NationStates Jolt Archive

Aleck placed the thick fiberglass helm over his face, giving it a tap to make sure it was secure, happy with the way it was sat he reached over to the table and picked up his sword. The blade was tempered by plasma, a generator sat in the hilt super-heated the blade. He gave it a few swings, impressed by the balance, then placed it in his scabbard.

Captain Aleck was the commander of the guard at the mine just south of the Imperial City. His full plate armor shook as he took a number of steps into the courtyard. The ‘peons’ cowered as he proclaimed in his computer enhanced voice that, “Lord Seric is pleased, peons! Double rations for all!”

The mine had just today made the years quota, 2 months in advance! It was close to a miracle considering the estimates had been done with power tools in mind… the miners on Planet Talex only had pick axes… in fact none of them knew what ‘power’ was. The people of Talex… the native of Talex more accurately, had no concept of space travel, TV, watches or even muskets. They were for all intensive purposes in the dark ages.

Talex was a mining station. It was also something much bigger, it was an experiment as well. What if you had a population that didn’t just think you were an Emperor… chosen by God. What if you had a population that worshipped you as a God? As their God.

Think of the opportunities… an army loyal, beyond corruption and completely unshakable. This is what Lord Seric had planned for the population of Talex, under the guidance of High Priest Talon.

Of course, the fact that the planet was rich in the radioactive mineral Empoium helped greatly in the short term also. The mineral was an excellent conductor for beam weapons, as well as advance ‘endgame’ weapons, something Wintrees was really interested in. It also carried a huge price on the galactic market, being somewhat rare in other parts of the galaxy. The downside was that it rotted machines and miners in its unrefined form. Machines were expensive… The miners of Talex were not, mining on Talex was VERY dangerous.

Above the planet, a battle station floated. It was about 20km in size and was lit up like a sun, but with white light, making the station appear as a huge star in the Talex night sky. This was where ‘God’ lived according to the people of Talex, in fact it was where a Army Brigade lived. Lord Seric lived on Keelth… well away from the frontier.

The troops on the ground kept control of the population using the front that they were holy warriors, encased in blight armor which was a personal gift from Lord Seric.

Try fiberglass with a personal shield ramped up to maximum output.

There had been concerned raised about the project, especially when an unidentified craft showed up earlier in the month and let of a distress call before it was wiped out of the sky.

These concerns where muted by Lord Seric however. Even if people found out what was going on here… who would care?

OOC: If anyone cares to jump in, that’ll be cracking. Bare in mind though, the people on the surface are fanatical. If you attempt to free them from their ‘captors’ in one swift swoop, you’ll have to be very careful, or your end up gunning down a human wave. Maybe some cloak and dagger stuff might be in order?

The answer: Far too many people to count. There are do-gooders everywhere. While hydrogen and stupidity are by far the most common things in the universe, good intent isn’t that far behind. However, benevolence and eleemosynary on their own don’t do one that much good. As well as that, one needs funds, and competence, and brave people willing to do extraordinary things.

The Necrontyr Empire had all of those things in abundance, and then some more things besides. Funds, in this case, came in the form of the support of a massive automated starship, four kilometres from bows to stern, three wide, and one deep – though It didn’t fill all of this space by a long way. Indeed, it was quite spindly. The vessel’s name was Erisavenus – and it was renowned among its kind for such interference – a name, in English, meaning Universal Dignity.

Competence, well, that same ship, with a mind of fluid metal dedicated to processing that was millions of cubic meters in volume, furnished the plan as well as the support. The first part of that plan involved what could only be called a long wait. The operative in question was launched by the Erisavenus in a modified version of the ‘starfighter’ currently used by Menelmacar, the Thoron Mark Thirty Five. At a constant delta-V (flipping over in the middle of its journey) of fifty kilometres per second per second, the fighter could make its zero point one light year trip in thirty six days. However because of the laws of relativity – the universal speed limit so loathed by space-travellers in a hurry here played to the advantage of the Erisavenus, for though it could reach the system in a fraction of the time it took light to make the journey, it did not wish to alert the current overlords, and so was staying well out of the way – a mere nineteen hours passed for the person.

In this case, the person was Jurai Seldon. One of the various contacts that the Erisavenus had procured in its recent interfering. He was human, or at least, he’d been born that way, though of course, along with the various pieces of equipment he had in his two-seat, elaborately stealthy fighter, he had equipment for disguising himself as practically anything via complicated use of holographic and gravitic technologies, and devices that were more sorcery than technology for communicating with anything with a language.

Of course, Jurai had been journeying in the tiny ship, with a modified shadow-field that turned inwards to mask its thermal signature, leaving it only visible as a speck of darkness where background radiation was cut off, for many weeks – or to him, hours – already, before he could see – for light still entered the bubble, it merely did not leave, instead being absorbed and routed to the engines - the destination world with his own eyes; for the thoron could accelerate in a direction other than the one it faced in. Talex, he thought to himself, here I come…

OOC: Perfect! I’m still in the mood to meddle in the affairs of less-advanced races, having recently read Use of Weapons and Inversions (both fantastic books, by the way). Therefore I hope you don’t mind.

ooc: No, thats great, just what I was expecting.

"Lunge!"

The small man weakly swung his sword at the wooden dummy, as it make contact he shuddered from shock to his hand.

"NO NO NO! LUNGE!" yelled the brightly armored man, "Look, like this!" he grabbed the sword off the man.

He lunged forward, impaling the wooden dummy on his sword and ripping it clean of its bolts.

"If you cannot fight! Lord Seric doesn't want you!" he threw the cheap sword on the ground, smashing it. "Get out of my sight peon!"

A bell rung, some distance away and everything in the 'arms' courtyard stopped. The bells rang all around the surface of the planet at midday. It was time for prays... Everyone flocked towards the nearest temple.

A sphere of total darkness dropped through the night air of the planet on the far side from the supposed sun-dwelling of the planet’s deity. It crashed into a riverbank with a force that the world’s natives would not even have a hope of replicating, burying itself in silt and scooping the same muddy material up over its feather-patterned wings, leaving only a slight dip over its canopy.

The canopy opened and Jurai clambered out, for all the violence of this impact, he was completely unshaken. He was dressed in a jacket over a knee-length scarlet robe, with a cloak of the same dark material as the jacket. Tapping at an implant that held a highly miniaturised battery of quantum-entanglement communications units, he spoke.

“Well, ship, can you hear me?”

The entanglement, because such systems didn’t work aboard a necrontyr star ship at hyperspeed drive, had been established when the ships launched, and the Erisavenus had constructed a large satellite, about the size of a hatchback car, to act as a relay. Of course, a relay that was a mere point one light years away was not too safe to transmit hyperbeams from, and so the Erisavenus had contacted another of its associates, the Menelmacari Warlady Naurelin.

The small frigate, MIV Denethor II possessed two faster than light drives, the Tesseract Jump Drive it had been built with, and a necrontyr hyperspeed generator. It went out on the second, took the relay unit on board with the first, jumped five hundred light years away, re-deployed the relay, and then returned to the fifth fleet.

“Of course I can hear you Jurai,” the Erisavenus said in its usual, soothing tones.

“Ah, good,” he said, “A few questions,” he said, patting the knife, a very special knife, holstered on the side of this holographic-assisted outfit, “are you sure these locals are humanoid?”

“I can’t actually say I am, no. From the data I’ve got, I’ve summarised the culture for you in the pre-mission briefings. You read those on the way, yes?”

“Yes mummy,” he said sarcastically.

“Well, quite. I’ve got some information on the culture, but the unimportant things like appearance are sketchy.”

Jurai pressed a button on his wrist-mounted remote control, and the fighter buried itself completely and switched to idle mode.

“You’ll have to just run into one and use the image extrapolator, I’m afraid.”

“Well, that’s fine planning,” Jurai muttered sarcastically, “Anyway, what’re you up to?”

“I’m currently taking some shipwrecked space-mariners home. If, perchance, I manage to get myself destroyed, you’ll be glad to know I’ve arranged for someone to take over supporting you.”

“Joy!” Jurai mocked.

Jennifer, a young girl about 12, was skipping down the track when she heard a whine in the air, looking up she saw something shoot over her head. She couldn’t make out what it was, but there was something there. She strayed off the track into the wooded area to look for what fell out the sky.

She was already late back from her friends house, she thought she couldn’t get in anymore trouble….

Jurai decided to take a perilous risk as he saw the native child approach. He left his disguise mechanism off, he was after all, human, by far the most common race in existence, and there was a fair chance that that was the image of their ‘god’ was human. And so, he simply said – translated into the native language of course – “Hello!” to the child as she passed through the woods, and waited to see the reaction.

She saw him, and after a few seconds of hesitation she spoke, “Did you fall from the sky?” Her eyes were wide as she tried to make out the features on the mans face. “Are you a Bright Knight?”

She breathed in sharply when she realized that he could indeed be a Bright Knight, and it was after Curfew. She started to run away.

She made it about 10 meters before she tripped on a branch and went crashing into the side of a tree, sobbing.

The nice thing about being an adult is that one can run down kids with relative ease. Jurai, for that matter, was in rather exceptional condition, and he wasn’t far behind when the child hit a tree, he leapt over the branch on the ground with all the deftness of his genetically enhanced heritage, and crouched, “I am not a Bright Knight… But I am… something similar,” he said, “I suppose.”

”Careful,” Erisavenus chided into his ear.

“And I will not hurt you…” he said, gently pulling the girl up to sit.

"Then who are you?" she said, holding her ankle.

In the distance, the sounds of troops marching past by.

“I am… from a far away land,” Jurai said, at a little prompting from his nagging ear. He took a small device from his pocket that emitted a blue glow, and waved it over her ankle, “Well, no bones broken,” he said, and replaced it. “I’ll help you home if you like,” he said, “I am… here to investigate these Knights…”

“Thank you, I,,, I live this way… but its late, we need to stay of the track,” she got up, “I’m Jennifer. Nice to meet you.”

She started walking, “My dad will be glad to meet you sir, he doesn’t get much company since the accident… You must stay with us, if your caught out after curfew, you'll be killed!"

She looked over to the stranger… “Where are you from sir?”

------

Elsewhere….

“MOVE! MOVE YOU SCUM!” yelled a Bright Knight, smashing one of the runners around the head with the flat of his blade, “Run faster! Work faster! Fight for your Lord and GOD!”

It was nearly pitch black, and about 100 ‘soldiers’ were running in a continuous figure eight. When they met at the center, they where to clash swords, one attacking… the other defending. The trainers found this was a good way to weed out the weaklings, the ‘training’ would continue all night until 25 remained, the rest would have perished from a poor defensive stance.

This sounds of the fighting could be heard throughout the valley, echoing into the area where Jennifer was.

What a well mannered child, the ship commented in Jurai’s ear, and he nodded slightly, “I suppose you’d say I’m from the stars. But I’m not really,” he said, “Imagine your world is like an island. Well, I’m from another island.” The sound of clashing swords in the background made him pat the dagger softly.

The 2 arrived at Jennifer’s house some time later. The house itself was little more than a cabin in the woods, a light flickered inside and a number of horses were tied up outside.

“That’s strange,” said Jennifer, “Father doesn’t own a horse.”

At that moment, the door crashed open, Jennifer’s Father falling into the mud outside. His body was missing a leg, although it was clearly an old wound.

3 men, all in armor, although not the same rune covered, almost magical armor the Bright Knight whore, filed outside.

“Oh know,” whispered Jennifer, who was stood at the edge of the tree line, “The City guard!”

One of the men, who carried an unsheathed sword spat on Jennifer’s Father’s back, giving him a kick at the same time.

”Where is she old man, where’s your little girl?”

“I… I…” mumbled the old, graying man.

Jennifer’s face screwed up in terror, “FATHER!” she called out into the night.

“What? There, Captain-Major! There in the trees! Its her!” yelled one of the guards, unsheathing his sword and charging in the direction of the voice.

One could well say Jurai was disturbed by the actions of the town guard, but that wouldn’t really be doing it justice. He wasn’t expecting such a reaction, and yet, they were still well off. It took him a moment to reach down to his sleeve to activate the device that would make him look rather like the locals, which it did rather effectively, extrapolating him out as a somewhat more masculine version of the girl, in adulthood.

“Let me do the talking,” he said, and slowly lowered her to the ground, letting her favour her wounded foot. He stayed still, and waited for the town guard to arrive, carefully sliding his dagger under his ‘poorly made peasant clothes.’ He was, of course, rather worried about the possibly strictures of this curfew…

The guard slowed as he came closer to the tree line, seeing someone who wasn’t Jennifer. “You!” he shouted, pointing his sword at the ‘woman’, “Why are you out after the curfew!”

He stopped and took what looked like a photograph out his pocket and quickly scanned it, trying to make it match with the ‘womans’ face.

“Its not her!” he called back to the Captain-Major, turning his back on Jurai, “Its just some yokel!”

“Kill her anyway!” yelled the Captain-Major, as he plunged his sword into the old mans stomach, causing him to scream out in pain.

Jennifer let out a whimper on the ground, knowing what had just happened.

Jurai took a step back, “I’ve been helping the child,” ‘she’ said, “She’s hurt herself…” And then the Captain Major gave the order to ‘kill her anyway.’ ‘She’ took a step back, and drew her knife.

It was about twenty-five centimetres from points to pommel, and made of silver. The blade was, in an unconscious echo of Menelmacari starship designs, divided down the middle, with a bracing about one third of the way up, with a narrow hole in it. Its wide hilt sported about hundred small circular studs two millimetres across.

“Raeutat!” ‘she’ said. It was an alien word, in a language not translated. One of the studs vanished with a quiet double ‘bang’ as the small micro-missile shot through the intervening distance faster than the eye could see, its course taking it to the base of the sword, the explosion creating the second part of the sound as it exploded with enough force to shatter the sword into fragments and possibly break the wielder’s wrist.

“You’re a fallen!” screamed the guard, falling to his knees, cradling his hand.

The Captain-Major, noticing the ‘magic’ yelled to the other guard, “Oh my god, a fallen… Seric protect me.”

The 2 guards disappeared down the track, the younger of the 2 dropping his weapon in the process.

The 3rd guard, the one who had approached the treeline, was knelt motionless, petrified.

The old man, Jennifer’s Father, moaned in agony as he slowly bled out into the mud.

‘You should kill them,’ Erisavenus said into Jurai’s ear, but he wasn’t listening. ‘If they report in, you risk your mission being compromised.’ Jurai was sprinting towards the fallen father, dropping the knife as he did so. He knelt by the wounded man and looked at his injury, fairly certain he had no way of keeping him alive – even if the anatomy of these people was human – ‘There’s nothing you can do but avenge him’ the ship said, but the appeal to his emotions wasn’t subtle enough. Jurai gave the knife no other commands, instead looking at the man’s stomach, reaching out to press against the wound instinctively to apply pressure. It was clean enough, but he didn’t have any means of, here, stopping the bleeding.

He remembered that on the ship he had the relevant equipment. “Jennifer!” he cried, as he tried to lift the man – and it wasn’t so hard, he was in good condition – “Come here…”

“Father!” she whimpered, as she ran towards the 2 men, “What… What can I do?”

“Oh, Seric protect me… I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, please spare me of the nightmare,” cried the man, he started to move off towards the tree line, still in shock and weaving somewhat.

Jurai pulled the man inside, “What I want you to do is keep pressure on the wound,” he said. He didn’t actually think that would to any good, really, and decided that such an instruction was best addressed to the father, anyway, and so repeated it to him. He gave Jennifer the knife and whispered, “Icin Venua,” and then, in her own language, “If they come back, this will protect you…”

And with that he ran back the way he’d come, uncertain whether his actions were wise or futile…

(OOC: Apologies for the delay. I’ve been cut off the ‘net)

(OOC: np, been away myself as well.)

City of Illosipi -

“What?” screamed the Governor, going red in the face as he rose from behind his table, “What did you say?”

“Sire… A Fallen, they have returned,” replied the Captain-Major.

“What makes you think this?”

“He did not wear the armor of a blessed ones yet he processed magic…”

“Magic, what kind of magic?” asked the Governor, sitting back down and staring at the Captain-Major.

“A bolt, a bolt of some kind projected from his knife and disarmed one of my men.”

“Are you sure?”

“As the sun rises, Sire.”

The Governor moved to the window, “Call out of the City Guard, have Illosipi’s gates closed… Inform the Priests that the Fallen have returned.”

“Yes mi’Lord,” called the Captain-Major, clicking his heels together and heading for the door.

The Governor, taking a sharp intake of breath headed towards his personal shrine located in the corner of the room. He knelt in front of the statuette of Seric and took a book carefully from the shelf.

“Domionus Carful,” he muttered, flicking to a page in the book, “Carful broon, Delonus.”

The words animated the face of the statuette and a voice resounded throughout the room.

“What is it Governor Dernic?” boomed the voice.

“The Fallen have returned mi’lord Seric.”

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

In the station orbiting the planet, Karl Fluxs sat in the communications room, whispering into the microphone, “What is it Governor Dernic?”

A voiced crackled into life in his head-set, “The Fallen have returned mi’lord Seric.”

“Go, Prepare the defenses my loyal subject… The nightmare will soon descend,” replied the operator, as he typed a command into the key board, notifying the station commander.