The "Black Box" of the Hispania (an IMG story)

[Pel]

The wreck of the Hispania still drifts near Planet Malta.



IMG scavengers recently recovered a corrupted data core from the ship's bridge. After recovering data from bad sectors a story began to emerge.

The core contains a final transmission from the Bretonia—sent after it was hit by the Coalition. It suggests that the Bretonia's engine failure wasn't just bad luck, but a deliberate act of shielding the Hispania from a Coalition missile. The Bretonians actually tried to save the Hispania, a story that might shatter the Border World identity of "The Betrayed."

What motivated the scavengers? Well, several things. One of which is that the Guild was founded, in part, by veterans of the Bretonian military who always tell the tale this way– “Among our ancestors are the crew who tried to save the Hispania.”

Back on Earth, resistance to Coalition rule in Iran was broad and cross-sectional– the protests were massive and included students, workers, professionals and ordinary citizens from all walks of life. The death toll in the clashes between the military and citizens had become untenable. Most troops wouldn’t fire on unarmed civilians en masse. Finally, an entire supersonic gunship squadron defected (with their families on board) and joined the Alliance. Many of these families made their way to Bretonia. Many of these pilots were the heads of military families that served on the colony ships. They were the officers who made the call to shield the Hispania.

The IMG is not just a loose confederation of miners who work on the periphery, they were pushed out and denied employment partly because they tried to tell this story, because the Crown didn’t want word getting out that Bretonia could have shared the same fate as the Outcasts and Corsairs. Because much of the crew was Persian it was easier to push them all out of the military and cover up the story.

The Outcasts don’t want to hear it either. What does it matter when things turned out the way they did? The Corsairs take pride in their scars– they need no one’s charity, past or present. They decide their own future.

The other reason is that deep in the ice fields of Tau-37 the IMG has been building a colony ship of their own, not to leave Sirius but just to carve out their own little part of the periphery– they call it the Sassanid. They don’t want to trundle about like Zoners and they don’t want to be stuck on a stationary base– the Sassanid can be both base and mobile colony, maybe one day they will find a world to settle. Until then, the workshops and schools of the Sassanid give the Guild a much more formidable, secretive backbone where they build their population, train them well and pursue technological innovation. Designs from the Hispania are part of what makes the Sassanid work.

The IMG isn't just a group of blue-collar workers; they are the protectors of a "Ghost Ship”-- fully pressurized and mobile, though it rarely moves. It is hidden deep within the ice clouds of the Tau-37 system, far off the jump-hole path to Omicron Alpha, positioned in a "dead zone" where the radiation from the ice crystals masks its massive fusion signature. It serves as the secret Guild Hall of the IMG, where the Guild’s elders and the descendants of the original Persian colonists reside.

An example of their innovation is that they have developed Advanced Kinetic “Xerxes Class” Weaponry. While the Great Houses focused on laser and plasma tech (which loses effectiveness in the dense nebulae and ice fields of the Taus), the IMG/Sassanid engineers perfected High-Velocity Kinetic Slugs.Because they have spent centuries mining high-density asteroids, they have become masters of mass-driver technology. Their "Rail-Drivers" fire depleted uranium or tungsten slugs at a fraction of the speed of light. These rounds ignore the energy-dissipation shields used by Liberty or Rheinland. In a dogfight, an IMG ship fires nearly invisible, hyper-sonic spikes that cause massive structural "shatter" damage upon impact. However, they keep this tech under the radar knowing it is not good to attract attention to themselves until they are truly ready.

In fact, there is a strict division between the Sassanidi and the miners-- private and public faces of the IMG.

The Guild Master, Ardashir "Dash" Barlow (High Overseer of the Sassanid / Strategic Advisor to the IMG) is one of the few “Boulder Rats” who knows the Sassanid’s exact coordinates. He manages the delicate balance of the IMG—keeping the public face of the Guild looking like a bunch of hardened, apolitical miners at places like Holman Outpost or Java Station, while secretly funneling the best ores back to the Sassanid to maintain its systems.

However, the Outcasts are getting bolder in Tau-37. Ardashir has authorized the use of kinetics on Outcast scouts, but only if they “hide the bodies” and leave no trace behind. He fears that if the wreckage is analyzed, the Outcasts (and eventually the Great Houses– those cardi sniffers are great gossips) will realize the IMG is hiding some choice technology.

The IMG has bases scattered across the most dangerous sectors in Sirius (Dublin, Tau-31, Omega-7) and purposely keeps places like Freeport 4 and Falkland looking "run-down" to discourage corporate interest.

While the IMG uses standard Humpback freighters for trade, they have a small, elite wing of Sassanid defenders—ships with carbon nanotube and smart matter shields and powerful long-range sensors.

Custom IMG ships are built to chew through asteroid belts, haul thousands of tons of volatile gas, and survive centuries of radio silence. Ships are bulky, modular, and asymmetrical. They are a tangle of exposed hydraulic lines, heavy armor plating, and large, external cargo pods. The base color is a chipped, high-visibility construction yellow. Heavy black warning stripes (chevron and linear patterns) break up the profile, highlighting cargo bays and reactor shielding. On the heaviest parts of the hull, the yellow gives way to unpainted, raw, carbon composite fiber plating. It is also customary to slice off a chunk of asteroid and integrate that into the bow of all ships. This provides protection and easy concealment in an asteroid field.

A lot of the Sassanid’s shielding is made up of ice– a small city’s worth of people are literally concealed in ice in the middle of an ice nebula.

If an outsider is caught snooping around these bespoke ships, they must die.

In the midst of these developments is Soraia, a young engineer from the Sassanid who is tired of living in the shadows. She "borrows" a prototype fighter equipped with kinetic rail-drivers and begins her journey via jump holes and backroads to Battleship Hood in Dublin.

Will she make it? What could justify such a risk?

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