Chapter Eighty-Nine - The Mushroom

Ganymede station approached. Or rather, they approached it.

The station was carved into the side and centre of a small moon, and that had led Ivil to imagine a certain... shape to the station.

Stations and habitations stuck to the side of asteroids and lost dwarf planets weren't entirely unheard of nor uncommon. Stone was a decent radiation shield, it was tough and could serve as a good anchor, and it was heavy and stable. Some bracing and reinforcement, and an asteroid the size of an Earthly continent could make for the perfect home for a decently large station.

Ganymede was a little different. The station wore the moon it was part of like a mushroom wore its hat. The moon was carved into, turning it into a rather fat hemispherical shield around a station that was built like a long stem. The stem was pointing towards Ganymede itself, and was larger at the 'top' where it met the rocky top of the station. It narrowed down as it went until it ended in a narrow point.

The station was quite pretty, Ivil decided as she spied upon it from afar. There were several smaller habitation domes on the rocky side, likely connected via tunnels through the surface to the main stem. The stem itself was rather large.

At a glance, she estimated it to be about as large around as an Imperial Star Dreadnought, only with twice the length. The stem housed several dozen smaller docking facilities for ships the size of the Sappho and smaller, and the narrowed tip had skeletal protrusions for larger cargo vessels.

At the moment, two rather ancient looking cruisers were stationed at the tip of the station, and three more were hovering nearby with a small complement of destroyers and frigates and corvettes.

The Jovian fleet, in all of its underwhelming glory.

"Twenty-Six," Ivil said as she tapped the comms on. "Can you help me identify a few ships?"

"One sec," came the reply before Twenty-Six appeared on one of the monitors on the captain's seat. "What sort of ship?" she asked.

"One moment, I'll figure out how to tie you into the Sappho's cameras," Ivil said.

"Ah, nevermind, I can do it!" Twenty-Six replied. Ivil saw a number of warnings popup and disappear on the console stuck to her seat, then the ship's camera was turned on. It adjusted a little, locking onto the station, then the tiny forms next to it.

The camera zoomed in, and what they saw looked like... a grain of rice on a plate across the room.

"Uh," Twenty-Six said. "That's a little far for an ID," she said.

"Hmm," Ivil replied.

"How did you even see them?" Twenty-Six asked.

"My eyesight is superior to the ship's sensors," Ivil replied. "One moment... I'll carve out a facsimile of what I see."

It wasn't too difficult to create some raw iron in the shape of the vessels she was seeing out in the distance. She made sure that she captured as many small details as she could as faithfully as she was seeing them. Some of her senses, of course, weren't limited to the visual, but they still gave her an impression of armoured panels and locations with bumps and ridges that made up the surface of the vessels.

Twenty-Six squeaked as a small armada appeared around her head.

She flailed for a bit on camera, then calmed down and blinked up at the floating models. "Oh," she said before carefully plucking the largest out of the air. "Did you make these?"

"Obviously," Ivil said with some slight amount of pride.

"They're almost as detailed as a model kit," Twenty-Six said.

"Almost?" Ivil muttered.

"Uh, anyway, yeah, let's see... These four cruisers are the same, I think I've seen them mentioned somewhere. They're Jovian pattern Hurricane light cruisers. Though I don't think the Jovians call them 'light' but that's what they are."

"Can you tell us more?" the question came from Aurora, who was leaning back in the communications station. She had been reading something for a while now, not truly paying attention, but it seemed like her curiosity was piqued.

"Sure! So, they were built near the start of the third inter-system war. I think there were supposed to be like, fifty built, but only thirty made it out of production before the war ended. One was lost in this big fight with some pirates a few years ago. The rest, I guess, are around still," Twenty-Six said. "They were pretty advanced when they were built, but they're also some of the first warships built outside of Mars and Earth, at least capital-size ships."

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Ivil nodded. There were several companies that built cargo vessels that were larger, of course, and those were located across the system. Organizations able to build larger warships, however, those were uncommon. It was one thing to slap together a destroyer-sized vessel like the Sappho. It was another to build an entire cruiser or an entire fleet of them.

"Are they noteworthy in any way?" she asked.

Twenty-Six considered it for a moment before shaking her head. "They haven't had much testing? I mean, I kinda vaguely recall people making fun of them on some forums, and they're supposed to be very hard to maintain. Jupiter isn't known for having great engineers, but it does have plenty of resources moving through, and a lot of people moved here during the third intersystem war."

"That could mean that they had access to some good engineers, but it might also just... not," Aurora said. "A lot of resources were being used up during the conflict."

"Yeah," Twenty-Six said. "They're relatively lightly armed, but heavily armoured. Not very fast, I don't think. Um, the rest of these ships... the destroyers are a mix. Some of these are old Earth-Alliance ships, some of these corvettes are Martian-made commercial transports with some heavy modifications, it looks like."

"You know," Pixie said. "You could just ask the local girl."

"That's a fair point," Ivil said with a grin. "So, Pixie, what's the story here?"

The tiny pilot shrugged. "It's a mix of whatever the local moons could grab for cheap. The League of Free Moons barely has any money, but they need a guard fleet to scare pirates off. It's not all bad, but it's nothing too special. Your shiny Martian navy would laugh at the sight of the entire Jovian fleet, but there are enough warships here to scare off even the biggest pirates. You'd need the entire Ceres pirate fleets working together to really push hard into the Jovian system, and they all hate each other too much to ever try."

"So, ships mostly designed for anti-piracy?" Ivil asked.

"Yeah. Those lighter weapons Twenty-Six mentioned? They track faster, shoot more rounds. That's important when the thing you're fighting are mostly modified civilian-grade ships," Pixie said.

So, the kinds of things that Ivil expected the average space pirate to field. It made some sense. "The Jovian fleet is the largest one in the League of Free Moons," Aurora said. "Most of the other moons have their own defensive fleets, but Jupiter has so many moons that it needed to invest in a larger overall fleet. And it was closer to the inner systems during the last war. Some of the fighting reached this part of space."

"All good to know," Ivil said. "Seeing so many ships right next to such an important station isn't too surprising, then."

"Obviously now," Aurora said. "That station is in geosynchronous orbit right above the seat of the League of Free Moons. The unofficial seat, that is."

"Unofficial?" Ivil asked.

The noblewoman sniffed. "Do you think it is so easy to have so many small governments agree to a single location to call our 'seat' of power? It's like herding zero-g adapted cats. The thing is, Ganymede spent a fortune building a large... palace of sorts on the ground. Supposedly for the Emperor of Jupiter, but he never used it. And it's now the location of many of the organizations that make up the League."

"Lots of really pretty, really expensive architecture," Pixie said. "I've flown over a few times. Did some escort work for some political sorts too. The city's nice, but it's also kind of empty? Really weird space."

And it had a large station hovering above it, needle stem pointing down at all times, a station which held one of the three Emperors. Ivil imagined that the people below wouldn't soon forget that.

In a way, it might be a sign of security. Mars often wanted her to have a fixed location like that, but other than a few stations she enjoyed and some quieter palaces on the surface, she never cared for one grandiose place to park herself.

Aurora jumped as the station's traffic control pinged their ship and started asking for information. Soon they'd be pulling in, and she'd have to... to be polite.

She wasn't looking forward to it.

***