Weapons in the Cortii

 First seen on the Space Trash Blog.

So, what constitutes weapons in the Cortii?

Personal loadout, for some reasons I hope will be obvious, isn't usually made public. No one who survives Cortiian basic training underestimates the value of surprise in a fight. However, there are some standard items. Uniform regulations dictate a hand laser and a stunner on the belt; every Cortiian in an active unit will carry them, in addition to anything else.

A laser is a distance weapon 

The regulation-issue hand laser is a Cortiian model, and the grip doubles as a basic ID system; no one who isn't Cortiian can take the weapon and use it. That safety feature isn't a lot of use on a Cortiian Base, but off one, it's worth having. The weapon weighs about 500 grams, most of which is the power pack housed in the grip. The power pack is good for thirty single shots under normal conditions, and can be recharged from heat, which is convenient for a belt weapon.

It can be used as a cutting tool, but only gives about five seconds' worth; enough for a field amputation or to make basic door security seriously unhappy. It's fairly short-range (shooting anything much further away than ten metres with it will lose you power and accuracy). For anything between zero and five metres, and not wearing a personal shield, it's accurate and lethal. Current models, and anything issued in the last couple of decades, are shaped to be fired via a stud at the top of the grip that you depress with the thumb.

You can't stun with a laser

Contrary to popular belief, you can't recalibrate a coherent beam of light to stun. For occasions where prisoners are needed, deriani also carry a stunner. Again, the most common models are Cortiian-issue, and the exact specifications aren't available, but effectively, they use sonics as a short-term, short-range knockout.

The Cortiian models are more powerful than similar weapons in human space, mostly because Cortiians are both tricky and hard to put down. Turned on a standard human type, a Cortiian stunner will cause unconsciousness on the close range of an hour, and leave the target disoriented for some time after that. It will also quite possibly cause nerve damage, and it will almost certainly do damage to the bones of the ear. Turned against a Cortiian, half an hour's unconsciousness is about the best you can hope for, and an indirect shot or long distance will be result in less. The closer you are to your target when you set it off, the more likely it is to result in disorientation. Five metres is about the stunner's best effective range; slightly less in thin atmosphere, slightly more in denser environments.

Up close and personal

Because lasers can be disrupted by any of a range of personal shielding devices, most Cortiians also carry edged weapons.

Fighting knives of various designs are common, as are throwing knives. Longer blades are used, but less commonly, as they become increasingly hard to hide. Most deriani lean towards a dull finish, and dark alloys on their blades. By far the most common preference is for double-edged blades, but beyond that there are a number of options. A personal shield will not stop a blade; they move too slowly and the approach is wrong. You can expect any Cortiian to be a proficient knife-fighter; the majority will also be good with longer blades. The Cortii are fairly equally divided on the topic of custom blades; the main argument for is that they're harder for someone else to turn against you, and the main argument against is that if you become too used to fighting with a custom design, you become less accustomed to using a knife you can take from anyone else or a standard dispenser.

Some deriani also carry blunt weapons; mostly these tend to be pocket-sized, as, again, a full-length staff tends to be noticed. As staves of various sizes are both common and easy to fabricate, however, expect most Cortiians to be able to use a staff weapon. On a Base, the most common variants tend to be worn across the knuckles, or a weighted or telescoping cosh of some kind. Variations on two heavy weights with a thin filament connecting them are also common; if the weights aren't getting the job done, there's always the chance of garroting your opponent.

Hand-to-hand

Every Cortiian will be proficient in empty-hand fighting. In this area, variation is key, and the more obscure the fighting style, the more likely you are to be able to come at an opponent in a way they don't expect and will have to invent wildly to counter. If there can be said to be a common hobby in the Cortii, hand-to-hand is probably it. It will be practised daily as part of any deriani exercise routine, and most people will have at least two styles that they're expert in, as well as a basic understanding of as many others as they can. It's one of the areas where real-world experience is invaluable, because a holosuit can only throw up combinations that already exist in its programming.

There are no rules 

The Councils have no interest in intervening in casual violence. The Councils will step in only if the situation looks likely to cause expensive damage; anything else simply saves them the trouble of weeding out the unmotivated, the unintelligent, and the unskilled.

Books and authors

First seen on the Space Trash blog.

...lying on my back on the library floor, staring blankly up at my bookshelves, I realised two things.

First: it's not hoarding if it's books; second, that I have a lot of series by female authors. Given all the unmitigated crap that occasionally hits the airwaves about 'women ruining science-fiction', and given the amount of sci-fi I read, it took me rather by surprise. I didn't, in fact, set out to collect books written by women authors. Actually, if I'm completely honest, unless I'm looking for some more of someone's work that I've already enjoyed, the author's name tends to be about the last thing about a book that I look at.

Generally, if someone's unwary enough to let me off my chain in a bookshop, my method of picking out books (yes, it's never 'a' book, kindly don't blaspheme) is to wander along the sci-fi and fantasy shelves, picking up random books that look interesting and reading the first few pages.

I like that first few pages, I buy the book - simple. If I like the rest of the book, when I've got it home and devoured it, then I'll take notice of the author - so that I can go and see what else they've written, and hang out in their metaphorical garden hedges watching to see when the next book may come out. Yes, I author-stalk. (Rabia Gale, I'm looking at you. W. Clark Boutwell, you too.)
 
From my unexpected vantage point on the floor (I was trying to clean - don't judge), for the first time in my life, I counted fingers and realised that, having used that method of book selection most of my life, I really do have a lot of books by women authors. C J Cherryh, Lilith Saintcrow, Anne MCaffrey, Dorothy Dunnett, Patricia Briggs, Rob Thurman, Michelle Sagara, Ann Aguirre, Laura Anne Gilman...I could keep going. I was almost relieved to come across half a shelf of Jack Campbell, a complete shelf and a half of Terry Pratchett (all hail to Sir Terry), a clump of Jack Higgins, the full Wheel of Time series, some Jim Butcher, a bit of Simon Green, and...yeah, I read a lot.

Basically, I like good writing, by which I mean a writing style that doesn't make me roll my eyes on page one, characters that aren't two-dimensional, and a plot that actually, well, has a plot. I don't select my books based on the shape of the author's genitalia.

Something that pisses me off no end is the sheer number of individuals (insert epithets of choice here, I'm a dirty-word intellectual trying hard to keep my blog mostly PG) going around claiming that 'men can't write fantasy' or 'women can't write science-fiction'. I call bullshit. J R R Tolkien, for example. C S Lewis. C J Cherryh, Octavia E Butler, Anne McCaffrey. I suffer violent urges when I read that J K Rowling is J K because someone told her that she'd sell fewer books as Joanne Kathleen Rowling.

I think at heart I feel that the only criteria that a book should be judged by is the quality of the writing. A good cover and a good blurb may well help to attract the reader's attention, but ultimately, you can have the best cover in the world, and unless that excerpt makes me want to read more, you're going back on the shelf.

Colonisation fleets: Successful, semi-successful, and completely unsuccessful

First seen on the Space Trash Blog.

Colonisation and the Cortii

Given the generally cold and occasionally fissionable-hot relationship between most of the humanoid governments and the Cortii, it may not be immediately obvious that there were Cortiian units on a lot of the early colony ships. And then, if you think about it a bit more...humanoid governments had been hiring Cortii to do their dirty work since long before the colonisation waves, and dealing with new things is inherently risky. Having some heavily-armed, survival-trained, and cynically-minded mercenaries aboard to drop out of the airlock first can pre-empt so many problems.

'A testing environment solves many problems.'~Training of a Cortiian

Initially, there were the interstellar drives - sub-lightspeed, because lightspeed, increase in mass to infinity, etc., etc. From whichever of the Central Worlds was the original homeworld (no one really wants to solve that argument), exploration ships took the long trip at somewhere between half and two-thirds of light-speed to other rocky planets in the original solar system, and set up bases, experimented with air scrubbing, water recycling, and food production until they got good at it, and finally took the sideways step into terraforming - with more and less successful results.

From there, with a lot of the basic experimentation done, colony ships were sent to nearby solar systems. Since absolutely no one really wants to settle once and for all which of the four Central Worlds was 'the' Central World, stick a finger in the hologram on whichever you like. Those ships also had Cortiians aboard.

At some point after that, researchers stopped banging their heads on trying to solve infinite mass versus propulsion, and had a breakthrough that resulted in point-to-point travel, or as it's more commonly known, deepspace drive.

This resulted in the First Colonisation Fleet, which would fall firmly into the 'unsuccessful' category of colonisation attempts.

'In the hands of a fool are all things foolish.'~Sayings of the Wise

The First Colonisation Fleet

Given primitive humanoids and their tendency to breed indiscriminately, it shouldn't be a surprise to hear that a lot of the incentive behind the development of the original deepspace drive was to solve a massive overpopulation problem. Population-wide contraception actually preceded it by a few generations, but by that point all the Central Worlds were pretty much teetering on the point of not being able to support their populations.

With the advent of the deepspace drive came another massive incentive: hail conquering heroes, go forth and be granted as much surface space as you can possibly manage. The governments of the time didn't need to resort to deportations - they had more volunteers than they could build hulls and suspension tanks for. Private initiatives sprang up across Central space, building deepspace ships and offering space aboard.

Records of the time, given the sheer numbers of parties involved, are contradictory, but somewhere between six hundred and thirteen hundred experimental ships vanished into deepspace over a period of a hundred years, each carrying several hundred to several thousand aboard.

Even some of these had Cortii aboard, due largely to hazard bonuses and pre-payment contracts. Even the healthiest culture of cynicism is soluble in enough credit.

However, given experimental drives and the fact that the numbers of ships leaving Central Space in every direction vastly exceeded the number of planets about which long-distance research and exploratory probes had more to say then 'we're pretty sure there is something there', only a fraction of that First Colonial Fleet actually resulted in stable, high-tech colonies.

Miners and scout ships in remote locations still occasionally trip over drifting wrecks, and first contact teams have discovered several humanoid populations on outer-system planets with some interesting gaps in their fossil records, a really big impact crater, or stories of ships that carried wisdom from a distant land.

'Coincidence is the crutch of optimism.'~Training of a Cortiian

The Second Colonial Expansion

...might fall into the semi-successful category. Much better controlled, with destinations that at least rated a definite maybe on being terraformable, or stable enough to support a station habitat, twenty systems were selected for the initial wave, reconnoitred on a detail level, and finally approved for colonisation.

Not to mention, the deepspace drive had had a couple more centuries of fine-tuning. All twenty ships made it, one got blown away by defences the probes had missed, two turned out to be station prospects rather than terraforming prospects, but overall it worked. Most of those twenty ships carried one or more Cortii aboard.

In the interest of accuracy, it should be noted that the defences the probes had missed were in fact Base Zero; the Cortii had a sizeable fleet of their own and substantially less bureaucracy. The Central Worlds government declined to believe that there was a Cortiian base already in the system, but their ship went in heavily armed nonetheless. In the event, not nearly heavily enough.

Those colonies, in turn, spread, and split over time into the various political factions that form the basis of current Cortiian employment - pardon me, today's civilisation.