Chapter 2.1 (such as it is)

[yhlee]

[GM's note: This is Ashari's summation of the mission briefing to Sasha, who is the new team leader in the interests of whisking away inactive PCs. While this letter is addressed privately to Sasha in-character, players are welcome to have out-of-character discussions [in bracketed comments] about, e.g., logistical concerns or things that they would like for their own characters. Regular IC discussion--e.g. if Sasha decides to start a meeting to discuss planning--can also happen in comments to this post, without the brackets.]

[Reminder: I'm out of the country from Sun., Dec. 2 to Wed., Dec. 5, so will be out of commission during those days and maybe a couple after. I apologize for the bad timing but hope this will give y'all something to chew on in my absence.]

[ETA: For reference, this is the one existing map of the hexarchate]. It's ca. Revenant Gun, but you can see some sites of historical interest. Candle Arc, for instance, is near the bottom center, in the Glover March.]

Congratulations, Sasha. You're in charge now. I expect you have very strong opinions on how things should be done. I look forward to hearing all about it upon my return.

As I told you earlier, Kaliyan, Ankat, Yehan, and myself will be siting a new base of operations just in case we need to cut our ties to the rebellion, or the Quill-led part of it. But don't worry. I wouldn't leave you entirely without hawks and foxes to play with. Don't hesitate to bully the new recruits as necessary to get the job done. I for one consider it highly promising that you seem to be getting along smashingly with the new Kel.

Here's your part of the mission. I have received reliable intelligence (no, you don't get to ask what I did to get it, unless you want to arm-wrestle for it after I get back) that there's going to be a significant push into the Lanterner era. Moreover, Quill is involved with rebellion operations via a rift to the heptarchate during 852 [h*archate timeline for reference]. Given what I understand to be the historical significance of that time period, this could be a major push.

Your task is to enter 852 via the rift map that Nirai Remi has provided us and figure out what Quill's people are up to. If this is a major intervention, what are they trying to accomplish? Can we get anything out of it?

The exit of the aforementioned rift will take you to a Lanterner orbital stronghold called Autumn Pyre. (They seem to have gotten their naming sensibilities from the Kel, how tiresome.) It's three days' travel by Cantata to Candle Arc, which has not yet happened. (You know what I mean.) Autumn Pyre is a military base, but it also houses a Lanterner aristocrat-diplomat named Aramis kae Pharon who fancies themself a natural philosopher and is interested in studying rift phenomena. Like civilized people, the Lanterners put their family/house name first, the personal name last. The "kae" designates an aristocrat or person of high rank--it can be given to generals and the like even if they're of low birth, it's all very complicated. Unfortunately for Autumn Pyre, but fortunately for us, Lanterner cultural peculiarities mean that kae Pharon is what we'd consider the "ranking officer."

Quill's people have already made contact with kae Pharon. Quill herself doesn't appear to be on site--yet. I've obtained forged orders that should make you look like reinforcements for the rebellion. Things are chaotic there anyway, what with interdimensional travelers. Get to Autumn Pyre and find out what's going on before it comes around to bite us in the ass. Oh, and if you get a chance, grab me some Lanterner red cordial, I've always wanted to try it. Good luck!

Ashari

Comments

Re: weapons development - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[slybrarian]

"Like I said, there's a lot of people named Mikodez. There's probably a Rahal Sasha who had a planet flogged because they bake pies at a calendrically inconvenient temperature and no one's assuming you're them. But if I see anything else that seems suspiciously coincidental, I will mention it," Alaric says grumpily. "And yes, apparently we have one, although so far he's been more of a mild nuisance - which is to say a teenager - than a terrifying spymaster."

Re: weapons development - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[zuhrovet]

Sasha pours tea for Seyli, and refreshes her own cup.

"Alaric, if we ever encounter something you consider genuinely scary, please tell me immediately, so I can make my way to a different galaxy. I wanted to ask you both about weapons, actually. We're joining someone who has been posing as a weapons dealer, selling plans for unusual designs. I have a weird question that can wait for Remi, but perhaps we can talk now about semi-conventional weapons? What can we offer the Lanterners that will seem exciting, but won't necessarily alter the course of history?"

Re: let's have a sensible conversation about maps

[kese_seyli]

Seyli accepts the cup and sits down across from Sasha, as it seems expected this would be a long conversation. It hits them where and when they're going for this mission and they take a fortifying drink. "I'd wager that defensive weapons and shields would always be useful, without particularly swaying the course. Less likely to cause a difference than heavy offensive weaponry."

Re: let's have a sensible conversation about maps

[slybrarian]

"Advanced invariant technology's always popular in a warzone," Alaric says. "Disruption to infrastructure and civic life causes calendrical rot, especially if there's not enough lensmoths or equivalents to forcibly stabilize things, so having good backups for your exotic weapons is a must. At the same time people don't like to spend money on it because it's not as sexy as exotic weapons, so they end up scrambling to upgrade when a war actually happens. Alternatively, something that's been customized specifically to work in the conflict zone. That applies to defensive systems, too."

Re: let's have a sensible conversation about maps

[zuhrovet]

"If they're throwing money at exotic technologies, maybe we should help them along?" Sasha counters.

Re: weapons development - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[kese_seyli]

[Sorry, I responded from my email and somehow it changed the title of the thread]

Re: weapons development - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[zuhrovet]

[This is sort of like a sensible conversation about maps ;) ]

Re: weapons development - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[zuhrovet]

[P.S.: I'm still hoping Remi will join this meeting at some point?]

Re: weapons development - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[yhlee]

[Sorry, my bad! I missed the page somehow.]

Remi enters late, looking harried but apologetic. "I'm sorry," he says with a sketched bow in Sasha's direction. "One of the mothlings had to be extricated from the matter printer. I didn't think you'd fancy mothlings trying to figure out how to work the machine from first principles."

[Feel free to assume that someone in the meeting quickly catches Remi up on what's already been discussed so y'all don't have to rehash the conversation to date.]

Re: weapons development - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[zuhrovet]

Sasha offers Remi tea or instant coffee, and sums up the meeting thus far. She includes the information she has gathered about Flute's resources, for everyone's benefit. She then says, "Alaric and Remi, this is very speculative, but I've been wondering: how hard would it be to disable the harnesses of other moths?"

Re: weapons development - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[yhlee]

Remi doesn't smile, quite, but his eyes light us in appreciation. "The sure way would involve getting at the harness and disabling it manually. Which might be difficult to arrange. Doing it en masse--that would probably take some kind of exotic and, to be frank, a larger R&D team and budget than you have access to, unless"--he nods courteously at Alaric--"you have some insight that I'm overlooking?"

[Note to slybrarian: Remi is smart, but Alaric is also smart and has just plain seen more of the universe! Feel free to spitball possible solutions outside the one Remi suggested.]

moth harnesses - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[zuhrovet]

"Can you give me a better idea of the mechanism?" Sasha asks. "I know there's software, hardware, and biological components"--some sort of binding--"as well as the influence of the calendar, but I don't know what the mix looks like, or in what ways the harness is protected."

Re: moth harnesses - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[yhlee]

"Personally," Remi says, "fucking up the hardware is the best for a long-term solution. As far as we can tell from examining the Cantata's, tuning a moth harness is a delicate business and if you know enough to mess up certain components, you'd have to pull out the whole thing and get some technician to retune it."

Remi frowns at his coffee. "What we did with the Cantata was short out some of the better-hidden components as well as disabling the software side. There's a dummy program running to make it look like the harness is still functional. A Nirai who knew what to look for could hack the dummy code and, just as importantly, replace the parts we fried. But this seemed like the better compromise given that we didn't know if we might face hostile inspections. If you didn't care about being caught, then of course nuking the harness is easier. Pardon my language."

ETA:
Remi pauses for a long while, then adds slowly: "There is one other possibility that has occurred to me. Once freed, you could teach the moth how to break the harness itself in case of further attempts at enslavement. But given that our communication with moths is imperfect and we don't yet know what they want, I wasn't sure you would want to jump to that measure."

Re: moth harnesses - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[zuhrovet]

Sasha wraps her hands around her mug. She isn't looking forward to this next bit of the conversation. Seyli, in particular, is going to think she's a barbarian. But she needs Remi to understand that she cares about the moths, even if her half-formed idea isn't safe for them, or anyone. "Where I come from, they bind people into ships. Not because it does anything useful, but because they want someone there to be responsible, if something goes terribly wrong. I can almost guarantee you, that odd ship that was tracking us as we left Moongray, it had a human at the center. I left because I couldn't stand it and I couldn't see how to move against it. With the moths, in the rebellion, I think maybe we can."

She goes on, "I don't think we have the political pull to free more rebellion moths right now, not if we want to keep them safe afterwards. But moths that aren't ours--or if we enter open conflict with Quill's people--fucking up a mothdrive sounds like a weapon. From what you're saying, I could do that temporarily with code, if I got access to the system? And more permanent fixes go after the hardware?"

Re: moth harnesses - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[kese_seyli]

Seyli sits with their tea and quietly takes all of the offered data in without offering anything in return. There isn't anything they can offer in return. They're more a point them in the direction to shoot kind of person. They're certainly not judging Sasha as a barbarian, they don't see it any worse that what the He*archate does to anyone else, from what they can see in their narrow world focus.

"This is all above me," they say as Sasha finishes. Point me in a direction and I'll fight or guard, or display weapons, but I don't have the experience to help you or anyone else with moths."

Re: moth harnesses - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[yhlee]

Remi looks Seyli up and down in a frankly speculative manner. "I wouldn't count you out just yet," he said. "In case of physical sabotage, we're going to need--crudely put--muscle and tactical expertise. Maybe Alaric here is secretly a master of martial arts, but if you sent me in alone on a moth crewed by, say, hostile Kel, I would be mincemeat in short order."

Re: moth harnesses - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[zuhrovet]

"I'm not sending any of my people onto an enemy moth alone, if I can help it," Sasha says. "Seyli, we'll get back to the conventional weapons in a bit. For now, pretend you're Flute--she's a former mercenary--and you're evaluating which of these wild plans you can sell to the Lanterners. Remi and Alaric, tell me why I can't just write a virus that disables harnesses and spread it to all of the enemy ships."

Re: moth harnesses - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[yhlee]

[Note to slybrarian: Remi won't know this with any certainty because it's after his time and he's only been able to examine a single harness up close. But Alaric, in his travels, has probably run into this. Ensuring moth compliance is a major concern of the Nirai, given the stakes, so they've thought of the possibility of virus attack.

This is going to be ~handwave~ because I am not a security engineer or programmer, let alone a security engineer of the grimdark future of dark grimness, just roll with it, but: just as mothdrive signatures are individual (like ~fingerprints), every mothdrive/harness runs on an individualized operating system keyed to that specific moth's physical identity. It's possible to hack a moth, but you'd have to do it one at a time.]

Re: moth harnesses - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[slybrarian]

Alaric shakes his head rapidly. "Each harness OS utilizes a unique cryptographic key derived from the moth's own physiology in order to prevent remote access. When software updates come in from central maintenance, the Nirai aboard the moth have to apply that key in order to make it compatible with the harness operating system. It's why the hexarchate can't just shut down rebel moths. We could write a toolkit that helps speed up the process of extracting that key and then applying it to our be-free patch, but you'd still need physical access. For us, that's inconvenient but worthwhile. For an arms purchaser's viewpoint, they might as well just smuggle in a bomb."

"It might be possible to come up with something that damages the harness from a distance, or that harms conventional matter but not moths. Trying to sell that, though, requires explaining why that's better than just the latest and greatest railgun."

Re: moth harnesses - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[zuhrovet]

"Right, so we're not creating something that would disable Jedao's fleet in the next three days! Or the Lanterners--I'm not sure which side our intervention is on."

Sasha's grinning. She hasn't had a problem this interesting in ages. "Alaric, when you say 'physical access', what level are we talking about? Does the harness simply run on a separate grid from the rest of the ship, so we have to get a drone to an appropriate access port and plug in? Or is some sort of medical procedure on the moth involved?"

Re: moth harnesses - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[slybrarian]

"The propulsion system is firewalled from the rest of the grid so that it accepts inputs from only a limited number of terminals, not all of which receive data back. Ideally the drone would plug in somewhere in engineering so you wouldn't have to work around that. Nothing needs to be done to the moth directly." Alaric considers that for a moment, then amends, "That we know of. Obviously we haven't had a chance to experiment with what happens if a moth tries to forcibly extract itself from a disabled harness and the rest of the ship."

Re: moth harnesses - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[zuhrovet]

"Got it. Can the two of you talk to Cantata, and start putting together orientation information, in case we do wake up another moth? Cantata recognized the rebellion logo when they first woke up, so even under harness moths must have some idea about competing groups of humans, but they won't know how to avoid unwelcome attention. Remi, if you want to teach Cantata how to break a harness, you have my authorization." Sasha wants to say 'my blessing', but that's not a concept that's easy to convey in the high language.

She turns to Seyli. "How are you with maps? If Aymad and I start pulling plans, can you suggest paths that a drone should use to get to engineering, without interference from humans or servitors? I can evade electronic monitoring, but you're the expert on human military training."

Re: moth harnesses - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[yhlee]

"It would be my pleasure," Remi says with barely suppressed enthusiasm. He looks inquiringly at Alaric. "Perhaps the Cantata can teach the mothlings as well, at some point--just in case."

Re: moth harnesses - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[kese_seyli]

"Moth maps?" Seyli nods. "Send me the plans and I can suggest paths. Although, I'll need to brush up on my history, to get a better sense of what human military training is at the time we're headed. If there are standards different from the times I'm used to being in." Seyli has always been a live in the moment and pay minimal attention to history...and now they're going back and forward into history, where everything is relevant.

Re: moth harnesses - paging Alaric, Seyli, and Remi

[zuhrovet]

"Sounds good! There's all sorts of historical information in the grid. Ask Aymad if you need help finding specific data." Sasha has the impression that Seyli is about as thrilled to be working with Aymad as she is to be working with Reshad, but they should know how to get a job done.

"Let's shift back to our ordinary sales offerings. Seyli, you were thinking shields? Flute is selling ship-mounted weapons, but maybe we should stick to small arms. What is flashy enough to impress people, but not so dangerous we can't build a prototype?"