Mid morning, Representative Claudia Larrsson took the rostrum at the weekly community meeting to discuss the recent expansion of United Nganinks into HIP 99878 amidst news that several conflict zones had broken out in nearby Nganinks as a reaction to an increased Hand Gang presence in that system.
"From the beginning, we only wanted to be left alone. The people of our colony of Baxter's Exile, named after our founder, Jerimiah Baxter, worked hard in the asteroid fields surrounding our sun and the rings of our third world, striving to make a living far away from the likes of the Federation. For nearly two centuries, we lived an isolated life, safe in the knowledge that the huge distances between stars and the relative obscurity of our system meant that our worlds were given a wide berth. There was a time when a journey to a system like ours would have taken months or even years travelling through hyperspace. We found out to our cost that the advent of the Frame Shift Drive reduced such journeys to minutes, hours, days. We hear word that trips to the core of the galaxy can now be completed in mere days or weeks, a journey that would have taken a life time in the day of Jeremiah Baxter.
Our galaxy grows smaller, and with that come new challenges. We have seen our system rediscovered and have seen Universal Cartographic give discovery credit of our system not to our great founder but to another! I understand your anger and you should understand that I have protested most fiercely in communications with UC. As always, independent systems like our own are ridden roughshod by major powers. It was this very reason, generations ago, that our forebears sought a life, however harsh, out here in the glow of HIP 99878.
With each passing week, more outsiders enter into our borders, trying to impose their rules and their laws upon us. They need to understand that the only laws that apply in this system are the laws we administer. For this, they declare us an anarchy system and I say they are right! Their ethics are not our ethics. Their laws are not our laws.
None of us are naïve - we know our colony was born as a frontier and we have lived that way for generations. We are a proud isocracy, a community of freethinkers who believe in the power of self-ownership, mutual aid and individual reclaimation. We will work hard to maintain our status as a Permanent Autonomous Zone.
All of us have roles, roles essential to maintaining our life here at Baxter's Exile and on the harsh worlds below. I call on all of you to support the Hand Gang in their activities. For they are we and we are they! For Baxter's Exile, for HIP 99878 and for each and everyone of us - believe in Jeremiah Baxter's vision!"
