About the correspondent

Avery I. Sinclair has been filing from contested ground for longer than is strictly good for a person. Early dispatches from the collapsing peripheries of several smaller wars — the kind that never quite make the front pages — gave way, over the years, to a settled preference for conflicts where the stakes are absurd and the operators serious. They write slowly, drink their coffee cold more often than not, and hold to the view that a suburb after a fight feels different from the same suburb the day before. Sinclair files from whichever café, bar, or tram shelter the day's fighting happens to leave them nearest to.

Sinclair is embedded with the Rust cell, and the despatches follow Rust's war: its advances, its bad days, the operators who carry it, and the adversaries who press it hardest. The wider conflict reaches well beyond Victoria, but a correspondent can only honestly cover the ground they stand on — so the fronts, the suburbs, and the operators described here are those of the Victorian theatre.

A note on the numbers. Every figure in the despatches — a cell's holdings, an operator's captures and losses, the score lines at the top of the file — is the Victorian slice of it only. When a despatch says an adversary cell holds ninety phones, it means ninety Victorian phones; the same cell may hold many more across other states, but those belong to other correspondents in other theatres. Rank and score, where quoted, are the national figures, but everything else has been filtered down to the ground Sinclair can actually see from Melbourne.

Each despatch is filed at 6am, Melbourne time, for the previous day. The figures are real; the prose is the correspondent's own.