by Aer-ki Jyr
That made sense, though it also underscored that Davis was serious about Corvati being on their own on this one. They might be doing contract work for Star Force, but that work was separate and apart, even if they were on the same planet. Jules had to make this work on his own, and Davis had chosen him as the man most likely to make it happen…meaning he had to come through. Failure was not an option.
That had made choosing items to ship out all the more harrowing. A great deal was going to be determined by his startup equipment, so he had spent an inordinate amount of time going through and tweaking the manifests, as well as getting redundant assurances from Star Force as to what products would be available from the local markets.
When Jules got to the docking port he jump/walked into the umbilical, feeling himself pass out of the range of the artificial gravity plates in the brand new dropship and float across until he reached the jumpship side and dropped back down a few inches into its artificial gravity. The Captain stayed behind to power down the ship and seal things up for the trip, then would join Jules in the jumpship’s passenger quarters.
Before that would happen Jules went around and checked on the other dropships, the cargo slabs in the main hold, and took a personal headcount of all his personnel to make sure they’d gotten onboard before he allowed himself to relax and retreat over to the mini-city’s entertainment zone where he found a smattering of Star Force crew walking the ‘streets’ of what would later become open to the public…but for now it was largely deserted, with most of the kiosks closed due to lack of customers.
One of the dining facilities was open, however, and Jules met up with several of his people there for a long meal, during which the jumpship broke Earth orbit to head out towards the jumpline to Proxima and the first leg of their journey. The following 9 weeks would be the worst for Jules, given that all he could do was sit and worry about how things might go wrong. Once they made planetfall his nerves would settle down as he was able to work the problems that arose, but until then he consigned himself to the downtime and as many games, movies, and dinners he could find on the jumpship to occupy his time with.
The last thing he wanted to do was sit in his quarters and stew, and he knew the best way to pass time was to fill it with something that would keep his mind busy.
3
June 7, 2259
Epsilon Eridani System
Corneria
Jules came down on the third dropship load of supplies, after the first run had delivered the forest-clearing cutting devices and the second delivered the prefab structures to set up their improvised landing pad. He took up residence there, overseeing the grounding of his equipment and personnel as a regular stream of the winged dropships descended from orbit and landed on the scraped dirt clearing, floating down into place on anti-grav engines.
His seven dropships were the most recent Star Force models. 5 were Mark VII Sparrows, the smallest dropships they made, while the other 2 were Mark VII Eagles, the medium version. They made repeated trips up to the ship, but along with them came the Star Force-owned dropships to assist with the cargo transfer.
Or rather handle the cargo transfer. Duke Hightower hadn’t sent over any Sparrows or Eagles. Instead, he sent over the large Falcons and even two of the new Dragon-class dropships. The extra-heavy lifters had only been put into service once the advent of anti-grav tech had hit the market, for without it there was no way the giant boomerangs could ever have flown unassisted.
With the larger model dropships unloading the bulk of the Corvati cargo in a relatively short time, Jules had to stay ahead of the surface unloading, as did the clearers who were having a hard time cutting down the thick trees and clearing away the underbrush before subsequent dropships would arrive. They had no other options for unloading other than what his crews cleared, given that the 247 square mile island had no natural clearings and only a thin beach around the perimeter.
A huge pile of brush was mounded up just south of the command center as the cutters worked their way east and west with the dropships landing in a roundish clearing to the north and their cargo being transferred off ship and laid out in a grid along the center, spreading out as if it were chasing the cutters east and west. Those crates that could be stacked on top of each other were, to save space, making for several artificial mountains dotting the dirt-fresh clearing.
Between running manifests and coordinating placements Jules would go topside on his command module to get his bearings, as well as watch the work being done in person. The upper balcony was still lower than the tree pile, but just taller than the highest crate stacks, having been constructed of several prefabricated segments that had been reattached to each other upon landing to create a four story tall building supported on thick legs that sank halfway down into what had just been the forest floor.
Overhead another Falcon came down, momentarily blotting out the sun as the large-sized dropship hovered over the makeshift camp, waiting for another to leave the landing area so it could take its place. Two Falcons could sit side by side on the landing ‘pad’ and give the offloaders plenty of work room to spare, but when a Dragon came down it had to have the pad to itself. For the moment though, both of the behemoths were back in space, being loaded up again for the third time.
Jules knew the jumpship had other cargo to unload and a schedule to keep, so he didn’t begrudge the Star Force crews their breakneck pace as he fought to stay ahead of it. They had more than half of their cargo on the ground now, and for some reason it seemed much larger in volume on the ground versus being stashed inside the hold of the Tardis. That…and he also had to allow access roads in between the stacks so they could sort out what they needed rather than just stack it in a big pile like they had on the jumpship.
“We’ve hit a snag,” Uriel said, walking up behind Jules on the upper platform. “The east clearing crew has come across a boulder they can’t move.”
Jules half turned to look at the woman as he kept his attention on the now landing Falcon. “Tell them to keep moving on. We’ll just have to work around it for now,” he said, looking to the east.
“Damn,” he whispered as she left to go below. Now that he knew what to look for he could see the top of the rock, which must have been bigger than a 2-story house. They’d either have to cut it apart later or build around it…something he didn’t want to do. It’d be a time killer either way.
He glanced back in the other direction, seeing the large cutting machines with their spinning blades hacking through the upper levels of the forest, then dipping down for another cut midway up, slicing the trees apart into segments rather than trying to topple the giants in one fell swoop, which would have been extra hazardous given their height and falling range. After reading through Star Force protocol, which he was obliged to follow now that he was doing contract work for them, he’d asked Davis’ for an allowance to use the massive cutters, which the Director had granted given that the planet had no wildlife. Otherwise, Jules would have had to have taken a much slower means of leveling the trees.
He didn’t really care one way or another for Star Force’s respect for wildlife, he was just concerned about keeping his schedule, though he had to admit it didn’t seem to slow the megacorporation’s expansion enough to matter. They were the most prolific builders in Human history, and given that record he didn’t mind having to follow their protocols, for in them might be some unspoken wisdom that would aid his own construction efforts.
By the time the last of the cargo shipments arrived it was nightfall, with the massive Star Force dropships landing in an impressive display of running lights. His own people had spread beacons out around the landing zone for visual reference, but he knew the navigational computers onboard the ships were sufficient to bring them down without the illuminated markers. Regardless, it helped to define a bit of order to the makeshift camp that remained even as the bigger dropships departed.
His own seven ships put down in the landing zone, parking close together to fit ins
ide the perimeter as the rest of his people filed out, having waited on the jumpship until the very end. During the interim several more prefab modules had been assembled to the south of the command center, giving them their temporary quarters and workstations. Jules met up with them as they arrived and got them settled in, then caught a couple hours of sleep himself before getting back to work before the sun came up and a new 22 hour day began.
It took more than a month to get the camp organized and functional, with two mining sites, three factories, a foodstuff production facility, and a power generator constructed from the cargo crates they brought with them. Davis’s orders gave them permission to colonize the island but nothing beyond that, for the time being, but his choice of sites had been deliberate. Star Force had pulled an extensive survey of the island’s natural resources that told Jules that there were large deposits of valuable metals beneath the surface, along with a host of other compounds that would have been unusually rare back on Earth. He had to keep reminding himself that the rules here were different, and while all the convenient deposits on Earth had been exploited years ago Corneria was virgin, so access would and should be easier.
The two mining sites he established were several kilometers away from base camp and required housing facilities of their own connected via several recently carved out dirt roads that were currently in the process of being paved. One was focusing on a rich iron deposit while the other was digging out a vein of gold that Jules intended to sell on the Corneria market to supplement his funding.
The factories were just barely operational and using the first shipments of iron to begin constructing various alloys of steel to start the construction of permanent facilities. Most of the resources needed for the construction material he had to buy from Star Force on site, but the iron at least he could produce himself and as his mining infrastructure gradually increased he hoped to be able to add more and more materials to his colony’s production list, not only for the sake of self-sufficiency, but because he was worried about having to burn too much of his 100 billion on subsequent purchases…hoping to be able to have Corvati pocket as much of that initial funding as possible when all things were said and done.
The foodstuff production facilities were, by necessity, farther along than the rest of the infrastructure. The fresh water producers had gone online within the first few days, drawing directly from the lake, then later augmented to feed the facility. The first few crops had already been harvested and converted into stored components, then combined with supplies to create the foodstuffs on Star Force’s brochure. Most of those other components were currently coming from reserve stockpiles and would eventually be replaced by local production as the facilities expanded.
Corn and sugar cane were the first two crops focused on, with enough now being grown to accommodate the work crew Jules had brought along with him in the months ahead, but it wasn’t nearly enough for the colonists that would be arriving in the future. While his colony was quickly working its way towards foodstuff self-sufficiency, it still had a long way to go in that department before they could begin pulling in more people from Earth.
The power generator was one of several they brought with them, but the only one with enough fuel to operate. It was the most basic, running off of hydrogen, which they had ample supply of thanks to the lake once the water was broken down into molecular hydrogen and oxygen. Basic solar, wind, and geothermal power stations had been constructed, with the current being generated used for instantaneous electrolysis on the lake water, creating the hydrogen reserves that could then be used by the generator whenever needed, combining with the oxygen already present in the atmosphere.
The more advanced metallic hydrogen reactor was one they couldn’t operate yet, short of buying the core material from Star Force for an exuberant price. Jules wasn’t going to even think of doing that until the colony had an adequate revenue supply, and in the mean time he was going to rely on the more primitive generators while assembling the newer model into the power grid at the outset.
Two months into the setup everything was moving slowly, but smoothly for the Corvati operation, without so much as a single ship being see in all that time, underscoring how remote a local they’d been given to colonize and how much they were truly on their own in this endeavor.
That changed one day when a pair of Star Force Skeet-class aircraft suddenly appeared over the colony and landed in the tiny city unannounced. Jules went out to the landing pad…now concrete rather than dirt…with a pair of security officers in tow. They’d had nothing at all to do since arrival, so he let them tag along unnecessary as they were.
“Hello there,” Jules greeted the two men climbing out of the small single-seat fighters.
“Hi,” Harrison replied, stretching his arms and back after having been confined to the motorcycle-like seat for several hours. “Didn’t figure you guys got many guests so we thought we’d officially welcome you to the planet now that it’s obvious that you’re going to be sticking around a while.” He walked up to Jules and offered him his hand. “Harrison-167.”
“Eric-489,” the other man said, doing likewise.
“Archons?” Jules asked, a bit surprised.
“From Clan Saber,” Harrison explained. “We’re you’re neighbors from the east…about 4000 klicks or so.”
“Puts a new definition to ‘neighbor,’” the Corvati CEO noted. “Jules Portman. I run this little shindig here. You really flew all this way in those?” he asked, pointing to the skeets.
“They’re faster than they look,” Eric attested.
“We were out on a training flight anyway, so we figured we might as well stop by,” Harrison said. “We had a few bets going on how long you’d last. Several people thought you’d have called for assistance by now.”
“We’re getting by,” Jules said with a hint of pride. “How’s your Clan making out?”
Harrison and Eric exchanged glances, surprised by the question. “We’re well established, with a controlled rate of growth.”
“Controlled?”
“Planning for the long term rather than building up a lot of cheap infrastructure,” Harrison explained, glancing at the security officers’ holstered weapons. “You guys having some trouble?”
Jules noticed his line of sight. “No, no…just procedure. You’re the first visitors we’ve had since our arrival. If you’d like we can go inside and I can give you a rundown on our operations…if for no other reason than to foster more informed betting in the future.”
Eric laughed, and Harrison was forced to break a smile.
“Thank you, that would be most helpful,” he said, accepting the gesture with a hint of sarcasm.
“Come with me,” Jules said, leading them back off the landing pad. “We may not be Star Force, but I think I can convince you with a short tour that Corvati is at least competent.”
4
August 30, 2260
Epsilon Eridani System
Corneria
The first year of the Corvati colony, labeled ‘Outlook,’ was moderately successful and uneventful…yet surprisingly frustrating. No major hiccups had occurred, but the sheer number of replacement part orders Jules had been forced to put in worried him. He knew that wear and tear was normal and had brought a surplus of replacement parts with him in the initial transfer, but things were breaking that he’d never have guessed would break…a door handle here, the tread on a chair leg there. Such things weren’t critical, but they left a bad taste in his mouth as the colony got a worn down feel to it that was just the opposite of the image he wanted to create.
The broken items were fixed, of course, but most was patchwork and not what Jules felt was up to Star Force standards of craftsmanship, which he hoped to replicate out of a measure of pride. He’d learned quickly enough that it wasn’t the predictable problems that were the problem out on the frontier, but rather the unpredictable ones that you couldn’t plan ahead for.
Fortunately he still had the lifelin
e of the Star Force markets to work with, expensive as they were. The time delay, though, was annoying. Some material they kept on planet and could be requisitioned and purchases within a few days, the rest had to come from Sol and would take nearly 3 months to arrive. And usually something would break right after the last jumpship would come through, meaning that the 3 month resupply window would nearly double for the circuit of ships to make their way around to place the order, then transit again to fulfill it.
As soon as Jules got one batch of problems fixed another would pop up, leaving his colony functional but haggard. His people were doing good work, and over the first year they’d gotten the first permanent structure built…a residential complex that they were all now living out of. Most of the materials for it they had brought with them or purchased locally, but a bit of their mining spoils were included in the fabrication, making it feel like Corvati had a small claim to the colony rather than just being a Star Force transplant.
The dirt roads had all been paved and small sections of the growing city had some landscaping put in around the residential complex, transplanted by seeds and seedlings from Earth. That one pinprick of civilization gave Jules hope, but as for the rest of the colony it still had a very rough feel to it and seemed to be decades away from accepting any type of civilian influx that was one of Corvati’s and Davis’s standing goals for the colony.
Jules had wondered why the Archons would have been placing bets on how long they’d last, but after more than a year on the planet he thought he was finally beginning to understand. Building here wasn’t difficult in any normal fashion. The climate was agreeable and the terrain chosen was relatively flat. There was no wildlife to worry about, nor any close neighbors to pose security concerns. It was as peaceful a place as Jules had ever lived…but in that lay the problem. It was peaceful because there was nothing here.