Location: Unmarked Unioner Container Transport (Formally the ALG Balletdanserinde) Transport last seen towed by the Unioners into the Nordheide, Hamburg, Rheinland Space, with an unknown repair barge and two tugs on-station. Probable illegal salvage claim.
Corin Frei, the belicose old arbeitsdirektor of the Alster Unioners, laid a fist to the bulkhead, let the vibrations of the engines rattle in his lungs, and teased a grin out of himself.
The old transport still had meat on the bone, then - he could feel the rhythm as her coolant pumps settled from a hesitant stacatto to as smooth as glass as the magnetohydronamic pumps took over the legwork, filling her cold, under-oxidised blue blood with convected heat from the MOX-drive.
Odd, almost profane was the beauty that came after - the joy of nothing. Of a tuned ship - all her disparate, alien parts, working together. Oh, but she was a flying monster of a transplanted body, this old girl. No two structural beams from the same vessel. It gave her a pulse that lacked the factory-fresh refrains of the Lied Der Seele or any of the other modern, Ill-gotten hulls that still had the mounts for the chrome that the Forge Unions had peeled off.
No sense in a high-visibility hull jacket, when you're a bug on the highway.
Aah. Here was the young man with the technical reports. A relaxed young man who nevertheless gave him the curteousy of making eye contact when he looked the old fossil in the eyes. He had the maker's touch, and like any journeyman craftsman he was keen to learn. Corin trusted his engineering wit - the boy knew that the best way to impress his brothers in the Direktorate's resource allocation department was to be honest, efficient, and fast. Make the truth speak for itself.
"Come. Give me the PDA - My eyes still guide me; I can read still."
"Yes Cor... DirectorFrei."
"Good lad. Stay out of Hart's sight for the rest of your shift. Don't want to bust a bright mind on a cargo manifest, 'eh?"
"Brother guides - thank you, Boss!"
"Prox' beskytter, Arbeiter."
"Prox' beskytter, Direktor.""
Good. He had the right kind of eagerness. He'd make a fine Oberarbeiter someday, given the right impetuousness, a little luck, and a cell that wouldn't feed him to the grinder. Nowadays, few did. He liked to think the slow, constant pressure of change had been his own exertion - but Frei was unwilling to praise himself. Correlation was a bucaneer's luck. Causation was a jail cell, or a shot in the back. That was the order of life.
The transport was a Skipper-weight. The classification had nothing to do with mass - of course. The old container transport was big enough to lose yourself in, when the crew state was low. It meant that the mash of repairs, welds, and inconstant parts stitched together by a wiring harness ripped from everything from a Kusarian bulk freezer for fish, to a Manhattan sky-tram, held the transport just together enough to 'skip' the essential crafts, supplies, and even food, water and medicine, from hideout, to hideout. It meant that the weapons grid would hold up for just long enough to look intimidating to any sole bountyhunter hunting for lower value claims. It wouldn't deter the hessians, of course - but yet again, what did? If men did not - then the plates of ships had no hope.
No-one understood the tie more than the kinsmen of the void engineers.
The corridor was empty, apart from himself. The rhythm dying to inaudible pink noise that set the stardog in him howling. He browsed through rows of numbers, written all in Unioner Tomrum - the bastardisation of Danish and Hamburg Street German that had become increasingly popular with Unioner technicians looking to score a line of seperation between themselves, and the hordes beyond the hulls.
Ach. Every rotation life became more simple, and in doing so, more exciting. More room for an unknown variable to make a chink in the data.
In this case, it was the starboard cargopod. It was full of heavy water from a poor man's Deuterium spitter that would have to be offboarded - but it was too valuable to Vac'. Vac'ing payloads was for the wolves and the corporations. The Tai-Suns and the Ater Hammers were already arguing over the fineprint. He'd have to arbitrate the exchange. It was almost enough to make an old, anxious pirate, go a-reaching for his sidearm.
Yet again, it was a new age. New ideas, bottled in old hulks.
Much like Corin himself.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
Location: Unmarked Unioner Container Transport (Formally the ALG Balletdanserinde) Transport last seen under its own power in Unioner possession heading out of tracked space in Cologne, Rheinland Space. Unusual cargo containers attached.
The Rheinland goverment had made an art out of hazardous materials storage. ALG had created the patants and the Federals had raided the office. That was the virtue of a state that had forged itself upon the premise of equality under the guidance of wealth and power and had stretched the compromise as far as it could go. Nobody was the victor - not least the ghouls who had been trafficked through the dark regions of central Rheinland in these containers, after the purge.
It was all ancient history now, though. The lockboxes that had carried alien horror were now devoted to the comparatively mundane hazards of ions, ionisers, and everyone who would prefer to live the rest of their lives without becoming as infertile as a maltese plantation owner. Rheinland's ships, souls, idiolects - all resembled tortoises - hunched and cowering - not out of fear, but of pragmatism. They knew exactly how harsh the void could be.
Voices echoed down the plasteel gangways that hid the vast network of pipes and sensors that kept the neutron beams in check. There was nothing new under the stars - most of the technological concepts on display here were fringing a thousand years antique. But age, by itself, did not inspire confidence to two young nuclear technicians hauling half a million credits worth of Zeeman Slower down the tube.
"Watch it, Paul, frick! It's worth more than you are."
"Get off my ass. They built these units at Freeport Five. They live and breathe radiation."
"You really want to risk getting stuck on latrine labour for the rest of the year?"
"Stop talking and walk. Damn it. It's hotter than a whore's thighs in here. Just put it down a moment."
The temperature had been rising around the central cargo area as the transport's refrigeration units - designed to keep cryotubes as frosty as the day they had first left the depot line - struggled with the rolling test cycles of the toroidal particle accelerator. The need to reduce reliance on thermal radiance against the hot soup of the Norddrauwolke had forced the Unioners to ring the connecting structure of the fifteen-story high cargo module with a brace of coolant feedlines and blue-laser active cooling. None of this unduly worried the inventive Krefeld cell - they had been rigging improvised particle accelerators since a Unioner first contemplated using neutrons to kill a man before his body hit the ground. A lack of military-grade components and a difference to systems purloined off-the-shelf from Davos had kept the artisanal super-accelerator breeder, just off the radar enough to avoid attracting attention. Of course, the word would get out - Unioners didn't keep secrets and were famous for their foot-in-mouth honesty, inebriated or not. And you could only smash so many particles as so high a concentration at such a low temperature before you ended up killing everyone aboard.
Which, of course, meant the machine had to be enormous. When aiming for fast, stealthy, comfortable, safe, and cheap, you could only choose two.
The young arbeiters gawped through the observation port into the starboard reaction chamber of a Hel Cruiser - or, at least - that was the original intention of the tube of empty space into which their eyes were fixed, testing their confidence in the magnetic shields. The stripped-down torus of an Artisan gunboat had been bolted into the inner wall - an act of expedient modularity that had been filled with neutron attenuators from a range of ship-to-ship weaponry, retasked as surgical tools. Here, they would be the instruments of creation for a radiance that would outshine the sum of their parts.
"Though the past is scarred and the future untold"
" Be the boot heavy, the vacuum cold."
"I of the Liga, do not fold" "For suits or saints or beggar's gold. Information-Recruitment-Message Dump-Feedback
Location: Unmarked Unioner Container Transport (Formally the ALG Balletdanserinde) Transport moored at Krefeld Base, Cologne, Rheinland Space. Unusual cargo containers attached.
Grim hours of sweat and toil had proven their worth - they had been hard, but never so hard that men and minds were pushed into uncorrectable mistakes. That was a 'perk' that the Unioners, if you could call it an advantage, had over much of the underworld's sweatshops, silt-lunged asteroid tunnels and crude, improvisatory foundries - you only slaved as hard as you chose to, to the edge of the line and no more. The residual memory of activism and what it meant to stand up for the self, and the group, as one, stuck with each John Doe Unionist, even in the rat-run of blackened plasteel and circuitry that comprised all but the most artisanal Unioner interiors - a functional mash of pressure-plates, welds, and function that held a form through the fact that it worked - and would continue to work, for tens of thousands of man-hours.
The fission core. The prime component for one of the oldest devices of man's power over creation still of grievous technological relevance. Nuclear technology had come a long way since smashing plutonium atoms together, but the concept remained. An instantaneous, sudden sun.
The Oganesson - a syntheic element so virulently unstable that it would halve into furious energy within a glimmer of an instant if it wasn't being actively contained by one thousand years of human experience with managing wayward particles - glowed through its electron reductive jacket - the lasers inside the cyclotron chilling the fissile mass as close to absolute zero as the condensate around the stunningly radioactive mass would allow. If the field failed, everyone in the chamber would be flashed dead as neutrons cascaded through their cells till they ripped apart at the seams. Five metres away from the epicentre radioactivity measured zero on the rather palliative dosimeters that would, if they all did their jobs as trained, have little need for. If anything went drastically wrong, they wouldn't have the time to check the dial on their sleeves.
Of course - logic be damned. When the containment cap slotted into place on the warhead's storage jacket, a sigh of bottled restraint echoed around the powersuit comms.
The Initiator didn't look like much of a missile yet - especially not a weapon of mass destruction - such things often appeared incongruous. The submunitions, antimatter initiated charge and the Technetium flechettes that would do much of the wetwork when punched into structural alloy by the pressure of a multi-gigatonne comet-cracker of a nuclear bomb, were missing. But the heart of the MIRV, - the heavy elements of the warhead core, had been stitched together. The rest was simple spacecraft technology - a field the Unioners knew well and modern nanomanufacturing made trivial.
If fate has a vengeful streak, they will reach their deployment site, in mere hours. Against the case, a Unioner with a flare for the literary had painstakingly scrawled in black plastic marker an old, earthly poem:
Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
"Though the past is scarred and the future untold"
" Be the boot heavy, the vacuum cold."
"I of the Liga, do not fold" "For suits or saints or beggar's gold. Information-Recruitment-Message Dump-Feedback