Entreprise Nouveau Caen

From Autonomicon Mk. II

Current revision

History

Entreprise Nouveau Caen was founded in 2179 on the planet Caen of the French Republic. The member states of the Democratic Federation were at that time suffering through an unusually bad economic downturn and Caen was particularly hard hit. As the amount of trade moving through the system fell off sharply shipping companies, interstellar trade conglomerates and even manufacturers with primarily off world markets closed their doors. The lack of once eager buyers forced the Beauville Orbital Station to shut down over sixty percent of non-military ship production and hundreds of thousands of unemployed laborers flooded into the planet's already stagnant job market. The Caen planetary stock market plunged, off world investors began to take their capital elsewhere and the economic future of the Caen system looked bleak.

Entreprise Nouveau Caen started when a group of destitute former laborers from Beauville met with thousands of other unemployed citizens in the basement of an unused office building in downtown Villefleuve, the planetary capital of Caen. The meeting was called as a public question and answer session with a board that included a representative of the Governors Office and Mayhew Faciane, Caen Regional Vice President of Expédition Interstellaire. At some point during the meeting an unidentified woman stepped up to the microphone and asked why Caen's excess labor force was not employed in planetary colonization within the Caen System. Initial survey of the system had failed to note that the second world out from the sun was just as suitable for colonization as the third world (which eventually became Caen). When the original exodus fleet arrived in the system and discovered the survey team's error they were forced to land on only the one world since they lacked both the equipment and the population to make a fresh start on two new worlds at the same time. The woman who posed the question remains anonymous to this day; Entreprise Nouveau Caen has a standing offer of ten million credits to anyone who can produce her or any of her descendants.

Entreprise Nouveau Caen was officially founded two weeks after that fateful meeting in the Villefleuve office block when former V.P. Faciane and the four other members of the first board of directors received their incorporation papers from the French government. In addition to a sizable grant from the Caen Planetary Senate the company was backed by heavy investment from Expédition Interstellaire, persuaded to back the endeavor by Faciane in the days before his resignation. The first transports ships broke Caen orbit for Nouveau Caen at precisely midnight on September the 22nd, 2179.

Entreprise Nouveau Caen was a disaster almost from the very start. Their troubles began when one of the six transport ships carrying the initial colonists across the system suffered a reactor leak and was lost with all hands less than two hours out from Caen. It was later determined that the leak was caused by poor maintenance of the entire drive system; the corporation was fined eight hundred million credits and two purchasing agents were given prison sentences for involuntary manslaughter. In their hurry to get the company off the ground the agents had purchased badly outdated and under-maintained craft for what was admittedly a relatively short in-system planetary hop. Another transport suffered massive engine failure and had to be towed back to a Beauville drydock by the Marine Nationale.

With only four of the six original Nouveau Caen colony ships surviving to reach the new world the company was in serious danger of failing before it had a chance to properly begin. Much of the heavy machinery required for the final stages of terraforming (the initial work had been done in the weeks before the launch by a contracted science vessel) was either sitting useless in a Beauville repair slip or scattered around the inner system as shattered wreckage. Despite their crippling initial setbacks the board of directors decided that the surviving ships would make planetfall as scheduled, touching down shortly after