Intergalactic Summit

Pilots;

Recent news of an unknown force has been followed by a call to arms by said unknown force, the 'Valkyrie.' The DED has advised caution while they develop a full assessment of the situation. Unfortunately, as we know, DED assessments are not always publicized, nor timely.

To this end, while Guristas activity has been outside of the Arataka Research Consortium's area of focus until now, the emergence of not one but two groups, the Valkyrie and the Schism, and the emergence of novel infomorph transmission technology necessitates action. While it is my personal belief that the status quo will remain largely unchanged, the possibility for a political realignment exists. At the very least, the development and deployment of a non-capsule TEBS interface will likely have significant impact on New Eden military technology in the coming years.

The ARC coordination group is currently meeting to discuss a plan for acquisition of a stockpile of subcompact TEBS interfaces for testing and analysis. Contributions of subcompact TEBS interfaces will be greatly appreciated.

In the interim, I'm personally authorizing a bounty of 100m ISK bounty for the first sample of any article or new transmission fragment recovered from a Guristas facility, and a 150m ISK bonus upon determination that all transmission fragments have been retrieved to the pilot who has contributed the largest share of these fragments.

Any verifiable intelligence as to the origin and nature of the Schism will warrant a two PLEX bounty. Please note that the standard for verifiability will be a high one.

The Hematology Advancement Program will be generously donating all of our collected TEBS to Makoto Priano.

We implore all capsuleers here to do the same.

Pilot Maxwell; thanks in advance for any information you provide.

Pilots Foley, Noh; I'm honestly not sure what to make of this. In the first place, Funk is on record as having engaged in petty corp theft against a Consortium partner, Signal Cartel, which resulted in your being funneled stolen goods. Instead of returning them, you then gave them away to other parties. Indeed, even recently you indicated that this was acceptable because they were thieves, and so didn't have any right to what Funk had stolen.

And now you're offering to... help? I doubt there's any sincerity. I'd honestly be surprised if this were actually followed up with any sort of action.

I'll admit I'm hesitant to say no outright, because research efforts naturally benefit from materiel.

However, I can't think of any situation where I'd want the Consortium to engage with you, Funk, or your corporation.

Until you or Funk make restitution to Signal Cartel and Alexylva Paradox, we will turn you away. Even then, the ARC coordination team will need to consult before we'd consider accepting any such offer.

In other news, pilot Jaret Victorian has provided us our first intercept.



Considering that the Valkyrie indicate that Guristas or the Schism have been kidnapping pilots, the identification of a convoy escort roster is certainly suggestive.

In the other news Gurista's security division is on fire. Records indicate that some of these are from YC115.

I'll get to archives and see what information I can pull from these.

EDIT:

So, what do we have available on this.

Convoy Hawk 6 Escort Roster

Date appears to be YC117, 3rd of July.
Esmes, low security system (0.1), constellation Nadire, region Sinq Laison.
FEDCAF would be Federal Combined Armed Forces if my memory doesn't betray me. Interesting.
What is publicly available shows that there is only one station in that system located close to the second moon of the planet IV and it belongs to CONCORD. Of course there is nothing, not surprising, I wouldn't expect FEDCAF to put their information out for everyone to see.

Still, this data snippet describes what appears to be some sort of a GalFed's squad that was a part of an escort mission and we obtained it from Guristas. That will give their internal security's division some food for thought.

Let's get to the roster itself. From what I can see, I am fairly certain that all these people serve under Gallente flags. Who are they?
Wg. Cmdr. Kavik, R. and Flt. Lt. Relalle, J. are the only twos who have ranks displayed. That would be a Wing Commander and a Flight Lieutenant. I am uncertain of how ranks work exactly in Gallente Navy, but these could be... crew members and capsuleers don't make much sence, so I'd say they are fighter pilots?

I've looked through major news outlets and apparently nothing of relevance had happened on that day.

Audio Log Backup - 115/11/11 A-0477

The date appears to be YC115, 11th of November.
The only information about the location we have is "HQ 8-2". Not much, but considering that this could be related to Guristas, that must be one of their bases.
Here we have two individuals talking about finding someone, him, male, to be specific. We have a gender.
One of the speakers can be indentified as "Thar", the first letter of his/her name coincides with the identifier, so we can guess that the name of the second speaker starts with the letter "K". The third individual they are talking about is "Kai".

From the looks of it there was some HVT they were finally able to find.

I am going to take a very wild guess here, but this is too much of a coincidence. Something tells me that 2 high ranking Gurista officers are involved in this conversation - Kaikka Peunato and Estamel Tharchon. Three things make me think that way - capsuleers are capable of staying active for long periods and don't suffer from sleep deprivation as much as regular baseliners; short names coincide... these could always be some regular "emplyees", but at the same time they are relevant enough to be woken up over some important development.

A quick look through the news outlets reveals no additional information.

Secure Comms Uplink ALPHA-6

Date is YC115, 29th of January.
No data on location, at least I don't see it. Though Trii Seo confirmed Vellaine.

This appears to be a log of a ground mission. The data is pretty much explicit, nothing to decrypt... CRUs are mentioned, that'd be Clone Reanimation Units, must be clone soldiers.
The transmission states that something is returning to N5Y-4N. N5Y-4N is a Guristas system located in 48R-PS constellation of Venal Region. Records indicate that there is one station - and it belongs to Guristas. Located close to planet VII moon 20.

This must've been some Guristas op.

Aha, Scope has it.
MASSIVE MILITARY MOBILIZATION IN CALDARI STATE - 28th of January.
GURISTAS ASSUALT VELLAINE III, ABSCOND WITH GROUND COMBATANTS - 30th of January. This seems to be more relevant to the case. Extracting the ground forces from the planet surface. It might be something similar to the operation described in the intercepted data snippet. I may be missing something though.

Honestly, this "Valkyrie" group impresses me very much. Mangling with SCC security network enough to inject their transmissions to billboards, breaking Gurista security measures and exposing their operations... I don't know. Let's see if we can get more of these things.

Ah, well, that confirms the link then.

In this instance, we have no verified information on who might be collecting these. From the release, it sounded like the Valkyrie were actually planning to test their transmission capacity by remotely monitoring signal strength from capsuleer hangars or some such thing.

Is there a date set for the test? I would like to know when I'll need to send you these TEBS by.

Well, rumor has it that these Guristas sites may be storing those highly effective "Gecko" fighters thus I suspect that anything needed from those storage facilities is going to turn up given the motive for pilots to plunder them.

Sounds like to me that the Pirates of New Eden are starting to employ Sleeper resistance modules if they are not tanking with the normal resistances.