0x2C2B11---File---

Name: Desna G. Hargrieve
HID#: 9332-38773-09
Astral Forces #: 2733-189871
Birthplace: Cheshana glacier, Serntiaari
Date of Birth: 293 Stormcall 1
Eyes: Blue/Synthetic Grey
Hair: Blonde
Height: 1.72m
Weight: 68kg
House Allegiance: Aesgar
Induction: 309 Stormcall 1
Active Since: 309 Darkstorm 10
Separation: [blank]
Rank: Proven Warrior (Primus)
Specialty: Gareshi War-Chaplain
Training: Grade 3 Infantry; Grade 1 Astral; Grade 1 Survival & Tactics; Basic,
Qualifications: Platoon Leader [see attached file], Basic Powered Armor Proficiency (BPAP),   Marksman score 399, Technical score 200, Piloting Score N/A [see attached file]
Battles and Campaigns: Fourth Serntiaari Polar Rebellion, Magath VI, Huorn's World, Asteroid Cluster 77B, Battle of Serpent's Pass, First Damaran Crusade, Second Damaran Crusade, Boarding Action: Ticonderoga, Battle of Crossed Hammers, Battle of Nightvalley, Aesgarian Offensive
Decorations and Citations: Blooded Fist, Wounded Heart (three), Prince's Cross, Laurel of Honor, Laurel of Victory, Sharpshooter's shell, Blade of the Warsworn,
Previous Assignment: INS-Shackleton security team
Current Assignment: 9th Gareshi Drop Infantry, attached to the 4th Fleet under Novarch Merik Avanus, (House Indaris)
Callsign: Deathspitter
Status: Active

---File---0x0071BC1A
This message was last edited by the GM at 21:05, Thu 24 July 2014.

[Getting all the personnel files done and we'll start on the narrative.]

"From one thing, know ten thousand things."

Dizzy twisted her body and stepped to the side at the choppy overhand swing of her sparring partner, turning on her heel as she stepped around to his shoulder.  She'd had the strange runes along the skana's blade translated for her after the end of the Shackleton's mission.  It was an inversion of an ancient earth philosophy, the Tao, which was unknowable but all the things of the earth reflected elements of it.  Supposedly, as one came to understand the whole of the world, the shape of this great force would make itself known.  For her part, the Proven Warrior Primus found the Shivari's take much more agreeable.

The raw soldier wrenched his momentum forcefully back, a wide back swing arching up towards her as he tried to take advantage of the double-edged nature of the blades the Gareshi preferred.  Still perched on the balls of her feet, Dizzy shifted her footing back, the short edge coming up short as he twisted awkwardly at the waist to brake his momentum.  War.  War was her idiom, her life.  Since she was a child, orphaned by the constant battles that wracked her homeland, she had given her body over to its practice.  She had devoted her mind to its secrets.  She had tempered her soul to its harsh realities, to accept it into her core without the comfort of blinding herself to its cost.  She was the willing instrument of a harsh, pitiless god with only the promise of greater battles and the strength that such tests granted as her rewards.  Not the only god, perhaps not even the greatest god, but the only one with a claim to her.

"You're dead." she intoned, the flat edge of her sword slapping against the thick cords of muscle that were her subordinate's neck.  She saw his teeth grit, her knuckles turning white along the grip of his short blade, and she fixed him with a flat stare as she waited to see if he'd actually contest it.  Shaking his head, clearly angered at the loss, she turned to the rest of the circle, "NEXT!"

So, from one thing, from War, she would learn ten thousand things.  Perhaps she could claim that Commander Farhenra had been the one to set her on this path, the day he'd handed her the sword of the traitor Meyrink, who had, in truth, perhaps been more devoted to the Hedgemony than them all.  It had been his trophy, won through bloody combat, but he had passed it along to her.  He'd probably never known precisely how much loyalty he'd bought with that gesture, but she had learned to use the light, single-edged sword, and it had opened her up to a very different kind of fighting than she'd learned in the cold stone houses of Serntiaari.  Faster, requiring greater speed, absolute control, fought at greater distances and demanding greater endurance in a duel.

And absolutely useless on the ice.  Learning this form had, indirectly, reinforced the values of her classical training.  The need for solid footing, the quick, sharp jabs and close-quarters stabbing and slashing that characterized close quarters combat in her homeland.  The fine sandalwood grip on the gift passed down to her, beautiful and treated though it had been, had swollen and cracked when she'd returned to her homeland, splintering in her grip as she'd demonstrated the forms.  She'd had it refitted to something more modern, more robust, and layered in leather straps to ensure her grip.  To this day, she still carried both blades.

"You'll not cross this line." she said, her face hidden behind the impassive skull helmet of her creed as she lightly drew a line across the deckplating halfway across the duelists circle as the next recruit stepped up.  She saw the look he favored her with, full of impetuousness, and allowed herself a private smile.  She had immersed herself in the bloody flow of war, fighting where the carnage was the thickest, and it had earned her scars and glories she could be proud of ... that yet, paled against the value of the insights granted her by her faith.  She learned the logistics of the Hegemony, and through it she learned what was valued by the soldiers on the front.  She listened, truly listened to the songs sung by the warriors of the Hegemony's other worlds, and learned something of their hearts and for what they would fight.  She studied battles fought on other fronts and in the past, and gleaned insight of the convoluted pattern of attack and counter-attack that dominated battle.  Her prowess had seen her promoted to Primus under a Knight with some diluted noble blood ... which of them truly lead the platoon was sometimes less clear that some would like, though there was no doubt to whom the commendations would gravitate.

The fight was joined in earnest.  This grunt knew his way around the blade, the ragged edge of an ear suggesting he had some practical application rather than the raw untrained methods of the majority.  There weren't many occasions in which it was advantageous to use a sword over a rifle, after all ... however, the Unified Brotherhood issued swords to all of their men, and Dizzy wanted her men drilled and up to date if they ever had cause to engage the invaders on that level.  It was only her own experience that had seen her lose only a lung to one of their Dekarchos's vibroblades rather than her life, and the blade he'd carried was significantly longer than the nine and a half inch blade issued by the Gareshi Military.  Her blade flashed this way and that, but never was there the clang of steel on steel that normally accompanied these bouts.  While the broad double-edged blade issued to the Gareshi was largely a defensive tool, the Skana was light, if used like a blunt instrument it was likely to fracture and break ... which is why she relied so heavily upon her footwork  The current recruit had apparently noticed this, he was trying to box her in, but she kept her blade out towards him to keep the threat of injury fresh in his mind.

In the deck lighting, blades flashed as they stepped around one another, Dizzy paused with her sword thrust forward, grip in both hands.  The other warrior had switched to a reverse-bladed grip to try and confuse her defense, but she'd kept the range.  She stood up straight and flicked her blade as if to clear blood from the monomolecular edge.

"You're dead." she said, the shallow silver crease along the abdomen of the man's armor showing where she'd have spilled his guts in a real fight.

"Ah, but I have crossed the line." he said in return, sounding smug under his helmet as he spun the blade back into a forward grip.

"And yet, still dead." she said, raising her arm and sliding the blade back into her break-away shoulder sheathe, the smooth black exterior sealing along one edge and going to work honing the mono-blade's edge, "You became so fixated on the goal of proving me wrong, that you never questioned if there was anything to be gained in crossing that line.  You need to retain your objectivity." she waved her hand.

"Continue your drills until the turn of the hour, then break for sustenance.  I have duties to attend to."  she said, unhooking the helmet of her armor and taking a deep breath of the ship's recycled air as she shook out her golden hair damp with the weight of sweat.  Her finger lightly brushed against a slight knick along her right brow ridge, and she smirked slightly.  Perhaps she hadn't quite maintained distance as well as she'd thought.

"Proven Tulius.  You will take my place in the circle ... pass it on, once you're at your limit."  she shrugged her shoulders and strode towards the cramped officer's space that she shared with the Platoon's CO, casting a disparaging look at the pile of forms that had gathered on one corner of her desk.  The damned Indari certainly did love their paperwork, always another form to fill out, time sheets here, requisition forms there, personnel and medical evaluations.  All of the wondrous niggling little duties that were expected of an XO, but made far more onerous by the use of language on the forms.  It was almost as though some Hegemony bureaucrat had set out to make everyone in the 4th Fleet feel like a simpleton ... whoever he was, she'd have liked to string him up for increasing the amount of time she spent behind this desk, rather than on drills or leading prayers.

Ah, but there were perks, she admitted as she spied the heavy brown envelope post marked from Fleet Intelligence.  She knew herself well, she knew the fighting methods of the Gareshi as a whole and had studied drop insertion protocol upon being assigned to the company.  As she untied the twine binding and began unfolding the brown paper, a wolfish grin settled on her lips, causing her scars to stretch along with her glee.  As much as she knew herself, however, the Unified Brotherhood was still something of a mystery to her.  Their strategies, their tactics, the insignia that denoted rank and division   As the Gorumskagat taught, if you knew yourself, but not your enemy, you would find a defeat for every victory.  They'd been in the grips of total war for nearly two years, but there was still so much she didn't know about the invaders ... their fighting strength, their tactics, the nature of their martial honor.  She'd had to pull some strings to get this from Fleet Intelligence, and she expected it to be heavily censored even so, but she was eager to help put the bits she'd managed to glean from her own time on the battlefield into a wider context.
This message was last edited by the player at 16:39, Sat 26 July 2014.

The folder was thick, heavy and smelled of fresh ink. Once, long ago, humans used the mulch of trees to make paper to write on, but now they manufactured an organic polymer to print their words on. Embedded in the paper were polymemetic pigments and tiny photovolatic cells arranged in a mesh to power their states. In essence, the paper could have moving images on it, supplying extensive interactive data with minimal physical real estate lost.

You begin to pour over the files. At first it's just history lessons, summarizing the actions of the last two years, any one who follows the news would know this stuff. Eventually it begins to dig into the specifics of the incidents. Gamma-071, Hydra Proximi, Morill... you stop at that name. The events of two years flood back. The Morill system was where you ended up when your ship, the Shackleton, was sabotaged. You found Pretech artifacts, dealt with the Shivari assassin and the brief fight with the unknown hostile ship. At the time, it was assumed the ship was part of the Pretech installation's orbital defense, much as the drones were. The ship suffered massive damage and was forced to retreat from the Star System back across the dead zone where you were eventually picked up by an Hegemony patrol about two weeks later.

This report contradicts that notion. The hostile starship was identified as a Unified Brotherhood destroyer which promptly charted your escape vector and followed your spikewave directly into Indaris space. In Fleet Intelligence, at least, the Shackleton was responsible for leading the Unified Brotherhood here in the first place. Several paragraphs and images are restricted to Security Clearance Priority 6 and display nothing for you.

You continue on, throughout the night, studying the files in your cramped quarters. You discover a few more interesting pieces of information before you finally feel the lack of sleep and exhaustion weighing on you.

The Unified Brotherhood is a theocracy. It appears to be ruled by some denomination of an ancient Earth religion: The Church of Orthodox Christianity. They are unlike our records suggest followers of that religion would be. They worship a Prophet who arose in the last century or two and unified the factions on their world, wrote a new set of scriptures and led the Church in a crusade of conquest for over one hundred years before he ascended to Heaven.

Their forces are divided up into entirely separates entities. Details are scarce, but we know they are lead by shock troopers called ARKANGELOS. They appear to be terror forces, intended to break the resolve of their enemy. They appear to be well liked amongst their own people, viewed as religious heroes and are leading the spearhead of the invasion.
HORSEMEN appear to be their armor corps, mounted in combat vehicles of some kind. Reports on this are incomplete, but hovercraft and tracked vehicles have been photographed by surveillance and recon units. Details are scarce and further reports on their motorpool appears to be restricted [Priority 4]
The rank and file appears to be composed of LEGIONS, which are by all accounts, little more than conscripts with low tech projectile weapons. The problem is that they tend to arrive in massive numbers. The logistics behind the Unified Brotherhood invasion has allowed massive troop deployments and suggests, along with their culture, that they have a lengthy history of invading and subjugating worlds.

One more thing you notice before you have to get some rack time, there appears to be one or two primary sources for much of the material. The lack of transparency on the part of the the writer about their methods and the source leads you to believe interrogation was involved. Once you have that idea, you scan back through the material and it becomes clear. The limited information, the Office of Special Intelligence seals, the restricted details. One or more of the enemy was captured and interrogated extensively to gain this information.

Dizzy settled down on the edge of her desk, picking up the stack of specially manufactured paper product and beginning to sift through the pages.  It wasn't the first time she'd neglected to strip off the thirty five pound combat skin as she tended to her paperwork, a fact that had drawn more than a few questioning looks from her CO in the past.  Eventually he'd just accepted it as "a Gorumite thing", but she still caught the occasional strange look out of the corner of her vision.  In honesty, she tended to forget she was wearing it, she'd trained to sleep in her field kit when necessary after all and the new Indarian armor distributed the weight more efficiently and was better machined to avoid interfering with her mobility than the Aesgar Skyplate she'd originally been issued.  It was essential, given the reliance on rigid armored plates for her protection.

"HRAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH!!!" roughly an hour after she'd initially sat down to review the file, there was a large crash as something heavy was thrown to the ground.  An Indarian crewmen poked his head into the office to make sure nothing was wrong, finding the broad armored figure of the warpriest looming over her desk which she'd apparently torn off of its moorings to throw over, paperwork and requisition forms still drifting in the air as she snapped her head to look at the person who'd opened the door.  Blue and gray, her hard eyes bored into him, her face still red from exertion as her hunched shoulders rolled with hissed, heavy breathing.  She looked like she might very well come after him and start butchering everyone on the level, loosely bound pages clenched tightly in her fist.  The door closed again hastily.

The Shackleton mission.  Intelligence laid the blame for the Unified Brotherhood at their feet.  Her right hand opened and closed into a fist, feeling the grip of the monoblade still at her side.  If it was true, and she had no reason to doubt it, then she had to accept the heaviest portion of the responsibility.  Security had been her duty, after all, the initial sabotage was shame enough, but she could at least share that with the engineering staff.  Meyrink, however, she should have watched more closely.  If not for his sabotage, the exploratory vessel would have left Moril IV's orbit almost two weeks sooner.  The spike trail they'd left would have long decayed beyond the ability to trace.  She punched an armored fist into a bulkhead, feeling the jar of impact rock its way back up her shoulder.  The crew had put their lives and safety in her hands, and because she'd been insufficiently vigilant, the lot of them had been exploited by some unknown conspiracy.

Maybe it was the will of Gorum, she thought as she rest her forehead against the bulkhead, gritting her teeth and screwing her eyes shut tight.  The whole of the Hegemony was thrown into a war of annihilation.  No bondsmen were taken, no tributes were offered, cities burned and noncombatants were swept into the vicious ortillary barrages.  The House she'd sworn to had declared Bellum Exterminatis, if the last two Houses could be swayed this would go beyond war.  She'd be called upon to slay their children, to burn their cities, to destroy them utterly and purge their legacy from the stars.  Such a thing was outside the perview of general practice.  The Gorumskagat preached to seek a war everlasting after all, and that ideal required a ready supply of strong opponents to test one's self against.  The next generation was supposed to rise up and take on the vendettas of the old, to raise again the call to war.  But there was a provision ... old and uninvoked since the days of the First Prophet, the call against the Abomination, the Holy War which called all Gareshi Citizens to become the mailed fist of their god.  With the call for Bellum Exterminatus from House Aesgar, there were those in the Church who were not content to wait for the other two Houses.  They were calling for the Holy War now ... with the loss of Toasaa, they might just get it.  One did not burn farms on Serntiaari, food was too precious to waste.

Whether the will of her god or not, Dizzy owed a tithe of blood for every soul lost to this war.  Even if it was only a drop per victim, with the shock tactics of the Unified Brotherhood, she could not help but think she'd be killing enemies for a long time to come.

Slowly, she righted the room, filing away a requisition form for someone to bolt her desk back down to the deck plating when they got a chance.  It was, after all, heavy enough to hurt someone should the gravity fail and it start floating around.  Then she spread the reports out across the desk and began studying in earnest, forcing herself to take short breaks every so often to keep her mind fresh as she sharpened a blade, eventually taking her armor off if only to maintain it properly.  In honesty, she was surprised no one came in to interrupt her ... she supposed that word of her loss of composure must had spread.

It wasn't until the words were drifting together on the page and she was physically unable to link the disparate words into meaningful sentences that she conceded that she was exhausted.  Reflexively, she reached for stim patch, the temptation to rely on chemical infusions to force the clarity she needed to properly digest the file rattling in her mind.  Her old instructor's words cut through the haze of her mind, however, and she brought herself up short.  Her body was Gorum's instrument, after all, she was to maintain it with the same diligence she applied to her tools of war.  Stims were for lengthy field assignments where alertness could mean the difference between life and death, not desk work.

Shaking her head, she gathered the papers and tucked them back into the brown paper, stuffing it in the top drawer and locking it up.  Pushing open the door, she strode into the hall, lightly trailing one hand along the wall so she could walk with her eyes closed, opening them periodically to check the foot traffic in the halls.  Finally, she reached the bunks issued to the 9th, clambering up into her bed and falling face-first onto her small squashed pillow, doubling it over as she rest her cheek  against her arm.  The ship's morning cycle would be coming all too soon, she was sure.
This message was last edited by the player at 02:53, Wed 30 July 2014.