Lore & Secrets – Nin­ja Cranston

The name that turns a strike into some­thing Coal Co hired mer­ce­nar­ies to break.

Lunar prospec­tor sci­ence fic­tion: claims, volatiles, and the peo­ple who work the surface.

The file opens on a con­tract, not a leg­end. Coal Co used to be the sole con­trac­tor for Lunadyne’s min­ing work. The min­ers had a poor con­tract and were prepar­ing to strike. Luna­dyne bought the con­tract and rene­go­ti­at­ed. In the mean­time, Coal Co had already hired mer­ce­nar­ies to break the strike before it hap­pened. That is the chain Granger will lat­er recite for Gen Miller in Mor­ris Mason’s office, with Mason lis­ten­ing just enough to make the cor­po­rate crux the point. Who want­ed the cor­ri­dors qui­et? Who already had a crew on the way? The name that makes the hire spe­cif­ic comes after the payroll.

What Is Known

Sher­iff Del Ander­son does not meet her first. He meets a con­trac­tor who will not give a real name. Tat­toos from the Cen­tral Asian jobs. A Coal Co. crawler logged as John Smith. A demand to let Smit­ter out of the tank. Smit­ter got drunk and tried to open a hatch to the vac­u­um. Del will not make an excep­tion. On the way out, the man leaves the name Del is sup­posed to wor­ry about. Lina Cranston.

Del’s thought is not Lina. Damn, not Nin­ja Cranston. I thought she was in prison.

Coot­er knows the rest with­out a brief­ing. One of the worst. Arrest­ed after a hor­rif­ic war crime in Cen­tral Asia. Key thrown away. Del knows why the key did not hold. After the West Coast seced­ed, the fed­er­al pen­i­ten­tiary emp­tied. Pris­on­ers dumped into Neva­da. He was in the U.S. Mar­shals. Over five hun­dred mar­shals in Vegas alone. He quit. Trish said the Moon would be bet­ter than that. Cranston was nev­er on the watch list. He fig­ured Paci­fi­ca had the sense to keep her in the cage.

Hear­ing she is out can make the sit­u­a­tion a hell of a lot more dan­ger­ous. Coal Co has dou­bled down. The sta­tion is about to get boil­ing. Civil­ians to Gor­donville. An ace in the hole, if they can find one. The mer­ce­nar­ies did not stand down. They took most of the habi­tats. Del regained the sta­tion. Granger’s lat­er brief adds the cost in one sen­tence: his wife and unborn child, dead in a mis­car­riage. Luna­dyne used the recov­ery in an adver­tis­ing cam­paign. The sher­iff became the company’s star. The calls from Earth went from twice a week to bare­ly once every cou­ple of weeks.

The pub­lic sto­ry is a con­tract vio­la­tion, and the safe­ty of the peo­ple is at stake. The use­ful sto­ry is a mer­ce­nary com­man­der whose rep­u­ta­tion is enough to emp­ty a clin­ic con­ver­sa­tion and jus­ti­fy a hire.

What Is Still Unpaid

Whether Lina and Nin­ja are the same per­son on paper is less impor­tant than the fact that Del treats them as one. The con­trac­tor need­ed him to wor­ry. The name did the work.

What Coal Co thought it was buy­ing remains unful­filled. Strike-break­ers. What it got was habi­tats tak­en, a sta­tion that nev­er quite went back to being a min­ing camp with a bar, and a sher­iff who drinks. In the years after, Luna­dyne sued the indi­vid­u­als and sued Coal Co. None of it gained trac­tion. Coal Co denied hav­ing any­thing to do with the men. They could not find the indi­vid­u­als, or the indi­vid­u­als stayed where author­i­ties could not extra­dite them. Del had deliv­ered them to Tycho. A lot of them were still on the Moon.

The oth­er unpaid item is the file Granger put in Gen’s hands. A Ranger team went into Cal­i­for­nia and took Cranston out at Vic­torville Pen­i­ten­tiary on the eve of the seces­sion. Years before the strike. Nils, who was there for the habi­tats, says she wasn’t even there. Gen has the report. Del does not. He con­vinced him­self that Cranston killed his wife, and lat­er that she had killed the deputy who van­ished. Doc Keller could nev­er deter­mine that Tricia’s sud­den mis­car­riage was any­thing but a nat­ur­al event. Hor­ri­ble. Not out of the ordi­nary. They can hap­pen in stress­ful sit­u­a­tions. The Moon is the harsh­est envi­ron­ment any­one in that room has tried to live in. Del’s answer is not med­ical. Those bas­tards told me they’d do some­thing to Trish if I didn’t coop­er­ate. I think they did.

Two doc­u­ments. One body that may have been in a Cal­i­for­nia pen when they took the habi­tats. One grief that does not accept the Ranger report. The debt is not a miss­ing vil­lain. It is a name that still clos­es a case the sta­tion nev­er got to file.

Why Con­rad Remains Useful

Con­rad remains use­ful to peo­ple who nev­er have to live there because a strike at a lunar hub is not only labor. It is air­locks, water, and who holds the cor­ri­dors when back­up is three days away. Hir­ing the name Nin­ja Cranston is how an Earth-side con­trac­tor turns a labor prob­lem into a secu­ri­ty prob­lem the sher­iff can­not file as a drunk in the tank. Gor­donville is the civil­ian answer. The lat­er deputy is the cor­po­rate one. Gen arrives to count thugs, some of whom may be the same pay­roll Coal Co denied in court, mov­ing through a sta­tion whose sher­iff is no longer the instru­ment that emp­tied the bar.

The Mason inter­ests sit on top of that file. They do not replace it. Granger can call the erup­tion sto­ry a fab­ri­ca­tion and still need a deputy who knows what a mer­ce­nary hire looks like when it does not stand down. Water claims, land­ing rights, a week­ly list of who arrived — all of them are eas­i­er to lean on if the sta­tion already believes a name like that can come back.

The use is not the reveal. The use is that an unpaid mer­ce­nary file still lets some­one treat Con­rad as a place a sec­ond attempt can land, three days from help, with a sher­iff who will hear the old name before he hears the new report.

Who still receives pay­ment when the woman in the file has already died, and they have tak­en the habi­tats, anyway?

Fur­ther Reading

The Luna­dyne Inci­dent and Oth­er Sto­ries — “The Luna­dyne Incident”

Thun­der Moon Tussle

Mask of the Joy­ful Moon

Relat­ed site posts: Lore & Secrets — Nin­ja Cranston (22 Sep­tem­ber), Char­ac­ter Spot­light — Sher­iff Del Ander­son, Char­ac­ter Spot­light — Doc Keller, Char­ac­ter Spot­light — Granger, Lore & Secrets — The Mason War, Fron­tier Foun­da­tions — Gordonville

The Joy­ful Moon is still watch­ing… and some ques­tions stay unpaid. — Torn MacAlester Still rid­ing the trails with Nils, Gen, and the whole Fab­u­lae Lunae crew 🚀🌕