Turn 52 - Oh God, our Heavenly Father
The ‘get together’ on Pollux takes place as scheduled, and it was just as bad as you had feared. About a half-dozen kids ranging from 6 to 14 from various stash houses, all of which you had under surveillance thankfully, were gathered by lawyers from the law firm and transported to the property, and a thoroughly disgusting ‘party’ takes place.
Janet convinces you not to watch the footage, but rather gives you the summary version. One of the oligarchs you already had enough on and 1 you previously hadn’t were present, along with members of their families. A number of lesser lights who had previously not been on the radar had also been present, and were now all under surveillance themselves.
You also are told that they’d gotten somebody inside, so you even had footage from inside the buildings where the external surveillance was unable to look. Janet is smirking about this, and mentions off-hand that it wasn’t Special Branch who pulled that trick off, and have you seen Harry lately?
Several increasingly incredulous minutes later you manage to extract the story from your old friend. Your
Intelligence Minister decided that if you want something done right you need to do it yourself, and had somehow managed to infiltrate the catering staff of the event with all of the nifty spy toys your Intelligence Agency has been developing for a field test… and Harry
had been a field agent before getting promoted to run the agency.
Janet manages to squelch your bellows of outrage over Harry being able to get out in the field by promising that when the time comes to swoop in and take out all of the scum you are more than welcome to be present, so long as you are wearing a stock Mk II battle armor suit with no identifying marks and do not open the helmet or your big mouth.
She also advises you to keep calm about this, as much as she wants to personally use those bastards genitalia for experiments on the boiling point of, well, genitalia while still attached to the host organism, she wants to catch them all, all of their hangers on, all of their accomplices, all of their enablers. Every single bleeding one of them.
[] | Strike Now |
- 50% chance of of lawfully convicting all primary perpetrators
- 10% chance of also sweeping up the entire support network
- If successful (primary perpetrators)
- Ends ‘the Weak’
- +15 Approval Change
- +5 Approval
- +10 Politics
- +2 Support - Chamber of Delegates
- +2 Support - Imperial Senate
- If successful (support network)
- Prevents future ‘Official Corruption’ negative meta-event rolls for 50 rounds
- Grants “Champion of the Weak”
- 1 reroll of any negative or neutral meta-event or dynasty luck check
|
[] | Continue Surveillance |
- Continue ‘the Weak’ through next update
|
[] | Continue Surveillance while turning loose Intelligence interrogators on captured accessories |
- Has a chance of accelerating the process of lawfully convicting all targets
- Has a chance of weakening the case against all targets
|
On a far happier note, the
Tramp, now renamed
Unicorn, evidently after the first ship to sail under the Cunard name, for some reason, is now ready for service. You later find that the person doing the naming is a big ocean liner geek… your beloved husband. He’d not mentioned this to you.
You have several potential uses for the 3-collar jumpship. The military wants to load up three
Devastations and go raid the Dracs, since the
Royal Sovereigns aren’t ready yet. They even have A Cunning Plan. One so cunning, you think, they could pin a tail on it and call it a fox. They’ve been training multiple crews onboard
Unicorn for the past year, you see. So they want to load those crews up on the
Devastations, and jump to one of the major jump points for Nowa Warzawa and engage in some Grand Theft: Monolith on any Kuritan jumpships present.
Another option is to use
Unicorn to transport
Enterprise-A, a
Sosumi for logistics support, and a single
Devastation to either Calliope, the system you got basic star charts for from the Free Folk, or the currently unnamed system just to Coreward of Griffon, to obtain detailed charts and potentially colonize.
Or finally you could take a pair of
Devastations and a civilian cargo hauled and engage in some commerce and pirate-hunting on the route between the NRI and Griffon.
[] | Install and play Grand Theft Monolith |
[] | Griffon Will Grow Larger |
[] | A huntin’ we will go! |
Meanwhile, in even happier news, Quan, James, and Thanh are all having more grandbabies for you to go all ba over! Each of the twins have annoyed their wives by, well, impregnating them with more twins, and Thanh is actually the one acting as Mom for her and her wife’s latest bundle of joy. Since, as your daughter grumps at you, you have effectively barred her permanently from the cockpit so she might as well have a kid.
You can’t resist. You solemnly inform your beloved spitfire of a daughter now that she’ll have a child of her own she’ll understand. You promptly are treated to a twenty minute daughterly freakout.
You still got it.
Jeremy then shows up with paperwork. Your beloved son, with whom you are well pleased, is still destined for the Window Of Defenestration, but this is business, so you let it pass.
The proposal is for the new deployable combined arms Armored Division. Like the current ‘heavy’ or ‘assault’ unit, such as 3rd Armored, it will be very mech heavy, primarily because of the sheer versatility of mech platforms in multiple terrains. It would consist of three brigades. First Brigade would have a single Pathfinder Regiment to secure the LZ during initial landing, and a pair of Standard Armored Regiments to solidify control of the LZ during the operation. Second Brigade would consist of an Armored Cavalry Regiment for screening purposes, and 2 Standard Mech Regiments as the primary striking force. Third Brigade would have a trio of Assault Regiments in order to utterly break the heaviest enemy defenses.
He and Admiral Benjamin also have some other proposals. The
Coyote design is, in many ways, an excellent raider transport,
Unicorn alone could transport an entire Special Forces Regiment using them. However the design has one critical weakness. She carries nearly no cargo and would thus be utterly unable to actually support the units it is carrying organically. They wish to either discretely hire Majeure Électrique to produce a modified
Coyote that corrects that deficiency, preserving a level of secrecy for special operations, or open up a design competition for a replacement.
[] | Hire Majeure Électrique to do the job |
[] | Hold a competition |