04 - A Strange Land
“Some claim magic is just a tool which can be used for good or for evil.
But if it is a tool, it’s one designed for ruin.
What can magic achieve? Magic can’t heal, can’t feed people, can’t build anything lasting.
What magic does is to kill, destroy and manipulate.
At those tasks, it is terribly effective: metal and stone will break like paper in front of Elsefire. Only the strongest explosive can hurt a disincarnated mage. A loving parent will kill their child without a moment of pause, if forced by a mind-mage.
No human soldier could ever stand up to a mage, if not for the one edge humanity was given against the Dark Power: silver.”
From ThauCon Handbook, introduction
I slide my wrist by the armory door, and it opens with a horrible screech. There’s no biometric scan, as required by operational guidelines.
Inside is a damp, dusty room full of half-empty racks of equipment.
We don’t come here often – equipment for agents in active service is stored in lockers in the changing rooms. But the armory should still be fully stocked, with special equipment and surplus weapons. ThauCon doctrine requires that in an emergency, reservists are recalled to the base, doubling its complement of agents, and we should keep the gear to equip them all.
I double blink to summon my Stemlink interface, and start subvocalizing my report.
COMPOSE NOTE: Armory: security is noncompliant with regulations, and the facility itself is ill-maintained. Of 24 required Vengeance-18 rifles, only 12 are in stock. Even those aren’t properly stocked - four of the cases have damaged seals, and the guns inside exhibit signs of rust.
All 24 required M4-Guardian pistols are accounted for, but they appear very old and are kept in simple, non-standard plastic boxes, without waterproof sealing and identity locks. In contrast with regulations, there’s no public maintenance log.
112 out of 130 20-gram silver ammunition canisters are present and properly sealed. Surprisingly at this point, all the 150 listed canisters of 10-gram ammunition are accounted for.
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Of the 12 expected suits of combat armor, 10 are present, but they have clearly been cannibalized for parts, and none are combat ready. This is especially concerning: there are no ready-to-use combat armor suits in this base, except those currently assigned to agents.
150 out of 200 theta grenades are in stock. They appear functional, but contrary to regulation, the rack is passive and doesn’t have the capability to perform diagnostic checks. There’s no equipment to check the functionality of theta grenades in the whole base. This is an immediate operational concern, since theta grenades are notoriously prone to failure and the whole stock should be tested monthly.
Of the 48 listed silver blades, only 17 are present, most of them 6 inch personal combat knives of the Shivar pattern, which has been abandoned because of its poor performance.
There’s no sniper rifle, and replacement parts are available only for the old M2-Supremacy rifle. While Rakavdon Base has no dedicated sniper, two riflemen have sniper certification and use M4 sniper rifles in their kit.
Overall, the amount of missing items far exceeds the commonly expected deviation from nominal. It should be noted that Rakavdon base has no dedicated stock officer, and the duty is ambiguously ‘shared between NCOs’, according to the Captain. Remarkably, my team’s corporal was entirely unaware of the fact.
Beside suggesting serious corruption and/or diversion of funds, the poor state of the armory is a major preparedness problem. In an emergency, Rakavdon base would be unable to equip reservists, and would struggle to keep its active agents fully equipped in any extended operation.
I sigh. This report is getting monotonous and depressing. Nothing in this base works as it should. While the equipment for active-duty agents is decently maintained, literally everything else is falling to pieces.
I submitted two complaints to the Equipment and Facilities department at Regional HQ, but my inquiries are deflected, and no one seems to care.
I even tried to talk to the Captain about it – but she’s a dead-eyed, middle aged woman obviously coasting to retirement, and she just said we’ll run an inventory at some point while playing puzzle games on her tablet. Does she know how bad the situation is? Does she think it’s not her problem since she’ll retire soon?
And where is all the missing equipment? There are millions of credits missing in this room alone. Were the missing rifles here at some point? Were they used to restock the teams, and the armory was never replenished? Or were they sold, or destroyed?
Why doesn’t anybody care about this? Kaelich shrugged and said the Captain can always request equipment to replace whatever we break, so we don’t need to keep a lot of extra stock on hand.
Kaelich doesn’t get it. Lost Stars, the officially listed assets of this base are pure fiction. What if the nuclear power plant, or the Theta Suppressor, are in equally bad shape?
What if a new mage war begins – because one will come, we all know it – and we find ourselves with inadequate defenses and short on weapons?
Of course, when we’ll need the missing equipment everyone will be shocked and outraged. But no one cares about boring problems until it’s too late, and suddenly they’re tragedies.
Like no one cares about the ever-growing desert and the dying soil and the ever-increasing demonfalls, and all the thousand cuts which are bleeding our civilization dry.