Guten Tag.

It is curious how a house that has spawned so much economic largess - the parasite for all other Sirian enterprise, can become a place of peace. Arbiters and Interrupters alike walk the bomb line between competitive interests. It is us, the middlemen, who prevent the universe from falling apart. We render those interests… commutative.

You, for cardamine. Us, for artefacts. The two hands at the end of a very long arm connected to the push-pull of untold millions of bodies and minds. In our end theatres, there is little distinction between us. What for you ends up on the street, for us emerges in the vault, the offshore bank, the laboratory. We conduct our trade whilst undermining those who have forced us here, out on the sea-stack, watching the law crumble around us under its own weight.

We are both the victims of the neocons. Of globalisation - of the mistake of false paternalism. Money is madness - a nothing created through the attachment of value. It is all we have. Be you socialist, nationalist or anarchs-communist, we fight the globalists by redirecting their end product. We siphon - money, assets, steadily sealing the zip-ties over the arterial tissue till hearts pop in their boardrooms. Our fascination is the local war - not pirate enterprise waged, out there, beyond the green, on the far side of the edge wall. That’s just a means to an end, Hackers. A glorious end.

The hackers hold a great many chords with innumerable puppets behind them. You are information brokers - you cheat at cards. We have much to benefit from working with you, as you do, in turn, from us. What you are for software we are for hardware. Molybdenum and Duralumin, gold and silicon.
We construct, craft. You code, manipulate, re-root. We have a shipyard. You, unless you’re hiding something remarkable, which you may yet, do not.

Apart from physical and ideological worth, there is the obvious… tactical… advantage to our collaboration. Whilst we may tryst with your Maltese allies, if rarely, within the Sigmas, we have no interest in conflicting with the Orange Alliance within the… remarkably faux named, house of Liberty. You need not lecture us on trust. We balance a tenuous, treasonous relationship between the self-interested Dorians and the disgustingly Marxist Hessians on a glass thread. All it would take would be the whisper of a lie to destroy the greatest smuggling enterprise in the Rhein.

You see; we thrive on falsehood too, Lane Hackers. Should not the truth dealers and the professional liars, thick as the thieves we are, find a common cause? We stand to write a good many wrongs together. Agiera and Republican cast us out. Made a criminal caste from good men. Intelligent men.

And now, in Texas, in Hamburg, they will pay.

We propose a formal reinstitution of positive diplomacy between the Lane hackers and the Die nationale Gewerkschaft der Alster und der fünfte Reich, explicitly for the purpose of causing the maximal possible economic damage to the Liberty Rheinland trade artery. If war between our houses was an atrocity, it indirectly succeeded in attaining what five hundred years of guerrilla warfare could not - crimping the Hamburg pass into a single trade lane. Together, we can guarantee the fall of hudson. Together, we can cut the globalists down.

Our resources and shipbuilding assets are at your disposal, should you require them, Lane Hackers. Till then, I remain your council.

I'd prefer not to be an afterthought, professorship.

No pressure.

The Professorship will have our transports. Expect our registration imminently.

You come armed with our history. That in itself is worthy of note. The Lane Hackers have a resumé quite distinctive - it is one of the reasons why we are dialoguing with you now; the re-affirmation of old alliances.

The Bundschuh plot is known to us. Disturbingly, the cessation of the war has not impacted it - Bundschuh activity within the New Hampshire system is as prevalent as ever. We believe that there is an interplay between the 5th fleet’s late co-operation with the Order Overwatch, the ‘Schuh, the newly-minted Agency 404, and the Gas Mining Guild to undermine Rheinland from outside whilst the peace treaty functions. Auxesia is also a player, but it is unknown what team they are playing for.

Rheinland is in internal turmoil - this is, of course, nothing new, but the situation appears to be particularly dangerous. The BDM appears to be serving an unknown agenda, with only the civil police and the Military still in service to the Federals. Pro-restoration sentiment is on the rise, as are the Union’s ranks, but only in interaction to sustained foreign influence over the federal government and the dominant industrial institutions. ALG appears to be acting almost entirely in servitude to the Liberty market, whilst Kruger, the last enterprise in the Rhein to still maintain adherence to the Imperial labour act five-thirty-five, as passed by the Alster Union, is under threat. With Interspace Commerce’s buyback of Bonn and them biocide of Stuttgart by Synth Foods, the economy is in total tank. The Red Army, are, of course, revelling in the moment; Dresden’s industry has been shattered.

Outside influences are already capitalising on the situation. We have seen foreign capital vessel movement within Frankfurt, and the BDM has been frequently found supplementing local law enforcement. This has been accompanied by increasing factionalism within the remains of the so-called “popular revolution”. The Children of Von Rohe’s day present a comprehensive threat to the sovereignty of the nation.

Most disturbingly, the Bundschuh have taken a dive to the radical. Your intelligence is in need of an update: Klugmann is the Bundschuh figurehead no longer. Instead, a militarist upstart by the name of Nika Haupt has swept the organisation up behind her. She has been acting much more aggressively than Klugmann; most likely in an attempt to consolidate her position by playing the strongman. Haupt is no fool - she knows that she does not have the assets to confront us directly, and has proven most proficient at finding third parties to duck behind. This makes her far more concerning than Klugmann. Where Klugmann was a knife in the dark, Haupt is a blade in the light. She takes greater risks for heavier rewards. Shock and awe. She will either destroy the Bundschuh or transform them into a significant strategic risk. Most intriguing is her apparent connection with the Order - she has been encountered twice in the company of critical representatives of the Overwatch, flanked by major strategic assets, in the absence of any escorting VWA vessels. Whilst we have no proof, this would infer an interplay running deeper than mere alliances - an individual tie. She is a worrying woman, Hackers. If we have our way, she is not long for this world.

You do not have to be a Lane Hacker to appreciate what this may mean for our near-future relationship with the Red Hessians, nor the extreme unorthodoxy the Union may have to embrace if such a situation came to pass. The Union has been the beneficiary of watching two great, malevolent forces grind each other to destruction. It remains to be seen how we swim with the sharks.


We estimate that we have anything between a week and several months before the Hessians have us re-enacting Julius Caesar at the Forum.

Unfortunately for the seers, there is plenty of the imperial echelon left, and we have been in a near-permeant state of preparation for the coming counter-revolution since Von Rohe’s day. Powerful friends hide in dark corners.

The odds, however, mandate brave rolls, and a great many wild cards. Fortuitously, providence has been most accommodating. Now is not the time to share, but we believe we may have discovered the key to the disabling of the Hudson gate. Once we have the data and evidence as to the functionality of the device, we will confide anew.

We need time to plot. Time to construct.