The Coterie

MagnusEffect · Dec 25, 2013

(from Interstellar Players Sourcebook)

THOUGHTFUL ECHOES

The opinions of the columnist are his own, and do not indicate
Monarchy Inc.’s position, explicit or inferred.

If you happen to live on a world without the Coterie, you’re lucky. It means your planet hasn’t been plagued by famine, mass death or war any time in the recent past. Or at least not to the extent that it’s deemed newsworthy enough to generate airtime on other planets.

4.9 million dead? Sorry, you didn’t make the cut.
5 million? We’re on our way.
Per capita income of 200 C-bills? Sorry, your world is just too wealthy.
Only 150 C-bills? Don’t worry, we’ll be there.

I’m certain some of the more inexperienced readers among you are wondering why the Ventriloquist bothers bashing an innocent little charity organization, suggesting insidious motives where instead it’s simply a matter of the Coterie’s ability to define what they can and cannot do. To such readers, I say: you haven’t read me for long enough to realize I’m never wrong. At least not when I write it down for you. I’m on to something here, and you’d better keep up!

Somewhere within this organization, someone applies perfectly acceptable math when deciding where to deploy. This method of policymaking has placed the Coterie on many a world, temporarily or permanently. To many, the Coterie’s presence among the stars seems random, beyond the group’s propensity to dwell on the more wretched worlds. Places like that give them an abundance of people grateful to have the Coterie break their bread and fish into a feast for multitudes for a mere twenty silver pieces. But surely the charity has no additional motive?

Of course not.

For a charity organization, the Coterie seems to spend quite a bit of money and effort away from feeding the hungry and helping the needy. Indeed, if you can believe their own payroll administration, 50 percent of their personnel focus entirely on recruitment. Those who refer prospective Coterie acolytes or who decide to jump on the bandwagon of their own volition can receive substantial rewards. Anyone who bothers to inquire about this generally hears blather like the following quote from the honorable Dr. Reverend Sabrina Heems: “The Coterie is greatly interested in helping anyone it can, wherever it can. We are limited only by the number of talented devotees, a limitation we are eager to reduce so that we can ensure basic human rights for all.”

Surely there is no hidden meaning behind such recruitment methods? Of course not.

For a group whose main focus is the well-being of others, it’s odd that they don’t extend this initiative to every member of the human race. Oh hush, I’m not about to suggest something as vulgar as racism in their ranks! No, the Coterie merely seems to have strong opinions about those they think might harm their flock. They communicate these opinions via the business end of mercenary PPCs, and the typical recipient tends to be whoever passes for lowlife scum in their locale. Good riddance? Indeed! A bunch of well-armed, mercenary-employing monks are nothing to be suspicious of, right?

(No, you don’t get another “of course not” here. I am not that predictable!)

If at this point you’re not the least bit wary of the Coterie, you’re too stupid to live, let alone read my column! Drop your rag and get lost! Retards like you are the reason I’m not making more money! Go play on a DropShip landing pad!

My friends, those of you who can honestly comprehend my words, we are facing a particularly insidious force. Those few of you who know a bit about history surely must have seen some parallels between this group and pretty much every known terrorist organization in the recent past. Heck, my own research proves that this type of setup was used as early as the 22nd century on ancient Terra!

Put together a charity group as a front, a fundraiser, a recruitment engine. Separate the wheat from the chaff, and the sheer bulk of your numbers means you’ll get some talented individuals. Keep a low profile until you’re ready to strike, and then you suddenly have an army no one saw coming! (I know, the armchair generals out there will insist that this kind of scheme is impossible. After all, surely the vaunted intelligence organizations of the various Great Houses would catch wind of such things. Wouldn’t they? Right, the same organizations that so epitomize the human intellect! No, wait, I won’t start. If you’re a regular reader—and by this point, you’d better be!—you can’t have missed my analyses of the (dis)abilities of the various intelligence organizations out there.

The truth is that the Coterie has managed to assemble quite a bit of military kit on its prime worlds, and not insignificant amounts of hardware on some of its other ventures. How to accomplish this? Just be selective about whom you pick. Grab those losers of the merc business, the Dispossessed. Make sure that another man’s war (or company store!) has done the dirty work for you, and offer a way out. Got a loser MechWarrior behind the controls of that vintage Catapult? Got an outstanding Dispossessed MechWarrior? Just swap the two—easy to do, since you have to surrender your belongings to the Coterie in order to become a member. I’ve seen footage of a MechWarrior thanking his brothers when they took away his Cobra, so don’t think it doesn’t work that way! Don’t ever underestimate the seductive attraction of belonging, of having all your worries removed, the powerful pull of self-righteous knowledge on the ignorant.

So what, you say. Who cares about some pirate-busting religious nuts out in the Periphery? Well, just ask the militia on Maduin. They got attacked by a ’Mech force, that much everyone knows and admits. None survived. Again, no contest. It was Circinian raiders, the Coterie claims, and we’re here to protect you from those pirates. I gotta tell you, it’s been damned hard to find anyone who says otherwise. And wouldn’t you know it? My informant managed to get hit by a bus the next day. Such bad luck! You know, the damage to her car looked an awful lot like a ’Mech stepped on it a couple of times, but hey, what does this lowly columnist know, huh? Those Maduin buses are big!

Guys and girls, I don’t begrudge anyone a bit of megalomania, some hypocrisy or secrecy. Stepping on my informants, on the other hand…not something to do when you want to remain on my Christmas card list. But de facto occupying some Periphery slum planet, I can barely be bothered to care.

No, what gets me is what I found out about who runs these clowns. Did I mention some meticulous design in the Coterie’s deployment? Well, it took me a couple of months of “borrowed” CPU time on the NAIS server farm, but I managed to retro-engineer the characteristics of the planets they target.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I was right. The cutoff isn’t a nice obvious number or parameter. It’s almost random, but not quite. I’ve run a program predicting the Coterie’s moves for several weeks now, and it’s accurate almost to the number of goons they deploy on some haphazard pit of a world!

So who runs this program they organize by? Who runs the show? Any traces run cold real quick once you hit their upper echelon. At a certain point, people stop meeting each other. So how do they organize? Well, I did notice that the truly big buffs have their own little JumpShip to move them around. And they make sure no one gets too close. But wouldn’t you know it? Some good sport managed to show me a picture of the aft of one of those JumpShips. Pretty much normal, except for this weird little array. I’ve seen it before a few times, usually when I happened to be near a Class A HPG relay.

So who’s picking up the receiver to these believers?

I lied, incidentally. I’ve noticed that a couple of this group’s Grand Poobahs often manage to disappear completely, usually when they get within a jump or three of Solaris VII. Guess they go meet their Big Cheese every now and then. Recharge the dogma batteries a bit, and they’re good to go again.

Watch your back around these guys, boys and girls. You can reason with the evil or the criminal. But there’s no talking to fanatics!

—Your Thought Ventriloquist.
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The Coterie

MagnusEffect Administrator Staff Member Jarl SC Huscarl

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The Coterie

MagnusEffect Administrator Staff Member Jarl SC Huscarl

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