The owner is a Roger Lang. (No clue who he is.)
Its purpose is to provide the wearer with an personal sense of community and purpose, and to serve as proof of membership on occasion. To provide a visual reminder of what is at stake, what is being protected. (No, I don't know what is being protected.)
The pendant is made out of colored ceramic and silver. The ceramic is actually a bit unusual, in that it's not a standard composition that I've encountered before. Not peculiar so much as different. (Like, if you were to encounter gold stamped "23.78 Karat!")
It has no other operational mode than to wear it.
Further Analysis
They come from somewhere you've never been. There are definitely more of them, but it's unclear how many or where. Though probably at least some somewhere on Sanctuary.
Well, some things jump out at you. The Palace Guard had been in place for a long time. It's possible a loyal one was simply swapped out, instead of being a sleeper agent for years and years, but even that requires a vast degree of planning, and then waiting for an appropriate moment as palace guard schedules aren't known so far in advance for security reasons. Same with the cop's cover.
More likely, this is part of something that has been in the works for possibly years, and just triggered recently.
It's clear that whoever is behind it is clearly well-funded. Money for this operation seemed to be channeled throough the Well, so it's going to be hard to trace that back to anything, but their equipment and technique imply a large infrastructure somewhere supporting it all. It's not the sort of thing a single eccentric millionaire threw together on a whim. Not necessarily nation-state sized infrastructure, but at least a large high-tech corporation. Clearly a major player.
The back-up goal seemed to be implicate the Red Hegemony in the heinous crime, but the prime goal, which was thwarted due to the verification actually working, was almost certainly more long term. Given what happened on Riden, if you assume it was the same people, it's not unlikely that the major goal was indeed to turn the Hegemonies against each other in the long run, or at least distract them from something else. (No medallions were discovered on Riden, or anything else pointing to this conspiracy. The main connecting piece of evidence is that the captured members had their brains implode immediately upon questioning. A clever trick, that....)
As to the current fate of the heir, the two likely possibilities are, she's going to show up dead on the "Guilder frontier" in an attempt to start a war, or she's going to be kept alive and safe as a bargaining chip at some future time. Given the time that's past with no word, you'd guess that later option. Either that or Guilder is deep in the Outworlds, and trying to start a war between the Blue Hegemony and Rupert's Hole or something seems unlikely. Ransom seems quite unlikely as money is clearly not the goal and no major policy decision seem to be on the horizon, other than the Tarn invasion. If it is intended to influence the governemnt on the Tarn issue, you'd have expected contact by now, as you've brought news of the Tarn to New Light already.
Finally, (*whew* 7 successes), whoever they are seem to be very minimalist on their mission manpower, which is great for security, but not so good when things don't go exactly according to plan, as you've seen. This probably indicates that they have difficulty recruiting, or training is a very difficult and expensive endeavor for them.
You and Max and the official investigation can put together more details of how the kidnapping was carried out, but at this point, that's all just of academic interest.
Roger had a pendant made of colored ceramic and silver. It is my belief that this symbol is used for recognition by an organization.
It has an unusual composition. Attempts to discover a natural reason (such as an unusual manufacturing process) came up negative. My conclusion is that odd composition is likely purposeful. Should an attempt be made to create duplicates, be aware that its composition could be used for authentication.
Searches into the symbol's meaning were unproductive, except for a single source indicating that the symbol itself could date all the way to the planet's founding.
It is my strong belief that there are not other instances of this symbol within the Palace.
"It's heavily tied to the hardware, we think. Here's a "copy" which should be able to confirm that something is encrypted in this style, but not actually decrypt and delete it."
"Attempts to simply copy the disk are going slowly as it seems to checksum some of the idiosyncracies of the actual hardware parts of the disk. Taking it apart almost resulted in it never working again, but someone with a good knack for that sort of thing managed to get it together again just right. Now they're trying to figure out what can be done with it."
[Copy of the disk is now in captain's safe, in my stateroom.]
Leonid Stace, he had those shields and is now a vegetable.
Jennett
Tyrell, not an active part of the conspiracy, but as an eligible rabid
anti-blue, would serve to drive the hegemonies further apart. She's
returned to Tinara in disgrace. She's descended from the Tyrell of
Tyrell's Folly "fame."
Conspiracy is to protect (from what we're not clear) the blue-green planet, Terra, and to destabilize the linked words. One guy, Enrique Galber, is actually from the conspiracy, the other 4 are brainwashed fanatic blues.
The mental shields are a teachable skill, but when it's triggered, it totally wipes your brain. (bleah)
Note that "Tarn" is a bastardization of "Terran" and that these people were therefore likely part of the Terran Alliance.
These guys had basically duped a bunch of hackers into trying to take down various government computers in order to destabilize the red Hegemony.
The amulet belonged to Gaudel Ausington. The owner no longer has any personal feeling for the amulet, being brain-dead. He's over there on the interrogation table. He had the amulet in his possession for about fifteen years.
The stuff in the syringe used to have a lot more of it, but then most of it went away suddenly recently. It's been in this syringe for several weeks, before that it was in a small glass vial for quite some time.
It's supposed to lessen people's resistence to mental domination.
There's a full syringe of the stuff a few meters to the left. Other than that, the stuff seems pretty rare. The only other samples you think are in range are towards the capital, you'd suspect somewhere in the palace area.
Gaudel Ausington was an import/export middleman, the sort who would deal with smaller trading companies (often the just-one-ship kind) and do all the planetary arranging for them to hook them up with appropriate planetside merchants. It seems to have been moderately lucrative. He's been doing that for about five years, though he has a Sanctuary and Homeground native background (his age is listed as 42). It seems to be the case that only the past five years (which is how long he's had that particular job) is a legit background, and the rest is forged, moderately competently but without enough personal ties to be true, and without any confirmation from the actual people who he's supposed to have interacted with. It's a decent forged background, but would surely not stand up to a serious background check. On the other hand, he had no need for any sort of security clearance.
It seems likely he was on planet before that, because he seems to have gotten things up and running pretty smoothly, but we haven't been able to track down his previous identity.
A few years ago, Citizen Archibald entered an alliance with a conspiracy of people who called themselves Proteges (of who or what, it wasn't clear). One of the interests of the Proteges appeared to be heating up the cold war between the Red and Blue Hegemonies, which is something he was interested in, as several of his more profitable concerns come from large weapons manufacture.
The Proteges ended up demonstrating that part of how they ensure a good loyal secret group is a lot of skill with brainwashing. Archibald wasn't brainwashed at this point, but a lot of the staff working with the Proteges were. Due to the particular nature of Mirris' psi, she managed to avoid being brainwashed by appearing that she already had been, but that wasn't really ideal, since apparently brainwashed people don't have to be paid as much as normal people.
Then, about a year ago, the Proteges acquired the kidnapped Heir to the Blue Hegemony. She's been being kept in various secure locations since then, and a number of the Citizen's staff went off to deal with that. A couple of months ago, Archibald actually got brainwashed as well, which that gave the Proteges a lot more free rein with what they could do with his resources. Keeping her cover started getting harder at this point; Mirris planted a back door in the Proteges system, which might be able to get a handle on where the heir is at some point in the future.
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