Breaking Ground
11 Mar 2024Argon Shadowstar
I have received a message from the Sol Liberation Front, one of the names the anti-Federation revolutionaries in Sol are using these days. It seems they've discovered some interesting data regarding last month's events on Rhea 3. A rebel operative managed to infiltrate Olympus Village during an intelligence gathering mission, and happened across some documents regarding a wing mission which was posted at an undisclosed station. This wing mission called for the transport of a huge quantity of seismic charges, of the type used in mining, to Cormack Penal Colony in the Rhea system. The mission was accepted by a group of commanders, whose names were also redacted from the documents. This wing was apparently intercepted no less than 5 times during their approach to the destination, according to the report. They did arrive with the cargo intact and received payment, however one of the pirates who intercepted them and survived apparently was caught by police later and claimed that he had been hired by someone who claimed to be a member of the Hudson administration. He would not name his contact for fear of his life, but assisted the local police in tracking them down. The report does not identify this contact, nor discuss anything regarding what happened next to any of the mentioned parties. The report cannot be used to incriminate anyone as the names had been redacted, however it does raise a lot of questions. The timing places the delivery a couple of days before the earthquakes, which is certainly convenient enough, but it calls to light the fact that so far, Galnet has treated this as a natural disaster with no acknowledgement as to the possibility that it could be the result of an attack.Naysayers claim that a seismic event of this magnitude is impossible to create artificially, however that's simply not true. Even without seismic charges, many types of large scale industrialized mining are capable of seriously destabilizing planetary crust. And that's with rudimentary technology. Any miner or historian can vouch for the destructive effects that these methods have on a planet. We need only look back a few hundred years to the Ruin of DeVries, or the Shattering of Jul, 420 years ago. We have had this technology for over a thousand years and yet it still causes devastation, though admittedly in recent decades the rate of mining related disasters has lessened significantly thanks to refinements in techniques and better guidelines. But let us not forget just how destructive these devices can be. The first mining-related large scale environmental disaster, a result of early hydraulic fracturing methods, remains the greatest teacher: The Collapse of Texas, 2082, Old Earth. You would think humanity would have learned it's lesson then. But then, the warning signs were there for decades and nothing was done. So when people say that humanity isn't capable of something like this, I say why not? We've been capable of it for over a thousand years.
But that in itself doesn't mean that it was human-caused. Old starmaps show that Pleione 4 once had 2 moons. Those moons are gone today, though thin dust clouds remain, now torn through the system by gravity and solar winds. What destroyed them? Legends tell of Thargoids once using the system as a base of operations. Perhaps they are capable of shattering entire planets. Were Thargoids responsible for Rhea-3? Well, we have no evidence of it. In fact, we have no evidence either way, but to simply assume that it was a natural event is naive. Especially if this heavily redacted report is real. Enough seismic charges could certainly do it, in my opinion.
Another interesting aspect of the report is the implication that the Hudson administration hired pirates to try to stop the shipment. Hudson has probably benefited the most from the event, with Winters withdrawing from politics and effectively extending his term. So why would he try to stop it? More than that, if he did try to stop it, it means he knew about it ahead of time. On the surface, it might look like he set the whole thing up to make it look like he was trying to be the good guy and prevent a disaster, in case the truth got out. He could point to this evidence and say he was actually trying to save lives. And it looks good, on the surface. Except the actual smart thing to do would be nothing. Don't say anything, don't get involved. Which is what he did. So, what is the purpose of this report? Someone is trying to make it look like Hudson was paying pirates to intercept a WMD designed to devastate his opposition's home world, implying that he had insider knowledge of the plot and was trying to cover his ass. But it's a flimsy facade, full of holes. In my experience, that means that this whole thing was a huge distraction. Someone just pulled the wool over everyone's eyes. We may never know what actually happened when all eyes were on Rhea-3.
In any case, it's only a curiosity to me. This has not changed my campaign in the slightest.