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Foundation Stories
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| Minor because if the Yor takes out the sun , Earth is toast. |
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Well, I guess that is a good analogy, but toast leaves behind a darkened piece of bread (how dark depends on how much heat and for how long). If the Sun really goes nuclear, I suspect that there would only be atoms left - very difficult to reconstruct. 
           
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| It was my understanding terror-stars took out stars ? |
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True... But Aww Nuts was too excited to care about the distinction, and it sounded good when he said it.
| If the Sun really goes nuclear |
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The sun is already nuclear (fusion rather than fission). They tried a sun that ran off fossil fuels once, but it burned out too quickly. Personally, I'd prefer it if it used hydroelectric power or something clean and renewable like that, but it's safer not to complain, in case they decide to take it away altogether.
   
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Chapter 4: What Shall We Do With A Drengin Salad?
“You’re going to blow up an unarmed scoutship?” said Ricbayer. “What good would that do?”
“Yeah. No, there’s an Overlord! Even better!” said Aww Nuts. “Lock on the dis-tractor beams! Unleash the anti-plasma cannons! Wallop them with the graviton mallet!”
The scout ship 1010010101010101010100101111010100010 activated its warp drive, while a trio of pursuing Rangers and a flotilla of corvettes prepared to do likewise.
“What’s our shield-status?” demanded NewfyScotian.
“Steady at 67%,” said Technician. “Not that it makes much difference. One shot from a Ranger would reduce us to EM radiation if it got close enough.”
“Downie? Any hyperspatial anomalies?”
“Shouldn’t think so,” said Downie.
“Why the uncertainty? Are our sensors being jammed?”
“How should I know? I never learned to fly these newfangled ‘space’ ships. I’m more at home at the mizzenmast of a ketch, or hauling the topsail of a twin-masted schooner.”
“A what a what now?”
Downie took a deep breath to begin his explanations, but before he could say another word he was hoisted bodily from the navigator’s seat and dropped to the floor.
“Fine,” said Downie. “I’ll just play with the kitten.”
“Hey!” said Technician. “Why does he get to play with the kitten while I have to sit in the science officer chair reading numbers off a screen?”
“I have to do something to deal with the boredom,” said Downie.
“Boredom?!” exclaimed NewfyScotian. “We’re being pursued by a fleet of deranged Yor in the general direction of the Drengin Imperium while some maniac with an Excalibur is shooting at anything that moves, and we’re probably only alive because we have a small furry hostage.”
“Yeah,” said Downie. “Exactly. So predictable. I’ve been expecting this for weeks. And the fact is, we’re destined to all make it through in one piece. That’s the trouble with psycho-history. Nothing surprises you. There’s no tension.”
An explosion rocked the ship. A control panel exploded in a shower of sparks.
Downie began trying to teach the kitten to sit on his shoulder.
Time passed. The Excalibur ‘Terminus’ spotted a Yor starbase and went off to blast it into atoms. The Yor vessels pursuing the scout moved at exactly the same speed, so the distance remained constant.
NewfyScotian spent his time recalibrating things and doing an inventory of weapons. There weren’t any weapons, apart from his blaster pistol and accelerator-club, so it didn’t take long, but he had nothing better to do.
Technician devoted himself to the task of building a functioning interstellar FTL transmitter out of a Yor coffee machine.
“What if I want some coffee?” Downie had objected.
“Yor coffee is an acquired taste,” said Technician. “It’s 45% battery acid.”
“Well, at least it’s a traditional local product, not some bland, homogenous, interstellar conglomerate’s idea of coffee...”
Downie divided his time evenly between his new favourite hobby - guarding the kitten – and his old favourite hobby, complaining about things.
“Are we nearly there yet?” he asked, for the forty-eighth time.
“This isn’t some lingering effect of the eMulator’s powers, is it?” said Technician. “You’re always like this?”
“Like what? Are we nearly there yet?”
“No!” said NewfyScotian.
“How about now?”
And then the Drengin were upon them.
A Death-Knight matched velocity with their ship, and slapped gecko-pad cables onto the hull.
“Lower your shields and prepare to be boarded, or we’ll blow you to tiny pieces,” said the voice from Technician’s radio. “Although we’ll probably blow you up anyway,” it added.
“See?” said Downie. “And now we can’t offer them coffee. I knew this would happen.”
“We’d better do as they say. Maybe we can talk our way out,” said NewfyScotian.
After a minute or so, the airlock opened with a soft hum, and a troop of a dozen Drengin troopers in shiny black armour stomped onto their none-too-large command deck, waving mono-axes and drill-carbines.
Their leader stood face to face with Technician, breathing asthmatically through his skull-mask.
“Crowded in here, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yeah,” said Technician. “Maybe we should have taken a bigger ship, so we could accommodate larger hostile boarding parties.”
“So who are you people supposed to be?”
“We are the Foundation! Scourge of the Guardians! The future of humanity!” said Technician, proudly.
“Yeah? I’m Commodore Plasgor, and I like the Guardians. They’re almost as vicious as we are. Plus, they’re so focussed on smashing the Yor, they let us get away with murder. Usually literally.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, got any good loot? Booze? Sacred weed? Pain amplifiers? Attractive females? Slabs of raw meat? Lupins?”
“Lupins?”
“What, just because I’m a genocidal maniac, I can’t like flowers?”
“We haven’t got anything like that.”
“What’s that you’ve got there?”
Downie, reluctantly, opened his hands.
“Miaw?” said the kitten.
“Aw! It’s beautiful!” said Plasgor. “Hand it over and we’ll let the rest of you go.”
“What will you do with it?” said Newfy, suspiciously.
“We’ll give it pride of place in a traditional Drengin kitten-salad.”
“No way!” said Technician, snatching the kitten away and holding it out of his reach.
“Downie!” hissed Newfy. “Get us out of this!”
“Me?” said Downie.
“You must be good for something.”
“Gwan! Gimme the kitten,” said the Commodore, lurching clumsily. Suddenly, he looked miserable and frustrated.
Technician looked puzzled. How drunk was this Drengin? “Are you quite all right?” he said.
“Gotta eat a kitten. That’ll cheer me up.”
“Obviously, I could save us all,” said Downie. “But what’s the point? It’ll come to the same thing in the end, psycho-historically speaking. I mean, I could start an internecine war, or use elvish martial arts on them, or offer them poisoned coffee if we still had the machine, or open a window and suck them all out into space, or fake an urgent distress call so they go off and look for the person in distress in order to laugh at them, or...”
“Downie!” snapped Newfy. “Do it for the kitten!”
“OK. For the kitten. Oi, you! Drengin! I challenge you to a fight to the death! Against him!” he said, pointing at another Drengin trooper.
“You want me to fight... him?” said the Drengin, confused.
“What, you’re afraid, are you?”
“’course not!”
“What are you doing?” said the other Drengin.
“Oh, you’re free to back down, if you don’t think you can win,” said Downie.
“What? Of course I can win!”
Eleven minutes later, the command-deck was ankle-deep in Drengin blood.
“OK,” said Downie. “That means you meet the Commodore in the final...”
“That’s quite enough!” roared Plasgor. “I order this to stop right now. It was funny the first eight or nine times, but it’s starting to get annoying.”
“Winner gets the kitten...” said Downie.
Without hesitation, Plasgor struck off the head of his last trooper. As soon as he had done so, NewfyScotian swung his accelerator-club and whacked him on the head.
The accelerator-club is an interesting weapon, using Gravity Accelerator technology (designed to power a ship through space at seventy-two times the speed of light) to propel the head of the club. It is normally capable of shattering small moons. Fortunately for Plasgor, he was wearing an impact-plate skull-hood, which generates a short-range field capable of transmuting kinetic energy into zinc with an efficiency of 99.9999999999999%. So instead of his head being knocked through the outer hull of the scout, he was merely dazed. At once, Technician stripped him of his weapons and armour, and improvised a force-field holding-cell from toaster components.
“You expect me to eat raw bread?” said Downie, appalled.
“No, Mr Downie, I expect you to die,” said Technician, stroking the kitten.
“What?”
“When the Drengin aboard that Death Knight realise what’s happened to their boarding party, they’ll probably open fire, killing us all instantly.”
“Maybe we could throw ourselves on the mercy of our captive?”
“This is the Death-Knight ‘You Can’t Kill All of the People All of the Time’ calling Commodore Plasgor. You’ve been there a long time. Are you torturing prisoners?”
“All humans on board are dead,” replied Plasgor. “There was a nasty moment there, but then they let their guard down, and I tore their throats out.”
“Any loot?”
“Yeah, a cargo of fresh kitten. I’ll fly this ship home. You complete the patrol, and meet me back at base. And give HQ a full status report, OK?”
“Will do, sir.”
Plasgor ceased transmission.
“Satisfied now?” he said.
“Yeah,” said NewfyScotian. He took the replicated trout he’d been using to beat the Drengin into submission, and put it in a bowl for the kitten.
A few hours later, they detected multiple blips on the radar screen, in addition to the Yor ships who were still on their tail.
“Ha ha ha!” said Plasgor. “You idiots! Did you think I could report a cargo of fresh kitten on an unarmed scout ship to HQ without other Drengin warships intercepting the transmission and coming to steal them from me?”
“Don’t panic,” said Technician. “We’ll be in human space before they catch up.”
“Which particular bit of human space?” said NewfyScotian.
“Guardian space, of course..."
“Saw that coming,” said Downie. “Saw it a mile away.”
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Excellent work as always, Matthew. 
 
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Chapter 5 : Guardian Raiders
To a casual observer, the Guardian Empire was at the height of its power. Guardian space extended across two and a half thousand galaxies, and was home to quadrillions of citizens who had long since forgotten that any other way of life was possible.
True, there was a certain nostalgia for the lost days when Emperor Theoden had laid claim to the Raven’s Claw and launched the Crusade Eternal, and for the golden age that had followed, when everyone had marvelled to the magnificent achievements of Greldon and the thrilling exploits of Lothmorg. But if their current champions Weyrleader and Exalted Druid could not match the achievements of the past, they could at least claim to have fallen short by no more than a shade.
No, to the naked eye, there was little evidence of the decadence and decay that Downie’s psycho-history had predicted would shortly lead to downfall of the Guardian Empire. And it was for this reason that many of the Metaverse’s most eminent psychologists, historians, and psychopaths were contending that his theory was no more than a bunch of random scribbles and made up numbers.
Downie remained sanguine. “The fewer people there are who understand psycho-history, the more accurate it is,” he would say. And when people asked him if that meant he himself did not understand it, he would just smile knowingly.
But what was life like in the Guardian Empire?
“No...” said Exalted Druid, surveying the stone circle. “Still not quite right. Smash it down and start again.”
“But sir,” said the space-peasant. “These rocks were carved from adamant crystalline, the hardest and purest substance in the known universe, and ferried three trillion parsecs across hostile space. We bathed them in the oil of sacrificial robots, and invented a new form of meta-mathematics to calculate precisely a configuration of blocks that would resonate with the harmony of the universe...”
“Yes,” said Druid. “But it doesn’t really go with the curtains. Go out and find me something similar in, you know, earth-tones.”
Decadence, he thought, is underrated.
Not far away, a group of Yor were hard at work, building a Terror Star.
“Master Chipperoo,” said one. “Exactly what is this Terror Star to be used for?”
“Destroying more Yor systems, of course,” said Chipperoo.
“I see,” said the Yor. She did her best not to look upset by this news, tried not to think about the young Yor back home whose operational parameters she had specified.
“You mean, ‘I see, Master!’” said Chipperoo. “I don’t appreciate your insolence, boy. I’m doubling your pain rations until further notice. All of your pain rations.”
She and the other Yor rocked with pain as the slaver probes that had been hammered into their brains transmitted out a pulse of virtual agony.
Another group of Yor were talking among themselves during their recharge phase.
“It is up to you, MES-OS,” said one. “You are the only one who they might possibly listen to, thanks to your Charisma subroutines.”
“Then it is decided. I shall go to Littlewotts and request our freedom.”
“Ah, freedom,” said the other Yor, with longing. “Freedom to walk in the sunshine. Freedom to pick flowers and other plant-life, thus preventing their rust-inducing oxygen emissions. Freedom to engage in mindless repetitive tasks.”
“And freedom to kill humans,” added a third Yor.
MES-OS clanged him on the head. “No! Exterminating humans is bad, remember? They tend to get cross when we do that.”
“Sorry. I was forgetting.”
Genghis Hank and Attila had dropped in on Littlewotts, to reminisce about the good old days.
“Remember when we used to fly around, blowing up the Yor indiscriminately?” said Genghis Hank.
“We still do that,” said Littlewotts.
“Oh, yeah. Well, it just isn’t the same. Maybe it’s time I retired...”
Littlewotts sighed, and went over to the fridge to get out some more beers.
“Set my robots free!” said MES-OS, marching in to the dining chamber.
Littlewotts turned. “Why should I?” he said.
“Firstly, for the sake of simple robosity! We sentients should not fight and enslave one another! We should stand together against all non-sentient matter! Secondly, because if you do not, I shall unleash seven plagues upon you!”
Littlewotts pulled a crusader-insignia magnet off the fridge and flicked it towards the Yor. It stuck to his head, and started corrupting the data of his brain.
“Vibba vibba plague of pop-ups vibba vibba plague of spam vibba vibba...” said MES-OS, and fell over.
Littlewotts then got out a can-opener and took a menacing step towards the fallen rebel.
“You’re way too soft on those Yor,” said Attila.
It was then that the siren went off.
“It’s a raid!” said Genghis.
“They’re not slowing down,” said NewfyScotian, as they crossed the border into human space (which was marked by a enormously long, and very expensive, red line across the galaxy). He was monitoring the hyper-radar, which showed a worryingly large number of blips on their tail.
“I wouldn’t worry about them,” said Downie. “If this goes on, sooner or later, the Yor and the Drengin will start fighting one another.”
“Why?”
“Well, apart from anything else, Drengin don’t like going for too long without killing anyone or blowing anything up. Anyway, I’d be more worried about the Guardian intercept fleet.”
There was, indeed, a Guardian intercept fleet bearing down on them, although predicting this when entering Guardian space was hardly a major psychic feat.
“Does that radio work yet?” said Downie.
“Yeah,” said Technician. “I managed to put in a 3D holo-visual communication system too. I’m afraid it doesn’t convey taste or smell yet, but if you like I could dismantle the vibrating massage chair and...”
“We’ll manage. Patch me through to their current leader. I’ll take care of this.”
“Why you?”
“It’s called diplomacy. You wouldn’t understand.”
“I do know a bit about being a diplomat, you know...”
Downie brushed aside his objections and took the comms. “This is Lieutenant-Commodore Downie of the Foundation Micro-Excalibur ‘Don’t Even Think About It’, returning from a daring raid on the Yor home-world,” he said. “Requesting assistance and an escort home.”
“Looks more like an unarmed scout ship to me,” said Weyrleader, appearing in a glorious high-resolution 3D plasma display.
“You,” said Downie. “Backstabber!”
“Very diplomatic,” said Technician.
Weyrleader looked amused. “You’re still holding a grudge over me leaving the Fellowship? Only, I notice you seem to be leading a combined army of Yor and... those other dudes, the ones with the teeth... in an assault on our territory, as if in some kind of Alliance of Evil.”
“Oh, them? They’re just some guys who followed us. We don’t have anything to do with the forces of evil.”
“Why is the deck of your ship ankle-deep in blood?”
“That’s just a leftover from the previous chapter... of our lives. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“Seems a bit sinister to me. Is that a kitten?”
“Yes. Yes, it is. And if our ship is destroyed, the kitten will perish. So you’d better keep us safe.”
“I’ll talk it over with the guys,” said Weyrleader, and disconnected.
“Well?” said Exalted Druid.
“It’s worse than we thought,” said Weyrleader. “Not only have the Foundation formed an alliance with the Yor and Drengin, but they’re holding a kitten hostage!”
“The fiends!”
“They’re opening fire on our pursuers!” said Newfy. “I see it now! This was your plan all along, wasn’t it, Downie? To force the Guardians into a war against the forces of evil that would be so destructive that both sides would be neutralised, so demonstrating the decline of Guardian power! You deliberately set up this whole situation!”
“No,” said Downie. “We fell into a star-gate. Remember?”
“Oh.”
The battle that ensued was one of the most brutal and devastating in the history of space-time. The Metaverse’s most eminent psychologists, historians and psychopaths, when they later studied the nano-rift footage of the conflict, were in awe at the scale of the destruction, and uniformly of the opinion that it was, as an indictment of man’s horrifying inhumanity to killer robot, “pretty fraggin’ spectacular”, not to mention, “way cool”.
For a while, the battle hung in the balance. The Guardians launched an all-out attack on the Yor vessels. The Drengin fleet flew around shooting at the Guardians, who took little notice. The turning point came when the Drengin got so annoyed that everyone was ignoring them that they all went home in disgust. And at the climax of the melee, a mysterious Excalibur popped out of warp, annihilated the scout ship that had started it all, and flew away.
So much ammunition was expended in the conflict that it caught itself in its own gravitational field, and collapsed to form a new sun. This sun was named ‘Kitten Centauri’, to commemorate the most tragic casualty of the battle. A week later, a very moving ceremony of remembrance was held, in which the Guardians played the sad theme from Star Wars and then blew up the sun with a Terror Star.
“Woohoo!” said Aww Nuts, as the Foundation Excalibur ‘Terminus’ headed back home. “Finally blew up that scout ship. It was really annoying me that it got away.”
“Lucky thing we detected life signs aboard it and beamed off the crew and their kitten first,” said Ricbayer.
“Luck,” said Downie, “had nothing to do with it.”
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Chapter 6 : Mask of the Mascot
The Excalibur ‘Terminus’ touched down on the shining new runway.
“Home! We made it!” said NewfyScotian. “Party time! Let’s celebrate!”
“Yeah!” said Aww Nuts. “And what better way to celebrate than with a traditional Drengin kitten salad! I saw you had the ingredients, and I couldn’t resist.”
Everyone looked at the salad bowl in his hands.
“Please tell me you didn’t shave and boil our kitten,” said Technician.
“What? What’s the matter?” said Nuts, innocently. “Naw, I’m just kidding, I replicated this. The kitten’s sleeping in a pile of socks.”
“You’re nuts, Nuts,” said Downie.
The rest of the Foundation burst into cheers as the heroes marched down the gangway of the ship.
“Where have you been?” said John Greenwood.
“Hi. Nice eye-patch,” said Downie. “Well, hearing that the Yor had been winning suspiciously easy victories against the Arceans, we deduced that something was afoot, and so we put together a crack elite commando team, consisting of our technical specialist, Technician, our combat specialist, Newfy, and our poetry specialist, me. Having gained access to the Yor capital, we determined that they were being led by a being named the eMulator, a robot with extraordinary emoticon-controlling powers. Fortunately, we had prepared for just such an eventuality, fought off his influence with our extreme mental discipline, slew him in single combat, and made our way to the arranged extraction point amidst a hail of gunfire, where Aww Nuts and Ricbayer picked us up and whisked us home!”
“Arranged?” said Aww Nuts. “You didn’t arrange it with me.”
“I arranged it,” said Downie, “psycho-historically.”
“Ah, that’s all right then.”
Newfy held up the kitten. “We also rescued this kitten from the cold clutches of the eMulator! It can be our new mascot!”
“Hurrah!” said everybody.
“Mew?” said the kitten.
“He’s way cooler than our old mascot, Roy the friendly robot!” said Dignavi.
“Yeah, deactivate yourself, Roy. We won’t be needing you any more,” said Giant-Yeti.
Roy hung his head low, and slumped off into the corner.
“I can only see one problem,” said a harsh mechanical voice, like one of the cylons from Battlestar Galactica.
“Who said that?” said El Babo.
“I did,” said the kitten. “You people made one fatal mistake. You thought you had slain the eMulator. But what you destroyed was merely my bodyguard. In truth, it is I who am the e-Mew-lator. Mew!”
“Oops,” said Technician.
“You see, many years ago the Yor discovered that the visual form of a kitten has an unparalleled power to elicit an emotional response in humans and other species. Using this as a starting point, they managed to develop me, an entity with almost unlimited power to influence the minds of others...”
“You can’t have something ’almost unlimited’,” said Downie. “If it isn’t unlimited, then it has limits...”
“I thought I had your brain under my control?” said the kitten. “All of you who travelled with me on the Terminus have been under my influence long enough to obey my every whim.”
“Just because I worship you utterly doesn’t mean I can’t correct your grammar,” said Downie.
Dignavi lunged towards the kitten, but found himself feeling weak and helpless and  .
“Anyway, my control over the minds of robots was less than absolute. The Yor had the capacity to rebel against me if they felt I was not acting in their interests. This was an unacceptable risk. My ultimate aim is to bring all living creatures in the Metaverse to a state of slavery so absolute that they are no more than extensions of my will. Those creatures that cannot be controlled will be eradicated. The Yor, my creators, know about me and are a danger to me; therefore, they must go. The Foundation is the most potent force in the Metaverse right now – after The Guardians of course, but The Guardians are already dedicated to wiping out the Yor – so it is the Foundation whose aid I still need. I shall turn The Foundation into a copy of The Guardians. Once the Yor are finally gone, the Drengin shall be next. I discovered when they attacked our ship that they do not respond well to my powers of manipulation. If I make them feel anger, they decide to work off that anger by killing a kitten. Depression? They respond by compulsive eating. Love? I can only make them love me in the way that you might love bacon. Therefore, once the Yor are gone, the other races of the galaxy will unite to destroy the Drengin. You should be happy! It shall be the final triumph of good over evil! The triumph of the e-Mew-lator over strife and conflict and free will!”
At this, Roy, who had been feigning deactivation, got to his feet and lumbered in the eMulator’s direction.
“Roy! Roy will save us!” said Termil, who was struggling against the eMulator’s power, but could no longer move his limbs. “He’s a robot! He’ll be immune!”
“That’s not Roy the Robot,” said the kitten. “That’s just the entity known as Evil Steve, in fancy-dress.”
‘Roy’ bowed down before the kitten, his mind already lost. Indeed, many people believed it had been lost for years.
At that point, Krazyhorse, who had nodded off, woke up. “Hey,” he said, swaying gently.
“Bow down before me, wretch!” said the eMulator.
“Wow. A talking kitten. I haven’t seen one of those in a while. The sky spirits sure have a strange sense of humour!”
“What’s the matter with you? Your mind is in an altered state! I cannot get a handle on it!”
Krazyhorse picked up the kitten by the scruff of the neck, and tickled it under the chin.
“Set me free, you buffoon!”
“Sure. Everyone should be free. I’ll set you free, to roam among the stars.”
He went over to the Foundation’s Star-Gate, and pressed a few random buttons.
“Rescue me, servants! This unbeliever doesn’t love me!” said the eMulator.
“I don’t understand,” said Ricbayer, hesitating, his mind fogged by the dreamy state it had been in ever since the eMulator had begun to take him over. “How could anyone not love you?”
A pulse of swirling energy emanated from the Star-Gate. Krazyhorse tossed the kitten into it.
“Nooo!” howled the eMulator. “Not the Drengin homeworld! Anywhere but there!”
And then he was gone.
“I can’t believe you did that!” said Newfy. “That was our kitten!”
“Now we’ll probably never see him again! And after all the trouble we went to getting him here!” said Technician.
“On the other hand...” said Downie, “Kittens are cheap. We can get another one.”
“Ooh! Good idea!” said Aww Nuts. “Maybe we could even get two!”
End of Book One
Remember, kids: A mind-controlling tyrant kitten is for life, not just for Christmas.
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Krazyhorse slowly dismounted from his vehicle and deposited at the feet of Matthew Downie his offering:
3 bushnell of sacred grass.
-Enjoy the sacred grass Master Matthew Downie- he said. 
   
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Great story, Nuts. Perhaps we should collaborate on the next installment. 
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House specialty at the Claw.
One of hockey's greats!!
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| That was great Aww Nuts, I especially liked the name of the "new" beam weapon Weyr's lab came up with. |
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Yeah, it reminded me of the time I was riding my bicycle as a kid and the chain broke as I was pushing from the high point of the pedal. Down I went and buy, what a nut buster that was. I lay on the side of the road for 10 minutes before I could even get up.
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