Kostemetsia

[Kostemetsia]

#1
He just wandered through his darkened, empty house. Everything seemed so dead... it seemed as if Novosol had been extinguished. His footsteps echoed as he trudged along the tile-floored hallway.

John Sanders had lost his wife Sarah and his two teenage sons to a disease the Commonwealth government had tentatively designated Infectious Organism DXKC... among the general population, it was known with a grim unoriginality as the Silver Death. Once infected, the victims would develop a silvery coating on their skin in the space of a few minutes. Then, it would thicken, covering their skin and their airways and asphyxiating them slowly.

He came to the window and looked out. Across the street, a white and blue building in an old Hispanic style seemed to glare at him, its doors hanging off its hinges - it had once been a bar, one that John had frequented, but the occupants had stampeded when the barman had given a frightened shout and pointed at a drinker slapping, panicked, at his arms as shining silver patches spread from under his hands. Most of the people who had been in the bar at the time were now dead.

Closer to his house, a pair of Marine soldiers were standing at attention. They were wearing standard government-issue biohazard suits and carrying rather deadly-looking slug-accelerator rifles. Every so often, one soldier would tense and raise his gun, then relax as the potential threat turned out to be something blowing across a deserted intersection.

Clicking on a light, John drew some comfort from the warm orange radiance it spread across the room. Even at two p.m., the city was still very dark, thick clouds obscuring the local sun.

As he switched on his hand computer - the only form of communication the New Brisbanites were still allowed - John distantly noticed the holographic cloud of message notifications that seemed to form around his head. They seemed to make a shape... Sarah...

He shook off the thoughts. He had no tears left to weep, and attempting seemed somehow futile.

As he progressed deeper into the Commonwealth starweb, message notifications were picked off by golden slashes of fire, revealing websites behind them. The CABC News globe floated to one side, a neatly defined red patch showing the quarantined area. On the other side, a blue-skinned New Alaskan solemnly read out the grim events of the day, each word seemingly another sentence to this eternal, purgatory-like limbo. In front of him, text alerts rolled across the screen: newsfeed updates from his favourite sites. Most were in large, colourful text, and all were panicky about the Silver Death's spread.

The newsreader began to read casualty figures, her voice cracking slightly. Her eyes seemed to glint with unshed tears as she let the damning six-figure numbers tell their lethal stories. John felt sympathy and pity for the young woman, and began to think up a note to send her through the CABC website.

He switched the channel showing the Kostemetsia Prime globe to the textual newspaper and began to scroll down the columns, eagerly looking for information on any cure. Then words jumped out at him.

SARAH MARGARET SANDERS
Died January 21, 3030
"If you are to shed a tear, let it be of joy - for now I can see again, for ever, father Roy."

An old snippet of poetry had been included in the joyful young woman's death announcement. It didn't seem right that such a dusty lexicological artifact should be in Sarah's obituary, but she'd asked that it be put there if she ever died, some years back.

John put the hand computer to one side, ignoring the objects floating on the screen, and lowered himself onto his back. He felt only an emptiness, an undefined sense of loss, spreading throughout his entire person. Sarah, Matthew, and Zachary had been such a joyful trio, and now they were gone. He didn't know what he would do.

[Naggeroth]

#2
Chaos reigned supreme in the pointcomms station as a number of Cyprian engagement units swept haughtily towards them. People ran back and forth, and the floor was littered with dropped binders and transparent-fronted display files; the people who weren't running were frantically tapping at keys and jabbering into headsets.

Finally, the ring of speakers encircling the inside roof of the comms dome began to crackle out a message. The fleet admiral must have caught on to the fact that nobody was listening, since there was an earbleedingly loud whine of feedback before the woman's voice began to thud out across the floor an order of magnitude more loudly.

"Kostemetsian pointcomms station five one three seven oblique stroke two, this is Cyprian Limited Engagement Unit Terminally Annoyed. Our destination is Novosol 3. Attempts to hinder us will be met with all due force."

A number of wet puddles began to form on the deck as the terrified pointcomms staff absorbed that statement.

+ + +

Another place where chaos reigned supreme was the Commonwealth Inner Office. The same type of untidy confusion was displayed there, only much more quietly. The situation wasn't helped by the number of high military officers storming angrily through the building, muttering words such as Black Sabbath might envy.

The General Secretary, for his part, swore heartily in a refreshing break from tradition. What had started out as a bad day, with things getting lost under tables and eaten by errant mouse-creatures in the gardens, now looked to be getting exponentially worse. Planetary-scale worse.

Clicking his handcom switch, he sat down in front of his desk and stared at the centre of his wallscreen as the large red numbers on it ticked down to zero, then the word CONNECTING...

Finally, the grim face of a female Cyprian admiral appeared on screen. The name Cyprian Star Ship Terminally Annoyed appeared in one unobtrusive corner of the wallscreen, prompting the General Secretary's heart to sink. He knew of the Terminally Annoyed; it was, as one Kostemetsian diplomat had so notoriously put it, "a big scary type which could quite comfortably slag the planet". And there were twenty-nine other ships around the same size orbiting the little world.

"Admiral Catali. Would it help to explain that this is all just a horrible mistake?"

"Probably not," the admiral said, without a trace of humour.

"In that case, these are the facts of the situation as the Commonwealth Government sees them. At six o'clock yesterday evening, your ambassador, Jason Fox, was killed by a bullet from a standard short-barrelled Commonwealth Marine forty-five-caliber sniper rifle. However, we don't believe that a Commonwealth Marine killed him."

The General Secretary steepled his hands in an earnest yet stressed fashion, while the Admiral frowned slightly.

"Explain, please. We were sent here to discourage further such attempts - after all, the fact that such an attempt could happen would be, we assume, due to either criminal negligence or wilful conspiracy. We decided on the latter; you are not an incompetent nation," she said, in an expectant manner.

"We believe the faction responsible for the attack is a fundamentalist group known as the Brethren of Kazth. They're a Holy Crusade-type jihadi nest, who we recently began to suspect of having moles in the Commonwealth armed forces. That would explain the weaponry and the crudely-left Marine uniform cloth."

"Continue, if you will."

"Admiral, there isn't any more to tell, except this."

+ + +

A bullet whistled past the young sergeant's head, and he ducked just in time. Returning a few HEIAD sidearm bullets, he sprinted down the confined, trench-like intersection, the rest of his group following, and ended up hard up against an alcove wall. Kinetic assault rifle fire sputtered futilely past him, to be met by a barrage of maser bolts from one of his marines.

Finally, the sergeant pulled a detonator from his belt. Alerting his squad to duck, he pressed it. Everything went white for a minute.

...

Hauling himself out of the fetal position he'd somehow got into, the young man kicked aside a stray piece of rubble. Pulling himself up the side, he saw with a certain amount of grim satisfaction that the disintegrator packs his squad had planted had done their jobs well. Everything above a certain level had been atomised, and in a couple of places there were still the soles of shoes, whose owners had left them behind in the process of energetic disassembly. On the downside, the floor now had a general red tint and stickiness about it.

In any case, the sergeant thought, that was most of the resistance gone. Of course, the compound's inner core had been equipped with pirated shields. EMP should take care of that, and it was due to be activated in... Now!

A glowing cyan bolt flashed down from the skies to strike the invisible shield globe. The shield, now no longer invisible, flared violently and just got brighter and brighter as the inner control computer ran amok and wildly increased the power load. Eventually, the shield silently disappeared in unison with the sound of sensitive metal bits exploding across a room.

Crossing the floor in a few swift strides, the sergeant tossed a grenade at the door and backpedaled slightly. An explosion immediately followed, with the lightly armoured door just falling into the passageway, its hinges shattered.

After a sensible period of time, the squad made their way into the newly revealed corridor, sweeping their weapons cautiously about, checking for enemies. Every so often, a sound would be heard and the nearest soldier would, startled, look in the appropriate direction -- only to see a mouse-creature skittering away or something of that nature.

Finally, they came to a green door dented by what looked like several bullet impacts. A spoofer was duly applied, and the door swung open to reveal a number of people looking about themselves in a surprised fashion. Heads spun to the door, and most of the heads' owners were on the floor soon after, stun pulses having hit them. One man alone in the middle avoided this, and he was quickly electrocuffed by the squad and escorted from the room.

...

Snickering, the squad loaded the man into a truck some distance from the compound, while the sergeant climbed into the front and started the engine. The rest of the terrorists would be nicely dealt with until a detachment of State Police came around to pick them up.

+ + +

The General Secretary netmemoed a rather favourable report to the Admiral, knowing it would appear in the corner of her wallscreen. The report was one with satellite images, x-scans, and footage of a certain deployment of the Commonwealth Marines upon a certain fundamentalist group. The report had come to the General Secretary about three minutes before the meeting, and had been automatically issued upon the conclusion of all mission objectives. It also happened to be a successful resolution to the situation. Of course, the downside (a number of terrorist fatalities) hadn't been included; what use was there in poisoning the well?

A few minutes later, the Admiral resumed speaking.

"Certainly intriguing, Mister Bovill. I'm forwarding it to Command now to see what they make of it."

The screen went dark, and a red 'pause' icon flashed up. After a few minutes of patient waiting, the Admiral's image blinked back onto the screen without preamble; this time Catali was wearing a slight smile.

"We've been given the order to withdraw. God willing, we won't be back any time soon. It's been as much of a pleasure as something can be in these circumstances."

With the abrupt, silent blink-off of the screen, the General Secretary let himself relax. He wasn't sure the citizens of the Commonwealth (excluding the hotshot space pilots, of course) had even known there were Cyprian engagement units in orbit, so the Government had really played the role of... the General Secretary attempted to think up a phrase. Of course: "The shield that shall not be seen."

As the order went out to all Naval units to stand down, the General Secretary settled himself more comfortably in his chair. Back to business as usual, he assumed - like life in space, governmental business could be summed up as weeks of tedium interspersed by flashes of terror. Of course, the flashes of terror were what most high officials really lived for.

Shutting down the various pieces of electronics round his office, the General Secretary left the room. A few minutes later, he was on the roof, looking up, eyes shielded -- and could vaguely see a flock of black specks shrinking to nothing.

[Trailers]

I like what I see so far. =) Looking foreward to the 3rd response.

[Kostemetsia]

(OOC: Thanks, Trailers. I'm satisfied with #1, but not with #2 - am planning to expand it.)

#3

Tugging at his tie, the Minister of Justice lowered himself quickly into his Inner Office aircar, avoiding a number of disgruntled protesters throwing a number of unpleasant items at him. The chauffeur boosted the car into the air, fired the burners briefly, and hovered into one of the designated emergence lanes.

Folding open his briefcase to reveal a laptop, Joseph Keeper, Commonwealth Minister of Justice, logged onto the secured surveillance server and took a brief, objective look down at the city. The satcam autozoomed to pick out areas of interest, most of these being streets along which ant-sized protestors swarmed.

The reason for all the civil kerfuffle was that trading had just fallen through with the Chinese Collective, an independent territory in the Kostemetsian Prates Cluster claim, thanks to a recent spate of piracy that the Collectivites were convinced had been engineered by the Commonwealth. Civilians were worried about the supply of food that was no longer reaching them, while the Commonwealth Navy and Marines were tearing their collective hair out over the similarly non-arriving cargoes of capital-ship weapons and higher-end electronics.

Keeper had seriously considered not coming into the office this morning, but rumour had it that President Hansen was going to resign, and the Minister of Justice regarded it as his sovereign duty to prevent any such badly-thought-out idiocy.

The aircar wobbled slightly as it settled onto its Inner Office landing pad, alerting Keeper to close his laptop and step out of the aircar. A detachment of Commonwealth state guards were waiting, grim-faced, at the top of the Office's external-entry stairs, and the sergeant stepped forward with a scanner, which he flicked over Keeper's wrist. Nodding, he silently waved the Minister through.

Taking comfort in the door's solid click-thud as it closed behind him, Keeper made his way to his office, flicking on the lights remotely from some distance down the corridor. The air-conditioning light blinked green, and the wireless network antenna extended from the wall.

The Minister sat down heavily on his office chair, which squeaked in protest, and retrieved his laptop from his briefcase. Plugging it into mains power, he started making some vidcalls.

+ + +

A while later, he was linked into an Internal Secure Network conversation which included the rest of the Commonwealth Executive Ministers, as well as the President and General Secretary. In due course, the youngish Peter McCrimmon (Homeland Security) cheerfully announced his intent to stay on till the bitter end, as did the pugnacious, red-haired Bruno Sciacelli (Defence) and blond, unsmiling Aidan Menzies (Treasury). Most of the rest had doubts, with the exception of Goldine Ephraimsson (Health and Human Services), who'd already written her resignation.

The General Secretary firmly told everyone they were staying on, at which a few of the ministers angrily blanked their vidcams. As ever, the Secretary was unruffled, but unruffled in that special way which managed to convey rather richly that a few people would be getting their offices redecorated in pink, silver and green.

Keeper blanked his screen after everybody else, and sat there thinking for a while. Goldine was a fairly good minister as ministers went, and competent people were a rare commodity, even on the Commonwealth's forty-six worlds. Pete, Bruno, and Aidan were excellent colleagues and exceptional at their jobs. The cabinet could probably afford to lose a few, though - Janine Lewis-McPherson had been talking about resigning recently, before the trade lines fell through, and she did seem to have a kind of universe-weariness about her. Perhaps it was time for her to take a break and see if she really wanted to come back to the Minister of Labour job.

Rising from his desk, the Minister of Justice strode majestically from his office.

+ + +

As he climbed the stairway to the roof, the Minister could hear chanting in the streets below. The words were indistinct, but the message was clear enough - there were a whole lot of pissed-off citizens down there. White placards' text was made unreadable by the glare of the Kostemetsian yellow-dwarf sun, and the citizens brandished their banners and logoes in all directions.

As he watched, a line of black-uniformed Commonwealth Police built up in front of the angry crowd. Gradually, it became a rectangle, then a square, then another crowd of police. Neither line was moving anymore.

Deciding he'd seen enough, the Minister strode back downstairs, only to see another angry citizen. This one appeared to have bashed through a number of lines of Presidential guards, and on sight of the Minister ran at him, shouting raucously and incoherently.

Or perhaps not incoherently after all.

"--you corrupt bastard! Taking money for yourselves out of the Collectivists' pockets! Now they're pissed at us and look what you've done! Your idiocy is the reason I lost my job, and--"

A Presidential guard strode up behind the man and lightly tapped him on the shoulder. The man almost spun, showing a look of complete surprise, then collapsed as if boneless to the floor. He appeared to be still breathing, but was obviously out cold. The Minister nodded and thanked the guard earnestly, then went back into his office. A vidcall tone rang from his laptop, and he got back into the seat just in time to pick up. It was May Connors, his personal assistant.

"Joe. Good news, really good. The Collective Naval Guard is cracking down on piracy, apparently. They've captured a ship and run it through their checks - turns out the pirates are from the Protectorate, painted to look like Commonwealthers. You and the rest of the Cabinet need to be writing up a resolution to reintegrate trade, which the diplomatic corps will present to them."

+ + +

Three days later, all was a bit better. A number of disgruntled citizens had lost a bit of their disgruntlement when the resolution was announced. There were still protestors in the streets, but nothing major was really happening.

Joe Keeper's name was prominently displayed at the top of the list of signatories to a resolution to reintegrate trade with the Chinese Collective. He'd mostly written the damn thing, in any case. Cheap high-end electronics and weaponry could flow freely again, and a couple of newsreaders made sharp, sarcastic comments on how easy it was to be a little bloody observant.

It was an understandable error on the Collective's behalf. New Kostemetsian Protectorate citizens had access to technology of at least the same level as the Collective could build, and so it was understandable that they'd exploit that technology to take the blame off themselves. Several key figures in the Protectorate Naval and financial administrations had been arrested and were awaiting trial.

In short, back to business as usual. Just another bustlingly active day in the Commonwealth. Fraud, conspiracy to murder, theft... nothing major, just usual everyday matters.

[Kostemetsia]

I'm about to make these replies formal and submit them for marking, but first I'd like to know if I'd be able to become an ESUS member with the results I would get from them in their current form.

[Trailers]

If you want to do some editing, I'll hold off on grading you. =) Or did you mean you want to completely re-submit your tests?

[Xenonier]

Kost is essentially asking for a grade, without it being official. Ie, if the above is enough to pass, Kost would like an indication of that.

I have no idea if it's against the rules, but I am not a tester, so I guess it's your call Trailers.

[Telros]

Don't want to be a prick, but when I asked, I was told to finish first before they would grade me. Probably to be absolutely sure I could make the cut or some such. That's my assumption.

[Kostemetsia]

What the heck. They're about as good as they're going to get - after all, I can hardly expand Scenario 2. I'm submitting my tests for grading - sorry for the inconvenience.

[Trailers]

Test #1 - 88% -

I rather liked where this was going. I felt sympathetic for John, even attached to him. You did a good job of showing the city going to ruin, as well as a lot of buildup..but the resolution felt empty to me. After all that buildup I wanted something more than an epitaph and a man crying.

Test #2 - 95% -

I liked this one the best. =) A good, full scenario that came to a sensible and conclusive resolution, no loose ends, as well as an engaging story. My only problem was that the Cyprians seemed a little too easily convinced, and the ease with which the terrorists were found just seemed a tad forced. =P

Test #3 - 90% - Don't get me wrong. The writing was top-notch; I mean, you used the word kerfuffle. The only thing was this scenario was heinously boring. .-. Now I know you had no control over the test criteria, but this scenario had potential for some very entertaining writing. Also, I didn't really see your minister doing anything productive. It was the Collective that proved their own error, all your main character did was sit back and write up a new trade agreement, really. :/

Still, top notch writing. You've proven to me that you deserve to join the ESUS.

Final grade - 91% PASS!

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