By Other Means (12 page)

“I got on the local network for a few minutes.”

“Anything interesting?” He asked.

“Mostly still translating, but I have some network addresses for censored material.” She admitted.

“Good. Store them, I’ll make sure that anyone who gets a chance sees if they can’t access it.” Ruger said.

“Yes sir.”

“How about your new buddy?”

Sorilla was silent for a moment, her gaze moving across the room until it settled on Sienel for a moment.

“Cordial.” She said finally, “He knows I’m looking, but isn’t overly concerned by it. I suspect that the Alliance isn’t concerned with any of these data, they’d probably hand it over if the Ambassador asked.”

Ruger considered that, “So why stop you?”

“He’s testing me, Sir.” Sorilla admitted, “Looking to see how far I’ll go, and just how good I am at gathering intelligence.”

Ruger considered that, but wasn’t terribly surpised.

The Alliance knew they had a Terran agent in their sights, but for the moment there wasn’t anything really secret at play. It made sense to bird dog her, throw up roadblocks, and watch her react. It would give them a baseline for dealing with future agents.

Smart.

“Good,” Ruger said, “Let them see how good you are, Major.”

“Sir?”

The Admiral smiled as he processed his next sub vocal burst transmission, “Major, no disrespect, but you’re not an agent. Any baseline they get from you is going to be skewed all the hell. I’ll make sure we use that when the time comes, in the meantime… play the game.”

“Yes sir.”

Ruger noticed her do a data dump to his systems, mostly information she’d grabbed in her brief time on her own, then sign off.

The opening moves of the game had been played, more or less as expected. Leading with a Knight like the Major instead of a Pawn was somewhat unorthodox, but Ruger was confident that the Alliance didn’t want to move this game to higher stakes just yet. He could use her to probe the intelligence battlefield without undue risk.

If he were wrong, well, she was expendable. Valuable, yes, but there were a great many others on Earth with her skillset. Her experience was somewhat unique, but it could be replaced in the worst case.

Still, he didn’t think it would come to that. The Alliance was trying playing the same soft opening game he was. They were in the polite stage of Intelligence contacts and data gathering.

Time would tell if it became a cutthroat game of spy vs spy or the more statesman like intelligence game played between opponents who had at least a modicum of respect for one another. It could even become both, in time, Ruger was going to be very interested to see that indeed.

*****

It was odd, distinctly so, for Sorilla to be sitting in the conference room and actively tuning out the speakers. Normally, when she was in such a situation, the intelligence being bandied about was too important to ignore, no matter how much it bored her. Most of this was just pleasantries and general diplo-double speak.

She focused instead on translating what she’d grabbed from the network, along with the conversations she’d recorded from everyone she passed.

It was all just normal stuff, of course, she hadn’t expected anything planet shattering. People bitching about their day, talking about the latest show they watched the night before, and other water cooler conversations.

The network dump was about the same, entertainment listings, a public board, a whole bunch of personal pages, and some news stories. More or less the same thing she’d get from a random sampling of the internet, assuming she had a porn filter turned on.

That didn’t mean that none of it was interesting, however.

She heard a man bitching about taxes, another complaining about some new Alliance regulation, both were things that while normal, were also potentially valuable. She also caught a petty thief on her implants, watching him lift cards from three people without getting caught. Sorilla opened a file just for him, putting his image there for the recognition algorithms to dig into.

A local underworld contact was always useful.

The network material held a few true gems, however, Sorilla found. The news stories were first, and easiest to translate. They spoke of unrest on three ‘local’ worlds, though she couldn’t determine what the Alliance considered local. Still, at least one story reported a bombing, and that was just the sort of detail she’d been sent to find.

Bombs were generally the tools of cowards or the desperate. Those who either had no stomach for looking their opponents in the eyes, or those who were so outclassed that honor had become a dangerous and entirely unaffordable affectation.

She and SOLCOM had some small use for cowards in this scenario, but the desperate? They were precisely who she had been sent to find.

She’d been desperate, more times than she cared to remember, and knew that it took a certain level of real oppression to bring out violence from desperation. It wasn’t always intentional oppression, but it had to be there, and where there were the oppressed… well, that was a place she could carve out a place for herself and her fellows.

Sorilla flagged the files, along with planet names, and sent them on to the Admiral to see if any of his people or the Ambassador’s staff could surreptitiously wrangle a stellar location out of the locals.

She now had three worlds on her vacation list for the near future.

*****

“What did she access?”

Sienele looked over the shoulder of the young technician he had scanning the records, eyes on the display as the tech continued to work.

“It appears to be a fairly random sample of pages from the local portal,” The technician said, “some censored material was blocked, based on her cash card ID, but even that wasn’t anything significant. A few news reports, mostly local events aside from those bombings in the disputed worlds last night.”

Sienel hummed noncommittally to himself, leaning back. Those reports were the only thing remotely sensitive she’d accessed, and frankly they were on nearly every portal at the moment so he’d have been more surprised if she
hadn’t
seen them.

“Just asteroid scanning, then,” He said, referring to the habit of many civilians who would spend time scanning the rocks in a system, looking for materials that were cheaper to mine than to convert from reactor energy.

“Appears so, Sir.”

That, and probably testing our response times,
Sienel admitted to himself.

Subtle, this one wasn’t. Still, she’d gotten some general intelligence from him without flipping much back, so he might be doing her a disservice.

No
, He considered it for a moment before deciding that he probably wasn’t.

She was far from unskilled, there was no question about that, but every read he had on her for the moment was that she was a warrior, not a spy. That bothered him more than a real spy would, however, because he couldn’t fathom just why the Terrans sent
her
.

He would not have sent a Sentinel to gather intelligence, that would like setting a hunting beast loose in a shop to pick out a pet for your child. You might actually get what you wanted, but if so it would only be because the beast finally stuffed itself enough to leave one pet left alive in the whole place for you to pick from.

It was driving him to madness, actually, because the things he could imagine sending a Sentinel for… didn’t match his reads on the Terrans or this Major Aida. Which meant that either they were much better at hiding their cues from him than he believed, or they had another use for a Sentinel, a use he was unaware of and couldn’t imagine.

Frankly, Sienel didn’t know which unnerved him more.

He was well aware of which
scared
him more, however.

Soun was young by his species way of measuring such things, but in the Alliance age was a fairly relative concept. Many species were such that they might generously be considered immortal, if not in the strictest sense of the word, and almost all lived a respectable span of time.

Immortal, however, didn’t mean everyone led a charmed life.

He’d been on his own since he was very young, by almost any standard, and while the Alliance provided for the basic needs of its citizens, sometimes the definition of basic got stretched, spindled, and occasionally mutilated.

He’d been a thief almost as long as he’d been on his own, and the station was his personal fiefdom. It was a good life, by his own estimation, if one that occasionally got more than a little tense. The local authorities were soft on non-violent crime, however, and generally as long as he kept the right people on his side he was untouchable.

At the moment, however, Soun couldn’t quite shake the feeling that he was being watched.

It wasn’t the local constabulary either, or even the copious number of military security that had recently flooded the station and put a crimp in his lifestyle.

No, it was the new species, the ones who were escorted everywhere.

Everytime he’d look up, Soun would spot one of them look away from him, that strange glow in their eyes almost invisible, but he’d seen one or two up close enough to know he wasn’t imagining things. Still, before the end of the day he was feeling more than a little paranoid and couldn’t help but wonder if he
was
imagining their attentions.

That thought was put to ground when he felt one of them brush up against him and only long experience kept Soun from reacting visibly as he felt a professional  drop slip something into his pocket.

A new species on the station, rumors of a war in the sector, one that brought up a
lot
of military traffic over the last few cycles, and all kinds of other whispers settled and clicked into place for him right then. Soun didn’t check what was in his pocket, not for a few minutes while he looked to see if any of the station’s keepers had eyes on him.

There were enough of them around, for sure, but they only had eyes for the new species.

So he checked the drop that had been made in his cloak, noting with some admiration that they’d even slipped it into one of the hidden pockets he used to sneak things past the patrols. The contents, though, they surprised him just a bit.

He was holding a half dozen station issued cash cards, the kind that could be tracked. Soun didn’t need to read the note to know what they wanted.

Clean cards.

Most Cash cards held the value on the network, where it was safe and secured by the Alliance banking laws. If anything happened, somehow, it was guaranteed by the bank, the guarantor, and the Alliance itself.

However, a clean card held the information currency directly on the card. Lose your card, damage your card, somehow erase your card? You lost your cash.

Some people preferred them, they were marginally less expensive to use, there were no charges associated with a clean card. No interest rates, no service fees, and so forth. The biggest use, however, was for travellers moving between sectors of the Alliance, beyond the range of realtime FTL communications, and among the criminal class and other underworld types.

Like himself.

Soun scanned the cards quickly, tallying up the totals, and considered his position. The new species were clearly sophisticated enough to understand how the game was played, that spoke volumes since he doubted that any of their criminal class were on board.

That meant spies.

Better ones than the locals, he had to admit, far better than the local law enforcement as well. They were on par with the rumors of the Alliance core agents, but he’d never met any of them in person that he knew of.

So, now he had a decision, and it wasn’t a small or simple one.

The cash was good, he could clean the cards and net several times what he’d give them, or he could dump the cards and walk away. The thought of keeping the cards didn’t even pass through his mind, anyone good enough to identify him and slip him the cards as they did were too good for him to screw over.

Soun pulled a clean card from his pocket, idly flipping it over a couple times as he walked across the shopping promenade. He walked passed one of the new species, one that caught his eye with a look. Soun dropped the card under an advertisement flyer for a local eatery, within reach, then he just kept on walking.

He didn’t even look back to see the card being retrieved.

Soun doubted it would be the last time.

*****

“Did you get it?”

The man nodded, producing a card from his pocket and handing it over to Admiral Ruger. “The Major’s ID of the man was spot on, clearly a low level pick pocket, but smart enough to stay under the radar and understand what we needed.”

“Assuming he didn’t screw us.” Ruger said dryly, accepting the card.

“Possible, Sir,” The young man, one of SOLCOM’s Intel Agents, said, “but minimal risk in this case.”

“The Major might disagree.”

The Agent shrugged, “it was her plan for the most part. She understands the risks, and if she’s burnt it’s a minimal loss. Unlikely they’ll kill her, not during negotiations. Most likely is they’ll declare her non grata and kick her out. Better her than a trained agent, she doesn’t need to be acceptable to the Alliance to do her job.”

Ruger grunted, but that was true enough.

Aida was a combat trainer, specializing in guerilla tactics, not an intel agent by any stretch of the imagination. If she were caught while doing her real job, it wouldn’t matter much if the Alliance had already booted her out. They can’t generally hang you more than once, after all.

“Alright, good job.” Ruger nodded, “I’ll get this to the major. You know what to do.”

“Yes sir, now that we’ve begun cultivating local contacts, the job is about to get interesting,” The Agent smiled.

“Just don’t screw up the peace treaty negotiations.” Ruger warned, “We’re not looking for a war with these people. Not now.”

“I know my Job, Admiral, trust me.”

After the man had left, Ruger just shook his head.

“Trust an Intel Weenie, that’ll be the day.”

*****