Story by Geoff Tuffli

• Back to the Fiction of ORG

++++ DATE 28.11.2468
++++ TIME 13:43 Station Time
++++ LOCATION Tàiyáng 4 Observation Station, at Mercury's L4 Lagrangian Point

In slightly under three months, the automated resupply ship from Mercury would synchronize its velocity with the Tàiyáng 4 Observation Station, cargo cells in slow, inevitable sequence sliding down the length of the resupply ship's spine, whereupon each would be reclamped to the station's cargo intake port.

The cargo cells - and in truth, there were usually only three or perhaps four for a standard resupply - would disgorge their supplies of vitals, including a substitute caretaker for the observation station for the next six months. Even more importantly, carried in the belly of one of those cargo cells would be a new air save pump to replace the one that had burned out two months ago.

In slightly more than three days, however, Sergei Viktorovich Ulyanov would be dead.

Every breath Sergei took was about 20% pure oxygen by mass; every breath he exhaled consisted of about 15% by mass of pure oxygen for an approximate conversion of 5% to an ultimately lethal, unbreathable CO2. 600 or so liters of pure oxygen went into his lungs every day, and every day something like 150 liters of CO2 would fill the station's air supply.

Under normal circumstances and normal operations, that CO2 would be laboriously but reliably reprocessed back into breathable O2 by assistance from a large air save pump.

That same air save pump that had burned out. Even that, by itself, was not supposed to be a death sentence. The Tàiyáng 4 Observation Station carried with it an emergency supply of CO2 filters for just such an exigency. When the air save pump had burned out, Sergei simply pulled up the hatch on the habitat floor panel, dropping down the long arm as, slowly, the partial gravity of the habitat ring turned into micro-gravity, then no gravity at all in the center section. Sliding along the rails thoughtfully set there for such maneuvers, Sergei pulled out of storage a crate full of CO2 filters, then hauled it back up to the habitat ring.

When Seregi opened the crate he swore softly.

Story by Geoff Tuffli

• Back to the Fiction of ORG

++++ DATE 12.5.2469
++++ TIME 06:22 Borealis Basin North Polar Standard Time
++++ LOCATION Hecatia Terminus Mining Collaborative, in the Borealis Basin of Mars

It had all gone incredibly, terribly wrong.

Havildar 2nd Class Astrid Narayan, Phoenicis Regiment, Company D, Force Section Alpha of the Mars Republic forced herself to relax her death-grip on her flechette pistol.

Holstering her sidearm, Astrid turned her head to get a good look at the entry wound on her left shoulder, but the camo-brown combat suit had already auto-sealed itself, only the sticky puce of the blood and the pounding fire below her collar bone betraying exactly how close she had almost come to dying before the micros in her bloodstream had kicked in to clot the wound.

Astrid pushed herself to her feet, collecting a handful of flechette cartridges from what had remained of her force section.

She tried not to look at their faces, but couldn't quite manage it. That was still better than looking at the faces of the others. The kids were the worst.

As far as her regiment was concerned, she was already dead. With the way things had gone, rescue was impossible, and the moment she tried to signal her location, Free State partisans would undoubtedly pick up the signal and trace it back to her. Hell, Astrid thought. That was probably how they had known where to hit us in the first place.

What had begun as a carefully planned occupation of the subterranean facilities of the Hecatia Terminus Mining Collaborative in the Borealis Basin had quickly turned into a proper cluster fuck almost as soon as her regiment made its insertion. They had gained access via a hastily rehabilitated mining tunnel that ran directly under the main compound, forward teams - including Astrid's own force section - securing the advance of the main force.

It had been impossible to tell who was a bystander and who was a partisan, so as her force section advanced they had had to neutralize absolutely everyone they came across rather than risk the entire operation being put at risk. They'd moved fast and with lethal efficiency, exactly as they'd been trained, taking half a dozen junction points before they felt, rather than heard, the blasts from the mining explosives that brought down the tunnel on half of Astrid's regiment.

The ambush had been exquisitely executed, Astrid thought bitterly.

The com had gone absolutely crazy, as each force section in turn was burned down by Free State partisans, improvised explosives and chemically-treated flechettes tearing through combat suits that could only reduce rather than stop the high-velocity carbon-fiber needles. This last firefight had happened as they had stopped for a moment to catch their breath; a grenade rolled into the room, spitting shrapnel and flechettes over it all. The only thing that had saved Astrid was the partisans getting cocky and moving too quickly into the room, allowing her to pick off both of them with her own weapon.

Her options were all bad. Some were just more bad than others.

Story by Geoff Tuffli

• Back to the Fiction of ORG

++++ DATE 4.4.2469
++++ TIME 23:01 MST
++++ LOCATION Waka Ama shipyards around Makemake, in the Kuiper Belt

Hannah Taylor scrunched up her nose, the combination of dust and bright light causing her eyes to water and threatening a sneeze. She glanced surreptitiously behind to reassure herself that the others were still following her. After concluding to her satisfaction that none of them were straggling too far behind, she pressed on through the dark access tunnel, the dull thrum of the life support systems here only a distant rumble.

"Tutae kuri," muttered Liam Walker. "How much farther are we going, Hannah?"

"Pissing already?" Hannah retorted.

"No," Liam. "I'm no quitter."

"Good. Because..." Hannah paused, stopping at a T-junction. She clipped the light to a service line and pressed her hands to the panel in front of her. Grimacing, she pushed harder, and it moved with a pop. "We're here," she said triumphantly. "Everyone in!"

"About time," a girl named Anahera Hineira Kaa Singh muttered under her breath. Hannah glared daggers at her, and Anahera wilted, looking down at her feet as she ducked into the small room beyond.

"I can't see anything," complained someone.

As the last of the small troupe pushed in, Hannah grabbed the light and stepped in herself, securing the panel behind them. She reaffixed the light to the low ceiling above them, looking around the group. "Well?" she said. "What do you think?"

"What is this place?" Anahera asked, eyes darting around the blackness.

Hannah shrugged. "An old storage room, probably. It doesn't matter."

"It's pressurized, though, isn't it?" Liam asked diffidently.

"Obviously. Or we'd be dead." Hannah looked around at the five of them - three boys, three girls, including herself. "Don't look so worried. Nobody will look for us. It's nightcycle, and everyone is asleep, anyways."

Anahera put down the blanket she was carrying, sitting down gingerly. "This was actually a pretty good idea, Hannah. But what now?"

Hannah tossed her head as she took her own seat. "We tell ghost stories. That's what you're supposed to do when you do things like this."

"There are no ghosts in space," Anahera scoffed.

"You're wrong," Hannah said. "Oh, I'm not saying any ghosts followed our grandparents and great-grandparents when they came here from Earth. But we have ghosts of our own out here. Haven't you ever heard your parents talk about the Kehua Woman?"

Story by Geoff Tuffli

• Back to the Fiction of ORG

++++ DATE 3.3.2470
++++ TIME 07:58 CST
++++ LOCATION Sioux City, State, Earth

"Ms. Cao?"

Maggie Cao looked up at the tap on her door. "That's me. May I help you?"

"Bernard Huxley. State Internal Security." He held up a hand quickly, "Not here for you. Probably," he joked. "This is more in the way of a consultation."

Maggie nodded at the open chair on the opposite side of her desk. "What can I do for you, Mr. Huxley?"

"I am investigating a series of disappearances, and was when I ran an A.I. assisted network search, your name came up as someone who might be able to help. Do you have any idea why?" Bernard asked, settling into the chair with a heavy sigh.

Maggie set aside her terminal, folding her hands in her lap. "I can't imagine."

"As it turns out, I can. I took the liberty of looking you up." Bernard shrugged. "Hazard of my business. I'm sure you understand. Every one of said disappearances has occurred in the course of off-planet travel. Given my own upcoming vacation plans to visit the Water Gardens of Mare City on Luna, I have a personal interest in this as well," he chuckled. "Other than the method of travel, however, no other pattern. None. So now you can see why your name came up."

"Because I am the Chief Transport Logistics Specialist for Roche Industries."

"Exactly. There's no indication of the who or the why, but I am betting you can tell me how, and that might lead me to one of the other questions I am so interested in uncovering. Could you describe for me how personal travel works - logistically speaking?"

Maggie cleared her throat. "Well, it's pretty simple. The system is basically divided into two parts. The part people generally think about is the freighter."

She spread her hands apart until they were about half a meter. "Every freighter is basically an exothermic chemical engine on one end and an emergency crew compartment and bridge on the other, each separated by a rail. The rail is really nothing more than a series of docking ports for cargo cells."

"Not to sound too much the neophyte, but what's a cargo cell?"

In the last Art Diary, we talked about some of the thinking that went in to the Dreadnought class battleship of the 25th century dystopian future of ORG. This time, we're going to go into that even more powerful class of battleship - the Super Dreadnought.

Although similar in form to the smaller Dreadnought class, the Super Dreadnought actually occupies a distinct role. Where the Dreadnought can operate as a mobile command center or light carrier, the Super Dreadnought is designed to do these things over a long period of time, even to the extent of providing diplomatic support and, if necessary, ground bombardment options. Around Mars, State's base of naval operations is not Phobos, but rather the Super Dreadnought battleship the Andrew Jackson, supported by its sister Super Dreadnoughts the Ronald Reagan and the James Monroe.

Three habitat rings allow the Super Dreadnought to maintain three different gravitational norms for the comfort of its crew, and four enormous nuclear reactors provide both a redundancy of power generation as well as the massive electrical energy necessary to support the Super Dreadnought's unparalleled Artificial Magnetosphere Generators, or AMGs. Half again as long and over five times as massive as the Dreadnought class, the Super Dreadnought class is a monster of both defensive and offensive weaponry, claiming not only the largest bank of HED Lances of any class of ship (though, it should be noted, not by mass ratio), but an unparalleled mobile capacity for tactical nuclear launchers, as well as hangar bays capable of handling drones or fighters, or some combination of both, depending on the particular outfitting of the ship in question.

Continue on for the full article with additional pre-textured schematics and a breakdown of the naval design of the main dedicated crewed military battleship of the 25th century solar system.

In much the way that Triton served as a center of operations for colonization of much of the outer reaches of the solar system, so too did Pluto come to be the commercial, political, and cultural center of the Kuiper Belt stretching beyond the orbit of Neptune.

•  Plutonian Assembly
• Pluto
• Charon
• Hydra
• Varda
• Ilmare
• Chaos
• Varuna
• Ixion

Settled in 2302, almost a hundred years to the day after Triton's founding, like Triton Pluto was a product of the great Diaspora project conducted by the Oceanic League on Earth, a noble effort to spread humanity far and wide enough that another disaster like the Great Contraction could never again present an existential threat to humanity.

The premier world of the Kuiper Belt, the Plutonian Assembly was the genitive force behind the formation of the Kuiper Compact. Though Xena has since eclipsed Pluto in population, Pluto remains the economic, political, and cultural center of the Kuiper Belt.

Within the Kuiper Compact, the Plutonian Assembly is the most expansionist of the compact's member polities. Though the Plutonian Assembly provides a full half of the compact's military force, not to mention its own substantial naval forces directly under its own control, the primary mechanism for its expansionism is via diplomatic and commercial pressure. Vast sums of money have been devoted to developing Haumea in an effort to nurture that polity into a potential member of the Compact, and more so than any other world in the Kuiper Belt, the Plutonian Assembly has sunk large amounts of resources into building new colonies on other worlds throughout the region.

The Southern Bloc represents the youngest and most vibrant of the great national polities of Earth. Rather than coalescing around a singular cultural identity, the Southern Bloc formed as a direct response to the rise of the powerful states of the post-Great Contraction world; as the nascent polities of State, Union, and the Eastern Federation rapidly expanded in the wake of the global disaster, many smaller nation-states struggled to maintain their independence.

•  Southern Bloc
• Southern Bloc

The horrific events of The Great Contraction in the latter part of the 21st century when nearly 5 billion human beings lost their lives to the varied depredations of war and famine struck Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia harder than almost anywhere else on the globe. Nation-states fell almost overnight as first millions, then tens of millions starved to death or fought a desperate battle for survival in a world gone mad.

The Sino-Russian War of 2105 resulted in the annexation of the better part of Siberia by China, a refocusing that also reflected a general withdrawing of large scale investment in Africa, an action that eventually indirectly triggered the East African Famine of 2122. Although itself brutally ravaged by The Great Contraction, India nevertheless sent a stream of food and medical aid to the East African port of Mobasa that became a lifeline for a population struck again by catastrophe so soon after the events of the 21st century. While India's efforts merely blunted the effects of the famine, the gesture was not forgotten and opened the door to a longterm expansion in mutual trade and cooperation across the Indian Ocean.

By 2140, the People's Republic of China had begun to expand aggressively across Asia, in rapid succession absorbing Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and, most alarming of all, Pakistan. India, alarmed that it would soon become the next target, began to reach out to other polities on the political and military periphery of China.

A collection of national polities including India, Iran, Turkey, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa began to be informally known as "the Southern Bloc", as they tended to provide a unified front against territorial and commercial incursions by both Union and the Eastern Federation. At last, in 2353 the informal coalition became a formal political entity.

Continuing to expand through the Middle East and Africa, the Southern Bloc has steadily expanded its reach, even to the point of extending feelers to Brazil in South America in attempt to extend the reach of the Southern Bloc across the Atlantic Ocean. Even more importantly, in recent decades the Southern Bloc has begun to extend its reach into space, attempting to make up for lost time. While the most desirable real estate through the solar system has already been claimed, the Southern Bloc is the fastest growing polity on Earth in terms of both military and commercial power. Several orbiting stations now construct Southern Bloc-designed dreadnoughts and destroyers, and politically and commercially the Southern Bloc has begun to apply pressure to the Asteroid Belt in an effort to make its influence there a reality.

By 2290 a mix of powerful national polities and multinational corporations that were often de facto laws unto themselves had sponsored colonies and outposts on dozens of worlds throughout the system. The largesse of the early expansion into the solar system was not evenly enjoyed, and among the dispossessed and disenfranchised grew a number of eccentric and at times bizarre ideological and religious movements.

•  Exalted Sanctuary of the Triforce Supremacy
• Nysian Cluster

One of the largest - and certainly oddest - of these neo-religious movements was that of the Triforce Supremacy, by 2290 itself firmly established under the leadership of Dr. Naomi Butler, a doctor of philosophy of the University of Santa Cruz of the regional polity of Pacifica on Earth.

In 2290, Dr. Butler chartered a colonial effort to the Asteroid Belt with the intent of setting up an independent colony free of the political requirements of any government on Earth. Purchasing a moribund mining colony on the asteroid Nysa, her followers became miners first and a self-declared free state the day after, and the Exalted Sanctuary of the Triforce Supremacy was thusly born.

The core beliefs of the Triforce Supremacy center around a humanic approach to technological development eschewing the breathtaking developments of Artificial Intelligence and even, where possible, advanced computer systems at all. Rejecting all but the most basic computer systems, the Triforce Supremacy adapted by developing an extremely sophisticated school of mechanical engineering that while lacking in the response times afforded by modern computer systems maintained a robustness and reliability that was rarely matched throughout the solar system. Even today, while the beliefs of the Triforce Supremacy are the butt of jokes throughout the solar system, mechanical engineers from the Nysian Cluster are respected, if considered exceedingly strange.

Relations with the various polities of the Asteroid Belt are complicated by the fact that no other polity recognizes the Exalted Sanctuary's claim to political independence, and in fact, legally most polities consider the Exalted Sanctuary to be under the jurisdiction of the Independent Republic of Ceres, although Ceres has thus far not chosen to press that claim.

Although temporary bases had been periodically established on Mars before and even sporadically during the hard years of the Great Contraction, permanent settlement on Mars did not occur until 2118 with the establishment of Mariner Base (eventually Mariner City) in the canyons of the Valles Marineris. Corporately controlled with just the right number of government pay-offs to polities back on Earth, the Mars Corporation was the first major human settlement off of humanity's home. The expenses were vast, the risks massive, and at first there was no concept of political independence, but rather commercial and scientific exploitation.

•  Mars Republic
• Olympus Mons
• Valles Marineris
• Deimos

As the population on Mars ballooned over the subsequent decades, the Mars Corporation by necessity took on many of the practical duties of a sovereign nation, simply without the common conceptions of political representation. Colony sites and commercial exploitation were rigidly controlled by the Mars Corporation whose directors began to resent the increasingly peremptory demands of State, under whose law the Mars Corporation was technically founded.

After a series of unsuccessful political maneuvers throughout the 23rd century failed to significantly deter the influence of State, the Mars Corporation took advantage of a severe recession gripping Earth in 2401 opted to nationalize themselves as a means of creating the political pretext necessary to sever State control.

An angered State was kept in check only by the rapid signing of preferential trade and military understandings with Union, something that had been carefully planned before the nationalization of the Mars Corporation. Union warships rerouted to Mars, though State still legally controlled the moon of Phobos, maintaining a small research station there until 2145 when construction of Laputa Station, a naval base, was begun.

The new Mars Republic began a def campaign of playing State and Union against each other as it slowly strengthened its own military and economic position. Before the labor riots in the northern polar region of the Borealis Basin in 2465, the Mars Republic was well on its way to being a powerhouse in its own right as the de facto "Gateway to the Outer Worlds".

The Martian Civil War crushed this hope, and as hostilities have worn on for the better part of the last decade, the Mars Republic's efforts at containing and subduing the dissidents of the so-called Free State of Mars have proven extremely expensive both economically and politically. Union, well-aware of its position as counterbalance to the military might of State, has used its position to wring concession after concession from the Mars Republic to the point that many in the republic have begun to wonder if Union's patronage has become a devil's bargain.