Inspired by the Magnificent 7 (a great flick) not the Battle Beyond the Stars with John Boy Walton which was a poor rip off.<br /><br />Calvera and the other mercenaries swooped down on the farming settlement riding their hovercycles and explorers. Some fired weapons into the air others whooped and hollered. At the center of the settlement they circled repeatedly stirring up dust before halting before the pyramid like temple.
Some of the mercs brought out a few sacks of grain and two cactus whimpers and tossed them on the ground before Calvera. <br /><br />The leader rolled his smoke leaf cigar in his teeth while staring the edestakia priest down.
“I said I’d be back for the food, so where is it?” <br /><br />“Still in the fields,” his polyvox translated the priest’s reply for him.
<br /><br />Nodding, Calvera responded, “Sure….just make sure its ready for us when we return or else we wont be as pleasant as we were this time.”
<br /><br />At a nod from Calvera, the heavy machine gunner atop the explorer fired a burst into the cage quickdeath in the temple killing the native’s “god.” The whole entourage of mercenaries swirled out of the village in a cloud of dust, whooping and laughter.
<br /><br />The edestakai chattered at the old eorna who lived up on the hill just outside their village. He sighed as he considered the complaints of the farmers.
<br /><br />He was one of the few remaining eorna to have survived the sathar’s second visit to Volturnus. He represented the last vestige of his race that was about to die out. With so many eorna dead on the battlefield outside Volkos, his race’s gene pool had dropped below viability. Yet the eorna had initially taken comfort in the arrival of the fleet from the United Planetary Federation. They had agreed to make Volturnus a UPF territory and appoint a governor to watch over the primitive native species.
<br /><br />The eorna had never counted on the influence of the mega corporations within the UPF and their ability to push the Council of Worlds to amend the Volturnus Protectorate Treaty to allow them to establish enclaves and exploit, no rape, the natural resources of the planet. Next reservations had been set up for the different natives and forced migrations had been instituted by corporate mercenaries to moved natives off of ground the mega corps wanted. <br /><br />Now a generation latter Volturnus had become a haven for mercenaries after a brief but vicious corporate war. Calvera’s band was a disenfranchised group abandoned by their corporate sponsor. Now they had gone bandit and were preying on whoever they could. The Star Law agents assigned to Volturnus could never be in enough places to truly keep the peace. They would occasionally station a pair of agents in the village but Calvera would just strike some place else and they’d have to go there.<br /><br /> Other then the temple guard who were armed with pikes, the edestakai were just unarmed farmers and unable to fight against professional mercenaries. They had come to him hoping he’d have an answer to the dilemma of giving their food to Calvera and starving or not giving it and being killed. Eorna philosophy abhorred unnecessary violence but the edestakai we’re going to die. Yet if they resisted maybe there was a chance they could survive.
<br /><br />He motioned for silence and said, “You must fight.”
<br /><br />The edestakai chittered, “But we have no weapons to fight them!”
<br /><br />“Then you will buy some.”
<br /><br />“We have no money!”
<br /><br />The old eorna drew out his last and most precious energy crystal and said, “Take this and collect everything of value and send it with three that are trusted. They will go to the Mercenary Star Base and buy guns.”
<br /><br />“It will never be enough!”
<br /><br />“Then hire mercenaries, many are out of work.”
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