Racing the Darkness - An Alpha Centauri Photologue

[Trenacker]

Convenience is what you want? Any closer and we'd be family. - Promotional material for MorganBazaar

If you could not go to the Morganites, they would come to you. Starting out from Golgu, their traders soon crossed the ocean to Shamash to present themselves--fearlessly--at every settlement they could find. When refused entry, they founded their own bases nearby and waited patiently for another audience.

This merchant, sketched on the Upper Slowwind, has a visor for the suns, a homemade re-breather for the nitrogen-heavy air, and makeshift body armor in case of attack by shredder pistol. A cudgel is his only weapon, suggesting business has not been good. In his last extremity, he may choose to sell his protective devices for their scrap value.

Hunters of the Pleiades Lodge returned to High Hide and Terra Nova with stories of root systems that branched for kilometers along valley floors, soaring to heights as much as fifteen meters. Their impressions, passed on to Deirdre Skye through Pilgrim prisoners taken in vendetta, informed the Lady's Theory of the Living Planet.

This Hunter survey team charts a course through the gloaming. For protection, the rearguard carries a rocket-propelled grenade launcher loaded with a high-explosive squash head munition--enough to crack the bark should the roots go into motion.

The Memory of Earth used Hoppers like this Kero Systems Wind Zipper utility craft to ferry settlers over intervening territories, straddling the Vertian Valley, where lay hidden the Four Cores, southernmost of the Children of the Atom's long string of bases, which ran the extent of the continent into the Orithyan and Sawtooth Mountains. Johann Anhaldt's people soon learned to fear Meractor's crack troops.

Wind Zippers, an Indian product, had extremely limited passenger capacity but their hull-mounted waldoes were acceptable replacements for earthmoving machinery that could not be risked on overland routes. Brought from Earth to capture and mine rogue objects moving through the Alpha Centauri system, they instead became trapped in Planet's gravity well and served the remainder of their lives as sub-orbital transports.

Sources:
First image is "Slaver" by Keithwormwood on DeviantArt.

Second image is "Erth621" by Elvisuall.

Third image is "Abduction" by GameLikeFire.

[MysticWind]

And it was so (pt. 4.2)

Explorers of the Armstrong Clan see a sign from the world-spirit on their first step out of the Riven Valley

The first mission decade had transformed the Confederation of the Land from last resort ragtag fragments to a people loosely confederated along familial ties, each clan ruled by worthy heroes of that wild valley. The former xenobiologist Joseph Gilpin, now a shaman visionary, sat first among equals at the newly-renamed headquarters of Council Lodge, but neither claimed overlordship among the clans, nor sole prophecy among the shamans. He did not have to. Those heady years were marked by equanimity and unanimity among the Landsmen, for all agreed that the world-spirit was real, the world-spirit was good, and the world-spirit wanted these sole survivors, kissed by the very Land itself, to recognise and live in harmony with the spirits of this world.

Soon after the Night of Whispers, the new Confederation began efforts for their emergence from the blighted holy valley. Their foray into low-tech weapons had provided plenty of slings and arrows for combating predators that disregarded the spirits. But for more dangerous game, they could not revert to absolute atavism.

A Hosa shock troop of the Rackham Clan carrying an AK-NV with axe bayonet attachment and wearing a ceremonial Bloodied Snow pressure mask

Fortunately among their number was Khalil Sultan Niyazov, a Soviet industrial engineer who once served as foreman at the Izhevsk Machine-Building Plant. Even while he now saw new violet-tinted versions of the suun sacred deer and the wolves of traditional Turkmen folklore running among the fungus, and venerated the spirit of the wild as a twin to Earth’s Kayra Han, he remembered how to build guns. Thus, he directed several families to slowly stamp out AK-47, AKM, AK-74, and AK-21C pattern rifles using the rock-basic semi-industrial base that the Confederation retained. When they were ready to venture forth, the first walkers were outfitted with basic slug-throwers capable of combat with any threat. Niyazov was honored as the Weaponsmith of the Land, becoming a clan leader.

The Confederation of the Land was far from the common caricature of a horde of neoprimitive barbarians. Dressed in ninthhand clothes stitched together from salvaged uniforms under comfortable coats and breeches of roughspun fabric, wearing sturdy mallowbeast boots tanned and stitched by the Msuya Clan, bearing pressure masks customized according to each individual’s view of the will of the world-spirit, toting newly-constructed rifles and powderless arms- these brave pioneers were a formidable sight. Each citizen of the clans was ruggedized for extensive outdoor operations. Thus the Landsmen moved swiftly into the new territories. Within a few mission years, new camp bases sprung up, small circles and grids of pressure tents in the style of traditional indigenous yurts, tipis, and goahti.

Two defining faces of the Emergence- a seeress-shaman of the Mokhelhe Clan, and a sharpshooter-scout of the Archer Clan

If you meet a stranger, do not be aggrieved by his ignorance. Those who have not experienced the birthing lack spirit-wisdom. He who has not shared in our dreaming knows no law beyond civilization. You cannot fault them for being grazers of the field. You can only guide them gently to the spirits, as you lead crawcrabs to a pen. But remember, folly is no excuse for evil. He who wishes harm upon your clan is a beast to be returned to the world-spirit.
- On the Birthing-Time

They had never wanted bloodshed. But it was inevitable just the same. The regions surrounding the Riven Valley was the distant frontier for established factions, so they were bereft of any appreciable presence. At most, there were isolated encampments of smacer renegades hiding among deserted Supply Pods and the carcasses of ruined Scout Rovers from doomed expeditions. These asocial outlaws were even more shabby and ramshackle than the tribal Landsmen, and so they generally avoided the columns of Gilpinist settlers treading through the valleys on foot and on subrid-drawn wagons.

The few encounters with the smacers were as ambiguous as the loyalties of the factionless mavericks themselves. Some greeted the explorers and offered them small alien artifacts- either common baubles, or outright fakes- in exchange for maps of the unknown lands that they had emerged from. Others begged for clemency and aid, offering sob stories of persecution from whichever factions they had fled from. For their part, the Landsmen offered to help however they could, believing the world-spirit desired them to extend all life wherever possible. That some of the smacers sought to scam them, rustling their wagons or laying traps for other brigands, only saddened them.

And these people from beyond the valley proved impassive to the call of the spirits. While some of the clan shaman had earnestly preached the will of the world-spirit, of its signs and manifestations, none of the antiestablishment smacers, a class defined by their rejection of cause and creeds, deigned to listen. Some, particularly those who had fled factions based on blind faith, such as the Lord’s Conclave or the Memory of Planet, mocked and spat at the nature-humpers in tribal gear. But that was not the worst offense.

Bold smacer tollsmen demanded payment from these interlopers for passing through “their” jurisdictions. Most backed down when the clan chiefs took off their pressure masks to express their displeasure. The ones who pressed the challenge, as well as ambushers who said nothing but simply attacked the settlers, quickly realized the hidden strengths these half-savages possessed. While the Landsmen carried at best only Kalashnikovs and Niyazovs, their discipline and numbers easily overwhelmed even marauders with stolen impact weapons.

The Ballad of New Amnesty

The experimental multi-factional armistice zone on the Silenus Plateau shortly before the arrival of the Landsmen clans

Finding these other tribes of man to be less than friendly, coupled with the intense trauma experienced by those who had awoken during Planetfall, the Landsmen ventured carefully onwards. Once they had gotten through the extended smacer-haunted wastes, they arrived at the frontier of other civilizations. Namely, they discovered the Silenus Plateau, one of the farthest settled territories at the time. Though a mere quarter of the size of the Sunny Mesa, this elevated flatland had become the once-uneasy, now-quiescent, site for several factions. A temperate highland with nutrient-rich xenolichen growing among its industry-refinable rocks encircling small pools of freshwater, the plateau also served as a protective refuge from dangerous wildlife. Its vantage point gave both early warning and tactical advantage against the ground.

Out of both cosmic coincidence, no fewer than six different factions had scouts that had discovered the plateau within a cycle. Perhaps out of the complexity of the situation, the permutations of potential alliances of convenience being too many to contemplate, the factions agreed to nonviolent mutual exploitation of Silenus. Its potential as a launchpad for further exploration was excellent. So like the Antarctic continent was on Old Earth, at least for a time, the plateau was settled by multiple factions with small frontier bases. This unique neutral territory, dubbed New Amnesty, grew to become a polite neighborhood of metaphorical picket fences managed via military preparedness. The factions engaged in light trade and sharing of explorational intelligence on the region, and social ties grew. This mixed salad of peace and prosperity, complete with outdoor parks growing revived Earth conifers alongside gengineered Planet hardwoods, now welcomed the newcomers.

Hutama, the Sumatran-born U.N. Under-Secretary of Economic and Peacecrafting Efforts, directed diplomatic efforts with the Landsmen

From the start, skepticism and suspicion ruled between the two assemblages. The sentries of New Amnesty first assumed the mass of post-apocalyptic-looking scavengers to be some sort of smacer army. Since the early mission decades, the fear of a charismatic bandit king uniting the smacers was a boogeyman for the baseborn. Others presumed they were perhaps a group of Darwin Raiders, seeking to capture the plateau in the name of the Khagan Robin Huxley. Closer inspection of the distinctive wilderness-oriented attire of the Landsmen, and their peculiar subrid steeds, allayed those fears. Yet the clans themselves, who had heard unreliable narratives of oppression from smacers, did not immediately trust these insiders. Regardless, all met at the foot of the plateau under the flag of truce.

Allsaints Abacha, chief of the Abacha Clan, whose Biafran family and followers had been among the first to accept that the world-spirit was an incarnation of their ancestors’ god (in their case, Chukwu) and its spirits simply Chironian variations of the same (for them, the Arusi), represented the Confederation in Gilpin’s stead. Having been disappointed by dishonest capriciousness of the wasteland dwellers, he sought to share the will of the world-spirit to these town-builders, who he trusted to at least be literate.

If you really want peace, prepare to trade. - Everyday Aphorisms for Personal Success

The local Peacekeeping Forces governor Hutama, former Indonesian delegate to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, spoke for the denizens of New Amnesty. Having been sent to the backwater posting for making incessant trade pact proposals back at headquarters, the diplomat who once wrangled megacorp contractors as the U.N. Liaison to the Unity Mission Industry Standards Board had made the most of his little pond. With the mindset that all of Earth’s problems should have been resolved through unfettered, mutually beneficial (yet still self-opportunistically asymmetrical) commerce, he had launched a charm offensive against the neighboring factions with a flurry of resource exchange deals and a Byzantine web of cross-factional agreements. As the prime diplomatic instigator, Hutama subtly set up the United Nations on Planet as the leading force of the plateau. In fact, he had even named the local Peacekeeper base U.N. Amnesty Town, attempting to create a synecdoche to conflate the region with his own faction’s settlement. So when this new rabble of scavenger-survivalists turned up at his door, he was ready to sell arrowheads to these aboriginal reenactors.

What resulted was a confused but vaguely agreeable meeting. The people of the plateau were unable to get a straight answer as to who exactly the savage band was and where it came from, other than claims about “people of the wild” from “the Heart of the World.” The local psych chaplains diagnosed mass delusion, perhaps owing to Spontaneous Atmospheric Shock Amnesia, and definitely exacerbated by technology deficiency. The people of the valley were unable to make the base dwellers understand the significance of the spirits, who lived all among them and were the source of their bounty. The shamans supposed civilization had little improved since the fire in the sky. But they did agree to peaceful relations. After Hutama and his delegation discovered that this settler column had apparently crossed the expanse of wastes, and knew of the geography beyond, he wasted no time in offering them nutrient resources, medical supplies, and all sorts of aid- even rounds for their primitive gas-powered assault rifles he surmised to be of little threat to a particle impactor-level society. In exchange he requested only geographical and anthropological information, which he believed to be intensely useful for expansion operations. And mutual defense against smacers, an easy ask as these newcomers had lamented at length the injurious ingratitude of the wastelanders.

Chief Abacha was once again let down by the resolute incredulity of outsiders, but he remembered the High Chief’s words and resolved to remain patient. He agreed to the deal, asking only to be free to preach the good news of the world-spirit upon the plateau. This ultimately resulted in more or less a Pact of Brotherhood, albeit loosely unofficial, as befitting an agreement between two frontier forces. The Landsmen settlers politely declined a plot of land (delighting Hutama, as it meant more land for the current residents), instead building the new tent base of Lone Pine in the foothills east of Amnesty. They also established a mission to the Silenus Plateau at the Peacekeeper base, where their shamans were to minister to their wayward cousins.

The settler train of the Confederation of the Land would build their largest camp at the doorstep of civilization. For now their wandering was at an end, as here were multiple cities of the plain who were ready to receive the will of the world-spirit. The leader of the plateau seemed overeager to learn what wisdom they held, while doling out lavish amounts of supplies the Landsmen would have gladly killed for.

Of course, this was all too good to be true.

Casting

Hutama is portrayed by Joe Taslim

Design Notes

The Landsmen (Tribals) use of AK-47s, importance of pressure masks and boots, and so on are details provided by faction creator nweismuller. Names of clans all taken from faction base names.

Notes:

Hutama is the leader of the sponsor Polystralia, also known as the Commonwealth of the Pacific, from Civilization: Beyond Earth. Teaser lore here.

Image Credits

Header is a Destiny 2 preview for its upcoming final campaign The Final Shape

Warrior is an Eclipse soldier from Horizon Zero Dawn tribes concept art by Luc de Haan of Guerrilla Games

Seeress is a Priestex character class of the SMAC-influenced Worldfall supplement for the Legacy: Life Among the Ruins tabletop RPG.

Sharpshooter is a Hanza sniper from Metro 2033.

Multicolored space colony base is from Quriocity.

[Trenacker]

Section 4.2.3a(12) - Emergency Communication. For all emergency transmissions, use radio channel 433.

Every part of Unity was made to be repurposed once the expedition arrived on Chiron, including the computer terminals installed in virtually all ship's compartments.

These were simple French- or Soviet-made boxes reliant on cathode ray tube technology, capable only of displaying text and making crude noises to announce system errors. Users that wanted to do more than talk to a hardwired mainframe needed a memory cart containing their program of choice, which they inserted in a central slot.

French models like the one shown here were ready for radio modem communication once on the ground. Signal-finding required manipulating the dials found on the right-hand side of the case.

One of the more useful pieces of diagnostic medical equipment available to early colonists was the 3KCAP X-ray gun. Fully-charged batteries guaranteed at least eighteen images.

Bad breaks were a constant threat in Chiron's high gravity well. The gun thus earned something of an unwarranted reputation as the harbinger of amputation (the first and last resort in Chiron operating theaters), and many colonists refused the dubious good fortune of its services.

The platform proved versatile enough to be converted to both non-medical civilian and military uses as a ground-effect scanner and a primitive, short-ranged weapon, respectively. At extreme settings, a single burst from an overloaded 3KCAP at 4 meters could inflict instant disorientation, followed within a day by bleeding gums, vomiting, headache, and fatigue.

High-powered point-to-point radio kept road crews, scientists, soldiers, and sailors in touch with Base Operations at their points of origin. No item other than the personal oxygenation system was more essential to life "outside the wire."

Unity carried a quarter-million two-way transceivers turned out by Turkish defense manufacturer ASELSAN and marked in English.

Sadly, the practical range of this equipment far exceeded the effective response time of most first responders, and the tinny cries for help on Frequency 433 were usually the bookend of a failed mission rather than the starting point for a successful rescue.

Sources:
First image is "Fallout 4 - Retextured Terminals  - 4K" by Ephla442 on DeviantArt.

Second image is "ЛП - 183" by Maxim Buyanov on ArtStation.

Third image is "Sci-Fi Device" by Rogelio Delgado on ArtStation, inspired by the work of Tony Zenitium.

[Trenacker]

Restorationist fighting vehicles approach a Tribal arcology, intent on its destruction.

Forgiveness was a discipline Mission Loyalists declined to practice.

There is no physical record to tell us what Pete Landers thought of the charges levied against him in the Planetary Council, nor any reason to believe he ever created one. Kellerites could hardly deny the great blow they had struck to the emergency response effort--a fatal one, perhaps, considering the severity of the Hypersurvivalist mutiny already underway.

Landers's cohorts were proud of their bloody work. At Cartersburg the device on their banner read "Nihil doleo," I sorrow over nothing. Unity was evidence of sin to the devoted Kellerite. What worse crime than to relinquish one's ties to family and community in favor of an enterprise that celebrated the anonymity of its members?

Tribal stockades and roundhouses hove close to one another at the mouth of the Slowwind. Expansion was slow, even grudging: there were few enough live births among Landers's people, and before the expulsion of the Spartans at Xerxion, no new colony could be conceived except in immediate peril.

Building skyward was expensive, but the heavy cannon installed in the uppermost levels had commanding range. The column seen here was routed after only a few hours' trouble despite the fighting skill of its members. The Minutemen took many prisoners for future exchange and recovered a platoon's worth of armored vehicles. Landers might have liked to match them against the notoriously mobile Spartans but for economic reasons they were stripped down and used as civilian tractors.

Unit operators at Morgan Monofill consider how to mitigate a burst cask of Shcherbinium 5, a Chironian chemical element and the most radioactive substance known to man.

Shcherbinium 5 was harmonically active at 45,000 Hz and repellent to xenofauna. Morgan Metals cultured the crystals to impregnate vehicle armors and building materials.

Morganite copywriters hailed Shcherbinium as the key to mastery of Chiron.

New State cadets perform routine inspections at Frontenac's Jaws, a military outpost in the Slowwind Delta. Unmanned submersible vehicles could have done the same work more safely and at lower cost, but the experience in pressure suits helped make canny marines of "St. Germaine's Boys."

Almost no problem underwater was a minor one. Sealurks were constantly fouling heat vents and cold water intakes. Shifting sediment blocked escape hatches. Sea creatures, including predators, thrived around pockets of waste heat and compost. Because oxygen scarcity encouraged deep-sea gigantism, pest control was warfare by another name.

Sources:
First and second images are from the collection "Battlefield" by Daniel Romanovsky on ArtStation.

Third image is from the collection "Ballast powered descent vehicles" by Patrik Rosander on ArtStation.

[Trenacker]

Food is the soul's ammunition. - Peregrinations of Planet

Colonists were pleased to take shifts in community gardens where they received a percentage of all produce brought to harvest. Everywhere, the practice was the same.

Walking wounded like this New State tetra-commander of 17 Inshore Squadron performed light duty in greenhouses as part of their convalescent routines. Scientific illiterates searched for rot-sign and replace insect media.

Deciding what to grow in these shared spaces was a cherished prerogative of all base inhabitants--one of the few decisions granted scrupulous respect by faction leaders worldwide.

Herbs were most in demand, then fruit in the form of coffee cherries and citrus. Kellerites, Spartans, Pilgrims, and Morganites were scoffed at for growing tobacco, which they issued in lieu of coffee.

Commercial bio-engineering restored the endangered blue whale and vulnerable sperm whale populations on Earth to the levels of least-concern, and with them, revived the appeal of whaling.

Terrestrial species took to the waters of Chiron more readily than they did to other environments, and their meat was a reliable source of essential vitamins and proteins for flesh-starved settlers.

"Subpars" were small commercial establishments that traded in additives used to supplement standard rations. Depending upon the faction, customers might pay in cash (credits), goods, labor, network time, or council votes. They could also swap unwanted items in their meal kit for something more personally palatable.

Salt was popular but expensive. Most diners came for spices, especially pepper and garlic.

Subparts sidelined in sales of alcohol (most often grain alcohol, derived from surplus rationpak noodles). In the University, subpars installed Geiger counters so that patrons could account for safety considerations before any purchase.

Sources:
First image is "space farm" by macarious on DeviantArt.

Second image is "Inside the Market" by METAPHOR9 on DeviantArt.

Third image is "Cyberpunk Tavern" by panprince on NightCafe. It was made with AI.

[Trenacker]

Technicians have mobilized from Lovelace Dome to staunch a coolant leak on a borehole mining rig. The angle of this image is fortuitous. A near piece of the Unity wreck passes low over the horizon beyond.

Alone on the eastern edge of the Uranium Flats, sensors at Lovelace Dome provided early warning for the faction's more established Vertian settlements nearer Shamash's western coast. Forward-deployed computers calculated probable vectors of attack and cabled them promptly to the Headquarters.

Pete Landers could not bite every hand outstretched in the spirit of cautious cooperation. By special agreement with Johann Anhaldt, two companies of Tribal militia were available to relieve pressure on the Four Cores.

The grenadier in this catch-vid is kitted out, for once, in a manner that makes it seem possible he may return alive. His accoutrements include a re-breather, laser-reflective helmet, ballistic vest, and grenades sourced from at least three separate militaries: spherical American, hive-shaped Yugoslav, and long-handled Gathi.

Once local armories had been stripped bare, museums were the next logical source of war-fighting equipment for the would-be militia. Kellerites were not to be excluded. This militiaman's tin hat and utility webbing predate him by at least 150 years, but there is less to complain about in his 96-model Stoner long-barrel light machine gun. A digital rangefinder will improve the weapon's already-murderous accuracy.

Barring the limitations of their undersized faction economy, Kellerites supplied their soldiers as well as they were able. This soldier is bundled against the upland cold and his pouches are full to overflowing with spare equipment and ammunition.

Sources:
First image is "Repair-Team Color" by MackSztaba on DeviantArt.

Second image is "An hazmat soldier wearing full body armour and Black-Glass Gas Mask" by weepy-hyena73 on Prompt Hunt.

Third image is "Soldier 5" by ProxyGreen on DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

This living world takes us for its own example. As we do unto Planet, so Planet will do unto us. - Planet Dreams

At seven, Dierdre Skye escaped her tutors to become lost in the moors. Home for school holidays, she fetched blankets and books to the battered women sheltering in the servant's quarters of Wainwright Downs. Some were scarcely a decade older than the impressionable seven-year-old herself.

Shailene Skye encouraged her daughter to learn the stories of others without disclosing her own. People needed symbols, she said, more than they did friends. The Lady Skye was more away in Edinburgh and Brussels than she was at home, tending the business of charity.

As an adult, Dierdre found she could take the part of others with little in the way of deeper knowledge about their circumstances. She held herself a leader--first to recognize oppression, first to contemplate action, first over the barricade. Her Earth liberation handlers knew her as credulous. This new recruit would throw a bomb or divulge trade secrets on the flimsiest suggestion that a righteous cause would be gratified. To her supervisors, Dierdre was a gifted botanist with regrettable fixations--an albatross they tolerated so as not to offend the influential mother, at least until the point she was jailed, providing adequate pretext for summary dismissal.

Dierdre's work straddled two worlds: she was trained to study a people-less past in furtherance of the future, but she spent her career trying to rewire a natural order upended by Man. The tension was exquisite. Dierdre felt the academy could not keep pace with the horrors of modernity--of war and industry, to be precise, and the scars they inflicted on the land.

Never lacking in physical courage, but blind to the privilege that spared her the full consequences of failure, Dierdre picked fights she had no hope of winning. Anyone in her proximity was potentially at risk of becoming a casualty. The U.N. overlooked that unfortunate business in America in favor of Dierdre's credentials. Her combination of skill and spirit seemed vaguely appropriate for a war zone. Recruiters hoped she might "prove resourceful" when matters inevitably deteriorated.

In Peshawar, with the radical mullahs against her and police leadership paralyzed by fear, Dierdre set aside the pleas of her own staff for conciliation with their oppressors. The female clerks stayed. The clinics and granaries remained open. Dierdre importuned the Northwest Frontier Force for more men and stronger guarantees. Jihadists murdered eight of Dierdre's people, maiming six more. Security forces were slow to investigate. Instead, they accused Dierdre of provoking the bombing. She had been warned many times what would happen if she insisted on defying prevailing customs.

Officially, the U.N. suspended Dierdre's operation for reasons of safety. Unofficially, she was blackballed for a second time--written off as a loose cannon without the reserves of patience necessary for her post. She retired to Wainwright and began to resume the acquaintances of a past life. Her "rehabilitation," culminating with accession to the Unity crew, was merely the happy accident of becoming a Nobel laureate.

Any believer in a prejudice will tell you plainly: it is a failing that is best when shared.

Dierdre's aggressive spirit showed itself immediately. Gaian raiders wasted no time falling on other factions in southern Shamash. They had their reasons. From Spartans and Kellerites, they wanted blood. Morganites were collectively to blame for the death of Captain Garland. Pilgrims and Dreamers were common thieves not entitled to the excuse of exigency. Anhaldt was the very face of the irresponsible science that had made it necessary to flee Earth. Pahlavi's geneticists were crypto-racists, Zakharov was a fool, and Miriam a geo-imperialist.

Skye's taste for the performative aspects of rulership led her to endorse physiolatry. Gaians leapt, danced, sang, and drugged themselves with untreated water. They celebrated the things they could see, touch, smell, and taste. They approached Chiron from a place of curiosity rather than opportunism, and in so doing learned more about its ecology than if they had rushed to kill and dissect.

The first great civilizations were sun worshipers. God first made light. We, a people of the sun, raised full generations underground, or wrapped in metal cocoons. But you're not really human if you've never felt the heat of sunlight on your upturned face. - The Lost World

Sources:
Dierdre Skye is Morena Baccarin as seen on the StarGate franchise.

[Trenacker]

A king is just a banker who spends men in place of money, and usually with less distress. - The Puzzle Box

Alfred Siegfried was a successful trader in seal fur prior to winning election as Shiloh's first monarch in 2029. He took the regnal name Silas and adopted the surname Benjamin, claiming descent from the ancient Israelites.

The new king was driven to insolvency by his wooing for the crown and began pulling the levers of state patronage to reward the backers who had made him. Disaster followed promptly. Third-party auditors reported that the central reserve bank was keeping bad reports. The national university at Antioch, previously recognized for excellence in oceanography and the study of tropical disease, gained new proctors who promptly sold most of its $14 billion collections. After deep cost-cutting by the national airline, a passenger flight crashed into the sea just short of Durban, South Africa. All 220 souls aboard were lost.

Foreign investors panicked. Then a sargassum bloom appeared along Shiloh's west coast. Disputes in the crowded fisheries off the Selah Bight escalated to violence. After the abduction and brutal murder of two ethnic Chinese fishermen, Beijing sent a pair of destroyers that opened fire on a pair of factory ships owned by the Shilohne government as they departed the small harbor at Küv. The bombardment overshot and struck a fuel depot ashore. Both irreplaceable factory ships sank and some 582,000 gallons of fuel oil spilled into the sea caught fire.

Küv, Shiloh, c. 2029.

Attempts at economic stabilization came to nought. Shiloh had little arable land and almost no natural resources were accessible from the surface. Silas first contemplated seizing U.N. trust lands from the country's Sikh minority, but backtracked when police admitted they would be unable to enforce the measure if contested. Six expeditions to the lava fields of the Slaar Cone came together after the dynasty mortgaged its crown jewels and adopted World Christianity as the state religion (badly alienating its own multi-confessional subjects) but these, too, ended in disaster. The colonies were abandoned after disagreements with their benefactors, leaving behind $4 billion worth of scientific equipment that Benjamin's government lacked the means even to salvage. Dutch objections scotched negotiations with Geneva over a new space elevator. A visit from the American supercarrier USS Bob Dole (CVA-121) next convinced Silas to send the Soviet ambassador packing with polite rejection of his country's offer to rebuild Küv.

Penitence cults accepted environmentalists' warnings that mankind was actively dismantling Spaceship Earth, but were more concerned with the recovery of a working civil society. Some, like the one at Slaar, attempted the Radical Reconciliation proposed by theologian Miriam Godwinson, forming colonies of mixed allegiance: ex-Holnists joined Vaulters, Unionists, Evangelites, and even ex-Kellerites in "free living," away from what they considered the insidious influence of corporations and the vengeance-minded popular consensus of post-war America.

In Shiloh, the cultists were welcomed only by the crown. Local wellermen resented what they saw as a government preference for outsiders and refused contracts to supply the Slaar venture. Confessional colonization by penitents was already problematic because of their association with an international steering committee under the influence of an exegetical synod that, contrary to Godwinson's stated intentions, insisted upon specific readings of the Marian expansions to the Bible. This stifled the organic revelation that tended to emerge in the isolation of colonial settings and led to many colonies breaking with the committee, thus ending the critical financial relationships that made them possible.

Facing food riots and calls for his abdication, Benjamin accepted the advice of his senior general, Linus Abner, and authorized the invasion of Shiloh's northern neighbor, Gath, a country more than twice Shiloh's size, but with just one-sixth its population. On October 7, 2032, Shiloh advanced two small corps north, led by the crack 3 Motorcycle Battalion.

Gath was caught by surprise. Port Prosperity, the continent's largest metropolis (population 420,000), was isolated from the rest of Gath by an 808-meter massif. The border was undefended. Leading elements of the invasion force road cable cars in from the suburbs unmolested. The local commander, an ex-Canadian Allophone expelled from Free Québec and resettled in Gath by the U.N., was killed in a car wreck speeding to the barracks. His successor, a Major F.R. Bilev, was helicoptered into the city from a pleasure yacht where he'd spent the previous night. Arriving to general chaos, he attempted to enact his predecessor's battle plan, hinging a defense plan on the city's waterworks, only to find that radio and satellite communications were being jammed. With reports of catastrophic casualties, Bilev surrendered the remaining defenders--4,600 of them--in less than two days.

Port Prosperity was recaptured by Gathi forces in the war of 2038. The ruined tower left of center, an observatory built by the Soviets at U.N. invitation, was converted to a prison by Vesper Abaddon in 2039. Its upper tier was destroyed by the Truth and Reconciliation Government after Abaddon left office.

Victory in war provided Shiloh with only dubious benefits. Port Prosperity was quiescent, casualties had been blessedly light despite two years of figthing, and much of the Gathi arsenal, including a modern frigate, fell into the hands of Abner's Royal Army, limiting the possibility for effective partisan activity in Occupied Gath and strengthening the Shilohne military's hand in national politics. A car carrier was intercepted fleeing the fighting, and Abner was able to gift his king with 1,700 Dacia automobiles, soon redistributed among courtiers in Gilboa. On the other hand, most of Port Prosperity's resident industries were unavailable for expropriation or resale. These included large railway workshops owned by Imre-Meinertzhagen, modern port infrastructure belonging to a Danish consortium, a navy yard managed by Grumman Engineering, and steel mills run by a subsidiary of Indian giant Vedanta. Silas left them unmolested, expecting they would remit future taxes to him, but instead they paid no one. Both combatant nations were also heavily indebted to arms traders. Abner had brokered a number of deals with Morgan SafeHaven to keep his soldiers in ammunition and clothing. (Various African warlords and ex-rulers consequently ended up at Silas's court over the next few years, some as guests of the House of Benjamin awaiting Morgan's fulfilment of promises to return them to power, others as beneficiaries of his mercy after being deposed.)

Somewhere along the coast, Morganite Resolutions fighters celebrate a victory over Gathi National Guardsmen during the first year of Silas's conquest. The company did Shiloh no favors by providing the impressively heterogeneous arsenal seen here.

Less than five years after the victory that made him a household name worldwide, Silas Benjamin disappeared. Whether he was killed during the Gathi bombardment of Gilboa in 2040, or became a prisoner of his great enemy Vesper Abaddon, it is unlikely he survived to see Unity on her way. Yet his problematic legacy went with the colonists to Chiron. Even as nationalism fell increasingly out of favor, Silas and Vesper dueled in abstentia through a series of ghost-written essays that appeared on the Planetary Networks beginning in MY4. Many were later traced back to faction leaders themselves.

Foremost among Abaddon's defenders was Miriam Godwinson, who understood Abaddon's self-abnegation as a Pauline allegory with important ramifications about the capacity for lasting reconciliation in the absence of retribution. Colonel Corazón Santiago celebrated Abaddon and Benjamin as the ideals of the reluctant warrior--prepared to fight in the last extremity, but always as monarchs in the pursuit of better circumstances for their respective kingdoms. Morgan was thought to have spoken through intermediaries on behalf of clemency to avoid setting the precedent that leaders might be accountable for crimes to a court other than one of their own making.

Oscar van de Graaf admitted that he'd have liked to hang Silas Benjamin as both a murderer and a charlatan, but held out Abaddon as properly ruthless in his pursuit of peace through total victory. Foreman Domai and Dr. Johann Anhaldt wanted both leaders condemned for squandering what meager national resources they'd had at their disposal. J.T. Marsh struggled to find evidence of good on either side but allowed, like van de Graaf, that Abaddon's was the better claim to clemency as the party "first wronged." Factor Roshann Cobb confined himself to wry remarks on the fact that the human species seemed only to have two solutions for any problem, and both of them war.

Sources:
Silas Benjamin was a main character in the 2009 NBC television show Kings. His part was played by Ian McShane. His general was Linus Abner.

"...and 20,000 tons of crude oil spilled into the sea caught fire," is a quote from a Clarke & Dawe skit, "The Front Fell Off." I've always loved that turn of phrase.

Walvis Bay, Namibia, stands in for Küv.

Slaar colony is "Ground work -Edge Colony" by Pablo Munoz Gomez on ArtStation.

Port Prosperity is Corto Maltese as seen in the Suicide Squad.

Our Morgan Resolutions mercenaries are cartel fighters in the 1994 film Clear and Present Danger.

Special thanks to the Internal Movie Firearms Database for the trove of relevant images.

[MysticWind]

And it was so (pt. 4.3)

Men’s words reveal their hearts, but the spirits show us their thoughts. - The Spirits Speak

The Ballad of New Amnesty (cont.)

A fully-grown Norton’s subrid, large enough to support both a carapace overcarriage and the standard drawn wagon for this Landsman pioneer family

Of the two factions that should have been most receptive to the Confederation of the Land, both had their relations end in ignominy.

The Hunters of Chiron who camped at Vista La Salle had decent initial relations with their fellow wilderness survivalists. After all, they were glad to meet any who embodied the machismo of living in nature. Even their queer worship of the wilderness was not too far from the superstition many in the Hunters’ number held for the woods and the fungal fields. The specific Hunters who were Centaur knights of the Saluki Lodge were particularly keen to learn how these exotic savages had managed to tame subrids to serve as steeds and draught animals. There were several splendid hunts between the Hunters of New Amnesty and the Archer Clan in the fields around Lone Pine.

But ultimately, relations deteriorated, as they often do between alphas. The Hunters believed that all of Planet was their domain for their mighty work, and did not hesitate to trespass on lands of their Pact brothers. Even groves and fields considered sacred by the clans were not exempt from roadmen of the Roadrunner Lodge or the fungicidal Goatmen Lodge. In response, the Landsmen huffily expelled the Hunters from their territory, denying their secrets of Centauri Domestication.

~

The Human Tribe who lived at New Denver were mistrustful of this rival community of tribals from the very start. Perhaps it was the wild shamanic appearance of the Landsmen which invoked bitter memories of some of the far right esotericists among the Holnist mobs. Strange reactionary beliefs from ancient civilizational palingenesis to national anarcho-primitivist ecofascism abounded among those who had once preyed upon the American Kellerites, and many of the Holnists wore flamboyant anachronistic costumes not unlike Gilpinist clan attire. Rumors spread among the Tribals that these bloodline-tracking nature lovers were none other than some lost militia of Holnists who had now returned to finish the job against the followers of Keller.

Local militia lieutenant Anto Kankaras made use of his citizens’ fear and mistrust of the Landsmen, lobbying against their inclusion into the New Amnesty framework. A security consultant who had sold confidential Unity intelligence to the preacher himself, the Yugoslav Serb had thrown in his lot with the Human Tribe for a ticket away from the dying Earth and a chance to crack heads at the head of a host of the fanatical communalists. Grimly accepting his faction’s dearth of professional military experience, Landers had begrudgingly elevated the turncoat to commander. At the plateau he sought to protect the riches reaped by the joint signatories of New Amnesty, agitating for a strongly-armed defense against potential treachery from these new arrivals.

For their part, the neo-primitives did not think much of the Tribals except their intransigent reverence for Jean-Baptiste Keller, a mere man, made little sense when compared to the majestic raw power of the world-spirit. Thus the tribesmen of the Land sought to avoid the Tribals as a lost cause. Ironically, these two sets of tribalists had much more in common than either thought, both having been marginalized by victimization and their convictions.

Landsmen trance-dancers convene with the world-spirit under his eye as they commemorate Spirit Whispers Night

Two of the factions that would have most prized the knowledge and wisdom of the Landsmen ended up repelled, either way.

The Peacekeeping Forces administration at U.N. Amnesty Town sent UNESCO cultural attachés to Lone Pine, and a SOCHUM rapporteur to the Confederation mission on the plateau. Hamstrung by Hutama’s trade-minded agenda, the attachés awkwardly wandered about the threadbare pressure tent circles of the new base camp, offering modern environmental suits and next-generation ClipCom, portable datalinks nodes and synthsucrose-infused ration packets. None of which the clans, so fixated were they on preserving a pure and unfettered connection to Planet, desired, but they did agree to purchase pressure masks, boots, old-style Soviet ammo, and camping gear.

In exchange they were only asked to give testimony as to their experiences as an incipient faction, which the Landsmen did at great length, ensnaring the Peacekeeper visitors in long-winded meandering tales that seemed to be bastardized renditions of various creation myths from Earth. When pressed for geographical information about the lands they had crossed and had come from, they were forthcoming, but subsequent expeditions discovered many of the noteworthy landmarks were not monolith sites or particularly fruitful nutrient reserves, but simply fungal groves that had been marked by the clan pioneers passing through, possibly for purely ceremonial purposes. Over time, the hosts of the new camp came to tire of the interviews that came without reciprocation (it has been said that the average Peacekeeper must file in triplicate to even consider a new worldview), and the patronizing way that these nervously-grinning bureaucrats offered to upgrade every aspect of their modest abodes with “modern goods.” Annoyed, they gradually shut out the inspecting interlopers. Regardless, this did mark the very first ethnographic study of the Landsmen.

~

The University of Planet research base at Biotic Survey, on the other hand, made only cursory inspection of the seemingly basic hovels of these anarcho-primitivists. While some of the scientists were at first amazed by how they had made it so far across the hostile wastes of Planet, their admiration was cut short once they realized that it was simply by careful conservation of Unity-salvaged resources and ingenious but simple recycling of the same. All of the land-worship, the University believed, was vanity. Needless irrationality, most irritating.

Worst of all, this rabble presumed to substitute actual scientific knowledge with their own regressive superstition. Landsmen medicine men and women spoke of the world-spirit’s four “key threads”, sometimes conflating the Anemoi, the Sì Xiàng, or the four sons of Horus when referring to the basic building blocks of life. The self-proclaimed shamans would brew elixirs and tinctures using the jury-rigged remnants of the ship’s gene therapy labs, despite seemingly having forgotten the fundamental realities of genetics! Seeing witch doctors mumble Planet prayers while titrating and injecting their credulous flock repulsed the scientists’ every sensibility. Thus, the disciples of Zakharov cut active ties with the Landsmen almost immediately, disgusted by seeming mockery of the most sacred sciences.

A Morgan Corporate Security recruit examines damage done to a Motherloder Supply Crawler by Landsmen vandals

The two factions most deeply-involved with altering the landscape of Planet received the sharpest responses from the Landsmen.

The Shapers of Chiron who toiled at Vines of Ararat regarded the Confederation warily. The disagreements between Nagao and Skye prior to and during Planetfall was part of the founding mythos of the faction, prejudicing them against those who maintained an overly-respectful, let alone worshipful, attitude towards the Chiron environment. But the terraformers became some of the most eager to exploit the Landsmen’s knowledge of the land for their own ends. While actual geographical information was lacking, the liquidators who visited Lone Pine and spoke to the green-talkers came away with a newfound understanding of Planet’s soil composition and intricacies of the fungal development cycle, known only to those who had lived in the Riven Valley. Even if it was cloaked in spiritualist woo, the geomancers were able to pierce through it easily enough, as theirs was a culture well-acquainted with melancholic evocations of the lost paradises of Earth’s old mythology, and the guardian deities that had ones ruled them.

In contrast, the Landsmen were profoundly disturbed by the aims of the Shapers, as they came to understand them more and more. When a party of Bauer Clan observers had witnessed a Shaper former party liquidating a xenofungal field, they were nearly moved to strike at the destroyers with giant stone mallets. But then they saw the Diggers mass-plant the reclaimed land with Terran trees and plants, and became fundamentally shaken. This was no simple act of blasphemy. This was syncretizing of a sort beyond their experiences in the valley. The co-mingling of Planet’s spirits within, with those of Earth’s species: what could this mean? Did this weaken the world-spirit, infecting her with the mute plants of the old biosphere, an alien contagion? Did it introduce foreign spirits that might compete with, even overwhelm, those who sang the songs of the fungus? Or did it strengthen it through hybrid vigor, creating a new pantheon? Chief Abacha had no answers, neither did the shamans of the pioneer party. They resolved to bring the matter before the council and the High Chief at the next available possibility.

~

The Dynamic Enterprise regional franchise at Morgan High Spirits was founded by a rogue office of entrepreneurs with little regard for stodgy corporate regulations. Imbued with startup energy and ruthless pragmatism, they went along with the New Amnesty program eagerly, reaping in the profits of joint exploitation of the Silenus Plateau and its environs, while externalizing any expenses and difficulties onto their faction partners. And so when this new batch of plant-lovers had appeared from beyond the great frontier, they were ready to pump them for cartographic data of potential thorium mines or fungal patches secreting biochemicals for pharmaceuticals. Ironically, the mercantile-minded Hutama had beaten them to the punch via the materialist appeal, sending his attachés to sell standard UNHCR refugee tents.

The growth hackers at Morgan H.S. simply pursued the spiritual path. Leaning on the massive conglomerate’s marketing division’s decades of wisdom, they quickly dispatched Morganite salespeople trained in the memetic arts to entreat with the Landsmen. Clad in blue robes, wearing bead necklaces, wired into the SciOps team via codec inner ear stimulation, trade-probes descended upon Lone Pine, posing as spiritual acolytes. As Morgan librarians poured over reams of anthropological lore to whisper New Age messaging into their ears, they claimed communion with this spirit or that, falling into trances in elaborate performances. They sought to gain the trust of the Confederation clans, asking probing questions about their sacred groves, fields of worship, and alien ruins seen beyond the wastes.

While these avatars of spiritual enlightenment did dazzle the Landsmen for some time, allowing the Morganites to gain some useful data to rival that of the Peacekeepers and the Shapers, it did not take long for the new neighbors to reveal themselves to be more than ingenues. Landsmen scouts quickly determined that the Morganites were the ones sending the most heavy vehicles away from the plateau, intent on reshaping the landscape for all sorts of extractive or disruptive industrial activities. Seeing the routine ecological devastation wreaked by Morgan activities, the natives of Lone Pine were quick to push back. The result was the culmination of all tensions that had built up between New Amnesty and the Confederation of the Land. As in so many circumstances, the Morganites drove the final nail.

Notes

Anto Kankaras is from Far Cry 2.

The Landsmen’s peculiar understanding of DNA comes from the SMAC Fac Pack’s tech quote for Biogenetics.

Image Credits

Subrid wagon is “Chull slave wagon” by Akhil Nasar

Landsmen night ceremony is a depiction of the Keepers of the Flame cabal from Worldfall

Giant truck tire shot with arrows is from the beginning of Avatar

[MysticWind]

And it was so (pt. 4.4)

Like you, we are sprung from our Mother's holy waters, and from Her very seasons. We call upon you now, before it is too late, to return to Her as you once did in summer evenings long gone by. It was our hand that smote the proud edifice of your tyrant kings. But it is our planet's spirit that has acted through us. Now it must act through you. - Sermon at the mission gates (0)

The Battle for New Amnesty

Aerial view of Lone Pine at its greatest extent shortly before outbreak of hostilities

The Confederation of the Land settlement at the Silenus Plateau existed seventeen decurns [1] - seventeen Chironian weeks - prior to involuntary dissolution. In that time, the Landsmen traded with, proselytized to, and learned from the basemen of New Amnesty, discovering both the bountiful crops of modern post-Planetfall civilization and the bitter fruits of its undiminished greed and avarice. Even as the baseborn members of the pact on the plateau learned more about this new society that had spawned in a faraway valley choked by fungal patches and that hideous strength of the sinister singing planet, the more divisions they discovered.

This came to a head around mid-mission year, not long after Earth Day [1]. While the colonists of the plateau had somberly memorialized their lost planet with U.N.-hosted ceremonies and lamentations at Amnesty Square at the junction of the six bases, the villagers below had feasted and reveled at the great circle of Lone Pine. Unlike the rest of Chiron society, they knew no connotations of mourning for the mid-year festival. Indeed some particularly amnesiac Landsmen observers politely inquired the basers what exactly was this other star they were weeping about. Was it a lesser spirit that had departed?

Landsyouth minibike gangers returning from a night of carousing at Morgan High Spirits

As part of the festivities, the clans’ youngsters, so often the most belligerent of a faction, took it upon themselves to act as avengers of the world-spirit. The Wild Things, a small gang of Unity electric minibike riders, bored of the sparse activities among the rocks of their encampment, took it upon themselves to harass Shaper and Morganite work convoys. While their activities had normally been limited to graffiti and firing harmless long-arrows at the massive ‘formers and cargo trucks, they had decided to celebrate the mid-year with a fiery christening. As “drinks that entice the body and mind” were cautioned against by High Chief Joseph outside of proper rituals, gift cases of tuak hydroponically-raised palm wine from Hutama and Glenailbhean Morgan Scotch went un-imbibed in the camp, and were readily repurposed by the young hooligans as Molotov cocktails. Since the low-oxygen atmosphere of Chiron quickly snuffed out most fires, most “terror toasts” gave the basers a scare at most, nuisances that led to complaints at the plateau mission but no actual harm beyond some swerving and cursing.

This afternoon, however, the Morganite convoy departing for a southeast worksite includes a Mansa fuel truck carrying over ten thousand gallons of liquid methane. Surely such volatile cargo deserved eminent protection, which is why a full escort of Morgan Corporate Security rides shotgun, firing next-gen combat shredder rounds at the marauding minibike kids, first as warning, then at their solar motors. But then Brave Kanata of the Wild Things gets the drop on the corpos, skillfully threading in and out between the smaller trucks and the slow-moving auxiliary ‘former platforms. He swoops in towards the rear right of the great vehicle, smashing mirrors and lights of smaller trucks he passes with a lacrosse stick carved from stiff fungal finger-roots. Dodging shredder fire, the Landsyoung tosses a lit-rag bottle of ‘23 Trekker Table Mountain Chenin Blanc at the fuel truck. Panicking, the nearest corporate guard leaps at the burning wine bottle, swatting it away but losing his balance. As he falls and twists in mid-air, he accidentally fires his service rifle, embedding several rounds into the cargo tank. The flechettes ricochets, denting the huge store of LNG but failing to penetrate the vehicle. Meanwhile, on a nearby rock ridge, a Wild Things sharpshooter bullseyes one of the dents with a SVN Dragunov Niyazov variant.

The resulting fireball is visible from the top of the plateau.

Human Tribe militia commander Anto Kankaras at bunker Reno Ridge before Operation Roll Out

To the credit of the Morganites’ professionalism, most of the surviving members of the convoy manages to avoid the flaming wreck without continuing the chain reaction too extensively. Even more impressively, the Azawakh monobike security personnel who belatedly emerges from the main truck successfully corrals and disables the Wild Things gangers without resorting to excessive force. (That they were contractors without shares, let alone options in Morgan HS, dampens any fury they might have felt towards the destruction.) A Unity scout ‘chopper scrambled from the base also captures a secondary group of Wild Things upon the barren knoll, including the amateur sniper himself: Abel Archer, the crown prince of the Archer Clan. Also in tow is his sister, seeress-in-training, and spotter Rayan [2]; the somehow surviving Kanata; and several other riders including one Tetsukabuto, the runt of the gang.

Events quickly spiraled out of control. The Morganites naturally demanded financial redress from the Landsmen, not only for the vehicles and lives lost, but also for the opportunity cost in operational interruption. Company leadership drew up plans to subjugate Lone Pine to ransom the Confederation, knowing that the pioneer outpost had little in the way of useful assets. They had little faith in the neo-prims’ further usefulness as a pact brother in the wake of such injurious insult, let alone their subsistence level of economic development.

This vengefulness was echoed by the unlikely partner of New Denver. The Human Tribe townfolk galvanized in response to the blast. Previously only those who had fought in the Second American Civil War who were most suspicious of the fur-wearers, but now nearly all of the Tribals were united as a community. This was helped in no small part by militia leader Anto Kankaras, who waved photos of the wreckage and directed his officers to disseminate portraits of the Morganites slain by the terrorist attack. While the actual Selectman who administered the base had cautioned against aggression, she was sidelined by Kankaras, who had tapped into the populist anger of the citizenry. “New Amnesty Strong” was the battle cry of the day.

At U.N. Amnesty Village, Economic and Peacecrafting Efforts Under-Secretary Hutama was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. His Peacekeepers were seen as the unofficial voice of the factions on the plateau, but now that spirits were running hot, it was functionally less direct leadership and more of a spokesperson role. The Morganites wanted blood for blood, and the paranoid Tribals backed them to the hilt. This had implications for the plateau’s economic order: Morgan High Spirits had often acted as a tech incubator for initiatives to develop the region, investing energy into other factions’ enterprises in infrastructure building and resource gathering. And while the Human Tribe was a small faction, it had a relatively sizable population on the Silenus Plateau. Gratified by frontier tolerance, the Tribals had become an eager workforce across the factions, from spear carriers for the Hunters of Chiron to latrine-diggers for the Shapers. Thus both capital and labor were represented in anti-Landsmen sentiment.

The University were happy to echo any condemnations of the irrational fungus-eaters. The Shapers had no love for these animistic newcomers who had stared at their terraforming operations for a little too long. The Hunters’ mood towards them had also soured and were ready to scrap mano a mano. As much as Hutama pleaded for calm and reminded the others of the cornucopia of frontier information that the Landsmen had gifted them for ergs [3] on the kilojoule, the rest of New Amnesty were done with peace.

The minibiker hooligans had been taken onto the plateau and were detained indefinitely, ironically at the Landsmen mission at the Mount Mar Elias Center. The large facility, a former hab complex, was hastily-deconsecrated and Confederation diplomatic staff were told to get out and go back to Lone Pine. Their protests and sit-ins were overshadowed by a rash of riots across the Silenus Plateau. Visiting Landsmen and local converts to the Terokredo religion counter-demonstrated against vendetta rallies headlined by Tribal citizens and Morganite-astroturfed drone paid protesters, devolving into street brawls in multiple bases across New Amnesty. Outside of Peacekeeper territory, local security forces universally backed the pro-vendetta side. Capitalizing on the growing unrest, Kankaras bypassed his Selectman’s leadership to directly call for mass detention of all Landsmen and sympathizers, and most of the plateau agreed. Dozens of unfortunates were rounded up and housed at Mount Mar Elias. Meanwhile, a joint Morganite-Tribal force was levied and a punitive expedition codenamed Roll Out was initiated.

A Landsman warrior evades a Tribal killsweep in the ruined outskirts of Lone Pine

The operation involved half a dozen attack rovers, over seventy infantrymen, and several recon ‘choppers. Anto Kankaras informed the Morganite corporate forces that overwhelming force was the most cost-effective method to neutralize and pacify the neo-primitives. They left the eastern approach of the Silenus Plateau at dawn, securing the passes and roads to the encampment. They arrived at the outer ring of pressure tents to find a small welcoming party of Landsmen bearing peace offerings of fungal-carved craft, spore “honey,” and rare wild fruit. University cybersecurity specialists had cut datalinks with the base days ago, at the height of the riots. Having been barely informed of what had transpired over the past decurn, the residents of Lone Pine were willing to make amends in exchange for the lost boys who had been taken from the convoy strike, so they could be properly disciplined for their intemperance… and ineptitude. They did not yet know why contact with the mission at Mount Mar Elias had been lost, assuming technical difficulties.

The Morganite commander refused, citing company regulations and U.N. extradition protocols alike to justify why the Wild Things were to be prosecuted by the faction that had been wronged by them. Instead they handed a notice declaring that they were no longer pact brothers with New Amnesty, and demanded that Lone Pine surrender itself. An involuntary leasing of the base and its inhabitants was to be in effect until contact with its so-called High Chief was established, to gain full remuneration for expenses incurred from the attack.

Confused shots broke out, perpetrators unknown. Within opening minutes several of the welcoming party had been slaughtered by the New Amnesty force, though witnesses admit that the Morganites had lept for cover behind their vehicles before shooting (back?). The remainder of the Landsmen let their gifts fall as they lifted up AK-NV rifles from their cloaks, firing precise shots that aimed at the front tires of the rovers. A lucky grenade round landed under the troop carrier, rendering it useless for transport during the remainder of the operation. Above the battlefield at rocky promontory points, Zulinski Clan icemen emerged from the mud they had lain shrouded in. Having used biofeedback techniques to lower their body temperatures to match their surroundings, the ‘choppers above had only seconds to register the sudden appearance of tens of heat signatures, followed by the telltale blasts of Unity surplus MANPADS. Within moments, half of the ‘choppers were falling from the sky. The rest of the icemen rained fire from their vantage points at the invading forces below, prioritizing officers- the ones from Morgan High Spirits were distinctly identifiable in flashy colored armor and unique helmets.

The initial incursion had been blunted at the start, but superior numbers and superior weaponry ruled the day. Despite losing several of their commanders, the New Amnesty force found its footing and unleashed its own mortars upon the heights above. Morgan corporate security countered the century-old Kalashnikov variants with particle impact weapons. Tribal militiamen, seeking to avenge the fallen of Des Moines, San Francisco, San Cristóbal, and the Unity itself, charged through Niyazov fire to tear their now blood-marked Landsmen enemies from limb to limb. Hand-to-hand skirmishing occurred between bowie knives against ritual machetes. Few defenders survived on the ground, where all were taken captive. On the rocks above, the icemen slipped away, but not before detonating several tons of nitrate explosives hidden in the pressure tents.

I don’t give a fung about what arms you’ve got! UN standard, NATO stock, pneumatic rifles, di-lasers, whoo-boy particle smashers, bring them all out. Precise targeting not required. Our guns will know who to shoot. - communique during ROLL OUT

The first battle of Roll Out set the tone for the remainder of the special police operation. New Amnesty would arrive with overwhelming force, meet unconventional defenses, suffer unnecessary losses, and win pyrrhically. Reinforcements were quickly dispatched from the home bases, as the war willingness among the civilian population remained high. Within days Lone Pine was in flames, though much of that was self-inflicted by defenders: pressure tents housing fuel and incendiaries were set ablaze to trap New Amnesty troops. Citizens of the plateau cheered at the scenes of barbaric nature-idols burning the same way the Morganite convoy had.

And yet, the progress was hollow. Chief Allsaints Abacha had evacuated his people within minutes of news of the initial attack. They had fled east with everything they could carry, leaving only token ambush squads to hassle the plateau forces. By the time the last pressure tent was in the invaders’ hands, the New Amnesty forces had realized the ploy and drew up plans for a subsequent campaign to capture the Landsmen. This final battle would take place in the fields beyond, on the Plains of Isaac.

Notes

(0) From the Autumn Rain Manifesto of The Mirrored Heavens, Book I of The Autumn Rain trilogy by David J. Williams

[1] Preliminary Report on the Alpha Centauri System, probably written by Derek “Del” Cotter

[2] The occasionally feminine name Rayan works just as well as an acronym as RYaN does, don’t you think?

[3] Erg could be one subunit for how energy is measured as a currency

Image Credits

Lone Pine aerial view is Red Rock Canyon from Fallout: New Vegas

Bike gang is from Akira

[Trenacker]

Feeling is information: a reflection of lived experience, and ritual a means of accessing it. - Human Calculus

Kellerites transit the water obstacles at Defianceburg on Rumrunner's Cascade. This far north of the Slowwind Delta, Spartans are a rare sight, but defenders are on high alert for Ascendancy Legionnaires.

The Tribe and the Hunters began with the smallest populations on Planet. Just 254 Kellerite stowaways boarded Unity. Three perished in passage, victims of faulty wiring jobs to cryobeds of second-hand provenance, and another forty-two during the struggle for supplies and escape. Rather than chance their wounded with either the U.N. or Security Forces mutineers, Kellerites shot friendlies who could no longer give battle. Faction fighters took another twenty-seven prisoners along the way, keeping only the able-bodied--thirteen--as slaves.

Marsh gathered 750 of the Forward Contact Team at a promontory called the Scalpel to declaim his manifesto but retained just shy of 400 when the rovers broke up. Nagao's defection, requested in private, led to a row of four hours. It was all a severe blow for a man who fancied himself a gifted leader, especially by comparison with the more "professorial set" like "Zachy" and Garland. A bottle of mushroom liquor got the better of him for the next three days and the matter was thereafter closed to discussion.

The largest faction at landing was the Lord's Conclave, bloated with the injured and the dying, but food ran out quickly and many starved. Believers nonetheless took seriously the Lord's commandment to multiply, and by Mission Year 5 were against the most numerous people on Planet.

Nwabudike Morgan's appeal proved as broad as it was familiar, and for a time during Mission Year 1 and 2, as others foundered, his well-supplied, completely isolated faction was the largest by a wide margin.

Birth rates were very high among the Pilgrims and Believers whenever food was plentiful and the same was suspected of the Gaians and the Hive. Both the Hive and the early Spartans practiced forced breeding, though their populations were much reduced by constant warfare.

Birth rates were abnormally low within the University, the New State, the Ascendancy, the Dreaming, and the Children of the Atom. The scientists were sick, sterile, or disinterested in traditional family life. Beneath the waves, St. Ledger's people needed little prompting to procreate but established a lottery system out of prudence to avoid overtaxing available life support. For the genetic supremacists high in the mountains, new life was created only in the test tube, which meant slowly. Cobb's people were too traumatized to reproduce, some because they were drugged, others because they were unfree. Anhaldt's developed a collective anxiety with similar consequences.

Gaians tend hybrid crops in a weather-controlled stretch of the Nýksan where the atmosphere is tolerable for human lungs.

Fungal bells have been adapted as vessels for Terran soil. The bells provide considerable protection from the natural hazards that ruin harvests on Chiron, including curious subrids.

The Children of the Atom earned the derisive nickname "actuaries" for their obsession with analytical modeling of activities performed haphazardly by their peers.

The human settlement is a self-regulating system that eventually achieves through popular demand the self-same cleanliness, splendor, and calm that it is impossible to impose at the founding. - Notes on Value

Sources:
First image discovered on Pinterest account of Tkachenko Zp, linking back to this Russian-language webpage.

Second image is "The Lonely Chull" by InvictaHistory on reddit (r/Cosmere).

Third image is "Mars" by CGCortex on ArtStation.

[Trenacker]

Superior biological testing station. University of Planet. Monsoon Jungle. Shamash.

Neo-Spartan Battle Master deploys a parasite hovertank during a collection of planet pearls. Red Wastes. Golgu.

Morgan Security Services casecar awaits a shift change in a worker's block of The Crack, better known as Warrentown 55-6.

Overhead, pirate wires connect rogue 'jacks to the faction datalinks. Hunter-seeker algorithms will eventually find their way "downstring" to present the offender with a recurring fine for unauthorized service.

Armored Myrmidons of Sparta take advantage of a whiteout to withdraw following a successful raid on the Helix, plundered network node in hand.

The second trooper wields a graviton splitter, courtesy of the University of Planet, with which the spoils of victory will soon be shared.

Behind them, a disabled Ascendancy shagokhod pays silent testimony to the martial prowess of these mechanized supersoldiers--a match, for once, against Pahlavi's test tube tyrants.

Sources:
First image is "Zaiya Ikowuro: Volume III - Wild Outpost (Evale)" by GratefulReflex on DeviantArt.

Second image is "RC-24 Design System: Vehicle Builder" by GratefulReflux on DeviantArt.

Third image is "Quarantine Patrol" by saralgam1980 at DeviantArt.

Fourth image is "Tears of distant sun" by ukitakumuki on DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

Man without history is a loaded pistol pointed at the wrong target. - Timelines

Name: Sathieu Metrion
Rank: Ensign
Position: Senior Archivist
Country of Origin: Thailand
Date of Birth: 06-06-2031
Height: 170.18 cm
Weight: 72.6 kg

Service Record:
Born in Chiang Tung, United Former Thai Territories, Thai-occupied Shan State. Mother, a librarian supporting "cultural conservation" of the area's Thai legacy. Educated at boarding schools in Bangkok after security situation in home province deteriorated. Contact with parents thereafter limited to written correspondence until their deaths.

Exemplary A-NET scores led to secondary screenings by Buenos Aires-based Tomorrow Institute under the Global Human Resource Project, a collaboration with various governments to identify future candidates for national leadership roles. Graduated Royal Thai Naval Academy. Posted to inshore patrol, primarily combating traffic in plundered antiquities. Initially disliked by subordinates for imposing additional training and education requirements at the expense of their recreation. Subject eventually won their loyalty, and popular acclaim, commanding several victories against trans-national criminal, corporate, and French Union incursions through Thai waters.

Studied data science at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. Temporarily assigned to Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency for SEATO's Fourth Earth-Io Mission aboard the Hayyānu, an orbital surveyor operated by the Trans-Neptunian Development Corporation. Crew claim to have discovered previously-unsuspected deposits of water ice, but the ship's data payload was corrupted and life support compromised by an infiltrator traced through Interpol to servers at the University of Trinidad. Subject later inducted into the Honorable Order of Rama for rapid restoration of central computer functionality despite severe injuries from cold, saving the lives of everyone aboard. Amputation of subject's left hand was mitigated by cybernetic replacement, leading to a long period of rehabilitation that included medically-supervised Dreaming.

Meritorious appointment to the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri with Thai national contingent, 2066. Entered Data Services under Lt. Cmdr. Tạ Dọc Thân. During mission training, subject participated in the so-called Frankenstein Debates, a series of networked meta-conversations about the likelihood that humans would inadvertently create a hostile artificial intelligence. With Thân, subject posited that the risk of such an outcome existed in proportion to the number of modifications to original software code. This was the beginning of the "disk obedience" movement in software engineering.

In 2070, subject led interplanetary evaluation team tasked with identifying the most-important areas of human knowledge for preservation in the Unity Data Core. The final report urged U.N. planners to devote more disk space to cultural products, arguing that these were less independently reproducable than practical information such as manuals on small unit tactics and remote imaging of Chiron's moons.

Awakened during Unity Crisis. Delivered most Atomic Energy Lab staff, including their director, Dr. Johann Anhaldt, from cold sleep before joining the larger body of Data Services responders in the Data Core. Participated in initial system impact assessments and remote damage control operations.

As conditions deteriorated, Thân countermanded the orders of Captain Garland and Executive Officer D'Almeida in order to prioritize support for Chief Engineer Zakharov's reactor repairs, leading to a brief confrontation between the two men. Subject was ordered out of the Data Core 36 minutes before its ejection, during which Thân was killed.

Subject gathered Data Services survivors, declaring his intention to follow Thân's plan of preserving "this fund of human knowledge--our sacred trust." En route to hangar bays, Data Services personnel recruited disorganized survivors of other divisions, including U.N. Security Forces wounded, structural engineers previously dispatched forward by Zakharov, damage control parties isolated by failsafes, and contractors of Comprehensive Transport, the quasi-governmental body responsible for regulation of space travel throughout the Sol System. They ultimately commandeered two Landing Pods.

Colonists under Metrion's supervision were first to interact with survivors of the preceding Chiron Interstellar Probe, from whom they contracted Red Flu, triggering draconian quarantine protocols to stem serious losses.

Psych Profile: Sentimentalist
Mission Psych Battery confirms observations by past superiors of surliness and persistent failure to build trusting relationships. Subject also suffers from moderate depression. Strong interest in mementos and memory recovery reflects longing for an idealized past.

Peer interviews demonstrate subject was widely understood to disapprove of Thân's leadership style. Private remembrances, accessed through random audit, indicate subject found Thân "preening."

Thân meanwhile characterized subject as "bookish" and "emotionally immature" and repeatedly withheld promotion in filings endorsed by Political Officer Sheng-ji Yang.

The partially-organized contents of just a single secondary drive of the Unity Data Core had the same footprint as a city of more than 120km². In this secvid view of Dewey's Divide, a commuter tram awaits visiting researchers, planetary archivists, and the odd data custodian.

Sources:
First image is "Cyberpunk portrait of man as cyborg, sci fi concept art, dramatic, artstation trending, highly detailed," created on Lexica by an unknown author.

Second image is part of the portfolio "777Jihad" by isleeyin on DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

Hive kiterunner confirms the destruction of a Restoration crawler after catastrophic loss of payload containment. Yang's salvage teams will mobilize at once.

This scout's personal transport is the Volvo trollslända, one of the most popular commercial sport vehicles on Earth in 2071.

Made famous a decade earlier by professional racer Su Jin-Che on the Cape Town-Khartoum-El Aaiún Run, the hoverbike was purpose-designed for that grueling, deadly event, combining blistering speed with mechanical simplicity.

A trollslända was nothing but carbon-fiber frame, solar power plant, heads-up display, and underslung, rear-loaded tool chest. Su and other trollslända operators trained as much to endure the extreme discomfort of long operation as to become adept at bike-handling and used painkillers to stay mounted.

Like Su, Chironian trollslända riders reckoned that the bike's best safety feature was its sheer ease of repair.

Perimeter minefields were just one of the many "hard work incentives" provided by Morgan Industries to all team members.

Morgan Security conducted visual inspections of the minefield whenever executives were inbound (as on the highship in the background), plugging the many craters that were formed each cycle.

The bipedal Multiple Use Labor Elements seen here take advantage of Chiron's nitrate yield as a cheap source of motive power.

On Factory Floor W-H-1 at Morgan Manufactures. This crawler chassis is in the middle stages of assembly.

Still garbed in their old uniform colors, former Data Services personnel are making final adjustments to firmware.

Sources:
First image is "Harvester" by cyberkite on DeviantArt.

Second image is "Terraformer 2" by cyberkite on DeviantArt.

Third image is "Assembly" by cyberkite on DeviantArt.

[MysticWind]

And it was so (pt. 4.5)

My latest sun is sinking fast
My race has nearly run
My strongest trials now are past
My triumph is begun

O come, angel band, come and around me stand
O bear me away on your snow white wings to my immortal home
O bear me away on your snow white wings to my immortal home
- “Angel Band”, Datalinks

The Battle of the Plains of Isaac

Emporium 64th Expeditionary Detachment “Plainswalkers” deploying to hunt the Landsmen

The special police operation had driven the Confederation of the Land pioneers far from the vicinity of the Silenus Plateau, but those who lived above were not satiated by the burning of Lone Pine. The guntrepreneurs of Morgan High Spirits found their runway extremely curtailed by climbing costs, necessitating greater monetization of the situation. Meanwhile, the Human Tribesmen at New Denver were clearly experiencing somewhat of a societal group therapy- having misidentified the Landsmen as the closest thing to modern-day Holnists, they sought to purge the regressives from their homeland, as the hypersurvivalists once did to their own forefathers in lost America.

Hutama of the Peacekeeping Forces was livid at what they had wrought. The obliteration of a base, especially one of a newly-minted pact sibling, was worth a war crimes tribunal before the Planetary Council. Yet this neighborhood interfactional pact he had entangled the U.N. into could not help but to bay for blood. Even Peacekeeper citizens began demonstrating in support of the expedition. Many accused the Confederation of striking first, and the insult of “a kingdom of smacers” would forever tar the faction. Seeing the way the wind blew, Hutama sought to direct the storm. He asserted Peacekeeper diplomatic preeminence on the plateau, formalizing the post-Roll Out operations into an actual alliance structure. Formal vendetta was declared on behalf of his newly-minted “Ever United Front,” the wartime face of New Amnesty. By putting the Peacekeepers at the forefront of the conflict, he sought to limit the violence waged by the people of the plateau, enforcing proper rules of vendetta and facilitating humanitarian aid to civilians caught in crossfire.

The Peacekeeping Forces’ first actions was the proper conversion of the former Landsmen mission into a properly-supplied and staffed prisoner of war camp. The previously-held hostages were upgraded to “displaced person” status and permitted free movement; but given that Lone Pine was long gone, and the entire plateau was suffused with anti-Landsmen sentiment, the majority remained at Mount Mar Elias. The few who didn’t were Prince Abel Archer and the Wild Things. Though officially prisoners of Morgan Industries vis-a-vis High Spirits, they broke out during bureaucratic reshuffling and rode away into the night on minibikes, searching for their exiled people. His sister Rayan refused, choosing to stay with the captives of the former mission.

Monobikes such as the Morgan Azawakh were a popular vehicle for traversing harsh terrain

The Ever United Front (0) was intended to forge New Amnesty solidarity. As a coalition military, it did represent every resident faction. The Peacekeepers took over strategic leadership, drawing upon the Terran U.N.’s peacekeeping misadventures during the Blackjack century and TwenCen. Hutama himself rode to the front to play referee, calling out atrocities. He sought to show firm leadership, unlike the company leadership of Morgan H.S. or Human Tribe militia leader Anto Kankaras, who huddled back respectively in open offices and command bunkers, issuing orders over the remote. Even so, the Morganites contributed a majority of the war materiel and logistical support, while the vengeful Tribesmen numbered a plurality of the fighting manpower.

As at Mount Mar Elias, the University of Planet provided electronic warfare support, aiming to disrupt Landsmen communications and perform reconnaissance. Since their unmanned drones had spotted the Landsmen refugees fleeing towards vast xenofungus fields not unlike the dark valley they claimed to come from, the Shapers of Chiron joined up several of their finest liquidator squads to commit mass herbicide against hazardous foliage. Hunters of Chiron sent bands of wilderness experts and trackers to the tip of New Amnesty’s spearhead, enjoying a friendly, sporting race with the University’s techno-toys.

Finally, they were joined by a contract of Emporium operators hired by Morgan High Spirits to ensure that the ex-Lone Pine Landsmen would be captured with no escapees. The mercenaries, some who had served under the Imperial Military Focus in African conflicts, maintained an uneasy rivalry with their Morganite counterparts. Respected as some of the most fearsome warfighters of the Planet, the Emporium contract rounded out the Ever United Front. Touted by Hutama and Kankaras alike as the most diverse multifactional coalition ever seen on Chiron, the seven faction army strode forth to crush the barbarians of the wild.

Morgan High Spirits’ Dynamo fighters pour into the Plains of Isaac

Ultimately, neither University Bartini UAVs, nor Hunters of the Saluki Lodge, nor even Emporium Manpoachers found the fleeing Landsmen. Instead, Shaper xenorinthologist Isaac L’Écobuage, after observing some strange spiraling flights of razorbeaks, tracked the Chironian avians past vast desolate stretches of sandy soil and a bog to find the refugee column in a field enclosed by rock walls and a xenofungus patch. The subrid mounts were tied to posts and resting, the pressure yurts were erect and blowing out smoke from indoor campfires. The Shaper scurried back to the Ever United Front and soon the entire seven faction army was speeding towards the plain.

The leader of the local Morganite franchise had originally proposed an elaborate conspiracy to pose as smacers in the first wave, cutting down the most powerful warriors and vehicles, then riding to the rescue. Hutama, aghast at the notion of such a flagrant war crime, not to mention dishonor against a former trading partner, insisted there was no need for trickery when numbers and equipment sufficed. Thus he led one arm of the tridentine charge in a Command Rover, bouncing along while scrutinizing the central spike Morganites for any evidence of foul play. Opting for flexibility mixed with power, the High Spirits had eschewed heavy vehicles on the field in favor of corporate elite Dynamo shock troops backed by cannon-equipped monobikes. While doubtless the neo-primitives were low on rockets, they decided light units would lessen vulnerability to explosive attacks, unlike heavy vehicles.

The other arm of the attack was a mixed force of Human Tribesmen backed by the Emporium operators. Vendetta hysteria was at its apex, and the Kellerites were led by survivor veterans of the Hypersurvivalist Wars back on Earth, some who had fought alongside Pete Landers to escape the hell of Planetfall. Landers’ men eagerly awaited to draw the blood of the Landsmen. The Emporium expeditionaries, squad “Plainswalkers,” were bedecked in the finest battlesuits and late Earth replica rifles from the foundries of Nový Škoda. On one extreme end of the field, Hunters rode in a tight formation along the rockwall, preparing to flank the camp from an approach perpendicular to the trident. On the opposite rockwall, the Shapers did the same, ready to clear the terrain with their miniature battle-formers. The University hung back, content to watch the battle from afar in a field command module.

Upon entry, the entire camp sprang to life as external tents exploded with proximity mines, an offensive barrier that wiped out several of the attacking rovers. But this time the New Amnesty lot had prepared sweepers, and so some were unmanned, remotely controlled by University technicians. As the arms and spike approached the second ring of the encampment, some men and vehicles suddenly vanished. They had fallen into sinkholes covered by brush or uncharacteristic litter from the camp, concealed by canny Landsmen [1]. At this second ring, the defenders shot back, peppering the chargers with Niyazov gunfire, arrows, and spears. The attackers kept coming, even as they drove into a third defensive ring of marshy land once again cloaked by leaves- it turned out the Plains of Isaac also contained a large bog. Some vehicles were stuck in the clay and mud, becoming sitting ducks for the shooting gallery of the pioneers’ last remaining MANPAD missiles.

But still the Ever United Front rode on. Emporium Plainswalkers, having used the Tribals as cannon fodder, sped past lightly-armored Tribesmen without stopping to help the fallen. They were the first to engage the Landsmen at close range, shrugging off bullet fire. The Morganic Dynamos followed closely after and in greater numbers, blasting defending warriors into smithereens with impact weaponry. Half a klick towards the center of the camp, both the Hunters and the Shapers arrived from each respective side, flanking the nature-babblers. Between the trident, the flankers, and the xenofungus field, the Landsmen were encircled. Some of the women and children broke from the protection of the pressure tents to run into the field without disregard for its jagged thorns.

The rise of Tetsukabuto

Zulinski Clan icemen clinging to the sides of the rock walls leapt from their hiding spots, only to be torn apart by precise Hunter rifles and Shaper chemical blasts. Archer Clan sharpshooters faltered at the armored helms of the attackers. Rackham Clan berserkers counter-charged at the attackers’ charge, only to be vaporized in milliseconds by particle beams. Chief Abacha and a group of battle-shamans clad in green armor gradually advanced. A screen of assault riflemen provided them cover, dying so the armored warriors could swing enormous axes tipped with monomolecular blades at advancing Dynamos and Plainswalkers. For every contractor or operator they beheaded, three sprang from its side.

At this fateful minute when all seemed lost, jet streams blew forth from the xenofungus itself. Somehow avoiding the hampered movement, the minibikers of the Wild Things returned to their people. Abel Archer shot the engine of a nearby enemy rover and let out a war whoop. The damaged rover, its reactor going critical, exploded- he and his gang had brought a store of impact weapons, a gift of elemental fire to the clans against these enemies.

It was not enough.

There were simply too many. The battle waged on for nearly another hour. Ring after ring of pressure tents had gone up in flames. Subrids, naturally docile, were made to run towards the enemy. Their riders were picked off one by one by University aerial drones. The majority of the civilians were now cowering among the painful xenofungus. Kanata and his comrades, the very hotheads who had set off the chain of events, were surrounded and fell from their minibikes in surrender.

High above the Plains of Isaac, a swirl of fliers appeared in the skies.

As armored Morganites approached the Landsyouth, one of the gangers stood defiantly against them. The long-overlooked Tetsukabuto, who had been intransigently unhelpful during the prison break, now dared them approach. When they did, he removed his mask, exposing himself to the poisonous nitrogen atmosphere. He began to sing.

The entire plains glowed with an unearthly hue. It seemed as if the magenta waves of the xenofungus flowed from the patch, and onto the battlefield. From rock wall to wall, soldiers paused their fight, battle bikes hit their brakes, ‘choppers fell out of the sky. One by one, the Landsmen knelt in praise of the spirits. Above them, their thunderstruck enemies held their heads and screamed.

Landsmen veterans of the battle would report they saw the same fluttering humanoid shapes once glimpsed back in the Riven Valley. They seemed to walk out from the fungus, some emerging directly from the earth itself. They walked towards their enemies as one, and the persecutors of the Landsmen fired their weapons in vain. Shredder rounds and bullets simply passed through them. Explosives blew some back, but they seemed to miraculously regenerate their angelic forms, continuing their inexorable flight. And as they approached the Even United Front, the enemy melted away. As they fired their rounds in vain, many of the seven faction army began acting bizarrely. Some threw their weapons down in surrender. Others began attacking their comrades. Still others turned their guns onto their own selves. As the mysterious guardians of the Landsmen approached, the invaders seemed to fall down, lost among the unearthly glow.

The el-tee was the first to snap. She just up and started raving about little people crawling out of the ground shooting lightning at her head. Typical wormspeak. Flanagan tried to flip her de-ack switch but it was too late, she turned and started firing at us with her shiny gauss gun. That was all it took. Half the squad cut and run, squealing about how this wasn’t in their agreements. Mulakla even ripped the Morgan tripoint off his suit as he ran for Shaper lines. But those vineyard dogs- they know their fung and don’t cater kindly to the wormmad. The ‘312s crisped them but good. Waste of fuel if you ask me. Should’ve saved some for the boil. It was FUBAR. - recollections on the Slaughter upon the Plains

Even as the Landsmen tribals fell to the ground in religious ecstasy, their saviors poured forth, sending waking nightmares and tearing through helmet faceplates and skull, consuming. Never before had such a large human army met such a sudden mass of mindworms, and been so unprepared to fight them. Tetsukabuto waved his arms like a conductor, and tendrils, then entire tentacles, of worms swarmed the seven faction army at his prompting. The boil attacked intelligently. Officers were targeted first, then field psych chaplains, then ammo supply vehicles. Heavy gunners, their eyes rolling over, fired upon their own. The Ever United Front splintered in a matter of minutes, each faction’s force quickly turning against the other, either in fight or flight.

Even amidst this, Head of Peace Operations Hutama attempted to stem the tide of chaos. Climbing out of the rover, he barked orders at his Peacekeepers, urging them to assume leadership over the factions, becoming the uniters they were meant to be. To their credit, Peacekeeping forces did lead several throngs of mixed-factional troops away in a somewhat orderly retreat, saving lives. But the dream of New Amnesty was dying in front of them. Furious Tribals, not allowing a pest infestation to deter them from righteous vengeance, ignored the blue berets, standing their ground even as the sea of worms carried them away. Hunters of the Salamandra Lodge, not wanting the Shaper Liquidators to get their fill of glory, cracked their knuckles and dove into the fray, flames dancing until the endless tide snuffed out their fire. Emporium Plainswalkers, unused to fighting an inhuman foe, gibbered and grunted as they writhed upon the ground, the worms gnawing into their suits. Even the University’s marvels were not spared. Teleoperated drones crashed as their electrical systems failed, indicating the presence of a powerful gestalt within the boil. The researchers who observed the battle would experience nightmares for years afterwards.

Swarmed not by worms but by fellow fighters, driven insane by psionic attack, Hutama scrambled to himself retreat. He was set upon by a mixed group of Tribal, Morgan, Shaper, and fellow Peacekeeper deranged, a grim parody of the Front he sought to build. Only through the “luck” of intermittent opponent suit failures caused by the gestalt’s EM interference, and his own pencak silat abilities [2], was the Indonesian trade booster able to escape the fracas. As he fled the field, he turned back, unable to resist temptation. To Hutama's horror, a massive fungal bloom had erupted upon the plain, xenofungus rapidly swarming from rock wall to rock wall, swallowing men and machines. But the Landsmen were not eaten. They danced in circles, joyously, effortlessly upon the razorsharp stalks and shoots. The young man at the center kept singing until all trace of the Ever United Front’s attack was buried below the fungal mat. Then he too fell to his feet, and died.

Notes

(0) Charles George Gordon, eat your heart out.

[1] SMAC Fac Pack quote for Perimeter Defense from modified blurbs.txt.

[2] Well, there has to be some reason to cast Joe Taslim.

Image Credits

Powersuit commandos is the EU's 3rd Infantry Division in Mathieu Chevalier’s Battlefield 2142 Fan Art

Monobike is from The Venus Wars

Morganite “Dynamo” troops are from Alpha Centauri: Power of the Mind Worms graphic novel

The vision of Tetsukabuto is from Legacy: Life Among the Ruins tabletop RPG