Table of Contents
Admiral Heston Reyes - First Interview
The Interview
Admiral Heston Reyes (Ret)
Pensacola, Florida - Late August 2045 A.D.
It's a humid sunny Florida summer day, though one can see the clouds of Hurricane Issac and hear the distant thunder as the outer bands of the storm are starting to become visible on the far horizon. Standing before me, just beyond the reach of the surf and looking out to the sea is the subject of my interview.
Dressed in board shorts and an oversized loudly decorated Hawaiian shirt, the former Admiral of Ghost Fleet plays the look of the tourists of old that used to frequent the beach before the arrival of the Shil’vati. Currently taking an active hand in rebuilding the Naval Aviation Museum located on the newly renewed NAS Pensacola, he acts and carries himself like those retirees. Yet despite looking like a well worn human man in his sixties, the quirks of genetically modified humans from the Sundala Starzone have allowed him to live nearly two-hundred years thus far. He turns to me a moment later and smiles in a grandfatherly manner that elder human men have become famous for.
Despite sixty years of the conflict being mostly ‘cool’ with the shooting being mostly isolated to unspoken but agreed upon regions of space. All the same things were still rather high strung between us, the United American Starzone, and the finger of the Imperium that had established itself down in our neck of the galaxy. The fact they were squatting on a few of our colonies certainly didn’t help matters, the nobility as you know doesn’t like to give up ground once someone has appointed themselves the rulers of it. No, for the most part the talks and diplomatic angle for the return of those systems was simply a dog chasing its tail and most in the more military wings of our society knew it would eventually come down to blows.
[I raised my red scaled hand somewhat, drawing up the holographics of my pad before us, showing two solar systems. They bear the names of Mobile and Concord with an additional third showing only partial red marks of occupation.]
These systems?
[He glances down, slipping his own fingers into the glowing hologram and manipulating the data in a manner that betrays long decades of experience with such interfaces.]
It still amazes me how quickly your people can pull such things together, I met more than a few of your kind uptime, and more still downtime, I suppose it's just in your nature like it is in the Erbian’s to worm their way into all aspects of something. You simply have to know, then again with neighbors like the Shil’vati what you don’t know…
[He trails off for a moment before returning to the subject at hand.]
Mobile, Concord, and Cascadium, the anchor for one of our development arms, the frontier we had along the border with the Mandate and one of the hottest zones for the Imperial Legion to try and control on our approaches. Of course it was nothing compared to the space around the Mandate’s Rump, just a continuous shooting war with those goddamn Russians and their Mandate proxies.
KSPN?
Ah! An acronym in cyrillic, it stands for the Coalition of Progressive People's Systems in the English language, in Russian its Koalitsiya Sistem Progressivnykh Narodov, a bit more of a mouthful for me I’m afraid.