The Ëchüha Incident: Part 1

QSI-N_0266801c

Fhá Vngví - Hàkétzü DZ-C_060041386

Part 1

Priority 1

It was another abysmal day of redundancies, triplicate, and tedium at the Ministry of Provincial Administration. Copy machines whirred away as they spat out interminable reams of paperwork. Boxes of unprocessed documents and filings stood in stacks and slightly slumped piles as their cardboard deformed under the crushing weight of the Imperium’s bureaucracy. The MPA, like any proper government office, refused adamantly to digitise anything it absolutely did not have to, and ensured to make paper copies of everything it could. If each MPA office didn’t raze an entire forest each day to satisfy its boundless lust for unoptimised ineffeciencies, excessive packratting, and the most magnificent music to any paper-pusher’s ears—the whirring of shredders—then all was indeed not well with the worlds.

This day, however, was not such a day. Paper flowed like an endless river. The copiers sang the song of their people to symphonies of shredders. There was no better soundtrack, thought Fhá Vngví, as she shoved another box of flawlessly processed, intensely insipid site inspection reports off her desk. No better music to focus the mind when grading reports detailing nothing of any real relevance in jargon so dense if it were a stellar body it would have collapsed into a black hole. The green bean in the cubicle next to hers passed out at his data terminal was proof positive of this.

How efficient he must have been with his assignment of last month’s water quality assessment reports from Tvchàmeitè. He was clearly made for this job. Such zeal and passion. Twenty-seven thousand of the most dull, abstruse, insufferable readouts couldn’t have inspired a state of such soul-sucking, brain melting, eye bleeding boredom as to have put him straight to sleep without finishing his work. Not this one. He was born for this job.

Fhà gave him two weeks tops.

Only the most stubborn, desperate, or hopeless lasted in the Imperium’s most bureaucratic bureau of bureaucracy. But never all three. Those possessed of such distinguished personalities could usually be found around 18:00 that evening at Bureaucrat’s Bridge.

“Fhá!” a shrill voice shrieked, startling her.

“Yes, Ngèza?” Fhá replied in her best faux-polite tone.

“Did you look over that report I sent?”

“Which one?”

“I sent it…let’s see here,” Ngèza said, “seventy-one seconds ago.”

“No.”

“I expect it reviewed ASAP,” Ngèza barked.

“It’s lunch time,” Fhá complained.

Ngèza pushed her corpulent mass halfway into the cubicle before getting stuck and resorting to leaning over Fhá’s shoulder. The smell of cheap perfume saturated the air like her cubicle had played home to a muskrat orgy. Like a well trained bureaucrat, Fhà resisted the urge to pinch her nostrils shut. Enduring the stench of senior bureaucrats was, after all, in her contract. Somewhere.

One of Ngèza’s titanic tits squashed onto her shoulder before pooling over it like some kind of gelatinous fleshy cocoon. Fhà suppressed a grimace as she felt a damp spot forming on her shoulder. It was too late to stop the thought forming in her head, though. Fhà surreptitiously slid her rubbish bin closer.

Ngèza stretched one morbidly obese arm out and jabbed at her dataterminal with an index finger so swollen with fat it could have replaced Fhá’s boyfriend.

“What does that say?” Ngèza asked in that classically managerial tone of condescending infantilisation.

“Priority one,” Fhá almost groaned.

“Exactly,” Ngèza said, so smugly her flopping jowls flecked saliva onto the side of Fhá’s face.

“Working lunch it is,” Fhá said, with jollity so fake and saccharine only management would buy it.

“That’s what I like to hear,” Ngèza replied, hoisting the half tonne of her mass off of Fhá’s shoulder and out of the cubicle.

Small earthquakes slowly moved to the next cubicle over. Preemptively, Fhá tensed up, knowing what was about to happen.

“HVANG!” Ngèza shrieked loud enough to be heard by the His Majesty the Emperor two thousand parsecs away.

Five decades in the Ministry of Redundant Administration kicked in as Fhá’s ears blissfully tuned out Ngèza’s shrill voice tongue-lashing the face off of Fhá’s most recent neighbour. There were those who would be completely unable to concentrate through the sound of bloody murder and banshees in heat, but not Fhá. She’d heard the same string of profanity and verbal abuse so many times it all just turned into white noise and party kazoos.

Gingerly, Fhà removed her blazer, doing her best to avoid touching the spot soaked with Ngèza's most proudly flaunted extracurricular activity. Once her now thoroughly ruined blazer was deposited in the bin, she opened the report, preparing herself mentally for a long, long day of shovelling feces on Ngèza’s behalf. Not that she minded, of course. It was, after all, a senior bureaucrat’s sacred responsibility to pawn their work off onto their underlings. Their underlings, being so graced as to have a job in the first place, and, yea, to be tolerated by their most benevolent of overlords, should accept such privileged opportunities with humility and gratitude. Even if it was a Priority One report. No, especially if it was a Priority One report.

P1’s…they were everyone's favourite thing and always only ever one of three possible categories of delightful: a provincial governor upset that he’d not received his allotment of whores, drugs, and booze; some Bannerlord having a sook about the lack of cloaks to throw mindlessly at some enemy he was entirely responsible for having created in the first place; or a violent insurrection broke out for the third time this anno on the local penal world. Only the latter was ever a worthwhile concern, even if it meant creating another half dozen P1s a few Lunes down the line after the Bannerlord sent to go crush the uprising inevitably made the whole situation that much worse and started having a sook about the dearth of cloaks to mindlessly throw at the other cloaks who'd thrown in with the rioting prisoners. Incompetence and bureaucracy, Imperium Kaidan’s two favourite things.

Then she saw the first document.

“What the fuck…” Fhá reacted, “Ngèza! Is this right?”

“Fhá! I’m busy!” Ngèza shrieked back.

“Apologies, ma’am,” Fhá responded, reading the report more closely.

In fifty years, she’d never seen anything like this. DZ reports came along infrequently. That’s just how the DZ was. Fresh colonies in unsecured space. Passages were dangerous. Transit lanes hadn’t been mapped out yet and Colonial Charters were given high degrees of autonomy to get their operations up, running, and viable. A lot of them went dark, and the Imperial Administration of Colonial Charters would send a Charter Closure Report their way after the Imperial Ministry of Inquiries concluded their investigations.

Those were fairly dry and boring, describing one or more workaday reasons why the colony proved unviable. Dead and missing had to be logged into the census rolls, the world’s status changed on the GMap, facts and figures input for use by the Ministry of the Imperial Treasury for taxes. Typical tedium.

Hàkétzü Province’s DZ was unusually quiet by Imperial Standards. The Lossec MPA office took great pride in this. In fact, they were more proud of not having to perform a CCI than the Lossec Colonial Charter Administration was about their record numbers of colonies failing because they forgot to send them resupply ships instead of them being destroyed or ravaged by marauding hordes of bandit scum. Good old incompetence. It was the number one reason why everything in the Imperium was a steaming fat turd. The current victims of terminal stupidity would be no different.

Fhá took down the charter designation and ran it through the Hàkétzü Province DZ Charter database. What she got back she was entirely unprepared for.

CHARTER: Hàkétzü DZ-C_060041386

AUTHORISED BY: Duchess Iju Kvaling Tvì [Imperial Seat]

AUTHORISATION DATE: [redacted]

RENEWAL DATE: [redacted]

EXPIRATION DATE: indefinite

CHARTER RECIPIENT: Ëchüha Tvì

Colonial Status: Tier 5 Pre-Established

Colony Type: SC-C IZ - Class IV

Provisional Designation: Ëchüha Tvì Éshà

Population: 14.234.671

ISK Valuation: 55 Tn ISK

Prime Resources: H | He Ne Ar Xe

Li Na K Cs

Be Mg Ca Ba

Sc Y La Ac

Ti Zr Hf

V Ta

Cr Mo W Sg

Mn Tc

Fe Os

Co Ir

Pd Pt

Cu Ag Au

Zn Hg

B Al Ga Tl

Si Sn

P Sb Bi

S Te

I At

Ce Pr Nd Gd Yb

Th U Pu

Ecology: !!Hothouse Paradise Xenobiosphere!!

Mythic Presence: [redacted]

Mythic Treaty Status: [redacted]

[continue report]