Schlock Mercenary

''Schlock Mercenary'' is a comedic webcomic written and drawn by Howard Tayler. It follows the tribulations of a star-travelling mercenary company in a satiric, mildly dystopian 31st-century space opera setting. After its debut on June 12, 2000, the comic was updated daily until its conclusion in 2020, supporting its author and receiving five Hugo Award nominations.

The comic had been collected into fifteen print volumes , and a sixteenth volume has been announced.

The online comic concluded in July 2020 at the end of the twentieth volume, with an announcement by Tayler that the main story was complete, though spin-offs might be expected in the future.

Story

The story primarily centers on Captain Kaff Tagon, his mercenary crew, Tagon's Toughs, and their roles as members in a for-profit military organization. Various story lines have the crew swept into conflicts on a single planet, a galaxy-spanning apocalyptic crisis or intergalactic war.

In the distant future of ''Schlock Mercenarys setting, many changes face Terran society. Faster-than-light travel is attained, alien races are contacted, and technology undergoes radical improvements.

Alien species varied from fairly humanoid to almost unrecognizable. There are carbosilicate amorphs with no easily definable limbs or organs (the eponymous Sgt. Schlock), eight-limbed Gatekeepers, two-bodied Uklakk, and the unknowable Pa'anuri, beings made of dark matter.

The number of sapient species descended from Terran stock increased as Earth's genetic engineers refined their craft. Enhanced chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, dolphins, snakes and two species of sentient elephant have citizenship. Genetic enhancement of the human population resulted in the purple-skinned photosynthetic "Purps", along with general improvements to the population.

Technology

As in many science fiction stories, technology forms a large part of ''Schlock Mercenarys storytelling framework. Several story arcs revolve around the political conflict surrounding rapid technological change. After a particularly complex or interesting new system is introduced to the comic, its in-comic explanation is often supplemented with a footnote.

Travel between the stars is accomplished through the use of "wormgates", large wormhole generators controlled by the enigmatic F'sherl-Ganni Gatekeepers. Within the storyline of the comic, wormgates are supplanted by the "teraport", a device allowing near-instant travel between any two points—usually as long as neither point is within range of an interdicting device. In that case, the teraporting object may be destroyed.

The F'sherl-Ganni also constructed several buuthandi, ''Schlock Mercenarys take on a Dyson sphere. A buuthandi is a balloon of solar-sail material around a star. Light pressure and solar wind offset the star's gravitation to keep the balloon inflated, while habitats and maintenance facilities dangling from the inner side act as ballast to balance the sails. Despite their tremendous surface area, a buuthandi provides a disproportionally small amount of livable habitat. "Control cables, millions of square kilometers of slack sail material, and some very clever engineering allow the 'balloon' to compensate for (and, in some cases, mitigate) the mood swings of the contained star." In the ''Schlock Mercenary'' universe, a buuthandi is about 300 million kilometers in diameter. ("Buuthandi" is a shortened form of a F'sherl-Ganni phrase which, after the foul language is removed, can be roughly translated as "This was expensive to build.")

Medical technology is based on nanotechnology or artificial replacements for damaged body parts. One important item featured in the comic is the "magic cryo-kit", an illegally-modified device with the capability to rebuild an entire body as long as the brain is intact. In the strip, this is shown as "from the head down", but, presumably, nothing more than the brain is necessary. Conventional legal medical technology is also capable of full-body regeneration, although at a much slower pace and dependent on your HMO insurance options. The Toughs employ various technologies to protect survival of heads until their owners can be regenerated. An example of this technology is the comedically ubiquitous "head-in-a-jar", which permits a character to interact in a storyline despite an otherwise-fatal injury. Another is the "nanny-bag" maintains the severed head and/or entire body of an otherwise mortally-wounded teammate for an unknown length of time. For example, Kevyn Andreyasn's head was sustained for several weeks.

In addition to medical benefits, nanotechnology gives the ability to "boost" soldiers to high levels of physical performance. Minor enhancements are legal, but extreme military modifications are highly-regulated. Significant examples of soldier-boosting within the strip are the mercenary grunt Nick and the bounty hunter Doythaban, along with the extreme boost of Kevyn.

Computer hardware progressed to the point true, strong artificial intelligence is common, and several artificial intelligences are characters in the story.

Weapons technology drastically improved as well, and a mercenary's arsenal can include railguns, lasers, non-lethal nanomotive "goober" rounds, and plasma cannons. Old-fashioned bullet-firing firearms continue to be effective against unprotected targets... and are less likely to rupture a hull than a plasma bolt.

Energy is a resource literally too cheap to meter. Anything powered by miniaturized fusion reactors (which, in the 31st century, are so advanced, they can operate solely on atmospheric gasses), is easily-fueled by massively powerful neutronium-annihilation "annie" plants—spherical devices generating massive amounts of power by gravitationally converting mass to energy, a means of power generation made possible by ubiquitous gravity manipulation. One-shot devices (and bombs) are often powered by fullerened antimatter, a carbon-based powder which contains antiprotons at the parts-per-thousand level, and should ''never'' be incinerated.

Gravity manipulation is a process as commonplace as modern electronics, employed in starship propulsion and artificial gravity, and weapons and shielding against weapons. Controlled/artificial gravity is referred to as "gravy." Gravitic weapons in particular are common and developed due to their dual purpose—as potent weapons, they can compress matter into neutronium which can then fuel an annie plant. The degree of this control is dependent on the number of projectors. For example, the battleplate ''Tunguska'' was able to manipulate individual limbs, and individual ''digits'' of crew on board the ''Serial Peacemaker'' while smaller ship create nodes of gravity in a few points on the ship and without the same level of control. However, the generation of gravity is beyond the capabilities of the sophonts of the Milky Way, necessitating ships to be constructed around annie plants as sources of gravity to manipulate.

These devices and more are built using fabrication technology, or "fabbers". While rare and expensive, possession of one of these portable factories and the appropriate designs allows for the cheap mass-production of any physical item. Several of the mercenaries are trained in fabber design, allowing the company to cheaply produce and repair their gear.

Main characters

Notable members of the crew include Kevyn Andreyasn; title character Sergeant Schlock, who is a carbosilicate amorph; Petey, a former artificial intelligence and now Fleetmind and pseudo-God; and the wry AI and former boyband, Ennesby.

;Sergeant Schlock
:The title character, a carbosilicate amorph " everyman" with no easily definable limbs, organs, or moral compass. He normally appears as a large greenish-brown mass coming up to about normal human chest height.

;Captain Kaff Tagon
:The human leader of the mercenary company "Tagon's Toughs". In early strips of the comic, he exhibited overt sexism, such as proclaiming that "women don't belong in my command structure" and hiring a doctor based on her looks.

;Kevyn Andreyasn
:Munitions Commander and resident mad scientist, an engineering genius. He has more common sense and faster intuition than most of the members of the mercenary company. He enjoys tinkering with stuff in his lab, being crazy over mechanical stuff as the stereotypical nerd. His most notable invention is the teraport, a teleportation technology which eventually led to full-scale warfare spanning the galaxy when it was made open source.

;Breya Andreyasn
:Former leader of the mercenaries, now diplomat, and Kevyn's sister. She is highly competent, can operate in a variety of fields, and has little tolerance for disrespect, having once injured Captain Tagon after he purchased power armor for her which featured exaggerated breast sizes. She was first seen collaborating with her brother on commercializing his "teraport" stardrive, handling marketing and business aspects.

;Ennesby
:Ennesby is an AI with Tagon's Toughs who looks like a "flying maraca" (the shape of his first physical body). He has human-looking eyes, a speaker grille in front that moves like a mouth, and floating eyebrows. The maraca is capable of withstanding chemical explosives at point-blank range. His various additional capabilities include short-ranged levitation and a maser.

;Post-Dated Check Loan ("Petey")
:The artificial intelligence of the massive warship of the same name, originally the ''Sword of Inevitable Justice''. Driven mad by a gruesome mutiny, Petey existed in a state of total introversion, rendering the ship nearly inoperative, until coaxed back to reality by the mercenary company. He controls the ship's every function and manifests an avatar in the form of a floating hologram of an Ob'enn, the koala-like race of warmongering xenophobes that constructed him.

;Chief Warrant Officer Gunther Thurl
:His job entails sitting at a console, and that, coupled with a tendency to snack and some genetic predispositions, meant he used to be obese. Because of a botched mission during which Schlock ate everything but his head, his body had to be regrown. He is now a lot slimmer than what he was used to. When the company added several new recruits (including Andy and Legs, q.v.), he was promoted to Chief Warrant Officer. Due to his experience and age, Thurl handles many of the administrative tasks that the current ship AI, Tagii, and Ennesby do not or are not authorized to do.

;Doctor Edward Bunnigus
:Originally hired by Captain Tagon for her well-endowed figure, she has consistently demonstrated an ability to deal with every situation Tagon's Toughs encounters. Less of a mercenary than many of her fellow officers, she concentrates on keeping the trigger-happy mercenaries alive. Her gender-inappropriate name, sizable intellect, and absurd proportions are the consequence of idiot parents and pre-birth gene therapy. Her parents wanted a child who had both a brilliant mind and the body proportions of an