(198X) Factbook entries, pt. 2

More from the factbook. These are without illustrations for now; that's been on the backburner in favor of writing. (Not quite three-quarters done and it's already more than a hundred pages of entries; expect more posts like this.)

Below is one entry from each subfaction (state, prefecture, etc.) in each of the four factions: a small slice of each part of the book. (Kindly forgive the fewer number of Rygo and Santi entries: those are still being written!) What's presented below doesn't necessarily represent the full coverage of each topic already written: many of the presented subjects have more than one entry written on them in the factbook.

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FEDS - "VANSA AND THE SEA"

Last time I was in Langport, I took an afternoon off to loaf around on Aanzee Beach. Yeah, yeah, I know—the go-to tourist destination. But the funny thing about it is that it’s not all crowded. There’s beautiful sand, beachside bars, the works; but nobody’s on the rocks. I figured I’d go there. There’s something to be said for discovering new places hiding right underneath familiar ones.

The Sea of Lights swallows up the horizon. Hard to describe; it’s not like any other body of water. Somehow you can sense the depth-of-field: the fact that you’re looking at a hemisphere of open water, save for a few odd little landmasses. Blueside surveys aren’t sure they’ve found the deepest part yet. Not for lack of trying; fifteen kilometers is a lot of cable to carry.

I hung around for a while. In the distance, a ship climbed over the horizon; emerging from the water funnel-first, then then pilothouse, like a mammoth submarine tanker surfacing after a long south-polar transit. The ship was a heavy-duty containerman of the Witkop Line, en route to its berthing in Loader’s Row. One of countless such ships—the Federal merchant-marine is the biggest in the world. No wonder; you look long enough over these shores and the sea calls to you. There’s not a sea on Oid that hasn’t beckoned ships flying the Polestar Rag.

Sometimes I regret my line of work.

-Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

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FEDS - THE SWORN OATH

The Lowlander can’t lie. No, really, he can’t—not under duress, not under torture. Some little pipe-bend in his brain just won’t let a knowing falsehood, made to profit off you, through. (It’s the intent that matters. A good joke, or a work of fiction, is all fine. But a Lowland accountant locks up when you ask them to file cooked books.)

We can. But somehow we still end up being more honest businessmen than them. See, there’s a million ways to lie without lying; and a great many of them invest a lot of effort into getting around their own heads. It ends up being a shield for them: “hey, when did I ever lie to you?” And if what they said didn’t come to pass: “well, honest mistake.”

Every agreement between cantons—or the wider Federation, for that matter—lies on the sworn oath. That’s not something to be taken lightly; mothers used to spank their kids for saying “I swear” about chores. You break a sworn oath—no matter how minor—and nobody will ever take your word for something again. You’re an untouchable; your best course of action is to eat your gun. There are cantonal martyrs so recognized because they died in the fulfillment of some mundane oath—like Ed Campbell, who ran through a roadside ambush he knew was coming for a payroll delivery he swore he’d complete.

Takes me back to elementary school. We had this school play about it. Campbell hung his head as soon as he’d said the words, because he knew he’d killed himself. But he still saw the oath through. Rolled his tin-lizzie into town with a radiator full of holes and a seat covered in blood.

-Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

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FEDS - RAILSHAKERS

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

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FEDS - GNOMES

I seen a gnome again lately. Now I was on leave from Catterall Air Base last month an’ I was drivin’ my Buffalo on Route 9 when th’ Number One bearing gave way. An’ there I was with no repair kit feelin’ damnfoolish. Then I hatches an enviable plan.

I took my last pack a’ Dog Heads—an’ it’s better if it’s the last pack—an’ popped the hood an’ laid out the cigs. Then I went n’ laid low.

Now you ain’t supposed to watch. But I swear by the tube of th’ Gun that I saw th’ tip of his pointy hat over the hood. An’ when I got back to the truck the engine was all right an’ the cigs were gone.

-Jaan Goots, Aviator, 512th Fighter Regiment

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FEDS - AIRLINERS

Vlaand International Airport: City of Windmills.

We like to advertise who we are, wherever we go. (Just try and disarm a Federal tourist.) You shouldn’t be able to miss a Federal envoy—man or machine—wherever he goes. Just look at our airliners. Who else runs a swept-wing turboprop fleet?

Forget the dogface propaganda about these things being ear-bleeders. They’re about as quiet (at least from the inside) and fast as any competitor jet. There are as many varieties as you’d like, but most have the same engines (or copies)—old Remko ten Bos’s mighty RB-12. If it ain’t broke...

Do yourself a favor next time you fly one of our machines. Ask the pilot, once you’re landed, if you can’t go down to one of the stilled engines. The enormous counter-rotating propellers span nearly six meters’ diameter. But the gearbox is hyper-mature: a masterpiece, one of those old-school projects that one or two guys makes perfect over half a lifespan.

Put a finger up to one of those stretching blades. You’ll be able to turn the whole windmill smoothly.

-Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

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FEDS - OLD NUMBER SEVEN

Fight a war for thirty-six years—on and off, sure, but still—and you get two wartime generations. One of the more popular ways of grouping yourself further, if you lived back then, is by what you remember being bombed by first. If you’re really old, you’ll recall airship raids; then, the succeeding generations of bombers; and, after the forties, the ballistic missile.

The name of the game was power. A bigger missile means a longer range, more throw weight. The payloads changed: first high explosives, then Oid’s first artificial satellites on their primitive espionage missions. The specifics didn’t matter much to the engineers. The weight quotas came from on high, and you didn’t ask what was ultimately envisioned. Everyone found out in ‘58 anyways.

With the shock of the war’s end came a rush to justify your firm’s items in the Federal budget. One of relatively few to dodge the fusillade-post was the rocket industry. Turns out putting things in space is pretty valuable in peacetime, too. And those big liquid-fueled boosters—slow, exposed, useless for modern arsenals—needed a job, anyways.

The Old Seven, in its myriad variants, is going on thirty years’ reliable service now. It’s changed a lot since those first launches, now that it carries up the lion’s share of blackwater craft across Oid. But there’s still a launch bunker, and precisely two kilometers of near-taut lanyard, and a firing-man who seizes the cord with both hands and pulls.

-Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

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LUPES - LUPARIC PHYSIOLOGY

The blue soldiers’ manuals refer to the work of savagery as “gorging”. For a people who cannot lie they are adept at saying that which is not true. Hunger plays little part in the urge. A victim’s body may be torn apart or his organs savaged. But most of the flesh is left where it sits.

It is the thought of breaking bones and tearing flesh that compels a man to forget himself. Eating a man’s heart cannot compare to the joy of pulling it out of his chest. This every cursed man knows—whether or not he has done it. The thought has occurred to him.

-Enzo Erskine, Voulgier, 32e Régiment de l'Intérieur

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LUPES - THE ROYAL PRESERVE

The Wolf-King built a new hall with his bare hands—this, to replace the ancestral structure he had once burnt in savage passion. He found in himself a great love of measuring and cutting and hammering. With his first chieftains and close friends he made of the new hall a strong keep.

But, for its finery, the Wolf-King spent little time in his house. He built it for the love of the ability—of that thing separating man and beast, that which he had learned to cherish. When he was not doing this, he was instead beneath the canopy.

The Royal Preserve, today, is the only place in the misty woods that could be called friendly. Here the mist conceals you so that you might find calm and peace; here, the stalkers-in-the-dark fear to tread. They remember the Wolf-King: the seven crushing jaws, the seven pairs of eyes held fixed and steady and purposeful. He understood all parts of his being.

So long as he is enthroned here, the Royal Preserve will hold its peace.

-Roul Lydon, Lieutenant, Escadron de Chasse 1/1

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LUPES - SILVER MINES

Hateful silver! In ten years one’s pelt falls out, though he mines dressed like an old copper-headed diver. It leeches into everything. The burning never leaves the pelt. And though you might scrub viciously in the shower all you will do is pull your hairs out faster. Unlike the barracks-shave it will never regrow.

The common miners serve short contracts for their national service. They escape without more than a slight thinning. I have said goodbye to all of mine—that straw-gold my wife picked me out in the crowd for. Now only my son wears it.

I must still be cautious. A heavy exposure would rob me of not just my pelt but my skin.

-Serge Blondeau, Shift Foreman, State Mine 12

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LUPES - LOAN HOUNDS

The clan makes great money off the Tòl waterfront. Where once squatted a poor fishing village there now sprawls hotels and restaurants and casinos. The Regency is proud of Koskal’s coming of age. The night in Tòl is neon-lit now. With the money came gambling and drinking. With these came the loan-hounds.

Old Bones protect you if you cannot repay them. They will have more than just a pound of flesh out of you. For some that is the whole purpose of extending the loan.

-Sloane Tescelin, Captain, S.S. Sauternes (B-601)
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LUPES - MISSILE WATCH

A tower with binoculars and a wireless set. Three men on shift rotation. A dugout full of stale coffee and salt pork. A generator and a little lattice radar sniffing at the waves beyond the coast.

Once a month a helicopter alights with fuel for the generator and consumables. A watchman can choose to stay another month or swap out with a fresh man. It is a game of pride to stretch one’s stint as long as possible. It is also good for the spirit. The air is fresh and the view is beautiful. You have privacy but also duty.

The Regent does not build such posts for nothing. Far beyond the horizon steam white-hulled warships with polestar flags. In their bellies lie great metal cigars that fly at wavetop height. In the noses of the cigars—

It would be so easy for them to do it.

-Conchar Goronwy, Chasseur, 96e Division d’Infanterie

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LUPES - NIGHTLIFE

Dogfaces don’t sleep the way we do, unless they’re trying to. Not like real wolves, either. They’re accustomed to long naps at dawn and dusk, and they’re up under the sun and moon. The state—at least the diplomatic arm—tries to keep a diurnal schedule as best they can.

Not like any big city ever sleeps, but you get a sense of the real nightlife in places like Sanc-du-Mer. Life’s the operative word. Buses are moving, mopeds are scooting, people are going to work—and when our bars are closing, theirs are just getting started. No wonder they’re friendly to flat-faces here. The bar crawl seems to never end.

Right when six AM rolls around—when my alarm goes off and my urge to drink on a working day is the strongest—it quiets down. There’s no morning traffic jams or afternoon rush hour. Dogfaces go to sleep and the residential streets are empty with the rising sun.

-Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

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LUPES - THE PAUPER-CHIEFTAINS

Clan Lasgelo was brave. When Abhais heeled for their Confederate masters—dragging along the dogs of the western forest—we men of the east met them in open battle. We lost.

Lasgelo was stripped of its titles and lands. From our good hills we were exiled into obscurity in the lands of the Gathering. My ancestor, the chieftain, was made to cut all but two braids from his mane. He had been reduced to a commoner. But he escaped with his throat uncrushed, and with a little of his old wealth.

There is scarce opportunity for rebirth here. The Gathering is a prison. Its trusties are the easterners who bowed to the Regent: who were allowed some measure of their power within the cage. They are keenly aware of how little separates us and them. If I was to wear robes with my family crest on them—to braid my whole mane—they would surely kill me.

I do it in my yard. It reminds me of who I am. Who I must become.

-Cyr Lasgelo, Chieftain

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RYGOLES - THE PRINCE-MACHINE OF BABA GADOU

Bodies dying of starvation and fever consume themselves. When our Master Brain fell silent, its loyal children tried to maintain order, to bridge the impossible void. But they often knew little more than their subjects. And the very same people who once looked upon them as angels, in the nameless rage of those days, set upon them instead in an iconoclastic spirit. The more beautiful and wise and powerless, the more enraging their presence was. The pulse of the time was: “the fire that burns a library should be fed wood!”

The petty princes came to power. They fed the people and slaughtered those who refused to take up their tools and work again. But too much had been already lost. They preserved what they could. Some man-machines survived as advisors, but never rulers. Some still do so today. They who are old enough to remember those days are poor candidates for any crown. They feel they could have labored harder.

Baba Gadou is the last city still ruled by divine decree. In its final years our Master Brain assigned a strategos to the defense of the city—a task it had customarily handled directly since the city's founding. The task of the strategos invited no faults or recursive self-reflections. When the city starved it took what was needed from those surrounding it. Riots were put to the canister. Now these are merely a bad memory.

It is no replacement for our Master Brain. This prince-machine thinks only of the city and its immediate allies. That is its sole charter; and the statement of the fact alone may be made freely. I dare not stray into critique.

-Giorgio Moceri, University of Baba Gadou

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RYGOLES - THE WAR OF THE FORECLOSURE

Recce Salvatore, Prince of Riksu, was in deep shit. He personally owed a staggering debt to Iškri Kitrantum’s bankers—a debt he had incurred clubbing his way to power among the princes of An Khnum Koine. The bad kind of debt. The kind you can’t cut and run from, can’t waive, can’t squeeze your own people to repay, because you’re losing money every year trying.

Now he tried to play it cool. Even a Koine mobster thinks twice about war when he’s been doing it for eight years straight. But he had this beachhouse in Procul Ab, a nice big villa, and they foreclosed it when he wouldn’t pay.

You know how Koinites work. It’s all about the physical: they took his house, he had to take theirs. And his battered little vassals followed him. They were smart, too. Knew how to cut up Kitrantum’s goons and then duck when the Host twitched. They were gonna salami-slice it, work their way to the jugular without letting go.

It became our problem. We moved in to bail our dumb-fuck allies out—to break Prince Salvatore’s back. The Host was real polite at first. They didn’t do anything when we landed at Procul Ab. Just stared. Then we moved in on Salvatore, and they were all over us.

It was damned messy. Didn’t matter that we were just popping in; Rygonet gave us more hell than the Army of Riksu ever did. But we finish our jobs.

-Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

We stomped the fucking Prince’s palace flat. And we ran him over. That’s right. We ran him over in first gear.

-Sergeant Sander Eijkelhof, 2-26 Armor

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RYGOLES - THE DOLE

There wasn’t such a thing as nobility in Rygos for twelve hundred years. “Prince” is still a loan-word from the Santagrines. They were the ones worried about the small details: counts and barons and duques and all that nonsense. Here the word “prince” carries a different meaning: a purer meaning, an older meaning. It means bread-giver.

The Master Brain gave us bread. Then it died, and we had to do it ourselves. But we still follow its example.

All of Riksu is mine—land, water, buildings, their output. Chiefest of all: food. In their bones, everyone remembers the brain-death. Everyone wants to eat. My predecessors in this seat were the ones who figured out how to get food and protect it. And they figured out the lesson every one of us has remembered since: “EAT FIRST!”

The Prince eats first. Then his court, then his soldiers, then his assembly-line men. Then the rest. If I want anyone’s loyalty, I get it by feeding them. So there’s enough to eat—and, if I want to keep this job, it’ll stay like that. But it all comes through me. Line up and get your dole. And remember who feeds you.

“To feed the enemy of the state is to feed the state poison.”

-Recce Salvatore, Prince of Riksu (1331-1385 IT)

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RYGOLES - RED STRIPE COLA

Red Stripe is the most popular soft drink in the world. There it is. We import a shitload of it. We even make the stuff here. Chalk up one for the Petty Staters—hey, they have to be able to say they export something that’s not raw materials.

The wild popularity defies analysis. People like to talk about this advertising campaign, that famous character with a taste for it—even the impression of age and dignity stuck to anything Petty Stater. You ask me, Oid picked it out of a hat. Now that it’s stocked in every gas station in the world, it’s here to stay.

As for the actual drink, it’s nothing special. A little caffeine, citrus, kola nut and carbonated water, plus a number of hidden additives. To their credit they keep the formula a trade secret.

The secret is this: there are two Formula Men. Both of them were built in a kiln, decades or centuries ago. One of them was kidnapped a decade ago. High-profile case. (Small-time capo or rival prince? You can’t tell the difference.)

The fixers had to give up after three days. The state was closing in and their man-machine still hadn’t told them anything. If you don’t feel real pain, having all of your limbs broken is just annoying.

-Rayleigh Irving, Federal Intelligence

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RYGOLES - THE SOIL AND THE FIELDS

The Arche Rygolike was an imperial body for our Master Brain. Therefore that body was divided into organs and arteries; into specialized regions, according to what could be found and along what paths things could be sent.

Many people lived in Hūl when the Host appeared. Where we Heartlanders were once nomads, the Hūl were always a sedentary people. In ancient recollection they had been our enemies. We outnumbered them now; but, in any case, we had our protectors, and needed to do very little ourselves. This was before the time of the mortal soldier, the man who would bleed to buy angels time.

They were moved about. Their cities were broadly flattened and the arable land filled with new fields. Some forests were left alone; others were uprooted. Wherever the black soil was available—fertile and well-watered and rich—there rose enormous fields of every crop. The hands that worked them were often the same as before. Their villages, though, were of concrete; and their plows walked themselves.

-Giorgio Moceri, University of Baba Gadou

Why did men have to work the fields? Could constructs not have been made to do all of it, rather than merely help—as if only to keep the farmers from growing stoop-backed?

One really asks: “Why did our Master Brain not liquidate all men, and populate its body with constructs instead?”

-Giorgio Moceri, University of Baba Gadou

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SANTAGRINES - THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE ELCANO

The Commonwealth Navy served with pride and distinction in the War. Our flat-tops and independent cruisers struck out far and wide, reaffirming Santagria’s old sea-mastery at every contest against our foes’ dreadnoughts. For a time the Navy fought the whole world to a standstill; a glorious time, a storied time. But it came to pass that the sea turned against us; the water changed to the cold and unfriendly blue of the Federation; and the Navy was confined to port, a mere fleet-in-being.

When the bombs fell they caught the ships at anchor. They sit there today in the shallow water, rusting islands and crenellated masts protruding where they have not been cut up for scrap. 

Those ships that survived received a final order from the fleet headquarters: to put to sea and engage the enemy “as not to disgrace the Navy”. All that heeded the order never returned to port. Most ceased reporting their positions within the week.

One ship survived—the newest carrier, the Elcano, blessed with a wing of Baviecas and eight reactors. The States-Navy set about killing this ninety thousand ton fugitive. She lunged far out to sea to evade them, steaming across the blue side of Oid: going west to flee east.

The things she saw! The people she met and fought on her rare landfalls! The brushes with death, without escort or screen, deprived in time of all her following store-ships, heedless of the tracks of the panthalassic storms—the suffering and starvation of the five thousand-strong ship’s company!

Ten miles from the shores of the friendly Overseas, held together by patches and churning pumps, she was struck with four torpedoes, fired in the night by a waiting Federal pigboat. She split at her seams and began to settle. But she was built by Santagrine craftsmen, and she continued to make headway.

The fishermen of Jara village were astounded that morning to see two thousand and thirty-one haggard sailors wading ashore before them. At the head of the pilgrimage was the captain, gaunt-cheeked with sickness, stripped to his underwear and his commander’s cap. Behind the procession loomed the grounded, broken-backed hulk of the Elcano.

-Brother Torres

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SANTAGRINES - THE ANTHILL

Toward the end of the War, as the old capital at Algavaro burned under the fall of a rain of napalm rockets, the King and his staff fled the piled stones of their saintly ancestors, and in the shadow of the mountains found refuge in the Anthill. It was a hideout fit for the times: sunken deep into the rock, encased in steel, the bunker’s warrens mounted on coil springs. There the last wearer of the Crown fought his war and fought it well: isolated from the starvation, the burnt cities, behind his mammoth blast doors.

Fate rewarded such hubris. On the day of the atomic exchange, a rain of ballistic missiles fell on the Anthill. Coincidence—as cannot happen in fiction—saw the rain of many nations fall on the King’s head almost in unison.

Fifteen minutes! Never before had such a yield landed on one place in so short a time; never again shall it happen as long as Oid turns. Never again shall Oid hear the sound of atomic drumfire.

No nomad of the Glass Dunes today strays near the Anthill—a flat tangle of glass and rock—the mountain blasted flat. At night, from the ruins, the beams of bone-white searchlights sweep the bases of the sooty clouds for the falling stars that killed them.

It is said among the dune-men that the Crown lies somewhere in that mass, miraculously untouched by the heat and the weight of the rocks. But though the isotopes should have long decayed, the Anthill still strikes dead any man who enters.

-Brother Torres