Syringe in One Hand, Gun in the Other 20 (Patreon)

Syringe in One Hand, Gun in the Other

Chapter 20

-VB-

8CA (Alan Marris’s clone)

Exploring new worlds always brought us a joy and excitement because we never knew what kind of spectacular new things we would find… and resources we might be able to exploit.

Our homeworld of Earth Nun wasn’t exactly that. Still, it provided us with land for our base, a lack of interlopers and interfering politicians, plenty of resources to exploit, and room for future family growth. Cyberpunk 2070 had been the worst world that we have visited so far; riddled with meddlesome megacorporations, scheming and incompetent politicians and governments, and a burned-out world where both the planet and the people lived their lives as if they were waiting to die, it was a horrible world that we lost more than we gained on paper.

Despite Earth Nun and Cyberpunk 2070 being poor worlds for us, they were the outliers and not the norm for alternate Earths.

The norm, as we came to find out through exploration of five dozen worlds, was - by the classifications we established for ourselves - on average Moderately Dangerous, Mildly Hostile, 20th Century Tech, Mild Deviance, and Unstable worlds.

At least that’s what we thought was the case for Earth G, a 20th century-ish Earth that was going through the end of its imperialism era. We had found ourselves in their equivalent of China that was going through a civil war-communist revolution-external invasion-large scale corruption-etc-etc-etc. So we did what we did best and set up a base and started inducting the locals into our local mercenary corp; they would be used in our ventures here but not in other worlds unless we could confirm their loyalty.

Having set up in the Liaoning province along the Dayang River, we expected to be free of most of the mess breaking out in the central plains. Liaoning was also a province rich in natural minerals, so we operated our mines using local laborers and more advanced tools like jackhammers instead of pickaxes. Where we saw natural gas and crude oil, we set up rudimentary pumps to exploit those.

It was to our surprise that the Imperial Kingdom of Joseon contacted us not too long after our production increased.

The Imperial Kingdom of Joseon, or Korea, was stuck between the civil wars of China, the imperialistic attitude of the Akisushima Dominion, and the meddling of foreign imperial powers. They noticed us and realized that we were a “modern” army that was both capable of fighting and exploiting resources. What the Imperial Kingdom wanted was for us to train them in both resource exploitation and modern army training. In return, they offered four counties right between them and China, grant us independence, recognize us internationally, and offered one of his daughters as wife or concubine for our “leader.”

Recognizing that becoming an acknowledged nation would allow us to operate much more smoothly on Earth G, we accepted, though we didn’t need to marry one of the princesses for the deal, thank you very much.

That’s… when the troubles began.

First, the King of Joseon was upset that we rejected the marriage. One of the “western-savvy” advisors to the king had to come to us specifically to inform us that marriage was still a form of alliance and rejecting that part of the deal was claiming, intentionally or not, that Joseon was not a worthy ally.

Second, all of the parties in China got upset. The commies got upset because we were operating in China. The nationalists were upset we were operating in China. The royalists were upset we were operating in China. The warlord that claimed Liaoning was his was upset we were operating in China. The Russies were upset because their allies were upset. The Akisushima Dominion was upset because they wanted to eat up Joseon in its entirety instead of maintaining the current protectorate status.

Yeah, we upset a lot of people. What we thought was going to be a smooth transition ended up becoming an international diplomatic clusterfuck involving at least eight different parties, half of whom were threatening violence.

Now, we could technically leave. We had other worlds, after all. However, we made a promise to all of our workers that we would provide them with wage, safety, and a future, and we weren’t liars. We now had responsibilities here.

So we made our stand and decided that it might not be a bad idea to go and see the Joseon princess.

Or we would have if the day before we would have left hadn’t begun with a warlord’s army bearing down on our base.