&chapter=Chapter 1 Commander Luke Hunter was a very personable humanoid. Fort Chipper trained, square jawed, blue eyed and always so positive. Standing at just the lanky side of seven feet tall, his shoulders reaching comedy breadth, his spray-on uniform ludicrously tight and revealing. Very much in vogue in every way, Commander Hunter had clearly made so much effort to achieve "the look" it somehow diminished the whole effect. What ever else he was, cool was not on his attribute list. Although he was very striking, not everyone who met Commander Hunter was impressed by his appearance. U.P. Flight Lieutenant Kevin "Slipshod" O'Rourke found the Commander a difficult man to love. Everything about him was designed to annoy. After fourteen years in the job, O'Rourke had rubbed shoulders with the best and worst, but none as dunder-headed as this overgrown pillock O'Rourke found the new spray on uniforms particularly annoying and he had flatly refused to adopt the technology. He, along with quite a large section of the UP continued to wear pull on clothing, and more challenging to the status quo, he had his hair shaved not permed. Hair perming was almost regulation, the styling left up to the individual officer, but the attention to detail in a hair style gave some indication as to the level of commitment a soldier had to the detail of conflict resolution. Judging by the complex and oversized coif the Commander had constructed on his huge head, O'Rourke could only assume the man was possessed with pure con-res zeal. O'Rourke struggled with the finger tip controls of the heavily laden U.P. freighter as it made it's stormy way planet-ward, the Commander stood behind him, holding onto his chair, grinning with studied enthusiasm but clearly little grasp of the situation before them. Luke Hunter had been craning his enormous neck to look past the scruffy pilot and see the ground. O'Rourke found nothing more annoying when trying to steer a 300 thousand ton freighter to a planet surface than some great square jawed U.P. chump leaning across the back of his seat trying to "lend a hand." He checked the gravity reading. Normal, he'd soon adjust that. Using very rapid hand movements over his smooth control pad he reduced cabin gravity and allowed the formidable pull of the planet beneath them to take over. The resultant feeling was stronger than he thought. A sudden lurch to the left sent the overgrown commander spiralling off his feet and crashing through the door of the cabin latrine. Not a pleasant experience after a three hundred hour trip with a broken vent system. "Sorry about that Commander." he grunted levelling up the craft and steering an ever steeper descent. "Holy H. Moses! Slipshod, that is most noxious." gasped the Commander in his soft pseudo-American drawl. For a man who had never been to earth let alone America, it was a tribute to the influence of the language among the group of four hundred. "Better sit back down and strap up sir." said O'Rourke with a happy grin. His accent gave him away immediately, he was of Australian descent, earth bred and only six three. The Commander did as he was bid. All 300 thousand tons of the U.P. freighter was due to land on the planet Nafos 6 clicks sooner, but the upper thermal storms of this particular sphere were notorious for throwing every guidance system in the wastebasket. It was fly by eye and no one liked doing that. On the planet surface just over the ridge to the north of the landing area, a pulse armoured surface combat vehicle had just killed six young Mullambimbi soldiers. On Nafos this is so nothing new. These two groups have been hacking each other to death for centuries, millennia possibly as due to the brutal level of destruction and ethnic cleansing there is very little in the way of long term re-call on the planet. Most buildings are destroyed at some stage during their early life as one side temporarily gets the upper hand. The only thing that's new on the planet is the UP. The U.P. United Planets, formed after the third interplanetary war. That isn't the beginning because there is no beginning but it's as near as dammit to a beginning as regards Luke Hunter and his spray-on uniform. After the third war. The third war happened a long time before Luke Hunter was born, although his dad was a young Earth rookie toward the end of the last big flare up. His father was promoted beyond all skill, married pure and bred two children, Luke and Bretta Salvo, named after their mother. Bretta was more successful than her younger brother. And shorter, she stood a mere six seven. Bretta was busy at UP High Command on the peaceful planet of Wisbeef. Due to his complicated history Bretta had a major hand in the movements of her overgrown brothers within the U.P. The U.P. is the interplanetary peacekeeping organisation with three hundred million troops at it's disposal, policing conflict throughout the known universe, which is more or less the whole place and the bits they don't police nobody is interested in. It's mostly dull, thankless, routine work, nothing to do but dodge pulse rounds, count corpses and wear a blue hat. Data collection in the field and constant monitoring of movements and political events was the main task. Then, if any resulting war starts getting out of hand, the U.P. flood the affected zone with ground troops and heavy artillery. They take out the militias with the incredible fire power at their disposal and re-instate a semi-democratic, peaceful, majority supported government structure. At least that's the theory. The soldiers were known as the "blues" by everybody, their distinctive blue uniforms and helmets setting them apart from any other fighting group. No one in the known cosmos wore blue helmets, which is why it was chosen as the preferred colour. Although of course some Earth based historians went on and on about how they'd started the whole blue uniform thing. Earth always claimed to have originated the major ideas, no one really knew or cared where the idea came from, they wore blue helmets and that was an end to the matter. When the freighter's huge landing pads finally made contact with the soil of Nafos, Commander Luke Hunter was already at the disembarkation point. He had shouldered his small clothing pack, by his feet hovered a thousand pound rations carton, standard issue to all area commanders due for an on planet data collection period. The giant cargo doors opened, flooding the loading deck with the slightly foetid but pleasantly moist air of the heavily forested planet. Nafos had been a signatory of the UP's primary declaration for over a hundred and twelve years. At the time Commander Hunter's boot touched tilth it had been at total internal war for just under one hundred and eleven years. Hunter had visited Nafos before when he was "a trainee greenhorn young-buck wet-behind-the-ears recruit way-back-when" as he described himself. It was part of his Fort Chipper training schedule to visit sites of prolonged skirmish. Yulaka, Wisbeef, Gancrisp and many others, some plagued by internal conflict, some, as Commander Hunter discovered, with barely suppressed hatred hidden behind a thin veil of civilisation. However, Nafos was different. At first sight a peaceful, one third forested sphere of about sixty eight trillion square kilometres in old earth surface measurement. Nafos wasn't really at war in the sense of massive bombardments and planet destructive pulse implosions from space based weapons launchers. This was a war where one group would casually cross over the agreed separationlines and hack another group to death using ceremonial swords, pulse side-arms and laser machetes. It was all very ugly and virtually impossible to police. Fascinating from a historical perspective but pretty miserable to be involved in. The other peculiarity of Nafos was it's orbital position. It span around, as all inhabited planets span, but it's axis pointed toward the local sun. One half of the planet was in perpetual light and warmth, the other in endless darkness and bitter cold. The light half of the planet therefore had seasonal bands, the nearest to the sun being the "Burning Desert of Thuuuughh, a parched desert with no rain. As the surface of the planet curved away from its sun, the climate steadily improved, hot jungle and tropical waters, then cooler forested areas, the section Commander Hunter was heading for. This forest then slowly died out over hundreds of kilometres until it turned into windswept tundra, grassy slopes blasted by icy winds. Beyond the tundra the light slowly decreased and the ground became higher and more treacherous. The landscape became bleaker and colder, ice and snow a never ending feature. The darkest part of the planet sustained no life at all, just a black, icy wasteland of trillions of square kilometres. This area of course was one of the main reasons the UP, and through them, the governments and institutions of many other planets, had an interest in the violent sphere. Off planet mining corporations had known for centuries of the huge deposits of metals and precious crystals, not forgetting Nafoolian clay, a naturally occurring high explosive of enormous potential. None of this fantastic wealth was being exploited because the habitable side of the planet where transportation facilities would have to be situated was so dangerous. With an endless and seemingly ever increasing orgy of war, no off planet corporation was prepared to take the risk. As Commander Luke Hunter's second foot made contact with Nafos soil a pulse round from the same RNA (Royal Nafoolian Army) ground unit who had just killed the six Mullambimbi's tore into the U.P. freighter's upper hull structure. Before any sentient being could respond, the freighter's computer controlled pulse cannons sprang into action. Large pistons snapped out of the ships hull and their deafening crackle ripped through the peaceful terrain. As the energy bolts found their target, which they did in just over one billionth of a second, they not only destroyed the RNA unit, they also removed a segment of the planet and all that ever existed upon it. The noise was deafening, the ground shuddered. As the debris started to fall, an action that would take many minutes to complete, birds skittered in all directions, the wind didn't seem to know which way to blow, and a silence fell over the forest. This then was the quiet voice of the U.P. It had always promised it would respond with utmost force to any attack on its ships or personnel. Hunter and O'Rourke were lying prone on the earth, along with all the surrounding U.P. personnel. The astonishing retorts of the impulse rounds slowly thundered away through the hills. "Oh man. That's another night stuck on this shit ball." said Flight Lieutenant O'Rourke as he stared up at the gaping hole in the side of his hated ship. "Just what I need." "There's many a worse place, O'Rourke, I can tell you that." said the beaming Commander. "I am here for six Nafos months, which, if I member correctly is about eight earth years. And greatly looking forward to it I am." O'Rourke looked up at the beaming commander and slowly shook his head.