Wilson Port, Tewanta - 3308-01-06 03:49 GST
Kelly Gunderson jogged through the corridors of Wilson Port. She hadn't been able to sleep and thought the exercise would help with the pre-trial nerves. Tomorrow was the start of a new case. She was prosecutor for an racketeering case being brought against Sean Murphy, a former enforcer for the Cullen Gang. Sending him to prison would go a long way to making the New Holborn area of the station crime free. The stakes were high, which probably explained the nerves. Still, the jogging helped.
Kelly dodged an automated deliver cart, turned a corner, jogged up a few steps into one of the residential corridors. Technically, this was a noise violation, but Kelly was light on her feet and her training shoes had a noise suppression sole, so she wasn't disturbing anyone. She took this route for the extra challenge of running up and down steps. She was mentally reviewing the plan for jury selection when there was a loud bang. Kelly was lifted off the ground and slammed against a wall. Her head connected with the heard plastic. She blacked out.
Kelly woke up lying on the floor up against the corridor wall under debris. It was dark despite the emergency lighting. An alarm was blaring. Nearby, under the debris, she could hear her hand terminal chiming out its own alarm. At least it was working. Hopefully, it was letting the emergency services know where to find her. There was the smell of burning plastic in the air and the metallic smell of blood. Kelly's arms were above her head and her jogging top was gathered up under her chin. Her head ached terribly, but not as bad as her left leg. She moved her head forward in order to see her leg, between the plastic slabs, foam debris, and metal conduits that pinned her to the floor. There was a large shard of plastic embedded in her thigh, blood flowing out from the edges of the wound it had made. She rested her head on the floor and hoped emergency services would get here soon. Down the corridor, she heard a door opened. Something in the debris above her shifted and large plastic panel on top of her started to slide. It hit the shard embedded in her leg, tearing it free. Blood sprayed from the open wound. Kelly screamed, then blacked out, never to wake again.
Grimwood Port, Tewanta - 3308-01-06 03:53 GST
Lionel Grassi's Cobra Mk III dropped out of supercruise in front of Grimwood Port. He was on his way there with a cargo of wine and spirits. None of it was particularly rare, but it was good quality for the price. Lionel's family had traded in wines and liquors for centuries. They had endured the ups and downs of galactic markets and survived because of their unusual inheritance policies. The family's business was run as a cooperative and all the members of the family got shares in the business when they came of age. All were expected to help with the business, though they could ask to be bought out if they wanted to do something else. Few did.
The Grassi family collective was large: over a hundred active family members flying ships, buying and selling wines and liquors. The family's knowledge of wines produced in the galaxy was unparalleled, and they were held in high esteem, especially in Federation space. Some Imperial senators who controlled wine producing planets resented the competition, but respected them all the same. Lionel was a small time trader in the family, but proud of the work he did, delivering wines to the systems at the edge of The Bubble. Demand was low for his wares in many of these systems, but profits were good, and by delivering to a chain of such systems he could easily sell all the goods in his Cobra's cargo bay in a couple of hours. On this run he was selling liquor and expecting to make about 200Cr per tonne in profit. A quick turn around was key to making the day a success, though.
Lionel's Cobra was 8.5km away from the station and he prepared to request docking permission. A ship dropped from supercruise just behind him and boosted past him. It was an Imperial Courier and closing on the outpost very quickly. His basic scanner indicated the ship belonged to Vlad Pedersen. A landing pad lit up.
"Frak you buddy!", said Lionel, "You've taken my pad!"
The Imperial Courier ejected a heat sink. Lionel raised an eyebrow: that was a well known smuggler maneuver. He switched to fire group with his warrant scanner and deployed hard points. He ignored traffic control informing him about the no fire zone and moved closer to the Imperial Courier to perform a scan: if the ship was wanted elsewhere, he'd track the ship and assist the authorities taking it down and earn a fat bounty in the process. It was not what people expected of a wine merchant, but profits were profits, and he never tried claiming bounties without a serious amount of system security support. His quarry was nearing the landing pad and Lionel's scan was just over half done. It was going to be a close thing, but until the landing pad lowered, he'd have line of sight with the ship and the scanner should be able to complete the scan. He was close enough that the scanner could take a reading despite the fact that the Imperial Courier was so cold that it barely showed up on sensors.
The Imperial Courier exploded in front of him. The explosion was close enough and powerful enough to take a ring of his shields. Lionel let out a long string of profanities as he struggled to keep control of the ship. Out of the corner of his eye he saw another explosion on the station: containers from a cargo bay tumbled out into space.
"Delacy Golf Romeo Alpha, please land on Pad 1, and turn yourself over for questioning, and your ship's black box for examination. Failure to comply will result in criminal sanctions, up to and including ship destruction."
"Woah! Woah! I'm doing it. Just don't be too quick to shoot. I'm a bit jumpy from my nearly dying in that explosion. I am going to need to take a minute to calm my nerves or I'll risk crashing into the station."
"Understood. Any time in the next ten minutes will be fine."
Lionel took a few deep breaths and then lined his ship up with Landing Pad 1.
Min Tourism Lodge, Tewanta A 7 C - 3308-01-06 03:57 GST
Kim McGowan sat in the bar of Min Tourism Lodge scrolling through galactic gossip feeds on her hand terminal and slurping up the last of cocktail number six, through its straw. Or was it cocktail number seven? She couldn't remember and was drunk enough not to care. It was late and she really should wander back to her cabin. This was the second day of her holiday here and she was enjoying every minute of it. She wanted to savour it. Admittedly, this little resort was not the most exciting tourist spot in the galaxy. In fact it was kind of dull: very few people and not much to do or see. It was a dark little moon. The rise of the gas giant was pretty and the moon the resort was on was in binary orbit with another similar sized moon, which was pretty spectacular to look at when it was overhead. However, the peace and quiet was what Kim liked about the place. And the food and drinks. It was a great place to relax and forget about the rat race of corporate politics, especially that asshole Lydell. He was throwing his weight around recently and was vetoing perfectly good projects that would improve corporate security. It was almost like he wanted hackers to get into corporate systems. She dismissed the idea as an unlikely scenario. Corporate politics to get his cronies the promotion she deserved was a more likely option. Still that was a problem for when she was back at work. For now she was going to relax and recharge and metaphorically rearm for the corporate battles in Tewanta Company that lay ahead.
Kim drained the remains of her cocktail and stood up to leave. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of a pink flash through the window. A small pink globe flew over the building. An urgent thought tried to battle its way through the alcohol induced fog in her brain, leaving a confused expression on her face. Through the window she saw two more pink orbs fly from the crest of the nearby ridge towards a target on the roof of the bar building. Kim staggered backwards from the window. The realization of what she was seeing sending a shiver up her spine: plasma fire. The resort's alarms sounded. She shot a panicked glance towards Conrad, the barman.
"Quick! Get behind the bar! Keep your head down!", Conrad said, as he loaded a power pack into a Takada laser pistol.
Kim ran to the bar and made her way behind it. She huddled in the corner between a rack containing clean glasses and a small refrigerated juice dispenser. Conrad was squatting low behind the beer taps, with his pistol ready, keeping an eye on the two entrances. Kim felt the rumble of explosions in the distance. There was muted gunfire: laser rifles, slug throwers, and the rapid whines of a vehicle mounted plasma repeater and the resort's multi-cannons. The bar's shutters deployed and the power went out. Kim shivered in her hiding place, to afraid even to whimper. The fear robbed her of what little bladder control she had after her evening of cocktails. Urine soaked into her new and rather fashionable leggings. She heard the hiss of an arc-cutter coming from one of the doorways. Conrad, put a finger to his lips, to tell her to remain quiet, and quietly adopted a firing stance aiming his pistol at the doorway. The hissing stopped and Kim heard the hum of the door mechanism. Quiet footsteps approached them. Conrad stretched his neck and adjusted his grip on his pistol slightly. Then, suddenly, he opened fire. The burst of laser fire was blindly bright and deafeningly loud to Kim in contrast to the previous few minutes. The response was a stream of profanities, followed a split second later by a lot of weapons fire. The bottles on the shelves on the pillar behind the bar exploded into shards, showering her and Conrad with glass. Kim screamed. Conrad lifted his pistol above the bar counter top and fired blind. The return fire kept coming. Two polyhedral orbs arced over the bar and bounced around on the floor between Conrad and herself. His eyes went wide. The blinking indicator lights on the grenades went a solid red.
Wilson Port, Tewanta - 3308-01-06 05:11 GST
Agent Hiroko Watanabe wove her way through the emergency response personnel, medics, citizens wrapped in foil blankets, and the stacks of emergency equipment, on the way to the site of the explosion. The rest of her team were travelling with Boon Commando squads to the six attacked settlements, to provide tactical support and gather evidence. She was acting as liaison between station security and the Buurian Protectorate Intelligence Agency. A part of her resented that she was not getting to go in with the assault troops, but most of her was relieved. Her last two missions had been traumatic: she'd been badly wounded both times, and nearly died. Physically, she was nearly back to full fitness, however, the psychological wounds would take a bit longer. She'd recover, though: the psychological services available to her were second to none. Hiroko turned a corner, nodded to the system security officer at the base of a series of steps and climbed them to be greeted by a scene of destruction. Chunks of plastic wall and ceiling material lay strewn along the corridor. A thin pool of blood gathered along one wall, pushed there by the station's spin. Hiroko noted the metallic smell and unconsciously rubbed her right forearm. Ahead of her, standing near a pile of rubble, was a short woman wearing chunky magboots, green overalls and a black jacket. She was shouting at three men dressed in station maintenance uniforms. The men looked like they'd rather be anywhere else.
"Nobody frakkin' touch anything without getting approval from me or Pavel there", the woman said, pointing at a technician operating a drone control deck."This is frakkin' crime scene, and if we want to catch the frakkin' assholes responsible for this, then we need to gather evidence. So unless something is going to blow up or catch fire, or someone is about to die, frak off an stay out of our way."
"Detective Geldof", Hiroko said.
"Agent Watanabe.", the woman replied. "What can I do for you? Are you here to steal my case?"
"Nope! Still your case. I'm acting as liaison. What do we know?"
"A bomb took out three large apartments on this level. We have three dead, and all residents of the apartments have been accounted for. The explosive used looks to be regular mining blasting charges. Very common and very easy to get hold of. We don't know how it was smuggled into residential areas, but there's a lot we are figuring out about the underworld on this station. It is going to be a frakking nightmare to trace."
"Do we know anything about the victims?", Hiroko asked.
"The woman under the pile of rubble was Kelly Gunderson, a prosecutor. The other two were in the center apartment: Brian Lydell, a VP with the Tewanta Company, and his girlfriend, Ashley Smith."
"That's a bunch of possible motives right there!"
"On the surface of it, yeah, but I have some theories."
"Anything you are willing to share?"
"Well, Pavel say that the blast looks to have originated inside Lydell's apartment. Also, while the explosive used was crude and common, the blast pattern of the explosion is unusual. Pavel says the blast damage to other levels of the station is minimal: the blast was shaped to deliver the majority of its energy on this level. That's pretty sophisticated. In addition, in a case involving a faction VP or their family, we'd normally expect the faction to be breathing down our neck for answers. In this case the Tewanta Company are very quiet."
"Do you think it was an internal faction assassination?"
"Possibly. Or there's something else going on and they are trying to figure it themselves first."
"Interesting. I'll cross check to see if we have any indications of internal conflict within Tewanta Company."
"There is one thing you could focus on. Miss Smith had shown up on our radar as potentially being involved in drug distribution. We have connected her to a potential drug smuggler, Vlad Pedersen. Still gathering information on that, but it is suspicious."
"Would it be more suspicious if I mentioned that Vlad's Imperial Courier exploded outside Grimwood Port this morning, and that the cargo bay containing his storage locker also suffered an explosion, that damaged all the cargo in it?"
"You are frakkin' kidding me! The drug connection looks like the best line of enquiry, in that case. Prosecutor Gunderson, may just have been tragically unlucky."
Detective Geldof pulled out her hand terminal and started typing with her thumbs. She retrieved a retinal scanner from her bag, attached it to her hand terminal, and raised it to her face. The device directed a beam towards her eyeball. The terminal beeped. A second later, so did Hiroko's.
"Okay. I have just granted you access to the case files and blackboard. Throw anything you find in there."
"I will do that. I could have gotten access to the files myself, you know."
"Not my file server, you couldn't. Ever since I found people creeping around in our departmental IT system, I have used a slightly customized system instead. Safer that way."
Hiroko raised an eyebrow.
"And you've never bent a policy when you though it was stupid? Besides, it is more secure than the regulation system, and people I trust have access, in case anything happens to me.."
"Fair enough! I'll upload anything I find.", Hiroko said, as she turned to walk back to her office. There were many dots to join.
Wilson Port, Tewanta - 3308-01-06 22:47 GST
Detective Imelda Geldof paced around the holo table in the department's operations room, literally looking at the case files from every angle. There were clusters of files hovering in the air above the table. There was a cluster for each site that had been attacked or bombed. There was a cluster for the Imperial Courier that had been destroyed. There was a cluster for the terrorist group that had claimed responsibility for the attacks, the Children of Nietzsche. They were a right wing extremist group that claimed that humanity was being softened up for a Thargoid invasion by liberalism. Apparently, the attacks demonstrated how open The Buurian Protectorate was to Thargoid attack. At the center of the holo display was the file for Ashley Smith. Her connection with the smuggler Vlad Pedersen was the key to the case. Imelda could feel it in her bones. As data came in throughout the day, this became more and more likely. The black box from Vlad's Imperial Courier had survived and had records for multiple visits to Sharma Synthetics, Khanna Synthetics, and Min Tourism Lodge, three of the settlements that had been attacked. Imelda hoped that once those sites came back online, that there would be more information on what Vlad was doing there, and whether Miss Smith or VP Lydell had visited them recently. The protectorate had opened restoration contracts to independent pilots, to speed up the process: its own resources were stretched a bit thin dealing with expansion efforts elsewhere. Imelda's partner, Detective Brendan Freamon, had spent the day interviewing colleagues of VP Lydell at Tewanta Company. He had discovered that one of the casualties at Min Tourism Lodge, Kim McGowan, was a corporate rival of VP Lydell and had flagged Miss Smith as a potential security risk. So, of the eight sites attacked, five had a connection to Miss Ashley Smith.
Imelda opened the folder that she had labelled, "Pending Searches". She had written a few crawler programs earlier in the day. About a quarter of them were looking for mentions of the attacks in online chat forums. These were merrily running, finding mentions, that another program was filtering out as uninteresting. They weren't likely to find much, but it wasn't unknown for criminals to be morons and incriminate themselves online, so Imelda wasn't giving up hope for them just yet. The rest were waiting legal approval. These were searches for financial and communications records of employees of Sharma Synthetics and Khanna Synthetics. Imelda reasoned that the smuggler had to have contacts at those sites and those searches would hopefully identify who those contacts were. However, the records were protected by privacy laws and had to go through legal approval channels before they were free to be searched. Imelda wasn't holding her breath.
A new folder popped into existence over the holo table. Imelda opened it. It was autopsy reports of the attackers that were killed at Hartog's Fortress. There had been an exchange of rocket salvos at that site and the security forces there had killed about seven attackers before being overrun. Imelda looked through each of the files. Sadly, the injuries to the attackers were catastrophic and normal identification methods had drawn a blank for each of them. One picture of a severed forearm caught Imelda's eye, though. It had a tattoo that Imelda thought she recognized. She spent about thirty minutes creating a search program to go look for similar tattoo from various databases and online forums. This one would not need legal approval, so she launched it into the virtual wilds.
Imelda stretched and rubbed the bridge of her nose. It was late and she was tired. Not much she could do tonight with a brain full of fatigue toxins. It was time for her to get some sleep. Before she shut down the holo table and left for the night, she brought up Ashley Smith's file again and looked at her holo-me portrait.
"What secrets do you have? What were you frakking up to?", Imelda asked the holo-me head. She shut off the holo table and left.
In orbit around Fall 1 D A - 3308-01-07 09:15 GST
Commander Graves sat in his office aboard the Beluga Liner, Palantir, and finished reading the report on Operation Iron Eagle. Apart from the loss of a few low level assault troops at Hartog's Fortress, it was a resounding success. Attacking that military facility may have been a mistake, but it did result in the capture of a lot of weaponry, including a number of Scorpion assault vehicles. The primary target, Ashley Smith, the rogue agent assigned to control Brian Lydell, had been eliminated. All traces of her involvement in Project Keeper had been destroyed. Of particular importance were the compounds that she was given to make her target more suggestible and infatuated with her. Those had to be destroyed. Had they fallen into the hands of The Order's enemies, then countermeasures could be developed and that would ruin the project. Operation Iron Eagle was a gamble, but worth it, in his opinion, to protect Project Keeper. The Official Tewanta Order had indirect control of factions in twenty systems, mostly through Project Keeper. However, there was a downside to the project: the agents, like Ashley Smith, needed to not begin operating on their own behalf. Things had gotten out of hand in Tewanta and a drastic recovery operation had to be mounted. To avoid this in future, a closer watch on the Keepers was needed, starting in Awawar. Commander Graves contacted the pilot to set a course there. He drained his coffee bulb and brought up the files for his agents on Cartwright Orbital.