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.