Rowdy Dead Productions

By David C. Daoust

Constable Joe Axel did not begin his life among the Royal Alliance. No. He started out as ‘Alfred Zhou’ with the Trade Consortium. If it wasn’t for his mother’s failure, he’d probably still be policing the ‘Industrial Stations’ that made up the bulk of Consortium holdings. He wasn’t like his mother, or his sister- he was not educated in the Royal Archives, mainly because he was so young when his mother denounced their titles, all to play business lady among the Consortium. Joe didn’t care about business, about riches, nor about royal blood. He cared about the law, and its enforcement.

Joe changed his name to avoid the shame that seemed to follow him wherever he went. He picked Joe, because that’s what most everyone had taken to calling him throughout his life: as a teenager, among the police academy, among the department that employed him. Zhou was pronounced Joe- pretty easy change in his opinion- and Axel, well, Axel just sounded tough, another personal opinion; ‘Joe Axel’, way better than ‘Alfred Zhou’. Changing his name wasn’t going to be enough though, he had to leave the Trade Consortium behind.

Living among the two societies, was such a different experience.

Growing up with the Trade Consortium, certain ideas- just weren’t propagated. There was a sense of not talking about ideas that were considered the ‘Old Ways’. That’s what they called them ‘the Old Ways of the Royal Alliance’; of the Ark Age. That sense of ‘don’t even say that’, when it came to socialism, permeated the culture.

This is how he was raised. So when he moved to the Royal Alliance City-station, and was introduced to all the different ideas, ‘socialist ideas’, ultimately it made him feel like a traitor. Not because he did not like the ideas, but because he did. It was different and fresh and new. And when he found out just how ‘wrong’ these ideas really were when compared to the Trade Consortium culture that was pounded into his very being, he felt like he was duped into liking something evil, monstrous…

Of course, once he got comfortable with the new society, among the reality of day to day life, the propagated ideas of the Viceroys and their Media Darlings, were all the same. He was just policing another section of the Onion. Rather than protecting corporate goods, he was protecting Viceroy goods. The brand was simply different; the ‘company line’ changed.

This crushing of ideas, which both sides tended to do, well, Joe Axel felt this was a poor move on both their parts. Ideas don’t go away. The only thing you successfully cover up is whether an idea is ‘good’ or not. Like a joke, Joe mused. You can get this great joke, and get great laughs in certain company. Maybe boos in others. But if you tell it at the wrong place, in the wrong way, or at the wrong time, it can be just a ‘bad’ idea. Never telling that joke again, doesn’t tell anybody if it’s good or bad. It just disappears. So, it is just a matter of time till someone comes up with it all over again. If you kept telling that joke, they’d of heard it- they’d know what reactions would come from where, they’d know when it was good, when it was bad… Joe could think about these things all day, it wouldn’t change what the world was.

In Joe’s mind hiding ideas is just as bad as book burning. All information should be readily available to anyone that wants it, at any time. Laws that protected freely sharing ideas- were laws Joe wouldn’t mind adding to his list of ‘laws to enforce’. He doubted he’d ever experience a society like that in his lifetime though. The Onion was divided, split; all for power, for control- to protect the Status quo.

Joe enjoyed his new life as a Constable. His new name freed him from more than just shame. Freed him from everyone knowing exactly who he was at any given moment, which was his experience growing up in the Trade Consortium. The Zhou family was one of very few Royal families that joined the Trade Consortium.

He doubted any citizens of the Alliance would recognize him on sight… but The Constable uniform included a full faced mask, so, even if someone could recognize him by his features here, it would be impossible. No one was ever the wiser, beside the higher-ups that hired him, that he was now a policeman on a City-station that his family had once ruled the airways, as Royalty, throughout the Ark-age.

His ancestral home, the City-station named ‘Titanholm’, was one of the four City-stations that were hauled through the galaxy by the Ark-ship ‘Rhea Epsilon’.

Titanholm was unique of all the City-stations, because it was deployed within the atmosphere of the Gas Giant ‘Iopa’; like some sort of cloud city or something. Of the three Gas Giants of the belt, Iopa, was the only one whose gravity would allow such an addition. Iopa was the only gas giant whose gravity wasn’t so high, that it would crush anything within its extensive atmosphere, under its own increased weight. There was only a ten percent increase in weight on Iopa; a fact that had changed Joe’s physique immensely over the years.

While the gravity of the smaller moons could be increased- thanks to Artificial Gravity technology- Gravity could never be decreased. The altered moons were so enhanced by tech, between the Droid Cities and orbiting satellites that projected such an Artificial Gravity field over its entirety, they were closer to space-station than natural satellites at this point. They said without these AG fields, someone could jump clear into orbit on some of the smaller moons.

Titanholm had a pretty strong grip on Iopa gas mining. The constant flow of solid work for such miners, kept the gangsters at bay, and the corrupted youth, of the infamous ‘Corridor Crews’, were at a minimum. Titanholm was one of the strongest and cleanest of the City-stations; even if all that gas went directly under the local Viceroy’s control.

The only other station in the atmosphere was an Industrial Hub known as ‘Deephull’. Deephull was Consortium owned and run. Joe had walked a beat in such Hubs in his days with the Consortium. Hub stations were made up, mostly of factories, docks, and warehouses, but there were living quarters that could rival a city station. Areas for employees to live with their families, not like the old-timey ‘Crucibles’ that led to riots before the War.

Joe lived and worked on Titanholm now, his only wish- that the Zhou name would just disappear, completely. He wanted a chance to start a life, maybe a family, without the past looming over all their head. He did not want his children to hide who they were, the way he tried to. He hoped with enough time, enough distance on the incident… Yet every time he’d thought it was behind him- he’d see his sister in the news again… ‘Sweet Honey Zhou the Pirate Queen’ digging it all back up again and again. He could not believe his sister was a pirate.

In all honesty, Honey was a stranger to him. They had extremely different lives; they’d followed completely different paths. Joe might have recognized her before she became so famous, but only because of her strong resemblance to his mother. Now, everyone knew her face, her voice… her name.

He just wanted that name gone.

When the piracy increased, throughout the trade routes from Iopa to Neo Vir’ees, Joe never imagined his investigation would put him on a gunship that would come toe to toe with the ‘Black Bruise’.