…we’ve got a hot soup spill in section 31, lead mops report immediately. Section is status yellow, caution…
…spallation debris approaching starport orbital, get a laser grid on it…
…can’t clear those remains for release yet, suspected contamination…
…major fire, section 10, and area is negative on water pressure. Think you can blow it out with a k-rod?…
…fluffships are inbound, expected to make orbit in plus four hours, keep jinking until then, flight…
…negative on that prisoner transfer, we have feral mechs in the area, stand by…
…get the net back up, dammit, the dynamic stabilization depends on cicencomp – stupid, half-assed, failure-forward…
…bunch of civilians with notions holed up in a museum in section 20, send in the spankers…
…all snarled up in 15 with locals staging for a riot, get us some weather over here…
…plant’s under our control, techs are isolated and software checked – are we go for reactor restart?…
…THIS IS THE VOICE OF THE RESI– <transmission terminated at source>…
…thanks for the priority-codes, old lad; infosec, scrub ’em…
…bandits, bandits! Three punchcraft breakin’ out to heaven eighty miles east of city-ref, mama bird, can you drop ’em?…
…clean stab, Wrecker team, we are splash three, zero defects…
– aftermath logs, Vontok II
From: Imogen Andracanth, VP Research, Ring Dynamics
To: Adm. [blank], Imperial Naval Intelligence
Subject: UNSEEN KEY
Security: EYES ONLY UNSEEN KEY
Shit and corruption, man, first Serril and your Athné vanish off the face of the cosmos while investigating the you-know-what and less than a year later we have Vonnies swanning around on our side of the border. Do either of us believe for a moment that that’s any sort of coincidence?
We have a damaged gestalt, although her original can’t make a mote of sense out of it. Does that get your attention?
From: Monitor Hakal Peressin, Stratarchy of Indirection and Subtlety
To: All Personnel, Vontok II Communications Central
Subject: Congratulations and Instructions
Excellent work, gentlesophs. Excellent work capturing this place intact. I know it couldn’t have been easy.
You all deserve to know and now have need-to-know, so here’s why we had to do that, at the summary level. Detailed orders will follow to Section Chiefs in due course.
We don’t yet have a good read on the Republic’s intentions, so we don’t know how long this war is going to last or what it’s scope is going to be, long-term. What we do know is that we’re out on the end of a long string, here, as you know. We can’t hold Vontok against a determined, large-scale counterattack, and the Admiralty needs to keep the forces that might change in that in reserve garrison against further movements into the Reaches and Expanse. So we may lose this planet at any time, or even have to return it under treaty or ceasefire.
Our job, therefore, in one of our least subtle Subtlety operations is to so culturally contaminate this world that the Republic won’t want it back, or at the very least, enough to make it a perpetually bleeding sore that will keep it from being a useful forward base for them in the future.
So, this time, we’re not shutting down the extranet relays. Keep them up and running, both ways, but get all the censorware out of the feed. Other teams will be fanning out to strip the censorware out of terminal equipment and their crippleware “replicators”, too. We’re going to show these poor sheltered sods what freedom of information looks like.
I’m having some Agalmia freelibs offloaded from our carriers: have them spliced into the feed, with full unrestricted access – and that means recipes too, with things like weapons designs included. That will make our occupation harder, but it’s a genie that can’t be stuffed back in the bottle, and the more any resistance tries to use them, the more they have to concede mentally to our way of doing things.
And finally: we have aboard the Mindweaver a colonial-sized tangle channel, hooked directly into the Worlds’ extranet at a central secure node. We’re going to set that one up as an additional feed – partly for some good old non-governmental news, but partly because we, as a mature information society, have the worst imaginable memetic weapon to deploy against this sort of planned and bland monocultural utopia.
Colleagues, cousins, we’re going to smack ’em sane with our advertising.
Mon. Halak