Torpedoes

Suddenly Yazmin
realized what was going
on. It nearly froze her
heart. Still, she needed
to hear him say it.
“And?”
“And we ain’t got
enough engines left to
pull us out of her
gravity well. The dive
we’re taking into that
big, wide ocean is
terminal, and I mean
that in every sense of
the word.”
Only one thing left to
do: activate the ship’s
life pod. It didn’t have
much in the way of
engines itself, but the
jets designed to blast
the pod away from an
exploding ship might
thrust them far enough
away from the planet to
make a difference—if
they were lucky.
After all, the ship had
gone into a nasty spin.
Although the Betafort’s
artificial gravity was
still holding together
well enough to keep her
from getting dizzy,
timing the life pod’s
release was going to be
tricky.
If she miscalculated—or
even if the
button stuck for half a
second—the pod would
jet off in the wrong
32
ASP Technocracy
The ASP Technocracy began many millennia
ago as a corporation on Old Earth
composed of several of the most powerful
research and development firms on the
planet. The name originally stood for Allied
Science Proliferators, but it was long
ago officially changed to just the initials
ASP. It picked up the “Technocracy” handle
when the corporation relocated its central
offices to its own planet and instigated its
own independent provincial government
for the province it was in.
ASPers, as the ASP’s people are known,
focus their attentions almost exclusively on
the use of technology to improve their lives.
They dabble in genetic engineering, cybernetics,
nanotech and other more advanced
sciences, constantly making some small
improvements to both themselves and
their creations. This has had an odd effect
on their politics.
The ASPers are governed by a council of
their most accomplished scientists, thus
making ASP a technocracy. Their domain
grew larger and larger over the years until
the became one of the most monumental
of the Empire’s provinces. Still, the Technocracy
had an Achilles’ heel.
Left Defenseless
The ASPers had curried great favor from
the Emperor by providing the Imperial Dynasty
Throne with the first crack at all of
its new technologies (after taking advantage
of them itself, of course). In return,
the Empire handled nearly every aspect of
the Technocracy’s defense. This included
just about everything except for the ASP
Technocracy’s corporate and governmental
intelligence gathering work, which the
ASPers naturally wanted to keep to themselves.