Jandakotian

The Jandakotians were the dominant people of Jandakot and the subjects of the Jandakot Empire. By 0030, approximately 300 million lived on their declining homeworld, concentrated within its industrial settlements and deep warrens.

Their known appearance and culture are recorded almost entirely through the royal court encountered during the

Systems Alliance seizure of Jandakot. Consequently, surviving descriptions may overrepresent the habits of the ruling class, its warriors, and the inhabitants of the deep warrens.

Jandakotians were porcine humanoids with heavy builds and prominent ivory tusks. Those gathered inside the royal stronghold were large, broad, thick-bodied, and physically powerful enough to wield oversized rifles and blades.

Observed characteristics included:

Many of the king’s followers had oily fur, broken or dirty tusks, and little apparent concern for personal upkeep. Whether this was typical of the species or a consequence of life inside Jandakot’s polluted warrens is unknown.

The Jandakotians seen in the king’s hall wore minimal clothing and little sophisticated armor. Their equipment emphasized practicality and intimidation over refinement.

Commonly observed weapons included crude rifles, chipped swords, heavy blades, and other implements suited to close fighting. These arms remained dangerous but were technologically unsophisticated beside the equipment of the Systems Alliance and its

Shrike operatives. The king’s forces also employed unidentified beasts as animals of war.

Known Jandakotian culture emphasized strength, appetite, territorial ownership, and public displays of dominance. Their king held court above a fighting pit surrounded by crowded grandstands, making violence both political theater and communal entertainment.

Pride carried enormous social weight. An insult or open challenge could not be ignored without weakening a leader’s authority. This made members of the ruling class prone to spectacle and retaliation when their status was threatened.

The people of the deep warrens called the Systems Alliance the “Soft Hands”—outsiders with contracts and clean boots who had never bled for what they possessed. To the Jandakotians, ownership was legitimized by endurance, sacrifice, and the willingness to defend one’s claim personally.

The Jandakot Empire was ruled by a king whose authority appeared hereditary and intensely personal. Its hierarchy was martial, with power centered on the ruler’s physical presence, reputation, and ability to command armed followers.

The empire’s ruling class inherited the wealth and machinery built through the labor of earlier generations. Even as Jandakot’s infrastructure corroded and its mineral resources lost strategic value, its rulers treated their surviving territory as evidence of enduring strength. Their identity became inseparable from what their ancestors had built and what foreign powers now intended to take.

Life on

Jandakot unfolded amid rusted machinery, leaking steam, stale oil, failing industrial systems, and vast subterranean warrens. The environment rewarded physical endurance and normalized grime, noise, crowding, and danger.

This setting likely reinforced the species’ known cultural traits: suspicion of outsiders, pride in hardship, territorial behavior, and contempt for those perceived to acquire power without suffering for it.

The Shrike assassin who confronted the Jandakotian king regarded his court as a gathering of ravenous and undisciplined beasts. She considered them dangerous in numbers but individually predictable, poorly maintained, and easy to provoke through their pride.

That assessment belongs to a hostile operative during a targeted regime-change mission. It should not be treated as a neutral or complete judgment of the entire species.

The Jandakotians appear in

Illumination III - The Bore, during the assassination of their king and the Systems Alliance’s acquisition of Jandakot.