For The Tyrants Fear Your Might (A quest of interstellar rebellion)

AKuz · Dec 10, 2020

THE ALL-RADIANT CONGRESS

Setting Information: The Solarian Compact:

Initially formed as the Solarian Treaty Organization from the ashes of the old United Nations Security Council, United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, and the Global Climate Relief Organization in the worst decade of Earth's environmental collapse. The STO was originally a body tasked with overseeing the granting of offworld mining permits and the purchase and distribution of the resources to countries struggling from climate change.

The advent of the Korolev-Chandrashker gates and the construction of the first one under STO oversight in 2063 led to the beginning of the transformation of that body into the de facto single governing body of the Human species.

Reorganized into the 'Solarian Compact', the first Charters were granted to massive corporate conglomerates to explore and exploit the cosmos for Humanity with little to no regulation or restriction.

In the early decades, the Solarian Compact oversaw the construction of KC gates in the systems closest to Sol and began the process of granting colonization rights to the most habitable worlds within that region with colonization rights granted to a number of national and international blocks.

With the growth of the Solarian Compact's power came calls for the body to become more representative and democratic, and in 2099, the Solarian Compact held its first elections and constitutional convention, inviting representatives from the Sol system and the five systems that held permanent Human settlement.

Over the course of the 22nd and 23rd centuries the Solarian Compact has held fast to what it sees as its duty to act as the mediator and financier of the Charters, the unifying agent of the disparate first Human colonies, and the guarantor of interstellar peace for Humanity.

As of 2252, the three most important bodies within the Solarian Compact are the Solarian Parliament -Located on Earth, the Solarian Compact Navy -based in the Korolev-Chandrashker system, and the Solarian Central Bank, -based out of the Columbia System.

Organized as a liberal democracy, with universal suffrage, the Solarian Compact is theoretically overseen by three equal institutions: the Solarian Parliament, the office of the Solarian Secretary General, and the Solarian High Court.

Though the Solarian Compact prides itself on being a Constitutional government, the actual original document merely outlines the terms of admitting new MPs and High Court Judges, and the electoral procedures of the Compact Parliament, with subsequent Parliaments meeting to add items like the Declaration of Property Rights, the founding of the Central Bank, the creation of the Solarian Navy, and the Laws on Freedom of Navigation and Travel being added later.

The Solarian Parliament is made up of two thousand six hundred and twenty seats representing ridings on Earth, Columbia, Atlantis, Penglai, Olduvai, and Epsilon which are elected every three years to a Parliament that meets in the New York prefecture of Earth.

Though the many frontier colonies do not have direct representation in the Parliament due to being owned and operated by private entities, their inhabitants are considered 'Absent for Employment' and may register with a home riding and submit a physical ballot (for security reasons) by courier from when polls open until they close. Though this process was suitable for the closely settled regions of space at the time of the ratification of the Compact Constitution in 2100, the rapid growth of Human settled space in the century and a half since has seen the de facto voter suppression of over 90% of Human settled space.

At the first sitting of each new Compact Parliament, the assembled members will elect a Secretary General and a slate of Ministry officials on a majority basis, and those individuals will oversee the executive branch of government and day to day operations. Though the average Compact Parliament contains between seven to nine parties in each Parliamentary sitting, the vast majority of seats belong to one of either the Party for Human Rights and Liberties or the Justice and Development Alliance and have since the very early 2100s. The governments formed this way can be brought down by losing the confidence of the Parliament for example, by failing to pass a budget, the process of finding a majority government will repeat again.

Though a democratic body that has maintained stability for over a century and a half, the Solarian Compact Parliament has been dogged by accusations of dynastic politics, Charter influence, voter suppression, regulatory capture, inability to reign in the Banks and MIlitary, and corruption at all levels.

Separate from the Parliament is the Solarian High Court that consists of eleven judges that serve terms of up to thirty-three years, with each new sitting of the Compact Parliament selecting one judge from a list provided by the governments of the six main worlds of the Solarian Compact. The High Court rules on matters of adherence of laws to the Solarian Constitution, and have been accused of serving as an arm of the Charters, though this has been strenuously contested by the Solarian legal profession as a whole.

By law the Solarian Compact also oversees a number of other important institutions including the Earth Reconstruction Commission (In a permanent public-private partnership with the Earth Reconstruction Association), the Solarian Central Bank, and the Solarian Compact Navy, though these important institutions often exhibit an alarming degree of autonomy from Parliamentary control.

The Charters:

The result of a cleverly conceived merger between specialty transport vessel manufacturer Titan Staryards and Private Military contractor Martian Military Solutions, Ares cut its teeth not just supplying material to the skirmishes between Mississippi Shipping and United Starhaul, but in supplying military contractors to both sides.

The professionalism of Ares mercenaries and quality of Ares gear led to the rapid expansion of business opportunities for the company and investment skyrocketed even after the Mississippi-Starhaul war ended in a hostile takeover of Starhaul by Mississippi.

Thanks in part to Mississippi debts held by Ares, when the RT-2102 Gate was opened up for settlement strategic maneuvering saw the Compact grant Ares mining and settlement rights to the newly opened system.

The rest, as they say, is history. Leveraging the immense resources of the Alexander system with their existing military expertise, Ares expanded nearly exponentially over the following century. While they maintain a dominating edge in the military field, they now integrated companies in fields from agronomy to personal fitness centers to xenobiology.

Internally Ares very self consciously styles itself as a hierarchical military organization complete with a semi-formal rank structure and an ethos of respect for the chain of command, professional courtesy, and treating your subordinates with respect. In practice Ares is hidebound, authoritarian, filled with passive aggressive sniping and rampant empire building.

While Ares remains headquartered on Mars, they have holdings in several systems and own the distant system of Alexander outright.

Rhodes Mining

One of the three original Charters that the Compact granted, Rhodes considers itself the singular reason that Humanity survived ecological collapse and spread past Sol. Immensely wealthy, over 52% of all material mined and processed by the entire Human race has passed through Rhodes hands at one point or another.

While founded merely to provide Earth the vital materials that it needed to rebuild itself after the lost decades of ecological collapse, Rhodes quickly expanded into all areas of the economy to support their mining, refining, and processing operations.

Dedicated to their vision of logistical chain efficiencies they've developed an entire chain of star systems into an efficient production center based around the resource rich system of Foundry, and the nearby feeder systems of Ecrams, Qem, and Crucible.

Rhodes considers itself home to a version of meritocracy built on hard work, education, and good old fashioned personal drive. This has developed over time into a stratified internal divide between the rank and file workers, the lower level management, and the highly lauded senior management. Each class lives in entirely separate worlds, attending separate schools, consuming different products, and leading very different lives in what many observers have labelled a de facto caste system.

they make food and medicine, the 120 year old CEO is kinda creepy tho?

Techbros, some of them science, some of them explore

Born from the union of Hermes Interstellar Services and The Ishtar Group, the Hermes-Ishtar Corporation owns and operates not only the communications backbone of Compact space, but much of the content that crosses over it.

The results of increasing consolidation of pre-spaceflight communications infrastructure and content creation and management firms, Hermes Communications and Ishtar Entertainment Group were both part of the second round of Charters established after the advent of the KC gates.

While Hermes quickly established operations throughout Compact space, their waystations, couriers, and communications repeaters a common sight in every corner of Human occupied space; Ishtar Group mainly limited their own operations to Sol and the Radiant system, where Ishtar owned and operated the world of Elysium to support their many projects.

Following a wave of Compact space wide reorganizations following the Mississippi-Starhaul conflicts of the 2130s, a desire for complete vertical integration on Ishtar's part led to a mostly amicable union with Hermes in 2139.

Since then Hermes-Ishtar have dominated all communications across Human space with only the privileged internal high-level communications of the other Charters managing to avoid consolidation under Hermes-Ishtar.

While Hermes-Ishtar make a great show of respecting individual creativity, initiative, and drive from their employees; in practice this amounts to rampant internal fighting involving the parasocial personality cults of different "genius" inventors, artists, and executive that rise and fall inside of Hermes-Ishtar at a dizzying rate.

Sketchy buggers, they can get you anything tho

Historical Topics:

Between 2036 and 2071 the Democratic Federation was the governing body of much of Earth's Western Hemisphere.

Initially comprised of a Federation of Socialist, Anarchist, Communist, and other far left social movements, militias, and political factions controlling regions of Earth's North American continent during and after the decline and collapse of the United States of America (1776-2034) due to the effects of unaddressed climate change amplifying existing political and economic crisis.

Eventually solidifying into the governing body of the former United States of America, United States of Mexico and the Dominion of Canada, the Democratic Federation embarked on an ambitious program of cultural revolution and economic reform designed to mitigate and reverse the effects of the climate change crisis.

As the patron of much of the central and southern western hemisphere, the Democratic Federation attempted to chart a course of environmental restoration separate from that of the Solarian Treaty Organization (In 2063 reorganized into the Solarian Charter), choosing not to contest Eurasian and African domination of outer space.

Having never existed out of crisis conditions, a combination of pre-existing economic damage, sabotage, and instability drove the Democratic Federation into decline in the Grey Decade of 2062 to 2070 and eventually forced the Democratic Federation to ratify a series of treaties giving the Charters economic access to Federation member states in order to conduct vital reconstruction work.

A last ditch uprising by radical elements in 2072 to eject the Charters from the Democratic Federation failed when Solarian Compact peacekeepers were called in and in seven months of street fighting pacified most of North America's key urban centers via strategic use of orbital weapons on the areas of greatest urban resistance.

Though guerilla warfare would continue in the Western Hemisphere for another three decades, the Democratic Federation was officially defunct by December 2072 and parcelled out into a number of Charter owned reconstruction areas under Compact authority.

Today radicals still pine for the four decades that the Democratic Federation attempted to build an alternative to the emerging Charters, and the polity's distinctive black, red, and green flag is brought out for each and every Great Black Summer. Well into the twenty second century, riots were often accompanied by demands to 'Avenge the Martyrs of 72!'.

Despite this underground extremist nostalgia, Charter and Compact schools teach that the Democratic Federation was a collectivist state whose iconoclastic behavior saw the destruction of famous landmarks like Mount Rushmore, Stone Mountain, and other monuments to Liberal Democracy and the Free Market in a mad attempt to remake the human race, but whose doctrinaire adoption of command economics saw them unable to deal with the ever-changing complexities of climate change.

Misc Details:

The first five systems to hold permanent Human colonies are known as either "The First Sisters" or "Earth's Daughters", depending on who you are asking and their political persuasion. From oldest to youngest, these worlds are:

Columbia: settled by billionaire American expats and tens of millions of refugees who had fled the unfolding revolutionary violence of the North American continent several years beforehand. Columbia was founded under a vision of fidelity to the American dream and to prove the indomitability of the soul of the United States of America and liberalism in the face of the red flags of the (North American) Democratic Federation. Fiercely loyal to the Compact and the dream of Charter prosperity, and home of the Solarian Central Bank, Columbia is often known as the "Gilded World" in reference to what many see as a return to American Gilded Age wealth and social inequality. Ares Conflict Solutions' central command is located here.

Atlantis: With colonization rights to this majority oceanic planet initially granted to the waning power of the European Union, the nations of the EU opened up colonization opportunities to other allied powers, especially Russia and Egypt. Atlantis was often seen by the EU as a place to dump unwanted refugees from outside of Europe's borders, and Russia and Egypt's tendency to see the world as a genuine project led to the usurpation of colonization rights away from Europe in the mid 2080s. Known today as the most restive of the first wave of colonies, Atlantis is the most skeptical of Charter power and plays a delicate game of wealth redistribution to underwrite the greatest social security net in Human Space. Cernunnos is de jure headquartered here.

Penglai: Originally the world in the most need of terraforming of the original colonies, Colonization rights were granted to the People's Republic of China and their allies after a lackluster bidding campaign. As China's focus was mainly on attempting to stem the damage of climate change on Earth herself, colonization of Penglai initially lagged until the Chinese Politburo struck upon the strategy of subcontracting colonization rights to Pacific adjacent nations suffering from the rise of that ocean. As colonization unfolded in the early 22nd century Penglai became known as a multicultural mosaic as hundreds of millions from across the Pacific settled and intermingled on the wine darkened shores of that world. Known today for its vibrant cultural milieu, violent clashes between labour unions, and private police, Penglai hosts the headquarters of the Hermes-Ishtar, Omoikane and Rhodes corporations.

Olduvai: With Colonization rights granted to a coalition of African nations at the height of the 'African Century', the African Colonization Organization did not see their colony as a refugee destination, dumping ground, or resource colony like their fellows. Instead the ACO saw the colonization scheme as an opportunity to preserve and export the rich traditions and cultures of Africa on their own terms, fully intending to set up healthy and self-sufficient colonies. To the current day, Olduvai has the closest relations with the home nations and is the heartland of Daughter sentiment and a bedrock for the Party for Human Rights and Liberties.

Epsilon System: While not technically a single world, the cluster of heavily inhabited space colonies in the Epsilon system are always considered the 'Fifth Sister' or 'Fifth Daughter'. As the most mineral rich system of the original colonies, Epsilon was the source of many of the materials that helped pull Earth through her darkest hour, and the system was recognized for their efforts by being invited to send delegates to the 2099 Solarian Compact Constitutional Convention. Epsilon is famous for its people's long roots in spacing and for being the headquarters of Mississippi Shipping Interstellar and thus the most heavily trafficked system in history.
Technologies: Nanomanufacturing, summary:

The contemporary gold standard for manufacturing. These devices use mechanosynthesis, a process that guides chemical reactions by placing reactive molecules with atomic precision. Ribosomes in the body's cells use a form of this method.

While the largest units can create objects up to 2m x 2m x 2m, smaller units (halving the units each time) are viable on basically any human scale. Projects larger than this size (such as ships or buildings, need to be either grown layer-by-layer via nanofabricators attached to robotic arms, or assembled from smaller parts through traditional assembly line, dry dock, or construction processes.

In principle basically anything can be made with these devices, and some materials can only be manufactured via these methods in microgravity. All manufacturing patterns in Compact Space feature Charter DRM using embedded explosive molecules like octaazacubane or cubic gauche nitrogen that will damage a disassembler or x-ray machine making reverse engineering of their products difficult.

A common part of 23rd century life is the near ubiquity of Artificial Intelligences in daily life, from consumer grade VIs through specialist TLIs, controversial AGIs, finally the perpetually 10 years away Artificial Super Intelligences.

The common consumer will daily run into what are properly known as Narrow AIs, and generally labelled as VI -Virtual Intelligences- by people outside the field. This category covers a broad swathe of techniques, from search and pathfinding to expert systems to genetic fuzzy trees to deep neural networks, which are mixed and matched with each other to optimize for the designed task. VIs are ubiquitous, exceeding human peak skill in their areas of specialization (though real world applications often don't do all that much better than trained humans), and have spent the past two centuries getting augmented with more and more clever algorithmic tricks for improving VIs. In order to do this, the Charters employ large teams of analysts and software engineers to develop clever algorithmic tricks that supplement or outright supplant neural networks, exploiting machine precision where stochastic methods are inadequate.

The use of VIs in everyday life is well accepted by the vast majority of the population, with professionals mixing and matching various consumer VIs to analyse data or assist them with creative or scientific works. Some VI lines are well loved by both the populace and the Charters themselves, with Charter programmers often deliberately leaving VIs with behavioral quirks and unpredictable glitches that not only save money on quality assurance, but are considered endearing traits that lead to anthropomorphization by the consumer market

Despite the mass comfortability and profitability of VIs of all kinds, the introduction of AGIs has been, to put it delicately, controversial. Though computer science has advanced to the point of producing programs that can not only pass the Turing test, but demonstrate sapience and match 23rd century human intelligence, flexibility, and creativity, the public reaction to the introduction of AGI saw the companies of the time rapidly pull them from the market, and even say the Compact itself move to heavily regulate the AI sector.

First introduced in the 2060s, the great tech firms began replacing their work staff with AGIs who did not require food, rest, housing, or pay. This shift led to an alliance between white collar workers fearing that automation would put them out of work and radicals who opposed what they insisted was AGI Slavery, a growing movement that would climax in the First Great Black Summer of 2084. When the ashes of the First Black Summer settled, the Compact's Parliament moved to grant rights to AGIs, and the resulting economic damage saw dozens of formerly great names in computing consolidate under the aegis of several of the first Charters who flaunted their extra-Solarian wealth by buying up prestigious brand names and research divisions on the cheap.

Since the 2080s, while the regulation surrounding AGI production and use have been severely weakened none of the Charters have sought to reintroduce them into the market, perhaps fearing another backlash like the First Black Summer and the few hundred thousand surviving AGIs that were granted Solarian Citizenship rights have found spread throughout the Compact and Charter Space where they usually work at the same white collar jobs whose workers they were designed to replace.

Perhaps due to the risks of attempting to reintroduce AGIs to the market, Omoikane has instead introduced their flagship product the "TLI" or Temporary Limited Intelligence. Approximately as effective as an AGI, a TLI is billed as a more moral replacement for AGI that uses a suite of high end VIs and a proprietary batch of creativity algorithms in order to complete complex tasks.

TLIs are used as a fire and forget program designed to be licensed to solve a single issue, no matter how complicated and then delete itself. Though the TLIs are a black box product, scientists from the other Charters believe that the central creativity algorithm in the TLI is inherently unstable and rapidly degrades in ability with time, making the TLI an instance of Omoikane attempting to market a critical technical flaw as a selling point that is accepted due to the ubiquitous market practice of planned obsolescence and artificial scarcity.

Though expensive, most businesses and successful professionals will keep a few licensed Omoikane TLIs on hand to throw at difficult problems or to supplement manpower in crunch situations.

While AGIs have been possible for nearly two centuries, the promise of a Seed AI, a recursively self-improving general superintelligence, is perpetually 'a decade away from the market', and no successful ASI ever been demonstrated to the satisfaction of the Charters or the Compact.

This is not to say that the Gödel machine architecture or the AIXI model has somehow been forgotten in the past 230 years, but that the Friendly AI problem has yet to be cracked. Every demonstration has either stalled out or gone immediately rampant, attempting to overthrow Charter Space before being stopped by the safety net of Narrow AIs. The small trickle of roughly human intelligence level AGIs that are created every decade typically come from these projects.

Urban legends persist that a few Seed AIs managed to escape and hide out beyond known space, plotting to return and crush humanity, or that they control all of society in secret, puppeting the Compact and Charters from their very foundation and occasionally engineering publicly failed ASI attempts to allay suspicion. These rumours are, of course, patently false, and simply the fevered imagination of crackpots at work, no doubt inspired by entertainment made by Hermes-Ishtar that feature AI supervillainy.
Systems: Map made by @Redshirt Army

The Spinward Frontier:

The Middle Spinward Frontier

The Core Region:

UNDER RADIANT CONTROL OR ALLIED:

The Radiant system is host to a G-class star, only slightly smaller than Sol. The system itself is rather small and resource-poor; experts believe that one or more Jovian planets ejected much of the system's bodies and then followed themselves. This is evidenced by the system's asteroid belt degrading over time, with high levels of eccentric orbits and impacts on planetary surface.

Radiant 1: A rather unremarkable airless iron planet, gravity 0.4 Earth Standard.

Radiant 2: A slightly larger unremarkable airless iron-silicate planet, gravity 0.6 Earth Standard.

Radiant 3: A binary planetary system and the outermost of the Radiant systems' planets.

Asphodel (Radiant 3a): The larger of the Elysium 3 pair, Asphodel might have once hosted life of its own. That life has been snuffed out for hundreds of millions of years, though, as the planet's significant atmosphere began the runaway cycle of your usual hothouse planet. Hermes-Ishtar maintained a significant aerostat and automated surface miner operation for in-house manufacturing, given that the frequent asteroid impacts from the asteroid belt keep digging up chunks of the upper crust and having low-melting-point metals rain out of the sky and solidify, unoxidized, on the surface for collection. Gravity 1.4 Earth Standard.

Elysium (Radiant 3b): Elysium was settled in the late 2190's, being a relatively simple affair. Simple life had already begun to evolve under its oceans, but continued orbital bombardment far past the lengths of things like Earth's Late Heavy Period had kept it there. It was a simple matter of forming up a small anti-asteroid task force armed with tugs and mining lasers to artificially end the pummeling, and the surface proved amenable to Terran life transplants. The colony is energy-self-sufficient, using a variety of solar, tidal, and nuclear power. Gravity 0.9 Earth Standard.

Radiant I: The outermost significant feature of Radiant, this asteroid belt is more a loose mixture of a primordial asteroid belt much like Sol's with a Kuiper belt. The shepherding gas giants which once nudged all these rocks into their orbits are gone, and with it the entire outer system is a maelstrom of chaotic orbits as the belts lose their coherence. This requires constant vigilance from Elysium's anti-asteroid team, but the high eccentricity of many asteroids also makes it cheap and easy to mine the ones that might come Elysium's way, which provides a trickle of basic resources for upkeep and personal goods. All large-scale building and infrastructure projects have been supplied from out-system, however.

A G-K far binary system, Gaid is simply a transit point to Radiant. Gaid's own gate maintenance techs and SAR rotated in and out through Radiant itself. There is no infrastructure other than a set of buoy lines for communications in Gaid A, and nothing in Gaid B.

Gaid A1: An airless world. Quality 10.

Gaid A2: A planet much like mars with a vestigial CO2 atmosphere. Quality 7.

Gaid A3: This planet boasts a methane hydrosphere. Quality 4.

Gaid AI: An asteroid belt.

Gaid A4: A turbulent Jovian planet, its storms would make resource extraction difficult. Quality 5.

Gaid A4a: An icy moon, with tidal heating creating a large ocean under a thin icy shell. Quality 9.

Gaid B1: A molten Cthonian world hosting a simply ludicrous amount of iron. Quality 15.

Gaid B2: An airless world. Quality 10.

Gaid B3: An airless binary system with two near-identically sized planets. Quality 7 and 8.

Gaid B4: This airless planet boasts a large and beautiful ring system, famous as a screen background option across human space. Every few years, a cruise or scientific expedition will stop by for more images.

Gaid B5: A small icy planet. Quality 3.

Gaid B6: A frozen world. Quality 7.

Gaid B7: An interesting gas dwarf sometimes referred to as an 'ice dwarf.' Quality 14.

A close K-M binary, Shei is home to an old Ares penal colony.

Shei 1: A Cthonian world. Quality 15.

Shei 2: An airless world. Quality 12.

Sheol (Shei 3): A boreal world, with a large, decaying ring, the planet features two large continents. The population of the consists of a large prisoner population on the larger of the two continents and a small Ares training base on the smaller. Records show that the prison consists of several million persons convicted to "high risk labour" and dropped on the continent with automatic resupply via Ares contractors and watched from orbit by weapons satellites. Most of the planet's land area is covered in a native tree analogue with a strange multi-stranded trunk.

Sheol is actually home to a population of over 100 million made up of prisoners and their descendants taht Ares was usuing as a live fire training course. Cooperation between Radiant agents, Ares mutineers, and the Sheolites themselves have seen the planet freed.

Gravity .95 Earth Standard. Quality 12.

Watchman (Shei 3a): Once the outer of two moons, this body now boasts Ares' local light shipyards and system command center. Quality 13.

Shei 4: Spiraling in from the outer system, this planet will eventually evaporate near-entirely as it closes towards the dual suns of Shei. Quality 3.

Shei 5: Martian planet with an active methane cycle. Quality 5.

Shei I: Asteroid belt.

Shei 6: Jovian planet with high rotation rate. Slightly squashed as a result. Quality 8.

Shei 6a: An icy capture, this moon will be torn into a ring sometime in the next hundred thousand years. Quality 2.

Shei 6b: Cold Martian planet, covered in a thin layer of water and carbon dioxide ices. Active methane cycle. Quality 8.

Shei II: Asteroid belt.

Shei 7: Jovian planet. Quality 13.

Shei 7a: An icy moon with significant cryovolcanism. Quality 6.

Shei 7b: A tiny icy moon, this is on the edge of hydrostatic equilibrium. Quality 2.

Shei 8: Ice giant. Quality 6.

Shei 8a: An icy moon. Quality 9.

Shei 8b: An icy moon, orbiting in an unusual polar orbit. Quality 9.

Population: 103,000,000

While lacking any currently-habitable planets, Five Lions' large size and potential have made it a significant point of Rhodes' recent extraction efforts. Ambitious terraforming efforts have recently begun.

Carajas (Five Lions 1): A Cthonian ball of iron, it's actively mined by robotic Rhodes-built landers. Gravity 2.3 Earth Standard. Quality 12.

Five Lions 2: A small rocky ball. Quality 3.

Five Lions 3: A rocky ball. Quality 7.

Grasberg (Five Lions 4): A large rocky world, glaciation has rendered it uninhabitable for now, but terraforming efforts have begun to artificially ramp up the greenhouse effect and restore liquid water to the surface, along with mining its ice. Gravity 1.11 Earth Standard. Quality 14.

Five Lions 5: This planet's atmosphere is so significant it verges on a gas dwarf. While a solid surface covered in a thin layer of ice is at the bottom, no reasonable colonization is possible. Quality 7.

Five Lions I: This asteroid belt, along with all the others, is being mined heavily.

Five Lions 6: This Jovian planet forms the center of current Rhodes extraction efforts. Quality 4.

Five Lions 6a: This Martian planet boasts significant ice caps and active plate tectonics, though only a vestigial atmosphere. Debate on whether to put resources into terraforming it are ongoing. Gravity .81 Earth Standard. Quality 17.

Oyu Tolgoi (Five Lions 6b): Home to the local population in covered shelters, this Martian planet, while nearly completely lacking water or plate tectonics, has its own atmosphere. Comet bombardment away from populated areas is ongoing and is already beginning to show results. Gravity .79 Earth Standard. Quality 11.

Five Lions II: An asteroid belt.

Five Lions 7: An unremarkable Jovian. Quality 2.

Five Lions III: An asteroid belt.

Five Lions 8: Jovian planet, its rotation speed has resulted in an unusually calm upper atmosphere. Quality 15.

Five Lions IV: An asteroid belt.

Five Lions 9: Jovian planet. Quality 9.

Five Lions V: An asteroid belt.

Five Lions 10: Neptunian ice giant. Quality 8.

Five Lions 10a: A small icy moon. Quality 5.

Five Lions 10b: A large icy body, this was probably its own planetoid at some point before being captured due to the complex interplays of no less than 5 gas giants.

Population: 15,000,000

A rare system with a brown dwarf orbiting a G-type star (just barely in the limits of what's considered a single system rather than a binary), and with a Jovian planet orbiting that, and on top of that treasure trove a dual ice giant binary, Osliam presents a golden research opportunity, and was bid on by Omoikane despite its otherwise sparce resources and poor habitable prospects.

Osliam 1: A rare hot ice giant, this planet is actively shrinking on a measurable time scale. It must have migrated in as a much larger planet recently.

Osliam 1a: This once-rock-ice moon is now a tiny molten ellipse barely holding together.

Osliam 1b: This somewhat larger moon changes color unusually with its day, as the shade of its parent cools lava to a dull red before emerging back into the light heats the lava back to a healthy orange glow.

Osliam 1c: This entire moon glows dull red in its day, just barely solid, and cools to an unusually smooth moon in its night.

Osliam I: This asteroid belt was probably a planet before Osliam 1's passing tore it to shreds.

Osliam 3: A hothouse planet with a relatively thin atmosphere, it retains temperatures and pressures that are survivable with heavy-duty equipment on the surface—when it's not raining sulfuric acid, that is.

Osliam 4: This small Martian planet seems to have collected some of Osliam 1's offgassing in its move inwards, and has a renewed temporary atmosphere.

Osliam 5a: This planet seems to have survived at the edge of the frost line by siphoning gas off its smaller twin.

Osliam 5b: Barely a gas giant, this planet was probably only slightly smaller than Osliam 5a in the distant past.

Osliam 6: The focus of Omoikane colonization in-system, Osliam 6 retains plate tectonics from the nearby brown dwarf but no atmosphere, an odd combination.

Osliam 7: A brown dwarf, this substellar object long ago burnt its deuterium and now lies slowly cooling, glowing dimly red. It is, however, still giving off a prodigious amount of low IR radiation.

Osliam 7a: Once its own planet, Osliam 7a was captured at some point by Osliam 7, perhaps in the same interaction that threw Osliam 1 to its suicidal innermost orbit.

Osliam 7a1: This icy moon is simultaneously shrinking and becoming more habitable—while its outer layers of ice are sublimating, the fierce tides of its complex interplay with Osliam 7 and 7a are heating the inner ocean to temperatures comparable to terrestrial water sources. Some scientists even suggest a pocket of water vapor is forming under the ice, and may form an internal "sky" for as much as a hundred million years before the outer shell sublimates entirely.

Osliam 7a2: This moon is less lucky; its tides are so strong that they seem to slowly be ripping the moon apart. It won't have the honor of becoming more than an ephemeral ring; the same complex tides tearing at it will rapidly disperse its debris field. While it lasts, though, it's easy water harvesting.

Population: 650,000

UNDER CHARTER CONTROL:

A distant double G binary, Xotreh hosts a small habitable moon around Xotreh B, the smaller of the two stars. As such, development has focused on the second star, despite the fact that the jump points center closer to Xotreh A.

Xotreh A1: This world boasts an active liquid silicate cycle on its surface, with oceans of basalt and continents of granite. Gravity 0.38 Earth Standard. Quality 8.

Xotreh A2: A rather large airless world, its original atmosphere was likely blown off by a massive impact. Gravity 1.2 Earth Standard. Quality 9.

Xotreh A3: A binary planetary pair of airless worlds about the size of Mars. Quality 6 and 8.

Xotreh A4: A hothouse planet with a planet-wide sulfuric acid storm due to its rapid rotation. Gravity .71 Earth Standard. Quality 8.

Xotreh A5 "Cueball": This planet is remarkably similar to Earth—if earth was buried under a kilometers-thick ice sheet across 90% of the surface. One day, as Xotreh A expands and dies, this world will become an ocean planet, but for now it's a cold desert. Gravity .87 Earth Standard. Quality 5.

Xotreh A6: An unremarkable icy ball. Quality 4.

Xotreh AI: An asteroid belt.

Xotreh A7: A Jovian planet, Xotreh 7 corrals the entire inner system in line. Quality 10.

Xotreh B1: This planet must have once been a gas giant at least the size of Uranus before it was sent inwards. Now all that remains is a dense core with a molten surface. Gravity 1.51 Earth Standard. Quality 13.

Xotreh B2: A binary pair of earth-sized airless worlds. Quality 6 and 7.

Xotreh B3: Another once-gas giant, this planet remains far out enough to boast a wholly-solid surface of iron. Gravity 1.64 Earth Standard. Quality 14.

Xotreh B4: A Jovian right on the frost line, its tidal heating keeps its moons on the edge of habitability. Quality 3.

Xotreh B4a "Sushi": An ocean world with massive polar ice caps, Omoikane has constructed a series of seasteads on the equatorial high ocean plateaus where it was feasible to drive foundations into the sea floor a few hundred meters below the surface. These small facilities serve as housing, data storage, and production centers for the research teams studying the dual Cthonian planets of Xotreh B. Gravity .67 Earth Standard. Quality 2.

Xotreh B4b: The lesser tidal heating here worsened the glaciation, and the planet lies under a planet-wide crust of ice. Gravity 1.13 Earth Standard. Quality 10.

Xotreh BI: The close proximity of this asteroid belt makes it an ideal location for resource extraction.

Xotreh 5: This Jovian is definitively beyond the habitable zone. Quality 6.

Xotreh 6: A dense ice giant. Quality 4.

Xotreh 7: Jovian planet. Quality 6.

Xotreh 8: An exceptionally cold Jovian. Quality 9.

Xotreh 8a: An unremarkable icy sphere. Quality 8.

Xotreh 9: This planet would have a massive atmosphere, if it wasn't so cold it all froze and fell to the surface. Only a few degrees above the space surrounding it. Gravity 1.3 Earth Standard. Quality 9.

Population: 54,000

Besides an interesting Jovian-gas dwarf planetary system, Bestreer holds little of interest other than its connections to other places.

Bestreer 1: An airless world. Quality 2.

Bestreer 2: An airless world. Quality 6.

Bestreer 3: This airless world once had a captured moon, torn apart at the Roche limit and forming a ring. A small gate maintenance and SAR team bases here, siphoning fuel and water from Bestreer 5 and mining into the surface for both resources and safe spaces for housing. Quality 10.

Bestreer 4: A rock-ice world. Quality 5.

Bestreer 5: Another rock-ice world made up more of ice than rock. Quality 5.

Bestreer I: An icy asteroid belt.

Bestreer 6: A large Jovian planet, on the edge of becoming a brown dwarf. Quality 15.

Bestreer 6a: This gas dwarf might have become a gas giant in its own right without its massive sibling. Quality 5.

Bestreer 7: Another Jovian. Quality 14.

Bestreer 7a: An icy moon, with an internal ocean buried under kilometers of ice. Quality 12.

Bestreer 8: An icy ball. Quality 10.

Population: 450

G-class star. A transshipping point to Radiant and environs, Mississippi keeps a substantial support crew on hand for possible cargo ship breakdowns or emergencies in-system, due to the slightly increased risk of issues from the absolute shambles of Akleod's inner system. A minor executive has also put together a cheap refueling and battery exchange station.

Akleod 1: Even actively evaporating and leaving behind a trail in orbit of dissipating volatiles, this body is large enough to have usurped Akleod 1a's orbit temporarily until it disappears away or the chaotic orbit of the two throws one into the star or out of the system. Quality 2.

Akleod 1a: The original Akleod 1, its orbit has been badly disrupted by the current, migrating Akleod 1. Which of the two gets ejected is still uncertain despite a decent amount of computational simulation; odds put it at 48-52% relatively. Quality 6.

Gnat's Ass (Akleod 2): A small, loosely-held-together icy body, perhaps what used to be an asteroid belt before Akleod 1's suicidal inner-system dive. It's not yet had time to fully reach hydrostatic equilibrium. Quality 3.

Akleod 3: An icy planet similar to Akleod 1, perhaps an old sibling. Quality 13.

Akleod I: An asteroid belt.

Akleod 4: A Jovian with an unusually elliptical orbit, it's regarded as the culprit for the chaos of Akleod's inner system. Quality 11.

Population: 5,000

As it turns out, transponder codes from regular priority messages through Gaid (now that we can see them, having backdoored the gate control) bear tags from a system, Thoa, along with navigational chart updates for any ships that happen to stop by. Thoa and Gaid both seem to have been nothing more than transit points to the far-more-valuable Radiant for Hermes-Ishtar, but Thoa holds a small anti-pirate base guarding against raiders from Signia. Hermes-Ishtar was apparently serious enough about it to have a converted corvette on station.

All told, the Thoa system holds gates to 2 systems besides Gaid's. There's also an unimproved jump point simply labelled as "dangerous." that leads to Signia

Thoa System Stats:

Thoa 1: A molten mess of a planet, it's hot enough that a residual atmosphere of vaporized low-melting-point metallics exists.

Thoa 2: An unremarkable airless metal ball.

Thoa 3: A super-earth hothouse, this planet would have been uninhabitable due to its gravity even before turning scorchingly hot.

Thoa 3a: A captured asteroid barely on the edge of hydrostatic equilibrium, the Nasty Bastardhad been excavating rudimentary shelters for "leave" for its crew.

Thoa I: An asteroid belt.

Thoa 4: A normal Jovian planet.

Thoa 4a: A moon much like Mars in climate.

Thoa 5: A Jovian planet with an unusual triangular wind pattern at the poles.

Thoa 6: Blooms of hydrogen well up from the core of this Jovian, perhaps disturbed by some recent impact.

Thoa 7: Bathyscapes would find themselves at home on the surface of Thoa 7. Pressures much like that at Earth's seabed keep a crust of ice 3 stable enough robotic drones could walk on it.

Thoa 7a: Unusually, Thoa 7a is the only large icy body in the system. Scientists are unsure of where the others went. As the only easy source of volatiles, the UNasty Bastard periodically stopped by a handful of obsolete volatile collection systems on the surface to top up.

Thoa II: A Kuiper belt of icy objects.

Empty Systems

Kimberly: A fairly unremarkable and empty system, this site was chosen as Rhodes' spinward boneyard—a place for failed experiments, old equipment, and ships so worn they weren't worth maintaining anymore, but were still valuable enough to warrant not throwing into a gas giant or otherwise completely destroyed. For 2 decades a Rhodes-affiliated salvaging contractor worked here, gathering scrap and other valuables, but following high injury and death rates and low returns, the contract (and most non-local dumping) was cancelled in 2247 (4 years before the March Days.)

Kimberly 1: A large rocky planet, this must have migrated inwards from further out in the system a long time ago to be so large so close to its parent star.

Kimberly 2: A Martian planet that keeps a comfortable daytime temperature despite its lack of atmosphere due to a close orbit.

Kimberly 3: A Jovian world.

Kimberly I: This asteroid belt is actually combined with a thinly-spread junkyard corralled by Kimberly's 2 gas giants.

Kimberly 4: A Neptunian world, this planet has several starship hulks abandoned as the closest stable orbit to the gate out. An old deactivation hub orbits in resonance with Kimberly 4a, the former site of a salvaging operation.

Kimberly 4a: The only significant satellite in the system, this icy moon retains a thin crust and a massive subterranean freshwater ocean.

Total:

Radiant:

Gaid:

Five Lions:

Head of Diplomatic Corps:

Name: Amanda Redcrest, Victoria Blackwell, and Kayla Hayashi

DoB: "2222", 2219, 2227, 2224

Current Position: Influential media figure and figurehead of Social Committee propaganda

Not a traditional diplomat, or a traditional individual 'Veronica Stardust' is the persona of a trio of XP broadcasters who have been working together since 2246 and has consistently been one of the most recognized figures across Charter space and is a local Elysian celebrity.

In Charter space those individuals who choose to make money by recording their lived experiences, of all kinds, for later playback are treated with an indulgent disdain by the polite classes as a mix of internet celebrity and sex worker despite the practice of selling XP experiences being common in the poorer segments of society and a smaller portion of the professional middle class attempting to stay afloat in a tight gig economy.

Amanda Redcrest was a former media programmer whose attempts to supplement her income with XP work backfired and saw her fired from her job. Contrarily, Kayla and Victoria both come from lower class backgrounds, though Kayla's attempts to climb into the middle class by earning a marketing degree were frustrated when her lower class status markers and financing of education via XP work saw her frozen out of the job market.

A former collaborator of Kayla's, Victoria had been a rising XP star in her own right and had no desire to change her station, but as her brief celebrity began to fade Victoria approached Kayla to propose the creation of a dedicated broadcasting persona that both would act as. Later bringing on Redcrest, who they'd both done crossover XP work with, to do technical work, the trio used carefully gathered market data and some intuition to create the "Veronica Stardust" persona of an middlingly-intelligent and freewheeling persona who played to the upper class's picture of what depravities and indignities the poorer class must get up to in their spare time.

From 2246 to 2251 the Veronica Stardust persona (performed by all three at various times, though primarily Victoria) produced experience recordings that were nearly always in the top 10 best sellers across Charter space.

Though they enjoyed the wealth that they brought in, the trio increasingly chafed at the market driven limitations of Veronica, and were considering a number of possibly catastrophic brand shifts when the March Days broke out and all three participated in street actions in a private capacity after sending one last broadcast as 'Veronica' to encourage revolt.

Since the formation of the Social Committee the figure of Veronica has been rebranded to serve as the figurehead of Social Committee Propaganda and several major initiatives have been launched with her at the forefront including a highly successful part of the anti-overproduction initiatives.

As part of the now-completed campaign to maintain the charade that Radiant was still under Charter control, Veronica Stardust continued to sell broadcasts to HI media chains, though the trio could not help but begin a brand shift towards a far more intelligent and radical persona.

Pros: XP Celebrity, influential, well known, inspiring to the middle and lower classes

Cons: XP celebrity, little diplomatic experience, three people

Diplomatic Goals: Defeat the Charters in the field of public opinion, push social revolution and freedom of information and communication, cause public opinion to oppose attacking Radiant

Unlocked FRM

Ares Peacekeeping Grade - Access to planetary army formation

Ares Military Grade - Access to mid-sized shipyards, bonuses to planetary army combat. Bonus to completion of Chinook remodeling

Rhodes Light industrial Grade - 10% increase to all mining income, reduced Cost for BLG and other actions that use basic fabber processes

Rhodes Heavy Industrial Grade - Massive discount on mining upgrades, able to unlock automated technologies with Omoikaine

Cernunnos Consumer Grade - +1 to all Soccom actions

Cernunnos Enterprise Grade - NOT UNLOCKED

Omoikane Consumer Grade - +1 to FRM reserach for each two tech bases unlocked (+6 currently)

Omoikane Enterprise Grade - +5 to blue sky research, automation with Omoikane

Hermes-Ishtar Consumer Grade - Your economy doesn't crash when the turn of funding

Hermes-Ishtar Production Grade - NOT UNLOCKED

MSI Consumer Grade - Consumer Goods, Drones, and personal vehicles, +2 to domestic projects in IndComm and SocComm

MSI Enterprise Grade - NOT UNLOCKED

Original Tech

The Box: Fabber the size of a X-box that can, with time, materials and power, print the components for a full sized box. Less efficient, but easy to print and hide.

Defence Coordinator:

Name: Maria Awhina

DoB: 2165

Current Position: Military Committee Delegate from the Radiant Veterans Guild

Born into poverty on Earth as the twenty-second century began to wane, young 22-year old Maria Awhina caught up in radical anti-Charter politics during the third black summer of 2187 and was convicted of property destruction during the rioting and sentenced to serve as a contractor to Hermes-Ishtar until her contract was paid off.

The stark choice of starvation or service to Hermes-Ishtar caused Maria to descend into self-destructive behavior where for twenty years Ms. Awhina continuously volunteered for the highest paid and most dangerous positions that Hermes-Ishtar had available.

Hermes-Ishtar considers Special Operations Lieutenant Awhina to have served with distinction throughout the heavy skirmishing of that era, though Maria herself continues to carry guilt for her service and her survival.

After performing exceptionally well in a hostage rescue operation Awhina was transferred to the Protective Detail Division of Hermes-Ishtar Security, and was eventually assigned to serve as the head of the Radiant Vice President's protective detail.

Over the next four decades she came to see the world as her home, and while her professionalism never wavered, her loyalty to the company who still owned her contract did.

This March, Maria had the option to gun down her fellow planetary headquarters workers to secure Yang's escape, or to finally return to roots in anti-Charter agitation. The fact that we are all here today shows what choice she made.

Pros:

-Actual Combat Veteran, knows Radiant inside and out, special operations expert, professional.

Cons:

-only academic knowledge of starship operations, logistics, organization command and strategic operations.

Command Traits:

-Objective oriented, unflappable, aggressive, prefers attacks and operations to come from unexpected angles.

Reports from the Permanent Commission for Military Intelligence on hostile forces in neighbouring systems:

Blue Squadron:
-Allegiance: Ares Combat Solutions
-Service: Mars Interstellar Security
-CO: Rear Admiral Weylon Kang
-Flagship: MIS Yorktown

We know little about Rear Admiral Weylon Kang except that he has received a number of commendations from the MIS board for keeping costs low while on deployment. He appears to be making an effort to clamp down on the rumours racing back and forth across the fleet.

MIS Yorktown
-British Empire-class Fleet Tender
MIS Eurymedon
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS La Rochelle
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Cape Rachado
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Second Schooneveld
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Matapan
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Valcour Island
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Kerch Strait
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Galveston Harbour
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Cape Sarych
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS River Plate
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Third San Francisco
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Scipio Africanus
-Cossak-class Frigate
MIS Suleiman I
-Cossak-class Frigate
MIS Louis Botha
-Cossak-class Frigate
MIS Fort Ware
-Hudson's bay Company-class Fast Fleet Tanker
MIS Fort Mackinac
-Hudson's bay Company-class Fast Fleet Tanker
MIS Fort Osage
-Hudson's bay Company-class Fast Fleet Tanker
MIS Arabian
-Postal-class Courier
MIS Macedonia
-Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport
MIS Hispania Citerior
-Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport
MIS Hispania Ulterior
-Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport
MIS Gallia Narbonensis
-Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport
MIS Sicilia
-Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport
MIS Corsica et Sardinia
-Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport

Fixed Defences:
Battery A
-MSS-54-F LMP Constellation
Battery B
-MSS-54-F LMP Constellation
Battery C
-MSS-54-F LMP Constellation
Shoal A
-ASR-33-C TAM Shoal
Shoal B
-ASR-33-C TAM Shoal
Shoal C
-ASR-33-C TAM Shoal
Shoal D
-ASR-33-C TAM Shoal
Shoal E
-ASR-33-C TAM Shoal
Shoal F
-ASR-33-C TAM Shoal

Fixed Defences:
Battery A
-Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation
Battery B
-Airstrike Pattern LMP Constellation
Shoal A
-Macross-Pattern LMP Constellation
Shoal B
-Macross-Pattern LMP Constellation
Strikecraft Wing, ID# 48603
-Radiance-Type Strikecraft

-None

Local Security Forces
-Approximately fifty strong volunteer station security militia drawn from station personnel

Local Security Forces:
-Deep Space Security Solutions (Omoikane Subsidiary) Customs shuttle squadron based out of Xotreh B-4a's orbital station
-Three companies of Standard Planetary Security Company (Ares subsidiary) troops based out of Xotreh B-4a's habitat complexes for internal security and law enforcement

139th Solarian Navy Squadron:
-Allegiance: Solarian Compact
-Service: Solarian Navy
-CO: Vice Admiral David Visser
-Flagship: SNS Krak de Chevaliers

Thanks to his heavy handed labour discipline and extractive tribute and demands for corvee labour from Ascension Admiral Visser is viscerally hated by the populace of Ascension, and to a lesser degree the rest of the Solarian Force as well. While the gate's completion draws near, it is uncertain what path that Visser will persue.

SNS Krak de Chevaliers
-Star-hold-Class light-tender
SNS Victoria Newman
-Leonard Greyson-Chang-Class Strike Corvette
SNS Julia Stonechild
-Leonard Greyson-Chang-Class Strike Corvette
SNS Robert Chuikov
-Leonard Greyson-Chang-Class Strike Corvette
SNS Wallace Al-Wazir
-Leonard Greyson-Chang-Class Strike Corvette
SNS Dawn's Early Light
-Freedom's Light-class cruiser
SNS Jacob Nagumo
-Herald Kanumba-Class frigate
SNS Alexander Hamilton
-Liberation-class troop transport

Solarian Marines now spread throughout the system

PCMI Provides new system data on the single system that lies beyond beyond Five Lions:

Mobile Force:

Current Orders: Defend the All Radiant Congress by acting as a rapid response in the event of any hostile acts.

CO: Commodore Stephanie Rousseau

CNS Velasco, United States of America-class Fleet Carrier

-CO: Captain Esteri Attar

-Orca Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft (Customized)

-CO: Wing Commander Jasmine Ang

-Red Wolf Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft (Customized)

-CO: Wing Commander Heloisa Kimura de Lima

CNS Shieldmaiden, Great Heathen-class Light Cruiser

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

CNS Shamhat, Great Heathen-class Light Cruiser

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

CNS Righteous Tempest, Cossak-class Frigate

-CO: Captain Vehement Shade

CNS August Willich, Cossak-class Frigate

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

CNS Elysium, Cossak-class Frigate

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

CNS Asphodel, Cossak-class Frigate

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

-

Home Force:

Current Orders: Defend Radiant, comet patrol, act as a reserve force

CO: Commodore Erina Kozlova

CNS Blaire Mountain, New Model-Class Strike Corvette

-CO: Captain Guillermo Kageyama

CNS Scutum, Comet-Class Patrol Corvette

-CO: Captain Martin Pagonis

CNS Buckler, Comet-Class Patrol Corvette

-CO: Captain Samuel Smiles

CNS Nasty Bastard, A Jury Rigged Mess of a Drone Carrier

-CO: Captain Jean-Paul Beaumont

-

Radiant System Self Defence Force:

Current Orders: Defend Radiant, comet patrol

CO: Overseen by Admiral Gregory Mansur in his capacity as MilComm Chief of Naval Operations

Radiant Customs Squadron, Arabia-class boarding craft with marine contingents

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

Switchblade Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

Apogee Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

Battery A, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery B, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery C, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery D, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery E, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery F, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Radiant Orbital Yard 1

Current construction: None

Radiant Orbital Yard 1

Current construction: None

-

Gaid System Self Defence Force:

Current Orders: Defend Gaid

CO: Commodore Victor Raine

Battery A, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery B, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery C, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery D, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery E, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery F, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

Zephyr Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

-CO: Wing Commander Ara Helge

Aeolus Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

Gale Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

-

Frontier Force

Current Orders: Keep watch on SolNav force in Raphanus, assist with integration of Ascension military forces, patrol Spinward frontier

CO: Commodore Shayla McLean

CNS Kiel Mutiny, Kaiserreich-class BattleCruiser

-CO: Captain Inana Devlin

CNS Choreographer, Janissary-class Light Tender

-CO: Captain Karl Xanthopoulos

CNS Valiant, New Model-class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

CNS Defiant, New Model-class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

-CO: Captain Fool's Errand

CNS Reliant, New Model-class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

-CO: Captain Rouge Napier

CNS Actium, New Model-class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

-CO: Captain John Rankin

CNS Crête-à-Pierrot, New Model-class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

-CO: Captain Nkiru Chaudhari

CNS Valmy, New Model-Class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

-CO: Captain Sumac Barros

CNS Revolutionary Will, Cossak-class Frigate

-CO: Captain Yamamoto Hanae

CNS Revolutionary Grace, Cossak-class Frigate

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

CNS Under New Management, Don-Class Fast Tanker

-CO: Captain Adras Kierenos

CNS Liberte, Hollywood(C)-Class Frigate

-CO: Captain Colin McRae

CNS Egalite, Hollywood(C)-Class Frigate

-CO: Captain Adelia Swift

Resources
Naval Ship Types: Ship Types (Public Version)
Naval Officers: Congressional Navy Officers (Public Version)
System Codex: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rtNbPCcPsTK7HCHKo9dPgK7ntx5tBKOpltrZb_In7GY/edit#
Blaze Zhang: Blaze Zhang is trans-masc. That means his pronouns are he/him.

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masterofmadness · May 6, 2024

SaltyWaffles said:
Huh. So Rhodes is resource extraction and manufacturing, which means MSI is just logistics and supply chains in terms of specialties?

It doesn't seem like Rhodes has the ability or inclination to adapt to the new reality. Which means that eventually the revolutionary governments will be able to crush Rhodes under its boot due to Rhodes massive inefficiencies.

Model DC.14F said:
Honestly, Rhodes major weakness is that, as the 'mining company', out of all the charters, its the most dependent on actual material reality, since most of its income comes from actual material wealth instead of just relying on copyright and IPs. And since those resources aren't flowing from the Frontiers anymore...honestly its probably even more screwed in the long run than the HI and Omoikane remnants.

I'm fairly certain that most of Rhodes' 'population' and industry is in fact now controlled by the Federation of Popular Citizen's Assemblies. Of their remaining major systems, Dyson and Birzona are right next to the Crossroad Pact, which means only Potosi isn't in immediate danger (as fair as we know). Unfortunately, the only two ways for Potosi to ship material to the Core without a huge detour are through Tereshkova (undergoing a 3-way civil war), and Trescore (loudly and proudly independent).

For Rhodes? As far as I can tell their post Broadcast prospects are mostly center around Potosi and the surrounding systems. But I do not think that is too much of a problem for them because Potosi is very valuable!

Even with its inefficiency the shere number of raw resources and already built infrastructure makes it one of the most powerful industrial systems if not the most. As long as they control it, they can have it be a much-needed foundry for any other faction to prop up in the Frontier. They do not need to ship their stuff to the Core anymore when they can build whatever warships or habitats or whatever that the reactionary controlling them needs.

I fully expect Potosi to be the Arsenal of Reaction in the Near Spinward and Coreward building the Diadochi, or Cosmos or whoever else pops up in the area what they need to oppress people. I am sure there will be resistance, but they have one jewel left in their Crown and by God are they going to grip it tight for all it is worth. Maybe they will embrace some more efficacy maybe they won't, but raw material and manpower of several billion people is a powerful force even used inefficiently.

Setsul · May 6, 2024

SaltyWaffles said:
Huh. So Rhodes is resource extraction and manufacturing, which means MSI is just logistics and supply chains in terms of specialties?

It doesn't seem like Rhodes has the ability or inclination to adapt to the new reality. Which means that eventually the revolutionary governments will be able to crush Rhodes under its boot due to Rhodes massive inefficiencies.

MSI does a little bit of everything and crime. A lot of crime. Epsilon is also THE spacer system so you could say MSI was the space mafia run by spacers in space and everything that entails.

Rhodes builds stuff. At its core, Rhodes is heavy industry without ever asking why. They just build more and more stuff. They've reached the point where they've designed the society on whole planets around not asking why they should build even more stuff, all the way up to the execs. That's the main point of the caste system, to build more stuff even faster.
They're "building" a Dyson Sphere. Sure, they're still in the resource gathering stage, but they would keep going for thousands or millions of years until it is done. I'm pretty sure they're the Charter with those fabbers that can build a continent. Why? If someone is willing to pay for it, Rhodes will build it.

Like masterofmadness said, my greatest fear is that the Spinward Triage Command isn't moving because they're happy sitting on Potosi, Springtide and Tereshkova because they can just tax Springtide and Tereshkova to pay Potosi/Alicanto (the shipyards where Argent Chevalier was built) to build all of the ships they could ever need.

Slamu · May 6, 2024

BiopunkOtrera said:
Emotional Futures Market.

I'm still a bit fuzzy on that. Was that an entertainment industry thing or a "we put money on the idea that someone will feel sad this time next year" thing? Could someone please explain?

SaltyWaffles said:
Huh. So Rhodes is resource extraction and manufacturing, which means MSI is just logistics and supply chains in terms of specialties?

It doesn't seem like Rhodes has the ability or inclination to adapt to the new reality. Which means that eventually the revolutionary governments will be able to crush Rhodes under its boot due to Rhodes massive inefficiencies.

And that, given The Box needs resources, such revolutionary polities are better-positioned to print out whatever is needed (be it 'self-defense' items or 'improve the standard of living' projects), giving them an advantage in the coming scramble. (Just hope that it's not one of the Humanist factions that wins out)

Fake edit; Potosi isn't in Revolutionary hands? Oh no.

SaltyWaffles · May 6, 2024

Oh, shit. So Rhodes and MSI might be the scariest of the remaining Charters, then? Rhodes because it actually has a major industrial base and resource extraction infrastructure set up and operational for building stuff (including ships) and the inclination to pump stuff out (even inefficiently), and MSI because its new supreme leader actually has the insight and initiative to reform and rebrand her charter as a non-charter for the purpose of retaining power while ditching the previous economic system before it completely collapses on them.

Well, Ares is still scary because they have massive fleets and armies (and control over Columbia), and Cern is a major concern because they always have the potential to unleash some new biological/genetic horror/abuse (and now have tentative control over Atlantis), but Cern could always have done that anyway.

It is amusing that Omoikane had the most legitimate potential in terms of R&D (having already successfully figured out how to create friendly ASIs, even if its leadership refused to accept those results and kept murdering its own successes...and had also developed the ability to mass produce AGIs if it gave a damn and tried to raise them well rather than treat them as disposable tools) but totally squandered it. And that Hermes-Ishtar had produced a lot of genuinely impressive and useful technology but ruined its potential through enshitification.

Slamu · May 6, 2024

Except by the sound of it Rhodes is (was?) already leaning towards disintegration with the executives being figureheads and the de facto managers being locally-oriented, so it's more likely we're going to see Rhodes successor factions than actual Rhodes remnants.
(unless I'm far off my mark here, which is possible)

Setsul · May 6, 2024

Slamu said:
Fake edit; Potosi isn't in Revolutionary hands? Oh no.

We don't really know anything about what's going on in Potosi, but we haven't heard of them throwing a fleet at the Triage Command every month like Crucible is doing, so they're probably not revolutionary. Doesn't mean they're actively reactionary. For all we know they might've pulled out 'Frontier War Protocol #37' and are merely building a huge fleet of shitty Rhodes designed ships and waiting for things to blow over.
Or they've pulled out #3 and are doing nothing because they're not involved in this war so obviously nothing needs to be done.

SaltyWaffles said:
Oh, shit. So Rhodes and MSI might be the scariest of the remaining Charters, then? Rhodes because it actually has a major industrial base and resource extraction infrastructure set up and operational for building stuff (including ships) and the inclination to pump stuff out (even inefficiently), and MSI because its new supreme leader actually has the insight and initiative to reform and rebrand her charter as a non-charter for the purpose of retaining power while ditching the previous economic system before it completely collapses on them.

Like I've said before, there's no Charter with unified leadership across the whole galaxy anymore, it's just blobs of a handful of systems at most.
But yes, Epsilon/IPA and Potosi/Rhodes are up there in terms of threat level.

Epsilon/IPA got a plan, a shit ton of shipyards, and a huge population on their side.
Potosi/Rhodes got a resource extraction and manufacturing capacity of YES, plus probably a decent number of shipyards next door in Alicanto, but probably no plan. They'd be hugely dangerous if co-opted though.
KC/SolNav has always been a sort of seventh Charter because they're largely self-funding. As many or more shipyards than Epsilon, but smaller population by more than an order of magnitude.
Columbia/Ares is up there in terms of population and even after losing most of their fleet and yards due to the revolutions in Alexander and Sol, they've probably still got more of either than anyone except the obvious candidates Alexander, Epsilon, and KC.

Asgard and Symphony are more immediate concerns for us and they're not exactly weak either.
Asgard still got twice our population with a much larger existing military and Symphony got five times our population, about 60% of what Potosi got. Symphony isn't even in the same ballpark in terms of industrial capacity, but they've got the potential, and just because Emily Weissmann hasn't been planning to take over the galaxy for over a century, that doesn't mean her plan to make it through this is bad. Thanks to the Broadcast they've got access to all the Rhodes tech we've got, so only cheating with AHB and the like will let us keep up.

MrRageQuit · May 6, 2024

Slamu said:
"we put money on the idea that someone will feel sad this time next year"

Basically this.

Edit:

Kirook said:
It's a futures market based on projected public responses to news and media. The fact that it's measured with "vibeometrics" means exactly what you think it does.

Torgamous · May 6, 2024

You know how in Watchmen, Ozymandias sells a cosmetics line called Nostalgia because of the world's gradual enshittification, and then after he blows up New York he switches to the more optimistic Millennium? Emotional futures is investors pretending to be Ozymandias. Vibeometricians probably even do the whole "giant wall of TVs" thing.

Himmelhand · May 6, 2024

Can a media/news company be liable for insider trading on the emotional futures market?

I can imagine an investigative journalist causing a scandal where the publisher hears about a scoop before it gets released and making some big market moves.

Derpmind · May 6, 2024

Slamu said:
I'm still a bit fuzzy on that. Was that an entertainment industry thing or a "we put money on the idea that someone will feel sad this time next year" thing? Could someone please explain?

The market tracked people's general emotions across Compact space, then used that as something people could invest in.

Slamu · May 6, 2024

MrRageQuit said:
Edit:

I...what? They had a financial crisis...about this?
Look, I was already onboard with fighting the Charters and overthrowing the Compact and stuff but...that bullshit? Seriously?
I think I might need a moment. That hurt to read.
I might have to cry a little.

DracoDracul · May 6, 2024

Slamu said:
I...what? They had a financial crisis...about this?
Look, I was already onboard with fighting the Charters and overthrowing the Compact and stuff but...that bullshit? Seriously?
I think I might need a moment. That hurt to read.
I might have to cry a little.

It makes more sense when you understand that finacialized just means "can be gambled on".

MrRageQuit · May 6, 2024

Slamu said:
I...what? They had a financial crisis...about this?
Look, I was already onboard with fighting the Charters and overthrowing the Compact and stuff but...that bullshit? Seriously?
I think I might need a moment. That hurt to read.
I might have to cry a little.

DracoDracul said:
It makes more sense when you understand that finacialized just means "can be gambled on".

It would also help to consider it - as with much of Tyrants - as a satirical extrapolation of current-day trends. In this case, the growth of speculative financial instruments increasingly divorced from material reality, and how much financial institutions and the economy are tied up in these instruments.

Which is where you get the Holy of Holies sidestory and SolBank deciding we must be running a wartime economy on nothing but Emotional Futures.

clockworkchaos · May 6, 2024

SaltyWaffles said:
Oh, shit. So Rhodes and MSI might be the scariest of the remaining Charters, then? Rhodes because it actually has a major industrial base and resource extraction infrastructure set up and operational for building stuff (including ships) and the inclination to pump stuff out (even inefficiently), and MSI because its new supreme leader actually has the insight and initiative to reform and rebrand her charter as a non-charter for the purpose of retaining power while ditching the previous economic system before it completely collapses on them.

Well, Ares is still scary because they have massive fleets and armies (and control over Columbia), and Cern is a major concern because they always have the potential to unleash some new biological/genetic horror/abuse (and now have tentative control over Atlantis), but Cern could always have done that anyway.

It is amusing that Omoikane had the most legitimate potential in terms of R&D (having already successfully figured out how to create friendly ASIs, even if its leadership refused to accept those results and kept murdering its own successes...and had also developed the ability to mass produce AGIs if it gave a damn and tried to raise them well rather than treat them as disposable tools) but totally squandered it. And that Hermes-Ishtar had produced a lot of genuinely impressive and useful technology but ruined its potential through enshitification.

Also Rhodes has it's caste system. Which can go wrong, but gives almost everyone a feeling something to 'lose' as long as they aren't the lowest castes. I honestly thing that, barring IPA, Rhodes could be the most stable charter in their core territories.

BiopunkOtrera · May 6, 2024

Part 3: The Maker of Blades

Content warning: The Toronto section of this post includes some pretty messed up revolutionary violence.

Pacific City Morro Bay

"Hard to believe this all used to be a state park isn't it?" Jackie said. 114 nodded, though she was pretty sure the areas of natural beauty had been actually rather further up. Morro Bay had never been a particularly important district of Pacific City, The DemFed hadn't ever really developed it the first time around, and great swathes of the area had still been park lands, even as the city lapped up around them. Even as the city continued to grow in the wake of the fall of the DF, Morro Bay had always been fairly low density.

It had only been fifty years ago, during one of the distressing outbreaks of revival kitsch that marked Compact life every so often that Hermes Ishtar and Omiokane had cooperated to rebuild Morro Bay with all new commercial and residential area based on its history in the creation of some 20th century futurism which HI had wanted to use to sell tourists from the colonies. Omiokane had ridden their fellow charter into a bunch of new buildings in the massive metabolist towers along the shore. They'd formed a secure facility, and Omoikane had brought a large part of the surrounding city as a Charter Special Economic Zone where its word was effectively law. The various gangs that Hermes Ishtar had sponsored as part of its "cyberpunk adventure experience" in the rest of Morro Bay had been a problem, constantly threatening to break out into real crime, but had only increased the facility's secrecy and security. Most of the off world staff didn't want to go out into Pacific City, which they regarded as squalid and dangerous.

The bay really did look like something out of another era. Indeed, something that had never really existed. 114 could imagine when the buildings had been shiny and new, or perhaps wearing a layer of cosmetic dilapidation. Now they were truly getting old. Outbreaks of modern admin towers and print homes starting in the gaps like infections in a wound.

What a morbidly noir thought.

"So who's this girl we're headed to see?" 519 asked. The three of them were in a Locust Army flyer moving in over the bay.

"Molly Gibson, former chief of administration of Omoikane Morro Bay. Pretty standard meritocrat background. A Earth native, two parents, five sisters. They ran an outsourcing company before the revolution, and now live in France. No known Humanist connections but they had some pretty bad labour practices. Gibson herself is the highest ranking known Omiokane employee who didn't flee during the exodus after Midnight."

"That's pretty funny." 519 said. "Almost all the C-suite guys, even low level ones, got out."

"Yeah." Jackie said. "That's why we're on her." 114 kind of liked the ex-cop. After the case was done she and 519 had discussed trying to seduce the cat augment. The Investigator was so serious though. It might not work. "We sent a patrol unit to his house earlier today, but she'd left already. We've located her within Mega Building H10. It's an old luxury condoplex, but not slated for demo. It's own–the residence of One Lorena Badcock-Cherry. Apparently Gibson's her ex-girlfriend. The patrol unit approached, but Badcock-Cherry intermated that her security would fire on them."

"I'd prefer to avoid storming it." 519 says. "But I guess it's easier for us to negotiate."

The X-wing rippled up, then down towards the top of one of the megabuildings. Another already sat on the pad. 519 walked over to the squad leader of that unit. 114 watched her go. She know 519 was still not happy to be investigating 114's past with Omiokane. Worried, perhaps, about some scandal that would make things toxic for the ex-human error processor team. The other locust was talking to a couple of civic patrol committee guys and a suited dude who screamed building manager.

It was strange how many of the really rich, those who hadn't left, or been involved in something questionable enough to get them assassinated had just continued to go about their lives. 114 had heard some of them had informal currencies going on, and privately thought the Federation should crack down on such things. Even if it wasn't really scarcity, and was strictly voluntary, these people were cosplaying their old lives of exploiters.

"114?" 519 called. 114 walked over. "We've got a line to the flat. You want to talk to them?"

"Sure." 114 walked over and took the cordless phone that the manager handed over. It was a strange, ornate thing, far too large and decorated with ornate neon-plastic. "Good evening, who am I addressing?"

"This is Lorena Badcock-Cherry."

"I'm Cobra-114, formerly of Human Error Processor, now of the Democratic Federation Locust Army. Is Miss Molly Gibson is there with you?" The old corporate titles that Morro Bay meritocrats had been mad for "Miss" rather than "Ms." The honorific changes for an unmarried or lesbian woman vs. a married heterosexual were so absurd, but 114 felt herself fall right back into them.

"I'm not going to confirm or deny that. I'll only say my security system is armed and highly advanced. If you want to come in and take us– we'll make you pay." Badcock-Cherry's cultured voice was surprisingly fierce.

"Miss Badock-Cherry. I have no intention of harming either you or Miss Gibson, but you must know it's impossible to keep us out if we really want to get in, yes?"

"What do you want from us?"

"We're not here to arrest you." 114 said. "And unlike cops in the old world, we're not allowed to lie to you except in very specific circumstances. You can consult a lawyer or your VI on that if you want. I'd like to talk to Miss Gibson, I'm afraid that time pressure means that we can't really submit written questions, but you may have your law VI on if you wish, and claim all normal rights."

There was a muffled conversation on the line, then 114 heard a different voice. Gibson presumably. "I remember you. You lead the squad that extracted me during one of the counter terrorist drills. And now you're with them."

"The Democratic Federation is building the future Omoikane only pretends to Miss Gibson." 114 said.

There was a small laugh on the phone. "You're probably right. Alright. I'll see you. No assault team though. Just you and one or two others."

114 looked over at 519 and Jackie. "That suits us fine."

*****

This was the old morro bay splendour. The apartment had obviously been freshly redecorated before the revolution with all modern conveniences, but retaining some of its old hauntological grandeur. It had a large, ridiculous floor space, partly filled with several art pieces in some stages of construction. Since the revolution, 114's VI told her, Badcock-Cherry had been making modern art and serving as a fitness influencer to supplement her life with extra luxuries.

There was a set of obscurements across the windows, silk curtains and blinds that let in the city lights without showing much of the interior. 114's eyes analysed patterns on the floor and concluded they weren't drawn often, but they were now.

Gibson had obviously had some work done since the revolution. Like most of the female meritocrat execs that 114 had met, she'd previously maintained herself at a point around thirty, old enough to be taken seriously, young enough to still be elegant. Now, Gibson looked like a particularly pretty college girl. Someone who did modelling on the side. Blonde and tan, wearing a silk robe over smart tights and a short skirt. Badcock-Cherry was similarly young, if slightly less spectacularly beautiful, toned and tomboyish in a tank top and cargo trousers that showed supple ankles.

114 kind of liked it. Both women were really in their fifties. 519 had begged off coming inside in favour of taking command of the perimeter outside, but Jackie followed 114 through the door. "Investigator Cano of the Los Angeles Committee ma'am." She nodded to the two ex-meritocrats.

"You're a little out of your way, Officer." Gibson smiled a bit lopsidedly.

"I'm no officer ma'am. Call me Investigator. And I'm temporarily seconded to STAKE for this one."

"STAKE?" Badcock-Cherry covered her mouth. "You can't think we're humanists! Both of us have augmentations. Not as much as your friend here but we're cyborgs still."

"Lori." Gibson reached over and squeezed the other woman's hand. "You don't need to protect me from this. They're here to ask about The Company." She reached down for a snifter of golden brandy on the table and took a swig. "Eventually, everyone's sins catch up with you."She looked at 114. "So, you're Federation now."

"You modelled us on VdCB. It wasn't much of a stretch. Especially after we saw the world they made compared to yours."

"I suppose not." Gibson pulled her robe about her.

"Why did you flee your home Miss Gibson?" Jackie asked, sitting next to her. "You'd already left when our patrol unit arrived. What made you think you were under threat?"

"A few days ago, an old friend of mine who worked for The Company tipped me off that a certain special forces unit had become active again in this area, and that my life might be in danger. It was a key word I'd never heard of: IMPERATOR."

That was new to 114 as well. Still, she'd heard vague rumours. "Were they connected to the security breach we had before the broadcast?"

"That's right." Gibson sighed. "There was some kind of black program being run out of Redwood Labs It was too classified even for the C-suite to know the full details, but I know that IFEHI was involved."

"The institute of friendly extra-human intelligence? An AI project?"

"Probably." Gibson shook her head. "From what I heard, one of the personnel at redwood labs went rogue. They stole something and it became a big stink. That was why your unit was brought in. I hadn't really thought about it until recently. From what I heard, anyone even peripherally involved at subsidiary level was going down for it. It was something about the employment of a seamstress– a corporate espionage asset."

"Is this why you stayed on earth?" Jackie asked. "You feared for your safety."

"That was one reason." Gison glanced over at Badcock-Cherry, who was staring out of the window.

114 saw her tense and then she threw herself on top of Gibson. 114 snapped her rifle up and threw herself between the civilians and the window as it blew out with the shock of an explosive charge.

The anti-sniper screen detonated in the upper level slipstream and a heavy electromagnetic round slammed through the room. 114 dropped flat, seeing the others had too and fired back down the scorching ion trail of the shot.

<<114, Contact. Out.>>

"Lori!" Gibson was screaming.

"I'm okay." Badcock-Cherry muttered. "I just hit my head."

"You idiot, you gashed yourself open!"

114 got up, engaged her stealth suit and moved up to an intact section of window. It was Aluminium oxynitride, thick enough it should stop even the electromagnetic. She aimed down the shot, seeing a building top. Drones were already hovering over it.

"Did you get them?" Badcock-Cherry was regarding volume.

"Doubt it." 114 said.

"We want protection." The artist touched her bloody head. "We're citizens of the Federation and entitled to it."

114 briefly entertained thoughts about atheists and foxholes. Amazing what it took sometimes.

Toronto: November 2255

Three Québécois tanks stood at the intersection, bright and invincible. The banner of the Fleurdelisé fluttered from an antenna. All three had stealth systems off, their big coil guns sweeping back and forth across the faces of the buildings ahead. Every now and then one of them would shoot, blowing apart one of the ground drones or automated bunkers that the defenders had laid in the ruins of the estate up ahead.

The tanks were unmanned themselves, heavy UGVs the Van Doos had sent forward, with their normal flare, to draw fire from the ATGW teams hiding in the wreckage of the conurbs up ahead. Their command APC was two bounds back, hidden in a better position.

It was impossible to engage them. Anyone who poked their head out would be killed by the massive stormcloud of drones that hung overhead. The defenders were down in their tunnels now, awaiting the infantry assault.

Felix watched them on his visor as he moved down the tunnel. His stomach twitched in fear every time they shot. The decision he'd made, the terrible decision had brought him no comfort. Now he just counted down to it.

At least the orbital strikes had stopped. The Federation wanted the rest of the city intact.

A dozen men in green fatigues with the four leaf clover emblem on their sleeves ran down the tunnel. "The fuck are you going smurf?" One asked. Felix didn't like the look of them. He had his carbine and a side arm but if he drew either of them they'd jump on him. If anyone had ever called him "smurf" before the broadcast he'd have stomped them on the street but this was a dozen guys.

"Message for Captain Morden." He said.

"Really?" The green uniformed militia stepped forward. "Because all I see is a smurf running away from the fighting."

"Please. I'm just trying to deliver a message. We're on the same s–" Felix took a step back as the man pulled a knife.

"We got a deserter here boys." The humanist said. "Time for a lesson."

There was a sharp sound of a gunshot and dust settled down. "The fuck is this?" Morden's gravelly voice growled. Felix turned to see him and a squad of police stepping around the corner, guns up. The humanists backed up, giving ground to the pointed weapons. "You fucking shamrocks forget who the enemy is?"

"He's a deserter." The leader growled.

"He's one of my men. Now fuck off." Morden growled. The humanists glanced at one another, then turned and headed for the battleline. Felix sagged in relief.

"You saved my ass Cap."

"Pieces of shit." Morden said, then lowered his voice. "Is it set up?"

"Yeah. One of my old CIs came through. He gives us safe passage beacons, we give him the stash from the evidence room. Apparently real cocaine is turning into a currency over there. Guess you can't beat capitalism." He laughed, hoping it didn't sound hollow, or if it did, his nervousness would be explained by the humanist with the knife.

Morden sniffed. "Fucking junkies. I guess they're spoiled under the new regime. Want proper biological cocaine." He laughed. "You did well kid. I knew I could count on you."

"Yeah." Felix said, and smiled.

*****

They were two vehicles driving along the lake shore, both old reproduction electric trucks, urban tactical vehicles with a dozen cops within. None of them were wearing their uniforms but all were armed. They'd driven out with DemFed beacons. Just another group of escaping refugees.

Felix sat in the second vehicle, with Morden beside him. In the back was Wilson, and Padua, a big nordic looking dude and another member of Felix's old squad. He remembered, before all this, laughing with them. Beers and shots at the bar in the old city police HQ. Beating the shit out of a drug dealer who'd sassed them. He remembered learning how to get more overtime, and how to shake down guys under the radar.

He remembered hooded students in the rain.

"Razor-2, this is Razor-1" The first vehicle came in on the radio.

"Go." Morden said.

"There's some kind of check point up ahead. They look like DF militia. Not that many."

"Just play it cool. We'll shoot our way out if we have to." Morden looked over at Felix. "Could your guy have fucked us? Figured we weren't really going to give him the drugs?"

"Maybe." Felix said. His stomach was a knot of dread.

A dozen figures, each with the illuminated black and red riot masks that socialist gangs often used materialised out of the evening ahead. They carried FB69s with a lot of accessories. But then all the Dem Fed rifles were like that now. These people all looked like gang members. Felix swallowed, filled with uncertainty.

Two of them walked up to the lead vehicle, keeping a careful L shape around it. "Man, they gave every fucking gang between here and the gulf tac training." Morden laughed. One of them tapped on the window.

Razor One's driver opened the window, then fired through it into the face of the DemFed trooper. The woman fell over backwards.

Several things happened at once. The truck's engine blew up as a single coil gun round punched through it. A second round blew out the windscreen. Red and black figures materialised out of the gloom around them, guns aimed dead centre at each man in the car.

At the same time, Razor-One was shredded. The 'gang' fired on Razor-One all at once, along with the coil gun. The windows blew out from an explosive charge from one's underslung and then they came in shooting, raising their guns over the seats to finish the men in the back seats.

The 'militia' woman who'd been shot sat up and pulled the mask away, revealing the pistol round had only scuffed the gleaming whiteness of her cyborg face underneath. She opened the driver's side door, pulled the dying man out and shot him three or four times to make sure.

"Throw your guns out and get out." Muramasa called. Felix pulled his gun and tossed it. That started everyone doing it. They stepped out slowly, hands raised. "Good work Felix." she said.

"Felix–" Wilson gasped. "You son of a bitch!" Felix glanced back at the man and saw his face was bone white. Then he saw a fist coming for his face. The blow was hard and unexpected, and Felix went down, tasting his own blood.

There was a crack of a suppressed round as one of the Cicadas shot Wilson in the leg. He screamed loudly, clutching the wound. The Cicadas grabbed the others and tied their hands and feet, then stood then by the van in a line. Only Felix was left free. Muramasa picked him up without any effort and set him on his feet, not yet paying him much attention. "Their eyes check out Cindy?"

"Yeah Boss." One of the other Cicadas gave a thumbs up. "We got who we came for."

"Cool. I guess we read them the legalese." She smiled. "Captain Gregory Morden, Lt. Kramer Wilson and Sergeant Stewart Padua, under the Defense Committee's Temporary Revolutionary Measures Directive you have been tried in absentia by the Provisional Committee for the Persecution of War Criminals and found guilty for your participation in the First and Second University of Toronto Massacres, the St. Michael's Cathedral Pogrom, the CN Tower Massacre, and the execution of Democratic Federation prisoners in contravention of the laws and customs of war. For these, and lesser crimes too numerous to list, you are sentenced to death, execution to be carried out by all agents of the Federation in a manner as they see fit." She took a breath. "It's nice having a proper government again isn't it?"

The other Cicadas laughed and Muramasa smiled nastily, her teeth sharp, and pulled a small pistol from one of the pockets on her attack suit. It was a tiny gun. A target pistol.

"This is a Beretta 87, it shoots .22 LR. Even this reproduction is a real antique." She put the gun to her own head with lazy showmanship and pulled the trigger. The unsuppressed shot was startlingly loud. Her head didn't even move. "Totally useless against one of us. Even more than that stupid .45 your friend in the front car was carrying. Cindy, you want a bump?"

"Sure Boss." One of the other Cicadas leaned in and Muramasa put the gun to her forehead and fired it again. The Cicada leaned into her with a giggle, hand up behind the other cyborg's head as if they were about to kiss. "With the upgrades it isn't quite the same. Doesn't even hurt. Maybe we should get a .38 or something."

"Ah well. The future is now and all that." Muramasa stepped forward and shot Wilson once between the eyes. His noise stopped abruptly. "Still seems to work on humans though."

Felix knew what was going to happen even before she handed him the gun. He didn't want to take it. She put the grip in his hand, and then her cool fingers closed his. "Blood washes blood, Felix." She stepped back, her body pressed up against his, raising his arm slowly to point at Padue's head.

He'd known that he was probably sending the others to their deaths. But not like this. He'd been told, give them up, he'd get to live. This– It was the same thing, he thought, looking at Morden. Giving them up and pulling the trigger shouldn't feel so different. But they felt a world apart.

"The deal--"

One of the Cicadas snorted. "For your life. If you want to spend it all behind bars, you could always just throw the gun away. Make a stand against murder." The sarcasm, the hate, he knew he was surrounded by people who wanted him to die, to suffer. Including the people he'd just betrayed.

Were they implying that he could get something more than his life if he… if he.

He had to take a breath to even try to keep himself from shaking to pieces. The grip on him was steady, cold, empty.

"Our Father who art in heaven,." Morden began to pray, "hallowed be thy–"

One of the Cicadas hit him across the face, hard enough to knock him back into the side of the van. "No god for fascists." She hissed.

Muramasa ignored the byplay, her hand on Wilson's arm, steady. "Do it." She whispered in Felix's ear. He could feel her sharp ceramic teeth next to his skin. So close she could kiss or bite. Her words caressed his face. "Do it." Her hand was strong on his wrist. She wouldn't let him drop it.

Felix screamed and pulled the trigger. Padua's head snapped back and he fell against the side of the van. Muramasa let go of his arm. He swung the gun onto Morden.

"Please." Morden whimpered. Blood dripped from his lip where the Cicada had hit him. "Please man, I saved your–"

Felix pulled the trigger until the gun stopped making noise. Morden slumped back beside the other two dead men.

Muramasa took the pistol from him gently, her delicate fingers teasing it from his hand.. "See. That wasn't so hard." She flicked a finger through one of his tears. "I don't know what you're crying for. It's not like we hooded them up and left them to drown. Really, this was better than they deserved." She turned him away as two of her fellows stepped in. The noise of suppressed FB69s made Felix hope that his bullets hadn't been the ones to kill them. The cicadas cut away the bounds from the dead men, left them sprawled out in the mud next to their knocked out van.

"You know, if the humanists or the compact ever win, this footage will come out." She pulled a hood out from her webbing and began to shake it out. "I've heard Morden was quite popular. He did that propaganda stream didn't he? The one where he pumped iron. Not my thing, but I guess guys like it. What do you think they'll do to you if they find out you killed him?" She smiled. "Think it'll be this easy?"

Felix's mouth worked, soundlessly. He realised, very suddenly, that he would never get out. Probably prison but his life if he'd refused was a lie. All he'd done by killing Morden was changing the terms, and he had no idea how.

Maybe they'd kill him. Now, a part of him hoped for it. He felt hollow. He felt that he had made a mistake.

The red-and-black chekist would have him in her grip till the stars went cold. Maybe even after.

The hood came down over his head.

Pacific City Los Angeles District: Now

There was the whine of a scanner, and then the hood pulled away from his eyes. Whenever Felix went to see Dracolich, they always put him through the scan for implants, a blip of X-rays. Privately, Felix was pretty sure that it did more harm than good. Muramasa had been carefully uninterested when he'd told her the meeting procedure, but with a sensitive detector, you could detect a burst of X-rays where one shouldn't be.

The most senior Humanist in the cell structure of Pacific City operated mostly out of the Los Angeles docks, or at least, that was where Felix always met them, amid the mass of rusted floating piers and ocean-rise architecture that extended out into the ocean. The meeting point was always different, but always in the same area. Felix would go to a point, be picked up by a team, hooded, and there would be a drive of exactly one hour before the hood came off inside a cargo container or an old hull of an abandoned freighter in the pier area. (He'd had to spend the better part of months trying to train himself not to have panic attacks every time he was hooded. It had worked enough to keep him outwardly steady.)

The Dracolich was a big man, bald and weathered. His bearing was military, and people deferred to him. Muramasa had told him his real name was Henry Baits, and he'd once been the sales manager for a firm selling reproductions of antique office equipment as an efficiency fad. He'd been heavily involved in Humanism before the revolution, but not prominent enough to die in the first wave of reprisals.

Today, they were in the remains of a boat's cabin, with windows to one side which had been spray covered in flimsy and spray painted.

Since only a month after he arrived in Pacific City, pretending to be a refugee who'd got out of Toronto on false papers, Felix had been into the Humanist underground. He got in by being reliable. He'd told them he wouldn't be a trigger puller, Muramasa had made it clear he wasn't authorised to commit major crimes, but that wasn't what they mostly needed. Thankfully. He couldn't do it anymore. Sometimes couldn't even look at a gun without wanting to empty his stomach. Other times a weapon in reach was the only thing that kept him sane.

But it didn't matter to the Humanists, either. They had plenty of street muscle, the bloated remains of various security agencies who'd melted away during the revolution but still hated that which had defeated them. What they needed was a guy who could be trusted to courier something, or rewire a safe house so it was free of easy surveillance, someone who could be trusted with a case of expensive off world brandy as a bribe to some gang leader and it actually got to its destination.

He'd made sure to fuck up a few times, and to get into some brushes with the law. Enough to make him look realistic. He'd recruited a lot of his old drinking buddies into the movement. No one who he (and Muramasa) thought wouldn't have joined anyway. That seemed to be a sore spot for her, she'd yelled at him over one dumb kid who he'd been trying to get in, but she was fine with those who would be lone wolves becoming part of a pack.

Felix had made himself indispensable to them. After three months, he'd introduced his source and become a source of information. They all thought he was mustard. Even as he fed them chickenfeed.

"Felix." The man nodded and clapped him on the back. "Good to see you son. Are you well?"

"Yes Sir." Felix nodded. "I have some information you might find useful."

"Right to business then." The Dracolich smiled. Felix was careful always to call him the Dracolich, even in his mind. It would be so easy to slip and call him 'Mr. Baits' and not walk out of here alive. "I suppose it's good. We're in serious times. A new player entered the game, maybe got some of our people killed. You told Janson you've got the militia report on that?"

"Yes sir. They didn't deeply classify it. My CI was able to get it off the network as a 'training aid'."

Felix couldn't believe they were still using the old CI who was into drugs story. He'd spun this lurid tale of a guy who he could blackmail about his drug addiction, about what the Demis would do to her if they found out, and they just ate it up. The CI really existed, a minor dealer who'd got leftist politics somewhere down the line and who Felix had leaned on in Seattle. She had the access that Felix was given. As far as Felix knew, she was probably read into the whole program. Felix could only imagine the little rat augment laughing as she thought of what was happening to the guy who'd once shaken her down.

Felix was obviously tight lipped about his source in any company, but if he did have to give it up, it was solid.

"According to this, the Locusts were following someone with our guys. They thought he'd killed some whores or something."

The Dracolich looked through the flimsy and huffed. "Fuck. I suppose they don't know who the team that they were meeting was?"

"No sir. We don't know that either?"

"No. Not even our friends at necroscope. Still, we might need to help them. They're promising things. Stuff even the Demis don't have. But they need information too."

"Sir? I'll get anything I can."

"Right." The Dracolich said. "There's an information broker. They've helped us, and just anyone who can pay a price, out on a number of occasions, but they're not indispensable. Their information's odd."

"Odd how?"

"How many times the traffic light will turn red along a particular street in an hour period. A gang used it to rob a bunch of fabber material from a truck while it was stopped. The security-shift change schedule for a company. How many times this rat bastard that was annoying one of the gangs went to a convenience store a week, and at what times."

That was odd stuff. Useful, sure, but odd. "Though some of the information they've fed to us doesn't quite… add up? But they were useful." Not that useful was all but implied, but now he got it. Or thought he might.

"Who is it?" Felix asked, trying to sound casual.

"They call themselves the Sybil."

AKuz · May 6, 2024

Fun fact: Felix has no idea what a "Chekist" is, but he is familiar with the more recently coined term "Censist" which derives from the "Censors"/"Censures" used by several of the Democratic Federation's (original flavour) components to repress reactionaries and fascists during and after the Warlord Period. While most "Censors" literally did censorship of published materials, with the term being adopted with some black humour in the early days in the face of traditional liberal media, some went further and hunted down reactionaries, fascists, and liberal legitimists who couldn't reconcile themselves to the new regime or in recently liberated areas.

The existence of "Public Order Censorship", "Revolutionary Censors", "Community Censure" or "Censureism" is one of the various factors that kept the DF decentralized because different groups had different levels of The Terror they were comfortable with (ranging from "none" to "yes").

Naturally the existence of these Censors was blown up by Old World and Colonial media into a vast and shadowy secret police state instead of the outbreaks of overzealous witch hunting and circular firing squads it mostly resembled in the early days of the Warlord period before moderating or fading away in peace time.

Critics of the Terror from the left within the DF and the International Anarchist/Communist/Socialist community invented the term "Censist" (neatly covering both the use of both "Censure" and "Censor") as a deliberate parallel to the Soviet Union's "Chekists". But as these things go, the word was adopted by the DF's Social Democratic opposition within the Third Russian Republic and from there spread into the liberal consciousness where it took root as the word used to describe "Anarchist Secret Police".

Which brings us to the fact that we as writers are probably using plenty of "Translation Conventions" to smooth over the reader experience. Substituting contemporary words and concepts as a best fit for the meaning as the characters in universe use their own words. From time to time we leave in something new as flavour, but time marches on and so does slang.

Just bear in mind that the Enlgish they speak would be a bit cryptic if transcribed directly.

Edit: this is inspired by the fact that while "Chekist" is the absolute best word for the situation, there's no way in hell Felix would naturally have that word in his vocabulary. "Censist" was probably introduced into his world via local Loyalist media using it.

yeastmobile · May 6, 2024

AKuz said:
Just bear in mind that the Enlgish they speak would be a bit cryptic if transcribed directly.

I genuinely would like a short piece about something inconsequential written in Future English... if any of the writers were willing to do such a thing to entertain people/give us something to try to puzzle over/dissect.

BiopunkOtrera · May 6, 2024

back in midnight I'd often have VdCB talk in a fairly affected, old timey style because they're actually speaking modern style english but old timey is how they sounded to their interloceters. By this point, they're frequently talking to normies and so it's normalised a bit.

TheArcanist · May 6, 2024

AKuz said:
But as these things go, the word was adopted by the DF's Social Democratic opposition within the Third Russian Republic and from there spread into the liberal consciousness where it took root as the word used to describe "Anarchist Secret Police".

Ah, so it's more or less turned into the contemporary version of 'Tankie' for in-universe liberals?

AKuz · May 6, 2024

TheArcanist said:
Ah, so it's more or less turned into the contemporary version of 'Tankie' for in-universe liberals?

A good approximation of the process yes.

BiopunkOtrera · May 6, 2024

(What do you all think of the prose?)

buli-buli · May 6, 2024

Well, if the Information Broker is not an AI they are trying very hard to appear like one.

That kind of granular statistical data is a very unique flavor of info.

Gummy_Dragon · May 6, 2024

Any VdCB chapter is a good one.

It did seem a little extra how they were broadcasting executions and forcing Felix to kill his buddies, but then again I've never had to hunt down fascist goons after the death of my country twice over, a 200 year war, and the subsequent revolution.

... Damn, that's heavy.

GardenerBriareus · May 6, 2024

BiopunkOtrera said:
Molly Gibson

Wasn't "Molly" one of the names Steppin' Razor went by in the Sprawl series, written by one William S. Gibson?

BiopunkOtrera said:
"We sent a patrol unit to his house earlier today, but she'd left already. We've located her within Mega Building H10. It's an old luxury condoplex, but not slated for demo. It's own–the residence of One Lorena Badcock-Cherry. Apparently Gibson's her ex-girlfriend. The patrol unit approached, but Badcock-Cherry intermated that her security would fire on them."

I'm not sure how to parse the section highlighted in red. Is her name actually One L. Badcock-Cherry, or did it get capitalized by accident? Is the idea that the speaker started saying "It's owned by-", and then corrected themselves?

As for "intermated", I think the word you were thinking of was intimated.

BiopunkOtrera said:
ex-human error processor team.

ex-Human Error Processing team.

BiopunkOtrera said:
The other locust was talking to a couple of civic patrol committee guys

The other Locust was talking to a couple of Civic Patrol Committee guys

BiopunkOtrera said:
"I'm Cobra-114, formerly of Human Error Processor,

"I'm Cobra-114, formerly of Human Error Processing,

BiopunkOtrera said:
Is Miss Molly Gibson is there with you?"

Is Miss Molly Gibson in there with you?"

BiopunkOtrera said:
This was the old morro bay splendour. The apartment had obviously been freshly redecorated before the revolution with all modern conveniences, but retaining some of its old hauntological grandeur.

This was the old Morro Bay splendour. The apartment had obviously been freshly redecorated before the revolution with all modern conveniences, but retained some of its old hauntological grandeur.

BiopunkOtrera said:
"The institute of friendly extra-human intelligence? An AI project?"

The Institute of Friendly Extra-Human Intelligence? An AI project?"

BiopunkOtrera said:
"From what I heard, one of the personnel at redwood labs went rogue.

"From what I heard, one of the personnel at Redwood Labs went rogue.

BiopunkOtrera said:
"Is this why you stayed on earth?"

"Is this why you stayed on Earth?"

BiopunkOtrera said:
heavy UGVs the Van Doos had sent forward, with their normal flare,

heavy UGVs the Van Doos had sent forward, with their normal flair, [I think]

BiopunkOtrera said:
"No. Not even our friends at necroscope.

"No. Not even our friends at Necroscope.

Things are getting interesting, that's for sure.

GardenerBriareus · May 6, 2024

BiopunkOtrera said:
(What do you all think of the prose?)

I'm a bit too tired to properly critique it right now, but I'll see if I can circle back around tomorrow morning and have a crack at it.

For The Tyrants Fear Your Might (A quest of interstellar rebellion)

Been Better

I am dissapoint, son

Aspiring Gynoid

Giant Sinkhole 2020

Transbian Communist

Traitor to her Class

Part 3: The Maker of Blades

Pacific City Morro Bay

Toronto: November 2255

Pacific City Los Angeles District: Now

Been Better

Traitor to her Class

Been Better

Traitor to her Class

This too shall pass