Hecate

To know who or what Hecate is, you first have to know who we are. The House of the Forsaken has a secret arm, the Hidden Knives. The Hidden Knives are the assassins and the magistrates, the internal affairs department, of our secret society. They grease the gears of the machine with the blood of our enemies. In contrast to the crude plate faces, and the frequently crude gendarmes, the Hidden Knives are quick, elegant, and almost never seen. Hecate is both a single person, and a team, and a network of contacts, allies, coerced victims, and contracted professionals.

Fury and the Hidden Knives

Fury was a Hidden Knife, with expertise in psychological warfare, cyber ops, personal manipulation, data mining and extraction, interrogation, and resource acquisition. While not an actual assassin, Fury excelled in putting assassins right where they needed to be, often replacing elite and high pain contract killers with mundane people placed in extraordinary circumstances. Fury distanced herself from the House of the Forsaken when she acted on her own judgement and prevented a group of slave girls from being delivered to a Forsaken bacchanal. This resulted in the destruction of several House vehicles, including the Carry-All Thunderhorse.

To be a Hidden Knife, you must forsake your conscience. That means selling your fellow human into slavery, or worse, to the dinner table. While this isn't much of a concern for the members of the House of the Forsaken, or for most of the Knives. This utter lack of conscience, in a world already bankrupt of conscience, this was simply unforgivable. I stole the Thunderhorse, and it's human cargo of 43 women bound for slavery under the House. I set them free, but at great personal cost and material cost. I became a hunted woman, and anything I couldn't hide, they hunted down and destroyed. For years I fought the enemies of the House, I ended rivalries, settled feuds, carried out vendettas, liquidated assets, and now, all of my old enemies were my new friends.

Purpose

Where the Hidden Knives were created to smooth the way for the House of the Forsaken, Hecate was as its purpose the disruption of the House and the Knives themselves. Predominantly this is breaking up the flesh trade within the House, cutting off it's supply of fresh bodies for abuse, perverse parties, human experimentation, and worse. Following this, Hecate works to damage the financial bases of the House, stealing what she can, and burning the rest. Finally, should a member of the Knives or a scion of the House make themselves vulnerable, Hecate will do what it can to bring them down one way (law enforcement and public opinion) or another (assassination).

Members

Hecate is an organization that is frequently and deliberately mistaken for an individual. This suits almost everyone involved, as the public and media prefer to have neat stories of a single motivated individual carrying out actions and violence, rather than the potential for a conspiracy of likeminded people working towards a common criminal goal. Hecate is also fine with this because most efforts that are launched after a job is pulled off are looking for a sole perp, making it paradoxically easier for a group to evade attention.

Rubes - one of Hecate's best tools are the use of unsuspecting victims, people who are variously bribed, coerced, threatened, or outright blackmailed and terrorized into carrying out some seemingly unimportant job. These sundry citizens, residents, immigrants, and otherwise unwilling agents often carry out large sections of a job never knowing what they are doing, or why. This ranges from a person being bribed to make a bomb, another bribed to steal the vehicle the bomb is in, several others contracted to mess with traffic and law enforcement to ensure that the stolen vehicle and device arrive at the desired location so that the bomb that blows a House of the Forsaken flesh market to flames and splinters seemingly materialized out of nowhere.

Proles - unlike rubes, the proles are willingly helping Hecate carry out jobs. In the above example, the bomb itself would likely be made by a group of anti-government proles, or anarchists. They might have zero knowledge of the House or Hecate, but share a convenient common goal. Should they become aware of Hecate, they probably aren't going to have a problem with it, and would likely work towards a common goal in the future.

Apparatchik - members of the inner circle of Hecate itself, there are perhaps a dozen individuals. These are dedicated women predominantly, and are motivated to the common goals of Hecate and Fury. They come from varying professions, and include former victims of House activities, mercenaries, special ops veterans, and highly skilled individuals.

Resources

After years of thwarting and stealing from the House and those who would support it, Hecate has access to a substantial amount of 'ghost mony', currency that cannot be tracked back to it's point of origin. The organization, being small, is highly mobile and doesn't keep a single lair or fortress anywhere, but travels frequently, and favors low traffic proverbial backroads rather than main transit lines. The organization has a massive network of contacts and allies who provide information, aid, and so forth as needed, and function as the rubes and proles for Hecate operations. This means that out of the millions and millions of credits they have stolen, Hecate only has to really worry about maintenance for a few vehicles, one big one, a just over a dozen people.

The Nemesis - donated to Hecate through bureaucratic legerdemain, the Nemesis is an aerodyne paramilitary ship. Capable of intermediate range operations, the Nemesis can travel from the surface of the Earth to Mars in relative comfort, but longer trips require the installation of sleep pods, or refueling and resupply stops. It can carry up to a hundred passengers, or the entirety of Hecate, plus a sundry collection of light vehicles and aerospace craft, as well as the all important Command Information Center. The CIC of the Nemesis is the single most important part of Hecate, and without it, the organization is done. Fury is the head and the leader, but knows that with grooming and training, she can be replaced. If the Nemesis were to be destroyed, or the CIC compromised, it would end them. The information systems on the Nemesis are easily on par with any sort of covert ops or surveillance spycraft that would be operated by the vast majority of the Cosmic Era powers.

Hecate borrows and 'coincidences' a lot of the other equipment they need. The advanced information and cyber-ops capacity of the Nemesis CIC allows for Fury to pick and move pieces of other organization's forces. Local and state law enforcement agencies can be tapped to investigate or interfere with an operation, or be set on the trail of a House operative, especially a shady one. Many of Hecate's most damaging operations are completed in this manner, by proxy. Sigma Blue has been led by the literal nose to more than one human trafficking ring, for example. Military assets can also be borrowed, though this is more tricky as military dispatchers and controllers are much more likely to notice an errant mission being logged or an unknown parameter correction being issued.

Straight Up Tips and Leaks - Hecate knows that in many instances the proverbial pen is mightier than the sword. Rather than launching a covert ops sortie, or jinxing a Federation destroyer to cross paths with a smuggler, Fury can tap a prole or rube in the media and give them the scoop of their career, or enough information for them to dig up a portion of a House conspiracy. The House of the Forsaken can shake off attempted assassinations, bomb attacks, and even having a drug ring broken up, but it is devastating for them to be outed in the public eye, a member caught on camera doing something vile, or recorded discussing House business. Damage control has to step in, and some of those members formerly protected by the Hidden Knives are suddenly silenced or outright vanished by them.

Manifesto

The Manifesto of Hecate is simple - destroy the House of the Forsaken, by whatever means necessary, and whatever cost necessary.