The Frontier Militia represents the military arm of the Frontier systems' territorial defense pact. The Militia is a loosely governed mishmash of homesteaders, bandits, mercenaries, and pirates, all rising up as 'citizen soldiers' when the need arises. Many homesteaders have taken on a ‘can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ attitude regarding working alongside different criminal groups. Naturally the people in this melting pot don’t always see eye to eye on how to deal with the IMC’s exploitation of the Frontier, but they are unified in fighting against it.
The Militia is loosely divided into Brigades. Each Brigade is responsible for fighting in an assigned section of Frontier territory, which might span as far as several planetary systems. The Marauder Corps, a.k.a. the M-COR, is a small part of a much larger Brigade tied to the Freeport System. Although some brigades are little more than vast pirate organizations, the Militia has enough resources to be a real obstacle to the IMC's ambitions on the Frontier.
The Militia often claims that direct action against the IMC is in the best interests of the homesteaders whom they allegedly represent, but not everyone on the Frontier sees it that way.
• MacAllan - A highly decorated veteran of the Titan Wars, MacAllan served as the executive officer of the IMS Odyssey, under the command of Vice Admiral Marcus Graves. The Odyssey’s mission was part of a peacekeeping operation on the Frontier for the IMC. Official IMC reports indicate that MacAllan led a mutiny aboard the Odyssey fifteen years ago, citing numerous grievances with the IMC’s treatment of Frontier citizens. However, these reports have not been proven, in the absence of the ship’s flight data recorder, which was lost when MacAllan and his people escaped with the Odyssey, and disappeared into an uncharted sector of the Frontier.
• Bish - The name Bish is short for Bishamon, the mythological god of warriors within the Japanese Seven Gods of Fortune. Bish is an IMC-trained electrical engineer, born and raised on Earth. After getting screwed over by the IMC on a Frontier job placement that cost him all his savings just to move out there, he ended up in the right place at the right time – the notorious ‘Bish bar brawl’ - to take the Militia’s timely offer of employment.
Bish now serves as a Combat Intel Specialist, remote hacking into IMC systems during combat on behalf of ground forces, tracking mission progress, and giving tactical guidance to Pilots on the ground.
• Sarah - As a child, Sarah lost several close members of her family to incidents in which the IMC displaced Frontier citizens by force. As a result, she vowed to take revenge on the IMC at every possible opportunity, refusing to rest until they have been removed from the Frontier. For most of her career, she served in Covert Operations for the Militia, before moving into the command ranks of the Militia’s Marauder Corps. Her long list of successful attacks on IMC installations landed her on the IMC’s High Value Target List, where she remains listed as one of the 50 most dangerous Militia operatives still at large.
The IMC
The Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation, or IMC, started out small, in natural resource extraction industries, under the name Hammond Engineering. Fifteen years later, demand for Titan manufacturing materials, combined with Hammond’s market-cornering planetary survey technology and map database rights, contributed to explosive growth for the company. Over the course of a century, a series of acquisitions, mergers, and re-brandings lead to the transformation of Hammond Engineering into the sprawling commercial empire that is the IMC.
Despite their reputation for exploitative behavior on the Frontier, they receive little criticism from their shareholders and customers living in the Core Systems – the material conveniences and widely used products provided by the IMC generate considerable ‘consumer inertia’, to the corporation’s benefit.
With the Frontier’s valuable shipping lanes and vast planetary resources ripe for exploitation, the IMC is dedicated to maximizing profits and shareholder wealth, using the legal application of force when necessary.
• Graves - In the IMC command structure, Vice Admiral Graves is formally known as the CINCFRONT, or Commander-in-Chief, Frontier Command. Despite the elaborate title, Frontier operations are notorious for their lack of adherence to traditional protocol, allowing Graves to personally command IMC forces in the field, and to operate far more informally than commanders in the Core Systems. Graves has a reputation as a maverick within the IMC. His calls for policy change have often been deemed too risky to IMC forces, and too lenient to Frontier citizens. During the inquiry into the Odyssey scandal, Graves maintained that the ship was forcibly commandeered by MacAllan and his band of mutineers.
• Blisk - Blisk is a South African mercenary working under a new long-term contract with the IMC on the Frontier, providing Combat Intel and Counterinsurgency services. His first contract concluded with his outfit making enough money to retire to a tropical paradise, but after considering the excellent pay, and more importantly, the opportunity to lay waste to everything in sight with state-of-the-art hardware, Blisk decided that the IMC’s offer of renewal was just too good to pass up.
• Spyglass - Spyglass is a physical manifestation of the IMC’s vast computational network identity, handling logistics, navigation, deployment, and communications between all IMC forces on the Frontier. Spyglass units are built on a modified Spectre chassis and are considered expendable in the field, often accompanying ground forces aboard dropships to provide up-to-date mission information and live surveillance.
