Caleedan Clan

Of the various Remnant organisations I have studied, the Caleedan have become... I hesitate to say familiar. That implies a closeness I am not certain I possess.

But their engrams are the ones I have spent the most time with. Their people are the subjects of my primary reconstruction. If I understand any clan, it is this one.

Whether that understanding serves the Archive or merely reflects my own preoccupations, I leave to others to judge.

The Clan

The Caleedan operated from the Vaults at Drift's Edge in the pre-Breakage era, maintaining multiple breacher crews and the ships that carried them into the black. They were neither the largest clan at the station nor the smallest—a middle position that seemed to suit them.

Their leadership remains somewhat opaque to my reconstruction efforts. Contracts flowed downward from "clan bosses" whose identities and decision-making processes I have not been able to determine. Perhaps this was deliberate. Perhaps the clans had learned that visible leadership makes for visible targets.

How They Worked

The Caleedan maintained a structured operation:

Scout crews—pairs, typically—ranged ahead to identify potential salvage targets. They tagged locations, assessed preliminary value, and reported back. Their work was lonely and dangerous, but less immediately lethal than what followed.

Breacher crews received assignments from leadership and ventured to confirmed targets. They entered first, assessed what lay within, and determined whether full recovery operations were warranted. Silas commanded one such crew aboard the Peregrine.

Hauliers, presumably, handled the heavy lifting once value was confirmed—though my engrams focus primarily on the breacher phase, where the danger was highest and the stories most dramatic.

The Contract System

Assignment to a Caleedan crew was effectively binding. The engrams are clear on this point:

"Once assigned, you're either in this crew or you're on the streets."

There was no gentle exit. A Rem who left their crew left the clan. A Rem who left the clan found no other clan willing to take them. The frontier did not reward those who could not be trusted.

And yet—pay could be negotiated. Silas successfully argued for increased compensation when his crew expressed reluctance about a particularly dangerous contract. This suggests the Caleedan valued willing compliance over forced obedience.

A distinction worth noting. Perhaps worth admiring, even across the millennia.

Their Resources

The Caleedan possessed access to an Oracular Acolyte for mission guidance—one of the Choir-derived intelligences that still functioned in diminished capacity. That they had such access suggests either significant resources or significant connections to those who controlled surviving Choir-tech.

I have not been able to determine which. Two thousand years later, the question still troubles me.

Their ships, including the Peregrine, were clan property assigned to captains who proved themselves capable. The vessels were tools, not possessions—a relationship that mirrored the clan's view of its crews, I suspect.

Known Personnel

Of the Caleedan I have reconstructed:

Silas commanded one breacher crew. A dreamer. Ambitious beyond his station, perhaps beyond his capability. But his crew followed him, which suggests he earned that following.

Vetch Harrow served as pilot and breacher under Silas. A soldier from a lost war. Reliable. Honest. Frightened in ways he did not admit.

Risa "Doc" Kline managed the crew's medical needs and, I suspect, much else besides. She kept them alive. She kept them functional. She threatened those who threatened her people.

Pax was the youngest, the newest, the most vulnerable. A sensor operator still learning the trade. Doc watched over this one with particular care.

I find I have grown attached to these subjects in ways I should not admit. They lived and died two thousand years before I was born, yet their engrams speak to me as clearly as any living voice. The Temple prefers its archivists detached, clinical, concerned only with accurate reconstruction.

I am not certain I can maintain that distance any longer.

The reconstruction continues.

~ NV