MURDERBALL

But the politics of the surface are complicated. War is uncommon and small and quick when it does occur in the modern era. ritualized, organized aggression is re-purposed into brutal games of sport, like football, but heavily militarized. Warriors are invested with psychic debt, magically augmenting their abilities far beyond those of a normal human. They have incredible strength, wield huge swords and axes and projectile weaponry on a playing field, wear ancient pieces of battle armor left behind by the space station soldiers and held together with a variety of magic and "kludging" a form of electro-magnetic steam powered engineering that involves sheathing things in a lot of copper and cable. There are 3 types of armor, the huge mech suits, the medium, iron man style of full body armor, and a light, flexible armor with jump jets and/or wings. Each of them typically requires spirit energy to function, in concert with barely functioning targeting computers and weapon systems, kludged to fire low-tech, reusible weaponry like bolas and spiked cannonballs.

Combatants try to get 3 markers to the other end of a field. Each marker secured in the enemy territory is a point, and each enemy marker captured is a point. Teams can field 3 marker carriers, or one, or an entire team devoted to rapid marker movement. This is important because singling eachother out for duels on the field is a critical component of the game, and winning a duel is worth extra points. Ties can be broken by duels, and many a duel has won a game. Dueling is achieved by pulling a warrior's flag off his back, so contact must be made.

3 duels are possible, per team, for a total of 6 points. Thus, teams strategize around these elements. Some teams are all carriers, avoiding combat and simply moving and capturing markers. Some teams focus all their strategy on duels, fielding hulking murder machines and one or two nominal flag carriers.

Dueling a marker carrier wins the duel points and the point capture if successful. This is counterbalanced by marker carriers typically being the hardest to catch and successfully duel.

There are 6 players per team. Typically this is organized with a team captain acting as a shot calling battlefield commander, mounted on foreman or reasonably fast Dyqorticual.

2 Players will act as flag carriers, usually *though this can be increased depending on strategy*

3 players will act as dedicated duelists or flag guardians. Typically they'll assign two heavies as flag guardians protecting their carriers, with the remaining heavy as the dedicated duelist who roves the battlefield looking for a fight.

The playing field is rectangular, and players traverse the long sides towards eachother, attempting to outmaneuver to plant flags on the enemy side.

All the glory goes to the duels, so this ends up being where the best players gravitate, where the media focus is, this and the team commander, who is usually also the team's owner and also usually a duelist as well. It's brutal.

Geo-politics, economics, and culture is now focused to a large degree around this game, sort of like Hunger Games, with titanic amounts of money swirling around the results of any given game. Lives are won or lost based on the games, eternities are decided by the games. Players are heroes and villains, huge celebrities, themselves sometimes up to debt for millenia. The wealthiest populations field the best teams, by investing their warriors with huge amounts of spirit energy as an advantage.

Jehann ends up playing for one of these teams, one of the loser teams. Using her special powers and ability to communicate with the greatest strategic mind the humans have (the ship's AI), she is able to start winning, using the priviledges afforded by warrior society to move freely and get closer to her target. No one knows who she is exactly, and no one knows she is an agent of the space station.

She rises to team captain.