Situation handled, security breach repaired. Temporary moratorium on all online communications and downloads bought time to patch the damage and run damage control. The mayor and her husband were working on the business and interdimensional relations front. Conflict was not expected but they were planning to be ready regardless.

Dragon’s presenting style seemed to be to start from the general and then hammer in specifics. That was the general.

Specifics: the security breach wasn’t a thing. Yes, some redundant security code had been used, yes, it was flawed, and they suspected the culprit was why. It was groundwork laid weeks in advance. But it had been spotted and ninety percent fixed. The culprit had pushed the false story regardless. Proving the falsehood would require a lot of businesses and groups to share private data on how they’d managed things, and that was going to be an uphill battle.

The brief internet blackout had been fought and delayed, forcing use of actual munitions to enact. It had led to minutes passing before the blackout took effect, after which point the adversary had ceased fighting. Speculation: they’d wanted those minutes, nothing else.

I skimmed other, lesser details, with lists of businesses and groups that may have been more explicitly targeted, but nothing jumped out at me, and Legend’s words were more interesting.

“We think this is more groundwork, a platform that lets them launch further attacks. If details, emails, personal information or secrets are leaked in coming weeks, then people won’t ask who. They’ll be interested in what, because their curiosity is piqued.”

“We should do everything we can to keep this from being named,” Lark said. “If it gets coined as a term then it moves us even further from the ‘who’. We should also pay attention to the initial details they share. If this becomes a battlefield where we’re painted as the bad guys, quote-unquote ‘leakers’ will be held up as heroes. We want to combat that, and it’s going to be hard.”

I found myself nodding along. I didn’t like Lark, he’d been scummy and tried to use me to get Amy into Auzure, his corporate team, but there was no denying that he and Legend knew their PR and image stuff.

“We agree there,” Legend said. “We’ve already seen some hints of how subtle this can be. Dragon?”

“Once I found the telltale signs, I uncovered two incidents, in addition to Antares’s case. I hope you don’t mind my raising the subject, Antares.”

“No,” I said. I hadn’t seen mention of my diary in the transcript.

“They manufactured months worth of falsified diary entries and planted them on Antares’s computer, put in key phrases they knew would trip my alarms when Antares shared files with me, and led me to think poorly of Antares for weeks.”

“What kind of thing are we talking about?” Rescue asked.