Sailskimmer

The illustration depicts a typical Djong-Kok sailskimmer, configured for service as a krill-harvest vessel. With minor modifications, craft of the same basic design are employed for such varied roles as piracy, merchant trade, transport, and fleet combat. Djong-Kok war-junks are often distinguished from civilian craft by the presence of armored hulls, broadside gun embrasures, and decorative martial designs on both sides of the main sails.

The aggregate populations of the Djong-Kok states together comprise the majority of the global total on Shindai. Descended from the original terraformers and colonizers of the planet, the numerous Djong-Kok peoples and states are divided among a number of rival factions, all centered on the ancient corporate heartlands of Shindai's northern hemisphere. There, before the fall of interstellar civilization, affiliated subsidiaries of the Haifeng-Hayashi Group had sowed the seeds of human settlement in the Corvus system. After purchasing colonization rights from the French astronomical consortium that had backed the first manned exploratory survey of the system, the Haifeng-Hayashi Group immediately contracted its subsidiary planetary engineering division to begin terraforming operations on Shindai. The decades long process was completed on schedule, molding an arid and marginally habitable world into a planet ripe for aquaculture cultivation and human habitation. With the aid of solar reflector arrays assembled in orbit, the polar ice caps of Shindai were melted to flood much of the hitherto featureless planetary surface with shallow seas, which were seeded with hardy strains of genetically modified algae designed to boost atmospheric oxygen levels and provide the nutrient base for the artificially constructed aquatic ecosystem that was to follow. High-yield plankton, specially tailored for local environmental conditions, were introduced to the shallow waters of Shindai. These initial seed-species in turn provided the raw biomass for the establishment of planet-wide cultivation of hyperkrill, the premiere export that the ecological engineers and financial analysts of Haifeng-Hayashi predicted would guarantee the greatest return on their decades-long investment in the Corvus system. To protect against the slightest chance of natural misfortune, orbital weather control platforms ensured that environmental conditions never drifted too far from the optimal equilibrium points required for the exponential growth of the hyperkrill population. Within a few years of seeding, automated harvester fleets plied the waters of Shindai, collecting and processing millions of tons of hyperkrill for shipment to the equatorial space elevator that would send them up the gravity well, and from there aboard interstellar freighters to points further beyond, as dictated by the forces of the free market.

However, the severe market fluctuations and logistical strains caused by the simmering Wars of Dissolution marked the beginning of the end of Shindai's halcyon days as an agrarian cornucopia. Fewer and fewer outbound shipping convoys risked traveling the increasingly perilous Outer Rim trade routes, now the favored hunting grounds of commerce raiders from a dozen fractious belligerents, so while shares of foodstuffs rose in value to dizzying heights unimaginable during the long years of peace, an immense surplus of export product accumulated at Shindai. As the bitter conflagration of war burned its way through sector upon sector of colonized space, drawing ever nearer to the Corvus system, the tens of thousands of employees of the Haifeng-Haiyashi Group and its subsidiaries on Shindai prepared for the anticipated day of evacuation by mothballing all corporate installations and assets in orbit and planetside, while placing billions of tons of unexported harvest into long term storage. The process was barely begun when three battle-weary squadrons of the Interstellar Commerce Authority jumped into the Corvus system, with an entire shock division of the Combined People's Liberation Fleet in hot pursuit.

The subsequent cataclysmic clash in high orbit above Shindai completely obliterated the carefully engineered orbital infrastructure and showered the planet below with megatons of flaming wreckage, the smashed and smoldering detritus of two mortally wounded fleets locked in a final fiery death ride that ended on the surface of Shindai. Caught between the warring survivors of the crashed fleets, who clashed over the precious depots of stored foodstuffs and supplies, the thousands of Formosan aquaculture engineers and Singaporean terraforming techs marooned on Shindai fled to the relative safety of the remote weather stations and hydroponics installations far from the southern debris fields of the dead fleets. Fortunately for them, the destruction of the weather control satellites provided another unexpected reprieve by gradually unleashing the cyclopean equatorial storm systems that had hitherto been suppressed via the delicate orbital platforms. Thus were the Haifeng-Hayashi employees of the northern realms effectively isolated from the depredations of the military remnants in the southern hemisphere. In their peaceful seclusion, they struggled to preserve the deteriorating colonial infrastructure that the company had so painstakingly constructed before the fall of interstellar civilization. But as the complex network of automated harvesters and transport power grids began to inevitably fail, the engineers and their descendants withdrew to the rocky island outcroppings and archipelagos that stood above the flooded plains, transforming once bleak irrigation substations and meteorological outposts into bustling settlements and cities. The foundation was thus laid for the thousand city-states of the Djong-Kok, as the descendants of the corporate employees came to see themselves. Although often isolated from one another by vast distances and difficult terrain, the inhabitants of the nascent city-states faithfully preserved many elements of the corporate culture that they had inherited and felt a strong sense of kinship with their fellow Djong-Kok states.

Each city-state came to rely on a combination of hydroponic algal cultivation and hyperkrill harvesting to provide for its population, and over the centuries, they came to master the latter through the novel construction of increasingly efficient vessels for the traversal of the mudflat steppes and shallow seas. The sailskimmer, as the most popular variant was called, was a spindly craft of neo-bamboo and synth-fiber capable of crossing both gentle terrain and calm waters, if provided a stiff breeze. With flotillas of this versatile amphibious design, the Djong-Kok were able to effortlessly make the otherwise laborious journey to the krill spawning grounds of the open steppe, regaining a little of what had been lost with the loss of the old automated harvesters. The sailskimmers also empowered the development of a flourishing inter-state coastal trade, which in turn fostered piracy among the more impoverished of the Djong-Kok clans. Masquerading as krill-fishers by day and seizing cargo skimmers by night, the sail skimmers of the southern clans were to prove a constant menace to the more prosperous Djong-Kok states, whose war-junk captains were hesitant to pursue their pirate foes into the storm-wracked wastes of the equatorial latitudes.

And it was from the equatorial wastes that the last and greatest threat to the Djong-Kok would come. After two centuries of secluded isolation, the peaceful spell was broken by the appearance of a Red vanguard on the storm-darkened southern horizon. While the Djong-Kok had fended off a dozen previous attempts by the military remnants of the south to penetrate their northern domains, those ill-fated raiders of yore had consisted of only a few squadrons of half-starved and desperate fugitives, whose vessels and crews had already been battered nearly to pieces by the titanic storm systems they had been forced to brave in their crossing of the equatorial latitudes. Now, though, entire shock brigades of the ravenous Great Red Fleet had forced their way through a slim gap in the equatorial storm front in a desperate bid to escape total destruction after the decisive Nine Islands Campaign, which had seen the Grand Armada of the Great Red Fleet shattered in open battle by the veteran squadrons of the Kommersant and the stolid regulars of the Texacor Battalion. Although their ranks had been utterly decimated by the time the last ragged remnants of the Red Fleet broke through the howling storm front, the battle-hardened survivors of the Long Flight now gazed upon rich domains ripe for conquest. Without pausing to lick their bloody wounds, the battered Red brigades surged forth in their thousands, with torn and crimson banners fluttering at their fore, and set upon the frontier settlements of the Djong-Kok states. One by one, the ancient strongholds and cities of the Djong-Kok fell before the ravenous hordes of the Red brigades. Two centuries of relative peace and prosperity had taught the Djong-Kok little of the arts of war, and their peasant levies and war-junk flotillas were unable to offer much more than token resistance before the battle-hardened ranks of the Great Red Fleet. Still smarting from their recent defeat by the hated squadrons of the Kommersant, the now victorious Reds showed no mercy in their conquest of the Djong-Kok realms. The ancestral temple shrines and corporate archives of the defeated Djong-Kok cities were put to the torch, and no quarter was given to those Djong-Kok captains and levies who vainly struggled to hold back the Red hordes.

In conquered cities and settlements across the northern hemisphere, the hereditary rulers of the propertied executive class were executed en masse for crimes of corporate oppression, and their wealth and holdings seized by the Red officers and commissars who would come to rule in their stead. Although they proclaimed themselves revolutionary liberators and distant kinsmen to the peoples they now ruled, the warriors of the Great Red Fleet had soon established themselves as the aristocratic overlords of the now subjugated Djong-Kok peoples. But with their hunger temporarily sated and their ambitions fixed on a triumphal campaign against their traditional Kommersant enemies to the south, the rulers of the Red Fleet were content to simply displace the former executive class and retain the highly stratified corporate class structure in being if not in name. For the Djong-Kok commoners, the Red overlords, with their unintelligible dialect and barbarian ways, remained a distant and alien ruling class more familiar for their oppressive martial law and demanding tribute quotas than their self-proclaimed revolutionary ideology. The traditional heart of the Djong-Kok economy, based on the twin pillars of hydroponics and the krill-harvest, was allowed to continue as it had in previous centuries, albeit collectivized and overseen by Red supervisors who collected most of the produce for the state and cracked down on the bourgeois cultivation of teas and silks.

For those fugitives of the former corporate executive class and the Djong-Kok loyalists who refused to submit to the oppressive Red regime, safe harbor and refuge was to be found in the secluded pirate archipelagos of the windswept equatorial latitudes. There, they found many sympathizers and allies among the numerous outcast bandit clans of the Djong-Kok, who viewed the newly established Red domains as a lucrative source of loot and ransom for their raiding expeditions. Annual campaigns by successive Red commanders to subjugate the bandit clans frequently returned empty handed, as the nimble sailskimmers of the pirate bands swiftly fled beyond the stormy horizon at first sight of the Great Red Fleet or simply bribed corrupt Red commanders to abandon their pursuit. Left largely to their own devices by an increasingly exasperated series of Red fleet commanders, the more prosperous outlaw states straddling the equatorial territories would come, in time, to be the stalwart protectors of the continuity of free Djong-Kok civilization.