NationStates Jolt Archive

OOC: This is the tech research thread. It is earmarked Secret ICly. It is older than God.

Division Five Command, Deep Tsarai

Lady Protector Rene Seingult leaned back in her wheelchair. "You. Report." she said, and winced a little as the familiar pain of gravity hit her again.
Kaligh ralInya was a tall man, heavily muscled as befitted the Commandant of Division Four, the construction and mining division. He loomed above the others seated around the table.
Kaligh slid a slim folder across the table to her. "We've finished the new housing complex here in Deep Tsarai. Also the new Derflon factory in Nova Reio. And the aerospace research center in the Skirré Mountains."
The man next to him, Commandant Irvali tsaHuri, was Kaligh's opposite; short and wiry, with a spiky black moustache Rene found mildly amusing (although of course she would never let it show).
"Yes, the research center is complete." tsaHuri continued animatedly, hands waving in the air above the the table. "The distance of transport was a difficulty, of course, for the first crews, but with the completion of the transport tunnels" - he nodded appreciation to Kaligh - "It became much easier. And now it's finished! I wouldn't want to intrude upon Division Seven's area of expertise, of course, but the Skirré Mountains do form our southern border, so it was important to get the top-side defences installed. Which we did. Hidden from air and ground. We-"
Rene held up a hand to stall him from futher speaking. Given free rein, Commandant tsaHuri could babble on about nothing in particular for hours at a time.
"Thank you, Commandant." she said. "Division Six, report."
Sural tsaChanya, the Research and Development Commandant was a classic "mad scientist"; a labcoat stained with various chemicals, bald head surmounted by a pair of bug-like goggles, a crazed grin. Closely related to the bloodline of the Lord Protectors, tsaChanya had inherited more than the usual share of Seingult insanity. Rene had made plans to have him executed following her death; the idea of Sural tsaChanya in command of the Commonwealth was not a good one.
"Certainly, my lady." Sural said, grinning. "My researchers are still trying to work some kinks out of the new growth acceleration proteins - all the clones we've tried to accelerate so far have died, unfortunately." He looked around almost unconciously, as if looking for spies.
"The, ah, "Ruki" Project also proceeds. We've met some snags, however, because the, ah, subjects are not cooperating.
But the aerospace research center looks very promising! I've ordered the appropriate personell to relocate there, and they appear to be throwing ideas around now."
"Excellent." Rene nodded to him, and turned to Division Seven Commandant Erin tsaKell.
"Your thoughts on the defense of the aerospace center, Commandant tsaKell."
The Ground Command Commandant nodded.
"Of course, the north side of the Skirré Mountains is the border of the Obsidian Wastes - the south side is entirely unaffected, since the prevailing winds avoid it. The old cloud forests provide some cover there. The north side, however, is bare, although erosion has removed much of the original fused glass of the surface. But the center, of course, is well underground, and well-defended, as are all our installations. But the proximity of the edge of the Obsidian Wastes means that an attacking force wouldn't yet be dead of radiation poisoning by the time they arrived."
"Thankyou. Commandant, what about Division Seven's Air Corps? Would they be able to pilot a fixed-wing aircraft?"
"Probably not, my lady." tsaKell replied. "The "Ghoul" transport dirigibles are quite different from fixed-wing craft. We'll have to set up simulators to train crews in fixed-wing flight."
"Good. Commandant tsaHuri, I want that done. Commandant tsaChanya, I want your researchers to work with Division Seven in designing a fixed-wing fighter aircraft."
tsaChanya nodded, although he looked less than happy about it. Division Six was traditionally at odds with Division Seven.
Rene nodded to the rest, including the Commandants of Divisions One and Two. "All of you, dismissed."

Ruki Project Core, the Eyrie

K-10 looked at the woman across the table from him. Tall, dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin. Part of the old ruling class. And if anyone had any doubts about her identity, the Iron Crown of the Dominion on her head announced it for all to see; this was Domina Rene Seingult I, Division Five Commandant.
If he closed his eyes, the shark genes inserted into his genome illuminated the electrical activity around her - her nerves and brain. The chip in his brain identified her mood instantly - interested, curious. The implants grafted into his spine allowed him to modify that, if he wished. K-10 considered doing that, but conditioning forbade it.
Likewise, conditioning stopped him shocking her with the spines in his wrists, or kicking her head in with his boosted musculature. All of these K-10 thought of and dismissed in instants, almost subconciously. He was a Rukine Knight, Homo Superior, and he lived to serve the Dominion.
"So," Domina Rene Seingult said, "You're K-10, then? The tenth unit of K series?"
K-10 nodded. J series and the others before J had gone rogue, he knew vaguely; implants, conditioning, or genemods rejected. K-10 had resolved not to do that, to remain faithful to the Dominion.
"You must be bored here." the Domina said, her voice loud in the quiet of the interview room.
K-10 shook his head. He had full access to the data intercepted from Outside; why should he be bored? Why should it matter? He was a Rukine Knight.
"And you serve the Dominion well?"
K-10 nodded. If he was required, he would serve.
"Fate curse it! Speak!" the Domina snapped.
"Visual cues should suffice. My lady." his voice was rough, gravelly; he didn't use it much.
The Domina scowled, and nodded back. That was logical. But, closing his eyes, K-10 could feel her anger, leaking a little into him. He supressed it ruthlessly; he was a Rukine Knight. Emotions were irrelevant.
"I live to serve, my lady."

Domina's Quarters, Deep Tsarai

Rene Seingult flopped back into her wheelchair with a sigh. "Fate be accursed, my legs hurt."
"You shouldn't have tried to walk, then." city commandant Casene tsaKell pointed out sensibly. There was worry in her eyes.
"Fate and gravity be accursed, both of them! I'll walk if I choose to, whatever the Gees. Fate be kind, I'll fly."
That hope, her one desperate hope, had come a step closer to reality today, as the Ghost Rapid Attack VEhicle, designed by a multinational consortium and tested in Tsaraine, had been cleared for production. Ghosts, arisen from the GRAVE... whoever thought of that acronym had a sense of humor, Rene thought.
"Open orders list." She told the computer, which obligingly binged and brought up the orders list; the Dominion of Tsaraine's "things to do".
"Order: Production of Ghost fighters to begin immediately. I want an Air Command Division as soon as possible (OOC: In six more days real-time). Also... Order: assign another Physics Platoon to Nanoforge design at the Eyrie. I want those as soon as possible, too."
Nanoforges, hopefully, would allow the Dominion to harness new levels of molecular engineering, giving rise to new materials, new technologies. When Tsaraine appeared once more before the world, Rene planned to have a military worth fighting with, a nation worth fighting for.

The Eyrie, Research and Development Core

On the screens, Ghost fighters soared through the bright blue skies; footage taken for Tsaraine's recent return to the public eye.
"Evidently the Ghost fighters work, gentlemen," Rene Seingult said, a rare smile cracking her face. "Good work. How goes the Nanoforge research?"
The Platoon Commandant in charge of that project looked up from her notes.
"Not well, I'm afraid, Domina." she replied. "We're having trouble with the particle auto-seperation mechanisms; right now we're getting spontaneous inclusions. Which isn't good for chemical synthesis, of course."
Rene scowled. "I guess we'll just have to do this without it, then." she said, hitting the "forward" button on the projector.
The next image was a sharp, angular craft; an old box-winged shuttle, of the pre-Event type.
"This, of course, is the Commonwealth's old shuttle design." she said. "Launched by antigravs, which, unfortunately, we don't have any more. Platoon Commandant ralGhema-"
The named man looked up, messy hair haloing his face with it's oversized bottle-green goggles. "Uh, yes, Domina?"
"You'll be leading a team to design a replacement. Commandant ralKeyra will be working with you."
A short, spiky-haired woman in the uniform of the old Commonwealth's StarForce groaned, muttering "Him again?". Rene pretended not to hear.
"As will I." she continued. And why not? I *founded* the StarForce, after all. "Sural tsaChanya assures me Nova Reio still has most of our spaceflight data online, Fate be praised. I was thinking something like this."
Rene pressed "forward" again, and the hypothetical design appeared on the projector screen; a large but spindly-looking aircraft with massively oversized engines, and a smaller, compact aerodynamic spaceplane.
"This is the booster plane - I've named it Isis. It's task is to get this second craft, the Osiris spaceplane, up to launch altitude, when the Osiris seperates from the Isis and engages it's primary thrusters to reach orbit. The Osiris, like the Ghost, will be powered by fusion."
Kyne ralGhema looked interested, at least. Rene looked again at the screen, imagining the day when that would be reality. One way or the other, I'll get into space again!

The Eyrie, Nanoforge Project Core

It had been a good time for the Dominion; the Isis and Osiris booster planes and spaceplanes were designed and in production, Set class satellites had been established in orbit, and the old Tsalin I was being salvaged. Tsaraine's space projects were progressing well - all except Rene's own ambitions. I'll get there eventually, Fate be blessed.
However, today Rene Seingult was at the Eyrie for a ground-based project, the long-awaited nanoforge molecular assembly plants.
"Where is it?" she asked one of the project scientists irritably.
"There, Domina." the scientist gestured to one of the far walls, where a massive steel cube took up much of the space.
"It's ... bigger than I expected."
"We're working on minaturising it. But it does work, Domina!" the scientist said enthusiastically, "Quite well, in fact. Researcher keiLaran, have you got the ... drat the man, where's he got himself to? Oh, there he is. KeiLaran, bring the demonstration we made for the Domina over here."
Most Division Six personell were indistinguishable from one another in their white coats and bulbous green goggles, but researcher keiLaran was without a doubt one of the most grotesquely deformed men Rene had seen. He approached with a limp, carrying in his arms something which shone brightly under the harsh fluorescent lights.
The researcher bowed uncomfortably, and proffered the object; a folded piece of shimmering black cloth.
"Spun diamond, Domina. Harder than RE-8, lighter than Derflon... needless to say, we can see some applications for this already. The dark colour is due to free carbon nodes lodged in the crystalline matrix but not a part of it; we're pretty sure we could get any colour we wanted, with a little work."
"Thank you." Rene bowed back, accepting the bundled cloth. It was suprisingly soft. "By this alone, the project has already proven it's worth. Now see if you can make it a little smaller."
KeiLaran saluted. "As you say, Domina. We're working on it."

The Eyrie, Air Command Development Core

I seem to be spending more time in the Eyrie than home in Deep Tsarai, Rene thought. This stop at the Division Eight craft development project was another jammed into her busy schedule.
"You see, this will fill a rather gaping hole in our air transport capabilities." the Platoon Commandant in charge said, indicating the schematics on the projector.
Rene nodded, examining the blocky aircraft delineated on the far wall.
"For a long time, our only transport aircraft were the Ghoul dirigibles," the Commandant continued, clicking the projector remote. An image of that massive airship appeared.
"It has the advantages of being able to transport a massive amount of troops, but it's slow, and uneconomic for small deployments. Not to mention completely unarmed. Thus, we've developed what we're calling the "Revenant" troop transport aircraft.
While it only carrys twenty troops maximum - the same number as our Ravager APCs - it can deliver them to a battlefield or deployment zone much faster and more economically than the Ghouls.
It's also much better armed; we've replaced the old RE-8 ceramo-textile composite cladding with the new spun diamond from the Nanoforge project, and of course it's shielded from radiation by Derflon cladding.
It's powered by the same fusion engines as the Ghost fighter, and has the same ejection system, though of course we don't intend to use it's destructive capabilities.
We've armed it with a pair of simple turreted machine guns, which should be sufficient for it's role."
The Commandant trailed off, coming to the end of his speech.
"Excellent." Rene told him, smiling. "You have the go-ahead to begin development and production."

The Eyrie, Air Command Development Core

The first Revenant troop planes lurched out of the hangar and into the sky, seeming to defy the laws of physics as they punched through the air. The roar of their jets was incredible.
They look like ugly, flying bricks, Rene thought, I like them.
Aloud, she said, "Excellent work, Platoon Commandant."
That was all that needed to be said; the Platoon Commandant beamed happily.
Rene looked up at the dwindling dots of the Revenants thoughtfully. What next? Where to next? Damnit, when will the Tsalin I get home?

The Eyrie, Applied Physics Research Core

The heavy metal shape was deposited carefully on a sterile workbench in one of the Eyrie's most secure vacuum laboratories; the researchers followed it like priests following an idol, and just as reverently.
This was an active mystery, something which contradicted the way the universe should work, and they were all very interested to find out precisely what it was.
An engineer had done the first scientific listing of it's properties, and the researchers were very eager indeed to reclaim the honour of it's decipherment for Division Six; no half-trained engineer was going to rob them of their glory!
The reactionless drive, now disconnected, was silent as the researchers set up their equipment, eager to discover it's workings.

The Eyrie, Applied Physics Research Core

"You said you had something to show me." Domina Rene Seingult was less than pleased at being dragged out of Deep Tsarai yet again to listen to physicsists babble on about things neither she nor they understood properly.
"Yes, Domina. We've figured out the principle behind the reactionless drive." The researcher waved to the center of the lab, where a metal sphere, hairy with wires, was ... floating a good meter above the floor.
"Sweet Blessed Fate! Explain this." Rene demanded.
"As far as we can understand according to conventional physics, it works by antimagnetics." the researcher said, sounding apolgetic.
"Isn't that impossible?" Rene asked sharply.
"We thought so too, Domina. A large sphere of antimagnetic metal, itself rather ordainary, is surrounded by conventional electromagnets. The antimagnetic object is attracted to things of like polarity, and repulsed by things of opposite polarity. That, of course, is the reverse of what happens in an ordainary magnet, where things of one polarity are attracted to things of the other polarity, and repulsed by the same polarity.
Thus the antimagnetic core is constantly moving towards the electromagnets, which are constantly moving away; we can modulate the rate of movement by manipulating the electromagnetic fields, which is relitavely easy when compared to comprehending the way the antimagnetic core works."
"So this, then, is moving upwards at a speed equal to that of gravity pulling it down?"
"Yes, Domina."
"So ... this is, of course, supposed to be impossible. How does it work?"
"Ah. That's somewhat hard to explain, Domina."
"Try!" Rene demanded.
"It seems to be explainable only by old Kymnari theoretical physics, and their thought processes were as different from ours as ours would be from a chimpanzee's. The idea of dual opposites balanced by intangibles is found throughout Kymnari theories; it formed a part of their Three Suns religion.
From what we've been able to decipher, the "holy omnipresent force of electromagnetism" - "electromagnetism" being a very rough translation, by the way - was opposed by the "unholy omnipresent force of electromagnetism", which was supressed by the "divine balance", which appears to be some kind of universal constant, perhaps representing the stabilising presence of the goddess Kymn in the universe.
As you can see, this is almost theology, or at any rate physics shrouded in theology. Normally, the "divine balance" supresses the "unholy omnipresent force", as it should, since the "unholy omnipresent force" is by definition unholy - another rough translation, the word in Kymnari means also "anathema" and "abomination". Despite their theological revulsion to it, however, specially consecrated technicians, engineer-priests if you will, who appear to have been part of the Dawn Sun caste, could seperate out the "unholy omnipresent force" from the "holy omnipresent force" by removing the "divine balance".
In any theological human society, we would simply not use a method so steeped in abomination as the Kymnari believed this to be. However, the Kymnari were generally more pragmatic than humans, and indeed did use it extensively, if with certain safeguards."
The researcher pointed to the floating object, which was plastered with curves and lines in the eye-wrenching Kymnari script.
"That's what those are," he said, "Sacred seals to appease Kymn and keep Her from forcibly reasserting the "divine balance". A function which appears to be more soundly replicated in certain objects inside the antimagnetic core itself."
"So we can replicate these devices without the need for superstitious scrawlings and ritual?" Rene asked.
"Evidently, Domina. Else the Tsalin I could not have been recovered from it's orbit, or gone on it's mission to bring the asteroid from the belt. Yes, we can reproduce the antimagnetic systems, although we'd need to reprogram a Nanoforge to do it."
"That's your next project, then," Rene said, "I want these things being reliably produced as soon as possible."

The Eyrie, Space Command Development Core

This section of the Eyrie, though closer to the surface and the space launch facilities, was no less important, and it was to the Space Command Development Core that Rene went next, to visit the engineers and technicians responsible for the development of new spacecraft for the Dominion.
Few of the researchers looked up as she entered; they were plastered around a grainy video feed from the orbital facilities - extractors and smelters, primarily - built into the High Stone asteroid.
"What is it?" Rene asked, her faithful clone aide wheeling her forward.
"Something rather irritating." one of the researchers replied, moving over absentmindedly. Suddenly she realised who exactly she was talking to, and leapt to attention.
"Domina Seingult! Sir!"
"At ease, researcher." Rene replied. "So, what is this "rather irritating" thing?"
On the screen was what looked like a very minimalist spacecraft, with reaction jets, fuel tanks, flight controls, power cells, and very little else. Nothing was pressurised, the crew cabin simply an outline of metal rods strung with spun-diamond netting.
"They call it a "taxi", Domina," the researcher said, wringing her hands, "And it's apparently used for short-range transport around High Stone. But we never designed it - apparently it was designed and built up there by unskilled craftspeople!"
"Hardly unskilled, if they're in Space Command." Rene remarked.
"That's so, Domina, but this thing has had no testing process, no design control-"
"Have you found any flaws with the design?"
"Well, no, Domina, but-"
"As they say in Ground Command, "if it isn't broken, don't fix it". If there's no actual problems with these "taxis", then I see no point in halting the production of such a useful tool."
With such an edict from their ruler, the problem evaporated instantly.
"Despite this "taxi", I have work for you." Rene continued, coming to the reason for her visit. "With the production of ore increasing at the High Stone, we need a proper vessel, designed for zero-gee work, to serve as a dedicated transport in space.
You'll be aware, of course, of the advantages such a craft would pose over the spaceplanes we're currently using; no need to lift the craft out of the atmosphere being primary among them. However, we also now have a much greater benefit; perfected antimagnetism technology - yes, we can now reproduce the reactionless drives of the Tsalin I. I expect those drives to be incorporated into the design - with appropriate safeguards, of course, to ensure that they do not fall into the wrong hands."

The Eyrie, Air Command Development Core

The Air Command Development Core ran to a somewhat slower pace than that of Space Command, as the focus of the Dominion's research had largely moved off the Air Command Division and onto the newer Space Command Division. Nonetheless, development still went on, with the researchers currently working on upgrades to the Ghost fighter.
Rene was greeted almost immediately by the Core Commandant, Kyne ralGhema.
"How can we assist you today, Domina?" ralGhema asked politely, bowing.
"The Applied Physics Research Core has finally deciphered the workings of the Tsalin I's reactionless drives, Core Commandant." Rene replied. "One of the uses of this is the ability to make the drive move up at the same speed at which it is being pulled down by gravity."
The Core Commandant grasped the meaning of that instantly.
"Why, one could make things hover, without needing lifting gas or rotors!"
"Indeed," Rene replied, smiling, "We now have technology which performs the same function as that which holds the famous Menelmacari gravships aloft."
RalGhema raised an eyebrow. "We scarcely have the technology to duplicate such a vessel, Domina!"
"Of course not; we lack several dozen millenia of development. However, we do now have the most essential part of those craft - or something which performs the same function, anyway."
"You want us to design a gravship for you, Domina?"
""Magship" might be more appropriate, as it uses antimagnetism, and not antigravity, to stay aloft," Rene replied, "But I do not ask for anything of a military nature as yet. I ask only for ... a private vessel, of sorts; a fitting transport for my status."
"Your status, Domina, is higher than that of the Elentári Sirithil, at least within the borders of Tsaraine. It may prove difficult."
Rene favoured him with a rare smile. "Do your best."

Scheighu Aerodrome, Scheighu, Tsaraine

Kyne ralGhema watched the engineers put the final touches to the black, blue and silver hull of the Domina's skyship, which glistened shiny new in the bright lights of the construction hangar.

The Domina should have been here, to witness the completion of the skyship, or at least the dedication ceremonies; but she was ill, or away, or something, and unable to attend. So said the SSC, and it was unwise to question them. So the craft was being completed without official attendance (barring Kyne himself, who'd been hovering over the thing all through it's design and construction, wanting to see it perfect), and the dedication ceremonies had been postponed until the Domina could attend.

Kyne sighed, and looked over the skyship again. Even if it couldn't come close to matching Menelmacar's gravships in technology, he was satisfied that they'd given the Elven vessels a run for their money in terms of style; unlike most Tsarainese vessels, the skyship was sleek and elegant, the big jet engines, similiar to those on the Isis booster planes, carefully muffled in flight. A long deck of finely polished wood would provide the occupants with the possibility of viewing the ground from far above, at the lower speeds the craft was capable of.

Get well soon, Domina. Kyne thought, and hurried off to yell at one of the technicians who was making a terrible botch of the delicate silver scrollwork.

The Eyrie, Space Command Development Core

Like most Tsarainese craft, the freighter on the development team's screens was blocky and functional, not pretty by any stretch of the word. But that was no matter; the object of this project was to design an efficient transport mechanism, which they had done. Their simulations had been successful, the design had been approved, and now all that awaited was to begin construction of the freighters.

OOC: That last post looks much better Tsaraine. :) Much easier to read.

So *bump* for you!

OOC: Ah, thanks.

Naval Development Core, The Eyrie, Tsaraine

The Naval Development Core still smelled of fresh plastic and steel, having been only recently completed. The Researchers gathered in it's main conference room were almost all bemused; after all, why have a Navy in a landlocked country?

Kyne ralGhema was one of the few who was not, having been given instructions by the Domina from her sickbed in Deep Tsarai.

"Ah, you may be wondering why you're here," he said, somewhat nervous; he'd never got the hang of public speaking, "So I'm here to explain that.

"The Domina gave me instructions as to the next direction to be taken by Division Six. It's somewhat unexpected, but it involves primarily the Air Development Corps, especially the team who worked on the design of the skyship, and the Naval Development Corps. Which is henceforth founded, composing the people present here."

Those were mainly the researchers who'd worked on the skyship, and a few researchers from the small Marshall Island* expatriate community who'd continued their former nation's naval tradition, despite the lack of open water, salt or fresh, in Tsaraine.

"The first task you have is to solve the problem of Tsaraine's location," Kyne continued, "Which is no longer as insurmountable as it once was. With the antimagnetic drives developed by the Applied Physics Corps, we can fly craft across the intervening land. We know it's possible, as the skyship has been tested, and works perfectly.

"The Domina has asked for a similar aerial vessel ... one that is also capable of functioning underwater. Obviously, this means that it will require multiple antimagnetic cores; at least one for lift, and one for propulsion, as obviously the propulsion systems of the skyship won't work underwater.

"By the same token, if we intend to arm it the craft will require weapons systems capable of functioning both in the air and in the water. The hull will require careful work, as it must withstand quite a bit of pressure; most of the time, our hulls are for keeping in the pressure."

Kyne waved upwards, indicating Division Nine, the space program.

"It must be capable of being used for exploration, construction or transport duties with only minor field refit between roles.

Now, you have your orders. Go to it!"

OOC: Marshall Island*: GMC gave his permission to have a GMC expat community in Tsaraine. Many thanks!

Coastal Plains, Ka Tikal Province, Ekatori

Thirty years ago, Ekatori had been a squabbling collection of chaotic warring states. Shortly after the Obsidian Event which crippled Tsaraine, however, one of those warlords, Qosin Ra, had conquered the rest, establishing one of the most democratic states bordering the Obsidian Wastes (although admittedly that wasn't saying much).

So the Tsarainese experimental craft Catfish recieved only stares, and no gunshots, as it made it's way through the air above Ekatori's southern province of Ka Tikal.

Some screams too, Kyne ralGhema noted; the Catfish looked like the bastard offspring of a submarine and an aeroplane, nothing meant to fly. In a way, it was. Who knew what the rustic farmers staring up from below thought of it.

Kyne wished there'd been some other, less ornery ruler to negotiate with than the wily Ekatorian Rega, but of all the nations bordering Tsaraine, Ekatori was the only one with a seacoast, it's Eastern borders extending out into the Sea of Storms.

So they'd negotiated with Rega Qosin Ra, and eventually the grizzled old ruler had been enticed by the promise of Tsarainese ore from High Stone, as so many other bordering nations were. In exchange for the guaranteed sale of a certain amount, Qosin Ra had agreed to allow the Tsarainese docking rights in the capital, Rakenno, and had sold them a survey ship, obtained through some semi-legal impounding of foreign assets in Rakenno.

Which led to the presence of the Catfish here above Ka Tikal, heading to meet the Tsarainese survey ship Stonefish out on the Sea of Storms.

The Catfish had been tested thoroughly in the air, performing better than they'd expected both in the Wastes North of the Skirré Mountains, and the steppes South of them. It had not, however, been tested in the water, so they went now to meet the Stonefish, and take the plunge. Literally as well as metaphorically.

"Look!" one of the Researchers exclaimed, pointing out of the Catfish's thick forward windows at a thin blue band where sky met land. "Is that the sea?"

Kyne noted the slight hint of fear in the young Researcher's voice with a little amusement; of them all, he was one of the few who'd actually seen the sea before, although the waters off Marshall Island were said to be nothing compared to the waves in the Sea of Storms.

Tsaraine had no large bodies of water of it's own, and thus most Tsarainese regarded so much water in one spot as something slightly unnatural. Another hurdle to pass on the road to becoming a seafaring nation instead of a sea-fearing one.

Sea of Storms, International Waters

"One!"

Behind him in the Catfish's crowded mess, Kyne could hear the development team begin one of Tsaraine's many diverse drinking games. He was grateful for the non-drinking crew, who seemed to be doing a reasonable job of keeping the Catfish running despite their relitavely short and on-the-job training.

"Two!"

After a while, we'll be too hammered to think, let alone talk. Best that I do this now.

Smothering a grin, Kyne opened a communications line to Irvali tsaHuri, Commandant of Division Three, and thus responsible for overseeing all production in the Dominion.

"Evening, ralGhema. Or should I say, night?"

The sea of storms was several hours east of the Wastes.

"If you want to, tsaHuri. I've got a production edict from the Domina here."

Technically, only another Division Commandant or the Domina could talk so disrespectfully with a Division Commandant, but in recent months Kyne's duties, ranging over several Development Corps, had eclipsed those of Sural tsaChanya, the official Division Six Commandant.

"The Domina?" Irvali's famed spiky mustache moved in something resembling suprise. "I thought she'd just got back from Rhea?"

Kyne hadn't heard anything about that, and filed it away for future investigation ... discreetly, of course.

"No," he replied, "Text. I quote, "Following the completion of field tests for the proposed dual environment transport craft, two manufacturing centers are to be utilised for the production of said dual environment transport craft, to a total number of 50 craft". I also quote, "A temporary training and command building is to be assembled in Deep Tsarai immediately, pending the construction of a dedicated site."

"Temporary, eh? Interesting. I'll get people on it."

Sea of Storms, International Waters

From the thick forward windows of the C-023, Captain Commandant Gimil tsaBarak could see the Catfish-class Dual Environment Vehicle's powerful lights illuminating the seabed, the fish fleeing the sudden brightness where normally daylight never came.

Distantly Gimil could see the lights of the other nine DEVs, also advancing on the coordinates they'd been given. Part of Gimil's mind was gibbering that this mission was absolutely crazy, while another part insisted that this was Duty, and therefore sacred. What was there down here of any importance which could possibly be affected, anyway?

The lights of the other DEVs dwindled and vanished into the cloying darkness; they'd stopped at the agreed upon perimeter. It was up to Gimil and C-023 to carry the payload to Ground Zero, for the strangest and probably most insane demolition project in all of history.

Best to get it over with, Gimil thought, increasing the field strength to the propulsion cores. The C-023 shot forward, pressing him back into his seat.

"We're at the coordinates, Commandant," his Second Commandant, Tyran Sche'daya, reported.

"Deploy payload," Gimil ordered, hoping that the thing wouldn't activate prematurely. It was superbly engineered, of course, but there was always that niggling shadow of doubt...

"Deploying payload," Tyran replied, switching a screen to view the payload, secure in it's blister on the side of the C-023.

On the screen, a hairline crack appeared in the blister, and the two halves of the shell slid apart. The payload extended on it's telescoping arm, driving softly into the soft sediments of the seabed.

The Sea of Storm's capricious currents meant that the sediment was very thin here, Gimil knew; that was why this site had been chosen, after all.

The arm, minus the payload, withdrew, and the blister closed.

And now, sweet Fate, we get out of here.

The payload was set to activate by remote, of course, and not by timer, but Gimil didn't want to spend any more time near an armed high-yield fusion warhead than he had to.

Gimil turned the C-023 around with a deft spin of the altitude/depth cores, and headed back for the perimeter as fast as the cores would take him.

Finally the lights of the other vessels came into view, and Gimil drew the C-023 into position alongside. Now they were supposed to wait, observe, and report; the Dominion had tested fusion warheads in the Wastes before, but never ones with such a high yield, and never underwater.

Gimil swallowed, and nodded to Tyran.

"Detonate."

Tyran nodded back, equally solemn, and typed in the codes. Several dozen kilometers away, a point of light blossomed from the darkness, flowering into a blinding radiance. The C-023 was buffeted by a sudden surge of water, Gimil barely managing to keep the craft from rolling.

So, that was a submarine fusion detonation. Certainly impressive enough.

Applied Physics Research Core, The Eyrie, Tsaraine

With a suitably impressive electronic whine, the compicated apparatus in the testing bay flashed into action, the status indicator building up ring by ring until the thing crashed back on it's shock absorbers, firing.

"Impressive," was the Domina's only comment. "So tell me, how does this thing work?"

"The gauss cannon is an application we began developing from the research into advanced magnetics begun by the antimagnetics project, Domina," the Researcher Commandant replied, "Although it uses nothing so complex as antimagnetics; only ordainary magnetics.

"As you can see in this working model, Domina, a series of electromagnetic rings are positively charged, while the projectile, being negatively charged, is attracted towards the rings. In this way the projectile reaches quite high speeds by the time it exits the series of rings - around Mach Six."

The Researcher Commandant waved to the far wall, where the projectile had left a large hole punched through a thick block of RE-8 ceramic plating.

"Impressive," Rene repeated. "How soon can you get it developed to a working military weapon?"

The Commandant blinked. "Ah, we're having some teething problems scaling the model up..."

"Fix them," Rene ordered. "You may have extra materials or personell if you wish; you know who to contact about that. But I want something useable as soon as possible."

[b]Obsidian Wastes, Tsaraine[/i]

Rene Seingult watched the suited figures hurrying around the base of the Gauss cannon from the safety of a Dominion official transport.

Although much larger than the model she'd seen in the Applied Physics Core's labs, the cannon looked no less fragile. It would require much more work to create a militarily useful weapon, even she could see that.

"Domina!" it was one of the researchers, his white suit bright in the midafternoon sun. "We are ready to fire the cannon!"

"Excellent." Rene nodded to her commtechs, who switched one screen to the view from the shell-mounted camera; a long series of electromagnetic rings, with the metallic blue sky at the end.

Another nod, to a different commtech. "Fire."

The electromagnetic rings disappeared in a second, as the shell soared from the barrel and into the air; the thing was going at Mach 15, both very fast and very far.

In the cameras, the blackened glass of the Wastes fell away and grew close again, the slight hills flashing past beneath the shell almost too fast to see.

The shell hit ground, and the screens went dead. Rene glanced at the sensors; the shell had travelled almost three hundred kilometers in just a few minutes. Impressive.

The cannon itself, however, was a different story. The recoil had shattered many of the electromagnetic rings and crumpled it back on itself.

"It needs better recoil compensation," she told the stricken researchers.

Obsidian Wastes, Tsaraine

This time, Rene noted, the gauss cannon did indeed have recoil compensation; the big (very big) hydraulic shock absorbers gave it a completely different look. Stronger, less like something cooked up in a lab.

"Ready to fire, Domina!"

Rene nodded, and gave the signal to fire to the weapons officer waiting at his console.

Just like the last time, the shell sped through the metallic blue skies above the Wastes, and achieved a similar range. This time, however, the barrel slammed backwards, cushioned by the hydraulics, and did not fall apart.

"Very good," Rene told the Researchers, who were looking on not unlike eager puppies, "It works. Your task now is to coordinate with the Ground Control Development Corps to create a viable artillery weapon using this."

Obsidian Wastes, Near the Eyrie, Tsaraine

Once again, Rene Seingult visited the Ground Command Development Corps for a firing demonstration of the Gauss cannon.

It had certainly come a long way from it's beginnings, she thought, as the massive cannon rolled past on it's tracks.

The GCDC had done a good job of adapting it to mobile artillery standards, although it had required an entirely new chassis to support the massive weight of the Gauss cannon and the hydraulics.

She could feel the rumbling through her bones as the thing rolled past her groundcar and stopped, stabilising feet extending to lock it in place (OOC: If you must have an image, picture the Siege Tank from StarCraft. It's sorta like that. But also sorta not).

The whine of the electromagnetic coils was low, tooth-jarring. The officers inside the thing, of course, were shielded, but Rene's groundcar possessed no such protection.

Then the whine cut out abruptly as the artillery fired. At fifteen times the speed of sound, one would never know that the shell had left the cannon were it not for that cessation of noise.

Since the first firing tests the accuracy of the shells had improved dramatically, until, with satellite guidance, the shell hit an X marked on the hard ground precisely two hundred and fifty kilometers away. Without satellite guidance, the shells could be up to a kilometer off their target. Rene considered it acceptable.

Well satisfied with the artillery's preformance, she noted in her logs to begin production of the Lucifer-class artillery immediately. Tsaraine would have some of the longest-ranged weaponry outside of orbital bombardment.

Nonlethal Weapons Development Core, The Eyrie, Tsaraine

After viewing the preformance of the new Lucifer-class artillery, Rene returned to the corridors of the Eyrie, where apparently the Taser people had found some way to improve the finicky primary nonlethal weapons of the Dominion.

She stood in the central discussion room of the Core, surrounded by the quietly humming computers and quietly breathing Researchers.

"What have you got for me, then?"

One of the Researchers - not the Corps Commandant, Rene noted, who was standing to one side and glowering - activated the projectors, and schematics sprang up on the screens before Rene.

She regarded the diagrams, one eyebrow raising in suprise.

"This certainly doesn't seem non-lethal, Researcher ralJaigh."

"Um, no, Domina, it's not," the nervous ralJaigh replied, cringing a little under her stare. "It's just a project I embarked upon - in my spare time, I assure you Domina - to adapt the Taser as a military weapon."

"It's agaist the entire ethos of the Corps," the Corps Commandant snapped. Rene held up a hand to halt that official's tirade.

"I see you've found a way to redress the range problem, too," she said.

RalJaigh nodded and gulped, looking not unlike a pelican. "Yes, otherwise the ionisation of the UV laser would have dissipated at around a kilometer ... attaching it to a fusion generator was the obvious solution, but the actual problem then becomes stopping the laser from burning out when it fires, but I think I may have figured a way around that..."

Rene nodded, listening to the Researcher babble on happily.

"RalJaigh, you're being transferred to the Ground Command Development Corps, but I want results, not just pretty schematics. See that I get them."

OOC: Well, I have no idea what that was about...

Obsidian Wastes, Tsaraine

The prototype of the military taser looked disturbingly like the prototype gauss cannon, Rene thought, as she waited for the development team to OK it's firing. Hopefully it would not experience such a disastrous test result.

"We're ready to fire, Domina!" Researcher Eirkhanz ralJaigh reported.

Finally, Rene thought. If this thing took so long to prepare for firing, it would be no use to the military. She'd have to tell ralJaigh to work on that.

The Researchers had set up a target some kilometers away - an old Type III Ravager APC, with it's electronics reporting it's status constantly to the Researchers monitoring it.

"Fire at will, Researcher ralJaigh," Rene ordered.

The man nodded, and turned back to his fellows, who set about firing the thing.

Anyone in the path of the laser would have been able to feel the air crackle as the laser ionised it, creating a path for the electric charge. However, such a hypothetical observer would have died rapidly; the big UV laser, despite it's adaptions for this task, was still a military-grade weapon, and almost identical to those used on Reaper tanks.

Had they survived that, the actual electric charge would have killed them instantly in a flash of bright light not unlike lightning, or possibly poisoned them as the charge fused oxygen into ozone.

The internal sensors of the target went blank instantly as the massive charge short-circuited them and fused the armoured hull into a single metal lump; they switched to external sensors just in time to see the fuel cells explode, pressurised oxygen and hydrogen gutting the APC in a satisfyingly large explosion.

Unlike the testing of the gauss cannon, the taser failed to fall apart.

"Well, it works," she told ralJaigh, "But you have some way to go before it's ready for military use. I want the firing time decreased and the range increased. Begin investigations into mounting it suitably, too."

Nova Reio, Tsaraine

After watching the test firing of the taser, Rene went to the research complexes in the depths of Nova Reio.

The existence of the Eyrie was something of an affront to the Researcher corps which remained in Nova Reio; they saw themselves as better than the development corps there, since they'd preserved most of the Commonwealth's technical knowledge through the Obsidian Event, not to mention a large chunk of it's remaining population.

They'd also preserved, in the deepest vaults, the Artifact Repository Core, the massive storerooms where every concievable artefact, from High Steppes vlrsukali to Kymnari temple reliquaries, was stored.

However, neither the Kymnari nor the Sche'dayach interested Rene today. Several decades before the Event, her uncle Kail Seingult IV had assisted in repulsing an alien invasion, and much of the orbiting wreckage had been salvaged by Tsarainese tugs (OOC: This actually happened, of course. I'm not entirely proud of my RPing back then, but I can make use of it all the same).

Since the civilisation which had created the artefacts left in the Invader Artifact Repository Core was far more alien than the Kymnari, the Xenoanthropology Corps Researchers assigned to study them had had little success, until now.

"What have you got for me, Commandant Sche'daya?"

The Corps Commandant - one of the myriad Sche'dayach bearing the name of his race - showed her a small table, with a glittering wafer of crystalline material sitting on it.

"Very pretty," Rene replied. "What is it?"

"We think it's some kind of optronic circuit, Domina," the Commandant replied, "We considered that it might be quantum - the Invader text that we can translate relating to it suggested it might be - but a nanoforged replication of it produced the same results, and we know that the nanoforges can't reproduce quantum machinery."

"So why are you showing it to me?"

"We think we can make it work, Domina," the Commandant replied.

"Ah." That was the sort of thing she liked to hear. "Very good, Commandant. Very good. How soon can you integrate it with our systems?"

"I'm not sure, Domina. We still have some way to go yet to understand it entirely."

"Well, keep up the good work, Commandant. I want results."

Ground Command Development Core, The Eyrie, Tsaraine

Having assured the GCDC that she didn't need a field demonstration of the completed taser, Rene examined the weapon in it's storage bay off the Development Core complex.

This was the prototype, the only one of it's kind; with her approval, production would begin immediately.

It was a fixed artillery piece, made to be transported via military transport and set up at the battlefield ... Rene could think of several disadvantages to that, but the Corps had explained that making it more mobile would require the development of an entirely new weapons platform. Which was a task for the future.

But the taser worked; it could fire once every five minutes and reach a maximum range of five kilometers. Properly utilised, it could be an excellent weapon.

Computing Systems Development Core, Nova Reio, Tsaraine

"Here, Domina, we have a computer assembled from optronic circuits."

She was suprised at it's size; the thing was not much larger than a basketball.

"And here, Domina, a computer of similar processing speed, assembled from conventional electronic circuits."

The more normal one stretched from floor to ceiling, it's coolant systems gurgling unpleasantly.

"I see." Rene said, impressed. "Much more size efficient. What of power efficiency?"

"Actually better than that of the electron computers, Domina. The Invaders had at least three thousand years of use in which to refine it."

"Excellent. Any problems?"

The Researcher hesitated a second before continuing.

"We're having trouble integrating it with our current systems, Domina. After all, it was designed by alien minds and it acts by alien principles."

"You have resource freedom to correct that problem, then. Get it corrected."

Computing Systems Development Core, Nova Reio, Tsaraine

"I take it you have managed to correct the problem?"

"Yes, Domina, quite handily."

That was precisely what she'd wanted to hear, that the Invader optronic technologies would work properly with the Tsarainese electrical systems.

"In your opinion, Researcher," Rene continued, "Would we be justified in mass-producing these for our mainframes?"

The Researcher Commandant paused a moment, considering, before replying in the affirmative.

"Excellent," Rene replied. "I shall have it done. You keep up the good work."

Air Command Development Core, the Eyrie, Tsaraine

Having done that, Rene took the military maglev south to the Eyrie, found Researcher ralJaigh in the Ground Command Development Core, reassigned him to the Air Command Development Core, and dragged him up to that establishment herself.

The ACDC was theoretically still under the command of Kyne ralGhema, but lately ralGhema had been assuming more of the tasks of Division Commandant Sural tsaChanya.

However, he was by some kindness of Fate in his office when Rene went to find him, with ralJaigh in tow.

"Commandant ralGhema, this is Researcher ralJaigh, creator of the military taser variant. I have a job for you which requires his expertise."

RalGhema failed to be ruffled by that; irritatingly, he was one of the few Researchers she couldn't intimidate.

"Oh?" he asked, "What might that be?"

"Some time ago the Division Six and Seven Commandants met with me to discuss the downsizing and restructuring of the military Divisions. We agreed that, among other things, Division Eight requires some form of heavy air support, similar in function to the helicopters used by other militaries.

"We are also lacking a suitable platform for the military taser."

"Ah," ralGhema said, comprehension lighting in his eyes. "You want a taser-armed helicopter?"

"Not a helicopter," Rene corrected, "A 'magship."

RalGhema blinked, and said, "That will require at least three fusion reactors, Domina."

"Then use three fusion reactors. I know full well that all told the fusion reactors and antimag cores are the size of two small groundcars. Those antimags also mean we need not be constrained by weight."

"It will be somewhat larger than a helicopter," Kyne pointed out.

"It will also be rather more effective than a helicopter, Commandant. Unless you have serious concerns about it's feasability, I trust you can design what I want."

Kyne frowned, thinking, considering her proposal.

"We can do it," he said finally. "The things won't be cheap, but we can do it."

"Then do it," Rene replied.

The Obsidian Wastes, Tsaraine

As with the taser development, it finished with a field demonstration. Rene and Kyne ralGhema were wedged uncomfortably in the narrow space behind the seats of the pilot, copilot and gunner as the Haunt AMcraft sped low and silent over the glittering black expanse of the Wastes.

"So," Rene said quietly, "Give me the half-Tsai tour, ralGhema."

Kyne gulped, and nodded. "As you can see, Domina, we managed to reduce size and power requirements by providing forward thrust via four high-power jet engines, which are run off the second fusion generator.

"That meant that we didn't need a second AM core and a related third fusion generator, which substantially decreased the weight and resource requirements of the Haunt Heavy Attack Vehicle.

"The jet engines are also cowled with similar noise-reducing hoods as the ones on the Kash'ha, to aid in stealth operations.

"As for the military operations, we should be coming up on the demonstration target shortly."

They flew on in silence for several more minutes, before the pilot made some neutral half-word in Sekhel, drawing her attention to the little Type III Ravager sitting in the midst of the desolation.

The Type III's might be not much use militarily, but they still had some worth as test targets, Rene thought.

One of the many LEDs on the control panels lit up, a lurid, hellish red; the target was locked and in range.

"Now firing," the gunner reported, and flipped several switches on his control panels. Depressed and turned the firing dial.

The forward screens showed a steady, rapid ionisation buildup as the UV laser charged, and another LED lit up. The electric charge that followed was massive, more impressive from inside the Haunt than seeing it outside on the ground.

"I like it," she told ralGhema. "Pipe the schematics over to Div3 for construction - I'll take care of the paperwork. Good work indeed."

Terraforming Core, Nova Reio

After the Haunt had returned to The Eyrie, Rene took the military maglev to Nova Reio and the Terraforming Corps.

Due to the security advantages of living under a radioactive wasteland, the Terraforming Corps, founded soon after the Event, hadn't recieved much resources since then. Now, however, things had changed.

Rene entered the unprepared Core with a sense of unholy glee at catching her underlings unprepared.

"You!" she snapped, glaring at the bleary-eyed Researcher Commandant who scurried hastily out of his office. "You call this a Core? I call this a recycling tank! Sharpen up, man, and look smart about it!"

It was a pleasure to find that the old instincts of a squadron commandant didn't fade, even after all these years.

"Hail, Domina!" the Commandant said desperately, saluting. "How may the Terraforming Corps assist you, Domina?"

"Make notes," Rene said slowly, pacing around the terrified man, "For I shall not repeat myself. There exists in the tropical waters of most oceans of this planet an organism known as "coral", which is famed for constructing artificial reefs.

"Samples are being procured. I want a genemod species with greater temperature tolerance which is much faster growing. I want it soon. The future of the hydroponics division may depend upon you, Commandant - look cheerful about it!"

The Researcher Commandant saluted again, desperately plastering a smile onto his face.

"Good man. Remember - results!"

OOC: Since I can't be bothered writing up a seperate thingy today for the coral, it's here (http://www.nationstates.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2269817). I love rubber time.

Air Command Development Core, The Eyrie, Tsaraine

The situation outside of Tsaraine was looking tense, with civil war in Indiastan and the usual troubles in Iraqstan.

Strategy analysts, going over the records of the previous troubles in Iraqstan, had sent a memo up the line to Rene Seingult, who'd taken it to Kyne ralGhema, the ACDC Commandant.

Kyne sat across from the Domina, and made notes on his screens as he spoke.

"We can certainly do it, Domina," he said. "Technologically, designing an antimag carrier vessel presents very few challenges. It will, of course, take quite a few resources to construct."

Rene waved a hand in dismissal of that; they had the resources. When Far Stone became operational, it would become even easier.

"There'd be no problems with the fighter compliment, then?" she asked.

"No, not at all," Kyne replied. "The antique Nimitz-class surface carriers some nations still use carries eighty vessels. Seventy-five craft, even if several are Haunts, would be no problem."

"Well then, I trust that the ACDC can provide," Rene smiled. "I'll leave you to it."

Air Command Fleet Yards, Deep Tsarai, Tsaraine

Kyne ralGhema stood on the catwalk above the cavernous construction hangar, looking down at the vessel under construction.

The Chreikhor at this point didn't look like much, being little more than the long line of keel and structural ribs, with a little of the hull itself under construction near the bows.

It certainly looked different from Tsaraine's only other large antimagcraft, the Kash'ha; but that was a yaucht, and much smaller. The Chreikhor was an aerial carrier, not a luxury vessel.

Air Command Fleet Yards, Deep Tsarai, Tsaraine

"All hands to stations. Prepare for launch."

The new plastic of the Captain-Commandant's chair squeaked as Gderakh tsaKazril leaned backwards, savouring the sight of his new command. Decks and bulkheads and consoles - all shone, all new and highly polished.

Gderakh had been transferred to the Air Command from the Sea Command, since only the Captain-Commandants of the Catfish supramines had experience with vessels of this type. Fortunately, the two Divisions shared close links - Div10 had developed from Div8, after all - but Gderakh was still adjusting to the fact that the Chreikhor couldn't dive if threatened.

Eventually the reports arrived from the aerial carrier's various sections; all lights green and ready to launch.

Excellent. Gderakh certainly hadn't expected the vessel to go green on it's first proper launching. "Launch Control, this is Captain-Commandant tsaKazril, requesting permission to launch."

"Permission granted, tsaKazril. The Chreikhor is cleared to launch. Oh, and Commandant?"

"Yes?"

"Good luck. Opening yard doors."

"Thank you," Gderakh replied politely.

Above the Chreikhor in it's cradle, the dome of the roof split down the middle, opening out onto the harsh blue skies of the Wastes. On the other side of the carrier's hull, the air was now filled with radioactive particles (less now, or so he was told, thanks to the Treznorikh rad-eating bacteria, but still there); the alarms wailing in the yard bay warned the unprotected against entry.

"Helm, take us up," Gderakh ordered, unable to repress a smile. The largest vessel ever constructed by the Dominion, carrying sixty Ghost fighters and fifteen Haunts, and it was his command!

"Affirmative, Commandant!" the helmsman replied. "Lifting to plus one hundred meters altitude."

Deep in the Chreikhor's belly, the antimagnetic cores shifted, increasing the repulsive force just enough to raise the ship's altitude by the amount specified. Gderakh felt the purr of the cores vibrate through the hull, like some enormous cat.

The Chreikhor lifted into the hard air, bright against the morning sky, and for an instant that cloudless sky was reflected in the glass of the surface, so that the vessel appeared to float in an azure void.

Air Command Development Core, The Eyrie, Tsaraine

Around the ACD Core, screens showed things related to the current project; the Revenant transport plane, Ghoul transport dirigible, Eidolon aerial carrier, and Catfish transport supramine; most everything the Dominion had made that flew, in fact.

"Now, this is another task in the project for the completion of the Air Command," Kyne ralGhema told the assembled Researchers. "The Ghoul transport is well known to be both slow and poorly defended, and this poses a considerable risk to troops in transit.

"We have been tasked with developing a sturdier, faster alternative to the Ghoul; I've taken the liberty of naming it the "Spectre". As is usual these days, propulsion shall be provided via antimagnetic cores powered by fusion generators - although I don't think it would be wise to sacrifice aerodynamics for utility in this case, as we did with the Eidolon class.

"Any questions?"

Transport Fleet Yards, Nova Reio, Tsaraine

One by one, the massive gasbags of the Ghoul-class transports assumed a skeletal look, as the helium kept ready there was pumped out for long-term storage.

"End of an era," sighed Teral keiNarya, looking out over the blimps he'd piloted in the Iraqstani conflict, soon to be replaced by the new Spectre-class transport planes.

"Not all change is bad, or so the Third Commentaries say," his friend Kilan ralSaryen remarked. Kilan was a Rukine esaren as well as a Copilot in the Air Command, and was often issuing such quotations from the Holy Books and the Commentaries; he hoped to get permission - secular and religious - to become a full aren soon.

"You have to admit, those blimps were deathtraps. Slow, undefended, ugly ... it'll be good to get something with modern AM cores instead of props - heck, some of those things still ran on hydrogen/oxygen combustion!"

Teral nodded. "I suppose you're right. Though if we're lucky we won't have to fly anything for a while. Warzones scare me."

"You and everybody with good sense, Teral. Even God Above, I suspect."

Air Command Development Core, The Eyrie, Tsaraine

The numbers on the elevator display went up almost faster than Erai could count them, flickering maddeningly before her eyes.

Beside her, Kyne ralGhema chuckled slightly, in what Erai suspected was a nervous habit. The Corps Commandant was beginning to irritate her.

"As you can see, Commandant, we're quite far down. So as to be safe from bombardment, of course." He chuckled again, and Erai ground her teeth. Most other Tsarainese secure facilities were around this depth (although, admittedly, they didn't have a mountain range on top of them). It was only the speed of their uninterrupted descent from near-surface to the deeps that made it seem deeper.

"Well, here we are," ralGhema continued into the silence, once the elevator finally stopped. "The Wraith Project Subcore."

"I will expect an explanation someday, Commandant," Erai remarked. "Preferably sooner rather than later." That was rather close to insubordination, but ralGhema was a Research Corps Commandant, not proper military, and whatever the Wraith Project might be, he needed her help with it. One didn't simply reassign one of the Dominion's most successful fighter pilots without good reason.

RalGhema nodded. "You'll get it, never fear - and yes, sooner rather than later." He slid his passcard through the lock mechanism, and the elevator doors opened.

All the secrecy surrounding the mysterious project had made Erai expect something more dramatic than this quiet, medium-sized room filled with gently humming computer banks, and a guard rather more formidable than the petite Hyazinari Researcher at the receptions desk.

"Morning, Raki," ralGhema said cheerfully. "I've brought in Commandant Radhiña for the standard briefing."

The Researcher nodded, and issued Erai a temporary passcard with a cheerful "good morning". Erai glowered back.

"You mentioned a briefing, Commandant?" she asked ralGhema. "I would very much like to hear it."

The Corps Commandant nodded. "This way."

"This way" was a large lecture hall, currently dark and empty. RalGhema waved her to a seat, and sat down beside her with the screen-control remote. A press of a button, and the large flatscreen lit up, showing the schematics of some kind of fighter aircraft.

"This is what the Wraith Project is all about," ralGhema explained, "The next generation in Tsarainese aerial combat. Our current Ghost models were developed some time ago, and are rapidly becoming dated compared to the more advanced systems being produced by other nations."

Erai nodded; she'd learned that well enough herself, in a more practical manner than ralGhema and his schematics.

"The Wraith design incorporates many new technologies developed since then - Treznorikh fusion reactors, antimagnetic cores, molecular computers, and the like. But the main aspect of the design is the fact that the pilot will not in fact be riding along in harm's way; instead, there'll be a full VR linkup via Nathicanikh spooky-comm technology to the aircraft, from some appropriately safe base. While the Wraith aircraft will range into the high end of construction costs, it'll keep the pilots safe from harm."

"It makes sense," Erai admitted. It was the sort of thing a Researcher would think up, not a pilot, but it did make sense. "So what do you need me for?"

"User critique," ralGhema replied readily. "Test piloting. Combat piloting, once it's complete."

"O-kay then. I assume that this falls under the standard "do not discuss" thing?"

RalGhema nodded. "As a matter of fact, I have the form around here somewhere for you to sign..."

In the normal state of events, rapid advance in technology is uncommon, found most often during wartime. At peace, the Esgrafiate of Armour Systems Development (a subsidiary of the Grafiate of Ground Command Vehicle Development, itself a subsidary of the Arkhgrafiate of Ground Command Research and Design) continued at a slow and steady pace. It might not get anywhere quite as fast as the Ground Command personell might like, but it got there, and without haste-induced errors in design.

Immersed in the SuperPlexus VR network, the researchers of the EASD could poke and prod at their designs cheaply and easily, and test them against anything up to and including direct nuclear strikes, without the cost and bother such would entail in the real world. It wasn't to be confused with real testing, of course - the Ground Command was strict about having everything it accepted rigorously tested in real-life conditions - but it was very useful.

And, when they finally arrived at a satisfactory design, it took just a wave of the hand to bring it before the Ground Command's Development Overview Board, and from there to the Arkhreifane of the Ground Command for final approval.

Erin tsaKell's SuperPlexus environment mirrored exactly the conditions of the surface; recovering steppes stretching away in all directions to meet the hazy blue bowl of the sky. At the moment it was snowing (although conveniently not on tsaKell or her work).

"Well, Researcher?" With a wave of her hand, the Arkhreifane vanished various floating paperwork, and stood to regard Varakhé Sche'daya.

Varakhé saluted formally, and followed that up with a slight bow. "Arkhreifane, the Development Overview Board has passed approval of the latest Project Scytheman model; it requires now your approval only to begin production and field testing."

"Ah! Very good, Researcher - what model is your Esgrafiate up to now?"

"Fifteen-G, Arkhreifane." TsaKell had declined approval on two previous models - Four-D and Ten-F - previously, and there were only so many times one could remodel a tank while still adhering to the design brief given.

"Show it me, then."

"Eja, Arkhreifane." Varakhé brought up his virtual file directory - a slim notebook, unlike the more pretentious massive tomes favoured by some of his colleagues - and opened the Fifteen-G model.

"Hmmm..." the Arkhreifane circled the tank, examining it from every angle. Like all Tsarainese military equipment, it was designed to operate in one of the harshest environments on Earth - the Obsidian Wastes. While the Wastes might no longer be lethally radioactive, vehicles were still designed with them in mind - which meant that Fifteen-G could operate in environments where unprotected troopers would be killed in hours or in days.

Hot nuclear strikes, chemical weapons drops, bioweapons targets - Fifteen-G could, theoretically, shield it's occupants from all of them. The long-awaited replacement of the old Reaper Mk. V Main Battle Tank, Project Scytheman Model Fifteen-G incorporated several new advances of Tsarainese technology, and done away with some of the more extreme follies of the Reaper design - most noticeably, the troublesome laser cannon main gun found on the Reapers had been replaced with a more standard chemical weapon.

There were other, less obviously noticeable changes - the microfusor power supply, shoehorned into the space that had taken hydrogen fuel cells on the Reaper Mk. I, was now a dedicated system, and the external cameras - essential when the tank was sealed and the commander could not ride exposed to survey the environment - linked now to the local SuperPlexus rather than internal screens, and that SuperPlexus was connected by q-link to the greater Tsarainese SuperPlexus, providing (theoretically) perfect communications and perfect local environment modelling.

The SuperPlexus VR system was rapidly sweeping through the Tsarainese burecratic hierarchy, and given the way that hierarchy permeated almost every level of Tsarainese society, that was a lot of people. Recently, the hardware implants had opened to an eager civilian populace, and, though it might be strictly seperate from the government side of the SuperPlexus, demand for the SuperPlexus neurosurgery far outstripped supply.

"It looks good..." TsaKell began, completing her examination, "But we'll have to give it a thorough field testing before we're sure, of course."

In the real world, Varakhé let out an unconcious sigh of relief. "You approve it, then?"

"I approve it, Researcher. Has your Esgrafiate devised a name for it yet?"

"We - we've been calling it Behemoth, Arkhreifane."

She laughed at that. "Trying to compete with the Marshall Islanders, are we? It's not quite so big as a Mammoth."

"The Mammoth is a breakthrough tank, Arkhreifane." And quite insane to boot. "We have Lucifer artillery for that, if necessary - or Haunts, or Shrikes. The design brief called for a Main Battle Tank, Arkhreifane - compensatory weaponry is the Tekhat of the Air Command."

TsaKell chuckled. "I'll tell tsaGhan that, Researcher - given his branch of Research is working on the Monitor project right now, he ought to be quite amused."

"Perhaps, Arkhreifane." Amused? I'm glad it's her telling Arkhreif tsaGhen, not me.

-----

For his part, Larak tsaGhen had been pushing other projects ahead of the Arkhora's Monitor. Aerial battleships were all very well, but the real strength of the Air Command must rest upon more conventional craft - the Ghost fighters, Haunt gunships, Wraith aerospace fighters, and the like.

In that list there had been some glaring holes since the Tsarainese had first taken again to the skies, holes Larak had been trying to close ever since with little success, so when the authorisation finally came through for a conventional bomber platform, it was natural that he'd ask often for updates. Once a day, however, was a bit much.

"We're still working on it, Arkhreif," Sean Fletcher told the man patiently. The Marshall Islander expatriate really didn't know all that much about aircraft development - he'd been incorporated into the Air Command's research section when the Naval Command had been amalgamated with the Air Command - but there were times when he wished, he really wished, that the Tsarainese would be more like the brass back home, who left R&D to R&D and didn't pop in every five seconds to give "constructive criticism" and "helpful suggestions".

"Show me," tsaGhen replied - demanded, really. The man might have been waiting for this project for years, but he could be a real pain at times.

"Eja, Arkhreif," Fletcher sighed, opening the appropriate files. "Today we've been modelling the airflow again, and I can happily report that performance is now much better than it was. We're approaching a feasible body."

"Excellent! Keep up the good work, Researcher." TsaGhen gave him a sort of loose bow, and vanished from the VRscape. Muttering about brass and micromanagement, Fletcher got back to work.

Magship Manufactory #5, Nova Reio, Tsaraine

"There." Eorigh ralGedh carefully soldered a last wire into place. "That'll hold it." finding his crew's records book, he located the field marked core wiring and signed off on it. If it failed they'd be able to find out who'd done the wiring anyway, and the penalties were almost worse for failing to fill out paperwork than doing faulty wiring in an air cruiser.

"We done here?"

"Eja, we're done. On to the next one."

With the rapid rate at which the manufactory robots were assembling hulls and locking on armour plate - in fact, doing most everything that could be automated - it was the non-automated work, the stuff that had to be done by humans, that slowed down the process. So Eorigh and his electrical platoon were constantly overworked, installing the electrical systems in the nearly-complete ships before they went onwards for the installation of internal panels, final fitting, and out of the manufactory to the Air Command. It wasn't a fun job, but it was good enough.

"Commandant? Come on!"

OOC: Ack, crap post. I figured by now my Air Monitors and Air Cruisers should be entering production, as well as the Phantom bomber.

Military Equipment Programming Core, the Eyrie, Tsaraine

Ekhano Sche'daya examined his screens, thinking. The Shrike gun systems had essentially gone out of production once the network had been established in Earth orbit, with only replacement runs for guns destroyed by debris, and partial runs for the guns of the Air Command's new Schiavona battleship, being built.

But now the Space Command wanted more Shrike guns, adapted not to strike targets on Earth but to defend targets in space - at High Stone, Far Stone, Kel Meralkharant. Since the guns already had jets for attitude adjustment, and antimag cores for orbit adjustment, it should theoretically be only a matter of altering the command programs. Easy enough ...

Space Command Development Core, High Stone

Without the atmosphere of Earth in the way, one could quite clearly see the "junk belt" in Low Earth Orbit, a smudge of debris around the belly of the Earth. Here and there, bright sparks in the darkness were in-system vessels going up from the surface or down from orbit, or between the many stations around the Earth. Even the L3 point, almost empty when Tsaraine had moved High Stone there years ago, was now cluttered with facilities.

Sethaine arAkhet had been here almost since the beginning, had helped design the Horus-class, Tsaraine's first true interplanetary vessels. Throughout most of the Space Command's history since, she'd been doing little more than designing refits for the Oberth/Sekhmet-class of destroyers, and modifications to the Ixhwa/Hades-class of cruisers.

She'd helped with the Air Command's Wraith aerospace fighter and the Shrike ortillery cannons, but it was only now that a truly original warship brief had come her way.

It was an ambitious project, too, this Avernus-class corvette; the higher-ups wanted a small, manoueverable vessel, with a primary armament of two forward-firing Shrike guns, plus four X-ray lasers a lá the Sekhmet, and mission adaptable pods a lá the Loki! Not to mention the thing had to have at least some "natural" lift; wings as opposed to "flying" on antimags.

In Sethaine's opinion, that many design requirements would make a terrible vessel, and the wings at least would have to be ditched somewhere in the design process; but if that happened, it would very probably reflect poorly on herself, in the eyes of the brass. So she'd do her best to accomodate the brief; if you aim for the stars and miss, at the very least you might just hit an orbiting alien mothership.

Freighter Yña, Far Stone, the Belt

Artyentau keiAehn watched as Far Stone grew larger on the main screens, two hundred and fifty kilometers of ferrous rock. The Gate to Tenebris tacked on it's side, a full kilometer across, looked miniscule compared to the bulk of the rock.

Artyentau thought it looked rather like a giant, diseased potato, and the mines, refineries, factories and yards on it were as grim and boring as the people who worked in them. But it wouldn't do to tell Melach Sche'daya that - the woman was after all a Senekhal, and despite the boredom etched into every corridor of Far Stone, it was an integral part of Tsarainese industry.

"Captain keiAehn?" the docking official on the secondary screens looked harried - with more work crews passing through Far Stone on their way to Tenebris, the crews were overworked. "Please state your cargo."

Artyentau grinned. "I have fifty Shrike gunsats and ammo for you to sign for."

Space Command Development Core, High Stone

Sethaine was rather pleased with her progress; on her screens virtual Avernuses flew, tagged with data recording their performance in atmosphere - which was good enough for the brief, and good enough for her.

Although it was well-known that nothing could replace field trials in determining the worth of a craft, a good simulation (and these were the best they could program, she'd been assured) could give a reasonably accurate indication of it's performance ahead of time.

As yet, the Avernus did not exist outside of schematics; actually producing the prototypes would be another test. How much of the production process could be automated, and how much would have to be done by hand, would play a large part in determining how many Tsaraine could build and mantain.

She was proud of the work she'd done, managing to keep to the brief and develop a working craft; even the wings were there, on the models rotating on the screens. They'd be able to descend into atmosphere with ease, and be as effective as - more effective than - the Air Command's Monitors. Shrike guns packed a massive punch, whether they were installed on a ship, in orbit, or on a flying monstrosity like the Air Monitors (there was, she'd read, a possibility that a Shrike bullet would fission upon impact, if it weren't made of depleted uranium).

Av-001(P), Upper Atmosphere, Earth

"You're sure you know what you're doing, pilot?"

Ksarian arKuegan turned away from her screens for a moment to give Sethaine a broad grin. The Pilot-Commandant was clearly enjoying every moment of this.

"Yes!" she said, and then; "Relax, I've done this hundreds of times before! Nothing can possibly go wrong."

Sethaine's stomach knotted itself tighter at that.

Why, why, why did I ever decide to sit in on this test flight? And how did an insane maniac get pilot's wings?

"In spaceplanes, yes!" she replied. "In simulations, yes! This is not a spaceplane or a simulation, it's thousands of tons of real live corvette rapidly falling out of the sky!"

Ksarian shrugged, as if to indicate that one reentry vehicle was much like another.

"You put wings on it, yes? It'll be fine."

Ainra eka Ruki Aestrakhor, y Vdakhor, y Vda'atar ...

Simulations said that the Avernus class should be able to fly just fine in atmosphere - not excellently, but well enough - but simulations failed to mention the horrible turbulence they were experiencing. Or, to be accurate, what it was like inside the corvette during that turbulence, with a crazed gun nut at the helm.

Sethaine lavished mental curses on the lack of atmosphere-qualified pilots among the military arms of the Star Command (where were Wraith pilots when one needed them?) and tightened her grip on the armrests of her seat.

"There we are, see? Now we're out of that rough patch, it should be smooth all the way down to the ground. Take a look at the screens - it's really pretty."

"Smooth" was relative, Sethaine thought, but the view from kilometers up was pretty. There were the uplands of Kynarai, and the Skirré Mountains, and the lake between them, where green was encroaching on the brown steppes as the Terraforming Corps worked.

Lakeshore District, Tsaraine, Earth

Kterrin Eidoradh shovelled fertiliser into place around this latest sapling, dusted off his hands, and returned to the truck for another. It was a few minute's walk through scattered, waist-high saplings to where they'd parked it, but it was good to see the results of a morning's hard work.

Most of his Platoon was there too, either picking up new trees as he was, or off duty for an unofficial tea break.

"You know," he told them, "This area hasn't looked anything like this for about three thousand years. I know, I don't make policy, but it seems odd - why would they plant trees as opposed to intensive farming?"

Aira rolled her eyes. "Not this again. Kterrin, nowhere has looked like this before - it's an engineered species! Breaks up rock to extend the soil, provides a habitat for all sorts of critters. For that matter, where we are now didn't exist three thousand years ago - they dredged it up out of the lake. Have a tree."

Kterrin lifted the sapling from the bed of the truck - you got fit in the Terraforming Corps - and deposited it on his trolley.

"But still, you'd think we need farmland."

"We have an island chain for that. I'm sure you can take it up with Command if you're that upset about planting trees."

Construction Site, Deep Tsarai, Tsaraine

Once a new design had been approved by Command - no matter whether that was the Air Command, Ground Command, or Small Appliance Production Command - it had to be produced. In most cases, this could be done by altering existing factories. But for some things, you had to build an entire new plant.

"Pass another bolt? Thanks."

Rough hands took the proffered item and thrust it into the wall. Kueral tsaChanya was just another human ant out of hundreds working on this factory, where individual people shrank to anonymity in the echoing space. Eventually it would be filled with machinery top to bottom, an almost-automated production plant for the Avernus corvettes.

But he screwed in the bolts and rods and sundry other supporting equipment happily enough; he'd passed quota some hours ago, and now everything he did was direct credit to his account. Credit meant the ability to buy whatever you wanted - which in Kueral's case was vintage vinyl, shipped in from foreign lands with exotic names. Iuthia, Gehenna Tartarus, Kelanthia; he had as much chance of ever seeing those places as he did of setting foot upon the Moon, but he could hear them, with a bit of credit and a bit of time.

Conference Room Fourteen, Military Equipment Programming Core, The Eyrie, Tsaraine

Blinking in the harsh fluorescent lights, Ekhano Sche'daya gathered his wits. Most of the assembled audience were from outside Programming, and a lot wore Star Command blacks as opposed to Research whites. Some wore officer's braid.

"Um," he began. Not an auspicious start. "Recently the idea of some sort of formal anti-missile defence has been doing the rounds here in the Eyrie; given the number of nuclear-armed states with Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile capabilities, and the general readiness of many administrations to use them - on both ends of the anarchist-autocratist spectrum - this is probably a good idea.

"Conventional thinking on anti-missile defence is considerably influenced by early efforts, when access to orbit was lacking and it was cheapest to intercept ICBMs during the final atmospheric approach phase. The development of Multiple Independently targetable Reentry Vehicle technology shifted the emphasis to interception during the launch phase. Interception during the exo-atmospheric phase usually required nuclear warheads to scramble electronics with an electro-magnetic pulse. In today's world, that is generally unacceptable to spacefaring nations.

"Problems with launch interception include the cost of what is essentially a counter-ICBM ICBM, difficulties with targetting at extreme range, and the risk of starting a major nuclear exchange instead of averting one.

"Also, launch interception cannot intercept FOBS - Fractional Orbital Bombardment Systems, in which ICBMs are launched into Low Earth Orbit and de-orbit to attack. Poor man's ortillery, if you will. FOBS is useful to an agressor because the target cannot be discovered from the orbital flight path - and given the number of nuclear-capable states, any one nation could be aiming at a dozen others entirely unrelated to ourselves. The Commonwealth used orbiting Space-to-Ground "STiG" missiles extensively, which was a form of FOBS system.

"So in general, launch interception is unfeasible. This brings me to the second strategy generally used; "Strategic Defence Initiative", a rather meaningless bit of beaurocratnobabble often shortened to "SDI", sometimes also called "Star Wars".

"SDI calls for anti-missile satellites, as simple as a chunk of iron with a rocket motor and ground-based controls, or as complex as orbiting deathray cannon. The Global Unity Defence Alliance used to be renowned for it's SDI satellites, but after the fall of that organisation they were partitioned up among the member states and have generally been forgotten.

"The advantage of SDI systems is that they can hit targets in the exo-atmospheric phase, before MIRV reentry, and without the expenses and problems associated with launch interception. The downside is generally the cost of launching the system into orbit - negligible for Tsaraine and many other advanced spacefaring nations.

"Now, what has taken a while for us to recognise is that Tsaraine actually has a potential SDI satellite network, the Shrikenet. Linked with the Setnet, we have near-total global observation of everything from weather patterns to car number-plates, and we have Shrike coverage over three-quarters of the globe, with more avaliable if we're given advance warning.

"Recently, I headed a team to reprogram the Shrikenet to strike non-ground targets. Here on Earth, that was easy; the Setnet monitors local space as well, and the Shrikes still take their information from it.

"Outside LEO, the defensive Shrikenets at High Stone, Far Stone, and Kel Meralkharant are linked to local defence flotilla and base sensors.

"But it should, theoretically, be quite easy to further reprogram the Shrikenet to hit missiles in the exo-atmospheric phase, using data from the Setnet, and that is precisely what I propose we do."

Launch Field Eighty-Nine, Scheighu Cosmodrome, Scheighu, Tekhat Scheighu, Tsaraine*

It was once again another hot and arid day in Scheighu; weather topside lacked climate control, and closely matched the semidesert of Undant not far to the West. Still, the band played admirably as Rei Tanekazrai took the podium, despite the weight of their Star Command blacks.

Larak tsaGehn regarded this entire event as another slight against the Air Command; while the Air might receive battleships, and air monitors, and carriers, and indeed the entirety of the former Naval Command, the Star Command now had an entire class of spacecraft which were not only atmosphere-capable, but were far more effective than the two Air Monitors in almost every way conceivable.

And now he had to sit here in the audience while a mere Operations Commandant took center stage at the inaugural launch; Tanyi ralKeyra was off on a lightning tour of Tenebris, and had left the responsibility of the traditional speech to her second-in-command.

So Tanekazrai was speaking, and he had to look attentive. She really did have a beautiful voice, very easy to listen to even if he couldn't make out one word in three through her Hyazinari accent. Military advance, grand work of industry and science, credit to the Star Command and the Ascendancy, and so on. Larak had given similar speeches at the launching of the Air Monitors - one of the things you learned to do in the military was deliver the speeches the speechwriters turned out as if they were actually much more than pomp and circumstance.

Finally she cut the ribbon strung across the nose of Av-001, and the corvette lifted silently from the tarmac. The cameras of the News Corps, and the heads of those in the spectator stands, followed it as it lifted - forward and up, like an aircraft, rather than the straight upwards thrust of a spacecraft - and disappeared into the sky.

OOC: *This shows you the problems associated with naming everything after one city. But then, Tsaraine was originally named after Kel Tsaraint (later Tsarai, now Deep Tsarai). Information on ABM systems courtesy of Wikipedia.

Star Command Development Core, High Stone, Earth/Luna L3 Point

"So you see," Sethaine arAkhet explained, "There's very little that needs to be done to the design before production can begin - the Aten was designed quite a while ago, back after inertial dampening was adapted for the Horus-class. We just haven't had the shipyard space to build them, until now at least."

The other designers nodded; with the opening of the Britmattian Minerva Yards in Lunar orbit, the Star Command had suddenly found itself with the ability to build ships in much greater numbers, at greater speeds, than would be possible using purely Tsarainese facilities.

"We don't need to do any updates to the design? We have advanced since then."

"Some," Sethaine admitted, "But not so much as you might think - the Aten-class was cutting-edge back then, and it still competes quite well now. Certainly it will be better than the Horus, which was designed before we had the dampening - the Aten won't require structural repairs after a round-trip of the system."

They nodded again; keeping the Horus-class running and up-to-date was a constant headache for the Star Command - the freighters had never been designed to travel at the speeds they did now - and they were rapidly becoming too small to handle an ever-growing volume of interplanetary and interstellar traffic. The Aten-class, at over twice the length, would be a blessing to the colonies.

OOC: Holy thread resurrection, Batman!* But then this is my tech development thread. Hurrah for allies.

* Batman Begins is an excellent movie and I encourage you all to see it.

Minerva Yards, Lunar Orbit

The Britmattian shipyards were just about the largest enclosed spaces Sethaine had ever seen; only the central shaft of Kel Eridhant was bigger. The Ascendancy's own paltry drydocks at Far Stone wouldn't have even fit an Aten-class within them, completed or no; this yard held three skeletal freighters side by side, and it wasn't even the biggest.

"We should have them completed in a month." Unlike most Britmattian dwarves, Bjorn Hammerhand affected a highly refined accent and erudite vocabulary, and dressed to match; Sethaine thought he looked like a shrunken Mafia hitman.

"So soon?" From their vantage point above the hulls, the ships didn't look at all close to completion, at least to Sethaine's eyes. She thought they looked rather like emaciated salmon attacked by a Cubist sculptor (whereas the Horus-class resembled a brick with extra scaffholding).

Bjorn shrugged as elegantly as a dwarf could. "Certainly - we have constructed larger vessels in less time, for the Kingdom, but not so often."

Minerva Yards, Lunar Orbit

"The strange thing is," Sethaine said, "Down there in the Mother Country, most everyone doesn't care. They're happy enough to serenade the launch of a new military model - the Avernus, the Hades, the air cruisers and the frigates - but the launch of several dozen freighters doesn't elicit the slightest interest."

"Mayhaps they're turning Federal?" Bjorn Hammerhand looked even odder than usual in a tuxedo; he'd just come from the official Aten-class launching ceremony. "Big guns, you know ..."

"Ah well, the Tekhati appreciate it, at least." The event had been the subject of great excitement further out - on Mars, in the Belt, orbiting around Jupiter, or on the far side of the universe, the colonies knew what would help them the most. The Aten-class would be more important to their growth than any number of warships.

The TESEC was happy too; their special orders, At(M)-51 and At(M)-52, were skeletal frames in the bay below. Just as the number of freighters in the Ascendancy had almost doubled, soon enough the number of science vessels would too.

Departures Lounge, Scheighu Aerodrome, Scheighu, Tekhat Scheighu, Tsaraine

They actually got lost, in the cavernous glass-and-steel halls of the Aerodrome. Sferan, who'd been here before, was no help whatsoever; he waved his hands in the air, explaining that the Air Command's side of the complex had visible signposts, but there seemed to be none about here.

Kata stopped a passing black-and-grey uniform for instructions, but the Security officer was apparently leaving too; he was as lost as they were. It was culture shock inside their own country.

Eventually they figured out they were actually in the wrong building entirely, and wondered how they'd missed the "arrivals" signs, or the fact that everyone seemed to be foreign (were there really this many people wanting to go into Tsaraine, Kata wondered? All the Tsarainese were trying to go out).

Departures was the next building over, an elaborate collection of spires and gables like a First Dominion palace done in glass. Outside it they could see aircraft going back and forth on the tarmac; the big black-blue-gold ones were Tsarainese, and the pitiful white-and-green ones were Ekatorik. A lone black-and-red jet was from Undant's national carrier, but that was all the contribution from the Border States; the rest were foreign, from the Non-Democratic Alliance or stranger still.

The one with the silver flower on the tail-fin was Treznorikh, and the black falcon marked another as Dominion; blue and gold was Lavenrunz. A red V on the tail of another was Federal, and Kata pointed it out; they might very well be flying on it.

Then the intercom boomed - would passengers scheduled for departure on flight EK-609-476 at fifteen-hundred hours please make their way to gate three? - and they checked their tickets hurriedly. No, they were ET-348-907 at sixteen-thirty. Time enough to deposit the last of their baggage with the cargo officials, and settle into line at the customs office.

The government might have freed up emigration, but the customs officers were some of the most suspicious Security officers Kata had ever met; what was their purpose for travelling to Marshall Island, they asked, How long were they going for? Never mind that they'd already filled out the forms for all this weeks ago.

By the time they got through that the intercom was calling again and their number was up - ET-348-907 at gate five, and they had to run to get there in time. The Federal plane waiting for them was white with black tips, as was the hostess who ushered them aboard; she was a neko, a little touch of the Federation before they'd even lifted off the tarmac. They tried to avoid staring.

OOC: Legalising emigration isn't a tech development, but I don't feel like making another thread for socio-political developments, so it goes here.

Space Command Development Core, High Stone

With the Aten-class launched, it was back to the grindstone for Sethaine, although she now had a greatly increased staff. She had set each of them to devising, in isolation, a solution to the latest brief; it was by no means the free-for-all competition of private design agencies in the capitalist sphere, but it should suffice to create more variation than any one person could come up with themselves. And it avoided design by committee.

It also meant that some of the concepts they came up with were practically insane; like the "skunk", built around a single oversized ion cannon, or the "porcupine", which bore hundreds. As usual, more realistic designs were somewhere around the middle; the current leader had been designed in strict accordance to the brief (always a good thing), and had the heaviest armour of any Tsarainese warship.

In a departure from conventional designs, it's primary armament (ion cannon and erasers) was turreted - while the Sekhmet or Hades operated on the principle that, at long range, it was more efficient to turn the ship than the weapon, the new cruiser would be engaging at much closer ranges, and thus it was worthwhile to have independently turning weaponry.

Sethaine put her stamp upon it, and, picking a name from the list of approved choices, christened the class Hecate.

SuperPlexus

Steel and alloy and latticed carbon rose up in Sethaine's vision, became the skeletal spaces of a disassembled warship. There were struts and bulkheads and ablative blocks; here the frame of an elevator shaft or corridor.

She was familiar with this design; the Hades was a hand-me-down from the Territorials, and she'd had ample time to learn it's secrets, back when those first thirty vessels were being built and fitted out in Saturnspace.

And any changes since then were her own. A flick of the fingers, a wave of an arm, and platings flew away, bulkheads warped and stretched; this was Erebus, Hades's bastard offspring; a missile cruiser incorporating the latest technology purchased from the Mechanoids. In some time - months, years, however long it took Sethaine on her end and the Arkhreifiate of Industry on theirs - Erebus would join the System Fleets, shuffling the Hades out to the Defence Fleets. And then on, and on again; the Space Command Development Corps was a job for life.

SuperPlexus

This was about as real as it got. Even the composition of the alloys in the bulkheads had been simulated, every iota of force accounted for - magnitudes beyond the simple simulations found in the SuperPlexus environments used by civilians. Such were the glories of a Research budget.

Sethaine and her design team stood perched above a tall drop - here in the Erebus' forward section the ship measured a full hundred meters in height. The space below their feet was occupied by racks and loading systems, shunting simulated missiles into simulated missile launchers. These had been changed hardly at all from the models installed by the Territory on the Hades-class, and eight tubes spat missiles at fifteen RPM per tube. Underfoot the catwalk pounded every three seconds - even the recoil compensation designed by Armscor/Territorial could only do so much.

With such a rate of fire, the Hades had always been able to exhaust it's ammunition supply in under half an hour. Nearly tripling the ammunition loadout - not to mention the size of the missile bay - had doubled that time. They'd joked about the Hades costing less than it's missile loadout, but the Erebus really would. Sethaine trusted that there was little the Erebus could expect to face that would survive more than six thousand heavy fusion missiles.

"We're getting stress fractures in beams IIR through IIX again," one of her Researchers reported. A hazard, that, with a much longer missile bay. "We'll need to increase the iridium content of the forward girders."

"Can we extend the side extensions forward, distribute the force? Extra space is always good."

"Increase in cost could be prohibitive. Plus you're talking about redesigning all that forward girder structure if you do that."

"Could be worth it for a missile section which doesn't break apart after extended use. Replacing the forward girder structure after every battle would be a prohibitive cost."

Such was their work; their bodies rested deep within High Stone, but their minds were far distant. Here in the SuperPlexus, they were the gods of forge and smithy, able to reshape starships at will. They had designs the Star Command would probably never rationally consider; gauss cannon superguns, remora bombs ... once (although Sethaine had been censured, quietly, by her superiors later) they'd had a mad evening designing a system to drop cream pies (each individually heat-shielded and parachute-equipped) on Sirithilia.

SuperPlexus

"Esar tsaRazh, I must admit some suprise at this meeting. What exactly is the legal extent of your ... corporation here?"

Varakhé tsaRazh held up his hands in a warding gesture. "Please, esen, nobody likes that word - we are a citizen's association, nothing more. We have forfeited some of the benefits of state employment in return for those of self-employment; I assure you it is entirely legal under the legislation of the larger Ascendancy as a whole."

Sethaine considered that. On Tenebris anything was possible, but that tsaRazh and his "citizen's association" might interfere with her work on High Stone - that was above any beyond what she'd thought the colonials could do. Where was the State in this arrangement? Indeed, tsaRazh was edging in on her work, the State's work. Unacceptable!

"And so you have just ... come up with this design," she replied. "I presume that this is not the first time you've done such - but how do you know it will work? You cannot have access to the military secrets of the Star Command."

"Indeed we do not - that would be entirely unacceptable from a security standpoint, of course. But the outputs of those secrets are not secret themselves - we know how large an antimagnetic core is, how much power it requires, the forces it puts out. We may not know how it works, but what we have created is entirely capable of being utilised by those who do. It is much the same system the Territorials worked under, when building the Hades-class cruisers.

"And no, this is not the first time we've designed spacecraft - we mantain factors on Earth, and are able to accept foreign design briefs - with appropriate Security oversight, of course, as is only to be expected."

Sethaine frowned. "And you think you can create a working spacecraft without full knowledge of it's workings? Esar tsaRazh, I cannot in good conscience approve of this."

Varakhé shrugged eloquently, disturbing the formal lines of his coat. Sethaine felt vaguely embarrassed at her own, which was a direct copy of the one she wore in reality - large and shapeless and comfortable. But tsaRazh could be wearing nothing at all, wherever he sat on Tenebris, and it would not affect the image of himself in the SuperPlexus.

"You may enquire with your superiors, as you are entitled to do," he replied. "But I assure you once again that the Tenebrian Advanced Design Association is entirely legal and proper in it's operations.

"Perhaps this is not a good time? I shall return in the future, or you may consult with one of our local factors, as it pleases you."

TsaRazh disappeared, and Sethaine growled. "Corporatist asshole!"

Tenebrian Advanced Design Association Offices, City Twelve, Southern Avalon, Tenebris Prime, Tenebris system

Varakhé dropped out of the SuperPlexus and back into reality, blinking a little to restore his perception.

"Well?" Sarya leaned forward in her couch. "How'd it go?"

"Conservative bitch," Varakhé growled.

"So it's off?"

"Za karkaradt, no, it is not off! The Star Command Development Corps cannot compete with Gyrfalcon, and she knows it. It's on."

He grinned, feral. That was the problem with his countrymen - they didn't understand what a wonderful thing it was to get ahead, to beat the competition. Varakhé didn't regard himself as anti-State in the slightest - Tsaraine was still a Soundly Governed state - but like most political Minimalists, he thought that a State with greater individual autonomy would be unstoppable.

"True, true," Sarya replied, grinning back. "Are they still trying for direct human pilots?"

"I think so. Which is why they can't compete - metal is better than meat! Resistance is futile!"

Sarya laughed. "It's a good thing we've got the Adaptive Programming Corps on our side, then. Gyrfalcon wouldn't work without them."

"Eja, eja, the State is still good for some things. Just not everything."

It was the unfortunate truth that, at the speeds space combat progressed at, the human mind couldn't keep up. Never mind g-forces, monkeys hadn't evolved to fly about at such speeds - the Wraith corps might be excellent pilots, but in the simulations even they lost to the Gyrfalcon design.

Varakhé's breakthrough was this; replacing the human pilot with an adaptive program. It was far from sentient - the Adaptive Programming Corps would be first to admit they couldn't program AI - but it could fight competently at speeds far faster than the Wraith fighters, speeds fast enough to match, perhaps, the fightercraft of other nations.

He'd had the idea after reading of the dogbrain intelligences used in Zero-One strike craft, and thought; well, the programmers might not be able to manage a program equal to a human, but what about an animal? And the Programming Corps had been more than willing to help.

As a result, the Tenebrian Advanced Design Association's Gyrfalcon model could fly faster, fight better, carry more weapons, and required less support than a manned fighter. Varakhé had won, and he knew it. Now if only the Star Command would get over their statist biases and realise it too ...

OOC: I usually don't do design posts in such quick succession - heck, I usually don't do design posts at all - but this popped into my head this morning and I had to write it down and hey, why wait? Oh, and RAWR! I'm HYOOOOGE!

Star Command Development Core, High Stone, Earth/Luna L3 Point, Sol

"Esen Radhiña, if you'd be so kind as to demonstrate?"

"Certainly, esariqi, eseniqi. One moment ..."

The fighter pilot closed her eyes, establishing a connection with the computers. On the screens and in the SuperPlexus, Sethaine's JHE-015-model fighter turned and swooped.

It's predecessor, the Wraith-class, was an elegant, streamlined arrowhead of a thing; the Fifteen, taking it's minimalist aesthetics to an extreme, was a simple triangular wedge, with a dorsal bulge housing drives, reactors, computers, and most of it's weapons. Sethaine was proud of the design, and justifiably so; the thing was, in her opinion, the best the Star Command could get. And yet it was doomed.

Opposite the Fifteen in the SuperPlexus environment was the Tenebrian Advanced Design Association's Gyrfalcon H-model, an ugly fist of a thing encased in heavy armour and sprouting weapons ports. It possessed none of the airworthiness of the Fifteen; Varakhé tsaRazh had said, quite simply, that they weren't designing for it, that airworthiness wasn't something the Programming Corps had managed for the program running it. If it had to enter atmosphere, he'd said, it could do so on antimagnetics just as well as any cruiser or destroyer of the Air Command.

It galled Sethaine because it represented a step back from the Wraith-class, from the ideal of interenvironment applicability; the Gyrfalcon might be able to accelerate at fifty or sixty gravities but it would quite simply rip itself apart if it tried anything over a few times the speed of sound in atmosphere.

But it looked like that was what the Star Command was looking at; the Gyrfalcon and it's dogbrain programming simply outperformed the Fifteen in space combat. As far as her superiors were concerned, that negated the original brief; the Air Command could keep the skies. They were shifting the goalposts on her, without the slightest word of apology.

Once again, Erai Radhiña was losing.

Factory Programming Corps, Nova Reio, Tsaraine, Earth

It was hardly a glamorous job, but somebody had to do it. Or something, really; most of Argavis Ghiran's work was watching programs refine programs until they'd met his parameters.

Every time someone designed a new toaster, or a vehicle, or (in this case) a missile cruiser, the factories producing parts or whole units of whatever it was had to be adjusted to fit. Sometimes that meant physical redesign - something Argavis had trained in - but mostly it was a simple matter of programming new modules for the robots who did most of the work.

And if Argavis' redesigns meant they needed to hire extra staff at that factory, his superiors would come wondering why that was; there was a poster above his workstation stating It is human to err; reduce human error!

About the only good thing you could say about it was that it left plenty of time for other things, like arguing with the Hackers who seemed to have found every backdoor into the Plexus there was. Oh, they were reasonably circumspect - Security would come down like a ton of bricks on anyone from outside the network, after all, even if they were foreigners - but one programmer could recognise another. They were good people, if a little insane.

Tenebris Fleet Yards, Tenebris/Moon L5 Point, Tenebris System

"Right!" Ekhano raised his voice, even though the suit comms transmitted every word he said crisply. "Run checklist, people. These suits are new, and if God Above is merciful we won't have any teething problems - but you know what they say about paranoia."

Like many things, the powered construction suits had had their origin in a military project, and it had taken a few years for the technology to filter down to sectors where it was actually needed. Ekhano and his shipbuilders had recieved their suits only a few weeks ago, and this was to be their first trial in a Star Command project.

Reassuringly, everyone reported clear results - no problems today, at least.

Or at least no obvious problems. Only two kinds of paranoia.

"This is a new project," he continued, "And a new design, so keep an eye on your HUDs - they're there for a reason. And remember, if we screw up on this we'll be watching robots for the rest of our working lives - so don't!

"The plans say we start with the AEF-958 sections, which should be over thataway. To work!"

His crew saluted smartly, and moved off across the space of the shipyard. Ekhano was proud - he had them well trained, quite like his old Ground Command platoon. Commanding people was rather like riding a bicycle - once you learned how, you never forgot.

A moment later, he kicked off smartly from the shipyard wall after his men. Thirty Erebuses wouldn't build themselves.

OOC: Ack, crappy. Ever onwards, I suppose.

Star Command Development Core, High Stone, Earth/Luna L3 Point, Sol

The brief had been fairly standard; the Star Command requires a new weapons platform to service and deliver to the battlefield subsidiary units ... and so on, going into further detail regarding required capabilities and so forth. Essentially, they wanted a carrier.

The part of it Sethaine objected to read in cooperation with the originators of the Gyrfalcon model - the Tenebrian Advanced Design Association, as fine a collection of wannabe-capitalist revolutionaries you could ask for. Sethaine didn't object to that so much as to the TADA's head designer, Varakhé tsaRazh. And no, it wasn't just because his Gyrfalcon had outperformed her JHE-015 model.

She would have complained, but recently Command had sent out a message regurgitating trite dogma from the Edicts of Sound Governance - stuff about avoiding the influence of the individual in politics, working together for the greater good. Things everyone had learned in political theory class.

What they meant, of course, was that any unprofessional bias would be noticed. She had no idea whether they even meant it in relation to herself, but it was best to keep one's head down when Command was on a witch-hunt.

So Sethaine had done her best to cooperate with tsaRazh, which mainly meant working in stony silence. But both of them were the heads of their respective organisations, both accustomed to being the final word; creative disagreements flared into arguments.

"These things are automated! We don't need passageways that large through the hangars."

"Look. I have had a great deal more experience than you in capital-scale design, and it would be very nice if you would realise that. The fighter is automated, but the maintenance is not - and believe me, maintenance needs space! This is simple ergonomics."

She glared at him. He turned back to the model onscreen ... and widened the corridors.

All in all, it was not so good a way to design a starship.

Tenebrian Advanced Design Association Offices, City Twelve, Southern Avalon, Tenebris Prime, Tenebris system


The door swung open, admitting a wash of pale midafternoon sunlight and Sarya, who bore a rolled-up poster-sized datascreen and a bag of fast food.

"Hiya." Varakhé spun around in his couch to wave, and completed a full 360-degree turn to end up facing his screens again, which had spread across half a wall. They displayed various cross-sections of the carrier design in progress.

"How goes?"

Sarya put down her purchases and walked over to have a closer look.

"Arrgh."

"More trouble with the Ice Princess of Sol, huh?"

"God Above, yes. I wish I could just shake that woman! Esen arAkhet is exasperating."

"You're still spending a lot of time on it, though."

"Sure - the carrier is a prepaid design. But ... look, right now over Mars there's a disaster going on, right? The Dominion's got their naval fleets doing medevac, so's the Triumvirate. We can't do that, because our ships there are very strictly warships.

"The plan calls for the battleship design to be a theatre commandship, to have all that sort of thing - but the plan also calls for battleships only in the response fleets! I raised the idea that it would be good to have all that, but no - "Esar[i] tsaRazh, you are deviating from the brief! If the Star Command wanted a hospital ship they would have asked for one!"

"God [i]Above. Enough about that. What've you got?"

"Food," Sarya replied, depositing a silicate-plastic box in front of him, "Though God Above knows what country this comes from. And ..."

She unrolled the datascreen, which went automatically rigid, the microscopic texture on it's back gripping Varakhé's desk. It displayed freighters of various nationalities - TYCS Lokis, Menelmacari Vingilots, Shogunate Busus and a half-dozen others.

"Freighters. Very pretty."

"Moron. What's useful is their Roll On/Roll Off architecture - if a freighter has a good plan behind the arrangement of it's cargo spaces, we can build a ship around that. All this is research for" - she tapped an icon on the datascreen, and the display changed - "This."

"This" was a very rough diagram of a spacecraft, cut away to reveal a massive crosshatched space marked "cargo holds". Sarya had drawn a Hecate-class cruiser for scale purposes beside it; this design was five times the length.

"Sarya, why would the Star Command need a freighter one and a half kilometers long?"

"Same reason the Menelmacari and Shogunate need bigass things? Bulk transport, mass passenger transit, colony ships, et cetera. Drone freighters really suck as a large-scale transport option."

"Drone freighters are one tenth the size."

"And thus ... if nothing else, it'd make a great explorer. Stuff a fabber and a nanoforge in there and it could hold a couple thousand scientists entirely independently - put mining robots on random asteroids for resource aquisition, grow food in on-board hydroponics, assemble small spacecraft in the hangar bays ..."

"You, esen, are a nutter. It might just work."

Sarya grinned, and tapped another icon.

"Then there's this. The Star Command needs a dropship design, right?"

"They haven't said anything ..."

"Varakhé, they don't have one! The Anubis is a fine little spaceplane, but it's very small. You can't use it for troop deployments very easily, so on, say, Mars for example, troops need to be funneled through a groundside base and shipped to a front from there. Another use for my freighter - troop transport.

"In any case, they do need a dropship."

"If you're trying to kill TME's Loki buisness, it's not going to work."

"God Above no, Loki is huge! We don't need mission adaptable pods or quite that much cargo space. What we do want is some kind of space drive which isn't restricted by the Star Command. Gravy or something."

"You think you can sell this thing to foreigners? We don't have shipyards!"

"Actually I was thinking we could sell it to civilians, but that too. And maybe we should? Have shipyards, I mean. It's not like there's not plenty of asteroids about in this system ... we might be able to develop robots or something, leapfrog the whole "human employees" bit."

"Sorya, you're a good ideas person."

"There's a "but" in there, isn't there?"

"No, no "but". Go work on these things, then. Money, duty, individual self-determination."

"You Minimalists really need a better battle cry."

Tenebrian Advanced Design Association Offices, City Twelve, Southern Avalon, Tenebris Prime, Tenebris system

"God Above, Sarya, you're an ... idea fabber or something. Okay, what's this one?"

To Varakhé, Sarya's sketch looked rather like an item of sado-masochistic jewelery; a ring enhanced with studs and spikes and miscellaneous shapes.

"Only the source to all our energy needs ever."

"Riiiight. Sarya, we don't have energy needs; everything is fusion-powered now. It runs on hydrogen ... oh."

"Ha! Precisely. This baby will use magnetic fields to extract and bottle hydrogen so freighters can come along every month or so and pick up a load."

"Where from? We don't have any gas giants in this system ..."

"Yes. Which is why it sucks hydrogen out of the sun."

"Out of the sun."

"Yes."

"Uh ... good luck with that, Sarya. Unfortunately, neither of us is a magnetic field physicist."

Sarya shrugged; in her worldview, all obstacles were surmountable.

"I can find one somewhere in the Ascendancy, I'm sure. Can you imagine the sort of royalties we'd get for solving the nation's energy supply problem?"

Tenebrian Advanced Design Association Offices, City Twelve, Southern Avalon, Tenebris Prime, Tenebris system

It was startling how fast things had developed from Sarya's original rough sketches and rougher physics; suddenly there was a group of physicists in the Eyrie, far away on Earth, assigned to the detailed work of what had been christened, somewhere along the way, a "solar well".

Although the distance between Sol and Tenebris far surpassed "astronomical", the Arkhreifiate of Research and the Sciences had pressed upon them an even larger bank of quantum-entanglement processors than they already possessed; now the white-coats Solside were permanently visible on a big datascreen covering most of the far wall.

While Varakhé continued to work on the Star Command's carrier, Sarya began to farm out her other ideas to affiliates elsewhere in the Ascendancy - through mutual contacts in Solside universities, there was a large network of professional and semiprofessional designers she could call upon, now spread throughout the colonies.

Truth be told, she'd rapidly become rather useless to the solar well project, as the researchers went beyond her original drawings and ideas into the realms of esoteric physics. Mostly Sarya just nodded when they said anything and tried to keep up.

OOC: I have no idea whatsoever whether sucking hydrogen out of a star using magnetic fields is at all possible, but Tsaraine has a reasonable command of electromagnetism, not to mention some knowledge of antimagnetism - in which like charges attract and opposing ones repel. Ultimately, like everything else it works upon "let's pretend", but if someone has any science suggestions regarding it, feel free to telegram me.

Officers' Bar, Kel Meralkharant Alpha Rock, Jupiter/Io Lagrange Point Four, Jovian Subsystem, Sol

Ingreidt and Iltarekhan got a pint of beer apiece and moved to a table near the wall, where a datascreen displayed a real-time map of traffic in the inner Jovian subsystem. There'd been some attempt to avoid the whole topic of Jupiter, when the bar was first opened, but over the years the administrators had come to the conclusion that the Outer System Fleet's Captains-Commandant were going to talk shop with or without their encouragement.

With or without their alcohol, too; while the Star Command was militantly dry on-duty, there was plenty of semi-legal booze aquired semi-officially on the grey market from the colonies or Earth. Which was why Alpha Rock had an officer's bar in the first place.

Right now the magnified section of the system map which showed Io and the stations in it's Lagrange points was full of green ship icons; fifteen Erebus-class cruisers had arrived at Kel Meralkharant for the Outer System Fleet, and Sekhmet-class destroyers like Ingreidt's Vokhar Eldiko which had arrived to be scrapped.

Ingreidt raised his stein to those green dots.

"To the Vokhar Eldiko, may she never sail again!"

Iltarekhan raised an eyebrow at that, and echoed with his own toast.

"To the Devouring Wind, may she consume the Martian hordes!"

"Mars has hordes? I thought all it had was radioactive dust. To the Oberth/Sekhmet-class of destroyers - no longer may their poorly finished surfaces present a danger to the Ascendancy!"

"I'm sure there are still hordes somewhere there, and knowing my luck I'll have to fight them when I'm there. As opposed to you, sitting here in a shiny new Erebus. To the Erebus-class cruisers, and enough weaponry to topple planetary civilisation!"

"Yah, but you never know when Jupiter's going to flare up again. Mars doesn't give you enough time to get complacent. To the Mark Three fusion warhead!"

"That's supposed to be a good thing? Should I be worried about my superiors, then, for exiling me to the Martian Defence Fleet while you get my job in the Outer System Fleet? To our superiors, may they be blessed with actuity of vision!"

"Hear, hear! Only hindsight is twenty-twenty, alas. Though Mars isn't that bad. To Arkhreifane ralKeyra - daudh dtokh Ruki Aestrakhor aseiravda!"

"Famous last words? To Arkhora Seingult - may she rule for a thousand years!"

"She just might, you know."

"Surely not."

"Well, she's technically, what's the term ... amortal? She could if she wanted to. To the Soundly Governed state, may it endure even longer!"

OOC: As of this post the Ascendancy's fleet of Oberth/Sekhmet-class destroyers have been scrapped, and replaced with Ixhwa/Hades-class cruisers from the Inner and Outer System Fleets. Ten of the Hades have also been converted to the Heavy Armour Variant, making the total number of Heavy Armour Variant vessels twenty.

The Hades have been replaced with Erebus-class cruisers - the bigger, meaner elder brothers of the Hades.

Tenebrian Advanced Design Association Offices, City Twelve, Southern Avalon, Tenebris Prime, Tenebris system

Sarya blinked at the Earthside Researchers, managing - carefully - to restrain the urge to goggle or to spout invective.

"You're telling me that we will not be able to test the Well until we build a full scale working model? Esari, you are smart men," - hopefully - "I shouldn't have to tell you what's wrong with that."

The Researcher-Commandant nodded. "Esen, eja - and it's true that the Solar Well is a very large project. It is unfortunate that it cannot be scaled down at all, yes - but all our simulations say that it should work perfectly, given materials of the proper quality. It would be best if we could engineer the entire structure in a nanoforge, but unfortunately we have no nanoforges on such a scale."

"I should think not."

The Solar Well, after all, would be over a kilometer across; there would never be a nanoforge large enough to build it. More conventional engineering techniques were sound - were bloody good, in fact, compared to some nations out there - but a screwup on such a scale ...

"A working Well will justify the resource expenditure used to create it, fortunately," the Researcher-Commandant helpfully continued. He didn't need to add that a non-functional Well would be a kilometer-wide waste of resources, a well into which all their careers would inevitably slide.

Untested technology, massive engineering, and disaster if I screw up ... If I'd known the problems involved here I'd never have shown that first sketch to Varakhé.

SuperPlexus

"Well. I believe that is that."

Sethaine arAkhet's smile was chilly, but it was there. Varakhé had no doubt that internally the woman was dancing with glee - anything to escape working with him.

"That is that," he echoed.

Before them the carrier was shrunken to the size of a bus. Varakhé thought it looked, like most Tsarainese craft, rather like a Cubist sculpture; but unlike the Aten-class, no resemblance to fish suggested itself. Fat block of forward structure, long broad back of hangar bays ... it was a bloated damselfly, perhaps, although that was stretching it.

"And now, before we put our respective stamps upon it - I trust you are going to put your authorisation upon this, Esar - we need to decide what it's to be called."

"We have an Avernus, an Erebus, a Hecate and Hades - weren't most of those picked out by Command? I'd say they've got a theme going. We can't use Elysium or Charon - that's a continent and a moon respectively - but there's still plenty left in the cthonic Greek pantheon."

She was silent, accessing the appropriate data, and names began to appear in the air before them. Acheron, Cocytus, Phlegethon, Styx, Lethe and Mnemosyne. Asphodel. Minos, Rhadamanthys, Aeacus - the judges of the underworld. Demeter and Persephone.

"I like Persephone," he said. "Unlike some of these, I can pronounce it."

"Despite the fact that it uses sounds entirely foreign to Sekhel."

"Well, I can pronounce it better than "Mnemosyne"."

"Demeter might be better. Not to mention less gloomy."

"Demeter is a goddess of the living, not the dead - it's the wrong field of occupation."

"And yet, unlike Persephone" - Sethaine pronounced it Verzevonné - "It can be reduced to a two-letter prefix which can be written without recourse to strange diacritical marks. It may be just me, but I rather think the Star Command will like that."

Tenebris Fleet Yards, Tenebris/Moon L5 Point, Tenebris System

The Yards were never still, never silent; the Star Command had a voracious appetite for vessels, and factory-made parts streamed in from across the Ascendancy to emerge as completed vessels.

There were hundreds of Anubises of various marks and modifications, which were simple, short jobs; Aten-class freighters, which were longer jobs but still relitavely simple; and now sixteen further Hecate-class cruisers, destinied for the twin System Fleets of Sol. Those were not simple, and not short; Ekhano supervised his workers in person.

God Above, when had he turned into an administrator? Somehow it had crept up on him, the amount of delegation he had to do creating paperwork which led to yet more delegation and so forth in a vicious cycle until suddenly he hardly spent one day a week at work in the Yards.

OOC: And there my brain collapses. Ack.

Keranes Design Association Offices, Nova Tsarai Arcology, Twisting Coast, Continent Rusalka, Sahel AI, Sahel

Even five years ago, briefs would have gone straight from the corps in question that wanted it to the appropriate subcorps of Researchers, who would have engineered something in keeping with the brief they were given. In the market economy now growing around the edges of the colonial command economy, things could follow a much more circuitous route.

Depsite the fact that they were technically competitors, Sarya - an old friend from university back in Deep Tsarai - had given Irény Keranes a brief. Irény wasn't sure if you could call it subcontracting, since the idea in question had no buyers lined up for the finished product (although Sarya insisted there would be, and Irény thought it was likely).

If it didn't work out, well, it wasn't like KDA wasn't making money - mostly automobile and light aircraft designs - and it wasn't like they didn't already have files full of potential designs. And it had been a while since Irény had designed a spacecraft, it would be good to get back into practice.

There was a problem, of course, and the problem was that, like most of Sarya's ideas, the craft would be well beyond what had been attempted in the Ascendancy before.

A fairly ordainary antimagnetic-propelled craft would be easy to design, but only the Star Command would be legally allowed to build or operate it. A craft propelled by fusion rockets would be slow, but it could be built or mantained by - or sold to - anyone. But a fusion rocket ship, unlike an antimagnetic craft, could not land or take off vertically - and a dropship had to be able to do that.

So Irény was busily investigating foreign possibilities - electromagnetics, gravitics, and stranger things besides. Like Tsaraine, most of them were proscribed by one national military or the other, and none of them were open-source, more's the pity. But somewhere there'd be something appropriate.

OOC: And once again my brain collapses. >.<

He(b)-037/Harvest of Souls, Kel Meralkharant Alpha Rock, Jupiter/Io Lagrange Point Four, Jovian Subsystem, Sol[/b]

Harvest still had that fresh-paint and silicate-plastic smell to it; Isren had commanded her new cruiser out of the Tenebris yards, alongside the other seven Hecates newly added to the Outer System Fleet, two days ago. Before that she'd been retraining for the command at the High Stone academy, and prior to that she'd been commanding an Oberth/Sekhmet, back when the Oberth/Sekhmet-class was still part of Tsarainese Defence Fleets.

The Hecate-class was certainly a good deal more comfortable than her old Shoggoth, entirely of Tsarainese make (as opposed to Shoggoth's dubious Iraqstani construction), and given that Harvest was the second iteration of the Hecate-class, it was one of the most powerful vessels in the Star Command.

Oh, certainly an Erebus-class might hold more raw TNT-equivalencies - more than a hundred gigatons worth of Mark Three fusion missiles, without even considering their ion cannon and erasers - but the Hecate carried more (and more powerful) erasers and ion guns, and a generally better-rounded loadout than the standoff-tactics Hades and Erebus.

OOC: Ack, crappy.

Tenebris Fleet Yards, Tenebris/Moon L5 Point, Tenebris System

Ekhano found that he was no longer measuring time in years, but rather in production schedules. Lags in construction caused time to slow, boosts in construction caused it to speed up, as if the Star Command's production briefs held some dark-matter effect capable of creating relativistic effects.

Today twenty yards were marked with Star Command in progress tags, time skipping along as effort was expended upon the Demeter-class carriers within them; another few dozen were going slower, projects for the colonial authorities - freighters, most of them. Off at the Minerva yards orbiting Luna and the new Fenris Fleet Yards at that colony were another twenty such carriers, one day to be a backbone to the fleets.

Ekhano had heard most every class that came out of the Yards described as a "fleet backbone" - Hades, Hecate, Erebus - but of them all only the Demeter looked like it truly possessed a spine, the long dorsal keel from which the fighter bays depended. At this point, sans the completed hulls of those bays, it looked a little like a wingless dragonfly.

[i]At-071/Heart of Brightness, Low Orbit over Tenebris, Tenebris System

At last, Sarya thought, The moment of truth approaches.

Now that the day was finally here she felt suprisingly stress-free; all that could be done had been done, and all that remained was to see if the gamble had paid off.

Success would mean accolades and rewards for the Tenebrian Design Association and her personally; failure would no doubt end her career. The Solar Well was a gamble with high stakes.

The Solar Well was a spiked ring a short way off, deceptively small without anything to scale it against. It was over a kilometer across, a mess of carefully insulated generators and exotic magnets. In her synaesthetic overlay Sarya could see the magnetic fields of the Well, and the greater field of Tenebris itself.

"We're good to go."

The researchers who'd designed the inner workings of the Well were aboard Heart with her - the first time she'd met most of them in the flesh, as opposed to the far side of a camera on Earth.

"Then go." "Initiate collection at will" would have been more suitable for a hopefully-historic event, but Sarya couldn't bring herself to say something so flowery.

The magnetic fields blossomed, intersecting with the stranger antimagnetic fields into a virtual funnel many kilometers long, reaching down from the Well into the bright maw of the star. And hydrogen began to flow against the tug of gravity, along the carefully arranged fields and into holding tanks along the ring.

The Solar Well had been a simple idea in concept - in design, less so. That it had produced a feasible - even a possible - technology was little short of a miracle.

On Heart of Brightness' bridge people were cheering - several of the researchers actually hugged her - and Sarya realised she'd been holding her breath, letting it out slowly.

Thank goodness for that.

OOC: As said before, the Solar Well is probably utterly impossible wankery, but in the absence of any hard data I'm following the flip of a coin, which said it works. Huzzah, hurrah, and hooray!

De-008/Fire of Heaven, High Stone, Earth/Moon Lagrange Point Three, Earth Subsystem, Sol

"It's good to have you with us, Captain-Commandant. The Inner System Fleet needs more people of faith."

Varessin Inkharent nodded. "It's good to be here, my Arkhreifane. And it's a great pity that so many of the Orthodox faithful do not leave the Mother Country. Even the Arkhaeron can see the way the colonies are developing."

Tanyi ralKeyra nodded sombrely in reply. Arkhaeron Vrel Tlesafr was something of a touchy subject among the Orthodox Rukine faith; his words were holy, but they were guided by the staunchly atheistic government in Deep Tsarai.

"Yet still, God Above is not in my chain of command, my Arkhreifane - much as we might all wish for a State ... more attuned to the needs of the faithful, the Star Command must protect every citizen, faithful or apostate. Such is duty."

"Such is duty," ralKeyra echoed. "You think we should have fleets guarding the colonies, then?"

Inkharent shrugged. "We may see no immediate threats to them, but that does not mean they don't exist - and we'd all look like fools, if an alien warfleet was to descend upon Tenebris tomorrow. Unfortunately ... you know better than I what our budget looks like, Arkhreifane."

"I've spoken to the Arkhora about it, but you're right - we lack the shipyard capacity to build the fleets up anything other than slowly, alas. These Demeter-class carriers are a good step on the road."

She patted the bulkhead of Fire of Heaven beside them, indicating the eight-hundred-meter bulk of the Inner System Fleet's latest addition.

"Building up the Solar fleets before we start on the extrasolar defence fleets? I can understand that."

"Eja. Though I can't say I'll feel safe until we get actual battleships."

"Agreed, my Arkhreifane. Until then ... ktoiudh dtokh Ruki Aestrakhor aseiravda!"

OOC: Although I got sidetracked into considering the nature of faith in the Ascendancy there, this post is to say that I've now finished my carriers. There are five in each defence fleet and response fleet, a grand total of forty spread out throughout Sol. I justify this by the fact that they're support ships more than command vessels - unlike, say, a USN carrier group, they're more support for the cruiser core of a fleet than the core of the fleet themselves.

Kzetrhaisha Court Three, Kel Meralkharant Alpha Rock, Jupiter/Io Lagrange Point Four, Jovian Subsystem, Sol

"Point!"

The kzetrhaisha ball thwacked against the target board at the far end of the court, and Svedai ralGanahlen flicked the scoreboard a number higher for Harvest of Souls' crew.

Isren grinned, stepping back as the defensive line of Harvest's team reformed fluidly. The ball belonged to Gaze in Stunned Disbelief now, and Gar Ingreidt delivered a powerful serve deep into her half of the court. Isren's helmswoman Mera parried it back, and once again the lines shifted up and down the court, following the ball.

Everyone with a drop of Tsarainese blood loved (or ought to love) Kzetrhaisha, and here on Kel Meralkharant the inter-ship matches were followed as fiercely as the inter-Rock and All-Ascendancy League games.

The ball was hit forward by another of Ingreidt's long serves, to a fellow attacker deep into Isren's side of the court. An extended racket and the man tripped, the ball bouncing into the air. A team-member whipped it back across the court, and the game surged back towards Ingreidt's half. The downed attacker was left to pick himself up; kzetrhaisha had always been a contact sport.

"Point!" ralGanahlen called, and "Time!". The two teams drew to a halt, looking up at the scoreboard; five-three in Harvest's favour. Isren and her team cheered heartily; Gaze's crew looked sullen.

"Next match; Frostfall versus Woken Nightmare!"

Tenebrian Advanced Design Association Offices, City Twelve, Southern Avalon, Tenebris Prime, Tenebris system

"Yes, I understand Well output is below our original estimates. Point out to them that this is the first iteration of a new technology! Point it out again, then."

Sarya was multitasking, coordinating the Solar Well management vocally while she sketched out refinements for TADA's multikilometer megafreighter. A stylus spun in her free hand, a nervous habit she'd never got rid of, and which returned in force whenever she was truly overworked.

Which was all the time, these days; although both their major projects were progressing fairly well, the two together took up more hours than the day possessed. Somehow Sarha had become the de facto expert on the Solar Well, despite the fact that little more than the original idea (and a good portion of the royalties) were hers.

The freighter, on the other hand, was almost a SuperPlexus model, ready to be tweaked and modified by more specialised engineers and shipbuilders; although it had yet to pay off, both the TESEC and the freighter fleet had expressed interest.

OOC: More crappy, but the important thing is I'm writing again. I've got other development posts scheduled, which hopefully will get written in the next few days.

Tenebris Fleet Yards, Tenebris/Moon L5 Point, Tenebris System

Varakhé saw the space-suited woman before she saw him. Silver hair pulled back tightly from angular Ktrazirha features, a jaw rather heavier than the norm for that race. Helmet hanging from one hand as she leaned against the bulkhead, exposing that sharp profile; a familiar face.

"Khara dteh, esen arAkhet. We meet at last."

Sethaine arAkhet turned to regard him, lips compressed into a line of existential disapproval. That too was all too familiar from their meetings in the SuperPlexus.

"Khara dteh, esar tsaRazh. I've been rather anticipating this meeting."

Her words were as clipped and formal as her accent, and likewise entirely lacking in warmth; neither designer had much lost love for the other, and both of them knew it.

"I do hope I don't disappoint, then."

"Esar, you live entirely up to my expectations. Shall we?"

She gestured towards the hull of the cruiser looming overhead, the product of their mutual effort.

"Let's, indeed."

At a quarter-kilometer long, the Charon-class cruiser was on the small side for Ascendancy warships, only a few dozen meters longer than the (late, unlamented) Oberth/Sekhmet-class destroyers but much heavier armed. It was a light-weight Hecate, a ship-of-the-line.

Like all Tsarainese warships (and indeed probably all warships everywhere), it was cramped on the inside, and entirely lacking in charm; precisely as they'd designed it. Added frills meant added cost and - worse - added manufacturing processes; anathema when each process had to be accounted for by the factory programs churning out bits of ship.

"Esar, I should like to talk to you."

"Certainly I shall listen, then. What have you to say?"

"Esar tsaRazh, this has to stop."

"This what?"

"You know full well what I'm talking about. You don't like me, and believe me it's mutual, but we dance around each other spitting polite hostilities ... your presence, tsaRazh, is toxic. It is scarcely a professional relationship."

Varakhé supressed a scowl with a perfect, neutral smile.

"Toxic? I should certainly hope not, esen arAkhet."

"Yes, that is precisely what I was talking about. Esar tsaRazh, I have no choice about working with you; the State commands and I must follow. But if you find me so difficult to work with as your attitude suggests, perhaps your Association should withdraw from this project."

Sethaine paused expectantly, waiting for his reply, and Varakhé realised that she was right; it was juvenile to continue such a feud. As the statists would say, individual emotions had to be subsidiary to the needs of the State; and his own minimalist politics would hope that people could be less petty without a State to watch their every move. Failing one's own philosophy was embarrassing.

"... I have made rather an ass of myself, haven't I?"

"You and I both, I'm afraid. Should we perhaps start over again?"

"Oh?"

The government designer bowed, formally and precisely.

"Khara dteh, esar. My name is Sethaine arAkhet, chief designer for the warship design section of the Space Command Development Corps, and I'm pleased to be working with you in the trials of this cruiser design."

Varakhé raised a mental eyebrow. Why not?

"The pleasure is mine, esen. I am Varakhé tsaRazh, co-founder of the Tenebrian Advanced Design Association."

He bowed, carefully, in reply. "Now we've got that over with, perhaps we should get a beer once we're done here?"

"Don't push it, Varakhé."

OOC: Not quite so crappy, I hope. I figured that over a month was long enough to go from zero to prototype for the long-awaited cruiser class.

Prototype Object 0845D, Tenebris System

"Close to fifty kilometers off the third buoy. Ready ion turrets one through six for firing. Input targeting solutions on the third buoy."

In battle, Kireltan Anazhkhi would have compressed those commands into a few short syllables, but this was a prototype testing exercise. He'd trained originally in the sciences, before a posting to the TESEC had turned into being tapped for Star Command command academy and an attachment to the Development Corps, and this exercise was as much an experiment as anything in a test tube.

Proper documentation must be kept in the audio logs, so that the designers back at High Stone could analyse the results.

"Fifty kilometers reached and holding, Captain-Commandant."

"Ion turrets one through six are charged and loaded, Captain-Commandant."

"Targeting solutions have a lock on the third buoy, Captain-Commandant."

Kireltan's crew felt as he did, or at least knew their captain's foibles well enough to please him; either sufficed.

"Fire on my mark. Five ... four ... three ... two ... one ... mark!"

In the six ion turrets studding the hull of 0845D, extreme currents broke iron slugs down into plasma, and electromagnetic accelerators slung the ionised gases forwards in concentrated streams. That was the simple version, ignoring the insane energies put through the guns, the extreme temperatures they reached, the speeds at which the ionised particles flew ...

In tacspace the buoy vanished - no air in space to explode, after all, and the ion beams themselves were invisible - coruscating beams of death just meant that you were losing energy perpendicular to the beam, no matter how aesthetically pleasing they might be. War was not an art gallery.

"Third buoy successfully destroyed, Captain-Commandant."

"Very good. Close to fifty kilometers off the fourth buoy ..."

Tenebris Fleet Yards, Tenebris/Moon L5 Point, Tenebris System

The vessel being assembled in the airdock did not resemble a Tsarainese ship, Ekhano reflected. Nowhere were the brick-fu aesthetics of the Star Command evident, nor the mathematical sleekness of their atmospheric craft. No, the dropship prototype was a stark arrowhead, perforated at the rear by the growing circles of drive vents.

Drive shafts. Whatever. Ekhano didn't pretend to understand the inner workings of the systems the Britmattians were installing (although he was doing his best to learn), but they were another patch of foreign influence. Star Command vessels didn't muck about with gaping vents like those; all their motive systems were safely confined within the security of the hull.

He still wasn't sure what he thought about commercial ships, of all things, being built in the Tenebris yards - weren't they under Star Command ageis here? - nor what to think of the Britmattians, scooting about with precise efficiency in his shipyards.

Although those dwarves could certainly hold their own in a drinking match, and that was a point in their favour. Even ghaníkhtan, horrible rotgut that it was, didn't seem to faze them ... yes, you had to respect someone who could down the Commonwealth's age-old moonshine shot for shot. Them or their liver transplants.

OOC: I decided to put an update for the dropship here rather than in Britmattia's diplomacy thread on account of not wanting to clutter it up, so here it is. It is good to be writing again!

Tenebrian Advanced Design Association Offices, City Twelve, Southern Avalon, Tenebris Prime, Tenebris system

Sarya groaned, rubbing her eyes, and fumbled across her desk for the glass of water and headache tablets that had to be about somewhere. It was too late, after too long a day, and hours immersed in the SuperPlexus had taken it's toll. Not, to be sure, on her body - her couch was better-designed than that - but the throbbing behind her temples gave her a horrid reminder of what happened if one went too far.

Found tablets, found water, and swallowed the first with the help of the second. Ainra kal Ruki!

Things were just too hectic these days, with the long days they were putting in to get the megafreighter 'plexus model completed and tested. Not that the Ascendancy would deny the progenitor of the solar well, but a one-and-a-half-kilometer ship was simply too large to make a working prototype. Everything had to be ready in the SuperPlexus model - right down to the last weld and bolt, to the inch of wiring - before it could be translated into factory patterns.

Meanwhile Varakhé remained hard at work on the Charon-class cruiser, alongside the stuffy Star Command Researcher with whom he'd apparently reached some manner of truce ...

On the plus side, when that work was finally completed, she'd be able to relax, take a holiday. Maybe visit Geri II, or the Mother Country, and look for new talent - the TADA was too small an organisation for the work they'd taken on, and they desperately needed to expand.

Ground Command Training Ground Three, the Wastes, Tsaraine

An armoured glove landed on his shoulder, and Yahn Ekkensch jumped a literal three feet into the air.

"Little steps, PlatCom!" Zvanrai keiTanist boomed. "The PACS emphasises all your movements, and the battlefield is not the place to play kangaroo!"

Yahn nodded, which, conversely, produced no effect at all - his head, cushioned in the powersuit's helmet, wasn't linked to any muscles.

"Eja, Commandant!" he said hurriedly - Commandant keiTanist was notoriously hard to please, and he didn't want to get on her bad side any more than he already was.

"Continue!" she replied, and turned to lope away with a grace belying the weight of her HPACS battlesuit. But then, she'd been in power armour since it's invention, whereas grunts like Yahn had been stuck in unpowered ACS, having to push to get a nominal amount of movement in those heavy suits. Small wonder they were having trouble adapting to powersuit-augmented muscles!

So across the training ground powersuited infantry were hopping and stumbling, overshadowed by the much bulkier battlesuits of their PACS Squad instructors.

At least Zvanrai and her ilk were learning too - now that the heavy infantry role of the original PACS Squads had been usurped by the Ground Command, what had been the PACS Squads were now Mobile Armour Anti-Tank Squads, with a much heavier weapons loadout to match; their gauss rifles came courtesy of the Star Command.

Little steps. Yahn took a cautious step forward, then another, and then he was loping across the training ground in two-meter strides. The trick was to direct your energy forward rather than upwards.

A battlesuit landed with an earth-shattering thud nearby - Zvanrai again, rising from an impact-absorbing crouch. Yahn skidded to a halt and fell over backwards.

"Getting better, PlatCom! Now let's see you turn around at that speed!"

OOC: So, yeah. I decided it was past time to get all my troopers into proper powered armour, which meant upgrading the ones who were already in it. I almost wish there was a war on so I could use it!

Officer's Bar, Tenebris Fleet Yards, Tenebris/Moon L5 Point, Tenebris System

Varakhé raised an eyebrow as the waitress deposited three tiny, glistening shot glasses at their table.

“I thanked you for inviting us, Kireltan, but if that's what it looks like ...”

Kireltan Anazhkhi mock-scowled, holding up an admonishing finger. “Ghaníkhtan is traditional! There is much honour to it! You are Tsakh, it is your duty to obey tradition! I – and Sethaine here, of course – are Ktrazirha, it is our honour to drink the horrible stuff!”

Anazhkhi had had rather a few pints already – albeit less potent stuff – and regarded the time-honoured moonshine with good cheer. Varakhé, rather more sober, regarded it with trepidation.

“Leave him alone, esar Anazhkhi, tsaRazh can't help it if his ancestors were pussies.”

Sethaine raised the glass in front of her dramatically high, and proclaimed “To the Arkhoraand the State, may Fate be kind upon them both!”

Then she downed the shot, her face screwing up into knots and turning bright red.

Kireltan raised his glass next. “To the Star Command, may it crush all opposition!”

For someone who talked a good line, he coughed and spluttered as he drank.

“To the Charon-class cruiser, that it might assist in both previously stated endeavours ...” Varakhé said, and drank.

The ghaníkhtan seared its way down his throat like molten iron, making his eyes water – but he mantained a perfect neutral expression. The Krisyakerisikhi taught, after all, that the accomplished man had mastery over his musculature, was not a slave to autonomous responses.

“My ancestors were pussies, were they?”

He grinned. The humour of it was that Krisyakeris had been a Ktrazirha concept originally, before the Tsakh appropriated it.

“The blood of the tsaLinh is strong in this one!” Kireltan exclaimed. “Even if he does give a toast like a mission statement.”

“It comes of writing the damn things,” Varakhé replied, “But it was appropriate – the cruiser is ready for production now ... ainra eka Ruki Aestrakhor, I don't have to look at it any more!”

“You don't like it?” Kireltan blinked. “It's a good ship, very sweet. Be good in the Star Command. You should both be proud.”

“Thank you,” Sethaine and Varakhé replied, but Varakhé added “I like it, but even so there's such a thing as too much, you know. You didn't have to design the thing.”

“Speaking of too much ... you know they're going to need one hundred and forty of the things?”

“Ainra kal Ruki Aestrakhor! And I thought forty Demeters were a big job ... that's going to take a long time to complete.”

“I expect they'll outsource the production,” Sethaine replied. “Caloris has all those factories on Mars now, after all, and the mechanoids are cheap workers.”

“Yeah ... on Mars? Is it safe to build several hundred capital ships on a planet continually at war?”

Kireltan grinned. “But the Basin is in Yut now, right? Nobody wants to attack the Triumvirate.”

“Plenty of maladjusts on Mars want to attack the Triumvirate,” Varakhé pointed out, “It's just none of them are quite stupid enough to actually do it.”

“Some of them push it! Those Vascilians ... ainra eka', I am not in the Arikhenikh Defence Fleet!”

“Do we even have crews for one hundred and forty new ships? That's, what, fifty, sixty per cruiser not counting marine complements, multiplied by one-forty ... eight thousand or so.”

“Have you seen the Star Command Officers' Academy waiting lists? You could replace every inch of red tape in the Ascendancy with them! Everyone wants to be in the Star Command! Because nothing impresses women more than “I command enough firepower to destroy planetary civilisations”!”

Sethaine smiled and rolled her eyes in Varakhé's direction.

“Want to know what we're working on next?”

“Next?” Varakhé frowned. “A beach on Geri II, I hope ... even Sahel Ai would be acceptable if I have to wait much longer! Doesn't the State understand holidays?”

“Not really, no. We're to design a battleship.”

Sethaine's eyes gleamed.

“Oh God Above no, I know the sort of work that goes into producing a ship that large, Sarya's only now finished her megafreighter design! I'm an independently employed Associate to the State, I can take a holiday.”

Y Arkhet-Eridhinra Tsaraineko
Arkhreifiate of the Star Command
Star Command Development Corps

Joint Arkhreifiate of the Star Command and Arkhreifiate of Research and the Sciences Project Code SC/RS(SCD:S)-5827 Clearance: 54E

Project BLUEBERRY HALCYON

Overview: Following the conclusion of Local Military Observation 346-MAR (Combined Mars Theater Nations v. Rampant Intelligence Fleetmind Kara) and the subsequent submission of the Star Command Strategic Analysis Readiness Report Number 5547 (Code: SC(SA)RR-47), it has become apparent to the High Command that the Star Command cannot adequately defend against local solar powers in either numbers or technology. SC(SA)RR-47:C suggests that TASC vessels are in fact underpowered compared to many civilian vessels, raising the threat that the TASC can no longer defend Ascendancy interests against piracy in the Sol system.

Accordingly, Project SC/RS(SCD:S)-5827 (BLUEBERRY HALCYON) has been established with the following aims;

1) To develop or acquire new technology for the use of the Star Command (with particular reference to sublight drives, FTL drives, power generation, and weapons systems);

2) To develop new warship designs for the use of the Star Command (with particular aims towards new Battleship, Carrier, Missile Cruiser, Cruiser, Frigate and Drone Fighter designs);

2i) And possibly including upgrades or replacements to the Solstice-B class dropships currently used by the Star Command for troop deployment;

3) To develop and test prototypes of these warship designs;

4) To liaise with Fleet Yard authorities and, if necessary, outside construction yards to produce these warship designs.

Notes: The Tenebrian Design Association and Keranes Design Association have been brought on board to assist in design work. Project BLUEBERRY HALCYON will liaise with the appropriate Researcher Corps for the development of new technologies. Foreign researchers may be brought on board from within the NDA with approval from Project Oversight. Foreign researchers from without the NDA are forbidden at present due to security concerns. Fei AIs may be brought on board with approval from Project Oversight and at least one Clearance: Gracious security stamp.

BLUEBERRY HALCYON is to finish on time and on budget.

Sector Four, Continent Two, Tenebris II, Tenebris System

Tenebris Prime's larger, uglier sister had never gotten much attention from the Greater Ascendancy; its surface was pocked with volcanic scars and the atmosphere was a choking fugue of carbon dioxide and sulphur, leavened with a dash of oxygen. Its dominant lifeforms were prokaryotic algae in the shallow, anaerobic seas, which might possibly produce an oxygen atmosphere ... given a hundred million years or so. The Terraforming Corps had classified it "Archaean" and moved on to other, greener pastures.

Recent years, however, had seen the arrival of people who realised that beauty was only skin deep, and that tectonically active worlds were fairly rare in the greater scheme of things ... and fairly useful. Now interests within the Ascendancy (or appended to the side of the Ascendancy, or loosely allied to the Ascendancy, however one wished to look at it) had mobilised to act, and sent their autofactories down to work.

No sedate beige warehouses these, with their activity contained within a shell; like great moles the factories plunged themselves maw-first into the regolith of the planet and began to dig. The great churning drills and teeth gobbled through rock, their innards processing the gravel ever finer, until machines far, far too small to see wove molecules of silica and iron into molecular computronium.

The autofactories descended into the planet at the tip of growing spears of computronium, each wrapped about a core of thermoelectric generators to power it. And each lance of matter was a city, an arcology for the thousands of AI emigrés from Fei; it was enough computronium to increase their subjective time another order of magnitude. Their many-times-great grandmother/original in Fei would always think faster then them, commanding as she did a substantial wedge of the star-englobing megastructure around their parent star; but for her distant children it was a homeworld of their own.

Star Command Development Core, High Stone, Earth/Moon L3 Point, Sol System

The Sevenfold - all the AIs spooled off from Seven a decade ago to serve and work in the Ascendancy, to experience the culture of the universe outside Fei - had schismed a thousand times since then, developing their own cultures and personalities as they diverged from the original Seven in Fei. Terms like "eccentric" or "odd" had limited currency for them; and so the Sevenfold did not consider Luriae Dana strange.

The AI's colleagues merely considered her alien, and God Above knew there were enough aliens in the universe! So an AI wearing a flesh-and-blood avatar grown from some backwards Ailuridine on distant Taiga IV was merely yet another flavour. An Ailuridine in a western-style business suit was a little stranger, of course.

For AIs, of course, meat was not mind, and Luriae's was conditioned in odd ways, filtered through subsystems and translating protocols to communicate with the cute meatbrained humans. Luriae was a physicist, and she had wrapped her mind about the thorny problem of Kymnari science to come up with a solution to a vexing problem.

"I really can't explain to you how it works," she told the Researchers again, "Humans simply don't have the concepts for it. I can tell you that it is as efficient as antimatter, and a good deal cheaper to run, because you can feed it anything from hydrogen to leftover CHON so long as it's a plasma going in."

She patted the head-high box beside her and watched the humans start, as they well might when someone dropped the word antimatter.

"Not to mention it is a good deal safer," Luriae added. "Your reliance on Treznorian fusors is the main problem holding back Project Blueberry Halcyon, and the matter converter will solve that problem. You could replace all the fusor banks in an Erebus-class with one of these, and your ships would still gain in power output! Esarqi, esenqi, I think I've just pulled all your bacon out of a fire."

Offices of the Corps-Commandant, Star Command Development Corps, High Stone

In other countries, scientists said that the punishment for practical excellence was administration. In Tsaraine, of course, the idea of promoting a non-specialist to a specialist position was anathema, so Corps-Commandant Teren Kareidhan had had to retrain in personnel management in order to be tapped for promotion. On the plus side, researchers (much less practical Researcher-Engineers) cross-specialising in administration were so rare that he'd been practically guaranteed the position; and now, at fifty-four, he had another fifty-four years of productive work in him before a comfortable retirement, thanks to Tsarainese medicine.

Now, however, he had a desktop screen cluttered with notes and charts; the organisation of Project BLUEBERRY HALCYON, plus the SCDC's other ongoing projects. But among the bureaucratic tedium was a happy note; a short missive from the negotiator in the Kingdom of Britmattia.

Have secured designs and production rights to Britmattian Naval sublight drives at cost of ...

Teren calculated that cost in Khoi and gulped. It wasn't quite over the budget he'd assigned, if only because BLUEBERRY HALCYON's budget was so huge. The note below it was rather longer, written in a diplomat's florid language, but it boiled down to the same thing;

Have secured designs and production rights to PanNorm naval FTL "tesseract" engine at cost of ...

Well, the Ants didn't use money, of course, so paying them in refined ores made sense ... but where was he supposed to find enough raw biomass to be measured in cubic kilometers?

OOC: Negotiated OOCly with Britmattia and S-14, of course.

Star Command Development Corps Project Core, High Stone

The assembled ship designers of the Ascendancy sat to kibitz. Some of them were long-time SCDC employees, in Research whites with black Star Command braid; others had been recruited from Tsaraine's growing (if heavily regulated) private sector, and wore whatever they thought appropriate. Sumptuary regulations, as well as Tsarainese propriety, made sure that that was appropriate to SCDC standards also.

"Whatever fighter we design will need to be of the same general dimensions as the current Gyrfalcon drones, so it can be used by the Demeter class without massive modification," Varakhé tsaRazh pointed out. He sketched a cube of those dimensions on the digital surface of the table before them.

Sethaine arAkhet, nominally project head of BLUEBERRY HALCYON's design team, nodded. "I have three ideas I'd like to raise on this. Firstly; the Kymnari matter conversion engine and the Britmattian drive systems are both larger than the current Treznorian XML fusors and the Kymnari drive boxes, so we automatically have a reduced weapons loadout" - she sketched those features inside Varakhé's box - "But an increased power output. So the weapons we do have are more powerful. I'd suggest erasers as a primary armament, to capitalise on that."

Irény Keranes nodded. "We'll also need more heat sinks, since the MCE does put out more heat."

"The Applied Physics Research Corps has an upgrade to the current model we should be able to integrate for this," Luriae Dana replied, drawing those features into the design.

"Very good," Sethaine continued. "Now, secondly; if we can make it atmosphere-capable, we can expand the operational capacity of the fighter."

"The Air Command won't like that," Varakhé pointed out, "They're very protective of their jurisdiction."

"The Air Command's fighter upgrade project is behind schedule and over budget," Sethaine replied, "And the operational air fleet is leagues behind current development. They should be thanking us if we can produce a cross-service vessel." And she drew in a delta wing on the coalescing shape.

"With the thrust output of the Britmattian design, it wouldn't need to be very atmosphere-capable," Irény mused. "After all, the Haunt class still flies, and without its drive cores it'd fall right out of the sky!" She revised the delta wing into a stubby arrowhead, sporting a pair of large cylindrical drive ports at the rear.

"Uh," said Varakhé, "Before we get too far ahead ... this is essentially a rocketplane capable of space combat engagement speeds. Meaning it can break atmosphere pretty easily ... that may not be too useful for the Air Command."

"It will still work for the Star Command!" Sethaine told him. "Now, thirdly; I think we should put a human pilot back into this one. A human pilot has a degree of initiative and independent ability the drones don't, since they're being controlled remotely from a carrier's tactics room; the Gyrfalcon is very good on the larger tactical scale, but against comparable fighters it tends to fail in dogfights. As anything other than attrition spam, they're limited."

"That makes sense, but" - Varakhé replied - "The Demeters aren't configured for human fighter crews at all. Do we scratch the size requirements?"

"I suppose we could use the same chassis, produce a drone version," Irény said. "Use the life-support room as extra weapons space. They'd be less adept individually against other fighters, but they'd be more dangerous tactically."

"That makes sense," Sethaine nodded. "Now we have some operating parameters ... to work!"