NationStates Jolt Archive

OOC: As always, this thread is mostly open assuming you have a plausible IC reason for involvement. For questions or whatnot poke me via TG or on IRC rather than making purely OOC posts here.

The Downward Spirit Four: The Lonely Position of Neutral
Concerning Weyr between the wars.

The ship dropped from the Line in a flare of azure light. Its single fusactor grumbled to life. Screens snapped into place, and it efficiently deccelerated the last few light-minutes to planetary orbit, ducking increasing traffic in Terra's orbital space. She filed a request for insertion, using the Tower's clearance protocols to speed things along, for a few moments simply hanging over the green-blue planet. Then number strings scrolled across a formerly blank navigation screen, and she dropped down to the surface, following invisible markers.

"Sorry," she apologised for what was not the first time. Raindrops coated exernal visuals as the ship passed through the clouds. "I should've checked the fuel."

Except she hadn't wanted to stay on Jurai. A perfectly selfish thing, Kira thought. Getting stuck in the middle of nowhere for no good reason.

"Ne, I promised you a drink, right?" she asked Lorain, locking down.

The charred armour plates slid shut without a sound, covering up the shimmering azure internal hull. The ventilation system hissed and sighed overhead, louder than the low whine of the Kokoro's fusator spinning down.

"There's a good place a few minutes away," Kira prodded her remote control pad. The ship settled onto its props. "If you're still interested."

A Shadow of the Old Sol Fleet, Self-Defense Forces Hold the Line, Barely.
WN3

Clearly, the High King has never been more wrong than when she dictated the reduction of the aptly misnamed Self-Defense Forces. Ten thousand are presumed dead, and ten times that number may be injured as the death toll over Mars continues to mount after the most one-sided engagement in Weyrean history. Antiquated nuclear weapons there killed more Weyreans than the combined firepower of the Imperial Fleet, and caused more economic damage than the Battle of Paradigm.

The Self Defense Forces have issued no comments. None are needed -- a handful of modern defense platforms could have intercepted the missiles from thousands of kilometers away. Instead, the fates of crews on a pair of cruisers and a Lineship left over from the Sith Wars proved, once again, that bureaucratic incompetence knows no bounds. The crews were certainly capable; many were veterans of engagements on the Line. Their swift response prevented many more needles deaths, and none will forget Ocean Destiny's withering fire over Mars.

In Wye City, politicians scrambled to condemn Tannelorn and promise swift action even as Kajali warships intercepted the last missiles. There will be no action against Tannelorn, who apparently cannot keep in line their own populace. Of our two Lineships, only Necessary Evil remains in operable condition. Her Assault Flotilla is at quarter strength. Official reports question if her guns and armour are even combat worthy after four years in port. The same ship that single-handedly saved Wye City in the Sixty Minute War decays over Terra. The best Fleet Admiral we have had since Masato Storm wastes time with the Board of Estimates, who have last year denied her funding for basic necessities like fuel and rations. The Self-Defense Forces spend more time defending themselves against the very government they are supposed to serve and protect. And in the meanwhile twenty trillion credits have gone towards feeding the vast hive of permanently unemployed immigrants who, despite contributing nothing, regularly vote for anyone who will refill the communal slop bucket.

Weyr is no longer capable of protecting her citizens within her borders, and belated police action in the Belt will not fool her people into accepting the status quo. There was never any reason to strip our defenders of their weapons in order to satisfy personal agendas. This problem has gone uncorrected for far too long.

Weyr Net News Network: Tagline Omitted

Act, the First

"I think I'm going to be sick," Fleet Captain Ai Tanaku thought.

The ArcFleet Defense Ship Amaretsu's artificial gravity was struggling to maintain a constant Terrestrial acceleration towards the deck. Her engines pushed sideways and towards the low overhead, maintaining a constant polar orbit. The planet's own gravity had the warship in a close embrace. The result was a feeling of sliding down a giant toilet bowl, punctured by regular decelerations and accelerations.

Tanaku walked around the central wireframe display tank, whose red strobes erratically stabbed out overhead. For now it was mostly empty, ignoring the thousands of freighters, liners, and milShips somehow fitting inside Terra's orbit. The steady thrumm of engines pulsed beneath her feet, running through the thin rubber soles of her shoes to tingle her feet. She swallowed, wishing for a large cup of coffee. The multi-faceted clock above the center of the First Bridge said it was an hour past midnight.

Azure pinpricks flare along the Amaretsu's silvery hull. In the vacuum of orbital space, the drone torpedo tube in a towed missile rack telescopes open. Passing out of the planet's shadow and into the sunlight, the Amaretsu flares brilliant silver, reflecting high-energy solar emissions. Even so she heats up; on her far side thin heat sinks extend from their protective sheaths. Without a sound a pear-shaped drone plops from the missile rack's open orifice, and just as silently the drone torpedo tube telescopes shut.

The ship trembled; thrusters roared through layers of insulation and armor. The Amaretsu picked up velocity after the brief bout of deceleration. Tanaku nodded at the new point on the central wireframe display of the First Bridge.

A technician came in through the open hatch. He leaned over his console. Tanaku watched him from across the First Bridge, through the multicolored wireframe. He quickly scribbled in his notepad, stuck it back into his belt. She circled around the wireframe and its surrounding consoles, and watched him leave, unnoticed.

She chuckled, and returned to her high-backed crash couch, letting the HUD displays auto-project around her station. The next drop would be coming up in thirteen minutes, she noted with some satisfaction; the Amaretsu was right on schedule. Now if only she could keep the acceleration sickness from returning. There were still a dozen rockets left. Thus far no one objected to the Amaretsu dropping some two hundred nuclear missiles into polar orbit over Terra. The Fleet Captain's hands trembled as she called up the galley. She could always dump a sober pill into her system to clear the caffeine’s less-desirable effects.

The sunlight reflected by the Amaretsu's polished armour strokes La Blue Girl's spherical hull four hours later. The photons do not register on the station's photoelecric panels. Ten thousand ships of significant size traverse the Sol system at any given moment. The Amaretsu is lost amidst the background, for now. La Blue Girl is parked in geostationary orbit over Neptune, peaceful once more with the Skeelzanians dealt with and gone.

Miko Mido watched Neptune's turquoise atmosphere-ocean. She kicked against a too-warm bulkhead, and floated closer to the clear dome perpetually facing planetward. Her gloved fingers stroked the smooth, transparent geometric carbon, reaching to touch the cool sphere seemingly-oh-so-close. Despite the best cooling systems available, sweat beaded on Miko's forehead in the unlit chamber. More droplets floated lazily towards their deaths in the station's ubiquitous ventilation system intakes which hummed softly, eternally. Wearing nothing except gloves and cat's feet had helped, as did turning off lights and all but the most necessary systems, but a blinking light at the bottom of her vision still warned of rising internal temperature.

A chime in Miko's right ear announced incoming communication. Text scrolled down from the top of her retina, coded and overlaid with data. She brought up information stored in the station's computers regarding the new visitor with a single thought, and grinned.

<Mouse Parade> Blue Girl, Mouse Parade.
<Blue Girl> Mouse Parade, Blue Girl. How's life? :P
<Mouse Parade> Coming in for re-supply. Life's boring as always. Nothing this side of the Line. What's on your end?
<Blue Girl> The cryo's broken, looks like. ;;-_- Got a spare?
<Mouse Parade> Gimmie a moment. I'll check. *runs*
<Blue Girl> Gotcha ;;^.^

The Mouse Parade is longer than the Amaretsu by ten meters. From afar the two are indistinguishable. Miko knows the difference between every ship to dock with the hydrogen-carrying drones parked just 'above' her. Each Third Bridge - Astrogation - crew has a different touch. The Mouse Parade's fuel line barely taps the side walls of Hydrogen Carrying Unit 08's gas port. Automated clamps latch onto the thin, semi-rigid tube. Little bursts of flame light up along the Mouse Parade's silvery hull. Despite its best efforts to maintain perfect position the fuel line minutely flexes and bends while the oversized gas bag holding thousands of tons of condensed hydrogen gas slowly shrinks.

Miko brought up the status on refueling with a single thought, remembering the Unnecessary Cleavage's minor bout of destruction. Fleet Captain Gino Al-Razi ran a tight boat, however, and nothing appeared amiss. Miko rotated with careless grace, floating along the transparent dome. Something fuzzy brushed against her bare back. She fumbled with a squeak, stabilized, grabbed it, pulled the oversized Landsquid plushy close, remembering to find Sandra something just as nice and cuddly.

<Mouse Parade> Yus! When do you want the parts? XD
<Blue Girl> Now? Please? *dies from the heat*
<Mouse Parade> Nuuuuuuuuu!!!!!

Lorain shook her head lightly, and smiled, obviously mentally occupied in places far away.
"Of course, I would love to. Even among all the strife here, I will always have time for you."
A smirk crossed her face, and she turns to face Kira proper.
"But that doesn't mean I dont have work to do, Kira. And all these incidents in the EffDeeKay itself really aren't helping. Which is partly your fault."
She smiles, her mood visibly lightening after such comments, and
reaches over to forcibly grab Kira's arm, grinning from ear to ear.
"Now, let us go and have some fun. I cant let even all that disturb us in the slightest."
The rain beat down upon them with evermore ferocity, as if stirred by recent events, determined to ruin their fun. These two, however, as lorain said, would not be disturbed or moved so far as to be depressed. Now was a time for fun and games along the line of 'whocangetdrunkthefastest', and Lorain wanted to get to such things as fast as they possibly could.

"Sometimes you make no sense," Kira grinned.

Wye City stretches down into the roots of the mountain. The pastel towers reach five thousand meters beneath the planetary surface. Intertwining passages and steamer tunnels join the megapolis in three dimensions. The rain floods topside city sectors with amazing speed. A dozen meters beneath the submerged pavement, the streets and alleys are as dry as ever.

Shutting down minor filtration nanosystems with a flicker of a thought, Kira drank herself under the table with alarming speed. She set down a hundred-silver note and the bartender obliged Lorain and Kira with a steady flow of liquor, no questions asked. In the semi-crowded bar two more patrons occupying a corner table went utterly unnoticed, those sober enough to follow a conversation watching the televocion suspended on the other side of the long, narrow room.

"The Dominion stuff's good," she said at the beginning. "A bit on the weak side, but tastes better than this," and proceeded to empty the bottle of what was usually described as paint remover. "Good place to start, still."

"Indeed.". Lorain turned a slightly drunk head to view the television, and then turned back to face Kira with a slight frown. "...Nothing uplifting on that sad box of biased news filth." She would only get worse as she, aided by the increasingly large amount of 'Paint remover', as Kira called it, remembered certain events in her past, part of the reason she had left the home nation in the first place. "I ...prefer the Dominion wine. 'S more what I'm used to. Nothing beats this swine byproduct for becoming...wasted, really.
And we can't stay here all night...We have work, and committments, and such and such and endless worry."
She slammed her mug on the table, and yelled to the barman "More!", for she would still be only slightly drunk for hours to come yet.

"Meh," Kira shrugged. "I'm a figurehead. It's what I do. Hell, I'm not even a real monarch. I'm just a placeholder until they find someone with two big ones between his legs. Then I'm out, poof, and nothing to it. 'S not like it hasn't happened before. They dig out someone who wants the spot, spoof the trial, and they got a perfectly happy little monarch with nothing between the ears and no need for random excuses 'cause his title actually belongs to him."

She sighed, staring into her mug. The television's talking head announced plans for leasing MegaCity 3's shipyards for constructing a new weapons platform. Stocks were on the rise, and the new defense spending budget was still within the one percent of total domestic product cap placed on it within the Standard Law.

"Miko's prolly getting company," she said finally, filling the mug up again without any spills. "So what're you doin' tonight?"

****

Miko snuggled the landsquid plushie, floating in La Blue Girl's the observation deck. The plushie's beady eyes reflected Neptune's azure sphere, tentacles reaching out towards the planet just beyond the thick pseudo-glass much like Miko had done hours before. Status reports in her peripheral vision noted declining temperature. She brought them up for a moment, thinking of a reply to Mouse Parade, as her text-based conversation with the ship docked to a hydrogen drone on the other side of the planet turned away from business.

<Blue Girl> You're a life saver. *huggles*
<Mouse Parade> No biggie. It's all good. =)
<Blue Girl> No, really. You're dropping in for shore leave, ne?
<Mouse Parade> Probably. *confuzzled*
<Blue Girl> I'll take you out to Poseidon, my treat?
<Mouse Parade> Really, it was nothing.
<Blue Girl> Moook? Please? It's lonely here. ;_;
<Mouse Parade> Okie. Thank you!
<Blue Girl> How does tomorrow 0800 sound?
<Mouse Parade> Mrrrm. Sorry, I'm running a training excercise for the newbies. Day after?
<Blue Girl> Sounds like a lark! ^__^

Two new cryogenic plants dump heat out of the station. The infrared signatures from their heatsinks light up on scanners around Neptune. A million kilometers away, the Mouse Parade finalizes plans for shore leave with Poseidon. Her astrogation scanners sweep surrounding space, looking for debris big enough to be a threat. Docked to countless tons of volatile, pressurized gas, with stationkeeping thrusters working to keep the ship from drifting despite a geostationary orbit, it is at its most vulnerable to surprise attack.

"Ah, you're not useless. At least by my estimation, and really, all that should matter to you is your own opinion. If you want complete control of your ...administration, for lack of a more fitting word, than sieze it forcefully. If you cannot, than I will for you. Tis one of my many uses to you. And what am I doing tonight?" Lorain grinned as though a cheshire cat. "..Isnt it obvious? Or did you suddenly lose all conscious thought?" And then her thoughts returned to the television, and it's subject nation. "Zee Em Eye, eh. Too many megacities if you ask me, too much like Deningrad."

Kira thought over Lorain's proposal. "We," she said, picking each word with excessive care. "Don't do things like that. The system has worked, thus far, quite well, without revolutions."

She closed her eyes, sighed, took a steadying breath. "Gah, who am I kidding, it's worked better than anything we've had. I just need ... to learn to work inside the system. Ne, Deningrad?" Kira blinked, trying to see if she remembered anything about the city, or where it was located. "Wuzzat?"

Miko floated through La Blue Girl's empty passageways, softly bouncing off sterile white and gray bulkheads. Her hand shoot out to grasp a handhold, and she swung through the open hatch and into the station's command center with its unused chair-couches and consoles, the landsquid plushie held firmly against her side.

"Oh, of course it's a bad idea," she said, settling into the central crash couch and nuzzling the oversized plushie before placing it in her bare lap. "Nin-Nin, why is it a bad idea?"

"Because that ship does not belong to us," La Blue Girl's assistant constructed sentience replied. "That ship is property of the Star Guard of Weyr."

"Which is now dead and gone," Miko deftly prodded the console keys, activating long-range sweeps and communications arrays. Flat holographic images popped up before her, framed in green. One showed a list of ships operating near Netptune, in the Kuiper Belt, and beyond; another gave conditions on inventory accumulated from unused components of the three freighters Miko cannibalized on arrival to expand La Blue Girl and repair faulty gas collector satellites; others provided data of a different sort. "Watch."

"This can't be good," Nin-Nin groaned.

"It'll be all-right," Miko said. "Ne, were you peeking at me in the shower?"

"What? No! Why would I do such a thing? Do you want me to peek at you in the shower?"

"I dunno." Miko's eyes blanked for a brief few seconds, running a direct transmission to an Angstian ship some twenty light-minutes away via superluminal systems. "Okie, can you hold down the fort while I'm gone? Wealth of Nations says it's up for making a few shuttles."

"It's on your head, missy. What's he asking?"

"The usual," Miko winked, and snuggled the landsquid.

Imagine an unbelievably cramped hall. Imagine utter chaos, tens of large, hundreds of medium and thousands of small machines moving, assembling, disassembling, breaking, repairing, constructing, analysing, transporting and designing parts of machines orders of magnitude larger or smaller than them. Imagine neighboring halls, just as cramped and busy, competing for space and resources.

Rather more than fifty percent of the volume of a General Manufacturing Unit look like this. Sufficient space for a hundred million people to live in a comfortably urban setting.

All cramped with machine parts, construction facilities, construction robots and ship-internals of unknown functions.

Obviously, calling it chaotic would be an understatement. On the other hand, chaotic as it may be for the casual visitor, the ship knows perfectly well where everything is.

It just doesn't like the idea of order, instead revelling in childhood memories of utterly chaotic rooms and resigning parents.

Constructing a few shuttles. Near-milspec, personnel/ cargo transport, no reactors, drives, controls or FTL necessary.

Well, that shouldn't take long.

Fields snap into existence, carrying hulls and internals. Machines vaguely resembling giant ants - in function, if not in look - join the operation. Parts are welded together, armour is grown, floaty micros jab their contents into circuits, a million and one jobs are done, near-simultaneously.

A little while and some extensive tests later, the Wealth of Nations shoots off its reply.

BL-FTLCOM@BL1e4&EM1e-1; SL 0; Tightbeam
From: GMU Wealth of Nations
To: La Blue Girl (Miko Mido)
Subject: Done, dear

Well, see subject: Done. Will have a field-tug carry them over, should be there in ~ nineteen hours.

Oh, and I included a 'lil present for you. Sandra mentioned that you really like plushies, so I thought it to be appropriate :)

Inside the first of the 'Shuttles' - ellipsoid as usual, 44m x 42m x 10m, with two PD clusters and lots of (Mostly rather uncomfortable) space - waited a second plushy, the giant landsquid's 'Little brother' so to speak, about as large as the palm of a hand (Not counting the tentacles), with eyes so large they seemed to spill over looking cutely at whoever looked at it.

The Tower of Twilight soared into the clouds surrounding the peak of the mountain supporting Wye City, a hodgepodge of architecture from two thousand years and two different worlds, each occupant adding to the spire-esque construction until it resembled nothing more than a tipsy wedding cake ever threatening to keep over into the mountainside rearing up behind it. The corridors, like the exterior, were an experiment in disjunction. Kira got off on the eighty-sixth floor, the elevator doors sliding open to reveal a dinky hallway seemingly too narrow from the high ceiling inset at regular intervals with sunlamps that managed to somehow provide just enough light to see by.

"Sorry," Kira stepped back a bit from the door, her black boots squeaking on stone floor tiles worn smooth by many feet. "It gets stuck, sometimes," she offered by way of explanation, considered the off-brown door just like every other all along either side of the corridor, and kicked it open with a muffled thud.

"There," she playfully prodded Lorain in the side, stepping inside, tripped o the closing door, and crashed into the heap of odds and ends coating the floor of her tiny apartment, almost vanishing in a pseudo-lake of clothes and papers.

Lorain remarked with some conviction that "Kira...I'm going to have to teach you to clean up after yourself.." before crashing in after her, intent in some playful mischief.

*******

Miko stripped off her EVA suit, shivering as her numb fingers worked the clasps and buckles, attaching toolbelts and instruments to their velcro fastenings in the stowage shelves through sheer habit.

"Fucking piece of shit," she muttered, almost throwing the faulty thermal control unit box against a bulkhead. Instead, she closed her eyes and counted to ten, focusing on nothing but the warmth of the air in La Blue Girl's internal spaces reasserting itself against the intrusion of an EVA suit cooled to two-seventy-three degree kelvin. "If the manufacturer's still alive I want a refund."

Clipping the thermal control unit to her belt, she pushed off into the well-lit residential and living section pasageways with their paneled bulkheads giving easy access to conduits and local system controls. The nicer accomodations came at the cost of slightly more cramped space in actuality, if not in perception, which for the station's sole inhabitant was not of much importance.

"Has something else failed?" the assistant intelligence unit's voice tickled the inside of her right ear, the sound piped from a miniature earpiece.

"No," Miko said.

"The manufacturer is ExoLimited, by the way."

"Thanks, Nin-Nin. Can you file a complaint, please? It's supposed to last three years, and it's been what, nine months? Do we have anything else by them, besides the other two suits and the old heatsink?"

"Yup."

"What?"

"Their spare parts," Nin-Nin cackled.

"Spare parts?"

"Container four, truss three."

"The one that fell into the planet?"

"No, that was container eight, truss three. This one got fragged when that fusactor exploded."

"Oh, sorry," Miko drifted down the empty passageway, half a handlength away from the overhead, shiny black hair fanning out behind her.

"Ne, something happen?" Nin-Nin asked after a long silence.

"No, just thinking."

"About?"

"Everything. It doesn't matter. I'm leaving tomorrow; could you please finish up the other hulls?"

"Um, Miko."

"Yes?"

"Gas collector six is offline."

"Great. I'll be back," Miko grabbed an overhead handlebar, using her legs' inertia to flip over into 'upside down', and pushes back towards the airlock in the same smooth motion, while estimating fuel burn and trajectory, recalling from memory the orbit of the faulty drone. "And just enough fuel to get there and back."

A hundred million kilometers away, the Weyr Self-Defense Ship Aleksandr Nevskii brought her fusactors from standby to full in half the time rated by her drive yards.

OOC: Okay, I've spent several days pestering Der Angst over IRC and performing egosearches, and have located next to nothing on Ganymede via either Jolt or Google searches, even when searching for all posts done by the Snel Race and then going through the threads. As far as I am aware the Snel have a colony on the south pole (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=5956337&postcount=22), Konania has gone anarchic, and Der Angst says it has mostly stopped using its installations following its civil war.

This post is subject to change pending a response from Snel.

Stationkeeping thrusters burn steady azure against the Weyr Self-Defense Ship Amaretsu's silvery hull. The warship wavers against a tenth of Terra's gravity, its primary drive flickering. Flywheels and fusactor shafts spin down into standby. The rocket-esque drive exhaust ports twinkle crimson and gold. Their lights dwarf the smaller astrogation strobes that warn the electronically blind of the hundred thousand tons of compact weapons and armor in geostationary orbit around Ganymede.

"Amaretsu, this is Lander Actual."

Sixteen kilometers beneath the Amaretsu, Lander Actual is in an approximation of a stable orbit stationary relative to Ganymede's ice-rock surface. Four long cargo trusses, each more than a kilometer in length, project at equal points from a spherical core, forming a tripod of sorts. It is an almost identical copy of the original La Blue Girl, whose direct descendent now orbits Neptune.

"Lander Actual, go ahead."

Subetha data networks pulse between the Amaretsu and Lander Actual, invisible to those without a century of focused Weyrean investigations into the thaumaturgic, or to those without the interest and funding to acquire a commercial subetha communications array. Leylines swell in the space beneath the here and now.

"We're deploying orbiters in thirty. What's the primary situation? Over."

Opening locking clamps send dull reverberations through the hull of one of the six frieghters accompanying Lander Actual. Servomotors spin up in the silence of interplanetary space, opening container hatches. In the drive segment at the aft of the freighter, forward of a drive aperture reminiscent of terrestrial rockets, the single operator leans forward in her crash couch for a moment.

Ethersat 01J7, the first superluminal Weyrean satellite in the orbit of the seventh Jovian planetoid, emerges from its protective cocoon in a brief burst of pyrotechnics. Composite shell pieces that protected it during its journey slowly tumble into their own predicted orbits for later pickup, phosphorescent paint aglow to warn travelers in the meanwhile. Small maneuvering thrusters nudge it into high orbit, building on momentum inherited by ejection from its container. Rod logic arrays engage once the engines flare out and are discarded. Energy flows warm circuits not tested since the satellite was packaged for its month-long journey. Finding no anomalies, the logic core engages servomotors on pre-programmed schedule. Spindly arms extend luxuriously from the satellite’s barrel-like core. Antenna arrays unfurl from their cases. Precisely thirty-two seconds are spent on more evaluations. A communications beam plays across the Amaretsu's silvery hull, and locks onto its counterpart on the gun-studded superstructure. From the warship's command bridge, Fleet Captain Tanaku Ai watches more satellites deploy over Ganymede, absently listening to the chatter on the pseudo-fleet data nets.

"Primary reports orbital insertion complete. JPS release in four-twelve. Over."

Primary races around Jupiter in a narrowing orbit, attitude thrusters flaring in stabilizing maneuvers. Cargo container lids open to reveal scores of spidery construction drones. They scatter over the tripod-esque ship under their own initiative, crawling in teams inside other containers to extract parts of gas collectors and of storage sattelites, while communications relays eject from still other containers, thrusters nudging them into designated orbits.

Alice Satoshi planted the last marker into the dirty ice just below the crater rim, designating the area as safe for landing craft and semi-construction. Straightening with a whir of servos, she looks up at the star-filled sky of Ganymede's 'far side'. Using millimeter radar she picked her way up the shallow crater wall to the very edge, and sat on the rim proper, protected from the cold surface by layers of military-grade insulation that are an almost perfect non-conductor.

"Lander Actual, Satoshi here."

"Satoshi, go ahead."

"I'm done."

"Gotcha. Any problems?"

"A bit chilly, if I may say so."

"Very well, we'll send a blanket. Sit tight for dustoff."

"Lander Actual, Amaretsu here. You look good to go, so we'll be our way."

"Gotcha, Amaretsu. Next time you drop by we'll have a full load of hydrogen ready and waiting."

"Thanks and good luck. Over and out."

"Good hunting."

The familiar thrum of fusactors rumbles through the Amaretsu's command bridge. The central wireframe shifts, redrawing to display a wider field of view with the Amaretsu's course charted in gray. Tanaku Ai brings up her own displays of the Jovian subsystem, replacing the pong game of the officer on watch who occupied her chair in her abscence. The Galilean moons shrink into oblivion, the outer satellites' orbits forming a flower around the tiny flare designating Jupiter. The Amaretsu's planned trajectory is a silver line slicing through the blue, crimson and white ellipses. Many of those orbits are neutral off-white, denoting unclaimed territories. The crimson dots of potential hostile ships and platforms, located through gravimetric and magnetosphere observation and through regular astrogation, are surprisingly few. For a system that was, and presumably still is, a major strategic center of gravity, Tanaku finds it awfully quiet, especially when compared to Mars.

Flight control, get us out of here, Tanaku Ai says over the ship's interbridge command net.

Aye, skipper, the response is immediate, loud and clear in her head against the backdrop of data feeds and communication nets. Main screws at point-three... she can feel the additional status reports streaming on the flight control bridge, but doesn't link in to listen.

"Ignition confirmed," the chief drive engineer's report comes by regular audio, while data on fusactor temperatures and inertial buffer levels stream via the ship net.

"Acknowledged," Tanaku says with the part of her that is still on the command bridge and pressed lightly into the crash couch by acceleration left unbuffered by the ship as a form of physical feedback reassuring the Amaretsu's crew they really are moving as the displays say.

Data analysis? Tanaku 'dives' from interbridge links into the lower-tier communications nets, linking into the secondary coordination network connecting the command bridge with all the sections of the ship. She avoids the section-specific communications zones; there's no need to look over shoulders.

All clear, skipper, chief data analyst responds after a moment.

How are the mags?

Beautiful, there's a hint of pride underlying the thought-words. We have the ears of a fox and the eyes of a hawk.

Famous last words, Tanaku drops out chuckling, with the image of a Gimli's encounter with elves.

The Amaretsu ignites her main drive in a flare of infrared and visual radiation. In Alice's eyes on Ganymede's surface the warship is a phosphorescent new star tracing an arc along the sky, growing smaller and fainter with every passing second. She stands up amidst a crackling of ice accumulated on her suit's legs, turning to follow the star's passage.

"Beautiful, isn't it," Pavel Chernyakov says from a hundred meters away, his voice piped through microphones in Alice's helmet.

"Yup," she watches the warship's flare vanish from the sky, then turns to face Chernyakov.

"All ground crew stand by to receive tarmac," Lander Actual announces.

"Acknowledged," Alice shifts to the command channel, then back to the frequency used by Chernyakov. "What was that about?"

"Oh, they're having problems with the magDrives," he says after a short delay denoting thought, or a switch between frequencies.

"And the normal rockets will turn the ground into mush," Alice chuckles. "I could've told them that a month ago. We we're building the tarmac?"

"Yup," Chernyakov says. "Hang on, I'm gonna give you the rendezvous coordinates."

"Thanks." A series of digits and numbers pop up in the upper right corner of Alice's HUD, just below the minimized transparent relief map of the crater and environs. "I owe you one." She opens up her wristpad, and sets her local compass' North to the coordinates provided. "They're bringing torches, right?"

"Beats me," Chernyakov is already bounding down the crater's gentle slopes.