Rhythm of the War Drums
23 Feb 2022Akheteru
It'd been a long time since Enkil Akheteru, a CMDR in the Pilots Federation, has flown under Felicia Winters' Letter of Marque with the mercenary outfit he founded, Dynamic Federal Acquisitions. So long, in fact, that DFA no longer existed; it lived on as Black Widow, now, and controlled a swath of territory in the name of Archon Delaine. For the most part, CMDR Akheteru spent his time putting out fires in his territory - a war here, a rigged election there, eliminating the entire staff compliment of a rival faction's settlement in order to remind them who controls a given system... these exercises, while largely trivial on an individual basis, together occupied much of his time and attention. He didn't concern himself with the Thargoid threat, so long as it stayed out of Black Widow space. He paid no mind to political infighting or kidnapping plots in the Empire. He didn't even know what the Alliance did and would be hard pressed even to remember where its borders lay.But the news out of the Federation in recent weeks had him concerned. He was, after all, born and raised in the Federation. And while he had fully bought into Delaine's vision of a free and sovereign Kumo nation, insulated from the political maneuvering of the Empire and Alliance, he still had a soft spot in his pirate heart for the concepts of egalitarian democracy espoused by the Federation and (at least publicly) championed by the Shadow President. So even as he oversaw the loading of ammunition into his Krait Mk.II, The Heart Attack, in preparation for another sortie into the combat zones scattered across Gatolla, in the back of his mind Enkil was calculating how long he could spend away from Black Widow's corner of the Kumo nation and wondering when one of Winters' functionaries would call for Pilots Federation Commanders like himself to take up her cause against Zachary Hudson in earnest.
