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People talk about falling through the cracks in society but if you jump through the stargate from Osoggur to the pirate areas of Amamake, Egghelende and Siseide you will soon realize that society has bloody great chasms to fall into and crack has a whole different meaning.


Like many actions in a war their true story takes time to surface, this is one such story and is from a time when the Caldari occupied much if not all of Gallente low sec and the Amarr had just taken Siseide.


Prologue 1:

The competition was simple in a manner universal of squaddies everywhere. Four men were standing on a stage at one end of the busy mess with a stream of toilet paper hanging out their arses and a jug of beer in front of them, the toilet paper was lit and they weren’t allowed to pull it out till they had finished their jug. Man with the least burned bollocks wins.

The smell of singed pubic hair soon reached a table of cheering men at the back of the mess who decided not to say anything to the man politely pushing past them, it wasn’t his rank that perturbed them so much as the lack of it and the sleek cloth of his uniform which was more suit than combat.

The man continued through the crowd and exited out the other side where a shadow slipped across the ceiling above, once in the corridor he punched in the door code of an officers’ suite and a shadow on the ceiling above became an assassinous melee kicking the man into the suite. The sound of a soldiers’ gurgled scream indicated that life was not going so well for one contestant who had choked on his beer.

Prologue 2:

Of all the races in eve the Caldari are the most suited to be allied to the Amarr, not because the megalomaniac nature of corporate control fits hand in glove with religious slavery but because the Caldari have a seriously catholic attitude towards birth control, promoted mainly by caldari provisions who introduced the rabbit gene into the population to give themselves a bigger market.

Helpfully this makes up for the lack of an Amarrian population which is kept low by the fact that your average Khandid woman has a right hook to humble Tyson. The rumour about Amarrian men being eunuchs is untrue, it’s more of a black widow thing where the male may or may not survive mating.

The Minmatar have the most need for sex because a home that’s been welded together from tin cans needs a lot of heating and tech 2 gaffer tape isn’t cheap so children are useful, even if only to sell them to the Amarr (who turn them into glue and sell them in Rens as tech 2 gaffer tape). While Brutors are known for energetic if unimaginative positions the sexual habits of Seibestors can’t be mentioned for fear of Concord finding out, though Gallente women have been known to use the tribe as a form of training ground which has not helped their reputation as harlots.

The Seibestor women are happy enough because any woman with cooking level 5 can get a Gallente man to eat her fish and most of said men will never be able to afford to marry a Gallente woman. This is because any good Gall girl knows she is worth at least a diamond encrusted titan and that’s just the runabout for shoe shopping. If he can’t afford this he can just go get reborn and try harder next time.

These are of course stereotypes but what makes people interesting is how they don’t conform to what society expects.

Chapter 1: Kemi

Kemi painted flowers, often her art reflected the harsh world of her birth and the slovenly violence of the space station where she now lived but there was no love here, so she always put flowers into the painting somewhere. In this case the flowers were being fertilized by the corpse of an Amatarr slaver and she was painting the periphery of the mural in the bright colours of dreams that might have been.

The first real flower she’d ever seen was at her mothers funeral, or at least what passes for a funeral when a drug addict is placed into the biomass. It was a turning point for her father who got paid work for the first time in years and was eventually offered an off planet job maintaining sewers on the old warehouse station, a position that may seem lowly but low is a relative term and any journey from the bottom of society is going to somehow involve dealing with other peoples’ shit.

Eventually Kemi put her spray cans down and stood back to look at the once nondescript metal wall at the side of the docks that had been her canvas for the past week. With mixed feelings of satisfaction at the finished work and despair at the thought of going home she rummaged in her bag for a spliff before pondering the nature of love and hate, feeling as though there was an answer almost in her grasp.

There are a number of things that can wake a stoned graffiti artist from their reverie and several thousand volts from a police tazer is fairly near the top of the list so by the time Kemi crashed to the ground her mind was considerably more alert than it had been. She ripped the barbs from her arm and shakily stood to face the two policemen who were by now in fits of laughter, one on his knee with tazer in hand while the other stood slightly back filming the episode.

Judging the steps towards them she approached and then without warning smashed her heal into tazer cops’ face with the sort of crunching noise rarely heard outside of Bruce Lee films, the tazer fired harmlessly into the air and with a feline leap over the prone cops’ body Kemi dodged the second cop before darting into the street, tripping over a drain and smashing face first into the side of the police van.

As tazer voltage once again screamed through her she felt the restraints go round her wrists and ankles, she gave up struggling and cursed herself for being such a prude and not just paying the fee like everyone else who got caught. Things had just gone from bad to worse and she had no one to blame but herself.

The barbs were removed and she found herself lying on the floor staring up at tazer cop who was cupping his broken jaw with his hand. Second cop finished checking the restraints and stood next to his colleague before shaking his head and saying “You know we would have settled for a blow job but now we’re going to need a much bigger fee.”

Kemi closed her eyes and tried to think how to escape when tazer cop tried to add his own threat but only succeeded in saying “Andummph ow argggh.” Which made her laugh and earned her a boot in the ribs before getting unceremoniously thrown into the van.

She crawled into a corner before the cops could get in and curled into a protective ball, aware that even on a flat surface they could make her fall down an awful lot of stairs before reaching the police station and given that the police were merely the hired thugs of the criminals who ran the station she would probably fall down a few more flights when she got there.

Second cop set the nav computer and much to Kemi’s surprise produced a flask of tea, while tazer cop pulled out a news screen and started to read, hand still cupped round his swollen jaw. After a few peaceful minutes she relaxed just enough to give tazer cop a clear view of her face and was painfully reminded that these were bad men when the barbs pierced her cheek, sending shockwaves of pain through her head. The cops roared with laughter at her surprise as she jerked around the cage before pulling the van over in a quiet tunnel entrance to take their fee.

A few minutes later the quiet serene of the area was broken by the sound of a policeman screaming.

Chapter 2: The 5 Pixies

The Brutor Nath and his friends liked the java bar with its dim lighting and quiet nooks, the jazz music and cosmopolitan atmosphere somehow seemed to help when plotting major criminal activity. Criminal is however a matter of perception and people with the means to destroy a missile production facility deep inside Caldari high security space would be heroes to many even though Concord might disagree.

Nath had chosen this sleepy corner of Molden Heath to research and manufacture the fake caldari fleet ships and it had become a home away from home for all of them, so they met up for a drink to toast the future success of a group of raven class battleships and associated support which were now on there way to Siseide to pick up slaves from the recently conquered solar system. Slaves who would be freed to work as crew on one of the shortest missions in military history.

With the hard work done and the interesting bit yet to start the group who referred to themselves as pixies were enjoying the time out from mundane day to day political assassinations and economic destabilisation.

Fly was taking the opportunity to work her way down the cocktail list and having made it from amorous arsehole to flavours feminine was beginning to think that cocktails were only ever invented by perverts. The drinks were however doing their job and she was steadily looking less like the professional scientific woman she was and more like the girl who knew why her tribal Seibestor tattoos were laced with scars.

Across the table from Fly was Antha, a quiet and respectably dressed antiques dealer who owned a chain of upmarket jewellery stores and could fence any item you care to name but was rarely inclined to do so. Her involvement in the pixies wasn’t so much operational as essential because being Cals’ daughter and Flys’ wife she was the voice of sanity in a mad world. Cal is the man who founded the pixies but we shall hear more of him later as he is currently busy FCing a certain raven fleet.

Chajik relaxed in an armchair next to Antha and as the wayward son of an Amarrian noble assumed an air of superiority over the group, said air was to some extent real because he was truly one of the universes’ most talented assassins and no one would want to get on his bad side. Said air was also often punctured by The Brutor Nath whos’ insecurities led to him denigrating others to reassure his status as the alpha male.

Aside from being pod pilots the five pixies had one thing in common and it was the ability to be provably somewhere else when a crime was committed, hence the name of their group which was given to them by some Concord lawyers who were sick of hearing the line “The pixies must have done it in the night, prove me wrong your honour.” No judge had ever proven them wrong but at the same time no state ever relies entirely on judicial means for its security.

Chapter 3: Klain Trover / Osuma Koro

Klain had a line between the mirror and his desk and it was marked by a hatstand, he rose from the desk which was covered in papers with the rather optimistic title of military intelligence and paused to choose a woven trilby that he was sure accentuated his artistic side while complimenting the dark green of his designer suit. On passing from the hatstand to the mirror he became a connoisseur of the arts and a part of his soul rejoiced at the freedom of infinite bullshit that is the realm of the artist while his sharp Achura mind recoiled to ask for the purpose and reason of it all.

The one thing the intelligence papers had been clear about was how the pixies were unhappy about likely events across the frontier solar systems of the war, so Klain assumed that events were more advanced than mere unhappiness and decided to pursue the lead he’d been building for some years with renewed vigour.

He stashed the artistic hat in a bag and headed out to a waiting vehicle populated by Amarrian military men who were unlikely to ever reach any rank above cannon fodder, on seeing how much space each one of them took up Klain decided it’d have to be a very big cannon.

The car was headed for a police station in one of the newly conquered stations of Siseide and Klain took time to drink in the small details of squalor which so many lost Minmatar lives had failed to defend. He wondered briefly about why the Amarr bothered so much when his own people were liberating Gallente stations that had good quality clothes stores to loot.

On arrival at the police station he breezed through into what he had been told was the commanders office to find a large space filled with a small desk and a lot of blood, there was no sign of the prize who he was here to meet. A stout man with pips on his shoulder marched up and saluted with all the grace of an ork.

“Chief Coulan Doulsty, Sir.” The ork announced and Klain decided that his revulsion towards this being was something of a truism of conquest, you hate those who bow before you because you see in them something that every person is capable of doing and you would hate yourself if you were in their position.

“Where is the artist?” Klain asked, smoothing his suit and almost hiding his panic at allowing these dimwits any part in his plan, even if they didn’t know it.

“Quarantine sir, only cell strong enough to hold an animal like that.” The ork was almost quivering in his attempt to do the right thing by his new overlord so Klain decided he must be lying and relaxed considerably while nodding to one of his Amarrian colleagues, a detective knows where they stand with a liar, it’s when they tell the truth that you’ve got to worry.

“She caused this?” Klain asked, indicating towards the blood, the ork nodded and enthusiastically described how he'd never seen a prisoner use their restraints to strangle a policeman before but Klain silenced him with a laugh. Whatever this idiot was trying to hide from him had nothing to do with the absurd notion that a girl arrested on minor vandalism charges could cause such destruction.

He ordered the ork to pass the girl in to the custody if his Amarrian colleagues, one of whom wore a small camera on his chest so Klain could observe their work without being present himself. He switched on his retinal display and went in search of the arresting officers, a twitch of one eyebrow was the only outward expression of surprise when the desk clerk told him they had both been admitted to a nearby hospital.

Klain strolled towards the hospital wards while the camera images showed a girl in her early twenties bound to a chair with hardly a stitch of clothing to mask the cuts and bruises, his paced slowed as the anger built inside him. These animals would be punished. With some satisfaction he watched as two of the Amarrians cut her bonds while a third motioned to her before pointing at the ork, she nodded and the Amarrian flattened him with one punch.

The nurse on reception at the hospital became very helpful when Klain reminded her that he had power to recommend residents to the Amarrians if he thought they’d make good slaves and he quickly got access to the two policemen. Tazer cop was on life support and clearly not in a state to answer questions while second cop was awake but a haze of sadness and morphine showed across his face.

A few questions later and the policeman confirmed that the ork was jumpy because he had failed to follow through on Klains’ order to ensure the girl would not be subjected to the disgusting practice of taking a fee in violence, money or sex. A few more questions resulted in the policeman revealing his injuries which were predominantly the result of misadvised felatio, it turned out the girl had eaten an entire sausage for lunch.

Having heard more than he wanted Klain pulled out a gun and shot the policeman in the face, he was disturbed at what this man had forced on the girl but was more disturbed that someone could commit a crime and then feel sorry for themselves when they were forced to live with the consequences of their actions.

After apologising to the nurse for any inconvenience caused Klain ordered a military attaché car to take him back to his ship, the Amarrians should by now have drugged the artist girl and placed her in a guest suite there. Klain spent the journey adjusting his artistic hat and practicing the lines he would use, though this was in part to stop him thinking about how he was responsible for getting the girl in to this mess in the first place.

Once back at the docks Klain boarded his ship and dismissed the Amarrians before settling in a seat to wait for the girl to come round. Eventually she opened her eyes and stared at the unaccustomed luxury of her surroundings, confusion flickered in her eyes but there was no trace of fear.

Klain knelt down beside her bed and apologized for not rescuing her sooner, offering her a glass of water he introduced himself as Osuma Koro, art dealer and supporter of the Minmatar resistance. She didn’t respond so he asked what her name was to which she responded, “Kemi, sir”

His keen mind and powerful social implants failed to find meaning in the fleeting movements of her facial muscles. Slowly her thoughts coalesced till she could ask about the one thing that stood out as being obviously wrong with the current situation. “What’s up with that horrific hat?”

To be continued.

All comments or hints on how I can improve my writing style welcomed ^_^

(2010-05-07 22:51)yani dumyat Wrote: [ -> ]To be continued.

All comments or hints on how I can improve my writing style welcomed ^_^

I suspect this will be spun off into the sub forum at some point but until then.

I like the style. Very energetic and descriptive. However you seem to be using a lot of Terran references (Ork, Java, Jazz and so on). I can see why. They make good descriptive shorthand. Can't help feeling that they shouldn't be there though