From the desk of the General. Mission 2.
#2 of From the desk of the General
The Kaos Army don't just wade onto battlefields with guns blazing, though that is a lot of fun. Sometimes, the situations they are called in to resolve require some thinking that's not just out of the box, but out of this world.
From the desk of:
General Sir Anarchy Warlock (Knight of the Extendable Table)
Senior Commander of the Kaos Army: Black Planet
Leader of 1st Tank Battalion
Eater of bacon sandwiches
Military tactical genius
Occasional Bad Guy
BP date 08/07/3012
Mission notes
Re: Operation FURNACE
Planet: BBAL8V
TDW Gate: 427-910-G
Portals are the Kaos Army's key to success. There's nothing that can't be achieved with the use of a portal or five. Also known as warpways, derived from the mysterious company name of 'Trans Dimensional Warpways' - they are a mode of transport seemingly devised by dragons to aid them in their wanderings of time and space and multiple universe's. At some point Gates were built, fixed access points, and Pocket Portal devices were crafted, that fit into a pocket for handy zipping about at leisure. The means to wander interplanetary systems and galaxies at will was born. This was both a good and a bad thing; everybody likes to go somewhere nice for their vacation and snapping up real estate on 5th Earth at bargain prices is a no-brainer, but just occasionally these handheld devices fall into the wrong hands. (Like ours.)
Whichever dragon it was who came up with the bright idea of making a company that would use interstellar travel as a profitable scheme, creating reliable fast public transport a bit like the London Underground but for Mars and Oberon 6, probably never dreamed of its creation being used in some of the ways we have utilised it here at the Kaos Army.
This particular contract that landed on my desk was an interesting one: we had a planet full of innocent life forms that had somehow managed to turn their world into a rubbish dump and they were desperate for an alternative home. Now refugees are commonplace, and we've had many instances where a country's citizens, for reasons of war, or natural disaster, or famine, needed to be placed into camps somewhere else. We've carted off whole towns to safety.
Re-homing the entire population of another world, however, was going to be a mammoth task. Just finding another space rock entirely suitable for their precise biological needs was bound to be hard. I've travelled around to quite a few different planets and let me tell you, when gravity isn't what you're used to, using the loo gets really uncomfortable really quickly. When the atmosphere pressure is off, and you can't get your coffee brewed just the way you like it, you get grumpy. (No, that's just you.) And having an 18 hour day? No lie-ins for you. (You're getting lie-ins? I'm raising a complaint!) But they're refugees, right? And a world is a world. Close enough is close enough.
I spent a long time, too long really, poring over my Warpway data to find a location that was going to tick enough boxes.
Then, in a moment of fortuitous (I'm glad this has spellchecker built in) coincidence, our sewage system backed up.
Here at the Kaos Army headquarters, Lowlands, Black Planet, we don't have the infrastructure of my old Homeworld. There is no underground piping. We use portals for everything. Heating? We've got an open link to scorching heat radiating from the supernova of a dying star. Water? We've got the freshest H2O from glaciers that have just been formed. And the loos? Well, let's just say our waste gets jettisoned into a galaxy far, far away.
But some silly sod had turned off that one, and with a thousand soldiers living and working on base you can imagine how quickly that became an issue!
It struck me. Instead of dealing with the impossible mission of moving and displacing millions, possibly even billions of people onto some other planet that they agreed would be apt for their society to thrive on, why not just dump all that rubbish into a star that we had a close enough TDW location for?
It's still a work in progress, but everyone is happy. They've got a bit of clean world freed up, their refuse is burned without killing any space pandas or whatever they've got, and we've got our payment.
Summary transcribed by LT. Rap (I better get this logged for overtime or I'm telling Rave about these lie-ins of Anar's!)