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Final War: Hetairoi [Mecha, Space Opera, Fantasy]
B1 | Chapter 02: One Small Step (1/3)

B1 | Chapter 02: One Small Step (1/3)

> If you’d asked me then why I made the offer to him, I’d have told you it was simply the right thing to do. With time and distance, I realize that it was so much more than that—and so much more terrifying than that as well. A man’s mind is the one thing he should have control over, especially in an age where maladies of the brain are eliminated… and yet in his presence, I was entirely outside my own good judgment. Throne of Terra, I still quail at the power he had even then—before he truly Awakened, and everything went so horribly, horribly wrong.

Port Asfalís, to Arthur’s eyes, resembled a gigantic metal umbrella. A colossal shaft of steel hundreds of feet long extended down from a circular top capped by a massive dome, and dozens of vessels—many far larger than the Enterprising Fortune—were docked among the endless number of carefully constructed drydock slips created to allow for rapid arrival, departure, and the loading and unloading of goods.

He had returned to the bridge near the end of the Enterprising Fortune’s journey through Graecia and had been present when they’d dropped out of Compressed Space with a vacuum-muted eruption of displacement.

He didn’t want to imagine how long it might have taken them to move from the outside of the Heliosphere to the third planet in orbit of the system’s A0V-type white star, Apollo, without the C-Drive. Being able to travel at up to 0.5c—149,896 kilometers per second—outside of gravity wells or warp anchors was incredibly useful for crossing the billions of kilometers that a star system contained.

It was also a steady drain on any ship’s supply of hydrogen fuel, though his understanding of the Enterprising Fortune was that for what the fast-packet courier lacked in living space, the immense engines around which the one hundred and twenty meters of its length was built greatly made up for it in terms of output and acceleration.

Then again, fuel needs were why Gas Giants were so incredibly valuable.

Arthur’s eyes drifted away from Port Asfalís and fell upon Hellas.

The first thing he thought of was how stunning the Ascendancy’s throneworld was.

The first colony and official Capital of the Graecia system and Ascendancy at large, Hellas orbited comfortably within Apollo’s liquid water zone. At almost twice the size of Terra, Hellas was a supercontinental world with three major land masses and two moons, both of which had been converted into colossal satellite fortresses. From Arthur’s research, both had been named for the twin sons of Ares; Deimos and Phobos.

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Hellas alone appeared to have been named for a region of ancient Greece, while the remaining planets in the System had all received names from the classical Pantheon.

Hades, which sat in the orbital position closest to Apollo, was a sickly green toxic world that Arthur understood to be completely uninhabitable outside of very specifically built bio-domes. Above Hades and hidden from Apollo by the toxic world’s shadow was Tartarus, another artificial fortress built out from a large asteroid, equipped with engines, and set into a static position to watch over the tidally locked green planet which doubled as the system’s supermax prison.

If nothing else, Arthur couldn’t fault Graecia’s work at deterring criminals.

Hades was a permanent warning against the folly of violating the Ascendancy’s laws.

Next out from Hades and between it and Hellas sat Poseidon; a storm-wracked massive ocean world that, based on Arthur’s research, was purported to be home to leviathans large enough to be seen from orbit in the right circumstances—and utterly antithetical to any form of human habitation thanks to the same fauna, despite its surprisingly hospitable atmosphere.

Then came Hellas, at whose Lagrange-1 point hung the immense body of Port Asfalís.

Demeter was the fourth planet out from Apollo after Hellas and was located at the outer edge of the liquid water zone, though still within its blanket. Demeter, which Arthur understood to be a dedicated Agri-World with one of the highest food productions in the entire Rim, was orbited by its single uninhabitable but mineral-rich moon Persephone.

Beyond Demeter and fifth out from Apollo lay Ares, which Arthur understood to also be the site of the largest amount of dedicated military infrastructure within the system outside of Hellas’ lagrange points. The entire planet had been largely converted to steel and industry, with a breathtaking orbital ring of shipyards encircling its equator. This ring was connected to four immense space elevators that anchored it in place and provided ready transport to and from the surface.

A surface that had continent-sized facilities and troposphere-tall habitation spires visible from space.

The small, habitable planetoid Aphrodite orbited Ares, its surface an eclectic blend of blue, purple, and green that had made it famous as a holiday destination throughout the Rim.

In the sixth position of orbit around Apollo lay the super jovian Gas Giant Zeus—twice as large as Sol’s Jupiter—and its moons Hera, Artemis, Dionysus, and Athena. The massive harvesting ring orbiting Zeus served both as a primary fueling station for the Ascendancy’s Navy, and one of the largest hydrogen extraction operations in the Rim; large enough to supply every ambition the Graecian Ascendancy might hold economically and militarily.

The last and seventh planet in the System was Hephaestus, a molten world to which all visitation was forbidden, and whose moons Aurum and Argentum had been converted into excessively powerful defensive fortifications. The entire thing screamed military research and development to Arthur, but he had no intentions of prying.

For reasons that Arthur had neither the education nor interest in understanding, Hellas had developed a superb habitation capacity; and was well-known as both a super-habitable world ideal for all forms of life, and a planet rich with a plethora of natural resources—especially metals—that had made Graecia the wealthiest star system in its home cluster.