Ciaphas Cain and the Tourist Trap (Part 2)

The trick to dealing with people who have an inordinate amount of power and nobody allowed to tell them 'no' is via distraction.

Somebody in the good Governer's train had learned that lesson well, and was apparently trying it out on me on the Governor's behalf.

It wasn't a particularly subtle effort, though, since Giorba, like the petulant child he was, had stuck his oar in in ways that I would have felt a vicarious sense of embarrassment on behalf of whatever grey eminences were responsible for the few competent bits of this shindig. The entertainment was first rate, the food spectacular, and the amasec, of course, was Father Peter's best.

I will grant that nobility is a completely different class of human, but still human for all that. I'd gotten what I thought was a fairly good handle on humanity in the underhive, and an even better one at the schola progenium: but I had every reason to be grateful for the advanced course in Slawkenberg's particular iteration of humanity that Father Peter hand been inadvertently running me through.

When I had first arrived on Slawkenberg, nobody quite knew what to do with me, Slawkenberg's previous Commissars having, as near as I could tell, stayed out of sight and quietly drunk themselves to death without even having had the grace to engage a servant who would find the body before it had started to smell.

Since they had been an array of tottering old men to start, and not the young, vigorous, and fresh out of the Schola Progenia newly-minted commissar the I was, I had been politely greeted by the PDF general staff and treated with the cautious courtesy of someone with leprosy- probably not much of a threat, but best not to get too close.

That had changed after a few dowagers had gotten a look at me, and I was promptly invited to a spectacular array of fetes, balls, cotillions, and garden parties all decorated by equally young men and women who generally were happy to teach a young, dashing officer the latest Slawkenberg dance steps, giggle charmingly at my naivete about Slawkenberg customs and tradition, and subject me to the most astonishing array of vapid conversation imaginable. I had never imagined that so many subjects could be so robbed of all interest, usefulness, and relation to reality and packaged neatly into the narrow conversational game called 'small talk,' but it would have been an eye-opening experience if I hadn't been bored to sleep.

Father Peter's appearance in my life had allowed me to bring along a companion of far more interest, and by the time the Governer got around to officially noticing my existence, I had the better part of fifty of these affairs under my sash.

It was a good thing, too, or the very opulence of the arena I had found myself thrust into might have dazzled me enough to seriously inhibit my chances of survival.

But being, as I eventually realized, military decor invited by various matchmaking matrons to liven up a party with a sense of dashing danger had given me at least a vague outline of a plan, since I had quickly learned the more exotically Imperial and militant I looked, the more impressed they seemed to be with me.

I had made some inroads on the daughters- and even some of the mothers- of nobility by pretending a martial enthusiasm and devotion to duty that I didn't actually have, while occasionally unbending long enough for them to give themselves credit for loosening up the stiff and duty-defined commissar. And any one of them, from the freshest young flower to the most hardened ballroom battleax of a woman had been a better host than Giorba.

Giorba, it seemed was determined to impress me.

So far, I had been treated to a command performance by Slawkenberg's leading dance company with Giorba's inane commentary, a bewildering array of delicacies cooked to perfection yet topped with Giorba's opinion of all of their flaws, and now the Governer was determined to cap it all off with amasec. I was determined to stop him before his inanity could spoil my enjoyment of the brew.

"And here." He said magnanimously. "I am proud to present to you Slawkenberg's finest Amasec."

I was surprised to see his beefy hands, so beringed with gold and platinum that they resembled a Soriritas power gauntlet, manage to execute such a delicate maneuver as pouring a shot of amber tipple. But then, I assume he got a lot of practice.

"Brewed in our most exclusive breweries, the recipe handed down generation upon generation from the finiest line of artificers in the capital, aged to perfection, and here today," he raised the glass to me, as if it were a miraculous libation, "it comes to release its sensuous bouquet of delight for the pleasure of Our Imperial Master's most welcome gift to our world!"

I smiled broadly, and took the delicately engraved glass, which caught the gleam of the thousand colored luminators bejeweling the vast ballroom with splinters of multi-hued light. It was like a flame captured in a frozen rainbow.

I could have told Giorba that he needed some training from his most competent tour guides instead of cribbing his speeches from the Slawkenberg spaceport literature, but I had lives to save, first and foremost my own.

I took a delicate sip.

It insinuated itself across my tongue, warm and welcoming and inviting, like the smell of fresh baked bread outside on the street five minutes before the bakery opens. I swallowed, and openly made a small moue of distaste, quickly surprised.

"Not a patch on the Throne Reserve from Terra," I said critiqued, "Though there's worse you could have if you have to slum it."

I graciously ignored the governor's attempt to turn both white with shock and puce with anger simultaneously, and watched as fear, an emotion he was probably singularly unaccustomed to, nibble its way around both expressions before swallowing them whole. He was after all, attempting to suck up to me, something which I had apparently deflected without effort, and I was the most potentially dangerous threat to his position he had ever met- and something small and wormlike within him knew it.

Fortunately, I spared him the effort of trying to find a way to flatter me, and quite possibly spared myself the effort of fending off assassins as his fears drove him to try and get rid of the one thing one the planet with the authority to mildly inconvenience him.

I smiled ruefully. "Fortunately," I continued, imitating the bluff, no-nonsense repartee of my fencing tutor, who could wield a phrase to as deadly an effect as his blade, "I'm not hear for the quality of the amasec." I made a gesture at the contingent I had subtly steered the Governor toward all night, who had been huddled together in their own corner like a heard of hostile grox. I pitched my voice to carry to them.

"I'm here for the quality of your fighting men." I raised the rest of the amasec in blatant toast in their direction, and tossed back the rest.

Giorba raised the rest of the decanter hastily, but I shook my head. "I'm not here to get drunk on duty either, and I'm pleased to see none of the other troops here are either." I let my smile widen to a pleased grin. "In fact, I've never seen a better corps of officers!"

Diverted from his attempted boozy bribe, the governor yanked his eyes off me and toward the flower of Slawkenberg's miliary. Flower was right, I thought, since if I tied the whole lot together, I could probably get away with handing them off to one of the dowagers as a bouquet. They even reeked of expensive esters, but they had been in their own little world and all of a sudden, I had yanked them to the front and center of mine.

The governor sputtered out. "Oh. Yes. Yes! There's no finer body of men anywhere!"

He waved his hand at a thickset general who bore all the hallmarks of being a Giorba. A brother, or a cousin, or maybe even an uncle- it was hard to tell age given the propensity to the nobility toward juvinant treatments. And he also waved a hand at the two musclebound meatheads that had confronted Father Peter and had the temerity to deck themselves out as Colonels of Marines.

"Marius here," Giorba gobbled, scrambling back for control of the conversational thread, "Can take on anyone in a fight!"

"No doubt he can," I replied, secretly pleased to have such a neat lead-in to my next distraction. "But that's what I would expect of the best of the best. I'm far more impressed by the valor and dedication of the common Slawkenberg trooper. As it is they who will protect the Emperor's realms and win the Emperor's wars."

I gestured at captain whose uniform I noticed seemed to have just as much red as my sash, although it contained significantly less decoration that of his fellows. I hadn't seen him before in my inital scramble to find a body of troops to hide behind, and I wondered if he was another potential Sanders. He suddenly looked sharply at me, and I wondered if I had overdone it a bit. But he wasn't exactly the target of this particular soliloquy, so I carried on.

Petulance warred with dismay for control of Giorba's face at being reminded that that the Emperor was technically above him. Although it made no practical difference on Slawkenberg given that the Emperor was far away on Terra and the bulk of the Giorbas were most certainly here.

Everybody else on the planet was within grasp of whatever toddler tantrums the Giorbas might care to throw. I certainly had no intention of forgetting that little fact.

"It is unfortunate," I said, wrongfooting Giorba again by graciously accepting the bottle of Amasec he hadn't actually intended to hand me, "that the distilleries of Slawkenberg have ample scope to display their talents-"

I picked a canape off a servitor's tray, and raised it in my other hand-

"And that the chefs of Slawkenberg can demonstrate their mastery of the culinary arts-"

I set both down on a particularly delicate piece of statuary that wasn't actually meant to be a table, but I considered its sacrifice to the point I was making well worth it, and flourished my now-empty hands at the group before me.

"-Yet the valiant and valorous fighting men of Slawkenberg have no such arena in which to display their considerable prowess."

Giorba froze, and gobbled for a moment. "But...but...there's no war here."

"An excellent point." I said, sighing as if that were a disadvantage instead of the specific reason I engineered my presence on this backwater.

"But the Tactica Imperialis is very clear on the point that practice makes perfect, and the more one practices for the disant day when a peaceful world might be called to the Emperor's colors, the better one succeeds at winning His victories."

I went in for the conversational kill.

"Many worlds across the Imperium are famed for their Combat Games. The Contests of Ultima Seven draw over a billion spectators from neighboring systems. The Blood Bowl of Arcana Eight, scarcely less."

Giorba froze, the only idea that could reliably percolate through what passed for his brain beginning to make a dent. I could see the gleam of hope and avarice throwing out tiny sparks into the greedy tinder of his soul, and I decided to fan the flames.

"I can think of nothing better than for the Jewel of the Damocles Gulf," I spoke the insipid tourist slogan as if it had weight, body, and real meaning, "to host the Segmentum's most elite, most arduous, most vigorous combat games."

I now had all the rapt attention of the entire military contingent, half the bureaucrats, and every noble, functionary, and hanger-on with the least interest in the tourist trade.

"A chance for every regiment to demonstrate their prowess. To whet their edge. To sharpen their bayonets against that far-off day when some foul Xenos, mutant, or heretic dares to pollute the sanctity of the Emperor's realm on Slawkenberg."

And then I saw Giorba looking confused and more than a little put out. So I simplified my rhetoric to accommodate his inability to take a hint if one tied it to the neck of a bottle of his favorite amesec and helpfully labeled it 'hint' in gold marker.

"Wargames."

I said.

"A fine Imperial tradition from the realm of Ultramar that Slawkenberg could stand to import."

I deigned to take another sip of Father Peter's Amasac.

Giorba was looking more confused, and I wondered how the man remembered to breath if he was this slow on the uptake. I decided to drive it in with a hammer.

"It's quite the most popular thing there with the Ultramar tourist trade."

At that his eyes lit up with the fires of understanding, fanaticism, and greed.

Giorba didn't understand much. But he understood that the very lifeblood of his rule, the source of his power and the crowning keystone of what little influence Slawkenberg wielded in the Segmentum depended entirely on tourism.

At least, his father and grandfather had understood that. And somebody had apparently pounded that lesson into him before he drowned any ability to think in decades of debauchery.

"What are these war games?" He said.

"Oh, they're quite the thing." I said, with all the air of a connoisseur. "And the best one by far is the one they call Combat Patrol."

If tourism had been the magical word to switch on what few brain cells Giorba had possessed, "Combat Patrol' was the even more magical phrase to summon what few aspiring-to-be-competent members of the Militarium existed at that party. It ought to, since it was practically chapter one of the Tactica Imperialis, after one had slogged through the Guardsman's Uplifting Primer.

And then I was compelled to explain in excruciating detail and at an inordinate length the fundamentals of running a basic combat patrol, cribbed directly from the Tactica Imperialis and translated into a tourist pitch. It said quite a bit for the absolutely miserable state of the Slawkenberg PDF that no more than five of them caught on to the fact that I was explaining things any six-year-old in the Schola Progenium- or even anybody who had bothered to watch any miliary documentary whatsoever- would grasp.

The red-coated Captain I hand singled out earlier, a man by the name of Mahlone, seemed to catch on quickest, and I mentally blessed the work I had been doing with Colonel Sanders to learn what phrasing and vocabulary would most suit the Slawkenberg militia audience.

"Why not regiment verses regiment?" asked a particularly snooty major, one I had called upon and discarded before settling on making Sanders' troopers my personal project.

"A fine idea," I allowed. "But more difficult to stage a battle in in such a way that an entire audience can see." I nodded at a few professional scrumball players who were attempting to elbow their way in and not particularly succeeding. "A Combat Patrol is approximately the size of a scrumball team, and can fight on a similarly-sized field."

"But won't that interfere with the Scrumball cup?" Whined an Administatum drone, and before I could say some tart words about the relative importance, another Administratum drone- a fellow who had had introduced himself as Jafar- cut in smoothly. "Not in the least." he said. "If I am to understand correctly, the best 'matches' would be played with considerable differences in environment and terrain. The fairgrounds for the artisan Field Days already have stadia and mobile bleachers, and even a few obstacles for the steeplechase and horseraces, and can be readily adapted."

"What about the Auxilia?" asked a sharp-faced woman in an even sharper uniform- I wondered if the creases in her uniform trousers were actually razors instead of just looking razor sharp. Judging by the five-foot bubble her fellow military officers were giving her, I would judge the former and more power to her if so.

'The more, the merrier." I said "Any unit expected to arm itself in the event of a planetary invasion is invited to put together a team."

"I...think then, we will." Buzzed an unexpected voice, and I suppressed a start as a tech-priest slid forward in such silence that I almost immediately realized it had to have replaced its lower body with hovercraft pulsers. I resolved to keep an eye on this one, since something seemed vaguely wrong about a techpriest that didn't clank and give fair warning when it ambulated. "This seems like an interesteing practical problem in statistics and probability."

I scarecly had to stay a thing after that. Dropping the idea for a whole new tourist industry into Slawkenberg resembled dropping a grox into in the middle of a pack of starving wolves.

For his part, Giorba himself was rapt at the idea of a new way of pulling in wave after wave of rich, well-paying, influential tourists and I wondered why the ideas of combat and bloodsports hadn't particularly occurred to any Slawkenberg governor before.

Well, maybe it's because they aren't slobbering fools who will let someone train an army up that might, one day, be aimed against them. I thought sarcastically. Not that I wanted an army in particular, except to stand between my comfortable little sinecure and all the horrors of the galaxy.

But all of the past governors were considerably smarter than Giorba was, and would probably have caught on to the fact that I was describing systematically creating the tradition and support structure for maintaining a competent miliary presence on this world, one that would just happen to directly strengthen my own power at the expense of the civilian government.

The trouble with manipulating the easily-led is that it makes you feel a bit too smart by comparison, and you start to get complacent, so I wasn't exactly paying attention when a green-eyed woman sidled up to me and attached herself to my arm, introducing herself as Emeli. "I don't suppose St. Trynia's can field a contingent?" She purred, and I looked at her quizzically.

"St. Trynias? I wasn't aware the Sororitas had a contingent on Slawkenberg," I hazarded, a shiver of fear running through me at the idea. I had had enough of the sororitas novitiates at the schola, and had no time for a rabid pack of emperor-botherers here. She laughed, a full, genuine laugh as if I had said something inadvertantly hilarious, and her next words enlightened me as to why. "Oh no, not in the least!" She said. "I am headmistress of the St. Trynia's Academy for the Daughters of Gentlefolk." She smiled sweetly at me. "But this sort of training is a bit outside the remit of my young ladies."

"A fine institution," One of the generals said. "Three of my daughters are graduates. But no, this is no competition the feminine flower of Slawkenberg's upper Tonne."

"Indeed not." I said, in my best valorous commissar voice, and redirected the conversation back to the details of the plan, although the addition of Emeli on my arm certainly made the evening pass far more pleasantly, and I was duly impressed by a couple of thoughtful points she made that greased the conversational wheels and would prevent a few logistical issues that could send the whole thing grinding to a halt.

I hadn't had much experience with the wider galaxy yet, and so a fine conceit of myself I had to be sure, as I watched a new vision for Slawkenberg's future unfurling in front of me like a rare orchid given precisely the right nutrients.

I distinctly recall thinking to myself, a trifle smugly, that it would be handy to have a trained military I could call upon at need...and that it would probably never come to that. It was so easy to pull Giorba's strings that I was confident I could lead him around by the nose indefinitely. After all, the universe was full of examples of the tourist trap, and all I would ever need to do if he needed distracting again was to pull out another one and feed it to him as if it were my idea. Or even better, as if it were his.

Amasec in one hand, a beautiful woman on the other, the entirety of a world dancing attendance on my idea, and I hardly had to lift a finger to execute it, with half a hundred of the most competent people in Slawkenberg fired with enthusiasm and scrambling to bring the idea into fruition...

As I watched the seed of the First Annual Combat Patrol Tournament germinate before my eyes, with a date a year from now to burst into full and vigorous bloom, I took another sip of Father Pater's glorious Amasec, and this time, let myself savor the taste of victory.

I've never been averse to being the center of attention when it doesn't involve edged weapons and incoming fire, and I distinctly remember thinking to myself, "It doesn't get better than this."

And, of course, I hadn't the least idea how horrifically accurate in every particular the thought was. Because it *didn't* get better, not in all the months, years, decades or centuries to come.


I'm going to need a variety of Slawkenberg Combat Patrols to pull off this story, so any of you who have a human imperial or humanoid chaos combat patrol you want to show off, send pics! I could use the inspiration.

Unfortunately xenos Combat Patrols aren't invited to this particular party.

Slawkenberg's Planetary Defense Force is terrible, so any level of painting skill is useful and entirely welcome.