Phantis

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Yes, it is fanfiction, another block- undermining story, based oddly on an ancient 8-bit side scrolling computer game whose only real distinction was it's pornographic cover art. I have certainly read far more into it than was actually there, and starting well before the events of the game. At least it isn't bastarding Disney.


Five planetary systems doesn't sound all that much for those used to galaxy sized dreams; but consider a planet, and all it's variety and complexity, how many people of varying kinds and species, it's climates and factions and corners where odd things can breed. Consider how long it would take to walk across one.

Consider how much trouble one is big enough to hold.

The empire consisted of five systems, but that meant nine stars, one dark star, one huge inner gas giant and fourteen outer, one of them a barely failed Sun itself, one small enough that it was possible for probes to reach the solid core before imploding. (Not always unmanned probes. Always wired for sound.)

Each of those had its' own system of moons large, near- planetary, and small; a few of the largest had moons of their own.

There were the rocks inner, from the blobs of magma out through the merely hellish to something like a liveable environment, mostly; precious few garden worlds- it was not that sort of place. The empire did have it's peasants, but they were mostly space peasants, cylinder habitats and hydroponics, protein vats and zymologists.

The little rocks, the rookeries of Lagrange points and asteroid families, the handful of cold, dark outer rocks half way to nowhere, the snowballs and iceballs littered with dead prospectors and failed freedom fighters- for someone who mostly lives within their own skin, five systems were more than enough for an empire of terrible, hostile vastness.

The powers of the five systems fought and struggled among themselves for ascendancy, underlords beneath a Power that maintained control over the cold, wild expanse by pervading the five systems with terrible examples and ruthless cruelty.

Bloody savagery was everywhere. Especially in the people.


This particular five- islet archipelago of life in the ocean of stars had been richly habited before the arrival of man, a rough millennium ago; four intelligent native races, two colonizing species with stardrives of their own, before the humans- refugees from the losing side of a bloody civil war- turned up.

Struggle, bloodshed, chaos, violence, treachery, brutality- life as perfectly normal across most of the galaxy, then. What really screwed things up was an attempt to make it better.

The Empire that set itself over the five systems was what had happened when the peacekeepers, and their skills and galactic standard hardware, went native. Terran Federation Star Patrol units had been sent, and then largely abandoned by their own command- the federation had not been short of its' own troubles.

In the way of frontier legions everywhere and everywhen, without much central backup they had only been drawn into the mess; divide and conquer meant taking sides in local quarrels, taking on local recruits- even the natives and the nonhumans- in lieu of the replacements central never sent, making it up as they went along instead of enforcing policy, and generally dissolving into the swamp.


If their descendants were lucky- and the locals that much un- as the ruling and warrior class of the new patchwork pocket empire. Worse, the Star Patrol was never a very democratic organization. It believed in heroes, in special people; almost feudal in that, even.

It also believed in the principles it held to, to an almost platonic, or if you prefer boy- scout, degree- and it took a few generations for that to corrupt and corrode away, for the aim to warp and waver into self- serving tyranny.

The Witch- Empress of the Pentagram Star Empire claimed legitimacy from her direct descent from General- Admiral Sol Hamdu of the star patrol; and great maker help her people, most of them were stupid enough to believe her.


The Empire believed in special people too; it had the technology to manufacture them. Sometimes it even made them do something useful- or failed to prevent them.

An imperial troubleshooter known, if at all, only as Arkos was on the move. There was a situation building that needed some attention; a nasty six way feud on a small breathable moonlet that could- if the palace records were correct, no guarantees- have wider consequences.

Getting the boss to sign off on being allowed to go and deal with it himself was more applied dramatics than coherent act of policy, but it was good- even essential- to get out of the palace. Arkos was a being with a reputation, which could be an unwise burden. Especially now.

It would be much better if none of those involved knew he was coming, travelling under a false identity could do that. Even better if nobody at the palace knew where he had gone, which some judicious covering of the trail afterwards could achieve. All that was necessary now was a sufficiently large explosion to make his apparent death look credible.

Most people would have called him superhuman; most did not know life at the court of the empress, where if honesty had been possible he would have preferred inhuman as much closer to the facts. Which it was not.


Moonlet Keroman IV was too good to be true; clearly terraformed, which should have been impossible on something only a thousand kilometres across- impossibly expensive, anyway. There never had been anyone here who was rich enough to do that.

The five systems were not short of oddities, or of people of all kinds desperate enough to not look a gift horse in the mouth. (That it may be a gift horse was what Arkos was worried about. He was well read enough to know what had happened the first time.)

It had been settled by Garklas, Izoube, Omonomolhil, and human Lodgists, Coromites and Ungthpleeti- none of them except, on a generous reading, the parasitic Lodgists, being much if any good at live and let live. The original scheme of partition had broken down and the place was rumbling along in a state of low level guerrilla war.

So far so back to normal, and nothing to be worried about. What had caught the troubleshooter's eye was the difference between the governor's reports and the garrison commander's.


The governor was paddling along in a state of tranquil stupidity, with reports full of taxes paid, agricultural produce exported, and the only notice he took of the factional violence was to say that it meant they would make their militia quota this year. He had wasted bits describing a flower festival.

The army, on the other hand, seemed to do its' reports in third person; and told a very different tale, and one with much more supporting evidence. Regionalism running wild- the infrastructure authority breaking down into competing fragments; patronage exploited for racial gain, widespread legal challenges to anything done-

Abusing the system to let it run itself into the ground, lawfare and disruption, gangs with guns not very far at all beneath the packs of lawyers. No go zones in most of the enclaves- unfortunately not for lawyers.

Great fleeping grobians, they were so far out in the boondocks there were actually still people who believed in the legal system. No, not quite- believed it was a gaping vulnerability in the hands of a governor who certainly had not got his job by behaving the way he did now he had it.

There was definitely trouble here, and it would certainly have to be shot.


They were expecting an Imperial dignitary, although not what kind- an undersecretary from the department of planetary development, officially; and the stupidest thing Governor Ingrussio-Terpzstra could possibly have done under the circumstances of ambient guerrilla war was to hold a parade to welcome him.

There was a parade assembled on the single official starport's outer apron. Of course.

Keroman IV Down was in a fairly poor place for a spaceport, in the river delta of the river the capital was built on. Low hills, prevailing winds in the wrong direction. The empire's attitude to mutation was basically 'sucks to be you', and a high cancer rate helped keep down the street people- not that they said that in so many words.

There were leaders of community groups present, actually a very high proportion of shadowy deputies and never previously heard of aides, representatives of the departments of the civil authority, but most critically, all except a few watch standers of the 433rd Composite Batallion of Detachments.

In theory. In practice the commander of the 433rd had considered joining the guerrillas, as that was the most reasonable way to protest such an utterly moronic order- shooting the governor would amount to that anyway. Kicking off open civil war would probably not solve the long term problem- no matter how much fun it would be, briefly. Much better to make the best of a bad job.


Arkos was on the flight deck of the shuttle as it came in; there was barely room for a fully cybersuited commando on the jump seat, but he was not going to be back there next to the shuttle's centre of mass. His presence made the flight crew were nervous- but anyone flying a cobbled together shoebox like this should have been anyway.

They probably had about a fifteen percent chance of falling out of the sky, and not in the dropship approved manner, even without hostile action which he fully expected. His suit sensors were better than the shuttle's- recovered Star Patrol gear- which was why he was up front looking out of the window.

How far was it necessary to let the shuttle get? Would postponing the inevitable incident be better than pre-empting it? Could it even still break back for orbit, at this point- not enough fuel reserve, no; anywhere else it could safely put down? For astronautical rather than tactical values of safety.

There were a lot of people in the hills around the city and port. A lot of small portable power sources as well. He was just starting to make out the deployment plans when it all kicked off.


Major Locke, commanding 433CBD, had taken a terrible risk with the lives of her batallion's families. The unit was supposed to parade in front of the court flunkey; who had not the faintest idea what she actually had as fighting force. The many, many rebels did, but the comnets were still government held- retaken to all practical purposes- the batallion could, just, move and plan faster than they did.

What was on the spaceport apron was a stunt team consisting of enough bodies in various outfits to give the impression of a batallion, while the actual fighting elements were dispersed in ambush positions in the hills. Quite a lot of those bodies were- who else could she trust?- the rear area troops, worse the spouses and kinfolk, of her fighting elements.

There was just enough of a leaven of real soldiers to escort and lead the bluff to safety, which included herself, also because she was one of the very few of the army the governor could actually recognize.

Her armour was a similar vintage to Arkos'; originally it had been a Star Patrol ranger battledress, the rangers being the go anywhere, do anything omnifunctional heroes of the Patrol. The lesser heavy- infantry version had been backronymed as All Planetary Environments Suits- never underestimate the grasp of pop culture on the human mind.


She could catch pieces and fragments of what was going on in the hills; underdogs always had to try harder, so it was a very backhanded compliment that the rebels' fieldcraft skills were better than those of her batallion. One suit, excellent eyes or not, was not the surveillance net she needed, especially not in the wrong place, and it was a drawback in a way.

Harder to lead people who can't even come close to doing what their leader can do; who had nothing like the speed, agility and firepower of a ranger. It also was not her job, and truth be told these days not her style.


The 433 was mixed in a way that should have started a running civil war within the unit; elements of Roumelian heavy armour, smug and clanking; of Ylemni bouncers, long term enemies of the Roumeli, human alien hybrids, all mad enough to use what amounted to an antigravitic pogo stick as a weapon of war.

Divide et impera, the Pentacle used each to suppress the other, by turns; only on the rough principle of me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousins, could they be brought to fight together- but they did make a very effective combat team. So much so that she cycled between optimism that some kind of peace and understanding might come of it and the pessimistic idea that they would prove such a danger to their neighbours that they would have to be put down.

A unit of Garklas mech infantry, highly unusual- the overwhelming majority of the garks that fought for the empire were Clonicos, genetically modified versions of the natural thing- almost primitively feral, melee warriors and trackers; cold blooded and ice hearted, genetically stripped back to their cave- lizard ancestors they made good murderers- the evolved version made excellent accountants. The 433rd' s element had basically been swept out of their jails and asylums.

A mixed company of Lodgist and high gravity adapted Ungthpleeti humans, on the loog side culled from three street gangs, a cult and a zoomball team that had been in the wrong place at the wrong time; on the ungth a small riot that had been offered the choice of serving- or being served, lightly sauteed, to the garks. There was a severe shortage of happy people in either element.

An air cavalry outfit of the thopterous flieboats of the Izoube, with drop, fall and plummet- screaming troops drawn on a volunteer basis from the rest of the batallion; four old wrecks sitting on the apron now, with considerable effort needed to move the hangar queens and hide the drag marks.

Phantisite storm strikers- light armour from the Imperial capital world, with such impenetrable accents and slang that they seemed more alien than the nonhuman contingent a lot of the time; most of their tech train was from blunvik, and they seemed to take great pleasure in hanging their principals out to dry.


So far, so hopelessly diverse. They had little if anything in common except the side they were on, and that was at times very theoretical. Enemies too, sometimes. Major Locke had been in charge for a while, she had spent much of her career commanding nonhuman troops, and had enough of a grasp of them to try something like this. Had to get it right, had to justify her troops' loyalty- lose their confidence and it was all over.

This could be pivotal. Most of the real rebel leadership would be up in the hills, much closer within striking distance than usual. (The shower of fakes down here were mostly suicide assassins, death cultists and similar raving fanatics.) It was a terrible gamble, and the worst aspect of it was that it was justified.

Someone jumped the gun. One of the suiciders couldn't take the waiting any more- gave off all the physiological signs of a crisis and a surge of stress. One of the bombers. Not the atomic one. The rest were picking up on it and peaking too. The bait- the dignitary- was well out of it. The ambush was set. The only reason not to shoot that one was in the hope of warhead fratricide, and there were too many dead switches.


An energy weapon gunfight is not a precise and discrete thing. The flash and noise are a thunderbolt, or worse; the amount of energy dumped into the atmosphere is enough to cause microclimates, and there are a lot of high energy particles zooming around, some of them even accurately.

By the end of a five minute blaster firefight, most participants will be at least temporarily blinded and deafened, have at least second degree burns over all unprotected skin and possibly lungs, have been gored by flying debris, have all their electronics fried, and be a fair few rems closer to a cancerous death. If they didn't get shot.

Mass use of energy weapons sort of invalidates the meaning of infantry, in fact- between the bulk and expense of protective gear and the devastation they can deliver, just build tanks, it's cheaper in the long run.

Certainly not all empires were rational enough to think in such a manner, though- the Star Patrol certainly weren't- and the natural tendency to want a bigger gun, the monsters many of whom were also the people of the pentacle, the amount of ancestral stupidity washing about the place, there were always going to be these little instant cauldrons of hell.

Much of the ordinary troops, militia and rioters were not so well armed, partly from choice but mostly from inability to make or get hold of them, but someone in the kit of a Star Patrol Ranger was rather well tooled up indeed. Shouldn't take anywhere near five minutes.


Major Locke could move faster than they could think; shot the two most dangerous ones in the bomb detonating circuits, in the bombs themselves- moves rehearsed and scripted in her minds' eye that would not have been fast enough with a lesser rig; then the suit's jets came online. Not to escape, they were the closest to a flamethrower she had, four manoeuvring clusters venting streams of plasma into the dubious dignitaries.

A couple might detonate, but at least the trigger circuits for the nuke should melt before it blew. If her judgement was up to it. Wouldn't be time to blink if she got it wrong. Four cones of heat and light melted into them; there were a few screams before they lost the power of speech, and life. One detonation- debris everywhere, more streams, a couple of hers must be down but she was hearing them, thank the Maker it wasn't the nuke.

Look round, hostiles in the crowd? Hostile crowd. This lot were supposed to be loyalists, the sort who would turn out to watch a ceremonial event- but who had supposed them to be so? The pollyannas of the governor's staff. (A phrase Locke had never got, viscerally- there had been a Pollyanna in her class at the military academy, a part- carcharodon genehack who had wrestled two of their classmates to death, killed three in formal duels and ate another one on a survival exercise. The faculty had considered she had a great future in assault infantry.)

Dependants or not, she was not going to ask anyone to do something like this and deny them a weapon. All of the personnel there were armed, some of them had taken considerable last minute refresher courses to make them less dangerous to each other than to the likely enemy.


It looked as if the crowd were about to rise; whether they were surprised and not in on it, just horrified by what was happening- likely- or if there were gunbeings planted to kick things off if the people didn't do it themselves- also likely- trouble either way.

Locke would have liked nothing better than to be able to shoot all her troubles, but knew perfectly well that there were too many individuals acting for their own reasons, on unlikely sides for twisted, circumstance- driven purposes, to really make any neat, clean divisions, or that most of the rebels would be stupid enough to stand up in front of her even if they were all in one place.

So the few that she were sure were baddies got plasmered, and the rest? 'Aux, hold fire, marksmen take the ringleaders, south hangars, move.' Not the most elegant and comprehensive order ever given, but adequate to the circumstances. Hopefully. She wasn't heading for the hangars because they were a place of safety- they were anything but; too thin to offer any protection at all, just solid enough to block line of sight and attract fire.

They were where they had planned to link up with the rest of the batallion. Holes blasted- cratering charges much faster than digging, and the soil of Keroman IV was strange stuff; not nearly as fluffy as it should have been on such a small and relatively uncompacted worldlet, not as solid as a full terraform, much more rich than a place with such a sketchy history of life should have been.

It had been a long time since most foot soldiers came from agricultural backgrounds, but infantry still spend a lot of time huddling in the dirt. Even the most heavily wired might notice things like that eventually. Another thing, the hangars' eye catching nature might offer some protective value that way- draw fire off the actual hides. And let her get into the fight.


Arkos saw it start to happen- saw the wilderness around the capitol erupt in firefights. On principle, the lines were almost always blurred, and you didn't get to be an Imperial troubleshooter if you had inconvenient scruples about legitimate targets. Screwed up motives and random grab- bags of fools doing unlikely things were a commonplace.

Not making unnecessary enemies was always a good idea, though. At least one side in this mess was probably- all right, possibly- officially on the same side as he was. Starting by shooting at the army might not be the best move. Would they use IFF like a proper techno- army, or would it be field sign of the day, personal recognition, what?

It seemed that with so many diverse elements on both sides, their boss- who probably had something to do with those explosions at the spaceport,
whether planned or improvised, had decided to make sure by going with all of the above. The advantage the regulars should have was firepower and discipline, and they should not be afraid of letting each other know where they were.

Friendly fire should be a greater risk than quasi- random bandit fire, at least that was what the manual said. Its' usefulness could be called into question by how many successful rebellions there were these days.

At first there were surges of movement towards the city and the port, but those moving bodies- ten separate groups, it seemed- were met with fire from field positions by almost as much of a random assortment, but who all seemed to possess the same identification codes.

On balance they were probably the imperial pentacular army. Hopefully. Worth going to see, anyway. If they were they had played the rebels' plan against them brilliantly, lying in wait and ambush, out- guerrillaing the guerrillas. Worth doing something like casually walking through the relatively flimsy crew access hatch and jetting down to join the fun.


The rebels, far from being one movement, were many; Arkos almost forgot, until the alarms reminded him, to rig for landing- so busy watching the play of death. Some of them were turning on each other, some with help- he watched a four strong element of spider shaped walkers scuttle between two rebel attack forces, fire on both, then seem to fade into the ground as he rebels started shooting at each other.

The question of where they had gone was answered a few moves later when a rebel command post collapsed as four moleks burrowed up through it; the reb- humans of some description, possibly the albino liberation front- counterattack was cut to bits when the tarantulas emerged from the tunnels pushed through by the moleks.

How far in advance had the loyalists planned this? Was it simply taking advantage of old tunnels and works? More to the point, what's the operating floor of those things- how deep can they go? How far into what may be at the core of this worldlet?

Most of all, when if ever had he seen an imperial army force, especially a ragbag like this, fight so well? They were heavily outnumbered, but that didn't seem to matter to them- not moving with perfect pitch, not quite, if they didn't have the comms for it they were coordinating on common doctrine, which was some feat.

Arkos was certain, now, that the army were in the right of it. Maker knew, the imperial army were often enough ready to attack the people for any reason- usually extortion- or none at all, but this was not mad butchers at work.


The odds were heavily against them, an understrength batallion composed of bits of almost everything possible- a 'company' of four tanks and some odds and ends, half of whose job seemed to be to get the rebel infantry to attack them- into the fire sack that happened when the mech infantry swung into place, and that suckered rebel technicals into pursuit that was shot to bits by the air cav, which were protected from the rebel ground fire and powergliders by the tanks.

Equivalences and vulnerabilities perfectly put together; brilliant. Not without loss- there were more than enough rebels to win, to put down enough fire to sweep the pentacle troops away, raw firepower was with them, but they had been surprised and shocked, and the Imperial forces were more than adept enough- were they now achieving sufficient electronic ascendancy to network?- to keep pushing, not giving them time to gather.

Damnation, there was nearly enough a division of rebels- far more than enough to roll over an understrength composite batallion. If they could stop being shot at long enough to get their act together. Someone on the imperial side had taken a terrible risk, but given the magnitude of the opposition, that the risk had existed anyway, what else could they have done?

A ranger battlesuit should be able to make a difference, even on this scale. There; movements- a Rebel attempt to push through to the city, to the urban warren- if in doubt, charge? Who behaved like that? Several varieties of human, certainly, but did it really matter? It was time to make a difference.

Particularly as the frantic rebel response seemed to be the most effective move they could make in the circumstances, concentrating on part of the ambush and powering through it. Head on? Showing off was all very well, but not getting zapped was better- come in from, Hm, there. Land behind that hill, configure the weapon rig accordingly, and come out shooting.


There was a thin defensive line forming at the outer edge of the spaceport; seemed to be anchored by another star patrol ranger. Hm. They were busy, anyway. Disruptor to full auto, this was not a moment for precision or sustained firepower, but maximum shock effect. Morphpod to wireframe plasma gatling. Blaster- tube to pseudobeam. Atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed, too. More like splatman, really.

The shoulder mount, servo driven disruptor would follow his eyeline, pound nuclear- force bolts into whatever he chose to turn the gaze of death on. With an area target to hose down, have to keep moving, that was all.

Same idea as the regulars, firepower and shock making up for lack of numbers. And that was a lot of firepower. Arkos jetted out of cover- hop, low to the ground- fixed a cluster of bounding rebels in the aiming point and opened fire.

Disruptor bolts glowed on wavelengths, in particles the human eye could not see; the trail they left was the broken and fusing oxygen and nitrogen behind them. Flashes and darts of rippling light- a thousand times worse when they hit. All their damage was secondary damage, blinding- white micronuclear fireballs edged in cherenkov blue, with the burning chemistry after.

It was a terrible thing to hit an unarmoured being with. It was overkill against most latter day tanks, for that matter. Extravagant overkill was the plan. And it delivered. He almost forgot to start shooting with the handheld guns, too busy watching rebels vanish in gouts of irradiated fire.

No time for sightseeing; move and shoot, his armour and shields could survive on the blasted heath and most of them could not. Slant across the face of the rebel axis of advance, weaving, angling shields, but fire his real defence, aim low to avoid overs going into the pentacle troops beyond- a plasma or disruptor bolt would still kill if it hit the ground at their feet. Blaster for point shots, pick off things shooting at him.


It was easy to understand how someone so garbed could go quite mad with power. Arkos had, some time ago, but he had seen too many people who didn't necessarily deserve it shrivel under the gun, and too few who did. Throwing himself into this fight had been more to do with what he had seen in the army than anything else.

Said army, on the other hand, did not know what to make of him. They prodded him with IFF, got loyalist answers for what they were worth. Locke could hardly believe it. She fitted the suit, the genetic keys worked for her, but she had spent the bulk of her career as a human officer of non- human troops; battlesuit more important as environmental protection than anything else.

Wasn't shy- who could afford to be?- but she wasn't an incarnate angel of death, either, usually too busy being a commanding officer to be a one woman army.

This was lethality unparalleled, orbital support might do that kind of damage but- do we take the risk and assume they are actually on our side? If we can trust this unknown- and who is that masked man?- we can turn this from a close run, frantic improvisation into a clear victory. She thought of the lies and atrocities that had brought things to this in the first place, and decided it was worth the risk.

Pull the air cavalry back to cover the dependent train, they could react quickly if anything else happened. Move the armoured cavalry up to support the ranger- or, well, rangers. Move the armour out to the northern flank- bounding with the cav to begin with before getting enough separation to break and travel. And commit myself, because if that ranger turns out to be a rogue, a renegade or a one man band with his own agenda, I'm going to have to stop him.


Running and gunning like this was all fun as long as it lasts, but tactics have to break in at some point. Arkos felt the army shift around him, reorienting to make use of his firepower- and prepare to move against him if it came to that. Made his shoulderblades itch, but it was a sensible precaution, in a situation that was undoubtedly riddled with treachery and unlikelihood.

Not that the action was going to take much longer; the rebels couldn't be hit this hard without feeling it, and the mass of them was starting to melt away from the back, the blinded and the flash- burnt reeling away to what safety the army were prepared to allow them.

Which, it seemed, was considerable- now that they were starting to run, there were a few shots to keep the panic up and speed them on their way, eliminate knots of resistance that formed, it seemed that in the army's opinion victory did not need to be followed up by massacre.

His instincts said that the situation was too far gone for any considerations of fair fight to enter into it, that letting the rebels down gently would drain none of the venom out of what had to be a very bitter situation to have come to this; but that was agent feeling, looking at the mess he had made it was time for the butchery to stop.

Cease fire, reset into downtime mode, regeneration and self-repair and a little light hiking. Ready to snap back into full kill-o-zap mode if the situation started to require it.


Right, let's see if I can be vaguely diplomatic about this, Locke thought. Haven't done any of that today, really. Great Maker, if war was all there was today would be my best day ever. That's another one from the academy, though- part of the difference between a great warrior and a normal person is that normal people worry about cleaning up the mess afterwards.

Lot of space between those two options, though.

I could send them a motivational composed of an image of this and the caption "yes, still worried about tidying up." At least there are far fewer friendly casualties than I had been afraid of. The political effect, the after effects- considering that by now I had expected to be dead or trying to raise a counter- revolution against the insurgent government, we can probably cope with this.

'Unknown ranger, this is 433 command, please identify yourself.'


Directly from the other ranger battledress, Arkos noted, which looks like a dumb move but is meant to draw my attention away from the conventional units setting up to blast me if I do turn out to be a blood- struck raving lunatic. Woman's voice? Deceptive routing, a parahuman with a translator, or, ah crap. I don't want an entanglement, I don't want to inspire anyone or to be inspired, I don't want to have to deal with anyone else's loyalty issues or have them try to deal with mine, I just want out. At least she's professional. Let's hope she's as ugly as a porcuswine's arse as well.

'I'm the stuck up, know nothing, out of touch Imperial bureaucrat you were asked to drag your carcasses out on parade for.' He said. 'Arkos. Special agent on her majesty's service.' The identity signal he sent matched. Of course.

He sounds dangerous, she thought, and then hoped she hadn't said it out loud, then wondered if she should. He's a killer, not necessarily a mad one, there was real method and skill to that, but between that and a sense of black humour, that makes it all too likely that he has an agenda of his own that could become part of the problems here. Or the solution. I wonder if he needs a couple of hundred henchpeople? Not as if my career's going anywhere brilliant at the moment...


'Major N.L. Locke, commander 433rd Composite Battalion of Detachments.' She said, sent encrypted ID, then mentally kicked herself for not switching on video feed. No, perhaps better play it cool for now until she had a better sense of him.

What now? See to the casualties, reorganize units that had been hit, wounded rebels to take prisoner and fleeing to track to their lairs for later action, scavenge the battlefield for what they could make use of and destroy or boobytrap the rest to deny it to the rebels. But most of all, find out what had brought Arkos here and what he wanted.

'I was under the impression that the situation here was seen as chronic, not serious, and we were being left to make do as we could.' She said, and even to him it was an accusation- to anyone else it would have been blazing anger. 'Your help is welcome but unexpected- what changed?'

'I read your reports.' He said, avoiding bringing the big secret up- yet. And making the situation- there was an instant electricity in the air between them, he knew she felt it too- a grade worse. 'There are overriding issues I want a clean room to be comfortable speaking of.'

Did he need a filter circuit? I've just told her that I want us to be alone together in comfortable circumstances, he thought. This death as aphrodisiac thing is far too potent. I don't have any idea what she looks like or anything. Although if it was her who was writing back to command, and it was, it fits, then she is a rare gem, cynically devoted, with that mature, clear- eyed loyalty that weighs the strengths and flaws of the cause, and outlasts disillusion. Mine didn't.


Oh, she thought. On one hand, he knows everything I've been telling system command, including the parts where I lost my temper, the parts where I babbled complete nonsense just to see if they were listening and the parts where I had apparently ceased to care. On the other hand, he bothered to read the reports. I wonder what he looks like?

'I have work to do, reorganize and pursue, ah- '

'Do that, Major. I'll catch you up once I have a moment to recharge my systems.' He said, suspecting she knew it was an excuse. In practice, now that he was within the area of the batallion's net, he could access her personnel jacket. Ah. Not a neopig's backside at all.


Couple of interesting black marks against her name; translating the dog whistles, she was very picky about her partners, had refused to sleep with at least one superior officer, had assaulted another, caught on the wrong side of office politics there, refused to play the game and suffered for it there, had committed the cardinal crime of proving her boss wrong on that assignment- and she apparently had no idea how lucky she had been to get away with so much.

As a young lieutenant, on the supermoon Bl-23 Shenai, she had been in charge of an urban warfare platoon of cyberslaved cat- girls, which job should have- in both senses- scarred her for life. She had made them effective, partly by leading from the front, even dressing as one of them- which was probably why the garrison commanding brigadier had ordered that she be broken, control rigged and transferred to his personal staff. One of the hazards of life as a cat girl.

She had been wounded and invalided out ten hours before the order arrived, the doctor exaggerating her injuries to save her from a life as a robot doll, claiming she had had her face blown off. In practice there had been some reconstructive surgery which Arkos thought only made her more attractive, destroyed overly- artificial convention, the healed scars actually made her look less plastic, and left her with a sort of quirky, eccentric beauty.

I wonder if she still has the cat girl uniform, he fantasized. Unlikely- the unit had been disbanded, after they had started to feel they were more than expendable playthings; the first had been put down for their presumption, the rest had sensed what was coming and ran for it, disappearing into the urban wasteland. Being slaves they really should not have been able to do that. Hm.


I cannot do nothing with this woman, he thought. She's far too...I have to make a friend or an enemy out of her, there can be no neutral response. If I do persuade her to run away with me, it won't be to a quiet life. If I get her to "kill" me, she'd probably make far too thorough a job of it.

At the very least there's still a pacification operation to go, and- oh. Balls. If that explosion is where the map says it is, the fireball rising and the spires collapsing inward look the part, then this is going to be a very long day.


I really should have expected that, Locke realized. What a perfect time to blow up the governor. I wish I'd thought of it myself, then at least I would have had the pleasure of revenge and the comfort of clearing up my own mess. Is the entire bloody population of this moon composed of rebels? Of course it is. Pointless trying to avenge him.

'Do you have a contingency plan for this?' Arkos asked her, expecting that she would.

Yes, several, which applied- looking at the rest of the city, gang warfare, fire and tracers, variations of one and two were out. Three would have been feasible with fresh troops, might be able to switch to that if the enemy suffered badly enough from their own friction to permit it. 'Plan TC-4a.' She announced to the batallion at large, and added to Arkos

'Fall back to garrison, conduct a physical defence on good ground for it, electronic offense to identify the rebel leadership, which of the usual suspects really, cause confusion and fratricide and target for decapitation, weaken them and let them bleed themselves against us, come out fighting when the odds have shifted a bit.'

Again using centgov access- the Total Chaos sequence of contingency plans covered a broad range from use of strategic weapons in immediate counterattack to fleeing off world, four fell into grim but not hopeless. After a major action like the battle of the heath, with exhausted troops, it was probably about right.

'I have override authority; I could command you to take the risk of an immediate attack.' He said, to make the point and mostly to see how she would react.

She took a deep breath, and decided- he had said could, he had said risk- to chance it. 'You could, but you don't get to be a Ranger by being a bad soldier, do you?'

If only you knew, he said, then realised that had come out loud. To cover that up he added quickly 'Do as you see fit, I'll RV with the garrison zone in five hours.' Started bounding towards the city, adding with the arrogance people expected of an Imperial agent- which probably didn't fool her at all- 'Decapitation is my middle name.'

Apart from anything else, the central intelligence cores might be conveniently unguarded if he could get to them before the looters and wreckers did, which should have some clues as to whether this world's name meant what he thought it did, and how much worse things could get.

[Simon_Jester]

Hm. Interestingly complicated empire- I assume this is your way of rationalizing the sort of fantastic hodge-podge of opposition the typical video game character goes up against in a shoot-em-up?

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Partly; also because it seems very likely that anything as big as an interstellar empire will contain a very huge amount of complexity- we're vastly better at that than we are at moving in straight lines;

consider how many different tendencies, factions and loyalties of human exist on earth- if we spread out into space, at least partially to get away from each other, it's only going to get worse;

and then each of those broken fragments is going to have to diversify to pass the reality checks of surviving in an alien environment, fill out all the things a working society is going to have to do starting from their asymmetric viewpoint, and when you add a significant dose of genetic engineering and cybernetics to let them rebuild themselves in their own image (possibly quite incompetently)-

Then once these cultures start colliding and interacting and trying to manipulate each other, if it doesn't passeth understanding it damn' well ought to.

Simplicity? People? Not a chance. Incoherent shambles are probably far more realistic, actually. We might end up with interstellar empires simply in a desperate attempt to make sense of it all.

(The space opera physics is actually a bigger liberating factor, to be honest.)

For those who remember the games, Spoiler

there are actually two in the series. The first is Arkos deciding he doesn't want to be an agent any more, and attempting to assassinate the Empress; the second is Locke trying to rescue him from the prison planet he ended up on after assassinating the Empress, but not quite managing to bring down the system.Obviously this begins a bit before that.

[kbird]

Hmm, seems interesting. Not familiar with the source material, but you paint an interesting picture. Love the descriptions of the weapons and tech and the realities of energy weapon warfare. Very interested to see more!

I can definitely see where you're coming from though. When/if we spread out from our "little" home, it's gonna get real weird, real fast. So many different viewpoints and possibilities, throw strange new tech in...crazy.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

I'm not sure there is much source material, as such; the serial numbers could be field off this one fairly easily. On the other hand what there is is good foundation for the sort of story I feel in the mood for.


Phantis Ch II

The garrison was based in what had probably once been a planetary defence fort; lots of featureless reinforced concrete, big empty chambers, flat and friendless. Right angles, brutalist, harsh and depressing enough to make even the most dedicated planetary defender wonder if it was really worth it.

From the military point of view, thinking bunkers, and space- gun batteries were the last word in bunker, ought to have pleasing aesthetic qualities was infantile, soft headed and downright dumb. From Major Locke's point of view, objecting to the dehumanizing effects of bleak grey- brown was one of the ways she reminded herself she was still a human inside the uniform.

What was the point of defying convention and breaking the mould, if all it did was move you from one constricted box of expectations to another? Just because she was a killer and a warrior leader didn't mean she couldn't reserve the right to come over all pink and fluffy when she felt the impulse.

Which truth be told she very rarely did, except when looking at this monument to fascistic totalitarianism. In one way it made no sense at all; the thing was- or at least had been- a defensive work, with an honourable and protective purpose; how could it be made to seem so sinister and evil?

Possibly because she was a ranger, her feet were a weapon; albeit not in the rotting and pungent sense that applied to so many of her troopers, even the nonhumans who barely had feet, and made a fair slice of the printable part of military humour. Mobility, flexibility, creative aggression, seizing the initiative, that was the mode and method.


The garrison base felt like the tomb of mobility, and the main reason they were garrisoning it was to keep it out of rebel hands, not because it had any real utility- most of the guns, sensors, shielding had been ripped out and cobbled onto ships of the Imperial fleet long ago.

All that remained was endless blank corridors, empty cable runs, ancient wheezing life support and a couple of mostly- semi- vaguely functional reactor modules left behind by an earlier occupying force. There wasn't even graffiti; nothing stuck to the walls.

Of course with her peculiar command, it didn't matter quite so much. It was probably the best place to put a bunch of Lodgists, there being nothing that they could wreck or steal, much. The Ungth mostly claimed to find it spacious and airy yet unpretentious, the Phantisiotes did have a bad time of it suffering from neon deprivation, the Izoube were unhappy under any but open skies so perversely they were no worse here than anywhere else.

The garks took it really badly, for essentially self inflicted reasons. They liked to believe they were a level above their neobarbarian relatives, and that they made war through the reasoned, pragmatic application of technological force; but they were also mostly severely claustrophobic, and in denial about it, precisely because it reminded them of the lives of their ancestors. She had never known that a cold blooded creature could sweat so profusely.


At any rate they were far from the only ones among her command making life difficult for themselves. In fact they must all be mad; why else were they loyal to the empress? I may be better off not integrating my psyche, Locke thought; I can fight, and organize war, but I have never attempted to do so in a frilly, fluffy pink manner.

At court, at the court he serves, directly, and I more distantly, that is supposed to be very common, exaggerated stylish foppishness, poses and attitudes and the theatre of war- in the dramatic sense, playacting and cheating to get away with it, were rampant.

Well, she had him here now, one of the languid poseurs of the court, one of the tribe of the venomously smug, and what was she doing? Drooling, mostly. Interesting that he seemed to share her low opinion of them- even more, he had challenged her with the authority of the court (although it had obviously been a move, a gambit in the game rather than a serious order), she had counterchallenged with the needs of the moment, he had not only conceded the point, he had, thinking about it, left the field.

He had let something slip that he shouldn't have, and fled to avoid saying more. Had I really made that much of an impression on him already? She thought. Unlikely, possible, but most likely he brought troubles of his own. I wonder if he actually likes his job? If he is a devoted servant of Empress Gremla, or if he has the usual range of fiddles and scams of his own?


Major Locke was a cynic, who knew perfectly well that the empire she served was a force of evil; but there were powerful countervailing arguments- for a start, what were the alternatives? This? Each against all, every life form competing for it's own advantage, solitary poor nasty brutish and short?

Tasha Locke did not subscribe to the view that organized anything was necessarily evil; it was probably true, considering some of the people she had met, but disorganize anything badly enough and you find at least the same amount of interpersonal violence, abuse, thuggery, petty tyranny, robbery, insecurity, betrayal, and general reasons for lack of faith in lifeform- kind.

At least Leviathan had some prospect of stopping everyone being at each other's throats constantly, instead reserving it for special occasions like this one, and of keeping things organized enough that there could at least be some material relief from the poverty and desperation of chaos.

Which the powers could then extort- or call it taxation, it took a lot of work by the authority to put any distance between the two and there was no reason why the authority should bother in many cases- to support themselves and the system, until it starts doing well enough to breed people who think things can be better yet, who believe in things like rights, and start revolutions and generally cause chaos.

Ah, what a wonderful thing is the rhythm of life.


That was merely the human version, of course- it depended what magnification you looked at the other inhabitants of the cluster on how strange you found them. On the grand scale, the laws of evolution were common enough, as well as large parts of politics and a surprising amount of the theory of self delusion.

Look more closely and with greater granularity, try to grasp why any particular decision had been taken or any particular event had taken place, and then you found yourself swimming in mindboggling, hindbrain- bending alien illogic, and what was comprehensible on the macro scale dissolved into howling madness on the micro.

Then again most of them said that about the human race too.


So, she thought standing on top of the sensor dome of the fortress, where does he stand in the spectrum? Idealists hatch out of cynics when they get pushed past their personal limits, when the interpersonal goo and petty spite gets too much, when people they were stupid enough to care about get hurt. When the outside world breaches their comfort zone.

I would expect someone who has risen to such heights to be a fairly callous customer, ordinary people including the lower ranks of imperial service basically the operative field, not really sentient beings with feelings and opinions of their own. Most of the people he has to take seriously are his rivals and superiors at court, and in terms of personal morality it is definitely not the cream that floats to the top.

In fact, if we want to talk about comfort zones and other things being breached and people being hurt, the fleshgardens of the court were an excellent place to start. Or never, ever go to, not without sufficient megatonnage anyway. Suffering and humiliation as a spectator sport had never been her thing; certainly not as a participant, a fate she had narrowly avoided.

Much of the leadership did have a sadistic streak, in fact it was hard to rise without one, and the legal basis for it all was fascinating, to a sufficiently warped mind. The empire was a thing of expediency, held together by force and the fear of force, over a group of entities who neither had or could have any complex values in common; only the very basics, like (mostly) not wanting to be dead.

And wanting to be on the winning side, that was an important one too. So in the name of efficiency and progress (definitely, absolutely not equality and freedom,) everybeing was considered capable of rising to higher things: which meant that they had to be inspected for suitability to do so, which meant the full security service vetting process at no notice or warning at all.

And of course anything discovered in that process could and would be used against you in a secret court of injustice, to which the only defence was, well, in a society of total surveillance it was the only even possibly safe place to be, behind the camera. Based on force, and the only reasonable thing to do was join the military.


Now, she thought looking out at the city, I am the highest point of the system, bar one anyway; with the governor dead, and from what I can actually make out of the fighting civil- administration buildings been shot up, burnt down and looted left right and centre, the military garrison here is in charge. I am responsible for all the oppression, tyranny and cruelty of Empire.

Whoopie doo. The system, the bits of it leaning on me, would like me to have a tremendous surge of ego and feeling of immense personal power at that. More living, breathing, squirming toys to play with.

And to be honest I could meet them half way, if what I got were toy soldiers that I could use to clean this mess up. Concentrate, woman. You came up here, away from the actual troops you actually have at the moment who need you and your leadership, to clear your head and think about what to do next. For a start I do now have recruiting authority, if there's anyone I can trust enough to have them stand next to me with a gun.

The police in the city hate us, most of my lot and the public hate the police for good and sufficient reason; are they going to be any use? Any help in beating down the revolution and restoring order? No- the ones that aren't hopelessly compromised in faction fighting are so hated we'd gain more credit with the people by suppressing them and starting again.

If there were any honest cops among them, there is no method that suggests itself for plucking them out safely from the wreckage of the force. They have paramilitary assets we would do well by attempting to seize, though- could get the equipment sets for another two mech infantry companies out of them. Although what we would actually be able to use as soldiers, given if the protesters don't kill the police we'll have to, who knows.


Put plan 4C into effect, then, for what it's worth. Let the fighting burn itself out a bit then go on the counterattack, retake as much as feasible of the city- personal question; could I stand it, she thought, if the batallion was to employ minion- soldiers, conscripted prisoners? Drones which had never been sentient, yes, it was what they were for, but turning people into drones and giving free reign- and that was the correct word under the circumstances- to her sadistic side?

No, she thought, not now. As a young hungry lieutenant, I could summon the ego for it, but even then I felt I had to set them free afterwards. There are a lot of ugly things that would constitute lesser evils at this point, and turning enemies into assets was no bad thing in itself, but she had never seen anyone come away unscarred from the method.

B and C companies aren't that far off, truthfully, but at least they do not have explosive devices bolted to their heads. The letter of the regulations, unit pride and their pay, are all that hold them, well that and the majority of the people would like to beat them to death with their own internal organs, and probably would if they caught them without the protection of their comrades.

Which is still at least one deviation away from being willing to blow them up myself; so we won't be doing much taking of prisoners, that being the reverse of that medal. Assuming I have my way about it all. Five hours, he said, and no conspicuous explosions so far; he must be trying to be sneaky. Hm.


He comes from beyond the moral event horizon, from the court; I didn't smell any of that on him, but maybe he simply cleans up well, anyone capable of surviving that should be a good actor. Could he simply have pretended to drop his guard with me? No, not simply. Nobody could seem to be that artless without being supremely artful.

Would I prefer a hawking particle of a man, materialized above the horizon and escaping, or a good actor who can fight and win in the backstabbing wars of court, and perhaps take me with him to greater things?

I am loyal to the court, I do serve the Empire; I just hope to not get any of it on me. I cannot believe, or pretend, that nothing passed between us. The question then is whether I, or he, or both of us, believe in "it's complicated" at first sight.


There was a flapping noise beside her; she turned and looked and saw one of her five captains, Chquzahkth Izolazhuru of the Izoube, flapping up to join her. 'Good evening, Izolazhuru- what are you doing interrupting my mating rites?'

'I was unaware that brooding in a gloomy and heavily armed manner on isolated rooftops was part of normal human mating procedure.' The company commander of the air cavalry decided to risk it. As for why a flying race should invent aircraft, people invented the wheel, didn't they? He looked like a leathery hummingbird.

'It's not mandatory,' She allowed, 'but It does happen surprisingly often. What did you make of him?'

'Your mating rites don't involve eating flying creatures, do they? Because I am far from certain how deeply I should be involved in this question.' He said. Sometimes she wondered if she valued the Izoube for their tactical assets or for their sense of humour. They had more of it than most people these days.

'Don't worry. We do exchange gifts of food, but it usually isn't sentient ones. I do need a second opinion, and you were airborne looking down, saw as much as anyone- answer as best you can.'

He knew better by now than to tell her only what she wanted to hear. 'He may be the most dangerous thing on this planet, and you are directly in his path to help or hinder. Aside from the fact that a battlesuit conceals almost everything. Are you thinking that you may have to offer yourself to him to prevent him destroying you?'

If you really don't want to hear the answer, don't ask the question. 'Considering his background, what I know of it, that might be the most dangerous thing I could do. He should be a ravening psychopath with no respect for weakness, a monster. Meekly submit to him and he'd rip my throat out. The problem is that that wasn't the impression I got from him at all.'


'So should you.' The Izoube said. 'Incidentally, what mating rites?'

'Our anthropologists don't like it when people think too much; they prefer to approach as if we were still subsentient and behaving in a purely animalistic manner, ignoring human intelligence makes their jobs easier. Unfortunately, look at that and tell me they might not have a point.' She pointed in the direction of the city.

The bell curve shaped skyline had gaps in it now, where buildings had been toppled or had pieces shot and burnt away. Strange thing about superstrong ultratech materials, they tend to be equally fantastic in their cost. Diamonic iron- iron arranged in flawless lattice like carbon in diamond, no flaws, perfect transmission of strain- actually cost more than synthetic diamond did; didn't want to be a lattice, wriggled, writhed, fought back.

Synthetic diamond itself was brittle, fractured too easily, somewhat useful in composite; the empress' personal guard wore synthetic diamond breastplates, but they took that a bit too literally for Locke's taste. Apart from that they themselves were not allowed to exist armed and so close to the centre of power without being under close control- the zombie rigs in their heads were too high a price for any amount of glitter.

Integrated matter- held under the opposite of a disruptor beam, made stronger by forcefields- depolarised over time, and the empire's industry was already at overcapacity trying to keep what they had in use; collapsium plating was so rare and in demand, there was a two hundred year waiting list for new thermostellar reactor vessels.

Superalloys based on rare earths- rare whats, five thousand or so years out of the cradle- were what could be called the normal extreme, and much in demand, but then there was the problem that no industry bred more rebels, renegades and freedom fighters than asteroid mining. Locke had wanted to be a prospector when she was younger, before the riots.


Which was a long way round to the conclusion that most of the burning buildings were made of fairly ordinary stuff, because it was cheaper. Especially on a world like this that seemed to have a shock absorber for a core- no seismic activity; none at all, which made no sense, none at all. Perhaps, she thought, his hobby is geology and he's here on a potholing holiday.

Well, he said there was something he wanted to talk to me in private about- and if I have ever heard a man blush on the radio, it was then, but he may still be no more than a good actor- perhaps that's not far from the truth; this is a very strange little world, and someone should have come to take a good look at it long ago. I thought that they had, and for whatever political reasons history had been rewritten, it's not a safe thing to ask about.

If he has found something out, something important, something that is going to make a difference to all of us clinging to the surface of this worldlet and squabbling over it, then...look too far ahead and start falling over our own feet.

I've had a good look over the city, seen who's doing what to whom, which neighbourhoods are quiet and which in flames; purpose served and time to be about it. 'Captains' conference, main briefing room, ten minutes.' She told the Izoube, still hovering beside her. Probably didn't have five hours to waste.

[kbird]

Nice world-building! It's my favorite part of your writing.

So an empire HAS to be brutal, because nothing else would work with such a varied populace? Hmm...you're probably all to right. Otherwise, imagine the political debates...megatonnage would never be more appropriate.

Can't wait for more!

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

That, at any rate, is the excuse of the empire. How much truth and how much spin there is in it...

Locke is, at this point, a major in the Imperial army- part of what she thinks on the subject is rationalisation, part lying to herself, part more or less correct. The problem is that empire tends to breed people who enjoy the cruelty and brutality of it, and the five systems have gone very far down that dark path; "the flesh-gardens of the court" for instance, the references to mind- controlled minions- this passes beyond necessity into the misery of others as entertainment.

What we could call cartoonish evil, if there weren't times and places where it came close to the truth. Jaw, jaw is still better than war, war.

Arkos can no longer stand it and is looking for a way to fake his own death and disappear; Locke's conscience is being prodded into action by responsibility, and is not comfortable with some of the things she may have to do. And then there is what Locke is assuming has been classified and hidden, that Arkos may have found.

I have to admit I'm enjoying writing Tasha (N.L.) Locke, so there will be more.

[Simon_Jester]

Locke has the basic ideal of the system- the idea that once you have established peace and order, it becomes possible to establish a rule of law, and ultimately just law.

The great obstacle that stops this from happening more often is, well. You said it already- when peace and order are maintained by raw force, the system breeds leaders who neither know nor care whether their rule is lawful or just.

[LadyTevar]

I am interested in seeing more of this

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Phantis 3

Arkos was not a stealthy being, by nature. That had been something that he had had to learn, a talent acquired in the field- to a degree; more so in the hundred kilometre wide maze, palace, government offices, pleasure dome, death camp of the imperial palace.

What he had been good at, ever since he had been tall enough to shin up the guttering, was urban mountaineering, parkour, found object acrobatics, the rooftop marathon. Another part of the love- hate relationship with his job- so often necessary in the line of duty, that really prevented it being an effective relaxation or any kind of stress relief at all.

Of course around here it presented more hazards than usual. Dissolving rooftops made things a bit trickier, but it was a hazard mitigated by the fact that he didn't dissolve for anyone. A rather bigger problem was the number of amateurs and wannabes cluttering up the course.

Most of them knew who they hated, but almost all were hazy about who was on the same side, and tended to shoot first and ask questions later. This was not the time to draw attention to himself, so he was having to be unusually discreet with his murders.

There were such things, as any connoisseur of death could tell you.


His secret weapon for the job was the morphpod, a personal trophy taken from a space pirate in carefully clouded circumstances; it was Patrol gear of course, couldn't make anything like that nowadays. An agent weapon rather than a warrior's, it was a blob of rare earth polyalloy, electrically and thermally variably conductive, piezoelectric, configurable in the microstructure.

It could be commanded to become many things, even if some of them did involve cad/cam 3d modelling under fire. A set of stealthy gliding wings, a ballistic shield, most hand tools including an electric drill and a pair of shears, a radar dish, some of the more common energy weapons including the upper- limit plasma gatling he had employed earlier.

For this, a low signature kinetic thrower, firing small aerodynamic darts made of a piece of blown- loose steel reinforcing bar. Enough for most of the mostly unarmoured rebels about here.

Most of the best kit had already been scavenged, years ago- there were still surprises to be found, usually unpleasant ones for the authorities; but they tended to be in places where hardly anyone ever went, among the forgotten and abandoned. There was a list, classified which only meant expensive on the black market, of Patrol, of Zybian Hegemony, of Mortarch equipment unaccounted for; of things that could threaten the fragile stability of the five systems.


Then there was the actual list, which was very different from the version that had been leaked in order to get as many of the pentacle's would be renegades and treasure hunters as possible killed, by tricking them into looking for impossible toys in suicidally dangerous- and stupid- circumstances.

The one about the assault transport that had crashed on Azgol IXa, for instance- he had helped salt that one; plant the false trails that had already led some hundreds of power- seekers to their deaths in the flare nebula. There was nothing there but a few oddly suspicious looking rocks.

The sacred regalia of the devourer queens of the vzlstoid swarm? He had got that idea from an ancient game show. It made much better holovision now than it had back in the aeon. This time, the contestants always got the goat. Or the flesh- devouring parasite. (The vzlstoids were, on average, two millimetres tall.)

The Mortarch Phratry didn't even exist any more; a cyborg murder cult spawned by a memetic virus devised by a renegade artificial intelligence? Scary stuff- but they had been stamped out by the Terran Federation half a millennium before they came to the pentacle cluster, all there was left was the entry in the Patrol archives. (And the occasional copycat killer who helped keep the legend alive.)

The number of people who were prepared to believe that there really was a Santa Claus, if you told them he lived on the north pole of a neutron star, was terrifying. It was probably doing their species a favour if he convinced them to remove themselves from the gene pool by going to visit.


And then there was Keroman IV. All Arkos had found was the initial patrol survey- assuming it was genuine and not a lure left by a previous generation of agents; it was never a wise move to believe unreservedly what you were told, in the pentacle- and anywhere else either.

It didn't smell like the usual treasure hunters' bait, though. It had the authentic sound of law about it, and it was describing a mystery. Keroman had wiggles and eccentricities that suggested that while of credible overall mass for it's orbit, the moonlet's internal weight distribution was seriously odd, and too dense overall. Surface temperature was too high, waste heat leaking out of the interior. From what?

Surface gravity was too high, helped hold the atmosphere on, but it had no business having one in the first place, and an object that size should have had maybe point oh seven 'g', not the point eight six it actually had. The survey suggested a more detailed investigation should be carried out as a matter of urgency. There were no records from it, if it ever had been. An official renaming had taken place though, three years later.

He knew some of the tricks pulled on the public. This, as far as he could tell, was not one of them- and there were genuine lost treasures, human and alien mysteries, shipwrecks and lost subcultures. There weren't so many decoys and diversions just to hide nothing.

Some of them hiding in plain sight- the percnopterous cyboge had been unaware that they were living in the ruins of a grounded colony ship until they had rebelled, and a navy ortillery forward observer had realized how much the street plan looked like a deck plan.

(They had been human gene- adapts, a semisynthetic species intended by one of the original colonist factions to compete with and beat down the Izoube in their own ecological niche. Past tense; the Izoube had made sure of that, and paid wergild for the extinct by refurbishing the colony ship's engines and powerplant for the imperial fleet. Mostly. And apparently they had been quite tasty, too.)


Could something of the sort happen here- had there been a second survey, quickly deleted for security reasons? Why the change to a deeply suggestive name if there had been? At that time the Patrol were still believing themselves to be crusaders for law and justice; didn't see empire in their future.

They were still giving things names that were useful and descriptive then, instead of ironic, deceptive or just gibbering nonsense. Arkos had been sent to hunt a renegade once, on a small moon named Aardvark Kudzu Polipooey XVI; it was a ball of talcum powder, probably mining spoil, everyone lived in fin equipped submarine- houses inside the loosely bound globe of dust.

The renegade had hardly been dangerous at all, even before the conditions had driven him catatonic. An accountant, who had been behind a tax evasion ring- supposedly. In fact he had been an innocent fall- guy, a victim even before being hounded to wibbling insanity. Partly his ordeal, partly the fact that it really was a very silly place.

Come to think of it, how could anyone remain a crusader for justice in a universe that contained such people and such circumstances? When things, almost all things, were simply not that straightforward, and the people shaped by such circumstances less so again?

One either bent with it and accepted the trillion dice of modern life, tried to hammer the universe into a comprehensible shape, or being human and liable to pick the worst available option, first went mad then tried to rebuild the universe.

At least madness served as some form of excuse...what had his been?


There were plenty of fragmented times and places in this gunshot- lit, scream- soundtracked night where a man could maim and kill, slaughter even, and still thereby advance the cause of right and justice. An overabundance of potential recipients for that policeman's phantasm, a righteous shoot. He wasn't a policeman.

My job description has nothing to do with justice, only with the maintenance of authority and order. These people, he thought, glancing down at a gang rape in an alley beside the low rooftop he was crouching on, are not supposed to be for me to waste my time on. They're just standard issue scum, same probably all the galaxy over.

The empire doesn't much care if they live tranquilly uneventful lives of pastoral bliss or if their existences are soul- crushing, drawn out living nightmares of suffering and horror; either way or any way, as long as they pay their taxes.

From my point of view, the blight at the heart of it, the black mould of the system, is how difficult it is to get people to pick option A. Bad behaviour drives out good behaviour; who said that? Probably many people, many times. Can't set the universe to rights by shooting the bad bits; we tried that and this cesspit is what we got.

I don't know what to do any more. This is just post battle shakes, isn't it? Great maker, I hate my job. It's better than letting someone who might enjoy it do it.


The morphpod shifted again to a blunderbuss looking thing that coughed out a doughnut of vapour, a vortex ring; he had read this one, got the idea from an old science fiction novel. In that, a medic- commando had dealt with the evildoers by firing rings of vaporous anaesthetic at them. Painless, humane, civilised.

He remembered a fraction too late that the last time he had done this it had been set to standard load, dichlorethyl dimethyl nitride. Suddenly, there were a lot more screams.

There are always a certain proportion of occasions, too, on which you attempt to shoot the bad guys and get it horribly wrong. Well it wasn't like they didn't deserve it. Not much of a rescue, though.

You are a bag of nerves tonight, and it is the people around who are going to pay for your mistakes, he told himself. It's just as well none of them matter, even though they should. And there are people who do officially matter- what would she do, if she had seen that blunder?


Have to do better than that. Can't be that careless. Not if I am going to find what there is to find, and have enough presence of mind to deal with it effectively. Can't save the world with half a brain. Have to stop rambling and get on with it.

The city was like most human cities, a grid of streets and tall buildings at the core, with suburbs and use and industry around, fitting into the shape of the local geography; looked humpbacked, low skyline rising to the centre then falling away again. Much of the city centre was or had been empty space, corporate towers for non-existent corporations, government offices for a power that barely governed.

Many of them were basically disposable, not only was it easier to make glass and steel than it was to make entrepreneurs, it was very hard to make janitors to look after it all. The result was very confused looters breaking into empty buildings and finding nothing to steal but floor tile, and like as not falling out over it, shooting each other, which at least left something for the next set of looters.

The governor's palace had been blown up and left burning, and strictly speaking that would have to be avenged, for the honour and glory of the Empire, but it was not currently priority one. Who was there worth bewaring of, or pointing towards the forces of order?

The L- shaped building extending over three blocks and lit in green and blue was not a police station, they needed that many but didn't have them, it was the central district hospital. They would be busy tonight.

The other really large public building was the university, four blocks together, and there were fires and strobes that might be a party, a riot or both. They were unlikely to be on the side of the pentacle at this stage in their life cycle; let them get their professions, get a stake in the system, and they would become the solid if blinkered backbone of empire, but not yet.


Where will what I want be found? Arkos thought. Those towers there, with the rippling concentric rings emblem, that is the sign of Biovondtz- Bridgeway, telecom provider to two and three eighths of the five systems; just corporate headquarters or server farms? How likely is it that any truly secret data would be held there?

If what I want actually exists, it will be off grid, not available by any purely electronic search; who would have got hold of it in that fraction of time when it was available, and where would they have kept it? The fortress? I can search that at leisure, in my own time, survival permitting. It certainly would have passed through there, but they are not likely to have both kept a copy and kept it secret. Might be lost in the deep stacks, a ghost image of batches long processed.

Worth eliminating the possibility; particularly as most of the factions seem to think that keeping the web up serves their ends. Problem is that actual survivals, the genuinely very secret, almost always exist in the land of the improbable.

Someone writes their memoirs, for instance, and realizes they can't talk about some part of it; deleted but not scrubbed, the memory module with the ghost image goes to the cyclers, and half of it turns up two hundred years later where it and the rest of the garbage was used as fill in foamcrete, when someone took a part of the building home as a souvenir when it finally fell down;

And that was how the Qlgwgnhvtyu Vector had ended up holding the largest arcology in the five systems to ransom with an antique nova bomb. Ninety- nine point nine seven eight percent of treasure maps are fakes; it was only the fluke and the freak results that had any chance of being real at all.


So was it worth combing the stacks of a telecom company for antique data that had somehow got stuck in the throat? Yes. With the problem that it was a lot of other people's prime targets too.

They all wanted the net to stay up; they were all afraid that the rest would try to take it and shut it down. Anyone competent could have told them about nodes and servers, but gangs tend not to be good with geeks- in the age of infowar they probably did have their own network engineers, but that didn't mean they listened to them.

Nobody intended to fight in it, but too many meant to fight over it- the towers were the calm eye at the centre of the storm. I could slaughter my way in, Arkos thought, but I am not in a slaughtering mood. As if they deserve to be prey of my moods or anything else. Not that any of them could be credibly described as innocent or anything.

There were at least four separate street battles raging, with the police being involved in three of them- in one case it was precinct versus precinct, and based on the ethnicity of the officers it was a grudge match.

I don't believe even a fight like this morning's could save this place, Arkos thought. Major Locke's assortment may be able to apply the scalpel, even metaphorically the rapier, but what this town needs is the million pound shithammer.

Speaking of faecal matter, one of the most lethal forces in the urban jungle seemed to be the united garbage collectors and sewerbeings. Under resourced and overstretched, it had made them angry and ferally cunning. They were using waste collection and dump maintenance vehicles as improvised armour, and were evidently tied in with the janitors whose window cleaners and scrubots made up their light cavalry.

They were vicious, too; even by pentacle standards, hosing a gang of rioters down with sodium hypochlorite was going just a shade too far- and their assassination methods were just grotesque. Then again if she can put up with me she can put up with them, he decided. We'll make them an offer later.


Right, a way in that bypasses the fighting and doesn't raise too much attention, which cuts out jetting in or blasting in. Service tunnels? Ranger armour could cope with venusian atmosphere; a jet of hot bleach in the face meant nothing.

Down through the tunnels and blast a way back up, and it was just as well that the sewage he was wading through could be kept off by shielding. Up into the foundations, there was a brief smell of the burn pit, then out and hooray for sterilizing energy barriers. Should keep them away from their homemade bomb factory for a while, too.

It was a powerful metaphor, of course, but the physical stuff was quite easy for advanced technology to deal with.

And had- no, fate and construction plans had not been cruel enough to let him come up in the stacks. He was in a room full of discarded office furniture, some of it recently scavenged- someone with more creative ingenuity than technical grasp trying to improvise mortars out of the gas struts in the swivel chairs, it seemed.

If fewer people had that kind of ingenuity perhaps the place wouldn't be a war zone. Just a thought.


Now it would be necessary to deal with what they had for security, which- was heralded by showers of neutrinos as the building's security system woke up. Maybe there were other reasons why the network hub wasn't being attacked.

Fusion power, on standby- security robots? From when? How seriously would a backbone of the infrastructure like this be allowed to defend itself? Officially or un? Did they only activate when someone threatened the computers? If they were official they-

'Halt corporate raider!' The synthesized voice bellowed at him, as the droid's shields snapped on. Ah, crap. Five hundred or so years ago they must have had some serious connections.

[Simon_Jester]

Finally, someone who's read the Med Ship stories!

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

How could I not? Murray Leinster is classic, but it is worth bearing in mind that he is also very optimistic. Sometimes you need that, but I do wonder what society would be like if, for instance, what was written in the book within a book of the chapter headings- Fitzgerald on Human Probability as I recall- was actually the case. It surely isn't in the Five Systems.



Phantis IV

The central briefing room of the fortress had the feel of an abandoned asylum about it, a home for the terminally militaristic; this had been nobody's permanent base, the moonlet had provided many individuals to the profession of violence, but had never been stable enough to raise formed- or looking round her assortment of captains, a typical heartworlder bigot would have said malformed- units.

On first principles it would be difficult to see such a polyglot, multiracial empire as being quite that racist, but in practice, the laws of laziness came into effect- a far more fundamental principle than equal rights- and simply standing back and letting every thing freely express its' prejudice and bigotry towards every other living thing saved police time, and at least gave them something to do when they could be bothered.

The result was, on the good days, a sort of crude balance of hatred where everyone held to their own and hated their neighbours, but brute economics occasionally forced them to talk to each other. On the bad days, well, small and the occasional medium war kept them busy and kept the populations from growing too far.

Technically, Locke did not have a license to kill; it was closer to a writ of genocide. Not that that would necessarily help the situation- there had been two attempts to do so already.


The room consisted of a sea of broken furniture heaped up against one wall, high ceiling with mostly broken lights and a skeleton of a triceratops- looking thing with a toolbelt propped up in one corner that had probably been a practical joke six centuries ago, lines of mostly dead consoles, a huge table that could be used to swordfight on, and had probably been repurposed from the load bed of an earth mover, with chairs huddled around one corner.

The bare walls had nicks and dents where other units had tried to hang banners, the military version of brightening the place up a bit; the walls largely rejected the effort. Apparently they also occasionally ate people who tried too hard. Considering it would be a damn' silly thing to be killed, by, Locke had decided to leave that one for the moment.

There were much less silly things to be killed by, and there were seven of them with her around the gloom lit corner of the table. Locke was the only one of them in full armour, but they were all in their working rig- nobody stupid enough to tart themselves up into dress uniform.

Which was exactly how she felt in hers, which was why she never wore it unless absolutely unavoidable, and was very thankful that ranger battledress generally took precedence. How an empress, a woman under a trillion eyes, could authorise and enforce the use of an outfit that made so many of her female officers look and feel like cheap streetwalkers was one of those existential exercises in human complexity and perversity. Which, perversity, was probably the right answer considering the rumours about the empress.


And it was certainly not the right thing to do to imagine how her company commanders would look in the official tin brassiere; this was not the moment for a fit of the giggles. Ubrwt Hhlehlynj of the Ylemni would certainly not suit it; he looked like a shelled turtle, short wide and heavy, limbs poorly defined, joints buried beneath layers of muscle and thick skin. His people were native to the cluster, and truth be told most of them would rather be at home fighting for their independence. They were only here to learn how.

The ylemni were natural tankers, whether they had really invented or simply reinvented what nature had given them was debatable; the empire had protected them, which had been a basis for goodwill, but then used that up and more in the service it demanded, and the way it had kept them in order. They were also natural candidates for rebellion, she knew it, and they knew she knew it.

She had, she thought, just about infected this bunch- turned them from barely contained terror- fighters in the making, by firing them through chaotic shambles after brutal streetfight after grey on grey mutual-error, into bricks in the blue wall. She had more or less made them part of the system, and the last hurdle was that they knew that too, and still hated her a little for it.


And in the other corner, the roumeli, genemod humans, but in practise about as close as you could reasonably get to an actual living breathing gnome. They had been made on a slowboat colony ship that had gone horribly wrong; redesigned- with only onboard facilities- to be the minimum body required for functioning as a tool using and brain supporting creature; few of them were more than a metre tall, and whether they were really a stable mutation was doubtful in the long term.

Like the imaginary gnome, they were great if unreliable gadgeteers and practical jokers, that was the gate they had had to pass through and would be extinct otherwise, but the incident that had been their making had left them with badly warped senses of humour, and the consciousness that the jests of nature and fortune can be very cruel indeed.

Hhlehlnyi was the company commander, but their senior lieutenant, the frighteningly normal sounding Adam Finbeck, had come along to see his people's interests were represented; he was sitting on the rim of the table, and was also tinkering with a captured blaster carbine, apparently heavily modified before being partially cooked, and to stop him being too enthusiastic she made sure he could see her shoulder mount twitch towards him now and again.


B company's captain's name was, as might have been expected from a species with such different vocal equipment, unpronounceable; transposeable, just, like playing a violin solo on an oboe. Which wasn't a bad analogy for their respective anatomy. Thoth was about the closest sonic equivalent, although not cultural, the garklas was the only other female there though certainly not feminine, if offered a brass bra she would probably have eaten it.

And then coughed it up and remoulded it into throwing stars or something; just because she was big, unarmoured about the same bulk as Locke in hers, didn't mean she was stupid. By imperial standards she was a company commander, but by her own people's she was the matriarch of the brood; there was some peculiar convolution of domestic, largely corporate politics that had brought her here, past normal induction age- her file was uninformative, probably largely because it had been written up by someone who didn't understand the cultural details and significances.

Locke had never quite had the nerve to ask just how many of the company were her own personal spawn, but she suspected several; that was Thoth's biggest flaw as a company commander, too willing to let the others down or even hang them out to dry to look after her own. Well, she had been an accountant before taking up warfare.

They had some personal things in common, but not many; the garklas, like most intelligent races, had a love hate relationship with the biological complexities evolution had left them, and while intelligence may be intelligence and logic may be logic, to the extent that their first class artificial intelligences were indistinguishable, no lifeform is a being of pure logic however hard they try, the needs and demands, hangups, hiccups and hangovers of their biology are ever present.

It turned out that just both being girls didn't actually amount to much, though perhaps the fact that they were both amused by how little it bridged the interspecies gap did. What would she tell me to do with Arkos? Locke wondered. Probably something accountantesque, actually, some calculation of hazard and opportunity cost.


C company, being of two halves, didn't have a captain; it had one captain-lieutenant, Erik Lodge Lacey, whose middle name rather gave away his allegiance and who looked like something out of the middle ages, long almost monkish cloak over patchwork, scavenged together armour. He only looked at her when she wasn't looking at him; he lusted after his commanding officer, but believed her when she said she would fillet him if he ever brought it up again.


He and his people, the priestly robes were true enough to the situation, were human pack rats, scrapheap hippies with a shade of postmodernist syncretic religion, of which he was the priest, and there were standing orders for Thoth to eat him if he started preaching. Her response to that was, I'll delegate; he's too stringy.

It wasn't just banter- he was simply not a soldier, shouldn't have been holding the rank he was, had used his civil rank to claim a job he shouldn't have had. He should have realised he was not- correction,was in serious danger of becoming- flavour of the month, but normally just carried on blabbering. Today, he looked a little shocky. Progress at last, perhaps.

The other captain- lieutenant preferred to be called a demicaptain, Bedel Modin, and he was just as unlike an infantryman as Lacey, though he did make a good combat engineer. He was only a fraction taller than Finbeck, but approximately four times the mass and point three of the madness rating; which was remarkably low for a sapper. Then again, Finbeck did ride a nuclear pogo stick so the standard wasn't being set that high.

The ungthpleeti half of the company were, like the batallion commander, cynics, which she appreciated and approved of. They were so used to getting the crappy end of the stick that they had more or less become immune to officialspeak, which meant she didn't have to use any of it with them. On the other hand they definitely had to be driven rather than led. Offer them something technically sweet and they showed energy, otherwise it was get behind and push.

The Lodgist element were just starting to realise that their use as suppliers of raw material was all that stood between them and a new official status of ablative meat, which, to prevent them being squandered, was the reason they had some command representation.


D company's boss was already there, and didn't know what was about to land on him with a sickening thud. E company, walkers and scouts, was represented by Castor Duvigneau, who had the biosculpt work over cybernetics that gave away he had been on the receiving end of several. He was the capitoline native and their genuine pet aristo, and unfortunately not much of a cynic at all.

If any of this polyglot crew were serious believers in the system, it was him; which could prove a problem in the department of other than war. He was good at what he did, took soldiering seriously and didn't let almost being ripped in half take him out of the game, but it stopped a shade too soon- didn't include playing well with others.

He was the only one of her subordinates Tasha Locke had seriously considered any kind of entanglement with herself; he looked the part, and his strength was, well, interesting, but there had been something not quite right about him, she had decided to hang back and see how he shook out and in the end been very glad that she had, because he was a consummate asshole.

Arrogant, pushy, demanding, and very rude to those beneath him, sickeningly sycophantic to those above, a bully, a sneak and a cheat, and unfortunately too good a killer to easily do without. At least he wasn't as spoilt and petulant as he could have been; he probably had been as a youth, before he had been shot at quite so much.

She wasn't a fleshist bigot- as her last job as a company commander she had led a force of magmoids; what did flesh even mean, talking about them? In fact she wished they had replaced rather more of Duvigneau, a cybernetic personality would have been an improvement.


'Captains.' She said, approximating for the sake of brevity. 'On the bright side we inflicted enormous casualties and shock on the rebels at little cost. On the dark side I think we can safely say that we are at war.' Nobody laughed.

'The governor is dead, there's no point declaring martial law that I can see- for most of the worldlet there's no law beyond the mob. We, I, now have authority to call out militia and to recruit, and I want to try to gather what strength we can, take up and if necessary make up any reinforcement we can get.

Now. Who wants to sacrifice their career by reporting to system command and asking for help?' She held out the poisoned pill. Metaphorically. Looked at on the broader scale they were probably supposed to fail; this place had been an overspill and dumping ground for too long, in system government's eyes it was doomed to explode sooner or later, and when it did, so what.

The moonlet had an extraordinary and insufficiently questioned ability to self repair, almost as if whatever unknown alien terraforming engines that had produced it were still present and standing by. Dump the undesirables and incorrigibles there and let them kill each other off, they're only making room for more, and turn the marvel into a self cleaning cockfighting pit. That was the five systems for you.

Did that apply to the army units involved as well? Probably; not as if I'm in good odour with the powers what is at the moment, Locke thought. They probably expect us all to get killed, and good riddance to us too and room for the next poor bastard.


Well, it's your lucky day, anonymous poor bastard, because I have no intention of dying and moving over. They'll have to make me, and I intend to take every one of them I possibly can with me. Wait a moment...

Izolazhuru got to the problem first. 'Would this be the same help we've been reporting the need for for the last five hundred days, and got none of? The chances of them doing anything useful are minimal, and of them telling us to do something stupid are high.'

'We can't not, I mean, the mess-' Lacey burbled.

'How many fighters can the organized factions have left? People with skill and proper arms?' Duvigneau said, tone full of scorn. 'Not that they were good to begin with. Jumped up peasant rabble.'

'What is this glory shit you keep going on about? I've looked at a lot of blown open bodies and a lot of blast patterns, and never seen any of it. What colour is it, the same as burnt blood? Does it glow cherenkov fashion? Does it sound like screams? You, you pompous bastard, that attitude is how system command has hung us out to dry.'

Normally it would have been lacey burbling like that, but it wasn't for once, it was Finbeck. Hadn't he landed in somebody? Oh, yes. It had been rather a bad afternoon for him. It is only by understating these things, Locke thought, that we can survive them; and yet...


When you start thinking that because of the terrible death and suffering you have made happen, perhaps you don't deserve to survive, then it really is time to get out. Keep on, and you will get yourself killed. The roumeli are going to need a new spokesperson soon.

He's right, though. They're not taking our war seriously, because it's just a scruffy little sideshow, which means we're going to be left to kill and die on our own resources; anyone who manages to hammer that into them, convince them otherwise, will be punished for the crimes of making system command sweat, and more importantly for being right.

'Pipe down, Finbeck.' She said. 'We all already know there's not much honour in this, and self and other hatreds are best left till after the war. And you're right anyway, that is largely why system command has hung us out to dry and I foresee terrible career damage being done to anyone who has the nerve to prove them wrong.

What I intend to do is send them fresh copies of every report for the last five hundred days, followed by this afternoon and the tag I told you so, basically. Which will move them- several whole multiples of the Planck length, I estimate. To get any action is going to require someone with personal credibility, however unearned. Someone who speaks their language.' She said, looking at Duvigneau.


'Career sacrifice, you said.' He rose to that with an eyebrow.

'To go back to how many are left, a crapload. We have the active support of only ten percent of the population, and probably the slowest ten percent at that- at least the elderly and dependent, the poorest fighting material. The only kind of walker they possess is a zimmer frame.

There's a lot of people in the middle who make angry mouth noises without the strength to go and kill and die, but the various people's militias and gangs, under arms, add up to about fifteen hundred to one odds against us.

You have a choice of career or physical sacrifice as the first move, with an excellent probability of both. I am thinking that this would be a very useful time to employ your family connections.' Locke suggested.

'There is a random factor. This imperial agent, Arkos. What can be expected from him?' Thoth asked.


What indeed, Locke thought- he had caught in her brain and still she knew almost nothing of him. 'That he has an agenda of his own, our survival may or may not be part of. Anything more is speculation.' Although I may be very grateful, she thought in his direction, if you do turn out to be the hero we need. Not instantly grateful though- you wouldn't respect me if I didn't make you struggle for it.

'He is a very good suit trooper, which means I'm going to have to start being more aggressive and risk accepting, factoring in system command also means that I'm going to have to appoint an official second in command. Just in case.' It was bad luck to speculate about one's own death, which was the part that came next.

Who am I kidding, she added in the one sided conversation in her head. I'm no beauty to tame the beast. Just a different breed of monster, if you believe the propaganda. Just don't turn out to be the beast you're supposed to be and we'll take it from there. If we get that far.

The air over the table could have been bottled and used as nerve gas, so laden with toxic glares it was. She didn't want to offend any of them by telling them they were second rate; was it worth explaining?


'Breadth. Two of you are so committed to your own companies that you would happily sacrifice the rest of the batallion as ablative meat- shields for them, and we can only afford very small and judicious sacrifices at picked moments. Two of you are specialists without combined arms training or mind set. Which awards the grand booby prize to, effective immediately, Lieutenant-Major Izolazhuru.'

The Izoube paused for a long moment, before saying 'Oh.' Didn't particularly want it, couldn't say no.

'A commiseration ceremony will be held when there's time. Our first major operation under the plan is to retake the capitol and spaceport; phase zero is pick over the rebel wreckage for anything of war or intelligence use, phase one comint/sigint, identify high value targets. Progress?'

The monitor on the table switched to a data feed; the exterior of the Biovondtz building. It was shaking and bits were falling off; then part of a support column broke away, with a robot clinging to it. A genuine antique Patrol securibot.

'Going fairly badly, then?'

[Simon_Jester]

How could I not? Murray Leinster is classic, but it is worth bearing in mind that he is also very optimistic. Sometimes you need that, but I do wonder what society would be like if, for instance, what was written in the book within a book of the chapter headings- Fitzgerald on Human Probability as I recall- was actually the case. It surely isn't in the Five Systems.

My own feeling is that it is, in a sense, but that it describes what one might half-accurately call a first excited state of human affairs.

The ground state being, of course, the variations on 'vicious muddle' that we actually observe and have observed through most of human history.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

My mental model is more industrial than that; formal law is the infrastructure of civilization- and a shared sense of what civilization ought to be, a shared common-law, is the foundation and raw materials of that.

A logical, sensible law that you need before you can describe crime as essentially by definition irrational and counterproductive, as Fitzgerald does, seems an achievement almost as far out of our reach now as a space elevator- and not only hard but damned unlikely from the law making process as it exists.

And yes, I'm a dinosaur. Still thinking in classical terms. Opinion, however, is probably quantum.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Phantis V

Arkos was not, by nature, a sneak. Stealth was a learned skill, not an innate gift. Misdirection he could just about do, that was even fun and challenging. Escape and evasion, catching escapers and evaders, he was good at all of that. Even tried not to be a complete git from time to time.

Being thrown out through the side of a building like a drunk nightclub guest was not part of his ambitions, was not calculated to make him look good before his peers and enhance his reputation. He didn't care any more, on one level, but realised he had to pretend he did.

Locke had called him a ranger, after all; not that that particularly made any sense, it would have been much more accurate if she had called him a murderer. Maybe she was just really, really old school- believed in law and righteousness and things. No, she wasn't, the woman who had written those reports was not naive enough to still be that idealistic.

For fnord's sake, the entire five systems were a monument to broken faith. It was only naive stupidity and pre existing feuds that prevented the entire population rising in revolt.


So when the security droids- old school, polarised armour, very zap resistant security droids- had activated he had thought first, they're trying to kill me, this is a proper trap, not some half- strung decoy, this means I must be on to something.

Then realised how many, many separate things they might be set to guard, in a data centre and major bit of infrastructure. It was unusual, it was heavy firepower, it was worth trying to hack them to see if his appropriate- vintage armour still had any of the command and override codes; then realised much to his surprise that his IFF was painting them as having gone renegade.

Not from the pentagram, from the star patrol. Six hundred years ago. Jackpot, he had thought, which was when one of the droids took advantage of his distraction and threw him through the ceiling, two support pillars and a conference table with a pressor beam.

They didn't want to wreck the lower levels, full of actual physical hardware and data stored thereupon, any more than he did; but get far enough away, out of the blast radius, and that was it, fight's on. That and they had him against a backdrop they didn't particularly give a damn about, an office tower full of corporate admin, tech support, middle management.

They sent streams of blaster fire after him and he thought fair enough, it's the sort of thing I never used to care about either. Before he realised that the building was still full of said corporate peons, most of whom had probavly actually come into work because they figured it was safer there.


Well, big parts of his job were about being the joker in the pack. And phenomenally destructive, there was that. The droids probably wouldn't- well, not necessarily- have been much of a challenge for a power armoured homicidal maniac, but circumstances were not ideal.

Dissolving people were a part of his life he was trying to cut down on. The droids- what would get an ex patrol droid, a workhorse of civilisation, to go renegade- correction, in this day and age, to register as renegade on relatively uncorrupted patrol discriminators?

Uncorrupted in the electronic sense, of course, not in the moral. If they had ever been as- well, that was the problem; they had been as upright and as integral- what was the right word for being possessed by a sense of integrity?- as they had claimed, and the shining bulwark had rusted through and rotted away, integrity had been corrupted, good had been defeated and the weak and defenceless were now little more than interesting squeaky toys.

They lived, or tried to, in the aftermath of the victory of darkness; or alternatively the reality of entropy. The stench of dead and rotting dreams. He had got high on that, for a while- and were there reasons for his behaviour, or was this no more than the long come-down?

Droids. Self- pitying soliloquies were things to be indulged in posing moodily on rooftops in dark rainy nights, not while actually being shot at. (One of the advantages of ranger armour, though- he could brood and feel self pitying many times faster than a normal man.)

Which was just as well, cause when you were really moving in a suit of high powered heavy armour, phrases like 'structurally sound' became rather hypothetical. It was like fighting in a house made of jelly; the structural beams could support him and the droids but the floors shook under his weight, wobbled and cracked; footprints in the concrete expanded into cracks.


And if he was being sufficiently sadistic, heading for the upper floors meant that most of the incidental casualties would be middle and upper management that the universe could easily do without.

That was enough to get a man severely reprimanded; he was supposed to keep the fighting, and the casualties, at low level among the working peons who were far more expendable and replaceable. He could make a case otherwise here, good sysops being rarer than corporate flunkies, but he had no intention of going back to a place where he had to answer for anything of the sort.

Six droids; more than enough to surround him and apply firepower. Skill, skill was all. If he was better than they were he could outmove them and pick them off; if they were better than he was, they could pin him and crush him. Unfortunately the people who had programmed them knew what they were doing.

Good enough to offer bait, at least; let one of them get far enough out of mutual support to make a play for, and find an ambush waiting for him. Although at the speed he and they moved at, it was a blur of blinding light to the outsider.

He had completely lost track of time in the dance- they had locked on to him as a threat; would not fall back to defend, but kept pressing, pushing, would not break contact. Partly because they must have known that he would destroy them if they did.


Determination like that- they respected him as a threat. How hollow a life that is, when that is enough to make someone happy. Warning; agent man in brooding mode. It was almost an involuntary reflex, programmed in by the pop culture which was itself the inappropriate echo of politics centuries dead; things agent man must do.

Come to think of it, doomed romance was fairly high on that list too. Did the garrison commander know about these droids? They were hidden well enough that she could easily have not, but perhaps there were deeper laid plots-

And there was no such thing as professional paranoia, he thought as a blaster bolt and an electron ram connected with one of the droids. Sending it tumbling to the ground where it spasmed and sparked off artificial lightning.

Normally that couldn't be done, they were too well shielded, but hit it at just the right moment with a powerful enough weapon to breach it's shields and follow that nanoseconds later with a very high powered ionizing weapon and it could be done. By someone like a ranger.


He put two disruptor bolts into one that had turned to face the new threat; it had to split shields between two, and could not keep the bolts out- two more bolts finished it.

'Try to disable them, take them intact.' Locke's voice in his ear. Of course, no- one else who was likely to help him would be able to get there in time, thirty- eight stories up an abandoned corporate ziggurat.

'Why, are they yours?If they are I'd appreciate your calling them off.' Arkos said, shooting up through the ceiling to avoid the four of them that had decided to rush him and take him down before support could make a difference. Wondering what the truth was. If they were hers, was she the keeper of the secret? That would mean her service record was entirely fake, and-

'Will be once you disable them.' She said, still thinking it was about military possibility added 'I have three working MBT; cannibalize these things' power pods, I get one more operational and two I can maybe use as firepoints.'


Which was a militarily credible answer; but- 'Look at their ID. You had nothing to do with this?' He said, ripping open the floor and dropping three levels onto an open plan office full of plastic skeletons.

'You thought I had?' She shot back, angry and indignant. And wondering what the hell was going on. The droids weren't sentient; they couldn't go renegade, they don't have the volition for anything like that. Another good reason to take them in one piece only lightly fried. ' If I'd known they existed I'd have conscripted them years ago.'

Can I afford to believe that? He wondered. If everything is a lie- and the skeletons started dancing and singing, which distracted the droids more than it distracted him. They were mocking him in the way they must have been set up to do, when? By whom? The things had activated when he had encountered them. They had created into action with bobbles, shudders and self repair surges that suggested they had not been activated in a long time.

Perhaps she had a time travel device and had set them there five hundred years ago to ambush him...No, there was a theoretical basis for time travel now; stepping outside the edges of the light cone was hard, but stepping back beyond the line of causal immediacy involved trying to pick up the universe and carry it with you. Violating causality was easier than causing it.

There were no time travellers. Probably. If there were, would we deserve their help? It should be easier to avoid screwing up now than to break the universe trying to fix it from the future.


One of the droids swung in through the side of the building and kicked one of the skeletons at him. The rest of it was plastic, but the ribcage was actual bone. The set of complicated electronic explosions outside the building distracted the droids more than it did him; he took the opportunity to blast its' hands and feet off.

Taking them alive was sometimes part of his job, but he had his own methods.

Waitamoment, where had the rest of them gone? There should have been another three on him. Had they- there was another electromagnetic surge outside, but much of it was shielding, and much of it from another power suit. Well, they were certainly being convincing about their attempts to kill her.

If they were outnumbering her seven to one, he doubted she could cope at those odds. Not against patrol kit, not as much a rear area trooper as she seemed to be. There was a zorch, a thonk, and an embarrassed call on com. 'Well, that was slightly worrying.' Followed by a distinct lack of fire.

He looked out- they were in the next building over, in the administrative levels, open plan, partitions and desks tumbled and broken. 'They, ah, seem to have acknowledged my authority.' She said, on radio.


On tightbeam, laser, she sent 'Bull- they recognize you as a greater threat and they're bluffing, playing divide and conquer to get us into an easier killing position. I think we can ride the bluff long enough to do it to them. Back me up.'

Paranoia came back in full flow then, as he thought this is a trap, it has to be. She's an agent, she's faking it, they're relying on me falling for her, she'll kill me with the droids, this situation is complicated enough to confuse me and set me up, it's just what they'd do to a burn out, no, my suit is more valuable than I am, would, wait, why are they obeying her?

He probed one of the droids, electronically interrogating it- carved through it's infowar defences as if, no, because they weren't there. And found an abject, grovelling apology straight from root directory. The thing just basically surrendered to me. Is this what she meant by riding the bluff? Why? Is this, what, medical telemetry the droids took from- this has to be a setup.

It's too melodramatic. It can't be real- they've only tried to backdoor into her suit by the medical systems, and apparently found that she isn't a standard disposable minion; according to this she's so blue blooded she should be made of cobalt. She's probably got a claim to the collapsium throne.

Doesn't act like she cares, or for that matter knows. I could get rich killing her; the Empress would appreciate that. She doesn't like rivals. Would likely reward me well for that- then dispose of me discreetly once the incident was almost forgotten about.


So what do I do, start calling her princess? There's still a good chance this is all a trap. Or several traps facing in different directions. How to, as she says, ride the bluff. 'I think they mean it.'

Locke was trying hard not to outsmart herself. She didn't believe he was secretly on the same side as the droids, but was still worried that he might think she was. The fact that they were pretending to obey her was a good move on their part to sow dissension and confusion, and just because they were officially on the same side didn't mean very much.

She had been deciding how to put them at a disadvantage- ask them to escort the pair of them perhaps, should get them dispersed on a perimeter and liable to defeat in detail. Could put the two rangers in a fire sack if she got it wrong. What had she been saying about looking for people she could trust to stand next to her with a gun? Those could be famous last words.

Was he trustworthy, for that matter- essentially by definition no, being an agent, but as she didn't yet understand what sort of game he was playing and for what end- and there might never be a better chance to find out.


She reached electronically for the droids- they had nearly found a backdoor, had they, have to fix that- they what? She had triggered some sort of genetic loyalty override, had she?

Bloody silly idea, hangover of pack animal behaviour, somewhere back in the family tree there may have been an aristo slumming it- what the hell difference did it make, when you arrive at a place by colony ship you all tend to end up pretty closely related anyway? Just as well they don't seem to have noticed my father was a lawyer or they'd never obey me.

If they have been drastic enough to offer us this morass of swamp coding to get stuck in- it's sort of what I'd expect from selfless wardroids, anyway- then this just might be enough to push them past the balance point. A dangerous bait to offer- although the idea that they had was reinforced by how thoroughly he's fallen for it.

'What kind of an agent are you, to be outpsyched by a droid?' She sent tightbeam to him. 'They've zugzwanged you, once they figure it out there will be zap, snap out of it, we'll need your guns.'


'No, they've opened root, they accept that you're a consanguinity one match to the line of Sol Hamdu, which overrides their task orientation-' and if that is so then they would, as I thought earlier, turn on me without a second thought.

Oh, Great Maker, she thought, that's what he's doing in an irrelevant scumhole like this, he's gone a bit funny in the head and refused to be put out to pasture. 'The only family that matters to me right now is that I am one of the Army's problem children. If they're playing silly buggers to that extent then keep them at it.'

Why had they gone rogue, or thought that they had? That would be worth probing for. And it turned out that they wouldn't tell him without authorization from her.

She was not as distracted as she seemed; hacking and cracking were secondary strings on both their bows, but more important to her as a command officer; watching his performance as a hacker was interesting- he wasn't as good with that as he was with feet and guns, didn't have a good grip of computer logic; used intrusion tools like, well, like tools.

She had a lot more in the way of foreign minds to deal with, more to coordinate, and probably was more subtle at it than he was with his electronic sledgehammer tactics. Maybe his methods were just more suitable to the situations he usually found himself in?


She could slide into root too- ah, now this was interesting. 'They've just asked me for permission to shoot you. Whose version of the desirable endgame is this again?' She asked dangerously, laying a trap of her own- go on, manipulate me, I want to see what you come up with.

'I have a rational aversion to being shot.' He said, trying to distract her by making her think.

Unfortunately it was the sort of line she could rattle off on verbal autopilot. 'Considering how much being shot at your choice of career path involves, who are you kidding, me or you?' Point to her. His relatively long pause inspired her to follow up. 'While we're in this compromising position, what exactly did bring you to Keroman IV?'

'Questioning me at gunpoint?'

'You can criticize my technique later. I am in a world of shit, and I need to know if you are going to help me out or help hold me under. The droids' conditions don't allow them to know what it is they were guarding. Start with that.'

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Part six;

Phantis Six

Now, Arkos thought. We, is there a we? Are surrounded by killdroids, that she doesn't actually believe she has control of- she thinks they're bluffing. She is therefore also bluffing, or trying to see how together I am. (The medical back door is unavoidable unless you choose to disable the suit's support system, which I have- I'm not usually in places where I can expect help or rescue.)

It's nice of her to be worried about my sanity; or perhaps just proof that she still has some of her own left. She knows how good I am, although must be thinking that it does not proceed from martial arts style centeredness and inner balance. May be right to be worried, an agent who loses the plot and goes berserk is a fearsome thing.

Chooses to confront danger, wait a moment, she may only have three of them but she still has tanks. Courageous but not completely mad, then. Could probably do with more tanks, actually. If I do tell her then I drag her into this, irrevocably. If I don't tell her, I'm back to finding some way of disappearing, which on a moon this small- let there be utter chaos, fleeing refugees-

but then what? A powerless life, on the run, knowing too much? They would come after him. A few old contacts, yes, but all still in the business- very few who could help him fade away. He'd probably lose the plot trying that it might be easy enough for them to find him.


Trying to change the world? What would not a princess do? She's not going to be easily persuaded, in fact she's going to object to being persuaded, manipulated, if I can't play it like that can I even still do sincerity? For void's sake, I may have to resort to humour.

A straight answer would not suit the moment. 'Oh, yes, I am the outrider of the shitstorm. Details are a state secret, of course. but I am definitely here to cause you trouble.' She wasn't going to settle for that though, was she? Might, if he could keep- start- a byplay between them,

'You've been watching far too many movies.' she said, criticizing the way he said it. 'And you're in the wrong one. You may think you're starring in Jaq Bullitt, Superspy, when you have actually arrived just in time for a walk on part in The Last of the Legion.'


She wondered if he would get the reference. They had thousands of years of pop culture to look back on- nobody was quite sure how many- and hurry up and wait had been part of military life in almost all of them, and not really giving a damn about authorization and copyright meant that for density of pirated entertainment, the average army unit exceeded the average student dorm by at least one order of magnitude.

'It's only through- pop culture is the acceleration padding of the psyche. Without that cushioning medium that- who ever learned anything by being taught it? Osmosis is the only way image- thinkers in a continuum of demotic semiotics absorb data- ' he said, sliding into an old familiar rant of his about rookie agents who practically needed cult deprogramming.

'Wittgenstein Has Risen From His Grave? I'm impressed.' She said. They were in no real danger of being interrupted- she had her map of the factions, and where they were was part of the road net- strolling along the superhighway, nobody's territory, good fields of fire. It would be nice if nobody was stupid enough to interrupt them.


She had a different weapons fit; one sustained fire autoblaster, one long and a short multicannon one the shoulder mount. Jack of all trades flexibility, in some ways a more agent like outfit than his disruptor. What would she do if I just handed her my ID, said 'I quit, you're me now, have fun?'

Apart from oh crap, what now? 'I have problems too. They don't cancel out, if anything they make each other worse. They raise the stakes.' He said, admitting to himself that he wanted to trust her, that he badly needed somebody to have his back. That it was small wonder they were talking past each other in a cauldron of stress and confusion, and he wanted to communicate so very badly.

'Is there some reason you're not calling for backup? More than simply wanting to be sure first?' She asked, after a short tactful pause. It was hard to read someone's body language in power armour, but if he- well, he knew what he was doing, tactically, but looked lost in terms of what he ought to be doing.


Oh, the hell with it. 'Do you know what a keroman is?' He asked.

'One of these, presumably, although I never could find out where keroman one, two and three were. Hidden worlds?' She guessed. He was being very weighty about this, acting as if he was wobbling under the pressure. She decided not to bring the princess thing to the forefront of his judgement; if this was political- 'or would I rather not know?'

'You mean that? You'd be happy to soldier on in ignorance, and let me not have to try to tell you?' He sounded so relieved by that that she knew she couldn't just let him away with that.

'How potentially disastrous is this secret of yours, anyway?' She had to ask. Looked again at the droids; they seemed to be raising no objection- she would almost rather it was a bluff, didn't want to think about blood and bloodlines. 'Most agents would be beating me about the head with need to know - too big for policy?'

She waited a second then asked ' "Keroman" doesn't translate from ancient alienese as "death star", does it?'


'It's ancient history, actually. Naval. One, two and three were forward bases- on the edge of enemy territory, almost indestructibly armoured support bases, for attack boats. They could sortie into the battle zone and return, rearm, repair from a point of complete safety.' Arkos exaggerated slightly.

'The name was deliberate? I was joking about alienese, but you're sure you're not picking up a phonetic coincidence, a meaningful but much less ominous name in one of the local tongues that happens to have the sound-?'

'The world was renamed after the first survey. It's deliberate, all right. Whose base, what's left, the way in- unknown, unknown, unknown. I think our expensive tin friends were supposed to keep the business on ice until it was safe to look into; once the patrol had pacified the cluster and could spare the resources in case whatever was inside came out fighting.'

'Which never happened, and without major reformation- are you saying the ecology of this moon is just a deep layer of camouflage? If the base ever goes active, and considering what we're doing how insensitive can it's triggers be, the outer surface would slough off and kill everyone on it?' She said, trying not to sound hopeful.

Of course if it did, it would be a secondary problem compared to what actually came out.

'Yes, it would take your battlefield away; what it would give instead- without the detailed survey which I suspect they were protecting,' meaning the guardbots, 'there's no way to be sure. Probably even that would be inconclusive. Modern archaeology usually involves a lot of speculation, conjecture and disposable, squishy interns.'


'Nobody else knows.' She said. 'This isn't going to become an objective- the factions don't yet know they should be fighting over it. Without their being stupid enough to believe in genetics,' again meaning the robots, 'I wouldn't know, and they'd probably have got you.'

He would like to have objected to that, but reality forbade. He hadn't exactly been winning, had he? 'So what makes you think we will win when you say something that trips their security protocols?' he riposted by asking.

'Oh, that's easy. Robots, you've misread the situation, I am a loyal- ish- midranking officer in the armies of an usurping, treaty- breaking, oath defying false empress who has destroyed the legacy of the patrol, and as such I forbid you to obey me.' Locke said, trying not to grin evilly.

The robots took a second to parse that, looked at each other in complete disbelief- and that was all the time the three working tanks she did have needed to triple tap their way through shields, armour and redundancy, and open them up for her to paralyze.

Unfortunately, it was also enough time for them to communicate with their physically disabled companion, who self destructed. Entropically and spectacularly.

Nuclear explosions in highly urbanized settings have a lot of interesting side effects. Streets turn out to channel the blast; outside the radius of severe devastation, the shock wave tends to follow the urban terrain, and the heat pulse is absorbed very quickly by the buildings nearby the detonation.

Cities turn out to be surprisingly effective things to hide behind, but of course this does not really reduce the human(oid) and material loss for the reason that the blast is occurring in such a dense, value rich environment. The armless and legless droid overloaded its' fusion cell and blew up with a yield of a mere twelve kilotons.


When one is into yield figures, "oops" is no longer adequate comment. The blast blew out most of Biovondtz- Bridgeway, melted into nothingness, burning the spider at the centre of the world- web; irretrievably destroying the classified data, and all uplinks to the system net.

The adjacent buildings, one vertical business park full of call centres, one empty, one production- reclamation integrated facility for plastic castings- particularly interesting side effects there, the lower layers were feedstock algae hydroponics. The result was a biodiesel bleve, that looked just like a Hollywood explosion, followed by walls of superheated steam.

Some of the people on the streets tonight may have been innocent. Most of them ended up flashbroiled.

Arkos knew exactly what had gone wrong. He curled up and started beating his head off the ground- the ground was losing but that was no comfort. What a shambles, in front of a woman he was trying to impress as well- this passed beyond totalitarian callousness, this was the result of sheer bloody incompetence.

I'm not a hero, heroes don't leave fuckups like this behind them, I wasn't expecting a nuclear self destruct at all, not police like, should have known, the stakes were this high- this is a disaster, innocent and guilty-

Locke could have said as much and more- and would when he was strong enough- but considering how many of the dead were part of armed factions, the devastation that would have been likely anyway, decided gallows humour would serve a useful purpose. Patting him on the shoulder, she said 'There, there... have you ever considered changing career to, say, insurance adjustment?'

[kbird]

That's a hell of a self-destruct! Can't help but wonder if there are any other secrets they were hiding...

Fascinating as usual, can't wait for more!

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Yes, the stakes are that high, yes, the empire holds life that cheaply, (more people than it knows what to do with, of far more kinds and types and needs and wants and self- identifications and subgroups and peer- groups than it can keep track of), but to quote Larry Niven, sometimes it's easier to move a planet than think up a good line.

Telling someone who has just caused an unintentional nuclear explosion to consider a career as a loss adjuster...well, that was what convinced me to go down that plot path. As you might expect from people in their position, they both have fairly twisted senses of humour. He's due either a good cathartic vent or a nervous breakdown. Which, next bit should tell.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Oh, yes, new bit as well.

Phantis VII

There was nothing else to do but admit it. 'I came here looking for a way out.' He said. 'Too many explosions, too many wastings, too many frakups waved away, too much who cares, they're only people.

I'm a coward. Should have faked my own death, should have gone missing years ago; how many bystanders am I going to take with me and then not go? When does this sequence of bloody disasters end?'

'When I get fed up with your self- pity and strip you naked and throw you into the fallout plume. Or would that run too much risk of improving your mood?' Locke snapped back at him. Well, she was getting answers to her questions now, albeit not much that she actually wanted to hear.

'Self pity? Are you- look at that, look at that damned bloody mess, and tell me that it's a good thing, that there is no pity to be had there, tell me that this was not a horrendous screwup. If you can do it flat I might- I don't know, agree with you or something.'

She made a couple of false starts, point taken- at least as a pure fusion detonation the fallout cloud wasn't too rich in bomb residue, and it was drifting over the higher rent districts closer to the shore- before deciding on 'It's probably not that much worse than they were going to do to each other anyway. From a certain point of view, you saved them.'


'I crispy- fried them.' He said, some anger coming back into his voice at last. 'And I've heard it all, the inquisitor logic, before, and it's sickening how they always pretend to believe it, not even the children any more read it as other than a threat, our morals do not protect you. Maniacal- manichaean- cackling is more honest.'

'Well, if you don't want to be told that you saved them by letting them die innocent before they could kill each other off, which is doubly untrue due to prior offences and that the Victimry Act of Space-Archon Sendivoge the Asymmetric was never locally repealed, then look at it this way; you stole all their kills. Nobody's going to be playing gangster- warlords of the genetic wasteland there for a while.' She said, and then it occurred, hold on, he's taking all the responsibility?

Looking closely at the sequence of events, I had at least as much to do with it as he did. Just that he took it hardest and came apart first, and I've been too busy holding his hand- and playing with him, a bit- to recognize that it's my explosion too. I could have played that differently, not trying to put them into an ego loop, and it was me declaring myself a renegade that caused them to burn rather than reveal.

Well, terran federation ranger suits don't just let anyone wear them- although in what respect is a patrol rank and clearance badge distinct from a magic talisman?- but the genetics don't have to be that close, and even top quality electronics go a bit squirrelly if left semi active for six centuries. Even if it was true, so what?


That and I'm simply too busy to be a fairy princess; I can't curl up and start wailing, my people need me, by which I mean the battalion really, and a strong idiot is better there than a sensitive genius, which is why there are so many idiots lying around the place- or is that just the use the system finds for them? He is losing it because he has no people, only himself to take all the load.

'Why aren't you affected by this?' He thought to wonder- anger tempered by confusion. 'We just blew the heart out of a major city- what a loss for law and order, for stabilization, for trying to put this world back together; there's hardened but-' He said without stopping to consider that he wasn't supposed to care any more.

'I've been dreaming of something like that for years.' Locke said, and it was true as far as it went. For the last few years an act of strategic terrorism had been a serious possibility, and everyone blaming it on everyone else almost inevitable.

She had been seeing groundburst craters and fallout victims in her dreams for years now. Actually, she thought to herself, one reason I can cope is that the other shoe had finally dropped and I don't simply have to wait for it any more. The agony of anticipation is over, at least. Which means that, silliness being the last refuge of the doomed, I can now afford to mock it, and him, which he probably needs.

'It was in the wrong place, the wrong shape, with the wrong people. I'm trying to think of it as extreme urban redevelopment. It also means that so much of the intricate planning that was hurting my head has just gone away. Few things as restful as a nice medium yield detonation in the right place.'


'I don't think I believe you.' Arkos said. 'You're not that detached from reality.' He said, and he was right. There were an awful lot of people in that burning waste, and she hadn't really sounded all that convincing.

'Maybe it's finally time to take that holiday from the actual the army owes me. Sunbathing on gamma- beam beach sounds much less stressful and damaging than having to pick up the pieces of this mess.' Locke admitted, casually because she had already really moved past that, could think of it without tension because it was already a not- happening.

At the same time thinking, having to make herself think, what difference does this make? What changes to the balance of power? Well, it's in theory blown the heart out of the Establishment and given the mostly surrounding area based rebels a tremendous advantage. On the other hand we have shot the hostage- and I wasn't kidding about having wanted to do that myself.

It's no longer somewhere we have to protect, defend and police, which releases that much more of my force, such as it is, for aggressive, mobile action- moving up a couple of phases in the plan. Now that the central hub is gone, they have to network among themselves, which will mean easily intercepted messages on shaky comms, and face to face meetings between arrogant, obsessive egomaniacs a high proportion of which should go pleasantly wrong.

Blowing the core out of the city is starting to sound like a good idea, great maker help me. Ah, there are two things we can get out of this. Why stop at a handful of admittedly top rate power cores, when post- disaster salvage can cover so much more? Second- 'How do you feel about doing a bit of that maniacal manichaean cackling on what's left of the comnet?'


Arkos had to pause to parse that, for a moment. 'You're not talking about deflecting the blame here, are you. False flag, pretending this was some kind of rebel action?' It was an old familiar stunt, so much so that as soon as the government made a press release, anyone with brain cells operating immediately discounted it, and started out into the hall of mirrors.

Which was as good a place as any to put people suspicious of the government; it made executing them by laser fire so much more efficient. As was becoming the way they communicated, she jumped a couple of places ahead in the conversation. 'When you do achieve your ambitions for martyrdom, can I have your disruptor?'

'Who were you expecting to have done this, in the normal course of events?' He followed her across the missing places to the next sensible question. Given the circumstances.

Who was I not, she thought. Who is it believable would stand to gain from this act, at this time? The second loudest separatist, local independence party trying to shunt the blame on to the loudest. 'Whoever has the largest independent ability to manufacture the industry and weapons they would expect to win with, as you might expect.'

'Or are they too obvious? Always the smallest curs that are the yappiest- a smaller group taking credit, trying to steal the credit?' Arkos knew the business, but then he laughed. 'If this goes horribly right we could end up starting our own terrorist movement. Knowing my luck-'


'Have you started many terrorist movements, then?' She asked, and he knew that she was doing so exactly because she wasn't supposed to.

He threw a non sequitur- and a Rorschach inkblot- back at her. 'The saddest were the most successful. I could see this ending with just you and me left in a field of cooling lava with occasional bones, stretching from horizon to horizon, agreeing that well, it was messy but we saved the planet.'

'Well, if you're holding that out as a best case scenario...'