Interesting.

My darling girl, are you not a little young to be confidently trotting out ultimatums?


But I digress.

When the Hessians were first a fledgeling movement, we had been serving the cause of Rheinland labour for over a hundred years. Rather than leave you to starve and be arrested by the Federal government, we instead housed you, clothed you, gave you ships, trained you how to manufacture your own, taught you to fight.

We made you - for you once gave us hope.

And then you fell in with the wrong crowd, became merely a gateway drug for the Sirian Coalition. The Socialist idyl you once had became contaminated with communism.

You became red. Look at the bloodstains on our prodigal sons.


We knew this day would come. The day when the dreams of Von Rohe’s day failed. The day when the last true servants of the blue collar turned on each other.

Do you want that day to come now? Next week? Next year? Never?

Choose.

This is how future will define you.


We were going to branch out to you, you know. After your leader returned from whichever assignment had interrupted her, such a correspondence was probable. We did not expect the time frame to be so minimal - but it matters not.

For centuries, Hessian leaders have respected our political distinctions. They have, in their wisdom, elected not to conduct the Federals' wetwork for them.

Cautionary procedures have already been fully implemented.

Firstly.

Our intentions are to serve the people of Rheinland to escape the influence of foreign alien agencies, such as the Liberty Government, Interspace Commerce, Ageira, the GMG, and the Federal puppets that represent them. We exist to challenge the artificial market mediocrity enforced by the externally controlled trade corporations, ALG and Republican Shipping. We protect the workplaces of the Workers. We request that the Red Hessians, you, or your puppeteer, elaborate as to how destroying a significant employer of blue collar labour is acting in the interests of Rheinland’s workers?

How does liberating them from their lives, at worst, and their jobs, at best - the choice between a quick demise, or a slow, agonising one - serve socialism?

We request that the Red Hessians justify the destruction of Reutlingen imminently.

Secondly.

The Union requests a comprehensive list as to whom the Red Hessians believe are the Alster Union’s said ideological leaders. You have not been acquainted with them, nor has Heinrich.

Thirdly.

Define “re-organisation” and provide a comprehensive plan as to how you entail to reconfigure several hundred self-dependent labour protection cells into one coherent authority, and once you do, share it with us. We have been trying to do so for aeons.

Fourthly.

Define how the wanton targeting of Rheinland low-level cooperate lackeys and the wholesale murder of their crews serves the “interests of the working class”?

Fifthly.

Define “Unioner archives and databases”?

Sixthly.

The entire Rheinland underworld is not a subservient appendage of your own foreign policy. The LWB are not Hessians - they share the same attitude to globalism that we do. The Bundschuh, despite Haupt’s militarism, are not Hessians - they believe in democracy whilst you believe in the idiom of a benign revolutionary dictatorship. They believe in multiple parties, whilst you see room for only one. The Unioners, manifold that we are, are not Hessians. We have no interest in carving a satellite state out in the Omegas, in fighting the Corsairs for a dominion of rubble and radiation.

Finally.

Ask your brigadegeneral if she wants to die alone.


We are much, much older than the Red Flag.


We are not elements of the so-named people’s revolution, and have never been. Our object has always been to restore Rheinland to the social conditions state of the 495 Imperial Labour Act and the re-institution of the National Labour Unions. That is our objective. We are socialists too, Hessians. Do you wish to shoot at every arm of Socialism against which you do not agree?

I have seen what your revolution has done to Dresden, once the jewel of Rheinland’s industrial heartland. It is now a graveyard. That is your revolutionary ideal, Hessians; dead Rheinlanders. And when New Berlin’s soil is stained with the iron blood of dead citizens and the Liberty Navy and the GMG invade to claim what detritus remains, will your victory be complete then? Will you have made the enlightened few, who first stepped out in front of the Federal tanks, proud?

Will your Coalition masters remember you, as their fighters scream through the skies above the bundstag? Will they let you raid the war-chest? Or will they execute you, just another set of useful pawns to to be discarded once you have served your purpose to the end?

There is no future in which the Hessians save Rheinland.


All you do, is destroy. You have never built. We will not let you destroy us as well.


You see, by issuing demands that you earnestly believe I will not agree to, you are attempting to force a state of hostilities and consider us the aggressor. It’s an old diplomat’s trick.

So I'll riposte.


The Unioners formally agree to the conditions imposed by the Red Hessian Army and propose a mutual meeting place to sign the terms of the agreement into enforcement, providing the contact representative clarifies on the given points.




I can have a squadron of first responders prepped as soon as you need them, if Heinrich is indeed interested in seeing her demands come to fruition.


The day is yours to write.

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?