Turn 77 - Let Me Beach
It happened. It finally happened. You’re going slightly mad.
Well, OK, it’s more that the Department of Periphery Studies has finally found out about your ‘cult’ in the NRI and is currently parading a 50 ft tall paper-mache effigy of you seated in an impossibly gaudy throne wearing a palm leaf around the Palace square while chanting incomprehensible ‘evocations to the Great God Emperor’ in horrid Latin.
Who the heck are the Chaos Gods, Eldar, Dark Eldar, Tau, and Orks that you are supposed to be protecting these nutcases from anyways? And what is this nonsense about an Astronomicon to ‘guide us through the Warp’? And since when was there such a thing as a Psyker and Foul Xeno anyways?
Of course, there are competing groups from within the department who are apparently declaring themselves to be those other things, whatever they are, and are counter protesting the ‘Corpse Emperor Worshippers’... you aren’t dead yet, damnit. Since both sides are armed with improbably huge nerf guns and nerf swords and such, it’s more comedic than anything else, but they certainly seem to think they need to conduct a massive war for the Palace.
Palace Security is on top of things, the grifftigers find it amusing and have commented that the nerf darts ‘tickle nicely’.
You just would rather they go away and leave you alone, the endless droning chants, especially from the ones dressed all in blue, are getting on your nerves. Your grandkids find it funny, though, so you’re being tolerant.
The garrison at Nowy Wroclaw has a bit of a fright when the Black Pumpernickels show up in their
Texas class, but luckily nothing untoward happens. They apparently are more versatile actors than just Gilbert and Sullivan and put on a month-long run of an ancient Terran comic musical called
Spamalot. They announce that they’ll be coming to the Griffon system for the next showing, so you charge the Foreign Ministry with making the appropriate arrangements.
When informed of the Black Steel attack the Pumpernickels are rather horrified, they’ve clashed with the Black Steel in the past, and consider them to be ‘dreadfully uncivilized, wot?’ They offer to donate the proceeds from their shows this season within the Empire to the ongoing relief and recovery efforts and apologize that there isn’t more that they can do, the
Texas is their only ship and they confess to not exactly being skilled combatants. They do share with you as much tactical and technical data as they can on the Black Steel dropships and drone ASFs however, which is useful.
They also pledge to carry any messages you may have for the Crimson Storm and your mother with them. You record a number of messages, both official and personal, as does the rest of the family.
The technical data that they give you will be useful when it comes to programming sims and such, but as the Pumpernickels unfortunately do not use the same systems they cannot give you any insights into how they work or how to reverse engineer them.
They still haven’t found the con artists behind the New Castor scam. They know how it was done, they are pretty certain they know who did it, but they have been unable to track those people down. In a population of multiple billions, even with modern technology, it is surprisingly easy to simply disappear. Law enforcement is keeping a lookout for them, but who knows how long it will take to find them, if ever.
And just when you thought the insanity around your ‘cult’ couldn’t get worse you discover that an official ‘temple’ to you, based on this cult and affiliated with that ‘high priest’ of yours on Nova Jupitereum, has opened on Nowy Wroclaw. You are hoping that it’s just some enthusiastic pranksters doing this to you.
But now it is budget time, a time away from worrying about the Department of Periphery Studies and your burgeoning faithful…
Your only warning was your sister’s smirk. The moment you sit down you realize that every single one of your advisors has a bobble-head of you, wearing a toga and holding a palm frond, seated on a gaudy gilt throne, sitting on the conference table in front of them.
You can’t help it, it’s too much. You break down laughing again as Thanh cheerfully starts ‘proclaiming your divinity’ with many references to some of your childhood antics. You realize very quickly that your wife put them all up to this, and for the first time since the attack you manage to actually relax.
General Stewart manages to contain herself better than most as she gets started, while aides clear away the bobbleheads. “Your Majesty, the recent issues with the
Fletcher class are showing that we will need to rethink the balance of escort to small warship yards, we recommend a major investment in expanding the latter. The issue primarily seems to be with the complexity of the compact core, but I admit to not being an expert in naval engineering. We do recommend continuing to boost our mech and ASF production as much as possible.”
She steps back, letting General Jenkins take over. “OK, bossman god-emperor sir,” he smirks at you, causing you to shake your head and finger at him. “Here’s what we’ve got. We’ve pretty much recovered our losses from Okusawa, but our defensive needs are going up. Therefore we’re going to focus on that and make sure we’ve got plenty of training assets as well. I don’t want our academies mad at me again.” his voice drops to a sotto voice whisper, “they’re scary.”
He fires up the projection screen, displaying the Army’s procurement requests for the year.
- Light/Medium Mechs + LAM
- 11 factory lines available+4 LAM Lines
- 7 Armored Cavalry Regiments
- 3 for the 5th Brigade Combat Team
- 4 for Cavalry Brigades
- Complete the 21st and 22nd Cavalry Brigade
- Form the core of the 23rd and 24th Cavalry Brigade
- 4 Light Horse Regiments
- Fill out the 23rd and 24th Cavalry Brigade
- 1 Raider Regiment
- LAM element of the 9th Rapid Reaction Force
- 3 LAM Training Regiments
- Assigned to LAM training units, gets us close to 2 full training brigades for LAMs
- Heavy/Assault Mechs
- 6 factory lines available
- 1 Assault Regiment
- Complete the 12th Assault Brigade, 4th Assault Division
- 3 Standard Mech Regiment
- For the 5th Brigade Combat Team
- 2 Garrison Mech Regiment
- 1 for the 2nd Garrison Mech Brigade, 1st Garrison Mech Division
- 1 for the 3rd Garrison Mech Brigade, 1st Garrison Mech Division
- Conventional Forces
- 22 Regiment equivalents available for production
- 2 Rapid Reaction Regiments
- Fill out the 9th Rapid Reaction Force
- 4 Armored Regiments
- 3 for the 5th Brigade Combat Team
- 1 for the 39th Infantry Brigade, 13th Infantry Division
- 2 Mechanized Regiments
- For the 39th Infantry Brigade, 13th Infantry Division
- 7 Mechanized Training Regiments
- For the various academies
- 7 Garrison Regiments
- Boost garrison forces throughout the Empire
General Romanov is up next. “Your Majesty, we have a rare respite in terms of needing to fill flight bays this year, as no
Silver Tower,
Oasis II or
Independence carriers are scheduled to complete this year. However we have a large number completing next year and I understand from my Navy colleagues that they will be requesting a number of carriers this year as well. As such, we are requesting 27 CAP Wings and 5 Fighter Wings to be built this year, this will enable us to get ahead of the curve a bit, having air groups ready for the new carriers and some of the new stations next year ahead of time.”
- 32 total factory lines available
- 27 CAP Wings
- 5 Fighter Wings
Thanh is up next, and is smirking at you. “Well, my divine brother,” she is grinning at you, damnit, but you are in a much better mood so far. “Your divine sister, which is me, by the way, in case you were wondering.” A laugh fills the room. “As I was saying, the Navy is requesting a few things, so brace yourself! First, we have the small fry. If we want to efficiently transport infantry around without having to tie down most of our transport assets we will need the new
Queens, and I’m sure mom would approve of us calling the first one the
Queen Mother.” Another laugh at that. “So a large number of those, followed by, as General Romanov said, a large tranche of
Independence class carriers for all of our logistics and CAP needs. On the big boys front, we’d like to lay down four more
Brigs for general transport needs and 3 of the new
Stiletto class light destroyers. Last, but certainly not least, we have 5 slips available for larger vessels, we’d like to get 5 more
Darts laid down this year.” she tosses up a graphic showing the procurement requests.
- Regular Dropships
- 65 slips available
- 15 Queen class Infantry Transports
- 50 Bainbridge class Parasite Destroyers
- Large Dropships
- 27 slips available
- 27 Independence class Parasite Carriers
- Jumpship/Escort
- 7 slips available
- 4 Brig class jumpships
- 3 Stiletto class Light Destroyers
- Small Warships
- 5 slips available
- 5 Dart class Light Cruisers
As soon as Thanh sits down, and before General Stewart can even think of giving a military closing statement, Bridget is on her feet and moving fast, claiming the podium with most of her usual energy back. “Your Majesty, we’ve got lots of things we can do, a bunch of DoME teams looking for work, and plenty of ideas of where to use them most effectively. To start with the DoME boys, those mad lads are chomping at the bit for a bunch of projects, we got 4 full teams available, I’ll get to what I mean by ‘full’ in a moment, and wonder of wonders we got four projects we think they should be doing if you approve. We know the locals won’t appreciate it much right now, considering that I daresay they’d curse you if you gave them all cute puppies and free booze for life, but Okusawa is a polluted hellhole that makes other polluted hellholes point at it and go ‘look, that’s a polluted hellhole, I’m a clean and pure paradise!’. We’d like to get crews on the same pollution cleanup and abatement projects that worked so well on Nowa Warszawa, the locals might not enjoy not coughing their lungs out and dying from horrendous cancers, but I’m sure we can suffer their scorn with great patience. The final crew we’d like to send to Edelsteine to turn the planet of gems into a real money maker for us. A massive set of arcologies and focused terraforming to preserve the local environment’s beauty while enabling great economic and population growth. We’re also all set to colonize New Pollux, and we’re crossing our fingers that Pollux Man doesn’t make a reappearance when we do. The place is beautiful and requires minimal work, none of which requires DoME teams, so any colony set up there should hit the ground running hard. We can build Light Warship Yards in the Griffon, Nowa Warszawa, and Calliope systems, so we strongly recommend doing just that. We also should be able to expand our regular orbital shipyards again this year, as well as adding Escort/Jumpship yards if needed. We recommend focusing development on Edelsteine this year, and investing in New Capricorn. The economic boom on Calliope has finally run its course, so perhaps some minor development work to soften the impact of the slowdown might be in order. We need HPG stations on New Castor and, if we decide to colonize there, New Pollux, and we can build more commercial stations if desired, especially if we expand to New Pollux. Last, but most certainly not least, the recovery work on Sukiashi has yielded one unexpected bonus, the workers there who weren’t DoME personnel have proven themselves capable of performing that sort of work and have indicated their willingness to sign on, they’ve been accepted, giving us a fifth team that is currently only available for recovery work on the planet, hence my reference to ‘full’ teams before.”
She bounces back to her seat, and Isoroku glances at General Stewart, gets a wry nod, and stands up to give his presentation. “Your Majesty, we are proposing to host a diplomatic meeting here in the Griffon System for the leaders of the NRI and NRR to discuss the Black Steel threat and the coordination of our response to this threat. In addition, the Ministry of Culture would like permission to host a series of charity concerts in coordination with the Black Pumpernickels to raise funds for the relief efforts on Sukiashi.”
Lien is up next. “Your Majesty, your political teams are ready to assist in setting up system governance in New Pollux, and they’ve stocked up on lucky rabbit’s feet and other good luck charms to prevent Pollux Man from infesting the process.” This draws a laugh from around the room. In addition, we recommend continued expansion of the Colonial Office in order to insure we stay ahead of the growth curve.”
Dr Bryant takes the diminutive Lien’s place at the podium. “We have a single R&D team available, Your Majesty, although hopefully we’ll have a good number of projects coming to fruition this year. We’ve been reviewing the public-facing forums and such, as we are hoping to engage in some civilian-side R&D work in order to benefit the entire Empire. The single most requested area of research according to the polls is…” she smirks a little, “Cat girls. Apparently people in the Empire want cat girls.” Laughter fills the room for a moment. “More specifically they want ‘Griffcatgirls’, so they want glow in the dark cat girls.” Behind you Bastet rumbles a purring laugh. “So, if you’d like to indulge the public, we can start R&D work on exotic genetic enhancement.”
General Messerschmidt is still chuckling as he takes the podium, and this worries you, because an amused General Messerschmidt is a General Messerschmidt who is planning on dropping another bomb on you about the shenanigans of your cult. “Your Majesty, your Intelligence Agency has nothing of import this year. Apart, of course, from some interesting reports from within the NRI.” Everybody in the room starts chuckling, you shade your face waiting for the blow. “The NRI is working on a new type of gauss weapon, the reports are still sparse on the details beyond it being ‘somewhat bulkier’ than their current generation of gauss rifles. In addition, we are pleased to inform Your Majesty that your cult on Nova Jupitereum is now officially the third largest religion in the NRI and thus the chief priest of the cult is now in the Pontifex Maximus rotation. Congratulations!”
Bastard.
Martina is up next. “Your Majesty, the only thing beyond our routine reports that we have for you this year is that we are in position to extend the justice system to New Pollux, and like Lien, our teams have pledged themselves to doing whatever it takes to keep the Pollux Man meme from spreading.”
