Chapter 16: Ravel
DATE: Year 487-A, Sol 11
LOCATION: Themisto (JLF Capital Colony)
Fesster Sypherd stood at one of the outer viewports of the main observation deck outside of the grand hall of the capital complex on Themisto. He knew it was almost over for him. He could sense them coming for him, though no one else knew yet.
For all the chaos, things had been going well for him. The JLF high council, of which he was a part, had been meeting since the bombing. They had started to unravel what was happening, stopped, reraveled and unraveled and got mixed up again.
Maybe it had been a mistake to stick around this long instead of finding some pretext under which to say he had to return to Ganymede, and then just disappear. But until he sensed his compatriot in the distance, approaching through space, there had still been a chance to save something, to at least stick around to try again.
One of the high council assistants came out to get Fesster.
-Are you ok, he asked, catching Fesster staring off into space.
Fesster wished the assistant and all the JLF humans would just disappear. To Fesster, and the others, they were not like the Saganites.
Once the Saganites had arrived on Jupiter hundreds of years earlier, they didn’t pay much attention to its moons, and didn’t settle them. Most of the subsequent human colonization was on Mars, with the moons of Jupiter starting to get settled before the Rip, mostly by colonists arriving from, and often born, on Mars. The Saganite Cities were obscured in Jupiter’s atmosphere, and not something the lunar colonists were looking for in any case. The Saganites had departed Earth rather quietly and didn’t stay in contact, so their story faded away.
Before the Rip, the colonies on Jupiter’s moons were supported by the human colonies on Mars, which were supported by corporate and government sponsors on Earth. After the Rip there were decades of bloody conflict between the chartered associations on Mars what was later euphemistically called “the consolidation.” The moons of Jupiter, with their relatively smaller population, had a less intense consolidation. A couple of charters were liquidated, and the rest consolidated relatively peacefully into the Jovian Lunar Federation.
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Themisto, a small rock of about an 8 kilometer diameter, was selected to construct the capital around because it orbited midway between the large Galillean moons and the Himalia group of asteroids, the two main regions of the Jovian system the charters had settled. The Himalias were rich in magnetite, an important mineral in industry, especially water-treatment. It was how the MTC came to be involved around Jupiter.
The MTC believed it was on the brink of a take over of the JLF’s operations when the Saganites had their “arrival.” They backed a radical back-to-Earth movement that had started growing at the time, as well as the JLF, providing it with the resources and technical know-how for its operations to remain independent.
Even after most of the Saganite Cities had departed for the Oort Cloud, the remaining Saganites maintained support for the JLF for generations. But in each generation, there was a little less support from the Saganites and a little more dysfunction with the JLF.
For the JLF, the bombing of the Hotel Florida represented an open attack by the MTC, a false flag intended to make the JLF appear unable to provide security for the hotel so that the MTC could take over. But it was not the truth. The truth was the bombing had been perpetrated by a break-away faction within the JLF leadership itself. They wanted to force the Saganites to withdraw from the Hotel Florida all together. Blaming the MTC was an after-thought for them. The goal was to force the eventual abandonment of the Hotel by its residents and replace them with workers to begin large-scale resource exploitation on Europa.
It was not the most well thought out plan, and the plotters worked through intermediaries to arrange it, making it appear as if only the landing pad were being targeted. The appearance of the dragons had helped spin it out of control, and the plotters were found out by the JLF ruling council, which dispatched a special squad to apprehend or eliminate Poe. The Broads, a powerful family within the JLF, thought they were being targeted, but the plotters insisted they had no idea Juntin had even still been at the hotel.
The ruling council had been meeting non-stop on Themisto since the bombing. They had made the decision to mislead the Saganites after the plotters had come clean, while they argued about what to do.
That changed when the first Europa alien arrived on the Sagan City. What it told the Saganite table compelled them to send a small force to Themisto, under its own command. The alien had told the table that the JLF had been infiltrated by one of the aliens, and that it had been responsible for the bombing. They wanted Europa, and the Jovian moons, for themselves.
Fesster Sypherd knew his time was up before the proximity alarms even went off.
