Chapter Text
“—confirmation in just a moment, Mr. Gloucester, sir.” The voice coming over the comms was tinny, the audio quality a reflection of the poor signal in this region of space. Lorenz forced himself to smile. The call was audio-only, but the smile would affect the sound of his voice.
“Appreciated. Have a good day.”
“Thank you, sir! And yourself as well—” The very end of the unseen caller’s words were cut off as Lorenz terminated the connection. In the privacy of his ship’s cockpit, Lorenz sighed and scrubbed a hand over his face.
He had been visiting some marginal planet on the edge—just past the edge, really—of Corporate Rim space to assess if it would make a suitable location for a new Gloucester Goods manufacturing complex. As the company heir, such scouting trips were beneath him, but he’d volunteered. The manufactory would primarily serve the company’s small-but-growing augment development branch. The company’s development and sale of augments—mechanical and bio-mechanical devices that enhanced people’s abilities, administered medications, and the like—was Lorenz’s pet project. His old security team would never have allowed him to venture so far out of the central ring, but the company had decommissioned them long ago. These days there was no one to object when Lorenz went haring off into unsecured, barely-civilized space.
The trip had been a bust, and the accommodations had been underwhelming. Nevertheless, he wasn’t particularly looking forward to reaching his residence. Although his suite on the home station was luxuriously appointed, the thought of returning to his empty rooms was stale. He would rattle around like a loose ball-bearing. Maybe he should simply return to his office? Then he’d be around other people, and he’d enhance his reputation for keenness.
Before he could sink deeper into gloom, the comms chimed with confirmation that he had approval to detach from the station. He put on an audio drama to keep him company and lifted off.
Leonie’s cottage looked as cozy as ever, surrounded by bare trees and dusted with snow. The light Leonie always left on glowed in the window and threw a distorted square of bright warmth onto the snow. The sky was growing prematurely dark overhead. It was still mid-morning, but heavy clouds were rolling in from the east. Leonie eyed them. She was in for snow, and lots of it.
The coming snowstorm wasn’t an issue, but she already knew from the prickling on the edge of her awareness that this storm brought more than snow and ice. This planet’s particular quirks included magnetic storms, which kept it isolated despite its proximity to CR space. The Corporates had little use for a planet where seasonal weather had a nasty habit of disrupting communications and other tech, and terraforming the planet too much hassle for too little reward. The planet was consigned to insignificance, which made it perfect for her.
The inhabitants of the planet dealt with the magnetic storms in different ways. Long-distance communications were provided by satellites and a network of heavily-shielded signal towers. As long as there wasn’t an active storm, the towers formed their own, wide-ranging network. The cities relied on hard lines set underground and in protective housings. It was primitive but effective. Some small towns like Sauin Settlement were too far and too poor to afford a hard line all the way to the nearest city, but most of the time they could connect to the tower- and satellite feed. Within the town limits they had a local hard line network.
Leonie lived far beyond the town limits, even beyond its network shadow. On the rare occasions she was compelled to connect with the outside world, she physically visited Sauin Settlement.
She wouldn’t be visiting it any time soon. The coming storm would knock her truck out of commission, at least until she fixed it up. Then the next storm would make it crap out again, and so on. Her cabin was shielded—everything inside would be safe from the magnetic storm—and she’d had her personal tech modified for her own safety many solar-cycles ago, but she still hadn’t gotten around to building a garage for the truck. It was a stupid system—fix the truck, let it break, fix it again—so she mostly didn’t bother. Easier and more peaceful to spend the winter close to home, then fix the truck in the spring when the storms abated.
She parked her truck next to the wooden tool shed, patted its much-mended nose, then let herself into her home. She glanced out the window at the massing clouds. Her security alerts were clear, and she had time for a quick patrol on foot before the storm arrived. Then she could settle in for a few weeks with nothing but her dramas and the forest to keep her company.