This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4
The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect
Published by the Trade Federation Library
Compiled and authored by Gav Lucky, Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness
Editorial Foreword
DarkClaw's Shadow
There was only one ship in the known galaxy that could do what the XL-7000 could do.
It wasn't the 4 omnidirectional heavy lasers and 40 directional quad lasers—though it was considerable firepower. It wasn't the 425,000 ton cargo limit or 5,000,000 m³ of storage—a Modular Taskforce Cruiser could carry 5 times that. It was something more specific than either of those things, something that set the XL-7000 apart from every other capital ship in every other fleet in the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and that the Federation's enemies had learned to account for in ways that other ships simply did not require accounting for.
It could land.
8,000,000 tons of mostly Meleenium and Varmigio spanning 3,120 meters at its widest point, capable of quartering 1,000 service members and their equipment and their provisions and their weapons—and it could set down on the surface of a planet. Most capital ships of comparable scale existed entirely in space, dependent on smaller craft to move personnel and material to the surface. The XL-7000 needed no such arrangement. When it descended, it became, in that moment, something between a warship and a fortress.
And only the Trade Federation could build them.
The XL-7000 belonged to the Federation, the way certain things belong to certain institutions not because of law but because of what those institutions are willing to do to keep them. Other factions flew other ships. The Federation flew those too, but the XL-7000—or Lucrehulk-class Battleship as it became known as around Year 7—was Federation property in a way that went beyond ownership.
It was identity.
And the Federation did not distribute its identity carelessly. A Lucrehulk was not assigned to a department, or allocated to a function. It was issued to a person—specifically to the kind of person the Federation had decided that they, after whatever internal deliberation such decisions required, were worth one. Directors, Governors, Presidents, people who made decisions that would determine if the Federation would still exist in five years—those people had Lucrehulks.
The Tenacity was one of the oldest of them.
She had flown alongside Viceroy Corbin Esco's flagship the Prosperity and Duceroy Nereus Eruresto’s duty ship the Integrity in Year 5, when the Federation was losing its foothold over the Glythe Sector. She had been there for the pirate attacks on Vinsoth under the command of Eruresto, its weapon systems deciding whether the Federation would survive. Tenacity had seen things that would never make it into a holorecord or a GNS broadcast.
By Year 7, she was still flying—her continued existence in the fleet a statement about what the Federation valued and intended to keep.
On Year 7, Day 15, at 20:57 hours, in the Tyrius system at coordinates [140, -9], the Tenacity was the ship Larbac DarkClaw was commanding when he delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast.
The galaxy watched the familiar Arconian showman, the founding director of the Techno Union, the man who had given them the Tauntaun Races and the first round of drinks at the CrossStars Tavern and five months of the most entertaining programming on the Holonet. They heard the announcements—membership numbers, construction projects, stock dividends before the end of the month, the promise of more to come.
And then it was over. The citizens wondered when the Tauntaun Races would return.
What they weren't wondering—what none of them could have questioned, because it was not the kind of thing that Larbac would have let show through his delivery, or his cadence, or his smile—is whether their favorite showman was in fact giving a performance.
Because behind the announcements was the fact that the Techno Union, the sole manufacturer responsible for keeping Federation warships coming off the lines for the ongoing war effort, the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full weight of the Galactic Empire—was struggling. For how long exactly, and why exactly, and what Larbac knew about it and when he knew it—we'll never know.
When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track, ideally before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.
When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.
The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.
“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”
“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off of our tax credits.”
“Jacob who?”
No One Ever Escapes the Cluster
The Hapes Cluster does not appear on most navigational charts the way other regions of space appear. It is there—ninety-five planets and nineteen smaller planetoids spread across seven distinct regions of the Inner Rim—but the space around it discourages approach in a way that no Imperial edict or border patrol could fully replicate. The Transitory Mists surround the Cluster on all sides: a nebula characterized by massive gravity wells, ion storms, and concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace travel through it nearly impossible. In the entire span of the Mists, there are two transit points—Lorell and Roqoo.
For three thousand years, both of them were closed.
The civilization that built those walls had not always intended to. The Hapes Consortium was founded in approximately Year -4026—not by statesmen or explorers, but by the women the Lorell Raiders had kidnapped. The Raiders were brutal pirates who robbed worlds across the mid and outer rims and brought the most beautiful women they could find back to their colonies inside the Mists. The Republic eventually sent the Jedi to deal with them. Most of the Raiders' ships were destroyed. Much of the male population was killed. And the women—left behind, outnumbering the men and free for the first time—rose up under Ta'a Chume and Enelithia Nele'serin, took everything the Raiders had owned, and built something from it.
What they built lasted nearly four thousand years—nine eras, ten dynasties. A matriarchal monarchy in which men were considered, by law and custom and the settled conviction of millennia, to be inferior and incapable of leading. The Queen Mother ruled the noble houses charged with serving her. The borders stayed closed—not from weakness, but from the specific contempt of a people who had been found by the outside galaxy once and did not care to be found again. The Jedi having killed their ancestors, the Cluster sent the memory of it back out through the Mists and shut the door.
The Civil War
The throne the noble houses were fighting over had been empty for less than a year when the killing started.
The last Queen Mother—Inaq Thian Pal`durath, final sovereign of a dynasty that had held the Hapes Cluster for generations—fell into a coma in Year -81 without naming an heir. She had two daughters, Da`tan and Da`tanah, both Pal`durath, both with a claim—both with the kind of conviction that, in a civilization built on absolute monarchy, leaves very little room for compromise.
What followed was not a succession crisis in the administrative sense—a matter of lawyers and councils and carefully worded precedents. It was a war. Fifty-five years of it. The noble houses of the Cluster, which had spent centuries accumulating military capacity under the feudal system the Queen Mothers had built and tolerated because it served them, now turned that capacity on each other. The treasuries the Consortium had carefully maintained across millennia began to empty. The worlds that had developed in careful balance—technology and nature, progress and tradition, the Cluster and whatever existed beyond the Transitory Mists—began to feel the weight of what it cost to sustain a war that had no obvious end.
The Draconian Union
The Draconian Union formed around Princess Da`tan Pal`durath—the elder daughter, in the view of her supporters the rightful heir, a woman whose claim rested on lineage and on the conviction that the Hapes Consortium was what it had always been and that the purpose of winning the war was to ensure it remained so. The Draconians believed in absolute monarchy. In the feudal nobility as the legitimate structure of Hapan society. In heavy militarization as the expression of Hapan strength. In the traditions of four thousand years as the irreplaceable foundation of everything the Cluster had built.
They were not radicals. That was the point. They were the Cluster's memory of itself, organized into a fighting force.
Da`tan died before the war ended. Leadership of the Draconian Union passed to her cousin Da`tanah—the woman the eventual victors would describe as a tyrannical and dangerous despot, which is the description that tends to attach itself to the leaders of losing causes when the winners write the history. Da`tanah was, by the accounts of those who served under her, something more complicated than that. She was the woman who adopted the Tylger children when their mother was assassinated. One of those children was Alexander Tylger. She instilled in a boy from Arxian an undying sense of loyalty that he would carry for the rest of his life.
The Sword Confederacy
The second major faction was the Sword Confederacy. Where the Draconian Union was ideological—a coherent vision of what the Cluster should remain—the Confederacy was more pragmatic. A coalition of noble houses that had their own reasons for opposing the Draconian claim, their own grievances and ambitions, their own calculations about what a post-war Hapes Consortium might look like if they positioned themselves correctly. They fought and held territory. They were a force in the early and middle years of the civil war that the Draconians could not only.
And neither could the Phoenix Movement.
The Phoenix Movement
The Draconian’s industrial backbone was House Olanji. The most powerful noble house in Hapan history, seated on Charubah—the technological heart of the Cluster, the planet whose shipyard facilities had been building the Consortium's warships for generations. House Olanji did not merely support the Draconian Union. It sustained it. The warships, the logistics, the manufacturing capacity that allowed the Draconian cause to continue fighting long after simpler factions would have collapsed—all of it ran through Charubah. All of it ran through Olanji.
Charubah was not the kind of planet that produced revolutionaries. It was the kind of planet that made revolution seem… unnecessary. The third world from its sun in the Charu system, and the only major inhabited world there, it had covered most of its surface in cities without losing the mountain ranges, the vast oceans, the expansive forests, the snowy poles. It had found a way to hold both things—the technology and the natural beauty of the planet—and it held them without apparent contradiction.
Its people were confident in the way that people become confident when millennia of orderly progress through reason have left them no experience of chaos. Religion on the planet was virtually nonexistent. Few anomalies occurred in the star system. Things just… worked. Things had always worked. The Olanji Corporation had been building the Consortium's warships from Charubah's orbit for generations—its shipyard facilities visible from the surface on a clear night, the control towers of its major cities monitoring the constant flow of traffic to and from those shipyards around the clock. House Olanji was one of the most powerful noble houses in Hapan history. It had backed the Draconian Union during the civil war and had the industrial capacity to do so. On Charubah, the Draconian Union wasn’t an abstraction—it was employer.
Barret Starfyre farmed a small patch of land on the outskirts of Per'Aghtra, the planet's capital, in the shadow of all of it.
He had previously served as a pleasure slave to a noblewoman ruling the province around the city. When he was thrown out of her court—she wanting nothing further to do with him or the child she had produced with him—he took the land and worked it. He was considered a peasant. And his son would be considered the same. What Barret gave his son instead of inheritance was a disposition: he studied starship schematics in his spare time, dreamed of traveling a Cluster at war with itself, admired the starfighter pilots visible from the ground. He was a man who looked at the wall the civil war had built around ordinary life and imagined, quietly, what was on the other side of it.
Years later, Andrew Starfyre and his childhood friend Derrik Florda found an old XGH-50 stock freighter at a recycling depot on Charubah. It had belonged to Draconian Logistics. Its original name was the Firebreather. They bribed the depot manager to let them take it, repaired it at the Starfyre farm, renamed it the Phoenix, and used the ship's old authorization codes to travel restricted regions of the Hapes Cluster—moving through a civilization at war with itself, under the cover of a vessel that the war's own bureaucracy believed was still one of their own.
What the bureaucracy also didn't know was that two farmboys with an expired set of credentials were piloting a salvaged freighter named after resurrection—and building a revolution.
Rise of the Phoenix
The Phoenix Movement took years to grow, but it gradually tilted the balance of the civil war. It began to win not because it had the largest army or the most powerful industrial base—it had neither. It began to win because of what it was. Two farmboys from Charubah in a stolen freighter, moving through the Cluster on expired Draconian credentials, befriending people that the noble houses had never thought worth befriending. Building something that did not look, from the outside, like a political movement until it was already too large to stop. Andrew Starfyre had understood something that neither the Draconians nor the Sword Confederacy had understood—that the war was not only being fought with warships and treasury credits. It was being fought for the imagination of the Cluster's people. For the story they told themselves about what they were and what they could become.
The Sword Confederacy read the momentum and surrendered. They had always been pragmatic. When pragmatism pointed in a single direction, they followed it.
The Draconians did not surrender. That was not what the Draconians were. They fought to the end—to the Second Battle of Gallinore, where Da`tanah died alongside one of the Olanji twins, and the cause that had sustained itself for fifty-five years finally ran out of the thing that had kept it alive. Not ships. Not credits. Not territory.
The will to fight.
In the Royal Draconian Palace, when the news arrived from Gallinore, nobles committed suicide. Not in defeat exactly. In the specific despair of people who had organized their entire understanding of the world around a set of convictions that the world had just finished demonstrating it did not share. The Draconian Union had believed the Cluster was what it had always been. And The Second Battle of Gallinore was the refutation.
It had always been something else. It had simply taken fifty-five years of war to figure it out.
House Olanji faded in the years that followed. The industrial power that had sustained the Draconian cause—the shipyards, the manufacturing capacity, the Charubah infrastructure that had made the war possible—did not survive the peace in the form it had held during the war. The family faded. The corporation persisted, diminished. And on the planet whose control towers had directed the flow of Draconian logistics for half a century, Andrew Starfyre established House Starfyre. Built it on the ground where House Olanji had stood. Put the flaming Phoenix where the Olanji name had been.
The Draconian ideology did not fade with House Olanji. That was the thing about the civil war that the Phoenix Age's optimism sometimes obscured. The Draconians had lost the military conflict. They had not lost the argument. The conservative conviction—that the Cluster's traditions were its strength, that engagement with the outside galaxy was a form of slow dissolution, that the walls of the Transitory Mists were not a limitation but a definition—that conviction went underground. It found new vessels. And new voices, new careers built inside the institutions of the government that had defeated it, working patiently from within to ensure that the defeat did not become a transformation.
It found, eventually, Alexander Tylger.
He was not a Draconian in the formal sense. The Union was gone. Da`tanah was gone. The cause his adopted mother had died for was gone. But the beliefs—the deep, structural conviction about what the Cluster was and what it owed itself—those had been installed in him during the years he spent in the Draconian Royal Court, being educated by a woman who had organized her life around them. These beliefs were the furniture of his mind.
He carried them into government. Into the Prime Ministership. Into Lorell Hall and the conservative bloc he built across years of patient coalition work, blocking the influence of foreign ideals, keeping the revolutionary implications of the Phoenix Age from becoming the permanent settlement of Hapan politics. The Dragon of Lorell Hall. The man who had survived the Draconian collapse as a child and had spent his adult life ensuring that what the Draconians had believed did not die with it.
King Andrew
In Year -26, with the Cluster exhausted and its treasuries emptied and its noble houses stripped of the power they had spent fifty years spending on each other, Andrew Starfyre was crowned King of the reunified Hapes Consortium.
He did not rule like someone who had won. He ruled like a man who understood the cost of winning. His reign was spent mending—rebuilding the Hapan treasury, reconstructing societal infrastructure, expanding security, carefully reintegrating the noble houses into ceremonial roles that gave them the appearance of consequence without the substance of power. He opened Lorell as an ambassadorial world. He allowed Black Sun to become a trading partner. He cut the first deliberate window into the wall the Cluster had maintained for three thousand years and stood in the opening, managing what came through.
He did this as a man who had been born on the wrong side of every line the Cluster drew. The son of a pleasure slave. A farmboy from Per'Aghtra. A man who had moved through his own civilization using stolen credentials because the legitimate ones were not available to someone like him.
He had understood something about the Cluster's walls that only a person born outside them could understand. That they kept things in as much as they kept things out. That the civilization they protected was also the civilization they were slowly suffocating.
The Stranger from Hapes
The Road Less Traveled By
Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet Hapes—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.
He enrolled at the Hapan Naval Academy nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.
The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.
What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.
Against Hapan law, he fled that night.
The Great Escape
The Transitory Mists do not care why you are leaving.
They do not distinguish between the deliberate versus desperate departure, between diplomat traveling to Lorell on a sanctioned vessel with filed flight plans and the man trying to move through them in the dark on a ship that had no business being in space at all. The gravity wells do not care. The ion storms do not check credentials. The concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace navigation through the Mists nearly impossible are not a policy that can be appealed or a border agent that can be persuaded. They are astrophysics. And astrophysics, unlike Hapan law, cannot be defied by conviction alone.
There were two ways through.
Lorell and Roqoo. The transit points—the gaps in the Mists where the gravity wells thinned enough to make hyperspace navigation possible, where the ion storms were sparse enough that a ship with functioning shields had a reasonable chance of emerging intact on the other side. Every sanctioned departure from the Hapes Cluster moved through one of them. Every diplomatic vessel, every trade convoy, every authorized traveler with the correct paperwork and the correct contacts and the correct understanding of what the Hapan border authority required—they all went through Lorell or Roqoo.
Which meant the border authority watched Lorell and Roqoo.
The Hapes Consortium had maintained its isolation for three thousand years. The infrastructure of that maintenance—the patrols, the checkpoints, the sensor arrays, the chain of command that connected a ship moving through the transit point to the ministry that would decide what to do about it—was not improvised. It had been built and refined and institutionalized across centuries. It knew what a sanctioned departure looked like. It knew, therefore, what an unsanctioned one looked like too.
Jacob Jansen had resigned his commission. He had a mark on his record and no allies left inside the institution that had produced the mark. He had whatever credits remained after the ship purchase—not many, and certainly not enough to bribe his way out of the Cluster. He had naval training that was now technically the property of a government he was in the process of defecting from, applied to a vessel that the government he was defecting from would, if it found him in the transit point without authorization, have every legal and institutional reason to stop.
But for some reason that didn't stop him. It didn't make him wait a little bit longer, save up a few more credits, or buy a better ship. In his mind, he had felt the pressure of Hapan isolation, its culture amplified inside the Academy—he couldn't stay another day. Another hour, or minute.
Being torn apart by the Mists sounded less painful than another debate in the mess hall. But if we know anything about Jansen, he had been thinking about this for a long time. And he had a good idea at this point how to get out.
What that passage actually looked like—the specific route he took, whether he went through Lorell or Roqoo or found some other way through the Mists that the border authority had not fully accounted for, whether he was detected and ignored or simply lucky or simply better at this than anyone had reason to expect—is not recorded in any document that has survived. The Hapan census records on the Jansen family, Hapan Intelligence would later insist, had been lost more than a decade ago. What sparse records existed had been supplied by Jacob himself. He was not, in other words, a man who left a detailed account of how he got out.
What is known is that he got out.
He got out on a ship he had spent nearly everything he had on—the only vessel on the lot he could afford that had a reasonable chance of getting off the ground. But it was not cut out for long voyages. It was not built for the Galactic Core, which had been the original plan—the logical destination for a young man with naval training and something to prove, the center of everything the Cluster had spent three thousand years declining to engage with. The reprimand had shortened his runway. The ship had shortened it further.
He went where the ship could take him.
The Glythe Sector. Home of the Trade Federation—an institution that had, among the Hapan people, a reputation for trustworthiness that most outside governments did not. It was not a warm reputation exactly. Hapans did not do warm reputations for outsiders. But trustworthiness was a specific quality that the Cluster's long experience of being betrayed by the outside galaxy had taught it to notice and remember when it found it. The Trade Federation had earned that notation, which was enough for Jansen.
He was traveling to a sector he had never been to, in a ship that may or may not survive the journey, with a few credits in his pocket, and the naval training that no one outside the Cluster had yet decided was worth anything.
The Mists fell behind him.
He did not look back. Or if he did, there is no record of it.
Outside the Cluster, he was no one.
Not yet.