Thirty-two years before the story begins, a group of adventurers had used the abundant energy storage possibility enabled by a recent innovation to leave the land on an enormous floating shipyard and anchor in the middle of the Pacific to start a new lifestyle on mega rafts. Now there are around 350 rafts, each hosting about 12,000 residents and industrial and agricultural sites. It is a city (Niout) of more than three million people with its own government and defence force. They run a planned (socialist) economy. Religions are not banned; however, temples and clergy are.

CLARR (late twenties) is a Niout-born resident, working at recycling and plantation as every resident has two halftime jobs. He occasionally has sex with LORYA, a young and beautiful Niout-born doctor; however, they both are reluctant to call it a relationship. Besides, Clarr has a crush on SUSAN, a beautiful sporty woman who seems to have some sort of a relationship with Clarr’s work colleague and close friend. Susan hints to Clarr that she likes sporty and cool men, not someone humble like him.

TARN is a top-rank commander in the Defence Quarters. This defence force is tasked with thwarting the attacks from the outer world, never letting them grow into a fight or war. The global capitalist world has reasons not to let this new lifestyle flourish, and they keep coming back with armed fleets to start a conflict. The Defence Quarters develop secret methods or high-tech tricks to bounce the assaults. These are highly confidential, called “shells”.

One of the other three top-rank commanders gets lured into sharing the shell details with the US by an online AI algorithm, leaving Niout with only one shell to use, which Tarn saves at the last second. Nevertheless, that one gets revealed at the next attack. So now Niout has no defence, apart from certain secret instructions prepared by the founders.

The secret instructions will have to be employed pretty soon while a hostile fleet is approaching. The

 

Genre Science Fiction/Fantasy