by Tony Daniel
TRITON
Triton is the major population center. Its principal city is New Miranda. The Triton temperature can get down to 38 degrees Kelvin, that is, ?390 Fahrenheit. You can put a simple substance in the shade here, and it will become a superconductor. At the average temperatures and pressure on Triton, the nitrogen atmosphere hovers around its solid-gas-liquid triple point, and occasionally conditions will be right for the formation of the famous nitrogen rains. Triton is easily the coldest inhabited place in the solar system. Even Pluto, built on different geology, is warmer by a little.
TRITON ’ S NEW MIRANDA
The principal city on Triton, the Neptunian moon. Named after the Uranean moon Miranda, from which the first settlers hailed. It is built on the side of an enormous crater in the southern hemisphere of Triton. New Miranda is a city of spires. The neo-gothic religious leanings of the first settlers combined with the low gravity of their new world to produce an architecture that is unique and at times breathtaking. There are some apartment buildings here and there, but for the most part each resident on Triton has his or her own spire—that is, families and familial units do. In most of the spires, the first five floors are fully pressurized and protected. They are usually given over to gardens and fountains. New Miranda bills itself as the “Garden City,” and there is a friendly competition among the more affluent residents in that regard. Of course, this has led to a few aesthetic horrors. But there is a professional class of elite gardeners who are strongly influenced by the Greentree priest (and gardener) Father Capability, and many of the gardens are justly regarded as works of art. These are another tourist attraction on Triton, along with the nitrogen rains outside. New Miranda is governed by the Town Meet.
NEREID
The moon Nereid is an important shipping port. It was the site of the first use of full-scale nanotechnological warfare by the outer-system forces when the DIED ship Jihad was infected with the PAL grist virus.
Pluto
The surface of Pluto is almost entirely covered with grist. The planetary geology is reshaped almost continually to serve the shipping that is the principal activity of the inhabitants. The poet Beat Myers wrote of Pluto that it is “where the stones go to die.” Pluto has an infamous orphanage where Kwame Neiderer was raised.
Oorts
The debris on the outer edge of the solar system. Sparsely inhabited by biological humans, but home to the cloudships. A source of a great deal of material for the construction of the Met. Home of the Federal Naval Academy.
Other Places and Phenomena in the Outer System
Dark Matter Road
Discovered in the late 2800s C. E., the Dark Matter Road is a stretch of unreflective material that lies between the solar system and the double-starred Centauri system. In 2903 C. E., Cloudship Mark Twain became the first human being to visit another solar system when he arrived at Alpha Centauri during that e-year. Cloudship Lebedev arrived there eleven years later, in 2914 C. E.
Del Rings
The rings of Saturn, renamed during the war for a heroic free convert.
Laketown
Main city on Titan, Saturn’s moon. The “lake” is a lake of liquid methane, and Laketown is at its edge. The area nearest the lake is called New Alki. The local mean temperature is -180 Celsius.
Mill
An enormous windmill in the Blue Eye of Neptune consisting of two blades that turn with the swirl of the storm. The Mill, from blade tip to blade tip, is as long as the diameter of planet Earth. It was built on the same physical principles as the Met. In the center of the mill, operating in a manner not dissimilar to that of ancient hydroelectric turbines on Earth, is a generator that beams a steady supply of microwave energy to a geosynchronous satellite stationed above it. And from that satellite, it is fed to Triton.
Object 71449-00450
AKA The Object. A cometesimal in the Oorts that houses a mining colony. Kwame Neiderer was born here.
Shepardsville
The degenerate red-light district located in the local virtuality on Triton. It is the bad section of Fork.
Windows
Ghost town in the local Triton virtuality. Dangerous ancient web site of Microsoft.
Appendix Nine
METAPLANETARY WARFARE
Boomerang
Formerly the DIED ship Jihad , which captured, for a time, the Neptunian moon Nereid. The official first spaceship to enter the Federal Navy.
Cloudship Warfare
see Cloudship
Fremden
DIED military slang for outer-system inhabitants. The term means “strangers” in old German.
Forward Laboratories
Federal Army’s grist weaponry development center on Triton, under the command of Gerardo Funk.
Glory
Pleasurable sensation of well-being, pride, and communal belonging sent through the vinculum to DIED soldiers who do a good job. Can be orgasmic. During the war, Glory was given to the entire population of the Met. Highly addictive.
Grist-mil
AKA military grist, grist-based attack. Using the grist as a military weapon. Various permutations, including a communications warfare attack that permanently disables the Broca grist in the victim and turns him or her into a gibbering idiot.
Knit
Special “channel” of the merci reserved for the Federal Army.
Measurement
Both militaries use the metric system for distance measurements. (Civilians use a variety of systems, including the ancient English, which is still hanging on strong.) All military time is e-standard (Earth-Standard). K is sometimes used to mean “thousands of kilometers per hour.” Fifty K is a standard ship approach speed. MK is “millions of kilometers per hour.” An MK is about as fast as any ship can go—that is, about 1/100th the speed of light in a vacuum.
Met Navy
Met spaceships used for warfare are not self-contained LAPS. They are usually commanded by a LAP, but that captain is not the control structure of the ship, only the command. The ships are under the auspices of the Department of Immunity Enforcement Division Space Marine Task Force, and their names are prefaced by that entity’s initials in Basis, DIED. These are the Met ships of war.
THE DIRAC CLASS OF CRUISERS
These are the DIED all-purpose ships. They are used for transport, and have weaponry for light attack functions, normally as “ground clearing” for the infantry about to be deployed. They might have a torpedo or two, but their principal weapon is a short-range positron cannon working off the antimatter engine, and several projectile catapults, the most fearsome of which is the flak ram, which shoots off the dreaded “nail rain” that can tear a kilometer of ground to shreds—neatly preparing it for occupation.
THE DABNA CLASS OF DESTROYERS
These serve both attack and transport functions. They are big and long, with a thousand-meter girth and a ten-kilometer length. They possess long-range antimatter cannon and torpedoes and catapults that will handle up to a hundred tons of material. They can also deploy special devices, such as the rip tether that was put to such awful use on Triton.
THE STREICHHÖLTZER CLASS OF CARRIERS
There were, at the outbreak of hostilities, twenty of these in the fleet. They carry a full range of weaponry and a large crew, as well as serving as a base for smaller attack and transport craft. In them you will find the production facilities for military grist and deployment devices for it as well. Carriers are also notable because they are constructed on the same principles as the Met cables, held together by macro implementation of the strong nuclear force. As such, they are imposing fortresses, indeed. They maneuver well in two dimensions, but their immense momentum makes them difficult to pilot attitudinally. This is not the case for a special class of carrier, the Lion of Africa division, which are basically carriers filled with antimatter engines, which also serve as weapons by quick conversion. These have a smaller crew. Their specialty is to enact disaster events.
SOL AND SCIATICA C
LASSES
The principal ships that depend upon the Streichhöltzer class carriers are the Sol and Sciatica classes. The Sol class is a transport vessel designed for quick planetary landings of about five hundred troops. Sciatica-class ships are attack craft, also designed for planetary operations. These boast a deadly array of close-range weaponry. They have something of the appearance of a pitchfork with wings. Both the Sol and Sciatica classes are aerodynamically built, and able to withstand huge pressure differential—something the larger ships are incapable of, as witness the destruction of the Schwarzes Floβ when it fell into the atmosphere of Jupiter.
ZIP CODE CLASS
A specialized class of ships that are communications boats with major defense armaments and fields, but only a single cannon, which operates off the engine. These vessels are mostly grist matrix, and they resemble spinning dumbbells, or jacks from the children’s game of pickup. They proved vulnerable to counterinformational insurgency.
MET NAVY ENGINEERING AND OPERATIONS
Except for the planetary and communications craft, most DIED ships are based upon the “spinning scythe” design. They greatly resemble bundles of these implements bound together in a clump, but some with blades depending from them all along their length. It is not without cause that at times the Met navy was referred to as “the reapers.” All of these ships have, as their end, large-scale murder.
Operations that require spin-induced gravity are carried out in the “blades” of the scythes, and these also usually contain officers’ quarters and command and control. Most of the weaponry is found in the long “handle” of the body, and it was here that attacks were most profitably directed. Ship defenses are varied and effective.
MET NAVY DEFENSE : ELECTROMAGNETIC DAMPING
You cannot hit a ship and depressurize the entire thing. Most nuclear weaponry is damped in the vicinity of a ship by powerful electromagnetic fields that control the rate of nucleus fission and keep it to a one-to-one basis. This immediately turns the fission trigger of a fusion bomb into a mere nuclear reactor and prevents a runaway chain reaction.
MET NAVY DEFENSE : ISOTROPIC COATING
The most powerful defensive system on a DIED ship, however, is the so-called isotropic coating each ship possesses. This coating makes use of the electroweak force of nature. Through a process called quantum induction, predicted in its essence by Raphael Merced, the exchange of messenger particles within the atomic nucleus can be controlled, and the actual spin of individual nucleons adjusted. The isotropic coating interacts with all incoming energies and particles (including micrometeorites and the like) and changes what is known as the “mixing angle” of atomic nuclei that make up the ship in that section. In effect, this causes the material of the ship to appear to the incoming weapon as an entirely different substance. If the weapon is, say, a stream of positrons, the ship will “seem,” to the positrons, to be made of antimatter, and the beam will fall upon it as would a ray of light. Small particles are passed through the ship, “believing” themselves to be passing through vacuum. It is an odd and sometimes frightening sight to see a chunk of rock move through one side of a ship and out the other as if the ship were a ghost.
MET NAVY DEFENSE : THE LIMITS OF ISOTROPIC COATING
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint and who is shooting at you, the isotropic coating loses effectiveness for masses that are much over one hundred kilograms, and the effects of gravity are never mitigated, so that when a particle passes through, it will leave on a new vector. The coating also loses effectiveness in the complexities of a planetary atmosphere and is only partially successful in protecting from a planetary attack craft or a soldier on the ground. Nevertheless, space-adapted soldiers have, as part of their adaptation kit, an isotropic coating that generally prevents rapid depressurization in space that might be caused by micrometeors, and limits the possibilities of any shrapnel attack upon incoming paratroopers until they enter the atmosphere.
MET NAVY DEFENSE : THE GRIST PELLICLE
The final line of defense possessed by Met ships is the grist pellicle, located just underneath the isotropic coating. This matrix responds instantaneously to any penetration and immediately sets to work containing the damage. Ships can “heal” themselves at an astonishing rate, and any effective attack must take account of this ability.
MET NAVY : CONCLUSION
Taking attack and defense capabilities together, the DIED ship represents a formidable opponent. What it lacks in generalized function it makes up for with specialization and maneuverability. If a cloudship is thought of as a sort of giant living cell, a DIED vessel might be thought of as a virus—not alive in the same way, but just as dangerous and, in some ways, more effective.
Montserrat
DIED flagship of Admiral Carmen San Filieu in the initial Met attack on Triton.
Rip Tether
An undulating space tether deployed over a planetary surface as a gigantic military weapon that tears through population centers like a merciless tornado.
Vinculum
Special “channel” of the merci reserved for Department of Immunity.
Schwarzes Floβ
DIED carrier that fell into the atmosphere of Jupiter during the war.
Sweeper
Department of Immunity antipersonnel unit, a Met policing-and-attack robot.
Marat
Transport that brought Leo Sherman’s platoon to Io.
Space-Based Defenses
Sensors
Mostly semisent free converts or semisents. These can be either fixed or traveling.
Minefields
Minefield commanders are fully sentient free converts with the rank of captain or above. A nonreplicated complementary key resides at local headquarters, also ranked as captain or above. Use of the key allows passage through the minefield.
Personal Weapons
DIED soldier appearance similar to a miniature attack ship.
GUARD KIT FOR A DIED SOLDIER
—Brace of arm rockets for each forearm
—Wrist band
• Rotating projectile weaponry
• Miniature railguns
• Capsule-sized grist grenades
—Outside of hands
• Antimatter rifles
• Entire arm stiffens into a stock for aiming
—E-M micro-macro goggles
• Adjustable for virtual reality, microscopic view, other e-m spectra
• Grist patch directly to the sight centers in the rear brain
—Body armor
• Isometric coating
• Grist supplemental
—Propulsion
• Attitude and impulse rockets on the legs
—Backpack
• Gyroscope
• Other supplies
Appendix Ten
CHARACTERS AND SPEAR CARRIERS
Principal Dramatis Personae
Roger Sherman
Federal Army commander of the Third Sky and Light Brigade of Triton, which, before the war, was principally a meteorological outpost assigned to study and develop the enormous power-generating Mill within the atmosphere of Neptune. Sherman was a former manifold who had reduced himself to individual human proportions after a series of professional setbacks and personal disappointments. Sherman started the war as a colonel.
Thaddeus Kaye
The first LAP manifold encoded using nanotechnology based on time-traveling graviton manipulation. Another attempt to foresee the future, the process succeeded too well, and Kaye became both a reflection of, and a direct causative agent upon, our local timescape. This proved to be a problem when Ben Kaye, the personality upon whom Thaddeus was based, sabotaged the encoding process as part of a lovers’quarrel. The resulting LAP was a combination of Thaddeus and Ben who called himself TB. Kaye’s fate was directly connected to the outcome of the war.
TB
Name that the Thaddeus-Ben Kaye combination man goes by.
Father Andre Sud
A shaman-priest of the Greentree Way, friend to Thad-deus Kaye and Roger Sherman. Sud was the Way’s time expert until he decided to retire from research and become a local priest and rock-balancing sculptor on Triton.
Molly Index
Friend to Thaddeus Kaye and Andre Sud. Index is a restorationist, specializing in the paintings of Jackson Pollock. Index was a LAP manifold before the war.
Jill
A scrap of security code that escaped its controlling algorithm and migrated to the Carbuncle, where it entered a ferret that Thaddeus-Ben Kaye used for hunting rats. Later “ferret Jill” was combined with an accidental re-creation of Alethea Nightshade in some modified military grist. The resulting young woman became the principal leader of the partisan forces during the war.
Jennifer Fieldguide
Young woman on Triton who is at first deceived, then wooed, by Colonel Theory. She succumbs to his charms and becomes the emotional guardian of his son during the middle phase of the war.
Leo Sherman
Youngest son of Roger Sherman. A journalist, essayist, and accomplished explorer of the Met Integument. Estranged from his father at the start of the war.
Ping Li Singh
Brilliant young theoretical physicist who is forced to work for Amés in a research prison on Earth.