The North Pole of Danera VIII and Other Ice Worlds

Most of my empyrean infrastructure is based in the Royal Khanid Navy place orbiting the inner moon of Danera IV. This is where I live. It's my home system. I have an excellent relationship with the RKN and they leave me to it (the thing with the mercenaries and strippers was so last year).

The Danera system has two 'ice planets' at its outer frontier - Danera VII and VIII. Residents of the townships on Danera V know them by other, much older and more traditional names associated with their extremely high albedo which renders both planets visible to the naked eye from V when their distance combined with their small size as rocky terrestrials should render them invisible. It's all that ice. The brightest light is the coldest.

Light without heat.

A few months back, I experimented with a token level of resource-extracting in the Danera system by setting up an ice-mining facility on Danera VIII, just to see how it worked. I bought the equipment and had it shipped down to the surface. I have no idea who installed the facility, which can't have been an easy job, or what ran it beyond caretaker servitor robots. In that environment though, with an ambient temperature that makes ice indistinguishable from solid rock, machinery wears out quickly. Which is worse, the frozen surface of an ice world, the crushing depths of a gas giant's atmosphere, or hard vacuum itself?

The returns from mining on worlds in high security space are acknowledged to be inferior. This is evident in Danera because even though it has two of what are supposed to be only 5% of all planets in New Eden, my facility on VIII is the only one on the entire planet.

I shut down my facility after a couple of production runs late in YC117 and had it mothballed. I didn't dismantle it because I knew karma would require me to restart it at some point, maybe years from now; and if I didn't restart it, then the environment would ensure its preservation for the lifetime of the Danera primary itself. My ice mine would bear witness to the G5 star's evolution and eventual transition to the white dwarf state, billions of years from now. Danera VIII's distance from the primary - 31 AU - would ensure its immunity from being engulfed by the star's red giant phase. At that distance, would the ice melt? I doubt it. Danera VIII is probably going to remain locked in icy stasis for all eternity.

However, last month I reactivated my ice mine because I've started producing combat boosters on an experimental basis. I have a tower orbiting the fifth moon of [classified] where I've become a producer, a supplier, and a dealer of performance-enhancing drugs.

I am a drug dealer. A producer of contraband. I have taken one more step down the slippery slope...

The boosters I'm producing all require large quantities of water as a key component in the chemical reaction. This is what I meant by karma earlier: I needed water and I happen to have an ice mine ready to produce it.

Fast-forward a month: the mine has come out of mothballs intact, it is producing water for my drugs and it launches that water into low orbit around VIII in those standardized disposable rocket-powered cargo pods that everybody uses. The timing of these launches is at my discretion and the inclination of the cargo pod's orbit depends on the position of the facility on the surface, so the pod could basically be anywhere when I intercept and retrieve it.

This one time I found the cargo pod above the planet's polar regions. It was an unusual and arresting perspective - most of the time our ships are programmed to arrive in near-equatorial orbits around any given world as a result of the intersection between orbital mechanics and starship design. Cargo pod interceptions are the rare exception.

This was another one of those cosmic alignments I'm into. Perfect geometry and karma. The light of Danera, close to the planet's horizon at this latitude, caused specular reflections off mirror-smooth ice plains; light that diffuses through VIII's tenuous atmosphere that is nothing more than sublimated surface material.

It would be worth exchanging the capsuleer's conditional immortality for a short time, for the ability to look upon these worlds with my own eyes instead of through the filtering firmware of the cam drone that gives everything in space a uniform luminosity. I want to go down there in a lander and an environment suit and stand at Danera VIII's pole, where I would see ice crystals in the thin atmosphere forming sundogs that would follow the star as it tracked around the horizon with the planet's rotation, slowly marking the passage of an elongated time (VIII's 'year' is 22 of ours). The Vapor Sea Nebula would also be a permanent presence, albeit barely visible.

I didn't realise I have a thing for ice planets and their unchanging states, until now. Desert worlds are also my thing because the Ni-Kunni homeworld is in my ancestral DNA. What is it with the desire to seek remoteness?

Escape?

From what?

The noise of the cluster - the oppressive instantaneousness of the fluid router which makes Anoikis no further away than next-door; capsuleer conflict and the constant threat thereof; Sansha, the Drifter enigma, monosyllabic Minmatar terrorists, the Covenant; the ridiculous bias of Amarr Certified News etc. etc...

If everybody looked the same, we'd get tired of looking at each other, but sometimes you have to get away from it all and recharge. Looking at the view - the awesome visual wealth of New Eden - from time-to-time, is also good for one's perspective.

Shut off your overview occasionally and just look out of the 'window'. Remind yourself of why you do this.

Strippers and Mercenaries

I swear I have an alarm clock in my head. My capsuleer sixth-sense (an implant?) woke me from a dream about Empress Jamyl that I can no-longer remember, about two seconds before a message arrived on my datapad while, I should add, I was in a hotel suite in Dan's second city of Centralis.

The mail was from an agent in the Royal Khanid Navy:

See this backs up exactly what I said previously about the Navy taking notice of Talos Coalition in response to our response to the alliance wars over territory going on in the regions surrounding Khanid. I thought this was as good a reason to go back to work, so I caught the next intra-system shuttle back to the RKN place and my hangar.

Now the Navy mission described above was no problem, it merely involved a bit of mining; but I knew it would lead to something much bigger and more profitable. Sure enough, after this I was contacted by another RKN agent - Anark Bandu - about suppressing some pirate activity in the area.

So I prepped Sid Vicious and headed out to the deadspace near Bomana to take down a Guristas outpost and 'rescue' some mercenaries.

This is where things started to escalate. I had to stash 40 angry 'Militants' into Sid's cargo hold and take them through the stargate back to Ishruna (Danera IV), through the stargate, through hyperspace, without medicating them with anti-cynosis drugs first. The techs at the other end said the stink in the hold from puke and piss was unbelievable. Then Bandu said he only wanted half of them (he had a list of names) so I was stuck with 20 pissed-off, angry, stateless 'Militants' in my hangar.

Of course the mission payment made it technically worth it (only just...) and when Bandu asked me to head out again and deal with some Sansha's Nation operatives in the area I thought I'll deal with the mercs later and headed out again. Fighting Sansha ships was entertaining, if only because their ships look as angry as Sansha Kuvakei himself. Such anger. Everywhere. I bet these pirates just need a big hug from time-to-time.

After this I thought I'd go and deal with the 'Militants' but Bandu offered me another mission involving the rescue of some politician's daughter from a pirate ringleader called Kruul.

I had to get the Omen out for this because I was outnumbered about 20-1 and needed the firepower and force-multiplying effect of drones. Rookies: get drones. Treat them like pets. They'll save you more times than you'll ever know.

Now this one took some time. Partly because I fitted a salvager to the Omen's spare high slot and used it on all the wreckage I created. Because of this, these low-level missions were still hugely lucrative because of all the quality loot, and particularly the salvage, which is essentially free ISK.

So I rescued the politician's daughter, killed Kruul, got the proof of his death in the form of a DNA sample, and salvaged/looted a load of miscellaneous hybrid turret ammo that will be worth playing with at some point.

Then, Bandu called with another mission about shutting down a pirate-run brothel out in some nasty deadspace pocket right here in Danera, so I headed out with the Omen and cleaned that deadspace right up. We can't have that sort of degeneracy in Dan. We just can't.

Since I'm such a nice person, I ended up rescuing everyone left alive in the wrecked brothel and took them all back to base along with a load of holovids that one of them said were 'important'. Yeah, right. Holovids in a brothel? Wonder what kind of holovids they are then..? Home-made?

Bandu then said some garbage about how rescuing people wasn't part of the mission, so I was left fuming, because in my hangar now I had 20 angry Militants who never say exactly what it is they're angry about, the DNA of a local pirate kingpin, 10 low-level station rat/janitor types that had come along for the ride, and 10 'exotic dancers'.

Just think about that combination for a minute...

Now if my mentor Aire Arryns from Hedion U in Conoban was here, I know what he would say:

"Vitoc them, Cassandra", he'd say. "You have a ready-made starship crew right there at your feet. Administer the Vitoc to all of them and you will have them worshipping you as if you are Empress Jamyl herself - they will be grateful for their service to you, Cassandra. Vitoc! It is the Amarrian way!"

I'm not Amarrian. I'm a Ni-Kunni.

If Taltha was here, I know what she would say:

"That's sick, don't you dare turn them into your slaves", she'd say. "Bring that guy Kruul's DNA over here and we can clone him without a brain and have some fun with him; but you have to deal with those others now, straight away, otherwise you'll have a riot on your hands. Strippers and soldiers in the same room? It's not as if you've given them anything to do in that hangar of yours except watch those porn films you found with them either. Sell them. Sell them all."

"But you just said no to slavery", I'd reply.

"No to you. Let someone else have them!" she'd say.

Not sure about the logic there...

I checked the markets. It turns out you can't sell 'Militants', because they can only sell themselves. Janitors are in infinite supply and therefore valueless, but strippers, sorry, exotic dancers, most definitely were in demand up in Palas. I loaded all ten of them into the passenger cabin of Sexy Beast and ferried them up to Palas, where I got nearly half a million ISK for them - after tax - in some poxy club where the owner openly advertises a huge demand for them. What a sicko.

So I started the day working for the Royal Khanid Navy, and ended the day dealing with a minor refugee crisis and dabbling in amateur people-trafficking. 

Welcome to New Eden...

I dread to think about what will happen to those girls now. Note to self: sentimentality is fatal in this game...

War's Over So I'm Going Planetside

I bought another Venture and ferried it to our new base in [classified], with the idea of doing some mining in the deep lowsec in Southern Khanid and basing this Venture there permanently.

I fitted it to a sort-of ninja speedy Venture spec: combat drones for defence, microwarpdrive for high-speed getaways and a cloaking device as a last resort.

A few problems materialised:

- all that lovely exotic lowsec ore is pointless if nobody will buy it. I have to ferry the bloody rocks light-years to bring it within range of others' buy orders.

- my Ninja Venture was defenceless against what NEOCOM classified as a 'Blood Raider Clone Soldier Cruiser' that I caught lurking in a belt in Gousoviba (0.1). A Maller, no less, that lit me up from 80 km away and one-shot me with pin-point accuracy. Seriously. A sniper job. The damn thing carried a bounty of 1.75 million ISK. Clearly it's been operating there for some time. If you see it, say hello from me before you kill it.

So my lowsec mining strategy needs work. I need something more substantial than a Venture.

In the meantime, the nuisance over the 'wardec' reached farcical levels with no less than eight alliances/corporations wardeccing us at the peak. Intel reached us that 'Space Warriors', the instigators of this thing, started losing members at around the same time for some reason - an exodus by all accounts, and that all the other war declarations were some sort of bureaucratic consequence of this, so it meant nothing. Then a mass of messages from CONCORD arrived that stated all the 'wardecs' were invalidated and cancelled due to an unspecified violation of the Yulai thing. In reality, they'd all failed to pay the fee. Some of these 'wars' lasted less than a minute...

So now we can go to Amarr and Jita again, and life in Khanid is, er, exactly the same as it was before.

I'm going offline for a few days as I've got a trip to the sand dunes of Danera V arranged. Since I've been based here in this system I've found out that Dan V is an unexpectedly interesting world:

- it's classed as temperate, so you can walk around outside without a pressure suit. You'll need a breathing mask if you're outside for more than half-an-hour or so as the pressure is lower than standard, but gravity is only slightly lower. The climate is even stable too as its year is 4.7 standard years long with no axial tilt. Not much changes except on a cosmic timescale that may see the large ocean sublimate away in the low pressure. At 11.2 AU, Dan V should be an ice ball, but it generates a lot of internal heat through tectonic activity associated with the tidal effects of having previously had two moons, so the average ambient temperature is only slightly lower than standard, hence the liquid water.

- there's not much in the way of vegetation because of the thin air and that tectonic activity, combined with what in the past must have been a period of bombardment from the remnants of the shattered moon that created Dan V's asteroid belt at only 90,000 km distance. So today it's mostly tundra, some mountains, large flood basalt traps and desert; with the remaining moon exerting weaker tides than before, resulting in a more benign environment. Liveable.

- here's the interesting bit: there are loads of archaeological remains spanning several thousand years. It seems that in the deep past, starting before the Dark Ages, Dan V had a human civilisation that dated from the Terran era that may have persisted on some basic level up until the time of the Reclaiming. Unearthed temples, relics and other artefacts have been found on Dan V that indicate the planet was known as 'Al-Kaukab' for a long time; that the Danera primary was, during the same period, known as 'Said al-Akbiyah' and that the two nebulae visible from the planet - the Cauldron and the Vapor Sea - were called 'Al-Khiba' and 'Al-Udhi'.

Fast-forward a couple of thousand years and the star was known as 'Dhanab al-Asad', by which time the population had almost died out. Then sometime around the arrival of the Amarr, the name 'Danera' appears for the first time and the standardised 'Danera V' designation sticks.

Today, it's a relatively unspoiled and underpopulated world that is away from a main trade route and home to various strict religious retreats and temples, amid small low-rise cities that are a product of the tech and personnel pipeline to the three Khanid Navy facilities elsewhere in-system. If I was describing Dan V in a tourist brochure I'd say it was a 'compelling fusion of ancient architecture and modern high-tech amenities - cave dwellings with holovids".

Time to go planetside and breath some real, albeit rarified air instead of oxygenated capsule fluid. Here's where I'll be for a few days - I'll send you a holopostcard:

In fact if the ongoing thing with the Drifter faction, the Sleepers and the Jove keeps on escalating, Dan V will be the perfect place to ride it out for a few years.

May you live in interesting times...