The Forge Region – Anttanen Constellation
Uitra System – Planet VI, Moon 4
State War Academy Station
15 February YC 121
When I returned from Jita I called Tarumo to check if there was any progress on the kidnapped miner case. “Working on it,” was his curt reply. There was nothing I could do, so by way of distraction, I spent the rest of the day reading books, and very peculiar books they were. I didn’t know there was a huge body of fictional works written by capsuleers until I came across a reference to Pod and Planet contest on one of the Net forums. At that time I glossed over it because I was looking for factual information but today was just the right time to have a bit of entertainment. At least, I hoped for entertainment, but in fact, it wasn’t something one would call light reading.
The topics were as broad as New Eden and took place in space, on turf and everywhere in between – that contest was called Pod and Planet for reason. There was one category dedicated to humour which lightened the overall impression, but the other pieces were dramatic and sometimes even tragic. I was particularly touched by a story named Low Power which described an attack on an Astrahus citadel in Anoikis from the perspective of ordinary people who lived in it. The author, Aenea Maim, skilfully expressed the tense atmosphere fraught with anticipation of impending doom at the station. It’s not often that capsuleers give any thought to the feelings of landlubbers but Aenea depicted their emotions so vividly as if she was one of them. She ended the story with a brilliant masterstroke filled with bitter irony. I liked that piece so much that I asked Aenea to give me permission to publish it on my blog, which she had kindly granted.
Aura, who read the story with me, was horrified, “Did it really happen?”
“I don’t know,” shrugged I, “it’s fiction.”
“But could it happen? Could thousands of people simply be abandoned in a space station?”
“It’s not impossible,” I said vaguely, “Now that you mentioned it, I’ve remembered the recent news article about destruction of Fort Knocks Keepstar in Rage. There was a lot of blabber about how that operation was prepared, how attackers infiltrated the system, how they exploded the citadel, how much loot they got, and nothing about evacuation of the station residents.”
“Did they all die?” gasped Aura.
“I don’t know,” was all I could say, starting to regret that I let Aura read that story. She seemed to become surprisingly empathetic and got distressed by any mention of human suffering or death. I thought that probably I should limit her to PG-rated information, for the time being. After all, emotionally she was just two months old.