Illuminae

In the interview with the Ministry of the Interior, Kady Grant and Ezra Mason recount their escape from school during the commencement of the BeiTech invasion of Kerenza, the illegal settlement with mines and a subway system where they used to live before their respective journeys to the Hypatia and Alexander ships.

Kady was in class right after a breakup with her boyfriend, Ezra. Sirens went off, alerting about invaders. Kady broke out a window and escaped to her mom’s truck, witnessing a teacher’s death by falling debris and catching sight of Ezra Mason across the way.

In Ezra’s interview, he says he asked Kady for a ride, even though he felt she had a right to run him over. Kady and Ezra then fled the parking lot in the truck. There were dead bodies everywhere.

Ezra identifies the invaders as BeiTech from the logo on their dreadnought warship, the Lincoln. BeiTech attacked Kerenza because they were a competitor operating illegal mines. The interviewer tries to steer the conversation back toward what happened during the attack rather than Kady’s exasperation around it. Kady is annoyed by this but continues describing their exit route, which was leading them to the spaceport. They were advised their research fleet would send shuttles down to bring the survivors up to the spaceport safely.

The interviewer refers to Kady as “Miss Grant” repeatedly, but when the interviewer tries to call Ezra “Mr. Mason,” Ezra pushes back and insists he’s not called his father’s name since the interviewer won’t allow him to see his father. The interviewer insists he needs to be debriefed before he’s allowed to have contact with civilians.

During the next segment of Ezra’s interview, he discusses how Kady’s erratic driving and the obstacles in their path led him to take over the vehicle. Ezra crudely states BeiTech launched missiles at the spaceport and caused it to explode. A lot of people Ezra knew, such as a friend from geeball (a sport he plays) and his neighbor, died in that attack.

Kady continues her interview by stating they reached a point where they were driving just to avoid attacks since they no longer had anywhere to go, and that she noticed the attacks were “cracking the ice shelf under the colony’s foundations” (10). Kady explains a conflict in the car during which Ezra wanted to find his dad, who worked for the refinery, but Kady wanted to find her mom, who is a pathologist and currently alive on the Hypatia, and her cousin Asha, who was training at a medical center and has since passed. Kady’s dad works offworld on a Jump Station called Heimdall, and Ezra’s mom passed away a while ago.

As they were navigating obstacles and debris, a cineplex fell on the truck. Kady was knocked unconscious, and as Ezra tells it in the next portion of his interview, he dragged her from the wreckage and gave her mouth-to-mouth, resulting in her punching him in the face. When Kady came to, they were about to fight, but Cyclone fighter ships closed in, and the refinery where Ezra’s dad worked was attacked and covered in slow black mist. BeiTech ground troops closed in, and as they did, Ezra criticized the day Kady picked to dump him. While the world was literally ending around them, Kady and Ezra fought over their future. Ezra loved Kady, but they were too caught up in college applications and commitment debates.

Ezra fled after their fight to go look for his father, but he didn’t make it that far because he was shot. Kady saw him get shot and headed toward the shuttles by the lab, where she assumed her mother would be. She stole a BeiTech truck and avoided attack by deftly navigating past the initial troops with knowledge of the town, and eventually, she got to a point where she thought the troops assumed she was a BeiTech employee driving around. Then, Kady saw the black mist by the refinery Ezra was headed to, which she heard was a biological attack. After ensuring she won’t be prosecuted for her actions, Kady tells the interviewer she mowed down a bunch of the BeiTech employees surrounding Ezra, and then he got into the car, bleeding badly. Ezra passed out next to Kady.

Kady says they made it close to the shuttles in the truck but had to go the rest of the way on foot so the civilians wouldn’t mistake them for BeiTech employees. Kady screamed to draw the civilians’ attention and get Ezra help, and the med center employees helped him into the Alexander, where he saw a doctor. Because Kady was able to scream for help, they left her to her own devices, and she had to board the Hypatia instead.

The interviewer asks if Kady saw missiles hit the refinery, but she didn’t. She only saw the black mist. Kady speculates that BeiTech didn’t want to demolish the refinery and chose this method of attack so they could mine the hermium for themselves. At the end of Ezra’s interview, Ezra asks for more pain medicine, and the interviewer tells him his father was among the casualties.

General David Torrence’s memorandum to the Alexander’s officers highlights their analytic crew’s findings on the situation in the 24 hours following the initial attack on the Kerenza colony. The Alexander’s jump gate, while still able to create wormholes, can no longer support independent jump travel. It’ll take them over six months to reach a populated area of space because of the damage and distance from a static jump station, Heimdall. Their Artificial Intelligence Defense Analytics Network (AIDAN) is damaged, but it is capable of self-repair. This impacts their ability to drive and calculate jump distances, among other key functionality. Their water reservoirs, defense grid, and propulsion systems are damaged. The Lincoln, a BeiTech dreadnought, is pursuing them, and they only have less than a quarter percent chance of surviving.

The Alexander is escorting two civilian ships, the science vessel Hypatia and a heavy freighter, Copernicus. The total population of civilians with the Alexander is around 4,400 people, and with the dwindling water supplies and pursuit of the ships, the Alexander anticipates having issues with which the other civilian ships are not to assist. They have sent distress signals to the United Terran Authority, but because they’re still unanswered, they believe their calls haven’t been received.

The situation aboard the Alexander is dire, and for this reason, General Torrence announces mandatory conscription of useful colonists, such as engineers and doctors, as well as aptitude testing for all colonists 17 and older to see if they can be of assistance in the STEM fields. Anyone with average scores will be conscripted, and even though this seems extreme, General Torrence underscores how extreme the situation itself is in that “no stellarcorp has ever openly attacked a United Terran Authority ship” (21). He ends his memorandum with a message of sympathy, solidarity, and gratitude. They are to try everything possible to get the civilians to the Heimdall waypoint.

Three side- and front-view maps are available for the Alexander 78-V, Hypatia, and Copernicus, the three Kerenza civilian ships fleeing BeiTech’s Lincoln for the waypoint Heimdall. In addition to the maps, there are brief descriptions of the ships and stats, including their commander/captain, executive officer, class, length, height, crew, max velocity, acceleration, main drive, secondary drive, inertial dampeners, defense grid, payload, fighters, and shuttles.

The Alexander is a large ship, both in length and width. It’s classified as a battlecarrier, has the fastest velocity and acceleration, and carries the most crew. The Hypatia is more elegantly designed in that it is slender, sleeker, and is a more scientifically-oriented ship. It, too, has quite a fast velocity and acceleration, but it holds far less crew (500 compared to Alexander's 4,000). Lastly, the Copernicus, a midtrek freighter, resembles a dirigible in that it’s short and stout with a slightly narrower front and a propeller on the back. It has a comparable crew to Hypatia (450), even though it’s mainly intended for long hauls.

The strengths of each are evident, with Alexander as the aggressor ship capable of nuclear attacks, Hypatia as the tracking ship, and Copernicus as the heavy lifter. Alexander is the strongest ship by leagues and doesn’t have as many pitfalls as the other ships, the biggest flaws of which are the Hypatia’s light defensive/attack systems and the Copernicus’s slow, difficult to maneuver structure.

Formatted like Wikipedia, Unipedia is a hacktivist public website that chronicles events and conspiracy theories. The Illuminae Group leaves a note on this file that they included it because there’s some useful information, and they may want to send their lawyers after the site. The page summarizes the Battle of Kerenza with six subsections: Background, Initial assault, UTA response, Pursuit, Secondary conflict, and Aftermath.

The Intro situates the battle within the larger, discreet Stellarcorp War between BeiTech Industries and the Wallace Ulyanov Consortium over illegal mining activities. When UTA sent the Alexander to help with distress calls, a three-way war broke out. The Background section provides additional information about Kerenza’s position in space and its abundance of hermium, as well as a focus on the Wallace Ulyanov Consortium’s illegal activities mining there, which were hidden due to the remoteness of the planet and the protection provided by the Defiant. The Copernicus transported the hermium, and two other ships, Hypatia and Brahe, also orbited Kerenza.

The Initial Assault section describes BeiTech’s attack on Kerenza, which they completed by creating the first ever wormhole jump point outside of a UTA lab and launching four of their dreadnoughts at Kerenza. They destroyed the Defiant, but the Defiant managed to reach UTA, which sent The Alexander in response. The Alexander called for backup, but BeiTech’s ships blocked its signals. They engaged in combat, and three of BeiTech’s dreadnoughts were destroyed or extremely damaged. The surviving dreadnought, the Lincoln, pursued the Alexander with the intent of keeping witnesses of the attack silent.

All ships were damaged to the extent that they cannot create jump points, so escape and help are months away. The Lincoln destroyed the Brahe ship, another science vessel, with the implication that around 2,000 Kerenza civilians were killed in this attack. In addition to this information, there is a stat panel for Kerenza’s surface pressure, elemental composition, radius, and flattening, as well as an artistic rendition of the Lincoln.

Ezra messages Kady from the Alexander on Valentine’s Day. Everyone on board the ships is supposed to have a means of communicating with one another. He thanks her for saving his life and says his shoulder is feeling better. He’s heard that there’s a problem with the Alexander’s jump drive and water supply and that BeiTech dreadnaughts are following them. He says there’s an entire UTA fleet supposed to meet them and that it’s a few days away from helping them. He awkwardly apologizes to Kady and wants to know what went wrong in their relationship but also thinks that their break-up is the only reason they both didn’t die, since she wouldn’t have driven to school and been able to drive them out otherwise. He takes it as a sign from the universe and wishes her well.

Kady’s Psych Profile and Conscript Suitability Assessment indicate that she won’t be conscripted because of her inability to work with a team due to her preference for isolation and her anti-establishment attitude that’s driven by her personal ideology. The profiler believes Kady purposefully scored lower on her tests to avoid entering the neurogramming training program, given her previous performance in school, and because of all this, they believe she would be more trouble than she’s worth and demoralize others. They also believe she’ll be less of a threat to their activity if they leave her alone.

The Network Security Incident Report has a note from the Illuminae Group regarding Kady Grant’s repeated attempts to hack into the Alexander’s shipboard security, which align with the description of her in her Psych Profile as someone who is quite capable with computers but resistant to authority. The log indicates a total of four breach attempts, three of which were successful. She managed to get into the datafort for three minutes, then canceled the Meals to Network Engineering by accessing the galley database, which consequently had a security upgrade. Lastly, she deleted Network Engineer Xi Wei Lu from the database, but they were trying to recreate Lu’s profile.

Byron Zhang, a research officer on Hypatia with known ties to information liberty movements, messages Kady three weeks following the attack and attempts to breach security. The message was partially unretrievable, so the only remaining parts are compliments on her hacking attempts and directions to learn more about hacking.

Kady, under the username “ByteMe,” responded to Byron Zhang, whose username is “CitB.” Despite the obvious prowess demonstrated in Zhang’s earlier message, Kady cracked his Intrusion Counter Electronics in 87 minutes. She is initially confrontational with him, and her inability to work well with others is apparent because she’s wary of the cost. Zhang replies that he simply wants access to more information and appeals to her desire for that as well. He offers to teach her again, and even though she’s snarky about it, she accepts his offer.

Ezra writes to Kady again and apparently has not heard from her, so he’s not sure if his messages are getting through or if she’s just ignoring him or busy. He tells her it was his 18th birthday, so he can legally drink, even though there’s nothing to drink. He comments again on the water supply issue. He tells her about the conscript testing underway and thinks he’ll be conscripted now that he’s of age.

He also shares a dream he had about her where they were in the parking lot, but she wouldn’t let him in the car and there was someone already in the passenger seat who looked exactly like him and was laughing. He wonders if there is any meaning in the dream. He wishes her well again and signs off with “Love” (33).

During Ezra’s interview with a psychologist, he’s asked about his mother, father, and girlfriend, all of which he responds to negatively because his parents are both dead and Kady is his ex-girlfriend. The psychologist notices that Ezra reveals he’s been to therapy before, that he still refers to his father in the present tense, and that he’s listed his ex-girlfriend as his emergency contact. Ezra is hostile with the psychologist, making jokes about how bad they are at doing their job by poking his most tender emotional wounds without care and tact. The psychologist gets agitated by Ezra’s continually disparaging remarks and defends their background as a psychologist with a degree and field training.

The psychologist points out Ezra’s anger issues, and they sit in silence for over 50 minutes. Ezra eventually opens up and blames himself for the breakup. Kady made herself vulnerable and asked him for something he couldn’t give her. He won’t tell the psychologist what it was or the reason why he couldn’t give it to her. He couldn’t even tell Kady the reason. The psychologist presses issues about Ezra’s mother and father again without giving him space to process. He asks if they’re being recorded, to which the psychologist responds that only audio is being recorded. Ezra flips his middle finger at the psychologist and describes it aloud for the record, which abruptly cuts off in the middle of Ezra’s taunts.

Ezra’s Psych Profile/Conscript Suitability Assessment finds him a priority 1 conscript because of his ability to lead, work as part of team (thanks to his background in high school sports), and his anger toward BeiTech industries for killing his father, which gives him proper motivation to fight. Typically, he wouldn’t be conscripted due to his PTSD and anxiety, but his test results are extremely high, and they believe putting him in the cockpit would allow him to air his aggression toward BeiTech in an advantageous way.

It has been four months since Ezra has tried to reach out to Kady. Ezra’s draft of a letter to Kady is their last communication before the Copernicus incident. He is writing drunk and doesn’t plan to send it to her, but he just pours out his feelings. He’s angry she hasn’t responded to him, says he’s ready to fly a cyclone soon, and is still in love with her six months after their breakup. He then slams his head into the keyboard, resulting in an unintelligible string of text.