The Ongoing Suppression of Heresy in the Empire

 'The evil that men do lives on and on...'

Dark Age Apochrypha and Cultural Relics: Volume 3 - Raihannes Korhominen

In the last month I have participated in a series of fleet actions all over the Empire, which Khimi Harar (LUMEN) has either instigated outright or participated in as a key player, all of which have involved an apparent surge in public heresies, abominations and offences against the Word of God, culminating in the atrocity at Kahah III, which you cannot fail to have noticed since it triggered a subsequent explosion in the activities of the thought-long-dormant Equilibrium of Mankind and its apparently back-from-the-dead leader Ocilan Ardishapur. You will no-doubt have participated in some of the necessary suppressions of pockets of EoM heresy over the last couple of weeks across the wider cluster.

I present an overview of some of those operations below, in as much declassified detail as I am permitted to give:

The Fekhoya Inquisition

LUMEN became aware of a corporation of Triglavian sympathisers called 'Assimilation of Everything Triglavian', operating industrial facilities within the Parses system in the Fekhoya Constellation in Khanid. 

Backstory: LUMEN was very active on the side of EDENCOM during the time of the Triglavian Invasion. After EDENCOM's defeat and the establishment of the abominable 'Pochven' region, LUMEN has sworn to eliminate the Triglavian menace and those sympathetic to it from Amarr space wherever it is found, so leadership filed the necessary 'wardec' with CONCORD (since the Parses system is in high-security space) and we deployed to the Khanid Kingdom for a week to perform the necessary inquisition, suppression and purging of this heresy from the Empire in the name of God.

The operation was a complete success.

You will notice that some of the fleet were using Triglavian-designed vessels during this operation. I am not a spokeswoman for alliance fleet doctrines and the nature of those doctrines is nobody's business...

On the other hand I very much enjoy doing these fleet warp shots with the cam drones:

None of this is satisfying; we do this reluctantly, in service of His Word and of Scripture. If only people would recognise the Light and the Truth of God, and follow the True Path, none of this destruction would be necessary.

After this, we made a triumphant return to our staging system in the Fekhoya Constellation. I contemplated how my former home of Ashmarir was just a few short light-years away from here, and how different life was back then. 

I was so... 

adrift...

* * *

'The time to hesitate is through'

Dark Ages Apochrypha and Cultural Relics, Volume 3

The Mayonhen Suppression

My own ancestral homeworld of Mishi IV was orbited by a POCO facility that was assigned to the very same corporation that we had purged from Fekhoya. There were other POCOs in the same Mayonhen constellation that were also assigned to these infidels, these amateurs, these sympathisers, these... edgelords... 

There are several Ni-Kunni in LUMEN so this operation had considerable emotional and symbolic significance for us. We all made the long trip to Aridia to perform this spiritual cleansing.

Again, it was completely successful. 

It was such a pleasure paying a visit to my ancestral homeworld, it's actually been a while, well over a year. We took down POCOs in the Mishi and Avada systems and reestablished our own over Mishi IV, which pleased us greatly. 

It is fascinating to watch these things explode in such a variety of different ways...

Order is once again restored. May His Word guide my ancestral homeworld to peace and prosperity.

* * *

The Kahah III Atrocity

I don't need to give you the preamble except to say that members of LUMEN were present at all of the events that preceded this one, but I was unable to participate due to 'operational inconvenience' (jump clone timing, being far out of position etc.).

I was however in the right place at the right time when news of the Avatar bombarding Kahah III filtered into HQ. Our fleet was assembled and despatched within half an hour. A new record, I believe.

It was the largest fleet action I've ever participated in. LUMEN Harbingers and Guardians, and all the other capsuleer fleets involved, against seven Dreads and an Avatar.

It was spellbinding.

Horrifying.

The final engagement with the Avatar took place above the planet's terminator. I can only imagine what it must have looked like from down there.

It was operationally favourable to observe the engagement through the Tactical presentation in my neural link to the capsule and the ship, which gave a sense of detachment from the whole thing, a feeling of not even really being there, of watching it on a holovid.

All those lives, reduced to sprites, icons on a grid. The triviality of it. 

The fog of war indeed...

You will know by now that the Avatar had the time to fire several rounds of its Doomsday weapon at the planet's surface, laying waste to large parts of the habitable landmasses.

But with all our temporary capsuleer alliance's combined firepower, it was inevitable that the Avatar would fall eventually.

It was spectacular.

Relief efforts on the surface of Kahah III are ongoing, and will be for some time. There will be some evacuations; and much repair and restoration of the planet's biosphere after the Avatar caused a nuclear winter to exist. It will return to normal, eventually, because it is God's will that nature - the universe - always wins in the end.

But these events are all the evidence you need that dark hearts still exist in New Eden and they must be and will be purged from the Empire. 

'Only the good die young, all the evil seem to live forever.'

Dark Ages Apochrypha and Cultural Relics, Volume 3

...And So It Begins Again

I spent a year in Darwinism, which started out well, but then over a period of time I became spiritually adrift and rudderless. I took a sabbatical. Two years planetside, away from the capsule, all my assets in deep storage across three systems, living another life, an actual life, far away from the quixotic pointlessness of killing the unkillable. Two years of distractions, interests, lovers, businesses, and a rediscovery of my Amarrian faith. Two years during which I saw the holovids about them.

Not Drifters, who are no longer a thing, no longer a threat.

This Triglavian Collective, who showed up in New Eden as if from another dimension of reality; scratchy, mutated monochromatic holovids appearing to show them owning the Drifters asses and making mincemeat of them. Taming them. 

One of the Triglavian ships arrived in Yulai, right outside CONCORD's front door. The ship was battered, on fire, and had a thing hanging out the back of it like a hernia - its power source, as near as damn it an artificial black hole. Nothing good can come of that.

Then they started broadcasting stuff: hijacking the fluid routers with bizarre, pompously-delivered impenetrable nonsense about clades.

Then this Collective starts occupying and seizing systems throughout New Eden and concentrating on systems with blue stars and converting those stars into something horrific.

The power to do that; the will to do that; if our Amarrian forces had 100 divisions with this power then our problems with the Minmatar would very quickly be over.

Then this Collective went even further and took their new region of systems, called it Pochven and walled themselves off behind collapsed stargates, the sight of which is utterly terrifying. 

Because New Eden has now changed forever and will never be the same as it was. 

The vision of this shattered stargate in the Madirmilire system was revelatory to me. God's will informed me at this exact moment that the time was right to end my sabbatical and fight for the integrity and continuity of the Empire.

I had already left Darwinism as I knew for some time my path was taking me elsewhere. I now knew where I had to go.

The Imperial Society of Scepter and Crown.

SFRIM

I am now part of a group of Amarr loyalists working to preserve the sanctity of Amarr, the Empire, its interests, its citizens, its territory.  

From now on you can reach me in the warzone.

Amarr Victor!

All Roads Lead to Khanid, Part I: Manifest

The Yulai System, Sanctum Constellation, Genesis. Directive Enforcement Department Logistic Support Station - Yulai VIII (Deck 4, Section 8 - Licensing Dept.)

Weary-looking middle-management-filing-clerk-type enters what back in the day might have been called a 'Records Room', where, back in the day, millions of hard copy files might have been kept in reverent seclusion in a warehouse-sized space, with an army of people tending them in silence like a form of clergy. These days, it's just like a bunch of terminals in a small, under-lit office where no more than five people sit, day after day, performing the never-ending task of updating the DED Starship Registry Database. It's nowhere near as visually impressive. There aren't even any windows in here.

Weary-looking middle-management-filing-clerk-type sits down at his assigned terminal for the day (for hot-desking is a thing at the DED), and logs-in. The second thing that happens during the login process is that The System asks the person logging-in a question. This time it's 'Does your work at the DED fill you with a sense of purpose?'

Middle-management-filing-clerk-type reads this and gets a gigantic flashback to the fork-in-the-road-of-life that was the time when he got chopped after Year One of capsuleer school; an event that caused the kernel of a lifetime of bitterness to form within his then-young soul, a soul too young to recognise that kernel for what it was: the poison of thwarted ambition.

His response to getting chopped was a few wasted years of oblivion spent in bars and pleasure hubs. When the hangover wore off, the opportunity to move sideways into being a regular starship meatbody had kind of passed him by or not even occurred to him (because the glamour of pseudo-immortality is everything!); so the only remaining choice was to return planetside from whence he came, or embark on an oxymoronic 'career in admin' with the DED.

Thus it was, or is, that middle-management-filing-clerk-type reads the question that The System is asking him, here in the present moment, and he sees the abyss of failure encoded within it. He clicks on 'Skip To Main Menu'...

Then the swoosh of the door opening behind him announces the arrival of a boss/leader type, whose name he doesn't even know, because it doesn't really matter. This boss person approaches his burning hot-desk and its expectant terminal and hands him a sheaf of printouts and says: 'Here's today's updates for The System. There's a new one for the Watch List.'

That last sentence generates a brief flicker of interest in the filing clerk. He says: 'Oh yeah?'

'Yeah,' the boss says. 'Legion-class, recently returned from a long deployment to the Anoikis Cluster. Spent the best part of a year there. '

'What's unusual about that? Happens all the time doesn't it?'

'Yes, but this one, its captain has changed employer at the same time. Left a research-focused pacifist group with no record of criminality and joined - or rejoined a group that's based in low-security space. Thing is, she's worked for them before. It's all there in her history. We've seen this pattern many times. It's a slippery slope, and who knows what the hell she's brought back with her from that place.'

Middle-management filing clerk takes the sheaf of papers and turns to his screen. The boss-type turns and swooshes out of the room.

Filing clerk starts typing...

>DED: A DIVISION OF CONCORD

>STARSHIP REGISTRY ENQUIRY: READY

>WATCH LIST: NEW ENTRY

>Legion-class Strategic Cruiser
>Ownership: Private
>Registration: ARX/O/12883745/III
>Name: Empress of Amarr
>
>Crew Manifest (see appendix for further crew details):
>
>Ship's Master: Cassandra Orizi-Habalu-Dannidaana.
>Security Status: 5.0 (provisional - subject to change - see below)
>Personal Details:

Birthdate: 10/28/90.
Ethnicity: Ni-Kunni.
Homeworld: Kor-Azor Prime IV.
Assessment:
Subject is heiress to the Proxima Direct Shipping Company fortune (status restored after recent Imperial decree clarifying capsuleer legitimacy within the Amarr Empire citizenry). Subject also known to possess interests in the Aridia region where she is a prominent political activist in her role as co-founder of the Ni-Kunni Capsuleer Development Foundation. Also known to possess interests in the Genesis, Tash-Murkon and Khanid regions. Operational track record demonstrates non-aggressive tendencies in general, except towards Covenant interests wherever found. However, recent activity involving a prolonged deployment to the Anoikis Cluster with her previous employer indicates the subject retains a strong interest in Jovian/Sleeper/Drifter culture, with a presumed interest in the acquisition of Sleeper-derived technology beyond that which is already developed as part of the baseline architecture of the Legion-class Strategic Cruiser she commands. 

Subject's addition to the Capsuleer Watch List is therefore based on the subject's recent change in employer within the context of the default operational strategy of her new employer, combined with the presence of a former Amarrian Templar in her bridge crew in the role of Chief Weapons Officer [see appendix for full crew manifest], a combination which requires the DED to assume that unverified Sleeper-derived technology will be used in flight operations in low-security space with her new employer outside the authority, control and jurisdiction of DED/CONCORD.
>
>Status: Expected to change. Watch-listed as of 10:49 NEST - 14/11/119.

>FILE Y/N?

A Ship Without A Crew Is Just An Empty Vessel

The Manarq System, Sanctum Constellation, Genesis - 2121hrs, 10/28/119

I've been here a number of times before. I've spoken to her. I've worked with her when I brought the renegade Dagan in a couple of years ago. I last saw her a few months back. She'll remember me, right?

I started to open a channel but they got there first...

'Ship approaching this battleship, state your registry and identify yourself.'

'Legion-class, registration ARX/O/12883745/III, Empress of Amarr. I was wondering if, er, Lear was around?'

There's a few seconds of static. The sound of military bureaucracy moving at the speed of geology.  We're not on a fluid router here. This is actual UHF ship-to-ship radio.

'I take it you mean Commander Evanus? She is not available. Please contact her through conventional channels. If you do not require any further assistance then please keep this channel clear. Goodbye -'

'No wait! Tell her it's Cassie. We go way back. I just wanted to say hello, that's all.'

'This is an Apocalypse-class battleship of Her Imperial Majesty's Navy, not a cruise liner, and nor is this channel a medium for light chit-chat. Goodbye -'

'No wait! Let me draw alongside. Just tell her I can see -'

'It's alright Captain, you can stand down. Cassie, it's Lear, switch over to this private channel I'm sending you.'

A window opens in my field of view. Lear!

'There, that's better. Now then Cassie, how have you been? How long has it been?'

'Ah, a few months, I know, I'm sorry, I've been busy.'

'You say you're going to call then you disappear for weeks at a time.'

'I know, but you know what I do, it comes with the territory.'

More static. The sound of me squirming with embarrassment even though I'm swimming in a pod and nobody can see me. Definitely nobody can see me, right?

'Hmmm, yes, yes it does,' Lear said. 'Anyway, that's a very expensive-looking ship you have there. Legion? Don't see much of those things round here, most ships that come through here are small-fry. Mostly destroyers. Boring. This is much more exciting. How many crew do you have?'

'None? Just me and a bunch of robots and a load of automation.'

'Are you telling me that ship runs itself? That you have it all to yourself? Does that even work?'

'Yeah?'

Another pause. The sound of disbelief.

'Don't you get bored?'

'Well, no, but, well, it works OK, but sometimes it gets a bit problematic.'

'Imagine if I had this thing all to myself. This huge ship. My God it would be torture. You have to have a crew to order around. That's the whole point. Who did your interior design?'

'I did. It's awesome. I have the most fabulous Captain's Lounge.'

'Who else gets to see it?'

'Nobody..?'

'I rest my case. What about the problematic thing? What's the problem?'

'The automation centre. Sometimes it lags, gives false responses. The helm doesn't always answer immediately. Target selection sometimes doesn't even work and I have to keep on selecting over and over. This ship is incredible really but if I could hit it with a hammer then I would...'

'And I bet they told you the automation would be flawless, like you wouldn't miss a crew, right?'

'Er, yeah.'

'That stuff never works properly. You need a crew, you need slaves, you need a functioning community aboard that ship. What I wouldn't give to get off this clapped-out old crate and get me some real technology. In fact I'll come over there and join you right now.'

'Captain Tight-Ass back there wouldn't like it.'

'I'm joking. Listen, I'd love to chat some more. We must have - what is it you call it - chai?'

'Chai.'

'Yes, that's it. Chai. Later darling!'

[voice channel closed]

'...'

Was it wrong to just show up like this? I know it's been a few months, but, you know, we all have lives, right? And I don't mean multiple lives in the capsuleer sense either.

Lear Evanus was right though, and to be fair, I had been coming round to the idea myself anyway. Just because you can fly a ship this big through an automation centre, doesn't mean you should. Sometimes I just need someone to tell me out loud what I already know.

A week later...

I docked the ship in Amarr. If you're going to recruit a crew - an entire ship's crew - it's best to go to the place where you're most likely to find people wanting to join a crew. The busiest place in Domain; the second-busiest place in the entire cluster. The trade hub.

So I got hold of a datapad, found the InterBus home page, subscribed to Crew Dock, placed an ad, retired to a favourite cafe, and waited...

Deus Ex Starship

'Only through many hardships, is a man stripped to his very foundations. And in such a state devoid of distractions is his soul free to soar. And in this he is closest to God'

 

GALNET: Devoid Region (excerpt from Amarrian Scriptures)

Emperor Zaragram Ardishapur II is not a name you will be familiar with unless you are an Amarrian theological scholar.

Or a capsuleer.

The historical legacy of Zaragram has been suppressed over the two millennia since his reign as Emperor, to the extent that there are no references to him by name in anything considered public record from that long ago. Instead you get non-specific references to the ‘head of state’ or ‘the Emperor’.

The reasons for this airbrushing from history are hard to piece together from what little is common knowledge, but it involves the usual corruptions: obsession with power and greed and megalomania, culminating with Zaragram declaring himself a God instead of being content with merely being God‘s choice of Emperor.

In short, he went completely mad. Totally off his gourd. A crazed dictator with a personality cult.

Examples throughout New Eden history indicate that this level of madness invariably reaches its zenith in a serious edifice complex. Thus it was that at some point during his reign, Zaragram ordered the construction of a series of large space stations in the Shastal system in the Devoid region. This collective was named The City of God, naturally after the God Emperor Zaragram himself, but it is not clear why it was built here in Shastal, 9.8 light-years from Amarr, on the edge of the Empire.

'God' worked in mysterious ways.

What happened next is again not clear because it was two thousand years ago, but Zaragram died not long after the completion of the City of God, and his death coincided with the inception of the renegade, underground Order of St. Tetrimon as well as inciting a whole raft of purges and doctrinal schisms within the theocracy that went on to last several centuries.

So nothing’s changed there, then. As an agnostic Ni-Kunni in charge of a starship, I can say things like that, even in public.

The City of God was abandoned and left to decay after the demise of Zaragram and his power structure all those centuries ago. It may have been mostly forgotten about by Amarrian rank-and-file since then, but to those of us who have a cosmic perspective it is impossible to ignore, because it still exists today and is a marked and beaconed navigational hazard which appears on our star charts.

Last week I did the wormhole shuffle from Anoikis and emerged into the Hakshma system in Empress of Amarr. I did a standard operational procedure sitrep to see where the hell I was, and I saw that the Shastal system was just one jump away. The City of God was right there on the map, so I headed straight over there to check out another example of Amarrian architectural abandonware (because I already did the Traumark Installation last year).

Sidebar: Empress of Amarr now looks substantially different from the last time I featured it in this journal. The ship's designers mandated a systemwide upgrade requiring the entire aft half of the ship to be rebuilt in order to accommodate a totally new subsystem architecture, resulting in a massive performance improvement across its entire operational envelope. I never said this before, but I was never totally happy with the ship’s capabilities in its previous iteration, because I came to realise it was never quite as good as it could be for what I wanted it to do; but now, after this upgrade, it’s transformed. It’s a new ship. It’s the ship it could be and now is.

So I arrived in Shastal, saw the City of God on the Overview and warped straight over to it. I expected it to be camped out by Sansha’s Nation pirates as they usually hang out at derelict space stations in this part of space, but no, I had this place to myself.

As well as the sole remaining station hulk, there were also a couple of those jury-rigged, ad-hoc asteroid complex things floating nearby: the ones where they hollow out a bunch of rocks and network them together with access tubes to form industrial facilities in arrangements that have no symmetry and must therefore be dynamically unstable ['cos you know how important that is, right? Mass/balance etc.?]. I got the impression the complexes were relatively recent additions to this site as they appear to be active, but you can never tell for sure whether there are people in these things as they can be run on automatic by robots, or occupied by slaves jacked up on Vitoc and living the eternal deathlife of the trans-cranial microcontroller. Or even miners. All those possibilities probably amount to the same thing to be honest.

There is a hemispherical dome monument here with a statue on it, presumably of Zaragram. I assume this even though I couldn’t find a single image of him to confirm it, because it makes sense that he would do a statue of himself here. The rest of the complex has that familiar vibe that we’ve all seen in derelicts throughout New Eden: failure, hubris and nemesis. The site has been here for two thousand years. If it’s lasted this long, it will be here for all eternity.

And yet if this structure is such an abomination, such an offence to Amarrian orthodoxy, then why doesn't somebody come down here and blow it up, destroy it, dismantle it, scrap it, remove it from the face of the cosmos? Why leave it here where it can be found? It's another core Amarrian trait: tell everybody that something is wrong and to forget it, then leave evidence of it so everyone can remember what to forget.

I drifted across the top of the giant station, the design of which is still in use in the Empire today. I had no idea they were this ancient. In the modern equivalent of these stations, the central core dome usually contains its docking bay. Under normal operations, a ship will emerge from that docking bay through the large opening in the top of the dome, so it represents a means of seeing inside it; but all I saw when I coasted over the dome was an impenetrable dark void, which is something that activates my inner Amarrian and causes me to blur the division between science and religion. Some parts of that station will still be pressurised. There will be corpses in there. Frozen meat popsicles. Ancient Amarr on ice. Perhaps Zaragram himself is in there, at one with his greatest achievement. Nothing I read about him suggests he died elsewhere.

I became aware of a certain kind of historical contrast going on that I had caused by showing up here. Empress of Amarr is the cutting-edge of Amarrian starship technology and embodies the perfect merger of human and machine like nothing else in New Eden. Zaragram declared himself a God in order to become closer to God, but all he had to disguise his mortality was his word. Today, two thousand years after Zaragram and his God complex, I jack into this ship and I become that ship. I get it to do things just by thinking about it, committing actions by thought. I can harness the power of a sun, break the universe's speed limit and traverse a thousand light years in a single breath.

I can also live forever.

To some societies, that kind of power would make me the God.