Rino had always wanted to see the universe. To get on a ship and explore star system after start system, see exotic worlds and alien environments. Such dreams were hardly rare; every child that grew up on scientifically-questionable cartoons wanted to become an explorer.

  Most children never had that wish granted. Space travel was expensive, and space tourism only available to one out of every million people living in the sector.

  Rino was the exception, though his trip had hardly been fun. At just sixteen cycles old, he’d been taken from his home and thrown into a prison barge to Nimbus. His exile-worthy crime? Criticizing the king. One short trial behind closed doors, and with just a single testimony from one of his classmates, and his future was obliterated.

  He’d spent half a decade as a penal laborer, breaking rocks, eating tasteless nutrigruel and sleeping in damp, cramped beds.

  Now, six years after that tear-filled trip on the prison barge, he had travelled on a ship once again. And he wasn’t alone either. Attracted by the prospect of revenge, pay, citizenship and the prospect of becoming something more than an ex-prisoner, nearly nine hundred men and women joined the nascent Federal Marine Corps.

  This time, they boarded the ship willingly. Yet instead of two to three weeks of preliminary training or just loafing about on the passenger ship, they were informed that they’d be sleeping it all away in a cryosleep capsule.

  Of Rino’s group of about fifty recruits, five must’ve quit on the spot. By the time they’d undressed and been given infirmiary-style white gowns to wear during cryosleep, another five washed out.

  One of the recruits had scrounged up the courage to ask the drill sergeant why those who couldn’t stomach cryo didn’t spend the trip awake in cabins. Every recruit had dealt with terrible living standards during their imprisonment; two weeks in a comfy cabin was practically a reward.

  “Because you’ll be deploying from cryo, recruit! What, did you think you’re a special snowflake and the corps ought to spend the resources to house and feed you for a month or two between deployments?!”

  That had settled it. Recruits were given four hours to mentally prepare themselves —as well as relieve themselves in the loo after some mandatory ‘go pills’—. Then…sleepy time.

  Two and a half weeks later objective time, Rino woke up from his capsule to find out they’d arrived in orbit of the Akritan crownworld. The drill sergeant was quick to ensure the ‘training platoon’ of fifty relieved themselves of their gowns and donned the off-green uniforms that were given to them.

  After so many years spent wearing beat-up jumpsuits, the uniforms were eagerly accepted. Good boots, good socks and a whole lot of environmental gear that they weren’t supposed to mess with until they were told to. That last part, the drill instructor made sure to say a lot.

  Even with the fearsome man in their midst, many had let out chuckles when a recruit did exactly what he wasn’t supposed to and unwrapped his kit. Heavy coats, ice boots and a whole lot of other gear fell out of the canvas bag and on to the floor. By the minute’s end, fifteen recruits had also dropped to the floor, huffing and puffing as they executed push-ups while the drill sergeant ‘enriched’ them with another speech about camaraderie and brotherhood.

  Then the time to disembark arrived.

  The same shuttles that had taken them from their respective ex-penal stations now sent them down to Domusec. Instead of descending in a steady spiral, like the more knowledgeable among the recruits said was normal in civilian transorbital trips, the shuttles…fell.

  They dropped from a hundred thousand kilometers above like solid ingots, rumbling and shaking all the while. It was fair to say that by the time they landed, every recruit had the experience of orbital descent firmly linked with the stench of puke.

  “Recruits, prepare to disembark!” Decker shouted, completely ignoring the puke stains on the floor.

  At his words, the rear ramp dropped to the floor. The recruits were frozen, looking out at the great grassy expanse beyond the landing field.

  Rino knew Sergeant Decker wouldn’t let them sit about for more than a breath or two, but he enjoyed the sight nevertheless. After six long years, he was finally back planet-side.

  “Welcome to Camp Lehey, your home for the next eight weeks.” The drill sergeant said, pausing for a long second before shouting. “What are you looking at?! Move it!”

  For most of her rule as Governor, Katrina Polk had low expectations of her colony.

  That wasn’t to say she was a pessimist; realism had been her guiding principle since her first days as a junior executive in the Republic.

  The simple truth was that Polaris had far few prospects beyond mining. It was far from the centers of power and finance, in an area scarcely seen by messenger boats or merchant vessels. Their only neighboring state, the Kingdom of Leonis, had remained staunchly isolationist since cutting ties with the Hegemony, and the Republic itself was fully focused on a dick measuring contest against the latter to give more than a passing glance at its spawn.

  With much toil and luck, maybe the colony would grow enough to see the first generation of children born on polarii soil grow to maturity. Even dreaming about complete self-sufficiency had been out of the question…until two and a half cycles ago, when she first met with Duke Akrites.

  Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

  Now Polaris was building one factory after the other, while its mining operations expanded from veisgolt to bulk manufacturing materials like nickel, chromium and aluminum. Even shipyards, like the one she was currently flying towards on her personal shuttle, were being built instead of imagined. For many, it was a heartening picture…yet Katrina’s feelings on the matter were bittersweet.

  The Polarii Government had taken no loans from the Duchy…yet capital had been given. The price? Stocks.

  Thirty percent of a refinery here, sixty percent of a factory there; even the nascent Blackbird Yards were owned in part by Akritan hands. She had overseen the exchange of stock and currency herself; almost every single company of the akritan defense industry had bought stock, and the Akritan Sovereign Fund itself had pledged hundreds of millions of marks.

  Her idea of a truly independent colony had been well and truly dashed; the Duke effectively controlled half of every new, shiny polarii business. Few people seemed to mind, which made sense; the cost of living was going down and wages were going up. Most were eager to live their lives to their fullest, uncaring about the changes occurring in the grand scheme of things.

  Plus, the ‘incident’ that had occurred five months ago in Jack’s Point had actually scared the Council into passing a new national security bill. Stars, it had even scared her; an active rebellion would undermine everything they had worked for since the colony’s founding.

  A concentration of semi-automatic firearms like that seen in the rural settlement would never occur again without the government’s knowledge. And if all else failed, the newly-formed and trained Special Intervention Teams of the National Gendarmerie would do what the Akritan shock troops had accomplished half a cycle ago…in a significantly milder manner.

  ‘They might as well have bombed the town hall from orbit for all they left behind…’

  Dismissing the thought with a shake of her head, she took one look at the staffers and bodyguards around her and realized they’d arrived.

  —

  Katrina had walked around the shipyard facilities at the Akritan Bridgehead Station a handful of times in the past few cycles, inspecting the Polarii Navy’s orders at various stages of their construction, outfitting and repairs. The Akritans ran a tight shop, what one Miss Kim Sun-hee liked to call ‘Applied Chaos’.

  As she walked around the completed sections of the Blackbird Yards, she saw both similarities and differences.

  Money was tighter, manpower less so.

  That meant less robots and drones flying, crawling or walking about, and more men and women dressed in hazard-pattern construction gear and vacsuits. Yet robots, once considered far too expensive for Polaris to use in construction, were still in use.

  The vast majority were so-called ‘hexabots’, waist-high droids with six articulated legs equipped with magnetic soles. Some carried arc welders, rivet guns, or any of a dozen other heavy tools, while others ferried materials, keeping critically-thinking human labor equipped and supplied to work all day, every day, three hundred and sixty days a cycle. They were also better at working in vacuum that even trained human workers; combined robotic and machine labor was able to complete interior and exterior components at similar speeds, thus leaving few areas in limbo between full operation and constructions.

  Yet construction was cheaper, obviously so.

  Grav-plating was set to only half instead of the normal three quarters of standard gravity, which meant the shipyards only had to employ three instead of four fusion reactors. It also made movements clunkier, though the work crews were quick to pick up on how to turn that to their advantage and mitigate the problems of low gravity.

  Onboard facilities were also significantly reduced. The Bridgehead Yards manufactured most parts in-house inside the station’s zero-gee spinal compartments, in massive 3D printers and auto-lathes, where the micro-gravity allowed high-precision manufacturing and rapid turnaround from raw materials to assembled components. Blackbird’ financial constraints meant that only the most mass-heavy components were manufactured on-site. Complicated mechanical and electrical components were shipped from factories on the surface of Polaris.

  That was already…causing issues.

  Sure, the Yards didn’t need an additional hundred million marks now, but the cost of building even the most basic patrol boat —inferior to the Reliance-class boats— had gone from thirty-five to forty-two million dollars, or just above twenty million akritan marks. It didn’t take a mathematician to realize those costs would balloon way beyond the hundred million in savings. They were effectively shifting the cost to the ships themselves, and that would bite them in the ass...but it also meant they'd be getting ships --lesser quality, but still ships-- sooner.

  —

  “Beautiful, isn’t she?” The Yards’ chief engineer asked, a grin evident on her face.

  They were staring out of a high-fidelity viewscreen at woman’s tiny on-site office. Katrina hardly minded the lacking space; she was entirely focused on the growing metal skeleton hovering inside the shipyard’s barebone cradle.

  “That she is.” Katrina agreed. “How is construction proceeding?”

  The chief engineer let out a sigh. “Quickly, but I suspect not quickly enough for what you’ve got planned.”

  “And what might that be?” She asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “The war, duh.” The woman replied, her lips forming into a cheeky grin. “With all due respect, ma’am, it’s a rather open secret. The akritans already finished their work in Nimbus, but I’m hearing about more logistics ships ferrying materiel to the system. Missiles, mines, sailors; there are even rumours about a new unit of nimbian marines being trained on Domusec. It’s pretty clear that the Duke is going for Leonis, and I’d stake my job on us following.”

  Katrina looked at the engineer in silence for several seconds, before her shoulders slacked. “Well…you got it one. I suppose we won’t have these missile boats ready by, say, the next month or three?”

  “No chance.” The engineer shook her head. “The earliest the navy is getting its hands on them is eighteen months, and that’s only because we’re kitting them out with inferior sensor packages in the first place. Even then, the line for getting said packages is long. The Akritans are building some spooky stuff of their own in Bridgehead One, and that’s siphoning away almost every bit of advanced electronics their lithography shops can make. Ours are not even close to on par, and won’t be useful in military applications for the next three or four cycles.”

  There was no going around it; both polarii and akritan defense projects were straining their respective nations’ resources to their limits. Even with more factories and mines coming online every week, Polaris still relied on akritan manufacturing for the most advanced components, and would continue to do so for a long time.

  Nevertheless, Katrina was proud of how far her nation had come so far…even if the akritans had paid for half of everything.

  Just three cycles ago, building an orbital shipyard had been little more than an outlandish idea best left to one’s dreams. Now, the Blackbird yards were real, and they would be complete in just another cycle. Sure, the current layout was small, and unlike the ever-expanding Bridgehead Yards it would remain so for many cycles to come. But this was good enough. Blackbird’s final form would be able to produce the basis of a proper navy; patrol boats, frigates and maybe even destroyers.

  More so, it would allow them to establish a merchant navy. With cheap hyperdrive fuel coming from Akritan antimatter refineries, they would be able to jumpstart their mercantile ambitions in a way most nations could not.

  hold the line!

  awesome if you wrote a review! It draws more people in, and gives me more reasons to keep writing!