The Fractal Zion Incident, OR How One Man Singlehandedly Saved the Brindus System
by Eno Reyalp
When Ked Ambrit was sent with a militia force of mercenaries to clear the shipping lanes of viral alien life forms in the Fractal Zion and (by extension) Brindus systems, the initial insertion team was too small. Indeed the entire force was wiped out, except for one man. Ked Ambrit himself. He was the only one to survive, out of a hastily-organized Space Marine Mercenary Militia force chiefly made up of locally available veterans, transfers from the segment garrisons, and impressed "recruits" or conscripted "volunteers" from among the settlement population. In other words, has-beens, never-weres, and do-what-nows. The force thus assembled amounted to a mere regiment, numbering only a few thousand men, of which only a handful had seen any actual combat against any alien lifeforms; and most of these had only seen action in humanity's original solar system, eradicating such menaces as the face-hugging lamprey-tongued spider-bats of the Titanian caves, and the mind-numbing ghost vampire manatees of the Tritonian Untersee.
Because of this, many of the members of the Fractal Zion Expeditionary Forces were equipped with the most rudimentary weapons: shotguns and blasters issued for police actions against human populations in the Settlement Zone, the venerable painsaw from the Interglobal Fighting Conference's SpaceArena series of tightcasts, rifles and lasguns of the Regular Corporate Settlement Reserves, flamethrowers from the Spider-Bat Eradication Wars. Very few of them had ever even seen, let alone used, powerful squad assault weapons like the chaingun or the pulse rifle, modified tools like the mass driver, or strange, controversial and quasi-magickal devices like the Lucifer Cannon, said to steal the souls of its victims to power its inexplicable metaphysical functionings, rumored to possibly harness apergic or levitric forces.
They were entirely wiped out, except for Ked. Humanity had never before encountered an alien race so fearsome, so vicious, so unrelentingly vindictive. Indeed, the beasts seemed to survive for no other purpose, except for the complete annihilation of the settlement population, and ultimately, the entirety of the human infestation of the starways, with its associated rape, pillage and plunder of the beauties created by the Infinite One.
When Haos Redro Corp. got back the barely-surviving remains of Ked Ambrit, whose physical form had almost been destroyed and whose mind contained memories no man should ever have to remember, they found the perfect subject for their newly-legal Human Settlement Protection Forces, (to be made up entirely of clones, since the settlers and shareholders had lost their stomach for further sacrifice after the Fractal Zion Massacre, in which the entire settlement population as well as their escort, the FZEF, was completely obliterated - except, of course, for Ked Ambrit).
Unfortunately, since the clones have yet to achieve full autonomous action, volunteers from among ranks of the telepathically-enabled empaths of the New Zion Project have been conscripted, and can remotely control the actions of the clones. While at first rather clumsy, such telepaths can eventually become quite skilled at controlling the clone warriors. Exactly how the telepathic communication is able to be achieved over such great distances almost instantaneously is still the subject of heated debate. (citation needed) Any clone killed in action is replaced by another spawned from a device known as a telenode, sort of a 3D printer which uses locally available matter to produce complex artifacts at remote locations according to a detailed set of pre-programmed instructions. Each clone is assigned to a particular controlling empath.
The current whereabouts of the original Ked Ambrit remains a matter of great speculation, especially among the more conspiracy-minded individuals familiar with the details of the case.
-from Brindipedia
