How to bring about a regime change in straightforward,
easy to follow steps; A simple guide by Tuco Ramirez (Volume 2)
People say that I’m not a man of great subtlety. People say that if I have the choice of getting a job done by either talking to someone, or by gunning them down where they stand, then I’d let my bolt pistols do the talking. However, they are wrong my friends and if they insist on disagreeing with me they better be able to back it up with a fast draw and a sure aim! Old Tuco Ramirez can use his natural cunning when he has to, particularly when there’s loot to be had. Take the time we were overthrowing the King of Pulonia Major. That wasn’t an occasion when you could just go in shooting and hacking without a care in the world. Oh no, that was a time for great cunning, or as one might say, the art of concealing your own defects, and discovering weaknesses of others.
We’d been working on the overthrow of King Agindar since our attempt at diplomacy and winning him over to our way of thinking had ended in us having to kill half of his retinue and car bomb his palace. Now, that definitely wasn’t my fault. I wasn’t even there when that whole mess kicked off. We’d left all the ‘talky stuff’ to our self proclaimed ambassador, Franz Schwarzenbach. The last thing I heard before all the shooting started was him saying how easy this would all be and how he’d have Agindar eating out of his hand before they’d tucked into the first course of the state dinner we’d been invited to. Now, I’m not one to dwell on the failings of others but what a bloody fiasco that turned out to be. As any of my crew mates will tell you, when I take a seat at the negotiating table I always take a fragmentation grenade with me to underline the strength of feeling that I hold about a particular position. Never failed yet. That’s where I believe old Franz went wrong. Nothing encourages compromise on the part of our opposite number like the threat of live ordinance.
Anyway, as I was saying, I’m not one to rake up the past mistakes of others so let’s move on. As part of our insurrection we’d decided to recruit disaffected soldiers from Agindar’s military to aid us in our struggle to usurp him. We’d succeeded in enlisting around 700 well trained men from Lotaro and had returned to Pulonia Major. We still faced a major problem though in that Agindar had a heavy cruiser in system, the Bellerophon, that would be more than able to repel any attack from the ships that we had at our disposal and that could also kill off any planetary assault we tried to pursue. Time for a cunning plan! Well, Bevan Gul, Malachai and I set to work on creating just such cunning plan to deliver the Bellerophon into our hands and completely turn the tables on Agindar and his cronies. After much discussion and the scrapping of many initial suggestions, we set upon the idea of smuggling a small team on board the cruiser disguised as the attendants of a group of courtesans provided by Lady Gamorrah. Once aboard we could take the cruiser’s captain, a nobleman called Fingol, hostage forcing him to allow a larger force of marines to land and secure key areas of the vessel, forcing their eventual surrender. Simple! The old cutting off the head of the snake trick. I’ve seen that old chestnut work a hundred times before and as they say, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.
Gul decided to go disguised as the courtesans’ guard, I went in as a clown/acrobat and Malachai dressed himself up as a servitor. You know, I’ve always thought that if I hadn’t become a mercenary, thief, bandit and murderer, that I might have joined the circus. I’m good with kids and would never tire of the Big Top, the smell of greasepaint and the rapturous applause of an enthralled audience. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls please welcome Tuco, the Flying buffoon!’ Anyway, I digress. The disguises worked a treat; we sailed past the guards in the Bellerophon’s docking bay. Hell, even I couldn’t tell the difference between Malachai and one of those zombie freaks! Actually, that’s maybe not such a tribute to Gamorrah’s makeup artists but anyway I looked amazing! What a transformation! Once out of the sight of prying eyes we switched clothing again and donned ship’s uniforms to throw their crew off the scent if we got picked up inside visitor restricted zones.
The next part of our plan involved us getting to the captain’s cabin in order to take him hostage. Our intelligence sources had sketched out a map for us but we wouldn’t have been able to make it that deep into the ship without our covers being blown at one of the many checkpoints. The only alternative was to take a space walk across part of the hull and come in at an airlock closer to his inner sanctum. We got out on to the skin of the ship OK but this is when we started to run into some hitches. Firstly, about ten minutes into our excursion, we realised that the ship was beginning to prepare to enter into the warp. If that happened and we were still on the outside of the ship, we’d have to start brushing up on our guidebook phrases for visiting the realm of chaos as we’d be keeping demons company for the foreseeable future. The airlock we needed to enter was a good slog so there were some tense moments getting there let me tell you my friends. To make matters worse we were buzzed by a fighter patrol and also had to negotiate a section of the hull that had some strange xenos infestation clinging to it. Never quite seen anything like it. Like barnacles or limpets they were but if you got close they’d shoot tentacles out at you. Thank the Emperor they didn’t catch hold of any of us and that we managed to string a grapple line up so we could rappel over and above them. Note, as soon as we get the opportunity we need to introduce those alien monstrosities to the cleansing flames of a promethean weapon!
Once back inside the ship we almost immediately ran into a patrol. With some quick thinking on the part of Gul we managed to fool them into thinking that we were a maintenance crew working out on the skin that was caught out by the unscheduled decision to prep for warp and were simply seeking shelter by the quickest means possible. They bought it for just long enough for us to get the drop on them and take their weapons. We then used them as unwilling escorts to get us as far as the final checkpoint without alerting the remaining guards or setting off any alarms. We overpowered the last of the pickets and found ourselves at the entrance to the captain’s quarters. Yet again Gul did some fast talking over the intercom and got the captain to power down the maglocks and let us into his cabin thinking we were a security detail sent from the bridge. Bingo! We were in and caught him literally with his pants down with some young male companion. Embarrassing for him but that’s what you get when you take your mind off the job and get to fooling around with the hired help.
Of course, I set to robbing him as quick as lightning! There were some really choice items in that cabin my friends let me tell you. Of particular note were a lovely 39th Millennium oil painting (a hunting scene on Jantine Prime) and a very valuable gold paperweight in the shape of a terminator space marine, a rare and unusual piece. While I was getting on with the basics Gul and Malachai were setting in motion the other part of the plan which was to force the captain to turn the ship over to us and allow our Lotarian insurgents to board. It took a little persuasion and I might have had to threaten to shoot him in the knee caps at some point but he eventually agreed and radioed his bridge crew to authorise the necessary shuttle docking clearances. And that my friends, is how you take a cruiser without firing a single shot! Someone once said that, ‘cunning is but the low mimic of wisdom’. Well, they never took a battle cruiser out with just three men and a couple of auto pistols!
Once we had control of the ship the rest of our impromptu revolution was a cake walk. Of course with the Bellerophon we very quickly established total control of the airspace over Pulonia Major and once you have that the outcome of a ground war is pretty much predetermined. It’s just a matter of time before your opponents get fed up of being bombarded from orbit and run up the white flags. Give them their due though they didn’t turn belly up at the first air raid and we actually lost quite a few good men before they realised the hopelessness of their situation. Now politics is politics and I’ve never claimed to be much of a strategist but to my great surprise Gamorrah and Co. didn’t string Agindar upside down from the nearest lamppost they could find. Admittedly, he is going to spend the rest of his life inside a pain amplifier but at least he’s still breathing, which is something I’d never leave one of my enemies doing if I got half the chance. Well, all’s well that ends well as they say. As I pen these lines we are taking some well earned rest in the pleasure palace of the former dictator and weighing up our next move as regards Gorian Debarii, which was the whole reason we came to this Emperor-forsaken hole in the first place. I hear young Darrius is returning with the Vengeance and the rest of the fleet in the near future. Perhaps he’ll have some idea of how to proceed? Me? I need to find someone who’s interested in taking a 39th Millennium Jantine hunting scene off my hands for the right price.
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