// Roleplay open to any character involved in the SDC.
Styria Cooperative, Munich System - 07:00 hours LST
The station had outgrown its own skeleton. Its muscles bloomed into the wisps of the cloud, shrugging aside the hail of microparticles that smashed into her with the slow regularity of a power sander, pressured smooth in the edgerocks that the gamma rays hadn't yet polished smooth. The grim station - for it had few of the ornamental features for which Munich had once been praised - had a garred, weathered look that belied its young vitality. Its outer layers, including its rearmost modules, had been rushed together in a matter of frenetic days that had, by breathless chance, avoided making a tomb of the young EVA technicians who laboured around her in cutterbees and industrial shuttles, rigged to some measure of security through layers of neodymium bolted to their pressure hulls, like a coat against the windchill.
The station had been born in secrecy and borne by her engineers into a slow, heady relevance by the desperation of the planetary system, deeper between the bright binaries that flooded Munich with light and painted the shadows long. Behind the hot sear of her dust accumulators and the sinew of her defensive systems, the station retained the sweating wet heat of a Nuremburg summer's day, kept locked away and preserved behind the pressure hull. Algae and mold filters were a fact of life in the cold storage sections. The atmosphere was oppressive through inference - the station was packed with volunteers - a menagerie of Sirian humanity as diverse as the fragile, glass-house ecosystems that the Union had preserved out here, with no small touch from the Gaians.
The station hadn't had the chance to live the digital lie, yet. It was analogue - its breaths could be felt in the walls. The cooperative, which had eschewed outside reliance and had not yet sought profit, but survival - had co-opted volunteers, adventurers, refugees, and those who still held the long scars of the Hessian advance - old and new, in its arteries. The station pumped them around from engineering points to bars, to recuperation cabins (which were communal, as with everything else aboard Styria). It was a station of incongruities as grim-eyed survivors of the Wedel Remenants Volunteer Militia cradled their collapse-guns under the Pirasharq and Torntre Embryos and Seeds floating above them. As coerced, dazed Daumann lower-rung transporters, sent off to die for the machinations of their superiors, are embraced by a two-metre tall Unioner harbourmaster, bedecked in tattoos. A station where Mollys drink with Corsicans, where LWB agritechs fill every available nook and cranny in the structural beams with air producing plants.
Plotters and charts fill every cabin, making an inventory of personal items on a station where all comings and goings are shared - including people. Styria was a station of reaction - of impulse. It had to be - a third of its structural mass, delayed for two months, had been bolted together in a matter of days. Those that had environments of their own - homes, perhaps, beyond the station itself, spent much of their waking hours in the bars, hangars, machine shops, or concourses - rather than escape from the constant noise. Besides, the families needed the space more than the working men and women who pulled co-operation out of Anarchy and made a Union out of difference.
But there was one institution that had been kept clear of the refugees. A tangle of prefabricated cargo pods that had their interior walls hollowed out - an open space that had become one of the few reservations of hiding turned profiteering turned humanitarianism turned brotherly warfare, that had become the Union way of life in a Rheinland dominated by the threat of revolutionary violence - a violence that Styria, in the spirit of cooperation, was desperately struggling to survive. This establishment - beyond the tangle of combat air patrols, strike sorties, refugee transports, and the crackle of the radiation clocks - had become the central nervous system for the station. Every Unioner Flight Arbeiter, Corsair Warrior, Smuggler, or Trafficker worth his salt had flocked to the concourse in the natural Spacer instinct to seek out the most pressurised volume possible.
Through the murmured conversation over Hessian tactics, the rising price of H-Fuel, uncertainty in the Gallic labour market, and fears of a new Rheinland Civil war, a young Unionist places a sun candle on each watermarked table. To the Unioners , the simple chemical reaction - oxygen burning against metallic wick - is a tombstone, a gesture for those lost to space, and the hatred of men, and the survival of new life. The candles will burn, tokens of remembrance, as long as the station stands. The message is simple. Keep the air going. Cooperate; Survive.
The bartender turns to the stranger: "So. What will it be?"
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)