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Mesa is an independent planet located within Solarian League space. Mesa is controlled by a Council of several unscrupulous interstellar Corporations . The best-known of these is Manpower Unlimited, a company that grows genetically engineered humans as Slaves . Another major Mesan corporation is the Jessyk Combine, a transport corporation mostly controlled by Manpower which operates its fleet of slave transports. Mesa probably has the highest level of genetic engineering in the galaxy (primarily since it is shunned by most planets). The Mesans skill at genetic engineering is used to produce slaves that are engineered for various functions, but it has also been used in a long term plan to "improve" the leaders of Mesa. Slavery is outlawed, formally, in most of the Galaxy. The Solarian League has contracted numerous bilateral treaties with assorted star nations, and one multi-lateral treaty, the Cherwell Convention. Nevertheless, Solarian bureauracies and large corporations find tolerance of slavery, Manpower, and Mesa generally to be advantageous. Some star nations, notably the Star Kingdom Of Manticore and the People's Republic Of Haven (or both after and prior, the Republic of Haven), are far less tolerant. Their Navies have long stringently enforced anti-slavery agreements, and even a few Solarian Navy commanders do as well, often by turning over captured slave transports over to the nearest RMN or PRH (RH) ship. As a result, Mesa is in a long term and somewhat active contest with at least two star nations. It is in a much hotter war with the Audubon Ballroom , an organization of escaped slaves whose policy includes kidnapping and assassination of those involved in the slave trade. Manpower's main market is the Solarian League, or rather some large corporations in the League. They use slave labor industrially and at pleasure resorts. Both uses are illegal, but somewhat tolerated in practice. Slaves are also marketed in the Silesian Confederacy , often also to large, though shady, based in Silesia and elsewhere. When Manticore and the Andermani Empire seized control of the Confederacy at the resumption of the Haven-Manticore war after several years of cease-fire and 'negotiations", the prospects for slavery in Silesia took a turn for the worse. Manpower and other Mesan multistellar corporations have numerous facilities off Mesa, but these have been under some pressure from some Navies on occasion, and from the Audubon Ballroom in every case it can manage to undermine Mesan operations. One of the most famous Mesan off-world facilities was the planet Verdant Vista (a.k.a. Congo) recently liberated by a joint Manticoran-Solarian-Audubon Ballroom operation and transformed into the independent Kingdom of Torch . In ''At All Costs'', we see a meeting of important Mesan corporate officials, and learn for the first time that Mesa is involved in plots covering centuries, possibly with the eventual goal of controlling all of human-settled space. (Albrecht Detweiler, the apparent Mesan chief executive, is possibly the descendant of Leonard Detweiler, who was a major proponent of genetic engineering and an opponent of the Cherwell Convention.) Mesan nanotechnology is used by their operatives to forestall any peace talks between Haven and Manticore, out of fear that the two nations and their allies would turn against their one common enemy: Mesa itself. |
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