Jake had given up hunting for phantoms by this time, but I could see him stalking around the bay, smoldering. Some lady nearby, doing a bit of spot welding, had been watching the antics the whole time, and kept chuckling when ever I peaked out to see if the coast was clear. I just stayed behind the leading end of a bulkhead reinforcement, and called Barney.
"Okay, if we're working together, then I could use some help," I told my roommate, when he answered.
"What's up?"
"I need leverage on CPS09 Byron Maelbrott. He's gunning for me because I'm AdSec, and he hates AdSec. Looks like he's put pressure on a Sub-Department in R&D to shake things up. If he gets me pulled, I'll lose any serious investigative access in here."
"You don't sound much like a gunner right now."
"I'm going to see this through, Barney! Will you help or not?"
"Take it easy," he replied thoughtfully. "That's a pretty big fish to try and scare off. Let me look into it. How much time do you have?"
"Almost none."
"Right. I'll call back."
There was really nothing for it, but to take a breath, step out of the shadows, and face Jacob, but just then he stomped back toward his own office. The first break I'd caught all day.
After that, I went to Weaponry and tried to get some work done. A couple of the others were there, but they'd seen Jake yelling, and I think they were mostly afraid of me anyway, so no one said a word, outside of a few quiet greetings.
After an hour, Ghazza arrived, looking very tired.
"HD won't budge," was her only comment, when I asked about the latest news. She sighed, and shook her head.
"Have you been home at all in the last couple of days?" I demanded.
"I don't remember, and I don't think my hubby remembers me.
"I have something in the works that might help. Go get some sleep."
She didn't argue. Jake tried to when she swung by his office to tell him the non-news, but she just walked out.
I was determined to put in a few good hours anyway, and finish roughing-out the design for a non-sequential missile launching protocol we'd been banging our heads against for a few days. This included those Mass-Effect Weapons (or MEW's) we were angling for.
I had suggested designing a missile pack along the lines of those in civilian armed merchanters -- something that could be placed on an extensible arm to clear the outer hull. Scaling up the design to fit military-grade weapons, though, meant there was no room. Team wanted the minimum capability of firing six high-acceleration missiles tipped with Schedule-C warheads. That's respectable stuff, meant to pierce heavily armored targets. For us, it meant using a custom frame to hold them; easy enough to sketch out, but it disallowed our Holy Grail of MEW compatibility.
It was a circular problem, until one of the kids suggested the idea of a swappable design. The idea was to make the entire weapon bay removable, so it could be quickly changed-out for a different one, pre-loaded with other ordinance types -- or even other weapon systems entirely.
Suddenly, the freejump fighter became incredibly flexible; in our minds, it could be loaded with Team's Schedule-C's, the nukes (or whatever Mass-Effects we settled on), smaller surgical strike missiles, self-contained DEW's, or specialized surveillance equipment. Heck, it could even be used for cargo space, if there was a need! We brainstormed excitedly, making cribbed notation on the bottom of the floating designs.
We were still fussing over this when Barney called back. I took a break to talk to him, speaking quietly into my fist as I strolled around the catwalk overlooking the bay.
"Maelbrott's breaking a ton of ship protocols," he told me. In my eye-view, I could see the big man was over in Samples; that new waiter passed by behind him at a distance. Barney munched on scobble while we talked. "Everything from traffic control procedures, to fueling prioritizing. His people just do what they want to out there, and it's really pissing off Orbital Control."
"Okay," I replied, feeling disappointed, "but that's pretty weak stuff. I could file some complaints and grievances, but it's not likely to impress anybody, least of all him."
"Except that he also brought his own private yacht. It's aboard Caesar's Palace. He uses it when he travels back and forth. It's a little thing, but high performance. Very posh."
"And expensive to maintain? Who's been paying for the fuel and upkeep -- him or Team?"
"I don't know, but I heard he just has it parked with all the other small transports and shuttles on the ship, and it gets the same treatment. If you could find proof he's been using Team supplies and personnel to maintain his own boat, without paying the Company back, you could level a charge of executive pilfering. The Appropriation Guidelines were amended last year, Company-wide, to be especially hard on execs; there was a big corruption scandal at Corporate HQ, and the fallout was ugly. Right now, they can't let that kind of stuff slide, no matter who it is."
"Sounds good. Thanks!"
"Sure, but they could be taking a maintenance fee for it out of his wages. There's no way to know."
"Maybe there is," I told him, seeing a way forward at last. "Any idea who I talk to about sending a classified message out-system?"
OOOOOOOOOO
The silence that followed was like an ice sculpture: solid and cold, but fragile all the same. It filled the room, freezing retorts and out-of-hand dismissals from all present.
Admiral Bethany Dusane's cat gaze narrowed, as she studied me.
She studied everyone on my side of the table.
Then she very deliberately turned her scarred head and stabbed a particular man in her entourage with a sharp scowl. This guy wasn't in good light from my point-of-view, and I hadn't really noticed him sitting there. I could tell, though, that he wore a dark civilian suit -- not a Fleet uniform. Light reflected off a bald head, but his face was in shadow.
"Comments from AINIB?" the Admiral asked.
"Not at this time, Admiral," the shiny shadow man replied evenly. His silhouette seemed to shift a bit and face directly toward me, but it was hard to tell.
The skinny red-head on my side leaned over in front of the young solicitor. She had to push back from the table awkwardly.
"What are you doing?!" the guy hissed at me.
But I was all-in now, and spoke to the room.
OOOOOOOOOO
twenty-six
* * *
A compact highdock, parked out near the jump point, kept a small fleet of courier ships on hand. It sent daily dispatches back to Interstar, with all the latest news from the system. Others would pop in regularly, up to several a day, with dispatches from Corporate HQ and elsewhere. They also brought in personal data for employees, like letters from home and such, along with occasional packages (Barney's fancy smackball basket had been one such). Team maintained its own courier system, and did the same thing for its people. It was this kind of traffic that had flagged the system to Annia Wi'iloni to begin with.
Department heads had the authority to dispatch special couriers, if communication was especially time-sensitive. Well, I was now head of a Department, and I needed info fast. Barney had told me to just go to the Out-System Communications Office (run by a private contractor called Distributed Light, Inc.), and have them do an IDent pass on me. Thereafter, I should be good to go. So I did, and I was.
Hearing back from Corporate HQ would take time, though -- maybe a day, maybe a few. I wasn't sure I had that many left in R&D.
Hull Design wasn't going to lay off simply because I was waiting on some information. They looked down on the rest of us to begin with. There seemed to be some residual animosity from the earlier management/engineering regime over there that had somehow survived the purge, like an endemic disease living in the soil, just waiting to flair up again.
Weaponry wasn't alone in its anger and shock over this development. The next day, we had a general meeting of all the Sub-Departments in the Integrated Systems Collective affected by the takeover. It was held in the largest conference roo
m, but just turned into a big gripe session. We ate up nearly half a shift, and accomplished nothing. My name was kept out of it, thankfully, but there were still unanswered questions.
Maelbrott wanted me where his operatives could watch me -- so he was reaching for the entire department?
I should have felt flattered by the thought, but I could only wonder why the man was going to all this trouble. It was the foremost question in nearly every conversation I had with my bosses.
Why would Corporate Security Space Branch be willing to disrupt the entire project...again? What did they think I was going to do? This would set it back weeks, maybe months, while yet another new oversight infrastructure was put into place. They might have suspected me of spying, which was fair enough; but if that was really the case, even at the lowest level of doubt, I'd have been back on Caesar's Palace, under heavy guard.
I actually didn't have access to anything that sensitive. While nearly everything we were doing in Weaponry represented customization of one kind or other, we had no hands-on with the new technologies. Details of the freejump machinery were completely restricted, nor did we get access to blueprints for the new GenDis system -- only where certain power feeds were, and how much juice we could pull from them.
What was Team so worried about, then?
Maybe it really wasn't.
Maybe it was no more complicated than what Eight Kesselior had said: Maelbrott hated me.
It was maddening, and bouncing ideas off colleagues and superiors, as well as Barney and his StaSec officers after hours, got me nowhere.
To be honest, the idea of talking with Barney's people had gotten me pretty worked up. There were seven or eight of them, total, but I only met three -- and they wouldn't share their names at first: two middle-aged women, and a muscley guy with suspicious eyes. They listened to my tale of woe without comment until one of the women asked about Shady Lady's crew members.
I tried not to go into deep detail; it was Mavis I wanted to talk about, so I did my best to keep the conversation focused in that direction. They weren't really interested in helping, I could see -- at least not yet. I went over what I knew about secret encrypted messages, assassins in the alleyways, and the true goals of all the players. It wasn't much. Even after all this time, it wasn't much at all.
If there was anything I could learn from them, it didn't present itself in that little audition/interview/meet-and-greet. And when it was over, they still didn't seem all that friendly, even though they acted, well, satisfied with my story. I had assumed that Barney was their boss, and, indeed, he might have been, but consensus seemed to be their standard procedure since StaSec's breakup and dismantling. That cybernetics specialist they had on tap sounded exactly like someone who could help Mavis, but they told me they had to talk about it among themselves.
I asked about the prisoner. Barney gave the others a nod of permission.
"He goes by the name of Mark D'beers," the muscular man told me, reading from a datapad. "That's fake, of course -- real identity unknown just yet. Manager for a cafeteria in one of the bigger Admin buildings. Completely innocuous. We weren't on to him at all before the attack."
He added nothing more. They were still sizing me up, so the conversation was naturally stunted.
"Why did you guys decide on this route?" I asked Barney after a fair amount of uncomfortable silence. "Why stay here and go underground?"
"It's our home, Ejoq," he replied, sounding surprised by the question. The others looked at me like I was especially dim. "When the research here was over, a lot of us intended to stay and incorporate -- turn Mylag Vernier into a full-blown colony station. It's big enough, and there's plenty of precedent. We were having preliminary town hall meetings, discussing the best and easiest way to make the transition; it looked like the project was going to wind down within a year or two, which would have been plenty of time to get our political and Company stuff in order."
"And then I shot down Jaybird," I supplied, so he wouldn't feel like he was accusing me of anything.
"Yeah...that's when it all changed."
"We picked up the encrypted transmissions prior to that," I explained. "You had a security problem long before we got here. We just drew your attention to it."
"In a big way. So big, it rocked the station. It rocked the Company! Why do you think UH would do this? Why do you think they'd want to get hold of advanced tech? Do they want to keep a lid on it?"
"Maybe. Kill the technology in the name of peace and stability? Or use it themselves?"
"Doesn't sound like them," he replied, dubiously.
"No, it doesn't. But big companies can change directions...diversify. One hand doesn't know what the other is doing. This was a plumb gig for me, and I had to work hard to get it. It had been canceled and restarted several times. If they're behind what we think they're behind, then it's no wonder it took so long to put together: they would have had operatives in far-flung parts of the galaxy to coordinate, and new networks to put in place. They would have had missions like mine to assemble and launch."
"It would have taken years," the muscle man, off to the side, put in.
"Which means they had to know about this project before it was in full swing -- before Mylag Vernier was even in this system. Again, it looks like a leak in Corporate HQ."
Barney shook his head, thinking.
"I could buy a UH mole in Corporate easier than a traitor. Why shepherd this project along, only to give the results to a for-profit NGO? Those executive bonuses are pretty sweet -- at least as good as what they'd earn for committing treason, certainly."
"Yeah, that doesn't track," I agreed, feeling lost. "UH has the juice to pull this off, but everything I've ever seen and read about them tells me they wouldn't act this way. And Churchspace is mixed up in it somehow, too."
"Then we're back to your mysterious BoD member, this CPM10 Farlington," he pronounced. "I've looked into his background. He rose through the ranks fast, coming up from a small tech subsidiary called Nuemira Industries, ILLC. It was the outfit that first started development on this new starjump system."
"We're calling it freejump."
"Really?" He looked perplexed, even a bit scornful.
"Yeah. Why? You don't like it?"
"No, no. It's fine. I guess." He shrugged. The others looked unimpressed.
"Okay, well, whatever," I replied, oddly annoyed. "If Farlington hasn't been selling us out, is he dumb enough to let all this happen?"
"Well, his background is impressive, but they have publicists for that. He wasn't on the Board of Directors until a few months ago. He replaced someone else from Nuemira."
"Oh? Maybe he wasn't part of the freejump's early development after all. How'd he manage to grab the seat?"
"Who knows?" the big man dismissed. "Bought in? Got himself appointed? I don't know how that works."
On a pocket datapad, he pulled up the names and company portraits of a mixed bag of very well dressed people. Some looked old, some young. He was scrolling, and stopped on a blond, pale man who appeared young, but with those telltale old-person eyes, indicating there'd been some genetic work done to set back the clock.
That kind of medical care had become fairly wide-spread and reliable. People could well live forever, if they had the money, and the procedure was getting cheaper all the time. It was widely speculated that the costs of so-called age re-assignment procedures would eventually drop to the point where nearly anyone could pay for them. That would make us a race of immortals -- barring accidents, violence, and extreme poverty.
Those three things were far from uncommon, though.
And just how did UH actually fit in?
It was an independent company -- yes, designed to make a profit for its share-holders. Supposedly, though, it was structured this way only so it wouldn't be beholden to the ephemeral kindness of governments, corporations, or wealthy benefactors. It was dedicated to brokering peace and stability throughout the galaxy, wrestling with issues large and
small, where ever people had conflict. This was a principle at the fundamental core of its vision statement. Either the entire upper management of the company, as well as all the private contractors involved, had been compromised by outside interests wanting to exploit the freejump tech, or...
What?
The idea of a vast, water-tight conspiracy between Churchspace, UH, Corporatespace Board members, and all the smaller companies and cells required to pull this thing off seemed flatly absurd. There was no way something like that could exist without every intelligence operation in space, as well as the media, getting wind of it. Bureaucracies simply weren't that competent. There would be holes, and secrets would pour out of them. They always did.
No, the picture was still clouded, and I said so to everyone present. Barney just shook his head, and the others offered nothing. To prove any of this, we needed evidence, and there was no way to collect evidence without proof. It was all I could do not to toss a chair across the pub in frustration.
But then CPS09 Maelbrott's office called, and my attention was redirected in a big way.
* * *
"You think you can play games with me?" he demanded. He had a couple of other officers with him in the meeting room, who seemed just as demanding, though they let their superior do the shouting. "You think you can force a Nine to lay off, with some sort of budgetary complaint? You're living in a dream world, Mr. Dosantos!"
I hadn't yet heard from anyone on Interstar about this, but the Nine apparently had.
"Am I? You seem pretty upset for someone so immune to Company policy."
"No one is immune. And I haven't done a single thing wrong. A simple error with the books hardly gives you leverage over..."
"It absolutely does," I countered, cutting him off, my own volume rising along with my blood pressure. The guy was a serial button pusher. "Because your yacht is only the tip of the iceberg, Nine! In the same dispatch as that complaint, I also sent a priority inquiry to Corporate Accounting -- yes, featuring you. An audit is underway as we speak. You can't stop it, and you can't stop any penalties that result. But I can. I can get a message to the BoD that you've become vital to my investigation in your present position. It wouldn't stop the audit, but it would delay the judgement, or even alter it in your favor."
Risk Analysis (Draft 04 -- Reading Script) Page 38
