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Chapter 19 - The Administrator[]
Boojum Shipyard
Kowloon System
Lyran Commonwealth
3142
Her Grace the Duchess Sharon Ngo floated untethered, watching the progress on Landmark Class hull number 4. Her mind worked over the information from reports she'd read earlier, cross-referencing ideas and concepts.
This has to be a testing procedure. To her, it was obvious. One ship, hitting targets in an escalating manner, altering behaviors but, not enough to conceal the presence of doctrine.
Someone was testing doctrine, and using her area of responsibility to do it.
She nudged a joystick, and the puff of compressed gas pushed her along at an altered angle and velocity, drifting toward 'the walk'-a series of catwalks between construction slips.
{We're being tested.} said to herself in her mind. She gently evaded a construction exo as it flew to slipway 12.
After the Blake War, her mother had withdrawn Coast Guard forces back to the Quarantine zone, and began distributing good condition vessels and training to the lords of the other worlds within the zone. This had been to avoid the reinstituted Militia requirements, but it was also done because Kowloon itself wasn't sufficient-the zone wasn't an empire. Since then, most of the other worlds in the zone followed Kowloon's lead-at least, mostly, in how they organized their Coast Guard units, depending on available manpower, local needs, and the express desires of the Melissa Theater Margrave.
She activated the mag-clamps in her boots as she got close to the Walk, and briefly felt the negative G's as they pulled her to the service walkway's surface.
{We're the most experienced fleet in being in this quarter of the Inner Sphere. Of course they're going to test their new technologies against us...but who's the real target?} Sharon Ngo began to think.
She looked up, letting the info-sphere flood her faceplate with navigation data.
Somewhere near the Nadir point of the system, a NIOPS flagged freighter was awaiting their Dropship, which was burning from the Sithers-Deen processing dome on Snark-a moonlet much like Ganymede.
She dismissed NIOPS. They had suffered catastrophically during the Blake War, and worse yet against the Marian Hegemony and Free Worlds League factions.
Food from Sithers-Deen was keeping NIOPS alive twenty years after their main agrodome had been bombarded. They're not the target.
She turned and contemplated the storm-wracked, glaring red-orange face of Boojum. The Gas giant roared on the radio spectrum.
{What are they after?} Sharon thought.