no one gets left behind

Friendly Stab

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“I noticed the knife the first day we were assigned to work with the Spireguard. It was easy to notice: everyone knows what a hanrian looks like, and there aren’t many who carry around multiple fighting knives. But even among those who did, this one was always set off to the side, away from the others. It’s a very distinctive knife; two opposed blades on the same hilt. One’s got a deep hooked notch near the tip, and serrations along the back of the blade. The other’s a fat spike with a triangular cross-section, and grooves wrapped around it; not along the length of the blade, as fullers would be, but circles wrapping around it.

“But not one ever used in the fight, that I could see, and when we were figuring each other out, asking questions about each others’ kit, and sharing war stories, that one knife never came up.

“So a couple of weeks into the fighting, I asked the question. And that night, I learned that it was called a ‘dignity knife’, and not something considered a matter for polite conversation.

“Eventually, I learned what requisition forms called it, which was ‘BS-11 Biological Security Knife, Block II’. One end is a pithing knife, which – while familiar to us now – was quite the shock to learn about in those days; the other, though? The fat blade was stuffed with incendiary explosive and lenses, those grooves, to focus the force of the blast. Per the manufacturer, that was ‘biotech security’, making sure no corpses were left behind for enemy intelligence to plunder for biotechnological secrets.

“Unofficially? The Legions had a unique interpretation of “no-one gets left behind”. For me, unnerving will always be defined by fighting alongside allies who carried special knives to kill their own wounded, then incinerate the bodies wherever they fell.”

– MSgt. Anvis Ankarian, 14th Drop Shock Echelon,
Memories of the Mnekkej Campaign

Trope-a-Day: Gunboat Diplomacy

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Gunboat Diplomacy: The traditional Imperial diplomatic transport is a cruiser-class naval vessel.  Need I say more?  (And the Empire in particular is quite notorious for this; the Don Pacifico Affair would not be in the least out of character for them, because No One Gets Left Behind.)

Also, refer back to Flaunting Your Fleets.

Trope-a-Day: No One Gets Left Behind

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No One Gets Left Behind: The Empire makes – and made even in the days before the Transcend, which is to say, before it would be like leaving part of yourself behind – a really, really big deal out of this, and is often quite comfortable about taking a fairly generous definition of who qualifies as one of no-one.

And not just in the military, either.  The Imperials make a point of ensuring that no Imperial citizen-shareholder will ever be left behind, anywhere, or at the very least, will always be returned for (see, for one example, Mugging the Monster).  And anything that gets in the way had best be prepared to get out of it, or be crushed underfoot.

Of course, getting their vector stack out of there (or even just their mind-state, by transmission) is generally good enough.

The flip side, of course, of No One Gets Left Behind is that the Empire very much prefers to clean up its own mess when any of its citizens commit what they think of as actual crimes and such abroad.  (Leading, often enough, to the rare sight of a government trying to extradite one of its citizens so that it can punish them more severely than the local governance would have – after all, they have to protect the premium brand which is Imperial citizen-shareholdership, which they will not be doing by letting the unscrupulous use it as a means to get away with abusing the locals in the outworlds.)

Brand Maintenance

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TANEV (QUAVE REPUBLIC) – The government today refused the extradition of Ferlyn Kazesh, the Crescent Bioproducts executive responsible for the Taniris chemical disaster, to the Empire.

[The disaster at Taniris earlier this year was the result of a faulty control computer in the Crescent Bioproducts factory outside Taniris City misrouting chemical flows in a manner leading to an explosion, which subsequently led to the venting into the local atmosphere of 300 tons of toxic intermediate products, including nanomotile catalysts.  Despite a rapid response from both local emergency services and specialist hazmat teams provided by Biolith Chemical Products, ICC, the owner of Crescent Bioproducts, this venting led to over 4,000 direct fatalities, and over 100,000 injuries with potential long-term consequences.]

In giving his judgment against extradition, Enforcer Parlaq of the Republic Court denied both the validity of the application, since the offences committed by Kazesh were committed entirely within the Quave Republic and therefore were subject to its sole jurisdiction, and cited the Quave Republic’s long-standing opposition to the death penalty.  Kazesh’s sentence of 85 years imprisonment under the Quave law of willful negligence therefore stands.

The Imperial ambassador to Quave, Sir Valeth Anandonos-ith-Anaxios, commenting, said “We regret the decision of the Republic government today to refuse the extradition of Citizen Kazesh.  While we respect the sovereign right of the Republic to exercise its jurisdiction in this matter, we believe that in this specific case we may have been able to better able to address the wider interests at stake while still ensuring that justice is done for the dead and injured citizens of the Republic.”

Anonymous sources close to the ambassador offered the following clarifying statement: “The records are clear, both those of your government’s investigation and those of Biolith when they got through investigating what the raicvef their subsidiary had been up to.  Kazesh killed those thousands of people just as surely as if he’d murdered them himself, by ignoring maintenance procedures, bypassing safety measures, and falsifying the plant records to let him embezzle the difference.  While we respect your legal system, that’s not willful negligence under Imperial law.  That’s something much worse.”

“Set aside the justice of it for a moment, although 85 years is a penny-ante punishment for anyone with either immortality.  We have to protect our brand.  The Empire’s thought of as a premium citizenship because we always clean up our own mess.  And we’ve got five trillion citizen-shareholders with investments all over – many of whom are themselves all over – the Associated Worlds.  None of them deserve to be – and none of them ought to be – associated with that shit-fucker.”

“So if you guys don’t want to do it, let me assure you that my government will take it as a personal favor if you can find a political way to send him back to us and let us shoot the bastard for you.”