SDNW4 Story Thread 1

[Shroom Man 777]

ALTACAR INTERNATIONAL STARPORT
FEBRUARY 3400

Agent Spozavik, Imperial Bragulan People's Department of Limited Foreign Interaction and Human Affairs diplomatic trade liaison Mr. Dryznyl Shpechtkov sat on a bench at the middle of the starport lounge. All around were many Altacarians, waiting for their flights, and all keeping a respectable distance from the big Bragulan. It was sensible, for it was rather awkward sitting beside a bear, even if that bear was an excellent conversationalist with a nice green hat and tie.

Spozavik... er, Dryznyzl Shpechtkov looked up and saw his comrades emerge from the bathrooms. They walked over to him and sat down. Not on his bench, because his bench could barely support his own weight. No, each of them sat on separate benches, which they had dragged off to use for themselves after shooing away the humans who were sitting on them.

Spozavik's stormtrooper-chauffeur sat beside him. Head high, ears perked, scanning the crowd for any danger signs, ready to react with violence of action at any an instant's notice. Though they didn't carry any weapons with them, for their cover was that of diplomats, an average Bragulan could easily maim an unaugmented human - and even lightly augmented ones were fair game.

The other Bragulan, his aide Gryza, sat herself on a bench directly facing Spozavik. She was a pretty little thing, with reddish-brown fur and small beady eyes, and a long bushy tail that complimented her hips. Spozavik had enjoyed watching her from behind, sensually swaying her tail with each trot.



"So," she licked her nose cutely and brushed her whiskers. She looked around them and gestured to the mobs of humans walking around the starport. Overhead, a transparisteel ceiling allowed them a good view of space, with ships flying to and fro while Altacar itself floated in the backdrop. "Boss, explain to me why we're here again?"

"We're here to play our small part in the Imperator's Fifty Year Plan, as the patriotic citizens that we are. Glasnot and Bragstroika means that the Bragulan Star Empire will begin to open itself, however slightly, to the galactic community. As our dear Koprulu Zone neighbors happen to be composed entirely of human degenerates, we will try sharing the light of Bragulanity to other, more distant, nations instead." Spozavik answered straightly.

"But these more distant nations are also almost entirely composed of human degenerates." Gryza pointed out.

"Yes, but their distance makes them slightly better human degenerates than our neighbors." Spozavik quipped back.

"I see," Gryza smiled. "Then our neighbors won't have a chance to be shown the light of Bragulanity and some such?"

"We've already showed the Sovereignty the light of Bragulanity over at Majella. And the ongoing cultural exchange with the Byzantines at that Jenova place... it's a work in progress. So we'll try to do a different kind of exchange today, I hope. If things go well." Spozavik shrugged as he pulled out a dossier on the various nations of the Spinward Expanse - which Bragulan terminology simply called the Spin Zone. He liked that label, since he was the one who coined it (actually a subordinate coined it, but he had the initiative to take the credit for it). "So we shall be heading to Umeria. I have received communications from parties there interested in trading with us. I've also contacted their ministry of Foreign Affairs, to see if we can set up an embassy there, and they have invited us to come over."

"Hmmm..." Gryza wrinkled her nose as she examined another dossier on her clipboard. "The Umerians are a nation of scienticians, technocraticos and bureaucrats. Reasonably progressive and permissive. They seem to be a well-to-do and reasonable power, non-confrontational, non-combative, risk-averse and primarily defensive oriented. They're a sound choice of business partner in the Spin Zone. Low risk. Much like the Altacarians.”

“The Altacarians were the ones who recommended the Umerians to me, actually.” Spozavik said. It was true, the Altacarians spoke very highly of the Umerians. “I'm actually eager to do business with them. Between the overgrown Zigonianish lizardoids at the NenAltKik, the isolationalist Four French Empires, and that Prussian Star League, the Umerians were by far the best choice.”

“Are you sure they'll be willing to do business with us? We're building the Shepistanis Gunstars. The Umerians might not like that.” Gryza cocked her head quizzically.

“It's the business of business. If the Umerians want, we can build them Gunstars of their own too. Though I'll have to ask Sonny if he can spare more gulag workers...” Spozavik thought about it for a moment. “Anyway, I'm sure the Umerians will understand.”

“If we want to trade, then what can we offer them that interests them?”

“Well, I hear they have a shortage in chromium, and one of their few sources of that mineral is a puny human shitnation called the Feelipeens. Certainly the mighty Bragulan Star Empire has plenty of chromium, and by exporting it to Umeria not only can we have trade but we can also deprive that puny Feelipeeni shitnation one if its poor impoverished people's few sources of incomes. Always a plus.” It was a masterstroke, Spozavik thought so himself.

“Good plan,” Gryza chuckled mirthfully. It did something interesting to her mammaries, and Spozavik couldn't help but oogle. Discreetly. Which was why he put on a pair of Bragulan-sized Gay-Ban sunglasses. Gryza glanced at him and smirked. “Hmm...”

“What is it?” Spozavik pretended not to notice that she had noticed him. It was a risky proposition, since Gryza was a fellow diplomat, which also meant that she was a fellow IBGV operative. With a license to kill, issued by the People's Civil Registry of Ideological Correctness. Still, he had no problems with flirting with danger, especially if it came in the form of a well-endowed redfurred female with lots of tail, Spozavik thought so himself.

Gryza was examining something on her clipboard itinerary. Meanwhile, panicking maintenance people were rushing to the bathroom the Bragulans had defiled. Spozavik's stormtrooper chauffeur tensed slightly, readying himself to kill the humans if they ever came for him for what he had done.

“I'm wondering about our flight plan,” Gryza said hesitantly. Spozavik had to give it to her, she was playing her part as his supposed secretary perfectly. “If we follow the original course, we'll have to take a chartered starship through the Prussian Star League. I'm not so sure about that. What relations do we have with them?”

“Absolutely none whatsoever. You have a point, though.” Spozavik considered this. She was right. There was nothing between the Bragulan Star Empire and the Prussian Star League, and they had no intentions of changing that. The only power in the Spin Zone the Bragulans consorted with was Altacar, and that was on a purely business-like basis. Years of IBGV-honed paranoia began circulating in Spozavik's brains (actually, the paranoia had already begun circulating in Spozavik's brain in the groggy moments immediately before waking up in the morning, as such was the extent of his training). Would it be safe to travel through Prussian space? Maybe. Could the Prussians be trusted? No. Without any diplomatic relations with them, there was a fair chance that the Prussians could easily abduct them as they traveled through – and nothing could be done about that. Afterwards, they would undoubtedly subject them to mind-numbing torture and interrogation, Spozavik was sure. He had good reason. A large source of information Spozavik had gone through was composed of Solarian action movies – and many of them had this 'Germanian' subspecies of humans as the evil antagonists. Spozavik knew that these Prussians were an aberrant strain, a mutation, of these 'Germanian' subspecies and were thus not to be trusted. Ever. So, he made his decision. “On second thought, let's not go through Prussia. It is a silly place.”

“Alrighty then. I'll make new arrangements for our travel plans.” Gryza said cheerfully as she pulled out her DynaBRAG compact communicator – a stainless steel vacuum tube-powered brick, with an integrated supercomputer and a radium battery – and made the call. “There we go. I chartered a flight, and scheduled us passage through a warpgate to Umeria. I took the liberty of charging all of it to your account.”

“Hrm,” Spozavik raised an amused eyebrow. He didn't mind, since his account charged all expenses to Gryznk as well. “This cuts a few days off our travel time. Does this mean we get some private time?”

“Quite,” Gryza wrinkled her nose, which made her whiskers bounce, and Spozavik thought he could see her blush under her face furs. “The plane leaves in half an hour. We better get going, boss.”

“Right.”

As one, the three of them – Spozavik, Gryza, and their stormtrooper chauffeur – got up and headed for the boarding area. Spozavik brought his attaché suitcase with him and felt the reassuring weight of his decoder ring on his fingers. He was all set. He was going to Umeria.

“Welcome aboard and thank you for flying Xenu Spacelines!” said the little human stewardess as they boarded the DC-8. “Have a safe trip!”




TO BE CONTINUED

[PeZook]

According to modern legends, the Datasphere was full of ghosts. It was not inconceivable that with trillions of messages relayed every second, single-bit errors and quantum uncertainty could, every once in a while, spontaneously create random chains of data that resembled coherent messages, or even - through sheer probability - reproduce actual information that was once delivered, even engaging in conversation. Nobody ever died in the Datasphere.

At least, that was what the legends said. The vastly powerful CIs that actually ran the network knew better: sophisticated spam generators heuristically analyzed network traffic and attempted to circumvent blockades and filters of equal sophistication by creating convincing facsimiles of actual conversation. It rarely worked, but in a network with so many users, that was enough to make a profit.

There were times, however, where even for people who knew the truth, things could get creepy.

Code: Select all

From: ADRESS SCRAMBLED
To: sidney.hank@pepositronics.com.sov.sol

Have you seen Agatha? I can't find her...

[Simon_Jester]

It had been a pleasant trip. With the puny human armrests and somewhat less puny tables between the seats folded up, the seating accomodations had been surprisingly adequate. The in-flight meal of NenAltKik bronto-burger had been large and tasty, a meal fit for a rex- a tyrannosaurus rex, even. Spozavik patted his stomach comfortably.


(Interior of a Xenu Spacelines spaceplane; passengers not included)

The Bragulans felt an indefinable sense of normality as the spaceplane deactivated its superluminal Heim drive and resumed relativitistic flight. Soon there was a rushing noise outside the cabin, as the liner nosed into the atmosphere of Reisenburg- but it was a calm, cool rushing noise, not a hot fiery one. For the gravity-powered reactionless inertialess craft of Xenu Spacelines, which could decelerate at will in orbit and hover above a planet even with no air, there was no need to reenter atmospheres at orbital speeds! That cost extra.

The craft rolled to a stop on the reinforced tarmac of a special landing strip and taxied to the docking bay. "Now landing at Prime City International Spaceport. Thank you for flying Xenu Spacelines. Have a clear day!"

The Bragulan delegation rose from their seats, recovered their luggage from the overhead compartments, and made their way to the exit at the front of the passenger cabin.

---

Carefully picking their way through the threshhold of the loading bridge, the Bragulans emerged onto the gate... where to their surprise, they were greeted by a brass band! The band was dressed in ancient Umerian formal garb, in styles dating back to another age, centuries ago. A gentler, yet ruggeder age. When starships were shiny, alienoids were alienoids, women were women, and men were MANLY SPACEMEN, taming the far reaches of the Spinward Expanse with atomic disintegrator ray gun and slide rule!



That time was a Golden Age, nay, a Chrome Age. And even after the terrible incursions of GRIMDARK in the 28th century brought an end to the high ambitions of the great explorators and their Five Year Missions, even after the depletion of the great chromium ore veins of Reisenburg brought an end to the high aestheticism of the Chrome Age... the Technocracy of Umeria remembered. And so they honored their heroic forebears, on ceremonious occasions such as this one was. The band lowered their instruments, unsealed their helmets, and stood at attention for the Bragulan envoys...



Then they picked up the instruments again. Their choice of music gave Spozavik a start. In honor of the first official Bragulan visitors to their nation, the band was playing the Imperator's March! A noble gesture, for unlike a proper Bragulan band, they would not have been educated in it from infancy. Surely these Umerians had worked long and hard to master its ominous and revolutionary notes.

As the last strains of that most Bragulan of Bragulan music faded, a little human in a suit- more modern formalwear- strode up to Spozavik. The ravages of old age were plain on his face, as he had lost even the little patch of fur humans had on the top of their head. Though the narrow bands of hair directly above his eyes were clearly flourishing, for some strange reason. Despite his age, he seemed alert, bright-eyed, and active. He smiled at the Bragulans, in the less creepy closed-mouth style, instead of the bizarre rabid-monkey bared-fangs style. Bragulan science still did not understand why some humans thought that baring their puny human teeth was a sign of friendship.

"Greetings, Mr. Shpechtkov." The puny human had even got the pronunciation right- a promising start! "I am Dr. Maxim Chernov, Second Technarch for Foreign Affairs. Welcome to Umeria!"

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

Soramirez, Do Everything!
Seize, Gorasnaya
Risea Sector (Sector O-23), Holy Empire of Haruhi Suzumiya



Even though the Risea Sector had been conquered by the Holy Empire over two centuries ago, there were still a few lingering problems with the native life, to put it bluntly. Of the occupied worlds of the sector, the planet of Gorasnaya had it the worst by far. Prior to the Haruhiist conquest, Gorasnaya was the site of a moderately-sized human colony; unfortunately for these colonists, Gorasnaya was also the homeworld of the Shu'ulathoi, a race of giant sentient grubs with broad similarities to the Amplitur in terms of psionic abilities and sheer malevolence, and the Chimaerans, the heavily mutated survivors of a native sentient humanoid species that the Shu'ulathoi had tried to wipe out with a bioweapon in centuries past. Those colonists who weren't slaughtered by the Chimaerans were enslaved by the Shu'ulathoi and transformed into cybernetic monstrosities simply called the "Watchers" by their new masters. While the Watchers were largely kept loyal by the Shu'ulathoi's powers of mind control, quite a few were able to break free from their control; these "Schismatics," as they were called, further modified themselves via experimenting with Chimaeran DNA. Naturally, the Shu'ulathoi attempted to quash these rebels, but the Schismatics proved to be quite stubborn, resisting all attempts to re-enslave or outright exterminate them.

When the Haruhiists came to Gorasnaya, any concern they might have had for the Schismatics' plight quickly evaporated when it became known that the Schismatics were by and large little more than savages, rendered permanently hostile towards all forms of life due to their genetic self-modification. The Haruhiists proved to be just as merciless, systematically wiping out any and all traces of the Shu'ulathoi, Chimaerans, Watchers, and Schismatics they encountered in order to make Gorasnaya safe for colonization again. Their efforts were largely successful, with the few surviving Shu'ulathoi, Watchers, and intelligent Schismatics driven to the Veil and the Chimaerans and feral Schismatics utterly decimated. However, even after more than two centuries of Haruhiist occupation (during which time other hostile species native to the Risea Sector were driven completely to extinction), there were still a few relict populations of Chimaerans and feral Schismatics on Gorasnaya that had escaped all previous extermination attempts; as such, there was always at least one full SOS Imperial Guard field army stationed on the planet to deal with these pests as they popped up.


SOS Imperial Guard Privates Kureha Suminoya (left) and Kanata Sorami (right), wearing their standard green BDUs without armor

Privates Kanata Sorami and James Ramirez were assigned to a platoon sent out to investigate the isolated mountain town of Seize, which hadn't been heard from for the last week or so. There had been reports of Chimaerans and feral Schismatics in the mountains during the days leading up to the comms blackout, which made the higher-ups understandably suspicious; another Imperial Guard platoon, led by a 2nd Lieutenant Vasquez, had been sent out to investigate, but contact with them was lost merely a day after they had landed. As far as Private Sorami, Private Ramirez, and their comrades knew, Vasquez and his guys might be dead, and the entire town might have been completely overrun by the damn things. Given the nature of Seize's location, the only option was to airlift the platoon over to the town, with gunships standing by for additional support and additional infantry and vehicles to be airlifted in if needed.



The CV-144 Kestrel light tiltrotor was one of a number of utility aircraft used by the SOS Imperial Guard. With a crew of three (one pilot and two door gunners) and a passenger capacity of four soldiers with full kit, the Kestrel was primarily intended to transport individual fireteams to the front. However, as it was also armed with a chin-mounted laser turret, was fitted with a wide assortment of door-mounted weapons (railguns, plasma guns, automatic grenade launchers, or additional lasers depending on the mission), and could also carry rocket pods, it also made an effective light gunship in the absence of dedicated close support craft.

Private Ramirez's Kestrel was sent up ahead of the rest of the force to scout the area and confirm the presence of Chimaerans or Schismatics. True enough, as soon as the Kestrel approached the main bridge leading to Seize, the door gunner spotted some suspicious figures moving on the ground; upon closer inspection, the figures were revealed to be Chimaerans. "Get us in closer so I can clear 'em out!" one of the door gunners called out as he readied his automatic grenade launcher.

"Roger that," the pilot replied. "Moving in to clear LZ."



The M570 AGL mounted on the Kestrel's door station erupted to life, dispensing death from above in the form of fragmentation and thermobaric grenades; with no means to retaliate against the Kestrel, the Chimaerans on the bridge had no chance as they were rapidly torn to shreds. "LZ's clear. Disembarking passengers and transmitting coordinates," the pilot said as he set the Kestrel down on the bridge. "Good luck out there, guys."

"We'll be needing it," the fireteam leader, Sergeant Keith David Foley, said before he exited the Kestrel. Private Ramirez followed shortly afterwards, followed by fellow fireteam members Private First Class Joseph Allen and Corporal Barry Dunn. "Dunn, Allen, secure the LZ! Ramirez, pop some flares so Lieutenant Heidelman and the others can see us!"



"Right away, Sarge!" James, Joseph, and Barry replied simultaneously. As Joseph and Barry stood watch on the bridge with their weapons at the ready, James grabbed four flares from his utility vest, lit them, and marked out the corners of a large square with them. With the sheer amount of smoke billowing up into the air, the other Kestrels could easily see where they were supposed to go; the rest of the dropoff went off without a hitch, with no Chimaerans or Schismatics to interrupt the proceedings.

Once Private Sorami and the remaining members of the platoon were on the ground, platoon leader 2nd Lieutenant Filicia Heidelman gathered her men and women together in order to give out orders. "Foley, your squad's with me and Master Sergeant Kazumiya. We're gonna go into town and check things out. Everyone else, remain behind and secure the bridge. Be on the lookout for further enemy incursions, and defend your positions until you receive further orders. Lock and load!"

The rest of the soldiers nodded in affirmation as they all went off to carry out their orders. While the rest of the platoon waited at the bridge, Keith's squad accompanied Lieutenant Heidelman and Master Sergeant Rio Kazumiya into Seize to find out just what the hell happened to the town and its inhabitants. "Suminoya, Allen, you're on point! Dunn, Kannagi, bring up the rear!"

Upon entering the town limits, the first thing Lieutenant Heidelman, Master Sergeant Kazumiya, Sergeant Foley, and the others noticed was just how quiet and empty the entire town was. Even small frontier settlements like Seize were bustling hives of activity by most standards, which made the town's newfound desolation all the more unsettling. "Man, just a minute here, and this place is already starting to creep me the fuck out," Barry remarked.

"Get ahold of yourself, Dunn," Keith admonished. "We still got a long ways to go. Who knows what we're gonna find here?"

"Yeah, who knows?" Kanata replied with a question of her own. "There might be more of those...things lurking around..."

"Great, not you too, Sorami," Foley admonished once more. "This is probably your first deployment to Gorasnaya, I assume."

"Yeah, it is, Sergeant," Kanata said. "I thought we had wiped out those things long ago."

"I thought so too during my first deployment here, but you'd be surprised at just how resilient those fuckers can be," Barry remarked. "Their populations are indeed dwindling, but not fast enough to satisfy the higher-ups."

"Huh. I guess we'll just have to see if they're really behind all this," Kanata said. "We got those reports of Chimaeran and Schismatic sightings, and there's also the disappearance of Lieutenant Vasquez's platoon..."

"We only lost contact with Lieutenant Vasquez less than 72 hours ago," Keith interjected. "His comms equipment probably got damaged. It's unlikely that he managed to get far from here, especially if there really are Chimaerans and Schismatics roaming around. His platoon's probably holed up somewhere waiting for us to find them."

"Sorami! Ramirez! Stay frosty Oscar Mike!" Rio called out. "We'll be counting on you and the rest of the squad!"

"You're probably gonna make me and Jimmy do everything for you guys," Kanata muttered under her breath.

"Kanata, quit bitching," James admonished. "We're all in this together, right? Sergeant Kazumiya just wants to make sure we're all gonna pull our weight here."

"Still, I got a bad feeling about this..."

[PeZook]

Zero, warp gate transit hub

The massive warp gate hovering in space over Zero spun to life, confusing its operators with an unknown address for the outside activation. Even more confusing was the fact the automated systems controlling the gate took more than ten minutes to synchronize the wormhole: standardized galactic protocols meant it never took more than a second. The operators knew this fact could only mean one thing: somebody was activating the gate from outside the network!

The event was so unprecedented that high layers of government became instantly involved. When the wormhole finally established itself, half of Commune's government knew about the situation.

A radio message was sent through: even more confusing than the activation itself, repeating over and over.

Code: Select all

"Would you like to talk? We like your Monolith."

After twenty repetitions, the message changed.

Code: Select all

Yes.

Instantly, it was relayed up the chain of command. To further confusion of the gate's operators, they soon received an order to lower the shield and allow incoming traffic. After a few brief seconds of tense waiting, the giant wormhole came to life and spit out a small ship bearing the Collector emblem on its hull. It immediately began spewing binary hash, establishing communications protocols with local space control AIs. The gate deactivated as soon as it was through.

Code: Select all

Requesting landing permission. Diplomatic Unit aboard.

[Dave]

Idura Sector (K:13)
Main Congressional Hall, Parliament Building
by Tom Schwartz

Confederation Parliament has approved a measure to accept military supply offers from both The Centrality and the Eoghan United Commons over the course of the next few years. "This bill strikes a political and military balance among all three nations, and will prove a powerful tool in combating increased pirate activity to the galactic west." said a spokesperson.

Details of the bill were not disclosed to the public, and military personnel declined to comment, saying that they were still reviewing the implications of the bill.

[Siege]

Ozone Park District
Solaris Major, United Solarian Sovereignty



Solaris had turned its back on the gas giant whose name it carried, and night had fallen over the city-moon. It wasn't dark, though – it was very rarely truly dark anywhere on Solaris, and Ozone Park was no exception. The smudged apartment windows offered a view of the run-down manufacturing district that was grand, if not exactly beautiful: even through the light drizzle generated by the artificial weather grid you could make out the blocky shapes of refineries and warehouses, intermodal freight terminals, smokestacks and pipelines, power stations and the Overzoom, the raised maglev that provided cheap and easy transport to nearby districts. Night and rain rendered everything in murky tones, but thousands of pinpricks of distant lights still illuminated just enough details to impress upon you the sheer size of all the smut-stained buildings. Neither the rain, the distance between the hab-zones and the factories nor the meagre isolation material in the walls could not fully block out the persistent hum of humongous slo-trans engines.

It had, reflected Liberty Kincaid, made an excellent soundtrack to make love to. She brushed a strand of bright red hair from her eyes and looked at the girl next to her. Yukio Jae was pretty in the way most posthumans were; pretty was something Liberty had long since gotten used to. However, she'd also definitely been enthusiastic, which had been a pleasant surprise. It wasn't after all a trait commonly observed in spoiled rich girls, baseline or otherwise. Liberty smiled. At heart she was a lover, not a fighter. To lie here, warm, comfortable and a little exhausted, it made for a nice little moment.

So of course it couldn't last.

The first sign that something had gone horribly pear-shaped came in the shape of the four windows of the small strato-rise apartment all shattering at the same time. The second followed mere moments thereafter in the form of just as many Max-Tac goons in black combat armour, who swung into the room on grav-harnesses and looked like they meant serious business. In the dark confines of the midnight apartment the troopers looked inhumanly large in their urban camouflage battlesuits, helmets bulging insect-like with optics designed to see into low-light situations as well as provide radar and sonar coverage which, in this particular case, was bordering on the obscenely excessive.

What was also excessive was the weapons they wielded, which looked for all the world like military-issue M116 plasma carbines. And the reason they looked like M116 plasma carbines was, of course, because they were M116 plasma carbines. Even in a post-orgasmic, slightly sleep-drunk state Liberty could tell that much. She couldn't help but take a mental note that this was a serious amount of overkill even by the standards of the gung-ho police commandos.

“Freeze!” yelled one of the troopers, and his hardsuit's built-in speakers amplified his voice into a booming baritone that rattled the empty wine glasses on the night stand. That probably would've done the trick of waking Liberty up if she hadn't already, but as it happened she had. She was also already moving, honed reflexes disentangling her body from the dark silken bedsheets and dropping her behind the poor man's cover afforded by the bulk of the bed. The exquisitely polished wood wouldn't stop a plasma pulse, not nearly, but it might buy her a second or two.

Unfortunately Yukio did not react quite so astutely to the sudden violent appearance of four heavily armed men in her small, sparsely furnished abode. The Asian-featured girl screamed, clutching the sheets to her chest.

Apparently the sight of a shrieking nubile girl was sufficiently reason for the policemen to open indiscriminate fire. Miraculously the first bolt of searing white plasma managed to actually miss the girl in the bed, punching a hole through the dry wall and setting the cheap plaster on fire. The second, third and fourth bolts did not however, vaporizing large chunks of Yukio's head and torso and instantly killing her – before setting the bed on fire as well. The acrid smell of burnt human tissues filled the apartment.

Time slowed to a crawl.

Liberty took a split second to assess her situation. She was unarmed, prone on all fours and quite naked, engaged in a close quarters combat fight with four heavily armed and armoured troopers who were presumably here to kill her, in an unfamiliar apartment, which was now on fire.

Just another day at the job, then.

At heart, Liberty Kincaid was a lover, not a fighter. But she was also a fighter, so it wasn't like these four clowns should get any ideas. Inside her body, three remarkable things happened. First, the Oxytocin released during sex had heightened her senses. Now added to that was the rush of adrenalin which enhanced her strength, speed, reaction time and speed of thought. And finally her internal chemical factory kicked in, releasing a tailored mix of combat stims into her bloodstream.

The effects were remarkable. Her movements became a blur as she tore the silk sheets off the bed and threw them over the nearest trooper, momentarily obscuring his field of view. It would take only a split second for his helmet to switch to a vision mode that could look right through the sheet, but she didn't need more than that to move past his guard and toward the second trooper, swinging her fist as if to sucker-punch him in the face.

She could imagine the man scoff underneath his helmet. And why not? She was unarmed and, for that matter, unclothed. And at first glance Liberty Kincaid seemed human enough – but under the hood it was a whole different story. She was a radical enhancile, a transhuman upgraded to the point where biological and technological components were practically impossible to distinguish, let alone separate. Her muscles were actuators controlling micron-thin sheaths of synthetic tough-as-steel tissue. Her bones had been replaced with the same allow the Sovereignty used to build starships. Even her skin had been altered, just as much to resist low-power projectiles as to endure the demands the enhanced body underneath placed upon it. A wide array of cybernetic enhancements had boosted her perceptions to excruciating sensitivity, and her strength was far in excess of what anyone would reasonably expect her frame to be capable of.

As a result, the Max-Tac trooper didn't even have time to yelp when she drove her fist straight through his faceplate. It hurt; acute senses told her she'd opened up a dozen minor wounds on her knuckles and fingers, but it was worth it for the rewarding crack-snap of the goon's breaking nose-bone. He fell; in one smooth movement Liberty took his plasma carbine from him, twirled it around, switched it to full auto and pressed the trigger. She was rewarded with a very satisfying flickering as a flickering line of plasma fire stitched through the apartment. Wherever the withering barrage struck walls or furniture they simply were simply vaporized in bursts of destructive sun-hot energy that set their immediate surroundings ablaze.

Wherever they hit the Max-Tac troopers, on the other hand, they simply seared through their armour as if it wasn't even there, to explode in gory red mist. The trooper who was constricted in the bedsheets died on the spot, torn almost in two by the fusillade. The third trooper almost managed to duck out of the way, but still caught a plasma bolt to his gut, causing him to die messily with his intestines turned into well done steak.

The fourth and final trooper dodged out of the way of the pulsing fire, a muffled curse escaping from behind his reflective helmet. The man landed in a picture-perfect roll and came up with his rifle raised – only to see the but of his fallen comrade's plasma carbine approach his face at lightning speed. There was a crunching noise, and the man collapsed backward, the now-ruined folding stock of the M116 firmly embedded in what was left of his face.

Three seconds had passed since the first Max-Tac goon had opened fire. In those three seconds, four policemen had died, and the apartment had turned from a nice, if sparsely decorated love nest into a raging inferno courtesy of the liberally expended plasma rounds. Cursing and uncomfortably aware of the heat that threatened to singe her skin Liberty ran toward the door and threw it open – to hear the excited yells of many heavily armed men stampeding up the stairs to their room.

Fuckle. It sounded like a full company of bruisers courtesy of Saika Armed Security was coming this way. Saika was a wholly owned subsidiary of Maibatsu and, of more immediate and pressing concern, the cyberized roid-boys they employed served as Yukio Jae's bodyguards. Getting through them to the ground level exit would be one hell of a fight, and even if she could make it, chances were their backup would arrive before she had a chance to get clear. Not to mention Liberty had a feeling the four Max-Tac goons weren't alone either, and their backup should be arriving any second now as well. This whole place was going to devolve into one hell of a fire fight any second now. She was two hundred stories up, and she couldn't go out the front door. That left only one option.

The windows.

Liberty didn't allow herself time to hesitate and vaulted through the nearest recently glassless window. She briefly caught sight of the street, hundreds of stories below. If she hadn't been falling already it might have given her second thoughts. She saw the powerline which drooped between two buildings and reached for the narrow bitumen-clad cable, hoping its insulation hadn't worn away. As her hand closed, the line gave away beneath her weight and he began to drop again. One side of the line remained anchored and she swung towards the starscraper's wall. She fought to control vertigo since she had only once chance to live. Liberty twisted her body so that it angled in through a window. Glass gave way and she landed in a bedroom where a fat businessman lay with three naked flower girls.

The man rose reaching for the gun beside the futon. The girls shrieked and rose from the bed like startled birds. Liberty rolled across the floor to absorb the impact of her fall, then reversed direction abruptly to kick the gun out of the man's hand and catching it as it fell. She heard the door begin to open and two huge bodyguards entered with sub-machine pistols clutched in their fists. Liberty put the pistol to the man's throat. “Tell them to put their guns down. I mean you no harm.”

Sweat beaded the man's forehead. She knew the fat man was struggling to decide whether to obey, but even so she noticed he couldn't help himself from looking her over. She didn't know if that should irritate or flatter her. “Do it,” he finally croaked.

Liberty smiled and looked at the nearest flowergirl who, she now noticed, was actually a Chamarran. Oh well. Boys would be boys. “Say,” she said. “I don't suppose you happen to have any clothes to spare, do you?”

Never Say Die... Twice

The Adventures of Liberty Kincaid, agent of CEID

The central headquarters of CEID on Solaris wasn't as impressive-looking as many people thought it was. The majority of pretty much everybody who held an opinion on such things thought the agency was headquartered in the Pyramid, the great obsidian megalith that loomed on the edge of the Senatorial and Presidential Districts. In reality however the Pyramid a decoy: the real thing wasn't even located on the same moon as it. CEID Central was a nondescript starscraper on Solaris Minor, the second naturally inhabitable moon of the gas giant Solaris. It had once been a deep cover installation for the agency, and at some point in history its cover had become so deep it became altogether more expedient and safe to make the place the official HQ. Now, the Pyramid was just something for tourists to gawk at – and for Bragulans to plot to destroy, no doubt, whilst the actual thing went unnoticed and unmolested.

The downside to this of course was that one couldn't very overtly protect what to the outside world was just a random building housing some privately-owned companies of no particular significance. But that didn't matter very much: CEID Central was instead protected by some of the most advanced passive security measures money could buy – which in a post-scarcity society, it turned out, made for some damned awesome security.

It was in that building that Liberty was now riding an express elevator to the very top floor. Not very many agents got to do that. In fact, not that many people got to do it period. One needed a special passkey to reach the summit of CEID Central, and it wouldn't be very healthy to fake one – despite looking quite solid and tangible the walls of the lift were not in fact walls, but rather force-field constructs that could be modified (or disappeared) at any time. The idea was that any unwanted visitors would promptly find themselves plunging helplessly to their doom hundreds of floors below, so if you could ride this particular elevator and reach the top of the building alive, you probably deserved to be there in the first place.

The elevator doors swished open with a happy chime, revealing the spacious suite at the very summit of the starscraper. It didn't look much like an office. In fact it looked like the luxury penthouse that it was: white wall-to-wall carpets covered the floor, comfortable designer couches were sunk into pits in the floor, expensive retro-post-modernist art adorned the walls and the whole place smelled like roses. Only a few meters from the elevator entrance stood an impossibly good looking naked man – or rather, a hologram of such. His body was sculpted to perfection – all parts of it – like an ancient statue, and that was of course exactly what he was. This was mighty Heracules, or an artistically rendered holographic depiction of him, who served as the fully tangible hologrammatic bodyguard of the apartment's resident. It was just one visible component of the penthouse's bewildering array of defences. Liberty knew that the place was chock-full of the latest and greatest in death-dealing technology: phase field generators, nanotechnological terrors, cybernetic intrusion systems, and those were just the ones she knew about from previous visits. Compared to most of those, getting beaten to death by a hologram of Heracules was a tame way to go. And he did make for an appealing-looking defence mechanism. It would've been slightly less awkward if he'd worn some clothing, of course, but the occupant was known to be a bit eccentric.

Most psions were.

“Ah, Liberty. Welcome,” came the honey-smooth voice of Abielle Magritte, DCEID and a level-12 Paramount Grand Master psion in her own right. The Director of the Central Espionage and Intelligence Directorate was a tall and leggy blonde with high cheekbones and the unnervingly large eyes natural to all third-generation Human-Apexai hybrids. She wore a stunning green dress that looked more at home on a red carpet than in the working suite of the director of one of the galaxy's most feared intelligence agencies. “I take it your trip was a pleasant one? And I see you've changed your outfit.”

“Ma'am,” Liberty nodded politely. “It was, and I have. Catgirl kimonos aren't quite my style, especially not when they're see-through.”

“Ah, but you looked so very lovely,” the DCEID smiled. It wasn't a very pleasant smile; for that it looked too much like the way a cat might smile at a mouse.

“You had me under surveillance.” It wasn't a question.

Abielle Magritte nodded. “Of course. The mission was too important to leave anything to chance. And since we were operating on home turf we might as well drop a few nano-cams and have an mib-team on standby.”

“I see.”

“I rather doubt that.” The smile widened. “I take it you got the information?”

Liberty nodded. “As soon as Yukio was asleep I used her portacomp to access the Maibatsu mainframe. It was almost too easy. I'd expected better digital security from the people who build like what? Sixty percent of all digital systems in the Sovereignty these days?”

Abielle shrugged. “Xifan Jae was never very rational about her daughter. That's just another thing we can hold over her head when her Board of Directors starts being uncooperative again. In the meantime, what did you find?”

“Nothing. There wasn't anything to indicate Maibatsu was complicit in the shutdown of the SchromKorp swarm, or for that matter the hack of that SinTEK manager. In fact their internal security department was in the process of trying to figure out who had stolen one of their military upload frames. They seemed quite flustered by the whole affair. If I had to guess, I'd say they had nothing to do with it.”

The DCEID scratched her chin with nails that had been painted blood red. “Hmm. Well, so much for that theory I suppose. That means we've ruled out DeBarros, SAWco, LaMerck and SinTEK. Unless Hank is up to his old tricks or SchromKorp is having some kind of internal trouble we haven't even heard about...”

“It's someone from outside,” Liberty finished that train of thought.

“Quite. And someone rather skilled at that, to evade our efforts so far. Which means it's a job for Zero. Which means it's a job for you.”

Zero. CEID 0. The elusive fifth department of the Central Espionage and Intelligence Directorate that didn't exist. Also known as 'Invisible Ops' by those few people who knew of its existence, CEID 0 was the sharpest end of an already very sharp stick. If the President wanted someone disappeared, a regime toppled, an election fixed or an entire arcology demolished in a way that absolutely, positively could not be traced back to the United Solarian Sovereignty, CEID 0 was the department she would call. Zero was a spy's wet dream. They possessed fleets of untraceable ships and a small army of black ops storm troopers with a license to kill, they had mil-spec cybernetics for every field agent and digital keys to damn near the entire Datasphere and the best gadgets, every last part of it financed with unlimited illegal slush funds. They had their fingers in a thousand pies both legal and illegal inside and outside the Sovereignty. They were a secret agency within a secret agency, a corps of hard-core killers with its own rules and laws and, most of all, the very best field agents in the Sovereignty.

And the best of all those field operatives, it was often said, was Liberty Kincaid.

She nodded. “Wbere do you want me to begin?”

“At the beginning of course. We went over Limpkin's imprint with a fine-toothed comb and found nothing, but I want you to go over it again and see if we've missed anything. Then do the same for the Von Neumann swarms. Nobody hacks a system-wide swarm without leaving a trail of some kind, so whoever pulled this off has to have left something behind. I want you to find it, and then find them.”

“What are my assets?”

“This is now a Priority Four situation. Take whatever you need.”

Liberty blinked. She'd just been given a carte blanche to requisition anything up to a small fleet of warships. “Very well, ma'am.” She turned to go, then hesitated. “Ma'am?”

“Yes?” Abielle Magritte raised an eyebrow.

“I take it the Max-Tac troopers were your idea?”

“They were indeed,” her smile widened. “Don't hold it against them, they weren't themselves at the time.”

Liberty frowned a little “You know, I could've gotten shot. You could've told me you were sending in a pack of killers to take out Yukio.”

“Now what would've been the fun in that?” The DCEID shrugged. “Besides, you're far too skilled to let a few apes like them get you killed.”

That made a ruthless kind of sense. First send your field agent to seduce the daughter of the CEO to gain access to the Maibatsu mainframe. Then when the deed is done, send in a pack of killers to take out the daughter, her portacomp and her entire apartment to cover it up. That left just one loose end. Liberty took great pains to sound carefully neutral when she asked, “what about me?”

There was the predatory grin again. “Don't worry. We hacked the personality backups of all four agents; they're quite firmly convinced they shot you. Yukio was temporarily dead so she won't be able to tell that's not what happened, and the police report will confirm two female bodies were retrieved from the scene. As far as this story is concerned you're quite dead already. So there's no need to die for real.”

That was comforting. She said as much. Abielle Magritte waved it away. “Don't mention it.” As the elevator doors began to close, the DCEID turned around, threw her a kiss, and smiled one more time. “Just don't get used to it!”

[Steve]

Admiralty House, Westminster
New Anglia, Star Kingdom of New Anglia
22 February 3400


Admiral O'Connor and Robert Dale were meeting in the latter's office; sacrificing time off on Saturday for the important business at hand; namely, the approach of a Shepistani fleet of some size toward the Outback. "Entrances to the Outback in Neutral space are limited," O'Connor noted, a map of the region and its known lanes visible. "If the Shepistanis can't get access rights from the Empire State Republic, and there's no indication they will, they have to go all the way around to the Imperium-New Anglia hyperlane and enter at Sector V-20."

"So where do we oppose them, and what with?" Robert tapped the map. "Sortieing the Grand Fleet back into the Outback would be excessive and costly, but given the size of the Shepistani expedition it is the only component fleet we have that is of overwhelming superiority. If we only send 2nd Fleet or even one of the others, the odds are even enough the Shepistanis could press their luck."

"My subordinates feel strongly about this, that we should simply send the Grand Fleet in to Lochley and have them move to intercept. Preferably at Theta Pellias." He pointed to a system in the Outback, where the Imperium-New Anglia hyperlane saw a small "spider-web" lane branch off. "This is the earliest point where the Shepistanis could depart the main hyperlane and move into the minor ones to bring them to Bannerman. Alternatively, an interception at Bannerman itself could be tried...."

"I'd rather not, better to intercept them at Theta Pellias." Robert tapped his desk. "We could shift one of the Spinward Fleets over as well to take up position in Bannerman."

"That would reduce our fleet coverage in the Spinward Command." O'Connor seemed deep in thought. "Still, I suppose we don't have a choice. If the Shepistanis were to somehow slip past the fleet at Theta Pellias, we can't let them get into the Gap. A force that powerful? Once they got to Pendleton they'd be in a strong position to dictate terms to us. We must ensure their interception before they into the Gap."

"We should send 3rd Fleet, then," Robert noted. "They just finished their refit and replenishment cycle.at Ji'Doreia. And the Grand Fleet will be placed at Bavaria to be ready to enter the Outback at a moment's notice. I'll inform the PM."

[DarthShady]

The Outback, Sector X-20
Planet Meskhenet, Edge of Karlack Space

The world of Meskhenet was once lush and prosperous, full of idealistic colonists and people hoping to build a new life on this green emerald world. Over the years things had changed. Being so close to Karlack space the world suffered numerous raids by the abominable creatures, that combined with the ever growing presence of pirates in the Outback, had made the people of Meskhenet change the way they viewed the world. They became tired of becoming victims to the whims of more powerful entities, so they took up arms and fought back. Although they weren't so much fighting the evils of the Galaxy, more like joining them.

Under the leadership of a man called Jarra, they embraced their new destiny and became pirates themselves. They used the remoteness and isolation of their world to their advantage, launching more and more raids deep into the outback. Their leader Jarra, a powerful ESPer, united many rogue pirate clans under his banner. And now the people of Meskhenet were no longer oppressed, they were the oppressors - a tyrannical pirate kingdom led by a ruthless and powerful warlord, only interested in one thing. Filling their pockets with any means necessary.

In orbit around this hive of scum and villainy stood a massive space station, bristling with weapons and decorated by the disassembled hulks of the pirates fallen pray - guarded by a small fleet of pirate ships. It was from this Palace in Heaven that Jarra ruled his kingdom. And his kingdom was now receiving guests.

Two massive flashes of light flared at the edge of the system, announcing the arrival of two even more massive ships.

The first ship looked like it was assembled from large pieces of space junk and a few giant rocks, its hull almost completely covered with various weapons and painted in a dark red color - this was the ship of the Ork Warboss Magsog Grotork. A well known pirate and mercenary, renown for his fondness of killing Humies. Surprisingly no weapons were fired and the Ork ship slowly made its way towards the space station.

The second ship was slightly larger, somewhat more elegant in its features compared to the ork vessel, but still just a large brick with weapons - it was the mercenary warship "Crna Ruka". Home of one of the more infamous band of mercenaries on this side of the galaxy, and commanded by none other than the Najrds Cirak. A man wanted for piracy, murder, and a host of other crimes on quite a few worlds in Wild Space. "Crna Ruka" followed the Ork vessel and soon it too docked with the pirate space station.

Fifteen minutes later, Jarra was on his observation deck, looking over the two new arrivals and preparing himself for the job at hand. The large metal door behind him opened with a loud clank and soon he could hear the lumbering footsteps drawing ever closer, the Ork Warboss was the first to arrive.

"I iz here Humie! Dis better be good" Magsog Grotork roared as he enter the room followed by a couple of his boyz.

"Patience my friend. We must wait for the rest of our guests." Jarra said, his eyes still focused on the outside. "It will be worth your time, I assure you."

The Ork simply grunted in response, but before he could speak the door opened again. This time a human in a black business suit followed by four guys armed with plasma guns and wearing black powered armor suits entered the room.

"Orks? That was... unexpected." Najrds Cirak, leader of the small group of men, said with a smile. "So what was so important that I had to fly all the way to this craphole to find out? Why did you call up this meeting?"

"I didn't." Jarra answered, not even bothering with a greeting.

"What do you mean?" Najrds asked, sensing that Jarra had a surprise for him.

"My...employer did." Jarra answered. "There is a job he needs done, and you and the Ork over there will be the ones doing it. No need to worry, he is a very generous man."

"So where is diz humie? Magsog don't like waitin." The Ork said and moved a bit closer, earning a few piercing looks from Cirak's body guards.

"He should be..." Jarra was interrupted by a flash of light in the distance. A gigantic Imperium Battle Ship emerged from hyperspace and moved slowly towards the station. Once the ship came closer however, the men and orks on the observation deck realized that no servants of the God Emperor were on that ship. It was instead inhabited by something else.

"He is here." Jarra said with a smile.

"You son of a bitch. That ship is..." Najrds shouted, ready to pull out his gun.

"Relax." Jarra stopped him. "You will not be harmed. He has other plans for you."

Upon seeing the infested Imperium ship up close. "Shit!" Was all Najrds could say.

[Shroom Man 777]

Somewhere in Bragulan Space



The SHEPlanetay Express ship flew through the iridescent interdimensional expanse of hyperspace at fast speed. As a Shepistani bulk cargo carrier, it was optimized for two things - carriage capacity and engine power. A little nuclear pop-gun was bolted on top of the hull to defend itself from space pirates and other depravities, but aside from that, it was all engine and storage space, with a little crew amenities as an after thought.

The captain of the vessel was a cyclopean woman with purple hair. Among her crew was a foul-mouthed alcoholic robot with sociopathic tendencies, an anachronistic slacker defrosted from cryostasis and still suffering from frostbite to the brainpan, and a physician who was actually a crustaceanoid alien with a mail-order degree in (in)human medicine and no friends. Together, they were the star employees of a Shepistani space shipping company used as a secondary source of income by a deranged and senile old research colleague and friend of Dr. Blitzschlag.

With them was a representative of the Shepistani government, military, of course, tasked with checking the quality of the Bragulan-grade SPUD missiles they were tasked to retrieve and to see other Bragulan things of interests. But while they were in transit, and without any Bragulan weaponries on hand to scrutinize, he had to contend himself with merely performing lecheries towards the ship's cyclopean captain or gyrating his protruding gut whilst abusing the space karaoke machine.

The trip to Bragulan space was long and meandering. With only each other's company, it was maddening. In the time since their departure from Shepistani space, the crew had had to dodge marauding pirates multiple times, and the ensuing arguments and interpersonal conflicts saw several incidents of near-mutiny not to mention murder attempts at each another. Luckily, the cyclopean captain was by far the best fighter of the lot, and had easily subdued and beaten the crap out of her subordinates. The treacherous robot, on the other hand, had his sociopathic tendencies easily placated by offers of illicit alcohol, and when this was not enough the microwave oven was easily jerry-rigged into a DEW weapon to short-circuit his malfunctioning microchips. By the time they were hailed by the destination system's space controllers and escorted by navy ships, their bridge was already littered with empty cans of Slurm and OrGazmo wrappers. They were vectored towards the world and were soon due to make atmo.



Finally reaching civilization, even if it was uncivilized bear civilization, and making planetfall was the best thing that had happened for the men and woman of the SHEPlanetary Express ship. After landing, they began throwing away the Slurm cans and OrGazmo wrappings and wiped off the dried bloodstains on the floors and walls of their vessel. Old grievances were put aside, any misgivings about attempted homicides and frustrated manslaughters were forgotten - at least temporarily so - and they focused on the job at hand. They touched down on that Bragulan fringe world and set about doing their duties.

Results: We will start exporting SPUDs to Shepistan! The Shep ship has arrived to come get some!

[Shroom Man 777]

Ammu-Nation
The Firepower of Freedom

Brown Gun


The Megapolitan Police Constable's best friend, a Brown Gun sonic carbine capable of non-lethally pacifying individuals and small groups of people. Calmly, coolly, entirely without incident.

Invented during the 26th century by the Solarian Megapolitan Police Department (popularly known as The Meg), the Brown Gun has come to the use of most Terran law-enforcement agencies and has survived almost a thousand years years relatively unchanged, playing a significant role in quelling rampant civil unrest during galactic civilization's most turbulent times.

The Brown Gun is an acoustic weapon, however, unlike most sonic weapons, the Brown Gun does not kill or incapacitate through the conventional sub-aural methods (such as those as seen in sonic-electronic ball breakers). Instead, it emits focused low-frequency sound, a.k.a. Brown Noise, that stimulates the human pyloric sphincter, causing anyone unfortunate enough to be in the affected area to develop severe bowel movements, which results in an unsightly and rather smelly... mess. Because of this, the Brown Gun has become rather notorious to the criminal underground and the mere sight and smell of it is more than enough to cause many sense-offenders to surrender.

Brown Guns, like other non-lethal weapons, are meant to be used by police prior to an assault to incapacitate and/or disorient the hostiles in situations like riots, hostage takings and prolonged sieges. However, due to the device's peculiar nature, there have been multiple occasions where the felons, and even the rescued hostages, have sued police agencies for the undignified use of Brown Guns.

Normally, specialized vehicles such as tactical police vans and repulsorcraft mount Brown Guns. This is mostly because of the riot control variants' size as they are designed to affect wide areas and not just individuals. For obvious reasons, these vehicles are soundproofed. Although there are hand-held Brown Guns, they are more often used on individuals and small groups rather than large mobs of rioters. Large Brown Guns are used to demonstrate that civil disobedience is still disobedience.

It is customary for USS police departments to bring sanitation specialists and vehicles, as well as large quantities of air freshener, when Brown Guns are employed. The most memorable use of the Brown Gun was during the underhive riots of the Solarian Mega Cities during '93, when the Meg used the device on thousands of unruly demonstrators and protesters. The resultant crowd-dispersal left such a mess that it took city sanitation services several days to clear and a whole week to deodorize.


A Solarian cadet drills with a Brown Gun in Police Academy. Like with pepper spray, as part of their training Solarian police officers are required to use Brown Guns on each other to build resistance and learn to withstand their own weaponry just in case 'perps' get their hands on it.


WOULD YOU LIKE TO LEARN MORE?

[Simon_Jester]

As the last strains of that most Bragulan of Bragulan music faded, a little human in a suit- more modern formalwear- strode up to Spozavik. The ravages of old age were plain on his face, as he had lost even the little patch of fur humans had on the top of their head. Though the narrow bands of hair directly above his eyes were clearly flourishing, for some strange reason. Despite his age, he seemed alert, bright-eyed, and active. He smiled at the Bragulans, in the less creepy closed-mouth style, instead of the bizarre rabid-monkey bared-fangs style. Bragulan science still did not understand why some humans thought that baring their puny human teeth was a sign of friendship.

"Greetings, Mr. Shpechtkov." The puny human had even got the pronunciation right- a promising start! "I am Dr. Maxim Chernov, Second Technarch for Foreign Affairs. Welcome to Umeria!"

Spozavik returned the humans' greeting with one of his own, barking out his thanks for the warm reception of the Umerians and giving Dr. Chernov a handshake - while being careful not to dislodge the frail old human's arm. Spozavik remembered the early days of his being Dryznyl Shpechtkov, when in his excitement he had accidentally maimed the first human who he had shaken hands with - nearly causing a diplomatic incident as he did so. Ever since then, he had taken care to watch his strength.

It was for this reason that Bragulan diplomats, who were mostly actually IBGV agents in disguise, now received training in shaking human hands and other niceties by practicing with various prisoners-of-war loaned from the gulags.

So far, considering his prior experiences with the likes of Altacarians and Shepistanis, he could say that the opening minutes of his trip to Umeria made him optimistic. The assembled brass band finished their piece, wore their shiny space helmets again, and filed out in formation. Watching them, Spozavik gained an appreciation of how they had played a decent rendition of the Imperator's March. Obviously the Umerians had gone through quite an effort to get it right. Not just the song, but even the pronunciation of Spozavik's own alias. Even with the Shepistanis, cultural awkwardness and mishaps were rife. But the Umerians, they were impeccable in their presentation. Perhaps too much so.

Which made him wonder. To do so, the Umerians must have had information. Proper information. And with the Spin Zone being so far away from Koprulu, such information wasn't easy to come by, which meant that in order to get the song right and the pronunciation of his name right, the Umerians must have gone through quite an effort to obtain the right kind of intelligence on Bragulan music and Bragulan phonetics... and undoubtedly much more. Spozavik's acute sense of paranoia kicked in and his paws began tingling. This happened in lots of situations, like the time CEID had sent infiltrator cyborgs - with living tissue over hyperalloy endoskeletons - after him, and that other time the Byzantines sicked an Inquisitorial kill-team at his hide. Spozavik wondered whether the feeling in his stomach was the bronto burger in-flight meal of Xenu Spacelines, or something else.

He eyed the comely old Umerian, Dr. Maxim Chernov, who was looking at him expectantly. What game was he playing at?

"Oh, how rude of me!" Spozavik chuckled. He noticed that Gryza and the stormtrooper-chauffeur were not yet introduced to the Umerian. "These are my associates. Ms. Gryza Grbychyov, and my aide."

Journalists from the Ministry of Welfare arrived, and Spozavik had to remind himself that they had hovering camera units instead of CEID kill-drones. The camera units were painted in soothing pastel colors- to lure the foe into a false sense of security? No. No, they were obviosuly just camera-bots, as shown by their primitive little helicopter rotors. CEID killbots used much more sophisticated engines, that could not be foiled by tricks like throwing fishing line at them and tangling them up! Well, usually not, anyway.

Having satisfied himself that the "journalists" were not in fact assassins, or that if they were, they weren't about to kill him, Spozavik faced the cameras and the journos. "People of Umeria, the Bragulan Star Empire extends its hand of friendship towards your nation. The Bragulan people and the Imperator Darvyl Sagatantron Byzon, come in peace. We have much to learn from each other, and much to benefit from as well in ideologically correct commensalism and mutualism between our kinds. The good people of Umeria are a credit to their race. The human race, that is."

---

Spozavik beamed. It would make a good sound-bite. Though to this day that term confused him. Human jaws were not well-developed enough to masticate on sound waves. How could anyone chew on sounds, anyway? It made no sense. Silly puny human figure of speech. In mighty Bragule, such inaccurate phrase would've warranted a stick-beating to reaffirm ideological speech content. In the Bragulan Star Empire, sound bites you.

But even if it was confusing, the inaccurate phrase seemed to satisfy the journos and the technarch. They nodded and smiled. Some of the journalists bared their teeth, and for a moment Spozavik had a flashback, thinking that the camera drones really were killbots, and that they were about to attack him! He felt the beginnings of an adrenaline rush, and prepared to defend himself. But what if they weren't going to attack him? That would be even worse than accidentally maiming someone by shaking their hand too hard! He was so confused.

Before he could decide whether to stand still, dive for cover, or launch an all-out assault to get into their midst, he saw the wrinkly old minister nod sharply to the journos and wave them away. They turned away, and Spozavik felt his instinctive urge to defend himself from the bare-fanged humans fading. The news reporters filed out of the room, though some of them seemed reluctant and took their time closing up their equipment.

Dr. Chernov turned back to Spozavik. "Thank you for your kind words, Mr. Shpechtkov. Now, originally I had planned a tour of the capital world's sights before we got down, as mentioned in the documents we forwarded to Miss... Grbyechov? Is that right?" He turned to the slim red-brown female, who nodded. That wasn't quite right, but it was within the bounds of regional accents... perhaps Chernov's research was not quite so comprehensive as Spozavik had first thought?

The Umerian continued. "But, because of your early arrival, the plans may need to be slightly modified. It's nearly dark at many of the sites of interest, for one thing, and it is rather late in the day even to take in the sights of the capital properly. Perhaps we could rearrange the schedule, have a brief preliminary meeting to discuss some of the key issues at stake this afternoon, then retire for the night and have the tour tomorrow?"

An efficient arrangement, or so it seemed to Spozavik. The Bragulan rumbled agreement. "An efficient arrangement."

"Good. Then if you would care to come along, we shall be happy to ferry you to the offices of the Foreign Ministry in the Central Administration Complex; from there, it is only a short jaunt to your hotel after today's discussions are over."

Chernov led the Bragulan delegation to the roof of the spaceport terminal, where a well-appointed, and reasonably large, aircar was waiting for them. Spozavik motioned his assistants into the rear pair of reinforced seats, while he and Chernov took the middle. With a single driver up in front and slightly below them, their view ahead of the aircar was unobscured. This would be a good time to get a clear view of the capital, and so a bit more insight into how this particular batch of humans thought and operated.

As the car cleared the spaceport traffic lanes, it started to gain altitude, levelling off at around four hundred meters off the ground. Spozavik cloud clearly see the inner city center of Reisenburg, with its larger, shinier towers; nearer to him were other buildings, mostly not so shiny and often with visible external bracing and girderwork reinforcing the outer surface. Perhaps two different styles of construction?



Here was a chance to show the Umerian that Spozavik, too, could gather a scary amount of information about other people's countries! He had been briefed on important facts about their ancient history, which meant he could learn about their recent history, and therefore their present! "So this is what the buildings of your Chrome Age looked like?"

Chernov gave the Bragulan another of those not-creepy thin lipped smiles and chuckled. "The Chrome Age... I haven't heard that one in a long time. If you read the schoolbooks, they call it a Golden Age, but if the shoe fits, why not? Yes, the buildings further into the city center are more or less as they would have back in those times. The ones beyond that big cylindrical one in the distance, those are good examples of what we call neo-classical architecture. Although neo-classical buildings often lack the luster of their... Chrome Age models. We have to make do with such surfaces as anodized aluminum, because-" he winked- "we are short on chromium these days."

Hmm. The human did not seem intimidated by how much Spozavik knew about his country's history. Perhaps he was just very good at hiding it? Chernov was a high-ranking minister in his country's government, after all. Officially, he was one of the ten most powerful people in the country. And now that he doublethought about it, there were other signs, other shows of subtle power. The wrinkly little man had just contradicted the word choice of his own country's official documents! With others present! Clearly, this was a bold and important human... but then again, that would mean he must have enemies. So maybe he was heading for a fall soon.

Spozavik would have to be extra-careful to make sure that any agreements between Bragule and Umeria didn't depend on this minister, or his outspoken-ness might doom the deal when his internal enemies overthrew him. While he was thinking about this, to avoid an awkward silence, he nodded and looked out the window.

---

Spozavik was a bear of the galaxy. So looking out over the Reisenberg skyline, his first thought was to compare it to the great flying-car-festooned metropoli of the Sovereignty. Or Altacar. It was both like, and not like, those massive cities.

On the one paw, there was the same kind of huge architecture: a great acropolis of arcologies, or maybe an arcopolis of acrologies. That was normal; except for the puniest of human cities (like those of Pendleton), humans built tall buildings to house their numbers in, just like Bragulans. Even though they themselves were not as tall, the buildings usually were. Perhaps their monkey instincts made them love being far from the ground? Hmm.

But anyway. On the other paw, it wasn't the acrologies that made Reisenburg seem different. Something was... missing. Spozavik concentrated. Maybe it was that there were so few flying cars, and so many flying omnibuses and minihovervans. Maybe it was that today was a clear day, and the city was lit by bright sunlight instead of being all full of rain and smog. That would make it look weird, because normally you got huge arcopolises on properly consumed and industrialized worlds where there was more of those things. But no, that wasn't it either.

Agent Sposavik scowled, being careful to scowl out the window so as not to frighten his hosts, though he caused an amusing amount of panic in the omnibus full of schoolchildren they were passing. It wasn't the shortage of flying cars and the excess of flying public transit. It wasn't the unnaturally sunny day and the lack of the proper noir and gravitas you got around most acrologies. It was... then he figured it out.

There was no advertising. Anywhere. In the Sovereignty, any building with more than a few square meters of vertical space would have slapped a billboard on it, advertising posthuman postenhancements, or the name of some corporation, or maybe a Sovereignty-wide product like HOOAH! or OrGazmo. In Altacar, you got the same thing, only with more neon lights and letter "S"-es in place of letter "Z"-s. Back home, that space would not be wasted on puny civilian advertising, but would instead be spent on worthier purposes, such as murals depicting the glories of Bragulanity, or gigantic pictures of the beloved Imperator Byzon, to show how beloved he was. He'd seen imagery of Byzantine hive cities; they did pretty much the same thing, only their murals weren't as good because they only had the feeble glories of humanity to depict. And their giant pictures weren't as good either, because they had to make do with their inferior human God-Emperor because they didn't have a real Imperator.

But anyway. The point was, in any normal arcopolis, there were pictures all over everything. Whether it was advertising or inspirational art showing the total glory of the country's leader, something would be festooning the sides of the buildings.

In Umeria, there was nothing. The buildings were unfestooned! There was nothing but big panels of armorglass and synthmetal, or big frames of girders. Maybe some interesting colors, or some artdecotectural fluting to break up the boringness of it all, but no billboards, no murals, no giant pictures of important people... just nothing. And that was not normal.

That... that probably said something about the Umerians. It could also be a tactical disadvantage; Spozavik remembered well the time he had narrowly escaped capture in Solarian territory because his pursuers were distracted by an unusually shiny billboard, giving him time to ambush them and rip their faces off. Here, he could not count on such an edge.

Darn.

[Steve]

Chapter Mattan, Outside Altair
Planet and Kingdom of Fynn, Sector X-13
19 February 3400


It was morning time in Chapter Mattan, located on an isolated property in the suburbs of Altair, and Druni grumbled as she was stirred from her sleep by Zara. Behind Zara stood a Caucasian woman with red hair and an oval face wearing the robes of a Knight-Captain, Bianca Magi, who had apparently been conversing with Zara.

"Come on, Druni, the Knight-Captain wishes to see you demonstrate your balance techniques after breakfast," Zara said while Druni slowly got up. "And then we have to get ready. Hilda and the others will be returning later today."

Grumbling, Druni got out of bed and followed the six other Acolytes and Apprentices down to the mess hall. Zara and Bianca Magi followed. "You're handling her about as well as any other Knight would," Bianca said approvingly.

"I fear that for all her talent, Druni will not be able to pass her Trials," Zara confided. "She is impulsive and shows no patience. And... I am not sure her heart is in serving the Order."

"It might not be. She would not be the first Gifted girl of the Dorei to be pressed into the Order by her parents, concerned for her own well-being." Bianca looked down from the upper floor to where the 10 Acolytes and Initiates living in the Chapter were dining, along with the four Sentinels. All of the girls save Druni and an Apprentice for another Knight were Human, local girls who had joined the Order and had not yet had room found for them in one of the Human Cloisters (the Order tried to keep the Humans learners in their own Cloisters and Chapters for their education, due to the language barrier). "But all we can do is give her a chance as we do all those who come to us." Bianca reached out and took Zara's shoulder as she went to go down the stairs and join the others for breakfast. "Sister Zara, I have received a message from Master Long at the Tasker Cloister."

"Yes?"

Bianca lowered her eyes. "You and Druni are to return home tomorrow, regardless of whether Hilda is coming back or not."

Zara took in a breath. "Yes, well, I understand. She was very generous to let me come here with Hilda. I'll tell Hilda tonight and find out how much longer her father is keeping her here."

"I am sorry. I know you two were about to become Bonded when her mother and brother died, and she was made Crown Princess." Biance's voice was fairly soft now, a soothing tone meant to reassure and heal. "I wish you could continue to be together."

"We do as Duty demands," Zara said simply. She felt sick to her heart. She knew that soon, very soon, it would be over. Layla would pass her Trials, Hilda would leave the Order, and she would be alone with nothing but her memories. Her horrible memories....

"We should eat," Bianca urged. "Then I can observe Druni's training and give my report to Master Long."


Royal Palace

The yacht carrying the delegation from Fynn came down over the tarmac in the Palace Courtyard. Zara and Druni waited patiently for everyone to come out, nodding to the King and Chamberlain and Chancellor... then Hilda finally appeared, Layla behind her. Zara gave her a hug as she came up. "How was it?"

"Somber and appropriate," Hilda answered. "And full of very important, very stuffy people."

Zara took Hilda's hands into her own. As they walked off to be alone, Layla and Druni went off in a different direction, likely to engage in sport or sparring as was usual among Apprentices. "Hilda, Sister Bianca told me today that I've been ordered back to Tasker Cloister."

Hilda showed no surprise at that. "I expected she'd have you sent back by now. Hopefully I won't be too much longer. When do you have to go back?"

"We leave tomorrow." Zara saw Hilda react with an accepting nod. "I would hope you can come back soon yourself."

Hilda drew in a breath. "Yes, well... I would hope so too. But at the Chancellor's behest, my father is going to ask the Order to let me finish Layla's training here so that I can be present as this arrangement with the Tyconians is finalized."

Zara tried to react outwardly to that, but in her heart she felt sadness and some despair. This, then, might be their final night... "Ah, your wedding?"

"Yes. It's not as close a secret as people wished," Hilda explained. "Both the Anglian and French leadership hinted they knew of it. There was no sign of opposition, but if they know it's possible the other states will too, and the government wants to move fast. Most of the agreements have already been finalized between Dragovich and Kasan. We're going to announce the plan... tomorrow." Hilda breathed in a sigh. "And Father thinks it best if I stay here now. I suppose that if Master Long insists on my return it will happen, but I doubt the Order will deny the request of the Fynnian Government. Also..." Tears came to Hilda's eyes as she reached up and gripped Zara's cheek. "This is to be our last night together, Zara. I have asked my Father to let you stay here tonight and he agreed. But starting tomorrow, you and I must part. He does not want our relationship to interfere in the marriage."

There were no words to describe the pain Zara felt and which Hilda shared. She fought back tears and put her hand on Hilda's cheek. "Then... tonight is it," she sniffled. "I will be content with this, for I must."

"I can never be," Hilda insisted, after which she pressed her lips to Zara's in a kiss.



In a non-script motel room, a group of figures laid out their equipment. Their leader, a burly fellow with a cybernetic eye and enhanced vision, checked his Hayha model laser-firing sniper rifle while the others murmured. Finally, he spoke up. "Listen up, everyone. Tomorrow's job's gonna be tough. These jobs always are. Remember the priority target and the secondary." He tapped his finger to an LCD screen beside him, showing a pair of pictures. One was of King Charles, the other Princess Hilda. "They're going public tomorrow, we've been told, that'll be our best opportunity to take them out without having to attempt an infiltration of the Palace. Above all else, we must take out the King. The Princess, well, full T-O-O. She's a trained ESPer, so we'll only take her out of the opportunity presents itself. Any questions?"

"Yeah. How much we gettin' paid for this?", one man asked.

"More than enough," was the answer. "And before you ask 'Who?', we're gettin' paid enough that the question shouldn't come up. Any others?"

There were no further questions.

[Lonestar]

Inner Harbor
Grayson City



“My, what a thrilling locale.” Said Colonel Morgan. “The crackwhores and the low-rise habs really add to the ambiance. It really gives the place an exotic feel, like Pubic Bay in the Feelipeens.”

The smallest of smiles jerked from agent Bessières. The truth of the matter was that the Dominion government didn’t give two turds about whether or not the Bragulans found their missing youth, they were just going through the motions in order to prevent an incident from arising with the Xenos, and he had been instructed as such. Whether or not these All-human loons had the yearling didn’t matter. If the situation was judged “too hard” the Bragulans would be sent on their way. Dominionite subjects would not be killed for the sake of a Xenos yearling. “I be appreciating you joining me Colonel Morgan.”

“Been a long time since we raided that cult on Dolly Sods Benjy. As soon as I saw you step aboard the Hellbender I knew there was fun to be had. There’s the wee lass.” Morgan was smoking a cigar, with his mechano-lungs handling the smoke far better than even the finest engineered organic ones. “Har har! She’s even wearing a promise ring! Woman like that, you know she’s…”

“Yes, yes.” Bessières wishing that he had had a real DPS team with him instead of borrowing personnel like some lackadaisical Imperial Inquisitor. Morgan was good in a fight but didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. “Just go over there to the bus stop and make conversation. I’ve arranged for the Blitzschlag Fields on this block to be reduced in strength.” Morgan was wearing a jacket(something that as a mostly-robot he didn’t need) with the team emblem of the Woodstock Bears scrumball team. Even with Terrazine Bessières wouldn’t be able to punch through the reduced Blitzschlag fields to search through the mind of the EA, something had to be sparked to bring images to the surface. Morgan ambled over across the street.

Within a few moments Bessières felt an a series of images flash from the mind of the young woman(among other things she thought Bessières was a drug dealer) and soon it was clear that Yivgny was being held at the Furry Conversion Therapy Camp the All-Human League had on Damascus, somewhere in the Eastern Mountains. Bessières sighed, the fleeting image of the camp showed armed guards and the orders were explicit: no Dominion subjects could come to harm. Right as he started to think about what lie he would concoct for the Bragulans another image flashed through his mind.

A Cardinal!

The All-Human League had a Cardinal at the camp! Was it one of the ones that had gone rogue and disappeared during the Troubles? Or was it an official one, and was the Church concealing the kidnapping of Xenos nationals? Either way it looked like young Yivgny had a reprieve. There would be a rescue now.

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

Soramirez, Do Everything!
Seize, Gorasnaya
Risea Sector, Holy Empire of Haruhi Suzumiya

As Filicia and the rest of the squad moved deeper into Seize, Kanata's apprehension was slowly proving to be somewhat justified. Various signs of a brief yet violent conflict presented themselves all over the place. While there were quite a few damaged façades, potholed streets, and junked vehicles, what really stuck out was the blood. Copious amounts of it, covering nearly every surface in red. Another detail that jumped out at the squad was the complete lack of identifiable human corpses; what few bodies were lying around the area were those of dead Chimaerans and Schismatics, and there was far too much blood in the area to have come from them alone. "Yeah, I definitely have a bad feeling about this," Kanata remarked.

As the squad moved amidst all this carnage, point woman Private Kureha Suminoya caught sight of a sign of life, though she wasn't sure if it was friendly or hostile. "I think I just saw something move into that alley up ahead!" she called out.

Keith and Rio raised their hands to signal the rest of the squad to halt. "Allen, Suminoya, go check it out," Rio ordered. "Sorami, Ramirez, cover them. Everyone else, hold position."

Joseph and Kureha nodded in affirmation as they started moving ahead of the rest of the squad to investigate the alley, trailed closely by James and Kanata. "I was right, wasn't I?" Kanata said. "I told you the sarge would be making us do everything, Jimmy."

"Joey and Kure-chan are with us, if you didn't notice," James said. "We're just gonna be watching their backs in case they actually run into anything."

True enough, Joseph and Kureha ran into something in that alley. Something that that wanted to rape them to death, eat their flesh, and sew their skins into its clothing (if it wore any). And if Joseph and Kureha were VERY lucky, it would do those things in that order. "CHIMAERANS! OPEN FIRE!"



Three Chimaerans were in the alley, on the verge of overwhelming a hapless police officer who apparently couldn't make it to one of Seize's emergency shelters on time. Joseph and Kureha immediately sprung to action, taking down the three with a few short bursts from their M358 gauss machine guns and saving the policeman, but there were more Chimaerans incoming. As Kureha focused her fire on the new arrivals coming straight down the alley, she spotted several more running up on a second-floor balcony and getting ready to get the drop on them. "Joey! Up to the left!"

Joseph aimed his weapon towards the balcony and fired off another burst, shredding the Chimaerans before they could react. "Jimmy, if you haven't called up the sarge, you better do it now!" he cried out.

"Already on it, Joey!" James replied as he pulled out his radio. "This is Private Ramirez! That guy we saw running into the alley was a local cop! We just saved him from some Chimaerans that we ran into in the alley! We'll try to withdraw back into the street and meet up with you guys, okay?! Ramirez, out!"

With the policeman in tow, the fireteam began to retreat from the alley, firing off bursts from their rifles and machine guns in order to deter the rapidly approaching Chimaerans. The policeman also pitched in, firing off single shots from his DeBarros M11A semi-auto rifle whenever he could; despite being fatigued and outright shell-shocked, he was able to land quite a few hits on the monstrosities. "Frag out!" Kanata shouted as she pulled the pin on a frag grenade and tossed it at the Chimaeran mob, taking out several of them as they charged.

The sounds of inhuman growls and snarls, intermittent weapons fire, and the occasional explosion of a frag grenade filled the air as James, Joseph, Kanata, Kureha, and the cop ran out of the alley to rendezvous with Filicia and the others. "You guys okay?" Rio asked. "Who's he?"

"No time for introductions!" the cop cried out, clearly agitated by his week-long ordeal. "We gotta keep moving, or those things are gonna tear us to shreds!"

Filicia saw no reason to doubt his testimony. "He's right, we've spent too much time standing still here," she remarked. "Let's go. Allen, Suminoya, you're on point again. Sorami, Ramirez, keep close to our new companion. Stay frosty Oscar Mike."

The squad, plus its new companion, moved out on the streets of Seize once more. While James, Joseph, Kanata, Kureha, and the cop were able to wipe out the Chimaerans in the alley, there were certainly going to be more of them in other parts of the town. They had yet to encounter any live Schismatics, though.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Jenova
The Imperial Orthodox Church was understandably furious that the biggest church in Shepistan space was wrecked in the most perfidious way possible. Plans were made to appoint another Shepistani Patriarch to replace the deceased Patriarch, although some cynically grumbled that perhaps they should appoint a Byzantine one, since Byzantines on average were cybernetically enhanced, and had thus better constitution, and would have likely taken the blow from the Bragulan easily, and delivered a return blow that would stagger even a Bragulan. Perhaps one of the former Imperial Guard types should be sent instead, some said, because it was likely the Bragulan's head would fly off and even kill another Bragulan. "The leader of the flock must be able to defend his flock after all," they said.

But the debate was settled, and it was determined that the policy of appointing a home grown Patriarch would be adhered to. Nevertheless, a statement must be made to the Bragulans. First, the Imperial Inquisition graciously agreed to build a great statue of the God Emperor riding the Bragulan leader Byzon on the planet Jenova. The statue was done immaculately, and even the detail accorded to Byzon exceeded even the best slaves' efforts. What was more, the statue was deliberately placed on the edge of the warzone, right in full view of Bragulan lines.



Naturally, the Bragulans on Jenova were horrified at this vile sacriledge. Plans were made to destroy the statue, but there was no doubt that, despite how feeble the humans were, they had done an incredible statue of their Lord Byzon. The only issue was that the God Emperor was wearing full powered armor and using Byzon as a steed.

In the end, a few of them agreed to pilot Spud missiles into the statue, without their warheads. The hope was their kinetic energy would be sufficient to shatter the God Emperor statue, and hopefully leave the statue of Byzon, praise be him, intact. To distract Imperial troops, the Bragulans would send out a sacrificial sortie.

The Imperium was not idle however, and had long foreseen the attack, but the statue was a kind of bait. The entire attack was filmed too. When the Bragulans attacked, the Imperials retaliated by sending out riders on Fenrisian Bears. These were the famed Fenrisian Bears that Rus Komnenos cherished immersely and loved. They were more massive than the average Bragulan, and they roared with a kind of bestiality that would scare the average Bragulan.



The Fenrisian bears had the kind of shock effect they were intended to achieve. Instead of charging head on into rows of Imperial guns, the Bragulans instead fled in total abject fear after they saw their compatriots being ripped apart by the Fenrisian bears. It was like the stuff of nightmares as the Fenrisan Bear riders rode their mounts into the ranks of Bragulans, tearing them apart with their claws and teeth.

The Spuds took off from their launch pads and headed towards their target. With unerring accuracy, they smashed into the God Emperor, yelling, "For Glorious Byzon!" at the top of their voices. But no matter how hard they tried, they made a mess of the pristine statue, defiling their Lord Byzon. The sole survivor of the air attack was summarily escorted to the de-education barracks, while the traumatized survivors of the ground attack fled for the de-education barracks. They were so traumatized that they specifically requested for the harshest of de-education treatment, because they would rather whimper as babies and forget the horrifying ordeal. The de-education center was never so overwhelmed.

Weeks later, the Inquisition and the Bragulan intelligence agreed to avoid such incidents again, and stop the tit for tat attacks. The Bragulans made one request however; they wanted a pair of Fenrisian bears, in the name of Fenrisian bear diplomacy. They were later placed in the same enclosure as the humans in the Bragulan zoo...

[Simon_Jester]

Nguyen's World, 1315 Planetary Local Time

Big Mig
Migwazza fought to regain control; it wasn’t easy. Tranquility’s massive turbofans put out enough pressure to set him tumbling. He watched the altimeter Bitzgrub had riveted to the side of the cockpit spool upwards. For some reason it had been measured in “feet” instead of humie meters. For a moment he wondered why... then, as he passed 2500 feet, he saw the next salvo of railgun rounds come screaming in from the west.

Oh zog.

The blast wave caught him twenty seconds later and slapped his fighter towards the ground. This was gonna be rough. For a moment, not even he was sure he was ‘ard enough to handle this...

“Boss! The ejection seats!”

Oh. Right.

He yanked the lever; the Stormboy rocket pack riveted to the back of his seat lit off. Migwazza’s last thought before he blacked out was how he needed to find something good to do for Bitzgrub... such a good mek...

“Uhhhhg.” The ace shook his head. He felt like he’d been bolted into a barrel and rolled down the side of a mountain, only without the fun parts. He shook his head again and pushed himself up on all fours, then to a wobbly standing position. His ears rang. The seat had crashed to the ground off to one side... maybe he shoulda remembered to have some kind of belts holding him in or somethin’. He shook his head again. This time it helped like it ought to. It looked like the rocket pack had busted off the back of the seat in midair, have to give his Mek a talking-to about that... what was his name... Bitzgrub!

So where’s da plane? He clambered onto a nearby rock. At least those damn guns had stopped shooting. He mentally moved up the day he went after Nazdreg’s big guns another notch. Zoggin’ bastard... He could see glints of ruddy metal scattered across the plain a ways ahead. Didn’t look like there was much left. So... what about the smartboy? He’d been pretty handy. That was a cunning trick, remembering about the ejection seats and all.

He looked around. Looked again. There! The wreckage of the other seat lay partly hidden in a gully. Crawling out of the gully... there he was. Slow but shaky, but he was still movin’, so he’d be OK. Migwazza sauntered over to his co-pilot.

“Boss! I can’t feel my foot, boss!”

Migwazza looked down. The smartboy’s right leg was missing from about the middle of the calf down. “Dat’s because it isn’t dere.” The smaller ork looked back and groaned.

“Oh, zog.” His eyes were wide. “I’m gonna miss dat foot.”

The warboss felt a strange, unfamiliar feeling. A human officer in this position- well, a human officer would have been smashed to death on the rocks. But a human who survived winding up in this position would call it ‘leadership.’ It wasn’t exactly orky, but it felt like the right thing to do. “It’s gonna be OK, Zimgrod. We get you back to da dok, an’ he fix you up wit’ a cybork foot. We just gotta get back to da airstrip.”

“Right, boss.” Like a good trooper, he kept crawling. But that wasn’t going to do it. This one was all the mob he had right now, and if he had to wait for the runt to crawl all the way back, he’d be at it for months. Zog that. He seized the smartboy, looping one long arm around the lesser ork’s barrel chest.

He'd need a... what was it, you saw the grots on 'em all the time... a crutch! “C’mon, we gotta get you sumfin’ to lean on.” Supporting his copilot, Migwazza struck out for the wreck of his plane. Maybe he could find a piece of wing spar or something...

1815 Planetary Local Time

One thing about being a fighta pilot, you usually had plenty o' dakka. More than anybody could carry. It was never really enough, you couldn't have enough dakka, but it was a lot better than nothin'. So when Migwazza found himself back on the ground, with no weapon to call his own but his personal slugga, he wasn't happy. Sure, it was a good gun. But it just wasn't the same as a battery of heavy machine guns and autocannon. After he'd pulled loose a suitable-length chunk of support beam for his smartboy's crutch, he'd gone looking among the wreckage to see if any of the guns were still intact. Finding that one of the wing-mounted dakkaguns still worked, and even managing to pull some ammo that hadn't cooked off out of the wreckage, was the best thing to happen to him all day.

So here he was, making his way back to base through the rocky badlands of Nguyen's World. He had his slugga, he had a machine gun slung over his shoulder, he had a follower trooping along in the sand beside him. Everything was OK. Well, pretty much OK. Only problem was, the little guy was making pretty good time with that crutch, but even so it was going to be a while. Then he saw a plume of grit and sand rising from the horizon. Good. Here comes my ride. He squinted, shading his eyes from the desert sun. It looked like... yup, bikers. As they crested the last rise in front of him, he saw that they were dressed in Nazdreg's colors, with a crude imitation of his banner flying from the lead bike. Zoggers.

He shouted as they pulled to a stop a few dozen paces ahead of him. "What you want?"

"Boss Nazdreg, he ain't happy 'bout you screwing up like dis. He saw you go down on da radar. How come you get shot down by a ship wit' no guns?"

That was the last straw. For a moment, that same weird impulse he'd felt earlier flickered, made him want to say something like "get off the bike and no one gets hurt." The impulse died fast. Zog that, he could do with a straight fight after all this muckin' around.

"WAAAAAGH!" Migwazza leveled the dakkagun at the leader of the biker pack and let fly. The roar of the heavy gun was deafening, and a blizzard of tracers streamed out. The ace walked its fire onto his newfound enemy, tearing both the ork and the bike he sat on apart in a spray of blood and sparks. Then he charged, firing from the hip. Even with the heavy weapon in his hands, he was still outgunned by the rest of the biker mob, who mostly had similar guns of their own mounted on the bikes. Two of the quicker-reacting bikers had already opened fire; most of their rounds slipped behind him to both sides. He felt a spike of pain from his left side as a heavy slug grazed the outside of his ribcage and tore a shallow gash along it, but now he was in close.

A point-blank burst from the dakkagun saw off another ork; he smashed a third off his bike with a jab from the barrel. Seizing the weapon the third biker had drawn in self-defense in his left hand and drawing his shoota in his right, he laid in among the other orks with pistol and axe. For a few moments, his mind dissolved in the berserk joy of combat, as he scattered the remnants of the biker mob and blazed away at the cowards who fled. Finally, he saw no standing enemies before him.

Nor did he see the one behind him. The biker he'd knocked down lept up and jumped on the warboss's back, growling and locking his arms around Migwazza's massive torso... and pulling a jagged-edged backup knife toward his throat. Migwazza wrestled with the unseen opponent. Normally, he'd have easily overwhelmed any ordinary ork, but the wound over his ribs was starting to weaken him on that side, and leverage was against him. He gritted his teeth and pushed, keeping the knife away from his neck, but the wiry little bastard had a grip like a bullsquig... then he heard a pistol shot. The arms clenched about his neck relaxed, and a burden fell away from his back.

Migwazza turned. His wounded copilot limped towards him on his crutch, a smoking shoota in his hand.

The ork pilot let out a mighty bellow of laughter. Now he knew why he took the trouble to save the smartboy earlier.

"Sometimes, Zimgrod, you iz real 'elpful."

"Thanks, boss."

Migwazza looked around, and spotted the bike with the fewest dents and bullet holes in it. Just his luck... it had a sidecar. He peered into the sidecar, reached inside, and pulled out a terrified grot with a toolbox- must be the mob's mechanic. Then he threw the grot into the distance.

"You, boy, you get in 'ere. I drive. We gonna be back to da airstrip in no time!"

Revving the engine and zooming out along the plains brought him back to his early days, before he'd learned to fly, when he was just another biker boy like the ones he'd smashed his way through today. He'd had nuthin' then, and he'd built up a squadron. But not a good enough squadron, fat lot of good they'd done him today. Bitzgrub was OK, an' Zimgrod was OK, but most of the others, they were just mucking about.

When he got back, he'd pull together what he had and get off this rock for a while. Nazdreg might be a grottish bastard some ways, but he had a lot of firepower, and Migwazza would need to rebuild his forces before he could take him on. He'd go find some other planet to work from. An' he'd build a new squadron. He'd get Bitzgrub to design better planes: faster, tougher, shootier. It would be the new... no. He wouldn't even keep the same name from the old squadron. This was a clean slate for him.

He'd call it... no, not that. Not that either. Wait! He knew what the name would have to be. Short, easy to remember, dead killy.

DEFF SKWADRON!

[Shroom Man 777]

____________________________________

- August 3392 -
- Lost Vegas, Shepvada -
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Carl Brownski was a middle-aged man with a modest income, a loving family, and a nice house that happened to be in a tropical paradise. Life couldn’t get much better, except when someone was outside impatiently ringing the doorbell.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming!” Carl said loudly as he brought himself in front of the door. He twisted the knob and pulled the door open.

“Carl Brownski?” inquired the visitor, a big man with a couple of piercings and a black jacket.

“Yeah?” Carl replied, eying the stranger who looked oddly familiar… “What is-”

Before Carl could finish, the big man kneed him in the gut and shoved him into the house. Staggering backwards, Carl struggled to defend himself. No luck, as the man slammed his big ham-like fist into Carl’s face, breaking his nose and sending him down to the floor.

“Remember me Carl?” the man asked as he kicked Carl in the ribs, twice.

Carl couldn’t hear him, he was too busy trying to crawl away, soaking the floor with his blood in the process.

“It’s me, Nickolai. Nickolai Saint. Saint Nick, remember?” he kicked Carl again, viciously. “Used to work for Iceprick.”

He grabbed Carl by his hair and dragged him deeper into the house.

“Used to, because you sold him out to the goddamn Feds, remember?” they were now in the living room. Nearby was a table, Nick slammed Carl’s already-bloodied face onto it, smearing its polished surface with blood. “Then you and your girlfriend got into the protection program and hid like fucking rats. That was twenty years ago, now you’ve got yourself a daughter. Nine years old. She’s gonna have her birthday two months from now, right?”

He slammed Carl’s face on the table again, smearing it with even more blood. Carl now had a bloody gash on his forehead.

“Or what? You think the mob would forget? The mob never forgets, you little piece of shit!” he jerked Carl off the table, and slammed his face on the table’s sharp edge. Nick repeated the process, careful to make sure that the edge met with Carl’s mouth, stomping him on the table's curb. “You little bastard. You little cunt!”

Carl’s mouth met the table again. Broken teeth fell off his mouth.

In one swift and painful motion, Nick threw Carl across the room with one hand, ripping a clump of hair out of Carl’s scalp. Carl landed on a pile of chairs.

Nick walked over to the brutalized man’s crumpled form, picked him up and plopped him on one of the still-standing chairs. He slapped Carl’s face, just to wake him up. He couldn’t tell if the man’s eyes were still open, his face was too bloody. Teeth flew out of Carl’s mouth as his head jerked sideways.

“So Carl, do you think Iceprick’s a bitch?” Nick asked as he pulled out a cigarette. He stuck it in his mouth, got out his lighter and lit it.

“No…” Carl replied, barely able to speak, mouth full of broken teeth.

“Then why did you fuck him?! Why did you fuck him like a bitch, Carl?!” Nick shouted. He stopped, took a drag, and exhaled, calming himself down.

Carl struggled to talk: “I had no choice, Nick… the Feds were-”

“The Feds were what? Coming to get him? To get us? They got him because you fucked him over, you little shit!” again, Nick took a drag and calmed himself down. He blew out some smoke and continued: “Iceprick took you in when you were a pathetic piece of shit, dead in the gutter. He gave you your wings, he gave you a nice percentage. He made you a made man! Without him, you would’ve been a nobody, Carl. So why did you fuck him over?!”

“Listen Nick… I’m so sorry. Tell the Iceprick I’m sorry. Please don’t kill me, please don’t hurt my wife-”

“Oh no, Carl. I’m not going to hurt her. I’m just going to cut her up like a bitch, and bleed her like a fucking pig. Then I’m going to put one between your little girl’s eyes, Carl. Because you fucked the Iceprick over, Carl. And the mob never forgets!” he capitalized his point by kicking Carl in the face, causing blood and teeth to fly all over as he fell backwards. “Oh, I hear them coming… it’s three o’clock, and that’s when your girl comes home after school with her mom, right?”

Carl, now a bloody crumpled up wreck, cried. “Please Nick… don’t do this! Please! They don’t have anything to-”

“Gotta go, Carl. I’ll be back.” Nick said as he left Carl to wallow as an impotent bloodied mess who could only hear the screams from outside and do nothing but wait…


After he called down the coordinates and vectored the fighters in, Nick placed his laser designator down and looked up to the sky as the Vipers came down for a high-speed strafing run. Their target, the Brownski residence with Carl and his little family trapped inside it. The Vipers cam in low and hard, the lead fighter strafing the family residence with repleted uranium cannons while the following fighter dropped a small diameter bomblet right through the ruined house's roof. There was a flash and a whoomping sound as the thermobarics turned the house inside out.



The airstrike was perfect. The pilots executed it with military precision fit for an actual combat close air support mission. Nick had also called in the danger close fire mission like how any real forward air controller would. Because he really was a forward air controller.

So he watched what remained of the house burn down to the ground, the Brownski family's remains buried under the smouldering rubble. There was a gas leak that somehow ignited, and they didn’t know until it was too late for them to escape. Or at least that’s how the thermobarics made it look like. Hopefully, no one in this inbred backwater shithole would figure out that all three of them died from an environmentally-friendly biodegradable bomblet, and the repleted uranium gun rounds would be even harder to find, having buried themselves hundreds of meters into the ground. And even if they did, they couldn’t do anything.

Nick walked to his car, crossing out another name from his datasheet’s list. The mob never forgets. Not this mob. This was no ordinary syndicate. No ordinary gang. No, sir. In Shepistan, only one family ruled the roost. Its members were made men. Untouchable. Badfellas. And its name was...

THE FIGHTER MAFIA

They loved the Shepistani Dream. With a vengeance.

A pistol shot rang through the compartment and both pilots felt the wake of supersonic air as the bullet passed between them to embed itself in the far wall. Both of them turned to face Commander Hushy, who had quietly reassembled the pistol during their argument.

“Both of you, shut the fuck UP. I have had enough of you two.”

Hushy paused to examine the pistol, making sure it had extracted the shell correctly before resuming his speech.

“You two are a disruptive element on my ship, and by all rights both of you should be in the ship’s brig, crawling the walls. But I can’t do that. Because you two are my best pilots on this damned tub.”

Reaching into his desk, Hushy pulled out a sheet of paper. “I have here a request from Fleet command to recommend two of my best pilots to go to the Naval Strike Fighter Tactical Instructor Program; or as you fucking degenerates know it – TOP SHEP.”

“I hate to do this; but you two stand above the other rejects on this tub who couldn’t even manage to fly a regular patrol without shitting themselves. So you’re both going to TOP SHEP.”

“Shroomdama; since you previously did a course in TOP SHEP, you’re being reassigned as a trainee instructor. Krace, since this is your first time at TOP SHEP, you’re just a trainee pilot.”

Hushy paused.

“Now get the fuck out of my office before I regret my decision.”

As the two pilots left his office, Hushy smiled an evil smile. Only the fleet commanders like him were privy to the true accident rate at TOP SHEP. Nearly half the pilots in each intake crashed or killed themselves. Shroomdama had survived it the first time; maybe this time would be the charm. And as for Krace…it would be no big loss.

The Shepistani Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program - TOP SHEP
Shroomiramar, Californicator / Faillon, Shepvada - February 3400

The airfield was desolate. Tumbleweeds rolled over the tarmac whilst wind kicked the long-settled dust into the air. The place was a fake airbase, a false site to fool enemy targeteers, to distract their attentions from other more valuable sites and bases. Near the shanty-hangar were crumpled paper mache aircraft and deflated decoys. In their proper state, they would've been as convincing as the real thing, but left unprotected in the harsh environment, they gradually degraded - rain making the paper mache planes melt, while mutant geese pecked and punctured the inflatable rubber dummies. For a casual eye, the base looked disused and abandoned, just like any other foreclosed Shepistani Aerospace Command base.

Which was exactly what they wanted you to think.

There was a sound of screeching tires that disturbed the prairie dogs that had taken residence on the airfield's many potholes, and the rattlesnakes that preyed on them. A chrome shape streaked through the horizon's haze, leaving behind it a plume of disturbed dust. The silver streak sped past the air base's unclosed gates, its shiny bodywork contrasting with the fence's rusty spools of barbed wire. The vehicle came to a screeching halt right on the tarmac. The smell of burnt rubber filled the air.



The vehicle was a low budget fighter variant designed for export to low budget countries and poor shitty satellite states like the Feelipeens. TOP SHEP used it for dissimilar aerospace combat training (DACT), so their fighter pilots could gain experience in dealing with foreign fighter designs. It was also used as a comfortable ride for officers, and the design had quite a few amusing novelty features.

The vehicle's gull wings opened and several figures stepped out of it. The last one had to be helped, for he was wearing cement shoes. They hauled his pleading, blubbering form to the middle of the tarmac. Two of the passengers merely stood from a distance, watching the spectacle while shading their eyes from the glare of the sun.

"I don't get it," came a familiar voice. Her blonde hair was blown by the wind. Her female form was clad in a jumpsuit. Eyes were no longer bloodshot, face no longer displaying the ravages of rampant abuse. She had cleaned up, gone on rehab. Still, when she saw one of the men beat the cement shoe-wearer, she couldn't help but smile manically and say 'hee!'. The urge to use was still gnawing at her, in the back of her skull. She still used from time to time, but no longer in the same amounts. She had learned to control herself. Now, she was far stronger than she ever was before. Greater. More powerful. She suspected the truth of what was going on. She was ready. "What are you showing me this for?"

"Just wait," replied her companion, her long-time friend and wingman. He wore a jumpsuit like her's, but like her he had other marks of extravagance. He wore a gold chain around his neck, and had rings on his fingers. The mark of a made man. Now, he was the one standing in confidence, he was the one who led - while she had to follow. This was his turf. His town. Now he was the boss. He was in charge. Finally, he was on top of her. Oh, how long he waited for this day to show her what was what in the real world. No rules, no boundaries. Here he was one of the untouchables, one of the badfellas. Mi casa nostra es su casa nostra.

The men popped flares around the one who wore the cement shoes. The flares spewed out green smoke. Just like The Rock.

STARFUCK and FAPOLLO watched.

The forward air controllers began designating the cement-shoe man with lasers, invisible yet high-powered ones aimed straight at his eyes, searing his corneas unbeknownstly. He knew what was coming. He pleaded for his life. The forward air controllers radioed coordinates to the incoming fighters.

Nick gave a thumbs up.

There was a rumbling in the air, like the sound of distant thunder. Overhead, two Vipers made a high-altitude pass over the airbase. They circled around and then descended to a lower angle of approach. They decelerated to attack speed. FATENING chin pods began locking on to their sole target. The rumbling grew louder. The thunder was coming.

The brown thunder.

Mere meters from ground-level, the fighters came in hard and fast straight towards the cement shoe man. Weapon bays opened. Repleted uranium gatling cannons began spinning their barrels. But as abruptly as they did, the bays closed and the cannons stopped. They wouldn't do it this way.

The Vipers descended even lower now. Any lower and they would've been submarines. The disturbed air in their passing blew a mighty whirlwind behind them, rattling the ground and cracking glass windows in their wake. The cement shoe man saw them coming with his laser-damaged retinas. Their blurry outlines grew bigger and bigger. Then with a deafening boom, they shot past him, over him.

It began to rain. A foul smelling rain comprised not of dihydrogen monoxide, but of space jet fuel. The cement shoe man was soaked in the liquid. Droplets fell down and landed on the dirt, on the concrete runway, on his skin. On the still-ignited flares.

Cement shoe man's eyes widened.

With a woosh, everything caught fire. The portion of runway soaked by the fuel, along with the man and his cement shoes. He began to scream. He flailed his arms wildly. His burning arms, which were connected to a body that was also burning, which was topped with a burning head that was screaming its head off. In a feat of impossible strength brought out by immense pain, the man began running across the airfield despite his concrete footwear, waving wildly as he did so. His marathon didn't break any records, he collapsed after a short distance and abruptly turned into a crisp charcoal colored corpse.



“Burninated.” STARFUCK said. Then she went 'hee!'.

Just then, she heard another sound. Rumbling, but not that of distant brown thunder. The rumbling was of close by brown thunder, brown thunder that sounded like motorcycle engines.



A biker gang had arrived. They too had ridden on dissimilar aerospace combat training vehicles. The riders dismounted and removed their visored helmets and oxygen masks.

STARFUCK gasped. She knew who they were.



Legendary ace pilot Major ICEPRICK van Kilmer. The man who taught STARFUCK how to dogfight, the only one who made her crash and burn in her ass. That man was dangerous. And he knew he was dangerous. A trainer of TOP SHEP elites and a ten-time champion of the Shepistani military inter-service beach volleyball tourneys.

And also a man court martialed and imprisoned for racketeering charges, extortion, illegal gambling, trafficking and patronizing prostitution. Somehow, he had gotten out early. Perhaps for good behavior. Or in recognition to the services he'd done for the country.



Still, after all those years, prison hadn't been kind to him.

If he was a lieutenant in the organization, then the man with him was the general. The man with him was no screw up. He was the one who ran things, who got to the top by being the baddest of the bad. The boss of bosses. The don of dons. The godfather.



Lieutenant Commander PIT VIPER Ironsides. The man who ran the Shepistani Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program. The SHEP of TOP SHEP. The king cobra. The snake of the so-called pit. It wasn't even his codename, PIT VIPER was actually his given name, christened by his father who was the organization's last don. He had inherited his position from his father. And earned it with a mountain of bombed out repleted uranium-riddled corpses.

ICEPRICK and PIT VIPER came to them. FAPOLLO went over and shook their hands. He even kissed the ring on PIT VIPER's finger. Then, together, the three of them appraised STARFUCK.

“Thara Krace. I suppose you know who we are.” ICEPRICK said.

STARFUCK nodded.

“We are the Shepistani Fighter Mafia.” PIT VIPER declared. “We've seen your combat records. Your kill counts. Very impressive. We like your style.”

“Hee!” STARFUCK squealed excitedly. She liked where this was going.

“Shroomadama's been watching you. He told us you had some potential.” ICEPRICK continued. “Said that if he could train you right, you might turn out to be a pretty good badfella. Just like him. Isn't that right, Lee?”

“Right.” FAPOLLO agreed. He grinned smugly, a look that just said 'I'm a smarmy asshole'. “We think you could be a good addition to the family. If you prove yourself worthy enough.”

STARFUCK glared at him. The limp dicked bitch was actually talking down to her. She'd show him.

“What do you say, Krace?” PIT VIPER pointed a thumb back towards the immolated man with cement shoes. “The guy was screwing me over, getting a bigger piece of the pie than he ought to. Stealing my money. Now he's fired. So we've got an opening for you, as an enforcer first, then if you do good we make you a made man. Woman, rather. Whatever.”

“This is an opportunity you best not turn down.” ICEPRICK mentioned. “So, what's your decision. Thara?”



“Heef!” STARFUCK jumped and grabbed both their hands and shook them, PRICKVIPER or whoever they were. “In! In! In!”

God she so needed that meth so bad!

“That's a good girl.” PIT VIPER pried his hand off STARFUCK's grip. “See you at the training center, Krace.”

“Take care of yourself,” ICEPRICK added. “You made the right choice.”

They both rode on the big bike. PIT VIPER on the handle, ICEPRICK in the sidecar. Together they drove off. Leaving STARFUCK and FAPOLLO by themselves, standing on the abandoned airfield in front of some cement shoe-wearing dead guy's smoking corpse.

“Just follow my lead, STARFUCK, and you'll be fine.” FAPOLLO said smugly, smirking smarmily as he did so. “You can be my wingman.”

“No.” STARFUCK replied as she grabbed him by the balls and gave him a tight squeeze. FAPOLLO keeled over to the sound of crushing nuts. “You can be mine.”



[Happy birthday Shep! ]

[Zor]

Commonwealth Central News

Brush Nibbler Mania


The Standard Socktheif has recently become the most popular breed abroad

The Domesticated Brush Nibbler is among one of the most beloved creatures native to Nova Atlantis and a popular pet, owned by Casual pet owners and distinigished breeders alike. The Famed Admiral Ivan Minoux bred these adorable critters and famously brought Karl, a Rimmersburg Red on campaign onboard his flagship Defiance during the barbarian wars. However, over the last five years these creatures have become popular abroad. From the Chamarran Heirarchy, the Prussian Star League, The Fourth French Empire and even the Holy Empire of Haruhi Suzumiya these nine limbed, three eyed creatures have found loving hearts abroad in recent years. This has led to a few instances of feral Nibblers establishing themselves on planets where native plantlife is similar enough to sustain them.

(More)

[Steve]

Royal Palace of Fynn, Altair
Planet and Kingdom of Fynn, Sector X-13
20 February 3400


It was pre-dawn and Druni stood alone in the middle of the Palace Gardens, wearing her sleeveless vest and trousers. It wasn't far from where she had caught Crown Princess Sarisa training the prior week, a secluded area where the only thing recording her presence was the palace security systems. They were set to monitor for weapons fire and unauthorized life signs, thankfully, and the customary ESP Null Field was turned off for Hilda and Zara's benefit.

There was a part of her that resisted doing this. It was something she had been trained to avoid, to suppress at all costs. But she could remember Sarisa's words so clearly. And it made her think; the Gift was the Gift, wasn't it? Even someone using only those permitted uses of it could do wrong; why couldn't someone use fire or electricity to do right?

And she also remembered what Sarina said. "The key to wielding fire is to learn to control it." This intrigued her. How would you control fire? You couldn't touch it, after all, it burned you just as much. And if you made it, it would start consuming fuel from the environment. How do you squelch it before it grows too big?

Druni sat on the grass and meditated, ignoring the discomfort of the brisk morning air on her bare arms. How would one control fire? Sarisa had used martial arts technique. Druni could remember the way her body moved, how her limb movements seemed to guide and control the flames she was creating. Limbs could not move flame, only the mind could. But the mind also controlled the limbs; the two things had become linked to her through training.

She stood up. Druni drew in a breath and whispered a prayer to the Goddess that, all things told, she didn't really believe existed, and settled her stomach. She drew in a breath, then a second one, and for the first time in years thought of fire. She punched thin air, but there was nothing. This wasn't doing it right.

Should she do it? Druni was afraid of what might happen if she tried and screwed up. If she set fire to the courtyard, they would know. Zara and Hilda would know. She would get reported and likely ordered to undergo a Rite of Contrition or Contemplation. And there was no telling what Knight-Captain Bianca, or Master Long back at Tasker, would order her to do as the fulfillment of a Contrition Rite.

I'll try one more time, she told herself. Just once, then stop. She stood there a moment and tried to think back to what she sensed in Sarisa's mind that morning. She had been watching the Human girl's movements with a degree of amazement and, admittedly, attraction to her. The way Sarisa could generate and control fire as if it was an extension of her limbs had surprised her. And Druni remembered how she had moved with such speed and power, an attractive thing to a Doreii.

Concentrating, Druni recalled everything. She felt the pace of Sarisa's breathing, how her arms and legs moved. Unconsciously she began to emulate those movements, punching and kicking the cool morning air. Feeling the energy in her body flow...

Energy!

The inspiration came to her immediately. All ESPers learned of the energy within when they developed telekinesis or other arts of the Gift beyond simple telepathy and empathy. You used it to move objects or to enhance your body, make your muscles grow more powerful and your reflexes quicken. That must be how. The energy within flowing through your arms and legs, igniting the air with just enough energy to make it burn.

After working through it, Druni tried. She thought of the energy shooting through her right arm as she punched forward. Instead of keeping it there, to power her limb and make her punch stronger, she pushed the energy outward into the air. She felt it erupt from her forearm and fist....

A plume of blue flame erupted from her fist, searing forward.... and impacting on one of the bushes. Druni saw it and gasped. No no no no no! she thought insistently. I've messed up! Have to stop the....

Before she could react further, to try and pull the fire out of the burning bush, the Courtyard's fire suppression systems acted. Water sprinkers popped up from the ground and sprayed at full power, dousing the entire area of the garden and quieting the fire she had ignited. Within seconds Druni was soaked to the bone through her vest and trousers, shivering in the 12 degree Celsius air.

She'd hoped to slip back into the palace unseen. That hope was dashed when, as she left the Garden, she was confronted by a light power-armored Fynnian Royal Guardsman leveliing his assault rifle at her. She raised her hands to indicate surrender and sucked in a breath.

Druni could already taste the sour sansa pastries she'd be living on for a while as a result of this...



Never in their relationship had Hilda and Zara made love so intently. Usually relaxed and devoted in the attentions they gave each other, their last night together had been filled with a sense of urgency and a desire to do as much as possible together. They had spent the time together through the night, finally falling asleep in each other's arms a few hours past midnight very much tired and exhausted.

Both dreaded what would come. Their Bond would be gone, remaining only in memory. They would never be with each other again, nor the intense feeling of their minds mingling in the throes of pleasure and physical contact. It was the most bitter of separations; one born entirely from Duty, Zara's duty to the Order and Hilda's duty to her people.

Despite the late hour neither would get to sleep in. As the sun began to shine over the horizon there was an insistent knocking on the door. It stirred them both; with only a few hours of sleep they were groggy and still tired. The attempt at "Coming" from Hilda came out as a "Cmblli" sound as she slipped on her pullover nightie and went to the door, Zara holding the sheet over herself.

At the door was Major Rita Saymon, the commander of the Royal Lifeguard and officer responsible for the Palace's security. The tan-skinned brunette, a native of Fynn's tropics, seemed to look past Hilda for a moment to see where Zara was still covering herself with Hilda's sheet, though she quickly met the Princess eye-to-eye. Hilda could sense that Major Saymon was also freshly awake and rahter grouchy. "Your Highness, we need Lady Zara to come with us."

Suspicious, Hilda asked, "Why?"

"Because her 'apprentice' set fire to the Palace Garden," Rita stated succinctly.

Hilda looked back and shared a look with Zara. "I'll get dressed," Zara said, after which she yawned deeply.



"What were you thinking?!"

Druni blanched under her teacher's angry gaze. She'd never seen Zara so angry. Actually, she'd never seen her so emotional period, and it was frightening. Even Hilda seemed surprised at the actual anger Zara was emitting psionically. "I... I was just..."

"You know pyrokinesis is forbidden!," Zara raged. "You know it can get you expelled from the Order!"

"I just wanted to try..."

"What could..." Zara cut off the sentence with a gutteral growl of exasperation. "I cannot believe you, Druni! It's bad enough that your discipline lacks and you don't practice your control nearly enough, but that you'd violate the prohibition on pyro... Goddess sometimes I do wonder if I should have..." She barely stopped herself from verbally speaking the sentence, but all present - including Layla - felt the ending. "...if I should have bothered taking you as my first Apprentice!" summed it up.

Stammering for a moment, Druni tried to explain. "It... it was the Duch.... the Duchess Sarisa."

"Crown Princess Sarisa," Hilda corrected.

"I thought the heiress to a Human Grand Duchess was a Duch..." Druni was silented by the angry look she got from Zara. "The morning they left, I saw her practicing her pyro in the courtyard. She was so skilled at it, so controlled... I thought maybe I..."

"She's been trained for years to control it," Hilda pointed out.

"You know the Order is against it," Zara continued. "You know it means automatic punishment just to create the smallest ember or spark! And you did it anyway!"

"I... well..." And then Druni felt a spark within her. Sarisa's words at the ludicrousness of the prohibition echoed in her ear and Druni started to argue back more forcefully. "Maybe I should've been trained to control it then! Maybe the Order should stop being so hidebound..."

"That is not the way of the Order and you know it," Zara snapped. "The Order is about perfecting one's spirit and body, about using the Gift defensively, there is nothing defensive about fire!"

"So you say," Druni spat. "But why can't there be?! Why can't someone use fire simply to hold people back?"

"Fire is an agent of consumption and destruction! It devours all in its path!" Zara reached to her forehead and groaned. "Please tell me you're not going to try and argue this to Knight-Captain Anne or Master Jennifer?"

"Oh, afraid I'll embarrass you?", Druni retorted.

"No, you ungrateful twerp, she's afraid you'll wreck your own life," Hilda answered. "From Day 1 Zara has looked out for you and all you've been giving her is headaches and trouble! And if you bring that attitude into a Rite of Judgement you're going to suffer for it. You might even get yourself Ejected."

The stress on the word was for obvious reasons. All other punishments, even the remaining instances of punishment through suffering pain, were preferable to Ejection for a Sister. "Better to be Scourged than Disgraced", was the saying; a Sister would rather have her back stripped of flesh by a four-bladed Saca than to be outright Ejected from the Order, as the latter meant being designated a Laytar - a Disgraced - and shunned by all members of the Order for the rest of your life.

It worked for the moment. For all that she sometimes chafed under the rules of the Order, for all she considered leaving when she came of age, Druni didn't want Ejection. She had friends, even lovers, in the Order. Like Zaria, whom Druni was looking forward to getting payback on when she returned to Tasker Cloister. And her parents... if she got Ejected for supporting creating-fire they might well disown her.

The idea that all of those girls she knew and liked would be required to forever shun her broke through Druni's defiance and made her shiver. "I.. I... understand," she stammered, lowering her eyes. She got on her knees before Zara. "I beg your forgiveness, Master Zara. I was being young and foolish."

"I'll have a word with Knight-Captain Bianca before we leave," Zara answered. "I have to inform her and Master Long about this, but once they realize the reasons I'm sure you'll be let off with a warning, perhaps a few days in a cell for Contemplation."

"Yes, Master,' Druni replied.

"Anyway, head back to your room to pack, we'll be heading to a ship as soon as we check in at Chapter Mattan and have a final meeting with Sister Bianca," Zara ordered her. She looked back to Hilda. "I'm going back to the bedroom to pack."

"Here, let me go help you," Hilda answered. "Layla, help Druni pack," she added for the benefit of her Apprentice.

Layla nodded and walked off, following Druni. Hilda, in turn, led Zara back to her room. Count Dupreè was waiting for them and was glaring at Zara. "Your girl ruined an entire hedge line," he declared. "It's going to cost a thousand dollars to replace it! I should send the bill to you, but I know you're a penniless peasant girl..."

Frowning, Hilda telepathically nudged Zara to head into the room, after which she closed the door and directed her attention to Dupreè. "Count, I'm going to say this directly and clearly. Fuck off." Being rather tired, Hilda didn't care to see the shocked, outraged expression on the Chamberlain's face. "I know you disapprove of my love for Zara. I don't care. You don't govern my life and I'll be damned if I ever let you. Now, I'm a fucking ESPer, so I already know what you're thinking. I'll have breakfast in my room. Zara and I can eat when we take a break from making love. And that's what we're going to spend the morning doing. I'll be out at noon to get ready for the public appearance; until then I intend to spend my morning making love to my beloved, for the last time thanks to you, and if I am disturbed by anything I will hold you responsible and devote my days to driving you out of the Palace. That is all."

Dupreè nodded stiffly.

"Now go protest to my father about my horrid behavior like you clearly are thinking of doing. He can get mad at the both of us I'll see you later, Count." Hilda entered her room and slammed the door behind her.

For what it was worth, Hilda and Zara didn't do anything like what Hilda claimed they would, but simply laid back in Hilda's bed and fell asleep.

[Shroom Man 777]

Welcome Back to the Feelipeens

Maynilad International Space Terminal



Everyone watched excitedly as the launch clock counted down. The mission controllers in their antiquated air towers, the selected dignitaries and guests fanning themselves in their safely-distant booths that were open air and subjected to horrid humidities, and even the bloody poor people from the nearby squatters who either looked on from the chain-link fences a few kilometers distant or stood on the corrugated sheet metal roofs of their shanty homes. This was a momentous event that occurred once every year. It was a tribute to the Feelipeeni people's national pride.

The clock counted down to zero, and then the earth shook as mighty thruster rockets combusted prodigious quantities of liquid oxygen and hydrogen to produce vast quantities of thrust. The spaceship was lifted off the launchpad by a massive column of smoke and fire, a plume visible from miles off. It soared into the heavens, high up until the clear blue sky turned to blacks pace, in its wake a thick contrail of white stuff discharged by its mighty emissions. Booster engines separated from the aerospaceframe, and with a final spurt of thrust, the spaceship entered space - wherein it would later de-orbit after delivering its load.

It was a spectacle. The homeless street children watching from the distance all squealed and jumped and clapped, the magnificent sight further enhanced by the plastic sacks of glues that they sniffed into their nostrils with drinking straws. The flight controllers gave each other high fives and cheered the success of their painstaking endeavor, relieved at very narrowly avoiding disaster once again. The dignitaries also offered polite applause - the foreign ones entertained by the display of paleo-classical fashion in the use of an antiquated and ancient method of transport that by all means should've been fossilized, while the local important rich people (in contrast to the poor people) likewise shared similar sentiments together with pride at their country's achievement in making such an awesome spacecraft that showed their nation's great capabilities.

In space, the great Feelipeeni vessel - countless centuries old, with an origin that was a mystery wrapped in an enigma to even the oldest and most fossilized musty wise men of the Feelipeenis - achieved its orbital destination. Then it opened its bay and released its payload. A wooden statue of the Salvador Niñyo, blessed by the priests and bishops, wreathed in many flowers, and with scrolls and letters of countless Feelipeeni peoples' prayers written on them giving praise and thanksgiving to Jesukristo and Mama Mariya.


Salvador Niñyo. In space.

The magnificence of it all made the Feelipeeni people proud to be Feelipeeni people. They were so proud of their culture, their heritage, their traditions and values. They were the only nation in space that still worshipped the Jesukristo, Mama Mariya and the Santos. For this, they were also the most blessed nation in space.

With the spectacle over, the flight controllers decided to have a snack and have their afternoon siesta - lying back on their chairs, putting their feet on their computer consoles and going to sleep. While the poor people went on back to being poor people.

The dignitaries and rich people, on the other hand, were treated to a full dose of Feelipeeni hospitality. They would have a fiesta, with bountiful meals and foods of exotic native Feelipeeni cuisine.



They ate. And amidst their eatings, they also did talkings.

Amongst the foreign dignitaries were Shepistani military liaisons, Tianguo business folks, and in particular Umerian Ministry of Finance (MiniFine) representatives. While the Tianguo discussed with their Feelipeeni hosts the intricacies of the Bratley Islands affair, and the Shepistani military liaisons stuffed their mouths on the real meats (and not the prefabricated embryonics that replaced real meat from dead animals, no thanks to damned libruls) and talked about civilian accommodations (read: WHORES) in Bark and Pubic Bay, the Feelipeenis had something else to discuss with the Umerians.

Feelipeenis always want to have harmonious relations with their neighbors. While they could not afford expensive gene-modded PUPPERS, too expensive to the average poor Feelipeeni and also potentially a source of food for the poor Feelipeenis, the rich Feelipeenis on the other hand wanted to stimulate foreign investment in the country. With Shroomarcos' blessing, they began reaching out to the hearts of the Umerians. And their pockets.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Excerpt from History of Byzantine Imperial Navy Design, 108th edition

The Imperium has always been regarded as an oddity when it came to ship design. During the Great Crusade, when the entire state was commited to a final brutal decades long war, the Imperium's naval ship design bureaus produced some of the largest and hardiest ships ever built. What's more, many of these large warships were built. Ranging from kilometer long corvettes, to twelve kilometer long battleships, these ships were among the largest ever constructed, and even antiquated now, they were incredibly durable, and could soak up lots of damage, while dishing out punishment nearly equal to similar sized counterparts.

Why were the vessels large and so durable? One has to first study the enemy. The Tau naval vessels were initially known for good long range lance weaponry. In the early days of the Imperium-Tau war, Tau vessels would snipe at Imperial vessels at long range, while trying to keep their distance from Imperial ships. Imperial ships tried to envelope Tau ships but were often destroyed before they could get into range. The Imperials resorted to higher durability and shielding, while using one of the first implementations of inertial gravity drive so that their ships could close in with Tau vessels and engage at medium to point blank range, negating the Tau superiority. This was also largely born out of the Imperial Navy's preference for plasma weaponry, that exhibited superior hull armor penetration compared to lance weaponry but inferior range. The Imperial Navy did have high power long ranged lance weaponry, but they were inferior to their Tau equivalents. Towards the end of the Great Crusade, Imperial lance technology steadily closed the gap with Tau lance technology, and fought the Tau on more equal footing. Imperial plasma technology also improved and steadily gained range. This however, meant that the Tau were facing even stronger opponents than before...

...

How did the Imperium ever build such tough vessels, and so many? The reason is obvious: during the Great Crusade saw all of Imperial society mobilized for war in a way no one had seen in decades, maybe centuries. All of Imperial society was mobilized for the business of war. Planets in Wild Space were stripped mined to the point that they were empty husks, just to feed the gigantuan war machine that the Emperor Heraclius XX had forged...

...

At the end of the Great Crusade, most of the fleet was demobilized and scrapped, and their parts broken down by swirls of nanites that broke down and reconstituted the parts into raw material. Though many of the large fleet elements were mothballed. Some old classes saw new use however; the old Dominator class battleships were refitted to become supercarriers. This was a testament to the excellent build quality of these old ships, that they could once again be of service in some way to the Imperium despite their extreme age...

...

Imperial Navy design innovation continued, even during the rebuilding period after the Great Crusade. As a triumph in the human spirit, four great warships, the Konstantin class Battle Barges, were forged at the beginning of the 31st century. These warships were the among largest ever series constructed. Some seventeen killometers long, massive beyond compare, excepting the Charamarran relics. These however, were the first serial produced superwarships ever constructed in the galaxy in a long time, using all the newest technology that could be possibily conceived. The invention of the rift generator some century or so before, resulted in one of the most powerful power sources ever created with human technology. It generated incredible amounts of energy, thus allowing the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Imperial Navy design bureaus, to contruct and power a monstrosity of a vessel. The ship was also armed with the most powerful weapons the Imperium could offer: the Warp Gun. These massive weapons could unleash firepower that could shatter even a small moon, when powered to full power of course. The ship used the strongest neutronium armor, as well as the most powerful redundant Void shield system, as well as the Aegis space missile defence system.

...

To be followed was the Retribution class Battleships in the 32nd century. They were similarly constructed to the Konstantin class Battle Barges, with some differences. Their Aegis space missile defence was a more updated version, and they did not retain space to carry Adeptus Astartes. They were strictly all gun battleships, though they might carry some probes for reconnaissance. The decision to build the Retribution class Battleships was made after the first few encounters with the Collectors, which included the destruction of a heavy cruiser. The Imperium decided to build more superwarships, with the desire to engage the Collectors on a more equal footing. Smaller less durable warships were not capable of dishing out the punishment required to at least cripple a Collector ship before being destroyed. ....

...

The Scutum Space Missile Defence system was a complete and thorough revision of the older space missile defence systems. The Karlack swarm and their swarm tactics forced the Imperium to deploy a space missile defence system that not only could handle saturation attacks, but also dish out considerable damage. The Karlack swarm taxed the older systems considerably, necessitating a complete and thorough replacement of existing systems, and the end result was the Scutum Space Missile Defence System was a product of this thorough replace, allowing the Imperium to engage the Karlacks on a more equal footing.

...

The superwarships were refitted constantly throughout their service lives. Their current space defence system was replaced with the newer Scutum missile space defence system. Their command and control systems were updated to accomodate improvements in Imperial cybernetic technology. Weapons and engines and power planet was upgraded and replaced repeatedly every few decades.

...

Current debate on the next steps in Imperial Navy designs are furious. Advocates for newer superwarships are influential and rumors of design work done on Apocalypse class Battleship, as well as a newer Justinian class Battle Barge have been swirling around for years. The current Battle Barges and Battleships are due for a major refit soon, and will likely result in 10-30% improvement in firepower. Likely these new upgrades will represent the next paradigm shift in the Imperial Navy; the shift to an all-Warp Gun warship, the current dream of the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Imperial Naval design bureaus. Advocates for medium sized warships are not staying silent either, and likely their calls will be aceded. Currently, it is believed that for the next decade, the Imperial Navy would expand its ranks of Scutum cruisers and Lunar heavy cruisers. More corvettes and frigates will also be constructed as well. Ultimately, the Imperial desire for superwarships will likely not be satiated in the near term, but who knows really...

[MKSheppard]

Battlestar Calvert Cliffs, Sector Z-16



Admiral Ro stared at the DRADIS display as the fleet jumped into sector Z-16 from outside the Galactic Ecliptic. Z-16 was the location of one of the few spacelanes that led to Pendleton. On the DRADIS display, more and more ships of the Fleet popped into existence until all ten heavy battlestars and sixty gunstars were in formation.

Some 540 million clicks ahead of them was one of the few known stable passages through Shoalspace that led to Pendleton.

BSG-62 and -75 had taken the long route. Rather than wend their way through various kingdoms and potentialities; the Shepistanis had decided to just go way 'up' beyond the Galactic Disc into wild space, and then travel across until they were above the sector in question and then travelled 'down' back into the Galactic Disc.

The journey had not been uneventful. During their travels in Wild Space; they had encountered several so-called 'space beasts' which had tried to alternately attack or mate with the Shepistani ships. These space beasts were the primary reason why most travel was done within the galactic disc.

Naturally, in keeping with Shepistani doctrine regarding alien lifeforms, the space beasts were blown into vapor.

Just after one of the more aggressive space beast attacks, Admiral Ro had received a series of transmissions with very clear and specific instructions on how to proceed.

"Sir; Anglican pickets on DRADIS; carom 120, 300 megaclicks and closing!" shouted one of the sensor techs.

Results: Sheppos arrive at sector Z-16, and attract attention of Anglican Picket ships.

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

Universal Galactopedia > Recreation > Recreational Drugs > PSYCHO

Psycho is the common name of a semisynthetic drug cocktail first developed by Shepistan during the Amplitur War as a high-potency combat stimulant. Intended to significantly increase the combat potential of soldiers in combat, it has the side effect of severely dampening higher mental functions, making for fearless yet uncontrollable and downright stupid troops. This, combined with its high addictive qualities (second only to Kasanarium and a few other drugs), led to it being dropped by the Shepistani armed forces only a few months after its first deployment in the field in favor of less potent but safer (relatively speaking) combat stim formulations. The formula for Psycho was later leaked and found its way into the criminal underworld, which led to the sacking of several high-ranking officers and researchers in the Shepistani armed forces once the leak was revealed. Psycho is now a widespread fixture of the Badlands drug trade, where it is used liberally by mercenary units, pirate gangs, and other criminal organizations with little regard for their members' health, as well as by recreational users looking for an even greater high than regular cocaine or methamphetamine; its use has also been documented in other shoal regions, most notably the Outback and Wild Space.

Physiological and psychological effects of Psycho are broadly similar to those of cocaine, methamphetamine, and other frequently abused stimulants, albeit on a far greater scale. Prolonged use of Psycho can lead to hypertension, cardiac dysrhythmia, seizures, paresthesia, hallucinations, and general psychosis; high doses have been known to cause heart attacks and strokes, often fatal. Withdrawal symptoms include anxiety, delirium tremens, insomnia, irritability, lethargy, mood swings, paranoia, and an intense craving for more Psycho.

Psycho is available only as an intravenous solution, which can be administered in single doses via hypodermic needle or on a continuous drip via a dedicated IV line. Use and distribution of Psycho is illegal in Shepistan and most other nations, though as mentioned previously, its use and distribution is very common in the Badlands and other unincorporated regions of space; despite being illegal in Shepistan proper, there are rumors that some Shepistani military units use the drug or a variant of it alongside other stimulants such as methamphetamine.

---

Universal Galactopedia > Recreation > Recreational Drugs > VALKYR

Valkyr is a synthetic drug and one of the oldest in continuous use, as it was first formulated as an experimental combat stimulant by the defunct Aesir Pharmaceuticals corporation in Zoria on Nova Terra during the early 21st century. The basic formula has been altered constantly since then, resulting in a highly potent and highly addictive drug comparable to Kasanarium or Psycho in its properties. Three different formulations of Valkyr are known to exist and are given Greek letter suffixes to distinguish one variant from another (Valkyr-α, Valkyr-β, and Valkyr-γ, respectively).

Valkyr is primarily consumed for its stimulant and hallucinogenic effects and, in the case of Valkyr-γ, its own ability to enhance and focus a user's innate metafaculties. The CEID intelligence agency once studied Valkyr-γ as a substitute for Kasanarium, only to reject it for being nearly as addictive as the Kasanarium it was supposed to replace while requiring higher purity levels to achieve the same effects. Nowadays, refined Valkyr-β and Valkyr-γ are considered viable substitutes for other drugs like Kasanarium or Psycho, while Valkyr-α and less pure preparations of Valkyr-β and Valkyr-γ are used for recreational purposes.

The potency of Valkyr is dependent on its formulation and its purity; for any given level of purity, Valkyr-γ is the most potent, followed by Valkyr-β and Valkyr-α. Physiological effects are broadly similar to those of Psycho. Psychological effects are similar to those of PCP and include ego death, depersonalization, altered perception of time, paranoia, synesthesia, and extremely vivid hallucinations. Prolonged use of Valkyr can cause hypertension, cardiac dysrhythmia, general psychosis, and permanent brain damage; high doses of Valkyr have been known to cause heart attacks and strokes, often fatal. Withdrawal is characterized by decreased appetite, depression, lethargy, and an intense craving for more Valkyr. Valkyr-γ with a purity level above 85% can allow a latent psion to naturally manifest his/her normally dormant abilities, while purity levels above 95% increase the focus and precision with which an operant psion can harness his/her abilities.

Depending on its preparation, Valkyr can be taken orally (tablet or elixir), snorted (powder or nasal spray), smoked, or injected intravenously. Use and distribution of Valkyr is illegal in most nations, though as with any other criminalized drug, its use and distribution is very common in unincorporated regions of space, most notably the Expanse, the Outback, and Wild Space. Due to its wide variance in formulation and purity level, caution should be taken when purchasing and using Valkyr.

[Steve]

HMS King George XIV, System NBD-1923
Sector Z-16, Star Kingdom of New Anglia
29 February 3400





The fleet command room aboard the massive Command Flagship became silent as the forward division of destroyers relayed the data of what lay ahead. The Shepistani fleet was more unitary in class variation than the Anglian, using just the two basic hull types: Basestar and Gunstar. They had 10 and 60 of each now arrayed on the Anglian frontier.

The 1st Task Group of the Grand Fleet had already arrived; the second half of the fleet would be here within two hours, having required some time to gather upon the alert of the approaching Shepistani fleet. Nevertheless the forces present were already more than equal to the Shepistanis; the King George itself plus three battle squadrons with a culmative 3 Flag Dreadnoughts (all of the most up to date class, Lord Nelson) and 9 fully modern Agincourt-class Dreadnoughts, along with two carriers, five Gun Cruisers (cruiser hulls of Heavy grade with capital weapon batteries), and a screening force with 12 Light Cruisers, 37 Destroyers, and 8 Corvettes.

Grand Admiral Sir Patrick Kingston was in command of both halves and was leading this one personally. He was a solid man, brown-haired and blue-eyed, who would make a good statue one day, if ever there were an occasion for one to be made of him. When he spoke it was with the colonial accent of someone from the planet Megiddo (formerly the Dilgrud world of Kortur), as the Admiral had never forgotten his roots.

His Chief of Staff was another matter. Vice Admiral Lewis Barclay was a man of New Scotland with, non-surprisingly, predominately Scots background. His hair and beard were a brownish red tint and with his hulking size and manner he looked for all the world like he belonged in a kilt and tartan marching with one of the Highlander Regiments (indeed, his brother was the Sergeant-Major of the Royal Black Watch). "Fleet is taking up formation," Barclay informed his commander.

"Open a transmission to the Shepistani fleet. Ask them what their purpose is at the edge of Anglian space." Kingston directed a look at one of the comm officers. "Maintain standby running status in the fleet. No hostile maneuvers, all weapons are to remain on cold standby unless the Shepistanis charge theirs."

At the same time, a transmission was sent to Calvert Cliffs: "This is HMS King George XIV. You are entering sovereign Anglian space. Please explain your intent."