With only two weeks to organize an opposition campaign, those who stood against the Imperial decrees had to haphazardly put one together. There was no time to coordinate strategies between planets and certainly no time to elect galactic leadership to direct the movement. On each individual planet, the individual leaders had to deal with their own individual circumstances in whatever way they individually saw fit. It is impossible to say anything more broadly about the electoral tactics used by the opposition than that.
Part of the issue was that every planet was different. Factors as diverse as demographics, climate, culture, and industrial development played significant roles in how the campaigns were performed. On a planet with a highly variable climate like Frizzid that was in a frozen phase when the decrees were issued, nearly all campaigning had to be done via the planetary internet. On Lynnys, deals had to be struck between several of the cults to decide on their delegate (a cause of considerable future conflict). A rather extreme example comes from Hhest where the members of the opposition were all the local rulers of the shared state and collaborated with one another to ensure that only the wealthier citizens who lived on the lens of the planet could vote, while the poorer daylaborers below on the core could not.
And those were only the cases where it was cut and dry that they would be participating in the symposium at all. What exactly constituted a “planet” was unclear. It was obviously beyond a simple astronomical definition of planet, nearly everyone considered populated moons as deserving a delegate, but there were other circumstances less clear. Places like the Tharreosis Asteroid Mining Outpost or Bhorpal-2 Stellar Reactor simply decided they counted as a planet as it was meant by the decree and sent delegates themselves, an issue that would be left to the symposium to deal with. More than just edge cases of things that may have not astronomically been planets but legally considered themselves planets, there were also edge cases of entities that certainly were astronomically planets but had a very dubious legal claim to be encompassed by the decree. Foremost among those entities were the Imperial tributaries which were almost never considered planets (in the legal sense) in any setting. Many of them never even heard about the decree before the symposium met and many of those that did wanted no part in it. There were a few exceptions though, such as Aasol: a planet ruled by an esoteric cabal that intentionally kept itself in a self imposed stone age for obscure theological reasons. Breaking its taboo and using outside technology, they selected a delegate from among themselves and sent her to the Vaird. Every single one of these cases would be debated over the weeks to come.
And those were only the cases where the preexisting planets and social structures created differences in opposition strategy. There were the personalities of everyone involved, both oppositionists and Imperial appointees. Many of the bureaucrats simply were oppositionists, incensed at the Necrotic Decrees’ attack on their entrenched powers. On many planets, the opposition had the assistance of the Imperial bureaucracy. Some historians have suggested that on planets where the race was particularly close (such as planets with an abnormally large military presence), the bureaucracy was able to subtly swing the race toward the opposition. That wasn’t true everywhere though and typically on planets where the bureaucracy was broadly against the opposition it was much more willing to use its powers to repress them. Sometimes this could be small, like how on Oxalis itself the bureaucrats acted as slowly as possible processing the opposition’s paperwork. Sometimes though, the attacks on the opposition were more extreme. On Wallach, General Lorkisian refused to hold elections at all, declaring that as he governed the planet on the trust of the Emperor, he would be its delegate. On Ensen, the strong unions caused the planetary elites to be some of the few who wholeheartedly embraced the Necrotic Reforms as a way to break the unions. This created an uneasy alliance between the elites and bureaucrats which forcibly crushed a union-led uprising on the planet and nominated Vestin Vestowski, one of the few unambiguously pro-decree delegates.
The vast majority of the planets managed to elect a delegate one way or another. While it wasn’t uncommon for the elections to be unfair or even for no election at all to be held, the conflicts were mostly confined to the ballot box and occasional clashes in the streets. Mostly. Mawr, the origin of the Coronation Strike, had been under military rule for nearly 50 years now and was already straining at its bindings even before Imperial Decree #4 had been promulgated. It took only three days for rioters to take to the streets. While under normal circumstances the military would easily have been able to repress them, a small faction of it making up no more than 10% was discontented enough that they joined the rioters – bringing with them as many arms as they could carry. More experienced but significantly less numerous, the Imperial military was forced on the defensive as a rebellion broke out. Memories of the strike, which many of the current rebels had been raised on stories of, only fueled the conflict while memories of Morroth threw oil on the flames. The leader of the expedition, Garrison General Tonnisey “Nicholeyevish” Michael, further worsened matters by refusing to retreat under any conditions. A man with a hard heart who had fled the Coronation Uprising as a child with his Imperial loyalist mother, he had a reputation prior to the decrees of being strict but fair with his soldiers. With the outbreak of violence in Mawr, that strict but fair approach was seen by the civilians he encountered as more strict than fair. The military justice he doled out only swelled the rebel ranks. Needless to say, there would not be an official delegate from Mawr. There would be 5 different ones, each claiming to truly represent the population. Just another issue facing the symposium.
The situation on Pearl was not that extreme. Rather than battles in the streets, the decision would be made in the smoke filled rooms of the United Pearlian Mining Union headquarters.
On Pearl, there were only two organizations powerful enough to nominate a delegate: a combined cartel of mining companies and the UPMU. Going by all previous history, the process of selecting a delegate should have been simple. The mining companies would have selected a candidate that was acceptable enough to the union that the union would not resist it. At that point a vote would be held to affirm the nominee at the planet’s delegate to give the whole process a democratic sheen and the only two groups with real political power on the planet would be in agreement. The local Imperial bureaucracy interfering with the matter wasn’t a real concern either as it had long since been captured by the mining cartel. This was not to be though.
The cause of the split was, unsurprisingly, split reactions over the labor policy of Imperial Decree #4. For the cartel which had long harbored ambitions of removing the constraints (no matter how minor) placed on it by the UPMU, the decree looked like a chance to strike a decisive blow against the union. For the UPMU, the decree appeared as an existential threat to its very existence. With the two factions locked in a seemingly insurmountable conflict, the first true miracle of Ghale Thusif’s life was to resolve the dispute in a way that totally sidestepped the issue.
He was not involved in the opening stages of the dispute, however. On the side of the cartels, the most prominent figure was Annette Waqa. The CEO of the Pearlian National Company and de facto leader of the cartel as a whole, Waqa had the reputation befitting a woman who had spent her life fighting at the top rungs of corporate politics. She was cold and calculating, able to drive her subordinates harder than nearly anyone else until they felt like they were losing their minds, before finally pulling back at the last moment and taking care to make sure their egos were intact enough to withstand that pressure again in a few weeks time. Waqa had the instincts of a bullfighter, able to know exactly how long to keep up the pressure without blowing everything up in her face.
Standing opposed to Waqa’s clockwork efficiency, stood the chairwoman of the UPMU: Marad Josephina. Marad was a decade younger than Waqa and had none of the organization of managerial genius. A contemporary description of a visitor to her office described it as “overflowing with papers on every conceivable surface. To even seat me, the chairwoman had to move a pile of papers half meter in height off a small stool.” What she lacked in tidiness though, the chairwoman made up for with drive and true belief. At such a critical moment, the UPMU had the good fortune of being led by one of the most driven and invested charipeople of the past century. Prior to the release of the decrees, she had gotten approximately 40% more concessions out of the companies than the three previous chairpeople. And with the release of the decrees, she was ready to fight to make sure those gains weren’t lost.
Quickly consolidating control of the cartel, Waqa secured the support of the rest of the corporations for herself to be nominated as Pearl’s delegate. Having dealt with the union many times in the past, it looks like she assumed the union would just act as a rubber stamp on the decision. Out of all the CEOs who made up top ranks of the cartel, Waqa was one of the least actively hostile to union activities and had brokered deals with them many times in the past whenever tensions got a bit too high. From her perspective, she was eminently reasonable and the best chance the union had at making sure nobody would be nominated who was actively opposed to union interests, even if she wasn’t actively working for them either.
The union made a different calculation though. Marad felt slighted that she hadn’t even been consulted as to the choice of delegate, which to her indicated that the companies weren’t even planning to work with the union. To the UPMU, it looked as though Waqa and the cartel were declaring their intention with the new order to run out the union, starting with cutting it out of delegate selection negotiations. From this point of view, it would be absolutely catastrophic for Marad to accept the cartel’s choice of nominee. To do so would be to sign the union’s own death warrant, it would show the cartel that the UPMU had no desire or ability to fight them on anything. Without fear of resistance, the union had nothing.
And so Marad rebuked Waqa. In a single sentence letter, Marad rejected the nominee and stated that unless the UPMU had an equal seat to the corporations in nominee selection, they would be happy to nominate a separate candidate. In turn, this seemed to the corporations to be an existential threat to their power. The union had never had an equal seat at anything before, to give them one now would be to simply hand over more power to what many of the CEOs considered their mortal enemy. What should have been a simple, cooperative decision had turned into a struggle for power at the highest levels of Pearlian society. Neither side wanted to publicly announce that they were running a separate candidate from the other in case that made it inevitable, but each one slowly began to prepare the groundwork for a campaign. They printed preliminary fliers (with Marad being selected as the UPMU’s nominee), felt out various constituencies who could swing the election, and most relevantly began to mobilize their grassroots supporters.
The two groups were not equal in all these areas. The cartel undoubtedly had more money and influence among many of the elites of Pearlian society. Their influence over the Imperial bureaucracy was especially feared by the union and was one of the key factors slowing their move toward an independent candidate. The union did have something the companies totally lacked however: manpower. In a free and fair election, there’s no doubt that Marad would have won. And even in an unfair election like a competitive one was sure to be, manpower didn’t mean nothing. Only so many votes could be fabricated or suppressed and many of the most diehard unionists were already beginning to form makeshift militias. All of this was happening as the news from Mawr was trickling in and the violence stuck heavily in the minds of the powerful as they watched gangs carrying UPMU banners coalesce.
A day before candidate nominations were required to be submitted and a week before the election, a last ditch attempt at cooperation was made. Relations had deteriorated at this point that neither Waqa or Marad were willing to come in, especially over fears that their mutual and growing hatred of each other would ruin any chance at compromise. Each side brought three negotiators and had been briefed on what they would be willing to give up in exchange for a unified candidate. We are extremely lucky that Leaf Rivers, who at that time was serving as the chief negotiator for the companies, kept detailed records at the time that have fallen into the hands of historians since then, allowing us to give a detailed reconstruction of the negotiations.
As previously mentioned, Leaf Rivers was the leader of the company’s team. In their late 30s, Rivers was descended from a long line of mining company employees. They had started their career at 16 as an intern in a union relations department and only worked their way up from there. In 11247, they were considered one of the most skilled and nuanced negotiators on the side of the cartels. The choice to send them was a signal from the corporations that even with all that had happened, they were still seriously interested in making a deal. Beyond Rivers, the other two members of the negotiating team were less important but still played critical roles in ensuring a compromise would be reached. Aliss Wenzhong was the economist and scribe whose role was to ensure no deals were reached that would bankrupt the companies (or cut too much into their profit margins), while Bogota Eriti, CEO of the fairly small Pearlian Luminium Ventures, was the team’s link to upper management.
The lead union negotiator was a grizzled veteran named Terence Smith. Smith, at 88 years old, was the lead corporate negotiator for the entire union and widely respected between both the UPMU and the cartel. In him, the union was showing its desire too to seriously communicate. However, at his age rumors of mental competence were swirling around him. Whispers that Smith was beginning to forget where his office was and that he was able to get through negotiations only with the assistance of his aids had been percolating throughout Pearlian society for years. Smith’s chief aid was his young daughter, a bright and active girl named Bai Patois who was also rumored to be the one really in charge of the negotiations he took part in. Almost as an afterthought, a man from the miner relations sector of the union was chosen to ensure the interests of the miners were at least heard. His name was Ghale Thusif and at the time, he appeared and was totally irrelevant and unknown.
The meeting opened with both groups affirming the desire to put forward a shared, agreed upon, compromise candidate. From there, both sides laid out their grievances. For the cartel, this was a belief that the union was trying to usurp power and instigate class conflict, that they would be unable to defend their interests with a union chosen candidate, and that the militarization that had been occurring in the runup to the election had to be stopped immediately. For the union, this was a feeling that their power was being usurped by the corporation and that they were under direct attack by Imperial Decree #4 and needed special guarantees to ensure their interests would be advocated for. These ideas were stated in more diplomatic language, but clearly enough that there was no ambiguity on either side.
The heart of the matter was that neither side felt like they could trust the other to nominate or support a candidate who would represent the interests of both the cartel and the union. At the farther extremes of either side there were individuals who believed that such a candidate was impossible, although none of them had been chosen to partake in negotiations. While they were not participating, the mere existence of those individuals was enough to strike fear into the hearts of even the most pro-negotiation members of either side. In order for negotiations to succeed, some way of ensuring a nominee’s impartiality would have to be found.
After their opening remarks, things seemed to start off well as both sides agreed that neither Waqa or Marad would be the nominee, effectively dropping their support for their initial candidate. Both of them had been too discredited by the other side and tempers had run too hot for either to be supported. With that success though, the negotiations hit a brick wall. Going through potential nominee after potential nominee, running through nearly the entire elite layers of both the mining companies or the UPMU as well as various other figures in civil society, neither side could agree on an individual who could satisfy their expectations. It could be because they were too radical or not radical enough, or that they were too unsympathetic to the other side, or too young or old (Smith himself was suggested by Rivers, but that idea was quickly shot down by his Patois), or too personally disliked by one of the negotiators. With the greatest of cordiality, the two teams cut every single person who prior to the negotiation could conceivably have been the nominee out of the running, making compromise seem all but impossible.
This process took about three hours. Most of the talking was done between Smith and Rivers, although Patois played a significant role any time she felt her father was becoming too won over by fond memories of dealing with some high level executive and was unable to see what was really at stake. Thusif, Wenzhong, and Eriti all chimed in occasionally to strike down a candidate who they considered unacceptable, but none of them played a significant role at this stage in the negotiations.
It was Eriti that first suggested a dual nominee. There had been very brief discussions on both sides about the idea very early on in the crisis about sending two delegates, but because of how unambiguous the decree was about having a single delegate that was quickly ruled out as a possibility. Eriti, though, according to Rivers having himself in mind, proposed that one side be the nominee while the other would send an “aide” to the nominee. In reality, the two would be considered equals with the singular nominee only being a formality. Anything that was to be done at the symposium (which at this point was still very unclear) would only be done after the two individuals both agreed to it. This way, both the UPMU and the cartel would be represented. Crucially though, Patois pointed out that the plan would only work if both individuals – and especially the nominee – could be trusted to not go off on their own.
With that caveat in mind, both sides quickly agreed in principle to the idea. It was apparent that some deeper form of cooperation beyond just the selection of the nominee was going to be required. And while Eriti clearly had himself in mind for the position of nominee, the UPMU team was not going to accept that. It was already a deal breaker for them Eriti was a CEO, no matter how small his company was, someone that high level could not be allowed as the nominee. More critically though, the union wanted its candidate to be the nominee. Their reasoning behind this was simple: they were the ones most threatened by the decree. Because of that, they were the ones who most needed direct access to the levers of influence. They were perfectly willing to keep the labor arrangement as it had been for centuries, but in order to keep that they needed the capability to effectively advocate their cause.
Upon this being made clear, the cartel team requested a few minutes to discuss privately. They did so for over an hour, with Rivers writing that they had to call several executives, including Waqa herself, to get permission for this. After a considerable amount of debate with their own side, Rivers convinced the executives to agree to the arrangement. This was done on one condition: that Rivers themself would be the aide. There were a couple reasons for this. Most simply was that Rivers was just a good negotiator. For years they had loyally served the companies’ interests and they were considered skilled at doing so. There were few better candidates for the job anyway. More than that though, it would put Rivers themself at total responsibility for making sure the compromise they had negotiated worked. It would force them to put their career on the line and put potential legal liability onto them if the plan failed spectacularly. Accepting those conditions, the cartel negotiators walked back into the room and agreed that the union would select a delegate, so long as the corporate team did not veto it.
Here again though, the two groups ran into the wall they had created for themselves earlier. They had already gone through every significant union figure and ruled them out, there was no way the cartel could go back and say some nominee who had been unacceptable previously was now acceptable (nor is it clear that they wanted to anyway). It was Wenzhong who proposed just picking one of the union negotiators. The idea wasn’t totally out of nowhere, after all Rivers had been selected as the aide for the corporations. What it had against it though was the lack of an obvious candidate. Smith had already been discussed and dismissed as too old, while everyone judged Patois as a schemer who was possibly really in control of UPMU’s side. That left Thusif who didn’t have anything against him, but also had nothing for him. He was a nearly unknown quantity, something that could be extremely dangerous to a group concerned about stability.
Wenzhong argued for him solely based on what she had seen in negotiation. It was enough. The day had been grueling, when Wenzhong made her argument they were entering the seventh hour of negotiations. Throughout the experience, none of them felt that Thusif had been unfair or done anything that would disqualify him. While he had been quiet, he had had a certain charisma that convinced them he would be acceptable. And so, with shockingly little debate, both sides agreed that Thusif would be the candidate.
The executives on both sides were shocked at the outcome of the negotiation. Nobody even knew who Thusif was and there were a considerable amount of questions about the ethicality of the negotiators nominating two of their own as the nominee and aide. But, the agreement stuck. Neither side could find anything totally disqualifying and the two teams both believed the arrangement would work and successfully convinced their executives that it was not worth blowing up the agreement and having the situation on Pearl devolve into a second Mawr. Ghale Thusif was officially nominated as the joint candidate of the UPMU and mining companies.
There were no other major candidates in the election, Thusif ran virtually unopposed. He spent far more time getting taught intricacies of the union’s structure and interests and forming a working relationship with Rivers (on which more in a future chapter). When the result that he had been formally elected came in, he was in the middle of a four hour last minute session with Smith, teaching him the finer points of persuasion. Within the hour of his election, Thusif and Rivers boarded a starship and had left for the Vaird where they would make history.