[color=#FF0000][font=Merienda One][align=center]Ofrezco mi carne al cuerpo de Creta. Ofrezco mi corazón a su pasión, mi sangre transfundida al pueblo. Ofrezco mi todo para conocer mi alma; Entonces sabes que estoy realmente vivo.[/align][/font][/color]
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
Errant Ident:Kostas "Φιλόπονος" Zana Errant Outbound Node:Cádiz Base, Omega-5 Topical Proclamation:One of many knightly vigils
Ha. I had to stop here to restock, refuel and all, but I wish I didn't. I fail to understand how the local crew can keep focused. They eventually offered me some kind of a room to sleep, which is made impossible by... by the Plains of Heaven, why are they moving those Correo spares through the corridor so late?
Is that what determination feels like, sleeplessness? Señor Cabrera, I remember something now. Once I asked a servant of the Bull: "Why, o Kyrie, do I sometimes feel the need to yawn while I'm listening to the Word? Am I of little faith?" And here was his answer as I recorded it: "O Son, do not fool yourself. While you're bored, your imagination is at work, full gas, and you're fully contemplating. You're charting universes you would never envision otherwise."
And my dear uncle added: "You're responsible for your own boredom."
...
Good day. I finally fell asleep and my Guardian finished my prayer for me. You were probably right the other night – huge rocks are milestones.
Ofrezco mi carne al cuerpo de Creta. Ofrezco mi corazón a su pasión, mi sangre transfundida al pueblo. Ofrezco mi todo para conocer mi alma; Entonces sabes que estoy realmente vivo.
Errant Ident:Dessalegne Linhares Cabrera Errant Outbound Node:Thira Colony, Omicron Xi Topical Proclamation:Vigils are for the vigilant, acere. CC-> Kostas Zana
Boredom is the basis of creativity, brother. Tumba eso; the only way it will slow you down is if you reflect upon the effect, and not the cause. Boredom is the means of galvanising substance from aether - or, at the least, experience. You feel yourself a-churning so you hesitate, uncertain of your next desire. Your uncle was a smart man, brother. Let it come.
I've heard a stirring of change. You can feel it in the deckplates, if you pressed your ear to the pressure hull just over compartment twenty seven black. Of course, that's the compartment containing the bar - the rumour mill of the sector whirls through there from time to time.
Crete is hungry. A man rendered esqueleto rumbero will start carving up their neighbours given the inclination and a sufficiently sharp knife. I wonder if these stirrings have touched your ears all the way to the south, brother?
Let me know when your boredom exceeds even the ample capacity of Cadiz for distraction. A fitful mind is best calmed with honest work, aye?
Ofrezco mi carne al cuerpo de Creta. Ofrezco mi corazón a su pasión, mi sangre transfundida al pueblo. Ofrezco mi todo para conocer mi alma; Entonces sabes que estoy realmente vivo.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
Most of the hard repairs are done for. Our scout drones recovered the last remains from the Intermares. SAR indicates no change from the first after-action assessment - only her message pods and FDR was launched before she sab-quenched her cores. The crew made their final rite - nothing of the gunboat was left to the Indols. Her crew died as Corsairs - I pray that someday we'll get the same chance.
We're still uncertain as to how the LSF found our convoy. There was no information leak, and the convoy flew as efficiently as astrogation would allow. There's Un putero unknown variables, but a best guess would indicate that we tripped an unseen pinger when transiting through Virginia. The enemy here is alien to most of the crew here - they're terrified of nebulae and asteroid fields - they cling to their infrastructure, their gravity wells. It difficult to anticipate the minds of the Alliance. Still, we got a morale boost: the picket gunboat served their purposes and martyred themselves for Crete. The rest of our fighter screen outflew the Indols and have regrouped with the convoy, cheering as they went. As shipdeath's go, it was a honourable one.
We're moving to fix up the last busted stellarator, manually. We tried running the nanobots over them, but they're aftermarkets - ripped from a indol corporate transport. Apparently their firmware wasn't reformatted properly - they didn't have the right pattern sets, and started printing superpolymers with all the wrong resistances - double thick and rigid enough that we would have cracked a seal under cruise stress. The little bastards chewed through about a third of the hard sealant we brought with us, printing all the wrong structures. By votive council, we decided to play it safe. Currently, we're shacked up in the wet-dock of the local junker hole - Beaumont, isn't it? They looked like their skin was going to crawl off of their backs when they were told their dock was going to host a patch-up party for a Hogosha hull. The credits must have swayed their spirits. Still, I have four Sicarios types guarding each airlock, warding away any Vac Suits away that arn't ours. It doesn't take a bright man to figure out what we're carrying, or who we're going to vend it to.
Bull willing, we'll be clear of this salvage rig turned watering hole before the Prod's learn that there's two treasure ships this far into Gommorah. Junker silence has a price tag, and they won't get a credit they don't deserve.. La mona aunque se vista de seda, mona se queda - we'd be fools if we expected any more.
We will head for the fence point the moment the other captains send me the go-ahead. I've ordered an extra ration of rum for the crew. They were high spirits as they watched the Intermares's reactors implode. A true Cretan cremation. Only the blessed risk their all, as our mothers tell us.
Morale is stable. I'm doing my best to keep the local whores out of the quarterdeck. You can never tell when the nightlife out here carries a cardamine burner with them. Ugh. The gutworlds are a nest of vice. Moor here too long, and they'll eat you alive.
Ofrezco mi carne al cuerpo de Creta. Ofrezco mi corazón a su pasión, mi sangre transfundida al pueblo. Ofrezco mi todo para conocer mi alma; Entonces sabes que estoy realmente vivo.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
Errant Ident:Kostas Zana Errant Outbound Node:Βουκέφαλας, Armicustos-class, main deck transmitter Topical Proclamation:Goods in transit
Hmmm. Yeah, so we're here in the middle of nowhere with a lot of cling-cling going around. Liberty they say, well, I understand why the Empire doesn't think there is a lot to plunder around these parts of the gutworlds. The few I saw from Rheinland looked better in terms of actual, concrete, how do you say, tangui... tenji... oh, touchable wealth.
We're waiting for the Hogosha-built craft to receive a couple of fixes. I'm no politician but I suspect our hosts are not very happy at this sight. Qué remedio, what other choice do they have. Ours doesn't need repairs though because we could avoid fighting so far. And still, our beloved Armi is a strong one too. I'm used to those beasts and I know they perform nicely under fire. This one really feels like childhood, however tech looks more advanced and plating heavier.
I cannot say our small crew isn't delighted by this improvised break. A couple of them seem to be known here, I couldn't figure out why but I guess you don't get experienced without getting your hands dirty. I'm leaving personnel management to the deputy commander anyway. Uncle Markos appointed him personally so I know I can trust him.
Now I'll walk around and see if I can learn something interesting. And find signs of the Bull.
Ofrezco mi carne al cuerpo de Creta. Ofrezco mi corazón a su pasión, mi sangre transfundida al pueblo. Ofrezco mi todo para conocer mi alma; Entonces sabes que estoy realmente vivo.
Marcellus is a terrible person. Or a genius - one or the other. I'm siding with terrible.
The crazy puta made an artifact run through the mouth of Malta itself. Less threading the eye of a needle than dancing his signature through sensor deadzones he could barely map, let alone predict. Once he gets to the drop-off he struggles to secure black market light-arms from a freelance Broker, he realises he's grabbed goods without knowing who the buyer is. Instead of taking the direct route back to Crete, he panicked, and tried to find a local buyer. Red flag number one - never put your neck on the line for independents. Red flag number two, never, for the Bull's sake, pull another man's contract. Him and his squeeze melted down the golden rules of smuggling and nearly threw their lives away dishonourably.
And they did all of that from the quarterdeck of my family's ship.
He tried to lay on the old Cretian charm and sell the arms to an independent vendor in the southern Taus. He had heard that tech hoarders were operating in the theatre, and he chased that fox till it bit him in the leg. What he thought was an automated service system triggered an artificial defence net of some kind. Drones and bombers started cropping up, laying in insults in the usual way that Housers do, and then rained fire. Marcellus clanged the Senora into the clamps hard enough to provoke this response.
I did a little Neuralnet digging. You've got to admire the tenacity of the sparkspinner who ripped these terminals out.
They're named after the Horae and an aspect of Persephone. Probably a sarcastic name as there was no verdure here. Whoever coded the defence system likely had Hispanic routes. Possibly a Maltese smuggler embedded in the Crayter sector, or one of Loyola's acolytes. He waited the defence system out as per doctrine, and then shattered the way in an attempt to cut transit time by bisecting Maltese space.
By navigational accident, he came across something of value. A miracle, as much as I've seen one recorded. A vast, computational structure, alike those recorded by our kin in the Heaven's Shift, dropped into a deep ecliptic of the sun. Contact was attempted, but no life stirred in the structure. If this creature of superalloy was truly alive, it is no more. Perhaps by Outcast design; it is the nature of Maltese to destroy all of the universe's children. A biopsy was extracted - mechanisms that could be elements of the vessel's tractor beams, or its weaponry. Their tangled mass of steel lines the hangar vault, and there they will remain until the Church find a purpose for the relics.
But the trade stops for nothing. It is the bread of our people, and sometimes you must put miracles aside in the name of preservation.. Another run from the reliquary to the profligates, the Macedon reported heavy contest at the Kusarian border, so we took the Emerald road.
Instead, contest came to us.
Under normal circumstances we would have stood our ground and fought. One typical adversary, a Hessian, along with a ship of the Defence Network that Marcellus must have ticked off. One Thor and a transport are pulp for the hooves. But the Bull is cautious and untapped relics come above what I wish for myself. We warded the aggressors off - they didn't scan our cargobays or comment on what they saw.
For now, we'll press on. I hear that we've relayed more artefacts and relics in the last two weeks than the rest of our race have in the last four months. Faith is a powerful ally.
Ofrezco mi carne al cuerpo de Creta. Ofrezco mi corazón a su pasión, mi sangre transfundida al pueblo. Ofrezco mi todo para conocer mi alma; Entonces sabes que estoy realmente vivo.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
The Taurus amigos and amigas let me tag along for one of their legendary calamar raids.
We got way more than we bargained for, as all hell broke loose!
End result? All squid fried, I will scrape the goo off our hull and sell it to stupid Gauls for mucho pesetas as artifacts!
Ofrezco mi carne al cuerpo de Creta. Ofrezco mi corazón a su pasión, mi sangre transfundida al pueblo. Ofrezco mi todo para conocer mi alma; Entonces sabes que estoy realmente vivo.
Errant Ident:Jack Mordred Errant Outbound Node:Omicron Gamma Topical Proclamation:Good old Gamma days
Hope I'm doing this right. Need to work on my comm terminal. Started typing this message and then realised I'd put a bottle of the good stuff in the compartment where the transponder was supposed to be.
Anyway. Just thought I'd check in. Been constantly scoping out Gamma during my off hours. Some of the stuff we've seen lately has me itching at the con to get right back into action. But isn't it the way of the systems that when you want it the most it's the quietest it's ever been? Found myself just taking pot shots at debris to pass the time.
Also not to sound sappy but just wanna say thanks to you guys from giving me a purpose beyond struggling from day to day on Crete. So yeah. We'll share some of this bottle when we can. That is if it doesn't stay too quiet out here cause then I might just finish it off myself!
Ofrezco mi carne al cuerpo de Creta. Ofrezco mi corazón a su pasión, mi sangre transfundida al pueblo. Ofrezco mi todo para conocer mi alma; Entonces sabes que estoy realmente vivo.
Ofrezco mi carne al cuerpo de Creta. Ofrezco mi corazón a su pasión, mi sangre transfundida al pueblo. Ofrezco mi todo para conocer mi alma; Entonces sabes que estoy realmente vivo.
Mucho bones and meat flying around! These Librarians taste good, si!
Ofrezco mi carne al cuerpo de Creta. Ofrezco mi corazón a su pasión, mi sangre transfundida al pueblo. Ofrezco mi todo para conocer mi alma; Entonces sabes que estoy realmente vivo.