Space Rangers
Space Rangers is an RPG about playing the people the galactic Confederacy call when the job just has to be done right.the first time.
In a Galaxy of 1 trillion nearbaseline humans and 6 trillion other sentient, about a quarter of which belong to the Confederacy, occasionally doing things through the regular channels just won’t or can’t take care of the problem.
When that happens in the Confederacy somebody calls in the Space Rangers.
This is my submission for the October 25 Ronnies.
Some days start better than others.
This was not one of them.
I’m Sara Levi. At 5′ 8 with the curly hair and straight nose given to me by my Jewish heritage, I?ve been called a good-looking brunette. I am also a Confederacy Ranger.
So what does that have to do with me having a bad day? Well I had been investigating a slavery ring based in the Empire of Men but operating in Confederacy space. Nasty chaps, these guys were picking off underdeveloped colonies, killing everybody and destroying everything they couldn’t sell, nuking the colony till it glowed and selling the proceeds and chattel (that’s right, sapients) over across the Arm in the Empire.
Personally, I’ve never understood slavery. Free women (and occasionally men) work so much better at everything. But that’s not how it is seen in the Empire. Now if the slavers had attacked a world like my homeworld, Liberty, there would have been a few less slavers in the Galaxy. We like to shoot at people; it keeps the blood moving, particularly when they are shooting back. If you shoot at me you are bound to get your damn fool head blown clean off. Makes me a fun girl to have at a party if you don?t mind things getting a little out of hand. Unfortunately, slavers prey upon worlds that can?t or won?t defend themselves.
So the Confederacy Congress decided to send in the Rangers to prove the existence of the slavers as an organization under the direct influence and protection of the Empire of Man or, failing that, undermine and destroy the slaver ring in the most effective manner possible.
Which meant, in this case, they sent me.
I was just about ready to wrap up my investigation and even had enough names of the big dogs in the Empire to make my case before the Confederacy. The slavers I was spying on were in fact collecting fuel to make the final jump home from a comet wending it’s way inbound in a solar system whose star just happened to be almost smack dab between the trailing arm of the Confederacy and the leading arm of the Empire.
The system in question has two habitable terrestrial planets, a rarity in anybody?s book. Why these slavers hadn’t cleared the worlds which had technology no better than that you?d find during the Terran European Middle Ages and would have been an easy mark for these guys, I?ll never know, but as it was they often traded for supplies with one of the kingdoms on Loran, the world that orbits closer to the sun. This particular kingdom on Loran practiced slavery. That being the case the standard trade was slaves for supplies.
While most of the slaves they had pulled in their last job could be sold in the Empire of Man, a few, for whatever the reason, had proved to be too much of a problem. The normal practice for recalcitrant or less than useful slaves is to push them out of an airlock, but with Romant being between here and there it made sense to collect the bunch that were not going to work out and sell them to the locals. That might actually be why the Empire slavers didn’t do in the planet, after all, it’s hard to find good help 5 light years from any place “civilized”.
Be that as it may, Grogh, he was the piece of work in charge of this lovely band of miscreants, decided it was my turn to head down to Romant on Loran and negotiate with the natives for supplies.
So in a shuttle with 6 of my ‘fellow’ slavers I was sent along. The fact that we were not carrying any “cargo? to show off our wares should have tipped me off but we were in low Loran orbit before I put two and two together and realized I must have been compromised.
Which is where my day began to suck really bad.
- Space_Rangers.pdf
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