“With me this evening, we have Rue Morov and Goro Tuva.” The host folded her arms on the table and leaned toward them with an attentiveness that almost seemed fake. “Tell me, what are your thoughts on this latest development?”
Rue and Goro shared a glance, and Rue nodded once for Goro to take the lead.
Goro cleared her throat and drummed her fingers on the table, her nails clicking in rapid-fire succession. “It all seems rather hasty, don’t you think?” she wondered. The host’s beaming smile dimmed slightly, but only for a moment. Goro paid it no mind and carried on. “The Oggs and the Estarians are supposed to be in agreement on these matters. It’s the Estarian-Ogg Space Fleet,” she emphasized sharply. “Not the Estarian Space Fleet. And yet we weren’t consulted on this; we were simply told it was happening.” She turned a sharp glare on the host. “Is this how Estarians keep their word, then?”
The host stammered for a moment before she coughed delicately behind one hand and pasted a considerably stiffer smile back into place. “I’m quite sure it only happened this way because it seemed like the most necessary course of action. These are trying times, after all, and we can’t afford to waste any time.”
Goro rolled her eyes so emphatically she could probably see her own brainstem for a split second. “Good to know that the Estarians consider honoring their agreements to be a waste of time.”
The host stammered for a few seconds, but before she could truly begin backpedaling, Rue sighed and made his own thoughts known.
“I suppose there isn’t much I can really say on the matter,” he mused, leaning his chin in one hand, his elbow balanced on the edge of the table. “Compared to everyone else, we have few ships. Certainly nothing that compares to the Space Fleet. Even so, the Commander has declared that he’ll be sending the fleet right into Teshovian space. Whether we have similar resources or not, it would have been a nice gesture to let us know in advance that he’ll be trying to wage war in our backyard.”
Even if she hadn’t come up with anything to say to defend herself, the host had at least gathered her composure by then. “I’m sure everything will line up soon enough,” she insisted, too upbeat to be speaking about impending war and invasions. “This is just the beginning, after all.”
If anything, Goro and Rue seemed all the more exasperated by the declaration, and the host hurried to move on from there. She didn’t need another fight breaking out on air if she wanted to avoid another stern lecture from her producers.
She turned her attention from her guests to the camera after that. “Now, sit tight for a few words from our sponsors, and we’ll be right back!”
Beaufort’s Office, Senate House, Estaria
Voices chattered, loud and hurried, frantic with excitement and concern alike. It was too loud to simply fade into white noise, snatches, and snippets of the various conversations too audible to fully tune them out.
Worse still were the people who were simply talking to themselves, voices carrying over the rest of the crowd as they checked equipment and rehearsed potential lines for when the press conference would inevitably be broadcast.
A man’s office was supposed to be a productive place. For the most part, though, Garet didn’t feel very productive. Mostly he felt a migraine threatening to lay him on his ass. He dug the heels of his palms against his eyes until gray and black patterns fizzed against the insides of his eyelids. It didn’t help with the headache or with the noise, but at least it was better than nothing.
The noise might actually drive him crazy. Garet groaned and heaved his window shut, but it wasn’t particularly helpful. Muffled though it was, he could still hear the babble of the crowd on the ground floor.
“Why hasn’t security chased them all off by now?” he grumbled to himself, peering out the window once again before pulling his attention away from it. At that moment, he had a very uncomfortable understanding of everyone who had ever chased someone off of their lawn with a stick. He, too, sort of wished he could chase them off with a stick, even if it wasn’t his lawn, strictly speaking.
All he wanted was some peace and quiet to make a call. He was fairly sure he wasn’t actually going to get it, though.
Resigned to the fact that the muffled rambling was as good as he was going to get, he opened his holoconsole and set up the call. As he listened to it ring, a familiar circle of dots chased themselves in circles in the middle of the console, the word ‘waiting…’ in the middle of them. He reached up to rub his temples with two fingers of each hand, eyes drifting closed as he did.
He wasn’t aware his call was picked up until he heard someone talking to him, her tone light and lilting with amusement.
“Wow,” Paige observed dryly, sitting at a table so strewn with files that the actual table was all but invisible. “Who pissed in your cereal this morning, Sir Grumpsalot?” She was looking at him with her eyebrows nearly at her hairline when he looked up again. “You look like you’re contemplating murder in various creative ways.”
Despite himself, Garet huffed out a quiet laugh. “You’re not far off,” he replied, gesturing loosely toward the window with one hand. “I’m assuming you can hear at least some of what’s going on out there.”
Paige leaned closer to her holoconsole and cocked her head to one side to listen, and her nose wrinkled slightly in distaste before she leaned back again, settling more comfortably in her chair. “Is someone throwing a party on your lawn or something?”
“Were it only that simple,” Garet griped, and Paige’s eyebrows shot up once again.
“Well, now you have to tell me what’s going on,” she informed him pleasantly, leaning forward just enough to lean her elbows on the table and prop her chin up in her hands. “So what’s all the hubbub?”
Garet folded his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair. “That is why I called, yes,” he replied wryly. “Granted, you’ll likely be hearing about it all over the news soon enough, but I can at least give you a bit of a heads up.” He paused for a second before he took a breath and stated simply, “Ekks has officially announced that he’ll be launching the fleet, right at the ships in the outer system.”
Paige’s eyes widened. “But no one knows what’s even going on!” she exclaimed after a moment of stunned stammering. “Is he trying to plunge us right into a galaxy-wide diplomatic incident?”
“Probably,” Garet answered simply, his voice low and soft. “Either he is, or whoever paid for him to have his position is.” He reached up to rub his forehead before he dragged his hand down his face. “He called me some time ago to bring the topic to my attention,” he admitted, slumping in his seat. “I tried to talk him out of it at the time. Maybe if I had been a bit more persuasive—“
Paige snorted incredulously, cutting him off. “Beaufort, come on,” she scoffed. “Ekks does what Ekks wants. Short of locking him up or killing him, no one was going to change his mind unless they offered him a better deal.”
“I know,” Garet acknowledged, leaning his head back against the back of his chair, so he could stare at the ceiling. “Even so, I can’t help but think that someone could have done something to keep it from getting to this point.”
“Maybe,” Paige sighed. “Or maybe not. Either way, we’ll do what we can to stop it from getting any worse,” she promised fiercely. “But that means you need to keep us filled in on anything you can.”
Garet nodded once, his attention returning to the holoconsole. “Of course,” he agreed easily. “I can’t make you any promises about how much I’ll be kept in the loop—matters in the outer system are a bit outside of my jurisdiction—but I’ll be sure to pass on anything I hear.”
Paige grinned. “Much appreciated,” she assured him. Her expression grew slightly more serious after that, her smile melting away until it was just a subtle quirk at the corners of her lips. “And we’ll…do whatever we can,” she sighed, running a hand through her hair to push it from her face. “I’m not sure what that
is just now, but it’s still early.”
Garet lifted a hand as if to toast with an invisible drink. “To nebulous plans, then,” he offered dryly.
“To nebulous plans,” Paige agreed, lifting a hand in a similar gesture. “I would say I’d like to hear from you again, but right now I’m pretty sure that would mean bad news.” She hummed a low, slightly consternated note. “Vexing.”
“I’ll do my best not to be offended,” Garet replied, good-naturedly exasperated. “I’ll get in touch if I know anything.”
“Later, Beaufort.”
With that final goodbye, Garet ended the call and sagged back in his seat. Head tipped back to look at the ceiling again, he mused quietly to himself, “Interesting times we live in.”
In his line of work, he supposed he should have expected it. And yet, as the jumble of conversations continued outside and he reined in the urge to throw a bucket of water out of the window and send the crowd scattering, he felt as if he wasn’t wholly prepared for whatever was coming next.
Chapter 18
Base Conference Room, Gaitune-67
As the name likely implied, the conference room was supposed to be used for conferences and the holoscreen was supposed to be used for demonstrations. There were no rules against simply working in there, though. Maya, like Molly, liked having space to spread her files out from one end of the long table to the other.
She also liked knowing that Paige was right at the other end of the table.
Maya had been ignoring the news playing in the background. There were half a million different ways to stay up-to-date, after all, and she always worked better when it wasn’t quiet, so the news was mostly acting as background noise. Something to fill in the gaps in the air that didn’t require any participation from her to distract her. At least, that was the case until some aggravatingly familiar words started to play.
“I know everyone has been waiting for someone to do something about the satellite signals in the outer system…”
Maya looked up from the files she was perusing to squint suspiciously at the screen. “This can’t be right…” she murmured to herself, trailing off quietly as she watched the screen. But Ekks’s press conference, filmed from a bobbing holocamera and with glimpses of at least a dozen other people popping into the frame from every angle, continued to play uninterrupted. There was no cutaway with a station producer explaining that the repeat was a scheduling mistake. There was no banner on the screen to offer some insight into why it was playing again.
She glanced at the time on the nearest clock, and her suspicion ratcheted up a few notches as she realized that, on any other day, the weather would be on.
“So it’s actively suppressing other things,” she mused quietly before she picked up the remote and muted the press conference. She could only listen to it so many times before she had it memorized, after all.
“Something wrong?” Paige wondered from the opposite end of the table. “Or are you just talking to yourself for giggles?”
Maya flapped a hand at the screen, and Paige had to lean forward halfway onto the table to actually see it from her side of the room.
“What about it?” she asked after a moment, eyeing the screen in vague distaste. Without the sound to make it clear that he was talking, Ekks stood so still he may as well have been a statue. To call it uncanny was perhaps a bit extreme, but if nothing else, Paige was fairly sure she never wanted to be in the same room with him on her own.
“This is the third time I’ve seen this same press conference today, and it’s hardly even lunchtime yet,” Maya explained, folding her arms on the table and slumping down on them until her chin was resting on her folded forearms and she had to practically roll her eyes back into her head to keep them focused on the screen. “And I haven’t even been paying that much attention to it. So who knows how many times it’s actually played?”
Paige hummed a low note in acknowledgment, scooting her chair around the corner of the table so she could sit back down and still see the screen. “Weird,” she agreed before she took a glance at the time. “Hey, shouldn’t—“
“The weather, yeah,” Maya cut in. “That’s what I figured. And yet…” She gestured to the press conference on the screen once again.
“Wasn’t it super unbalanced after that last big senate meeting, too?” Paige wondered. “I mean, I swear I saw that clip of Ekks basically saying ‘no comment’ like a billion times a day. Everyone started getting seriously freaked out.”
“Of course, they did,” Maya scoffed. “I mean, ever since this whole ‘signals in the outer system’ business started, that’s all they’ve heard about. It’s been playing to the exclusion of…basically everything else.”
“No local news,” Paige sighed. “Not even any planetary news. Just…the outer system. Of course, everyone started getting jumpy when they weren’t even allowed to know what was going on in their own backyards.”
“I don’t think it’s an accident,” Maya stated cautiously. “It just seems a bit…much, to be an accident.”
“And an accident would have been corrected at some point,” Paige agreed. “Plus…” She picked up the remote and started scrolling through news stations. On each one, it was the same press conference. “It was like this last time, too. If it was an accident, I don’t think it would be on every news station.”
Maya reached out as she sat up, flexing her fingers open and closed expectantly until Paige slid the remote across the table to her. Maya kept scrolling through channels until her exasperation compelled her to simply shut the screen off. “It really is all of them,” she groused, slumping back in her seat. “This isn’t a network thing or a journalist thing. This has to be coming straight from Cyber Communications.” Her voice got quieter as she spoke until Paige had to lean closer to hear her, as Maya very nearly forgot that there was someone else in the room with her and that she was not actually speaking to just herself. “That’s the only source that would have access to all of them.”
Paige cleared her throat and drummed her hands lightly the table, Maya’s startled attention snapping back to her again. She offered a crooked, sheepish smile.
“Someone has to be futzing with the scheduling algorithms,” Maya continued, sure and steady. “That’s the only way every station would have the same footage and the same oversaturation when there was a whole crowd of reporters at the conference and there are other things that aren’t being covered.”
“Then we need to get a handle on this,” Paige replied decisively, straightening up in her seat and turning to the side to get up. “I mean, you’ve done all…this,” she flicked one hand toward where the screen had been until a moment ago, “before, so if you say it’s Cyber Communications then I’m willing to put my money there.”
With a final, decisive nod, she started toward the conference room door.
“Where are you going?” Maya asked, bemused, getting halfway to her feet.
Paige turned, walking backward for a moment as she replied, “I’m going to call to let Bates know. She’ll probably want to do something about this.”
Maya nodded slowly in agreement and sat back down. “Right. Let me know if anything exciting happens.”
Paige flashed her a thumbs-up before turning to step through the door. Maya watched the door for a moment before reluctantly pulling her attention back to her work. After all, she doubted she would miss it if anything new came up.
Special Task Force Offices, Undisclosed Location, Estaria
The lights above the bullpen flickered. The bulbs probably should have been changed weeks ago, but they still had a few weeks left until they actually died, and so no one had bothered. Rather than finally dealing with it, Elroy simply watched them flicker a few more times before they steadied once again.
In the cubicle to his left, he could hear Dhashana organizing the hard copies of the last two weeks’ files, preparing them to be sent down to the archives. In the cubicle to his righ
t, he could hear Soraya tapping her stylus against the edge of her desk as she proofread a weekly report.
It was quiet until he heard Soraya jump in surprise, slam her knees into her desk, and start swearing profusely. Despite that, when she answered her communicator, her, “How can I be of assistance, ma’am?” sounded remarkably steady and professional.
Elroy slowly straightened up in his seat, getting ready to get to his feet as he listened. Soraya’s end of the conversation mostly consisted of a series of hums and “uh huhs” until she finished it off with, “Of course. We’ll be right up, ma’am.”
He heard her chair slide away from her desk, and by the time she was standing in his cubicle, he was already on his feet and stretching his arms over his head. “Upstairs?” he guessed.
“Upstairs,” Soraya confirmed before she turned to lead the way. As they passed Dhashana’s cubicle, she nearly tripped as she stomped her feet back into her shoes before she fell into step with them.
They were admitted into Bates’s office as soon as Soraya knocked, and they filed in one by one to stand in front of Bates’s desk. Her holoconsole was still open, a call recently finished.
Without any preamble, she began speaking. “It seems safe to assume that you three have noticed how single-minded the news has been lately.”
Soraya nodded once. “Of course, ma’am.”
Bates hummed in acknowledgment. “It’s been brought to my attention recently that this intense level of focus is likely not an accident. The odds are high that someone at Cyber Communications has been tooling with things to make sure that there is always coverage of the outer system debacle,” she explained briefly.
“That is where the three of you come into play.” She gave them a pointed look. “However you see fit to do so, I need you three to find the culprit and take them into custody. If we’re going to straighten this mess out, then we need to start somewhere.”
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