Original story based on and including characters and material created by Project Aces for Namco Bandai. The author claims no for-profit ownership over them.
Interlude II: Thoughtcrime
WNN Nightly
14 November 2020
... spokesman for the Aurelian Air Defense Force confirmed the destruction of Leasath's airborne fortress Gleipnir over Santa Elva earlier today after a protracted battle that resulted in the city's recapture by Aurelian forces.
We now go live to our correspondent in the region Scott Diamond for more on what these developments might bring. Scott?
"I'm standing near a park by the Iriba River where, as you can clearly see, the humongous bulk of the Gleipnir right behind me. The army and local authorities have already blockaded the area to stop scavengers but as you can see that hasn't stopped a few anxious locals from wanting a photo opportunity with it."
"It must have been quite horrifying for the people underneath its flight path."
"Well, the Gleipnir's final path followed the river for the most part, which enabled it to avoid crashing directly into downtown. You can see just down the river here the remains of a small bridge that was in its path."
"Scott, how has the Leasath military reacted to this? The Gleipnir was the spearhead of their initial offensive and losing it at this point in time must be a significant setback."
"The occupation authorities actually released a statement today claiming that the Gleipnir was hijacked by Aurelian spies and deliberately aimed at the downtown area to cause maximum casualties. The statement also claims that a heroic officer managed to take control of the ship and steer it away from harm just in time."
"Well, they appear to have gotten something right, it doesn't look like the Gleipnir was that badly damaged during its landing."
"Good point, Alma. In fact that's the reason for the barricades, the Aurelia Defense Forces are trying to see if there was any vital data stored onboard that will help their battle plan. But the technology that we have seen it demonstrate such as the cloaking and shockwave weaponry will definitely be valuable enough in their possession."
"So it's most certainly going to aid the Aurelian army's momentum?"
"The technology itself will take sometime to harness, but the fact that the Gleipnir had been brought down will most certainly be a morale booster for the Aurelian counterattack, as it is very much the largest remaining threat to their forces at this point in time."
"Okay, thank you Scott."
"Same, Alma, thanks."
"That was Scott Diamond in Santa Elva reporting from the Gleipnir crash site. Turning now to the FCU, where protests are mounting over rising unemployment..."
Ciel Restaurant, Gaiuss Tower
Griswall, Aurelia
Mid-November 2020
The food is still the same lively, five-star selection it was for the last few months, the ambience still a mix of eclectic piano and some jazz every now and then. The Ciel staff are still hard at work catering to the occupation, as it remains about the only stable employment in the city after hours.
But the silence that had befallen the guests this evening is deafening.
The fall of the Gleipnir had brought an end to Navarro's regular firebrand speeches. All of a sudden, the lively opulent conversations had died into hushed mutters, as if a murderer were in their midst.
The loudest exclamations are written, not said, as demonstrated by the Leasath People's Daily screaming SABOTAGE in large bold letters, finally getting it some semblance of readership on the stand. At least it seemed they had learned something from previous attempts at state-manipulated media by not covering up the blatantly obvious. Perhaps that would have caused a bigger loss of morale as compared to blaming it on The Enemy.
Premier Navarro seems to understand it too. He is no longer grandstanding, but instead mingling with his supposed constituents: the few remaining foreign journalists and other well-to-do Leasath dignitaries and businessmen that were a staple at his functions. He even seemed to be doing a good job at assuaging their concerns, as if the transition from dictator to standard politician somehow improved his standing.
I remain at the periphery of it all, preferring to watch the goings-on at ground level. With the days growing longer, it is a more appealing view than watching a prolonged sunset.
The Leasath People's Army has the entire capital under lockdown. Armored attack vehicles and artillery are being set up around every corner, just out of the light. Entire fleets of transport and assault helicopters use the larger avenues as landing pads, soldiers loading and unloading cargo as studiously as worker ants. Large container trucks shuttle unusually-shaped crates toward the walls, possibly for gun emplacements.
And with Griswall International now converted into a military transport base, the walls have become my cage.
That, as it happened, was fine with me.
"Mr. Genette, it's almost time for curfew," comes a voice at my side.
I turn to find my minder, still dressing in that same gaudy suit with a Leasath flag pin. Other minders are making their way among the crowd to remind people that their current residences are the safest place to be with the capital soon to be under siege.
The only thing that apparently changed since the more opulent earlier days of the occupation was the look on his face, no longer brimming with scripted enthusiasm or drooping from intoxication. It is that kind of gentle, reassuring expression that implied he knew what I was thinking, and shared the sentiment.
"Sure."
He blushes a little as we rode the elevator back down to the ground level, keeping our distance in obvious recollection of that one stupor he had months ago.
Before we get into the luxury sedan for the ride back to my hostel, he withdraws a small device about the size of a cheap cellphone and places it under one of the seats. He does this in a way that I am supposed to notice.
The ride home is nowhere near as lively as it was at the start of the occupation. It is tense, mainly because of the device. Rather it is a silence made all the more tense by the fact that my 'usual minder' looks like he had been forcibly sobered up. Just as well, I remember that any trouble I caused would further reflect negatively on him.
Or rather, any trouble they are able to sniff out. We make small talk over life back in Leasath, what he intends to do if the war ends. He does repeatedly mention settling in "South Leasath" to start a family and perhaps work in a large library. He mentions wanting to be a historian, which I can assume in a dictatorship's newly-annexed state would be a very important profession.
When we pull up to the hostel, I get out of the car and bid him good night. But before I turn to leave, he reminds me, "Oh, and Mr. Genette, you left something?"
I raise my hand to my forehead as I am about to enter my hostel. "Ah, sorry. My bad," I reply as he withdraws a suitcase from the trunk and handed it to me. "I shouldn't keep forgetting these things out here."
I check the suitcase on the car's closed trunk to see if anything was stolen, tell him "it's all here" before nodding and thanking him, then heading into the hostel. He's already driven off before I close the door.
The hostel has been mostly empty after the end of the initial invasion. The other guests had returned to their home countries, the few journalists among them only stopping in to sleep and sober up after another night of wining and dining.
It is the perfect opportunity to finally take advantage of an expense account I hadn't paid much attention to since the end of the Valahia Crisis. Knowing my current room is probably bugged, I have another one reserved one across the hall and turned into my impromptu micro-bureau.
Once inside, I place the briefcase on a desk I had moved to the back of the room and open it, beginning the arduous task of rearranging and evaluating the small volume of documents inside.
As much as I mentally prepare for the these documents being faked or part of a trap - in which case I have a half-hearted plan to smuggle myself north to Terceiro - I find I am never quite prepared for the revelations these documents actually contain after having been verified as authentic. After all, this isn't the first batch I'm dealing with.
Still, many of these documents continue to confirm what I've already found.
Aurelia's exploitation of Leasath was a long-standing ruse, engineered even before the Valahia began aiding the country's long-running insurgency.
Diego Gaspar Navarro had been the leader if not an influential power player in Leasath's politics since the Cold War. As a General he used that leverage to get him into the country's department of national defense after Ulysses fell, building up the country's military in response to "potential regional unrest."
He also fostered his relationship with Gründer Industries through the Osean government, who were looking for influential clients to bolster their campaigns against Yuktobanian and Usean proxies. Navarro used this to build Gründer's South Osea branch, making him the godfather of the domestic arms industry as well.
When Osea seized Gründer's assets after its war against Yuktobania, Navarro was able to keep the South Osea division for himself, profiting off sales to many different factions and conflicts across the globe. Flush with wealth from developing its own indigenous weapons industry, Leasath was well on its way to becoming the next "airborne fortress" power after Estovakia.
But Navarro's ambitions were no match for the atmosphere of global disarmament. He was fast becoming obsolete, and his extensive contact list with the other arms dealers, crime cartels and the private militaries were putting him on the fast track to the villain short list.
The Valahia were, ironically, his godsend. During the Crisis they fueled the People's Revolutionary Army of Leasath (EPRL) insurgency to such heights that ministers had to travel with air escort. Navarro took advantage of the chaos to launch a coup d'etat against the struggling government, with the support of the various factions that hadn't thrown their support to the Valahia.
Once in power, he focused all his efforts into developing his airborne fortress fleet - which he then used against EPRL bases with drastic efficiency.
In the process he also cultivated his contacts with the international media through generous payoffs, who were quick to accept planted evidence of Aurelian "manipulation" in the civil war even after the Valahia crisis.
Secretly in league with the Valahia, they would write, the Aurelians apparently funded the EPRL in hopes of installing a like-minded regime and becoming a regional power of their own. Obvious ideological differences aside, it had obviously been their ploy since the rich elites toppled the idealistic South Leasath governors in the early 1900s and founded their Osean puppet regime.
Of course, all this expenditure for Leasath's "great counter-attack" had to be paid for. And that ironically was where Aurelia came in...for the most part.
Aurelia had been Leasath's biggest benefactor in aid since the earliest campaigns against the local drug cartels in the 1980s. But as the EPRL crisis escalated, the money they had sent for food and development had been siphoned off to feed the Leasath military machine. After all, every army marched on their stomachs.
Meanwhile, the hundreds of millions of zollars sent as monetary aid was used to pad the profit/loss statements of Navarro's arms industry. These expropriations were listed under every insignificant expenditure in the book and then some.
Much of the remaining expenditures were accounted for by extremely lucrative contracts for natural resources in both Leasath and the presumably-occupied Aurelia, totaling into the billions.
These contracts were awarded to companies based in Usea and Leasath's regional allies, but searches of each of these companies' names and their parents and affiliates on my laptop stationed nearby quickly led back to a single entity.
"...Neucom." I found myself staring at the screen - and at the logo on its website.
Like General Resource, the Erusean conglomerate had also been making moves outside Usea. They utilized the existing subsidiaries of the Erusean industries that had banded together to form Neucom to pursue aggressive expansion and marketing. And like General Resource, they weren't above putting every card on the table when meddling with international politics either.
Their dealings with Aurelia were publicly promoted. Under their Rising Power program they sent entire shiploads of experimental aircraft for use in fighting Leasath, and the Aurelian military's resurgence was certainly if not finally paying dividends on that investment - in terms of money and data gathered.
These documents detailed technology transactions with these companies through their local subsidiaries, along with massive purchases of commodities. These were easily fingers in Leasath's pie as well.
But none of their contracts for Leasath ever advanced past feasibility studies or geological surveys to make sure that the natural resources were actually there - even though a good portion of the money had already been paid.
It almost seems as if Neucom are willingly taking part in some kind of grand Esapino prisoner scam, but a corporation with the brainpower to supply viable experimental fighter planes to national air forces would certainly not be that naive to fall for something like that even on such a big scale.
This created a yawning gap for all these revenues to account for more than just Leasath's ability to build the airborne fortresses as well as create a regionally-dominant fighting force in such a short time span.
This war was obviously conceived as a replacement for the civil war in order to maximize profits from arms and commodities sales. Neucom is profiting from betting on either side to win.
The only question left to answer is what fills the gap left behind.
It was easy enough to surmise that Diego Gaspar Navarro wanted Leasath to be a superpower and use its conquest of Aurelia for global prestige. And regardless of who won, Neucom looked set to profit immensely from arms contracts, resource concessions and infrastructure.
But that doesn't explain 'why' Navarro seems completely at ease despite the loss of his precious airborne fortress. Maybe his mingling at the party earlier was his effort to assure his Neucom backers that things would turn out all right for their bottom line when they'd willingly poured as much money into his coffers as the Aurelians inadvertently did.
I feel confident that I can close this gap as I put these pieces together, which was not reassuring in itself. It was bad enough that what I was doing would risk discovery by the Leasath occupation authorities. Finding out what a corporate giant was up to without the reach of a superpower or the Osean media industry to protect me was already biting off more than I could chew.
And it is, to put it bluntly, the spark I'd been waiting for setting a wildfire I couldn't control.
Especially when I once again learned never to judge a cadre by his suit.
As it turned out, my minder hadn't been drowning himself in luxury and drink for no reason.
Of all the things he wanted to grow up to be, he explained he wanted to be an author. Or librarian. Or some mix with a little bit of adventure thrown in, like the great adventurer-detectives of the time. A genuine historian, not just one that rewrote it to suit propaganda.
The man survived the civil war, scraping and hiding whatever he could to finish his education when peace finally broke out.
In the process, he built up a little social network of his own as the first school year resumed. He'd tried to keep his spirits up even with Navarro in power, and that meant mouthing the propaganda if he wanted to stay in school.
Yet he quickly realized he wasn't the only one that didn't want to do it. His little social network extended to the Ministries of Information and Foreign Affairs. Each of them a survivor of their own, they privately affirmed to each other that Navarro was a dictator whose goal was to rule South Osea and profit off of it. Whatever Aurelia did or might have done - and in the game of global power, it may as well have been substantial - did not absolve him of his ambition.
They knew his coup d'etat against the previous administration and victory in the civil war had been planned in advance, and each of them held a component of the smoking gun.
All they needed was someone to entrust it to, and they couldn't trust anyone in their government.
Maybe the bottle of Stiergarten 1994 was a clue, or a feeler. A day after he tried to literally cop a feel with me in the elevator, he went on another drunken rant, revealing bits and pieces of his life story. Perhaps the civil war that left his home country a failed state made these little revelations inevitable.
But about a week after the Aurelians took Port Patterson, my minder approached me in the restroom during another banquet night and told me simply that he had "heard of my work."
In that moment I was struck with dread. I was unsure if I was going to be deported, jailed or passed off as another "casualty", until he continued that there were "others like him" that knew something that "they" didn't want me to.
I was also unsure if 'they' referred to the Aurelians, like they had done something particularly bad that the Leasath government was hiding. He then made an offer: if I really did want to know more, I would ask the hostel's receptionist if there was a package for me from a "Mr. Mondeci."
That he addressed the package from the now-deceased-and-disgraced founder of General Resource was what set off my motivation. The package that arrived for me contained a seemingly ordinary ledger that detailed a shipment of aid being rerouted to an armored unit that had briefly recaptured Port Patterson in a daring raid only to be thwarted by the increasingly-legendary Gryphus Squadron.
I had to be sure it was real. I quietly forwarded it to my regional contacts through encrypted cloud storage to avoid censors.
And before long, they got back to me and confirmed they were authentic. With that, I wanted more.
Every time I get into the car to or from the Gaiuss Tower or whatever landmark I am supposed to be shown, my minder discreetly reveals to me the bug he is required to plant in the car. The small talk is there to ensure they only hear what they want to hear, and Navarro's agents are clearly too busy managing defense of the capital to take care of their minders' drinking habits.
Each sheet I feed through a cheap Verese-made document scanner I had delivered from a nearby computer shop feels like a giant grain of sand in my own hourglass, before being placed in a plain cardboard box marked with "Souvenirs" or something trivial to that effect. I need not worry about organizing those for the time being, since I've already done those with virtual files in virtual folders. With every batch, the process of encrypting and bouncing them off my contacts for authentication begins anew, like the hourglass turned over.
But even those boxes are starting to build up in the closet, undoubtedly noticeable.
Navarro and Neucom are hiding something bigger than the airborne fortress and its weapons underneath all the black marker redactions on these documents and all the billions of zollars and francs he had poured into his army and Neucom contracts. Something the LPA and perhaps even my minder and his allies do not know.
The one thing I do know is that time is running out to find out what that is - as well as the identity of the pilot i'm looking for. The LPA will fight even harder to protect Griswall, posing more risk for the pilot that they believe leads the charge against them.
I am now certain that this "Nemesis" they speak of is that very pilot.
I can only hope I find what I am looking for before the hourglass really runs out...for me and the Southern Cross.
To Be Continued...
A/N: As you have clearly read, I've now taken some fairly massive creative liberties with the ACX canon, including preserving the Gleipnir (because I think it's cute) and wedging Neucom into the plot. I don't believe one person could have engineered all that conflict himself without at least a little help.
A/N 2: You may also have noticed I uploaded this less than a week after the last chapter. As mentioned previously I do tend to work on chapters in batches, so I post a flurry at a time then "go dark" due to whatever commitments I have. Sorry for the inconsistency.