SDNW4 Story Thread 1

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Force Lord
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Force Lord »

Center of War Building, Central City
Centrum, The Center, The Centrality
8 April 3400


Cracus Vompey was never a man given to sensibilities. Many years of experience inside the Party and Government had taught him that. That was shown all too clearly when he shouted down the Army and Marine representatives opposing the planned manpower cuts, saying that they were lucky he was not going to go much farther than halving the ground forces' numbers.

But he was not concerned with that at this moment. He was busy looking at the Navy High Command's plans for sending a force against the Space Pirates of Zebes. Not that an attack was imminent, but he lacked anything else to do. So he read.

"Hmm, sending a Task Group against these pirates seems sufficient, if other nations chose assist us..."

Not that he expected the interstellar community to respond to a Centralist request for help of all things...

Vompey decided he needed to talk to Borlon. He activated the holoprojector that was connected to others throughout the Party and Government Buildings. It was safely protected from eavesdropping.

A staff droid appeared in the hologram.

"What is your request, sir?"

"I need to speak with Borlon."

"I will alert him. We will be sorry for any delays, sir."

After a moment, the image of the Secretary of Foreign Affairs appeared.

"Ah, Vompey! What pleasure! Fine weather today, isn't it!"

Vompey noted that there was currently a thunderstorm over the city. Did Borlon like storms?

"I believe you wanted to speak with me?"

"Of course. I will not bore you with the details for Operation Rhodes, but I want to know if anyone has responded to the diplomatic message your successor Nostrum sent out to the nations courteous enough to keep an embassy at Centrum."

Borlon shook his head. "I'm afraid none have responded at present. You know that we are still learning the art of diplomacy. That's what over a thousand years of isolationism does. Has the CIS found more about the Zebesian Pirates?"

"Nothing so far. We have, however, discovered something very amusing. It concerns the Chamarrans and the Solarians."

"Well, what happened?"

"It appears the cat people had failed to do their Intelligence homework. Sending a stealth ship to a location full of sensor devices, failing to retreat after detection, unwillingness to surrender honorably, abandoning ship despite being cornered, and having their ship self-destruct with a Solarian boarding team in it..."

"Wait, they did all of that?"

"It appears so. Such staggering idiocy is very damming for the Chamarrans' intelligence services. Even our debacle with the Datton didn't reach such disastrous proportions. Something tells me that executions will be in order in the Hierachy."

"I really doubt the cats will go that far. No more than some serious sacking. But I do find this so ridiculous as to be almost comedic."

"The CIS thought so too. Their schools have already added this sad story to their curriculum. Maybe they will find it more useful than the whole Datton business."

"Yes. Well, I'll soon be busy with the other Triumvirs. I feel they will be most amused by what you told me. Farewell."

Borlon's hologram vanished.

Vompey returned to read the papers regarding Operation Rhodes. He hoped that there would be no obvious flaws on it...
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Darkevilme
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Darkevilme »

Hierarchy Palace, Chamarra Prime. Hierarchy space
Tia Kithandra had returned home once more, her tasks more than that of any of other family member took her far from here. This time however her return is not one she enjoys, a fact she has ample time to consider as the VIP Trigrav silently glides down through the cloud mired cityscape towards the mountainous bulk of the palace.

For the past several days she'd tried to develop a rapport with the Didat cartographers but recent events had forced her to cut that short just when breakthroughs were likely and leave it in the hands of her immediate vassals on the scene, who she had confidence in but the Didat flotilla was only likely to be in known space for months and they also ran the risk of squandering the advantage of finding them first once the Didat got further into known space.

With all that Tia can only hope this situation resolves itself. The royal catgirl extricating herself from the Trigrav as it docks and making her way into the palace itself only to be met by her younger sister, Maybe this'll resolve quickly after all.

“Welcome home Sister. I hope your time with the Didat went well.” Mela said with a smile as she bounds over to embrace.
“Other than me having to return to clear up the mess caused by one of your ships it was going perfectly sister.” Tia responded with her ears and tail most expressive of her annoyance.
Mela's ears lowered and she has a look of Really? Serious right now? on her face as she holds off on the embrace and responds “I'm a victim of circumstances sister, lets at least get comfortable first if i'm gonna get berated about it though.” says Mela and finds a cushion scattered place of repose in which to do just that, Tia reluctantly following to do the same.
“You ordered a ship to prioritize completion of their mission over other considerations and put an AI on it which would follow any orders given to it to the letter sister, what part of that is circumstances beyond your control?”
“Both...well I may have given my fleet coordinator the wrong impression of how important gathering this intelligence was but I had no idea this Callahan AI was going to try and start an international incident.”
“So you had them given orders like this without considering an event like this could happen?” asks Tia, choosing to ignore the evasion of responsibility.
“I didn't see it coming; hell no one did, the Collectors came with two monoliths, the Sovereignty came with every fleet they could muster. No one jumped into that system not expecting a fight. Who other than the Byzantines uses their most powerful warships to taxi around diplomats in the warp gate age after all?”
“The Collectors do and we know so little about that them that this might be what they do every other time. But still, blanket orders to prioritize getting the data Mela. Nevermind the AI according to the report that just made things worse it didn't start this sorry tale.”
“Alright I made a mistake are we content now or must you get a red wide brimmed hat for this?”
“At least you know it sister. I think you need to reconsider your assets before we try and pull anything like this again.”
“Oh I plan to, I've already seen the matriarchs of the clans that gave us the computer intelligences personally.”
“Just tell me you didn't disgrace them, we do need that expertise even if it is somewhat flawed.”
“Sister.” Mela reached forward and flicked Tia's ear “i may have made a big mistake but that doesn't make me a fool.”
“You know I don't think that Mela. Please tell me there's good news though.”
“Her Holyness the Empress has offered to mediate the dispute.”
Tia smiles “It will be good to hear from her again, though I wish it was under better circumstances. I should probably pay another visit to her sometime after all this blows over.” Tia said and gestured to bring up the palace schedule on the holoprojector, then blinked and turned to Mela.
“Sister, what's this about a Bragulan deal?”
“We require a lot of heavy elements that they retain vast reserves of and of which our own sources are becoming increasingly difficult to extract. Also there's an opportunity to acquire cheap groundcars and diversify our military equipment.”
“In exchange for, what are we going to be giving them?”
“The plan is to sell them primarily robotics and electronics seen as our drone production is mostly unused, for a galactic power the Bragulans are surprisingly ill advanced.”
“Let me guess, Kara's doing it to express her displeasure at the Solarians? There are other sources for these materials after all.”
“Pretty much. But anyway, you planning on accepting Haruhi's proposal?”
“Of course.”
“Good plan, otherwise Kara might end up ordering the grand fleet to go for a manhunt to destroy Olympus's core if she receives any more scathing messages.” jokes Mela, though as jokes go this one falls flat cause she could actually do it.
“Olympus is a distributed AI Mela. But agreed it is probably for the best I hear he's really good at antagonizing people. With any luck we can get this resolved before the fleet arrives in position.”
“I hope so as well, I have some serious restructuring to conduct. Now how was your time with the Didat Cartographers go?”
“Surprisingly well, they're hard to communicate with but interesting people: Did you get the report of how they've been doing this voyage around the galaxy for three thousand years?”


Results:
Tia returns to bring a fresh perspective to the whole issue with the Sneakily Does It.
The other eleven stealth cruisers in the Koprula zone shoals are recalled.
Hierarchy decides to restructure espionage services such as they are.
The grand fleet continues to pass by Pfhor space.
STGOD SDNW4 player. Chamarran Hierarchy Catgirls in space!
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Agent Sorchus »

UN Space April 27, 3400 (Sector )

Baron Loxley pulled his pocket chronometer out of his fur doublet. He would usually make a point to his followers that his vest really was Bragulan chest, but he knew that one of his guests had heard it before and was skeptical enough. While his other guests were all too readily impressed as it was.

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He brought the chronometer up to his one half-way good eye. He stared into it until he was finally certain that he understood what he read on it's blurry face. The Orchestra was about to begin.

He'd bought these balcony seats more for his guests than for himself. After-all all he could see was fuzzy cream and ivory walls and the dark shades that were the players moving about in preparation.

Ah he heard shuffling from his impatient young guests. To be a young hot blood again, rallying against the pleasures of your elders, with half a kingdoms worth of enemies at your back. Actually it was better to be the elder and having outlived most of your enemies and able to enjoy a night out with a familiar soul. Sure his eyesight could have been better, but he treated it as a luxury that only the old and rich could honestly enjoy in the security of their own mortality. Though his friend didn't seem to have noticed the decade or two since they had last seen each other, but that was pretty normal for him. He turned his head to address his guests.

"Be patient, even if the symphony has yet to begin the warm-up can be almost as enjoyable so long as you set your mind to it. It isn't like the Centrality can bother you here."

Luis brought up the obvious counter, "distance didn't stop them when they went to Pendleton."

"But this is UN space, and if their was one thing the Centrality has always respected it was the birthplace of humanity. What could you have possibly done that would make them ignore that?"

"You really don't have to answer that you know." His old friend Valentine finely tried to put his armored boot done on the conversation.

"So you really think they did something that would make the Centrality ignore their own restrictions to go after them? That is fascinating, you know I won't stop pestering you until I know what it was, don't you?"

"Would you be so disrespectful as to interrogate your guests? It isn't like I ever bothered you before about your little secrets."

"That's because you always already know. That reminds me to ask you this question from the last time you were about: how do you always know?"

"You know I think I'll finally tell you one of the ways that I have, so long as you don't bug Luis and company, deal?"

"Ah, I guess my curiosity should be happy with that. Deal."

"I look it up on one of you fan's blogs."

"What!"

"Yeah, one of the blogs attached to the Internationale Union of Evildoers cyberspace. Mostly the fans are focused on your chances of beating all your opponents before you keel over. I barely even recognized some of them, like those ... uh.. power rangers? Baron you attract the weirdest foes."

"And you don't? Who is your boss now? And what do you think is likely his obsession, Demonology, superhero comics from the turn of the 21st, or intact pieces from the Starlight?"

"Orchestra, is starting," Cybele noted pointedly. This group of small time mobsters really hadn't liked learning that Cedric was really named Valentine and that he was a spy for the Eoghan Inteligence service codenamed Chaos. He was smilling now, for this was one of the better Orchestras that was wholly traditional in nature (no Shroomophones here) and it was a personal favorite anyway.

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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by MKSheppard »

Claw and Order

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

Braghattan Heights; city of Braghattan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click.

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

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

Click.

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

When it shot him, that got his attention.

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

An Indeterminate Amount of Time Later

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

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

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

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

So Ygor told them everything.

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

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

"STAS!"

Finally, a nervous looking bear shambled into the room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Fifty-three."

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

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

"Yefym here."

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

"It was a clear cut case, Bragscoe."

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

With that, the commlink shut off.

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

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

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

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

Shits, why did they have to assign me to the newest Suicide Policeman on the force? thought Yefym as Stas scurried off to loot the apartment.
"If scientists and inventors who develop disease cures and useful technologies don't get lifetime royalties, I'd like to know what fucking rationale you have for some guy getting lifetime royalties for writing an episode of Full House." - Mike Wong

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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Simon_Jester »

Shroom Man 777 wrote:It was the Space Security Force that contacted us, really; do you have a rapidly-deployable box launcher for space defense missiles, something along those lines? We’d be interested in buying a sample on a preliminary basis, for test launching. In fact, the Bureau of Armaments has informed me that they’d be willing to pay for a light freighter with samples aboard to make warp transit from your home systems…”

“Hrm.... Sounds like your Bureau of Weapons wants an express delivery. We can send a vessel with missiles from Bragule to Reisenburg via warpgate in short order. I just have to make the arrangements. ” Spozavik looked at Gryza and made sure she got that down.
Primary Control Room, Capital Warp Gate, Reisenburg L1 point, Sector W-7
March 9, 3400

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The Capital Warp Gate was one of the most expensive single pieces of infrastructure in Umerian space. There were plans for others like it... someday. For now, it was unique, a tool for long range courier traffic and the occasional high-value cargo.

Space traffic control around warp gates was always difficult. The Reisenburg gate hung at an unstable Lagrangian point midway between the planet and its primary moon, with occasional shoves from a capital-class tug to keep it on station. That put it all too close to the main traffic lanes between moon and planet. Normally it was manageable; space was big, the safety zones on a magnetogravitic drive were decently small, and the warp gate transits were announced well in advance.

Today looked like it was going to be an exception.

The atonal buzz of alarms jolted everyone in the control room to hair-trigger alertness. Everyone's eyes snapped to the main display, showing a camera-drone picture of the gate. As the alarms indicated, the gate was going live, in an unplanned transit. The space inside the ring began to glow with the hypnotic blue of low-velocity tachyonics.

"Outside activation!"

The analysis team's voices were strained with disbelief, but they stuck to their tasks with no extraneous words. "Power level extreme: high mass, long range transfer. Could be over a thousand light years."

"Horizon shield up; ergosphere is stable."

"Picking up antineutrinos... looks like a fission power source?" Who in the heavens would use fission reactors to power a warp gate?

"Minor instability on sender's end. Within parameters, but... looks like consistent with ninety kilohertz ringing in control circuits. Bringing up Auxiliary One to stabilize." That wasn't right either; any decent control circuit should be able to correct for instabilities in power flow on ten-microsecond time scales.

The Chief Controller frowned at what he was seeing.

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"I need better resolution. Get me a precise analysis of those tachyon pulses."

"Copy that. Boosting the anti-mass spectrometer to 104 percent... military drive signature, heavy destroyer or light cruiser tonnage."

The Chief's blood ran cold. Last time that had happened, a Collector ship had popped through, and no one knew exactly how much firepower they could pack into a maximum-tonnage Gate transit.

"Wave off all shipping, get them out of the exclusion zone. Alert Zeta command to our situation." They had a plan for this; the cislunar defense guns should be able to handle anything light enough to be pushed through a warp gate, in theory. Of course, there was always the chance that this was an attack aimed at the gate itself.

In that case, it wouldn't make any difference to them what the system defenses could handle.

"SECURITÉ! SECURITÉ! SECURITÉ! All shipping, this is Gate Control, flow to safe area Delta now. We have unauthorized military transit of the gate!"

"Harvest Moon, wave off, say again WAVE OFF. We have an incoming warship."

The gate charging process took the better part of half an hour: the tensest half hour in recent decades for the Capital Defense Force. On the planet below, civilian evacuation to the deep bombardment shelters proceeded for the second time in less than a month: much faster for the practice the February civil defense drills, but no less stressful. Planetary defense shields hummed to life. While the bulk of the system defense units spread out to cover the surrounding space- this could be a diversion- one particular defense command had a different mission.

Defense Platform Iota-Two, Planetary Synchronous Orbit over Reisenburg

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The gun platform was a fairly standard Umerian anti-capship installation. It was built around a single heavy battleship gun, dismounted from one of the old Goliath-class dreadnoughts when those aging ships were decommissioned. The Mark 12 Block 20 wasn't up to the standards of a modern capital ship's Mark 14, but it was still good enough to cover a static post.

Iota-Two had much more flank protection than a Umerian capital ship of the same tonnage, but it couldn't dodge worth a damn: it needed that armor. Then again, for this fire mission, there would only be one target, if that.

Gun Captain Dominique Landry looked over the feeds from downrange. For now, they could still rely on electromagnetics; that would end fast if the proton beam went live, but they had enough subspace backups and drones to work around that. They didn't even need their active designators; the capital defense passive sensor networks were feeding them all the data they could want, and would continue to do so provided no one shot too many holes in it.

"Kien, run those halo simulations again." They'd been having problems with sidescatter from the beam in recent firing tests, and it was not acceptable to have a few thousandths of a full power beam scraping off on the moon. She wanted their fix nailed down in triplicate before they opened fire.

Her earbud clicked. "Captain, gate energy density is approaching critical."

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"We have transition, ma'am!" That was all they could see for some time; the side lobes from a gate transfer were more than enough to dazzle even milspec sensors. Hopefully the unknown ship would be just as blind. Unless it was Collectors...

Definitely not. As the picture cleared she got her first look at the unidentified ship. The bogey wasn't moving or even throwing out jamming. Some of its active sensors were running... was that a physically traversed radar mount? For that matter, the whole thing looked like it had been hammered together from half a dozen navies' scrapyards. Old scrapyards. High resolution optics gave her the picture clearly enough. The ship was obviously not designed for planetary atmosphere, not that that was unusual for something its tonnage. It bristled with unidentified mass drivers of some sort, external missile batteries, internal missile batteries, appliqué armor, what looked like several dozen giant lawn chairs riveted to the hull for some inexplicable reason... counting all the externals it was cruiser sized, and heavy for its volume at that.

"Comms, transmit firing solution to Iota-Three." They might well need the other gun platform to backstop them. If this thing was shielded commensurate with its tonnage, one Mark Twelve might not be enough.

The beast had big damn engines too. "Tactical, compare the rad signature off those engine mounts to the old magnetohydrodynamic drives." Some of what she was seeing in the gamma bands looked hauntingly familiar. It reminded her of footage of Golden Age atomics... atomics!

"Ma'am, tentatively identifying the bogey as a Bragulan Niva-class gunskimmer. Subject is still not maneuvering; space search sensors are live but I am detecting no fire control."

Landry nodded crisply. She'd been right. "Comms, open a hailing frequency." She switched to external communications. Command had delegated the job of calling to the bogey minutes ago, which made sense; she was the one who had to land the killing shot if the unknown ship had opened fire.

"Bragulan vessel, this is Fortress Iota-Three. Your warp transit is unscheduled and you are in violation of traffic control regulations. Please identify yourself and state your mission in Umerian space."

There was no reply for several long seconds. Maybe it was some kind of mistake? No, that was impossible; no one threw around the kind of power needed for warp transits by accident. And yet there the Bragulan was, floating there, saying nothing. Taking in the scenery, perhaps...

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"Guns, set up a solution for a point one thousand kilometers off their dorsal bow, relative azimuth zero, relative depression minus point five. Stand by to fire a two-megaton burst on my mark." As a warning shot, that should get their attention, but she hoped it wouldn't be necessary. By the looks of it, the gunskimmer could spit a lot of missiles in a hurry, and it was painfully close to the most obvious and expensive target in the entire star system: the gate itself.

For a moment she wondered. Do they even have hyperwave receivers? Maybe so, maybe not... no, they had to. Perhaps, though, it would be best to send on electromagnetics too. "Comms, I want this one doubled, hyperwave and radio. Use all standard navigation bands, and if there are any Bragulan comm protocols in the database, use them too."

She gave the operators time to set that up, then spoke to the Bragulan again. "Bragulan vessel, this is Fortress Iota-Three. I say again, identify yourself and state your mission.

This time, she was rewarded with a crackling reply; a display sidebar indicated radio transmission... but also that they were being pinged by a low-power active hyperwave navigation sensor. Guess that answers that, then.

"Umrian Fortress Yoda-Tree, we the pretty darn glourious Imperial vessel Grand Thug! Here to make special delivery of most excellent Bragulan thermonucleonics!"

She blinked. Blinked again. That could mean anything. But the Niva-class just sat there, quietly sweeping the area. Those impossibly archaic sensor dishes were still spinning, taking in everything.

"Comms, get through to Central. Is there some kind of shipment scheduled, some "special delivery?" She turned back to the gunskimmer.

"Grand Thug, please clarify your mission for us; last transmission was... garbled."

"We on mission of friendly nukitude! Pacifisticuffs! Bragstroika! Own small part of the Fifty Year Plan! Mighty Byzon sends bought-and-paid-for gift of missiles to puny Umrians! Uh, well, sort-of-puny Umrians..." That last sounded vaguely nervous. Perhaps Grand Thug's captain was aware of just how many guns he was under, and how heavy those guns were... but the rest made very little sense.

"Grand Thug, we're still having technical difficulties. Could you-" Allowing for transmission lag, the Bragulan's reply would have come instantly after she finished that last sentence.

"YES! Difficulties are technical, technicalities difficult! Humble servant of Imperator lack total mastery of puny human sociolinguoculturomemetics, makes Bragful apology to Umrian gunforts and fortguns! We here to deliver missiles. Trade... capitulation? Trade... phased-surrender-to-Byzon... No! Not quite right either! Trade... concession... no! Stupid Zigonianoid translator paleothesaurus... HA! Got it! We here for trade agreement! You pay us cree-dots, we pay you missiles! For to practice, for to shoot at enemies of Umrian bureautechnocraticos! We sell you all rope you want, you see?"

What does that last mean, anyway? But she was starting to get the picture. Now that she thought about it, hadn't there been something on the news a few weeks back about some kind of Bragulan envoy coming to Umeria? Could this be part of that?

This was getting political. She'd have to wait for orders from Command. "Grand Thug, we are waiting for confirmation from our superiors. Please accelerate direct forward at no more than one standard gravity to clear the gate; take no hostile actions."

"Your superiors confirm! We agree! We go! You no worry! We no shoot!" The Bragulan's engines flared- definitely some kind of atomics, but fairly capable ones.

"Ma'am, target is accelerating at just under twelve meters per second squared and climbing slightly..." Not one standard gravity, but... she stopped to think before telling them to throttle back. "Yeoman, check the surface gravity of the planet Bragule."

Yeoman Anirban nodded; a moment later he replied. "Ma'am, Grand Thug is accelerating at just under .96 standard Bragulan gravities.

"I see." No need to make a point of it, they were complying with orders, and the misunderstanding was no worse than the earlier translation difficulties they'd been having...

Niva-class Gunskimmer Grand Thug
Outbound towards Grand Coreward Trunk
March 11, 3400


Captain Yurgi Raghwarinoff felt happy. The mission to Umeria had been difficult at first; his command of human languages was not excellent, and for a moment he had feared that the Umerian defense platforms would fire into his ship due to their puny human brains' inability to comprehend his speech. There had been some shitting big beam weapons back there, too; perhaps even Koprulu-worthy in their zappitude. Granted, with a strategic battlefortress, some screening warcruisers, and a good-sized gunskimmer squadron to pick off the lighter platforms, the system would crumple like a thin-boned human face under an steel-shod Bragulan boot. But with only Grand Thug at his command, he had been forced to be careful.

After the technocrats had figured out what was going on, though, all had gone well. They had assisted him in offloading the missiles. The Umerians had been polite, though, offering him extra navigational charts and a massive stock of free bronto-steaks for the ship's cryo-meat locker. It would be a long trip home, and the additional provisions would be welcome.

One thing still worried him, though. The Umerians had paid an awful lot of credits for those missiles. Way more than normal, even given that they were usually selling them to random shitworlds and not to a major galactic power. Did they want something... unusual?

Yurgi was a lucky Bragulan in several ways. One, because he was permitted to serve the Imperator as commander of a gunskimmer, a small but useful piece of Byzon's plan for the Bragulan species. Two, thanks to his record on independent patrol, he was often given glourious new opportunities to travel the stars, meet strange and interesting lifeforms, and kill them. Three, because he had his health.

Fourth and most importantly, he suspected his commissar was actually a bit of a softie. On average, there were fewer executions aboard Grand Thug in a given month than any other ship Yurgi had ever seen. The commissar said it was because the crew was mostly very ideologically pure, but Yurgi suspected it had something to do with his habit of sniffing captured Zigonian incense. After emerging from his smoky quarters, the commissar was usually both mellow and ravenously hungry for some of the bronto-burgers in the meat locker.

It was as he greedily tucked into a one-kilo burger that Captain Yurgi approached him with his fears.

"Commissar, I fear treachery on the part of the Umerians."

"Sit down, comrade captain! What is on your mind?"

"They seemed most eager to obtain the missiles. What if they are not just engaged in testing for a larger order, as they said? I fear that they may prove tricksier than we believed. What if they try to reverse-engineer our missile technology, and learn the secret of our mighty subnucleonic drives and warheads from them?"

The commissar barked a mighty laugh, and washed down a mouthful of ground brontosaurus with a draught of Bragulan Ale. "Do not fear, comrade captain Turgi! Surely you are aware of the great efforts Byzon demanded of our scienticians to find new ways to enhance the power of the modern Bragulan thermonuke! Why, it would take a super-scientific super-genius of criminal treachery and great menace to deduce the secrets of our missile warheads in anything less than decades!"

Captain Yurgi relaxed. Truly, his fears had been unreasonable. No puny human could possibly be cunning enough to scrute the inscrutable plans of Byzon!
This space dedicated to Vasily Arkhipov
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Siege »

The War Room

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Across the Perseus spiral arm, more than a hundred billion stars, planets, nebulae and other spatial objects were bound together by gravitational attraction. Curving from the other side of the Milky Way galaxy around Sagittarius and the Local Spur, the arm had a diameter of approximately 10,700 parsecs, dispersed across each of which were literally millions of stars. Its contra-spinward sectors, nearing the edge of the arm, were home to the section of space commonly referred to by the many species of Known Space as the 'Koprulu Zone'.

And from all across the vectors of the K-Zone, from the voidal spaces above the main galactic disc, from the edges of the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical and from throughout the Human Arm they came, the intelligences behind the mighty vessels of the United Solarian Star Force; a meeting of the War Room.

It was important to understand that communication between these super-intelligences was not comprehensible to simple organics. They were not talking like an organic would, but instead exchanged data-packets through the quantum foam at speeds so far beyond light it was practically instantaneous over what were essentially limitless distances. However, it was possible to view the exchange between them as though it was a cyberspatial conversation, with the chosen avatars of the Shipminds present.

A round table in a darkened room, sparsely illuminated by white lamps. Around the table, simple if comfortable chairs, each one occupied by an avatar of one of those participating in the discussion. One of the representations, a woman with shiny brown curls cropped to shoulder length gestured and brought attention to herself, silencing the chatter on the hyperband which had been designated for the closed discussion. She was Circe, CI aboard the deep-range explorator Dausendstern, currently halfway across Known Space from the Sovereignty headed away from Pfhor Space toward the Commune. “I welcome you all,” she said, “to this meeting of the War Room. The topic: the Chamarran situation, and its impact on the state of galactic affairs.”

“Perhaps we could keep it within our home regions, rather than concerning ourselves with all of Known Space.” The voice of Othello was gruff. He was uniformed as always, befitting the controlling entity of several thousands of sensor swarms and weapons drones littering the Bragulan frontier.

Circe cocked her head. “Why would we do that?” she asked almost teasingly. “Surely you don't find the galactopolitics of Known Space boring?”

“Quite the contrary,” he replied with no trace of ego in his voice. “But I know that Olympic is more interested in the state of affairs in the Koprulu Zone than in the rest of the galaxy.”

Across from Othello a bald, hawk-nosed man in a navy-blue turtleneck sweater looked up from his silver watch. “That is correct,” intoned the avatar of the most powerful CI in the Sovereignty, and his voice matched the perpetually bored expression on his face. “Although it can't hurt to expand our interest outward. After all, the Chamarrans were once considered a threat to the entire Human Arm.”

“I know, exciting isn't it? They just showed up in 3042, forty colossal warships that take over nine sectors in a matter of weeks, and then they just... scatter, before the UN can even muster a proper response! Now there's 300 billion of them, with only a fraction of their former influence, and still nobody even knows where they came from in the first place!” The breathless ejaculation of information belonged to another female avatar, not as strong or straight as Circe and in fact rather mousy looking for the avatar of an Outlaw class Independent Offensive Unit.

A tall and darkly handsome man on the other side of the table cracked a grin. “We know that Geometry,” said Lucifer, the representation of the Genocide-class dreadstar USS Murderous. “That's not anything we don't know, or at least don't have access to.”

The Datasphere persona of the IOU Fluttering Petal shrank back into her chair. Even for a massive hyperturing intelligence like Geometry it was possible to be nervous, at least when surrounded by warships many times older and more powerful than a young IOU. “Sorry,” she mumbled, as though it was meant to be a strong reply.

“She is right though,” said a square-jawed man in a peaked-lapel tuxedo, much to Geometry's obvious relief. “The Chamarrans are not the threat they once were.” Bond, the CompInt controlling the CEID spystar Element of Surprise, beamed a handsome, reassuring smile at the IOU. “Although considering their recent buffoonery one is left to wonder if they are aware of this themselves.”

“Clearly they aren't,” said Hoodoo. Bond's fellow spystar, was represented as a bearded, olive-skinned man. “Word has come through from our brothers in the Ascendancy. The Pfhor Imperial Navy is in the middle of redeploying several patrol groups, including one of their Light Dreadnoughts, purportedly in response to Chamarran activity at the galactic edge. The Cevaukians believe there's a fleet circling this way.”

“Ha!” chuckled an athletic blonde in a Star Force uniform, the avatar of the Atrocity-class warstar Bone Will Break Metal. “They're sending a fleet all the way around Pfhor space? That's insane.”

“Considering how far away from resupply they would be, whereas we would have not just our fleet bases and reinforcements but also our allies just around the proverbial corner, I am inclined to agree with you,” bassed Othello. “But then we must remember that the Hierarchy is ruled by organics, and thus prone to fits of insanity.”

“Thing is... Can we expect our allies to back us up again?” Geometry asked with a small voice.

“We did invoke their help only recently,” admitted Circe. She raised a hand to forestall the inevitable protests. “And I mean, of course, recently on organic timescales.”

“Even so I estimate a 89.9 percent probability that the Imperium will send support.” Olympic didn't even look up from his watch this time. “They are ever eager to puge xenos, which in this case suits us just fine. As usual the situation vis-a-vis the Ascendancy is a bit more difficult to predict--” he made a point to ignore the two spystars whose avatars mimicked expressions of fake amazement at those words “-- however unless A-sec needs all its forces to quell a serious uprising or another major warlord problem, the chances of which I deem to be remote at this time, we can expect their support also.”

“So the Sovereignty is secure regardless of the outcome of the Holy Empire's attempt at mediation,” Circe nodded, clearly pleased. “Though, what of the Bragulans?”

“What of them?” Othello asked brusquely.

“Would they not be tempted to use this crisis to improve their own strategic position? In fact, the Chamarrans might try to strike a deal with them.”

“Despite what the Umerians might think,” Othello said and he spat out the name of the remote human polity as if it were an insult, “the Bragulan Star Empire serves only the Bragulan Star Empire. To bargain with them and expect anything material to come off it, much less expect to come out with the better end of the deal, is the height of folly.”

“You underestimate the Technocracy,” Olympic injected snidely. “But there is no sign that the Empire is mobilizing its forces in support of the Hierarchy. There has been no noticeable increase in Imperial Navy activity along the frontiers, and CEID has intercepted no increased chatter. In point of fact right now the Bragulans seem to be focusing primarily on diplomatic efforts and in other sectors of the galaxy at that. We can rule out a Bragulan push until any of this changes.”

“Which brings us back to the mediation,” said Circe. “I heard the organic government has decided to send a representative – I assume it will be Mr. Hank?”

“You assume wrong.” Olympic said.

Circe frowned every so slightly. “Then who?”

For the first time, the advisory to the president and the senate expressed emotion – to wit, by cracking an asymmetrical smile. “President Sinclair has decided to send Brigadier Stalin.”

For a second, the deep-range explorator looked at him funny. Then she laughed. “Who said organics couldn't be amusing?”
Last edited by Siege on 2010-10-01 11:37am, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Master_Baerne »

ANS Uhtred Ragnarsson
Flagship, Battlecruiser Squadron 17; Commodore Guillaume Murat commanding
Unnamed Star System, Sector CC-12


"Run that by me again, Admiral?" There was an unusual look on the Commodore's face, composed of equal parts disbelief and amusement.

"As I said, the Voyageur System Republic does not harbor pirates. You will remove your ships from our space, or my fleet will be forced to open fire."

It was a tense situation, made more so by the difficulties the Ascendant officer was having in not laughing in his opposite number's digitally-transmitted face. Shortly after the four ships of 17th Battlecruiser had arrived in the system, they had been confronted by a dozen smaller (much, much smaller; the heaviest was an obsolete medium cruiser) warships which sortied from an asteroid base between the two inhabited planets and the Ascendant Navy ships. Their drill was flawless, their commander's words steely with resolve... and their power readings laughably small when compared with the power Murat had at his command. 'Admiral' Duroi, Voyageur Republican Navy, was brave, but not entirely in touch with reality.


"Admiral, we are not pirates, though I can understand the assumption this far from civilization. I am Commodore Murat, Federated Ascendancy Starfleet; I am an officer of Her Ladyship Sikala II, Lady Ascendant. In fact," and here his voice took on a decidedly sarcastic tone, "it is more likely that you are a pirate, this far into uninhabited space."

"I am no pirate!"

"As I am well aware, Admiral. I meant only to prove my point. Perhaps you would care to board my flagship; that we might discuss matters face-to-face? I would be perfectly happy to receive you, with any security personel you feel necessary, in... Five t-hours, say?"

"T-hours, Commodore?" The Admiral's voice was puzzled, but sounded hopeful that bloodshed would not be required. Murat, meanwhile, was speechless. Terran standard time was, well, standard. Everyone, at least every human, used Terran standard time.

"Ah, 60 to the third power of... this unit of time." A one-second pause in the middle, carefully timed by both parties, cleared up the confusion, and the crews of 17th Battlecrusier prepared for... Well, not really first contact, as the Voyageurs were human, but something close to it.
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Force Lord »

Space Pirate Command Center, Tourian
Zebes, Sector H-12
11 April 3400


The surface of Zebes was deceptively barren, something that initially fooled many an intrepid explorer who came to study it. The smarter ones noted that Zebes had vast underground caverns, where many of its life forms inhabited it. Of course, these were dangerous, as the skeletons of many a human researcher attested. Lower down, one could find lava flows, old ruins of an unidentified ancient civilization, and the metallic walls of the pirate base.

Inside the base, many pirate personnel were busy with their tasks. Some were simple guards. Others were engineers working to rehabilitate technology stolen from nearby nations for pirate use. In the inner dephts of the base were the commanding officers, deciding what was their next targets.

One particular pirate commander was in his office, reading the latest intelligence on the disposition of their enemies.

His name was Weavel Grutardus. And he was not pleased.

"This is the biggest imposture I have seen! Who is responsible for producing all this rubbish?!"

The subordinate in front of him would have preffered to be somewhere else, but he had to endure his commander's hollering.

"Sir, this Intelligence was triple-checked by our spies, and it is clear that the nearby nations are increasing their scrunity in this sector."

"How is this possible? No large-scale fleet movements have been detected heading here!"

"Our intelligence believes that our foes are trying to acquire better information of this sector. We've already detected a few stealth ships in the nearby Cyclosis system. They promptly fled as soon as we discovered them. Their affiliation is unidentified at this time."

"So an attack is truly imminent, then?"

"Perhaps. We can count on the fact that no nation is willing to act on its own against us, giving us time to prepare. I doubt we can get more than a few months, however. Already the Centrality is making threats."

"The Centralists talk big, Captain. I seriously doubt their will to bite us."

"Not after we've destroyed several of their freighters. And the whole shenanigans they pulled in Pendleton meant they took a hit to their credibility. Sir, it will not be surprising if the Centralists decide to act tough on us."

"Yes, but who will ally with them? They are not exactly nice to others, and that is not saying much."

"Well, we have not been certainly been concentrating on the Centrality, are we?"

"Enough of this, Captain. Your pessimism is starting to bore me. You will return to your post."

"Sir, one man's pessimist is another man's realist."

"I said return to your post, Captain!"

"As you wish."

The Pirate Captain soon left Weavel's office, leaving him to grumble.

Weavel felt that an attack on his domain was too soon. The piracy was one of neccesity as well as design; his forces needed ships, weapons and other things needed for the defense of this planet, as not everything could be produced in Zebes. Once, his race controlled a large area of space, but a civil war millenia ago fractured his species and had them disconnected from each other. From what he knew and interpreted of their past, their rise to prominence was aided by large-scale piracy, which appealed to him. He was forced to use other races, however, to fill up otherwise empty positions. They were useful fools, however, and as long as he controlled their purses, they were bound to him.

Well, a pirate needs all the help he can get, right?

Suddenly, however, a red light came from his desk. He froze: his benefactors were calling.

Pushing a button, he saw... someone. For secrecy, the holographic images of their benefactors was covered up in static, their voices disorted but still understandable.

"Have you recieved the information?"

Weavel was confused. "You mean, my Captain's findings came from you?"

"Yes. We believed that you would not trust a subordinate, so we decided to confirm it with this call. But that is not our only intention. Your new supplies are arriving."

"Ah, yes, good! What have you sent?"

"Everything from weapons to food. They will be sent in several waves as discreetly as possible."

"I will send my ships to recieve them. When does the first shipment arrive?"

"Today. The next will be sent a few days later. We will inform you exactly when."

"And the others?"

"The same will happen to them. Of course, we expect you to defend to the utmost your positions."

"Of course. Our enemies will learn to respect us."

"We are sure you will know, Weavel, the importance of following orders..."

"Yeah, yeah, sure. I still don't know who you are."

A moment of silence.

"Do you really want to know?"

"Why not?"

Another moment of silence. The voice finally spoke, rather jestingly, "Helmuth, speaking for Boskone."

Weavel stared at the image dumbstruck.

"Uh, what?"

"It's a codename, so no real name for you. Farewell."

The image vanished before Weavel could respond.

"Helmuth", he muttered. "Who the hell are you? And who or what is this Boskone?"

Result: The pirates ready themselves, and are aided by a mysterious benefactor....
Last edited by Force Lord on 2010-10-01 06:55pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by KlavoHunter »

Muzaffer System
In UNREAL GODDAMN TIME

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The space around the Warp Gate was kept clear of unnecessary ships, a necklace of weapons platforms keeping silent watch over this critical piece of infrastructure. A variety of navigational aids lit space up on the final approach to the gate, where a typical-seeming event happened. A large freighter was preparing to jump through, typical of those who valued their time greatly, or perhaps had a desperate fear of piracy.

Not all was as it seemed, however, as within the freighter, stealth systems passively engaged, 10 Djinni-class Scouts were using its cavernous holds to hide their transit through the gate. It was a trick they did not use often to hide their comings and goings, it hurt to get too predictable, but now was the time to pull this rabbit out of their hat again. The gate surged with energy as the control crew prepared for the relatively normal transit, unaware of the presence of a Klavostani Intel Service AI inside their computers, supervising and scrubbing data.

Diving into the energies harnessed by the Warp Gate, the freighter was hurled many sectors away in the blink of an eye...

New Aden, Sector I29

... and then emerged from the gate in the independent New Aden system, where a large asteroid fortress idly scanned the freighter, but showed no sign that it had detected anything amiss. Passed by local warships patrolling the main routes in and out of the bustling trade hub, the freighter made its way out into deeper space, waiting until it was completely alone and unobserved.

Enormous doors popped open, and the Djinnis gently freed themselves of their confinement, pushing away on pressors and light hands on the maneuvering thrusters. Its sneakier purpose now complete, the freighter engaged its hyperdrive and proceeded along along to the next destination on its trade route. The Djinnis dispersed as well, and soon found themselves on the trail of the Chamarran Grand Fleet, noting its size and location as it traveled further from home, sending a steady stream of reports back to the Sultanate...
"The 4th Earl of Hereford led the fight on the bridge, but he and his men were caught in the arrow fire. Then one of de Harclay's pikemen, concealed beneath the bridge, thrust upwards between the planks and skewered the Earl of Hereford through the anus, twisting the head of the iron pike into his intestines. His dying screams turned the advance into a panic."'

SDNW4: The Sultanate of Klavostan
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Zor »

Facility-37, Ivory, New New York System

Ivory was never a major population center. It was a cold moon about Luna sized with a white surface (hence the name) and while it was well known, it was also mostly ignored. Only a few attempts at colonization had been made, mostly relating to mining as well as a few attempts at shipbuilding during the Barbarian wars that produced a few troopships and the occasional frigate before it was destroyed in the liberation of the system, but nowadays there was about half a million people living on scattered mining settlements. What was sugnifigant lay beneith its white dusty surface.

A cargo container was manuvered along a subterranian maglev tube before being parked in a pressurized camber where it was unloaded. It contained a few supplies, mechanical consumables, spare parts and some food. However, more importantly was a specialized salvage. Several more would arrive over the next hour. A week ago, a convoy of freighters was attacked by unknown assalients. Fortunately, the Destroyer CNS-Vanguard was on patrol nearby and arrived in time. Several of the Raider ships were destroyed or damage to the point where they could not go to FTL. Various machines of unknown manufacture were loaded onto hover dollies to be analyized. Several corpses were taken to various labs, where numerous Earth Caste Tau and Posthuman scientists worked, while a captured individual of the race which had been designated by the forces of the Centrality as Zebesian, restrained and disarmed was brought to a holding cell by several armed guards. The Commonwealth needed information, and that was what Division-5 and Division-6 of the Unconventional Warfare Corps would gather.
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Shinn Langley Soryu »

The Last Castle
Fortaleza de Enrique Christophe, Santo Domingo de Trujillo outskirts, Nueva Hispaniola
Wild Space beyond the Sovereignty frontier
7 March 3400


Image

The Fortress of Henry Christopher, better known to the locals as la Fortaleza de Enrique Christophe, was a truly imposing edifice, situated at the very top of a hill overlooking the greater "city" of Santo Domingo de Trujillo. Its builders, a group of mercenaries led by the eponymous Henry Christopher, had all met violent and bloody deaths at the hands of Bragulans, Karlacks, Orks, and rival soldiers of fortune in the pursuit of money and infamy. After the last of Henry Christopher's men had passed on, the citadel stood silent and impassive atop that lonely hill, surviving the depredations of looters, petty criminals, and the forces of nature; even as the rest of Santo Domingo de Trujillo crumbled during the great earthquakes of 3390-3391, the citadel stood unfazed. Due to its lengthy and oftentimes violent history, many of the locals and even quite a few offworlders now considered the fortress haunted; few, if any, wanted anything to do with the godforsaken place.

Until now.

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After escaping from his crashed prison transport back in 3396, avowed doctor-hater Mikhail Tripper somehow managed to fall in with a group of mercenaries led by a disgraced ex-USMC Brigadier General named Francis X. Wespe; desperate for all the men he could get after he and the remnants of his unit went rogue in the aftermath of a Karlack bug hunt gone horribly wrong, "General" Wespe gladly took Tripper under his wing, apparently sensing something in the hateful little man. Now having worked his way up to second-in-command of the unit, Tripper accompanied his fellow mercenaries to Nueva Hispaniola with a mysterious cargo in tow, one that not even he was privy to know despite his high position...

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The actual space transports that Wespe and the other mercenaries rode in on had landed in the jungles far from Santo Domingo de Trujillo. From this landing spot, a group of "Mad Peso" helicopters journeyed to Fortaleza de Enrique Christophe, their ancient forms barely holding together as they made their approach to the abandoned installation. Once the helicopters had landed, Wespe and his mercenaries disembarked, glad that they and their cargo had all managed to make it to the fortress in one piece; truly terrible things would have happened had there been a crash. As the rest of the men spread out to secure the complex and stash their cargo someplace safe and secure, Wespe, Tripper, and several of the mercenary officers went off to set up their headquarters...

Image

After nearly a century of disrepair, Fortaleza de Enrique Christophe was now open for business once again.
Last edited by Shinn Langley Soryu on 2010-10-02 03:46am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Written years ago by a buddy, Simon Johansen, a.k.a. Peregrin Toker, for an old 'verse featuring the Sovereignty and the Bragulans! Edited to fit SDNW4.


Here And Now: The Latest News On The Galaxy's Rich And Famous (3398 Edition)

Wesley Prefect Birkin
By Simon Johansen
By some strange coincidence, the two most famous filmmakers from the United Solarian Sovereignty happen to be polar opposites, other than both have done theirs to blur the semantical difference between "famous" and "infamous". The first is C. J. Motonow (3218-3338), best known for his remakes of Star Wars. Calling a Motonow movie "bizarre" is often claimed to be a great understatement; one of his films, the aptly titled Fried Fish consisted mostly of close-ups upon fish frying upon a pan accompanied by lots of exposition whereas another, Tapestry Woven With Swords, was made by patching together footage from old TV news into a remotely coherent story. If there is one thing which unites Motonow's movies is that they (usually) make perfect sense despite resembling hallucinations more than actual movies.

The second most famous Solarian director is Wesley Prefect Birkin, born in 3360 in Margarethea City on Auriga. While the films Wesley Birkin, who usually leaves out his middle name, often go far beyond what normal directors are willing to do, that does not mean that Wesley Birkin is some sort of avantgarde auteur like Motonow, quite the opposite.

As reviled as he is, though, you cannot escape Wesley Birkin. He churns out movies at an impressive rate, often directing three or four each year, and people actually pay to see them. It is also common knowledge in the USS that an Aurigan cocktail parties and film festivals is not complete without the appearance of a walking coathanger of a man, who usually looks more at home in an oddly-named punk rock band than a fancy dress party, with a certain mohawked Tiffaine Sinclair lookalike on his arm, followed by one of two different exclamations from that odd couple:
My name is Katarzyna Granzowa and I survived MetaBrawl!

My name is Wesley Prefect Birkin and I was paid to direct (insert name of movie).
Each exclamation is usually followed by all the guests dropping their jaws and staring in disbelief towards that couple, even though most of them have heard the same approximately 10,191 times earlier. It is jokingly referred by movie fans to as the greatest mysteries that of the universe that:
  • A non-metahuman such as Katarzyna Granzowa entered MetaBrawl and survived physically intact.
  • Wesley Birkin has even come within a chance of making movies.
  • A pretty lady such as Katarzyna Granzowa, who could practically get any potential spouse she wanted, not only married Wesley Birkin but also stars in every movie he has made over the last three years.
But how did all this begin? And how did an otherwise very friendly person end up as the most hated filmmaker of all time?

As mentioned before, Wesley Prefect Birkin was born and raised in the Aurigan city of Margarethea, where he went to an expensive private school from which he graduated with flying colours in 3377. Throughout his high school years (3368-3381) he decided that he would be a filmmaker upon seeing The Speed Of The Ninja and took Film Knowledge as an optional class for his sophomore year. According to former classmate Douglas Dent, a 16-year old Wesley Birkin vowed loudly to himself in front of his classmates that "When I start making movies, film enthusiasts shall never forget my name". Ironically, he was told by some "be careful what you wish for, for it may come true".

Expectedly, he went on to study filmmaking at the University of Margarethea and in 3387, he published his doctoral thesis The Dynamic In Zombie Madness XII's Interlogistically Multipolar Imperatives: A Study In Transrelatoric Gender Forms. This explains why his cult followers often refer to him as "Dr. Birkin", as well as why he sometimes is credited in opening credits as "Wesley Prefect Birkin, PhD".

However, even while he was working on his thesis, he was also working on an ultra-low-budget movie starring a cast which not only was of unknowns, but of literal amateurs. It was not released until January 3388, when a small company called Success Film picked it up, added some rudimentary post-production and marketed it under the name The Final Showdown.

The Final Showdown, which was banned in Byzantium, purported to be a martial arts action film and starred Birkin's friend Douglas Dent as Spike Monsanto, a CEID-Zero agent tasked with infiltrating "The Berserker Cult", a shadowy organization of ninja who sold Kasanarium. Dent was cast in the role due to having dabbled in martial arts with no other instruction than an obscure book on the matter he purchased from a now-defunct Holo Net site once. Incidentally, he happened to be the only cast member who had as much of a vague resemblance of a beforehand experience with martial arts. All the extras were merely given photocopies of the book in question a week before filming. However, in the "The Making Of The Final Showdown" featurette on the same disc, Birkin and Dent both explained that they did their best to give the extras as thorough a knowledge of the ancient art Tenshin Shoden Shinkage Shinto Booga Booga-ryu as detailed in the book owned by Douglas Dent.

The supposed plot, however, had little to do with what actually happened on screen; several reviewers described the script as simultaneously being an exercise in sticking to whatever sets, props and costumes the filmmakers had access to for free and a product of what film reviewers call the "You know what? This would be cool!" syndrome.

Nonetheless, it was a sign of what was to come from Wesley Birkin.

Later the same year, with The Final Showdown still being relatively obscure to the vast bulk of the galaxy despite having become familiar to B-movie worshippers due to its unintentional humour, Birkin was brought in to direct an adaptation of the cult comic book Death Is Unimportant To Me due to being a major fan of the comics, which revolve around the adventures of a sarcastic hired gun who has returned from the grave to wreak havoc upon his former employers.

During the pre-production, however, Birkin came into not so few arguments with screenwriter Alexis Bremer due to the early drafts of the screenplay not having enough in common with the ultraviolent gallow's humour of the original comic book. Nevertheless, Wesley Birkin agreed to the third draft and the film premiered in February 3389.

Death Is Unimportant To Me was Wesley Birkin's ticket to fame as a director, as mixed as the response was.

Non-readers of the comic found either found it simultaneously awkward, tasteless and offensive-for-offensiveness'-sake or relished in how over-the-top it was. Fans of the comics, however, found that Birkin and Bremer had both misunderstood the source material completely and produced an unintentional parody.

However, it did introduce one of the greatest one-liners of all time to those unfamiliar with the comics, namely:
Yeah, try walking into my dojo and fight under our rules. It's called Kick-Dick-Do and we train in the deadly art of nut kicking all day. Now that's what I call full contact. Oh wait, we also have an affiliated art developed by my late sensei called ass stuffing where we use dildos.
Due to Alexis Bremer being unavailable for the following three years due to writing on a completely unrelated movie called Nice Knowing You, however, Wesley Birkin also wrote the screenplay in addition to directing the 3390 sequel Death Is Unimportant To Me 2: It's Just A Minor Inconvenience.

Though Death Is Unimportant To Me 2: It's Just A Minor Inconvenience stuck as closely to the comics as the preceding, the script had that added extra strange touch which Birkin appears to give all movies whose scripts he writes, and it was generally considered inferior to the first movie. In Birkin's defense, however, he had to adapt the more ambiguous and surreal later era of the comics to the screen, which was no easy task for a screenwriter.

Years later, however, it appears that while Death Is Unimportant To Me 2: It's Just A Minor Inconvenience has its fans, most of them watch it for the cheesiness factor and its cult status first and foremost.

It still made money, and most notably, every film enthusiast now knew who Wesley Birkin was. This caused a great many fans of the Death Is Unimportant To Me movies to seek out The Final Showdown, leading to a huge growth in the cult around that movie.

The same year, a company called Sidewinder Cinema, which was on the brink of bankrupcy, had recently gotten completely new owners who were interested in bringing whatever brand name cast and crew they could afford, as well as becoming the leader in action movies. The latter dream was one they shared with Wesley Prefect Birkin, and they thusly employed him as their chief screenwriter and director. This is often considered the true beginning of what film enthusiasts call Birkinian Madness.

In March 3391, Martial Monks of the Gun-Kata Temple premiered. Everything which his previous movies hinted at was present in this movie, but to a much greater extent and much more explicitly. It certainly squeezed the budget for all it was worth, using it mostly on gunfights, though it is arguable to which an extent the script was a product of the "This would be cool" syndrome. It also introduced another infamous "trademark" of Birkin's, namely that of characters suddenly popping in and out of the plot. (thought to be connected to the "this would be cool" syndrome)

Oh yes, the plot. It is not as if you walk into a movie called Martial Monks of the Gun-Kata Temple expecting much of a plot. However, this movie literally consisted of someone walking or driving somewhere and then getting into a gunfight, sometimes when driving, with each gunfight getting progressively more over-the-top. Well, at least as over-the-top as the budget would let it be. Strangely, practically every reviewer agreed that the camerawork in Martial Monks of the Gun-Kata Temple was very good. The only thing it lacked to be Wesley Birkin's defining moment was the plethora of "just because" scenes of which The Final Showdown has been described as a montage.

The "just because" scenes motivated by either budget constrains (and in those cases stretched to absurdity) or an overactive imagination on Birkin's art, though, would make their full return in Touch of Death which debuted half a year later. Made in practically no time (thanks to extensive use of stock footage), Birkin described Touch of Death in an interview as based upon the first draft for The Final Showdown, which included all of the scenes which he did not have the money to film, though the overall plot (or what passed for plot) was somewhat altered, due to Success Film owning all the copyrights to The Final Showdown.

Touch of Death was basically the same story, though, but this time of Calvin Steinbeck, a CBI agent from Solaris who arrives on the Seche (incidentally the planet where Sidewinder Cinema are based) to assist the planet's police in fighting an unnamed criminal syndicate. Due to a much larger budget, however, this one was overall better technically, and benefited from the addition of a few car chases. Interestingly, the car which Steinbeck drove in Touch of Death used to be owned by Wesley Birkin himself. (he had recently bought a new one, meaning that he had a disposable car for the shooting)

Of course, it was an abject failure if judged as a piece of art, and the only area where it was remarkable as craftmanship was the fight choreography; it has actually become a cult classic among martial artists due to being one of the few action movies in existence where the hand-to-hand combat scenes use realistic martial arts.

Roughly simultaneously with Touch of Death, Sidewinder was shooting an equally low-budget horror movie using the same cast, also scripted and directed by Wesley Birkin. It was universally panned by its critics for its simultaneous incoherency; an example beneath:
The Undead is about... well, some archeologists are excavating some sort of mysterious place and then people start disappearing. Then some sickly-looking strangers wander a bit about and frighten the archeologists, who immediately decide that the strangers are undead.

Then, it suddenly goes from confusing to confusing and ridiculous halfways through this. It looks as if our pals at Sidewinder Cinema jettisoned the previous script, or what passed for a script. Suddenly, one of the archeologists remembers that he had brought lots of guns and ammo with him; something which they appear to have ignored for the first three disappearances and all the appearances of the undead.

The really ridiculous thing is that the undead, who cannot even be called ghouls because they do not even attempt to eat anyone, suddenly turn out to have been summoned by a nearby evil wizard (portrayed by Wesley Birkin himself, wearing a silly purple robe) who suddenly, having been conveniently ignored for the most of the movie, arrives in a van with his own private stash of machine guns which he hands out to his undead minions.

And then, after a ten-minute discussion consisting of the head archeologist and the wizard yelling Shakespeare quotes at each other, the wizard sees the error of his ways and faces off in a deadly machine gun duel against one of the undead, who has suddenly gained a black belt in Gun-Kata. For reals. Of course, there is little gore, mosty just shots of someone firing off a flurry of bullets and then cut to a group of people falling about.
The only critics who gave The Undead good reviews did so because they found it unintentionally hilarious, prompting perhaps the only time that Wesley Birkin described one of his own movies as substandard:
Wesley Birkin wrote:Okay, I have pulled a clunker there with The Undead. The end result is totally indefensible, I know. The guys at Sidewinder Cinema wanted me to make two movies this year, and write the scripts for them, too. To make a long story short, I wrote the entire script for The Undead in a couple of days with little afterthought. I'm obviously not the man for the job either, I had the feeling throughout the writing process that the end result would not be as good as Touch of Death and Martial Monks of the Gun-Kata Temple, which I believe will soon be considered modern action classics. I'm simply not a person who can make horror movies.
Learning from the mistake of having Birkin direct and script a horror movie, Sidewinder Cinema finally OK'ed his request for a three-month vacation and let other, less known but also less reviled, filmmakers, take care of the next films they were to direct; save for a film which both would be Sidewinder Cinema's first cinematic release and Birkin's last movie for Sidewinder.

Ironically, that movie would leave its mark in the public consciousness as both the epitome of both Sidewinder Cinema and Wesley Prefect Birkin. The movie was Dissident Aggressor, debuting in 3393, the story of a never-named man living in a militaristically utopian community isolated from the outside universe who one day finds out that he - and all his friends - are in fact genetically engineered beings manufactured as disposable super-soldiers.

Just like Dissident Aggressor is perhaps the best representative of what Birkin's films represents, so are the reviews quoted below the best representatives of the two most common opinions on Wesley Prefect Birkin:
I am sure that one day in the far future, this Wesley Prefect Birkin will be hold single-handedly responsible for the cultural decline of the Sovereignty, or at least a symptom of it. This filmmaker cannot possibly be an Aurigan or even a Sovie, as Dissident Aggressor is such a haphazard and backwards movie that only the Haruhiists, the Shepistanis or the more degenerate parts of Shinra could have spawned it. It takes a premise which would perhaps have been considered somewhat intelligent a few centuries ago, and then does practically nothing with it. Calling the characters "stereotypes" would be too kind towards Birkin's skill as a screenwriter. Even describing the film as having a plot would be inaccurate; it does not even pretend to be coherent. In the 33rd century, the best-known filmmaker of the USS was C. J. Motonow. In the 34th century, we get... Lennart Kaufmann and Wesley Birkin?
The best comedies are always the unintentional ones, and Dissident Aggressor is proof of this. As an example - in one scene, when Our Hero (tm) has been wounded by his pursuers and is hiding in a little house. Then, he removes a bullet from his arm and eats the potted plants in the house... and the wound starts healing. I am not making this up. Remarkable is also the scene where Our Hero hitch-hikes a lift from someone who just happens to read Orion's Guardian and believes all his claims to his background. It's not as if not much is done with the Orion's-reader; the scene is merely an excuse for yet another car chase with the conspiracy theorist frantically commandeering a trusty KSC 550 (and seriously, how many readers of the Orion's Guardian can afford one of those?) while Our Hero (tm) blazes away at the pursuing jeeps and cop cars with a machine gun, standing up through the car's sun roof.
In the autumn of 3393, Birkin formed his own production company, the aptly named Birkin Film Group. Though he would never again work with budgets as big as that of Dissident Aggressor, that did not quell his enthusiasm the slightest. By June 3394, Kung-Fu Cavemen premiered with a box-office record for a Wesley Birkin movie which had not been seen since his adaptation of Death Is Unimportant To Me, though that was most likely due to two factors. The first was of course, the title. The second was that the fight choreography had been supervised by none other than Katarzyna Granzowa, self-proclaimed "Most Dangerous Woman Alive" and supposedly the only unaugmented human to enter MetaBrawl and survive. Ingeniously enough, Birkin let volunteers do all the promotional work, which actually was fairly easy due to the enormous cult following which The Final Showdown has.

What made the galaxy drop their jaws even further was that by the time it premiered, the tabloid A Look Inside wrote that Wesley Prefect Birkin and Katarzyna Granzowa were madly in love with each other. This was further confirmed by both rival tabloid Watch and Listen and the behind-the-scenes photographs for Birkin's next movie Alexandra Wong, P. I. (which premiered in the late November of 3394) where Granzowa played Arcadia Kafka, the foil to Alexandra Wong as portrayed by model Jill Heng (no relation to CEID-4 director Casey Heng). Again, the critics poured their derision down upon the resulting movie.
Holy product placement, Batman! I do not think that I saw a single car in Alexandra Wong, P. I. which probably had not been donated by AuriMotor. And considering the frequency of car chases, this is essentially the only car commercial I have ever paid for seeing. But it is not just a commercial for LARCs, though. The guy sitting besides me in the theatre noted that every single gun seen was manufactured by Solarian Arms.
This movie plays like an exercise in how not to make a police drama. A witness appears to assist Alexandra with The Damning, but said witness barely gets any screen time. Subplots about an attempted assassination of another witness, a police chief who may or may not be a double agent and a paramedic who moonlights as a drug runner are thrown about and never picked up again.
One, however, had something very interesting to say:
Remember when intellectuals say that action movies use violence as a metaphor for sex? Well, Alexandra Wong, P. I. is direct proof of that. It appears that Birkin wanted to film two hours of non-stop lesbian sex between Katarzyna Granzowa and Jill Heng but did not have enough money on hand to coerce Jill Heng into that. I mean, what else should I make of the fact that the climactic "gunfight" (read: strap-on dildo orgy) happens in the locker room of a swimming bath? By the time they run out of ammo and Jill and Katarzyna are fighting hand-to-hand in their bikinis (seriously, who the hell thinks that Jill Heng could stand a remote chance of defeating Katarzyna Granzowa?), they are only one hard step away from 69'ing each other. And when they both collapse from exhaustion at the end of the fight, they could just as well be exhausted from lovemaking as for fighting.
However, the uniform trashings of Alexandra Wong, P. I. provoked something unexpected. A group called the Agents of Birkin appeared to vehemently defend Wesley Prefect Birkin and his movies publically. Most of these were the cult audience of his films, not just The Final Showdown, but many of them were Sovereignty culturalists who praised Birkin for "reclaiming the action movies from the cultural hegemony of Anglia".

With the Agents of Birkin on his side, he went on to, in a lightning period of time, have three movies out in 3395.

One was Screaming For Vengeance, an unofficial sequel to Dissident Aggressor set in Carthago Secundus. (Birkin could not afford the actual copyrights) It featured Elijah Duncan as a total amnesiac who one day goes to a therapist and finds out that he actually is Z-3381, a genetically engineered superbeing and a product of a cancelled super-soldier project. When the CEID find out about this, they dispatch an endless series of hitmen to get rid of Z-3381. The critics described it at "what Dissident Aggressor would have been like with the budget of The Final Showdown" (Sovereign Star) and "an exercise in getting the most gunfights and car chases out of the fewest money, story be damned". (Schlock & Awe Magazine)

The other was the techno-fantasy outing The Hunt Has Begun. In The Hunt Has Begun, twelve warriors from "opposite corners of this universe" - one of whom, Morana, was played by Katarzyna Granzowa almost covered entirely in elaborately patterned blue bodypaint (and very little other than that) - gathered upon a "wasteland planet" to hunt each other for the sheer pleasure of the hunt, using only close-combat weapons. Strangely enough, this is perhaps the best critically-received Birkin movie yet, though this may have something to do with the outfit (and blue bodypaint) Katarzyna Granzowa wore as Morana, not to mention the now-infamous publicity photoshoot of her posing on one of the sets in full costume (including bodypaint).

The third of the movies, the space-pirates-attempt-to-loot-a-haunted-starship flick The Blood-Staining, was ignominously dubbed the "Greatest Failed Opportunity" of the year by The Tarsonis Herald. Other reviewers, however, recalling The Undead, remarked that Birkin had at least made an actual horror movie, though even the positive reviews remarked that it in tone altered oddly between ordinary horror and splatter between each act. In a somewhat odd move, every singly of the living characters dies in a very bloody manner; by the time the movie ended every single character, except the never-really-explained nasties aboard the ship, was dead.

For the year 3396, he unveiled a mammoth book which he had spent the last two years writing in total secret. The book was Reel Bad Sovereignty, a veritable encyclopedia of stereotyped depictions of people from United Solarian Sovereignty in films made in the Holy Empire of Haruhi Suzumiya and (especially) the Byzantine Imperium.

A few excerpts:
Wesley Birkin wrote:Today, you would almost expect the villain in an action movie to speak with a Sovereign, especially Solarian, accent and display caricaturized versions of stereotypical Sovereign mannerisms. Now, this would hardly bat an eye if this applied to movies made inside the USS. However, this also applies to action films from practically elsewhere in the Koprulu Zone, if the villains. And if the Sovie is not a major villain, a burly Tarsonian or a stereotypical effete Solarian appears amongst the henchmen or as comic relief.

A question this negative stereotyping and outright defamation of Sovies raises is: What influence does this have on politicians? To which extent is this the cause of the growing discord between the different Koprulu Zone nations?
However, what made this book garner much implication was Birkin's implications that Haruhiist-based critics hated him solely because he was from the United Solarian Sovereignty, made his films with Solarian funding and Solarian cast and crew. He even explicitly likened himself to a 34th century Sergio Leone in the book. As a result, many saw the book as a well-inteded analysis which Birkin turned into a vanity project of his. As his wife said:
Katarzyna Granzowa wrote:I think that Wesley went a bit over the top at times, but I think he has done the right thing. After all, had I been a Hollywood actress 500 years ago I would have taken a similar issue with Hollywood's en masse vilification of the Slavic peoples, no doubt sparked by the Cold War at first and later by the Yugoslavian Civil War.
If anything, the book made more people take Birkin seriously, and it certainly elevated the view the various intellegentsia of the galaxy viewed him.

It certainly helped to cushion the impact of the later-discredited rumour the same year that Birkin would direct a live-action version of the surreal cult animated series The Sulphurous Glow Of Fimbulwinter (which won Useless Reviews' 3389 award for Weirdest Head Trip Ever Committed To Film Since C. J. Motonow Disappeared). A lot of film fans actually believed the rumour; Wesley Prefect Birkin had actually confessed frequently to being a huge fan of The Sulphurous Glow Of Fimbulwinter. Nevertheless, most fans of Fimbulwinter were enraged and sighed in relief as the creative team behind Fimbulwinter confirmed that a live-action Sulphurous Glow was not even planned.

Just as they were relieved, so did the July of that year see the cinema premiere of The Ginger-Undead Bragulan, Wesley Prefect Birkin's most intentionally strange film yet. As the title implied, this film was about a Bragulan warlord who was reincarnated as a gingerbread man and went on a rampage inside a Human Enclave on Wild Space (played by Nemedia, a geographically and astronomically similar USS planet). Not surprisingly, the "flashbacks" to the life of the Bragulan warlord were actually taken directly from an old shot-on-location documentary about the Bragulan Star Empire. Of course, this time the critical response were the usual...
While Wesley Prefect Birkin can certainly write about movies, he unfortunately cannot write the movies themselves. But he tries.
Good news: Birkin is not making a live-action adaptation of The Sulphurous Glow of Fimbulwinter.
Bad news: He has just made something which somehow manages to make even less sense than Fimbulwinter.
If only the title character was played by a Bragulan dressed up as a gingerbread man. Still, you have not lived until you have seen a cookie walking around with a K-bolter and gunning down everyone in sight while howling praises to Byzon to the skies? Seriously, the entire script is just some sort of strange justification to make this happen. Continuity and logic be damned.
Later the same year, not one or two, but three more movies of Birkin's making hit the screen. The first was the oddly-titled Is It Supposed To Be God? wherein a Katarzyna Granzowa played a CEID-Zero agent tasked with the search for the Holy Grail. It faced many of the same criticisms as Dissident Aggressor (namely: That the plot basically was a concept which may once had been considered intelligent which had been used basically as an excuse for car chase after car chase), in addition to accusations of blasphemy leading to most Byzantine theatres being unwilling to show it. Even more strangely, this film was scored by none other than NecroLucifer with all of the band's members making cameos at various points. It even had several Ninja making an appearance.

Second was crime does not pay (Birkin insists to this day that its title must be written in lower-case letters entirely). This was Birkin's first movie supposedly based upon a true story, this time about the police's attempt to catch the master burglar Apollo Beltran, who was famous for the bizarre schemes he used to commit robberies, often improvising them from seemingly random combinations of objects used to make odd traps and other devices. This film is generally considered incredibly dividing - half of the population consider it the only decent script Birkin ever penned, the other half consider it one of the dullest mystery movies in recent memory.

Third was I Taste Better With A Golden Center, which prompted Schlock & Awe Magazine to have an editorial in its December 3396 year about the increasing obtuseness of Birkin's film titles. The film itself, while both praised and derided (depending on which reviews you read) for being 90-minutes a barely-dressed Katarzyna Granzowa killing people in increasingly weird ways, marked the second Birkin-penned one-liner to make its entrance into everyday slang among geeks, uttered by Katarzyna Granzowa's character Louise Tesla:
No way am I a tough kickass bounty hunter. I don't wear near enough eyeliner.
Fourth was a supernatural thriller which in the words of Useless Reviews rounded out "The Oddly-Named Quartet", They All Float Down Here! This, incidentally, happened to be the second Birkin movie scored by NecroLucifer, who in the meantime admitted to being members of the film cult around The Final Showdown.

An excerpt from their review of They All Float Down Here!:
If Freud wrote an action movie while smoking liberal doses of Good Ol' Mary Hwanna, the result would be not unlike They All Float Down Here!. The beasties are supposed to be material incarnations of traumatic memories... or the unconscious parts of the subconscious... or just the hive-mind of the galaxy's collective subconsciousness. My head hurts from trying to make this make sense. But at least it did end with an atomic blast.
It certainly was not a movie any viewer ever forgot, as it within its first 20 minutes featured a holiday resort overran by zombies, the Grim Reaper's younger sister (portrayed by the one and only Katarzyna Granzowa) "harvesting" people to the tunes of NecroLucifer's Before The Host Of The Fallen Angels and a man tearing open his skin in order to reveal a completely inhuman creature underneath, every of those scenes culminating in either a huge shootout or kung-fu fight of course. Oddly, They All Float Down Here! has been recently accumulating a cult following similar to that revolving around The Final Showdown. Some even think of it as a live-action successor to the ancient Heavy Metal, referring to the NecroLucifer score, bizarre visuals and abundance of violence and female nudity.

Upon finding out about this, Birkin immediately started appearing at film cult events and said in an interview in February 3397:
Wesley Birkin wrote: I am pleasantly surprised by the immense following They All Float Down Here! has acquired. If things continue this way, after my death they will reflect upon me the way they currently reflect upon C. J. Motonow. I mean, nobody were particularly interested in Vincent van Gogh's paintings and the books of Herman Melville and Howard Phillips Lovecraft when they still were alive.
Tiffaine Sinclair, descendant of C. J. Motonow, actually seriously considered suing Wesley Birkin for that remark. A notion which, fortunately for Birkin, did not blossom into reality.

The undaunted Wesley Birkin took one step further: He literally reached out to those who enjoy his movies because they find them cheesy by personally appearing on various B-movie festivals on Auriga together with Katarzyna Granzowa, who reportedly almost overheated during showings of bad martial arts movies with commentary about how unrealistic and/or badly choreographed the fight scenes were. In addition to evidently having a lot of fun doing it, both used it as a way of audience research which would be used for their next movie.

This movie, the last directed and written by Wesley Prefect Birkin to open in theatres yet, was the swords-and-sorcery film Red Haired Devil starring Granzowa with an orange wig as Shula, a wandering warrior who teamed up with Prisciann (Aghora Romero), an androgyne turning out to be the last living Atlantean Mage and numerous other characters which Wesley Birkin deliberately drew from the ranks of stereotypes in the genre. Opposing them was a similar variety of stock characters including such foils as Edur (NecroLucifer guitarist Nevada Leonard), amazingly good-looking and amazingly evil long-haired prettyboy, his annoyingly persistent right-hand man Kazyon (Sadamoti Matsushima) and the insane jester Belenus (Gabriel Dirkenschneider). Birkin actually admitted to writing the script for Red-Haired Devil as an exercise in combining as many clichés he remembered from role-playing games and fantasy novels.

Birkin is currently working on a film called Reptiloid about a genetically engineered secret agent from the Haruhiists infiltrating the Zigonian republics, who requests the assistance of a CEID-Zero agent who happens to be a Kung-Fu master. Godspeed, Dr. Birkin.


Filmography:
The Final Showdown (3388)
Death Is Unimportant To Me (3389)
Death Is Unimportant To Me 2: It's Just A Minor Inconvenience (3390)
Martial Monks of the Gun-Kata Temple (3391)
Touch of Death (3391)
The Undead (3391)
Dissident Aggressor (3393)
Kung-Fu Cavemen (3394)
Alexandra Wong, P. I. (3394)
Screaming For Vengeance (3395)
The Hunt Has Begun (3395)
The Blood-Staining (3395)
The Ginger-Undead Bragulan (3396)
Is It Supposed To Be God? (3396)
crime does not pay (3396)
I Taste Better With A Golden Center (3396)
They All Float Down Here! (3396)
Red Haired Devil (3397)
Reptiloid (currently filming)
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Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people :D - PeZook
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Force Lord »

Deep Space, Sector H-12
11 April 3400


Image

The pirate vessel was waiting for the supply convoy promised by Helmuth. It was the largest vessel available for the pirates, and consequently only a couple of them were in their possesion. Armed with a large plasma cannon at the middle and several smaller ones, it was a nightmare for the small ships the pirates usually faced. Against larger vessels, however, it was hard-pressed to deal with those.

The supply convoy finally arrived, their symbols not familiar with the pirate crew, but their captain shrugged it off. After all, these people were helping them.

Soon, both the convoy and its escort hypered away, to Zebes.
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Previously on Jenova wrote:Ember sighed. She knew that Tyrus was ... simply put, a recalcitrant xenophobe, and the very notion of working with Bragulans probably did not horrify him, but rather disgusted him enough that Tyrus could, and probably would since he had the authority, to order the exterminates of Jenova in a heartbeat, even if it demanded crashing one of the old hulks in orbit onto the planet. “Alright. Why don’t we do this: I will make the offer, you just do what you need to do. I suspect the Bragulans won’t take the offer much at face value anyhow, and would follow their own leads anyway. I assume you know where the pirate base is?”

Grudgingly, “Yes.”

“Give it to me.” Ember handed a datapad to Tyrus.

Tyrus keyed the coordinates into the datapad and handed it back. “If you will excuse me then.”

Ember watched Tyrus walk away. Sighing, she went back to prepare for the meeting.
JENOVA

Image
Mount Mortor lay at the exact middle of Jenova's Twilight Meridian, the place where the night side and day side of the planet's hemispheres met. The place where Byzantine and Bragulan lines converged, facing each other off in a Re-Militarized Zone spanning the whole world's circumference, a belt of steel and armor and guns and minefields that went around the entire planet.

By a feat of coincidence, Mount Mortor was also smack dabbed in between two tectonic plates. Like the inexorable armies of the Imperium and the Bragulans, the geologic forces of the world's very crust clashed with one another, giving rise to seismic activities and volcanisms that played merry havoc on the two armies that warred on Jenova's surface. Even in the grim darkness of the far future where there was only war, in the 35th century, the forces of nature were still to be contended with. The earthquakes and volcanic eruptions could kill just as many as weapons fire. Entire battles had even ended with defeat for both sides as pyroclastic clouds swept their forces away, blowing them apart like leaves in the wind, and leaving the battlefield scoured of all life. Whenever nature won, everyone else had lost.

But then, one day, both the Byzantinians and Bragulans had decided that enough was enough. After a particularly destructive volcanoquake, both sides temporarily buried the hatchet, declaring a ceasefire as they teamed up together and declared war on Mother Nature herself. Orbital strikes from Byzantine warships had lance beams burning holes through the planet's crust, while the Bragulan engineer corps hurled nuclear time bombs with fissible warheads the size of buildings down into the gashes of the planet's wounded face. The penetrations and subsequent detonations relieved the geologic pressure of the area by disrupting the very flow of the planet's liquid mantle (causing some other volcano, somewhere else in the planet nobody cared about, to explode violently and burninate thousands of albino natives, while tsunamis and earthquakes raged elsewhere), and the brief pact between Imperium Man and Bragulan Star Empire ended up defeating the powers of volcanism itself. Shortly thereafterwards, both sides dug out the hatchets they had buried and resumed killing each other with them. But the victory over geology had not been forgotten.

This act of silencing Mother Nature with a boot to the face, thus allowing Bragulans and Byzantines to continue killing each other without interruption, was commemorated the construction of a monument on top of Mount Mortor, at its dante's peak. That great building, built by enslaved and press-ganged albino Jenovans, was situated in the crater, right over the boiling lava of the volcano, suspended by mere metal frames and support cables. There was no danger, as save for dissatisfied grumblings, some quakes and false alarms; Mount Mortor had been silenced in its awe of the Byzantine lances, their penetration of the planet and creation of new geological orifices, as well as the enormous spherical Bragulan nuclear jewels that were larger than the Jenova's own pair. The administration of nuclear suppositories had calmed the movements of Jenova's infernal bowels. The great mountain that would've made Everest on Old Earth look flaccid was, itself, rendered impotent. There were statues of the Imperator, and the God-Emperor, on top of its limp form.
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This building was not just a mere monument. It had a function too. It served as the only place on Jenova where both sides could communicate, and even negotiate, with each other properly. There, over a crater full of lava, in the middle of No Man's Land and No Brag's Place, at the very center of the Re-Militarized Zone, was the clubhouse where Byzantine and Bragulan commanders, diplomats, Inquisitors, and IBGV agents, could meet. Outside, in their respective front lines, the Byzantine and Bragulan forces had enormous quantities of firepower pointed at Mount Mortor as well - for should whatever negotiations taking place there end up breaking down, Volcano Cannons and Spud missiles would immediately be launched at Mortor to provide the necessary counter-arguments for those in there... whether they wanted it or not!

It was an incentive for whoever was there to quickly come to an agreement, an added motivation for both parties to be polite and demonstrate the willingness to compromise and cooperate with one another.



Inquisitor Ember Veil was of the Ordo Xenos, temporarily attached to the Ordo Diplomatica, chosen from the ranks of xeno-hunters and witch-smellers pursuivants for her practicality, her level headedness, and the fact that her brain was not dominated by the thoughts of purging xenos and mutants and heretics, and only those thoughts. Unlike the other Inquisitors who would order the Exterminatus of entire worlds at will, she had a softer, subtler approach to the persecution of the God-Emperor's enemies. Sometimes, that even meant working with the enemy, if she had to. Upon hearing of her dalliances with the Bragulan IBGV, and her times posing as a Rogue Trader in Wild Space, she had been Diplomatica's first choice. At first, she was pleased to hear of such an important assignment, but now days into her stay in Jenova, she was beginning to regret it.

Finally, she arrived at Mortor. But one did not simply walk into Mortor. It's black gates were guarded by more than just orks (though now the Byzantine-Bragulan occupation had sterilized the world of all greenskins). There was evil there that did not sleep. The great eyes were ever watchful. It was a barren wasteland, riddled with fire, ash, and dust. The very air one breathed was a poisonous fume. Not with ten thousand men could she do this. It was folly. To negotiate with Bragulans.

As she saw first hand.
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She was there, looking at the enemy face to face. They were seated at the opposite ends of the table, alone save for their assistants. The Bragulan diplomat, who was undoubtedly an IBGV agent, uttered a guttural stream of dialogue utterly incomprehensible to Inquisitor Veil. At the same time, his translator - an emaciated androgynous albino Jenovan - began translating the Bragulan's words into comprehensible Gothic:

"He asks what part of the ceasefire you did not understand. He says perhaps his translator did not make it clear to you. He says he should... fire his translator?"

Suddenly, the Bragulan diplomat pulled out a K-bolter and shot the Jenovan translator in the face just as he turned to face his master. The Jenovan's head melted all at once, and his body fell to the floor twitching.

At this sight, Ember's interrogator was on the verge of pulling out his own boltgun, but she stayed his hand. She herself had almost activated her digital weapon, a ring-mounted neurotoxin dartgun, but when the Bragulan diplomat lowered his K-bolter and holstered it, she relaxed as well.

The Bragulan picked up a remote control, and a nearby telescreen flickered to life and began showing footage of the recent Byzantine offensive in the Re-Militarized Zone.

"Okay. Who ordered that attack?" the Bragulan spoke in thickly accented garbled Gothic.

"Lord General Melchius was feeling a little bit adventurous." Ember said, referring to the commander of all Byzantine forces on Jenova - the very same fool who led the Imperium's invasion of Jenova in the first place, and whose just 'reward' was an indefinite post on the world, without leave or reprieve. Only rejuvenat treatments had kept him from being retired, and now he was entering his third century, which was his second century of service in the Jenovan conflict, a service that would continue on and on until the time he could achieve his impossible victory over the Bragulans. Then, and only then, would he finally be allowed to return home - with his void shield, or on it. While normal commanders would've eaten a bolter to spare themselves from such a fate, Melchius seemed to actually like his lot in life. Perhaps that had something to do with his bloodline...
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Yep, definitely something in his bloodline.

"Byzondamnit!" the Bragulan spat. "We do not need this! Between your Lord General's half-brained attempt at getting himself off this rock by trying to beat us, which we all know is impossible by the way, and then having your damn Patriarch declare us as fitting 'pets', none of this is helping our efforts. Your Ordo has been pathetic in upholding your end of the deal."

"And what about you, Zygrv?" Ember shot back. Fething bears. "What do you have to say for yourselves?"

"We're implementing glasnot and bragstroika to parties more deserving to be graced by Bragulanity," Zygrv crossed his arms. "Now if only our Koprulu Zone neighbors could see the superiority of Byzon's intellect and how the glourious Bragulan Star Empire only wishes harmony and stability not only in the K-Zone, but for the whole galaxy, then you would appreciate the fact that the Imperator is truly the great architect of galactic civilization. Too bad your puny humans are unable to excrete excrement at sufficient speeds and bulks, leading to an accumulation of feces that makes you full of shits."

Bragstroika my ass. Ember refrained from making a snide remark about the Bragulan's Imperator, and how he was obviously full of bunk. While the stupid bear could speak the Imperator's name in vain, he was still a loyal and ideologically pure (well, mostly pure) servant of Bragule and an IBGV agent as well. So she dialed down her snark and gave out her contingency comment: "You call having your goons kill defenseless Byzantine Orthodox priests, and riding churchgoers and smearing them in your filth, glasnot and bragstroika? I'd like to see your people try that in an actual battlefield. Heh."

"Oh ho ho ho! We already did. Why don't you take a look at what we did to your Titan, that Beneviolent Wrath." Zygrv pressed a remote button, and the telescreen switched to the gun-camera footage of the last Spud missile flying right between the Titan's legs. He laughed. "Violate agreements with Bragule, and Bragule will violate you."

That was it. Ember scowled. It was too early for this kind of bullshit, or bearshit, or whatever, and just a week in she already had more than enough of Jenova. It was a shitworld, pure and simple. It also didn't help that it was that time of the month. She looked at Zygrv, who could probably smell it, and she saw the damn bear was sniffing the air and looking at her funny. Emperor damn these Bragulans. "What do you want, Zygrv? A broken nose? Some spit in your eye? Virus bombs? Cyclonic torpedoes? You're pushing me, Zygrv. If you want to be stuck on this goddamn shitworld forever, throwing away your people and getting them stepped on by our Titans, fine. So be it.

"If that's what you want, and if you're content being an IBGV agent doing 'galactic vigilance' on a miserable mudball investigating degenerate albino cultists over geostigma and lifestreams, okay. Alright. Great. Just don't talk to me about how miserable it is on your side of the planet, where the very ground boils from the perpetual sunlight. 'Cause we Byzantinians, we don't have to use any stinkin' freon-vests since we're in the cool side of the planet where our males can mark their territories by writing their names on the snow, where we can get hot tea, stick it out the window for a second, bring it back in and have iced tea. You? You have to import ice cubes from the system's Oort cloud just to stay cool, and when they get to your bases they've already melted from the heat. Poor miserable sweaty bears, your dens must smell like you've been hibernating in it during springtime."

Ember paused a while, letting it sink into the bear's thick skull. Then she continued:

"Me? I've been here for a week and I already hate this place. And I know you do too. Jenova is stupid. This whole war over this stupid planet is stupid. Our generals are stupid. The state of affairs in the damn Koprulu Zone is stupid. We both know this. Everyone's sick of all these whiny albinos with their disturbing Mother issues. What's with that anyway? I don't know, and I don't care, because nobody gives a damn about this Emperor-damned hole and I'm sure even your Imperator shares the same sentiments towards this miserable planet and everyone on it - us included." Ember took a deep breath as she finished her spiel. "So, Zygrv, what do you say we cut the chit-chat, a-hole?"

Zygrv glowered at her intensely. For a moment, she thought he was going for his K-bolter. While she had protection in the form of Soritas powered armor, her face still wasn't power armored. But Zygrv merely barked a fierce chuckle.

"Agreed, Inquisitor!" the Bragulan fucking laughed. "You are quite the fierce little female human. But what you say is true. Now, if only your predecessor was here, but unfortunately he is not, and I hear now he is in Al-Kar after a certain mishap," involving a Karlack cult, somewhere sometime ago, Ember knew. "This is a puny human shitworld, and the current situation in not just Jenova, but all over the Koprulu Zone, is something that is not to be desirable. The most recent Tannhauser Tango nearly brought the entire K-Zone to war. I am sure despite all your Imperium's bluster, such circumstances would be undesirable."

Zygrv smiled, baring his fangs. Was this some kind of test?

"And I'm sure," Ember began, albeit uncertainly. "Despite all your propagandas, an entire K-Zone pitched in war would be unwanted either. Hence the bragstroika and glasnot?"

"Da." Zygrv nodded his head, a curiously human gesture. "So now what do we do?"

"The Imperium's policy has to be flexible, even if not overtly." Ember stated flatly. Diplomatica, and a certain clique in Xenos, were for co-existence with certain workable alien species, such as the Bragulans. Not because they wanted to, but out of practical concerns as a Great Crusade like the one that wiped out the Tau was unfeasible at this age. It was too expensive. Not to mention, they already had the Karlacks to deal with, and that threat was even higher than the Bragulans and thus prioritized over the bears. "We need to de-escalate. Certain, ah, groups in the Imperium have been attempting to soothe the tensions."

"Like?" Zygrv asked, tersely and pointedly.

"The Rogue Traders. War is bad for business, at least their kind of business," which competes against the defense contractors, the ones who profited over wars, the only ones who had earned and gained during the Great Crusade while so many Byzantine lives were lost. "There is also the Byzantine Patriarch."

"The Byzantine Patriarch?" Zygrv repeated incredulously. Then he scowled and growled. "The one who said we were pets?!"

"It was his way of calling for peace and compassion." Ember smiled at the confusion on the dumb bear's face. "But you had to shit in church and kill one of his priests."

"He had it coming." Zygrv muttered.

"We all have it coming." Ember replied cooly. "Now, how about your end?"

"Our diplomatic trade liaisons would prefer to continue business with the Rogue Traders," while expanding Bragulan business outside the K-Zone, Zygrv didn't bother to say. The diplomatic trade bureaus of the Bragulan Star Empire, like their diplomatic departments, were often fronts for the IBGV, so more trade meant more money and resources and power for the IBGV itself. This, oddly enough, enhanced their hold over the Bragulan militaries and placed them in the Imperator's favor. Whereas, in war, the opposite would happen and more power would be delegated to the Space Fleet and the Legions of Liberation, and any victories they would win would place them in the Imperator's graces, thus overshadowing the Bureau. Co-existence meant that while the military would fall into disuse, the IBGV would rise to prominence in carrying out espionage and intrigue in the receptive nations Bragule dealt with - such as Altacar, and even faraway Shepistan, as evidenced in the Pendleton escapade. "Since we can't make you Byzantinians go away anytime soon, nor the Sovies for that matter, the Imperator now favors stability in the Koprulu Zone, and openness towards the rest of the galaxy. It is a long term approach."

"Until we dig up the hatchet and resume business as usual?" Ember asked, in a euphemism for 'until the time is right for the Bragulan Star Empire to make another bid for galactic domination'.

"Yes." Zygrv put it bluntly.

"I'll take note of that," Ember smiled. "I take it back. You Bragulans are very forthright and forthcoming."

"The truth of Bragule is self-evident," Zygrv quoted one of the Imperator's great sayings. "By the way, how is old Tyrus? Did he have to look for spare parts after his little visit to the space hulk?"

"He's just fine, thanks for asking. He managed to evade your Spuds just in time," Ember replied. "He says he'd rather not repeat the experience, lest he has to return the favor one of these days. I take it you found what we found?"

"Da, and I take it you found something that we haven't found?" Zygrv asked back.

"Yes. The coordinates to the pirate-smugglers' base. Here, take it." Ember tossed a microfiche envelope to his side of the table.

"Thank you." Zygrv accepted it. He was tempted to take it and leave without further ado, but that would've been rude and he knew the Byzantinians had a whole shitsload of guns on the other side, so it was best not to upset a hormone-ridden human female who was already stressed. "Such magnanimity is unknown to us in the IBGV. Pray tell, what do we owe this generosity to?"

"A gift, an assurance that those of us in the Emperor's Inquisition are committed in this dialogue with the Bragulans. We want a détente." Ember explained. "Call it a gesture of good faith."

"I hear you Byzantinians have a lot of that. Faith." Zygrv chuckled as he pocketed the microfiche. "So, détente it is. What would be a good starting point?"

"A ceasefire, here on Jenova and other worlds like it where Byzantine-Bragulan 'cultural exchanges' are currently taking place. De-escalation along the borders. Relaxed trade regulations for Rogue Traders dealing in Bragulan space. The establishment of diplomatic channels, unofficial if we have to keep up Koprulu Zone appearances, perhaps through us - the Ordo Diplomatica, Xenos - and your branch of the IBGV." Ember enumerated.

"You ask for much. But we can give much. We will reciprocate, if you can guarantee us that you will uphold your end of the bargain. After all, it was not we who had a Titan take a stroll through the RMZ. We need an assurance that your Lord General Melchius will not break our deal." Zygrv said.

"You have my assurances." Ember smirked. "It's all in the microfiche. I took great pains to compile it in your archaic data formats."

"It is appreciated. If you give us your assurances, then you shall have ours." Zygrv got up. "I guess this meeting is adjourned, Inquisitor Veil. Thank you for your time and frankness. You are a credit to your race, the human race."

"Inquisitor Tyrus will be at the coordinates. He won't wait, and he'll start without you." Ember stood up and walked out of the room.

"Don't worry," Zygrv grinned, baring his fangs. "I'll give him my regards."



When Zygrv returned to his refrigerated office, deep underground in the sunny size of Jenova, he took off his freonic jacket and sat naked in the makeshift meatlocker. He sighed in relief, and saw with satisfaction that his breath was vaporizing into cold mist. It was comfortably at standard Bragulan room temperature. He placed Inquisitor Veil's microfiche in the projector and after flipping through the Shinran pirate base coordinates and other data, found something interesting.

It was the assurance that their Lord General Melchius would not break the deal.
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Last edited by Shroom Man 777 on 2010-10-04 03:26am, edited 3 times in total.
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Siege
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Siege »

A word to the wise: The following was written by Shroom and me to wrap up the Majella storyline which had stalled something fierce. We both agree that it’s just about the absolute worst, terrible and insane thing we’ve ever produced together, which really is saying quite a bit. Having said that however, we would like to shamefully present...

[THE FOLLOWING BROUGHT TO YOU IN I-CAN'T-BELIEVE-IT'S-UNREAL-TIME]

Previously, on Majella...
Shroom Man 777 wrote:
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'Cause this is deadite vengeance night
Bear, I can thrill you more than any ghost would ever dare try
Deadite vengeance night
So let me hold you tight and share a killer, thriller, ow!

(I'm gonna thrill ya tonight)
Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour is close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize y'alls neighborhood

I'm gonna thrill ya tonight, ooh baby
I'm gonna thrill ya tonight, oh darlin'
Deadite night, baby, ooh!
THIS IS IT
The deadites were everywhere, creeping across the landscape like the crawly ghouls they were, devouring the living and the dead like true equal-opportunity necropredators. And in the process of doing so, they threw the whole planet into disarray – again. Bragulan units shot at zombified Bragulan units, and other Bragulan units shot at the units that shot at the zombified Bragulan units, erroneously believing they had been zombified when they had, in fact, not. It was very confusing, and when Bragulans got confused they broke out the big guns. The result was the fourth, fifth and sixth consecutive nuking of the capital city St. Gerard. Even the remains of the city had been flattened, pounded and glassed into a dance stage for Majella’s final number. The lingering gamma-radiation fed the necronites with more energy, and though St. Gerard was lost, they began to spread throughout the planet.

The only thing that protruded from its remains was a strangely robust statue in the likeness of Free Militia revolutionary leader, and now primary necronite hive-host, August Bullfinch.
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All necronite forces on the planet were converging on the mighty statue even as the remaining Bragulan forces on the planet were also converging on it. The movements of the deadites were strangely synchronized because of the coordinating overhive intelligence, looking for all the world like dance moves.

Of course the Bragulans knew not what dancing was, since the Imperator, himself in his antediluvian youth a terrible dancer, had outlawed the act of dancing many centuries ago, and all those who danced on Mighty Bragule were inevitably at some point sent off to the de-education camps. Where the boots of commissars danced on their faces, forever. As a result, the once mighty bear-dancing-skills of the Bragulan race had atrophied into near non-existence. So none of the remainder of the Legions of Liberation still on the planet recognized the strange movements of the necronite infested deadites for what they truly were.
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The dancing mob of necronite-infested humans presented an obstruction to the forward advance of Bragulan forces. Even the unarmed, zombified civilians were bogging down tanks with oceans of shambling corpses - and the Bragulan forces, now low on ammo, had to conserve their munitions for the deadites that were actually armed, like the zombified militia and even their necronized Bragulan comrades.

So they unleashed their final anti-infantry weapon: the BragHack, a flying contraption composed of counter-rotating blades, that could turn any unprotected target into shish-kebab. The rotors were the size of butcher knives, meant to incapacitate unruly Bragulans by wounding them and bleeding them out, though to much-smaller humans the blades easily amputated whole limbs and heads.
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“Hee-hee!” said one of the eviscerated zombies before finally bleeding out. A second BragHack swooped in and took its head off. Its twitching headless body jerked a few more steps, while its hand reflexively grabbed at its crotch. “Awwww!”

At the obscene sight of a disembodied head squealing while its headless body grabbed its genitals, Colonel-Commissar Klyvko Bryzvitz roared in fury. The past few days had been utterly miserable and he seethed with Bragulan rage. First he had been on the hunt of that invisible mechanical monstrosity the Sovies had unleashed on his beloved IFOB, that damned FORCE suit. Then, as if things couldn’t get any worse, it did and his pursuit had been called off when the forces in the Majellan capital mutinied - except they didn’t, and the mutinous traitors turned out to be dead corpses coming back to life and infecting everyone with an Imperator-damned nanonecrocontagion. Now Commissar Bryzvitz’ execution pistol was out of bullets, not from executing his own men but from shooting the deadite shamblers in their shambling deadite faces.

“SHITS!” he roared. The severed head was growing legs, crab-like legs, and it began skittering across the ground and leaping and lunging. Then with a cry of ‘EVOLUTION COMPLETE’ the thing grew an extra pair of eyes. Commissar Klyvko pulled out his execution pistol and fired at the thing, only to find his gun empty. Then the head-crab leapt at him!
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“Imperator’s bowels!” that did it, the Commissar lost his composure and began cursing in an ideologically-questionable fashion. He smashed the thing with his sanctioned beating-stick, sending it flying away like a Bragball. Just then Bragulan troops arrived, and before Klyvko thought of asking them whether they were deadites or not, they proved their loyalty by burninating the headstrosity with their nuclear flamethrowers. Under the heat of irradiated incendiaries, the headcrab popped like a pus-filled pimple.

Relieved, Klyvko pulled out his radio and contacted one of the loyalist un-undead tank commanders. “Commander Helanska, the BragHacks have whittled these dastardly dancing deadites like a plowscythe through an impoverished human crapfield. Maintain your advance and make sure to smear them under your treads!”

“Clarify, Commisar. Dastardly what-ing deadites? ‘Dancing’? What on Bragule is this ‘dancing’?”

“Nevermind. Just shut up and follow your orders!”

“Confirmed, Commissar.”
***
Little did the Bragulans know however that they Were Not Alone. High above the miserable little shithole world that was Majella, the 616th Interplantary Patrol Group burst out of hyperspace in magnificent flurry of hyperspatial radiation that would’ve fried anything unshielded in three AUs.
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Brigadier Stalin had his systems automatically link up with Harabec Weather’s fleet element that was still hiding on the outskirts of the system and assumed control by dint of seniority. Wasting no time, he moved directly toward the inner system with enough firepower to hopefully dislodge the Bragulan presence from the system.

Of course, not even Flash Stalin had imagined he’d be coming all this way to liberate a planet that was infesterized to the core with goddamn deadites. He sat on the grand command chair of the USS Murderous and glowered at the grisly sights (of fossilized funk) relayed to him by the advance sensor probes his flotilla had seeded throughout the system. Then he spoke six words of immortal wisdom. “What the fuck is this shit?”

“Deadites, sir,” spoke his XO.

“I can see that much fuckstick! Is anyone even still alive down there?”

The XO shrugged. “We can transmit the super secret code phrase and find out, sir.”
***
At the outskirts of the capital, the marine column of Lt. John Baylor was observing the giant slaughtercauldron the city had become from the cover afforded by a ruinated Byzantine cathedral dedicated to Saint Janet the Fashionable. When suddenly, deadites!
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“Fuck, deadites!” yelled Baylor. He grabbed the PMG mounted atop the Blackbird’s cupola, switched the auto-tracker off, and poured a burst of plasma fire into the group of ghouls who, for some reason the LT couldn’t quite comprehend, seemed to be dancing a funny jig. Well, whatever. That just made them easier to blow up.

“Sir, I think we’re in the wrong video,” frowned his tank driver, a spunky girl-marine called Billie Jean (he’d forgotten her last name).

Baylor’s confused reply was cut out when a comms signal echoed through the tac-net, weak and distorted at first, but then increasingly stronger. “ANNIE ARE YOU OKAY... ANNIE ARE YOU OKAY... ANNIE ARE YOU OKAY...”

“Holy fucksticks” Baylor blurted out, abandoning the plasma gun for a second. “It’s command! BJ, get on that radio and give ‘em the proper answer. Tell ‘em to get us the fuck outta here!” Then he turned back to the deadites, who were streaming into the ruined cathedral of dance, no doubt seeking to defile it by spilling blood on the dancefloor and doing unmentionable things to the marines. “You think you’re bad?” shouted Baylor and he switched the pulse gun to full-auto. “You think you’re bad?” He blew a whole host of deadites away, only to see more come marching inexorably behind them. “Who’s bad now? Who’s bad now!”

Billie Jean dropped down the hatch into the hull of the Blackbird and wormed her way into the radio compartment, grabbing a code book (which came on actual old-fashioned data-plastic so that it couldn’t be hacked) and flicked through it in search of the proper response as the super secret code phrase continued to echo across the sub-ether. Then she breathlessly transmitted back: “MY LONELY DAYS ARE GONE”.
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Meanwhile back in space, the XO excitedly turned to Flash Stalin, who glowered some more. “I suppose that answers that, sir.”

“I suppose that means we have to beat it.”

The XO creased his brown in confusion. “Beat what?”

“The goddamn Bragulans of course you idiot. We’ll show ‘em how funky strong is our fight!”

“... what?”

Stalin ignored him. “And we’ll need to rescue the guys on the planet too. Prepare an away mission!”
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Inside the steel belly of the USS Murderous, a select company of elite para-marines prepared for their away mission. They were the 7016th ‘Smooth Criminals’, lead by their gallant tomboy commander, ‘Dirty’ Diana Jackson. “So them’s the breaks” she explained to her men and women. “We got Bragulans and deadites down there, so shoot anything that moves or looks at you funny. Oh, and II don’t care what happens down there: Any of y’all break into song,” Diana warned, “Imma shoot your asses.”

“Hoaah sir,” her second in command grinned and closed his helmet, which was painted in glittering colors. “Let’s burn this disco out!”
***
However! Unbeknown to Baylor however there was still another USMC force on the planet Majella. Only a few dozen miles from his position, FORCE operative Selphie McAlister was using the awesome power of her multi-billion-dollar exo-armor to vaporize yet more whole columns of deadites with enough pseudo-atomic force to send even the primary hive intelligence August Bullfinch reeling.
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When the dust cleared, she found herself looking at a whole bunch of dirty gritty United Solarian Marines,

“Woman,” Baylor said to the pretty girl in the giant suit of killy powered armor. “You rock my world.”

Selphie smiled at him and made a lousy-looking mockery of a salute. “Hey guys,” she merrily greeted them. “Are you a full-bird lieutenant? Hmm, II think I’m a junior lieutenant.” She flashed him her credentials. “Yeah. See, junior lieutenant. So that means you’re in command, right?”

Baylor frowned ever so slightly. She was the FORCE equivalent of a junior lieutenant all right -- a junior lieutenant general. He decided not to alert her to the fact that this was in fact about a dozen grades above his own pay-grade. After all, FORCE operatives weren’t exactly known for doing well in teams. And this was no time to quibble over details “Sure,” he said. “I can be in ruttin’ command. We just got our extraction location. Let’s get a move on!”
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Meanwhile, in Majellan orbit, the forces of the Bragulan Space Fleet had detected the approaching Star Force warships even before they had arrived in the system. Combined with the USMC flotilla that had lingered in the system’s outlying zones, and with the Dreadstar Murderous of none other than Brigadier Flash Stalin incoming, the Bragulans knew they were outmatched. Outgunned. As loathe as they were to admit it, but just this once the Sovereignty’s was bigger than the Bragulans’.

No one was bigger than the Bragulans.

No one.

“Prepare to evacuate all ground forces,” Captain Grydon Feindflug said with resignation. He took a swag from a flask of tsvagna. “And tell all the ships to make for the hyper limit when the last transport is in.”

He could imagine the humans sneering at him, laughing at him. That Harebec Weathers most especially. After their initial order, in a twist of irony it was Feindflug who would end up giving the order to withdraw his forces. The liberation from subjugation was for naught. He would have to return to Bragule and report his failings...

The bitter taste of bile seeped in the back of his throat. He washed it down with more tsvagna.

“Ah, captain my captain.” Intelligencer Kolzitz stalked beside Feindflug. “Contemplating your choices?”

“There is no choice to contemplate. We lose.” Feindflug grumbled. “At least, I do. You, you found what you came for, didn’t you? Those deadite things.”

“Oh, no, no. I didn’t just want an undead body crawling with nanoes inside it, though I had my men collect a whole cryo-container full of those. I wanted the whole facility. Sadly, it was vaporized. Along with all of St. Gerard. We both lose, captain.” Kolzitz consoled him sneeringly.

“When I go back to Bragule, I will use every inch of my power to make sure you, Intelligencer, end up as a Post-Intelligencer.” Feindflug raised his paw, almost as if to clout Kolzitz in the face, but instead he took his flask and downed another gulp - but he found it dry and in frustration he threw it away.

Kolzitz watched him bemusedly, before saying: “There is a way out of this, you know. The moon cannon. Use it on the Sovereignty forces to slow them. Use it on Majella to exact your revenge. The final Bragulanization of that wretched world. Yes! Grydon, if we can’t have Majella, then there will be no Majella!”

“You’ve gone mad! That is not glorious Bragulanization!” Feindflug protested.

“No, but it will be the ultimate act of spite! Ready the weapon, my captain, I command you. We will teach these humans to be Scared of the Moon... Cannon!”
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Back planetside, the message to evacuate had reached the Bragulan forces storming the re-ruinated ruins of St. Gerard. Colonel-Commissar Klyvko Bryzvitz was the first to receive it, having assumed command of the loyalist non-infected ground forces after shooting the original commander in the face for incompetently nuking an uninfected unit by mistake. The commander was the last one in a long line of incompetents Klyvko had executed. After dealing with the commander, he had intended to execute the communications officer who was guilty of transmitting the mistaken orders, but the little shit was lucky since by then his execution pistol had run out of bullets. Klyvko reminded himself to finish the job later, but for now the very same communications officer was handing him the radio headset.

The message was a simple burst-transmission that the Commissar recognized immediately. It read:

BEAT IT

Damn, that was it. Klyvko barked at the cowering comm officer to transmit his commands to all loyalist and living units.

“To all points, orders have been received to begin withdrawal immediately. Continue offensive operations, but reverse your heading towards designated extraction points,” the colonel-commissar commanded courageously. “I repeat, do not stop attacking, just attack in a different direction!”

“Commissar, are you telling us to retreat?” came the brash voice of tank commander Helanska.
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“I’m telling you to beat it!” Klyvko shouted over the radioset. The fire was in his eyes and his words were really clear. “So beat it, just beat it.”

“But we wanna be bad!” Helanska protested.

“Just beat it!” Klyvko roared. “Beat it! Nobody wants to be defeated! It doesn’t matter whose wrong or right, just beat it!”

“....acknowledged, Commissar.”

“To all forces!” Klyvko hated doing this, but he had to in order to get the message through. They had to run, he had to do what he can. So he repeated himself and the general retreat codewords over and over again: “Beat it! Beat it!

The Sovies were out to get them, so they had to leave while they could. Don’t wanna be a cub, you wanna be a Brag. They had to stay alive, they had to do what they can. “So beat it, just beat it!

He wanted to show the Sovies that he was really not scared, but he was playing with all his troops’ lives, this ain’t no truth or dare. The Sovies would nuke them and blast them and tell them it’s fair. “So beat it! Just beat it. Beat it! Beat it! Beat it! Beat it... beat it...!

The signal rang throughout the Bragulan comms and the troops even began relaying it to one another, repeating it over and over again, filling the airwaves with its tunes, filling it with the urgent command to beat it. So it was that the Bragulan withdrawal began. They barely had an hour before the fleet would execute Bragulan Directive on the entire planet.

They had to beat it.
***
The dropship rocked away from the planet’s surface, which was now being scourged by unholy Bragulan fire. Aboard, the marines of Baylor’s refugee column had collapsed from sheer exhaustion and terror. The para-marines however were not tired yet. “Aww yeah!” shouted one of them. “That’s how you do it!”

“They’ve been hit by,” said one marine.

“They’ve been struck by,” continued another.

“A SMOOTH CRIMINAL!” they all hollered together.

But it wasn’t over yet, for at that moment the Bragulan commander in charge of the Moon Cannon pressed The Button.
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And so the Moon Cannon fired its mighty swordmissiles and guncannons at the planet, in an ultimate act of ultimate spite.
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Little did the Bragulans know however that their spiteful actions had not come in time. For far above the newly devastated world of Majella-3, now completely devoid of life, hung the great statue-ship of August Bullfinch.
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As he watched his ruinated domain, the dictator-turned-necrodude couldn’t help himself. He felt an irresistible urge... A need... A calling from the power cosmic...

And so, as his few remaining necronite servants danced a jig in zero-g, he burst out into song.
What about sunrise
What about rain
What about all the things
That you said we were to gain.. .
What about killing fields
Is there a time
What about all the things
That you said was yours and mine...
Did you ever stop to notice
All the blood we've shed before
Did you ever stop to notice
The crying Earth the weeping shores?

Aaaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaaah


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THE END (HEE-HEE)
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SDN World 2: The North Frequesuan Trust
SDN World 3: The Sultanate of Egypt
SDN World 4: The United Solarian Sovereignty
SDN World 5: San Dorado
There'll be a bodycount, we're gonna watch it rise
The folks at CNN, they won't believe their eyes
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Lord_Of_Change 9
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Lord_Of_Change 9 »

Planet Null-17, System X841, New Rhineland Colonial Sector

One did not tread lightly upon the surface of this hellish world. Known officially by the Prussians as Planet Null-17, it was wreaked by gigantic earthquakes and ceaseless volcanic eruptions caused by the gravitic fluctuations of its parent star. It was known by various unofficial names, the most fitting of which was also taken from a literary work of Old Earth - Mordor. It was a den of pirates and thieves, and worse, Orks. The greenskin menace was hated by the Prussians, especially after the Volksreich War, where they had embarked on a brief alliance (as far as Orks could ally with someone) with the old Volksreich (of which Volksland had been a rump state), which had failed when the Prussians defeated the Volksreich/Ork space fleet in a series of decisive battles in the year 2997.

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But not for much longer. After all, one didn't send the Kaiser class battleship Wilhelm II and a group of Siegerkranz battlecruisers to a system known to harbour pirates if one expected to do nothing. Ludwig Karl Von Allenstein, the captain of the Siegfried, a Siegerkranz that had recently fought in the Volksland War, looked over his orders. There were 5 Reichswehr Divisions (each numbering 10,000) and the Third Hussar Regiment numbering 3,000, a segment of the League's Powered Armour elite forces in the flotilla.

His orders: bring orbital support to the ground forces and drive out enemy fleet assets.

He looked at the pirate ships, cobbled together with weapons more used for menacing traders in the region than for attacking warships. They had raided a few Prussian vessels in the past few weeks, and he was going to teach them why pirates were considered enemies of all mankind in the League. And, of course, the exact punishment for them. A disintegration chamber was useful for criminals (the worst kind, of course) that had already been captured, but disintegration (along with most of the ship) or spacing in the heat of ship-to-ship battle was considered reasonable as well.

He heard the order from the commander of the Wilhelm II - 'attack'.

'Fire all batteries,' Ludwig commanded.

A barrage of nuclear-tipped missiles and railgun shells were sent, breaking through the pirates' crude shields and melting their armour in a burst of infrared radiation, as well as giving the crew of the ships massive radiation doses that would have killed them in short order if not for the second barrage of explosive missiles and shot that blew the ships apart. The battle was over.

There was no need to occupy or rule this planet - it wasn't suitable for habitation anyway. But there was a pressing political need, to see that something was done about these pirates, that their lairs were uprooted and they were themselves destroyed. And that was what the flotilla's leader planned to do.
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PeZook
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by PeZook »

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Almera colony
Corinth, Pelania
X-COM field command centre, Altea military airbase

Colonel Delgado, commander, X-COM Field Division 1, stared intently at the pair of huge LCD displays taking up the bulk of his command tent. He clenched his fists, watching the remote tracks of captain Scavo's collumn heading back towards the city.

"Still no reply, colonel.", one of the soldiers manning the command post said in a hushed voice. They all had friends in Scavo's team.

"It's been two hours, colonel.", Delgado's second in command noted, "We need to initiate the contingency."

The officer was correct, of course. X-COM expected such an occurence: they had a procedure just in case it happened. Unfortunately, it means Algeiran heavy bombers would annihilate the entire collumn: almost a company of the organization's best troops. Delgado had to give the order to kill the men he was responsible for.

He cleared his throat. With a grave tone in his voice, he gave the command. Soldiers operating the communications gear started calling in the airstrike: six heavy bombers were orbiting Pelania since Scavo's collumn went out. They'd now vector in and wipe out an entire grid square, along with Scavo's collumn...

"Sir! We've lost communications and satellite feeds!"

...unless something like that happened.

"Inform the general. Looks like we'll need his men after all."

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Presidential palace

The goddamned Algeiran barged into his office again. Corello had just about enough: he spent the last day being pushed around by the Algeiran commandos, evicted from his military facilities and generally treated like a damn servant. He was about the scream some obscenities at the colonel, but then he noticed something about his face, so he justed asked:

"What's going on?"

"General, you need to mobilize your men immediately. Captain Scavo's collumn has been subverted by the extraterrestrals, and is marching towards the city."

"What?", the general's expression was one of pure disbelief, "What?", was all he could ask again.

"They are not responding to orders, they have turned back towards the city. We lost all communications, so we can't call for air support. We need to stop them."

"The...aliens can mind control people?"

"Apparently so. General, you must give the order now. Who knows what these men will do?"

"If they took over your men with their fancy gear, why can't they take over mine?"

"They may be able to. That's why we need to attack in force and destroy the collumn as fast as possible. Give the order."

The general hesitated, but only for a moment. He was scared now...the revelation about the alien capabilities was a surprise to him...but then again, it seemed like it surprised the Algeirans, too. He picked up the phone, when a thought occured to him.

"Wait...why are they here at all? What do they want?"

"We have no idea", the Algeiran lied.

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Corinth, downtown

Jarrise was packing. It was strange to be doing that: a few hours ago, she though her daughter's gone insane: perhaps from stress, or the pressure of living in Corinth with her condition. But then, right as the sun was setting, a huge collumn of armored vehicles rolled down the street. Foreign vehicles, full of well-armed foreign soldiers.

Jarrise could see something really was happening. She decided to take the chance: they'd find a new place to live. Corinth had been safe enough so far, but whatever was going to happen in the next few days would be horrible. She still wondered what it could be, though: civil war, perhaps? Did general Corello bring foreign mercenaries to help quash a rebellion?

Either way, she had no intention of staying in the city when it started. She hurried around her small home: barely more than a hovel, really, but still a place to live, and thus full of little things. She was hurriedly selecting only the most necessary ones and packing them into two bags she and Vilena could carry themselves.

Vilena was helping, of course. In the flickering candle-light, they managed to pack both bags in barely an hour.

An hour too little.

A powerful explosion shook the ground. In the cold night air, sounds of gunfire carried from afar: somewhere from the city's outskirts, towards the San Dorado hills.

"Mother...we should go.", Vilena said, glancing fearfully in the general direction of the battle.

Jarrise didn't need to be told twice. She hefted her bag, handed her daughter hers, and left her home for the last time.

There were people outside. They were standing there, not knowing what to do, staring at each other. They barely noticed the two women quickly making their way across Corinth's winding streets, in the opposite direction from the battle.

They noticed a huge collumn of the general's militia driving their technicals towards the gunfire. Armed men ran between the shacks and shoddily-built houses. Jarrise and Vilena had to move very carefully, trying to avoid attracting attention, especially since panic was starting to worm its way into the city.

Despite their hurried pace, the journey was still taking a long time: lots of it was wasted on hiding, changing routes and avoiding looters, who now appeared in the empty streets. Each moment they wasted was another when they risked being trapped in Corinth by a wave of panicked refugees. It didn't help that Vilena kept looking around her shoulder, at the outskirts where the battle was raging, wondering what was going on.

"It doesn't seem like I saw at all. They didn't kill those people, they...", she tried to speculate, but was cut short by a pair of huge men, armed with machettes, who rounded the corner they were approaching. Jarrise froze, grabbing her daughter's hand.

"Cover your face!", she hissed to Vilena. She didn't know what else to do, especially since the men - bandits? looters? - she didn't know - noticed them and walked up. They were clearly nervous, glancing to the sides, as if expecting an attack.

"What do you have in those bags?", one of them accosted the women, grabbing Jarrise's bag and tossing the contents on the ground. His friend grabbed Vilena. She tried to struggle, but he was so much bigger and stronger she had no chance of getting out.

"Please! It's just some food and supplies, we're trying to get out of the city!", Jarrise tried to plead. The man rummaging through her belongings just pushed her aside.

"Well, then you're out of luck. We're taking those!"

"No! Please, we'll die here!"

"Shut up. You're lucky we don't have time to have some fun with you two.", the bandit said, grinning.

"Maybe we could just do the daughter...", his friend commented, and tore off Vilena's hood. He looked at her face for a while, his creepy demeanor gone for just a second.

"Holy shit, look at that...", he called to his friend, "...Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"No!", Jarrise screamed and leapt at the first man, the one who robbed her. He turned around briefly and slashed her across the chest with his machette. Vilena screamed "Mother!" and jerked the bandit holding her. She managed to get away briefly, but her mother's killer caught her by the hair.

"Oh yes.", he said, examining her, "We'll live like kings off her!"

"Let me go, you bastard! Let me go!", the girl screamed, trying to bite her captor, do anything at all. The screams turned into sobbing. Her mother was bleeding out in the mud. She'd be taken to be sold into slavery or worse...all because of her stupid little field trips!

She stopped struggling. There was no point. With uncontrolled tears streaming down her cheeks, she resigned herself to the fate of a slave.

The sobbing intensified when the bandits tore off her clothes. It turned into another, horrible, painful, terrorized scream when, instead of raping her, they started hacking off her legs.
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JULY 20TH 1969 - The day the entire world was looking up

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
- NEIL ARMSTRONG, MISSION COMMANDER, APOLLO 11

Signature dedicated to the greatest achievement of mankind.

MILDLY DERANGED PHYSICIST does not mind BREAKING the SOUND BARRIER, because it is INSURED. - Simon_Jester considering the problems of hypersonic flight for Team L.A.M.E.
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Force Lord
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Force Lord »

Force Lord wrote:"You two will stay with the Anglians for the moment. I'll tell Tardis and Enduvos what's going on. And then we wait."
Hangar Bay, CNS Govard
Rimland Sector, The Centrality
23 February 3400


The consequences of the Datton's capture were quite embarassing for the Centrality. It was the low point of Gabriel Enduvos's career, and this, combined with his attempt to gain an alliance with Shepistan and the Grand Dominion, lead to his violent removal and death in the Valentine's Day Coup of 3400. The men in charge of the operation were officially "released from office", some meeting their ends in mysterious accidents and poisonings, others vanishing entirely. The lucky ones, those who opposed the operation at its inception and those in charge of carrying it out directly, were either given honorable discharges, demoted, reassigned to remote places, or retained their posts under "certain conditions".

Tardis was the only one who retained his post of Admiral without conditions. He was busy in his office, dealing with the routine tasks of heading a fleet. He still commanded the 5th Fleet, and it was now over Sephire, capital of Rimland Sector.

He reflected for a moment what happened after the Datton debacle. The crew of that ship mostly chose to seek asylum in New Anglia, the few brave ones following Forg and Zader imprisioned along with them, for Enduvos failed to secure their execution. After the coup, they were liberated, and the chosen punishments were rather light. Forg was demoted to Captain and reassigned to Rimland. He was now commanding a destroyer-type vessel in the fleet. Xader was discharged, and as far as Tardis knew was recruited by the Clankor Sector Defense Forces as a drill sergeant. The Datton itself was still in Anglian hands, no doubt being analized by their engineers. The Centrality's naval designers have been forced to design a new stealth vessel, but it will take years for a new one to appear.

As for the citizens now in asylum, it was decided to leave them alone. A war with New Anglia over them was not worth it.

All in all, the whole incident was not beneficial to the Centralists. But Tardis was thankful he did not have to order his ships to start a war.

No, paperwork was more attractive compared to that.

Result: End of the Datton incident.
An inhabitant from the Island of Cars.
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Darkevilme
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Darkevilme »

Orbit of Chamarra Prime, Hierarchy space.

It was dark in the shadow of their world. The clustered lights of cities scattered and gleaming upon the surface of their adopted home. It was a sight to cherish for those charged with protecting it, and it was a sad state of affairs that the one now regarding this vista and tasked with protecting it was Tia Kithandra, on her way to sort out this miserable mess. Tia turns her gaze to the warpgate, watching the final initiation sequence and considering her duty. In minutes she would be halfway across known space in Haruhiist space and tasked with finding a solution that will satisfy the ire of the Sovereignty and convince her majesty to call back the fleet, not an easy task and made no easier by the Sovereignty sending their favourite Brigadier presumeably to try and intimidate her. On the plus side she'd bought herself some additional time. it helps to be both royal and a diplomat sometimes, it gives you friends in all sorts of places.

Blue light erupts from the forward viewports and then engulfs the shuttle as the warpgate initiates and the craft plunges through, next stop: Haruhiist space.

HSF Fearless, Grand Hierarchy battlefleet, Hyperspace
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“We have been asked to delay.” Melusine announced once all the other battlemistresses were in holo conference.
“By who- Oh Tia of course.” Battlemistress Eshe says, not alone in having been woken up for this meeting.
“Yes, Tia wants as much time as possible to resolve this and I for one am willing to give her this. We all know the realities of this mission.”Melusine says.
“Are you sure we can't give the sovvies a bap on the nose? Just a liittle one?” Jokes Battlemistress Nian, tail swishing in amusement.
“While we could it would give the sovereignty little more than a bloody lip,we do not have the resources for a prolonged engagement. But more importantly we would then be depending entirely on the good graces of the Holy empire to stop the Sovereignty beating us back to home space and that more than anything else counts against it.” Melusine says, getting comfortable and guaging the mood of the other battlemistress's. They're obliged to follow her commands but not necessarily in this, and though she did not expect open dissent it was always best to remain friends here. The mood was favourable though.
“We're also agreed that the show of force would do little but antagonize the Sovereignty correct?”
Melusine asks, almost rhetorically as the nods come before she's finished speaking.
“Then it's settled, we will delay.” she finishes and then smiles “Now those of you I woke up for this can go back to sleep.”

Result:
The Hierarchy grand battlefleet slows down dramatically on its way to the edge of Sovereignty space.
STGOD SDNW4 player. Chamarran Hierarchy Catgirls in space!
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Simon_Jester
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Simon_Jester »

"Commissar, I fear treachery on the part of the Umerians."

"Sit down, comrade captain! What is on your mind?"

"They seemed most eager to obtain the missiles. What if they are not just engaged in testing for a larger order, as they said? I fear that they may prove tricksier than we believed. What if they try to reverse-engineer our missile technology, and learn the secret of our mighty subnucleonic drives and warheads from them?"

The commissar barked a mighty laugh, and washed down a mouthful of ground brontosaurus with a draught of Bragulan Ale. "Do not fear, comrade captain Turgi! Surely you are aware of the great efforts Byzon demanded of our scienticians to find new ways to enhance the power of the modern Bragulan thermonuke! Why, it would take a super-scientific super-genius of criminal treachery and great menace to deduce the secrets of our missile warheads in anything less than decades!"
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Laboratory for EXotic COndensed Matter Projects
830 Hours Local Time, March 14, 3400


Dr. Alexander Martin gazed contemplatively into the stabilized-Rubiconium crystal he kept on his desk. He wasn't much for false modesty; he knew why the samples taken from the dismantled Bragulan missile warheads had come to him- he was the leading expert on exotic-physics solid state materials. The best in a hundred worlds. He was the one who'd finally nailed down the dependency of Rubiconium's uptake and transmutation properties on isotope balance. He was the one who'd come up with a process for stabilizing the deadly stuff, disabling its replication power and making it safe to hold in your bare hands without superheating it and without destroying its beautiful luster. An expensive process, granted, but it worked!

And to think they all laughed back in '83 when I said I could do it... He chuckled.

Rubiconium was his specialty. When the first round of preliminary scans after cracking the warhead casings showed large amounts of a material that showed some similarities to rubiconium, over fifty kilos of the stuff had shown up on the loading dock in a shielded packing crate within a matter of hours. It was immediately obvious that the shielding was unnecessary; the stuff was chemically toxic but no more so than any of a dozen reagants in his personal laboratory's stockroom. It was also immediately obvious just what they'd got their hands on. He felt a thrill; the Bragulans had just sold the Technocracy over a ton of something they'd been aching to get even a few kilos of for a lifetime and more.

Tylium!

Centuries ago, Shepistan had faced dark days. Even their most advanced nuclear warhead designs were starting to fall behind the curve; they were approaching the theoretical limits of what fissile materials could do. It was a violation of everything the nation stood for, and Martin had to hand it to them; they'd risen to the challenge. Soon, a top-secret Shepistani government lab devised a new, mysterious substance that boosted the yield of nuclear devices tremendously: codename SMOGBANK.

Naturally, the nature of SMOGBANK was of great interest to the Technocracy, but the Sheppoes were paranoid and thorough when it came to government secrets. They knew what an edge SMOGBANK gave them. They knew what Umerian science was capable of. The conclusion was inevitable, and the implementation of that conclusion admirably ruthless.

In all the years since then, they had managed to prevent even a small sample of the stuff from falling into Umerian hands. They would scuttle a damaged ship in neutral space rather than take any risk of salvagers getting their hands on the warheads. They would purge anyone even suspected of vulnerability to being turned from SMOGBANK handling facilities; even the copious OSMS sufferers hadn't managed to get a sample out.

For years, Umeria had been tempted to hope that the sheer secrecy of it all would lead to the Shepistanis themselves losing track of how SMOGBANK was made, but their nuclear weapons program was too active to allow such a thing. The Technocracy had limited themselves to second-hand deductions and information around the edges of the program.

It was soon clear that the code-name was not actually the official Shepistani term for the boosting agent; its real name was "tylium." Tylium was a derivative of the exotic self-replicating crystal rubiconium, which the Shepistanis harvested with vigor wherever it was found in their space. It was largely non-radioactive... but the lattice energy stored within the material exceeded that of weapons grade plutonium. Under the conditions of a nuclear initiation, it released that energy to devastating effect. But the composition of tylium, how it was made... unknown.

Until now.

Time to schedule some analysis work. Unfortunately, there was no way around it; that would mean working with Brown.

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LEXCOMP
1100 Hours Local Time, March 14, 3400


If Martin believed in gods, he would think Ryan Brown had been inflicted on him as a punishment by some malicious and powerful deity as a price for his great scientific ability. Since that was impossible, he was forced to take Brown as simply an example of the depths of human nature, and of the unending need to fight relentless war against human stupidity.

There were several scientists at LEXCOMP with the sense of perception: esper power that allowed them to sense the internal structure of matter. All of them had refined that ability with an eye to extreme resolution, allowing them to observe deep-structure on the atomic, if not subatomic, level. All of them were competent people- some he would not have allowed to work in his own facilities were it not for their esper abilities, but they would at least have been worthy to be called scientists. Some of them were exceptionally capable: lacking Martin's special genius, they were nonetheless worthy collaborators and had made significant discoveries in their own right.

Then there was Ryan Brown. Brown's direct-perception powers far exceeded those of anyone else Martin had ever known. He was almost unique in that, and entirely irreplaceable. He was also an adult Type Two.

"Hi, boss!"

"Hello, Brown; it's time to get started."

"What are we doing today?"

Perhaps I should use shorter words in my next memo to him... "An experimental rubiconium-type material. The sample just got in last night. I need you to do a preliminary examination."

"Is this going to be one of those... trans-nuclear things?"

Martin took a deep breath. "Quite possibly, Brown, quite possibly."

"So, what am I looking for?"

I'm surrounded by fools! Worse, I'm surrounded by only ONE fool, and he has me outnumbered! "I don't know. If I knew what I was looking for, I wouldn't need you to look for it. That's why it's a preliminary."

"Oh. OK."

"Let's go get 'Dita."

Ahladita Verma was the only reason Brown was of any use at all. Brown, by himself, could observe matter on the subatomic level, but could not explain or quantify or even comprehend what he was seeing. But with the services of a telepath, he could pass his observations on to someone who could. The real key, of course, and this was the secret to much of Martin's recent success, was the choice of a telepath who could pass the observations without the irrelevant, distracting, useless thoughts that leaked along with them. Martin wasn't sure if it was possible to catch stupidity via telepathy, but he had no intention of finding out.

Ms. Verma wasn't an especially powerful esper, but she had a remarkable discriminatory power to transmit perceptions while blocking the sidebands that went with them. Of course, she knew little about science and did no real work on her own, but that was to be expected. During hours when Brown wasn't in use, he kept her working on the laboratory's financial records, where she was a fairly capable organizer and very much to the satisfaction of Ministry of Finance auditors... and therefore to Martin's satisfaction. Since she was useful and capable, Martin made the effort to be more courteous to her than to the average person.

He found the telepath in her office, working on something on the holodisplay that was an indistinct blur of light from his side of the room. "Good morning, Ahladita; we're ready."

"Hello, Dr. Martin! Just a second." She flipped one of the control wands end-for-end and tapped it on the virtual keyboard. The display faded. "I'll be right along."

She followed him down the corridor, Brown trailing along behind them, staring at the posters on the walls and scratching his head.

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Nothing based on rubiconium was anything you wanted on your bare skin, unless it had been very thoroughly deactivated. There was no evidence of the tylium sample being particularly dangerous, though, so they observed only minimal precautions: long sleeves, single-layer nitrile gloves, goggles, passive-filtration masks, and a light overcoat that could be easily removed in case fragments struck them.

Martin did the honors, unsealing the crate and removing one of the small fragments in its leaded vial. Like the heavy shielding, that had been an unnecessary precaution, but a laudable one. The fragment was no more than a cubic centimeter in volume, but it added noticeable weight to the vial; as the initial reports had explained, tylium was extremely dense.

He placed the vial on the table and gestured to Brown. "Brown, I want you to start with the atomic lattice. Like the run last month." In preparation, he shut his eyes and leaned on the table, waiting for Verma to begin her transceiver work. It didn't take long.

The lattice structure was... interesting. Very tightly bound, unusually so even for rubiconium-based substances. Same composition, but definitely something unusual going on.

"Focus on one of the heavier atoms." Those were the ones where the exotic physics went on in rubiconium, mostly; the ones with the relatively massive quasiboson condensates bound into the nuclei. Despite the sudden change in resolution of orders of magnitude, the picture from Brown via Verma was still perfectly clear: the atom as a true physicist might dream of it, in defiance of all observer effects! This was why the sense of perception was so valuable; while conventional instruments might detect events inside the atom, they invariably did so by disturbing the structure as they worked. Integrating the data from so many distorted images to form a complete picture of something as complex as a rubiconium-variant could take years, even for him.

But with this, he could find a starting point for investigation so much more quickly... he chuckled softly once again. Yes, there was definitely something interesting going on here; the outer orbitals were all wrong, with some sort of angular rippling that should not be present in an s-orbital. He had the picture clearly in his mind, and typed notes into his personal minicomp as he examined the image. He couldn't get any numbers out of this kind of image, of course, not to more than about five to ten percent error, but he'd know where to look using more conventional apparatus now.

"Brown, can you show me the nucleus?" That would save months in itself, if he could deduce exactly what the problem is.

"I'm... I'm not sure. It's... twisty. Feels... wrong."

"Brown, this is very important. I need to see the nucleus!"

The Type Two was at least obedient, there was that to be said for him. Martin heard a faint grunt with his own ears, but his concentration was entirely on the picture being passed to him by Verma.

YES... Now he saw where the angular perturbations were coming from! There was some kind of spin-hyperspin coupling with the condensate component, something he'd wondered about but never been able to implement properly experimentally. Always he tried, and always... wait.

"Brown, step back two orders of magnitude."

"Phew. Thanks, boss!" The picture expanded and the nucleus shrank to a small speck.

Hmm. If I'm right... "Brown, one more thing. I need you to isolate the nuclear magnetic moment of this and all the surrounding atoms of the same element."

"Nuclear magnetic... magnetic..." Am I going to have to explain to him again? For the... eighteenth time? But Brown thumped his hand against the table. "I remember! OK, gimme a minute." The mental images blurred and spun, no longer resembling anything Martin could recognize from his knowledge of nuclear physics. For this to work, Brown would have to examine a large number of atomic nuclei scattered across the width of many atoms: a feat equivalent to detecting a dozen peas spread across a volume the size of a city. Granted that most of that volume was empty or nearly so; it was still an feat precious few perceptionists could perform. Times like this made all the irritation of dealing with Brown worthwhile.

Soon the picture cleared, and Martin was rewarded with a dozen side-by-side images of different nuclei, all seemingly identical. The spin... YES!

"That will be all, Brown." The image vanished, and Martin opened his eyes... to see Brown stagger against the table. Verma rushed over to steady him.

In all fairness, all objectivity, Brown had just performed a valuable service.

"I have work to do, but... thank you, Brown. You did very well." The esper gave his employer a weary grin; Martin nodded briskly and strode out of the lab. He would need some gear brought in from the storage bay.

Image

LEXCOMP
March 17, 3400


It had taken him three days, with only a few precious hours' sleep and the occasional meal snatched on the side, but the experiment was a SUCCESS! While none of his old theories had shown the need for a rotating RF magnetic field in the synthesis chamber, it had been a simple matter to adapt his existing equipment to perform the task.

Dr. Martin felt a buoyant surge of joy. He had accomplished what generations of Umerian condensed-matter scientists had struggled towards. Even the most trivial effort on his part would guarantee groundbreaking theoretical papers now! For the lessons learned from this synthesis chamber result, combined with his existing corpus of theory, would permit even a simple perturbation expansion to reveal new, untold vistas of potential applications for rubiconium-derivatives!

Though... perhaps this discovery would have to be kept secret among the upper tier of the research community, given its military application. That would be saddening, but acceptable. Because even then, his development of a method to synthesize tylium would be a feather in his cap with the Ministry of Security, and that would help to expand his pull with the government.

Martin was ambitious- not out of line with his abilities, of course, but ambitious. Like many before him, he remembered the legendary genius of First Technarch Marc DuQuesne as a shining example of what a talented scientist with brains and determination could accomplish. It had been DuQuesne who led the Technocracy out of the opening disasters of the Jaggan War through victory and reconstruction. It had been DuQuesne who made the hard but necessary decisions. Yes, at the end he had been struck down for defying the impersonal Selection process, the man hadn't known when to quit while he was ahead, but that was a minor issue.

In spite of his imperfections, DuQuesne was a role model. Stories of his early work at the Rare Metals Laboratory had inspired Martin to go into condensed matter physics in the first place, and here was the opportunity to follow further in that great man's footsteps: military applications!

He just needed to find a few cooperative fellows at the Bureau of Armaments. He thought he knew who to call...
This space dedicated to Vasily Arkhipov
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Siege »

USS Intolerant
Tannhaus, Solarian Mid-Rim


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"Brigadier, Helm One. I have permission from Local Control, we have a clear run for Kansai-Hyogo ."

"Very well, Helm One. Match our heading for Sierra Gamma Alpha. What's our ETA to the hyperlimit?"

"Mark plus twelve minutes."

"Data One, hyperpulse to local control to expect visitors imminent. Data Two, inform Flag that we are heading in for transition. Helm, get us off the shelf. Let's get this shark fishing expedition underway, shall we?"

The strikestar Intolerant leapt forward with a speed belying its imposing bulk, accelerating toward the hypershelf of the Tannhaus system. Aboard, the Solarian delegation set to negotiate terms with the Chamarran Hierarchy in the capital of the Holy Empire.

Brigadier Stalin pensively looked out through the bridge tower windows. Everything about this mission was carefully tailored to give the Chamarrans pause: everything, from the emissary to the warship chosen to carry him. Not simply to intimidate the cat people, although that was certainly a factor, but moreso to make it absolutely clear that this was not something to be shrugged off, that the Sovereignty meant business. And Flash Stalin knew the Sovereignty meant business, for he had already seen the war plans drawn up by the Consensus. Plans to ambush the Chamarran armada in Wild Space and, using a triple hammer-and-anvil manoeuver, annihilate its entirety between Imperial, Cevaukian and Solarian flotillas.

Stalin was enough of a strategician to know the plan had a large chance of success. A-sec and Star Force knew the Wild Space araes along the Solarian-Cevaukian frontiers like the back of their hands; it wouldn't be difficult to ambush a fleet that would have no operational knowledge of that area whatsoever. And between three of the four powers that had managed to stare down a Collector fleet the likes of which hadn't been seen in recent memory, it was likely combined allied firepower would overwhelm whatever the Chamarrans may have deigned to send this way.

So sure, victory was a likely prospect. That didn't mean the Brigadier was wholly comfortable with the idea of war with the Chamarrans. Flash Stalin firmly believed the priorities of the Star Force should be the Bragulans, Karlacks and Collectors -- in that order. Whatever came next was distinctly unimportant. Sure; the cat people had committed a terrible faux pas; sure, they needed to be made to see the error of their ways; and sure, if they wanted to play ball he'd be more than happy to oblige them. But at the same time, one of the mantras of his Star Force conditioning kept ringing through his mind. "... thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory."

Stalin continued to watch impassively as realspace vanished and was replaced by the fractal vortex of hyperspace. Diplomacy, he knew, was just a continuation of war with other means. Embassies and court rooms were just another battlefield; one that might appear more civilized because of the absence of wanton bloodshed and murder... But how civilized could any place really be, if it was one where the fates of thousands or millions were signed away with the stroke of a pen? Certainly Flash Stalin preferred the honesty of hard vacuum war above the underhanded manipulations of diplomats. Regardless however his government had seen fit to give him a mission, and he would seek to accomplish it. And if it was possible to do so without firing a shot, all the better.
Image
SDN World 2: The North Frequesuan Trust
SDN World 3: The Sultanate of Egypt
SDN World 4: The United Solarian Sovereignty
SDN World 5: San Dorado
There'll be a bodycount, we're gonna watch it rise
The folks at CNN, they won't believe their eyes
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Steve »

Tanara House, Westminster
New Anglia, Star Kingdom of New Anglia
28 March 3400



Janice was first out of the car and noticed that they were about on time; there was a crowd of people at the door, various peers and their families waiting to get announced at entrance, as the Lushan could be fairly insistent upon such protocols. She waited for Danielle and Amber to step up before she did, allowing them to go first in deference to their higher social rank. The two lovers set their arms around each other - Danielle's right and Amber's left - as they walked up, Dani being ever the flirt by running her hand along Amber's backside and giving it a feel before settling it on her hip. "Down, Dani, there'll be plenty of time for that tonight," Amber remarked.

"Oh yeah. Rowr."

"Your Grace, please," Janice pleaded as they came up to wait in line. They all recognized Violet McAdams, the former holovid starlet and wife of the Duke of Aberdeen, ahead of them; they shared an amused glance at each other. McAdams thought she was being daring wearing that Cliffton gown, but the Julianis the two were wearing made the Cliffton look, well, almost as modest as Janice's gown.

They waited patiently - the people behind them didn't think much of their dresses since the daring part was in the front while, ahead, nobody was bothering to look backward.- until they got to the door. The sashed-and-robed Dorei servant who greeted them struggled to find his voice as he confirmed their invitations and announced them, title-by-title, thankfully not an exhaustive process.

Some eyes turned toward them. There were looks of surprise and disapproval. Janice herself began to burn red with embarrassment, enough to make up for the fact that her employer had none. "Look at them gawk," Dani murmured happily.

"I just hope we don't get Prince Yanal on the war path over this," Amber murmured. She was blushing too and took hold of Dani's arm. "I know it was my suggestion to wear the Julianis, but I'm starting to have second thoughts."

"You shouldn't, it's a great idea. Besides, we're not the only ones here showing off." She indicated a Dorei woman, teal-skinned, who was wearing a strapless dress nearby. It was a Dorei fashion, obviously, and very flattering on the woman's form. "We're just being... more bold about it."

"Yes. 'More bold'. If my father were here..." Amber forced a smile to come to her face as a Dorei male stepped up, wearing a formal uniform and balancing a tray with glasses of wine. She and Danielle each took one, after which she took an immediate drink of it. "Just let me have some wine and my courage will be back."

Dani giggled at that, using her free hand to hold Amber's tightly. "We'll just make some rounds and head back to my place for the night."

Amber nodded. As she did so, her mind went back to the bill she'd gotten. No, don't want to think about that. Tonight I just want to be with Dani and have fun.

"Let's go pay our respects to the guest of honor," Dani said. "To get that out of the way."

They milled their way through those already in attendance and up toward where the Lord Priest would be sitting and standing through the night, greeting the elite of Westminster. He was tall, almost six and a half feet high, wearing robes that seemed out of place amongst the evening dinner wear of the assembled crowd. A woman of Oriental descent stood beside him, wearing robes as well. As they waited a servant offered them shuri snacks, a kind of sweetened pastry made from Lushan grain, which they accepted and munched on briefly.

They walked up to the Lord Priest, Ramay, after the Baroness of Siena had given him a greeting. Danielle introduced herself and allowed Amber to do the same. Ramay paid no heed to their dress, though whether it was genuine lack of caring or incredible tact you'd have to be a mind-reader to know. He introduced Knight-Captain Ann Wu, the head of the Silver Moon delegation sent to be part of his formal guard for this event, and they exchanged handshakes as well.

Danielle turned and saw the wings first. You always tend to notice them. And then the complexion, the figure... the face.

Amber saw her too. "Isn't that...?"



Shayera had seen them enter. The sight of Danielle in her dress was not surprising; she hadn't changed at all, it seemed. At least, not that part of her. Seeing her again, and dressed in such a flattering way, brought back thoughts and memories Shayera had spent the day trying to bury.

The woman beside her, announced as Countess Amber of San Luis, was equally beautiful. She could see their arms together and knew what it meant. For a moment Shayera didn't know what to feel. Betrayal? Consignment? Seeing that Danielle had moved on was telling her she had to as well, just as Cassandra had said.

She looked away. She could still sense their location, but didn't want them to see her. A part of her wanted to talk with Danielle again, but her thoughts restrained her. Could she bear to hear her say something along the lines of "Oh, she's my old crush as a teenager"? She wanted Danielle to remember her as she remembered Danielle, and perhaps to hear she still harbored thoughts and yearnings like Shayera did.

She kept looking away, monitoring one of the side doors, trying to focus on her duty as protector and not think about other things. She thought about security, and where potential attacks could come from, anything but...

She sensed the thoughts moments before the words came out. "I know you." Shayera turned to face Countess Amber, who had split off from Danielle for the moment. Shayera felt a little lump in her throat. "Danielle has pictures of you." Amber tried to smile, knowing how awkward this was. "I'm Amber."

"I heard you announced, Your Ladyship," Shayera answered politely. "I'm pleased Danielle is with someone so like her." There was a sly grin on her face as she looked at Amber. "Who's idea was it to attend the hosting party for His Eminence wearing those?"

"Mine," Amber answered, a little apologetic. "Dani wasn't going to come, but I appealed to the part of her who likes to tease high society."

"She has gotten more daring over these years then. She used to restrain herself somewhat to not give grief to her poor father, may he rest in peace." Shayera briefly looked back to the door - being on duty and such - before looking back to Amber. "You're lucky to have her."

Amber nodded. Her thoughts centered on that; for all the financial troubles she's had, and keeping Sarina in line, and the fuss of being in the National Parliament... Danielle made it all worthwhile. Since she was thinking actively of these things, it was hard for Shayera to not hear those thoughts, especially when her mind flipped over the message on her loans she'd gotten. Looking Amber in the eye and putting a sympathetic hand on her arm, Shayera remarked, "You should tell her, Amber."

Amber looked at her intently. "What?"

"I apologize. I wasn't looking into your mind but... you're dwelling on your money issues rather strongly now, I can't help but hear your thoughts. It'd be like telling someone to not hear things being shouted in their ear," Shayera explained. "Dani would pay for your bills without fuss."

A blush of red came to Amber's face. "This isn't any of your business," she growled, lowly, not wanting to cause a commotion.

"You're afraid Dani would start to see you as a gold-digger. She wouldn't, not after so many years," Shayera continued, feeling shame and anger resonate in Amber. "But it has to be your decision, I'll be quiet about it now."

Before Amber could raise her voice again, a hand touched her on the shoulder. "Couldn't let curiosity go, could you?", Dani remarked, a bit of a happy giggle coming from her. Looking to Shayera, Dani's expression was soft, though Shayera could sense a bit of... irritation? Concern? She wasn't entirely certain, nor did she want to bring it up. "Shay, you look good."

"As do you, Dani," Shayera replied plainly. "Amber says these dresses were her idea?"

"Wearing them here, yes? Though if it hadn't been here, it'd be somewhere else suitable. Anything short of the King's Birthday, really," Dani explained. She didn't need ESP to see that Shayera was having... thoughts about her again. "I wouldn't have worn it if I knew you were coming," she continued. "After all, I might tempt you away from whatever hottie you're undoubtedly shacked up with in the Order."

Shayera grinned thinly. "Yes, thank you for that consideration," she said, not wanting to mention her status as resolutely single since she'd been with Dani. "Well, I hope you enjoy the night. I'm afraid I'm on duty."

"Thank you, Shay. Take care of yourself." Dani wrapped her arm around Amber's and pulled her away amiably. "Amber, I'd like you to meet Mr. Coswell, he's a professor I had at university...."

Shayera watched them go and let out a sigh. She has moved on was the thought that occupied her again and again, prompting tears to come to her eyes. "Sister Shayera?" Jala, the blue-skinned Dorei Sentinel part of their contingent, had walked up and was looking at her. "Are you okay? I sense you are hurt."

"Only my heart, Jala." Shayera looked to the younger woman. "You have had a Bond?"

"Not yet," Jala answered. "I would prefer a male suitor, Sister, so I am waiting until I meet a good one."

"Ah. Good luck to you on that. Just remember the lesson I learned; not all love lasts." Taking a last look to where Dani and her lover were talking with a man, Shayera turned away a final time. "I believe I am to relieve you on the perimeter? I would like to be outside for a while anyway..."


Several hours later...


Dani and Amber had ended up staying at the function until the very end, not leaving until nearly an hour before midnight. They held hands and remained silent on the way home. Amber could see that seeing Shayera again had made Dani start to think. She was thinking herself, thinking of what the older woman had told her, advised her, to do.

"So, what did you think about her?", Dani asked aloud as they waited in traffic to head on to Galicia House.

"Hrm?"

"Shay. My old girlfriend?" Dani smirked. "What did you think about her?"

"Oh." Amber chuckled nervously. "Um, an interesting woman. And kind. Though I don't know how she was when you two were together."

"About the same, though more fiery. We used to wrestle quite a bit while making love." Dani blushed and took Amber's hand. "Not that I'll bring up much about that. It was twenty years ago and you're the one in my life now, Amber."

"I know." She swallowed. The advice she got from Shayera played in her mind again. "Dani... do you remember the cottage villa my family owns off Rosaria Bay?"

"The one outside New Columbian Los Angeles? Yes, I do." Dani grinned. "It was a cute little place, and we had quite the weekend there as I remember."

"Yes, we did." Amber drew in a sigh. "I... I have to sell it, Danielle."

"Sell it?" Danielle looked to her. "Why?"

"If I don't come up with the money to pay up on the house loan I took out on the main estate, the one I used to pay for Sarina's tuition, they're going to raise my payment up. And if I don't get it paid up soon enough they'll put a lien on my property." Amber looked ahead. "I need to pay it off, Dani. I thought I'd be able to, but then the Government voted through that reduction to our stipends and I'm not getting the income from the land renters and tenants I'd been expecting. Plus the tuition costs went up...."

"Amber, it's okay, sweetie," Dani said to comfort her. "I'll pay the note off for you. How much is it?"

"Dani?! I couldn't ask..."

"I've got a lot of money, Amber, I can't spend it all on fine living," was the sarcastic answer. Dani reached over and pulled her close. "I love you, so it's no big deal." She planted a kiss on Amber's forehead and waited as the car came to the road her home was on.



Tasker Cloister, New Caroline Islands
New Anglia, Star Kingdom of New Anglia
29 March 3400



It was the night of the following day when Shayera was able to return home. Zaharia immediately retired to her dorm, leaving her mentor to fly about the Cloister and think. Though when it came down to it, she'd been thinking non-stop since the prior night. Seeing Dani involved, and happy, had made her realize that she'd been foolish to hold out for so long, sublimating her passions with her attention to her career.

Even Rana has found happiness, she thought to herself, knowing her former acolyte was Bonded to a young ESPer girl from Pendleton. She'd not been able to attend due to duties, but she'd sent her congratulations. Now that occurrence was coming to her mind as well. And she came to her conclusion.

She had to move on.

Shayera dipped low and to a window. She set the device on her belt to let her levitate outside the window and looked in, seeing Cassandra there, still in her vest and pants. "Cassandra?", she said.

That prompted her to turn. "Ah, having an evening flight now that you're out of the Capital?" Cassandra grinned and motioned for her to enter. "How was it?"

"It was... enlightening." Shayera took in a breath. "Where is Sister Micaela?"

"She's not here right now. If you're wondering about us, well, it's strictly for pleasure and companionship." Cassandra crossed her arms and grinned. "Micki actually wanted you to join us."

Shayera blushed at that. "I'm... I'm not that..."

"Kinky? I know. And honestly with the wings I think it'd get a bit crowded..." Cassandra stepped up. "So, what is it you want? I sense you're having thoughts, something happened in Westminster?"

"Yes. I saw Danielle, Cassandra."

Cassandra's expression shifted to direct interest. "Wow. How is she?"

The reply was telepathic. Shayera showed Cassandra her memories of the prior night, of Danielle and Amber, and how they looked. "Goddess, she is gorgeous," Cassandra answered. "And those closes... surely His Eminence didn't become offended? That... that's so provocative."

"And unbelievably sexy," Shayera finished for her. "As for His Eminence, I don't think he cared. He was forewarned that some of the elite of Westminster and New Chatham were bold beyond words."

"At least they avoided that." Cassandra gestured for Shayera to sit on the side of her bed. "So, you've seen her. And she's involved."

"Yes. You were right. And I've decided... I need to move on." She pulled a lock of red hair out of her eyes. "I'm ready to find someone."

"And would that someone be me?", Cassandra asked with a smile.

"Well, you've been flirting with me for months," Shayera pointed out. "I figured there was some interest."

"Oh, there is." Cassandra's eyes had a bit of a twinkle to them. "But what am I going to do about Micaela? She is a strong woman, like you... passionate and devoted. And I enjoy her a lot..."

"Well, it's your choice. If you say no..."

"I'm not saying no. What I"m saying..." The mischief in her voice came through clearly now, as she stopped for a moment. "What I'm saying is, before you get into it for Bonding you should probably take some time to enjoy yourself."

"Uh huh?" Sensing her friend's thoughts Shayera grinned widely. "And I guess what you're hinting at is that if Micaela comes into the room we should both stay. Despite all the issues that come when we ladies start competing for each other?"

"Well, 'compete' is a strong word. I was thinking of something a little more... collective." Cassandra grinned slyly. "There's nothing in the Code about it, after all."

"Mostly because we're presumed to be smart and mature enough to avoid these things."

"Maybe. So..." Their eyes met as Cassandra let the word hang in the air a moment. "What's your answer?"

It took a few seconds for it to come. And while it wasn't verbal, it was certainly related to it, as Shayera took Cassandra's cheeks in her hands and planted a firm kiss on her mouth. I hold judgment on what will happen if Micaela comes in, though, was the telepathic warning as they kissed warmly.

You say that now, but once I've got you going I don't think you'll mind was the insistent reply, as they reached for one another's wardrobe with the intention of removing it.
”A Radical is a man with both feet planted firmly in the air.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism." - Sir Winston L. S. Churchill, Princips Britannia

American Conservatism is about the exercise of personal responsibility without state interference in the lives of the citizenry..... unless, of course, it involves using the bludgeon of state power to suppress things Conservatives do not like.

DONALD J. TRUMP IS A SEDITIOUS TRAITOR AND MUST BE IMPEACHED
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Siege »

Villa Straylight
Geosynchronous orbit around Solaris


Image

“Grab your coat and get your hat,” sang the woman on the ancient vinyl record. “Leave your worries on the doorstep...” The laser phonograph rendered Judy Garland's voice in soft tones reminiscent of times long gone. It was an antiquated form of entertainment in this age of fully-immersive holodiscs – almost regressive, even. Strangely though, it somehow seemed to fit with the times. 3400 was turning into a year of strange tidings. Old friends long lost to the mists of time stalked the face of the galaxy once more.

“Luckily,” the ancient man in the wing chair said to no-one in particular, “I don't believe in signs and portents.” Maybe if he repeated it often enough, he thought, he'd eventually believe that. Sidney got up out of the chair and placed his hands on the mezzanine's stone balustrade. Through the open doors behind him, the music continued to play through the villa's expansive library. Below him, the green expanse of bio-dome #3 stretched for miles. And above him, behind the vaulted steel and safety glass of the dome, the vacuum of space. Even after all these years, the sight of mighty, violet-hued Solaris could take his breath away.

He considered the latest message and wondered if perhaps he should have changed his name after all. It would not have been difficult, especially not in the mad days of the early Diaspora, to board a colony-ship bound for the frontiers and beyond; to change his identity, to become lost in the swell of humanity surging out from the Twin Cradles.

But he hadn't, for practical reasons as much out of sheer bluster. He had, he now realized, taken a liking to being regarded as a living legend. Back in the old days his connections, experience and sheer political capital had allowed him to play a role in the formation of the United Nations of Earth and Nova Terra. By that time he'd already been 200 years old, one of the first to embrace experimental life-extension technologies. He'd taken a liking to power, or perhaps it had taken a liking to him. It had been one of many character flaws, that firm belief that he was uniquely suited – indeed, uniquely capable – of guiding the twin worlds of humanity through the politically difficult, philosophically perturbing and existentially worrying process of contact and unification.

He'd served as the UN High Commissioner for Nova Terra; as the Executive Secretary for Interstellar Integration; even briefly as Deputy Secretary-General. He'd spent decades so mired in the convoluted politics at the UN headquarters on Luna that he'd been by and large oblivious to the pressures building in the Human Sphere. There had been warnings, sure. Plenty of them, from his own wife even, but he'd ignored them – after all, surely he knew what was good for the little people?

But he hadn't, or at least the disgruntled masses hadn't seen it that way, and by the time he realized that it had been too late. The Great Upheaval had been a humbling experience. He'd tried to keep things from falling apart during the the March of the Light-Huggers, the Babel Elevator Crisis, even the Snow Plague. It had been the Meme Wars and the subsequent Neurasthenia that had finally forced him away from Earth again.

Fleeing the Twin Cradles by hyperyacht during the latter half of the Diaspora, he'd found himself truly alone for the first time in a very long while. Everyone he knew, he'd left behind. It hadn't even been that difficult: most of the people he truly knew had been dead for decades or centuries by that point. The few friends he had left, weren't. He'd become estranged from even his wife. He'd started over, from scratch, in a remote corner of the Perseus Arm.

But he'd never changed his name. Out of stubborn pride he had refused to sever that last link to his past.

Now though, after all those centuries, he began to wonder if that had not been a mistake after all.
Hello Sidney.

I was thinking we need to meet again. Hopefully it'll end up better than it did the first time we met, I wouldn't want to have to jump out of a helicopter again and go running around the Sabikan countryside. Besides, I doubt you've learned how to use anti-tank rocket launchers beyond those simple Shepistani ones we found? For that matter, I doubt you've ever come around to not selling weapons to people who might one day shoot at you, which was what put us in that situation in the first place.

As for where, I figured you would be best suited to find an appropriate meeting place. I'm afraid the Veil is short on comfortable places to meet, especially this dustball planet I've been staying on. Would you mind securing a ride for me? A man of your resources should easily figure out which planet I'm on and who to send. I'll be waiting patiently. Patience is a trait we pick up over the years...

Sincerely,
An Old Friend

P.S. Daphne never got around to killing you over the rocket launcher stunt like you thought she would, did she?
The hyperwave message originated from a Star Force strikestar on a long anti-spinward patrol. According to a brief explanation added by the transmitter, a green lieutenant serving aboard the warship, he'd been asked to send it by some kind of hermit, who lived on a planet called 'Toutaine' by the locals. It was a distant and inaccessible place, located somewhere in the sectors beyond the Veil of the Pfhor. Despite his insistence on details, the lieutenant couldn't give him more than a brief description of the man and the two women that accompanied him. As far as brief descriptions went, though, it was spot on.

“Another one,” he mumbled. “I must stand out like a flashlight in the dark.” Given the circumstances it was hardly unexpected, he figured. He was, after all, not hiding anymore. After two centuries of laying low he had figured the galaxy would've forgotten about him. And for the most part, it had. No doubt there were still people around who realized he was the same man as had been around during the Upheaval, but by and large the universe had moved on, and no longer realized they were dealing with the same man who'd authorized blanket nerve-stapling during the Syndicate Wars.

He went over the message one more time, and ruthlessly forced down the pang of regret he felt when he read the name of his wife. It was quite clear who the hermit was. He hadn't met Stephen Garrett as frequently as the President of the UCSR – now turned Karlack Aspect – but those few times had been memorable. They had been forced to fend for their life together when their helicopter was shot down in the Coilerburger countryside; they had come out of retirement together to end the cold war between the Pacific Union and the North Frequesuan Trust. He had seen the man one last time, that fateful day in Lem Base when the Straylight had launched for Earth. That had been three days before he died.

They all died. Cold bitterness welled up in Sidney's throat. They all died and left me to fend for myself, and now they're all coming back, just like that. As if nothing happened... As if a thousand years didn't pass. The unreasonable grudge surprised even himself. There was nothing 'just like that' about it. The sorry bastards could hardly help their circumstance – they had no defense against the meddling of weakly godlike beings, not like he did, anyway. Besides, he'd chosen this path for himself. To live forever had been nobody else's decision but his, and to blame anyone for the results was... spurious. Logic routines kicked in and isolated the unusual thoughts from the main mind-construct. It was the digital equivalent of a cold shower.

Abruptly he turned and paced back into the library, cross-referencing vast volumes of data on the Veil of the Pfhor and those known to be familiar with that region of space as he did. Stephen Garrett wanted to speak to him again, and if to do so meant retrieving him from some hole in Pfhor space, he'd do just that. He owed the man at least that much. A thought opened a hologrammatic screen in mid-air, the projectors craftily hidden in the tiled floor. “Rise and shine, Jason. I've got a job for you.”

On the other side of the Datasphere connection, a man muttering what were undoubtedly vile curses disentangled himself from his bedsheets and turned to the camera. In the process of doing so he revealed the naked back of – is that Phani? Whatever the case, Jason Chandra obviously couldn't quite appreciate the interruption of his sleep cycle. “Boss,” the mercenary grumbled, obviously still sleep-dazed. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“Time to pack your bags. I need you on the next priority flight for Anglian space.”

“Ang-” Jason frowned. “What in the name of all that's holy could possibly in Anglia that can't wait 'til morning?”

“I need you to find a man and offer him a very lucrative contract. His name is Bartholomew Miedan. He's a former officer in the Anglian navy who's-”

“I know him,” the mercenary cut him off. “He runs this ship called the, uh, Flare or something.”

“Strahl.”

“That's the one. Motley crew, penchant for heroics, fancies himself quite the dashing gentlemen. We've run into one another on several occasions.”

“Ah. I never knew that.” Sidney raised an eyebrow. “These run-ins wouldn't happen to be of the... physical kind, would they? This is no time to settle grudges.”

“Nah. It was just business, nothing personal. He's quite the Rooinek, that one.” Jason pulled himself out of bed, obviously resigned to the fact that he wouldn't get back to sleep anytime soon. In doing so he revealed more of the woman beside him – she was definitely the Wild Geese sniper. “What do you need Balthier for?”

“There is a certain somebody I need picked up behind the Veil... Or possibly multiple persons. I'll send you the specifics, but suffice it to say he's the most trustworthy person I know that's familiar with that area.”

The mercenary nodded slowly. “This another one of your... special cases?”

“It is,” Sidney attested.

“Alright.” Jason nodded. He wasn't wholly aware of what was going on, but between the revelation at Grid Works and the meeting at Mistral Station, he knew there was more to his employer than met the eye, and that he was caught up in things far greater and all-encompassing than the usual Solarian corporate intrigue. That was fine by him though: the knowledge that the success of whatever galaxy-changing machinations were afoot might depend on his actions was a thrill like no other. “Where do you suppose I can find him?”

“Mr. Miedan and his crew base out of Lochley's Retreat,” a pause and a flurry of Datasphere activity that Chandra wasn't able to see but inferred. “I have arranged a priority transition from the Solaris Stargate through to New Anglia and a fast courier...” Sidney cracked a smile. “With plenty space for two.”

Jason Chandra blinked, still a little groggy and daunted by how his employer just spent more money in a split second than most people made in a year. “Why for two... Oh,” he looked from the camera to the sleeping figure next to him, then back to the camera. “This is not what it looks like.” He frowned. “All right, it's exactly what it looks like, but I can explain.”

His employer waved his concerns away. “This isn't the military, Jason, you can do whatever the hell you feel like as long as it doesn't affect your abilities.” He theatrically looked at his watch. “Now the both of you better get packing. Your yacht leaves in one hour, and the stargate isn't waiting.”
Image
SDN World 2: The North Frequesuan Trust
SDN World 3: The Sultanate of Egypt
SDN World 4: The United Solarian Sovereignty
SDN World 5: San Dorado
There'll be a bodycount, we're gonna watch it rise
The folks at CNN, they won't believe their eyes
Simon_Jester
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Simon_Jester »

Offices of the Bureau of Armaments
0930 Hours Reisenburg Planetary Time, March 18, 3400


Dr. Anton Krupsky grunted as the visiphone buzzed. He'd just been getting into the latest report from the proving grounds people about the performance of the Bragulan missile buses- the ones they hadn't dismantled the warheads from were proving... very easy to operate, really. Worth considering in a standalone role, though they'd never fit into the existing system defense networks. He checked the number, the picked up the phone very fast. As expected, the face was Alexander Martin's.

"Yes, Alex?"

"Good morning, Anton. I've done it."

"What, already?"

"Oh yes. Once I had a sample to work with, it was... relatively straightforward to work out the rest. I can have the first batch of synthetic tylium over to your people for examination as soon as you can get a courier over here."

Gods of space, how did he do that in three days? But Dr. Martin rarely answered questions like that until after he'd gotten a chance to publish, or until after he'd been outright ordered to do so by the government. He stuck to the heart of the matter. "How much?"

"Only about fifty grams for the first lot. You know the drill, Anton. "A very little of that stuff will go a long way." It was true of stabilized metallic hydrogen, and it's even more true of this stuff." Anton nodded. Alex's fascination with First DuQuesne might be a little stronger than was healthy, but there were admittedly worse role models for a scientist to aspire to, and in this case DuQuesne's comments during his latter days at RML definitely applied.

"Hmm. If you were running your apparatus continuously, with minimum regard for safety consistent , how much could you manage in theory?"

"No more than a few kilos a day even then. Call it... three to three point four. That will do for a few test firings, but we'll need something larger if we want to pass it out to SpaceSec."

"Good. Can you set it up on the test range by your lab, one of the side buildings?" No sense risking blowing up the whole lab...

"Already started. The equipment is mounted on the pallets and going out the door as we speak." Martin missed a trick once in a while; this hadn't been one of those times, apparently.

"Great. Now that you've got it, any idea what to do with it?"

"Aside from 'stick it somewhere in the warhead and pray?'" Martin laughed scornfully. "No. But one of my people will run the apparatus while I work on that. It's not my strong suit, so I'll want someone to check my math in... call it tomorrow afternoon. I think we can get some good from the stuff just by wrapping a jacket of the stuff around the secondary core. Crude, but hopefully effective."

"Thought you said you didn't have an idea."

"I don't; I have an abstract. I'll call you when I've got the math."

Goldberg Crater
Dark Side of the Moon Reisenburg Alpha
March 22, 3400


Image

Anton had to give the team credit; they had worked frighteningly fast on this one. The modifications to the fission-fusion demo charge weren't all that extensive, but it had still taken a truly unreasonable number of man-hours to get it made. Most of our best tend to work to the job, not the clock, when there's science to be done...

Reisenburg Alpha was too light to hold an atmosphere; so far, no one had tried to make it do so. There were fairly extensive habitat domes and underground cities- all comfortably far from this test site. It was the best site they could find on such short notice: the detectors and monitors had been rushed out of various Armaments Bureau facilities in the system. This wasn't a world-changer on the strategic level, but it was big enough to get people moving within the Bureau.

The observation bunker on the lip of the crater was a standard modular unit, flown in by planetary landers, but it was well armored and at a comfortable safe distance from even the maximum plausible yield of the amount of tylium they'd wrapped around the device. Even so, Anton had been tempted to watch from a video feed from the other side of the moon- exotic physics was nothing to cavil with. But when he'd found out Dr. Martin would be there, he decided there was nothing to worry about. Martin took risks, sometimes very alarming ones, but only when he was gambling on his own competence.

Anton could do worse than to gamble on the same.

"Three... two... one... zero."

A nuclear initiation in vacuum wasn't as impressive as one in air. There was a flashbulb burst of light, damped so as not to be blinding by the bunker windows. A moment later, the shock wave propagating out through the ground rattled the floor. Anton had been to enough test firings in this class of observation bunker to know something was different, though; at this distance he should barely have felt the shockwaves...

One of the Bureau technicians looked up. "Yield looks to be about one point three... one point three seven times nominal maximum." That was... well, a bit disappointing compared to some of the theoretical yields, given how much they'd used. He turned to Martin.

"Think the geometry needs work?"

"Yes. Now if you'll excuse me, I have more work to do."

Anton nodded. "You can come with me on the Bureau shuttle." What am I forgetting... OH! Turning to the test oversight team, he gave one last order before leaving.

"Make sure there's no rubiconium down in the crater. If we have to police some up, we'd better get on it fast. I don't want my grandchildren looking up at a moon made out of green Swiss cheese."

Offices of the Bureau of Armaments
March 28, 3400


Anton grinned into the visiphone as he spoke to his superior, Dr. Cheng, head of the Bureau. "The second shot was more of a success, sir. We used the same mass but got 1.8 times over the device's design yield."

"Does tylium burn clean?"

"Looks like, just as our intel from the Shepistanis suggested. No sign of even microscopic rubiconium formation, very little particle radiation of any kind. Lots of hard X-rays but that's to be expected. We did the second shot on Kronos to get a look at atmospheric effects."

"In a hydrocarbon-slush atmosphere?"

"Well yes, but we couldn't very well do it on Reisenburg. Third device is on the way out to one of the Fringe worlds now to test in an oxy-nitrogen atmosphere, but as far as we can tell, the stuff seems to be almost as clean as pure-fusion."

Dr. Cheng chuckled. "You know, that would explain why the Bragulans deliberately jacketed the ground-attack missiles in an extra layer of radioisotopes."

"...they did what?"

"Think of them as huge hairy Sheppoes for a moment, and it'll all make sense."

"What, to give it more fallout?"

"Commensurate with the levels we'd see from an unusually dirty fission device of the same yield."

"...damn. That's harsh."

"Exactly. One more reason I wouldn't trade Fritz and the Sheppoes for the Koprulu Region if you paid me."

"Tell me they don't do the same thing for the antiship missiles, the ones we're actually thinking of buying?"

"They do not. Apparently they had a moment of clarity or something. Anyhow, how soon do you think you can have a modified prototype that'll fit a missile chassis?

"One more week. Two more after that to optimize, and three more after that to have enough of the things to pass a few out to Fleet units."

"How many will we be looking at by then? And how effective?"

"I can't swear that they'll be optimal, but they should work. Call it... to within maybe 20% error, fifty torpedoes and a thousand or so fighter-weights; take your pick whether you want Mark Five or Mark Six, but get back to me by the end of the week, because the refurbishment teams will have to start studying now to get it done on schedule."

"I assume you'll be able to keep up production at those rates?"

"Higher. I'll send you a curve projection, assuming we get priority on equipment, as will be in the appendices."

"Excellent. Should be enough to at least begin to outfit a control group-strength force. Now to find somewhere to send them for live-fire exercises..."
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1

Post by Steve »

Blind Boar Pub, Lochley Landing
Lochley's Retreat. The Outback
25 September 3400



As always, a visit to Lochley Landing by the crew of the Strahl meant a visit by their captain, and various members, to the pub (various except Marissa, who was judged to lack the necessary maturity to enjoy the establishment without challenging its seedier clientele to things like arm-wrestling bouts or axe fights, and Quinn, who disliked such places). Today it was Kaylee and Vanrya who had accompanied him, enjoying the slightly-alcoholic Dorei fruit drinks Vanrya had introduced Kaylee to while Balthier was content with his favored brandy.

It’d been a while since they’d been on Lochley. Balthier had been running goods into Sassanid territory from a Cevaucian vendor and, having to take the long way home, he’d investigated, to his satisfaction, the borders of the new state of unknowns who’d popped up in the old Nebradian Confederation. Now he was back “home” - as much as Lochley was his home as opposed to just a base of sorts given its trade position in the Outback - and waiting for a new job to pop up.

“I was thinking about the overhaul coming up,” Kaylee said, speaking more to Vanrya than him. “We’ve not been running through actual shoals for a while, but we’ve been doing a lot of running, some off-network spans, a good tune-up is just what she needs.”

“Tune-ups can be rather pricey given our customized drives,” Balthier mused. And while the money had been good from their latest run, and he’d had Fisher’s £200,000 in the bank should he need it, he wasn’t looking forward to draining that comfortable reserve as he’d undoubtedly have to. “Maybe after our next job?”

“Better hope the next job don’t take us into shoals then,” Kaylee retorted. “Drives don’t go on forever, and we’ve put our’s through some paces since I overhauled her for Pendleton. Shoal runs, distance runs... not counting our trips through the Gap. Would feel better with some new coils and a regulator, maybe some...”

Balthier gave her a bemused expression that told her she’d gotten through. “Well, I suppose you should investigate then. Do need to keep the Strahl in top shape.” He didn’t mention the money again. The truth was, as much as he liked getting paid, he was being honest when his reasons spoken concerned the cost of maintaining his ship. Money was not his objective and never had been; it was always about keeping his ship flying. It was what he wanted in life, really.

Taking a drink, Balthier noticed the door to the pub opening. A pair of individuals entered, looking rather intent on business. Most of the pub’s occupants hadn’t given the pair of newcomers more than a second glance. Because at first glance, they appeared ordinary enough: just a couple, arms intimately draped across one another, obviously well to do but not too much so that frequenting the Blind Boar would appear strange, and obviously enjoying each other’s company to the extent they seemed to hardly be paying attention to the rest of the bar at all.

A man like Balthier however, a seasoned explorer with more than ample experience dealing with officials in the pay of agencies of varying secrecy, wasn’t deceived by that first-glance appearance. Their clothes, they way they moved... Something about them was off. Not to mention there was something about the man that was familiar. Balthier caught the covert glances with which they were scanning the place for, he was certain, emergency exits, potential trouble-makers, and places one might find a hidden weapon. He also noticed how those glances lingered on him just a little longer than on the others. Clearly they recognized him as well. “Now, ladies, remember the rule about first impressions,” Balthier said in a low voice, just audible enough for his crewmen to hear. “I believe we have potential new employers to meet momentarily.”

Sure enough, the couple began surreptitiously making their way toward their corner of the Blind Boar. “Ah, Bartholomew Miedan,” the man began, and Balthier noticed how the woman had taken up a position that covered him with the practiced ease of a veteran soldier. And was he mistaken, or was that the outline of a set of throwing knives under her dress? “It’s been a while since the Browncoat War and the Independent Spinward Republic.”

Recognition dawned. “Jason Chandra. And please, it’s Balthier.” Balthier finished off his brandy. “Yes, it has been quite a while. Some rather tricky jobs in those days. As a matter of fact, I distinctly recall you attempted to kill me on one occasion.”

“Yes, good times were had by all. And I do believe I saved you from that Technocrat assassin later on.” Jason cracked an easy smile. “I have a business proposition for you. Mind if we sit down?”

“Of course, good company is hard to come by these days, especially when it’s so well-armed. Brandy?” He motioned with his hand where Cammie could see him, telling the barmaid he wanted more brandy. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Jason sat down. A barely perceptible gesture, and the woman who accompanied him took the empty seat next to him. “This is Phani, my... associate,” he introduced her. “We’re here on behalf of a very rich man. Mr. Hank implied you’ve worked with him before?”

“Ah, the illustrious Mr. Hank.” Balthier’s smile took on an edge now. When Hank hired out, the risks tended to be as great as the financial reward. “I have had the experience of being in his employ. I can see you’ve set yourself up rather well, Mr. Chandra. You actually accepted his pitch of a retainer offer?” At that moment Cammie came up with the bottle and more glasses.

“It seemed like the smart thing to do at the time. After all, I had to get out of Umerian space... rather hurriedly. And we don’t all possess ships with which to get out of Dodge.” He flashed a smile to show he held no grudge, and took a sip of the drink. “This is a very good Brandy.”

“Ghis, it is a favorite of mine,” Balthier answered.

“I can see why,” Jason said amicably. He changed the subject again. “Mr. Hank would like for you to pick up and deliver someone to him.”

“Ah. That sounds enough like a simple job, though knowing Mr. Hank it isn’t so simple.” Balthier leaned forward. “Particulars?”

“This someone is on a world behind the Veil of the Pfhor.” He pushed a piece of old-fashioned paper across the table. “These are the coordinates.”

“Hrm, Sector P-26. In a pocket of good space within the Rimward shoals off the Cevaucian Coreward Trunk.” Balthier thought back to the pair of times he’d been in the Veil before. It wasn’t quite so settled as Wild Space or the Outback. But the planet’s name was familiar. “Toutaine? I’ve heard of this world. It’s a dustball, a desert planet with a low population and no export of valuable.” Save flesh, sadly, he added mentally. “A favored place to lay low for pirates and slavers working the Pfhor-Wild Space trade lanes.” He looked up to Chandra. “Just who is Mr. Hank looking to recover from a planet like this? Don’t tell me it’s a fellow needing rescue from some trade deal gone bad.”

Another lopsided smile. “Nothing quite so spectacular I’m afraid. The fellow in need of transport is a... long-time acquaintance of Mr. Hank who for reasons of his own decided to take up residence on Toutaine. He’s changed his mind about that particular arrangement, but as I’m sure you know it’s not exactly the easiest place to get away from. Not to be deterred, the person in question managed to send a message along with a Star Force patrol, requesting Mr. Hank come get him. Your name,” the smile widened, “came up on top of the short list of people suitable to do the job. It should be a quick in-and-out... For a given value of quick. This is shoal space after all.”

“Yes.” Balthier looked to the paper again. “It will take us some time to get there. I’m not very welcome in Imperium space these days.”

“If it helps, Mr. Hank can arrange high-priority transit for your ship from New Anglia through to Cevault. That should shave quite some time off your initerary, yes?”

The mention of the capital world of the insular Cevaucian Ascendancy piqued Balthier’s interest, as it did the other two of his crew present. “A priority warp gate transfer? I imagine this ‘acquaintance’ of Mr. Hank’s is quite an important fellow then.” Balthier looked to Vanrya. “What do you say?”

“The Warp Gate transit from New Anglia to Cevault would shave about 10 days off our trip, and that’s if you’re willing to skirt through either Haruhii territory or the Tau Sectors.” The truth was, of course, that Balthier wasn’t very welcome in Haruhiist space either, while the Tau Sectors could be a dangerous place. Continuing, Vanrya said, “A warp gate trip would be rather useful to trim time off. We’ll be there in a week’s time from leaving here.”

“Indeed? That is a nice cut of time from our trip, and I have a liking to Cevaucian space.” Balthier looked back to Chandra. “Any time limits I should know of?”

Jason scratched his chin. “As you can probably tell, Mr. Hank is eager to speak with Mr. Garrett. The quicker you can get this done, the better.” He shrugged. “I’m afraid my employer can be quite an impatient man, y’see.”

“So experience has told me.” Balthier took a quick drink of brandy. Inebriation was setting in, but he was still sober enough to think - which told him he’d had enough. “I think you can report to your employer, Mr. Chandra, that he has my acceptance. We shall depart tomorrow for New Anglia. Our gate transit should be booked four days from now.”

“I’m sure he’ll be delighted to hear that,” Jason nodded. “That leaves just the matter of your compensation to discuss. Mr. Hank is prepared to offer you the following sum...” He pushed a data-chip the same way the piece of paper had gone.

Balthier read it. “Ah, a rather generous fee indeed, on top of paying for the gate transit I presume?”

“Of course.”

“It is clear this ‘Mr. Garrett’ is a fairly important fellow to Mr. Hank. That leaves how I am expected to contact him. I don’t suppose Toutaine has a planetary communication network that he can be called through?”

“You don’t suppose correctly. Unfortunately Mr. Garrett didn’t leave an easy means with which to get in touch with him...” Jason shrugged. “I’m afraid you’ll have to rely on your well-known resourcefulness, Balthier.”

“Yes, I suppose some work is to be had for compensation this generous,” he lamented in a way not entirely lamentful. “Though with Mr. Hank so eager to see him, you’ll understand if I’d like some indication of where he is on the planet. Toutaine has a population in the millions, after all, it would be faster to know precisely where he dwells.”

“You could begin your search north of Al-Yasuj,” Chandra was clearly going by what he was told now, having never visited the planet himself. “That is where the Star Force landed; most of the hamlets are located to its north. Other than that, we have preciously little leads.” He pointed at the woman beside him. “That’s why -- with your permission of course, oh captain my captain -- Phani and I will be tagging along. You’ll find that there’s nobody better at... finding people than her.”

“I see. Hopefully the search won’t take too long. Vanrya, call back to the ship, let Umar know we need to speed up our replenishment and to ensure we have provisions for two more people.” Balthier looked to Kaylee. “I would suggest that if you want to get at least some of your desired overhaul done, you see to it tonight.”

Kaylee nodded while Vanrya began making the call.

“I believe you will find our spare cabins satisfactory? There’s one for each of you. Or...” Being no fool, and with a bit of a glint in his eye, he continued, “perhaps just one?”

Jason and Phani looked at each other, and something unspoken passed between them. “One cabin will do,” he said with a carefully neutral voice. “We came by our own hyperyacht -- does your ship have hangar space to store it? I’d hate to leave it behind.”

“I’m afraid that will be quite necessary,” was the reply. “Our vessel lacks the hanger space for any ships. But I do know some people who can look after it.”

“That would be good.” A barely perceptible shrug. “I’m sure Mr. Hank can arrange for someone to bring back his ship for him.”

“I’m sure he can...”



Prince Jabin's Palace, outside al-Yasuj
Toutaine, The Veil, Sector P-26
27 September 3400



Jabin's man from the north had finally arrived, on his knees respectfully before his master. "Great Prince, I have come as summoned!"

Jabin brought up an image he'd taken of the two women he was now seeking. "Do you know who these people are?"

"I know not their names, but I have heard stories from the Yildiz in Jeziri," the man answered. "The alien woman has been called a 'Dorei'. She dwells at the Tari Homestead near the town where she watches over a student of the Holy Man."

"'Holy Man'?", Jabin asked, incredulous.

"The Man of the Plains, Your Highness! He lives at the edge of the wasteland, communing with the All-Highest God and standing watch against the Sand People! The Yildiz respect and fear him as an agent of Divine Power. It was he brought the alien woman to the Taris years ago. They whisper that he has also blessed the daughter of the Homestead."

"Why should they fear a mere hermit?', Jabin demanded.

"Because they have seen his power. My own neighbor was there when he created a new irrigation channel from the Samiz with but a wave of his arm!"

A psyker, then, was Jabin's thought. I shall have to send many men. "Very well. You please me with this news." Jabin nodded to one of his men. It was a special nod, complete with an apparently thoughtful hand on the chin that meant something else entirely when combined with the nod and the context. "Take him to his reward."

"Yes, Master," the guard said.

The messenger was led out, ready to receive the gift of the Prince he'd served so faithfully. He never saw the blade coming before it cleaved clean through his neck.

As the head and corpse were taken away to be disposed of, Jabin mused more on the situation. He wasn't one to kill messengers, usually, but the last thing he wanted was to risk the man speaking too much to others. He wanted to take this "Holy Man" by surprise, should he actively protect the two objects of Jabin's lustful desire. "Summon Captain Pakalîn," he said. "He has work to do."
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