Mandate 9
"You don’t fight
Mandate 9 to win a battle. You fight them to remind them they’re not the only ones willing to burn a planet to make a point."
Profiteers of Permanent Conflict
Mandate 9 began as an internal division within Vanguard Dynamics, originally tasked with high-risk recovery and extraction operations for their clandestine espionage division. Following a corporate merger that birthed the notorious Fury intelligence arm, this group—now redundant and over-trained—faced liquidation. But under the leadership of the cloned and disgraced Solar Clone Corps commander 5-XIV-0212, the division went rogue. Taking their Equipment, contacts, and tactical infrastructure with them, they transformed into a freelance Private Military Contractor with no allegiance beyond contract clauses. Where Vanguard Dynamics retains a nominal allegiance to the Pan-Solar Consortium, Mandate 9 does not. They serve clients ranging from secessionist enclaves to warlords, terror cults, and even rogue Great House vassals. More concerning, they’ve been known to deliberately destabilize systems by arming insurgencies—creating the demand they’re uniquely qualified to fill.
Clone-Led Cells and No-Code Warfare
The death of 5-XIV-0212 at the hands of the Solar Defense Fleet over Titan was not the end but a beginning. A hidden Exemplar Cloning facility activated shortly after his demise, mass-producing functional copies of the commander, each acting as a warlord and cell leader across Human Space. These clones follow identical doctrines: encirclement, escalation, annihilation. Mandate 9 forces are conditioned to ignore surrender and engage in "degradation warfare," where every enemy asset—personnel, supply, even infrastructure—is considered a target for eradication. Their units are small, modular, and devastatingly coordinated, favoring encampment break-ins, aerospace interdiction, and psychological shock ops. No battle fought against them ends with prisoners. Their clones issue autonomy protocols, allowing squads to operate without centralized command, and are often accompanied by proprietary war tech stolen from Vanguard Dynamics before the split.
A War Economy in Microcosm
Despite their savagery, Mandate 9 is not chaotic. Their operations are tightly organized, with black ledger contracts, false-flag missions, and arms deals managed via off-grid networks tied to fugitive quantum brokers and ghost corporations. Surveillance shows they actively manipulate local economies, introducing just enough chaos to drive need for hired guns—and then filling that need themselves. They serve as a brutal warning of what happens when corporate militarism is left unchecked: a military-industrial complex turned predator, unbound by legality, oversight, or conscience. Even within Vanguard Dynamics, whispers persist that Mandate 9’s continued existence is tolerated, if only to test battlefield doctrine and drive gear sales. Whether true or not, what’s certain is this: where Mandate 9 goes, peace is either dead or sold by the hour.
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