To: Oberst Anika Haupt, VWA

[Arno Schultzky]

Incoming Transmission

To: The Bundschuh. Docktor A.Haupt.
From: Armin Jansen.
Subject: Your court.

---

Oberstarbeiter Morgan Koll is not at your disposal. This goes higher. I am the prime diplomatic contact for the entire Union administration. This as close as you come to the top.


Alright, doktor.

If I was to use one faction of the Bundschuh to judge the actions of another, you’d call me blunt. You’d say my comprehension of your organisation was insufficient. Do not believe we are any more centralised than you are - we may hold the strings but we cannot always predict which way the wind will blow the puppets. There is no great census as to how many of us there are. There is no metric we can quote. Individual groups under our flag may use a flag to fulfil whatever agenda they may personally hold. All I can negotiate with, all I can communicate, is organisational aims.


I, and the representatives I front, know naught about any relationship between the Corsairs and the Union - and even if I did - how would it diplomatically advantage me in… any way… to pretend such a thing existed in public? You have no proof of any relationship between the Corsairs and the present administration of the Union. None of our present cabinet positions are occupied by the tenants of that era. If you can find evidence of any Corsair Union interplay existing without our knowledge, please, present it to us so we can root out the culprits. However, until then you’d do well to drop that line of enquiry whilst you lack anything definitive.

We remained unaware of the Bund’s claim to the asteroid field - we don’t regard space as private property, only assets - but that doesn’t give us the authority select your property metric for you. What aspect of the field do you claim? The rocks? The aluminium particles? The vacuum between? Show us an ownership claim in no uncertain terms and we can hash out the details.

However we cannot, for reasons of practicality, abandon our trade connections to the Sigmas. I am a diplomat. I will take any peaceful workaround that exists, even if it comes to us paying instance-to-instance rent for our use of the asteroid belt - but until you can convince the Bundestag to tolerate Unioner freighters transiting the trade lanes or somehow move the location of the jump connections, you will continue to see Unioners transiting northern Frankfurt. You are discussing a field a light minute across. There is minimal risk of disruption - indeed, most of our logistics assets slip through the field without confronting a Bundschuh once. This is an acceptable risk to our assets. We already lose transports north of Frankfurt to the Maltese, to the Auxesians, to the Bounty Hunters Guild. You are just another error margin.

You have to understand, Bundschuh. We would prefer peace beacuse it is practical for organisations on the outside of the law not to cannibalise each other and do the job of a corrupt law enforcement for them. We do not like each other. If both of our political parties remained in the public sphere, we would be at opposite sides of the court and would often attempt to mitigate the decisions of the other. Wing Commander Riehl is a Unioner by birth, as are most. You are, to her, a peril. You advocate democracy, which we view as a failed system that leads only to civil war, anarchy, and excessive government regulation of business. You believe the Kansler is overtly autocratic, we believe he is insufficiently autocratic, and, worse, that his autocracy is misdirected. We have aristocrats no longer beholden to the delicate balance between the forces of the central market and the labour unions, but at ambition against each other, rather than the class system ascension process. He has emergency powers, but they are checksummed not by corporations invested in Rheinland economic expansion and domestic employment, but alien enterprises such as Interspace, Ageira, Synth Foods. We are a Liberty and GMG proxy and the people are dissatisfied with this fact - it is why piracy and terrorism are so rampant. It is why Rheinland has the lowest standard of living of any house in Sirius, whilst, five centuries ago under the empire, it had the highest.

Riehl views the Bundschuh as evidence of the corrupted nature of our house. We know your history - you appeared to protest against the Empire we loved, not to save it. From this thinking, there exist Unioners who believe that you are a symptom of Rheinland’s decay, not a cure for it. This is attitude which most Unioners share. But you are only one symptom - there are others which create far more anger than you.

So when you tell us to abandon Munich and the Sigmas, you are telling us to abandon the gains we have made. That is is impossible, unrealistic, improbable. We will not sacrifice centres of operation, indeed, a third of our entire organisation, because of one asteroid field - sweeping the boundaries of us, and the system we represent, back as far as Hamburg.

That is not going to happen within our lifetimes.

Gunda held you at gunpoint because you had attempted to detain her. That is not a marr against her conduct - Unioners are expected to resist arrest and coercion. She would have been punished if she had not. Unfortunately, an eye for an eye does not discourage anything - it encourages reprisal. So does demands over an organisation’s ability to enforce them.

We trust you recognise the benefit of the doubt whilst our losses are even. Of abandoning an eye for an eye. This is the perfect opportunity for both sides to ignore each other and go our separate ways. It is the intent of the present administration to avoid highfalutin rhetoric. There are no turkeys to be shot, and whilst you would doubtless love to undermine us there are subtler ways of doing so than damning the torpedoes.

This isn’t a request for you to compromise. It’s for you to show strength by placing old enmities aside. Construct it as a diplomatic victory - a sign that the divides that split Rheinland politics is not intractable. That is your intention, is it not? The Bundschuh have been searching for peace with the Federals for centuries - an in-road back into the proper arm of the government - to fight through legislation and not through bombed trade lanes and dead Kruger wage labourers who would have otherwise voted for you.

Show your movement that your cause is valid - show us. You believe Rheinland can become a functional democracy wherein all sides of the political spectra are represented - and many of us do not. Show partisans like Gunda Riehl, who believe that bodies, not negotiations, will decide the future of the people, that she is wrong. Convince the rhetoricians who yell that their causes exist in isolation - many of them in the Union - that their arguments are false. Give them pause. Give ground to take ground.


You have a golden opportunity to be the leader the Bundschuh deserves.

Regards,
Armin Jansen.
???, Unknown Outpost, Location Undisclosed.

Transmission Ended

---

--