Captain Howard Blunt rested his head in his hands and let out an enormous sigh.
His job was a stressful one, and he’d never truly enjoyed it. ONI Section Two was the propaganda department, and Blunt was one of its best fakers, forgers, editors, whatever term you wanted to use for a liar. For too long, Blunt had been dealing with the Insurrection, which was a constant headache for him. He hated it, because the Innies were a fundamentally complex topic. Yet he had to deal with it, because propaganda and public relations made more of a difference in these rebellions than any number of soldiers did.
The UNSC did not declare all Innies to be traitors and rebels, and insist that they should be killed on sight. That would have been emotionally satisfying, yes. It would have made HIGHCOM happy, sure. At the same time, it would have driven more people into the Insurrection’s arms, increasing their recruitment and capabilities, even before the possibility of more damn defectors.Instead, ONI Section Two had carefully walked a tightrope. They could never publicly accept the premise that the Insurrection was right about their fundamental belief, but neither could they publicly declare that the Insurrection was wrong about everything. Factually speaking, the Insurrection was not correct. They argued that the UNSC was evil, and it wasn’t.
They often repeated the old slogan of the Outer Colonies, that the UNSC had trillions for warships, but not a nickel for defense. Blunt hated that line. It was bullshit of the highest order. The Outer Colonies bitched that the UNSC taxed them too much, just so they could maintain a Navy that had no useful purpose… then turned right around and complained about piracy problems, and demanded the UNSC Navy put a stop to it!Hypocrisy, however, was the human condition. As much as Blunt wanted to use that Innie hypocrisy to write off their entire movement, the truth was that the UNSC itself was also hypocritical.
The complaints of the Outer Colonies had a tiny bit of truth to them. Yes, the UNSC taxes were probably too high. Yes, the UNSC Navy was not effective enough at stopping piracy. Criticizing something from outside the system was always easier than actually solving the damn issues, no matter if it was piracy, politics, or production. Those whiners thought it was as simple as telling people to just do their jobs better, and it would magically happen. Complete garbage, as Blunt himself knew well. But just because the Innies were wrong didn’t mean that the sentiment itself was wrong. They were expressing their emotional unsatisfaction with the UNSC, and that was something important.
Yes, Innies lied often, but sometimes they were actually correct. They loved pointing out corrupt administrators, planetary governors, and other failures of the system, because it strengthened their terrorist cause. In return, the UNSC had to remove those people, both to protect the legitimacy of the system, and to deny the Insurrection that ammunition in the eternal propaganda war.
Each time, it gave the Innies just a little bit more legitimacy, as the UNSC gave ground… but at the same time, it allowed Howard Blunt and Section Two to argue that the UNSC was responding to legitimate problems, unlike what the Innie propaganda claimed.
And now… it was all over.
Just a few weeks ago, everything had changed, and not for the better.The Covenant. An actual alien species. Just the announcement of their discovery alone would have consumed Blunt’s office, even in a peaceful first contact.Unfortunately, the Covenant hadn’t come in peace. They’d destroyed at least two UNSC warships directly, were probably behind the disappearance of several dozen missing freighters, and worst of all, they’d destroyed Harvest.Blunt always hated dealing with the aftermath of terrorist attacks. He hated having to put out press releases showing bombed out cafes, craters in market squares, and shattered remnants of where people had once walked, talked, and mingled. There was something... cold and sick about taking a human tragedy, and turning it into propaganda. But it was necessary, and he reminded himself of that each and every time he had to edit out the blood and guts, and make the carnage into something less horrifying.Harvest was even worse. There were no bodies to photoshop, no screams to muffle, no human expressions of terror. Just video clips of a monstrous purple warship, in the cold black of space, firing lasers and plasma blasts and God knows what else, shattering a battlegroup of three UNSC warships in less than a minute. Such a short amount of time to shatter the carefully construction image of UNSC invulnerability that Captain Howard Blunt had spent decades propping up.And the planet… He shuddered, gritting his teeth.There were no manuals for this. Nobody had ever even theorized on how to spin the destruction of an entire population center. Do you use the unfiltered image, and show everyone what three million dead colonists looked like? Or did you censor it, just a little, so that it was clear that Harvest had been destroyed, but without the visceral clarity of the jagged lines carved into the planet in a glyph? Without the burning red hot-spots where major cities had been? Without the infernos raging across the planet’s atmosphere?
Even a nuclear detonation would have been easier to handle! Just lean on the old cultural distaste for nukes, cite Hiroshima and Nagasaki to shame the Innies, and censor the actual carnage in the name of ‘not giving in to terrorism’, or some other justification. At most, you show a crater, because craters were understood, and weren’t as raw as this new form of devastation.The UNSC couldn’t cover this up. Not that they’d even thought about doing it! But if they had been as evil as the Innies claimed, and wanted to cover it up, it simply couldn’t be done.
Harvest was one of the most productive agricultural worlds in the Outer Colonies, and its loss was already going to send a hammer-blow through the food markets on dozens of nearby worlds.
When the freighters stopped coming, it wouldn’t take long for people to figure out that Harvest didn’t exist anymore.
But how, in God’s name, was Howard Blunt supposed to play this? HIGHCOM might think that the final decision was up to them, but they weren’t creating policy whole-cloth out of nothing. They were picking from the suggestions created by their bureaus, departments, and ministries. In this specific case, that meant Section Two, since they had authority over major military tragedies – and this was a major military tragedy, make no mistake.
Within Section Two, it was his job to decide those suggestions. Nobody else’s. And right now, Blunt wished that it wasn’t.Even as he sat here, the work was already in progress. He’d given three different sets of orders to his three best teams, and while he had this minor breakdown over the looming reality, they were hard at work. After they’d gotten him some rough drafts, he’d take a look, make a decision on which to go with, and concentrate all three teams onto the singular focus.
The first team would make Harvest as ‘clean’ as possible, without hiding the fact it was destroyed. Blur the planet, blur the alien ship, make it all as non-descript as possible. Whatever poor bastard was assigned to be the spokesman for the press conference could cite military necessity and classification as the reason why they were releasing impressionistic artwork instead of accurate photographs. The horrible details could be stated verbally, where they would have less impact while still being truthful.The second team would try to hit a middle ground. Remove the brutally vivid lines that had been carved into the planet by the aliens in the shape of a strange sigil. Blur away the glowing balls of magma that had once been cities into a duller red haze. Yet, at the same time, show the planet’s new color: black and grey, all the water boiled away and the atmosphere ringed by fire. The Covenant ship, similarly, would be in full detail, but from a moment when it hadn’t been firing its weapons, so that it was ominous, but not immediately threatening.And the third team, those poor bastards. In theory they had the simplest job, since they were going to show the entirety of UNSC Heracles’s recordings, in all their detail. No video editing or photoshop required. But in practice they had the toughest job. They had to write a press conference speech that acknowledged that full truth, and somehow convinced the audience that the UNSC was not deeply and truly screwed. Even after the audience had seen the burning ruin of Harvest and the alien’s advanced weaponry. They had to maintain morale after showing all of that.Howard Blunt never thought that he would have wished for another image of a bombed out city-block, with the corpses of innocent families and children strewn about the place. But he did. He never wanted those horrible bombings to happen, but at least he knew how to spin them, how to show the right mix of anger at the Innies for their terrorist actions, while also showing concern and sorrow for the lives of the dead. Insurrectionist attacks were a solved issue for Section Two. Show a middle-ground image that showed some of the carnage without the gore of exit wounds or detached organs or shredded bodies. Speak calmly into the camera with a tone of solemnity and an undercurrent of anger. Recite the names of the innocent dead, and express the UNSC’s sorrow at their murders by the Innies. Always, above all else, pin the blame firmly on the Insurrection itself. The Innies had chosen this path. The Innies had resorted to violence first. This? This was something new, and Howard Blunt feared that it was soon to become his new normal. He had no proof of his fear. He wasn’t an intel analyst from Section One, or one of the eggheads or trigger pullers from Section Three. Yet these days, he knew quite a few of those people. More and more, he was collaborating with the other branches in ONI, spurred on by the unstoppable force of nature that was Doctor Catherine Halsey, and her odd mixture of talents. Their skills and expertise had proven surprisingly useful for his work, helping him refine ONI’s PR campaigns into something a touch softer, more personal.And right now, with the little tidbits he’d picked up from those people, his mediocre instincts were telling him that Harvest was not going to be a one-off. Blunt hadn’t told that to anybody, of course. Just saying it out loud would have cratered morale.
This kind of destruction was simply too thorough, in his eyes. If the Covenant had been pissed at humanity, bombing the cities from orbit would have killed enough of Harvest’s population to get their point across. Yet they’d done more. They’d burned the entire surface of the planet.
The Covenant had been so extensive in their work that even the oceans had been flash-fried by their weapons. Even if the UNSC painstakingly restored the soil of Harvest’s once bountiful fields, there was no water to feed the crops. The planet might still exist as a ball of rock, but without water, it could no longer support life.Add in that they were powerful. Too powerful for the UNSC to actually defeat, militarily.
Sure, the Navy had only sent a destroyer and two frigates out to investigate. That was barely a picket force compared to the fleets that had retaken Eridanus II during the second rebellion a dozen years ago. That didn’t change the fact that a single Covenant warship had swatted them like flies, and allowed the Heracles to escape. Was this the strongest of Covenant warships? The weakest? Were there dozens more? Hundreds? Thousands, dare he wonder?He had no way of knowing, but he didn’t think that the Covenant would have sent their strongest ship un-escorted, either on a first contact or on a deliberate extermination mission. Even if they only had a limited number of powerful ships, that didn’t make sense for the combination of how quickly and how powerfully they’d acted.The implications were clear to him: this new war was only going to get worse.In some ways, Blunt wished that Halsey was here, so he could consult with her on the issue.The brunette doctor had proven herself useful for Section Two in the past. She was full of surprises, and the single most useful one was her almost detached viewpoint of how the universe worked. It wasn’t that Halsey was clueless, or amoral, or even slightly crazy. It was that she almost always seemed to take the long view of any given subject. She was concerned with how events would unfold in ten or twenty years, rather than just one.Economic investment was the comparison that Halsey liked to use. It seems like she could discuss anything from the framework of how much you were willing to invest, when you wanted to get your return, and how much risk there was. Alas, Doctor Halsey had been unavailable for the past few weeks. He’d sent her requests for her assistance, and got total silence back. She was probably elbows deep in some laboratory right now, working on another element of this disastrous first contact.Still, that didn’t mean that Halsey was useless to him. He could try to imitate her mannerisms, try to copy how she might have reasoned with the situation. She had a very… distinctive style.Let’s assume, just for a moment, that this never happens again, Blunt thought to himself, resting his chin on his hand as he looked at the image of Harvest on a wall-mounted computer screen. If we give people the uncensored image, it will have the largest possible impact on our society. That would be bad, because people would be overcorrecting for a problem that no longer exists. But if we give them the most censored version, it’ll have the least possible impact… and that’s good, because then we wouldn’t have to spend as much controlling rioters.But flip it around, he continued, as he stood up and started to pace in his office. What if I’m right, and this is only the first of many burned planets? In that case, we actually need the largest possible impact, so that we can convince the population to support the war against the Covenant. If we censor it, there’s a risk that people won’t believe us. They might think we’re lying about it, and that loss of confidence could be catastrophic. We can’t do a mass mobilization if people think we’re just making up ghost stories about aliens.Blunt was reminded, painfully, of an example that then-Captain Michael Stanforth, the Spartan-II Project’s supervisor, had shared with him. The first rebellion on Eridanus II had been sparked by a rabble-rouser who’d lied about the Colonial Authority’s attempt to boost the planetary economy. The Insurrectionist had simply lied, over and over again, in a way that was provably wrong... but the truth didn’t matter to all those people. They’d risen up in rebellion and seized the entire system. People weren’t really rational, but emotional. That was fine. Whatever. But it was his job to try to convince those emotional people to not commit cultural suicide by believing every lie that they saw on their screens. The fact that his best methods used the same tactics as those lies was a bitter irony.
There were two different challenges with this whole issue, and they overlapped. The first was that Blunt had to predict the future. The propaganda of today had to be useful for the challenges of tomorrow. The second was that people were highly emotional, and even the objectively correct decision for the future could still rock the boat too far, and cause massive chaos in the short term.Someone had to make the call – and that someone was him. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t, Blunt thought to himself, sighing as he turned away from the image of Harvest, and walked back to his desk. He sat down heavily, and thought about cracking open the humidor for a Sweet Williams… but even the calming tobacco wouldn’t have helped right now.Normally, he had more to work with. Even in the worst scenarios, where a bomb was too gory to show, he usually still had images of the dead UNSC troopers, or the civvies, that he could toss up for some sympathy points. Pictures of the local area from before the Innies had blown it up.And sure, he had plenty of archival footage of Harvest on record… but if he used it, then he was only going to draw more attention onto the images. If he went with the fully censored or half-censored stuff, then the before pictures would make the censorship obvious. If he went with the raw footage, then the images of the agrarian paradise of Harvest would make it even more emotional. Which meant that he didn’t dare use that footage. It was too much. Too horrifying. Forget the public backlash at the UNSC for not stopping the Covenant, there might be genuine stress casualties or suicides if Section Two spent that much effort on thoroughly explaining what had happened to the Outer Colony world.Someone knocked on his office door. It was a fast pattern, sharp. Blunt wasn’t expecting it; his teams should have taken another couple hours, if not a full day before getting him their rough drafts. “Come in!” he called.His right hand man, Commander Vincenzi opened the door.“Sir, we just got more information on Harvest!” the Commander said, his wide-eyed look gave Howard Blunt pause. “Fresh material.”
“Harvest is a cinder, Jimmy,” Blunt reminded him dourly. “More material isn’t going to help right now.”“No, from during the attack!” Vincenzi told him hurriedly.“What?” Blunt demanded, standing up quickly and knocking his chair backwards. “How?”“There was an Army Ranger unit on Harvest doing anti-Innie ops when it all went down,” Vincenzi explained. “They got some of the population out alive.”“My God,” Blunt muttered, as his heart hammered in his chest.“Even better, they’ve got video,” Vincenzi told him. “We’ve got the whole thing, from dozens of different angles.”
“Put that footage on the conference room monitors, and call everyone in, right now!” Blunt ordered, grabbing his tablet and tapping out a set of messages. “We need to know as much as we possibly can. And who’s the man I need to thank for this?”“Ackerson,” Vincenzi said, following along as Blunt strode out into the hallway. “Captain James Ackerson.”