Weyr
01-02-2005, 01:02
Wye City
Earthbound Weyr
Twenty Years Prior
He stroked the controls gently, and the craft hummed to life. Engaging repulse drives, it pushed off the gravitic core of the planet below, employing a principle that, if legends were to be believed, powered the Skyships of Old Cloudhavven. But those were sailing craft, using wind and light to power ancenstors to the firien cell arrays that filled the drive sector of Carrier No.1C, whose rear screws burst in a brilliant azure flare a thousand meters above the VTOL pads of Wye City Int'l Skyport. The Ouroborous of The Tower, a snake eternally eating its tail, glinted on its silvery hull.
***
The Tower was a private enterprise. To bve more exact, it was an independent association free of any governments or phyles. As such, it needed to get funding on its own. The interest off a massive endowment, accumulated over the centuries, paid for upkeep. New expansion, however, was financed by other means.
Grand Alchemist Li doubted The Tower should have taken up a contract on behalf of Allanea, considering that state's track record of getting pounded into the dst. But the reward for completing this project, the greatest effort since the original settlement of the Paradigm System, would be enormous. The Tower was in need of new expansion, he knew that. Perhaps he should stop fretting, he told himself, surveying Wye City from behind the stressglas windows of his office, on the three-hundredth floor of the slender main spire of The Tower. Allanea did honor its obligations, after all.
***
Present
Former ADK Territory
Terra
It was a beautiful sight to those watching it from the right angle, Flare Alchemist Bradford Eng thought, as the meteocarrier craft shot through the atmosphere, leaving a creamy vapor trail in the perfect blue sky, until it lanced over the temporary control center that administered the construction site, disappearing from the alchemist's sight on its way to the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the massive pile of rock and refuse that was being sued to raise ADK from the sea. Perhaps construction was not the best term; raising thousands upon thousands of square kilometers of land out of the sea was no small undertaking.
Five years had been spent studying the old topograhical data, determining what rock would go where, running sims to see what arrangement would produce the most fertile and sustainable arrangement possible, as per their client's request.
Eng's job was to oversee the placement of the giant chunks of asteroid belt, and the alchemists who would fuse it to the rest of the planet. Naturally, The Tower didn't possess the capability to handle something like this alone. Dozens of contractors, most of them Weyrean firms, would ultimately take part in the effort. Thousands of jobs had been created from the preliminaries alone. He glanced at his wristpad, noting the purpose of the arriving hauler. There would be a hill there, in a few weeks.
Twenty years of smooth operations were perhaps boring, but Eng was not about to complain. In the air-conditioned building, which was really not all that temporary since it would be up for at least thirty more years, possibly more if something went wrong. The alchemist fired up his persCom, and went to work, which mainly involved reading through reports compiled by his staff.
The timetable stood at sixty-five years now. There were problems with getting the right kind of material, which meant using alchemists, and alcehmists couldn't transmute that much rock in a day. People thought alchemists could do miracles. In a way, they could, but that way didn't match what outsiders often expected. Alyssa Kir was demaning a larger team -- getting a mountain range up with a hundred trained alchemists and a thousand workers was taking too long. Upping shifts wasn't an option -- it increased the risk of errors. A single unplanned pocket of air could cause disaster years down the road. He sighed, began typing up a request for more resources.
Earthbound Weyr
Twenty Years Prior
He stroked the controls gently, and the craft hummed to life. Engaging repulse drives, it pushed off the gravitic core of the planet below, employing a principle that, if legends were to be believed, powered the Skyships of Old Cloudhavven. But those were sailing craft, using wind and light to power ancenstors to the firien cell arrays that filled the drive sector of Carrier No.1C, whose rear screws burst in a brilliant azure flare a thousand meters above the VTOL pads of Wye City Int'l Skyport. The Ouroborous of The Tower, a snake eternally eating its tail, glinted on its silvery hull.
***
The Tower was a private enterprise. To bve more exact, it was an independent association free of any governments or phyles. As such, it needed to get funding on its own. The interest off a massive endowment, accumulated over the centuries, paid for upkeep. New expansion, however, was financed by other means.
Grand Alchemist Li doubted The Tower should have taken up a contract on behalf of Allanea, considering that state's track record of getting pounded into the dst. But the reward for completing this project, the greatest effort since the original settlement of the Paradigm System, would be enormous. The Tower was in need of new expansion, he knew that. Perhaps he should stop fretting, he told himself, surveying Wye City from behind the stressglas windows of his office, on the three-hundredth floor of the slender main spire of The Tower. Allanea did honor its obligations, after all.
***
Present
Former ADK Territory
Terra
It was a beautiful sight to those watching it from the right angle, Flare Alchemist Bradford Eng thought, as the meteocarrier craft shot through the atmosphere, leaving a creamy vapor trail in the perfect blue sky, until it lanced over the temporary control center that administered the construction site, disappearing from the alchemist's sight on its way to the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the massive pile of rock and refuse that was being sued to raise ADK from the sea. Perhaps construction was not the best term; raising thousands upon thousands of square kilometers of land out of the sea was no small undertaking.
Five years had been spent studying the old topograhical data, determining what rock would go where, running sims to see what arrangement would produce the most fertile and sustainable arrangement possible, as per their client's request.
Eng's job was to oversee the placement of the giant chunks of asteroid belt, and the alchemists who would fuse it to the rest of the planet. Naturally, The Tower didn't possess the capability to handle something like this alone. Dozens of contractors, most of them Weyrean firms, would ultimately take part in the effort. Thousands of jobs had been created from the preliminaries alone. He glanced at his wristpad, noting the purpose of the arriving hauler. There would be a hill there, in a few weeks.
Twenty years of smooth operations were perhaps boring, but Eng was not about to complain. In the air-conditioned building, which was really not all that temporary since it would be up for at least thirty more years, possibly more if something went wrong. The alchemist fired up his persCom, and went to work, which mainly involved reading through reports compiled by his staff.
The timetable stood at sixty-five years now. There were problems with getting the right kind of material, which meant using alchemists, and alcehmists couldn't transmute that much rock in a day. People thought alchemists could do miracles. In a way, they could, but that way didn't match what outsiders often expected. Alyssa Kir was demaning a larger team -- getting a mountain range up with a hundred trained alchemists and a thousand workers was taking too long. Upping shifts wasn't an option -- it increased the risk of errors. A single unplanned pocket of air could cause disaster years down the road. He sighed, began typing up a request for more resources.