SYSNES2: On the Lathe of Suns

Thlayli said:

Dis, I think that I am supposed to have refined Atmospheric Streamlining, otherwise my Ne'er Do Wells do curiously explosive things when subjected to gravity.

Click to expand...

Yes, my mistake

Fun story Thlayli - but even if everyone has guns, how do you prevent those with the best guns, resources and friends from taking over?

How do you think Commodores become Commodores? In practice there's an informal system of patronage between many clans that allow less-well-connected folks with a lot of talent to rise up the ranks. But even in largely corruption-free societies, who you know is just as important as what you know.

Random stuff I noticed:

I have no idea if private sector spending ratios are calculated pre or post-upkeep. I'm sending orders and assuming (read: hoping) that it's post.

Parts of the stats imply that there are two Standard Rebel armies, but I can only find records for one.

In the first few years after the Standardite migration, there existed a very tense political atmosphere in the greater Abell system with vocal and influential forces in both the Standard and the Csser’ian Confederacy urging action against the other state. To prevent the outbreak of a mutually destructive conflict, the ambassador of the Standard Confederacy, Archimedes Sujiston, led a diplomatic team to Larsilla, the Capital of the Csser’ian Confederacy. After a spectacular entrance into the city, the Standardite Ambassador met with Prime Minister Josef Leoni and Foreign Secretary Haymir Jabal and finalized a treaty to ensure peace and trading relations between the two states within and beyond the Abell system.

The Csser’ian Confederacy and the Standard Confederacy, desiring to work towards greater peace and prosperity between our two states and to enhance the future prospects of peaceful cooperation, do hereby resolve to sign The Treaty of Abell.



Signed,

Josef Leoni
Prime Minister of the Csser’ian Confederacy

Haymir Jabal
Foreign Secretary of the Csser’ian Confederacy

Trevi Lewiston
Commodore-in-Chief of the Standard Confederacy

Mandell Owens
Provisioner-General of Oia of the Standard Confederacy

Archimedes Sujiston
Ambassador of the Standard Confederacy

The Standard Confederacy recognizes this in full.

Thlayli said:

Random stuff I noticed:

I have no idea if private sector spending ratios are calculated pre or post-upkeep. I'm sending orders and assuming (read: hoping) that it's post.

Click to expand...

That doesn't make much sense; how can the government pay upkeep for infrastructure such as roads with 0% taxation?

4/13.5 orders in

5/13.5 orders in. Congrats to SymD, Thy, Kal', Kraz and Frozen! All were fine.

It was a lot more work than I was expecting. Still I expect that it will get easier.

I'm trying to get orders sent tonight about 6 hours from now... Dis, if you might be able to be on #nes at that time to answer a few questions? Worst case scenario I send the 'temporary NPC' orders.

“It is with great honor and pride that I declare the First Session of the United Council of the Csser’ian Confederacy to be in session. May those who come after us remember us and our deed for the occurrence of death is inevitable, the loss of liberty, unthinkable.”

Josef Leoni, First Prime Minister of the Csser’ian Confederacy







The twin moons shone. A perfect alignment.

She sighed and lifted her head from the telescope. It was a beautiful omen. An omen of doom. Returning to her logs, she marked the dates. Science might have told all of Abell that it was a simple quirk of astronomy that the two moons would criss-cross the night sky but science had never been good at predicting the unpredictable. It was only afterwards that the high priests of science would trot out their new discoveries to put science back into line with their supposed new empirical data.

Idiots.

Sick of being mocked and ridiculed, she herself had crossed the vast canals to the mountain ridgelands in those days of peace where she sought and received a certification in archaeology. With that opening salvo, she accomplished more than she imagined. She still remembered those faces. Remembered those faces simply drop in shock when she unveiled her research. Abell had been completely covered in vast forests only a few centuries ago.

Legend and lore had always maintained that their ancestors had been skilled manipulators of life and the great forests but it had to wait until she had the proof, the proof found under merely a few feet of earth. That wasn’t the troubling part. It was what her findings meant. For the dreams and the nightmares had long come to pass, all too quickly.

She straightened her shoulders and walked out.

Apologies for messing up orders the first time, and sending a revised orderset in.

10/13.5 orders in, wooo. Unfortunately something came up today so laggards have until tomorrow morning to get stuff done. I will not be available to answer questions though.

I've been kind of panicking over my orders, though they're mostly done. This extension is a godsend, as I've been working 16 hour days over the last week, and a 24 hour extension gives me time to clarify my understanding of the rules and send out some orders that I can actually be proud of.

Also, could you please resend me our last PMed correspondence? I want to check the specific names that I gave to my two starting designs.

I realize I forgot to spend my miniscule s in my orders.

Just do 100% re-investment for this turn, I suppose.

Mudlands

[tab]Sun rains down on mirrored water, shimmers up again as if off mercury. Wobbly, warping reflection stares back, well on its way to dusky from exposure, fire-eyed under short-cut gold. HUD frames it all in cold blue for contrast. I feel my lip curl in grim amusement. Can’t remember the last time I saw a mirror. Lately I forget my eyes aren’t real. Well, not their real color. Not their real look.
[tab]The river stinks. The river boat stinks. The Mernt a half meter down the rail stinks. The Manderly Basin stinks. All of planet Oia stinks. The degenerate, mutant cousin of taro I have to constantly eat stinks. I stink.
[tab]It’s a magnificent camouflage. I absolutely hate it.
[tab]I can’t complain too much. I volunteered. They asked if I would serve and, stupid young me, I said yes. They asked me because I already mostly looked the part. Mostly looked like a Mernt. I thought nothing could be as boring as being a country boy down in the Sulfur Frontier.
[tab]Nothing but the mudlands.
[tab]I put the rancid smell of slow decay out of mind. I put the gnawing hunger in my gut out of mind. I put my hatred of this place out of mind. Slowly I slide my eyes up-river, slowly I turn my head. On the farthest edge of the horizon waver the indigo tips of the Karsin Mountains, the start of the Ridgelands--the objective. My skin brain, long totally disengaged from the skin proper, crunches the data and comes up with a distance. It’ll only be a few more days.
[tab]I start chewing on another piece of taro without a thought. I can live with a few more days.
[tab]The earth bakes, chalky yellow-brown that crunches under my boots. I walk on autopilot, the Karsins retreating into the distance footstep by footstep. I pull the brim of my gaucho hat low, roll my shoulders against the absurd brocaded poncho to shuffle the Gauss rifle beneath it, and studiously ignore the ticking distance indicator at the bottom right of my vision.
[tab]The road has been out of use for months, discernible in optical mostly due to a consistent pattern of fewer rocks covering it than the landscape on either side, the storms having had their way with the simple dirt trail. The Mernt don’t come this way anymore. The Standards saw to that when they fell out of the slate sky guns blazing.
[tab]I was here for their invasion. I watched the ships fall. I saw the masers and electrocasters light up the skies. I watched the surge of refugees, of women and children fleeing in panic. I watched men cut down. I smelled the ozone, the fear, the despair, the death. I tasted it. It seeped into my bones. “Observe,” they had told me.
[tab]I observed. It was electric--quickly boring, quickly monotonous and disgusting, but for a brief moment, it was electric. I observed it all.
[tab]Then one day Home started talking. In the blink of an eye centuries of silence became an endless media blitz. Praxzen Bureaucracy Foreign Relations Bureau this, Praxzen Bureaucracy Trade Promotion Council that. Within the messages, within the advertisements, there were patterns. Patterns only easily noted by someone with the right processing architecture. Patterns only easily noted by those like me. The messages in these patterns were never complicated. Operation “Corduroy” became “Stonewall,” “Observe” became “Observe and report,” and “Mernt” became “Standard.”
[tab]So I started moving. I went thousands of miles from the bizarrely acrid cesspools of the Scattershot Lakes through Manderly Basin, a third of the way around the planet by foot, by primitive carriage, by riverboat, and once more by foot. I hazard a glance at the distance indicator and find myself immediately wishing I hadn’t.
[tab]I take up position on a small escarpment with the setting sun off to one side so as neither to stare into it nor be silhouetted against it. A few kilometers ahead, sits the ramshackle Standard capital of Airharbor, a sprawl of piled mudbrick and rocks studded with corrugated roofs and primitive antennae, swarmed by dull, buzzing air vehicles going this way and that with neither rhyme nor seemingly reason. I observe it for some time, watching it shift into a visual cacophony as thousands of clashing lights and signs begin to glow in protest against twilight. I find I come up with little to report other than “primitive.”
[tab]I hear the crunch of approaching footsteps several minutes before they begin to draw near, and count three sources moving together. I try to figure out how they might’ve spotted me. Finally they stop, some five meters behind me.
[tab]“Hey, Blondie,” comes a twangy drawl, “what you think you’re doing there?” The dialect is clearly not Mernt. So, these are Standards.
[tab]I take my time picking up my hat, put it on, adjust it, and rise. I listen intently. My delay is long enough to provoke a “I said--” before I turn around.
[tab]“Well look here, boys!” says one of the three, “I think we got us one of them Mernt! I thought they all done run off!”
[tab]I survey this group--posse--and find them just as archaic as their city: a lot of denim, leather, shades, paramilitary style vests and joint-pads, knives, and guns, guns, guns. Each has at least four different projectile guns visible. They match, in vague outlines, Mernt descriptions I’ve heard of Standard civilians. I have observed. My report: threat rating is not necessarily a function of firepower. “I--I don’t want any trouble.” I say it quiet, in a Mernt accent.
[tab]“You hear that? He doesn’t want any trouble!” They laugh as if it’s the height of comedy and creep closer in some mockery of intimidation. Yes, that’s good, closer.
[tab]“I don’t want any trouble,” I parrot again.
[tab]“That’s too bad, I done hear trouble’s having a firesale!” They cross the two-and-a-half meter boundary, positioning themselves in an equilateral triangle, pinning me to the edge of the escarpment. I find I can’t help but grin. I’ve got that electric feeling again.
[tab]“What’re you smiling about, boy?”
[tab]The rising anger in his voice makes me chuckle. I lick my lips, and take up their slurred speech, “I think ya’ll done misunderstood the source of the trouble I were indicating.”
[tab]A flash of confusion overtakes them for an instant. At this range it’s all I need. I fling my poncho over my head--taking the hat with it--and into the face of the left Standard and simultaneously grab the right one by the windpipe, using the motion to counterbalance a kick to the left one’s celiac plexus. Rebalancing again, I bring my left hand back across, grab a knife from the right one’s belt and tear his throat out while slashing the same of the center. Hot arterial blood sprays everywhere, glowing like neon in my infrared pits.
[tab]I turn to find the left Standard on the ground, frozen in momentary horror. I lunge on him and pin him with my right hand about his jaw, holding the point of the knife a centimeter from his right eye. “Where’s your vehicle?” in no local accent.
[tab]He struggles, wide-eyed. I slowly bring the knife closer. “I’m only going to ask one more time.”
[tab]He moves his eyes back the way they’d come from, mutters something. It figures as much. I toss the knife aside and study his face. His eyes are of particular interest, a light brown. I cycle my contacts from Mernt red to this Standard shade. In the reflection of his eyes I can see them go clear, revealing my own as pure, infinite black. The Standard makes a muffled scream and I snap his neck.
[tab]I stand and take stock of the situation: three dead bodies and my clothes and blood-splattered, as are two of the casualties, but the third is alright. I resolve to go get the vehicle first--maybe it’ll have a shovel.
[tab]I should’ve made the last one dig and strip before killing him. I go over this point again and again until I throw the last spade-full of earth onto the shallow graves. I find some lighter top soil and distribute it over them to diminish the obvious color difference. A few weeks under Abell’s glare and no one’s going to be any the wiser.
[tab]I adjust the straps and belts of the various Standard harnesses and holsters and collect my hat and poncho--“I got them off a Mernt.”
[tab]I take a final look at Airharbor before boarding the aerial vehicle--“the veto.” Time to do some more observing and reporting.

Departure from Hankville

Mersey Toles leaned back heavily in her chair, chewing on one end of a stick of sponch and feeding the other through the piercings in her lips as she waited, with no lack of impatience, for the Spaceport Authority to grant her vessel takeoff authorization. She was young, barely an adult by Hankish reckoning, and clad in an odd assortment of fabrics, including a heavily-worn vest that might have been high fashion on the old moon a decade ago. Now, it was little more than a tattered, sentimental garment. Air blowing through the cabin jingled the twisted pieces of metal jewellery that held her frizzy hair into distinct locks.

Her ship was Something Ventured, a Wild Blue-Class Escort Frigate. Its weapons systems had been entirely scrapped, throwing the 'Escort' portion of its name into contention, and its once-spacious interior had been gutted to make way for a battery of auxiliary burst drives and a tightly-packed cargo hold, but its aesthetic curves and unnecessarily streamlined chassis betrayed its past. It was an elegant vessel, designed in more prosperous times for less utilitarian purposes.

Mersey was in many ways an organic mirror of her vessel. She'd been little more than a child when Datha burned, too young directly comprehend the trauma of her home's destruction, but not old enough for the event to fail to mold her as a human being. Born into the family of an up-and-coming shipping manager at Hank-Sober, she might have experienced the luxuries of life in the Dathic upper crust, though she had little conception of what sorts of alien wonders such a life would actually entail.

It was not something she spent too much time fretting over, possibly due to the fact that she couldn't really understand the magnitude of what had been lost- no one her age could. She'd grown up fast, by necessity, developing an indefatigable sense of responsibility and self-reliance. Long absences from her parents had left her quite accustomed to the isolation that comes hand in hand with work in the shipping business.

Though this time she was not alone.

"Mister Toong, be this one ready to go?"

Her accent rang distinctly of the Dathic Moon of Quorum, from which most of the people who identified themselves as Hankish had originated. Further back in the corvette, a middle-aged diplomat, Yurnun Toong, extended his head from behind a mass of boxed supplies.

"All clicked into place. Shall these ones get moving now?"

As if on cue, Mersey's comm jack buzzed, and the launch clearance transmitted itself through. Without taking a moment to think, the pilot began to instinctively flow through the routines. As the familiar drone of atmospheric engines began to vibrate the cabin, she opened up the interface to her navigational computer.

"Glon..." she murmured, a smile playing at her lips. "Should be fun."

Lights in the Darkness

"You're sure about this?"

"The spectral work is ancient stuff, so yes I’m sure. Whether that links up to any of the known Pre-Third Age ruins is harder to determine,"

"Run, a better model. I hear the Yanii have done some excellent work on mathematical modeling of populations,"

"That's their cutting edge stuff. I can maybe hack the mathematics but there is no way I can understand the social underpinnings of the models they are using. Our own sociologists can't grasp the basics of the social models they’re using,"

"Well, how about incorporating the hardware we’ve been developing"

"You know that won’t work. Be happy with what I'm giving you,"

"Yes, yes....Well write it up and send it to me. I'll clean it up and present it to the Pentarchs,"

"Sure thing,"

"Cvetan, fly safe"

Cvetan smiled "Thanks,"

Cvetans optical and visual feeds terminated. He sighed in the recesses of his mind and checked the time and brought up the airlock controls. In a moment he was outside. His mask and robe on, he moved himself slightly above the outer hull of the Glon Space Station and admired the view. He brought up his multispectra sensors to admire the light of Glon reflected in Glon I, cycling through some wavelength ranges and settled on a combination of a few X-ray and ultraviolet wavelengths.

He considered going to one of the observation points inside the station to admire Glon directly, before rejecting it. They were always crowded. It was hard to enjoy the views with the presence of others. He began to write his report.


Cvetan, hailed Casey, one of his doctoral students, on his implants,

"Hey Case, the Pentarchs have given us the go ahead. I, uh, owe you a drink," That bet had always been a win-win he mused.

"Hah, they’re sending us to SAH8 then. I told you the models for SAH4 wouldn't pan out,"

"And I told them that we should be looking in the out of the way places, the ones that haven't been picked over yet,"

"Or harbour hiders and raiders, we don't want a repeat of the Pre-Jump incidents,"

"Look, the model suggested a three sigma certainty of finding a relic on those pre-third age ruins on Caos, the Hiders were an absurdly unlikely outcome and none of the post incident analysis changed that,"

Prior to their arrival in Alnitah Subsegment the Ilosians had been combining their twin loves of mining and wander-lust to look for relics. The Hiders had been of the confrontational sort, it had not ended well. They had left for a Long Jump almost immediately. Alnitah combined ease of travel and being the arse-end of nowhere it was a good place and time to cool down and do some more relic hunting.

"Hey Cvetan, Think we’ll find something at SAH8?" Case’s voice cut through Cvetans reverie.

"I don’t think it matters Case, SAH8 is the gateway into the Fingers, Triplets and eventually the Cloudbank. Our primary mission is to determine if there are any good rare metal lodes. Everything else is a bonus,"

Shadowbound and Seon: I am disappoint. You still have time as I haven't started on the update yet, but one of my friends isn't going to have a stroke every weekend, so future deadlines will be stricter.

<3 storywriters

OOC: I'm sorry to hear about your friend. British black humor