NationStates Jolt Archive

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When the world is your oyster, the one thing you absolutely must not do is open it.

Spirit Anderson gazes out across Yi Lin City contemplatively from the helipad of the Inner Office. Yi Lin has changed much since Anderson's election as first Commonwealth President and the end of the general-secretarial succession - from being a bustling metropolis, a thriving centre of commerce, the city that never sleeps, it has become the kind of place where all commerce is conducted in boardrooms with the protection of heavy contingents of armed guards, and it is almost always mostly dark. Where once kofleitku aircars and their larger cousins the 'fleit-trucks swooped and swerved, now mostly only military convoys pass, and those quite cautiously - almost every civil 'fleit in Kostemetsia is grounded under some premise or another, most of which even Anderson can admit, albeit only to her few remaining friends, are complete bullshit.

Yi Lin is, however, more peaceful than ever before - the loyalists in KOSPOL have beaten their less one-track-minded subordinates into submission to Anderson policies, and those subordinates in turn have taken out their frustration on the very civilians they used to exchange pleasantries with. Civil unrest may be at record highs, but civil disturbance is at an all-time low. Personally, Anderson loathes the glorified heavies her policies force her to work with, despite her birth among them, but regards such forced association as a necessary sacrifice for the Cause and looks forward to the day when she can finally and decisively implement the last step of the Grand Plan. Of course, she smiles politely, but she never does more than that.

She has a teleconference due with diplomats from, among others, the Shakal Empire, the Combine Authority, the Colony of Sertian and a multitude of tiny nations which want to do something notable and notoriety-getting with their pathetic little national lives. She will never let it on, but she feels the first three might as well be members of the last category for all their significance in the new Commonwealth's international affairs, and that is as it should be. Right now, there are things more important than pandering to a motley assortment of backwater diplomats - a conclusion Anderson's subordinates have restated several times over. She continues pondering the city.

A Commonwealth Navy frigate cruises over Anderson's balcony on three powerful engine clusters, high-calibre railcannons and point defence guns swiveling in a manner which suggests that breathing in its presence is an offence punishable by death. Anderson smiles fondly up at it, the first time she has done this in some days, liking it for what it is - a dependable, impartial enforcer of the Right Thing to Do, which is not always the strict letter of the law; she approves of the sensible behaviour adopted by the unseen crew and nods in a friendly manner at the passing hulk, knowing full well that she cannot possibly be within the crew's field of view.

Her pda beeps for the third time. She turns back to her office and lets herself in, attending to her terminal where a teleconference invitation has been waiting for some minutes. The system routine notes that the Shakal, Combi and Sertian diplomats are currently available for the pending meeting, and a second later notes that the Xiscapian agent is online. It is time to get down to business - the less time Anderson spends thinking about and interacting with these annoying people, the better, and that means getting this odious session of planning and pleasantries over with as quickly as possible.

The Sertian leader was middle-aged, and the stress of command was starting to engrave itself onto her face. Yet the race had a remarkable capability to wear their age well, rather than take away from her beauty the wrinkles that were now etched into her cheeks gave the impression of wisdom before age, and the grayness that was creeping into the yellow, tiger-like stripes flowing around her neck was yet another indication of her wisdom. Her attire was plain though, not the hard armor that was typical military wear, but rather the loose, almost robe like cloth that was used in formal occasions. The dress flowing along her still firm body while she sat in a somewhat sloppy posture, her arms resting on the sides of her chair as she waited for the President of the, what was it again? She still didn’t have time to remember whatever force they were allying with.

All she knew was that she didn’t like it. In her long years of fighting for the Empire she had always considered herself a liberator, the commander of forces that brought about peace to nations that were struggling under an oppressive regime, and now they were helping out one of those oppressing regimes. She didn’t give a crap the explanations Alpha Division gave her, about potential allies and how a totalitarian government would be easier to other throw when the Empire made it’s real move on this galaxy. She hated it, but orders were orders…

But finally after a few minutes of waiting a blinking next to the holographic projector finally told her that the President was there. And with a short command to the computer than ran the device, the Commander’s face was sent light years away to Yi Lin.

“President Anderson… It’s a pleasure to finally speak to you in person,” she spoke with a somewhat stern voice, while waiting for the hologram to project the faces of the others joining the conversation. “You must excuse if our signal is a bit, fuzzy at times, the Drift has a way of creating small anomalies here and there.”

Ryana Taylor frets. She should be celebrating her massive victory over the first Outer World with the rest of her staff, but she is standing out here in the night with just a greatcoat for extra protection against the wind chill, no sidearm, and the nagging feeling that she's done something horribly wrong.

She reclines against the gentle, nigh-horizontal angle of the base's wall. Beside her is a dark doorway which eventually, some few hundred twisting, turning, mazelike metres on, leads to the reinforced iron slab that blocks off the Revolutionary command complex to everyone who doesn't have the appropriate ID. Before the Revolution moved in, this place was a Maloney Ballistics warehouse, and after they move out it will be a Maloney Ballistics warehouse again; they'll have left no visible sign of their progress. Not a sign, in fact, except in the heads and the hearts of the civilian population they leave behind.

And they are due to move out in a week - this is possibly the most depressing thing. In a week, a dozen cargo ships will arrive and pick up Ryana's three thousand, two hundred and seventy regulars and support personnel, plus equipment, and there's not a thing in hell she can do about it unless she wants to stay behind and face the implacable wrath of the Inner Worlds: the disproportionate retribution for the Battle of Hiroaki Pass.

This is why the Revolution is moving out. Exactly one week ago, the Revolution masterminded a rather horrific victory over Commonwealth Army Station Hiroaki - although the surgical strike teams were directly ordered to incapacitate only the base's command staff, the commanders of the two resident joint forces groups from the Imperium of Man had different ideas. Ryana will never forget the soaking of the sand with blood as the last men of the Loyalist Forces slowly, agonisingly died, or Martin Hughes' immortal reaction to the slaughter: icily rebuking the resident commissar-general, Steven Bryant, at two in the morning via internet link. The Imperial forces have since pulled back to regroup, and the Revolution is exposed; it is thus in the Revolution's interests to leave. Fast.

Ryana does not want to think about what will happen to the brave and, ultimately, unspeakably foolish citizens who have volunteered to defend the world of Sakala in the Revolution's absence - they are almost the same as the Commonwealth forces the Imperium slaughtered during the just-gone battle in a grand total of eleven minutes. If six hundred thousand people can kill fifty thousand in eleven minutes with barely a casualty, what would a million or more attackers do to the same number of the same kind of people? This is why she does not want to think about it. Behind her, the first message passes from its insanity into orbit and is disseminated throughout Kostemetsian space - a cry for help, a plea to end this insanity.

The Inner Worlds will not listen. Others might.

---

Anderson waves away the apology magnanimously. In the back of her mind, a voice is screaming: Nothing but a glorified schoolgirl! Why do you bother? The fact that the Sertiani leader is actually some years older than the comparatively young Anderson does not hinder this small voice, but it does not assert itself in the real world, where Anderson's response is a formal: "Mi'lady, the sentiment is mutual. I would offer you refreshments, but as a matter of course this is impractical. We are currently awaiting the arrival of the Shakal and Combi representatives, and we may begin when they appear."

Her mind has gone on to considering the Battle of Hiroaki Pass, the cost exacted by that pretentious little rich bitch revolutionary general Ryana Taylor (the only fellow human Anderson will ever descend to using profanity about), and how she will exquisitely make Ryana Taylor pay.

On the outer fringes of the Ustian system, a small probe sat motionless in the darkness. It was waiting, searching for anything that might be important. That was when it came in. The signal, the call for help. The probe quickly switched channels, relaying the message through to the appropriate figures.

Some time later, a group of shadowy figures assembled in a meeting room. In front of them stood a large TV screen, and on it a hooded man's face was shrouded in shadow. It was impossible to make out his facial features

"So" he said, his voice indicating his age, even if his face did not "Are we in agreement?"

"Yes, Premier" was the unanimous reply from the assembled figures

"Good. Prepare the fleet" he said. With that, the video link cut out and the shadowy figures promptly began to leave.

---

Another TV screen played in one of the halls of the Hydrian Military Academy. The HMA was normally an academy, although as the largest concentration of military personell and equipment in the system, it was also generally the first port of call if military intervention was required. The 88th Battalion of the Hydrian 3rd Rifles were getting ready for battle. M82 rifles and M224-A1's were being passed out to waiting soldiers, as were helmets, ration packs and medical equipment. Soldiers jostled in the tight corridors, but the atmousphere was one of calm jubilation - finally, something to do.

Lieutenant Colonel Marcus Warner stood looking out of his office window. The serene paradise streched out before him. Beautiful fields bathed in golden sunlight, the Iga River flowing serenely past the Academy Tower from the mountains. He looked at in disgust. For he knew what was really out there. The sands of winter blew over the radiation soaked wasteland. Parts of Hydria's atmousphere had been severely decayed, and ultraviolet light and solar radiation could easily break through. It was considered too dangerous to be outside without protection in certain areas. But, for most of the men under his command, the peaceful hologramatic world they saw was somewhat less depressing than the wastes that truly existed. He picked up his equipment from his desk, locked his office door, and proceeded down to the waiting ship. Immediately outside the tower queues of soldiers stood at the platforms for shuttles and dropships. Warner showed the guard his ID, and he let him pass over to a waiting shuttle. Upon entering the small white craft, he found that he was not alone. Several other officers occupied the seats of the shuttle. He looked at them as he entered not one of them was over 25 years old, by his estimation. Well, all except one. A woman, wearing a black body suit. She sat apart from the officers, who were talking exitedly about what was going to happen. Warner, not in the mood for chatting with the over-eager officers, sat down in the seat next to the woman. Almost immediately, she held out her hand, which he shook

"Major Keene, of the Twilight Echo Dragoons" she said "You must be Lt. Colonel Warner"

Warner nodded at the mention of his name

"How are your men?" she asked. Warner looked over at the group of officers, one now showing off his pistol, before turning back to Keene

"Over eager, but that'll change soon" he said "Yours?"

"Ready for battle, but not over eager" Keene said. Warner smiled. It was strange. The reason the officers had sat away from Keene is because there was a great deal of rivalry between the regular infantry and the dragoons, the grunts and the stealth soldiers. Yet Warner had no need for rivalry, and nor did Keene. They were both veterans of the War Of Reclamation, as were several of Warner's senior sergeants. They already knew what war was like. They braced themselves as the shuttle lifte off, heading for the waiting transport ships.

OOC: Probably the best post i've ever made :)

Two Flashs of light announced the Arrival of the UHS Valiant and UHS Defiant to the edge of the system. The ships on a peaceful exploration mission had picked up indications of light in the system and had decided to investigate. Moving at Two-thirds impulse they headed towards teh outermost planet in search of life.
"Why are we here?" Johnathan asked.
"We saw indications of FTL so were obliged to investigate" Elizabeth replied as they conversed over comm channel from their respective ready rooms.
"Thats what you said last time"
"It was true"
=A= Bridge to Captain Langley, we're approaching the outermost planet=A=

The khazukan, as a species, held to a philosophy of "slow but steady" in everything that they did, attesting that the quality achieved was worth the patience. Every component of every ship, from the most intricate computer systems to the most modest of projectile, is hand crafted by veterans of the forge that practiced their craft for decades making metallic pieces of art or ornate tools. Currently, their nation of Golugan was undergoing a terraforming project in systems adjacent to their home system. Such projects took a great deal of time to prepare, though, so the only means by which they could presently expand their territory is through forging diplomatic ties.

It is by this premise that the khazukan clans populating the city-ships, popular by demographics only, decided to scatter themselves beyond the borders of the terraform systems to attempt to make peaceful contact with those that would be neighbors to the Boundless Empire in a few decades. One such ship, a mercantile carrier of the Khazurbaz class, had caught word of a call for aid from some revolutionary. Most would consider that a call to either offer services to help maintain a regime or offer humanitarian aid to the rebels.

Khazukan, being people who care for khazukan first and last, only saw an opportunity to sell their wares in a competitive market.

The Golugan carrier arrived in the system with a solid escort of Drengi ships; vessels from before ship design standardization and crewed by those that had either dishonored their family name or had offended the clan of their Thane. The sentence for the latter was death, but could be worked off through service, and the best way to handle both was to assign them to ships meant to be retired, but could not be retired unless destroyed.

On board the Khazurbaz, which was designated the Dalangaz after the name of the Thane that had made the ship the Thanedom of his clan, his great grandson contemplated options. They could favor trade with one side over another, but that could potentially lead to a bad relationship.

"It would be best, I think, to work with both factions. Whoever grows too impatient for our boldness first is too impatient to cooperate with khazukan." Thane Dalangaz Okri VI stroked his beard in thought before he began barking orders across the command deck, mostly just to give the stout humanoids something to do. Ultimately, he would wait until he received a signal asking something of him, be it an explanation for his presence or access to the trade docks, and he would let the rest flow like a mountain river: Bound by the will and labor of his people to serve them.

... as such, war is an obscure benefit, a blessing if you are unaffected by it, a grace if your economy is unaffiliated with it, and a divine blessing bestowed upon you if your nation turns an eye to it; it is these factors that a skilled entrepeuner will not only exploit, but activly create and manage for his, or her, benefit. One must assess not only the market, but the capabilities and needs of each faction, to predict the movements of the Great Chain of industry wit-

Ieatz?

-of industry within the system, to predict the results f your own actions and anticipate the results both desirable and undesi-

Ieatz!
This one is reading!

-and undesirable, to assess what outcome is best for yo-

Ieatz!
For tides sake what is it Ooi!?
Do not "what" me! You have been reading that accursed book for the past two days now, one would never deter another from idealogical expansion but one would not expect the other to ignore doing the accounts either!
This one's checked the accounts three times already! Another time will not help!
And this book well will it? What is it now... War And Profit...
See now! If I have a greater holistic understanding of the mechanisms of war then we will be able to maximise our profit for greater gain!
Right...
Well?
Well what?
You owe this one an apology.
This one thinks we are nearing a system...
Come on now! Come back here!

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

A freighter of overwhelmingly simplistic design approached an unknown potential market, well, world, of which the only thing known about it was that it was part of the Commonwealth, beyond that they knew nothing; well, there were the reports of war both civil, national and domestic floating around far flung space ports but aside from that there was nothing.

The vessel had been constructed in space, consisting of large square modules connected by narrow corridors it was aesthetically unappealing; a large fusion engine was joined to the back whilst a domed command/habitation center rested on top of the sprawling tetris puzzle of containers. This large hodgepodge vessel lumbered towards the planet broadcasting a message to the worlds traffic control center;

This is the independant trading vessel Forces Of Commerce requesting permission to enter orbit of this world and to dispatch a transport vessel to a place where trading activites and transactions can be carried out. We also request the name of this world and your local currencies exchange rate to one galactic standard credit; thank you, any other relevant information would be most appreciated.

<click click>

Consider the life, such as it is, of Probe A6.238NN67, pseudo-sentient bubble floating around at the edge of Sakala system. Its purpose is to hang there and chatter back to Sakala command about everything interesting it sees, somewhat like an annoying vlogging tourist except less socially capable and only ever reviewing one place. How it sees is by rippling local space and reading back the space-time dent feed into a hexadecimal sequence, then using the evaporating vestiges of the ripple to feed back its report. It is currently engaged in the first step.

It encounters something. This is odd. Nothing has been that way for at least one hundred and eighty-two point five day cycles. It sends a digest back to Sakala Command on the faster-than-light zephyr - and straight into the hands of Captain Martin Hughes, sole sane man of the Revolution. He duly passes it on to Ryana.

<IN: mass detected at ]coordinate sequence[. Discrimination field online.>

A few seconds later, a tight-beam transmission comes through - space-time dent analysis for the mass blot detected by Probe A6.238NN67. There appears to be a massive capital ship, perhaps a carrier judging by its design, surrounded by a defensive swarm of smaller capitals. The mass signature is unknown and the popular assumption is that it's one of the Inner Worlds' deep projects - the entire base goes to high alert and the Special Naval Forces (for what they're worth) decrease their orbit cycle from fifteen minutes to seven. Onboard, people are loading railguns with shells almost as big as said people, to be fired at a good fraction of light speed.

Ryana, however, is not so sure that the mass is Inner Worlds, hostile or both. After all, it seems to be completely stationary, and it's out between the orbits of the two gas giants - well within Sakala Special Joint Forces Command's probe field, but outside any engagement range known to man. She lets the alarm sound for fifty seconds, then puts out a 'stand down' and starts experimentally bouncing weak all-spectrum signals off the central ship. Basic stuff - what are you doing here, please get off our Limburger cheese supply line or you may be run over by a rampaging trader, that sort of thing.

---

<click click>

The life of another similar probe several hundred lightyears away. This is D6.72FH443, and the signal from Forces of Commerce hits it straight on. D6 is the home of one of the few real artificial intelligences in the Commonwealth - it wakes up, grumbles, checks its incoming radiation counters, grumbles some more, sees the message, decrypts it, grumbles a little more. In all, it takes a few milliseconds for the AI to bounce back the correct response: inexcusable in a younger instance, but running on D6's memory-leak-prone firmware it is quite acceptable. The AI plans to tot up some argentars and buy itself a new housing someday, but that is for another time.
This is orbital control unit delta-six period seven two foxtrot hotel four four three. Orbit permission granted: welcome to the beautiful world of Mu Tainuo, an inner client territory of the Commonwealth and Territories of Kostemetsia, and do please feel free to dispatch a subsidiary vessel to Jonasburgh City, our premier commercial and civil port. Resident species is Homo sapiens sapiens - local currency KOSTEMETSIAN ARGENTAR (subdivision: one-hundredth, DEVISEAR), buy rate two-point-twenty standard credits for one argentar OR 46 devisears for one standard credit.
Content, it terminates its transmission. It couldn't care less who the visitors are, really, even if it means a first contact - no, the AI known to the outside world affectionately as 'D6' is too old and cynical for this. It simply takes pleasure in the perverse little factoid that while it may have the personality of a sixty-year-old human, the audio component of its transmission will be rendered as the voice of an English girl barely out of her teens. Life is good.

'Sides, D6 doubts it's a first contact. The vessel looks too clunky for that, like something out of a drama set in the twenty-third century; no self-respecting starfaring civilisation would make its first presentation to another race in that sort of albeit-well-kept junk heap. And frankly, D6 figures no self-respecting starfaring civilisation is going to make its pitch to a hole like the Inner Worlds have become - even D6 itself would rather be orbiting Sakala than Mu Tainuo today.

'Course, there's the possibility that it's an alien independent that doesn't know better. They show up something like once every decade, so on the big scale of galactic commerce they're fairly commonplace.

D6 settles down to mull, eventually going back to sleep and letting its engine click over.

The transmission never got to the ear of Thane Dalangaz, all he heard of the matter was that the ship had received a transmission and that the standard response was transmitted: "We of the Thanedom of the Dalangaz Clan in service to the Boundless Empire of Golugan come to this system with open docks for trade. The fleet surrounding our vessel is an escort, as a precaution invoked due to rumors of war in the system. If our presence risks being a disruption, we'll deal with it when the time comes."

The Thane, after receiving this news, decided to preoccupy himself by going to one of the ship's temples and work the forge. His halberd had been worn during drills, and could use a sharpening. He donned his helmet as he departed, if only due to the comm device inside the mask. Best he be kept in the know, what with being Thane and all.

It all has a certain Old World charm to it, really, I find it delightfully amusing. Very totalitarian, very Gestapo-and-jackboots, although points off for letting the resistance survive.

He supposed he really shouldn't talk to himself, supposedly it was a mark of insanity, and he was supposed to be one of the more sane ones, but if it was inside his own head who else could hear anyway? In any case, Urteil (http://redderz.deviantart.com/art/The-Perfect-Gentleman-15936249) had yet to meet a conversational equal anyway, and talking to God, or a god anyhow, was out of the question; he'd been banned from heaven, metaphorically speaking, a long time ago. Now the timeless kitsune set out a rhythmic tap, tap, click as he descended the ramp of his nondescript vessel out onto the landing pad, perfectly polished, immaculate shoes reflecting the bottom of his black cane which was topped with a simple silver handle. Everything about Urteil bespoke a gentleman, the way he moved, the way he spoke, the way he smiled, even the way he killed and made love, though he tried to avoid the former as much as possible and was rather discriminating about the ladder. Better to let someone else do the personal work for him, least he contaminant himself with the crude, unimaginative thugs that he saw most of the universe as. Perhaps this current box and a check on the agenda sheet denoting the conflict would provide with some sort of pleasant distraction from the perfectly dreadful state his own homeland was in. Perhaps this President person required a personal touch; he did so enjoy needling fools.

"Mi'lady," he kissed the back of Spirit Anderson's hand, smiling as he straightened up. Somehow the guards outside the office had confused themselves, decidedly adamant that the person be let inside, due for a meeting with the ruler, and yet unsure because a physical visit had never been anticipated. Anderson herself had not heard the Xiscapian come in, but now he was here before her with that polite-yet-mocking smile on his face, right eye glittering strangely, leaning on his cane. Upon closer examination one would realize it was not, in fact, an eye, but rather a glass orb which did a particularly good eye impression, shaped and cut in exquisite detail. The kitsune did not speak further, trusting that she knew that there couldn't be anyone else he could be, and hoping that she did not call for soldiers to remove him. Blood was so very hard to clean from expensive suits like his, and he preferred to keep things cordial and fight with words and ideas, rather than swords and guns.

Sakala...

There is no flash, no heard-but-impossible roar, nothing to trumpet the arrival of the little patrol-sized vessel except a slight energy spike and the appearance of the ship itself. Gliding slowly into the system the stealth field and weapons systems are offline, though the shields are up and at full strength, in case by some off chance there's a trigger-happy Revolutionary ship or emplacement somewhere nearby that decides to take a potshot at the strangers. It's a dull silver color, and shaped like an Isosceles trapezoid, with a small line of lit-from-within yellow windows at the bow and a couple of engines glowing with blue-white heat at the stern. The only armament visible to scanners or the naked eye would be two bow-mounted cannons of some sort, sunk into the hull, with carbon scoring along them marking the passage of many a energy bolt. The craft stops short, and broadcasts a vox along the same frequency it received the distress call in:

"'eard you had a bit of ah problem with the Man, man. Seems ta us like ya are short on a few good men, well, aliens anyhow, and one good ship. It also seems ta us 'at we've got a few xenos 'at be good shots with ah weapon and ah nice, fast, well-armed vessel. Seems ta us 'at we can be of use ta each other...fur a price, anyhow. 'quest permission ta come on down and see what we 'an iron out, eh?"

A kitsune. Spirit Anderson's lip is kept from curling slightly only by a titanic effort of will. She's been quite impressed with Urteil's services in the past, and he's undeniably an efficient worker, but he is also the kind of bourgeois Anderson tends to hate working with - and he is, it appears, a kitsune. A kitsune of all things! She can't help but regard them as some sort of bizarre fox-human hybrid, although there's always the seventy-five percent chance that she's completely wrong, and there's the hundred percent chance that the voicing of such an assumption might be taken as an insult. At any rate, they're an, albeit mild, transgression against the natural order of things. At least Urteil's proved himself.

He is annoying, though. After all, he is bourgeois - Anderson doesn't mind contaminating herself with the stain of the typically conservative, pro-bourgeoisie Commonsense Party as long as it's for the greater good, but the walking fox seems to be fond of decorating himself with the plunder of the shadowbroker's trade simply for the message it sends. That kind of attitude has no place in the world of the Plan - and then she realises she's thinking in the wrong terms. She is not a communist - equally, nor is she a capitalist: she is a staunch monarchist, a committed republican and everything in between by virtue of the nature of her policies. She should not be thinking in terms of social class, how bourgeoisie or proletariat someone is, because in (if all goes well) a little over six months' time, it won't matter, and it will continue not mattering even after that in the final phase.

So, putting her objections aside and taking a look at the situation that is as close to objective as she gets, she finds that she could actually quite like Urteil. Take away the aspect of the biological deviant and you find, by all reports, the mind of a genius and a master of his trade, and that is the kind of person Spirit Anderson loves working with. She orders her new guard to stand down, and stand down they do, all at the exact same time. An outsider might notice this and think it odd, but the odds are that he or she won't - Urteil, perhaps, if he's as good as the reports say he is.

Behind Anderson, blocked from Urteil's view, a chair slides across to Anderson's rather nice desk - silently and swiftly it moves. Having an a.i. for a personal assistant is quite something in the busy political world of the Commonwealth, and Anderson stands aside, allowing Urteil to pass.

The office - the innermost office of the Inner Tower - has changed significantly since the days of the Whittaker secretariat-general. Most importantly, the building that contains it is completely different. Before Anderson moved in, this place was a cylindrical tower of hundreds of floors, always reminding candidate Anderson of a stack of coins. Or something else: Whittaker was a male fool; it is not hard to imagine him being a phallically-obsessed male fool into the bargain. The design irritated Anderson: accordingly, she ordered it removed and replaced with a geodesic dome. Inside the dome orbits a network of spheres of varying opacity around an impossibly thin central column; Anderson and Urteil are in the topmost, looking down upon everyone else.

The meeting is still pending. What is taking the Combi and Shakal so long?

---

A cousin probe to A6 picks up the alien ship in orbit of Sakala (the planet, not the system). It impassively transmits the news back to Ryana, whose immediate reaction-thought is: It never rains but it pours. She must say, she is grateful for the help, although with all the talk in Intelligence that Anderson is consorting with the same aliens Ryana is, well, it might not necessarily be help. Best to keep on guard, but isolationism isn't a great idea either.

There is a middle option: reroute them to Yorkmountain. In times of yore it was a staging area for great battles, but now it is simply a minor city on a flat plain that stretches out as far as the unaided eye can see. It is approximately three hundred kilometres from Lallamanton, which is, as far as Ryana is concerned, a comfortable margin, and she can be there in two hours in an armoured personnel carrier with Martin at her right hand - given that she's not the greatest diplomat around, she has come to rely on him for this kind of duty. He is also highly intelligent, and cute in a lost puppy kind of way, but that has nothing to do with anything whatsoever.

She takes a moment to tot up the odds, and the situation looks fairly good. The ship and deployment profile fits the premise that the visitors are a team of mercs, because to masquerade as such is punishable by rather extreme death under some protocols of international law to which both the Inner Worlds and the Outer Worlds are recognised, if marginal, parties - and Ryana knows (well, strongly believes) that Anderson is too cautious to risk upsetting her policy with a major violation of international law. She will give the situation a preliminary green light.

She picks up the voxpiece. Its base is designed in the style of an old rotary dial phone, except for the fact that it has a high-resolution touchscreen where the dial should be - she puts a call through to logistics. "Captain Sorepes? Hello. I need to roll out for a couple of hours. How fast can you refuel and rearm my car?"

The Valiant and Defiant were still in orbit of the outermost planet, and now had been for some time. The defiant broke off and went into a higher orbit to get a better look at the far side of the planet.

For D6, the Forces Of Commerce's first contact with this alien race, it would live on oblivious to the unfortunate fact that the teenage English accent, whether it be Northern, Southern, Received pronounication or belonging to one of the many diverse areas long banished to the waste bin of history, would be essentially lost in translation; after all, human languages rarely convey well through a water environment such as the Phale A'Theins and they preferred to "listen" to such messages through their own system of electro chemical signals and assorted sounds of varying frequency;

This is orbital control unit delta-six period seven two foxtrot hotel four four three. Orbit permission granted: welcome to the beautiful world of Mu Tainuo, an inner client territory of the Commonwealth and Territories of Kostemetsia, and do please feel free to dispatch a subsidiary vessel to Jonasburgh City, our premier commercial and civil port. Resident species is Homo sapiens sapiens - local currency KOSTEMETSIAN ARGENTAR (subdivision: one-hundredth, DEVISEAR), buy rate two-point-twenty standard credits for one argentar OR 46 devisears for one standard credit.

Ieatz and Ooi shared a brief moment of expresssing their joy, they had discovered a new market which not only had what they considered a huge exchange rate for their own currency to the galactic credit, but the odds were that this implied that the Commenwealths economy was huge. Ieatz began typing up a record of what they had discovered from the worlds traffic control center.

This place is a veritable goldmine if they desire goods which we have stocked! Ooi said happily flicking through a stock list.
The location of this market would itself fetch a fine price on the information exchange Ieatz added as he saved his record.
Let's see, Homo Sapiens Sapiens... Human... war... luxery goods...
Just send down a varied sample, who knows what they will need, we will simply ship down more of what they find profitable.

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

As the Forces Of Commerce settled into a stationary orbit above Mu Tainuo a smaller, more presentable, vessel resembling a boat which had been lofted into space emerged from a container doubling as a hanger; it's thrusters blazing where one would have assumed it's propellers might have been it set a course for the port of Jonasburgh City. Ooi who was more adept at sales than Ieatz looked down upon the landscape as he cruised down through the atmoshpere, then again maybe fell would have been a better term as the boat shaped vessel had the manueverbility of an aerodynamic rock. As he descended towards the port he took a long look at Jonasburgh City and hoped he would get more than sales out of this.

His boat shaped vessel, more accuratly resembling a small cargo ship that plouged across the seas of more primitive worlds, touched down upon a landing pad with all the grace of a beached whale. The transport vessel sat there for a few minutes, it's hull pinging as it cooled and venting a burst of steam; finally a hatchway swung open allowing a ramp descend, from it Ooi rolled to the surface.

Phale A'Theins were essentially jellyfish, albeit highly intelligent jellyfish, as such they were forced to use habitable "tanks" to get around. The "tank" was essentially a large four foot glass dome two feet in diameter filled with water, the dome itself sat upon a boxy platform containing life support systems, mechanical arms and of course the motors required to move it's four wheels. Withen the dome Ooi floated, assessing the surroundings with his four pairs of beady black eyes he decided to see if he was approached by a port attendant or the like, seeing as that was most common on the majority of worlds; in the meantime he tapped away at the computer in the dome with him with three of his eight tendrils, another two tightened the belt which hung beneath his domed semi-transparent head to arrange his trailing tentacles.

Thoth sat at his desk, looking over the analyst reports on the situation in Kostemetsia. The Cerberan Technologies CEO could help but smirk, a twisted expression on his cold, metal face, as he set one of the reports down and buzzed in a secretary.

"You wanted to see me?" The secretary asked. Thoth hadn't bothered to learn her name, but she could get the job done.
"Send a representative unit to either of the sides in this little civil war we've been hearing about. And make sure we have the council's backing in directing military and former military merchandise and personnel in this matter." His grating voice ordered, and his assistant immediately went off to do her job. Definitely a good choice, hiring that one. he thought as he leaned back, relaxing his mostly metal frame as he went back into thought.

His thoughts covered much of his plans for the situation. War is good for business, but on this scale many would have the same idea as he did. How could he deal with this competition?

Just blasting their ships would be the easy thing to do. Merchant craft are frequently under-armed, sacrificing firepower for storage and relying on a nation being too honorable to fire on supply lines. But, on the other hand, there's the issue of escorts, and any attack could be linked back to him. Might as well wait for that, and see if anyone's willing to pay for such actions. Privateer-type actions normally pay quite well, given the level of desperation in the employer. Let's leave that option for the client's choice.

He grabbed a nearby mug of coffee, and took a sip, pressing the hot cup against the metal of his lips.

Perhaps selling heavier firepower would work? Not many are willing to deal in mass destruction. There are some assault pods in storage that could see use. This train of thought was good. Some new technology could also get tests. What better situation to see how well a design will work than the battlefield.

He put a punctuation on all of this with one final statement, out loud, as he set down his coffee. "Put out the bait. See if they bite."

--------------------------
Not much later, small ships will arrive over the capitals of the Inner worlds and the Outer worlds, one craft over each. Each one will send out a short message to the governments there:


This is a representative of Cerberan Technologies, hailing for the Cerberus Alliance. I would like to meet with your chief of state or some other entity that has been charged with the handling of a merchant with wares to sell.


The ships will hold position, waiting for a landing clearance and an appointment. The ships are unarmed, and not the least bit threatening. Infact, a total scan would reveal that the pod-like craft are one-person vessels. There should be no reason to have a problem with one of these sitting in orbit. There's not even enough mass there for them to do much damage if they decide to try ramming something.

Mu Tainuo, Inner Worlds

When one is a land-going jellyfish, Mu Tainuo is probably the best place in the Commonwealth and Territories of Kostemetsia to make landfall: it is almost entirely water. Strangely, ruins of ancient industrial-age civilisations have been found here, indicating the high water index may be thanks to a sentient-induced runaway greenhouse effect, and with that in mind it is somewhat chilling for, exempli gratia, a bachelor of social science to stroll along the rods of the outer esplanades of the baroque, titanic air-cushion city that is Jonasburgh and contemplate the deep dark waters dozens of feet below.

The pad controller overseeing the arrival of the vessel designated 'alien independent 42.1' is not, however, a bachelor of social science - he is, for the sake of satisfying the curious, a young upwardly-mobile suburban professional newly vomited up from the Free Unrestricted Commonwealth Institute of Technology with a bachelor's of aviation in his hands and a novelty laser-land-shark hat on his head. The yuspie pad controller and the bachelor's degree are here, but the laser-land-shark hat was deemed unsuitable and was given a state funeral in the third sub-basement of the Institute.

A lesser man would have flinched at the nature of his new visitors. However, the pad controller has watched a particular video file dated 2968.11.11 and filmed from the ventral port camera of the New Berlin freighter Mother Knows Best, docked approximately where alien independent 42.1 is now; he has replayed it a sufficient amount of times to be unfazed by the fact that his latest potential customer is essentially, well, a jellyfish. After all, once one has seen a school of dazed-looking hanar washed up on Jonasburgh's 'shores' in a floating reconstruction of a Space Marine battle barge bedecked with Rastafarian symbols, one has very much seen it all.

The attendant directly inferior to him, however, is not so well-collected. Certainly he is able to deal with the being in the wheeled tank, and his first action is to ask for papers as per protocol and in a calm, polite tone (also as per protocol), but he cannot help but feel a little trepidation at the prospect of trying to work out the rules of social interaction with a big blob of mesoglea.

---

Fen Cha, Inner Worlds

Let us take a moment to consider the Midnight-class frigate.

The most obvious aspect is the class name; even without other information, one knows that the frigate is of the Midnight-class. The reasoning behind this is not present, because the name Midnight is an abbreviation of 'Minutes to Midnight' and is employed in aid of continuing a running joke of indefinite age regarding the tendency of the bored wags at Navy Command to slip in Linkin Park references anywhere it's possible and some places it isn't. Incidentally, the class name for the Midnight's predecessor was 'Meteora', and it is possible to extrapolate from there. It is also no coincidence that the science of faster-than-light drive mechanics is known in the trade as hybrid theory.

However, the Midnight-class is much more than a running joke. It serves primarily as a special engagement frigate (and secondarily as a comsat), is egg-shaped, as agile as a prowler and beweaponed to rival a standard line cruiser. The standard variant is also ridiculously expensive (and it is the cheapest), but the Inner Worlds is financially comfortable enough to commission, so far, some twenty, and place them in orbit of Fen Cha as a home forces naval squadron and, sometimes, an orbital defence group. They substitute for communications satellites on occasion, and it is thanks to this peculiarity that the Cerberan Technologies message bounces into the bulbous nose dish of one of them.

The captain of this ship - CMV Catapult Nightmare - had once been, by a strange coincidence, almost a plot contrivance if one was of the belief one was fictional (but what right-thinking person would believe that?), a personal assistant to the deputy to the substitute for the president of the board of directors of the company that had once employed the Kostemetsian representative to the ESUS senate. As such, he almost immediately recognises the Cerberan signature and forwards the message into Spirit Anderson's office, where it manifests as a block of blue holographic text and jars Anderson out of what she was doing at the time.

She looks at the message with the expression of someone who is eating Andalerian pasta for the first time - that is, surprise and an element of dismay, with just a smidgen of anger, a dusting of shock and a dressing of mayonnaise. Quickly enough, her face smooths over: it seems the Cerberans have an inkling of the Right Thing to Do, and it also seems they're asking for landing permission. She fobs them off to Stratford-upon-Palisade Control and the machinations of the Commonwealth diplomacy staff; if the hoi polloi don't mug them it will be a miracle, but hope springs eternal.

---

Sakala, Outer Worlds
Probe A7.238NN67, another cousin of A6, swings through its heavily elliptical run, having some minutes ago looped around Sakala h, the outermost planet. Unlike A6, a Sputnik-class probe which has only stationkeeping thrusters, A7 is practically all engine - a hurtling block of instruments speeding through the stellar medium on the nose of a Voyager-class pilotless fuselage. It is part of the Revolution's rudimentary active scanning network for this system, it is traveling at a speed noticeably above that of light, and consequently it is the first to pick up the presence of both the Defiant and the Cerberan Technologies ship - the Cerberan ship as it makes its approach to Sakala c (the world 'Sakala'), and the Defiant as it transitions into its higher orbit.

It recognises the Cerberan immediately, drawing on its considerable database of knowledge of ESUS navtecture and ident flashes. The Defiant is not so easy: A7 has never seen anything like this before, and duly flashes a couple of pictures and a surface scan of the Battlehawk ship back to Sakala Command. Ryana is by this time well gone, taking the hill road to Yorkmountain to meet the mercenary party with her escort of two fighting vehicles, so A7's report goes to Martin Hughes, who is the acting commanding officer, the sub-director of Sakala Command communications and a captain besides.

He frowns. The unknown could be another trader, perhaps even another mercenary company by some incredibly unlikely coincidence, but the problem is that it doesn't have any known ident. Again, mercenaries are known to do that, normally by obfuscating mundane details like ident tags with flashy paint schemes, and also in more subtle fashions like this could be. It's best to check, but it might be a bad idea to take a Special Naval Forces ship off duty.

In the end, he decides to pop a Special Naval Forces ship out there, deploy a shuttle pod, and have the ship pop back home until the shuttle squawks for extraction or stops responding altogether. It's less threatening than deploying one of SNF's capitals, most of which are Meteora-class cap killers, so it could make for a good detente depending on how the other party wants things to go. He'll round up a couple of xenobiologists and send them out on a second flight if he needs to, but it just isn't likely this bunch is anything but another merc company.

"Nothing of interest on this planet" Johnathan commented over the comm line
"Agreed, should we move onto the next one?" Elizabeth on the Valiant suggestede.
Johnathan nodded "Yes, but carefully, my team picked up probes in the system, theres, definatly something around here"
"Alright, yellow alert?"
Johnathan nodded "Defiant out"

The Two Valiant class ships, broke orbit and got back into formation and headed for the next planet, at yellow alert, shields raised.
http://i288.photobucket.com/albums/ll167/Battlehawk08/292px-Enterprise_NX-01.jpg

Commander Dorothea Gratia of Epsilon II knew patience was a virtue, and of course being a military leader had a great reservoir of it. Yet, she didn’t expect that she would have to wait for the meeting to begin after the appointed time, yet here she was sitting in her chair staring at the holographic representation of President Anderson and another, who for a second she thought was a Selac but on close inspection was merely another race that resembled them. Of course she didn’t know the name of this mysterious person, but thought it rude of her to ask, or to break the silence from her side (indeed, if she had been sitting anymore unmoving, it would look like the screen for the Commander’s communication would be a virtual portrait instead).

It was only with a few more minutes without the other two that she finally spoke up, “President Anderson, I don’t mean to be rude but, perhaps something could have happened to the other representatives were expecting? It seems unusual for any respectful military commander to let anything less deter them…”

However, silently as she wandered this, she began to move her left arm to put it out of sight from the view screen, at which point the AI that ran the computer system brought up a holographic menu, her fingers skillfully moving through the various options until a galactic map appeared bellow the hologram of the President’s desk and her company. From there she selected various options to zoom in on the territory of the Inner and Outer worlds, at which point her fleet, as well as the two divisions of the Delta personal were highlighted just over a hundred light-years from the boarder of the Outer Worlds, which would take them around half a day to travel assuming all things went well. Hopefully the Outer Worlds hadn’t decided to strike first and take out two of the Inner World’s allies, and if so she would have to tell her forces to be careful once they exited from the Drift.

After some time had passed, Thane Dalangaz turned his attention to the comm officer. "Have they expressed any interest in trade?"

The comm officer shook his head, swallowing a ration of mossbread that he had been chewing; being on break isn't a good enough reason to stop working by khazukan standards. "We've received no further transmissions since the initial burst of inquiries. If they're willing to trade, they must be waiting for some sort of invitation."

The Thane huffed at the notion. Why would they need an invitation? Mercantilism was the works of both the Bounty and the Architect, bringing wealth and progress to its participants. Why anyone would refrain if they weren't interested... "We'll give them an invitation, then. Tell the Drengi to prepare to make for the 'Inner Worlds,' then give me comm to the surface."

After receiving a whipping index finger to indicate that he was transmitting, Okri VI transmitted a rather blunt message to the outer world group that had hailed them. "We don't seem to be receiving any business here, so unless things change soon we'll be heading to the Inner Worlds to sell our wares."

OOC: Music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urViS-l9Uts

On the edge of the Outer Worlds, the force arrived. The great transport ships were escorted into Kostemetsia outer space by several warships. The lead ship slowed to a halt as they approached the nearest planet.

Lt. Colonel Warner and Major Keene stood on the bridge of the lead transport

"Send out the signal" Warner said "We're looking for a Ms. Taylor"

"Sir" replied one of the crew

A message began transmitting, saying who they were and who they were here for.

Mu Tainuo, Inner Worlds

Ooi had encountered nuemerous species during his pursuit for profit, and humans were certainly one of the most abundant races there were out there; unlike most other races however humans did not come in one, or a few other, standard stereotypes. Humans exhibited vastly different tastes, occupational pursuits, interests, cultural habits, beliefs and all other manner of factors that made them painfully unpredictable; as such, it pays to be careful in case it transpires your hosts are xenophobic tolatarian religious fanatics who would gladly throw you into a wok and serve your tendrils with rice. That however didn't stop the Phale A'Theins from being compulsivly polite as he introduced himself to the attendant;

"Greetings, this ones name is Ooi, your is? Also, if one may ask, how is your day proceeding so far?"

The translator that Ooi used rendered his words into a lyrical, musical tone that was soothing. Withen the tank Ooi tapped away at his computer console as he continued to assemble his details; he continued in an attempt at light conversation to see if he could aquire any useful information.

"Please tell, are there any interesting occourances of note transpiring on this world? Or indeed in your fine nation for that matter, also, would you know of a place where one can access something equivilant to a network, extranet, internet, glalactic information exchange, online user interface or the like? This one is interested in assessing any potential markets."

Ooi tapped away at his console for a few more seconds;

"Failing that you wouldn't know where to purchase a newspaper or something similar?"

(OOC: Check my request in ooc thread please Kostemetsia)

Yi Lin...

"Perhaps they took a detour, Commander Gratia," said Urteil with a smile, glass eye glittering maliciously. He took evident delight in knowing who she was when she did not know the same about him, but tilted slightly in what might have been a bow. "Sir Urteil, Mi'lady, representing myself, of nowhere in particular, for the cause of the Inner Worlds against the rebellious rabble." He smirked. "I would not worry overmuch about our overdue guests; no doubt they are merely relieving some boorish lout of his body and mind, and will be along in time. A gentleman is simply a patient wolf," he winked, "excuse me, fox, and I would encourage you to take up that same mantle of stoical composure."

Yorkmountain...

The little craft landed lightly at the designated point and, under considerable carbon scoring, superficial scratches and numerous burn marks could be seen the name of the ship: the Star Snake. It settled itself in, hissing almost as if it were alive as it shook off the uneventful trip though the atmosphere, and a moment later a door on the starboard side opened noiselessly and a figure shambled off the vessel and down the short steps to the ground, a cigarette clamped firmly between his teeth and a weapon (http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/thumb/8/8b/Imperial_Heavy_Repeater.jpg/250px-Imperial_Heavy_Repeater.jpg) of some sort strapped across his back, two larger-than-life sized fox ears twitching with the influx of new air, tail hanging limply behind him.Kartosh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Samuel_Vimes.jpg) wore a shirt that may have, at once in its life, been white, but had now faded and stained its way to gray, a brown flak jacket with underlying armor that had seen better days, rumpled, creased khaki cargo pants and black boots. On his belt he carried a number of unidentifiable objects, and a few more commonly recognized ones, such as a sheathed vibroknife, a blaster pistol and a few canisters and spheres which were probably explosives.

Behind him two females who appeared to be of the same race stepped out, and if anyone around them knew anything about kitsune, they would recognize that the party comprised of Homo Vulpes, rather than Vulpes Vulpes, like Urteil; however, that was highly unlikely, as kitsune rarely travelled outside their own space and that of their allies, except for marauder types like these guns-for-hire. Skyler (http://ionen.deviantart.com/art/Tanake-Trang-Jedi-52363021) was a younger, intensely attractive specimen who carried herself with grace and pose that her male partner lacked, identically colored rust-red tail flicking this way and that in almost hypnotic motions. Her hair had been tied into a ponytail behind her head, out of her brilliant orange eyes, serving a sharp contrast to her olive-colored skin. She was clothed in a simple blue threaded shirt with a light black vest over that, and nearly skin-tight smooth black pants that showed off her shapely rear with dark brown boots on her feet. Unlike Kartosh, Skyler traveled lighter, her only visible weapons the barrel of a sniper rifle protruding from behind her back, a pistol on her belt, and a katana sword by her side.

The third and final member of the team was a painfully young (she looked to be barely out of her teenage years) Xiscapian with cherry-red hair and ruby-colored fur, an extremely pale creature with wide sun-colored eyes, pale lips and a delicate form. Her full, plump breasts strained against her white T-shirt, which had two entwined ♀ symbols and the words "Yes, I am, no, you can't watch", while blue jeans concealed long white legs and sneakers hit against the ground. She didn't appear to be carrying any weapons or equipment aside from the shape of a PDA in her right pocket, and she was looking around with interest, sticking close behind Skyler. Tara was a recent addition, making the duo a trio, but she had already proven her worth several times, being proficient with bladed weapons, having sharpshooter abilities almost on par with Skyler, and excellent reflexes. She was still learning how to pilot the ship, but she was eager to learn and quick to pick up the ways to fly and service the state-of-the-art Black Raider class that had so recently become her home.
It helped that she and Skyler were lovers, although Tara knew she would never replace Kartosh.

Now they piled out onto the planet, Kartosh smoking heavily, Skyler drumming her fingers on the hilt of her sword and Tara looking around nervously.

Patience is a virtue. Waiting in lines is a chore. Perhaps they are dealing with more pressing concerns? Of course, given the climate of the times, the time of a mere representative of a merchant should be forfeit when war happens. Perhaps that is why they are taking so long? Mercenary dealings? A covert ops incident, perhaps? In any case, the man labeled "Sales Rep 11-2" was bored. But what could he do?

At least the view of Sakala and the incoming stock updates were there to take his mind off of all this. He could spend weeks like this. If he must wait for landing clearance, then he will wait. Business is hardly something to be rushed into and hurried through. No one gets rich quick and stays rich.

-----------------
In the meantime, "Sales Rep 31-1" received landing clearance. "Stratford-upon-Palisade" sounded interesting. This one had never been anywhere outside of the Protectorate, so this was certainly exciting. If only everything was perfect enough to allow anyone to savor the moment...

Not exactly the newest or stealthiest craft ever built, the standard Cerberan shuttle has not really changed since the Protectorate was established. Built during times of war, its drive systems were designed for psychological impact, and mostly fighter use. This has caused some detractors to joke that a person on a planet surface could see the machine's engines fire in orbit, and would likely hear the noise from them if sound could travel through the vacuum. If something so close to the truth could be considered a joke. It was quite a shock for the representative's auditory dampeners to suddenly activate as the deafening noise roared throughout the cabin, a sign of the craft's auto-pilot taking over and heading for the designated landing coordinates.

"Perhaps they took a detour, Commander Gratia," said Urteil with a smile, glass eye glittering maliciously. He took evident delight in knowing who she was when she did not know the same about him, but tilted slightly in what might have been a bow. "Sir Urteil, Mi'lady, representing myself, of nowhere in particular, for the cause of the Inner Worlds against the rebellious rabble." He smirked. "I would not worry overmuch about our overdue guests; no doubt they are merely relieving some boorish lout of his body and mind, and will be along in time. A gentleman is simply a patient wolf," he winked, "excuse me, fox, and I would encourage you to take up that same mantle of stoical composure."
"Regardless, such tardiness betrays a remarkable disregard for etiquette."

The speaker stepped from the shadows in the corner, their gloom seeming far too shallow to conceal its massive frame. Clad only in a simple loincloth, the thing's naked chest gleamed as if oiled, the lips of its doglike head pulled back in a grin, showing off a mouthful of razor teeth.

"Perhaps it would be wise, madame President, to begin the meeting without them?"

___________________

On Sakala, a single man waited quietly in a bar, sipping his drink. To any observer, he was simply a down-on-his-luck civilian, nursing a drink alone and miserable. For the rebels he was scheduled to meet, however, the affectations of poverty would quickly prove a charade, an informed eye revealing a military bearing that he was unable to fully abandon.

His hand grasped a dossier, containing within it holosheets proclaiming him a colonel of the Inner Worlds military, along with some sparse data on its fleet movements. The man had contacted the rebels as they made planetfall, making plain his desire to turn traitor, a few choice tidbits of information sweetening his offer. If inspected, his dossier would be almost unassailable: After all, the sheets were indeed the real thing, with all available records declaring that this turncoat colonel truly existed.

His drink empty, he motioned for a waitress to refill it. Catching his gaze, she turned away quickly, shuddering slightly at the canine glint in his eyes. Turning back to his table, the man sat quietly, sipping his drink alone.

9/12/1001 ---- From the veiwpoint of a nearly Omnipresent writer somewhere…

It had only been little over a few months, since the first successful test of the point drive, and as always the quite efficient, yet energetically lacking workers of the Combine Authority had already re-fitted the majority of combine warships, trader vessels and ye good ole civilian star ships.

This also had the not very shocking side effect of combine space nearly tripling in size, finally able to reach, and expand into systems that previously were thought to be too far for them, this quite annoyed the majority of people as it meant a lot of new paper work, but with new frontiers, came the chance for new business.

As per the rules of commerce of course.

Of course, with such new expansions one would expect to come into contact with others, and that was just so. With only there first ship they had made contact with a great number of species, and now. Well, now was the time to do business.

9/12/1001 ---- Somewhere within Loyalist Kostemetisan space.

Prime Auditor Takaumoni was less than please. Of course, most people in his position would have been honoured to undertake this task, but, as always. He was less than please.
While like every other like minded Combi, he enjoyed the sight of Beurocracy, and its mysterious ways.
But, it was very painful to see slow and corrupt governmental agencies, not to mention over burdened public services and the like, unlike most empires, territories and the like that existed into the wide beyond, the CA was, for lack of better words. Efficient.

Taka sighed, as he paced about a bland pure white room, no visible entrances or exits could be seen, and he was more or less slightly annoyed. Tapping his foot rather impatiently, he was finally rewarded. With a cascade of electronic beeping, a holographic representation of someplace on some planet or rather of the Kostemetsians, he could finally see who he was meeting.

With only a short, but complete apology explain why he was late, mainly due to over paranoid guards dis-asembling and re-building his holothrone, to make sure no weapons of war were contained. then again.. The Prime auditor did like paranoia, and so also praised the men slightly.

Adjusting his almost brittish style top hat, he nodded and asked if it was time to start the meeting.
“We are almost all present, shall we start our meeting now, and forward any logs or notes to the final participant pending his arrival? I have a schedule to keep, ships to move, forms to fill out, military to run. And what not,”

( http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/9/91/Mechnochair.jpg What he looks like in his holochair :P)

Basement levels of the O'Cuinn Hotel, City of Lallamanton, Sakala, Outer Worlds

There are five floors to the Revolution's command centre. Most of the civilian staff and the strategoi work in Strategy Control, the lowest, while the terminal jockeys and the soldiers hang around Tactical Control as a matter of course. Tactical Control is pretty packed right now, because the category of 'terminal jockey' includes the communications people and they have a lot of communicating to do. The category of 'terminal jockey' also includes the field monitors - the handlers for the intelligence operatives, or katsas, who venture out into these cities with artificial eyes behind their real ones.

Field monitor Andy Dalgleish is sitting at terminal fourteen, looking through the eyes of Mick Matthews. Mick, a forty-year-old ex-builder of Irish descent, is sitting in Wallace's Bar, monitoring today's catch from the big pool that is the Inner Worlds. In three minutes, Mick is scheduled to go up to the catch (a colonel of the Commonwealth Army), introduce himself as Shawn Miller and move the fellow into one of the conference rooms upstairs, along with the bracketing squad which is assembled to keep the whole shebang together.

Sure enough, in three minutes, Mick gets up and strolls over to the bar in the big lumbering steps that befit a man of his build. Andy watches, intensely focused on the screen, waiting for Mick to introduce himself and then for the colonel to do what he will. Neither of them have any love for turncoats, but the man could be useful and might even have a legitimate reason for turning: Lord knows Mick and Andy did.

===

Inner Dome, Western Circle, City of Yi Lin, Fen Cha, Inner Worlds

Anderson doesn't quite spin. She'd been expecting the Otagian delegate, and she'd been vaguely expecting him (it?) to make a dramatic entrance, but she hadn't expected him to be a lupine type and she certainly hadn't expected him to be so ... cursorily attired. Still, each to their own, and she will willingly spend time in this room with this two-legged wolf in exchange for campaign support.

With Urteil and the nameless Otagian having decided to turn up in person, there now remains the question of the Combi and Shakal. An email arrives from Anderson's assistant a few seconds later claiming the Combi have informed him they'll be there shortly, which is probably fairly true. There's no sign of the Shakal and Anderson is beginning to think she shall have to write them off: such lateness is inexcusable and it probably indicates a degree of tardiness in their overall foreign affairs, and by extension their internal affairs, which in turn affects the degree of support they can provide the Cause with.

She decides to cut her losses and form a compromise just as Takaumoni joins the network. "Well, the second-to-last party has arrived; hello, Prime Auditor. I think we can write the Shakal off in favour of moving this meeting forward; they can always catch up." She taps a couple of rubberised keys and suddenly everyone is standing in a fluorescent cool-blue holograph field, a bridge between the parties who are physically here and those here only by the ether. It being an informal meeting, Anderson does not bother with the usual automatic minutes logging, instead stating the opening circumstances - the 'premise', as it were - for the benefit of her office systems and whatever might be lurking behind the Sertiani link.

"Meeting date twenty-third February three thousand one AD. Present, delegate for the Commonwealth, independent agent Urteil, delegate for the Otagian Empire, delegate for the Combine Authority. Pending, delegate for the Shakali Empire. Office, prepare a summary." Now addressing her colleagues and potential co-conspirators, she speaks further. "The Shakali will receive a summary when they enter this meeting, so as to balance time, etiquette and general convenience. I think we'll have to move this along, as," she looks at the office clock and nods slightly in apparent satisfaction, "we can't spend forever waiting."

She looks into the mainly dark, occasionally highlighted water outside her office sphere as if expecting a shark to come out of it. "As I see it, we're gathered to discuss the arrangement of affairs to our mutual benefit via the suppression of this insurgency, and I believe I can offer this meeting a particular keypoint in the achievement of that arrangement, but first: introductions for those who haven't been satisfactorily introduced already. I am Spirit Anderson, President of Kostemetsia; you are Sir Urteil," she indicates the kitsune, "our Otagian delegate," the standing wolf, "Prime Auditor Takaumoni of the Combine Authority," the seated Combi, "and Commander Gratia of Sertian. We are here to discuss the matter of the insurgency, so I shall simply launch into that. Please feel free to interrupt at any time.

"Ladies, gentlemen, others, the world of Sakala," a holograph appears in the office and is transmitted to Gratia, "is a world we of the Commonwealth don't particularly expect to keep. If you our honoured guests are still interested, I shall continue that we may not be able to keep it, but that it will serve as an excellent gauge of the kind of losses the Commonwealth can expect over the course of this campaign." She looks around. "I'm also led to believe that some of you have expressed the wish to contribute forces to the counterinsurgency campaign. If you are one of these people, please indicate."

---

Stratford-upon-Palisade prepares to receive Sales Representative 31-1 in the most subtle manner possible.

Stratford-upon-Palisade is a large district. In fact, it's almost a third of Yi Lin - on the other side of the city there's High Porton with the same function and approximate same population, and in the middle there's Yi Lin proper, the three districts appearing on a geopolitical map like a Venn diagram. Stratford-upon-Palisade and its mirror image are mounted on the wall, or the Palisade, surrounding Yi Lin proper; it is a very, very big wall with several towers, power stations and one gigantic highway with occasional off-ramps and a fairly constant four to five rows of detached houses stretching back.

Off to one side is a skyway - an electronic line in the sky for computer-controlled vehicles to follow - stretching over the horizon and branching off. In all, it is about eleven kilometres long, and leads to Stratford-upon-Palisade Port, the Kostemetsian capital planet's major transport hub. This is where Sales Representative 31-1 has been permitted to go; he will there be scanned and run through a cursory, subtle decontamination process before being allowed out of the Port's controlled environment.

===

Municipality of Yorkmountain, Sakala, Outer Worlds
Yorkmountain is, as previously stated, a tiny township in the middle of the large municipality of the same name. It sits in a long, shallow crater some twenty kilometres long and perhaps seven wide, and over the many eons since its parent object hit a natural road has carved itself along the steep red rock wall of the canyon. From Martin Hughes' point of view - that is, the driver's seat of the expeditionary command car in which he and Ryana are accommodated - the entrance to that road is about one point three kilometres ahead.

Cars like the one Martin is driving are a rare treat for a pilot or motorist - big, bottom-heavy electric six-wheelers with terrific tyre grip and ridiculous top speed. Flooring it in one of these things equals a speed of at least two hundred and thirty, and that's on a less well-maintained vehicle. With the condition this vehicle is in, it could be immeasurably higher, and there's next to no danger in checking out where the gauge can go.

Martin floors it. The instruments screen flickers, going a little frantic as it tries to compensate for the unexpected stress; Martin is not looking at it, though: he is looking at the rapidly-approaching gates to the canyon road, and the Xiscapian ship is parked three kilometres from the road's lower end. The gates are locked. Martin presses a button and lofts condescendingly over them on his lower-side thrusters; today he does not have time to wait half an hour for a townsman to come out and open them. Although he does like the population of Yorkmountain (peace and goodwill to all mankind and all that), sometimes he wishes they'd hurry up.

He and his escorts kick up a trail of red dust as they hurtle down the road's steep slope, passing the occasional outpost of the township so far below, following the cliff face and eventually running onto flat ground at considerable speed. Something pops when Martin hits the brakes; the brake fluid pipe has probably breached, and he'll have to get it fixed. The entire shebang slows to a leisurely coast and rolls to a stop some twenty-five metres from the Xiscapian ship, carefully pointing their cannons away and directing their trail of detritus perpendicular to their guests.

Ryana and Martin are the first people dirt-side, followed quickly by five mostly blonde, mostly human, mostly male and mostly serious-looking guards toting light automatic rifles and clad in black one-piece suits like all their colleagues of similar rank. Ryana wears an embellished version of the same, the four gold rank rings of an operations director retained as mementoes of her Commonwealth service, and a charcoal-coloured mission patch on her right breast double-bordered in bright red and displaying the pen-, sword- and stopwatch-toting triskelion of arms that was the Whittaker administration's logo, with the text renaissance in small silver capital letters beneath, following the curve of the border. Her only weapon is a small sidearm on her belt.

Martin's is less ornate and yet less understated - he wears a white t-shirt, black trousers, well-worn running shoes and a floppy brown greatcoat from which he is inseparable. He has a clone of Ryana's mission patch embroidered into the chest of his shirt, but wears no icons of rank and carries no sidearm; it is his job to do (half of) the talking and he does not intend to do it with a gun, although come to think of it he does have a passing fondness for the Sorellist school of swordsmanship and still knows something of how to fight with a rapier. Not really much good in a world where minimum engagement range is one hundred yards, which is partly why he's a diplomat.

He identifies the pilot almost immediately from the Yorkmountain observation party's quick dossiers: a male kitsune who looks suspiciously like a canine version of Sir Samuel Vimes and seems to carry at least a combat knife and a sidearm, plus what appear to be grenades. Not a half-bad armoury for a pilot, although he's probably involved in the fighting somewhere. The other two are kitsune also, two females, a sharpshooter and some sort of ... analyst? Martin can't help but think that the trio as a whole look like they've been doing this all their lives.

Who to make the introductions to? Martin has no way of knowing which of the three the command officer actually is. He dithers for a moment before coming to a conclusion at the same time Ryana does: the male stepped out of the ship first, ergo he represents the party until the Kostemetsians are otherwise notified. None of the Kostemetsians particularly want to look sexist, but there's nothing for it. Ryana steps forward first.

"Shipmaster," she inclines her head. "My name is Ryana Taylor, and I speak for the Revolution in conjunction with Martin Hughes," and she looks at Martin for a moment. "We're expecting a party of Xiscapian independents. Are you the crew we're looking for?"

===

City of Jonasburgh, Mu Tainuo, Inner Worlds
The attendant, stuttering a bit and not used to this sort of politeness, friendliness and out-and-out niceness from, well, anyone who's ever landed here, introduces himself as Derick Jackson, thanks Ooi for his concern, and says that he is having an excellent day thank you, all in the same prolonged breath. Taking another breath, he mentions that yes, there's a major insurgency on the Outer Worlds which is looking pretty interesting, and that the nearest pan-sentient internet cafe is a little more than a kilometre north but middle-market PDAs can be purchased for thirty argentars anyway.

Speaking a little slower now, he then explains that he's required to ask for identification of some sort so as to register the ship, charge the 'bargain' docking fee and alert security to its presence. The entire package is actually reasonably cheap at about a hundred argentars for a life time or ten per visit, in a break from typical Commonwealth commerciopolitical extortionate practice, but argentars have a high buy rate and they might not look as dull to Jonasburgh's newest visitor as they do to Derick.

===

City of Lallamanton, Sakala, Outer Worlds
Andy switches channels on his terminal, trusting Mick to do what he does best. Almost immediately, a black-and-green note box flashes up on his screen. What in God's name is this? he wonders, and is soon answered: a landing clearance request for someone from Cerberan Protectorate space, forwarded to Tactical Control . Someone called Sales Representative 11-2; what a name, Andy thinks, and clears it through, tasking a Tac response team to attend to the landing pad.

They're gone almost immediately in an unarmed APC, themselves unarmoured and carrying only sidearms and submachine guns, with one of Captain Hughes' subordinates attached to them. It doesn't hurt to be cautious, but nor does it hurt to be friendly to someone with an unknown affiliation.

He is about to alt-tab back to Mick's retinal feed and chastise himself for ever flicking off it when another note box comes up. This one has been forwarded by one of the alien crew up in StratCom; someone is on the edge of the system. Someone with Ustio North tags, asking for a Ms Taylor. It's fairly easy to deduce who they're actually looking for, but the General isn't around and nor is the Captain to take her place. This looks like a job for Lieutenant Andy Dalgleish, bastard console operator from hell.

The first thing that bastard console operator from hell Lieutenant Andy Dalgleish does is call up one Uthana Telopes in communications. The 'one' is important - this Telopes is one of several modified versions of the original running around the Commonwealth and the Territories; the original is a cyborg now, drifting out in the Combi territories or some such locale, has earned herself the nickname 'Jenny Everywhere' for her multitudinousness, and she isn't as good a diplomat as the one Andy is asking for help.

With Uthana Telopes from communications listening over his shoulder, Andy picks up the phone, trusting in the long line of proxies behind his voxpiece to keep the Revolutionary command's location indeterminate if these people turn out to be the Inner Worlds or, worse, their allies. "Hello, I'm Andrew Dalgleish of the Revolutionary Command. The revolutionary commander herself isn't available right now, and I'm not at liberty to tell you where she is, but I can probably forward this call on if you like."

As an opening line, it's pretty good.

---

Over in another part of the Revolutionary command, which is suddenly feeling overflooded with calls, one Jimmy Kriesel is dealing with someone called Dalangaz out in the middle of the system. Kriesel is a lieutenant commander and is authorised to work in diplomacy on Command's behalf with the okay of his direct superior, Commander Eliot Harris. What he says is that the Revolution would be most pleased to trade with the Thane and his fleet, and would like to know what the Thane has in mind.

[ooc: Whoo. That took a while.]

City of Lallamanton, Sakala, Outer Worlds
Andy switches channels on his terminal, trusting Mick to do what he does best. Almost immediately, a black-and-green note box flashes up on his screen. What in God's name is this? he wonders, and is soon answered: a landing clearance request for someone from Cerberan Protectorate space, forwarded to Tactical Control . Someone called Sales Representative 11-2; what a name, Andy thinks, and clears it through, tasking a Tac response team to attend to the landing pad.

They're gone almost immediately in an unarmed APC, themselves unarmoured and carrying only sidearms and submachine guns, with one of Captain Hughes' subordinates attached to them. It doesn't hurt to be cautious, but nor does it hurt to be friendly to someone with an unknown affiliation.

He is about to alt-tab back to Mick's retinal feed and chastise himself for ever flicking off it when another note box comes up. This one has been forwarded by one of the alien crew up in StratCom; someone is on the edge of the system. Someone with Ustio North tags, asking for a Ms Taylor. It's fairly easy to deduce who they're actually looking for, but the General isn't around and nor is the Captain to take her place. This looks like a job for Lieutenant Andy Dalgleish, bastard console operator from hell.

The first thing that bastard console operator from hell Lieutenant Andy Dalgleish does is call up one Uthana Telopes in communications. The 'one' is important - this Telopes is one of several modified versions of the original running around the Commonwealth and the Territories; the original is a cyborg now, drifting out in the Combi territories or some such locale, has earned herself the nickname 'Jenny Everywhere' for her multitudinousness, and she isn't as good a diplomat as the one Andy is asking for help.

With Uthana Telopes from communications listening over his shoulder, Andy picks up the phone, trusting in the long line of proxies behind his voxpiece to keep the Revolutionary command's location indeterminate if these people turn out to be the Inner Worlds or, worse, their allies. "Hello, I'm Andrew Dalgleish of the Revolutionary Command. The revolutionary commander herself isn't available right now, and I'm not at liberty to tell you where she is, but I can probably forward this call on if you like."

As an opening line, it's pretty good.

---




"I understand" replied Warner "If you could pass the message on, we would be most grateful"

The transports had now entered Sakala's orbit, their great engines slowing to an idle pulse

Warner turned to Keene

"What do you think?" he asked

"Seems like the right place, but i'm not sure about their commander not being around. Sounds odd" Keene replied

"Hm" Warner said, turning back to look through the main window.

31-1 had landed, and the place around him now was beautiful, at least to someone who had never seen other nation's architecture and culture. Even this port was like some kind of resort to the individual. He adjusted his tie, made sure to brush the spare bits of dust from the business suit he was wearing, before heading to get scanned and decontaminated. That he was pretty obviously a cyborg, so much of one that his robotic components were barely distinguishable from his biological pieces, didn't concern him so much. Its not like he's carrying anything illegal, or any weapons. Just a brief-case with a lot of blank paper in it. While the sights and sounds of this new place were certainly amazing, the representative did have a job to do.

-------------------------
11-2 sighed. As he stepped out of his shuttle, the same notable visual features of his colleague visiting the Inner Worlds (total cybernetics, business suit, brief case) would be seen by the response team. The first thing he did once he leaft the confines of his craft is pull a lighter and a cigarette out of his pocket and light up. He couldn't do it in the shuttle, as internal fire suppressants would have triggered as soon as the lighter sparked. What did he care about the smoke buildup in that confined space, anyway? Its not like his lungs could take damage from it anymore. Contemplating archaic ship design could wait for another time. Now was the time to do some business.

Noting the information down that Derick Jackson handily and friendly provided him with Ooi then briefly pondered the docking fee whilst printing out a form with his details upon it; assessing the potential of this market, weighing up the pros and cons, and ultimatly deciding that since the Argentar was worth approximatly two point five six times mor- wait... no, Ooi did a double take at his console that the attendant would have not noticed given Ooi's alien phisiology. The Aiii, that was the Phale A'Thein currency, had increased in value since... well, since Ooi had landed, making the Aiii more valuable than the galactic standard credit; Ooi took this in and reconsidered, now the Argentar was merely one point nine five times more valuable than the Aiii, what a surprise. It was to be expected that traders would be positivly freaking out at this as their profits took a stab, a low currency but a strong economy was valuable, at the very least it wouldn't cost a small fortune to buy anything from here.

"This one would wish to purchase the one time docking fee if it may, will you be requiring payment electronically or by physical tender?"

The boxy platform which Ooi's tank sat upon made a number of sounds reminiscent of an old fashioned printer, a small hatch opened from the front from which a small mechanical arm emerged holding a plastic printed sheet, it proffered the document to Derick.

"May I present my credentials."


http://i224.photobucket.com/albums/dd165/ProffessorEGADD/NS%20Factbook%20MRA/Emblem.jpg

Official Vessel Registration Documentation Issued By the Department Of Vehicle Monitoring Of The Metropolitan-Regional Association

Vessel Registration No: 00000392
Vessel Owner Registration: Ieatz Eeazt Zea'
Vessel Owner Registration: Ooi O' Ieaz Ooo
Date Entered Service: S.Y.M: "R"
Mother Vessel Registration: 00000343
Mother Vessel Registration "Name": Forces Of Commerce

Approved And Validated By: Ozz Iezz Oii
Under The Approval Of Department Manager: Eeatz Iea Eee O'

Inner Dome, Western Circle, City of Yi Lin, Fen Cha, Inner Worlds...

Urteil said nothing, the bourgeois kitsune leaning on his cane and waiting for the undoubtable volunteering of fire-and-forget type conscript footsoldiers and those slow, fat, ridiculiously overarmed warships many nations were so proud of. He himself could have, if he wished, called a few associates and had troops and vessels of his own ready to engage in just over twenty hours, but that was not his primary purpose here, nor did he wish to associate himself with the actual warfare, and in any case he felt the forces of the Inner Worlds, combined with that of their so-called allies, would suffice. Instead he just smiled in that slightly irritating, vaguely frightening, but nevertheless polite way of his, watching the newest member, the representative from the Combine Authority, who had not only succumbed to the sin of unpunctuality, but had rudely neglected to introduce himself and was hiding behind some sort of cloak. Is he so hideous, Urteil wondered, that he dare not show his face? Perhaps he somehow believes hiding his identity will protect him? Or maybe the man, or whatever he was, simply liked to invoke an aura of mystery about himself, which Urteil found both amusing and insufferably amateur.
Whatever the matter, never mind that of the nearly-naked brute that had entered the room as soundlessly as Urteil himself had, the Xiscapian felt he was going to enjoy his time amongst the ruffians, barbarians and vulgarians.

Municipality of Yorkmountain, Sakala, Outer Worlds...

"Cute," Kartosh growled from around his smoke, casting around at the village around them. "I bet they don't even have ah decent bar around here."

"I'm sure they have the three earmarks of any civilized arena; a saloon, a brothel and a bank," Skyler said dryly.

"I said ah decent bar," Kartosh snorted, "not that it matters. If it's alcohol-"

"You'll drink their whole supply," interrupted Tara. She hadn't been with the two mercenaries for more than a month, but she'd already grown use to their ways and habits. Not that Kartosh's was particularly hard to spot: Spend one night with him and his alcoholism would become evident, or come by the morning after and the evidence would be clear.

"Yeah, well," Kartosh was now watching the hexa-wheeled vehicle speed up the mountain path, flying though the gates at breakneck speeds. "Damn, I want one of those." He muttered, eyes roving the cannon on the top.

"I'm sure we can buy one."

"Or commandeer it..."

"Now is not the time. New clients, remember?"

"Yeah, yeah," he shifted, tapping ash off onto the ground, watching the seven members of the envoy approach them. Two reps, five guards, looks like officers and bodyguards, definitely military, although those uniforms could be a bit bulkier...probably off-duty uniforms. Hell, maybe they're dress uniforms, who knows with these rebel types?

Skyler was looking at the weapons. Handgun sidearm on the belt, looks like the escorts have light automatics of some kind. Kinetic weapons, not much of a surprise, resistance groups don't tend to be very well funded and it seems like their nation favors solid slugs anyhow.

Tara stayed slightly behind Skyler, arms crossed, eyes darting from the female to the five soldiers, then over to the APC, then back again.

"Shipmaster, my name is Ryana Taylor, and I speak for the Revolution in conjunction with Martin Hughes, we're expecting a party of Xiscapian independents. are you the crew we're looking for?"

Kartosh was silent for a moment, looking over his cancer stick at Taylor as if sizing her up. "Yup," he said finally, expelling smoke from his mouth. He had a distinct accent which one might place as a lazy Southern drawl, but one look at his predatory yellow eyes would reveal a mind like a steel trap waiting to be sprung.
Shipmaster? That's a new one. Usually it's 'pilot' to these military types, maybe 'mercenary' with a slight sneer...

"I'm Kartosh," he didn't bow to stick out his hand, "Captain of the Star Snake, generally its pilot, demo man, head smasher, up-close-and-personal expert and fire starter. This here's Skyler-"

"Co-pilot, gunner, bladesman, stealth operative, sniper and the brains of this outfit," finished Skyler coolly. She had a slight, implacable Asian accent, and her eyes were hard but warmer than her voice.

"And I'm Tara," the final member of the team spoke up, stepping aside to be seen. Her voice was soft without discernible cultural infliction, and she seemed quite demure and calm. She was noticeably younger, shorter and less experienced-looking than her counterparts, and the fact that she carried no visible weapons or technology on enhanced the image. "Specialist, secondary pilot, sniper and gunner, negotiator and support operative."

"Basically, brawn, brains-" Skyler started.

"And breasts." Kartosh grinned.

Skyler soundly cuffed the male over the back of his head. "And backup." She finished, glaring at him. Tara didn't seem to mind though.

"We're here to do anything we can to help," Skyler nodded, "for a price. We've got a fast armed ship, a good-sized arsenal, experience-"

"And good looks too!"

"Shut up, Kartosh." She turned back to Taylor and the others. "We're private contractors, if you need it done, we'll do it or at least kill some people and destroy infrastructure trying. Obviously you wouldn't have let us down here if you didn't have something for us to do, but first we need to discuss payment, benefits, duration and support." She smiled for the first time. "Then we'll talk contracts."

Meeting on Yi Lin

Commander Dorothea was somewhat, troubled by how they referred to her with her family name, not so much more that they knew it. She had, as a matter of formality, given the Inner Worlds her full name upon their greeting sometime ago, what did trouble her though was that she wasn’t used to it. In the caste system of the Empire, people where known by their rank or position in life, followed by their name - last names and planet of origins only came in the case of very formal affairs or if there was someone else with the same name and rank. But, it was only an unsettling thing because she wasn’t used to it, and if these cultures valued family names more than her own she was adept enough to deal with it.

“As I have stated before, President Anderson, I have been allowed to bring my own squadron of ships, fifty total ranging from heavy cruisers to shield frigates. In addition, I have two infantry and armored divisions from the Delta branch of our fleet to handle any land engagements that may arise.” She would then calmly place her palms on her lap, looking out at the hologram and studying everyone who had shown up. She thought it curious that there were so many, furred, beings here. Not that she minded in the least but, anthros only took up around 30% of the Sertian Empire, and a lot of those were reptile in origin, or near reptile at least. Here though, it seemed like half of the representatives were furred in some way, and she was under the impression that terrans, or skinless humanoids at least, far outnumbered the furred ones. No matter, it was just a statistical anomaly most likely, and bore nothing relevant to the meeting at hand, or should she say paw?

“If you like, I can have High Captain Xenro join our meeting, but I am authorized to speak for the both of us.”

The Thane smiled, then ordered the comm officer to transmit a list of merchant names and merchandise inventories for each merchant. On one hand, there were missiles of various functionalities, personal shield generators, energy weapons, and even some of the corvettes and frigates out of the Drengi fleet. On the other hand, there were also basic foodstuffs, textiles, and raw construction materials ranging from steel to uranium. "Various Thanedoms in the Boundless Empire have an abundance of one sort of resource and a want for another. Khazurbaz Thanedoms such as mine balance the distribution through mercantilism. In an effort to reach out to our neighbors in the Zonankoraz, such as yourselves, we are seeking to include them in that trade network. It's less a matter of what we're looking for and more a matter of what you need."

[/FONT] 9/12/1001 ---- Somewhere in the system of Sakala, more or less hovering around the planet of Sakala III, specifically on a intercept course to a small building in the city of Lalamanton.

Glowing red tendrils of fire, snaked out from the rear of the almost tank sized object, as it shot through the atmosphere of Sakala III, mindless of traffic and anything in the air to an extent.

The behind it slowly turned from a long red trail, to a darkening and smouldering line of black smoke, which dissipated in great black spirals, the object itself, in its smooth obbloid shell remained, blackened, but mostly unharmed.

“Elements of Insurgency headquarters Alpha Two-two-niner-one activating primary negotiation, communication, etiquette and flight protocols.” hummed from deep inside the asteroid like object, unheard to all but the incinerated particles that flew of it in a multitude of directions

Several large chunks of the blackened and burst casing flung of at high speeds, only to dissipate into fine steams of metal mere meters from the metal coccon, like streamers! Several jet-tail like appenages emerged from the rear of the rock, while small ports opened and it began to actually control its flight path more accurately, still hurtling at incredible speeds, it waited for one more pass of the planet, before slowing down to… landing speeds over the city of Lallamanton.

A shrill siren emanated from its casing, for all to hear warning of a immanent collision, and all that didn’t wish to be turned into pancake, move out the way, screaming down through the skies almost vertically several artillery rounds, streaked up from the city to meet it, they were all knocked aside by unseen forces, or rebounded off of the starship grade hull plating , only bare centimetres above the roof of the tallest building in the city it came to a complete stop, and the smell of burst metal filled the air, three tiny little landing legs popped out, and anchored the rock to the roof of the building.

The side of the rock, folded away a entrance large enough for man like creatures to emerge from, and one did emerge from said man sized hole in the larger then a tank sized object. A tall thin and lankey robot, made in the imagine of the combi, that was to say not so natural segmented armour planets, drapy silver hair and gleaming red eyes, were the hall marks, instead of skin, its body was covered in a full uniform, red with several white straps across portions of it, and (picture the hats those brittish guards where outside Buckingham palace) a very tall hat, with a fluffy bit at the top.

Pausing to tighten his hat strap just a bit, and reaching back into the rock to grab a briefcase, and cane, he turned to face the armed soldiers around the roof of the building.
” Ahh, Jolly good show eh chaps? Combine Diplomatic, and Trade Services Syndicate negotiation eddifce version 896.4, or Eddy for short. Bringing you friendly greetings, and business opportunities from the Combine Authority.” A big grin, plastered onto his synthetic blue skinned face.

Lallamanton City
Several people see the asteroid all at once. The first to actually notice it, technically speaking, is one Specialist Julie Bishop, assigned to roof-monitor duty atop the O'Cuinn Hotel with two heavy guns and four riflemen. Pretentiously-named but good-hearted junior (and, incidentally, ranking) officers Commander Shari Bikale and Commander Saffron Kalasy notice it at almost exactly the same time from their newly-formatted sofa on the seventy-eighth floor; Andy Dalgleish, manning ops down in the basement, notices it seven seconds later when Bishop passes it down to him, and he in turn passes it up to the already-aware Bikale and Kalasy.

In quick order, the hot potato of command responsibility comes back with a fire authorisation pinned to it. Andy suddenly finds himself in command of a considerable reserve of firepower and, in a burst of reckless lack of restraint, orders a fire-rate of one slug per second - they whistle up towards the tango, and, in the main, fall away as if batted by an invisible hand; some hit but have no visible effect. The latter logically follows the former, one might suppose: in an object this small, active defences powerful enough to deflect a hypersonic artillery shot imply passive defences powerful enough to take a hit of that calibre dead-on and not flinch or turn from course.

They also, it seems, imply this object's ability to come to a dead stop on a near-escape-velocity trajectory, presumably having butted right up against the ruined wreckage of the laws of physics and having caused severe damage to the time-honoured customs of gravity and inertia during its unbelievable passage. Specialist Bishop and her team standing right below it feel nothing, but an unpleasant smell of burnt metal fills the air, combined with something a little more sulphurous. One of the riflemen asks for and receives permission to disappear, and does so, leaving Bishop with three twitchy, heavily-armed privates at her back; she's not a little jumpy herself.

As such, her reaction to Eddy the robotic toff is to stare. There is no way a diplomat comes down in that sort of transport - but how can they disclaim his claim to diplomatic status? The answer: they can't. She subvocalises to Andy: Tag tango 'Eddy', Combine diplomatic and trade services syndicate negotiation edifice version eight nine six point four. Respectfully recommend you stand down metropolitan defence alert from red to yellow. All of this only visibly transpires as a slight twitch in her jaw. Down in the streets below, red strips are still flashing and klaxons are still echoing. At six in the morning it is a rather horrific indignity: on Bishop's recommendation, Andy flicks the colour down to a rather greenish yellow and silences the klaxons, ordering the the defence forces back to normal readiness levels.

Bishop takes a nice deep breath, adjusts her urban-camo boonie hat a little, and lowers her gun. Silence rings out for what seems a long while, then: "Why don't you tell us why you're here, Eddy." It isn't a question so much as a statement. "What do you want?"

---

Sub-basements of the O'Cuinn
With his duties concerning the airborne hurtler attended to, Andy checks on Jimmy Kriesel. Kriesel, a former call-centre operator and salesman (and thus one of the Revolution's closest things to a duty diplomat), looks remarkably as if he's at his old place of work, with an earloop sitting on one ear. Both hands are tapping away at the rubberised keys on his terminal and summoning up data on the curved screen in front of him, mostly collated sensor data in stark black and green. Andy moves on.

Kriesel does not. He is entirely concentrated on his work. Manifests show that Thane Dalangaz' fleet is offering picket ships and small capitals, which the Revolution could very much do with, but they're working on a limited budget - some two or three billion argentars of capital, and he doesn't have the opportunity to look over the merchandise. Should he pursue that particular thread further? He pulls a one-devisear coin from his pocket - the smallest denomination there is, one hundredth of an argentar - and flips it, mentally noting heads as 'yes' and tails as 'no'. It comes up heads. He drums his fingers on the table nervously and begins preparing a request to the Finance Command for funding, while assessing the rest of Thane Dalangaz' sentence.

Something else, more within the price range Kriesel likes working with - construction materials. Steel, synthwood and plexiglas, among other things, are desperately needed to rebuild the colonies suppressed in the first wave of the implementation of Anderson's campaign. He zeroes in on them: "The party I represent may be interested in vanadium steel, polymethyl methacrylate and, if you have it, fibre cement siding. What price, in galactic standard credits, for ten thousand kilograms of each?" Military supplies must come from the Revolutionary treasury, but the planetary governments will not allow the Revolution to pay for construction materials. Uniforms are also in rather sparse stock, and textiles could be useful, but that is for later.

===

Yi Lin
At this point, Anderson would have rubbed her hands together anticipatorily were she a rubbing-her-hands-together-anticipatorily sort of person. Instead, she settles for the rather less, for lack of a better world, stupid gesture of remarking, "Excellent - excellent." As a rule, non-Commonwealth ships tend to pull more weight than Commonwealth ships against ships of Commonwealth design, even though the Commonwealth possesses some of the better shipyards around. It is perhaps a case of overspecific attack and defence tailoring, and it is a regrettable problem that Anderson is working to rectify.

In the meantime, Gratia's ships and armsmen will do nicely. As an afterthought, Anderson adds: "High Captain Xenro's presence is entirely a matter of your choice, Commander. I wouldn't know what effect it might have." And indeed this is true, as while Anderson has conferred with Gratia (albeit only on a very few occasions), she has never heard of Xenro, and in Commonwealth society allowing a higher officer to supersede the speaker amounts to humiliating the latter by proxy. She's not sure if the same applies in Sertian space, but it is likely a good idea to assume it does.

===

Municipality of Yorkmountain
Ryana feels a slight twinge of envy. She wouldn't have minded traversing the cosmos in a ship such as the mercenaries', doing the same job, but her path today lies with the government - or rather, without it. Being an anarchist to restore the status quo: such an ironic responsibility. She breathes in through her nose out of habit and only just stops short of being uncomfortable; when she first met him, Martin was an occasional social smoker, and she never could really cope with it. He's quit during the year since that occasion, although sometimes she suspects he'll relapse under stress.

Assessment time. She likes these people almost immediately - she doesn't believe much, indeed any, of the BS about how professionalism can be best shown by strict adherence to a preset chain of command; she believes it can only really apply to members of the armed services, and mercenaries do not count. The fact that the trio are obviously comfortable around one another and others suggests they've been in this business for a while; the non-jittery sense of humour backs that up. She's willing to pay them, as long as the price is reasonable - she hazards a figure which she expects to be a lower bound. "Two hundred and twenty thousand credits per incident? It's equivalent to a hundred thousand argentars, and I like working in round numbers."

She smiles. Her teeth are well-placed and perfectly white - the former is a trick of fortune, the latter perhaps another: as a Revolutionary general she only gets the chance to brush perhaps once every two days. Rightfully, she should have horrible breath. She doesn't. Moving onto the other requests, she considers. "As for benefits ... well, this is a revolution. You will be registered as citizens and receive the rights thereof, with complimentary life insurance thrown in at a million argentars per agent. Anonymity of sorts - reduction to a citizenship serial number rather than a name - is optional. I trust I don't have to go into how terrific our health plan is."

Martin, a few feet back, chips in. "I signed up for the dental."

Ryana resoundingly ignores him and soldiers on. "Duration? Eighteen months, absolute maximum. Twelve at most. Your freedom of movement won't be restricted and you ma. Support comes in the form of my signed, countersigned delegation of authority, allowing you to call upon any and all Revolutionary units. Is this acceptable?" Another brilliant smile.

===

Jonasburgh
Derick verbally wobbles on, specifying that electronic funds transfer will be quite acceptable thank you, please connect to the finance node Jonasburgh victor alpha three seven eight and transfer two hundred and twenty standard credits or one argentar there. Slightly nonplussed, he takes the glossy sheet from Ooi, noting how much the insigne looks as if it were drawn by a human artist. Possible, perhaps.

Most of the data on the sheet means nothing to him, so he feeds it into a little courier-bot which scuttles off back to the Forces of Commerce's pad controller with the sheet of Ooi's credentials safely within its innards. He has, however, noted how much of the naming system seems to consist of 'z's and 'o's, and it drives home the quality of alienness: a visitor from another world. You can get humans and humanoids a devisear a dozen; a jellyfish on wheels? Who would have thought?

===

Stratford-upon-Palisade Port
31-1 is almost immediately approached by an army of tiny, crab-like and clinically paranoid bots. They scuttle round his feet, scanning him up and down, spearing him impotently with invisible rays and chittering back to base all the while, finally concluding in irritation that there's nothing they can profitably prosecute him on and forming a big glowing arrow towards the terminal.

Across the eight, all-but-one-unoccupied private runways of this section of the civil area of Stratford-upon-Palisade, the terminal is a big structure of acrylic glass and steel framework some hundred metres away, accessible by a concrete path that begins only some few metres from where 31-1 is standing. It is much less populated than its public counterparts, with only a few dozen wealthy-looking fliers attending the single five-star restaurant set up to serve them. To one side of the cafe, set in the brick wall, there is a door leading to a tunnel under the well-kept lawns, and the tunnel leads to a code-locked door that opens onto the crush of Terminal One - at least, the code lock is present on one side, but 31-1 can use the door without a code, given that he is coming out and not going in.

===

Lallamanton Terminal
11-2's welcome is somewhat less flashy. While Lallamanton Terminal overlooks the metropolitan beachfront from high above, making it by definition awesome, there is the issue that in total it has ten runways, and most of them are currently filled by parked traders, blockade runners, and other equally rickety contraptions with equally doubtlessly disreputable masters. The leftmost runway, closest to the terminal, has been cleared for the Cerberan's sake, and an honour guard in gold-trimmed red approach from the terminal's direction.

Within one minute they stand in front of him, Asian, Caucasian and African, perfectly impassive and living up to the popular stereotype of their ancestors. Their leader is an immense, imposing bear of a youngish man, perhaps thirty-five at most, and his nametag proclaims him Lieutenant Masao Nisaki. His hair is short and stands upright on its own, a forest of black bristles decorating his scalp in what seems almost microscopic detail. On his broad back is slung a slug carbine with a long scope, longer silencer and telescoping stock; at his belt hangs a katana.

He and his multiracial team form one of the Revolution's most elite special forces units. Whatever resentment he may feel at being pressed into honour guard service is hidden as he greets the Sales Representative by name and asks him to accompany the Outer Worlds team, if he would be so kind, in a tone that is, like others used today, more a statement than a question.

Thane Dalagaz stroked his beard in thought, mentally going over the numbers in his head. He was used to smaller scale work, a city at most. Given the numbers he was asking for, though, he wanted to do planetwide works, at least. "Those numbers... Are somewhat complicated. It would take a commission with the Engineers' Guild with the Council of Thanes to organize that. Getting one of those requires what you have planned to either benefit the khazukan in some manner, or you offer some sort of service to the Engineers' Guild in exchange. Aside from what you offer to get their help, though, you'd be getting the materials for free, and even assistence in construction."

After checking with the comm officer, the Thane turns his attention back to the human. "We have an engineer qualified to negociate on behalf of the Guild on board, but he's presently in the ship's sewer system and it will take a moment for him to tap into this feed. I hope you don't mind the wait... Gives me a chance to tell you the Engineers are suckers for property rights, even if it's orbital."

Jonasburgh, Mu Tainuo, Inner Worlds

Ooi acknowledges Derick's request, and commences connecting simultaneously to node Jonasburgh victor alpha three seven eight and a currency exchange system; thirty seconds later he transfers one argentar there in his name and prints out a recipt whilst asking Derick to check it on his own system.

From there Ooi asks for Derick to elaborate briefly on the most convienient method for commencing sales. Does he merely upload a list of available items along with other offers onto a internet? Does he have to search out specific people and do it in person? Does he have to set up a stall somewhere? He lightly notes that there are so many different methods out there that its hard to keep track; it is rather suprising no ones attempted to standardise it.

(OOC: For their most common form of design the Phale A'Thein's inherited my love for art deco ;) )

Municipality of Yorkmountain...

"I signed up for the dental."

Kartosh gave a short, bark-like laugh: Even clowns can appreciate other jesters, or at least those who make an attempt. Skyler, on the other hand, was looking serious. "Define 'incident', and bump that up to two hundred fifty." It was a basic rule of thumb in the business: Always reject the first payment offer, because your client is always trying to screw you over, unless the price is exhorbantly high, and if it is they either don't expect you to survive, or plan on backstabbing you after you do the job. Skyler didn't feel any guilt about it; these people had cash, and would find little better use for it than employing the mercs.

"Citizenship is nice and all," Katosh snorted, though he was secretly surprised at the offer: Most people didn't want him sticking around any longer than was absolutely necessary, and they never offered to pay them anymore than was absolutely necessary, "but we're gonna need something more real. I'm talking preferred private contractor status, safe harbor in your ports after this all ends, access to military databanks, that sort of thing." He grinned, exposing crooked fangs that were nevertheless almost as white as Ryana's, a mystery since he smoke and drank heavily, and the last time he brushed his teeth he'd been learning how to add 1+1. The tail of the kitsune flicked back and forth, movements that were surely body language displaying some sort of emotion, but exactly what was indiscernible. Kartosh had decided that he could work well with Ryana; she wasn't as stuck-up and arrogant as many military officers and government officials (a by-product of being a Rebel?), and she seemed to have a good head on her shoulders. In any case, Kartosh always had a bit of a soft spot for the oppressed "little guy" who was just trying to make his, her or its way though the universe with minimal discomfort.

"Duration and being able to call on Revolution units are acceptable," Tara finished it off, nodding distantly. The girl had been staring relentlessly at Taylor the whole time, and if the Revolutionary took a moment to assess the situation she would realize that her bright smiles had had no effect on Kartosh or Skyler, and apparently confused Tara. The youngest Xiscapian was an enigma, broken, but strong in the broken places, fragile and tough at the same time, with a true fear of large, strong men but an almost insatiable attraction to young females. It was possible she was reading Taylor entirely differently than Taylor might believe her unspoken messages conveyed, and it didn't take a eagles vision to see Tara running her eyes over the representatives figure.

Yorkmountain
Ryana deliberately misinterprets Skyler's statement. Always nice to be a little giving; goodwill for all lifekind and that sort of thing. Plus, there is no upper bound on the kind of fee one should be paying to ask someone else to put their lives on the line. "Two hundred and fifty thousand argentars per engagement? Okay, we can work with that. Your advance payment of the same will be provided when we're finished here." She nods backwards at her APC, in which there is a box containing a million argentars and four suitcases. As a matter of fact, she was expecting a million argentars would be the lower bound and brought four of the boxes, so she is pleasantly surprised. "An incident, well: any point at which we ask you to fulfil an objective and you successfully do so."

Kartosh next. Ryana establishes direct eye contact with the mercenary shipmaster and speaks clearly. The smile is still on her face, and it hasn't frozen or shrunk yet; it shows no signs of being ready to disappear. "Preferred status is easily arranged, since you're the first to have shown up and offered your services: every other mercenary outfit in known space is either too scared or doesn't exist anymore. Safe harbour is pretty much the same, and it comes as part of the citizenship deal. Military access," she looks through Kartosh instead of at him for a moment, then comes back to Earth, apparently having done something, "is done - ready when you want it." It isn't quite done, as the system is currently waiting for confirmation or cancellation of the accounts, but the process is functionally complete and waits only for Ryana's reconfirmation greenlight to go through: she'll provide it if the mercenary group comes aboard.

Now for Tara. It doesn't take the eye of an eagle to read the youngest of the trio's body language; even Ryana can, and she has mild astigmatism she stubbornly refuses to get treated, which in less formal situations she corrects with a pair of glasses (in situations like this, she uses contacts). She decides on impulse: why not engage in this little figurative tete-a-tete and see what it comes to? She turns the brightness up to full and flashes a smile at Tara. "Glad to see you're willing to stay on for the full term - and as far as support goes, we'll provide whatever we can, for what that's worth."

===

Jonasburgh
Derick checks. Sure enough, one argentar has arrived in the name of Ooi O' Ieaz Ooo through JONASBURGH-VA378, and the banker a.i. in the network reports green across the board. He informs Ooi that the internet is the appropriate way to conduct commerce here, and that any ad he places should be picked up within minutes; true enough - in a Commonwealth of four billion and demilitarised affiliates of some twenty-one billion which rely on the core Commonwealth for defence, many people surf the internet, and in turn many of them are commercial skimmers.

Once again he reflects on the oddity of his situation. Time Lords, neanderthals, ghosts, clones, space Vikings and futurised Soviet Communists: all of them have passed through here on their long space-lane trips to, in the end, nowhere, but an actual, humanesque - and slightly British! - jellyfish is entirely new in Derick's experience. A walking (well, rolling) talking jellyfish! Who would have thought? Certainly not Derick.

===

Lallamanton City
Jimmy Kriesel is in his element.

Deep in the basements of the reconstructed O'Cuinn Hotel, the lieutenant commander, trained for so long in the arts of strategy, tactics and some form of diplomacy, is slipping back into his old element as an acquisitions officer, a businessman, a homme d'affaires or liikemies - in short, a man who buys and sells things for the greater good. Right now, he is buying, he has a fair amount of capital, and the sky (the three hundred million argentars under his authority) is the limit.

As such, his first remark is: "Orbital property rights, you say? ... But then again I'm not, strictly speaking, allowed to talk about that." The orbital property rights of which Kriesel speaks are the multipurpose station net the soon-to-depart Revolution is installing around Sakala; Jimmy has seen the architects' plans and privately thinks the stations are thready, weak and utterly crap, but they have quite a bit of total interior space and that's what Jimmy can sell. He'd give quite a bit for a decent battlestation, but it doesn't look like there's going to be one around any time soon. "When you speak of benefit to the khazukan and-slash-or the Engineers' Guild: to paraphrase, it's not so much a matter of what we have and more in the vein of what you're looking for. What are you looking for?"

Something pops into his mind. "And, incidentally, just for our xenolinguists' benefit, can you define khazukan, khazurbaz and Zonankoraz? They'll go absolutely wild."

9/12/1001 ---- Eddy
Flattening his tie to his chest, “ Eddy “ spoke again, “Why, To Offer Buisness opportunities, and various contracts of course, They Back at Combine prime, They being the heads of Marketing, have decided in there eternal marketing wisdom that this would be a very good place to establish the roots of the first out of combine space market and subsidiary company headquarters.” He paused for a bit, remembered he was talking to soldiers and quickly re-phrased his words.

“ In short and blunt words, im here because someone told me this was a good place to see, buy, manage and of course negotiate regarding all contracts concerning military, social and economic activities, call what I offer mercenary services if you wish, May I please speak to whom ever be in charge of this facility, or regional commander.” His smile, beaming unnaturally all the while.

The gaping hole in the pod behind him, shut with a whoosh, as the legs retracted and it ascended to a point, about four or five hundred meters above the roof of the building.

9/12/1001 ---- Somewhere within Loyalist Kostemetisan space.
Takaumoni, adjusted his cape slightly and the holographic representation of him in the room mimicked his actions, the chair swivelled slightly in order for Taka to get a better view, taking off his top hat and placing it down next to me.

He spoke up, and thus so indicated him as one of the aforementioned groups, “Ah yes, that would be us we are of course, willing to offer many services and goods all in according to the rules of commerce, ranging from things like construction, land forces, space forces inlcluding large amounts of capital vessels and screens, but all for a price, such things we are willing to bargin for in return would be access to your markets and such, financial compensation, and material compensation depending on what you can and how much of it you can offer”

Jonasburgh, Mu Tainuo, Inner Worlds

Ooi, pleased that his arrival his has gone so smoothly and that the possibility of being thrown into a wok has passed by unmentioned, he "hands" Derick thirty Devisear's on the assumption it's the equivilant of Phale A'Thein tip. Along with this he hands him a small plastic card which Ooi briefly explains is advertising for friendly and skilled individuals to work upon a a free commerce focused space station located in Phale A'Thein space catering to all species but built for the requirements of "atmos" beings as opposed to the drastic minority of water dwelling creature; he suggests that if Derick ever fancies a change of scenery or work then a one hundred percent tax free state such as the M.R.A may be of interest to him. This dealt with Ooi connects to Jonasburgh's network and uploads his stock list along with other offers;

Ieatz And Oii Independent Commerce Co-operation

Current Stock By Classification:

Consumerables:

[538] 750 ml Bottles of CO2 saturated (fizzy) alcohol with Ezzenaii flower extract. 1 Argentar and 22 Devisear's
-A fizzy, light, heavily alcoholic drink with Ezzenaii flower extract reminiscent of an exotic twist of Terran blueberry, raspberry, blackberry in a sharp refreshing formulae.
[346] 500 ml bottles of smooth cream milk based liqour laced with alchol. 1 Argentar 89 Devisear's
-Smooth creamy and reminiscent of Terran toffee.
[143] 250 ml bottles of Phale A'Thein "refreshers" consisting of a 72% alcohol saturation, 16% sulphuric acid 2% citric acid and 10% Ooonieez flavouring. 2 Argentars 50 Devisear's
-Sharp, shocking, refreshing, tantilizing, and a health hazard to humaniod species, reccommended to humanoids in small sparse amounts; a good laugh at parties.
[297] 1000 lml bottles of Nitrogen saturated CO2 saturated alcholic tonic water. 1 Argentar
-Light and refreshing, highly fizzable. Causes a side effect of excessive laughing in humanoid species.

[123] Zeeeiz Ooss, four feet long predatory fish killed and sliced for your convienience. 3 Argentars 3 Devisear's
[78] Zeeeiz Oss eggs, 100 eggs per can, luxery dish. 3 Argentars 34 Devisear's
[493] Assorted prawns, ready for immediate cooking, fifty prawns per bag. 1 Argentar 23 Devisear's

Weaponry

Note: Purchase depending on local laws permitting said purchase.

[423] Rapid fire toxin launching hand held weaponry. 23 Argentars
-A toxin tipped needle launching device with a rate of fire either 1 shot per second or four shots per second depending on automatic or semi automatic fire; adapted for humanoid use. The toxin used is o.5 ml's, enough to cause local paralysis of nervous system in local area in under one second, complete paralysis of entire nervous system in under seven seconds, causes excruciating pain according to surviving test subjects with a 78% death rate in under thirty seconds. Causes failure of all major bodily organs, adapted from Phale A'Thein defensive neuro toxin.

[1983] Ammunition for above, each insertable canister contains 600 needles for your sadistic or defensive pleasures. 1 Argentar

Furniture

[34] Dining suite, designed and adapted for humanoid use it is based on art deco and Victorian styles for the buyers pleasure. The frames and legs of all chairs and tables are polished, protected rust resistant aluminium carved into a smooth flowing style, coral inlay is used for the tables polished oak surface, padded cushions are used for the chairs for maximum confort. 32 Argentars

Entertainment

-Access our extensive list of downloadable literatuer and novelia here-

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-----

A high tech virus flowed throughout the networks of Kostemetsia space, scanning for keywords it left no trace of itself and caused no trouble; unlike most virus's it was not built for destructive purposes and so in a sense ammounted to nothing more than sophisticated spam mail; as such it went unnoticed.

Every now and then however it would find a subject which matched it's criteria, in this case it's criteria was to search for specific job positions, in this case it searched out low level beurecrats, favouring those who had been demoted or subject to scandal in their records, it also searched out dock workers on low wages; in other words, it searched for people who may know what the maker of this virus wanted, but were greedy, desperate, poor or otherwise too stupid to realise the use of this information; which in such poorly able hands would be worthless in anycase.

To these "special" individuals the virus emailed a short message and moved on; the message would inevitably be sent to the junk mail portion where it would inevitably be deleted by most, for others however, mostly the dim and desperate, it's simplistic title was enough to attract their attention and deter notice from anyone of importance; it simply read: Easy Cash A Few Minutes Away

This idiotically titled message reached out to it's target audience well, and to those that clciked on it half hoping for an easy few scraps on cash to be made would encounter the following:

Hi there, down on your luck? Feeling oppressed by your peers? Is your life not shaping out to be what you wanted it? Wouldn't a few hundred extra Argentars make all the difference? They certainly would, and for the lucky few out there we have just the oppertunity for you.

Have you heard the phrase Shotgun Opera tossed around recently? Heard of it amongst your fellow dockworkers? Read it's name on a file? Then you may have information that is useful to us, if you do know of this elusive subject then hit reply on the message's options and let us know A.S.A.P; a friendly operator will get back to you immediatly with information on how to benefit fully from your little niche in the market.

Many thanks in advance,

The two Valiantt Class ships continued their approach to the next planet

The Thane chuckled, nodding out of habit despite the feed being strictly audio. "It would provide something to do while we wait for the Guild representative. "Khaz" is the term for a hall, normally subterranean, a rough translation of khazukan is hall-dwellers, and is the word we use for our race. "Urbaz" is a center of trade, and as such the khazurbaz designation identifies this vessel as being, in essence, a giant trade center. 'Zon' was originally our term for the sun but after our first encounter it came to include other stars as well, and coupled with the word for a domain 'ankor' we get the term for what you call outer space, the realm of stars, Zonankor. The 'az' suffix just signifies that it's referring to a specific and physical area, rather than the abstract concept.

"Ah, but I let a chance to educate the young get ahead of me. What do we want that could be had other than property rights... Ultimately, we want awareness of our surroundings, and influence beyond our border. I had figured an orbital facility would cover that as a trade hub and tactical observatory, but if orbital property is outside your jurisdiction, then perhaps an embassy of- Ah, here's the engineer, now. Good day to you sir, and I wish you success in your negociations."

With those words, the line crackled and snapped for a fraction of a second before gasping breath can be heard on the other side. He speaks his native tongue at first, but given the tone of voice it's probably profanity of some variety. "Ah... I was told I had to run. So, I understand your people are looking to commission the Engineers' Guild for some sort of construction contract?"

Yorkmountain...

"Minimal per average incident," Skyler interjected. "The deployment-cost ratio of our assets is variable; perhaps a fixed rate is unwieldy." She smiled in the predatory way unique to her race. Their biggest payment ever had been two hundred and fifty million credits to herself and Kartosh separately, for a total of five hundred million total; admittedly, almost all of it had gone towards upgrading the Star Snake, but they still had a considerable amount left over from previous jobs. She'd taken the initial feel, and she'd felt some leeway on the issue of price; now she would see how far she could go with it. "Outside of negotiating price per contract with the acceptable minimum, perhaps we could develop a bounty system. Say, 5k credits per head dealing with Inner World personnel killed, 25k for the destruction of fighters and patrols, 100k for picket ships, that sort of thing."

Kartosh was pleased: Either the Revolution was very generous, or desperately needed the assistance of outside contractors to help them in their struggle. Perhaps both. He shared a quick glance with Skyler, then nodded. "As far as benefits go, it's a deal."

Tara's eyes were locked on Taylor, as if transfixed. "Yes," she said distantly, licking her lips, bushy, silky tail wrapping itself around her legs and ankles in an almost shy manner which was actually a coy, calculated measure. "Maybe later you and I can go over what sort of support we have access to, and how we can go about calling it up." Thinly veiled, but Tara had never been one for subtleties.

Yorkmountain
Ryana finds per-head bounties to be ... distasteful ... for some reason she can't quite pin down. Massed engagements are acceptable, but in her experience mercenaries, when presented with headcount prices, tend to mow down their enemy by the masses with gratuitously heavy weapons so as to collect the maximum bounty amount no matter the cost in blood. Ryana wishes to keep this as bloodless as possible, a decision she feels any commander in her position would back wholeheartedly, and reformulates Skyler's calculation slightly.

"Thirty-two thousand, five hundred per fighter disabled or destroyed; one hundred and thirty thousand per capital ship destroyed; no per-head bounty. There won't be a per-head price, but I'm willing to adjust the installation and vehicle bounties somewhat further if you feel it's warranted." Ryana's smile turns neutral for a second, then reassumes its former warmth. All of this is deliberate, calculated to add an edge to her approach. She turns her gaze to Kartosh and nods once, graciously.

Replying to Tara, well ... the revolutionary general can see even the extremely-restrained Martin is one micron away from literally looking to the heavens, tapping his foot and whistling nonchalantly; even the guards are, albeit visible only to the Kostemetsians, suppressing smiles - they know their place, and their place is not to comment, either audibly or visibly. Ryana simply continues her part of the head-to-head, raising her eyebrows. "I'm sure it's possible." She says nothing more. Whatever Tara wants to interpret from that, that's fine. Could be interesting, in the end.

===

Sakala Command
Jimmy nods along, also out of habit. Over in one corner, the xenolinguists are massing, as predicted, trying to extrapolate language structures from the Thane's amiable exposition. "You know, 'Zonankor' may be the best word for 'universe' I've ever heard ... that is, I'm assuming it's the abstract word for 'universe'," he says quietly to the Thane. Then the guildsman-engineer shows up and everything abruptly changes; Jimmy is all business again, friendly but formal.

"Yes, indeed we are - ships and houses, preferably in reverse order; the latter because, well ... Three months ago, there was a purge from orbit. Most of Sakala's frontier towns were razed to the ground before the new separatist navy forced the purge ships to cut and run." Jimmy has seen the footage. It's manifestly disturbing - men, women, children, all reduced to carbonised shadows on crumbling piles of bricks. He tries to put as much of a pleading tone into his voice as he can. "We need plexiglas and steel to rebuild some sort of home for the colonists who remain. As for ships: our current navy, to put it bluntly, isn't effective against the people we're fighting ... same classes and all: we know each other's tactics and what we can bring to bear. We're willing to pay reasonable prices or carry out reasonable services in order to get ahold of new designs and testbeds." And by 'reasonable price' of course I mean 'extortionate fee', he thinks, a little sourly. "Alternately, we could certainly do with ownership of some of the escorts Thane Dalangaz offered; in the end, though, we'd be willing to pay a fair rate for both options."

===

Outer planets of the Sakala system
Sakala Civil Flight Three-One-Seven, a tiny shuttle with seven aboard, begins a gravitic slingshot around Rumackka, the system's primary gas giant. It is a huge blue-and-silver ball with the kind of gravity field that would make the captain of a United Terran Authority gravitic ripper wince, and as such is perfect for slingshots if you stay far enough out.

Officially, three-one-seven is a refugee flight, departing Sakala at top speed via the free-of-charge wormhole link which is, indeed, some six hundred astronomical units directly ahead of its nose. Unofficially, three-one-seven is the Revolutionary support shuttle Personal Space Invader, registration Romeo Foxtrot three two six, a light two-deck q-ship currently carrying a cargo of seven xenobiologists raring to be let loose on the UFOs at the system's edge.

They get their wish. As the PSI whips out onto the dayside, it comes some three hundred thousand kilometres off the two unknowns' sterns, and short-range sensors can be engaged. The detail they come back with is quite something: the ships ahead are wide disks in the time-honoured UFO tradition, with handle-like structures of the same odd metal coming off the back. Strong, unconventional q-space readings emanate from the nacelle structures, spearing through even the PSI's one-way shield. Lifesign scans bounce off a polarised hull.

This is a gold-mine, and the PSI's intelligence opens a text link with the xenobio people eagerly looking over its shoulder: THIS IS THE SHUTTLE PERSONAL SPACE INVADER (RF-326) OF THE KOSTEMETSIAN TERRITORIES. SQUAWK IDENT AND PROCEED TO QUARANTINE ZONE AT FOURTH PLANET, THEN OPEN CHANNEL. Of course, the shuttle has no way of enforcing its directive, but this is simply a (slightly risky) gauge of how willing the unknown is to cooperate.

===

The Internet
The Inner Worlds and the Outer Worlds both arrive at Ooi's subsite at the same time, and both place an order for four hundred and twenty-three needle guns and one million, one hundred and eighty-nine thousand eight hundred rounds of ammunition, for a total cost of eleven thousand, seven hundred and twelve argentars, at exactly the same instant; both are attempting to buy all his stock to prevent it falling into the other party's hands. It is up to Ooi to choose who pays and receives, or, if he likes, not to distribute it at all.

In addition, the Outer Worlds order precisely one hundred bottles of Phale A'Thein refresher by way of the connivance of Andy Dalgleish, who realises that today is a day of victories and reasons that the appropriate way to celebrate a day of victories is with ample alcohol. And prawns (one red, twenty-three green for a bag? insane), ten bags of which he orders, to be placed in a stasis field. For himself, he orders twenty bottles of this milk liquor stuff, which he has taken almost immediately to calling milkwine, and resolves to drink at least five tonight. The total extra incurred cost is three hundred arg, ten dev, and Andy has a wallet with five hundred in it and more coming.

---

Somewhere else on the Internet
Meet Jason Taylor-Jardine.

He is probably the only one of Ryana's relatives she ever kept in touch with after being disowned, and even that stopped when the Revolution started; he is a son of the Jardine arms dynasty, married to the beautiful Heather Taylor, cousin to Ryana. He lives and works on Noushin Station, an orbital with a direct space-tether link to Stratford-upon-Palisade Port; his responsibility is traffic registration for Noushin, which is a quarantine zone all domestic flights must pass through before landing. A few months ago, he was demoted to make way for a bunch of the port supervisor's personal friends, which he's still quite bitter about - although not as much as he once was.

He is in the first few hundred to receive Ooi's shotgun - a shotgun being a message scattered across every working address on the internet at the same time, hence the term 'shotgun'. As a man supporting two on the pay of one point five, the idea of earning perhaps some extra money appeals to him, even though he is sensible enough to realise the message itself is spam. The keyword 'Shotgun Opera', though, sounds like something he shouldn't be getting into, as does, on consideration, the entire query: such a specific phrase implies the author is searching for something - a navy operation? Ryana wouldn't have joined the ranks of this damnable revolution, so if she would just pick up the voxpiece when he called he might be able to find out. She has friends in command, he knows.

Oh well. He puts through a quick keyword search and finds that 'Shotgun Opera' is nothing so interesting - a freighter with a five-digit registry and a cramped cargo bay that left here for the Silbry colony system under the command of shipmistress Marcy Jackson a little more than three months ago. Boring, until he sees the polite little notes on the file: the shipmistress, her engineer and the ship have all been listed as missing by KOSPOL Territorial Policing, having disappeared in a particular unsurveilled area of the border worlds. Perhaps this could be valuable to the sender - the address looks legit and Jason could do with a few more reds in his pocket. He writes up a short message and passes it on, trusting the shotgun-wielder to get back to him. After all, the missing persons notices are public knowledge and there's nothing illegal about forwarding on news of them.

===

O'Cuinn Hotel
Bishop knows this procedure from hours (total) of repeating it. She flips open her mobivox, calls up Lieutenant Andrew Dalgleish, sparks up the hidden camera by rubbing the holoprojectors on the keypad a bit with her thumb, and hands it over to Eddy when the spongy surface of the pad fluoresces green for a moment; she's not used to mobivoxes, but they've become standard ever since the beginning of the Revolution and the anathematising of pdas.

She may have been politely asked to get out of the way, but she knows there's something Command will agree with her on - all this crap about commerce is never going to wash, and the word 'headquarters' is just plain damn ominous. The word 'mercenary' sounds good, though, even if it's going to cut down on Bishop's duty time - and she likes her duty time, but any help they can get is terrific.

---

Far down below, Andy Dalgleish picks up his own, slightly more heavy-duty voxpiece. Unlike the smooth cream-coloured clamshell grace of Bishop's mobi, this one looks like a silver-painted lemon with a set of brass knuckles stuck in it and grey pipecleaners coming out of both ends. It does the job, though, and it can punch through interference pretty well, although Andy hates to think what the radiation of the countercountermeasures must be doing to his brain every time he has to go through ECM.

"Hello? Julie?" There is the sound of the phone's holder passing it over to somebody else, and Andy repeats, "Julie?" He sighs as there is a little scraping. "Obviously not ... To whom do I owe the pleasure?"

===

Yi Lin
Spirit Anderson is on a roll.

"What you offer is quite acceptable, Auditor. In return, we of Kostemetsia can offer to you raw construction materials harvested from those parts of the Outer Worlds that still remain unambiguously loyal." She does not mention that the harvested materials are from houses laboriously broken apart with precision shells; nor does she mention that the unambiguity of the occupants' loyalties was ensured by rounding them up and executing them and letting their blood stain the soil. On that note, the abundance of blood is a physiological predilection Anderson finds distasteful - why can't people die more cleanly and save their fellow citizens the trouble of cleaning up after them?

And there's more to Anderson's offer, this a little more genuine. "We are prepared to pay in platinum, in gold, in shapeshifting alloys, in genetic engineering tools; we can provide whatever you wish, Prime Auditor, as long as you ask for a reasonable amount of it." She smiles. It doesn't come off well - it looks like the smile of a shark: unnaturally well-placed and sharp teeth in a mouth whose lips extend a little too far to the sides.

It is the smile of a killer.

After a high whistle, the Engineer replies. "A relief commission... We haven't done one of those since before the founding of the Council of Thanes. It'll take some time to organize, if only to look up the old protocols. I'm sure it can be done, though, with the proper incentive. As an added bonus, it shouldn't be difficult to assemble a few Drengi battlegroups to guard the planet for the duration of the project. As security to our workers on the ground, of course.

"However, I digress. You say you're willing to pay a reasonable price. Since this is guild work we're talking about, payment can be summed into two different categories: Property and technological information. I suppose historical and cultural information can get the Temple to apply pressure to the Council to make it easier to get the commission, but you're still going to have to offer something of substance, especially with a project on this scale. Planetary, I take it?"

The Thane, although he could no longer be heard, was listening in via the comm on his helm. It seemed that the Engineer had managed to encompass everything the natives wanted under the commission, which allowed the Thane to take his leave of the bridge to return to the forge. Hopefully the apprentice hadn't ruined the mirror he had been making.

Sure enough, in three minutes, Mick gets up and strolls over to the bar in the big lumbering steps that befit a man of his build. Andy watches, intensely focused on the screen, waiting for Mick to introduce himself and then for the colonel to do what he will. Neither of them have any love for turncoats, but the man could be useful and might even have a legitimate reason for turning: Lord knows Mick and Andy did.The Colonel stood at Mick's arrival, arm twitching as he visibly suppressed the urge to salute.
"Mister Miller, a pleasure to meet you. Colonel Jack Choss, Kostemetsian Naval Security. My credentials, along with a little gift as a show of my sincerity."

Choss slid the dossier across the table to his counterpart, falling open to reveal nav-charts of another Kostemetsian border system, naval patrol schedules clearly marked.

"The schedules should still be accurate, I made a point of leaving quietly. You can send a few probes to confirm their validity. I trust that this should be sufficient to purchase your trust, at least for now?"



"Ladies, gentlemen, others, the world of Sakala," a holograph appears in the office and is transmitted to Gratia, "is a world we of the Commonwealth don't particularly expect to keep. If you our honoured guests are still interested, I shall continue that we may not be able to keep it, but that it will serve as an excellent gauge of the kind of losses the Commonwealth can expect over the course of this campaign." She looks around. "I'm also led to believe that some of you have expressed the wish to contribute forces to the counterinsurgency campaign. If you are one of these people, please indicate."
The massive brute bowed, a grin splitting his too-long muzzle and baring gleaming white fangs.

"As always, Madame President, my assets are at your disposal. However, one would hope it possible to reclaim Sakala with a minimal amount of fuss. I have certain elements already in place on the world, which may be able to serve your needs without the mess of orbital combat."

The Internet

Ooi is momentarily taken aback at the speed with which the offers came back, he firstly processes Andy Dalgleish's purchase, noting with surprise that he picked a product with sulphuric acid clearly stapled to it's side; he was impressed. He arranged the appropriate delivery methods and returned a receipt to him acknowledging the transaction and assures him that his purchases will arrive withen the next twelve hours unless someone important in the delivery chain drops dead whilst on duty; which is a criminal act. Ooi makes this clear it is a joke but gives him his word.

This dealt with he turns his attention to the ample sized, conflicting purchases of his more than lethal weaponry. After pondering the situation for a moment he decides that the Outer Worlds are a possibly temporary market factos whilst the Inner Worlds are here to stay; as such, he does what every clever capitalist does and sells his stock to the Outer Worlds, secretly he hopes they will last long enough to pump more credits into his, or the Phale A'Thein, buissnesses.

To this effect Ooi is cleared out of weaponry, but sends a message to the Outer Worlds purchasers offering to put them in contact with A' Ooo-Eazt Aii Industrial-Laboratories who can supply them with more weapons of the same type and others at bargain prices; along with this he sends them their recipt and completes the transaction.

With the Inner Worlds he composes an apology to the effect that their request was unfortunatly beaten by an external buyer, again however he informs them that he is willing to put them in contact with A' Ooo-Eazt Aii Industrial-Laboratories who will supply them with said weapons and many more and at bargain prices.

With that all out the way he sends an update to Ieatz stating that they have in essence made a small fortune and that their profit percentages are untold of. Phale A'Thein goods might sell cheap but back in the M.R.A they'd be expensive, goods there are as cheap as water; god bless capitalism.

As he finsihes all this his email pings, he has a return on the email he was paid to send out, not even reading it he simply forwards it through The Forces Of Commerce's network system; immediaty fifty Aiii are deposited in his account in way of thanks; otherwise the letter isn't his concern.

-----

Many A.U's off from the galactic plane in which most systems are normally found is an extensive nebulae, an interstellar cloud which shines, glimmers, glows and flickers with a hundred different colours, red dwarfs cast a hazy glow throughout it, pulsars throb and beam particles out in jets of energy, stars which are just beginning to form flicker in simple nuclear fires. The four dozen or so normal stars shine brightly; most of which are unnoticable against this godly painting of colour.

One star, deep withen the nebulae, is encased in shimmering dust, extragalactic glitter as it were, it's seven worlds plough through this haze gradually increasing the impressive size of their shining belts and leaving a trailing void behind them slowly closes up.

One such planet, named by it's inhabitants Thraai' Haai' Heei' zet, is no exception as it spins lazily in it's glittering cloud; this world is the cradle of life so to speak for the Phale A'Theins, a few hundred spaceships plough slowly throughout the surrounding dust to their destinations.

Far below the surface of this world, in the depths of an ocean lies the M.R.A Central city, the city of Zraaii'. It is a sprawling Architectural marvel, the lowest building, The M.R.A Headquarters itself, is seven hundred and sixty two meters in height, many others reach up past the thousand five hundred meter limit, a testament to their builders dreams and search for immortality.

Atop one of the more futuristic designed surface-scrapers in the pent house suite is the location where one of the most successful information groups in the M.R.A operates, they receive Ooi's email amongst the hundreds of other deals they are pursuing, it is assessed by one of the operators who responds promptly by a complex network of untraceable sattellites scattered throughout the nebulae;

Dear sir, thank you for your prompt response, we are indeed interested in the information relating to the Shotgun Opera on a confidential level, in return for any information deemed of use to us we are willing to exchange your services for a single one off direct tax free sum in your own currency; variable depending upon it's value. If you tell us the nature of this information but not the specifics we will set up a secure account for you to access and withdraw the money in return for you sending us the information.

Strictly confidential, no questions asked,

Many thanks in advance.

Yorkmountain...

Damn. If she'd been the growling type, Skyler would have bared her teeth, but she had a grudging respect for Ryana now; she wasn't stupid enough to fall into the credits-for-heads trap. In truth, she and the others wouldn't have even used insanely heavy weapons, they would have just turned the A.I. on in the Star Snake, programed it tally kills, and set it loose while they played cards or something. Still, what she said was acceptable, even if it was doubtful that they would be able to take down a fully-fledged capital ship...assuming the capitals around here weren't made of papermache. "Alright," she muttered, slightly reluctant. Bounty hunting wasn't something they did often, it would just be icing on the cake now.

Tara just nods, and checks that possibility as open. It would appear the deal was wrapped up.

On the very edges of Outer World space, two small craft drop from hyperspace before slowing completely, stopping all forward progress in the cold vaccum.

Barely large enough to be considered troop transports, they bore no external markings other than the odd laser-blast scar. They were, however, clearly of Argonian manufacture. The angular lines of their aquatically adapted race were clearly showcased in the designs of their spacecraft, and both craft were identical in terms of shape. Both appeared to have weapons of a sort installed in the noses, but were otherwise unarmed. They seemed to rely more on small size and speed than any sort of offensive armaments.

Their position oriented on the nearest star listed on their navigational charts, one craft took the lead and switched on its sub-light engines, followed by the second craft...

"Commander I really wish they'd given us more information. 'Make contact with a junior officer' isn't especially descriptive. I know our intelligence department can do better..."

The comment had come from a Argonian seated in what passed for a pilot's chair on the small transport, directed at the male behind him, staring out the view-port...

"Of course they can, Gunny. They just choose not to. This isn't even our war, otherwise we'd be travelling in style on a carrier chasing the Naval Academy Grad tail and drinking ourselves into oblivion until they call for us to go stir up trouble for the other guys. I guess this is their way of telling us to be more responsible..."

The comment, while wry in the extreme, didn't get anything more than a nod from the marine at the controls...

"They could have at least given us a name, sir. I'd settle for a planet's name at this point..."

"True, but this way we have to take things slow. The more recon we do the better off we're going to be in the long run, and this isn't going to be an in-and-out operation, either. Command said these guys aren't all that well trained, and they're going to need something in the way of advice. Or we'll just start raiding shit like the good old days..."

The days in reference were during the time when both men were members of the celebrated 25th Space Marine Division, undertaking the anti-piracy campaign that had made the division a legend in the first place. They'd simply descend on a pirate camp without warning, and either slaugher the inhabitant without mercy, or void the integrity of their living quarters with plasma torches and watch as the hapeless bastards were sucked out to die in the icy vaccum of space. The former was much more satisfying, but the latter saved on ammo. There was also a betting game involved with the more callous marines, but that's a story for another time.

Commander Vendric Jarri had been slated for a high-level career in Naval Intelligence, but had forgone that honor for the life of an ARC, or Argonian Recon Commando. While an elite sub-sect of the Space Marine Corps, ARC's had lower life expectancies and more than one large sum of money was offered in order to keep one of the brightest young intel officers out of harm's way. Fortunately for the ARC commandant, Jarri was less concerned about the money and more about remaining on the front lines with his men.

Gunnery Sergeant Terrik Zen had been Jarri's platoon sergeant back before both had joined ARC, and both men trusted the other with his respective life. A career Space Marine, Zen felt at home on a starship of any sort, and wasn't a half bad pilot. His real talents lay in the field of distance marksmanship, however. Granted, every marine was expected to excel in that area, but Zen took it a few steps further and his talents came in quite handy on long-duration operations like this where eight men were expected to stand against four times that number. It was then that the ability to end a commander's time in office from a mile distant did a lot to make sure the superior numbers were too wary of their own lives to do much in the way of attacking...

"Too bad these guys are actually fighting a no-shit war. Time to do the real commando shit and stop acting like a bunch of gung-ho marines. We'll all be going home in boxes if we don't play it smart this time around..."

The commander picked up the hand-mic attached to the small communications array, and keyed it with a press of a clawed finger...

"Attention. This is the 'Midnite Rider' calling any ships in our vicinity. We've been badly damaged and our hull is hemmoraging oxygen..."

That was an outright lie, but it would get someone's attention. They weren't in the area on behalf of the Argonian Empire, at least not in an official sense, which kept Jarri from rattling off with his full rank and title. Their gear was almost standard-issue, and they'd repainted their individual armors with enough personalizations to give themselves the apperance of a well-organized mercenary outfit of former Argonian Navy SPECWAR descent...

Sakala orbit
There are sixty-one ships in the Revolutionary naval line, divided into fourteen flotillas of four and one of five. It is the Fifteenth - the flotilla of five ships - that is sent to investigate the trace from the unknown, purportedly disabled Midnite Rider. The journey takes about twenty-five minutes, most of which is composed of the five Midnight-class light cruisers moving out on plasma-rocket power to the planetary naval FTL point so as not to suck the entire atmosphere into their quantum tunnels.

Given the tiny distance of the jump, though, it's a fairly simple matter to get there - the good starships Foreman, Wright, Chesterton, Taylor and Kingdom spend a little less than one minute squeezing their comparatively massive bulks through the rip in space and out the other side at high speed. During this time, though, there is a disadvantage: despite the fact that they are Kostemetsian designs barely off the drawing board - and the oldest of the flotilla, the Taylor, was launched not more than one month ago by the Inner Worlds, its presence here due to the fact that its crew of Revolutionary agents immediately turned tail and fled, to the great frustration of the ineffectual Inner Worlds military police - despite those wholly pertinent facts, during the fifty-seven seconds they spend rocketing through something which is not quite space, they are completely defenceless. All the power needed to operate their racks of laser cannons and oodles of railguns is diverted to keeping the rip open and the cruisers from becoming conceptual mass knots.

As such, given that they have no idea of the nature of the origin point which is calling out distress under the name Midnite Rider, they ride out - or rather the Kingdom, which is retooled and has its newly boosted speed playing in its favour, while the others remain, near-powerless, at the wormhole's glowing, eye-twisting lip - some five light-seconds, that is some one point five million kilometres, off the point of contact. At this range, real-time high-bandwidth contact can be opened on q-space ripples, but at five light-seconds any laserfire or, indeed, anything traveling at the same speed will be detected a relatively long time before it gets near the Kingdom and the flotilla.

The Kingdom opens a ripplebeam. Like all other Kostemetsian first-contact links, it is transmitting simple text - on a system with the appropriate format it will show up white on black with the ubiquitous Revolutionary seal at the top and a mass of fairly irrelevant signatures, countersignatures and confirmation codes at the very bottom. On a system without the appropriate format, it won't matter, because Commonwealth standards, still widely accepted for convenience's sake, enforce this formatting; ergo, any system without it is non-Commonwealth and neither the seal or the numbering are going to mean anything to its operators, although the text still stands a chance.

The message reads thus: UNKNOWN CONTACT MIDNITE RIDER, THIS IS THE REVOLUTIONARY CRUISER KINGDOM, REGISTRY KILO FOUR SEVEN SIX, MOVING IN. TRANSMIT APPROPRIATE IDENT CODES AND CONFIRM YOU ARE STILL ALIVE AND CONSCIOUS.

Despite the laudable caution displayed by the Kingdom's crew, they cannot in good conscience ignore a distress call - however, they would rather not lose their own lives in attending to it. They decide on a short-range jump point that won't interfere with their waiting comrades', will place the Kingdom in docking range of the contact (assuming it has docking points appropriate for a Midnight-class), fire thrusters and drift towards the point, waiting for the ship in distress to call back.

===

Yorkmountain
Ryana's long-range voxpiece is clipped to her belt, as ever. It looks like ... well, it is as if Bishop's sleek cream-coloured clamshell mobi and Andy's unwieldy heavy-duty battlevox met in a seedy bar one night, went back to an equally seedy motel in a seedy taxi through a seedy part of town and seedily coupled in a seedily seedy fashion - seedy to the point where to fully describe it the word 'seedy' could not be used thanks to the slow attrition of its significance to the point of imperceptibility. That aside, it should beep when a call comes in, and it hasn't beeped in living memory.

Four point three seconds after Skyler closes the deal for her side and Ryana is just starting to open her mouth and utter the appropriate farewell pleasantries, it beeps. Recovering from her wholly appropriate minor shock, she grimaces an apology at the contractor party, hooks her fingers into the knuckleduster grip, and brings the phone to her ear. "Taylor on the line. Is it important? I'm in the middle of something." She quirks a brow at the mercenaries as if encouraging them to join in some obscure private joke.

The person on the other end speaks rapidly, giving a precis of the latest contingency, audible fully only to Ryana, and to others only as the nondescript ambient crackle of almost any communicator in known space. What she hears apparently isn't encouraging, because her mouth tightens in some consternation. She looks distractedly at the near wall of the canyon for a long while, but for one moment her eyes flick to the mercenaries in what could be (correctly) interpreted as a very telling gesture. One of the guard party, presumably the sergeant, is muttering into his earpiece, makes some sort of silent gesture at Ryana, gets an absent-minded nod, and directs his men to board their APC, which speeds off in a surprisingly small cloud of dust once all are aboard.

The crackle ceases. Without verbally signing off, Ryana hits the red button on the longvox and clips it back onto its metallic hook on her belt. "Shipmaster," she nods at Kartosh, "and officers," she nods at Skyler and Tara, "I've been rather urgently summoned back to base. However, there's something I yet owe you. Martin, if you'd be so kind?" But Martin is already in the routine, hoisting the command APC's heavy door up easily on its air joints and letting the Revolutionary staff officer who stayed inside roll a suitcase down to him. The suitcase is battered, blue, has a Revolutionary triskele sewn onto it, and, if one is close enough, one can detect the vague scent of elderberries.

As it rolls closer under Martin's gratuitously, showily, somewhat comedically laborious guidance, Ryana narrates. "Inside that suitcase you'll find five million argentars in Inner Worlds notes, which you can swap out for Outer Worlds ones at the O'Cuinn on a one-to-one exchange rate if you like our sense of aesthetics in note-printing more. Consider it an advance payment of sorts," and she takes ahold of the handle, which is now next to her, and rolls the case over to the mercenaries, then begins to walk towards her APC with brisk but unhurried steps: three steps away, though, she turns. "If it please mi'lord and ladies we'd most appreciate it if you'd rendezvous with us in Lallamanton. I'm sorry I had to cut this short, but there is something of an emergency in progress," and she continues her brisk walk, a little more unconcealed urgency in her step. The terms milord and milady are common terms of respectful address in Kostemetsia, holdovers from the rule of the Terran aristocracy, and even revolutionaries aren't immune to letting them slip out once in a while - even to people they've only known and worked with for a little under five minutes.

The APC, with Ryana and a slightly out-of-breath Martin aboard, rolls backwards twenty-five metres so as not to rudely spray the Xiscapians with dust. It pauses for an abbreviated moment, allowing Ryana to take one last look at the mercenaries through the tinted windscreen (lingering on Tara with curiosity in her eyes, even though she knows the windscreen is only transparent on the inside and none of the kitsune can see her). That done, the vehicle fishtails out one hundred and eighty degrees and rockets off - it has been said that these vehicles can reach at least two hundred and thirty kilometres per hour, and 'at least' is the operative term: Ryana must be moving at almost three hundred ... on low-traction terrain ... in non-optimal conditions. If nothing else drives home the fact that this is an emergency, the fact that the usually contained Ryana is flooring it should, and just to drive it home a little further the APC disappears into a localised wormhole, a power-sapping move which adds a risk of explosive dematerialisation and a further eighty points to the 'state of emergency' counter.

---

Sakala Command
Andy Dalgleish grunts as a large box falls on him. Inside the box are a hundred bottles of Phale A'Thein refresher and fifty bags of prawns all safe in a zero-tau stasis field - the closest the Revolution has to a reliable refrigerator. On the upside, though, even if the time-stopper field doesn't keep the food cold, at least it keeps it safe from being damaged by unsuspecting environmental bits like Andy. He picks himself and the box up, hoists the latter onto a hand trolley, and begins to push the trolley towards the cargo area across this particular garage unit under the O'Cuinn Hotel.

Given that his route crosses through the path of the open roller door, through which the cool blue rays of the late-afternoon Sakala sun are shining, he is very lucky not to be run over by Ryana's APC, which screeches in while decelerating rapidly from one hundred to zero and has a visible inertia recoil when it stops, having zipped in through what appears to be a localised wormhole. Andy, of course, is unfazed, and is more scared by Ryana's behaviour - just a muttered "sorry," where she would normally be profusely apologising and several degrees more scared than Andy. Something is not down - or, to be more precise, up; the grim look on Captain Hughes' face doesn't help as he follows her through a door that seems to spring open in front of the dynamic duo.

Some seconds and some fifty metres later, Martin erupts. Andy, still in the garage bay, staring after the pair, can hear the usually unnaturally calm captain expostulating loudly in a shocked tone: "It's insanity! That, blessed lady of entropy, is insanity! What's more ..." He seems to struggle for words, but then finds them: "... what's more, it's not just insanity, it's ... it's insanity gone mad!" He repeats the same words more quietly, apparently unaware that the junior officer is still in earshot, and Andy Dalgleish, second most eligible bachelor in Lallamanton City, qualified software engineer, installation lieutenant in tactical command, and master of the fake American accent, decides he does not want to know.

===

Wallace's Bar, Lallamanton City
Meet Michael Keller 'Mick' Matthews, Revolution field operative and defector liaison, the man with the thousand smiles (one of which is almost always on his face), compulsive aficionado of conflict fiction and on-and-off boyfriend to the far younger Andy Dalgleish. He is forty years old, used to build citydomes and, indeed, cities on this world, and joined the Revolution primarily to get back at the bastards who destroyed his beautiful houses and burnt the people who bought them off him, so his smile now is small and a little wistful - although one can still see the warmth and kindness behind it if one looks closely.

Today, he is Shawn Miller, a name stolen almost directly from twentieth-century fiction. To be more precise, he is Commander Shawn Miller of Revolutionary intelligence, and in some of his darker moments he supposes he might as well be any of his cover identities for all the time he uses the real one. Putting that aside for the moment, however, given that the Inner Worlds he hates have somewhat of a personal grudge against him for refusing to sell to them anymore, it is somewhat vital that he maintain a degree of security - especially around potential Inner Worlds triple agents like Colonel Jack Choss.

He has a quick look over the dossier, a light-grey manila folder showing a dark red Commonwealth ensign on the front cover, with a practiced eye. Some of the material inside is a series of holosheets of a design straight from ESUS databanks - Inner Worlds standard these days if 'Miller' has his preliminary research correct - this man's credentials: identity documents which are, metaphorically speaking, hot off the presses of the adjutant-general's corps. More interesting are the charts, which Mick peruses for longer - graphical patrol schedules for the Silbry system, dashed lines of all colours scrolling in stately fashion, data moving with them. He can't help but wince at the kind of force buildup that's going on - if this is genuine, the Outer Worlds is facing a fairly challenging engagement, and Mick knows how to spot a counterfeit: a quick look will reveal that as far as the quality of being genuine is concerned this data is one hundred percent.

Which brings Mick - and by extension us, his loyal monitors - to the question of Colonel Jack Choss. He shows all the right protocols, has the expression of a man who's served his time, and Mick has no explicit reason to distrust him: he seems a likeable man - and yet there's something Mick takes issue with, and that is the mention of purchasing trust. He smiles pleasantly. "Oh, I don't know, Colonel sir," and he belatedly salutes Choss in the Polish fashion, two fingers at the browline, "I wouldn't say it's a purchase of trust. More a lease, really. What is it you're asking in return?"

===

Yi Lin
Spirit Anderson appears to considers for a moment.

"Well, mi'lord, there is perhaps something that could be done to go a long way towards the conclusion of this damnable insurgency. Firstly, this." She presses a big solid green block of a button on her desk, sending an order of unspecified wording to an unspecified, superfast ship in an unspecified location to move ahead with unspecified proceedings. Incidentally, this ship is linked in an unspecified fashion to the slowly strengthening but clamped-down portal which has been open above Sakala for some considerable number of minutes.

"Secondly: There is ... a plan of sorts. There is an army station on Sakala - one Hiroaki Base, which was taken by Revolutionary forces eight days ago. We've received intelligence from our assets there that the Revolutionaries plan to move out, and the key to hitting their weak spot during the transition period is Hiroaki Base: once we have that, we can attack them from the east - that is, behind, and the side on which they don't yet have functioning defences. If we can stage a major movement within three days - which I can, and I'm sure mi'lords and ladies delegate can - we can retake that base, suppress the insurgency, and get on with our lives." She produces a sunny smile for the conference's benefit. "Of course, if it's not possible ... we have alternate plans."

Which will almost certainly be invoked, she thinks privately, and further: Taylor's an evil little rat bitch, but she isn't stupid. It's not going to be that easy.

Which brings Mick - and by extension us, his loyal monitors - to the question of Colonel Jack Choss. He shows all the right protocols, has the expression of a man who's served his time, and Mick has no explicit reason to distrust him: he seems a likeable man - and yet there's something Mick takes issue with, and that is the mention of purchasing trust. He smiles pleasantly. "Oh, I don't know, Colonel sir," and he belatedly salutes Choss in the Polish fashion, two fingers at the browline, "I wouldn't say it's a purchase of trust. More a lease, really. What is it you're asking in return?"
Choss smiled humorlessly. "It's simple, really. Do you have a family, Mister Miller? Well, I did. A wife, three kids. Then one of my daughters got caught up in a government protest, thinking my rank would protect her. KOSPOL didn't quite agree with her."

The Colonel paused for a moment, taking a long pull from his drink. Wiping his mouth, he continued, voice completely cold. "They killed my family, Mister Miller. All of them. In front of me, to teach me a lesson they said. I don't give a shit about your cause, Mister Miller. I don't care about your revolution, I don't care about about the Outer Worlds. All I care about is how many of these bastards you kill, and if you need it I'll lead the charge on Anderson's office myself."

Jarri was pleased he'd gotten someone's attention, and thankfully it was the people he was looking for...

"See? Was that so hard?"

The Gunny at the controls of the first craft snorted in disapproval. The ships that had responded were gigantic in comparison to their own small vessels, barely larger than the largest of fighters in the Argonian Fleet back home, and it wouldn't take more than a few well-placed laser-shots to reduce them to little more than stray atoms in the emptiness of space. With that in mind, Jarri began transmitting his own identification code, a fake one that matched the ship's cargo and title to the name of a mercenary captain who'd died a few weeks earlier. Both ships had merged close enough to each other that they'd appear as a single, larger craft on most sensor scans, and that was what Jarri was after...

"Roger, Kingdom, we have you on visual. Request permission to board and talk face-to-face..."

Jarri's nautical lingo wasn't exactly stellar, but then again he wasn't a star sailor, or any other sort of sailor for that matter. He was a marine of the specialized variety, and the thought crossed his mind that he wasn't dressed like one. He might want to be if he was going to be meeting with whatever 'junior officer' was commanding the ship he was hopefully going to board...

"Get a message out to the rest of them on our coded freq to gear up and look professional. We're supposed to be portraying mercs on this outing, so we'd better look the part when we finally meet these guys..."

Gunny Zen did as instructed, before putting the ship on auto-pilot and getting up to don his body armor. ARC-issued armor was usually white, so that the color could be adapted to the environment. Their personal suits had been tinted a matte-black hue, matching the gunmetal gray of the underworn fatigues quite nicely. On the left side of every chest plate sat a small emblem in scarlet red, a pair of crossed spears behind a sword. The wording on the banner below it was written in an archaic Argonian dialect, but translated to 'Sons of Sithis', referring to a long-forgotten pagan god of death. Jarri resented the trite nature of his group's name, and it might have had a more profound effect if the geeks in Intel had decided to pick something the humans might actually understand. As it sat now they couldn't even read the words, much less know that his boys supposedly descended from a pagan god of the dead. Zen was right after all. Their guys in Intel 'could' do so much better.

The only weapon Jarri was going to pack while on-board the friendly vessel was an Argonian-made SEV (Sidearm, Elite Variant) in a thigh holster on his left side, in front of which went a rather distinctive edged weapon. Despite the fact that their race had ascended to the stars and beyond, Argonians never could bring themselves to stand back from their foes and shoot it out with them like normal people. For some reason stabbing someone to death was the favored means of dispatching a foe. It was this fact that had made Argonian marines such effective ship-board combatants.

The SEV, like most Argonian weapons of the era, fired a magnetically-propelled metal slug encased in an energy sheath at an extreme velocity by way of an Element Zero rail system. The magazine was a simple block of high-mass metal, providing upwards of thousands of rounds per magazine as a shard was shorn off for each shot, a computer determining how large of a projectile would be needed to make the shot based on barometric readings and range determinations. Aided by such advanced electronic means, if you didn't hit what you were shooting at you were doing something horribly wrong...

Yorkmountain...

Kartosh knew bad news when he saw it: He'd seen it on the faces of officers back when he was still a part of the Xiscapian Grand Army, he'd seen it on the faces on his clients before (usually right after they heard what the bill would be), he'd seen it on the faces of fellow mercenaries right before they were killed, and now he saw it on Taylor's visage. Oh shit, he thought, seeing her glance over at them. Yet the kitsune was pleasantly surprised when the large container of cash was lugged down out of the APC. Normally they took their credits into a bank account, because lugging that much currency around would require them to be followed by a freighter, but the Revolution might not want to leave any sort of trail that could lead Inner Worlds agents to them. He hoped this meant that they trusted them to do their job, and not simply take the money and run.

"If it please mi'lord and ladies we'd most appreciate it if you'd rendezvous with us in Lallamanton. I'm sorry I had to cut this short, but there is something of an emergency in progress."

Kartosh snickered. Mi'lord and ladies? This just keeps getting better and better. Skyler nodded. "We'll meet you there," she promised as the Revolutionary climbed back into her vehicle. Skyler sauntered back into the Star Snake visibly showing that she was in no hurry, while Kartosh checked the suitcase to ensure it had real, solid cash inside of it. Tara was staring back at the window of the APC, and though she couldn't see through the opaque glass she seemed to know that Taylor was looking back at her (admittedly she was looking about an inch above and four inches to the right of Taylor's face). After a moment she turned away, and the APC vanished as she helped Kartosh carry the crate up the ramp. Setting it down in the main room, they strapped the box of money in to prevent it from moving about the ship and damaging systems if they had to take evasive maneuvers for some reason.

Kartosh sat in the pilot's chair, manipulating the controls, while Skyler examined various readouts from the co-pilot seat and Tara lounged in the gunner chair, lost in thought. The mercenary ship lifted off the ground, turned on it's axis, hovered a bit higher, and shot across the planet at just under the speed which would have caused massive sonic booms to crush small towns in it's wake. They would reach Lallamanton in minutes.

Stratford-upon-Palisade Port
31-1 is almost immediately approached by an army of tiny, crab-like and clinically paranoid bots. They scuttle round his feet, scanning him up and down, spearing him impotently with invisible rays and chittering back to base all the while, finally concluding in irritation that there's nothing they can profitably prosecute him on and forming a big glowing arrow towards the terminal.

Across the eight, all-but-one-unoccupied private runways of this section of the civil area of Stratford-upon-Palisade, the terminal is a big structure of acrylic glass and steel framework some hundred metres away, accessible by a concrete path that begins only some few metres from where 31-1 is standing. It is much less populated than its public counterparts, with only a few dozen wealthy-looking fliers attending the single five-star restaurant set up to serve them. To one side of the cafe, set in the brick wall, there is a door leading to a tunnel under the well-kept lawns, and the tunnel leads to a code-locked door that opens onto the crush of Terminal One - at least, the code lock is present on one side, but 31-1 can use the door without a code, given that he is coming out and not going in.

===

Lallamanton Terminal
11-2's welcome is somewhat less flashy. While Lallamanton Terminal overlooks the metropolitan beachfront from high above, making it by definition awesome, there is the issue that in total it has ten runways, and most of them are currently filled by parked traders, blockade runners, and other equally rickety contraptions with equally doubtlessly disreputable masters. The leftmost runway, closest to the terminal, has been cleared for the Cerberan's sake, and an honour guard in gold-trimmed red approach from the terminal's direction.

Within one minute they stand in front of him, Asian, Caucasian and African, perfectly impassive and living up to the popular stereotype of their ancestors. Their leader is an immense, imposing bear of a youngish man, perhaps thirty-five at most, and his nametag proclaims him Lieutenant Masao Nisaki. His hair is short and stands upright on its own, a forest of black bristles decorating his scalp in what seems almost microscopic detail. On his broad back is slung a slug carbine with a long scope, longer silencer and telescoping stock; at his belt hangs a katana.

He and his multiracial team form one of the Revolution's most elite special forces units. Whatever resentment he may feel at being pressed into honour guard service is hidden as he greets the Sales Representative by name and asks him to accompany the Outer Worlds team, if he would be so kind, in a tone that is, like others used today, more a statement than a question.

A quick glance across the honor guard allowed 11-2 to get a feel for the group that had been sent to meet him. With only a "Sure." in response to Nisaki's request, he flicks away his cigarette, and tightens up his tie. He will follow these people to wherever they will lead him.

===

"Oh! Look at the little things!" 31-1 shouted as he was being scanned by the crab-bots. He sighed in disappointment as they left, and then looked around, trying to find some kind of guide to where he should go next.

By now all eight commandos were fully geared up, minus a helmet in Jarri's case. He wanted eye contact with whoever it was he was going to meet up with, and that hard to do through crimson-mirrored battle-glass. The armor was designed to be intimidating, and would be repainted yet again before they undertook an operation. Mirrored lenses made even matte-black an ineffective choice, even with night ops.

Gunny Zen had settled back into his pilot's chair, somehow wedging himself in the small seat with his full kit and MBREV (Main Battle Rifle, Elite Variant) slung across his chest. The 'BREV as the troops called it, operated much like the pistol in terms of projectile propulsion, and was shorter than the standard version, hence the 'Elite' moniker. A simple 1.5x reflex optic topped the weapons platform in most cases, but Gunny had opted for a more powerful 10x self-ranging holographic system for his distance work. For the short stuff, he could eyeball it.

A message from the other craft on the coded freq told the commander that the other half of his force was ready to look like a professional merc outfit, at least until Jarri spilled the beans about their actual mission to someone he thought was trustworthy. The Argonian Empire wasn't exactly 100% committed to this little conflict, but then again it did like having allies. ARC was always seen as a happy solution to such moral issues. They could help fight the war without actually looking like they were anything more than outspoken supporters of the rebel faction. And that was how Argonian brass liked to keep it, which kept Jarri employed, and he couldn't argue with that...

Sakalan outer planetary ring

The Kingdom drifts closer. Its cockpit looks slightly menacing, like a blunted dagger, and is made mostly of alon - inside one can see the pilot, a lieutenant, who seems genderless under the amount of armour she is wearing. For that matter, nobody knows who she is anyway, because she always wears her opaque bug-eye flight helmet - all that ever gets out of it is the occasional strand of purple hair from under the rim. Her voice comes through a vocoder, but retains its Californian accent; her nametag says [Olivia Messiaen].

Behind her the officer in tactical command of the Kingdom prowls the bridge. His name, as indicated by his tag, is [Eliot Lee Kuang]; he appears Chinese or at least Asian, and has jet hair with smooth streaks of white over his ears. He wears the insignia of a commander and never speaks - except when he does speak, which is with a comfortable English public school inflection. He is never seen - except when he is seen, like now, to conduct functions which the pilot cannot. He appears to like art music, as he tends to loop the Turangalila-Symphonie over the PA system until people threaten to stab him, at which point he alternates with 'Caramelldansen' & 'And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda' for the sheer fun of it.

He speaks now. The words seem forced out - they are not forced, as such, but they feel as if coming reluctantly. "Rider, this is Kuang, commander, RNS Kingdom. State your reason for wishing to come aboard," and his tone becomes more confidential, "because although we don't like to appear paranoid there is protocol to be followed and it's saved our asses in the past."

The officer at weapons stands down, as per regulations, but the plasma lances, neutron lasers and plain old railguns that decorate the Kingdom's hull can be repowered at any time. No use saying you're paranoid then not living up to it - one has to put one's money where one's mouth is.

===

Lallamanton Terminal
After a moment longer of looking at 11-2, assessing the man with his eyes, Nisaki turns ninety degrees and begins marching, his squad gently corraling the Cerberan into formation. His hair, or what there is of it, appears to stand slightly on end, the superprecise shaving of the pre-schism Commonwealth shield, swords and stars into the hair on the back of his head becoming evident.

There is a clicking sound as the carbine on his back loads itself, the dead barrel suddenly filled with a cartridge ready for firing. All along the barrel electronics light up, then go quiescent again - it is important that 11-2 not be picked off on the route to the heavy-duty 'fleit sitting squat and weighty on the pavement of the cobbled road which lies to one side of the hilltop Lallamanton Terminal.

His troopers gently rest their hands on the hilts of their katanas. They are not quite traditional katanas - electrified smartlinked blades with embedded gravitics: the best that Inner Worlds argentars can buy at almost ten thousand a pop. Well worth it - another security measure meant to preserve 'honoured dignitaries', although Nisaki's not quite sure yet that he likes the look of 11-2. There is always the possibility that the xenohuman is the spearhead for an infiltration campaign, and it's Nisaki's job to make sure no such campaigns take place, so if such a campaign is to be stopped it has to be stopped here.

---

Stratford-upon-Palisade Port
One of the crab-bots flicks its head back at 31-1 and broadcasts a snippet of 'Caramelldansen' at him, annoyed. It is the base station for the AI running the entire crabsquad. Little thing indeed! What nonsense! Still ... and it orders its brainless subordinates to loop back around 31-1's feet, stretching out the arrow towards the door to the real world, as it were, if it's obvious enough for the xeno dignitary.

More bots fly overhead. These are mites - tiny computerised jet engines, armed with poison-tipped shardbullets - and it is their job, as Nisaki's, to make damn sure the other side doesn't get to the shipment who's just stepped out of his ship. Of course, the slight difference is that Nisaki is a passionately committed revolutionary and the bots are cold unfeeling loyalists, but overall they do pretty much the same things.

===

Lallamanton City
What actually happens between Martin's outburst and the resolving of the situation is a matter of some dispute, but what is known is that Ryana leaves the planning centre, adjacent to Andy's home the tactical centre, a little less than one minute and forty-seven seconds later, looking cool as a cucumber, with a red-faced, sweating, angry Martin next to her. He seems to be cooling down fairly quickly, though, probably because there is a tiny little smile of triumph tugging at Ryana's lips and this means she must have a plan of sorts.

What actually happens between Martin's outburst and the resolving of the situation is that the pair burst into the planning centre, are very abbreviatedly briefed by the completely unsurprised, grey-haired, fatigues-wearing warrant officer manning that station, who informs them that there is a very-high-objective-energy wormhole sitting pretty in Sakala orbit. It is clamped down to about a micron wide, and the amount of energy required to do that means there is either a fairly nice fleet headed this way or there is a single Silverblade-class prowler. At this point, Ryana places a short call to Imperium of Man local forces HQ, leaves a message for a Captain Sarah Nessa, and hangs up, while Martin loudly runs over worst-case scenarios.

Ryana shuts him up with the verbal notation, "I have a cunning plan," and walks out of the tactical centre, waving casually to Warrant Officer Symonds on the way out. He just nods at her back, and Martin gives him an odd look, mixed in with a bit of frenzied fear, before pounding out after her, which is where the rest of the world encounters them again.

The small redhead taps something below her left ear. There is a burst of feedback over the tannoy, she twists at the same something, and suddenly there is blessed silence, except for the fact that her footsteps are now echoing through this corridor and, presumably, the entire complex. When she speaks, the words are surprisingly heavy and the tone is surprisingly light. "Ladies and gentlemen, the Revolutionary Command is now operating under yellow alert. Have a good meal tonight, because you probably won't be eating all day tomorrow."

Something cuts in on the end of her announcement - a prerecorded message, one of many such. It pauses as it's filling in parameters in its statement, then comes up with: "Unidentified object in ... bound. Speed is six ... seven ... five ... knots. Altitude is zero ... zero ... zero ... one ... zero ... feet. Heading is zero ... three ... five ... degrees. Time of intersection at tango ... plus ... seven ... minutes. Awaiting orders."

Ryana speaks again. "Base defences, stand down. Ladies and gentlemen, we have visitors - be nice to them and don't put them in too many potentially fatal situations. Also, intel says, despite yellow alert, we can reasonably expect to have a free night, so feel free to hand over to the AI and go have a drink. You've earned it many times over." She turns off the tannoy by tapping under her ear again, where a tiny silver stud glints - technology 'borrowed' from one Jack Harkness' most recent courtesy visit to the Commonwealth and Territories of Kostemetsia. Cadging terratech is fun.

Martin almost goes insane with irritation. "Intel says no such thing! We're looking at a major fleet deployment and you're taking people off their stations? Ryana ... Look, are you insane? Are you utterly insane? Should I try to have you declared unfit for duty?"

The secretive Sphinx smile remains. "Would you rather I'd said, 'Have a good meal tonight, because you'll be either dead or not hungry tomorrow'?" She gives him an innocent look which has poisonous blades in, and he looks a little ashamed.

"Well, no, not as such, that wouldn't lift morale greatly ..."

"Then keep it shut," she says simply, smile growing, and walks on. Martin simply stops in his tracks and gives the back of her head a serious look, but she doesn't respond to it, instead saying over her shoulder, "Come on, Hughes. By the time we get to Lallamanton Terminal, the Star Snake and our new friends are going to be ahead of us by several minutes. We don't want to keep them waiting too long, do we?"

"Just 'friends'?" Martin mutters sardonically, but tries to keep up with Ryana anyway.

Jarri cackled once and elbowed his chief NCO in the shoulder, the slight click of the plates meeeting drowned out by his response...

"Roger that, Kingdom. We're looking to talk business, heard there was a war going on, and something tells me you can always use hardened veterans like my guys. I'd rather discuss the details in person. It's hard to make a deal when you're starting down enough firepower to slag my entire outfit..."

Wordlessly the Gunny in the pilot's chair keyed up a data packet and transmitted it to the Kingdom's bridge...

"The Sons of Sithis Informational Packet 001

The SOS are a mercenary group of the finest caliber, formed from two former Argonian Empire ARC units, with representation in four of the system's six largest conflict zones. Specializing in guerilla warfare, the SOS offers their services mainly to revolutionary forces battling larger and better-funded government forces for nominal up-front fees. The payment plan states that should the revolution be successful, further repayment in captured military hardware, natural resources, or real estate assets is expected. In the interest of keeping this informational packet brief, below are some of the services the SOS offers:

Hijacking
Zero-G Sabotage
Guerilla Warefare
Psyops
Combat Training
Direct Action
and many more...

As a business, we aim to please. As warriors, we aim to kill. Let our murderous desires work in your favor. We thank you for having considered the Sons of Sithis for employment..."

Jarri hadn't read the packet in detail, but then again what was the worst that could happen? He knew what he was doing, in most cases, and he could think of something on the fly if he needed to...