Family history of Feldwebel Nikolai Sovok

[Sturmwind]

The dramatic change that the Rheinland exploration party and the Schiller appearing brought didn't have an effect on the Kuznetsov descendants, until one of them who was skilled at engineering so far only fertilizing machines, Juan Kuznetsov was asked to fulfill engineering tasks on board one of the vessels created by the Cretans. The vessel's design was similar to that of the Rheinlander exploration ship, it was built from the metals the Cretans harvested from some of the newly discovered asteroid fields nearby, as they were now in possession of the means to collect resources from space, decades after the Schiller's arrival.

The newly commissioned ship was named La esperanza (hope) and it was tasked to survey one of the system's nebulas for minable materials. The journey was supposed to last for two mere months, but the ship never returned to Crete. The Cretans never learned what happened to the vessel, but the truth is that it was sucked in by a gravitational anomaly in the nebula, or a "jump hole" as it was later called by travelers. The ship ended up in a system with a dead sun, emitting an amount of radiation that disabled the ship's systems within minutes, even beginning to literally melt the hull. The crew members suffered heavy radium poisoning, but miracaculously they were boarded and rescued by a vessel never seen before.

The ship was in fact a freigher deployed by the Independent Miners Guild, which was planning to expand into the system, regardless of the heavy radiation that seemingly infested the whole area. The technologically advanced IMG ship extracted the La esperanza's crew, shamefully only two of the five crew members survived the heavy radiation poisoning. Their most terrible deaths were witnessed by Juan Kuznetsov himself, who was needless to say, one of the two survivors. The exploration vessel returned to its original base of operations, which was a supply station somewhere on the edge of Rheinland, from which Freistadt was later expanded.