=The Minervan Fleet and Sis=
**Posted by:** Sun Jeong, Sentinel <**__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__**>
[[image:CronosFleet_MaciejRebisz.png width="800" height="492" align="right"]]
Some interesting things happened in the early days of the Jovian Republic. A diverse array of military, intelligence, and government groups and figureheads, many of them the only remnants of larger institutions that didn’t survive the Fall, came together to establish a new state. The Junta would have you believe that the Security Council stepped seamlessly into their dictatorial role, as if mandated by heaven. What the sanitized historical records don’t capture is the complete mess of shady negotiations, faction-forming, threats, bribes, backstabbing, and outright power grabs. Nor do they tell you who was on the losing side.
When the coup that established the Security Council came about, not all of the various military units that had coalesced in Jovian space were involved. It quickly became clear that the determinist faction was going to hold the most sway in the new Junta. This ideology of isolationism and defensiveness did not sit well with certain military commanders who had pushed for a hawkish and proactive foreign policy—one that would first eliminate nearby security threats and then seek to build a wider defense network through pacification of strategic habitats throughout the solar system. After a brief power struggle, a small group chose to disappear into exile, taking their ships—and a number of civilians—with them.
You’ve probably heard of Jovian Space Force Intelligence (JSFI). What you probably don’t know is that it was first spearheaded by Colonel Diego Grossman. Yeah, that Grossman, the one who led the assault on the TITAN shipyard found in the Martian Trojans, which would have failed if he hadn’t rammed his ship into it. He somehow survived and made it to Jovian space, where he was decorated as a war hero. Unfortunately for Grossman, Zane McFarlane was hellbent on bringing all Jovian intelligence assets under the sway of Security Council Intelligence. Grossman resisted, but he didn’t have anywhere near McFarlane’s political leverage. Grossman was ousted and charged with treason, but he managed to escape, taking some of his top agents with him. His name was scrubbed from Jovian history.
Naturally, these two renegade groups came together and established an alliance. The splinter military units re-branded themselves as the Minervan Fleet, establishing their own Admiralty and military government. Grossman’s intelligence unit now calls itself the Special Intelligence Secretariat (SIS), and works alongside the armada. Both groups consider themselves the rightful heirs to the Jovian throne. More distressing, however, is that their hawkish views have grown even more radicalized. The Minervan Admiralty holds a sweeping definition of x-risks, now considering virtually all of transhumanity a threat, effectively making it a terrorist organization bent on wiping out the rest of its species.
Our intelligence on these groups comes primarily from a sentinel who managed to infiltrate the fleet. Though we lost contact quickly, they did manage to sneak off several encrypted messages. The rest of the information is assembled from various incident reports that until recently we thought were unrelated.
==The Fleet==
The Minervan Fleet operates on the far edge of the solar system, presumably deep in the Kuiper Belt, and possibly far out of the plane of the ecliptic. We suspect they go to great measures to stealth their ships and likely coast dark for long periods, so as not to signal their location with their torch flares.
The armada is centered around the //Minerva//, which is more of a mobile habitat/carrier than a proper warship, albeit with more weaponry than a dozen scum fleets. It is essentially an asteroid beehive hab fitted with massive rockets, holding enough warrens and tunnels to house thousands. Much of its real estate, however, is devoted to research labs and weapons development.
The //Minerva// is accompanied by a fleet of dozens of warships and support craft. We don’t have an exact count on what they have, but we know at least three destroyers and two cruisers went missing from Jovian space right around the time they defected. We suspect they’ve pirated at least a dozen ships in the years since, and even their civilian/commercial craft have been equipped with weaponry. The //Minerva// itself carries a full complement of fighters and several thousand marines. Fleet craft are not equipped with AIs and are refit with analog rather than digital electronics, to decrease their potential attack surface from hostile hackers or AIs.
All told, we suspect the fleet is home to around 20,000, though this is based on a lot of guesswork. While we are not aware of the fleet possessing shipyard or antimatter facilities, our analysts think both of these would be high priority objectives. It is highly possible that the fleet is already constructing such stations deep in the Kuiper Belt, and they likely have an antimatter source/supplier in-system. We suspect the Minervan Fleet of numerous incidents of piracy and attacks on brinker and exhuman outposts, all in the Kuiper Belt or Neptunian Trojans. They have thoroughly destroyed such habitats, leaving no survivors.
==The Admiralty==
The fleet’s current Admiral is Kjell Osorio, a former naval commander who came out of retirement to help organize and command coalition space fleets defending Earth orbit during the Fall. Though of advanced age, Osorio has only taken limited longevity treatments. Like the Junta, the Admiral controls the fleet with tight military discipline.
Our psychological profile of Osorio paints him as dedicated to cleansing the solar system of transhumanity, one habitat at a time. He believes the world went mad ten years ago and the only humans left got the raw end of the deal by having to settle for Jupiter. No one with biomods, mesh inserts, or any type of augmentation more advanced than clunky, mechanical prosthetics is trusted or allowed into a position of influence. He doesn’t even trust the Jovians, believing they have sold out to us transhuman monsters. Osorio is, however, more than willing to attempt to turn the weapons of their enemies against them.
Interestingly, Osorio maintains direct contact with elements within the Terrestrial Ancestral Heritage
Group (TAHI), a paramilitary “lobbyist” group in the Jovian Republic. In fact, our infiltrator was originally working their way within TAHI ranks when they were tapped for a special project and shipped out to the Minervan Fleet.
==The President==
Despite being under military control, the fleet does adhere to the pretense of representative democracy. The civilian side of the fleet is overseen by President Avery Affricano. As the former American Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Affricano was the next in line for presidential succession, had there been a government left, and the only cabinet member to survive the Fall. Her claim to leadership was blocked by the Jovian Security Council’s coup.
According to our infiltrator, there has been some tension recently between the President and Admiral, as the civilians in the fleet have been ruffled by the military’s heavy handling of affairs they feel should be democratically controlled. Admiral Osorio has made it quite clear that the fleet remains on a war footing, and as long as the transhuman menace is at hand, he will call the shots.
The President is not above her own aggressive maneuvers, however. She reportedly had her security detail airlock a life support engineer on the barest suspicion that the woman had tampered with the climate control in the President’s private quarters.
The fact that the engineer was related to the Admiral’s chief of staff was presumably an unfortunate coincidence.
==The SIS==
While the fleet builds up its strength in hiding, the SIS carries on the fleet’s aggressive, bioconservative, anti-transhuman agenda throughout the solar system. To this end, SIS cells seek out TITAN technology, WMDs, and dangerous nanotech. They then look for ways to deploy it against transhuman settlements, going for maximum destruction and loss of life. With these recent revelations, we have linked several terror attacks to the group, including a nanoswarm outbreak on a Uranian anarchist hab and a recent attempt to redirect an ice comet shipment directly into Extropia. Their activities are confined largely to the outer system because it allows them to get support from the Minervan Fleet and because outer system settlements tend to be small, isolated, and far from help—low-hanging fruit.
Because they won’t resleeve or egocast, SIS teams travel by ship. This means their ops are long duration just because of transit times. They use flat morphs exclusively and keep to an extreme biocon line on what kind of augmentations they’ll take: no stacks, no biomods or other bioware, and no implanted nanoware. They do use cyberware, but they stick to physical modifications like reflex boosters and avoid anything that affects thought processes or radically modifies their physiology. As far as gear goes, they’re much less picky; they like using jammed bots, combat drugs, and nanotech.
The good news about the SIS is that it’s a small organization. Firewall estimates the SIS has no more than twenty active field agents. They work solo or in groups of two or three. Don’t underestimate them just because they’re flats, this is more than enough to do a great deal of damage.
==Experiments==
Our infiltrator was taken by TAHI to the fleet specifically to help with weapon research. In the course of this, they discovered two disturbing things. First, both the Admiralty and SIS have taken a keen interest in asyncs, but as weapons, not allies. They recognize that asyncs are useful for interfacing with some types of TITAN technology, so they have captured a number of asyncs for the sole purpose of weaponizing them. Captive asyncs are fitted with TITAN weaponry and subjected to psychosurgical behavioral modification, making them pliant tools. Weaponized asyncs, referred to colloquially as freaks by the SIS, suffer from severe mental trauma due to the treatment they’ve received and can be as dangerous to their handlers as to the enemy.
The second and more disturbing find was that the fleet had come into the possession of a cache of TITAN technology—possibly raided from an exhuman nest. The haul was apparently quite large and included a number of unusual artifacts and rare weapons systems—some of which were already fitted to the Minerva’s hull. One unusual item was described as looking like a miniature hand-sized Pandora gate enclosure; it’s purpose was unidentified. The Admiralty and SIS are hard at work figuring out how to best use these devices against transhumanity.

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