Secretary Reynolds,

I am Harold Kane, Taskmaster-Adjutant of the Octavarium Fleet, retired Minister of Relations, and former Overlord of the Vagrant Raiders.

Having perused the channel and your summary of it, and it appears to me that the situation in Tau-31 can be best described as "poking the bear that wasn't asleep but was preoccupied with a fish it had caught". Your fleet admiral -- what happened to the last few, anyways? Crayterian fleet admirals seem to be fairly disposable -- effectively opened negotiations with Kusari by telling them exactly where to shove their battlecruiser and yet you seem to have expected something else than "of course you realize, this means war" in return. Not only is Crayter's claim on the Tau-31 system only formally documented as far as I can see in Crayter's own publicly-available legal codex, it is mentioned only in the Leviathan Accords (which Kusari was, unsurprisingly, not party to) as being subject to bilaterial negotiations between Bretonia and Crayter. I would recommend that if you wanted to avoid this conflict that you ask Bretonia to support your claim.

The closeness of the Kusari Naval Forces to Tau-44 with this move concerns me somewhat. We have no capacity for open warfare, and minimal capacity to defend a hundred thousand innocent souls from the wrath of a house that was for all intents and purposes unaffected in military capacity by the decade-long total war that just concluded. Yes, they have had their own internal conflicts, but nothing so devastating to their fleet as the Battle of New London or the hundreds of smaller battles over the course of the Gallic invasion of Sirius, many of which the Crayter military took part in, and many of which they came out of in poor shape. If a flotilla of dozens of Tokugawas appears on my doorstep I will be forced to surrender unconditionally, provided that they do not simply run my people through with reckless abandon on the way to whatever their next target is. We have nothing to offer an invading force, and nothing with which to counter it. I doubt that in the grand scale of inter-house war, even every single Crayterian capital ship living and dead put together would outnumber a full, nearly completely undamaged house's fighting force.

One of the core concepts that our two nations had in mind when the Crayter Federal Republic was originally formed was the interest in keeping war out of Tau-44, as the Natio is effectively "leasing" some space in the Makassar field to house its civilians, and as the system had already once been lost to an invading force. Of course, turnaround in your government seems to be frequent and rapid, so on occasions like this I wonder if that interest is still being held in mind by the upper echelons of Crayter.

Being incapable of open war of course does not mean we are useless in a conflict. Our oldest history some twenty-five years ago was that we were a very capable and effective organization of pirates, and any imperialist expansion needs a supply line. In the event that this crisis as you describe it escalates to a war, then we can help with issues like Samura and Kishiro moving transports to supply the KNF machine at home and abroad. It may even be fun to be the "bad guys" again, so to speak; I almost exclusively pilot a desk these days, but it could be good to get back into a Broadsword to go extort two million credits and a bottle of fine sake from someone. I'm sure we have many former Raiders around who would be interested in playing a game of "the cargo may be insured but what about your life" with some hostile transports.

So, in summary: We can put the hurt on their supply chain, if Crayter and Kusari come to blows, but we would appreciate it if we did not have to erect a wall of names somewhere at the end of this and would be even more appreciative if we still had a home of our own in which we do not have to erect such a wall.

I personally hope that you can find some way to stop this before I have to consider paying the Junkers to section up Canberra and move it somewhere not being overrun by Kusari and the Enclave.

Regards,
Taskmaster-Adjutant Harold Kane
Fourth Octavarium Fleet

PS: An important part of leadership when your field is foreign relations is stepping in when a military suit decides to start making diplomatic decisions. If your current fleet admiral is about to be responsible for a war that may kill millions over a system that holds little to no economic and strategic value to a nation of only a few million to begin with then my personal recommendation would be that you accelerate the timeline on finding a new one.