DOC-01 · THE STORY UNTIL NOW · STATE DOSSIER

Tortuga Dominions

TriStar Universe Divergence Notice

This article documents the TriStar Interstellar campaign universe. Canon events hold through the fall of Paula Trevaline; the divergence begins with the Tortuga Campaign of 3030 (see D-001). In the canonical timeline the Dominions remain a bandit kingdom into the IlClan era. In this universe, they became something no one predicted: a demilitarized democratic free-trade state.

The Tortuga Dominions is an independent Periphery state rimward of the Federated Suns' Periphery March. For nearly five centuries it was the archetypal bandit kingdom; since the fall of Lady Death in 3030 and the Dominion Charter of 3049, it has reinvented itself as a demilitarized neutral trading hub between the Federated Commonwealth and the Taurian Concordat — retaining the old pirate name, as its citizens like to say, if none of the practice.

History

Founding and the Pirate Centuries

The Dominions began with defeat. During the Reunification War, an AFFS formation — the 237th Light Cavalry — was shattered in a wasteful raid on the Taurian world of Sterope. Rather than be fed back into the campaign, the survivors struck out into the deep Periphery and settled a pleasant world beyond anyone's border. Within a generation they were raiding the Federated Suns as the Pirates of Tortuga, and within a century their descendants had colonized five more systems, whose raw materials and radioisotope deposits sustained a genuine pirate nation.

Through the Succession Wars the Dominions earned a reputation for exceptional cruelty, raiding deep into both the Suns and the Concordat, and maintaining in the Jolly Rogers the largest pirate fleet of the era. Punitive expeditions came and went — most famously the Wolf's Dragoons operation on New Hati in 3007, ordered by First Prince Ian Davion, which bought several years of quiet — but no Successor State was ever willing to pay the price of permanent occupation.

That calculus held until Paula Trevaline unified the pirate bands under her sole rule in 3015 and made the Dominions strong enough to tax interstellar commerce itself — and until a shipping company decided the invoice had come due.

The Tortuga Campaign and Military Administration (3030–3049)

The Tennessee Star Guards' conquest of the Dominions and the execution of Lady Death in 3030 are covered elsewhere (see: Paula Trevaline). What followed was improvised. New Hati fell first and became the template: TSG garrisons secured the population centers, pirate materiel was confiscated wholesale, and civil administration was rebuilt from the settler and tradesman classes who had lived under pirate rule for generations. Within eighteen months New Hati and her sister worlds were under military authority.

That authority was a legal fiction of layered convenience. Officially, the occupied Dominions were administered by the Federated Suns — New Avalon accepted the paper sovereignty of a conquest it had not ordered and could not easily refuse. Practically, garrison duty fell to individual Periphery March formations, March noble house troops, and the TSG itself, with TriStar Interstellar funding reconstruction outright. The company's motives were not charitable: the Dominions' radioisotope deposits and the elimination of the pirate tax on rimward shipping repaid the investment many times over. But TriStar money built spaceports, schools, and water systems that four centuries of pirate lords never had, and the company's freight lines gave six isolated worlds their first honest connection to the Inner Sphere economy.

The occupation generation is remembered ambivalently on the Dominion worlds — as liberators by some, as a corporate protectorate by others. Both readings are defensible.

The Dominion Charter and Independence (3049)

By the late 3040s the military administration had become untenable in the best possible way: there was nothing left to occupy. A generation raised without pirate rule wanted self-government, the March formations wanted their regiments back, and New Avalon had no appetite for formally absorbing six Periphery worlds. The result was the Dominion Charter of 3049, ratified by plebiscite on all six worlds months before the Clan invasion redrew every strategic map in the Inner Sphere.

The Charter established a parliamentary democracy — the Dominion Assembly, seated on Tortuga Prime, with a First Minister as head of government — and made two founding commitments that define the state to this day:

Demilitarization. By its own constitutional law and by treaty, the Tortuga Dominions owns no military assets. No BattleMechs, no armed DropShips, no standing army. The clause was the price of independence — no signatory would tolerate a revived Jolly Rogers — but the Dominion's founders embraced it as identity: the pirate kingdom that disarmed itself.

Neutrality. The Dominions sit in the seam between the Federated Commonwealth and the Taurian Concordat, two states with three centuries of poisoned history. The Charter declares the Dominion worlds neutral ground and open ports. Taurian merchants who will not cross the Suns border, and Commonwealth traders unwelcome in the Concordat, meet in the free ports of Tortuga Prime and New Port Royal. Trade that officially does not exist between the two states flows through the Dominions in growing volume — much of it, naturally, in TriStar hulls.

Defense Arrangements

Defense of the disarmed state is provided by treaty through a deliberately entangled rotation:

• AFFS garrison elements, rotating through under Periphery March command
• Taurian Defense Force detachments, whose presence alongside AFFS troops on the same worlds is the Charter's boldest gamble and, so far, its quiet success — each guarantor's presence checks the other's ambitions
• Tennessee Star Guards elements, maintained continuously since 3030 and regarded locally as the senior service
• Corporate and mercenary contract forces, retained by TriStar and other commercial interests to secure ports, stations, and shipping lanes

The arrangement makes the Dominions the only place in known space where AFFS and Taurian regulars routinely serve within sight of each other in peacetime — a fact both governments find useful and neither will admit to valuing.

The Worlds

Befitting their pirate founding, the worlds carry names drawn from the classical Caribbean age of piracy — a heritage the modern Dominion has chosen to keep, museums and all.

Politics

Differences from the Canonical Timeline

Cross-reference: divergence log entries D-001 (Trevaline) and D-002 (this article).