#109 Technology and Capabilities-Ashes Under Uricon
“The machine conceals the machinations.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, —The Left Hand of Darkness
Before the fall of Toledo, the Order’s homeworld was a wonderland of technological advancement. The fruits of a dozen cutting-edge projects poured in from distant facilities and, for the average citizen, quality of life rivalled that of the poorer core worlds - a level of luxury almost unheard of amid the savagery of the edge.
Civil development began to degenerate as the conflict with the Core dragged focus from civil works to military production, but Toledo never devolved to the brutal survivalist philosophy seen on humanity’s most distant outposts. While Cape Hope’s burgeoning civilian population ruled out high-risk research on Toledo’s surface, the steady tide of prototype equipment and schematics that fed the planet’s ever-growing factories owed its existence to that research, conducted a star system away.
The Order had always been an organisation that defied national borders, and nowhere was that more apparent than the research labs of Omicron-100. Propulsion specialists from Cambridge worked alongside Kusarian nanomedical teams even as their home nations turned to war. Engineered plagues, grav-shear weapons, artificial general intelligence; little was off-limits in the search for weapons that could stand against the nomads. Studies that would have been shut down at the business end of a gun in civilised space flourished in the distant dark of the Omicrons.
Military research was only a part of the Order’s work; however, and civil development projects marched in lockstep with Toledo’s growing population. Terraforming studies, advanced life support equipment and ever more efficient hydroponic farms became increasingly dominant areas of research as Toledo’s manufacturing expanded. While the houses of Sirius stagnated beneath the bloated weight of legislature, the promise of a hundred breakthroughs waited in the labs of Mora Station.
Those breakthroughs burned alongside Toledo.
Robbed of a huge portion of its industrial capacity, the Order salvaged what little it could from the ashes of its homeworld The lion’s share of research data and schematics survived, locked away in orbital habitats in Omicron-100, but the banks of machinery that would have carried those projects to production was no more than dust decorating a dead world. The knowledge that Toledo’s massive industrial base was no longer required offered little consolation. Overnight, the Order’s civilian population had been all but wiped from existence. The Order that rose from the wreckage was a twisted, militarised shadow of the organisation that had preceded it.
The changes began before Toledo’s shattered surface started to cool. Civil research projects, catered to maintain a growing population on the inhospitable surface of an ice world, were tossed aside. Teams that had worked on genetically modified crops found themselves plunged into bioweapons research. Engineers abandoned habitat design and turned to the creation of orbital weapons platforms and, with barely a whisper to mark its passage, the promise of a better tomorrow was buried with Toledo’s dead.
A Limpet-class research habitat. Several similar stations were in common use before the fall of Toledo.
In its place rose the certainty of a fiery retribution. The Order had survived Toledo, but what emerged from the ruins could never be mistaken for the diplomatic, humanist organisation that came before. Military research surged forward at a rate not seen since the days preceding the nomad war, and civilian development was left abandoned and forgotten in its wake. Piece by piece, the relics of the old establishment were torn down as the Order reforged itself into an instrument of war. Only a handful of those old development projects remain, sealed in shelters buried deep beneath Toledo’s shattered crust and trapped beyond the reach of their creators by a landscape scorched beyond recognition.
Ironically, modern Order operatives are even better equipped than those who served before Toledo’s fall. The Overwatch’s narrow focus on military development and manufacturing saw a surge in equipment quality, and the sudden reduction in the organisation’s manpower reduced demand to a level that even Omicron-100’s orbital foundries had no trouble meeting. Older ships were rapidly modernised, and new strike craft rolled off jury-rigged production lines in quantities that, while a mere fraction of that manufactured by Toledo, were more than adequate for the organisation’s reduced numbers.
The capabilities of the NRI, an independent offshoot surviving on shoestring resources, are little more than a shadow of the strength wielded by the pre-fall Order and the Overwatch that followed in its wake. Apotheosis, between its long deployment to Alaska and subsequent rotation to low-risk patrols, was never prioritised for the upgrades that dominated much of the Order fleet and, while formidable, the ship lacks the most modern advances of Order science. Those few functioning examples of the Initiative’s pre-fall technology are geared more towards the rigours of immediate survival than replicating the bleeding-edge research of Omicron-100’s labs.
Not all of the Order’s advances were confined to Mora Station; however, and not all of them have entirely escaped the reach of the Initiative. A handful of half-completed schematics and early production runs survived, scattered among bolt-hole stations and the wrecks of evacuation shuttles. Though little more than untested remnants, these unfinished projects promise strength and annihilation in equal measure to a Fleet Director willing to risk their reactivation.
Aside from a few inactive remnants, most of the Initiative’s technology would be recognisable to a Sirian spacefarer. Warship drives utilise variants on the same fusion technology that powers civilian deep-space haulers, artificial gravity generators lurk beneath Apotheosis’ decks, and the presence of synthpaste is a universal torture. Hydroponics bays, all but abandoned as unnecessary relics in house space, supplement banks of chemical oxygen scrubbers aboard the fleet’s largest vessels, while strikecraft make do with rebreathers and what tanks they can haul aboard. Metastable antimatter stores are universally feared, and the compound is produced only when use of the fleet’s most powerful weapons seems inevitable.
The list below discusses life in the Initiative and the organisation’s general technological capabilities – what is and isn’t possible.
Accomodation
Apotheosis and her order-designed escorts were created with long-endurance missions in mind, and the quarters aboard the Initiative’s dreadnought and gunboats are testament to that. While rooms are still tiny by planetary standards, crew members on order warships have access to private quarters - often little more than a single strip-thin bed and a desk - and ablution blocks are shared between compartments.
Operatives stationed aboard naval ships are less fortunate. The jump network made journeys over a week rare and, consequently, accommodation aboard the fleet’s auxiliaries is cramped and communal. Crew compartments hold between four and eight racks, each shared between sailors on four-hour watches - a practice known as hot racking. Access to better quarters is dependent on seniority, and only a handful of ranking officers have ascended to the luxury of private quarters.
Generators in inhabited compartments typically maintain gravity at 0.3G when the ship is not under acceleration. More powerful fields are possible, and are used to cushion g-forces during maneuvers and create the extremes of pressure that power the ship’s reactor, but the generators consume too much energy to make constant earth-like gravity economical.
Communication
Far from the support of the network of lanes and gates that links the houses of Sirius together, the Initiative is forced to use more archaic methods of communication. Communication between ships in the same system is conducted at light speed with laser bursts or radio transmissions. It is far from a perfect system, and the lag between sending a message and receiving a reply for ships on opposite sides of a star system can stretch to almost a day.
Interstellar communication is simply impractical by conventional means, and long-range messages must either be carried by courier ship or sent using Apotheosis’ on-board subspace array. Most ships within a few light-seconds of Apotheosis are capable of communicating with the wider universe using the Osiris’ systems, though the information must still be sent to and from the dreadnought using conventional means. Further, subspace communication is only workable so long as both sender and receiver have access to an array. A subspace-equipped ship cannot use it to contact a ship without one (except by using a nearby, subspace-equipped, ship as an intermediary); however, for most of house space, the trade network fills that function for both sender and receiver. For the most distant or most paranoid of humanity’s outposts courier ships remain the method of choice for long-range communications.
Medicine
Traumatic injury is a surprisingly rare event in the Initiative. Most of the dirty, dangerous work that lead to injury in ages past is carried out by automatic systems, remotely-controlled drones, or hordes of interlocking nanomachines. Bloody boarding actions of the sort fought by house militaries and peacekeeping forces are all but irrelevant against an enemy that makes no distinction between ship and crew, and the forces involved in the destruction of a capital-class spacecraft are rarely survivable for things as fragile as flesh and bone. Nonetheless, Apotheosis and the fleet auxiliaries maintain small infirmaries capable of handling complaints ranging from viral infections to broken bones.
Hygiene and screening procedures for transfers between ships are strictly enforced. Nomad infiltration aside, conventional disease can spread rapidly in the confined environment of a starship and it falls to the fleet’s handful of medical officers to ensure it is not given the chance. Operatives showing signs of illness are frequently confined to their quarters, lest they infect the rest of the ship.
Long-range scouts, expected to deal with human opponents and colonies, mount comparatively advanced medical bays equipped with trauma kits, automated diagnosis units and cold sleep facilities in case an injury proves beyond the ship’s ability to treat. Overall, the Initiative’s medical capabilities are functional, rather than exceptional, and the cybernetic limbs and nano-scale reconstructive surgery seen in high-end house medical facilities remains beyond the reach of shipboard medical technology.
Travel
Modern starship engines hold tremendous power on a careful-forged leash. Even the smallest and weakest of the Initiative’s ships is capable of harnessing energies that outstrip the entire power production of Old Earth before the 22nd century. Every ship in the fleet is comfortably capable of flying brachistochrone trajectories and, without the impediment of an atmosphere, achieving escape velocity from most terrestrial planetary bodies. For a deep space hauler, landing on a civilised world poses fewer difficulties than inadvertently incinerating a continent on take-off.
Power for most systems is provided by tremendous fusion plants, though some particularly volatile dreadnought-killer armaments make use of carefully contained stores of antimatter collected just prior to their use. Similarly, some exceptionally backwards settlements employ fission-based shuttles where modern fusion ships prove too expensive or too complex for use.
All that power is less than the flaring of a match against the enveloping cosmic darkness. Travel beyond the immediate confines of the fleet is expensive, resource-intensive, and, in the Omicrons, likely to be fatally dangerous. Journeys that would take days via the trade network stretch out to weeks in the undeveloped edge worlds. Only a handful of specially-configured scout craft; typically freighters or stripped-down gunboats, tend to stray more than a handful of systems from Apotheosis without a supply ship in tow. Consequently the ban on unauthorised flights in the Initiative is as much a matter of practicality as it as of security. Ships and fuel are too valuable to trust to idle fancy. Any operatives with unofficial business outside the fleet must wait until space is available on an outgoing ship, and such spaces are inevitably highly sought after.
Weapons & Equipment
The Initiative’s limited store of military-grade equipment is kept under lock and key in shipboard armouries, and released only on the order of security officers or authorised team leaders. The fleet has access to a handful of powered hardsuits, intended for hazardous work outside the ship, in addition to ablative armor, man-portable gauss weaponry, and modern pulsed laser rifles. Rumours abound of more exotic equipment, kept under the careful eye of the Fleet Director.
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