The Dies Illa is a much-mythologised about anomaly within the Sirius sector, an old smuggler's yarn, a legend of the tradelanes and independent worlds. According to myth, the Dies Illa was a Lane Hacker battleship that came under the use of explorers and independent citizens after the hacker cell responsible for its construction inexplicably vanished without a trace before the vessel could be completely assembled. Incomplete and screaming with systems bugs, the Dies Illa traced its way through the stars as an improvisatory habitat before the crew, from the few scraps that can be acquired from the records, died to a man after the vessel’s carbon scrubber unit inexplicably raised the acceptable levels of Co2 in the battleship’s atmosphere to far beyond survivable levels, presumably due to software errors left over from her rushed construction. The vessel was eventually repressurised by a collective of Texan civilians who saw themselves as a legal counterpart to the Xeno movement, and rushed into the long-lost system of humbolt as a trading outpost, only to be murdered to a man by a Liberty Rogue contract killer who had placed himself amongst the crew by Junker bosses keen to collect on the vessel’s significant scrap value - single-handedly returning the vessel to Puerto Rico, the vessel’s jump drive made a freak navigational error that bathed the spyglass in the radiation beam of the Puerto Rican rift, and never made the rendezvous. A brave salvage team of Junkers succeeded in repossessing the hulk years after, rescuing the vessel from the clutches of the rift. Suspicious of the vessel’s ageing systems and the insidious reputation the vessel had developed, the Junkers shut down the vessel’s dangerously inconsistent VI systems and repurposed the vessel as nothing more than a well-armoured hauler, using her significant jammer suite and ample detection abilities to steer clear of the law. All record of the the Dies Illa was lost shortly after the inexplicable death of the crew following a supply rendezvous with a Junker cartel selling known export rare organisms native to the Omicron Alpha system. Last detected seen on an escape trajectory from the Kansas system, the Illa has been presumed lost somewhere within the depths of intersystem space, a cursed ship, best stricken from the darker pages of history.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
The vessel’s last emergence into known space occurred in the early part of Eight Twenty Four AS shortly before the commencement of the Second Sigma War between Rheinland, the GMG, and the house of Kusari, within the desolate Koeln system to Rheinland’s cosmic west. Badly damaged and missing most of her critical components, the Dies Illa drifted amongst the interplanetary debris unnoticed until her computer core started to further degrade under the intensity of Koeln’s twin suns. Functioning unpredictably, ionic scrambling of the vessel’s intrinsic threat response programming caused the vessel to view most of its local environment as a potential EM invasion, enabling its active jammers as it drifted between the stellar fields, to the predictable outcome of degrading most of the nav-comm functionality of the few pirate patrols who blundered upon the stricken hulk. Worst affected were the Unioners, steadily mobilizing for an expected flanking attack into Hamburg from their newfound nemesis, the forces of the Red Hessian Armee and their feared special operations branch. Fearing that the disoriented patrols were the consequence of some eldritch Hessian weapons system dragged out of the edge worlds, the Alster Union’s controlling cabal moved quickly to label the incidents as nothing more than system malfunctions combined with alcoholism and discipline issues – which unintentionally engendered a mythologizing of the incident within Unioner flight operations circles. As the months progressed, the operations disruptions eventually progressed from a wary irritant for the Koeln cell to a genuine source of fear, with police arrests of Unioner members gradually skyrocketing due to the ever-increasing number of Unioners depending of pre-placed nav buoys to avoid getting lost in the treacherous fields they’d once called home. Eventually, the distruptions were considered notable enough to attract the eattention of the Arbeitsdirektorate, who swiftly deployed the Unioner's famed spectre divisions to
prosecute the matter further. It remains unknown if anything came of the search.
The Dies Illa exists in a space unoccupied by the concerns of humans – its mechanical shell unyielding to the concerns of the individuals who have attempted to force the ship to yield. Whilst the specimens of humanity who have graced its pressure vessels have left tokens of their previous existences tucked within the crevices of the tomb, the vessel remains an ossuary, perpetually outliving the existence of its regiment, or even its own legend.
Even a legend cannot remain undiscovered forever. The emissives of the Illa pumped exultantly into the void, calling for those ears sensitive enough to listen. After a bizzare concentration of background interference presented a severe enough navigational threat for Unioners transiting in and out of the Volkhoven nebulae to reach the tattle of the Underworld, the legend of krakens at the edges of the map became all the more fortified. Before the exceptionally superstitious Unioners could put fact to hearsay, the interference vanished – swooped from the shadows of living mythos by the pragmatic eye of the MND’s police liaison division; a particularly ignominious sector of the federal agency devoted to interpreting the reams of unlawful trajectory data in and out of Koeln’s stellar north.
One agent in particular, a captain Finn Haast, approaching the end of his career without significant commendation, successfully triangulated the position of the interference source by analysing the trajectories of panicked Unioners who had entered the Hamburg radar net from the Koeln system. After handing the information to BDM proper, Haast, in violation of standard operating protocal, attempted to plot, discover, and board the unknown object himself, in an attempt to earn the commendation Haast had long considered himself worthy of, yet had perpetually eluded him. Haast, in violation of the odds, remained extremely successful - yet ghosts are a harsh mistress to men obsessed with the tenacity of their own legend.
Instead, the vessel fell into the proprietary control of the straight-laced and unimaginative Lutz Gilger, a contemporary of Haast's within the MND, and a long time rival - Haast being forcibly returned to his former posting without encouragement or advancement. Haast jealousies gently fermented at the prospect of lost professional fame, and began to use his position as the head of the Hamburg listening post co-ordination to undermine the project, hoping to discourage Gilger from persevering in the allegedly "haunted" command. Meanwhile, the Unioner search persists, as the legend still quietly haunts the background radiation of Rheinland's many kuiper belts.
The legend persists, as does the potential for nascent violence.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
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