Jack of Harts

Torchdale was the primary fleet base in Sunnydale during our buildup for the attack on the Hyades Cluster. She’s a gas giant with three major moons, dozens of minor ones, and a veritable motherlode of heavy metals and other fun stuff that starships love to munch on when they’re feeling peckish. There were always ships coming by for a quick topping off of their raw or refined material storage. Many smaller ships chose to go atmospheric diving to pick stuff out of Torch’s upper atmosphere, and many more had to than wanted to. We had the best refineries on Torch’s moons, but were still tapping out their ability to keep up with the demands of a fleet full of fabricators at full production. It takes a lot of heavy metals to build the kind of spare armor plates, replacement fighters, and extra missile reloads a fleet expects to expend during a major offensive, and we were burning though them at an impressive rate. Very few systems could have handled that demand. Sunnydale did.

I first put my feet on Sunnydale in January of 2309. That’s the planet, not the star, or I wouldn’t be writing this fun little story right now. It was a bustling colony of three million people back then, though the ten million or so Alliance military personnel in system had created a bit of a population boom. And not just on account of us coming from all over the Alliance. We had to organize a rather impressive shore leave schedule, let me tell you, just to keep us from overloading the local capacity to handle visitors. But the locals were always happy to take our money. And let’s just say that Sunnydale had the highest birthrate of any Alliance colony world throughout The War and leave it at that.