One of the basic definitions of old people, is they have lived a lot. So they carry with them a baggage of memories of all kinds. Where other people have knowledge, old people have experience and plenty of stories to tell.

Beto arark was no exception, and as the week-long travel in hyperspace was nearing its end, The grandmother stopped working out and keeping to herself. She reached out to Baris while everybody was having dinner and could hear. The old lady's eyes glistened, and her cheeks reddened as she released her rehearsed remembrance of things passed.

"Baris, you wondered if there was anything interesting on Vadada. The answer is I am linked to this planet in some ways. It's a long story.

As anyone can guess from my appearance, I am not of Florian descent; I am an offspring of Solomani colonists. Anyway, I grew up in the League, and at the age of 22, freshly graduated from the 28th Uni of Flora with a degree in Astrogation, I signed in the Florian Navy.

My first post was the Naval Academy - on Vadada's moon of Jarno; two months later, I was an Astrogator/Navigator trainee aboard the Achantea, a mobile Space Traffic Control Station.

We were monitoring the movements of celestial bodies, the trajectories of gravity wells, and of course ships. Once, our unit participated in naval exercises, involving a simulated invasion by the Hierate fleet. The "hostiles" were flying our own i401 "Starshooter" interceptors - more on that later.
I was under the supervision of Petty Officer Runk. I spotted an "enemy" fighter dangerously close, coming for what seemed a strafing run on the exposed parts of our ship. A little alarmed, I pointed the fighter's trajectory to Runk."

Transported into her vision of the past, Beto gestured the respective movements of the ships.

"Runk praised the dare of the pilot of the interceptor and added "don't worry, the i401 have their automatic anti-collision system activated".
It would be her very last words : the fighter crashed into us.

There was a violent decompression, and I lost consciousness. I was rescued, while 18 crewmembers on that level lost their lives.
Until the end of my term, I crawled in and out of the Navy hospital, all my remaining strength dedicated to focus on breathing. The first weeks are the scariest, when you wonder if the breath you're taking will be your last; then you fear the machine which makes you breathe breaking down ; then the worry goes a little away...

While I emerged and immerged in and out of coma like a flying fish, the Navy investigated and somehow pointed at me as being partly responsible of the accident, for not having warned the coming interceptor...
Unsurprisingly, between that suspicion, me not being a Barnai (1), and my condition, the Navy dumped me as a worthless piece of crap at the end of the term - fortunately without billing me with the medical expenses.

Still today, those four lost years of my youth, spent in a bland hospital on a bland moon do not count as a term for the Navy quartermaster, so I can't claim a 5-term pension", reflected the bitter old Beto, unconsciously clenching her fists - but not much, since she suffered of arthrosis.

"Still in love with space and stars, I joined the Merchant Marine, but that is another story.
However, my interest in investigation must have been born here; I took every opportunity in the next forty years to investigate those interceptors's use in the Navy. Business stopovers as a merchant; reportages as a journalist; signing again in the Navy at the ripe age of fifty when the League was losing the war - again -, and spending 4 terms within it.

This is what I gathered.
The i401 "Starshooter" interceptor was a very advanced, groundbreaking space fighter for the time.
The Florians have this fascination for technology as the solution to every problem; it's not surprising that they favored top-notch hi-tech like the i401. However, the interceptor lacked testing and proofing; MMB basically built and sold a prototype to the Navy.

It was also very expensive. This allowed its maker - MMB (Messerwerk-Möhb-Bauschmitt) - to develop a comfortable profit margin, a part of which the company transferred to the Navy buyers and admirals. Nowhere did this bribing system work better than here in Vadada...  Since this world is hostile, and the moving cities are overcrowded, life is not pleasant. This is a crowded hole on the frontline. Every admiral posted here - and it's a kind of punition - waiting for the next traitorous Hierate attack, wants to embezzle as much as possible and retire on the nearby garden world of Tanar.

The Starshooter was unreliable and prone to breakdowns. The accident of the Achantea was not the first, and wouldn't be the last. While every committee of inquiry concluded the pilots' mistakes were responsible of the many crashes and disasters, the interceptor was nicknamed "staffshooter" and "widowmaker" in the Navy circles. The i401 model was supposed to last 20 years, should have been retired after 3 years, but lasted 18 years, with many variations and upgrades, each correction being cancelled by a "new high-tech" (and untested) upgrade.

Now... you remember we did exercises where the Aslan were also flying i401 too? That is because MMB had a subsidiary in the Hierate, and built and sold the model there too!

Officially it was another company, and officially the Aslan spies had stolen the plans... Of course their fighter had another name - it's translated "Sabertooth". But I know - and cannot prove - that the money came back to the same arms dealer shareholders.
The irony is, the Aslan still cherish that ship. Because of their pride (pun intended), they could not admit the model was simply flawed, ill-conceived and unadapted to their morphology and culture - their copy was even worse than ours ! It was a conundrum for the Aslan pilots, and eventually it fared so badly for them during the last conflict that it brought victory to the Florians!

As to my investigation... when I finished accumulating all that information, no publisher  showed any interest.. The story was forty years old. The Staffshooter had been replaced twenty-five years ago. All admirals were dead, retired, or worse had become politicians... MMB itself had been bought and rebought, merged and split.

Vadada is still the capital of the military-industrial complex. And that, captain, is something interesting about it."

(1) The Floriani minor human race comes in two groups : the Barnai - the ruling group - and the Feskals.

OOC : sorry for the time it took me to write this! I didn't realize I have conflicting needs at the end of every quarter

"I am so sorry for your early troubles, Beto," Baris responds.

"I don't pretend to understand what motivated you to spend so many years tilting at windmills. Having found your answers, are you at peace now? Or is there still something you hope to accomplish?"

"Are you returning to Vadada to exorcise old ghosts?"

"Do I want to exorcise what?!" - Beto choked on her jello enriched with proteins and raised an eyebrow. "Does Rejuvenium damage the brain? I'd like to know before submitting to the treatment myself!", she snapped. "We - and I mean WE - are going to Vadada because Bannacor determined it would be an excellent stopover to sell and buy, before traveling to Tanar, Sif, Eahaw, stepping again at Vadada, staying an average of 3 days in each system, in order to be back at Trush, meet The Hyena 13 weeks after leaving, and pay our first quarterly payment of 5 million Credits... Buying back my ship... our ship... is the reason we're jumping around the place, must I remind you!"

Beto realized she had stood up, and slowly sit back.
"Besides, it takes more than 3 days to divulge a scandal and fight a megacorp's legion of PRs and lawyers. And believe me" - she weighted with her fork, pointing it at Yuri Argonov - "with this man's shady business, enough time, the money and support of a news corp, we have more than tilted at windmills. We have razed them to the foundations, ah-ah !"

Beto lowered her voice and nearly hushed "If there's a ghost in this story, it would be me. I'm the one appearing to the castle guards at midnight, and They are afraid that I reveal that there is something rotten in the state of Floria. I am not paranoid but..., ten years ago I was actively investigating and nearing more revelations, gathering damning evidence, and witnesses' accounts ; but suddenly Alejandro Valentino appeared in my life and ended up in my arms, leading to personal turmoil - you know of it - and a brutal halt in my investigation. Maybe They still fear me. They fear that someone, on their deathbed, filled with remorse, would spill more beans to me..."

Seeming still annoyed by Baris' "misplaced empathy", the commander looked around and her stare stopped on Lady Arslan. "Dear", she said with a mellow voice, "this makes me think about the accident that brought your fighter pilot career to a halt. Was it in the Vadada system too?"
This message was last edited by the player at 08:33, Sat 09 Apr 2022.

"Afraid not. Never even heard of Vadada until Bannacor stuck it on our flight path," Daphne replies.

"That was on Jokotre. The government, if you can call it that, is a religious dictatorship. Ling-Standard finally decided to exploit a rare vein of tantalum. Unfortunately, it was on Holy Lands. The Archon organized military opposition to it, a skirmish broke out, and when it looked like the Archon's forces were going to lose, he decided that total destruction was preferable to 'desecration by infidels'. No one suspected he'd acquired some nukes."

"His only mistake was in misunderstanding his delivery system. He thought his 'overwhelming' Tech-7 fighters could stop the Imperial ships. We took some casualties, one of which was me, but, in the end, the Archon's forces were no match for the Mora Squadron. We lost 3 ships while they lost over 100, including the nuke bombers, so they never got to deploy the nukes."

"It was one of the reasons I became a Diplomat. The whole damn thing could have been avoided if a Diplomat had stepped forward. When all the shooting was done, Ling decided it was no longer worth the cost to develop the site."

"I still can't decide if that's just the way of the universe these days, or you and I just happened to be the unlucky ones."

Beto nodded. "Incredible things happen when a government serves a megacorp, and does not its job of restraining it. It's as the tax money went straight from the taxpayers to the corp's coffers. Here in the League, the councilors - you may call them representatives - are designated randomly, among the Barnai population, for a single mandate of four years. After that, they may never be entered in a Lottery again.

Though every person has thus an equal opportunity to lead, the result is - more often then not - incompetent people found themselves councilors. If they are interested in their job, they only gain a handle of it after a few years, and at that time, well their term is over. So the real power lies in the hands of those who stay at their posts more than one term: the bureaucrats, the military, the corporate management..."

"A new round of the Lottery is coming up", she sighed. "We'll see what new bunch of weirdos Fate calls to the service. Maybe another barrel organ player ?"

Beto looks at the Universal Time displayed at her watch.

"Are we there yet? it's been 168 hours already", she grumbles. ;)

"Now, Beto, you know it's never as simple as that," Baris chided the old lady. "If the astrogator nails the course at exactly 100% and the engineer activates the J-drive at exactly the right moment, then you get the precise time of 168 hours. In theory. Jump-space isn't static, though we tend to think of it as such. For all intents and purposes, that doesn't really make a difference. But it does affect the time."

"As I understand it, our astrogator gave us an ETE of 170.3 hours. So, we've got about another 2 hours before we exit Jump-space."

"Has Vadada changed since you were last here? If not, what can we expect?"

"Actually, as your astrogator, I gave you an ETE UP TO 170.3 hrs, with a minimum of 165.7 hrs." Beto wondered if Baris was suffering from an allergy to Rejuvium. After all, it wasn't precisely an over-the-counter drug.

"That's an +/- 1.4% incertitude, which is due to the irregular energy feed of the Jump drive. I am in charge of the J-drive, and even though I carried out the fine-tuning of it, it's still a civilian, commercial ship which was badly maintained by Aslan smugglers."

Beto had turned to the tone of the Astrogation professor that she was at the end of her career. She sighed, not wanting to fall back into that habit.



"I don't know honestly. I ran out of that place as soon as I was cured and discharged, and I tried to avoid the Naval Academy on Vadada's moon of Jarno if I could. I never went back to the Navy hospital there - too many bad memories. I have stopped on Vadada shortly, and investigated a little, but most of my research on the i401 contract was held in the capital, Flora. And it's been ten years since I last was here, since the place reminds me of my encounter and first months with Alejandro...

It must have changed certainly ; may be not on the global level, because a world of 8 billions inhabitants does not change its course quickly; but locally, certainly it has. I'm afraid I don't have any recent news, as I was not really interested and focused on recovering my ship.

But... let me ask a question, Baris. How come have you never been in Vadada?"

OOC : see private message :)

"It's not a very nice place to visit, as I understand it," Baris answers. "It's a desert vacuum world. Habitats are roving mining cities. There's no downport, only the highport that shuttles supplies down to the cities. Even with the military base, the naval base, the naval academy, and the shipyard, there's just too many people packed into too small a space. 90% of daily living is just supporting the mining."

"70% of the population are the working Feskals. Not very entertaining or talkative."

"Not even the Aslan had any interest in it since claiming what they considered worthless territory was an act of stupidity. Not enough ingenuity to see the potential. Normal Humans would have, but the Floriani took it one step further."

"Anyway... no air, no wind, no dust. The cities chew up the crust for the iron beneath but don't see any reason to put it back into a pristine condition--it wasn't pretty to begin with. Zangar Chasm is the worst. 200 miles long, a mile deep, no end in sight."

"So, why would anyone want to go there?"

"I suspect that only you, Beto, of all the crew, have ever been to Vadada," Yuri chimes in as he listened to the discussion between Captain and XO.

"Once it became a viable production facility, that attracted the Aslan, if for no other reason than to cripple the Florian military. Didn't work out so well for the Aslan. And they can't escalate their efforts for fear of drawing the Imperium into the fray."

"It's a good thing we're not of significant interest to attract the Aslan. There are bound to be Aslan scouts at the edge of the system. It's just too large of a volume of space for the Florians to monitor that tightly."

"As long as we're well inside the Oort Cloud region, we shouldn't be bothered by any Aslan raiders."

Beto nodded to Yuri, but left a finger to correct Baris : "The military baseS, the naval baseS and the multiple Vadadan shipyardS. Iron and the other minerals are mostly not exported, but worked locally; the factories are numerous, the workforce is abundant and the shipyards produce virtually all Florian naval vessels and are the only ones capable of building the League's heaviest designs. Attached to the shipyards come the engineering and research departments.

This world is the heart of the military-industrial complex - Floria being the brain. Vadada is a strategic world for the League - and is further from the Imperium, Yuri, than you think.

She shook her head. "And your employment figures are wrong, Baris - or rather falsified to make Vadada look less strategic. It's rather : 20% in the mining and the refining, 40% in the factories, 30% in the military, and 10% in the civilian and public services. Only those who are born here stay more than one or two terms."

Beto glanced at her pad, noted the time, sighed, and looked at Yuri, in charge of the sensors. "Maybe we better take our positions at the helm. Since we're coming from the Hierate, we may expect the customs and the navy to examine us closely, and our schedule in this system is tight (84 hours max!). So sublieutenant Argonov, be ready to scan Friend-or-Foe as soon as we exit J-space, and Captain Dahl, will you work a message introducing ourselves, which I could send even before inquiries?"

The old lady mouthed a silent call to the ceiling : "are we there yet?"
This message was last edited by the player at 11:19, Sat 09 July 2022.

"The ship's transponder does all that, XO," Yuri said, moving back to his bridge position.

"We'd had a week to add anything new to it, but if the transponder doesn't check out, nothing we say will make a difference. The Florian Navy will shoot first and ask questions of the survivors... or the corpses."

"There aren't going to be any pirates or Aslan raiders as close to Vadada-Jarno as the Jump Limit. Besides, we're coming in from a known vector."

"Is there someone in particular that you wish to communicate with? Not necessarily by name, but position, title, function? Otherwise, no one's apt to listen. Or answer."

"Okay, lights dimming... we're exiting J-space in 3... 2... 1... And here we are!"

He double checked the sensors to make sure the ship's transponder was broadcasting as normal, and verified that there were no immediate nearby threats that the proximity alarm might not have warned them about.

"We're clear. Inbound trajectory puts us at Highport in 17 hours at standard acceleration. Receiving clearance and inbound vector."

The old Lady thought about adding the new registry information to the transponder. "Formerly ill-reputed (smuggler-thief) "Roarl-Ooargl", flying Aslan flag. Under new management & flying League's flag" - but they already did that.

The new registration in Thrush had been done 5 weeks ago. They had left Thrush 4 weeks ago. With the Jump-4 mail boats, the news should have reached Vadada Space control 3 weeks ago. So their transponder should check out, hopefully.

. She began to breathe again.

"17 hours in, 17 hours out when we leave, that will give us 50 hours in port... 4 days," Baris says out loud.

"Should be enough time to do what we want, but I'd rather get ahead of the itinerary if we can. Yuri, tell ATC that we're on a timetable and request a 2-G inbound vector."

"It'll shave a few hours off travel time in, and we can do the same outbound."

"Carmichael, you might as well start looking for cargo and passengers going to Tanar and Sif. Don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves."

"Our estimated time of departure will be in 2-4 days, exact departure time to be determined."

Bannacor stayed at his station for now, not sure what was going on. The Old Lady didn't exactly reveal her plans.

"That'll be a relief," Anzha said. "It's bad enough watching the clock for 12 hours!"

"I always have a hard time doing anything constructive in that short of a time frame when I know the clock's ticking. I've been considering taking up painting as a way to get around that, but then I keep thinking that it'd just be a waste of time. After all, what would I do with it when I was done? Give it to someone who thinks it's horrible... which it would be?"

"Maybe a study plan? Or maybe I'll just get drunk to pass the time away."

"Drunken gratuitous sex?" Bannacor asked Anza with a grin.

"The days of Baris's home planet last 12 hours", explained Beto, tongue-in-cheek.

"Actually, our schedule is based on the idea that we spend a week and a half between the moment we leave a world, and the moment we leave the next. A week in space, half a week in a system. And half a week is 3.5 standard days. I insist on the .5 - it's not a full day. You'll see the difference after 9 trips."


Who, Beto? Ye old virago already said she had no plans - no exorcism, no windmill attack, no time to deviate from our course and arrive at Thrush in 9 weeks ;)

Beto looked disapprovingly at Bannacor after his quip. "I consider Anzha here as my daughter, and I'll defend her against all malignity if and when she's under influence.", she stated.
This message was last edited by the player at 13:53, Sat 23 Apr 2022.

"Pttthhhhttttt, I was joking, as in kidding."

Nicodemus looks toward Bannacor, "it was likely the 'gratuitous' bit that was most objectionable, although when the other two are together that would almost be a given."

"Have we gotten any medical updates from Vadada, Doc?" Baris asks Nicodemus.

"There aren't usually any, but it never hurts to double check. It's generally part of the communications handshake that the transponder does, but we still aren't firmly convinced that we've ferreted out all of the previous owners' tampering with our systems."

"Nothing came back on the alert, so it would seem all of our medical files are current."

Nicodemus shrugs, "just the usual aberrations. Even with people packed that close together the rate of viral mutation doesn't necessarily overwhelm a properly bolstered immune system."
"Of course, insuring the presence of a properly bolstered immune system is why I've scheduled the physical evaluations during transit time. Please try not to miss your appointment."

"Good point, Doc!" Yuri agrees. "The problem with all the bioscanners is that they don't update themselves, and the bio-techs don't always get to them as fast as viruses mutate."

"And while we think we've got Science under control, the universe is so vast that there are still things we don't know about it. Doomsdayers keep saying that we're going to run across something out there that will wipe us out before we know what hit us."

"Personally, I think if that was the case, it'd have already happened. And yet, we're still here."

"Of course, there's those that claim WE'RE the plague! Sometimes, I even agree with them."

There's about a minute of minor discomfort when the halfway point is reached and deceleration begins. If some sort of impulse drive (liked rockets) was being used, the routine would be to do a end-for-end skew flip so that the engines were pointed at the destination and were used to slow down the ship's speed. With a gravitic drive, that isn't necessary. It was only the transition that took a moment to reverse.

Soon enough, the ship is approaching Highport. It's huge! But there isn't much aesthetic to it. It's just metal blocks and spires seemingly stacked on top of each other... and sticking out on all sides as well. It's only the presence of dozens of ships of all sizes and shapes that gives it the 'busy' look.

Following the designated vector has the ship docking at an external docking bay that has a cargo airlock as well as a standard personnel airlock. It's Docking Bay Geva on the Arezal Arm.


As soon as the ship is docked, you receive a comm: "Greetings, Captain Dahl and Countess Daphne. Welcome to Vadada Highport. I am Highport Commander Clarson Rego. I see that you are a free trader outbound to Tanar, Sif and Lafkin. If there's anything you need while you're here, feel free to comm me."

"Why, thank you, Commander Rego!" Daphne quickly exclaims in reply. "This is my first time visiting Vadada, and, I must say, it's rather fascinating so far. I'd be oh so grateful if you could arrange for someone to give me a tour of your Highport. It really is BIG! I'm afraid I'd get lost on my own."