SDNW4 Story Thread 1

[Dave]

Ojofu Sector (K:12)
Admirals Board Room, Ojofu Sector Command Station



Admiral Vantor sat down and nursed his Leefe whiskey. "The question, of course, is how to spin their offer to Parliament."

"How about the rapid response time the Eoghan patrols would give us?" said Rear Admiral Mylor.

"But it doesn't actually give us that." said Vice Admiral Drostan. "We don't have operational control over where they go. At best they'll tell us where they're going and listen to our suggestions."

"Alright, how about the fact that this is what we actually wanted? I mean, we're looking at a loan of up to three destroyer squadrons here!" replied Mylor.

"They didn't care when they scarfed down the Centrality's proposal, why should they now?" pointed out Vantor.

"Alright then, lady and gentleman, why don't you tell me what you had in mind?" said Mylor, a little irritated.

"I would suggest pointing out that it won't be their constituents running around getting killed." remarked Vantor. He chuckled. Quietly of course, for the Iduran manner of laughing looked more like a yawn to humans. "Kind of hard to vote for your MP when you're dead."

"Further, they can save money. We're only providing logistical support to the Eoghans -- we're not paying their salary or incurring ship maintenance costs." reminded Drostan. She turned back to Mylor. "Is that satisfactory?"

"Yes, it will suffice." grumbled Mylor.

Now Mylor just had to present the case to Parliament. Wouldn't that be fun?

[Agent Sorchus]

The Freebooter Vessel Bigga Fish
Kaptin Dharaz gazed out into the veil of hyperspace. His Mekboy was banging away on his plotin table, while da dok was pounding away on the Nob who broke his table.

He would be having fun joining the party in the Irdun Indar, Scalies space place. But no some Nob wit more hunger than sense jump'd on his table while chasin' a dinna squig. Unfortun'ly that but him 'tween the Kaptin and 'iz prey. Even now 'iz prey was escaping 'im as he flew 'round halv blind.

Reaching down with his power klaw he grasped the broken model of the prey ship.
That 'ittle ship would be 'iz.

Even if those gnats still chased 'im.



Iduran Cruiser Patriot
Captain Foj brooded upon his bad fate. What by the gods had he done to earn their displeasure? One big old pirate ship on scopes hunting a civilian transport, and five other very light targets on a similar vector. And all of them had eluded him with that last maneuver.

His first sign of the changing wind of fortune was the clatter that the sensor crew was generating. Finally the senior lieutenant raised up from the conversation and met the Captains eye. "Captain, we have re-established contact. Still reading one Ork ship, a Chevy-II class transport, and aprox 5 medium to heavy yachts. The ork ship has lost it's position relative to the transport, and the yachts are still keeping vector with the Ork and closing."

"Whats our position look like?"

"We're good to intercep... no wait. The freebooter is changing directions... and yes the yachts are matching. As it now stands the yachts will pass the Ork ship just prior to both intercepting the transport. We shouldn't be far behind. Nav give me an estimate."

"We will be there within four minutes of the intercept."

"All right fire control prepare an alpha strike on the Ork. With the next volley target half the Yachts, aim for crippling as best you can. Sustain missile fire on the Freebooter. Give me Internal. Men we are about to enter combat against the pirate scum. The freebooter is going to make this contest close, but we need to give the good fight so that the Ork stays long enough for reinforcements to arrive. Odds are we can't stop the pirates, but this crew will pull through."

"Captain Out."



Aboard the Yachts
Brenton shifted in the oh too comfortable seat of his Zord. His former reserve officer training sponsor (Capt Greg Smith-Hanson, USS Marines) was right the waiting was the worst part. He knew Effie was eager for the justice they were to exact on those that had taken her sister from them. This was but the first step in avenging the black ranger.

"Okay guys we found this old pirate finally and have him cornered. It is time to finish him. It's Morphing time!"

Thanks to the ever increasing destructive methods that soldiers had at their employ that there would be a requirement for far more sophisticated defenses. Power armor and force fields dominated the market, but for a bunch of vigilante goody two shoes neither were a good fit. Power armor was too threatening and depersonalizing, and force fields didn't work so well versus fists and swords. Thus the technology that they took an interest in was more akin to the Communes Fog than anything else. However this goop also incorporated Moshushi rituals and mana converters to physically augment the wearer.

The Dire Wolf's combat systems came alive around him as the limited mind machine interface sync'd up. The red goo that formed his armor stopped dripping over the consoles. "Red ranger ready, Dire Wolf standing by."

"Blue Ranger ready, Mad Cat warming up." Thaddeus happened to have been the member of the team that had the most experience as a Ranger. He knew the most about the Zords, but he had spent to much of his youth training for the role and not enough time working with other people as a team.

"Yellow Ranger ready. Vapor Eagle prepped." Miss Regina had never been that out going, and had her hidden past. She had been there when the Black Ranger fell, even if she had been an outsider amongst the team.

"Green Ranger ready! Jade Hawk all green." God, when would Alexander ever learn that the joke was just dead. Couldn't blame him, Sherisse had always gotten a laugh out of it and they were fighting in her name.

"White Ranger, Kit Fox is all set." Euphemia, aka Effie, the youngest of their little group. Her zord was even similar to her sisters Vixen. And yet they weren't that similar, just the nostalgia took it to a new level.

Hyperspace glittered around them as they approached the massive Freebooter from behind. The Chevy-II had given up on subtlety and was trying to make the run into a faster lane, this made it easy for the rangers to draw alongside the Ork. Grapples fired from all the Zords, solidly tethering them to the hulking vessel. Both the Dire Wolf and the Mad Cat strained to keep the Ork in hyperspace.

Effie started calling out the primary targets. While they could have formed the MegaZord, they wouldn't have been able to hit as many targets at once. And even with it's greater power the Ork ship would have held a great advantage in a traditional slugging match. The rangers weren't interested in a slugging match though.

Jade Hawk started their plan off smoothly, delivering 3 nicely formed Space Karate Chops to the primary Sensor's. The Vapor Eagle delivered wire guided short range missiles on the primary Gunz in-between kicking in a thruster station. Kit Fox dashed up and down the hull pulling at loose power cabling.

Not to be out done both the Red and Blue rangers were using their Space Parkour training to run down the tethers to board the Ship. After all they needed to ask the Kaptin some questions.

Kaptin Dharaz was easy enough to locate. Just go towards the greatest volume on the ship. Plus He was kicking some Mega-Nobs out one of the near airlocks, in a vain gesture of defiance.

Thaddeus dropped the first of the half dozen Nobs with a wall running jump kick to the back of the head. A Skorcha came across Thaddeus' back, while Brenton lashed out with blaster akimbo and then a sword swipe at the fallen Nob. Two Nobs fell back under the blaster fire, while another broke Brenton's charge into a dodge with the application of his Big Choppa. Thaddeus rose into a hand stand, which he transformed into a pirouetting kick versus the Skorcha Nob. The Nob fell, Thaddeus rolled through in time to see a Grotzooka fly past. Brenton found himself wishing that Sherrise was here, she really the heart for these types of brawls.

Both Brenton and Thad found the Kaptin's evil old eye. "What Dharaz? Care to give up?"

"Humes funny. Iz thinkin you should give up."

"Why Dharaz? It is just you and us and you know how it went last when it was just you and me," said Brenton as he smashed the Last Nob's head into the wall.

"Cause I gotz bett'r help now, alls thanx to Sorser'r Alfher. Girly show 'im what ya got." OoC:You need this music for the next section. It was my inspiration.

She hit from the side, slapping a grapple to Thaddeus as she pushed him out the 'lock. Brenton's heart stopped. His wish was horribly fulfilled. There she was, black armor still showing where it had been ripped asunder by last fight. But it was her, oh yes it was Sherrise.

So he jumped out into hyperspace, quickly deploying the safety cable. It was a smart move, because just like he had lamented only moments ago, she loved that sort of Brawl. Brenton quickly scrambled to reel Thaddeus to safety so that they could go back to the Zords.

Of course Vixen had joined the fight before they had gotten back to the cockpit. Brenton was almost to the Zord when the Vixen expertly got within the Jade Hawk's reach and deflected the claws into the Dire Wolf's tether. He drifted away from the battle, unable to make it into the Zord's cockpit to correct for the loss of the tether. he heard Effie freeze up. He heard as the Vixen severed all of the tethers save Alexanders. He heard as Thaddeus called out for Alexander to try harder.

When Alexander called out that he was separating from the Ork, Brenton couldn't fault him his logic. The Ork ship could drop out of hyperspace at anytime without the others fighting it. But he knew Alexander had stopped fighting well before calling his separation. He knew, and he couldn't do anything about it.

"Guys, lets meet up at the nearest bar, I think we're going to need it."



Iduran Cruiser Patriot
Captain Foj watched the Ork ship blip between hyperspace and realspace, well out of reach of his guns. He knew something had happened between the Yachts (that were even now fading away on his screens) and the Pirate. The Pirate ship obviously wasn't in good shape and had no heart for conflict now. Foj ordered a chase cvector to be set and for reinforcements to help finish the pirate, but he yearned to learn what had happened in the depths of hyperspace.

Still he remembered his manners and congratulated the Chevy-II for having successfully escaped pirates.

But now it was his turn to hunt in the depths of hyperspace.

[Siege]

Written by Shroom, modified for this setting by me!

Section City
Shin-Hokkaido, Solarian mid-rim



The best bounty hunter in the galaxy, Aurigan Bob, the Duke of Death, surveyed the street for ground cars and LARCs that would be coming in at hundreds of kilometers per hour. Finding the road to be safe, he nonchalantly crossed to the other side.

He had unfinished business to attend to. Half a year ago, he had received an invitation, a challenge, from a samurai dojo renowned for producing some of the deadliest swordsmen in the Federation. The dojo master, a Maibatsu stooge neo-samurai thug named Kenshin Himura, wanted to see who was the better warrior. But when the challenge was issued, the Duke was thousands of lightyears away, in Bragulan space, busy chasing down a dissident Imperial official. Just two weeks ago, the he had managed to track the fugitive to a forest world in Wild Space, so he met up with the guy and killed him by setting the entire jungle he was hiding in on fire. Then he went to the nearest Imperial commissar and got his bounty, an assworth of gold bullion worthless to Bragulans but priceless to humans, Zigonians, and the rest of the civilized galaxy. Upon arriving back to Terran space, he checked his phone for messages and found that some two-bit samurai had demanded a honorable duel to the death. Since his work-schedule was empty, he decided to have himself a little fun.

The Duke of Death was going pro bono.

As he approached the dojo, he compared it to the descriptions given to him by his sources. It was rather inconspicuous, with the cheap plastic-y look typical with Maibatsu corporate construction – this being a sector dominated by the Maibatsu megacorp, see, and they didn’t bother to beautify things for the employees and wage slaves who comprised the bulk of their population. The building had several large glass windows and signs that identified it for what it was, a training ground for warriors-for-hire. The place’s name was written on some of the signs in plain English, but on the others were weird archaic and oriental symbols the Duke could not decipher, despite being fluent in all standard galactic languages. However, he wasn’t interested in names and weirdo symbolisms, he was interested in the windows. See, he could see right through their reflective covering, and he could see all the samurai performing their repetitive training routines – training routines that did not involve playing sticks, but fully sharpened swords. From what he could see, he could ascertain that there were probably a hundred of them. Maybe more, but the Duke always prepared for the worst case scenario, which explained why he was bringing no less than four Imperial-issue grenades. Two of them fragmentary and the other two thermobaric.

He pulled one out of the jacket and looked at it. See, unlike Terran grenades, Bragulan ones were shaped in a way that would allow more explosives to be crammed into them. A Bragulan grenade had shaft-shaped handle that was topped with a can-shaped part that held the bulk of the explosive. At the top of the ‘can’ was a dial where the user could adjust the time it took for the detonation. Squeezing the handle also delayed the detonation. And at the base of the handle was a pin that would initiate the countdown.

The Duke pulled the pin off with a gloved finger and threw the grenade at one of the windows without even bothering to set the time. The steel-encased explosive smashed a hole through the glass and Duke could hear it drop to the far side of the room, he could also hear the surprised mumbling of the practicing samurai. Not for long, however, as the entire room was consumed in a massive earth-shaking explosion whose shockwave shattered all of the remaining windows and whose shrapnel killed everything beyond its blast radius.

Continuing his little stroll, the Duke made his way to another window. This one was blasted open, which saved the Duke the effort of smashing through it. He simply lobbed a second grenade in, walked out of range, and waited for the explosion to hurl debris – either blown up concrete or chunks of human flesh – towards his general direction.

For good measure, the Duke threw in a third grenade, a pocket thermobaric warhead, and watched as the clouds of smoke were replaced with a giant ball of yellow fire that illuminated everything beyond its destructive radius – which sadly did not include the poor people inside the dojo. While whistling a favorite oldie, the Duke realized that he wouldn’t even find a single mutilated corpse once he entered the building. They were all probably vaporized. But since the Duke did not become the galaxy’s best bounty hunter by being careless, he kept his last hand grenade just in case a few samurai might have survived the immolation.

Entering the desecrated dojo, the Duke found himself in the middle of a scene of silent carnage. Charred bodies lay on the ground steaming, filling the room with a repulsive odor all too familiar to the Duke. It was a grisly sight, a scene from hell. Molten plastic walls, half-combusted corpses strewn all over the floor, still clutching their weapons and looking like as if they were screaming out silent screams of agony as their vocal cords were instantly transmuted into embers –

The Duke decided to spare himself the poetry. He had a job to do.

The man who incurred the wrath of the Duke of Death was probably in a backroom somewhere, the Duke thought. He knew there was some sort of indoor garden inside the building, for meditation or something. That was where this ‘Kenshin Himura’ was probably at. Probably had a few friends with him as well.

A door at the end of the room slid open and out came a swordsman dressed in an oriental fighting robe of some kind. He unsheathed his beam-katana, which erupted in blazing orange light.

“You call that a knife?” the Duke asked rhetorically. The swordsman cocked his head, confused. “This is a knife.”

In a blur, the Duke whipped out a Bragulan combat knife and the samurai soon found the foot-long piece of sharpened Bragulan Steel embedded in his throat. He fell to the ground, gurgling and chocking, while the Duke of Death simply strode over his dying form to conclude his business.

Walking through several winding corridors, the Duke finally found the samurai-cult building’s indoor garden. He kicked the wooden door open and entered it.

The room was large; there were a few genetically altered pygmy-trees, some orchids, and even a tiny artificial stream. There were carps in them. The floor was composed of smoothened pebbles, and there were several lanterns hanging from the ceiling. The ceiling also had a sunroof that enabled natural light to enter the room, probably to ensure the healthy growth of the bonsai plants. It looked nice, but it was going to get pretty messy pretty soon, the Duke mused. At the other end of the room was his challenger, the samurai known as Kenshin Himura. He was wearing a much more ornate version of the fighting robe worn by the other dead man. He also had a sword, a katana, sheathed in a rather intricate and expensive looking scabbard.

“Bob, I have asked for your presence six months ago and you only show yourself now,” Himura had an accent the Duke couldn’t place. It was also odd that he was being referred to as ‘Bob’, as in ‘Aurigan Bob’, one of the other names he went by. He was usually known as The Duke of Death, ever since that book of his was published… “I was beginning to think you were too spineless and dishonorable to show yourself. With what you have done to my dojo, to my students, that is almost certainly the case. Pick up the sword, Aurigan Bob. I challenge you!”

Looking to his side, the Duke noticed that there was an unsheathed katana propped against the door. He picked it up with his left hand. He noticed Himura smirk at that. Probably some swordfight-samurai rule about only using the right hand. He tested the weight of the sword and found it to be of good quality. He turned to Himura and said, “You’re pretty spry for a dead man.”

“Enough talking, gaijin,” Himura said. He had an angry tone in his voice that went with his odd accent. “Only one of us will be leaving this room alive. Prepare to engage in honorable combat, ready yourself, Bob!”

“You know Kinjo, that cyber-ninja guy from back in the days? He practically said the same thing,” the Duke said just as Himura assumed a fighting stance. He estimated the distance between them to be around ten meters. “You know what happened to him?”

Not even bothering to acknowledge what the Duke had said, Himura shifted his footing and charged at the Duke of Death. He gave out a battle cry and positioned his sword for an overhead slash that would bisect the burly leather-clad death dealer’s head like a watermelon.

Just as Himura halved the distance between them, the Duke looked at the blade he was holding in his left hand and threw it away in disgust. Then he pulled out his Colt M2411 handgun, deactivated the safety and fired from his hips.

In the Sovereignty’s Frontier, where the names ‘the Duke of Death’ and ‘Aurigan Bob’ were originated, the Duke was frequently described as ‘Jesus with a pistol’. Whoever Jesus was, it was generally implied that the Duke was practically godlike with a pistola. A revolver, a semiautomatic pistol, a personal defense weapon, even a sawn-off shotgun, if it could be held in one hand, the Duke could use it to blow the wings out of a fly from half a mile away. Or so legend said. And the M2411 had been manufactured by a company which, among the gunslingers of Wild Space had reached a very nearly mythical status – Colt, the long-gone company of Old Earth, maker of the finest hand-guns space had ever seen. And perhaps their finest product ever had been the M2411, a descendant of the M1911, which was among the first semiautomatic pistols and perhaps the most effective. That was over a millennium ago, and the Colt M2411, itself now another antique weapon, was a special pistol made by Colt to commemorate one of its most popular designs. The company went through great pains to make the 2411 the finest weapon in the galaxy, with accuracy and stopping power that would make it even better than handheld laser guns.

The Duke used the Colt M2411, a special customized variant, and legend said that he killed a village full of outlaws with just that handgun and five clips. Some of them said that the Duke’s Jesus-like abilities, whatever a Jesus was, was because of his special century-old 2411. That with it he was able to blow the wings off flies from half a mile away. Or so legend said.

Whatever legend and myth and hearsay and rumor said, the Duke knew for a fact that he could blow off the kneecaps of a screaming sword-totting cultist from just fifteen feet away. And that’s precisely what he did. Gunshots filled the air as two caseless rounds were ignited and sent towards the legs of the charging samurai. The shouting turned to screaming that filled the air as the explosive bullets turned the honorable Kenshin Himura into an amputee. Oh sure, his legs were still intact because of a few strands of flesh – still didn’t change the fact that mister Kenshin Himura would be needing cloned limbs or cybernetic prosthetics, as well as a blood transfusion.

Kenshin Himura fell face first to the gravel, writhing in pain and moaning all sorts of profanities in whatever archaic language he was using. He screamed: “You dishonorable gaijin! How dare you! You spineless coward! You have no honor at all, none whatsoever-”

“Didn’t answer the question, bub,” the Duke said nonchalantly as he walked over to the fallen master swordsman. He picked up Himura’s intricate and finely crafted sword and examined it finely. “This is a very nice sword!”

Himura didn’t bother responding, he busy bleeding. “Did you know what happened to Kinjo?”

After a half-minute’s worth of agonizing wailing, writhing and bleeding, Himura finally replied: “NO!”

The Duke chuckled. First time in years. He aimed his pistol for Himura’s head. “I put two between his eyes.”

“No! I don’t deserve to die like this, in disgrace, after being dishonored by such a spineless gaijin coward! I should die with dignity, in honorable combat!” Himura groaned.

“Wrong.”

Bang. Bang.

[Shroom Man 777]

Welcome to the Feelipeens
Lower left quadrant of Sector Z-6



The Feelipeen system was a minute star nation occupying only a single star system. That star system, though, was known as the Feelipeen Archipelago for a reason. Two worlds, located where Earth and Venus would be in Old Sol, were habitable and now inhabited by millions of Feelipeenis. Those worlds they called Luz and Bizminda. On Luz, fairest of the worlds, sat the lofty capital of Maynilad and the upper class rulers and monied men of the Feelipeens. On Bizminda, the world was halved into two pseudo-Pangean continents, Bizayahs and Meandanaw, and on them were provincial lands with farms and unending fields of rice paddies, t'was a hot and humid world for it was closer to the sun.

Beyond these twin worlds was the great looming brown dwarf Bisdak, the size of many Jupiters, and orbited by countless hundreds of moons. Largest of the Bisdak Moons was the moonworld of Sebuu, the size of a small planet, and it was the queen of these islands in space. Amidst the many inhabited and uninhabited moons and planetoids were the Nilo Cylinders, the poor man's Feelipeeni version of O'Neil Cylinders, completing the archipelagic nature of the Feelipeeni system. There were other fringe moons as well, orbiting other gas giants within the system, along with a myriad other Nilo Cylinders and space stations. In total, the Feelipeens had thousands of habitable bodies, all drifting in the sea of space.

Though it was a modest country, the Feelipeens laid in betwixt the trade routes of Umeria and the dinosaurians of NenAltKik. Likewise, it was situated within a small hyperlane junction that controlled trade from Shepistan and the Grand Dominion to the rest of the galaxy. Prospectors and Pilgrims to and fro the Badlands likewise ventured to the Feelipeeni isles, along with the Byzantine Rogue Traders scouring the galaxy for goods to buy and sell, competing with Venetian merchantmen flying the Fourth French Empire's flag and Oriental Junks from mystical Tianguo. Though small and seemingly insignificant, the Feelipeenis was quite a hub for trade and travel. Likewise, it was well-endowed with resources, which it consumed and exported just as well.

Still, the Feelipeens was not a perfect country. Poverty was at an all time high, and government corruption was widespread and all-present. Illiteracy, the widening gap between rich and poor further enforced by rigid social structures, and often violent social upheavals stalked the land like big... stalking things. Yet the Feelipeens was a hopeful country. People prayed to their Jesukristo and Mama Mary, went to Church and celebrated the Saints' feast days.

Despite the troubles plaguing the land, these were still optimistic times for the Feelipeens and their President.

Ferdinand Shroomarcos.


Bizayahs, Bizminda
FARMVILLE



The MAD PESO rotocopters howled over the countryside as they patrolled the skies of Bizayahs. These Mad Pesos were faithful workhorses of the Feelipeeni military, so very reliable, having been in use for so long that they were older than anyone alive in the Feelipeens. Where the Mad Pesos came from, nobody even knew, no one remembered exactly, all they knew was that the damn things were damn ancient.

The rotors whooped, making their distinct noise as the Mad Pesos went on the hunt. Door gunners manned their ancient machineguns. Over the midday sun, the Mad Pesos casted eerie shadows on the flat fields below, black forms over green grass.

"Cobra-Three-Two this is Ibon-Four-One, we're approaching your location," said the pilot. Lacking reflectorized visors due to the military's dismal budget, he instead shielded his eyes from the sun's glare by wearing big aviator sunglasses. He had an Upper Marlboro cigarette in his mouth. With a cocky grin, he spoke in Bisdak: "Na, ato na i-pa aso ang kaning mga bandits."

Come on, let's smoke some bandits.

On the ground, a team of scout soldiers were performing deep reconnaissance on a local barrio. They had discovered that it was sheltering communist rebels. That the farmers were against the Agrarian Reform policies of President Shroomaros, and that the communists were helping them plant their crops. The communists also opened schools for the children, and they also had sympathizing doctors and nurses doing medical missions there.

The recon scouts forwarded this to high command, and the decision had been made.



"Ibon-Four-One, this is Cobra-Three-Two, pag dali na mo diya, na kitan na mi sa mga communista! Gi pusil na mi nila!" the recon scout shouted to his radio set, telling Cobra-Three-Two to hurry up, that the communists had spotted them and were shooting at them. "Uy, Pedro! Pag return fire diya!"

"Tae!" Shit, Pedro cursed. He shouldered his Armalyte and returned fire while Juan kept on screaming at the radio. Pedro shot a farm girl in the face, making her head explode. He moved on and shot a boy running at them with a stick of dynamite. He even killed a machete-wielding communista on horseback. Then, he saw something else, something worse - "Juan, naa silay carabao!"

They had a water buffalo.

"Pisti!" Juan cursed. "Ibon-Four-One, enemy has heavy weapons incoming. Atay!"

"Roger that, Cobra-Three-Two," the pilot laughed over the radio. "Sige, mo go faster na mi. Pag stay calm lang diya"

"Shit!" Juan and Pedro ran for cover as the communist carabao neared them. Normally carabaos would be used to haul plows to till the land, but this one dragged heavy weapons. A communist farmer manned the weapon and began firing at them. Emerald green bolts tore through the trees, melting them with acid bullets. They both knew what those were, they had seen Solarian war movies. "Unsa man na?! K-bolt?!"

"Murag K-bolt gyud! Atay, aha man na gi kuha sa mga communista? Gi palit nila gikan sa mga Bragulans?" It looked like a K-bolt, though where could the communists get that? Did they buy it from the Bragulans? "Shet! Facking shet!"

They returned fire with their Armalytes, but against the K-bolter, they might as well have been throwing balut eggs at them.

"Cobra-Three-Two, this is Ibon-Four-One duol na kaayo mi, pop green smoke to mark target, over."

"Sige, sige! Pop green smoke, bay! Mura ta naa sa The Rock ani da!"

They threw a green flare at the K-bolting communist carabao. Then they waited, but not for long.



The Mad Pesos came high and low, door gunners using their machineguns to shoot up the carabao and the communista manning the K-bolt. The waterbuffalo exploded into buffalo wings. After that, the Mad Pesos moved to strafe the village that harbored the goddamn communistas.

"Turn on the cassete player, para ma hadluk ning mga communista!" They played loud music so that the communists would be scared.

"Wala, bay. Gi baligya nako ang cassette player kay wala na koy kwarta para pagkaon. Wa man gud ta gi sweldo-han pa gud." The gunner had sold his cassette player since he didn't have any money left for food. He wasn't paid his salary, that's why.

"Okay. Sige, patya nalang nang mga tao diya." The pilot shrugged and told the gunner to just kill those people there.

The Mad Pesos swept down for a strafing run, door gunners tearing men, women and children apart with their machineguns. Some soldiers sat right at the doors, letting their feet hang in the air while gunning people down with their Armalytes.

"Na, ba butohon na nato ni sila!" It was time to make them explode. "I labay nang LPG gas tank!"

They threw LPG gas tanks at the village. The Feelipeeni military could hardly afford big napalm bombs or thermobarics, so they made do with modified gas tanks. They dropped it right on top of the schools and the hospitals.

The recon scouts saw this and began running away from the giant explosion that would soon explode.

"Dagan! Adto sa chopper!" Run! Get to the chopper!



The village exploded.

"Haha! Daug ta! Patay sila tanan!" We won! They're all dead! Juan shouted. "Mission accomplished!"



Maynilad, Luz
MOUNT MARCOS


President Ferdinand Shroomarcos was a patriot. President Ferdinand Shroomarcos was a hero. President Ferdinand Shroomarcos had a giant statue of his face carved on the tallest mountain in Maynilad. But since the Feelipeens was so small, that tallest mountain was just a small hill. There was nothing big in the Feelipeens. Except the corrupt police officers. They were more than big. They were fat.

Just like Imelda.

Ferdinand's wife.

"Welcome home, my dear!" Ferdinand Shroomarcos greeted his wife and kissed her on her fat, surgically swollen, cheeks. "How was your shopping spree?"

"I bought six hundred more shoes today!" Imelda laughed. "I also had a rejuvenat treatment on the way home since they were offering a discount on their botox. How about that?"

"Wonderful, my love!" Ferdinand Shroomarcos and the First Lady spoke Anglian English, since only poor people spoke the native languages of the Feelipeens. Even the Senaturds and so forth didn't speak Feelipeeni, they spoke English. Because English was the medium of instruction. Feelipeeni, on the other hand, was just the national language. Nobody cared about that. "Imelda, dear, I'm meeting some guests tonight."

"Oh? What kind of guests?"

"Foreigners. Shepistanis. Did you know that our military just burned down an entire farming village today?" Ferdinand asked with a smooth smile.



"Oh? How lovely!" Imelda giggled like a fat haggard cosmetically surgerized schoolgirl. She picked a thing from her purse and began powdering her nose. "Dear me, then I suppose we'll have to lease that burned up village land to some Shepistani agricorp, say... Shroom Monte? Oh, Ferdi, you bad boy!"

"Oh, I try my best, Imelda dearest." Ferdinand chuckled warmly. "Now dear, we're going to have dinner at Shroomdorf Astoria with our Shepistani friends tonight. Since it's early, maybe you can take a couple of hours to pick which shoes to wear."

"Of course, love." Imelda smiled sweetly as she walked over to her shoe cabinet.

"As for me, I have to finish my revisions to the Agrarian Reform program. Those provincials are just so stubborn, so I hope what we did to Farmville will set an example for them. Hopefully they'll be more cooperative in selling their land to the agricorps. Don't you think so?"

"I don't know, my love. Should I wear the Zigonian skin stilletos? Or the ones with Chamarran leopard stripes? So hard to choose..."

[Siege]

SAWco Orbital Dockworks
Tannhaus, Solarian mid-rim



Whichever way you looked the latticework of plaz-steel and advanced ceramics climbed out toward the distant sun of the Tannhaus system. The system's fifth Lagrange point was wholly owned by Kerenkov-based Solaris Advanced Weapons Corporation, who had made made the absolute most of their investment by turning this area of relative gravitic stability into a giant manufacturing center where the corporation built some of the largest ships the Sovereignty had ever seen.

The Orbital Dockworks was a hive of unending activity, workplace and indeed home to thousands of people, dozens of CompInts of varying but universally superhuman intelligence, and indeed its own colony of unwilling, uncooperative and ceaselessly arrogant Apexai scientists. At any moment hundreds of lighthugger barges and supralight freighters slid into automated docks to unload raw materials for the matter furnaces or unload half-products manufactured by sub-contractors on a dozen different planets. Lines and rows of immense robotic assemblers moved huge chunks of ships-to-be with microscopic precision into place through the microgravity environment of the station, to be welded in place with automated plasma lances. Sub-bright, multi-legged drones scuttled through slowly evolving ship hulks, drawing cables and conduits. Dense utility fog drifted through hallways, assembling electronics and even layers of paint on a molecular level. These scenes were repeated dozens of times all over the dockworks, on a bewildering variety of scales -- after all, SAWco built anything from small yachts to the very largest of Dreadstars.

Today though, Solaris Advanced Weapons would begin a project that would tax even its not-inconsiderable expertise with building vast death-dealing warships. Dr. Annalee Call, lead engineer of Project Triassic, had of course known she'd be in for a challenge, but the real immensity of the project hadn't struck her until she saw the immense, 17-kilometer long spacedock for herself.



“This is going to be one big boat,” she couldn't help but mutter.

“Big perhaps by the standards of your puny human brain,” replied a whiny, nasal voice. Call turned around to face her ever-annoying second. The Apexai engineer Wonviffy was, like all of his kind, a diminutive grey alien, dressed in a small tux with a bowler hat pruned on top of his oversized head. “I assure you however that by the standards of the mighty Apexai Exodite world ships, this ship will be positively pathetic in scale and ability.”

Call began to suppress her annoyance, then decided that the Apexai – who was, like all of his kind, a telepath of not inconsiderable ability – could probably tell he irritated her and just didn't care, and so she indulged in groaning audibly. “The Exodite worlds are a myth, Wonviffy. If they actually existed and were anywhere near as powerful as you never cease to describe them, the Bragulans wouldn't have been able to drop a moon on your planet.” She furrowed her brow. “Which I suppose means I should wish they were actually real, because that would mean you would not be here to annoy me.”

The Apexai regarded her with his black, unblinking eyes and sniffed. “The mechanisms of Apexai politics are also beyond your puny human understanding. The loss of one world means nothing to us.”

“Right,” said Call, who was obviously not convinced. “Because you guys like it so much in the Sovereignty.”

“And anyway,” the Apexai continued, ignoring her last comment. “If I and my kind weren't here, you monkeys and your primitive half-baked monkey brains would never be able to build a ship like this.” He made a three-fingered motion toward the drydock outside the observation platform.

Call was about to make another sarcastic comment, but halted. The Apexai was right: the Sovereignty had gone from a collection of backwater planets struggling against the shadow of an overwhelmingly powerful Bragulan Star Empire to a regional powerhouse that could match even the millennium-old Imperium virtually – at least in galactic terms – overnight, and much of it had been because of the help the Apexai race had given them in exchange for refuge from the Bragulans. It was an Apexai who had demonstrated the first Dark Energy reactor, it had been Apexai who had built the first fifth-order force manipulators, and without Apexai input the first autolaser battery would probably have either melted itself or exploded cataclysmically upon first powering up. And now, they were lending their considerable expertise and technological know-how to the Sovereignty's next technological breakthrough: Project Triassic, and the construction of the Super Dreadstar USS Extinction.

Call shrugged. “I guess we're much obliged.”

Wonviffy managed to contort his alien features into an expression of unbearable smugness. “You bet your perfectly formed monkey ass you are.” He stuck a hand in his coat and retrieved what looked like a golden pocket watch, but when he manipulated it a hologram of unimaginable complexity sprung into being above it. “Here are the plans for the reactor matrix and the primary force bus.” The hologram flickered a little as the station's sentient computers synchronized with the portable alien device and hungrily copied its contents.

Call raised an eyebrow, impressed despite her best efforts not to be. “You are done already? I thought it'd take you at least another month to get those done.”

The alien smiled, which made his bizarre features look distinctly creepy. “For a being of such vast intellect as I it was a trivial matter.”

“You copied them from somewhere, didn't you?”

The smile widened. “From the specifications of ancient Apexai war saucers, yes.”

Annalee Call shook her head. She'd never figure out how, with all their advanced technology, it had ever been possible for the Bragulans to get the drop on the Apexai. It had been a matter that had left Sovereignty historians and military analysts alike scratching their heads – it just seemed so unlikely. Maybe, she briefly wondered, Wonviffy was right, and this was all just some kind of elaborate multi-generational game the creepy aliens were playing on the rest of the galaxy. Then she caught herself. There was no reason to buy into the self-proclaimed ridiculous superiority of the Apexai. For all she knew they had just been unimaginably stupid, lost their homeworld because of it, and were now far too embarrassed to admit their cock-up.

She turned back toward the window. Far below, in the vacuum of the titanic dock, the first robotic assemblers had swung into motion, beginning the onstruction of the largest warship the Sovereignty had ever built. “Well, Mr. Wonviffy, your efforts and those of your kind are most welcome. As much as I loathe to say it, we would not be able to make it work without you.”

The small alien stepped into the nearest turbo-elevator. As the doors closed he smiled. “And don't think we'll ever allow you to forget it.”

[Lord_Of_Change 9]

Neu Preußen

'Is it confirmed?' Franz Hoffman, Reichskanzler, asked.

'Yes, unfortunately,' Roderich Von Edelstein, Feldmarschall, said. 'We've determined that Volksland was behind the events of Black Sunday. In fact, we need to make sure they never try this sort of thing again.'

Volksland was a tiny pariah-state dictatorship composed of one system in Sector T-10 close to the border of the New Rhineland Sector, closely adhering to an old ideology that had been popular in Germany from 1933 to 1945. The common opinion of this ideology in the Prussian Star League was that of venomous hatred towards its practitioners and extreme anger if a citizen was confused for a follower of this diabolical ideology.

'Crush them,' Hoffman spat out, clearly angered, 'we will teach them a lesson they will never forget.'

This was like it.

[Shroom Man 777]

P.N.S. Hellbender



They met at the "special needs" trailer meant to accommodate the Bragulans. Benjamin Bessières sat at the other side of the table, before the bears. With him was Greene, discomfited at seating beside a psyker, and being face to face with a pair of enormous bears, talking ones. Xenos or furries or Moreaus, they were still huge.

"So, my brother bears, what evidence has led you to suspect the involvement of a Dominion organization in the kidnapping of this yearling?" Benjamin Bessières began. "I was told you had irrefutable evidence, but the specifics remain unknown to me, you see."

Arbitrator Fiyor Byordyng had taken the time to digitize the microfilm pictures as well as the various other documents and files they had collated and compiled. It was now in an enormous floppy disk, the size of a piece of sliced bread, he placed it in a drive and connected it to a compatible Shepistani interfacer. The interfacer was connected to a projector, and a hologram of the M3189 Dominion Patriarchal Star Sloop-of-War was displayed.

"The M3189 Dominionoid Patriarchal Star Sloop-of-War displayed here was detected by Spevik Ansils' orbital sensor grid, right as it was making atmospheric reentry. Previously, it was undetected as it made its approach and only when it touched atmo was it visible." Commissar Vikim did the talking. "A cloaking device. A Dominionoid Patriarchal Sloop-of-War with a cloaking device. Hopefully that narrows it down."

"Yes it does," Benjamin replied, looking at the hologram closely with his altered eyes. "But not by much."

"Then perhaps the modus operandi of the perpetrators will help make things more concise, then," Arbitrator Fiyor commented as he moved on to the next item, manipulating the Shepistani interfacer's analogue controls. The image turned to that of several severed body parts belonging to that of a bear. "Several severed body parts belonging to that of a bear. A Blue Ridge Black Bear, to be exact. This species is found only on a few worlds in this part of the galaxy, the perpetrators who have access to a Dominionoid cloak-capable sloop also have access to this creature - despite your human environmentalist laws. The perpetrators used plastic explosives, a kind which you call 'C4', to blow up this poor animal and scatter its corpse in an attempt to cover their trail."

"Hmmm..." Benjamin gave it some thought. It would take a while to connect unaccounted for Dominion ships with cloaking fields to kidnappers who also had access to protected wildlife species.

"It's just a bear!" Captain Greene shook his head incredulously. "Anyone could've gotten a bear and blown it up, who could tell the difference between Bragulans and... bears."

The captain shut himself up when Benjamin gave him a disapproving look with his ocular implants. The Bragulans too were looking at Greene, and they didn't seem too please with his interjection. He kept quiet for the rest of the conversation.

"Thank you for your silence, brother." Benjamin told him. Then, the big space Haitian turned to the Bragulans. "Sorry for the interruption, my brother here is a bit... enthusiastic."

"He is your brother?" Arbitrator Fiyor asked. "Your furs are of different coloration. You would seem to be more like a woodland forest human, while he looks more like a polar human. Unless if he was adopted."

"Yes, he was." Benjamin nodded sagely. "Now, back to the matter at hand?"

"Another item came up in the course of our investigation," Commissar Vikim continued. "Arbitrator Fiyor has noted that on Spevik Ansils, there is a rather large population of human deviants you like to call 'furries'. These furries have also reported a series of kidnappings amongst their members, in the days preceding the kidnapping of young Yivgny Chamski."

"Now, that is interesting," even with his keen mentallic powers, a connection between cloaking Dominion Patriarchal ships, bear corpses, Bragulans and furries was a very strange one for Benjamin Bessières. At least it would make for one interesting story.

"These furnappers had methods similar to that of Yivginy's kidnappers, up to and including the detonation of animal corpses, strangely enough. It cannot be coincidence." Commissar Vikim concluded. "Isn't that right, Shagfellow?"

"Right, right!" the furry suddenly blurted out. He had trotted behind Captain Greene and went to lick him with an animatronic tongue. "Yiff! Yiff!"

"GAH!" Captain Greene yelped. "Get him off me!"

"Sit, Shagfellow! Stay!" commanded Commissar Vikim. Shagfellow gave a whine and a pouty before obeying. "That's a good human-animal-hybrid, following the Imperial Commissar's commands, good boy!"



"Yiff! Yiff!" Shagfellow's animatronic tail wagged delightfully.

"But then, what motive could these kidnappers have, whoever they are?" Benjamin wondered out loud, trying to ignore the strange sight before of him.

"I'm glad you asked, Mister Bessières." Arbitrator Fiyor had trouble pronouncing the surname. "Because upon cursory examination of Dominionoid media, I have read of this 'All-Human league' that calls to occupy and surgically 'restore' Bragulans to our... 'true human form'. Absolutely disgusting stuff. There's also mention of these 'Moreaus', which were present in the human furry population on Spevik Ansils that had members taken as well. This All-Human league seems to suffer a delusion that gives them a distorted idea of Bragulans being just another kind of furry Moreau, which is most definitely not the case. Their statements could be interpreted as motive to come and kidnap Bragulans, and they seem to be the only group in the Dominion that has said as much."

"Tell us, Mister Bessières, what do you make of all this?" Commissar Vikim asked. "To save young Yivgny, we will need the assistance of your Grand Dominionoid. We cannot do this ourselves."

[Steve]

Vessel Strahl
Approaching Lochley’s Retreat
29 January 3400


The Strahl moved slowly, almost lazily, toward the approach vector to the Lochley Landing Spaceport, banked slightly in relation to the planet and seeming to fly without a care in the world.

In the cockpit, Balthier and Vanrya were at their usual stations, while behind them little Hope was watching from the backup control station. Sara stood behind her, a hand on her neice’s back, watching the approach as well with Rana at her side. Hope stared with awe and childish glee at the sight of the Anglian naval base in orbit and the space elevator tethering it to the planet. There were ships docked there, small and great in size. “Are we going there?”, Hope asked rather hopefully.

“No, I’m afraid the Navy is rather strict about whom may dock at their bases,” Balthier answered. “But I promise you a fine view of the bottom of the elevator as we land.” He returned his attention to piloting, noticing out of the corner of his eye the ominous form of an Imperator-class Star Cruiser at one of the station’s main docks.

“Do you have somewhere for your family to stay planetside?”, Vanrya asked Sara.

“Lord Fisher is to make arrangements for a home on the base for now. I’m not sure if it’ll be ready when we get there, but...”

“The Order will provide temporary lodging.” Rana put an arm around Sara’s side and waist. Sara’s hand moved up and took Rana’s.

They watched as the ship made atmospheric entry. As he had done countless times before, Balthier guided Strahl to a pricey covered hanger. On his way in he took extra care to be a bit slower than usual, though still within permissible limits as directed by the traffic controllers. Hope gawked at the city around them; Lochley Landing alone was larger than any city on Pendleton, being a major trade nexus and stopover through the Outback. “The buildings are so big,” she murmured emphatically.

“I wonder how she’ll take the real metropolises of the galaxy, then,” Vanrya remarked with a slight grin on her face.

A familiar shudder filled the ship as the drive wings folded backward. Anti-grav units eased the Strahl onto the surface of the private hanger they’d leased while burning in-system. “And so we’ve made it.” Balthier made out a bit of a sigh. “And just in time for Cammie‘s shift at the Blind Boar Pub. If you’ll excuse me...”



HMS Ruthless
Departing HMNS Lochley’s Retreat


Governor-General Tarkington watched on a viewer as the naval station began to shrink from sight. Around him the efficient crew of the Ruthless were finishing up the necessary work for their planned flight to Pendleton, where Tarkington would relieve Admiral Fisher and take control over administration of the planet.

The issue of Pendleton’s annexation was somewhat up in the air. There had been murmurs in Parliament of delaying it in lieu of prospective opposition from other states. Word was the Shepistanis had apparently not heard about the annexation plan and were furious about it - other states may also protest. Tarkington found it all rather idiotic and silly, the kind of paranoid imbecility one associated with ideologically-charged states. What did it matter if Pendleton was to be annexed? It was a lonely planet isolated from the rest of the galaxy by shoals. It offered no strategic position, no sizable resource deposits. The only motivation for opposing annexation was, in Tarkington’s mind, meaningless ideological blathering.

Either way, he was being sent to take control of the situation there. By itselt, Pendleton was the largest and most populated of the territories that fell under his control as Governor-General of the Outback Territories. It was only right and proper he take up residence there and begin the work of civilizing Pendleton and ensuring its integration into the Empire. And woe be to any holdouts on that planet that interfered with his work.


Chapter Sunelis


Rana, Maria, and Rydia stood quietly in Syrandi’s “office”. She appraised them quietly as she considered their reports on what happened. “You are all to be commended,” she finally said, showing about as much of a smile as she ever did. “Your actions during this mission were without flaw.”

“Thank you, Sister.” They all said the line and bowed.

“Sister Rana, I wish to speak with you. You two may go.”

“By your leave.” Rydia and Maria stepped out, leaving Rana alone with Syrandi. Syrandi got up and walked up to Rana. “You interfaced with the Collector Machine?”

“For a brief moment, yes,” Rana answered. “It was... unlike anything I’d ever imagined.”

“Did you get any memories from it? Information of others it had possessed?” Syrandi frowned. “Over the recent centuries a few Sisters have disappeared while working in Wild Space, that the Collectors might have taken them...”

“I am sorry, Sister Syrandi, but I did not get any such data from the Machine,” Rana answered, lowering her eyes.

“It is okay. You have done well.” Syrandi grinned softly at her. “Now go back to Sara. It will take you several weeks to recover from your wound, that is time you should spend with the one you love.”

Rana smiled and nodded. “Thank you, Sister.” She turned and left.

Syrandi drew in a sigh and returned to her seat. It had been a long shot, but the mystery of what had happened to Yamia still tore at her. And she wouldd not rest until she got closure...

[Steve]

Princess Jaya Spaceport, Darnis
Doreia, Star Kingdom of New Anglia
1 February 3400


The city of Darnis was one of the great metropolises of the Dorei Nations. Spires of violet and green and blue pierced the teal-tinted sky, magnificent monuments to the achievements of the Lushan spread everywhere. The Princess Jaya Spaceport, utilized by private concerns instead of commercial liners, stood in one of the city's outer-range districts.

Yuna, Ashe, and Ezria emerged from the cargo bay of Sorceress with Kaga in front. Kaga was in the same dirty clothes he'd worn the entire trip, the other three had taken spare jumpsuits Hecate had available. He went to his knees and actually began to weep, somewhat amusing to the other three. "Really missed home, didn't you?"

"Actually, I think he's just glad to be in open air again," Ezria speculated. "And out of a confined ship where he was the only one not getting laid."

"Well, I did offer." The three turned back to see Hecate. "Figured I'd see you off, I've got about fifteen minutes until my departure time anyway."

"Thank you." Ezria's face curled a little bit. "Wait, you offered what?"

"What can I say? I've never been with a Dorei guy before... heh, that rhymes." Hecate smirked. "But he said no. Honestly I think he's gay. Who else would turn down a threesome?"

"Threesome?!" Ezria's look betrayed irritation. "But I didn't say..."

"Don't look at us," Ashe said to Ezria. "She's your girltoy..."

"I thought it was the other way around, actually," Yuna chimed in.

"It goes both ways," Hecate chuckled, watching Ezria's cheeks burn. She came up and gave Ezria a pat on the butt. "Oh, calm down Ezri, I was joking. Anyway, it was good to see you again. I hope we can hook up again sometime."

Ezria's blush relented a little. She pressed a kiss to Hecate's lips. "Okay, 'Cate. You be careful out there."

"I will. Make sure to take care of those drives." Hecate indicated the package Ezria was carrying. "I'd hate to think we went through all that trouble for nothing."

"I will." They shared another kiss before Ezria walked off, Yuna and Ashe following her. Hecate watched them disappear into a terminal and returned to her ship. She went straight to the cockpit and settled in. "Ten minues until departure," she sighed. Doreia was a beautiful planet, but she wanted to get back into space as soon as possible.

"I think I'll miss them," Bob said suddenly. "Especially Yuna and Ashe. They're very... enthusiastic."

Hecate raised an eyebrow. "'Enthusiastic'? Just what the hell..." A slight blush came to her face. "Oh. You didn't record them did you?"

"....Depends."

"On what?"

"On whether you want to watch."

A gasp of indignation came from Hecate at that. "That would be a violation of their privacy, Bob, shame on you!"

"That it would. And you want to watch, don't you?"

Several moments of uncomfortable silence passed. "Okay, yeah, I do," Hecate finally admitted, her cheeks beginning to burn from how hard she was blushing. "Given what Ezria said about them, this could be good."

"Well, too bad. I didn't record them." At Hecate's silence, Bob added, "I was too busy securing computer memory space anyway."

"One of these days, Bob, one of these days..."



The Great Cloister of the Silver Moon


The Great Cloister was a part of Darnis' "Old Quarter", the section of the city where structures two and even three millennia old were kept standing by meticulous maintenance and care. The Cloister itself was a marvel of Lushan architecture, smooth angular elements in the supporting columns inside and outside the structures and covered in frescoes, statuary, and other things. The full moon insignia of the order dominated the main building, where the Council lived and met and the highest ceremonies and rites of the Order were held.

Traversing the main gates of the Cloister, Ezria, Yuna, and Ashe were absorbing the sight. All had been here before - it was custom to take Acolytes to the Great Cloister after their Acolyte Rite - and it had not lost any of its power in their eyes. The dormitories, the Trial buildings and pavilions, were teeming with life. There were only about 1,400 Sisters, after all, but there were at least twice their number in Initiates and Acolytes and ten times their number in laity or contracted workers. Additionally the Order customarily permitted visitors to the central structures, as they were considered a national architectural treasure by the Kingdom of Lushan, and to the Library of the Order.

"It's always so beautiful to come here," Yuna said, almost in a whisper, as they looked up at the statue of a female Dorei figure. The sophisticated lunar accessories on her and the form of her clothing marked her as a representation of Elunaria, an aspect of the Eternal Goddess associated with Doreia's primary moon. As the Order was always meant for the purpose of using the Gift for protecting others - albeit initially in the form of helping religious pilgrims and the like - they had drawn their name and icons from Elunaria the Protector (the Lushan associated moonlight with protection and aid). "I wonder what it would be like to be stationed here."

"You'd have to get used to Lushan food," Ezria quipped. "And those damned shuri snacks."

"What's wrong with shuri?", Ashe asked innocently.

"They make my spots itch."

"On the other hand, you'd get to study with many Masters, even the Grand Master herself," Yuna reminded Ezria. "You could learn so much."

"It's boring here, though." Ezria began to walk in. "Anyway, we're due to meet Master Jaina in minutes, we'd best be going."

They continued on into the central structure. It was dominated by the Cloister Chapel, for the religious services and ceremonies held nearly all the time in the Cloister. Even as they walked by they saw a Dorei couple undergoing a Rite of Bonding. The sight made Yuna and Ashe hold hands tighter; they were planning their own, but only after their first Outback tour was done.

In the upper floors the Masters of the Order had their dorms, not far from the Council Meeting Chamber. They were going to meet with one of the Council Masters now; Jaina Bailey, the younger of the two Human Masters on the Council at age 120. They found her in an office space that doubled as her meditation chamber and training room (making maximal use of space was always at the forefront for the Order). Her rich purple Master's robe had blue layering to the standard teal trim, signifying her Council position. Long blond hair flowed down to her upper back and blue eyes carefully appraised the three younger women present; to a society without anti-aging Jaina would look to be an attractive 40 at very most.

In truth 120 was still only reaching the cusp of middle-age going by modern anti-aging techniques. But less than a tenth of the Order's Sisters were over 100 years old, including the forty-eight Masters currently in the Order. Casualties from field service, retirements to raise families, or simple fatigue with the lifestyle trimmed the list of older members every year, especially amongst those who found themselves permanently stuck at Knight-Captain or Knight rank. As a result, the Order maintained an aura of being overwhelmingly young and vital, not aged and reactive.

"Sisters Ezria, Yuna, and Ashley." Jaina smiled toward them from the partial Lotus meditative pose she had on her floor mat. She indicated the kneeling mats they could sit upon. "I apologize for the lack of chairs, but it is tradition here to use lepi, save in the Chapel."

"We understand, Master." Ezria produced the drives from her suit pockets. "Here they are, as we said."

Jaina lifted them up and considered them. "I appreciate what you went through to get these. What can you tell me about your attackers?"

Ezria took the lead in telling the story of what the Watch was up to, with Yuna and Ashe chiming in with their experiences and what they remembered of the captivity. They all saw Jaina's expression harden ever so slightly as they continued.

"You did well to bring this, then," she finally said. "I'm going to arrange spare dorm rooms for you. I believe the Councill will want to interview you come tomorrow or the day after, as soon as we can discuss this material and set time for it. Please, until then, enjoy your time here. I admit to spending my spare time in the Library, but I was always a bookworm." She smiled at them and stood, signifying they should too.

As they did so, a young Dorei man of dark teal complexion opened the door. "Master Jaina, you called?", he asked in Lushan.

"Sisters, this is Namal Padya of the Lumina. Namal, these are Sisters Ezria, Yuna, and Ashley. There are spare rooms in the Lanya Dorm, I wish you to direct these Sisters to them and to show them around the Cloister, if they ask," Jaina answered. "They will be here for a while."

"Yes, Master." Namal bowed to her and then to them. "Please, follow me."



Nabaal Minor Station
Hiigaran Space
3 February 3400


The Nabaal Minor Station was named in honor of the Kiith that paid for and manned it; it was astride a minor hyperlane junction in Sector AA-18. Few people actually stopped here save Hiigaran patrol ships giving their crews liberty or the ship captains looking to get their hyperdrives checked up after a long trip.

It seemed almost obligatory for such a station to have a seedy tavern, where young crewmen and women could waste away their pay on gambling or drink (or both; the joke was that the drinks always cost extra on Poker Night).

Eyes turned toward the curved feminine figure that entered the bar. Hecate returned the curious glances, mixed with lustful, by ignoring them utterly. Her jumpsuit left almost nothing to imagination with how tight it was, but the blaster pistol hanging from the waist and the beamsaber hilt on the other hip were good indicators that her attention wasn't something a man might want. She glided ahead to the bar, called for a whiskey straight from Earth, and after throwing a UN credit chit on the bar she snatched the entire bottle from the bartender's hand and walked off to a table.

She was on her third swig, reclining in the booth, when a fairly non-descript woman slipped into the booth opposite her. She had no distinctive look to her. Her hair was plain, her eyes were plain, her face and clothes plain, everything plain. You couldn't even call her attractive or unattractive - she was just there. "You do know how to make an impression," the woman said in a deep soprano. "My name is Karan."

"It seems all the Hiigaran chicks I know are named Karan," Hecate noted with a bit of sarcasm, after which she took another drink.

"In my line of work, that comes in handy." Karan took out a card. "Your money."

Hecate pulled a thick data drive out. "Your information." She slid it over to Karan as Karan slid the card, each taking the other's item at the same time in an exchange that almost seemed well-rehearsed. "Everything I learned from Hanson is on there. Including the materials my girlfriend in the Silver Moon got from them."

"Did you tell her?"

"No." Hecate shook her head. "She's still hung up on the Order stuff, as much as she pretends to be a maverick. And I don't want her getting the wrong ideas..."

"Like?"

"Like that I saved her so I could get paid," Hecate remarked, before taking another drink. She stuffed the card away. "Even if you hadn't sent me that message asking me about looking into the Hanson thing, I would've gone anyway. Wasn't going to leave Ezri to whatever those bastards intended for her, especially after it was my fault she got sent to that shithole planet in the first place."

Karan nodded. "Either way, the people of Hiigara thank you for your service. I'll be seeing you." She turned and walked away.

Hecate took some time to finish her bottle of whiskey. When it was done, and she was generally inebriated, Hecate walked out of the bar, requiring a great deal of focus to keep her footing through the genial haze of alcohol that had settled into her head. She made it back to Sorceress just as her head begin to hurt from the effort of walking.

"I trust you have our compensation?"

Hecate mumbled an affirmative to Bob.

"Ah, good. I was afraid you might have drunk it away. She wouldn't hate you, 'Cate. You know that."

"Eh, she lives as a freaking warrior-nun living on cots and hard beds, gets no real money. I should set some aside for her," Hecate grumbled as she went up the stairs to the common area and toward her bedroom. "And now, I need to sleep this stuff off."

"It's what you get for being so short, you know," Bob mused drolly as Hecate stumbled to her bed, still in her jumpsuit, and slowly fell asleep. "I'd better go get your hangover relief ready."

Hecate's mumbled thanks was lost in a drunken yawn.



The Grand Cloister of the Silver Moon, Darnis
Doreia, Star Kingdom of New Anglia


After hearing the testimonies of the three Sisters and overviewing the information, the Council discussed what to do with it. Grand Master Yemila Paytalo, a blue-skinned Dorei of the Tryni Nation, said nothing as her fellow Sisters discussed the issue. This was not the kind of situation Yemila was, self-admittedly, used to. As an administrator she had helped the Order maintain financial solvency and worked to make the most out of every donation and grant. But this... a conspiracy aimed at depowering ESPers?

"We should forward this to the SIS," she sighed suddenly, cutting into a low-key discussion between Pani Semi, a Lushan Dorei woman of 130, and Kynandi Najeni, a 119 year old Sindai of the Kingdom of Drunara with the dark purple complexion her people were known for (the darkest complexion of that kind, generally). "This is beyond just us."

"Would the SIS even care?", Kynandi pointed out. "They focus on threats to the Anglian Empire as a whole. This conspiracy has not even reached their territory yet. It is in the Hiigaran influence zone of the Outback."

"Sir James Bronson cares about just about anything," Master Violet Reynolds pointed out. The 132 year old brunette, from Hansom's Planet, was the second-oldest Master on the Council now, with the retirement of Master Greta Bernhardt. She was considered the favorite candidate for replacing Yamila when she retired, which would make her the first Human Grand Master in the Order's history. Yamila looked forward to seeing that day, though she wasn't ready to retire from the Order quite yet.

"That being so, I doubt he will put much effort into this situation." Kynandi looked to Master Jemma Yutal, another Lushan Dorei. "Master Jemma, you have a suggestion? I can sense it."

Jemma fixed her blue eyes forward from what she was doing. "Well, there are other ESPer organizations we can turn to."

"True, but we will still need government aid," Violet pointed out. "We need to tell the government about this too."

"I agree," Yamila said, re-entering the discussion. "Even if Sister Kynandi is right about their ability to deal with it, the attempt must be made."

"It should be made in person. And quietly." Violet looked up. "I volunteer to bring him the data. I can blend in more easily with Anglians, after all."

"Nevertheless, you should not go alone," Yamila pointed out. "I will send the Sisters who retrieved the data with you."

There were some nods at that. The vote was held and the decision reached. Violet gave accepting bows as she was charged with the duty and left to prepare for her trip. Yamila tapped her staff of office against the table. "Master Jaina, inform the other girls of their duty with Violet. The Council is hereby adjourned."

[Lonestar]

P.N.S. Hellbender

Captain Greene was sweating profusely while Bessières, damn him, seemed to not mind the presence of these things at all. It had taken all of his self control not to pull out his plasma pistol and vaporize the top half of the Furry abomination that had snuck up on him. He had barely heard what Commissar Vikim had been saying when Bessières responded to him.

“You Bragule be a proud people, it took a lot for you to try to ask around rather than come charging in here. “ Bessières stroked his beard. “Brother Bears, the All Human League is a 501(c)(3) organization, it should be child’s play to track their assets. We will get right on it. Captain Greene, I believe the League’s corporate HQ is on Damascus. Perhaps ye could set course to it?”

“Yes, of course.” Greene stood up, and headed out the door of the trailer, walking across the landing bay to an IVCS phone ignoring the dozens of sailors who apparently had nothing better to do but gawk at the Bragulan Courier and hang around outside the trailer. “BMOOW, this is Captain Greene, I need you to file a transit plan with sector fleet for a trip to Damascus.”

“Damascus? That’s in Rogers Sector!”

“Just do it!” Greene snapped. “We need to leave as soon as the plan is acknowledged. Tell them we are operating under Agent Bessières’ authority.”

“Yes sir.” The Chief Boatswain’s said. Greene sighed as he hung up. He glared at bay crew and as he started to walk towards the trailer he heard a shout from inside. He went running in, Bessières was standing over the furry holding a knife while the two Bragulans were on their hind legs holding out their paws as if they were trying to calm Bessières down.



“I won’t have you be disrespecting me.” Bessières said. Shagfellow was whimpering and in the fetal position.

“What happened?” Greene demanded.

“Ah, after Agent Bessières said that if Yivgny was at a League conversion therapy camp it would be shut down Shagfellow got excited and ran up to the agent. The agent kicked him and sent him flying, he has the strength of a musk-ox! Agent Bessières! Calm down!” Vikim said.

“You act like an animal I’ll be treating you like one. Dog makes a fine meal in my village.” Bessières waved his knife in front of Shagfellow. “Even an effeminate Anglian Dog be a fine meal with all the right seasonings.”

“Agent Bessières, ah, it may cause something of an incident if a member of the Bragulan party comes to harm.” Greene said. For a terrible moment it looked as if Bessières was going to finish the job, then closed his knife.

“Brother Bears, I be speaking to you at the evening meal. We can finish the brief then. Control your animal.” Bessières stepped out and left. When Greene poked his head out of the trailer a second later, he was gone.

[Simon_Jester]

Glowworm-class Transport Tranquility, on approach to the planet Nguyen’s World
January 18, 3400, 1500 Hours, Eavesdown Mean Time

John had rounded up the passengers in the lounge, opposite the infirmary. Lakatos, the Techie doctor, looked nervous- he could understand that; still regretted decking the boy. Dobson looked confused. The old man Glazer, impassive. He’s guessed more than he lets on, I bet... so why does he look like he doesn’t care?

“All right, gentlemen. We’re going to land to drop off the supplies soon. Gavin and Sammie will mind the ship while I take the others out a ways. We should be back in a few hours. But the ship will be staying buttoned up on the ground; could be bandits out there. So sit tight, and we should be back on our way to Praha shortly and close to our scheduled arrival time.”

Dobson spoke up. “Uh... are you sure this is safe, then?”

The captain grinned- he could tell the man the truth here, if in nothing else. “Reckon so. Gav can have the ship lifted off in a couple minutes, and he’ll be keeping a watch out from the cockpit. You should be fine back here.” Glazer looked back at John and nodded gravely; he still got that weird sense off the preacher that the fellow knew, knew more than he should about this kind of work. Still, long as he made no trouble, John figured it didn’t really matter, not for this run.

---

1530 Hours, Eavesdown Mean Time;
1120 Hours, Planetary Local Time



Brecht hopped down from the freight hauler; Sammie rushed out to steer it back into the cargo bay. The mercenary joined Livvy and John off to the side, and began conferring. Tranquility had touched down at the upper end of a dry mountain valley, dotted with brush; their meeting place was in the valley below. Boulders and side-ravines strewn across the slopes made for a lot of hiding places.

Olivia looked over the terrain. “Nice place for an ambush.”

John nodded. “That it is.”

Brecht grinned, and passed a bottle to the captain. “From Sammie. I buried the crates good. Equipment is back on the boat.”

Hmm. How’s he gonna pull this? On the one hand, you could usually count on orks to do things a certain way. On the other... Nazdreg was a sly one; back in the day, he’d been prone to going on about “Mork:” the ork god of brutal cunning. So if you’d walk into the situation and count on him to do it one way, he probably had a backup plan.

“He’ll figure we buried the cargo. Which means putting us to ease ‘fore there’s any action. He’ll come at us from the east, talk the location out of us. He’ll have the coin, to show us first. We get it, give him the location, he gives the signal, sharpshooters hit us from... there.” He pointed.

Livvy looked at him. “Ork sharpshooters?”

John chuckled. “Sergeant once said to me: If your attack is going really well, it’s an ambush; the enemy never watches until you make a mistake...”

Her lips twitched. “And the easy way is always mined, sir.”

“He knows we’ll be expecting his boys to rush us. Most orks, that’d be Plan A and they ain’t too keen on the rest of the alphabet. Nazdreg, though...”

“Point. If any warboss bothered to train a few marksmen, it’d be him.”

“Exactly. I have a feeling- like I said. Sharpshooters, along the cliff. Probably only a few; won’t want to risk one getting trigger happy and giving him away.”

Brecht grunted. “Figure they’re in place yet?”

“Should be. Feel like taking a walk around the park?”

“Damn straight. Been too long.”

“Walk soft. I want him to think they’re in place. And remember the signal.” On a good day, he might think twice about hitting first, but... If anyone’s up there at all, it’s proof Nazdreg wants a fight, not just a trade.



Brecht took one last moment to survey the terrain, then checked the silenced bullpup rifle slung at his hip and lit off around the edge of the valley. Livvy looked at him again.

"I don't think it's a good spot, sir. He still has the advantage on us."

"Everyone always does." He smiled. "That's what makes us special."

---

John heard Nazdreg and the gang a long time before he saw them; they came roaring up the valley on bikes. When they did come into sight at the bottom of a plume of dust, he saw that one pair were driving what looked sort of like the bastard child of a wheeled technical and a halftrack, with some kind of pintle-mounted weapon... he squinted. Grenade launcher? Chain-gun? Bit of both? Looks nasty, better make sure it goes down first.



The others were wearing ramshackle plate armor. Straight-metal plate like that would be a joke against modern firearms on a human, but he'd seen orks slap enough iron on that any normal man would fall over on the spot from the weight. Could be a mite hard taking them down... well, he'd have to hope for the best. He'd seen worse; these bastards weren't all that tough compared to a damntechie intervention squad.

As they got closer, he saw that over their armor Nazdreg's warriors were decked in the usual bizarre mass of odds and ends you found on orks: furs, bits of metal, piratical-looking jewelry. Along with their large-caliber pistols and heavy machine guns they strung an assortment of hand to hand weapons from belts and bandoliers- axes, clubs, and wicked-looking knives. It would be an intimidating show if he hadn't seen similar mobs before blasting away with as much sound and fury as a Techie heavy weapons platoon... and putting about as much fire on target as a pack of kids playing with cap pistols.

Still, could be difficult. Brecht better come through... Nazdreg pulled his bike to a halt; standing in the stirrup-like footrests on either side, he waved his arm.

"Tamrin! How you doing, old pirate?" From him that was a compliment; you never normally expected an ork to try and turn on the charm, but some of the smarter ones picked the knack up somewhere.

"Walkin’ and talkin’, same as ever."

Nazdreg barked a laugh- he looked to be in a good mood, probably because he was expecting to kill somebody. "Just fine, Tamrin, just fine. T’anks for meeting me out here. Don't like da boyz zoggin' around when I try to do business."

Livvy’s eyes narrowed. “Brought an awful lot of the boys with you, in that case?”

“Heh heh, want to be sure you don’ try any... surprises.”

John put his left hand to his belt, away from his gun. “Just doing the job, Nazdreg. Not interested in surprises." Brecht, you'd better be ready...

---

Brecht slid around between the rocks and bushes at the top of the ravine, trying to ghost through his surroundings. People called him clumsy sometimes; those were the ones who'd never seen him looking forward to a fight. It didn't take him long to creep up on the spur where John had figured to find the sharpshooter. The mercenary peered through a tangle of scrub... at the skinniest ork he'd ever seen- muscled, but wiry instead of the bodybuilder look you usually saw on greenskins. Even lying prone, the thing looked hunched up and scrawny, with an enormous projecting nose that almost obscured his view down the sight of his weapon.

This was going to be easier than he'd thought. He wouldn't even need the gun.

He kept crawling towards the sniper, slipping his right hand into his pocket. At the last second, the creature's large, mobile ears twitched as it instinctively sensed approaching danger, and it began to let out a warning screech, but it was too late; the human was already lunging to the attack. Brecht's left hand clamped down on the grot's muzzle, yanking it up and backward with brutal force. His right fist slammed into the creature’s temple, his considerable strength backed by a set of brass knuckles.

After the beast stopped kicking, the big man took a look at the weapon- and a fine weapon it was. How'd a runty little critter like this keep his hands on a piece like that?. Even through the tinkering damage the orks had done to it, he recognized the gun. He'd never gotten a chance to handle one before, but he knew it- who wouldn't? This was a Umerian Mark II 20 mm Callahan plasma rifle.

The Techies' elite strike and intervention units used it as a heavy battle rifle; the regulars couldn't afford them as anything but squad support. The Callahan's jacketed plasma bolts were fast enough to fly straight and level almost clear out to the horizon, hot enough to blast straight through light armored vehicles, energetic enough to burn gaping holes in soft cover from sidescatter alone. It was perhaps the most beautiful killing machine he had ever laid eyes on. It was an epiphany, and he took the time to savor the moment, murmuring to himself:

"I think I’ll call you... Vera."

He would take her back to the ship with him, he would carefully remove the weird, desecrating extras the orks had hammered onto her. He would make her perfect. But before he could do any of that, it was time for a truly righteous shoot.

Brecht lay down into the grot's chosen firing position, nestling the stock by his cheek carefully, and making sure the plasma rifle's bipod was secure and level. Aiming towards the little knot of orks and humans down in the valley, he dialed the magnification on the scope down a bit and got ready to fire. He grinned.

---

Brecht, you’d better be ready...

Nazdreg cut into the pause. “I don’t see my cargo anywhere. Where you put it?”

“You’re not gonna see it, not till I’m holding my two hundred credits in coin.”

“You think I just take your word for it? What if you lying to me, huh? What if you don’t have da goods?” The warboss’s lips skinned back in a smile that revealed a massive row of pointed teeth.

John fished in his outside coat pocket, then slowly drew out a flask and tossed it to Nazdreg.

He fiddled with the screw cap for a moment, then took a slug. “Yeah, that’s da stuff... So where’s da rest?”

“‘Bout half a mile east, foot of the first hill. You’ll see where it’s been dug.”

The ork squinted. “Reckon I will.”

“Well then.”

Nobody moved. The orks didn’t draw their weapons. Livvy stood very, very still; John felt the tension winding him up. He decided he had to break the silence.

“Now, I’d appreciate it if you all would ride back over and circle around. I don’t much feel like walking backwards out of this valley, and should I turn, well, I’m not sure I trust your boys here not to get... entrepreneurial.”

“You got an awful lot of coin there. I can see how da ladz might want a go at it.” That raised harsh chuckles from the warriors around Nazdreg as the warboss spread his arms.

“But you, Nazdreg, you’re a dealmaker.”

“A... how you say... a practical one.” Now his grin was very wide, showing even more teeth than before. This was going nowhere good, and he knew it.

“Isn’t practical to go back on a deal. Don’t complicate things.”

“You know how it is. Hard year. Boyz get... restless. Don’t like to see someone pull one over on da boss. And you. You just another humie ship-jockey buzzing around till his time is up. Which yours is. Now.”

That settles it. He tossed the pouch of coin back to Nazdreg.

“There. You got the money back. No need for killin’.”

Livvy’s eyes never left the orks, but her posture rotated just enough for him to see from the corner of his eye. “We’re just gonna walk away, sir?”

He shrugged. “Guess that’s up to Nazdreg here.” The ork chuckled once again.

“You know how it is. Can’t back down from a kill in front of da boyz. Nuffin’ personal.”

“Could be messy.”

“Good.”

“Say, Nazdreg? One last question.” The ork frowned, but didn’t interrupt. John gestured at the ork standing next to the warboss, wearing a horned helmet and carrying a large-caliber machine gun. “That’s quite a piece your boy’s got there. Must be your best shooter. Not counting you, I mean.” Nazdreg couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn without half his own weight in ammo belts, but fat chance getting a nob to admit that in front of others.

“Yup. Badakka ‘ere, he good shooter.” He nodded to Badakka, who grinned.

“T’anks, boss.”



“Badakka. Nice hat.” John nodded once more, lowering his arm to his side.

He’d been expecting Brecht to drill the ork through the head with the rifle he’d had with him, so he was more than a little surprised to see a streak of dazzling blue-green light slam into Badakka’s chest and blow him apart. The horned helmet spun through the air for a moment, then tumbled to earth. The other orks had been expecting the shot, but aimed at John, not one of their own. For a split second they all gaped and shouted in mixed surprise and rage up at the cliff, figuring that the grot had missed. It was all the distraction he and Livvy needed.

John's pistol was out in an instant; he brought it up in a two-handed stance, pumping rounds into the wartrak gunner’s center of mass. The first few heavy slugs sparked off the armor, but they battered the ork back enough to keep him from reacting to the humans drawing their weapons.

Olivia lifted her short-barreled carbine to her shoulder in a smooth, practiced motion and started working her way down the line. Her first target was the ork henchman immediately to Nazdreg's right, who was still gaping up at the spur when her first shot scored a line across his pauldron and ricocheted up through his neck. The high-yield cartridges had a vicious kick, but she had it well in hand as she switched targets; her first victim toppled forwards, his head half-severed by the round.

The orks had started to react, lifting their bulky weapons to bear, by the time John's fourth shot struck the same hand-sized area of the vehicle gunner's chest. The heavy cast plate shattered, and the gunner slumped down, clutching at the triggers of his gun... which wrenched the muzzle skyward and out of the way for the moment. A second plasma blast from the cliff took down a bellowing warrior swinging a drum-fed mob gun to bear on the captain. The weapon tumbled away, the ork’s hand still convulsing on the trigger. The shotgun had twisted as it fell, and the burst of fire lashed the bushes behind the orks’ line, harmlessly.

Olivia’s second target had been one of the first to react. The massive nob disdained to draw a firearm, instead pulling a huge axe from his belt and bellowing a mighty “WAAAGH!” as he charged. Her second shot took him in the belly, battering through his armor, but his charge was hardly slowed. Meanwhile, a third had already unlimbered a massive automatic weapon and started blasting away in her general direction. She dived to the right to try to avoid the fire, but the ammo belt slung over the ork’s shoulder had kinked and twisted during the long ride out to the valley, and the gun jammed after the first wild burst. The greenskin fumbled with the feed, pounding on the side of the gun and cursing as only a greenskin could.

John stooped to one knee behind a nearby rock; Nazdreg pumped a burst from his massive autogun toward him, but the first three shots smacked into the rock and the rest of the burst went high and wild. John put his last two rounds into the wartrak’s driver, who had just hoisted himself out of the seat and raised a pistol. The driver wore no armor; the first shot in his chest didn’t slow him down much, but the second went through the ork’s pistol arm, ripping the thick muscle. His hand dropped, still clutching the gun but otherwise unmoving. The captain crouched further, reloading his gun.

Olivia regained her feet just in time to meet the charge of the second ork, waving his choppa and still bellowing war cries, ignoring the heavy rifle bullet buried in his gut. A ducking step back and to the side carried her under the first irresistible slash of that giant battleaxe, but this was no time to play tag with something that outmassed her three to one and had damn near a meter of reach on her. Holding her carbine like a pistol, she jammed the muzzle under the ork’s chin and fired. The beast’s helmet rang as the bullet punched up and out through the top of his head; he sank to his knees, then flopped to the ground, twitching. She was just turning to fire on the third ork when he cleared the jam and put a single exploding slug into her chest, low down on the left side. She flew backward.

John saw Livvy go down, saw the ork curse and thump his weapon as the next round jammed it again. By now he’d slid in more cartridges; steadied by the rock his aim was good enough to put a bullet through the greenskin’s head. The driver had started to stir again; four more shots took him down. The gunner had slumped over on the bed of the technical, not moving- might be back up, but not soon. That was damn near the last of them... except for Nazdreg, who had taken cover behind his bike. Crouching low, he was an impossible target... but his gun didn’t bear on them. Always was a little cautious for an ork.

“Livvy?” He called to her- hadn’t seen blood, but you never knew.

She gritted her teeth, pulling her shirt open to check the woven-wire armor vest underneath. “Armor’s... dented.” He could see Nazdreg inching around behind the bike, reaching for... oh Hell. Reaching for one of the stick grenades slung over the handlebar.

Brecht wasn’t taking the shot... He’s still got the money. Couldn’t risk outright vaporizing it with whatever the hell he’d found up there. The answer came to him in a flash. Around orks, things got... weird. Stuff that ought to be a pile of junk would work, guns flashed... too loud, somehow. And always there were plenty of explosions- ork gear was volatile as all hell.

John’s bullet punched through the thin casing of the stikkbomb; it blew up in a roar of blackpowder. Fragments whipped past John; a big one tugged at his left arm, tearing a shallow graze just above the elbow, but it was better than letting him throw the damn thing. Nazdreg roared with pain- his hand had been right next to the grenade when it went off, even if most of the shrapnel had blown away from the stick handle. That might not have stopped him, he was tough even for an ork... but the bike, still rocking from the explosion, fell on his torso and other arm.

John glanced down at his elbow- just a flesh wound, fine for the moment. stalked over to the fallen warboss, still struggling to free his right arm, staring down into his bloodied face. He brought down the revolver, holding it inches from Nazdreg’s face.

“Now, I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words about my character. So let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job.” He bent down and seized the pouch of coin from the ground beside the wounded ork. “And then I get paid.”

There was a voice in the back of his head telling him to shoot, world’d be a better place... No. He was not a vicious man, or at least he didn’t aim to be. Even an ork could learn a lesson. He pulled the revolver back and holstered it, then walked over to Livvy and helped her up.

“You all right?” She seemed to be standing on her own two feet well enough; he let her go.

“Hurts like hell...” and then she coughed, staggered against him and hissed. There was a speckling of red on her hand.

---

His eyes went wide, mind snapped right back into combat mode. In a flash he tapped his commbead. “Brecht, get the hell down here. Livvy’s hurt.” Then he switched frequencies, with only a flicker of hesitation- he’d be telling Gav. “Gav, get Sammie out our way with the mule. Livvy’s hurt. Reckon she’s sound enough to stand, but get that Techie doctor to prep the infirmary.” Crackling over the radio from the ship, he heard nothing for a moment.

“GAV! Get moving!”

That snapped him out of it. “On it, John. Oh God...” But there was no damn time for that. He cut the radio.

“Livvy, lie down. Let me help you...” He eased her down to the ground, then looked up as Brecht came skidding down the side of the valley, holding some kind of heavy rifle up in the air with one hand, carefully. “Brecht, Sammie’s coming with the mule. I want you to help me get her in the back, you hear?”

“Right. Did you see-”

“Brecht.” He gave the merc a cold, level stare; that got him to shut up and soldier.

Sammie was as fast as he could have hoped for. She hopped down from the driver’s seat and grabbed a pair of long poles from the bed. “Konrad threw this into the bed as I was getting her out. Stretcher, right?”

“Field stretcher, yeah. Give it here, now.” They rigged it, then gently slid Livvy onto the stretcher and lifted her into the back. “Brecht, you ride shotgun. I’ll stay in back with her.” They turned around and headed back to the ship.

Behind them, still pinned by his bike, Nazdreg grimaced with the pain from his injured hand. With a wrench he pulled out his personal radio, a boxy contraption with a nice big antenna- his top mek had made it for him personally.

“Boyz! Dis is Nazdreg! You kommandos, you listen good! Dunno where da ship landed, but I put you all over da place. Some of you iz close. Get there, NOW! You boyz back in da base, you do two t’ings. You get da big guns ready if dey break atmo... and you call Boss Migwazza. Tell ‘im where to go and ‘dat I got a t’ousand teef for him if he catches d’ose humies! WAAAGH!”

He might not get revenge on those stinkin’ grots in person, but he’d get it... oh, he would get it.

[Shroom Man 777]

SEBUU CITY, Feelipeens



It was a happy day. It was the Holy Sinoluge. Fernando Martinez walked joyously across the street, casually observing the spectacle that came to the moonworld Sebuu, as well as the rest of the Feelipeens, only once every year.

All over Sebuu, as well as on a whole lot of other Bisdak Moons and Nilo Cylinders, people were celebrating. Jubilation, for not only was it a Sinoluge a millennium after the After Earth, but it was also the first Sinoluge ever since the end of the thrice-damned Spice Wars.

Fernando sidestepped a flock of celebrating children, who were wearing neon-skeletor masks and shooting each other with squirt guns. He chuckled, for he could remember himself as a child chasing his little sister with a piece of raw dodo’s leg during Sinoluge. But his thoughts were soon dispersed, as were the kids, by an exploding belt of fireworks thrown at them by a jolly old fat man in red clothing.

The fat man asked him something that he couldn’t hear due to the exploding fireworks, probably if he was okay. Fernando merely nodded and said ‘Si’.

The fat man leaned back and grasped his belly with both hands. “Ho, ho, ho!”

Fernando smiled and walked away from the exploding fireworks and into the crowd of celebrants. The crowd had formed a circle around a bunch of little children and elderly folks armed with sticks. The children and geriatrics were blindfolded and were attempting to smash a levitating object, a statue of a funnily-sculpted demonyo, undoubtedly hollow and filled to the brim with all sorts of treats. Either that or more fireworks.

Fernando shook his head as one of the geriatrics smashed open the demonyo with his stick, only to have at least a hundred mini-rockets shoot out of the paper mache monstrosity’s behind. Old people and children alike ran screaming blindfoldedly as the rockets began detonating amongst them. At this, the crowd of onlookers that circled the blindfolded children and their equally-blindfolded grandparents roared with laughter.

As the last of the fireworks exploded, the crowd suddenly grew quiet. The celebrant was finally here.



Fernando, along with everyone else, turned to see a noisy parade coming from down the road. The procession was that of the Niñyo, the Feelipeeni version of the infant Jesukristo child. The Niñyo himself was on top of a highly ornamental wagonfloat of gold. And the golden wagon was, in turn, being pulled and pushed by at least one hundred gnomish mutants. It was quite a sight. On top of the wagon, but behind the giant effigy of the Niñyo, was a holy man – a Padre from the Katlicko clergy of the Ordo Immaculada. The psyker was sermonizing, emanating a psykonuclear aura whilst his ministrations were amplified by macrophones. He was quite loud, and he preached in a mixture of Feelipeeni and an archaic tongue known only to those of the Immaculada churches.

In front of the wagon and its gnomish pullers were at least a hundred children, all covered in charcoal and all wearing sackcloth. They had poles, each one at least ten times taller than any of them, and they banged these poles on the ground – making a loud and very deep thudding noise. These children were flanked by drummers and trumpeters, whose loudness was made obvious when they began playing.

As the drummers and trumpeters began drumming and trumpeting, the crowd grew wild, and the party once more resumed. Across many moons, many millions would be celebrating just like them, celebrating in their barrios, pueblos, mooncities and space-stations.

Few minutes later, the parade passed by, but only after being mobbed by elderly women, stampeding and crushing each other underfoot as they desperately tried to obtain blessings from the Child Jesukristo by touching the wagon. And then what came after was a truly sight to behold.



Following the parade was a procession. A very queer procession that inspired the crowds of spectators to party even more vigorously. This was so because the procession was composed of Shinran-esque androgynes. Pink and green haired androgynes, half-naked and being whipped by midgets who were chanting choir music and quoting the scripture. Among the androgynes were anorexic women flagellating themselves. These anorexic autoflagellatrixes were particularly grotesque, for their bleeding forms were as gaunt as skeletons and scantily clad in sacramental cloth – which only further highlighted their emaciation. Buzzing above these walking and praying cadavers were clouds of flies and forming a perimeter around this queer procession were people on stilts, costumed with paper mache to make them look like flamboyantly colored giants. These flamboyant giants carried huge swords, probably from Shinra too.

Behind the procession was yet another wagonfloat. This time, the wagon was not topped by an effigy of the Niñyo. No, it was far more exotic. Instead of a giant Niñyo, it had crosses. And impaled upon these crosses, crucified, were people. They were bleeding, but instead of screaming in pain, they were rejoicing to the Jesukristo in a gory prostration.

This tradition originated in the inner world Bizminda, but was such a popular way to celebrate joyous occasions that it became a standard throughout the Feelipeens.



At the sight of these crucifixionists, the crowd hooted and the children cheered in admiration while crying old women kneeled down and began thanking Mamma Mariya.

Having been entertained enough, Fernando disappeared into the crowd. He already went to church at dawn, so he decided to have lunch.

He walked over to a karenderya, a kind of store, and sat down on a chair in front of the establishment. “Hoy!” he yelled, to which he was replied to by a young girl at the counter.

“The usual, Señor?” the brown-skinned girl asked.

“Of course, Chiquita,” Fernando winked.

A few seconds later, Chiquita came out with a plate and a bowl. She placed them on a table in front of Fernando, and he thanked her in a most suggestive fashion. She giggled and went back to the counter while Fernando began eating contentedly. After chewing on some dog meat, he broke open an egg and began sucking vigorously on the yolk and boiled embryo.

“So, how was your Sinoluge?” Chiquita asked.

Fernando sucked some more before wiping his mouth. “Oh, it was a bit boring. It’s always the same, you know? Kind of gets old...”

Chiquita sighed. “Si, I know. Oi, you better finish your dog meat!”

[Shroom Man 777]

P.N.S. Hellbender



"Bad Shagfellow!" Commissar Vikim shook his head disappointedly. As a Commissar, he may have shown leniency to the Arbitrator and even took in the humanimal degenerate, but there were limits. As representatives of the Bragulan Star Empire, the Commissar and Arbitrator were in a way representing the Imperator himself, so losing their face in front of the Dominionoids in such an undignified manner was tantamount to disgracing the Imperator and Empire. "Very bad Shagfellow! Making us look bad in front of these Dominionoids!"

"Yiff! Yiff!" Shagfellow pouted, with big animatronic puppy dog eyes to garner sympathy. The Commissariat had ways to deal with things like these. It was even written in an instructional textbook, which Commissar Vikim kept in handy at all times.

"Arbitrator," Commissar Vikim simply said, and with that Arbitrator Fiyor picked up a very thick galactic phonebook, rolled it up like it was a few sheets of newspaper, and clobbered Shagfellow with it. The execution was flawless, as the Arbitrator was well-practiced in stick-beating degenerates back in Spevik Ansils. Vikim couldn't have done it better himself.

"YARP! YARP! YARP!" Shagfellow cried out as the Bragulan law enforcer smacked him in the snout with the rolled up phonebook.

"Don't you ever do that again, Shagfellow!" Commissar Vikim growled. "Even mutinous livestock, pet animals and decorative vegetations, should they defy the orders of the Commissariat, can be subject to summary execution by gun! Do I make myself clear?"

"Yiirrrrfffff..." Shagfellow whined. His face was a bit brutalized, the animatronic servos were making whirring sounds just trying to move his facial features. A cybernetic eyeball was dislodging from its socket. Shagfellow used a paw to feebly push the eye back inside.

"I am glad that we have come to an understanding," Commissar Vikim crossed his arms and smiled warmly. "I hope you never do that again, Shagfellow."

"Yiiirrrfffff...." Shagfellow mewled, like a frightened tree.

"That's a good dog. Now go back to your cage," Commissar Vikim said nicely.

Shagfellow looked at the tiny cage and looked back at the Commissar sadly.

"Back to your cage..." Commissar Vikim removed the safety catch of his gun.

The furry sagged his head and trotted inside the tiny cage.

"That's a good doggie. Doggie gets a treat!" Vikim praised him. "Doggie gets to eat people food later. Don't you love leftovers, Shagfellow?"

"Yiiirrrffff...." Shagfellow cried. Who knows what the human under the animatronic suit was feeling. Who cared.

Nobody.

"Arbitrator Fiyor, I do not think we will be bringing Shagfellow with us to dinner," Vikim said matter-of-factly. "I want you to collar him and leash him whenever we bring him out of that cage. Is this clear, Arbitrator?"

"Yes, Commissar." Arbitrator Fiyor saluted. As an Imperial law officer, Fiyor had access to detentionary collars used on Bragulan prisoners of war, and prisoners of non-war. These collars were capable of exploding, and the shaped-charge jets of molten copper were directed inwards towards the wearer's neck. These measures were devised by the Imperator himself, the Great Architect of Galactic Civilization, when the need for synchronized and simultaneous remote-controlled executions by decapitation came up, and giving each inmate his own guillotine proved impractical even for mighty Bragule's industrial prowess. Bragulan handcuffs later implemented similar technology. Arbitrators brought both cuffs and collars with them at all times. Fiyor had them in a locker. "I know just the thing, Commissar."

"I bet you do," Vikim nodded. All the talk of Dominionoid dinners had made him hungry. "Hrm, I wonder if they'll be serving those salamanders for dinner later."

[Darkevilme]

Station 13, deep space

Hierarchy Research station 13, a secretive facility placed in deep space not so much for security reasons as much as the sheer danger involved in their research. There are scarrs on a moon which station 12 once orbited as testament to such a danger, and the partially assembled frame of the next experiment sitting in station 13's bay as a rather nearer to home reminder.

“Gold channel communication incoming.” Shiran ear flicks at the interruption of his thoughts and clears the diagrams from the holotank. “Computer, accept communication.” he says and waits a second before the holotank flickers and displays another Chamarran looking back at him.

“Ah Mela'Kith'andra, as always a pleasure.” Shiran says and inclines his head having known pretty much before the tank switched over, the royal family is one of the few that have access to the gold channel for station 13 and only Mela ever used it.
“Likewise Shiran, though I suspect your pleasure is about to sour. You and your department are being reassigned.” replies the apparition of Mela, filling Shiran with three shades of shock.
“MELA! I don't believe this, we've been working on this for decades and now you want to stop the project? After all that talk about how the interdictor bomb would provide us an unparalleled strategic advantage?”

“This comes from my Sister, it will do no good to argue against it so are you quite done?” Mela says and then takes Shiran's silence as capitulation and continues talking
“Besides, you have not made much progress. And yes I know you'll say you have great hopes for the next one being the break through but so far you've only created a series of ever more spectacular explosions, so this new project should work to your strengths.”

“How do you mean?” asks Shiran, curiousity of feline and researcher both perked by those words.

“I want you to find a way of killing a Collector monolith.”

“Oh that's easy, get the battlegroups together and keep shooting till it's reduced to glowing slag.” Shiran says semi scornfully, this did not sound like a research project.

“The Bragulan encounter indicates that faced with overwhelming firepower a Monolith will retreat and possesses enough endurance to do so successfully. We require a way to finish the job.”

Shiran is silent for a few seconds deep in thought, Mela knows him well enough to be quiet and patient while he's thinking. Finally he speaks “There is a way, we will require extensive readings on their hyperdrive however.”
“You will get them, go on Shiran.”
“Assuming you do not wish to risk the battlegroups in a field collapse event there is another way but it requires initiating the device during the Monolith's translation to hyperspace. A precisely calibrated hyperspace pulse while their field is shifting them into hyperspace will cause the energies to feed back into the hyperdrive.”

“And this will destroy the Monolith?”
“Impossible to say, Collector hyperdrives while operating on similar principles seem to work from a better understanding of those principles. It could destroy the Monolith, it might destroy their drives, it could just give you more time before they jump out.”

“Very well, your proposal is approved. Though personally I think you just suggested it so you could repurpose your last warhead.”
Shiran grins “I may have...Good day Mela.”

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

Welcome to Katagalugan
Reach Sector (Sector O-20), Holy Empire of Haruhi Suzumiya



Despite their common origin in the Philippines of Old Earth, the world of Katagalugan and the minor star nation of the Feelipeen Archipelago were complete opposities. True to its heavily bastardized name, the Feelipeens was corrupt and backwards, seemingly rooted permanently in the mid-20th century as far as its politics, culture, and even some aspects of its warfighting technology were concerned. The great wealth that the Feelipeens as a whole would have been entitled to by virtue of its status as a trade hub was by and large squandered horribly, to such an extent that even the most jaded RIS or Sovereignty corporate vulture would blush. While its workers languished in truly insurmountable poverty and its soldiers were forced to make do with truly ancient weapons like the Armalyte rifle and the "Mad Peso" helicopter, the bank accounts of dictator Ferdinand Shroomarcos (one of many examples in Feelipeeni history proving the adage that those who don't learn history are forced to repeat it) and his numerous cronies steadily grew fatter and fatter, much like the average Feelipeeni policeman or Ferdinand's botox-ridden shoe fetishist of a wife Imelda. There was also the old joke that the Feelipeens' largest export was mail-order brides, which, unfortunately, had quite a lot of truth to it.

Katagalugan, on the other hand, was everything the Feelipeens was not: Clean, progressive, and prosperous. Under the stewardship of Empress Haruhi, it had been elevated from a semi-habitable near-Earth world to one of the five crown jewels of the Reach Sector in a few short centuries after initial settlement. Without corrupt governments, antiquated social structures, pervasive poverty, obsolete technology, or the dogmatic restrictions of the Catholic Church to tie them down, the people of Katagalugan could easily show what they were truly capable of, and they gave their services to the God-Empress with a zeal matched by few others; their boundless enthusiasm was particularly evident on the battlefield, where SOS Imperial Guards and Marines from Katagalugan made reputations for themselves of being especially crafty and tenacious. The people of Katagalugan were just as zealous in defending the honor of their women as well, not wanting to become the galaxy's largest exporter of mail-order brides. The solution they came up with was a simple one that was easily amended to existing Haruhiist legislation regarding human trafficking: Anybody caught soliciting a mail-order bride on Katagalugan would simply "disappear." Such was the price paid to keep Katagalugan clean, progressive, and prosperous. Besides, who would miss a few socially-deficient nerds or dirty old men, anyway?

New Manila, Katagalugan

Sergeant Yvette Nuñez of the New Manila Police Department often found herself with long stretches of time where she had absolutely nothing to do. She particularly relished going out on a call, for there were few things she hated more than being bored; she didn't care what the nature of the call was, just as long as it kept her busy. Today, it was just a simple call about a public disturbance; she would just go to the scene and check it out before going back to her usual routine of keeping herself occupied before the next call came in.

As Yvette drove up in her patrol vehicle to the open-air market where the disturbance was reported, it became quite clear to her what the source of the disturbance was: Elderly people attempting to score mail-order brides. Apparently, the constant disappearances of all the socially-deficient nerds and dirty old men who came to Katagalugan in search of would-be wives never quite got the message across. If there was one thing that Yvette hated more than boredom, it was dirty old men, and there was a group of them practically begging to be disposed of. She grimaced as she stared at the geriatrics brazenly accosting all the women they saw, be they shopkeepers manning streetside kiosks or simply pedestrians minding their own business. After a few seconds of watching, she decided she had had enough of this scene and exited her vehicle, making sure to draw her sidearm and keep it behind her as she walked towards the old men.

"Y'all seem a bit lost," Yvette called out to the geriatrics, her speech slightly accented. "Are you absolutely sure you're on the right planet?"

There were three old men. One was blind and another was deaf, but there was also one who still had reasonably full use of his senses. As the two sensory-deprived geriatrics fumbled around, the one who could still see and hear turned to face the sergeant. "Yeah, I'm pretty sure. This IS Katagalugan, right?" he replied, surprisingly managing to get the pronunciation of the planet's name correct.

"Yep, you're on Katagalugan, all right," Yvette said. "You mind stating your business here? I've been getting quite a few calls about how y'all have been causing a ruckus up in here, and I'd just like to know what's up."

The old man was surprisingly straightforward with what he and his companions were out to do. "Well, you see, we're in the market for new wives, and I figured that we could get some here for far cheaper than in the Feelipeens."

"Well, you figured wrong," Yvette intoned, suddenly dropping the vestiges of her Southern drawl and startling the lead geezer. "This isn't Luz or Bizminda. This is Katagalugan, and here, we don't tolerate human trafficking of any sort, especially mail-order bride services. Do you know what we do to human traffickers?"

"I-- I can't say that I do," the geriatric stammered.

"Anyone caught soliciting a mail-order bride or engaging in any other form of human trafficking on Katagalugan is subject to summary execution by whatever weapon the arresting officers deem appropriate."

With that, Yvette finally brandished her Colt M2411 handgun, known to the natives of Wild Space as Aurigan Bob's gun of choice. While the good sergeant was obviously nowhere near as skilled as the Duke of Death, she didn't need much of it to put one between each of the three geezers' eyes at close range. The blind man couldn't see it coming and the deaf man couldn't hear it coming, but all three knew that they were going to die far sooner than they expected.

Three shots rang out, and three bodies fell to the ground. The marketplace fell silent for precisely one second before the people in it went back to whatever business they were conducting prior to that unpleasantness. Yvette knew that if anyone outside of the police came to ask about the old men, they heard nothing, and they saw nothing. The official report would list the three of them as missing, presumed dead. Business as usual on Katagalugan.

[Shroom Man 777]

MAYNILAD, Planet Luz, Republic of the Feelipeens
At the SHROOMDORF ASSTORIA...



President Shroomarcos and his wife arrived with much fanfare and ado. Cronies and hangers on swarmed them, forming a posse of backers and supporters as well as lowly sycophants loyal to the regime. Those who sought the Shroomarcos' favor came with much extravagance, but were careful not to outdo the flair of the Shroomarcos' themselves lest they earn the wrath of Imelda's scrutinizing fashion sense. Those who had already proven their loyalty and shown themselves dependable did not need flair or fashion as they lurked beside and behind Ferdinand Shroomarcos, trusted enough by the man himself to be his shadows.

There were children. So many children, from the public schools that Shroomarcos was building and reforming, they came to thank their hero for giving them a chance at education. Their teachers stood and watched their students proudly, and they too thanked Ferdinand Shroomarcos for securing the next generation of the Feelipeens. Imelda kissed many of the kids, for she loved children and small animals. They were very much alike.

Around them were men wearing fake imitation Gay-Ban sunglasses, cheap clothes too tight for their big muscular bodies, and denim pants with bulges in them. The bulges weren't their pieces, but were another kind of pieces. They stood around, alert, watchful, mean tempered and irritated at the squealing kids, but otherwise quiet. They had mustaches, big hair and shirts with big collars. The Presidential goon squad looked very much like the nameless bad guys from ruthless action movies from the 3380s. Because they were.

The guests arrived. A convoy of armored vehicles bearing the markings of the Republic of Shepistan. Unlike the very civilian, very metropolitan gathering at the Shroomdorf, the men who emerged from these vehicles were all garbed in fatigues and they stomped on to the red carpet with their combat boots. The crowd of government officials, socialites, cronies and sycophants piped down. The military men assembled themselves in formation, and from the largest half-track emerged the last figure - imposing, with graying hair, seemingly command of the whole regiment, despite being indistinguishable in his battle dress uniforms. The arrayed soldiers saluted him as he made his way outwards.

Somehow, this out of place entrance amidst a gala of well-to-do hobnobbing Feelipeeni folk seemed to have taken away the thunder from the Shroomarcoses. Even the normally noisy children had shut up.

The leader approached President Shroomarcos, and Shroomarcos parted from his bad company without hesitation. With a well-practiced, charismatic smile he welcomed his guest.

"General Sheppard," Ferdinand greeted the supreme commander in chief of the entire Republic of Shepistan. "Welcome to the Feelipeens."

"Good to be here, Ferdie." General Sheppard said with a drawl. While many would've been put off by his military casualness, those with a better understanding of things would've known how seldom it was to see the leader of Shepistan outside of Vulture Rock - much less gracing some third-world planet with his presence. Somewhere in the crowd, a random miscellaneous Pendletonian person lost control of his bowels and ureters and ran into the bathroom. Goddamn Astarian. "How are you? How's the Feelipeens?"

"Things are good, we're doing fine, General." Ferdinand replied. He straightened his back and feigned a military salute at General Sheppard. "El Grande Generale Gigante!"

"Hahaha!" General Sheppard laughed, even though for such flippant disrespect from a two-bit fringe world yokel, he could've easily punched Shroomarcos in the face without fear of any repercussions. He knew his men could've easily killed any weaksauce security Shroomarcos had here, he could've killed everyone. He also had an unseen, undetected Advanced Technology Bomber orbiting in space, right above the Feelipeeni capital, loaded with a hundred graphs' worth of Kill in them. But Sheppard was an officer, and thus a gentleman. He laughed and put Shroomarcos in a bear hug. "You little Feelipeeni dictator, you!"

They both posed for a photoshoot. There were no independent journalists here. If Shroomarcos had his way, there wouldn't be any independent journalists in the whole country at all. The photographers and the journos were all thugs of his, except their bulging pieces had been replaced with Dickkon film cameras. They got those cameras off the independent journos they had left in prison, or in ditches.

Sheppard and Shroomarcos said cheese.

"We love your adherence to democratic principles and to the democratic process, and we will not leave you in isolation.” Sheppard said to the video crews. It would make for a good soundbite, for sure. He grinned at that. The Feelipeens was a bastion of freedom, of Shepistani-style democracy in a galaxy full of commies and perverts. So what he said was the truth, plain and simple. General Sheppard did not lie.

"Thank you, thank you!" Shroomarcos exclaimed, clapping his hands. "Bravo, Generale. Bravo. Such kind words from a man such as yourself touches my heart."

They both laughed at this and went on into the party.

Behind them, the Shepistani military Mack trucks suddenly moved, rearing up and transforming, with intricate mechanical parts and servos and hydraulics and thick slabs of armor moving and interlocking and clicking into place as the trucks turned into the deadly FREEDOM PRIME killbots. These were special ops variants, and were thus more than meets the eye. In combat, in truck mode they could haul trailers, and when they transformed into robots they could pull out mobile Peacebreaker nuclear missiles from these trailers to use as clubs. They didn't have their trailers now, but they were still programmed to kill commies.

"COMMUNIST DETECTED!" a FREEDOM PRIME killbot blared as it stomped on a bush, squishing a sneaking independent journalist underfoot.

Shroomarcos saw this and gasped in excitement.

"I must have some of these," he said to himself.



They were now in the party, having fine dinner. General Sheppard had ordered steak, and was relishing in slicing pieces of real meat and putting them into his mouth. He chewed them, they were medium rare and thus had a bit of blood that now dribbled down his chin. He wiped it with a handkerchief.

"Honey, why didn't you tell me that General Sheppard was coming himself?" Imelda asked her husband.

"Because, dear, if I told you then it wouldn't have taken you an hour to choose your shoes. It would've taken you the whole day." Ferdinand laughed. His cronies laughed with him too. Imelda glared at her husband's pet sycophants and they all became silent. Except for one, who didn't get the clue and kept on laughing. Imelda made a small gesture, and the thugs dragged the man off his chair and into a backroom.

General Sheppard didn't notice. Within a minute he finished his big steak and let out a content burp.

"I almost forgot what real meat tasted like," Sheppard said contentedly. "Damn hippies won't let us kill animals anymore, damn environmentalist."

"The trick is to kill the hippies first," Shroomarcos commented as he brought up a balut egg and downed it like how one would down a shot glass of liquor. Sheppard looked at him strangely, but he just shrugged. "It's an aphrodisiac, you know. The wife lets me eat some every night."

Imelda giggled naughtily.

Behind them, they could hear horrible screams. Then there was a gunshot and the screams stopped.

"You really must upgrade your soundproofing my dear Ferdie," Sheppard said nonchalantly.

"I was counting on them to bludgeon him first," Shroomarcos replied. "They're getting sloppy, there aren't many independent journalists left in Maynilad. I guess I must let them practice on some student protesters. Those are the noisest ones, anyway."

"Maybe we can export our own dissidents to the Feelipeens," Sheppard thought aloud. "That way, if you get rid of them here, their deaths won't count in Shepistan. We can improve our human rights record that way. If it's not in the graphs, then it's good. What do you think, Ferdie?"

"Sounds like a plan. A business proposal?" Shroomarcos smiled. They were getting into business, and they were starting out on a good foot.

"Yeah, yeah. We can import, fruits, sugar, rubber, that stuff. Buy a lot of your cheap textiles, you still got kids working in the factories? We'll also tell companies to invest in the Feelipeens since your country's so Shepistani-friendly, just give them some tax breaks, okay?" Sheppard realized that he was no good at this diplomatic stuff. "Alternately, I can just let my civilians do the deal-making."

The General said the word 'civilians' with such apparent disdain.

"Good, good," Shroomarcos got another balut and offered Sheppard one. The General declined. "I've had a couple of projects in mind. Well, more then a couple. We've been talking to your Shroom Monte agricorp -"

"Ah, want to set up some plantations, do you?" Sheppard laughed. "Good move. I think the Feelipeens could use some more sugar plantations too."

" - and I was thinking of improving our space transport capabilities by building a Space Bridge." Shroomarcos offered.

"A what?"

"Oh, you'll see." Shroomarcos moved on. "I've also been thinking of the Feelipeeni migrant workers in Shepistan."

"You mean those mail-order Feelipeeni wives that marry to fat old ugly Shepistani tourists?" Sheppard burst out laughing at that, slapping his thigh and nearly spilling a champagne glass. Imelda stifled a shocked gasp, covering her mouth as she did so, while the rest of their polite company stared at the General. "What? Right, right. Okay, I'll let immigrations ease up on migrant worker laws, let a few thousand Feelipeenis get their visas, sure. They better join our armed forces, have them work as cooks for SAC. This food delicious. What is this called, by the way?"



"Dinuguan," Ferdinand simply said.

"Come again?" Sheppard was too busy chewing to hear him.

"It's also called pork blood stew." Shroomarcos explained, as he was quite talented in the culinary arts himself, being a talented chef. He often cooked for his friends and cronies, and they always enthusiastically told him that his food was good. He was always flattered when they complimented his cooking, and in return he placed them in charge of more departments and increased their off-the-books salaries. "It's made out of pig blood and meat, typically pig stomach, pig intestines, pig ears, pig heart and pig snout. We mix a little something into the pig blood to turn it into gravy. It tastes good with vinegar too."

The normally stern and implacable General Sheppard, known for his disdain for weak stomached girly men like libruls and limp-wristed types like Anglians and such, suddenly grew pale. He felt queasy and nauseous, and being known as a man of action who seldom hesitated in taking that action, Sheppard didn't hesitate to take a particular course of action that suited the moment. He heaved and hurled chunks of brackish pig blooded pig guts and ears on the nearest lap next to him. Shepistani vomit landed on Imelda Shroomarcos' beautiful dress.

"YOU SHEPISTANIMERICAN BASTARD!" Imelda Shroomarcos screamed. The disgrace of having Shepvomit spewed all over her designer dress was... was... disgraceful! She howled bloody murder and stamped her feet and pointed at Sheppard. It didn't take subtle cues for her thugs to know what they had to do.

"Um, thanks?" General Sheppard wiped his mouth with a napkin. The Shroomarcos' thugs moved menacingly towards him.

The head of a FREEDOM PRIME killbot emerged outside the nearest window.

"POTENTIAL COMMUNISTS SIGHTED CONVERGING ON BAD DOG ONE." FREEDOM PRIME boomed. At the sight of that terrible nuclear laser-eyed visage, and at the sound of that rumbling robot voice, the thugs cowered and backed off from the General. "FALSE ALARM. NON-COMMUNISTS TAKING WISE COURSE OF ACTION. ALL HAIL DEMOCRACY."

Imelda was flabbergasted. She looked at her withdrawing goons, looked at the ugly metal face of the giant Shepistani robot, and looked at General Sheppard who curiously looked back at her. Realizing that the Shepistani was too big and bad to be bludgeoned to death and shot in a backroom, that he could get away with ruining her beautiful gala dress, Imelda had no other recourse. She screamed and got off her chair, sobbing as she ran into the bathroom.

Shroomarcos was watching all of this with a detached sense of curiosity. He was, after all, a political animal. He didn't get an almost perfect score in the law bar exam, after studying for it in jail due to accusations of murder (he was acquitted), for nothing. He even had to retake the exams because people thought he was cheating, and he showed them by getting perfect in the second round. Decades later, after he became President, he had those people who accused him of cheating killed. Because he was a smart cunning unpredictable cocksucker. Except, he didn't suck just anyone's cock, he sucked his own.



"General Sheppard, my friend," Shroomarcos said coolly, as though nothing had happened, while lighting an unfiltered Upper Marlboro cigarette and taking a long drag. "What do you want for your birthday?"

"What?" Sheppard didn't expect that, honestly. A Shepistani by nature, he was expecting escalation, which would have had to have been answered by a first strike, or if they struck first, then he'd strike with a second strike as per Shepistani deterrence policy. FREEDOM PRIMES stalking the yard outside, and a Space ATB in orbit, yeah, he could do that. He could take them. But his birthday? "My birthday?"

"We share the same birthday, September 11. Thank god for 9/11, just like that convenience store, eh?" Shroomarcos grinned. "So, what do you want, my friend?"

"Let's see. I want to lease some land to build bases on. Say... Pubic Bay and Bark Space Base?" Sheppard shrugged. "We'll pay, of course. You can get Imelda to set up some nice whore houses around the base, to give the local women some livelihood."

"Good, good!" Shroomarcos nodded. He knew that the Shepistani presence would actually be a boon in dealing with their problem with the communistas. "Sure thing!"

"Hrm, what do you want?" Sheppard asked, suddenly curious at where the little Feelipeeni tinpot dictator was taking this.

"Oh, a few hundred vintage FREEDOM PRIMES?" Shroomarcos said, as if it was nothing.

"Why? Got any problem dealing with student protesters and indie journoes?" Sheppard chuckled. "Need a giant nuclear robot to stomp on them? Hah!"

"Yes, there's a bit of that, and a bit of the communistas that have been troubling us." Shroomarcos said, examining his fingertips carelessly as he did so.

"Commies?!" Sheppard straightened up, suddenly alert and attentive. "You've got a commie problem, Ferdie? Why didn't you tell me about it?"

"Well, I thought you were too busy bombing Amplitur holdouts and nuking Pendleton. We are a small country after all and -" Shroomarcos wasn't able to finish his sentence, as Sheppard reared up, got on his feet and slammed his fist on the table. That jolted Shroomarcos out of his feigned facade, and he saw the sheer look of outrage on the Shepistani supreme leader's face.



"Commie sons-of-bitches," growled Sheppard, murderous expression on his face. "It'll be a cold day in hell before I let them cross Canada into the mainland."

[Lord_Of_Change 9]

Volksland (Sector T-10)

Fuhrer Karl Gottlieb looked down from the skyscraper at Fuhrerstadt, his capital and the beating heart of Volksland. It was located on Volksland-A, the administrative heart of the star nation. Volksland-B was a farming planet, and Volksland-C was an icy moon where prisoners worked for the rest of their (very short) lives. Normal crimes were punishable by military service, but thought-crime was punishable (and always was punished) by transportation to a labour camp where the criminal would die in a matter of weeks, months if particularly unlucky.

Fuhrerstadt was a grand city, but behind its facade it was clearly rotting, literally and metaphorically. But it could have been worse. The other cities of Volksland were gigantic slums, built purely to service factories that endlessly produced the goods the upper elite needed, ceaselessly pumping poison into earth and sky and water. But that wasn't good to dwell on, soon Hate Week was coming around and the citizens would rail and mob against the scapegoat of the year, the false reason why Volksland was so poor. The real reason was that it was a pariah, embargoed by most nations. And the reason why was simple. Its ideology.


The Hall of Volksland in Fuhrerstadt

The Fuhrer was thinking, Black Sunday had been an excellent way to attack the Prussians, but still...unease filled him. Volksland's ten million strong army was composed mostly of underpaid workers and criminals, and apart from the Sturmwache, there was no real discipline or good equipment. Its navy too, had nothing above the size of a Cruiser, and those were rotting into obsolescence. Even the government of the Feellipeens would have had them mothballed as soon as possible.

But then, even in such a poor nation, subservience was everything. Even if the cities outside of Fuhrerstadt were vast slums, there were the National Reich Church and the Loyalty Police to terrify people into subservience and endless devotion to their Fuhrer.

That was when the aide came to him, a pretty blonde woman in her black uniform. She walked up to him, and said in her svelte voice three words -

- 'You're doomed, Gottlieb.'

'What?' Gottlieb demanded.

'The Prussians are advancing into the outer system.'

'How do you know?'

'Because they told me.'

She then drew her pistol, a Colt 2411 (a type renowned for being Aurigan Bob's personal weapon), walked a safe distance away, and shot him between the eyes with a thermobaric bullet.

Boom.

Gottlieb's head, neck and upper torso had ceased to exist in that explosion, and his lower torso was badly bloodied, it was clear to her that he had died instantaneously. It wasn't what a monster like him had deserved, and he was hopefully burning in whatever hell existed for his type of evil. Nothing was left of his head, neck and upper torso but bone and teeth shards, a blood-red stain around what was left of his body, and a few shreds of red-pink flesh.

Ilse, top Esper and agent in the Prussian Intelligence Service, walked away calmly, putting her pistol back in its holster. This mission had been executed perfectly. She sent a single telepathic message to Roderich Von Edelstein, commander of the ground part of this expedition.

Extraction requested.

+++

Volksland System

Grand Admiral Fritz Von Langstein watched the Volksland forces begin their attack.

Thirteen cruisers and twenty-six Frigates against 10 Kaiser-class battleships and twenty-five Siegerkranz Battlecruisers. It was a foregone conclusion.

The Volksland ships fought desperately, and, Langstein had to admit, they were courageous. But for their superior numbers, they were most definitely and clearly outgunned.

'Fire the nuclear missiles,' he ordered crisply and clearly.

The Hellfire-designation nuclear missiles fired, overwhelming the shields of the enemy fleet and destroying them utterly. A few remained, but were crippled and swiftly, efficiently, mercilessly destroyed.

The invasion of Volksland was about to begin.

[DarthShady]

Infested Space Station, In orbit over Karlack World of Abraxas

Abraxas Prime is a volcanic fiery world in the sector of the same name, it is one of the Core Worlds of the Karlack Swarm, and as such it is teeming with life. Due to the planets nature and the Karlacks fondness for hostile enviroments, Abraxas is one of the largest Hive clusters, and is one of the primary places where The Swarm breeds its numerous deadly broods of warriors and workers. A comparison could easily be made between Abraxas and one of the more heavily industrialized Bragulan worlds, but even with its hostile environment and the fact that it was infested, the planet was still far more friendly to life than its Bragulan counterparts though.

The Planet was surrounded by makeshift space stations, which were in fact nothing more than pieces of infested Imperium battleships held together by the mutated form of certain Karlack creatures that have grown inside and around the ships. Warships of other species and remains of pirate stations completed the monstrous constructs that orbited the planet. It was a graveyard of sorts, the remains of defeated enemies - a grim reminder of the Swarms bloody history. And it was on one of these infested space stations that a meeting was held and decisions were about to be made.

***

"Our defeat on Janus is assured unless additional forces are deployed." A chorus of voices spoke in unison. "The Imperium is relentless and they have come with great force."

"That is not certain. We still have substantial forces left on the planet." Alyxia Komnenos interrupted the voices, letting her opinion be heard. She was standing inside a large chamber on the station, the chamber used to be the command center of a battleship once, not it was covered in bio-mechanical creep and served as an impromptu meeting place. "Even without the support of our Brood Ships we can still damage the Imperium greatly, force them to fight us on that insignificant world for months. Its not like it matters to us anymore...our objectives on Janus were achieved."

"True." The voices agreed. "And sending additional Broods would only attract more attention from the Imperium. Its not worth the effort."

"There is however one more thing the Broods on Janus can achieve, aside from killing the God Emperors fanatics." Another voice joined the discussion, speaking from a dark corner of the chamber. The voice belonged to a dark figure which soon moved to the center of the chamber, that figure was the blue eyed Aspect known as Seth. He smiled and stroked his beard. He was the only Aspect who didn't share his thoughts with the others, so they had to ask - and they hated doing that.

"And what is that?" The chorus of voices and Alyxia asked at the same time, speaking as one, and seemingly annoyed with their blue eyed friend.

Seth's answer was rather short and straight to the point.

"They can kill the God Emperors Son."

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

“Lads. We are here today to fight the vile xeno Karlacks, who have decided to lay waste to this human world.” The Commissar spoke stately and sagely. The Imperial Guardsmen of his regiment had just completed a check of their personal equipment and their weapons, powered their personal shielding and powered armor, and were just about to board their infantry fighting vehicles. Unlike the PDF, the Imperial Guardsmen were armed with heavier infantry weapons such as plasma guns, which were more powerful than the lasguns the former typically carried.

“The Karlacks however, will not succeed today. We are here to liberate this world from their foul claws. We are here to ensure they do not encroach on human territory again. They also have come way too close to Imperial space for our personal comfort. An example is to be made. We are here to ensure they do not think that the Imperium sleeps. No we do not. We are here to disabuse them of this notion.

Lads, we are here to fight for the glory of the Imperium. We are here to fight for the God Emperor of Mankind. We will do him proud, and we will make sure the Karlacks learn a lesson from this debacle of theirs: That the moment that they lay their filthy slimey hands on a human world, we will strike them with the Wrath of the God Emperor.

Praise the Emperor! For the Glory of the Imperium of Man!”

“Praise the Emperor! For the Glory of the Imperium of Man!” the troops chorused.

“Then go! Show no mercy, for there was none to be received!”

The troops yelled in reply and boarded their troop transports. The Superheavy tanks were organising themselves into a mailed fist and would lead the way. Titans would follow and provide close support. The monstrously huge tanks roared forward with their huge guns, intent on bringing death to the enemy. The bulk of the Imperial Guard and PDF would attempt to encircle the capital from the north, while the Astartes would invade from the south. The other battlegroups would proceed towards their objectives as commanded by a General.

It did not take long to meet resistance. The infested Karlack humans, or Genestealers, rushed out to face the Imperial Army. They were like screaming raving lunatics, swarming their way towards the Imperial troops. Sonnar Rocket artillery vehicles and Kondensator artillery begun laying down fire with a combination of dispersed plasma munitions, or outright atomics. Any Genestealers that somehow escaped the bombardment was simply destroyed by Imperial armor.

The main body of the Karlack Swarm then struck. Swarms of Karlacks, Predators, and Executioners charged at full speed towards the combined Imperial Guard and PDF army. The Titans’ weapons roared with full power. The Warlord Titans gave fire support to the Superheavy Tanks as they established a kill zone, where entire swathes of Karlacks died under their guns. Nevertheless, some Executioners and Predators attempted to flank the Imperial Army, and the the forces on the Imperial Army’s flank turned to meet the new threat. It was a clash of the titans, as some Karlack Predators managed to close in the tanks and tore up a number of them, sending their ruined metal hunks flying into the army, crushing men when they fell. Imperial Guardsmen and PDF soldiers clashed at close quarters with the Karlacks, many dying as Omega energy ripped through their personal void shielding and armor.

Nevertheless, the sheer mass armor saved the day, as Imperial armor, artillery, space fighters and the Titans rained enough energy on the enemy that it would have destroyed many a city several times. The Imperator Titan Righteous Cleansing Fire of the Emperor stood at the rear of the army loomed mightily in the background and scorched all the earth that lay before the mighty engine. The Titan’s powerful plasma and warp cannons sliced through entire throngs of Karlacks, burning their carcasses to fiery bits. The earth shook as the mighty engine walked, and its sheer size would have sent many an enemy of the Imperium cowering. However, the Karlacks were never the sort to show any kind of fear, since they were driven by the Swarm like slaves whipped relentlessly by a cruel master and they would fight on regardless how despondent their situation was.



To the south, a different picture of the battle appeared. The Astartes begun mobilizing and surged forward with a force that would have sent many the bravest cowering in their little foxhole. Among all the Astartes Legions, the Varangian Rus were known for their unparalleled ferocity. With all guns blazing, the Astartes army charged towards their enemies. Astartes armor unleashed a furious bombardment on the enemy, resulting in huge craters forming on the ground. The Karlacks had few of their dreaded Spectres on Janus; they did not anticipate an Imperial response. The Spectres were a response to the dreaded fighting efficacy of the Adeptus Astartes during the Imperium-Karlack war; the Adeptus Astartes simply slaughtered just about any Karlack hurled at them, short of an Aspect going down to fight the Astartes toe to toe. Each Astartes was a walking tank: their hand weapons were far more powerful than the average Imperial Guardsman’s rifle, be it the elite stormtrooper, special forces, or the mechanized infantry, and their armor and void shielding gave them protection from most weapons. Astartes armor was also far superior to most contemporary armor as well.

Specters were created for a reason, they were an example of the rapidly evolving Karlack war doctrine, the Swarm always adapted to its enemy - evolving new and more dangerous breeds of creatures, with which to kill and consume its enemies. The Astartes were powerful warriors, but even the strongest warrior could be overwhelmed. While they focused on holding back the chitinous horde of creatures, that descended upon them like a tide of death that consumed everything in its path, the Astartes were surprised when the ground beneath them erupted in a hale of dust and flying rock. Black fog rose up from the ground with lightning speed, desitegrating everything in its path.

This black fog of death were the Specters and even the mighty armor of the Astartes could not resist them. Tanks were ripped up into the air and consumed by the black fog, making it grow larger, and descend back down focusing its attention on the Astartes. The Specters were renowned for their cruelty and efficiency, that combined with the fact that they could regenerate by consuming their enemies, made them an enemy to be feared. As te battle raged one of the Astartes was lifted up above the battlefield, a Spectre seized him and decided to show off its power to its human enemies, the black cloud of death swarmed around the Astartes and in seconds turned him to dust. There was nothing left. Considering the power of the Astartes, to prove that one of them, one of the God Emperors finest warriors - could be killed with such ease, sent shivers down the spines of many a Imperial soldier.

Fighting the Swarm was a hard task as it was, and no matter how much faith and firepower they brought, the guardsmen were in fact still only human. And it was not easy for humans to face such unnatural horrors, such creatures of nightmares, things that showed no fear and just kept coming until you were dead and they could feast upon your rotting corpse. For them to see one of the Emperors mightiest warriors die in such a way, to simply disappear and be consumed in seconds, it was a great blow against their moral. And the Swarm knew how to take advantage of such things as fear, the Karlack would redouble their efforts, they would make even the mighty Astartes spill blood and sweat, and die upon the surface of Janus. This world would become one of the largest graveyards in the known galaxy, and example of what only a fraction of the Swarms unyielding wrath, could achieve. There was a reason why humans feared the Karlack, and Janus would soon serve as a terrifying wake up call to the Imperium and others.

The Astartes were not easily cowed however. The Astartes rallied. The Terminator armored Astartes charged forward with incredible speed, carrying thunder hammers and shields, heavy bolter guns and plasma weapons. With a terrifying crash, they attacked the Spectres head-on. If ordinary Astartes armor was barely a match for the Spectres, the Terminator armor was a different matter entirely. Built tougher than tanks, the Terminators wielded their weapons with alacrity and power, and they were the elite among the elite in the Astartes ranks. Mighty Astartes Dreadnaughts joined the fight, firing their massive hand weapons, and smashing a few spectres with their powered weapons. Some of these Dreadnaughts were crewed by company captains and crippled Astartes. Land Raiders and Nihilus super tanks moved to support the fight.

Then came a roar. A roar that surged through the minds of all. The Strategos Primus Rus Komnenos had descended from his Battle Barge and had landed. Upon stepping on the alien soil, he had let out a psychic roar that resonated among all, even the Karlacks. It filled Imperial troops with a renewed sense of rigour and courage, and morale lifted. Rus Komnenos had joined the fray.

[Simon_Jester]

Boss Migwazza, A Biography
By the Rogue Chronicler

Boss Migwazza is a good example of the cream of the crop among that most interesting of ork subcultures: the orkish aerospace arm. Infamous for his daring raids, his gift for penetrating enemy defenses to launch a devastating strike against his foes, and his homicidal indifference to the laws of physics, Migwazza has been a bane of the Badlands and its border territories for decades.

Migwazza was marked for the orkish Kult of Speed since his first days on the battlefield, when he crowded into the back of a truck for a speed run across the plain towards a human settlement. Frustrated at the driver's incompetence, he swung into the cab of the truck, seized the other ork, and threw him bodily from the vehicle. The truck predictably went into a roll due to the loss of control, flinging the squad across the landscape... but Migwazza did manage to crash into and destroy one of the settlement's guard towers, greatly easing the progress of the offensive.

Next time, the trukk boyz concluded that it was best to let him drive from the start.

Eventually, Migwazza acquired his own warbike by the simple expedient of riddling the owner with bullets over an insult. It was during his quest to upgrade the bike that he found his most valuable ally, the mek Bitzgrub. Behind every successful ork speed cultist is a successful mek, and Bitzgrub was more successful than most. His ability to assemble power armor and military vehicles in a cave from random pieces of scrap iron was unremarkable; most of his peers could do the same. But Bitzgrub was an innovator, known among his people for cutting-edge designs, as exemplified below:



Bitzgrub was a mathematical genius by orkish standards, being one of the few meks on the frontier who would occasionally attempt to calculate certain aspects of his design before testing it with a manned prototype. This earned him a certain amount of derision, but Bitzgrub always let the results of his work speak for themselves. This occasionally involved reducing a rival mek to a smoldering crater, which Bitzgrub naturally regarded as a pleasing form of entertainment.

Bitzgrub and Migwazza soon found that they shared a tremendous enthusiasm for fast-moving, heavily armed aircraft, even more so than the typical ork. By now Migwazza had collected a squadron of like-minded enthusiasts, whose successful plundering expeditions and daring air-mobile attacks against rival clans on the desolate world of Jagga gave the increasingly powerful ace plenty of resources to act as Bitzgrub's patron.

Bitzgrub soon decided to throw himself at one of the great problems faced by the Kult of Speed's air arm, known as the WAAAGH! barrier. Even the best designed fighta-bombas...



...had difficulty reaching truly entertaining speed in atmosphere. At speeds in excess of about a thousand kilometers per hour, the typical ork aircraft would start to lose control, shudder, then tear apart into a thousand pieces, leaving the pilot to tumble to the ground below. Attempting to power through the difficulty by strapping extra rocket engines to the rear and building hypertransturbocharged engines was seldom successful.

There were, of course exceptions: if the plane was truly orky, the ground crew truly fired up with the spirit of WAAAGH!, and the pilot well and truly drunk, it was sometimes possible to pierce this mysterious barrier. Having done so, the pilot reached the much-sought after "ludicrous speed," trailing a thunderous and extremely loud blast of noise in his wake. As a result, this limit on ork aircraft became known as the WAAAGH! barrier, a widespread subject of speculation and drunken barfights wherever the Kult of Speed gathered together.

Migwazza gained a much greater number of followers after his first successful breaching of the WAAAGH! barrier during a scramble to intercept a fleeing starship before it could leave atmosphere. Unfortunately, half a dozen of his lesser squadronmates didn't make it. Having his wingmen ripped to pieces proved an annoying nuisance when Migwazza confronted the escaping ship's point defense at altitude so high that his breath-holding abilities were challenged to their limits. After exhausting his plane's munitions in a futile attempt to bring down the massive target, Migwazza gently nursed his damaged fighter into a controlled crash in a nearby field, only later discovering that it had been seeded with land mines.

This experience left Migwazza with one great desire: a plane that could reliably breach the WAAAGH! barrier without relying purely on the orkiness of the pilot. He didn't just want to travel at ludicrous speed himself; he wanted to bring da boyz with him.

The task of designing a faster-than-WAAAGH! aircraft fell squarely on Bitzgrub's slouched shoulders. With the aid of a loyal and surprisingly long-lived team of gretchin oilers and mechanics, Bitzgrub went to work in a shop known as Da Skunk Workz, after an unfortunate incident that forced the evacuation of the lab on its first day of operation. The master mek designed dozens of prototype high speed aircraft, resulting in hundreds of test pilot fatalities- roughly 20% in the actual planes and 80% in brawls over who would get to fly them. Finally, he came upon a solution:

To breach the WAAAGH! barrier, an aircraft had to be pointy, more like a bullet and less like a deffkopta. The classical straight-wing aesthetic had to go, in favor of a more rakish swept wing... and the reddest paint anyone could find.



The test was a booming success. Soon, Bitzgrub had copied the design, and any member of Boss Migwazza's warband could be guaranteed an aircraft that would take him through the WAAAGH! barrier with ease. All was well. Migwazza was soon a much sought-after mercenary pilot, though the size of his squadron varied wildly from mission to mission and even hour to hour as volunteers, casualties, and volunteers willing to create casualties to empty cockpits stacked up.

With the addition of flash turbo-booster rockets and an enclosed canopy, Migwazza even took his new super-WAAGH!-ic fighters into low planetary orbit around the worlds he chose to harass, attacking space stations that had formerly thought themselves immune to the orks by virtue of being too far up for them to hold their breaths along the way.

In an attempt at follow-up research, Mek Bitzgrub began babbling excitedly about the idea of an "Area-er Rool" and "Zoomlining," mooting the idea of even pointier aircraft to his boss, with the aid of a pad of looted Shepistani graphs. However, Migwazza properly gave him a thump upside the head with the butt of his slugga and told the designer to quit muckin' about and get back to business. Thus, Bitzgrub has mostly confined his aeronautical research to finding the perfect combination of red paint and black/white checkmarks to optimize the speed and maneuverability of his boss's fighter; he gets closer to perfection with every passing month.



(not nearly Orky enough)

Bitzgrub has also been one of the leading developers of the groundbreaking Squigwinder air-to-air guided missile, bringing the same exceptional precision made possible in bombing by the advent of the grot-guided bomb to orkish dogfighting... but that is a story for another time.

[Steve]

Ministry of Defence, Westminster
New Anglia, Star Kingdom of New Anglia
3 February 3400


Stephen stepped into the room to find the Defence Council waiting for him. Lord Tevala was at the main chair beside his; Hro Talak and Robert Dale sat across from him as heads of the two senior services while the Minister of State for Aerospace Defence and the Minister of State for the Territorial Servce - MPs Julian Crossmere of Alba and Giancarlo Douhet of Latium - were down from Tevala. Further down were the military heads of each service, including First Sea Lord Sir Charles O'Connor.

Over the weekend, the staff of the Admiralty and Defence Ministry had worked to compile all of the data from the invasion, and the battle preceding it. The records of the Collector ships had attracted the most attention; already several governments, even the distant Chamarrans, were asking the Government for copies. Now the Defence Council got to see the footage together for the first time. Stephen drew a gasp at the raw display of power from the Monolith; even with so much of its internal spaces given to carrying its large parasite craft - ships large enough to be destroyers or even light cruisers - its fire had left one Star Cruiser crippled and the others damaged to varying extents. Only a portion of the fire at that, as the Collector ship's batteries had also engaged the escorting destroyers of both the Anglian and Ascendancy ships.

There was some muttering from Hro Talak and a couple of the others at one sight, that of the Shepistani ships holding back, though even they took hits - everyone watched as, among other ships, the Shepistani "Battlestar" Baltimore took severe damage from the Collector parasite vessels.

After the Monolith disengaged, and the battle became a curb-stomp with the angered Coalition fleet destroying the Pendletonians utterly, the playback stopped. "What are we going to do, Sir, about the murder of Coalition crewmen in escape pods intentionally targeted?", O'Connor asked.

"Pendletonian officials and officers will have charges of war crimes placed against them at their tribunals," Stephen answered.

"It is clear, Sir, that the Collectors pose a massive threat, one we had not fully realized," Robert spoke up. "Analysis of the Monolith indicates that by itself a Monolith equals the combat power of an entire Fleet. Only the Home Fleet could engage one with a realistic hope of victory, and it is likely the Monolith could withdraw before destruction."

"Then we should increase the Building Programme," O'Connor mused. "Bring newer, larger warships online. The biggest we can manage."

"And bankrupt the entire Empire in the process?", Tevala asked irritably. "The Collector involvement with the Pendletonians was clearly a one-time event; they withdrew despite being in clear control of the battle."

"According to Admiral Fisher's report, an ESPer interacting with the ship may have been responsible. In fact..." Stephen cleared his throat, waiting for the tumult of disbelief to come crashing in. "...it appears to have been Katherine de la Poer herself who caused the Monolith to break off its attack."

There was stunned, disbelieving silence at that, but before anyone could protest Robert brought the subject back on topic. "EIther way, the Collector issue is one we must take care to consider. If this is not an one-time event, if the Collectors are expanding operations into the Outback, we must be ready to deal with them. At the very least... we should consider an expanded building programme over the following decade to bring the Home Fleet up to three task groups."

"And what about the phasing out of the older designs?", Stephen asked.

"We delay that," was the answer. "The ships can be put into service extension refits in staggering figures over that time period. By the 3410 fiscal year the Empire could be fielding an expanded Home Fleet and a 4th Fleet."

"Details of an expansion of the Building Programme will have to be considered in the Cabinet. The Exchequer must be consulted, especially in our current fiscal situation." Stephen looked to the others. "Any other issues of note?"

After a few points about the particular nature of the Collector ships were made, they continued on to observing the invasion. The firing of missiles by the Shepistanis brought myriad reactions; shock from MP Crossmere, apathy from Douhet, and even a bit of a smirk from Talak. "Why did the Shepistanis have clearance to engage like that?", Crossmere asked.

"They didn't," O'Connor answered. "Lord Fisher had assigned them to defensive support only. But the Shepistani vessel was apparently under orders to extract a Shepistani intelligence asset who had been exposed and was fleeing planetary security. The Shepistani commander, a fellow named.. Hushy..." O'Connor looked like he wanted to chuckle at the ridiculous name. "...provided Lord Fisher with some of the intelligence apparently retrieved by this agent. According to reports it does appear fairly accurate; our last dispatches verified several BOSS operatives and weapons caches had been seized by the Royal Marines by making use of this information."

"And what was Lord Fisher's reaction to this gross display of barbarity and insubordination?"

"He released the Shepistani squadron from the fleet."

"They may have even done us a favor," Hro said. "The Pendletonians know we mean business now. And the threat that we could bring them back in could undermine any insurgency the old guard props up."

"Speaking of them, Mister Prime Minister..." Tevala looked to Stephen. "What, precisely, do you have in mind for dealing with them?"

"I've already instructed Sir William to do as he needs to, but within the confines of Anglian law and custom," Stephen answered. "I suspect forced seizure of estates and assets and relocations will be in order for the most intransigent who are not outright implicated in greater crimes. Perhaps, though I dread it, outright forced exile from Pendleton entirely."

"It would not be unheard of, Sir. Shroomarcos did force his predecessor into exile in Umeria," Douhet remarked.

"Where Shepistani intelligence promptly assassinated him a year later," Tevala added drolly. "But I tend to not dwell on the behavior of wretched little men like Shroomarcos or Sheppard."

"In the past Pendletonian insurgency has been focused against their own people, not our's," Stephen noted, returning to his thoughts. "They simply thwarted attempts at local reforms and made Pendleton impossible to effectively rule, at least short of drastic measures, so that we would tire and throw our hands up in frustration. But they must know this time is different. Even if not for our statements, our outright plans to annex them, the blood they and their allies shed amongst our people and others have made withdrawal unacceptable now. The Empire would never accept it and our neighbors would be incensed if we made their losses amount to nothing. The Pendletonians will know this and may try something else."

"Outright rebellion would be fairly suicidal, though. And an attempt to focus on harrassing our troops will not help them any; their rebellion would run out of manpower long before we did." Robert put his hands together. "We know they've stockpiled some modern weapons but those won't last forever, and they won't have the cash to be able to afford smuggling new ones in."

"Various nations, such as the Bragulans, are known for selling their weapons at cut-rate prices," Crossmere reminded them.

"So?" O'Connor let out a sharp laugh. "It doesn't matter if the bears give their guns away for free, any insurgency still has to get them to Pendleton, which means finding smugglers willing to run in shoals for four days round trip and to risk capture and quite possibly the noose to get the guns through our patrols and inspections. That's where their money shortage hurts them; any smuggler is going to demand extraordinary amounts of cash for the risks involved. Cash that Pendleton simply does not possess."

"All things considered, we'll let the Marines continue to spearhead efforts to suppress insurgency on Pendleton. Now, if there are any other matters..."



No. 19 Churchill Street


Stephen was enjoying a quiet post-dinner reading of the The Times when he was disturbed by the usual source, a frisky three year old leaping into his lap and crumbling the old-fashioned paper. Adrian, wearing his pajamas, sat in his lap. "Playtime!", he yelped eagerly.

Stephen breathed in a sigh. "Let me guess. Horsey rides?"

"Horsey ride!"

And so it was that the Prime Minister of His Majesty's Government got on all fours and lumbered around the room, his giggling and happy three year old sitting on his back. After a few minutes Adrian, with the usual attention span of a three year old, had lost interest and climbed off, running along to go get his other toys again. Kneeling on the carpet, Stephen looked up to see Rachel, clad already in one of her strapped silken nightgowns, leaning against the doorframe to the den. "It's always good to know that the most busy man in the Kingdom can still spare three minutes to give his little boy a horse ride," she teased. "If only I could get that much time."

"You need only ask," he pointed out.

"I try to ask on the right days. Otherwise you fall asleep," she answered, teasing again, though with a kernel of genuine irritation.

"Well, if you want to spend more time together, it would be appropriate for you to accompany me to France for the late Jean-Baptiste's funeral. I've been invited to be with the King's entourage, naturally."

"We'll be using the Warp Gate and you know it, the flight will be what, two hours at most?" She walked up to him and put her arms over his shoulders. "Though I suppose it would be nice to see the romantic sights around the city together. After business of course."

"Of course." He gave her a kiss on the lips. "Want to go put the children to bed?"

"It would be nice." She gave him a "I'll be ready for you" look as she slipped back to the bedroom. Stephen, for his part, went to immediately collect the children and escort them to bed. Which was, all things told, far easier said than done, and in the end required Rafael's aid.

[Lonestar]

Message from LCDR Colin Crapspray, GDN Observer on Upper Marlboro

TS/SI/PIZZA ROLL

TO: WAR ATTACHE OFFICE
RE: INITIAL REPORT FOR LIBERATION OF PENDLETON

(1) AFTER ARRIVAL OF COLLECTOR MONOLITH SRN STRIKE GROUP MANEUVERED TO REAR OF COALITION VAN IN ORDER TO AVOID MAJOR DAMAGE FROM XENOS VESSEL. IN SPITE OF THIS RSS BALTIMORE RECEIVED SEVERE DAMAGE AND WAS SUBJECT TO EXTENSIVE REPAIRS IN ORDER TO GET UNDERWAY POST BATTLE.(SEE ANNEX PYTHON FOR DETAILS)

(2)AFTER XENOS VESSEL DEPARTED RSS ANNAPOLIS DEPLOYED A DROPSHIP FOR REASONS UNKNOWN INTO PENDLETONIAN SOUTHERN PROVINCES. ANNAPOLIS USED STANDARD LOADOUT FOR SUPPRESSION EVENTUALLY RELEASING APPROXIMATE HALF A GIGATON ON SLAVER FORCES IN SUPPORT OF MISSION.(SEE ANNEX VIPER FOR DETAILS)

(3)ANGLIAN COMMANDER FISHER ORDERED THE DEPARTURE OF SHEPISTANI FORCES FROM SYSTEM, CLAIMING AN ATTACK OUT OF BALANCE WITH PENDLETONIAN THREAT. DOMINION OBSERVER MISSION HAS SINCE LEARNED THAT ANGLIAN OCCUPATION FORCES HAVE BEEN USING SHEPISTANI MISSION FOR PROPGANDA PURPOSES AMONGST PENDLETONIAN LOCALS.(SEE ANNEX COTTONMOUTH FOR DETAILS)

(4)ANGLIAN EMPIRE INTENDS TO UNILATERALLY ANNEX PENDLETON WITH NO RESPECT FOR INTERSTELLAR LAW OR STANDING. THE ANGLIAN EMPIRE HAS INDICATED THAT COALITION FORCES OR INTERSTELLAR NEIGHBORS WILL HAVE LITTLE TO NO SAY IN THE OCCUPATION OF PENDLETON(SEE ANNEX COPPERHEAD FOR DETAILS)

TS/SI/PIZZA ROLL

[Shroom Man 777]

Once Upon A Time in Wild Space
Tucamcari, off the Sovereignty border



The K.O. Korral was just like many upstanding well-to-do saloon bars in Wild Space, a fine establishment noted in serving a wide variety of beverages that make you blind, from rums in bottles marked 'X', to rums in bottles marked 'XX', and even rums in bottles marked 'XXX'. The ones with three Xs on 'em were harder to come by in Wild Space, which made Korral much more popular with the rootin'-tootin' high-falutin' crowd of vagabond transients just passing by and looking for a proper local watering hole. Which the Korral was, see. They came by often since Tucamcari was by the railway, and locomotives brought in plutonium prospectors and pilgrims from the high heavens straight into town, before throwing them to the badlands where lives were lost and fortunes had.

The fact that trains coming from the space elevator passed Tucamcari by meant that the Korral didn't have a shortage of customers. Also meant that the Korral could get its hologram pool table fixed often thanks to readily available supplies, a contrast to the normally flickering holo-billiard balls plaguing other establishments round these parts. Train also meant Korral got an ample supply of rare triple-X rums.

Right now, the establishment was nearly out of all kinds of Xs since the place was packed. People enjoyed their drinks, while gathering round to watch a game of pool or spectating on a game of Dominion hold'em poker, waiting to see who won, or who got shot in the face for cheating at cards. Downstairs was where they put the latter, upstairs the former where there were warm beds kept that way by fresh girls. The next train would bring in a shipment of X and XX and XXX to restock the counter, as well as bring in a lot of new customers needin' a servicin'.

The robot playin' the piano played Sweet Home Shroomania. Where the skies are pink, the song went, but before the robot got to that part, he stopped as a new entrant came a walking into the saloon. It was one of the regulars, not really a patron, well, maybe some kind of patron, but not a regular or a patron who was usually welcomed around these parts.

Taco Benedicto Pacífico Julia Marío Ramírez. A greedy, self-serving bandit wanted for a string of crimes involving but not limited to armed robbery, rape, bigamy, abandoning his wife and children, receiving and selling stolen goods, and more. He had a 2000 credit bounty on his head, 'xcept those who collected it often wounded up dead.

He grabbed an XXX and laughed boisterously as he walked through the crowd of people who were quick to get out of his way. He went over to the poker table, rudely shoved one of the players away, and took the man's seat.

"Hey!" the player moved to get his seat back but stopped before he got close enough.

"You see, in this world there's two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who stand. You stand." Taco said as he pointed his gun at the man, who simply gulped and decided to quit while he still had a head. The other players and watchers by the table were silent, eying Taco apprehensively. Taco regarded them for a brief moment, before taking a swag off his bottle of XXX and slamming it down on the table. He laughed.

Those around him, not knowing what was going on, decided to chuckle lightly as a precaution.

Taco took the cards left by the man whose chair he was sitting on now. He also took the man's stake, a small bunch of dollar bills, a golden watch, and some golden tooth fillings. He raised his eyebrow at that. Odd. But no matter, he laughed anyway.

"Hello my friends! Mi amigos! Muchachos!" Taco said boisterously. He eyed the other players' stakes, the piles of money they had on the table that were larger than his, and grinned with his yellow teeth. "Mind if I join your game? I will, as you gringos say, clean the house down!"

"You're not wanted in this game -" someone said, would've said, before Taco interrupted him.

"On second thought, maybe I wasn't asking!" Taco declared as he reached for his gun. Almost everyone else around him jumped, except for those who reached for their pistols and drew them out. Soon enough, Taco found himself surrounded by pistol barrels aimed at his face. "Ay carrumba! Esplosivo! But wait for Taco, people, please!" he grinned mischievously as he slowly pulled out his own weapon and placed it on the table for everyone to see. He looked at the expression on everyone else's faces. "Si seniors, see what this is? That's right, it's -"

"A Colt," one of the bystanders said. He wasn't particularly impressed. "M2411, by the looks of it."



"That's right, an Em-Dos-Quatro-Uno-Uno!" Taco said with an evil look on his face. "Aurigan Bob's gun! The gun that killed countless wagons full of men all over Wild Space! This here is the same one belonging to the Duck of Death's!"

"Duke," the man replied. "It's the 'Duke' of Death."

"Duck I says!" Taco shouted back, grabbing his Colt by its grip and slamming it on the table for emphasis. Some more of the crowd jumped, fearing an accidental discharge, though such things were rare nowadays. "And just like the Duck, I can kill every one of you in the blink of an eye! Like Jesukristo with a Pistol, as they said to me!"

Taco did the sign of the cross with his other hand, the one not holding the gun, his left hand. He was doing it wrong, but that was because he was a lousy Catholic.

The other man just chuckled.

"What's so funny, hombre?" Taco clicked the Colt's safeties off and eyed the man. He regarded the others as well, noting their placements, ready to explode in a whirlwind of violence to kill all of the pigs with eight rounds of lead. But the man had his attention. Was that a badge?



Shit.

"Now judging by the way you said the words Jesukristo and crossed yourself, I say you'd be from the Feelipeeni system, or at least you passed by the place," Little Bill Hackman intoned as he walked over, shoved another man off his chair, and sat right in front of Taco. Little Bill took the man's cards and glanced at them before looking Taco straight in the eye. "And that's where you got your Colt, am I right?"

"Wrong." Taco replied harshly. "I'm no Feelipeeni. I'm a Mexikant! Born and bred!"

See, Mexikants were a kind of Replicants, albeit with a Hispanic flavor.

"But I did get my Colt from the Feelipeenis." Taco admitted.

"Just like Geraldo," Little Bill shook his head and clucked his tongue. "His gun was also a Colt, M2411. Bought it for cheap in the Feelipeens. For all the good it did him, should've brought a spare."

"I thought Geraldo had two pistols," Taco wondered.

"First off, Geraldo never carried two guns. Though he should have." Little Bill replied.

"No, no, he was, he was called 'Two-Gun Geraldo.'" Taco shook his head. What was this gringo talking about?

"Yeah well, a lot of folks did call him "Two-Gun" but that wasn't because he was sporting two pistols," Little Bill chuckled. "That was because he had a dick that was so big it was longer than the barrel of that Colt that he carried."

"Que?" Taco scratched his head.

"First thing you should know about Colt pistols is that they're rare, they don't make them anymore. The ones you find were probably found in the Feelipeens," Little Bill explained. "See, ever since Aurigan Bob made that book of his, everyone wanted to try their hand at being the Duke of Death, so the demand for Colts, M2411s specifically, went up, you see. Except there weren't anymore M2411s around. So the Feelipeenis, being the 'peenis they are, made their own M2411s. They make them in their garages, hand-built with all the tender loving care you'd get from a bunch of fringe world yokels cashing in on the I-Wanna-Have-Aurigan-Bob's-Gun bandwagon. Geraldo should've paid attention to this when he got his Colt. He should've paid attention to this when he met Aurigan Bob himself."

"Two-Gun Geraldo met Aurigan Bob?" Taco asked. "What happened?"

"It was in the Big Shootout in Blue Beetle. See, one night Geraldo walks into the Blue Beetle, which just so happened to be in the middle of a mighty gunfight, and before he knows what's happening, Bob here takes a shot at him! And he misses, but he doesn't, and he kills the man right next to Geraldo. Now that bullet whizzing by panicked old Geraldo, and he did the wrong thing. He went for his gun in such a hurry that he shot his own damn toe off!" Little Bill snorted as Taco looked on incredulously. "Meantime Bob here, he's aiming real good, and he squeezes off another, but he misses, because he's busy killing everyone else, and he hits this thousand-dollar hooker right in the head. Well, she had a gun too, so she had it coming. And now, the Duke of Death is as good as dead. Because Geraldo does it right. He aims real careful, no hurry, and... BAM! That Colt blew up in his hand, which was a failing common to M2411s made-in-the-Feelipeens. You see, if old Geraldo had had two guns instead of just a big dick, he'd would have been there right to the end to defend himself."

"Wait a minute, Jose. You mean that, Aurigan Bob killed him when he didn't even have...?" Taco looked at Little Bill, before looking at his own Colt, which was safely in his hand.

"Well, old Bob wasn't goin' to wait for Geraldo to grow a new hand." Little Bill shrugged.



After finishing a few games of cards, Taco decided to take his winnings and quit while he was still ahead. He didn't fire his Colt M2411.

[Lord_Of_Change 9]

Volksland

Fuhrerstadt was under attack. Its defences were failing one-by-one, its anti-aircraft SAM batteries were running out of rockets to fire at guided missiles and rail-gun shells coming from orbit, and its anti-aircraft guns were running out of bullets and energy. Then, a single Acheron-designation missile carrying a thermobaric warhead hit the Hall of Volksland, its mere impact shattering the great dome of that cavernous building, pushing through the floor and entering the foundations, such was its terrible swiftness. Then, milliseconds later, it exploded in a massive cloud of fire and thick oily black smoke, with the force of 800 tons of TNT. Not for nothing did the Prussians call the type of warhead it was carrying 'the Father of All Bombs'. The building ceased to exist, shattered by the immense, devastating explosion, half of it vanishing under a cloud of smoke and fire, the other half simply collapsing as its foundations encountered forces they were never meant to handle.

The National Reich Cathedral was also hit, a cloud of railgun submunitions disintegrating the roof, shattering the spire, its black marble structure crumbling as incendiaries fired from orbit set everything flammable within (fortunate, nobody was inside at the time) alight. The walls remained, the building gutted, transformed into a ruined husk from which thick black smoke rose. Its stained-glass windows depicting the horrific extermination of what Volksland's population considered to be lesser beings had been utterly destroyed.

The skyscraper from which the Fuhrer had once looked at his capital city had been devastated by the bombardment, half of its concrete-and-metal superstructure collapsed, and it looked like the rest was going to soon fall. Then it did, explosions and fires devastating it, falling with a boom and a gigantic thud.

The soldiers were desperate, looking at the sky, trying to control the panicked flight of government officials from the buildings where they worked.

Smoke rose high, as fires swept through Fuhrerstadt, abetted by massive damage to gas lines and power plants. The gas lines were so damaged, that explosions of blue flame randomly hit the streets, blasting craters from below. Complete pandemonium took hold, perfectly preparing the stage for the arrival of the Hussars.


A section of Fuhrerstadt after the bombardment. Note the Volksland tanks in the street.

+++

Meanwhile, at Lake Kulturkampf, 120 miles north of Fuhrerstadt, a different situation was unfolding. Lake Kulturkampf was two-thousand and thirty square miles wide - it was also five-hundred and ninety feet deep, and 85 percent composed of poisonous inflammable pollutants that were pumped in constantly from the factories surrounding it. It was also a rather large reservoir that provided electrical power to the whole Fuhrerstadt region. Thus, when a thermobaric warhead struck it, the water itself exploded in a massive pillar of flame. But what goes up must come down, and fire literally rained from the sky on the cities surrounding the lake.

The dam simply disintegrated as the massive explosion ripped it apart, as fires burned within the cities surrounding the lake. And as they burned, so did Volksland's way of life.

+++

The secret base was located approximately 500 kilometres from Fuhrerstadt, 1 kilometre under the ground, designed to enable the government of Volksland to survive in times of crisis. Unfortunately for them, this crisis was greater than any of them had anticipated, the devastation of Fuhrerstadt mening that few important government officials had made it. Thus, power resided in the hands of the generals, who knew clearly that the Prussians demanded unconditional surrender, and that meant death for them.

So they had all resolved to fight the enemy to the bitter end. They didn't know how bitter it would be.

+++

In Orbit of Volksland

Roderich Von Edelstein was personally leading this expedition. He was wearing his Hussar's armour, a powered suit that protected him against most threats, specially reinforced with an energy field that could deflect the forces unleashed by most energy or projectile weapons. He had been a Hussar for 80 years, joining at the age of 20, with rejuvenating treatments ensuring he was still combat-capable. After all, one didn't rise in the Hussar's ranks without direct combat experience. Even though he was Field Marshal of the Armies of Prussia, the saying went 'Once a Hussar, always a Hussar'.

And that was definitely true for him, for he was, as one of his ranks, Colonel-Commander of the First Hussars, a Regiment with a proud tradition of decoration. And he was following his troops into the fray, that was for certain.

+++

The air in Fuhrerstadt was uneasily silent, as Corporal Siegfried Wolfgang checked the sky for any signs of orbital attack. He was the only survivor of his unit, and had not found any other survivors in the ruins of the street he was standing near. It had only been an hour since the bombardment had ended, and Wolfgang knew that his only chance of survival was to stay in the city and not go into the open where the Prussians could bombard him as they wished. He shivered in the cold, looking to the smoke-clouds created by the fires, and the lightning that blazed within them.

Then, with a sonic boom, objects began falling out of the sky. Wolfgang was terrified, was the bombardment beginning again? If so, he was a dead man walking. Three objects crashed down, opening up and revealing fifteen soldiers in what looked like high-quality power armour, very bulky, obviously created by somebody with no love for aesthetics.

Their armour was camouflaged, and they carried big, imposing black weapons, bulky and seemingly powerful. Missile pods were built into their armour, and though Wolfgang couldn't have known it, just one of them could have flattened a city-block. Not that there was any need for them, because Fuhrerstadt had already been flattened by the bombardment, all its proud Neoclassical monuments and buildings reduced to so much rubble.

He didn't know that 9,000 Hussars, three regiments worth, had just assaulted Fuhrerstadt. The Reichswehr would hold what the Hussars had taken.

They fired their rifles.

Wolfgang's heart exploded, as a chunk of iron the size of a soda can passed through it at high speed.

The Hussars moved away.

The Battle of Fuhrerstadt was on.

[MKSheppard]

Feeleepenes System



General Sheppard watched as the giant asteroid known only by its designation 2312 Shadowshroom; grew larger in the viewscreen as his personal frigate approached it. Shroomarcos down on the planet could think all he thought; but the real power in this backwater solar system was on Shadowshroom -- the center of an interstellar empire of crime run by one of the most enigmatic crimelords ever.

R. Julia.

Sheppard hadn’t wanted to come at all to this backwards shithole star nation – even gaining Pubic Bay and Bark as replenishment posts for the Shepistani Navy wasn’t worth having to put up with that smiling jackass Shroomarcos and his wife. Ugh. His wife. Even now, Sheppard could still see her botoxed skin all stretched over her skull in a fake smile. He felt the vomit rising in his throat, but managed to force it down this time.

Thirty minutes later; with his frigate docked in one of the asteroid’s cavernous bays, Sheppard stepped out onto Shadowshroom and found a honor guard of people wearing red and silver trimmed power armor of indeterminate origin.

Beyond the guards was standing a colossal tower of a man.

R. Julia



For several moments an uneasy silence filled the room as the Atomic Madman and the Asteroid Madman stared at each other, looking for any possible weaknesses in their opponent.

Finally, it was Julia who broke the silence.

“My dear General Sheppard; how are you? I hope that insect on the planet who deigns himself the ruler of this system did not trouble you too much.”

“Save me the bullshit.” muttered Sheppard. “I could have this whole fucking ratfuck hole of a solar system incinerated by my military as a mere live fire exercise. Why the fuck did you contact me?”

“Ah, so you admit as much that you are interested in the two prisoners I acquired recently.”

The Dungeons of Shadowshroom

Of all the things Sheppard had expected to see in this fucked up world created by Q; he certainly wasn’t expecting to see himself in a heavily armored cell.

“Who the fuck are you?” asked Sheppard.

“I was going to ask you that.” replied Sheppard. “I assume your name is one M. Sheppard and you are loosely associated with one R. Falkenhorst; and you go by the alter ego of Salk and Fhep in an amateurish attempt to throw off policemen.”

The man in the cell only stared back, saying nothing.

“So how the fuck did you get here?”

Still silence.

“Let’s just cut the bullshit out. I know you’re responsible singlehandedly for the deaths of Jean-Luc Picard, Malcolm Reed the Fourth, and tangentially for the deaths of Jake Sisko and Julian Bashir, as part of your schemes to make a criminal empire out of pornography.”

This finally got a response from the man in the cell.

“How the fuck do you know all that? Rom never told anyone but us about Sisko and Bashir; and we were never connected even remotely to Picard’s death.”

“Because…I am….YOU!” shouted General Sheppard. “So what the fuck are you doing in this fucked up universe created by Q?”

“So this entire thing was made by Q? Figures.” replied crimelord Sheppard.

“Did that bastard finally run out of the pure Shroomanian Coke we were supplying him with and have to make something to pass the time with?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“So we were all tooling around in the Asskicker, having loaded up a fresh stack of Trill Soup Mix for a run into the Romulan Empire when this fucking wormhole opens up in front of us. We try to reverse the engines; but we still fell into the fucking hole.”

“When we came to, this huge fuckoff ship was staring us down and broadcasting all sorts of weird shit. Even weirder was that it was crewed by goddamn bears man. Goddamn bears.”

“Those fucking bears were horrible. It turns out that Trill Soup Mix is incredibly delicious to them. Before we knew it, their fucking boarding team had broken the seals and drunk several cannisters of Soup Mix. Then they found the porn we had hidden in the bottom of the cannisters.”

“That’s pretty grim,” replied General Sheppard. “The penalty for smuggling in the Bragulan Star Empire is usually death by explosive collar. So how’d you get out of it?”

“We tried to ‘donate’ the porn to the fucking bears. But they weren’t having any of it. They even had the gall to say that this wasn’t even alien/human porn – that it was just humans with silly makeup on them playing with other pathetic humans.”

“We finally had to give them all of our fucking porn.”

“Wait.” Interrupted General Sheppard. “You said before that the Bragulans didn’t want your porn.”

“Not the porn itself; but the Trill Soup Mix, all ten thousand cans of it we had in the Asskicker’s cargo bays. Along with the porn inside. They didn’t even let us pull the porn out; for fear of contaminating the soup with our human wastes. Fucking bears.”

“So we were left in a strange new galaxy with no saleable product after those goddamn bears took it all. We tried making gnome porn with the lower deck crew, but that didn’t sell. Fucking gnomes.”

“So you did what you did best," replied General Sheppard. "You knocked off some world to grab its porn. This worked nicely for a little bit, until you ran into certain problems.”

“Yep. Problems like that rat-fuck bastard who runs this stat…”

At that moment, Prisoner Shep collapsed on the floor in a writhing ball of tortured muscles, screaming for all he was worth.

General Sheppard suddenly felt a presence beside him and turned, finding General R. Julia standing there, with a non-descript box in his hand.

“Such disrespect towards one’s superiors should not be tolerated. Especially from such insects. The other insect I have in my prison tells a story substantially similar to this one’s.”

General Sheppard tried to act all nonchalant, despite his alter-ego writhing in agony in the cell several feet away. “So what did those two do?”

At this, R. Julia’s eyes flashed with anger. “Those two insects destroyed two very important worlds of use to me. All for some…pornography.”

“Destroyed? How?”

“They showed up at Sector Seven Lima at a rather nondescript world that I use to launder and distribute the work that I do here at Shadowshroom. When the planetary governor refused to allow them to land; they naturally nuked the place from orbit with some nuclear weapons they had somehow obtained from the Bragulans.”

“So?”

Julia looked at General Sheppard for a moment. “My apologies. I keep forgetting your nickname. What was more disturbing was what they did after they had nuked the world. My men who responded to the planetary distress call found hundreds of dead midgets all over the world wearing white robes with hoods.”

At this moment Prisoner Sheppard interrupted, having somehow stopped writhing on the floor.

“That was Falkenhorst’s idea. Use the hundreds of gnomes we had filling in for crew on the lower decks to load the pornography from that planet into crates and beam it up. We told them that all those crates of Space KKK outfits were actually lead-lined protective gear used by the Coneheads of Arcturus Six.”

R. Julia turned around, enraged. “Who gave you permission to stop suffering, insect?” and with that he activated the torture remote, turning up the intensity as he did so.

“They next visited the Colony world of Leviticus 7, a Christian Baptist Bible Fellowship Colony that had been of considerable use to me, as the appetites of its leaders were…useful.”

“The medical responder teams found virtually all of the adult population of Leviticus 7 suffering from radiation burns to their genitals and hands; as these two insects did not even bother to decontaminate or un-irradate the pornography they had seized.

“Even more disturbing was the fact that my men discovered that the leaders of Leviticus 7 had been attempting to create the Second Coming by using genetic engineering to recreate Jesus. They paid swiftly for their lack of foresight.”

R. Julia’s hands clenched. “But the damage had already been done. My men found an empty cloning tank with a very radioactive copy of Playgirl next to it; and scores of corpses around it. What was very disturbing about the whole thing was that all of the corpses had been sodomized to death.”

“Apparently ‘Jesus Two’ had its mind utterly warped by that magazine and is now spreading a dangerous cult throughout my region of space, requiring rather…extreme measures to clean up afterwards. You can thank the insect suffering before you for that.”

“So the fuck what? You talk about how much this man before you has hurt your business. But all he’s hurt is your ego, “ said General Sheppard in a derisive tone of voice. “I’m sure you have scores of other worlds that are untouched by this so called Jesus-Two cult; and others that you already use to launder whatever it is you do on this asteroid. You’re just upset that those two made you look bad and lose face.”

A look of pure hatred emerged on R. Julia’s face. “That may be so. Likewise I am sure you won’t mind if I dispose of those two insects through my businesses. After all, you two only share a name.”

“Dispose of them?”

“Ah, you see -- on this asteroid, I run the notorious SHROOM FIGHTER tournament. You might have heard of it.”

“My God,” remarked General Sheppard. “So you’re the man behind the whole ‘Two Men Enter – No Man Leaves’ bit?”

Julia’s chest puffed up at that. “Yes indeed, I am. But I face a problem. I run about a hundred tournaments a year with thirty, uh…contestants. That means I require three thousand contestants a year. Recently my suppliers of contestants have started to dry up, limiting my expansion plans.”

“You have expansion plans?”

“Yes. I have been getting feelers from within the Bragulan Star Empire about producing a daily show. Seems that humans killing each other for the amusement of others is a very big thing over there. But I can’t keep doing my regular shows here on Shadowshroom and expand into Bragulan space at the same time without a massive increase of contestants.”

At that last, General Sheppard finally put it all together.

“So you want to bargain with me. You want me to supply you with more contestants in exchange for sparing the lives of the two prisoners you have now.”

At that, Julia smiled. “Ah, now you see it, my dear General. Surely the lives of those two are worth more than whatever scum pass through your legal system?”

General Sheppard sat down on a nearby stool and began to stroke his chin. “I can’t supply you with the amount of prisoners you want. At least not out of my regular prison system. The goddamn Libruls are already wailing about Shepistan’s poor human right’s record; and I gotta improve it somehow. You’ve heard about my agreement with Shroomarcos?”

At Julia’s nod of acknowledgement, Sheppard went on. “That one will tie up all of the remaining surplus of my prisoners. But…I can give you a special line to the Justice Department’s Psyker Division. You want them?”

Julia stood there for several moments. “What about esper powers? In my line of business, psychic powers tend to be…very bad.”

“Not a problem. The Psyker Division recently received some interesting technical information about a drug that burns out psychic centers in conjunction with sleep deprivation and electroshock treatments. We can apply those to the prisoners we transfer to Shadowshroom.”

“Most excellent. I’ll send my lawyers around to talk with yours.” Julia then made a motion with his hands. Out of nowhere, a pair of guards appeared, who opened the cell before them and began to drag out the unconscious Prisoner Sheppard.



“The two insects are yours, of course. I do advise you to tell them not to go anywhere near my holdings again; for in that case, their lives are forefeit.”