Lancer - The Karma Reef

What is old and what is new doesn't matter so much... what matters more is why they try to murder one another. Eh. Turns out the old and new do matter to know, after all.   Listen up, while you futzed about not yet being born and all, this place had epic struggles all of it's own. We had the Ymirians collectively bash in their heads until they finally figured there's other people out there whose heads need bashing in. So they stopped, unified and are now a fucking menace on this place.   We had the Minervans and their... shall we say... highly educated populations, widespread power and haughty demeanor, who in their wisdom thought reintroducing large-scale slavery was a grand fucking idea. Well, come slaves, come slave revolts. That's how Decimas was born, that's how Union got involved in the mix and that's how the Minervans are now sympathizing with the Second Committee scumbags of Harrison.   Then there's my own shitbags of the Twin-Sun Compact. Dual star-system, seemingly blessed world, torn to pieces regularly by the influence of both stars. Tears us a new one every few years... we managed, always did. Now we do so much better thanks to Union. We work with 'em, we're their guides in this ass-end of nowhere called the Karma Reef.   That's the old. What's the new? Delvington Colonial dropping in and setting up shop. Well, they are less of a problem... so far. They sit on their worlds, Crisis Response Teams placed near Shukuen and wait out the growth of their worlds.   Well, Shukuen is also new. It's one of those newfangled Blinkgates that make me skin crawl. I'd rather still chug along through Nearlight than get close to one of those things. So yeah, that's Union's schtick. They also got a few places set-up around Shukuen. Scythe and Vandrake are newer projects. Caldera was supposed to be an easy recolonization of a failed colony. Tough luck on that front, now they got some crazy religious homelanders on their arse, freshly connected to the omninet and being supplied by outside forces with necessary tech to fuck shit up big time.   Then there's the Li-Jiang, with their "ethical investment" strategy that sounds like shit and smells worse. Ethical local colonial efforts, most notably by ways of buying "slaves" (by a different name so Union shuts up and does nothing) or encouraging citizens to "invest" (meaning: "sell their souls to a corp"). Bad thing is... nobody ever hears stuff coming from their colonies, and that's where the worry starts on my end... cause if a corpo makes sure you ain't hearing it, there's nothing good to hear anyways.   Well and then we have the bulk-order freakos, the Kastoria Horizon corp. Relatively small-scale on the galactic magnitude from what I read, but I ain't never seen anyone throw around as much Manna as they did. They got three somewhat developed worlds nearby nowadays (Svarl, Hastun Gamma and Ilumia Alpha) and then offered Union a mind-blowing sum to big and win on the entire ILOS cluster, a solid ten systems of which only three even have normally habitable planets. They are up to something, I'm sure.   So yeah, that is where we are. New and old. Everyone hates everyone and Union smiles, nods and tells us something of ethical baseline values. Well, they're better than the alternative, as we old hands experienced in the past...

 

Jessah Rudin-Kamiya Twin Sun Compact Liaison to Union