[Izz]

Narrator’s Note

As you read this I will be somewhere in the Void, that colloquial term we have for the vast stretches of empty space that separate us from our closest star neighbours. I may be heading to Tau Ceti or one of the Centauri stars. I cannot give more details than that.

Before I continue, please be assured dear readers that this baseball history will continue. Over the last few months I have been toiling feverishly to produce updates that will automatically upload on my behalf while I traverse these depths. In fact, you have already read one or two such.

This obsession I have with AUNZBL history, and with this historical account, was not easily explained to the people who have sent me on my way, I can tell you right now. But I argued them down, helped by the fact a couple in their ranks were already familiar with my work. I’ve also had a surfeit of time on my hands, which I’ve mostly spent researching and writing. There are some interesting times ahead for the AUNZBL, times which the official histories only skim over.

But back to the here and now.

I will admit I don’t totally understand everything that’s happened or is happening. The crux of it all is that I may have unwittingly found myself in the middle of a war. Not an official war, not yet, at least, but a war nonetheless. Mars is independent, Luna also, and most of the rest of the solar system self-governs in all but name. However, the new colonies, one of which I’m heading to now, are still very much under the thumb of this Solar System, despite their distance apart. It reminds me of snippets of ancient history learned back at school, of North America straining under the yoke of Great Britain before eventually breaking free.

At this stage though, this war is being fought quietly, almost passive aggressively. My late captain may have been involved on the New Colonies side, or he may have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t know either way, and nobody I’ve spoken to is willing to say. Certainly most of the people I’ve met since are just your run of the mill ‘entrepreneurs,’ a fancy term for traffickers and all the other shady types operating just beyond the tentacles of the Solar governments. Whatever the case, Captain and the rest of our slaughtered crew were the first public casualties of this brewing conflict, even if I still don’t know which side did the killing.

Lupo and I are witnesses, and while the recordings Captain sent across are no longer in our possession, our safety is supposedly still of the utmost importance.

If I sound sceptical, that’s because I am.

Lupo’s fallen in love with the idea of being a revolutionary. I haven’t. And I don’t think we are revolutionaries, in all honesty. I think we’re patsies, though I’m not quite sure of what or who. I’ve been practicing my gunplay when I haven’t been writing. Just in case.

A brief (hopefully) recap: There was a ship on our tail. It got close enough to open fire but I spotted it coming a few hundred thousand kilometres away, having also discovered that our A-class was severely modified. One of those mods was a complex weapons system, which I didn’t use. We also had a scramble-hull, which I did activate, though no missiles got close enough to see if it actually worked as advertised. What I did make use of were several chaff-boxes. They distracted the missiles nicely, which gave enough time for the other ships that’d tight-beamed me with codes our system translated as ‘friendly’ to arrive.

Our pursuer didn’t stick around and our rescuers didn’t give chase. “One on one, it would’ve eaten us up,” I was told later. “Better to give a show of force, avoid a firefight and get you to safety.”

We were thankful. We followed the ships back to their smuggler scoop, which was far more palatial than I’d imagined, where we then went through what can only be described as an intense debrief before being placed under house arrest. Not that it was described to us as such but being confined to quarters with guards stationed outside can’t really be anything else.

Several days later we were given free run of the scoop. It was basically a small town, complete with shops, bars and, strangely, a chapel. “For weddings,” a bartender told me with a wink. Organized religion might not particularly exist anymore but apparently smugglers still liked getting married in a holy place.

A week or so later we began the pattern of the last few months: get shipped from place to place like illicit cargo, stay out of sight, repeat process, get told very little. The only constant has been my access to the archives which, as mentioned, I fought to get. The access was slow at times, as they bounced my signal off a ton of locations to keep us hidden, but I was happy for it, and especially now as I won’t have access to any of the Sol nets for the foreseeable future.

I don't know what the future holds. My anger has built steadily alongside my confusion and it's all I can do not to act stupidly. But one can only wait out a situation so long. However, I won't be the only one with time on my hands during this trip so perhaps I will be able to put the pieces of the puzzle together before we arrive at our destination.

If not, things may very well explode.