The Kurage Crisis had been bad. Omar had commanded garrison units flung into full-blown warfare against veteran strike teams from across the human sphere. Casualties were heavy, losses were constant. And yet... They held. They were bloodied and bruised but they held. And that was enough, Nasirdin Datka had kept to his promises. Soldiers with their careers crippled by politics or indiscretion gained a second chance, officers found themselves being promoted again, and soon enough they found themselves off of Dawn. It had been a solid term of service since then, but this new position, Novyy Bangkok, well... He wasn't a fan. They were too well armed for 'peacekeeping patrols'. You didn't need a corsair warship for that, you didn't need a Ramah Taskforce detachment for that. You didn't need the mercenaries for that. And you definitely didn't need the damned consultant. * VV had a nose for military crises. They'd served with a lot of outfits in some way or another, done a lot of political analysis, intelligence analysis, military analysis for half a dozen mercenary corporations. And everything they'd learned told them that Bangkok was gonna blow. Maybe it was the increased, militarized investment. Maybe it was the declarations from the Hachib. Maybe it was just their own vested economic interest in new content for War Talk, but something was in the midst of happening here. It'd been hard to get someone to take it seriously, and they were pretty surprised when the Hachib ended up approaching him. Some spy passed one of their presentations to someone in the Haqq chain of command, and now they had the position they wanted with the people they really, really didn't. But now that they were en-route, the imminent crises didn't even have his attention. He was trying to figure out what the hell was up with the journo. * Ahmed Miles was not a conspiracy theorist. He had to insist on that. The Walder case was huge. Maybe not on the level of the Human Sphere, but thousands of earth-bound Americans had been caught up in the scandal. Corporate malfeasance, abandoned environmental scrubbing, a horrorshow of neglect ignored for years because it happened to a third-world has been on the homeworld rather than anywhere important or rich. And he'd broken it, got Walder himself in front of a Concillium court. And then the moron of a prosecutor fumbled the case and Walder walked free. But that wasn't a conspiracy. That was the system failing its most vulnerable and that happened on a daily basis. No, the conspiracy was what happened on Walder's way to the spaceport. The comprehensive ambush that had isolated his O-12 guard, resulted in half a dozen casualties, and Walder's disappearance. Other reporters said it was an attack by American terrorists. By mercenaries hired to avenge a fallen nation. Maybe even Walder's own business associates, keen on disposing of their man now that he was bad press. But he'd gotten some of the damaged footage. He'd seen the professional, anonymous killers that had ripped through an O-12 guard detail like it was nothing. He'd seen their uniforms and... business suits, black as night, silhouetted against their cover before the static of their jammers kicked in. The savagery of their precision and calm, snap reactions as their picked apart their targets sent a frigid chill down his spine. He knew, knew, that there was something larger at work here. Because his research had found that it wasn't an isolated incident. That there were more of these attacks, and a pattern to them. And he had traced that pattern to Novyy Bangkok.
Omar had woken up to reports of combat across the docks. Blaring alarms, wounded streaming into the Zabaniyah's medbay, screaming in the halls. He'd assumed they were under attack for a moment, images of PanO bombing runs at Johnny-5 coming unbidden to his mind, the first of many deaths. He'd rushed through the stark, brightly lit halls of the warship, trying to raise his command over too-crowded channels. No-one had given him a coherent answer until he entered the command center, began to review damage reports, footage. Even then, he didn't know much. There'd been a firefight. Some bar brawl had turned into a Shasvasti assault on a communication's antenna and a dock as the infiltrators tried to exfiltrate. Then the mercenary showed up. VV strode through the doors in a tall, male lhost with close-cropped hair and damaged body armor. "What happened," barked Omar. "Salaam, Captain," said VV with a salute, "I have three reports to make." The near-panic that gripped the command room completely missing from their demeanor. "What happened," repeated Omar. VV sighed and threw their head back, looking up at the ceiling. "I'm not sure," they admitted, "Still piecing through the information. Gotta decompress in a less twitchy body." Omar fixed them with a glare, half fear, half fury, all adamant that this wasn't going to fly. "Some PanO dipshit stumbled on a Shasvastii cell. They hit us on the way out. Why, how? Not sure." Omar blanched, "How bad was it?" he asked. "Moderate casualties, we repelled one assault on a transmission grid, but their follow up transmitted whatever it was they were trying to get through. Managed to stop one strike force from commandeering a shuttle for their escape, but we've no idea how many others managed to get out. We've got some casualties, and a lot of civilians, in medbay. People were evacuating through a firefight, we had a rocket hit a capsule hotel," says VV, "Also, it turns out that this body can, in fact, dodge monofilament mines." "You dodged what?" repeats Omar. VV shrugged. "Bad call on my part. Not important. What's important is that shit kicked off." "What's important is that we are being invaded by the Combined Army," countered Omar. VV shrugged once again, and Omar had a deep-seated urge to grab them by the shoulders and shake them while screaming. "With all due respect, sir, if we're mostly shooting the EI by the end of this, I'm gonna call it a win," they say, "Shit's kicked off. You need to kick off your investigation now, or we're going to be too swamped in people eager to take a bite out of the Port to figure out what the hell they're planning." "This isn't Dawn, V," says Omar, "No-one's stupid enough to start shooting each other with the Combined Army on the-" An alarm klaxon began to blare from Omar's command console. He turned and stared at his console for a long, long moment. His Geist silently explaining what he was looking at, the news, clandestine and official, that was just beginning to air. "Sir?" asked V. "Correction," said Omar, "They are, in fact, exactly that stupid."
