Federation of the Fused Mains/secret

It is good to be the pirate king.

Pirates from the Spike Society arranged the battleship construction and theft, and subsequent public relations campaign that spurred the Federation's secession, seeking to have entire worlds under their thumb. This only somewhat worked: the worlds were free of the Pirian Domain, and unified into a new polity, but wound up choosing their own leaders. Still, it was a useful independent area to move operations to, which had come under scrutiny in the Society and Domain.

Their heirs (some by blood, mostly adopted) recruited heavily over the next two centuries to build their power and prestige, building the Federation as a merchants' haven. Counting on individual and collective greed, they manipulated power blocs against one another and exploited the naivety of constant immigrants from the Society, accidentally creating a government more stable than either progenitor polity.

And then the Society blundered into synthetic anagathics. (They were aware of the supply from Anagathica, but the Solomani Preserve had grown less willing to export after a nearby warlord who had once used anagathics found another way to extend his life, which the Preserve feared meant he had reverse-engineered their wares.) Suddenly, heirs started having to wait much longer to rise to power. After the initial rounds of (sometimes literal) backstabbing, a new balance was struck - the remaining elders deciding it was better to share power than to die sooner than their ancestors had before the life-extending drugs - with quite a bit of the resources skimmed from the Federation's operations used to fund anagathic creation. Government of the Federation matured from a small tight-knit cabal of the rich to a civil service bureaucracy.

Those who get too close to the truth and might expose it are often rewarded with opportunities to get rich, which work but result in ample blackmail material, with which their silence is bought. Those who insist on social justice are directed toward ventures their new wealth might support, often times some reform that the existing masters would not mind implementing but do not have the personal drive to perform.

Warning of the Empress Wave immediately inspired thoughts of reconstruction budgets. While their motive was further profit, the Federation has been responsible for much of the post-Wave recovery of Gakghang Sector.