(198X) Factbook serialization, part 4

Continued from the third part. Find the first part here.

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SUMPKASSEL, continued.

POWER FLASKS

Federal engineering depends on the skill and eye for detail of Federal engineers. The customary first assignment for a new apprentice is to machine an irregular lump of steel into a perfect cube. In the automotive world, there is a second (and far more memorable) initiation. The young man, given a tiny corner of the shop floor, must build a power flask.

Power flasks are individual items; the name is never applied to a mass-produced portable engine, even one of a similarly bottle-like size and shape. They are more than simple toys or emergency power sources. A power flask is one’s signature as an engineer. No two are alike. They are only produced to those plans drawn by the apprentice himself.

An old man often gives up one wall of his home shop for his power flasks. On one side lies a crude enginelet: one cylinder, rough and awkward, its mechanical heartbeat irregular. On the other end, in a glass housing, eight miniature cylinders cycle with a velvet motion.

• Martijn Groenhof, Sumpkassel Historical Society

OLD TRACKS

...Now I was cold, dirty an’ wet, an’ I hadn’t as much as my old groundsheet anymore t’ keep off the rain. I figgered my luck’d just about run out. This time a’ year, this far outta town n’ off the road, there’s nobody who’ll come by before you freeze. I thump my chest n’ wheeze n’ say out loud, “Come on, Great Gun, I’ll be signin’ onto yer crew real soon.”

Right as the words leave my mouth I’m trippin’ over overgrown rails. Ol’ rusty ones in the antique gauge. An’ I’m lyin’ on the wet mud n’ laughin’. A run of bad luck starts gettin’ you mad; then it sucks the life outta you; then it’s jus’ funny. I’d’a layed on the tracks forever if they didn’t start t’ shake all of a sudden.

I slop off th’ side, cursing, and I hear brakes screechin’ and pistons snortin’. Right in front of me’s a big ol’ ten-wheeler, such as ILCO used to build ninety-some years ago, all in shiny black and gray-headed an’ with a big kerosene headlamp. An’ pokin’ his head from th’ cab is a man!

Now he welcomes me on, an’ Gun, how warm was that open firebox! How cosy was the rain fallin’ on the cab roof!

“Funny you come along,” says th’ engineer, “cause I needed me a fireman for this reefer drag.” He hands me a shovel. Before long we’re makin’ one-twenty an hour by th’ gauge. Soon I spot th’ town lights an’ th’ engineer looks over my way: “Sorry, son, but you’d best get ready to jump soon.”

I looks at him like he’s grown a new head. We sure ain’t goin’ any slower. An’ he shouts, this time: “Great Gun, you poor dumb bastard, leap for it!” I looks out the fireman’s window and see the tail lights of a standin’ train a hundred meters in front!

Next thing I know I’m in a nice warm bed in Ijzerbonden with a bundled up noggin. Doc comes in an’ says I’m all busted up an’ asks me what damnfool act I was up to out there. I ask him what happened to th’ train.

“What train? Found you all beaten up by the old Confederate railroad. Those tracks ain’t had a train on them in fifty years. You oughta lie down and take it easy a while.”

• Isaac Tillmann, Hobo

HELL

A lost-and-found; a sifting-place. There’s a hell for all men, but the word applies to places, too. A graveyard is a hell for bones and a place for ghosts to muster and drink—leave a bottle, and it’ll be empty in the morning. A scrapyard is a hell for machines. Some of the things in a hell are worth taking and restoring. Others are rendered down for their useful parts. Yet more are left to simply rot.

• Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

“Have you checked the school hell for your coat?”

• Anonymous

DJEKKER

OVERVIEW

The woods. Not the cold-shouldered mist of our northwestern neighbors, but a warm and quiet place. “Undisturbed” is the word I’m looking for. Not a lot of reason to disturb it; and there hasn’t been one since it was one of the Founding Four. It’s got forestry and fish, but outside of a small coastal pocket around Djekker’s Ferry there’s little else to offer. Little in the material sense, I guess. Peace and ancient quiet is reason enough for it to exist. Better yet, there’s nobody around to see what you’re doing.

• Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

DJEKKER'S FERRY

If someone says “I’m from Djekker”, they’re either from Djekker’s Ferry or they’re an illiterate woodsman. What Langport is for the Sea of Lights, Djekker’s Ferry is for the Sea of Masts: a final port of call. From there it’s up the Djekanal to Sumpkassel and wherever else. I think of it more as a tendril of the developed Federation, reaching out to warmer waters, than as an actual part of the state it’s the capital of. Listen how people talk there and you’ll come to the same conclusion.

• Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

THE DJEKANAL

A real feat of engineering. Cuts right through Djekker’s lowlands; climbs a staircase of locks, hitches a ride on the mighty Blue River just past its source in the Heupbergen. Wherever the river doesn’t pass muster for shipping, it’s been dug out. The combined seaway cuts the whole nation in half.

You’d think the prize for all that staggering investment would be a clean connection: that you could just ignore everything short of Langport on your way there. Not so. Foreign ships and our own Blue Stacks alike have to offload here, transfer their containers onto little river feeders that can skirt the shallows. Didn’t used to be that way, but the ships kept getting bigger.

Every now and again there are calls to dig deeper, to let the supermax ships (the ones that’d need bigger locks already) through. They go nowhere, even when it’s feasible. This middleman system benefits the interior states too much.

• Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

The shallow-draft containermen on the Blue River include no few paddle steamers—new and old. It’s a useful arrangement. Less of a draught than a screw ship, and it won’t go into open water anyways. You don’t need bow thrusters, either, because you can just about turn on a dime already. And best of all: they look great. When I get sick of the Marshals, I’ll buy a plane ticket back to Djekker, and find work on one.

Decades ago, when my family still lived in and served the country of the enemy, my old man wore a sailor’s cap and the sea-lion pin of an Ebon Navy submariner. He spent a lot of time listening to the land he would one day call home—its music, its voices, its lifeblood moving through the water. But he never loved paddle steamers the way I do. The splash of the wheels in the water, to him, still means the approach of a subchaser. They rode too high to hit with torpedoes.

• Marcel Laurent, Federal Marshal

THE ROCKY COASTS

Geography is destiny. Great Gun, that takes me back to college—what a fucking waste of money. I could have gotten drunk in friends’ living rooms on my own time, without any fees. But I guess they did teach me a few things. Djekker could have easily been a rival to Vansa—maybe even bigger—if it wasn’t for its coasts.

The whole damn place is rocks: cliff faces up to the water, or piles of boulders, and more the merrier just underwater. Good luck carving out a serious port anywhere along it. You’d just be pissing in the wind. Djekker’s Ferry already nabbed the one suitable stretch of coast along the whole face of the state. Ships’ll just go there.

But like I said before: it’s not all bad that nobody wants to build a thousand high-rises there. You want to escape society for six months or a year? Go tend a coastal lighthouse. It’s grunt work; they mostly manage themselves, and the repairs are rare and dead simple. That makes it ideal for the educated.

I knew a guy who took a half-year off to do it in college. If I didn’t enlist, I’d have followed suit. He was an artist, see; one of those loner types. High up in the lighthouse he’d watch the waves and the spray on the rocks, day and night. And from the ground: the slow sweep of the beam.

• Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

THE BLUE STACK LINE

Ask any foreigner what "Federal" means, and you'll get a different answer. Coffee; tobacco; the roar of heavy diesels. The open lowland; ditches, swamp, the bayou. Bald-skinned flat-faces and the bayonet-point. Blue smokestacks on the far horizon.

The Blue Stack Line is the biggest shipping line in the Sea of Masts: a bitter competitor to Vansa’s own Witkop Line for the crown of “world’s largest”. They’re a cultural institution. Blue-stacked containermen anchoring in your port means you’re doing business with the best. They mean a lot of money’s coming your way soon: a one hundred forty-something year tradition.

More than money. Federal goods, machines. Ideas. “You are what you eat” applies to countries too.

• Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

PRIVATEERING

DIRK BERKHUIJSEN, Stateholder-General of the Intermarine Federation,

TO ALL WHO SHALL SEE THESE PRESENTS, GREETING:

BE IT KNOWN, That in pursuance of an Act of the Assembly passed on the nineteenth day of Vismaand one thousand nine hundred and eighty, I have commissioned, and by these presents do commission, the private armed Submarine called the Duivervoorde, formerly S-315 of the States-Navy, of the burthen of 1050 tons surfaced or thereabouts, purchased and owned by Arnout Vredeveld of the City of Djekker’s Ferry, mounting six torpedo tubes, and navigated by fifty men.

I hereby authorize Nicolaas van der Wel, Captain of the said submarine Duivervoorde and the other officers and crew thereof to subdue, seize, and take any armed or unarmed Ebon vessel, public or private, which shall be found within the jurisdictional limits of the Federation or elsewhere on the high seas, or within the waters of the Ebon dominions, and the goods and effects which shall found aboard the same. This commission to continue in force by the pleasure of the Stateholder-General of the Intermarine Federation for the time being.

Given under my hand and seal of the Intermarine Federation, at the city of Langport, the twenty-fourth day of Vismaand in the one thousand nine hundred and eightieth firing of the Great Gun, and of the Independence of the said Federal states the two hundred and eighty-ninth.

• VLF signal to submarine Duivervoorde (ex-S-315)

CAR CULTURE

Djekker was never worth building much railroad in—where would you build it to? Not much in the way of domestic flights either. Not even so much as a good set of state highways; half of them are dirt. If you want to get anywhere, you’d better know your way behind the wheel—and know where you are, too. A gas station map isn’t gonna get you very far.

The place breeds the best drivers in the Federation, by necessity. Since there’s nothing else for them to do, they’ve made it a business. The Sumpkassel Longshot Special and Langport Automotive Thoroughbuilt Circuit can’t field racers half as good as Djekker’s own. Just look at the gate attendance for the Thousand Kilo Showdown. It blows other states’ events out of the water.

They’re not too pissed off about it. Not like any stock car in Djekker has an engine that wasn’t built out-of-state.

• Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

The day of the Thousand Kilo Showdown is traditionally the best for our brewery in the whole year. It beats out a Firing of the Great Gun, or the Victory Day Parade—if you can believe that. It feels like the whole country sits down in front of the TV to watch stock cars go flying for four hours. And a good show without a drink or eight just isn’t a good show.

If you’re driving, too, four hours is a long time. You really have to be at your best—you can’t be racing parched.

• Staunton Ross, CEO, Johnson Bar Brewery