The Union Chronicles (RP environ open to all Unioners, tagged or not)

[Enkidu]

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Subject: Gunda Riehl

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Gunda really didn’t want to live like this.

You couldn’t live to be a harass without a touch of embitterment - and bitterness lay everywhere. From the etching of her copilot’s face, to the touch of silica from the air from fighters that’d spent most of their service lives plunging through flying grit and nobody had bothered to clean them up to make them presentable enough for closed circuit life support. Everybody on the station was living on borrowed time, playing chess with the cancer.

There was nothing decidedly worse about Wedel than any other pirate base in the sector, apart from the fact it -looked- worse, which accounted for 90% of its psyche. It looked intentionally, depressingly, derelict - a shabbiness that bordered on and pitched over on occasions fine ridge of structural collapse. People were selling good-luck charms to warn explosive decompression away - as if a one-inch carved lump of mineralised bauxite would plug the void between the half-life of existence and the colours of the open universe.

“Oai, jackass! You’re dropping live munitions, you prick. You want that bloody proximity cap barrel crash in the chamber, get my arse filled with shrapnel at point two light so I get spagettified all over subspace with an ejector seat rammed up my ass cavity? Make an attempt to look frickin’ alive, pig.” She bawled, slapping her half-conscious crew tech to the floor. “”Get up.” Nesrin snarled, foot-massaging his kidneys.

Everything is going to the dogs. But it had been for centuries, long before the Union took up the place and kept he station immaculately frozen in time - rotting, but not quite rotten enough. Over time, the delusion would fail. Federal officers would figure out the long con and then they’d all be foisted out into the vacuum to die amidst the nothingness. El perfecto.

They were skittish enough. Far too skittish to be hauling nuclear ordinance around a pressure vessel, steadily oxidising under its own atmospheric layer and the sweat of its occupants. Far too skittish for phantoms and freaks.

Which was why the ‘ghost ship’ rumour had pushed Riehl off the brink. The crapometer had overloaded and everyone was eating up the overspill. Especially this man. Especially the person who was going to load pre-primed munitions into a square metre box directly under her fighter’s control position.

Ghost ships my arse. The myth had got nuttier with elaboration, with hand-around. First part, the ship got so much longer every time it was described, you’d think the rumour purveyors were comparing schlongs. Then you got people with the real sense of the mysterious, taking it overboard as only a Unioner could; the ship was shaped like a sword. Morons.

Nesrin screwed on her flight helmet, scampered up the ramp, as the station’s proximity klaxon put everyone’s adrenal system through destructive testing.

No time for phantoms, when you’re hunting for wraiths.

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