THE BARTDON PAPERS - "Cancel all previous directives."

[roboslacker]

Sidke is certainly a kerbal after Barton's own heart.

[Thedrelle]

Bartdon will go stir crazy before the first day is out.

[Newtie]

Glad to see these still going! This is my favorite reading by far

[HamnavoePer]

On 12/11/2018 at 11:24 PM, UnusualAttitude said:

submitted you to a brutal interrogation and killed you, Bartdon

O.o

 

On 12/11/2018 at 11:24 PM, UnusualAttitude said:

Despite this, you deserve some answers, so I have taken the risk of writing to you. Don't be offended if the gentlekerb who handed you this letter personally didn't stop to chat. He is putting himself at risk too by delivering my mail.

Uhmmmmmm. o.O

On 12/11/2018 at 11:24 PM, UnusualAttitude said:

I'm sorry but I had to send you to the most remote place I could think of.

 

Hol' Up, is that Ascension Island?

 

On 12/11/2018 at 11:24 PM, UnusualAttitude said:

PS: I had a set of clubs left in that basement. At least you will be able to practice your swing.

XD 

[UnusualAttitude]

On 12/12/2018 at 12:36 AM, roboslacker said:

Sidke is certainly a kerbal after Barton's own heart.

 

On 12/12/2018 at 6:55 PM, Thedrelle said:

Bartdon will go stir crazy before the first day is out.

A set of golf clubs is like giving bubble wrap to Bartdon. It should keep him occupied for quite some time...

On 12/12/2018 at 8:17 PM, Newtie said:

Glad to see these still going! This is my favorite reading by far

Awww, thanks! It's cool to see you're still around after all these, uhm.. years. 

6 hours ago, HamnavoePer said:

O.o

 After all that they've done, did you expect anything less of the Board...?

6 hours ago, HamnavoePer said:

Hol' Up, is that Ascension Island?

Nearly. It's Saint Helena. Interestingly, this is where the English imprisoned Napoléon Bonaparte following the defeat of Waterloo until his death in 1821.

Spoiler

Let's hope that someone comes to pick him up sooner rather than later.

[UnusualAttitude]

YEAR 15, DAY 339. THE ANDES.

High above the summits Labrihe flew, a lonely speck lost in a sea of deep azure that not even the most majestic peaks of the chain could reach. The gossamer wings of the slender aircraft carried her effortlessly above the turbulence that swirled between the mountaintops, tiny propellers pushing her ever northwards on the power of the sun alone with a gentle hum.

If flown skilfully, Labrihe could remain aloft for days on end. She rode the updrafts that flowed around the mountain chain and charged her batteries during daylight hours, then retreated towards the pampas to the East when night fell and she gradually drifted to lower altitudes. Come dawn, she could repeat the cycle.

Labrihe soared above and beyond the mundane concepts of scarcity, commodity, and supply-and-demand. Running on empty, she could cross oceans and continents as long as the sun continued to rise in the morning. And yet even she had her limits: in the end, she could endure no longer than her crew could keep her in the air.

Lisabeth rubbed her tired eyes and took in the stunning landscape once more. To her right, the jagged crests of the eastern cordillera rose like a string of ancient, crumbling ramparts. Beyond lay a sweeping wilderness of foothills and mosslands that stretched all the way to the horizon. To her left, another wall of mountains and the more gentle coastal terrain that bordered the Pacific Ocean. From fifty thousand feet, its waters were clearly visible in the distance.

The land drifting past below Labrihe was a wasteland of frozen plateaus and deep rift valleys that plunged thousands of metres into the surrounding terrain. League after rugged league without a single trace of civilisation.

They had left Lake Barreales that morning and in a hurry. Lisabeth had cursed herself for her lack of foresight: she should have seen this coming. News of the lunar station's hijacking had spread like wildfire and reached even their remote settlement in a matter of hours. In such circumstances, a security crack down could hardly be considered unexpected.

With just a bit more warning, it could have been entirely without consequence. After more than two years of keeping her head low, she knew all the tricks to avoid their patrols and identity checks. Besides, it had looked more like a simple show of force, just to make sure that the local population wasn't getting any ideas about the Company's ability to have its way.

The security team's convoy had reached Barreales just after dawn. One of the vehicles peeled off to position itself at the top of the rise overlooking the north shore, probably looking for anyone trying to escape the settlement unnoticed. As fate would have it, Lisabeth and Raylo had already left to prepare Labrihe for that day's test flight. Unfortunately, the solar aircraft's hangar and landing strip were both clearly visible from the team's vantage point.

As Lisabeth was busy starting Labrihe's engines, Raylo emerged from the hangar and spotted the Buffalo charging across the mossland towards them. Momentarily forgetting the monumental events taking place far away in space, a single thought crossed his mind.

They've found her.

He panicked. Shouting at her to take off over the whine of the electric motors, he threw himself at the ladder and hauled himself into the back seat.

“Go! Go! Go...!” he yelled over Lisabeth's confused protests. “They're coming, take off!”

And so they had made their overly dramatic escape from Lake Barreales, fleeing from a security team that almost certainly had not been looking for Lisabeth in the first place, leaving the puzzled hired thugs to pore over the sack full of food and water bottles that Raylo had dropped in his scramble to board the aircraft.

He'd been muttering apologies every five minutes ever since. Nevertheless his mistake was irrevocable. Labrihe might be capable of flying on forever, but they faced the prospect of dehydration within the next forty-eight hours if they did not land somewhere.

For lack of a better idea, they had set a course northwards.

They buzzed the neighbouring settlements of Llancanelo and Nihuil and discovered the same state of affairs. Lines of standard issue Buffalo rovers snaked across the plains towards the homesteads or blockaded the cave entrances. The team back at Barreales would have had the chance to report, and everyone would be on the lookout for their little aircraft. If they landed anywhere near a town between the mountains and the pampas, they would be intercepted and taken into custody on the spot.

At noon, they turned towards the cordillera, aiming to gain altitude and top up the batteries before sunset. Lisabeth and Raylo took turns flying and napping, realising that a long night lay ahead. During the brief spells that they were both awake, they bickered over what to do.

Raylo wanted them to keep searching for a settlement where they could resupply in the lowlands. He suggested that they put down at a safe distance, and he would go in on foot himself, leaving Lisabeth to guard the aircraft. She could always take off again if she had to avoid another security team.

“Nice try, hon,” she said. “But you're not getting rid of me that easily. D'you really think they will invite you in for tea if you swagger out of no-where on foot during a security raid? You might as well hold a big sign reading 'arrest me now'. And besides, if I have to take off, how do I ever find you again...?”

“D'you have a better idea?”

“Yeah, I do. We stick to the mountains until sundown. There must be someone up here somewhere, and even the Company won't make it this far for a few days at least, if they bother at all. The more isolated, the better...”

“And you're gonna land this ship on a mountaintop, Lis?”

“Sure. D'you remember who I am, Ray...?”

He said nothing, but she could almost hear him smiling behind her back.

Night fell, and they turned Labrihe eastwards towards the plains. They had agreed to take turns, but she let him sleep. He looked so sweet when she turned to watch him, head pressed up against the side of the canopy with his mouth open, breathing slowly and peacefully. Poor Raylo. She knew he was feeling guilty for screwing up and getting them both into trouble. All because he'd tried to protect her.

They'd known each other for a couple of months. Raylo had arrived in Barreales with Labrihe and a couple of technicians for a test campaign in the southern hemisphere summer where the long days and tall mountains were ideal for flying on sunlight. It was as if he'd answered her prayers. After two years of rattling around the tiny outpost with not much to do and nothing to fly, he'd turned up with a job offer for additional local pilots to try out his aircraft.

Against the advice of the old airship maintenance technician that Sidke had assigned to shelter and protect her, she'd signed on immediately. She'd had enough of lurking in the shadows.

Despite being both a talented pilot and a diligent engineer, Raylo was also an idealist who romped through any obstacles that happened to get between him and his goal with joyful abandon. Improbably, he'd managed to secure substantial funding for the development of an aircraft that required only free, renewable energy from a company who's main activity consisted in selling hydrocarbons. Go figure.

Deep down, he probably knew that solar aviation was a pipe dream. His team had pushed the limits of solar panel efficiency, battery density, airframe design, and still Labrihe could only carry a token payload. A drone version of his craft might have its uses for scientific research or as a local communications relay, but it would never upset the balance of things.

Despite this, he remained determined to demonstrate that his design was capable of almost unlimited endurance. This explained the need for a second pilot. All Lisabeth had to do was make sure that the second pilot was her.

“Can you fly?” he'd asked at the start of the first interview.

“Can you sit on a stool and eat fish paste?” she'd replied.

The ultimate goal was, of course, non-stop circumnavigation with zero fuel, he had confided once she'd proved herself to be far more capable than any of the other candidates. And because she admired his idealism and felt that she could trust him, she'd told him who she really was and why it would be impossible for her to take part in such an attention-grabbing event.

“If we do it, the Company will be waiting to arrest me the minute we land, y'see...?”

Raylo had shrugged and kept her on the roster, regardless. And he hadn't betrayed her. That was when Lisabeth began to suspect that his interest in her was more than merely professional. The thing was that, well... she kinda liked him, too.

No, it was more than that.

His enthusiasm and optimism were refreshing. His scruffy appearance and cheeky smile were disarming. She found that she could relax in his presence, a luxury she had never felt possible with anyone else during her long and dangerous mission to Mars, or during the time she had spent as a fugitive.

But most of all, she loved his dogged determination and single-mindedness. He was incapable of calling it a day until the problem at hand was solved. He would get that damned solar aircraft to fly around planet Earth at least once, or die trying. And once it was done he would move on to the next challenge. In this, at least, Raylo reminded her of someone else...

She looked out at the gibbous moon that was rising above the plains to the Northeast. Don't go there, Lis... Don't even think about him... Don't...

Well, screw it. This has gone on long enough. Let's go there. Let's think this through.

Yeah, OK, in some respects she thought that he reminded her of Camwise, but it had been such a long time that she couldn't even be sure of that anymore. Ten endless years had crawled by since they had last been in the same room together. Since they had last breathed the same air. Since she had last felt his touch...

She had known him for a cosmic blink of the eye, and yet life had somehow tricked her into thinking that those few days had been both the beginning and the end of everything.

She remembered the months of flings and superficial relationships that followed his departure to Mars. How desperately lonely she had felt when they'd lost contact with the first Martian mission. The joy at learning that he was alive followed by the gnawing guilt when she'd finally decided to get on with her life and career, join Bartdon's crew and leave Camwise to a cold exile in Antarctica... even though she had been powerless to do anything about his situation.

Most of all, she remembered standing on the surface of Phobos and looking up at the breathtaking sight of a planet that was not her homeworld dominating the sky. Within their reach. What a beautiful moment for kerbalkind as a whole. But the realisation that her Camwise had stood almost on that same remote spot a few years before and had perhaps experienced the very same emotions had hit her with the full force of a sledgehammer.

He was one of a handful of Kerbals in existence who could claim to know what the loneliness of a spacefarer was like. A true soul-mate. And she hadn't even had the nerve to go say goodbye, or say that she was sorry for what had happened. Or, rather, what hadn't happened between them. How pathetic was that?

Camwise, wherever he was now, must surely be sure that she had died when Quissac had come down. Due to no fault of her own, she couldn't travel to seek him out and she had no way of contacting him. Their paths had been separated by a chasm of tragedy that neither could hope to bridge. This was the hand that fate had dealt them, and it was time to accept it at last.

Embrace it, even.

She turned to look at the sleeping form of Raylo once more. Never give up, huh..? Maybe, but sometimes you had to just let go...

“Raylo, we need to talk,” she murmured to herself.

 

YEAR 15, DAY 340. THE ANDES.

She awoke with a start just before noon. They had returned to the cordillera. Her lips were cracked from thirst after twenty-four hours without water, and her head throbbed. The cockpit was stuffy and the sunlight that blazed through Labrihe's canopy was almost unbearable.

Raylo filled her in. They had ended the night at five thousand metres above the pampa and he had set a course back towards the mountains, trusting her intuition of finding somewhere to resupply there. So far, nothing.

“What's on the radio?” she croaked.

“Nothing that will surprise you,” said Raylo. “A general crack down is in force until further notice. A couple of settlements in the region attempted to start a mutiny. It didn't end well... Oh, and we lost satellite navigation a couple of hours ago. The Company pulled the plug. We're currently flying by dead reckoning.”

His mention of satellites made something click into place. A piece of her former life rose from the depths of her memory.

“Look, hon. I have an idea. Gimme our last known position will you...?” she said.

“OK. This had better be good...”

However, when she shared her plan with him, he gave a thick rasp of exasperation.

“Atacama? You're kidding me! We're dying of thirst and you want us to land in the driest place on Earth..?!”

“Trust me. There's an observatory there. Radio telescopes. It's at high altitude, so nothing can fly in. Even if the Company sends a security team, it will take them days to reach it overland.”

“Nothing can fly in, huh?” Raylo snorted.

“Except us, hon.”

Raylo was still concerned because Atacama was technically on Trans Pacific's turf. Lisabeth knew, however, that the observatory there was a trans-company venture and that the entire staff consisted of scientists. In a sense, it was even more isolated than some of the polar bases. There was no need for a security team up there: if you lived and worked at Atacama, you weren't going anywhere else in a hurry. It was their best shot by far.

She pulled out the map and began to make hurried calculations. They could make it well before nightfall if they corrected their course immediately.

“The heading is three-five-oh, Ray.”

Raylo adjusted the autopilot, muttering darkly to himself.

***

Atacama turned out to be unlike anywhere she had ever seen: a barren strip of dirt and desolation that nestled in a large basin between the coastal range and the rest of the cordillera.

The surrounding mountains acted as a rain shadow, and it was said that some corners of the desert had not seen precipitation in living memory. From high altitude, judging solely from the drab shades of brown, grey and beige that carpeted the depression, she could tell that it was a harsh place. For a moment, she even began to have second thoughts about landing.

Then she spotted the observatory in the very heart of the depression, lying in the centre of a wide salt plain. She could make out a small group of buildings and a sprawling field of antennas beyond. The surrounding terrain was completely flat: they could not have hoped for a better place to land.

She made a first low pass above the research centre, praying that she would not glimpse the tell-tale sign of a rover convoy surrounding the complex.

The coast was clear.

The large dishes flashed past Labrihe's starboard wingtip. Lisabeth pulled, and with a deft kick on the rudder she banked the slender craft into a wide loop that would bring them round to the opposite side of the observatory.

With flaps and gear deployed, Labrihe felt unusually sluggish in the thin air, more than fifteen thousand feet above sea-level. She set a shallow glideslope and, watching the dishes that were now to port with hawkish vigilance, she put the solar aircraft down gently just beyond the last antenna. Silky-smooth.

“Watch your twelve o'clock!” hissed Raylo from the back seat.

Lisabeth's eyes snapped forward as she stamped on the brakes reflexively. She had been so focused on clearing the antenna dishes to her left that she had failed to notice the obstacle that lay dead ahead.

Labrihe pitched forward and lurched to a halt in a cloud of parched dust. Collision avoided. She blinked stupidly.

Sitting in the middle of the desert in front of them was a caravan.

Two minutes later they had turned and parked Labrihe, ready to take off again. They dropped the ladder and approached the vehicle on foot cautiously.

Sometime in the distant past it had been a standard-issue Buffalo model, designed to be towed behind a rover to act as extra living space and cargo haulage for transcontinental trips. However, at some point in its long history, it had been customised almost beyond recognition. Antenna masts had sprouted on its roof, sporting a motley collection of dishes of various sizes. Lisabeth couldn't even begin to guess what the sensors that covered half of the solar panels on the roof were for. At some point, someone had riveted steel plates over the caravan's windows, blacking-out the interior.

All was silent, but the caravan's ladders were deployed. Her raging thirst overcame her apprehension. Lisabeth hauled herself up its rungs while Raylo shot a worried scowl at her from the dust below.

She knocked. Once. Twice. Silence...

“Is... anyone... home...? Please...?” she gasped, her feeble voice snatched away by the chill wind that whipped across the desert plateau.

Lights clicked on bathing them in a multicolour glow. To the rear of the caravan, an electric motor whirred into life and a hatch cracked open with a rusty screech. It swung upwards to reveal a cargo bay that had been refurbished as a research study of sorts, its walls adorned with flatscreens, datadrives and even more exotic instruments.

Behind a desk sat a kind-faced kerbelle, the wrong side of eighty with dirty blonde hair, squinting in the evening sunlight that had suddenly blazed into her cubby-hole. She clicked off the radio that had been warbling quietly to itself beside her and stood to look down at Lisabeth and Raylo, examining them both curiously.

“Oh... hello dears. I could have sworn I heard some ruckus outside but I wasn't sure. Heh! Come on up! I was just about to put the kettle on.”

Raylo gawped. Lisabeth opened her mouth to speak, but no sound would come out. The middle-aged kerbelle concluded that tea was not to their liking.

“Uh, do you two like tacos? I was going to make tacos for dinner...”

It was Raylo who finally managed to explain to her that they desperately needed just one thing: water. She was just as happy to oblige, and let them into the tiny living quarters of her caravan, leaving them to help themselves from the kitchenette while she returned to her study.

The place looked like it had been hit by an earthquake. Empty tea-cups littered every surface and open cupboards spilled their contents out onto the floor: a jumble of food, discarded clothes and notebooks full of spidery handwriting. As they drank their fill from the caravan's water tank, they glanced at each other across the fold-out table, listening to the chatter from the kerbelle's radio through the paper-thin walls.

...schhhhhhht... Tanegashima has issued official directives to all security teams in Sector Four permitting repression of any attempt at mutiny with extreme prejudice as ... schhhhht ... Polar Station Leopold declared independence earlier today, stating that it would not comply with Trans Indian resolutions... schhhhht... in Hammaguir, CEO Sidke has declared that he will make an official statement at 0800 hours universal time tomorrow ... schhhhhht...

On and on and on, in endless flow. Stories of rebellion and repression. Of freedom and death. That dude up on the Lunar station sure had stirred up some serious crap, thought Lisabeth.

“We should leave,” said Raylo, looking anxiously at the door.

“Well, your solar wonder is not going anywhere until sunrise,” said Lisabeth. “So... tacos sound good to me.”

***

It was almost midnight when they managed to coax the mysterious kerbelle out of her study to share the food that they had prepared, since she had showed no sign of emerging to cook herself. The kitchenette was far too small for the three of them, so they ate outside in the cold, thin air as their host picked at her food, her attention still glued to the reports blurting from her radio.

The moon had risen, pale and full, casting its light on the snow-capped summits of the eastern cordillera. The night sky was the most stunning they had ever seen, with so many stars visible that it appeared almost cloudy in places.

“What are you doing out here?” Lisabeth ventured at last. “Are you a member of the research team from the observatory?”

“Sort of, dear. I help them out occasionally. But they supply me the data I need and let me do my own thing most of the time. For the past couple of years I've been trying to calculate where the centre of the local- oh, would you pass the hot sauce, please? ”

Their absent-minded host reminded Lisabeth furiously of someone she felt that she should recognise. She nodded at the radio. “Are you worried about the Company raids?” Something told her that an eccentric investigator crunching raw data from one of the world's largest telescope arrays had no business living in an ancient trailer-home in the middle of a desert.

“The raids...? Oh no, dear!” she replied, flicking through more channels. “That's the precise reason I live out here: to avoid that kind of unwanted attention. One crazy kerbonaut stealing a little space station won't change anything. For us to see a security team up in Atacama, it would take something much, much more-” She suddenly started and switched back to the previous channel, twiddling the volume knob up to full. “Oh, shhh!! Let's listen...”

...schhhtt... the rogue kerbonaut speaks! We are now patching through a transmission coming in live from Station LDRO.... schttt...

“Fellow Kerbals. My name is Camwise. I was the Senior Engineer of Omelek Space Centre...”

Lisabeth froze and stared wide-eyed at the radio. Time sputtered, then ground to a halt. Her brain floundered in denial for a few seconds until it registered that the voice was indeed his. It had been such a long time...

In a dream-like state she listened as Camwise pronounced his own self-inflicted death sentence. She heard his plea for rebellion and his instructions on how they should go about cancelling the apocalypse.

...and Second Pilot Lisabeth. Remember them, please.

She heard him say her name and above all, the way he said it. At that moment, she knew that he still loved her. What the hell was wrong with him, after all these years..?

“You're just kidding, right Cam?” Lisabeth whispered to herself in horror.

When she came to her senses, she found that Camwise's message had ended and that she had staggered some distance away from the caravan into the chilly night. This impact will occur within a few minutes. Look on the bright side, it's not like I will be bothering you again.

“Seriously, you're kidding us. You're not really giving up, are you?”

If you look carefully, you will all be able to see a brief flash of light between Mare Nubium and Mare Humorum.

She looked back at Raylo and the strange kerbelle. Just like ten million others around the world, they were both staring at the sky to the east so intently that they hadn't even noticed her wander off.

“That's not you. That can't be you. Don't give up, Cam.” She forced herself to turn and look. Don't blink. Tears came. Don't you dare blink. You have to watch this.

Once I'm gone, it's your turn. Rise! Rise, Kerbals! You must resist!

“Don't-”

A pinpoint of light flickered on the lower half of the moon's disk, as bright as it was ephemeral. It quickly faded, washed out by the cold glare of reflected sunlight.

Camwise, out.

“-give up...”

Lisabeth sank to hers knees in the dust as the anger, the denial and the loneliness of being a kerbonaut abandoned in this vast, insane universe swept over her.

Love. Lost. Found. Lost once more.

Much later, she heard the soft footsteps of the kerbelle approaching and the gentle touch of a hand on her shoulder.

“Won't you come back inside, dear? It gets quite cold up here at night,” said Steledith.

 

YEAR 15, DAY 343. ATACAMA DESERT.

The security team arrived on the third morning, and this time Lisabeth was prepared.

They had listened to the news broadcasts non-stop. Less than twenty-four hours after the station hit the moon, most of them were shut down as Trans Pacific switched off the various channels of communication in a desperate attempt to stop the rebellion from spreading. Instead, they tapped into the security team's geostationary network via the trailer-home's dish using a decryption key Steledith pulled from the bottom of one of the kitchenette's drawers.

“Don't ask, dear,” she said to Raylo when he tried to.

From the back-and-forth between the teams on the ground and their headquarters, it gradually became clear that Trans Pacific and Trans Indian would manage to smother the uprising, albeit at the cost of many lives and with the loss of many of the more remote parts of their respective empires.

The Trans Atlantic Resource Company, on the other hand, wasn't going to make it. Sidke had seen to that. A very different type of governance had taken hold of Hammaguir. Unfortunately for them, this meant that Trans Pacific would dispatch their security army to every single outpost they could possibly reach to make sure that they didn't attempt to defect to the budding new nation. They could therefore expect company in Atacama very soon.

They possessed an aircraft capable of taking them almost anywhere in the world. But Labrihe could only carry two. Setting out across the Atacama desert on foot would be suicidal. The chances of hiding within the observatory complex during a full security crack down of indeterminate duration were marginal.

One of them would be trapped. It was as simple as that.

Therefore Lisabeth rose before dawn, slipped the note she had written the night before under Labrihe's canopy where Raylo was still asleep, and set out across the desolate landscape towards the radio dishes and the observatory beyond.

My dear Raylo,

Please forgive me for leaving without warning but we're on borrowed time here. You and I both know that we would have bickered for so long over this that the security team would have tossed us into the back of a rover long before we came to a decision, anyway.

I've gone to turn myself in to Trans Pacific. Don't even think about coming after me. There is something you must do: get Steledith to Hammaguir. She is the greatest investigator of our time but she is barely capable of looking after herself. I've no idea how she managed to escape the Company for so long, but she can not be allowed to fall back into their hands.

You must get her to Sidke so that she can continue her research. Teach her to use Labrihe's autopilot on the fly. At least it will be fun: I'm sure you two will get on together just fine, and you will get to show the world what your little solar plane is capable of.

Take care, Raylo. I hope we meet again in better times.

Lisabeth.

As dawn broke over the observatory a line of vehicles approached from the West, their headlights throwing flickering spears of light across the desert.

Lisabeth braced herself against the chill wind and trudged forward to meet her fate.

Edited December 27, 2018 by UnusualAttitude

[HamnavoePer]

That was amazing! Now to sit in anticipation until the next installment

[Nivee~]

Oooof!! Right in the feelings!

[UnusualAttitude]

7 hours ago, HamnavoePer said:

That was amazing! Now to sit in anticipation until the next installment

Thanks!

I'm on a bit of a roll here and getting stuff done on an almost daily basis, but this one took quite a while. For a start, this part is strongly related to some pretty critical decisions I had to make about the future storylines of several major characters (including one we haven't seen for quite a while...). These decisions had to be made whilst not even knowing whether what I have planned for them is even possible (in-game, I mean: all of this has to be feasible in RSS with plausible space tech...). So I spent almost a week mumbling to myself ("eeeeerrrrrrrmmmmm...") before finally taking the plunge and putting fingers to keyboard.

I think it may also the longest ever single publication of the Logs, too (nearly 5k words...). 

Next, we will return to Bartdon to see if has turned the entire island of Saint Helena into one giant divot yet.

3 hours ago, Nivee~ said:

Oooof!! Right in the feelings!

Yes, this is the other reason why this took a long time. Not easy to write... 

Oh, and the caravan. It took a long time to place all those fiddly details but I'm very happy with the caravan.

[Newtie]

You keep tempting me to try starting an RSS save. I doubt it would be anything close to as fun as reading these though.

[UnusualAttitude]

20 hours ago, Newtie said:

You keep tempting me to try starting an RSS save. I doubt it would be anything close to as fun as reading these though.

Try it? There is nothing fundamentally more difficult about RSS if you've played stock KSP for a while. It just requires a bit more patience and planning, and even then that depends on what sort of thing you want to do.

I would advise you to choose some objectives (send a probe to your favourite crater on the Moon, fly-by Enceladus, whatever...) and choose mods to allow you a level of technology you want to play with. A lot of RSS players get a kick out of installing RP-0 and recreating 1950s to Apollo, but you might not want to spend ages grinding sounding rockets. I certainly wouldn't. 

The rest is up to your imagination. This is something I find really important in order to enjoy KSP in general. One of the major flaws of this game is that the planetary surfaces are bland and featureless. You really have to fill in the gaps yourself. Visiting places that actually exist (and we have actual pictures/data of) is a huge boost to immersion.

[roboslacker]

Shouldn't this part have been The Lizbeth Narrative? 

[HamnavoePer]

17 hours ago, roboslacker said:

Shouldn't this part have been The Lizbeth Narrative? 

@UnusualAttitude This

[Thedrelle]

Fantastic!

Poor, poor Lisbeth. 

[UnusualAttitude]

On 1/2/2019 at 12:56 AM, roboslacker said:

Shouldn't this part have been The Lizbeth Narrative? 

 

6 hours ago, HamnavoePer said:

@UnusualAttitude This

"Lisabeth's Story" was indeed the working title, as you can see from my screenshot folder...

Spoiler

...but, as always, I used a gratuitously attention-grabbing quote from the text itself as a title. This is just a cheap marketing tactic, as you have probably gathered by now...

6 hours ago, Thedrelle said:

Fantastic!

Poor, poor Lisbeth. 

Thanks! I like my Kerbals to suffer. A lot. And not just in the usual expedient, blown-to-tiny-bits manner in which most player's Kerbals meet their end.

The long, slow, drawn-out way of suffering. 

[UnusualAttitude]

YEAR 15, DAY 356. BARTDON.

Every evening I would take a walk along the western end of Longwood Island and watch the sun sink towards the ocean. It was the least unbearable part of this existence that I had quickly come to hate.

Nine hundred days and more. I was a scientist with nothing to research. A leader with nowhere to go and no-one to follow me. And I had an impressive track-record of failure in both of these fields, anyway.

There was nothing much I could do to help the crew at the station, so they mostly left me to myself.

I'd never really thought about what the end of my career might be like: worrying about such blasted trivia was never my style. But I'm pretty damned sure I would not have imagined it resemble this. I was trapped on a humid, wind-swept island in the middle of damned no-where, while beyond the surrounding ocean the members of my old club fell over themselves with their new-found obsession of hoarding asteroid water in lunar orbit.

Had the entire world gone insane? It was like one of those old fables. But this time the moral would be that all the asteroid water in the system wouldn't help anyone when the rocks started to fall on Earth.

Every day I gazed out across the waters of the mighty Atlantic. For millennia, Kerbals had respected and feared the seas and oceans as harsh deities of our planet. Our whole civilisation was structured around them and the daunting hurdle they represented to communication and exchange. Hell, even the godless Resource Companies had taken their names as if, deep down, they were still paying some kind of superstitious tribute. In our minds, the oceans were uncaring, pitiless, and permanent. Yet even they would be swept away or boil into nothing if Earth was struck by a large asteroid.

Behind the endless roar of the waves I could almost hear the sound of ticking as the last few moments of history slipped away. I had set off the count-down, and due to my misjudgement almost no-one was paying attention.

Stuck here, I was powerless to stop the clock. News from the outside world sometimes took weeks to reach Longwood. For all I knew, a comet might be hurtling towards Earth already.

So, when the large aircraft appeared in the sky one morning, I marched straight out to meet it. At this point in time, I no longer really cared who was coming for me. Just as long as they got me off this damned island.

***

Whoever it was had sent a large airliner, no doubt full of hired muscle. It was a new design that I had never seen before, powered by propfans and with an elegant forward-swept gull wing. It made a first low-pass overhead to check out the runway before making a sweeping turn into a short final approach, its airfoil bristling with flaps and spoilers.

There were no stairs available at Longwood, so the aircraft dropped a ladder as soon as it came to a halt. I expected a swarm of thugs armed with riot-control gear to hit the ground and fan out to surround me. I gripped the shaft of the club tightly. A nine iron. Short. Good for fighting at close quarters. I would not go quietly.

Instead, I was greeted by the sight of a young kerbelle with blue hair sliding lightly down the ladder and striding purposefully across the tarmac towards me. I hid the club behind my back.

“PI Bartdon!?” she shouted above the roar of the props.

“Yes...I...”

“Sidke will see you now,” she said curtly, as if informing me that I had successfully made a last-minute appointment with a dentist. “Follow me, please!” Then she turned and marched straight towards the aircraft without looking back to see if I was behind her. This took the wind out of my sails. For a moment I was thunderstruck but I shuffled after her nonetheless, muttering beneath my breath.

“Sidke will see me now, eh? It's about time, dammit!”

The airliner's passenger cabin turned out to be empty except for the two of us. Whoever was at the controls was obviously in a hurry, as the craft started taxiing before I even had the chance to sit. As a result, I stumbled heavily into 1C just across the aisle from my prim travelling companion.

I looked across at her. She wore the blue suit of an Investigator, but without the shoulder patch that indicated senior status. She glared at me disapprovingly from beneath a stylish fringe, her dark gaze just daring me to engage in a conversation. However, as Longwood Island slid away into the distance and the aircraft set a course towards the North, a bit of my old fighting spirit returned.

“So, what's your field of research?” I asked.

“Geology,” she said bluntly.

“Ah... I've done a bit of that myself on-”

“I know.”

I tuned and looked back at the rows of empty seats behind us.

“Bit of a large bird just to come and pick me up. There was no need, really-”

“I quite agree,” she shot back. “Huge waste of fuel, if you ask me. But it was the only aircraft we had available that could make the flight out of Hammaguir and on to our destination.”

“Well, where is it we're going, exactly?”

“You'll see.”

I sighed and admitted defeat. This was getting no-where. “Do you at least have a name?” I asked, somewhat grumpily.

“Tifal,” she said, and lapsed into silence once more.

“The damned pleasure is all mine...” I muttered.

We were in for a long flight. Sidke, I thought, this had better be worth it.

***

I awoke to the jolt of the aircraft touching down. I looked out of the window, eager to be greeted by the sight of something new. My heart sank. We had landed on what appeared to be yet another island in the middle of the ocean.

The terrain was flat, brown and covered in marshland. To one side of the runway I spotted a couple of large hangars and, to my great surprise, what looked like a VAB. Trans Atlantic had their own space programme? I drew in my breath sharply. What the blazes was this place?

Tifal looked over at me and seemed to guess what questions were going through my mind. “This is Bonny Island. Sidke is scheduled to arrive just after us. We shall meet him at the landing pad.”

The landing pad?

A rover was waiting for us on the edge of the tarmac. It trundled us around the facility and came to a halt right next to the towering VAB.

Tifal got out and invited me to follow her. One endless elevator ride later, we stepped out onto the roof of the massive building that had clearly seen little use.

A hot wind blew into my face as I looked out across the ocean. It was uncomfortably warm, even this late in the year so I guessed that we were somewhere near the equator. From this elevation I could see the green continental coast of what was probably Africa away to the North. And then, from that direction, came the throbbing sound of an aircraft engine. Apparently, Sidke was punctual when he eventually decided to turn up.

It was a type of aircraft that I had never seen before. It was fairly small and its wing was short and stubby. It sported a pair of turbines that each powered a large rotor with a distinctive high-pitched whine. As it drew closer to the VAB, the rotors rotated smoothly into a horizontal position and it slowed dramatically. It came into land vertically - just like an airship - but without all the fuss of a massive hull filled with hydrogen.

I had heard of previous attempts at designing such a machines, but they had all failed to achieve the range required for linking the sparsely scattered settlements around our planet. I wondered idly how far we were from Hammaguir, if that was indeed where Sidke was flying in from.

The tilt-rotor craft touched down with pin-point precision and within seconds a hatch opened, a ramp dropped, and Sidke sprang into view immediately as if he had been camping out behind the aircraft's door for the duration of the flight. He trotted across the landing pad with barely contained impatience and took the stairs down to where Tifal and I were waiting two by two.

Sidke was a gentlekerb of unguessable age: although he sported a shock of well-trimmed white hair, his expression was one of youthful energy and enthusiasm. He marched up confidently, and nodding briefly to Tifal, thrust his right hand out towards me.

“Welcome to Bonny Island, Principal Investigator. I am Sidke.”

Still not knowing quite what to expect, I shook his hand cautiously.

“I'm very sorry I couldn't make it to Longwood myself,” he went on, “but I happen to be leading a revolution at the moment, and you wouldn't believe how much of one's time this sort of thing eats up...”

“A revolution..?” I floundered, now wondering what on Earth I had got myself into.

“Yes, Bartdon. Much has changed for Trans Atlantic in the past two weeks. But come, we have another flight to catch, I'm afraid. We must make it to our destination before sundown. We will talk en route. I believe that Thil is being prepared as we speak.” He promptly bolted off towards the elevator with Tifal in his wake.

Fine by me, I thought. I just want to know what the hell is going on here.

With no choice other than to roll with it, I tagged along behind.

***

Thil turned out to be the considerably larger sister of Sidke's personal ride. It sported the same short wing and two even more impressive tilt-rotors, but it had the fuselage of a medium-sized cargo aircraft, with ramps to the front and rear. It had apparently rolled out while we had been on top of the VAB, and was in the process of being loaded with cargo pallets as we pulled up in the rover.

We accessed the cockpit via a ladder that dropped into the cargo-bay and made ourselves comfortable behind the two pilots as they powered up the craft in readiness for departure. As the turbines were situated far aft on the aircraft's tail, I found that we could converse easily, even as they spooled up to full thrust for take-off.

To my surprise, the crew lined Thil up on the runway. Leaning forward to look out of the side windows, I noticed that the rotors had been pitched forward to an oblique angle.

“This will be a rolling take-off,” said Sidke. “We're heavy with cargo.”

Thil nevertheless shot forward and became airborne well short of the runway threshold, banking sharply to the right and heading southwards. Still not sure what to make of these flimsy-looking craft and their whirling blades, I muttered “What's wrong with Livernon..? Don't you fly hypersonic now you're in charge?”

Sidke threw me a sideways glance and a slightly mischievous smile. “Our destination lacks the several kilometres of runway needed to accommodate a hypersonic flight. In fact, it doesn't have a runway at all. Ah, Bartdon... you will forgive me, but I ordered most of the high-speed transports to be scrapped. Their fuel requirements were quite... obnoxious.”

I looked at him blankly. “You are in charge of a Resource Company now, right?”

From the seat behind us, I heard Tifal stifle a cough. Sidke's smile grew broader.

“It is now known as the Trans Atlantic Cooperative, to be precise. You must understand that its raison d'être is very different from that of the Resource Companies you once knew. And I am no longer in charge, at least not in the same way as the Board of Directors once was.”

“Then who is?” I demanded. “Dammit, Sidke! I spent more than two years on that island, hoping against hope that you would be able to help me. Don't tell me all that time was wasted! We need to-”

“Rest assured, Bartdon,” said Sidke, reaching across and gripping my forearm. “I am fully aware of the urgency of the situation. And, thanks to the sacrifice of one of the former members of your team, so are the vast majority of the kerbals who have joined our cause.”

“Sacrifice..?” I looked at him aghast. “A member of my crew? What happened?”

“Not the crew of Laroque, but an engineer who was a member of the very first mission to Mars. His name was Camwise.”

“Camwise, eh? What has that underachieving misfit been up to..?”

Tifal stifled another cough as Sidke gave me a long, hard look.

“Senior Engineer Camwise – and I believe he fully deserves his original title – succeeded where all others failed. His actions were the catalyst that was necessary for us to overthrow the Board of Trans Atlantic. Tifal, I and others merely did the groundwork. Look, Bartdon, you've missed a lot while you were at Longwood. Let me start from the beginning.”

As Thil sped on above the ocean, Sidke told me about his years as CEO. It had been a position of apparent power, but in practice it had consisted in executing the Board's directives with little say in anything that mattered. Nevertheless, with help from Investigators such as Tifal and loyal friends from within the security teams that he had once been part of, he had managed to mitigate some of the crueller aspects of the Board's rule.

He had cooked the books to conceal credit granted to impoverished communities. He had managed to sway the Board from introducing ruinous tariffs, convincing them that they would prove impossible to apply in practice. But all of these actions had been covert. Disguised. Risky. Sidke and his cabal had lived on a knife's edge. The slightest mistake, the slightest betrayal, and they would have all been eliminated in a heartbeat.

“And the withdrawal of Trans Atlantic funding from the space programme back in Year 7, that was your doing, I expect.” I said, thinking aloud. Sidke gave me the sideways look once more.

“As a matter of fact it was. I managed to convince Trans Atlantic that we needed our own space programme. I pitched it as a contingency plan, just in case cooperation with the other Companies was compromised for some reason. This is how Bonny Island was eventually built, and why we have already developed a launcher of our own. We had several ready to fly when the rebellion started, and a rudimentary communications network is already in place.”

“A contingency plan? You're not telling me the whole damned truth! Why back then, specifically?”

“I'm getting there...”

Sidke went on to tell me about the hijacking of the Lunar station and its impact with the Moon. Only the inner circle at Tanegashima knew exactly how he had managed to pull off such a feat, but it was common knowledge that Camwise had managed to infiltrate the space programme under a false identity. I must confess that I found the whole affair really fishy. Camwise had never seemed like the radical type, to me. I just couldn't imagine him flinging bits of himself all over our night sky just to make a damned point. I kept these thoughts to myself, however.

“It was the snowflake that triggered the avalanche,” said Sidke. “Camwise had brilliantly demonstrated how fragile the Resource Companies could be if their own employees turned against them. The next morning I gathered my most loyal security teams and arrested the members of the Trans Atlantic Board. I then made a public announcement, declaring that the Company would become a cooperative, lead by a new board elected by - and answerable to - every single employee and consumer within its sphere of influence. It was a huge gamble, but it worked. Just not quite as well as we'd expected it would.”

I sat listening in a daze. This was just too much change for me to process in a single conversation.

“We had hoped that Trans Pacific and Trans Indian would follow suit,” Sidke continued, “But neither Company harboured an organised nucleus of dissidents like ourselves. The Boards were able to smother the rebellion within their core settlements, and Trans Pacific has even managed to take over most of our territory on the South American continent. Only Kourou remains under our control, thanks to a costly airbridge, and it is under direct threat.”

I gathered my thoughts together. “So you're telling me that as things stand, you're on your damned own.”

“Yes, but-”

I was gaining momentum. “That's just great. Your beautiful new cooperative, its dear leader and your moondust messiah versus the rest of blasted planet Earth. And you had the brilliant idea of making it a damned democracy while you were at it!”

“So, you would've had us replace one tyranny with another?”

“Politics 101, Sidke. More freedom is not the answer when faced with an existential threat. What the hell do we do now, old boy? Sit in a circle, hold hands, and sing mantras until the damned rocks start to fall!?”

Sidke's gaze bored into me for what seemed like an age. It was Tifal who broke the silence at last. “Do you hear him, Sidke? Is this who you want to lead the mission? I warned you that he worked for the Board members for too long. He thinks like them. He talks like them-”

“-and yet he interrupted the Martian Transmission, Tifal,” said Sidke, turning to face her. “An act which, I believe, did not obtain the desired result. Indeed, an act that backfired in a spectacular manner, both for him and for us. I'm not sure he realises how obvious this was from our perspective back here on Earth. Is this not the case, Principal Investigator?”

This stopped me in my tracks. I closed my eyes and drifted back to that dreadful moment in the shadow of the Kerbal Face. My shattered fingers raining blows on the rover's antenna. A few seconds, just a few words. A few too many. Should you fail to do so...

“I was too damned slow...” I admitted. “I cut it off too late. It was obvious that the message was a threat.”

“But you cut it off nevertheless and the end of the message was lost to us,” said Sidke. “Thus plausible deniability was preserved, and the Companies were free to carry on business as usual.”

“I was trying to avoid a mass panic, dammit...” I snapped back.

“So you do care about your fellow kerbals after all, Bartdon. Who would've guessed?”

I glared at both of them angrily. Sidke met my gaze, searching its depths for a glimpse of what had really happened millions of miles away and many months ago.

“Don't you want to know what the First Mate had to say?” I spat out. Anything to stop them looking at me like that.

“We already know,” said Sidke.

“Are you really so sure of yourselves?”

“Yes. Yes, we are...” murmured Tifal, looking forwards through Thil's windshield. Out across the ocean. Towards the horizon.

It struck me like a bombshell. “You found another one...” I breathed, as things began to make sense at last. “A Crewmate... That's where we're going, isn't it?”

“Yes, Bartdon,” said Sidke. “We're taking you to meet the Surgeon.”

Edited January 29, 2019 by UnusualAttitude

[Newtie]

The suspense on these last few logs is killing me Starting to get curious how dark this will get before the end.

[Lisias]

10 hours ago, Newtie said:

The suspense on these last few logs is killing me Starting to get curious how dark this will get before the end.

The darkest hour of the night is the point in which the morning starts to rise.

[MatterBeam]

I love all these VTOL plane designs and the use of turboprops instead of whiny jets.

[UnusualAttitude]

13 hours ago, Newtie said:

Starting to get curious how dark this will get before the end.

Darker than a bat's armpit on a moonless night. In a cave. With the blinds drawn.

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

The darkest hour of the night is the point in which the morning starts to rise.

We'll see...

2 hours ago, MatterBeam said:

I love all these VTOL plane designs and the use of turboprops instead of whiny jets.

Thanks! I finally got round to making a couple of tilt-rotors. For a long time I considered that they would never have sufficient range for my sparsely populated kerbal Earth (aircraft in my universe must go long-haul or go home, hence the airships...). These VTOLs are turbo-electric, however, courtesy of parts by Wild Blue Industries. Drudas can cover about 5,000 km, Thil about 7,000 km with a reasonable payload.

In truth though, I find that anything that that needs massive whirling blades to get off the ground is a terrifying death-trap of death. I love all things that fly with wings, but personally I wouldn't board a helicopter for all the guacamole in Mexico. 

Testing and flying VTOLs in KSP is an endless source of lols and outtakes, though...

Spoiler

 

 

 

[MatterBeam]

Thanks for taking the time to show those... mistakes!

Turbo-electric turboprops is an interesting choice. I would think that if fuel is the limiting factor, then fuel-electric-motor-prop is a less efficient use of it than simply fuel-motor-prop.

[UnusualAttitude]

25 minutes ago, MatterBeam said:

Turbo-electric turboprops is an interesting choice. I would think that if fuel is the limiting factor, then fuel-electric-motor-prop is a less efficient use of it than simply fuel-motor-prop.

With existing technology, it probably would be less efficient. However, the old problem with any type of turbine (jet/fan/shaft) is finding a compromise between thermal efficiency and propulsive efficiency, ie: getting your core and your fan/props/whatever spinning at the best possible speeds. Some systems use gearboxes, but a gearbox for a large VTOL with many 10,000s of horsepower is a major challenge in itself. If you go turbo-electric you can completely decouple the turbine from your propulsion unit and optimise the turbine for thermal efficiency. This does assume some near-future magic for the electrical parts (light, superconducting generators, power lines and motors), but this is the Camwise Logs, so that's OK.

There would be a host of other potential advantages: reduced noise, improved safety (ability to redistribute power in case of engine failure)...

 

[Nivee~]

I hope one day you catalog all of this in a single pdf document, so that I could take a printout, get it bound and donate it to a library, its that good!

But seriously, please catalogue all chapters and pictures...

[UnusualAttitude]

8 hours ago, Nivee~ said:

I hope one day you catalog all of this in a single pdf document, so that I could take a printout, get it bound and donate it to a library, its that good!

But seriously, please catalogue all chapters and pictures...

Well, I have all the Log's text as OpenOffice text files, and all the images on my hard drive, backed up on my Imgur account. 

This would be something to do on a rainy day, I suppose. It would be quite possible, but time consuming. Would anyone else be interested?

[Newtie]

Yes! I second that!