Molly bowed her head. “Then I would be honored to work with your warriors, if you’d allow it.”
“Yes, I’d allow it. In fact, I’d be pleased to help on this mission. However, we need to figure out how we might navigate the agreement we have with the Federation.”
“Yes, Ben’or has mentioned that as a potential issue.”
The Emperor’s face settled in a grave expression. “We’re not allowed to ally with anyone other than the Federation. To do so would lead to a breach of our agreement and a loss of the benefits we receive.”
Ben’or took over the conversation. “I’ve considered our position on this Your Highness. I was wondering if we hire a few ships out, then perhaps it would be seen as a commercial venture rather than a political one. After all, it’s not as if the Federation would object to us lending a hand in a scenario such as the one we face.”
The Emperor sighed. “Yes, I suppose that’s a good workaround. What specifically did you have in mind?”
Molly felt herself brighten. This was something she was comfortable with now. “I could give you 100k credits.”
The Emperor chuckled with the same deep belly laugh she’d heard come from Ben’or. “How about 1 credit?” he countered. “We owe you a debt already.”
Molly bowed her head again. “Your Highness, that debt was already paid in full.”
“Well, maybe we can do a reduced rate because we’re friends?”
“I would very much appreciate that your highness,” she responded politely.
“Well then. It’s settled. Ben’or, please attend to the details and liaise with whomever you need to back here. If General Mackintosh gives you any problems, send him to me. Otherwise, I will bid you both a fond good night.”
“Thank you, Your Highness. Your kindness will forever be remembered.”
“You’re welcome Molly Bates. Good night Ben’or. Let me know when I can expect to have my General Council back!”
Ben’or chuckled. “Yes, Your Highness. Good night for now.”
The call ended and the holoscreen disappeared back into the center of the conference table.
“Well, Ms. Bates,” Ben’or chuckled. “I didn’t know you had that level of diplomacy in you! Well played.”
Molly sniggered. “I just applied the same principles I use when dealing with Sean and Joel when I want them to do something they normally wouldn’t like to do. The only difference was I threw in the odd ‘Your Highness’.”
“Well, it worked like a charm. Very good show, my dear. Good show.”
The two chuckled some more, so their laughter could be heard by Jack and Sean coming out of the gym further down the corridor.
“Wonder what’s going on in there,” Jack said to Sean.
Sean threw his towel over his shoulder. “Goodness knows. But it sounds like we may have had a breakthrough in the preparations…”
Department of Cyber Communications, Spire, Estaria
With a few more clicks and splices, Jennifer finished editing another clip, just in time to hear the words, “Anything you can tell us about what went on in there, Commander Ekks?” from the small screen that hovered just in front of the far wall. She’d had it set up so she wouldn’t need to worry about falling out of the loop if she worked late. She had already seen the clip a few times that day, but she glanced over her shoulder at it all the same.
She hadn’t filmed that particular segment, but she had edited it, and she couldn’t quite keep the tiny, crooked smile off of her face as she watched the Commander’s exasperated expression.
She turned her attention back to her work, humming under her breath as she did.
She let the news turn into background noise, only dimly aware when the voice from the screen switched over to an expert in the field saying in earnest tones, “If the Commander of the Estarian-Ogg Space Fleet isn’t willing to confirm that there isn’t a threat, then it seems clear that we have something to worry about.” Jennifer didn’t look up again until she had two more edits under her belt and the door slid open.
She glanced over her shoulder once to see Andrew peering around the edge of the doorframe, and her eyebrows rose. She swiveled her chair around to face him, folding her arms over her chest and crossing one knee over the other. Her eyebrows rose higher and her expression turned more expectant until Andrew at last seemed satisfied that she didn’t object to his presence and he stepped inside, letting the door slide closed behind him.
He leaned back against it, feigning a casual air.
He gestured toward the screen with one hand before shoving both of his hands into his pockets and letting more of his weight slump back against the door. “A bit much, don’t you think?” he ventured, arching one eyebrow. “The Ekks coverage, I mean. It has your handiwork written all over it.”
She pouted at him playfully. “What, you don’t like it?” she asked, tipping her head to one side, only for her hair to fall across her face. She straightened up and pushed it aside. “I thought it turned out pretty well!” she insisted, bringing one hand to her chest.
“A masterpiece,” he assured her wryly. “Your magnum opus, to be sure. It just seems a bit…heavy-handed?” His mouth twisted to one side as if that was not quite how he wanted to say it, but he didn’t try to correct himself. “It’s not like it’s the sort of thing you’re going to net a bonus for.”
Jennifer’s pout turned into a slightly more genuine scowl before she rolled her eyes and let her expression fall into exasperated amusement. “Why does it have to be for a bonus?” she asked, scowling once again when his only answer was for his eyebrow to rise once again. “What?” she demanded sharply. “I’ve got some integrity left. Don’t look at me like that.”
“Your integrity already has people getting worried,” he replied, flapping a hand toward the door, back in the direction he had come from. “Just a lot of nervous phone calls for now, but it will probably get worse as more people see the clip.”
“So what if people should be getting worried?” she asked, in the coaxing tone of someone trying to lead a nervous puppy into the snow. “Listen, Andy,” she sighed, ignoring the way he wrinkled his nose in distaste at the nickname. “We’re journalists. Our job— “ She paused, shook her head briefly, and then carried on more emphatically, “Our moral duty is to make sure everyone is kept in the loop. If we try to pick and choose what we think is important, then we’re failing at our jobs. We don’t know there isn’t a threat,” she carried on, “so it seems irresponsible to just pretend everything is perfectly fine. And it will be good for the department if we’re on top of everything.”
“That’s exactly my point,” Andrew groaned, remarkably unswayed by her speech as his head thumped back against the door. “We don’t know there isn’t a threat. We don’t know there is a threat. We know basically nothing right now. We have a moral duty,” he imitated her tone almost perfectly, “not to start causing riots because we decided to base everything on a thirty second, grumpy soundbite. Besides, I’m pretty sure it would be pretty damn bad for the department if a mob formed and someone decided it was our fault.”
With a scoff and a roll of her eyes, Jennifer lifted a hand, leveling one finger in Andrew’s direction. “You,” she enunciated slowly and clearly before she let her hand drop again, “have absolutely no faith in anyone. The people of this system are smarter than you seem to think they are.”
“A person is smart,” Andrew corrected dryly. “People as a whole are irrational on their best days.”
“Ye of little faith,” she sniffed, turning her nose up, though the motion was exaggerated enough that she didn’t even bother making it seem natural rather than for effect. Though Andrew still seemed as if he wasn’t in the mood to play.
“Everything will be fine,” she soothed. “Everyone has had plenty of practice at watching the world change; it’s been almost a hundred years since everyone on Estaria learned that the Estarians and the Oggs weren’t the only peo
ple in the galaxy.”
“And that went swimmingly,” Andrew deadpanned. “If that’s supposed to make me feel any better about this, then I’m pretty sure you didn’t quite think it the whole way through.”
Jennifer waved it off with a flippant gesture before she folded her arms over her chest again. “That’s beside the point.”
“So what is the point?” Andrew asked wearily, already beginning to sound like he was exhausted with the entire conversation. “Enlighten me, please, because so far it just feels like the point is to feel important.”
“The point is that people are smarter than that now!” she snapped, her mouth twisting downward at the corners. “We can’t just keep treating everyone like they’re dumb cattle. The system is smarter than that, even if you don’t want to acknowledge it.”
“But this isn’t about how smart anyone is, is it?” he asked, his voice hardening. “I swear, I’ve already heard that clip and the accompanying commentary a dozen times. It’s so slanted I could use it to go sledding. You don’t want to keep people in the loop, you just want people to be nervous.”
The office was quiet for a moment before Jennifer groaned and threw her hands up in the air. “You are such a downer!” she exclaimed, her arms falling back to her sides as she let herself slump back in her chair with a huff. Her words kept pouring out in an angry rush. “It was turning out to be such a good day, and then you had to come stomping in to try and ruin it. I’m just doing my job. Why don’t you go do that, too? I mean, if you’re going to waste this much time in here with me, I have to assume there’s something else you could be doing instead.”
Without waiting for a reply, she uncrossed her legs and planted her feet on the ground. When she used the leverage to swivel her chair back around, she did so quickly enough that she had to grab the edge of her workstation to stop. She bowed over her station, eyes darting over the clips in front of her, though she got nothing done until she finally heard the door slide open once again, the sound of footsteps retreating, and the door sliding closed.
Molly’s Base Lab, Gaitune-67
Maya and Paige sat quietly in Molly’s unused lab. Though it was in need of a clean, it wasn’t as if there were any toxic chemicals around. Apart from anything it was away from the hub of activity that had descended on the base since they all heard about the radar blip. The low levels of unspoken anxiety made it difficult to concentrate.
Paige crinkled her nose, engrossed in three holoscreens at once.
Maya caught her out of the corner of her eye. “What’s up?” she asked, allowing a screen in front of her to dissolve so she could see her friend.
“I dunno,” Paige grumbled, flicking from one screen to another. “I don’t think these searches are actually working. Oz?”
She waited, looking up as if that would get Oz’s attention over the audio of the lab they had commandeered for their investigation. Nothing.
“Oz?” she called again.
“You rang?” Oz asked, in a pretend butler's voice.
Maya sniggered quietly.
“Yeah. I’m looking at these two holoscreens and nothing seems to be working. It’s like they’re just not running.”
“Hang on.”
Something started to happen on her screens as Oz presumably logged in and started poking around. Then the two projections flickered and went blank. Then they started up again, with the searches giving a timed-out message.
“I see what the problem is,” Oz reported back to her over the lab intercom. “It’s the data. There’s too much of it to be trying to access and analyze at the same time from up here. Remember how this works… we download a batch and then use it. The kind of wide-angle searching and cross-referencing you’re trying to perform is just too much. It would only be possible if you were connected continuously.”
Paige’s expression went blank. “Oh.”
Maya frowned. “You know what that means?” she asked.
“Not a clue,” Paige confirmed.
The two girls smiled at each other.
“Run that by us one more time, Oz,” Paige suggested.
Ten minutes later, Paige and Maya were a little more frustrated but a little wiser as to the intricacies of the system capabilities.
“Well, it sounds like we need to get down to the surface then,” Maya deduced. Her mind started to churn with the thought of shopping trips on lunch breaks, just like it used to be when she worked down there. And then she remembered she worked through all her lunch breaks…
“That would help in theory, but I won’t be there to help run the analysis. You’d need one of the cross-referencing databases to do the churn work for you, once you find the data.”
Paige slapped her hand to her forehead. “Of course. So we need Molly down there in other words.”
Oz paused. “Yes. But in practice, she’s gearing up to head out elsewhere. No way she’s going to have time to pop down to help with this. I do have another suggestion though - if you’re open to it.”
“Sure!”
“Well, the kind of thing you’re trying to do is something I built a system for not long ago.”
“AH!” Paige slapped her hand on the table this time. “You mean the one for Carol’s Spy School!”
“Exactly. All you need to do is let them know what you’re trying to do, and they can do the intel gathering and analysis for you.”
Maya’s eyes looked serious. “You think we can trust them?”
Paige thought for a moment. “I don’t see why not. They’ve been in on this from the beginning. They have the clearance. I guess the only thing is we’d need to check with Molly that we can make that connection. Oz?”
“Yes, already asking her,” he confirmed.
Maya grinned at how proactive Oz was.
“Ok. She’s agreed to it. She said…”
“What?” Paige asked.
“Oh, you don’t need to know.”
“What? You can’t just— “
“Ok. She just said as long as she doesn’t have to deal with her mother you guys can do whatever you want.”
Maya burst out laughing. “That is classic!”
Paige chuckled quietly, connecting her holo. “Lemme see if I can fix up a conversation with the Director.”
“Cool,” Maya agreed. “I’m going to… erm… head out.”
Paige looked surprised. “You don’t want in on this meeting?”
Maya was walking backward and already halfway out of the door. “No, no…it’s fine. You go ahead. I’ll be back shortly.”
Paige narrowed her eyes. “Hang on… are you scared of Molly’s Mom?”
Maya shrugged. “The real question is, why aren’t you?”
Then she was gone. Paige sniggered to herself. That was priceless ammo to tease Maya with later. But the girl had a point. Even as she tapped the call request, she could feel her heart rate elevate. The woman was enough to put the fear of the ancestors in anyone…
Chapter 6
Molly’s Base Lab, Gaitune-67
“Thanks for speaking with me Director Bates,” Paige started.
“Of course. Anything for the Sanguine Squadron.”
Paige smiled politely back through the holoconnection. “As I mentioned in my message, we are trying to run down a hypothesis that we have about the radar readings potentially having been faked.”
Carol pulled her lips to one side. “You know, the thought had crossed my mind too. After all, this Northern Clan would stand to gain from the traction if they had an external threat to wave around in their discussions.”
Paige nodded. “We’ve been trying to run that down from here. To verify the findings. Only we’re having difficulty because we don’t have running access to the data. We can only download packets at a time.”
Carol held her hand up. “Say no more. I can get my people onto it straight away.”
Paige felt her spine relax. She was sure she almost detected a
smile from the director too. “That would be super helpful! Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. They’re champing at the bit for another operation anyway.” She rolled her eyes. “New operatives, eh?”
Paige chuckled. It was odd to see the Director being a human being. “Yes. New operatives,” she agreed.
“Send us what you have, and the parameters you were using, and we’ll see what we can do. No doubt it’s straightforward… We just want to verify that the data was generated by a physical signal and not planted by someone on the servers, right?”
“Exactly.” Paige was surprised by how much Director Bates knew about the ins and outs of an operation… until she remembered why she was the director, and how she had been an operative most of Molly’s childhood. She subconsciously shook her head in disbelief at remembering how Molly had shared the story with her.
Right then, the Director continued. “If there’s nothing else, I’ll get right on this and let you know what we find out.”
Paige nodded sharply, remembering herself and who she was talking with. “Thank you, Director. I very much appreciate your assistance. I’ll look forward to hearing from you.”
The Director waved then the call cut out.
Paige sat back in her chair and noticed her heart was pounding.
“Shit, that woman is intimidating,” she muttered to herself.
Maya poked her head around the door holding a couple of green smoothies.
“How long have you been there?”
“Long enough. And yes, she’s bloody scary that woman.” She traipsed in and handed a smoothie to Paige and sat down. “Now what?”
Paige shrugged. “We need to get the details over to her team stat. I have a feeling she’s briefing them now as we speak. Don’t want to hold them up!”
She placed her smoothie down and immediately started working, anxious not to make a mistake on the Director’s watch. That would be embarrassing…
Bates’s Office, Special Task Force Offices, Undisclosed location, Estaria
Carol Bates looked up from her desk as she heard footsteps approaching along the hallway outside of her office. She watched through the glass walls expectantly for her guests. It took only a moment before Cleavon appeared and stepped into the room with Alisha and Joshua behind him and Rhodez bringing up the rear.
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