Gardens Of The Sun, Chapter 7 (i)

Sri Hong-Owen didn’t hear about it until a news bite hit the nets: a brief announcement that Avernus’s daughter Yuli had been taken into custody following a collaborative action between the civilian administration of Dione and the military, soundtracked over video of a tall young girl dressed in an orange jumpsuit and sitting at a table in a bare room with two burly marines behind her. Propaganda no doubt meant to dishearten the resistance. No details about how or where she had been captured, or whether she had given up anything useful about her mother. Sri tried to reach out to Arvam Peixoto, but couldn’t get past an aide who, even though the line was strongly encrypted, refused to give her any information ‘for obvious security reasons’.

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The Last Word On The Moon

Norman Mailer's Moonfire (Taschen Books), a compendium of Mailer's prose (from Life magazine articles and his book, Of A Fire On The Moon) and hundreds of digitally-restored photographs and maps. Limited to 1969 copies, a snip at $650. Or why not splash out for the special edition?

No. 1958–1969 LUNAR ROCK EDITION

• Marc Newson designed this special edition of only 12 copies
• Each copy comes with a unique specimen of lunar rock, ranging in weight from a slice of the moon at 0.4 grams to 30.34 grams, one of the largest lunar meteorites ever found on Earth
• Specifications and prices available on request

Red Queen's Race Part XXXIV

Hmm. Didn't take long for reality to catch up with this. Gene fabrication and fakery no longer the province of SF but crime fiction. Wonder how long it'll take the crime genre to catch on?

Gardens Of The Sun, Sixth Chapter

Loc Ifrahim deserved a world of his own. Instead, they gave him a junkyard full of dead ships.

When the war had kicked off, most of the Outer ships in the Saturn System had been killed by encounters with singleships or drones or mines. Now, robot tugs were locating and intercepting these hulks, modifying the long and erratic paths they traced around Saturn, and nudging them towards Dione, where they were parked in equatorial orbit to await the attentions of the salvage gangs.

A dozen agencies commissioned and loosely controlled by the Three Powers Authority were attempting to reconstruct damaged infrastructure in the Saturn System, find gainful employment for tens of thousands of displaced Outers, set up Quisling administrations and police forces, harness the skills of Outer gene wizards, engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, and reboot the economy using a centralised command-and-control model. All this required a robust transport network, and because it was too expensive to build ships from scratch, repair and refurbishment of those damaged in the war was an essential part of post-war reconstruction planning. Loc Ifrahim was responsible for civilian oversight of the salvage operation, reporting directly to the TPA Economic Commission. A key role in work that was crucial to the success of the occupation. Nevertheless, he felt short-changed and slighted.

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