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Username: babur.khan.94
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Freeport 5, Omega-41 system
February 10, 826 AS
Turns out I used to have a log like the one I'm about to start recording, but I completely forgot about it four years ago. Figured I'd waste some time over a personal diary to get rid of some of the anxiety, especially considering that there's no psychologists around. I would update the old one but the files are corrupt for some reason, so...
Anyway, what happened so far...
that job I had on Leeds, I'm fired. Okay, not fired, let's say that I had an unpleasant confrontation with the Gallic military police that forced me to flee offworld. Turns out smuggling refugees out of that hellhole and military equipment in for the Resistence is likely to attract attention sooner or later, no matter how closed you keep your mouth about it.
That or someone was a snitch, but at this point I don't care anymore about vengeance. The place will be off-limits to me for some time anyway.
Between what I made from smuggling men out and weapons in on Leeds and my work for [REDACTED] I would say I have enough to feed three generations, so in this respect I'm content anyway.
Until about a few months ago everything was okay. I used to farm a small piece of land on Gran Canaria with Ersheen (you'll be amazed at how cheap the land was down there. But then again, it was a virtually empty wilderness settled by a million people at best) and I must say that, though there were tensions between the various settler groups, it was a far cry from what was happening at home in Bretonia.
More or less everything was quiet, but the Gallic blitz through New London messed up everything.
I received news of mami and daidi's deaths from the Bretonian embassy on Gran Canaria, apparently they died during an orbital bombing, and shortly afterwards I had to flee the place as my own country brought war to my new home following some failed negotiations.
What a fucking waste of resources... to make enemies of your neighbours when the world you're trying to occupy is already ripe for settling without forcing anyone out... If it was room for refugees that the Bretonian government was after, there was already plenty without occupying the place and forcing a change authority. And then there was Sprague...
I want no part in this and neither does Ersheen, so we fled as far as we could.
I've heard Pygar's remarkably cozy for a desert planet with near-supersonic sandstorms.
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Planet Pygar, Omicron Theta system
February 17, 826 AS
After a brief stop on Corfu (the Ahoudori isn't made to withstand turbulences as strong as those below, so I had to rent a shuttle) I'm finally planetside on Pygar.
Not on the surface though, you don't want to be on the surface. Where you want to be is below, underground.
The exiles from Gran Canaria have dug below the surface after having found some weird rocky formations, and it turned out that the world was once inhabited.
Since I have nowhere left to go and it's on solid ground that I want to sleep, I decided to check the real estate market on this planet, and as predicted housing is extremely cheap.
Every week new tunnels are discovered with new ruined cities and new potential housing, you could potentially just unpack your things in a decent spot, claim it as your own if nobody had the same idea before you and not pay a dime for it.
The harder way is to buy on already claimed land, but be sure that in any case you're going to get enough to make the poor bastards living in the cramped and overpriced hovels in New London red with envy for the tiniest fraction of the price.
Still, despite the accessibility of real estate, it's hard to consider the situation idyllic. Crete's a jump from here and, while we did entertain half-decent relations back on GC (they even tried and failed to defend the world from Bretonia, probably more so than the Zoners themselves did), they're still not the most easygoing people, and it's in their backyard that we're settling. They may also take offense at their monopoly in the artifact trade being challenged, considering that this place is full of ruins and it's in fact among ruins that the exiles from Gran Canaria are building their new homes. Whoever will get the bright idea of dealing in artifacts without going through them first is going to attract a lot of trouble.
Worse still, the ruins may or may not be Nomadic, so there's that.
Either we piss off the Cretans or one of us attracts the squids here from whatever hellhole they're from - and I'm told it is not too far from Theta by the way - by stepping on the wrong foot plate or whatever. If we aren't infected here in the first place, that is.
I've even heard that not too far from here there's thinking machines, but I'll have to verify for myself.
Overall, yeah, good housing, terrible everything else. But we're out of options and neither me nor Ersheen want to live in some simulated gravity environment for the remainder of our lives.
She's deluded herself that "everything is going to be fine", and she's trying to convince me of that as well.
I want to settle here, but I'll need a lot of gymnastics to be as optimistic as she is.
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Username: babur.khan.94
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Lanzarote Base, Omega 49 system
March 17, 826 AS
Boy, that was a month of happenings. I can say that my life turned upside down, though I can't say for sure whether for better or worse.
Good news first?
I have a new house on Pygar. On unclaimed land, which means it costed next to nothing, barring the little work needed to arrange rooms and to ship the Ahoudori's furniture from orbit. Nothing too big, but cozy enough and I have half a mind of claiming the surrounding territory as well and hiring some security. I could earn some serious money handing out construction permits.
It does feel lonely for now, but people will come.
Now, the iffier news, bad too depending on anyone's point of view:
I have taken a trip in the neighbourhood, and the Omicrons are a proper mix of zoo and mental asylum with no walls to contain either.
Between thinking machines, Nomads, Nomad reverers (!!!) and corporate-empowered mercenaries shooting first and asking questions later, when they do ask questions that is, this place is a hellhole, and again all this is just a jump or two from home.
I have realized that, considering this neighbourhood, Pygar needs defense, and so I have permuted the Ahoudori for a Fearless-class destroyer, fresh from Livadia's shipwrights, handing out much of what I had for the difference. Her name is the Multan, called so after an ancient city of saints back on Earth.
She isn't quite complete yet, there's much to be done about the armor and I will not be happy until I will get her a cloaking device four times her price, but I would say she's flight and battle-worthy.
After having recruited a crew as inexperienced as I am, I realized that Pygar needed a fleet to defend it and I was ready to commandeer such a fleet if need be. Thankfully, though, the responsibility fell on someone else.
Voncloud - this is the name of the one who came up with the initiative - is a Canarian originally from Bretonia, like me, and he is a huge romantic. He has connections with important Zoner orgs and Cretan brotherhoods, likely enough to let Thetans sleep well at night as soon as his Black Kites project takes off. We already have our volunteers, and I was among the first.
I'm trying my best to keep my hopes high.
And, speaking of Cretans, Voncloud convinced me to do something that I would have never conceived on my own:
give one last middle finger to Carina.
See, while Jerard is a Bretonian citizen, much like many others he wanted nothing to do with the war against the baguette-eaters, and so he emigrated to Gran Canaria in the vain hope of escaping the mess. And when the Tommies landed on his world, well, he took it personally, so now while he openly works as distantly as possible from Bretonia as the admiral of the Black Kites, he is in fact also in touch with the resistence on GC and his hatred goes as far as planning black ops against Bretonia.
Today he involved me in a raid in Gran Canaria's orbit organized with the support of other revanchists among the exiled settlers and a Cretan brotherhood, and he instructed me to come in with an unmarked ship.
Being a good and upstanding member of society, I had none, so I had to buy an old mining rig from those Rheinlander communists on Tangiers, which I refitted with some decent weaponry on Freeport 5.
While I can't claim to have scored any kills, I can say I'm satisfied of the thing considering that I came out of an engagement with the Bretonian Armed Forces in one piece.
So enamoured of the thing I was that I bought another and fit it with the same weaponry, but this one's marked for the Omicrons.
So yeah, that's what happened so far.
I must say, the route I've taken is far from the most legal one, or the most humane one for that matter. But the reality is that I was cornered here, on the Edge, and I'm among beasts now. And if I want to survive, it's as a beast that I must act.
For my ship. For my home. For her. For our children.
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Planet Pygar, Omicron Theta system
March 24, 826 AS
Been some time since my latest entry, but I've been busy between making the money I need to finish the Multan and serving as a Black Kite.
Considering today's events around Freeport 11, I would like to dedicate this entry to our alien neighbours and their agents among us (yeah, there are people who would side with the alien over their own kind, believe it or not).
There isn't much to say about the thinking machines of Gammu, they hate our guts and it is my hope to see their world glassed within my lifetime and their "species" erased not merely from existence but from the pattern of possibility, so I think I will go straight to their organic cousins (???) and the friends they have among us.
And the truth is... they are an enigma.
We can see what they do, they take advantage of one of our biggest flaws to pit us against our fellow man, and as a rule they intend to see us gone from good.
And, worse still, they have allies among our own kind, who would be glad to see 95% of us gone if that paves the way for their inter-species utopia, whatever that is.
Still, the few encounters we've had so far have been mostly within the no-fire zone of a Freeport, which they appear to respect with a certain devotion.
Now, as a rule we back off from each other but today the situation came very close to blows, and I think that we would have been wiped out had they not retreated despite their tactical and numeric superiority.
I still wonder whether that was at least in part because of my less than hostile tone, at least as compared to the others in Velvet squadron who appeared to be all too eager for martyrdom. I guess that, unlike me, they had nobody willing to reach them upon hearing news of their departure.
To keep a wary but never hostile tone has been my rule so far: do not provoke them, and they will not shoot me and put Zoner assets has been my memo.
It limits or even prevents damage, but the reality is that I have an admittedly unhealthy curiosity towards them and their thralls.
What exactly prompts them to act the way they do, considering all the available room for both?
And what prompts some of our own to betray their fellow man? What kind of utopia is worth building upon the corpses of dozens of billions of people?
I have tried to extract explanations from Pennybrooke khanun in the past but I was cut short by the intervention of one of her alien acquaintances, in Kappa, and I can't say I had the time to rectify that today.
Was it trying to hide something? Did it think she talked too much?
Judging by my impression of Pennybrooke khanun, they justify their hostility by thinking that we are hostile in the first place. In their minds, we are an existential threat to them. Needless to say, just like a well-meaning but socially estranged college student from an affluent family who needs to feel like a hero for the underdog at all costs she believes this and has projected herself into the hostile side to the point of referring to mankind as "them". A human referring to her own kind as the great other, let that sink in for a second.
Both for the sake of peace and for more utilitarian reasons (see: survival of Zoner settlements), an attempt must be seriously made to convince them that neither us nor the vast majority of mankind means any harm to them.
Even if that attempt wont pass through official channels.
