Pact, a trade and mutual defense alliance organized by Lucien Davion and his brothers on New Avalon. Lucien was, by all accounts, a genuinely skilled statesman — one of those rare figures who could build coalitions without building empires.
The original Crucis Pact was a democracy. Member worlds sent delegates to a High Council, which elected a President to handle defense and foreign policy. Local governance remained local. The Six Liberties — personal freedom, property rights, weapon ownership, fair treatment, privacy, and political participation — were foundational principles, not afterthoughts.
It was, for its time and place, a remarkable achievement. A genuine attempt at representative government across interstellar distances.
It lasted about a century.
Democracy is inefficient. This is not a criticism; it is a feature. The inefficiency exists because democracy requires consensus-building, debate, and compromise. These things take time. They are also the processes by which free people govern themselves.
The Davion family found this inefficiency inconvenient.
Over several generations, the Davions accumulated power through a combination of genuine political skill, strategic marriages, and control of New Avalon's considerable economic resources. The Presidency became hereditary. The High Council became a rubber stamp. And when the deranged twins Edward and Edmund Davion nearly destroyed everything, their cousin Simon used the crisis to formalize what had already happened: the transformation of a republic into a monarchy.
In 2418, Simon Davion divided the Federated Suns into five Marches, each ruled by a Prince, with himself as First Prince above them all. The High Council remained, but its power was now purely advisory. The titled nobility Simon created held their positions at the pleasure of the Princes, not by election.
The official histories present this as a necessary reform. Perhaps it was. The twins had demonstrated that the old system was vulnerable to incompetent leadership. But let us not pretend that Simon Davion saved democracy. He ended it, efficiently and permanently, while keeping enough of the trappings to maintain the pretense.
Citizens of the Federated Suns learn the Six Liberties as children. They recite them in school. They invoke them in political arguments. They genuinely believe they live in the freest nation in the Inner Sphere.
For some of them, this is even true.
If you live on New Avalon, or one of the other "Golden Worlds" of the Crucis March, your liberties are relatively secure. You have access to good schools, functioning courts, responsive law enforcement, and economic opportunities. Your right to participate in government means something because your planetary parliament has actual power and your representatives actually represent you.
If you live in the Outback — the rimward reaches of the Crucis March, the border regions of the Periphery — your experience may differ.
LIBERTY ONE: Personal Freedom
The right to live your life without undue interference from the state. On developed worlds, this right is protected by functioning legal systems. On underdeveloped worlds, "the state" may be whatever noble or corporate entity has enough armed men to enforce its will. The national government is too far away to help and generally uninterested in trying.
LIBERTY TWO: Property Rights
The right to own property and have that ownership protected. This right functions well for the nobility and the wealthy. For tenant farmers on agricultural worlds, for workers in company towns, for colonists on worlds where a single corporation owns everything — the protections are more theoretical than practical.
LIBERTY THREE: Weapon Ownership
The right to arm yourself. This one they actually enforce, everywhere. An armed populace is harder to conquer and easier to conscript. The AFFS has always appreciated a population that knows which end of the rifle points at the enemy.
LIBERTY FOUR: Fair Treatment
The right to fair treatment before the law. On paper, every citizen has equal access to justice. In practice, justice requires lawyers, and lawyers require money. The courts of the Federated Suns are neither more nor less corrupt than courts anywhere else. Which is to say: if you can afford a good attorney, your liberties are well-protected; if you cannot, your experience may vary.
LIBERTY FIVE: Privacy
The right to be left alone by the government. This right is honored primarily in the breach. MIIO (Ministry of Information, Intelligence, and Operations) and DMI (Department of Military Intelligence) maintain surveillance operations that would make ROM envious. The difference is that the Davions spy on their citizens in the name of national security rather than religious duty. The citizens being spied upon may not appreciate the distinction.
LIBERTY SIX: Political Participation
The right to participate in government. Local government, yes. Planetary government, to varying degrees depending on local tradition. National government? The First Prince rules by decree, the Privy Council is appointed, and the High Council has no real power. Citizens may petition, protest, and vote in local elections. They may not meaningfully influence who rules them or how.
The Federated Suns encompasses over 500 inhabited star systems. Governing them all equally would be impossible, and the Davions have never seriously tried.
The core worlds — New Avalon, the Golden Five, the major industrial centers — receive the attention of the national government. Their infrastructure is maintained, their defenses are funded, their concerns are heard in the halls of power.
The Outback receives whatever is left over, which is generally nothing.
Travel more than a hundred light-years from New Avalon and the Federated Suns becomes a different nation. Worlds where the HPG station is the most advanced technology on the planet. Worlds where a "school" is whatever building the community can spare and a "teacher" is whoever can read. Worlds where the arrival of a JumpShip is an event worthy of celebration because it means mail, medicine, and proof that the rest of humanity has not forgotten them.
The official explanation is resources. The Federated Suns is vast, and there is only so much money to go around. If the Outback worlds want better services, they should develop their economies and contribute more to the national tax base.
This explanation contains a certain vicious circularity: you receive no investment because you produce no wealth; you produce no wealth because you receive no investment.
The unofficial explanation is simpler: Outback citizens do not matter to the people who make decisions on New Avalon. They are too far away, too poor, and too few to influence elections or policy. They exist to be conscripted in wartime and ignored otherwise.
When Hanse Davion launched the Fourth Succession War, he did not consult the Outback worlds. When he stripped their shipping for military transport, he did not ask permission. When he cancelled their educational programs to fund his conquests, he did not apologize.
They were subjects, not citizens. Subjects do not get consulted.
Hanse Davion was brilliant. Even his enemies admit this. He was a master strategist, a capable administrator, and a genuinely charismatic leader. His marriage alliance with Melissa Steiner was a masterstroke of political engineering. His conduct of the Fourth Succession War was textbook operational art.
He was also a man who measured success in conquered worlds, not in citizens served.
The Fourth Succession War (3028-3030) doubled the size of the Federated Suns. Hanse conquered half the Capellan Confederation, absorbed the Tikonov Free Republic, and established the foundation for the Federated Commonwealth. New Avalon celebrated for months. The holovids showed endless footage of liberated populations cheering their Davion saviors.
They did not show the Outback.
During the war, every available JumpShip was requisitioned for military transport. Civilian shipping — the lifeline of frontier worlds — effectively ceased. The University of the Stars program, which had been bringing education to isolated communities across the Periphery, was "temporarily suspended" to free up transport capacity.
The suspension lasted years. On some worlds, it never ended.
"Pissed? Oh hell yeah, I was pissed. Just as I was thinking that the Davion family might actually give a damn about their people, they go and show us what 'subject' really means. Subject to bad policy, subject to the whims of a power-craving military, subject to the snobbish prats that dominate New Avalon. My kids had just begun to see that there was a life beyond subsistence farming, and the rat bastard takes their schools away! Great Leader my ass!"
— Martha Culhane, Coordinator, "University of the Stars" traveling school program
Hanse Davion's war was a strategic triumph and a moral failure. He expanded his realm while abandoning his people. He won glory while children on frontier worlds lost their only chance at education.
The New Avalon histories do not record Martha Culhane's words. We do.
The Federated Commonwealth was supposed to be the culmination of the Steiner-Davion alliance. Two great nations, united under one ruling house, stronger together than apart.
It lasted about a decade before the rot set in.
The problems were structural. Lyran nobles resented Davion dominance. Davion nobles resented Lyran mercantilism. Both sides blamed the other for every problem. When Hanse and Melissa died, the alliance lost its architects and its emotional center.
What followed was a generation of dysfunction: the Clan invasion, which the Federated Commonwealth survived but did not handle gracefully; the rise of Katherine Steiner-Davion, who combined her father's ambition with none of his competence; the Lyran secession; and finally the FedCom Civil War, which killed more Federated Suns citizens than the Fourth Succession War ever did.
Throughout this period, the Outback was forgotten. Again.
While nobles fought nobles and armies clashed over succession rights, frontier worlds went without. No one in New Avalon cared whether farmers on distant planets had medicine or teachers or functioning infrastructure. There was a civil war to fight, and civil wars are expensive.
The war ended in 3067. Katherine was deposed. Victor declined the throne. Yvonne became Regent. The Federated Commonwealth was officially re-renamed the Federated Suns.
And then the Jihad began.
The Word of Blake's Jihad devastated the Inner Sphere. New Avalon was besieged. Major industrial worlds were bombed. Millions died.
The Outback, for once, was relatively spared.
This was not mercy. The Word of Blake had limited resources and prioritized strategic targets. The Periphery March was neither strategic nor a threat. The Blakists largely ignored it, focusing their fury on worlds that mattered to their apocalyptic vision.
The result was that the Periphery March emerged from the Jihad in better shape than the rest of the Federated Suns. While New Avalon burned, Memphis traded. While industrial centers crumbled, TriStar shipping kept frontier worlds fed. While the AFFS bled against Blakist divisions, the Tennessee Star Guards defended their homeworlds and asked for nothing.
When the Jihad finally ended, New Avalon noticed the Periphery March for the first time in decades — and discovered, to their surprise, that someone had built a functioning regional government while they weren't looking.
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