Loose Ends: Cal & Howie

Prologue

In the year 2100, the planet Omeocoon suffered a catastrophic event in which a small group of terrorists attacked the planet with charges of chemical explosives that killed most of the population and decimated the landscape. One of these associates was an Omeocoon with a distinctive canine shape. He shared Kieran's distaste for the Dynamic Patrol. Howard, who preferred to be called 'Howie,' was unique... in that he was somewhat unstable. He was at the age of ascension before most of his other colleagues, which was typical for most of Kieran's team but uncommon for a standard Omeocoon. Inside Howard's delusional mind, Kieran was the perfect leader. Completely without flaw, Howard believed in the needs of the few. Only a select number of Omeocoon would survive their assault, and those could also be taught to have a distaste for the patrol.

Howard became part of the group with no name when an acquaintance of an acquaintance showed him one of the bases for this group... with no name, as an express hater of the Dynamic Patrol and an activist against their beliefs on his own. The sales pitch entirely swept away Howard, and he joined. Howard was not simply a handyman or some security watch. He was an expert in the matters of espionage and computer science. He was a hacker. And he did not hesitate to utilize his abilities when called upon. And he was not limited to petty hacking either; Kieran used him to train a team of 'decoders' and utilized them to gain access to essential data banks: ship schematics, deployment schedules, and all sorts of vital information that would've been used to dismantle the DP further had Kieran not been taken into custody.

Howie's team was so intricate to Kieran's operation that they were placed in an offsite facility, off-world, on the moon of Omeocoon. This base was unknown to pretty much everyone— including Gel-Squad. Howie and his small crew of engineers designed this system of undetectability, and a sophisticated array of sensor blockers were deployed around the facility, blocking prying eyes from reading the haven. Outside communications were weak but frequent— an advantage they had over the rest of Omeocoon. Everything seemed to be going rather well. But, of course, like all tremendous evil operations, a foreign object was lodged into the gears of Howard's and Kieran's well-oiled machine. In this case, an explosion occurred right within Kieran's primary base. Which, at the time, was a skyship still under construction. It was somewhat poetic, but Howard found the concept rather pointless, especially considering it would require non-renewable fuel sources to drive it when wind was unavailable. But other than that, Kieran was flawless.

To Howard's knowledge, when COMMS went offline, he had mistaken the break in communications for yet another weather storm on the planet. But boy, how wrong he was. Their non-communication was just standard protocol as far as the station crew was concerned. Still, on the surface, the entire operation was being systematically dismantled by a group of protectors(Gel-Squad.) Howie and his team did not know they were in danger; they just kept working as usual. Well, until now.