Sunset: Then, Now, Tomorrow (Maintenance & Role-Play)

[Sunset]

Delta Tangiers Orbit, Tangiers System, Beta Quadrant, Milky Way Galaxy... Republic Date 175.546...

"...a flimsy excuse."

"The flimsiest," Captain Pie'T agreed quietly, standing just off the Admiral's right shoulder as the pair stood alone on the transparent view screen that dominated the forward half of Sinetyra's command deck.

As the flagship of the fleet, the Heavy Cruiser was afforded a second command section where the Admiral and his officers could oversee the operation though the view screen itself was wholly unnecessary. Even in the OSA - which loved to bark commands and push buttons - the orbital side of things was regulated by computers. Thus the officers who stood at their stations far behind the pair were mostly silent Watchers while the Admiral himself - a Pagani of aging years and the grey roots to his horns to prove it - was only there to issue the broadest of orders and to fulfill the requirements of personal responsibility. This left him free to watch the action as it unfolded 'below' and to comment back and forth with the Captain, who was similarly unneeded at the moment.

Delta Tangiers was one of the Martian Conglomerate's COATs - Corporate Owned Alien Territory - and like all of the other COATs in this slice of the galaxy the OSA had decided that today was the day to show up. All at once - and in overwhelming numbers. Below them the dusty yellow surface rolled by as Sinetyra headed towards the endless horizon. Underneath their feet the flattened wedges of Thunderer drop ships raced ahead while gull-winged Loki's followed. They'd hitched a ride in the drive envelope of one of the other vessels and were now nosing into the thin atmosphere, their destination a corporate outpost another thousand kilometers past the curve of the planet.

"There's no way the natives have this kind of money..."

"Mhmn;" which didn't make it as much an 'excuse' as a 'reason'. Where in other places the inhabitants - mostly human, occasionally not - made suitable if unwilling additions to the Conglomerate corporation's profit-driven workforce that was not the case on Delta Tangiers. Here the inhabitants were natives and highly adapted to the marginal conditions. To get at the valuable resources they wanted, the corporation had 'negotiated' the natives onto reservations.

Hardly fair when the fellow across the table had space ships and a corporate military only answering to the same fellow, was it?

Well, the OSA had more ships, more soldiers, tanks, aircraft, and giant stompy robots. It had also been given a surprisingly generous contract in cash and paid up front to secure the planet and enforce native law while the original treaty was 're-examined' minus the legal system that had allowed it in the first place.

All across the region and across the reasons the question now was 'would they fight?'. The rational answer was 'no' - the Conglomerate corporations were far poorer after the last cycle of government chaos and collapse. The standing offer would be nearly the same; the OSA would remove and provide transport for corporate citizens and personal possessions back to their planet of origin. Everything else would stay behind as small compensation. If they fought...

They'd find that the OSA was ready and itching to fight.

[Sunset]

Joint Committee Chambers; Senate Foreign Relations & Economy Committees, CORE CyberGov Virtual Proceedings... Republic Date 175.554...

"To begin, it is clear that the previous government of the Martian Conglomerate and the corporations that exercised an undue amount of influence over it were together guilty of especially pernicious activities in the pursuit of personal power and corporate profits," Secretary Jin began, his triangular face calmly stern as he laid his charges bare before the seated committee. Beside him sat the Undersecretaries for Labor, Commerce, and Industry with their expressions if not their features largely following his own. As high-ranking technocrats, their duties were largely managerial and analytical and their insights would help inform the political policies that would be shaped by the two committees they faced.

"Based on information supplied by the new government - and verified in detail by my own departments - we have come to the joint conclusion that the government and corporations colluded together against the citizens of the Martian Conglomerate by means of their aggressive expansion into the galaxy. The details of the scheme are as follows; to secure so-called 'vital resources' for the state, certain Martian Conglomerate corporations were empowered to establish colonies and settlements with the stated purpose of extracting these resources. These resources were then purchased by the government at costs far above market rates. Further, these resources were typically neither vital nor rare - helium-3, titanium, and other common minerals and elements. These resources were and continue to be available in large quantities and at competitive rates from their Martian neighbors or from their own Martian soil."

"This was the most basic of graft, Senators. But this was not the end of the scheme. It should be noted that during the previous government, the corporations had their own political representation. Tracing back the currents of money and corruption, it is clear that the corporations themselves enacted the legislation and regulations that enabled the scheme. The government was required to purchase these 'vital resources' by the purveyors of the resources themselves. But further, the corporations then created the 'need' for these 'vital resources' by enacting policies - through their political representation - that would put the Conglomerate at odds with foreign powers and thus with the apparent 'need' for those resources."

"These resources and the graft and corruption associated were not free," he emphasized harshly. "Ultimately their cost fell on the citizens of the Conglomerate and this cost was paid twice. First, the average tax burden was far higher than it would have otherwise been. This was - as I said - to pay an above-average rate for resources the Conglomerate did not need or could gain elsewhere for less. Second, the corporations were able to use the justification of a 'vital war industry' to manipulate the labor laws in their favor, both placing employee safety at risk as well as paying them less than the industry average. Further, the corporations were then also empowered to 'recruit' native labor to support their efforts - a situation which has been likened to indentured servitude," he said, looking to the Undersecretary of Labor, who nodded her approval of the statement.

"More than that, this high tax burden was a weight around the neck of the entire Conglomerate economy. This excessive tax burden - concentrate mainly on those in the lowest income brackets thanks to a proliferation of tax-avoidance schemes - reduced the amount of discretionary wealth available to the average citizen to such an extreme that consumer spending suffered. This in turn caused a downturn in the market for consumer goods - responsible for a much larger portion of the economy than resource extraction - and a decrease in tax revenues. Which, as the resources this tax revenue purchased were 'vital' to the state, caused the state to again increase tax rates and again modify industry regulations. A cycle that would have likely concluded in civil war if not for the corporation's own attempts to overthrow the state by force."

"Of interest to the committee is what has now happened in the immediate aftermath. The Conglomerate corporations established a large number of often-small resource extraction sites and settlements across the galaxy. A survey of those sites - as provided by the new government - has found that most of these are now abandoned. Without the exorbitant income provided by the state, the corporations have pulled their operations back to only the most profitable sites. Of the majority, many were fully abandoned but others have been taken over by the employees that these same corporations 'cut loose' - leave them to live or die by their own devices. Some of these so-called 'wildcat' operations have become successful while others have failed spectacularly..."

[Sunset]

A Dusty Red Planet, GEC-2005 System, Ares Local Cluster, On the Alpha-Beta Border... Republic Date 175.580...

"...an odd place for a picnic," Erika said, her first words as her projected image blurred into existence next to her daughter, who was sitting ankles-crossed on an uncomfortable looking rock, her violet eyes looking here and there across the barren landscape. It was no hyperbole; the one planet that had formed however many billions of years ago in GEC-2005's habitable zone had never made it that far. A tenuous atmosphere had been stripped away millions of years later and when one of the Triumvirate of Yut's Beagle-Class Explorers had passed through the system they'd found it exactly as it was now and had been since - uninhabited and uninteresting.

"Oh, but it won't be," Katryna replied, a knowing grin on her chin as she glanced back over her shoulder at her mother and then down at the old-fashioned wicker picnic basket sitting on the ground next to her. That was incongruously real and inside Erika could see a bottle of wine - frozen solid - as well as an antique French china set and the smaller baskets that would undoubtably hold the rest of the prepared dishes. "Someone said something the other day and it got me thinking..."

Which explained the grin and her mother's next comment, "That's dangerous, you thinking."

"It is! Back in 2032, someone else had an idea too and they got to thinking. There was a lot of new and exciting things happening back then and that was the decade when the first real cybernetics were starting to come on the market. They were an artist, you see - but they couldn't hold a brush or a stylus to save their life. He had beautiful images in his head but no matter how much he practiced he couldn't put them on canvas. He was technically gifted though, so what he did was design what he called a 'mental image camera' - a way to record and then print an image entirely conceived in the human consciousness. It was a fantastic invention for its time but there was a catch - just like putting pencil to paper, the quality of the image and the detail depended entirely on how well trained and focused the particular mind was."

"He put it to good use - his mind worked that way," she said after a moment's pause.

"But not everyone 'thinks' that way. The idea is still in use, of course - mostly used by designers to rapidly create the 'broad strokes' of a design or image," she said, holding up one hand as though hooked through a painter's palette and moving the other as though there was a brush between her fingers. "Then they usually turn to their regular tools to refine it. There was a bit of a craze though, back in the same era - images captured, printed, and sold just as they were as art. DaFoe, Gambison - a few others. They're very valuable now."

"And we're going to do this?" Erika guessed, looking around at the harsh landscape. There were several formations that looked worthy of such an effort, but they could just as easily be captured by the high-resolution cameras that most everyone had lurking just behind their eyeballs - again, the results of that cybernetic age.

Again there was that smile, "Nope! Take a walk with me..."

Taking the picnic basket, she stood and began to walk, again explaining as she went, "See, minds like ours are particularly well-suited to the idea. They're very disciplined, very orderly. We don't lose 'resolution' between our eyes and our storage like biologicals do. And the same is true of our mental images. They have as much detail and are as accurate as we want them to be. Now, I somehow doubt that we would end up producing very valuable images because of that - those prints are art because they are the product of the artist's subjective perception. What their brain considers important enough to render and in what detail to render it."

One set of footprints left dusty impressions in the dull red regolith and they walked together, Katryna swinging the basket back and forth at her side, until a narrow gap between two curled slabs yawned ahead of them and she hurried through. Pointing off to the left, she drew her mother's attention, "Here!"

Erika rounded the corner and found herself looking down a rusty lane between two low canyon walls but the ancient passage was only there for a moment. Just ahead of her feet the ground was changing, transforming. Crimson soil began to sprout tendrils of green that spread out to either side and raced ahead. In the center regularly spaced objects began to sprout up, resolving themselves into stylish concrete planters filled with rich, loamy brown soil. A tree sprouted from the closest, rapidly growing up and out until a canopy of bright green spread out above them and fruit - apples - hung from the furthest branches.

"What is this?" she looked around to watch as the canyon walls were replaced or augmented with the sharp edges of buildings facing what was now a pleasant walking street. A section of one - braced between two remaining slabs of the original wall - retreated to form an alcove with a window set in the middle and a flower bed with a comfortable-looking bench sprouted up in the vacated space. Looking away and back even for a moment resulted in the addition of more details with the interior of a small shop appearing behind that same window and a doorway just down the way sliding open to beckon them inside. "Nanites? Or..."

She had a guess but she waited for Katryna to confirm it with a shake of her head, "Nope! This is the next step. We've transistorized boundary manipulation, we've made software. This is direct mental expression. I took exactly that idea and I've piped it through a specialized version of the TRIPWIRE array that's pulling power from Nichibotsu*. All of this," the two stepped into a small square with a rapidly growing edifice emblazoned with the Republic's Atomic Sunburst flag facing back down the street they had just come from, "is real. Or at least as real as anything in this universe is, given what we're now capable of."

There was a fountain in the middle of the square with jets of water playing up and down in a choreographed figure-eight - the symbol for infinity, she realized - and Katryna placed her basket on a table that sprouted right out of the ground while the benches to either side spread out so they'd have a place to sit. Flipping back the lid, she began to take out their lunch while the sounds of birds began to drift around them and a pollinating bee buzzed by, intent on delivering its own cargo to the flowers that bloomed in the planter boxes under the benches.

"This... I did say you thinking was dangerous. This is really dangerous," Erika warned. Every moment more and more details were cropping into existence, some appearing as though copied and pasted while others followed the pattern of the fountain to grow out of the ground. "Fantastic..."

Katryna nodded before a sip of wine, "It is. I'm it though - I'm the only one that can do this. At least for now. We ran some simulations back in the lab - it didn't work, even for Amaril;" Menelmacari having reasonably ordered minds, and her husband an engineer to boot. "Things would happen. You know that whole myth about men thinking about sex every seven seconds? It wasn't seven seconds, but there was nudity. For as long as he could hold the image. When he stopped concentrating it fell apart. Our minds are so organized that I won't over-write something I've already created but theirs aren't. Details - resolution - gets lost or fuzzy really quickly."

Overhead the sky was now... Well, there was a sky. It was just the right shade of blue and there were puffy white clouds drifting across it, angling towards their unknown destination. A slight breeze rustled the grass at their feet and the flags of the various Republic Federal States dangling from their poles outside the building rippled and furled.

"That's the weather system starting up. I cheated a bit there - again, something only an electronic mind can do. A hypothetical model for the planet's weather if it had an Earth-like atmosphere. Animals..." she looked to the side and a deer stepped into the road, nibbling unconcerned on the grass before looking up and past the two. "Culled from existing databases. They're real but I've set a filter so nothing too intelligent is created. No whales, no great apes. Right now we're sitting in the only city on the planet but inside of a couple weeks..."

[Sunset]

RDF Training Academy 2, Peabody (Colony World), Far Western Fringe of the Ares Super-Cluster... Republic Date 175.589...

"...while you're not expected to be economists, having some grasp of the concepts can give you some insight into those you might one day interact with - particularly those in government or the military. So everyone grab the rope..."

It seemed to be an odd way to conduct an economics class but this was the Academy and the gathered cadets were used to odd lessons. One by one they bent, stooped, or squatted to pick up the thick rope that had been stretched out across one side of the grassy lane that divided the cobble walkway from a series of tree-studded planter boxes. When the last student had taken their place the instructor - a young-looking woman of indistinct Human origins - counted down the line until she reached the middle of the class. Taking a scarf out of her pocket, she tied the red ribbon around the rope between the two cadets.

"Now, just like a tug-of-war, an economy is basically a contest between opposing forces. More than two, usually..." she paused as the more competitive cadets began to look back and forth across the ribbon, subtle tugs already indicating their readiness to engage in economic warfare on the campus green. "But we'll get to that. Right now what we're interested in is the tension in the system."

Reaching between a pair, she grabbed the rope and tried to tug it to no avail, "Everyone feel that? Nice and tense - everyone is ready to pull, ready to do their part. Ready?" she raised a hand and looked up and down the line, "Steady? Pull!"

Young and old, green and blue, they all pulled for all they were worth as feet and hooves dug into the grass. Muscles strained and mouths cursed and grunted, some urging their impromptu team on while others hauled in stoic silence. In fits and starts the ribbon moved, tugged first one way and then the other as their strength waxed and waned. For a minute and then two it looked like a stalemate and then the marker began to inexorably move, one team pulling the other forward until a foot reached the edge of the grass behind them.

"Alright!" she held up the matching hand, "Game over! Stop!"

A few more self-congratulatory tugs and the winning team wound down, standing eagerly with the rope still in their hands or nearby breathing hard as they recovered. A minute to rest and she spoke again to immediate laughter, "Well done - the economy has collapsed!"

"Now what was the problem?"

"Not everyone was pulling!" one of the cadets on the losing side complained while another added, "They had stronger people!"

"Two reasons," the instructor agreed with a nod. "And we're going to be putting some blame here, but that's part of the lesson. Yes, not everyone was pulling as hard as they could and the two sides weren't balanced. The same thing happens in an economy but yet the rope was still tense. There wasn't any slack - any room to adjust. So this time I want half of each team to come over here," she gestured, pointing to the cobbled walk.

One by one they left, counting themselves off or making their own decision as to whether they would be able to contribute as well as another to the remaining team. Whether by design or choice those that remained were also the strongest and largest competitors, one team anchored by a slate-grey Eakhm, the rhino-like centaur standing tall with the rope coiled around both thick wrists and the other by a massive Troll. She held her end loosely but the knot of muscles under her tunic threatened to bulge again at any moment, hauling everyone between the two into the air.

"Ready?" she looked one side to the other, "And... Pull!"

The battle began anew but this time the teams were not as evenly matched and the ribbon began to immediately march toward the Eakhm in a steady repeat of the last match.

"Now this time there's obviously tension in the system but there's also a lot of slack," she looked to either side at the cadets who'd taken themselves out of competition. "So let's balance things out. Not too many at once though!"

With little urging the Troll was joined by three, then four, then nearly eight until the marker was steady in its place.

"Now a few more," she urged. "Until we get it back to the middle..."

It took more than a few; the great gray quadruped had apparently been holding his strength for just that moment and it took a solid five minutes of sweaty heaving to get him to give ground.

"Now the system is in balance but..." she stepped up to the middle, "What if one side decides to let go? A systemic failure? A drought?"

For a moment both sides looked anxious, wondering which side would send the other tumbling onto their butts.

"The good news is that we can absorb that shock because we have some slack," she pointed to the remaining cadets. "Go stand next to your teammates - don't take the rope, just be ready."

The Troll had other ideas and with everyone distracted, she released her end of the rope and even the Eakhm took a stumbling step backward while others spilled over each other.

"And that's it - once again the economy has collapsed! Alright - we're done for the a little bit. So, what have we learned? We've learned that an economy needs tension - forces pulling from both sides so that things stay in balance - but also that it needs slack. A way to absorb shocks to the system. And you want the right amount of both. You can learn a lot about an economy and a civilization by how much of each is in the system. There are no absolutes but an economy with more slack tends to be better prepared for shocks and a good indication of competent leadership and government while a particularly tense economy tends to reflect a government that is poorly prepared or incompetent. Don't make absolute judgements though - the reason we have slack is so we can absorb shocks and there's not a lot that's more shocking than suddenly finding out your civilization isn't alone in the universe..."

[Sunset]

Dr. Juanita Esteban-Gomez' Office, Grand Iesus, Ducri, The Ares Local Cluster... Republic Date 175.619...

"...you're asking for my what now?" the physician said, looking at her visitor oddly from under eyebrows stitched into a question mark. In her younger years, Dr. Esteban-Gomez had been a reasonably plain woman of the ethnicity her name suggested but as she'd aged - or at least the body she still wore as habitually as the medical scanner she kept tucked into the pocket of whatever outfit she was wearing that day - her increasing collection of lines, wrinkles, and gray hairs had turned into an elegantly crafted portrait of a woman in her professional Prime. Behind her and around the office were the other possessions of her art; displays showing everything from minute cell cultures to sprawling maps of entire star systems with hot spots marked and accompanied by scrolling numbers. Instruments with purposes both apparent and prosaic sat here and there with the largest being an old Mark-23 Multi-Spectrum HydroAnalyzer that sat in one corner, arms akimbo as it patiently awaited a sample.

"A copy of your concious engram," the visitor repeated, though she was certain the Doctor knew what she had asked for - the real question and thus answer was why.

The visitor was from Special Projects and both the pin on her lapel and the note on her appointment indicated such. She was younger than the Doctor by far - both mentally and physically - and was what could be reasonably called a 'gopher'. Go for this, go for that - visit a thousand different people and ask them the same question and be ready to explain why you're asking.

"We're working on a project to assemble copies of the concious engrams from a thousand or so of the best examples of technical experts, academics, scientists, and so forth across a similarly broad spectrum of specialties, from all across the Republic."

That last was an important qualification. Other entities were going about the same task and they too were in possession of experts that could be said to be 'better' than those of the Republic, just as some from the Republic were assuredly better than their own. That wasn't the point though - the point was to have a variety of cultural perspectives and experiences as well as raw knowledge, a point that was just about to be addressed.

"Why? A simple search can tell you everything I know."

"It isn't strictly about the knowledge, though that is part of it. Great works are typically the combination of the right knowledge, the right mindset, and the right circumstances. We're looking for your mindset and your knowledge - the final circumstances are unpredictable. We're going to take this collection and store a copy of it on every Defense Force platform large enough to not notice the loss in mass of an object," she sketched out a space with her hands, "about this big."

"A breadbox? Mass is not the same as volume, Miss Octavia."

"No ma'am," the visitor returned her hands to her lap, "it is not. But the specifics on the mass are classified while the volume is not."

Of course some of the people she'd visited had immediately attempted to work out just how many engrams the device could store based on the volume described and known densities for various available storage media, but nerds were nerds.

The Doctor though seemed to accept the answer as plain and moved on, "What will be the purpose of this device?"

"In case of emergency. Normally the RDF is able to call on in-person expertise from nearly anywhere, no matter the location of the expert or the service member in need of that expertise:" Juanita nodded. She'd had colleagues in related specialties that had been called on and she herself had provided remote expertise on a few occasions - the work if an epidemiologist being less hands-on than others. "But it is the job of Special Projects - my division, at least - to prepare for the unexpected. By preparing this system the RDF will still have access to appropriate expertise and again mindset even if our entire communications network goes offline."

"That sounds reasonable if remote," Juanita said with a frown...

"...with our budget, we can afford to worry about the slimmest of chances, Doctor," Octavia smiled, letting the physician continue with her thought; "Will they be alive?"

"As in concious? No. That has a wide range of ethical concerns. The data will be stored as separate parts - files - on a physical media. If the need arises it will be loaded onto a non-volatile substrate. It will lack the morphic capabilities of a concious mind. In the worst of the worst case scenarios, the engram could be loaded onto a morphic substrate but that individual would then be an individual and thus under the full protection of our laws - even if done under Defense Force auspices. I have a wide body of referential case law, if you would like it," she offered.

Dr. Esteban-Gomez shook her head, "No, it won't be necessary. I'm familiar with the law. How would the procedure work, if I were to accede?"

"Like the vast majority of the individuals selected, your mind resides in an ExoCortex stored in the Eien. When you sleep - the ExoCortex's maintenance cycle - we would make a copy of your mind-state. You shouldn't even notice, though there have been a few individuals who have reported the occasional dream where they see themselves in a mirror or similar. Nothing harmful."

"And have you ever had to activate this system? Activate someone? In either manner?" This would seem to be her final question as she returned to her desk and sat down, hands beginning to organize the space in anticipation of returning to work.

"No. We're still in the assembly stage. There's been testing, of course..."

"...of course..."

"...but only using engrams from inside Special Projects and only onto the non-volatile substrate. Once we've assembled our experts the system will go live in a few hours and we would then inform you - as stipulated in the contract - if a fully concious copy of your engram was ever activated..."

[Sunset]

TYCS-Cephalopod, Circlet VI Station-Keeping Berth, Delta Quadrant, Milky Way Galaxy... Eh, It's Only Been a Few Years...

"...because it would be funny as hell."

That had been Katryna's - no, Admiral Silaco's - default answer for the past fifteen minutes or so. She'd even trotted out the uniform for the occasion, standing at mock attention next to the Cephalopod's Captain as the bridge crew familiarized themselves with their stations. A lot of the Combined Service still used buttons and knobs for certain things and so the drills being conducted behind her were often resolved by 'Where's the button to..?'

"Just think about it. You've been isolated for however long, laboring under the assumption that somewhere out there the Triumvirate of Yut is sitting there plotting your utter destruction;" she nearly broke into a laugh at that one. It only took a bare modicum of research (Amendment Two, Sections 1 and 2) to establish that it had been established as a defensive charter - at least as far as the military was concerned - and that more-still the various extant member states were more interested in trade, cultural exchange, and beach parties than they were with anything resembling conquest.

"...you poke your head up, invite everyone over, someone starts something, and it's the god-damned Triumvirate of Yut Combines Services that shows up to keep the peace!"

"What are the odds?" Captain McHale asked, though there was the honest question of whether he was being rhetorical or if he was seriously asked for the Admiral to do some bookmaking.

"Not good."

"Not good? Five-to-one? Three? What kind of action should we be expecting?"

She half-turned to look at him directly, "Honestly? The very fact that we're going through all this rigamarole," she gestured to the screens where the great beak-prowed bulk of the Supreme Emperor-Class Battleship stretched away from them into the far distance before tapering off into empty space only to be replaced by the glowing hexagonal radiators of another one of the behemoths just a few hundred meters beyond it, "says that it will never happen."

There wasn't just one more either. There were dozens - scores even - of the great gray juggernauts with their iconic dreadnought bows and mid-ships 'smoke stacks' - really auxiliary heat exchangers - stretching away and behind until they faded into the thin band of the Circlet itself. Over, under, and between them there were also the usual collection of second-line WarShips with everything from missile-spewing Grendels, fast Pumas, the odd Sulaco, and innumerable Lokis represented. And each and every one of them was proudly emblazoned with the blue, silver, and gold roundel of the Triumvirate of Yut. Not just painted either - each step from the background circle to the foreground star was raised and vividly enameled, as was the lettering each ship carried with their name and identification/classification cypher.

Of course, they'd also been nothing but star-stuff just a few hours earlier. And neither were they technically products of the Combine Service's shipyards and thus perhaps technically they weren't on the fleet roster.

Oh well - Article Two covered that.

Technically they weren't Supreme Emperor, President-General, or Grendel-Class vessels either. These all sported PTU-557 composite hulls - so dense that it made other post-transuranics question their purpose in life - as well as upgraded weapon systems, ordinance, shield grids, electronic systems, and juuuuuust enough crew to technically count as 'manned'. Which also mean that they didn't have the enormous open spaces that would normally allow their crews to do things like play Gear Hockey or set up an alpine bobsled in one of the storage bays. These were all replaced with boom. Lots and lots of it.

It also didn't matter that the crew - RDF seconds to a man, even if they did a pretty good job of representing the wide spectrum possible to the Combined Services - didn't know their ass from their elbow as far as the ship's controls were concerned. It only took the ship's Captain issuing the order to 'blow them up but good' and the ship's combat computer would take over, making sure the result was not only 'good' but particularly high on the Baysian Quotient.

"That's just the way it works," she continued with a shrug. "We take all this time and effort - admittedly not a whole lot of effort, given just how big our triangle is - and the short odds are that nothing happens. I mean, I wouldn't try anything. Not in front of the Menelmacari or the C'tan. They'll gleefully turn you inside out. I mean, sure - there's the outside chance that some idiot that I won't name because I'm nice," she clasped her hands in front of her and batted her lashes innocently, "might decide to turn up, throw their tantrum around, bellow for attention... But I doubt it."

"But you're not promising," he pointed out.

"Nope. Can't promise anything. All I've got on my side is precedent. All they have is a long history of excuses. If something does happen, we'll be ready at the post..."

[Sunset]

OSA-General How'Eel, The Sea of Ghosts, Juniper, The Coreward Expansion Zone... Republic Date 175.633...

"...gentlemen, I suggest you come inside," the Pagani Lieutenant said, a serupticious smile creeping across her charming features. Like the two visiting VIPs, she was standing at the battleship's railing but while they stood with one hand or two on the rail, she stood casually with her hands tucked behind her back, her lean body steady against the slow motion of the waves against the great sloped sides. "Its about to get a lot wetter and a lot rougher..."

Above and behind a claxon sounded and what crew were visible across the decks and clustered around the guns dashed from their places. Most followed the Lieutenant's unheard suggestion while others reached for lockers and bins, pulling out colorful helmets and brightly patterned vests.

"What do you mean?" the first half-shouted over the jarring noise, a portly Hauyht who also happened to be the Mayor of the How'Eel's first port of call as well as a (distant) relative of that same notable namesake. "Is this some kind of drill?"

"Uh, sir;" he felt his assistant's tug on his sleeve and looked over, "What is it?"

The assistant, a much leaner and younger man than the Mayor, kept his hand clutched on his sleeve while he pointed over the side with the other, "Look!"

The sea that had been relatively calm when they'd boarded had now become a choppy froth, surging up against the sides only to fall back again as briny foam. Just down the way they could see the yacht that had brought them out, its own crew racing around the deck like headless chickens as it was steadily pushed away.

"Are we under attack?" he asked again, already unsure of his own question. "Are we sinking?"

The Pagani said nothing but the smile remained, only growing cleaner as a rogue wave leapt up the side of the ship to soak the pair to the skin. Flinging water away from his eyes, the Mayor studied the churn for a few seconds before turning back to her, "This is a submarine, isn't it?"

It was a question both incredulous and awed. He had no real idea how big a submarine was but this would be a doozy - and stacked high with tier after tier of heavy guns, missile launchers, and all the other usual accoutrements of war. But his assistant tugged at his sleeve again, "No, sir! Look! We're not sinking," his voice rose appreciatively...

"...we're rising..."

He stared over the side as the froth intensified, throwing up huge sharp-tipped waves as the claxon continued to wail behind him. The bulk end of something had burst free of the water and the entire ship was now straining as the last pools of water drained away only to be replaced a second later as the artificial tide roared over once again.

"...it's not a submarine," his assistant half-screamed in his ear before he unconsciously corrected him; "No... ...this is much, much worse..."

---

"...a what-now?"

"A GravShip," the Lieutenant repeated herself as the three now stood protected inside one of the glass-enclosed balconies that projected from the second-to-highest tier of the ship's armored super-structure. "In this case, a gravetic battleship, or GravBattleship if you like."

For her origins she was odd-looking but for her purpose she was fit. In addition to the guns in their turrets that rose up in terraces on the topside, another set dropped away on the bottom or 'downside' as the sailors called it. Instead of four great screws she mounted titanic impellers on her stern, invisible when she sat atop the waves. Freed of the burden of the sea she was also surprisingly fast, the distant shoreline quickly coming closer and then falling away as she raced along the coast. Her speed was such that the pennants that hung from their masts has no time to flutter or snap but instead hung as straight and quivering as an arrow.

"First of her Class, but we've already got more laid down. And GravDestroyers, GravCarriers, and even," she winked knowingly, as though she was sharing a secret she probably shouldn't, "a few GravSubmarines. Apparently someone was trolling through the old historical archives, the Ardan Wars, and they liked what they saw," she finished with a smile and a shrug...

[Sunset]

Camp Thirty-Three Artillery Range, Tengu Mun, The Coreward Expansion Zone... Republic Date 175.651...

"...when we started shooting down our own bullets, General."

"How's that?" General Tslbikora looked up from the notepad that was sitting on his lap, the pen he held between two blunt fingers twisting around as it expected an interesting answer. "Shooting down bullets? You'll have to explain that one to us..."

And by 'us' he meant the rest of the staff officers who sat on a couple rows of folding chairs facing out over the range. As in most military organizations they looked uniformly similar, which was just as much a play on words as a true fact; the average Hrkac officer wore the same brown and orange uniform with the same collection of markings and had the same tight lines shaved into the thick hair that stretched from their flat nose all the way back over their head to disappear into the cuff of their uniform blouses.

"...how does one shoot down another bullet?"

Commander Waxler paused for a moment to consider his answer. His original remark had been somewhat flippant - an easy answer to why the Republic preferred directed energy weapons rather than the bullets and chemical cartridges that the Hrkac were still using. The long answer would be rather more complicated and would also require some context, though it would be inflicted on the reader rather than the General.

Tengu Mun - the first word being the local translation for 'planet' while the second was the numerical equivalent of 'two' - sat somewhere in the middle edge of the wide slice of space deemed the Coreward Expansion Zone. It, like many other worlds and systems in the Zone, had been contacted by the Republic with an eye towards bringing it into its political system as a way to protect it from other expansionist powers that were by-and-large far less interested in things like political, social, and economic freedoms - which covered most of the galaxy when one sat back to think about it.

A little haggling, some wrangling, more than a few rounds of negotiations, and the Hrkac had signed on with the intention of becoming a Republic Federal State. They'd have their own laws in some areas, operate under the Republic Constitution where applicable, and by-and-large advance their civilization at their own pace with the interesting provision that they now knew there were intelligent beings out there with capabilities very nearly beyond their wildest dreams - science-fiction having been an established literary genre for nearly a century. One of a long list of exceptions was the military, which was more than willing to upgrade to the standards expected of the other Federal States.

After all, who wouldn't want their own spaceship? Even if they didn't have a place to park it?

And so as soon as the relevant paperwork was signed, the process of training the locals up to acceptable levels had begun. For the staff officers that was more a question of general familiarization than learning the ins-and-outs of a new system or methodology. Their role would be much the same as it was before - managerial - and thus for the most part it would be sufficient that they know that their cavalry would be able to fly rather than the specifics of gravitic propulsion. Which didn't mean that there weren't officers who demonstrated a certain technical bent or who - like the General when given an opportunity - asked for more information than the script included.

Of course the disbelief in the General's question was somewhat reasonable, even given the technology he'd already seen. At contact the Hrkac had been in possession of a military machine roughly equivalent to that of early 20th Century Earth. Very early. When cavalry was mentioned earlier, the average trooper was enthusiastic about trading in the smelly, ill-tempered ostrich-like animals that they currently rode into battle for the new-car smell of a first-generation suit of GhostDragon Power Armor. The average infantry weapon was a bolt-action rifle of credible range and stopping power but still - a bullet shooting down another bullet?

"This will require some explanation," Waxler decided. "That sounds impossible, right? A soldier standing here who tried to shoot the bullet from another soldier's gun standing all the way at the other side of the range would miss every time, right?"

There was a collective equivalent of nods and he went on, "But we didn't start with bullets - we started with missiles."

Which would require its own explanation; "Which are like the signal rockets you currently use, except they have a warhead - like a cannon shell - and are guided by an onboard mechanism. A computer. When we first began to travel through space - and fight wars in space - the missile was one of the most effective weapons. Unlike a cannon or an energy weapon - a laser, for instance - a missile can adjust its course so that it has a higher probability of hitting its target. When ships in space are moving, they are moving very fast - like a bullet, but much, much faster. Even with very advanced weapons, hitting a moving ship becomes an exercise in saturation fire."

That was at least a concept they were familiar with, as they were sitting at the head of an artillery range with a few old-fashioned towed field pieces sitting beside them. Given the amount of time it took for a shell from one of their light guns to hit the outside of its range, the ostrich cavalry that comprised the bulk of their force could have moved a hundred meters or more from the possible point of impact. The only way to have even the possibility of a hit was to fire multiple guns at the same target and more-or-less guessing where it would be when the shells came down. For the Hrkac, this mean that their artillery was mostly used against static targets and of course other artillery but also that they were familiar with the core concept the Commander was trying to convey.

Again a chorus of nods.

"Missiles offer other advantages as well. Since they have their own propulsion, they can simply be pushed away from the ship to launch themselves and because there aren't any aerodynamic concerns, they can be of whatever shape is most conductive to carrying lots of them. Which was how most battles ended up playing out - both sides would launch massive waves of missiles at each other with whoever had brought more ships and thus more missiles to the fight generally carrying the victory. One way to counter this was to create what we call 'point defense' or an anti-missile system. At first this was simply having the missiles that we fired at them recognize their missiles as valid targets - one missile shoots down another missile and again the side with more missiles wins."

"That make war generally an exercise in adding another 'zero' to the end of however many missiles the enemy had. They'd add another zero, we'd add another, and so on. But missiles are expensive compared to bullets, so we began building weapons that used cheaper bullets - or even cheaper, lasers - to shoot down the enemy missiles when they got close enough to reliably engage. Of course I can't shoot down a missile, even with a laser rifle. That takes a computer, and motors. Things that are both faster and more precise than I could ever be. So ships began to mount anti-missile systems and the way ships fought other ships began to change - different weapons for different situations, though missiles are still widely used. We even have missiles that mount point defense weapons as their warhead - a bullet with a gun on it that shoots down other bullets."

That earned him a range of expressions from curious to humorous and he continued, "Now, for some militaries, it ended right there. But we're not like that - we tend to think towards the secondary consequences. In space, distances are very large. Ships typically won't even be able to see each other when they are shooting at each other. But down here we can. Instead of having to sense and engage a target a million kilometers away, we only have to sense and engage a target that can see us. Now at first, those same point defense systems were used to engage and destroy enemy missiles, the same as in space. But when it comes down to it, a bullet is a missile that doesn't have a guidance system. The cameras and other sensing mechanisms..."

He paused again, "You're familiar with a camera, right? At your current point in development, the cameras you have take one picture at a time and they take some time to process - develop - so you can see the image, right?"

There was a general hubbub of consensus on this point and he went on, "At that point we had cameras that could take hundreds of thousands of pictures every second and then feed those pictures to a computer that could detect even the smallest details - like the flash of a muzzle, or the shape of a bullet. So the cameras and other sensing mechanisms - radar, which we'll get to at some point - could 'see' those bullets and the guns that fired them and act on that information faster than it took for the bullet to reach the target."

"Which is why you prefer these 'directed energy weapons' - they cannot be shot down," the General summarized.

"Exactly. Though we've taken things several steps beyond that, as your cavalry troopers will find out. We started with bullets, but a camera and computer that can pick out a bullet in flight or a muzzle flash would reasonably be even faster at picking out a rifle. Their new suits won't just be able to shoot down bullets - they'll be able to disable an enemy before they even get a chance to shoot. A lot of the nations out there still rely on flesh and blood to lift the rifle, aim it, and pull the trigger. Their choice, of course - and a humane one, if you think about it. Because if they try shooting at your soldiers, they'll find that their weapon has a hole in the breech and is now useless. It might not seem very sporting," the Commander had noted the looks on some of the officer's faces, "but war isn't about fighting fair..."

[Sunset]

The Streets of Landor City, Terra Incognito, The New Latin System, Ares Local Cluster... Republic Date 175.654...

"...so you're winning?"

Katryna laughed. It was an honest laugh, quick and to the point, but then she followed it with a complicated answer, "Sure, if we wanted to think about it that way. But let me ask you a question - what is the role of government?"

That seemed to be a head-scratcher and her visitor - a tourist from a far away portion of the Galaxy who had seen the brochure and decided that the endless beaches of Terra Incognito were just where he wanted to spend his retirement - considered his answer for a full block before answering, "To be a skullfucking nuisance!"

That provoked another laugh and when he'd followed it up with a throaty chuckle he asked her in return, "Why? What do you think the role of government should be? Back where I come from, they're mostly there to bother you. Rules, regulations - you gotta do this, have to do that. Mandatory service when you're eighteen and into the labor pool when you're twenty-one. They decide where to put you and then you get your one week off a year until you're sixty-five. Then when you're old and broken and they need the job for some fresh-faced idiot who can't find his own dick they cut you a check that won't last five years and turn you out, like that," he snapped his fingers sharply.

"Took every favor I'd racked up over forty years just to get permission," he spat, "to leave! That's the role of government!"

"Well, not here;" and Katryna Silaco ought to know. She'd met him when she'd have otherwise been out the door on her way to work. He'd been standing outside the door to one of the apartments in the same building where she lived fiddling with his key and after helping him inside - "Say, this actually looks like what they showed in the brochure! For once..." - they'd got to talking and she'd offered to take him on a brief walking tour down to the beach, which was conveniently just outside her office.

"...'and that government of the People, by the People, and for the People shall not perish from this Earth.' Abraham Lincoln said that over three hundred years ago and it was a different place and a different government but it is something we believe now. The role of the government is to serve the people - me, you - and I'll agree with you that in a lot of places it's the other way around. Not here. This way," she pointed to the left.

They'd just reached an intersection and she was pointing down towards the end of the junction where they could both see a thin line of blue where the slope curved away to the hidden beach and the line of grass and sharp-edged sandy cliffs above it. Like most Republic cities, Landor City was laid out as a walking city with everything within easy foot distance. There was no vehicle traffic either - a paved walk edged up to the buildings on either side but the middle was low, soft grass with trees planted up the middle or spaced out on either side for variety. Those that needed to be somewhere distant mostly took small fliers that appeared and disappeared from the rooftop garages where they were stored.

"Ha! I'll believe that when I see it. All this ain't free," he noted, an edge of bitter complaint on his words. "Someone's building it, maintaining it, paying their taxes to pay the government feller that's telling them all how to do their jobs..."

"Robots, robots, and what are taxes? I'm kidding," she'd seen the look on his face. "We used to pay taxes but these days the government is self-sustaining."

"Okay, robots I get. Old place hated them - said they took jobs away from hard-working folks like me. Horseshit, of course. Lookin' back on it now, it was jus' a way to keep us all busy so those at the top could stay at the top. Robots start doing all the menial jobs and people start askin' questions. But how can the government be 'self-sustaining'? Money don't grow on trees around here, does it?" he looked up at one of the trees lining the street as they walked under it, expecting an unexpected bounty to hit him square in the eye.

"No," she laughed, "though I'm sure we could manage that if we tried. Money is just a convenient substitute for resources, right? A long time ago - back when you were a young man - our government began to invest in its own resource extraction program. Now that program provides for everything the government needs and more - it still pays people and companies to put up buildings and provide the services it needs. So it is putting money back into the economy instead of taking it out."

He considered this for a half-block, the sleek black office tower that was her stopping point growing steadily larger.

"Aha! But that means you're taking things out of the ground that someone else could be! There's no such thing as a free lunch - yer just doing the same thing but with a different answer!"

"That would be true if we were getting them out of the ground, or asteroids, or whatever. But we're not," she pointed over to where the sun was just really starting its lazy crawl across the sky. "Our largest mines and biggest asteroids are nothing compared to how much energy that throws off every second - most of it flinging away into the depths of space, wasted. Not here."

"I don't suppose you can tell me how?" She shook her head; "No, but I'm sure you can think of a couple ways."

"Alright, sure - but then why isn't everyone else doin' it?"

"Small thinking? Or just as you said - a way to keep those on top on top. Controlling artificially scarce resources is one way to do that. Though someone else once said 'never attribute to malice what could be explained by stupidity.'" They were just outside the doors to her offices now and she stopped a respectful distance away. "And this is me. And the beach is right there. Say - if you're interested - stop by here around noon and ring. We'll have lunch and you can meet my husband. We'll be seeing you regularly now that we're neighbors, might as well get introduced."

He looked down at the beach where a gaggle of families, friends and other tourists were already setting up for their day's activities. A raised boardwalk ran away to either side where the street faded into sand. Vendors of food, souvenirs, and forgotten essentials were setting up there as well and his stomach rumbled a query, "Alright, might just do that, Miss..."

"Katryna. Just ring, they'll know who you're asking for..."

[Sunset]

Katryna's Office, Special Projects Office Complex, Landor City, Terra Incognito, The New Latin System... Later That Same Morning...

"...it wasn't my idea - ours, really. Einstein predicted it, but it was first discussed as a possibility back in twenty-twenty. They didn't have the kind of sensors that we do now, and they didn't have direct access to a black hole either. Now we have the sensors and the access to a lot of them, thanks in part to our colleagues in the UIK," she nodded to an unseen participant. "And we can do them a step better. A couple steps better, in fact."

"The basic theory here is that black holes are more than just super-massive points in space - they're also a camera of sorts. As light from around the universe comes close to the singularity it is captured in the event horizon. These captured photons then form an infinite series of rings that creeps up on the event horizon until they eventually fall in or are thrown out. What we propose to do is alter the current boundary manipulation so that the outside of the interface acts like a camera, taking all the photons that come in during a particular instance and storing them inside the manipulation. These could then be mathematically arranged inside the manipulation to show the universe as it was from the perspective of the black hole during that particular instant."

"We'll also then take the pictures from other black holes and overlay them with the first, adding more and more so we can eliminate the shadows, so to speak. As with our other very large array projects, this will also increase the resolution so that astronomers and other researchers can get more useful information out of the images. But as I said, we can do a couple steps better. Instead of waiting on the astronomers, what I'd like to do is take advantage of the current state of complexity possible and apply some filtering. All of that information is going to be passing through the interface, so we might as well look for things that we consider useful..."

"...say stars that suddenly disappear without explanation. Since we'll be able to look in detail at distant galaxies, we might be able to pick up things of both scientific and political usefulness. A Dyson sphere going up - another civilization that has come across holographic manipulation. Closer in, we should be able to establish a very precise timeline of our own galaxy up to this point. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate..."

[Sunset]

Tertiary Applications Laboratories, Special Projects Wing, CORE XXI Deep Space Station, Somewhere in the Monoceros Ring... Republic Date 175.663...

'Using Tools and Materials In Ways They Were Never Intended'

That was both the motto, goal, and raison d'être for the Tertiary Applications Laboratory; to take someone else's life's work and figure out ways to pervert it. Its personnel files were full of hackers, criminals (not the same thing), con artists, and eccentrics. These were then not-unironically divided up into A-Teams of three to five who would be presented with some new or old technology - source unknown - and invited to break it...

"Alright, so - neat idea, but you've got a big problem..."

"What's that?" the interviewer asked, every note in her tone suggesting she was she was about as dumb as a brick. Much prettier though; the role of the interviewer was to get the often-reclusive personalities in the department talking and they'd found that most liked to think they were the smartest person in the room and that a good percentage fell for a nice pair of tits like a bucket of water balanced on top of a door.

Those who didn't had different interviewers.

"Well the idea itself is neat, even if I'm not sure how they did it..." The researcher, a sandy-haired young man with a hint of untreated acne on his cheeks and the thin scratches of a poorly-chosen goatee on his chin, held up a hand. A moment later a pen appeared out of thin air and almost slipped through his fingers as he clumsily tried to catch it - a move that he'd practiced endlessly in the workshop but now failed predictably in the presence of a pair of double-D's.

He put it down on the desk in front of them with a hard 'click'.

"So yeah, that. It is a system hooked to your Plexus node that allows the user to create any small object they want basically out of thin air." That was the part he didn't understand; his security clearance was far too low for accessing the secret world of Holographic Boundary Manipulation. It was in fact the lowest of the low and this was planned as well. The lab's constant attempts to breach their clearances kept the Security Department on its toes. "Pen, umbrella, whatever comes out below a kilogram. It is supposed to appear where you can easily grab it."

"Oh! Neat!" as though she'd never seen it before in her life. An enthusiastic clap would have been taking it a step too far though, so she kept one hand in her lap and reached out to pick up the pen with the other, "What's so bad about this? It's just a pen."

He snatched it out of her hand, "It's not just a pen... Here, watch," he rose from his chair and went to the wall facing them.

The office was sparsely if comfortably decorated. Big enough for two but too small for three, there was the desk in the middle with two chairs on the same side for a false sense of intimacy. On another wall there was a short sofa, an end table with a reading lamp and a collection of books and magazines with uninspiring titles tucked away inside or casually piled beside the lamp. There were no demotivational posters or cat pictures but there was a large three canvas landscape split between three of the primary walls and he had chosen the fourth.

For good reason; pressing the button on the end of the pen, a brilliant blue beam emerged from the tip. Moving his hand carefully, he managed to carve out that most recognizable of mathematical formula before the beam tapered off.

"You can make a weapon, sure - but that's easy. All that took was some alterations to the pen design in the interface. Now watch this..."

He returned to the desk, standing over it and across from her. With his hand palm-down at one end, he paused for a second as words moved across his eyes and then began to move his hand from one end to the other, slowly and carefully.

"What I did was hack together a high-precision motion detector and the input mechanism for an industrial fabricator. That is piped through to the input for the item creation routine. It took some finagling, but," he picked up the energy rifle and held it across his chest in something like a heroic pose. It was large, ugly, and impractical - exactly what one might expect from someone who's familiarity with such things was mostly through video games and the claw-handed characters who wielded them.

"Whatever you want, you can make it. As long as you've got the engineering designs. And the system doesn't know, either. All I did was request specific elements. You could make a house, a ship... A bomb."

"What else?"

It was a challenge and he rose to the occasion, "What else? How about this?" He put the weapon down, conjured another pen, and proceeded to chop a couple nasty-looking holes in the rifle. "Broken - useless, right? Except if you do a bit of creative adjustment," he ran his hand over it and the damage disappeared, "you can override the function that keeps the system from say, creating a pen inside your head, and replace the damaged areas with a simple comparator function..."

[Sunset]

Department Head Meeting, Special Projects Division, CORE VirtuaGOV... Republic Date 175.664...

"...which we'll be rolling into the next iteration - ARC5 - of the synthetic crewman program. We've cleaned up his work," the department head scowled; nobody but nobody in the TAL turned in clean code, "and with access to the design catalog, this will allow the ARCs to make near-perfect field repairs - at the cost of higher energy expenditures on the front end."

"Not something we're worried about at the current time," one of the other seated figures in the chamber pointed out. At least from their perspective the room where the meeting was being held looked like a curved-out rectangle with a matching table, cabochon ceiling, stylish chairs, and a smoky smoky indeterminate humanoid floating above each seat. Some of the other department heads had a preference for distinctly garrish personal avatars and he preferred not to be distracted by more colors than a carnival. "Why not mount the same system on the ship or tank or whatever?"

"Flexibility, though we're looking at adding this as an upgrade model to our Super Aggressor platforms;" a hologram-inside-a-hologram of the Heavy Assault Fighter appeared in front of the speaker, slowly rotating before flipping this way and that and stopping to show off it's best attributes. "This would allow them to act as an external mobile repair unit or even as a mobile construction platform. Our modeling shows that they are our least-used platform."

Which was true for a variety of reasons, but instead of an explanation the figure returned to a previous point, "Separating the functionality from the platforms will mean that we can, say, deploy a few hundred ARC5s from a ship to rebuild a town that's been hit by a tornado, for instance. Or a few hundred thousand - a few million. Whatever we need. We're also trying to avoid having large platforms engaging in direct boundary manipulation. It is a form of FTL - or FTL is a form of it, depending on how one approaches the question - and we would rather everyone and their dog not deploy FTLi by default. That would make citizen access to the Eien spotty and unreliable."

"So when will this be?"

The indeterminate figure paused for a moment before replying, "We're not in a hurry - a few weeks for some play-testing, another pass through the TAL..."

[Sunset]

Dri'Ze Kor, The Perfidious Expanse, Somewhere in the Gamma Quadrant... Republic Date 175.669...

"...because, my dear - as lovely as you are - you're just not exotic enough."

The squirreling stared back at him through large dark eyes that lay seductive under heavy eyelashes - Do squirrels even have eyelashes? Well, in the lair of Dr. Stephen Ambrose they do and they are thick, long, and downright erotic - with her bushy tail slowly lashing back and forth. Perhaps she was considering his words but more likely she was deciding whether this not or that grub was edible. In this jungle and on this world, he was the undisputed master of intellectual conversation.

Which was fine, as things went.

He'd started the conversation himself, answered all of his own questions, and seemed quite happy to continue. Dressed in a fine khaki outfit suitable for the Dark Heart of Africa and a few centuries previous, he was also wearing a pith helmet and carrying a machete - which he would occasionally use to emphasize this point or that. The blade itself was as untouched as a forty year old virgin; a long train of dark-haired squirrelings stretched out behind him carrying the expedition's supplies while gun-totting mercenaries flanked them.

Order of the Something-or-Other Talon.

They were there to protect him from the monsters in the jungle - apparently they liked that sort of thing - as well as to do the hard work of clearing the path. With energized blades humming they'd made steady progress, wandering away from their base camp in the general direction of a picturesque volcano that rose in the far distance. It certainly didn't hurt that they were all women and as well-formed as one might expect them to be. A few in the lead had even doffed their suggestive armor, opting instead for the skin-tight breather suits they wore underneath as they nimbly slashed their way through vine, creeper, undergrowth, and the occasional large tree.

It was a sight to behold and he'd found his thoughts sidetracked more than once as he watched supple bodies twist, turn, and bend enticingly this way and that.

"...I wonder what has become of Agent 16?" he asked aloud, a chirp from his assistant seconding his inquiry. "Yes, I'm quite aware I left her in the lurch, but she was - presumably 'is' - a very resourceful woman and I have little doubt she escaped the destruction of my moon base..."

---

RDF Training Academy 26, Ares, The Ares System...

"...this all seems to be in order," Commander Sheldon frowned, carefully looking over the woman's application for any reason - any reason at all - to impolitely brush it off the edge of the desk and into the waste basket. "Sixteen? Miss?"

"Just 16," she corrected, somehow subtly changing the name from letters to numbers. She stood at-ease a respectful distance away from the desk, her hands clasped at the small of her back and her feet planted just so. The matte crimson body suit she wore was split less-so, open all the way from her shoulders, just inside the peaks of her breasts, and all the way to the unreasonable limits of her waist. She was not breathing hard but still somehow glistening beads of perspiration had gathered here and there to pick out every detail of her cleavage and smoothly muscled abdomen.

He didn't care; he was gayer than a Cher-Gaga duet.

Still, impressive - particularly for someone without augmentation and still in their original body, "16 then. It says here that you are a new Republic citizen and that you were previously employed as a personal security specialist. Is that correct?"

"Yes, and yes."

She didn't care to elaborate and he didn't press her. What was more impressive than a resume point was that she had managed to show up in front of his desk without passing through the usual rigamarole of kidnapping and hostage scenarios, an escape from the same, and of course the required hundred kilometer overland trek through terrain that would make Australia seem like a pleasant walk-about.

'Or was it two hundred?' Either way, she was the exception and not the rule.

"And why are you, a new citizen, interested in joining the Republic Defense Force?"

The question wasn't on the application but she answered anyway, a hard smile across lusciously full lips, "Let's just say I'm very motivated, Commander..."

---

"...the paying public requires something new to hold their attention and if I want SEXYE¡ to hold that attention then we must find that something new," he continued, pointing the tip of his machete to the surrounding flora. "And this seems like just the place to find it!"

That and while one might expect there to be plenty of opportunities for recreation and leisure in a sprawling underground facility built below a quiet neighborhood, he had found himself suffering from the dreaded Cabin Fever.

"So we will look for what Mother Nature has hidden from us and in that hopeful process we will uncover some new, exotic species. A new species that I will then integrate into SEXYE¡ and that will then bring the cash-laden consumer to our humble doorstep..."

[Sunset]

Strategic Systems Laboratory, Special Projects Wing, CORE XXL Deep Space Station, Somewhere on the Other Side from Andromeda and the Milky Way Galaxy... Republic Date 175.698...

"...think of them as the big brother to our existing Coronal Mass Ejectors. If they were..." he scratched his head, "Newborns? And their big brother is a sportsball legend. Here, let me walk you through the platform," and he held out a hand, guiding his colleagues towards the hologram in question.

The nexus of the Strategic Systems laboratory was laid out much like the station itself; a pronged horseshoe with the exits at each matching end of the prongs while individual workspaces were accessible from alcoves spaced out around the outer perimeter. In the middle was a raised platform that hosted a few large meeting spaces, a theater, and a canteen. An open stairwell in the middle of that led down into the platform where there were living suites for those that chose to live 'on site' while an open bridge opposite this led to the offices that hung over the deepest bend of the horseshoe. The whole thing looked very modern with pale grey walls accented with steel, glass, and ribbed black carpet edged with slate. Here and there were touches of green and splashes of color; living walls and dividers, planters bursting with flowers, and an endless bank of better-than-real virtual windows that ran all the way around the outside rim to show the stars beyond.

Next to each alcove there was also a display area and this was what he led them towards, "Here we are. The current generation of deployed CMEs and their replacement."

It didn't look like much; "It doesn't look like much..."

It didn't. The first was clearly a gun of some kind. A stack of rings was fixed to pylons that rose out of an open apparatus with another series of larger rings at the base. The whole thing definitely looked like it was built to shoot something at something else and mean it. The second looked like a piece of trademarked candy with a shallow scoop taken out of one flat side and a smaller one taken out of the other. It was even smaller than the first - according to the hologram it was perhaps a quarter the size - though it was dressed out in the shifting variegated white-to-gray that indicated it was built from the newest generation of military composites. Still - small.

"In this case, size or a lack there-of is very useful. These new platforms will take advantage of boundary manipulation technology - two, specifically. But importantly the larger a manipulation is, the longer it takes to set up. Technically we can create a boundary manipulation around an entire star, collect the energy, then shoot it at something. A Nichol-Dyson in whatever flavor we like. But that takes time. We can off-set that by putting more energy in, of course, but that again is also a factor of time. To get back to the point - time is our enemy when we're discussing warfare. A long set-up time gives our potential enemy time to do something about it."

"The previous incarnation uses gravity 'pumps' to pull coronal mass off the surface - not really the right word, but you understand what I'm getting at - of the star and then accelerate it towards the target. The mass is diffuse, which is already not optimum for use as a projectile, and the 'pumps' have to fight the star's own gravity well. It isn't very efficient - which was and is okay. Really the point of the mass ejectors wasn't to destroy but as a lure - get the enemy fleet away from their planets by menacing the whole world with a heat wave of devastating proportions, that sort of thing. It worked very well in the war with the Ynij Dominion and that would still be part of the toolkit with these."

"What we're doing here is setting up a 'passive' gravity pump but on a far larger scale. This side," he indicated the larger of the two scoops, "is the host for an interface that acts as a gravity syphon. It creates an extremely steep gravity well that is only felt on this side," he put his hand 'behind' the thing and closed his fist as though he was pulling against something invisible. "This will draw in what the star is naturally throwing off as well as 'tug' on the star's corona. It won't affect the entire star - it isn't that big - but for a mainline spectrum star we're running numbers with about one-sixteenth of the star's output. Far more than what the old CMEs could scoop up or put out."

"This incoming stream is then converted into energy which is then pushed out this end," he moved his hand around to the smaller scoop and rested a finger over the hole, "and spat out as whatever we want; the 'hot end' is a VPI. Variable particle interface - like on the new Super Aggressor;" A model of which was rotating on a display outside an alcove not that far away. "So whatever they're programmed for. Neutral particle beam, osmium 'war crime' kinetic vehicle... Whatever is most appropriate to the target. They're messing around with planetary-scale weapons, we're fighting with stellar-scale weapons."

"And again, their size is useful. We'll have a huge number of these by the end of the day tomorrow because their physical material requirements are much less. That is somewhat off-set by their energy requirements though. The syphon interface will have a large reserve to use to kickstart the process and the VPI will have one as well for self-defense as well as for faster-than-light travel."

One of the small crowd held up a hand, "Wait, what was that?"

"Which part? The syphon interface or the VPI part?"

"The VPI part. You said that it will have an energy supply for self-defense as well as for faster-than-light travel. Are you saying what I think you're saying?"

The first looked at him oddly, "Well, yes. Of course. I should say it is more than a variable particle interface. Using the same technology as in the upgraded TRIPWIRE arrays, it can alter the local matrix. Which would also mean that a physical FTL drive is no longer needed; it can create the same space-time conditions as a faster-than-light drive would..."

[Sunset]

RDF-Springbok, Some Half-Million Light Years from the Galactic Core, At the Very Edge of the Milky Way Galaxy... Republic Date 175.712...

"...was it worth the trip?" Captain Brown asked, standing just to the right of between the two forward bridge officer stations. Ahead of them the vast spiral of the galaxy was spread out like a vortex of lights, each the same but somehow still different. The view was from half a million years ago - more or less - so what they saw painted out on the trim-to-trim display wasn't completely accurate given that the light from some was 'only' three hundred thousand years ago while the light from others was almost doubt the age but yes; it was still worth the trip.

It wasn't why they were here though.

The first reason was that they really didn't want anyone watching and so they were out on what even the Ellians might agree was the Frontier. Out this far the stars were so diffuse as to be observable, often hidden behind this or that, or simply gone, swept up billions of years ago by the super-massive black holes that were themselves the remains of more ancient times. The other reason was the NX257, which sat comfortably a few million kilometers away, the blue and orange from its navigation signals and the aesthetic glow of its trim lights just now reaching the Springbok's external cameras from the moments they'd both arrived.

For a ship under the 'NX' prefix - 'Naval eXperimental' - it looked perfectly finished, a design that followed the Springbok's own though there were both clear and subtle differences. That was the Republic's triangle though; a ship conceived to test a theory had no reason not to look as polished and elegantly lethal as her cousins.

"Enough sight-seeing. '257, what's your status?" he asked, glancing down at the indicators arrayed along the edge of the navigation console. Now that they were here-here, the Lieutenant at that station was keeping himself busy by acting as overwatch for the engineering and science stations at the back of the bridge. That meant that the black glass slab that curved around within easy finger-distance of the Ojeni was covered in status lights that often enough showed the status of the status of other lights; a Christmas tree that terminated in a small number of lights that themselves all showed green.

"All green here, Captain. The experimental parameters have been set and confirmed. We are ready to begin on your orders."

The voice was oddly familiar. In fact it was very familiar, as it was Brown's own timbre. NX257 was manned but unmanned; given the risks inherent in the experiment, the 'crew' was made up of a number of ARC5 synthetic seamen that had been loaded with non-sentient engrams of the Springbok's own bridge crew. His counterpart looked like him - thanks to the polymorphic 'flesh' that covered the ARC5's head and hands - and it talked like him and it even thought like him but it was not conscious. It was a data file that had been loaded into active memory and it knew this as well.

But what of the experiment itself?

That had been partially explained in the previous post. A new sorta-super-weapon system had been developed based on another smaller system that was being deployed in a new combat platform that had itself been developed as a way to try to impress a girl based on an idea to bring the hyper-abundant resources available to the government directly to the average citizen. That system worked by - in part - converted something to something else. Stuffium to Knicknackium, for instance. The theory and thus the experiment was that this same system could replicate the effects of a faster-than-light drive without the hardware. There was still hardware, of course - a boundary manipulation interface that ran in an unbroken band around the outside of NX257's lopsided horseshoe shape just under the outermost of several hull layers - but the 'what' of just what that interface could do was defined by the software running on it, rather than by the hardware itself.

If it worked, well...

"Alright, then you are so ordered. Begin the test sequence..."

It wouldn't do any good to look at the screen, of course. By the time whatever happened showed on the cameras it would have been several seconds after it showed up on the Springbok's sensor console. On the console there was a reduced representation of local space that showed exactly two things and two things only. When he looked down, one of the two was in one place and then it was in another.

"Test complete, Captain," his own voice answered the unasked question. "Our position relative to your own has changed per the parameters of the experiment."

...well, then the Republic was about to do what it had done before. Instead of carrying a faster-than-light drive and all of its associated systems and sub-systems, a given ship could instead use the same variable interface that it used for other things like blowing things up or stopping things from being blown up. And software being what it was, rolling out a more efficient or faster method of faster-than-light travel was no longer a matter of replacing ships or parts of ships but instead a few seconds download. Which also meant...

"Awesome - alright, let's go for the second test sequence then. Load the Bli'ishi Fold Drive emulator and we'll try that one out..."

[Sunset]

Maintenance Access 243-B, Tunnel Two (2), Shabana to New Vancouver Maglev, Mars, Sol System... Republic Date 175.718...

The maintenance alcove was quite ordinary as such things went; a concrete rectangle scooped out of the side of the tunnel that encircled the raised maglev line as it plunged below the Martian surface on it's way to this place or that. Yellow lights set into the ceiling indicated its purpose while a painted strip of orange and black warned nonexistent visitors away. There were signs as well, held to the wall by sturdy bolts, and tiny lights flashed on the outside of panels to indicate at a glance just what might be amiss if a maintenance worker ever had cause to visit.

For the passengers on the trains that flashed past at breath-taking speeds the alcove was just a momentary blip, an instantaneous distraction for those who had chosen to stare at the wall for the few minutes of their transit. Few knew or cared that behind one of those hatches sat a repeater that was in turn connected to one of the enormous data cables that connected the Republic together. For the most part these carried the torrent of mundane information used by the average citizen on a daily basis; the passenger on the train whizzing past who had chosen to sink themselves into a virtual world, or the flow of orders from one business to another. But buried together but separate was another cable, this one part of the original network that had been built out when the virtual government had been created. While the vast majority of the data used by that system now flowed through other networks, these cables were still active and thus connected to something; something that might very well be interesting.

At the edge of the alcove something moved, the vanishing trace of an outline of a form that might very well have been dust in the air. Then it stopped. There might very well be a dozen different sensors pointed at that very spot and it would be best to set off the alarms now rather than proceed into the open where any number of nastier things could happen. While the Republic had shown no interest in stopping them up to this point, it was unreasonable to assume all that wasn't about to change.

Getting here had been easy. He was even a citizen now. When he'd stepped off the transport he'd gone through a customs portal - they hadn't asked where he was from - where he'd come back 'clean' except for a slight sinus infection which the holographic attendant had issued medication for on the spot. Next to the information kiosk there had been another advertising the benefits of citizenship with nothing more than a dotted line to sign on. That had then issued him two self-implanting chips - one with his new passport and the other with his voting ID number - both of which he assumed contained a tracking device of some type.

He'd left both unmolested in the pocket of his travelling pants. These in turn were back at the apartment he'd been able to rent with the generous credit stipend that had been attached to the passport. It was a nice place, with a sweeping view of the Valles Marineris and the reservoir that filled it. His next stop had been to gather some black credit chips from a dead drop provided by an agent who had been in place for years now. A cushy posting, if one could wrangle it. With those in hand, he'd gone around to the shops buying the various components he needed to make the stealth suit he now wore. Back in the homeland even inquiring about them would have flagged someone for the wrong type of attention but here...

Then he'd snuck to the station in the middle of the night, slithered over a service gate, and trudged the next sixty-five kilometers until he was right between the two arcologies. Now he'd stuck his hand out and...

...nothing. Of course any alarms they had in place could well be silent. But this was also a maintenance outpost far from nowhere that ostensibly served the maglev. According to the information drudged up by his agency, the original intention had been security through obscurity - which wasn't secure at all. That had been a long time ago and time tended to make governments forgetful. There was a good chance that this repeater station hadn't been included in whatever modernization plans undertaken since that time. And - immediately useful - there was a thick strip of dust built up in one corner where the vortex from the passing train hadn't quite managed to suck it away. Even with all that, he crossed the open space at a crawl, his carefully crafted suit rendering him invisible to everything from the naked eye to millimeter-band radar.

He didn't touch the wall. Instead he crouched beside the access panel and examined it carefully. There was a lock on the side with four glowing green lights but he already knew there would be another. This one would recognize the ID chip carried by the maintenance robot. It would make a show of unlocking the cabinet but that was just security theater. Placing a fingernail just below the visible lock, he extruded a hair-thin flat camera strip through the seam between the door and the flange and burst into flames.

There wasn't a moment of realization or shock or even pain. Every molecule of water in his body had been forced apart - oxygen and hydrogen - and then tried desperately to come together again. The heat released by this sudden electrolysis caused the two intermingled gases to ignite and inside a few moments the body had been reduced to ash. A train swept by, the buffet of air flowing away from the sleek cylinder pulsing through the alcove and tossing the floating remnants up into the air where some drifted out to settle among the dust in the corner...

---

A Nice Apartment Looking Out Over the Valles Marineris, Just a Few Minutes Later...

Floyd held up a pair of pants, shook them out, and then dropped them to fish around in a pocket coming up with a pair of chips a moment later, "His own fault - if he'd put these in we'd have had to arrest him."

"Yep." Walter didn't look up. There was work to be done and in front of him the rest of the former occupant's luggage was open and spread out for inspection. "Same mistake as the last one. Me, I'd just falsify my reports and drop off the grid..."

"Yep."

Neither Floyd nor Walter were really there. Instead the company that owned the apartment had been notified through its management portal that the new occupant was vacating the premises. That same server had then sent two most-humanoid robots - 'Floyd' and 'Walter' - to assist the occupant with packing, moving, and then making sure the apartment was clean and tidy and ready for the next resident. Inside of those parameters the two suborned robotics were doing exactly that.

"Looks good," Walter declared, carefully packing away every article of clothing just as it had been found. The whole lot would be officially taken to the on-site disposal center and then unofficially bundled into the back of a waiting drone to be taken to a secure facility for breakdown and analysis. Clean, tidy, and ready for the next occupant...

[Sunset]

Director Vermir's Office, The Mount Kidni Observatory, Fer Gul Region, The Great Principality of Don A Lucc, The Planet Rins... Republic Date 182.872...

"Seen the news?" Finin laid the evening paper across the Captain-Director's desk, headline facing his superior officer for easy reading. "We're up to thirty-seven now..."

"Let me see this," Vermir picked up the paper and shook it out straight, scanning first the bold-print headline and then the section under it while Finin - Sergeant Finin, now - stood there adjusting the various apparatus on his sleeves and shoulders while he waited.

They'd been drafted, of course - along with the staff of every other observatory within the Principality. It was both the greatest boon to astronomy and the largest pain in the thoracic that he'd ever experienced. They still went about their work as normal but now every photo plate was double-checked for a star that had gone missing and then the whole lot was photographed - in triplicate - and sent off to the National Observatory for further analysis. He'd already lost two bright young interns to their requirements for more staff and that had left him with...

"Killermi;" Vermir didn't look up. He didn't need to - the bumbling oaf's shadow had fallen across his very soul the moment the young assailant had crossed his threshold. "Good evening," Finin continued, "Is everything alright? You look flustered..."

'Oh no...'

The Director let out a heavy sigh and then leaned back in his chair with the half-read paper discarded and his hands at his temples. He could already feel the headache coming on but it was now his sworn duty to ask the first question and his unpleasant duty to follow with the next, "What is it now, Killermi? What did you fool up this time?"

It was an easy assumption. Little had changed during the past half-year and while he was now firmly ensconced as part of the team he was still an idiit. Whether it was breaking something, mislabeling something else, or just plain getting in the way, he spent so much time fixing Killermi's mistakes that he spent precious little time on his own telescope. Another missing star would be a blessing - as bad as that was - because that would at least lead to speculation and theory rather than the hard certainty that the man was addled in the head.

"Sir, I, uh," and then he remembered the trivial detail and fired off a salute that Vermir returned with another sigh; Finin hadn't bothered; "What is it?"

"Well, I was, uh, cleaning the lenses. My regular duty, Sir. And I happened to take a look..."

Which meant he'd been doing more than checking his work, but that was somewhat reasonable - as long as he hadn't broken the damned thing, "And? Spit it out, man."

"You should come take a look! Before it moves!"

Vermir heave himself up from the desk with the third heart-felt sigh of the evening, "Did you at least take a picture?"

Of course the thing had probably moved. They were astronomers - everything they studied moved. Some moved more than others so whatever it was was presumably something close enough for that movement to be more rather than less. One useful thing about the whole situation though was that the government had supplied them with all the photo plates they would ever need - a huge crate of them had been on their doorstep just that very morning in fact. So there was no reason not to...

"...I don't see anything," Vermir agreed, raising his face from the eyepiece and looking over to Finin, who agreed with a nod. They'd also gotten some useful upgrades to their telescope, including a very expensive splitter that allowed two to use the same eyepiece. The prism alone was worth an entire month's budget under normal circumstances.

He hadn't expected to, really. As soon as he'd left the office he'd sent Killermi to the darkroom with the photo plates. Then the two real astronomers had taken up their places at the telescope first checking the locked-in position before sweeping it back and forth across that stretch of late evening sky in search of anything unusual. That left Killermi to his work and say what you will - he was quite the genius at developing photographs.

Of course that was only after the Director had saddled him with the dirty job. The chemicals involved smelled disgusting and irritated his snout to no end.

"Director!" The cylindrical 'door' to the darkroom turned and Killermi emerged into the light, a large sheet of paper held excitedly in his hands, "I got it! Here!"

He surged forward, immediately catching his foot on something that wasn't there and tearing the sheet straight down the middle. What followed was a particularly grotesque sixteen letter word that invoked a method of intimacy the Director had been unaware of until that moment but there was no reason to chastise him; "Put it here, on the table - and bring the cellophane tape."

Even the accident served a purpose and while he hunted for the roll the two slid the sides together along the seam and studied the complete image intently. Finin let out a long whistle, "Do you think they'll believe us?"

"They'd better," Vermir grunted. "Or I'd say we're all in for a world of trouble..."

What was depicted in the photograph clearly wasn't of this world and nor was it a possibility of natural chance. The object seemed to have started as a perfect sphere made of some brown-tinted metal. It had then been carved away by some means to leave a forest of straight-edged semi-circular bands and asymmetrical shapes ringing two-thirds of the interior with two notable gaps at the top and across the lower-left quarter. Set inside this cradle was another sphere, this one with shapes set into the surface that very well could be...

"Are those letters, Director...?"

[Sunset]

RDF-Ojeni, The Outskirts of the GEC-6000000 System, Inside the Beta Luminar Nebula, The Monoceros Ring... After Some Maneuvering...

"...we're in, Captain. We've got positive alignment on their near array and they are responding," Thomas added, hands moving over the smooth glass of his console as he checked and rechecked multiple data screens. "At this point we're mimicking what the next link in the chain should be responding with. That's easy enough..."

"And it tells us something interesting," Captain Blaine answered, studying the Ensign's console as she worked in tandem with the Lieutenant Commander. "Cause they're not freaking out. Unless they've completely abandoned the visual spectrum they have to see us..."

And the pronged horseshoe that was Ojeni was quite different from the locals or indeed most any other breed of spaceship in the galaxy.

"...and we're not picking up any attempt to ask us just who the hell we are?" she glanced back at the communications officer, who shook her head; "Nothing."

"So I'd say the whole thing has been set to automatic. They don't care that we're here because there's no one to care."

That seemed to be the general opinion around the bridge and she continued with a nod, "So let's get a little bit aggressive. Anything you three can think of," she indicated the navigation, sensor, and communications officers with a glance, "that will get us inside their systems. Start gentle if you can, but feel free to just try stuff."

They had some protection as well. Ojeni didn't just happen to have a large laser communications and maneuvering array sitting around - they'd had to rig something up. The Eye's solution had been an array of refitted navigation beacons that had been launched from the larger ship and then spread out to match the spacing of the target array's emitters and receivers. These were then linked to an isolated system aboard Ojeni - even if the whole thing was an elaborate honey pot the only system that could be penetrated or suborned was this single system.

"We're already getting data back, but it's probably encrypted. So what we're going to start with is sending out the occasional bit of mismatched data. They say 'banana', we say 'banana', they say 'banana', we say 'aanana'. Then we see what they do. Right now we're not even talking to them. We're just repeating what another array at the same position relative to that object is saying. Feed them something different and hopefully we'll be able to puzzle out how they are talking then what they are saying..."

---

"...it took a while, but despite coming at it a couple degrees off from backwards, we're got something," Thomas announced to a half-empty bridge. Both the Captain and Commander had gone to lunch and that had left him, his girlfriend at the Tactical Station, and the new girl in the Captain's Chair. It wasn't regulations but with two Lieutenant Commanders to back her up it was 'no harm, no foul'.

The Tloqsi turned to look over her shoulder - and under the railing - while Calindra made a noise that indicated she was paying attention while keeping an eye on her own displays and thus what was happening around the ship.

"There's multiple channels 'open' but not all are being transmitted. All the data suggests that the channels in use are those assigned to station-keeping. The rest aren't blocked - they're just dead. I've started the computer trying to establish a connection with some of these dead channels but it has to build up their communications protocols from scratch and by throwing data at it and see if it responds. There isn't going to be anything like our automated communications and translation sub-system attached - why would there be? The system is designed to talk to their own, not us. And more computing resources won't help - this isn't taxing Ojeni, it is taxing the array itself."

"Can we connect to multiple arrays?" Tilassi suggested, turning back to the spread of holographic consoles she was using to replicate her own station as well as a half-version of Ingersol's. "We've got more beacons and if we double the connections we should have the time. We don't know how long that is, but..."

"Good idea," he frowned. "I'll talk to the Eye, see how many we can set up. Cali, can you get a list of additional connection points? And someone might want to tell the Captain that we're about to put a lot more brute force into this..."

---

It was like magic... One moment the screen was dark as the computer behind it threw what seemed like random chunks of data at the other system and then there was a coherent response and an answer and a query and a disconnect and another query then... But millions of iterations happened in only a few seconds and then... 'Public Information System'

Which wasn't what it actually said, of course, but the computer executed that translation on its own, filling in more blanks as it pulled down every file it could get its grubby hands on. More data meant more comparisons but the interesting part was right there in front of them and all eyes but two were on their own copy of that screen as they began to poke through the menus.

"'Calendar of Events'," Kami read aloud, spread out across her own chair again with what looked to be a liter of purple slush drink in one hand and the straw nearly at her lips. She took a pull, "Date something-something, 'Final Stage of Project Something'..." She read through the next few paragraphs in silence, an occasional word re-coalescing into one or more words she could understand and forcing her to re-read the whole thing a dozen times just to be sure. "Huh. They did it - they're gone."

"And with good reason," Sloan spoke up just a moment after, an annoying 'slurp' from the Captain cutting her off for a moment. "The VUG had started attacking them - they call them something else, but the pictures fit - and they were stuck. They'd used up the system's material resources on their habitats. They couldn't fight back effectively."

Then Tilassi chimed in, "Then they went to war with themselves. One segment of the cluster wanted to try to build warships to fend off the attackers, another didn't, some wanted materials to try and build the faster-than-light drives that gave the Veer Un Guun the advantage... They couldn't agree so they fought," she finished, emotional clogging her words.

The Captain picked it up from there, "That gave them the resources they needed though - all those dead ships. It looks like once the fighting had stopped, this segment started to work on a faster-than-light drive. They figured they could run faster than the VUG could chase them. But their research went sideways. Instead of finding a way to skip from here to there, they found a way to jump into another parallel universe. One that didn't have the VUG or themselves, it seems." She flipped to the next entry, "And they took the opportunity. Says here they set up gateways on all the ships in their segment, sent everyone through, then just before the gateways were to close they sent the design but not the equations to the other segments so if they followed them they wouldn't land in the same universe. Guess they figured they'd start fighting again."

"Looks like there are nine segments," Thomas counted, comparing what the information screen said to the great flotilla of habitats spread out across Ojeni's sensor arrays. "A few thousand years ago, assuming they all made it through safely - you might have a lot of ancestors out there now, Ensign."

Another pull and Kami's tongue was dyed a vibrant violet, "I don't think you're going to have a reunion any time soon though, sorry. Says here that they wiped the designs and equations from the system and scrapped the gateways when they were gone - fired them into the sun. Very Roanian. Didn't want the VUG to follow them..."

[Sunset]

Downtown Shalbatana Arcology, The Martian Territories, Sol System... Republic Date 175.743...

"...do you currently or have you ever held a certain belief in the supernatural, including such phenomenon as magic, ghosts, spirits, demons, prayers, gods, or auras?"

Emily eyed the questioner strangely; it certainly looked like he did. The Centaur standing behind the floating table - itself covered in candles, magical apparatus, a black coverlet embroidered with mystic symbols and all explainable by a hidden anti-gravity unit - was wearing a long-sleeved hooded robe that nearly covered his hands and draped back over his haunches in a suitably wizardly fashion. It also looked somehow like a uniform, with the required beading, patches, and a nameplate on his right breast. It also wouldn't take much more than a smile to send her off with a case of the giggles, even though she was a true believer.

Spells, prayers, rituals - crystals? The odd vision or two?

She'd always felt there was something more out there - something beyond the physical world that science and chemistry and physics couldn't explain. And she knew there was such a thing as magic - the Menelmacari practiced it, but they'd carefully and politely given her the brush-off. Her clumsy mind was just not disciplined enough. No, better for her to stick to her fantasy novels and online roleplaying.

But here was an opportunity - or an elaborate practical joke. She didn't care; she took the chance, "Yes!"

A bit too emphatic, but he didn't seem to notice or care, "The Defense Force of the Republic of Sunset has seen fit to establish an Academy of the Arcane and Mystic Arts as a method to both study them and to prepare practitioners in these arts for duty with the Defense Force in various areas ranging from intelligence gathering, leadership, logistics, engineering, and special operations to education and training. Are you or do you wish to become a citizen of the Republic of Sunset?"

The question had been asked in complete seriousness but it was the statement before that threw her for a moment before, "Wait, back up a bit. Magic? You're talking about magic?" A passerby looked at her oddly and she matched it with her own expression, "The RDF is doing magic now? Do you..." The robe was certainly a good indication, "Know magic? Spells?"

He returned her questioning look with one of his own but he held out a hand, focusing his gaze on the palm as his fingers moved. There was a trace of something - purple, orange, octarine; it was hard to say - and then there was an apple in the palm of his hand.

"A hologram," she crossed her arms defiantly, rocking back onto her heel, but he held it out towards her; "As real as you and I. Here - taste it."

It certainly looked real. Polished red with a short brown stem and a tiny green leaf growing to one side. It was the proverbial poisoned fruit but she took it anyway, felt its weight in her hand, turned it over once, and then took a big bite, 'Not like it can kill-kill me, right?'

Sweet and juicy with only a mild tartness, it chewed and felt and then swallowed just like a real apple and she held it up to look inside. Peels of skin were caught here and there at the edge where her teeth had left a ragged line and there was just the trace of green at the center where the seeds would be. If this wasn't a real apple...

She put it down on the table and knocked, knuckles hard against the wood. Then she knelt and looked underneath for the familiar panels and vents and... Nothing but hardwood, the stain that colored the top a rich red-brown seeping across the unstained bottom like tiny fractal fingers, "Huh. Magic too?"

"A levitation spell, yes. Are you interested? And a Republic citizen?" he asked again, a little more expectantly this time.

"Hell yes! Where do I sign...?"

[Sunset]

Dr. Kraus' Laboratory, Definitely Not Inside the Nazi Base, The Vinson Massif, Antarctica, Earth, Sol System... Republic Date 175.750.943

"...so yeah, we were pretty much all tired of freezing our dicks off, so we decided to punch out and come back later. Like after the next warming period."

"Punch out?" The technician put his coffee cup to his lips and took a long draw, giving the researcher a chance to continue fiddling with the disturbing-looking contraption in front of him. Disturbing in that it seemed to prominently feature a brain floating in a jar of indistinguishable fluid with a host of cables and connectors winding into it, mostly on the underside. Also disturbing was the fact that it looked possibly Human, even to the untrained eye. And with Dr. Kraus, well... "What do you mean?"

"Disconnect, leave - pull the ol' power cable..."

"...except for the Doc here," another voice interrupted, this time from the invisible side of the contraption and for a moment the tech thought it might well be coming from the brain until the head and shoulders of one of the other lab techs emerged from hiding as he stood.

"Yeah, yeah," Kraus rolled his eyes and waved his hands around, "I had to get all 'dramatic' they said."

"I don't doubt it," the first technician half-mumbled behind his coffee cup. "What'd he do?" his question directed to the second.

"Cut his own throat. Or tried. Took him like, three or four passes..."

"And then you said 'I thought he smelled back on the outside!'" Fredrick said, waving a tool in the direction of his assistant. "You forgot that it takes thirty seconds to a minute for someone to lose consciousness! I heard everything you said!"

The tech looked the model of innocence, his hands in his pockets as he faced the scientist, "Forgot? I didn't forget..."

Kraus glared at him and the man smiled back. For a minute no words but a volley of insults and accusations flew silently between them until the intruder broke the silence, "So... What'cha working on, Doc?"

It was if a switch had been flipped and Fredrick was instantly behind the device, running his hands across the top as though it was the crib of his youngest child, "Oh, this? Nothing special at all, really. I was just thinking about my previous earth-shattering invention, the BioCortex, and thought to myself, 'You know Handsome, there has to be a way to make the BioCortex better. More appearing. Less of a big ol' sloppy bag of brains left afterwards. More... TV-friendly.' And so," he waved a hand back and forth as though someone had just bought a vowel, "I present to you... The EnCortex!"

"...maybe. I'm still working on the name. But let me show you what it does," he reached around and across, dropping his tie neatly in the goo while pressing a button on the front panel. Standing up, he felt the wet silk slap across his chest and reached down to brush it off, consternation on his face, and so missed the entire process.

There was a noise from the machine - a low, ominous 'hummmmm' - and several of the cables and pipes leading into the brain from the apparatus just below shuddered and thrummed. A few seconds later and while Kraus was sucking the last remnants of the apparently flavorful solution off the black tip of the tie there was a sudden surge and the entire organ went from a pinkish-grey to metallic gray in an instant.

"...okay, so... You're carbonizing brains now?"

"No..." Kraus looked down, "Ah, it's done. No. What the EnCortex does is leverage the circulatory system to distribute a micrite swarm through the organ. When they are all in place, they instantly encapsulate every cell and fuse together - not permanently - into a gestalt structure. The cells maintain their connections but they are now 'fed' by the encapsulating micrite foam, which also acts as a repair agent. This foam can then be further reinforced by a hardened cranial structure either in-situ or post-op. With proper maintenance, this new structure can fight off entropy for... Well, as long as we want, really. And no bag of goopy gray brains. You could take it out of there and start kicking it around the lab if you wanted..."

"I don't..."

But Kraus was already up to his forearms in goo, pulling the cables loose and leaving them to float free in the gel with whatever life-sustaining fluid they'd held pumping free and slowly turning the solution a vivid pink, "Here, catch! Don't worry - it's no one you know..."

[Sunset]

The Rusty Shank, Drifting just Inside the Afreras System, At the Edge of the Galactic Disk, Alpha Quadrant... Republic Date 175.753...

"...so Cookie - what's for lunch? Will it be as good as breakfast?" the crewman asked, leaning up against the hatch flange as he looked down at the cook. She was bent over nearly inside the cabinets under the cooktop and was making such an unholy racket that it was possible that she'd missed both his words and his approach. A little louder, "Whatever it is, I'll bet it will be a lot fuckin' better than the slop the last guy fixed us!"

"Kinda odd, that," he mused, his voice dropping to it's normal drawl. "Disappearing like that. One minute he's there - with a sweet berth on nothin' more dangerous than a scout ship - and the next he's gone... Like thin air... Poof!"

"Like he was pulled through a sewer grate when he went to take a piss..."

"What was that?" He'd mostly missed the woman's comment over his own musings but in a manner familiar to those who have been trapped inside with someone else way too long, he continued past them without listening or caring, "Yep, like magic. Good thing you popped up real soon or else the Captain would have me feeding the crew!"

"And the head would always be busy..."

This time he heard clearly and laughed, "Yep! I barely know which end of the can to open - I ain't no cook!"

Now as the banter continued, it bared explaining that the Rusty Shank wasn't a scout ship as one might ordinarily think of the term. The crew was neither prospectors nor were they employed by any government. Instead the hundred-and-seventy-odd meter Excellence-Class Corvette with the sleek-but-aging blue, white, and gold paint job billed herself as a nomadic trader, flipping from port to port and somehow making a living off the bare handful of goods that traded hands. Most were baubles and geegaws - glass beads, iron knives, simple toys like paddleboards. Not worth even enough to put five bucks in the tank at Gus' Galaxy Grill and Gas.

Or Gassy Grill, if you ordered the Special.

What she was was a scout for the small collection of slave barges that inevitably came behind her. The trade goods had tracking beacons hidden inside and with these to guide them in, the barges would land and whole villages of primitives would disappear overnight. Most would then find themselves performing menial labor under the lash of some two-bit nobility who didn't know their head from their ass. For the crew of the Rusty Shank it was a sweet gig - they weren't pirates or slavers and they got to see the local culture before the raid made a mess of things.

"...anyways, I gotta get back to my station. Should be landing soon - maybe have dinner on the ground. A nice picnic!" he laughed. "So," he watched her open a very large can of something green and purple by the simple expedient of pushing her thumb through the steel and running it around the inside before dumping the contents under the running faucet, "What'cha makin?"

"Oh, nothin'," Meli turned around, a delicious smile across her wide lips as she held the empty can up to her shoulder so he could look down into it, "Just Canned Surprise..."

"Canned Surprise? What's tha-uuurk.." he half-asked as she shoved the can forward and up with instant speed, catching him under the chin with the lower rim and taking his head off in one clean scoop.

As the body sagged, she snatched out to grab the stump of the neck, cutting off the flow of blood with thick fingers. Setting the can down on the counter with one hand, she picked the slaver up by the belt and took two steps across the galley to launch it into the chute for the disposal. There was a horrible grinding noise and she turned back to the can, "Canned Surprise, just lakh Ah said."

Flipping open an upper cabinet door, she gave the can a parting rattle before setting it next to a half-dozen others. Grabbing the mop from where she'd stashed it behind the hatch flang, she began to clean up. Once the blood was mostly gone - "Seventy percent of the work, ninety percent of the evidence" - she'd go back to waiting for the next inquiry and working on the menu.

"Ah should have though o' this before. Ah'n turns out Ah ain' a half-bad cook," she said to herself, pulling another can from under the sink. "Tamatos. That sounds good..."

[Sunset]

Marine Systems Development Laboratory, Energy Weapons Division, Special Projects Research Wing, CORE XXIIV Deep Space Station, Somewhere in the Kareen Expanse, Alpha Quadrant... Republic Date 175.761...

"...you know, I could watch this all day."

One wall of the double-height laboratory had been replaced by a thick transparent panel but instead of looking out onto the stars, or the dramatic vista of the sun poking over the horizon of an alien world, it instead looked 'down'. Down onto a complex labyrinth of white cones, walls, corridors, tunnels, and dead-ends. Through that maze two armies fought - one black, one red - with each consisting of hundreds of shiny sphere about the size of his fist. The two sides flowed here and there, back and forth with a wild flash of cyan blue bolts where the two met. Life or death for one of the spheres was a matter of milliseconds with neither side gaining enough ultimate advantage to end the fight.

At the back of each army was the source of their frustration. A tentacle surge of red balls surged into an opening, attempting to crush the intervening black forces between two fronts, but they were themselves annihilated as red gave momentary ground in that corner to execute its own flanking maneuver. It all happened so quickly that it might as well be the flow of water but in the back more red and black balls appeared from thin air to replace those lost, immediately rushing forward to join the endless fight.

"So each force - red and black - is a single boundary manipulation. They both have their own pool of non-baryonic energy that they draw on. The battle will eventually end when one side or the other runs out first. They can use this energy to move their interfaces - the red and black spheres - to generate a particle beam to destroy another sphere, or to generate another interface. More spheres. They also have a very basic swarm fighting algorithm, which is why they aren't destroying the battlefield."

"Or generating an expression on the other side of the glass and shooting us in the face..."

"Right, exactly. Now when they go live as the replacement for the anti-material drones the Marines currently use, they will be able to do that. Not the shoot-in-the-face part, but they will have an 'experienced' combat engram included in the manipulation that will be able to leverage lateral tactics and adapt to the situation on the ground with guidance from the individual Marine. Against a swarm, they can deploy a swarm. Against a small group... Well, they'd probably still employ a swarm. As long as one interface survives and has energy, it can quickly exponentially redeploy..."

[Sunset]

RDF Training Academy 26, Ares, The Ares System, Alpha Quadrant... Republic Date 175.766...

"...activate the Tactical Display Enhancement," came the suggestion and Johann leaned back in his chair as she stood and leaned across him, following her own suggestion to guide him through the menus to the appropriate entry and then, as he hesitated, active it herself. "There..."

It wasn't that he was unsure of himself...

Okay - maybe he was. The new Cadet had a way of doing that to people. And she wasn't rude about it. Instead she seemed to be just naturally intimidating. And as knowledgeable and skilled as he'd expect from a Cadet who'd chosen to jump in at the middle of the quarter rather than wait for the next Class to be inducted at the beginning of the year. She'd clearly had outside experience as well, knowing when to do things by-the-book and when to feel her way through. If she had a drawback it was that she was a loner, preferring to study and work alone unless the assignment demanded it.

Which was too bad, according to most of the students who leaned towards the female end of sexual attraction. Because - for some reason he couldn't fathom - she was also eye-wateringly sensual with every movement naturally falling into a pose or stance that showed off her carefully sculpted body to best effect - and she had to know it. It wasn't regulations - and given the plethora of species that populated the Republic there couldn't be - but she'd taken the time to modify her issued uniform into a skin-baring catsuit that fit her tighter than a glove.

He was looking past this now, two perfect half-rounds framing the forward display with a band of uniform-gray on the outside of both. From his enviable perspective he watched as a ship that had been invisibly distant just a moment earlier scaled up to visibly clear along with the asteroids and debris surrounding it. That put most of the drifting craft just at the bottom of her cleavage and below the number that had been stylistically tattooed there in crisp black ink that matched her raven hair.

"What's that do?" he asked, though the results were obvious. It was his first time in the shuttle simulator and suddenly everything looked like it did in the video games even though his console showed they were still hundreds of thousands of kilometers away.

"Tactical Display Enhancement applies a scaling function to everything on the external displays, appropriate to the standard visual range of the officer at the console. There is a sub-setting to adjust it to a particular species or numerically," she reached over from where she was working at her own console to hover a razor-sharp fingernail over the menu option. "The function is 'smart' - the scaling algorithm curves so that a nearby object is shown at it's normal size for precision reference while a planet or other very large object is moved so as to preserve the visual reference points."

It sounded like she was reading straight out of the manual and perhaps she was; "TDE Mode will also re-draw and scale weapons fire. Energy weapons fire which may otherwise be entirely invisible - such as lasers - will be re-drawn with a time and distance dilation that will give it the appearance of speed relative to the object draw scale. Advanced Tactical Display Enhancement is currently unavailable due to a training mode restriction."

He glanced down at the console, expecting there to be another icon with a strike-out around it or something similar but there wasn't one, "What's that do?"

"ATDE spends additional visualizations, such as traverse cones originating at turreted weapons, engagement envelopes around targets, point-defense engagement ranges, standard weapon ranges, and other tactically useful visual aids. Normally these would not be needed - the combat operations system would handle all of these - but the training officer has elected to put us in a scenario where we are restricted to sub-standard systems..."

"Makes sense;" she'd said it as though it was somehow unusual but his experience from Day One was that the staff liked to make things interesting - challenging - often by removing some familiar and useful resource. This would be no different. "So what's the scenario?" he asked, scooting his seat forward so that he was just at the edge of the console, hands hovering and ready.

A light blinked yellow in one corner and he reached out to bring the communications system into the foreground; "I suspect we are about to find out," she offered with a thin smile as he activated the incoming channel.

'...is the SS Kobayashi Maru. We have been attacked and are adrift and require immediate assistance. Again, this is the...'

She turned to him, "A classic," she said simply while sightless fingers flipped to the tactical screen and slid down the entries, red going to green as the shuttle's limited weapon systems were unlocked. "Tell me, Cadet Kaski, how's your Klingon?"

"Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam!"

"Oh?" she arched an eyebrow, "Let's find out. Open the channel..." He tapped the button but waited for her to to speak. He wasn't surprised when it sounded like she'd practiced the line a hundred times, her reply heavy with confidence. "SS Kobayashi Maru, this is Republic Defense Force Vessel Spokane-3. We have received your distress signal and are responding..."

[Sunset]

RDF-Ojeni, The Outskirts of the GEC-6000000 System, Inside the Beta Luminar Nebula, The Monoceros Ring... With Some History Established...

"...no? Well, I suppose that would be too much like the last story," Captain Blaine said, looking over the Ensign's console for herself. To break the maudlin moment she'd put the Tloqsi to the task of determining if any of the dimensional gateways that had been fired into the stars had 'missed'. It was a longshot of course - hard to miss a star, especially on that kind of timetable.

With that settled, she was just about to move on to the ill-defined Step Two when Lieutenant Commander Calindra, "Something interesting here, Captain..."

"Oh?"

It wasn't emergency-interesting, whatever it was. The Coatlique's tone was fairly neutral as she continued from just over her Captain's shoulder, "The dates. The computer has worked out the Republic equivalent and I've been comparing them to the timeline of events as we know them. If accurate, the Tloqsi have been gone for nearly eight thousand years. Their first contact and conflict with the Veer Un Guun was less than a hundred years previous. That puts the local end-point of their civilization far before the beginnings of the Blishi'i Federation and the first 'known' substantial opponent to the VUG."

"Reviewing the information the Tloqsi made publicly available, there seems to be little difference between the VUG of 'then' and 'now', and much of that can be written off as the difference between their public data and our intelligence data. They are, from appearances, a static civilization."

"That makes sense, in a somewhat depressing way," Commander Sloan agreed. As usual, the Captain had done little more than skim the files on that particular threat and she turned to her left to explain, "The Veer Un Guun's technology base is essentially based on that of the Krȃng. Their culture isn't - the Krȃng were so dangerous because they were ambitious and dynamic and malicious. Everything we know about the VUG puts them at nearly the opposite. They are malicious, yes, but decadent and self-serving. Even when they are fighting outsiders they are fighting themselves. Internal power struggles are common and bloody. With suborned Krȃng infrastructure to make everything for them, they have no interest in advancement or development. And this is another data point confirming that."

"Which is probably why, when they figured out the Tloqsi had left, they didn't come in and destroy all this," the Tactical Officer picked up. "Piece by piece. They could have, but the only thing the Tloqsi had that would interest them was their bodies."

"Their bodies?" Ensign Tilassi asked. "Why their bodies? Do the Veer Un Guun take slaves?"

That was one of the sad realities of the modern galaxy. A lot of civilizations out there were just too frankly stupid to realize that the era of biological labor had long since passed. Some offered excuses - 'Idle Hands are the Devil's Plaything' - while others gave reasons - 'We are Much Faster and More Able than Humans' - but at their core each was about keeping and accumulating power and wealth to those already at the top of the pyramid. So too the Veer Un Guun had a reason though it was more terrible than most, as the Ensign was about to learn.

"Yes and no," Commander Sloan explained. "As I said, the VUG technology base is largely derived from that of the Krȃng. One of these was a modification of the Krȃng life-cycle. The Krȃng reproduce by implanting larval cysts into an individual's central nervous system. The larva hatch and then consume and absorb that nervous tissue. According to their pseudo-religious dogma, the more intelligent the individual, the more intelligent the resulting Krȃng will be. This is more likely due to intelligence being keyed somewhat to nutrition - certain hosts simply provided better nutritional value. The VUG possibly modified this to a life-extension technique."

"They implant their own nervous system into a host body, overriding that of the host but leaving the conciousness intact. This is deliberate - the Veer Un Guun have a culture of cruelty. Even transplantation is often done for malign reasons. A superior will punish an inferior by having them placed in a weaker body, or having their mind connected to that of the original owner. Able to sense but not act, they are usually driven insane..."

[Sunset]

OuterSystemsAllianceMilitaryIndustries

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OSAMI

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Procurement & Direct Sales Information

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Informational Header

Outer Systems Alliance Military Industries - OSAMI - is the military-industrial wing of the Outer Systems Alliance, a Law Enforcement Services Corporation headquartered on the planet Juniper in the Coreward Expansion Zone of the Republic of Sunset, itself located some five hundred light-years coreward from Sol in the Milky Way Galaxy. The OSA provides law enforcement and first responder services to numerous Republic-aligned star systems throughout the Expansion Zone as well as select non-Republic entities throughout the galaxy. As a State-scale entity, the OSA has established OSAMI to provide for its own systems and platform needs with additional manufacturing capability available for external direct sales and entity-level procurement.

Alongside their corporate headquarters, most of OSAMI's manufacturing is based on Juniper where it is managed by-and-large by an enthusiastic army of mostly-Hauyht workers. Resettled refugees from the destruction of their former homeworld of Alice, the Hauyht have thrown themselves heart-and-soul into the design, testing, and manufacture of the platforms and weapons needed to ensure their new home - as well as those of other diverse peoples spread around the galaxy - never again come to the same harm. Thanks to the deep resource-pockets of the Republic government, they have decided that it is time to bring their offerings to the greater galaxy where it is hoped they will help bring peace and security to those who love life and liberty. Those that purchase from OSAMI - and we hope you will be not just a customer, a repeat customer, but a friend - can stand assured that their contribution will go towards the pursuit of happiness and the the assurance of freedom for uncounted billions across the stars!

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Sales Restrictions

As a military-industrial manufacturer headquartered in the Republic of Sunset, OSA Military Industries (OSAMI) sales, licensing, and technology transfers are limited to those entities who are considered 'friendly' or 'neutral' to the Republic of Sunset. If the particular entity you represent is 'friendly', either by general relationship or by treaty, it enjoys a 10% (General) / 15% (Treaty) discount on multi-unit sales. 'Neutral' entities would be those without specific relations to the Republic that are on the same portion of the Socio-Political spectrum. Unsure? Direct your enquiries to the nearest Republic of Sunset virtual consulate or diplomatic enclave.

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Purchase Options & Exchange Rate

All prices listed are for single-unit sales. Bulk orders may receive a sliding discount based on the entity of origin and the amount purchased. State-level purchasers should enquire about negotiating a standing discount; contact your OSAMI sales representative for more details.

Out-Of-Character Purchasing Information: For those player-nations that are friendly to myself & my nation, the only post requested is one listing your purchasing agent & the government or individual entity that will be making purchases (EG 'John Smith, Somebuckistan Military Imports Directorate'). Those that are neutral - that is, on the same portion of the Socio-Political spectrum but not personally known to me - the same information is required as well as what particular systems & packages you will be purchasing (EG 'John Johnson, Uneverheardofstan; Titan Tanks, Pegasus Transports'). A single post is all that is required; any other information you care to list in your post will be appreciated but not required.

Code: Select all

[b]Government / Entity:[/b] National Entity / Mercenary Outfit / Government Agency / Household
[b]Purchasing Agent:[/b] Howard Johnson
[b]Systems & Packages:[/b] Two Week Vacation to Tahiti

For the purposes of sales to external entities and given the restrictions on sales (see the previous segment), the currency of the purchasing entity is assumed to be equal to the DiCoin; no currency conversion is necessary and OSAMI will gladly take whatever form of payment you have whether physical or electronic. Aside from the Purchasing Options listed in the individual unit entry, most are also available for direct licensing & manufacture to entities with a 'friendly' or 'treaty' relationship with the Republic. Direct maintenance contracts - serviced by the same OSAMI engineers and technicians that designed and built the offered platforms - are suggested; manuals are included with every purchase as is access to the OSAMI parts, maintenance, and repair web-source.

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Platforms & Systems Stock and Availability
The following platforms and systems are available and in-stock or can be manufactured to required quantities inside an acceptable time-frame. When new entries are made available for purchase, the oldest current entry may be removed to a secondary display area; these will be linked at the bottom of the current offerings.

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Titan-Type Super-Heavy Hover Tank

Inspired by the RDF's Typhoon Super-Heavy Grav Tank, the Titan is a surprisingly fast high-mobility, high firepower platform that features the OSA's standard angular design aesthetic as well as the over-abundance of weaponry that the organization prefers. Why a 'law enforcement' organization needs a super-heavy hover tank is anyone's guess but foundries on Juniper seem intent to churn them out in vast numbers. This may be good for you, however - especially if you're in need of an armored combat platform that ticks these particular boxes.

Designed to be the hard-hitting fist of a highly mobile armored force, the Titan's primary armament is a pair of linked ultra-high velocity linear accelerators. Due to their particular construction, both must be fired together but this offers additional hit & penetration potential. While these guns feature the standard assortment of warhead-rounds (kinetic, explosive, etc), they are also self-correcting and can effectively engage targets up to 3° off-bore at over-the-horizon ranges. These weapons are also equipped with an auto-loader as well as an automatic platform stabilization system that reduces the unit's 'felt' recoil to a negligible amount. Most of the secondary weapon systems are technically 'outside' of the hull, reducing the risks of platform degradation due to ordinance cook-off.

As might be expected for a unit of this size, the crew spaces are reasonably spacious with multiple upholstery and species accommodations available. Each position has its own ejection-capable compartment with built-in screens as well as an augmented reality 'battle space' providing the illusion of over-the-shoulder contact. Each is environmentally sealed and provided with an independent & recycled atmosphere as well as a small compartment for personal items, nutritional, and survival items and a waste disposal unit. Cup holders are standard, as well as a chilled food storage unit.

Designation: Armored Heavy Assault Platform (Export Version)
Crew Complement: 4; Commander, Gunner, Secondary Gunner, Driver
Power Plant: Advanced Fusion; 3 Month Refueling Interval
Motive: Heavy-Grade RepulsorLift Drive
Maneuvering Characteristics: Terrain Hugging (2 Meter Maximum), Good Acceleration and Maneuverability. Top Speed of 320 Kilometers Per Hour
Armor & Structure: Proprietary Multi-Layer Composite; Thickness Varies by Location
Electronics: Integrated Full Spectrum / Multi-Band Total Theatre Awareness System with Voice, Augmented Reality, Holographic, and Manual Interface
Armament: Main Gunnery; 2 High Velocity Linear Accelerators. Secondary Gunnery; 2 20 Cell Medium Range Missile Boxes, 2 6 Cell Short Range Missile Boxes (Turret), 2 6 Cell Short Range Missile Boxes (Hull), 1 Coaxial High Volume Linear Accelerator (Turret). Auxiliary Gunnery; 2 2 Cell Utility Missile Boxes (Turret), 2 5 Tube Utility Dispensers (Hull), 1 Laser Anti-Missile / Anti-Infantry Emitter (Turret)
Dimensions & Mass: 32 meters x 18 meters x 11 meters, 980 tonnes

Purchasing Options: Manufacturer's Specifications (89.3m DiCoins per Unit), Hull & Turret Only (7.1m DiCoins per Unit), No Weapons or Electronics (23.2m DiCoins per Unit)
Maintenance Outlay: 8-23% Yearly, Depending on Local Infrastructure. Maintenance Contracts Set at 9.5% Per Year

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Thunderer-Type Assault DropShip

With perfectly reasonable and immensely serviceable craft such as the Loki-Class DropShip available, the OSA once again chose to take a hard left, developing their own heavy orbital transport from whole cloth. The result was the Thunderer-Type which was then classified as an 'Assault' DropShip due to its numerous forward-facing weapon systems and its aggressive look and feel. Catering to the needs of the OSA, it is capable of putting a well-rounded armored cavalry unit on the ground very quickly and then providing either landed or in-flight supporting fire for the same.

Primary transport facilities are provided by a large single-ramp bay located at the rear of the main body. This is large enough to accommodate a large variety of units and OSA loadmasters have been known to stretch this space in 'creative' directions, such as securing vehicles directly to the loading ramp so that they are 'stowed' vertically when it is closed. To assist the loadmasters, the bay is provided both with numerous tie-downs and load-bearing attachment points as well as two heavy-duty winches and a ceiling-mounted robotic arm that can extend out of the bay and has been used in combat. On several occasions. Forward of this is a large secondary transport bay with access hatches just behind the fairings on either side of the nose. This and these can accommodate both infantry and light vehicles, such as jetbikes or modest two-man vehicles. Again, it is provided with numerous tie-downs and mobile dividers and can be re-purposed into anything from a forward command center to a field hospital.

Primary firepower is substantial but mostly oriented along the forward axis with a quartet of super-heavy linear accelerators hanging under the forward wing-shoulders. These are super-heavy pieces designed to deliver direct-impact ordinance over ludicrous distances; pair with the Thunderer's standard long-range communications and battle space suite, they can easily engage targets at mid-orbital distances. The same is true of the four long-range missile launch racks; in-atmosphere these are more equivalent to cruise missiles with an appropriate duration and effect. These are augmented by four laser-type emitters at the base of the wings; while anti-ordinance duties are their primarily billet, they are also quite effective against both infantry, powered infantry, and light vehicles.

Because the Thunderer is primarily seen and intended as a 'here to there' transport, crew accommodations are spartan but functional. The largest crew berth is reserved to the commanding officer and this is about the size of a walk-in closet. Other berths are as simple as a pull-down bunk mounted to a corridor wall. Due to external interest, OSAMI does offer an interior package geared towards the operator who intends to use the craft as their full-time living quarters; a heavily-armed RV with space for some very fun toys...

Designation: Assault DropShip (Export Version)
Crew Complement: 27; Command Crew, Maintenance & Engineering Technicians, Loadmasters
Power Plant: Advanced Fusion; 6 Month Refueling Interval
Motive: 2 Orbital-Grade RepulsorLift Drives and 8 Repulsor Maneuvering Sub-Systems
Maneuvering Characteristics: Space-Capable, Good Acceleration and Maneuverability. Top Speed of 1280 Kilometers Per Hour
Armor & Structure: Proprietary Multi-Layer Composite; Thickness Varies by Location
Electronics: Integrated Long-Range Full Spectrum / Multi-Band Total Theatre Awareness System with Voice, Augmented Reality, Holographic, and Manual Interface
Armament: Main Gunnery; 4 High Velocity Linear Accelerators. Secondary Gunnery; 4 20 Cell Long Range Missile Boxes. Auxiliary Gunnery; 4 Laser Anti-Missile / Anti-Infantry Emitters
Haulage: 1 Rear-Opening Primary Drop Bay (40 meters x 24 meters x 18 meters), 1 Forward Light / Infantry Transport Bay (42 meters x 18 meters x 10 meters)
Dimensions & Mass: 132 meters x 99 meters x 37 meters, 3.14 million tonnes

Purchasing Options: Manufacturer's Specifications (2.8b DiCoins per Unit), Hull Only (210m DiCoins per Unit), No Weapons or Electronics (642.2m DiCoins per Unit)
Maintenance Outlay: 5-15% Yearly, Depending on Local Infrastructure. Maintenance Contracts Set at 6.5% Per Year

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LE-Type Police Cruiser

In late '175, it finally came to pass that the OSA - technically chartered as a 'law enforcement organization' - would design and field something that kinda-sorta looked like a police cruiser. If one happens to ignore the turret ring occupied currently by the light bar and the two empty sponson rings on either side of the drive pontoons. That is; it is clear that the OSA's designers intend that the Patrol Cruiser can be quickly fitted with heavy weapon systems 'if' and (hopefully) 'when' the need arises. To accommodate these (potential) systems, the design is fitted with a fairly substantial power plant that - in its base configuration - makes it pretty darn fast. It is heavily armored for a law enforcement platform and can shed small-arms fire like rain, though only moderately so against military-grade weaponry.

A quick count of the top hatches indicates that it had room for four, though two is standard for an OSA patrol. There is an empty compartment in the rear accessible through a large hatch-ramp and this is fitted out with a restraint system as well as an active suppression system for 'de-escalating' unruly suspects via sedative riot foam. Two six-tube box launchers visible just aft of the light bar are meant to carry 'utility' ordinance such as additional riot foam missiles or first responder drones but it isn't unknown for patrol officers assigned to the rougher parts of town to slip in a couple high-yield short-range missiles by 'mistake'. There is a laser anti-missile system mounted just above the forward OSA logo but safety systems built into the software supposedly make it impossible for this to be repurposed.

Unless one happens to know where to put the screwdriver.

Designation: Patrol Cruiser (Export Version)
Crew Complement: 4; 1 Pilot / Driver
Power Plant: Advanced Fusion; 2 Month Refueling Interval
Motive: Medium-Grade RepulsorLift Drive
Maneuvering Characteristics: High Acceleration and Maneuverability. Top Speed of 530 Kilometers Per Hour
Armor & Structure: Proprietary Multi-Layer Composite; Thickness Varies by Location
Electronics: Integrated Long-Range Full Spectrum / Multi-Band Total Theatre Awareness System with Voice, Augmented Reality, Holographic, and Manual Interface
Armament: Secondary Gunnery; 2 6 Cell Short Range Missile Boxes. Auxiliary Gunnery; 1 Laser Anti-Missile / Anti-Infantry Emitter
Haulage: 1 Rear-Opening Storage Compartment (2 meters x 2 meters x 1.5 meters)
Dimensions & Mass: 10 meters x 4.5 meters x 2 meters, 27 tonnes

Purchasing Options: Manufacturer's Specifications (420,000 DiCoins per Unit), Hull Only (75,000 DiCoins per Unit), No Weapons or Electronics (353,000 DiCoins per Unit)
Maintenance Outlay: 7-11% Yearly, Depending on Local Infrastructure. Maintenance Contracts Set at 8.5% Per Year

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Savage Axis SAX-3A-Type Assault BattleMech

To ask why the OSA fields BattleMechs will more than likely get one a look lacking in understanding. To ask that question is to deny the 'stompy'-stompy', to ignore the pure and unadulterated joy of plowing through thick stands of trees, sprawing greenhouses, glass-faced office complexes...

Late one one night at a lonely desk, an engineer sat alone with no particular place to go and nothing particular to do with his time. To relieve the boredom - and to justify his continued effort to warm the seat - he decided to combine this favorite piece and that particular element from various OSA platforms into a single model. The first choice was - oddly - not from one of the BattleMechs that were his normal domain but from the new Gryphon Ground Attack Fighter; the interesting engine and missile launch system that supplied a good portion of its offensive punch. Next would be the leg assembly from the light Grey Knight ProtoMech. The odd split torso from the Helion had always caught his eye and that was next, stripped of its head. That would be added again from the Grey Knight though there would be some tweaking.

The design was coming together now but it still needed something more. A big gun - and his chosen candidate was the shotgun-like linear accelerator used by the Marauder XL (Which stood for Xtra Light, but any sense of scale was already well out the door). With this already open he tore off one of that 'Mech's particle cannon and stuck it between the two box launchers that were now mounted on the thing's shoulders. A medium pulsed laser on the head, a couple high volume rotary cannon on either side of the chest, and a chopping blade under the barrel of the double-accelerator. And a yawn - time to call it a night.

But he didn't close the file.

The next morning, he made his bleary way into the office to find his desk surrounded by a small crowd of colleagues. Some were dismissive, others were interested. He shrugged it off as 'piecemeal salvage'. But someone else higher up the chain had already seen it and whether he'd wanted it or not, the newly dubbed and slightly modified Savage Axis was soon headed for test production. That same year the 'Savage - piloted by one Warden Stillwell - would defeat all opposition at the inaugural Warlord's Tournament on the planet Sakaldale and establish itself as the 'Mech to beat in the coming years.

Designation: Assault-Class BattleMech (Export Version)
Crew Complement: 1 MechWarrior
Power Plant: Advanced Fusion; 3 Month Refueling Interval
Motive: Big Stompy Feet, 2 Heavy RepulsorJets
Maneuvering Characteristics: Average Acceleration and Maneuverability. Top Speed of 62 Kilometers Per Hour
Armor & Structure: Proprietary Multi-Layer Composite; Thickness Varies by Location
Electronics: Integrated Long-Range Full Spectrum / Multi-Band Total Theatre Awareness System with Voice, Augmented Reality, Holographic, and Manual Interface
Armament: Primary Gunnery; 2 Double-Barrel Large Bore Linear Accelerators, 2 20 Cell Medium Range Missile Racks. Secondary Gunnery; 2 6 Cell Short Range Missile Boxes, 2 High Volume Light Linear Accelerators. Auxiliary Gunnery; 2 Laser Anti-Missile / Anti-Infantry Emitters
Dimensions & Mass: 28 meters x 18 meters x 15 meters, 590 tonnes

Purchasing Options: Manufacturer's Specifications (295m C-Bills DiCoins per Unit), Chassis Only (75.8m DiCoins per Unit), No Weapons or Electronics (112.4m DiCoins per Unit)
Maintenance Outlay: 11-14% Yearly, Depending on Local Infrastructure. Maintenance Contracts Set at 12% Per Year