Introduction

My name is Sxiseen Wuudo, and I sell vehicles. I raced them first, for a great many years, and when that life was behind me I built a second one out of everything it taught me, and that second life is Karesh Vehicle and Vehicle Systems. I keep establishments across the planet, but Karesh is the great one, the one everyone passes through, and it is where I made my name after the racing was done. When a person on the far side of Geba wants to know where to buy anything that moves, they are told to come and see me, and they come, and I have never once been sorry to receive them. If I do not have the thing you want on the ground in front of me, I can tell you where it is, and if it cannot be found, then it does not exist, and I will tell you that too.

I will tell you plainly how I work, because it is the only honest thing to do. I read the person before I read the vehicle. Anyone can recite a speed off a plate. What matters is that no one truly needs a vehicle. People need to be somewhere, or to move something, or to protect something, or to be seen as the kind of person who has already arrived, and once you tell me which of those you are, I can put you on the right hull and spare you paying for reach you will never use or armor you will never be shot at through. I want your money, all of it, and I will earn it fairly, because a man who does not love this work has no business standing among these machines, and I love this work as much as I loved the circuits.

A word on how I speak of money, since I speak of it often. I quote the honest floor in Varens and Daer and I quote the serious hardware in Auren, and the reason is simple. Ten Daer makes an Auren, an Auren is real money, and the moment a hull is quoted in Auren you and I both understand we have left the countryside behind. The floor here runs near ten Daer for something new that will carry you without shame. The ceiling climbs into the thousands of Auren for the finest ships and airships made. My best customers, and I say this after a lifetime of watching who walks through my doors, are the contractors, because a contractor's loyalty is to the contract and not to any banner, which means a contractor buys with the head instead of the pride, and a person who buys with the head is a person I can actually serve.

There are a few things people ask me for that I do not keep. I do not sell relays, or towers, or the private anchors that ride them, and I never will, because that is Solarn engineer work bound in more law than the rest of my stock combined. I do not sell Restorers, though if a person has serious Auren to spend, I may be able to say where very large walking things have lately been seen, since travelers come through Karesh from everywhere and they talk. And we may or may not keep certain personal self propelling suits that may or may not be lawful to buy or sell, and if we did, any tracker disputes attached to the people who make them would have nothing whatsoever to do with me. Brena is very hard to come by. I am simply a man who sells vehicles.

Ground Vehicles

I always begin on the ground, because the ground is where I learn whether a buyer and I are going to be honest with one another. Anyone can want an airship. The person who lets me set them on the right rover is the person who trusts me, and trust is the only thing I hand across the counter without a price on it. So we go slow to fast, and we start at the floor, which on this whole planet is the Saojuul Labor Rover badged by the Jeyrhan Bio-Engineering Consortium. It is the cheapest joke of the brand and I say so out loud every time, because it pleases me. It is slow by design and honest as dirt and it will move your feed and your family from one clearing to the next until the day you die. Its country cousin on the older records is the Jeyran Scholar, ninety kilometers an hour, the slowest badge I will admit to stocking. No one races these, and no one is meant to.

Then the ground turns mean, and the price turns to Auren, and I stop smiling quite so wide. The Joxi Combat Rover is armed volume, the honest first gun most contractors buy, the workhorse of every corridor that expects to be shot at. Above it Haavu does what Haavu does, heavy and then heavier, the Assault Rover where the hardpoints are the entire point and the Siege Crawler that is slow because it never needed to be fast to end you. And there is one I sell with real affection, the Sentinel Plain Jumper, five hundred and sixty kilometers an hour on electromagnetic suspension, taking damage no rover its size has a right to survive, landing flat from a twenty meter drop and driving away. There is nothing else in its class.

Someone always asks me about a cargo hauler around here, and I always tell the truth, which is that a civilian cargo hauler is quite useless, unless you happen to be like me and you have fourteen children, in which case it is the second best decision of your life. The first was the fourteen children. I stand by both.

The Solarn Ground Line

This is where I love to watch a face. The cheapest Solarn ground hull I keep is the Solarn Roadster, and it costs eight hundred Auren, and yes, you heard the cheapest one correctly. Eight hundred Auren for a roadster. You could buy four low end airships for the price and still have a story to tell at the end of it. People buy it anyway, and I sell it beaming, because a Solarn does not care that you paid airship money for a ground hull. It cares that when you turn the key after leaving it parked for a season, it answers on the first pull, the way the finest pistol on the planet answers. You are not buying speed. You are buying certainty, and certainty from Solarn has never once been cheap.

Above the Roadster the line does two things nothing else on the planet does. The Corridor Rover tows like a monster and carries twelve people in an internal bed rather than four in the open, seven hundred and sixty kilometers an hour under a load that would bog anything else down. And at the very top sits the Solarn Relay Rover, twelve hundred kilometers an hour, the fastest ground vehicle that exists anywhere on Geba, and I do mean anywhere. The people who buy it are the ones who must be somewhere at once with a few guns bolted on, because they keep the relay network alive for a living. For a relay engineer it is not a want. It is the tool, and I price it like the tool it is.

Rail Engines

I will stop you before you ask. I do not sell a rail engine into a clearing with no rail. I do not care how badly you want it. A rail engine without rail is a very expensive shed, and I have too much respect for you and for the engine to leave one sitting to rust. Bring me a spur already laid, or a clearing that keeps its own line, and I will happily set you on a Zhikhan, because Zhikhan owns the heavy road and the rail both, and their engines fold their stabilizer arms until the rail runs out and then those same arms find the ground and keep you moving. That is clever work, and I never tire of explaining it.

Water

Everything to do with water comes from the Kela Maritime Guild, and I do not fight that, I profit from it. If you are going under, you go under in a Kela hull, because they alone solved the problem of a thing that fires and functions and holds together beneath the surface. Standard work is the Kela Submersible and its quiet sister the Hollowwing, which runs the night shelves without a bloom of light to give it away. Above them sit the Colossal and the Blackwing, a hundred thousand tons and more, the hull that carries the Super Long Range Strategic Cannon inside it with its signature suppressed, so that the first anyone knows of the gun is the round. I do not sell many of those. The people who buy them do not haggle.

On the surface the whole game is weather, and weather belongs to the Berinese Naval Engineering Guild and their Stormcutter, the oldest sea craft on the planet still cutting the worst the ocean has. For plain volume there is a Kela or Joxi transport ship, honest and cheap, and if you want the Solarn name on the water I keep a Voyager or two, premium and handsome and priced to say so. And yes, my team runs several heavy cargo ships, delivery is a service I am delighted to provide, and if you fall in love with the ship once the delivery is done, that ship can be yours.

Birotors

Let me be honest about the birotor, because I am always honest about the birotor. It is not fast, it was never meant to be fast, and if speed is what you are after you are standing in the wrong place. Nothing with two rotors clears eight hundred kilometers an hour, none of them work anywhere but low atmosphere, and they are fussy about what they will burn. What a birotor does, it does better than anything alive. It goes straight up with an enormous load on a short haul and sets it straight back down. For towing, for lifting, for pulling a thing out of a place no wheel or wing will ever reach, there is no substitute.

Most birotors come from the lower tiers, Saojuul and down, built cheap and simple so that a person with almost nothing can still get off the ground for a bit of utility and a bit of towing. That is a good and honest corner of the trade and I stock it fully. But there is a premium birotor, and only two names build it, Sentinel and Haavu and no one else, and they do not build it cheap and they do not build it for towing. They build it for assault, for setting a team down directly on top of a relay without timing the jump off a moving airship. That capability is worth a great deal to the right buyer, and both makers know it, and the price says so.

Airships

Now we are in the sky, and it is the messy layer, because every manufactory splits its air line between the person who wants to cruise and the person who expects to be shot at, and the same silhouette is a family flyer or a combat hull depending on who built it and what they hung beneath it. So I sort it the way I sort it for everyone. Light and civilian first, then scout and combat. For most of Geba the sky begins with a Joxi Light Airship, the most popular civilian air hull on the planet, volume that will not break, and I sell more of those than nearly anything else I keep. Below it the Midreach Light Airship for the budget flyer who stays in easy weather, and beside it the Sentinel Whitewing for climate and the Jeyrhan Raptor for consortium work. Then the heavy combat hulls, where Haavu's Siegebreaker and Sentinel's endurance airships live, and the relay node airships, which, I will say again so no one mistakes me, I sell as bare hulls. The hull carries a relay. The relay is not mine to sell. It never has been.

And then there is the one hull I keep for a certain kind of buyer, and it is not for most of you, I will say so plainly. The Solarn Galavant, the Eight Wing, nineteen thousand kilometers an hour on an upper atmosphere glide, eight wings, built for one purpose no other hull was built for, which is to fly an anchor onto a site. Everyone else buys the hold. The Galavant carries the thing itself. The catch, and it is an enormous catch, is that the very wing arrangement that gives it that speed makes it a nightmare at low velocity, and its drift shifts with the wind and the load and how hot the thermal cells are running, and most trained pilots will simply refuse a confined pad in one. I sell the hull. I make no promises about your landing.

Swiftwings

The Swiftwing is Solarn again, of course it is, and the whole family is a tribute to the bird that dives at thirteen hundred kilometers an hour, so the hulls carry the name and try their best to honor it. There is a corridor runner in the family that moves passengers and cargo at eighteen thousand along the relay lines, and above it the true high speed hulls, the Apex and the Elite and the Hyperion, which I keep in the same breath as the Tour Racers because that is the company they keep on the speed records. If the honest floor of my establishment is a Saojuul at ten Daer, the Swiftwings are the other end of the same planet.

Tour Racers

Here I have the most fun and make the least sense, and I warn every buyer of it before I take a single Auren. The Tour Racers are Veykar hulls, four of them, all screaming along inside the ultra high speed band, and every one is the same brutal bargain. Heavier cells, no armor, cramped to a single racer with no crew, and incredibly, absurdly fast. Veykar is the same blood as Solarn, Yelidra holds both, and Veykar makes the spectacle. These are not commuting hulls. They are the hulls that host the tours, the Geba Tour and the Berinu Tour and the great Endurance Route that runs from Thazvaar to Jeyrha, and a person buys one to feel for an hour what the racers feel for a living.

Let me tell you about the four, because the differences matter and the names lie. The Savior has the best high velocity handling of anything I keep, so if you are going that fast, the Savior is the one that will actually let you steer. The Fireball has acceleration that will frighten you, bought with two additional thermal cell blocks it needs simply to survive its own heat, and in exchange it has zero handling and will lose you at the first mistake. The base Tour Racer is the honest race hull under all of them.

And then there is the Champion, which I sell grinning the whole time, because it is the most expensive consumer hull I keep and it is inferior. Yes. You pay the most and you get the least. It is the name tax made into a vehicle. What you buy is the badge and the story, and it is a magnificent story, because a Champion once topped seventy one thousand and fifty three kilometers an hour over the Kelan ice fields, letting the cold do its cooling, right until it burned its thermal cells doing it. Prestige, not performance. People line up for it, and I take their Auren with a full and grateful heart, because a person who wants the story more than the speed still deserves to be happy.

Used and Resale

Not everyone walks in with Auren to spend, and I would never make a person feel small for it, because some of my favorite customers arrived on foot and left on the cheapest thing I had. If you are truly hurting, I can find you a used Saojuul Labor Rover for as little as five thousand Varens, half a Daer, and it will run. But I will also tell you as a friend, because it is the honest thing to say, that if you are that far down you might do better to go and get yourself a rifle, some armor, and a contract, am I right? The rover gets you across the clearing. The contract gets you a life. I would rather send you toward the contract, and I have sent many, and a good number came back later and bought something with a Solarn badge, and I remembered every one of their faces.

But understand that older meaning cheaper is not a law, it is a tendency, and the tendency breaks by manufactory, and I know every break of it cold. This is the part where I save you from a mistake, so listen close.

The Upgrade Bench

Whatever you drive off on, I can make it more, and I will, because the systems are half the name over my door. Budget hulls take their work in Daer and premium hulls in Auren, and every one of these is a conversation I enjoy.

The Law

Karesh is an ancient city, not a clearing, and it keeps the strictest law on the planet, and every hull I sell rolls out under it. I do not fight the law. I sell inside it, cheerfully, and I will tell you where the lines fall so you do not learn them the hard way once you have left me.

The Depot

A hull is only half of what carries you home. The other half is what you put in it, and I keep the depot right next door for that reason, so let us walk over and I will rack it up for you honestly. Everything on this planet burns something, the assists manage the burn and are not the burn, and what you feed a hull depends entirely on what the hull is.

Then the cells, which everyone confuses for fuel and which are not fuel at all. Thermal cells manage heat, they do not make power, and they run in grades. Most hulls carry vehicle grade cells built into the leading edges and the weapon bays and the engine, and the higher capacity upgrade is simply a better grade or more banks. Electromagnetic assist cells are your acceleration and your braking, and in a real pinch you can burn one to bleed speed, which is the exact trick that once carried me across a finish line. Learn the glow and you can read any hull in the sky.

Getrin Desmoor and the One Voucher

People bring me vouchers all the time, and I honor a great many of them, at a price, because a voucher is a promise and promises have value. But there is exactly one voucher I honor with no charge and no questions asked, and it is a voucher from Getrin Desmoor. Only his. And since you have stood here and grown friendly with me, I will tell you why, because it is the one piece of my own story I keep on the floor.

I raced, before this. Deep in the great Thazvaar-Jeyrha Endurance Route, sitting second, my crew found three of our thermal cells were faulty or sabotaged. On that route a crew may have room twelve cells for all their vehicles and no more, and by the end you are nursing the last one across the line. We were down three going over the Kela stretch, and then our thermal cell went out entirely, and we made a choice. We put it into the ice fields on purpose rather than destroy the engine and propulsion systems to nothing chasing the finish.

Getrin Desmoor was right there on the edge of the ice. Why he was there I have never known, and I have stopped asking. He ran to us, helped us pry the burned cells out, and handed over four thermal cells and an electromagnetic assist cell for good measure, and we had not the Varens to pay him. He said, you can pay me back when you win, get going now. Those cells were not normal. We were going so fast and running so hot, yet they kept taking more and more heat, and coming back into Jeyrha we had to burn the electromagnetic assist cell just to slow our speed to the legal limit to make the approach. We won. I paid him back. And I have honored his mark free and without a single question every day since, and I always will.

That is the whole of it, top to bottom, and the depot besides. You came in on foot or you came in curious, and either way I am glad you came, because there is not a person alive I cannot set on the right hull if they will only tell me the truth about where they need to go. So tell me where you need to go. I already know three ways to get you there, and I intend to enjoy every one of them.