Open Space and Hyperspace

==Making War SL==
<<85 PP; O4 Sector>>

Master Private (P5) Piroska was in her drop harness. The CR25 troop carrier jolted to the right then down a little. Most likely from incoming fire from the surface. It wasn't heavy enough that she was worried though. The orbitals were already controlled by the Clan, with every major target on the planet being wiped out by either heavy bombardment or pinpoint kinetic strikes. The only targets left on the surface were those too close to neutral or friendly features to risk friendly fire & those that were too heavily defended to fall quickly enough for Clan purposes.

For the moment she was happy to just ride. The squad's interlink was already up & running. As the squad commander she had extra feeds in her HUD to keep track of the units under her care. Everything was minimized to a small tray, displaying only the power levels & damage alerts. It was of course extremely simple to pull up more detailed info on any of her units if she should decide she needed it. The major feature was the pair of Ground Armored Tanks that made up the majority of the squad's firepower. Then the two MER-2 drones that packed nearly as heavy a punch as the tanks, if far less endurance. Finally was a block grid giving an overview of the sixty MER-1 drones included in the squad. They weren't very effective on their own, but massed they proved a heavy threat. Of course they were mostly used to lay down expendable cover fire in support of the more valuable units.

The icon at the top center of her HUD changed color. Like most of the Clan HUDs, hers was customized to her personal preferences. The icon currently in the shape of a winged rod burned green telling her that the Squad's command interlink had just been connected to one of the command rooms of this sector's citadel. The brief time spent glowing yellow had been the time that the suit & the distant control room had been exchanging hand shake protocols. That meant that soon enough they would be landing & running headlong into the most heavily defended pirate fortress on this planet.

-Ash
Light Assault Squad 48, this is your Operator. Bringing up HUD feeds. Prepare for insertion.

A timer appeared on Piroska's HUD, counting down time to touchdown. At twelve seconds, the CR25's cannons sent shivers through the ship as they dispatched some obstacle or other at the landing target. At five seconds, the floor snapped back out from under the her feet, leaving her dangling by the drop harnesses with nothing between her feet & the ground but 60 meters of open air. At zero seconds, the drop harnesses quickly descended, landing the squad precisely at the target point. From either flank of the ship, a single GAT dropped as well. A moment later the squad was alone in a small dell as the transport quickly retreated the way it came.

---

Major (O1) Ash Ant wasn't on the planet of the battle. He wasn't even in the same system. He was safely tucked away in the Sector Citadel in one of the Combat Control Rooms. This was a major deployment, An entire battalion of the Sector Legion, so the command room being used was one of the largest available. It was in many ways like being in a giant ring theater.

Around the outer edge of the circular room were the Majors (O1) like himself, each directly in contact with one of the squads involved in the assault. Each was sitting at a large shrouded desk. From the other seats it was about as interesting to look around as a very boring office. However, looking at the desk in front of each major told a different story. The desk was actually a recessed holo field showing not only the assigned squad, but the surrounding area, points of interest, info readouts on all the units in the squad (right down to individual drones).

The next step down toward the middle of the room were the Lieutenants (O2), each assigned to the control of one of the thirty Platoons (& the two majors leading each squad). The next step down were the Colonels (O3), in command of the six companies present. At the bottom of the room & commanding most of the area, was a massive holofield. It was from here that the Captain (O4) commanded the entire flow of the battle. Stalking through the glittering field of icons & projections she issued commands to those seated around her. Commands were issued & the various squads moved in eerie concert, twisting & striking enemy units from multiple fronts in heavy numbers.

---

Sergeant (P7) Jareth Lovett, was also not on the planet itself. He wasn't in the massive command room either. He, along with his wing man were in the Sector Citadel. Their room was much smaller, consisting mainly of what looked like a pair of tank cockpit emulators, albeit ones with most of the outer frames removed for ease of contact with the other tankery pilot. The main difference between a tank emulator & what they were sitting in was that they were actually piloting a tank about to float into live combat.

He technically outranked the woman leading the squad, but things were more complex that that. For one thing, the P4 would actually not be doing any real leading unless command links to the battle field somehow got cut. & if that happened, he would be cut off from 'his' tank anyway. The real person 'leading' the squad was the O1 in the command room.

-Ash
LAS48, Objective marked. Strike on time.

Thoughts other than the battle quickly fled as his tank settled roughly to the ground from the drop ship & the first objective icon appeared on his HUD with a timer. The squad began to move forward as the MER-1 drones ranged out in a rough hemisphere centered forward of the rest of the units.

---

Piroska checked the target one last time as the timer ticked down to zero. It was a heavily fortified Anti-Air emplacement, preventing air support further in. As the timer hit zero, the squad crested up from the hill & began pouring fire into the emplacement. Two other nearby hilltops erupted in similar or heavier waves of fire as three squads opened fire simultaneously. The emplacement effectively evaporated as the combined furnace of fire obliterated massive chunks of the defenses. After less than two seconds of fire, the icon vanished. A moment later a new icon appeared. There was no timer this time, but the squad would still have to move quickly.

-Ash
LAS48, Objective marked. Regroup on target.

---

Captain (O4) Stayndem Artodium watched as her troops slowly eroded the pirate defenses. She was setting up for a hard push in the near future. An emplacement here, a power line there. Slowly pushing in deeper. She was mostly trying to play it safe though, trying to minimize casualties for the organic units on the ground. The drones & vehicles down there were all expendable, the organics were much harder to replace. A few more strikes & she would be able to launch a heavy attack that would have a high chance of bringing down the city scale shield protecting the pirate fortress from bombardment. Then they would either surrender or die.

---

Piroska was down one tank & nearly half her MER-1 compliment. But the squad was otherwise doing exceptional. Setting the last charge at the marked objective, she pulled back to outside the blast zone. A few moment later a series of explosions ripped into the ground, followed by a much larger explosion as whatever the target had been also exploded.

-Ash
LAS48, congratulations. Prepare for extraction. Warning! Whips inbound.

Piroska hit the dirt at that last warning. It wasn't common, but the pilots of the heavily armed speeder bikes commonly called 'whips' had been known to 'accidentally' open fire on friendly squads. A dull thunder in the distance quickly rose to a ungodly roar, just before the auto-dampeners kicked in in her suit. Even with the sound being actively canceled out by the suit, the sound was still a solid presence. A thing felt in every bone as stones began to leap into the air under the pressure of it. She knew the sound was technically a song, something about immigrants & Valhalla, but at that volume it was more like an assault. The five slim darts passed overhead so fast they were barely visible before being gone again. Behind the racing heavy speeder bikes, the sound immediately dropped to nearly nothing. Piroska knew she & the other squads had been clearing the road for these berserkers. The target was most likely the massive shields overhead. With those gone, the ships in orbit would have no problem ending the battle.

Sure enough, it wasn't long afterward that the shields overhead flickered & then failed completely. As the squad finished loading up into the returned CR25, the pinpoint kinetic strikes had already started, obliterating any defenses still remaining after the attack.

---

Ash let out a sigh as his squad was successfully pulled back from the fortress. The battle was over, the kinetic strikes had already all been lined up waiting for the shields to drop, & now there was nothing left but to watch the fireworks & hand over the situation to the diplomats to wrap up. A quick check showed a loss several thousand drones, & only three Clan members. It was much better than the old days where thousands of vode would have died assaulting the fortress in undisciplined rushes. All in all, a good battle.

==Socii SL==
<<65PP; P7 Sector>>

Timothy Gates didn't consider himself a particularly brave human. On days he was feeling particularly honest with himself, Tim would admit that he was, in fact, a bit of a coward. Tim didn't want to be shot, stabbed, clubbed or have any other form of violence acted out on him. He was actually fairly opposed to the entire idea of violence. What Tim did have was a fairly good head for maths. That & a rather strong desire to have nice things. Tim had joined MandalMine as a droid repair technician. The reason had been quite simple. MMine paid nearly twice as much as his last job. Tim had agreed to be shipped off to a somewhat remote colony world on the outer rim because it included hazard pay, which again doubled his already nice pay check.

The colonists had at some point decided they would rather focus on things other than growing their own food. To that end they had hired MMine to grow food locally for the colony. The reason for the hazard pay however was a local splinter group of the colonists that wanted to remain completely independent of the rest of the galaxy. They weren't a real threat, but it was enough to justify hazard pay for the workers. The real joy to Tim was that in the event of an actual attack, which happened every now & again, his pay (after the hazard bonus was counted) was quadrupled. This meant that he would earn sixteen times the amount from his previous job to sit around safely inside the center of what amounted to a fortress.

Of course there was a down side as well. For one, he was stuck, at least for the time being, on a back-water world with pretty much nothing to spend his money on. True, he could always order it & have it shipped out to him on the next transport, but it didn’t have the same feel. The second downside was that he had been passed over on several times for advancement, despite his level of skill with repairs. He had even been matter-of-factually informed that it was entirely due to him not being part of the Clan group that controlled the company. They had immediately offered to let him join the Clan, but he had declined after hearing all the various details required. Every few months he would receive another notice that he had unfortunately not be picked for advancement, along with a smaller note asking if he had reconsidered joining the Clan. After the third one, Tim had stopped reading them completely.

It had been a mostly normal day so far. The only real thing of note so far had been the new recipe of waffles the cooking staff had tried out. They had been surprisingly good. Tim checked his list of assigned tasks. Generally speaking, no-one bothered him about work unless he did a poor job of fixing something or he took too long to get something working again. Usually, this meant he quickly worked his way through the easier fixes & then focused on the more difficult things. One of the easy jobs that stood out today was a jammed cargo hatch on one of the harvesting droids.

Looking over the hatch in question, Tim gave it a firm tug or two. Sometimes the easiest solution was the best. This time however, the door didn't give. Sighing, Tim pulled out a couple tools & started working on loosening the fasteners around the hatch frame. Pulling loose the first access panel, Tim was surprised by a small puff of arid black smoke. That was odd, as nothing inside that panel should have been able to overload or burn out.

Poking around inside the panel, Tim noticed a small discolored patch of metal flush against the hatch. It almost looked like the hatch had been spot-welded closed. However, there wasn’t anything in the panel that should be able to burn at even close to that kind of thermal output. Shrugging, Tim decided to make a note of it for the eggheads to figure out. Lining up a small mallet with the spot, he gave a hard swing to try & break the weld. There was a heavy thud as the hatch flipped open of its own regard & a heavily armed human came tumbling out of the cargo bin.

Tim let out a surprisingly girly scream as the mallet he was holding swung around & accidentally smashed into the head of the armed figure. As the figure fell backward, his hand clenched down on his weapon, sending nearly half a dozen blaster bolts into the sealed cargo bin. By the time the armed figure hit the ground, Tim was already halfway across the work bay & gaining speed.

By the time security troops showed up roughly a minute later, the armed figure was already dead. Inside the cargo bin they found three more figures dead from blaster wounds. A quick check of the security feeds showed that no-one else had exited the cargo bin. Tim was surprised to receive a rather hefty bonus on his next pay check. The security scans for droids with cargo bins ended up getting a little more complex to prevent that same trick from working again however. Tim also found himself wondering if it really would be all that bad to join up with the Clan, after all it would certainly include a raise.

==Gun Ruler SL==
<<77 PP; Q6 Sector>>

Spar Thomasin was carefully dismantling & reassembling an older model commlink. It didn't work of course. Most of the pieces weren't even functional even with a charged battery, but it was something to do to pass the time while waiting for his contact. He was sitting on a rather low & long crate. behind him an aged sentinel landing craft was also waiting, its ramp lowered.

Eventually, nearly half an hour late in fact, a pair of speeder vans pulled up. The collection of figures that unloaded from them could generously be called scum. Spar was not technically in good standing with the Clan. He could be considered, at best, barely still a part of it. He had never been pinned with anything, but he kept a good distance from any law & order type Clan members. After all, he made a rather hefty sum going from world to world on the outskirts of Clan territory & selling crates like these to anyone that wanted them.

As the figures drew closer, Spar popped open the crate, revealing it to be stuffed with a massive collection of weapons of nearly every conceivable manufacturer. Mostly pistols & carbines, but there were a couple heavier weapons mixed in. Holding out his hand, he watched the scum's leader look over the haul. After a few seconds, the leader tossed a small sack across the gap. Grabbing it from the air, Spar checked the contents. Easily two dozen green crystals. Pulling one at random, a small sensor on his belt confirmed it, refined Nova Crystal.

Tapping a caller, a set of drones in the sentinel quickly brought out four more crates, the agreed total. Within a few minutes the scum were loaded up & gone again. He knew that the scum would undoubtedly use their new equipment to rob the locals, or maybe even start a civil war. Whatever made them happiest. Spar didn't care. He would keep selling them weapons until they either died or stopped buying. The nova crystals were the important part though. They were effectively untraceable. He would trade most of them to a certain contact he knew in the Clan that was supplying him with a steady stream of the gun crates. If he happened to recognize one piece or other in his supply time after time, well, that was how the galaxy turned.

==Gun Ruler SL==
<<77 PP; Q6 Sector>>

Georgie Stone watched the rain fall beyond the wall. She was standing on one of the upper walkways of a wall surrounding a preplanned & scratch built city. One of several dozen scattered across the planet. It would be hard to tell from a glance, but this world was once home to a thriving if somewhat undisciplined race. As few as ten years ago they had a mostly unified if haphazard government. Then they managed to get galactic weapons thrown into the mix.

The resulting war had more or less destroyed every major population center of the planet & dragged the survivors into a nearly stone age existence. Surprisingly enough, the population hadn't taken nearly as big of a hit as that implied though. Up until the local government collapsed, the Clan wasn't able to do much more than help from a distance. The locals had never asked the Clan to get involved after all. With the fall of the government though things changed. Within a month, the first garrisons had been landed.

While there was some fighting with the more aggressive groups, most of the surviving locals only wanted food & a safe place to sleep. So areas were cleared, defensive walls were put up, & locals invited to get a taste of nearly forgotten fruits of civilization. The price of entry was cheap enough. Turn over any weapons & agree to resolve disputes peacefully under the protection of the Clan. Each of the walled cities was effectively a self contained state, including all the agriculture & manufacturing the inhabitants would need. Soon others began construction across the world, seeking to save as many as possible from starvation & the remains of the secessionist that had nearly ended their race.

That had all been years ago. Now the only ones left out in the wild were the tribal gangs that had formed from those early groups. Many of the civilized population had joined the Clan sooner or later. Though a few had still maintained a misguided loyalty to the failed government that had abandoned them.

Sensors had picked up a tribe moving too close for comfort. The tribes beyond the walls were all brutal savages, but many still had functional off-world weapons to back them up. So they still had to be treated with caution. Hopefully, they would pass by without incident. Otherwise another tribe would be buried in a mass grave tonight.

==Moondancer SL==
<<106PP; S5 Sector, Serene Moondancer>>

During one of the standard real space transfers between hyperspace jumps, the Serene Moondancer happened to pass within the range of a Infinite Imperium relay. Normally, this would go completely unnoticed. However there was a small device hidden in the luggage of one of the passengers that noticed the faint signal & replied with a ping. This return ping was also not normal, even within the Imperium. In fact only twelve of them existed in the galaxy. The device established a connection with the relay & exchanged a vast amount of information. The device uploaded the memory block formed since the last upload. The man going by Z'har was not in fact the one that had gained the moniker of 'The Admiral'. In actual fact, he was a droid loaded with a complete set of that man's memories. Though complete wasn't exactly accurate. The old man had been paranoid enough that not even his body double droids knew everything he did. While everything that was public record was included, vast tracks & blocks of times where missing. In some places, there were years or decades between memories.

There hadn't been any new memories in the last several years as Z'har had moved more & more out of the public eye of the clan & passed more control over to his daughter. In turn, the decreasing need for body doubles has seen most of the dozen lords, as they called themselves, either opting to travel the galaxy or choosing to power down for the long haul. This update didn't have any more memories for him, but it did have a disturbing update on the major Clan news. Z'har had died. As of yet, there was little additional news or details, but the death had been confirmed.

Z'har Desmonde wasn't sure how to take it. On one hand, he knew he wasn't the original. On the other, his entire life revolved around being the shadow of a man that was now dead. Before he had just been waiting to be called back to duty, though the advancing age of The Admiral meant it would be unlikely. However with this death, Z'har was suddenly cut free in a strange new galaxy. All this happened in the space of a breath, between his light-hearted commit on how the group wouldn't be boring & whatever reply the Jawa was formulating.

Clem nearly rolled his eyes at Z'har's comment but settled for shaking his head slightly before muttering towards BB-Awesome. oh... that's right I forgot some of us came with tags that said some re-assembly required... Clem wasn't sure if the droid would have heard him over the noise in the hangar but it wasn't important anyway. Any further thoughts on his comment were cast aside with Han's next comments. He was about to voice his concerns over how potentially offensive the first comment was however the prompt mistranslation of the second made him stop. Han needed to get that translator unit fixed before it caused trouble somewhere... if it hadn't already. As Han left Clem looked over towards Z'har shaking his head in silent humor at Han's defective translator. His still rapidly beating heart skipped another beat when Penny suddenly leaned into him. His eyebrows once again shot up while still looking towards Z'har, not entirely sure how to react to this latest situation.