Daneel disagrees with Jerry, "But Captain, our mission is to assist the local governments in King Oleb's name - hopefully making them friendlier to Drinax. So maybe we should avoid Bulhai - it might piss the government off if they found out we were dealing with their competition."
"You have a point, Daneel," responds Jerry as he rubs his chin.
"Let's fuel at Blue and see if we can pick up any news."
Nemesis drops out of J-space about an hour's distance from Blue Hightport.
"[i]Beachcomber, this is Traffic Control. Come to heading 251 by 62 mark 4 and stay on glide path. The mail is always welcome."
Blue is a reasonably busy port. You count four 200-ton free traders, three 200-ton far traders, one 2,000 ton GeDeCo freight hauler and a single luxury yacht, all within a thirty-thousand kilometers of the station. Further away, you can detect mining ships and transports working the outer system.
What do you do?
"Steph, can you handle communications? They seem friendly - tell them that we are registered at Drinax," suggests Jerry.
"Maybe ask if they have mail or freight for Clarke, but we don't have any mail for them."
Jerry spins his chair around to look at the others.
"We should dock, fuel and see what we can learn about the raiders that hit Clarke and Torpol. Maybe they have heard something, maybe not. What do you think about disclosing that we are sponsored by King Oleb?"
"Are we going to try to be fancy diplomats and make some deals for Drinax or just get the lay of the land? If we're just trying to get the lay of the land then I suggest we keep the King out of it."
Steph turns to the communications array. "Blue. I'm afraid we don't have mail for you, but we'd be willing to bring mail or freight to Clark. That's on our route. We're also interested in some down time, and a fuel top up. Which bay can we have for say two days?"
After a few moments, you are directed to Bay 17, a small berth about the right size for Nemesis.
Daneel accesses Blue's local nets and again searches for any information about the raids and raiders. He is particularly interested in finding and video of the attacks and aftermath. If no video is to be found, he focuses on any eyewitness accounts from survivors.
The people of Blue aren't terribly interested in the raids since they're not happening here. There is some video, however, of the attack on Torpol.
Torpol’s lack of stable land means that many of its industrial facilities are in orbit. The target of the pirate attack was one of these orbital factories, an automated chemical refinery. The factory’s onboard cameras
transmitted images of the attack just before they were destroyed. The images show two ships approaching from the orbital refuelling dock. A barrage of deadly accurate laser fire severs the refinery’s cargo module, and one of the ships swoops in to capture it. The other vessel moves to provide cover, then departs. One of the ships was a Far Trader, the other was a 400-ton Vulture-class salvage hauler.
The authorities on Clarke released no video.
"Let's fuel and prepare to move onwards. Did the video show any identifying features of the two ships that made the attack?," asks Jerry.
"Lemme see if I can enhance the image." Daneel calls up some imaging software and goes to work enhancing the image of the two ships to try and find something useful/interesting.
That's all that you can determine from the low-quality video being shown on the news. If you could get your hands on the actual video data (such as by actually going to Clarke and/or Torpol, where the adventure is...) you might be able to tell more. ;-)
"Well, let's get that fuel. Shore leave, in rotation, while we are docked. Everyone stay out of trouble," instructs Jerry.
"No problem, Jer-Bear," says Ray as she heads for her locker.
Steph gets the ship fueled up and takes her rotation. She gets something different to eat than can be found on the ship, and keeps an ear out for anything interesting.
Not having the skills to Carouse with the locals, she heads back to the ship quickly. She prepares the ship to depart when the leave rotations are complete.
While she's at her station she watches the video over and over trying to see how "real" pirates handled the attack. She's impressed at how they used the lasers to remove the storage facility from the factory.
Be nice if we can get ahold of a couple more ships. Especially one with bigger cargo capacity. She makes a note on her data pad about what we might look for in a second ship of the fleet, and laughs to herself that they might someday have a pirate fleet.
Byron will go out and carouse and see what rumors he can pick up.
Daneel hurries after Ray to try and keep her out of trouble (or at least minimize it).
Ray visits a few rougher bars, drinks like a fish, swears like a sailor and hugs Daneel perhaps a tad too much for his comfort, then tells him to relax, she's just joking. He gets her back to the ship in reasonable shape.
Byron hears a story that the planet Theev is a base for pirate activity and that the entire planet is secretly controlled by advanced AI robots.
Soon, the crew is ready (well, except for Ray, who's sleeping it off) to get back to the Black.
"Everyone accounted for?," asks Jerry.
He turns to discuss strategy with his companions. "I think we should first make the shorter jump to Clarke. It is only one parsec away, unlike Torpol"
"If nothing else, we will starting sooner."
"Sounds good to me, Captain. I'll run the jump drive through the checklists and make sure we're good to go." Daneel grabs some coffee from the common area and then heads down to engineering.
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Another week goes by and the faded grandeur of Nemesis's trappings seem less awe-inspiring than ever before. Most of you would kill for the chance to walk around and breathe fresh air. Steph's new holovids are popular, but the crew is still bored. Everyone is grateful when the Jump alarm sounds and the lanthanum grid begins to fade on the ship's hull. Nemesis drops out of J-Space a four hundred thousand kilometers above Clarke.
Clarke is, astrographically at least, the least important of the three cluster worlds, though it does see significant amounts of offworld traffic. This is mainly local, i.e. jump-1 ships moving within the cluster or jump-2 traffic coming in from Drinax and Arunisiir (by way of Blue). Long-range ships tend to use the port at Torpol and move on, with any elements of their cargo that enter the cluster’s economy moving by local transport.
Clarke has a reputation as a gloomy and rather unsettling place, which is probably deserved. It has never truly recovered from the bloody days of the late Sindalian Empire era, either physically or psychologically, and its strange religion is famous for many parsecs. The real Clarke is not quite the same as the image most offworlders have but it is certainly not a cheerful place. As a result, those who have the choice do business at the altogether more welcoming Torpol.
THE CLARKE SYSTEM
The Clarke system is centred on a yellow-white (F1V) main sequence star which has a distant red (M9V) companion. The companion system does not normally appear on starcharts as it is not inhabited. It is known to have several mapped comets, and not much else.
The Clarke system proper has no gas giants, making it necessary to obtain fuel from the starport or go looking for ice on a planetoid or comet. Few vessels can afford the time for such an undertaking, since the saving on fuel would be vastly less than the costs of running life support whilst searching – let alone the time lost from commercial activity. However, since many of the system’s comets and planetoids are charted it is possible that those who want to stay off the spacelanes might have their own wilderness refuelling spots.
There are two planetoid belts, neither of which is especially rich in minerals, and a total of seven terrestrial (rocky) planets. Two of these (other than Clarke) used to be inhabited; one still is. The old colonies were shot up in passing during the wars of the Sindalian Empire. Those settlements not eradicated were abandoned or succumbed to systems failures, creating mass tombs for their remaining inhabitants.
The only permanent settlement in the Clarke system outside the mainworld itself is a small town that grew up around a religious mission on one of the former colonies. This project aims to recover all the remains from those that died and inter them properly. They cannot be preserved in the way that recent dead are, of course, but the religion of Clarke demands they be given the proper rites and not left lying in the cold and dark for all eternity.
The two belts have communities of belters here and there. These are independent and do not answer to the world government. As a result their numbers are unknown. The belter population is probably quite small, and although belter ships do come in to the highport to trade, they contribute relatively little to the local economy.
CLARKE HIGHPORT
Many visitors to Clarke are reluctant to visit the surface, and prefer instead to stop over at the highport. Although given the same classification as the port at Torpol, Clarke’s is much less grand. It is functional, and well able to serve the needs of passing trade ships, but has none of the vibrancy and welcome of Torpol. Most of the ships that come through Clarke are local and small compared to the large long-range freighters seen elsewhere in the cluster. Clarke Highport’s large ship
docking areas can stand empty for weeks or even months on end, but there is a constant turnover of smaller ships.
Trade is also generally on a smaller scale, with Clarke considering a large cargo to be tens of tons rather than hundreds or thousands. Despite this, there are good trade links with Drinax and Pourne, and thence to other systems. Some Aslan clans maintain a jump-3 trade and passenger service to the Imperial worlds of the Trojan Reach sector, and many use Clarke’s port as a stopover en route to Arunisiir. Aslan are more common at Clarke than in most systems along the human side of the border.
CLARKE - B899753-8 NI
Clarke was once a garden world, largely unspoiled except for a concentration of high-technology manufacturing around the capital. This was the first target for orbital bombardment when the wars of the Sindalian Empire came to Clarke. It was also the last, and was worked over a few times in between. As a result, the capital region is still a radioactive wasteland, its terrain pocked with craters interspersed by mounds where rubble has been buried in the years that followed.
The rest of Clarke had little industry, but that did not save it from the bombing. Indeed, Clarke stands as a particularly thorough example of Sindalian spite. Every major settlement was flattened in a series of attacks, with refugees from one disaster zone finding shelter at another city, only to be bombed again. The result is a ruined world whose technological base was completely shattered and whose cultural psyche never recovered.
Despite the destruction raining down on them, the people of Clarke tried to save everyone they could, including the recently deceased. Before the bombing, technology existed that could repair and revive those placed quickly within cryogenic suspension at the point of death. Although this capability was lost along with the capital, it was hoped that relief would come and at least some of the dead could be saved. This, of course, did not happen but over time the hope of healing and revival
became an obsession and finally a religion.
The practice of freezing the dead was replaced with a rather macabre form of preservation in which the deceased is interred in a monolith of carbon. These dull black blocks are used as building materials in the cities of Clarke. Their dour appearance creates a grim and oppressive form of architecture which is only intensified by knowledge of what lies within them.
The process of preservation is controlled by a hierarchy of priests known as psychopomps. This translates as ‘soul guides’ and refers to the fate of the soul in both life and death. The stated aim of the psychopomps is to preserve each and every member of Clarke’s society for the Day of Healing, which will be brought about by the rediscovery of technologies lost in the bombardment of Clarke. The Day of Healing concept probably had a fairly limited and secular meaning at the beginning, in that there were practical limits on who could be revived even when the technology was available. However, today’s society on Clarke generally believes that everyone can be brought back – perhaps even the dusty dead of the offworld colonies.
The gloomy, death-obsessed religion of Clarke pervades all aspects of society and is genuinely believed by most of the population. The psychopomps are thus not only priests and advisors, they are also the world’s political and economic leaders. This can make interacting with the government of Clarke a sobering experience for Travellers; local metaphors and figures of speech are mostly concerned with death; contracts have strange religious overtones, and dealings are conducted in gloomy and oppressive surroundings.
Despite (or perhaps because of) this obsession with death and preservation, Clarke actually has a quite low Law Level. The citizens are generally well-behaved and abide by the rules of civilized behavior without much need for law enforcement. It has been unkindly suggested that the people of Clarke are simply too depressed to cause trouble, but the reality is that their religion implies consequences beyond death. This is sufficient to keep most people from straying too far from
the accepted norms.
Although the psychopomps’ goal is to bring about the Day of Healing by reconstructing old technologies, little progress has been made. There are archaeological projects digging through the radioactive wreckage of the old capital and various offworld assistance projects but, on the whole, these are underfunded and progress has been extremely slow for many years. Cynics might observe that the psychopomps risk losing their position if they actually succeed in their mission, but it is equally likely that Clarke simply cannot break out of its present mid-tech-backwater state for lack of money. The cost of rebuilding even part of the original technological base would be astronomical, and Clarke does not have sufficient income.
Today, the population of around 80 million dwells in several dispersed cities built mainly out of grim monoliths containing the waiting dead. Cities are noticeably ‘hard’ in terms of resistance to attack; buildings are shaped and positioned to deflect blasts and spaced to prevent a nuclear strike eliminating all key infrastructure. Reserves of food and medical supplies are maintained in most settlements, even though there is no apparent or immediate threat.
Clarke’s dense atmosphere is still tainted by the bombardment, and some parts of its ecosphere never recovered. There are large barren areas, and contaminated material from the bombing sites has been carried worldwide by currents in Clarke’s extensive oceans. Water for farming and drinking is carefully filtered and processed, but there are concerns that the world is still slowly dying. Far from preserving the populace for the Day of Healing, it may be that the psychopomps and their religion are doing no more than staving off the inevitable.
PIRACY IN THE CLARKE SYSTEM
There is a lot of traffic around Clarke’s highport, mainly small ships that provide excellent targets for pirates. Of course, there is also a reasonable level of protection offered by the system’s defense boats. Away from the port region, there are few good prospects. Belter ships offer a fairly poor return if pirates are only concerned with stealing cargo. Those willing to murder crews and chop ships up for spare parts can make more money, but that activity tends to provoke a more robust response from authorities.
There is salvage to be had in the wrecked offworld colonies, though the people of Clarke would consider this desecration of graves unless a scavenging operation were properly sanctioned and accompanied by a preservation team. Any equipment salvaged would be very old and might have already been cannibalized in an effort to survive after the ttacks. Troves have reportedly been found, however, and there have occasionally been reports of battles between rival scavenging gangs in the distant offworld colonies.
There is also the possibility that the outsystem contains some kind of refuelling outpost. An ice asteroid or a comet could provide enough fuel for many ships and, once located and plotted, it would not be hard to jump straight to. Finding such a refuelling station would be a difficult undertaking, however.
"Sweet Adeline, says Clarke traffic control, [b]"Come to 247 mark 2 and ride the beacon. State your cargo and intentions."
Jerry decides to answer this hail.
"We have a cargo of mail for the planet! We wish to land and unload our cargo. Anyone waiting for mail would like that, too."
Jerry continues after a moment. "We would like to land to unload the mail and arrange for another cargo."
"Sweet Adeline" is directed to a berth on the highport by a bored-sounding traffic director.
The berth is a normal starport berth and the station crew soon arranges to remove the mail drums from your hold.
Do you plan to talk to the planetary leaders as directed by King Oleb?
Jerry finalizes the arrangements for transfer of the mail. And, more importantly, payment for moving the mail.
Once that is finished, he speaks with his companions, "I think that we should speak to the leaders here. Or, at least try to do so, and find out what we can about these raiders."
"Uhh ... Ray. Can you keep an eye on the marines? Maybe stay with them on the ship? At least until after the audience with the leadership here."
Ray snorts. She knows when she's being called rough-around-the-edges. "Sure, Jer."
Ray stays aboard Nemesis with the Marines while Jeremiah, Steph, Byron and Daneel take a shuttle down to the surface of Clarke. The drab shuttle lands in a light rain. The dour downport is inside an enormous pyramid of black stone - a necrotemple built of thousands of slabs of black stone.
The people of Clarke wear plain clothes of black, gray and white. Here and there are serious-looking lictors in hooded black robes and armed with staves of office. One of these directs you to the necrotemple when you ask about the raider attacks. "You will wish to speak with Keeper Malos," says the Lictor.
As you approach the necrotemple, you realize that the black slabs from which it is built are carbon grave markers and each one contains a corpse. The features of the corpses peer out of one face of the monolith like a bas-relief. You are surrounded by the dead.
You eventually find Keeper Malos. He is the starport administrator and also a priest of the death cult Malos wears black robes, and on his back is a ceremonial freezer-tank that contains the carbon-foam spray used to preserve the dead.
He looks up as you approach his workstation. "What is it you require?" he asks, his face glum.
"Keeper Malos," begins Jerry.
"I am Jeremiah Xavier Jaramill-Smith, from Drinax. I bring greetings and the offer of assistance from King Oleb of Drinax."
Jerry pauses for a moment in order to try to gauge the Keeper's reaction.
The Keeper eyes, his impassive face revealing little. "And what is it that the King of Drinax wants to assist us with, Mr.... uh... Smith?"
Anyone, feel free to keep this rolling...
Daneel is somewhat creeped out by the Keeper and his temple, but tries to hide it as he answers. "His Majesty instructed us to use our skills and ship to help you track down and punish the raiders that attacked your orbital factory."
At the mention of the raiders, Malos becomes visibly angry.
"Those....barbarians... KILLED many people before they could be preserved. Do you understand? Deliberate killing is the highest sin in the Psychopomp faith. Those murdered by the raiders will never be resurrected on the day of healing!"
Malos calms himself and smiles a small, sad smile. "No. Anger, like life, is fleeting. We would be grateful for anything you could learn."
He waves a hand and a holographic map display pops up in the air over his desk. "This is where the attack happened. We call it the Relic-quarry. It is an archaeological dig at the edge of the ruins of Hiewad City, where explorers look for high-tech items and materials that survived the bombardment by the Sindalian Empire long ago. Perhaps you will find something there."
The explorers remind you of the Vespexers of Drinax, who practice a
similar form of scavenging.
"Did anyone survive the attack that we could talk to?" Byron asks.
"Yes," says Malos, pointing to the map coordinates. "And that is where you will find them."
He explains that you can rent a private vehicle and go there or you can take a bus. One leaves every other day.
You look into it and find that you can rent a private air car for Cr100 per day.
"Did the attackers send any messages? Threats or warnings of reprisal perhaps?" Byron asks.
"No. They came and they killed! Perhaps you can learn more at the Relic-quarry."
"Thank you for your time. We will go and see what we can discover." Byron looks to see if anyone else has anything to say before backing out.
"Did these barbarians do anything besides kill your people? Did they steal anything, or take captives?," asks Jerry.
Steph stands quietly as they gents try to get more information out of the Keeper. She almost wishes Ray was here so she could share a look that says. "You can find that information at the Relic-quarry. This person was going to give them nothing additional.
"Thank you Keeper." She gives him a brisk nod, and turns to Jerry "Captain, I believe we can find any information we need at the Relic Quarry. We've taken up enough of the Keeper's precious time."
Malos sighs and says "They caused widespread destruction, but I don't know particulars beyond the deaths of those now irretrievably beyond my ability to save. Hiewad City is not under our direct control and so I have no more answers."
"What I do have is half a million credits as a reward. Bring them in, dead or alive, and it's yours."
<'Girl from Ipanema' plays over the muzak.>