Penny

Dogs of War: Old World Mercenaries

It probably said something uncomfortable about Emmaline's moral state that she didn't immediately reject the idea of murdering the Sheriff. Even when her mind got around to rejecting the notion it wasn't because she felt the idea was somehow wrong but rather because the potential risks were too high.

"Much as I enjoy the idea, I'm afraid a few too many people saw his men drag us to his stupid audience this evening," she lamented, taking a sip of the whiskey and enjoying the burn of it down the back of her throat.

"Someone would be bound to point the finger at a mysterious forgiener such as yourself," she told him with a wink and a stroke of the cheek. Unfortunately Amal would be a natural suspect and neither of them would be exactly inconspicuous anywhere in the Empire if a hue and cry were raised against them.

"Annoying though it is, I think the best thing to do is have them come with us and then point out the first possible evidence of beastmen as the 'place where we were 'attacked' preferably near a stream or something so I can claim I was bathing, after the way I turned up half dressed," she went on with a slight snicker at the remembered afrontary of the townswomen.

"We are planning on heading south west anyway so even if we 'lose them' in the woods we won't be any worse of," Emmaline continued though she pursed her lips in disapproval at their much deserved rest being interrupted so soon.

Men vs. Women Race to 1000: Version 2.0

-418

Men vs. Women Race to 1000: Version 2.0

-416

Men vs. Women Race to 1000: Version 2.0

-416

Penny's Pencils

Men vs. Women Race to 1000: Version 2.0

-417

The Blackwood

Kyiriniae'aea sagged with relief as the human mage stepped through the portal. She didn't much like humans, they could be powerful but their short roach like lives made them unpredictable and grasping. Still, given her other companions were literal cannibals, she supposed she could tolerate the arrival of so useful a pawn.

"I did," she admitted, smiling winsomely and stepping forward, holding out her hand like a human noble so that the mage could take it and kiss it in the proscribed fashion. She made a gesture that encompassed room.

"We are in a place called the Blackwood," she explained, taking a step back and gesturing to one of the chairs by the table in her newly cleaned study. The chaos had been put to right and she even had taken the time to properly set up the alchemical equipment in the corner. The tower still didn't quite look lived in, but it no longer resembled the ruin it had when she had first come in.

"I'm afraid it was something of a desperation move," she confessed, her lip quivering ever so slightly to convey fear and vulnerability as she took her own seat. She badly wished she had some wine, but that would have to wait, instead she offered the human some of the roasted boar that her servants had brought her.

"I am Kyiriniae'aea, though you may call me Kyra," she introduced herself. She chewed on the end of one of her long blonde locks for a moment before continuing.

"I am afraid I have been cursed by a Warlock," she admitted, "and if you were willing to aid me, I would be forever in your debt."

Star Crossed: The Duke's Rebellion

Rene had been trained in the rudiments of flying Marine Dropships. Unfortunately there were nearly no similarities between the armored boxes that delivered marines to the surface and much more sophisticated spacecraft like the Bonaventure. Yarue was doing well under Solae's direction, though the ship had a tendency to bobble as they rose through the atmosphere on their jet of plasma. The Syshin was clearly nervous about making a mistake and when one of the thrusters lifted too high and began to unbalance the ship, he almost unconsciously throttled back and they mushroomed as their velocity fell off and needed to be rebuilt. The net result was that by the time they reached orbit and the gravity generators took over, they all felt a little queasy and they had burned a third again as much reaction mass as Solae would have used to make the same assent. Still it had been a success and Rene clapped Yarue on the shoulder.

"Well done, you have the makings of a fine pilot," he told the Syshin. Yarue made a grin that immitated a human smile but it was clearly a little forced before letting go of the controls as Mia took over the relatively simple task of pointing them directly away from the gravity well to get them to a safe distance to jump. After the attentions of both Ten and the Kalderi the Bonaventure was no longer the barely functional wreck it had been when it lifted from New Concordia and assiduous application of cleaning agents had removed the lingering smell of the slaves that had once been transported in its hold. It didn't look exactly new, but the scarred old bulkheads were at least clean, and the parts locker and food stores had been replenished to a point which probably exceeded that of most tramp freighters of a similar size. Rene had performed a sweep for listening devices, it was his duty as Solae's chief of security afterall, but neither he nor Mia could detect anything of the sort, not that it particularly mattered.

"Thank you Col... Rene," the Syshin replied, remembering to use his given name now that they were in private.

"We have some skill from when we were forced to work the rockhoppers, but never in an atmosphere," the Syshin replied with a trace of pride that Rene was pleased to hear.

"How long to this HK-421?" Rosaria asked as Rene stood and stretched, stifling a yawn. He hadn't slept much in the past several days and it was starting to wear on him even in spite of the various genetic augments.

"It should take about a day," Rene told her, at her look of surprise Rene touched a key and brought up a holographic starmap. A red bead appeared indicating the alpha numeric star system where they had spotted the derelict Corsica. A golden line appeared tracing the jump to Ranal Pindi, he manipulated a control and a second line appeared to the uncharted star system designated HK-421. The lines made an acute angle with the end points closer together than might have been assumed from travel conditions. Rene added their current course which created a triangle and then, for reference, added Zatis, a dark green bead considerably further away than any of the earlier points.

"If it is so close why haven't the Kalderi colonized it?" Rosaria asked, her eyes narrowed in concentration. Rene shrugged his shoulders.

"It dosen't seem to me that the Kalderi are a particularly expansionist people," he told her. Indeed, given their focus on maintaining the continuity and harmony of their communities, it was somewhat surprising that they established colonies at all. Perhaps at some point in their history scarcity of resources had forced the race to migrate, or perhaps when really serious disagreements arose they solved the problem by fissioning groups rather than by conflict.

"Indeed, of the aliens we have met," Rene paused to give Yarue a respectful nod, "humans appear to be the only ones who habitually spread to new worlds regardless of any particular need."

"That makes us sound a bit like locusts," Rosaria said, sounding a trifle unhappy with the analysis. Rene shrugged his shoulders.

"I suppose it depends on how you look at it," he replied, "at our worst, sure, maybe locusts, but I think at our best we are explorers fascinated by the unknown." It was a romantic outlook he knew, but Rene was, at his core, a romantic. There was an undeniable excitement to seeing an unknown world and it was another place he could be all but certain the Duke's thugs wouldn't be looking for Solae. A win win.

"So what are we going to do now?" the girl asked, "more training?" Rene glanced at Solae and shook his head before yawning somewhat ostentatiously.

"I don't know about the rest of you, but I think we ought to get some sleep. It is a short jump and we don't know what is waiting for us on the other end, clear heads will do more for us than a few extra hours at the range."

_______________________________________________

The crowd roared with approval as the parade made its way down the main thoroughfare towards the Ducal Palace. The palace was constructed in the Jovian style, with tall soaring arches and elaborately decorated colonnades surrounding the hollow hexagonal structure. The interior contained the actual Ducal residence, surrounded by well manicured gardens and parks which were in turn protected by the outer building from direct line of sight. Emperor Alexis Tan sat on a throne at the top of the large steps which lead from the boulevard to the elaborately decorated entry portal to the palace flanked by guards in body armor of gilded bronze which clashed with their modern and functional looking assault rifles. A small and very expensive energy shield had been erected infront of him, though it wasn't apparent to the naked eye other than for a slight tinge of ozone in the breezy afternoon air. The crowd close to him had been swept by his security, but an Imperial agent with a sniper rifle could be anywhere within several kilometers. Still, Imperial, or formerly Imperial subjects, expected that their leaders would do more than cower in their boltholes, and that was particularly true where Tan was trying to set himself up as the head of a new people. Enthusiasim for his elevation had been uneven among his subjects, but distribution of free food and drink as well as curiosity had been sufficient to bring the people of Trallus Prime out in droves. His officers and political allies stood behind him in solid ranks including Antigony Bhast, although the general was significantly further from the throne than she had been before her failure to prevent that cursed Falia bitch from activating the PEA on Zatis.

Trumpets blared brassily as the parade approached. Spacers in newly issued uniforms marched in step to either side of three self propelled flat beds which had been converted into parade floats by draping them with red velvet. Atop each float stood a large piece of mangled metal, each engraved with a single word in gilt lettering half the size of a man. Each bore the name of an Imperial warship which had been destroyed when they jumped in system. The leading piece of wreckage bore the legend: INS Yasimir. The words were only barely ledgeible on the twisted scrap of titanium ceramic composite. The two floats preceding it, INS City of Miridan and INS Selpura, were in better condition, but a practiced eye could detect that they were props rather than the real thing, the actual vessels having been blasted to atoms and thus not amenable to salvage. Another brassy blast sounded and the spacers halted in formation. Tan had never known a real spacer to be able to keep step, but these actors made the point better than the scruffy mercenaries who actually crewed his ships would have done so. The officers, resplendent in the new uniform of the Empire of the Eastern Cross, lifted glittering swords in salute and then fell into a posture of attention.

"Come forward Admiral Rade," the would be Emperor boomed, his voice picked up by hidden microphones and transmitted by a PA system boomed. The officer at the head of the column, a small somewhat rat faced man in an elaborate uniform, climbed the steps before kneeling before Tan. Rade looked like a weasel, but if that was so he had the cunning and viciousness of the breed. His strategy had allowed him to ambush the modest Imperial task force and destroy it entirely before any of the ships could escape, though the last had been a near run thing. The tactics had been designed around the many light auxiliary 'anti-pirate' vessels Tan had illegally built up over the last several years. He could never hope to equal the tonnage of the yards at Capella or Simtai, but Rade had demonstrated that a fleet of smaller ships could, at least for now, supply the lack. The Navy of the Eastern Cross could never hope to match the Imperial Navy, but it could, with luck and the kind of tactics Rade had pioneered, make the sector a mouthful that was just too unpalatable for a divided Empire to swallow. Tan cursed inwardly at that thought, if only he had access to the PEA arrays he could communicate with his conspirators across the Empire and know what was going on. Irritation welled up inside of him and it was with difficultly that he refrained from turning to glare at Bhast. Instead he stood and held up his hands imperiously.

"Admiral Rade, in your defeat of those who would oppress us you have earned, the eternal gratitude of the people of the Eastern Cross. You have secured your name among the greatest warriors our race has produced, you have served as a shield to protect liberty and peace for my people," Tan boomed theatrically. That was guiding the lily considerably, the Imperial force had been a small scouting element, but there was an element of theatre to building an Empire, and this was the first military victory of any note that Tan could point to. It would be foolish not to capitalize on the opportunity. The destruction of the trio of scouts was a victory after-all and hopefully it represented all the effort the Imperial Navy could muster given its, theoretical at least, troubles in other sectors. Tan took a large gold medallion shaped wit the arms of the House of Tan and the new stylized X of the Eastern Cross engraved in sapphire inlay. He settled it around the rat like admirals neck with slow deliberation for the benefit of the holocameras.

"Arise Admiral Rade, Knight of the Eastern Cross and Baron of New Concordia," Tan pronounced, stepping back away as the Admiral rose and saluted before turning to the cheering crowd. Tan smiled thinly, cursing the Falia bitch in his mind for leaving him blind and drawing the Imperials in months before he was ready to face them. Once he got his hands on her she would pay for what she had cost him, though her death would be delayed until she could birth an offspring with the right genetic markers.

"Soon," he muttered to himself as Rade began to recite his acceptance speech, "Soon..."

Men vs. Women Race to 1000: Version 2.0

-414

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

Judging by his increasingly demanding comm calls, Miguel was both confused and irritated by Sayeeda’s new passenger. She made no reply to his transmissions simply staring out into the desert, which was probably unprofessional as he was technically the representative of her putative employer. At one point Miguel went so far as to swerve toward their car. Sayeeda reacted to this simply by laying her rifle across her lap, casually, but in a fashion that pointed the weapon at the Spider commander’s jeep. The disrupter rifle was a formidable weapon but, as she had seen on Cylonikea, it lacked penetrating power. The solution had been to attach an underslung grenade launcher that she had stripped from an assault shotgun. The lancher was configured to fire self forging penetrators, copper discs seated against a small charge of explosive that would forge the plate into a spearhead of hypersonic metal. The weapon was designed to threaten light armored vehicles and would certainly gut a soft skin jeep like a rifle bullet opening a can of soup. Miguel probably didn’t realize exactly what the weapon was, but it would be obvious to a fool that being on the other end of it was contra-indicated and he made a frustrated gesture and swerved away.

“What are you thinking?” Taya asked, clearly uneasy with the situation. The young woman had the most visceral distaste for the bandits but she was obviously determined not to be caught napping.

“For right now we are going to finish this job,” Junebug said glancing sideways at Neil. The pilot didn’t appear to have a reaction, which might be because he was thinking along the same lines as Junebug. The convoy rolled up out of the valley and over the low hillock at the end. A broad valley spread out before them, incongruous green due to irrigation channels that gathered a shallow river into weirs and canals that radiated outwards from the water like the bones of a fish. Small huts stood at intervals along the canals surrounded by a greenish orange crop with thick succulent leaves like beach grass. The hutts appeared to be made primarily of sheets of extruded plastic, often printed with the logos representing beers and soups and other canned goods. Judging by a half destroyed hutt on the edge of the town, the locals packed mud between two layers of the stuff to provide some insulation from the heat. Small kitchen gardens surrounded the huts, mostly beans, tomatoes, and other crops which could be trained to climb wooden lattices. Here and there, scrawny chickens wandered pecking at bugs and other fare among the plants. The locals toiled in the fields, picking the leaves and tossing them into woven wicker panniers or scooping buckets of water from the canals to pour into pvc piping that served as cheap drip irrigation. At the end of the village where the much diminished stream turned away to the west was a large shed sided with corrugated iron. Judging by the pile of picked leaves at one end and the barrels of transport matrix stacked haphazardly at the other, that was the … facility might be to grand a term, that the spiders used to stabilize and transport the narcotic leaves. Beyond the shed was a banked dirt road which followed the river. Along the top of the bank were a series of stakes, perhaps a half dozen, each decorated with a corpse in various stages of decay. Some were merely blackened skeletons but the latest one was ripe enough that the sound of vehicles cresting the ridge startled a swarm of flies into the air, though they returned just as quickly.

“What the fuck?” Taya exclaimed, pulling out her binoculars to get a better look. Seeing it up close didn’t please her any more and she gagged slightly.

“You bastards did this!” the kid beside Taya snapped in a voice that clearly verged on tears.

“They shoot anyone who they think grows too much food and not enough drugs, or anyone that dosent grovel enough and they stake them up there,” he spat. Junebug’s mouth compressed into a frown but she didn’t speak.

As the small convoy pulled up in front of the shed a dozen bored looking Spiders ambled out into the midday sun. Some of them looked like they might have been drunk or drugged, others scratched and swatted at insects but all were heavily armed. Miguel hopped from his jeep and started to stalk towards the trio of mercenaries. Before he could open his mouth however a woman in a dirty white dress let out a shout and rushed across from the nearest field.

“Rodrigo!” she shouted arms opened wide.

“Mama!” the sniper, apparently Rodrigo, shouted and tried to hop out of the car. Unfortunately the woman’s run brought her past Miguel who grabbed her by the neck. The woman whipsawed in an almost comicbook fashion and let out a strangled squeak. Rodrigo let out a scream and grabbed for his rifle but Neil slapped his hand down on the weapon to prevent him from pointing it. There was a general stiffening as men grabbed for their own weapons.

“Looks like I get to wipe out a whole family of useless scum,” Miguel commented, sounding very much like the cat who ate the canary as he drew a pistol and pointed it at the womans head.

“Hey,” Junebug called, “they aren’t paying us to shoot women and children.”

“Shut it bitch, they aren’t paying you at all! We know how to keep order in our own territory and we don’t need no advice from snooty off world putas!”

“Funny,” Junebug observed, “that wherever you go in the universe you will find someone willing to call you a bitch and a whore. Some things truely are universal.

“Junebug we can’t just let…” Taya began but Junebug chopped the air to silence her as she vaulted over the side of the car and landed facing Neil, Taya and the boy.

“This train is about to start rolling kids,” she told them in a quiet serious voice, “if anyone wants to get off, now is the time.” Rodrigo stared at her in mute terror his eyes darting between her and his mother.

“You know I’m always ready to dance babe,” Neil replied with a wink.

“Junebug… there are thirty of them…” Taya began, clearly not wanting to look afraid but also cognisant that they were out gunned to an almost ludicrous degree.

“Thirty seven,” Junebug corrected, then turned and walked over to where Miguel stood. She had her rifle but she kept it pointed out the ground, her manner nonchalant and the thugs seemed to relax.

“Please spare my son!” the woman wailed imploringly, Miguel responded by clouting her with the barrel of his pistol hard enough that the gun came away bloody. There was a strangled shout from the car and Miguel grinned evilly.

“So goods delivered, jobs done right?” Junebug asked, her voice so casual that despite the tense situation the guards seemed to relax another degree. Miguel frowned as he clutched the moaning woman, clearly taken aback by the apparent non-sequitur.

“What are you talking about?” he demanded. Junebug made a gesture that looked like a shrug with her rifle.

“I mean, we have delivered the goods so the job is complete? Right?” she asked, making the same gesture with her weapon.

“Of course the job is complete you stupid…”

Junebug’s left hand came out from behind her back and tossed something small and hard at Miguel. His attention had been on her disruptor rifle and so he was taken by surprise. The grenade hit him in the mouth with a clack of breaking teeth and then exploded in a blinding white light that made the midday sun seem like a distant candle. The blast was literally stunning to anyone looking at it, which she hoped wasn’t Neil and Taya, but her helmet’s sophisticated combat AI was able to blank her visor and harden her hearing protection to resist the concussion. It didn’t protect her from the overpressure of the blast, but between her battle armor and years of experience she was still able to move. Sayeeda leaped towards Miguel tackling the woman to the ground a she caught her around the waist, the weight of her gear and armor bowling her over effortlessly. Gunfire erupted from all points as the gangsters tried to shake off the effects of the flashbang. Junebug picked the woman up and tossed her bodily into the nearest canal and then leaped after her, landing in the hip deep water in a spray of mud before whipping her weapon up to rest on the edge of the improvised trench and opening fire.