Hoegennaker was cruising through the Munich system collecting readings and scans on the dark matter fields enveloping this place. The LSF wanted an update of the criminal activities within Munich which had grown ever since Rheinland had begun an evacuation and abandonment of this region. Without local law enforcement here, the intelligence analysts at the LSF noticed there was a higher than normal number of artifacts entering into Liberty illegally.
He flipped a light and pulled out a cigarette. The on board filtration system would expunge the polluted air outside where it was burned, and belonged, by the surrounding dark matter. He took a deep breath of “fresh air”, what he liked to call smoking. Every marine smokes, because being a marine, sucked. And once a marine, always a marine.
He noticed off in the distance a small spec in the middle of space and redirected his undercover ship towards that spec. It was another ship, a freighter. Perhaps it was carrying contraband so he typed in the cloaking commands into his ships console. The light around ship bended, the way it bends around the event horizon of black hole, like the one in Omicron Sigma. He had to cut out the smoking out now even if it ****ing annoyed him. Nobody’s been able to figure out how to keep an air filtration system running while cloaked…yet.
He ventured towards the direction of the freighter and cut his engines thus floating through the dark matter fields towards it. And then, he was in scanning range. But there was nothing. No contraband which didn’t make any sense. And then there was a big rock in the way. Because why wouldn’t there be. Of course there was big rock just when he needed his engines to be quiet.
He quickly started up his thrusters to get out of the way, but naturally his ship made noise and the freighter detected it and began moving. They knew they were being followed by someone cloaked. But they weren’t carrying any contraband. So nothing made sense to Hoegenakker about this. They weren’t doing anything illegal, they weren’t carrying any valuable cargo. Nobody would pirate them. They were trying to hide. But from what?
They sped up so Mattis kept his distance. He re-oriented his ship towards them but they kept changing directions. They kept evading, the way military-trained pilots fly, not civilians. This is just the kind of thing he was sent here to investigate by the LSF. Discrepancies that don’t make sense. It could be nothing, but why take a guess? Why not be sure?
Then the light around the freighter began to bend, because of course they had a cloaking device of their own. These guys knew what they were doing, with their training and equipment. Another intelligence agency was conducting their own operation in this area, so he was going to find out everything he needed to about them. All they knew about him, was that he was a cloaked ship. Anybody could be a cloaked ship.
He couldn’t see or hear them anymore as they cut their engines, they were likely floating to their target. But they were probably here for a while. So he headed back to Planet Nuremberg. Maybe he could find out more about…unusual visitors, over there.
At the bar he watched for anybody who was a foreigner. He struck up conversations with drinkers and alcoholics. He kept trying to talk about the number 3. Sounds random, but all he needed to do was figure out who was a foreigner. The Rheinlanders would show three fingers using their thumb, index and middle fingers. Anybody who wasn’t, would use their index, middle and ring finger. Talking to people gets you a lot of information. Everybody who isn’t a spy thinks that you have to be some kind of quick witted one-man army to be a spy. But really, it’s just about talking to people. Maybe stay silent during a conversation for a bit, more unnecessarily then you need to be. This makes people feel awkward, and they begin to talk about anything that comes to their mind. You’d think people would want to talk about the weather but no, nobody wants to talk about the weather. Because it’s boring. So they talk about whatever comes into their mind first, and that can reveal a lot of information, that they may not have wanted to reveal. Because most people don’t work well when they’re stressed.
While speaking with a group of Rheinlanders about anything to do with the number 3 (like the third installment of some blockbuster film, whatever, it didn’t matter to him) he noticed one of them quickly raised their ring finger before realizing their mistake and switching it out for the thumb. Bingo.
He paid for his drinks and left the bar. Walked back quickly to the safe house. The others were there, his team. They were part of a specialized LSF reconnaissance unit utilizing optical/active camouflage, a miniaturized and portable, man-sized cloaking device which bent the light around them, but only partially. They weren’t commonplace yet due to how expensive they were. But during his time in Marine Special Operations Command (MARSOC), Hoegenakker pioneered reconnaissance and raiding operational techniques and strategies using this technology. He gave them a quick brief of the situation and they armed themselves up before leaving the safe house. At the bar, a small discrete floating camera was watching the group of non-Rheinlanders and their movements, giving updates to Hoegenakker from time to time. These were the same guys in the dark matter field.
The discrete camera followed them back to their destination, which was also a safe house. He had two of his guys, Oscar Team, set up recon positions near their safe house while he took two more back to the bar, Hotel Team. They had big jackets on, to hide their weapons and equipment. There, he inconspicuously asked the bartender for information on the crew of non-Rheinlanders he was spying on, which ship they were on and where the landing platform was. He took his two guys and headed straight for that landing platform.
Oscar Team was going to keep watch on the non-Rheinlanders while Hotel Team snuck into their ship and conducted a thorough search. They activated their optical/active camouflage suits and of course, the light started to bend around them. One of the guys Hoegenakker was leading in Hotel Team was an engineer, so he plugged into the ships door and began running a decryption program to unlock it, but not before knocking two of the guards unconscious, and then drugging them to affect their memory. Another guard was thrown off the ship’s platform, but it took two of Hotel’s guys to do it. These guards were well trained, possibly foreign Special Forces operators themselves.
But hey were on a time limit, they weren’t going to stay invisible all day, so they broke into the ship. Hoegenakker guys were all ex-MARSOC, now working with LSF. They f***ed up rarely.
Once Hotel was inside the brightly lit freighter, the rummaging began. Oscar team meanwhile had to relocate to a new position. The hostiles had a night watch going on. They should’ve picked a better spot, but they moved to a more discrete vantage point quickly.
That night, nothing happened after the ship’s guards were taken out. The hostiles remained at their safe house without knowing what was going on inside their ship. At the freighter, Hotel went through the databanks and collected communications codes to encrypted transmissions. Hoegenakker had his engineer decrypt them on the spot to see what all the intel was about, but there was nothing. They decrypted transmissions logs only for there to be nothing. F*ck, it was a set-up, Hoegenakker thought. Time to get both of his teams out before they all get killed.
But then his engineer found one transmission with an active log after decrypting it. It wasn’t a set-up, they were decoys, in case the information was leaked or revealed. It was meant to buy time to retake the ship if it was compromised, or to waste the enemy’s time. Whatever, Oscar Team didn’t notice any movement from the enemy safe house, but they kept their eyes open, and made sure to turn on their active camouflage when they needed to. Hoegenakker took the datapad and saw the leaked transmission.
He read through it, carefully. He asked his engineer if technology like this was possible, and his engineer said no. The tech is either decades away or the science is too infantile. The Bretonians would never be able to make this kind of weapon in time. But there was another document on the ship, and Hoegenakker and the engineer took a look at it.
Oscar and Hotel team packed up and returned to their own safe house. They got back on their own ships with the intel, and left Munich. Nobody said a word. They were supposed to beam the intel like this over to the Liberty Embassy at New Berlin, but they didn’t. They covered up any evidence that the ship was broken through and put a fire around the ship’s platform to make it seem like the guards died of suffocation rather than being taken out. And then regrouped at Planet Holstein.
At Holstein, everybody was quiet. They were waiting for their orders that Hoegenakker was supposed to give them. But he didn’t.
Instead, he didn’t sleep, for 12 days. He got on his bed, closed his eyes. There was a silence he enjoyed, for the first 5 minutes, before he started hearing the f***ing screams. Every night. It was just him, nobody else could hear them. For twelve nights, this was his sleep.
But after 12 nights, he was done. His team was still waiting for instructions. The engineer especially, since he read the transmission between the SIS and the Admiralty. They were the kind of guys who would send this intel back to Liberty, following their orders. He was too. But what would happen when the LSF got their hands on this intel? Start their own program? A program to destroy entire solar systems and kill billions? After twelve nights, he had enough of not being able to sleep.
He had done renditions before of drug smugglers. Most of his career in the military and LSF was going after drug smugglers because he could speak Spanish, Italian and French. Later on, he got deployed to the war against Gallia to use his optical/active camouflage spec ops unit to capture and interrogate Gallic officers for intelligence. It’s one thing to violently interrogate one man, it’s another to hand over the ability to slay billions over to a State. One he can live with, the other, he couldn’t sleep.
He spent the thirteenth day haphazardly. He told his team that he was going to organize a debriefing regarding the next steps, but they could tell he hadn’t slept and he was very disturbed. But that didn’t matter, he just needed them at one place so he could do what he needed to, to sleep again.
He stole the datapad and the documents on the weaponised jumpgates and went to a funeral house. Here, he burned all the intel there on the furnace. The LSF wouldn’t have any hard proof of this transmission or the intel. They wouldn’t be able to start their own program. He however, would desert. The engineer would be the only other person in Liberty to about this. The LSF would need more than one guy, and some hard proof before they believed what Bretonia tried to do.
That night, he slept again. There were no screams, he didn’t feel a lump in his throat for abandoning his own team. There was no guilt. He slept sound. And in the morning, he decided to sleep soundly for the rest of his life.
And that meant killing the woman from the transmission, Adrienne Perry, and ending her f***ing weapons program.
Hoegenakker was busy, recruiting Freelancers to gain the trust of the Rogues to get them the intelligence they wanted so that they would give him safe haven onboard one of their stations. All the while, if anybody found out he was practically committing treason, the Freelancer could be set up to take the blame.
The warlord calling himself Dwayne Lewis handed over the location and access to Montezuma Base at one of the nearby independent worlds systems. He pretty much had guns pointed at him the whole time, but nobody had sloppy fingers.
Now it was time to find Perry. The Lane Hackers would never trust him, but there was a black hat he knew of who could get the job done. He found her via the LSF’s databases. Vove Tague, a university student funding her way through education by stealing cash from bank accounts. She always developed a new code every time she pulled off some heist off the neural net. If she kept using the same code, then the banks would have adapted her code and made a firewall for it.
That’s the thing about neural net warfare, any cyber neural net attack you deploy, your enemies can use it to strengthen their cyber defences afterwards or use the same one against you. But she always developed a new code. Even if it meant waiting for days or months to see the results. It was inefficient, but safe. And very dangerous for anyone up against her.
But she was still a civilian. And that meant all he had to do is walk into her class, grab her shoulder from behind and put a f***cking gun up her lower back to keep it hidden while threatening her. She would either do exactly what he wanted, or she’d be paralysed for the rest of her life from the neck down.
As usual, she chose the safe option.
Once her work was complete, she was shipped off in an automated transport that would take her to the Sigmas. Eventually, she realized she was alone, and untied the blindfold, finding herself in a strange, but very real predicament.
Vove got out her laptop while waiting for emergency services. She ran a code, an untested code to hack into the guncam of someone she could identify. She could identify Hoegenakker and hacked into his guncam to discover she had unwittingly participated in the murder of Adrienne Perry, once a former 2nd in command of the =LSF=, and later the 2nd in command of the [SIS].
The public generally assumes that dark secrets are classified and extremely difficult to get a hold of.
This is completely and utterly untrue.
Given enough time, any encrypted file can be decrypted.
The reality is, there is too much information on the neural net. There’s too much information in the streets of any planet. It’s just a matter of penetrating it. Making connections with the correct people and knowing exactly where to look. Secret information isn’t hidden, it’s a needle in a haystack. But given enough time, anybody can find it.
Cpt. John Mellark of the BRF|HMS-Westminster witnessed the assassination so he definitely sent out a message to the government to let them know the [SIS]’s second in command had been assassinated. But Bretonia is at war and it was annexing territories. Their priority was to replace her with someone new, who is as of yet, unknown. That message would become noise, not a signal. As for Mattis, he could disappear. Assassinating one person in Sirius doesn’t draw enough attention anyway.
But the program would not end just because its leader was dead. As mentioned, she would just be replaced. A decapitation strike could only go so far.
Effectively ending the program meant finding the hadron collider. Those things were expensive. Even in the ancient Earth times, there were plans to build a supercollider which were abandoned due to its cost.
But of course everything fell into place, just as it needed to. Like an epiphany smashing the fog of war that surrounded his mind, Mattis just figured out an expensive but possible pathway to achieve his objective. It wasn’t about sleep now, it was about having a purpose worth fighting for.
Get the money, create a distraction and deploy the satellites.
At Montezuma, Hoegenakker forged his own identity papers because he needed to head over to Curacao and book a passenger flight back to Manhattan. So many people go through a spaceport; they think it’s the safest place in the entire sector. It’s not. Too many people go through spaceports each day. There’s too much data for the government border agents to process; to see who is or isn’t a criminal or a terrorist or a foreign agent in their data banks.
Rhianne Wardwell had just finished up a legal court battle over a securities fraud investigation led by the government. They thought her company, the Bank of New York - Whitehall was guilty of insider trading. All the successful investment banks in Manhattan were doing the same even if it was illegal. Market Psychologists already concluded that stock markets and investment deals were a game of chance, an educated game of chance, but still a game of chance. You might as well roll a ****ing dice. So if someone makes good deals, they got (mostly) lucky, and if anybody made a bad deal or a bad trade, then they were just plain, downright unlucky.
But if you were good, you made your own luck and paid off people to tell you about the deals companies were making even if the public didn't know it yet. That’s insider trading, an unfair advantage over the markets due to information that other bankers didn’t have. That’s what made a firm successful, even if it was still illegal. Rhianne Wardwell’s Bank of New York-Whitehall managed to dodge the securities and trading commission while breaking the hell out of that law.
It took Rhianne quite a while to get here. She was a coked out heroin addict back in business school. When you do cardamine, it makes you live longer, but crashes your birth rate. It gives you benefits, not just a high. The old drugs just made you high, but you wouldn’t live as long either. It took her a while to claw herself out of that mess, but she did it. She got clean, and started her own successful firm and stopped prostituting herself for sub-par narcotics. She meditated 15 minutes every day and ate healthy. It was a stubbornly rigid, strict and disciplined lifestyle, but it made her damn good money.
And that’s where Hoegenakker was going to get the money from. His college friend, Rhianne.
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