The Freedom - Bring Solar System To Life

Part 2 - Blood On Ice

PART 2 – BLOOD ON ICE  

SHINE AND TERROR

Fear is an efficient tool of management.

Ana Himaliova

A year has passed since Ana Himaliova took control over Aral Space. The company is undergoing radical changes, transforming everything. Each space station is being redesigned, improved and transformed into something more efficient. Each cosmodrome is being transformed into a more functional one, able to handle far more passengers and cargo then ever before. A new generation of spaceships, much larger and energy efficient, is about to be launched. The new ships use far more efficient engines, multiple-stage magnetic ion engines, able to accelerate their exhaust to half the speed of light and reducing the need of fuel to 10% for interplanetary missions.

New launch vehicles are being designed, built to save fuel and carry more people and cargo to space or to surface with one go. New, innovative designs are becoming reality. On the Moon, the space carousel is taking shape. It is a large-gauge railway, designed to accelerate objects to 2.38 km/s or 8500 km/h to send them directly into space without the need of chemical engines. For the moment, it is only an experiment, but if it proves efficient, a lot of fuel can be saved.

With transport prices lowered, the space now experiences a bloom colonization. More and more people leave the Earth to look for a better future in space.

Workers within the company don't see things the same way. It is true that before Ana Himaliova took power a lot of wealth used to go to the council members and other corrupt bureaucrats, but the lives of ordinary workers did not change significantly. There is more work to do, despite a continuous influx of workers both from the Earth and from the colonies. Aral Space is transforming into a military base.

There are many unhappy voices within the company, complaining of too many hours of work or too much activity. But Ana doesn't care. She pushes everything further. She uses her power to upgrade Aral Space into something that nobody knows what will be.

There is another aspect of her policy: the purges. Despite work at Aral Space is well paid compared to life in the colonies and on Earth, it is by far not safe. Special, secret units are known to inspect the work everywhere. These inspectors are not the reason to worry. After them come the justice teams, who take people into custody without a warning. They take people out and that's it. Nobody knows where they take them.

To make things more complicated, Ana is getting more influential in the lives of colonies. Until now, colonies spread through the Solar System never organized themselves into a state-like structure. They are independent and stateless, although loose federations and agreements exist between them. Industrial corporations are those who keep a sort of balance of power among the colonies, even if their power is limited and diffuse.

Ana's struggle is to unite the colonies into state-like structures, to convince them to form some sort of local governments and to gain a state of equilibrium of power between corporations, local governments and Aral Space.

This proved successfully on Mercury, where the North and South colonies had to work together all the time to survive. It looks like Mercury will become a state with two governments and two presidents.

Venus, with no settlers, is no man's land.

Around the Earth, there have been a lot of voices asking for a partition of the Moon and the Near-Earth Asteroids. Nothing is agreed upon yet. Aral Space would like the Moon to form a single state, but the Moon is more linked to the economies of surrounding Earth Sector. The space stations around Earth and nearly half of the asteroids remain as no-man's land. Being out of any state and any regulations, their owners are happier this way.