The Confederation Handbook (7 page)

Also available are
antimatter combat wasps providing a much greater performance than the
fusion-powered versions. They are subject to the same proscription as
antimatter.

Zero-tau is a method of
stasis employed by most starships for their passengers. The system
normally consists of a pod large enough to hold a human body,
although anything can be stored inside it, and there is no
theoretical limit as to how large such a unit can be, provided enough
power is available to sustain it.

When activated, the pod surface is cloaked in a midnight-black field
effect, and the flow of time effectively halts within it. The
contents of a zero-tau pod are also impervious to acceleration forces
as the stasis locks the material inside into a specific space-time
coordinate. This effect is utilized to full effect by starships
fitted with antimatter drives. During combat they are capable of
accelerating at well over 30 gees, which would crush a human body,
even one augmented by nanonic supplements. So, for periods while the
antimatter drive is on, the crew will go into zero-tau, allowing the
flight computer to carry out a pre-programmed maneuver.

Most starship passengers
prefer to use zero-tau than stay active during a flight. Any flight
is extremely boring and, even with Confederation medical technology,
free fall nausea is common. The most extensive zero-tau usage is in
colony carrier starships, which typically carry 500 people at a time.
The life-support requirements for so many active passengers would be
prohibitively expensive to provide, and would more than double the
size of the starship. Instead, zero-tau means that colonists can be
carried in the same way as cargo, and also no on-board facilities are
necessary for them. The only requirement for zero-tau is the large
amount of power it consumes, which necessitates several fusion
generators per craft.

Zero-tau is also the
standard method of carrying animals on starships, although artificial
hibernation is frequently used by colonists to stage-one worlds,
principally because of the cost of a portable zero-tau pod.

Since zero-tau’s development in 2121, as an adjunct of ZTT
physics, it has been employed regularly by people who wish to
“time-travelâ€

These are the weapons most
feared across the Confederation. They are also the simplest to build
once a source of antimatter has been established. Essentially, they
need just a confinement chamber for a large amount of antimatter
built into a missile capable of penetrating a planetary atmosphere.
Typically, they are bombs in the multi-teraton range. Once detonated,
their blast is sufficient to wreck an entire planetary climate, and
saturate the surface with a lethal level of radioactive fallout. They
take the old concept of nuclear winter one stage further—into
nuclear hurricane. The amount of thermal energy pumped into an
atmosphere will result in extremely high-speed storms raging for over
a decade before they finally begin to dissipate.

Though the Black Syndicates are the producers of antimatter, little
information is available about these shadowy organizations. They
appear to be made up from people and organizations who have acquired
a great deal of wealth by illegal means, typically armaments and
proscribed stimulants. This money is needed to purchase the machinery
required to produce antimatter on an industrial scale. As the
majority of this equipment can have legitimate civil applications,
its acquisition is relatively simple. For the core of the operation,
all that is necessary is a few cargo starships and a crew of
technicians to assemble and run the station. Typically, a station
will be placed in orbit around a star just outside the
Confederation’s boundaries—and also far enough away to
minimize discovery by navy patrols.

Cooperation and secrecy are
enforced by customized neural nanonics, which are provided to
everyone involved. They run specialist programs which monitor
everything the user says. If the program determines that the user is
being forced to divulge details of the operation, they will kill him.
These neural nanonics cannot be circumvented or surgically removed,
and once implanted they are there for life.

The Confederation includes
861 terracompatible planets settled by Adamist humans, 525 of them
with a technoeconomy advanced enough to build starships, twelve xenoc
planets, and three joint human-xenoc (Tyrathca) colony worlds. In
addition to planets, there are 12,370 independent asteroid
settlements (all Adamist), and five independent bitek habitats. The
Edenists have germinated 8,310 bitek habitats, but colonized just one
planet (Atlantis).

All their governments are
represented in the Confederation Assembly on Avon, with voting rights
proportionate to their population and development status.

Confederation territory in 2611 is a roughly spherical zone of space
some 600 light-years in diameter, with Earth at its center. The main
purpose of the Confederation is to guarantee free passage to all
ships throughout this territory, and to prevent the use of weapons of
mass destruction. To this end, all the numerous members pay a tax to
the Confederation to finance its administration and its navy. A
secondary function of the Confederation is to act as arbitrator in
disputes and to establish a framework for unified interstellar law.
More recently it has become involved in monitoring human rights
violations on planets with oppressive constitutions or leaderships,
an activity which does not have the wholehearted support of the
entire Assembly.

There are ten fleets, with a
total fleet strength of 9,000 ZTT warships, and a further 2,000
auxiliaries, mainly concerned with communications and supply. Of the
warships, 1,000 are dedicated starships, forming the core of each
fleet, with crews made up from career personnel. The remainder of the
fleet strength is composed of ship squadrons on assignment from
national government navies, with a further 5,000 pledged should the
Assembly declare an emergency situation. There are also a number of
voidhawks on naval duty, typically 1,000 to 1,300 at any given time.
Their captains traditionally sign on for a seven-year tour.

The Confederation Navy headquarters is an asteroid, Trafalgar, in
orbit 110,000km above Avon. It serves variously as the main career
officer academy, a repair and maintenance port, a Marine barracks,
signals coordination center, and 1st Fleet base. It is also the
premier research center for supralight communications, the so-called
hyper-radio, with physicists from across the Confederation
contributing to this project.

The First Admiral of the
Fleet is Samuel Aleksandrovich, sixty-seven, appointed in 2605, a
Confederation Navy career officer. All Confederation Navy fleets, and
their individual squadrons, are always commanded by career officers
who have renounced their national citizenship. Edenists are all given
career officer status, as they can hardly renounce their culture. In
peacetime, the navy’s primary duty is to patrol and observe,
with major exercises undertaken every four years. It is the
Confederation Navy squadrons which are assigned to enforce sanction
blockades (such as Omuta) ordered by the Assembly. And special
reconnaissance craft (usually voidhawks) routinely examine both
uninhabited stars within Confederation territory and stars around the
fringe, searching for illegal antimatter stations.

In times of emergency, the
navy’s primary duty is to stop antagonists from attacking each
other until a settlement can be reached by the Assembly arbitrators.
The major problem with these emergencies, especially the small “bush
fireâ€

Because of the conflicting
loyalties which may arise during Confederation Navy service,
Intelligence commissions are only available to career officers. It is
the CNIS’s job to correlate political data in the hope of
predicting likely flare points. The sheer number of asteroid
settlements precludes an officer being stationed on each one of them,
so the service relies heavily on the larger national Intelligence
services to keep an eye on neighboring governments. The CNIS does
have a bureau on every member planet, however, down to stage-one
colonies. Very few CNIS covert operations are launched against
governments and institutions of industrialized worlds, and those that
are must be personally approved by the First Admiral, who may find
himself called before the Assembly to justify his reasons, not least
to the government concerned.

The other major functions of
the CNIS are to track down pirates and Black Syndicate antimatter
stations. Again considerable cooperation with national Intelligence
agencies is the norm in these instances, enabling them to track the
industrial equipment essential to such illicit operations. The CNIS
also possesses a large scientific division dedicated to monitoring
weapons development, legal and otherwise, among Confederation member
states and their corporations.

Govcentral is responsible
for civil administration on Earth, as well as the O’Neill Halo.
It is a democracy, with separate continental congresses and a
thousand-seat senate. However, barely 50 percent of the population
bothers voting.

The planet suffered from
vast ecological damage during the twenty-first century, culminating
in the armada storms, while its population was estimated to reach in
excess of 40,000,000,000 by 2160. Govcentral took drastic measures,
including building the arcologies to protect the population from a
lethal environment, spreading geneered tapegrass across the land
surface as the remaining vegetation was destroyed, and seeding the
oceans with an alga to act as a carbon sink. Newly discovered
terracompatible worlds were employed purely as a method of disposing
of the surplus population. Financial incentives to resettle were
offered to the middle classes, while poor (welfare-dependent)
districts were cleared out en masse. Towards the end of the Great
Dispersal, 2250 saw upwards of 5,000,000 people being deported per
week, in a fleet of 4,000 starships with a capacity of 5,000
passengers each.

Population is now officially stable at 38bn, though unofficial
estimates place it closer to 42bn. Emigration has dropped to a steady
70,000,000 people per year, a figure which includes involuntary
transportation. The penalty for virtually every crime, from rape to
tax evasion, is now deportation. The entire population lives in
arcologies, a term which has come to incorporate any urban area that
has been covered against the weather.

In Asia, Africa and South
America, the original city-in-a-building concept was employed on a
massive scale, as didactic education and industrialization caught up
with expanding population. There most arcologies consist of a vast
metal gridwork, with pre-assembled factory-built housing modules,
shops, offices, industrial units, etc., stacked into place and
plugged into the utilities, all newly founded. Such giga-constructs
are less common in Europe, Japan, and North America, where
reorganization of existing cities and towns was the norm.

Each arcology produces its
own food in factories and vats, the land being unfarmable, with the
tapegrass coverage now total. Imported delicacies account for 30
percent of imports in revenue terms.

Government

Earth is now officially a
republic with a single government, Govcentral. Consolidation of
regional governments was a gradual process throughout the
twenty-first century, aided considerably by the steady globalization
of markets, uniform communication and data access, and the European
federalist movement as well as other regional associations. With the
introduction of fusion power, currency variations began to level out,
effectively producing a uniform currency from 2075.

The various legal and administrative mechanisms for a global
government were in place by the end of the twenty-first century, and
the actual consolidation took place in 2103. At the time there was
considerable resistance from nationalists across the globe; however,
the worsening ecological crisis required a uniform response from the
authorities. The arcologies were also established by this time,
allowing for considerable regional autonomy while alleviating the
fear of direct rule by “foreigners.â€

This is a ring of 974 asteroid settlements, in orbit (120,000km)
above the Earth, with a population of 435m. Every settlement comes
under the jurisdiction of Govcentral and has its own democratically
elected council; the Halo has its own congress (the same as any
continent) and forty-five representatives in the planetary senate.
The first asteroids were funded by companies eager for new business
ventures and the high profit levels resulting from microgravity
manufacturing; and though über-capitalist culture still thrives,
Halo corporate legislation is less restrictive than on Earth. This
fact has helped to build the Halo into the largest concentration of
non-Edenist manufacturing in the Confederation, with a technology
equal to that of the Edenists and the Kulu Kingdom, producing 62
percent of Earth’s export earnings. Now that many of the first
asteroids are mined out, producing often three or four caverns per
rock, the Halo settlements accommodate the largest asteroid
populations to be found within the Confederation, with up to 400,000
people living in the largest.

The Halo
Economy

Power for the asteroids
comes from a mix of fusion and solar panels. Fusion tends to be used
for the biosphere heating and lighting requirements, and for heavy
industry, while solar panels are employed for the smaller
(free-flying) industrial stations. Between 2125 and 2230, large
starship assembly stations were built by Govcentral to provide Earth
with its colony ships for the Great Dispersal, giving the Halo an
early advantage in this field, which it has capitalized upon.
Starships remain its premier export, and its maintenance, support,
and refit industries are second to none. Contracts with the
Govcentral Navy (the largest single defense procurement agency in the
Confederation) form an essential financial pillar for the
astroengineering companies, which allows them to tender extremely
competitive prices.