Conséc

The Eye and Tear, one of the most feared symbols of its age.

In 2902, shortly after Empress Aquila Alejandra Ari’s coronation, she created the **Conseil de Sécurité Impérial** (Imperial Security Council), or **Conséc**, as the intelligence, black ops, and propaganda arm of the Imperial Legion. A majority of the Imperial Legions' covert operations corps were either dissolved or incorporated into the Conséc, organizing a number of splintered special missions assets that had previously answered to individual families into a cohesive division of spies, interrogators, saboteurs, assassins, propagandists, negotiators, secret police, and loyalty officers.

To the consternation of many powerful figures within House Aquila at the time, the Conséc accepted anyone with the necessary cunning and loyalty into their ranks, regardless of House or social standing. It was the first Sector-wide Imperial institution to accept members from any house without segregation, though the Imperial Legion followed shortly after. Worsening the matter, all Conséc agents were required to renounce their families and nobility before the Church, even members of House Aquila. The Conséc swore loyalty only to a peaceful, unified Empire and to Empress Aquila Alejandra Ari - the woman who created it. They swore to be the light that scoured the sector, burning it clean of violence perpetrated by nobles who had forgotten the will of God and the greater good in their selfishness.

Conséc rank and file were typically recruited from worlds that had suffered the heaviest destruction during the generations-long civil war before then-General Aquila Alejandra Ari’s Imperial Legion “liberated” the recruits’ system from petty squabbling, and many saw Alejandra Ari as the First Emperox reborn, an omen of hope in a desolate time. Agents chosen for promotion were as often penniless lesser nobles or richly educated freemen as they were respected heirs, frustrating the expectations of those that understood their lineage would guarantee their ambitions. By the Blood Eagle's command, Conséc officers were chosen for intelligence, ability, cunning, loyalty, and the willingness to do anything for the mission. There was very little exception to this rule regardless of family ties.

Noble sentiment about this perceived usurpation of their privileges was heightened by the abrupt unification of what was once their own regional forces. This transition was not without its frictions, and many nobles resented the loss of control, especially when the Conséc was given carte blanche to detain and question any Imperial citizen or any element of the Imperial Legion that struck them as corrupt, disloyal, or criminal. A notoriously traditional Aquilan colonel once commented that “he didn’t know what was worse, all the nobles who look like freemen ordering us about, or all the freemen who act like nobles ordering our serfs around.” After many other such comments and a public statement against one of Empress Ari’s proposals, the colonel was found dead, having apparently choked on a poorly prepared local fish. The deceased colonel’s budget and lands were reassigned to the intelligence division and the cook was executed for insufficient patriotism. This is often used as an example of the Conséc's preferred methods for dealing with dissent.

## Les Yeux Vrai (Eyes of Truth)

An ostensibly independent set of news and cultural ventures on Echo, Diomikato, and Imperial Prime, Les Yeux Vrai was actually owned by several exceptionally rich close friends of Empress Aquila Alejandra Ari. In practice Les Yeux Vrai was a massive Imperial disinformation and propaganda organization run by the Conséc. Despite regular features showing the handmade poetic devotions of serfs who revered Aquila Alejandra Ari as the First Emperox reborn and frequent claims of sharing absolute truth, Les Yeux Vrai was an objective news venture in the same way that washing machines manufactured by the military are part of the war effort. The Conséc-affiliated propagandists created everything from patriotic songs, children’s books, and good-hygiene posters to system holidays, unification parades, and monuments to Imperial heritage. Because of this widespread usage, Les Yeux Vrai symbolism and design practice from this period is almost synonymous with the Blood Eagle and her military government. A clever artist can invoke the Blood Eagle’s shadow with a font choice, a bold splash of color, and a subtle turn of phrase.

Citizens under the Empress’ governance watched popular television, listened to musical celebrities, and played video games commissioned or created by Les Yeux Vrai. Some of the most famous artists to survive the war spent the rest of their careers intermittently defending themselves from accusations that they had been patriots and still harbored a fondness for the Blood Eagle’s despicable ways. Propelled by military funds and guided by some of the most cunning artists of their day, the Yeux Vrai embraced the High Church’s doctrine and used every facet of religious symbolism available, hoping to enshrine the sense that Empress Aquila Ari was heaven’s will visited upon reality. Children’s cartoons would show the followers of “Imperial pretenders” as mobs of heathens shattering church windows while singing off-key hymns about the will of their masters, who would either look on with demonic menace, or stand out by their foppish, overly-dressed military unfitness. Supposedly objective news sources would speak at length on the unprepared depravity of nobles unwilling to unify with the whole.

One highly popular Yeux Vrai anime was created during efforts to retake Aomori, and featured the story of “Aomori Ariko,” an ace Reticulum mech pilot struggling to keep her world protected from the greedy self-interested nobles surrounding her system. Despite “Ariko’s” repeated prayers to God asking for the many blessings given to the First Emperox and other religious propaganda, the over-the-top mech battles kept viewers hooked and the show became one of the most popular animations in Imperial space.

On a darker note, Conséc agents would often use the legitimate section of Les Yeux Vrai’s reporting arm as a cover or a staging point for their operations. It was common for agents to recruit Yeux Vrai war reporters, pose as war reporters, or blackmail war reporters in order to get close enough to their targets to hide recording devices, kidnap adjacent officials, or even assassinate enemy leadership. It was not long until there was a regular fear that any journalist might be suspect and any number of innocent and upright reporters suffered or died as a result.

## The Conséc and Service in the Imperial Legion

During the chaos of Sector-wide war, and with supply lines collapsing across the Empire, many Conséc agents found themselves isolated from their peers as their local Conséc handler was forced into hiding or eliminated by the enemy. As the Second Imperial Civil War (ICW II) dragged on, even if the Conséc still maintained a presence on any given planet, it was not uncommon for agents in deep cover to be swept up in a bombing run or other disaster and see the group they were surveilling became another set of displaced refugees with no particular value to military intelligence. Standard protocol for these agents was to report to the nearest detachment of the Imperial Legion and request transfer back to Echo or Imperial Prime for debriefing. The Legion didn’t always have the resources to help agents return, especially after the Withdrawal from Echo, and towards the end of ICW II, it became standard practice to reassign stranded agents to whichever local military roles fit their training and certifications.

## Research on Inmates at the Claw Prison Camp

It can be safely said that a significant segment of the scientific and medical community in Acheron Rho would like to conveniently forget the origins of some of the sector’s foundational research — if Les Yeux Vrai war crimes can be said to have scientific value. It is known that certain Cygnus, Serpens, and Triangulum scientists who joined the Yeux Vrai subdivision of the Conséc used the political prisoners and dissidents interned at the Claw prison camp as subjects for experiments that explored the boundaries of what information could be pulled from or implanted in the mind. Spurred on by credible rumors that the Council of Noble Houses was close to a breakthrough on the topic, they began trials and observations of prisoners, comparing traditional intelligence gathering with ever more obscure and ever more refined methods for subtly or overtly divining a person’s loyalties and inclinations. They would deprive prisoners of sleep for days or subject them to extreme and excruciating acts of manipulation, hoping to permanently affect their subjects’ psychology. Then they would place their own volunteers under similar conditions to test various methods for resisting their own discoveries. Research continued at a wild pace, and Yeux Vrai researchers were always under the pressure that any day the Council of Noble Houses might beat them to a devastating new technique — partially fabricated Conséc evidence alone would prove how close the CNH was.

Les Yeux Vrai attempts to create sleeper agents and idealized, perfectly loyal citizens laid the foundation for some of what would develop into the Sector’s illegal trade in mind controlling technologies and also defined a few semi-effective methods for identifying or subverting that control. For a while their mind altering techniques saw a small resurgence in popularity as they were integrated into Cygnus techniques and became part of the complex methods for programming the psychology and control commands of synthetic lifeforms. But the fall of House Cygnus turned even that questionable redeeming quality on its head and the contributions Conséc research made to the synth identification tests were quietly hushed up.

Nevertheless, it is a politely ignored secret that much of Echo’s famed Interview derived from the loyalty, personality, and psychological aptitude tests discovered by Yeux Vrai war criminals. Echo’s tests still select for a certain kind of ruthless loyalty and efficiency to this day. Every generation or so, an effort will be made to remove bias from the system, but even after hundreds of years of peace, these efforts have never completely succeeded.

## Project Signet: Creation and Early History

### Creation

In 2905 - One of the pillars of research on Echo, the Project SIGNET identification technology is completed. Created as a proof-of-concept for sector-wide identification, Project SIGNET started with data pulled from fragmented pre-Scream research tracing heritable diseases through genetic markers all the way back to the noble families that exalted the First Emperox. Using attached pre-Scream techniques for analyzing biometric signifiers and lineage data, Project SIGNET is able to analyze a subject’s biology and positively identify them 100% of the time.  With biometrics from both parents, SIGNET can identify children through five generations with 70% confidence. The number of factors analyzed and the carefully guarded, previously unrecovered techniques make this technology extremely difficult to fool. The most reliable method requires directly tampering with the genetic profile stored in the primary database. Over the next seven months, heavily redundant infrastructure is placed in all systems under Imperial control to allow for cached, localized identification. Military-grade malware is used to rig normal ship data transfers to allow positive IDs to cascade back to the main database on Imperial Prime.

In 2906, the Blood Eagle issues the Edict of Confirmation, adding a new step to all official baptisms. During the last stage of baptism, supplicants must record their lineage in the High Church’s Grand Genealogy by processing a mote of blood through the SIGNET system. All imperial citizens, noble or freemen, are required to undergo a second baptism and officially register their citizenship before the Divine by adding themselves to the SIGNET database within three months of the first SIGNET installation on their planet. Anyone not reconsecrated within that time would be excommunicated and stripped of all noble title and holdings. The pace of the Second Imperial Civil War intensifies as nobles revolt against this imposition against their lineage and their faith.

### SIGNET Early History

The first confirmed military use of Project SIGNET was in a series of assassinations conducted by the Conséc between 2907 and 2915, eliminating the influential members of the Sueño Luminoso secret society. Many junior legionnaires whispered that the Sueño Luminoso had become the true power in Acheron Rho, that Empress Ari’s top advisers, generals, and bankers conspired for their own gain and the Empress did not act without their blessing—this was an insult that could not be allowed.

Sueño Luminoso members were defined by two things - power and paranoia - their leaders were rich, wealthy, and often noble.  Each of the Sueño Luminoso’s leaders was an operation unto themself, for the cabal understood that no sect could know more than a codeword for the others. Even entering the same building as a member of the leadership would take Conséc agents months or years of carefully proving their loyalty and worth. Security measures were tight enough that the relatively new SIGNET technology quickly became best way to catalogue Sueño Luminoso members of all levels. It was a time when few understood how a simple scan could negate the use of masks, false fingerprints, cybernetic eyes, and other advanced concealment methods.

These were the assignments where the Conséc first refined one its favorite techniques: it would catalog and watch identified members of the Sueño Luminoso, ferreting out their social circle, and gathering information on their finances and resources. Eridanii methods for analyzing finances became a standard part of Conséc surveillance, allegedly so that agents would know what kind of danger a subject might present. But in practice, the Conséc became adept at making vast piles of land and infrastructure vanish into Imperial bureaucracy along with its previous owners. Once a complete Sueño Luminoso cell was identified, its members would be assassinated, detained, or placed on public trial, and all of its conspirators would vanish on the same day, with only the Conséc’s military icon and a notice of Imperial confiscation on the door to explain why.

Meanwhile, the vanished would almost inevitably be smoothly replaced by younger, more loyal, more grateful nobles, as if the original traitor and their family had never existed. This led to a fiercely loyal Empire that projected iron strength until it shattered. And the fear and resentment of the Conséc and its practices offered no small part of that collapse.

## Organizations Associated with the Conséc

While PRISM survived its *Rebranding* into the Videri and then into PRISM with the most intact core of the Conseil de Sécurité Impérial, a number of other organizations are sometimes associated with the Conséc either by historians or in the popular imagination. Very few of these antecedent or splinter groups have the resources that PRISM commands today, but all contributed or came away with some portion of the Conséc’s personnel, research, resources, or philosophy. Others see something worthwhile in the Blood Eagle’s most feared servants and attempt to emulate the Conséc and claim that mantle as their own.

### The Quaestionarius

When the Conséc on Echo began to *Rebrand*, forcing any intelligence officer they captured to join their enemy-aligned Videri at gunpoint, Conséc agents that had become embedded in Imperial forces as de facto legionnaires and the ever-dwindling Imperial Prime office became the largest remaining Aquila-affiliated segment of the Conséc. When the Accords of Peace were negotiated and signed, this small group of Aquila loyalists paid for the crimes the Conséc committed throughout the war.

While historians might debate how voluntary their demonstrations of loyalty were, few would argue that Aquila’s concessions on the Conséc were not the harshest or the most deserved — The Conséc must be formally disbanded, its agents’ actions in war must be recorded in the Legion’s official history as marks of highest dishonor, and House Aquila must never again train or maintain a covert operations corps. The Council of Noble Houses would not accept Aquila back into the fold without proof of how committed Aquila was to ridding itself of the Conséc’s shadow.

Despite protest from portions of Aquila’s leadership that saw the concession as a betrayal of faithful soldiers, often of decorated Constitutio, the Legion’s commanders were ordered to humiliate any Conséc agents who surrendered with honor. Conséc soldiers were publicly stripped of rank, branded with the burning holographic mark of dishonor, and ordered to never again bear arms in the name of the Empire, but they could walk free if they would disavow their fallen Empress. A famous series of letters written by a Legate at the time portray an officer deeply torn between duty and the knowledge that Conséc agents who did not surrender to her would eventually be caught by their former comrades among the Videri. And refusing to swear allegiance to the CNH and rejoin the Videri had far more permanent consequences for the former agents than being sent to Gleipnir for not renouncing Empress Ari and quietly accepting the sting of dishonor.

Perhaps because of this confliction, certain elements of Aquilan command allowed former Conséc agents more free reign than they might have with other dishonored legionnaires. The justification went that if the Conséc were not members of the Imperial Legion, then they were not prevented from passing their skills to their young friends and heirs who would then “happen" to join the Imperial Legion. And then if those same young friends were to convince an officer to make them their unit’s morale officer, why, morale officers were perfectly legal. And likewise, it was perfectly legal to talk to disgraced soldiers. Asking an old mentor for unclassified advice wasn’t a jailable offense — that was the kind of draconian measure that a dishonorable leader like the Blood Eagle might have taken.

And when the newly-formed Quaestionarius Corps turned out to be handy in counterintelligence situations, no one could blame them for reporting anti-Council influence or Videri spies. Even Aquila’s most vocal opponents couldn’t argue that the Imperial Legion shouldn’t be defended against infiltration, thought some tried. Slowly the Conséc-trained Quaestionarius began to regain the Empire’s trust, and they were given more resources, permission to train recruits, and, eventually, the authority to conduct interrogations and other limited clandestine operations. And all the while, House Aquila could say with complete honesty, that the Accords of Peace had been upheld. The Conséc were disgraced and not a single one had ever joined the Quaestionarius.

### House Serpens, Mucalinda and the Executors

Until the recent assassination of the Betrayer Emperox, House Serpens’ activities during Imperial Civil War Two (ICW II) had been one of the most famous reasons for their perhaps not completely deserved reputation as secret police, spies, assassins, mental enforcers, and all around suspicious persons. To the frustration of certain favored children of House Serpens, Hroa’s decision to dissolve its military into the Aquilan Imperial Legion, and most especially into the Conseil de Sécurité Impérial, has often led historians to blame Serpens for the actions of its members who chose to go into Exigo and follow a life of service to their Empress. Former members of the House Serpens military were one of the most cohesive elements within the Blood Eagle’s secret police and few deny that the officer corps from the Serpens’ Mucalinda brought with them a culture of doing whatever peace required. Perhaps this is why so many historians speak Serpens’ name when trying to understand why the Conséc was able to pursue one of the most bloody and terrifying campaigns of enforced loyalty the sector had ever seen.

As the hereditary protectors of the Empire’s psychic academy - often the only source of psychics vital to the war - the Mucalinda and its noble commanders faced a sector all too keen on teaching the lessons of betrayal and conquest. Some see it as natural that the Mucalinda cultivated a scale-like callousness and began to deal with infiltrators and attackers with extreme harshness. With both seers and telepaths on hand, it became common to eliminate enemy leaders before they gained power and to repay betrayals just before they occurred. No other House could see the future as clearly as House Serpens. That gulf in understanding became part of the burden of the Mucalinda’s mantle.

It was easy for the Mucalinda to imagine themselves the only truly enlightened warriors in the Sector - moral outrage, even revulsion, these were necessary consequences of the Sector’s lack of foresight, signs of a internal eye closed to future events. And as more law-minded Houses began to notice this pattern of outwardly inexplicable acts, the Mucalinda learned to hide their actions and operate in secret as much as possible. However reviled this made the Mucalinda among their enemies, it was effective. Leaders who valued their lives learned not to interfere with Serpens hospitals, doctors, teachers, or civilians. Importantly for the Conséc, this gave the Mucalinda exactly the skill set Empress Alejandra Ari desired in her secret police. When the Empress commanded her cousin to form the Conseil de Sécurité Impérial, it is said the Blood Eagle personally requested that Brigadier-General Madhur Uttara Viktoria join the Conséc as its chief operational commander.

Brigadier-General Madhur had seen Hroa through the fiery end of ICW I as the High Lassi of the Serpens Mucalinda, and it was rumored that many of Empress Ari’s competitors for the Throne had died under a Serpens blade by the Brigadier-General’s command. The same mysterious deaths are often attributed to the perpetually savvy Governor Aquila Ignace Alessio of Echo, but specialists in the Conséc’s history often point out how Alessio and Madhur worked so easily during their first years at the Conséc that common knowledge in the hidden legion suggested they had been allied secretly for a decade or more already. Whatever the case, as the former High Lassi, Brigadier-General Madhur maintained extraordinary pull among the Serpens military class. Her own personal gravitas and selfless determination to serve in Exigo as the Conséc required, combined with Governor Alessio’s popularity for his role in the Liberation of Hroa made requesting assignments with the Conséc very common among the Mucalinda. For some, serving as the Empress’ personal spies more than recovered the honor lost with their House and titles, especially among younger nobles itching to pay out the wounds of Hroa one seditionist and traitor at a time.

While Governor Alessio’s political savvy made the integration of resources from so many Houses possible, it was Brigadier-General Madhur who knew how to train, organize, recruit, and place so many new intelligence officers. Former nobles of the Serpens Mucalinda had been training for the Conséc’s duties their entire lives. Their now-liberated lieutenants often came from families honed for war over generations serving the Mucalinda. This existing expertise was far from overlooked. Serpens mental discipline, covert knowledge, and organizational structures were adopted and integrated with skills contributed by other Houses, Imperializing the Mucalinda-style training that every Conséc agent was required to complete before being sent into the field. The former Mucalinda formed the bulk of the Conséc’s initial officer corps and retained that seniority through much of the war, even as the Conséc expanded into a thoroughly pan-Imperial organization.

As the war went on, rumors began to emanate from Echo, whispers of how Brigadier-General Madhur was the Conséc’s iron watchman, how the governors and admirals she spoke to would be promoted or imprisoned based on her word, how she was tasked with ensuring the loyalty of the Imperial Legions. And Brigadier-General Madhur Uttara Viktoria’s gaze was ever more relentless when it fell on her own agents and officers. She required nothing less than complete loyalty. Anyone straying from the Conseil’s ideology would be retrained, and infractions were punished harshly. By Brigadier-General Madhur’s orders, Conséc agents caught spreading sedition would be imprisoned in the Claw, where they would be announced to the interned populace alongside a list of the unfortunate they had condemned to suffer at the notorious prison site. Even adjusting for the lethal conditions among the glacial flows of southern Sapphire, Conséc agents died significantly faster and more regularly than any other class of prisoner at the Claw.

Where Brigadier-General Madhur remained in command, the Conséc remained unified. Historians attribute much to her guidance when discussing why the Conséc’s Echonian division remained cohesive and loyal so late into the war. Officers chosen for command by Brigadier-General Madhur had a knack for spotting weakness, disloyalty, and lack of conviction, and they were taught how to lead their agents back onto the blood-soaked but solid ground. In a rarely discussed bit of training, Madhur’s officers were required to understand criminals as much as they often despised them. Charm, wit, knowing how to win loyalty not just coerce it - these were the less remembered but thoroughly vital tools of the Mucalinda-inspired Conséc officer. Combined with the Conséc’s tendency to not act immediately on suspicions when more traitors could be discovered, this made Conséc agents hard to uncover and easy to like. They often seemed like loyal supporters of the cause, right up until the entire rebel cell was dismantled overnight.

This was a constant struggle for CNH forces during Imperial Civil War Two, as any number of defectors from the Conséc, the Legion, or the Imperial government might turn out to be a mole disguised as an old family friend.  Few anti-rebel infiltration campaigns were as intense as Brigadier-General Madhur’s war on the Fangs of House Serpens. The grassroots largely-noble Serpens militia initially formed in protest of Imperial interference with the Academy’s traditions, and it is rumored that Madhur took their opposition to the party line personally. Fierce opponents of the Imperialization of the Mucalinda, the Fangs took new titles, and began consolidating CNH-supported resistance via a string of dangerous operations meant to damage Imperial supporters and breed resentment for the harsh responses favored by Aquilan governors and administrators. Agent after agent was sent to join the Fangs, extended families were targeted for Conséc recruitment or used as hostages, serfs aids were promised citizenship and developed as assets. Where cunning failed, Brigadier-General Madhur called on Aelius Romulus and the Seventh Fleet to hunt the Serpens militia across the Empire. More than one modern drama embellishes the conflict between the dashing Fangs and the sinister Brigadier-General, and the formation of House Serpens’ modern military order has become a shining example of the noble spirit winning out over the evils of emancipation as a result.

Despite all their skill, as ICW II went on the Conséc began to chip at the edges. By the Second Battle of Imperial Prime, the intensive bombings of public infrastructure and general chaos of the war had left a number of Conséc resources embedded in local Legions on a semi-permanent basis, and the increasing number of Houses that declared for the Council of Noble Houses saw a steady rise in defections as soldiers left to fight alongside their families. Few important Conséc desertions predated Brigadier-General Madhur’s assassination and the resulting Withdrawal from Echo, but the Al-Dost mission proved to be an exception to the rule. The famously disastrous mission sent a number of Madhur’s most trusted officers to the notoriously remote and highly sophisticated planet in the hopes of securing advanced weaponry and an inaccessible location to manufacture more. The numerous failures of planning and execution that plagued the mission are too many to list here, but the end result was a small band of highly trained Conséc survivors deciding to strike out on their own.

The mostly psychic remnants of the Al-Dost crew quickly decided that the strict controls on MES medication instituted by the Aquilan authorities meant that the only “safe” place to hide was the Imperial Academy of Psionic Health and Wellness on Hroa. Of course, that meant evading capture en route to Hroa, and then finding some way to hide among the heavily surveilled student body at the Academy. The story of the Al-Dost crew’s months-long attempt to avoid Legion checkpoints, maintain a viable supply of MES medication, and keep their ship spaceworthy has become something of a local legend among those that play at the intelligence game. Every few decades some new variant of the story appears as a would-be historian uncovers some new link in an already complex chain of events. It is simplest to say that after ten months of travel, the Al-Dost crew reached Hroa, where they hid in the firebombed sections of Yggdrasil while attempting to contact the High Nominator in charge of student enrollment, a noble who had originally owned the crew’s seer and who still owned the seer’s mother.

High Nominator Serpens Barnes Miska was a man in a precarious position attempting to maintain his life and titles in an Academy where everyone’s loyalty was tested between Conséc imperialists looking to sort psychic talent into every kind of governmental position and Fang loyalists attempting to expel and undermine Imperial influence on House Serpens’ Academy. The Academy itself struggled, pressed between two groups with equally legitimate claims on House Serpens’ identity. Like many civilian administrators of the Academy, High Nominator Barnes found himself quickly caught in the middle as he did his best to comply with Empress Alejandra Ari’s laws and with the orders of the former Mucalinda who delivered those commands. Meanwhile, his sister, Serpens Barnes Jolan was a known leader of the Fangs and High Nominator Barnes did his best to help her escape from trouble when he could.

The Executors formed out of High Nominator’s Barnes dealings with the Al-Dost crew and other Conséc defectors, and the Executors like to remember the High Nominator as a Serpens patriot who did what he could to neutrally stick to his duty to the Academy despite the extreme circumstances. Of course, the Conséc’s Echonian division often remembers High Nominator Barnes as a clever and ambitious man who took advantage of the chaos to centralize his own power and eliminate rivals. Whatever the case, High Nominator Barnes took the Al-Dost Crew in and agreed to help them hide on the condition that they help eliminate or adjust the loyalties of several nosy faculty members that Barnes suspected of marking good students for kidnapping or execution, either by the Conséc or the Fangs. The Al-Dost crew agreed, and the most extreme of the Fangs were allowed to be captured by the Conséc, slowly quieting the voices calling for a grand purge of all instructors tolerated by the Aquilan Empress. And, on the flip side, the Fangs found themselves flush with unexpected lists of Conséc recruiters and other credible tips warning of coming raids. High Nominator Barnes’ Executors worked subtly and thoroughly, stabilizing the situation at the Imperial Academy of Psionic Health and Wellness, replicating Fang-style assaults and Conséc-like mass disappearances as needed until the war began to end.

Enough Serpens-affiliated Conséc defectors were recruited into the Executors that when High Nominator Barnes and the Fangs were taken into the confidence of House Serpens’ leadership, the Al-Dost crew and its Conséc affiliates were formalized as the House Serpens Executors. They proceeded to implement methodology informed by Conséc operating procedure, improving House Serpens’ already well established skill with the expertise in policing, technology, and propaganda that the Executor’s early membership gained from working so closely with agents from other Houses. As was common for nobles returning to their Houses after the war, a veritable spree of clerical errors revealed that many of the Executors had never performed a legal Exigo ceremony at all, and their less fortunate psychic compatriots were happily discovered as long-lost members of House Serpens. Continual use and development eventually pushed Executor secret policing skills beyond what the Conséc had available in its day, and the Executors are a well respected element of Serpens nobility through the present moment. Despite all this, the Executors have never enjoyed the Imperial reach, unquestioned authority, and vast resources available to the Blood Eagle’s secret police. Few leaders will ever be as feared and respected as Brigadier-General Madhur Uttara Viktoria of the Conséc.

### Crux Cathar Bureau

As with any deeply controversial moment, House Crux’s role in ICW II and especially its involvement with the Blood Eagle’s Conséc are passionately debated by historians, scholars, and armchair philosophers alike. The positions listed here reflect the experiences and recollections of Conséc agents who joined the Videri during the Conséc’s *Rebranding*. The era they describe is one of the most shameful and messy periods of House Crux’s history and it ended with the Mother of Mercy’s prohibition on the death penalty being formalized in the Accords of Peace. The reason for this reassertion of the Divine’s sacred mercy is sometimes sardonically referred to as the Cathars’ Mercy.

To understand the Cathars’ Mercy, it is important to understand that during ICW I, House Crux had pushed itself well past the boundaries of its resources while attempting to police a sector at war with itself. Significant sections of Acheron Rho’s population felt they were above Crux’s reach and all manner of local security forces, some hardly better than bandits, would disagree with the extent of Crux’s authority over their chosen leaders. The situation was bad enough that two seperate movie genres are devoted to the heroic lone Crux inquisitor and the slowly dwindling Crux task force in a hostile land. The constant string of missions lost to a lack of backup, local unrest, and poorly maintained equipment was especially lethal in the Crux Cathar Bureau. Even compared with House Crux’s well-known ethos of service, the Cathar philosophic minority held a near-religious cultural emphasis on service to the end.

That culture pervaded the Crux Cathar Bureau, where Crux agents drove themselves to do the most exceedingly thankless and dangerous work available. The Bureau’s agents took the coldest cases, pursued the most elusive criminals, and would jump, often literally, from orbit to deal with high stakes crimes like mid-atmosphere hostage situations. They would pursue the perpetrators of Imperial High Crimes into every deadly environment in the Imperial Belt and were known for their strategy of infiltrating heavily guarded settlements and subverting local militias in order to extract well protected criminals and hostages from hostile situations. Like most parts of House Crux, the CCB was proud of its members who lost their lives or were injured in the line of duty. But there was a growing anger and frustration there as well.

Facing such impossible situations over decades, seeing their ranks ever-thinned by accident and war: no small few of these Cathars began to understand the Sector as a deeply lawless and criminal place, a place where people could be divided into criminals and civilians. The CCB moved towards suppressing crime with deterrence and fear, citing data about the benefits of harsh policing. They were not alone in House Crux, and many saw Empress Aquila Alejandra Ari’s efforts to create peace through force as a deeply positive return to the correct order of things. With their early support for Aquila’s unification efforts and their favorable ties to Aquilan high command, House Crux suddenly found itself with the resources and the Imperial support that it had so long been lacking. Peacekeeping forces that had been permanently, if unofficially, assigned to military duty were reassigned to their official purpose once more. The coalition controlled Imperial Territory formed an ever-expanding safe zone for Crux policing forces, and the CCB’s training was met with deep respect from the Aquilan Legion, where CCB instructors were highly prized and inter-House skill sharing was seen as an improvement of the whole.

When Empress Aquila Alejandra Ari finally took the throne and formed the Conseil de Sécurité Impérial, it only made sense to Crux that its special missions and Imperial high crimes bureau should send its best and brightest to shape the Conséc into a new, deeply effective group. At the time, House Crux treated the requirement that Conséc forces perform the ritual of Exigo as a natural attempt to prevent division and the crimes that division caused. It was thought that without separation between Houses, there would be no favoritism or rivalry, exponentially increasing the Empire’s unity and ability prevent inter-House skirmishes. Asking their own nobles to maintain the same ideal, requesting that they accept the loss of nobility seemed like yet another cross to bear.

Many in the CCB carried this cross out of responsibility or an excess of religious patriotism. One former Cathar recalls being told that their service to Crux would become service to the Empire and to every Imperial citizen — that serving their Empress directly was second only to serving God, and that citizenship would, in time, become a kind of Noble House of its own. But not every Cathar agent felt that alone was enough, and the same source remembers two of their cousins who were adamantly against renouncing their nobility. One was talked into agreeing to perform Exigo after feeling she lost a five hour formal debate with a more senior Cathar, and the other cousin claimed he was quietly threatened with a beat assignment policing a serf community unless he agreed to disavow his family. Many accuse this former noble of lying or cherry-picking a few bad officers, but the anecdote remains popular among scholars who have always been suspicious of Crux’s too-clean reputation.

Still, whatever the reason, when the Crux Cathar Bureau’s duties were given to the Conséc, some 76% of the CCB’s agents agreed to the transfer. The newly minted Conséc agents continued the CCB’s work and began the process of rapidly training enough newcomers to investigate high crimes, treason, and sedition throughout the entire sector while the few Cathar officers who remained behind were integrated into the Crucian Inquisitors or took on specialist roles in the Imperial Legion. At first, the Conséc seemed like the perfect answer to an Empire still struggling with the concept of a unified peace. Even agents who might have stood on opposite sides of an armed barrier a handful of years prior would share knowledge and work together. It seemed like the first steps to a return of the Golden Age before the Scream. Ex-Cathars had been allied with Aquila for long enough to trust implicitly, and their long coordination with the Aquilan Legion gave them experience adapting new techniques into investigative context. It was very common for formerly Crucian freemen and nobles to command places of respect in the Conséc’s officer corps.

The Conséc’s CCB instructors were instrumental in organizing most of the early pursuit of rebels and traitors hiding among the populace, and their successes contributed to a forming sense of the Conséc as a true reflection of Imperial citizenship. As the Conséc developed, so did its mission. Its first few charges were self-explanatory. Mass murderers and other serious criminals must be caught, regardless of whether local Crucian inquisitors had the resources to bring the villains to justice. Even when the Legion’s unshakable military might pushed rebels into hiding, armed rebellions could not be allowed to quietly gnaw away the fragile peace. Likewise, no one would allow open calls for violent overthrow of the Empress’ “tyranny.” Who would allow an Empire divided for so long to fall apart because its protectors were too weak to imprison avowed criminals, especially misguided ones inciting treason over the fate of other criminals? How many justices were subverted during every minute of a civil war? Surely anyone who called for war could not see reason and must be removed from the civilian population before their ideas invited disaster.

Tools were created to increase the efficiency of the Conséc’s search for major criminals and seditionists. Scientists on Echo made stunning breakthroughs in communications surveillance and indexing, allowing organizations with the resources of the entire Empire to routinely observe all civilian communications and flag interactions for human review if needed. When the Second Imperial Civil War broke out in earnest, the Conséc began rapidly expanding its deep cover missions and other efforts to support the Imperial Legion with military intelligence. Contacts on the streets became a network of spies and informants. One form of protest would be adopted by a rebel cell and be labeled as treason, pushing well-meaning civilians into other signs of solidarity, which would then also become treasonous as another group began to use it as a rallying call. Seditionists would be moved to prison sites en mass. Enemies captured by the Conséc or pulled from the populace would be interrogated on location, or sent back to Echo if they were seen as a high value source.

The Conséc’s officers were imbued by the Empress with the power to pass judgement on crimes and assign punishment at will. More and more often, this power led to mass assassinations and sudden detainment for all members of a criminal society or participants in a conspiracy to commit high treason. Soon even enlisted Conséc agents were granted special dispensation to try and convict persons of treason without their presence or knowledge, sometimes with only God or another agent as their witness. This license to kill was seen as a necessary measure due to the dangerous and fast-moving nature of deep cover missions and the continual presence of insurgents hidden among the populace. Often only the quick elimination of a threat would defeat saboteurs and spies, and as the Conséc became a more hardened and military organization, this became the natural and appropriate course of events.

Or at least, many Conséc agents found every way to justify their actions. At first it was frequently a former Cathar who would raise the initial objection to a new policy or tactic. A lifetime of Crucian philosophical debate taught them to demand ethical reasoning and reject injustice. But their concerns would often be considered then ignored and outspoken agents found themselves passed over for promotion, socially isolated, and eventually jailed for dissention in the ranks — typically for refusing to follow orders. Anyone who objected to the treatment of critics also met the same fate. Those ex-Cathars who remained free learned to object privately and follow orders. They lived in quiet horror as they were commanded to commit act after act of injustice, and watched as people they knew so well in their CCB days became cold and turned their anger over lost friends into a sense that criminals and traitors deserved every tactic the Conséc chose to use against them. By the middle of the war, showing disloyalty meant a quick trip to the Claw or a sudden shot in the back of the head. Conséc field agents were considered too dangerous for Gleipnir, and its analysts and propagandists knew too much to risk in such a general population.

Many ask why House Crux would possibly allow such behavior. That answer is as varied as every individual leader who knew the Conséc’s tactics and recognized Empress Aquila Alejandra Ari’s many other injustices. The truth is complex. Some Crucian leaders had spent much of their lives working with and for the Empress, others feared a return to the destruction of the First Imperial Civil War. Many at least understood that the Empress would have them assassinated by the very same Conséc agents they prepared to denounce. Others worried that all of House Crux would be excommunicated and destroyed. Enough of the existing leadership only disagreed with a few policies that a sizeable group felt such things were temporary war measures and justice would soon be restored. Another group hated the injustice but felt the Council of Noble Houses was worse in some ways, or might be too unstable to prevent another endless civil war. The question of why House Crux took so long to denounce House Aquila and join the Council of Noble Houses is one of the most fascinating questions of the time period, and an entire field of scholarly research is devoted to understanding the answer.

According to the Conséc agents who passed the information back to their former House, even with a continual flow of information from Echo, Crucian leaders kept the truth from the majority of House Crux, and it took a small internal coup to gain enough momentum to reveal the full extent of the Conséc’s injustice. A truly comprehensive file was created and shared with Crux, detailing the abuses of power, usurpations of justice, and more than anything else, continuous violations of the Mother of Mercy’s mandate. By God’s will as revealed to the Mother, there was to be no death penalty except for the crime of treason. Only a tyrant with no care for justice would react to that commandment by making such minor crimes treasonous. It is often said that the day the Cathars’ Mercy was revealed, the Ellis system stood still. The outrage and shame on Hiera was so great that Cathars who had joined the Conséc under orders began to be blamed for not preventing the evils of that hated organization. The prohibition on the death penalty had always been deeply emphasized by the High Church on Hiera and soon the whole situation became known as the Cathars’ Mercy.

Unaware of sentiment on their homeworld, Cathars often joined the *Rebranding* early and pushed recruitment hard. They revealed the Conséc’s crimes to the general public, tried war criminals for treason, and called every legionnaire and lost soul to join the Videri in throwing off their Imperial commanders. Few who followed the war at the time could have forgotten the impassioned radio speeches of the ex-Cathar Terentius Wendel Ural, the Liberator of the Claw, a Videri war hero who made himself the public voice of all righteous souls suffering silently under the weight of bloody service. Much as Empress Alejandra Ari took on her own moniker, Terentius embraced the Crucian slur. He asked servants of the Empire to give their commanders a Cathar’s Mercy, and he did so with eloquence many attribute to his time as a lawyer and rhetorician:

> Bring to trial and execute the bad apples, the mass murderers, the perpetuators of war. If you would kill a tyrant in battle, then kill one closer to home, for the tyrant does not respect the honor of war. The tyrant does not care if you are at home or in a church. The tyrant does not worry over young or old, serf or noble. The tyrant seeks to give us all a Cathar's Mercy! Go out, go out and show the stars what “mercy” her actions have inspired!
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This excerpt from Terentius’ “Patriotic Denouncement of the Atrocity at Cabina” is often used in documentaries about the period, as historians explain the latest understanding of the Videri and the actions of Conséc agents who defected because of the Cabina speech and speeches like it. Old letters and journals show how many ex-Cathars were driven to overthrow the previous order out of a sense of repentance and atonement. They often fought as much to fix past wrongs as they did to enstate the Accords of Peace. With House Crux joining the CNH, one former Cathar recalled the sense that their long and bloody service was ending. Justice had returned to House Crux and after the war closed, they would return home and rest. Their family would adopt them, their nobility would be restored, and the sector would be as it should.

Formerly Crucian Conséc agents very rarely saw their hopes of returning home realized. Unlike several other houses that quietly allowed their in-Exigo members to be adopted back into the family, House Crux was too up in arms over the violations of justice to comfortably sweep the situation under the rug. Even those Cathars that spent the war as political prisoners were a deeply uncomfortable reminder of Empress Aquila Alejandra Ari’s tyranny. The Cathars who flushed out Conséc agents still loyal to Aquila were outcast over the Videri’s shambling war crimes trials, which Crux declared illegal retroactively. Even the ex-Conséc agents who survived by staying quiet and following orders were unbearable to look at. No bloodline would willingly taint their history with such despicable actions, even if those same agents had already been found innocent of war crimes. Never mind if these Cathars had always been members of the family and left only on Crux orders: Exigo was intended to eliminate that bond.

As far as the majority of Crucian nobles were concerned, ex-Conséc agents were freemen and always had been. With ICW II ending and most Crucian Conséc agents being refused a return to their house, Hieran nobles in-Exigo became one of the largest sustained groups in the Videri. Amid the rampant corruption and post-war chaos on Echo, ex-Cathars often became detectives for hire, bending rules and using force to insist that crime be punished during the wild days of the Echonian reconstruction. Though the period of private investigators and badly over-stretched local security was short, it continues to live in the modern imagination through numerous films and novels that portray the time in striking color and shadow, and worlds filled with suspense and shifting intrigue. In a far more present and lasting way, ex-Cathars began the impressive practices in investigative journalism and law still present on Echo to this day. Their work is credited with the creation of a class of morally upstanding journalists who dedicate themselves to telling truth to power. Of course, others would point to the intricate web of Prismatic legal work and suggest that some of PRISM’s surveillance contracts amount to systemic, perfectly legal extortion, but Echo has never been a place for untarnished heroes. Few who survived the Conséc came out completely unchanged.

Meanwhile as the Conséc became the Videri and then moved into a post-war recovery, eventually becoming the PRISM Network, their official role as the investigators of Imperial high crimes was returned to House Cruc, which found itself significantly understaffed. The Cathars who had stayed behind had a reputation for being troublemakers and loose cannons who weren’t willing to follow the House line. They weren’t always the best leaders. And the ex-Conséc agents returned from a stint in the Claw for keeping to their morals came home with all kinds of intriguing new techniques other houses had shared with the Conséc, the CCB advanced. In particular, the reformed CCB embraced more computerized analysis and electronic surveillance and began to bring in at first, Crucian officers who didn’t hold the Cathar philosophy, and then envoys from other Houses in an attempt to scale up to policing an entire sector. Rather awkwardly, for most of the Masked Emperox’s reign, even these early joint task forces did not always have enough specialized training to catch some of the most elusive criminals, and House Crux began to routinely make “one-time exceptions” for hiring its former members to help out. Over time this practice developed into private intelligence firms like Hardlight Analytics, as ex-Conséc agents sold their skills to whoever needed them most. The newly formed-PRISM Network and its Analytics division remains a major resource for surveillance footage, specialized analysis, and deniable operations for the CCB and seems likely to do so far into the future.