Jan Richthofen
I encountered a ship, called the 'WhippingGirl', while docked on Planet Malta. The name...intrigued me... Needless to say, I had it checked out. The Malta Outcasts had taken quite a liking to her...poor dear wasn't wearing a rebreather...breathing the air, you understand? they didn't want to talk to me...had to twist some arms, pirate ports are never honorable. Anyway, her name was Sophie...I'm sure you recognize these pictures...that ship, the Pirate Train, the cargo bays are equipped with life support.
Lady Juno Kietan
Jan closed his eyes, tensed and clenched his fists. Where had he gone wrong? He had always been a good father, and was around as often as possible in spite of his duties in the Order and later the Rheinland Military. Was it because her mother had died in a raid on a Wild Wrath wing, leaving a gap that he couldn't fill?
He groaned. Not even that could drive his darling daughter to that, could it? Dropping out of flight school, where she was doing well, apparently, to become a drug-hopped slave-trader. Damn.
He'd find the cause of this. She'd be home soon and those bastards would pay.
He brought up various pages on his computer unit relating to the latest rise in the slave trade. Apparently one of the Military's pilots, Corporal Gunthram, attempted to apprehend a 'Seth Driskill' in Liberty and earned herself a forty million credit bounty on her head for her efforts. This 'Driskill' was about to find that corrupting his daughter and targetting Rheinland pilots was as big a mistake as taking part in the skin-trade.
Now, Jan began to plot on how to best get the son of a bitch and retrieve his daughter outside of Rheinland Military jurisdiction...
The Rheinland Military offered no way to get his daughter back. In fact, she was probably already wanted dead or alive by the military... and they'd probably prefer dead. Jan found it ironic that the fascist bastards up top were punishing slavery with such fervour, considering how hard the Bundschuh political prisoners worked in the mines.
He needed to get away from Rheinland for a while. They didn't care about him or his daughter. Their insane 'Church of the Chancellor' made no sense to his reasoned mind. They had a list of banned books half a mile long. They crushed the people under their immaculately polished boots, goosestepping on the faces of the populace.
This wasn't the nation he signed up to fight for as a youth. It hadn't improved, even after the expulsion of the Nomads. The Chancellor had corrupted their 'democracy' with an obviously false religion... no... a cult. The Cult of the Chancellor. It sickened Jan to see brave young men and women throw their lives away for some old bastard that sat in his opulent offices, ordering dissidents to their deaths for not believing that he was, in fact, a deity made flesh.
Jan paced back and forth in his office above the fighter hangar on the Alzette, the Chancellor's flagship; which was ironic really, considering what was transpiring.
Using an old, secret, communications encryption for the Order's reconnaisance pilots, he waited as his computers attempted to contact an old friend that defected from the Rheinland Military to the Order with him many years previous, who returned to purge the Wild after the war, leaving Jan in the Order for years because of his young family, his wife and his daughter, Sophie.
When Jan returned to Rheinland, his friend was gone. All records erased. He knew better. They had erased all evidence of a pilot having betrayed the Rheinland Military, to save them any embarassment.
Jan worried that his communication would be intercepted despite his taking every precaution. The message was not on hostile frequencies and was written in code anyway. Totenkopt, if he was still alive, would hopefully be able to respond.
Pressure cubes last exactly 3 days without power, before they begin breaking down. Pair that with lack of water, and radiation punching through the thin hull...people die. Four thousand, two hundred, ninety five people. The scent of decay, of bacteria eating through intestines, with that same bacteria floating up, getting inside internal atmosphere scrubbers attached to a bay never meant to contain live cargo, one that usually stank of rot and feces...now stank of death. Four thousand two hundred ninety five dead, mortified people, each packed into a cube eighty cm to a side. The scrubbers passed it up to the command deck...
Sophie lay curled around the husk of a young girl...her blood pooled and congealing on the deck.
Three RM pilots had chased the WhippingGirl from the docks of New Berlin, to the edge of Omega-56. During the escape, Sophie's rear compartment was punctured by micro-asteroids while the shields were down. The compartment was sealed off, and it slowly depressurized. Sophie had sent her plaything, a young girl, to fetch more cardamine. She slowly suffocated, and the cardamine was sealed off from the forward compartment.
Chrysanthemums....My own sisters, pirating my business. Bundies, sure, that I can understand. Someone who hasn't heard a rumor, and it was a new ship. Mr. Wren, gentle old man...hospitalized because I've faded from the news of the day, sure, fine, understandable...can just bounty them, pay a few million, return the balance. But...Chrysanthemums...Its only been a year. A year, and a bit. Sixty Four weeks, and I've dissappeared. So has my home, and that hurts. I've always looked back towards Ainu, to Morika. Have I lost that? I've wealth, riches, dreams....does Amaterasu smile on me? Or even care?
I'm alone, out here...more alone than I've ever felt before.
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