Ptichka, near Saturn
We were goofing off around Saturn when the call first came in. Officially we were on the clock; a friend of a friend of a friend who worked for JPL had asked us to do a maintenance run on Cassini and take some HD movies of Titan for the enlightenment of the scientific community while we were at it. As a rule this wasn't the sort of thing we usually did, but a job's a job, it paid okay (considering the bitch of a currency conversion rate) and it was as good an excuse as any to spend three weeks out on the edge of the system. We'd canned the Titan footage and were in the process of getting a few candid shots of Cassini just for giggles when Ptichka's email server chimed.
It was the ship's email, not one of our personal accounts, that meant it was something the Nation wanted to discuss. Nation email is always interesting to read; when you've got several thousand ships and several hundred habitats in the solar system representing twenty different fandoms plus maybe another six dozen independent ships & stations comprising somewhere around a million people all told, and there's one all-call mailing list that everybody's subscribed to... well. At times it can downright fucking hilarious.
Anyway, I punched up the old laptop we'd crazy-glued into the control panel and took a look at whatever the Nation wanted to herd us into this time. What I got was this:
Date: 5 May 2012 From: command@sos.co.jp (SOS Brigade Supreme Headquarters) To: all-call@nation.fen Subj: CONVENTION!!!! Note all fan: We came empty here the earth of one thing of heart: Because you become the hero. Our hearts it echoes the dream of bravery in our centers, that is our obligations to those dreams fufill! Our 2 weeks of the group hearby call of SOS for splendid conference where that of heart and, at the place of Phobos it should you grasp from today. There we organize because because of the star you become the hero, start! Everyone who obtains this message is invited. It has your boat and your story, do! --SOS Brigade Supreme Headquarters!
From the message text, I could tell two things. First, somebody needed to shoot their machine translator before it could harm helpless verbiage again. Second, we were going to have to hit the inner system earlier than I'd previously thought.
Whoever "SOS Brigade Supreme Headquarters" were, they'd called a Convention, and out of season to boot. Conventions are serious business for Fen; since we moved off Earth, they've become sort of our United Nations. Every so often the movers, shakers and poseurs of the Nation get together, get drunk, get laid, exchange pleasant threats, debate the few issues that can't be handled inside our own little factions, make a few policy statements like "bow before our might, pathetic Earthlings!" and then go home with hangovers and some interesting blackmail material. So it's not entirely unlike mundane government.
The point is, when somebody calls a Convention the major power players in the major fractions (along with free agents like us) have to come out, hear what the organizer has to say and be civil to each other for a week or so. We're so scattered through the system that while Conventions might still happen once a year, actually getting to attend one instead of telepresencing it or watching the results on the news was a major event.
In this case, the SOS Brigade (whoever they were) had called for a Convention and had specifically invited everybody. Thankfully they wanted to use Phobos; the Martians were using it as base camp for their terraforming ops, the place had been mostly hollowed out and there was plenty of room for everybody and their rides. What they were calling the Convention for on the other hand... the machine translation fucked that up enough that I couldn't quite figure it out. Idly hoping that whoever was speaking at the con had better translators, I fired off a quick reply:
From: ptichka@sovietairforce.fen (Soviet Air Force Central Committee) To: command@sos.co.jp Subj: Re: CONVENTION!!!! We'll be there with bells on. Will also bring booze from the Ringed Planet. --VVS
Figuring that should keep them happy, if confuse them a bit, I turned off the email client, opened the navicomp, set up a course for Phobos and turned on the intercom.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I said in my best airline-pilot voice. "I'm afraid that our vacation around sunny, tropical Saturn has been cut short. We've been invited to a Convention at Phobos, so if you guys will pack up the cameras and make sure we've got enough booze to last us, we'll be on our way. Launch window in-" I glanced at the nav window "-one hour."
