DOC-03 · PLANETARY GUIDE · SYSTEM DOSSIER

New Gascony

TriStar Universe Divergence Notice

This article documents the TriStar Interstellar campaign universe. Canon sources record almost nothing of New Gascony beyond its map position and Dominion affiliation; nearly everything below is original to this universe. New Gascony is the Dominion's frontier: the gate the pirates fled through in 3030, and the gate their grandchildren now knock at.

New Gascony is the outermost world of the Tortuga Dominions and, since the Charter, the state's rimward customs frontier. Everything entering Dominion space from the deep Periphery clears the Gate; so, increasingly, does everything the deep Periphery wants to say to the Inner Sphere.

The Name

New Gascony is one of only two Dominion worlds that does not carry a name from the classical age of Caribbean piracy, and the exception tells the planet's founding story. The world was populated in the early expansion era largely through the hostage-dispersal system: the families of skilled workers kidnapped in pirate raids, scattered across the outer worlds to guarantee compliance. New Gascony's early hostage population drew heavily from Franco-descended colonial stock, and the settlers named their exile for a homeland none of them had seen. The pirate lords, who garrisoned the remote world thinly and cared little what its farmers called it, let the name stand — the only permanent thing the hostages of the Dominions were ever permitted to keep.

The result, four centuries on, is the Dominion's most distinct planetary culture: Gascon patois in the markets, hostage-lineage genealogy as civic religion, and a settled conviction — long predating 3030 — that the people of New Gascony were in the Dominions but never of the pirates.

Planetary History

The Hostage Centuries (c. 2680–3030)

New Gascony spent the pirate era as the Dominions' quiet agricultural margin: temperate enough to farm without heroics, too far from Raider's Roost to matter, garrisoned by whichever gang leader had most recently annoyed the Duke. Its function in the pirate economy was human collateral — generation after generation of dispersed families working the land while their relatives labored on Tortuga Prime. Its secondary function, winked at by every ruler from Hibbert to Trevaline, was smuggling: the world's jump point was the Dominions' back door to the scattered deep-Periphery settlements rimward, and Gascon middlemen quietly brokered the trickle of trade the pirate state officially disdained.

The Exodus (3030)

The Tortuga Campaign reached New Gascony last, and barely as a battle. The hostage-descended population had no loyalty to spend on Lady Death's cause; the small pirate garrison commandeered every hull on the field and ran. Through New Gascony's jump point, in the final weeks of the campaign, passed the Exodus: the unreconciled remnant of the pirate Dominions — surviving band leaders, Trevaline loyalists, the harder fraction of the Jolly Rogers — fleeing rimward into the French-named deep: Hope, Cooperland, Merowinger, Fugeres, Valois.

The TSG's decision not to pursue past New Gascony was made in a single staff meeting and has been argued about for forty years. The official reasoning was sound — exhausted regiments, ninety more days of transit for diminishing returns, and worlds that were somebody's home even if they were also somebody's bolt-hole. The unofficial Gascon summary is sharper: the company chased the pirates exactly as far as the shipping lanes went.

For New Gascony itself, 3030 was not conquest but restoration. The Reunion Registry's first flights originated here — more dispersed families traced their lines through New Gascony than any other world — and the planet supplied the reconstruction era with a disproportionate share of its administrators: people who could read, keep books, and hate pirates fluently in two languages.

The Gate (3048–3070)

The Charter made the old smuggler's back door official. The Commerce-class station New Gascony Gate, commissioned 3048, is the Dominion's rimward customs port: under the free-port protocols, all traffic entering Dominion space from the deep Periphery clears inspection at the Gate, worked by Dominion civil inspectors alongside the station's TriStar crew — the first joint corporate–Dominion staffing under the Charter, and the template for New Port Royal's free-port administration.

The arrangement carries a structural irony no Gascon fails to relish: a state constitutionally forbidden to own a single armed vessel operates the most heavily defended customs house in the rimward Periphery, because the customs house belongs to a shipping company and mounts sixty PPCs. Enforcement teeth are provided by the Charter's defense rotation — TSG marines resident on the station, with AFFS and Taurian aerospace elements cycling through the system.

The smuggling problem is the Gate's permanent weather. A demilitarized free-trade state wedged between the Federated Commonwealth, the Taurian Concordat, and an unpoliced deep frontier is a laundering temptation of the first order, and the Dominion's credibility as a neutral entrepôt rests on the Gate's incorruptibility. The Gascon inspectorate has cultivated a ferocious professional pride on this point — descendants of trafficked people, as their oath of office pointedly notes, do not look away from hidden cargo. Assembly delegates from the other five worlds complain that Gascon inspectors would impound their own grandmothers; the inspectors regard this as a job description.

The Returners. By the late 3050s, the Exodus worlds' second generation began arriving at the Gate — not raiding, trading: hides, rare-earth ores, hard-luck manifests, and surnames the inspectorate's genealogists recognized on sight. Dominion policy, settled after fierce Assembly debate in 3061, is conditional openness: exile-world traders clear customs like anyone else, and no one is prosecuted for a grandfather's crimes. The policy has slowly pulled Hope and Cooperland into the Gate's commercial orbit. It has not reached everyone.

The Gate Run (3066). The harder fraction endured. In 3066 a corsair squadron out of the Fugeres direction — flying, with grim nostalgia, Jolly Rogers colors three generations dead — attempted to squeeze the exile-trade convoys assembling at the Gate. The action that followed lasted under an hour: the station's PPC batteries broke the corsairs' approach, and the pursuit was flown by AFFS and Taurian Concordat fighters from the same rotation, on the same tactical net — the first joint Davion–Taurian combat action in the history of either state. Two corsair DropShips struck their colors; the prize crews that boarded them included a Gascon customs inspector, at her own loud insistence. In the Dominions the Gate Run is remembered less as a battle than as a proof: the Charter's strange machinery — corporate guns, rival guarantors, civil inspectors — works.

New Gascony in 3070

The frontier world of 3070 runs on the Gate's payroll and the land's produce: customs administration, transshipment labor, provisioning agriculture (Torment-lineage cultivars arrived via Mararn's license evangelists in 3064, extending the growing season into the dry south), and the slow, watchful commerce of the Returner trade. Bayonne Landing has doubled in a generation. The inspectorate's academy takes cadets from all six worlds now, though its instruction remains stubbornly bilingual.

The planet's self-image was fixed by First Minister Kalume, of all people, in a speech at the Gate's commissioning: "The Dominions were built by people taken through a door against their will. It is fitting that we now keep the door — and that it stands open, and watched." The Gascons put the second half on the inspectorate's crest. Ouverte et gardée. Open, and watched.

Planetary Locations

• Bayonne Landing — capital and downport; seat of the Rimward Customs Inspectorate
• The Genealogical Archive — the Dominion's central registry of hostage-dispersal records; primary source for the Reunion Registry, now a research institution and place of pilgrimage
• The Southern Terraces — cultivar agriculture belt (Mararn-licensed strains, 3064)
• New Gascony Gate — Commerce-class station, jump point; customs port and site of the Gate Run (3066)

Differences from the Canonical Timeline

Cross-reference: divergence log entries D-002 (Exodus origin), D-004 (cultivar spread), D-005 (this article).

Watchbird — all New Gascony entries →