The voyager has some interest assets, namely lots of guns and not a lot of cargo space. Given that I'm more of a talker than a fighter, that doesn't seem to be the best choice for my activities in Leeds and beyond. So I upgraded.
I upgraded big time.
"Vow to Thee" was a fine ship for transporting refugees out of Leeds, but she always felt... wrong, and not just because her docking algorithms were dreadful. Having her try to find the center of a trade lane was like a recreation of my senior prom. No, at the end of the day, she was a Libertonian ship. It shouldn't make a difference, but it does. The angles just don't feel right to those of us born and raised on the bulbous curves of our beloved Bretonian craft. A space ship should look like a fish. Not a pocket knife, not a brick, and not a boat. It should look like a giant leviathan of the deep rose up to the stars and paddled its way from plane to planet.
So I scraped together what I could and purchased an old Palace class luxury liner. It was formerly used by BMM to tour the gold fields of Dublin (man, BMM buys a lot of luxury ships) but she's seen better days. She was press-ganged into mass evacuations when Leeds fell (sorry, when the temporary interruption to Crown administration first began) and those huddled masses took their toll on the girl, rendering her useless to anything save transporting refugees.
Guess what I'm using her for!
I'm keeping the name Vow to Thee and am proud to be flying a Bretonian craft under Bretonian colors with a Bretonian crew of... 5. That last part is a bit of a problem. Unlike our Liberty counterparts that rely on automation, Bretonian luxury vessels were designed to have large crews waiting on dignitaries hand and foot. Five can keep the ship running... barely, but our refugees are on their own for food and such. That's why they bring so much luggage aboard, right? However, if I keep the crew down to five, along with the necessary armor modifications, my cargo hold is exactly 5 times the size of the one on my puddle jumper, meaning 5 runs will load her up to the gills to send her on her merry way.
That was the good news. The bad news is that more cloak and dagger nonsense is afoot. A freelancer named Prometheus contacted me and asked to meet in the same place Wolf and I used to chat. He claimed he was also Liberty Navy Intelligence. He also claimed he had LRF assets mined and ready to destroy, which made me more readily believe that he might actually be Liberty Navy. If that's how they treat their allies, I'd hate to be their enemies. Anyway, this guy wanted the low-down on Wolf, and also wanted me to kill him.
I'm a delivery boy, not an assassin. I've actually never killed anyone face to face. The most I did was suppressing fire with the planetside resistance. I was a terrible shot. Asking me to 1) contact Wolf (I have no idea how to reach him, he always initiated), 2) Invite him aboard my vessel (plausible, he might want to see the inside of a palace), and then 3) slit his throat (hah! If I tried I probably wouldn't be walking away from that one) was an exercise in folly. Eventually, Prometheus seemed to get the point and said I should try to lure him out the omegas instead. Omega-29 to be precise with a story of a liberty dreadnaught acting odd in the borderworlds. I'll pass along the message. Never said I wouldn't pass along a warning to go with it.
Here's the thing: I know Wolf is actually working with the Liberty Navy, or at least with SOMEONE in the 5th fleet. All I have for Prometheus is the word of a guy who's first action was to threaten to blow up everyone I care about. On the other hand, Prometheus tipped me off to a Gallic ambush in Magellan. I was going to head back out to space, but chose to wait, and lo and behold long range sensors picked up Gallic navy craft. Maybe Prometheus knew, maybe he was getting lucky (it's not exactly hard to predict a gallic show of force in Leeds) so that means he's done more for the resistance than the technically-helping-by-not-blowing-us-up that Wolf ever did. I honestly don't know how to play this one. Maybe I should drop a line to Mounier as revealing Liberty infighting keeps me relevant to him without compromising LRF proper. It's late, I should get some sleep and hope that all this makes more sense in the morning. Or at the very least, get Hudson's take on all this. Prometheus also claimed there's a mole in the LRF. Hudson needs to know about that.
Unless he was referring to me, of course. Man, wouldn't that be ironic?
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