And, frankly, heartening. I'm tired to my bones of all the hot air, pomposity and ego-centric jockeying to be the most visible Good Child in the playground that's typified what I'm laughingly going to call the "organized capsuleer resistance".
It's refreshing to get a glimpse past all of the arrogant showboating at people who are doing their jobs with concern for doing it well out of a sense of obligation, rather than out of concern for their public image.
Fuck the Matari and their whole "CONCORD allow slavery to endure" thing. Whatever the organisation as a whole may do, the people in it, I can see now, include some very fine persons still driven by those same qualities that I wish I'd better retained from my life pre-capsule.
but... I've lived in space all my life. I've wandered anchorless among the stars for five years now. I've become a Henkaavelij, a spirit-walker. I'm among them every day but these aren't the friendly spirits of home and hearth. They aren't spirits that are close or familiar with humans, like Cold Wind or Mesikaammen. These are star-spirits, void wraiths... the timeless Kami of blackness and infinity.
And I've spoken with them. At least, as much as any man can. I pray, and I listen, and they tell me things, precisely because I DO listen. A black and terrible knife has been carving at the empires for months now. But the spirits say... They say that soon, that knife will strike deep into the guts of our society. That cold shard of unfeeling ordered oblivion will seek to impale everything that is messy and living and thriving in New Eden. There will be blood and pain, but we will not die. Instead we will thrive, overcome.
And we need to. Aria Jenneth has always been right, to be a pod pilot is to be feared. That which is feared will be attacked, driven off, defeated. For years, our kind has been a parasite on the cultures of New Eden, taking their money, lives and resources and giving them only fickle protection and cruel whimsy. It was only a matter of time before New Eden did to the capsuleers what any wilderness trainer will tell you to do with a blood-sucking tick: Burn it out.
CONCORD will try to stop the knife from sinking in, of course. Bless them, how they'll try, but they can't stop Sansha's Nation.
Nor should they, because Sansha.... heh. The poor stupid bastard is just feeding us the purpose we need to finally become symbiotes with the culture that birthed us. With his help, the time of the Capsuleer is going to enter a golden age.
The citizens of New Eden will adapt. They will build shelters to hide in when the True Slaves come for them. They'll strengthen their anti-orbital defences, put systems in place to minimize the damage that the Nation can do... and then they'll throw pod pilots at the problem. Spurred on by bounties and the promise of Nation technology filling our cargo holds, we'll tear into the Nation's invading forces and drink them of every resource they can provide us with.
We capsuleers... we're the paragons of humanity, the distilled essence of what our species is all about. When faced with a threat, we turn it into an opportunity. Adversity becomes incentive, defeat becomes the catalyst for adaptation. Worlds explode and die, dead civilisations return to haunt us, and what do we do? We chew them up and turn the debris into warships. We FARM them.
Just as we will farm Sansha's Nation.
Save. End.
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