Etheirian Ascendancy

[dumbluck]

Author's note: due to a boneheaded action on my part, the savegame for this story was lost. Infancy's First Steps has been heavily edited to reflect the "new" first ten turns.

Infancy's First Steps (2401.0)

Yet another Colran Ibar left dry dock today. She'll shake down this month, and then be on her way. I can't say that I agree with Command's decision to focus on a rapid exo-system colonization push with minimal defensive constructions, but it's not my call to make. Despite this plan, however, one of the first places we went was Egoria VII; there were some structures there that seemed worthy of research. And indeed, we discovered some strange lotion from a long-forgotten race. What it could be good for, however, I don't know.

The new colony, which we named Erosion for the high amounts of wind erosion that take place there, has produced some warehousing facilities. Oddly enough, we seem to be running a surplus at the moment, so we'll tuck that away for future use. Eight colony ships have been built now. It's hard to believe that a year has already come and gone! We've had so many problems with the spaceyard we'd managed to piece together it's almost embarrassing at times. And colonist recruitment has been.... less than satisfactory. There is an apparent lack of enthusiasm in starting all over again, AGAIN. I can't say that I blame them, we only just managed to get New Haven turned into a viable home a year ago, and they're being asked to go off and struggle through it all over again?

Luckily, we've still not contacted any of the Traitors. We have yet to be able to fend off a concerted offensive; in fact, we barely have a military navy to speak. All of two measly missile corvettes are all that stand between the Traitors and New Haven. I'd just as soon avoid a Traitor's attention until we can make a better showing than that. But it will likely be some time in the not so near future before we focus our construction efforts more on ships of the line, and with our deep space colonizers now out beyond the Egorian system... We've been lucky so far; let's hope that our luck continues to hold out. But I, at least, am beginning to wonder about how we've been so lucky. Or more specifically, WHY. It's been almost 25 years now since we've had any contact with the Traitors at all. We haven't seen so much as a static filled radio intercept, much less an actual vessel. That implies that either we aren't listening on the right wavelengths, or our “friends” are VERY far away from us. But ... how could that be?

Now comes the arduous task of colonizing some of the planets that the deep space colonizers have passed by. Hopefully, continued colonization efforts will alleviate some of the overcrowding that New Haven has been suffering from. I just wish that more people would sign up for the colonization missions. We are beginning to exceed New Haven's sustainable housing levels; we NEED to move more of these people off-world! We're producing enough food to feed an army, but we just don't have the space to house that army. In fact, we're producing such an abundance of ALL of the resources that we just can't use them all! We're building warehousing facilities on Erosion, but it just doesn't seem like it will be enough. And additional research facilities need to be built off-world, as well. Our research labs here on New Haven are barely adequate. We need to augment them, and soon. At least we don't have to worry about FUNDING all these projects at the moment!