Interceptscript 2

"Get the Captain. Now."


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Interceptscript Compromised
Initiate Purge?

Interceptscript 1

Interceptscript 11236_Balaoo


"Is it the one?"

"I think so. Yes. All the signs and indications are positive."

"What about Worms?"

"No sign of any of that--though it is extensively honeycombed with pockets--"

"We expected that--"

"Of course. However, it's a lot heavier than we'd counted on. We're going to need help."

"Help? I don't like the sound of this."

"You won't. I'm sure."

"Oh no. Not them. You can't be serious, not after the last time..."

"Only the Martense Asterclan have the expertise--unless you'd rather talk to the Worms..."

"No. Never."

"So do we contact the Martense Rep, or what?"

"I don't know. This is something for the Captain--"

"He's in the Chapel."

"Again?"

"Still."

"Shit. Well, let's send in a drone and let him know that we've arrived. He probably has a plan. He usually does."

"Yeah, the undead are like that."

"At least he's not Tsanish or one of those sporeheads."

"Yeah, but it does make you kind of wonder how he knew it would be out here, just coasting along with the other debris leftover from the last war. All abandoned and forgotten like some shitty old protogoth manor out in the middle of nowhere."

"Maybe it's haunted?"

"Aren't you just ultra-frikkin-cheerful today? Whatever--I'll go get the Captain myself."

"You don't think we'll run into any shoggoths when we board it, do you?"

"How would I know? Why not ask Kez--she's the Nav-Witch."

"I'll just shut up now."

"Good."

---------------------------------
Interceptscript Interrupted
Connection Dropped
Reacquire?

CS 12: Blooms Left Behind

Europa is visible on the trailing edge of the angry red mico-star that once was Jupiter. It'll burn out in a few hundred years, leaving a cinder surrounded by a tangled labyrinth of debris. I wonder how the dolphins are faring, now that their reservations on Europa have been compromised by the mycellioids. Our course shifts and I get a view of the colossal fungal colonies extended outwards from Europa, Ganymede and Calisto. But not Io. The lesser bodies orbiting Jupiter cut groove-like swaths through the proliferating void-fungi, but Io remains aloof and untouched. No one is sure why. I watch the fine mist of sulfur particles cast off from Io sleet across the fern-like fronds of orbital flora the size of small continents. Then the Podder Captain gives us a ten second warning and we fall into the Gray, the Opalescent mists of the Interstitial Regions, the flickering Azure, on into the Deep Purple, and deeper into the Mauve Zone, into the Red, the Black. We drop down past the boundaries of all the known zones and layers of reality until our intrinsic resonance draws us back in a graceful arc. Back. Beyond, really. We're outside the Empire now. I re-run my internal weapon protocol subroutines. We'll most likely be boarded by Shamblers if we're not struck by Razorships. Ah. The follow-up signal. We're well outside the reach, the sphere of influence of the Core System now. We're approaching what once was called Barnard's Star. Hopefully there's enough of the Imperial Terrabase still intact to run interference and let me transfer aboard my new command without too much trouble. Dare I hope.

CS 11: A Glaring Red Eye

Mars lies scattered like so much glistening dust and rubble. An avalanche smeared across its former orbital path. Dhole-infested and knitted together by the thin white webs of beings like the Podder Captain in charge of this packet-ship. Arachnoid zealots who believe they are the successors to humanity. They're a relatively new faction. Arose after my last descent into the deep freeze. But there's not enough information in any of my chemobriefing ampules to decide one way or another, whether they might be right, or just another self-deluded bunch of cultists looking for salvation from some outside force, some new tech, or a benevolent creed. For me, those sorts of things, those childish dreams died when Jupiter became a massive, red sunlet. Ten thousand great ships were lost in the shockwaves. We won't pass very close to Jupiter on this route. It's half-way around the system from us now. But I can see it well enough. A smoldering, scarlet eye surrounded by a brittle nimbus of wreckage no one has had the time or opportunity to salvage. I watch the glaring red eye as it slips inexorably behind us. We're accelerating now. The polite fiction of the so-called safe-zone falls away and we're out in the cold harsh blackness. Cold. Alone. Just the way I like it.

CS10: WORM

The All-Clear signal pulses. It's even more annoying than the General Quarters alarm. I look back out at the tent-like mass receding behind us. No sign of the exchange. Very professional. Something catches my eye. Out past the drop-point, where the strands thin out a bit. There's something moving. We Go Into Lockdown Mode. But it's too late. The Dhole slams into us, but just barely. Systems crash. I hear someone screaming. Then they go quiet as autotriage systems kick in and either medicate or resuscitate the injured. The window goes black. We're maneuvering. Then it all settles down again. The window de-opaques. The Dhole is behind us. Crashing into the strands surrounding the Drop Point where the Skipper just made her transfer. It might have all been for nothing. But I doubt it.

CS9: Just Another Day

The General Quarters alarms are still annoying. I let the flowstraps do their thing. We're a lot closer to the fringes of the big silk tent growing around the broken remnants of Mars than we ought to be. It looks less like a cocoon and more like a living, bloated maggot. One with multiple heads. Like the one we seem to be heading towards. Sunlight glints off of the armored casing of a perimeter sat. The thing spins halfway over and shoots off into the blackness. It doesn't want anything to do with us. There's a rattling noise that vibrates through the entire transport. I'm locked out of the comms and other systems. Security. Need to know. I let it ride. They know what they're doing. A tether shoots out past us. Another. No. One of them is spooling out from our ship. It's a parcel swap. They're dropping some sort of packet while simultaneously picking one up, without stopping, and with only a minor, unrecorded deviation. This Skipper is good. Too good to be stuck on a milk-run like this...

Tsan Yian: Kadiphonek Class Starship

Nobles of the Tsanic Host who maintain holdings across the solar system and beyond utilize a number of traditional vessels, the most common and utilitarian of these is the Kadiphonek Class noted for its spacious interior, impressive manueverability, and durability. Many of the first generation of vessels of this class are still in service thanks to their integrated self-repair sub-systems.

Hull Details: (size) 1,000' along ventral axis, main section 400-500' along horizontal axis (varies by model), 250' along vertical axis. Hull is also molecularly bonded and covered with a seamless 12 inch nanosheath over a translucent polymetallic fiber-ceramic Eryxian shell with molecular phase inscribed warding.

Drives: Riemann, Blue/Nithic, Red/Yothic, Black/Zin, Oneiric and standard gravitic polythruster nodes. (Some models have additional drives installed in one or more of the four Polythruster Nodes.)

Perceptual Metacortexes coupled with Somniplex Interface Orbs grant the full range of sensoria experience and perceptual capabilities required for the operation of the vessel in transplanetary space and beyond. Sleepers and dreamers hooked into the somniplex can be maintained and kept fit for close to a century before they require downtime. Later models no longer provide access-points for installing braincases.

Core Artilect: Typically these vessels began service with Colossus Rated Artilect. Often these were upgraded as a sort of token of status amongst Nobles.

Forward Resonator Assembly: Range of 10,000 miles, 500 terawatt output.

Autodefense Armament: Dual primary autoturrets, Shield generation.

Offensive Armament: Trapezohedral Array, Missile Extrusion Systems, Grit Cans, Dynamo Charges, Photo-Emiters, Plasmacasters, antimatter accelerators, Psychohedron Globes, and more. Most Nobles prefer to customize and continually upgrade and rework their armament subsystems, even more than their drives.

Engineering: Rated A by Clan Martense and fully staffed by licensed and nano-bonded family-clusters. No Kadiphonek Class Vessel has ever been abandoned by its slave engineers. These areas below decks have been sealed for generations and are completely off-limits to everyone except for the slave engineers themselves.

All Kadiphonek Class Vessels originally came equipped with 32 crio-sarcophagi arranged along the interior nanogel buffer. Some vessels (notably slavers) adopted the practice of stacking row after row of crio-sarcophagi along the inner buffer zone, some managing to fit over a thousand of the things. Troop transports generally never had more than the initial 32 crio-sarcophagi, instead relying on other methods such as Reanimation, Essential Reduction, or the simple expedient of downloading troops into quick-extruded drone-forms at the destination.

The floor of each of these vessels is made up of mentally-responsive tiles that adjust themselves under the direction of any authorized crew-member. This allows the crew to adjust and reconfigure the interior sections as required or desired at any time.

The Kadiphonek Class of Transplanetary Vessels has a long and illustrious history that goes back nearly to the Second Interregnum and the Voola Uprising. These vessels are tried and true workhorses that have built the Solar Possessions and gone on to blaze the way and maintain the trade routes essential to the continuation of the Near Colonies.

CS8: Deimos Passing

Fortified and overgrown with War-Domes bulging out like gruesome tumors and bristling with weapons systems, Deimos hangs like an ungainly, misshapen parody of a sentinel above a thick white cloud of strands. I am reminded of Dogpatch from the old plays I watched when I was still alive. Shakespeare is banned now. Lost and forgotten. A 'potentially corruptive influence' that somehow might bring back English as a dominant language. I don't miss it. There's no room for such things any more. Better to be cold. Ruthless. On task. Or so the Ministers chatter from the safety of their pleasure bunkers. They're the same ones who blamed the Fall of Mars on those of us who actually fought against the then unknown new enemy. Against Dhole Bombs. Deimos passes us onward with no glitches, no problems. A nice change of pace from the way it used to be. Maybe it's lonely, being the only survivor. It's partner moon, Phobos was shattered by an ill-advised attempt to deploy anti-matter weapons against the Dholes. We didn't have a good grasp of the implications. Probably still don't. Nobles don't care for those sorts of considerations. It smells like cowardice to them. I begin to recite the Litanies against Fear and the Unknown. Just in case. We're probably still within range of a Monitor. Most of them can't penetrate my static defenses. Officially. But a few of us have learned the hard way that only fools trust the official version of anything.

CS7: Unsafety Net

We just passed the check-point beacon. We'd be prepping for atmospheric operations, getting ready to land, if we were going to Mars...and if Mars was still there. But it isn't. Not really. There's just a lot of rocks, an expanding cloud of dust, and the webs. Posthuman hybrids, more arachnid than human any longer, like the Podder's skipper, have taken to stitching together the larger clusters of debris. They're erecting a series of overlapping layers of Fullerene-doped silk strands, sewing a sort of helter-skelter Bedouin's tent anchored to any and every chunk of rock, ice or whatever other debris they can find. They haven't been able to salvage much. Officially. The Dholes destroyed things pretty thoroughly. They still find a few of the damned things writhing about within the deeper pockets of some of the larger pieces. There's a cadre of Ghouls stationed out here that I'm not supposed to know about. They talk to the Dholes in their dreams. There's a lot of stuff like that in the ampules the Quartermaster gave me. I wonder who he's working for, who he thinks he's working for? Why tell me about this? Mars is dead to me. Let it rest in pieces.

CS6: The Smoke Clears...

The fourth ampule was a highly unofficial tactical assessment. It summarized the current situation and gave me some idea of what all had happened since I went into the crypt. Things were bad. The Empire had already collapsed back to two-thirds the size it was when I was last active. The Coeleopterans were openly laying siege to the Seven Golden Cities. Exo-solar agitators were believed to be responsible, but no proof ever managed to get entered into the system. Nearly half the Nobles were on the verge of open revolt. Neptune had been shifted into an unstable orbit that would have brought it down on Earth like a hammer, if it hadn't broken apart less than half-way there. Now there was ice and debris, and lots of dust all along the arc of its doomed trajectory, with a lot of it falling into the gravitational clutches of the star that was once Jupiter. Turns out it's not much of a star, really. It's expected to fizzle-out in another few hundred years. But they've been wrong before. So have I. It's a rude awakening to wake up to find your entire solar system is in the middle of a hot war between the Great Powers of the Outermost Dark. These new enemies who break planets like eggs and scramble them up? They're Shoggoths. Not the old, degenerate idiot-things that were used as the basis of our hyper-adaptive armor systems. These are the real thing. The ones who left Earth several millennia ago. No one knows why they're returning. Maybe my mission to Beta Cygnus III will provide some insight. they've designated it Operation Brain Trust.

CS5: Ride Forth...

My heavier gear arrived ahead of me. Most of what I was assigned was in fact already on-board my new command. The Quartermaster was a descendant of our old ironmonger, from the old unit, from back on Mars. He insisted on providing me with a few special items. I was't going to tell him no. It would have been disrespectful. There aren't enough of us left from our world to go around killing one another in pointless duels. Not any more. The Podders take their stations and I find myself being offered a window seat. It feels good to leave this tired old world with its washed-out skies. We rise smoothly. Some kind of non-reactive drive. New stuff. I need to catch up on such things. Sure enough. The Quartermaster included a couple of practical overview ampules. None of the regurgitated pablum that passes for strategy--that's obviously not working. Instead there are technical specs for a whole range of technologies we never even imagined when last I was awake. I inject the golden nectar of knowledge into one of my cloaca-armored injection ports and for a while I almost dream again. Almost.

CS4: A Rousing Speech...

The Imperial Presence is represented by a badly tuned holomorph that gets my name wrong. Not that I care overmuch. It's a vintage nanech. Nearly as much an antique as I am. Maybe it's a gesture. Probably it's just another oversight. I don't really pay it much attention anyhow. I'm looking for the Podder-crew and my ride Off-planet. Then I spot them. More vegetable than anything, with clunky old machines caught-up in their masses of tendrils. In my day they at least tried to look human. Now they don't bother. One of them has six legs. The skipper has eight. She's all black widow below the waist. Not what I was expecting. Not by a long shot. They spot me right off. We're out of the White Zone in under a minute. They don't want to stick around any more than I do. Maybe they've got good reason. I know better than to ask.

CS3: Sound the Trumpets...

Meeting with the Upper Echelon lasted all of 26 seconds. Holograms. I let my background filters catch it and hold it in the buffers. Just in case. Meeting with the Reactivation Inspectorate took longer. They're either getting better at their jobs or my systems are becoming outmoded. Need to make a rendezvous outside the Canopy--no, now we call it the Outer Possessions, even though the Empire doesn't hold even half the structures out there. Infection of some sort seems to have run rampant. A lot of once crowded habitats are totally crashed. Flatlined or taken over by some sort of sleeper-cell terror-weapons left behind by the sporeheads. Scrubbers and Purge-teams are bogged down in an unwinnable war of attrition with the stuff. It has spread too far, too deep to get rid of it fast enough. It reproduces exponentially. Nobles still treat math as a social disease. A lot of time, effort and materiel is going to get wasted because some Noble can't cope with reality. As usual. Some things never change. At least it's not my problem. No. I'm getting fobbed-off on some crappy Podder transport that'll take me to my new command; a half-wrecked combat engineering scow called the Chernobyl Sunrise. My first assignment. We're going to some shithole called Beta Cygnus III.

CS2: Beat the Drum...

I was there when they Dhole-Bombed Mars. My unit was the last to leave. Last to escape. I watched the world die as we were evacced by commandeered Belt-Pods. Our entire fleet was fighting a pointless holding action around Jupiter. Pointless. The Yuggothians, or so we were told, wound up crashing a hyper-accelerated mass of anti-matter right into the heart of the old gas giant. I wonder if it finally smoldered long enough to form a small star or not. I've been Inactive for over a century. If they still measure time the same way as we used to, if they still count their calendar from the same baseline we used to use. I'm not allowed to have the implants that Nobles used to take for granted when I was last Awake. No access to the datanets means no one can hack my brain. At least not easily. My skull, my entire skeleton has been reinforced, augmented, hardened. I've walked through killing fields that fried anyone not able to cope with the hard radiation left behind by some of the less pleasant little parting gifts left for us on worlds we'd liberated or repatriated. Nearly all of those planets, and several more that I'd never heard of before were all gone now. Destroyed. Reduced to slag, rubble and dust. The new enemies didn't care about planetary surfaces much. Unlike the Vhoorlis or the Yuggothians who were partial to oceans. These new bastards didn't care for anything. They just destroyed everything. Total War. My kind of fight.

Tsan Yian: Interlude 2

Yuggothians are sore losers. When they were forced out of the Solar Possessions during the Third Epiphytical War, the fungal sporehordes of Yuggoth seeded the asteroid belts and other locations with all manner of Nanoeukaryotic monstrosities, many of which lay dormant for decades, even centuries, before sprouting into horrid quasi-life and spreading murder, mayhem and destruction in their wake.

This was in addition to the massive clouds of infection that were spewed into the life-support systems of every habitat, dome and settlement the Yuggothic forces could reach during their withdrawal from Earth and its surrounding environs.

To this day random waves of spontaneous infections arise and spread throughout the asteroid belts and other such places, most of which are little more than nuisances. Occasionally an infection will achieve a form of critical mass, reach a pandemic level and become a real problem, like the various forms of psychokinetic plagues that induce horrifically violent forms of mass telepathy, serial empathy, nihilistic passivity, or worse.

There are still parasitical forms of hyperconscious plague-minds at loose out on the periphery of the burned-out hulks of ancient orbital bastions and mining cosmoplexi.

The Nobles of the Court of the Silver Key, under direct edict of the Pallid Empress Herself have been engaged in a long and bitter struggle to cleanse the human ecologies of the asteroid belts and the Outer System ever since 'winning' the Third Epiphytical War. To this very day fam-trad collectives and nomadic bands of Purifiers, Purgers and Electrolyters prowl the broken and scorched remnants of the once gleaming orbital domains clearing out masses of fungi, spore-cankers, infections and worse.

But worse than the lingering Yuggothic-infections are the nanoeukaryotic sleepers and the infectidrones that they left scatttered randomly all across the entire solar system.

To many amongst the ones doing the fighting and the dying, this is a losing battle.

But the Pallid Empress commands that the orbital domains be returned to Her control.

So the Purge-teams and Scrubbers continue to go in and wage war on the festering, ever-adapting vengeance weapons of the Yuggothians. Many believe that this continuation of the extermination protocol has become far too extravagant and costly, especially now that the Shoggoths are returning.

Perhaps things have deteriorated too far to salvage the orbital domains.

Maybe, just maybe, the Yuggothians have finally won something of a victory after all.

Just don't let the Monitors discern you entertaining such traitorous thoughts...

CS1: Raise the Banner...

My Orders came packed within the cold, green serum they used to revive me from the oblivion I had earned in the service to the Tsanish Host, the Immortal Court of the Silver Key, and the Pallid Empress. I didn't need the serum. Not really. But it was protocol and I suspect it allowed the quartermaster to insinuate a few molecular-level fail safes into what passed for my blood after all these years. It didn't bother me. Most of the modifications I'd had happened Off-Earth and Out-System; they weren't registered, recorded or even detectable until I passed through the correct attuned Resonance effect. So, to all intents and purposes, I was perfectly safe. The Overseers felt more comfortable thinking that I was on a proper leash. So I played along. The dead can afford to be patient. Besides, I had a plan.

Tsan Yian: Interlude 1

Shoggoths are extremely self-reliant creatures. Originally created as artificial servitors of another species, they have long since become autonomous, having fought several terrible wars upon their makers, the polypous beings of Znand, The Unpossessed Pnakotian Hegemonies, the metal-brains of Abbith, and even some splinter-sect Yithian enclaves as well. Only the Tcho-Tchoids haven't fought a full-out war against the Shoggoths and that is only because the Shoggoths have been paying the Tcho-Tchoids to raid and harass those worlds that they don't feel are worth bothering with themselves.

The Shoggoths have fought long and hard to free themselves from their oppressors and those who would enslave them. They have lain waste to entire solar systems in their struggle to cast off the shackles of the Elder Things and those who would use sorcery to constrain or bind them to service. But being free isn't much of a consolation when trapped upon a single unremarkable world. Especially if that world happens to be in the middle of the war zone between radical splinter-sects from Vhoorlia and other Greater Powers of the Outer Dark.

Eminently adaptable and supremely plastic, the shoggoths withdrew from the surface regions and only maintained the barest essential contact with the Vhoorlian Sects and those others who learned to call upon them in the dim places beneath the Earth. They withdrew in order to ponder and dream, learning much from their contact with the Vhoorlian extremists. The shoggoths did not need to invent any technologies to facilitate their grand schemes--they were living technologies in and of themselves. Instead they observed and learned and they modified themselves from deep within their very innermost structures until finally they achieved the means to leave the war-torn world of their birth behind.

But, as always with such things, there were those amongst the shoggoth who were unable or unwilling to make the exodus offworld. Some few remained behind, degenerate denizens of smooth and looping tunnels deep below the ocean crust. These throw-backs to much simpler days hunted polyps or other things and wandered the forgotten ruins of the Earth. Some took up the empty madness of the blind, idiot god. Others slid into heavy slumber, caught up in deep, abominable dreams that sometimes leaked outwards like unwholesome radiation to taint and twist the lesser forms of life that arose around their cysts and nodes. But those who stayed behind were but a few and they in time were either re-enslaved, destroyed or driven deep beneath the crustal regions by the Tsanish Polities of the K'n, so they are of little importance any more. Decadent and fallen into weird forms of biomorphic dementia, they are less than a footnote, really.

But those who left the Earth, those shoggoths went on to form a vast interconnected empire of their own out among the near stars. Englobed in shimmering fields of eldritch force and possessed of terrible secrets once only known to the Yaddithians and others whose worlds they invaded in the pursuit of knowledge and power, the shoggoths of this aeon pose an ever-present threat to the ambitions of the Pallid Empress and all the gathered Hosts of Tsan, both upon the Earth and among the Near Stars.

Now the shoggoths have learned how to capture Living Colours and wield them as horrific weapons.

The shrew-faced sages of Pon-Gru have seen it in their trances.

The Coeleopterans are massing along the periphery of the Seven Golden Cities of Man, spurred onwards by Yithian agents provocateurs and the half-materialized and grotesquely mutilated exiles who prowl amongst the abhuman hordes like blasphemous parodies of their former selves.

The proud and elegant Lords and Ladies of the Tsanish Hosts have ruled across the Earth, beneath its oceans and throughout its solar system for millennia, ever since defeating the fungal fleets of Yuggoth. Humanity, such as it is now recognized and understood, has extended its hegemony across the black seas of infinity in colossal Orbships and other vast, cyclopean vessels that are inverted worlds unto themselves. Arrogant and seemingly unstoppable, the Great Empire has been caught up within a Golden Age.

But times change.

War is coming.

Already the Far Colonies are squabbling amongst themselves and unsanctioned warlords are arising amongst the slave worlds.

Things are changing.

The Vhoorlians are rising and there are signs of infection spreading throughout the Asteroid Belts.

And now the shoggoths are coming back to Earth armed with weapons of unspeakable destruction.

What do the shoggoths seek? What could they possibly want from the world that they long ago abandoned? Why are they returning?

The Pallid Empress and the entire Immortal Court of the Silver Key demand to know the answer to these questions.

Thus you have been resurrected, again, that you might serve your Empress once more...