[Sol System, Alliance] A Quiet, A Softly Creeping Stillness [close]

Everett nodded respectfully to the Commander before moving to take a seat with the rest of his new comrades. He took one of the datapads from Arai as she handed them out the team, and listened intently as she proceeded with the briefing. Warning signals started blaring in his mind as soon as she relayed the very specific and restrictive guidelines for managing and accessing mission intel. The fact that she, an AIA spook, along with Everett, an N7 operative, were going to be attached to this squad, certainly didn't help with that. Then she dropped the bombshell.

"I'm sure you've all heard of Lieutenant Suarez's murder."

...Of course. Suarez's murder may have been a horrific tragedy, but Everett figured that the local garrison would handle the investigation. Instead, N7 and Alliance Intel were getting involved, taking control of the situation. It was a rather drastic measure, and it told him that this whole mess was much bigger than he thought. Big enough to send intel into a frenzy over it.

And then the crime report came up. Everett just stared at the screen, his mouth parting slightly, letting out a shallow breath. "...Jesus," He muttered. It wasn't the worst death he'd seen. He'd seen worse, far worse; he took part in the Battle of London, after all. He saw good men and women of all races die by the dozens on the city's ruined streets. He'd never seen so many corpses before... especially ones as broken and grotesque as them. The nightmares still plagued him to this day. Even so, the sight of a fellow marine strewn up like that sickened him. Suarez didn't deserve that. He went through hell, only to perish at the hands of people he gave everything to protect. His death had no point.

We're supposed to be better than this, Everett thought, remaining completely silent otherwise, his narrowed eyes locked on the holos. He knew what was coming. He was going to join the search for the psychos responsible for this atrocity, and by god, he was going to hunt them down and make them pay for it, one way or another.

Luna

Arai's eyes flickered over the group as she touched the holo to bring up the next image-an overview of part of London, touching on the squad as Alazar hummed a thank you to the engineer.

"The Navy Investigative Service, or SANIS if you've never run into them before, are currently investigating Suarez's murder-but it's their suspicions Intel is interested in and why you are all here," She paused, bringing up the SANIS report, "The Service believes that the killing was done by several individuals with outside support for one reason: certain details about the murder have been kept from the public while the investigation is on-going. Only, these details keep turning up. Pictures of the body, rumours, things that no one without having been involved should know-all distributed in hard copies around this area of London. It's the view of Intelligence that this is an organized group deliberately making their crime known despite our efforts."

She paused, glancing at Adalseinn who was tapping metallic fingers on the table, "SANIS is of the opinion that this group is either politically motivated or a Reaper cult," A grimace, "And the murder has succeeded in destabilizing the area-there have been fights between our troops on the ground and locals. That's where we come in-the Service finds the murderers and we take care of them. Any questions?"

***

London

"That will be all," lieutenant Ryeom replied simply, hands clasped behind his back. His crisp uniform and shiny black boots were a sharp contrast to the people outside the base.

Private Rajapaske's dark eyes flickered around, suddenly looking like the teenager she was rather than the hardened Marine she usually was, "Yes. Once. The battle. I was with my Recon unit then," A crooked smile and choppy words, "'First ones in', you know?"

Wyeth saluted perfunctorily in response. Ryeom had all the signs of an up and coming REMF, but Wyeth knew better than to judge a man based on how crisp his uniform was. At any rate, it was time to set up shop, and not ruminate on bad first impressions. He was more concerned about how to deal with possible backlash his marines would be dealing with, thanks to their predecessors. If Suarez's platoon had been only one causing problems.

Not to mention whomever killed Suarez is still out there. Christ, what a fucking mess.

The sergeant grimaced at the thought, before turning to face his troops.

"Alright, you know the drill. Stow your gear, suit up if you haven't already, and report back to me for your assignments. Dismissed"

With that, the marines started to make their way to their assigned barracks, Vohkaidin, now free to talk without fear of interrupting a superior officer, spoke at a regular volume, his tone cautiously curious.

"Really? I suspected....how much has changed since then?"

He asked, gesturing vaguely around them, presumably referring to the state of London since the battle.

So basically a cross-bureaucratic charlie-foxtrot between November, the AIA, wherever the Seven came from, and now the SANIS. Oorah for all the red tape and hurt feelings that came with those. Best leave the politicking to the people with more shiny pieces of medal than you and just focus on your role, your job, and doing it to the best of your ability.

On that subject

Yeah there actually were a couple questions he had. A hand that probably could have doubled as a shovel rose in the air, he waited until he was acknowledged before speaking.

"How bad's the situation on the ground and what RoE are we going in under if/when the call goes out?"

He didn't bother elaborating, clearance and protocols on the past deployments of operators being what it was (Alai and the Commander would understand what he was asking). Suffice to say that concern for civilian collateral on previous actions had been counted among secondary concerns. But this was Earth. This was the homeworld. And what was standard operating protocol on some shithole far, far outside the jurisdiction of the Council probably wouldn't fly here. As for knowing how things were, really were, in London and it's environs: that was just common sense. Nobody should have to trust their lives and the lives of their squad to the whitewashed damage control fed to the press.

Now there was another eye-opener for Everett. This case sparked violence between garrison forces and locals on the ground? Everett knew that the Alliance had received some backlash from the civilian population, but he didn't think things were this unstable. This was actually starting to scare him, not just how there was infighting going on down on Earth, but the fact that the people behind this murder knew exactly what strings to pull in order to make it happen. This was no joke; these murderers had to be brought down, and fast, before the situation could escalate any further.

Joshua's question did not help, either. Everett didn't even want to think the possibility of being forced to take action against civilians. On Earth, no less! He found it hard to believe that they had to take such a scenario into account. The Alliance did everything they could to save the rest of humanity, but these people wanted to reject it? Why? What would it accomplish? They should've owed the Alliance everything. To Everett, rebellion would mean that everything humanity had accomplished up to this point would have been for nothing. That was a future he could never accept.

"We're talking isolated pockets of resistance, right?" Everett asked, adding to Joshua's question, "And have we identified any of these... rebels, as of yet?"

Dimitra had continued to watch and listen impassively throughout the briefing thus far. She doubted the marines were enthused about her presence, the military rarely like intelligence agents on their ops. Here she was though. There was just one thing... all this talk about rules of engagement and acceptable civilian casualties... if she was a terrorist... She spoke up for the first time, her voice fairly quiet even given the silence of the room, "If I was a violent separatist, and I had murdered this guy, an Alliance spec ops team with loose rules of engagement is exactly what I'd want. It'd make the Alliance look even worse than it already does. If the Alliance doesn't want to look bad... again, then we either need to play with kid gloves, or we need to make sure there are no witnesses to our activities. Period. There really isn't any middle ground, not the way things are on Earth."

Luna

Arai crossed her arms, regarding the group. To Vukovic she replied, "The situation on the ground is tenuous. As things are, we're far from open rebellion, merely minor street fights without weapons that should subside. But we must assume that this is an attempt to destabilise the region and that if we misstep, we will bring the whole bloody mess crashing down. Rules of engagement are simple. Lethal force is authorised but only when targets are checked and collateral risk is low. We don't need dead civilians."

"No fucking explosives or crowds," Adalseinn broke in.

To Everett Arai shrugged, "At the moment, we're not sure who is responsible. One or two civilians have been arrested for the violence but we can hardly arrest a whole lot of them, now can we? Not with our own people being responsible for a lot of the fighting. SANIS is working on getting us suspects, but it's early days yet. Once we know who they are, we take them out."

The Lieutenant nodded to the AIA agent, "Correct, Agent . We're going for both. You'll be out of uniform for this one-I'm sure November is used to a few missions like this. You'll need to keep a low profile and be prudent about who exactly you shoot. We're here to fix a problem, not cause new ones."

London

Rajapaske shrugged armoured shoulders, voice flat "Few less husks." After a moment she looked away, "More people too. When I was here last, it was just-the sky was black with smoke and all you could hear was gunfire. Now at least it looks like people live here."

"Kid gloves" that, oh now that rankled a bit. Mean, of course she was right strictly speaking but that nice little turn of phrase had all ten of them bristling. Oh it was only in little movements, small hints. May's hands tightening on his datapad. St. Jame's fingers stilling. A thinning of a combat engineer's lips, the slight arch of a vanguard-class's eyebrow. "Kid gloves" like they would break the civvies just by brushing by them. "No witnesses" like they didn't know how to do their own fucking jobs.

You see this was why nobody liked the AIA. Obvious is as obvious does but (also and sadly) obvious isn't exactly wrong a lot of the time and it wasn't wrong now (on a somewhat related note, the mention of no explosives and no crowds sent an unvoiced wave of sadness rolling over all the engies and vanguards present).

Vukovic, meanwhile, leaned forward, features as expressive as the side of a mountain. The RoE made sense, it was reasonable, it was, frankly, probably what he would do if he was in a command position. But as the man who had to go out into the field...


he didn't like it. Leashes chafed around the men, choked out the desire to take some of the more dangerous risks and, in these kinds of situations (aka the ones with an armed insurgency aka the ones where tits will inevitably go up), rare was the time where you could get the kind of accuracy and security that was implied with these orders.

Oh they would do their duty by all means, they were soldiers, they did their duty, but that didn't mean they had to enjoy it.

Across the table Joshua inclined his head as the Lt answered the AIA agent.

That was something at least; nobody on his side of the table was any stranger to this kind of op.

Angry civvies? Check. Mandated stealth? Check.

Wet-work? Counter terrorism? Dire consequences?

Check. Check. And Check.

Vohk observed his companion, noting the contrast of emotions. The no doubt horrific presence of the Reapers and their armies, as terrible as they'd been, had ironically suffered from overexposure, to the point the men and women fighting them had to desensitize themselves. It was either that, or lose it.

Vohk pursed his lips at the thought. Truth be told, he'd tried to do the same, during the siege on the Citadel, and later during training, he'd tried to believe that he'd be able to succeed in conditioning himself like that. That he had succeeded. After Loki, he was fairly certain he'd been deluding himself. The whole affair had made whatever discipline he'd gained feel like crystal glass, ready to fracture from the pressure.

He shook the thought away, even as he noted how Rajapaske had looked away at the mention of the people. He smiled wanly.

"Yes. Plenty of people and no smoke. You know, a few hundred years ago, this whole city was almost destroyed in a fire. I imagine that when they started to rebuild, they'd never believe that, centuries later, they'd be able to pick themselves up after something worse, and start over once again. "

The barracks edged ever close, and Vohk, hoping he was hitting on all the right notes, finished what he was saying.

"Call me a sap, but for me, its a beautiful thing to think about. A beautiful thing you helped make possible."