Taurus Corsairs - Internal Communications and Reports.

[Enkidu]

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Errant Ident: Ramey Florinda Torres
Errant Outbound Node: <scrambled - nonlocal node selected>
Topical Proclamation: Goods in Heaven.

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Marcellus is a terrible person. Or a genius - one or the other. I'm siding with terrible.

The crazy puta made an artifact run through the mouth of Malta itself. Less threading the eye of a needle than dancing his signature through sensor deadzones he could barely map, let alone predict. Once he gets to the drop-off he struggles to secure black market light-arms from a freelance Broker, he realises he's grabbed goods without knowing who the buyer is. Instead of taking the direct route back to Crete, he panicked, and tried to find a local buyer. Red flag number one - never put your neck on the line for independents. Red flag number two, never, for the Bull's sake, pull another man's contract. Him and his squeeze melted down the golden rules of smuggling and nearly threw their lives away dishonourably.

And they did all of that from the quarterdeck of my family's ship.

He tried to lay on the old Cretian charm and sell the arms to an independent vendor in the southern Taus. He had heard that tech hoarders were operating in the theatre, and he chased that fox till it bit him in the leg. What he thought was an automated service system triggered an artificial defence net of some kind. Drones and bombers started cropping up, laying in insults in the usual way that Housers do, and then rained fire. Marcellus clanged the Senora into the clamps hard enough to provoke this response.

I did a little Neuralnet digging. You've got to admire the tenacity of the sparkspinner who ripped these terminals out.

They're named after the Horae and an aspect of Persephone. Probably a sarcastic name as there was no verdure here. Whoever coded the defence system likely had Hispanic routes. Possibly a Maltese smuggler embedded in the Crayter sector, or one of Loyola's acolytes. He waited the defence system out as per doctrine, and then shattered the way in an attempt to cut transit time by bisecting Maltese space.

By navigational accident, he came across something of value. A miracle, as much as I've seen one recorded. A vast, computational structure, alike those recorded by our kin in the Heaven's Shift, dropped into a deep ecliptic of the sun. Contact was attempted, but no life stirred in the structure. If this creature of superalloy was truly alive, it is no more. Perhaps by Outcast design; it is the nature of Maltese to destroy all of the universe's children. A biopsy was extracted - mechanisms that could be elements of the vessel's tractor beams, or its weaponry. Their tangled mass of steel lines the hangar vault, and there they will remain until the Church find a purpose for the relics.

But the trade stops for nothing. It is the bread of our people, and sometimes you must put miracles aside in the name of preservation.. Another run from the reliquary to the profligates, the Macedon reported heavy contest at the Kusarian border, so we took the Emerald road.

Instead, contest came to us.


Under normal circumstances we would have stood our ground and fought. One typical adversary, a Hessian, along with a ship of the Defence Network that Marcellus must have ticked off. One Thor and a transport are pulp for the hooves. But the Bull is cautious and untapped relics come above what I wish for myself. We warded the aggressors off - they didn't scan our cargobays or comment on what they saw.

For now, we'll press on. I hear that we've relayed more artefacts and relics in the last two weeks than the rest of our race have in the last four months. Faith is a powerful ally.

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Ofrezco mi carne al cuerpo de Creta. Ofrezco mi corazón a su pasión, mi sangre transfundida al pueblo. Ofrezco mi todo para conocer mi alma; Entonces sabes que estoy realmente vivo.

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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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