Alster Unioners

Been a while.

How's the heart holding up, Nisk'?

Yeah, I rotated stationside. They'd put some kinda' pinescent in the life-support recirculation. The steelplate tastes like Hamburg Tagia. Lecker, right? Keeps the newblood from going cuckoo.

Maintenance work's... honest. Seems they'll make an electrical engineer outta' me if they keep putting everyone to the plates. I think I'm borderline enjoying myself. So a bunch of Kusarian quantatransistors came through lately - surprise surprise, they all work. The merits of peace - smugglers don't stiff you for running over an active combat zone. Shooting up to the Hogosha is a breeze.

Truth is, I'd be happy to shack up here for a while. Maybe, after all the tearing apart we've been doing, I'm obliged to. There's only so many ejection cycles you can put a body through before you end up in a bag. But you know me. Shirking my obligations.

She stubs her cigarette out on a plasteel wall, smudging the ash into the ventilator grate.

Truth being truth, this life is wearing on me. Taking the sharp edges down flat. Call it the time of year. Resolutions coming at you from all kinds of desperate, hardhatted guys. The food's good. Too good. Real duck patte good up from Ceuta deck. Perhaps it's the pirate in me hankering for the promise that you take the short pains for the long privilege. Greed and pragmatism, all lumped together.

The Old Guard are coming home. You heard Admiral Lindauer preaching of a sea-change over the Neuralnet. Seems like Frei's longgame was as good at it could have been. Even Arbeitsdirektor Garen, that ramified bastard, probably would be clapping his old, skeletal paws together at the sight of how far we've delved into the woods. It's enough to get you singing the Internationale, right?

Anyway. Here's the weld-together:

We're going raiding. Gonna' strip the 'Felds back for any hard resources we can. Take the cells and make them thrive by putting fresh credit chips in the packs. Start pushing out new ships to get our glut of fresh Unioners some deckplates under their feet. Time to win some hearts and minds by seeding the hard loot over Hamburg. Ears to the floor from the refugee ships cropping up is that the Westfalen isn't tagging back to Kiel's L1 point till she's been fixed up. That means we're left with the Soltau in Hamburg - and boy, she isn't happy about us making a haven up here.

We can pull our eyes from the Sigmas - The Military's doing out our own work out here. We roll with the times and focus on glueing Thuringia into our net. There's a boatload of imperial artifacts out there we can hoover up and roll into a fresh, scarlet carpet for the new order. In this brave new world we're helping put together, they might even help us gift ourselves a road to a better life.

There's a lot of kids dreaming out here. It's up to us to keep them from disappointment. Like the lot of our own generation.

Alster Unioners

I needed to stretch the fingers.

Zurich can sit you wrong. It helps to be flying with steady hands off starboard, off the ventral. It's the icebath of space.


Help. Keller wouldn't know the concept if it was screaming for its own name whilst he murdered it.

Alster Unioners

You live and work in space long enough, you learn the solar touch through the visor. That rise of hackles that creep up and over you where you can feel the radiance through your suit. The pressure of a mad, angry star. It's not the cool old red codgers you need to watch out for. It's the firebrand blues and yellows.

You dredge enough Junker roidshine yarns out of the edgeworlds, they crawl back into the sense and sensibility of the real-world, the core worlds. Back where everything makes sense.

But you didn't choose this life - for of you who were nutty enough to make a choice - because you were made from mainline mettle. No, you're plasteel brittle and you'll break under the hammer blows, but boy, you just keep pushin'. It doesn't matter that your very existence makes the cabals of dictator-lickers roll their eyes and cackle to their acolytes. In any hard and fast metric that sticks, you'd question yourself.

Rosalina. I'm going to have to ask that capricious polser how she keeps her lid buttoned down. I won't, of course. She's not the kind to confide in me. Markus Webb is as rigid as a board.

So, uh. Current events.

Got accosted by a 'Schuhshiner with the least original tacname I've ever met. 'Jaeger'. Literally hunter. What a complete wad of a name. Anyway, he shot me down. After finding out that I survived (my podluck is still dancing in Molly Clovers), whoopee-do, I crawled their log data back to the rock.

The shoulder's getting worse. I'd like to say I'm steeling myself, but it ain't that. I'm being bent around like a spoon, and the only magic trick in the room is how I'll fold over.

Why is it the bad guys are accursedly full of themselves? That's a song that'll be played forever more. 'Course, they're not. There's layers to even compost, right? The LWB love rolling this over me. As if I'd know a Farm from alien life. That's the problem with being at the head of the readyroom, you've gotta be dishonest about being god.

Saying that.

There was that MND guy. And that GRG captain - they all seemed willing to revisit the potholes of the past. Revolutionaries? They're like a comet hitting a trade lane gate. Not so much arrogance as a force of nature. No, these guys theoretically stood for the big heavy boot of 'Progress' with a Political-P, but they all gave us a chance at a reprieve.

Ran into Os and C again. Those captains know the score. Crooked as a Coalition tractor emitter but damn are they honest about their corruption. I get that I'm meant to hate them but it's tricky to do that when you realise if you have to blow out their pressure hull you're going to be maiming ten thousand odd jack-and-jills on their winter vacation.

Honesty. It's a rare, valuable kindness that can't be buried no matter how much antimatter the goons project at it.

It's late. I'm waxing philosophical post smokerush.

Time to hit the cubes.