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

[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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