Vierlande’s an old prison. It’s as old as the Rheinland Republic and the outlaw of the Unioners and the Bundschuh soon after; designed to box away the social ‘problems’ the Republic created for itself by making neither anti-monopolist wealthfare-leaning Syndicalist parliamentarians or the representative democrats very happy, by criminalising both wings of Rheinland discourse together. One artefact of Rheinland’s founding laws and Unionisation compacts, as much as they’re adhered to at any part in the Republic’s history, is that an imprisoned party cannot be executed by order of court. The Republic needed to kill thousands quietly and inconspicuously within a short amount of time, and couldn’t do it by order of government or of the courts. One of the benefits of a public-owned police force is that the government doesn’t earn a cent from incarcerations.

Vierlande solved that need. Anybody important who got life imprisonment who was thought to be part of the Exiled Unions, Exiled Parties, or the ringleader of that niche little institution of Nordic mining guilds that grew into the bubonic rat-king we call the Hessians nowadays, needed killing off. If they caught a cell leader, architect, or someone who’d significantly damage operations, they’d get locked up in Vierlande. Hannover’s a cold superneptunian world – the light from the sun is cold and harsh out there, the shadows long. Vierlande’s walls were thick enough that anybody who got life imprisonment could have the life support gases quietly vented out as soon as there was nobody interested in taking up their legal bills. No visits. No recourse. The best part of it was that the rumours eventually got out as to what conditions the inmates were stored in, so any attempts to rescue the condemned was close to deluded; not that thousands didn’t try, and die doing so. The prisoners were hostages. One bulkhead in, one bulkhead out.
There’s Unioners everywhere in Hamburg aerospace – you can’t spill away from the lanes without bumping into us. That won’t cause you any trouble unless your Republican corporate staff. We’re an institution here. That gave us a window into monitoring Vierlande to see if there was any chink in the gallows that we might slip a man out through. The Prison had a sixty thousand capacity and nearly fifty-eight thousand crammed in when a Unioner corvo picked up that the station’s life support system was completely offline; apparently, they were trying to move all the inmates out at once to separate cells to maximise confinement space, but the records are fried by Federal anti-tamper measures and will take a while to rebuild.

The cells lobbied for a prison-break, en-masse. With a limited window before the transfer was finalised, the Unioners couldn’t arrange a force large enough to breach the prison by ourselves. We turned to the Hessians, the Coaliton, who could spare enough ships to operate as staging platforms. The arrangement was simple; we’d provide every flight Arbeiter willing to charge into history at the end of a gun barrel, and enough fuel and torpedoes to arm the Hessian and Coalition quick reaction forces at short notice; the Coalition provided command and fire control through the carrier Alvin Katz, the Hessians, bombardment support. It was, briefly, for nearly an hour, the greatest show of Rheinland underworld co-operation since the Von Rohe uprising.

We don’t know when they decided to tear us apart. Retrospectively, the signs have been on display for months. The elevation of Lucas Keller to Field marshal of the Coalition placed a hardline anti-Syndicalist at the head of the Coalition’s extensive military intelligence and sabotage apparatus. Keller has been outright braying to murder Unioners since his days as a Coalition intelligence operative, although records are sparse in those years, he’s the prime suspect of an ongoing counterintelligence search by the Garenite Exingency into the murder of Arbeitsdirektor Hansel Garen nearly three years ago. Equally, Heinrich, whilst not especially anti-Unioner, has been completely unwilling to respect Unioner non-intervention within the Omega conflict, to the point of starting a year long border skirmish with the Unioners that was only barely resolved by a ceasefire. The short answer is that they can’t stand us. Our cause is compelling. We don’t wear uniforms. We represent people from all over Rheinland’s working class. We stand for social freedoms and individual freedoms. We don’t regulate or police Unioners as the Coalition and the Hessians does to its own. We’re less involved in politics as we are to sticking to our mandate – improving the lives of the exiled Unioners, and restoring popular economic organisation within Rheinland. We might do this through organised crime, we’re rather upfront about this. We don’t do this by assuming that we’d be any better at running a gigantic pile of corporate corruption and abuse than anybody else. Save the collective farms and the tractor factories for someone happy to slave for a different set of chains. The Communist – Capitalist split is over a thousand years out of date and irrelevant to the Rheinland everyman. You’re born free. You deserve to live free, with your brothers and sisters watching your back. That is all we guarantee our people; and it’s compelling.

They had to wipe us out.


We don’t know which of the Hessians or Coalition are responsible, but several compression devices layed in the propulsion bays of the four Bayern battleships the Unioners maintain, went off in two; the Undine and the Apisdochleone. We preserve them largely for the same reasons the Hackers preserved the Spyglasses in earlier generations; technical experience and deterrence. The Unioners lack uniformity between cells - macroscale projects preserve the skillbase that we once kept during the Rheinland Empire for modern generations, giving us all a goal to rally around.

The Hessians knew this from our Skirmishes. The Bayerns are very old - sabotage was concealed as a technical malfunction. This left the Undine out of position – the Apisdochleone detonation happened several hours after the Undine and damage control crews were prepared. Suspicions had arisen of foul play, but our primary suspects were pro-Schilder insurgents or the BDM, who were aware of the possibility of a Vierlande attack by the extent of their preparations.

The Vierlande attack’s combat replays speak for themselves. The attack proceeded according to forcast and was overwhelmingly successful. Unioner losses were maintained low, whilst the Coalition and the Hessians were the primary targets of the defence forces. Vierlande was overwhelmed and boarded by coalition marines in conjunction with Liga espatiers and Hessian enforcers. The Union's support, funding groups, and operations, are all co-ordinated from Hamburg. We cannot survive as a people without a presence in the Hamburg system. The Hessians and the Coalition knew this. It is why they chose to attack us where they have."

What happened next is unknown, as far as the Hessians present themselves. The Unioners withdrew to our rally point around the Undine as encrypted message data was transmitted in en-masse packets between Coalition and Hessian forces. Simultaneously, they locked us out of their comms and tactical nets. If not for the sacrifice of the GEIST neraware team aboard the Undine, none of the strike force would have made it out.
The Undine managed to decipher enough of their sealed orders to realise they were readying an attack mission. The Undine’s airgroup and the surrounding Unioner vessels, plus the Apisdochleone retreated to Wedel before they could intercept the bulk of our forces, hoping to wait it out. We were outnumbered one to three and outgunned in the size and ordinance of their ships – their was little hope of freeing the Thirty five to thirty seven thousand Vierlande Unioners now in Coalition chains.

In preparation for the operation, the Alster Union had entrusted Wedel’s location and status to the Coalition and the Hessians, in order to retank and re-arm their vessels for operations after the flight from the Omegas. The Hessians decided to finalise their incursion with a direct strike upon the Wedel Mining Station habitat – the most storied station in Unioner history, and our first redoubt following our exile. Without munitions to spare or the resources to supply and repair combat damage, the Unioners mounted a redoubt, destroying several major coalition and Hessian fleet assets. The actions of the Alster Union that day were heroic, providing Wedel enough time to evacuate scattered families beyond the attack screen.

Nearly a hundred thousand Unioners are dead or in Coalition and Hessian hands, we are without a home, in our own homeland. A betrayal of the united cause that only the oldest Unioner families could tell of; when the soldiers whose weapons we hammered together first turned upon the striking workers.

The Von Rohe’s revolt is dead. Heinrich is a would-be Tyrant. She exists because other Hessians are scared of her. The Coalition is a daydream without a nation. They had to kill us to make us the more deluded of the old fools of Sirius."