Romulus, Remus and the Core Worlds

1. Overview

The Romulan Star Empire is ruled from a single star system that holds two inhabited worlds. Romulus is the capital world, the home of the Romulan people since their ancestors left Vulcan, and the seat of the Praetor and the Restored Senate. Remus, its twin, is a harsh world that keeps one face always turned toward its sun. Most of the Reman people live there, on the dark side and underground, and its dilithium mines have fed the Imperial Fleet for generations.

Around the home system lies a ring of old, settled systems that Federation analysts call the core worlds. Beyond them stretch the colonies and the provinces, and at the outer edge the border sectors that face the Federation across the Neutral Zone. This article describes the two homeworlds, the core, the provinces in general terms, and the way traffic moves between them. It does not cover the politics of the Reman people, which are treated in The Remans, or the state that governs all of this, which is treated in Government of the Empire.

A word of caution belongs at the start. Almost nothing in this article was observed directly by a Federation citizen moving freely. The Empire does not admit tourists, does not publish maps, and does not answer questions. What follows is built from Starfleet charts, from the reports of the few Federation visitors who have stood on Romulus, from liaison work during the Dominion War, and from the joint recovery initiative that followed it. Where the record is thin, this article says so.

2. The Home System

Romulus and Remus first appear in Starfleet records as a pair on the charts used during the border crisis of 2266, the first time a Federation crew saw Romulans face to face. Both worlds orbit the same star. Federation charts give that star no agreed name; Romulans are believed to use one, but it has never been confirmed in any source the Federation trusts.

The two worlds are close enough in their orbits that traffic between them is constant, and Romulans treat the pair as one home. To a Romulan, Romulus is home and Remus is a possession. That difference is the root of most of what is said about Remus below, and of most of what is said in The Remans.

The system is the most heavily defended place in the Empire. Fleet anchorages, orbital docks and sensor networks surround both worlds.

3. Romulus

3.1 Land, sea and climate

Romulus is a world of seas, river valleys and high ground. It is generally described as cooler and wetter than Vulcan, with real winters in its higher latitudes and long, damp seasons on its coasts. The few Federation officers who have walked its capital found a city with a great deal of it below ground, though whether the caves and tunnels they saw were typical or simply the places a hidden movement chose to meet is a fair question.

A handful of Romulan places are known to the Federation by name because Romulans themselves spoke of them. The Apnex Sea is one of the world’s bodies of water. The Valley of Chula and the Firefalls of Gal Gath’thong are landmarks Romulans have spoken of to Federation officers with obvious pride. Federation sources know them only by name. What the firefalls are, where the valley lies, and how large the sea may be are not recorded.

Beyond those few names, the general picture runs as follows. The great cities stand near the coasts and along the major rivers. Inland lies farming country, much of it held by the old noble houses as estates that have passed down for centuries. To the north rise the Hesthral Highlands, a cold, thinly settled upland where several houses keep country seats and where, by Romulan tradition, the first settlers made their earliest permanent homes.

3.2 The capital

The capital of the Empire stands on Romulus. Federation records in general use simply call it the capital, and this reference does the same: no name for it has come through a source reliable enough to print. It is the seat of the Praetor, the Restored Senate and the great ministries, and the home city of most of the major noble houses.

The Federation’s knowledge of the capital comes from very few visits. In 2368 Ambassador Spock was found living there, working in secret with a Romulan movement for reunification with Vulcan, and Starfleet officers entered the city in disguise to reach him. Their reports describe an old city under heavy security, with a network of tunnels and caves beneath it that the movement used for its meetings. Ambassador Spock’s work is covered in Dissidents, Splinters and Unification.

In 2379 the Senate died in its own chamber in the capital, killed by a weapon set there during Shinzon’s coup. The chamber stood at the centre of the city’s political life, and its loss was felt there more sharply than anywhere else. The Restored Senate has sat in the capital since 2382. Whether it meets in the old chamber, rebuilt, or in a new one has not been confirmed. See Government of the Empire.

3.3 Other cities

The capital is not the only great city on Romulus, though it is the only one most Federation readers have heard of. Two others appear often enough in intercepted traffic and in reliable reports to be worth naming.

Thelvesh is a port city on the coast of the Apnex Sea, old, crowded and commercial. It is the centre of the Empire’s sea trade on Romulus and of much of its food trade, and it is described as less formal than the capital, a city of merchants and minor houses rather than senators. Dhavra, inland and to the south, is a city of ministries, foundries and Fleet schools. Many of the officers who serve on the border are said to have trained there, and the city’s houses have strong Fleet ties.

3.4 Life on Romulus

For a Romulan citizen of a good house, Romulus is the centre of the world in every sense. Careers that matter are made there, marriages between houses are arranged there, and a posting to the provinces, however important, is often felt as a kind of exile. The customs of house and family that shape this life are covered in Society, Houses and Customs.

The ordinary life of the city is less visible to outsiders than its politics, but what is known suggests a busy, orderly, deeply watched society. Accounts describe a population that is used to being observed and has learned to live with it, speaking carefully in public and freely only among family. See The Tal Shiar.

4. Remus

4.1 A world with one face to the sun

Remus is tidally locked: one side faces its sun at all times, and the other never sees it. The sunward side is described as a burning waste where nothing lives on the surface. The far side lies in permanent night, cold and dark. Between them runs a narrow band of twilight that the Romulans call the Ashline, where the light is dim and constant and where most of the surface installations stand.

The Reman people live on the dark side and below ground. Their eyes and skin are suited to darkness, and bright light pains them. See The Remans. What matters here is that the people who live on Remus live in tunnels, caverns and sealed settlements, and that the world above them is hostile on both faces.

4.2 The dilithium mines

Remus is valuable to the Empire for one reason above all others: dilithium. Its mines are among the oldest and deepest in Romulan space, and Remans have worked them for generations, under Romulan overseers and in conditions that every outside account describes as brutal. The best known workings lie under the dark side, in a region of shafts and caverns Romulans call the Khethra Deeps. How much of the Fleet’s dilithium still comes from Remus, rather than from colonies opened since, is not known.

The mines are part of the public record in one well known case. Shinzon, the human clone raised by the Romulans and later sent to Remus, spent his youth in the dilithium mines before he rose to lead Reman forces and, in 2379, to seize power on Romulus. His story is told in History of the Romulan Star Empire.

Remus also served the Empire as a source of soldiers. Reman troops were used as shock forces in the Dominion War, sent into the worst of the fighting. The politics of that service, and of what Remans have and have not gained since, belong to The Remans and T'Met.

4.3 Remus today

Since 2381 Romulan law has called the Remans “subjects of the Empire under protection”. Federation observers agree that the change made little difference to life on Remus itself. The mines still run. The overseers are still Romulan. Travel off the world by Remans is still controlled. The breakaway of T’Met, a Reman-settled system outside the border, and its entry into the Federation in 2392, have, by every indication, made the Empire watch Remus more closely, not less.

5. The Core Worlds

Federation analysts use “the core worlds” to mean the old, settled systems close to Romulus: the worlds the Empire took first, settled most thickly, and would defend last. The Federation does not know the full list, and the systems named below are those that appear most often in reliable sources.

The core worlds are where the Empire builds and feeds itself. They hold the great shipyards, the older dilithium and metal workings, the farming worlds that supply the capital, and the academies. They are also where many noble houses keep their second seats.

The core held during the Silence. Between 2379 and 2382, with no Senate and the provincial governors acting for themselves, the core worlds stayed close to Romulus and to the Imperial Fleet, which held the Empire together by refusing to take sides. It was the outer provinces that drifted. See History of the Romulan Star Empire and The Imperial Fleet.

6. Colonies and Provinces

6.1 How the Empire is divided

Outside the core, the Empire is a patchwork of colonies, conquered worlds and provinces. Each province is governed from Romulus through a governor, who answers to the government in the capital and who, in practice, often comes from a great house. Governors control local administration and the local garrison, though not the Fleet, which keeps its own chain of command. The relationship between governors and the Restored Senate is covered in Government of the Empire.

Not every world inside the Empire is settled by Romulans. Some hold other peoples brought under Romulan rule, and the Empire also maintains labour colonies, many of them worked by Remans, on worlds valued for what can be dug out of them.

6.2 The Silence in the provinces

The years Romulans call the Silence, 2379 to 2382, were felt most in the provinces. With no Senate in the capital to answer to, several governors ran their territories as their own, some in alliance with local houses and some against them. When the Restored Senate first sat in 2382, it spent years bringing those provinces back under the capital’s authority. By most accounts it did not fully finish that work until well into Praetor Sorrel t’Keleth’s term. The Lyreth Shiar, the sect that rose in the 2380s, found its footing in exactly this kind of loosely held ground; see Dissidents, Splinters and Unification.

6.3 The border provinces

At the edge of the Empire lie the border provinces, the sectors that face the Federation across the Neutral Zone. Three matter most to the Federation:

• Chaltok Sector, opposite the patrol region of Starbase 234. It takes its name from Chaltok IV, a Romulan world known to the Federation since 2366. The Imperial Fleet’s Chaltok Sector Command keeps the order of battle, patrol assignments and logistics for the sector.
• Nevrha Sector, spinward, running toward the Klingon border. Its garrisons look two ways, and Klingon memory of Narendra III keeps them busy. See The Klingon Empire.
• Aethren Sector, coreward, quiet and heavily fortified. It is the sector the Fleet would hold hardest if it ever had to fall back toward the core.

The border provinces are frontier country by Romulan standards. They are thinly settled, heavily garrisoned, and run as much by the Fleet as by any civil governor. Since 2387, when the patrols came back to the line, the border provinces have filled again with ships, listening stations and the people who staff them. Their part in the cold war along the Zone is covered in The Romulan Side of the Zone and The Neutral Zone (2393).

7. Travel and Traffic

7.1 Inside the Empire

Traffic inside the Empire runs along established routes between the home system and the core, which Federation analysts call the Inner Lanes. They are busy, closely watched and patrolled by the Fleet. Beyond the core, traffic thins quickly. Travel between provinces is less common than travel to and from the capital, which reflects how the Empire is run: lines of authority, supply and trade run to the centre and back, not sideways.

Romulan civilians do not move freely between worlds. Every journey outside one’s home province needs a permit known in Federation sources as a passage seal, issued by the provincial authorities and recorded. Journeys to Romulus are watched with particular care. Remans need a separate permission for any travel off Remus or out of their assigned colony, and it is rarely given.

Romulan starships of the modern era draw their power from an artificial quantum singularity rather than from the matter and antimatter reaction Starfleet uses. This is known from encounters with warbirds since 2364 and is covered in Romulan Technology.

7.2 Between the Empire and the Federation

There is no regular traffic between the Empire and the Federation. No Federation passenger line crosses the Zone, no Romulan merchant fleet trades in Federation ports, and the Neutral Zone itself may not be entered by either side without it being treated as an act of war. Official contact runs through diplomats, and it is thin.

There have been exceptions. During the Dominion War, from 2374, Romulan and Starfleet officers served together and liaison staff passed between the two powers. From 2377 the joint recovery initiative, twelve ships from each of the three powers led by the USS Viola, put Romulan and Starfleet crews to work side by side for most of a decade, dismantling derelicts and returning the dead to their homeworlds. Much of what the Federation knows about ordinary Romulans comes from those years. Very little of that contact survived the Empire’s return to the Zone.

The one steady trade between the two powers is illegal. Romulan ale, banned in the Federation for more than a century, still reaches Federation ports through smugglers and through third parties, and other goods follow it. See Society, Houses and Customs.

7.3 What a Federation visitor would face

No Federation citizen may travel into the Empire on their own. Diplomats travel under escort and see what their hosts choose to show them. Everyone else who has stood on Romulus in living memory has done so either at Romulan invitation, as in the events of 2379, or in disguise. A Federation citizen found inside the Empire without permission can expect arrest and interrogation, and the Empire’s interrogators are feared for good reason. See The Tal Shiar.

8. What the Federation Does Not Know

The gaps in the record are large and worth listing plainly. The Federation does not know the full list of the Empire’s inhabited worlds or its population. It has no reliable map of Romulus beyond a few named places. It does not know the name of the capital in any form it can confirm, the size of the Fleet anchorages in the home system, or the present output of the Remus mines.

Readers should treat this article as the best account available, not as a complete one.

9. See Also

The Romulan Star Empire · Government of the Empire · The Remans · T'Met · Society, Houses and Customs · Romulan Biology and Mind · The Imperial Fleet · The Romulan Side of the Zone · The Neutral Zone (2393) · Starbase 234 and the Patrol Region