Harold Kane is the leader of the Vagrant Raiders and Minster of Relations for Natio Octavarium. He uses the VCS Metropolis as his flagship and symbol of leadership of the house. As CO he performs several duties around the ship both in and out of combat. He maintains an office aboard the ship which is open to any member of the Vagrant Raiders, as long as they knock first.
Tobiah Nitaen is the Vagrant Raiders quartermaster. Outside of being second-in-command of the Metropolis and a bridge officer during combat, he handles Vagrant Raiders internal affairs and is the main operator of the Root of all Evil and its armouries.
Chief Tactical Officer:Marauder Daniel Keighley
Marauder Keighley coordinates combat movement and instructs the gunnery department during battles. His non-combat duties include overseeing small craft maintenance and adminstering the security team. Daniel is one of the younger officers aboard the Metropolis, giving him a personal drive to aim for excellence.
Chief Medical Officer:Marauder Yumi Kimura
Yumi Kimura acts as the head surgeon and trauma expert aboard the Metropolis. While her name is very Kusari-influenced, she is of Bretonian descent, and was named by her adoptive Kusari parents. She is rarely seen on the bridge due to her oft-required presence in the medbay.
Chief Personnel Officer:Marauder Daryl Ogden
Daryl Ogden is the person responsible for representing the crew and people of the Vagrant Raiders to High Command. His primary duty is to supervise the support personnel and pilots. Daryl prefers to be called by his first name by everyone, including the newest of Bandits, to promote a friendlier atmosphere aboard the Metropolis.
Chief Engineer:Marauder Florence Clemens
Marauder Clemens is the supervisor for the entire engineering team aboard the VCS Metropolis. She holds several duties, including supervision of the maintenance teams during and after combat situations, directing repairs and daily checkups, and overseeing fleet structural integrity.
Constructed originally by the Hellfire Legion as a Spyglass-class battleship, the Metropolis set out as the Vagrant Raiders flagship under the command of Overlord John Petrucci in 815 AS. For three years, the Metropolis served as the mobile home of the Raiders, and having been tweaked over time by its crew after departing from the Hellfire Legion, became a symbol of power and identity unique to the faction.
In 818 AS, the Metropolis commanded the Vagrant Raiders fleet at the Battle of Omega-3, helping secure victory for the independent forces and Zoners in the system. Unfortunately, after the battle, several of the Vagrant Raiders' capital ships were damaged substantially, including the Metropolis. During repairs of the Metropolis behind Planet Sprague, a subspace tear suddenly opened and brought the battleship beyond the edges of charted space.
Fragile and with little cardamine for the crew, the Metropolis slowly made its way home in its damaged state. Determined to get the ship and her crew home safely, Petrucci personally cut down on his cardamine intake, even though he knew it could very well kill him. Luckily, the Metropolis found the assistance of a Neo-Terran Fleet vessel not far outside Sirius. The damaged flagship was resupplied by the NTF ship and arrived in Maltese space. Upon returning, Petrucci went into a coma from the lack of cardamine, and was taken to a hospital on Malta for care.
After being brought back to the Kansas system by the NTF, the hull of the Metropolis was hidden in the depths of the system for almost two years until the new leader and veteran of the Vagrant Raiders, Taskmaster Harold Kane, received the location of the ship's corpse and had it towed to another secret location in the system where the reformed Raiders could begin rudimentary repairs to the ship to get it back up and running as a stationary base of operations. Presently, the ship is being used as the flagship of the Third Vagrant Fleet, stationed in the New Caledonia system, watching over the Natio and her people.
Log active. Entry: #00001 Submitter: Taskmaster Harold Kane Date: 28/06/820
Since the computers aren't working quite right yet, I'll have Florence patch this one in later.
The VCS Metropolis has been recovered from top-right F7 in the Kansas system and towed via repair ship to the field behind Planet Wichita. Repairs started with the installation of a new docking bay and sealing of several internal bulkhead breaches. Several corridors and rooms are now pressurized, but since the main fusion generator isn't online, we can't expand a whole lot. We don't have enough power for all of the active CO2 scrubbers, just a few. The CO's office -- my office, I guess -- is a mess. The lights must have burst at some point in the past couple years, and there's a whole chunk of the ceiling and its contents that are in pieces on the ground and all over the desk. It's so bad in there that I have to write this from my fighter in the docking bay.
Our first order of business is to restore sufficient power to turn the rest of the scrubbers on the central deck on, replace some of the emergency lights that have burnt out, and set up a few places to sleep and eat. After that we'll figure out what we're going to do about the hull. No one has a copy of the Spyglass design blueprints, so we can't really rebuild the ship. I'll see if Escher knows anyone who can help us out with that. Worst comes to worst, we build a new ship around the Spyglass core.
Speaking of which, we also need to see how much of the Spyglass array is left. I don't remember it taking any significant hits during the Battle of Omega-3, but I don't know what happened after it disappeared.
Tonight, I sleep in my fighter's cockpit. Tomorrow, I might have an office floor to sleep on.
Log active. Entry: #00002 Submitter: Taskmaster Harold Kane Date: 29/06/820
Computers still aren't up. However, the lights are on, and we're home. Today was a success. The scrubbers are online, and the mess hall -- now also a temporary shelter and the Quartermaster's office -- has been repressurized. Environmental controls are also online, to an extent, so it's no longer like California Minor inside. My office is pressurized, but there's even more work to be done in there than I thought. Turning the lights on is both a blessing and a curse. Looks like I'll be sleeping in the mess hall tonight with the crew.
The Spyglass core is, miraculously, almost undamaged. A few relays need to be replaced here and there, but once the fusion generators are up, we can start using the array. It'll be an important tool for reconnecting the Vagrant Raiders as a whole.
I want to get to work on powering some of the kitchen components tomorrow. The folks we've had doing maintenance on the ship haven't had a proper hot meal in 48 hours since they just haven't left the ship other than to transfer supplies from transports. Also, the waste systems need to come online or the crew's going to be pissing in jars and throwing them into Wichita orbit instead of transferring to transports and back. The one latrine we have is starting to smell something fierce and I'm about to push it out the airlock if we don't supplant it by the end of the day tomorrow.
I haven't heard from Escher yet about the blueprints. He'll come through, I'm sure.
Seeing as Ms. Clemens got the computers to start, I think it's time for me to add to the logs.
I have an office now. It's the back of the mess hall.
The Root of all Evil is locked up at Barrier Gate, but I'm here at the Metropolis and it's different than I'm used to. I lived in that thing, but now I'm sleeping on the floor of a battleship's mess hall. I can't tell if this is a step up or not. Oh well. Back to the important stuff.
The armoury was repressurized today. I checked it out and there are six laser pulse rifles, all of which seem to work. I just need to find more batteries for them. They seem to be a Libertonian design. Definitely not Vengeance-class. They're not assault rifles at all. More of a security thing. I can't imagine where we got these from. You don't usually find Liberty tech like this on the black market.
I've moved our whole internal information system from the Root to the Metropolis for ease of access once we get the Spyglass array up. Ms. Clemens says that'll be hard, but doable. Something about electroplasma relays or something like that needing to be replaced? I'm not an engineer. I just give people guns.
Harold says I'll be his executive officer aboard the Metropolis once we get her up and running. Restored to her former glory, he calls it. I can't wait to see what he means by former glory. Right now, this ship looks like a badly-thrown-together base made out of the corpses of a thousand Hogosha-salvaged Corsair wrecks.
Log active. Entry: #00004 Submitter: Taskmaster Harold Kane Date: 30/06/820
Computers are up. Florence expects it'll only be a couple days until we can broadcast from the Spyglass array. I am a very happy man right now.
I started clearing out my office. Lot of Petrucci's old stuff is still in there. I've packed most of it up to be sent back to Malta to his family. Maybe I'll deliver it myself if I can get the time. For now though I'm helping with the repairs. I don't think this room will be ready for use for a couple days though. We have more important parts of the ship to work on. Our latest completed area is the conference room, and the path to it. It happens that there's a fairly significant data junction through the conference room and we had to clean the whole thing up so Florence could route the computer network back up through this deck.
I'm leaving Tobiah here in charge as my executive officer. I have an important trip to make to meet some Junkers about salvaging a couple wrecks in Omega-3. I'm hoping everything will be going smoothly when I return, and the Spyglass array will be up. Florence says it's not entirely out of the question. She's a miracle worker, that one. We'd be completely screwed without her directing the maintenance around here.
Escher returned with some blueprints of a ship the Hellfire Legion call the Arbiter. It's a militarized Spyglass. Most of the interior is the same, but streamlined. We can more or less build a new exterior around the ship and fill in the holes. However, we're going to need help. We can't do this alone.
What we need badly is a shipyard. Working in empty space is taking us much longer than it would with proper facilities, and we haven't even begun building the new superstructure or hull.
We got hit by a rock last night. The transports and repair ships managed to stabilize the Metropolis almost immediately, but now there's a small asteroid in one of the upper decks. Ms. Clemens thinks it's taken out an important power junction. This is going to set us back another few million credits, which Taskmaster Kane is not going to be happy with.
So far we're in the hole for about fifty million on this project. Our original estimates were six hundred. It now looks like it's going to be eight hundred or more. I trust Kane, but I don't know if he thought this through or not.
This is going to cost us more money than a band of pirates can afford.
Log active. Entry: #00006 Submitter: Taskmaster Harold Kane Date: 02/07/820
Tobiah just told me about the damage and the cost to repair. We've started shipping some Junker-made hull panels from Trafalgar out to the Metropolis using the Silent Man as cover. I don't know how happy the Bretonian Armed Forces are about that, but we'll find out soon enough. Rochester's just too far into Liberty to be safe. At current prices, we're going to come in at around seven hundred and fifty million credits for this project.
I talked to -- or maybe at is a better word -- Escher about the Natio Octavarium concept I've been drafting for a while. He seems indifferent, but willing to help. I'm going to need the whole faction on my side for this one.
My goal is to begin diplomacy within the next two weeks. With some of our shipping resources going to Omega-49 to help the TAZ in the conflict between the Coalition and the Corsairs over Gran Canaria, we're hoping to get some help rebuilding our flagship in return. Additionally, we've taken sides with the Coalition in the conflict. Or maybe we've just found we have the same opposition. I don't know yet.
We'll see how things unfold over the next few weeks.
Log active. Entry: #00007 Submitter: Taskmaster Harold Kane Date: 03/07/820
A new Internal Affairs location has been opened up in Tobiah's office behind the mess hall. Tobiah seems to be pleased with his office, even though it's just a desk, two tables, a fridge, and a pair of whiteboards. He's a simple man sometimes.
Repairs are continuing steadily. Current records for how much this has cost us so far is close to a hundred million credits. Florence expects this to only be a tenth of what we'll need. I don't know where we're going to fund this project. The Metropolis is integral to the Vagrant Raiders, so we're going to have to find funding somewhere. There's this startup funded by Interspace that we might have use for. Circular something. They might be of use to us.
Recycling of the hull is underway, but it's slow. We'll save almost a hundred million credits by doing it in exchange for a bit more time being used. They say time is money, but I'd rather spend more time I have and spend less money I don't have.
Log active. Entry: #00008 Submitter: Taskmaster Harold Kane Date: 04/07/820
Bandit got splattered today. Saved Miles from being splattered, at least.
We have roughly eight hours left until the Spyglass array comes online and things are looking up. As soon as we can use the array, the ship becomes strategically much more valuable than it is without it. We'll be able to broadcast and bounce communications around Sirius and perform incredibly long-range scans remotely. I have a feeling this will prove useful in the future.
Transports have returned from Gran Canaria with several thousand standard units of Deuterium. I don't know where it comes from, but it'll be incredibly useful in powering the generators until we can properly acquire a large amount of H-Fuel from the Gas Miners Guild. The Spyglass core takes a lot of power, more than we thought in fact. It's a good thing I'm the ship's captain and not her engineer.
We have one weight off our shoulders -- it seems that the Hellfire Legion's primary fleet has been disbanded. I sense the Vagrant Raiders may soon make an incursion into Vespucci. There are plenty of good places to build a starship there.
Log active. Entry: #00009 Submitter: Taskmaster Harold Kane Date: 06/07/820
We lost power again. Something's weird about this system. We're starting a survey of the whole place. I want to know if anything's there. There are some funky-looking clouds out my office window.
Yesterday we patched up another couple internal bits and we now have some real quarters set up. Florence estimates that by tomorrow evening we'll have a few more sets of quarters ready for the crew. This is going very smoothly -- much more so than I had expected.
Plans are underway to get this ship stable enough to move if needed. In its present state, the Metropolis would be ripped apart if we had to move her. For the next two weeks, she's a sitting bullseye.
