(Private Room, Raven’s Roost Bar, Black Star Station, Dimiya System)
“So, like I said, I can get you three crates of the BFG-2000s, and two full containers of the XM-27s. The BFGs are psy-weapons, so no need to haul around ammo or batteries, as long as your people have enough brain power to keep it up, but the XMs use ballistic rounds. I can get you another container full of ammunition for them, easy. And you can fit a LOT of ammo in one of those containers.”
Genda Thadik, Second of his Name, Gunda of the North, Dol Signed, Heir to the True King of Sandar grit his teeth as he looked at the knelfi ‘merchant’ sitting across the table from him. As a true son of the Dendrak people, from the God-World Dendra, he should not even be speaking with this unclean filth. By rights, he should take up his traditional axe and bury it in the knelfi’s face as the proper start to cleansing God’s creation of their filth.
He held his tongue, however. Nothing good ever came from dealing with the unclean offworlders, but he was desperate. And the merchant had what he needed. That many weapons would go a long way towards helping them in their fight against the Confederate invaders that had held his people down for too long.
He nodded once, and said, “That is acceptable. What of the rest of the things I asked for?”
Ryul Yelro smiled winningly, though it had little effect on the Dendrak. Or did it? It was always hard to tell with their bodies which seemed to be made of stone. At any rate, if he nailed down this contract, then it could be the start of big business for him, so long as he could keep the weapons flowing.
“Well, some of them are easier than others, you understand. Let’s start with melee. You have a wide selection there, but I would recommend ones that take advantage of your natural strength and mass. Energy sabers are great for the light, quick types, since they can cut steel like butter, but they lack the mass of a solid blade, which means someone’s raw strength is effectively useless with them. Now, you might want to keep a couple around, since they are easy to conceal, if you know what you’re doing, but, for your people, it would be more of an assassin’s weapon than a freedom fighter’s weapon.
“Fortunately, you got options when it comes to weapons that take advantage of your power. Obviously, the megafist is the simplest of them, just being a gauntlet that you wear over your normal hand, which provides enhanced weight to your blows, with enhancements to your natural strength. Then you have your lightning hammer, which is a two-handed hammer that can shock foes in addition to beating them, damaging flesh and disrupting electronics. The power sword and power claws are variations of the same technology, using a light electric field to turn the blades into a monofilament edge, and increasing their durability, making them capable of slicing almost as well as an energy saber.
“But my personal favorite, especially if you’re trying to drive home the point that people should think twice before crossing you, would be the chain weapons. Basically, some damned fool human took a tool for cutting down trees, and thought, ‘Hey, it would be great if I could hit someone in the face with this!’ Obviously, the materials and engineering are much more advanced than the original item, but they are brutally effective against body armor and flesh. They come in three main forms, swords, axes, and fist weapons.”
Genda considered that for a moment. What the merchant said made sense. And he had seen video of weapons like what the merchant described in action before. They would be very effective in the hands of his warriors. Of course, every warrior had their own preferences, when it came to weapons.
“I see. Would it be possible to get a selection of weapons, so my warriors can find ones that suit their training? They will already have to learn the new firearms, after all.”
“Sure, sure. You wanted weapons for five hundred, with the possibility to expand to a thousand in short order, right? Then how about one hundred megafists, one hundred lightning hammers, two hundred sets of power claws, two hundred power swords, fifty chainfists, fifty chainaxes, and three hundred chainswords? I’ll even throw in five of the energy sabers for ‘special occasions’, since you’re buying in bulk.”
Genda nodded. “Acceptable. And what of the rest?”
Ryul grinned. “Done with the main course, on to dessert, yeah? All right, then. Let’s talk explosives.”
(Safehouse, Black Star Station, Dimiya System)
Amra Lorasys just shook her head at what she was hearing. Rebels and separatist groups were simply a fact of life when you were dealing with a single planet, much less an interstellar polity. Well, once you got past a certain population level, at least. New colonies, like Star’s Reach, simply hadn’t had time to develop them, yet.
In the Confederation, most of the worlds had been settled for a very long time. They’d had plenty of time to develop their own cultures, and, with them, their own rebels. Honestly, it would be more surprising if there weren’t any rebels in the Confederation.
At last count, across the two hundred and eighty-seven systems that made up the Confederation, there were five hundred and ten different rebel organizations, separatist fronts, or religious crusades in operation. Roughly four hundred of them were mostly peaceful groups, that were working to try and change things from inside the system. Another fifty were proponents of revolutionary change, but were too small in scope to do more than a local impact.
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The rest? Well, they were the problems that kept the Confederate Intelligence Service’s domestic wing busy. Thankfully, most were too self-destructive, either in their ideology or their methods, to have a long-term impact, though that didn’t downplay the damage that they could cause in the short term. Some, however, were far more problematic.
The Fist of God was one of those far more problematic groups. The Dendrak were a race of lithomorphs, their bodies composed primarily of a form of granite, giving them incredible strength and durability. They also moved surprisingly fast, when they wanted to, making them incredibly dangerous combatants, even without technology.
The Dendrak lived on the world of Sandar, a volcanic world rich in mineral and metal wealth. The world was utterly inhospitable to any more normal form of life, giving the Dendrak a lack of natural predators or rivals save the great fire worms. This lack of competition stunted their technological progress in roughly the iron age.
Before the Confederation found them, just over four hundred years ago, they remained in this iron age society, ruled over by an absolute theocratic monarchy. The True King of Sandar was also the High Priest of the God-world that they walked upon. Or something like that. The description in the briefing pack she was given before the start of this mission went into some combination of alien philosophy, history, and religion that she neither knew nor cared about.
The Sandar system, being only thirty light-years from Dimiya, was one of the first systems annexed by the Confederation as it began growing. In those early days there hadn’t been any rules against simply taking a pre-FTL species’ homeworld and turning the species into a servant race. Those rules had been written largely because of Dendrak, and the Sandar Revolt.
The True King and his people did not take kindly to their annexation, once it was described to them, and fought back. They fought back surprisingly well, considering that they were using iron age technology against a civilization that controlled the high orbitals. As the Confederate Navy soon discovered, orbital strikes are of limited use against creatures that can ‘swim’ through stone.
The Sandar Revolt took ten years to put down. Ever since, the descendants of the True King and their faithful had been making trouble, off and on, trying to regain control of their planet, by any means necessary. Over the centuries, their numbers had been whittled down through attrition, until only about eighty thousand Dendrak remained in the current day. And still they fought.
The Fist of God was merely the most recent group to follow the True King in their quest to take on the Confederation. Their limited numbers and primitive weaponry kept them from being a true threat, of course. But that, it seemed, was about to change.
When the CIS got word that Genda Thadik, leader of the Fist of God, had actually travelled off of Sandar, something that no member of the Fist or its previous incarnations had ever done, as far as the intelligence agency knew, eyebrows were raised. When he booked passage on a freighter headed to Dimiya, the CIS took notice. When the freighter’s destination was listed as the Black Star Station, people got worried.
The station itself wasn’t the problem, of course. It wasn’t even the station’s owner, or the company he ran, if Amra was honest with herself. No, the problem was that the station was run as a ‘grey market’ port, where grey could move to black in an instant.
The criminal element loved it, of course, despite the hefty ‘protection’ fees Black Star charged the syndicates. A safe harbor and neutral ground, not run by the Dimiya Trade Authority, was worth the fees. Of course, the protection itself was worth every credit. The last group to try and cause trouble on the station had found themselves on the outside of the station without a suit, and then Black Star’s lawyers went to work on their families with a ruthlessness that was usually the province of Confederate Internal Revenue Service agents.
Needless to say, the hottest syndicate war became ice cold on Black Star’s station.
The CIS tolerated a certain level of criminal activity, of course. Trying to wipe out the criminal element was as futile a task as trying to wipe out all rebels. And managing the level of activity wasn’t CIS’s department, thankfully.
Even the arms dealer, Yelro, was not a major concern for the CIS. Their kind were useful enough, so long as they didn’t trade in things like nukes, or other truly nasty weapons. Being able to get weapons of questionable provenance was always a useful thing for CIS agents.
Thankfully, Yelro was one of the ‘known’ arms dealers. He mostly worked with mercenary groups and syndicates, but sold to pirates and rebels as well. That meant he knew where the limits were. If he was going to sell any of the really nasty stuff, he wouldn’t do it in any way that it could be traced back to him, and he certainly wouldn’t do it from here.
But that didn’t mean she could just ignore that the Fist of God was looking to gain modern weaponry. And not just small numbers. With the amount of weapons they were looking to buy, that meant—
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Wait. Who was knocking? She hadn’t ordered anything, and wasn’t expecting anyone. With a mental command, she sent a command to her electronics, switching them to their ‘civilian’ displays. Checking once more to make sure there was no visible sign that she was anything other than the traveler she was supposed to be, she took a breath, and went to the door.
She was about to reach her hand to the intercom to see who was at the door, when the door opened of its own accord. She knew she had locked that door! Amra was surprised, but training kicked in, as her hand moved to the pistol on her hip.
“That would be incredibly unwise, Agent.”
She her brain caught up to what her eyes were seeing. A lone knelfi man, dressed in the Black Star Corporate Security uniform, a badge on his chest. He had a pistol, like hers, but she noticed that his was already in hand, and pointed directly at her chest.
She slowly pulled her hand away from her pistol. “So, to what do I owe this ‘pleasure’? And do you have a name?”
“I have several. But any that I’d tell you would be as meaningless as the fake name you used to sign for this hotel room. As for why I am here, that is simple. You were spying on one of the residents of the station.”
“Wait, are you trying to say that the arms dealer is connected to Black Star? Is that why you’re protecting the deal?”
“Oh, nice try, but that isn’t it at all. You see, Mr. Thadik paid for the private room, with the discrete staff option. He neglected to pay for the privacy screening measures, or he simply did not know about them. Either way, that is why your bug was allowed to remain in the room.
“However, this brings us to the matter of the fees you owe. First, there is the privacy violation fee, with a penalty for forgetting to purchase it before you began spying on customers on Black Star Station. Second, you have the optional discretion fee, where we don’t inform the parties you were spying on that you were spying on them. And third, you have the optional fee to skip the mandatory thirty day ‘cooling off’ period before you will be allowed to report your information to your superiors. All told, your bill, with the optional extras, comes to 254,340 credits.”
“And if I refuse to pay this blackmail?”
“You will be shot for violating station rules, and ejected from the station towards Dimiya’s surface. Your fees will then be presented to the CIS, with an added 1000% processing fee, and a public statement will be made about CIS spying on private citizens on corporate property, while exposing your name, and as many names and cover identities of your superiors and fellow agents as we can uncover. All pitched as concern for the rights of common citizens of the Confederation.”
Amra grit her teeth. The smug bastard had her over a barrel, and at gunpoint, and he knew it. “I don’t have access to those kinds of discretionary funds.”
“That’s fine. Our security experts have arranged for the comm set on the table that came with your room can temporarily serve as a secure line, so you can talk to your superior. Your actual superior, not the cut out you report to. The number is pre-dialed and waiting for you to initiate the call.”
Amra tried to keep from hanging her head in defeat. There wasn’t going to be any way of getting out of this clean, it seemed. As she reached for the phone, she said, “So, what tipped you?”
The nameless security officer chuckled. “That’s need to know, and you don’t. Now, make your call, or we start moving into the other options.”