Longshore crew Hanover

Background information for the Longshore Crew campaign. You can read more information on the groups mentioned here.

Hanover Industries are in a difficult position. They desperately want to retain their position and independence as an Incorporate state, but their main territorial holding in Germany will revert to the German state in two year's time. To ensure the state continues after that, they are working hard to make Lebensraum their new base. This base needs to be secure, and that means that it has to be capable of self-sufficiency. But the current macro-economic structure of Posiedon means that Lebensraum, and Poseidon as a whole, will not be self-sufficient in food for a long time to come.

The reason is two-fold. While there are plenty of plants on Posiedon that could become food crops for humans, they are still wild species and will need significant development before they are suitable for the modern agricultural methods needed to feed hundreds of thousands of people. Until they, such crops will require too much support and attention to provide food in sufficient quantities, and Poseidon is very limited in population and hence the amount of attention that can be paid to agriculture.

On the other hand, terrestial crops will provide the necessary high yields, but they don't grow on Poseidon. Different trace minerials and different soil micro-fauna put terrestial crops at a disadvantage, allowing native plants to simply crowd out the terrestial plants all but the most intensively managed research plots.

There is only one quick fix to this problem, and the Hanover board decided to take it. Rather than waiting several years for Poseidon-native crops to be developed, followed by several more years to expand them to large-scale production, the Hanover board decided to exploit terrestial crops by eliminating their competition. Thus was born the Neuland Betrenten Projekt.

The idea was to sterilize the area around Lebensraum of all plant and bacterial life, to innoculate the soil with terrestial micro-fauna, and then use the new pristine fields to grow fields of terrestial crops. The later stages were easy to perform. The first stage was both technically and morally challenging. They ordered their top xenobiologist, Prof. Heinrich Schmidt to start work on it.

Schmidt quickly realized that he had the tool needed to sterilize a large swathe of Mandalay: the Fischer Blight virus. Using genetic engineering techniques made possible with xenosillicate, he and his team could alter the virus to target all Poseidon life instead of terrestial grasses. It could be controlled by ensuring that it required and artificial micronutrient to reproduce. With this nutrient, the virus would sterlize the land; withdraw it, and the virus would become inert.

The Hanover board realized that if word of this project ever got out, the GEO would destroy Hanover Industries and execute the board members. Lt. Gen. Karl Aachen (not a Major after all) of Hanover Security Services was ordered to ensure that there was no possibility that word could ever leak out. He decided to play on their existing poor reputation for ecological mismanagement: he would get eco-terrorists to kill the project team. That way, the secret of the Neuland Betrenten projekt would die, and Hanover would have an excuse to crack down on the eco-terrorists in retaliation.

With the modified Fischer Blight virus ready to be deployed, he leaked word to a Blue Water Circle cell of where various team members would be. The BWC took the bait, and so began a series of killings of prominent Hanover scientists. Eventually, only Schmidt was left alive and Aachen announced that Schmidt was not safe in Lebensraum because of the suspicion of a mole guiding the BWC attacks. Aachen took Schmidt to Longshore where the BWC could kill him more easily.