QM Note - You guys have been great with voting and such, would love to see more people get involved! Remember, omakes are welcome and even if not made canon will result in bonuses to rolls.
Turn 13 Advisors and Story
Looking over the lists of names submitted for consideration to rename ‘Wow’ to something less, well, ‘Wow’ shakes your faith in humanity.
‘There’, ‘Here’, ‘SuperAustralia’, ‘Runaway’... you groan, shaking your head, then have one of the interns in the office clear out all the drek. It’s nice having interns these days, you are too busy doing actual work to bother with the sort of things that they handle.
So you get the abridged and trimmed list. There are a good number of names on it still, all of them far more acceptable to your mind. Sorting through them it comes down to two, Phoenix ‘symbolizing our rebirth from the ashes of the raid’ and Capricorn ‘fitting in with the names of Castor and Pollux’.
You can work with this.
In the end you decide to take advantage of having two acceptable names, one unnamed continent and one badly named one, and kill multiple birds with a single pen stroke. The continent formerly known as Wow would now be known as Capricorn, while the still unnamed northern continent would be called Phoenix.
You love it when you can deal with multiple issues so easily!
The economy is still in the depths of recession. Simply reopening things now that the vaccine is out helped keep it from being a total crash, but it’s still bad. You are very happy that you expanded the social safety net before this had happened, otherwise you shudder to think just how bad it could have been.
For their intensive efforts in assisting with relief work during the flu crisis, the Rapid Reaction Force has been recognized with being upgraded to a more veteran unit. The Foxhounds aren’t quite up to the same level as the Chasseurs, but it is nice to see that their hijinks and inability to successfully train doesn’t seem to transfer to inability to handle crisis situations.
It is rather fun to be able to chat with Sekhmet via the machine interface. The linguistics and computer science folks have put together a ‘symbolic logic to human’ translator that smooths out some of the conceptual difficulties involved in communicating with the Grifftigers.
You spend quite a bit of time talking about motherhood and the kids, and simply sharing stories. Sekhmet doesn’t quite seem to grasp ‘history’ as you think of it, but she is happy to talk about her life before she joined you.
One thing that somewhat concerns you is her references to the ‘Old Ones’, evidently the eldest of the Grifftigers on Capricorn. From what she says, you get the idea that it is quite possible that the eldest of them may have been alive when the initial colonists landed on the planet, what with her telling stories passed down to her from her own mother when she was a cub about ‘great eggs flying through the sky on pillars of fire’.
Considering that the zoologists have confirmed that Grifftigers never stop growing throughout their lives, and that it is extremely likely that the older they get the smarter they get… the idea that somewhere on Capricorn there are tigers that old, and likely that large and intelligent…
You get on the comm with Tyler and Janet and discuss the issue. They both agree with you, care needs to be taken to ensure that there are no conflicts with the Tigers. You know there will be resistance to it, but you are certain that it would probably be a good idea to expand the environmental protection laws you’ve already established to include significant habitat protection, especially on Capricorn.
Talking a bit with Sekhmet you find that the Grifftigers tend to avoid ‘bad-tasting water’ which after some clarification appears to be their term for the ocean, so coastal settlements would probably be fine.
Your son wins his first race in the pee-wee league, which leads to you jumping with excitement like any other mom.
The next day he has his first big crash in a race, his hovercraft spinning out when transitioning from land to water and hitting the buoy marking the course. He manages to hang on and get the hovercraft going again, but your heart was in your throat and it took Willis almost physically restraining you to keep you from charging down to make sure your son was fine. Then you had to force yourself to not immediately withdraw him from further races.
And later that day you are again jumping up and down with excitement when he wins another race!
Emotional whiplashes, the bane of mother’s everywhere.
Sekhmet at least agrees with you, as she bestows the big slobbering lick of approval on your son for his triumph, then picks him up by the back of his racing suit to deposit him in front of you to the good-natured laughter of the crowd.
While your boy crossed his arms and pouted adorably.
But then it is time to get back to work.
General Wolf comes in with a stack of papers and a grim expression. “We have multiple things to handle, and only a limited budget. I’d love to expand our military more, but we have other draws and most of what I want will need to wait a bit. To begin with though, it is critical that we expand the Aerie. Adding an Advanced Tactical Training Annex will allow us to begin actually training mechwarriors. Not only that, but doing so would allow us to start upgrading the facilities to make our overall training regimen more effective. We also should get started on establishing the deep water coast guard. We are seeing enough nautical traffic that not having one is a greater risk to us than the expense of establishing one.”
“We also,” he continues, “should continue with training. Getting as many of our forces as possible up to veteran levels of skill is crucial.”
Tyler then joins him. “Now that we have a battlemech design we’ve got a whole new kettle of problems for production.” the old lech says seriously. You worry about him sometimes, he’s not been hitting on pretty girls as much as he used to… a most un-Tylerish sort of behavior. “Battlemech factories are giant factory-shaped holes in the ground that consume money, according to all the documentation we’ve been able to find, and we can find no real indications to the contrary. Unlike combat vehicle factories there are nearly no civilian uses for the tooling or equipment of a Mech factory, even workmechs and industrialmechs are too different from battlemechs for the tooling to be cross-compatible. Moreover, output is limited at best. The basic factory design that we’re considering would only be capable of producing a platoon of four battlemechs each year, moreover the resource and manpower requirements for a factory means it would be impractical to have more than one major production facility per continent.”
He grimaces. “In the future we’ll need to bite that bullet, but not this year. This year there are two things we should do. First, now that the survey force is ready to go, we send them out to get started on their work. This is going to take years to complete. They’re first priority will be to find suitable sites for initial ports, so if we get started now we’ll be able to get started on putting in the port complex for Castor by next year, and one for Pollux the year after. Secondly we need to implement what we discussed concerning land-use restrictions and habitat protection. It will be unpopular with those who simply want to expand willy-nilly, but the long-term benefits far outweigh that. Pull that trigger now and simply get it down before things happen which we’ll regret.”
Dr Young shows up for her scheduled meeting with a small folder or proposals. “I’ve got two different proposals to support your anti-drug efforts. One, a straightforward ‘Drugs are bad for you’ campaign aimed at the youth. The other something a bit more subtle, a promotional campaign for the Hovercraft Racing League showing the most thrilling highlights, and displayed in such a way as to make it obvious what a real thrill-seeker would aspire to do. I prefer the latter approach, but either is viable.”
Professor Chapman sends you a memo, noting that for now there’s really nothing from the political office, as Parliament is still in recess following the flu outbreak and has decided to defer their sessions this year. A decision that is surprisingly popular, but doesn’t really affect their relative influence.
Dr Palmer, on the other hand, shows up with stacks upon stacks of paperwork and proposals. “This is going to take a while.” she announces as she swoops in, looking inordinately cheerful. “We’ve got a full slate of research teams read to go, so…”
She slaps the first folder down. “First things first, the power generation project is ripe for study. The teams for that one are eager to get going and have ideas for improved power transmission in high-stress environments that would be very useful for other areas. I strongly urge you to back that study.”
“Secondly,” another folder is slapped down. “Rockets, unguided, dumbfire, box-launched rockets. Right now our long-range missiles have an arming distance, our short range missiles are utterly lacking in range… These rocket pods would be light, cheap, and while single-shot give a potent punch for that shot.”
Another folder. “More orbital surveys.”
Another folder. “Improving agriculture.”
Another folder. And another… soon all of the folders have migrated from her to your desk for you to read through. Joy.
Juanita looks tired, but she reports that there still have been no signs of infiltrator-like behavior on the part of the watched groups. They’re still watching, just in case.
Janet is bubbly and perky as always, and the two of you spend most of the time allotted for your meeting just talking about your kids, sharing pictures, and generally being moms with each other. Sekhmet joins in the conversation, although she needs to prompt you to show photos of Bastet being insufferably cute. Janet doesn’t really have any business to report on, beyond some amusing stories about various shenanigans out there.