Mara Goes Letara, Ep. 1-1
Early morning, 16th June 1947
Office of Mara’s chief development engineer, Mara main factory grounds, just outside the town of Mara, Archana
Junior development engineer Rodyn Gumprov knocked on the door to his boss’ office, with an envelope in hand.
It took a few seconds for the office’s owner, Fedor Piechov, to answer. “Enter”, Fedor said curtly.
As Rodyn entered, Fedor sat behind this big oaken desk, stacked with papers and drawings and looked wordlessly at him.
“Sir, here is a letter from the Letaran government that you might be interested in. They invite tenders to supply them with a certain type of personnel transporter. Would this be something we would consider?”
Fedor thought about it for a moment. “Letara? They are on the other side of the world, right?”
“Yes, there were not involved in anything that happened over the last years”, answered Rodyn. Everyone’s memory of the recent war was still fresh, of course, and one usually avoided naming it explicitly, despite Archana being part of the victors. While the front over in the west was always far away from the area around Lake Mara, and there were therefore few visible impacts around them, everyone has had to make enough sacrifices in one form or another to not have any happy memories about it. The only remotely positive impact for Fedor and Rodyn was that their employer was enabled to move from just engine to full-scale automobile production through military contracts and hasty factory construction.
“Then we might. Let me have a look.” Fedor took the envelope from Rodyn and opened it.
“Eight seats… special purpose… rugged… economical…” Fedor mumbled as he skimmed through the specifications.
He looked at Rodyn for a moment, got up and looked out of his office window on the 2nd floor.
“Perhaps this is an opportunity to get rid of these.”
He gestured to Rodyn to join him and they looked at the well familiar sight of brownish-yellow ex-military vans that had now occupied part of a Mara factory yard for over a year.
“I thought the same when I read the brief” said Rodyn. “If you excuse me, I have always wondered what the exact story was behind these. I know the broad strokes of course.”
“Then you know that the HD6s were the standard military personnel carrier for behind the front, being unarmored and such.” He appraised Rodyn. “Given your age, you probably rode in one.”
“Driven, actually, and plenty of times. I know the road to Novobeskov like the back of my hand.”
“Lucky you… perhaps.” Having been a driver was a considerably safe wartime posting, of course, but neither the road nor the HD6s must have made for a particularly pleasant driving experience.
Fedor continued. “Anyway, we and some others built them basically until weeks before the victory, and now we have many more on hand than we know what to do with, many of them hardly broken in. Can’t sell them either or they will help kill the few sales if our Konyk jeep and truck variants that we current have.”
Fedor paused.
“So we can civilianise and refurbish them, and then perhaps offer them to Letara. Doubt there are any state secrets in the engineering - except maybe for how to make an unkillable boxer engine. And how many transports could they possibly want?”
A further pause. Rodyn had learned not to interrupt Fedor unless it was clear that he was done or expected a response.
“Consider this your next task - take stock of what we have in store, and what’s in store somewhere else, and in what condition all those HD6s are. I’ll clear it with the comrades higher up, and possibly in the government. Doubt either will refuse an opportunity to get their hands on some foreign cash, especially from outside the continent.”
Rodyn was unsure whether to be happy or not by this sudden shift in this task priorities, away from the early stages of Mara’s first clean-sheet designed passenger car. But he rightly assumed that Fedor wouldn’t have cared about it either way. He also wondered whether there was a hint of disdain in Fedor’s use of the word ‘comrade’. “Yes, sir”, was all Rodyn said, however. He took the lack of a further reaction by Fedor - who still looked out the window - as his cue to leave silently.
Rodyn made his way down to the storage lot and, for the first time in quite a while, had a close look at a HD6 personnel carrier.
On the surface, the HD6s had not changed at all since his time as a driver in his wartime service, of course. For Rodyn, however, it was an unusual experience to stand in front of one in the Archanan morning sun in civilian clothes and be surrounded by - literal and figurative - peace and quiet.
