From the personal journal of Bruce Wolf

Let’s be honest with ourselves for a minute. I was never anything more than a fake Wolf. Unlike the Trueborn Steel Wolves, I had no lineage, no claim to clan Bloodlines or Bloodnames or the like. And given when I came into the Steel Wolves, my claim to being a Wolf began and ended with Kal Bloody Radick. I look back on it now and the few Steel Wolves that wound up becoming Imperial Wolves, and I notice that almost all of them were Trueborns or had become warriors prior to the Blackout. It does make your feel a little bit cranky, specially given that Anna Bloody K is now an Empire Star Colonel.

I only mention this because Mu Galaxy’s warriors are real Wolves. They’re citizens of the Empire who have chosen to become warriors and, in doing such, do all the same bullcrap that I did; give up your name and identity and all that sort of buggery. But given that they’re actually a bunch of galahs who don’t know their arse from a stick, they’re pretty piss-poor warriors. And yet, I knew fake Wolves who were far better warriors then these real Wolves ever could be.

The last little blue we had here on Shasta kind of proves my point. We’d spotted a convoy heading through the jungle that looked interesting. Much of that was because they had six tanks escorting a pair of trucks, which seems like an awfully bloody big investment of resources for a little bit of security. So we were really interested in what they were protecting and maybe takin it for ourselves.

Recon lance was sent out after them, which meant I got a chance to try out my new Buccaneer in a fight. (Okay, it’s not new; it’s probably seventy-something years old and it’s been running on a huge bloody mess of bypasses and jury-rigs that’s making Stanley cry, but you get the point). We hit them on the road in the jungle, which we figured would really limit their mobility while giving us the advantage; after all, three of the lance jump, and it’s not like my Bucc’s a bludger in the speed department either. We’d also bought along the Spectres, who were clamped onto the Ostscout.

The enemy force weren’t exactly on top of it all. Intel says that the poor mongrels in Mu galaxy are at the bottom of the Empire’s supply chain. Their equipment comes from the League salvage that every other Galaxy has passed up on, so they have a real dog’s breakfast of leftovers. In this case, their understrength Star was equipped with some old League medium tanks; Vedettes, Main Gauches and other such bollocks.

We were running rings around them, jumping tree to tree and not giving them good shots. I mean, they were tyring; those two Vedettes must have burned down half the bloody jungle by spraying Infernos all over creation trying to hit us. I mean, they hit Shona a couple of times and she screamed blue murder at them, but that’s Shona. Even after they popped out some Battle Armour we kept the battle mobile enough to make sure their value was limited. (We also got some good intel out of that; they’d upgraded some of their old suits to be Surats so maybe the cluster’s supply situation isn’t entirely rooted).

Sure they got some shots in; all of us did take a few hits, including Shona nearly losing her Pixie’s left arm, but we gave back much better then ere got. After we destroyed one of the Vedettes and both Guaches, and left a second Vedette immobilised the rest of the bludgers decided that they’d had enough and were going to bugger off. The one immobilised Vedette crew chose to torch their tank before bailing. Likewise, their Battle Armour melted into the jungle and would have been hell to catch.

In fact, in a way, the two trucks gave us more of a hard time. The pair of them took off like a pair of woolly jumpers, trying their best to slip past us and make a run for it. In the end, it took me looming over them with hatchet in hand to convince them that it wasn’t the best plan. The drivers bailed out and we were left to see what cargo had been worth all the effort.

Turns out they were hauling prisoners, of all things. A bunch of rough-looking people with not much immediately in common besides being generally burly and probably happy to rip the heads off their Wolf guards had they not been secured. As it was, once the Wolves buggered off, they were glad that we released them but also not entirely talkative either. They didn’t exactly offer us much in the way of conversation an instead simply took the trucks and drove off. We later found the trucks abandoned, so yeah.

All in all, a bit of a weird start to our stay on Shasta. Makes me wonder what’s going to happen next.