They set light to the horizon with a tac-nuke – a slow burn destined to be the only source of light under a bruise black sky. Red Wolf One was in geosynchronous orbit forty eight hours later, and Alpha Dog was sat in the situation room trying to work up a scenario with his best men on how they might be able to formulate an adequate response to the naked aggression already in play.
Diplomatic solutions had been taken off the table in the middle of the previous week when a rogue actor had walked a dirty bomb, stitched into the cavity where their appendix had been, into the heart of the central city they had claimed as part of the occupied territory, but which they now had to abandon. Tanken Prime was not a place that they wanted to be in anymore, but because of their very public commitment to the locals and the Galactic Confederation, they were obliged to stay and do something.
Red Wolf weren’t officially sanctioned, and they weren’t acknowledged by anyone; and there was also a D-Notice preventing any reporting on it. This didn’t stop there being a couple of embedded reporters gathering data, but if a single word found its way into print their media outlets would find themselves shut down. Red Wolf didn’t exist – they were a sunset operation, brought in to wrap things up. Red Wolf had originally been designated as a rescue operation, but the term rescue had been expanded to include the notion of military action when necessary – they had always had that capability, they had just not been sanctioned as a private organisation.
Repair could be done once they had eliminated the potential of further enemy action. In a theatre that had already undergone an attack of such a scale they weren’t going to drop sentient assets into the warzone, so they had remote operated semi-intelligent agents that had the remit of seek and capture for anyone in the command structure, and kill on sight for any footsoldiers, or anyone of dubious allegiance.
A separate task force was despatched to find friendlies and bring them on board. They had designed on aggressive planet-sculpt for one of the planets in the system that was most pliable in terms of the deployment of their Genesis Technology.
The whole plan was to be in and out as quickly as possible, so that no one could nail down who they were or what they were doing, because knowledge of them would damage their ability to do what they did.
It was calendared out and began to roll as a plan a day later. The enemy organisation was organised into a 666 strong group – organised entirely to unnerve them – not that it did. There were 6 leaders who they captured, two of whom died in custody. One was kept for the data he could give on the supply lines that snaked out of the system and through the whole multiverse, and the rest they executed, when it became obvious that there was nothing to be gained from keeping them alive.
Red Wolf One was a shimmering mirage that would appear elsewhere. The mission was a success.