House of Steel The Honorverse Companion - By David Weber Page 0,100

all essential dietary elements, much of it was digestible by terrestrial life forms. Thus, terraforming requirements were extraordinarily modest, consisting of little more than the need to seed food crops and selected terrestrial grasses to support imported herbivores. Unfortunately, that very ease of adaptation had a darker side and Manticore proved one of the very few extra-terrestrial systems to possess microorganisms which could prey on humans.

The culprit was a pathogen—or, rather, a small family of pathogens—that were similar to human coronaviruses and had been missed by the original survey team. Some virologists argue that it was not, in fact, missed but evolved in the six centuries between the initial survey and the arrival of the colonists. Whatever the truth of the matter, the pathogen, when it combined with human coronaviruses, was deadly, producing a condition analogous to simultaneous virulent influenza and pneumonia in its victims. Worse, it proved resistant to all existing medical technology and over thirty years were to pass before a successful vaccine was found.

In those three decades, almost sixty percent of the original colonists died. Their Manticore-born children fared better against the disease, experiencing a generally less severe manifestation of it. Without the cushion provided by the MCT funds on Old Earth and the evolution of the Warshawski sail hypership, the entire expedition would almost certainly have come to grief.

The Plague was initially restricted to Manticore itself. Colonization of Sphinx continued but under rigorously applied quarantine conditions as a “fallback” position for the colony as a whole. Sphinx was seen as a “citadel” from which the star system might be resettled, should worse come to worst, after the Plague was finally defeated. Unfortunately, the quarantine procedures failed, and in 1463 PD, the Plague “jumped” to Sphinx with equally catastrophic consequences for the colonists living there.

Founding of the Star Kingdom

1471–1542 PD

Under the circumstances, the colony found itself in urgent need of additional homesteaders. These were recruited from Old Earth, another process made much easier by the existence of the MCT, but the original colonists, concerned about retaining control of their own colony, adopted a radically new constitution before opening their doors to immigration.

Roger Winton had been reelected continuously to the post of Planetary Administrator and served superbly throughout the early settlement period and the Plague crisis. He was now an elderly man whose wife and two Terran-born sons had died of the Plague but he remained vigorous and his Manticore-born daughter Elizabeth showed promise at least equal to his. At fifty-three, she was President of the Board of Directors, making her effectively vice-president of the colony, and one of the young colony’s preeminent jurists. Because she had a large and thriving brood of second-generation Manticoran children and her family had served so outstandingly, a convention of colony shareholders converted the Corporation’s elective board into a constitutional monarchy and crowned Roger Winton King Roger I of Manticore on August 1, 1471 PD.

It was a post he was to enjoy for only three years before his death in one of the secondary outbreaks of the Plague, but his daughter succeeded him as Queen Elizabeth I in a smooth and popular transfer of power. The House of Winton has ruled the Manticore System ever since. Simultaneously, the surviving “First Shareholders” and their descendants, who held title to vast tracts of land, acquired patents of nobility to go with their wealth and the hereditary aristocracy of Manticore was born. (It should be noted that the term “lands,” under the original colonial charter—and, indeed, under current Manticoran law—refers to much more than actual land on the surface of one of the Manticore Binary System’s habitable planets. It also references mineral rights in the system’s asteroid belts, portions of the broadcast spectrum, etc.)

The new wave of immigrants arriving in the wake of the Plague comprised three distinct classes of citizens. Each immigrant received a land rights credit, the value of which precisely equaled the cost of a second-class passenger ticket from his planet of origin to Manticore. Any individual capable of paying his own passage received the full credit upon arrival. Those unable to pay their passages could draw upon MCT for a dollar amount equal to their land rights credit to cover the difference between their own resources and the cost of passage. An immigrant whose resources exceeded the cost of his passage could invest the surplus, paying fifty percent of the “book” price for additional land. The most affluent immigrants thus became “Second Shareholders,” with estates which, in some cases, rivaled those