Sender ID:"Tantalus" Location Origin:Vieques Shipyard, Puerto Rico Encryption:Balor Greetings again Paladin Khan, I've arrived upon a situation with which I could use your engineering expertise, and it involves my ship.
As you may, or may not know: the Razgriz has initiated it's grand escape from the Order, having faked it's death throes and escaping with Auxesia to Puerto Rico for repairs. The supplies for the engine reactor have been delivered, and while I am certain the ship will not function the same as it had before, I want you to come and take a look at the Junkers handiwork on the reactor. I don't want anything huge, just some verification on your end before this ship heads back to Inverness and begins it's time in Auxesia.
Sender ID:Paladin Nesrin Khan, Battlegroup Auxesia Sender Location:$()(@£* Node, Liberty, Puerto Rico Encryption:URSULA Recipient ID:IDsign Tantalus.
Way ahead of you, ex-commander.
Fortuitously, I’m already on Vieques, handling the replacement crew handover and generally ensuring the Junkers keep their creativity conservative with the core install. If the ship doesn’t take a core dump on the way out of the fixture, you owe me a nice, cool unalcoholic mojito from the minibar I’ve taken the liberty of installing in the situation room. You haven’t heard much from me yet since I’ve been primarily shipyard side, dealing with construction admin, but now the repairs are directly underway I’ll be pressing on ship-side to recee the ship’s data core, scrub the command VIs of any remaining tracer worms locked into the transponders, change shield frequency phase plots, that kind of thing, personally. Lobotomies on a battleship tend to prick up to a supercomputer’s touch, and human techs don’t have the tenacity to trawl through eleven dimensional datapoints at anything approaching efficiency, nor does Vieques, for all its Romany genius, come rich with software engineers that can crack the kind of Machiavellian slight-of-hand shenanigans the Order likes to boobytrap data cores with, so you’ve got me. Plans include general ship wide de-bugging of anything the Order could utilise to ID, or much, much more life impairing, compromise your central command authority. At most, it’d take a few hours to triple clean the warship - hours that correlate to years you’re not going to spend in a freezing, dark cave under a mountain range on a lesser known part of Ackbat’s crust.
The trick of obscuring a warship is hiding in plain sight. This is not done through subtlety. You cannot Where’s Waldo a line dreadnaught. They are prominent, massive, solar phenomena and unless you hide one behind a sufficiently huge EM shield, like a planet, you will be pinging long range sensors as soon as you enter local space of anyone with the ears to listen. As her CO, you’re more than aware of this - except, you’re not -her- CO anymore.
Within a few weeks, you will not know your own way around your own ship. Subtle details are going to change, right down to the fittings on the bridge windows, much of which will not be particularly materially intensive. Compartments will be reshuffled. Fighter gantries in the hangar will be moved. The hull will be resprayed. Solar erosion and combat wear and tear will be filled in, filed, and replaced. We will be moving hull patches, carbon scoring. The personal effects of the old crew will be stowed. We’ve even moved the fire suppressive casters, scrubbed the serial numbers on mass production components. My apologies, Tantalus, but any distinctive quirks of character that the Razgriz once possessed will, in a matter of days, be entirely absent. You’re going to get lost on the way to the bathroom all over again. You will be glad to note that we haven’t been barbaric enough as to so much tweak the lumbar positioning of the captain’s chair, however.
You’re going to have to devolve old persuasions. Primarily, you can’t call her the Razgriz anymore. The Razgriz is vapour and shrapnel. The Razgriz is a closed book. We’ll wire the transponders according to your own inclination, even with a parallel name, but that’s not a proper noun your throat gets to utter anymore, even in writing. What the Order doesn’t know, can’t hurt them. More pointedly, what the Order doesn’t know, can’t hurt -us-.
I have five service droids denuding the Razgriz of her nameplate as we speak. Let me know what I should program them to install in its place.
Congratulations - according to the Overwatch you are officially dead. So in the absence of anyone better equipped I’ll play Saint Peter for you: Welcome to our little circle of revenants, Paladin Tantalus. You’ll fit in the afterlife quite well.
Good luck. Not that you need it, you've already shot your way through the greatest of escapes.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
Sender ID:"Tantalus" Location Origin:Vieques Shipyard, Puerto Rico Encryption:Balor Thank you Paladin.
The... ship has gone through a lot, and while I appreciate a good touch-up, turning this ship into something totally unlike its former self is something I didn't have in mind. I'm already dealing with a new engine reactor and new crew here, the ship will likely be outfitted in the future for more stealth and reconaissance focused tasks. The nameplate however, is something that indeed has to change.
This Osiris has existed with its name for a long time, so would be easily traceable if I were to keep it. I have already discussed this with Hunt, and the ship will be re-christened to the "Andraste" once it leaves Vieques and begins its service in Auxesia. If I kept "Razgriz" the ship would be trackable in an instant, and I plan to hide this vessel as long as possible with sneaky snitches like the Amenhotep and Order primary vessels like Oathkeeper and the Tombstone still strolling around. I'm going to have to put this stealth tech to use more than ever until I can confirm them leaving in some way, especially if our operations are based in Inverness and Coronado.
To a good few people, I'm dead now, and that puts ease in my mind knowing that those people no longer have a connection to me. This was the best way to get away from the Order, and all they ever need to know is that I'm floating dead, among the wreckage in Magellan.
Sender ID:Paladin Nesrin Khan, Battlegroup Auxesia Sender Location:$()(@£* Node, Liberty, Puerto Rico Encryption:URSULA Recipient ID:IDsign Tantalus.
Andraste. Icenic revenge goddess. Span the spokes of Boudica’s chariot during the Roman occupation of Britain. It’s a masterful touch.
I don’t believe in divination. Any reprieve we possess right now will expire as the escape window seals. There will come a time when the Order no longer associates the Razgriz’s disappearance with coincidence. Golanski has a tenth Dan in the art of demagoguery and he didn’t earn that title by bribing the other contestants - if he has a reason for suspicion, he will act as if that suspicion is fact. It’s why he’s so competent at his job - and why he gets everybody who enters his wake is drowned in his crusade. He has no evidence yet, but when has that ever stopped the Overwatch? Restraint is not in their vocabulary.
I still believe the roughest rode is that yet to be taken, Tantalus - but as curtsy to you I’ll keep the ship’s less revealing internal fittings untouched - keep the vessel homely. It’ll knock a few days off the service time, and won’t make any difference from the perspective of external signal intelligence.
The reactor is the less bothersome of your two concerns. It’s a Pave Furnace class MOX pellet fed laser fusion system - same output levels as the drive system you had before, and a little more responsive to surging power requirements than a deuterium or hydrogen fuzing system, coupled to your bulk standard proton fusing kick drive for the fusion beam. The fuel presents no ambient fire hazard and storage is a doddle, and it works great as a direct thermal accelerant line for the drive system you already have installed. The technology is comparatively unsophisticated yet exceptionally effective. It’s the best we could rustle up in a month’s short notice, and it’s the best you and the Andraste are going to cope with until we can ensure that we’re not about to have an Osiris drop in from the heavens on us.
The crew is more of an issue. Each have been run over between fifty and a hundred hours of Osiris sim training, but that’s not an acceptable margin for running straight into forward fleet operations. Fortuitously, most of the Sovereign’s crew have served on the Arktos at one point or another, so you won’t be staffing a bridge filled full of laymen who do not know how to operate a battleship - still, be relaxed with them. They will not be reaching similar performance margins to your previous crew until they’ve adjusted to your command style, which will be markedly distinct from anything they’ve been previously adapted to. The Order exercises command through the need-to-know and authoritarian command drip down. To jump when jump is ordered. Auxesians are encouraged to use initiative - to provide information and tactical appraisal to their peers. To still follow commands intimately, yet to attune the execution of those commands to their individual skill sets. For example, if a commander sends nano repair drones down to the reactor bay, it’s the chief engineer’s duty to assign which fusion torus gets patched in what order. It’s going to be a culture shock, Tantalus. Both you and they have much to prove to each other. They’ll go through the motions of following your commands, but you’re going to have to build up a personal connection with them if you’re to deduce their individual strengths. I advise patching the Andraste’s surveillance network to your PDA - Auxesians aren’t camera shy, nor are we snippy about our privacy. We live in space, we sleep in each other’s beds, we defecate in zero gee. Get to know your crew, and they’ll follow you into a neutron star if you asked them. That’s the trick to command here. Respect the humanity of your underlings.
Oh, as afterthought; whilst I don’t have operational command here - your ship is your own - I’d advise pelting it into Bretonia and out of the independent worlds once the repairs are finalised. Liberty is crawling with provocateurs.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)