Volume 2 - Chapter 66 - Squad Time II
| “Colonel Harlan Vey,” the interviewer began, “thank you for joining us. I’ll get straight to it: A UHF world was lost. Command leadership was decapitated during an enemy offensive. And now we know there was a traitor involved. How could something like that happen?” Colonel Vey did not bristle. He folded his hands on the table and answered calmly. “Because spies and traitors are hard to catch. Harder than most people want to admit.” The interviewer leaned in slightly. “Even with Faction Traits in play?” “Especially with Faction Traits,” Vey replied without missing a beat. “There’s a popular idea that Traits make everything easy. That we can just point at someone and force the truth out of them. But that isn’t how reality works. Every activation of a Trait comes with a Merit cost. For us especially, but also for them. You can’t just burn Merit on every suspicion that crosses your desk—in extraordinary circumstances, we do. But not as a general rule. You’d be burning down your own army to embers before the first shot is even fired.” “So you didn’t test them,” the interviewer said pointedly. “We couldn’t,” Vey said. “Not at the scale required. Not responsibly.” He continued before the next question could even come. “People also imagine that we can just put every Marine into the DDS and let the AIs sort things out over time. And… In theory, yes, if we have the time. In practice, however, the answer is simply: No. There are limits. You see, respawn chambers are finite. When a ship is en route to a Battlefield, we board tens of thousands of Marines along the way. Many of them never enter the DDS at all. They come aboard combat-ready days before deployment. “Add to that, a large portion of UHF Navy personnel being Unintegrated and you have a large collection of people that you can’t simply Faction Trait check, even if you wanted to,” Vey said. “And even those who are Integrated often stay outside the DDS. Someone has to keep the ships running, after all. Someone has to manage the reactors, the engines, and calculate the jump windows.” The interviewer nodded slowly. “So there are gaps.” “There are realities,” Vey corrected gently. “Add Void Incursion response teams manned by our own Marines. Add long-term external deployments made up of both Marines, Navy and AD. Add the fact that the Allbright System enables some very dangerous Abilities for assassins and infiltrators. And suddenly you’re no longer looking for one failure point. You’re looking at thousands of moving parts that all need to be perfect, all the time.” “But this time,” the interviewer said, “they weren’t.” Vey exhaled. “This time, someone happened to choose the exact right path. The exact right moment. They snuck in, then struck at headquarters and cut the head off the chain, just when the chain was being pulled taut. It worked.” The interviewer paused, then asked the question many were likely thinking. “So why should people still trust the UHF Marine Corps to handle things properly, if something like this happens?” Vey looked straight into the camera. “Because you’re all hearing about it.” The interviewer frowned. “Elaborate, if you would?” “If failures like this were common,” Vey said, “they wouldn’t be news. They’d be statistics, and I wouldn’t be here to listen to your questions and give answers. The very fact that this incident is being dissected across the entire UHF right now tells you something important...” “That your defences usually hold,” the interviewer said quietly, realisation dawning. “I always knew you were one of the smart ones,” Vey confirmed with a smile and a nod. “It means that our preventive measures work far more often than they fail. We caught tens, even hundreds of thousands of threats you’ll never hear about. This one got through. And because it did, we are tearing the system apart to make sure it never happens the same way again.” There was a short silence. Then the interviewer asked, “And the battlegroups responsible for that planet?” Vey’s jaw tightened, just slightly. “They didn’t die for nothing. And the person who betrayed them will not be remembered as clever. Only as temporary.” — [Excerpt from UHF Public Affairs Network – (Integrated) Interview Segment, PFC 924]
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