The door to a medium sized office swings open and promptly falls off one of it's hinges; the door hanging on for dear life from it's sole remaining hinge.
"Looks like we've still got some work to do around here." mumbled a well-kept man around the hanging cigarette in his mouth. His piercing blue eyes were examining the damage to the door. "Guess I shouldn't be surprised, considering how long this damn place sat abandoned."
He sighed walking away from the door, paging one of the repair crews to inform them of the damage to the office before he dropped the bag to the floor that had been slung over his shoulder. He'd just flown from Omicron Delta to Tau-23 through some rather risky star systems with limited firepower, no cloak, and no jump drive. The skeleton crew who were onboard the ship during the flight had their nerves frayed too. These were scientists and engineers, not battle-hardened fighters.
"Need to have Dr. Wright take a look at the coils on that jump drive before we take it out again. Need to make sure the damn thing can jump quickly if we need it to. So much to do, never enough time to do it." he said plopping down in his desk chair, leaning back, and closing his eyes. "What a beautiful day for science." he said with a subtle smile as he drifted off to sleep.
By the following morning we find that Brad had been wondering around the station for the better part of a half hour looking for the directors office, having just arrived overnight as well. There was, however, an appalling lack of signage on the station. From a distinct lack of a directory. To missing evacuation pods. Even the exit signs were missing, no doubt the work of copper thieves. Then of course there were the dreary walls, and in a few places something that looked disturbingly like blood stains. "My Eris what did I get myself into here." Brad muttered to no one in particular, once again finding himself at an unlit dead-end of a corridor.
Sighing loudly before continuing on in a different direction Brad's mutter rose to something that might resemble a rasp, the same sort of rasp that one might have after smoking for decades. "and where is the director, asks me to show up and present myself, but to what or who is anyone's guess." His voice dropped out, he had turned down another nondescript corridor and was pleasantly surprised to find light casting itself out of a room, although slightly worryingly the door appeared to be hanging on by one of its hinges, about to collapse onto the floor. An apt description of the stations sturdiness as a whole. Brad stretched out a hand to knock on the clinging doorframe before thinking better of it.
"Uh," Brad cleared his throat momentarily before continuing by calling into the open doorframe "KNOCK KNOCK, anybody home?"
It felt like mere seconds when he heard someone loudly say "Knock knock" as if it were the sick opening to a knock knock joke. Sailas promptly sat bolt upright in his chair. The rear wheel snapped, sending the chair cartwheeling backwards and sending him to the floor.
"Fucking hell. Even the damn chairs are falling apart in this place." he said more to himself than to his visitor. He stood up dusting himself off as if he hadn't just fallen on the floor in front of a new hire. "Yes, yes. Come in come in. I'd offer you a seat but it seems the only one I have right now is falling apart as much as our station is at the moment...but not to worry," Sailas said with a wink. "we're working on on fixing that up as we speak. Doctor Brandon Wright I presume?" he said holding out his hand.
Brad appeared elated on confirmation that this was indeed the room he was looking for. "Ah yes," he gleefully grasped at Sailas' hand and shaking it a few times firmly. "I am the one and only. And you," Brad leaned in close, as if about to share some grand secret. "Are the one and only Doctor Montgomery, leader of this rather, ramshakle consortium." Brad leaned back and laughed heartily, "Course your message had said something to the effect of the general looks of the place. Little did I know." Brad reached into one of his pockets and produced a tablet. "I've already put out a call for my dedicated supply vessel, The Hellespont Tara. Bob's a good captain, runs a clean ship, I'm sure you'll like him. But it may be a few days until he gets here and a few more after that to get settled into the swing of things." Brad added the tablet to the growing pile on the desk. "You'll be a dear and make sure he gets paid won't you?" Brad laughed again and produced another tablet from another pocket, "Now we'll let the children work on getting this place all fit and ready, let's be the adults and work on the big picture." Brad cleared a few notifications from the screen then opened a blank page. "What is today's miracles request from the boss?"
"Not to worry, the people you bring on-board under you will be paid well for their assistance, as will you." Sailas said walking towards the door and motioning for Dr. Wright to follow. As they left the office and walked down the hallway to the room next door. "Ikarus Station, as it will eventually be called, was once a Junker storage facility. It's name was a mistake by the previous owner intending to call the station Kusari Storage Facility 03 but messed up on the lettering outside. So the name sort've stuck. It's been abandoned for years. The exact amount of time, I'm unsure of. Records indicate it hasn't had anyone dock for close to a year-and-a-half, however."
The two entered the office next door to the one the exited from. Sailas flicked a light switch but the light refused to come on. Sailas pounded his fist near the light socket hard enough to rattle the frame. The light reluctantly flickered on. He made a satisfied sound as he turned his attention to a large board situated in the rear of the room.
"This is your office. Don't worry, we'll get the lights working properly. I was using this room as the planning room initially as I didn't have room for this board in mine."
The white board had many things written down including a chart indicating the plans for the station, future research opportunities, theories, and other things. It looked like chaos, but Sailas understood where everything fell in regards to the future plans for both Ikarus Station and the SLRC.
"Looks like chaos, right?" he said with a chuckle scratching the back of his head. "I guess it sort've is. What you see here is the future of the SLRC. First things first, we need to get this place back to operational status. We're well on our way to doing that already. We've got crews working around the clock fixing things."
As Sailas said this, a crew of five men walked by headed for Sailas' office to repair the door. "Hey, boys." he called out leaning out the door. "After the door, I need you to check the lighting circuit in this room here, seems to be a short somewhere." the men grunted acknowledgement and continued to their work on the door.
"Anyway, once the station is operational we need to work on expanding. I have some resources still, around 1.5 billion credits from various grants given from different parties, but it's going to dry up soon. We need to get some research going to help fund other projects. We must ensure however that the research we sell is not dangerous and will not cause any societial breakdowns due to the items contained therein. I'm sure you know what I'm referring to in regards to that statement. We also recently purchased and docked a Nephilim Colony Ship. She's seen some combat and needs a little bit of work, but it will function nicely as a mobile research platform for deep space missions. Beyond that, we have a few agreements and a loose ally in the Starfliers. Leon is a good friend, and knows his stuff. So we can count on them for assistance if we request it. Beyond that, it's open ended. I'm always open to suggestions, however. Where do you see us going in the future? Where would you like to see us go? I'm all ears. It's always good to hear suggestions from a new individual recently welcomed. Fresh eyes are always good." Sailas queried.
Brad chuckled lightly, "Well for starters this place needs a general overhaul. Then of course there's the usual diplomatic games, no doubt we'll need to let the locals know that 'here we are', so to speak." Brad started to tap away diligently on the pad. "Now to a certain extent I do appreciate the high and mighty 'thou shall not build weapons beyond the conception of human imagination', but existentially speaking we can never know the true results of any of our research. After all was Alfred Nobel thinking of war and strife when he invented dynamite. Certainly not." Brad paused again, looking over the room thoughtfully. "We can only ever try our best and I think our best needs to start with this station. Overhauling a Neph, even a recently used one" Brad stopped for a moment to scratch at his head. "On the order of tens of billions of credits. And we're going to ignore our staffing issues for the moment, and the lack of a shipyard with which to conduct said overhaul..." He lapsed into an unhappy silence. "Of course" Brad continued, "I'm not saying no. But I think our more immediate concerns should revolve around this station, recruitment, and everyone's favorite, funding." Brad tapped a set of new icons on the pad. "Now, my surveys do bring in a fair bit of credits, but after general upkeep, salaries, and the occasional bad day; well its certainly not going to put a full plate of anything on the table, not consistently anyways."
"What I have seen a lot of recently is scientific reporting on our local Baxter Object. Now gathering data is quite the pain, and only the most recent data will do. But these reports I'm told are what some other research esq entities are collecting for resale on the open market. Now of course the primary goal should be to get the station up and running, but I do believe these reports will be our ticket to stable funding for the future."
"Agreed on all counts." Sailas said returning his gaze to the board. His attitude shifted from carefree to a serious tone, his eyebrows furrowing in the process. "The station is, of course, our primary priority. In the coming days I expect us to make much progress towards this goal if not completion of this goal. The station has already come quite a way since we wrested control of the station to ourselves with the aid of the Starfliers."
Sailas paused for a few moments, his eyes drifting methodically over the board. His analytical mind analyzing the flowchart he had drawn.
"While the Nephilim will take some time to overhaul, I do have an ace up my sleeve, so to speak. Before I left Cambridge University, I took much of my research with me as a condition of my employment there was that I would be permitted to take my research with me if I ever decided to depart. This research data may prove valuable enough to fund the retrofit of the Nephilim. Even with that being the case however..." Sailas paused. He crossed his arms, closed his eyes, and leaned back his head as he took a deep breath. "It may be more prudent to utilize that research in advancing "Ikarus Station" once repairs are complete. Things such as research laboratories, a shipyard for ship maintenance and retrofit, biodomes to be more self-sufficient, and shielded ablative armor to protect the station from the anomaly field just outside. Once we have that completed, we can begin selling the data we compile. To be safe, I'd like to compile 2,500 petabytes of data before we move forward with selling any data." Sailas opened his eyes and looked to Dr. Wright with a serious tone. "The safe data, Dr. Wright. I'm firm on that point. Anything that can be used in a destructive manner is to be held in reserve not for ourselves, but to prevent mankind from continuing to kill one another. I will not become another Dr. Oppenheimer nor the destroyer of worlds."
Sailas stood in silence for a period of time, composing his thoughts.
"In regards to our staffing issues, we do have some low level scientists that have come onboard recently. None that meet the level of experience and knowledge that you and I do, however. While that is the case, they are still invaluable members of our team and will be treated as such. I'm sure you will agree on that point."
"indeed, when I refer to staffing" Brad picked up from Sailas, "I mean the actual day to day, er, shenanigans" Brad had happened upon on of his more favorite words he had learned from the great repositories of Goddess Geode. "yes, shenanigans. I'm talking the cooks, the cleaners, the pumpkin eaters." Brad gave a hearty chuckle to his own joke. "In any case I do believe we have at least reached a consensus of our next move. Repair the station, introduce our self to the neighborhood, make credits. It seems simple enough" Brad typed away on his data pad again, "I say we meet again in a few weeks to discuss our progress. In the mean time I'll keep you apprised of my own research and progress on our reporting channel. Unless of course there is anything else pressing?
Several weeks had gone by and things were finally starting to move. There was ample progress on the IFF for the station and getting it to display the correct Affiliation and name. The base was fully repaired and things were moving along.
"Just one more step for mankind." Sailas mumbled to himself as he looked over the progress reports from various departments:
The Nephilim remained docked at the station without any of it's retrofit being done as of yet. Luckily they'd patched it up enough to at least jump if the needs warranted it. The engineers were certain of it's capacity for sustained flight.
The Gallic Liner they'd found had exploded near the Languedoc Jump Gate (luckily no one had been killed), it's death the result of extensive damage to the superstructure and the fusion reactor overloading due to the stress. The engineers swore up and down that the ship had been flight worthy and it's explosion was a mystery to them. Something to look further into in the coming weeks.
Research had been moving quickly in various fields surrounding the Baxter anomalies in system. Although the more research that went on, the more questions that cropped up without any real means of solutions. This was frustrating the scientists under his employ and many were on the verge of burnout.
The coffers were starting to run dry. He didn't want to concern anyone, but if things didn't start looking up soon, he'd have to start paying people of his own accounts. He had no problem doing so, but it wasn't the hallmark of a successful business, no matter their field of study.
"Be a scientists they said, run your own company they said..." he said rubbing his face as he talked through his hands. He put them down and looked over the documents again. "Once the station upgrades are complete, we can really start making some money to fund various research tasks...but that's not something that's going to happen overnight. We need to move faster if we're going to get to that point."
So much of Ikarus has been refurbished, and in some places expanded, since Dr. Sailas Montgomery brought it back to operational status. However, due to the sheer pace of development, new construction was prioritized on an "as-needed" basis. Usually new labs, storage and testing facilities are what gets set up first, then the requisite accommodations for the personnel who'll be using them. Aspen Harlow, lucky as they were, arrived aboard the station in the midst of new facilities expansion - personnel accommodations were thus languishing at the bottom of the queue. This lead to many fun nights of sleeping in the hangar aboard their Spatial.
It wasn't that it was uncomfortable, though. Aspen slept decently in their ship on the regular at most of the other docks they'd visited around the sector, well-equipped for modest comfort during long voyages. They didn't sleep as well here, though, and it was leaving them crankier than usual. Maybe having to walk and take elevators the whole length of the station to get to residential for breakfast and back wasn't so great. Or, maybe they felt like they didn't truly belong on-board, this place for grizzled veteran physicists, engineers and scientific pioneers. --Would my own office change that?--, they had wondered.
They had occasion to find out. Aspen's little coffee request on the side turned massive Sunbucks brand expansion, embarrassing for them, at least got their name around the base crew. Falling in with some of the various Zoners and House expats there to work as technicians, assistants and other staff, a little circle of acquaintances was built up around them. And when it comes to refurbishing a set of quarters ahead of the maintenance schedule, many hands make for light work.
It'd take a while to pay off in terms of favors to their new crewmates, but after a whole four days of tough remodeling with them to soup up one of the untouched habs, Aspen had carved out a little space on-board. It couldn't be called "home", not quite yet. No nameplate outside the door, nowhere to hang their degree, no furniture at all and their personal effects were still on the ship. --But every good change starts small--, they thought, surveilling the empty space.