Bastion Saturn Read Online Free

especially. Work? Jobs! Jobs were way-stations from pile of shit to pile of shit. Nevertheless, his survival instinct ruled for the moment. The uniform was a positive development, and he vowed to himself, beyond the empty vow that he had made to the Hanson Chamber of Commerce, that he would give this opportunity his best shot. Being a cop meant being something greater that just another cog in some clockwork. Being a cop meant being an overseer of the greater society, someone who helped his fellow citizens stay within the social contract. Perhaps best of all, being a cop gifted him with power. Caleb had never felt powerful (except for when he had successfully made off with things). Power, anchored in the foundation of the ruling class (for that was who had the real power), felt exhilarating.
    The Pandoran flotilla comprised one large container ship surrounded by five smaller police ships. Caleb was directed to bring his shuttle into the formation by a police sergeant named Gunderson who was directing things from the bridge of the container ship. In a society without an official military, the formation felt very marshal to Caleb.
    Though the orbits of Titan and Dione caused the two moons to come relatively close to each other on a regular basis, for whatever reason, the Pandoran flotilla chose to rendezvous with the smaller moon when Dione’s orbit was on the opposite side of Saturn from Titan. As far as Caleb was concerned, this required an illogically long trip—but who was he to question it?
    After a few days of mind-bogglingly boring travel, with little to no communication, they finally approached their destination. As the fifteenth largest Saturn satellite, Dione was yet another pockmarked gray body, not terribly different from the bulk of Saturn’s airless moons. Primarily a dirty ice ball, its craters served as foundations for the domed acreage that was the hallmark of the farming community. Huge mirror-arrays guided the nurturing sunshine to the crops beneath and automatically tracked the star to maintain their intense focus as the moon orbited its gas-giant mother. When the Sun was out of view, hydrogen power plants did the rest, converting the energy locked up in the ice into electricity for UV LED banks. The climate inside each dome was adjusted for the type of crop, though most crops on Dione were of the cannabis and poppy variety.
     
    The 3,942,021 people who had set out for a new life in the Saturn System had a natural libertarian streak, bonded by a consensus that this new land of opportunity, made up of likeminded, live-and-let-live people, would need very little in the way of law enforcement. Such a conceit naturally assumed that every man woman and child would choose to be armed. What better way for a population to honestly thrive than to ensure that individuals were well armed? Nothing keeps folks in line better than cold loaded steel (or in most cases a short-range nerve disrupter) nicely displayed on everyone’s hips. As a result of this mutual understanding, only one hundred cops had made up the original token force, in a planetary-lunar system that far exceeded the landmass of humble old Earth. In a community where everyone had a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag, there were nearly infinite possibilities for treading.
    Without a nanny-state enemy to fear, and theoretically safely removed from the evils of AI and a planet full of ABE jerk-offs, the natural thing for these humans to do was to find new enemies. Cliques formed, with sides taken and property squabbled over, and in the land grab that ensued with the settlement of any of Saturn’s sixty-two utilizable moons, inevitably conflicts arose.
    After the chaos of year one, the police force expanded to eighteen-hundred mostly disaffected individuals who had found that colonizing grit didn’t come to everyone. Additionally, the mighty Bez Hanson, father of the new colony, had asked for deputized law enforcement volunteers to fill the gaps. These folks