Part 24: Turns 238-260

Turn 238

He Who Shapes takes his time out of his busy genocidal schedule to greet a survey fleet sent by Mother to Gotham. The Publisher incursions have grown more frequent of late, and they must be taught a lesson while he focuses his energy on finally eradicating the remaining Customers.



Meanwhile, the cunning Zuul in our Small Doom Craft division devise a cunning way to make our assault shuttles and slave discs go faster by throwing the fatter females out of the airlock.



Turn 244

A more advanced version of PainTech is made available, which suspends a holographic image of what will happen to our captains if they fail to obey in front of their face, and inside their head.



Turn 247

A former captain of a front-line ship, demoted to piloting freighters after making a pass at one of Greatfather's females, suggests putting guns on freighters 'to make them more deathy'. After being laughed at, he is forced to redesign his own ship to be even more cumbersome than before, by stuffing more cargo onto it.



Q-ships are useless to the Zuul because they're immune to piracy. They're also useless in general, as you're much better off just building more police cutters to eliminate piracy entirely. This tech gives a 10% boost to all our trade income, which given that it provides a full third of all our income, is quite substantial.

Turn 248

His ideas about making supply ships bigger, however, are seen to have merit.



We continue to raid the Humans, even as we work to destroy them. They barely bother putting up resistance any more.



Turn 252

The prototype of the new purveyor of supplies and (whisper) repair is complete. The Ashsaber joins the Goonfleet at Dorsai, and sets a course for a nearby Publisher system in order to test out its firepower.



I'm not properly attacking the Publishers yet, but I want to forestall their constant attacks on my worlds, which are annoying and taking up time I could use to think up puns about slavery and horror. Also it's a chance to show off these DNs in case Mecron suddenly pulls the plug. Ratsolov, you're still down for a BR - and you'll be on display sooner than you might think.

Turn 253

One of our raids brings back an interesting trinket.



It is likely that this is the last secret we will wrest from human minds. Their economy is too shattered and their entire civilisation gripped with too much fear for them to do anything useful that we can steal.

Turn 254

At Maltus, the Goonfleet screams into the system, ready to dispense its might upon the pathetic mewling creatures that once were our first quarry.



Unfortunately, they only find a collection of defence platforms, a small outpost and a single strange ship, which dies very quickly to our Raptors.



Our Inquisitors suggest that it is designed to deter interlopers attempting to steal freight. How weak these slave races are, that anyone would dare to raid their trade lanes! And how pathetic a vessel designed to deter such raids; any Zuul ship would crush it in an instant.

The outpost dies, and any threat from Mother (or the Internet, which clearly got to this colony ahead of us) is temporarily put off. The Ashsaber acquires an extraordinarily obtuse nickname.



The Hazamuth is much more pleasing.



But the Arglebargle III's nickname is positively insulting.



We continue to make great strides in the fields of making large objects. Greatfather finds this pleasing. He appears to enjoy constructing titanic monuments to his own glory.



Turn 255

Christmas for Kissinger, it appears, involved precision shooting from great distances. We are unable to assess the historical accuracy of this statement.



These might've been useful a hundred turns ago. They're replacements for Gauss cannons that have high accuracy from a distance.