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To: -LR. Subject: Love the Treason, Hate the Traitor. - Enkidu - 10-30-2019

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---------------Welcome, Arbeiter ---------------

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Arbeitsdirektor Corin Frei


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Unionised Peoples of Syndicalist Advocacy

To: The Liberty Rogues.
From: Corin Frei, Arbeitsdirektor. Alster Unioners.
Subject: Love the Treason, Hate the Traitor.

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There appears to be a general ruckus behind Frei. The Unioners are apparently celebrating, although it's generally hazy and out of shot. The direktor himself is jovial, even slightly playful. It's not as frequent as he'd like that he gets to talk to decent tunnelborn outside of the Astrospace Unions. But, rogues are rogues. To the Unioners, they were more than business partners; they were the downstream traffic. The next team-member in the relay. Liberty was a market and Rheinland was the supplier - Unioners who were too hot with the scales and the blindfold would make their fortunes running the interesting-and-rare up to the 'Hattan distributors, where the streets, they tell us, are paved with rhodium.

Unioners liked rogues. Rogues were savvy. They looked out for themselves, they competed, without screwing over the pack. Rogues didn't see themselves as better than anyone else, or acted aloof, and looked reality straight in the eye and stuck their teeth in. Rogues knew that the world was screwed and pretending to be a hero or a savant wasn't going to put food on plates and pull good men out of prison. In short, Rogues lived. They knew the difference between Bullenscheiße and the bottom of a beer glass.

Frei had been dealing with so many men in pressed vinyl zoot suits of late that he'd started to worry if there was any red-blooded honesty out there at all. Technically, being the head-piece (and logical assassination target) was a paid job. He received a ration stipend and extra investment in his transport and security. But talking to the rogues was a pleasure. They had an integrity in grit.

He checked himself. Petra Abendroth probably had the same thoughts sing serene in the back of her head sixteen years ago, shortly before a rogue enforcer shot the back of her head off with a Detroit Linebacker. That was the trouble with being honest crooks. Sometimes the job is worth the steel. In that case, it'd been the Hessians paying - and it was the Hessians who had taken the counterfire.

It was a rough and ready sector out there. And yet, Frei would rather have an unassuming pirate at his back than a flag-hoisting revolutionary.

He pushed the transmit lever, and pulled a playful face.


"Hej. Now arn't you a savvy sort."

"Now it's an open roidfield to be talkin' with rogues again. We've kept our ops' scaled back in Liberty of late, 'cept a coupla' hard-hits at the filling plant in Atka orbit, of course. The big money nowadays is in hittin' 'em when they reach Hamburg's homelanes, now that we've got our whole prison station to ourselves."

"'Course, we paid for that day in more than blood and iron. I hope that the rogue packs never need to take the wounds we took to bring that box to heel."

"I 'eard you boys have tried for the Sugarland a coupla' times. Tried to make your own big break out here. I figured we might be able to help you nail a plan down - see, we've been rebuildin' Vierlande - our own big old supermax camperwagon - down with production and 'yard modules. We've 'ad to ID every structural joint and point out every line and seam in the station. We're solid old structural engineers, you might say; if it floats in the void and people are meant to live in it, we can figure out how it works."

"There's enough inter-house similarities in how the prison station lockup system works between Liberty and Rheinland, that I bet we could help your men out with some updated technical data. I'll get that wired over once the men have stopped cheering themselves through the eye of a bottle. We've had some victories of our own out in the Rheinland core. Let us know if you need any extras now that the markets are booming on the drum. Fighters, bombers, blasters from the ring. We will send a carepackage northbound for you."


The canny director hesitates. He seems unwilling to end a relatively jubilant transmission with bad news. The Bad News. It deserved capitalisation. Unfortunately Arbeitsdirektor’s tended not to live very long by ignoring the obvious.

All it took for evil to prosper was for good men to do nothing, Frei reflected, then laughed at the hubris of it. Well, he wasn’t a Keller or a Heinrich, but he was no angel. He knew himself well enough.

But maybe he could play the angel just long enough, to earn the real demons some sweet-earned divine retribution. He could borderline taste it.

Behind Frei, the commotion was beginning to die off, the last of the revellers heading for a more active compartment. The Unioner waited for the last drunk to stagger out of the bulkhead before speaking up once more. His eyes didn't meet the camera. He glared straight into the tabletop.


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When Frei finally speaks again, his voice is sullen. More stable. The Pacifica dialect has vanished - he now speaks in clean, unaccented, Hamburg German.



"There's another matter. It's less important, but I fear it may interrupt our operations if there's no check to accountability. Call it the old engineer in me not wanting to let a seam grow, a crack go welded. "



“So, rogues, if you’re not in for a long, maddening story that’ll only make you angry or reach for a drink, I’d put this transmission down right now, and end on a high.”

He pauses. He wants to make good on his word. It also has the secondary effect of letting the Union's cryptographers add additional layers of protection to the transmission.

"We've 'ad a... switch of courage from the Lane Hackers. They've turned from close friends and partners in the triangle trade to a guard dog champing at the hand that would free them. They've making forcefull plays towards Unioner ships and trade avenues. They've blackmailed us, threatened us with war, worked with our enemies, lied to us, and recently, tried to steal from us.


This all started some months ago. The Lane Hackers rallied the Unioners to push a large number of our flight arbeiters up into Liberty to fight the Hellfire Legion - all the way to Kansas, even. They made a point that the Unions would benefit from extra resources after the Vierlande massacre and that we could seize these resources from Kansas. The Hackers even promised a ceasefire with the Red Hessians, but they did not make good on their word - the Red Hessians never reached out to us, nor did the Hackers ever tell us any more information as to if they'd tried to communicate with Heinrich. I do not believe they had the means to do so anyhow - they have little sway in the Rheinland core. Still, the Lane Hackers needed the force of the Unionists to invade Kansas, one way or the other. We have the numbers and machinery that the Hackers do not. We agreed to their plan - the Legion did hit us with a WMD, and our people needed a victory after Vierlande - but the situation was obviously odd.

"That's the Lane Hackers caught lying, rogues. That's strike one."

"Currently, the situation is minor. It gets worse. I hope you have a cigar to hand."

"As the cells contributed men and ammo to the trust of a Kansas front, the Lane Hackers began to... over-reach. They made us offers beyond what we would accept, or even wish for. An information pipeline grew between the Lane Hackers and the... the Xenos. Now any Unioner who has fought in Bering and Hudson knows the Xenos to be as toxic a roach as any that crawled out of the corpse of Liberty's mistreatment of its people. We know it, you know it. Men who blame foreigners for the hate of their own kind, have no respect in the underworld. No place in the black-market. But still the pipeline grew, the Hackers pushing forward a proposal that the Xenos would betray their Hellfire allies to cover the Unioner strike.

Now you might want to ask why, and how, the Lane Hackers are talking with the Xenos? Planning strategy with them?"

"Why would the Lane Hackers believe that the Xenos would betray their closest allies in the name of the Lane Hackers; a group allied to you and ourselves - the longstanding enemies of the Xeno movement?"

"If you are confused, so are we, Bosses. So are we. Strike two."

We followed along with it for some time to see if there was integrity to the deal; but the Xenos never stopped their assaults. Either the Xenos lied to the hackers, or, what hope is not the truth; the hackers lied to us. The Xenos still attacked us anyhow."

"Again, lies. The Xenos had never abandoned the Legion. They were still using Legionary ships and equipment. To help the navy, too."

"Hardly what you'd call the actions of a war ally. Hah."

"It'd be funny if men weren't dying in this conspiracy."

"So, we fought the Xenos back. We persist - for we've been fighting the Xenos for decades now and they haven't made any headway against us yet. But it seems the Xeno-Hacker co-operation went deeper than we'd feared. We made an information request to the Lane Hackers regarding a group called 'The Bering Bereft' - a group of militant Zoners that had taken a less.... active... path towards my fellow Unionists in the belt of Beringia. Not only did the Lane Hackers use the Xenos as a source, they asked the Union transfer funds to the very group that had not honoured the deal the Lane Hackers claimed to have set up. The situation smelt of bad faith."

"We paid, in hope that the Xenos might trip up and show their hand. We're still waiting."

"We thought that the Lane Hackers making deals with the Xenos behind the Rogues and the Union's backs would be the end of it. Whilst they are dishonouring our alliance, they are, after all, information brokers. They could have been playing a scam on the Xenos for our benefit - what right does one man on this side of the law have to tell another how to run his business, eh? But now they have come after the metal that makes us men of the Union. Our ships, my rogue brothers."

"About two years ago, the Southern Unionists were tracking down an unfamiliar signal in the Cologne system. It was intimidating our men - you know how superstitious pirates are, and we thought it may have been a trap by the Federal police. We had to turf it out and expose the truth. A Kraken in the asteroid belts will make a raider think twice about hiding in them, of course. We sent our men after this 'ghost ship', looking to put hard deckplate to myth.". This myth became known as 'Der Sirene' - the Siren, in your tongue. We had records around from the days when the Hellfire Legion's grandiose titled 'Task Force Gladius' operated in Hamburg. We suspected that it may be jamming, or spyglass interference, from a Hellfire legion warship. Obviously, we couldn't have the Legion running around south of the border, setting fire to the underworld below the belt as they have above. We sent a message to the Lane Hackers, looking for a means to determine if the 'Sirene's' shriek of electronic noise was Spyglass data. The Hackers confirmed the spyglass battleship’s signal data, but Professor Hunter, an enterprising woman with the access relevant to ID the ship, did not provide any name to the intel. The Lane hackers called the design outdated, suggesting, quite naturally, that they had no interest in the technology. From what we have seen, they prefer their miniaturised spyglass relays; all the better to track shipping with, with a subtlety that a juggernaught cannot. We doggedly kept the search burning, until we were informed to the utter surprise of my predecessors that the Siren was both a real ship, and that it was present in the Rheinland Federal Intelligence fleet Breaker's yards as a Federal Military asset.

"It is always the case that our accursed states and the corporations funding them have access to far more ears than we do. A fact of life that keeps jails on both sides of the Hudson stocked, as both Rogues and Unioners know well. Of course, big money makes even the smartest roach immune to threat when it’s munching through the pulled pork; but the BDM had enough of a reason to believe that the Military was spying on them, or playing some form of institutional prank. Imagine the inter-service tensions between the LSF and the Liberty Navy – oho, my friends, they are more extreme to the n’th power in the Rhein. The Direktor before me approved a multi-cell operation to take the Siren for the Unioners, rather than let the Federal Intelligence services have access to the wreck."

We began a heist to retrieve the ship. I’ll cut the fat. Since ships are our bread-and-butter, we succeeded."

"We've ran the Siren past multiple different engineering groups to try to figure out its origins. From what we've pieced together, the vessel is a Junker patch-together of an old vessel from the Vespucci Triurmivate days. The vessel is a spyglass battleship, yes, but has no Lane hacker spyglass network. Anyhow, we've stripped the vessel back to the structural plates and replaced any old components in the wreck with our own. The Natio Octavarium had a look over the vessel, and found nothing odd. The Sirene has flown along with the Lane Hackers in space, and the lane hackers have remarked on nothing unusual."

"Until, suddenly, they decided that they wanted the ship for themselves after we’d just finished adding our own repairs and upgrades to the base hull. An odd sense of timing, don’t you think?"

"About a week ago, we received a message from a Lane Hacker called Mildred Wolfe, speaking, in her own words, "On behalf of the inner circle." Odd. Wolfe is a known assassin, who, again, in her own words:"

"Yet she's been speaking for the Hacker Inner circle of late. She's done more than speak. She’s experimented with blackmail."

"She's threatened to attack the Unioners if we do not give the Lane Hackers the Sirene, in defiance of Nicole Hunter's own analysis of the ship. Initially, she requested that we turn over the Sirene for a 'team of specialists' to analyse the vessel. They claim the vessel is a ship called 'The Fu Manchu' - when quite clearly, it is not."

"Let's compare photographs, shall we?"



[Image: EXIkxvi.png]
An image of the Fu Manchu sourced from N.Hunter. Date Unknown, estimated 817 AS


[Image: uUKBnO2.png]
The Ventral Hull of the Unioner Cellship Sirene, including Unioner retrofits. Date 825 AS




"Wolfe brought a squadron of fighters and bombers to Vierlande, deep in Unioner space, when she claimed that she was going to bring a survey team. She did this with no prior warning, and immediately opened by threatening the Vierlande home wings, if we did not unconditionally turn the Sirene over. A strange toast for her to make, from one ally to another."

" Mildred’s goons then refused our request to let them land on the Sirene and investigate for themselves. , and threatened 'consequences' if we did not give them that which is not theirs to take. We did consider their claim, and gave them every chance to board the Sirene and experiment upon her in our own shipyards. They showboated that the only way to save the Unioner - Lane Hacker alliance is for the Unioners to… surrender… the Sirene to Mildred’s enforcers for her to waltz up Ontario with the ship in tow, without any Unioners aboard. They claimed our alliance was in peril, peril that Mildred had created herself, if they did not give us a ship that they both knew of, and that they know, is not the vessel they claim it is."
“There’s two rules in Hamburg:”

“You do not steal a Unioner's ship.”

“You do not threaten a Unioner in front of his home”.

"Strike three."

The three strike rule was notorious; It was the basis of much of the LPI's arrest procedure for petty crimes, and had kept Sugarland handing fat cheques to the Houston senate office for years. The meaning was obvious. Three strikes, and you're out. Three strikes, and you lose your freedom to earn another line.

“Mildred’s attempt at intimidation suddenly stopped looking enforceable when the Vierlande cell charged numerous fighters, gunboats, and cruisers out to surround her and her six hired goons. She promptly ran, and never started the fight she threatened. It turns out that there’s no backbone under that wishbone body, to the surprise of no-one.”
“When faced with the playground bully, Rogues, you let him know if he’s going to take your lunch, he’s going to have to lose his teeth, first.”

"I hope Mildred Wolfe is a Xeno agent - that would be the least jarring headache out of a range of bad options. I believe that a minority of Lane Hackers who are working with the Xenos, are trying to disrupt Lane Hacker alliances, or start a war. I believe that the Lane Hackers are collaborating with the Xenos behind our backs. I believe that a minority of Lane Hackers are fabricating evidence, or downright lying, to spoil the stability our underworld has enjoyed for so long in the Liberty-Rheinland border. I believe that the Lane Hackers should be held to account for working with the Xenos, let alone the disrespect they've shown my People - but that's my problem, not yours."

"If the Rogues have any information regarding odd actions or communications by The Lane Hackers, that have happened in the last several months, please tell us if you think it's worthy of being shared. The Unioners still see the Lane Hackers as our friends - irresponsible, high-maintenance friends, but friends non-the-less, despite multiple dishonest acts towards us. We would like to see our alliance fixed, and not broken."

"Thank you for your time, Rogues. I appreciate that I'm the bearer of bad news. If you need anything from us, we're but a system away. We hope that the situation calms down, someone thumps miss Wolfe on the forehead, and an adult swiftly reigns the Lane Hackers back to their normal antics of scheming against their enemies, not us."

"There's a free bottle of hooch on Pacifica waiting for any rogue who needs a dutch mindwipe after reading all of this."

"Good luck out there. You might need it. If you need us, we have your back."

"Frei out."










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You cannot cut off the tongue, of a man who speaks through his acts.
C.Frei.
143rd Arbeitsdirektorate, Syndicate Leagues of the aligned Unioner Syndicates and the LWB.



Transmission Complete


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RE: To: -LR. Subject: Love the Treason, Hate the Traitor. - Hemlocke - 10-30-2019

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Comm ID: Josie “Rose” Hemlocke

Location: -Dark Matter Interference-

Frei.... I've heard that name before...

You've probably heard the title "Hellhound" before right? Whispered among some of the... less desirable 'assets' known as our low ranking thugs. Think I almost blew up Dawson one time... Not important, see, allow me, a bit of a disclaimer before hand.

I don't like you, I don't like the Hackers. I don't like my own rogues, I don't like people. I fought against you and your people in Rheinland for a long time, under the notion you were simply my enemy. You seem to be an elder, a rare sight in our line of work Frei, I must admit. I'm sure you saw my Werewolf in the bowels of Dresden a few times.

Now, I am a killer over a diplomat, but much like that goon Wolfe, as of late I find myself being the ladder more and more often.

You ask of anything odd happening in recent months... for a long time now Hackers have refused to aid us in brutal dog fights against the Xeno "Alliance" Odd enough, but there's nothing we can do. Chalked it up to they just didn't want to get their hands dirty. Now I know why that was happening, And actually, not even a month ago. We were sent This Communication from none other than Mildred Wolfe herself. Oddly, I must admit. Using the exact same words. "On Behalf of the Inner Circle."

And as you can see there, an outright denial to put forth evidence for your incursions. Now seeing as you've always been in Texas, I don't care much if it's our turf. They demanded we force you out of Liberty. On what basis? Now we know, you have plenty of dirt on them. I sent them this Communication hoping to discuss the matter in a more private setting. As you can see they worded things in a very odd way. Seems Wolfe couldn't keep up the charade forever.

Now you come to us, with evidence of their grand schemes, all I can say to this is. I should've known, it was right under my nose. I had every hunch in the world but I was played the fool. Thank you for enlightening me.

You say the Hackers entered Rheinland and threatened you. Well... provided visual evidence to the contrary. You should know us by now Frei. There is no repairing this alliance. The only thing I wish for now, is their blood coating the walls of every single ramshackle hovel the rogues own. Their legacy battered and broken, left to spread to the solar winds.

I can't even fathom my own rage. It's potent... foul... like a plague has washed through these halls and claws at my very soul.

I'll butcher... every last one of them...

-Hemlocke-