To Hell and Back (Hellworlder pirates)

Ch51 Noctis

Noctis

Alwen wasn't really sure what she had been expecting from a Terran city. She had seen plenty of old Terran movies set in some of their larger more iconic cities like New York of London, they had always seemed very straight edged and dirty, not at all like the buildings on Torwen. On her home world buildings tended to swoop, dip, and curve like the waves on the sea, it was hard to find a straight angle or a pointed edge. The streets were all mingled with parks and water fixtures, sometimes a walking path would have you walking on the ground level only to have said path dip into a lit tunnel that went under the road, or on a bridge overlooking the street.

But that was all because civic infrastructure and public transportation was all handled by central guilds who set up strict limitations and architectural styles. Terrans however trusted their city development to whichever contractor or construction company could get the job done at the cheapest price. That meant a lot of straight and unimaginative lines crossed perpendicularly by other straight and unimaginative lines, with straight square buildings capitalizing on as much of the space as they could. As she and Gato rode the monorail that stretched itself over the main road Alwen couldn't help but feel unimpressed by the tall square apartment complexes that sat on small plots of grass.

Limey had come through on his part, he had somehow temporarily incapacitated half of the marines. Nothing serious, just something that made them all too drowsy and exhausted to go anywhere. So when Alwen asked Gato if he could be her chaperone, he had no one else to thrust her upon.

She absently remarked to herself that she really should feel bad about drugging her friends so she could spend time with a guy she wasn't entirely sure she had romantic feelings for, but she couldn't actually summon up any guilt. Back on Torwen a thought like that would have been unimaginable.

"Something on your mind?" Gato rumbled snapping her out of herself reflection.

"Not really, the city just looks boring"

Gato grunted "That's Noctis for you. The industrial heart of Mars. Most of the housing complexes on the outskirts of the city were built by corporations who just wanted a place for their workers to live, and the inner city is a complete mess."

"Really"

"Yeah, After the Union was done Terraforming the Martian Colonial Union began to section off places for their first open air cities. Noctis was chosen to be the heart of the economy since it had lots of water access and plenty of mineral deposits. They set up a grand plan for the inner city with plenty of parks, shopping, and museums, and auctioned off swathes of the outskirts to fund inner city's construction. They then laid hundreds of miles of monorail and metro stations to connect the urban heart to those soon to be working class neighborhoods. The result was densely populated outskirts with hundreds of commuters who had to do all their shopping in the inner city."

She frowned, "that sounds... like a really bad way to plan a city."

He smiled "It is. Noctis was the first off world city, and the people who built it didn't have any real understanding of urban development. The swathes of workers and industry they wanted came faster than any of the actual city. Noctis was built from the ground up, with none of the usual infrastructure or materials something like this would require. No trucks, bricks, concrete, wood, or glass. It all had to be shipped in from earth. They had to rush a lot of the construction with less than perfect materials. The result was cookie cutter housing complexes and an inner city that looks like a complete mess with tons of buildings slowly crumbling around their occupants"