There is a spaceship of gargauntan proportions. A massive city state hurtling trough the endless cosmos.
Its name is Zeridyes.
Zeridyes is lost in the void.
Five years ago a terrible incident occured.
An accident with the ships faster than light drive. During transit the entire ship shook violently, a sensation as if everything and everyone was about to be torn apart, and all went dark for a few horrifying moments. By the time emergency power went back on, the ship was floating in the void between stars, with nothing outside save the cold emptyness. As the years pass. resources grow strained, tensions mount, and society itself strains underneath the pressure.
This is the ship of Zeridyes, and the city state which inhabits it.
Welcome.
Zeridyes, the forsaken, the lost, judgement day come, harbinger of war, the old soldier.
A leviathan-class spaceship, a monstrosity of gargantuan proportions. Over three thousand years of history has passed inside its halls. At its inception Zeridyes was a colonization vessel, intent to travel to new worlds and bring them civilization, but since then the ship has gone trough deep reconstructions, upgrades, extensions, its initial purpose twisted and altered by the course of time and the march of history. It is now an undeniable vessel of war, with everything from two-thousand year old antimatter rockets, shiny new disruption cannons, and shields upon shields, upon shields. Its crew is a mercenary city state, and in the last three hundred years a militaristic and authoritarian society have arisen.
Countless teeming souls inhabit the vessel. From overpopulated sectors with people stacked into every available space, to huge swathes of abandoned wasteland, lost to time. The ship has artificial gravity, with its core at the center of the ship. In the upper regions, the Military rules supreme. Inside the depths, huge tracks of uninhabited and uncontrolled territory lies.
The Captain Leads.
The society of Zeridyes is extremely hierarchic, It is a tightly controlled city state, a caste based society, where your status, influence, and duties are determined by what caste you belong to,and your rank inside that caste. Castes are the Military, the Technicians, The Doctors, Maintenance, and the fifth - silent caste - the Shadows. There are also lesser groups such as the revolutionaries and the oblivion cults that are to splintered or to small to function as a caste but that still has a presence on the ship.
“Security checkpoint A.G-110345, we've been covering the stairs down to checkpoint A.G-110346, apart from all this paperwork everything is calm an- ”
The ruling caste. It controls the administration of the ship, fields its security forces, enforces the rule of law. It is the strongest faction by far.
The military values pragmatism, discipline and loyalty. According to them, duty is the highest virtue. This is not a culture of honorable warriors. This is a city-state of mercenary soldiers, and it shows within the ship. The military is the controlling caste of the ship, and they set the policy, control the laws, and handle administrative tasks. A large part of the caste is bound up in its complicated and messy bureaucracy. At some level, every member of the military is a bureaucrat. They control the only legal armed troops on the ship, and the largest and most advanced collection of weaponry, armaments, and vehicles.
“So as I approached the site I tapped into local surveillance, but most of it was down, and we had to go in blind. Told 'em never go in blind, but you know. Orders are orders. So we get there and of course it's a mess, I take one or two guys down, then get hit square in the chest. Personal forcefield goes down. That's when they bring out two E14-Lancer Cannons, Hellfire configuration, the stuff you use planetside to breach heavy fortifications or enemy heavy tanks. I drop a... classified piece of weaponry I've been keeping for a rainy day, and ran like hell.”
The keepers of High Technology. The Technicians are in charge of the ship replicators and industrial base, as well as sophisticated if limited non-medical nanotechnology and other advanced tecnology, such as forcefields, void engines, and the gravitonic engines. They are the only faction capable of intepreting the Engineers - ancient artificial intelligences heralding from the time the ship was new. These AI's speak an archaic, dead language, describing technology that is barely understood.
The Technicians are responsible for research and for the advanced technologies on the ship. While dependent on military authorization to carry and use most of their equipment, in practice their command of high technology and its necessity for the smooth operation of the ship grants them enough political power that they can requisition a huge amount of resources. They possess a near unparalleled command of the information systems run troughout the ship. Though these networks are isolated from each other - either due to age and the reworking of infrastructure trough various sectors, or due to security interests - they remain critical to security and the smooth functioning of the ship. Technicians also assist in the maintenance and repair of systems and equipment that is deemed to advanced or important to leave to Maintenance.
“There were several wounded. I applied nanite countermeasures to the most critical causes, and battle stims to the less severely wounded. As the battle turned for the worse, I started applying battle stims to the fatally wounded. I only survived myself thanks to my subdermal mesh and onboard medical nanites. It was dreadful.”
Close allies to the Military. They control the peerless art cybernetic, which has great cultural status on the ship. They have knowledge of life prolonging methods, healing nano-technology, and more common medicinal skill. These resources give them great political influence, despite being the smallest faction on ship.
The Doctors are the smallest faction on the ship, but they are one of the most important politically and culturally, secondary only to the military. This is due to the military depending on the Doctors for medical aid, as well as the culture of the ship revering cybernetic implants. Implants the Doctors have full command over who is authorized to have, an authority the Doctors apply stringently ensuring only the most important inhabitants on the ship have access to their cybernetics. The medical technology on Zeridyes is advanced, and the most advanced of medical technology is also wholly underneath the Doctors domain. It is whispered even the Captain rely on the highest ranks within this faction for his eternal life. Should the Doctors grow to powerful, or try to assert their authority to fair over their given provenance, the ensuing conflict with the Military would be disasterous.
While each member of the caste is technically a Doctor, only a few members carries the title as their primary one. Only a few are Doctors. The rest are ‘Doctor, 2nd assistant’, or ‘Doctor, research and field work operative.’ Each doctor of the ship strives for years to become a full Doctor, and ultimately only a fraction will reach this esteemed position.
“So... the entire subsection is flooded, there's a bunch of corpses floating in the... stuff, must be rather ripe by now, and I'm not sure what exactly you did in there, but I'm reading disturbing levels of radiation emanating from somewhere inside. And you want us to “fix it”. Of course. I will get right on it. Sir.”
The ones responsible to keep the ship alive. The servants of Low Technology. Zeridyes is old. It has been rebuilt many times. Many parts of ship technology cuts against other parts. There's patchjobs, whole ripped out sections, and just simple gaping holes that have been sealed away trough the years. Much of the technology is no longer understood, or only understood sporadically. Maintenance have an ungrateful, dirty, and often desperate task.
Maintenance is the most popolous caste, just barely surpassing the military in pure manpower. But it is the faction with the least political power. It is the faction responsible for keeping the ship going. These are the workers of the ship, the repairmen, plumbers, electricians, janitors, construction workers and craftsmen. Whether it's assembling a vessel or a machine, whether it's repairing a corridor, renovating a sector, or keeping the ship clean, it is on Maintenance the ultimate responsibility lies. They tend to be a stoic, no-nonsense lot. It is illegal for them to carry weaponry, unless given special dispensation. Even then, they are only supplied with light sidearms.
“How the hell did we just survive all that?”
The forgotten ones. Stowaways, runaways, criminals and their descendants. The abandoned and the forgotten. In the desolate wastelands of the ship they form communities. Villages and towns hidden in abandoned sub sections or between kilometre long walls. Within the populated sectors of the ship they gather into organized crime syndicates, and ignored slums. Tenaciously communicating trough abandoned or ill maintained corridors and comm-links, trying to live as well as they are able to.
The Shadows are the hidden people of Zeridyes. Whether appearing in the slum of a maintenance habitat, in a secret room deep in the upper levels, or in a small community, thriving in an otherwise abandoned area, the Shadows pervade through the ship. Their interests vary, but tend to lie in their own survival and in improving their own quality of life. As they are not recognized as ship personnel by the military, they are not covered by Zeridyes laws. They're often involved in a wide variety of criminal acts above and beyond simply existing. Some of the Military zelaously seek them out, purging them wherever they are found, but many quietly accept the 'Silent Caste', accepting bribes to look the other way, using them for their own ends, or to smooth over ship operations where the more rigid strictures Zeridyes is formed around falters.
“Next time.”
Then there are the cults, the revolutionaires and the mutants. To small or to fractured to form a proper faction within the vessel. Wild life, doomsday cults, revolutionary groups or twisted aberrations stalking the corridors.
A disparage crowd of malcontents, visionaries and horrific monsters.
Doomsday Cults – Since getting stranded in the dark, fear has taken root like a weed. Where it blossoms, the cults form. These have varied ideologies and do different things, but one thread is common. Zeridyes is doomed. The dark has called to the ship, because of its war torn past, because of the lack of virtue in its crew or because of cold and cruel fate. It is only a matter of time. Some cults lose themselves in hedonistic escapism, others try to help the coming apocalypse along, others still develop occult rituals and traditions, calling to the dark they believe calls to them. Where these cults form, panic, treachery and the dissolution of social order follows.
Revolutionaries – Rebels against the military regime, these militant resistance cells take hostages, sabotages strategic resources, subvert population centers, incite riots, and in all ways try to loose the military's stronghold off the ship. These madmen believe that survival can be achieved without the order of the military and the guidance of the Captain. As treacherous hounds, they must be brought down. But where one operation is purged, two others spring up. They and the doomsday cults feed on eachother like an incesteous boil in the heart of the ship.
Mutants – Feral individuals corrupted by the dark or by the irradiated areas of the deep low, these horrific monsters lurk in the dark corners of the ship, hunting for the flesh of the living. Often used as a fable to scare children.