Mentak Coalition

Before the uprising, Erwan Mentak was unremarkable even by the standards of the billions of Humans he shared a descendancy with. His crime is lost to history, but it was severe enough that the Lazax sentenced him with transportation to Moll Primus.

With an abundance of natural resources churned up by its geologically active areas, three beautiful if small moons, lush paradisical surface, and breathtaking nighttime views of the galactic rim, Moll Primus would have been a prime destination for colonization... had it been anywhere near populated space. Instead, its extreme remoteness, hunkered in the borderlands beyond the Mahact Plateau, meant that the planet was cataloged but never seen as particularly suited for exploitation.

Doubling its disadvantages was the route needed to get there: through the old Exiles' Path, a winding, dark journey around the treacherous gravity wells of the Mahact Plateau’s edge. For thousands of years, the Moll system lay undisturbed, except for the occasional supply landing for a freighter bound for Hope’s End.

The Gandar were a proud species, too proud in fact, and their furious but doomed rebellion against the Lazax left the Emperor seeking appropriate retribution. The Lazax settled on mass transportation— to the remote world of Moll Primus. Subsequently, that world became a penal colony for all manner of political dissidents, traitors, and criminals whose offenses were particularly heinous or especially embarrassing to the throne. The punishment, called transportation, saw prisoners ripped from their families and cultures, bound for a lifetime of backbreaking manual labor under the wizened eye of a Lazax Governor.

On paper, the Moll Primus Governors and their legions were there to ensure that the highly dangerous population they oversaw could be adequately pacified; in practice, assignment to this backwater as a Governor was a political punishment, a career-ending sentence for politicians or public servants who had fallen into disgrace. Adding to the insult was the breaking of the tradition of one Governor per planet. Instead, each Governor on Moll Primus was given charge over a single prison, meaning that at times, two dozen administrators were fighting among themselves for planetary control.

With no incentive to be anything other than incompetent martinets bickering among themselves for power, the Governors tortured their malnourished prison population, enriching themselves with their labor. Sometimes they even armed the strongest and toughest prisoners and forced them to fight small-scale wars against other Governors for supplies, mineral claims, or hunting grounds, or simply out of pride.

This went on for more than eight hundred years, until the Twilight Wars. As the Lazax lost their grip on the Core Systems and the Empire crumbled, supplies and supervision from Mecatol Rex abruptly ended. The smartest Governors fled the planet with their entire households. Those who stayed to try and play warlord inevitably perished in the prisoner revolts that followed.

Erwan Mentak was one of the original leaders of the rebellion, with designs for peace and unity. But a significant portion of the multi-species prison populations had formed their own factions long before the revolt. As soon as they had killed the last of the Governors and jailors, they fell on each other in an attempt to claim power, food, and resources for themselves.

Despite Mentak’s various efforts to drag his fellows to the negotiating table, the true birth of the Coalition was the arrival of a Lazax cruiser in orbit. As soon as its crew learned what had happened in the prisons, the cruiser opened fire on the main spaceport. A furious battle ensued between the Lazax and the coalition of ships that took to orbit to defeat them, ending with Erwan Mentak and his comrades boarding the cruiser, defeating the crew in a desperate fight, and claiming the vessel as the first flagship of a new allied navy.

Luckily for the nascent planetary government, that cruiser was the last ship to arrive for decades. Now, Moll Primus’s isolation worked in its favor. Building on this united victory, Erwan Mentak dedicated the rest of his life to the Reconstruction, overseeing infrastructure upgrades, the establishment of a fair and equitable government, and the finding of homes for all of the former prisoners on the planet’s beautiful surface. For this work, even more than his daring leadership during the rebellions, the new Coalition adopted his name upon his death.

The Mentak Coalition Today

In the years after the revolts, the Mentak Coalition quickly took to the stars. Moll Primus’s isolation and limited infrastructure meant that many valuable resources needed to be obtained from other worlds. The Coalition traded with other small independent systems, but its members’ status as former prisoners meant they were persona non grata in the ports of the Great Civilizations. In response, they turned to piracy, something the Coalition has indulged in ever since.

Today, the Mentak Coalition makes a point of separating the official vessels of its navy from the fleets of privateer vessels that do not officially fly the Coalition’s flag. Officers and crew who become pirates officially retire from Coalition service beforehand, and Moll Primus and the surrounding territories maintain separate dockyards for privateers. In the Coalition, privateer service is seen as dashing and romantic, and nearly every young military officer seeks to put a few years on a pirate vessel before “reenlisting” in the Mentak Coalition Navy.

These state-sponsored privateers do enjoy a great deal of latitude in their duties, but the Coalition still maintains some control and uses them as more than simply a plausibly deniable revenue stream. Pirate attacks are often coordinated with diplomatic efforts; the Coalition’s allies enjoy clear spacelanes, while its enemies see vital trade routes swarming with buccaneers. Additionally, pirates who serve the Coalition avoid atrocities and senseless butchery, following their own code of morals and showing mercy to their foes. This allows the Coalition to position itself as the underdogs fighting against an uncaring and amoral galaxy, particularly when a sizable portion of their spoils end up donated to neglected or starving independent worlds.

Piracy has come to define the Coalition’s culture to the point that the government of Moll Primus and all Coalition territories is led by a Table of Captains. Each captain represents one of the historical governorships or a new territory claimed in later centuries, and in properly piratical tradition, each is elected by popular acclaim. Officially, one does not need to be a former or current starship captain to be elected. In practice, nearly everyone who sits at the Table of Captains has captained a vessel at some point in their life.

The Table of Captains chooses one of their number to serve as Erwan’s Hand, the head of the government and commander of the Mentak Coalition Navy. Currently, Captain Sorthina Chung is the serving Hand, but the position tends to rotate often between the captains to ensure that no one leader has the chance to amass too much power. The Table of Captains attempts to personify the Coalition’s strengths: diversity, egalitarianism, and a seat at the table for all.

Goals of the Mentak Coalition

With the restoration of the Galactic Council, the Mentak Coalition has found itself in a tricky situation. On the one hand, most of its citizens prefer the more egalitarian galactic governance of the Council to a single person or faction declaring a new Imperium. On the other, the Coalition has thrived when galactic governance has been weak and disjointed, and even after several thousand years, most Coalition citizens dislike the idea of laws coming from Mecatol Rex.

As a result, the Coalition has joined the Galactic Council, but its representatives work tirelessly to keep the Council’s authority weak and limited. They are always pushing for more autonomy for individual Council members, fewer regulations, and laws that protect the disadvantaged societies in the galaxy from the predations of the Great Civilizations. If it weren’t for the arrival of the Mahact, the Mentak Coalition likely would never have backed the formation of the Keleres. As it is, the Coalition is an enthusiastic supporter…so long as the Keleres stay focused on pangalactic threats.

For the Coalition, the ideal galaxy is one where nobody rules, because nobody can be trusted to avoid becoming a tyrant. However, if someone must take the throne, then shouldn’t it be the people whose ancestors knew the dangers of tyranny?