I've just had a notion for a story that could be very cool, if anyone wants to go for it…
I'd like to see a murder mystery set against the backdrop of the Imperial Space Command. There's a lot of activity going on around asteroid mining in MK2K, and the cultists of Nasoj (the Brotherhood of the Sepulchre) are gradually infiltrating the ISC in order to eventually use those asteroids as weapons in a mass human sacrifice. Obviously, not everyone in ISC is going to go along with this, so some high-level people are simply going to have to be removed.
For the cultists' purposes, the most important person to remove is the commander in charge of the space station where asteroids are brought for processing. I haven't established anything about this place or its people, but the following traits seem reasonable:
- It would be located at the L4 libration point in the gravitational system between Earth and its moon, Celine. This is a gravitationally stable position that would allow the station to remain locked in place relative to the Earth and the moon — a good way to stay close to the planet without being so close that one can't safely work with things like asteroids (and also not so close as to spend huge amounts of fuel moving ships out of Earth's gravitational pull).
- Outer space has nothing to connect it to the Aether, so mana is extremely scarce. All magic on the station depends on mana batteries that are shipped up from Earth; since this is very expensive, the use of magic is heavily restricted. Mages who want to cast spells on board the station will either be expending their own life force (which is extremely dangerous) or they'll have to depend on a direct physical connection to a mana cell, which might be held in some kind of backpack. These would not be given out lightly, and their use would be closely monitored.
- The station's primary business would consist of sending out ships to locate asteroids of usable size and valuable composition — either valuable minerals, or clean ice. These capture teams would install something on the asteroid's surface that would allow them to move it back to the L4 station, where it would be mined and the resulting ore sent back down to Earth. (Water from harvested ice would be kept for hydroponics and other uses aboard the station.) I'm not sure what tech would be used to move the asteroid — perhaps a pulse-detonation engine, using small nuclear blasts to accelerate the asteroid toward L4.
- The station would also need some means of snagging and decelerating the incoming asteroids. I'm open to suggestions on this, too; maybe a magnetic impeller of some kind that would push against the iron ore in the asteroids. The "ice cubes" couldn't be captured by this method, but they'd also have less inertia, so perhaps they could use normal thrusters to maneuver these into position.
- Making gravity with magic would be too mana-expensive, so the station would either have to have rotating habitat sections or it would make do with null-gravity. The harvester ships would definitely be null-grav.
- Moving asteroids would be a slow process. The capture teams would need to start one rock moving, go back to L4, go out, start another rock moving, etc., and would probably keep this up for months before the first one they sent out arrives at the station. This means that a whole lot of rocks are in transit at any one time, and the station staff needs to calculate how long it will take to process each rock so they can time when the next one should arrive. (This is how the cultists eventually plan to launch their barrage of asteroids at Earth: no one will know that the rocks are off-course until it's too late — or nearly too late — to stop them.)
- While the station would be under ISC command, the mining operations would be privately run. Majestic Industries and one of Talia's corporations would be the primary groups competing out here; both organizations are highly tech-driven and need the rare metals located in these asteroids to make many of their technomagical products. (It's also an easy way to get large amounts of iron and other base metals for use in manufacturing additional equipment for space exploration.)
- The station probably includes research modules, as well, and the scientists most likely feel very out of place among the miners and engineers of the asteroid operation.
So, then: The station commander is murdered, magic can't be spared to do the divination necessary to find the killer, and the next shipment of mana batteries is months away. Essentially, we have a locked-room murder mystery. To make things even more interesting, perhaps the killer drew on the station's mana batteries to do the deed, and now key life-support systems are in danger of running out of mana. (Alternatively, perhaps some of the batteries have simply disappeared.) ISC is rushing to prepare an emergency resupply mission, but the launch window won't open for at least another week. In the meantime, someone needs to figure out who killed the commander and what happened to the missing batteries, before the life support systems shut down and everyone dies. Perhaps a young ISC officer fresh out of the Aeromancer Corps…?
If this sounds like a fun idea for anyone, by all means go ahead and run with it. I've never written a locked-room mystery, so I'll gladly cede the concept to someone more skilled with that sort of storytelling.
