Spent too much time thinking about this today. Ah well. Have a story snippet; the Order's invasion of Secundus proceeds apace!
FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information
"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
Quote:The Last Chance Saloon was the first public house established in the fine city of Grand Central on the planet Grand Central. As the colony became the heart of Fenspace’s gatecrasher community, the saloon became the main pump. Most off-call gatecrashers hung out in one of the Last Chance’s expansive drinking rooms, and the back rooms were used for briefing and planning missions. Sometimes a team would be technically off-call, but waiting for a particular job to open up, and they would hang out at the Last Chance until word came back from Gate Control.
And this is where we find the Order of Saint Grimace, occupying one of the saloon’s back rooms while waiting for the call to return to Secundus. The vultures had already done a fair bit of aerial surveillance of the mysterious other-Earth, and C-Sec wanted a team on the ground soonish.
The problem: The gate in question opened up on Secundus’ moon, which meant they needed a way to insert the team from Luna-2 down to Secundus. The first option, using their trusty old runabout Mystery Machine, was quickly and violently nixed by C-Sec authorities. “Too conspicuous,” they said. “Too obviously alien even when stealthed. After the fuckup with the vulture, we want you guys running around in something that won’t arouse as much suspicion if you get spotted.” This left the Order at something of an impasse, until the rookie said she might have an idea and give her a couple days to do some digging. She then left Grand Central on the next gate for Sol.
That was a week and a half ago. Now, the Order waited for the call to action, and for their rookie to return from her mysterious errand. Mal Fnord sprawled on a handy couch, watching the latest pirated movies on his smartglasses while his partner Tina napped, feet in his lap. KJ DuPree and Deidre Griest played a desultory game of pool while Sep Lacroix and Lena Oorebeek workd on draining yet another pitcher of beer.
The scene of terminal boredom exploded, when the rookie finally returned to the Last Chance. “I got us a ride!” Sora Anderson announced triumphantly, bursting into the back room. The assembled Order jerked as one, abandoning their posts and clustering around Sora.
“What’d you get,” KJ asked. “Please don’t tell me you went to Stan’s Used Spaceships.”
“No. Jesus!” Sora glared at KJ. “I’m not that green, come on. No, I had to dig deep for this, but it ought to be good for the Secundus job. C-Sec approved, even!”
Mal raised an eyebrow. “That was quick,” he noted.
Sora preened. “All I had to do was show them the plans,” she said. Pulling a portable holoprojector out of her pocket, she laid it on the pool table and activated it. “Ta-dah!”
“It, um.” Lena paused. “It looks like the Titanic, only it shrank in the wash and somebody glued a couple fuel tanks to its belly.”
Tina gave the displayed ship a once-over, her eyes widening. “Son of a bitch,” she said. "That’s a Columbian sky-schooner! How the hell did you get the plans for one of these?”
Sora shrugged. “Called in some favors. My aunt Meg collects Columbian documents and artifacts, so I asked her if she had any sky-schooner stuff.”
“Wow... talk about your strokes of luck. Did she, you know, have the full blueprints?”
“Don’t be silly.” Sora rolled her eyes. “I’ve spent a fair bit of the trip setting up modcons; we’ll use darksci repulsors for primary lift and propulsion, with dummy props it should be convincing enough. Obviously the windows, hatches and the like have been space-proofed. The lift tanks are vacuum aerostats instead of hydrogen, which gives us a lot more safety and makes it pretty close to neutral-buoyancy at normal flight altitudes. Plenty of room for drones, collapsible trucks, labs, actual bunks...”
“Sounds good, but objection,” Lena said. “This thing is pretty gorram big, are we going to be able to get it through the gate?”
Sora sighed. “Probably not. We could fit it through here, but we might snag the masts on the New Clavius side. New Clavius has fabbers on their side though, and plenty of feedstock; we send through the plans and they’ll fab it for us.”
“Fits the defining paradigm, a bit big but well-apportioned, good for a long-term mission to a strange new world. Well done, Rook,” Mal said. “Let’s get the plans out to New Clavius and tell C-Sec we’re ready to roll as soon as the ship is.”
“One last thing,” KJ said. “She needs a name.”
“Well, it’s Columbian so it ought to be something appropriately high-falutin’. How about ‘Intrepid Spirit?’” Mal offered.
“Nah... a little too high-falutin’ for the Order.”
“Yeah, point.”
“How about ‘Floating Vagabond?’” Lena offered. The Order paused in thought.
“I like it,” KJ said.
“Works for me,” Sep agreed.
“A proper name for one of our ships,” Deidre said.
“Well, let’s go with it.” Mal finished the discussion. “Floating Vagabond it is. May the solar winds be at our backs.”
Quote:Excerpt from Thompson's Guide to Pre-Wave Weird Science (Univ. of Chicago, 20XX):Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
"SKY-SCHOONER: A form of lighter-than-air transport used by the inhabitants of the aerial city Columbia (1893 - 1915?). The sky-schooner used some form of greysci or darksci electromagnetic propulsion system, the exact details of which were never made public and have since been lost to posterity. Only three examples of sky-schooners are known to exist from the Columbian period; none are intact hulls as the vehicles were lightly constructed and the engines apparently rigged to self-destruct if handled poorly.
FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information
"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"