Kerberos: 1

The EA securitisation and development of the Kerberos asset was initially structured around four overlapping facets. 

Protection This facet, the earliest to mobilise, was charged with ‘ensuring the continuous and improving physical, virtual and communications defence of the KMA asset against all credible and other threats'.  The first act of the Protection facet involved the installation of nuclear devices on the surface of Kerberos with sufficient explosive power to destroy the moon from surface to innermost core eleven times over.   

Since that time, over the many intervening years, a series of interweaving defensive shells of varying makeup were constructed around the whole Plutonic system. These are directly controlled by Protection.

Stabilisation This facet was charged with ensuring a robust, secure and productive environment for the further development and exploitation of the area of 'cosmic softness' indicated by the KMA. 

For the first twenty years of the EA programme, military personnel worked almost wholly in microgravity environments. As such, and to reduce fatalities, severe body modification became the norm for workers. Eventually, however, the Stabilisation facet restructured the moon’s orbit, and paired it gravitationally with minor planet 2817 Perec, which was towed into orbit around Pluto from the asteroid belt in CE 2183.

Perec was hollowed out and heavily modified in transit, and became the advanced scientific and military centre for the study of the KMA. Finally, from 2190, Perec was installed with modified Higgs field generators which produced a local pseudogravity of 0.8g.

Containment Perhaps the most controversial and challenging facet, Containment was charged with ensuring a safe, conservative focus on the protection and development of the KMA. 

Based on the careful work of the Containment teams, no attempt was made to move Kerberos closer in to the centre of the solar system; use of Higgs field generators within 200 km of the KMA was banned for many years (so that closeup work with the KMA itself still continued in microgravity for that period); and all work of the Exploitation facet was subject to comprehensive multilayered risk assessment prior to implementation, as well as during and after deployment. 

Eventually the EA military drastically reduced the scope of Containment to what was essentially a truncated quality assurance and observation function, which some have argued was a proximate cause of the events of CE 2287.  

Exploitation. This facet was the core of the whole programme, which the other facets were intended to enable and protect in a balanced manner. 

Exploitation was charged with fully understanding the characteristics and features of the KMA; the identification of opportunities for development of the softness itself and any ancillary spinoffs; and ensuring the ongoing military, industrial and economic exploitation of the asset. 

Early work involved the multimodal measurement of the KMA, exploiting all then-available instrumentation.  This was followed by a range of nonphysical and then physical probes, which provided little further data, before remote excavation began.

It had been speculated that the volume of softness was being generated by some unusual natural phenomenon, or potentially by advanced alien technology.  But what was eventually revealed was – nothing.  The anomalous volume remained, but no matter what remote probes were used, there was no discernible reason for the existence of the KMA, nor explanation for its close adherence to the Kerberos moonlet.

Nevertheless, as a result of the technological and scientific efforts arising from the mere existence of the softness, Exploitation made significant discoveries in a number of physical disciplines which had a major impact on human life in the Solar System. Indeed, an early spinoff benefit of some of the initial theoretical work was the Higgs field generator itself. 

It was, however, the perceived slowness of the work in this facet, and the perceived failure to fully-realise the imagined potential of the softness, which prompted the curtailing of Containment and the military acceleration of engagement by Exploitation, which led to more aggressive exploitation and development.