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The Rumor Mill

---The alliance has this mind-reader project. Rumor has it they've lost a few. Including a

controller, some guy driven nuts by the experiments who fled out to the deep black and

found the reavers. Only instead of getting eaten, he took 'em over...controls them now. Nowthey've got a plan.

---You heard about that battle between an Alliance Fleet and the Reavers? The governmentwon, just barely, but they didn't get all the reavers. I heard the surviving reavers are after

government Pax stockpiles...they're going to try to slip it into the terraforming processors

on some populated planet...increase their numbers.

---Some reavers can be sneaky if they need to be...you got your stealth reavers. Guys who

hate you just as much as the rampaging hordes do, but are willing to play like a normal

human long enough to get the drop on you...they're getting smarter...

---Some Independent war chest got buried in a cache on Curiousity, that moon that got

blasted to hell from orbit? Rumor has it, there's a fortune in there, if you can find the lastsurviving independent who knows where it is...he's in some war hospital, comatose or

catatonic or something.

---So, Parliament's in a huff over this thing on Miranda. But that ain't the real scandal- the

big conspiracy is what they did with machines. They lost control of a von Neumann

construction AI out in the Kuiper belt and now it's building an army...

---Out on Hadley's Hope some colony vanished without a trace, and the Alliance rescue

squad sent in vanished too. Gives me the willies, imaginin what happened to them poorsouls.

---Food stocks on Rose just got contaminated, but the government doesn't want to admit it

on account of fearin' panic. The whole moon's gonna start starving soon...be some workthere if you just fill your holds with food. If you can deliver without getting swamped by

rioters, o'course.

---Plague on Prophecy's got the whole moon in a panic, and now people want off. Some'll

pay, some'll try to take your ship from you. The biggest trick is figurin whether or not your

passengers got the plague themselves.

---Some Parliament member's son murdered a girl and fled to the Rim. Now the law wants

him back, only quiet like- too embarassing for the bigwig to have it go public. If you can

discretely catch and bring back his son, there'll be quite the reward...

---What? Naw, you're just talkin'gou shi. The Alliance knows the Pax experiment created

the reavers, because they did it on purpose. Think about it -- an army with no fear, nomercy, no mind of its own -- hell, Parliament doesn't even admit they exist! I conjure

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they've got some secret way of sending the reavers at anyone they want dead. Probably has

to do with all that psychic research we've been hearing about....

---"The Alliance this," "the Alliance that." You sha gua don't know what you're talking

about. The Alliance is just a smokescreen -- it's the Companions you should be worried

about. Every general and CEO in the core worlds has a companion mistress, and youbetter believe those girls keep in touch. A casual bit of pillow talk, a word whispered in the

right ear.... I got reliable sources say the Alliance would've lost at Serenity Valley, if one of

the browncoat generals hadn't talked in his sleep...

---Ever heard of the Ming Ue? Big luxury cruiser, disappeared more than fifty years ago

en route to Boros, no one knows what happened. But sometimes independent traderstravelling the route pick phantoms signals and transmissions from a big ship which isn't

just there, and a few claim actually having seen it, flying silently across the great black, a

ghost spaceship...

---You know about those Alliance relief programs, the ones financed by Blue Sun anddestined to aid the rim colonies? The foodstuff packages are spiked with different kinds of

psychoactives, a different mix for each colony. It's all a big experiment to control themasses, and Blue Sun is using the colonies as guinea pigs.

---Somebody swiped a medicine shipment destined for some settlements over on Zeus.Rumor has it the colony elders want it back bad, and that someone's gonna be sellin' it on

the black market right here, tonight.

---Some independent terrorist group assassinated the Alliance Governor of New Rome andall hell's broken loose. There's an planet wide insurgency forming, and it might even

spread to the nearby moons. Lucrative work if you don't mind smuggling guns.

---There's a man in Callahan's Moon who is old enough to remember Earth-That-Was. He

lives in Yuang, or maybe in Desdemona.

---One in every five Companions is a trained Alliance agent. It's part of the agreement

between the Houses and the Alliance, that's why the Alliance let them operate - since a

Companion chooses her customers, they can keep an eye on political troublemakers.

---Never take a lady with purple eyes, platinum blonde hair and a white star tattooed on

the shoulder as a passenger. The last three crews who did haven't seen alive since then.

---There was an Earth-That-Was, but History records have been altered to conceal the real

cause of the exodus - the war between mankind and their former robot servants. That's why

the Alliance keeps blocking AI development

---There's a gaunt woman roaming frontier towns across the rim and leaving a trail of

violence and corpses in her wake. The Alliance has sent bounty hunter after bounty hunter,and she's killed all of them. They say that she's been in a thousand gunfights and bullets

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can't harm her.

---There's a hidden moon on the edge of space, a green paradise of fertile lands and cattlein abundance. It's the Promised Land, but only the Faithful are able to find it.

---There's a lake on Greenleaf that if you bathe in it, it cures all disease. Even the plague.

---The mudders are planning to rise up, led by them jaynite preachers. They're smuggling

in weapons and gunfighters who can use them. Not likely to be a lot of coin, but whoevercomes out on top might be running Higgin's Moon instead of Higgins, if you get me.

---All of Blue Sun navigation software has backdoors which send your ID and positionthrough the cortex, so the Alliance can know at every moment where you are. They can

even take control of your ship!

---There's a new gang vying for control of criminal activity in the quadrant. They're former

browncoats, stone-cold killers all of them, and their leader is a war criminal who runspeople through engines for kicks. He also keeps a couple of psychotic siblings on payroll

as interrogators - they hacked their own parents to pieces, so you don't want to know whatthey do to other people. These are the guys who have been raiding Alliance convoys and

facilities, and also launched a surgical strike against Niska's station - yeah, that Niska.

They ever show up, you walk the other way.

---Speakin of Niska, he tried to jump back into it after his place got shot up, but some of

his enemies decided the time was right and finished the job on his station. Werent no

criminals, neither; they was some religious nuts callin emselves The Paladins, all deckedout in military gear painted up with crosses. I hear they even carve crosses into their

bullets, fill em with the wrath o God.

---Speak'n of religious nutballs, you ever met one of them witcha people? Most of them are

alright, nuttin moren medicine men and women, but some get a little weird about the

"magic" crap. Aint right, all them chants and talk bout curses and such.

---There's been a gold strike out in Yellowknife, in the Badlands. Lots of money to be made

for them as can get there afore the pirates and feds do. Only some say it's just a reavertrick to lure fresh meat out into their territory.

---They found more than one system, you know. Way back when they left Earth -that-Was.

And the others are starting to get back to us.

---The alliance has all sorts of secret programs for making better soldiers. Psychic

assassins, elite troops, and the ultimate disposable shock troops. Think about it, you everhear of the Reavers raiding a planet that supported Unification?

---I was visitin' a friend o' mine out on Dyton Colony (he works at the orbital dockyard) an'I saw 'em bring in this derelict Alliance ship they found driftin' out in the black. Nuthin' too

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unusual by itself, but the interesting thing was wrapped around the hull... a tentacle. I only

saw it fer a second, before it vanished behind a Blue Sun docking web, but saw it I did.

Plain as day.

---I got a friend who knows a gal who's a Parlementary Page. She says she heard that

there's one of them Generational Arks that took folk from Earth-What-Was still in the'verse, all derilectified in the Black. Big deal, real hush-hush. They say she's calledKuan

Yin. I know, I ain't stupid, they did all get broken down to make the first settlements in the

Core. But this one had shipwide life support failures. Quarter-billion people sufficated andfroze on this massive tub. Came into the System dead stick, never set down, and been

oribiting in a wide eliptic like a crazy-ass comet for centuries. Now it's passin' back

through populated space. Alliance wants it, 'course. But imagine the take if somebody gotto her first. More than you could haul, but if'n you could light her back up... think about it.

They preserved the rations t' keep forever, heavy equipment, medical facilities, Earth-That-

Was artifacts. You could feed a whole moon of people and equip yourself an army. Buy a

kingdom with that haul. Heck, maybe more if you're ambitious, these bastards were big. I

mean we were startin' over and tryin' to take Earth with us. Kinda boggles the mind.

---All the banks on Miranda still got hard coin. Some of the ports got spaceworthy boatsjust waitin' to gas and go. Alliance ain't got men enough to keep everyone out of either,

they spent their wad gettin' chewed up by Reavers when they thought they were just gangin'

up on that Mal Reynolds guy. Sure, they'll try and stop folk from lootin', but it's a big damnplanet and they don't got enough boats to get feds their fast enough. 'Course there's still

some Reavers about in that area, and you're bound to get into a disagreement over

'salvage rights' with other folk who got the same idea as you about a planet full of loot. An'

you don't want to be suckin' that globe's atmo for too long or you'll get a bit tuckered out...forever. Or worse.

---I heard tell of a man walking the worlds like one a' them masterless samurai, sword an'all, helpin' folks in need and strikin' against secret Alliance projects. They say he saw

Miranda for himself and turned agin' his masters.

---You've seen a Lovebot, right? They're pretty phoney when they move, but they could

pass for human in a still photo, they can walk and talk and breathe an' all. You think that's

the upper limit of that kinda technology, or just the most we've seen on the frontier? Y'allknow what I'm sayin'. That's right. Androids. They're out there right now, lookin' like

people, workin' for whoever can afford them. The Alliance, the Blue Sun, whoever. Doin'

jobs people can't do. Or won't do.

---Now I ain't no high-falutin' scientist, but I get around, and this just bugs me. Y'ever

stopped to consider how difficult it'd be to travel 'twixt stars with the boats we got? Heck,

travellin' from the Core to the bumblefuck nowhere outer moons is at east a weeks ride,that's if you travel direct-like in a fair spry tub. Ponder you now that travellin' twixt

diffrn't stars ain't like travellin' from one side o' the 'verse to t'other no more than holdin'

hands is the same as bareback grapplin'. That's like a single pace next to walkin' cross acontinent and back again. There's no way the Exodus happened like the histories said,

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everyone loaded onto boats pushed through the black with nothin' better than what we got

now. Heck, we'd still be in transit, and have a good long while left to boot. Either we went

a fair clip faster than they're sayin', or we didn't go as far as we're meant t'b'lieve. I don'tknow the answer my own self, I'm just sayin' it don't add up.

---They say there's an out of the way piss-nothin' moon way on the distant rim where armyfolk think the Unification War is still goin' on. Folk from both sides, and their still fightin'

it. Ion cloud or somesuch cut off communication, and their shuttles and ships got wrecked

long ago. They either got forgot, or some bean counter didn't see the margin in pickin' 'emup. Started with a battallion of Alliance and Browncoats, but they got chewed up over the

years. Now it's several dozen on either side. They say there's even a handful of kids

spawned from folk keepin' eachother warm in foxholes, raised like Spartans of Earth-That-Was to fight wars and nothin' else, 'cause that's all these poor souls know.

---Something's that's been all bothering me. They say that they sent us out here from Earth-

That-Was cause they went and used 'er all up. Right? Now, but my reckonning, we got bout

five dozen lil' Earth's floating around here, and none of them started that way. We went inand we made each and every one of 'em ourselves out of some lumps 'o rock and ice. So,

why couldn't Earth-That-Was just do the same damn thing, and save themselves one hell ofa walk? When they shipped our grand-pappy's out there, they weren't just leaving one

broken planet, they were fleeing a whole mess o' planets, and I know that they couldn't

have busted each and every one of 'em. My guess, they was planning ahead. They sent usout so that they'd have someone to do their work for 'em when they moseyed on back to

pick us up. All that talk 'bout aliens? That's just them coming back here to check on their

investement.

---I heard that some bastard went and discovered immortality. 'Course the Alliance would

have none of that less'en they were responsible, so they shoved him out an airlock, what

with them not being able to kill him proper. You find him floating around the black andhe'll tell you the secret to his sauce if you give him a trip back to civilization, assuming you

can get him to shut up long enough to ask for it. All that time drifting out there alone

makes a man right chatty.

---You know those DR-15s? Mechanic was looking at one the other day, and found out that

the reason they run like a one-legged grandmother is that they've got three analyticcapacitors, 'cept twore kept turned off. No clue why, though our greasemonkey says that

it don't look quite like anything's he's seen before. Anyway, he went a hooked the gorram

thing back up, and I'm gonna try flying that tub on all cylinders when I get back. Just gotta

finish shoring up my courage first. Pour me another one, bartender!