Divided Loyalties #2

A Station Keeping story, by tycho garen
on 5th September 2008. (commentary)

This is the second and final installment of the sixth Station Keeping episode “Divided Loyalties.” This episode develops the character Nan Gee, who first appeared in Diplomacy Maneuvers. Enjoy and look for a new installment from Knowing Mars starting on Monday.

Nan almost tripped on a box as she walked into her office. “How’d they get that in here?” She wondered.

She put her bag down next to her desk and walked carefully back to the package. There was a blank piece of paper fastened to the top of the box. She lifted it carefully, and on the back she read: “Nan: Hope these help. Hanm will be free.”

The memory of last night’s comm call came rushing back. “I guess it wasn’t a fake or a dream,” she muttered as she set the paper back on top of the box. She sat down at the desk and called up the communications log.

“What the hell am I supposed to do now?” She asked, only slightly disturbed that she was talking to herself.

permalink • • zero comments
tagged: • •

Divided Loyalties #1

A Station Keeping story, by tycho garen
on 4th September 2008. (commentary)

This is the first installment of the sixth Station Keeping episode “Divided Loyalties,” which will be presented in two parts. This episode develops the character Nan Gee, who first appeared in Diplomacy Maneuvers. Look for the second part, tomorrow.

Nan rolled over for the third time in as many minutes, and tried to ignore in incessant pinging from her communications panel. She was stuck in that twilight space where her grasp of reality and the limits of possibility were tenuous at best.

She relented and stood up. The comm was on the opposite wall and squinting, she stumbled across the room to activate it. “Maybe turning up the lights would help,” she thought, a bit late to do anything about it, and when the video system didn’t activate she was glad that she hadn’t. “Hello?” she asked, after a long moment. She wasn’t used to the audio comm, particularly when half asleep.

“Ms. Gee, I can’t tell you my name,” the voice on the other end spewed from the speaker with an astonishing speed. “But I’m with the Hanmist Resistance, and–” Nan would have cut him off sooner had she not been yawning.

“What do you want. It’s the middle of the damn night up here.” She wasn’t sure what time it was, or even if night was the right word to describe the time on the station. Hell, she didn’t even know if this call was legitimate: the voice wasn’t any that she recognized. Her caller knew more about her than she did him, if it was a him, and she wanted to even that playing field as soon as possible.

“We know your work, and we we’re building a network of supporters. You’re position on Hanm Centre will be very valuable to us when we come–”

“Come? I haven’t been notified of anything.” Nan thumbed up the lights and squared her shoulders, in a hopes of sounding more authoritative.

“We support you, we support Hanm. We just want you to be ready for us when we come…”

“Oh come on, no one actually talks like that,” Nan thought to herself. “How will I get in touch with you?” She changed strategies and hoped that the person on the other end couldn’t hear her eyes rolling: it was probably better to play along with this, even if it were a prank, but she didn’t have to like it. And hell, if there was a Hanmist movement around to talk to her, this couldn’t be a bad thing.

“You’ll know. Do we have your support?”

“I support anything that’s good for Hanm.” Just ambiguous enough, and ultimately true, she thought.

“Good, expect a package with more information soon. Hanm Will be free.” the words were uttered with a dispassionate murmur that sent a tremble down Nan’s spine.

“Ok, thank you.” Nan responded politely before she cut the connection. “Log last transmission and send the details to…” her command was punctuated by a brisk entry of a code for her terminal in her office. There was supposed to be a way for her to do this verbally, but she always felt that it was easier and more secure to just enter the code by hand.

Her command sequence was short, and she still hoped that she’d be able get back to sleep. She cut the lights and stumbled back to bed. The revolution would wait until morning at least.

permalink • • zero comments
tagged: • •

Mars L4 Outpost, #2

A Trailing Edge story, by tycho garen
on 3rd September 2008. (commentary)

I present to you the second part of another essay from the writings of Leon Winter, our guide for the Trailing Edge stories. The first essay can be found here, and I hope you enjoy.

The incident at Mars L4 didn’t slow the exodus from earth; it did however, speed up the occupation of the moons in the outer system, and it did foreclose the possibility of any long-lasting settlement of any of the L4 or L5 points. Europa first, but ultimately the rest of the Jovian system and Titan.

If the Visa Riots were the spark that started the exodus in earnest, Mars L4 was the fuel that kept it going. I can’t fathom this, I’m sure that had I been there I would have predicted that a tragedy with one of the colonies would have discouraged further colonization.

Clearly that wasn’t the case. Except in the limited form that people were completely unwilling to settle on space outposts like Mars L4. Within five years, all of these habitats had been abandoned, some people even went back to Earth, which was still overcrowded, but most moved on to Mars, the Moon, laid the basis for some of the outer colonies. More than anything thing else the legacy of the Mars L4 disaster was the concentrated development of the OuterColonies.1.

The road that lead humanity to settled on Europa and Titan was difficult and fraught. So many people missed so much: the people that never got to leave Earth, the people lost at Mars L4, the generations of people who never got to see Earth. And yet, for a time, I think Titan and Europa represented the very best of what humanity was capable.

– Leon Winter



Notes:

  1. I am throughly a product of the society of the outer colonies, as I suspect most of the people reading this are as well. The great ships bound for other solar systems bring not the children of Earth but the people of Europa and Titan to the galaxy. Though I still get nostalgic for Earth, it would be thoroughly incorrect to think that any of my relations for the past three–very long generations–had spent any substantial amount of time on the planet. ↩

permalink • • zero comments
tagged: •

Mars L4 Outpost, #1

A Trailing Edge story, by tycho garen
on 2nd September 2008. (commentary)

I present to you another essay from the writings of Leon Winter, our guide for the Trailing Edge stories. This essay will be posted in two parts, and I hope you enjoy.

Though it is hundreds of years past, the collapse of the Mars L4 Outpost remains a vivid and touchstone for most of us that remain.

Outposts and colonies had failed before; but some how, in the early cases, the collapses happened with enough warning to stage evacuations, or before the colony superstructures had become activated.

Mars L4 was different. There was no warning. And no recourse.

Somehow, disasters in space colonization had always seemed like hurricanes: devastating, huge, but visible on the horizon. Mars L4 was an earthquake by comparison: Dangerous, and a known possibility, and seemingly never predictable in the specific instance.

L4/L5 stations were great joys of the orbital mechanics: stable, easy to maintain, large, but particularly as you got further from the sun they were pretty far flung. Though we still do not know what happened to the station–aside from the fact that the air processing system failed–the tragedy was caused by the distance between the station and help.

What we do know is that one of the station’s central air processing unit–and it’s backup(s)–failed. It was 15 days out from the nearest ship.

Any outpost or settlement is always the most vulnerable when it is new, and this is especially true in space before routines are established, when hardware is newly fabricated, and software is largely untested. These factors probably all combined at Mars L4, but in the final analysis it’s difficult to determine if the station collapsed because of simple hardware error or because of some sort of programing mishap. That detail is lost to us, and the station itself has long since been scrapped.

If such a thing had happened on one of the colony structures on, say Mars–as it surely did in the early days of the colonies–there would have been ships, nearby stations, and other colony structures that would have been able to evacuate the population, fix the malfunction and then re-inhabit the structure when it was safe. What might have been lost to history as a routine maintenance situation, is instead remembered as the only instance where a fully populated space colony was lost with all hands in the entire history of human space occupation.

Though to be fair, the extra-solar colonization project is subject to the same challenges as Mars L4, but it will be generations before the news of those outposts reach us. At any rate I hope that we have learned our lesson from Mars L4, but I fear that we have not.

permalink • • one comment
tagged: •

The Historical Moment

A Station Keeping story, by tycho garen
on 29th August 2008. (commentary)

This is the fifth installment of the Station Keeping story. This episode comes to us from the history compiled by J. Tiltsten, written several hundred years after the conclusion of these stories. I hope you enjoy, and I’ll see you back here on Tuesday.

The Necessity of Hanmist Studies, Part I

by Professor Jonathan Tiltsten

Unlike some other pivotal moments in the development of human colonial efforts on other worlds, many documents survive from the period just before and during the occupation of a space station in-orbit of the rim-world “Hanm.” Though in retrospect it is widely accepted, and obvious to many scholars of post-League political organization that the events on Hanm Centre were very important, if not key in determining the organization of human government for the next hundred years; at the time, the key actors in this milieux were not only unaware of their coming role in history, but also the importance of their moment. First a letter from the papers of Commander Eli Banner, the first commander of Hanm Centre, written shortly before he departed for Hanm:

Sometimes I think I’m getting too old for field assignments, but it’s better than getting fat and old behind a desk core-side, a lowly commander would never get chosen for a relativity cruise cycle1. But I’m basically unattached, and I have some experience in the field, but who knows anyway. This time period never did suit me, and it’ll be interesting to see how the world looks on the other side. A of a long flight; not that the core will matter very much out there I trust. I just hope I get a chance to come back someday.

At the same time, the leaders of the civilian government on the colony world Hanm knew that change in the status quo, at least for their people, was imminent–and strictly speaking, it was–their opposition was to the league presence on Hanm Centre, not, in their mind, to the entire League, as it would later become.2 Or the interstellar political status quo of the previous thousand years. Indeed it we now think that it would have been at least a generation on Hanm from the time that Eli Banner departed the core-side world until he and his convoy would arrive on Hanm.

This is an excerpt from an editorial circulated by early “Hanmist”[^ists] shortly the Navy confirmed that it was sending a high level operations convoy after Commander Eli Banner left the core for Hanm Centre.

Above all, I would like to express my objection to the fact that the outpost currently under-construction in high orbit of the planet will be operated and governed by the League’s Navy. While an easily accessible space outpost in this part of the galaxy is not inherently objectionable, I would like to locate my resistance to Hanm Centre not in terms of resistance to the League at large, but rather in acknowledgment of the fact that the Civil authority on Hanm was not–according to the public record–consulted by the League authorities, and furthermore, the fact that the station is not to be administered or overseen by Hanmish authorities. Indeed, there is no reason that it can be directed and administered by the civil authorities on Hanm, who would surely be the best suited given their experience with the region.

As we can see, the seeds of the “Hanmist Separation” movement were significantly more modest than the militant movement that would follow in their name. In an age where the technology of space travel had paradoxically brought time and history to a virtual stand still, it took by the standards of the day, only a paltry handful of years for the Hanmist movement to sour. Though from our contemporary perspective this may not seem particularly remarkable, it must have been–particularly to the then unknowing Eli Banner.



Notes:

  1. Key leaders of the League and Navy during this era were frequently cycled on and off interstellar flights to help provide continuity with the League’s longer term missions on outer worlds. This kept some level of stability, but meant that policy changed back and forth as various leaders came on and off the cruises. ↩

  2. In fairness, it is only in retrospect that we can make this claim, in a lot of ways, Hanm Centre was of a guilded age of a dying empire of sorts, and the accomplishments of the station and it’s crew though too numerous to list here, were not typical of any late imperial project. afn:istsz:”Hamnism” refers to the political movement started on Hanm (that quickly spread to other large rim worlds) that advocated independence and separation from the League, the policies of continued colonization, and distant centralized government. ↩

permalink • • zero comments
tagged: •

Visa Riots #7

A Trailing Edge story, by tycho garen
on 28th August 2008. (commentary)

“Visa Riots” is a short story from the Trailing Edge project. This story happens several hundred years before the other stories in the project. This is the final installment, of 6 7 parts. Read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5. Enjoy!

“–just to be clear on the story, again: you beat up a maintenance worker, crawled halfway across the London dome, snuck into the transport dock, and hijacked a pod and flew to Marrakesh Dome?” Salimia asked, in disbelief: a grin slipping across her face.

Selimia was one of the city administrators, young, fierce, and commanding despite her slight figure. Their fathers had been colleagues, during dome building, and they had played together as children.

Edwin had expected that Salimia would pay them a visit in holding cell–their bedraggled appearance, and long flight in a London Dome maintenance pod reflected poorly on them as possible immigrants or visitors. Bun insted, without hearing their story, or even seeing them, once she had gotten word of their arrival had managed to advocate favorably for Perr and Edwin

Now–a shower and a change of clothes later–they were just like old friends having lunch at a quaint cafe on the streets of Marrakesh.

As if all the worlds great cities weren’t presently aflame. Marrakesh had avoided riots: it’s residents had more connections to the Corps and the Colonization authority because it was the, It helped that the population was smaller when the dome was built so it avoided the pinch after the baby boom.

“Different order, I think,” Edwin said, laughing.

“And it wasn’t halfway across the dome, we weren’t more than a few miles from the transport dock,” Perr said.

Salimia was dismissive. “Whatever, you’re here now. I think we can get you spots on the next shot to orbit, if you want,” she said.

“I’m not sure that we’re ready to leave, there’s work left to be done on Earth,” Edwin said.

“–someday, I might take you up on the offer,” Perr said. Her enthusiasm was not as rabid.

“Don’t wait too long,” Salimia said. “Marrakesh didn’t fall, and we can learn from this mess, but I’m not convinced that there’s as much time as you’d need.”

Edwin smiled, “We’ll see…”

permalink • • zero comments
tagged: •

Visa Riots #6

A Trailing Edge story, by tycho garen
on 27th August 2008. (commentary)

“Visa Riots” is a short story from the Trailing Edge project. This story happens several hundred years before the other stories in the project. This is part 6 of 6 7 parts. Read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5. Enjoy!

“What do we do now?” Edwin asked when he was fully awake, still tired, but awake. He was still filthy, but he hadn’t slept well enough to care and there were more pressing concerns.

“I think we need to leave here,” Perr said, from another sofa on the other side of the door. She was still groggy but had been awake for several minutes. “I don’t want to be around when the owners come home and see this,” she said waving her hand over all remnants of their meal the previous night.

The riot had slowed over night, but there were still intermittent sounds from outside the door, as there had been all night. Edwin wasn’t even sure that it was even properly morning.

“Right, sis, but how,” Edwin said.

“Do you think they’ve opened the dome for venting?”

“We’re still hear aren’t we? So probably.”

“Do we know anything that might be useful. I don’t think there’s power here. I don’t have a terminal with me,” Edwin said, sitting up.

“It was coming toward the transport complex. It’s probably about this visa thing, I mean? What else?”

“Right. We still need to get out somehow, we could try and get out of the dome through the venting, but that’s a dead-end, probably.”

“I’m sure it’s safe out there. The Domes are more connivence than necessity at this point,” Perr said.

“Especially when the fucking city is on fire. If we get out of the dome, what’s to say that the next…”

“Right. The transport complex’s closed… didn’t Dad’s company have a little dock port? It’s still there, I’m sure there’s a trans–” Perr said, her voice trailing off. “–from this side, come on.” She jumped up and began to walk down the hallway toward one of the building linkages.

Edwin scooped up a couple of water bottles and a few snacks and followed her. “Wait, Perr, what the hell?”

permalink • • zero comments
tagged: •
< Previous Entries •