It started as a way to get some nice guard animals, by the by. Parazoologicals that were dogs invested with insect spirits, figuring that a double-dose of loyalty would be a good thing. This moved up a step into investing humans, trying to get some kind of bio-augmentation designs. (Or, more likely, investing a critter, killing it, harvesting parts, and attaching THOSE to people, but residual buggyness seems to come through.) At some point in the process, one of teh researchers got infected somehow (invested or emotionally) and flipped to the bug side and started working for the captive queen that had been pumping out spirits. Very slowly, they worked together to take the facility over, but when an investigation hit (Roge Soaring Owl went there in person), they realized that the jig was up, killed everyone in the facility that wasn't buggy, and took off.
Since then, there's been an quiet war going on, where the bugs have realized that Ares is Enemy #1 and that they have weapons that hurt. They've set about killing their enemy, both by infecting personnel and trying to bring the company down from the inside, and hitting other targets, most especially anything insecticide-related. Some Ares people have been invested and now work for the other side, with Leonard Aurelius' death at the hands of Wasp spirits a sign that someone higher up, or at least with knowledge of where to find higher-ups, has been flipped.
Ares hasn't made any of thispublic (obviously) and Knight himself seems to either think it's no big deal or is confident that his people can handle it while he focuses on other matters. When Soaring Owl brought all this to his attention, whatever Knight said was enoug to make him say "Screw you guys, I'm going home" and he bailed on the corporation, returning to teh Sioux lands (Where, a few months later, there was a lot of activity. Presumably, he's setting up his own Firewatch teams and trying to roust any invested in his homeland.)
Where it goes from here is anybody's game, but we know that the Firewatch teams of Ares are disrupted and the Ares higher-ups are still in a tug-of-war for the company. Stock prices are down, their reputation is bruised from teh whole Excaliber thing, and the future's nebulous at best.
