Building the Collateral - 84 - Early Access (Patreon)

Well, talk about getting blindsided by family. My cousin-niece was a wanted war criminal like me. Huh.

Union’s probably not going to be happy about that, but you know what? Screw it. I hadn’t even entertained the notion of turning her in to even my sentence, that’d be seriously screwed up. It’d probably also backfire magnificently on me considering the setting I now lived in, so there wasn’t much second-guessing to do there. It’s not like I knew any other family currently was to send her instead.

… I do wonder if they’re okay. Hopefully so. But there wasn’t time or opportunity to spare for a personal search to them, not when I had to wrangle an entire rogue station and bring that into line first. Then that cascaded into additional domestic issues for my administration to handle. Oh boy, here we go again.

Right, time to categorize this mess into something my game-oriented head could tackle. First, green stuff: livelihoods. That translated into food and healthcare in this case. On that front, both good and ill-boding news.

The big thing is that thanks to our expanded hydroponics facilities on Cavia, we could feed everybody as needed. We’d be running a little slim on our surplus for a bit, but that should theoretically balance out with further internal development. Our Department of Agricultural seized possession of the facilities that were used to feed Port Barbarus, and Apples gave a mixed report there. They were technically functional and could be used- but on a very personal level, the clones almost seemed offended by the idea of continuing them as is.

Algae farming technically was the most efficient utilization of water to produce. It also happened to be slightly demoralizing, as the taste was something one certainly had to acquire. Probably after downing plenty of alcohol to wash it down. It was something that was labeled in the Half-Committee’s logistics book as ‘emergency rations.’

V1P3R had apparently been utilizing it for a while for the station’s inhabitants, to the point where the average resident just grimaced and accepted it. Stars, they almost seemed afraid of the first fish dish we provided to them. Something about how seeing a face on their food making it quite unsettling.

Anyways, Apples personally vowed to me that he was going to overhaul those facilities and bring them up to the Cavia standard. It should lessen the strain of the near-constant supply ships between the station and the planet below if the people onboard could feed themselves. I gave him my blessing on that regard, eager to get our numbers back in the green soon enough. Then I turned to the other half of living and sighed, as this one was an unfortunate headache.

Healthcare in Cavia was pretty ad hoc. The prior establishment certainly didn’t spend much on things like public hospitals, so their people had to learn to fend for themselves. For the most part, it was fine in the sense that most simple injuries could be treated easily enough. In fact, I daresay they could even be utilized emergency disaster relief in a pinch if need be. However, your cabinet medical box could only go so far.

The next step up, that being things like chronic diseases or severe injuries? We weren’t really handling so well. The medics our logistics corps supported could handle things like broken bones well enough, anything that could be constituted as a common battlefield injury. Heck, they could probably even treat something like a plasma burn well enough. But their expertise definitely laid in being able to immediately diagnose, treat, and solve whatever ailed their patient. They weren’t equipped or trained to handle things like lasting medical conditions requiring annual care and checkups.

It had been a little surprising for me to learn of it first, but then I recalled how the clones underwent more proactive genetic treatments for their own healthcare. The army doctors could handle a cadre of soldiers with regular screening to prevent needing to worry about those complications when they manifested. They weren’t going to be so effective at handling the condition when it already was present, nor were they suited at managing an entire civilian population.

Especially not one that had so many issues resulting from experiencing very poor lifestyles onboard cramped quarters, under quite stressful conditions.

The free checkup offering I had pushed for yielded a dizzying plethora of medical complications that we were simply not able to handle. It wasn’t good, but rather darkly, those affected simply gave grim expressions of understanding when we glumly admitted our competence. They’d lived the hard life already; they were quite depressingly used to it.

Ugh. Even with that assurance, my mouth still felt bitter at the thought. I’d promised we’d care for them, and already, we were failing that endeavor.

My options to resolve the matter were also cripplingly limited. Our budget wasn’t going to be able to support trying to poach foreign doctors from elsewhere, and it would take a long time before any domestic ones emerged. If any did, with our rather lackluster state of education at the moment. Tch, these were issues that Veronica and I admitted as temporary setbacks and put aside for the moment, needing to actually continue on to matters that we could do something about. Better that than just wringing our hands uselessly about.

There were some definite positives about bringing a rogue station into quite literally our orbit. For one, we now had a veteran spacer community, a substantial one in fact that could easily fill out still nonfunctional dockyard printers. They didn’t have to sit idle either; there were plenty of work opportunities down below in Cavia, for those who wanted to give living on the dirt a chance.

It was a rather interesting moment, seeing some of those families depart and hesitantly step off the shuttles. They were likely the first of their line to, in a very long time, finally touch grass. So to speak, we didn’t really have much grass in this tundra ecology. It was more moss.

However, that was only for those who sought a civilian life. There were also those who sought to voyage across the stars that they could only stare out at for so long, close but never able to escape from their home. Now the galaxy was open to them, and there was a rather simple way to do it for those without the manna to pay for the trip.

Join the navy, and we’ll take you to sights you won’t forget anytime soon.

I suppose that if there had been something our opponent was good at, it’d be guiding this trapped populace to serve their needs. Before, it’d been their HORUS cell; Now, it was our own armed forces were the ones who were seeing the desperate and the believers signing up for. Some did veer and align more with some other factions present in the Cavia Committee, but a good chunk went and willingly volunteered for service of their own will.

While it did slightly disturb me to be taking on these recruits so soon, deferring or turning them away was probably an even worse idea. We also did need fresh hands to fill in our ranks, now that we were looking beyond our own little orb. There was even some chatter about perhaps putting a semi-permanent population on whatever land there was on Cavia II, that water world did supporting a few scarce archipelagos. To whoever dared, I wished them the best of luck- and maybe the usage of some idle labor corps in the future.

For the moment though? We absolutely needed all of them. It was all hands on deck, tackling the myriad of problems that Port Barbarus had. From cleaning out the stubborn (and stupid) gangs, repairing structural integrity, or even just cleaning up the mess of a battle which had raged on within those living zones; there was much to do. Thankfully, Mingyu and Nasir were able to handle the vast majority of these minor issues, ranging from law enforcement to repair work.

That left me with only handling some other matters, like the demilitarization of the rogue station. You know, no big deal.

Tempting as it was to have my own little battle moon in orbit around our home, I took one good look at the concept and couldn’t bring myself to go along with it. Because thing is, if it was a fully armed and operational battle station, it could be very well-reasoned as a valid military target by less scrupulous folks. It didn’t matter if there were civilians onboard- they could even be argued as involved, being support personnel to a defensive platform.

It was an ambiguous gray area that even my Director of Law found hard to properly differentiate legally. Assuming said legalities even counted in the Diaspora, but you know. We have to make the effort because we can.

There was also a little part of me that mentioned that having something like this around me was begging to be like a final climatic showdown to a tabletop campaign. One that might slightly rip off a certain famous scene from another franchise. Which, considering the memes I’ve seen back then about how much of a tremendous waste that weaponized moon was, only contributed to my decision to properly disarm Port Barbarus.

Note though that I just was going to take off those very scary guns. Everything else like point defense turrets and port hangers were already established in naval doctrine as reasonable self-defense, placing it under the ‘inhabited city’ label. Which meant invasion was permitted, and orbital bombardment quite highly frowned upon. To say nothing of very illegal planet crackers, but let’s not go down there for the time being.

The hard part now was handling these terrifying tools that could distort reality. While they would probably be fantastic to have as additional defenses to our military bases, we simply just couldn’t use them. Their operation required not just an NHP, but one who definitely was verging on the deep end. Which made sense, as V1P3R was one such being.

Unfortunately, our only friendly alternative was unabashedly affiliated with HORUS. Forget upsetting Harrison Armory, my own forces would understandably ask if I’d gone mad by handing a bunch of digital vandals the keys to such powerful weapon systems on our territory. So appropriating them for our use was out of the question.

That left disposal then. I was tempted to see if we could find the closest black hole and eject these mounts into it, though that might end up having rather unforeseen consequences via paracasual shennigans. But then Luna contacted me, acting as an intermediary for Jean who was apparently still recovering from his ordeal. Expending a metavault to warp a station through space did that.

He had learned of my worries and offered to take some of them off my hands for quite the deal. As Port Barbarus would probably still have to deal with whatever machinations V1P3R had buried deep within the systems, the NHP would commit this local cell towards at least restoring an equilibrium, all but slowly rooting out the former cell’s influence. Of course, his own would slip onto the cracks established, that much was a given- but very importantly, it would only match the presence we already had on Cavia.

The rogue station, in other words, would have their indoctrination and inclination towards HORUS removed- and slowly returned to normal.

Honestly speaking, I think that should have been the end goal from a moral perspective the whole time. But well, our affiliates did also expend more than a few assets in this conflict and it also stretched into affecting things elsewhere too, or so I’m told. Handing over at least a few of the guns would probably help assuage cells elsewhere that this hadn’t been for naught, thus increasing their opinion of us.

That was pretty valuable too.

However, I also couldn’t help but suspect that they would want to fiddle around, then remount these weapons onto ships of their own. Which was probably an issue in itself, but you know what? If they’re on a ship, that’s a valid military target. Maybe it could even lead to our local cell supporting a shadow fleet that operated out of Cavia. That… would be pretty interesting.

It’d also be dangerous, but I mean. I already had a Harrison Armory force sitting around here. Another to the list probably was far from the worse idea.

While I didn’t immediately accept the arrangement, we could at least chat and lay down the foundations of it. Which was just being better colleagues, something that was a pretty good idea. You never know when you wanted a little digital magic in your back pocket. I just had to be very careful not to delve too deeply, lest our nation start leaning heavily their way too.

Though that might be a premature worry, as Harrison Armory also renewed their interest in us. Maybe Erica’s little foray pleased them or they felt like they had to counteract a growing HORUS influence; whatever it was, we began to receive lucrative kickbacks in our resource treaties. They framed it like ‘disaster relief’ and ‘loyalty incentives’ to support us suddenly taking on a rogue station, which I guess was nice. If it meant they wanted at least a foot in the door when discussions about our foreign relations came up, sure, I wasn’t going to turn away our very distant SecComm cousins.

Speaking of cousins and megacorporations… I suppose I’ll tackle that now, as it does also relate to the problems I’d left later. Because really, when you think cloning, you think one company. When you think healthcare, you think one megacorporation. When you think genetic manipulation, you think one faction.

Smith-Shimano Corpo.

“You already contain perfection. Welcome to the future of humanity: You, by Smith-Shimano.”

They were a big player in this galaxy. One of those whose frames actually lined catalogs alongside IPS-N and Harrison Armory, despite their self-professed interest in the individual rather than the machine. Toss in a mastery of biology and you’ve got a megacorporation that might not have the prestige of older powers or the eagerness of newer ones- but doing it all with a flair that made the others seem bumbling in comparison.

Refined elegance. That was the best way to understand them, and their approach to business. While others utilized cutthroat and heavy-handedness, the SSC would instead watch from afar and probably sip some sort of genetic cocktail. Then swoop in and undercut them all, appealing to the most basic needs of an individual over the many concerns of a people.

Such approach meant that they had undoubtedly some of the best biologists and geneticists that humanity could offer. I’d maybe say they were perhaps the intellectuals compared to the others, boasting more about their customized and artisan products instead of mass-produced efficiencies. And as it so happened, I found myself looking at what they could offer with a wanting gaze.

That matter with healthcare? Something they could handle easily. Our domestic education? Surely they could spare a professor or two, build a university campus even. My niece?

They might know something about her. The Monarch she supposedly piloted was one of their flagship products, and that lab environment she grew up in… it reeked of human experimentation, which the SSC are a priority suspect in.

At the same time, it was because of Morgan that I was somewhat reluctant to try and initiate contact with them. I couldn’t predict what they would ask of me, what they might even demand if they caught a glimpse of her. Then I’d have the incredibly envious task of choosing between family and state, which… ugh. Even just thinking about it put me in a foul mood.

I wasn’t so afraid that they would try to take her back by force. If they did, then I did have Harrison Armory and HORUS on my side, both of whom would probably take it as an excuse to make sure another megacorporation doesn’t swoop in to try and take a slice of the Cavia fish pie. But it would definitely be a strain, a door shut closed that I really was hoping would be opened even for somebody like me.

You know what? Nothing to it.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Let’s just send out a feeler and see-

Huh? They’re contacting us first?

… And they’re saying they owe us reparations?

What?