(( Open RP )) Stride Across the Stars

Message traffic on Vanguard's Ultra-Low Band COMMS network wasn't exactly rare. Still, critical bits and pieces of intelligence necessary for Earth's defense against many threats, including the Rikti, were sent out from time to time so that those agents of Vanguard, formal and informal, both in Paragon and the Rogue Isles, could be aware.

Inside the Vanguard Office in Cap au Diable, Assistant Deputy Undersecretary Talitha Laurent, designated UNSCSHA Special Projects Directorate liaison to Vanguard, quickly reviewed the ULB-COMMS message she'd painstakingly constructed from the various sources of Intel available to the Special Council and Vanguard, and then pressed the "SEND" key.

Vanguard knew what the Rikti used Dropship hulls for. The skies over Paragon, the Etoilles, and other major cities had suffered from bombardment and invasion before. Still, it wasn't a given anything of the sort was imminent. What was needed was preemption. Let them know they would not simply be allowed to amass forces while Earth's defenders cowered in fear.

The conference room had been full of Vanguard brass; but even that couldn't keep the Longbow and Arachnos representatives from hurling invectives at each other. Marshal Drammond had insisted that the virus was Longbow's creation. Everyone knew their Cyber Division had been preparing specialized defense system worms since the first Praetorian invasions and Longbow's capture of advanced clockwork designs. Talitha had to position herself carefully; Longbow would immediately suspect a plot if she spoke in their defense, and Drammond already considered her a traitor.

She had plans for him, indeed, but those would be held for another day. Today, she had seen the execution traces taken from the compromised control core in Vanguard's lab; that code wasn't human origin, but there were bits and pieces that seemed ... out of place. The day-zero hacks, the compiler signatures ... Borland? Really? Who used that anymore? ... it had the superficial look of human codes, but the convoluted infection kernel of the code had to have been developed by an AI, and one that wasn't well trained for modern ExArch computers. Far too clever. If it wasn't alien, then a new cyber-criminal had broken us into a new paradigm. Vanguard Agents in the field had to be warned against the former; and if the latter, it wouldn't be Vanguard's concern for long.

Cybersecurity in the Etoilles reported first; three days, minimum, to shut down, clear, and restore operating functionality to Sky Control, the whole system being taken down simultaneously to refresh from a three-week old read-only checkpoint. Even then, they couldn't be sure; too many systems had cache memory in too many places. Paragon's War Wall Control had similar problems, and they couldn't even contain their systems yet. Too many supposedly isolated processors had been hit, and some were responding to external instructions, but no one could identify just -how-. Paragon's war walls could be taken down at will, and the Etoilles were defenseless from above. It didn't take a criminal mastermind to see where this was going.

Across the ULB COMMS System, a flash message arrives.