The physical security aspect of this operation has been a nightmare. Though it is also, by far, the most visible aspect to the largest portion of the world. The section of the NEMA around Boston is densely populated at the coast and slowly thins as you move farther inland.
In order to setup and maintain a quarantine, the forces needed something they could use to stop people from trying to leave the area (or get in.) A lot of those “some-things” have been bodies of water. Rivers, lakes, and streams are all over the area, and those (combined with some quickly constructed walls and destroyed roads) helped to lock down the area. Since then, the majority of the boundary has been solidified along I-95 around most of the city. The forces arrayed over land, water, and air are a varied mix of corporate forces.
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These forces spent a lot of time in the first days of thequarantine glaring at each other instead of the walls.
That’s actually been the cause for all the near breakouts.
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StoneLAND
The land defenses are actually being led by a non-cor-porate force. UCAS National Guard forces, along with their contracted advisors from the CDC, are in charge according to the official NEMAQSC information. The forces at their disposal come from Ares, Renraku, MCT, Aztechnology, Lone Star, NeoNET, and Saeder-Krupp.
They all wear the NEMAQSC patch on their uniforms, but it’s usually pretty easy to tell where they’re origi-nally from.
Ares offered advice (that the UCAS National Guard is happily ignoring) on how to run a quarantine from their experience in Chicago. But they were actually re-moved from the Security Coalition Council for a short period of time after the Brookline incident due to sus-picion that they had a part in undermining the security in the area to make the National Guard look bad. They were cleared, but they’ve been stuck working every middle-of-nowhere spot the Guard can find for them since that time.
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Ares is pissed and bribable. They have been rumored tobe the easiest way into the QZ. But it’s a one-way trip. They don’t want any more bad publicity, so they are as tight as everyone else on letting people out.
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SticksRenraku and MCT are working together to keep the roadways cleared and move traffic around the QZ in the smoothest ways possible. They also use this optimiza-tion to spot anyone who might be heading toward the zone or making multiple passes over the same area.
MCT has thousands of drones in the air at any one time.
These are the low flyers covering the ground. It doesn’t even include the forces that the air guards have flying around. This mass of drones can be helpful if someone wants to get a look inside the zone with their own drone and can fake an MCT ID that can hold up for a short time.
I wouldn’t recommend trying to hack this network, but stupid people can try—and feel the wrath of GOD.
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I have 1.2 seconds of footage from that trip. It was worth it.>
Slamm-0!Aztechnology and Lone Star have had their forces blended because someone thinks it’s funny to have the Texas corp and the Azzies working together. They keep a close eye on each other, but the number of off-duty brawls that occur in the bars near their stations is off the charts. They’re mostly assigned security in the rural and wild areas. Those areas are also where they have put all the holding facilities for people who try to get in. These places are full of distraught family members just trying to get in to see if their relatives are ok. Well, them and the runners who have tried to get in. These spots are popular targets for runs to breakout friends, assets, and even the occasional rich exec who got pinched and has the cash to get out. No one has been released from the holding facilities since they were assembled, and the of-ficial word is that no one will until the quarantine is lifted.
Discussions have even been in the works to move these people to other facilities.
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I don’t know if any of you caught the five-second newsstory about a mass breakout from a facility near Westwood.
It happened about a week ago and was reported by a nosy KSAF reporter staking the place out. It got quickly covered up and the reporter is now MIA, but an entire holding facility escaped. The same facility has also been suffering a rash of illnesses that look a lot like CFD infection, which is what drew the reporter to the area. My speculation is a head case got themselves captured and then spread the infection to those around them. I could be wrong, but it’s a tale of warning.
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HannibelleThe urban security force is a mix of National Guard, Minuteman Security, Lone Star, and Knight Errant officers.
These four blend together like oil, water, and gasoline—
their integration is lacking, but they make one hell of a volatile and dangerous combination. NeoNET’s Minute-man officers think they know everything about Boston and so do the Knight Errant officers who have been here for years, while the Lone Star officers think they know everything about everything. The National Guard offi-cers in charge of all this spend most of their time trying to keep the infighting to a minimum while attempting to keep up the image of a unified force by putting members of different corps’ forces into the same squads. It’s a no-ble gesture and I’m sure it worked in basic training to get that sense of brotherhood, even between folks who may have hated each other for years, but this is the world of megacorporations. Those megas have as much identi-ty as any nation, and the National Guard doesn’t realize that their plan is not about members of the same nation getting along; it’s more like putting members of enemy nations together. Silly national citizens.
The urban forces are deployed in seven-man squads to patrol the evacuation zones and keep the squatters out while also working the wall to keep people inside the zone. This aspect has been the hardest for the Na-tional Guard members. With the zero-zone policy in ef-fect, they aren’t even supposed to give a warning. Most of the time they do, and get reprimanded for it, but a lot of lives have been saved with those warnings.
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The Guard members actually have a running tally of thenumber of citizens they didn’t have to shoot. It’s kept quiet but others have heard and some of the more bloodthirsty corp officers have started shooting the citizens the Guard members warn. The situation on the wall has a lot of tension between the corpsec guys and the Guardsmen.
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Stone>
The report here is nice and all but it’s missing one ofthe biggest stories of the quarantine: The way all of these people are watching each other. There have been numerous incidents of friendly fire covered up, and most of those were not actually friendly fire. They were members of the teams on the outside flipping sides for no apparent reason. Beyond the corporate rivalry here, there is something else going on. I’m not altogether sure this quarantine is as effective as they are trying to make it sound.
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Picador>
That would match some of the rumors I’ve picked up.Looks like the forces all around the wall are being tested and separated frequently. The tests are likely for infection, and most of the separations seem to be along local vs.
non-local lines.
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KaneSaeder-Krupp is the engineering corps for the land defense forces. They build the walls, bulldoze the roads, and tear down the buildings. They are responsible for fortifying the QZ and they are very good at it. They are also very good at deflecting attention from the fact that they are building fortifications around a city in quaran-tine for encephalitis. A lot of their work is done at night.
Teams of S-K troops will clear a building during the day, and then the engineers come by at night and turn that building into a stretch of rubble wall. The next night an-other crew turns the rubble into a real wall. They’ve done quite a bit of work on the landscape of the Boston area in the past month.
WATER
Aquatic defenses have been interesting to watch. Ev-eryone has been talking about and waiting for the mo-ment the small force of UCAS naval vessels that are quarantined in the harbor might decide to make a run
at the blockade. It hasn’t happened yet, but everyone thinks it will. I hope it doesn’t. That would be a seri-ous waste of life, since the UCAS Navy and Yamatetsu Naval Force (compliments of Evo) have a small arma-da hanging around just outside the harbor waiting to squash any such run.
The harbor and the ocean are actually the easiest waterways to protect. Sonar buoys have been dropped in a line out in the water. The buoys are topped by dog-brained autocannon turrets with some decent radar sys-tems set to warn anything they detect via comm message and loudspeaker to turn back before they open fire. When the sonar detects anything it starts tracking and calls in nearby forces, which usually is a depth-charge-equipped cutter or an Osprey loaded with torpedoes. Rumors have it there are some hunter-killer subs in the area as well as droned subs but I have nothing to confirm those.
The tough part of the waterway protection is actually the rivers, streams, and lakes. Renraku and Aztechnolo-gy are the big force suppliers on the inland waterways.
Both have famous small-boat divisions under their cor-porate umbrella, and they’re using those divisions to supply themselves. Right now they are also setting up some subsurface monitoring systems in preparation for the winter. When it gets cold and everything freezes, a well-equipped diver could go under the ice on one side of a lake and pop up in a side stream or even a well-hid-den inlet. It’s possible that could happen now, but the boats on patrol are all running some nice sonar equip-ment, so it’s probably a little tough to pull off.
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Not to mention the bubbles. The diver would need are-breather setup to prevent their bubble trail giving them away. I can’t imagine those are very common in Boston.
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KaneDroned sensors have been used extensively along the rivers and streams to warn nearby forces of anything strange. In the more rural areas the troops that check these out have been eating a lot of venison when they find the sensors tripped by deer. Many of the sensors in those areas are inside the Quarantine Zone to give units time to respond. Installation of those sensors involved quite a few incidents early on, including members of the Guard and even local corporate forces slipping away into the QZ.
AIR
The entire Quarantine Zone is a militarized flight zone.
The only flights allowed to cross the airspace, which extends about twenty miles past the land-based edg-es, are authorized military and corporate flights. Even most of the supply drops, mainly run by Renraku and Ares, are done from altitude near the edge of this area, taking advantage of the prevailing winds to push the supplies into the zone. Those are general supply drops,
intended for the average citizens. Corporate supply drops have been allowed to fly into the zone and make drops right where they need them. According to the official NEMAQSC records, three of these trips have re-sulted in crashes when the craft were attacked.
Much of the air security is provided by drones, most-ly launched and maintained from a fleet of Skyswimmer airships. The airships have been fitted with Suncell tech to provide power, which is especially useful given the power needs of all the drones they’re hauling. They cur-rently have the best kind of air force: one that is always in the air. That’s not to say they don’t have other craft at the ready. Aztechnology has brought in a dozen of their small Firebrand fighters to assist, and the National Guard’s Air Corps has four Eagle Cs on loan from the Air Force. I’m also quite sure the regular UCAS Air Force is staying on ready alert in the area just in case the situa-tion gets out of hand. Or more out of hand.
Armed and transport helicopters are constantly buzzing all around the edge of the Quarantine Zone.
They fly low and run wall patrols as well as move materi-als and men to areas for construction. The transports are usually escorted by a flight of drones. The more drones, the more valuable whatever is on board usually is. While S-K handles most of the materials moving, Ares and the Guard Air Corps usually provide support, and Renraku usually moves supplies around. There are ground- and water-based air defense weapons around as well, but most of the time they are kept out of sight. It tends to frighten the locals to see those kinds of arms deployed in a situation like this. Plus it doesn’t match the enceph-alitis outbreak cover story.