Journeys through the Saint Strenberg cluster



''A treatise on the Koriri by Xenobiologist Senior Eric Von Mannheim at the behest of his Grace the Duke of Zumerin Sir Friedrich Tons Zumerin. ''



My esteemed lords and ladies I present this treatise complied during 18 months contact with the aliens who identify themselves as Koriri and who we of the Empire first became aware of approximately 4 years ago. My studies were conducted under the kind patronage of his Grace Duke Friedrich of Zumerin. I urge all readers to consider carefully the worrying implications which my research throws up.

 My Journey

Approximately 18 months ago I joined the company of the battlecruiser Redemption as it prepared to rejoin the 4th fleet in the Saint Sternberg cluster. As any avid student of recent history will know the 4th fleet had recently been deployed under the command of Admiral Graf Ostian. Admiral Ostian, while still a commodore, had been the one to forge a fragile understanding with the newly appeared Koriri some 2 years previously and as such the 4th had frequent dealings with these volatile aliens as both parties engaged the encroaching Klawzint.

The Redemption, along with a handful of attendant destroyers and smaller cruisers departed Zumerin and I passed the weeks spent at super luminal travel in reading the scant background information contained in the various contact reports filed by Admiral Ostian and his juniors. The earliest of these reports, dealing with the initial shocked encounters around what has become known as the Mycene system, were little more than garbled and panicked rants about near fictional weapons and attackers that tore into Klawzint and Imperial forces alike. A credit must be given to Admiral Ostian for his rapid realisation that the Empire, struggling against the Klawzint, could ill afford another enemy in the galactic south west. The Admiral’s orders to avoid engagement while attempting peaceful contact with these Koriri has proved an important boon at least in the medium term and despite the worries that my investigations have drawn I consider that actively engaging the Koriri would have been a catastrophic mistake and handed much of the southern empire to the Klawzint.

I was fortunate that many of the Redemption’s crew were veterans of the war with the Klawzint (the lizard war as they called it) and had first-hand experience of the Koriri. Indeed it appears that the Redemption had been on the wrong end of some Koriri attention. One veteran gunner, a brute of a man by the name of Chief Ratzen who stomped around the ship with the aid of a wheezing brass bionic leg recounted the following tale (I have removed the coarser language)