Petolemaiac Hegemony

Disclaimer: This Article is based on Starship Troopers Film/TV Series Universe Canon and the Tabletop Game by Mongoose Publishing.The Petolemaiac Hegemony is a sovereign state, abeit a loose confederation of Skinnie tribes and nations. A centralized government was put in place, representing every tribe, clan and other faction, thus propelled the Petolemaiac civilization into a golden age of interstellar discoveries and tranquil peace before their encounter with the Arachnids.

Shortly afterwards, through numerous conflicts with the Arachnids during the Bug Wars the Hegemony was quickly destabilized after the demise of their leading clan Gen'tak and with the defeat of Warlord Tel'Rock's Conclave during the Petolemaiac War, the vision of a truly unified Hegemony government is naught but a dream yearning by many Petolemaiac tribes and nations for the glorious prospering past that they could never hope to regain during post war period.

Followed the dissolution of Warlord Tel'Rock's Movement, a dominion of the Terran Federation and the Skinnie tribes were established in a buffer zone after peace agreements, this new self-governing dominion eventually evolved into the System Alliance as many of the Hegemony's former territories eventually become incorporated to the new nation.

The Age of Tribes
Before the Skinnies developed the technology to lift them from their homeworld of Ptolemy, a multitude of tribes dominated their society. The Time of Peace put an end to millennia of world-wide warfare and counter-conquest, though it would never completely unify the Skinnies.

The Age of Hegemony
Once the Skinnies started exploring their nearby worlds and star systems, the Age of Hegemony came upon them. A centralized government was put in place, representing every tribe, clan and other faction, though this was quickly destabilized and replaced with the current system – no tribe or nation is automatically guaranteed representation within the Hegemony and must instead seek to consolidate its power base.

While outright war is not unknown between nations or tribes, Skinnie society is, at whole, at peace with itself. Their governmental system, however, often makes them appear primitive or even barbaric to humans who enjoy a unified political body. Many violent rituals are practiced among the Skinnies, such as gladiatorial combat that harks back to ancient wars and struggles for power. While Skinnies still compete in these contests, and can gain a great deal of personal power by doing so, most are forms of entertainment that use the slaves of various tribes to fight one another to the death. The use of slaves is widespread throughout Skinnie society, be it for entertainment in the arena, back-breaking manual labor or cannon fodder in battle. During the Age of Tribes, it was common for slaves to be taken from defeated enemies but since the rise of the Hegemony, the practice of using other Skinnies as slaves has grown into a repugnant practice, only seen rarely on border worlds. With the advent of space travel and the acceptance of their own morality, the Skinnies found many alien races that could be used as slaves instead. The first appearance of Skinnies in Federation space were raiding parties on missions designed to capture humans alive, to be sent back to their respective nations within the Hegemony.

The thought that sentient races should not be subjected to slavery simply does not enter the mind of a

Skinnie, any more than a human can accept the concept of a ‘bug that thinks’. Morality in a universe with no over-arching god of all races is an artificial construct and though the Skinnies can seem purposefully cruel or wicked to human eyes, they are better described as alien and inhuman, in the traditional sense. Gifted of a similar intellect as humans, they have reached different conclusions.

When held up to the Federation, the Skinnies are, ultimately, a parallel culture of comparable (but incompatible) intellect, scientific understanding, technological development, moral standards and social organization. They have not had the same burning desire to dominate the galaxy possessed by humanity but necessity has propelled them forwards as the Federation and Arachnids slowly draw them into the galactic war.

The Time of the Headless Tribe
When the Arachnids arrived, the Skinnies fought. Like the humans, they initially underestimated their enemy but when their most powerful ruling tribe, the Gen’Tak, were wiped out by the Arachnids, they retreated the bulk of their armies and fortified their most valuable worlds.

This had the effect of turning the Arachnids towards weaker human systems but the damage had been done. Without the centralized core of power coming from the Gen’Tak, the Hegemony has become destabilized and a period of fractious rule now exists, with many tribes competing for power, some desperate enough to stoop to assassination or starting wars in order to rule.

Second Bug War
The Petolemaiacs, a species with methane breathers with dark skin and three clawed appendages made their first contact with the Federation on on Tophet when the Roughnecks encountered a Skinny village on a recon mission. At first it was believed that the Skinnies could become a new ally in the war against the Arachnids.

However it soon become very apparent that these Skinnies were allied with the Arachnids. SICON launched a campaign on Tophet against the Arachnid-Skinnie forces. During this campaign it is discovered that the Arachnids had been brainwashing the Skinnies through using control bugs inserted into the back of the Skinnies necks, and that the Skinnies are being enslaved by the Arachnids. With the help of Colonel T'Phai SICON forces were able to locate the Arachnids Slave mines and liberate its Skinnie population. Shortly after this the Arachnids are defeated and retreat from Tophet.

Eventually the Petolemaiac from Arachnid occupied regions were freed from their Arachnid brain-controlling overlords and their leader, Colonel T'Phai, then fights alongside their new human allies. After being freed from the Arachnids, many of the Skinnies decided to join the war against the Arachnids. However, these liberated Skinnies did not possess any spacecraft and so joined SICON's military instead. Many Skinnies were then fighting alongside humans in the Infantry. It is very possible that Tophet was the former Capital of their once unified Hegemony before its demise by the Bugs.

The Nations
Beyond the division of tribes and clans, there lie the Skinnie nations. There are perhaps a hundred such nations, all nominally united under the banner of the Hegemony. However, the nations are not a simple stratiﬁcation of Skinnie society, nor are they always deﬁned geographically or by allegiance to a single leader or set of ideals.

A nation is usually a collection of tribes or clans that have a common set of interests – normally, these interests revolve around the city, continent or planet they inhabit but this is not always the case.

A powerful religious movement, for example, may form its own nation and yet have constituent members strung throughout the entire Hegemony, living within the geographically deﬁned nations of others. This can, of course, create a truly chaotic state of affairs with a single Skinnie belonging to a tribe that may have its power base situated light years away, owing its allegiance to a nation that deﬁnes the entire Hegemony as its territory. Yet this Skinnie may live and work within another nation based in his home city that could be hostile to his own nation. In theory, each Skinnie belongs to one tribe and one nation, though convenience and practicality often takes precedence.

The one thing all Skinnie nations have in common is that they can all be deﬁned by an ever-shifting balance of power. A single very powerful or very remote tribe can form a nation unto itself, while another nation may be ruled by a king whose role is decided by single combat among champions. The differences in the structure and rulership of a nation can be as varied as that of an individual clan.

Every nation has the right, in theory, of representation in the Hegemony’s Council. However, as is the case with much of Skinnie politics, this is rarely clear cut either. A nation may dispatch a champion or set of delegates to the Council in order to speak for its people, while others send their overall leader who will both rule the nation and speak for it within the Council. There has never been a clear ruling of whether a nation has one voice in the Council or many and so some nations, at times, have sent dozens of delegates, while others believe that a single voice is ultimately more powerful. It has even been known for a nation to relinquish its representation in favour of another, either through bribery or threat.

Language
The spoken word of the Skinnies is difficult to comprehend even in concept. Formed by alien mouths, the speech has never been successfully duplicated by human interpreters of the Federation and even computerised translators have had only limited success.

This is compounded by the fact that dialects can vary wildly across nations and tribes, making them appear as completely new languages and further throwing human study of the tongue into confusion. Among themselves, Skinnies seem to have no problem with communication, even between tribes normally situated light years apart.

The current Federation theory is that the Skinnies have a psychic capacity that overlays the spoken word, forming a context that humans can never understand. Some SICON scientists have begun to postulate another theory, however. It is suggested that Skinnies have an understanding of the core of their language that enables them to integrate with one another. On first encountering a new tribe, some time will be spent communicating only in base concepts which, in itself, is usually enough for a Skinnie to get what he wants. As time goes on in the company of other Skinnies, he will gradually pick up the nuances of individual dialects by instinct so that communication becomes seamless.

Throughout this study of Skinnie society, culture and military capability, human equivalents have been substituted for real Skinnie terms in order to better familiarize the reader with the concepts covered.

Government
The Hegemony Council

At the heart of the Hegemony lies the Council. The Federation often assumes that the Council is the Skinnie equivalent of Citizenship or, sometimes, SICON, but this is afallacy. Comprising representatives from most nations within the Hegemony, the Council is more of a forum than a ruling body.

All nations have, in theory, a right to representation though how large a voice they have usually depends on their overall standing and status within Skinnie society. Small nations may have a single, insignificant, representative while very large ones tend to have either dozens of delegates or a single, renowned individual speaking for them. Small nations are leaned upon by the strong while past alliances can cause friction as a nation moves from one camp to another. The nations, therefore, tend to form ‘clusters’ within the Council, often ultimately ruled by a single, very powerful nation.

Additional power can be gained by a nation within the Council by assigning representatives to multi-national bodies, such as trade organizations, scientific delegations or legal panels.

While these are often titles of convenience, temporarily created to solve a single problem, real power can be wielded within, as this is where many of the decisions that affect the Hegemony as a whole are finally made.

Space Travel
The Skinnies have possessed the ability to cross the light years between stars for some centuries, using a star drive similar in concept (though radically different in design) to the Federation’s own Cherenkov Drive. Content to live in their own region of space, they have only travelled to the worlds of other aliens for trade and raiding, depending on the tribe sent on the voyage.

Skinnies, like the Arachnids, have avoided the development of huge starships capable of winning entire wars by themselves. The Federation’s Fleet, therefore, is arguably the undisputed master of space. Instead, the Skinnies tend to build lightning fast raiding craft, the largest of which is capable of transporting an entire tribe to a combat zone. Possessing advanced stealth characteristics, Skinnie craft are designed to avoid combat and approach unseen upon a target, deploying troops and then retreating until needed.

For a Federation that invests so much self-esteem in the building of massive warships, this philosophy seems like a backwards step but the frightening speed by which the Skinnies can attack and dominate a world suggests much that remains unseen by human eyes.