Dr Weiss

[argyle]

Weiss could swear he was going bald, from tearing his own hair. This damned fools errand! What had he been thinking, giving up riches beyond his dreams to follow his... dream.

The Darmstadt had been performing flawlessly, ever since the ship left Oder Shipyards. It was a beast of a ship, and he had fallen quite in love with it. The crew was performing to the highest standard, and the science team... well they hadn't had anything at all to do, but at least they hadn't complained or gotten in the way.

That was the core of the problem: there was just no research to do. Finding nomads, monsters from drunken tales and blurred images was proving extremely difficult. So far, they had found absolutely nothing. Nothing! All they had to show were a few jumphole locations and some stories from drunken zoners and pirates. This wasn't even the main problem.

Who would have thought the untamed wilds were so... domesticated? At every turn there were ships, and they all claimed some kind of ownership to just about every last rock in the edge worlds. They didn't just claim ownership - they had forced him out. Colonials, the Order, pirate groups... the story was the same: get out, or eat plasma blasts. The frustration was killing him. Followed, accused, warned, threatened, fired upon... he'd experienced everything - except anything remotely alien.

The thing that bothered him the most was the way every single group claimed to be acting in his best interest, and serving as the grandiose guardians of humanity. The Order... oh they just took the cake. Pirates, the lot of them, in Weiss' opinion. Claiming they encounter nomads on a daily basis, fighting a deadly fight to save humanity, knowing the reasons behind the nomad aggression - oh they were only too eager to tell what a grand job they were doing, but they never showed any proof. They refused to let him do his research, every question met with "classified" responses. They couldn't even produce a picture of a nomad. He was beginning to think the sceptics in Cambridge were right: there are no nomads - it's all a massive hoax to scare people off, keep them away from secret installations belonging to God knows who.

They kept asking for cooperation, but they never asked him to cooperate in research, only in doing as he was told - which usually ended up with "get out". It was always such a hostile atmosphere; Weiss clearly wasn't welcome. Weiss thought about the Order the way he thought about everything - with a scientific approach: gather the evidence, all of it - and formulate a theory. Gather more evidence, to prove and disprove the theory. Well, so far, the theory was that the Order was a militant group with unknown interestes, hostile to outsiders and unwilling to share any data abaout anything. Damn them.

"For my own safety, my arse." he grumbled to himself. He'd rather die seeing the truth, than live in the dark. It wasn't greed, not for fame, not for money... It was for himself, for the pure knowledge. Peace of mind. He had to know the truth, even if he died searching for it. They couldn't understand that, barely anyone could; only the most extreme scientists shared that view. Well... it seemed the Order was there to stay, and had the power to keep him in the dark. It was time to strike a deal with the devil.

Weiss sat down and started to compose a message to the Order.

Message to the Order