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.