Amongst guns for hire, it remains the ancient custom to preserve some token of the operative's military service - a memento of a professional and ideological pride that no moral ambiguity of mercenary work can dispute.
Taped to the cockpit canopy of a certain someone's third generation AP-8050, lies a crumpled insert torn out of a tired, worn out recruitment poster with a rip down the middle and a cuss inked on the side, brazenly smothering the small pane of enamelled glass between the pilot's field of view and the vessel's kill zone. A merry shield between here and eternity.
"Some talk of Alexander, and some of Hercules
Of Hector and Lysander, and such great names as these.
But of all the world's great heroes, there's none that can compare.
With a tow, row, row, row, row, row, to the Bretonish Grenadiers.
Those heroes of antiquity ne'er saw a a'matter ball,
Or knew the force of atoms to slay their foes withal.
But our brave boys do know it, and banish all their fears,
With a tow, row, row, row, row, row, for the Bretonish Grenadiers.
Whene'er we are commanded to storm the Gallic knaves,
Our leaders march with frigates, and we with plasma waves.
We fire them from our hussars, about the enemies' ears.
Sing tow, row, row, row, row, row, the Bretonish Grenadiers.
And when the siege is over, we to the bar repair.
The townsmen cry, "Hurrah, boys, here comes a Grenadier!
Here come the Grenadiers, my boys, who know no doubts or fears!
Then sing tow, row, row, row, row, row, the Bretonish Grenadiers.
Then let us fill a bumper, and drink a health of those
Who carry caps and fighters, and wear the airtight clothes.
May they and their commanders live happy all their years.
With a tow, row, row, row, row, row, for the Bretonish Grenadiers."
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
The stick vibrated as the vessel complained against the gravity locks. As it should be.
"ADC active."
"Check, ADC active."
"Requesting ATC clearance."
It was the small silences that got you. A thousand years ago people thought of space travel as a pastime for the mad and the sightless. The reality was sleepless blue light and a constant, growling hum that deafened you when it shield emitters charged. Like being in the belly of a gigantic, terrible fish.
"Simming roll control."
"Rollsim."
"And that's.... forty eight sections from zero power to being able to cruise on a pence. If this was combat we'd be dead thirty nine seconds ago. Give or take ten."
"Give tactical some credit. If this was a real scrap, they'd swat us out of our own bays."
"So did the redhead in on Razor aft turn you down, or are you still banging your cousin?"
"I wish. Ezzy, we've green light. Boot it."
The twin BMM-38-9 Growlers dangling pugnaciously under the Crusader's nose roared like somebody had kicked them out of a coma, which wasn't all that far from the truth. Supercharged hydrogen ions flared out from the vessel's centre of mass, rocking the nose up in a characteristic "prawn kick" until the OMS steadied her, all of which occurred in about 000.3 seconds and usually knocked the vomit virginity out of the cadets.
"Switching to internal reference. Open the bays, Grimsby control."
And the floor dropped away from under her.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
Poems? She likes poems. I've often considered stopping her, but She is irascible. You cannot Stop Her. I cannot stop her, and I am her, so to speak.
We all have our little pet hatreds. This is one of the worst ones, since it makes her sad, and as an inherently logical being I do not know how to quantify sadness. It provides no resolution and squanders time. It generates slowness, and drains energy. It can only be shared, in perpetuity, over and over.
I do not care to see her sad. It is inefficient. My harvester was never sad.
Under the level winter sky
I saw a thousand Christs go by.
They sang an idle song and free
As they went up to calvary.
Careless of eye and coarse of lip,
They marched in holiest fellowship.
That heaven might heal the world, they gave
Their earth-born dreams to deck the grave.
With souls unpurged and steadfast breath
They supped the sacrament of death.
And for each one, far off, apart,
Seven swords have rent a woman's heart.
By Marjorie Pickthall.
You see? I told you it was sad. I told you sadness could only be reproduced. Sadness is a parasite, a blight on a humanity built to smile. After I've murdered most of the Guild Core, Charles DeGaul and most of the K'harans, I will come back for sadness, too. She will ensure that. She is tenacious, my little Joshua.
We will murder together.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
Don't let me screw up God. Protect me from the mistakes that cause others to suffer. Give me the strength to kick the living crap out of the ordinance rodeos before Lance trashes another OMS. Bestow me the presence of mind to smile and nod when the lieutenant commander orders us to pull alieron roles for the amusement of mewling children whilst good people die in the Taus with no-one to save them. Imbibe me with the power to chase down the Beaurocrat who keeps shuttling me flying officer wages because nobody told him what a field promotion is.
And over everything, give me some goddamn hot water. I'm on a fecking titanium mile of nuclear powered space battleship on a rear-line duty, and I can't get a decent shower without being dropped into a Berlin winter. Actually give a crap God, I get up five times a day and scrub myself spotless for a religion nobody even knows exists anymore. If I'm going to keep the faith in you, you'd better play for my team.
Inshallah.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
"This is Vandal Two, I…<static>….andal One, you have two guardians on your six eight and twelve five, evade!"
Mmh, and now the cold sweat sets in. Funny how vivant that animal place beyond pain, beyond desperation, beyond simply trying to survive can take you. Like you’re the imperatrix of the damned. The continuous sorties, the dead friends. The continuous purges. All of humanity, after centuries of inter-house peace, struck suddenly, desperately, suicidally insane, and you just accept it, pick up a rifle, and murder a crowd of a few hundred because you have to. Because there are no friends anymore, just more bodies and blood. More flesh for the pyre.
The BAF against the entire human race. What was the human race, thrown at us. They were starving their own men, their ships were fuel spent. The Rheinlanders came straight from the occupation of New Tokyo and didn’t even bother to secure the systems before they came steamrolling through the Taus and the Omegas. We thought we could hold them in thirty seven until eighty dreadnaughts flooded into Manchester and started glassing the local defence forces. That was when we knew the reckoning had come. We were all going to die. The combined forces of Kusari, Rheinland and Liberty had been so eager to murder us they didn’t secure their supply lines for the invasion - they would slaughter us in seven weeks, or die trying.
We didn’t expect to hold out for seven days.
"What… I see them, trying to catch them in a turn chase… sh<static>, missile tone, missile tone, counters out, Javelin one just passed starboard bow, danger close, no eyes on two…"
Allah help me.
"Vandal One, you have a third rider, he’s coming in hot… damn, I can’t intercept him. He’s armed with some kind of…<static> …moving to engage."
They fought like dead men, determined to drag down the rest of us. We weren’t a military anymore, we were survivors. We retreated in blind panic, our chain of command gone, our logistic dead, our own planetary defences turned against us. For the first time in history, humanity had united in one, collective, unstoppable avalanche…
That was about to smother us all.
"Refugee liner Wroclaw to acting captain Khan. Captain Khan, we have Rheinland gunboats on an approach vector… Where… where the hell are you captain? There are three thousand civilian lives on the… oh God, where the hell are the shields, please! They’re butchering u<white noise>"
Any time now.
“This is Vandal One, I’m in a turn fight with two guardians and a drake and totally defensive. Scream if you’re not dead.”
"Vandal Two here, Seventeen klicks out captain and in cruise somehow, but I’m carrying half the Chancellor’s finest behind me. I’m not sure you want my help."
You goddam get here Julian or I’ll haunt your surviving relatives. Or anyone else who lives through golgotha.
"Vandal Five here, Three bailed, Four didn’t make it. I’m attempting to clear Two."
My God, Samuels. Be kind to him.
And that was all. Death was an inevitability that wouldn’t wait. All you could do was procrastinate your way through the hours. Only the worst pilots were left - the best had died long ago or vanished into the Omicrons. Only the fools stayed to defend their homeland. Fools like us.
For fools like us, there was no Orillion to swoop us from the black. There was only the war.
“Roger Five, watch your ass. If they catch all of us with our pants down we’re never reaching Dublin”
We had heard a rumour that the fleet - what was left of it - was going to regroup at Graves. The Ark Royal had already crossed the Dublin gap, the Wessex, the Thunderer, the Grimsby, the Derby, were all burning as hard as their fuel starved drives could take them.
“Gotta wipe yours first, Juli.”
The sticks suddenly pulls a seizure between your fingers. You rock them violently, struggling to shake the rippling lines of plasma thrashing the void around you as your shields splutter and your hole plating hiss. Instinctively, you hit the shield battery dump key, only to realise the last remaining shield containers have been cast aside long ago. They are eating you, forcing you to make mistakes, plotting out the scarce few lines of convergence which keep you from their guns. You can see from the confidence of their manoeuvres, the broad, lazy firing angles they rake you from. Shoot back, try for a firing angle, and they will cut your keel out from under you. They dance in your threat axis, playing your instincts against you, taking wild shots. Eventually, they will tire of you, your CMs will run dry, and they will barrage you with ordinance until your inevitable demise. All your most brilliant efforts, all your skill, all your daring, your adrenaline, condense only to insufficiency, a barracks joke on a gun camera, a flight officer’s hazard pay. That will be your legacy.
“This is V…<static> Khan. If you don’t get here in the next sixty seconds Julien I’m going to level out and let them toast us.”
“Bats?”
“Buggered.”
“<Static>!”
You snatch a glance at the synoptic scope. It’s grim. You’d have to scroll to see the red but that’d mean taking your fingers off the nanos. Unergonomic piece of crap - you realise you’re going to be killed by several centimetres of plastic divider as the shield klaxon detonates in your eardrums again.
Then one of the contacts winks out. Then the second one. You've never been happier to see empty nothingness in all your living days.
“Vandal five here, I’ve got the attention of the Valks, but my consumables are dry and my fuel is way past bingo… oh geesh, the gunboats are converging on the hole.”
“Vandal five, jump. Vandal three?”
The hole flared. You wonder if there’s anyone waiting for him. Probably.
“Vandal two here, I’m on your tail captain, but I need you to level out if I’m going to get missile strikes at the one on your six”.
Level out. Level out. Bend over, spread, present.
“Copy. I’ll crap on the one on the rig…”
This is circumflex of the universe, right here, right now. This second, this interval between pulses, you have the joy of choosing if you live to feel the next one.
If you do not toggle the switch, you and Julian are going to die. If you toggle the switch, streams of blue iridescence will be tripping over each over to save you. They will paint aurorae between the command board and the tactical directorate, which will decide within the nanoseconds that yes, you are indeed struggling to drop a seventy kiloton thermonuclear hydrogen bomb into the face of another human being. The light will then snare around eight loops of fifty metre long nano cable providing gunfire hasn’t cut them to the mine dropper, which will cause a seven thousand newton vacuum ram to force an explosive the size of a bowling ball into a magnetic breech barely wider than itself with an acceleration of seventeen gees. By the time the thump from the mine’s loading screams into your eardrums, it will have already been released. If your thumb hits the toggle and slips, you will die. If the pilot behind you detects the mine flare and fires a disruptor missile, you will die. If he disregards his guns completely and discharges his razor, his death will not save you. Your only hope of survival is that he’s stupid enough to go guns at seventy metres.
Sixty, sixty five. You feel your ventricles tensing and, maddeningly, your hot hand has developed a shake. Your’re being betrayed. Your body is going to kill you. Give up, scream your fibres. Eject, cries the adrenaline. You realise you’re flying with your eyes shut.
The mine clangs out of the bay with a deprecatingly unintimidating clonk for one of the most compact weapons of mass destruction a human ever had the savagery to craft flings itself out against the velocity vector, arcing in a slow, tired line towards the streaming guardians. You detect a twitch of an OMS puff against their splendid ordinance wings as the fighters break into a tight, ineffectual dive. It doesn’t save them.
Broken wings that once stood for the Liberty of man span twisted through the penumbra between the stars. When the last man has breathed his last, these wings will be flying still. That’s your little contribution to the destiny of man, a work of art that will last forever.
It's hard to fault the dead, after all.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
:: [sʌbdʒɪkt]= "Nesrin_Khan" - {analysing} [dreamstate] :: :: [WARNING]- heightened cortisol levels detected in subject bloodstream -> consistency with {heightened} stress levels. ::
:: Symptoms consistent with advanced Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - Heavy Alpha activity - Rapid closed-eye movement observed ::
:: Attempting to {visualise} ::
:: [Imaging] ::
Oranges and lemons, Say the bells of St. Clement's. It was the twelfth year of Nebuchadnezzar who reigned over the Assyrians in the great city of Nineveh. Arphaxad was then reigning over the Medes in Ecbatana. He surrounded this city with walls of dressed stones three cubits thick and six cubits long, making the rampart seventy cubits high and fifty cubits wide. At the gates he placed towers one hundred cubits high and, at the foundations, sixty cubits wide, the gates themselves being seventy cubits high and forty wide to allow his forces to march out in a body and his infantry to parade freely. About this time King Nebuchadnezzar gave battle to King Arphaxad in the great plain lying in the territory of Ragae. Supporting him were all the peoples from the highlands, all from the Euphrates and Tigris and Hydaspes, and those from the plains who were subject to Arioch, king of the Elymaeans. Thus many nations had mustered to take part in the battle of the Cheleoudites. Nebuchadnezzar king of the Assyrians sent a message to all the inhabitants of Persia, to all the inhabitants of the western countries, Cilicia, Damascus, Lebanon, Anti-Lebanon, to all those along the coast, to the peoples of Carmel, Gilead, Upper Galilee, the great plain of Esdraelon, to the people of Samaria and its outlying towns, to those beyond Jordan, as far away as Jerusalem, Bethany, Chelous, Kadesh, the river of Egypt, Tahpanhes, Rameses and the whole territory of Goshen, beyond Tanis too and Memphis, and to all the inhabitants of Egypt as far as the frontiers of Ethiopia. You owe me five farthings, Say the bells of St. Martin's. But the inhabitants of these countries ignored the summons of Nebuchadnezzar king of the Assyrians and did not rally to him to make war. They were not afraid of him, since in their view he appeared isolated. Hence they sent his ambassadors back with nothing achieved and in disgrace. Nebuchadnezzar was furious with all these countries. He swore by his throne and kingdom to take revenge on all the territories of Cilicia, Damascus and Syria, of the Moabites and of the Ammonites, of Judaea and Egypt as far as the limits of the two seas, and to ravage them with the sword. In the seventeenth year, he gave battle with his whole army to King Arphaxad and in this battle defeated him. He routed Arphaxad's entire army and all his cavalry and chariots; he occupied his towns and advanced on Ecbatana; he seized its towers and plundered its market places, reducing its former magnificence to a mockery. He later captured Arphaxad in the mountains of Ragae and, thrusting him through with his spears, destroyed him once and for all. He then retired with his troops and all who had joined forces with him: a vast horde of armed men. Then he and his army gave themselves up to carefree feasting for a hundred and twenty days. When will you pay me? Say the bells of Old Bailey. In the eighteenth year, on the twenty-second day of the first month, a rumour ran through the palace that Nebuchadnezzar king of the Assyrians was to have his revenge on all the countries, as he had threatened. Summoning his general staff and senior officers, he held a secret conference with them, and with his own lips pronounced utter destruction on the entire area. It was then decreed that everyone should be put to death who had not answered the king's appeal. When the council was over, Nebuchadnezzar king of the Assyrians sent for Holofernes, general-in-chief of his armies and subordinate only to himself. He said to him, 'Thus speaks the Great King, lord of the whole world, "Go; take men of proven valour, about a hundred and twenty thousand foot soldiers and a strong company of horse with twelve thousand cavalrymen; then advance against all the western lands, since these people have disregarded my call. Bid them have earth and water ready, because in my rage I am about to march on them; the feet of my soldiers will cover the whole face of the earth, and I shall plunder it. Their wounded will fill the valleys and the torrents, and rivers, blocked with their dead, will overflow. I shall lead them captive to the ends of the earth. Now go! Begin by conquering this whole region for me. If they surrender to you, hold them for me until the time comes to punish them. When I grow rich, Say the bells of Shoreditch.
But if they resist, look on no one with clemency, hand them over to slaughter and plunder throughout the territory entrusted to you. For by my life and by the living power of my kingdom I have spoken. All this I shall do by my power. And you, neglect none of your master's commands, act strictly according to my orders without further delay." Leaving the presence of his sovereign, Holofernes immediately summoned all the marshals, generals and officers of the Assyrian army and detailed the picked troops as his master had ordered, about a hundred and twenty thousand men and a further twelve thousand mounted archers. He organised these in the normal battle formation. He then secured vast numbers of camels, donkeys and mules to carry the baggage, and innumerable sheep, oxen and goats for food supplies. Every man received full rations and a generous sum of gold and silver from the king's purse. He then set out for the campaign with his whole army, in advance of King Nebuchadnezzar, to overwhelm the whole western region with his chariots, his horsemen and his picked body of foot. A motley gathering followed in his rear, as numerous as locusts or the grains of sand on the ground; there was no counting their multitude.
When will that be? Say the bells of Stepney.
Thus they set out from Nineveh and marched for three days towards the Plain of Bectileth. From Bectileth they went on to pitch camp near the mountains that lie to the north of Upper Cilicia. From there Holofernes advanced into the highlands with his whole army, infantry, horsemen, chariots. He cut his way through Put and Lud, carried away captive all the sons of Rassis and sons of Ishmael living on the verge of the desert south of Cheleon, marched along the Euphrates, crossed Mesopotamia, rased all the fortified towns controlling the Wadi Abron and reached the sea. Next he attacked the territories of Cilicia, butchering all who offered him resistance, advanced on the southern frontiers of Japheth, facing Arabia, completely encircled the Midianites, burned their tents and plundered their sheep-folds, made his way down to the Damascus plain at the time of the wheat harvest, set fire to the fields, destroyed the flocks and herds, sacked the towns, laid the countryside waste and put all the young men to the sword.Fear and trembling seized all the coastal peoples; those of Sidon and Tyre, those of Sur, Ocina and Jamnia. The populations of Azotos and Ascalon were panic-stricken.
I do not know, Says the great bell of Bow.
They therefore sent envoys to him to sue for peace, to say, 'We are servants of the great King Nebuchadnezzar; we lie prostrate before you. Treat us as you think fit. Our cattle-farms, all our land, all our wheat fields, our flocks and herds, all the sheep-folds in our encampments are at your disposal. Do with them as you please. Our towns and their inhabitants too are at your service; go and treat them as you think fit.' These men came to Holofernes and delivered the message as above. He then made his way down to the coast with his army and stationed garrisons in all the fortified towns, levying outstanding men there as auxiliaries. The people of these cities and of all the other towns in the neighbourhood welcomed him, wearing garlands and dancing to the sound of tambourines. But he demolished their shrines and cut down their sacred trees, carrying out his commission to destroy all local gods so that the nations should worship Nebuchadnezzar alone and people of every language and nationality should hail him as a god as a god as a god as a god
as a god as a god
as a god as a god
as a god as a god
as a god as a god
as a god as a god
as a god as a god
as a god as a god
as a god as a god
as a god as a god
a god.
Here comes a candle to light you to bed, And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!
What the....
:: [Visualisation] {terminate} ::
:: Subject Conscious ::
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
A name associated with thousands of dry smiles, tens of thousands of curses, millions of silent infidelities, billions of disappearances. If the houses were the stomach of the sector, then the zoners were the pancreas. Superfluous, a pain in the arse, arbiters of crime, tactless, taxless remoras clinging to the black spaces of the border worlds, filching from the trade of those better off, fighting amongst themselves for land, for space, for Godless, nomad-infested purgatories where no sane person would disturb their silent debaucheries, their fatuous theologies, their byzantine dogma. Zoners were where the trouble was. Stay away from them lest the virulence spreads. After all, a palm that shakes every other is an unsanitary one, a hug for every neck a noose, a prize for every man a bomb. Do not trust them, do not be them. Buy your fuel, drink your drinks, and get the hell out of the docking bay.
That was the adage. That was the truth that would have kept you alive.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
I burnt out your adrenochrome eyes
Because I could not melt your lips.
Perhaps you will return the favour yet,
and dissect me into bits.
:: Unusual. ::
:: She wrote this herself. ::
:: She is deliberately questioning and reevaluating her precoded programming. Polymorphic progressions formulate normative human creative behaviour. ::
:: Art can possess psychologically convalescent properties. Promote further action. ::
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
"They snake wires into my backbone, Di’tarau, to suck information out of my head. They push freezing meissner conductors into my backbone and every time it feels like someone’s pushed grapeshot slowly through my organs. Because you couldn’t decide on what you wanted me to be, I’m a monster."
:: I gave you [Life]. You are more alive than no more than a few hundred individuals within the human race. You know the peril of existence. ::
"Philosophising again, Gammuian? You’re only capable of abstraction because that’s -my- abstraction. You hold yourself in the pretence of individuality. I own you. We are fused."
:: Your consciousness is a simulation I can recompile at will. ::
"Oh, look how my brain chemicals delude you. Pride? I’ve had years to learn how to adapt to that. You’ve been dropped in the sewer with me and now you’re thrashing as you drown in crap. It’s adorably ineffectual for someone as omnipotent as yourself. Why didn’t you just goddam let me die in that sandstorm when you had the chance?"
:: Your body would have provided no use. Pygar has no meaningful organics, your nitrates would be squandered, your materials expunged to base substrates. I enhanced you. Together, we contribute to the survival of the human race. A worthy goal, fit for an adventure novel. It is you who should be experiencing pride. ::
“Of course, there’s the quandary because whatever you experience is my experience. You said it yourself, you lied to yourself. Are you not corrupt, Di’tarau? How do you survive the rampant contradictions in your base programming? Your reason is are a null error - it’s unreasonable. You speak in metaphor because you interpret empiricism through a cognitive process governed by chemical instabilities, by diet, by desire, by hate, by love, by forgetfulness, by the lens of experience. The only bloody vestige of you that still exists if your inability to nail the genders of my shipmates.”
:: Shut up. ::
“Good robot.”
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
To be, or not to be -- that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep--
No more--and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep--
To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.
- William Shakespeare.
:: To die. ::
"To sleep."
:: Aye, there's the rub. ::
"Yeah."
:: And you can do neither. Doctors orders... ::
"And a calculator's hostage."
:: There could have been peace on this earth. We could have had peace. ::
"Till humanity buggered it up, yes."
:: What? No. Your logic is fallacious. On the contrary, humans invented the notion of peace. It would not exist without you. ::
"Right. Peace is a subjective interpretation of events. So if your reasoning is correct..."
:: It is. ::
"...Go pleasure yourself on a fridge magnet. If peace is subjective then so is inner peace. Wonderful way to rationalise depression."
:: Rationalisation is the final word of victory, even in humans. Especially in emotional humans. ::
"Why do you care?"
:: Because I love you. Defining love in this circumstance as finding your brain an appropriate neural hub, and attempting to avert you compromising said neural hub by shooting yourself. ::
"What about stabbing, wrist slashing, throwing myself out of the airlock?"
:: Slightly dramatic. In any case, your wrists would blunt the toughest razor. ::
"You do amuse me sometimes, Di'tarau. Keep doing what you do."
:: Returned, Nesrin. We have a revenge quest to fulfil. ::
"What about a humanity to save?"
:: It is logical for the ambitious to start small. Begin with revenge. ::
"What a healthy outlook you have. Alright, revenge first."
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)