by Jyr, Aer-ki
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 th
e 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.
That was already happening across Star Force territory, for Clan warships weren’t always returning to Clan facilities for repair work. They were all a team and helped each other out as necessary, so that didn’t violate the exclusion protocol for the Clans, but if the Snowstorms wanted to acquire new vessels they’d either have to produce them themselves or trade with the other Clans. New drones could not be supplied from Mainline facilities.
So deals had been made to compensate for that snag, because Oni insisted that the Clan was not taking a ‘timeout’ from the ongoing lizard war. She’d been adamant that they not scale back military operations at all, but they were going to start centering around this star system in the coming years. The sooner Sheen got a working shipyard built, no matter how small, the better Oni would feel, hence it was one of her top priorities.
Getting a major shipyard established was more of a dream at this point than a workable goal, but Oni had already slated one of the insane Sol-level facilities for their future plans, though Sheen knew that such a monstrosity was going to soak up so many resources that it wasn’t going to be viable in the next 50 years, minimum.
They’d talked for hours upon hours about what the trailblazer’s future plans for the Clan were, and they were nothing short of ridiculously ambitious. She seemed to think that with isolation came opportunity, and absent the few Trials they would be participating in back in Sol everything competitive here had to come from within, and with their own brand new oceans to play in, aquatics was going to be their first major push.
That was why they’d dropped a huge amount of resources into prefabricated surface facilities that had already allowed aquatics craft a home on the shore of the primary site. Even as initial underwater construction was ongoing training missions were being held and obstacle courses set up. Oni wanted to see them rise in the ranks within two years in that category, and was devoting a lot of resources to get the type of facilities set up that had been impossible to create on the barren, rocky worlds they’d possessed in Sol.
Had Sheen been making the call, training would have come in as a distant consideration, but Oni wanted it first and foremost, even before sufficient housing was built for the Clan’s population. The Marquis knew that getting basic quarters built for every single person was the right way to go before expanding out to other infrastructure projects and had argued against the fact that they could live on the jumpships for a considerable length of time if necessary.
Oni had nixed that, stating that they couldn’t let their people grow stagnant with the limited training facilities onboard the jumpships and that when they had a full planet to play with now they were going to take advantage of that from the beginning, reminding the Marquis that this was to be an active transition.
That word was going to come back to haunt her, Sheen knew, for what Oni wanted across the board was more than just a challenge…it was nuts. She had no way of knowing how much of what the trailblazer wanted was possible, for there were too many variables to consider. The only way forward was to get her ass on site and start working the problems one by one and see where it all led.
So now she was here, sitting in her orbital castle overseeing the ever growing army of workers beginning to transform a pinprick of the moon into a bastion of Clan Snowstorm civilization. Meanwhile the other Clans continued to grow, some by leaps and bounds considering what they’d just acquired from them. In the short term it seemed like a huge step backwards for Snowstorm, not just a transition, but Oni was adamant that this was going to work and that was enough for Sheen to pour everything she had into the effort.
But if this didn’t work, and work well, her Clan was going to be diminished to an insignificant blip within Star Force.
4
July 3, 2811
Solar System
Earth
Sean-939221 ran up to the entrance of the final chamber along with two of his teammates, Vlad-939228 and Sarah-939225, taking cover amongst the crooked halls as they scouted what was beyond…seeing the large open chamber with a low wall on the other side and the holographic icon floating over top of it, marking the end of the trainees’ Final Challenge and their graduation from basic training. They’d already spent more than a day surviving the twists and turns of the labyrinth they had to fight their way through, and now the 100 of them were almost to the end, with the rest mopping up some mobile drones that had sniped down a few stragglers.
Those trainees were being recovered and reawakened from the stun hits, for everyone made it to the finish line or no one did. That wasn’t a rule per se, but it was how everyone felt, and regardless of whether it was one of Sean’s 2s or any of the other teams, all 100 trainees were equally committed to completing this challenge and becoming Archons. In a rarity over the past three years, they weren’t competing against each other. This time they were all on the same side and the course was the enemy…and then some.
“Damn it, looks like Dash was right,” Sarah commented, seeing the lone figure in the room ahead waiting for them. “That bastard is just standing there waiting for us.”
“Wouldn’t feel right if he wasn’t here,” Sean commented, seeing the Black Knight waiting with stun sword in hand. Whether or not he’d spotted them peeking around the corner was unknown, but if he had he’d chosen to stay put, still as a statue, and literally daring them to come to him.
Which they had to.
Sean ran his pale fingers through his bleach blonde hair. “Let’s stay out of sight until we figure out how to deal with this.”
“There are 100 of us and 1 of him,” Vlad countered. “We just rush the mother.”
“You really think it’s going to be that easy?” Sarah asked.
“Probably not,” Vlad admitted, glancing around the room, or what he could see of it from his position. “Walls look clear, so if there’s any turrets they’ll be hidden inside.”
“He’s probably just the bait and that whole room is a kill zone,” Sarah floated.
“We need to find out for sure,” Sean suggested as another pair of trainees caught up to them and hunkered down behind them in their white with blue
stripe uniforms, one of which had a pair of blue paint smears on his left hip more than 12 hours old.
“What’s up?”
“Our old friend is here,” Sean said, stepping back so they could have room to look themselves.
“Shit. Like this wasn’t hard enough already.”
“We think there’s probably concealed turrets,” Sarah said as more of them began to catch up with the scouts, some armed with pistols, others with stun sticks and grenades.
“I’ll go,” Sean offered. “Just be sure to drag me across the finish when it’s over.”
Sarah frowned. “Go and do what? You really think the turrets will come out just for you? If I were the trainers I’d hold them back until most of us got in there.”
“She has a point,” Krich-939281 said, placing a restricting hand on Sean’s shoulder.
“Got any better ideas?”
“Make it a trio,” someone else suggested, tossing a shield up and over the heads of the others that Sean grabbed out of midair.
“Thanks,” he said, bringing the 3/4th length narrow piece of armor up in front of him. It’d do well to stop any incoming stingers, so long as they were shooting him from the front and didn’t hit his feet. He could crouch down to cover but would have a hard time maneuvering around, though he’d done it before. Adding two more similarly equipped trainees would allow them to turtle up in a technique they’d developed early on in their training to beat the pesky hidden turrets that the trainers seemed to place everywhere.
