Season 05 - Episode 09

‘list without taking’

Ga is busy and loving it.

Her plans above and below seem to be taking care of themselves for now while her plans closer to home are threatened by the chaos of the war. Tracking all the various skirmishes and compiling them into an overview of the conflict is a relentless task but with Mako's help she's keeping up with it.

Her eyes are sore, dry and tired but still they flicker across the many screens, watching events live when she can and catching up on recordings of the rest. She doesn't know how but Mako seems to know exactly what she needs to see and so flags particular feeds for her attention, continually adding to and reshuffling her viewing list.

Without taking her eyes from the ever shifting images, Ga reaches out a heavy hand and a desk drone scrambles a tall cup into her thick fingers. She sucks at the straw idly, taking on yet more caffeine, then blinking her eyes wide and shifting in her chair.

The date time stamp on the live feed she is watching registers vaguely towards the back of her mind. She wonders how long it's been since she shaved or washed or redid her makeup. She can't remember but her fingers tell her that her stubble has now graduated to scrubby beard and a glance into the dark lens of a briefly blank monitor shows her eye makeup has faded and spread to old bruises.

She frowns a little at the image and shifts her bulk about in her seat again, but then a new feed lights up the screen, wiping away her image and capturing her attention once more. Mako has flagged a scene from a few days before which she now watches intently, checking the time and place for context.

At the start of the war she had used security cameras to track troop movements and engagements. A few weeks in however, both sides decided that they'd rather blind themselves than risk the enemy hacking their cameras and so most had been promptly destroyed.

Since then, Ga has relied on Mako's children, the steady stream of crawler drones he churns out day after day. They are smaller and more nimble now, with cameras and microphones far better than the security system. Between their kit and Mako's ability to distribute them to all the right places, there's very little that happens which she can't see.

She can even eavesdrop on individual conversations, giving her insights into what people are thinking, planning and feeling. What the people are thinking right now, she knows, is that the war is a stalemate, an endless slog likely to drag on for months or even years.

They're wrong.

She understands that, being in the midst of it all, battles raging at random in all directions, it's impossible for the people to get any real sense of what's happening overall. From where she sits however, in a fabulous if now crumpled ball gown, she does see it all.

The Church is winning.

GovCo are putting up a valiant fight, with their typically mercenary attitude to their own people, but it isn't enough. Their resources are dwindling while The Church are resupplied almost daily. The higher ups on both sides know exactly what's coming and several of the most senior GovCo Executive Ministers have already jumped ship, slipping away in the night to try and blend in with the civilian population.

This also explains why The Church is already turning its attention away from GovCo, looking ahead to other threats like The Resistance. The latest scene flagged up by Mako demonstrates this clearly.

As Ga watches, a meeting of familiar faces is violently interrupted by an entire chapter of Seraphim. They come through the walls and the ceiling, neatly executing all but one attendee with single gunshots to the head. Only the leader remains, standing dumbstruck among the bodies of his comrades. In an instant more he is held, bound, hooded and gagged, then dragged from the room. The whole thing takes just seconds.

The Resistance are gone.

Ga frowns her irritation. The loss of this group doesn't derail her plans but they had been a useful distraction to both sides. With them out of the picture she needs to accelerate things even further.

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