Arbeiter Frei,

It has been a very long time since we have heard from you and your organization, and in that time, we have seen and heard strange things coming out of Bering and Rheinland.

We are hereby issuing a request to you, or to whoever is in your place if you are no longer with the Unioners or this mortal coil, to state your allegiances and, if there has been a shift in the ideology of your organization, what it more accurately aligns to now.

Regards,
Taskmaster-Adjutant Harold Kane
Taskmaster Escher
Taskmaster Eva Flores
Taskmaster Weaver
Ministries of Relations and Intelligence, Natio Octavarium

There are a great many people who have decided what they choose to believe. Because the voice is the loudest, because it is popular, it becomes conflated with what will save lives, and feed mouths. I would not deny the trust and respect we have placed in one another by talking past you.

I learnt something, three years ago, when the Hessians first shot at us. I suspect you learnt that lesson - all of you, when you turned the Raiders into the Octavarium.

You cannot be robin hood forever. In the end, you're just a thief and a murderer. One day, someone will hang your family. The merry men you sacrificed a piece of yourself to save. You're alike me in that respect, Harold. A younger, more successful me.

If you have already made up your own truth, and you don't wish to listen, then you don't need to contact me. Stay firm to what you think is right. It is the way to power - it worked for Charles DeFrance, Florian Neimann. If you want to know why, how, and for what cause, perhaps you'll ask me.

But if you have no interest in knowing why, then stop here. Read no further. It won't be useful to you. I am sure you have ultimatums to write.

But I want you to know this. When the Federal Republic was first created, their first founding act was to replace tear gas with plasma cannons and microwave incinerators, turned on a crowd of protestors. These protestors were just men and women who wanted the right to go to work. Men and women who had their rights protected for six centuries. Their basic needs turned into a crime.

They then built a prison. Just one year after the "Republic" had founded itself. A huge steel coffin hid in the shadow of a methane giant. Cold enough to freeze a man through a vacuum suit. They put these protestors in there and never let them out. Every so often the prison would have 'accidents'. The prisoners would die, be ejected into a decaying orbit, and left to burn, with no memory of their lives. They would be erased, to save face for the same Republic that is casting itself as some bastion of democracy. All sentences for life, of course. But few would reach the end. They were processed and spat out.

My whole life has been spent, my body, my health, everything. In trying to stop the cycle of persecution, poverty, imprisonment, crime, persecution, poverty, imprisonment, crime. I believe I have done rather well.

I took the prison down. In the process, thirty-seven thousand of our people died. Killed by the Revolutionaries. We turned to them first. The Bundschuh and the Hessians - they promised to take the oppressors out. They had a century and a half to do it. All that happened is that they started to believe they could kill us, too.

So, we need a third way. Along comes a group of people. Statesmen, politicians, anyone. They say that they will return to the old ways. The time before the government took men and women who just wanted to work, and nailed them in a box. Turned them into criminals. Turned them into me. I do not agree with them in everything, but I've seen enough. Everywhere we have looked is just more death, more crime. So the Imperials have their new state, what they call a constitutional monarchy, aye? At least, now, they are negotiating.

I wish I was like you, Harold. I did not have ten thousand people, but several hundred million across the whole house. We could not move them to find a new home in the border worlds, like you have, for many believe our home is here, and could not relocate even if they had the spacecraft to do so. I wish we had that chance. No, we had to change powers that we could not touch.

I want to help the empire avoid the mistakes of the Republic. I'm a Unioner. Flags, to us, are not important. Rights, for the workers that still toil under the corporations, do matter. The empire is new. It does not fully understand itself. The Federal Republic was born in violence, and once it came out the other side it began deciding who deserved to be a citizen, and who would be a pariah. Perhaps this time, this cycle - we can prevent history repeating itself.

The Unioners have no chance to return to peace, to giving our children the chance to have real jobs, in a real market, to have their rights respected and to live in a life without crime. To own a passport. To have hope. Not under the Republic. No, they would call us monsters to justify killing us all. Frankenstein killing his own creature.

I get called a liar time after time. Day after day. A mastermind of evil. All words. Over and over. I have done right by my people. And if I am shot tomorrow I will die smiling. I do not mean to be captain Kidd, the unwilling pirate. No, that was the choice made by others. But you cannot convince those who do evil that they are a part of evil. They are either 'Just following orders', or 'unaware of the consequences', even when you put them out the airlock.

We had to learn to be useful again. You did help, Kane. Reactivating the Sirene gave us a bargaining chip to bring Unioners back to the shipyards. The Lane Hackers turning against us brought the separatists against us, which helped with the Imperials who no longer saw us the criminal threat in the borderworlds. Generalmajor Heinrich and Premier Selim's betrayals meant that Daumann saw us have similar interests. We leveraged that interest. Now Daumann pays a living wage to their employees. Every betrayal of people who claimed to once care about resistance has made real resistance, real change, possible. I've lived a life of Piracy with nothing to show for it. There's no wealth in stolen money. Only in changing hearts, minds, people. Leaving the next generation less damaged than the last.

An old friend of mine, Ernst Klugmann - aye, a Bundschuh - people are not defined by their flags - believes that you're not truly making change unless you're making people angry. We - the ants - took down atlas. Turned all the efforts of those trying to keep us down into assets. Advantages. Ways to gain pressure on the establishment. A way to get them to respect policies that they formally no reason to.

I suppose this is the end. You won't listen to me, Kane. If you hadn't already made up your mind you probably wouldn't have sent me this in the first place. I believe that this transmission will be jostled around to various parties as proof of my assumed evil, as does seem to be common practice nowadays. Likely with some cropped quotes - that seems to be quite popular, too.

There has been no shift in our ideology. No. This is us achieving our aims. The Trade Unions are coming back to the Rheinland. Slowly, those who turned their engineering abilities to piracy will become engineers again. It may take fifty years, but my people will be free of slavery, free of crime, and there will never be a need for another Corin Frei.

I hope that whatever stance the Natio Octavarium takes, you will one day see the improvements in our condition, in our lives, in Rheinland itself, and you'll raise me a glass. And If I'm wrong - well. There are worse ways for a man to die than as an old fool who spent his last credit on the wrong horse.

I am prepared to do anything to save the lives of my people. And we have exhausted every other road. We will negotiate with the Corporations and see what can be done. In return, we will trade the technologies we have accumulated, and the ships we have built, for legal leniency. In time, we will make the empire better. Become a conscience acting from the inside. Break the cycle.

You saved us a year, perhaps two, in time. Thank you, Natio Octavarium. Your people fought the federals once, seeing them as an oppressor. Now you have been a part in their fall.

Taskmaster Weaver, OIC.

Frei, we're both busy men. I've got reports to process and you've got... I don't know, civilians to gas or something. Can we skip the propaganda and the dithering and get to the point?

Are you familiar with the Gallic Junkers? I promise, it's relevant and important.

Yes, I know of the Gallic Junkers. We are close allies of the Junkers. There are even ex-gallic junker refugees in our organisation. They were a fiercely independent people who co-operated with the Gallic Monarchy, the DeFrances and their entourage, to spy on and gauge the capabilities of Sirius. The invasion would not have been so successful without them.

Once they were no longer useful, they were a liability to the King, so Charles ordered their expulsion. Tens of thousands died, sacrificed to the power of a mad government.

Yes, I do know that story. It reminds me closely of the story of a network of Trade Unions, in one of our own Sirian houses, who had helped bring stable, safe, and reasonable working conditions and fundamental rights to the working classes of that house, for six hundred years. They had helped gain compensation for industrial accidents, they had gave the poor the agency to prosecute the corrupt, all without violence. Suddenly, they were betrayed, cast out, by their employers. So, they helped raise a new government, that promised them solace and security. This new "Republic" claimed that it would build a better world than the one they had left. The first act of this government was to throw every trade Union member it could find, into prison, for life.

I wonder what I am talking about. Hm.


Then you say I gas civilians. Hah. Five years ago there was a man called Hansel Garen. He called himself 'Of Heaven', because he believed he was the second coming of Jesus. This insane man was very charismatic, believed he was fighting for good, as all charismatic madmen do, and had become popular enough to become arbeisdirektor of the Unioners. He, along with Vorarbeiters Lukas Mohr, Adrian Hahn , Maxwell Schilder, Mary Dross and several others, had killed a number of Unioners in a violent purge. You can view the biography of that despicable man here, and draw your own conclusions. It was they who ordered, and participated in, the Alster Shipyard gas attack of 823. Yes, we do not shy from the worst moments of our history. Hansel Garen is dead, and for good reason - he killed workers to kill executives. Dross defected to the Coalition because she did not like that I banned the use of chemical weaponry. Schilder fled to Liberty. At least three of the other ringleaders are still alive, and I will hand them over to the Rheinland Imperial Police so they may answer for what they have done, Mr Weaver. It was a Unioner, who made Garen pay.

I thought perhaps you had a reason for your rhetoric. But instead, you simply buy the Federal agitprop that all Unioners gas shipyards and that we all deserve to die. Would you kill the women and children too, on your white horse, in your shining armour?

You are no different to an old Sol racist who detests people because of the colour of their skin. No, Mr Weaver, you are not the hero you think you are. No, not when you take the same stance on the issues that matter as Joseph DeFrance .

You're reading into things too much. I just like spiders. They're cute.

Moving on.

The Gallic Junkers were purged because the war started going poorly, and the Crown needed someone to blame. They needed a new Other. This is how nationalist-imperialist governments work. There must always be an Other. To support unjustified invasion, you must consider the victims to be less than human. To accept a purge, the victims must have done something somewhere to deserve it. To support ever-increasing power grabs, you must first convince the people of the threat of the Other.

And when things start going poorly, you must distract the people with more Others. Once they buy into the Othering, the people will accept many things they otherwise would not have so long as you continue to use the same framework.

The Gallic Junkers had been loyal servants to the Crown, whose most heinous crimes were generally just smuggling. The Alster Union are known terrorists. You'll be the new Other as soon as you're no longer useful.

Setting aside your misunderstnading of the fate of the Gallic Junkers, and your condemnation of the thousands beneath you to the same, there's two other things to address.

Your comparison of my stance to racism is laughable, and I will charitably pretend to assume it's merely a rhetorical device that you don't actually believe.

And you claim we are allies. That's interesting. You only act like that when you want something.

So what is it now?

It's simple. I want to see Sirius give the empire a chance. Aye, I can't change everyone's hearts and minds, but it's a simple calculus. If the empire is born into opposition, it will found its ideals around fighting a foreign invader. It will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who will say 'I told you so' will have the war that they're craving, and millions will die pointlessly again, and again. The Republic will make a few high astounding speeches, and then criminalise the Bundschuh again at the time of first convenience. You know they will, I know they will. The military did not join the Imperial cause without a civilian backing. Most Rheinlanders - hell, most of the working class, supports the Empire. This movement might have corporate money in it, but it was not a corporate movement. I've been watching it since the early years. Despite what the Bundschuh throw at us, the Unioners did not influence its rise - we had a seat at the table and we did not take it. We wanted to see who was entering the stage. We wanted to see if the people would have their backs.

Right now, the 'other' is internal corruption. Real corruption. People are fighting back against Interspace loans, against synth foods burning entire farms to drive smallholders off their land, and yes, even demanding higher wages from Republican, I suppose soon-to-be Imperial Shipping, and Daumann. Universal basic income, free University tuition, national service turned to infrastructure and employment, not just the armed services. These are all guarantees the Crown Prince has made a part of his public policy. Nor is it some absolutist monarchy or revenge cult alike royalist gallia. The Emperor has called for an end to Sirian war. Peace in our time. There is an elected parliment, made up of members of the Bundestag the people voted for. The entire goverment did not flee to Thuringia, just a federal minority. It is the Federals who have to roll out great incredulous banners indicating their ginormous support to reflect the reality that if they truly were the will of the people, they would have their flag planted on Stuttgart, or Hamburg, or Berlin, or Holstein, by the citizens of those worlds.

Every state needs an 'other', not just those who we call our enemies. You need an other. The Natio Octavarium has no obligation to risk itself in the turbulence of the great houses. It is a risk without a return. Yet, you're doing it anyway. Perhaps you need an other to validate your history as the Vagrant Raiders. Perhaps you want to tie yourself to a cause of noble democratic resistance - Robin hood and all that.

Let me put it like this. If Sirius makes the Empire an 'us and them', they will be manufacturing consent. They will socially engineer Rheinland into the adversary they despise. The empire exists, it wants to make changes, and I will be damned if the Imperial economy that could be spent on social programs is spent fighting an eternal guerrilla war, spreading misery and famine in the name of Democracy. Rheinland has been constantly suffering since the start of the eighty years war through to the Libertonian invasion. It is time to staunch the blood. One push to end the violence. End the divide.

Give us a chance. If not the empire, us. I sent refugees to the Natio Octavarium with no knowledge that you would care for them as your own. No, it was a coin-toss if you would load them onto a leaky pilgrim and ship them up to Malta for a new palladium-plated statue of yourself. You did the right thing. I am... angry. I am exhausted that few outside the Empire are willing to trust us to do the same.

That, is all I want from you.

It's amusing to me that you cite the outcome of the Eighty to justify a return of the Empire, when it was an imperial Rheinland that started that war. The Eighty was the origin of the debts that resulted in the fall of Stuttgart, the ruination of Rheinland's farmers, the Popular Revolution of 702, and the violent uprising of the LWB.

Some of us do read history.

By definition, there cannot be an empire without conquest. There will be war. Thousands will die, and if we're lucky it'll stop at that. More likely, millions. You've already bought into blaming Liberty, and likely so many of your countrymen have as well. It's a deeply corrupt state to be sure, but those debts weren't simply manufactured from the void. But the propaganda working this readily tells me that if the Imperial government manages to stomp out the opposition - and the numbers, along with the Rheinwehr's history of simply throwing more battleships at everything associated with the Bundschuh, say that's rather likely - there will likely be another move on Texas. Or perhaps yet another attempt to re-fight the Eighty.

Neither will go well, and all of the deaths will be of the common man, conned into fighting for someone else's ambitions.

Corin, with all due respect...

What the fuck are you thinking?