Zepplin Manufacturers
05-08-2005, 16:41
The Deep Cometary Halo 1.83 light days from Earth.
A magnificent starscape seemingly utterly empty save for a few rogue specks of ice, the interstellar medium an empty and cold in comparison with the hubub system it surrounded and its worlds swinging endlessly about in there warm soup of energetic but still relatively thin solar ejecta. Suddenly part of the view shimmers, blinks and something that had been hidden is now visible. A scattered remnants of man made detritus slowly spreading across the supposedly virgin starscape, now shown to have been corrupted by the mind and materials of man. Its starlight obscuring vaguely spherical form was made up of flecks of ash, scorched reforming droplets of a dozen metals and the glitter of advanced synthetics. Here and there the shining tumbling chunk of a solar panel or a heat dissipation fin flashed. If one looked at the patterns of remains and had a sufficiently advanced extrapolation system one would find the slowly expanding remains of what had been a station
The last module was burning. A vanilla white cylindrical canister nearly 80 metres long and 40 wide tumbling in the depths of space its surface pitted and stained, the stumpy slagged remains of conduits and cables strewn across its slowly rupturing skin obscuring a single massive slowly peeling corporate logo. On one end of this burning lump a vast airlock door which had once been covered in a wasp like warning pattern gaped open, its massive doors blasted outwards by heavy weapons fire, slashed by lasers and still studded with needles and old fashioned bullet holes its thick form was steadily beginning to glow and char. This door had been tough, remarkably so. It hadn’t helped, the pathetic remains of blackened combat suits their visors cracked with heat and scorched and shattered drone bodies making a sad drifting trail from the airlock. If one looked outward the blasted particulate remains of three shuttlecraft were slowly expanding, there forms having being rent down to almost nothing, there pieces showing signs of ship to ship high energy weapons fire.
The modules interior was a cluttered mess, the scorched blackening metal panelling in places glowing and drifting away in burning white motes while swathes of stronger support columns still kept there silver shine, the heat however visibly causing them to sag. A wall locker silently exploded into the modules tight confines, a tangled burnt hose of some synthetic within it having been volatised it added its contents to the ricocheting mess filling the interior. Here an unrecognisable chunk of bone sat stuck in a puddle of black melted synthetics to a floor tile, there the remains of a standard EVA suits helmet lay slowly but surely sinking into a puddle of metals supposedly capable of withstanding exposure to live plasma the puddle itself steadily eating through the modules floor, its visor a jaggedly blown outward. On the side of a bulky heavy combat helmet still on its servo assisted rack a blinking red indicator finally shattered and ceased operation even as finally the columns began to glow with heat even there engineered molecules passing there limits.
The heat just as suddenly as it had started stopped. The remains began to cool, drift, and disperse.
Megacity One, Zone 8, Sector 3.
The first thing Doctor Henri Jackson’s cat Marie saw that morning was a hail of shattering lumps of wall falling onto her basket, still awaking she jumped deftly aside and she never felt the moly wire rendering her into a pathetic flying pile of meat as the walls chunks still covered in flickering images crushed the basket flat. Jackson himself was sitting on his breakfast nook calmly looking through his morning data streams as the entire north facing wall of his apartment was cut to ribbons by sub sonic molly wire meshes. He briefly had time to scream as one strand neatly sliced through his arms and legs spread above and beneath the nooks small table, then a cable scythed through his head and ended his active thoughts. The doctor still had a chance however, as the cable slowed down by its passage through his organic self wrapped itself around the ultra dense matt silver form of his spinal backup core. His body hit the table, blood mixing with the milk of his cereal, some of the flakes sickeningly sticking to membranes of his body never meant to see daylight. The moly meshes were still flying, slicing through hunks of wall and furniture, the light panel in the roof eerily flashing as one strand etched its way across its surface. Then the rooms sprinklers tried to start but the piping was cut at multiple points , and water flowed freely from rents in not only it but the mains lines and began to swirl the broken remains. The mesh’s stopped, and before there whining noise had ceased echoing a figure stalked into the shattered heart of a life. A thick metal device swung twice spraying particulate grey matter and grisly gore covered chunks of bone over the figures garishly covered garments. There was the audible crunch of bone, then the odd noise of braking synth alloy. Jackson’s core irrecoverably smashed the figure ran out, vaulting over the remains of the wall dividing Jackson’s apartment from the hallway and the apartment which the mesh’s had penetrated the building from.
Megacity One, Zone 8, Sector 83, 34 East air transit way between Augment Avenue and Willow Industrial Node, 18:28. Rush Hour.
A seemingly endless flow of airborne traffic flowed in steady controlled streams darting between the massive buildings like schools of fish in a coral reef there movements timed and controlled by a thousand separate drone agents. Below them a cobweb like network of railways arced between the buildings on delicate spans occasionally vibrating to a darting train, standing on seemingly far too thin silvered supports, below them the huge concrete embankments of heavy cargo maglev lines cut through the city like scratch marks, sharing the limited surface area not taken up with structures with a 12 lane motorway, smaller streets and walkways visible below it, seemingly skipping up the sides of buildings in crazy jumps till they reached to just below the height of the railways. Through it all a dancing myriad of advertisements broke the lines of structures. This multicoloured haze of advertising holograms giving the sunset dominated horizon an odd multicoloured dapple, huge holographic figures in the distance almost looking like small angry gods at war.
The seeming well ordered nature of things was shattered as a burgundy 39 Parkan “Whitewater” sports special slammed through the traffic, the illegal streamers of iridescent gas cooled overcharged repulsors leaving a glowing con trail behind it as it smashed through the streaming traffic, traffic control agents slamming the huge number of passengers under there care in sudden hi g manoeuvres the tiny compensators on the vehicles were never built to handle. Then came a flurry of white and black darts, drones, followed by the screams of jet engines and grav impellors as manned heavy pursuit vehicles followed, there bulbous sides studded with retracted drone mounts, while smaller two person standard police air cars arced around them there M1PD insignia quick golden flashes, their lights seemingly taking on the forms of smears of blue, the red being almost invisible against the setting sunset.
The words to describe this situation were “hot pursuit”. Its not a situation Inspector Sarvin Thompson was overly fond of at present, his coffee having died an ugly death on his lap after sitting pecariously balanced between his knees some 8 minutes ago due to a close call with a 30 ton aerofrieghter. They ran, they always run he thought grimly banking his somewhat battered Mark.8 Air Ranger over the stuttering mass of an overloaded filthy green garbage collector.
It had been a fairly uneventful day most of it spent with a visit to take an interview from an insurance companies internal auditors wife. The woman had been as dreary as her husbands job sounded, her spouse however had embezzled a little over 80,000 rungs over a period of 4 years, a tough feat to do in a AI saturated environment. Sarvin still felt better for doing the interview in person, for all that the gadgetry of emotional analysis he still had an unreasonable belief in his gut feelings. It had served him well enough in the past. He had finished his report and was eating the somewhat sad sandwich which made up his dinner in Sector 4 from a Smarty Happy Mini Mart auto outlet when the Whitewater had darted past, his coffee rocking out of his grasp and giving him more than enough reason to assist with the chase. This little shindig had apparently from the disturbing cascade of reports sidling through his incoming data stream started in an apartment complex hub building in Sector 3. From the brief details the nice vehicle in fronts occupants had shot the hell out of the apartment complex supervisors residence with Wreath guns, a favourite of the dock gangs, the monomolecular meshes they launched having turned it and the surrounding apartments into a charnel house. They had then landed and driven what the analysis agent was giving a 93% of being a SCAPA industrial moly cutting tool through one of the unfortunates spinal cores. Permanent death was not something the M1PD tolerated with ease nor did it like heavy weapons fire in an uptown habitation district. This however didn’t look like the work of a gang, it was the wrong part of the city and the wrong pattern, if one of the gangs wanted a hit they made a point of making it clean outside there territory. This Sarvin thought as he watched the Whitewater scraped past a school transport was definitely not “there” territory if it had been a city from an earlier period this would be suburbia and this rampant use of weapons was a far cry from the ordinary criminal world that the uptown areas of Megacity one tended to experience. Sarvin arced the Ranger over an Air Taxi landing pad, his wake scattering trash from a poorly ceiled bin, the roar of the Rangers twin Verdion ionising compression scram jets as he kicked the antiquitated police craft into high gear reverberating from the monolithic faces of the buildings unlike the smooth hums of the drones modern repulsors or the booming noise of the transports big impellors.
The Whitewater was dancing, the heavily modified the illegal gas cooled repulsors making a mockery of the police’s units feeble attempts at grapnel field capture its pilot takeing it closer and closer to lighter traffic, daring the police units to miss which with a grapnel field set to stop the 3 tons of speeding Whitewater would crumple a normal vehicle like a poorly made tin can. Suddenly they were out of the “sunny suburbs” the accommodation towers and the tiered levels dropping away nearly a kilometre straight down as they passed over sector wall and diving down and into the outright maze of an industrial sectors insane pipe work. A voice crackled over the com “This is control I have definite weapons going hot on suspect” the charteristic police drone nasal twang identifying itself almost immediately. Sarvin blinked in disbelief, were they suicidal with police drones in pursuit? Suddenly there was a flat blast of noise as the Rangers sonic baffles struggled to dampen. Sarvin knew that noise, but it couldn’t be. One of the drones was simply gone another was tumbling with a disturbingly clean cut straight through its hull towards a warehouse. Gang members rarely even had the weapons to scratch a police drone much less damage it. Mayhem broke out on the coms strings of swearing and the voices of controllers trying to calm the pursuers down. One scream above them all its agonised sound quite human but its tone giving it away as the bisected drone “SMECKIN DISINT” before it echoed away to nothing.
A disintegrator on an air car? Sarvins mind reeled. Impossible they weighed tons and by there nature were huge. It was military grade equipment, expensive military equipment at that there was no way a gang could get there hands on an installation. Sarvin recalled from his brief stint in the city defence corp standing on a dull yellow dusty testing field his uniform sticking unpleasantly to his back as he stared the huge whining mass of the convoluted form of the disint field generator that must have been three times the height of a man at the base of a tower that looked like nothing more than a microwave communications relay mast. It had looked harmless enough till it started punching neat basket ball sized holes in a retired DX8 30 main battle tank. The ample evidence suggested that it was no longer “impossible” to miniaturise.
Thumping the com override that his rank bestowed Sarvin bellowed “Com discipline and open formation with them damn you!” He was too late, one of the heavy pursuit units suddenly became nothing but a rear engine block plummeting to the ground, its six man crew erased from existence. Then another drone hammered a simple curse over the com and opened fire. Sarvins winced and called out he needed answers damn it, but that car and its weapon had to go, no one not even the dock gangs just “bought” a car mountable disintegrator much less used it. That amount of firepower simply could not be allowed to escape. Part of him cheered as the burning light of the drones outboard high precision energy lances began reaching out and dancing over the Whitewaters form, obscuring it in a crackling roiling mass of discharging energy and shattered lumps of burning bodywork as they sought out power relays. Then he recoiled as the Whitewater glittered. A battle screen. A smecking old battle screen by the looks of its visible discharge one of the hundreds lost over 20 years ago in the brutal gorilla war on Gastins world, more and more of them were finding there way out of the ruined hulks of company war machines in the fetid jungles of Gastins northern continent and into the airy machine shops of Megacity ones criminal element. However they still were a mind numbingly rare commodity. Sarvin grunted as another drone simply ceased to be, but now the drones as one opened fire with the slicing fat white eye burning fast moving bolts of there integral heavy ion bolt infinite repeaters. The battlescreen flared, overloaded and the Whitewaters boot which must have been filled with it violently exploded and the bolts began coring out neat 25 centimetre wide shafts through the vehicle. The loud crack of a turret mounted high energy rip gun from one of the heavy pursuit transports which had finally got a bead on the erratic movements of the Whitewater ended it as it’s passage through the Whitewater blasted the last of its repulsors to explodeing volatile white hot shrapnel, grimly showing the reason gas cooled systems were banned. The police grapnel fields finally took hold of the shattered and corpse filled metal carcass.
A magnificent starscape seemingly utterly empty save for a few rogue specks of ice, the interstellar medium an empty and cold in comparison with the hubub system it surrounded and its worlds swinging endlessly about in there warm soup of energetic but still relatively thin solar ejecta. Suddenly part of the view shimmers, blinks and something that had been hidden is now visible. A scattered remnants of man made detritus slowly spreading across the supposedly virgin starscape, now shown to have been corrupted by the mind and materials of man. Its starlight obscuring vaguely spherical form was made up of flecks of ash, scorched reforming droplets of a dozen metals and the glitter of advanced synthetics. Here and there the shining tumbling chunk of a solar panel or a heat dissipation fin flashed. If one looked at the patterns of remains and had a sufficiently advanced extrapolation system one would find the slowly expanding remains of what had been a station
The last module was burning. A vanilla white cylindrical canister nearly 80 metres long and 40 wide tumbling in the depths of space its surface pitted and stained, the stumpy slagged remains of conduits and cables strewn across its slowly rupturing skin obscuring a single massive slowly peeling corporate logo. On one end of this burning lump a vast airlock door which had once been covered in a wasp like warning pattern gaped open, its massive doors blasted outwards by heavy weapons fire, slashed by lasers and still studded with needles and old fashioned bullet holes its thick form was steadily beginning to glow and char. This door had been tough, remarkably so. It hadn’t helped, the pathetic remains of blackened combat suits their visors cracked with heat and scorched and shattered drone bodies making a sad drifting trail from the airlock. If one looked outward the blasted particulate remains of three shuttlecraft were slowly expanding, there forms having being rent down to almost nothing, there pieces showing signs of ship to ship high energy weapons fire.
The modules interior was a cluttered mess, the scorched blackening metal panelling in places glowing and drifting away in burning white motes while swathes of stronger support columns still kept there silver shine, the heat however visibly causing them to sag. A wall locker silently exploded into the modules tight confines, a tangled burnt hose of some synthetic within it having been volatised it added its contents to the ricocheting mess filling the interior. Here an unrecognisable chunk of bone sat stuck in a puddle of black melted synthetics to a floor tile, there the remains of a standard EVA suits helmet lay slowly but surely sinking into a puddle of metals supposedly capable of withstanding exposure to live plasma the puddle itself steadily eating through the modules floor, its visor a jaggedly blown outward. On the side of a bulky heavy combat helmet still on its servo assisted rack a blinking red indicator finally shattered and ceased operation even as finally the columns began to glow with heat even there engineered molecules passing there limits.
The heat just as suddenly as it had started stopped. The remains began to cool, drift, and disperse.
Megacity One, Zone 8, Sector 3.
The first thing Doctor Henri Jackson’s cat Marie saw that morning was a hail of shattering lumps of wall falling onto her basket, still awaking she jumped deftly aside and she never felt the moly wire rendering her into a pathetic flying pile of meat as the walls chunks still covered in flickering images crushed the basket flat. Jackson himself was sitting on his breakfast nook calmly looking through his morning data streams as the entire north facing wall of his apartment was cut to ribbons by sub sonic molly wire meshes. He briefly had time to scream as one strand neatly sliced through his arms and legs spread above and beneath the nooks small table, then a cable scythed through his head and ended his active thoughts. The doctor still had a chance however, as the cable slowed down by its passage through his organic self wrapped itself around the ultra dense matt silver form of his spinal backup core. His body hit the table, blood mixing with the milk of his cereal, some of the flakes sickeningly sticking to membranes of his body never meant to see daylight. The moly meshes were still flying, slicing through hunks of wall and furniture, the light panel in the roof eerily flashing as one strand etched its way across its surface. Then the rooms sprinklers tried to start but the piping was cut at multiple points , and water flowed freely from rents in not only it but the mains lines and began to swirl the broken remains. The mesh’s stopped, and before there whining noise had ceased echoing a figure stalked into the shattered heart of a life. A thick metal device swung twice spraying particulate grey matter and grisly gore covered chunks of bone over the figures garishly covered garments. There was the audible crunch of bone, then the odd noise of braking synth alloy. Jackson’s core irrecoverably smashed the figure ran out, vaulting over the remains of the wall dividing Jackson’s apartment from the hallway and the apartment which the mesh’s had penetrated the building from.
Megacity One, Zone 8, Sector 83, 34 East air transit way between Augment Avenue and Willow Industrial Node, 18:28. Rush Hour.
A seemingly endless flow of airborne traffic flowed in steady controlled streams darting between the massive buildings like schools of fish in a coral reef there movements timed and controlled by a thousand separate drone agents. Below them a cobweb like network of railways arced between the buildings on delicate spans occasionally vibrating to a darting train, standing on seemingly far too thin silvered supports, below them the huge concrete embankments of heavy cargo maglev lines cut through the city like scratch marks, sharing the limited surface area not taken up with structures with a 12 lane motorway, smaller streets and walkways visible below it, seemingly skipping up the sides of buildings in crazy jumps till they reached to just below the height of the railways. Through it all a dancing myriad of advertisements broke the lines of structures. This multicoloured haze of advertising holograms giving the sunset dominated horizon an odd multicoloured dapple, huge holographic figures in the distance almost looking like small angry gods at war.
The seeming well ordered nature of things was shattered as a burgundy 39 Parkan “Whitewater” sports special slammed through the traffic, the illegal streamers of iridescent gas cooled overcharged repulsors leaving a glowing con trail behind it as it smashed through the streaming traffic, traffic control agents slamming the huge number of passengers under there care in sudden hi g manoeuvres the tiny compensators on the vehicles were never built to handle. Then came a flurry of white and black darts, drones, followed by the screams of jet engines and grav impellors as manned heavy pursuit vehicles followed, there bulbous sides studded with retracted drone mounts, while smaller two person standard police air cars arced around them there M1PD insignia quick golden flashes, their lights seemingly taking on the forms of smears of blue, the red being almost invisible against the setting sunset.
The words to describe this situation were “hot pursuit”. Its not a situation Inspector Sarvin Thompson was overly fond of at present, his coffee having died an ugly death on his lap after sitting pecariously balanced between his knees some 8 minutes ago due to a close call with a 30 ton aerofrieghter. They ran, they always run he thought grimly banking his somewhat battered Mark.8 Air Ranger over the stuttering mass of an overloaded filthy green garbage collector.
It had been a fairly uneventful day most of it spent with a visit to take an interview from an insurance companies internal auditors wife. The woman had been as dreary as her husbands job sounded, her spouse however had embezzled a little over 80,000 rungs over a period of 4 years, a tough feat to do in a AI saturated environment. Sarvin still felt better for doing the interview in person, for all that the gadgetry of emotional analysis he still had an unreasonable belief in his gut feelings. It had served him well enough in the past. He had finished his report and was eating the somewhat sad sandwich which made up his dinner in Sector 4 from a Smarty Happy Mini Mart auto outlet when the Whitewater had darted past, his coffee rocking out of his grasp and giving him more than enough reason to assist with the chase. This little shindig had apparently from the disturbing cascade of reports sidling through his incoming data stream started in an apartment complex hub building in Sector 3. From the brief details the nice vehicle in fronts occupants had shot the hell out of the apartment complex supervisors residence with Wreath guns, a favourite of the dock gangs, the monomolecular meshes they launched having turned it and the surrounding apartments into a charnel house. They had then landed and driven what the analysis agent was giving a 93% of being a SCAPA industrial moly cutting tool through one of the unfortunates spinal cores. Permanent death was not something the M1PD tolerated with ease nor did it like heavy weapons fire in an uptown habitation district. This however didn’t look like the work of a gang, it was the wrong part of the city and the wrong pattern, if one of the gangs wanted a hit they made a point of making it clean outside there territory. This Sarvin thought as he watched the Whitewater scraped past a school transport was definitely not “there” territory if it had been a city from an earlier period this would be suburbia and this rampant use of weapons was a far cry from the ordinary criminal world that the uptown areas of Megacity one tended to experience. Sarvin arced the Ranger over an Air Taxi landing pad, his wake scattering trash from a poorly ceiled bin, the roar of the Rangers twin Verdion ionising compression scram jets as he kicked the antiquitated police craft into high gear reverberating from the monolithic faces of the buildings unlike the smooth hums of the drones modern repulsors or the booming noise of the transports big impellors.
The Whitewater was dancing, the heavily modified the illegal gas cooled repulsors making a mockery of the police’s units feeble attempts at grapnel field capture its pilot takeing it closer and closer to lighter traffic, daring the police units to miss which with a grapnel field set to stop the 3 tons of speeding Whitewater would crumple a normal vehicle like a poorly made tin can. Suddenly they were out of the “sunny suburbs” the accommodation towers and the tiered levels dropping away nearly a kilometre straight down as they passed over sector wall and diving down and into the outright maze of an industrial sectors insane pipe work. A voice crackled over the com “This is control I have definite weapons going hot on suspect” the charteristic police drone nasal twang identifying itself almost immediately. Sarvin blinked in disbelief, were they suicidal with police drones in pursuit? Suddenly there was a flat blast of noise as the Rangers sonic baffles struggled to dampen. Sarvin knew that noise, but it couldn’t be. One of the drones was simply gone another was tumbling with a disturbingly clean cut straight through its hull towards a warehouse. Gang members rarely even had the weapons to scratch a police drone much less damage it. Mayhem broke out on the coms strings of swearing and the voices of controllers trying to calm the pursuers down. One scream above them all its agonised sound quite human but its tone giving it away as the bisected drone “SMECKIN DISINT” before it echoed away to nothing.
A disintegrator on an air car? Sarvins mind reeled. Impossible they weighed tons and by there nature were huge. It was military grade equipment, expensive military equipment at that there was no way a gang could get there hands on an installation. Sarvin recalled from his brief stint in the city defence corp standing on a dull yellow dusty testing field his uniform sticking unpleasantly to his back as he stared the huge whining mass of the convoluted form of the disint field generator that must have been three times the height of a man at the base of a tower that looked like nothing more than a microwave communications relay mast. It had looked harmless enough till it started punching neat basket ball sized holes in a retired DX8 30 main battle tank. The ample evidence suggested that it was no longer “impossible” to miniaturise.
Thumping the com override that his rank bestowed Sarvin bellowed “Com discipline and open formation with them damn you!” He was too late, one of the heavy pursuit units suddenly became nothing but a rear engine block plummeting to the ground, its six man crew erased from existence. Then another drone hammered a simple curse over the com and opened fire. Sarvins winced and called out he needed answers damn it, but that car and its weapon had to go, no one not even the dock gangs just “bought” a car mountable disintegrator much less used it. That amount of firepower simply could not be allowed to escape. Part of him cheered as the burning light of the drones outboard high precision energy lances began reaching out and dancing over the Whitewaters form, obscuring it in a crackling roiling mass of discharging energy and shattered lumps of burning bodywork as they sought out power relays. Then he recoiled as the Whitewater glittered. A battle screen. A smecking old battle screen by the looks of its visible discharge one of the hundreds lost over 20 years ago in the brutal gorilla war on Gastins world, more and more of them were finding there way out of the ruined hulks of company war machines in the fetid jungles of Gastins northern continent and into the airy machine shops of Megacity ones criminal element. However they still were a mind numbingly rare commodity. Sarvin grunted as another drone simply ceased to be, but now the drones as one opened fire with the slicing fat white eye burning fast moving bolts of there integral heavy ion bolt infinite repeaters. The battlescreen flared, overloaded and the Whitewaters boot which must have been filled with it violently exploded and the bolts began coring out neat 25 centimetre wide shafts through the vehicle. The loud crack of a turret mounted high energy rip gun from one of the heavy pursuit transports which had finally got a bead on the erratic movements of the Whitewater ended it as it’s passage through the Whitewater blasted the last of its repulsors to explodeing volatile white hot shrapnel, grimly showing the reason gas cooled systems were banned. The police grapnel fields finally took hold of the shattered and corpse filled metal carcass.