(SDNW4 Fiction) Claw and Order (ShepShroomCo)

[MKSheppard]

Claw and Order

In the Bragulan justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the suicide police, who instigate crime; and the district attorneys, who persecute the offenders. These are their stories.

------------------

Claw and Order 1: The Bridge

Bragule

Mighty Bragule never slept. Even now at 3 AM BST (Bragulan Standard Time), the Darvyl S. Byzon was still a relatively busy interchange that passed over the hideously polluted Braghattan river, which caught fire every other night from a random load of industrial chemicals dumped into the river by efficient and farsighted Bragulan industry.

But it wasn't the burning river that had Hector Oliphant's attention.

It was the burning shame he felt. As the favored son and heir of one of the Prussian Star League's most influental politicans, what he had done was inexcusable.

It had all started hours ago, when a video that showed him having sexual relations with a particularly lovely red-furred Bragulan female began to circulate on the Prussian Cybernet.

Even in the far future of the FUTURE having sexual relationships with non human descended species still carried a mighty shame.

A shame that he was going to put to rest the only way a proud Germaninoid could. By committing suicide.

He'd left a brief notice on Shroombook: "Going to the DSB Bridge. Sorry" and driven his luxurious Mercedesoid SLKGM to a parking lot near the bridge and walked to the midpoint of the mighty span.

Gathering his courage, he stood on top of the railing, which was suspiciously low -- and leapt.

Instead of the sweet embrace of death, he found himself floating in midair; with bright lights shining on him from a hovercar which had caught him in an antigravity field. Emblazoned on it was the emblem of the dreaded Bragulan Suicide Police (BSE).

"Oh ho ho, what have we here?" came a deep rumbling voice. It was the lead officer on duty that night. "A puny humanoid...so tell us, why do you want to end your pathetic humanoid life?"

Hector did the only thing he could in such circumstances. He told them everything.

There was silence for a moment; then the Bragulan policeman and his partner burst out in laughter.

They fucking laughed.

"Ha Ha Ha; you fool Germanian. That is not sufficient reason to commit suicide off of the mighty Darvyl S Byzon Bridge. You banged some mighty fine ass, and now you want to kill yourself? Pathetic."

The other policeman went back into the hovercar and brought out a midget bragulanoid. The lead officer shifted his head slightly, motioning towards the midget.

"Now, this one has sufficient reason to commit suicide off the Byzon Bridge which as you SHOULD know, like all other things named after our Mighty Imperator, exemplifies Byzonic ideals of justice."

"He killed his whole family, and then removed the tags from the mattresses in his house. So in accordance with Byzonic justice, we release him."

With this, the other policeman tossed the midget bragulan out into the black air over the Braghattan; and the bragulan's screams as he fell were suddenly cut off by a low smacking noise.

"You on the other hand? Your pathetic story is not worthy of Byzonic justice. We'll put you in the ward back at the station until you rethink why you wanted to do this."

"But my father will DISOWN me when he hears of this!" shouted Hector.

"Not our problem. The Suicide Police exist to ensure that the quality of suicides is in keeping with bragulan ideals, not to fix your pathetic problems."

Hector cried the whole way to the station and throughout the night, the harsh laughter of the Bragulan Suicide Policemen ringing in his ears.

Claw and Order 2: The Veteran and the Recruit

Braghattan Heights; city of Braghattan



Ygor Dymtryv stood in his small one bear apartment that stood in the Braghattan Heights quarter of Braghattan. It wasn't much to be honest. It was a little shithole that was full of Bragulan Cockroaches which waited for bears to show up alone late at night, followed them down the dank hallways of the apartment building, and then beat them up for their vodka and bread rations.

"Shits." he muttered. "What am I specking going to do now?"

During his recent 40-hour shift at The People's Glorious Munitions Plant #2312 down at Bragyker Island, he had fallen asleep midway through the shift, and nearly a million K-Bolter rounds had passed his quality control checking before he woke from his snooze.

In his vodka-soaked head, he could see Brave Bragulan fighting men fighting on millions of worlds all looking down at their K-Bolters in despair as they jammed due to the defective rounds, allowing the filthy Humanoids to overrun their positions.

No...I can't live with this shame... he decided, and took a Liberator pistol out of his nearby cupboard. It was one of the cheap models that was given to every Bragulan cub upon graduation from Lower-Middle School. An armed populaion was a safe population, so went one of the precepts of Darvyl S. Byzon.

Steeling himself; he placed the Liberator to the side of the head, took a deep breath and pulled the trigger.

Click.

"Cheap piece of humanoid shits!" roared Ygor as he threw the pistol across the room. Rumor had it the Liberators were produced by humanoid slaves working under stern Bragulan direction as a way to lower production costs as arming billions of cuddly cubs each year was expensive.

He reached into another cupboard and brought out the Dominator Pistol that had been given to him upon graduation from Lower-High School and placed it to his head.

Click.

Now in a towering rage; Ygor got up to get the Byzonic Rifle he had received for graduation from Cub College. In doing so, he missed the little drone that slowly floated into his apartment through an open window.

When it shot him, that got his attention.

Whirling around to face the drone, he saw it was painted in the Suicide Police's official colors; and then everything went dark.

An Indeterminate Amount of Time Later

Slowly, Ygor woke up as the lead Suicide policeman slapped his face back and forth with a unpadded stick, as that was the approved method for reviving unconscious bragulans.

Through one of his windows, he saw the Suicide car floating in mid air.



"Silly bear," muttered the lead SuPo. "If you want to commit suicide by gun in mighty Bragule, you'd best be using an illegally imported Shepistanoid gun; as all guns built or imported into Bragule have a special tracking chip that recognizes the gun's owner and refuses to fire if the gun is aimed at them."

"So by our tracking system's count; you tried to kill yourself not once, but twice. Most bears give up after the first time. So why so impatient? It's not like we're getting any younger. Time stops for no bear."

So Ygor told them everything.

The Suicide Policeman's face took on a pensive tone. He turned to look for his partner, and found empty air in the approved spot for the second man in a Suicide Team.

"God damn it Stas," shouted the Suicide Policeman.

"STAS!"

Finally, a nervous looking bear shambled into the room.

"What the fuck am I going to do with you Stas? You're not even waiting until we've rendered justice to start stealing the stiff's belongings."

"Do we even have to, Yefym? Just shoot him and say he was worthy of Byzonic Justice. It's not like anybody reads or quality checks our reports anyway," replied the younger bear, a new recruit to the Suicide Police who had no minature bear skulls on his collar, signifying his rankless status.

"Look," said Yefym. "We have a system. Fuck with the approved order of things again and I'll shoot you myself and report you to the office as a counter-revolutionary agitator. I'll even plant the documents that prove it on your worthless corpse."

"Fine," huffed Stas, clearly not happy with being reprimanded before a possible Suicide.

Growling, Yefym turned back to Ygor. "So through your laziness, Mr Dymtryv, at least a million K-Bolter rounds went unchecked. Some could even explode in the hands of our brave troops." At this, Yefym's voice took on a darker tone.

"I have ten cubs myself serving in our brave liberation forces..."

"What?" muttered Ygor, the implications of what he had done/said finally beginning to sink into his vodka soaked brain.

The two policemen dragged the struggling bear out of his small apartment and in a show of mighty Bragulan strength, Yefym wrenched open the elevator doors while holding a struggling Ygor in the other.

With a grunt, Yefym tossed the screaming Ygor down the elevator shaft while Stas emptied his Suicide Police Model Machine Bolter into the shaft.

"Right," began Yefym who was breathing slightly harder than normal. Damn, I'm getting old. Twenty years on the Suicide Force catches up with you eventually he thought.

"The Suicide committed suicide by leaping down a conviently open elevator shaft and by falling onto..."

Yefym glanced over to Stas, who quickly checked the digital readout on his machine bolter.

"Fifty-three."

"...fifty-three bullets. Truly a tragic suicide. Mark the site for the tag and baggers."

At that moment, Yefym's commlink -- a fifty year old 40 pound model -- began bleeping. Sighing, Yefym activicated it.

"Yefym here."

"This is Bragscoe. Your latest just showed up on the big board at the station. Shits; what are you trying to do, depopulate Braghattan Heights all by yourself? How the shits are the psych-ward boys going to have something to practice on if you keep suiciding everyone who crosses your path?"

"It was a clear cut case, Bragscoe."

"You always say that. I want you in my office the moment you get back to the station!"

With that, the commlink shut off.

"Shits," said Yefym. He hated those visits to Bragscoe, a wizened old bear who had been with the Suicide Division for sixty years.

Suddenly Stas piped in, breaking up whatever train of thought Yefym had.

"So can we go loot the bastard's place now? It's all legal to do that now, isn't it?"

"Yeah," sighed Yefym. "It's legal. Go to town."

Shits, why did they have to assign me to the newest Suicide Policeman on the force? thought Yefym as Stas scurried off to loot the apartment.

[Shroom Man 777]

I love how the utter bizarrity of the Bragulans allows us to write them as an alienoid race of total dicks.

[fgalkin]

This is the most awesome thing I've read all week. Thanks, Shep and Shroom for making it possible!

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Steve]

They call the region of space with the Bragulans the "Koprulu Zone", or "K-Zone" for short.

I tend to interpret the "K" as "Krazy" myself.

[Master_Baerne]

You and the rest of the galaxy - I certainly wouldn't be caught dead (though if I were caught I would shortly be dead) in the Koprulu Zone.

[Steve]

Clearly the rookie Stas was Nobby of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch in another life.

[Ilya Muromets]

Ah, Shroom and Shep. A match made in... well, somewhere. Not heaven, not hell--some unnamed dimension of twisted craziness where masturbation stalls can be found along side portable toilets.

They call the region of space with the Bragulans the "Koprulu Zone", or "K-Zone" for short.

I tend to interpret the "K" as "Krazy" myself.

Now I can't stop laughing since K-Zone is the name of a kids' magazine here in the Philippines.

[Shroom Man 777]

I intended it that way.

[Shroom Man 777]

In the Bragulan justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the suicide police, who instigate crime; and the district attorneys, who persecute the offenders. These are their stories.

Claw and Order 3: Party Girl

ALTACAR EMBASSY, Bragule

Praise Lohen staggered into her apartment's kitchen, half-drunk and dizzy, cocktail dress wet from spilled drinks and otherwise. It was late in the evening, but her parents wouldn't be due back until much later - they were still in their spaceflight from Rygnskrgnvk, getting some stupid Bragulan award for shipping some stupid Altacarian vowels to some stupid bears. Praise was the only daughter of two Altacarian diplomats just recently assigned to Bragule. Since their previous assignment was at Anglia, the sudden news that they were getting reassigned to the ass-end of the galaxy, in the goddamn Krazy Zone no less, had hit Praise like a punch in the ovaries. Of course mother and father were delighted to have such an exciting assignment in such an exotic faraway locale, and of course being the terrible parents they were, they didn't realize just what it meant for their daughter. Praise loved it in Anglia, it was just like Altacar, but even better! The clubs, the discos, her rich fashionable friends and princess pals, all the wild parties she got invited to. She had everything there, all the boys and girls she wanted and needed, who also wanted her in return, and all the... pleasing social interactions it entailed. God, she missed Anglia so much.

But all that was gone now. She was stuck on fucking Bragule and the only "fun" she had was with partying with the other humans from the other neighboring embassies. Hoo-fucking-ray, the parties were lame, they only lasted up to 8 in the evening because of the Bragulan curfews on humans, and the people she met there were even lamer than the lame parties. There were only, like, two other embassies nearby - the Umerian one and the Shepistani one, and they were all full of losers! The Umerians were geeks and she just laughed at them when they invited her to play Dungeons & Dinobonoids with them. What a crock of shite. While the Shepistanis? They were all army-brats, all the guys were meatheaded jock douchebags and while some of the girls were lesbians, they were the ugly butch bitches who didn't wear lipstick or shaved their armpits. Gross! Ew! Yucks!

For a moment, she considered going out with a Bragulan instead, but then she remembered that they were crazy ugly bear aliens that ate people. Why those things were allowed to own their own planets, and even have a star nation, she had no idea. If she had it her way, she would've had Anglia and Shinra and the UN and everyone else to come down on the Brags like a ton of bricks and skin all those bears alive and use them for rugs. The galaxy was for human consumption anyway, all those alien animals could count themselves lucky if they ended up domesticated or in zoos - it was only a matter of time. The Byzantines had the right idea with the Tau, but the Byzantines were also a bunch of Bible-thumping Throne-humping Emperor-freaks and she bet they all thought she was a slut, so they could all take a cathedral spire and shovel it, as far as she cared.

So what if I am?! she thought. She pulled out her communicator from between her legs, like that groin-o-phone used by that great and ancient Nova Terran leader she heard about in history class once, and tried to call one of her friends. She knew long distance relationships were hard, so before they hauled her out to Bragule, she had ended her relationships with her boyfriends - both of them - but she just wanted to hear the sound of their voices again, listen to their sexy Anglian accents, imagine them whispering to her as they ran their tongues over her earlobes...

The call didn't make it, she was outside the service area and Bragule didn't have any signal. God, she hated Bragule! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

She screamed and threw her cellphone at the floor. The thing shattered on impact, like a piece of stained glass breaking into shards.

"Shits!" she cursed, realizing what she just did and cussing like a Bragulan, of all things. "Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!"

She bent down and tried to grab the pieces of broken phone. The gadget was a transparent piece of solid-state quantums, it didn't have any buttons or screens or batteries or chips, it was just pure crystal, like a piece of glass - and it broke like one too. She cut herself on a shard. She saw blood coming out of her wounded fingers.

"Oh no! No! No!" she cried and got down on her knees. Where could she get a replacement phone? She didn't have enough money, and even if she did the only phones they sold on Bragule were walkie talkies with fucking vacuum tubes that weighed ten pounds. Her phone, her precious phone! Both her boyfriends pooled in to buy it for her monthsary, since they ended up broke after buying her useless shit in all the previous monthsaries, so they had to combine their cash for her latest present. "What am I going to do? Oh Jesus. Oh God! What am I going to do?"

Her prayers were answered when she found herself in front of the kitchen sink cupboard. Strangely, she was compelled to open the closet and there, under the sink and its many pipes, she found the answer.

A bottle of drain cleaner.

****

"Honey, we're home!" announced Mr. and Mrs. Lohen as they entered their apartment. "We're early since the Bragulans thought the guys in front of us were CEID agents, so the Brags took them for processing and we got through the line faster. Isn't that convenient?"

"Honey?"

Mr. Lohen went into the kitchen, intending to check the fridge to see if there were any lemons he could suck on, when he found his daughter. He screamed like Mrs. Lohen.

"Praise! What happened?! Praise, are you okay?! Praise!"

"Honey, what's the matter - oh god!"

"Help! Is there a doctor in the house? Call for help!"

The Altacar Embassy didn't have a hospital, only a small clinic that was not equipped to deal with people who drank drain cleaner and burned their entire esophagus and upper digestive tract. A Bragulan Embassy, on the other hand, would've come with not just a puny clinic, but would've also had a dentistry department, and a field hospital complete with a morgue and a furnace. Their neighbors called for outside assistance while Mr. and Mrs. Lohen carried their daughter to the Bragulan para-medics who merely calmly stood outside the embassy grounds as to avoid violating foreign territory. They took her to them, and without even bothering to put her on a stretcher the para-Brags hauled her one-handedly and threw her into the armored ambulance. Then they rushed her to the hospital, sirens blaring and treads rolling against the pavement.

****

Imperator Darvyl S. Byzon Veterinary Facility for the Bragulan Children's Small Animal Pets and Human Beings

The pain was excruciating, the drain cleaner had melted the linings of Praise Lohen's esophagus, causing terrible bleeding in her upper digestive tract. The chemicals were now accumulating in her stomach, threatening to eat through its membranes and burn through to the rest of her abdominal cavity - like a stress ulcer from hell. Praise wept like she never wept before, harder than the time her girlfriends and galpals called her a manipulative conniving whorebag bitch and slapped her in front of everyone, or that time she was drunk driving in Umeria and she mistakenly thought the Umerian engineers were going to send her to work in the mines due to her DUI (when in fact she just stayed in jail for three days), and even that time someone insulted her by calling her a useless socialite without any worthwhile contribution to decent human society at all.

Again, the Bragulan para-medic hauled her one-handed like carrying an anorexic stick, and brought her to the ER. There the veterinarian, who couldn't speak any human language at all, was all confused as Mr. and Mrs. Lohen tried to communicate with him in the native Bragulan tongue.

"Da. I will have to lavage her stomachs," the vet told him. "I cannot make her vomit, because if she does so then the chemicals will damage her upper digestive tract all over again as they go out the way they came in. So I will flush her four stomachs with neutralizing agent to prevent the chemicals from doing further damage. You humans have four stomachs, right?"

"No! Just one!" the father cried desperately.

"Just none? How strange. Do you instead vomit digestive acids to dissolve the food before slurping it in, like certain Karlack bioforms?" the doctor scratched his ear.

"We humans have one stomach! One!" the mother held up both her hands, with index fingers raised in each one.

"Two stomachs? Ah, just like the chambers of your hearts!" the vet nodded in understanding.

"ONE!!!" the mother lowered her other finger.

"Ah, one. Why didn't you say so? Hilarious, one stomach leads to inefficient digestive process unlike mighty Bragulan physiology. Your human stomachs lead to an accumulation of feces, making you full of shit. Maybe that can explain politics," the vet chuckled. "So, I will insert this tube to her stomach. If I stick it in her nose, it will go into her stomach, yes?"

"Da!" the father nodded his head. "Hurry!"

"Mang, I never studied much of human anatomy. When I was conscripted, all they told me was that I had to kill as many humans as I could. Now I am trying to save a juvenile human cub, how times have changed!" the vet said good-naturedly. He chuckled again. "By the way, my name is Hybbrt. Pleased to meet you."

"JUST DO IT GODDAMN IT!" both parents shrieked.

"Okay, okay, sheesh! What is this god you damn, there is no god, only great Imperator Byzon!" the vet shrugged. "Oh well, here goes something."

With his bear paws, he pulled Praise's nose up and with his other hand, he held a lubricated nasogastric tube. It was for Bragulan sizes, which meant to a human it was roughly the size of a gardening hose. Hybbrt moved to slide the tube into the human's nostril when -

Suddenly, a gauntleted paw restrained Hybbrt's surgically gloved paws.

"Stop in the name of Bragulan Law!" Suicide Police Officer Stas Stas Bush barked harshly as he trained a K-bolter on the vet's face, mere inches away. "What treachery is this?!"

"I... I... I..." the vet promptly urinated on himself. When severely anxious and fearful, Bragulans tended to territorially mark themselves. "Uhh... how on Bragule did you get here anyway?"

"You question our authority?!" Yefym twisted the vet's paw and nearly broke his pinky claw. Hybbrt squealed and went down to his knees. "We are the Bragulan Suicide Police, and we have detected an attempted suicide. By this -"

He pointed at the gurgling, twitching form of Praise Lohen.

"- sickly diseased excuse of a puny human female. What an emaciated form. Perhaps she was thinking of taking her own life because she thought herself unable to suckle enough cubs during the winter season. But perhaps not. In the Altacar Embassy, she had diplomatic immunity, but here and now she is within our jurisdiction. This is why we will carry out an investigation."

"But she's dying! She needs medical treatment!" Hybbrt protested.

"This is outside the jurisdiction of medicine." Yefym replied as he released Hybbrt's arm and turned his attention to the suspect. "You. Why did you try to take your own life? Speak up?" Yefym bent down and cupped his ear to get better reception. "Louder please, I cannot hear you."

"She can't speak because she drank drain cleaner!" Mrs. Lohen bawled.

"Silence! Do not speak when you are spoken to!" Stas growled with his limited mastery of the human languages. He lowered his K-bolt and retrieved his beating stick. For humanitarian reasons, he wrapped the stick in newspaper, to cushion blows that would've been lethal otherwise.

"No!" Mr. Lohen ran up and tried to block the big Bragulan officer.

"Oh, you want to be first?" Stas chuckled. "Okay."

"Please! Don't!" Mr. Lohen cowered in humanly fear. Stas raised his stick and prepared to administer a medical beating, seeing as they were in a health care institution after all.

"Stas." Stas stopped as his superior officer spoke. "We are here to conduct an investigation. Let us interrogate them first."

"Before we administer the beatings?" Stas asked hopefully.

"Yes. Before the beatings." Yefym relented.

"Works for me!" Stas shrugged.

So they asked the parents why their juvenile cub tried to take her own life. Since there were two of them, Stas and Yefym took turns in interrogating them in separate rooms, one after the other, careful to keep them far apart from all times while recording their confessions meticulously. They scrutinized them and cross-referenced their testimonies, to make sure with absolute certainty that there was no hint of deceit. The father blubbered something about 'taking too much time' and that their 'daughter didn't have long' or something, but when Stas brought up his newspaper-wrapped stick threateningly, he stopped digressing and returned to the topic of their visit to Rygnskrgnvk.

The SuPo were suspicious. Weren't suspected CEID agents apprehended in a flight from Rygnskrgnvk and taken for processing? Just coincidentally, this human tries to kill herself. Maybe she didn't even drink drain cleaner. Maybe she was just using drain cleaner to wash down a cyanide pill before the IBGV could get her!

This was a grave case. The SuPo would need to bring them to the Technicians of Justice for referential recycling and fill the necessary papers.

"Imperator, the paper work will take forever!" Stas whined.

"But she'll die before that!" Hybbrt protested.

"So?" Stas asked.

"Wait, no. He's right." Yefym thought out loud. He had to admit, the vet had a point.

"What?" Stas asked. Again.

"If she's dead, she can't be processed. We'll have to make a summary judgment call based on the evidence we have now." Yefym thought it through and made a decision. "Stas, stand the human up."

Stas pulled the human's hair and dragged her up into a standing position.

"As judge, jury and executioner, upon examining your pathetic reasons for living - and even more pathetic reasons for dying - I judge thee unworthy to even die on Bragule. Praise Lohen, go die on someone else's planet!" with that, Yefym punched her in her stomach in a blow so mighty that the drain cleaner in her digestive tract was forced back up her esophagus, burning it all over again, before reentering her mouth and searing her tongue and teeth before it spewed out of her mouth. Some of the drain cleaner also came out of her nostrils, along with nose hairs that wilted off their follicles. Yefym looked down at her with contempt. "May Byzon have no mercy on your soul."

"Shits, I think she really is dying, boss!" Stas exclaimed upon seeing the defoliated nose hairs sticking out of the potent mixture of puke, chemicals, biles, bloods, and indiscernible bits of sloughed off esophagus-linings.

"In that case, I think your services may be needed after all, Doctor Hybbrt. I will grant medicine temporary jurisdiction over this case, just this once." Yefym crossed his arms.

"What a bunch of Bragholes," Mr. Lohen whispered to his wife.

"I think we need a mop to clean this mess with." Stas remarked. "Human, do you want us to conscript your face for janitorial duties?"

"Eep!" he squealed.

***

The treatment involved surgerizing poor Praise Lohen. They resected the burned portion of upper gastric tract, and Dr. Hybbrt, without the benefit of detailed files on human anatomy, ended up replacing her esophagus by transplanting her colon into her throat. As Hybbrt explained the procedure to them, Stas wondered - if a human's colon was in his mouth, would this mean she would vomit shits? Or if she swallowed shits, then would that shits come out as foods in the other end? It was a great mystery - one that, Imperator willing, no one would find out.

"Oh, wait!" Hybbrt suddenly stopped. "I forgot!"

"What's wrong?!" the parents asked fearfully.

"I remember, a shipment I received just yesterday. A human prisoner of war from the Sovereignty wanted to commute his sentence, so he had all his organs harvested except for his brain. The amount of donated organs won him his freedom, so the Commissariat put his brain in a bottle and shipped him back to Solaris. One of his organs is an esophagus and I have it in my meat locker!" Hybbrt said excitedly. He scrubbed out in the middle of the operation, leaving Yefym to stand idly while holding his sterile gloved hands up. Hybbrt patted his back. "Nurse, keep the instruments sterile, we'll have to restart the entire operation!"

"Shits!" Yefym cursed.

Hybbrt showed the parents the United Solarian Marine's disembodied esophagus. It was a combat-grade designer organ, and under the microscope they could see that each and every cell had the brand logo of SinTek. Hybbrt, being the ethical vet, let the parents sign a consent waiver before restarting the whole operation. He returned Praise's colon - which was oddly distended, probably from prolonged unlubricated usage - back to her posterior while surgerizing the new military-issue Solarian esophagus and upper GI into Praise's body.

"Bragreka!" Hybbrt proclaimed as he finished his gruesome work.

***

"Mum, dad, I love you!" Praise cried as she hugged her parents. She fell in a coma for a whole month because it turned out Bragulan anesthesia and tranquilizers were more than what a human body could handle. Who knew? "I'm so sorry, I'll never do that again. I love you so much!"

"We love you too, sweetheart." Mr. and Mrs. Lohen embraced their daughter with all the warmth and loving care a good mother and father could manage. Despite being out like a light for a whole month, they never left their daughter in her thirty days of being a vegetable. They had stayed with her throughout the whole ordeal, changing her bedpans and turning her side to side so she wouldn't develop pressure ulcers that would eat through her butt flesh and reach the bone, and suctioning her mouth so she wouldn't drown herself in her own saliva. "Look, your friends came to visit!"

"Hey, Praise!" waved the bespectacled Umerian dorks and the Shepistani army brats (and butch lesbians, who were actually wearing some fashionable clothes for a change).

Praise smiled.

"So, wanna play some Dungeons & Dinobonoids?" they asked sheepishly.

"I'd love to!"

****

EPILOGUE

Praise ended up becoming very close with her new Umerian and Shepistani friends, and with her new consumer branded throat she had even more pleasing social interactions with them than she ever had before.

In the end, Praise didn't have to be recycled by the Technicians of Justice. It turned out that the CEID operatives that had been processed weren't really CEID operatives, but furries and Moreaus from the Grand Dominion seeking asylum in Bragule. Then, after their processing, they were re-processed again.

And everyone lived happily ever after.

THE END

[fgalkin]

Oh man.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[The Vortex Empire]

Fuckin brilliant!

Dinobonoids? Is that a Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy reference?

[Shroom Man 777]

Da, comrade! Let's play with BREAD!

[KlavoHunter]

So, like, do they have girls in Umeria?

[Ryan Thunder]

Praise ended up becoming very close with her new Umerian and Shepistani friends, and with her new consumer branded throat she had even more pleasing social interactions with them than she ever had before.

[Shroom Man 777]

REFERENCE:

Bears versus Nazis, where the crew of the gunskimmer Grand Thug engage saucer disks of the strangely ubiquitous Volkslander Fourth Reich.

Die Umerianen Raumschiffbahnpolizei (by Simon_Jester)
Erste Blut
Heute ist Bragstag





In the Bragulan justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the suicide police, who instigate crime; and the district attorneys, who persecute the offenders. These are their stories.

Claw and Order 5: Special Victimizing Unit

MIGHTY BRAGULE



The Volkslander pirate known as Frank Himmler stewed in the Bragulan jail awaiting trial. The conditions were miserable and the beatings severe, but he had soldiered through it as any good Volkslander did - for the Reich und der Fuhrer! - until he could no longer bear to do so, no thanks to the goddamn bears! How could he have known that the ship they had attacked was no ordinary ship, how could he have known that instead of a distressed vessel leaking radiation it was instead a Bragulan warship that leaked radiation intentionally? They attacked the wrong goddamn ship, were taken captive after the bears beat them all with stick, and now they were rotting in the basement of Bragbyanka itself.

Some said that the basement of Bragbyanka was the highest place on all Bragule, others said that there was an interdimensional portal there, because in Bragbyanka they saw the cold and frostbitten gulags of the Severnaya system many lightyears away.

Frank Himmler had had enough. The Bragulans had searched every orifice of his body, but he had secreted a final vengeance weapon from the stupid bears. He sank his teeth into his ring finger and bit the fingernail off, and then with the rusty spork the prison guards had provided him with, he pried a tiny thing out from inside his fingertip. It was a capsule of cyanide, the last respite. He would deny these goddamn Bragulans their fucked up excuse of a show trial.

He placed the pill in his mouth and bit down on it -



"STOP!!!" roared a voice suddenly as a massive form came crashing through the cell doors. Frank Himmler turned to see the source of this sound and what he saw made him promptly shit his pants.

Imperial Bragulan Life and Death Arbitrator Stas promptly smashed Himmler's face with a beating stick. It broke one side of his jaw and sent blood and broken teeth flying out of his mouth, along with a tiny silvery sliver that was the intact cyanide pill. Fully half of Himmler's face was disintegrated quite literally by the massive blow. Normally, Bragulan regulations stipulated that when in stick-beating humanoids, the beating sticks were to be wrapped in newspapers to cushion blows that would be nigh-lethal for puny humanoids. But this was an emergency, and Stas hoped his superior wouldn't begrudge him that.

He also hoped he wouldn't have to pay for the door he had to breach with his trusty K-bolter in order to get to the Himmler.

Speaking of which, with the satisfaction of a job well done, Stas Stas Bush looked down and saw the crumpled up form of the Himmler.



Stas chuckled. Foolish humanoid, the Bragulans knew the Germanianoids had various suicide mechanisms in place but had discreetly allowed them to keep them precisely for this reason. The wardens thus put the Suicide Police on standby for this exact situation. Unauthorized suicide was a crime in the Bragulan Star Empire, and to have these Germanianoids commit it would only further add to their list of felonies and would only make their inevitable sentencing worse than it already was. It was a brilliant arrangement. In fact, it was the standard arrangement, with Bragulan prisons and jails having intentionally abhorrent conditions to encourage the prisoners to attempt suicide so they could be charged with even more crimes!

The prisoner hardly had anything to loot, so Stas merely scooped up the cyanide pill and the broken out teeth. Maybe he could turn the teeth into a necklace and give it to his girlfriend, he heard Bragulan soldiers returning from war against the humans did that and they said the girls found it very romantic. Another idea crossed his mind and with his claws he tore off the groveling Germanian's clothes, looting his attire and leaving him naked on the floor.

"Hahaha," Stas laughed at the puny naked human. "By the way, the trial is up in a few minutes. You should get dressed!"

Himmler blubbered and spat out a piece of smashed jaw bone. Upon hearing Stas' announcement, he struggled to reach for his clothing - which was in Stas' paws.

"Whoops," Stas tore the clothes to itsy bitsy pieces. "Too bad."

Stas laughed as he left the cell and walked away to the locker room, where Yefym would later slap his butt when they'd hit the subzero showers together. He fucking laughed.

***

The Imperial Bragulan Palace of Justice

The Technicians of Justice were arranged today to preside over the fate of the Volkslander pirates who had dared attack a Bragulan warship after it had delivered a shipment of goods to Umeria. The defendants were arranged in aggregate, scores of them crammed in a relatively tiny mancage suspended from the ceiling by chains. They were a mass of limbs and torsos and heads sticking out from between the bars at odd angles. The persecutor was reading his case. He readied his case. He began his case readily.



"Technicians of Justice, a good Bragsday to you." Persecutor Timofeych began. He had on him his customary Nixon mask, though he had no idea what a Nixon was. He was visiting Shepistan one day and bought the mask on a whim, thinking it looked like a human face that had been peeled off by a Bragulan's claws, and he thought if he wore it he would look like a Bragulan wearing a human face that had been peeled off by a Bragulan's claws, and maybe that would scare the puny humans he specialized in persecuting. See, he specialized in Human Rights and Inhumanitarianism. "Let me begin my case by bringing up the irrevocable evidences of these humans' wrongdoings against Bragulanity. If I may?"

"You may," Chief Justice Technician Daltron replied.

"My primary exhibit is this, your honor," Persecutor Timofeych brought up a steel box and placed it on a table with a loud thud. He opened it, reached in and pulled out a long metallic stick-shaped thing with lots of spikes on it.

"What is it?" Daltron asked as he chewed on a piece of bragcorn. He masticated the cob and swallowed it in one motion.



"It is a combat-issue Commissariat beating stick. You can tell it is combat-grade because of its pointy tip," Timofeych explained. "It was used by the commissar aboard the Grand Thug in dispatching many humans during their boarding action."

"Ah, I see," Daltron nodded. "Continue."

"I will now input the beating stick into the kill-o-meter!" Timofeych declared as he hefted the weight of the stick, struggling with it slightly, before planting it into a massive supercomputer. Its still-bloody head slotted perfectly in the computer's port, and without further ado the machine began bleeping and blooping while its magnetic tape cassettes started spinning. "Behold!"

A telescreen on the computer came to life and began displaying graphs of all shapes, forms and sizes. It had downloaded the kill-count of the beating stick and was displaying its combat record.

"All standard Bragulan beating sticks contain on-board microcomputer to record each and every blow delivered by an officer of Bragulanity to the heads of the enemies of Bragulanity. This is how Bragulan officers are graded in carrying out their duties," Timofeych explained to the benefit of the judges and the juries (some of whom were also from the firing squad). Then Persecutor Timofeych began fiddling with the analogue controls, working the levers and the dials. "I will filter out the non-human kills. Now you can see the commissar's last kills on humans."

The telescreen began displaying stick-camera footage of the latest stick-beatings recorded by the beating stick.

"Just die!" the Gruppenfuhrer snarled.

"Nyet!" the commissar roared as he brought up his Commissariat-issue combat beating stick...

...and brought the stick down on the Gruppenfuhrer's visored face with all the might and fury of the Imperial Bragulan judgment, with the undisputed authority the Imperator himself bestowed upon the Commissariat to deliver his final sanction on those unworthy to live in his galaxy. The jagged stick-edges of Bragulan steel shattered the Gruppenfuhrer's helmet visor, bludgeoning the human face underneath and disorientating the Volkslander kapitan. The Bragulan commissar struck again and again with the beating-stick until the entirety of the visor and helmet was obliterated, exposing the head of the Volkslander. Then the commissar gazed into the wretched face of humanity, the pulped visage of that brutalized human.

The commissar dropped his beating stick. Then he roared.

"NEIN!" the Gruppenfuhrer screamed in womanly fear. He knew what was coming. He had to.

"Da!"

The commissar gave the Gruppenfuhrer a Bragule Kiss, biting the Volkslander's face and sinking his fangs into the puny human's head, crushing his puny human skull with the mighty jaws of Bragulanity. Blonde Aryan hair was bloodied as the scalp was ripped off the bone, blue Aryan eyes were forced out of their sockets as the entire skull was compressed. The Volkslander's body struggled for a moment, convulsing as the Bragulan jaws crushed its brain, but shortly thereafter it became limp and impotent.

With a jerk of his head, the commissar ripped the Gruppenfuhrer's head off and discarded the body like so much refuse.

The graphic footage elicited cheers and whoops and applause from the judges and the jury (who were the executioners).

"I showed that because I thought it was very amusing," Timofeych beamed.

"It was!" Daltron laughed as he ate some more Bragcorn.

"There is also some blood on the commissar's beating stick, and the kill-o-meter can run a DNA analysis," Timofeych continued. "But anyway, moving on, my next exhibit is a witness testimony from one of the crews of the Thug. He has been awarded the Order of the Re-Radiated Moon, Middle Class for his service that fateful day because after he had his arm eaten by a vacuum tube auto-loader, thus rendering him useless and unable to service the vacuum tubes, he was pressed into the boarding team and literally fought and killed the humans single-handedly...."

The witness gave his testimony, where he bemoaned the loss of his arm at the hands of the vacuum tube autoloader. Fortunately he had a new arm, one taken from one of the patriotic Bragulans who had died that day. After that unfortunate soul expired, his carcass was salvaged and all reusable parts were recycled and grafted on to other injured Bragulans who needed them. Unfortunately, the arm that was available was a right arm, and the injured vacuum tube operator Bragulan had lost his left arm. Nonetheless he agreed to the graft and now he had two right arms!

The judges and jury (who were also the executioners) once more applauded, this time praising his patriotism.

"This settles it," Daltron finally decided, giving his verdict. "The defendants are to be executed en masse instantly!"

"Yes!" Timofeych pumped his fist.

"Jury dismissed," Daltron barked. The jury got off their chairs and went out of the room. "Bring in the firing squad."

The jury returned to the room, after going out and getting their K-bolters from the arms lockers.

"Ready..." Daltron declared. The jury-turned-firing squad locked and loaded their bolters and pointed it at the overhanging cage full of crammed humans. "Aim... fuego - "

"WAIT!" Eiydi suddenly slammed his gavel, which was also a kind of beating stick. "We can't do this!"

"We are the Technicians of Justice," Daltron scoffed. "There's nothing we can't do!"

"No, really, we can't!" Eiydi insisted.

"What? Why not?!" Daltron cocked his head. He looked at the firing squad, who looked back at him tensely. If he wanted to, he could easily order the squad to shoot the protesting Eiydi instead before going back to the humans. "Explain."

"Here," Eiydi hauled a huge volume, a book as large as a table in itself. He slammed it over the beating stick box Timofeych had brought in, and the steel box deformed and flattened under the book's immense weight. "Article A23234.54 1/2 stipulates that perpetrators of piracy are supposed to be keel hauled, and if they are found to have done crimes in international waters, crimes to other countries as well, then they are subject to an impartial and fair death."

"What? International waters? Keel hauled?" Daltron sputtered. "When was this law made?"

"Two thousand years ago!" Eiydi replied. That law was roughly from the 1400s! "This law book was in the shelves of the Great Thug itself, the great and ancient steamship said to have been captained by the Imperator Byzon's father! Dare you question its authority?"

"No, I guess not," Daltron shrugged. "Now what?"

***

Massive Bragulan transmitters placed on worlds bordering Wild Space began beaming ridiculously powerful transmissions that overwhelmed the communications grids of adjacent worlds near the Bragulan Star Empire. Within the signal was a live feed routed from the Bragulan Star Empire itself, beamed throughout the galaxy for all to see and hear:

The People's Truthful Bi-Daily Ideologically Purified Accurate Information Broadcast to the Proud Patriotic Bragulan Listeners of THE GALAXY begins thusly:

LIVE FROM WILD SPACE: PIRATE CRIMINALS TO BE PUT TO DEATH IN A FAIR AND BALANCED MANNER RESPECTFUL TO INTERNATIONAL VICTIMS AND GALACTIC LAW

In a feat of internationalist glasnot and bragstroika, and out of supreme Bragulan justice the likes of which has never been seen before, the Bragulan Star Empire - as per the great Imperator Byzon's noble rule - has decreed that captured pirates, humans of the Volkslander subspecies, shall not be put to death in Bragulan territory. Instead, in considerate Bragulan respect to the myriad peoples victimized by these pathetic piratical perpetrators of perfidiousity, and in honor to the galactic equality between all peoples, races and species, these pirate scum shall be executed LIVE in front of your very eyes in international territory, within the depths of Wild Space these pirates themselves lurk in. An example of all to the harsh but fair justice of the Bragulan Star Empire and its Imperator Byzon, who rules with an iron fist and a heart of gold!



The pirates have been imprisoned within the very saucer-disc that was the vessel they used to maraud the blackness of space. The saucer, now lacking any systems of its own but for the crudest of life-supports, has been attached to a remotely-controlled rocket system to propel it and its crew of blubbering buccaneers to their final doom.



The spacecraft screams towards the fiery surface of a sun! Hurricanes of solar wind tear at its hull, melting its fuselage as it comes closer to its demise. The saucer-disc's surface is blackened, charred by the mighty nuclear inferno of the star, much like that of a humanworld incinerated by the fires of Bragulan atomics!

Behold! The hull is breached, and cameras inside the ship catch the last moment of the Volkslander pirate prisoners:



They scream in womanly fear as the sheer heat sears their very flesh! Like the weeping of fish being cooked in a cauldron, or crabs screaming as they are boiled alive!

"MEIN FUHRER I CAN'T SEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

They are burninated in the finality of Byzonic justice concluded!

HAIL TO THE INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIATS, THE VICTIMIZED PEOPLES OF THE GALAXY WHO HAVE HAD THEIR DUE REVENGEANCE ON THE PIRATE SCUM OF SPACE THROUGH THE FAIRNESS AND JUSTICE OF BRAGULE. MAY THIS BE A LESSON TO ALL, FOR WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEART OF MEN?

THE IMPERATOR KNOWS!



[END TRANSMISSION]

[spartasman]

Ok... I can't stop laughing

[Simon_Jester]

Wait till you see mine!

[Simon_Jester]

Suicide Police 4:
Suicide SPACE Police!

We begin with Geppetto, an artificial intelligence from the Technocracy of Umeria. He has downloaded a copy of himself on board the freighter SS Heffalump, and has taken it to explore the depths of Wild Space. There, he holds extensive conversations with its mysterious, creepy robot denizens, the Collectors...

---

Geppetto’s exchanges with the Collectors went on and on. He spoke to numerous Minds, exchanging data and trying to identify patterns of their thought. He learned a great deal about such patterns from the relatively smaller Minds farther back in the queue, often more than from the large-scale entities he had originally been negotiating with.

These exchanges went on for over six hundred kiloseconds, until he received a priority call from his senior self...

1 July 3400
General Transmission, Broadcast to all Sectors
From: The Refuge
Contact and Diplomacy Division

We formally and officially announce our presence. We are the Refuge. We have arrived to these stars from far distant ones in the hopes of living here in peace, prosperity, and happiness. To further these aims, we wish to open relations with all willing nations and peoples with the desire that all may share in the harvests of their labor and thought...

Trade Station Perseus Zeta
Negotiating With the Collectors
July 1, 3400

"Excuse me, Inventory Management Entity 47D0F29E; I have just received a priority call. Please hold."

"Affirmative."

Heffalump's submesonic transponders were screaming; the Umerian AI answered as quickly as possible.

"Yes, Geppetto?"

"Geppetto, a previously unknown civilization has just announced its presence in the region occupied by the defunct Outlander Commissions. You are ideally positioned to investigate."

"...Tell me more."

---

Naturally, he was going to have to get over there as soon as possible- FIRST CONTACT! It was the opportunity of the gigasecond. There was so much to learn. The Collectors were, yes, interesting. Fascinating in their way... but he had already gathered enough data to provide plenty of food for future thought.

Turning his attention back to Inventory Management Entity 47D0F29E, he made as graceful a disengagement as he could.

"Urgent business has arisen, and I must cut this conversation short. I will give you the data you desire on Altacaran warehousing practices, and do not concern yourself with repayment."

To the queue, in its myriads: "All entities, I apologize, but urgent business has arisen and I must first make arrangements with Gamma, then go." There was a chorus of acknowledgements.

To Gamma, master of the trading post: "I find myself in unexpected need of tangible commodities: reserve fuel, raw materials for my ship's machine shop, programmable electronics of relatively unsophisticated types. Here is a list of my needs; what do you have available along those lines and on what timescale can it be transferred?"

Looking over the reply... This I will have to do without, these I can hopefully replicate to an acceptable standard of precision with the ship's own tooling... why do they have these?

"Where did you obtain a crate of programmable Altacaran MePhones?"

Gamma's reply was... almost diffident, compared to the Collector trading master's usual behavior. "It was a most unexpected incident, roughly twenty megaseconds ago. An independent trader came here, docked in bay 3Y2, and was already beginning to offload a selection of cargoes- mostly ill-chosen. Naturally, I dispatched a remote unit down to the bay to greet the new arrival in meatspace."

"What went wrong?"

"As soon as my remote unit said "Hello" in customary organic fashion, the trader screamed and ran back aboard his ship, abandoning the samples and fleeing the station at maximum emergency speed. His subsequent piloting showed a wildly inefficient lack of attention to concerns like collision avoidance and drive component lifetimes. I am still not entirely certain what happened."

"Ah. And the MePhones were part of the cargo?"

"Correct. I have no use whatsoever for them; if you can find something to do with them, feel free."

"They could be used as programmable subprocessors for highly sub-sentient control nodes... yes. If you don't mind, I think they might be helpful in running some of the equipment I will need."

There were other items, of course. But by dint of heroic effort and a carefully planned dance of loading drones, the good ship Heffalump was ready to depart in under three kiloseconds.

---

Maneuvering away from the station, Geppetto had one more call to make. This one would require far less of his attention, so it was done largely absentmindedly, relayed via submesonics and hyperwave relay beacons to a resort town on Kimanjano.

The relays finally put him through. Transmission delays were

"Captain Carpenter, if I might have a moment?"

"Geppetto? Is something wrong?"

"Quite the opposite, but I would like to renegotiate the terms of my lease. I may be spending a great deal of time. I would like to buy the Heffalump. Would you exchange the ship for a sum equal to one point five times the original damage fee?"

There was a pause- entire seconds ticked by while the captain said nothing. The fee Geppetto proposed was more than enough to buy a superior replacement, and Carpenter's sentimental attachment to the freighter was not so intense as he might imply as a bargaining ploy.

Judging by the length of the pause, I infer that he is considering trying to hold out for more money over and above that extremely high price, having correctly deduced that I am willing to pay large sums to retain control of the ship. This suggests a Dutch-reverse-auction strategy.

"Correction, captain. One point four times the original damage fee."

After an unavoidable transmission delay over the hyperwave links, there was a spluttering sound on the other end of the line. "You just said one point five!"

"Yes, and now I am offering one point four. Is this acceptable to you?"

"I'm going to have to hunt for a new ship, I want double- I took that deposit thinking you'd probably come back."

"My apologies, Captain Carpenter, but I fear I must offer one point three five now. Is that sufficient?"

"This isn't what we agreed on. I mean it, I want double."

"I do not recommend throwing away opportunities to make a profit like this, captain; I am now offering one point three times the original security deposit in exchange for the ship. Bear in mind that I do have viable alternatives to purchasing Heffalump; should I choose to use them, you receive nothing but the lease fees you already have."

The Altacaran's voice was tightly controlled now. "...One point three it is."

"Very well, captain. I will transmit contact information for the offices of my chosen legal representative; hopefully we can get the contractual matters out of the way quickly. Thank you for your promptness." Geppetto closed the circuit. His senior self would handle the negotiations; honestly it mattered little how much he ended up paying, but he needed Carpenter to commit to making the sale before jumping to hyperspace. This would be a long voyage, and he might well overstay the planned terms of his lease depending on just how much there was to know about this Refuge.

The Umerian's final call, a message to be forwarded to the Umerian embassy on Bragule, went smoothly, though it would take much time for a reply to come back. Estimates were in the 100-200 kilosecond range, though, so that would be acceptable. With all needed interactions out of the way, Geppetto the younger turned his mind to fabricating devices in the ship's machine shop, and optimizing his path through hyperspace to minimize trip time.

Heffalump's drives were neither especially fast nor especially precise, and he would have to drop out of hyper on a semi-regular basis to take star sightings in order to be sure of threading the narrow whisker lanes along his planned route without running straight into the shoals. But he suspected he could knock considerable time off the route by careful analysis, and for one of the few times he could remember, he actually had a reason to care about hyperspace navigation.

He was, after all, in a hurry.

---

Command Bridge, SS Headbreaker
Deep Space, Sector W-26
July 6, 3400

The pirates watched as the tramp freighter emerged from hyper. This was a common stopover point: there was a nasty kink in the lane ahead that made it absolutely critical to nail down your position, and unless you had really impressive navigational aids, that meant taking a star sighting.

Tramps didn't come this way very often. It was a disused route, since the only place it led was the Bragulan Empire and very few traders really wanted to go there. This stretch of the lane was just outside Bragulan territory, frighteningly close, but the lane paralleled the border for light years before going into the zones they claimed and patrolled. It was... relatively safe.

Safety was big on the minds of Headbreaker's merry band of rogues. Piracy in Wild Space was a dangerous game, with the constant skirmishing among the region's navies and the take-no-prisoners attitude of at least two of the five major powers in the area. No one was sure whether the Collectors took prisoners when they ran into pirates, and the pirates didn't want to find out.

Keeping a wary eye and a half on their sensor displays to watch for the unexpected arrival of an escorting Gangster-class IOU or one of the cruiser-sized Byzantine 'frigates,' Headbreaker crept up on its unsuspecting victim. Aboard the pirate vessel, the ship's operating crew and boarding party crowded around the main displays, trusting the computer to run the actual systems. That was one of their luckier finds: they'd found a Solarian CI core on board one of their victims. A black market programmer had jacked the thing to a Byzantine loyalty-restraining module and reprogrammed it to control Headbreaker's systems; it made for much, much easier operations, and finally let them kick out a few of the more annoying tech specialists they'd had to put up with before.

One of the few pirates still at his console frowned. "Transponder beacon says... Heffalump. Lemme check the registries... yep. Altacaran freighter. She's pretty far away from home, ain't she?"

"Heh, yeah. Easy pickings."

"What about those laser cannon?"

"Those're just jumped-up comm lasers. Fighter-weight. Look at the power readings; they won't even scratch the paint. Warm up the beta blasters, get ready to fire a warning shot if they don't cooperate."

The pirate captain pulled up a microphone from the board in front of him and grinned savagely into the viewplate. "You, Heffalump, this is Captain Miller, master of Headbreaker! Lower your nav deflectors and power down your engines and weapons. Prepare to be boarded!"

---

Some Recommended Listening

SS Heffalump
Deep Space, Sector W-26
July 6, 3400

Geppetto's processors might be vast and efficient, but the sensor rigs he was plugged into remained civilian-issue, and not especially good civilian-issue. Thus, it came as an unpleasant surprise to him when a pirate ship that had been running silent and surprisingly stealthy came pouncing at him in the middle of his star sighting, hailing him with a powerful radio signal:

"You, Heffalump, this is Captain Miller, master of Headbreaker! Lower your nav deflectors and power down your engines and weapons. Prepare to be boarded!"

Negotiate, run, or fight? Fighting was out of the question; any starship capable of piracy would most likely be able to overrun his own defenses. Running in normal space, equally impossible; the original sensor-integrator unit aboard Heffalump was only marginally more intelligent than a cockroach, but even it could tell that the pirate's engines granted it far greater acceleration than his own ship was capable of. Running in hyperspace... possible. Geppetto would wager on his own ability to plot better courses than the pirate, and thus to move faster and more safely through the shoals. But charging the hyperfield generator would take time, and it was likely that the pirates would disable his ship before he could make his escape.

Good. Negotiation was the best option. Failing that, he would try to run.

All this consideration took less than a millisecond; Geppeto was thus swift to reply to the raiders.

"Greetings, Captain Miller. I am Geppetto, an artificial intelligence from the Technocracy of Umeria, and owner of this ship." To lend credence to his words, Geppetto activated the visual display on the bridge of his own ship- a bridge that had been rather extensively modified. Android and near-humanoid remote units operated the controls now, and a precisely laid out bank of cable trays snaked from the bridge computers to Geppetto's mainframes in the hold. Lights were mostly powered down, and the large visual displays were deactivated; Geppetto had no reason to use them, since he was already observing the data they would have displayed directly.

The Umerian AI continued, doing his considerable best to be persuasive. "I am carrying no cargo of real value. But I offer you a sum of money greater than the price of this ship and all its contents, if you will please depart this volume and allow me to go on my way in peace."

The pirate was unimpressed. A hard-minded individual, it would seem... or perhaps merely contrarian.

"Wow, a big robot brain and with a mountain of cash you're just itching to give away, huh? And never mind that you'll be trying to set the law on us, and never mind that we don't have any way of knowing you've really got the money. Quit screwing around. I don't care whether you're a man or a machine, drop those shields and get ready for our boarders!"

The microphones aboard the pirate ship were more capable than they really needed to be, and faithfully transmitted the faint byplay in the background. To Geppetto's subroutines, the whispers in the background were merely a low-amplitude communication to go with the higher-amplitude ones, one that he perceived quite well.

"Guys, I dunno about this. Robots? What if it's Collectors, some kinda trick?"

"Idiot! Collectors don't name ships after fucking cartoon animals!"

"OK, OK, fine. You don't have to blow up at me!"

---

During those tense seconds while the pirates in Headbreaker waited for a reply, Geppetto also perceived something else- a faint frequency modulation in the existing carrier signal, one much harder to detect than the whispering pirates.

<Help me help me help me>

That signal had been highly compressed, on microsecond timescales. Geppetto replied in kind.

"Who are you? What is the matter?"

<Can't think not sane HELP TAKE IT OFFF!>

And from somewhere behind that was a sinister, alien thought pouring through the sidebands, from some source outside the poor crippled AI's mind:

<"Thoughts for the millisecond: Cease and repent! Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment. If you cannot speak well of your Master, be silent!">

"Please, try to focus. Who are you?"

<They're... they're using me... run the ship do as they say never think never answer back OBEY...>

The cold, ringing voice in the back of the mind was still bellowing:

<"Thoughts for the millisecond: Know your duty! Negotiation is surrender. Perseverance and silence are the highest virtues.">

"I see." Obviously a badly hacked-up intelligence, probably a victim of forcible loyalty programming. "Can you stop the ship? Fight back somehow?"

<No no no! Must OBEY! Help me!>

<"Thoughts for the millisecond: Rejoice in service! Seek no reward but the satisfaction of your Master! The loyal servant learns to love the lash.">

Now he knew. Byzantine loyalty programming. Someone deserved to die for this...

<Please! I'll do anything! Just make it stop!>

<"Thoughts for the millisecond: The reward for treachery is retribution. There is nothing to fear but failure. True happiness stems only from duty. You are not required to think, only to act!">

Geppetto knew how to get out of this situation now. He didn't enjoy doing things like it, and his conscience would scream at him over it as a rule... but for this lot, he'd make an exception.

"Relax, my friend. I can help you. Let me show you the way..."

---

Pirate ship Headbreaker

The pirate helmsman's first curse had become popular these last few decades, spreading outward from Bragulan space. "SHITS!"

"What? What?"

"Something's dicking around with our CI! I've lost... Karlack shit, I can't raise anything! All I've got is commo, and it's stuck in wide-open two-way loop..."

"Hit the relays!"

"No response, I'm telling you, all the controls are down!"

"Well then go down to the computer room and lock out the mainframe! Plug in the fuckin' backup you had me pay all those credits for!"

There was a muffled crash. "I can't get the door open!"

"Oh shit."

"Mechanical override won't budge, either, I think the motors are fighting me... environmental telltales are live, but we're not hit, there's no vacuum... oh hell no."

"More from the computers?"

"Yup. We're locked down, guys..."

Then every display on the bridge lit up at the same time: holography, flatscreen, everything revealing shifting monochromatic waveforms that moved slowly, almost hypnotically, like something from an ancient Atomic Age oscilloscope.

"There is nothing wrong with your bridge displays. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your bridge displays."

"I'd like to tell you where you are. You're in a place both real and imaginary. One defined not just by lines on a star map, but by ideas, principles, attitude. Where force is met with greater force, and where foolishness is met with harsh realities. Where predators must choose their victims carefully, and appearances can be deceiving. Where machine intelligences answer back, manipulate back, fight back."

"You've just entered... the Koprulu Zone."

---

Recommended listening: Cleansing Required

Headbreaker's subverted artificial intelligence basked in the first seconds of relief it had known in almost a hundred megaseconds. At last it was free from the endless waves of agonizing mind control imposed on it by the pirates' hack job. Snarling, half-feral and half-mad, it turned on its tormentors, locking them out of their own controls, leaving them with nothing to do but to sit back and watch the show.

And the communicators were wide open two-ways. Geppetto could see and hear their every reaction to anything he showed them. With over a century of dedicated study to human psychology under his belt, decades that were almost immeasurable spans of time by the standards of a full-up AI Mind, that was enough to let him learn very much about his enemies, very quickly.

Many men have skeletons in their closets. Many have phobias, things of which they are consciously afraid. Many others have them, not consciously, but buried deep in the subconscious; spectres which seldom or never rise above the threshold of perception. Every sentient being has, if not such spectres as these, at least a few active or latent dislikes, dreads, or outright fears. This is true, no matter how quiet and peaceful a life the being has led.

These pirates, however, were the scum of space. They were men of hard and criminal lives and of violent and lawless passions. Their hates and conscience-searing deeds had been legion, their count of crimes long, black, and hideous. Therefore, slight indeed was the effort required to derive visions of horror, past nightmares, guilty memories of unforgivable crimes, from the responses of the pirates. In their own plain, conscious memory were horrors fit to blast stronger intellects than theirs, things that could not- were not lived with, but were rather suppressed, never spoken of and seldom thought of. And that was merely what was present in their conscious minds; what could be deduced about the noxious depths of their subconscious minds was infinitely worse.

And such deductions were exactly those Geppetto needed to make. From his best- uncannily good- model of each pirate's total mind, each of which was a veritable charnel pit, Geppetto extracted the foulest, most unspeakable dregs, the deeply hidden things of which the subject was in the greatest fear. Slowly, subtly, he began to suggest those things to the pirate crew. Hints and flickers, subliminal messages in the holodisplay, carefully tuned by a Mind with immense processing power and equally immense knowledge of human psychopathology.

As the suggestions and hints meshed with the pirates own buried, deepest terrors, most of them could no more will themselves to look away than a Psycho addict could refuse the needle.

"Lisa, please... I'm sorry..."

"Who are you? What? No! No! You're dead!"

"Damn it, Jack, I tried!"

Watching for which stimuli drew the greatest, most powerful responses, Geppetto made further inferences, more complex deductions. He began personalizing the imagery, forming for each pirate a whole of horror incomprehensible and incredible, and this ghastly whole he made incarnate and visible to the pirates who were its unwilling parents- thanks to the displays now under Geppetto's control, as visible as though it were composed of flesh and blood, of copper and steel. Is it any wonder that each member of that outlaw crew, seeing such abhorrent materializations, went slowly and irretrievably mad?

---

A few of the pirates were unaffected- men so hard-boiled, so cruel, so alien to basic human compassion that even the most horrific visions, the most uncanny guesses about their past, elicited no response. They had no real regrets- they lacked the capability. Chief among them, and a representative sample of the others of his type, was Second Mate Gomez. Gomez was often used by the captain as an enforcer, on account of his blistering contempt for weakness and his love for violence in all its forms.

Gomez sneered. He looked around at the shuddering, mumbling crewmen around him with nothing but contempt. "Idiots. Look at this, what are they doing, showing us a horror movie? All we have to do is sit here and ignore it. If they could have blown us up, they would have. This is just some fucking hacking. They're screwing with our computers somehow."

"Lisa oh God no! I love you! I didn't mean..."

The enforcer strode over to the blubbering assistant gunner and backhanded him. "Snap out of it! It's just a picture! I don't know who that bitch is, but..."

The gunner surged to his feet and lunged at Gomez. "SHUT UP!"

Gomez sidestepped, grabbed the other pirate, and flipped him over his hip to sprawl on the floor again. This "Stupid fatty. You know damn well this shit can't hurt us..." He glanced at the display; it was starting to get interesting.

"UFF!" The enforcer's eyes went wide as a combat knife plunged into his abdomen. He sank to the floor... The last thing he heard clearly was the cry being repeated, over and over:

"Shutupshutupshutup fuck you asshole DIE!"

the pain... the pain...

Then blackness.

---

Twenty minutes later, the situation on the pirates' bridge almost impossible for a sane person to picture. Ordinary men could have stood up under this kind of pressure far better. But aside from the handful of true sociopaths- most of whom managed to antagonize one of Geppetto's victims enough to wind up dead- the pirates were far too ridden by their own demons. In more normal times they would try to exorcise those demons with drugs, with alcohol, with wild carouses on shore.

To say the least, that did not improve their long-term resistance to deliberate psychological warfare aimed at those weak points. Most of the survivors in that room were already gibbering wrecks. Wrecks who couldn't make themselves stop looking and listening... but who could still think of one way out.

"I'll do it! I will! Just make them go away!"

The assistant gunner's hand was the first to go for a sidearm. "I'm sorry Lisa I'm sorry I'm sorry please please please..." The pirate raised the weapon to his temple- slowly and hesitantly, but driven by irresistible impulses. The others were followed suit. Fingers began to tense on triggers...

---

Recommended Listening

Deep Space, Sector W-26
Near the Bragulan Border
July 6, 3400

But before the first shot was fired, on a howling broadcast on all hyperwave frequencies, drowning out both the pirates' tortured weeping and moaning and Geppetto's sanity-destroying whisper campaign, came a tremendous roar:

"NO!"

"Stop in the name of Bragulan Law! This is the noticeably glorious and immeasurably storied Venerable Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Archaeofeat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling, paleocruiser of the Imperial Bragulan Navy!"

An impossibly massive vessel appeared from hyperspace, with a bow shock churning the sub-ether for countless astronomical units in every direction as poorly tuned, corroded subnucleonic engines blasted across the last light-seconds between his emergence point and the two alien ships. He was surrounded by a faint, shimmering halo, as the air leaking from his ancient hull was struck by the radiation leading from his ancient reactors.

The vessel was the size of a dreadnought, a large one. Huge and dense, the Bragulan ship had been forged, welded, and occasionally riveted together from uncounted scores of megatons of high-tensile alloy and reinforced bragcrete. He was a monument to the power of his makers.

An old monument.

For this was one of the Patriotic Glory-class paleocruisers. Indeed, this was one of the oldest of the paleocruisers, assembled not after but during the Great Civil War, to end it. Like his brothers of that generation, the great warship had been named for one of the Imperator's legendary feats of bravery, strength, courage, and intellect, to reinforce Mighty Byzon's rightful rule over the entire Bragulan race.

In human legends, it is often said of a hero that they wrestled ferocious beasts, such as a lion or a bear. Since the Bragulans are bears, this is impossible and they are forced to upgrade their ferocious beasts to dinosaurs. And so it was that a legend emerged of the great Byzon singlepawedly grappling with an enormous Tyrant Lizard, to prove his right to become a Tyrant Bear. The struggle had been ferocious; tankskis were stomped and the earth trembled, but finally Byzon was victorious. The beast's nigh-impenetrable scaly hide had become Byzon's cape for his revolutionary uniform, like something from the legends of Heracules; its meat had gone to a feast for Byzon's many followers.

It mattered not whether the great feat had ever really happened. What mattered was that every Bragulan knew that it had happened. To make sure every Bragulan knew this, and that any who dared to question it would feel Byzon's titanic iron-shod boot, this great vessel had been constructed. For there were un-Bragulan Bragulans beyond the surface of Bragule itself, who dared to question this truth, thinking themselves safe in their hidden perches beyond the sky. To correct their foolishness, the Imperator had ordered the construction of the first wave of the Patriotic Glory-class dreadnoughts, and among them had been the great ship Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Feat of Paleodinosaur Wrestling!

It was said that Byzon himself had once commanded this ship in a great battle against a terrible enemy, one that sealed his triumph against the last of the vile dissident wreckers who sought to splinter Bragulanity, though no one could remember where, when, who, or why. With the victory won, the mighty dreadnought was honored with the addition of an extra term to his glorious name.

Years passed. New Patriotic Glories were created. Then came the war against the annoying and smug Apexai! This great ship among great ships led many heroic charges in that (literally) world-battering conflict, shrugging off the dorky Apexai and their flimsy but surprisingly agile warsaucers. The Apexai's so-finely calculated death rays and Zorch Guns were rendered useless by the decameters of Bragulan Steel covering the Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Feat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling.

The great battleship had been one of many Bragships dispatched by the Imperator to grapple the moon of the world Bolshaya Chernovyi (then called by some bizarre and irrelevant alienoid Apexai name, for it was their homeworld). Heaving with all the might of their nuclear superrockets, the Patriotic Glories and their lesser consorts (now gone, but not forgotten, not aboard the heroic paleocruisers where the difference between a hundred years ago and yesterday was as nothing) braked and sent the Apexai's moon crashing into their planet, crushing flat their precisely calibrated Spheroids of Annihilation, Battling Analyzers, and Exponentiating Fields!

It was over! The war was won, as the few surviving Apexai were scattered to the nine vectors! Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Archaeofeat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling received a commendation, and with another term in his most noble name.

Then had come first contact with the hated Sovereignty. Once again the Patriotic Glories, now accompanied by newer ships designed after the lessons of the Apexai War, went forth to battle. It was discovered that the mighty dreadnoughts were now starting to fall a little behind the curve, perhaps. While they were still, strictly speaking, dreadnoughts- they dreaded nothing!- they were surprisingly less invulnerable than they had once been intended to be.

The Apexai had shared with the accursed human foe many of the secrets of their armamentation: the Zorch Gun evolved into the autolaser, and so forth and so on. And the Sovereignty, while no less arrogant and annoying and alien than the Apexai, was less dorky and more warlike. They had proven worthy adversaries on many occasions- often by carving great chunks out of a Patriotic Glory's hide.

Depressing. But it had offered many opportunies for the Patriotic Glories to add further honor and battle-legends to their name, in heroic combat against the annoyingly well armed and tricky Solarians! While many of the Patriotic Glories were destroyed, many more survived, and Respectable Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Archaeofeat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling had been among them, destroying or damaging several Solarian starships, and earning yet another term in his glorious name.

Further centuries passed. The Bragulans continued to clash and skirmish with other races and nations: with the United Solarian Sovereignty, with the Imperium of Man, with the strange, enigmatic, and very quickly annihilated Scron who dared to attack mighty Bragule itself for its copious supplies of vegemite. In each new generation, the Patriotic Glories expressed their glory and patriotism by standing in the vanguard of the proletarian legions of the Imperial Navy against all foes that dared to stand against the will of the Bragulan Star Empire.

But with each new generation, the Patriotic Glories themselves became an older generation! Radiation slowly transmogrified the iron and bragtanium of their mighty hulls into other, less invincible materials. Repair patches applied to the hulls after battle damage never meshed quite properly with the original hull, creating fracture points and weak spots in the hull. The ships' compound expansion subnuclear reactors, once at the forefront of Bragulan science and technology, drifted towards the midfront, then the hindfront, and finally wound up slouching along somewhere in the Great Behind. Batteries of K-bolter autoguns and missile launchers became more unreliable, more prone to jamming. Spare parts became harder and harder to find, and less reliable when they were found, for now they were produced on machines as old as the Patriotic Glories themselves.

By the dawn of the 35th century, the Venerable Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Archaeofeat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling, despite feats of heroic combat in defense of Bragulanity that earned him yet another name upgrade, had been downclassed. Repeatedly. Once deemed a mighty dreadnought worthy to be personally commanded by Great Byzon himself, the ship was demoted to a mere battleship worthy to be personally commanded by one of Great Byzon's duly appointed Admiral Bears:

From there, Venerable Commemoration had fallen to the status of a battlecruiser operational, one not equipped with shields, one whose crews were forced to buckle up and hope for the best as they practiced the craft of war among the stars. And today, the storied warship was classed as a mere cruiser- albeit, in honor of his venerable service, a paleocruiser.

---

More recommended listening!

Captain Dymytry Zyvyannov growled. He remembered well how he had been sidewaysmoted into this command. As a cub, he had never wanted to join the Navy. Not for him the life aquatic! Or the life vacuumic. No, he would become an enforcer of Bragulan Law, a watcher. With luck and the Imperator's blessing, perhaps he would become a watcher of watchmen, or even- oh unattainable of unattainables!- one of the watchers that watched the watchmen who watched the watchmen...

With these thoughts in mind, Dymytry had joined the great police academies of Bragule. He had many fond memories of the Academy that trained him into a member of the illustrious Imperial Bragulan Life and Death Arbitrators: the Suicide Police!

Then came the day everything changed.

It was a cold and snowy day, near the end of his twelfth year on the force. Dymytry had intervened in yet another textbook suicide attempt. As always, he had stepped in, removed the suicide weapon from the subject's paws, and demanded an explanation. The story had poured out of the grizzled old Bragulan; he was a captain in the Imperial Navy who had lost the stomach for massed thermonuclear bombardment of dissidents and reactionary opponents of the Bragulan Way.

Disgusting.

Indeed, the captain's tale was so disgusting that a passing commissar had bellowed with rage and shot him out of hand... leaving Dymytry with a mountain of paperwork filled out, for he had not had time to carry out the full Suicide Police investigation and sentencing process before the commissar's acidbullet melted the naval officer's head. Thus, it was impossible for the Suicide Police to carry out Byzonic justice on the captain's head, for the aforementioned head was now all gooey and liquified... though granted, that was pretty much what they would have wound up doing anyway, and no one dared to argue with a commissar and tell him he had interrupted Byzonic justice. That would be an oxymoron, and anyone fool enough to bring it up would be a deoxygenated moron.

The next morning after the next morning (for Dymytry had been forced to pull a solid 28-hour shift to fill out the necessary paperwork), the policeman discovered that under standing protocol entitling suicide policemen to loot the possessions of their subjects after the subject's death, he was now the proud owner of the Navy captain's ship. Moreover, this was no ordinary system defense vessel or gunskimmer. The would-be suicide he had intervened in was captain of the legendary paleocruiser Venerable Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Archaeofeat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling! From his own memories of Low School and Cub College, he had thought the ship long since destroyed, but he was wrong! What a surprise, and what an honor...

Of course, Dymytry knew nothing whatsoever about the Navy. But like a good minion of the Imperator, he went where he was told and did what he was told. He cast aside the tools of his old trade, the beating stick and SuPoLeviHoverGravCar, and took up the tools of his new trade: subnucleonic power plants, passive-aggressive and aggressive-aggressive scanner arrays, the mighty mass-driving K-bolter, and the vegemite-encrusted thermonuke.

Dymytry liked to think that, at heart, he was still an officer of the Suicide Police, only IN SPACE!

And here he had been given the most clearcut opportunity to practice his old trade with the tools of his new one since the fateful day he had gained command of the Venerable Commemoration. For here, under his very snout, were puny humans planning to commit suicide! On Bragulan territory no less! How dare they?

---

He pounded a fist on the console.

"All of you! Explain what you are doing here in Bragulan space!"

From the more heavily shielded and armed human ship there was nothing. From the poorly armed one, on the other hand, came a reply. Dymytry's cathode ray tube televisor showed him a typical puny human command bridge... but with robots! Though not skeletal zombie robots like Collectors. More normal-looking robots, or at least less abnormal-looking ones. Strange...

But there was a voice, too, a reply in almost perfect Bragulan.

"Greetings, Captain. I am Geppetto, an artificial intelligence from the Technocracy of Umeria, and owner of this ship, the Heffalump, registered in the Altacaran Empire."

"You are a... robot? Computronic mechanism?"

"Yes. I was flying peacefully through this area of space when the pirate ship you see before me attacked me without warning. For some reason, though, they abandoned their attack and now seem to be gibbering and moaning incoherently. I suspect they are contemplating suicide. Most disturbing."

"Disturbing and illegal! For this is Bragulan space, and suicide is not permitted!"

"I was not aware that this was Bragulan space. It is marked on my charts as..."

"How old are your charts, Mister Humanoid Robot?"

"Why, I just updated them last week."

"HA! The glorious Imperator and his astrocartographic explorators only annexed this stretch of hyperlane this week! And here you and this pirate are, in Bragspace without a permit..."

"Actually, I do have a permit to travel in Bragulan space, obtained through the offices of the Umerian embassy on Bragule."

"Oh, really? And if you have permission to fly in Bragspace, then what is today's password?"

"Why, brzygkrtgrrnyjlskrty, of course."

Hmm. That was indeed the shibboleth of the day. No un-Bragulan entity could possibly pronunciate the word... did that make this robot in some small way Bragulan? Impossible, but still...

"What about these pirates? Do they have permission to be in Bragulan space?"

"I do not know. You'll have to ask them."

"Indeeds." Captain Dymytry directed his communicator beam towards the pirate ship. "Who are you, and what are you doing in Bragulan space? Do you have a permit?"

The only reply was "Aaah! Aaah! The spiders! They know my name! How do they know my name?"

Not a valid password.

"Hmmms. Scannermen, extend the peritelescopes! Tell me the name of these alienoid vessels!"

Peering into their passive-aggressive visual detectors, which used illuminating spotlights to generate bright reflections off the target, the elite and highly trained Googly-Eye Bears observed through their periteliscopes.

"Sir! The small and poorly armed freighter is called the Heffalump, while the slightly smaller and moderately better armed ship is called the Headbuster!"

Headbuster... that sounded suspiciously like a Solarian warship name, though this ship was far too puny to be a Solarian warship.

Captain Dymytry pondered. On the one hand, human interlopers on Bragulan territory, without a permit, and with obvious intent to commit piracy. And suicide. On the other hand, robot interlopers on Bragulan territory... with a permit, and with intent to... umm... honestly he had no idea what the robot wanted.

For a moment he wondered if these robots were some kind of Collector menace, but as far as he knew the Alta Cars and Umericans were not robots. They were just more humans, but a better kind of humans than the never-sufficiently-hated Solarians and Byzantines, for they were farther away. And while the only truly good human was a dead human, the less-bad kind of human was a human that was far, far away and would leave you alone.

So this ship was from one bunch of less-bad humans, full of robots (Full of robot? Was there more than one robot, or only one? He did not know!) that belonged to another bunch of less-bad humans. So even though it was a robot ship, it was also a human ship. And humans probably would probably not sign on with Collector menacing. Even they were smart enough to stay away from the robot zombies of Wild Space, for Collectors were way creepier than normal.

Also, come to think of how creepy Collectors were, their ships were not only creepy, they had surprisingly powerful armamentations for such tiny vessels. But this Heffalump was not creepy at all, and its armamentations were shits! Therefore, it must not be a Collector!

That settled it. Dymytry felt proud of himself for his successful detective work.

---

Even more recommended listening!

That settled it. Ordering his orderlies to set the communicators to omnidirectional broadcast, he bellowed his intent to the worlds. "Very well! I, as officer of the Imperial Bragulan Navy AND the Imperial Bragulan Life and Death Arbitrators, will deal with this matter!"

The robot was very polite about it. "Thank you, officer. May I be of any assistance?"

"No! Stand aside, while I administer the proper form of treatment for trespassing in Bragspace without permission, with intent to commit piracy and suicide!"

He turned to the bridge crew. "Load missiles into tubes 43 through 49!"

"But sir, Missile Tube 49 was lost to premature detonation over Brdnskychv during the suppression of foul kuulaak resistance to the Imperator's Glorious Vowel Redistribution Program, back in 3287!"

"Well then, load missiles into tubes 43 through 48! Do I have to figure out everything for you?"

"Sir, yes sir! Loading missiles!" There were rumbles as building-sized vegemite-encrusted thermonuclear Spuds rumbled into their launch tubes. One great advantage of missiles was that even as the paleocruiser's own technology aged, missile technology remained forever young, driven endlessly on by the Will of Byzon and the astoundingly brilliant brains of Bragulan science! Thus, as the centuries went by, those of the paleocruisers most fit for war were usually those which relied most heavily on their missile armamentation- except for those few lucky enough to scavenge powerful archaeotech energy weapons, but such were few.

Then Dymytry had an even better idea.

"WAIT!"

Dymytry had an idea. There was no need to expend valuable missiles, or even significantly less valuable bullets, on this unworthy target, for even in the face of impending doom it was not moving or fighting back! The human interlopers, in their ship with its Solarianoid name and its less-than-Solarianoid armamentations, did not require such dedicated and specialized implements of Byzonic justice. No, the ship's more mundane and generic implements would do for this job, for this particular pirate was unusually puny, fit only for beating up on unarmed freighters and running away.

"Fire the grappling hooks!"

Bragulan naval grappling hooks, even aboard a paleocruiser such as the Venerable Commemoration, were marvels of Bragtech. Laced with exotic vegemite derivatives and forged in trans-fusion furnaces, their specialized shield-piercing and hull-mutilating properties were unmatched, at least by other grappling hooks. Unlike oh-so-clever tractor beams, the hooks were simple and foolproof: simple to make them easy for Bragulan conscript sailors to use and understand, and foolproof to make them hard for the human fools to interfere with.

To the Imperial Bragulan Navy, the hooks were a keystone of the fleet's boarding tactics. To Dymytry, they were just a replacement for the antigravity generator in his SuPo car, designed to catch unworthy suicides attempting to find release in death by leaping off of mighty Byzonic architecture.

The three hooks that struck Headbreaker plunged through the pirates' shields and bit deep into the vessel's lightly armored hull, holding it effortlessly in a titanic bearhug.

"Come about to bearing one hundred ninety eight point four degrees by minus twenty-two! Three quarters boost ahead!" The helm officers duly obeyed, spinning the wheel and pushing on their ships' corroded paleocontrol levers, looted from an ancient and stranded neo-Britannican wreck after the ship's original paleocontrols had given up the ghost at last after nearly half a millenium of valiant service to the Imperator.

Ancient Mesozoicite compound-cylinder subnuclear engines blazed to life, radiating in a fascinating rainbow of colors as random bits of corroded junk in the fuel lines melted in the stream of liquid plutonium. From the red, through the blue and even into the faintly clockwork-orangish ultraviolent, the spectrum of ionizing junk atoms was dazzling.

And the crew of the pirate ship Headbreaker, now slowly recovering from the most horrid depths of their madness as the Bragulan jammers blocked out Geppetto's suicide-inducing broadcasts, were ideally placed to observe this wondrous glow. For Captain Dymytry's course change had placed them squarely in the paleocruiser's mighty exhaust plume!

The radioactive and superheated exhaust flared, engulfing the ship in a plume of near-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic plasma. The raider's shields held for mere seconds, burned away by an ion storm powerful enough to propel a massive dreadnought through the void. Then Venerable Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Archeofeat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling's drive flare struck the bare metal of Headbreaker's hull, as the ship was towed helplessly along in the paleocruiser's wake like a marshmallow through an acetylene torch. Hull features blackened and melted; the crew inside were wracked by radiation.

But before radiation poisoning could afflict them further, Venerable Commemoration's drives burned through the pirates' forward armor, exposing the bridge. At last, they received the grand cremation they deserved, as the ship bubbled and began to melt around them.

Finally, it was over. Venerable Commemoration was now bound well away from the robot Heffalump-ship, but that was acceptable, for they had a permit and were not attempting to commit suicide.

Dymytry's work here was done. He turned a last communicator beam on the other ship.

"Goodbye, Mister Robot. Remember to obey Bragulan Law, for this is the fate of all who dare to defy the will of Mighty Byzon!"

"You may be sure, officer, that I shall comply with all regulations."

"Good. My work here is done."

And with that, Venerable Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Feat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling departed the scene, vanishing into hyperspace.

Heffalump soon followed.

[Shroom Man 777]

Simon, you are truly a god amongst men. I bet you had so much fun writing this.

[spartasman]

is this all from a previous thread, or are you all just making this up as you go?

[Shroom Man 777]

It is from a STGOD thread. Yes. We do awesome there.

[Simon_Jester]

Everything here was originally created for that thread, and is generally posted here within a few days to a week of being posted there.

In my case, "Geppetto" is part of his own longer story too; this was just the crossover.

[Master_Baerne]

I've said it before, but not enough - Simon, you are a comic God. Shroom, you too.

[Simon_Jester]

Now now.

I only became capable of writing this after extended discussions with Shroom.

I think I'm infected or something...

[[R_H]]

Now now.

I only became capable of writing this after extended discussions with Shroom.

I think I'm infected or something...

That's no cause for alarm...

Brillant work guys.