I couldn’t hide the amusement on my face as I closed the screenplay for seasons five and six of An Honest Bureaucrat on Tellus. The girls had totally taken Mata’s rapid advancement through the ranks of the Tellurian government and made a massively entertaining drama/soap opera/political intrigue serial out of it... and it was wildly popular on the far side of the Rift, Names Changed to Protect the Guilty.
Mata had inherited the soul of the madam of most of the sex workers of Habberblok. She was a Femme Fatale right to her core, and when it came time to send one of ours off to Tellus, she got the nod without any hesitation.
She had worked diligently to get her Focus Hari up to the point of being able to Riftcut, signed up for governmental exams, and scored so highly she was shipped off to Tellus to distinguish herself... said wonderful experience being shared by hundreds of thousands of others who were basically cheap imported labor being fed into the governmental machines that employed tens of billions of people to control the galaxy, and were considered outlander competition by the native Tellurians trying to inherit their parent’s positions.
Undeterred, she had clawed her way up the hierarchy, and if she couldn’t grind monsters for Karma, she found all sorts of other monsters there who couldn’t wait to be ground up in the honored traditions of the political machines on Tellus. Her kill totals were very, very impressive... and that was before she ever got her hands personally dirty.
She had an especial talent for sniffing out Amourean cultists, and naturally no dops could evade her eyes. She had broken network after network of cultists, infiltrated some, and learned a lot about rival cults of competitors that wound slowly up through the hierarchy, just waiting for her to bring down in her relentless advance.
Deep in the depths of Tellus, she had sliced open a Rift long enough to bring in some of her own daughters, and a hundred Femme Fatale Ranthas had hit the underspires of Tellus, recruiting, turning street punks into well-educated government functionaries overnight, and she had gutted out the competition and begun to build her own network underneath her with amazing speed.
The rate of her advancement was noted by her superiors, and they weren’t stupid enough to think all those impediments to her career being removed in so many interesting and usually fatal ways were accidents at all. Her utterly remarkable skill at surviving attempts to do the same to her also raised some eyebrows. Finally, the aide of a stuffy, hidebound curmudgeon of a Senior Director in the Senatorial Intelligence Directorate was found to be an Amourean cultist selling copies of Senate discussions to an information broker in possession of drow shadow technology, all discovered by the anti-dop division she had set up following the aide’s replaced lover around to discern her connections.
Impressed by her organizational skills and the dismantling of a cult network that eventually brought down one of the enemies of his own Senatorial sponsor, Mata was invited into the halls of the government agency that acquired the information that was fed to the Senate and multiple other government institutions to guide their decisions... by its Director.
The place had lost more information than it had ever passed on. Indeed, many of its operations were deliberately designed to obscure and diffuse useful information so it could not be overwhelmingly abused, as Mata confirmed with the experience of hundreds of other Ranthas by then moonlighting with government jobs in between their Karma grinds. Removing or ignoring some of those protocols by various means, including outright subversion of those supposed to be imposing them, increased the efficiency of the unit she was overseeing a hundred percent, delighting the Director.
The government naturally would have had conniption fits if they knew that her classified Band, which would not transmit or record information outside government premises, was dumping reams of data into Markspace for the Goldilocks crew to look over. As the demands for information for the Senators and other services were so wide-ranging, and Mata and her crew became so very good at gathering them, the demands for specialized information resulted in them being sent into ever more secure and confidential corners... and of course she passed all the bribery tests and temptations with flying colors.
Prying open secrets soon became part of her job description, and even the Umbrans started looking askew at her and her crew when they started unearthing stuff they really shouldn’t have been able to. Then the Umbrans realized how extensive the support network beneath her inside the government she had arranged for herself was, and quietly recruited her on the sly to start providing counterintelligence among the ever-shifting factions within the megacity-sized Senatorial complex.
She was having a wonderful time in a Machiavellian nightmare, a political world so overdone and complex it would give Byzantines fits, where the fates of worlds and lives of billions were bandied about idly by men who should never have been given such power and responsibility.
More importantly, we had Marked players inside the heart of the government on Tellus, and were growing our influence at the street level and spreading it out slowly. Mata’s kids had already taken over one major family of the Themis, unearthing a level of corruption big, thick, and fat that they were chewing on, spitting out, or digesting with grim enthusiasm.
To the utter consternation of many other branches of the underfamilies, they got on famously well with the Ancients of the underspire, who generally belonged to the Skraelings and had long and brutally hostile relationships with the Themis. Those Ancients generally fell head over heels for Mata’s kids on first sight, and were totally happy to beat the shit out of anyone to prove it. If some of the younger Ancients who joined up also happened to not have Briggs for a surname, that was surely quite a coincidence as they began their own climbs up the Skraeling ranks... and gathered followings of Ancients and hard, strong men about themselves.
Stolen story; please report.
The key fact was that we now had real-time information access to the heart of the Empire on Tellus. We learned about things before Twilight Dukes and Fleet Admirals did, let alone Imperial Governors or mega-corp Presidents... and while there was a whole branch of the kids who took huge advantage of that for multiple reasons, just knowing which way the political winds were shifting, and if any major moves were being made in advance, was proving very helpful financially.
There was no way we could get into the Imperial Palace. All the permanent positions there had been hereditary down to the worker bee level for thousands of years, and any positions of authority that moved in and out were former Imperial Governors, Fleet Admirals, Twilight Dukes, or other officials with similar world-spanning power. Those people were often trained on Tellus, sent out, and came back for their twilight years to the seat of Imperial Power to satisfy some final ambitions.
The Auric Leaf (of COURSE it wasn’t a branch of the Green and Gold, nope nope) she had set up was spreading out laterally, and if there were more gutter-scum blade boys around than there used to be, they seemed to think fighting zwilniks was fun, and the armies of the drug lords were soon rolling into motion, generating heaps more Karma for the thirsty young folk Down Under...
That stuff didn’t quite make it into the serial drama, but the valiant Honest Bureaucrat Mariko’s skill at sniffing out corruption and surviving assassination attempts certainly made up for it.
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Deep in the asteroid belt of E26-I9’erspace...
“Gorgum! How the hell are ya.”
His barbarically furred, fanged, and tusked face twisted a bit at my friendly introduction, and Chalice hummed politely in greeting to him. The hobgoblin to his right and goblin Techrunt to his right hummed along until his big yellow eyes turned on them, and they hastily shut up.
“Hurm, Dark Angel. You cost me a lotta gobz,” the hulking urgob said, looking down at me with a scowl... which looked rather charming, and I could see all the fear and unease behind it.
I made a shooing motion. “Are you gonna send all the excess lads back, or do I butcher them all and throw them into the tube?” I asked politely.
He growled at me, I smiled wider, and Chalice tinged two notes.
Tremble...
Sudden thoughts of being the subject of an -aaaK! verse rising in his head, and with all his mitey tuff urgob buhzurker cyber-armored stealth axe-wielding furball commandoes leaning backwards and away from me at those notes, he turned around to grunt at them, somehow conveying an explicit order to get the frack out of there in good order with one syllable.
Rather smartly, the urgobs hastily preceded the much more disciplined purple- through crimson-skinned hobgoblins in their black carapace armor out of there, leaving Gorgrum and his two advisors behind, along with the cold smell of goblin fear, dunno why.
I gestured, and a Disk came swirling up, flattened out and expanded, becoming a nice floating table. Other Disks glided smoothly up, formed into hoverchairs for everybody, even Gorgrum in all his crude and highly dangerous power armor.
“Please sit,” I told them, and a bit jumpily, the three Goblins did so, finding the seats quite comfortable for all of them. They relaxed visibly when I followed suit.
“Wut you pull us ‘ere for, Dark Angel?” he growled at me, looking over my shoulder through the transparent shell of the conference dome hanging between our ships. One extended walkway led out from my ship, one out from his. Neither of us had weapons hot, both of us had stealth ships waiting out there just in case of surprises, but I’d given my word I wouldn’t start something, and I’d also given my word that if they did, I’d end it.
“My goal is pretty plain. I want the Goblins out of humanspace, right? Nothing complex about it. But, that won’t work if you all don’t have someplace all to go, right? Best to just keep conquering and plundering until you’re big enough and strong enough to have some territory you can keep... or you fail and shatter and go back to lurking in the shadows of the galaxy until the next time, amiright?”
“Yarz,” Gorgrum agreed, nodding his thick skull, and the slitted eyes of the hobgoblin agreed, while the Techrunt giggled. “You wantz talk peez?” He grinned widely: extortion and bribery that wouldn’t work were favorite things of the Goblins!
“Hah, no. I want to send you a long, long ways away, where you ain’t got no Elvar, Humans, Way Federation, Tekrons, or Ruk to fight.”
“Ruk?” Gorgum huffed. “Ain’t no rockies out here...”
“Infernal Warlord Ashigazkar was blown to pieces just two cycles ago when he made a move on Ruk holdings in the core. Here’s the vid relay.” The Goblins all blinked as I pulled up a vid of the massive Hobgoblin-designed mothership, so cold and hard and black and spikey they all oohed to see it.
The sight of it somewhat later after it exchanged opinions with a Ruk Citadel ship named the Axe High was considerably less inspiring, with its belly blown out from a ruptured power core, engines ripped apart, its massive Supahnovah Boomah Cannon split and shattered, and lots of fires burning over scattered forms in and outside the hull.
The view panned back and forth, revealing some extremely brightly burning Goblin ships all around... and then the massive, silent hulks of multiple carved flying mountains, hanging out in the Void, looking a little carbon-scored here and there, but certainly none the worse for wear.
“Youz met da rockies.” Gorgum reached up to stroke his brick of a chin. His war marshal sent him a warning look, the Techrunt looked a wee bit uncertain. “Dat’s new. Didn’t know humies dealt with da rockies.” He shrugged. “Youz stab’em in da back, like youz do all da races, ain’t youz.”
“Just like Goblins.” He beamed; they all did. Proud Goblin tactical thinking, it was. “Right. Well, how’d you like to go fight for a bunch of worlds that will literally be your own, and no one else’s? No alien races, no vast number of ships, no organized navies coming out to rival yours and beat on you.” I glanced over the trio. “You’re almost at the point where you can do the job.” To all their amazement, I nodded at the Techrunt. “He’ll be able to do it soon, once I give him a suitable challenge.”
I tapped the floating Disk, and a starmap came up. The galactic view zoomed up, slid aside, and settled on another agglomeration of stars, about half the distance of the galaxy away through the void.
“We call this Canis Major, I don’t know what your people do.”
“Da Little Egg,” Gorgum supplied helpfully.
I just raised an eyebrow. “Very good. There’s approximately a billion stars in the Little Egg. However, there is next to no organic life there... except for one.” Another holo came up, and they all kind of grunted the same way.
“World-eaters...” Gorgrum growled.