GblaRCS Chpt 52

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 52 -==
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"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."Quotation from a flyer distributed by the Niops Association Hegemony in the Inner Sphere - 2842CE
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===A Policy I can get behind===
Toruń City Spaceport – Copernicus System – 2842
Growing up Václav Štefánek had never really thought he would get to travel, much less leave Cerignola for good, but now as he led his young family down the ramp of the DropShip to set foot on another world for the first time in their lives he was pretty sure that this wasn't even going to be their final destination. Štefánek had been a farmer back home and wanted to remain one, he just wanted to farm land actually worth farming and fortunately his wife Anjali had agreed. There was clearly no future for them back home and when the opportunity to start a new one dropped into their laps they had seized it with both hands.
The Niops Association was looking for people to settle their new colonies out in the periphery and they were the ones currently offering that better future Václav and Anjali wanted for their three children. The fact that someone actually was establishing new colonies was weird enough in this day and age, but if you took their offer to emigrate Niops would even transport you there for free and maybe even give you land for a farm if you convinced them you would work hard.
The big attraction of moving to Niops controlled space however was that they weren't at war with anyone. As a result interstellar commerce there wasn't in its death throes, the economy was booming not contracting, people were willing to take risks on investments and companies were building capital constructing new factories because people weren't randomly dropping WMD on them.
In an era where weather forecasts across much of the Inner Sphere could be summarized all too often as 'Light breeze with a chance of nerve gas' or 'Twelve-thousand degrees, very cloudy', even those people who did still had money were understandably somewhat loath to risk their savings on anything that might attract orbital bombardment.
Nobody had directly attacked Cerignola of course, it was so poor they didn't even have to deal with pirates all that often, let alone assaults by House militaries or mercenary raids, but the wars raging elsewhere still impacted them hard. Like many it had relied upon imports to maintain its economy and among those imports were the water purifiers needed to sustain viable agriculture on a marginally habitable world.
The destruction of the factories on Brownsville that had made the Jamerson-Ulikov purifiers had not hit the Free Worlds League as badly as it did everyone else, at least not right away. The less efficient but still functional TriFil system made by Curtiss Hydroponics in the Paradise system had allowed many Marik-administered worlds which were dependent upon cheap water purification to soldier on for decades longer. Now however, with the Free Worlds League lacking the JumpShips needed to keep the civilian economy running and transport things like water filters to everywhere that needed them, less important worlds like Cerignola were drying up.
It wasn't just systems like Cerignola that were suffering though. Right across the Free Worlds League, much like the rest of the Inner Sphere, everything was spiralling towards collapse. Even before the First Succession War had really got going you could go six months between visits by JumpShips in many systems, and as the wars between the Great Houses ground on that interval grew longer and longer until it was measured in years. Lacking an HPG the population of Cerignola didn't even find out about the ComStar Interdiction on the Free Worlds League until it was already over, and the only effect it really had on them was to learn from the crew of the Merchant class JumpShip which had appeared in their midst one day was to learn that from now on they should probably expect to see visitors even less frequently than they had before.
There was clearly no future on Cerignola, maybe not even for the Free Worlds League itself which was being assailed from all sides and losing systems to both the wretched Capellans and the insidious Lyrans. That was why when the ship from Niops arrived one day offering the people there a chance at a new home, saying it would be back again in a few months to collect anyone who was interested, Václav Štefánek and most of his neighbours had decided to take that chance.
The government back on Atreus didn't kick up a fuss about it all. Judging from their non-reaction they might have even been secretly pleased to have the problem the people on Cerignola and other worlds in similar positions represented off their hands. As such, while a few of the people who decided to leave Cergnola on the Niops owned Jumpship decided to disembark early on Romita and remain living in the League, most chose to stick with the ship and continue their journey towards a new home in the periphery.
For Štefánek's three kids it was all a big adventure of course. Fortunately, and unlike some of their friends, they didn't discover during the first jump of their lives that they suffered from Transit Disorientation Syndrome which made some people extremely nauseous or disorientated during interstellar travel.
The Monolith class JumpShip which had come to collect them from Cerignola was massive, able to carry nine DropShips at once, each one huge, and with tens of thousands of people loaded aboard, along with a surprisingly generous allowance of luggage and personal items it had jumped from Cerignola to Izmir, then onto Romita its last stop in Marik controlled territory, before finally jumping to Niops itself one jump further out in the so-called near periphery.
While nobody would call their parent star particularly impressive, when the Monolith had manoeuvred alongside a massive space station floating there to fast-recharge its jump-core for the next leg of the journey it certainly confirmed that Niops was not your typical periphery world. While they waited at the Niops zenith point for a few days recharging the drive for the next leg of the trip they even got to see an actual warship off in the distance, the crew loaning out a hand-held telescope to anyone wanting a better look through the portholes at what they said was the destroyer currently operating as the Niops guardship.
Those among the Cerignola migrants who knew more about military matters than most weren't actually as impressed, or surprised by the warship as they were the aerospace fighter that flew past their ship not long after they arrived, the fighter close enough to see the Red Cameron Stars on its wings and tailplane as it buzzed the Monolith.
"That's a ****** Voidseeker drone" someone Štefánek knew in passing had exclaimed in obvious shock. Štefánek didn't know them very well, they were from a couple of valleys over from where he had lived, but if he remembered right their grandfather had served in the Free Worlds Navy.
"What's that then?" Štefánek had asked curiously, wondering what the fuss was about.
"You know, a Voidseeker, a robot fighter, they used to use them as part of an SDS system along with Caspar AI warships." the man answered his query. "I've seen pictures of them in old books."
"Don't be too impressed, we didn't make them, we just salvaged some of them from an old SLDF base" one of the jumpsuited DropShip crew interjected, floating past them in microgravity presumably on the way somewhere. "It'll be a few more years before we can make things like that on Niops, but we'll get there eventually" she said confidently. "You might see one again when we make the jump to AJC, we use them to defend space stations. They don't get bored doing guard duty or flying repetitive patrols like human fighter pilots do so they're always alert and ready to throw down if someone tries to shoot up the station."
"Has that ever happened? Someone attacking your space stations I mean?" the man who had recognised the drone asked.
The woman in the jumpsuit shook her head, the movement in microgravity causing her longish hair to tumble around. "Nah, after word spread about our warships, and that pirates who wander into our corner of space inexplicably vanish, it's been really quiet in Niops territory" she replied. "If we weren't always concerned about the Succession Wars spilling out of the Inner Sphere into our laps we'd probably mothball the battle fleet, but as it is we're all warshipped-up and no-one to blow…' she said, "to bits" she added after a brief pause, grinning.
"Inexplicably vanish?" Štefánek repeated her phrase, quizzically.
"Sounds more shadowy and dramatic than 'get immediately blasted and end up dead or doing twenty-five years hard labor' don't you think?" the crewwoman joked. "We like to maintain our air of mystery in the Niops Association. Gives the conspiracy theorists out there something to talk about. Talking of which, quick warning, if you ever meet someone in the Hegemony calling themselves Kerensky they're just yanking your chain" she told them.
"But what if they call themselves Cameron?" Štefánek replied, smiling.
"Oh, that might be a real Cameron, we've got loads of them running around. I know plenty of people out there already know that Amanda Cameron wasn't an only child, saying that her parents secretly had twins, but that's misdirection" the woman announced, trying to sound sincere. "They actually had octuplets and since then they've all gone on to have at least half-a-dozen kids of their own too. It's gotten bad, you can barely walk down the street without tripping over a Cameron on Niops these days, honestly they're starting to become a pest" she said sadly.
"So you're saying that ComStar doesn't have the Cameron heir hidden on Mars?" one of the other migrants asked, playing along.
"Only the fake one we planted on them, the Cameron they have is just a doppelganger. The Primus is going to be really mad when he finds out he's only got a McKenna with some plastic surgery."
"I knew it!" someone else exclaimed resulting in considerable laughter from all sides as the Voidseeker made another final pass and then headed back towards the station.
It was also while waiting at the Niops zenith point that Štefánek got to try out a couple of unfamiliar foods for the first time, part of the resupply that was ferried over from the space station. The fonio bread from Alphard and some kind of meat from an animal called a 'Moa' was different to what he was used to eating, but they weren't bad by any means. The Moa was supposedly a recreated Terran species, not the completely alien one he had assumed, a flightless bird from New Zealand that had originally gone extinct more a thousand years ago and was now being raised for its meat on Niops VII.
Judging by the size of the drumstick he saw Štefánek concluded that the bird it came from must be as tall as a man at least and out of curiosity he asked the ship's cook how big they actually got. Being told in response that, 'one species is the size of a Battlemech', Štefánek naturally assumed that the man he had asked about it was just yanking his chain, people from Niops seemed to enjoy doing that to people from elsewhere, he had laughed and thought no more about it.
Nobody not actually from Niops was allowed to land on one of the planets in the that system, and there wasn't even a planet to land on in the oddly named 'Annie Jump Cannon', the next stop on their long journey, so it wasn't until they reached Copernicus that Václav Štefánek and the other migrants got to actually set foot on one of the worlds belonging to their new homeland. His initial impressions on arrival were that the local climate seemed better than it did on Cerignola, and as they headed down from orbit he had seen that the region around the spaceport and the town nearby called Toruń was studded with seemingly well-organized and productive farms, but Štefánek knew that if he agreed to settle on a more recently colonized world than this one he would be granted more land so he wasn't planning to stay on Copernicus very long, even if some of the other families were.
There was a good future to be made on Copernicus for anyone that decided to make a home there, although it would likely be as an employee of someone else not as your own boss. Thanks to its central location the system had been designated as the future commercial, trade and transport hub of the Niops Hegemony going forward. From there the large majority of worlds with a Red Cameron Star currently flying over them could be reached in one or two jumps, and because of that it was supposedly next on the list to get its own recharge station after Alphard did.
Unfortunately for those like Štefánek that had been farmers on Cerignola, and still wanted to be, most of the good land on Copernicus had already been claimed by people from Comstock and Francas. Those worlds were both former Terran Hegemony colonies like Niops itself so Štefánek assumed the people from there were getting preferential treatment over non-Terrans, but if you were willing to travel further afield then there was still plenty of free acreage available for budding farmers on Baccalieu and Ballalaba apparently, wherever the hell they were.
The buses waiting at the starport ferried the immigrants from Cerignola in batches to one of a trio of large transit camps nearby, each camp a collection of large tents and prefabricated buildings where they were able to shower and get something to eat in a large canteen before the bureaucracy got to work. People in uniforms hurried around answering questions as best they could and assigning everyone temporary quarters in the camp, families sharing dorm rooms together.
A few refugees from the Inner Sphere had been trickling into the Niops Association for a few years now, and while they had initially all been directed towards Alphard more recently the government had been settling them on Copernicus, building the transit camps to help smooth out the process. Having tens of thousands of people all arriving at once was new, but the people running the camp seemed to have been prepared for it and the process of dealing with them all appeared to be going smoothly as far as Štefánek could tell.
After some paperwork was completed a full medical screening came next, starting with the taking of DNA samples and then an eye-exam performed by some kind of computer-controlled machine you sat in front of before the main event.
Štefánek had expected to be prodded and probed by doctors for the main battery of tests but instead everyone was directed to a large room consisting of a number of cubicles, each one holding a disconcertingly coffin-like machine that you had to climb inside one at a time after partially undressing.
It was a medical scanner, some kind of Terran technology that Niops could still produce but was lostech most everywhere else. The thing didn't just perform CAT, MRI, GRT and VelRay scans upon you, do an ECG, monitor your blood pressure and analyses the chemicals in your breath it also painlessly took a blood sample all while playing soothing music.
If you were scared of such procedures, or machines generally, it would also surreptitiously tranq you with a mild anesthetic if it noticed your heartrate climbing too fast, though only after it determined you weren't allergic to the drug being used.
Anybody that refused to be scanned was told that the only alternatives were to be put back on a ship heading for the Free Worlds League or to be examined by human doctors instead.
Nobody chose to go back to the League, while those who chose to be medically examined by a human instead soon learned that the third generation Eligus Medical Diagnoser likely had a much better bedside manner than the grumpy military doctor concerned.
For one thing her own blood samples were not drawn painlessly and there were no happy drugs involved.
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===New settlers receive second chance at new life===
While it was medical technicians who actually operated the machines the results of the tests were sent to other doctors for review, that part of the entire operation taking rather longer so it was a couple of hours later when Václav Štefánek and his wife Anjali were summoned to an office to discuss the findings while their kids played.
Sat at a desk looking at a computer screen a doctor in a pristine labcoat stood up when they entered. "Mr and Mrs Stepanek?" he asked, butchering the pronunciation.
"Yes"
"Please take a seat" the doctor said, sitting back down himself as they did on the chairs provided. "I've gone through the results of your tests and can confirm that both of you are perfectly healthy, as are your two eldest children, but I'm afraid that I have to inform you that your youngest daughter, Diya, has a serious medical condition related to her kidneys and unfortunately it has progressed too far at this point to reverse or mitigate it effectively with drug treatment" he said in a manner that appeared far too relaxed given the gravity of what he was telling them.
"How serious a condition?" Štefánek asked as his wife stared at the doctor in horror.
The doctor leaned forward in his chair. "Potentially life threatening if we don't do something about it" he replied. "If it had been caught earlier we could have probably fixed it with gene therapy, but at this stage she'll certainly need a transplant. As yet she's still asymptomatic, but that won't last and when her health starts to deteriorate it'll do so fast."
Štefánek blinked as his wife gasped. "If she needs a kidney transplant you can take one of mine" he told the doctor immediately.
"Or mine if he's not compatible and I am" his wife Anjali added quickly.
The doctor looked from one of them to the other then inexplicably chuckled. "This isn't the Dark Ages" he responded. "At least not here anyway. We'll clone her two brand new kidneys from her own cells, transplant one when its ready and if everything goes smoothly transplant the second a few months later once she's recovered from the first operation" he told them. "I read on your file that you were planning on going on to Baccalieu or Ballalaba to start a farm, but I'm afraid she'll have to stay on Copernicus for this particular treatment. The medical services on the newer colonies aren't up to full Hegemony standard yet, it hasn't been all that long since we even got them here to be honest. As late as last year we had to send patients with the most serious conditions to Alphard or Comstock for treatment."
Štefánek stared at the man nonplussed. "So, you're saying she'll be okay and we don't even have to donate a kidney ourselves?" he asked.
"Your daughter will be perfectly fine" the doctor reassured him. "By cloning her own organs for the replacements the chances of tissue rejection are practically zero" he told the couple. "I'd even go so far as to call it a routine procedure except for the fact that, like I said before, we would normally deal with this particular problem using gene-therapy well before it got to this stage" he continued before frowning. "Routine medical screening really should have caught this before now. I'm assuming that your doctor back home never said anything?"
"We didn't really have 'routine medical screening' back on Cerignola, certainly no fancy new machines like you have here" Štefánek replied.
"Those fancy 'new' machines were invented about two hundred years ago but okay" the doctor replied, shaking his head sadly. "We've sent out the blueprints for them to everyone so they can make their own too if they want, but being cynical about it they might be too busy making devices to kill each other with instead" he said wryly.
That was probably all too true, Štefánek decided. The forever war between the Great Houses had been raging since his grandfather was a boy. "How much will this cost?" he asked seriously. "I have some money saved, we can sell some things and I guess I can borrow some as well."
The doctor smiled. "It'll cost you about a third of your income for the rest of your life" he replied, clearly amused by the question. "Healthcare here is provided by the state, paid for via taxation. That is of course assuming that you plan to take up Hegemony citizenship, if not then you will have to pay I'm sorry to tell you. Guest workers and their dependents are only entitled to emergency care, not cloned organ replacement or elective surgical procedures. It stops health tourism by people coming here trying to get a new heart, for example, without paying for it and then heading straight back to the Magistracy or wherever afterwards."
"I already intended to become a citizen" Štefánek told the doctor truthfully. Admittedly that was because he had been told by a crewman on the DropShip that only Hegemony citizens were allowed to own land there, but now he had a really good reason to do so. That kind of high-tech medical care must cost a fortune.
"Good for you" the doctor replied, smiling once again. "I'll refer your daughter's case to my colleagues at the hospital in town, they'll get in contact and arrange everything. In the meantime I'll also notify the administration team that you'll need to stay here on Copernicus until after your girl completes her course of treatment. That'll stop them shoving you all on the next Dropship to Baccalieu to get rid of you before the JumpShip from Melk brings in the next batch of immigrants."
"We won't have to stay here at the camp until she's treated will we?" Štefánek asked. It wasn't a bad place to be for a few days, or maybe a couple of weeks, but you wouldn't want to be there for much longer. For one thing he and his wife had to share a room with the kids.
The doctor shook his head. "Nah, they'll find you a place in town and maybe help find you a job too, plenty of work around. You might find yourself helping to dig sewers or build roads for the government though if you're not planning to settle on Copernicus permanently. Most employers on Copernicus these days want their workers to sign a contract saying they stick around at least a couple of years, there was a problem with people not turning up for their shifts because they'd suddenly decided to go join the Galileo gemstone rush."
"Gemstone rush?" Anjali queried.
"Diamonds and fire-opals" the doctor explained. "Fool's errand really, the mining companies have already claimed all the best potential places to dig" he told them. "Most people heading to Galileo and buying some land to try and make their fortune would be better off planting crops there than digging for shiny rocks on it."
Štefánek nodded. "Hard work is more reliable than pinning your hopes on being lucky" he agreed.
The doctor pursed his lips. "Here's a piece of advice since you plan on getting some land for a farm" he said. "At the moment anyone not wanting to settle on Copernicus or Alphard is being directed towards Baccalieu or Ballalaba. Now don't get me wrong, neither of them are bad places to live, they're almost certainly nicer than where you came from at least, but in about six months or so there's going to be opportunities for people to emigrate to Islington instead and if I wanted to be a farmer that's where I'd go. From what I've heard it's a future breadbasket world, great climate, rich soil and the people already living there are happier to allow large-scale immigration than they are on Stafford."
"Someone on the JumpShip mentioned Stafford being very nice" Anjali remarked.
"It is, all green and verdant with a pleasant climate" the doctor confirmed. "I actually spent a little time there myself working with the flying doctor's service. We visited patients in remote towns that couldn't make it to the capital for treatment, basically tearing around the sky in a big VTOL with an operating stuck theatre in the back" he continued, grinning. "Their planetary government recently passed a law restricting how much land anyone not born on Stafford could own, and since that's a domestic political decision Niops isn't complaining about it. It's not like we let people from Stafford come to live on Niops so it would be hypocritical of us to try and get them to be a little more accepting of immigrants than they currently are" he said. "Regarding your daughter, I can give her the bad news myself or if you prefer you can do so. The hospital will be able to explain to her exactly what it is they'll be doing when the time comes using age-appropriate terms and language."
"We'll tell her" Anjali replied. "Just to be absolutely clear, she's not in any danger?" she checked.
"Well, there's a risk involved in any medical procedure, but honestly her journey getting here in the first place would have likely been statistically more dangerous than the transplants will be" the doctor replied. "To not have the surgery would be orders of magnitude riskier" he continued before looking at the screen on his computer. "Now if you'll excuse me it looks like I need to talk to an elderly gentleman that needs a new liver. That's always fun, I love threatening people that if they don't cut down on the booze we won't clone them a new liver. You know what they say, cirrhosis is the Almighty's way of telling you to quit drinking."
"What do you do when people don't take the hint?"
"First replacement liver is free, after that you're on your own. God helps those that helps themselves and so does the Niops Hegemony Health Service." the doctor replied. "Nice to have met you both, though I wish it could have been under better circumstances without the bad news" he said, standing up, Štefánek and his wife doing likewise.
"The news could have been much much worse" Štefánek replied, shaking the doctor's hand before heading towards the door to leave.
"Oh, and while your eyesight isn't too bad at the moment you both might need laser eye surgery in a few years. It's not a big deal but it will mean getting a replacement identity card and have your government file updated at that time because the retina scan won't exactly match afterwards."
"Identity card?"
"You'll see, we've all got one, make sure not to lose it. In a few years it'll be difficult to do anything without one. At the moment you just need one to vote, obtain healthcare, access government buildings and such but, if the bureaucracy has its way, you'll eventually need one to buy bread" the doctor joked. "Technocratic government at its finest. Coming from the Free Worlds League you might find our way of doing things a little more organized than you're used to."
Given that the government structure of the Free Worlds League had been described as chaos, disagreement and bickering moderated by assassination that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, Štefánek decided. There was a vast gulf to be found between the way things were done back home and an outright police state like the Capellan Confederation, something which became clear the next day when they started citizenship lessons with a lecture on how things were done in the Niops Hegemony.
Predictably the 'Niops Association Hegemony' modeled itself on the Terran Hegemony, which was certainly a better decision than copying the old Terran Alliance would have been. Niops itself took the role of Terra in this arrangement, clearly 'first among equals' but within a federal structure where the other member worlds largely controlled their own domestic affairs.
Defence and interstellar trade policy was controlled from Niops, they were after all the ones supplying the JumpShips and the military might, as well as the technological wizardry, so that seemed reasonable enough, but as long as the local governments of the member worlds didn't implement laws Niops deemed entirely unacceptable on moral or security grounds they largely ruled themselves.
Niops expected the colonies within the Hegemony to follow Star League legal precedents and cultural norms regarding things like universal suffrage, they were for it, equality of the sexes, also for it, freedom of and from religion, again for it, freedom of the press, ditto, and slavery/serfdom, being very much against it. They expected town mayors and planetary governments to be voted in via free and fair elections and they insisted on observers from other member worlds being present during those elections to make sure they weren't being rigged.
Fortunately for the immigrants from Cerignola the Free Worlds League wasn't a totalitarian police-state ruled imperiously from on-high like the Capellan Confederation so this all didn't seem particularly outlandish a notion to them. Whatever criticisms you might make of the government on Atreus it was at least still partially accountable to the people via parliament, and a certain amount of power had always been devolved downwards to regional or planetary governments.
If Stafford, for example, wanted to restrict the number of people going there and buying up land that was their choice. They had elected a government which ran on that platform and Niops wasn't going to try and force them to absorb a bunch of refugees against their wishes.
Try and introduce something like the Servitor system with restricted citizenship such as existed in the Capellan Confederation however and Niops would go berserk. If you lived in the Hegemony a while you found that it was generally held as a truism among the colonial populations that the technocratic nerds running the Niops Association from their closed hermit republic were culturally more than a little weird, just mention astrology in front of them and you'd see first-hand, but they were generally nice and well-meaning nonetheless. Just don't make them angry, you wouldn't like Niops when it was angry.
They were also very security conscious. The restrictions on who could work in a factory making defense related materials or join the local militia was pretty extreme. If both your parents and at least three of four grandparents weren't born on a Hegemony world you weren't ever going to be allowed to do certain jobs or enter certain locations and your identity card made sure of it.
Your identity card didn't just have your name and photograph on there, it also had your retina scan encoded upon it, along with your fingerprints and a unique section of your DNA code any of which might be needed into get into a certain building.
While Štefánek was still living on Copernicus with his family waiting for his daughter's operation the local authorities caught someone from SAFE trying to access a militia base there which made the news when he was deported.
The woman from ComStar's ROM that was apprehended on Alphard not long after he moved to Islington was a bigger story though, people didn't rate SAFE highly enough to think catching one of them was all that impressive.
The land Václav Štefánek and his family were given on Islington to farm was all he could have hoped for and more. Good fertile land with rich dark soil that could support most any crop and the warm, wet temperate climate of Islington meant you didn't even need any of those fancy water-purifiers to feed irrigation systems.
Not that people he knew from back on Cerignola were doing badly on Baccalieu or Ballalaba. Thanks to NHCOMNET he could stay in touch with them and Diya stayed HPG-pals with a girl she had met while on Copernicus.
That ROM spy had deserved to get caught, ComStar had clearly been overcharging people for sending HPG messages for years Štefánek had decided, watching the news on the families new holovid projector imported straight from the factory on Alphard. He had to borrow some money to pay for it but the interest rate the bank charged wasn't too high and the kids had missed the shows they used to watch on Copernicus.
Anjali liked the documentary channel, particularly the nature shows which was why one was playing when her husband came downstairs after taking a shower, ploughing fields all day was hot work even with the new tractor.
Štefánek stared at the image. "What the hell is that?" he asked.
"It's called a Thunderbird, they're native to a planet called Folly out near Frobisher." Anjali replied.
"Is that a Battlemech wearing a park ranger hat?"
"Yeah, I think they just made one that size for fun" Anjali replied. "Thunderbirds are ten meters tall, they herd them using assault Battlemechs."
"For real?" Štefánek asked his wife seriously.
"Yeah. What's wrong with you?"
Václav Štefánek frowned. "I'm wondering if the Cameron octuplets weren't just a joke." he said confusingly, his mental state not being helped by the fact that the documentary was now showing footage of feathery pink mammoths performing a mating dance.
"Please don't go crazy on me, Václav, Diya's new kidneys were one thing, but I don't think they can grow you a replacement brain" Anjali Štefánek told her husband, wondering if he had been outside in fields too long without a hat to keep off the sun.
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==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : In canon very large numbers of people fled the Inner Sphere to come live in the Marian Hegemony because of the Succession Wars, this despite the knowledge that many of them would end up joining the plebian class (or even potentially ending up slaves). Given that the Niops Hegemony is both freer and has better prospects they should have little trouble attracting people to go live there (although some of the member worlds might still want local restrictions).The Free Worlds League is a melting pot of cultures, Václav Štefánek is of Czech descent, his wife Anjali Indian, they lived on Cerignola which was about to fall off the maps and is only a couple of jumps from Niops.Suetonius (here called Copernicus) had the second highest population of any world in the Marian Hegemony so it must be quite habitable (the Roman cosplayers didn't have any fancy Terraforming gear) and it was a trade hub with some industry based there.Islington, like Stafford, was a breadbasket world of the Marian Hegemony. I'm running with the notion that worlds with non-Roman names had a reasonable number of people already living on them when Imperator Johann O'Reilly turned up with his mercenaries and a whole heap of germanium in the 2930s.
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