New Hades City

I'm trying to find out some more on Andiron and the local situation so we can hunt down the Reapers. It's becoming clear that they're a lot better dug in then we thought, and even locating them is not going to be easy. So every little scrap helps. This is a transcript of a discussion I had with Raoul Fassan, one of the Chasseur's hovertank commanders. He turned out to be very willing to talk and had a lot to say on the subject. I've annotated it where needed - NK

The city... Well crap, let me see. Been a while since I was there. Ray (Major Raymond Terrace - NK) wanted us to keep out of there after the mess we got into when we landed. A few of us headed for the city and that's when we had our first blow-up with the Reapers. Two of us ended up dead and another two were Shanghaied into their ranks. Never saw those poor bastards again either. It's also how they got onto us, and when they started 'suggesting' that we should join them 'for our own good'. Plus with how remote we were, sneaking off wasn't that viable an option. But I hear stories and had a few good leads that kept me in the loop. Helpful to know, 'cause I was hedging my bets against when everything fell apart. I mean, come on, look at us. You know it was inevitable. Only Ray kept saying we were going to get off-world somehow, but I don’t think anyone really believed him.

So there's not much to say about its past. What we've got here is the third version of the city, and it's by far and away the worst. The first version was when this hellhole was Hellbrent - yeah, I know, I figure Hellhole would have been a better name - and a part of the Rim Worlds Republic. The capitol was called Hellsgate because they had a pattern going and so sure, why not?

Anyway, Hellgate grew to be a pretty big place during the Rim Worlds, what with regular access to clean water and food and all that other crap that people need. It was enough so that Amaris even had troops on the world, if you can believe it. Yeah, somebody thought that this rock was valuable too. Crazy.

So when the Rim Worlds falls apart, ol' Hellbrent is abandoned and left to its fate. The water purifiers break down and the population collapses. Hellsgate doesn't fare to well, because what do you know, when you take away food and water cities tend to die. The place was reduced to a ghost town, a huge city but with nobody in it but the poor bastards who couldn’t find a way off the planet. Same happened to every other city on the planet, though, and a good number of them just simply vanished.

That’s how the Circrinians found it when they took over the world. And like everything else, they had to rename the place as well because they liked doing that for whatever reason. I dunno, maybe when you have a pirate-based government that's what you do. So when Hellbrent became Andiron, Hellsgate became Firegarde because the Circrinian's love their nonsense names. Seriously. Under their rule things get a bit better as the population begins to bounce back, thanks again to that whole pirate thing. Helps when your leaderships getting fat off their ill-gotten gains.

But the real boom times came when the Word started running the show. They really got big on the infrastructure on Andiron and built all sorts of crap, like water purifiers and a huge-arse space port and the like. They did a lot of redevelopment of the capitol too, turning it from a shantytown built over some ruins into something that was honest to god modern and the like. I've seen pictures of it too; Firegarde looked like a legit city in the Inner Sphere, not some backwater hellhole.

And then, for some reason known only to The Master himself, they bombarded it form orbit. Because the Word, am I right? Between the attacks and the resultant fires and the inevitable collapse of the planetary government, they probably killed over a million. And since the Federation itself stopped existing, nobody was coming to their help. So the survivors were left with dick.

They rebuilt, though. True, it wasn’t anything grand. No it was just a shantytown built out of whatever they could pry from the rubble. It's not like they had much to go on, but the city, or what was left of it, still had some clean water and the like, which was better then anyone else was getting on this rock. I mean, look at where we were living. A fragging fish cannery on the shores of a dead sea. And we got one of the better options.

I couldn't say when, cause I’m no sociologist, but at some point the city got itself another name. Somebody remembered what it was before the Circrinians took over and somehow the name 'New Hades' got started. It wasn't like it was official at first, but it quickly stuck and so that's what the city's called for whatever passes for official around here.

I mean, it fits, because again, it’s an utter hellhole. The city government comes in the form of some guy who calls himself 'Sharkey' for whatever reason. Never met the man myself, but everyone says he's well, a shark. He’s got his hands in everything that happens in the city and is living it up off the proceeds. He basically controls the city because he's so well connected and knows everything that's going on. Oh, and also because he's got a lance of BattleMechs to make sure nobody disagrees.

Sharkey was chummy - see what I did there - with Bronski, the old leader of the Reapers. No idea how things went after Kaine took over.

That aside, there's a lot going on that he's living off. The pirates bring a lot into the planet, one way or another, and he does get his cut of everything. And New Hades, well... you name it, it had it. And more to the point, everything was legal too, since it all went into Sharkey's pocket. Gambling, pit-fights, drugs, girls... Whatever you wanted. Hell, Jonas (Jonas Cruz, the Hunchback pilot - NK) was regularly getting Stoatblaster from some of the traders, made in New Hades' best drug labs. Managed to hide it from Ray too.

Though a word of warning; avoid the girls and drinking the water. Both are full of diseases. Some of our boys found that out the hard way.

'nother thing you want to avoid is the Warrens. They're the bits of the city that are still rubble and nobody was arsed building over. Those are where all the truly desperate go and where Sharkey doesn't even bother to police, largely because he won't make a Groat off of them. (Groats are what pases for the local currency. They're essentially valueless outside of the city - NK) If you don't get shanked by a murder hobo, then a chunk of falling rubble will get ya.

The pit-fights are the best, though. I had a deal to trade tapes with one of the trade caravans, I gave them old vids of Solaris matches or whatever else and they'd give us vids of those. I mean, they're as brutal as all hell. They go all the way from unarmed submission fights up to weapons and to the death, so you get to see all kinds of insane crap, like chainsaws and whatever else. They're a huge racket all over the city, and play hand in glove with the drugs trade. And yeah, Sharkey's getting his cut of all of it.

You probably actually did me a favour there. I got one of the traders hooked on vids of an old League soap, but we were about to run out of tapes. Guy would have probably gutted me when he realised he'd never find out who was the father of Media’s baby. Heh.

The Reapers have a presence in the city, yeah, but they don't operate out of it. Even when Bronski was in charge and all budddy-buddy with Sharkey, the pair of them probably still saw the other as being rivals. You know, too big for the one city and all that. And Sharkey knew that if he ever pissed Bronski off enough, the Reapers could flatten the city for laughs. So they played nice with each other, knowing it was in their mutual best interests to treat each other well.

Oh, if you do head in there and come cross a former Chasseur by the name of Frank Yazzan, let me know. That jerk owes me money and ran off to avoid paying me.