Hellfire Cabal

"The Flame Awaits Your Soul" ~Graffiti commonly found in an area up to a week before an attack by the Hellfire Cabal

Symbols as a Weapon

The Hellfire Cabal's primary weapon is the science of Memetics. They use ingrained symbols, cultural iconography, and religious imagery to create a potent sense of fear, allowing them to 'punch above their weight.' One of the basic uses is their uniform: red capes, black armor, and hideous demonic masks. They mark horrendous graffiti in their areas of operation, appropriate and corrupt beloved symbols such as cartoons and celebrities, and they bury hidden messages inside of innocuous Solarnet ads that remain just on the outer edge of detectability. They use these as well as Neural Weaponry, Necroids, Nanomorphs and worse in order to spread fear and horror far and wide.

Otherworldly Allies

Their secondary weapon are the Redspace Adversarial Intelligences (RAIBs). These are sentient and sadistic extradimensional predators. The Hellfire Cabal is the only known group that seems to be able to exercise any control over them at all. It's rumored that it goes the other way and the Cabal is actually operating under the direction of one or more RAIBs, as the true leadership, motivations, and resource base are unknown.

A Heinous Weapon from a Prior Age

Their tertiary weapon is the Luxiphage, an engineered nanoviral weapon from millennia before that attacks the Prefrontal Cortex, Amygdala, Orbitofrontal Cortex, and the Anterior Cingulate Cortex to remove the victim's ability to feel empathy, remorse, shame, or joy and grow tumors in the brain that reconnect various links in the brain and encourage sadism beyond normal human intelligence. They use this to create 'sleeper agents' that carry out a lot of their attacks, which generates yet more fear and uncertainty; anyone could be 'recruited' in about a week and detecting them without a full, high resolution brain scan is difficult.

A Rising Problem

An apparently unforseen side effect of the Space Rush and even the temporary loss of so many military aged adventurers, Corporate Raiders, privateers, and freelancers is that the piecemeal counter to the Terrorist organizaions and separatists is largely gone, and the Pan-Solar Consortium government has had to take on a more direct role battling them. While many of these groups are amoral and violent, the Hellfire Cabal is the worst of all of them.

Signature Gear of the Hellfire Cabal

Hellfire Cabal terrorists have Signature Gear designed to be hard to detect, easy to conceal, and quick to employ after an attack begins. One instant, everything will be fine and normal. The next, a number of people milling around in the crowd, going about their business, will receive a signal to 'activate' and will don their gear.

Weapons

Hellfire Cabal agents use holdout Neural Weaponry, especially Shriekers, Mindrippers, and Nerve Disruptors. They tend to prefer Molecular-Ceramic Blades and MAWs to Particle Rippers because of the mess and the higher agonies involved, though some do use Particle Rippers due to the weapons' 'heroic' place in PSC culture. Hellfire Cabals also make use of Necrotubes, often delivered by drones, and Nanomorphs. In addition to these more widely available weapons, they have also developed a number of weapons that are unique to them. The most basic of these is the Nanothorn Dagger. This is a Molecular-Ceramic Dagger with a Nanothorn Blade Modification.

Manufacturer	Weapon	Damage	Reach	Parry	Cost	Weight	ST	LC	Notes
Hellfire Cabal	Hellfire Cabal Dagger and	thr-1 imp 1d corr	C	-1	$2,000	0.05	3	nil	Can be Thrown

Manufacturer	Weapon	Damage	Acc	Range	Weight	RoF	Shots	Cost	ST	Bulk	LC	Notes
Hellfire Cabal	Hellfire Cabal Dagger and	thr-1 imp 1d corr	2	x1/x2	0.05	1	T(1)	$2,000	3	-1	nil	May get stuck. If it does, it deals it's corr damage every round until removed.