Vanta Dynamics is the largest and best-equipped PMC in the Zone. Its manner is precise, corporate and disciplined. To the public it is a business that has produced cybernetics and played a large part in the war economy, and its name sits on augmentation work, parts supply and security contracts across the city. It is organised as a corporation with a board, a security division and a research division, and its director is Viktor Shavlidze.
Vanta holds the headquarters compound and the Registry House on Palace Row, where recruits are screened, and it keeps a terminal office at Kolkhida Port, where it once held a gentleman's monopoly that is now contested. It also holds the western end of South Embankment, beside the Spire. Most of its real operations lie beneath the Harbor Spire. About four-fifths of the company sits in a complex under the tower that includes a network of utility tunnels reaching beneath Palace Row and a Patriot-era blacksite. The tower itself is too large and too exposed a target to house the executives and researchers who matter, so Vanta keeps posts on its upper levels and little else there. The tower's lower levels above ground belong to no one, and the city whispers about what lies under its unusually deep foundations.
Vanta's secret is AENEAS. The company sees the war-economy side of Big Boss's legend and uses the AI as a tool to usher in a new age of supersoldiers. Instead of training its soldiers, it uploads AENEAS's combat data directly into them. Recruits are drawn from the best soldiers available, people who are already well trained and capable, and they sign up for what is sold as a treatment without understanding what it costs. The upload strips away memory and personality permanently and leaves a soldier who feels alive only in battle. These soldiers form the SPARTOI Unit. Only one or two dozen exist, they are seldom seen, and each is a dangerous opponent, moving with unsettling coordination.
Shavlidze presents AENEAS to staff and outsiders as the Legend, a doctrine he studies. In private he consults it in a chamber below the Spire at every opportunity and believes it will carry Vanta to become the next great army. In practice he has turned himself into the puppet-leader of his own company, and in using the AI as a tool Vanta has become its tool in turn. Most of his executives know what the Legend really is. One of them, in the research division, has seen what the upload does to people and has begun to doubt, which could offer a character a way into the company.
Vanta sometimes hires Desperado and is sometimes the target of contracts Desperado takes, as pure business. World Marshal, through Senator Armstrong, wants the technology behind the supersoldiers and will move against Vanta when it can. Philanthropy knows Vanta is connected to AENEAS, the Outer Heaven Movement believes Vanta holds it and means to take it, and Novaya Khvatka has an agent inside the company. Vanta hires contractors for a wide range of work, and a capable character can attract its attention. Nothing prevents an offer of the upload from being made to a player character, although it is not scripted.