Commissioned by RoyalTwinFangs
Project PHAETON
Chapter 6
-VB-
Noctis knew what was going to happen the moment he heard about it.
After her long voyage to the Jupiter Fuel Fleet on a diplomatic mission, Astraea Caelum was back on Ceres.
He let out a long sigh even as he watched - through the camera securities afforded to him in position as the house’s head of guard - her and her retinue march down the front doors of the manor and through the wide and tall corridors.
And the look on her face said everything about what she was going to be shouting the moment she punched his doors open.
She did exactly that.
Her hands slammed into his office’s usually automated but currently heavy double doors and shoved them open like the gorilla she was, trapped in a body that made everyone but question and appreciate her.
“BROTHER!” she shouted as she marched toward him in her white and green mid-cut dress in long sleeves, stiff enough to be a formal dress but not so uncomfortable as to prevent the skin from breathing. It was her own design as well.
She really should have been a clothing designer. Instead, she was doing what she disliked all for the sake of the family.
He sighed.
“What is it, Asta?”
“You dare engage in border conflict without my say so?!”
Oh, yes. He forgot. She was very territorial about her responsibilities. Coddling her during her early teens had made her very insecure.
“Because they fired first.”
The woman who stomped her way through his office and came to a stop in front of his desk was Astarea Caelum. Formally, she was one of the few foreign relations diplomats employed by the Phaeton League. She was also House Caelum’s ambassador for external and internal matters. She was able to become this not just because she was the sweetheart of House Caelum but also because she had the brains for politics. But instead of becoming the full time representative for House Caelum, she chose to travel all around the Asteroid Belt and the wider Solar System.
“Hello, Asta. How are you doing? Did you finally get the Jupiter Fuel Fleet to abandon its idea that we owe them something for the voluntary self-exile our parents underwent?” he asked after a moment.
She huffed. “No. The old bastards still refuse to acknowledge the League as our own polity. He’s still set on ‘putting us in our place.’”
“Did he try anything?” he asked with a frown.
“He desperately wanted to. But then he was reminded again and again by others and by the view of our Diplomatic Squadron.”
Noctis grinned unashamedly.
The Diplomatic Squadron was House Caelum’s protection detail for his sister’s many travels. It had some of the warships and converted freighters from the earliest days of the League, including the original fuel tanker Caelum, which was now a converted freighter carrier-gunboat hybrid. There were other dedicated capital ships in the Diplomatic Squadron like the carrier Solaris, a carrier capable of fielding close to fifty fighters. The point of the Diplomatic Squadron was to make it very clear to other powers of the Solar System that the Phaeton League was real, it was independent, and it would not take bullshit from other powers against their diplomatic representatives.
Namely, the Jupiter Fuel Fleet and Zeon, recently.
The Jupiter Fuel Fleet, because of the fact that they too had a very shaky ground as an independent polity that was barely recognized by the Earth Federation, tried to bully those that they saw as their lessers. The Exiles, as the Fuelers liked to call them. They also hated the fact that Father never set up an official trade with them for the Helium-3 while everyone else had. They considered it an insult, however perceived and weak the excuse may be for it.
But unlike the Principality of Zeon, the Jupiter Fuel Fleet never built up what colonial infrastructure that they had or started a true military navy, and continued to stubbornly focus on their fuel fleet’s growth. Because of this, what little threat they posed was negated by the presence of the League’s naval assets.
Because if the Fuel Fleet decided to shoot first, then the League can and will wipe them out without a problem.
But there were those within the League who … still wanted to have some kind of a good relationship with the Fuel Fleet. A lot of it had to do with the fact that many Leaguers had friends and family who still lived on the Fuel Fleet. Actually, that was the biggest reason.
As part of the League’s wider diplomatic overtures, Astarea had gone as both the representative of House Caelum and a diplomat of the Phaeton League. And like Father and he had predicted (as did many others in the League), it did not pan out well.
“The Jupiter Fuel Fleet still refuses to acknowledge our sovereignty.”
He snorted. “As if they could do anything else.”
She shrugged. “So. Do you want to explain to me what actually happened, oh Victorious Admiral?”
He groaned. “Can you not call me that? It’s embarrassing.”
She giggled, her golden hair bouncing with her laughter. “My brother’s getting famous! How could I not tease you?” she asked with a brilliant smile.
Noctis just knew that she was going to break even more hearts and attract even more pests than before.
“What about the independent colonies?”
“Most of them were happy to acknowledge us. You know how it goes: we open up trade to them and they acknowledge the Phaeton League is an independent nation.”
“Good enough for me. Have you talked to Father yet?”
“Of course. Where do you think I heard you were getting called the ‘Victorious Admiral’? He was very happy about that, showing me clips of the battle and everything.” Then she paused and narrowed her eyes. “You made a lot of mistakes. What were you thinking sending all of your fighters to rush down theirs? You didn’t even know what they had. Did you even think about them bringing nuclear weapons? Those are completely legal in deep space, you know? And most of our fighters are known to be automated, which means that we can’t even complain about them using nuclear weapons on them.”
“Hold your cables, Astarea. I did what was right for the situation.”
“And the tone you took with Lord Garma! No matter how much of a puppet or figurehead he might be, you should have been professional from the start to end. You let your personal distaste of the principality get in the way of your speaking. You know you are supposed to be the next lord of House Caelum, so you can’t be acting like that! Father taught us better!”
He raised his hands in surrender at her nagging. “Father already scolded me over this. Can you let it rest?”
She hummed with those narrowed eyes and then huffed. “Fine. What have you done since then? I heard you managed to salvage some new principality technology.”
“Ah, yes. Those. The Zeonites are calling them mobile suits.”
“Hmm. How big are they? Mobile suit sounds like some kind of power armor.”
He chuckled. “These Zakus we salvaged were seventeen meters tall.”
Astarea paused and stared at him.
“Seventeen meters tall?” she asked after a long while.
“Yes.”
“Seventeen?” she repeated.
“Yes.”
She stared at him.
“... It has to be a man thing. It’s a man thing, isn’t it?”
“What?” he asked, confused.
“Only men like their toys that big. Are the Zabis small down there? That has to be why they made something that big. Don’t they realize that seventeen meters anything is a giant target?”
Noctis held off on joining his little sister in slandering the Zabis. They did deserve it, but he also wanted to make sure she got some good information about why they might be that big.
“It might be because of the Minovsky Reactor.”
She frowned. “What’s that?”
Right. He forgot that she wasn’t much involved in the tech field like he and their father was.
“It’s their new super efficient and high power generator. But because it uses the Minvosky particles to achieve this, it has the added side effect of disrupting everything electromagnetic.”
She stared at him confusedly. Then understanding dawned. Genuine confusion followed.
“What kind of self-defeating -?”
“Remember that they don’t have the fusion engines Father made.”
His comment made her pause and then she sighed. “I suppose that is true,” she grumbled.
Because the fact of the matter was that both of them knew exactly when and how the Phaeton League was able to grow explosively. It had happened decades ago when they were still children when Father introduced his first fusion engine. Not the design but the actual fusion engines that were to be put on ships. Combined this with the super efficient thrusters he also made, they were the reason why the Phaeton League was able to spread out all throughout the Asteroid Belt instead of hanging around a cluster or dispersing into dozens of smaller and weaker colonies.
“What is different is how much smaller our fusion reactors are compared to Zeon’s Minovsky Reactors.”
“How much smaller?”
“Around half the fifth for the comparable output. The Minvosky Reactors in the Zakus - those are the Zeonite mobile suits - are slightly better in distributing the power, though.”
She stared at him. “So they made it that big because…?”
“The size of the reactor, the fuel needed for their inefficient propulsion systems, layers upon layers of armor, and the ammunition needed for their oversized guns. Because, let me tell you sister, their mobile suit machineguns run full-auto with light artillery shells, and these mobile suits have several hundreds of shells stored inside of them.” He paused. “Granted, a few hits from artillery shells would destroy a Ghost fighter with ease, but since they are also so slow and limited by visual targeting thanks to their own reactors’ EM disruption, which includes things like radar, microwave, and even thermal, it’s quite useless against us.”
She hummed as she leaned back. “What if they use it against the Earth Federation?” she asked after a moment.
Noctis nodded. “It would be effective since they don’t have any way around the EM disruption like we do.”
“... And what does Father want to do about that?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Father is not in the business of handing out technologies for free.”
“Fair,” she said before her mouth opened and she yawned. “
“No, you -!” he hissed out before he started yawning, too.
“Haha, got you,” she grinned while tears built up from yawning.
“Ugh,” he grumbled before letting out a sigh. “Alright. You should go and take a rest,” he said. “You don’t know when the League Council will want to send you out. Again.”
---
Later that day, they all got together to eat.
As usual, their mother didn’t leave her room, so the first full family dinner in a long time was just the three of them.
But instead of eating it in the manor’s main dining hall, they chose to eat like how they did from the time they ate dinners in the cramped halls of the Caelum before it was handed over to the Diplomatic Squadron.
So instead of the large dining hall, they were eating in the cafeteria attached to the kitchen. This was where employees ate most of the time, but the staff were dismissed for the day so that they could have better bonding time.
The main dish today was ginger pork and cilantro steamed rice, spicy cod stockfish soup, herbal beef stew, and water. And a lot of other side dishes.
“Pass the pickled radish, please?”
“Here.”
“Can I bit more of the beef stew?”
“Of course.”
“Give me a bit of the stockfish soup.”
“Here.”
Chopsticks, forks, spoons, and bowls clicked and clacked silently as the three of them, in their most casual and comfortable attire, ate dinner made by Father.
“So what should we do with the Zakus?” Noctis asked.
Astarea looked up from her most recent bite. “Um. Research it?”
“We already kind of know everything about it after … three months of researching.”
“Why not turn it into mining mechs?”
The siblings turned to their Father.
“Wut?”/”What?”
Father hummed as he chewed on a tough beef tendon before swallowing. “Zakus are big, yes?”
“Yes?” Astarea repeated.
“It’s not useful for us because we don’t have a dedicated carrier for it.”
“True,” Noctis hummed.
“But each Zaku has a lot of space inside of it once we get rid of all of the ammunition, doesn’t it? And it is human shaped, so it should be intuitive for neural-linked miners to get a hang of it.”
They stared at Father before turning back to look at each other.
That … wasn’t a half bad idea.
“Couldn’t we use it for developing our own mobile suits?”
“Oh, sure,” Father hummed after a sip of the stew. “But we already have mobile armors and power armors, don’t we? We really only need one to get into mobile suit research, and ours doesn’t need to be as large for the same level of protection and firepower.”
“... True,” Noctis repeated. “So keep one for research and, what, sell the rest?”
“Why not? We have a few close colonies who would be glad to have some mining equipment. And let the Zeonites know that we’re using it for mining. That should piss them off.”
Astarea sighed. “Are you trying to kill me with overwork, Father? You know they are going to demand answers from us,” she whined. “They’re going to think we’re insulting them.”
Noctis chuckled. “We are insulting them, sister.”
-VB-
Earth Federation Interpol Files
Trainee Instruction Manual
Chapter 2: Political Structure of the Phaeton League
The Phaeton League should not be considered as a singular entity like you are expected to with the Principality of Zeon, the Jupiter Fuel Fleet, any of the Side and Lunar colonies, and our own federation.
A generalized and distilled title for their government structure would be a “noble council republic.” However, their definition of who might be considered a noble (which they do not call it that) is very broad and also restrictive. A single person in charge of a corporation fulfilling the social contract of “prosperity for all” for ten thousand employees - clones and naturalborns alike - would be considered a noble and allowed the chance to participate in politics. A similar person in charge of a corporation focusing on shareholder profit with a hundred thousand employees would not be no matter how much more they make.
But above this vague classification of nobles exists the Houses and Clans. The terms “House” and “Clan” are interchangeable as it is used informally. A good example of this would be House Caelum. The civilians of the League will refer to Caelum as House or Clan interchangeably. This is because there is no distinction between the terms except one: respect. All major powers within the Phaeton League are afforded the term “Clan.” Only those who have the respect of at least a significant minority of the League are allowed to call themselves a “House.” A Clan would also only earn the right to call themselves a House if they have a noble in an important position within the Clan.
Because of this combination of informal social structure and the confederated nature of the Phaeton League, there is no single term to describe the League’s political structure.
They are a republic, but those who can serve as representatives are “nobles.” Nobles are an informal title and also not what the “nobles” refer to themselves or referred to as. There is also no singular term for these nobles, which makes the classification even more difficult. Because of this, they are a “noble republic” but there are layers to this republic’s governing bodies. One of these would be the Clan Council, an advisory council with a representative from all Clans. Another would be the League Council, a legislative council where only nobles from Houses could serve. But if a super majority of the Clan Council objects to a law made by the League Council, then this advisory council could overturn the decisions of the League Council.
Below these League-level councils are semi-independent colonial governments. These colonial governments are also vastly different from one another. The Ceres Colony is a de jure constitutional monarchy (but de facto absolute monarchy) ruled by House Caelum. The Vesta Colony is a triarchy ruled by three Houses, one of which is House Vesta. The Pallas Space Station is a corpo-state while the Pallas Asteroid Colony is a direct democracy. The Krome Hierarchy is a cult of some kind where citizens of the hierarchy are either children born to citizens or clones. So on and so forth. Because of these diverse and disconnected colonial government structures that number in the hundreds, infiltration into the League is both easy on a micro level but horrifyingly complex on a macro scale as the tools and skills needed to infiltrate a cult are different from those needed to infiltrate a direct democracy….