To: Contact Viola, by extension, Anna Heinrich.
From: Armin Jansen, Chief of the Alster Union's Diplomatic Staff and first First Contact representative.
Subject: The Goose is cooked, Maverick.
I enjoy your justifications. You passionately believe in your cause and serve as a paragon of its attributes. You are a model Hessian. I had initially expressed cynicism in the ability of a soldier to be truly representative, but I see now I was wrong.
You represent the Hessians, perfectly.
And as for me? I am a pen-pusher, not a general, Heinrich.
It is a obscene quirk of the Union that diplomats do not, by chance, hotseat space superiority fighters, nor do we measure the worth of each other by the number of skulls on our mantlepieces or our latent ability to buzz towers. How offbeat.
Your flying ability is completely irrelevant to me.
Fighters do not fly on skill alone.
They fly on credits.
Let me ask a rhetorical question.
Who sells your blood diamonds on to the Libertonian underworld, thus providing the entire market for hessian mining and trade?
Who owns the smuggling routes which fence the goods you steal?
I offer you another.
You’re here to talk peace, are you not?
You need to be very careful which narrative you’re spelling out, Heinrich, for you’re becoming ambiguous.
Are you threatening us, or reconciling us? You are not going to coerce us to peace by pointing a flotilla of over-glorified mining lasers at us with a fancy norse name. You cannot make a winning strike for peace by blowing into a clarion - the implication you have been wearing around your necks ever since your funky penned this communique.
We are Unioners. We do not care if you are Von Clausen himself - if you come at us with an assault rifle we will attempt to take you down with a toothpick, irrespective of the consequences. You think you are brave? True bravery is the ability to face near-certain destruction and yet continue to fight despite the odds being against you, not to hold all the cards and gloat. True bravery is in self-sacrifice - and yet, here you are.
I do not care if you possess a planet cracker comet aimed directly at every one of our installations.
You can insult our ships and we will do nothing. You can insult our organisation and we will do nothing. You can lie about us, our objectives, and our allies, and naught will come of it. You can insult our belief systems and we will not bat a lash, you can even revise Rheinland’s very history to fit your own reality, as you have here. It is your cause - you can choose what you grease its wheels with.
I told your messenger that if you choose violence, violence you will receive. We are prepared to die to defend our cause, to the last man, woman and child, if that is what the Linden demands, and our cause will be justified through the serendipity of self-defence. Are you prepared to die to prove a point?
We do not bend to violence. We bend to reason. Threaten us again and the onus of proof will be on you.
So.
You requested all available documents and archives on the Unioner movement, with a particularity towards diplomatic data - I will not lie to you - you will get them, providing your intentions are noble which you have not yet made clear.
I will summarise.
Kruger is an Imperial institution. They have been in continuous production since the dawn of the Rhein, and, unlike the Abfallentsorgung and Daumann Robust Konstruktionen they have not fallen to the inferior labour standards of the foreign yoke. It is partially why Kruger remains comparatively uncompetitive and receives few federal subsidies. Life as a Kruger employee is frugal, yes - but it is not fatal. Daumann sends people to die in the Von Rohe Belt, and it is Daumann the children of Von Rohe’s eponymous day fight against. We do not condone every aspect of Kruger’s operations, nor do we directly assist them, except against common enemies we would otherwise engage, but they are the lessermost evil. Ostensibly, our battle is against external meddling, not domestic enterprise.
As for your favoured sparring partners, the Corsairs, we renounce any and all connection to them - for there is not one. We do not fight them, nor do we have any calling to, for we have no goods nor food that they desire and do not stray far into the deep. We prefer to concern ourselves with Rheinland, and see little as to how fighting an agency which exists only on the Rheinland periphery could benefit our cause. The Corsairs cause far less damage to Rheinland than, say, Interspace or Synth Foods, and we are neither equipped nor willing to expend ourselves in keeping them out. Of course, they are a pest and a danger to the security of the nation, but a minor, dangerously well armed one. It is not in our interest to fight them.
There is a significant distinction between electing not to blow a party up and subservience to said party, Heinrich. If your statement that non-aggression and grovelling are indeed the same, was true, I could readily construct an argument that you are merely a disposable asset of the SCRA using the very logic you outlined, and that would never do, would it?
We are hostile to the GMG, for reasons so obvious we need not waste time with their discussion.
So there you have it. The grand conspiracy revealed; we have our own foreign policy independent from the RHA, which, at most, differs by three neutral parties. How nefarious of us.
We are not allies of your enemies, nor do we assist them.
However, we remain economically valuable to each other, a special relationship which transcends political division, and have multiple incentives not to threaten each other with ground loops, immelman turns and the corpses of dead federal admirals. We fund you, you fund us. That is how it has always been.
We are in the stone business. We sell stones - we sell yours. It is perhaps the least harmful smuggling operation ever conducted in human history.
We have much to benefit from business as usual - and by “we”, I am addressing us both. We are both bigger than mistrust.
A face-to-face meeting between respective field operatives within our services can be organised over the encrypted channel.
Are we done here?
Regards,
Armin Jansen.
???, Unknown Outpost, Location Undisclosed.