(198X) Factbook serialization, part 3

Continued from the second part.

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CYDOLAND, continued.

FOREVER SOUP

Ever made a forever soup? Throw some leftovers in a pot, cook ‘em, but don’t drain the whole thing. As it gets lower, just keep adding ingredients to your fancy. In Cydoland they’re a fixture of the mountain inns, both the real deals and the tourist joints—not that most of the latter’s customers can tell the difference.

See, the popular establishments have a dilemma: everyone wants to feel like their taste of the soup was unique, but they also want to taste the same thing everyone before them went crazy for. So, while they change up the ingredients from time to time, the base remains pretty much the same—as it has been for decades.

The ongoing Bantam versus Bantam-MK debate in Klein Grotehaven is just like that. Sure, they’ll spice it up now and again with new combat tapes (courtesy of Bluebird—thanks, you peeping toms). But the tried-and-true arguments for both sides’ adherents will never go out of style.

MK? Yeah, the autocannon’s great. I’ve put some rounds through it myself. Chews up the scenery something fierce, and it doesn’t shit the bed when you switch belts in a hurry. Reaches far out enough to make helicopters sweat, too.

Bantam? Sure, the low-pressure gun lobs its shots like a fat kid throwing a football. The range is crap. But the saltier Bantam jockeys (the big-name ones) love its punch, and that shuts the MK crowd up.

• Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

KLEIN GROTEHAVEN

Twelve hundred square kilometers of Langport’s land and facilities, as if they couldn’t find anywhere in Vansa to put it. The primary proving ground and R&D center of the States-Army, and a four-decade marker of direly renewed unity between the states. We’re even willing to let them get away with butchering the name—in classic Lowlander fashion—on all the road signs. (For the record, it’s “Little Grandhaven”. I only write it all fucked up and Vansan elsewhere because that’s how my bosses like it.)

Or maybe not. It might be named after our capital city (that’s “Big” Grandhaven), but it speaks and dresses like no particular state. The eggheads who live and work there, and the guest units that rotate in and out on exercises, are drawn from all over the Federation. That means seven different signature methods of getting drunk and disorderly on post, every night.

• Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

THE HACKENSACK RIVER

Border patrol lit up a small party last night. Bald-skinned reisers from Roundtop canton—young reservists—starlight scopes, no thermals. They'd seen silhouettes on all fours and got to blasting.

The post called me up at dawn, right when I was getting ready to sleep. Asked if I could I.D. them. Wasn't sappers with bound snouts and wire-cutters this time. Mom and pop, a couple teenage kids. Only three bodies. One got away the way he came, but not without a few holes. They probably had family on this side of the border. Couldn't have crossed legally. Too long, too dangerous; their own rulers see that sort of thing as traitorous. Chanced it and came up short.

The triggermen were awfully embarrassed. They acted like they'd shot my own people. Not so. My own, back in the day, made that leap.

• Marcel Laurent, Federal Marshal

LUPAR EXPATRIATES

Cydoland is home to the largest lupar community in the Intermarium. Figures: just across the Hackensack is their country; the misted country; the dark country. Cross-border raids are a fact of life—once just by bare-chested clan warriors, and now also by uniformed troops. Sometimes they come with the intent to stay.

Blackschanz canton is the first stop by defectors from the Regency. For most of them, it’s where they settle down. Densely wooded, mountainous, cold and misty—a little slice of home; even its delegates to the Council of the Cantons are lupar. If you’re an ecologist, you’d call it part of the Ebon Forest proper. The inhabitants take it to heart.

My old man stayed there for a little, when he jumped the border. But not for long. They might hate the Regency, but they brought all its customs with them. The same choking etiquette. Better housing, but only because there’s less of them to crowd together. Shot through with royal agents.

We left the mountains and the forest for good. It hurt the old dog a lot to live on the plains. Didn’t feel right at first. But he wanted a clean break for us—for me, when I was born. Wanted me to live like a flat-face.

Funny how I found my way back there...

• Marcel Laurent, Federal Marshal

Blackschanz lupar fall into three camps.

First, the heritage dogfaces: the ones that used to kill mountain miners in the ancient past, farthest from Old Bones and his guidance—the ones who still see themselves as our vassals by right of our conquest, not as brethren.

Second, the freedmen: bought one by one from thrall-markets in the woods and hired on by Confederate railroad bosses and independent traders, as surveyors, spike-drivers and guards; the ones who could not dream of the land beyond the Hackensack. We overwrote them with our culture. These we trust. There’s nothing left for them back “home”.

Third, the expatriates, spies and defectors: those who fled their master for our protection, or to bite us in the ass in his name. All too often, they simply wish for a stronger ally against him.

• John Malte, Blackschanz Canton Watch

SUMPKASSEL

OVERVIEW

If Vansa is the spiritual heart of the Intermarium, Sumpkassel is its physical heart; something the former still resents losing. That means the open lowland; the rustle of the wind through wheat fields, and the distant roar of atom-fired railshakers. The Long Flat.

It was once part of Vansa; just look at the map. Long borders across open plains don’t come naturally, and skewed ones even less so. They’ve got a working relationship today, but there’s still a little bad blood. Wounds from a civil war don’t heal overnight.

• Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

CASTLES

A border is what you can practically call yours. Barring gentleman’s agreements between states that cannot or will not fight, that means they are what you can defend. Thus they follow natural lines: places to choke up armies and their lines of communication. Where these do not exist in the land, you’ll have to make them up yourself.

The history of Sumpkassel is measured in its castles. With no significant natural defenses across its flat land, nor Vansa’s protection by sea and flood, its freemen and nobility had to look to their own construction for safety. Safety from all directions: the cantons of Cydoland, and lupar from abroad; competing warlords in Vansa and Riesling; and, later, the Master Brain of the Rygoles. Together they formed an impressive defense in depth, improved over the generations to resist ever-stronger siege weapons.

• Martijn Groenhof, Sumpkassel Historical Society

“Castle bid” — An agreement or purchase that significantly improves one’s standing, but also introduces unwelcome challenges and obligations. Historically, rather than belonging to a hereditary aristocracy, Sumpkassel’s many castles were bought and sold like other wealthy estates. The new lord of the castle was obliged to take on its maintenance and defense of the area. The largest and most enviable castles were also the most expensive to hold onto.

• Adje’s World Slang, 198X Edition

THE INTERMARINE CIVIL WAR

The Confederate Constitution was written to preserve the sovereignty and independence of its member states in perpetuity: first and foremost, it was a matter of mutual defense. No standing States-Army existed during the tenure of the Confederacy. Rather, each state maintained its own army, to common regulations, and united them under the sign of the North Star in times of conflict. And though the Confederate Assembly held exclusive power to wage war and make foreign policy, in practice the states did these quite as they pleased.

With minor amendments and periodic spats this shaky arrangement lasted two hundred and thirty years. All told, a good run. But the cracks deepened; and Sumpkassel’s fortified lords came to resent their wealthy masters along Vansa’s coast.

The late Thirty-Six Years’ War swept up all the world in arms. Sumpkassel, as it had for many years, accepted yet another Vansan call to mobilize. The generation of plainsmen who answered the out-staters went whirling into eternity. On the slopes of Ronceu and Ulaut they lay in scattered heaps among a thorough dusting of shell splinters.

At last the cracks became a fault line, and Sumpkassel sought to wash its hands of the war.

With it came every state and no state: rather, constituent parts of almost all of them. Far from the hoped-for peace, every backyard in the Confederacy was now a war zone. They called it “the Big Shootout”. It was a good time to live in a castle.

When the smoke cleared, the states reviewed their special trust and bond to one another. They came out stronger for it: one Intermarine Federation in perpetuity. A mere eight years later they were once again fighting the war that raged on around them.

• Martijn Groenhof, Sumpkassel Historical Society

My uncle was fifteen when the Big Shootout kicked off. Like a lot of Cydolanders in those days, he’d taken the hobo express down to Sumpkassel to find work on the railroads. The town mine’d shuttered and it was that or herding goats.

The civil war started pretty much overnight. There’d been bad blood—there still is—but never a bloodlust until then. The state government wanted a diplomatic solution, to waive its recruitment obligations and see itself out of the war. But the people wanted the Vansans who’d stolen their kids and husbands stone dead. What started as recruiting offices shuttering turned into recruiting officers getting shot in the back at bars.

Then it wasn’t recruiters and States-Army men. It was guys who owned stock up north or who flew the Polestar Rag instead of Sumpkassel’s own. My uncle said that even then there was a smug air to it. In the most heavily armed society on Oid, the street shooters never dreamed that the bullets would come back their way.

A civil war is an awful enough thing when it’s cities and states against the same. Cydoland had its share of cantonal exchanges, but we were spared the worst of it. When it’s man against man, neighbor against neighbor, it’s the law of the jungle. You can’t trust your own family. You certainly can’t trust the supply chain. And the looters called themselves “militiamen”.

Lowlanders ought to cut us some fucking slack every now and again. When the then-Regent had his one big shot at coming “over the hills”—of chasseurs in the streets, lever-actions at port, peace and bread and sanity—it was my homeland that slammed the door shut in the wolves’ faces. All while we were accused of sitting things out.

• Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

The flag of Sumpkassel sports five stars, marking its order of admission as a full state of the Confederacy. It was a peaceful and orderly secession from Vansa, as much an administrative as political action, and for seventy years before the Big Shootout the flag of Sumpkassel wore only those five stars as its raiments. None of the framers of the new state could ever have dreamed that there would be war between them in less than three generations.

Civil war in the Intermarium caught the attention of all Oid—and beyond. By that time, of course, the old High and Low Lighthouses, used by the learned men of Oid and her moon, were superseded by powerful radio transmitters permitting extensive communication. Proserpina became an eager spectator to this new episode of the Thirty-Six Years’ War. She could not possibly intervene across the void of space. But her words, cast down the gravity well, fired the hearts of the fighting-men like hard anthracite.

Sumpkassel bears a crescent moon on its flag in memory of the Battle Hymn to the Soil, or “Cannons’ Rattle”. That the song was of no Oidly extraction, but penned by a “belle of the stars”, was no obstacle toward its popularity. If anything it helped it. The rebel fighters, squatting in their rifle pits, could look up at the night sky and see their allies.

• Martijn Groenhof, Sumpkassel Historical Society

fisc> This whole damned enterprise was started to keep foreign conquerors from tramping over us.

fisc> No god-machines, no kings, no shades-in-the-dark looking at us as a sort of interesting resource.

fisc> Boil it down and you get the notion that the states had ought to steer themselves asthey see fit, with just enough cooperation to rebuff a gradual conquest.

fisc> *as they.

fisc> Well, now, we’ve got to fight for our own damn armies and we’re supposed to go hat-in-hand to Langport to ask nicely if we can do this or that in our own foreign policy.

fisc> The sonuvabitch with a boot on your neck speaks your language.

fisc> Isn’t that a neat compromise?

brom> Kill Yourself

jaan_27127> hello all theyre sending me to the army in 2days because i stole a car

fisc> Come on now. The statement’s in earnest.

brom> and the response

brom> You talk all this shit about intermarine tyranny as if getting paved over sequentially by dogfaces or whoever would have been better

uwb64> What car

brom> Real “lose with dignity and principles” guy

jaan_27127> it was a Guggender stationwagon really beautiful machine. Big leftside stack

uwb64> Thats cool if it was an ezel they should have just shot you

• Anonymous users, Dwell Time BBS

THE WHITEWATER GUARD

When the smoke cleared from the Civil War, the new Federation wielded a standing States-Army: no more a pile of state militaries jockeying for high command. But though its pan-state charter was welcomed, as a way of ensuring some other poor bastard died for your own defense, the states resented the loss of their troops to Langport’s command. They begrudgingly nationalized their men-at-arms, branch after branch, with only the notion of another civil war—the bone-white faces of the dead, so fresh in their memory—advancing their pens.

They sought, and found, a way around it. The Intermarium’s many rivers and waterways produced in almost every state a river patrol of some kind. The same story repeated itself from Vansa to Riesling: the river service soon grew infantry battalions, then artillery, then tanks and aircraft and every other killing tool. The “Whitewater Guard” of Vansa was followed by one in every other state, if not by that name. Attempts to arrange any interstate structure over them have been bitterly opposed.

They are a second Intermarine army, divided among the states, deployed only with their consent; armed with the States-Army’s leftovers and manned with its draft rejects. In every Whitewater general’s heart is the fear (or perhaps hope?) that he will one day turn his rusting guns on Intermarine targets again.

• Martijn Groenhof, Sumpkassel Historical Society

RAILSHAKERS

Sumpies make a lot of airs about their piles of stone, but the reason anybody still pays attention to them is their infrastructure. All that flat, firm ground is good for more than just fields and tourist traps. There’s more miles of rail in Sumpkassel than there is anywhere else in the Federation; and, given its place in the middle, it’s where all the transport hubs are. The Rygoles once said that all roads lead to Baba Gadou. Well, all railroads lead to Sumpkassel Proper.

Rail traffic still constitutes the bulk of Federal freight, particularly the kind of military loads my boss actually pays me to write about. It’s an enormous industry. Nobody does it better than we do. These days, there’s not a lot out there that we don’t lead in.

The long intermodal hauls are handled by railshaker. Take a steam engine: the biggest you’ve ever seen. Fire it with atomic fission, so it runs out of hours-before-overhaul before it does fuel. Give it three shift crews sleeping and smoking and watching TV in the tender. There’s even a shower and a head.

A few other things, too: a MANPADS locker and an NBC overpressure system.

• Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

Technically speaking, sir, most all electric locomotives are atom-fired; their power plant is merely situated some ways away on solid ground, and the electricity brought to their wheels by overhead lines.

We accept a certain loss of safety and efficiency in taking our fission with us. In return, we needn’t worry about the cables being cut.

• Dolf Guhnen, Shop 322 Chief, Vansa & Sumpkassel Road

On the Intermarine character:

The boss of the Sumpkassel Central heard that one of his railshakers was consistently behind its timetable. It had been making the same unscheduled stop each time, far out in the countryside. He scratched his head: the engineer who held down the route—on whose watch the great iron horse lagged—was an old “atom-hand”, known to be one of his best. So he summoned the engineer and demanded an explanation.

“Well, sir, there’s a little town we pass by, and the locals put up a good peach stand.”

Rather than fire the man, who halted thousands of tons of steel and fissioning fuel and cargo to buy a few peaches, the boss rode along on the next trip—to see if the peaches were good.

There is no longer a peach stand there. The locals sell them at a small, very new station on the route.

• Brother Torres

An Interairfleet flight is faster, and in terms of comfortability it is not dissimilar. Efforts to economize by scale have further reduced the difference in fare prices. In spite of these, though, our passenger revenue remains strong.

Simply put, sir, an airliner does not have a lounge car. It does not have an open-glass view to the Intermarine countryside. And a flight is all over simply too fast for our tastes.

• Dolf Guhnen, Shop 322 Chief, Vansa & Sumpkassel Road

THE LOCOMOTIVE AND ITS MOVING PARTS

ROAD SWITCHER, TYPE 67

CONSOLIDATED LOCOMOTIVE WORKS

A pile of well-formed steel. Sitting in the middle ground between dockyard freightcar-movers and the big interstate railshakers means you can find Sixty-Sevens anywhere, whether caked in soot or freshly painted. She does the job whether she's wearing a red-and-black dress or overalls.

See, machines are like animals in more than just your moral obligation to them. The smallest forms, like insects, are specialized. All fine. But the bigger they get, the more they ought to do. An ugly diesel box, like what the dogfaces build, would have sufficed for freight hauling. But it'd shit exhaust fumes all over your neighborhood on passenger runs, and it'd leave nothing for the eye. When a Sixty-Seven raises her pantograph she leaves nothing but water vapor and captivated imaginations in her wake. And unlike a purely electric machine, she thinks nothing of hopping off grid—on oil or coal-firing, buyer's choice—when the time and place calls for it.

Nor is she as worried about electromagnetic pulses.

• Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

A dogface will tell you that the way you spot an evil man is cruelty to animals. He's half-right. It's cruelty to machines you ought to really look for.

I don't mean using it like an idiot. Misuse and no maintenance will break any complex of metal or meat. I mean casual cruelty.

See, a machine's not some animal you browbeat into the task. You get nothing out of caring for it beyond what's necessary to keep it running. But that gets you thinking: everything that wins me my bread is just a tool. Disposable. Better if it was cheaper. Closed up and neatly covered, so you needn't know about its moving parts. Better forgotten about.

It's a short hop from there to thinking of men in the same way. Just wads of meat in the same replaceable pipeline. Just more funnels into your mouth. A man who's got no room in his heart for machines doesn't often have any for people, either. And if he doesn’t reward an engine for its steam, he’ll give you short shrift too.

• Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

A machine, sir, is an expedient. They have been around us since dimmest antiquity; the natural mountain trail, an inclined plane, makes of its walker a machine operator. A street, like a funnel, is a redirecting machine.

People drink, whore, and shoot one another on some streets. Perhaps the lay of the street makes evil more accessible; but the street is not the fount of it. Nobody killed another man because the concrete sang to him.

• Dolf Guhnen, Shop 322 Chief, Vansa & Sumpkassel Road

“...The foreman, a little old man without much faith in living people, scrutinized Arnold Brijk for a long time. Arnold had heard of the man, who was synonymous with and preceding of his remote shop. His hands were of worn red leather like gloves and his face was molded of dry jerky by five decades’ open fireboxes.

‘Had it been up to me I’d grant rest eternal to every locomotive. They’re mutilated by their keepers now. Rough hands!’

Lines broke across the hard face where the leather-skin gave way. Arnold saw at once that he no longer existed and relaxed. The foreman’s mind was full of the agonized hisses and squeals of his iron flock and his mouth was left to narrate the vision as it played out.

‘There are few machines, but all too many people, boy... An engine’s a tender little thing. Fragile and defenseless! A man’ll stand up for himself, but an engine’ll do what you tell it, although it might be maimed. Even an animal can nurse a wound—but not an engine! You must be on the lookout for the smallest thing. To leave an engine to its own defenses is like exposing an infant!’

At once he was examining Arnold again. This was the sharp eye of a man who could lay it upon a locomotive and at once see the lay of the fire-tubes, the height of the water in the boiler, the springs bearing the great weight loyally and without complaint.

‘You’re an idiot, boy. No two doubts about it. Deaf as a post. One tap with a hammer will sound just the same as another to you. You’ll have no concept of what ails the engine until you kill it.’

Now he spoke only to torment himself.

‘By rights, every engine ought to be stopped where it stands and seen to as if by paramedics. Not by the depot crews, or—Great Gun!—their engineers. Those scum should be chased away, but not with wrenches; their thick skulls would ruin the tools! These bums come right off the fields or their worthless technical courses and think they can seize a throttle. Like they work with whores and not innocents!’

Arnold wracked his brain for an analogy as to what he saw. He felt that the foreman was like a torsion bar, seized at both ends and twisted—full of coiled energy, weakened by retaining it without release. Slowly the bar untwisted before his eyes and the bile in the little man gave way to a flat silence.

They worked together awkwardly and under the foreman’s suspicious eye. The foreman allowed himself only a few disapproving notes. He even permitted Arnold to return in the morning on the condition that he was on time.

The sun had fallen. The depot was a concrete pad—black sky above, black plain beneath—a little flat platform in foreboding space from which strong steel rails raced into the unknown. Only the glare of floodlights across the concrete cast the tall sharp shop-buildings and machines into relief. Arnold was filled suddenly with the conviction that should he step off the concrete his feet would touch no grass and he would fall away into a void.

In the morning he was served coffee—black like old machine oil.”

• Aanders Plaatsman, “That Enticing Hum”

A hundred fifty years ago, the Firing of the Great Gun was a silent ceremony. Only the sledgehammer-blow on your chest and the pillar of fire in the sky. But tastes change, and the Gun came to be seen in the same brotherhood of metal life—full of dignity and power—as the steam drills and locomotives and ironclads. Had the Gun left us behind? Would we shut out this new strain, of our making, too?

The modern Firing is a one-hour ceremony. When the last dignitary has poured in his cup, another—a tiny silhouette on a high rooftop, conductor’s flags in hand—begins. The choir and band are soon followed by the “instruments of the city”. Diesel engines cough to life and rev. Factory whistles and weather sirens scream. Locomotives placed on heavy rollers race in place at full speed. Machine guns chatter and cannons bark. And from the coastal monitor Westergo—dragged overland in one piece to its museum-place in Gunbed, and made to raise steam—there booms low the foghorns of eleven scrapped ships in addition to its own.

• Martijn Groenhof, Sumpkassel Historical Society