Chapter 4 – Data Management
With the boost in manpower bought about the assimilation of Reaper and Solitaire flights, the 95th and 99th had found themselves merged into a single new squadron, the 501st Dissimilar Tactics Squadron.
They would be the equivalent of the Erusean Air Force's special operations unit, something that Diavel was no doubt quite proud of, given he had been the one to suggest the 501st as a designator. A few of the members of the new squadron had had a little laugh at that one, whilst Ronye had pointed out that half of the 501st they were to be based off would be killed in the crash of a Star Destroyer…
He wasn't sure why he was surprised that Diavel was a Star Wars fan, but he supposed he shouldn't have been.
The first missions of the 501st Dissimilar though, would be relatively simple – disable a solar farm to the east, supplying the major shipyards constructing what was known as the Geofront. Geofront was a major project that General Resources had inherited from one of the many thousands of companies they had bought out during the 2020s and would one day form a floating city off the coast of Erusea. Of course, GR claimed this was a purely philanthropic gesture, but anyone with more than a modicum of sense saw it as GR attempting to build something that would mean they no longer had to play by any laws whatsoever, regardless of whether the lip service they paid towards doing so currently anyway.
Still, that wasn't the thing that concerned the Erusean command, no – that would be the potential for Geofront to become a weaponised base out in the open sea, somewhere that GR could easily base their myriad of weaponry projects, and leave them completely open to whatever superweapon could fit in the floating city…
Which meant delaying its construction as best as they could.
Levelling the shipyards was simply not an option – they would need an entire wave of heavy bombers, plus a cruise missile strike, as well as follow up strikes, with follow ups to those… and all of that assumed that the bombers made it through the IADS in the first place, something that really wasn't guaranteed. Which left the task to the newly formed 501st Dissimilar…
The solar farm was lightly defended (in comparison to the sheer wall of anti-aircraft fire that surrounded the dockyards, anyway), with most security measures being in place to deter ground-based saboteurs – thieves, and the occasional militia raids mainly – not aerial threats such as themselves, but it did have one unique defensive feature that the ex-GR employees had been warned about.
A scrambler, Sierra had told them, though they were none the wiser on what such a device was.
In theory, the device would disrupt signals between the aircraft's various interfaces if they weren't physically connected through cables, pulleys and hydraulic lines, but on a COFFIN equipped aircraft, the pilot to plane interface was also affected. This should've simply disconnected the pilot from the system, but in at least one test, it had rendered the pilot brain dead when it disrupted the signals between their unconscious body and the plane's control interface…
And General Resources had kept such a device around in order to use it as a defence mechanism.
No wonder they hadn't kept much by way of AAA around there, they didn't need it if that was in place.
Still, the scrambler wasn't an instant kill switch, and based on the data that they had, the scrambler nodes had been marked on maps, with their effective radius also drawn on. The device could only be fed through multiple nodes as a defence system – previous tests had shown it to be so powerful if fed through a single node at once that it would essentially black out anything within a 50-mile radius, just a slight problem when it was tasked to defend a power generation facility, he reckoned.
That had given them an idea though – each of those nodes had to be fed by some kind of power supply themselves, and whilst common sense would dictate those generators should probably be inside the effective radius, General Resources weren't known for using common sense quite as much as they should have done…
Satellite imagery showed that the generators were outside the nodes, and by using a co-ordinated time on target strike, it would be possible to disable the four generators to the east, then use the Tempest Dragon, an electronic attacker flown by two of the ex-GR members, Jet and Sierra, to launch a cyber-attack on the facility controlling the scrambler, whilst the remainder of the squadron launched a kinetic attack on the solar farm.
The plan was set, and so, Operation Four Horsemen would commence in the morning…
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04:45 rolled around, and the members of the 501st assigned to the strike – himself, Eugeo, Tiese, Ronye, Asuna, Mito, Klein, Jet, Sierra, Kureha, Zeliska and Itsuki – had begun to form up into their attack packages.
He would take Asuna with him as his wing woman, her F-35 being equipped with predominately air-to-ground ordnance, whilst he carried a more mixed loadout: a quartet of Archer-Xs, a quartet of Adder-Xs and four Krypton-Xs configured for destroying the solar arrays, rather than the SEAD role they were usually carried for. Their flight had the callsign "Black Horse", in keeping up the operation's codename…
The early morning sunrise that day in August was something to behold, the light reflecting off Asuna's Lightning, but not so much his blackboard-coloured Flanker, which almost seemed to absorb the light of the early morning sky…
"Look at that view…" Someone spoke in awe as they climbed up to their cruising altitude of around 10,000 feet. "Didn't get that at General Resources…"
"Almost gives me hope that we might actually win this one." Mito said, her tone cautiously optimistic.
The light mood was shattered as someone else spoke, a voice he didn't actually recognise… "Was there a man dismayed? Not though the soldier knew, someone had blundered. Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die. Into the Valley of Death rode the six hundred…"
"Cheery start to the morning, isn't it?" Klein joked to lighten the mood a little after the impromptu poetry reading.
"It is hard to be light when you spend your life in shadows…" Itsuki responded, and even he rolled his eyes at that one. It sounded like something an overly dramatic theatre kid would come out with when they didn't get the role they wanted…
"Itsuki, knock off the edgelord crap would you?" Jet, if he remembered correctly, told him off. "This is already hard enough without you depressing everyone before we've even reached the border. Mito, feels weird that we're using your callsign, y'know?"
That would no doubt cause a little confusion at GR – that the Tempest Dragon was using the callsign of Reaper, rather than Mito's flight – but he shrugged it off. They mostly communicated with each other's names anyway, other than when talking to the limited AWACS support they had these days…
"I want it back once you're done with it. Try not to bring me into disrepute, would you?"
"Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, didn't they?" Sierra poked at the former Grim Reaper a little bit.
"Someone is going the right way for a kicking when we get back…" Mito retorted. "Why were you lot the only sensible ones we could escape with?"
"Hey, we aren't all those three…" Three? He had only really heard Jet and Sierra engage in bantering, and even then, the former tended to keep it to low stakes situations. It was only really the Reaper and the American who would poke fun at each other at all times…
Their radios all crackled into life, disrupting the ongoing argument, as Diavel came onto the frequency. "Silver Knight to Four Horsemen. Everyone is clear on the plan, yes?"
"Yes sir, we're all clear."
"Not like you to take up the back, Diavel…" Mito pointed out. "What happened to all that knight of the air shtick?"
"It died when my squadron did, Blue Horse Two." Diavel answered curtly, cutting off that conversation. Kirito had to admit that he hadn't known the blue haired man too long, and for what little of that he had known him, he had been on the ground, leading the planning for them. To know he had once been in their position did somewhat reassure him, as it confirmed Diavel wasn't some power-hungry fool…
A naïve fool, maybe, but not a power-hungry one.
"Time on target is 05:34. Set clocks on my go – time is 04:46… now." With the clocks in the Ultra Flanker set for their time on target strikes, he took a quick look around his cockpit to ensure all of the switches were set for their flight into the jaws of General Resources. They were, and he looked out to the wave of aircraft around him…
It had been almost six months since he had flown in true formation like this – obviously they'd flown as a four ship relatively regularly, but this was the first time in since then that they had more than four aircraft to do so.
"Black Horse Two to Black Horse Leader, are you receiving?" Asuna called him.
"Loud and clear, Two."
"Good, I was just ensuring our radio link is operational." She told him. "Do you think we'll succeed? General Resources are not fools; we all know this…"
"As long as we do what we do best, we'll pull through this." He told her. Whilst he couldn't say he knew his new wing woman well – or even at all, come to think of it – he could tell she was a skilled pilot; she had to have been in order to escape from General Resources!
"So, we should just follow the plan?" She asked.
"Until it goes wrong, yeah." Kirito admitted.
"You don't have much faith in it then?" Asuna asked, concerned by his response.
"Huh?" He wondered why she had that impression of it, and then realised he had sounded rather dismissive of it… "Oh, no! It's just that no plan really survives contact with the enemy. It's how we react when it goes wrong that makes us better than them in a crisis. We think for ourselves…"
"Kirito-senpai is right, Asuna. We all survived as long as we have because we made our own calls out here. We were lucky though, we got good commanders… some of us weren't so lucky." Tiese told her, and Kirito thought back to the flight that Tiese and Ronye had originally belonged to – Prodigy Flight (an unfortunate name if ever there was one).
The girls had never really talked about the events that led them here, and he didn't blame them for that. Talking about death was always hard, and doubly so when it was people you knew. Triply so when those were people you were friends with, he thought.
Alice had only left back then, and it had left both himself and Eugeo devastated – he didn't want to imagine how bad it would've been had they believed she was dead…
"I'm sorry for your loss…"
He couldn't imagine those words were any less painful from them than they would be for him, especially when they were coming from people they had been fighting until less than 24 hours ago… and the silence from the usually polite girls suggested they weren't all that happy about it either.
"Yes, that is all rather behind us at the moment." Diavel interrupted the silence to given them an update. "Alongside most of our communications in the region, actually…"
"Wait, what?!"
"Sorry, Silver Knight, repeat your last?"
"We're aborting the mission. Return to Artiligo, and you'll be debriefed on the current situation…"
He wasn't sure what was going on, but if it was important enough to abort the mission this far in, then it must have been serious…
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As it was, the situation they found themselves in was as dire as it was bizarre, Eugeo thought to himself.
Somehow, the base's security had been compromised by a hacker of some kind, who had left a calling card – one he annoyingly recognised after a little too long playing games, and he was fairly sure the Phantom Thieves weren't a thing outside the Persona universe – and so, Kirito was in a mad rush to work with the base's cyber security experts to try and trace down this mystery "Phantom Thief"…
As their systems almost all worked off the now compromised mainframe, it meant that they were all grounded until the system was at least secured, and as a result, Eugeo found his mind wandering to what Kirito had mentioned last night.
Had he really come across Alice again, just by chance? Or was he making connections where perhaps none existed? It wasn't like he could do any research into what his partner had seen… because their internet access had functionally been revoked.
"Is something the matter, Eugeo-senpai?" Tiese asked, having stayed with him, whilst Ronye had gone to help Kirito with the technical side of things. The others had all gone to help where they could, but with most of the localised network down, it went that many old school methods had been hastily bought back into use.
He couldn't say he'd expected to have to learn how to use a fax machine in 2032, but those were the breaks, he supposed.
"It's nothing really." He told Tiese. "Just something that Kirito told me about the mission last night."
"Oh? Did something happen, or…"
"Kirito and I, we've known each other since we were children. Heck, we grew up with one another, but… we had a friend, a girl called Alice." It almost hurt a little to remember their friend – they had barely had time to say goodbye as her parents whisked her away to who knew where – but he carried on. "Then one day, her family left, and we always wondered if we'd ever see her again."
Tiese caught on immediately. "And Kirito-senpai thinks he met her again?"
"Yeah, he reckons that she's of General Resources enforcers."
"…Oh." Tiese understood exactly why he was hesitant. If Alice was indeed one of GR's enforcers, it'd mean they would come to blows with her, and whilst he knew deep down that would be a fight only one side could win… he knew that would mean that his survival depended on putting down one of his best friends.
Could he really do that? He wasn't so sure there…
"Yeah, and that's why I'm unsure about what Kirito said. If he's right, then…"
Tiese placed a hand on his, and he couldn't help but flush a little bit at the gesture. "Whatever happens, if Kirito-senpai is right, I'll have your back out there. It won't be one on one at least, and I'm sure Kirito and Ronye would do the same."
"Thank you, Tiese." He smiled back at her, and it was her turn to blush now. "I couldn't ask for a better wingwoman." There was a brief pause between them, and Tiese leaned into him a little, almost as if-
With almost perfect timing, Ronye burst through the door, only to go the colour of Tiese's hair at what she no doubt assumed was some kind of romantic liaison between them… "Ohh, umm, sorry to interrupt, but…" She stammered, looking at the ceiling. "-we've caught the hacker and they're being bought in now."
"That was quick, wasn't it?" He asked in surprise.
"They, uhh, they came forward. Which is strange, but…" Ronye stumbled over her words a little bit, and he was unsure whether it was still her awkwardness at the scene, or something else entirely. "But they said they wanted to offer their services to us in particular."
Now it was Tiese's turn to be confused. "Eh? Why us?"
"I think we'll just have to ask them ourselves." He admitted, with a sense of unease.
Almost everything about this screamed "this is a trap!", but perhaps it wasn't for once. Maybe the universe would let them off this once, and it was just a well-meaning white hat hacker who had messed up royally… rather than the likely trap that GR had set up for them.
He could hope, anyway.
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Arriving in the briefing room, Eugeo found himself heavily conflicted.
If this wasn't a trap, then the hacker they had bought in was very young – in her early teens and looking absolutely terrified of what was happening – and probably deserved some lenience. After all, it wasn't as if they'd never completely messed up something experimenting with stuff in their early teens.
Kirito certainly had – he remembered the hash he'd made of his computer when he'd said "don't worry, I know how to solder things" … and clearly didn't. He still had flashbacks whenever Kirito uttered those infamous words - "what's the worst that could happen?"
On the other hand, if this was a trap, this girl was the most convincing actor in history, and her sister was just as impressive – both looked as if a loud noise would scare them into a panic attack at that moment.
Either way, neither of them were what he'd expected when they'd mentioned they'd bought in their hacker…
"Young lady, you're aware of the damage you could have caused, right?" Diavel asked.
Mito snorted from behind. "Damage she could have caused? She took the whole base offline all day!"
"I swear I wasn't trying to do that! I was making a worm that could break through GR's encryption and tell us when the missiles would be coming… I, umm, I lost control of it, and well… it ended up in both yours and GR's systems."
"Are you telling me that stopped GR dead in their tracks too?" He asked, surprised by that. It had been the closest thing to a victory over the juggernaut that was GR… and a teenager had manufactured it in her bedroom!
"It did, yeah. That's why I reached out to you guys – when I realised it had been noticed by GR…"
"They'd have not bothered talking, they'd have sent people out to deal with you, yes." Asuna agreed with the girl's assessment of her chances.
"Well, at least we know it wasn't a GR attack at least…" Diavel sighed. "But still, you could've caused our entire air force to be wiped out earlier, had we not noticed it as early as we did."
The girl gulped in fear. "I swear I'd never intended to do anything like that! I just wanted to warn people when missiles started coming down!"
Off to one side, Kirito seemed contemplative, having not spoken since the girl had started explaining herself. He wasn't sure why, but he could almost see the cogs of an idea rotating in his friend's mind as he did so… "Diavel, I hate to admit it, given the damage it could have caused, but that worm she made, if we could stabilise it… we'd stand a good chance at levelling the playing field with GR." Kirito explained the idea in his mind. "We are the Dissimilar Tactics Squadron, after all. I'd say that's pretty dissimilar…"
A brief pause filled the air in the briefing room, as the gathered members of the 501st considered Kirito's suggestion.
The worm hadn't been controllable, that was the entire problem from his understanding of the situation, and here was Kirito suggesting that not only should they keep her on their side, but that they should continue to develop the worm that had nearly crippled their entire capacity to fight back?
He really wasn't too sure on this one, and there seemed to be no consensus over it either – one side of the room seemed willing to take the risk, especially if the rewards could be extremely high; after all, they had survived this far by taking risks no one else would, even if they didn't like them, whilst the ex-GR side of the room seemed hesitant to take the risks, having survived by toeing the party line as it was.
In the end, it all boiled down to what risks Diavel was willing to take.
"There is only one problem with the worm though – I was able to insert it through a known security vulnerability in the early warning systems. After this, I doubt General Resources won't patch it out." The girl explained.
"Then that will be something you have to work around, won't it?" And now they had Diavel's answer. "I suppose the idea is worth the risk. If nothing else, we have a way of unleashing mutually assured destruction, should the situation become more dire I suppose."
That was a grim way of looking at it – that the worm could easily become a cyber WMD if things went awry again, but it wasn't a bad thought to be considering some way of making any victory that GR could achieve one that would cost them dearly…
"Well, we don't really have time to waste." Diavel told them. "I suppose introductions are in order first though…"
"You can call me Seven!" The girl said cheerfully. "And that's Rain, she's my bodyguard."
He wasn't sure why, but he felt some kind of tension between Seven and Rain at that, though he couldn't tell what it was, and whatever it was, it felt very much one sided from Rain's direction, despite the smile on her face.
Still, the two girls made up a new capability in the 501st's arsenal, and hopefully one that would prove useful in the fight…
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Something in Mito's words had truly stung for Alice.
She would admit that she was perhaps too trusting for her own good, and that she sometimes failed to notice when others were taking advantage of that for their own purposes, but for her to say that she was just an unthinking servant of General Resources, subservient to them?
She did not think that she was, but those words had stuck in her mind, almost like the detached stinger of a wasp, burrowing deeper and deeper, despite her attempts to remove them, and that would never be freed, unless… "Selka, what are your thoughts on all of this?"
Her little sister looked at her with a look of confusion on her face at the seemingly random question. "Umm, I don't follow, Alice?"
"General Resources, our positions within the company. How do you feel about it?"
Selka looked away anxiously. "Umm, I don't follow, Alice?"
"General Resources, our positions within the company. How do you feel about it?"
"I... don't think it's right for me to say what I think of it, Alice." She looked away anxiously, and her sister's expression told her everything she needed to know.
"Then I shall ask one more question - would you be happier elsewhere?"
Selka's continued silence told her more than mere words ever could, and in her mind, two voices fought a battle to determine her future...
One side fought for her loyalty to the people she had sworn loyalty to, people who had given her everything she needed to succeed, whilst the other reminded her that loyalty to such a rotten regime was worthless, just as she would be to them.
It came down to a single question by the end: who would she be loyal to?
Herself, or her corporate identity?
She hated that it was even a question she had to ask herself in the first place, but she knew the risks of betraying General Resources - they all did, and for candidates, that applied even more so...
Just because they had escaped successfully, she was not so sure she could. They had evidently been planning their escape for weeks, if not months, and they were many.
They were two.
"Alice, what are you thinking of?"
"If I told you, you would be at a greater risk Selka. For now, allow me to shoulder this burden."
If anything, she hoped that shouldering that burden would protect Selka when things went wrong - if it meant that she would lose her life, but hopefully Selka would be spared from the same fate that would befall her…
As if by the wretched and twisted sense of humour that the universe so often possessed, the last announcement she wanted to hear came over the tannoy… "Candidate Zuberg to position please."
"Good luck!" Selka told her, trying to keep her spirits up.
"Thank you Selka, I rather feel we will need it…"