Star Force: Ghostblade (SF67) (3 page)

The truck passed over them and headed for the small
open section that had been cleared and leveled, then it opened its bottom doors
and dumped the full load in the center of it. The vehicle shot into the air a
moment before the anti-
grav
compensated, then it
closed its doors and headed on the return trip as a third mech woke from its
statue-like stance and headed over to the pile, intending to work it down into
a meter thick bed, compacting it with a series of rollers in order to lay the
base for an artificial mountain they’d be constructing.

In the future that mountain would be cannibalized and
eaten away by processing machines for raw materials, but right now those
facilities hadn’t been built yet and wouldn’t be coming online for weeks at the
minimum. Right now the digging crews from multiple sites needed somewhere to
put the dirt, and this would be it.

Over the next 24 hours there would be more mechs and
trucks coming into play as the influx of personnel arrived to run the machines,
which would also be added to by subsequent orbital drops. It would be awhile
before surface factories started making any useable projects, meaning that
right now it was all about earthmoving and setting up some basic, permanent
facilities built from materials being shipped down from the jumpships sitting
in orbit around the enormous moon.

And there were sites like this all across the island,
most of which were just getting up and running. Sophia really had gotten here
at the outset, and while this planet was definitely still on the frontier and
very wild, with every bit of dirt she moved was helping to make it into their
new home. The feelings of unrest at having to abandon
Arwen
would never totally leave her, but now having a hand in the construction of
this world she was able to put aside the constant worry and dive into the work,
for helping her Clan was her foremost priority, and if this was the course that
Oni wanted for them, then so be it.

It might still be a stupid move but it was the
trailblazer’s to make, and the Snowstorms would make it work eventually, no
matter how much they lost in the transition.

3

December 2, 2783

Frost System
(Bsidd Region)

Flake

Marquis Sheen sat at her workstation onboard the jumpship
Polar Veil
, a Clan cargo ship that
was already half empty after only a week of unloading, which
was
quite a feat
considering its size. It was a product of Clan Humungousaur
and had been traded to Sheen’s Clan along with a lot of other equipment and payment
promises going forward for part of their territory on Titan. The cargo ship
design was the largest within Star Force, but had a disproportionate amount of
its bulk dedicated to engines, making it more maneuverable and a touch faster
than your traditional jumpships.

It wasn’t cheap, by any stretch of the imagination,
and economically speaking you could have built 5
Mammoth
-class cargo ships for the same amount of resources, which
was why Mainline and most of the Clans had never bothered to go that route. As
more technologies were unlocked from the pyramid the size of Star Force’s ships
was getting larger and larger, but the Humungousaurs had taken the leap forward
without the necessary tech and gotten around the lack thereof through
innovation and by cannibalizing a good part of what would have been storage
areas for additional engine power and other ship functions.

The
Island
-class
design definitely lived up to its name, and while there were only 16 in
existence this one alone had brought in its holds enough foodstuffs and
collapsed prefab buildings to set up the next expansion site on Flake by
itself. The primary site in the ocean was progressing well, but now that Sheen
was here with a much larger fleet they were going to start construction efforts
on a number of other sites across the moon. All would be resource gathering
operations while the ocean island was going to be the focal point for the
influx of population and technology to come. She knew she had to get its
factories up and running before the surge of raw materials began arriving, and
so far everything was proceeding according to the schedule she and Oni had
worked out.

The trailblazer and several other Administrators would
be overseeing the rest of the evacuation of their facilities in Sol while the
Marquis was now here in Frost to stay. Oni had wanted her here early and she’d
agreed that the events of the coming months had to come off without a hitch
else they’d risk jeopardizing the transition. Cities couldn’t build themselves,
and without proper infrastructure there wouldn’t be room to put Clan
Snowstorm’s population when it fully arrived. As it was they were going to have
to make use of a lot of prefab settlements just to get the people off the ships
initially, with the permanent structures soaking them up as they eventually
came online.

Oni knew this was going to be a camping trip these
first few years, and it was imperative that they hold to the evacuation
schedules that they’d negotiated with the other Clans. If they had to delay the
others wouldn’t penalize them for that, for the Clans weren’t cutthroat with
each other, but they were professional and not meeting the deadline was
something that just wouldn’t do. Each Clan had its own objectives within the
Empire and would be making schedules of its own with regards to the new
acquisitions, so if the Snowstorms couldn’t hold up to what they’d promised
they’d mess up a lot of other Clans’ plans.

That was unacceptable, for the Clans didn’t sabotage
each other. They always wanted to outdo each other, but that was from sheer
performance. The stronger each Clan became the stronger Star Force would be
overall, so the impetus was always on improvement and success, never
destruction and hampering one another. Sheen knew this better than virtually everyone
else because she’d been running the Clan for the past 129 years. Technically
Oni was in command, but as a warrior needed she was off fighting most of the
time and only kept in contact to stay appraised of ongoing events and to
troubleshoot new endeavors going forward.

The routine business of keeping the Clan running
smoothly was the job of a Marquis, with the administratorial position requiring
constant oversight. Having all Snowstorm possessions within a single star
system had allowed her to micromanage to a far greater extent than the Clans
that had pieces of planets across the ADZ in their possession, and it would be
no different here. The lag in communications was mere minutes compared to the
days and weeks elsewhere.

Right now there was a split, because the Frost System
wasn’t even hooked up to the grid yet, meaning all communications had to come
through courier ship. That necessitated her presence here and other
Administrators back in Sol, for one couldn’t keep track of the other, even on
relative delay, without the communications grid link. Here was the more
important task so here Sheen had come, and the
Polar Veil
was making for the perfect orbital command post now that
the cargo was flowing out of its holds and numerous prefab structures were being
set up in the empty spaces, creating a makeshift city inside that would grow
with select personnel as they came in.

And here she would stay until the primary surface site
reached a prerequisite level of completeness…which wasn’t expected to occur for
the next seven years. This entire move was a gambit that would have the
Snowstorms reduced to a nomadic existence in the near future, and it was one
that Sheen had not wanted to undertake. Oni had eventually convinced her of the
long term advantage and the Marquis had agreed to accept it as a challenge,
though they were giving up everything they had built up in Sol for the
opportunity.

That development was what was now funding this
opportunity. Director Davis was still masterminding all territorial expansions
along with the trailblazers and had told Oni that he wasn’t going to allow for
such a valuable and distant acquisition of the system unless they could do
better at developing it than any of the other factions. In fact they were so
close to the lizard border that well over 60% of the Clan Snowstorm fleet now
sat in orbit to safeguard the construction efforts. The rest was out helping
the Bsidd fight the lizards on nearby worlds and would continue to do so going
forward, with their Clan literally putting down roots in this frontier region
and taking a personal interest in its defense.

Such a determined effort was what had convinced Davis
to agree to Oni’s request, but he wasn’t going to fund the transfer. The Clan
had to do that on their own, and per the terms of the origination of the Clans they
couldn’t trade with anyone other than each other. That stipulation had relaxed
in times of need in order to benefit the overall Empire, but the principle held
true to this day so they couldn’t hire out or purchase equipment from anyone
other than their fellow 99 Clans, and vice versa.

The idea was to keep the Clans isolated from the rest
of Star Force so that any disruptions in the overall economy, or even a massive
invasion into the ADZ, wouldn’t affect them in terms of their production
capacity. Relying on the larger economy was a strength at times, but also a
weakness…and it was a weakness the Clans had been designed to circumvent.

Given that all of the trailblazers were essentially
clones of one another, the Clans had developed along the same philosophies that
they all shared. That said, competition between them had garnered alterations
to be made that distinguished one from another. The choice to keep all
territory within Sol had been one of those deciding factors for Clan Snowstorm,
but there were also some structural differences as well.

Early on Oni had wanted Snowstorm to be
self-sufficient, but above and beyond what they all had decided was necessary
for the Clans. Originally the groupings had been developed to facilitate Archon
training and advancement through competition, but when Davis had insisted that
they be expanded into miniature empires of their own Oni had made
infrastructure redundancy a top priority. She’d wanted them making everything
themselves rather than having to trade with their fellow Clans, but then again
that’s the way all of them operated.

What she had done differently was to instruct her
previous Marquises to build planetary infrastructure with an obsessive
redundancy and to keep their production levels at approximately 60% capacity.
Rather than upping that productivity when needed, they’d build more facilities
to compensate for the growth. From a certain point of view that had been
wasteful, but she wanted the ability to absorb bad scenarios with their current
assets rather than being forced into a situation where they had to deal with
shortages or rely on trade with the other Clans.

Several other Clans had taken the same approach, each
with a different percentage as protocol, but Clan Snowstorm, Clan Emerald
Shark, and Clan Apex had
collabed
with each other on
a development project that would take the infrastructure redundancy to the next
level. Oni, Roger, and Wes had done most of the work themselves, in secret, and
designed modular add-ons to the standard drone docking berths on warships and
other carrier craft. These were more than just docked ships, and required a
layover at a shipyard of scale to accomplish, but if you had one sitting ready
it would allow you to convert a warship or hybrid cargo vessel into a mobile
factory within days.

These pseudo MCVs were not designed to build new
infrastructure from scratch, but rather to produce specific high end produce
just as if they were a factory on the surface of a planet or an orbital
facility. The three Clans hadn’t shared the designs with anyone else, though
word of them eventually spread after a few decades of limited use and a few
copycat projects sprung up, but neither the original mods nor their designs
were ever offered up as trade, and all three Clans went about building their
own industrial mods and quietly storing them away in stasis orbits should a
time come that they would need them.

Over the years Clan Oni had sold off about a third of
their mods to the Emerald Sharks and Apexes, given their Sol-only territorial
move. The other Clans were able to put them to more use as they expanded to new
systems, able to fly the factories there and have them continue production
immediately so long as they were given the necessary raw resources via supply
flow. Oni had instructed Sheen to always hold back a sufficient supply of them
should there be a need…and now there was, more so than ever before.

The Marquis had been in negotiation with the other two
Clans to buy or trade for more of the mods, resulting in a sum total of 245% of
their original number, many of which had entered the system along with the
Polar Veil
and were already spinning up
production. Everything from fuel to foodstuffs would start to be made locally
to supplement their cargo stores, and the flow of raw materials would also be
coming in as other Clans would be sending shipments to them in exchange for
what Clan Snowstorm was leaving behind.

There were hundreds of deals that had been made, some
by Oni herself, but a lot by Sheen on her behalf. Oni would often tell her what
she wanted and the Marquis would make the contacts and see what was available,
though sometimes the trailblazer could directly acquire things that Sheen never
could, simply because of her relationship with the other trailblazers. Together
they had spent more than 2 years hammering out deals, with many of them
detailing that the production of natural resources within the territories being
transferred would be shared at a rate of 50% for the first ten years, then 25%
for the following five.

That would mean for the next decade several other
Clans would be sending half their mining produce from the transferred
territories to the Snowstorms, and would be responsible for the shipping
themselves. That meant the Marquis wouldn’t have to be relying on just the
infantile surface production to supply the modular ship factories with the
materials they required, and other deals had been made for them to receive
finished products from other Clans, giving them a supply flow to suck off of
while they got around to building what they needed on Flake.

This entire operation had been designed, not as a
startup operation, but an active transfer from one location to another. There
was a lot of loss happening in the transition, but the Clan was still going to
remain very active…or at least that was the plan, and Sheen was here to bring
it to life as much as she could while Oni was off fighting lizards with the
Bsidd or who knew what other projects she had cooked up with the other
trailblazers. Most of the time her Marquis didn’t know exactly where she was or
what she was doing, but then again she didn’t have to, for the relay grid sent
out duplicate messages to every receiver station, on which they were then
stored for infinity.

Sheen had her work and the trailblazer had hers, but
together they were going to make this move happen, and if Oni was right, their
Clan was going to shoot into the upper ranks a century or so from now. For a
lot of people that seemed like forever, but to the Clan it wasn’t, and to Sheen
it was a lot of work ahead of her but the timeframe didn’t seem unreasonable.
In the meantime their warfleet would be working out of other ports, some Clan,
some Mainline, some Bsidd, for refitting, rearming, and resupply in lieu of the
fact that as of soon Clan Snowstorm wouldn’t have a shipyard large enough to
accommodate anything larger than a drone destroyer.

They had brought along several MRVs that were
jumpships that had been modified to act as small-scale shipyards, capable of
repairing extensive battle damage on the smaller drones in short order, but
they only had a handful and the larger vessels couldn’t fit within their tiny
slips, meaning that any work done on them would have to be ‘by hand’ and would
take forever, hence the deals made with the other Clans and factions within
Star Force to compensate in the meantime.