///From the author: this is a brief rundown on the location of Europa, as featured in the upcoming Spacers Saga story, The Europa Goodbye. Included are a couple of maps put together to illustrate the basic look and feel of the settlements there, as well as some lore about the history and present of the frozen moon circa 2351 CE, when the story takes place - with luck, this one will be out for you all to see in full sometime next year. When it is, these maps might just make it into the addendums, and the lore therein will be more fleshed out as a matter of course
Map and Background of Europa:
Jupiter's second large moon was first settled in 2085 as part of the Pathfinder Organization’s push to establish a permanent human presence in the Jovian system. During the expansion into deep space which filled much of the 22nd and 23rd centuries, Europa became a hotbed for research projects of questionable moral standing, conducted under the authority of the ICA and specifically the Spacer Corps’ STRATCOM.
After hosting the infamous IDC black site at Kelvin Station throughout the 22nd century, Europa has become a home to more general ICA-sanctioned weapons research, as well as other R&D programs under the purview of the Europan Research Authority (ERA). This organization, though not quite a political entity or a corporation in the strictest sense of the word, nevertheless runs a very tight ship on Europa, and oversees all of the top-secret, illicit, and often dangerous research conducted by the citizen scientists living there.
The ERA maintains relative peace and tranquility amid the ongoing strife of the post-Jovian Civil War, Draconist Crisis-era outer solar system by way of the Europa Security Force (aka as E-Sec), a mercenary police force comprised mostly of former ICA military personnel assigned to crack down hard on local union movements and keep the wheels of the Europan research industrial complex well-greased, by any means necessary.
Map and Background of Conamara City:
As of the mid-24th century, Europa's population is largely contained in a handful of urban housing projects, similar to the "glass cities" on Luna and elsewhere. The two largest of these, Conamara City and Cilixville, are home to more than 84 percent of Europa's population as per the 2250 census, or approximately 960 thousand people. Many of these only live here for the chance to work in the ERA's various R&D programs, even as research assistants and laboratory technicians. The work is hard, and morally dubious, but it pays well.
Conamara City, named after the region in which it is nestled, is the capital of the Europan colony and has a population of approximately 1.2 million, spread between seven wards (numbered by order of their construction). Each of these is a separate and self-contained centrifuge city, approximately five kilometers in diameter and about three kilometers in height from their base to the upper rim. These cities spin on their long axis to provide a modicum of centrifugal gravity to the population, in order to prevent microgravity casualties.
The nine wards of Conamara City are laid out around the Central Habitation Terminal (10), which also houses the shuttle landing pads and administrative offices. It is from this central point that the ERA runs Europa as a sort of technocratic fiefdom, with E-Sec as their force in readiness to contend with errant syndicalists and Draconist sympathizers. As of 2351, ten years after the Jovian Civil War ended, the bosses on Europa are eager to get on with business as usual, even though people still turn up dead with alarming frequency.
Story pitch for The Europa Goodbye:
July 2351. Three hundred years after the Interplanetary Cooperative Administration was founded to oversee its governance, the solar system roils with tension as the Draconist Crisis rages on. After nearly two decades of war tore through the Jovian system, a fragile peace endures on the tiny, frozen moon of Europa, held in place by the iron hand of the Europa Security Force. This corporate-funded mercenary police bureau protects the bottom line if nothing else, and answers to Mars and Ceres before its own citizens.
One of the men charged with keeping the peace here is Darius Maroney, an eight-year veteran of the privately bankrolled J-Sec and a former spacer who fought in the War on Draconism. The first of these identifiers doesn’t endear him to the local populace, but his go-with-the-flow attitude keeps him in the good graces of his superiors. That’s why he is given a special case, one which should see him finally advance past Detective: a simple murder investigation involving a syndicalist fugitive with ties to the Draconist Front.
But this case could blow the doors off of a much larger conspiracy reaching from the freshwater catacombs of Conamara City to the corporate boardrooms back on Mars and Ceres. For the potency of the vast revenue drawn in by interplanetary commerce and outer system resources means that those in power will do anything to keep it, meaning that as Darius Maroney fights to get to the bottom of this web of allegiances and dredges more baggage of the Draconist era to the surface, he might find out just how expendable he is…
More to come, when it's ready...
This is brilliant. Your map work is fantastic as always. We should put these in the final novel when it comes out next year. We could call the big Encyclopedia "the frequency," in honor of this blog, and work them into the chapter breaks.