Nation Maintenance for the Interstellar Empire [CLOSED]

[Nyte]

Rip and Tear
03/12/0498AG

"I see you've met my dogs" Damien quipped mockingly at his target; petting the two massive cybernetic warhounds heads with his power armored hands. He ignored the blood misting the air from the whirring rock drills that made up their jaws as he stepped out from between them and approached the 'man' quivering in terror against the wall. "Perhaps you'd like to be a bit more cooperative than your friends" Damien continued; looking disdainfully at the chewed up meat that had been several people before Rip and Tear had gotten a hold of them.

The 'man' moaned in terror again as a trickle of urine made it's way down his legs...

"No" Damien asked in a quiet, measured voice. "Hmm... Very well. Rip, Tear" he continued, looking back at his faithful pets. "Kill!"

And they did... The sound of screaming, and flesh and bone being run through a meat grinder filled the room behind him as Damien turned and simply walked away. He had a few other leads he would have to track down. One of them was bound to be more cooperative.

A few days later found Damien and his hounds in the bowels of Halcon on Nyte; sloshing through dirty, shin high water in a filthy tunnel with the occasional flickering yellowed light panel offering the occasional bit of illumination... Not that Damien; or any other Nyteborne for that matter really needed the light. His hounds sloshed through the water a short distance ahead, special receptors built into their heads scanning the tunnel for any sign of their current prey. It was quiet aside from the sound of sloshing water, and the quiet whir of mechanical parts in motion... He didn't like the quiet. His mind had a tendency to wander into dark places when it was quiet. He shook his head violently; taking a trip down memory lane was not something he needed right now.

Head still moving to the side, he noticed it; a tiny, nearly invisible mark low on the wall by the entrance to a side tunnel. "Rip, Tear... Heel" he ordered; the cybernetic killing machines stopped dead at the command and looked back at him with cold blue glowing eyes. They seemed eager; or so Damien thought to himself as that was the impression they gave off. He moved to examine the mark, realizing that if he hadn't shaken his head at just the right moment, he would have missed it entirely. Looking at Rip and Tear he commented stonily "well, aren't you two useless?... And you're supposed to be programmed to hunt down targets too."

Both of the hounds whined; the sound sharing more with broken machinery being shredded rather than any natural animal sound. The noise echoed down the tunnel, and Damien turned to stare at them stonily through his skull faced helmet... They got the message though as the whining stopped immediately. Turning back to the mark, he knelt down in the water to get a closer look. On his HUD, the symbol was being quickly cross referenced with hundreds of others that had been found on Nyte since the disaster that was the Daemon invasion of several months previous, and when a match was found, he grinned murderously.

"Come" Damien said as he began to move down the side tunnel. It did not take long for his hounds to catch up, and barely a few minutes later, his helmet sensors picked up a heat signature ahead... A humanoid heat signature.

Shifting his combat shotgun to hang over his back, he drew one of his combat knives... The black material the weapon was made from glinted strangely in the dim light; the unnatural, painful to look at sigils etched into the blade seemed to draw what little light there was into the blade, and even through his power armored gauntlet, he felt a coldness radiating slowly up his fingers and hand before it began to work it way up his forearm. Ignoring the unpleasant sensation, he exploded forward with a burst of speed and a splash of dirty, tepid water and detritus. He was on the figure quickly; grabbing him by the throat as he opened his mouth to scream. Lifting the man into the air, he slammed him into the tunnel wall before pistoning the knife repeatedly into his chest and stomach. By the third thrust of the blade, the scent of burning flesh, and the slurp and sizzle of the blade going rhythmically in and out of the mans deteriorating torso filled the hallway as the mans body began to melt.

Dropping the bloody remains he moved on quickly, all pretense of stealth gone as he charged down the tunnel; Rip and Tear moving to either side and easily keeping pace. The sudden rise of the tunnel floor, and the equally sudden drop was unexpected, and Damien landed badly; sliding on something fluid, yet thick and vicious. He regained his footing quickly enough however...Rip and Tear doing the same and moving to stand protectively beside him as he took a moment to process what he'd fallen into.

"For fucks sake" he said to himself. "Not again."

The newly summoned daemon, and the dozen odd cultists looked equally put out Damien thought... Well the cultists did at least. The daemon just looked like a twelve foot tall reddish black rage monster covered in blades, claws, and curling horns.

"Rip, Tear... Kill" he commanded as he swung the shotgun from his back to his off hand. His finger squeezed the trigger, filling the ritual chamber with the barking roar of APHE Manstopper shells. The automatic shotgun bucked as he wielded it with his off hand. Compensating for the recoil, he strode forward toward the daemon as Rip and Tear lunged forward with matching mechanical growls, their bladed jaws growling to life with a throaty whirring noise that was just barely audible between the banging of the shotgun and the screaming of the surprised cultists.

The daemon didn't seem to care however. Instead, it charged gamely into the hail of HEAP Manstopper shells; seeming to ignore the chunks of flesh being blown from its hide. It was on him in a few seconds; swatting the shotgun from his hand and batting Damien back nearly twenty feet into a wall... The violence of the impact nearly knocked him out even inside his power armor. Ignoring how his HUD flickered, and a stream of error messages began to tick past the corner of his left eye, Damien drew his second combat knife; a matching twin to the one he used earlier, and had just enough time to brace himself before the daemon was on him once more.

The following brawl was hectic, and when asked to report on the incident later, he'd be hard pressed to come up with any details of the actual fight. There was pain though; and screaming, and blood; he remembered that much... Whether his or the daemons he would not be able to say, and the camera built into his helmet was an early casualty of the fight... Along with the helmet itself for that matter.

When it ended finally, it ended just as suddenly as it had begun, and Damien found himself slumped on top of a slowly corroding daemonic corpse in a pool of acidic blood with far too much vibrant crimson mixed in with it... His blood he thought sluggishly as he slid unsteadily off the corpse; dragging himself slowly away to lean back against a wall.

Rip and Tear approached him whining, practically bathed in the remains of the cultists; a fact Damien struggled to comprehend for some reason.

"Good dogs" he commented slowly. "I think I'll just rest here for a moment" he continued quietly as he slumped down against the wall. He did not hear them whine once more, nor did he notice as they cocked their heads to look at each other before turning to bound rapidly from the room.

[Nyte]

The Attack of the Dead Men
08/06/0499AG

It's been asked of me...many times at that, why we started just bombing infected worlds from orbit rather than continue to use other, less final options. Of course, those who asked this usually hadn't had the...pleasure, as it were, of facing a daemonic horde and the cultist scum that was so frequently associated with it. Of course, there were a number of good explanations for it...my favorite being a certain...event from relatively early in the whole mess. It came to be known as The Attack of the Dead Men in the Empire, and after hearing it; or seeing some of the footage if they were truly unfortunate, most of those who came to me questioning why we did what we did stopped asking so many questions to say the least.

04/01/0498AG

The Feloston were something of an oddity in the Gamma quadrant; a peace-loving, and largely anti-war star state...a young and a naive one at that. The single system they had to their name was fairly lacking in anything really special or truly valuable though, which was probably what had allowed them to last as long as they had to be honest. Their mistake; the one that would lead to their extinction would be that they were foolish enough to open up their borders to refugees. This, after having received the numerous reports and warnings pouring out of the Interstellar Empire of the dangers of doing so.

It should come as no surprise that their generosity was to be repaid with a daemonic invasion orchestrated by several cultist cells that had infiltrated the tide of refugees that had come flooding into their system over a period of just a few short weeks. In just under a week over half of the Feloston population had been herded together into concentration camps and then systematically and ritually sacrificed, and their central government had effectively ceased to exist. This would be the situation into which a small expeditionary fleet belonging to the Interstellar Empire would arrive. Rather than just sanitizing the entire planet from orbit, they decided instead to try and play the hero, and landed a fairly significant ground force into a somewhat fortified position on the Feloston homeworld to attempt to delay the oncoming horde while simultaneously attempting to evacuate as many of the surviving locals as possible.

The first few hours went fairly well to be honest. Heavy volleys of disciplined fire and effective use of the terrain gave the Empire's forces an early advantage...or at least it seemed to. Just under twelve hours into the operation, atmospheric observation drones picked up what seemed to be some type of chemical gas attack; the origin of which was never actually determined. Considering the fact that the power armor utilized by the Empire is rated for use in NBC effected areas, there seemed to be little cause for concern, and the operation continued on... It wasn't until the screaming started to pour in over the communication channels that anyone realized that this wasn't the case after all. A review of the drone footage after the fact, along with thousands of hours of saved HUD and gun camera footage showed people literally falling apart within their power armor; their flesh sloughing off of their bones like mud...ripping off their helmets to claw their own faces off as they bled profusely from every orifice as they vomited up their internal organs.

Finding uncensored copies of this footage today is nearly impossible mind you...even for high ranking military officials such as myself, but I digress...

The end of the disaster is only known thanks to such footage however. In said footage, a few hundred mutilated, blinded, and clearly dying survivors can be seen shambling at a stumbling jog through a greenish blue haze to crash into a horde of tens of thousands of oncoming daemons... Mercifully perhaps, they don't last long, and the drones in the area only last a few minutes longer before decaying to a point where they basically fell from the sky; little more than corroded hunks of useless metals and plastics.

The expeditionary force would end up bombing the site from orbit... The few thousand Feloston that had been rescued...well, their fate is...classified to say the least. The public might be allowed to know about that in a century or two... Maybe.

[Nyte]

Unrepentant Nuclear Thuggery
04/28/0498AG

The forest was eerily silent; there were no animal noises...no birds singing...not even the rustle of fallen leaves on the wind. The four cloaked, armed men moving purposely among the alien trees were nearly as silent themselves; only the sound of their steady, muffled footsteps betrayed their presence; audibly at least. Visually, their grayish black armored bodygloves were concealed almost head to toe by sophisticated chameleoline cloaks that quite effectively mimicked their alien surroundings.

It was a distant cacophony of what sounded like thunder that caused the first of them to finally break their self imposed silence.

"The mission briefing didn't mention any inclement weather did it?... Where'd this thunder come from?" The youngest of the four commented grumpily, clearly not looking forward to slogging through a thunder storm on some nameless alien dirtball.

Another of the four chuckled darkly. "That's not thunder boy" he quipped; the humor in the comment clear in his tone of voice.

"Then what the fuck is it?"

Turning his helmeted, hooded head back to look at the youngest member of the squad, a third replied simply "You'll see in a moment...keep moving." The voice was a cold monotone devoid of emotion, accent, or inflection, though it had a steely quality to it.

And indeed, a few minutes later the four men cleared the tree line and came to stand on a ledge with a commanding view of forested valleys, hills, and mountains as far as their augmented eyes could see... It was a view that was made even more impressive by the hellish glow of blazing mushroom clouds stretching across the horizon for what must have been hundreds of miles; the glow of which was so powerful that it had temporarily turned night into day.

The four stood there for several minutes taking in the view; silhouetted a shadowy black by the rosy glow of distant nuclear fire.

"Well," the second man continued; breaking the silence once more. "I told you it wasn't thunder boy."

[Nyte]

Whispering Steel
04/30/0498AG

"Despite the recent string of experiments, and a few test runs conducted in the field by..."

He ignored the doctors spiel...instead, his attention was on the sheathed weapon that was currently cradled in his hands. It didn't appear all that special in his opinion. As a matter of fact, it looked no different than any of the other swords he'd used in his younger years while on any of his dozens of deployments with the army. Grasping the hilt, he noticed that it fit perfectly in his hand; almost as if it had been specifically made for his use.

Slowly drawing the weapon from it's sheath, he didn't notice the odd tingling sensation beginning to form in his fingers. Instead, he focused on how well balanced the blade felt in his hand as his eyes were drawn to the unusual black material of which the blade was crafted, and the unusual symbols etched along it's length. They really were quite mesmerizing he thought to himself; admiring how darkly the weapon gleamed as he slowly shifted it in his hands.

In the background, the doctor continued rambling on about his teams findings based on their most recent series of tests and experiments, but slowly, as the tingling spread from his fingers to his hand, then his forearm and beyond, the doctors voice seemed to grow quieter and quieter... Replaced at first by an indecipherable sussurus that slowly drew him in.

After several moments of listening however, several words, barely audible at first, began to emerge. They were sibilantly spoken, with an undercurrent of raw malice that became more and more palpable with each repetition.

murder...death...kill...

murder...death...kill...

murder...death...kill...

murder...death...kill...

yesss...

Shaking his head, he threw the weapon forcefully across the room... Not noticing the fresh sheen of blood that was slowly being absorbed by the now faintly glowing symbols burning with an eldritch fire along the glistening length of the blade... Nor did he notice the silence of the room, or the fresh, mutilated corpses of the doctor and his assistant; both of which were butchered almost beyond recognition.

No, instead, he could only focus on the dark murderous laughter echoing sibilantly in his head, and the icy numbness slowly fading from his arm.

[Nyte]

And Watch As The Ships, Go Sailing...
05/01/0498AG

The old man moved swiftly down the dark hallway... Well, as swiftly as his mechanical prosthetic leg and it's odd gait would allow. Despite this, he made relatively good time; odd gait, or no odd gait. He whistled quite happily as he went as well, as he was in a very good mood all things considered. His favorite time of the month was just a few short minutes away, and though he was running just a tad bit late, he should still have plenty of time to catch the launch from his spot.

Sitting down on the cold metal floor with a slightly pained grunt, he pulled out a wrapped lunch and a thermos full of hot 'caffe from within his dirty coveralls and set them on the floor beside him. Shifting his back along the wall a bit, he made himself comfortable before opening the thermos and taking a long sip of the hot caffeinated beverage; sighing contentedly as the beverage sent a wave of warmth through his aging limbs.

He looked up and out; the thermos still clutched in his hands. Through the massive, reinforced window, grey, armored leviathans were slowly beginning to move free of their moorings. He couldn't see all of them of course; there were far too many, and they were spread out over far to great a distance for his simple, unaugmented eyes... The farthest visible ones were mere specks of light grey in the mostly hollow void, and barely visible through the mess of gantries, girders, cranes, and construction bays.

At first, they moved in the dozens... Smaller ships mostly; frigate and destroyer hulls... Soon however, he was counting ships up into the hundreds, and bigger hulls were clearly in the mix; cruisers, battleships, carriers, and an unusual number of dreadnaught hulls as well. His eyes widened; he'd never seen so many of the Empire's larger ships slipping out of the bays at once... Not once in the last thirty years had he seen such a spectacle. Stunned, he sat, food and drink forgotten as he lost count of the number of grey armored leviathans somewhere in the low hundreds, and those were only the ones he could see... If things stayed true to form, a good three or four times that number must have been moving all at once; steadily making their way to, and through the tunnels that would lead them out into open space.

He sat there for some time after the last of the ships were gone; his 'caffe and lunch going cold and ignored. He had no idea where all of those ships were going, or if they were all even going to the same place, but he almost felt sorry for whoever it was that was going to have to face them... Almost.