[dogscoff]

Kleesh was on the up again. As Minister of Galactic Domains, she had taken direct responsibility for every failure of the colonisation projects, and there had been many failures. For a while she had been forced into virtual exile by the propaganda and machinations of Shrikeesh, her scheming sister, who had worked her way up to become the current favourite for the crown while simultaneously pushing Kleesh down a few dozen places. Kleesh had retreated for a few years to one of the more comfortable colonies and hatched a small brood of around 70 with one of Shkimsk's sons. she had decided that if she couldn't take the throne legitimately, she would have to take other steps to secure power and respect for herself and her line. As a result she had begun to raise and educate the brightest and fiercest four-dozen of her offspring to take their eventual places as planetary governors, and had begun building shipyards and military training camps.

However, the situation had begun to improve since then, partly through Kleesh's own shrewd maneuvering and partly as a result of blind chance. It all boiled down, as everything does with the KanesS, to food. Despite the catastrophic delays caused by the slow progress of the colonisers, the exploration of other planets and their ecosystems had eventually led to an explosion in the exotic foods market and Kleesh had been in a prime position to capitalise on the exports now flooding back to the homeworld. Every KanesS everywhere wanted to try the latest meats from across the galactic domains, and she and Shkimsk had found very profitable ways of managing exports. More importantly though, she had managed to tie her own image tightly to the influx of delicacies. The average KanesS saw her as the direct source of their new cuisine and gradually they were learning to love her for it. Shrikeesh had tried to compete by buying food from various alien governments, but she simply couldn't provide the sheer variety that came from the colonies. Despite this however, KanesS still wanted to stay at home to enjoy having the benefits of expansion brought to them. Colonists had to be press-ganged from the lower classes, and only a very few desperate or enterprising souls went voluntarily.

But then the Xiati arrived, and everything fell into place. It all began with the boarding of a stranded Xiati exploration craft on the Pruli/Marak warp point. Shreekep, The captain of that craft, returned to Catia with a hold full of exotic meats- some of it still alive- and made a packet from selling the captured hull to a salvage firm as well. Xiati meat wasn't particularly tasty, but it was hugely popular. The thought of eating something intelligent fuelled an ancient hunger in the KanesS that hearkened back to the good old days before the Red Plague and the ban on cannibalism. True, the occasional Cue Cappan had been eaten before now, but that had been different. The Cue Cappans were allies, and as such they were strictly off the menu under similar penalties to those for cannibalism. The Xiati though- it was open season on them, and a veritable frenzy ensued. Shreekep became an overnight folk hero. Orders for suitably-equipped scavenging ships soared, and suddenly every entrepreneur, every adventurer-aristocrat wanted to prowl the frontiers, scouting for damaged or under-defended craft.

And this new enthusiasm didn't stop at piracy: Suddenly the colonies themselves were seen not as harsh and inhospitable hell-holes but as gleaming new worlds, bursting with excitement, opportunity and adventure. The colonisation offices were inundated, and if more than half of the starry-eyed hopefuls who boldly migrated were unable to cope with the stark chasm between their expectations and the gruelling reality of colonial life, then at least there was always another transport right behind them, full of yet more hopefuls eager to try where the others had failed. In this highly competitive, high-turnover environment it was inevitable that cannibalism would reassert itself on the colonies and the transports invariably went home empty. This only served to enhance the romantic perceptions of the colonies as a wild frontier where one could still find old-world values and plenty to eat, and Kleesh eventually relaxed cannibalism regulations somewhat to reflect the actual state of the new societies she ruled.

For those who remained at home frontier-chic was all the rage. Suddenly it was fashionable for comfortable middle-class parents to order their homes tunnelled in the vertical zig-zags favoured by the colonists of Catia IV, where tidal activity and frequent ice-breaks made such water traps an essential feature. Others used the 'accented' sonar that colonists from Daran II had employed to counter the crawler-mimics that infested their tunnels and interfered with their signals.

The public mood was swinging confidently in Kleesh's favour, and she was shrewd enough to capitalise on it as soon as possible. She organised an expedition to the tiny moon of Pruli VIa, upon which a small Xiati outpost had been discovered by Captain Shreekep. She advertised for willing combatants on the homeworld and within just a few tenths had almost fifty thousand hungry KanesS, all of them gripped with frontier-fever. She organised them into fighting units under her own household guard and loaded them all onto a specially-built invasion craft, along with a handful of adapted tunneling machines.

Apart from the core of professional soldiers, her makeshift army was largely untrained and armed only with whatever weapons the troops could provide for themselves- in most cases this meant nothing at all. She had expected to take heavy losses, but the Xiati were completely unprepared for the assault. The colony had several million inhabitants, but none of them were armed and it was clear they didn't know what the KanesS wanted their Xiati for, because they surrendered with only just enough resistance to satisfy Kleesh's bloodthirsty rank and file. She knew that if left on the planet her troops would rampage among the local population and slaughter every inhabitant in a matter of days, so she had the vast majority of them herded back onto the transport, paid handsomely for their efforts and shipped off to Catia to be trained into a properly armed and disciplined fighting force. She left most of her experienced soldiers on Pruli, where they kept control of the population until the arrival of the transports.

Pruli VIa was now a KanesS colony, and the colonisation offices back on the homeworld had been advertising land there for tenths. All the colonies so far had been on ice worlds, where the KanesS could dig their tunnels and feel at home, even on those worlds where alien atmospheres made it necessary to construct air-tight domes over the tunnel entrances. This moon, however, had no ice-sheet to speak of, it was solid rock. The Xiati had overcome this by building strange little structures on top of the rock and putting their homes and facilities within them. Every KanesS who bought space on the colony was to be given one of these structures. It seemed an unnatural, unpleasantly exposed way for to live from any KanesS' viewpoint, and ordinarily Kleesh would have had to give such endesirable properties away. However there were near-riots outside the colonisation offices as KanesS clamoured for the limited places, because the Xiati-built homes for sale included not only the structure but everything- and everyone- already in it.