Taking some time for myself at Dav's Hope
21 Mar 2021User319792
The GALNET entry from the 17th of March started with these lines:The Alliance, Empire and Federation have created a centralised agency dedicated to investigating and eliminating the NMLA paramilitary group. The new Affiliated Counter-Terrorism unit (ACT) is a direct result of the Cornelius-Lasky Convention, which was signed at the Galactic Summit.
Generation Ship: OdysseusWhen I woke up the morning after my promotion, Aisling was still on my mind. Like I said, I'd been so caught up in the passion of the rescue missions that I didn't stop to get my bearings. She's fine, I suppose, but there's still no word about her on GALNET. With that Rochester guy at the Summit, there's no way she's not at least a little suspicious of the whole affair. I know I am.
Generation Ship: Spear of HopeBut I had to push that out of my mind and focus on what the man in the black suit wanted, which was... going... I guess. I can never really tell with him. But with all that's going on, I decided that I wanted to see where it all started, so I went over to Cannon and looked up the locations of the known generation ships- the ships that carried us away from a war-torn Earth. Ships like the Ovid was to those folks at Hahn Gateway and millions of tons of other ships were and are to anyone else at the 9 Martyr stations, on a larger scale I suppose.
Dav's HopeNow I'm sitting here at Dav's Hope and I'm thinking about everything. The mission statement of the NMLA is being represented by the story of a single person, I suppose, in this Theta Seven guy. His statement after the attack said a bunch of stuff about losing his name and family and being left with little more than a sign and a number to mark him as who he is.
Generation Ship: HyperionI don't doubt that the combined intelligence and efforts of the three superpowers are going to utterly demolish him and the NMLA. It would be ridiculous for me to think otherwise. But that's always how it goes. That's been the history of humankind. There was a war on Earth, we all got in a bunch of ships and ended up in the far reaches of space and then all of us ended up back in conflict with one another and one of us will eventually win or we'll all lose and then we'll have to find a way to make our way afterward and of course we will because that's who we are as humans.
Generation Ship Carrying Lazarus ExpeditionI expect at some point the combined efforts of the Alliance, Federation, and Empire in the Affiliated Counter-Terrorism unit will make sure that Theta Seven's story of the 9 Martyrs killed in the attack on Kepler is ground to a pulp in order to leave no doubt in anyone's minds that the NMLA is nothing more than a group of madmen, the nine martyrs little more than an externality in an accounting of the tragedy.
Generation Ship: Dameter There's suspicion that the degree of coordination required for an attack of this size would have required people on the inside. The same suspicion was being tossed around when it came to light that a bunch of these NMLA terrorists escaped from some secret Imperial prison where they were being tortured.
Generation Ship: EpimetheusIts always the case that these kinds of suspicions arise when something this big goes down. That's nothing new to us. But with Aisling having been so closely linked to the Marlinist's efforts, her cousin's rejection by the Imperial Council, her former betrothed's connection to the Federation and the potential for their marriage to have been a symbolic union between Federation and Imperial hopes and her, as of now, extreme invisibility, I wonder if she's facing down some internal pressures within the Council to cough up any information that she won't have.
Generation Ship: AchlysThe Federation was real quick to jump on the Empire, and President Hudson even went so far as to accuse Shadow President Winters of being directly responsible. Senator Patreus is clashing with the Chancellor and even the Alliance isn't sure who it is they should be congratulating for what had been accomplished at the Galactic Summit before the attacks.
Generation Ship: VenusianNow, some private investigators are working the case, apparently, and their GALNET exclusive is already beginning to carve away the frayed strands of any of the various stories that might make it into our collective memories as the history of the Galactic Summit and its aftermath. Theta Seven's release made it clear to basically everyone that the attacks weren't the result of some external forces, be they human or alien, attempting to demand the legitimacy of their contestation for space amongst the three superpowers. Archon Delaine hasn't been mentioned once by anyone, even with his surprising ascent to attempted legitimacy at the summit, and the Thargoids are still not even seen as legitimate enough a threat to the sanctity of our competing political systems to even have been considered a potential source after Theta Seven's release. This was a catastrophe that took us down from within. It was simply a systemic failure to accurately assess the threat posed by the Neo-Marlinists
Generation Ship: Phobos
Generation Ship: Atlas
Generation Ship: Lycaon
Generation Ship: ArtemisIt's all where it needs to be. The puzzle pieces to this are all neatly cropped and fit together in a nice and tidy picture. A group of people were forced to leave their homes after being ruled a threat to the Empire and an even smaller subset of these people decided that leaving wasn't the solution to their predicament. It's the story of human history. People open their eyes and they see themselves as they are, rather than as they would like to be, and they have to make a choice.
Generation Ship: Thetis
Generation Ship: GolcondaBut something still seems out of place, to me. It's too perfect... too tidy... the story makes too much sense with too little to think about afterward. We'd thought the situation was figured out and we were wrong and we paid for it with human lives. That's how history works... or, at least, it's that idea that makes history work.
Generation Ship: PleioneI've gone through the logs of all the generation ships Cannon currently has listed in its public archives. None of them end well. Actually, they're all horrifying. Every single one. The stories of Technician Farrow- of The Spear of Hope- and Chief Engineer Tom Edwards- of Generation Ship: Atlas- are the least horrifying and both of them are about people that get stuck on generation ships for the rest of eternity due to one series of horrifying events after another, none of which would have made it into the history books without Cannon Research helping to pull them from the vacuum of space. Even then, these stories aren't history. They're just stories. They're just things that happened to people during history's passage from before now to now. Every single one of these generation ships were part of a history that takes no account of what happened to them in its retelling. The horrors of those who, at one point were nameless and faceless, give way to the grandiosity of greatness and open-ended hope until they're once again pulled from the black.
Generation Ship: Phanes