2952-10-09 – Tales from the Service: The Incarnation Home Front
Duncan here. I am back to Ashkelon after having conducted a few interviews. One of them, with Captain Samuel Bosch of the heavy cruiser Raymond Spruance (who needs no introduction in this space) you either have already seen by time of posting or will shortly see on the main vidcast program, so I will not discuss it here except to note that this embed team expected Bosch to ride out the rest of the war in a desk posting, and are pleasantly surprised to see him back in action commanding a Seventh Fleet capital warship.
The interview relevant to today’s feed item is the one I did with Naval Intelligence lieutenant Kirsten Reid, lately come from investigating what was left of the Incarnation depot on Hausen’s World. Colonel Reid sat down with me for a rare one-on-one interview to discuss what we know of Incarnation civilian life based on the findings at Hausen’s and elsewhere. Nojus, obviously, was back on Ashkelon maintaining the feed item, as I did not know initially when I would be back.
Because of its length, I will be splitting this interview across two weeks’ text feed items.
D.L.C. - Duncan Chaudhri – Junior editor and wartime field reporter for Cosmic Background
K.R.R. - Lieutenant Kirsten R. Reid is a Naval Intelligence senior analyst assigned to Seventh Fleet. Recently, she has been at Hausen’s World, the site of Operation HELLESPONT, examining the wealth of Incarnation intelligence left in the supply depot captured there.
[D.L.C.] Lieutenant Reid, it is a pleasure. I don’t think we’ve met before.
[K.R.R.] We have not met, though I already feel like I know you, Mr. Chaudhri. I have been reading your text feed for nearly four years. I saw you at one of Admiral Abarca’s press events late last year, but I did not get a chance to speak to you then.
[D.L.C.] Lieutenant, I am flattered. Surely in your line of work there’s far more interesting reading material to keep you busy than our feed.
[K.R.R.] I think you have a rather romantic idea of what we do in Naval Intelligence. Most of what we work with really is terrifyingly dull reading, and the stories you publish are anything but.
[D.L.C.] Thank you again, but I must say I am not here for an endorsement to use in our advertising, Lieutenant. I’m here-
[K.R.R.] Call me Kirsten, please. I was a civilian analyst before the war, and those stuffy titles don’t fit me very well.
[D.L.C.] Kirsten. We had planned to talk about some of what data from Hausen’s World has revealed about life on the Incarnation home worlds.
[K.R.R.] That is what we discussed, and I brought a few documents that I am cleared to share with your publication that will expand on what we talk about here.
[D.L.C.] It is good that this was cleared for release. I’ve had something of a variable experiences with the Naval Intelligence clearance process, as you probably know if you’re a regular reader.
[K.R.R.] Of course. Fortunately, this is a collection that has no bearing on the military situation but which I think your readers will find quite interesting. We have collected a little bit of data on what the Nate home worlds are like from devices captured on other worlds, including a few rare video recordings, but the Hausen’s depot seems to have been a mail stop for messages and packages being taken back from the Incarnation fleet to their home worlds. Unfortunately, they are careful to conceal the coordinates of the worlds themselves, even from their own rank and file, but we know quite a bit now about those worlds.
[D.L.C.] I suppose if we’re reading mail sent by their service personnel back to their loved ones at home, that would make sense. They don’t use a Hypercast relay chain to send data to and from their fleet, of course, otherwise we would have found some of their Hypercast nodes already.
[K.R.R.] That is correct. Incarnation technology is very capable of creating a Hypercast relay network, but they do not do so. They seem to consider the network a vulnerability, and employ a system of what amounts to high-capacity mail courier vessels to move data and small parcels around their space in a relatively regular manner. We have never captured one of these courier ships, but they seem to be a civilian government rather than a military institution, with the fleet having no control over their movements.
[D.L.C.] That is strange to hear, but I suppose I’m used to the fleet mail system and Hypercast relay network, both run and maintained by the military.
[K.R.R.] Yes, it is strange how weak their Naval institution seems to be. We are used to the Confederated government being somewhat subsidiary to the Naval authorities, and the Rahl Hegemony’s leaders being military leaders first and civil leaders second, but that was not the way of governments before the Terran-Rattanai War. The Incarnation, being descended from a Ladeonist schismatic group from that period, seems to have organized itself more along the lines of a civil government with a military arm. As far as we can tell, not even the Immortals program or the Inquisition, both of which have featured in your text feed, are military institutions. They’re initiatives of the civil government, created to infiltrate and control the Naval forces at a relatively low level.
[D.L.C.] They don’t trust their own fleet?
[K.R.R.] Their leaders keep the fleet on a very tight leash. They trust them to fight the war, but grand strategy is coming all the way from the top.
[D.L.C.] Very interesting. Who is at the top?
[K.R.R.] A single dictator with the title The Incarnate. They don’t ever use his or her name directly, but supposedly everything comes down from a single person, probably a person whose brain is implanted extensively to take some of the load, like they do to their senior officers.
[D.L.C.] I shudder to think of what horrors such a leader might do to himself to maintain power.
[K.R.R.] At least as much as he’s doing to the Immortals. Fortunately, it seems that the universal implantation thing we see in their military forces does not extend to the civil population – based on stills and video we captured on Hausen’s, it's only overseers, law enforcement, and government officials who get implants, mostly. The bulk of the population is unmodified, or at least, is not visibly modified with that characteristic temple implant you see on captured Incarnation personnel. The lower on the totem pole one is, the less they are implanted.
[D.L.C.] Interesting. I suppose that makes sense. Implanting tens of billions would be hideously expensive.
[K.R.R.] To say nothing of the percentage that would die from unforeseen complications of the procedure. Perhaps one in five hundred by our analysis of the technology. Even with as many as they do implant, the death toll must be grim.
[D.L.C.] I can imagine, not that I want to. And all those people live in fear of implanted and augmented law enforcement?
[K.R.R.] Their system is not really based on fear, as far as we can tell. Military personnel seem unafraid to speak their minds to their families back home, and if there is any censorship of their negative opinions of the progress of the war, it is done back there, and in a way that the personnel censored do not suffer for it. There is some rule by force – we have hints that the Inquisition is also responsible for hunting down any opposition to the Incarnation’s program – but most people are on board with the ideas, if not precisely the individual steps, of the regime.
[D.L.C.] They’re all Ladeonists, then? Not just the leaders and the military?
[K.R.R.] Incarnation civilians have been educated by Ladeonist ideologues for at least four generations. It is the culture, and there seem to be few dissidents. They see themselves, as Ladeonist cells in the Reach do, as doomed to do their part as part of a great collective effort to save the human race from extinction, and though they do not always agree with the steps being taken, they generally trust that those at the top know better what is needed than they do.
[D.L.C.] That is not particularly encouraging to think about, when it comes to what happens after the war.
[K.R.R.] We have thought of that, yes. I can’t speak to any optimistic conclusions of that thought.
[D.L.C.] What about their planets? You say we have some idea of what life is like on them?
