yefiridwa

Peter Zeiwlander- the belt



The question of fusion power was cracked during the 1950s, the answer of how to make a fusion plant? Literal magic, with the use of magic you can create the field needed to have a working fusion plant, unfortunately you need a leyline to keep that plant running. But provided you have Hydrogen, a dedicated team of magi, leyline and the political will to put it all together? Well, that's a whole lot of power without the noted downsides of the fission powerplants the soviets used.

So why is this important? Leylines are attracted to gravitational bodies and asteroids have enough gravity to snag them. Ceres, Vestas, Pallas, and Hygiena contain about half the asteroid belt's mass and all of them have Leylines.

Leylines make a lot of things that should be impossible possible. For example on Phobos during the 90s they did an experiment and were able to create a zone with earth-like conditions. You could walk on Phobos safely on the leyline. Have earth gravity, a breathable atmosphere, and if you brought water could farm there. Of course if you left the line you would die instantly but that brings up a whole lot of possibilities.

Religious minorities, mining companies, outcasts, criminals and misfits have slowly been moving into the belt. Some places have been claimed. Those four main chunks of real estate? They were all successfully claimed by religious minorities who wanted their own headquarters.

The Bahai's control Ceres, The Zoroastrians claimed Pallas, Vesta was claimed by the Mormons, and Hygiena was claimed by Taoists. These four mini nations are what pass for the great powers of the belt. Which considering that the belts entire population is less than half a million isn't saying much.

As for its legal situation the only agreement the powers of the UN could come to was that they didn't want the other powers to have dominion over the belt and they didn't want any group to grow too powerful. So the belt has been designated as an international free for all. Where anyone with the money, people, and organization can create their own fiefdoms.

Sometimes, as in the case of the big four, it turns out all right but in other circumstances it ends in complete disaster. Right now no one knows how the belt will turn out but it's worth watching.

 

Robert Kline


"Were you really that rude to her?"

"The shrink said I had abandonment issues, I'm doing better now."

He poured some more coffee and took a sip.

"So, I looked at your file, you visited the Nazi moon base?"

I rolled my eyes.

"It's not like they built it."

"So how did they get there?"

I leaned back.

"They got exiled during the 90s."

Riku raised an eyebrow.

"Exiled?"

"Yeah, you have to remember the Nazis were not liked by the german left but they were truly despised by Germany's religious right, especially the Bavarians. After world war 3 ended Germany's population found itself surrounded by its far right clone forces."

"And they rebelled?"

"No they hated the Nazis more than the germans who were already there, called it a corruption of german culture. Germany's NeoNazis made the mistake of coming out of the closet with this idea that the clones would like them. Not the case, the clones wanted them either dead or exiled."

"And?"

"They outnumbered regular germans 3 to 1, so compromises were made and around 25,000 people were exiled."

"That few?"

"They summoned demons and sold their souls for power, committed genocide and acted like crazed maniacs. Germany to this day has outlawed swastikas and other Nazi symbols."

"So then what?"

"Nobody wanted them at all, so the only place left was the old soviet moonbase."

"And that still works?"

"It was pretty trashed during the war but the soviets had built the place up for over 15 years, used most of their seasonal magi to do it, and it was built to have a self repair function so it was more or less functional by the time of the exile."

"So they moved into the old soviet bases and got them working again. Lots of people died during the process but no one cared, because Nazis."

"What was it like?"

"Mostly underground, with food being grown in the domes. Poverty was a pretty big problem. Food was rationed and what few bars existed wouldn't serve me. It was, well, depressing."

Riku looked at me.

"Depressing?"

"Yeah, depressing. Everyone had this defeated look in their eyes, and people just wandered the halls of the old base."

"How did they survive?"

"Farming and raiding the other bases on Luna."

I paused.

"Pretty much everything got abandoned after the war. So they scavenged old American, British, French bases for what they needed."

"So the moon was heavily settled?"

"Building stuff on a leyline is pretty easy, the soviets only had the biggest presence. Felt like they had to have that because they were beaten to the moon, because they didnt have the escape plan that NATO and friends had."

I paused.

"Derzkiy base was this big overbuilt thing created to house a new Soviet Union."

He blinked at me.

"Place names never translate, it means bold or daring in Russian. There were other, smaller, bases but that was the biggest one. America had Bravo and Delta base, France had Vanguard base and the British had Crumpet."

Riku stared at me.

"Why would they name their base Crumpet?"

"I don't claim to understand the british. So, after the war, everyone basically abandoned the moon because they had entire planets to colonize so the Nazis scavenged what they could to fix their base up so they wouldn't die."

I shrugged.

"The conditions were pretty lousy, even the UN refugee camps are better. The belt's a shithole but it's better."

"Worse than Earth?"

I shuddered.

"Ok, maybe not that bad."

It was hard to top the Earth That Was for horrible.

 

UN agent 47


Interpol was founded in 1953, it died during world war 3.

The Former organization had been built to handle global problems, to help coordinate arrests and police assets. World war 3 scattered humanity throughout the solar system. Entire nations were consumed by the four horsemen, others gained their own planets. With the chaos of the war and its aftermath Interpol died and was replaced by the special investigation agency or SIA. SIA kept the old operations and mandate of Interpol but it was decided that a group of handpicked people would act as special supernational agents.

Each UN member country would have the right to appoint 8 special UN agents.

These agents would have the power to travel to any UN world to conduct arrests of a target. They would enjoy diplomatic immunity and have the power to do quite a lot in the name of catching their perp, as for the perp they could be killed during an arrest without consequences for any reason.

That sounds like a lot of power, and it is, but it's limited. A perp has to earn their way onto the black list, a list of people who have been declared Hostis humani generis. In order to get on that list you have to do some thing really bad. Murder isn't enough to get on that list. The crimes that get you on the black list are Piracy, running an international slaving operation, and other things so heinous that you are tried in absentia, found guilty and marked for death.

And yes we are allowed to kill our targets.

One example was someone I hunted named Fritz Lang, he ran one of Germany's many death camps during World War 2. He fled the country before Nuremburg, managed to make it to Paraguay. I tracked him down to a villa on Paraguay's world, deep in the new territories, and used a garrote to choke him to death.

The german government paid me a million marks for the bounty.

So what's it like to be an official UN agent?

Well your name is officially removed for the rest of your life or until you retire. You go by your number, that is your new name because your old identity is destroyed. You are now an official agent of the United Nations with a limited licence to kill. For the most part we all do the same thing, we might have different ways of doing it but we have the same job.

With one exception. In the organization there is always one person tasked with going under deep cover. They are put into the official black book. They will have an agent tasked with killing them who doesn't know they're a fellow agent, they will be hunted like anyone else and decried as a public enemy. All that to help catch the worst of the worst.

The agent given this task is given the number of 13, and it's the single hardest job an agent can have. I have thankfully never been picked for the position of 13 and if I have met an agent 13 then I didn't know it. 13's, from what I am told, never last long. I pray I am never picked for the position.

 

Riku Dan


When I got to the top of the roof I smelled fire, the stewardess screamed.

"Shut up."

"It's all on fire!"

I heard an explosion and she screamed again.

"That's mortar fire, you want to give away our position and die?"

The woman whimpered.

"I thought so, I'm going to fly down there and help fight them off."

"You're going to leave me alone?"

I blinked.

"Yes, this building is made out of solid concrete, you have walls to hide behind and it's high up. It's probably the safest place within the airport. If I take you to ground level you risk having to deal with the Chu's."

She stared at me blankly.

"The people who are blowing stuff up."

"Chu's?"

"Chūkaku-ha they're a communist terrorist organization funded by the Soviet Union."

I pulled out my radio and turned it on and heard Gunfire.

"Boss?"

"God damned."

"Is that machine-gun fire?"

"Yes, Riku, that's machine gun fire."

"But that's."

"Don't tell me it's illegal to own a machine gun, Chu's really don't care about the law thing."

"How are you doing?"

"15 of our guys are injured bad, at least a third of them are going to die. No civilian casualties thank the gods."

"I can help."

"Great."

"Save me."

I stared at the woman.

"What was that?"

"A stewardess, we got caught in an elevator."

"Ok, that changes things. Your job is to protect her and any other civilians you find."

"But I can fight."

"Look, Riku. When you became a member of our family you swore an oath. A part of that oath is that when the chips are down and the world gives the Japanese a losing hand you go out there and help."

He paused.

"Civilians come first. If you have to pick between your life or that of some random woman, she comes first. Some kid, even if you don't like them, they come first. Let me talk to the civilian."

I put out the radio toward her.

"Miss? Can I have your name?"

"Yukina."

"Yukina, I'm not going to tell you were good people. Most of us were born into poverty or had something that just messed us over. Circumstances sometimes push people into doing bad things and we are very desperate men."

"Ok."

"So I know what I'm going to ask is a very big deal but please give us a chance, just this once, to be better people."

"I, I think I'm ready to trust you."

"Thank you, Yukina. Riku is rough around the edges and he has a problem with women. We are sorry about that, he's got issues and we are trying to figure out how to help him with those issues, but his job is to protect you and if need be die for you. Your job is to live, can you do that for me?"

"Yes."

"Good! Riku? Keep her and any civilians you find safe. I'm out."

I sighed and looked out.

"You know where your friends are?"

"In the bar, I think?"

"Take off your shoes, we are going back for them."

She reluctantly took them off and I went back towards danger.

 

Habiki Kato



The Kakumaru-ha were a trotskyist group who believed that Stalin betrayed the communist movements principles after his rival, and in our opinion rightful leader of world communism, died fighting the Polish military. After the failure of the Hungarian revolution the Japanese Communist party split into two major fractions.

Us and the Chūkaku-ha. For a while there was peace but the Sino-Indian war threw a wrench into that. We supported the Indians and Neru's milder socialist platform and they supported Stalinist inspired China. The 60s saw a rash of streetfighting between us, the yaks, the chu's and other political groups. That doesn't really get talked about in the history books, there's really no nuance, and in the aftermath of world war 3 the masses really didn't care.

All communists were traitors to Japan and deserved death. I managed to escape the rage-filled mobs of the red scare, and then the red purge, by already being in prison. As for how I got there?

It was 1969 there were peace talks between India and China and the Chu's likewise offered a peace deal. Tokyo Tower was one of the early Fusion plants, something the yanks built as a gift of friendship. The power plant was all located underground with the tower acting as both an esthetically pleasing tourist location and a way to vent the steam.

The chu's wanted to hit it because they felt that Japan shouldn't be reliant on an unnatural magic that removes humanity's innate equality, that instead we should rely on our own human skill and ability. Well, we agreed. Most communist fractions had a dislike for magic and thought of magi as petite capitalist class that would at most be tolerated until technology could replace them and they could be safely purged.

So we came out in force, all of us together and found out that the Chu's were not there and that the Magi who made the plant function were waiting for us. It had in fact been a trap, a way for them to purge the movement of people they didn't trust or like.

It is said that it takes three mundane men to beat a hedgemage and three hedgemagi to beat a seasonal mage. Which means that you need to out number a seasonal mage 9 to 1 to have a shot at beating them. I personally thought that was garbage. I had made some home-made armor, had a spear and I charged forward, and then I found out the shear gulf that existed between ourselves and true magi.

The movies, TV shows, manga, cartoons... all of it lies! They make out magi to be relatively slow and ponderous in battle. That isn't the case in real life, the person I fought was some punk kid from the local magic school. Kid hadn't even graduated, he didn't have the training that his fellows had. Kid was the lowest rank Malkuth in everything, he only knew the bare basics.

But those basics made the difference, you see he had senses I simply didn't have, had a suit of spiritual armor while I didn't. He could control the air itself, he could sense the odds of an attack, sense the timing of an attack, he could sense my life force, sense my spirit, he could sense my body heat, sense the invisible currents of magic, sense the material components of my spear and body armor and sense the distance between himself and others like radar.

We looked down on Autumn magi as the weak ones, but that fight was utterly one sided. The boy toyed with me expertly, dodging every attack, and then he shattered my spear like glass and slammed me into a wall with an expertly timed blast of air. I lost consciousness after that. I woke up and my case went to trial. I got 20 years, and in the aftermath of world war 3?

Parole wasn't going to be possible... When I got out I found out that angry mobs had pretty much wiped us all out. The only people who made it were those who sold out their fellows, went to ground, or were in prison like me.

I left Japan proper, went to the colonies and accepted that the dream was over. I live a simple life now, a good one, but a part of me is still bitter about the betrayal, still bitter that human ingenuity and skill was no match for magic.