Operation Kurgan - the Story So Far

I feel bad that Elite Patrons don't really get much in the monthly update, so I thought I'd start telling you a bit of the story of Operation Kurgan. As we're on month three, what I'm giving you here is "the story so far" rather than the full, novel-y fiction that'll be in the final book.

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Following the discovery of the Namib Facility and the revelation of the existence of a secret group within (and above) the Skymasters, the embarrassed Venusian command ceded access to the facility to the Martians in return for a round of settlement talks.

So much, so political. But Mars's intelligence community, dominated by the Aichar caste, still wanted very much to know what it was the so-called "Skylords" had discovered. Given how much prime, bleeding-edge tech was left behind, the fact that only a single unit had been extracted and spirited away was of enormous concern.

"Operation Kurgan" is their attempt to allay that concern by hunting down either the lost tech or the people who had taken it, by whatever means are deemed necessary. Kurgan operates as a triad, with separate operations and intelligence teams working under the supervision of a pan-caste oversight group. The organisation's Head of Operations bears the codename ZEUS. His opposite number in Intelligence is HERA. The oversight body is OLYMPUS.

ZEUS assembles a number of "K" teams to undertake operations, amongst which is Team Kondor.

Part of the oversight agreement at Kurgan is that the whole project runs under independent media scrutiny. The journalists assigned to Intelligence and Operations theoretically have access to everything and can write anything, but there is a two-year moratorium on any publications, and a five-year one on anything exceptionally classified. That's Mars years, by the way - they are about twice as long as an Earth year.

Mars has a complicated and conflicted relationship with its media, but the idea behind this is that Operation Kurgan has a clear time limit within which to achieve its mission and, come what may, in no more than ten Earth years, everything will be out in the open. The object is to make sure that Kurgan doesn't overstep its rules of engagement or do anything illegal or immoral.

That said, no journalist can wait four years to publish. So a limited amount of "live" publishing is permitted. However, as it is highly sanitized for operational security, the journalists complain that they need some quality stock footage to work with that isn't jeopardized by security classification.

As a result, Kondor is sent out with a journalist (or two) to perform a number of "basic" local interdiction missions, dealing with criminals and militia groups. These form the basis for the first mission in which the team performs "stunts" for the cameras.

However, before too long, ZEUS suspects that someone in HERA's team might be working for a group called the Aphroditic Order - Martians who have been won over to the most extreme forms of Venusian philosophy and who want to overturn the Martian government and the caste system and who are widely considered to be a Fifth Column for Venus on Earth. In order to smoke them out, he calls on Kondor - because they've been doing "stunt" missions, they are the least likely team to be implicated. Kondor is sent to perform an infiltration of a Martian tech facility in order to steal classified data that ZEUS believes an AphOrd infiltrator will be unable to resist stealing themselves. The catch, of course, is that the team has to try to steal the data without, actually, killing anyone.

The mission is a success and the infiltrator is identified, but not before she is able to slip away. Kondor is sent after her and, after a long hunt, she is tracked down in Singapore (a shattered labyrinth and something of a "free-for-all", being packed with stealable technology but far from the headquarters of either Venus (Africa) or Mars (South America) (this story is this month's Mission of the Month).

Before she can escape, the infiltrator is persuaded to come quietly with Team Kondor. She reveals that she isn't AphOrd but, rather, an agent of a senior government group above OLYMPUS who suspect that ZEUS might, himself, have a secret agenda. By way of evidence, she shows them what they stole from the Martian facility: the plans for the first SLAP drive - a space-folding system that would allow vessels to travel between Earth and Mars in minutes rather than months. Her superiors are worried that ZEUS is part of a faction seeking to break away from Mars entirely and claim dominance of Earth, using SLAP technology to run rings around anyone who could challenge them.

As we head into Mission Four, in August, the team must find out the truth for themselves!