System: Zion

Having escaped from the clutches of the loathed Capellan Confederation, Zion’s people found the prospect of a dynastic marriage between the Marik and Liao families too much to bear. In the mid-3050s, the world of Zion and its attendant province erupted in a violent rebellion, put down by the FWLM in a bloody campaign.

The collapse of the marriage deal and its attendant alliance in the early 3060s came as a bitter irony, considering the many scars of the abortive revolt that remain in settlements across this planet. The arid expanse of the Negbek Desert suffered the most when the pipeline that supplied its outlying settlements with fresh water from Lake Aleppo was sundered in several places. For the duration of the revolt, local farmsteads and communities were forced to rely on small water-extraction and desalination plants; only after the FWLM occupation were engineers able to patch the pipeline system.

A military occupation force remains on Zion, under the command of Géné Ward, but the general takes a hands-off approach to commercial affairs and the economy has made a surprising recovery. Trade with the Federated Suns is brisk, as is that with the independent worlds of the former Sarna March. Even Capellan merchants journey to trade in Zion’s bazaars, but for the most part they maintain a low profile and keep to their own enclaves in the capital, Beersheba. Only the seemingly endless series of terrorist attacks by radicals has prevented the return of civil government, the need to neutralize the scattered cells taking precedence over the return of civil liberties. For the most part, the population does not object to this continuing “soft occupation,” regarding the handful of troublemakers in their midst as a threat to their own lives. Most locals see the terrorists’ actions as opportunistic rather than linked to Zion’s own anti-Capellan agenda.

There are no functional factories located on this planet.