Bonfires of Passion

When Phillip Staunch conceived the Solar Time Watch, no one thought it could be done.  Decades later, historians realized he had been an astute businessman, recognizing many niches ready to be exploited, and raising the prestige of the STW to that of the old Marshall Service in the American West.  

With no fanfare what so ever, his company enginnered a medium effecient, high impulse ion engine.  It could push air in one configuration and plasma in a second.  To acheive low earth orbit, he simply supplied two of each. 

His petermac launch birds combined with the conastoga lifter changed the economy of space quickly, quietly, and forever.  Suddenly, the average man could afford his own conastoga for the price of a car. And the lift charges on a petermac were on par with gasoline. 

Rather than compete directly with the Rock Rats, Phillip bought asteroid nanobot refined metals to make his habitats directly from existing miners at Celeste on Ceres, or through the Selene Corp on Luna.  He always paid a premium and the first few habitats he had built were termed Phillip's Follies.

It was essential navigation for the averge joe, that there had to be the equivilant of a GPS system for space.  This implied a universal time reference.  Publicly Phillip esposed the great service having time relay stations in space meant. Privately, he knew everyone of them became the new Chicago's of the solar system.

Phillip had stragetically positioned the shell of STW habitats  at galactic right angles to the ecliptic, each relaying the master time signal from Earth on their own repeater frequence and hence allowing electronics to calculate a 4 space position within the Solar System. 

Each relay shell had a habitat termed North, South, East, West, Spin and Anit-Spin.  These were in relation to solar system motion. A sketch of each shell would look like a large skeleton of the child's toy ... a gyroscope.

The first shell was set at 30 light minutes from the sun with the four primary habitats in the middle of the asteroid belt, later in Phillip's son's time a second shell layer was added in the middle of the Kuiper belt at 6 light days from the sun, and a final shell during the presidency of his great granddaughter in the Oort cloud belt at 6 light months.

As man expanded into the solar sytem, each of these habitats began with the STW quarters, and space was rented out to the Hilton chain.  Celeste and Selene Corp supplied trading stations for prospectors which soon turned into permenant stores, and the economy of finding and shipping gases and nutrients back and forth became the expected. 

Over the years, nanotech experts worked on combining both the Bresser type one fusion engine and the Phillips cold ion engine.  The results eventually led to a type 3 fusion drive driving the cost of space travel into the lunar dust.  This drove even more people out to the habitats to find their strike. But just like gold before it, there were the cutthroats and pirates, and the STW being the only organized force in the shells, became also the Marshall service, rather than risk another Belt War.

Operas, docudramas, histories, all began to spring up around the STW.  They had become, defacto, the outer system governement.

The status quo of minor changes remained into the final century of the STW.  An unknown race attacked Sol using ice sheilds and bussard ram jets.  The live pictures of people vacationing within the Oort Casino at the 1 light year mark, being harvested and slaughtered as food animals, aroused the species known as man like no other historical event.

No quarter was asked, none was given.  The Oort Belt STW developed in overnight a spectacular array of carriers, battleships, fighters and assult ships.  Denueing nearly all of the STW personell and about 1/2 of the population of the Oort Shell, the STW fought the invaders to a standstill as the invaders approached Neptune.  The inner system fleets arrived upon the stalemate, anxious to take their chunk of revenge too.  The unkown foe realized they had bit into something they could not digest and tried to run with 6 human fleets on their tails.

But the STW was no more. Its functions would go on, while man was on his way to the nearest stars.

These are the future histories of the people successful or not, who made the STW what it was.   Are you archeologist enough to add to this history? 

Stories should be between 3500 and 7500 words, pulp oriented, with melodrama... and can be from any part of the STW lifetime.  No stories looking back at the STW or childhood stories from the Belt War.

Remember, send me your story in electronic form to review and if I think it is worthy, I'll list it here and ask you for a link to it so people can find it, You're always free to market it and sell it, and even point to the fact its an official story.  All copyrights are retained by you, the author.

Captured the iron will of the STW?  Want to share it with other readers, and have it used in someone's official story? Here's your chance! If I agree, it gets listed as an Official Picture and I'll make sure its available for others to use in their stories.  Just be sure to sign, date, and state your age on your picture.