Intrigue in Marsonna
12 Mar 2022Iridium Nova
The situation in Marsonna continues to get more complex. Now, suddenly, it seems Alba Rotam is no longer inactive. Quite the opposite in fact. Someone, maybe several someones, have dumped a lot of money on Alba Rotam investments in the system and established crackdown squads aimed at culling the rebels. The strange thing is, there's been no mention of Marsonna operations on their comms channels. Now, admittedly, the comms channels I've been watching may not be the ones they're using for this operation, but you'd think a big response like that would have had some kind of chatter to go along with it. Squadron comms for Alba Rotam has been relatively quiet lately, though there is some occasional chatter, but nothing at all about Marsonna. This tells me that whomever is responsible isn't coordinating with the squadron and is likely working via local contacts. All that said, this sort of thing is actually pretty common. Most factions don't rely on huge coordinated operations to get their day to day tasks done. Usually they just put up some notices on job boards and mission terminals and let the galaxy's population of opportunists handle it. But that usually doesn't result in the kind of changes I'm seeing in Marsonna. Random opportunists can be a powerful tool when properly managed, but for big changes, you need coordination.
But hey, this looks like a good thing, right? Now the Dogs can relax and let Alba Rotam go back to managing the system like before and forget any of this happened. I don't think so. I've seen ops like this before. Someone is trying to make it look like Alba Rotam is active again, and the paranoid in me says it's to lull the Dogs into a false sense of security. My first thought was that the Criminals in Disguise might be behind it, but it doesn't make sense. Their MO up till now was to bring Alba Rotam down, not boost them up, and if they had the resources to create the situation we're seeing now, they should have won the election and saved themselves a lot of time, money, and trouble. That led to the next natural conclusion: Royal Phoenix Corporation. They definitely have the resources, and they're new in the system so the timing checks out. But that leaves the why. An influence gain for Alba Rotam doesn't really help them, though it could set them up for a power play if it bumps the Dogs down, which it has.
So that's the rub: whoever is responsible, the side effect is that it's going to hurt the Dogs, and I suspect that may be the real intent. With this in mind, I decided to counter it. The idea was to do my own investing and reinforcement of Dogs infrastructure in the system. By preparing the Dogs for this expected power play, I hoped to be able to turn the interloper's op around on them, or at least maintain Dogs assets. I headed for Marsonna 1B, a planet fully under the control of the Dogs of Lore. And then, as I approached the planet, my onboard computer informed me that the planet was now permit locked.
Baffled, I decided to try 1A, another planet fully under the control of the Dogs. Permit locked again! By this point I was well suspicious and decided to head to another planet in the system, one which held one Dog settlement as well as a few others. On the way, I reported the incident to my buddies in the Canonn, who are always looking for mysteries to solve. By the time I reached 3B, a couple of Canonn investigators had arrived in system. Landing on 3B was successful, at which point the investigators contacted me. They had discovered the remnants of a virus in the system's navigational beacon, one which had been designed specifically to target me. Upon entering the system, the nav beacon detected me, blasted a slice signal through my Pilot's Federation connection, and had me flagged as permit locked from those two planets. By the time the investigators figured out what was going on, the affected systems had already purged the virus and reset, restoring my access to those planets. I get the feeling that it wasn't intended to permanently disable me though. Whoever did it just wanted to buy time. More concerning than the event itself was the level of skill (not to mention Dark Wheel clearance) necessary to even have a snowball's chance in hell of pulling it off. That's basically tantamount to breachng the PFed central core, basically the holy grail of hacking. The only other alternative is that the Dark Wheel themselves have taken an interest in this system and what I'm doing here, and while that would certainly be a twist, I highly doubt it.
Still, this does leave the question of why. I've only heard legends of hackers capable of that kind of wizardry, I didn't think they actually existed. So, then, what the hell are they doing here?