To: My brother Arbeiters. Subject: Getting the Gang back together.

[Enkidu]

Alster Unioners

Sender: Gunda Riehl
Tacname: Hellion
Positional group: Volenteer Flight Arbeiter, Union Raiders and recovery
Location: Frankfurt. Position undisclosed.
Branchgroup: Unioners

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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.

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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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