5.3

"I need a distraction for the PCA."

"That is one hell of a way to start a conversation, Flatwell." And yet, it was so very intriguing an idea. "Before I say yes, how big of a distraction are we talking about and why?."

"One of my investigation teams identified a vulnerability in a PCA groundside facility." Flatwell began to elaborate. "As far as I can verify, it's real. The only problem is that accessing it isn't going to be easy, and I'm going to need Dolmayan as part of the team to do it."

He wanted Dolmayan for a strike operation? Huh. Must have been pretty damned serious... "And so you want them absolutely distracted. What kind of window are we talking about?"

His head tilted to the side, eyes briefly flicking as he considered his options. "Within the month, if possible."

A month... Relatively short-term, for him. Anything that wasn't an emergency was something he liked to carefully plan around. "I can do that." I had several options for doing that, even. But, if he wanted a big distraction... "Does Grid 339 sound good enough for you?"

Flatwell leaned back in his chair, arms crossing over his chest as he brought one hand up to his lips. After a few seconds, he nodded. "It could be worth it."

I, metaphorically, raised an eyebrow. "This facility must be pretty important."

Which... did raise some questions. A lot of the PCA's infrastructure was currently orbital, after all. Not all of it, but the Enforcement System's Core, the Watchpoints, some scattered supply depots, and a few spaceports made up the vast majority of the remaining groundside infrastructure. About the only other place of any real importance was-

"You found an opening in the Belius Staging Point?" The text message I sent him could not properly convey my incredulity.

Back when the PCA first arrived at Rubicon, they had landed in the Ice Fields, expecting that Institute City, and therefore the vast majority of Rubicon's most powerful and dangerous technology, would be there. They were ultimately correct, yes, but the Fires had sunk the city so far beneath the ground that it wasn't nearly as easily accessed as they hoped.

This was, to the PCA, both good and bad. Good because the city was sunk and therefore the absolute worst stuff was fairly safely contained already. Bad, because the PCA's goal of preventing Coral Technology from leaving the planet required them to be able to interdict the planet, and they had been hoping to use the resources of the city to do it. With the city barely accessible, they had turned to a different solution.

They went down to Belius, intending to use the industrial might of the Grids to fuel their megastructural efforts. And they did, even if they had to use some of the hardware they'd brought with them in order to access the more functional Grids after they encountered a few surviving groups that had since formed into new, small polities on Rubicon.

Belius Staging Point had been where the PCA had first set up a permanent base in Belius. There had been other bases, eventually, but as far as I was aware, they'd all been demolished when the PCA had finally moved to mostly orbital infrastructure.

Belius Staging Point itself, however... It had been constructed to greater standards, and it wasn't so easily removed. Thus, the PCA maintained it, using it as a storage, repair facility, communication node... It was practically a secondary headquarters, even though its activity had been slowly winding down over time in preparations for proper decommissioning.

"We did." Flatwell answers my question, nodding.

"Are you sure it's legitimate?" I really had to ask that question. Even if the place was slowly dying, it was still pretty damned important to the PCA. A breach there...

"As much as I reasonably can be." He stated.

Well, fair enough. "Alright then. I can get ready to fake a low-priority intelligence leak to the PCA within the day. Their typical response time usually hovers in the vicinity of three to four days for those, so tell me when you're ready and we'll both mark the schedules in our calendars." Everybody who was going on that mission was in for some boring few days while they waited for the problem to escalate. Unfortunately, a necessity. Aside from that... "You realize, of course, that this is not going to look like a coincidence to them."

I did not need to ask, there. We both knew what was going to happen once the PCA realized they'd been duped.

"If there's one upside to so many outsiders being present, it's that they can't go too far in their retaliation." He sighed. "It won't be good, but we have survived worse attempts from them. With a bit of luck, we'll come out of this better than we'll go into this."

A bit of luck, he says... Well, he's not wrong, either. The PCA is a militarily superior force. Sometimes, risky choices had to be made, because not making them would simply lock you into a worse path.

Of course, you couldn't go too far. Taking each and every risk was a fast way to die, because it wasn't always going to work out. Balancing the two, taking the opportunities where they appeared and reducing the risks as much as possible, was difficult work.

Still, after knowing him for as long as I had, I trusted Flatwell to thread that needle. If he needed a distraction worked?

"I'll lend some Antigens to keep an eye out."

It was time for me to get working.

Grid 339.

Four years ago, I had a plan to turn this place into a giant distraction while the RLF went and got other shit done. I had just started on trying to reveal it, too, before Zatsuba fucked up hard enough that I sent the Firekeepers to go make them find out.

Grid 339 had been left by the wayside ever since. I'd already had the reveal go, and my Firekeepers had been running consistent operations ever since.

To be honest? It probably worked out better than what I'd originally planned.

However, while Grid 339 had been left in the dark, it had not been left inactive.

No.

Far from it.

I could not power the Grid up to its full potential without the PCA immediately falling on the place like a sack of bricks, but it was possible to run a surprisingly large amount of industry in there so long as you were careful to manage the waste heat that would reveal the place.

If you happened to be using Coral Surge generators as the primary means of energy supply? Surprisingly, that's actually a lot easier than it could otherwise be. There's no waste exhaust. There's no fuel requirements, either. Just... time, with a generator that could run surprisingly cold if you knew precisely what you were doing when tuning the characteristics of a Coral Surge.

Grid 339 has been operating for the better part of four years now. It has been using a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of its true potential, but for something on the scale of a Grid?

That's still quite a lot.

Every single day, a new set of productions would roll off the lines. Batches of drones, MTs, weapons, armour, emplacements, generators... whatever I wanted, whatever I needed.

Some of it I supplied to Flatwell on the downlow. A lot of it, I just stuck in storage, ready and waiting for usage.

Well, now was the time.

I spent a week preparing the Grid for its part in the play. The units I'd stocked up by now were distributed around the Grid, emplacements set up and readied, slabs of armour disguised as cargo containers, weapons and ammo stored in convenient locations...

I was running a careful balancing act of my own, here. I wanted the PCA to come investigate and come get stuck in, and that meant that I had to space out everything I had so that it slowly got worse the more time they spent here.

Because if the PCA knew what was actually in here, they'd probably just blow the place to hell. I wouldn't even blame them, to be honest; If I was in their position, I'd do the exact same thing.

In any case, after I had everything prepared, I snuck the Coral Surge Generator out of there, replacing it with a Fusion generator in the process. After that, I did basically nothing but scrub the place of anything potentially identifying, preparing explosives to scuttle the place if I needed to, and finally running simulations based on prior PCA behaviour to make damned certain that this would go the way I wanted it to.

Three weeks and three days later, I got the message from Flatwell, and it was officially time to get started.

Four years ago, I'd planned on revealing the place through unusual network activity. These days, I had a different plan.

I simply faked a message using encrypted comms across an RLF channel. The trick, however, was that this encryption had, in fact, already been broken by the PCA within the last two weeks, and the channel had also been compromised not too long ago, either. Seria had found out basically the day of, and Flatwell had quickly capitalized by using other channels to inform RLF commanders to not send sensitive data, but also not try to reveal it yet. Flatwell had been using it to spread some partially fake and partially real plans, just to confuse shit even further.

The timing of it had been pretty excellent, to be honest. On top of serving as a distraction, this was also going to allow Flatwell to change things up and lock them back out again without much actual suspicion.

After that, there was nothing to do but simply settle down and wait.

I was, admittedly, the fortunate party here. I had plenty of things to do while I was waiting- unlike Flatwell's strike team, which I met with the promised Antigens outside of the detection radius of the Belius Staging Point. Dolmayan was there with ASTGHIK, but he'd also been joined by Ring Freddie in CANDLE RING, as well as a pair of infantry squads with their own transports.

A fairly reasonable set, there. Freddie was the third best pilot of the RLF, behind Dolmayan and Flatwell. He did, however, also know Dolmayan very well, and was able to significantly augment their combined threat level because of it. Between the two of them, they wouldn't have much trouble dealing with what stayed at the base. In turn, that would leave Flatwell with Dunham, and while Dunham wasn't anything to write home about in terms of piloting, on the defense with Flatwell leading MTs, they've got a lot of firepower to spare.

The infantry squads... Well, they're there to storm the places that can't fit an AC. They'll be in for information retrieval, mostly, because in this day and age, there's no place for infantry on the battlefield other than the grave.

About the only thing I could give them was the chance to relax properly; with the Antigens on lookout duty, they didn't need to be constantly high-strung; something that was usually underappreciated until one knows what the other side of it feels like.

In the end, it took three days before the PCA finally took the bait.

In the early morning of the third of July, a PCA Subject Guard investigation squad arrived at Grid 339.

This was the start of a very, very long day.