The Treason of Lady MacDuff - The private diary of Nesrin Khan

[Enkidu]

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HostSource: Local Neuraspace. Phalanx fleetwide FTL commnet.
UserIdent: Templar Nesrin Elhertani Khan, MidCOM.
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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
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[Enkidu]

Entry 1. 23rd July, 823 AS.

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This log has been a long time coming - perhaps several years coming. If I had a diary with me before Pygar, maybe I’d remember more. Maybe it’d just be more atoms for Di’tarau to stitch to me, like a load of misshapen sheets into a poor man’s trousers.

So. Everyone on the ship, seemingly - Miranda, William, Aria, Raven, Hunt, have been off at Honshu for only a week and I’m already going mad - the COC net feels like someone set off a nuke. The workload hasn’t been light, of course… I’ve been sweating my way playing diplomat with an ESRD Commander for the Liberty Navy - some Avery Reeves. Mild mannered man - adept at his job and kind enough. I kept my poker eyes squared away and I think I sold him - he’s on our side, anyway. Makes me dry-retch when I think about the consequences of failure; how can I fight Libertonians? How can we forget the price of war in only twenty two years? I worry about the safety of the Eidolon through Magellan, through to Kansas, worry we’ll have to crawl back to the Commonwealth if the Republic stitches us. But I trust Avery - he sang me enough real talk to make me think he’s in with the good guys, fighting the good fight. He’s no misanthrope, the man’s a patriot, you can see it in his soul and he knows the Republic’s in twilight if it doesn’t get conciliatory sometime, but if I can’t gain traction with him, I’ll change my attack vector and go for the moral throat - I have to. Whatever the price of peace.

Allah protect me. I’m about a panic attack away from wishing Saffir was back around, traipsing around the halls nearly getting her head blown off, or relaying vague half-orders through her robot myrmidons. I almost miss her paranoid eyes staring everybody down over the security screens - it felt maternal, at least. Good thing is I won’t have to go stir crazy any longer - the man himself summoned me directly over the FTL for some project. Guessing by my skill set, it’s going to be some real skunkworks shenanigans since Aria wasn’t enthusiastic about having me play guard dog. If there’s one good thing about this N-diplomacy nonsense, I can take my work with me, providing I don’t get pranged by the Republic’s finest on route - good Darwin irony, if I wasn't at the bottom of the feed line.

Foulke messaged me over the N-net, just an hour after Hunt. Told me to head to Kamakura space port before burning to the blacksite - over fleet standard comms, which puts his “we may be watched” statement into acuity. If there’s any way of attracting signals intelligence filtering, it’s happening - partly why I set this whole thing up on a private server. William’s paranoid, but it must be major enough - I don’t know if he knows why I’ve been summoned to Honshu yet - I know I don't.

Which gives me an interesting crises of faith. Hunt or Foulke. Duty or friend.

I’ll have plenty of time to pick an order on route. Carting two of dragoon wing with me on escort detail - it’s as much as I can spare without drawing attention to myself. Don’t want to get caught violating the sovereign territory of the Republic mid negotiations like an asshole.

Put the right word out for me.

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)

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[Enkidu]

Entry 2. 26th July, 823 AS.

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Someday, I’m going to grow sick of having everything I believe in thrown back at me as false.

Duty, or friend?

I keep slicing my mind on my own facile words. I let myself be sucked into misconception and played Judas when I should have been a Simon. It doesn’t matter now, anyway. I learnt what I need to learn.


Turns out I can trust Raven again. Those aren’t words I type with any great ease - she could walk in on me at any moment and I’d have to tab the bloody thing down. Yes, they’re mad, paranoid. Raven and Hunt, Hunt and Raven. Two ants circling the cosmic drain, swimming against the tide. Mortals with a demigod’s touch and the inability to know what to do with it.

I met with Foulke in a noodle bar off the Spaceport proper and he… he almost convinced me to plan a coup - a Junta of officers. Lord protectors. Shoguns for the Empress - we had pretensions enough. The conversation went clandestine enough until I spotted Pike’s cloaking veil - we thought he was there to kill us. Snuff the traitorous flame before it touches the match paper - poof, gone. Old fashioned Order style. Turned out he saved us from prison sentences.

Foulke had busied himself planetside; got into a bar fight with the local Hogosha gangbangers. He never offered the specifics, never had to - I was more preoccupied with the projectile rifle pointing at us. State police officers tried to catch us dialoguing - he played the disgruntled IMG stock character and I played the concerned honeymooner dame - worked well enough until they caught him loaded down to the mid-forehead with black hair dye, the blond twit. Well, they got to laugh for all of two minutes before Pike zapped them with a few well trained knockout darts from the long gun - so we’re criminals now. Great.

How can two principled, capable soldiers rationalise with the same ethos they serve under, the destruction of their own cause? Auxesia exists to protect the people of Sirius, MIDCOM exists to protect Auxesian populi. As simple as on and off. You protect yours, and I’ll also protect yours. Vox populi vox deorum, we chanted, till our responsibilities infected our minds and became causes all of their own. We lost our function in the machine. We acted on what we thought we knew, as officers, as those gifted with command - and forgot our own commanders.

Act on what you know - do not suppose what you don’t. Therein lay the shatter point.

I still have the data chip Foulke gave me in his pocket - the location for the Corvo he and the rest of our diablerie of dissidents have eyes on if we ever need an external command centre. Somewhere that isn’t crawling with the scrying stone eyes of Raven and Hunt. Pike - the sniper Hunt sent to overwatch us - I nearly broke his neck. I bent the plates around his jugular till he stuck a sidearm into mine. He never fired. He never twitched. And in his pacifism, I knew I had sinned.


She loves us, but she fears us. Raven is a glass cannon - mentally and physically frail, morbidly pregnant despite still actively combat flying and codependent on a man whose misanthropy might just save the sector from Ish’tar and co - and yet she holds the plans for a black hole gun on the chainlinks around her throat. A throat weighted down by enough potential energy to crush a thousand suns.

They showed us the endgame. The Nemi ships. The Tartarus project in all its diabolical genius. The cannon to break the walls of Babylon.

The plan is brutal. If we cannot defeat the K'hara, we will drag them to hell with us. Build a hammer big enough and you will smash any armour - whether a God is wearing it, or not.


One cannot begin to guess the mass of her heart.

I pity the Keeper - I will go to my grave to save her.

For the Alliance.

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
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[Enkidu]

Entry 3. 29th July, 823 AS.

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It’s been several days and I still haven’t had the time to mull over the Dawnbreaker schematics - well, no, not the time. The sleepy hours are boring me into an aneurism. It’s tough to mull over the blueprints when Raven is perpetually wondering into the supercity alone, God keep her - although I don’t see how God could keep her better without posting her in a cage.

In other news, everyone and their mother in the Commune is attempting to capture the illustrious Joshua Hunt, as per usual. The man's a veritable Houdini. Less predictable was the Liberty peace treaty getting tossed aside with the sewage despite Avery’s best intentions - which is a damn shame considering the entire Republic is on the brink of quartering itself.

We were never naive enough to believe that time was on our side, but damn it, if only there’d be more. Even the bleakest calculus couldn’t have predicted the fratricide crumbling the sanity of Sirius’s heartland. Liberty’s security agencies, caught in political gridlock, have chosen to cut their strings apart by the fangs.

I remember the last age the LSF was in a feud war with Navy particularists. I watched the Nomads sweep the core worlds before them like drowning sailors - watched the human stacks of the survivors clambering over each other in the disbelief of our failure. Prayed and slayed through the infinities of hell, through my brothers in gore, through the scarecrows that once were men, holding out for a child’s miracle that, when it came, nobody could brace themselves for. Some shot themselves, some shat themselves - most shot each other. Parent against child, Sister against brother, we killed our way through the shells of those we love, for the love of still knowing the pain of loss, and for those that we still loved who slaughtered their path to the sun with us.

Funny how crises brings us all together - several days ago, we were at each other’s throats - literally, Pike’s stealth suit wears my thumb marks like a factor mark - and now we’re all sitting together, quiet like, pretending the balcony is a war-room. Even Raven’s working with the pack tonight.

Before they rename Liberty, Anarchy, we’ve got a game plan. It’s half-baked, covered with failure points and might kill two of the finest officers I’ve ever served with, but what the hell. I don’t want to go into plot points under the extremely unlikely event that somebody other than me is reading this, but I’ve got a death to fake, two sides of a civil war to infiltrate, a battered old corvo to morph into an AWACs, and a hostile officer who just sent the us a declaration of war, who I may have damaged the career of, to win over to our cause. So no biggie. Conventional work week, then.

Just your everyday bout of Aux’ problems; saving the universe, and we don’t even get paid for it. Maybe they’ll give us all Lone Stars or something after we save the elected government - don’t have my hopes on it, though.

God protect the Republic and God protect us. In that order.

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)

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[Enkidu]

Entry 4, August 1st, 823 AS.

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I believe.

Over the last two weeks the situation has degraded so rapidly you’d start to think the universe wanted to punish us. The grim verity of it doesn’t provide any settlement - the universe is trying to punish us. We are all going to be slaughtered by the mechanism of the ancients.

But we play the paradigm, we load the dice. We do what humans are designed to do - we cheat.

Through Admiral Hunter of the Order and Commander Reeves of the ESRD, we have, gradually, steadily, accumulated agents to our cause. “Our” cause… It’s difficult to avoid the talons of institutional thinking. Organisations mean nothing in our rarified times - there are the infected, and those who are not. Us and them. Us and them.

I looked out of the Eidolon’s bridge and saw an Osiris next to a Bullhead next to a Liberty Dreadnaught. Three ships sitting next to each other under a banner of truce, when they should have been blowing gouts out of each other’s space frames. Curious how the apocalypse makes armies out of the multitudes. I nearly got canned for disclosing HECATE to the Overwatch representative in his gunmetal warship. Too many secrets. Too much hiding from each other to bridge the boundaries between those who still harbour independent minds.

Liberty is degrading. The LSF and the Navy are tearing into each other, into the hide of the house body. Infected are crawling everywhere - Ish’Tar itself was sighted within Cortez just a few hours ago - I heard the war klaxons claw around me as the LNS vengeance tried to carve us into atomic ash. We survived the present day - but what of the next, the next, the day after days?

Until HECATE can be deployed, better sooner than never, the sooner we can start to detangle the chain of chaos strangling Liberty by the neck. We need trust. There’s nothing more rarified than trust.

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)

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[Enkidu]

Entry 5. 3rd August, 823 AS.

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Expects a demotion, gets a promotion. Goes to Hunt expecting a deballing and a slap on the wrist, gets a pep-talk and a slap on the back. Probably the first time in two months life’s thrown me some good surprises.

Hunt’s boosting people up the rank structure as fast as he can spring us - a whole lot of meritocratic reshuffling is going on in the backrooms. I’m self interested, obviously, but it needed to happen. He needs his organised people supporting the tree if we’re going to weather the thunderstorms.

Tundra is everywhere. There hasn’t been another sighting of Ish’Tar but everything’s too close to call. Liberty ESRD is entangling us with promises of neutrality if we save their golden girl from Drake, but that system is suicide in the flesh. Our internal intel is spotty at best, there’s only one way in, one way out, and the centre field is crawling with eldritch abominations dragged out of Sirius’s cosmic trailer park. Granted, we’re going to have to defang the monster sometime, but on a whim? We don’t have the turrets yet even if we do have the manpower. However the Liberty Navy is starting to move faster than the bureaucrats pulling the strings - a little worrying if the the Admiralty’s starts playing with emergency powers but it’s encouraging to see some kind of positive motion. Whatever happens between now and the unknown, we have a shot at this. The houses are pulling together with the Colonials, the Liberty Navy has become almost affectionate to us and we’re starting to flush the infected out. The Order, of course, isn’t playing ball. Nobody but the one man army that is the OCV Razgriz. That fully automated Osiris is going to be a pain to service - hopefully it doesn’t flush us out of the airlock.

Jenkins is a casualty due the Order and their Blood Dragon stooges being goddamn incorrigible, as per usual - shooting at us instead of the K’hara, effectively executing the infected’s work for them. The Blood Dragons have been laying down false claims left and right about the Arktos and the Eido’ violating the airspace sanctum in the clouds - the Keeper asserts to me that the Blood Dragons are falsifying their claims, although I wasn’t there to witness first hand. It sits right, though. The Keep’ wouldn’t risk our primary assets by running through the hedgemaze. Unfortunately that didn’t stop the Dragons for hauling their heavy Cav’ all the way through the entire Imperial blockade, through two sets of opposing lines somehow, and dragging them down to Baffin. Either Amaterasu blessed them with an unlimited quantity of fuel, munitions and men, or something’s directly wrong here. That reads like an Order play - it’s too aggressive for anyone other than the Overwatch, too much of a crapshoot. Grimly, the mount Fuji still fragged one of ours. They’ll pay through the nose.

Being Paladin and the resident repairman, I’ve been pushed into the figurehead role for project NIKE - the fleet’s attempt to minimise the size of the Lightrider propulsion block. Since Hussar usually gets drafted on the long range ops, I used a prosecutor hull as the base airframe - didn’t do a damn thing - there’s no passive electrical insulator effective enough to reasonably protect the pilot, and I don’t want to be playing Russian roulette with active shielding on a combat craft. Either I’m going to have to reinvent the Plasma thruster, as you do, like I’m going to have to find a bigger airframe. I don’t have the resources for the first, and the second doesn’t leave us with many options under freighter class, which means outsourcing, third parties, all sorts of cunning tricks to compromise our intellectual property.

I miss my Osprey. I miss the innocent fatalism of the Zoner way.

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)

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[Enkidu]

Entry 6. 5rd August, 823 AS.

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We escorted a convoy of independent miners - couldn’t stand the damn people. They’re rude, crass, no sense of discipline, whilst unfortunately they do their job blisteringly well.

I wouldn’t ever haul with them again if it wasn’t for the credits. They came by the motherlode. As each transport ran the route, my bank account appeared to gain a few stretch marks. I’m still wondering what to do with the mass of wealth they’ve heaped us with. Glorious, philanthropic, wealthy bastards. I can’t stand the sight of them. The boredom was as insipid as their humour.

I’ve continued to work on the Osprey, digging out the stellarator. Conflicted if I should keep the original fusion block in there or strip it out entirely and replace it with a reforged core - tending towards the second option, using a retrofitted Moray reactor. APM builds sophisticated powerhouses so I’m going to have little problem pasting the two designs together. Whilst there’ll be some basic inefficiencies with output - when are there ever not - the two designs should synch fairly consistently. I’ll just nix some of the high end output on the power system to keep it from blowing a few PTCs upon operation. Raven will be stellar about that one.

My state of mind... it's in civil war. There is no state. No military of the mind beating the nightmares into line. The longer I work without the leash of Dr Glass, the more the machine slips out. I need to be careful. Any more hours without neural dilution and I risk losing track of the presumption of being anything more than inhuman. Sometimes, my limbs move without thinking, without me commanding them to move. That sounds ridiculous - reading into instinct and motor twitch. But it isn't. I've executed entire physical tasks in a conscious blink - hours are passed, my duties completed, conversations dialogued, fighters serviced, sorties flown - and then I wake. As if Di'tarau holds the light switch to my existence.

I don't know how to fix myself. Perhaps I will turn a corner, some hour, to discover me dead. I'll never think again.

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)

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(Links pending redevelopment).