R.W. Krpoun's Blog, page 21

Gamer Story XXIII (FS)

I’ve always had a web site devoted to my gaming campaign to help my players keep track of events. In the early days I wrote short stories based on the PCs and posted them on the site for my player’s amusement. This campaign was set in the Fading Suns setting.

“Standardized weapons,” Sir Damarus repeated to the Templars surrounding the table. “From now on, the only small arms carried by everyone except Ragnar are going to be Li-Halan S-3 pistols, Imperial R-6 submachineguns, or Li-Halan S-2 rifles. Exceptions are for Quinn’s assault shotgun, case-less weapons, and rail weapons. I’m having my new Stormbringer modified to accept S-2 magazines.”

“Is this about Hal’s whining?” Nick asked. “Because it’s not like he’s got anything better to do.”

“Look, we have eleven different calibers, not counting case-less…” Hal began, only to be waved to silence by Sir Damarus.

“We need to be able to interchange ammunition and magazines. Frankly, the missions keep getting tougher, and the margin between success and failure narrower. We need to get every advantage we can.”

No one wanted to dispute that.

“All right, co-ordinate with Hal for replacement weapons.”

“Why are we going to such heavy calibers?” Cody asked. “I mean, I liked my 5.56mm carbine.”

“Undead require more stopping power.”

The medic shrugged; that point was unarguable.

“Secondly, ammunition and munitions: we need to carry more, and we need to carry them safely. For example, Red had grenades strung all over him last mission; one lucky hit and he’s a cluster bomb.”

“Red’s always a cluster,” Quinn grinned. Red made a short, vulgar gesture by way of a reply.

“So I want the techs to adapt the standard load-bearing vests we all use, and the hard-case ammo packs used by the Imperial Legions, into a better, and more flexible, ammunition carrying system,” the knight tossed a sheaf of papers to Elvis and Quinn. “I call it the Modular Combat Load System, MCLS for short. There’s some ideas and suggestions; make it work.”

“We’ll need a lot of materials and more tools,” Quinn observed, thumbing through the papers. Elvis nodded empathically.

“Talk to Hal.” Seeing their disappointment, Sir Damarus relented a bit. “Give them a couple hundred up front, Hal; plus beer and an account with the fast food joints.”

****

“I don’t see why you need me,” Cody muttered as Quinn wrapped coarse packing material around his torso.

“We need somebody to define reach and torso curvature. We used a dummy for the initial work, but now we’re down to the fine detail. Rib?” Elvis offered a greasy slab of meat.

“No. Look, I’m the only Obun in the group; shouldn’t you use a Human?”

“Nope,” Quinn paused for a gulp of coffee, a sandwich ready in his off hand. “We checked: body reach and dimensions are identical.”

“Got it from your think machine data,” Elvis grinned smugly. “Besides, you’re the only one left aboard ship besides the pilot and Ragnar.”

“How long will this take?” the medic sighed.

“Don’t know,” Quinn said around a mouthful of day-old rye and pastrami. “But Damarus wants it done right away.”

“What are you trying to do?”

“Build a foundation unit, a modified load-bearing vest that attaches directly to the clamshell torso armor. We’ve got the attachment points worked out, and how to put the fasteners on the sides so when you take the armor off, the foundation unit goes with it,” Elvis explained.

“That’s a good idea,” Cody mused. “It would speed treatment of wounded by making it quicker to get to the wounds.”

“Really…yeah…we figured. Anyway, next, we put the hard-cased back and side units on. These will be modular, quick attach-detach. You wear a back unit across your shoulder blades, and a side unit down each side, like an upside-down capitol ‘U’. A one-gallon water bladder rides in the center back area, inside the ‘U’, with a drinking tube mounted so.”

“Excellent; hydration is very important.” Cody was warming to the project.

“Yeah, right, plus we needed filler: see, the back and side units will double as a pack frame. Now, the back and side units are Imperial issue: spring-loaded hatches, water-proof, and configured so an internal explosion is directed outward, away from the body. You lose the ammo, but the wearer is unhurt.”

“Clever. So if they’re Imperial issue, what do you need me for?”

“Ammo haulers wear the Imperial versions, not line troops. The Hauler wears a pack made of these units, and runs along replenishing infantry during a lengthy fight. Damarus wants these modified so we can use them as individuals.” Elvis tossed a rib bone at an over-flowing trash can, and missed.

“That’s why we need you,” Quinn explained. “We need to figure out the angles for mounting the units. Doesn’t do you much good to carry lots of ammo safely if you can’t reach it.”

“I see. All right, what do I do?”

“We wrap you in this black paper we cut in the shape of the foundation unit; them we put white dye on your hands and you reach as if you have a back and side units on.”

****

“I’m tired,” Cody objected as Quinn approached with yet another black packing paper ‘foundation unit’.

“So’m I, but Damarus is gonna stop by and check any time now. He gets real pissy if we haven’t made any progress,” the big Tech explained. “And he bitches about my singing.”

“Damn. Let me get something to eat, then. Any of that rice and shrimp left? It didn’t smell too bad.”

“A couple pounds,” Elvis fished out the bucket-like container. “They’re not real shrimp, something local, but they taste as good, maybe better. And it’s cheap. Beer?”

“Is there any tea?”

“Nope. How ‘bout some coffee?” Quinn held up his mug.

“Beer is good,” Cody hurried assured them. Quinn’s coffee was black as midnight and stripped the plating off spoons.

With a big bowl of re-heated rice-and-local-shrimp-like-creatures and a cold beer to hand, Cody felt better. “When did Damarus decide to change weapons? Sort of sudden, wasn’t it?”

“Well, Hal’s been bitching about trying to keep calibers straight for a while,” Quinn observed, leaning back against the lathe, a leathery slice of cold pizza in one hand. “But the cost, hassle, and complaints kept it from being done. I think he really started thinking about it when we crossed that mud-pit right after Tank was killed.”

“The one where Ragnar towed the kicker unit with Nick and Remmie on it? And the Undead kept popping up out of the mud?”

“Yeah. Remmie shot off most of his ammo, so did Nick as a matter of fact. And they couldn’t swap back and forth because they had different calibers and magazines. Plus, remember how that pink stuff jammed weapons? Everyone borrowed weapons, and had a bear of a time using ‘em.”

“And stopping power has been an issue, too,” Elvis observed. “5.56mm and 9mm were okay when we were shooting up rebels, but things are getting tougher. Remember that wing cat that jumped on Quinn on Daishan?”

The burly tech shuddered. “Thank you for reminding me.” The Imperial Eye had sent them to the dead world of Diashan, which was expected to be a lifeless desert, to recover data on the Symbiots from an abandoned base. It turned out that the fire-bombed planet was not radioactive, was in the grips of a nuclear winter, and was far from lifeless; in addition to Symbiots (who had bred a variety of creatures, including a sort of flying-squirrel/tiger cross) there was the survivors of an expedition mounted by the al-Malik a quarter-century before.

“Daishan was the worst. First we get shot down because Elvis was asleep at the switch…”

“Bite me! Anyone could have missed that; the sensor signature on a pod ship is minimal.”

“Whatever. Anyway, we get shot down, we’re equipped for the desert and there’s six feet of snow on the ground, and we have to walk for nearly a week through the snow. Then we run into Sister Sergia of the Brother Battle and her survivors….

“What a bitch,” Elvis shook his head.

“…and we have to enter the old base through the ventilation ducts…”Quinn plowed on.

“Yeah, remember the spores from the fungus? Damarus thought Stormbringer was a snake, and cut both barrels off with his sword,” Elvis cackled.

“…yeah…and then fighting the Symbiots? You have to hit the Seed or they just keep on coming.”

“But that’s an advantage of the lighter calibers,” Cody objected as he cracked a fresh beer. “5.56mm weapons have a higher rate of fire and larger magazine capacity.”

“True, but 7.62 is better against Undead. There’s no one all-purpose caliber,” Quinn shrugged.

“Blast caps like Remmie uses seem to be a universal cure,” Elvis observed, trimming another paper cut-out.

“Yeah, but they’re hard to find, and the Nightstorm is the only weapon in 12mm case-less that we’re got,” Cody pointed out. “I’m done, let’s try another measurement.”

***

“Those big watermelon-lookin’ acid bombs the Symbiots used were pretty bad,” Quinn mused as he made some notes on buckle angles. “I think we’re ready to glue fasteners to a cloth vest and see how it feels.”

“That, and the way you can blow them in half and they keep moving,” Cody agreed, tossing his empty beer can into a packing crate used as a trash can and grabbing another.

“That was nothing compared to Sister Sergia,” Elvis shuddered. “Remember when we tried to put her in quarantine? Damarus cut off her arm at the wrist, and it just flew back up and re-attached itself.”

“And then she shot him, Ragnar, and Hal,” Cody nodded, tossing back half a can in a gulp. “And froze Tim with a word.”

“I hit her with a canister round, and black….fog just replaced the body parts that were blown away. We must have poured two hundred rounds into her of all calibers, plus Damarus and later Blackie hacking away at her.”

“She cut Red’s hand off,” Elvis muttered, staring off into the distance as he cracked a beer with shaking hands. “And the barrel of his grenade launcher, all in one go.”

“If it wasn’t for that churchman the response force called up, we wouldn’t have kept her down,” Quinn sighed.

“It, not her, at that point,” Cody nodded, fishing a beer out of the cooler. “We had destroyed most of her physical substance by then. What was left was all Dark Entity.”

The three sat and drank in grim silence for a while.

Finally Quinn crushed his empty can and tossed it aside. “Screw it, we survived. We always survive. That’s what counts.”

“Yes, and we brought out the formula and some samples of the Symbiot vaccine,” Cody agreed, tossing a fresh can to Quinn and taking another for himself. “Give the Engineers a year or so and we’ll be sending unconvertible troops to Stigmata. That will improve morale to no entt…end.”

“Yep. And we fried two Fark Durnances…Dark Furnaces,” Elvis nodded owlishly. “Showed them, by the Pancreator.”

“Yeah…,” Quinn muttered, having just discovered that he had glued his hand to the glue gun. “Gimme…gimme some solvent.”

****

Sir Damarus stepped out of the lock, papers in hand. Everything seemed to be cleared up with the Port Authority; now all that remained was to straighten out the business with the pilot…the sound of singing tore him from the immediate problems. Looking up, he was surprised to see Quinn and Elvis, staggering drunk, lurching down the corridor with a semi-conscious Cody between them. The Medic appeared to be wearing a sort of vest of rough, cheap cloth with an Imperial ammo pack, two beer cans, and a wrench attached to it in a random pattern. Quinn had a beer can attached to the front of his coveralls, and Elvis was covered in bits of cloth, paper and buckles; a glue gun was stuck to his left trouser hem, rattling across the deck with each step, and leaving bright milky drops of industrial glue behind.

“Mornin’, sah,” Quinn tried to salute and missed his head; the trio swayed dangerously from the action.

“What in blazes are you doing?”

“Takin’ Cody to his quarters, but it’s gone,” Quinn explained cheerfully. “Whole damned aft side’s gone, too.”

“This is the aft side,” Sir Damarus pointed. “There’s his cabin, you just passed it.”

Quinn and Elvis managed to get turned about. “I’ll she rammed,” Elvis muttered. “The bastid’s right. But…if dis is shaft, then whose door did we glue the toilet seat to?”

A sudden bellowed roar sobered both techs.

“I’ll just leave you to your business then, shall I?” the knight observed cheerfully and stepped away briskly, nodding to Ragnar as the angry Vorox hopped past, trying to get something off the sole of one of his feet, a toilet seat in one hand.

Gamer Story XXII (FS)

I’ve always had a web site devoted to my gaming campaign to help my players keep track of events. In the early days I wrote short stories based on the PCs and posted them on the site for my player’s amusement. This campaign was set in the Fading Suns setting.

It had lain in the glass display case on blue velvet like an item of jewelry; the instant he had seen it he had fallen in love. The metal had been finished in silver-gray Teflon and rough-brushed to prevent a tell-tale shine; the ballistic plastic of the stock and fore grip were similarly rough-textured to provide a solid grip and prevent any light reflection. The card next to it with the price had named it an ANX Assault Shotgun, but from the moment he had laid eyes upon it in the arms dealer’s showcase Quinn knew it as Big Thunder. He had laser-engraved its name across the receiver in fifty-point Gothic script, and added a grenade launcher, holo-sight, assault sling, and mini-spot. That was back when he was a brand-new Iron Templar, and guns were something special, unusual, even.

Now, a year later, Big Thunder had considerable finish wear, and its selector switch had lost its crisp click as the tightly machined edges had smoothed with use. Quinn had replaced the extractor assembly because of wear, and the original drum that had come with the weapon was lost on Malingatius, ejected during a firefight and never recovered. There were scars, too: shrapnel strikes on the fore-grip from a homemade grenade on Shaprut, a slight dent in the folding carrying handle from a rock kicked up by a mortar explosion on Hira, a groove in the metal where the barrel had banged against a hatch on the Zemchug.

He had scars, too, from wounds and from what he had seen. He hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, but Ilidan still haunted his dreams, even though he hadn’t known the man very well. Still, the silent bodyguard had been the first person he had known to die in combat.

Lately the missions had gone from bad to worse, from drifting, Husk-infested hulks where guns did not fire, to Dark bases, to large-scale battles where young men still in their teens screamed and died under merciless fire. Quinn felt the last year pressing down on him like a pack filled with wet sand.

***

The cigarette pack was crisp and warm under his fingers; he could feel the clean white tubes packed with rich tobacco shifting as he increased the pressure slightly. Remmie would have given a month’s pay to be able to flick one out of the pack with a practiced wrist-movement and fire it up. Smoking steadied his hands, which had developed a tendency to tremble lately. The Scraver attributed it to fatigue; he hadn’t been sleeping much these days; first, there had been the long hours put in scrounging up arms and equipment for 3/30, on top of learning to be a military officer, then the brutal patrolling, culminating in the battle at Outpost Four. There were a lot of hours that should have been spent in a bed that had been spent elsewhere.

He wouldn’t have admitted it, but when he did get into bed, more often than not his nightmares woke him up; the memories of the raid on the Dark Base just wouldn’t leave him alone. The room with the jaw bones especially bothered him, although he hadn’t given it all that much thought at the time.

And here he was in another Dark Base, lugging in another fusion device to destroy another Singularity Furnace before the enemy could get a Black Gate opened. This time they were in the mines of Julka, a dank, hot, foul-smelling complex of tunnels and galleries, guided by a Church-built device that should lead them to the Furnace. It certainly had led them to enough Undead-manned guard posts.

***

The aura of Darkness that clung to the place was growing stronger, and making his sinuses ache; Sir Julius pulled his IR goggles away from his face with his left hand and massaged the bridge of his nose with his right. He hated operating with IR gear; there was something unholy about seeing in the darkness through electronic devices. Like many Churchmen, Sir Julius distrusted advanced technology.

Part of him wanted to strike down yet another Dark Furnace, but a growing part of him was too weary, too worn by events. The raid on the last Dark Base just weeks ago, the strange military undertakings since, the terrible battle which had consumed so many young lives and bodies, and now this foray…sometimes Sir Julius felt as if his nerves had been stripped of their protective coatings, like wires stripped of their casings; he slept poorly, jumped at sudden noise or movement, and had trouble making decisions. This weakness while in the company of men who had unflinchingly borne the same tribulations troubled the young knight.

***

The movement of reaching for a fresh 40mm grenade and loading it into the breech of his underslung grenade launcher caused his armor to flex, rewarding Damarus with a puff of his own sour, sweaty body odor. The mines had minimal air circulation and were quite warm; those factors, combined with armor and exertion, were draining the Templars quickly.

Raising Stormbringer, the knight placed the launcher sight (which glowed orange in his IR goggles) on the low barricade and dropped a second HE round behind the crude stone barrier.]

As he reloaded, Damarus gave the order to advance. He figured this was a defense point, as side-shafts and galleries had been blasted shut, channeling every approach into this choke point, a man-made gallery carved out of the living stone by miners extracting ore.

The cultists had radically modified it; it was split into fifths: the entrance and exit areas, about a hundred yards apart, and three areas filled with thick, colored liquid: first pink, as you came the direction the Templars had, then green, and finally red. All were the consistency of gelatin and vivid in color. Narrow walkways curved and zigged across them, the convex surface of the walkways mere inches above the fluid, while the green area had small stone islands with waist-high walls serving as guard points. Those islands had been the targets for Damarus’ and Red’s grenades, as they silenced the Undead guards.

Damarus had no idea what the various fluids would do to anyone exposed to them, but he certainly did not want to find out. He ordered the Templars forward singly, well-spaced in anticipation of a trap.

Nick was first; moving at a careful trot, SAW ready, he made it halfway across the pink belt before slipping and plunking into the thick liquid. Careful to keep his mouth and eyes shut, he rolled to his feet and heaved himself up onto the walkway just in time to catch Ragnar’s middle knee on his left ear and flop back into the fluid.

Damarus cursed bitterly as Ragnar, off-balance from hitting Nick, scrabbled for traction he could not get as the bodyguard tried to round the corner onto the cross-walk that separated the pink from the green, only to end up thigh-deep in green muck Moments later Remmie hit fluid splashed into the walkway by Nick and crashed into the pink on the opposite side from Nick.

Quinn chose to crawl when his turn came, which kept him from losing his footing, but slowed the rest down so badly that Tank, Cody, Elvis, Julie, and a dripping Remmie were stacked up on the pink area’s walkway; Nick was still floundering about trying to get back out, and Ragnar was back on the walkway and half-way across the green area.

As he waited for Elvis to move forward, Julius let his head sag forward to give his tired neck muscles a rest. The throbbing pain was much worse, and the IR goggles weren’t helping. Sighing, he pushed them up on his forehead and massaged his nose again. Looking down, he was shocked to see that the pink fluid glowed faintly when seen with the naked eye; fishing a small sample bottle out of his assault vest, he flicked on his flashlight to collect a sample.

The white light of the flashlight caused every set of IR goggles except Quinn’s and Ragnar’s to shut down; it also illuminated the row of Templars on the walkway above the pink fluid. Instantly, a line of muzzle flashes erupted above the stone wall immediately in front of the chamber’s exit.

Cody gasped as a Dark round smashed into his knee, the round being deflected by his fragmenting armor, but the impact numbing the limb and sending him crashing to the catwalk. To his right he saw Tank get one shot off before being knocked backwards into the pink fluid; behind him he heard Elvis scream.

“STUPID,” Remmie screamed, flipping up his inert goggles and shoving Julie, causing the churchman to slip and crash into the fluid.

“Oh, crap,” Nick gasped as Dark rounds ripped through the thick fluid around him. Shouldering his wet SAW, he pulled the trigger; the weapon fired once and jammed. Cursing, he worked the action twice, ejecting a live round, and pulled the trigger again. The weapon fired and jammed again. Jerking on the charging handle accomplished nothing; the Marine realized that the pink fluid had bound up the caseless action to the point of immobility.

Resetting his goggles, Damarus launched a grenade at the enemy firing line, hearing Red fire as well. It was a disaster: half the Templars were caught in a ‘fatal funnel’ ambush and were getting chewed up; as he reloaded, the Captain saw Remmie get hit and crash on top of Julie just as the priest was about to climb onto the walkway, both flopping into the pink fluid.

The eruption of the enemy fire was about what Ragnar expected; he was well ahead of the rest of the party, the green stuff on his legs was starting to burn, and the mines and fluid stunk so bad that he couldn’t smell a thing. The sudden appearance of a dozen Undead ambushers was practically anti-climatic.

Swinging his mini-gun on line, he flipped up his IR goggles on his forehead and triggered a long burst, knowing fully well that the yard-long cone of muzzle-flash was illuminating him like a spotlight. The top of the wall dissolved into gravel and dust under the torrent of 7.62 rounds, and several Undead likewise suffered serious structural damage. A second burst traversing back the other way toppled several more Undead, and vastly lightened the backpack ammunition storage unit. By the time he ripped off a third, short, burst to insure that the ambushers were either inert or hiding, he estimated he had less than a hundred rounds left, one moderate burst at best.

Cody hardly noticed that the firing had stopped as he worked on Elvis. Julie had vanished, leaving him to cope with all the wounded, and he had his hands full.

Cursing viciously, Nick managed to heave himself up onto the walkway as an equally pink Julie squished up. “Where’s Tank?”

“Tank?” Nick tried to get his IR goggles to work, then gave up; cylumes were staring to glow here and there, and he could hear Ragnar giving the all clear, so he pulled one of the plastic tubes from his harness and bent it, breaking the inner cells, causing the now-mixed chemical to glow. “Hell, I hardly know where I am.”

“Oh, no,” Julie breathed, pointing.

Nick turned, and saw Tank floating face-down in the pink fluid. “It figures,” he muttered as he slid back into the fluid and grabbed Tank’s arm. “Here, pull him up.”

They rolled the hulking knight onto his back before they lifted him onto the walkway; doing so exposed a row of entry holes blasted through his chest armor. Julie immediately set to work as Cody came up, but after a moments examination, he sat back on his heels. “Dead. Looks like at least one round hit his heart.”

***

Hal could feel the anger radiating off Damarus like heat off a stove as he came over to report. “The pink stuff has jammed up every weapon it got into; they’ll have to be soaked in solvent to clear. Elvis is pretty weak, and we’re down to a quart of water apiece after washing the stuff off Ragnar’s legs.”

“Have you redistributed weapons?”

“Pretty much; we’re short one for Nick.”

“Here, he can use my SMG; I’ve got it in my pack.”

“Great, thanks.”

“This was the worst foul-up I’ve ever seen,” Damarus snarled as he assembled the submachinegun. “One dead and three wounded for nothing. If it hadn’t been for Ragnar, we would have lost a lot more.”

“It wasn’t our best day,” Hal agreed. “The guys are tired. Too much, too fast. Hell, I bet there isn’t more’n four hundred guys in the Known Worlds who have taken out a Dark Furnace, and here we are going after our second in three months.”

“True.” Damarus sighed. “But it has to be done. The Suns fade, and Darkness encroaches; if we do not push ourselves to ever-greater efforts, the Light will fall.”

As Hal went to arm Nick, the young knight flexed his hands; lately, he had noticed that they trembled, even when he wasn’t tired. Of course, he was tired a great deal: too many different climates, too much responsibility, too many missions. He had lost three of his tiny band in less than a year, twenty-five per cent losses, and still the missions came in. It seemed as if the entire Empire was being held together by tiny bands such as his, who spent their lives and health in desperate actions against the many-fold enemies of Mankind.

He shook his head. Hal was right: this definitely was not their best day. And he didn’t think there were many good days in their immediate future.

Gamer Story XXI (FS)

I’ve always had a web site devoted to my gaming campaign to help my players keep track of events. In the early days I wrote short stories based on the PCs and posted them on the site for my player’s amusement. This campaign was set in the Fading Suns setting.

All right, listen up,” Damarus banged on the mess table, and the Templars quieted down and watched him. “Patrolling and garrison-bashing is over. The Fifth Legion is going to deploy to Outpost Four; two regiments of the Third Legion are going to take over the defense in Shaytown.”

“Good deal! Those lads have been stuck in OP 1 for weeks. We ought to clean up in girls and….beer…” Remmie trailed off under Damarus’ cold glare.

“The Twenty-Ninth and a battalion of artillery will move to OP 4 tomorrow; two days after, on the sixth, we will follow; beginning on the eighth, and continuing on each even day, another regiment and a portion of the Legion support staff will move to OP 4 until the Legion is completely in place.”

“I thought OP 4 was still under construction?” Quinn asked.

“There will be some detail work, yes,” Damarus admitted. He had seen an aerial photo of the place; there was a lot of work to do, but at least there were trenches and watch towers in place, and some wire.

“And what do they mean, a ‘battalion of artillery’? The Legion is supported to have a artillery regiment of three battalions; what we’re got is six 75mm fixed-case howitzers and a dozen 120mm mortars. I hear they haven’t got much ammo, either,” Hal pointed out.

“They picked up some recoilless rifles, but yes, the Legion is short on heavy weapons. In fact, our weapons company has more firepower than the regimental heavy weapons company, and we’ve more automatic weapons than the rest of the Regiment combined,” Damarus conceded.

“Thank you, thank you,” Remmie executed a seated bow as the rest of the Templars applauded him.

“Speaking of ammunition: Remmie, you’ve got twenty-four hours to get us eighty thousand more rounds for the rifles and MGs, and at least ten thousand for the submachineguns. Grenades and mortar rounds as are available,” Hal noted.

“Damn! No rest for the righteous,” the Scraver sighed. Quinn snickered.

“All right, we deploy by truck to the Rail Center, and by train to a point directly north of OP4, about one and a half miles out. We’ll walk from there. We’re traveling as a Regiment; the order of march is First Battalion, Third Battalion, HHC, regimental weapons company, and Second Battalion. Check your men’s loads: we’re leaving the mess hall, bunks, and everything else that won’t shoot, explode, or treat wounds behind.”

“What about beer? I’ve got sixty cases set aside,” Remmie asked. “And I planned to put a couple girls in uniforms and pass ‘em off as militia.”

“No whores, no booze,” the young knight shook his head. “You’ll have to tough it out.”

“Not for me,” Remmie was scandalized. “Some of the guys in the Twenty-Ninth still have some money. We could clean up.”

Damarus sighed and massaged his temples.

***

“YOU! Where’s your squad? Well, why aren’t you with them? Shut up and move, cretin!” Hal bellowed. “Come on, come on, pick ‘em up and put ‘em down. Get your gear and get off the cars. Move! Ragnar, get them…no, don’t…see? See? That’s why you don’t throw people. Now help him pick up those rations.”

“It’s a complete and utter cluster,” Elvis observed.

Tim nodded silently, absently fingering the stainless steel omni-socket that was attached to the stump of his left arm just below his elbow. He had lost his left arm in the raid on a Dark base, and in fact had just re-joined the Templars, having spent nearly six weeks in the hospital.

The Thirtieth Regiment was disembarking from the train with some difficulty. None of the units had practiced loading and unloading from transport, and the shortage of rolling stock meant that half the platoons were split up in order to move the entire Regiment in one trip. Units quickly intermingled and disintegrated; even the Third Battalion (under the command of Sir Damarus ) , easily the best-disciplined of the Regimental units, was having considerable difficulty.

***

“The First Battalion is moving out,” Nick reported.

“Finally,” Sir Damarus shook his head.

“Did you see how much crap they’re carrying?” Tank grinned. “Beds and chemical porta-johns and beer by the case.”

“They’re marching in formation, in column, too,” Red observed uneasily. “The whole Regiment is.”

“Not the whole regiment,” Sir Damarus observed. “We’re moving tactically, on a platoon frontage. I want everyone ready for trouble. We’re one big, fat target out here.”

“Hey, we’ve got the brave boys of the Twenty-Ninth watching our backs,” Quinn observed brightly.

“Screw the Twenty-Ninth,” Nick sneered. “Buncha nancy boys, they are.”

“They’re supposed to have been patrolling the area, but you know how they patrol: find a shady spot and catch a few winks,” Tank observed. “At least they marked the route with engineer tape on pegs every thirty feet.”

“As if we could get lost,” Quinn pointed towards the outpost. “Its on the highest ground around-you can see it from the rail line.”

“All it does is mark our route for the enemy,” Tank agreed. “And they followed the easiest path, rather than sticking to the high ground.”

“That’s good in one way: we would lose a lot of stragglers from of the rest of the Regiment if we stuck to the crests,”Cody observed. “They’ll be more than a few in any case.”

***

The blazing sun lanced through the thin artificial atmosphere and rebounded from the thin, lifeless soil, baking the column of men as they struggled along. Although the militia were hardy young serfs well-accustomed to labor, until recently they had lived on cold Malignatius, and the heat took a heavy toll. First the 3/30th began to pass equipment: beds, porta-johns, cases of beer that gushed half their volume out as foam when opened, and after a bit packs and bandoleers of ammunition. Then they started passing men: red-faced stragglers collapsed onto the sand, gasping for air.

Cody, Julie, Tim, and the minimally-trained ‘medics’ roved through the battalions’ ranks, reminding the men to drink frequently. Salt tablets had been consumed before departing, and the heavy patrolling of the last five days and Damarus’ brutal PT regime had served to acclimatize the men. Still, every man carried his pack, a rifle or SAW, ammunition, grenades, and some item of Battalion equipment, whether a case of rations, three-gallon water can, ammunition, grenades, or other supplies. Despite careful planning, the average load was fifty pounds plus weapon, bad but hardly impossible. The 3/30th was feeling the march, but the sight of the Second Battalion dropping troops stiffened their resolve.

The column wound its way between two low ridges nearly half way between the rail line and the Outpost, following the stakes marking the route the Twenty-Ninth’s pathfinders had chosen two days before.

The First Battalion was marching in column, four men abreast, weapons slung and the troops sagging under the heat and heavy loads, when black flames erupted from the hard-packed sand of the trail, roaring up to waist height, searing flesh from bone like a blow-torch hitting a moth. A hundred men died in the initial eruption, and twice that many were horribly maimed. Within the space of a heartbeat the battalion was broken, with its commander, executive officer, three company commanders, and nine platoon leaders dead or wounded.

As the flames flickered and died, figures clawed out of the sandy soil of the slopes to either side the length of the regimental column, Undead warriors who had lain buried until the occult pulse of the activation of the fire-trap had alerted them to emerge, rip away the plastic that had protected their weapons and ammunition, and open fire.

***

“Herringbone!” Damarus roared into his radio mike. “Tank, get the heavy weapons working.”

“First and third platoons face north, Second and Fourth face south,” Hal bellowed as he raced down the line of his company. “Take cover and engage. Put it to ‘em!”

Ragnar’s roar was drowned out by the burring rattle of his Saber mini-gun pouring out a long burst, the expended cartridges and links pouring from the weapon in a hot flow. With a free arm he gestured for the nearest platoon to lay down suppressive fire.

***

Twelfth Company was getting hit hard; Red cursed as one of his best squad leaders took a round through the throat. “Aim, aim, aim!” he shouted. “Aim low, squeeze ‘em off, and put ‘em down! They’re Undead, but bullets work on ‘em!”

Dark-infected bullets sent up gouts of dirt around Nick as he raced to his Third Platoon’s positions. Cody was tending to the wounded, leaving the Marine to hold his company together single-handedly. They weren’t doing as badly as he had feared; Damarus’ wisdom in traveling light and in combat formation was paying off. The Dark commander had expected a fat, easy target, and had only a thin line of enemy along each side of the ridges.

Not that the Undead weren’t doing a decent job: the First Battalion and the Regimental Heavy Weapons Company had completely dissolved, with the survivors dumping their gear and stampeding back towards the rail line. 3/30th was taking losses, but they were dealing them out as well; the militiamen in Red’s company were white-faced and shaking, but they were fighting, and that was all that mattered.

***

Pulling the DP SAW from the still-warm hands of its late gunner, Quinn braced the bipod and opened fire, working the tracers across the enemy’s lines. When the bolt slammed forward on the empty chamber, he hit the pan release and the shaking militia loader kicked it free and slammed a full pan in its place. Four eighty-round pans per SAW had seemed like a lot back in Shaytown, but right now the burly Tech was wishing for more.

***

“Dump the mortars,” Tank yelled at his Second Platoon leader. “And the ammo; they’re too close. See those MGs the 16th Company ditched? Grab ‘em and bring them into service, face south. Get moving!”

“We’re out of rounds,” the Fourth Platoon leader shouted at the hulking Knight as he ran up.

“Shit. Okay, gather your guys and grab those SG43 Mgs the 16th Company abandoned. Get them into play, fire to the north.”

“What about our mortars?” the platoon leader asked, gesturing to the hot 60mm mortars his crews had been firing.

“Leave ‘em,” Tank shook his head. They just couldn’t carry enough rounds for the weapons, which had wreaked bloody havoc in the Undead ranks until the limited supply of ammunition had run out.

***

“Elvis, how’s it look?” Damaras kept his eyes on the slopes as he spoke into the mike. The Dark commander hadn’t planned on the Thirtieth having a battalion as well equipped, nor in combat formation, when they planned the ambush; his men were breaking the Undead ranks in their sector. But the First Battalion was gone, what survivors that were left running headlong back through the 3/30th towards the rail line; the 16th Heavy Weapons Company (Regimental) had likewise broken and run. Tank had managed to salvage eight machineguns from the gear the 16th had dumped, and had extended the 3/30th perimeter back to the west a bit, but everyone was reporting heavy losses and diminishing ammunition reserves.

Cursing as Dark rounds spanged off the Fast Attack Vehicle’s frame, Elvis swerved around a abandoned porta-john. “Regimental HHC’s scattered or dead,” he yelled into the mike. “Second Battalion’s still fighting; I’m crossing their perimeter now.”

***

2/30th was fighting but hopelessly intermixed, all sub-unit cohesion lost. Sir Damarus directed Hal and Quinn’s companies against the ridge-lines, clearing away the Undead facing the 3/30th’s sector, then reformed his battered battalion into a box. Moving slowly, carrying their wounded and all equipment save their mortars, they moved west and linked up with the 2/30th. By that time they had confirmed that the Regimental commander and deputy commander were dead, along with First Battalion’s commander, leaving Sir Damarus the senior officer in charge.

Breaking through to the Outpost was the instinctive course of action for Damarus, but his battalion had taken about fifteen per cent losses, ammunition was running low, especially for the automatic weapons, and the 2/30th was simply a mob. Without reinforcements, aggressive action was out.

And there were no reinforcements coming: headquarters was sending an armored train, and had a transport train ready to pick up survivors, but that was it.

Reluctantly, the young knight gave the order to withdraw.

Gamer Story XX (FS)

I’ve always had a web site devoted to my gaming campaign to help my players keep track of events. In the early days I wrote short stories based on the PCs and posted them on the site for my player’s amusement. This campaign was set in the Fading Suns setting.

Sir Damarus Li Halan sat before his journal in his darkened quarters, the pale light of the lid-screen drawing harsh shadows across the strong planes of his face. Nodding to himself, he began to type.

“Upon my arrival on Julka, summoned as I was in my secondary capacity as an Imperial military officer, I was bade by the bridgehead commander to place my experience and training at the disposal of the commander of the Fifth Malignatius Legion. That worthy saw fit to appoint me commander of the Third Battalion, Thirtieth Infantry Regiment, Fifth Malignatius Legion.”

“The Third Battalion was well-manned with healthy youth men well-suited to military discipline, and quartered in a suitable structure.”

“Five hundred twelve fresh from the plow,” Hal reported sourly. “Most have had three weeks basic drill. No uniforms, no weapons, no NCOs, no formation assignments, nothing.”

“The building is all right, used to be a warehouse, has running water and chemical toilets,” Cody advised Damarus, who was staring at the mob of militia with horrified fascination. “They receive two cans of rations each morning, which consists mostly of beans or processed yam. Certainly not enough calories for military drill.”

“I was given thirty days to complete the formation of the battalion, with the authority to appoint non-commissioned officers; all members of my entourage were accorded the rank of acting Lieutenant in the Decados militia, with five members chosen by myself holding the acting rank of Senior Lieutenant. I drew heavily upon their experience and known qualities to serve as the backbone of the new unit.”

“Uniforms, weapons, and rations,” Damarus handed Remmie the lists. “For eight hundred and twenty men, counting the new draft we got this morning. And I need it right now.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” the Scraver thumbed through the papers. “How am I going to get all this?”

“That’s up to you. Keep the details to yourself, and make it happen. Hal, we need to start sorting out section and platoon leaders.”

“The shortage of trained personnel, coupled with the relatively short preparation time made it necessary to streamline certain aspects of the usual military practice.”

“So, you’re having some problems?” Remmie asked, pushing his Decados uniform cap back on his head. The Templars were wearing Decados Militia uniforms, complete with rank and regimental insignia, as befitted the command staff of a militia battalion.

“Yes,” the woman sighed. “Drunks and bullies pushing the girls around, refusing to pay, that sort of thing.”

“Well, you’re in luck. We can arrange so that no one bothers you or your house.”

The woman eyed him cautiously. Shaytown had been stripped of all its able-bodied men for the two militia regiments (1st and 2nd Julka Regiments, now guarding the hydro plant) of the Julka Brigade, and the shanty town that had served the gulag system on Julka had been transformed into a military storage base and quarters for the Fifth Malignatius Legion. Marge Desson had taken advantage of the situation by providing the services of three reasonably pretty nieces to lonely young servicemen. “We’re just barely feeding ourselves…”

“Ah, that’s not a problem. See, we’ll accept payment in services; you’ll set aside a certain number of hours per girl to our…needs. Now, your house is nice, but it’s not set up as a brothel should be if it wants to make money. We’ll get some lads and lumber down here and make some additions….”

***

“Go! Go! GO!” Hal screamed at the panting, filthy militiamen, who were scrambling over a six-foot wall on the obstacle course. “Move, move, MOVE!” Surveying the field, he flinched: Ragnar, caught up in the excitement, was bodily hurling several of the slower members of his platoon over the wall. “Ragnar! They have to do it themselves. Quit…seriously, stop that. They have to learn for themselves.”

“Supply, as is commonly the case in wartime, was a difficulty that was only partially overcome. With a militia unit, it was best not to have too great of expectations. We overcame the shortages as best we were able.”

“Look, I need fresh food and a tobacco ration for eight hundred twenty men,” Remmie handed the fat supply sergeant the paper.

The sweating man glanced at the top page and dropped them on his cluttered desk. “Militia battalions don’t rate that high, Lieutenant. Canned rations issued once per day until the bridgehead stocks reach Stage Four is how Command wants things handled for Militia units.” The two men stood in a huge warehouse at the Rail Center; forklifts loaded with foodstuffs purred about in silent shoals like lemon-yellow fish.

“I obtained an exception,” the Scraver insisted.

Sergeant Hood glanced at the form again. “From who? Nothin’ on this form indicates an upgrade in priority.”

Remmie waved, and a pretty young woman stepped around palleted sacks of potatoes, wearing sandals, short shorts, and a halter top that was a bit strained by the effort of containing her bust. The neck of a quart bottle of beer jutted from the cold-bag she was carrying. “My logistics expert can explain it.”

The fat sergeant stood very still, a thoughtful expression stamped on his face. “I….see.”

“I hoped so.”

“The thing is…rations have to be issued every day…”

“I’m a busy man; could I send my expert by each day to make sure everything is taken care of?”

“Every day? Ah…,” Hood tore his eyes off the pouting girl and grabbed a pen. “Right, rations and tobacco ration for a Cossack aviation unit, series four, allotment one, that’s ten cigarettes, four cigars, or one plug of tobacco per day per man, you’ll need to complete and turn in form 323 to get it started, here’s a copy.”

“Fine. Why don’t you work out the details with Ensign Bambi while I take a look around?”

***

“What are you doing?” Damarus asked, scowling.

“Building a mess hall,” Quinn advised him cheerfully. “Had to take Second Platoon off drill to do it.”

“Why do we need a mess hall?”

“To put our kitchen in.”

“We have a kitchen? The equipment? Why?”

“To cook our rations; starting tomorrow we’re getting bulk food.”

“Really? How…never mind. Get them back to drill ASAP.”

“The arms allotment to a militia battalion is never as great or as modern as one could hope for, but diligent training and well-motivated troops can overcome a great deal.”

“SKS rifles are fine and good, and the extra automatic weapons you negotiated from the Twenty-Ninth Regiment are great, but we need ammo,” Hal explained. “Grenades and mortar bombs, too.”

“That’s a problem,” Remmie sighed. “Look, the only things Shaytown has in terms of resources is women and booze; we’ve a lock on both. Troops stationed at the Admin Center, Rail Center, and Space Port can’t get either. The trouble is, the munitions dumps are here in Shaytown, so the supply people in charge of ammo and ordinance can get their own; I’ve got no direct leverage. I have to trade girls and booze for other supplies, then swap those supplies for ammo, which is slow and time-consuming. If we hadn’t had so much success in organizing the free-lance talent, we couldn’t afford half the stuff we’ve gotten. I’ve got four girls a day doing nothing but paying off the gear and rations we’re drawing.”

“Four out of how many?”

“Sixty or so. Look, we’re just a tax for protection; Marge still has to make a living.”

“We rebuilt their damn brothel!”

“A growing operation means capital investment in facilities,” Remmie shrugged.

“We maintained good relations with our sister units, while maintaining a healthy spirit of competition.”

“The Twenty-Ninth Regiment traded all its automatic weapons for what?” Damarus was aghast.

“An equal number of rifles, plus two thousand new berets and ten cases of boot polish.”

“Ten cases?”

“Yeah, about three thousand cans.”

“What do they need that much boot polish for?”

“How should I know?” Remmie shrugged. “I’ve never been in the military before. Can you kill people with it?”

“Hal says their people do nothing but close-quarter drill,” Damarus mused. “Sounds like their commander wants a good showing in the Legion final inspections.”

“But will the Dark forces be impressed?” Quinn wondered.

“I doubt it. And speaking of that, I noticed the Fourteenth Company now can sing the ‘Engineer Ballad’ and ‘Quinn the Engineer’.” Damarus fixed the Tech with a steely glare.

“Its good for morale,” Quinn managed.

“In the end, we managed to create a credible unit out of the materials and personnel provided to us. Difficulties were overcome, and problems mastered. Along the way, we managed to establish close ties with the local community, as support from the local populace can never be underestimated.”

“Who were those people?” Damarus demanded as he strode through the door.

“Which people?” Remmie asked, looking guilty.

“The men with the bodyguards who just left.”

“Ah. Those people. Well, things took a couple unexpected turns.”

“Such as?”

“Are you sure you want to know?”

“No, but tell me anyway.”

“Well, Black Ray started harassing Marge at our….procurement center…”

“Brothel. Keep going.”

“So I took Ragnar and a couple lads and went to explain it to Ray that Marge was under our protection. Turns out that Ragnar misunderstood my signal, and shot Ray on the spot. So we hauled off the body and drafted his bodyguards.”

“That would be the deserters you brought in.”

“Right. Anyway, the organization here… it’s not Scraver. The whole set-up is local talent plus a few freelancers from outside, but nobody with formal training or Family connections. Anyhow, they misunderstood what happened…somehow, they think I’ve taken over, that Ray and his boys were some sort of example.”

“And they came here to warn you off? Declare war? That sort of thing?”

“Not exactly; they came here to pledge their loyalty and set up my cut.”

Damarus stared at the embarrassed Scraver. “Let me get this straight: you are the head of criminal operations in Shaytown?”

“Well, most of ‘em. There’s this guy Wade and another guy, Cliff, who are holding out. But I figure….”

“Enough!” Damarus shook his head. “Look, do what you have to do to get the battalion equipped. That’s all: understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Six days ahead of schedule, 3/30 assumed combat patrols into the Rutter’s Ridge area, north of the bridgehead. These operations proved to be a ‘final examination’ for our battalion, providing very valuable experience and training. Both the Order and the Throne should, I hope, be pleased with the results of our efforts to build an effective unit out of the Third Battalion.”

The young knight ran a hand through his hair. The words on the screen were the truth, but a truth so faintly connected with reality as to make one wonder as to what the truth really was.

He shook his head. Nothing was ever as it seemed, nor as easy as it looked.

Gamer Story XIX (FS)

I’ve always had a web site devoted to my gaming campaign to help my players keep track of events. In the early days I wrote short stories based on the PCs and posted them on the site for my player’s amusement. This campaign was set in the Fading Suns setting.

“ Damn, its cold,” Elvis shivered as the Templars slogged along across the tundra. Julka, Malignatius’ moon, hung overhead, a dim oval made fuzzy by its terra-formed atmosphere.

“Well, it was nice and warm back in the Dark Base,” Remmie reminded him. “Remember how the Singularity Furnace kept us toasty ?”

“Do I.” Elvis shuddered hard. “I swear, I could feel it turning my bone marrow into mold. I never, ever want to be on the same planet as one of those.”

“Well, in about two hours the one on this planet will be a cloud of singed atoms,” Red remarked happily. “That fusion device will clean ‘em out.”

“Us, too, if we don’t step it off,” Quinn gasped. “Its got a blast radius of six miles, even three hundred feet under the bedrock. And we’re still only two miles away from it.”

“Its those blasted hoppers,” Elvis muttered, scanning the darkened sky. “They’re cutting into our escape time.”

***

Protos Sir Julius Li Halan, knight and brethren in good standing with the Sanctuary Aeon branch of the Church, slogged alongside the KICKER unit, a folding mesh sheet the size of a stretcher supported at waist height by two small anti-gravity units. The unit supported Tank, who had taken two Dark Rounds in the side, and while neither had unleashed their unholy warheads, the wounds themselves were deep; and Tim, who had been hit by two huge rounds, one of which had blown his left arm off at the forearm. The other had mangled his chest and possibly damaged his spine; Tim’s future was uncertain, although it was certain that if they did not get him someplace warm soon, he wasn’t going to make it.

The IR goggles on passive mode really weren’t that much of an improvement over the naked eye, but Damarus did not dare activate the unit’s IR beam; they had bumped into a patrol while searching out a good place to plant their bomb, and the resulting firefight had gotten Tim badly shot up, and the alarm raised. Breaking through a defensive barricade had used up the last of their grenades and a lot of ammunition. Tank had been badly wounded, and Cody had advised him that they were running low on medical supplies. Upon reaching the surface, with the fusion bomb counting down behind them, they had discovered hoppers circling overhead, searching.

It had all started with a letter from a distant relative who claimed to have dirt on the Decados rulers of Malinatius, once a Li Halan planet, now a Decados fief. Acting on the information in the letter, the Templars had gone to Julka, the planet’s terra-formed moon, to contact a prisoner of the gulags there.

On Julka they had been caught up in a Dark-based prisoner uprising, and had barely fought their way free. They had gone to meet this relative, only to walk into an ambush. Damarus was ready to chuck the whole matter when he woke up one morning to find a business card stuck to his forehead.

Which was how he had met Joni Lethco, a curvy Jacobin agent who, but for the timely intervention of Ragnar, would have conducted the briefing in bed. As it was, she had informed Damarus that the family member was now a follower of the Dark, dug into an old Second Republic military base in a remote area of Malignatius. House Decados did not want the controversy of taking out a Li Halan holdout, so the Templars, as an Imperial force, agreed to take the job. Lethco provided a fusion device to destroy the base, and information on a hidden entrance (an old power conduit).

Except that she had not mentioned, if indeed she had known, that the base had a fully operational Singularity Furnace, a Dark-fueled engine of unholy power which was making an army of Undead possible, and was fueling the construction of a Black Gate.

***

The sudden explosion of gunfire sent the Templars sprawling into the snowy turf as Dark Rounds whipped past their heads.

Cursing, Nick dodged to the right and sprinted up on line, crashing to the ground and rolling twice in case any of the shooters were tracking him. Snapping the bipod legs out, he braced the his SAW and ripped off two long bursts at the muzzle flashes dancing in a ragged line ahead.

“You’ll be all right!” Cody yelled to the wounded Tank above the gunfire. “Stay down.”

Someone screamed further down the firing line. The medic gave Tank a reassuring pat and got to his feet, firing blindly with his pistol as he raced to the sound of pain. He always fired his pistol when he ran; he doubted he ever got close to hitting anyone as he never bothered to aim, or even look in the direction he was shooting, but it made him feel better about being upright in a firefight.

And he needed all the good feelings he could muster: they were still within the blast radius of the bomb, whose timer was steadily ticking down the seconds, and they had just walked into a neatly-deployed Dark patrol. But for Ragnar’s keen nose they would have been chopped up; as it was both Damarus and Red were badly wounded.

***

Big Thunder bucked and roared, spewing rifled slugs at the Necromutants lying prone on the tundra forty yards away. One shivered and flopped as the heavy projectiles smashed its corpse-body apart, but the sight was little consolation to Quinn: his last drum of slugs was nearly empty, and the few buckshot rounds he had left were useless at this range. He had seen Ragnar swapping empty pistols for full, and then reloading the second pair; ammunition consumption had been heavy, made worse by the fact that everyone was carrying less in order to bring along silenced SMGs. The silenced weapons had not been needed because the noise generated by the Furnace and associated machinery drowned out all but the heaviest gunfire.

***

“BASTARDS!” Remmie screamed, awkwardly ramming a stripper clip of caseless rounds into his Nightstorm assault weapon. A Dark Round had blown most of his left ring finger off; Cody assured him it could be re-attached, but the pain was killing him.

***

“We got ‘em all,” Nick dropped to one knee by Damarus. “How ya doin’ capt’n?”

“I’ll live.” Damarus forced himself to sit up and look as a knight should. “How’s Remmie’s hand?”

“Doc got the finger back on. Looks like they got one of them ground radars set up, vectored these stiffs right into our path,” Nick grinned mirthlessly. “Better hope we’re off the screen, ‘cause ammo’s getting tight.”

“We’ll make it.” Damarus levered himself to his feet, keeping the pain from showing by years of Li Halan training. “And we had best get started right now.”

***

“Six miles,” Quinn sagged onto the tundra, gasping for air. “We’re safe.”

“Not hardly,” Hal grabbed him and heaved the burly Tech to his feet. “Six miles is an estimate. We need to get some extra space between us and the bomb.”

“Well, screw me,” Quinn sobbed.

“Thanks, maybe later.”

***

“Fifteen minutes to detonation,” Hal called. “Everybody stop, pick as big a hump as you can find, and dig in on the west side of it, pile the dirt to the east.”

“Dig with what?” Elvis wanted to know as Quinn collapsed behind a rock the size of a loaf of bread. “Damarus made us leave the tools behind, the bastard.”

“Watch your mouth, boy.” Hal loomed over the Tech. “That’s Captain Sir Damarus to the likes of you.” He pulled the heavy fighting knife from his LBV. “Use your knife.”

“I don’t have a knife,” Elvis pointed out peevishly.

“Sucks to be you, doesn’t it?” the Marine grinned as he moved on down the line. “Come on Quinn, start digging.”

“Bite me.”

“Its your funeral.”

“Anything’s better than being here.”

“ ‘It’s Captain Sir Dam-I’m-a-moron’,” Elvis mimicked under his breath. “Piss off, you bald bastard. I’m surprised we didn’t go ‘ten more feet’.”

***

Despite being seven and a half miles from the base, the shock wave rolled over the Templars with gale force, a graphic example of what could have happened to them had they been closer.

Two hours later an airship was making its approach, and the battered band limped away from yet another battlefield.

Gamer Story XVIII (FS)

I’ve always had a web site devoted to my gaming campaign to help my players keep track of events. In the early days I wrote short stories based on the PCs and posted them on the site for my player’s amusement. This campaign was set in the Fading Suns setting.

Remmie took a long drag on his cigarette as he rummaged through the disks. Selecting one, he inserted it into drive A, and then checked the unused space on the disk in drive B. “Should be more than enough,” he muttered. The monitor screen flickered and sprang to life.  The jolting viewpoint of a helmet-cam danced across the screen, and the speaker system rattled with gunfire and small explosions.

“Freggin’ smoke-humpin’ warts!” Hal cursed as he scrambled along the weed-choked drainage ditch, his broken ribs twisting his features with pain. Behind him, Mud Puppy, their tracked Krad motorcycle, leaned at a crazy angle in the blast crater created by the command-detonated mine; Augie was sprawled nearby, unconscious.

The Templars were searching a rebel-haunted corner of Shaprut, an al-Malik world of no particular distinction, for some Ur formations they believed were linked to Sathra cult activity. At the moment, though, they were most concerned with surviving the ambush sprung upon them by rebel forces.

“ARRRRGH! ” Hall screamed, popping up to pump half a magazine from his pistol at the muzzle flashes in the brush across the road. Dropping back down, he glared at his G-11, still in its rack across Mud Puppy’s handlebars. “Anybody in a position to give me some cover?” he snapped into his radio as rebel bullets sprayed dirt across his head and shoulders. “They’re knocking the hell out of me here.”

“It sucks to be you,” Remmie radioed back.

“Ought to edit that,” Remmie muttered, making a note. The monitor flickered with the images of the Templars gradually breaking the ambush and pushing the rebels back. Four disks later, the disk in drive B had all the footage from that ambush. It was Remmie’s standard procedure: transfer the files from disks slaved to individual cams onto one large-capacity master disk, time-code them, then blend them into one continuous-flow document.

Storing the Shaprut disks in neatly-labeled jewel cases, he racked them and dug through the box of cam-disks.

The monitor flashed into a scene of a darkened ship’s corridor illuminated by mini-spots clipped to helmets, the stark white beams picking out the twisted swirls of insane graffiti covered the bulkheads.

“Ohhhh, mannnnn….that’s the Zemchug ,” the Scraver breathed, a chill crawling across his body.

Damarus ducked the cleaver-bladed pole arm and swept the ‘blade’ of his wire-blade katana through the torso of the Undead husk before him. Soundlessly, the creature’s halves fell to the deck, still trying to attack the lean noble.

Quinn leapt forward with his chainsaw, Longtooth, and reduced the husk to its component sections.

“ ‘Oh look,’ ” Remmie observed to Hal. “ ‘A Lucretzin -class galliot adrift in the gravity well; the hull’s intact so lets investigate!’ Welcome to the Zemchug !”

“Too damn true,” the Marine growled, peering nervously about. “We should have guessed something bad was afoot.”

“ ‘Bad’?” Quinn snarled. “Shaprut was bad. The Drowned City on Byzantium Secundus was bad. Those black-eyed nomads were bad. This, now, is something you get when you go through bad and come out the other side.”

“Its not that bad,” Damarus assured them, cutting the power to his sword’s blade.

“Not that bad?” Quinn’s voice rose. “Not that bad? There’s gylphs hidden in the graffiti that prevent the powder in our cartridges from igniting, there’s a Dark entity loose with plenty of husks to animate, and there’s an entire Dark library in the hold. How can it get any worse?”

“ Never ask that question,” Remmie snarled. “It’s just begging for trouble.”

“Oh, crap,” Hal swore. “Captain, it looks like the Entity took over that cultist we had stashed; the pilot says he’s trapped on the bridge, and the tube-way connecting us to our ship has just been set adrift. Augie and Julie aren’t answering their radios, either.”

“See?” Remmie glared at Quinn.

“Augie didn’t make it,” Remmie muttered as he lit a fresh cigarette with shaking hands. “It damn near got all of us.”

The next disk brought up footage of a bright summer’s day on a lovely green world. The speakers rattled as tracers criss-crossed the screen and explosions flung clods of earth into the air.       

“Hira,” Remmie observed, squinting against the blue tobacco smoke. “What an armpit.”

Remmie squeezed the trigger three times in rapid succession, the holosight dancing across the tree line a hundred yards away. Brilliant flashes sprayed shredded foliage as the blast capsules in the 12mm caseless rounds exploded. Out of the corner of his eye he saw someone, Cody or Julie, sprinting through the smoke from the smoke grenade someone had thrown out for cover.

“Oh man, oh man,” Quinn panted, ripping off another burst of twelve-gauge slugs from Big Thunder. He couldn’t see a thing, just tracers screaming out of the trees, mortar rounds crashing in, RPGs impacting here and there, and the radio jammed with shouting. Damarus and Red were gone, probably dead, the Rapid Strike Vehicle with most of their gear was on fire, and Barnabas had been hit.

***

Ragnar ducked as a rifle bullet ripped overhead but did not paused in his efforts to drag equipment out of the RSV and throw them to safety. He had gotten the mortar tube and base plate, but couldn’t find the bipod or the anti-tank rifle. Tank was fighting the fire with the vehicle’s extinguisher, but Ragnar had seen too many RPG hits to think there was much chance of putting the blaze out.

***

He could taste dirt as he tried to claw deeper into the grassy meadow, bullets lifting gouts of dirt all around him. Damarus knew he should try to give his men some direction, but the HLF gunner had the range nearly perfect, and he did not dare move.

Snarling at the pain from the bullet-wound in his forearm, Red worked another 40mm grenade free of his load-bearing vest and slid it into the hot breech of his under-slung grenade launcher. His first shot had put a rifleman out of business, his second was spewing smoke near a RPG position, and if he lived long enough, he was going to put this HEDP round right on top of the rocket-launcher. Rifle bullets were whipping in all around him, but the smoke grenade he had tossed between himself and Damarus seemed to be giving him some concealment. But for the bullet in his arm and the lack of cover, he would have been doing fine.

***

“Keep it up Remmie! Blast everything you can see,” Hal yelled into his mike, ripping off bursts at an enemy SAW. The Templars had been ambushed by a unit of the HLF, the Hira Liberation Front, a group which wanted both the Kurgan barbarians and the Hazat Known Worlders off their mud-ball. Personally, Hal didn’t give a rats rectum who ended up with Hira so long as he wasn’t buried on it. The ambush had been a good one: the Templars had been driving along when they heard an explosion ahead; in a grassy meadow, two young children were screaming, apparently having tripped one of the many land mines in the area. Damarus, Red, and Cody had moved up on foot, and the jaws of the trap had closed; the kids, who were unhurt, had ducked into spider-holes, and the HLF force had opened up.

“Get some smoke grenades out,” the Marine roared. “Light up the tree line!”

“Barnabas didn’t unlock Lonesome Doug before he died,” Remmie observed sadly. “The worthless shyster couldn’t stay alive long enough to be useful. Damned Reeve.”

Sighing at the thought of lost profits on the bootleg magic lantern market, he filed the labeled jewel case and slotted another disk into the drive. A dry desert view sprang onto the monitor, and panned to show a mono-rail train rumbling across the barren wasteland.

“Julka, our first trip,” Remmie muttered, filling out a label. “The L-47 uprising.”

“Get off my train!” Quinn roared, blasting a convict with a burst from a SPAS shotgun, the cloud of buckshot shredding the man’s torso. “You, too!” He hammered another burst into the radically modified solar-powered ore-buggy that was attempting to offload more attackers onto the slow-moving train. The buckshot spread red ruin in the buggy’s closely-packed passenger compartment.

Turning from the window, Quinn wrestled a fresh magazine from his harness. “How’s it going?”

“Damarus is hit in the leg, and there’s a couple convicts in amongst the refugees.” Elvis Sparks slapped a fresh magazine into his borrowed pistol. “I should be on the ship; I can’t hit a thing.”

“Just firing helps. What got Damarus?” The two Techs had tried to repair the train’s radio with parts of Quinn’s radio, but the effort had failed.

“Tank shot him in the leg with that huge pistol he carries.”

“On purpose?”

“Apparently not. But with Tank, who knows?”

***

The Templars had come to Julka, Malignatuis’ terra-formed moon, to check on the fate of a convict they had received a tip about. The Decados authorities were helpful, and the Templars, carrying only side arms, set off to Gulag L-47 to see their man.

At the gulag, they discovered that the inmates had been organized by a Dark cult, and were in the midst of an uprising. Loading up their train with cars from the ore-producing gulag, and filling these with the women and children from a nearby village, the Templars had headed to safety at fourteen miles per hour, hundreds of buggy-mounted cultist-convicts in pursuit. Only the heavy weapons scrounged from a Decados fast-reaction pre-position site had kept them alive so far.

A sudden shape in the cab door made both jump; a filthy, runic-tattooed convict leaned in and fired his crossbow at Quinn; the bolt, a slender steel rod capped with a wrench socket filled with home-made explosives, blasted a hole through the burly Tech’s breastplate and undersuit, cracking several ribs and raising a nasty burn.

Elvis blasted four shots into the convict, who tumbled back out of the doorway and down the metal ladder. “Quinn! You okay?”

“Yeah…yeah…I’m OK,” Quinn managed as he tried to open his first aid kit with shaking fingers. “Get that crossbow: it really works.”

“Why did we ever go back?” Remmie wondered. Ejecting the last complied disk, he slipped it into a case and logged off the computer.

“Done?” Lily leaned in the door, wrinkling her pert nose at the cigarette smoke.

“Yeah.” Remmie stubbed out his cigarette in the over-flowing ashtray and stretched. “Took forever.”

“Well, the important thing is that you’re caught up,” the pretty little blonde girl assured him. “Come on-I made you supper. Its ready in the galley.”

“Sounds good.” The scraver heaved himself to his feet. At the doorway, he paused and turned, eyeing the rows of cam-tapes, and the much smaller stack of compiled disks. “Not a good minute on any of them,” he muttered, before slapping the light-control panel and stepping out into the passageway.

 

Gamer Story XVII (FS)

I’ve always had a web site devoted to my gaming campaign to help my players keep track of events. In the early days I wrote short stories based on the PCs and posted them on the site for my player’s amusement. This campaign was set in the Fading Suns setting.

“Go check it out,” Damarus motioned Remmie forward.

“It’s a door. I can see that from here,” the tired, filthy Scraver snapped. “What more do you want to know?”

“Is it locked, is it booby-trapped, that sort of thing.” Damarus was as filthy and tired as Remmie and the others, but he bore up under discomfort with true Li Halan stoicism.

The Templars had gotten a hot tip through an Engineer contact of Quinn’s that a covert Scraver dig in the Tepest Desert had stumbled across signs of Antimony.  They had gotten an Imperial Runt-class shuttle to drop them and a borrowed Mech-Mule loaded with supplies at the site of the dig.

But things had not worked out as hoped or expected. The Scraver base was unmanned; equipment was smashed and supplies looted or ruined; the Templars had taken some ammunition, weapons, and cylumes from the mess, but had few clues as to what had happened to the personnel who were supposed to be conducting the dig.

Until they had seen the nomad war bands darting from cover to cover, working their way in. Their background investigation (actually, a few minutes spent perusing a gazetteer while the shuttle loaded) of the desert had warned them of tribes of black-eyed Changed roaming the nearly lifeless desert, but nothing in the book had suggested why they would be concentrating at this point. Quinn had pointed out that it seemly unlikely that spear-using primitives could raise such a force when the tribes were scattered far and wide, but the fact remained that they were here.

Quinn had managed to get a portable think machine they had found in the ruins of the Scraver camp working by connecting it to a mapper unit’s screen. From it they had learned that the Scravers had been searching for a smuggler base that had been hidden in this area at the fall of the Second Republic, before the desert had claimed this continent. Another Scraver expedition had supposedly reached the base three hundred years earlier, than vanished.

The mapper unit had showed the Scraver progress towards their goal, and the Templars, armed with tools salvaged from the Scraver work site, headed underground, reasoning that they were better able to defend themselves in the rat’s nest of tunnels and crawlspaces than on the surface. From a daring recon by Illidan they learned that a thick maxicrete wall was less than forty feet of buried corridor from the Scraver diggings, and that the nomads were in the maze with them.

It took over eight hours, but the Templars cleared the corridor until they reached the wall, and a steel door set into it.

Remmie sighed and moved to the door.

***

Remmie howled as he raked a long, barrel-heating burst across the lines of advancing nomad spearmen, ending it in a curse as the bolt slammed forward on an empty magazine. Punching the mag release with his right thumb as he ripped another magazine from his load-bearing-vest (LBV), the Scraver trotted towards Hal, who was calmly pouring fire into the massed archers as arrows flashed down in hissing clouds.

It turned out the reason the nomads had not ambushed them while they cleared out the corridor was because they were waiting for the Templars at their destination. The door in the maxicrete wall had opened into a size-able underground hanger, which contained a powered-down starship, and over two hundred nomads. They had archers atop the ship, and spearmen below.

Damarus let his empty submachinegun drop against his chest and ripped his katana from its scabbard, combining the draw with a single fluid stroke that beheaded the closest spearman. He was under the ship, thus sheltered from the archers, while Remmie shot up the spearmen further aft.

The young noble was calm, the inner quiet of a true swordsman, welding blade and body into a killing machine while his brain struggled with their dilemma. They had opened the door causally, took some arrow fire, and immediately charged, only to find themselves staggeringly outnumbered. They had the massive advantage of full auto weapons, and the effects of a flash-bang grenade upon the spearmen, but they were burning ammunition at a staggering rate, and they had nowhere to retreat.

Believing attack to be stronger than defense, Damarus had led a charge, but the full group had not responded. Spotting the dim lights of a control panel next to a cargo elevator hatch on the underside of the ship, Damarus side-stepped to it as he sliced open a nomad’s throat. To his right, Remmie and Hal had taken cover behind some crates and were laying down cover fire.

Big Thunder roared out an eight-round burst, the cloud of triple-ought buckshot sweeping away a half-dozen archers. “Yeah! When Quinn the Engineer gets here, everybody’s gonna wanna cruise!” the big Tech bellowed. He was trying to cover the retreat back into the corridor. They had all started after Damarus, even Ragnar, who had had a leg crippled by an arrow, but Illidan had taken a shaft to the throat, Ragnar had been hit in another leg, and the charge had been stopped in its tracks.

Cody dragged Illidan into the corridor, then raced back out to help Ragnar, who was backing towards the door, his H-6 machinegun roaring into the ranks of the spearmen.

Quinn ripped another burst into the nomads, then howled as an arrow punched through his armor into his side. Cursing at the pain, he emptied the drum and slapped another in place as he backed through the doorway.

Kicking the door shut, he turned to Cody, who was crouched by Ragnar, working on an arrow. “How’s Illidan?”

“Dead. Watch the door.”

“I’ve got an arrow in me, when you’ve a free moment,” the Engineer observed as he pulled the door open, ripped off a burst, and then kicked the door shut. Arrows clattered against the steel portal’s far side.

“This is that black water the book mentioned,” Remmie yelled to Hal as he slid another magazine into his hot machine pistol. “Looks like liquid tar.” He bobbed up from behind the crate and fired a burst into the spearmen, who were badly intimidated by the savage volume of fire they were receiving.

“Thick,” Hal agreed as he reloaded, flicking his weapon so the empty mag landed on the hanger floor and not in the liquid, where expended brass floated. “I think we’re gaining fire superiority. Damarus still alive?”

“Yeah, the spearmen are withdrawing.” Remmie hastened their retreat by cutting two more down.

Hal bobbed up and picked off another archer. “Hey! Damarus is calling you.”

“Really? My battery must be low.”

“Yeah, he’s saying you should come up to where he is.”

“What? Couldn’t quite hear you.” Remmie ducked down to reload.

“Get yer butt out there, boy.” Hal jerked a thumb towards the ship.

“ ’Boy’ this, you stupid peasant,” Remmie snarled as he raced towards the knight. “I’m not some damned Marine, you know.”

***

“It’s a League Sentry-class Escort,” Remmie announced, leafing through the papers he had found in the ship’s safe. “From the dates and the recorder we found, I’d say this is the ship used by the missing expedition.”

The Templars were gathered on the ship’s bridge, which was illuminated by a couple cylumes.

“All right, good work. Quinn?”

“Its been powered down for a couple centuries. There ought to be just enough juice left to start up the power plant. Once its on-line, we can get the ship’s systems going and start storing enough power to get out of here.”

“That’s going to be a problem,” Hal pointed out. “The nomads are back under the ship, and we have to get the hanger’s roof hatch open  or we’re not going anywhere.”

***

Remmie slapped another magazine into his machine pistol as he leaped over a dead nomad, cursing under his breath. Snapping a burst at a retreating spearman, he kicked a steel door closed and twisted the deadbolt. It had been his idea to close and lock the six doors into the hanger once they had driven off or killed the nomads under the ship, in order to prevent more from coming in, but he wouldn’t have suggested it if he had known that it would become his job to carry out the plan.

Quinn had rigged a power cable from a line stripped out of the ship’s turret, and had improvised a sort of barricade on the cargo elevator. Once the ship’s engine had powered up and the systems were running, Ragnar, Remmie, and Damarus had dropped the elevator into the nomad’s midst (after a volley of grenades). The sudden wall of firepower drove the nomads off, and Hal and Quinn had then exited through the two torpedo-tube-like Marine portals near the bow. Hal had covered while Quinn hooked the line to an exterior power port on this ship and then ran it to the roof hatch controls.

Remmie flipped a frag through the next door and ducked away from the blast, then darted forward and slammed the portal shut. Tripping the centuries-old lock, he mopped away sweat and eyed the hanger as he trotted towards the third door. Ragnar was clinging to the side of the ship with several limbs while he blazed away at someone on top; more archers, the Scraver guessed. Hal was up past the bow firing at nomads on top of the ship; Quinn lay nearby, an arrow jutting from his back.

Weaving to make himself a poorer target, Damarus darted to Quinn’s side. “Quinn, are you all right?”

“I’m dying, dammit!”

“Hang on, Cody’s on his way.” The slender nobleman grabbed the coiled cable and scuttled to the controls, paying out the cable as he went. Flipping open a dusty cover, he slotted the connection into a emergency power socket.

‘That’s IT?!” Quinn roared, his voice hoarse with pain. “I took an arrow for THAT!? Why couldn’t someone with better armor have carried the cable?”

***

“Are the crates aboard?” Damarus asked as he climbed into the pilot’s chair, the age-worn material of the seat ripping at his weight.

“Yeah.” Hal tried to fasten the buckles of his safety harness in the co-pilot’s seat, then gave up at the old clasps failed to close. “Lets hope this works.”  Lights flickered from red to green on the panel before them. “The elevator’s secure.”

“Not any too soon.” The grinding of the hatch system overhead changed in tone, and sand began pouring in from above.

“We’re secure, sealed, and probably safe to take off,” Quinn announced as he trotted onto the bridge.

“Probably?” Damarus and Hal said in unison.

“Well, everything looks okay, but without shipyard equipment, I can’t say for sure.”

The young knight sighed. Nothing was ever easy, simple, or as he expected.

 

 

 

Gamer Story XVI (FS)

I’ve always had a web site devoted to my gaming campaign to help my players keep track of events. In the early days I wrote short stories based on the PCs and posted them on the site for my player’s amusement. This campaign was set in the Fading Suns setting.

It had seemed so easy a couple minutes ago: they had located the beasts’ lair, and from the appearances all that remained was to stroll in and wipe them out. Three of the creatures had attacked them an hour before, and it had been the work of a few seconds to cut them down, so how much harder could this be?

A lot harder, Captain Sir Damarus Li Halan discovered. The hard-faced young nobleman and member of the Order of Questing Knights had led his entourage (the Iron Templars) into the Drowned City beneath Byzantine Secundus. Their mission was to eliminate a band of feral creatures which were harrying a Church shelter for the poor, and to determine what was causing a diversion of the water in the area. The creatures, Raech-el, or trolls as the locals called them, had been tracked down to their lair, and Damarus had led the assault personally, as was his custom.

Things had begun to go wrong from the onset: first, the young woman-child, Me-kee, whom Damarus had rescued from drowning back at a squatter settlement had refused to stay with the boats. Then on the final approach, wading through knee-deep water, both Damarus and Remmie Garrant had stepped on ‘caltrops’ fashioned from rusty sheet iron. The thought of the number of different infections possible in this filthy water was unnerving.

The lair had been in an old workshop, a concrete oval set into the tope-colored bedrock whose strength and ease of working had led to the thousands of miles of underground cities beneath Byzanium Secundus’ crust. Three feet of filthy, stagnant water lapped at its walls, and a cloying stench of bad water, rotting vegetable material, and limited ventilation hung in the air. The only light came from the mini-spots (small, powerful flashlights) clipped below every gun muzzle, the white cylumes (chemical glow sticks) clipped to every Templars’ back, and the half-dozen cylumes they had thrown into the chamber just before bursting through the opening.

Damarus had intended for the cylumes to reveal any trolls hiding beneath the water, but the glowing plastic tubes floated, offering little clue as to what lay below the water, although they had helped illuminate the area.

For a few seconds, as the Templars splashed clumsily into the room, it had appeared that the trolls had fled. Then the first scaly humanoid leaped down from the beam secured to the wall over the doorway….

***

The shouting and gunfire made effective command impossible; Damarus dodged a mighty swing from a rusting cleaver and fired a short burst into its wielder’s chest, the heavy bullets smashing the creature off its feet. Punching the selector up, the granite-jawed knight fired four single shots rapid-fire into another troll erupting from the water.

He risked a quick glance around him as he plucked a fresh magazine from his load-bearing vest; the scene, however, was not a promising one. The trolls had split into four groups, three hidden beneath the water to the left, right, and center of the doorway, while the fourth group had balanced on a beam crudely fastened to the wall above the door. The latter had jumped down onto the Templars as their comrades rose up from beneath the water.

Ragnar, his mercenary Vorox bodyguard, was struggling with one troll on his back while firing two pistols at a second nearby; the ten-foot, six-limbed alien (who resembled a Kodiak bear from old Urth) was standing upright in order to be able to employ four of his multi-role limbs as arms. Clad only in a loincloth and harness, the big carnivore’s fur was nearly invisible beneath the load of weapons and equipment he had strapped about his person.

Halil ‘Hal’ Kona, an unflappable Charioteer Marine Damarus had hired off a League galliot, was nearby, one cheek bulging with a cud of tobacco, snapping off precisely aimed shots as if the lanky ex-serf was back on the firing range.

‘Precise’ could not be applied to Remmie’s shooting; the Scraver Associate was on his knees, water lapping at his chest, white-faced with pain from the terrible wound in his left shoulder which rendered his left arm limp and useless. He was not out of this fight, though: the slender Yeoman had just blasted a troll with a long burst from his machine pistol.

Andy Quinn, a glowing cigar butt jutting from his face, was on Remmie’s right, his cut-down shotgun belching flame and shot into a troll as the husky Engineer sought to cover his wounded comrade. Illidan Elis, Damarus’ personal bodyguard and House retainer, was spinning away from a troll, having just amputated its left arm at the elbow with his katana; the knight scowled at the sight: he had spoken to Illidan about this before, but the highly-trained martial artist disliked using firearms.

Codinesh Trandez splashed past, medical kit in one hand, pistol in the other, heading for Remmie. The tall, slender Obun male, christened ‘Cody’ by the rest of the Templars, was Damarus’ personal Healer and House retainer.

Magazine in place, Damarus turned his attention to the battle, squeezing off three more rounds into another troll.

***

“No loot to speak of,” Hal reported over the thunder of Quinn’s shotgun as the Tech administered head-shots to any troll which looked like it might not be completely dead.

“We are not here for ‘loot’,” Damarus sighed. “Did we get all of them?”

“We might have missed one or two, but no more than that.” The Marine spat a jet of brown juice into the water.

“Very well.” Damarus shook the worst of the water from an empty magazine and stowed it. He was out of ammunition for his rifle, and Ragnar had just reported that he was out of ammunition for his H-6 machinegun as well. Obviously, their planning had fallen a bit short in some areas.

There was so much to learn. Damarus had thought that after years of training on his family estates on Ikon and a tour as a Marine officer in his House’s Navy, he was prepared for anything. Just a week into his service as an Imperial Questing Knight he was learning the hard way that he had been wrong.

Not that all his planning had been bad: he had brought Illian and Cody with him from Ikon, and had hired Ragnar and Hal for added firepower, plus Remmie for his Scraver skills and Quinn as a Tech. All were reasonably well-equipped, competent in their fields, and loyal. But Damarus was learning the difference between being a Questing Knight and being a Marine Officer or householder: there was no logistical staff to attend to the details. The weight of command was hardly unfamiliar to a knight of House Li Halan, but never before had it weighed so sorely.

“Gather the men,” he instructed Hal. “We’ll return to the surface, obtain more ammunition, and then resume the mission.”

Weapons at the ready, the Templars left the chamber and splashed down the tunnel, their first task complete.

 

Gamer Story XVII (FS)

I’ve always had a web site devoted to my gaming campaign to help my players keep track of events. In the early days I wrote short stories based on the PCs and posted them on the site for my player’s amusement. This campaign was set in the Fading Suns setting.

It had seemed so easy a couple minutes ago: they had located the beasts’ lair, and from the appearances all that remained was to stroll in and wipe them out. Three of the creatures had attacked them an hour before, and it had been the work of a few seconds to cut them down, so how much harder could this be?

A lot harder, Captain Sir Damarus Li Halan discovered. The hard-faced young nobleman and member of the Order of Questing Knights had led his entourage (the Iron Templars) into the Drowned City beneath Byzantine Secundus. Their mission was to eliminate a band of feral creatures which were harrying a Church shelter for the poor, and to determine what was causing a diversion of the water in the area. The creatures, Raech-el, or trolls as the locals called them, had been tracked down to their lair, and Damarus had led the assault personally, as was his custom.

Things had begun to go wrong from the onset: first, the young woman-child, Me-kee, whom Damarus had rescued from drowning back at a squatter settlement had refused to stay with the boats. Then on the final approach, wading through knee-deep water, both Damarus and Remmie Garrant had stepped on ‘caltrops’ fashioned from rusty sheet iron. The thought of the number of different infections possible in this filthy water was unnerving.

The lair had been in an old workshop, a concrete oval set into the tope-colored bedrock whose strength and ease of working had led to the thousands of miles of underground cities beneath Byzanium Secundus’ crust. Three feet of filthy, stagnant water lapped at its walls, and a cloying stench of bad water, rotting vegetable material, and limited ventilation hung in the air. The only light came from the mini-spots (small, powerful flashlights) clipped below every gun muzzle, the white cylumes (chemical glow sticks) clipped to every Templars’ back, and the half-dozen cylumes they had thrown into the chamber just before bursting through the opening.

Damarus had intended for the cylumes to reveal any trolls hiding beneath the water, but the glowing plastic tubes floated, offering little clue as to what lay below the water, although they had helped illuminate the area.

For a few seconds, as the Templars splashed clumsily into the room, it had appeared that the trolls had fled. Then the first scaly humanoid leaped down from the beam secured to the wall over the doorway….

***

The shouting and gunfire made effective command impossible; Damarus dodged a mighty swing from a rusting cleaver and fired a short burst into its wielder’s chest, the heavy bullets smashing the creature off its feet. Punching the selector up, the granite-jawed knight fired four single shots rapid-fire into another troll erupting from the water.

He risked a quick glance around him as he plucked a fresh magazine from his load-bearing vest; the scene, however, was not a promising one. The trolls had split into four groups, three hidden beneath the water to the left, right, and center of the doorway, while the fourth group had balanced on a beam crudely fastened to the wall above the door. The latter had jumped down onto the Templars as their comrades rose up from beneath the water.

Ragnar, his mercenary Vorox bodyguard, was struggling with one troll on his back while firing two pistols at a second nearby; the ten-foot, six-limbed alien (who resembled a Kodiak bear from old Urth) was standing upright in order to be able to employ four of his multi-role limbs as arms. Clad only in a loincloth and harness, the big carnivore’s fur was nearly invisible beneath the load of weapons and equipment he had strapped about his person.

Halil ‘Hal’ Kona, an unflappable Charioteer Marine Damarus had hired off a League galliot, was nearby, one cheek bulging with a cud of tobacco, snapping off precisely aimed shots as if the lanky ex-serf was back on the firing range.

‘Precise’ could not be applied to Remmie’s shooting; the Scraver Associate was on his knees, water lapping at his chest, white-faced with pain from the terrible wound in his left shoulder which rendered his left arm limp and useless. He was not out of this fight, though: the slender Yeoman had just blasted a troll with a long burst from his machine pistol.

Andy Quinn, a glowing cigar butt jutting from his face, was on Remmie’s right, his cut-down shotgun belching flame and shot into a troll as the husky Engineer sought to cover his wounded comrade. Illidan Elis, Damarus’ personal bodyguard and House retainer, was spinning away from a troll, having just amputated its left arm at the elbow with his katana; the knight scowled at the sight: he had spoken to Illidan about this before, but the highly-trained martial artist disliked using firearms.

Codinesh Trandez splashed past, medical kit in one hand, pistol in the other, heading for Remmie. The tall, slender Obun male, christened ‘Cody’ by the rest of the Templars, was Damarus’ personal Healer and House retainer.

Magazine in place, Damarus turned his attention to the battle, squeezing off three more rounds into another troll.

***

“No loot to speak of,” Hal reported over the thunder of Quinn’s shotgun as the Tech administered head-shots to any troll which looked like it might not be completely dead.

“We are not here for ‘loot’,” Damarus sighed. “Did we get all of them?”

“We might have missed one or two, but no more than that.” The Marine spat a jet of brown juice into the water.

“Very well.” Damarus shook the worst of the water from an empty magazine and stowed it. He was out of ammunition for his rifle, and Ragnar had just reported that he was out of ammunition for his H-6 machinegun as well. Obviously, their planning had fallen a bit short in some areas.

There was so much to learn. Damarus had thought that after years of training on his family estates on Ikon and a tour as a Marine officer in his House’s Navy, he was prepared for anything. Just a week into his service as an Imperial Questing Knight he was learning the hard way that he had been wrong.

Not that all his planning had been bad: he had brought Illian and Cody with him from Ikon, and had hired Ragnar and Hal for added firepower, plus Remmie for his Scraver skills and Quinn as a Tech. All were reasonably well-equipped, competent in their fields, and loyal. But Damarus was learning the difference between being a Questing Knight and being a Marine Officer or householder: there was no logistical staff to attend to the details. The weight of command was hardly unfamiliar to a knight of House Li Halan, but never before had it weighed so sorely.

“Gather the men,” he instructed Hal. “We’ll return to the surface, obtain more ammunition, and then resume the mission.”

Weapons at the ready, the Templars left the chamber and splashed down the tunnel, their first task complete.

 

Gamer Story XV

I’ve always had a web site devoted to my gaming campaign to help my players keep track of events. In the early days I wrote short stories based on the PCs and posted them on the site for my player’s amusement. This campaign was the Hackmaster system set in the Kingdoms of Kalamar setting.

A cool spring night settled over Geanavue; carts and wagons rumbled through the narrow cobble-stoned streets, taking on and unloading cargoes that would have been impossible to move through the daytime pedestrian crowds.

The walls of M’s Welcome were thick, muting the street noise of iron-rimmed wheels on stone into a distant, almost comforting, rumble which disturbed neither sleep nor conversation. And Max had both to hand: he was sprawled in an oak-framed featherbed, one thick arm around Osila’s narrow waist, while beneath his pillow Doomsaker muttered. The burly leader of the Talons had come to terms with the personality embedded within the sword, and seldom did ‘Saker’s nocturnal reminiscing bother him, although occasionally his dreams turned to scenes of fields of battle from centuries past.

***

“It’s really enchanted?” the busty red-haired girl asked, her green eye wide.

“Yep. Bearbane, it’s called, for its habit of slaying Bugbears. I’ve hewed my way through many a war-band with that blade,” Loki assured her, tracing the patterns of freckles which splashed across her ivory shoulders.

The girl, a day maid at the Welcome, traced a rune etched in the black steel of one crescent blade. “It looks as if it just came from a forge.”

“The enchantment protects it from wear and rust; you should see the axe I used before: a year’s good use left the blade a quarter-inch shorter from grinding out nicks, I’d replaced two handles, and it looked as if it had rolled down a mountain in a barrel filled with bricks. Battle’s hard on blades.”

***

Ta’Chala shivered and reached for another blanket; although spring was here according to the locals, it was still cold to a man used to the heat of Svimhozia. Settling back into his pillow, he smiled at the faint, high-pitched snores coming from where Tylwyth slept atop a big feather pillow, wrapped in a towel for a blanket.

***

The Ant-men were closing in; Norbert’s arms were wooden, and his wounds throbbed like fire. He and Felosithe had been separated when the ground had collapsed from beneath their feet, and fighting alone was just one more unpleasant surprise in a day filled with unpleasant surprises. He’d killed several of the seven-foot humanoids, but the numbers were too many. He saw the lash of the spiked mandible, felt it crash into his chest¼.and sat bolt upright in bed, heart pounding.

“Hizure?” Felosithe murmured, laying a warm hand on his trembling back.

“Yeah, the ambush.” He had died from the stroke he had seen again in his dream; only the most powerful magics had been able to breach time and Death to reunite his soul with his body. “Not too bad, though,” he lied. “Sorry I woke you.”

“Is good time,” his wife assured him, nimbly slipping out of the old tunic of his that she slept in. “Now make relaxed.”

***

In his dreams, Shadow Rider (his new travel name, having lost his albino coloring) wandered the steppes, the ancient lands of his people, homeland to his kind. Rolling expanses of tall, sun-browned grass swept away from him on every side, no matter how long he walked. Beside him, old Urgy kept pace, his former headmaster at the Dark Academy looking unchanged, although it had been years since ‘Rider had seen him last. “It goes on for flippin’ ever,” ‘Rider moaned. “All this stupid grass. I’m a city boy, for Light’s sake. Which way is north?”

“A true son of the Dejy plots his path by the sun and stars,” Urgy observed, twirling a feathered boa.

“It’s noon! The sun’s straight overhead! How can you tell anything from it? What about moss? If I find some moss, will that help?”

“The Dejy are people of Nature.” It was still Urgy’s voice, but it was spoken by a large black duck which was hearing Max’s cloak.

“Screw Nature! I just want a slab of breaded pork and a flagon of cold ale!”  A sharp jab in the ribs woke him.

“Shut up,” Falastel hissed. “And quit thrashing around.”

“Thank the Light,” he mumbled. “I’m in a city.”

“You’ll be on the floor if you don’t quit waking me,” the warrior-mage warned him. “I’m serious.”

***

Merrick groaned. For years he had dreamed of getting his hearing restored, and now all it meant was that Arron’s snoring kept him from sleeping. For a moment he considered kicking the swordsman awake, but the sure knowledge that Arron would get no more than three or four hour’s sleep under the best circumstances stayed him from that course. Convinced that Norbert was his true King, Arron was ruthlessly exploited by his ‘monarch’, acting as dogsbody and general manservant in addition to his duties as a Talon. It would kill him if it kept up long enough.

Sighing, the Elf climbed out of bed and dragged on his clothes. A bottle of wine should quiet the world a bit.

***

Trova Greenriver slept peacefully, dreaming of neatly ordered columns of armed and armored men moving with discipline and expertise. He was alone in his double room, and nothing disturbed his slumber.

***

“See, dis is a ‘glint’,” Boager held up the coin for inspection. “Its gold. They mint ‘em here instead of crowns. See da eagle? That’s a good eagle, you don’t see eagles like that every day. Now, this one, Ta’Chala, he’s the black one who’s taller, but really is short, he said this was a five-ducal piece from Pekal. It’s worth the same as five crowns, only it’s not round. Ta’Chala said this is a hex shape, and he can read so’s I suppose he knows. Now this one here is a silver piece with the symbol of the Flesh-Render Orc tribe; I found it on the street in Xaarum one day, you remember, you were with me, we got a pie, it was blueberry.”

Calvin looked at the coin with wise goat’s eyes as he worked at a mouthful of oats. He and Boager were resting on a straw pile in Calvin’s stall. The huge half-Ogre spent most nights sleeping in the stall; they wouldn’t let him bring Calvin into his room, and a feather bed never felt right, somehow. He liked sleeping in clean straw with Calvin and Steel Brand. They could stay up and talk about the coins he had, or about what they had seen that day, as late as they wished.

Boager picked up Steel-Brand and held the hilt close to his face. “Hello?” Doomsaker talked, and Merrick said that there was a personality in Steel-Brand as well, but that it was dormant for now, until Boager bonded with the weapon. “Hello?”

***

Dag slipped across the rooftops, moving quickly and surely in the faint starlight. The Drow needed less light than the blanket of stars provided to move with confidence. Trained as an assassin by House Shadowlord (it sounded a great deal more impressive in its native tongue), he had broken with his House, his family, and every oath he had ever taken rather than take a child’s life as the final step of his acceptance into the Dark Blades. Now an adventurer on the surface, pursuing the path of Good with the assistance of Rex, the Merga Troll who had led him away from Evil in the harrowing days after he had fled his home, Dag faced daunting odds in his efforts to retain life and sanity.

Sometimes it bothered him that the others often acted as if Rex wasn’t even there, but he reasoned that racial prejudice took many forms, and being ignored was hardly the worst of them. It certainly didn’t bother Rex, who was somewhat intimidated by crowds in any case, and Dag worked hard not to let it bother him.

Slipping into position, Dag took up his assigned task: watching whichever Silver Taker the bounty hunters had assigned to watch the inn. They rotated the duty, but over the last few nights the Talon had seen them all, and learned their habits. It bothered him a bit that the Silver Takers were all rather young, but passed it off as a logical result of their savage beating at the Company’s hands last year.

***

The wains rumbled and dray teams clattered as they moved across the cobbles. Geanavue’s night-blood, as the locals called the nocturnal traffic: the economic heart-beat that kept the city alive.