Intergalactic Summit

Very simply, yes. War, you argue, is only just if the price of war is outweighed by the price of peace. Peace under threat of Kyonoke bioweapon attacks, you say, renders peace insurmountably costly, and so you argue in favor of total war between the Federation and State.


And there, Syagrius, is where you state again your bias.

When?

Even the Black Eagles are saying it was an unknown quantity, at worst a Caldari nationalist extremist, not a product of the State as an entity or its component Megacorporations.

And your bias -- unsupported by any fact or rationale, except that you're angry over a Gallente group attempting the employment of soft power being dealt with by hard methods -- is the unsound foundation for your house of cards.

So, yes, I insult you. Because you can't be worked with anyway, and attempting to work with you would just waste our time and further inflate your overweening ego.

In the meantime, our staff and associates are preparing for deployment to Postouvin, establishing contacts both within the delegations there, and ensuring effective command for our contingents remaining elsewhere.

The pattern of dispersal would most strongly suggest accidental exposures, or limited intentional exposures for testing purposes. Has anyone plotted the quarantine events on a map to see if they follow a logical path? Perhaps we could find a path that was being followed by whomever had Kyonoke with them.

You'd need to isolate the initial infection vector for each outbreak first. Then you can track them back to see if there was a common point of origin.

You insult as you have no other reply, and many of your kin have worked constructively with me. But I understand it’s more fun when you work only with people who agree with you. Ego indeed.

I did, however, notice you avoided answering my one question.

Is it not out of the realm of possibilities that yes they effected their own and all others simply to cover their tracks, hitting their primary target but still making it look like an accident or something else?

And why would they want to cover their tracks? Terrorist groups are usually very loud when they obtain a weapon, using it on the most people possible and claiming responsibility, letting everyone know exactly why they did what they did. You should know that; Minmatar commit far more acts of terror in Greater Amarr than the Templis Dragonaurs do in the Federation.

It would have been simple to let the plague loose on Luminare immediately after obtaining it. If, that is, it was actually contained. There are only two possibilities if it is indeed Caldari nationalists: they do not have it contained and all of the exposures so far have been accidental (highly unlikely because what would they be doing in the Republic and Empire?) or they purposely exposed a Caldari planet to Kyonoke so that it would look like they weren't Caldari, which is bloody idiotic if they are trying to destroy the Federation and take credit for it.

I see, well we all have our biases, don't we.

So, you have already determined then that ‘if’ it is the State, it will be at the order of some nameless middle manager… Interesting level of access for a middle manager. But then we forget Heth, was much the same. Who could have expected that?

But forgive my rambling’ so ‘if’, only one person will hang? Just one? If you are telling the truth and you can't even imagine that this was engineered by elements of the CEP… bias indeed.

Humm, I suppose I should answer this seriously, but considering the tenor of our conversation thus far, I will say... ‘If’ it was the FIO, and as I said elsewhere, I have considered the possibility. Then they had better have had exceptional reasons. Then perhaps we will take your advice and hang a middle manager.

Terrorism usually does not wait and allow quarantines to be established and held. A terrorist would continue to use their weapon, would overwhelm response. I would.

Here is something for you to consider Aldrith: At Postouvin there was a 'hoax' distress call at 0800 long before the official quarantine was established. There was a lot of emphasis placed on exactly what the station does while the others received not as much speaking on that subject in the official releases. Repeating the function and history of the platform was irrelevant to the news of the outbreak but Commander Esmoreures was very keen to do it. He could simply have been a poor speaker rambling but his terse closing statement makes me doubt that.

All the others were either transit hubs (Muttokon) or had a visitor or clear vector from the outside. (Efu, Oijanen) Postouvin closed without any mention of a visitor or crashed ship. Emphasis was placed on its history and what they did there, though none was needed. These make Postouvin suspicious but alone they do not explain anything.

It seems like these vectors were black flags to distract and mis-direct. Attacks on orbitals that are easily contained but still hit every nation of New Eden. It makes things so confused that now anything seems like a conspiracy theory. Everything is suspect and it means that now, nothing is too. Aside from Oijanen but that seems intentional to me. A clear threat or vector that has a much higher risk of escaping. A planet is not an orbital and attacks on the State always point to the Federation.

I do not think anyone would be surprised if the FIO were responsible for such a thing, it is believable that they would. If anyone is capable of attacking four nations at once in the desire to start a war or cover tracks it could be them. But not only them. The RSS are also capable, so really are any of the nations if the motivation was there. But for any of these nations, the motivation to risk a super-infection just to attack one target or cover tracks is unclear.

The Federation researching Kyonoke is not surprising, it is not alone cause for some cover up that would risk the lives of everyone in the cluster. As much as suspicion points to the FIO there is no motive for them to stage attacks to mis-direct or try to infect other places than the State. If they were discovered to have stolen Kyonoke all those years ago or even two weeks ago I doubt anyone would be surprised or they would even feel the need to cover it up with something like this. It is in their interest to hide it, not to risk starting a war to hide it though. But this speck was modified and that takes time. I do not think it was done in two weeks. This makes me think of the confusion around Postouvin and a possible laboratory there. Just a feeling and I am no investigator, only a hunter.

If a megacorp in the State were acting with the assistance of the Federation and something went wrong? That is a secret worth keeping. Worth risking the lives of trillions and worth killing millions for. This closing of the border hurts relations between the Federation and the State but it does not really hurt the Federation. It hurts most those Caldari corporations who do business in the Federation. I do not know the situation around the speck between the megacorps but perhaps this break in two weeks ago was an attempt by one megacorp to gain the speck from another or others. Perhaps this is so convoluted because both actors in the State and Federation are involved.

I pray that this theory seems as insane in six months as it does now. A simple and clean answer of provists trying to start a war or EoM trying and failing to kill everyone I think is preferable to everyone. But nothing about this seems simple or clean and the Infection is still out there now. I would be very happy to be wrong about black flags and actors in more than one nation's government. Because if either or both are true then we are moving to war. The closing of a border will be simply an opening act and not the climax of a difficult time.

But there is a lot we do not know about the circumstances surrounding Lieutenant Kasaras and the things that moved to allow him to be there undetected. There are suspicious circumstances all over and too much smoke with no clear fire.

It's a little more complicated than that. You're assuming the recent attempted breach of the quarantine zone around the Pit was successful. It doesn't have to have been. This could be something kept in storage in an off-the-books weapons lab somewhere, or something one of the pirate cartels has been sitting on, waiting for a customer.

After some consideration, I think instead we should be looking at what we know and/or can learn, and working from there.

I. We know when each outbreak started.
II. We should be able to find out how quickly, after infection from this particular strain, symptoms begin to appear, and when the disease becomes communicable. That gives you your window for when the initial vectors would have been infected.
III. Once you have that initial window, you know how far back you need to be tracking travelers.
IV. Start with the arrivals to the orbitals during the incubation window. Get a list of all of them. It can't be more than a few thousand for each facility.
V. Track them back to the points they'd have been at when they would have needed to be infected, allowing for variation in incubation period.

Then you can start looking at who else might have been in those locations, at those times. Yes, it's a lot of data to sift through, but sweet Mother Matar, we'e got on-board computer systems that can calculate how to take two and a half billion tons of tacky gold plating, crumple it up into a tiny little ball, fling it 47,000,000,000,000 kilometers, and then un-crumple it again, without any of the systems or biological bits on board spazzing out and suffering catastrophic fluid containment failure. I think we can plot the movements of a few hundred thousand people for a few days and compare the travel records of those locations at those time periods.

Heck, if we have to, we can even use one titan or supercarrier's navigational computer per site. It's not like we don't have enough of them.

Oi vey