NationStates Jolt Archive


Gifts for Caesar (attn Questers/Doom)

New Manth
07-07-2008, 23:17
For Mr Questerian
Please give to Maximus & Doomland & all Slavers with our good wishs
From, your men from 610 Dock yard

The young dockhand stood back to admire his work, which was scrawled out in red paint on the side of a large steel crate. Satisfied, he waved over to a group of older men clustered around a large crane.

"Eντάξει!" ["Alright!"]

One nodded, and yelled in turn up to the man in the cab. With a rattle of chain links and a slight screech of steel over steel as the chains took on nearly twenty thousand kilograms of weight, the crane lifted the crate wholesale from dockside and slowly swung it out over the water. Lowered slowly and carefully, it came to rest with a final clank, neatly in place alongside a dozen others aboard the Navy cargo vessel Automedon. Many were scrawled with similar messages in Greek, Arabic and English, ranging from the simple - "FOR MAXIMUS" - to the erudite "Ἀπόδοτε οὖν τὰ Καίσαρος Καίσαρι κερδίζωv," roughly, "Give unto Caesar what Caesar deserves."

The vessel was mostly loaded, and in a few more hours would be ready to ship out with the tide, the first bound for Questarian ports from the wide harbors of Alexandria. Under the recently signed Executive Order for the Support of Abolition, many such vessels would soon be receiving similar cargoes.

Over eight hundred thousand various Questarian-designed missiles had been manufactured for domestic use by the Union Navy and the Army Air Service, and production lines on almost all types were still active. Stacked aboard the Automedon were almost three thousand of these missiles, in this case mostly AS-62s drawn from Navy overstocks. But a far larger number of weapons would be newly manufactured to meet the Questarian demand for more weapons. Already-large production lines were being expanded to put out an even greater amount of munitions; the Director of the Office of Naval Procurement had offered a personal estimate that theoretically, if the conflict went on long enough, numbers would reach 'tens of thousands per month,' shipped overseas to arm the Questarian Empire.

On signing the Executive Order, President al-Baradei had made a short statement describing the Imperium Doomanum as a threat not only to its neighbors in Haven, but to the freedom of nations world-wide, and describing a "clear moral duty for all nations" to oppose the Doomani. Al-Baradei also noted that vessels en route to Questers and flying the Manthian flag would receive protection from the Union Navy until they reached the outskirts of Haven.