Days of ash and Flame - Aboard the RNC Vorpommern/KKS Greif

[The Syndicate Leagues]

The Scorch

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There is no group of humans who put credence lapsarian myth more than the Unioners - a society built around the descent from heaven, the catharsis of failure. It is a state of being to which the Unioners are well-adjusted - an immunity to catharsis that keeps suic8de rates low, for what motivation is there for death when life is a deathless insistence of its own? Meat to be ground into fortune, the grist of heaven, the dirt that brings character to the most sterile of alleyways - that is the Unioner idyll.

Some would call the Unioners deluded, but even fantasy would be an inept term. Is a cause truly dead when said cause holds a gun to your cranium and blind to your eyes? Is it fantasy that bored the rifles that beat their stocks against the against the Rheinlandic underworld, forging order from the disparate unions of smuggling cartels, idealists, and separatists that still beat the Imperial drum? Can a society be consigned to history when its dictums, creeds and laws still sculpt the edicts of millions of minds over centuries of swashbuckling scorn? The Imperial ensign runs ragged, but still raised, on the bridge of every Union destroyer in the cosmos, in the pocket of every tattered uniform, etched into the stock of every improvisatory cannon.

The battlecruiser that was once the RNC Vorpommen sat idle, drifting amidst Bering’s star-seared accretion disk, her fusion cores mauling their way through the remains of her pile as she prowls the edges of the Rhein she was once built for, as incongruous as an athlete without legs. In the months following her capture, much of the burn damage had been stripped from her compartments, the stains of flash-carbonised flesh stripped from the pressure walls, all matter that had linked her to Federal service gone - vented from the hull or recycled for their naked atoms, and covered in reams of stained white pressure laminate. Her weapons suite, critical to her function, remained uncoupled from her power grid, all attempt to restore her vitality sacrificed to the clarion of war. Why squander time on a guilt sabre when a thousand swords could be pressed out for less? Like a cripple without her organs, she strolls, a empty house, squatted in by the plentiful Unioners who seek retreat away from the oversight of the primary cells, becoming something of a shrine for those still holding imperial pretensions and of affiliates of the Kaiserflotte. At least she was sterile, clean, spacious by Unioner standards - yet the smell of dead skin, steamed in boiled coolant still lines her darkest recesses. She remained as comatose as her commanding officer, swaddled, as she was, in burn ward white.

Her hangar - one of the few more permanent modifications the Unioners had carved into their hard-conquered hulk, remained lined with the fighters of the great many Unioners capitalising on her copious fuel caissons to grab respite on the hard-worn run between Hamburg and Koeln. Against the walls of her hanger, Arbeiters glistened, their chrome hulls studded with micrometeoroids that they had brushed aside with little care or consequence. Flush against the roof, stood a hastily stencilled imperial flag, tacked together out of reactive alloy pilfered from her reserves. Old Scorch, they called her, despite her relative youth - for her battle damage gave the ship a bristled aura that had won her a reputation as a lucky ship. Only a Unioner could find integrity in a baptism of fire.

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"Though the past is scarred and the future untold"
" Be the boot heavy, the vacuum cold."
"I of the Liga,  do not fold"
"For suits or saints or beggar's gold.
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