Charon

Charon was a bastion of the old empire. The ships that destroyed Nemesis launched from its spaceports. It was the first colony established in Paradisian space, it was the last system in the cluster to be abandoned in the empire’s decline. A backwater, maybe; but a backwater where a man could get a decent meal, have a proper bath and hold a decent conversation.

So the withdrawal of the Empire was a hard blow to Charon. But Charon endured; where other systems fell into anarchy, the nobility of Charon tightened its grip.

When the robots fell into dysfunction, the last spark dying in their positronic brains, Charon trained its own people to be computers. And with the skill of the Calculators - trained from the cradle to crunch numbers without mechanical aid - they willed themselves back into space.

Charon is world where tradition matters, where birthright matters, where responsibility matters. Not a ‘System of Shopkeepers’ like Fortuna, the Charonites take their responsibility as the keepers of civilization seriously.

Among the noble houses the firstborn males are expected to take their place as leaders upon the death of the family scion. The second born are to take up military duty as officers or ‘Cyberknights’, sacrificing their humanity and perhaps even their lives in the service of the New Imperium. The third born sons, or daughters that must remain unmarried (in the case where a dowry cannot be secured) are given to the Order of Calculation to be trained in the ways of the Calculators.

The commoners are given less, so less is expected of them, but they are also given the option of serving bravely as Tommy-Gunners in the NMA (New Model Army), or to join the Imperial Space Navy and serve the Imperium in the endless seas of space.

The popular media of Charon tends to support these ideas, often with romantic/erotic overtones like in the planetary romance series ‘Jon Quarterman, Warmaster of Castor’, or as in the competing series ‘Livingstone, Sailor of the Seas of Pollux’.

A rare female example would be the series ‘Alestra, Princess of the Savages’, where the heroine is courted by a wide variety of exotic suitors only to settle down with Tommy Mosby, a brave Captain of Psychopomp-on-Tyne.

Aspects

Stiff upper lip

Cyberknight EVAs

The Suns Shall Never Set Upon the Novus Imperium