Our last operation was a success despite the loss of my ship. I barely managed to escape however and most of my crew did not make it out of there alive. Due to my light injuries I could not participate in the offensive operation against the Red Menace in Texas system a few hours later. I am sure you will be glad to hear that the Lane Hackers dealt a decisive blow on the communists. Speaking of that, we saw the Coalition battlegroup entering Bering system which we hope did not result in Unioner lives or assets being lost.
However that is not the reason I am contacting you. The Lane Hackers believe that your latest announcement directly harms our interests and the spirit of our alliance so during the operation I had the opportunity to relay our position to Frau Alise von Ravensberg. I suppose this lady did not forward our conversation to the Oberkommando, as I kindly requested her to do so. The black box of my ship is still examined and I cannot forward said conversation at this moment, so please take the data from her. Of course we are eagerly waiting to hear your response on this most important matter, and hopefully it will be a positive one.
To: Wolfgang Weisen. From: Sascha Lattke, der Alster Union, leader of the Pacifica Cell and de-jure commander of all Unioner Smuggling operations in the Bering and Puerto Rican regions. Subject: The Bones of the dead are not meat for the butcher's slab.
She has indeed, Mister Weisen. The VonRavensburg sisters are trusted field agents of the direktorate. We have the logs in their entirety.
I will inform you that promoting pressure upon the Unioners in this matter will not lead to a change in Unioner internal policy. It is a strange irony of fate that the existence of the Unioners themselves are a reaction against coercive statehood practices, despite Piracy and smuggling being blackmail-reliant industries. For thirteen months, we fought an uphill war few anticipated we would even survive against Anna Heinrich's Red Hessians to combat the Hessian history of coercive influences over our Arbeitsdirektorate. We not only survived, we flourished, the volume of our movement expanding by a full third as we annexed significant components of the southern Rheinlandic contraband distribution net. We are popular amongst the land owner who control the lives of the poor, and our blue-collar backers. The borgeouise label us terrorists, as they well should. They deserve to be terrorized. We produced more ships and hardware than any contemporaneous so-called "unlawful" organisation of equivilent strategic capacity. Our lineage is outmatched only by the Blood Dragons in the longevity of our cause.
It is a testament to the fertillity of our alliance that we have not gone to one another's throats. Lane Hackers often behave aloof towards the average Unioner, or consider the average elevated Hamburg elevated unemployed as capricious, unreliable, aggressive. or excessively young for the uniform in an industry where older men are the survivors. Equally, there is a tendency amidst the Unioners to view the Hackers as staid and overconfident software engineers without a whit of hardware awareness, zero street-smarts, a clique-y attitude to the underworld, an ego as large as the bourgeois we combat, whilst being too reluctant to bloody their Dolce & Gabbana cufflinks to get properly stuck in.
Yet our alliance flourishes. Why? Because our mutual co-operation has yielded more successes than faliures. If not for the Lane Hackers sharing information over the spyglass architecture with us - freely, I will add, without cost, we would not have possessed sufficient strategic intelligence to orchestrate a plan of recovery for the KKS Sirene, nor would we have been aware what celestial symptoms to listen out for. You movement is single-handedly responsible for bolstering our forces in a time of grave institutional danger - we will not forget this. Equally, your men have fought and died alongside us, despite your modus operandi to avoid direct combat with the federal military services, in the Texas system. The strategic intelligence the Hackers have provided has saved Unioner lives.
In return, we have incubated the Libertonian Seperatists despite occasional security crises, provided you with strategic materials that you yourselves would have difficulty accessing alone, forwarded information when requested. We would happily retail the Lane Hackers Unioner ship models if the Hackers so requested. You are, in effect, a brother to us. Brothers fight, yes. But they come together afterwards.
We have a brotherly relationship with the Junkers - there is no institution closer to us, both physically; the rift is but a phase connection away, and ideologically; we are both black-marketeers who profit from salvage operations whilst producing a diversity of individualistic ships without equal considering the resources involved with their construction. We both deal with groups that would otherwise be at each others necks, we are both neutral parties in the Hispanic civil war. The only primary distinctions are simply a matter of modus-operandi. We are especially close to the Congress and the Reys family, who have not objected. This leaves the Marauders as a possible origin point for your complaint. The Marauders we have less contact with, but that is simply a matter of differences of operations zones. Marauders are nearly never seen in Bering. They are, in effect, foreigners, and we are not so naive as to treat all junker organisations in parallel.
Which is why, Mister Weisen, if the Marauders wish to hash out an alternative agreement, they can do it themselves.
Till then, I will inform anyone who cares to listen that grave robbing the remains of battles between servicemen whose only crime was to die in defence of their homeland, be it Libertonian or Rheinlandic, friend or foe, is greviously offensive to the Unioner beliefs regarding the inherent rights of man, and any indiscriminate Junker who only cares about the hardware is almost certainly going to atomise their bodies with an indiscriminate extraction beam without the slightest concern. A secondary concern is the fact that the Unioners do not have any resources of our own except our abillites as engineers, pirates, enforcers. We are entirely dependent upon other people's contraband. Economic protectionism is the soul of what we are about. In Bering we have the capacity to nourish ourselves. Re-patriation of the means of production is indespensible to the principles of Neofeudal Market Syndicalism and the conventions of the Reichsarbeitergesellschaft der alster.
In short, consider that A) our forces in the area are overwhelming and that the Marauders do not have a hope in hell of doing anything more effectual than grumbling to their allies, B) the Seperatists appear to back our claim, and C) we are both ideologically and pragmatically opposed to obsessive regional monopolism, our attitude should be evident.
Please tell the insipidly greedy idiolects of the Marauders that they are welcome to mine Premium Salvage in Bering without any trouble, and that attempting to steal Unioner proprietary resources in violation of the terms of trust we place with the Junkers will result in the Marauders not robbing from the graveyard, but adding to it. If they wish to receive their "no" in person, they should communicate with us, and not duck behind another. If they wish to receive their "no" at gunpoint, attempt daylight robbery. They will not get away with it.
I ask you this; if a foreign party started carving chunks off a Lane Hacker asteroid base, would you sit back and let them carry on, as they were? Of course not. We will, however, operate through licensed Proxies. This channel is one where Unioner-extracted Salvage can be obtained for a tiny nominal fee, through the intermediary of a Syndicliga-approved lawful shipping guild subcontractor who shares our anti-corporatist, anti-monopolist sentiments. We would also be willing to mine on the Marauder's behalf, in return for payment. However, they, themselves, cannot conduct the salvage operations.
One final note; we do not have an 'Oberkommando'; we are not Hesse. We have an 'Arbeitsdirektorate'.
We're done here.
In solidarity, in peace, I remain yours.
Sascha Lattke
Cell-Lord, Chort's Forge, Westphalia.
"Though the past is scarred and the future untold"
" Be the boot heavy, the vacuum cold."
"I of the Liga, do not fold" "For suits or saints or beggar's gold. Information-Recruitment-Message Dump-Feedback
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