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

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

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