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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BlueTwinkleToes · May 1, 2022

The Laurent said:
No questions about Mirror Segregation?

One question, what does that even mean?

Twei · May 1, 2022

The Laurent said:
No questions about Mirror Segregation?

My guess is that they've somehow managed to put both Israelis and Palestinians in de facto ghettos, which would be an impressive feat

CyberFemme · May 1, 2022

The Laurent said:
No questions about Mirror Segregation?

No. You've inflicted enough curses unto us.
I'm deferring knowledge of this curse until after the Battle (TM).

The Laurent · May 1, 2022

BlueTwinkleToes said:
One question, what does that even mean?

Twei said:
My guess is that they've somehow managed to put both Israelis and Palestinians in de facto ghettos, which would be an impressive feat

In order to quell religious tensions, a process of "mirroring" has been created, in which separate but equal facilities need to be created in predominantly X areas, and new development needs to be "mirrored." That is to say, if the Muslim neighborhoods of a city get a new library, so do the Jewish sections, and this further means that even the developments of roads and parks are highly politically charged with

CyberEnby said:
No. You've inflicted enough curses unto us.
I'm deferring knowledge of this curse until after the Battle (TM).

Nevermind, I'll tell you more later!

Model DC.14F · May 1, 2022

masterofmadness said:
Congratulation Maggie, you played yourself. Their is no getting out of this and their never was.

Compact: I don't get it, we tried everything to reach a peaceful conclusion. Threatening them with the police, threatening them with Armies, threatening them with orbital bombardment, and threatening them with WMDs. Clearly the Anarchist are just too irrational and unreasonable.

BlueTwinkleToes said:
One question, what does that even mean?

Well, they can hardly call it seperate but equal nowdays.

Jane Dough · May 1, 2022

Nice to see that pope bonerface has at least some principals left

ExNihilo · May 1, 2022

Jane Dough said:
Nice to see that pope bonerface has at least some principals left

"I don't want to be nuked" is a principal, I suppose.

bookwyrm · May 1, 2022

Also wait what exactly is that "everything economically feasible has already been done, please fuck off" Japanese PM actually proposing vis a vis mad Maggie's nuclear ultimatum and the new AI homeland/collective off the Japanese coast, is this them getting kicked out of power and the sheer whirlwind change of the 14 days making even a stolid good Cosmoliberal technocrat such as them sound vaguely reasonable compared to the brewing counter-revolution by the ex-Cosmoliberal and now increasingly fashy Compact regime? Or is this some sort of hail mary attempt to stealth back in some social control and state penetration over AGI libertalia with the good old fashioned plea of needing to do so "for your own protection"?

Genderite · May 1, 2022

bookwyrm said:
Also wait what exactly is that "everything economically feasible has already been done, please fuck off" Japanese PM actually proposing vis a vis mad Maggie's nuclear ultimatum and the new AI homeland/collective off the Japanese coast, is this them getting kicked out of power and the sheer whirlwind change of the 14 days making even a stolid good Cosmoliberal technocrat such as them sound vaguely reasonable compared to the brewing counter-revolution by the ex-Cosmoliberal and now increasingly fashy Compact regime? Or is this some sort of hail mary attempt to stealth back in some social control and state penetration over AGI libertalia with the good old fashioned plea of needing to do so "for your own protection"?

It looks like that is actually a different ex-PM then the Yagami guy from the first few days.

Angelform · May 1, 2022

clockworkchaos said:
The Solarian Marshals have begun handing in their resignations after the recent news of…

Brave of them. Good odds there will be people wanting them put up against a wall and shot regardless of who wins.

Model DC.14F said:
Compact: I don't get it, we tried everything to reach a peaceful conclusion. Threatening them with the police, threatening them with Armies, threatening them with orbital bombardment, and threatening them with WMDs. Clearly the Anarchist are just too irrational and unreasonable.

In fairness quite a few of the anarchist groups have just as little interest in a peaceful conclusion.
Although they at least admit it.

Acc. No. 1409 · May 1, 2022

clockworkchaos said:
Democratic Federation Plots Invasion of Canada--New England Godly Times

Thanks for the reminder that people that insane exists, and the fact that they are forgetting that they are definitely in the Blast Radius or not caring that they are.

clockworkchaos said:
Pope Issues Heartful Condemnation of nuclear strikes - God Daily

Uniting all the world's religions and faiths, making the long and bloody histories of each irrelevant, for the sole purpose of telling the SolNav to kindly fuck off with the Nukes. Truly this is an age of wonders.

clockworkchaos said:
Missed Connections? Call Us--Missed Connections Commune

It's the heartwarming things that make this utterly dystopian timeline worth reading though. And the fact that these folks are trying to do good despite the fear of nuclear annihilation is one of those things.

clockworkchaos said:
Japanese government remains in Chaos – Japan Times

I actually didn't think about it until now. If the Glass the Surface plan actually goes through, Japan is going to get Nuked, which is definitely black humor to some degree.

trooperist · May 1, 2022

The only place the Compact actually did some good was in the Holy Land where they managed to get the Muslims and Jews to not turn the whole region into a war zone. I guess that counts for something right?

Now all three sides can unite against Egyptian imperialism.

As for Egypt, well, nothing unites the populace like a short victorious war right?

Baron Ouroboros · May 2, 2022

Prepare your sun goggles, people.

mmgaballah · May 2, 2022

I can see a few ways this nuke them from orbit plan will fail , first is a case of the national void fleets of earth's nations putting their foot down and kicking the compact fleet out , second is a mass mutiny from the poverty draft enlisted ranks and the more sensible officers finally third the officers of the fleet might just refuse to follow through with their orders to nuke humanity's home world after all loyalty to the compact government can only go so far in the face of common sense and decency there is also the fact that officers understand how leadership works and know better than to give an order that won't be followed never mind one that could start a civil war in the fleet

Godwinson · May 2, 2022

For a professional service, sure. That ain't SolNav.

mmgaballah · May 2, 2022

Godwinson said:
For a professional service, sure. That ain't SolNav.

they have to at least have a few truly competent people around if only by the law of averages

Godwinson · May 2, 2022

mmgaballah said:
they have to at least have a few truly competent people around if only by the law of averages

Unless their institutional culture punishes certain kinds of competent that manifests in undesirable ways. Like, say, refusing to give an order you know won't be obeyed, rather than giving the order and harshly punishing anyone who refuses to obey.

masterofmadness · May 2, 2022

Depending on how things go with both 12.7 and Earth I want to ask if it would be possible to get a new Solnav propaganda project done in time before the Broadcast gets shut off because I think it might be the biggest thing we can do for the revolution beside the rest of the FRM cracks.

Making sure every grunt in the galaxy possible hears and understands how thing have changed would be perhaps the biggest blow we could do. Let everyone know that Solnav is going to ask you to commit horrible crimes, that they will be against the kind of communities you were drafted from and that you are now going to face battle against foes who will cause causalities of your fellow enlisted if you fight them. Ideally pair that with captured or defected troops from taskforce 12.7 or Earth to how the anarchists will accept you if you defect or surrender as an alternative.

They will have better preparation to block it then before but it will never be perfect and anyone who hears it is a victory for us. Any boost we can give to Solnav defection will be a huge ripple across space in our favor.

Amorous Intent · May 2, 2022

I'd like to thank everyone who contributed to the penultimate update to the Sol arc: @Estro, @AKuz, @clockworkchaos, @The Laurent, @BiopunkOtrera, & @veteranMortal. Oh, and I guess I edited.

Midnight Approaches

Ichika Reizai Misawa Aerospace Force Base, Japan

Ichika sat under the stars and sipped at sparkling water. She wanted a beer, or at least a coke but she also wanted to launch, and she wanted nothing save the complex cocktail of tailored stimulants and neurotransmitters of her combat drugs in her if she did.

She was sitting on the roof of the hanger, watching the sky. With her eyes at maximum magnification she could see the new lights of the Compact ships up there, hanging in their high orbital formations that the navy called bastions.

The alpha crews had been on ready five since the first shootdown, sleeping, when they did, in cots or on the hanger roofs, waiting within moments of their machines. Ichika was glad, in a way, that there were no trusted replacements, it meant she would be the one to fly if it came to it. She also felt shamed by it. What had happened to Japan that it couldn't even muster two rotations of competent flight crews?

Behind her the base's big fabricator rumbled. It had been going continually for days now, trucks of feedstock rolling in, made materials rolling out. They didn't have people but they could get machines.

So much of the broadcast made her feel that way. She'd never been an anarchist really, and wouldn't have thought of herself as a nationalist either. She'd been as shocked as anyone at the horrors the charters had created on the frontiers, the slaughter of demonstrators on Atlantis now being shouted about by the press. If being anarchist would mean that wouldn't have to happen, and that people in Osaka and Tokyo and everywhere wouldn't need to choose between food and heat, then she guessed she could be an anarchist.

But she felt a strange shame. So much of what was in the broadcast was of Japanese origin. Box-Chan. The anime. The manga. It was all her own culture, at least things that she connected to historically and that Japan still produced.

But it was divorced from the real Japan. From the floods and the incompetence. The population that had only ever stabilized rather than really starting to grow again. There were groups on Earth who were worse off. Japan made money from tourism and culture but it was not England, a wholly owned theme park. But it was not where it could have been. That was how she felt all around the world. Everything was not what it could have been but some lesser, more broken version. Year on year. More and more broken.

Maybe that was what really made her feel sympathy for the anarchists. She had no real love for AIs, but the self replicators fascinated her because they were something new. Something that might move the future forward.

On the radio beside her, the voices of orbital military traffic hissed and crackled. Tension crackled with it. People were talking but it was in that tense way that could turn into a fight.

If it came to it, she thought, then she was going to be a hero. Not because she particularly wanted it for herself, but because it would give people something to be proud of.

She was going to be the first over the wall.

-

Katrina MacLellan, aboard SNS Susana Kato, somewhere above Earth

Like always when there was nothing else to be done, Katrina MacLellan threw herself into the familiar surroundings of Silver Moth Lake.

The lag as she logged in, sitting in the quarters she shared with another Solarian Navy Officer, was almost perceptible, but then the authentication servers sent their final kick and her rig went into offline mode and she found herself staring out of a cosy little cabin at a wide placid lake surrounded by trees in the full bloom of spring.

And she just stood there in her little world.

Decades of painstaking work. Building this little offline paradise just for herself that she carefully cultivated. Cutting down trees, building a cabin to her own exacting specifications. Fishing in the lake, using the little garden outside the windows that she couldn't see from where she last logged out.

She wanted to log out. But where would she go?

What does the executioner do the day before they bring the axe down on a million innocents?

What does the woman who will have the final responsibility of firing a battlecruiser's nuclear weapons at the surface of Earth do?

Apparently?

Playing a game and weeping while the world's pyre is being prepared.

There is nothing else to be done.

-

Ramiel Kitsuragi, aboard SNS Andrea Rusu, somewhere above Earth

The mood in the wardroom was tense. There was a surplus of officers - enough that we were hot bunking - ever since they'd picked up Aldrin's forces, and that made everything just that little bit fraught, a little bit tighter and tauter. What Bukowski had created, Nakamura had worsened.

She'd known people on Nakamura.

She was crammed onto a table with several other flag officers and the star minister, pads crammed onto the table with magnetic strips between the velcro'd plates and drink bulbs as everyone tried to discuss the ongoing madness.

"Kitsuragi, what are you doing? You've never been shy to share your opinions," Filatra asked, tilting his head to try to look at her pad.

"Working out where to go from here. I think if we do a partial warp brachistochrone, with our engines and current position we could hit the gate in under Eight days. Seven days eighteen, by my maths. We'd need to refuel immediately, but that's what the infrastructure is for," Ramiel said, looking up from her pad. She looked like a mess, she knew, her hair a tangle barely kept in line by her officer's cap firmly lodged on her head and her clothes showing every sign of having been worn for… was it really four days now?

Star Minister Elaine Vandermeer looked down the length of the table to stare at her. "You're planning… a retreat? Now? We're just about to secure the entire affair. First use of the Navy in force in decades." It was clear the Minister was looking forward to this garnish on her career.

Ramiel raised her hands up to her face, rubbing at it to try to get some relief, psychosomatic as it might be. After five, six, seconds - long enough to seem rude, she knew, but she didn't give a flying fuck at this point - she dropped them away.

"Permission to speak with absolute candour, Star Minister?"

"This is going to be good," muttered someone - a Rear Admiral-General by their rank markings - that she didn't recognise.

Elaine gestured for her to continue, and so Ramiel straightened up, locking her pad as she did, letting it float around her so she could gesture with both hands.
She idly glanced at Manderly, who was tossing one of his weird historical coins between his fingers as he grinned. Twat. "Ma'am. While we undoubtedly possess the force to orchestrate the… designs of the Prime Minister, likely without suffering further GTO casualties now that we are aware of them, it's… pointless to do so. Her plan is entirely unworkable - the means she proposes to utilise will not achieve the ends she desires, and given your own decision to bring none of the useful elements of the seventh fleet, the entire thing's … useless." She gave a brief grimace at the end, her tone bitter. "In summary, ma'am, the Compact has died, the Prime Minister's an idiot, and there's nothing to be gained from starting a fight we might not win."

Ramiel reached towards the table to grab a quick bite of her kung pao, while the 7th Star Minister stared at her. "I saw the transcript of that meeting, you know. Your plan was even more dramatic than the Minister's and you're getting cold feet now?"

"I know what my plan was, ma'am, it was my plan. But it was designed for a particular time and has been useless since sometime on the nineteenth." She hooked her feet underneath the table's edge to pull her back down to the nominal floor, and breathed in through her nose, trying to maintain her calm. "Frankly, ever since you only asked for the most useless parts of seventh fleet and nothing else-" She made a small gesture at that nameless Admiral-General to take out the sting, "we should have left. You undermined the core competency of the entire Navy doing that."

She reached up, adjusted her hat, and internally grimaced. Oh, that was going to go down well. "Ma'am," Ramiel added, belatedly.

"Enlighten me, Commodore. I have undermined my own Navy?"

"The Solarian Navy exists for one single purpose, despite the corruption and deviance that the centuries and Charters have caused. The Navy exists to protect human space. That is it. We do not exist to enforce IP rights to allow the Charters to generate ever larger inefficiencies they call 'profit', or to stabilise meaningless dirtball statelets. We protect the gates, and we protect everyone from the threats of space, from the Rocks and RKKVs. The Navy exists as a Navy, and if you'd actually dragged your naval elements here instead of appearing with only the Marshalls and Infantry then perhaps things would be a little more different. Because you also forgot how the Navy does its job. We do it very simply, Star Minister."

She took a deep breath, before projecting from her chest. If she was doing this, she might as well go all the way. "One methodology: Hegemony!"

Elaine's face was dark, and Manderly's insouciant grin had only grown wider, but she cut off anyone else before they could speak. "Hegemony, Minister. Hegemony means that when you move reinforcements you don't leave the main elements of the fleet at home. Hegemony means that you don't give your fucking second cousin the Omoikane executive a sweetheart deal. Hegemony means that we don't settle for allowing the Charters to militarise to such an extent that we're in danger of losing the two-power standard. Two power! We shouldn't settle for that."

"You go too far, Kitsuragi."

She barked out a short, sharp laugh, her anger rising in her gullet as she finally spoke her mind. "Too far! I don't go far enough. What, shall I spell out what's going to happen to you? China's basically a fucking member of the goddamn Democratic Federation and the ratings were already miserable ever since the broadcast happened." She grabbed her pad out of space and furiously gestured at the walls with it, her other hand instinctively moving to counter the rotation. "Do you think you're going to go into this united? We're not even the majority of power in cis-lunar space, you imbecile, what do you think the reaction is going to be once we start dropping bottled sunshine? 啊, 老祖宗呀, 你他妈的，你傻呀." She raised her hand to her face and dragged it slowly down, the energy leaving her body as soon as it had arrived, leaving only exasperation and bitterness.

"Candour doesn't stretch into sedition. I think we've heard enough from cowards like her."

She tossed her pad down onto the table, and it bounced across the meals and warplans, before flying past the Star Minister's ear by a matter of millimetres. She clenched her fists by her side until she could feel the struts in her hands start to flex.

"I have given everything for this navy, Minister. More than you ever will. My entire fucking body! I'm three pounds of flesh in a steel shell! And you say that I'm a coward. Well, I've done my duty to this Navy, unlike you. This navy is more than a fucking vehicle for your ambition, Elaine." The anger simmered in her voice, in the flexing of her fingers, the teeth gritted together. Even the artificial nature of her body couldn't hide it all.

The doors to the wardroom hissed open, and two marines loped through after a yell of "Enlisted requesting permission to visit." All the stupid, archaic rituals of the dead blue-water navies.

Elaine looked at Ramiel, who stared back, her face lined with nothing but contempt. "Marines, take her to the brig."

Ramiel grinned, and threw her arms wide. "Of course. To the brig with me. But that won't solve your problem, Elaine. That won't save the Navy from the Compact's collapse. But I know what will."

Her arms were grabbed by the marines, and she was hauled close to them, their feet hooked under the bolted chairs and floor holds to give them the leverage. "Kill yourself! We cannot survive with men that don't trust us and with your failures hounding us. But you can do that. Be the scapegoat, Elaine, use that fucking side-arm for once in your life and-"

The blow jerked her head back, but her false flesh wouldn't even bruise from the slap. Ramiel shut up, but her eyes danced in their sockets as she was dragged away, a bitter smile on her face.

The doors to the Wardroom closed with a definitive thud as she was dragged from them, and she slumped in the marine's hold. Well, that was probably her career down the toilet.

Probably.

-

Porfirio Morales, Somewhere in the Andes Mountains

Porfirio sits on a slope in the Andes, echos and flashes of war in the distance accompanied by the rumbling and clattering of vehicles as the Andean Communal Republic tried to reduce two and a half divisions of Solarian Naval Infantry to dust.

The small dusky skinned man's concern isn't with the fighting below him, or even the mountains around him, but the skies overhead.

He hadn't been in on the kill of SNS Shohei Nakamura, but other spotters and skywatchers like him had helped to kill that beast.

In fact Porfirio Morales hadn't even been awake when his comrades had blown that wretched carrier out of the sky. Instead he'd been taking the shortest sleep that he could manage on a rest melting cocktail of pills and diet supplements when his colleagues a few dozen kilometres away had bagged themselves an honest to god carrier in low orbit.

In a strange way Porfirio almost misses the track associated with that now dead death dealer. After all, she had been his companion for as long as he'd lived in these mountains and a malevolent star of doom for the last two weeks.

He was now familiar with everything in orbit, from the satellites in their stately orbits to the vigilant cruisers of the various fleets, and he was even familiar with the tracks of First Fleet's command ship SNS Andrea Rusu as well.

There was something… A brief delay, nearly imperceptible, when she climbed that he'd noticed. But he'd noticed similar habits about every other craft in orbit, the European flagship Cannae was sprightly in everything but a dive, the craft of Celtic Union skittered like insects unsure of their own legs, and the monitors of First Fleet moved… just differently enough that he could distinguish them from their warpcraft cousins seven times out of ten while never having a satisfactory answer as to just how he was able to.

Porfiio made enough of a habit of looking up as well to match track to blinking star that his dreams had become a nightly shifting kaleidoscope of lights, clouds, mountains, and blue skies.

He'd spent much of his life watching the skies, with and without equipment in his hands. Someone had to spot for the nearby anti-aerospace batteries. Someone with a radio and even flares if jamming cut communications lines and electronic eyes on the skies. Someone had to warn their comrades if all else failed and the shuttles were racing overhead. It was why Morales had more than just a tablet hard linked to nearby antennae and satellite dishes, he also had high powered binoculars and the best eyes in the ACR.

And right now he used them to watch the constellations move in orbit, each star a dancer and chess piece both as they moved into their final appointed positions above his head.

-

Melisandre Leclerc, Aboard EDF Cannae, somewhere above Earth

Melisandre Leclerc watches the curvature of Earth below her as she waits for her call to go through.

Every time she looks at Earth, really truly looks at Earth she's reminded of an old Spacer legend that recounts that in the first days of spaceflight every astronaut and cosmonaut and every other kind of 'naut that ascended into space and saw that delicate blue and green orb streaked with white they were filled with the resolve of universal brotherhood and respect for the planet.

And that the first man to see the sight she sees below her and reject that feeling of peace and compassion wasn't a highly rational scientist or a militaristic soldier or even a curious tourist, but the first billionaire in space.

The Spacers say that that great captain of industry looked down at Earth, reached out his hand as if to grasp the Earth and said, "That too shall be mine." And that was when the first Charter was born in the hearts of men.

Melisandre Leclerc didn't feel either the universal sorority of the first Spacers anymore or that all consuming desire of that long dead billionaire. Instead she mostly feels… Tired. Her body is young but her spirit is old and she feels once more drained as she floats limply against a wall in her private quarters and listens to a call ring a fifteenth and then sixteenth time.

The tenor of the line suddenly shifts with an impolite swiftness and Melisandre bolts with an agonising swiftness from her half-attention and grabs a handhold on the wall to steady herself, turning to face a screen expectantly.

A thin smile actually reaches her eyes. One quickly dashed.

"Hi! You've reached Leliana Leclerc!" Melisandre's heart skips a beat as she recognizes her daughter's voice, "I don't care to answer my phone right now or am screening you." That was a very her comment. "Take as much time as you need and leave a message after the beep!"

Since when had the kids started bringing back custom answering messages? That was something her parents had done back in the mid twenty second century.

"Uh, hi dear, I wanted to talk to you. But I guess that you're busy your life," Melisandre Leclerc says in the universal language of air and space flight that very much wasn't her mother tongue, but a tongue she couldn't turn off while she yet floated weightlessly, "Your father gave me your contact information. I guess it really did take the end of the world for us to speak to each other again." She gives a bitter bark of laughter.

She would have loved to speak with her daughter again, and just talked to her as mother and daughter instead of having a screaming match as a mother and daughter that very much had disagreements over…

"I hope you're keeping safe. I hear that the autonomous zones are being legalized. I-" she takes a deep breath, "-I am proud of you. You believe in something with all your heart. I just didn't want to lose you too. I-"

No, that wasn't what she should say. That would also cause an argument. Leiliana wasn't a child. Didn't need to hide behind her mother's skirts anymore and always hated her mother implying it.

Reach out, Melisandre. Reach out. Be better. Be better than usual at least.

"You're a lot like your older brother. I know I don't talk about Max a lot. He's been dead fifty years longer than you've been alive, but." Melisandra doesn't like thinking about her second son. That bright faced boy with hair like polished hardwood, hazel eyes light with confidence, and a smile like Sol herself.

It still hurts dully to think about him. Hurts to think about not even being on the same planet almost seventy years ago when a baton had-

No, it still hurts. Would never stop.

"I think-" She stops, suddenly uncertain of what to say next. What can she say, what is Melisandre doing with her life? She's got a daughter who hates her, an ex-husband who Melisandre hates even more than that, a girlfriend she's only met in person once in the past year, and a job she used to love, in a place she once spent an entire childhood dreaming of, "-I think Max would be proud of you too. And he was a better person than I am-"

Really? She's going to bring up the idealised son that Leliana probably hates from a lifetime of being silently weighed against. The one sibling she never knew whose spectre hung over the family like a falling moon as said unhappy family slowly broke apart under the weight of Melisandre's vaunted duty and idealism.

"I love you Lel. No matter what happens, know that your mother loves you."

Leclerc leaves the call off like a coward. What's more to be said? Everything? Nothing? She's so bad at this, what kind of daughter wants to hear the disjointed ramblings of a semi-estranged mother. If she was that bad at speaking in her career she would quickly be out of the job.

…Not the most unappealing concept. To be fair.

Melisandra sighs and floats back from her wall mounted terminal for long enough for her heart to slow and her emotions to settle. A long awaited gentle chime eventually interrupts her.

"Admiral Leclerc?"

The highest ranking officer of the European Defence Forces Orbital Force spins herself around on the bulkhead and addresses the intercom which has just addressed her, "Yes, Lieutenant Meyer?"

"Message from Brussels. They want a status report on the Orbital Force." Her aide pauses. "I think they've about ready to come to a decision."

Admiral Melisandra Leclerc looks down at Earth again and -finding Paris- nods to herself before leaving.

History would not repeat itself. She would not let it.

-

Ahmed Raiss and Reuben Jin, Aboard SNS Jean Planche, somewhere above Earth

Ahmed Raiss isn't an anarchist. A month ago, had someone asked him what he thought about anarchists - even if he weren't fairly sure it was a psych evaluation - he'd tell them that anarchists are naive, dangerous fools who want to break the Compact because they're upset they don't get to have everything they want for free, without working for it. He had to work hard for his position here, in the Home Guard. The First Fleet.

That's the crux, though. The First Fleet is the fleet that defends Sol, and now…

"There's been some mistake," he says, not for the first time, taking a swig from the bottle they're passing around. "Someone's misunderstood an order."

Katie laughs as she takes the bottle from him. "No mistake, Raiss. Anarchists have seized chunks of Earth, the footsloggers can't winkle the little snots out, so they sent for the navy, quelle surprise."

There's no work to be done; the strike craft are all ready, gleaming with barely contained lethality in the hangar; the ship's point defences are loaded and ready; even the floors have been scrubbed clean. Wouldn't want to go into combat for the first time in centuries in a grubby ship, after all.

But that leaves them, a motley collection of ground crew, ratings and other detritus of the SNS Jean Planche, with nothing to do. As sailors with nothing to do, it took no time at all to congregate, and only moments more for someone to locate a bottle of something foul.

"It's not right," Hugo butts in, taking the bottle from Katie. "They won, fair and square, and now we flip the table? I don't want to kill billions because some groundpounder tinpot general is steamed he couldn't keep a lid on some ambitious rioters. And have you watched any of that Broadcast? Some of the shit the Charters are doing out in the Frontier…"

"They should've let us off leash, let us crack the whip over the Charters, bring order to the Frontier," Katie replies. "But instead they break windows and burn things down, then cry when the Compact has to swoop in to clean up the mess."

"We shouldn't be glassing the fucking homeworld," Ahmed says. "We're First fucking Fleet. It's our job to die on our feet, putting our hulls between the rest of the goddamn Galaxy and Sol."

He turns to Reuben Jin for support - his friend's been quiet so far, drinking and listening.

"I…" Reuben starts, "I… think we signed up to be in the Solarian Navy, and that means when the 7th fucking Star Minister gives us an order, we see it through. No matter what."

"It's Earth, Reuben! Humanity was born on Earth! We can't destroy Earth like the villains in some HI thriller, come on!"

"And what do you suggest, Ahmed? We turn on the Captain? On the navy itself? The Solarian Navy doesn't get to pick and choose what it does. If we start disobeying orders just because they upset our delicate sensibilities, we may as well blow the gates and be done with it. The 7th Star Minister isn't stupid. We wouldn't be doing this if there were any other way, if anything less than the complete collapse of order were on the line."

"The anarchists haven't blown any gates so far," Ahmed replies quietly. "I don't think they've glassed any planets, either."

The others are quiet now. Ahmed and Reuben don't argue. It just doesn't happen. They signed up together, have served together ever since. Rumour has it they grew up together.

"So you're an anarchist now, Ahmed? You want to destroy the Solarian Navy, break the Community of Humanity apart into endless war?" Reuben's voice is sharp. "The anarchists shot down two of our carriers after a handful of days with this 'Box'. By next year, it could be too late. Do you want the anarchists to be able to swipe us out of the sky at a stroke?"

"Obviously not, Reuben, I just…" Ahmed replies, defeated. "We're about to kill more people in a day than the Solarian Navy has since…"

"Since ever," Reuben replies. "The navy has never done anything like this before, and - we may only hope - will never have a need to do anything like this again. Surely you can see that we would only be ordered to do this in the worst circumstances. This is the lesser evil, it must be."

Ahmed is silent for a long moment.

"I have work to be getting on with," he says at last. "There remains much to do before the end."
-

Theodore Santiago, Chicago

Somehow the party had kept on going, heedless, like a cart being carried by gravity down a long, long hill to a very solid-looking wall. Theodore Santiago and Ahmed Yehli, the Professor and FatBlunt and of course Crossfield and Jason… and Manfred Folly, who had woken from sleep and was now considering what if any drugs to take to calm down after having looked at his messages and seen several hundred logistical questions…

All of them were now gathered for a very, very late lunch. As in, such a late lunch it was late for dinner. It was nearly a midnight snack. They'd all been keyed up, and let's be truthful also sampling FatBlunt's wares for the last few hours, in most cases. Except for Manfred. ("I don't do well with weed, I'm sorry. I know that's boring." "It is what it is," FatBlunt said, philosophically.) He was almost ready to give in and dance with Ahmed, because even though he'd thought that last night might be it, the evils of time zones had been revealed once more.

He looked around the pizza place, which was filled to the brim with others that he should probably talk to, to give even more last-minute reassurance now that doom had passed through the other side and it was another day of tense waiting for the end.

But he was really, really tired. Then his phone rang.

The voice on the other end was a familiar one. Iza Sapphire, the Elf Augment who was the "Liaison to the Amaranthine Interstellar Commonwealth and/or the Interstellar Amaranthine Commonwealth."

"Is FatBlunt and Manfred with you? And Crossfield, of course."

"Yes," Santiago said, quietly. "They are."

"Get them somewhere for a video conference. And maybe where you can see the sky."

This led to four people huddled in the back of an alley of a pizzeria that had been repurposed, staring at their phones.

"I'm sorry for interrupting, but we need to keep you on the call. The Democratic Federation has judged it of utmost importance, considering some of the things we have in play," Iza said. "Including attempts to encourage defections among certain units both of national and Solarian fleets. I know that you all are not in the best condition right now… but protocol dictates that you be around to see it, as key figures in the Democratic Federation or valued allies…"

"Right," Santiago said without resistance.

The vacation was over.

It was almost time.

-

Valter Walmsley, aboard SNS Japik Gupta, somewhere above Earth

"-and so as you can see there's a lot going on in my life but I'm otherwise doing fine." Lieutenant Valter Walmsley says, back straight, uniform crisp, harness holding him into the communications seat pulled taut and professional.

Just like father always said: 'Project the image of the person you want to be. And you will become that person.'

And Valter Walmasley had always wanted to be an officer in the Solarian Navy. Even now when he had his… doubts. (Even when his career was stymied by other officers with more prestigious bloodlines and lesser abilities, and his life was now threatened by violent thugs whose desire to destroy was greater than their desire to cooperate.)

His eyes flick to the edge of the screen that showed his image of himself talking, there were two timers spinning downwards at the same rate: one in yellow reading '01:30' and one in green reading '18:30'.

A whole minute and half to fill. He was bad at filling spaces. Always prided himself on knowing what he wanted to say and saying it as efficiently as possible. But it would be rude (never mind a waste of limited broadcast time) to leave his family on Lemuria (approximately 17 light minutes away) with a minute and a half of empty screen time.

Valter casts around for topics. There's no partner. Politics is right out (he was not a fan of politics in general). But he knew the things his mother would be worried about, what the incoming frown on his father's face would be for. So he took a moment to steady himself and checked the time again (1:20/18:20).

"I need you to know that there is a good chance that I will be headed into combat tonight." (He knew even as he said it that the monitoring AI would censor it. But the conspicuous absence of broadcast would be telling enough), "I will be safe. There's nothing in the stars that can challenge the Solarian Navy. It may be difficult but I am determined to distinguish myself. To push myself to my limits in defence of the Community of Humanity. Whatever happens on Earth or… elsewhere, won't happen to Lemuria. This chaos will not come home. I vow this to you."

(That's the kind of thing a Navy officer says. The kind of thing that a hero says before the day of the big battle. Did he believe it? Sure. Maybe. Kinda. Enough to keep his hands from shaking and his mind from wandering into a place of sheer terror.)

There is another long and awkward pause and the first timer counts down and turns red and the second turning yellow now too as the picture changes to his parent's communication.

They appear on the screen, his mother shorter and thin, almost wispy with pale skin, blue eyes, and golden hair. She was the one that Walmsley himself took after in stature though he had his much larger father's much darker skin and hair. (That was all but uncontrollable even with his regulation length cut.)

They smile and begin talking about life on Lemuria in such wholesome terms that 23 year old Lieutenant Valter Walmsley is able to forget (If only for 16 minutes and fifty one seconds) that he would be the one pressing the button on any plan that called for his ship to use nuclear weapons on the Earth.

-

Marcy Collins, somewhere under Pacific City

Marcy had played a lot of dungeon crawls, in her video game time. She's sometimes even imagined the subway as a dungeon, a place she could find her way through. A way to make the crowd's easier, and fun, instead of scary.

The crowd now is different. She knows a lot of them… at least a little, and even the ones she didn't, it's not as scary with Sasha and Anna around.

That just makes it worse.

Because tonight.

Tonight it felt like a tomb, or catacombs.

Everyone talked about how safe these tunnels were but… she'd been looking it up, they weren't rated for modern nukes, not really. If it came… they'd be here, underground, and then… the heat wouldn't kill them immediately, not this far under, but the shockwave might break the bunker, burying them all alive. If it didn't, everything outside would be on fire, and the air here could get sucked out, leaving them to asphyxiate to death. Or the black ash-rain of radiation would pour into this and-

She shouldn't have spent so much time looking up videos.

"Hey, you okay?" She looked up, to see Anna looking at her with concern.

"Yeah, fine, why wouldn't I be?"

"Well, um, you are spinning."

"That's just a stim."

"Yess…. But usually that's with your pencil, not the um… Shiv." Marcy followed Anna's eye to the Shiv, which she quickly stored away, embarrassed.

"Sorry just… ugh. I can't stand waiting down here for… what comes without knowing." Marcy said, half babbling, and feeling so stupid for it.

"Yeah… I… kinda feel the same way," Anna said, sliding against the wall next to her to sit down. Marcy was probably pathetic, but right now she needed to lean into someone and… Anna at least didn't see to min-

"Yeah me too, so let's blow this!"

Marcy jolted up as Sasha crouched down in front of them. "What!?"

"Look, your parents are busy so let's go out and watch. Better dying knowing it's coming than just waiting here, we are all going to go insane." Sasha gave a grin.

"You… I…" Anna stammered, while Marcy took a second to rally.

"We can't. The battle is high enough up, it would barely look like small stars."

Sasha's grin widened. "Yeah, unless…. We had a way to see them up close. Like a telescope or something."

"That's what you were up to!" Anna hissed as she sat bolt upright. "I knew you hadn't suddenly gotten into stargazing. You were planning this from the beginning."

Sasha barely acknowledged it, merely giving a look back and going, "So you coming?"

"No, and you aren't either!" Anna hissed, shooting up and, a moment later, grabbing Sasha and picking her up.

Marcy stared. Huh, the tunnel seemed to have gotten really hot all of a sudden.

"Yeah I am, and you are too and you know it. You just want me to convince you more," She replied, looking shockingly calm.

Was her head woozy?

"What makes you think that?" Anna whispered back.

What were they talking about? Marcy was having trouble concentrating.

"Because if you actually wanted to stop me, you'd have yelled and told the grown ups. Now stop being a wimp and admit you want it as much as I do. So I know you are in, and Marcy's in too, right?"

"Huh, what? Yeah sure, anything."

-

Tobby Joss, New York, Atlantic City

Tobby Joss sat in his office in the parliamentary annex and drank the coffee Anna made him. The time to the Prime Minister's ultimatum ticked down. Earlier in the day he'd been horrendously busy stage managing it, making sure there was unity in the parliamentary party, and a good show for the papers. AJ was working frantically to get everything ready.

Now he just sat here and ate thick salami sandwiches with salad and mayo. The delli was still in operation, and he needed the food. Across the water, the city still burned, The battle continuing even more fiercely. A pair of Brazilian warships sat out in the bay, their lasers knocking down any munition thrown over at Manhattan.

News from Atlantis and Olduvai was playing on one side. Tobby wasn't quite sure how to feel about Atlantis. It was– irrational, to imagine this having happened to his home. Of course nobody he knew had been on strike, but he'd found Anna crying in the morning after finding out an old school friend of hers who'd become a public school teacher had been shot during the rioting.

He'd tried to console her but somehow it just hadn't worked.

He couldn't think this way. What had been done was necessary to restore order. The protestors had been a useless lot, not like the protestors when he'd been a younger man, when they'd protested properly. Things were so different now. Didn't they realize that all the problems they were mad about had already been solved or rendered moot? You couldn't solve social issues like racism, you could just signal which way power felt about them and over time things would get better for most people.

All they were doing by this temper tantrum was unleashing the worst forces in society. That was the real problem. People had a lot of natural impulses towards authoritarianism. If you empowered the mob they would play those impulses out in the worst ways. Whether it was the anarchists rioting or the fascists killing people in Toronto. That was human nature. That was what happened if people didn't have a steady job and a steady hand on them. Those forces had already been unleashed. All that could be done now was to suppress them hard.

Tobby knew that had already happened on Atlantis and Columbia. Obviously, he'd need to do what he could to contain things now. To limit the damage. Some allowable blowing off steam for the population. He could put together a policy proposal for Rex, a set of tough measures for criminals of the insurrection, debt evaders and IP thieves. Olduvai would also need some reconstruction. It was obvious that Meziene could not be allowed to stay on. This little manoeuvre he had pulled would only render the situation more unstable. Perhaps they could create a package of sanctions… but probably it would need to be more military action.

"Tobby." Tobby jumped out of his skin and almost spilled his coffee. Anna was at the door. Her face was a mask now, makeup done oh so carefully. "It's almost time."

-

Bertrand Jefferson-Smith, Aboard SNS Andrea Rusu, somewhere above Earth

"So that's it then?" Bertrand Jefferson-Smith says, handing the tablet back over to his superior officer.

"That is it. Yes." says Fleet Admiral Elaine Vandermeer, (CO 1st Fleet, 7th Star Minister, Star Marshal, Medal of Gallantry, Solarian Cross 1st Class, etc, etc) taking the pad back, "We begin by using strategic grade nuclear weapons on the Saharan wastes, and if that still doesn't compel a surrender, we move over to military targets in the Americas. Cracking open ACR positions in the Andes so that Commodore-General Sunden can break out into the countryside and begin liberation operations." She cracks the neck of her dark navy blue uniform's high collar and sighs, "Then we break the siege of Atlantic City and Toronto with tactical weapons and start using regular weaponry against every identified military target south of the frostline."

"What are we looking at?"

"Preliminary planning says that if they don't surrender we're looking at… five hundred thousand to a million dead in a collateral damage in the initial strike pattern. Which is in addition to nearly four times that in military age men and women."

"And if there are no surrenders?"

Vandeemer shrugs. "Then we move to the next phase."

Jefferson-Smith looks at his own pad. "So phase two requires the fleet moving on to using bunker busters and high altitude nuclear detonations across insurrectionary areas to keep them off balance. Then stage three is picking apart military strongholds starting along the American pacific coast and walking our way to Atlantic city?" He looks up again. "What are we looking at there?"

"The PMO's office forwarded us an analysis that says twenty to forty million dead military age anarchist personnel and two to three million in collateral damage from the destruction of vital infrastructure."

Bertrand frowned, "And if they still don't surrender?"

"Bill G-178 passed. We're officially fabbers free until the job is done."

"Until it is done…" Jefferson-Smith strokes his chin, white SolNav officer's gloves rubbing against his neatly trimmed goatee, "You know it's going to be worse than those analysts say right?"

"Of course I do. We've going to be knocking out every power generator in two to four continents. The fucking species barely got by before we had electricity, the hit to quality of life alone will be catestrophic."

"Goddamn that's a heavy death toll."

Elaine lets her tablet magnetically attach to her desk and rubs her eyes with one hand, "Do you know what the official death tolls from 2071-72 and '87 are?"

"No idea."

"Well there's a reason they don't ever talk about the total numbers who died from our predecessors ripping the arteries out of the Democratic Federation-"

"The old one."

Elaine snorts. "Yeah the old one." She pauses. "Anyway, there's a reason why Ayodele shot himself."

Bertran leans forward incrementally and raises an eyebrow. "Really? I'd like to hear it."

"Well. No one can tell you what really happened. But as the only other person in history who's just received orders to walk orbital strikes from one side of a continent to the other. I think I can put myself in his shoes."

It's Bertrand's turn to pinch his nose with his white gloved hands. "God-DAMN. I don't want to think about this Elaine."

"Do you see how many people died on Atlantis and Columbia? The fighting in the streets of Penglai? The rumours trickling in from the frontiers?" Elaine looks deadly serious. "Do you know how many people are going to die because we lost our grip?" She pauses for a long moment. "That fucking woman was right."

"Kitsuragi?"

"This was a black swan event." The Fleet Admiral rests her temple in her hands. "God, we fucking wargamed this how many times? The Compact is fracturing, Bertrand." She sighs. "Everything that's happening now will be a picnic compared to the horrors of a divided humanity. We might kill some fucking sixty million people tomorrow. Most of whom probably have legitimate grievances. But some wannabe idealist that we've never heard of might kill a billion people in an afternoon because the Solarian Navy wasn't there anymore and they had a fucking point to prove."

"I guess our orders are a necessary evil, Ma'am."

"That they are," the commanding officer of the Solarian 1st fleet says, her grey eyes flashing with… something Bertrand has never seen before and can't name. "Vice Admiral Bertrand Jefferson-Smith, can I count on you to go into this with both eyes open?" She looks him directly in the eyes, the familiar details of a Solarian Navy compartment fading away into that one question. "Once we begin, there can be no turning back."

The Vice Admiral leans back, his posture instinctively adjusting to match his patron's formality. "Ma'am?"

"I need to know that you are prepared to go all the way with this, Bertrand. Can you live with this?"

There is a long moment, the Star Minister's eyes narrowed at her subordinate, the Vice Admiral himself trying to find any reason to say that he couldn't in good conscience carry out the Prime Minister's orders.

But he was a SolNav man. Always had been, always would be. There was nothing. No matter how hard he searched, there was simply no other way to prevent the Compact's fracture into an age of horrors.

"Yes. Yes Admiral. I am prepared to go all the way with this."

"Good. Gooood." The senior admiral nods and faintly smiles. "I'm going to need you to carry out these orders even if I'm killed. I need you to swear to me that you'll keep this fleet intact and do your utmost to protect the Community of Humanity from fracture."

"Of course?"

"Swear to me, Bertrand."

"Yes, Ma'am. I swear on my honour as a Solarian Naval Officer."

Elaine Vandermeer smiles and leans back in her seat, intense expression fading, and she sighs in evident relief. "Thank you Bertrand that will be all. Dismissed."

As Vice Admiral Jefferson-Smith unclips himself from his chair in the fleet commander's office and pushes himself towards the exit, the Fleet Admiral herself sets her uniform right, sealing her uniform collar, placing her officer's peaked cap back on her head and tucking a stray hair under it, and pulling taut her white gloves, making herself every inch a Solarian Naval officer.

Seventh Star Lord Elaine Vandermeer Dies During Accident While Cleaning Service Sidearm--#NavyNews

As per regulation before a probable military engagement, 7th Star Lord, Admiral Elaine Vandermeer, 7th Star Minister, Star Marshal, Medal of Gallantry, Solarian Cross 1st Class, was cleaning her personal firearm, a Solarian Armouries Model-2156(VA) when it unfortunately became discharged. She died immediately, with her death being ruled an accident by first responders.

Having served in the Solarian Navy her entire life, Admiral Vandermeer had an illustrious career spanning postings from the First Colonies to the Far Spinward, with her last position being the commander of 3rd Fleet's Penglai detachment, until she was confirmed as Seventh Star Minister two months ago.

She is survived by a husband, Solarian Armouries Vice President Avner Keegan and four children.

Her second in command, Vice Admiral Bertran Jefferson-Smith has taken command of 1st Fleet until a new Seventh Star Minister can be appointed by Parliament.

BurnBright · May 2, 2022

Coward. Either refuse the orders or be a monster.

Kirook · May 2, 2022

If I were ordered to kill sixty million people I would simply not do it. RIP to the Solarian Navy but I'm just built different

taovkool · May 2, 2022

Well, I guess that's that.

Goodbye, brave souls of the revolution. Fuck you, SolNav and Charters scum.

ExNihilo · May 2, 2022

The chorus of Bomber are really echoing through my head right now. Congrats on picking that song, I don't think I'll be able to get it out of my head for weeks.

He just flies the bomber...

The3rdCorinthian · May 2, 2022

This is the sad truth I think we never really accepted - That ultimately, SolNav will always choose the option to kill people in the name of the state, because they legitimately believe it's the right thing to do. And believing that you're right is all you need in order to be willing to kill someone.

Beyogi · May 2, 2022

So um did someone off the star minister, or did she suicide after murdering billions?

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