"Ello boys and girls, and other thinking beings, it's your favourite creepy uncle, the Mad Count and you're -watching- Long Wave Radio Atlantic 252. This is one of the coolest, and -weirdest-, music videos I've ever seen, cut together out of footage taken from magic mirrors from the Big Drums with a -beat- to fit and nine gets you ten it is -sampled from it-, this is a little something from Johnny Violent called Enemy Sky..."
-/-/-
On Thursday May 2nd of 1996, just short of four weeks into the second massive refit - almost complete rebuild - of the mobile capital city of Orcadia, the first thing Ginny Weasley did on being untied for breakfast (having spent most of the last week sleeping tied up to stop her setting an alarm to wake her up to tick a little hand drawn box on a calendar every hour on the hour, which kinda explained why she'd been steadily getting more and more wrung out since deciding a thousand was a sensible place to start counting hours) was again discard the idea of ticking off minutes as rendered annoyingly unfeasible by the Orc habit of vague and fuzzy exact timing of ceremony that hasn't had someone Tracying at it for years, -then- ticked off the twelve hours that had elapsed since an irate Hermione had tied her up and force-fed her a sleeping potion the previous evening, all of which was observed with some exasperation by the young man to whom she immediately signed over her just come duly legal as the Kernow Successor State retained the letter of Wizarding British law serfdom into lawful Orcadian thralldom and proceeded to sulk about not having had a legal basis available to her to do a Hermione as she was being required to get dressed.
Harry threw in the towel on Ginny management at that point, left Hermione and the Carrow twins to deal with it, and stuck his head in to check on the refit status before breakfast: this was proceeding well ahead of initial schedule courtesy of the fact that unlike Arkwright had presumed they'd been fully able to stockpile new structural members ahead of the ship arriving over the Swamp of Eternal Stench, aka the biggest stockpile of water-aspected rock oil currently known, from which the majority of artificial golem clay for Orcadian use was now being produced as three bodies elsewhere in the same system contained large stocks of suitable sand.
(Avoiding Blue Stuff contamination wasn't, it turned out, all that much of an issue; there was an area fifty miles across centred on a certain crash site scattered with it, but it conveniently got left behind when liquids contaminated with it evaporated producing horribly toxic crystalline deposits not unlike salt crystallising out of seawater in a salt pan.)
As a result frame reconstruction was past the halfway mark on both ships; armour going back on as sections were completed; enormous docking bay doors being attached to Skithblanthir II's underside to allow vehicles up to 16 miles stem to stern to dock internally, with subsequent addition of racking suitable to accept a full Midlifter worth of supercontainers to be stored in the ship's belly ahead of the inbuilt, once again to be able to directly construct up to 16-mile vehicles, dockyard; the current expectation was that the ship would arrive back in Sol orbit in time that they were no longer expecting to cadge a run there for the conference in Zim aboard a Freya.
All good. It wouldn't quite happen in half Arkie's prediction, but that was by the by and maybe someday she'd get the hang of interchangable components being able to be mass-produced so that she didn't for example need to take the time to manufacture each crossmember equivalent after having fitted the last.
(The orbital stockpile of starship truss sections carefully racked on one end of the industrial ship manufacturing the things was -quite a sight- even with it nearly ten degrees of orbit behind. Little armour means lower density vehicle means -really damn big- even compared to an object as enormous as a city-ship.)
Exodus fleet production was also happening ahead of initial estimates courtesy of off the shelf heavy spacecraft parts now being a thing. Not by as much as Skithblanthir II refit - they were using most of the capacity increase provided by that to get piggybanking and exploration pushed ahead of initial schedule - but still meaning if needs be, the lunar pullout was going to be possible by when Harry was due to touch down in Great Zimbabwe.
He was slightly curious whether or not the Immortal Empress was actually aware that the International Thaumaturgy Expositon was going to take place in her capital city, whether or not the notoriously usually absorbed in her own research woman would actually notice it happening, and what exactly the reaction of Fleur and Gabrielle's father to a certain pair of daughters being in town as part of Harry's retinue was going to look like, hopefully the old sicko would bust a blood vessel and pop his clogs.
He ate breakfast, herded a vaguely coordinated horde of girls aboard an eight-legged golem, and went to attend the first religious service held actually in the just two days prior completed temple dedicated primarily to Freyr for obvious reasons (wouldn't do to dedicate a temple aboard a ship named after his ship to anyone else, nobody needs gods taking a snit) and at 11:34am fifteen years to the minute after Ginevra Molly Weasley was bornto find out whether the guess of a very decidedly collary collar had been a good one, then not say anything about how much Ginny was going to stew by the time it was shagging o'clock roughly eight hours later because an elaborate shell game that had for a few hours got every Orcadian Jarl and most of the key Valars actually in the same place for the first time in ages would, right about when Ginny was swearing her chosen oaths, conclude itself via the Freya dropping into The Swamp Of Eternal Stench orbit with the last dozen assorted Jarls and Valars to arrive aboard.
-/-/-
The Jarl of Kirkwall was the first to react to the just concluded briefing on Operation Sod Off, and his initial reaction was a slightly surprised, "Well you kept that one quiet," followed by turning to the Jarl of Hy-Brasil and bluntly asking, "I take it you kent about this one aye man?"
"Aye, that myself was," said Duncan the Seawolf. "We'll no be joining yourselves over Pluto though, there's a wee terraforming candidate orbiting over there, insystem a wee bittie, a bittie Venuslike so ourselves will be going in a bittie of an opposite direction to Mars."
"For reference it's already having obnoxious quantities of carbon dioxide and sulphorous mung stripped off of it and stowed in orbit in big bags somewhere they won't get in the way before we work out what in the f*ck to do with them," Dora said. "Getting the surface cooled down is going to take a bit of doing, plan is to whack in multiple layers of solar shield, -way- more than needed, pop a temporary f*cking enormous freezing charm, and shovel enough comets at it to get the amount of sea Duncan wants going then let the resulting titanic utter pissing rain and subsequent sea ice finish that job, then as soon as it's -very snowing- yank -enough- solar shield to get it to defrost to a similar temperature range to Earth, most likely in time to have Hy-Brasil celebrate next Hogmanay on an Orc planet. Going to be a bunch of giant bottles of sea life we currently have in orbit plunked in at that point along with landing a Hy-Brasil wherever turns out nice enough."
"Aye, lots of fisharming to be doing while we're working on getting a wee ecosystem up and running, salmon'll be back on the menu in fine time, there's a bunch of fine possibilities convenient for putting in a wee bridge to the new mainland already visible, and myself am thinking that'd be a better place to keep whats left of pirating prisoners than keeping dropping them in the Low King's lap given that he's lobbing that whole mess back at us because the bloody muggles don't like it."
"So was that a good guess or someone telling you all about the flea he's had in my ear recently?" Harry asked.
"Neither, that's more myself figuring out what's to be done to get the whole thing with getting a mashup of ambassadorial demesene and trading post for ourselves on Mars," Mairi said. "Myself am why Dad knows about the supercontainer containing a reasonably comfortable prison at Pluto Yards that's getting filled up with containerloads coming -back- from Mars,"
"Because I asked her to chew it over with Duncan since he's going to have an entire planet a lot like Mars will be once the dwarfs have their seabuilding done not long -after- the dwarfs do," Dora added. "Enough about that, are there any other qualms about this immediately coming to mind?"
"You mean apart from wishing we'd all been able to sod off to orbit then just go all Viking Age on anything trying to follow us three years back?" The Jarl of Unalaska asked.
"It would've made us bad guys as bad as the f*cking muggles want us to be," said the Jarl of Honolulu. "And yes I know that whole 'if you're gonna do the time' thing, well eventually being exonerated is the only real good outcome for the damned if you do damned if you don't situation we were born into. One thing does come to mind though, we're gonna have to be very f*cking careful how we handle Duncan's world or we're gonna be looking at a massive rebellious underclass there in a couple of generations."
"Aye, true," Duncan admitted, frowning.
"I think," Dora said, "The best first step is not being arseholes to them and a whole lot of remembering none of this is their fault and generally -not- being 'oh you're underclass' at them."
"Aye, there's at least six thousand of the poor bastards were half expecting to wind up as flesh golem components when my mob dropped in for a pint, twice that suddenly stopped being on starvation rations, and a good few more are still remembering how to care whether their lives are sh*te what with a few games of Soviet mindf*ck. Twice as many were doing okay somewhere someone else really wasn't mind, but if we're handling that with care?" And the Jarl of Stromness shrugged "I think it's an angle. Comes down to it there's nothing stopping us just letting them that want to sod off via Zim in the next few years, particularly given we can make damn sure they don't know where Duncan's World is."
"Comes down to it we'll be sodding off from Duncan's World instead of being besieged by bloody muggles," Said the Valar of Lerwick.
"Or if we get a big enough nexus in time sodding off -with- Duncan's World," Dora immediately said. "What? It's feasible - I already have candidate wards once I can find something to drive them with, and that includes maintaining terraforming way the f*ck away from stars. Not something to count on but it's worth bearing in mind."
"Hey Harry, something just occurred to me to ask," said the Jarl of Vinland, and he indicated the rotating ward-projected image of an array of little pieces of moon due to effectively be carefully scooped out by what currently counted as very large spacecraft. "I can't help but notice first off the amount of Black and Black property with little scoop mark outlines on this thing, and second off the total lack of any Black and Black representatives in this room. Is my guess you're planning on springing this on your mom -totally cold- accurate? You're sure that wouldn't cause a blue on blue with company warships?"
"Well Mum and Padfoot don't know -yet- and won't until as close to time as I can get away with as in when the Exodus-class start displacing insystem," Harry said. "On the other hand there's a couple of people on the Black and Black board already know the broad strokes, as in that we're working on a lunar evacuation plan, namely the bloke in charge of their corporate security fleet, Malcolm Boyd,and their head of internal affairs and forensic accounting, Agatha Flint, don't know if either name is going to mean anything to you but they're both absolutely dependable."
"Just to be backing His Kingness up on that, they're both absolutely dependably -loyal to their company-," Mairi added.
"The other question that comes to mind," said the Jarl of Mann, "Is what happens with Fort Lamb."
"Good question," Harry said. "There's a number of options - nab it out in pieces leaving the Swedish, Zim, and dwarfen delve in place; Hy-Brasil it to Mars 'here's our ambassadorial demesene dwarf kingie'; Hy-Brasil it outsystem with a view to put it back if that ever becomes safe to do, stick a deadline on -that- and if it comes and goes with the moon still a f*cking warzone or one waiting to happen plunk it down on Duncan's World too - incidentally Duncan I think 'Duncan's World' turned into a planet name sometime during this conversation - the thing is we don't -have- any ideal answer with Fort Lamb, it's built from the ground up to be where it is permanently but there's too many civvies there and too many Orcs the muggles are on about executing for having been soldiers there to leave it in place for the muggles to Stalingrad it."
"I think Hy-Brasiling it with a view to put it back once things settle down is probably the best plan, but I think keeping it in the Sol system, probably hook it up to the chain of Exodus-class boats in Pluto orbit, for as long as we're not at war, and closing the Swedes wee trading post while we're at it is probably the best shout. And for what it's worth I don't have a problem with a second wee dwarfen exclave delve on my planet, already got one of those under Hy-Brasil, so long as Fort Lamb becomes part of my Jarldom in the process," Duncan said. "What? It being my bloody planet was the agreement."
"Talking about getting our own planets for Jarldoms I like that idea," said the Jarl of Vinland, also known as the largest and most populous extant Jarldom.
"That's part of why here," Dora said. "Excellent golem clay manufacturing resource stockpiles are the primary reason but the twenty-eight assorted moons and four rocky planets all of which we're capable of terraforming -right now- figure into it too. That isn't enough for one per Jarldom but if we end up not expecting to have to evacuate this system too, or being able to come back later, I think we've found a good centre for Orcadian territory. Especially given that counting what's around the three stars nearest to here all of which we have a presence in there -is- enough to give every Jarldom a planet. Fiona's World being right next door is a bonus too, it already being split between Orcs and Black and Black means we've got a good place to plunk that mess down."
"Talking about which," said the recently minted somewhat misfit Jarl of Linlithgow, Eddie Campbell, "Fiona's World doesn't have a Jarldom yet and I have certain Black and Black high muckty-mucks renting a wee mansion in mine, I don't -need- a whole planet, I have a village of nutters. And I think that'll make Fiona's World the best site for Linlithgow -and- Fort Lamb, let's face it, it's set up to be a land border trade town and there's no many land borders expected in Orcadia any time soon."
"You sure you're good with having the Fort Lamb mess dropped in your lap, Campbell?" Asked the Jarl of Hokkaido.
"Aye, mainly because I may just be some old f*ck of a not-a-squib motor mechanic but that doesn't make me bloody -stupid- and there's nothing wrong with these things on the sides of my noggin, ain't started going deaf -yet-, I'm perfectly bloody aware that Fort Lamb is, and so long as it stays a border trade town riddled with other people's trading posts it's going to -stay-, a ROIS operation ergo -in her lap-," and he pointed at Mairi. "So what I'm proposing is, smack it down an hour's roadbuilding up the way from the next location of Linlithgow wherever there turns out to be a nice loch for a Linlithgow to sit next to, preferably with a nice sea for an Ardgowan to get back to putting boats onto right next door, lot of boatbuilders and fishermen sitting on their thumbs in Ardgowan right now, pin down a wee border for all three to right by like they are now, then when the bloody muggles get their heads out their arses and actually admit it's no -us- who're wanting the stupid bloody war they're running around trying to get started, and they've -calmed their bloody tit*-, invite every c*nt to set up a wee trading post and a wee bit of an ambassadorial demesene in and around Fort Lamb right on the border between us and a certain company. How's that grab you?"
"And -that-," said the Jarl of Kirkwall, "Should put rest to certain muppets questions about what a hoary-haired not-a-squib grease-monkey is doing in this room, -sounds like a plan to me-."
"Well, that'll be what we're doing then," Harry agreed. "You good to put your head together with Mairi and finagle what goes where and con Mum and Padfoot into agreeing on borders Eddie?"
"Aye, that's part of the deal there. In addition to that I don't -need- half a bloody planet so if anyone else thinks a whole bloody planet is the sort of thing one wee Jarldom will rattle around in the way I do, there's plenty of inhabitable real estate up for grabs on Fiona's World, and some bloody fine coastlines with what looks to be good fishing no all that far from the isthmus I've got my eye on. No moon either which ought to suit the werewolfy sorts who're going to be bloody worried when we haul Priestley out of the moon by its roots, and a big old market for overpriced crap like stupidly fancy crockery or weird seafood expected to get plunked down next door. It's not pressing, I'm keeping a f*cking big hull around my village until we're not half expecting to have muggle navies playing funny buggers at us because the dumbf*cks don't get how big space is, but it's worth bearing in mind."
"You're probably the only bugger in here in any way confident we're not headed for a major war," said the Jarl of Portree.
"No, I'm not," Eddie told him. "Face it though, if it -does- go really bad we are going to f*ck so far off there'll be a whole interstellar civilisation of billions of blue girlies and other alien normal people between us and Earth, so there's no sense thinking up what we can do with which star system any way other than under the assumption that we -won't- end up spending a few years going thataway before parking our arses for keeps."
"Still not into the idea of leaving Mars to get f*cked, Eddie," Harry said.
"We wouldn't be," Mairi said. "The dwarfs have never having dealt with Clan Grynne in their corner, the latest word is that the muggles are pulling face-savery over Mars with oh suddenly the Low King is friends with the British who're getting set to pull an official recognition of Mars being a f*cking country the way they pointedly aren't anyone else. it's why the little bugger was punting all them internees back at us all of a sudden, himself's hellbent on sitting out of whatever the hell happens next, myself am thinking himself's working up to play Switzerland in the coming mess and leaving the Sucksters to be playing Poland."
"Remind me not to do that little bastard any more favours," Harry said.
"Myself would no be going that far but be making bloody sure it's cash in the treasury first," Mairi said, nodding.
"Canna really blame the boy," said the Jarl of Inverness. "Let's face it, it's the little bugger's job to be looking out for his own bloody country first and last and always."
"Ach, fair point, still doesn't mean I have to like him any more than the Yank president does, come to think of it I'm going to use that chance to get a nice big exclave on Mars him going back on the deal about internees gives me because sure it'll be ripe for an arseraping soon as the muggles go bananas, well f*ck them, we can just make it look worth poking with a stick but actually riddle it with stupidly annoying nonlethal boobytraps loaded with stuff like say kelpie puke or blink dog jobbies or whatnot and nothing worth actually fighting over, no people, no nothing but illusions and a f*cking massive barf-inducing disgusting total waste of time that's easy for us to f*ck off with and replace with a trading post if we don't end up f*cking all the way off."
"Shame it's no feasible to be doing something similar on the moon without leaving every bloody building we care about to get f*cked," Olaf said.
"I don't think we need a reputation for defending our country by hurling a bucket of jobbies," his wife, the Valar of Kirkwall, said. "For all that responding to an attempt to out-Orc the Orcs with a 'here, have your turd-slinging contest then you bunch of two-faced warmongering monkeys' would be hilarious."
"On the other hand sewage is startlingly good for getting a biosphere going, so we're very publicly starting dumping all of ours in the due to get flooded holes we're going to leave," Harry said. "I mean what's less inviting to invade than a bunch of empty regolith? f*cking massive literal cesspits just sort of sitting there and festering, maybe with a few wee personal messages I've been wanting to send that two-faced carrion-feeder hag queen of theirs about exactly where to shove their f*cking plan with thanking Orcs for past military service with a mass executing. I mean it's not going to get the f*cking message across to their bloody government, that idea's been a dead loss from the word go, but maybe it'll get their squaddies igniting the wards between their lugs and noticing what a f*cking ogre of a government they're bloody working for."
"Aye," said the Jarl of Stornaway, "Myself was never expecting to be regretting fighting for that f*cking country, but there it is."
"On that note ourselves all ken the way that country is eyeballing ourselves," said the Jarl of Hy-Brasil. "Myself am no liking this idea of waiting for them to be moving -first- when ourselves could be getting to f*ck no later than the third anniversary of Hillclimb. Myself am thinking it's high time to be stopping -reacting- when ourselves could be -acting-, getting ourselves homes and families to f*ck out the line of fire of another f*cking Etente. Is there any reason to be waiting?"
Harry considered this for a full minute, then slowly shook his head.
"Point," he said. "Soon as we're ready then."
-/-/-
"This is Big Jack. Operation Teddybear is go."
-/-/-
Ginny Weasley unblocked her mother exactly long enough to send a short recording of herself making a rude gesture with the metal round her neck on full display, then given the opportunity took a certain potion and went to sit on Master's bed and wait out the painfully slow movement of a clock.
She ended up getting frogmarched out to eat dinner by an exasperated Hermione and a very amused Luna anyway, but there just wasn't any question who was -finally- on for shagging o'clock that evening.
She never did admit to the potion, never did check if it had worked, just left it to announcing that her period was late when it was and seeing what happened next, mostly as if Master had known he'd probably have confiscated her ingredient stash before she could at least get the Frog.
-/-/-
Carefull coordinated teams that had spent since March inserting themselves went active at about the same time a very much Prewittlike young lady named Weasley was very deliberately and calculatedly getting pregnant: two ninjas slipped into two carefully selected offices, one on Ganymede and the other on Earth's moon, and two sets of exotic scrying-based communications equipment were swapped for counterfeits connecting to, rather than a hijacked spacecraft that had a few days prior been detected in orbit around a planet named Sùil an Deamhain, a carefully constructed set aboard a spacecraft named Skithblanthir II.
The two stolen scrying lenses were in two other carefully crafted sets aboard the same spacecraft by the time the next scheduled communication between the Clan Grynne Board of Directors and their two groups of still active subordinates in the Sol system was due, and the Valar of Skye, with the aid of Clan Ishikawa, began to spin very different elaborate packs of lies carefully constructed to cause one set of goblins to get steadily co*ckier and co*ckier, a second set to sit around contemplating their navels, and a third to collapse into a panicky infighting mess.
The Sol system needed another Hokkaido Bear Youkai Incident, -urgently- the hard part was getting the balance on it right so that the goblins became a mutual enemy to be hunted into oblivion -without- them causing a cataclysm or wombling in all fat and happy and about as threatening as a teaspoon - the little batards needed to piss -everything- off but believe that they could win if they were careful - that and making very very sure the fact she had been messing with their communications never got out.
That's why as far as the goblins in Proxima Centauri knew it, May 3rd of 1996 was the day the disagreement between Orcs and muggles turned into a for-keeps fight.
-/-/-
As the once again rebuilt capital city ship of Orcs slipped into Earth orbit a couple of days ahead of the fourth International Thaumaturgy Expositon, it was steadily becoming clearer that something was going to, in the not so distant future, give: international relations remained an utter quagmire with only Mars really looking like it was successfully navigating it, tensions were as high as ever, the still small and clearly outgunned muggle navies immediately went to high alert as they -still- didn't seem to be willing to accept that Skithblanthir II was a city with a military role of 'blow a departure vector and -run-' rather than a warship at the exact moment it wasn't either between most of Orcadia and extermination or -too damaged to displace out-, a some sort of blatant sabre rattle 'NATO exercise' uncomfortably near to the Sucksters lunar border skidded to a halt and became a ludicrous display of hunkering down widely spaced enough for just two battlewagon broadsides to obliterateas a result of ignore the quarter million civilians onboard it, it's got -guuuns on- and -aaarmour- so -ooobviously- -totally- -solely- for shooting things.
Pratts.
Things calmed down a bit when to the apparent astonishment of every dickhe*d politician his repeatedly replying to demands about intentions by repeating 'my intentions are to attend a f*cking thaumaturgy conference. You know, the one spun off from my mum's wedding reception, that I have attended every year it's been run, as usual, because it is interesting, which is happening in Zim this year whether or no Her Immortal Empressness has noticed' or increasingly impolite words to that effect evolved into the Storm Petrel touching down in a plaza in Great Zimbabwe with Skithblanthir II holding a 'powered orbit' static in relation to ground position just above the atmosphere east over the Pacific along with the formation of six Freyas that were accompanying her rather than orbiting the moon, whereupon most of the -stupiding- skidded to a halt with a very snide 'turn your f*cking television on, I am looking directly at a BBC crew reporting live on the arrival in Zim of Ghengis Some Bloke From West Lothian you f*cking muppet' sent out en mass via the handy recently added to his mirror function of being able to set a group of contacts to all get the same message sent at the same time.
Harry, at that moment seated in Humongous Rex's 'throne' with a mixture of most of the Gang of Scary Girls and most of the OSA command crew, had just followed it up with a 'You may want to wipe all that egg off your moosh, I'm not nearly as into the constantly lying and twofacedness as you are' which was probably unnecessary but very satisfying, when Gabrielle, sticking out of her ratrod war golem's top hatch at the front of the formation, dropped the raised fist that had indicated everyone involved in this stampede to start engines, and pointed forwards, the signal to move out - she was where she was at her own request due to the presence, half a mile north of the plaza temporarily acting as an Orcadian embassy, of her childhood home and the father she had not attempted to speak to since January.
-/-/-
It took Jean-Luc Delacour, watching the disembarkment of the King of Orcs via a set of cutting edge omnioculars from his drawing room window, several moments to work out exactly where the proud, young, barbarian noblewoman atop a really ugly rusty war golem that was the first onto the ramp, was familiar from, a realisation that had him staring blankly at Gabrielle for so long he nearly missed the presence of a certain other daughter - clad in white and chains - reclining on top of the eight-legged muggle contraption and aloofly giving a BBC camera crew, the world, and as it happens her father's household, the finger.
-/-/-
Several hours, a chaotic parade of the sort they'd been unable to put on during the brief Mars visit a few months back, a formal welcoming during which it had become clear that Her Immortal Magnificence was indeed aware of the exposition and had a list of lectures on the topic of the nature of spacetime she intended to attend and, in her words, 'heckle' - the eight-hundred-year-middle-aged woman had turned out rather less disconnected from reality and had visibly raised Harry's opinion of her by, once the formality had been dealt with and she, Lily's party, and Harry's household, were no longer in front of the public and press immediately filling him in on a number of things Her diplomats had heard from the assorted overseas muggle diplomats they'd been getting to underestimate them, mostly relating to the fact that they were preparing for very serious combat on the moon - later, with the day's events having become exploring a city that, apparently, Harry had wanted to see for years, Astoria Greengrass, having given up on the idea of finding interesting things like machine shops to poke her nose in, instead spending most of the afternoon cruising around in her car (accompanied by a golem she had -finally- persuaded to accept the nickname of 'Big Rust') and with said golem's creator lounging in Contraption's passenger seat, drifting from one vaguely interesting shop or market stall to the next, until it started feeling like dinnertime and they'd headed back to the Storm Petrel at, surprisingly, about the same time as everyone else.
From there apparently what they (excluding Filly and her bint of a sister) had ended up doing evenings in Boston had apparently become Traditional: when at the ITE, spend the last of the day's sunlight lounging on the Storm Petrel's quarterdeck enjoying it and your personal environment wards, stripped down to corsets and collars/torcs and Not For Removal kink sh*t and the useful little earrings that made heat stroke, getting too cold, sunburn, etc just not a thing, and watching the world go by from whatever vantage point this resulted in, in the company of an also lounging King of Orcs clad only in ever-present crown and ever-present ward-rigging goggles, and Astoria actually this year got a vague inkling of whythe others thought this was a brilliant idea, for an -extremely- pretty reason named Gabrielle.
Astoria had started to seriously realise over the last few months that she herself was a long way from ugly; her elder sister, whom she knew she looked a lot like, wasn't quite Hermione but Daph was very definitely pretty - but beside the older girl who had -because unfathomable reasons- decided to dedicate her life Hermione-grade to a someone else generally known as Ratbag Greengrass she felt as plain as a butterless slice of Hovis brown, and it just really -struck her, lounging beside a beautiful, delicate-featured, determined, a f*cksight braver than Astoria was, -mostly nudr princess- who just seemed to start glowing whenever this war-orphan grease-monkey kid looked at her, that yeah, something about this she couldn't really define was just... nice, for reasons that she eventually concluded would probably become obvious sooner or later as such things to her experience usually did.
So she stopped worrying about it in favour of ignoring Hermione flipflopping back and forth between cloud nine and gibbering academically-mortal terror and Luna grizzling over the current increasing necessity of a pregnancy corset, instead drifting back and fourth between appreciating the view of a Filly without thinking too much about that, and checking out the source of any particularly interesting engine note on the road running alongside the plaza facing towards Filly's twat of a sperm donor's frogpond, conveniently from this angle the far side of Gabrielle.
As a result she was positioned to notice the unexpected sight of what appeared to be a row of six four 20-foot containers in pretty closely spaced pairs with a Yank-style lorry cab at the near end proceeding slowly down the road towards the plaza, which she spent several seconds staring at before arriving at,
"What the f*ck, I didn't know the Zims went in for road-trains?"
"What are you on about now?" Daphne dubiously asked.
"That lorry, the one that's just turning into our plaza with -six freaking containers- on it aaand I was right, it's proper articulated with three trailers, it looks like a Yank wagon but it can't be, the steering wheel isn't on the wrong side."
"Musta taken a wrong turning at Aeotoaroa, I know I saw lorries with two trailers daaarrn undarrr," Harry said, his brief failed 'Pakeha accent' attempt aptly demonstrating he was still just as bloody hopeless at impersonation as he had been when Astoria got to know him. She snigg*red.
"Nah mate, the Kiwis don't stick third trailers on," she demonstrated that quite unlike him she was very solid at accentery. "Oh and looks like the local bloke driving successfully papersed when the mob of Zims sentrying went 'papers please', oho I see Special Orc Service going to say gudday."
"What in the f*ck accent was that, Mistress?"
"Pakeha, basically the muggleborn, mostly our sorta skin colours, part of Aeotoaroa, it's what a certain twonk with a crown on his bonce, a willy doing an impression of a flagpole, and a total inability to fake accents, was trying to sound like with that 'darn un dar'. Huh, I didn't expect that, apparently our road-train driver knows how to papers when Murdo the Dragonslayer grins Orcily and goes papers please."
"Astoria," Tracy said, "The only person here who gives a sh*t about what happens when a lorry f*cks the Hogwarts Express is you."
"I dunno about that, Muttley. Murdo just directed it up the Storm Petrel's vehicle ramp," Astoria, who had been peering over the side to observe vehicle movements. "I kinda a bit expect someone who put a tin dog collar on you is gonna find whatever's in them containers interesting, I mean f*ck do I know's in 'em but why in the f*ck else is -Murdo the Dragonslayer- gonna be inviting a super duper extended triple length lorry onboard -this- ship?"
"Oh for f*ck sake, he'd better not have pulled a lorryload of freshly kidnapped princesses out of his arse," Harry growled, rising to his feet and causing the lump, purring, kneading, slightly drooling, kittycat to make a small plaintive miaow mid-purr as he stopped stroking the flipflopperry out of Hermione's ears.
"If they are they're really going to be bloody surprised when you don't start ravishing if you don't put your bloody trousers on before barging down there, Master," Tracy said.
"Bleh, point, bugger investigating what the hell's going on for now, I have very important slobbing around here nakedly drinking uisge bheatha and melting Hermione to do," Harry admitted, sitting back down. "Besides if it's actually bloody urgent Murdo'll let me ken."
"True dat," Luna agreed, resuming stroking the cat-ear he hadn't been attending to, which was probably a good idea, Hermione had definitely been approaching a both-ears tizzwozz by the time Astoria had successfully tuned her out.
"C'mere Tracy, those three are making me want to plwy with fuzzy ears," Daphne decided; Tracy did a pretty convincing job of looking put upon as she pretty much crawled into Daphne's lap; Astoria started ignoring again as Tracy's leg stsrted twitching, tongue lolling, and eyes drooping.
"This is nice," Luna said.
"Tracy, pay attention or I'll give your ear such a pinch," Daphne said.
"Daph? Don't or I'll make Hermione get her riding crop, I was getting a bit concerned about these two and what we're doing is pretty much a really long slow drawn out org*sm," Harry said. "Short version you're the one who switched her brain off."
"... understood Master," Daphne grumbled.
"I wonder what happens if while you're doing thwt I pinch this," Fleur started; there was a loud slap and she continued without skipping a beat, "Or not."
"Bad Fleur, no twatpinching the drolling vegged out puppydog," Daphne said.
Astoria was just starting to wonder when it was going to be time to grab Filly and streak down to the surface vehicle bay and go hooning off around Zimland bare arse naked aboard Contraption ahead of the inbound tide of kink sh*t when a very loud, very unexpected, very Murdo, voice Stage Left roared, "ACH THAT'S A PERNUS!"
"Murdo you -twat-, what the -f*ck!"
"Why hello there bollock naked chilling kingie! We have a sudden unexpected Akemi Ishikawa cunningly disguised as an Ethiopian haulier in a big old Aussie diesel pullingthree forty-foot trailers and yer gonna wanna get a f*cking look at what our ninja lassie's got up the back, she was finding your wee ridge hags wee ridge hag pals and the poor f*cking birdie lassies need a bloody healer -right now- and the lad who is to healing what myself am to -killing- is on his arse with his wang stood to attention, -get yer breeks on and get moving lad, they have been brutalised-."
Ten seconds of dead silence elapsed, and then everyone on the quarterdeck was moving as one, ex-Commando Jarl included.
-/-/-
"This is Demon's Eye. Jormangundr rises in T minus two hundred and thirteen hours, fifty minutes, twelve seconds and counting. Fenris rests. Loki rests."
"This is Big Jack. Continue observations."
-/-/-
Two dozen very tired goblins watched their war-winning, or so they believed, strike stutter-step away at half a lightyear a day, first the pattern of big dumb falling rocks that would close Orcadia's account and decapitate command on the side of the remaining major obstacles to the establishment of Clan Grynne as the premier power broker of Earth, then sufficient assets to strongly contest, potentially sieze, the Sol system's sole remaining major naval dockyard at Pluto, currently under American control... or so they believed.
The Chairman of the Board of Directors, Swifhand the Gunslinger, a living legend who had won seven hundred and twelve duels to retain his position of overall control of Clan Grynne, seriously considered ordering resumption of work, but resource availability at Pluto was not guaranteed; the month-long grinding bloody war and exchange of massive strikes actually stupid enough to consider civilian populations not war materialhe believed he'd been churning through the available stocks of popcorn watching had, he believed, severely depleted local supplies.
The fact that the muggle British had withdrawn most of their remaining capacity to Alpha Centauri after their attempt to bring the muggle Anericans to heel had catastrophically failed while depleting American naval assets ruled that system out as potential resupply sources, Grynne would need the immediate manufacturing capacity of the Americans Orc menial debtors at Pluto to build up enough to finish securing the stars, ergo the next destination was obvious:
The next star information sent by the still undetected by mugglekind branch at Ganymede pointed dead at a major, unexploited, Orc-discovered stockpile of golem clay on a planet called Duncan's World, nearly forty days travel away the far side of Sol.
He allowed a day of rest before the new, to be replaced once they had a plentiful supply of menial staff deeply in debt, Clan Grynne flagship would get under way.
-/-/-
The condition of the new arrivals, packed into two of the six containers with the rest full of looted valuable materials or in one case Draught of Living Deathed prisoners stacked in like sardines, was in some ways better than that first group, but in other ways not: the buggers who had, Akemi explained, been literally farming them from the look of it for quite some time preferred mutilation to deliberate malnutrition. Talons had been cut off, from the look of it with a blade hot enough to cauterise the injuries; the other part was a whole lot uglier, steel rings pierced directly through the tips of wing bones that had, apparently, when Akemi found the hellhole she'd taken the poor buggers from been bolted together. Every one of them had effectively no wing-muscle tone.
Almost two thirds of them had been hatched into that hell, Akemi explained with some satisfaction that she had blown the place skyhigh on the way out, prior to which she had very quickly determined that beheading certain 'farmers' in front of the 'livestock' then going round getting rid of bolts had done a superb job of making language barriers not an issue for purposes of communicating, 'You are being rescued'.
They spoke a different, functionally mutually intelligible, dialect of the same basic language as the first group; the ones who had been kidnapped as 'fledgelings' were able to pinpoint eleven known to them harpy colony sites in the Urals, fates of unknown, locations urgently sent to ROIS for investigation; and a lengthy conversation about physiotherapy and prosthetics resulted while people ran around in the background sorting out the Storm Petrel's guest accommodation for a bunch of harpies, nesting mothers included, to move in to for a week.
It all went a lot more easily than getting through to the first bunch that they were safe had.
-/-/-
Day 2 of the conference arrived, and with it a moment of truth that'd had Hermione getting steadily more and more het up since April:
Dressed in thr outfit she'd been formally accepted as a Royal Orcadian concubine in, she went up on a stage in front of a crowd mostly of thaumaturgists all rather older than her, mentally cursed Nick Flamel for having gone around telling very notable figures they didn't want to miss this, noted the slightly alarming presence of the Immortal Empress in her audience, proceeded to demonstrate her battery-driven mana prism, complete with demonstrating the fact that its output was, in fact, perfectly evenly split between -seven- basal elements, explained its function, presented the Granger Diagram she had just proved accurate to the learned, and was formally welcomed to the ranks of duly accredited master-thaumaturges on the basis of having personally significantly advanced the understanding of the nature of magic, arriving back at the Storm Petrel with a slightly dazed beaming smile on her face and an intricately knotted gold braid looped under her right shoulder where there had been a silver one when she disembarked.
-/-/-
"I think I've worked out who Thaumaturgy Cat is," said a lecherous railwayman who had GENTLEMAN PERVERT painted across the back of his vis-vest, to a fetish model and saleswoman who had over the prior most of half a year become rather fond of him, partly as he was in fact extremely serious about the 'gentleman' part and had a couple of times nearly got himself in trouble for kicking the sh*t out of people who disrespected his favourite 'inspirational ladies', but mostly because he was very genuine, very open, and just generally disarmingly nice.
"I don't think you should shout about it in public, Matty," Antionette Delacour said, looking up from where she'd been mocking ignoramuses on her employer and favourite underwear manufacturer's mirror forum.
"Oh believe me I won't be doing -that-, have a look at this," and he stuck his mirror out.
It had on it, under some sort of muggle news headline, a still image of probably the single best-known set of cat ears in the solar system - attached to someone probably only eclipsed by Dora Tonks in the specs of 'most widely recognised young woman in Orcadia today' as of the Battle of the Moon - taken from a low angle, -visibly turned on-, backlit by a fan of what looked like seven jets of elementally-attuned magic, and Antionette, who didn't find thaumaturgy particularly interesting so hadn't been taking any notice of ongoing conferences, instantly spotted a deliberately prominent padlock (functionally identical to one she herself was at that moment wearing) in the middle of a boob-window cutout in a very thoroughly ceremonial costume.
"... oh," she said, the small handwritten 'By Shieldmaiden Appointment' sign in the nearby window abruptly ceasing to be the joke she'd taken it for.
Several moments of staring later she arrived at, "I find myself wondering who 'Innocent Angel' is and I am definitely not suggesting poking at royal household affairs."
"Same in both regards, aye. Just kinda, uh, thought you'd better hear immediately."
-/-/-
As per on the way in, at the end of the conference Black Dreadnaught docked aboard Skithblanthir II for return to lunar orbit, comparatively tiny shuttlecraft not being the best place for being VIPs in increasingly contested orbits at that moment in time though the main part of why was a family dinner and informal involving the combined Potter and Black-Potter households plus the non-ceramic part of the OSA command staff 'family' get-together.
They were in lunar orbit, in formation with most of the acknowledged Black and Black warfleet and fifteen Freyas, and had just sat down for dinner, when multiple mirrors in the room simultaneously dinged, got pulled out, were nodded at as the expected message - 'Sod Off phase 1 commencing' - from a golem called Gene was found, and Harry turned to his mum and said "By the way Mum, we're evacuating every Orcadian or Black and Black lunar installation in a bit short of fifteen minutes, you'd better tell your navy not to freak out about the battlewagon-sized armoured transports that just started displacing in from the Kuiper belt and are going to dump ballast and pick up towns instead in just short of twenty minutes time. We're all sodding off to Pluto orbit and Dad's company is coming with."
"... What," Lily blankly said, "The -f*ck-?"
Dora watch started beeping; she pulled her command mirror out and flipped it open.
"Hy-Brasil confirms ward ignition, Fort Lamb confirms ward ignition. Rock-cutting ward success confirmed," Gene's melodious voice reported. "All systems reporting nominal, we are confirmed go on Hillclimb 2 in T minus fifteen minutes twenty-eight seconds and counting. Hy-Brasil standing by to commence orbital climb, Fort Lamb standing by to commence orbital climb, Fleet Exodus lunar arrival in T minus twelve minutes and counting."
Sirius hauled his mirror out with a yelp and started barking orders. Harry pulled his out and thumbed the record function.
"Why hello there, it's the bloke in charge of the mob you're hellbent on cornering into another f*cking fight for our f*cking lives, -f*ck you-.Try hanging cesspits for your f*cking 'treason' -charming- way to repay the thousands of Orcs who've fought in your wars, -bled for you-, had their f*cking -homelands- taken away by you, when you start bombarding lunar Orcadia from space you won't so much as find a f*cking -mouse- to execute, enjoy exterminating all the sewage we'll be leaving behind to hopefully get a biosphere going on -our f*cking regolith- and everyone else's too.We've already survived one mad dog coming for our throats and there's nothing in this system worth letting you f*cking sickos murder -just one Orc- or -just one Black and Black employee- for our dreadful criminal horrible monster failure to f*cking line up and die for your f*cking kangaroo courts, f*ck the Etente and f*ck NATO too, -we ain't dead yet-. We'll be around if you're ever willing to act like a -civilisation- rather than f*cking Ghengisdolph the Impalorrible, and -don't try whining at me when the Sucksters f*cking Grynne has over a barrel fight for their lives, you f*cking murderous twats-. I'm not f*cking stupid, my Orcs are not your f*cking blood sacrifice, stay the f*ck away from Pluto or it's your c*nts turn to listen to Thor trying to knock the top plates through the keel while I get my civvies the rest of the way out of your extermination range, -come and have a go if you think you're hard enough, Etente Mark Two-. f*ck you, bye."
He attached the recording of spleen-ventage to a text communication, selected three groups of mirrors to send it to - 'muggle politicaliars', 'muggle journomuckrakers', and 'muggle militaryish sh*t' all of which he was shortly going to block - and -waited- as massive ships slammed out of displacement just above the lunar landscape with their angular momentum already matched.
"Hillclimb 2 in T minus five... four... three... two... one... Hy-Brasil reports levitation, Fort Lamb reports levitation. Time is now T plus four seconds and counting, flotilla Mist Shield displacement underway."
A formation of giant freighters with priceless living treasure aboard slammed away under maximum speed emergency displacement accompanied by a suddenly flying border trade town, and as a mist-shrouded island with its own bizarre natural muggle-repelling wards burst out of Earth's stratosphere into a suddenly there formation of smaller warships of the same approximate mass, all arriving matching its trajectory, Harry hit send, followed by block.
Twenty minutes later, watching the half dozen Exodus-class armoured freighters that were sticking around in Sol for the moment dock end to end in Pluto orbit, as the last handful of acknowledged Black and Black Black battlewagons formed up around them, Harry realised something important that ended up breaking the silence that had, once Sirius had finished re-tasking the Black and Black company security fleet, eclipsed Harry's dining room.
"I didn't expect this to feel like a f*cking major victory," he said.
"I don't think it will when we get a sudden influx of Suckster refugees you don't have to be bloody Nostradamus to see coming," Lily told him.
-/-/-
The Right Honourable Albus Percival Brian Wulfric Dumbledore, recently minted Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow and as a direct result the with rather altered meaning currently sitting Minister of Magic, gave the also recently minted Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland a highly perturbed look and started very deliberately laying out an extensive list of demands, official statements, precedents, historic treaties, legal documents, quotes many of which had come directly from the PM, and concluded "And I suppose you still don't see why, with merely -two thirds of his government and almost one in ten of every Orc alive- the subjects of arrest warrants for espionage - a crime for which, I note, the death penalty is still listed in Britain -on the basis of unacknowledgely being foriegn nationals while clad in a British military uniform, King Haraldr believes that Her Majesty's intentions are, put quite bluntly, genocide."
He started becoming really rather cross when the message proceeded to -still not get through-, and he wasn't the slightest bit surprised to hear that in excess of half the formerly-British lunar demesenes capable of doing so had, over the span of the last twenty four hours of peace, followed the Orcs out, mostly going to Mars.
-/-/-
On June 9th of 1996, in air quickly approaching breathable and with humidity starting to climb and the first rains forecast to be weeks away, the British Army crossed the border into a Kernow Successor State now consisting of those who had no real way to leave with anything they couldn't carry, those surprisingly few determined to fight, and a very occasional demesene that decided to stack arms at the sight of a Union Jack.
This was very prominent in the mind of a very, very worried young man by the name of Ronald Billius Weasley who was at a very historically significant moment 'tromping the boundary', read driving an Orc-built rough terrain Volkswagen Beetle at a lowish speed with one of the various people who had over the half year since the Home Farm and attendent village of agricultural workers had been budged by a Black and Black spacecraft to its current location, as part of the continuous patrol that made everything inside the endlessly looping vehicles lawfully Weasley land.
Endless grey regolith to the left, green fields and woods a hundred yards away to the right, they'd rather expanded as their wards had been able to cover a wider area and Ron's dad had scored flasks of the Orcs soil transmutation potions with the result of the four mile wide band of new pastures surrounding the original Home Farm. The only real landmarks were roads chewed into the regolith by wheeled vehicles, and the broad region battered upon by the occasional visit of a small cargo spacecraft, a short-haul tramp freighter from the Hwicce Successor State Ron's parents had a contract with to take their stock and produce to market in the Demesene of Sc*nthorpe over in the Mercia Successor State.
Ron had needed to step up - he was the only child of the House of Weasley still at home between Bill having decided being a former Gringotts employee meant staying in the Successor States was all too likely to become decidedly unhealthy, he was on Mars; Charlie was still farming dragons with Orcs now somewhere not listed; Percy was in Sc*nthorpe, working for the Lord Waddington as a low ranking working on promotion file clerk at the heart of the steadily expanding lunar railway network; the twins were in Fort Lamb working as commercial alchemists, also currently someplace not listed; and of course odds were Ginny was never going to speak to their mum again, leaving Ron slowly realising that he was most likely to end up being the Weasley in his generation who ran the farm.
And he was -bloody determined- to not mess -that- up. He'd -seen- how much work it had taken his mum and dad to recreate what Ron's great-grandfather had lost, the plan was to get hold of more wardstones and demesene security golems and -expand- to raise grain and cattle and pigs on hundreds of square miles of what had been regolith... if the muggles didn't kill them all.
He was painfully aware of the fact that muggle armoured vehicles were moving north, on a direct line towards the Demesene of Birmingham, on a roue only a couple of hundred miles east of where his 'moon beetle' was trundling along armed with his second-hand wand and gis dad's farmhand Bob Sykes shotgun currently in the passenger side footwell, and he just about sh*t himself when the ground jolted hard enough to make him momentarily loose control of the car.
"f*ck was that!"
"I dunno bosslet," Bob said as Ron skidded the Moon Beetle to a halt - they both piled out and into the trench just outside the perimeter wall, dug and sandbagged for that purpose, just in time for it to happen again.
And again.
And again.
Ron fished his mirror out and got on with the important lansholder's-son-and-deputy work of finding out the -f*ck- was going on and whether they were -under attack-, just about when the last displaced-in asteroid aimed at the moon was smashing into the former location of Neo-Oshamambe and the next, falling towards the city of London n Earth, was being latched onto by an Orcadian flagged asteroid mining tug that had just dumped the giant bag of carefully mixed Venusian gasses it had been shepherding towards the moon, bodily -tore the kinetic kill vehicle's tacked on nexus out with its rock-cutting equipment-, and displaced the inbound 'dinosaur killer' out from the edge of Earth's atmosphere and into a trajectory where it would not bludgeon anything, in an emergency response mirrored with another fifteen rocks aimed, for the main part, at muggle capitals cities.
One rock, aimed at Washington DC, came in too low: it was successfully displaced hundreds of miles west, and slowed enough to prevent it airburstingby levitational apparatus designed for dragging huge quantities of ore around, but the combined load trying to displace inside atmosphere was too much for the tug's displacement wards, burnt them out, and the last comment from the OSA golems aboard -that- tug before a megaton of rock slammed into the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginiawith a comparatively tiny spacecraft decellerating it at two gravities all the way to the groundwas a blunt, "Displacement failure, we're dead. Tug Seven Eight Seven out."
Things were really about to -kick off- and the Orcs had just, surprise surprise, started getting looked at -a bit funny- when the Gringotts branch beneath Birmingham on the moon pompously publicly announced that there would be a whole lot more of that sort of thing if the muggles and Orcs didn't immediately surrender to Clan Grynne, and if a swarm of seventy-six asteroids each roughly two thirds the mass of a Freya-class battlewagon, fitted with Etente-style capital-class mass drivers and set up as cobbled-together gunboats, hadn't also dropped into Pluto orbit and started attempting to shoot up everything in sight.
-/-/-
The meeting, held by mirror between the impacted heads of state with a few advisers apiece and the Low King of Mars acting mediator (which was just f*cking funny)was one of the oddest experiences so far of the life of a deliberately provocatively strange metamorph being as it was the first time the naval authorities of Orcadia - meaning the Jarl of Kirkwall, the Jarl of Stromness, the Jarl of Lerwick, her incredibly pissed off surrogate brother, her-not-quite-uncle Sirius, and her own weird self - actually sat down to talk to a bunch of muggle top brass and spaceflight experts and heads of state and/or government, the Lowest King of Dwarfkind, and an -unutterably bloody furious- Immortal Empress who had just for the first time in centuries had something, namely the murder by unprovoked asteroid impact of several thousand of Her loyal subjects as the Zim colony in Lamb crater hadn't been destroyed but it'd been -messed up- by the rock that hit the former location of Fort Lamb, that was not in fact investigating the nature of reality drawn her full, detailed, -outraged-, attention, and discussed the very significant topic of the little bastards who had just attempted to murder the world upon which everyone involved had been born, and that's why she, directly after pleasentries had been formally exchanged and the Low King had called this council of war of the civilised children of Earth (his phrasing) to order, immediately opened her yap and said "So let's not beat around the bush, anyone else run the numbers on the displacement trajectories, angular momentum, so on?"
"Da," the very Russianski bloke from Roskosmos who'd been brought in as an available nearest thing to neutral spaceflight expert, immediately said. "From the direction of Proxima Centauri this deployment of weapons of mass destruction is coming."
"Ivan's right," the man from NASA agreed, this not being a flippant nationality related nicknaming, the bloke's given name was in fact Ivan. "It definitely stacks up and from their displacement rates they probably spent about eight to nine days in transit."
"Pretty good match for our numbers, yup," Dora said. "And it talles with what we're seeing of hardware in the roid gunboats our lot disabled rather than weird-boomed over Pluto. Nothing wrong with their nexii, mana conduits, levitational apparatus, helm control, so on but their wardstones are - no offence Your Immortal Magnificence - third rate Zimbabwean granite with badly-set-up hack-job displacement wards looking almost directly copied from Zim runeschemes designed for something -a lot- lighter, probably around the half million ton mark."
"I believe," a deeply solemn English queen said, "That the current most pressing topics are twofold and should firstly be:establishing whether repetition of this ghastly affair is possible to -prevent- in the future and an immediate avenue of investigation is quite clear to me. Director Tonks, I understand that you are as of this time conidered the foremost expert on the subject of spacecraft propulsion: do you suppose it might be feasible to ward an area, as an example up to the very furthest reaches of high orbit around Earth, against displacement?"
"Are We, His Orcadian Majesty, and His Lowness to take it that you believe Us -fools-?" The Immortal Empress asked, -decidely unimpressed-. "Attempted establishment of any such warding undertaken by governments who have -consistently- acted in bad faith since the first moment of conclusive disintegration of the Statute of Secrecy can only be regarded as a direct attack upon the sovereignty, security, and freedom of Great Zimbabwe."
"Aye, hey Olaf, what'd you say about handing that capability to the government that's declared you due to be shot for having fought for them?"
"I'd say they can take their request for a fish to design better trawl nets and f*ck right off."
"We keep hearing that assertion and have yet to see any proof of its veracity," Queen Elizabeth II said, eyes narrowing.
Olaf snorted and pulled his jacket off, flipped it round, and pointed at the pair of patches flanking the trilobite.
"This one was on me when I arrived in France aboard a beat-up old -very explosive- boat called HMS Campbeltown, I made some Jerries lives a wee bit exciting, helped blow up a wee pumping house, found out my ride home was -a bittie on fire-, made a few more Jerries lives even more exciting, swam across an estuary, admired a slightly delayed bang from the far side of the water, took a wee walk to Gibraltar, hitched a wee ride to Cairo looking for something useful to be getting on with, and was given this other one by a lowlands laddie named David Sterling. Look up Sergeant Olaf Coulston, it's under that name there's been a warrant for my arrest for treason out since late last year right alongside the warrants out on everyone ex-forces in Orcadia for the crime of serving your country, the one that our bloody homes used to be amongst,while being Orcs. Now we're willing to work alongside your people to take on a common enemy, but trust you? f*ck off, the bridges Britain's spent the last year burning take a long f*cking time to rebuild."
"Arr arr, yer all pretty princesses, dial it back a notch you longshanks plonkers or I'm cutting this yikyak short," the Low King rumbled. "You, ya f*ckugly longshanks, you, ya f*ckugly longshanks, you, ya f*ckugly longshanks," this continued for a while as he called each and every muggle involved in the conversation a 'f*ckugly longshanks', "Need to get it through yer oxygen-deprived altitude-sickness-addled longshanks skulls," you could hear Yank presidential teeth grating over mirror, "That the bunch of hairy extra-long f*ckugly longshanks over there, and the pink f*ckugly longshanks with them, wouldn't so much as trust you with an ounce of dross-grade iron and a turd and they've a bloody good reason for it. You need to get it through yer thick heads that the old f*ck of a f*ckugly longshanks from Zim distrusts you -only marginally less-. And you need to get it through yer thick skulls that -half the damn FTL-capable warships in known space- able to respond to the sh*t Clan Grynne just started have an Orcadian flag on. They f*cking hurt you, well they came -one piece of outdated intel- away from killing nine tenths of all Orcs, if you're a mite het up that f*ckugly barely-bearded longshanks over there is -f*cking livid-.That's the pertinent f*cking topic, not all this yikyak about who holds a greater grudge against whom, -how do we end this threat-?"
"On that note," one of the British advisers - an old geezer in a razor sharp Navy uniform, who had been holding a whispered exchange with another Navy sort - said, "I have just been informed that my son's command, HMS Warspite, entered the Proxima Centauri system a little over an hour ago. The reports I have here are -very- preliminary, but I can immediately report that a Zimbabwean flagged heavy cargo vehicle in the half million ton mass range was detected in orbit around the star's innermost planet forty-six minutes ago due to the presence of still-active environment wards. Captain Cunningham made the immediate decision to intercept: the Royal Marines boarded twenty-two minutes ago and report that the vessel is derelict with her primary wardstone, nexus, and levitational apparates removed, no cargo to be found, and her crew quarters appear to have been extensively ransacked. The fate of her crew has not been determined beyond multiple very much dried bloodstains and fragments of most likely four golems. For what little it's worth, you have my deepest condolences, Your Magnificence: evidence found by my men suggests that much of your vessel's crew were murdered in their bunks in an exceptionally brutal hijacking. There are no other detectable wards in the Proxima Centauri system at this time."
"Am I remembering correctly about a half million ton Zimbabwean container ship vanishing in transit to Uranus a few weeks back?" Harry grimly asked.
"Thankyou, Rear-Admiral, and quite so, Your Orcadian Majesty," the Immortal Empress said, wychlight starting to curl off her fingers as she proceeded to become even angrier. She barked an order in a language Dora didn't know, and the sound of a dogsbody legging it could be heard.
"Good point, Magnificence," Harry said, nodding. "Aye, exactly what cargo the bankvermin cleaned out is definitely topical, as is: detection ranges. I have a stopgap solution active, put bluntly at this moment in time a formation of Freya-class battlewagons are on station with their long range detectors overlapping to surround the Sol system, sufficient to track any active displacement ward inbound towards Sol as it crosses the heliopause."
"Establishing your grip on the spacelanes," British Adviser 2 - a stuffed shirt political type - fair old sneered.
"Oh put a sock in it dickhe*d, you want NATO to do that job? Fine, on top of your so far seven vehicles capable of both doing the job and -not getting vaporised with one capital-class weapons shot- you're going to have to con the Yanks into donating their -nine- so far to the job -and- constuct another -thirty-three-, which is going to take you until what, November at NATO's current heavy vehicle construction capacity? I don't even -get- why you're so adamant I'm Ghengis bloody Khan, has it somehow escaped your notice I've had the ability to literally hold this bloody star system hostage since 1993 and consistently -haven't-? How hard do you think it would have been for me to turn Earth's upper atmosphere into an iron sodding curtain starting when people like the Zims and the Japanese were still figuring out how to copy our bloody spaceflight capabilities? f*ck -sake- will you people -get your heads out your arses already-!"
The Low King calmly leaned over and tapped the stuffed shirt's mirror with his wand, rumbling, "Silecio you longshanks pratt."
"We," said the Immortal Empress, "Propose the immediate, -urgent-, fabrication of assets sufficient to allow the Orcadian navy to add their warships to the ongoing, -rather pressing-, task of chasing Clan Grynne down. In addition we -strongly- suggest that any know sources of firstly golem clay and secondly ward granite within the search area be investigated first, as Grynne appears to have expended a third of the supply of the latter, and a tenth of the supply of the former, listed in the hijacked vessel's cargo manifest."
"And we need to get on the same page on what is and isn't a threat gesture," Queen Elizabeth cut in.
"The existing treaty is a dead letter," the Low King agreed. "Written by wazzocks with no idea space is not a bloody ocean, f*cking -twenty mile- 'standoff range' and yikyak about 'coming to a dead stop' in -orbit- in there. That's not a job for this discussion and it's going to need the input on -physically possible- from people who actually sodding understand spaceflight it didn't get last time, but either way arr, it's -overdue-."
"Establishing a Sol space traffic control system seems vital from where I stand," the Yank president said. "With established zones of control - I believe de facto is most likely the only way to make it feasible meaning Earth STC is inevitably going to be -decidedly international- - and established civilian traffic lanes I am fully clear will be constantly shifting as planets move. Likewise it seems eminently clear that this should be primarily decided upon by qualified personnel, on an international basis. On a more immediate note I am able to contribute all as noted nine battlewagon class spacecraft so far in US service to efforts to chase down Clan Grynne: all nine are under way to Proxima Centauri as we speak. Ladies; gentlemen; Prime Minister; I believe that the immediate subject for discussion should be search coordination and the establishment of an international task force to jump on our mutual enemies as soon as they are found."
"What is latest estimate for search area?" The man from Roskosmos put in.
"Assuming Grynne aren't completely stupid?" Dora asked. "Assuming the same Zim hardware base and a departure time around when their f*cking present headed our way, we're looking at a current search area of around eight lighyears radius centred on Proxima Centauri, widening to ten lights by the time anything that isn't Warspite can hit the search area. We have a one and a half light year detection range from Sol and four other monitored areas each roughly a half lightyear across within that area, assuming that your mob are on the ball at Alpha Cent, Rear-Admiral."
"Your outsystem shipyards I take it?" The man from NASA asked.
"Nope, we have environment survey units in orbit in the Lalande 21185 system, the Lacielle 9352 system, the Ross 128 system, and the Epsilon Eridani system, monitoring conditions on the lifebearing worlds Mordor, Fiona's World, Dust, and Reothadh - Gaelic name so very not spelt like it sounds listened to in English -and in the case of Mordor preventing more extinctions by salvaging seedstock and viable eggs as we found the place probably seven or eight years after it met a comet going the other way, there's this ever so slight mass extinction going on over there."
"You've found -four alien biospheres- that close to Earth?" The man from NASA asked, suddenly excited.
"Nah, that's just the ones interesting enough we're still keeping an eye on them, you know, mass extinction in progress on Mordor, really uncannily like Earth on Fiona's World, legit primordial soup on Dust, f*cking global ice age frozen over to the tropics and subarctic conditions -in- the tropics despite it getting a tad more solar heating than Earth on Reothadh," Dora said. "There's what, fourteen native biospheres - I think, rough from memory ballpark figure - within eight light years of your office that we know of and we haven't looked all that hard for more Europas, all that ice makes fishing a bit too annoying to bother with especially when there's a stupidly enormous population of space fish right there... Oh for f*ck sake, how haven't you noticed the Kessler fish?"
"What," said the muggle queen, "Is a 'kessler fish'?"
"Ang on, hold yer horses," Harry grumbled, fumbling with his mirror; he held it up. "This sunlight-eating your bloody problem now that got weird boomed into existence by a French battlewagon blowing up back in January is a Kessler fish. You may want to overfish the f*ck out of them, we've been dragging a hundred thousand tons out the asteroid belt a day and it's barely keeping the population under control, by the way we've got tugs preequipped with space trawler equipment for sale at a really f*cking competetive price because I think 'inner Sol system cut off by fish Kessler syndrome' would be a pretty bloody embarrassing headline - incidentally if you notice the occasional star getting dimmer and a lot purpler that's because they're delicious deep fried in batter, all it takes to get a population going is a few tens of thousands of eggs and a suitable asteroid belt, and the fact that the best bits make your turds glow purple doesn't do anything harmful."
"Arr, they're good eating and just as good fertiliser ingredients," the Low King agreed.
"Is it always like this?" The Yank president asked.
"We live in a f*cking strange universe," Harry said, shrugging. "It's just some of us have an easier time noticing just how weird reality is because it starts playing funny buggers if we think at it in the wrong tone of voice."
"Out of curiosity, what is 'weird boomed'?" The bloke representing the muggle French for this conversation asked.
"Slang term for what happens when damage causes an artificial leyline nexus to build up too much magic for its containment to contain insteadof either just cutting out or proceeding to sit there pumping mondo wychlight out a busted mana conduit," Harry told him. "The technical term is an explosive improbability and blowing up a nexus isn't the only thing that can cause that,it's what happens when the concentration of magic in one place causes reality to go completely wibbly at the same time as the blob of magic expands explosively, it tends to really bizarrely transmute anything actually -inside- the exploding blob of stupidhuge magic while blowing the absolute f*ck out of anything-outside- it,a good example of the result is the pod of two dozen what look kinda like sperm whales that used to be a goblin gunboat's nexus chamber currently lazily raising their orbits away from Pluto by swimming."
"What, don't tell me you're -surprised- industrial magic is every bit as capable of being dangerous as any other very powerful piece of machinery, the word 'Chernobyl' comes to mind," Sirius added, giving several muggles irate looks. "And we're beating around the bush again, we have an unidentified spacecraft full of unknown number goblins and unknown number golems needing found, we have two dens of iniquity posing as banks needing stormed, and we have a not getting The Troubles in space to do because -that is the direction NATO are headed for-. I can't help with Ganymede, but, ladies and gentlemen, meet a friend and political ally of mine," and he raised his handheld communications mirror. "Lord Cuthbert Waddington, Landholder of the Demesene of Sc*nthorpe and conveniently in possession of a -not insignificant- formation of Crab war golems and a spaceport fifty-six miles south by southwest of the city currently being held hostage by Clan Grynne on the moon."
"Yes well," said the elderly gentleman on the far end of Sirius's mirror. "Unfortunately the goblins have warded their establishment against house-elfs thus the absence of a strategic series of gunpowder plots resolving affairs, and at this moment in time although I have the capability to hold off beseigement from Brum indefinitely I am unable to successfully breach that city's wards with my available forces. I believe that siege or direct assault is unwarranted this time, as the Lord Black noted Birmingham is effectively held hostage by Clan Grynne with all underage persons in the demesene's population including a large percentage of the Lord Farnborough's descendants having been kidnapped by Grynne during the late unpleasentness in London and are being held captive underground. However this presents us with something of a opportunity: ladies, gentlemen, in particular Emperor Akihito: how effective are your hostage rescue capabilities? I shall immediately becoming willing to volunteer Sc*nthorpe as a jumping off point for combined special forces, particularly should such special forces include Your Imperial Majesty's loyal ninjas, and to arrange the assistance of Lord Farnborough in their entering Birmingham outside the notice of Grynne courtesy ofthe inability of goblins to intercept communications via Lord Black's scrying apparatus, contingent on two very pressing demands."
"And those are?" The Low King immediately asked.
"Firstly, the immediate recognition of the seven Wizarding British Successor States as sovereign nations in our own right with inalienable right to occupation of our regions of the lunar surface, by the muggle governments of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. And secondly, immediate termination of hostile actions and withdrawal on the part of muggle Britain from the southern Kernewic Successor State with consequent release of any and all Successor State citizens currently imprisoned by the British; I don't believe these criteria in any way excessive and I would quite like to see things rather settle down so I may resume peacefully running my transportation businesses and building what I shall most likely in a few decades bequeath to my descendants."
"I believe," said the Emperor of Japan, "That is entirely acceptable though the fact that the Prime Minister of Britain is currently silenced makes his input rather difficult to obtain."
The muggle queen meanigfully waggled a telephone handset.
-/-/-
As a combination of multinationalmuggle special forces, Special Orc Service mercenaries hired by the Demesene of Sc*nthorpe, ninjas, and other such individuals were boarding a freight train with a gleaming scarlet steam locomotive at its head in Sc*nthorpe, a cobbled together battlewagon accompanied by a fleet of armed asteroids slipped the net and continued, completely unawares, directly towards the location of Orcadia's outsystem shipyards and a very significant defence fleet of upgraded Freyas, right as a ninja by the name of Aoi Ishikawa was with some very serious amusem*nt watching a tense atandoff between the two surviving goblins in the Gringotts branch on Ganymede, which she had thoroughly enjoyed provoking the descent into infighting of by carefully directed murder and coopted communications having them all convinced that a traitor in their midst was feeding information to the muggles.
Now she had the branch's third general manager in the space of three days starting down someone who had a week ago been a menial employee, both with their hands hovering over sidearms, both furiously accusing each other of being the traitor, and interestedly waited to see who was going to draw first.
It ended up being the ex-menial, who caught a bullet between the eyes, three to the upper chest, one in the arm, and one in the groin as his boss was really quiet good at shooting from the hip.
The manager growled something incoherent and started reloading his revolver as he turned to hurry off - he must have glimpsed or heard movement when Aoi picked the dead goblin's hand, still wrapped round a pistol grip, up because he started whipping back round, but she successfully blew his balls off anyway because she was a lot faster than him, whereupon she did a little extra 'goblin infighting damage' that successfully got rid of their communication log.
The final stage of the plan was to put on a last litlle stage play, this time for whoever would shortly have the two branches coopted communications equipment, involving the apparent start of infighting aboard the Grynne junkhead of a flagship resulting in the comms scrying lenses that end catching a shotgun blast the 'chairman of the board' didn't.
Operation Teddybear had turned into a near-disastrous success when Grynne's directors had decided to attempt the Mad Maxing of Earth along with the pelting with rocks of what had been lunar Orcadia, as a result of which all records or evidence of the op would fairly soon cease to exist wholesale.
Still work to do, and the destination of the Grynne director had made very sure that the evidence on that end was not going to continue existing after they got ripped a new one by the fleet at The Swamp of Eternal Stench, where there'd be Ishikawas waiting to double-check any wreckage after what they were calling the 'Goblin Space Hulk' got run down and rendered inert, but the job of providing another 'bear youkai' to get people working -together- was done.
-/-/-
On June 20th of 1996, the Skithblanthir II returned to hovering over an ocean on Earth, this time the Atlantic over international waters east of New York City: the Storm Petrel touched down in Washington DC alongside a number of other vehicles ranging from jet aircraft to foriegn-flagged Royal Orcadian Shipyards Togal tugs various people had kitted out as very plush private shuttles, the original first constructed Japanese football and one of its British-flagged sister ships, and multiple other people's domestically constructed vehicles including, to the surprise of a great many, a vehicle constructed in orbit around a star called Jenjen.
In a very real sense the postStatute era of the history of Earth began during the next three days of carefull face to face negotiations - notable for reasons including being the first time in at least four centuries that the Immortal Empress of Great Zimbabwe had actually exited the city of Great Zimbabwe and the first time Ancient Mother Green Rock River had ever exited the Jenjen system- at the end of which the first international treaty on conduct of warfare in space, and the agreements setting out the very basic version of the eventual Sol Space Traffic Control system, were signed.
The result only really solved the border establishment situation - all established claims would be upheld, going forwards the first nation to establish permanent occupation in any star system (or on any body in the Sol system) would have first dibs on the rest of it and, importantly, the use of orbit to surface weaponry over a specific destructive power (pretty much anything indiscriminate) was legally defined by all signatories as a declaration of war against every nation named therein, applicable to the actions of parties who had -not- signed.
Importantly every nation signing that treaty recognised the existence as a sovereign state of the others, along with recognising the nationality of everyone resident therein as of the moment it was signed and, importantly, attempts to remove them for presecution elsewhere without the sayso of their national government considered an act of war, a tradeoff to spite the British that was why Harry had agreed to the bit about orbit to surface weapons. Unfortunately this included Catalonia, as a result of which it -did not- include Spain, and it had not involved the Chinese.
There was still obvious considerable suspicion aimed at Orcs to the tune of several snide remarks about a 'pirate kingdom' and an 'evil megacorporation' getting recognised as nations by dint of signing a limited moratorium on planetary bombardment but -oh well-, and at least the agreement on space traffic included that plunking a gigantic warship in orbit in a moon-planet system you have territory in formally wasn't to be considered provocative meaning that although likely only to be inhabited by military golems and golem-staffed trade shipping facilities for quite some time, lunar Orcadia and the lunar territory of Black and Black had just become very strategic and would put a stop to most hysterics about the capital city of Orcs parking itself near Earth, along with the fact that vessels entering other inhabited star systems now required the permission of one or more nation resident therein, with nations present in the form of leasehold exclaves, say for example ambassadorial demesenes or importantly something like a dwarfen exclave delvenot permitted to invite someone else's shipping in.
In the end the only person who really went away satisfied was the Low King of Mars, who had got exactly what he wanted; Harry was particularly not satisfied as he had only managed to get that bit about exclaves in by letting the -British- get the bit about how if you fully removed your national territory (say for example: Hy-Brasil) from a system occupied at time of removal by other people you'd need their unanimous agreement to -put it back-.
Arseholes.
Oh well: securing Fiona's World and Duncan's World was worth it, and Orc ownership of Titan and a vast swathe of due to remain dry land lunar surface had suddenly stopped being a question: there was a lot of border-related horsetrading on the moon with independent demesenes due to get wet taking shameless advantage of their extant rights to smack flags on bigger bits that'd stay dry, the Yanks and British had for definite plotted as they stitched up very big bits of prime nearside real estate, so on, but in the end in a lot of ways for the Orcs, the Year of Chaos just stopped being chaos early: nine Jarldoms (including a certain village of villeinous nutters) had set down on Fiona's World by the start of July as had the Black and Black formerly lunar installations, a stub of Zim railway started getting extended from Fort Lamb to Linlithgow and Ardgowan as a stub of North Rail standard gauge started getting extended towards the various Black and Black sites in one direction and a Jarldom formerly known as Strathcarron seventy-five miles away in the other, roadbuilding ramped up, shipbuilding commenced, a ship called Exodus started making routine trips between Fiona's World and Earth orbits ferrying ferries and, on July 1st of 1996 an odd new trend popped up when Sarah and Nigel Kinsey, a pair of muggle self-sufficiency nuts from Los Angeles in California, contacted the Jarl of Linlithgow looking for permission to set up a homestead for themselves on the wayside halfway between Fort Lamb and Linlithgow.
They went down in history as the very first 'muggle' pioneer spirit sorts to move to a world already inhabited and inhabitable but with a lot of land up for grabs and join in with the local new normal.
They would not be the last - not by an -enormous- shot - and they wouldn't be the last to get know as bloody strange people but no bad neighbours either.
Another new trend - buying or swapping just generally stuff using a magic mirror to work out what went where, and a line of business involving couriering stuff between planets using a van and existing interplanetary, or newly established interstellar, car ferries also almost immediately emerged as routine civilian traffic between Earth and other places began to get back together, now open to both sides of the Statute, directly attrubutable to Astoria jonesing for spare parts and conning someone to go pick some up for her in Aeotoaroa.
In the end Harry was in Fiona's World orbit helping harpies learn (or relearn) how to fly when he got the news that a bunch of goblins in a space oddity made by strapping asteroid together around a Zim-built wardstone and nexus had barged in accompanied by a flotilla of armed asteroids, crashlanded their object on the incredibly uninhabitable surface of Duncan's World in the resulting chaotic combat, succeeded in shooting back from the surface, and got thoroughly pounded into a massive hole in the ground by long-range orbit to surface use of warship blasting hex generators, as they'd apparently very unfortunately for themselves utterly misread the information - apparently passed along by the long since cleaned out 'bank' beneath a lunar town called Birmingham, going by evidence found therein after a major, very successful, international counterterrorism operation- that the majority of Orc golem clay was coming from that system.
(The volcanic eruption that went off under the beating delivered by the Swamp of Eternal Stench defence fleet finished the job of making sure that nobody was going to get much information out of the final combat of the final Clan Grynne rebellion but oh well. Not like anyone ever found any further proof of Grynne holdout activity outsystem as the Sol diaspora commenced, and not like the Orcs ever actually mentioned that Clan Grynne died in a place that, a few months later, had the junk quietly recycled then became seafloor mostly because they weren't entirely sure whether dealing using big guns on a landed warship did or didn't contravene a certain treaty, oops?)
-/-/-
Harry James Potter received two very significant things for his sixteenth birthday. Well, actually one was something he gave someone else and the other was an international news headline.
The something given someone else was why he that morning fused intricately decorated steel connected by undecorated also very shiny chain round Fleur Delacour's throat, wrists, and ankles, and he didn't pick up on the slight air of smug coming from Ginny as he was too busy teasing Hermione for her clearly being very envious of Fleur getting to wear chains -all the time-.
The second was reports that the Chinese civil war had just abruptly ended with the assassination of the Emperor and a bunch of maps hastily being redrawn, with Vietnam and Cambodia suddenly definitely very much their own things and Vietnam having a bit of a problem called two gargantuan levitating turtles chained to the ground with palace on their backs. Apparently they immediately decided - because giant turtle food budget is also giant -that it'd be best to loot the palaces literally back to giant sky turtle shell, cut the chains, and not worry about it any more, with a result including Gabrielle taking bets on when the two levitating behemoths were going to conclude that they weren't getting dinner and go looking for tasty treats for giant sky turtles somewhere else.
Things were coming together. Earth was starting to settle down into a serviceable holding pattern after seven months straight of utter bedlam. The Royal Navy had gone full West Africa Squadron in a total strop about someone doing a stupid and trying to get the interplanetary slave trade going after the Orcs naffed a lot more off. Attempts to overfish Kessler fish into extinction at Sol had worked, and the light issued from several other stars was now getting dimmer and purpler. David Attenborough had produced a show involving space whale sex, Kessler fish, giant glowing mushrooms, and really annoying bioluminescent prawns. Spain was still a hot mess but Africa was starting to succumb to the effect of sudden unexpected industrial powerhouse syndrome while South America appeared to have lost interest in redrawing borders every other week and got on with doing something less repetitive.
Çloser to home worry about weather or not harpies ate people had faded, an 'aviary' had its exterior doors knocked out and a lot of redecorating, and certain gloves had at some point had easily popped open and closed latches replace locks as it turned out -not- embedding the tips of your foot-fingers into everything when you didn't want to was useful - if Harry had the idea of it right harpies just generally -being around- was probably going to be into perpetuity, he needed to get round to detaching fifteen completely unecessary collars at some point.
Everything was settling down, and Harry Potter, along with having a baby brother two weeks short of sixteen years younger than him who after several minutes of Sirius and Lily panicking about names had wound up dubbed Charlus John by Eddie Campbell, was waiting for the other shoe to drop and hoping that the shoe-drop would be predominantly around the fact that they were somewhere around eight weeks from the palace in Thordrumsheim suddenly ceasing to contain a becoming -very- pregnant Luna.
He just kinda knew that one way or another there was no way in f*ck the future extent of Potteritis would be limited to the fact he was about to have to work out how to be a father, but that was by the by: his lifelong fear about what exactly would come of the collapse of the Statute of Secrecy had begun to fade.
That sordid -stupid- chapter of the history of the children of Midgard was done, the idea that somehow someone, -anyone-, would turn the whole mess into an empire was steadily more and more getting chucked into the dustbin of history where it belonged, and the free for all of expanding into a galaxy had just begun with, as they had been since an unexpected realisation during a conversation about expensive bedsheets, Harry and his Orcs at the forefront of the tomorrow they, and a whole lot of other people, had spent most of Harry's life in a way working towards.
He was lounging in bed with Fleur, post her having got her apparently this was a household tradition now ceremonious am-concubine-now rogering and thinking about the latest state of known space when to his momentary pique his mirror started dinging.
"Oh for f*ck sake well at least it's not a matter of 'coitus interruptus'," he complained; Fleur started snigg*ring.
He picked the poxy thing up, found himself looking at the name 'Randall Randallson' - the bloke in current command of the Leif Eriksson along with a long-range corvette carrier and formation of other exploration corvettes, who had been hopping from star system to star system ever away from Earth towards the galactic core since April, both extending the limits of Orcadian knowledge of the galaxy and acting as a contingency plan charting the available resources (and leaving behind golem-crewed mining tug teams building up materials caches) ahead on the way towards the nearest known point on the Asari's maps at the arse end of something Asari didn't have a very high opinion of calling itself the Batarian Hegemony in case sh*t went really sideways at home and the Orcs had to -proper- sod off, current location roughly 200 light years away from Sol. "Bugger! I have to answer this," and he thumbed it and as soon as the expected Vinlandr appeared continued, "Groundloop, don't tell me the Asari have somehow managed to cros the first like twenty-eight hundred lights of gap and managed to insanely improbably bump right into you,"
"Nah, not that chief," Said the eldest son of the Jarl of Vinland, "But we ran into cavemen again, f*cking bug alien types busy being hunter-gatherers who haven't got round to inventing pottery or working out what flint is, that's not why I dinged you though, get this, the poor bastards have a specific type f*cking massive bomb times portal generation thingy floating around in their outer solar system with very familiar coating of Oort cloud crud and you know that theory going around that our one blew up -because- we got it to f*ck? I'm thinking we should sit back with our ships outside kaboom range and examine it. In detail. Using the better detection wards that've been rigged up in the last half year."
"... Aye, okay man, better alien abductionise a bunch of alien cavemen and wildlife samples, enough to build them a replacement bloody bioaphere, just whack them in stasis and stash them aboard, so if it kaboomed because we'd been poking it with a stick we don't -extinct them-."
"Yeah -point-, I take it we're putting exploration on hold for now?"
"Aye, until either the situation here stops stabilising and starts deteriorating, or we know enough about those damn bomb portal thingies to -know whether it's possible to make ones that do the portal without the being a bomb-, whichever happens first. Keep me posted and remember, a big boomy thing comes under the bit with where you are and what you're doing being classified."
"Yeah, willdo boss, I'll let you get on with ansl probing your abducted Frenchie and get my guys and gals situated then," and the -git- cut the connection as Fleur started giggling.
"f*ck sake Groundloop can be such a -git- sometimes," Harry grumbled. "Bugger, might as well crawl back out of bed and start whatevering, that's wrecked the post-shag lounge mood."
"I take it we're not telling the Asari about this yet?"
"Not until either we've got a really decent plan of the insides of that f*cking thing, enough to be confident we can get it to f*ck away from these 'stick insect people' -without- it going bang very, very loudly or better yet get it to capable of generating its portals without being -able- to go bang, or it turns into a moot point by either us cracking the bigger nexus problem or someone making it make portals from the other side. Well, or it goes boom and we never speak of it again. Either way I know it's a dirty thing to do to Benny and her girls but I am completely and utterly convinced those things are weapons first and last and only and switching one on in some poor bastard's star system isn't nice, betcha Benezia would be offski to do that like a -shot- if she knew we'd bumbled into one, it's in her flying bottles service range."
"Mm, point," Fleur said, picking up an article of underwear times bondage device that post not needing to being proven to Harry's satisfaction she had proven to -her- satisfaction it wasn't morphic f*ckery 'making' her like it. "Lock please Master?"
-/-/-
Nearly a thousand lightyears closer to the galactic core than where Groundloop was now making ribald jokes about arse-obsessed aliens, and at a very very different angle compared to Sol well off to one side of the vector of the line of Orc 'known space' charted by his team, an independent mining vessel dropped into yet another star system and on top of the second in their chain of core discharge sites, found something really very unexpected in the form of an inhabitable world, with what appeared to be derelict artificial satellites in orbit, and a postnuclear by a couple of centuries wasteland populated by furry frequently-deformed postapocalyptic techno-barbarians on the edge of spiralling their way to extinction - only a few hundred thousand alive in scattered tribes living in the wreckage of a selfdestructed civilisation-and to the considerable surprise of everyone aboard an inactive mass relay - pointed to the Terminus systems - in the outer star system, shrouded in a layer of cometary detritus.
The decision was made to leave it closed as the primitives in the Athetya's Quest system had already been hit by a couple of Batarian '-totally- pirates, honest' slaver raids since the various navies had effectively run out of attention span and the poor bastards in this one didn't need that sh*t on top of everything else.
They discharged their ship's core, dropped off an exonet connection satellite, checked their supply situation, and pushed deeper into the trackless depths of darkspace.
-/-/-
Q: What do you get if you cross a prune with a shaved puffskein then attach a shipwide collision alert klaxon to one end and a capital-class dungbomb generator to the other?
A: The initial impression of Miss Astoria 'I am not your f*cking babysitter' Greengrass of a child named Johnathan Roy Potter, as stated the day after Johnny was born, coincidentally two days after Fleur Delacour discovered she too was pregnant.
-/-AN-/-
A headlong collision involving Batarians is looming, though it's going to happen after Stephen Hawking changes the game at the 1998 International Thaumaturgy Expositon. Timeline wise I expect the next few parts to pass several in-story months, potentially running to most of a year, each, but I don't know for sure as this thing has a habit of doing things I didn't see coming either.
Especially when, as in this part, I start by glossing over whole strings of events then go back and actually write them while consuming beer and listening to Alestorm. This time I found out that by the instory 2020s there's going to be -reams- of conspiracy theories about the eventual fate of Clan Grynne's high muckty-mucks with the general belief that they probably killed themselves off infighting ala Ganymede and are most likely headed generally away in a ship containing dead goblins and dumbass directed to 'get us out of here' golems, somewhere in deep space, probably to eventually go weird boom in the far black distant yonder due to lack of maintenance, though it's going to be donkeys years before governments stop being jumpy about there being goblins under the bed.
Cheers,
Cal.
