New Home: History

4977-5130AD The Atomic Dictatorship

The Hierarchy had destroyed their sophisticated network of orbital bombardment satellites before they fled to Esperanza. The Free State had never considered the military to be a spending priority, and so there were no weapons of mass destruction on New Home at the time of the Collapse.

However, the Hierarchy had also possessed a number of spacecraft equipped with nuclear missiles. It had been thought that all of these had been destroyed at the time of the Grand Uprising. Unfortunately, one had survived.

The Harsh Discipline was a 1000t frigate. It had been downed by a terrorist bomb in 4808AD, and had lain undisturbed at the bottom of the “Brittanic Sea” for 160 years. A young warlord named Andrew Horton bought the location of the ship from a band of sea-going nomads. After years of planning and gathering supplies, he managed to raise the ship. It held hundreds of intact nuclear warheads.

Horton’s two neighbouring warlords ruled the cities of Fry and Hodder’s Holt. Horton destroyed both cities and instructed all other warlords on the Nort Continent to submit to his rule. With this violent act, the Atomic Dictatorship had begun.

Horton swiftly enslaved the whole planet. He devastated two more cities before his control was absolute.

With absolute control of the whole planetary population, reconstruction was simple to organise. New Home’s industrial base was rebuilt within a generation. The population at large saw few of the benefits. Most industrial capacity was turned over to the production of military equipment and luxuries for the Dictator’s family and his cronies. Ordinary New Homers were forced to live and work in the meanest of conditions. The underclass faced even worse hardship. They were herded together into vast slave camps and forced to work until they died from malnutrition and exhaustion.

For a century and a half, Horton and his descendants were the absolute rulers of the whole planet. Non dared to challenge the Atomic Dictator.

As the wealth and sophistication of the Dictatorship grew, so did the need to enlist at least the passive cooperation of the populace. In 5101AD Catherine, the 4th Dictator formally acknowledged the Covenant of Landfall. Most New Homers were thus freed, at least in theory from the slavery of the Dictatorship. Only the underclass remained totally without rights.