I'm going to be writing a serial set in my Legacy of Eight universe, since I've decided that it's likely that Hammercalled will be consuming the majority of my efforts for the foreseeable future. My original plan was to have Hammercalled finished this month, but given the strong positive reception it's been receiving and its current state I think it'll be a long time before I'm ready to move on.
However, the Legacy of Eight has been a setting that I keep coming back to. I have plans for a fairly ambitious associated product line, but it's just not something that I have time to bring to fruition yet. It's my next major project after Hammercalled (and it will probably receive a setting splatbook for Hammercalled at some point), and represents a different sort of experimentation with rules and play styles that I'm not yet ready to go into more detail on. Let's just say that I think it will be quite enjoyable for a broad audience, if I can pull it off right, but it'll definitely be more technically difficult than Hammercalled to execute.
When I go to tell my story, people always ask why I left the Saint George's Third.
It's a common misconception that mercenaries only hang up their hats after they've gotten too old or done too many things they can't forget at night.
You hear about the guys who shoot the wrong person, or bomb the wrong building, or get hit with a mind-virus, and then they're done. They shake and whimper at night, seeking absolution or seeking cover.
I'm not one of those guys. I left because of what the war did to other people.
I left after I got put into the infirmary off of Caliban II. I'd lost a leg–all us veteran Neocanter mercs wind up being made of omnistruct and metal rather than flesh and bone, so it wasn't serious, but it still takes time to get a replacement. Pretty much everyone else had it worse.
Ben. Ben had it worse. He joined the Third a few months after I did, so I wasn't really his superior officer, but you know how it goes. Newbies are either a liability, or a resource.
And Ben was like a lost puppy. Sure, he was a Neocanter, so he had the cybernetic packages that we could get. But he didn't adopt them quickly like the rest of us, a Korsakov circuit was all he got.
He loved his body.
And, to be fair, it is a privilege that most Imperials can have. If you're living on a core world, you take magical resurrection for granted. We don't do that on Nova Canterbury–no "filthy witchcraft" for us.
But when the wars heat up, you don't get your body back if you get killed.
No, they plop you in a goohead. Gooheads are fairly simple to manufacture: synthetic brain, synthetic muscles, synthetic flesh. Grows back like the real stuff, or even quicker. A good one's probably a step up from the human baseline, the closest anyone without an exemption gets to being a full-on augmented cyborg like we get to be.
But there's something to be said for running on your own brain, not a positronic lattice. I've gotten used to the lattices; the difference is psychological. A lot of people lose their spirit when they lose their body, or see it get eaten away.
Ben hadn't even died, but he couldn't take it. They didn't have time to force-grow an arm for him, so they just slapped on a prosthesis. Carbon black with silver outlines. The field hospital only had a couple things above human rating, and truth be told it was probably superior to my own, but it didn't look real.
He just sat there on the edge of his bed, staring at the fingers.
"Look at its hand. Look at its hand. Look at its hand."
God, I still hear him chanting it in my sleep.
"Look at its hand."
I don't know what happened to him. Heard he got a jump back to Canterbury, reconnected with his family. You can never tell if they're just saying that or not, because nobody tells you what happens afterward.
But when you go through a psychological break like that, you aren't really yourself, not the same you. It's like doing an extra decade on the front.
That's when I made up my mind not to re-enlist. Sure, you get a nice medal from the Imperials for each decade of service–and they count time spent in stasis on ships, so you don't even have to be awake for all of it. I've met people who did four decades and got out without ever seeing combat.
Neocanters never get that option. When you upload and download, upload and download, watching your body be pulled out from underneath you time and time again, it takes a toll on you. It's a just a fact of life when you're working around atomics and orbital bombardments.
As soon as my decade wrapped up, I left the Imperials and went freelance. People say that what I do is dangerous.
That's true.
But I haven't died since leaving the Third.
When you live forever, the only thing you have to fear is your own limitation. I've watched enough people go down coughing blood all over themselves to see the impact it has on their minds. They can fix your mind, sure, but you're not really you after that. They can bring you back to an earlier backup, leaving you disconnected from the universe.
Sure, you have as much time as you want after they do that, but it really doesn't matter. Everyone you know changes, and you stay the same.
I'm much happier working freelance: small jobs, just enough to pay the bills, but safe ones.
Or as safe as anything that requires you to carry a railgun is.
But you don't want to hear my life story. You want to hear what happened on Typhon.