Turn 75 - I Was The Cut, Down To Your Bone
A few hours after the relief force departs for Sukaishi the time chop for the expected arrival of the medevac
Caravel passes with no reports of its arrival. An HPG message is sent to Nowa Warszawa to confirm, and they do so, the ship has not arrived as expected but they are monitoring the situation.
You grit your teeth at that, certain that something else has gone wrong. Throughout the Griffon system, and empire-wide for that matter, full civil defense procedures are underway due to the possibility of additional attacks. But so far all is quiet. Additional reports from Edelsteine indicate that a number of commercial jumpships were damaged or destroyed when the
Vincent jumped in and began firing indiscriminately, along with an audio recording of the disturbing chanted ‘Death to all’ that was broadcast on all channels in a horrifying cacophony of sound.
An encrypted message is received from Kilburrough for their embassy. A few hours later you receive an urgent request for a meeting from the eccentric, to put it kindly, ambassador.
Evidently Kilburrough was attacked, but from their message it appears that the Kilburroughans are far more upset over the fact that they attacked on Opening Day of their baseball season than about any damage, with the ambassador stressing that the Black Steel actually caused the executive council of the planet to miss two innings of play and they are extremely unhappy. Unhappy enough that they are now offering you a ten year 75% discount on any purchases with your first order free.
In essence they are offering up to ten million genetically optimized fetuses a year, as according to the Ambassador your Iron Womb technology is ‘adequate for the purpose’. Initial tranche would be free, follow-on tranches would be $25,000,000 a year for the first ten years, and $100,000,000 a year thereafter. And, of course, the ‘usual terms and conditions would apply’ and a binding service agreement would, naturally, be negotiated.
| [] | Accept the offer |
- Starting next turn, 25,000,000 in Misc Expenses each year for 10 years, then 100,000,000 thereafter
- Starting Turn 93, +1% POP growth on all peripheral planets
- Starting Turn 93, +1% GDP growth on all planets
- Starting Turn 93, +5 to target numbers for all procurement
- Starting Turn 97 +5 to all Research and DoME target numbers
- Potential events
|
| [] | Who does he think you are? | |
A week later you get word from Sukaishi. Your warship squadron engaged a crippled and immobilized
McKenna and a badly damaged
Quixote in planetary orbit and were able to destroy both with minimal damage, as both Black Steel vessels seemed far more interested in continuing to bombard the surface of the planet than in actually defending themselves.
And according to the preliminary report it is bad, the Black Steel were using extremely dirty high-yield nuclear devices in their bombardment, concentrating on inhabited areas. The racetrack where your brothers were and the beach where your wife and kids were vacationing are all highly irradiated and blasted. The interference from the radiation means that they are unable to contact the deep shelters at the beach, the one small bit of good news is that none of the deep craters are in the actual area of the deep shelters. Unfortunately there were no such shelters in the area with the racetrack. Planetary authorities have been attempting to get reorganized to start recovering from the disaster, but the highest surviving level of planetary government right now is a single deputy mayor of a small resort village who was out of town when the attack hit, conducting a submarine tour of a local reef and who wisely kept the submarine submerged. There are most likely more survivors in the various deep shelters across the planet, but communicating with them is currently not possible.
You do get confirmation from the jump point defenses in the system that the ‘Death For All’ chant had continued the entire time.
The warship squadron and the
Monoliths are currently recharging from the
Oasis II and will proceed to Okusawa as soon as that is complete.
And you still haven’t heard anything from Okusawa, the medevac jumpship has still not returned and due to how small the pirate point it is at is the navy is extremely reluctant to risk sending another. The best possible scenario in this case is that the local command has held it back for SAR operations, the worst case is that the Black Steel managed to destroy it before it could jump.
The mood on Griffon is incredibly somber, but quiet. People are keeping close to the shelters, which have all been checked and are in full readiness for any alert. It’s rather nice to see that there are no issues in that regard, the people whose job it is to maintain them obviously are doing a quite good job of it. The economy across the empire is suffering because of it, for obvious reasons, leading to local recessions in several of the Peripheral systems and relative stagnation in the Core, with only Calliope IV showing any real growth, and even that is depressed compared to how it has been.
Charitable relief efforts have started, with people banding together to collect what might be needed for the survivors on Sukiashi, and bracing for official word from Okusawa. There are numerous reports of food drives, medicine drives, and the like, with some organizations mobilizing for possible refugees arriving in hopes of getting ahead of things.
Speaking of which, the issues with New Eden have been… clarified in a horrific manner. You do have confirmation that the large refugee settlement on Sukiashi where the survivors from the Drac genocide were living was thoroughly worked over with nuclear ordnance, and it is confirmed that there are no survivors. A horrible footnote on what is already a horrible tragedy, compounding horrors upon horrors. You can only pray that they will find peace in the afterlife.
