Thanks to little tectonic activity of its own but a lot of early asteroid-battering that had produced lava outflows covering large parts of the world, it had been a fairly smooth little globe to start with. The Werpesh had decided to improve — as they saw it — upon this promising start, and used planiforming techniques to turn Eshri into one of their Sculpt worlds; a flat-surfaced planet of polished rock with a network of encircling trenches — steep sided, kilometres deep and tens of kilometres wide — incised into and right around it. From space the planet looked like a colossal ball-bearing etched with ball-races for thousands of smaller spheres.
Scholars of the Werpesh and their works reckoned Eshri was the most extreme of all the Sculpt worlds; on no other had the ground been so thoroughly levelled, the remaining atmosphere so assiduously removed, the canyon-trenches etched so deep or so wide or attained such a bewildering complexity.
Like all the few dozen or so Sculpt worlds, there had been no utility to the project. As far as could be discerned — the Werpesh had been a reticent species, unable or unwilling to explain themselves to the extent that other, more nosy species thought they ought — the Sculpt worlds were basically a series of titanic works of art.
That they also functioned as highly visible expressions of sheer power and a certain willingness to ignore galactic etiquette (most species/civs had long since agreed to leave “wild” worlds like Eshri untouched), well, that was probably just an added bonus. Nevertheless, although the Werpesh had not been a particularly aggressive or expansive people, it would be fair to say that their contemporaries had been less than heartbroken when they’d opted for Subliming and stopped building such impressive vulgarities as the Girdlecity of Xown and the Sculpt planets.
The Gzilt, by luck and the good grace of at least one Elder species in nominal control of the Werpesh legacy, had fallen heir to most of the Sublimed species’ abandoned systems in their immediate vicinity, and had quickly and enthusiastically got on with the business of — for example — colonising and rebuilding on and within Xown’s great Girdlecity. They were less sure what to do with the brace of Sculpt worlds they had inherited; neglected if never quite abandoned, these had by default become no more than occasional if rather one-trick tourist stopover sites.
Then the Socialist-Republican People’s Liberation Regiment #14 — which was all and none of the adjectives in its name — had chosen to make Eshri its home. Or at least the home of its home.
Fzan-Juym had been the Regiment’s headquarters for nearly a millennium by then. Roughly spherical and a couple of kilometres in diameter, the satellite had started out life as an asteroid of the Izenion system; just another tumbling rock amongst tens of millions of others. Initially, after being hollowed out to become the regimental HQ, it had been left in a close-to-original orbit within the Izenion system’s inner asteroid belt, theoretically gaining from being just one of a bewildering array of potential targets, should anyone ever be foolish enough to wish it harm. Later, with improvements in weapon and sensor technology, the natural camouflage effect of being part of a mass of other asteroids had been negated. Happily, the likelihood of any realistic threat had receded at the same time, so the placement of the regiment’s HQ became more about statement — prestige, even — than about operational survivability.
So Fzan-Juym had been appropriately refitted, refurbished and improved, towed to Eshri, slung into a low orbit around it and then carefully lowered still further — kilometre by kilometre, metre by metre, eventually millimetre by millimetre, speeding up all the time — until its orbit now lay a kilometre beneath the planet’s surface, darting along one of the widest and deepest canyons of all in a blur of planet-girdling movement, its course held steady by a network of hermetically isolated AIs and multiply redundant thruster systems dedicated to doing nothing else.
Its own engines had done almost all the work at every stage, though various other craft had helped and been there to step in had anything started to go wrong, but a modest degree of seeming helplessness was deemed to be useful in providing a sort of camouflage of its own.
Fzan-Juym, headquarters of the Socialist-Republican People’s Liberation Regiment #14, had been in sub-surface equatorial orbit of Eshri ever since, zipping along like a super-fast bullet in a slab-sided groove open to the pitch-black sky, orbiting the planet in less than an hour and covering over two hundred million kilometres every year — nearly half a trillion altogether by now — while never coming closer than fifteen hundred metres to either the flat canyon floor or its sheer, polished sides.
You approached Fzan-Juym carefully, from astern. Approaching it any other way meant its hair-trigger defensive systems would blow you out of the sky. Coming in from astern meant that even if you collided with it, approaching too fast, the extra impetus would, in theory, merely boost its orbit a fraction, sending it higher, away from danger. It also meant that as well as the arrays, batteries and multiple turrets of emission, kinetic and missile weapon system sites pointing at you, you got to contemplate the impressive collection of variegated main drive units and crater-wide thruster nozzles pointing straight at you, each of them guaranteed to be usefully and reliably — and terminally — weapon-like in their effect should they be turned on even for a microsecond while you approached.
The principal hangar entrance lay nestled in the centre of a quartet of main drive units; the transfer pinnace slipped towards it, shadows wheeling about it as it gently outpaced the asteroid, approaching at about humanoid running speed, a little faster than was normally allowed. The little twelve-seat vessel disappeared, pitching nose-down for a moment and trembling as it encountered the asteroid’s own internal gravity field.
The view behind cut off as a field and then a real, physical door blocked the view of the deep, sunlit trench whipping past outside, and lights came on in the hangar as the pinnace settled to the floor. Somewhere, a system would be compensating for the small amount of downward impetus caused by the tiny craft transferring its weight to the hangar deck.
Commissar-Colonel Etalde looked at Vyr Cossont and smiled. “Home at last!” he said, possibly a little too heartily.
Cossont just smiled.
They had crossed the few decades from Xown in the Mureite system to Eshri in Izenion within the 5*Gelish-Oplule, a regimental cruiser about as fast as anything the fleet possessed. Tired, and with nothing seemingly expected of her after they’d transferred to the ship above Xown, she’d slept aboard in a cabin of a size significantly above that her reactivated rank would normally have called for and wondered if she had the bulk of the elevenstring to thank for this; they’d quartered it with her.
She’d risen, done a little practice — it had been unsatisfactory, thanks to a deep background hum the ship was making which interfered with some of the internal resonating strings — and thought she’d have time to breakfast with the crew and maybe try to get more out of Etalde regarding what was going on, even if it was just gossip, when they’d arrived, and Etalde was there at her cabin door offering to carry the elevenstring to the cruiser’s hangar and the waiting pinnace.
“No food?” Pyan yelped. She’d just let it fasten itself round her neck. It tended to nibble at whatever Cossont ate and breakfast was its favourite meal.
Etalde frowned at the creature. “That thing is security-cleared, isn’t it?”
“Sadly,” Cossont said. “We’re there?” she asked. “Already?” She stared at Etalde’s plump, gleaming face. “Sir?” she added. She hadn’t even had time to be issued with a proper uniform; all she had was her civilian trews and frankly inappropriate jacket. Luckily the avatar, when worn as a cape usually, covered the more garishly offensive parts of the logo.