THE SHUUBAN PLAN

[Nodoka Hanamura]

"Agamemmnon was an old Greek leader - think one of those Custodi guys' terran ancestors. He and his ancestors, were caught up in a familial curse, doomed to kill their next of kin or the sort - the story is somewhat rough given it's been over 4 millenia since this was all written. Anywho - Orestes. After Agamemmnon is killed after sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia, by his wife and her lover Aegisthus, his son, Orestes, proceeds to kill the two of them. He's arrested and taken to court and later acquitted, essentially breaking the curse.

The way I see it, Hanamura's using his name as a blessing to the mission to break the cycle. Pretty sure there's been people on the inside at either Kishiro, or in Miyasu's shoes that saw Project SHIRAYUKI and wanted justice but either were put down or shut down before they could act upon it. Hanamura, and us thereby, are the first ones who can, even if it ends up somehow never seeing the light of day. Even if this just ends up being a smash and grab to bust her sister out, the damage alone is certain to see SHIRAYUKI done for."

- Major Jae-un Song, Commander, Kotetsu Fighter Brigade, Battlegroup Ouroboros; Factional E-mail excerpt to Major Brett Kensignton, SANZU DEVGRU

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PRELUDE A

CYCLES

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OCS Utsunomiya
Tau-23 System, Tau Corridor
December 11th, 835 AS
1142Z

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The Utsunomiya and her fleet, pass by what remains of the under construction, Satporopet Citadel, a slow impulse past. In the Officer's meeting room near the bridge, Hanamura stands facing the stars and asteroids ahead, visible via a synthetic vision display at the fore of the room. The dark room was quiet, the staff from all of the MAJCOMs, as well as Starcat's Brent Allinson, present, sitting at the long table. Kensington, in a rare sight, lights a cigarette, his brunette hair glistening in the light, on account of his officer's cap resting on the table. Bride, meanwhile, sits at the table head down, but not on the table, sitting in front of a somewhat chilled cup of green tea, which she has drank only some of. Alexei and Setsuna look to Nodoka, both pondering in their minds what she's going to do. Allinson, meanwhile taps away at a datapad, trying to occupy himself with small odds and ends, to keep himself from worrying that Hanamura might be shoving him into an Airlock in due time. Meanwhile Mercury, the teal-haired Nordschelife-class AI in a shell, that leads the CSG under Hanamura, sits hands together and simply awaiting directives, lacking any emotion, at least visibly.

After some time in silence, Hanamura turns back to the group. She is visibly frustrated, but otherwise stalwart.

"So. Brent, I'd like to know for starters, what in the hell, happened to our base?" Hanamura says to him. Starcat was originally a Gran Canarian concern that Hanamura established ages ago, before Ouroboros, but shortly before her departure from Freeport 11. The Libero-bretonian man who she hired to oversee it as a front for Ouroboros, was a recent bachleor's in BA recipient, eager for a well paying career - and as much as it would bite him in the ass, Brent Allinson was at least thankful for it. Though now, he would have to explain why their nearly 400 million credit investment into the base, has now gone up in flames.

"Well.. uhm, ma'am.." he says, nervous, looking to Hanamura before she slams her hand down on the table, shocking him. "Brent!" she shouts, angrily.

"I don't have time for anxiety attacks - if it'll make you feel better, unless this was some attempt to ruin us for your own gain, you have nothing to fear - now out with it." Hanamura says intensely, not in the mood for niceties, but trying to at least assuage his anxiety as best as she can in her current mood.

He clears his throat, takes a sip from a nearby bottled water, and resumes.

"The uh.. Citadel project was attacked last night by a raiding Maquisard cruiser battlegroup and their aviation complement. We had tried to alert Java and notify you through the emergency channel you provided, but we couldn't get through on either. I've hired a consulting firm out of Rheinland to look at logs and sensor information like you and Major Kensington asked, and should get an answer in a day or so. That being said.. the defense batteries were routed faster than we expected and well.. it all went downhill from there, Miss Hanamura."

Nodoka collapses forward slightly, planting her hands down on the table, exhausted. " I didn't expect some two-bit French pirates to rout us like this, but.. then again, I didn't expect them to do.. whatever the hell they did to get one up on you all."

"My thoughts are leaning towards some sort of cyberattack. Might have been caused by a third party logistics contractor leaving something on the base network when they were offloading construction supplies." Kensington responds, giving his best analysis of what could have happened.

"What about OECM?" Bride interjects, before Kensington shuts her down.

"Unlikely. Maquis aren't known for being on the spectrum like we are - EWAR is far from their specialty. CYWAR is too, but they tend to outsource for that kind of thing. I poked the Lovelace girls, Mactan - fuck, even sent a guy out to the asshole of Sirius in Kepler to talk to people at Ames, every major APT in the sector that we are on at least neutral ground with, all of them said they had no one who was tasked to a hit on Satporopet's net let alone anything big in the Taus. Someone in Gallia must have done the hit for them. Possibly might have been a autonomous compute package with geospatial sensors for a fuse from when Akibara did one of those hauls out of Languedoc for us a few weeks back."

"Svoloty, yak patsyuky v stinakh.. So you are saying - they had this planned for weeks, and we didn't know anything about it?" Alexei says, concerned about how easily they slipped in.

"That's the most plausible explanation, Alexei. My guess is they knew the IMG was ferrying supplies on agreement to Satporopet, they saw it as just some ordinary corpo base being put together, and decided to either make a statement out of it, steal what they could from the wreckage because they lacked enough people for a boarding party or just blast it for kicks. There's so many of these fucking Maquisard cells you could get one of those ancient-ass post-colonization printed directories and put them all in one, we'd be here for weeks playing where's Enma." Kensington says before throwing up his hands in defeat, before going to the nearby coffee maker to make a cup.

"So what is to say Kamuymosir is not compromised?" Setsuna says, a bit nervous about such a cyberattack.

"Kensington's guys did an audit after the attack. Kamuymosir, its' AD Servers, data shares, mail servers, datalink coordinator servers and all other factional infra came back clean. Satporopet was never intended to have any connection with Ouroboros until it was in our hands proper. People doing packet sniffing on traffic from its' IP if they were in any of the nearby RAIS arrays would have been able to make out our network DMARC router IPs from following the packets' destination via a reverse DNS check and pwned any VPN endpoint for logging and follow up pursuit if we had. All comms between anyone in Ouroboros and Starcat were done through encrpyted netmail over the neural net via a SOCKS8 QR-SMTP/IMAP2 proxy server on Freeport 14." Bride answers for him as he starts to pour a cup, leaving him to respond. "Pretty much what Jae said." he answers, turning around to sit back down.

The group looks to Hanamura.

"Without Satporopet, we've flushed half a billion credits down the drain for nothing." Hanamura says, a bit dejected. "Our men I can tell you right now, are already tired of sitting on these ships and want either someone to shoot, or somewhere we can properly call home - and now with this.. people are going to want out. It's Maehara all over again."

The group looks to each other, thoughts on their own memories of Maehara, save Allinson, who simply is reminded of stories told by Hanamura. "It'll take ages for us to build up the capital needed to start again, even with Starcat's fronting efforts. And given murmurs in the underworld of more popular causes taking to the foreground of Kusari.. I think.." Hanamura says, trying to grapple the gravity of what is about to come out of her mouth.

"I think it is time.. for the Shuuban plan."

The faces of the rest of the command staff turn either pale, concerned, or both, towards Nodoka.

"You understand the gravity of this, yeah, Hanamura? We're going to be slinging everything we have at Kusari to.. send some sort of message, do.. something.. as a last cry. You're essentially ordering a suicide mission." Jae-un asks, a bit unnerved.

"Yes. But at this point we have been routed twice already. Once by that scum Namura.. and again.. by these accursed Maquisards. We will not bow to the fates. We will burn in spite of them, in a blaze of glory... in the hope of a brighter future for those who survive." Hanamura says, her thoughts shifting mid sentence.

The group looks confused. Survival? Shuuban was a suicide run, not some last hope. Bride chimes in, trying to understand the large non sequitur, staring them all, save Hanamura, dead in the eye.

"Hanamura.. the Shuuban plan is a suicide attack on Kusari, either against their government or against Kishiro. Chances are, none of us who go along with it are going to survive."

Hanamura looks to Bride, then Kensington, and then to Allinson.

"I think we can commit to the plan, and if we survive.. see to it a future for us. But it won't be the original plan." She says, moving back to the display, switching it to a drawing board mode. She starts to work on a chart, before speaking up again.

"Kensington, that report, last week, that Shinta provided! Remember page 34?"

"Yeah, mentioned what she learned about the Kishiro facilities on Honshu, why?"

"It mentioned they recieve large shipments of Cryogenic Materials from the Sigmas, one of the byproducts the GMG sells direct to Kishiro, yes? Mostly gasses like Liquid Nitrogen and the sort?"

"Yeah?"

"Contact Shinta. If my auspices are right.. we could likely have a workable plan for.. all of us." she says, getting to work, flipping between 'sheets' of the 'workbook' on the screen.

Kensington sighs, nodding and through his neural lace, making a call to Shinta.