DOC-03 · PLANETARY GUIDE · SYSTEM DOSSIER

Memphis

TriStar Universe Divergence Notice

This article documents the TriStar Interstellar campaign universe. Canon knows Memphis as a Federated Suns map dot whose only recorded adventure was being unsuccessfully raided in 2604. In this universe it is the capital of the Periphery March, headquarters of TriStar Interstellar, home of the Tennessee Star Guards, and keeper of the best-kept secret in ComStar's own filing system. Irreverent is the official language of Memphis; this article is written in compliance.

Memphis is the transport hub, foundry, granary, university town, and unofficial capital of the Periphery March — a world settled by people nobody else wanted, rescued by a man collecting a poker debt, industrialized by a Star League that forgot to finish, and run ever since on the principle that if you can't be powerful and respectable, powerful is funnier.

Founding: The Unwanted and the Owed (pre–Star League)

Memphis was founded by Baptist religious dissenters who had, in the delicate phrasing of the planetary museum, "outstayed their welcome on approximately every world they landed on." Granted colonization rights to a remote system on the Periphery edge — the interstellar equivalent of being given bus fare — they discovered that faith moves mountains but does not irrigate them. The first colony failed.

The survivors were evacuated by a tramp trader who happened to be in-system trying to sell agricultural equipment to a dying agricultural colony, a business plan that tells you most of what you need to know about Alexander Starr. (He was actually there chasing a poker debt. The debtor's descendants dispute this. The Starr family archive contains the IOU.) The colonists traded their planetary stake for passage to "anywhere with running water and plentiful restaurants," and Starr found himself the owner of a solar system, which he wanted for one reason: to retire beneath the rainbow deserts with, per his journals, companionship of a caliber his charisma could arrange.

It didn't work out that way. What worked out instead was a germanium-rich asteroid, a fortune, and a second colonization — this one backed by Starr money and the FarStrider, his famously ragged JumpShip. Memphis took root along the Chickasaw River, in the great valley on the far side of the Sharptooth Mountains from those rainbow deserts, and named its bluff-top first city after itself, because the founders had learned the hard way not to get sentimental about places.

The Boomtown and the Erector Set (Star League era)

The Star League looked at the Ra system's resource survey and lost its mind in the best way. The golden decades brought a permanent mining station into the asteroid belt, a surface base onto brutal, iron-rich Sekhmet, a zenith-point refitting yard, modernized aluminum works, a huge spaceport, an "advanced communications station" on remote, dark Set (hold that thought), and the crown project: a tremendous planned city, ten square kilometers of gleaming intentions, rising beside Memphis to house the workforce of a magnificent future.

Then the Star League fell over, and the magnificent future was cancelled with the projects half-poured. The JumpShips at the zenith yard waited for orders that never came. The planned city stood open to the wind, and Memphians, surveying ten square kilometers of girders and ambition, named it the Erector Set and started storing grain in it.

Melissa Starr, CEO of Starr Traders, looked at the same wreckage and smiled — a family talent. The Star League's own projections showed its mining plan would have gutted the system inside two centuries; the collapse, she reasoned, was a stay of execution with free JumpShips included. Orphaned hulls joined the Starr fleet. The refit yard learned to keep them flying. The half-built university district of the Erector Set got a modest tenant called the Memphis Mining Academy. Mine within reason, ship everything, teach the children: the whole TriStar doctrine, assembled from salvage.

Famine, Alliance, Empire (2786–3005)

The First Succession War took Starr Traders' three registered JumpShips (the AFFS high command sent a thank-you note; it has not been framed) and left the rimward March to starve. The remaining five hulls — two Invaders, two Tramps, a Merchant, all run through pirate points with smuggler's nerve — fed the Davion Periphery border worlds through the dark years, and Memphis, Sherwood, and Lackland fused into the triple system: Memphis the hub, metals, and grain; Sherwood the timber, cattle, and small arms; Lackland the ocean (see: Lackland). The worlds of the March never forgot who fed them, and never forgot who didn't.

Starr Traders became TriStar Interstellar in 2830 — the same year, company historians note with studied innocence, that Memphis Motive Works began producing the MON-80 Mongoose, a thirty-ton license-flexible resurrection of an SLDF classic whose original manufacturer had inconveniently exploded. Two centuries of patient expansion made TriStar the second-largest shipping company in the Federated Suns and its third-largest media buyer — and made the Periphery March's leadership the best-informed provincials in the Inner Sphere, because a company that carries everyone's freight and brokers everyone's news doesn't need spies. It has customers.

The Shadow War and the Martyrs (2990s–3010s)

ComStar noticed, in the late 2990s, that TriStar's message traffic and media handling were simply too good — the performance of an organization with an alternative to ComStar's services. This was correct. ComStar could not find the alternative. This was also correct, and it drove them quietly insane, because the answer had been sitting in ComStar's own inherited Star League registry the entire time: an advanced Class A HPG station, completed on Set, never staffed, and misfiled under Crucis March by some Bureau of Star League Affairs clerk whose name is unknown and whose memory Memphis toasts annually.

TriStar had put a "maintenance caretaker" crew on Set generations earlier, begun test transmissions in the 2970s, and by 2990 was running a dark long-haul backbone that made its network hum. ComStar, unable to find the thing, settled for a decade-long dirty-tricks campaign against what it could find: the political and business leadership of Memphis. The campaign ended with the deaths of Belasarius Starr, President of Memphis, and his wife Marlene Starr, CEO of TriStar Interstellar. No charges were ever filed. None were needed; the March reached its verdict quietly and has never revisited it.

The murders produced three permanent Memphis institutions: the Belasarius Rule — TriStar's iron internal policy that no board member, executive, or major shareholder may ever again hold the presidency of Memphis (Belasarius, company historians sigh, just couldn't help himself); the martyrs' place in every triple-system civic liturgy; and a nineteen-year-old named Tennessee Starr, whose consolation prize from the board was a mercenary company and whose story is told elsewhere (see: Tennessee Star Guards; Paula Trevaline).

The Big Decade (3023–3033)

Memphis's 3020s read like a planet clearing its throat before a speech. Tennessee came home in 3023 to build three regiments named for the capital worlds. The University of the Stars traveling schools, curtailed by pre-war shipping demand, went to ground as the "warehouse schools" — mocked on New Avalon, plus twenty-five points of literacy in the outback — while the collegiate program moved permanently into the Erector Set, growing the Mining Academy into a genuine research university. The turned ComStar Adept on Memphis dutifully lost reports, and the galaxy's intelligence services enjoyed the spectacle of country bumpkins playing school.

Then the Fourth Succession War made the bumpkins rich. TriStar's refusal to lease hulls — cargo rates only, company crews, take it or leave it — proved so efficient the AFFS took it. The Defiance Industries fusion-engine and vehicle plant, wooed to Memphis in the late 3010s, ran off roughly two hundred Rommels and Pattons between 3020 and 3027 before TriStar's ace: a share-manipulation and open-bribery campaign of such completeness that the plant woke up one morning in 3028 as a division of Memphis Motive Systems — a morning New Avalon might have made noise about, had the Fourth Succession War not erupted almost immediately and given everyone official something better to do. Output never dipped; the muffled objections stayed muffled behind the plant's continued deliveries and local sentiment, which regarded beating Lyran merchants at their own game as the finest entertainment since the fall of the Star League. The same era delivered the AFFS black box blueprints — traded for friendly press, freight discounts, and the TSG's standing pledge never to fight FS troops — giving TriStar a visible explanation for communications performance that actually ran through Set. And in August 3030, the Mining Academy parade ground hosted the trial's end of Dame Paula Trevaline (see: D-001); the spot is marked by a plain stone, and the campus that grew around it treats it with the one thing Memphis never jokes about.

The Revelation (3053–3054)

The Com Guards' stand at Tukayyid changed ComStar; the reformed Order under Focht and Mori then did something the old one never dared — it audited itself. In 3053 an adept named Stevens, running registry reconciliation, found a Class A HPG in the Memphis system that ComStar did not operate, had never staffed, and could not explain. His terminal query and its immortal annotation — "Memphis was founded by religious zealots of the Baptist faith" — leaked within the year and is now a framed reproduction in approximately every bar in Stars End.

TriStar, reading the new ComStar correctly, chose disclosure over discovery. The Set Settlement of 3054 legitimized the station as the first privately operated Class A HPG in the Inner Sphere, certified and inspected under the reformed Order's protocols — and told the public, without one word of accusation, exactly why the President of Memphis and his wife had died forty years earlier. The old ComStar could not be prosecuted. The new one, pointedly, did not defend it. On Memphis the announcement day is remembered less for celebration than for its quiet: four hundred million people saying we knew.

Memphis in 3070

Four great cities, twenty-odd Landings (the regional seats — river-and-port culture never calls anything a county), and four hundred million people:

• Memphis, on the high bluffs of the Chickasaw — capital, corporate headquarters, university city, with the Erector Set's girders long since skinned into campus and grain exchange and the galaxy's most argumentative civic culture. Presidents since the Belasarius Rule have been resolutely un-corporate: Coretta Hays (3031–3047), a warehouse-school teacher who governed like one; Jubal Reyes (3047–3059), Stars End port master; and Winnie Chao (3059– ), Sitka fungus magnate, universally the Mushroom President, universally not to her face, universally to her face.
• Stars End, on the second continent — first landing site, largest aerospace port on the planet, home of the fleet's crews and the victualing exchanges and every bad decision a spacer ever bragged about.
• Deseret, on its high plateau above the rainbow deserts — the later faith-migration city (Memphis being a planet with a tradition of taking in the unwanted devout), gateway to the mineral pans and solar farms, owner of the view on every travel brochure.
• Sitka, on the geothermal peninsula jutting from the ice-bound southern continent — cave-farm city, where TriStar's centuries of station agriculture came down the gravity well into gravity-bound fungi vaults. Every ship's store in the network carries Sitka protein; every TriStar spacer is, whether they know it or not, slightly Sitkan.

Overhead: the SL zenith refit yards, still turning hulls after three centuries, and Cotton Exchange, flagship of the station network. Out-system: the belt mining station, the Sekhmet heavy-metals base grinding away at 1.5 g, and Set — dark, remote, and finally allowed to say hello.

Differences from the Canonical Timeline

Cross-reference: D-001 (Trevaline trial), D-006 (triple system), D-007 (this article). The Set Settlement's Word of Blake implications are flagged in the log — the schism of 3052 predates the Revelation by two years, and the Blakists will not think the joke is funny.

Chickasaw Kingfish · Glasshopper · Sanddiver · Sitka Kettle Shrimp — all Memphis entries →