A day like any other day to approximately about 90% of the entire Sirius population. You wake up, you go to work, you do your job, you socialise with your workmates, you drink your coffee, you're anxious to go home, you finally end your shift. You enter your quarters and you remember a conversation you overheard at work today. "Hey, did you watch the news yesterday?" "No, why?" "They mentioned something about a crisis down south, I think Bretonia's gone to war with another neighbour." "Oh. Cool."
You start making yourself dinner, and realise you're bored already. You start up your neural net interface and enter some words into the search engine. You get many results with official coverage, but amongst it all is a different page, home made and not flashy at all. Just like so many other people you enter the link out of curiosity and start reading...
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Introductions
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My name is Kritzky and this is my diary.
Actually, neither of these statements is true. Kritzky is just a nickname I use for business among other things. In my line of work one can never be too careful. I am sure you will never find a character called Kritzky in any of the Omega systems because I change my nicknames weekly.
If you're reading this, you're probably one of those people who don't really matter in what is currently going on in this part of Sirius. After all, why else would you search for the exact keywords that led you to this page? Whoever you might be, I still want you to know that what you will read here is history. Or rather it is the present, but it certainly will be history soon, and as we all know history is usually told by official sources and official sources have a way of... reinterpreting the facts. Of course, I fully expect you to believe this story as biased, and if you do - good for you. For that would be what one could describe as "the Zoner way". Good old anarchists.
Back to the start though: My name is Kritzky, and I am a smuggler in the employment of, among many others, the Red Hessians.
The Business
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You can learn a lot about an organisation by the way they do business with you. And I do business with every single mook in the book. Most of them are unsophisticated types. They just want the job done because, unsurprisingly, their orders are to make sure it is done. Then there are the big wigs. Shady characters, far more interesting than any smuggler you would ever meet. Guys you wouldn't quite be afraid of at the first look outright, but you just know they have a million ways to screw you over if they just wanted to. These guys are usually the friendly types. They know they are pretty untouchable, unlike you, so they will make sure you know it as well. And this is how I end up drinking liquor with people who plan and carry out strategies meant to win one of the bloodiest wars Sirius has ever seen.
That's right, I am talking about the never ending Corsair expansion. It kills probably in excess of a hundred people every day. And it provides a cause to work towards for for thousands more. Like me. Quite frequently, I have lately found myself shipping construction materials to this one asteroid base. Normally it's uneventful: I dock, I spend an hour in the bar waiting for the cargo unloaders to finish, I meet some generic, well built, uniformed character who's always named Hans, and who doesn't want to know my name. We spend some time going through the cargo manifest top to bottom. Then I receive a bag of credit chits from him, and I get told to get out within the next 15 minutes because I am blocking the cargo hold. Funny as it may sound you get used to this kind of cold efficiency pretty quickly. It's almost like renting a wench: predictable. You meet, you do your business, and then you part ways hoping nobody else finds out about what just happened.
Well, the other day something entirely different happened. Instead of the usual Hans I get a whole welcoming committee. They pretty much drag me off into the cold, dark back of the whole base and somewhere along the line I get this intense feeling that I've done something they really didn't like and now is the moment for me to pay the price. Instead, I wind up in a room full of high ranking generals or whatever, playing pool and drinking scotch and champagne like its some kind of bachelor society celebration. I quickly notice a few things. A bunch of them have different uniforms from the usual greyish Hessian ones, while one guy completely stands out by being shorter than the rest, wearing a pair of old style circular glasses and a well cut black suit rather than a uniform and bio-enhancements like what you would expect from the typical terrorist slash wannabe super soldier type living it large in the deep edge worlds.
I snap out of it when a lackey comes over and points me to a corner where three very differently dressed people are sitting at a table with some kind of a map and a bunch of drinks in front of them, discussing stuff. I go over to them and immediately the one in the Hessian uniform recognises me and motions for me to sit down. I pull up a chair, and what follows is one of the most bizarre nights of my career. I find myself being woken up the next day by a pair of guards who, completely disregarding the astounding headache I had then, pretty much push me back into the docking bay where I am told my ship is filled with diamonds and I am to take them to... well, a destination.
I could mention a million reasons why I didn't protest. The money, the fear, the fact that I promised the good Coalition political commissar that I will not disappoint his friend - the Coalition marine with a huge revolver - and do what his Hessian friends tell me to do. The fact that they packed me a bottle of a drink they called "vodka" for the road ahead. Something told me back then that I was going to need it.
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This is the point in the story where the public gets a flash forward to a situation that will be later explained. In this case it would be a short clip of me running through a corridor with a fire extinguisher, frantically trying to dodge the panicked people running in the other direction. The sound of an alarm gradually drowning out the shouts and screams generated by a population that knew that should the walls around them fail, there would be nowhere to go but cold, deep space. Another hard impact shook the entire station. I'm trying to make it back to my ship dodging deck fires and collapsing hallways. I can't lose this cargo, or I might as well just off myself right now. Impact after impact after impact, finally the inevitable happens: we lose power, something hits me on the head and I pass out.
Freeport 1 is a nice place in general. Most of the time it's pretty quiet, but it has this lawless mentality also. Kind of like that desert planet from the movie with the big hairy mooing guy, the one you'd only know about if you were a buff of old movies back from the pre-Alliance times. It is one of the few places where you can see a lot of opposing sides sitting in their own respective corners with their weapons holstered and safetied, rather than being pointed and fired at each other. Sure, you get the occasional scuffle from time to time, sometimes by a drunk Corsair or a Zoner capital ship captain feeling important. But situations like this get quickly disarmed and don't last long.
It was a really nice day. The young Omega-3 sun was entering perihelion this month, so the station had more power than usual. It was nice and warm, and I was sitting in the bar waiting for my ship to be refuelled, while chugging down a glass of good Stuttgart beer and conversating with this fellow I met a while back. He was a shipper, kind of like me. Interestingly, our schedules usually matched each other even though we worked for completely different people, so it wasn't the first time I met him on the bar deck. And the conversation we had went something like this:
(excusing the lack of the whole context but I am sure you will get the point)
Him: You know what I find exceptionally funny? The way certain people try to do business around here. They stroll around with their big guns and huge egos, thoroughly disrespecting their peers. This, not actual differences, is how conflict is born around here.
Me: What's your point?
Him: My point is look at the Zoner destroyer moored outside. Just look at it through the viewport. I've docked yet two days ago last, heard the ordeal the captain of the bloody thing did over comms to a Corsair gunboat that strolled in looking for some docking space. He carried on pushing the Corsair around until he got annoyed and just left saying that he'll be back to "claim his spine".
Me: Heh, that sounds nasty. I heard the same thing happened at Freeport 11.
Him: Yeah. The other day I heard a Zoner convoy was hunted down in the deep Omega systems. By hunted down I mean completely obliterated, no survivors. Somebody just swooped in and killed them all, no questions asked. Nobody has any idea what hit them, but a lot of people keep pointing fingers at one another.
Me: So who do you think offed that convoy?
Him: Probably the bloody Corsairs for all we know. Making sure the Zoners know they mean business. One thing sure as daylight, this isn't going to end well.
It occurred to me only later how perfectly spot on he was. Not before the first signs of commotion showed though.
The Overture
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What would be your first thoughts were you sitting on a space station bored out of your mind, seeing the guards and technicians around you suddenly start running around frantically? A security announcement soon following about an unexpected situation unfolding outside the station, but soon interrupted by a series of station wide tremors. What would you think was happening? The last thing that came through my head was that the station was under siege. What would anyone have to gain from besieging the Zoners? Yet here we were. As the collective crowd of the bar had their noses stuck to the main viewport observing all the Zoner defence ships undocking from their moors, I had my eyes fixed on the opposite one - the one where it seemed like a large number of flies buzzed around the horizon. Except the flies were becoming bigger at an exponential rate, and one of them started to glow. It was mesmerising, and as the blue glow became impossible to ignore and illuminated the inside of the bar, someone shouted "Incoming!" at the top of his lungs, and by force of sheer instinct I feel down on the floor just before the hit came.
The rest was pure adrenaline. I picked myself up, dragged my unconscious friend out of the bar room and as far away from the bulkhead as possible, then took the first fire extinguisher I could find and ran for the docking bays hell bent on only one thing: saving my ship. The rest is, how they say, history.
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