Yule Hoff
Yule Hoff was a graduate of Gudersnipe School and a member of the Assassin's Guild. He spent most of his life as a deep-cover operative, living on a Kamian-occupied planet during the Kamian Succession Wars, and was a key player in Operation Rook Takes Pawn, and spent thirty-seven years living as a fugitive and vagrant among the Kami.
War Account
"Insertion was easier than you'd think. The Kamians weren't particularly pissy about a solitary, unarmed courier ship vilating their space. They shot us down, but only because they were in the area. We were watching COM traffic, the patrol that took us out didn't even bother to report. We crash-landed, but that was fine.
"No, the weird part was learning to survive. Funny story; there aren't a whole lot of bums in GS towns. I was familiar with the concept of homelessness, but actually kind of had to go through 'hobo training' in preparation for the mission. Why? Because that was our cover. Sure, the Foundation likes to provide living spaces for the poor and downtrodden. Not exactly palaces, but our less fortunate permenant, safe shelters available to them if they do not desire to be homeless. The Kamians have a... somewhat different tack.
"Let's start with their economy: it's all slave-based. Think your old-timey servants but without getting paid. All of their grunt work - mines, farms, factories, they use slaves for all of that. Their house servants? Slaves. But they don't really treat them like property, buying and selling them the way you expect with that sort of thing. It was kind of like they came with the buisness; if you sold a farm you sold the slaves along with it, part of the deal. If you needed more slaves you got them from the milary. They didn't "cost" anything, you just asked. It was assumed you could afford to feed and cloth the slave. The Kamians didn't tend toward a lot of individual cruelty, so believe it or not, most people who couldn't afford slaves didn't have them.
"The class differentiation was really interesting. At the lowest-levels of Kamian society, you had other actual Kamian vagrants. These were mostly orphans - war orphans - who had survived into adulthood. Since they had no families, they were denied status, and without status they couldn't work. But since they were Kami, they couldn't be used as slaves. Many such orphans formed communities, constructed families for themselves; and, if they were lucky enough to find a piece of land no one was using, could build themselves a house and pull themselves out of poverty. It was especially interesting to me, because of the way it differed from poverty elsewhere in the verse. Kamians... don't really have stores, the same way you and I are used to. They all live in large houses, dozens, sometimes hundreds of family members; so shopping is done en-mass. You can't walk into a shop and buy a loaf of bread, your house has a bread kitchen and orders flour by the sack. So, for the poor, there was nowhere to buy food, at least not as individuals. More on that later.
"The middle class? There wasn't much of one. They lived in either large houses that were closer together and with more people, or in little complexes of houses. Think an apartment building, only everyone who lives there is related, it was crazy. There weren't as many of those. As I said, the Kamians didn't have much of an economy the way we'd precieve it; you had skilled laborers, sure, the guys who built their starships, carpenters, craftsmen, scientists. If there was a store, it was usually delivery-only, they didn't have malls or showrooms. A family might own the store, and if they didn't have slaves they'd use their own children for the grunt-work. In a good-sized family you always have a handful of teenagers to push brooms around. In the less well-off, you'd see older but unimportant family members relegated to menial tasks.
"The upper-class all lived on working estates in enormous manner homes. This was where all the food came from; or in the cities the manner would sit atop a large, industrial factory. If you were wealthy, you showed off with a big space.
"But the one constant was the dinner table. Every home had one. Rich or poor, big or small, they always ate dinner as a family; always sat at a single (sometimes massive) table.
"Our mission was to pose as escaped slaves. As I said, Kamians were not often given over to individual cruelties. Hunting down and punishing a single escaped slave wasn't worth the effort to them. Sure, if enough were to band together, they might carpet bomb the area; but if you kept to small groups, they just didn't much care.
"Food, however, was the real issue. There weren't stores to go and buy things in. The working estates sold raw goods; grains, meat, vegetables, so whole-salers and factories, who processed it and sold it to retailers; who in turn sold it back to the households. If you didn't have an established house, they wouldn't sell to you. You couldn't walk up to a place and even try to buy a bag of grain, they had no time to sell a single bag of grain to a single person.
"What we had to resort to were the kind of corner stores, convenience stores were you might grab a sandwich or a cup of coffee. Those would sell to us, but you couldn't buy anything non-perishable there, and a bum walking around with enough cash to eat at a coffee shop every day was bound to arouse suspicion. A lot of the time, we had to go back to basic survival, living off the land. If we kept to the forests or stole from the farms, that was our best bet. It was surprising how many people we found like that.
"In the countryside, outside of the big cities, you had the estates. Each estate would have a sort of workers' village (don't get your hopes up, everything was still communal) where the slaves lived. They had the land, the farm-works, grounds for the family, some areas set aside for recreation, and the formal boundaries. Between each estate was a sort of no-man's land, an unprotected wilderness, un-developed. Most of it was useless land, unsuitable for farming in one way or another. Some was owned but unused, some was hunted, most was just left.
"For the op. we were originally sent in to carry out, we had to travel extensively and get the lay of the land. This made for an interesting time; did you know Kamians don't have hotels? If you're traveling, and travel is rare, you're expected to know somebody whose house you can stay at. They don't take vacations. In the larger cities, you did have some kind of hotels; basically, if you were rich enough to own, say, a factory or what have you in the city, but also owned a manor in the countryside, but weren't quite rich enough to own a home in the city... yeah, they had some kind of spaces for rent like that, but it was such a niche market. Everything in Kamian civilization is about who you know, and what favors they can do for you. Need to travel somewhere? Better know a family you can stay with. Need to go far? Better know someone who owns a plane - yeah, they didn't have comercial air transport! That's how little travel there was!
"Trains were the Kamian preference, which explains why they took so well to the concept in the Primitive Plus. You had trains going in and out of the cities, trains going city to city. If you wanted to fly, you had to be rich enough to own a plane or connected enough to borrow one - or in the military. Most Kamians never traveled more than a few hundred miles from home.
"So, to travel, we took trains. We couldn't board the passenger trains: they may not have cared to capture us as escaped slaves, but we still couldn't be allowed to mingle with decent folk. So we rode on freight trains, living in box cars and such. Gathering the information we needed wasn't hard; every house had its slaves, and the slaves were either other humans or sub-races of Kamians. The humans were all to eager to help: they didn't even care what we were doing or why; a few simple "who lives here?"s and they'd tell us whatever we needed. The lesser races, like the Kami Dogens whom we often found, were a bit less forthcoming. I think they were more indoctrinated, plus they actually had something to lose. You can't fire a slave, see; and while most Kami Dogens were also slaves, they COULD be denied military service, which for them was considered a one-way ticket to the good life. Still, they were friendly people and often welcoming to vagrant travelers, and while they didn't like direct questions it wasn't hard to learn from them all we needed.
"No, the hard part was remembering it all. We couldn't risk writing anything down, not even in code. And, for security reasons, we couldn't bring our communications equipment with us on most of our fact-finding trips. We had to commit it all to memory, every name, every family, every affiliation. The Kamians helped a lot, they published freaking magazines with a lot of that crap in it. All we had to do was learn which families were where, Crimson Blade intelligence did the rest.
"When the time came to strike, we had weeks to get into position. I don't think there was a single target where somebody had trouble finding a sniper's perch. I think it helped that, since most were officers' wives, they lived in big manor homes, and the Kamians' favorite manor home was sitting in the middle of an open grassy field in the middle of a valley. Yeah, we did not have trouble.
"I was younger and personally knew some of the students at Gudersnipe School masterminding the whole thing, but most of us didn't actually know what part we were playing. Hell, a lot of them thought they were just going to execute Kamians, some thought we were going after officers. Most of us didn't know - most of us died never knowing - the role we'd play in ending the war. I wasn't surprised, but my team mates were shocked when the order came in to take our communications equipment with us to the nests. To transmit the signals from our scopes. Since I was 'in' on it, I was given the order to aim a little Kamian girl. I took the magazine out of my rifle first, no way in hell I was pulling that trigger. There were eight in my group, three shooters, three spotters, two defenders. My target was the daughter, my buddy had the wife, the third guy had a grandfather. Were allegedly to take out all the three and anyone else at the house we could get if the father - a man himself being held at gunpoint, on the bridge of a starship half a galaxy away - didn't comply. He did. We killed the grandfather anyway, he'd been an officer himself and participated in the slaughter at Danielle. We didn't tell him, the captured officer on that ship died thinking he'd saved his father, but we carried out the death sentence he'd received the day he fired on our boys.
"The next six months were exhilarating. It took a while for the Kamians to catch on. We'd been told, after the operation was completed, to hide our communications equipment again; but not before one last message: Kamian Hunting Season was open.
"In the lead-up, absolute secrecy was essential. Our weapons, our coms, all of it was hidden in secret caches, and we weren't even supposed to break any Kamian laws. We did a few, but no matter how juicy the target, we weren't allowed to go after anyone. Then, after the op, well we used all the intel we'd gathered and every bullet we owned. We took out the grandpa, and at his funeral around the family plot, seventeen more relatives. Some active officers, most retired. Then we went to another manner home and took out a very high-ranking leader and seven of his sons. This went on for six months; every two or three days, we'd be camped out, miles from a manner home, sighting in, choosing our shots. The Kamians had absolutely no defense, we'd made hundreds of hits before they even figured out we were using snipers.
"I'll say this for me and mine: we never once killed a wife or a child. We had every right, we'd been given permission, even orders - well, not on the child thing, but we'd been told to kill wives - but we didn't do it. My team limited ourselves exclusively to serving line officers after the first few "revenge" hits. Others didn't, but I don't think anyone ever went after the kids.
"A lot of teams were caught. Mine was lucky, we were always in it for the long game. The teams that got caught were systematic, the ones trying to just kill as many Kamians as they could, or the ones who just went from house to house. We were always planning on being extracted someday, and we also wanted to do the most lasting damage. So we were slow, and we moved around, and we'd laid low a lot. In all, my team and I remained active for another ten freaking years, until we ran out of bullets. They sent each of us in with twelve hundred sniper rounds, and we killed twelve hundred Kamian officers. Each.
"We kept our side-arms, but since they didn't have the range for continued long-distance attacks, we decided it was time to stop and go to ground. We'd gone in to the mission - now thirteen years ago - knowing full-well that we would not likely ever be extracted. We had two choices: evade and survive, or go down in a hail of bullets. I chose survival. Mine did the same.
"I think we hid out for a couple of more years after destroying our guns and most of our equipment. Once it became clear no one was looking for us, we started to travel again. We still had our coms, so we relied information back to the Crimson Blade. Not a lot of good it did, we were far behind enemy lines. THe kind of information we had access to was limited to things like which officers were home visiting their families; we couldn't get things like what ships were in orbit.
"Eventually, we founds a spot far from the populated areas, were a number of escaped slaves had settled. We knew we couldn't try to build any kind of technology or even form large groups, but it was good to be around others. The whole area was huge, most lived in caves or camouflaged, miles apart. But we could grow some crops, live off the land a lot, and socialize. I myself took up with a lovely young Kami Dogen woman and had the kind of on-again, off-again relationship that would elicit a sitcom laugh track. We were probably living in poverty, sure, but it was not a bad life.
"Three of my companions died, two from illness and one in a rock slide. We were living in caves, there wasn't a great deal we could do. Time passed, and I thought 'this is it, this is how I live out my life'. I had just broken up with my girlfriend for what felt like the twentieth time when the ships came. Apparently the Blade felt our region would be an idea beachhead for a ground campaign. I joined back up and fought for six months, using what knowledge I had (remember: thirty-seven years had passed) and eventually we took the planet. I married my Kami-Dogen girl, and we lived happily ever after."
