ARC SPECTRA / ARCSPECTRA

“…And then there is Arc Spectra, defined loosely—if defined at all—as a splinter faction within a splinter faction, like the innermost figure of an ancient set of Russian Nested Dolls, buried deep within the concentrated tiers of the Advocacy and perhaps its most terrible secret.” —Andrews, Sarah. “New Findings on Anniversary of The Bacchus Bloodbath.” Stanton Post N.p., 23 Apr. 2940

Though agents for the Advocacy traditionally work alone, the investigation into Ando Brothers Salvage & Reclamation revealed a corporate front for one of the largest criminal organizations in UEE history, and infiltrating it would require a focused effort between the agency and an unnamed contract organization.

“Everything!” an informant answered under severe distress when interrogated about the Ando Brothers. “Drug manufacturing, sales, prostitution, siphoning off government contracts, espionage…hell, all that’s the least of it…[takes huge gulps from a glass of water] fuckin’ murder. Bodies you could stack to the moon. Well, not from here, because there ain’t no moon, but…oh, that senator bitch? The one they found a while back, her head wrenched around backwards and her eyes wide like you thought they’d tumble out of their sockets and down her cheeks? Yeah, man, her for a fact.”

Enter the Advocacy’s secret operation, SCRAP TRACE.

Spanning four years and severely damaging the relationship between Banu and UEE, the investigation conducted by the newly-forged Operation SCRAP TRACE would be unprecedented in how covert and unrestrained (even by Advocacy standards) its processes were. SCRAP TRACE would be the last of the Advocacy’s assembled collection of unbridled misfits, forged from old policies going back to the Messer Era.

According to one source, the four Ando Brothers became spooked during the investigation and abandoned their Salvage operations and other holdings and fled to the nearest Banu system. Operation SCRAP TRACE sent its contract agents in to locate the brothers and circumnavigate the system’s hostile attitude toward extradition, a task the anonymous organization likely excelled at. These events culminated into what has come to be known as the Bacchus Bloodbath.

The Ando Brothers—along with a large contingent of mercenary-type associates—were massacred on the Banu homeworld of Baachus, and though an Advocacy presence was emphatically denied by the agency, the scene of the aftermath, and the bodies of several unidentified persons, indicated otherwise.

The political fallout from the Baachus Bloodbath complicated relations between the Banu and the UEE on a scale not seen since the Vernon Tar altercation. The destruction and loss of life caused major ripples along the trade routes between systems (the hijacking of two Merchantman ships in the nearby port thought to be used by the agents to escape the system certainly did nothing to help), and many of those trade lanes are, to this day, cold to the touch.

Two years ago, Sarah Andrews, a young and ambitious Stanton Post journalist, focused her investigation into the Advocacy’s use of contract organizations going back over a decade in hopes of finding something substantial linking the agency to the Bacchus Bloodbath. After months of ignored FOI requests and half a dozen heated courtroom battles, the Stanton Post successfully acquired little more than a small stack of heavily redacted DD46 operation sheets. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for her to discover a thread running through several of the Advocacy’s larger operations.

“To this day, I don’t really know what I was trying to do. I think I was just looking for something to jump out at me. I wrote down all of these names they’d given to these clandestine operations over the years on index cards and spread them out on the floor. Then I just sat in the middle of it all and looked them over with what my editor used to call “soft eyes”. It wasn’t long at all before I began to notice something peculiar.”

“There were all these covert operations with strange titles like RACERS PACT, CARPET SCAR, TRACER CAPS, CARPA CREST, CAT SCRAPER, SCARCE PART and then SCRAP TRACE …some others as well. At first, I only had a vague sense of what I was looking at. I could see there were similarities between these particular names, and so I set them aside. I should have seen it immediately, but I was so tired by that time, and I ended up going to bed. The next morning, as I walked over the cards on my way to the kitchen, I screamed, “They’re anagrams!”

Sarah’s article was published the following April. In it, she revealed a month’s long study to discover how Advocacy had used devices like scrambled operation titles to both conceal references to contract agencies while still being able to identify them in-house (since these agencies were never named in any documents, no matter the classification level). A list of all possible anagrams were generated and analyzed. In the end, only one name matched any known organization.

Arc Spectra.

The organization which carries the name Arc Spectra has repeatedly denied that its founding members were ever a part of the Advocacy’s most elite and secretive contract unit and have publicly expressed that Ms. Andrews’s article had defamed the organization and was both irresponsible and actionable. At the time of this writing, however, no complaint has been filed.