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Mankind first came to Polk out of the spirit of exploration. It was home to a listening outpost and little else, a refuel depot on the way to greater things. A dry world with a thin atmosphere it was not considered suitable for adaptation. That very isolation eventually drew other characters. And that was when they discovered Novidium. An extremely rare compound, it was incredibly difficult to find using normal means, its very scarcity compounded by its unusual properties (namely mild space-time warping). It could not be mined on the industrial scale like other minerals. A seemingly rich vein could dry up overnight and appear somewhere else. Mining was an ad hoc business carried out by canny individuals or ambitious smaller companies. Novidium's value was that it was a reliable fuel for FTL travel, and while there were other methods they were less reliable and more dangerous. Even a tiny quantity of Novidium, refined could keep a spacecraft travelling for years, but the extreme scarcity of the mineral meant it remained highly valuable.
With the Novidium miners came the terraformers who began to make the planet conducive to life. An infrastructure developed of water farmers who condensed the atmospheric water into underground aquifers, the building of canals and the eventual building of a topsoil and healthy atmosphere. This took decades, but eventually, Polk was considered ready for its administration to move away from the Special Operations Authority to the Department of Colonial Affairs, basically opening up Polk to American colonisation as opposed to the limited operation which had been taking place.
As the planet became more and more habitable, settlements cropped up like wildfire, either ramshackle mining towns which tried to track down the Novidium, living a somewhat nomadic lifestyle, or farming communities which grew up around the canals and over the aquifers. Other people came too, like the scientists who tried to engineer a breed of cattle which could survive in the dry Polk wastes. The result were giant cattle, virtually impossible to wrangle by any but the most hardbitten of cowboys. This scienific experiment was abandoned, and they went wild in the vast wildernesses. The ecology of Polk grew from this base, as predators were bred to keep the Macro-Cattle in check, and new plant life introduced to feed them. This contributed to the terraforming of the planet. The huge quantities of dung the Macro-Cattle produced were used to fertilise the fields and people followed the herds collecting the dung for sale in the farming communities.
Other less savoury types emerged, as they always do. The nature of Novidium required a nomadic lifestyle, and in the rough world of staking claims and mining the ore, violence was common. Life was hard for the miners, but the possible gains were huge. If you had to kill a man to take his claim, you very well could. Law enforcement was poor, the typically lackadaisical attitude of the DoCA leaving the colonists to themselves. And when a Novidium vein dried up or warped out, there were some who had gained nothing or even lost out. Some believed if they stayed awhile the vein would restore itself. From these desperate men, living hard, solitary lives in the badlands, they became bandits surviving by preying on the nomadic miners, dung-farmers and cowpunchers, carrying out raids on the farm settlements. The potential wealth and power that could be acquired through this lifestyle in time attracted the poor and desperate from the settlements and from criminals from further afield who wanted refuge from the authorities.
As this progressed, the DoCA continued to be very relaxed. While they received news of the poor situation in terms of endemic crime, the profits from Novidium mining were such that they simply couldn't be bothered to fund an extensive bureaucracy and planet encompassing police force. So they used a cast-off from one of the military's myriad supersoldier programmes. Captain Alun Enriquez was a synthorg, a human being who had been enhanced with synthetic organs, and chemical stimulants to make him incredibly resilient to virtually any damage. He was practically immune to any disease or toxin, could survive trauma which would ordinarily kill a man outright and he had almost perfect situational awareness. He had been field-tested in conflicts with the Vexxons, against civil disturbances on urb-worlds, and had even fought in the Proxy War of Pang-Wei III. His major shortcoming, the reason the programme he had been a part of had been abandoned, was that he was a psychopath. His mind had been left unaltered, and while he could survive his arm and a good section of his torso being blown off, and it could be reattached later, his mind couldn't put two and two together. He knew he should be dead, leading to a descent in existential nihilism compounded by severe PTSD. He could be safely sequestered on Polk where he could merrily shoot up outlaws to his heart's content.
And so thats how things went on Polk for at least fifteen years. Enriquez flew about in his personal craft, shooting bandits and blowing up thief fortresses while the miners and cowpunchers and farmers carried on their lives. People continued to trickle in, either honest people looking to work on the mines or farms or just looking for adventure and opportunity, or miscreants running from the law looking for a quick dime with the grizzled diehards of the Polkish badlands. The United States profitted enormously from its reliable source of Novidium, making space travel much cheaper, and allowing it to expand faster than its opponents (whether human or alien). And eventually, the tensions which had been growing between the various powers snapped. The United States fell under the spell of triumphalist cries of American exceptionalism, and faced off against the Vexxons and their allies in New China.
Polk was exempted from military service, due to their Novidium. But state employed miners were brought in to work the Novidium face, and Enriquez was joined by a permanent military force to keep that Novidium flowing. For Polk, there was a time of unprecedented peace as the law was finally able to clamp down on the troublemakers and while there was controversy over the cheap miners brought in from outside, the locals still led the way in finding the veins. The Blazing War went on for many years, a war in which little actual fighting took place. It was mostly carried out by computers, which calculated who would win the war and both sides armed themselves to compensate. Finally, an American scientist devised a war-winning weapon. The N-Bomb, an atomic device fueled by Novidium. The mineral's unique properties, usually used to open a hole in space-time to allow FTL travel, weaponised to create space-time crevasses which could cause untold destruction. The computers rattled out their verdict. The United States could win the war, and there was no way the Vexxons and their allies could sufficiently balance the scales before the US had already crippled them. The war finally went hot.
The destruction was huge. While the N-Bombs tore holes in space-time and collapsed planets, the Vexxons still had huge reserves of military power and resisted as much as they could. And the United States had not planned for the aftermath of the N-Bombs. Such huge disturbance of space-time caused huge folds, making FTL travel unreliable for the first time in decades. Fleets popped out of warp travel to find they had arrived to late or before they had set off or hundreds of thousands of light years away. Within months, interstellar civilisation was in a state of collapse. Without the complex web of supply, whole worlds starved or reverted to savagery. The war ended with a whimper and whole worlds burned as riots broke out. Space-time anomalies and gravity distortions wrecked entire solar systems.
It has been twenty years since the end of the Blazing War, which ended the world as we knew it then. Polk still carries on, though the Novidium mining business dried up with the end of FTL travel. Most honest folk are farmers or follow the Macro-Cattle, or mine something else which is more reliable. There are many more bandits, who have been joined by a few of the military personnel who were abandoned here. The state employed miners have been integrated into the wider populace. Enriquez still leads the police force of the planet, at least nominally, having taken on the more loyal military men to fend off the bandits. Abandoned Novidium refineries have mutated some of the creations of scientists meaning the occasional giant cockroach infestation happens, or fungal abominations emerge from canyons and destroy a whole town. The terraforming processes have also reversed somewhat, and the planet is slowly drying out once more, the seas retreating and ice caps expanding. Its a hard life on the wild frontier of Polk, a Wild West landscape of giant cattle, mad roving outlaws, impossible monsters, distrustful locals and unreliable law enforcement. And deep in one of the planets canyons, a strange archaeological find has been uncovered. Maybe Polk wasn't as lifeless as everyone thought it was...
With the Novidium miners came the terraformers who began to make the planet conducive to life. An infrastructure developed of water farmers who condensed the atmospheric water into underground aquifers, the building of canals and the eventual building of a topsoil and healthy atmosphere. This took decades, but eventually, Polk was considered ready for its administration to move away from the Special Operations Authority to the Department of Colonial Affairs, basically opening up Polk to American colonisation as opposed to the limited operation which had been taking place.
As the planet became more and more habitable, settlements cropped up like wildfire, either ramshackle mining towns which tried to track down the Novidium, living a somewhat nomadic lifestyle, or farming communities which grew up around the canals and over the aquifers. Other people came too, like the scientists who tried to engineer a breed of cattle which could survive in the dry Polk wastes. The result were giant cattle, virtually impossible to wrangle by any but the most hardbitten of cowboys. This scienific experiment was abandoned, and they went wild in the vast wildernesses. The ecology of Polk grew from this base, as predators were bred to keep the Macro-Cattle in check, and new plant life introduced to feed them. This contributed to the terraforming of the planet. The huge quantities of dung the Macro-Cattle produced were used to fertilise the fields and people followed the herds collecting the dung for sale in the farming communities.
Other less savoury types emerged, as they always do. The nature of Novidium required a nomadic lifestyle, and in the rough world of staking claims and mining the ore, violence was common. Life was hard for the miners, but the possible gains were huge. If you had to kill a man to take his claim, you very well could. Law enforcement was poor, the typically lackadaisical attitude of the DoCA leaving the colonists to themselves. And when a Novidium vein dried up or warped out, there were some who had gained nothing or even lost out. Some believed if they stayed awhile the vein would restore itself. From these desperate men, living hard, solitary lives in the badlands, they became bandits surviving by preying on the nomadic miners, dung-farmers and cowpunchers, carrying out raids on the farm settlements. The potential wealth and power that could be acquired through this lifestyle in time attracted the poor and desperate from the settlements and from criminals from further afield who wanted refuge from the authorities.
As this progressed, the DoCA continued to be very relaxed. While they received news of the poor situation in terms of endemic crime, the profits from Novidium mining were such that they simply couldn't be bothered to fund an extensive bureaucracy and planet encompassing police force. So they used a cast-off from one of the military's myriad supersoldier programmes. Captain Alun Enriquez was a synthorg, a human being who had been enhanced with synthetic organs, and chemical stimulants to make him incredibly resilient to virtually any damage. He was practically immune to any disease or toxin, could survive trauma which would ordinarily kill a man outright and he had almost perfect situational awareness. He had been field-tested in conflicts with the Vexxons, against civil disturbances on urb-worlds, and had even fought in the Proxy War of Pang-Wei III. His major shortcoming, the reason the programme he had been a part of had been abandoned, was that he was a psychopath. His mind had been left unaltered, and while he could survive his arm and a good section of his torso being blown off, and it could be reattached later, his mind couldn't put two and two together. He knew he should be dead, leading to a descent in existential nihilism compounded by severe PTSD. He could be safely sequestered on Polk where he could merrily shoot up outlaws to his heart's content.
And so thats how things went on Polk for at least fifteen years. Enriquez flew about in his personal craft, shooting bandits and blowing up thief fortresses while the miners and cowpunchers and farmers carried on their lives. People continued to trickle in, either honest people looking to work on the mines or farms or just looking for adventure and opportunity, or miscreants running from the law looking for a quick dime with the grizzled diehards of the Polkish badlands. The United States profitted enormously from its reliable source of Novidium, making space travel much cheaper, and allowing it to expand faster than its opponents (whether human or alien). And eventually, the tensions which had been growing between the various powers snapped. The United States fell under the spell of triumphalist cries of American exceptionalism, and faced off against the Vexxons and their allies in New China.
Polk was exempted from military service, due to their Novidium. But state employed miners were brought in to work the Novidium face, and Enriquez was joined by a permanent military force to keep that Novidium flowing. For Polk, there was a time of unprecedented peace as the law was finally able to clamp down on the troublemakers and while there was controversy over the cheap miners brought in from outside, the locals still led the way in finding the veins. The Blazing War went on for many years, a war in which little actual fighting took place. It was mostly carried out by computers, which calculated who would win the war and both sides armed themselves to compensate. Finally, an American scientist devised a war-winning weapon. The N-Bomb, an atomic device fueled by Novidium. The mineral's unique properties, usually used to open a hole in space-time to allow FTL travel, weaponised to create space-time crevasses which could cause untold destruction. The computers rattled out their verdict. The United States could win the war, and there was no way the Vexxons and their allies could sufficiently balance the scales before the US had already crippled them. The war finally went hot.
The destruction was huge. While the N-Bombs tore holes in space-time and collapsed planets, the Vexxons still had huge reserves of military power and resisted as much as they could. And the United States had not planned for the aftermath of the N-Bombs. Such huge disturbance of space-time caused huge folds, making FTL travel unreliable for the first time in decades. Fleets popped out of warp travel to find they had arrived to late or before they had set off or hundreds of thousands of light years away. Within months, interstellar civilisation was in a state of collapse. Without the complex web of supply, whole worlds starved or reverted to savagery. The war ended with a whimper and whole worlds burned as riots broke out. Space-time anomalies and gravity distortions wrecked entire solar systems.
It has been twenty years since the end of the Blazing War, which ended the world as we knew it then. Polk still carries on, though the Novidium mining business dried up with the end of FTL travel. Most honest folk are farmers or follow the Macro-Cattle, or mine something else which is more reliable. There are many more bandits, who have been joined by a few of the military personnel who were abandoned here. The state employed miners have been integrated into the wider populace. Enriquez still leads the police force of the planet, at least nominally, having taken on the more loyal military men to fend off the bandits. Abandoned Novidium refineries have mutated some of the creations of scientists meaning the occasional giant cockroach infestation happens, or fungal abominations emerge from canyons and destroy a whole town. The terraforming processes have also reversed somewhat, and the planet is slowly drying out once more, the seas retreating and ice caps expanding. Its a hard life on the wild frontier of Polk, a Wild West landscape of giant cattle, mad roving outlaws, impossible monsters, distrustful locals and unreliable law enforcement. And deep in one of the planets canyons, a strange archaeological find has been uncovered. Maybe Polk wasn't as lifeless as everyone thought it was...
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