Chronicle #13
Commanders unite in their protests over a megacorporation’s secret operations
As if March hadn’t been turbulent enough already, news had surfaced throughout February that corporate operations — in this case the Wreaken Construction and Mining megacorp — lay hidden deep inside the otherwise permit-locked Collinder (COL) 70 sector. These operations had apparently claimed at least one life with corporate officials apparently trying to cover it all up in several press statements. That was when a certain investigative Commander Scarlet Ashcroft of the Earth Defence Fleet (EDF) called out to the public to boycot and blockade Wreaken orbital and surface installations. Due to the already tense mood all around, the response was swift and overwhelming with independent pilots coming to Scarlet’s aid from all across the Bubble, while a number of NGOs targeted the working and security conditions of industrial deep space construction in general. The latter caused a number of strikes across several Wreaken installations.
The original statement and a subsequent discussion was archived in a newsgroup related to the Pilots Federation.
An interview with Commander Ashcroft was archived in one of the bigger newsgroups in audio format.
The protesters and workers on strike demand that Wreaken safety conditions, in which their employees are forced to work, be significantly improved. They also demanded the COL 70 sector to be unlocked in order to conduct independent investigations on what’s going on in there. Both demands were met with silence and sitting out the situation.
Throughout the protests, the Children of Raxxla (CoR) weren’t able to confirm that Wreaken’s employees suffered from poor working conditions, but what the CoR found out was that Wreaken facilities were heavily guarded by military grade security forces, both spaceborne and on the ground. While investigating the COL 70 borders, pilots had also found a number of transport wrecks with containers of performance enhancers, further augmenting the feeling that something fishy was going on in the locked down sector.
Week after week, from February into March, the protests intensified and garnered more and more responses from various organisations. Some even went as far as challenging Wreaken assets or supporting Wreaken’s competitor Mastopolos Mininc Inc. to add some leverage but in the end, neither Wreaken nor the Pilots Federation lifted the COL 70 permit locks.
That was when another news item from the COL 70 area bushfired across the Bubble: A distress signal directly from within the sector had been received by numerous pilots who were busy scouting the sector’s fringes (see Chronicle #14). When Federal Intelligence deigned to make a statement, they only vaguely confirmed what pilots had been speculating anyway: It apparently came from an older model Cobra-class space ship; which didn’t surprise anybody, given that an older model Cobra had recently been involved in a heist in Darnielle’s Progress, Maia.
There is was again, that feeling of foreboding.
Out-of-game context:
In early 2017, many players were fed up with the lack of interaction with the conspiracy themed storyline. The game mechanics gave them only limited choice with what ‘tools’ they could accomplish their goals. So Commander Ashcroft first called to protests by blocking the landing pads of a number of Wreaken stations in the game’s open mode. People hoped, Frontier Developments would ackowledge their efforts maybe with a community goal or some new GalNet articles, which they didn’t.
So players resorted to Background Simulation operations, forcing Wreaken and their subsidiaries into retreat from multiple star systems. That was one of the bigger “BGS movements” but in the end, Frontier didn’t do anything with it. Drew Wagar, on the other hand, offered Commander Ashcroft and her efforts a place in his soon to be released book Elite: Premonition.
The Children of Raxxla 