Sol
“We are approaching Sol Captain” Kat reported to Astarte.
“Thank you Helmsman, slow us down to 1 kilo light and transmit our approach to Neptune tower.” Astarte ordered.
She had been away from her command chair for so long that it felt great to just deal with the minutia of space travel. They had spent three months traveling from the Confederacy capital to their home system, they had trouble finding a caravan that felt comfortable with Hellworlder vessels traveling with them. Nothing a large sum of credits couldn’t ease though. On a basic level freighter captains and pirate captains were all the same, following their greed and ambition like they were the steady needles of a compass and not some insane roulette wheel.
During that time Aster suffered from Alwen’s weekly procedures until her bones were finally on the proper path to recovery. She had only been let off bed rest a few weeks ago, and her first steps had been far to shaky and uncertain for her liking. Gato had looked at her and just grinned with sadistic pleasure as he began to plan a workout regime that would swiftly bring her back to her peak. She still had several months to go before she would feel as strong as she had before her fight with Kazlum.
The ship passed by the Oort cloud without any fanfare and approached the furthest planet of the Sol system and slowed down to relativistic speeds. From their distance the massive gas giant was just a pale blue ball about the size of a football. Unlike stations, the Union controlled the entrance and exit of inhabited systems and only allowed traffic to enter through one specific corridor where an established hyper-lane entered the star’s heliosphere. In the case of Sol their corridor currently let them out somewhere near Neptune’s current position in its 165-year orbit.
“Independent Star Ship Astaroth please state your business” a traffic controller from the station called over open comms.
“We’re returning to our home port on Mars for repairs and rest. We were ambushed by pirates during a journey to the core worlds.”
“Rodger that, Martian Drive Yards received your Wake-com two weeks ago and are ready for your arrival. Will the other ships on your travel log be joining you?” he asked.
They had decided to send Astaroth ahead to get the lay of the Sol system to see if any Union ambush had been lying in wait for them, her sensors and scanners were already sweeping the nearby space for any suspicious groupings. If worst came to worst Astaroth could fight a retreat and escape into the wild reaches of undeveloped space and lead the enemy away from the rest of the fleet as they changed course for Pandemonium.
Aster checked the scanners and saw only the expected traffic and nothing malicious hanging out in the shadows. Still, they would only send the ‘safe’ signal when they were settled into their berth on Mars. “Yes, they will be along shortly”
“Rodger that, you are to proceed along Sagan starway and enter Martian air space, Welcome home” the man said before the transmission clicked off.
Astaroth banked to port and passed the outer most ‘buoy’ satellite that marked the entrance to the Carl Sagan Star way and accelerated to a leisurely .01 Kilolights. Unlike in interstellar space both Luminal and FTL speeds were tightly controlled, there were so many mining drones, communication satellites, planetary ferries, and commercial vessels flying between the planets of the Sol system that the likelihood of a ship-on-ship collision were much higher than in interstellar space. Thirty or so years ago a super freighter full of refined acids had failed to correct their speed due to a thruster malfunction and had barreled into a transport ship full of passengers on their way to Ceres, the cleanup had taken years to collect all the small fragments that threatened other ships. In an attempt to better control ship approaches a system of star ways had been developed and were named after famous Terran astronomers.
They fell into an easy pace well behind a freighter that only could be seen on their radar and Aster relaxed as her ship made its way to Mars. As the ship made its final approach to Mars they slowed down to Luminal speeds and began to enter the planets gravity well. They passed by Phobos and rolled the ship until her keel was facing towards the planet’s surface as they entered the artificial atmosphere of Mars.
During the Union terraforming of Mars they had installed some sort of generator that had somehow changed the planets mass and had made the planets gravity more suitable for human habitation. It wasn’t the same grav-plating they used on the ships, nor was it a manipulation of the gravitational field. It was some sort of artificial mass placed it the planets center, it wasn’t known how it was placed there or what it was. The only thing they had deduced about the danm thing was that it was only the size of a small car, absorbed any energy waves bounced at it, and that it didn’t require any sort of maintenance. They only knew its size by the shadow it cast when they tried to bounce seismic waves off it to get a better idea of what it was.
It perplexed Aster and every Terran physicist who frothed at the mouth to dig a tunnel down to the center of mars and observe it. But the Union had a distinctly different attitude towards scientific discovery, they believed that a company had a right to not only patent whatever universe shattering revelation they made, but also the equipment necessary to duplicate it. To this day Terran physicists knew that the nature of Dark Matter had been confirmed, but were barred from any of the juicy details, and were also barred from building the necessary equipment to find the answer for themselves. Even the warp field emitters that the Astaroth used were a complete unknown to them. Before fist contact humanity only knew enough about warp fields to move an object less than half the speed of light, and there were several major leaps in physics necessary to make engines capable of 7.6 Kilolights. All Astarte and the rest of humanity knew was that if they pumped power into the warp field emitters then they could go forward really fast without encountering any relativistic time dilation, somehow.
This was how Astarte had struck a deal with the University of Olympus Mons. She offered them the funding and supplies to build secret research facilities across Sol and on Pandemonium, and they simply informed her of what they found along with a few other benefits. It had been a massive money pit for many years and had only recently born fruit. They had stumbled onto a path that might, after many iterations, grant them warp emitters equivalent to Union models.
The ship cleared its path with space controllers on the orbital station that also acted as an EM field to protect Mars from solar winds, and began their decent to Mars. The ship rocked and roared as it descended through the atmosphere and brief flickers of red flame danced past their external cameras until it ended abruptly. MDY tower controllers handshaked with her ship’s navigation computers and began to guide them on a route that had them skimming above the waters of the Mariner Inlet until they reached the port city of Noctis, the end of the Mariners Inlet and the gateway into the Noctis Labyrinth of the Tharsis plateau.
The steep twisting valleys of the Labyrinth of Night were formed from geological rifting in the volcanic highland of Mars’ massive shield volcanoes, which had exposed many easy to find and rich mineral deposits. Two of Sol’s largest terrestrial aluminum deposits, and dozens of copper pits dotted the maze-like valleys. Factories in Noctis refined the material and port side Facilities loaded them onto cargo barges and shipped them out across Mars or off world to factories on Terra, Luna, and Ceres. The port was also a convenient location for several space ports and ship builders, but the only one worth a danm was MDY. After the planet had been terraformed the Union had auctioned off many prime locations to Earth based companies to encourage them to set up shop on Mars. And Boeing had won a majority of the land just outside what was designated as the ‘Noctis city zone’, along with a majority of the ore veins up the Labyrinth of Night. They then leased out that land to mining companies and began construction on a dry dock that would soon grow into the heart of Sols interstellar economy.
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Normally they would build the ship and it would then move into a port, but since Astaroth and the rest of the fleet needed constant repairs and refits they had instead leased off a section of their facilities to the Hellworlders. MDY had been stagnating for years as more and more Coreworld companies began to push into their share of the market, until Astarte had come along. Her business had pumped new blood into the dying company, and in turn she had bought enough shares to have a voice at the table.
It was Night in Noctis so massive spotlights fixed themselves on the Astaroth and guided them into the dugout berth, Astaroth deployed her landing gear and settled on to the Martian surface as soft as a butterfly. The dust that got kicked up by her ventral stabilizers slowly settled and deck apes burst out of the interior hatches to receive the docking ramp and to needlessly toss a rope over the side and tied the ship to a sturdy mooring ring they had welded to the dock yard.
She cracked her neck and slowly stood up, “Let’s see how much paperwork has piled up on my desk while we’ve been away.”
~~~*~~~
Alwen stared out of one of the ship’s windows as the strange world came into view. She had seen plenty of Terran TV and movies based on the little planet, but they just couldn't capture the majesty of the world. She knew that Mars had once been a barren red rock that the Union had Terraformed for the Terrans, but looking down on it now she couldn’t see how such a vibrant world could ever have been that barren and lifeless rock. The whole northern hemisphere was dominated by a brilliantly blue ocean, while the southern region held the largest continuous landmass Alwen had ever seen. The continent was so large that Alwen could only see half of it due to the planets curvature, but what she saw was impressive. A fractal inlet that went from the larger sea to the north all the way to the illuminated valleys to its west, another branch of the inlet led south and connected it to the suspiciously round inland sea with snow covered peaks running around the outer shore. Not far from the shores of the inlet massive mountains and plateaus rose up out of nowhere, and sitting in the shadow of the mighty peaks Alwen saw for the first time in her life something the Terrans called a desert.
Torwen only had three land masses that could be classified as ‘continents’ by Terran standards. Her own homeland the Altoray continent to her world’s north, the Solvan continent just south of the equator, and Bikail which took up a majority of her worlds south pole. Altoray had large expansive plains divided by relatively young mountain ranges formed by continental collision and tectonic uplift, it was where the Pact of Torwen slowly developed the finer arts of agriculture and animal husbandry, and when the invention of the steam engine came along they tapped into Altoray’s massive coal and iron deposits to become the world power they were today. Solvan was really just the largest island in a long chain of volcanic islands where Torweni civilization began, for centuries it was the heart of trade and culture. Nowadays the countless city states and smaller island nations struggled to challenge the north’s economy. Bikail was mostly dominated by endless ice caps, but along the coast glaciers had carved out many fjords and inlets where many seafaring people made their living by fishing the plentiful waters around the pole.
Nowhere on her world did the right ecological and geographic features line up enough for any of those land masses to become dry and hot enough for a desert to develop. She knew them to be desolate places where life was a daily struggle, but from her vantage point high in the air it looked stunning.
“Pretty innit luv” Limey said next to her.
“Yes it is, I especially love the deserts” she said.
“Oh yeah, the way I hear it the Union terraformers could have created a verdant green rock without any deserts at all. But life on earth sort of needs deserts to balance out our environment”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah, back on earth sands from the Sahara would blow into the Atlantic and allow for greater blooms of plankton which feed all the other ocean critters. And there are a million other little processes that deserts contribute to. That’s the nature of deathworlds, even our most desolate and harsh environments are essential to our continued survival.”
Alwen stared at Limey and blinked several times, there was no one else around her to catch the very intelligent thing he had just said, and even his typically thick and hard to pierce accent had dulled to something comprehendible. “You’re not actually an idiot are you?” she said carefully.
He turned and winked at her “Even a broken clock is right once and a while, it takes a lot of effort to always be wrong all the time though.”
“But, why?”
He gave her a sad smile, “I’m not the smartest luv, I’m not the strongest, or the fastest. I have no special talents, or any particularly interesting hobbies, if I didn’t play the fool then I would be the most boring person on this ship.”
“Then why’d drop the act around me?” she asked.
“Because I know that you wouldn’t really care one way or another. I love Gato, Alice and all the others like they were family, but they are who they are.”
“That doesn’t sound very nice, pretending to be someone you’re not.”
“All the worlds a stage, and all the men and women are merely players. We all wear masks and play pretend, even when we feel like we’re being our true selves. A key trait of sapiency is free will, choosing to live, choosing to act, choosing who we are and how we act. Our personality is all a choice, a bad person chooses to be bad, a good person chooses to do good, and real people choose to do good and bad things all the time without ever realizing they could have chosen differently. I like to play the buffoon because it makes other people laugh, and I get to laugh with them.”
Alwen starred at him for a long moment as she pieced out his hidden meaning. We choose who we are, and we choose how to act. To Alwen who had most of her life decided for her this idea clashed with everything she knew. Her attention was drawn back to the window as bright red wisps of flame dance outside the window as the ship fell through the atmosphere.
Limey cleared his throat “Or maybe I really am a fool who has just deceived himself. Come now luv, the rest of the view won’t be much to look at, what with it being night and all.”
She shook off the invasive ideas and joined him as they left the room. They walked together in silence for a while.
“Any plans for your first visit to a Terran world?” he asked casually.
Alwen shook her head “Not really. I don’t really know what a real Terran city will be like, so I plan to just stick next to Alice or Gato.”
“Might have some trouble with that last one deary, Gato doesn’t leave the ship whenever we’re on Mars. He just stays behind to get some extra gym time.”
“Why?”
“Bad memories. Maybe you could drag him out of his funk and help him make some new memories.” He said very unsubtly with a wink.
She felt her face flush “I have no idea what you’re talking about”
“Come now luv, I’m a fool, not blind. If you’d like I could deliver your confession for you, I think one of the snipes has a cupid outfit I could borrow.”
“If you even think about hinting at it I will spike your tea again” she growled.
He went pale “No thank you, once was enough for me.”
After the marines had come together to make a ballad about ‘Bones the God Slayer’ she decided to get even with Limey by spiking their Sunday tea session with a cocktail of something that would annihilate most of the bacteria in his guts and gave him the runs for a week straight until the fauna in his intestines recovered. No one had sung that damned song around her since then.
“Besides, I’m not even sure if I should. He and Alice have a lot of history I don’t want to get in the way of.”
Limey nodded “I see, bros before hoes. Have you told Alice?”
“Yeah, that’s how I learned about their past relationship.”
“What did she say?”
“She said go for it.”
“Then what’s stopping you?” he asked.
“About a million different little things, none of which sound very convincing out-loud though” she said dejectedly.
Limey nodded “Well let me ask you this, do you just want a quick shag, or something more.”
“Shag?”
“Sex; deary”
“Oh” Alwen coughed in embarrassment. “I, I think I want something more than just sex”
“Then I say you should go for it, the worst he could say is no” he said frankly.
Alwen smirked “My brother said the same.”
“Smart man”
Alwen sighed “Thanks for the advice L-“ she paused and realized something for the first time “Hey, what’s your real name?”
“Limey is fine enough for me”
“Limey is fine for when we’re joking around, but for something serious like this I would like to use your proper name”
He frowned “Its Lewis, Lewis Bailey”
Alwen smiled, “Thank you, Lewis. Now I need to figure out a decent excuse to get Gato to take me out on a date. He might just refuse and tell me to go with Alice.”
He smiled mischievously “do you have any other nasty tricks that you could lend me?” he asked with a devious twinkle in his eyes.