NationStates Jolt Archive

As the door to his fetid, dank cell creaked open, the man known as Joran Grul grunted in grim anticipation and struggled to his feet. His beatings were getting pretty regular now, almost as if his guards had decided that his upcoming execution would deprive them of a beloved pastime and were seeking to get their jollies while they could. He had long since learned that fighting back too successfully was a counterproductive strategy at best, but he hardly turned the other cheek when his friends came calling.

His eyes adjusted to the light from the corridor beyond (they left him in near-total darkness, of course), he saw that his visitors were not scruffily dressed and foul-smelling Vironian Correctional Officers with whom he had shared so many cathartic beatings. For the briefest of moments, he wished they were. The strangers appeared as if they were identical, at first glance, but on closer inspection just looked strikingly similar. All were pale and clean-shaven, both things that marked them as off-worlders. Additional common traits were closely cropped black hair and strong jaws. But while the two that entered the room first wore black, reflective sunglasses, the final man did not--and it was his eyes that had filled Grul with such dread. While the gaze of his captors was typically one filled with piggy, unthinking malice, the grey eyes of the stranger saw the man before them, acknowledged his human life and simply did not care.

He glanced down at the floor for a second, as if to check to make sure he was not standing in anything exceptionally unpleasant, and then looked up to survey the cell. At eight feet by eight feet, it was a quick job. Practically the only feature beyond the thin mat Grul slept on and Grul himself was a bucket whose contents indicated both by sight and smell that the planetary government did not splurge on prison food of the highest quality. Finally, reluctantly--as if finding him the room's least interesting feature--he settled on Grul, looking quite at home in his uniform of tattered brown rags.

"Joran Grul?"

"Yeah."

Grey Eyes raised an eyebrow. "Joran Niels Grul, formerly a colonel of the Liatia Defense Militia, court martialled and exiled for his actions on November the seventh of Liatia Calendar Year one hundred and seventy? Joran 'Blackbeard' Grul, pirate extraordinaire and scourge of Outer Thessalia?"

Grul scowled. "Y'know I am, if yer askin' all that." He rubbed his chin and his expression became reflective. "Lost the beard a while back, 'tho."

"So it would appear." The man's jaw set. A temper, then. "I will be frank with you, Mr. Grul, as we are busy men and you have little time left for conversation--even less if you are a man for prayer, though I would suspect you are not." Grul snorted, confirming that suspicion. "We have been searching every scumbucket prison, every festering gulag and every other lightless hole from re-educational facility to penal camp for light years around. We have been looking for a man with your prior military and criminal experience, and also for your casual disdain for life." He smirked. "My name is Greers," a lie. "And I have come to make you an offer you cannot refuse." The very purest truth.

Grul's voice was full of pathetic hope. "Ye'll spring me?" He was not what people would call a man overburdened with intelligence, but his experiences had taught him at least one thing: deals that are too good to be true always, always are. "What for? What do ya want from me?" He squinted at the dichromatic brigade. "Ya'll aren't doin' this out of the goodness of yer hearts."

"No, Mr. Grul, we are not. You will perform services for us, once you are released from custody. Once you agree, the appropriate bribes will be paid, another man will be found to stand trial for you and the relevant descriptions will be altered in the database. Your name is known publicly, but due to your own diligent efforts no eye witnesses exist to testify that the other man is not you. In addition to your freedom, we are prepared to offer you five percent of the revenue generated by the drug, weapon and slavery businesses you will set up across the region."

"Woah, now." Grul chuckled ruefully and waved his hands in a dismissive gesture. "I ain't goin' out to come back in. I've done some durty stuff--drugs 'r ok--, but they'll torture ya'll fer that kinda--"

"Do we look like amateurs?" Greers all but screamed, face grotesquely contorted. Grul pressed himself back against the wall and shut up. "You won't," Greers exhaled, recovering, "'go back in.'" He smiled, offering the last in a wide spectrum of demeanors. Grul slowly peeled himself off the wall. "You have not seen the resources that will be at your disposal. There will be very little to worry about." Greers cocked his head at Grul in a manner typically the province of predatory birds. "Do we have a deal, Mr. Grul?"

It was, in fact, an offer not to be refused, and the response was immediate. "Yeh. Yeh, I guess." Grul stuck out a hand, grimy and colored from his stay.

For a moment, Greers--his real name: Alex Strabo, one of the three members of the Conquest Incorporated Human Resources Triad #13--looked at the outstretched hand, his distaste evident. Reluctantly, but with firmness, he reached out and shook it.

He retrieved his sunglasses from under his suit jacket and turned to the door. He called over his shoulder as he exited: "We expect great things from you, Colonel Grul. Great and profitable things."

OOC: This thread is open, within reason. Grammar, spelling and punctuation not optional, nor is it acceptable for large fleets to wander onto the scene and polish off dear Colonel Grul on the first page. It is exceedingly likely that Grul will be done away with at some point, and perhaps by a fleet of do-gooders, but not right away--we must ferret out his hiding places and so forth first, of course. There is plenty of room for character role playing (suffering slave seeks salvation, perhaps?), as well as whatever else anyone feels like contributing, either working for or against the antagonists. There should be room to enter after the next post or so.

OOC: Is this FT?

OOC: It is, indeed.

The problem with slavery, from a legitimate business perspective, was that it’s hard to get behind.

Even in an age when progress was such that the most rudimentary technologies in the most pathetic backwaters are cheaper and more efficient than manual labor, slave trading had the profit margins one liked to see. Slave soldiers controlled by wetware more effective than the greatest mental conditioning sold well, as did those destined for the entertainment industry and scientific testing. Another source of demand was that peculiar class of individual who demanded his household staff be his property for the self-congratulatory glee of it. Demand was strong.

Stock was easy enough to come by--there were more than enough unarmed transports, aboriginal civilizations and pacifists to glut the market. What then was the problem?

Setting aside the danger of the practice’s extreme illegality, since sentients had been accepting that as a risk of doing business since the foundation of law, it was really the moral repugnance of the thing. It was hard to get people to do the work, and easy to amass an endless array of do-gooders out to get you for participating in it all.

So the aspiring slave magnate needs two things: plausible deniability, if not total anonymity, and someone else to run the business who is both a sorry excuse for a living being and dumb enough not to know exactly how much trouble they were in.

When it came to the latter, Conquest Incorporated had their man.

Of course, it would be inaccurate to say that it was Conquest Incorporated that was behind Grul’s release and the carnage he would sow. Institutions with billions of members are hard to make generalizations about, but it would be fair to say that most of its employees would find the notion that they were part of a group enslaving people, selling them drugs and so forth... upsetting. Rather, it was the tiniest fraction of a fraction of the megacorp that moved in the shadows concealing the good colonel.

Not that Grul had any idea what kind of apparatus supported Greers and his two silent companions. Other than that it was loaded beyond belief, anyway.

“Sixteen Jem’ho assault craft, a pair ‘o Boulder heavy cruisers, a slew ‘o fast transports and armored freighters... and I’ll be damned,” here Grul’s face took on the excited mien of a schoolboy in a candy shop as he continued in what was virtually a whisper, “a Centurion-class battleship.” Grul removed his forehead from the depths of the tactical display and turned to look at Greers and his ever-present, identically-dressed attendants sitting further back in the lounge area of the richly upholstered executive transport. “Ya’ll were right, Greers--I don’t hafta worry about gettin’ slung back in the joint after this. I’ll run this sector.”

Greers nodded. “That is the idea, Colonel. I am afraid, however, that the fleet we are approaching looks more impressive than it is. Our associates have collected it from light years around and it is not yet a cohesive fighting force.” He crossed his legs, and Grul saw himself reflected in the polished toe of the other man’s shoe. He had cleaned up nicely since Vironia. “We have also prepared a staging area and stocked it with the supplies and equipment you will need to start building momentum.

Grul whistled, throwing out an arm to lean against the bulkhead. His backers, whoever they were, were going to be getting 85% of the take, so they could afford to invest heavily. But damn. Damn.

As the transport docked with the ugly, scarred hulk of the battleship, Greers escorted Grul through a series of largely featureless corridors to an airlock. As Grul reached out to key the lock access, Greers stopped him. “This is the ass-end of the universe, Colonel.” He moved in close, his breath hot against Grul’s face and his eyes gleaming with a fiery light. “To get anything worth stealing, you have to squeeze until there is nothing left. Rule it like a king.”

Grul grinned. “Hell. Ya’ll picked the right man.” With that, he cycled the lock, stepped through and exited.

Finally, one of the silent suits beside Greers spoke. The one on the left, if that matters. “Sixty stars in this pocket--dozens of habitable worlds, three billion sentients in defenseless, scattered backwaters... all naked, open to the first heartless bastards to wander by.”

Greers, or rather Strabo, smiled a sly, murderer’s smile. “Be glad we were so lucky to be those heartless bastards.”

New Carthage Times
“Your source for news in the Ticonderoga Sector.”


Pirates Strike Again, Authorities Appeal for Aid
Genova, Alp Stellar Cluster, Ticonderoga Sector--Genovese authorities reported the second attack on regional shipping in three weeks on Thursday, and indicated that its features suggest it was “very probably” conducted by the same raiders who recently have been active near Santa Andre, also in the Alp Stellar Cluster.

“They are very good, whoever they are,” reported Group Captain Fritz Fersky, a spokesman for the Genovese Customs Office. “They managed to approach the transport, the Derkins, without raising alarm, and fired on her with precision and at close range. It was a callous attack, and the initial salvo opened the crew compartments to space while leaving the storage areas structurally sound.”

The bandits used military grade equipment, according to sources within the GCO speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. Their selection of the Derkins was particularly troubling, confirmed these same sources, because she was listed in the public registry as a grain freighter, while in fact she was under contract with the Genovese government to deliver machine parts with “military applications,” which suggests the new force at work has access to restricted information. Group Captain Fersky declined to comment on the nature of the lost cargo.

Roughly two weeks ago, the superfreighter Calypso--one of only twenty-two in the Ticonderoga Sector--disappeared sometime between the time it left Genova and its scheduled arrival at Santa Andre. Undisclosed details of the Calypso Both system governments are sharing resources in the ongoing investigations, officials say.

The attacks have drawn the attention of other local governments, not least that of New Carthage. “These attacks have been very bold,” commented Vice Admiral Elisso of the Carthaginian Navy. “We are very concerned.” He went on to say that New Carthage, the largest society in light years with a population of nearly eight hundred million, was considering contributing resources that its much smaller neighbors can not bring to bear to combat the emerging threat.

Neither Santa Andre or Genova support populations in excess of ten million, and lack dedicated navies. They issued have a joint statement expressing willingness to hear offers from private security firms, bounty hunters and "others of that sort" to help secure leads.

Execution of Mass Muderer Comes Under Close Scrutiny
Vironia, Baka Stellar Cluster, Ticonderoga Sector--The execution of ex-milita colonel Joran Grul is being reviewed by police tribunal, government officials have disclosed. Amidst rumors that Grul may have escaped, officials remain tight-lipped. “Well, we executed someone,” said Judge Malthus of the 12th Executive Court. “I, uh--no further comment.” Read more?

SPACE*

Exiled. Her fingers tap on the steal railing. She looks down on the city lights below. Shamed. She looks out, still more city lights. Marooned. She looks up. No sky, just city lights. Trapped.

There is no sky inside the habitat, just the city. The deep near-purple blue of Chimeara's night skies was gone forever to her.

A silent caravan floats through the void of space. Thier crafts are dingy, hulls torn. Long gone is the Homeland--Darius made sure none of them could return. Few thought of the Homeland as so near the rim for the wormhole junctures, but it was, and in near the rim they drifted, so far from the rest of Man.

"Faith?" An attractive male voice calls her attention from inside the suite.

She answers from the balcony. "Tyler, hello. You've got news?" She turns to see his equally attractive face and dark skin.

"Yes. We think we've found the next mark."

Her delight is muted. Another planet to sack--more die. This isn't what they were meant to do. This isn't how it was supposed to be, but it was. "Where?"

He turns on the Telecomm and navigates the map for her. "There. That cluster of stars."

"It's in the cluster?"

"It is the cluster."

She looks at him, confused.

"A whole collection of populated worlds. Some of them without interstellar spaceflight, we think. I mean, we are on the rim. We could stay here... for some time."

"Yes," she said, face blank, hiding the terror. "Yes, we could."

So much had happened since they left the Homeland. So much change. So much

Just 5 Years Earlier...

She wasn’t called Faith back then, not since the Verniians came and flattened the moon Osirus’s face with their bombs and the Homelanders came to kill all the Men of the Church. Names like “faith” were “problematic” to the Homelanders—they were everywhere, in the schools, in the registrations offices—so she was “Fay,” when it happened.

The sun was shining in Chimeara where Fay sat reading the Business Section on her patio in the back yard in her sunhat eating a light brunch before heading for the office. Phoebe, her daughter, played in the grass with Sheri, the nanny. The sound of car doors echoed around the side of the house.

They ran in from every way. They wore black suits but didn’t bother with masks—the Kuma Adad never did because they didn’t have to. One swept up Phoebe and another threw Sheri to the ground. She couldn’t count them, but at least one grabbed her—they put something over her head so she couldn’t see. When she woke up she didn’t know how long she’d been out—she just knew she wasn’t alone. Pheobe?


TO BE CONTINUED...

[OOC: *lolzFT]