Like the last room, this one was deep in the box, the zero-G heart of the station, windowless, separated from the rest of the station by a vacuum gap once the door was closed. It was like a small space ship, held in place by gentle magnetic cushions, with its own air and power supply. It was linked to the outside only by quantum-encrypted, infrared data channels. I scanned the door for bugs. Clean, so I entered, closed the door, and waited for the air to be pumped out of the gap. Marya waited quietly as I continued to sweep for bugs. As I finished, she wafted closer, propelling herself with the magnetic wands built into her pajamas. She asked quietly, almost hesitantly, “Do you accept the assignment?”
I said, “Yes.”
She continued, looking quite relieved, “Good, I am pleased to inform you that you are now the Head of Forensic Accounting for Law Enforcement on the ESK. In your new role, you are authorized to investigate every aspect of the Fairy Dust incident, including but not restricted to financial, commercial, material and personnel. The title, of course, is a shallow cover story. You have just been promoted within MI, although I am not authorized to supply the details.
“It seems we have both been powdered with fairy dust, because I am now the Chief Custodian on the ESK, authorized to go anywhere that domestic service is required, which is just about everywhere in the station. I have also been promoted within CI to match your rank, and am similarly constrained not to tell you what that means.
“The commander of the ESK, Director General Xiaowang MacKenzie, has been told that we will be arriving on the shuttle Laika, and of the covert and critical nature of our business. He has been directed to provide us with every assistance that we require.”
She handed me the sealed envelope with my new orders from CI. I scanned the contents, which included a coded reference to my contact in MI who would provide their new instructions.
With my best poker face, I commented, “Well, if we now have the same rank, at least we can attend the same parties within the intelligence community.”
She smiled wanly, “Sounds like so much fun. You must have really impressed them at that briefing. Since I submitted your request for more resources, I have had a nearly continuous series of meetings with the most remarkable variety of people, all of whom ordered me not to tell you anything until the final decision was made. The last meeting, with a courier who seriously outranked me, just ended. Ze could not give me the package containing our new orders until ze heard which of the three options to deliver, and needed explicit permission from six different ministries to open the correct compartment in zer briefcase.
“Boyfriend, I recognize that look on your face. I will be there to guard your back and clear the hassles. Better, the Terrestrial Government takes this case almost as seriously as you do. But, speaking of fun, we should get over to Tailoring and Alterations to receive our new faces and personae.”
She and I both knew that fraternization across ranks was forbidden within CI and that it would be dangerous for our careers if we became a couple. We both wanted to take that risk and flirted constantly. I could never follow through, knowing what the real risk entailed. I would not impose that on anyone, especially now that I feared the Martians were coming for revenge.
2357-02-28 12:00
T&A
I looked up the acronym “T&A” one time while trying to understand the jargon of one of the drug gangs. Four centuries ago, it meant “tits and ass” and referred to the well-endowed women used to attract customers to shows and events. I never have understood that era – they made it sound like men had all the money but women did all the shopping. Regardless, I think the druggies were interested in the part where the dupes mindlessly watched pretty girls without noticing that they were being fleeced.
The way the gang used the term, T&A was a riveting event they staged to distract people from their real operation. We caught them at it a few times.
Once, they arranged a local political hothead to hold a protest march while they drove a load of smackdowns out of the city. Law Enforcement had their agents watching the warehouse where the smackdowns were stored and reported the truck leaving, but by then the protest march had grown into a riot downtown. With the regular police tied up at the riot, there were too few available to follow a nondescript truck out into the suburbs. The truck was found a few hours later, abandoned and empty. We only learned of the gang’s involvement when the hothead was murdered a few months later. Law Enforcement found a receipt from one of the gang's front companies for the cost of organizing a riot.
Another time they detonated a poorly built bomb in the waiting area at an airport, right after their drug mule was apprehended at security. No one was killed, but the bomb disabled the security cameras in that section of the airport. The airport security agents were too busy with the bomb crisis to worry about broken cameras. While they were away, the mule hid the drugs just past the security checkpoint; when the agents came back they found that the mule was clean and released her with an apology. Fortunately, another detainee reported what she had done, so when a second mule tried to pick up the drugs the next day, he was arrested.
Personally, I was suspicious of the second detainee and of all the airport security agents. Somebody planted the bomb and somebody did not find it, even though that was their job. Also, people detained by security rarely rat on each other voluntarily. Either the second detainee was also a plant, or someone coerced her. Nominally, the bomb was the T&A for the drug mule, but I seriously wondered what else might have moved through the airport that day.
That gang was large and sophisticated, with powerful political connections to several of the regional governments on the Earth. I would guess that they picked up the expression “T&A” from their members in Nuevo Los Angeles in Noram Baja. I learned about it because the same gang was trying to sell dangerously addictive drugs to the security personnel in one of the asteroid mines at L2. With that warning, I had checked the origins of every cargo, including all the personal trading and the unscheduled purchases made by crew members, looking for incidents that had distracted the station security agents over the previous year. A pattern emerged, so we had agents in place at the mines ready for the next T&A event. They nabbed the drug merchant, confiscated five separate packages of drugs on three different freighters, and arrested a dozen security personnel who would be detoxified and deported back to the Earth to face charges. In the same sweep, we found twenty corrupt freight handlers on the docks, half of whom were not even connected to that gang, and three more addicted agents within Commerce.
Now, I get itchy every time something odd happens. The Fairy Dust was the biggest piece of T&A I had ever encountered, inexplicable unless something major was happening. As soon as I heard of it, I called Marya and begged her to call in every favour she had available, to organize a watch on every dock worker and check every ship's manifest, if possible to halt all incoming and outgoing ships for a few days at least. I sent a similar request to my supervisor in MI and everyone else I knew with any connection to shipping.
Marya had tried to organize the lockdown. Of course, none of us had the authority or personnel for such a major action. As expected, I and the few agents I commanded were ordered to investigate the Fairy Dust ourselves. I had an almost desperate feeling that something was slipping past us unnoticed.
Somebody must have been listening, and had plans already in place. This new team was beyond anything I had ever attempted in CI, beyond anything I could have attempted. We just might be able to do something. It scared the willies out of me, but I knew I had to try.
So, now we were off to Tailoring and Alterations, CI's own version of T&A. They had surgical teams who would alter our appearance and supply us with new names and ID appropriate to our new positions. The changes would be sufficient to deceive officious people and would get us past the station's automated ID checks. MI had a similar operation, much more thorough, that would do major surgical operations to change the shape of their agent's faces, lengthen or shorten bones, a
nd often install weapons, communications and data analysis systems. I carried a few of their implants myself. In a sense, I had become MI's spy within CI, although I tried not to abuse that role.
As part of their own cover, CI's T&A actually did do tailoring and alterations for our clothes, along with laundry and cosmetics. We handed them our soiled clothes every week for recycling, getting in return fresh clothes tailored to our specific requirements. Everything was recycled. No cotton here, as I sometimes wore when I was off duty back on the Earth. The fabrics were synthetics that could be dissolved back to the original chemicals, spun into thread, woven into fabric and made into new clothes within a few days. Expensive as hell, but it removed the marker dyes and mood-altering drugs that criminals would occasionally spray on us, along with the transponders and miniature cameras they embedded into the fabric. Every day, we tossed our dirty laundry into a communications-proof bag. Every week we passed the hamper back to T&A and picked up nice, new, clean clothes, a luxury that MI agents out in the field could only envy. I would have killed for that service during my time on Mars.
Clothes were much more fun on the earth stations than deeper in space. They carried embedded magnetic motors that helped us move around in low-G parts of the station. All the major halls in the low-G and zero-G sections had two lanes with linear magnetic impellers that whisked us along faster than we could have moved safely by ourselves. It was always fun to watch cherubs fresh from the Earth learning to fly in their lanes. Until you mastered that art, real spacers would hardly talk to you, snickering as they remembered their own initiation. It is an odd sensation having your clothes drag you around. Some people ordered their clothes to be stiff and tight to minimize the distraction, others kept them loose and flowing because they liked the visual effect of having some parts of their bodies highlighted by taut cloth while other parts were hidden amongst the billowing folds. So long as it does not interfere with your job and you have the appropriate insignia needed to pass the security checks, no one minds the variations.
Most weeks, we dragged our laundry hamper with us when we went to pick up our clean clothes, but you could also set the hamper into the magnetic lane and it would be routed to T&A automatically. Those hampers were targets for criminals, of course, but the hampers were easy to trace, almost indestructible, and locked with codes that only T&A knew how to unlock. T&A knew their business, so no one had ever successfully snuck a bomb, a camera, or even a passive tracker past their checkpoints. A hamper disappearing would be a T&A event in the bad sense, and I half expected to hear of it in our weekly incident reports, but so far there had been nothing.
Marya and I split up as we left the meeting room. On duty, we rarely traveled anywhere together for security reasons and off duty our different ranks in the hierarchy kept us in different social circles. There were days when I really missed the informality of shipboard life, where such petty restrictions did not exist.
When I reached the first T&A checkpoint, the guard did the normal check. “Agent, you seem to have something on the back of your shirt, under your collar.” I had been thinking of other things and had not been maintaining my guard as I moved, but as soon as I checked I could also sense the bug that attached itself to my shirt. The guard continued, “May I do a trace of your movements, Agent?”
“Yes,” I replied, “back to the moment I exited from the high security section.”
“Of course, Sir”
I did my own review internally. “I think you will find it appeared along the main magnetic lane one deck up,” I continued, as though I had known that all along and was just checking.
The guard looked troubled. “No, Sir, you seem to have had it from the moment you left the high security section.”
Rats and cockroaches! I did a double check of my internal systems, which did not report anything until the magnetic lane, and certainly nothing in the high security section. I had that nasty, nasty T&A sensation. “That is weird. I guess we will have to remove it and file an incident report.”
“Yes, Sir. Would you step into the booth over there, disrobe and put your clothes into the hamper? We will need to do a more complete check.”
The word “step” is one of those archaic euphemisms in zero-G. Waving your feet around is a waste of effort outside a gym, but I grabbed the wall rings with one finger and the toe of my shoe and pulled myself sideways into the booth. I had bug-hunting tools installed in the bones of my hands, and another in the back of my skull, so a pat down or hand shake often told me more about someone than any civilian would guess. They would alert me to anything unexpected through the comm unit in my medical monitor, which included up-to-date copies of the MI and CI bug databases. It also included a log of where I had been and when each bug had been encountered. At least, it was supposed to.
I did a sweep, first of the hamper, then of the fresh clothes stored in the booth. Lastly, I went over my old clothes. There were two bugs, one on the collar of the shirt, another in the hem of my pants. Neither was in the database of known bugs. For now, they were just bits of foreign material, which on the Earth I might have dismissed as dust or mud splatters, but not here. Even knowing what to look for I still could not detect them in my internal record before I reached the magnetic lane, but the station scanners were bigger and more sensitive. The bugs had not triggered an alarm, probably because they served no known purpose and might have been bits of garbage, but T&A had good policies and well-trained guards to stop anything coming in that was an unknown threat. Except, of course, for the plants that MI placed on and in me. With a sigh, I removed my insignia from my former clothes, pinned them onto the new ones, and sealed the hamper.
Somebody, perhaps two somebodies, wanted to know where I was and what I was doing before I had even received my full set of orders. Seriously not good, but when I noticed my adrenalin levels rising I tamped down the emotional reaction.
It took an additional ten minutes to fill in the incident report, which was unusually short because aside from the discovery of two foreign objects, nothing of obvious significance had happened. Even the two bugs served no obvious purpose. That, in fact, was the substance of the report, because I should have been notified by my internal sensors and by the station sensors when the bugs had first attached themselves. That went double inside the secure section, although I would not have put it past those guys to have planted the bugs themselves.
I would fill out another such report for MI when I had an unsupervised moment. Having formed that intention, just briefly, I felt better again. I knew MI could get stuff past CI’s security, so maybe somebody at MI was suspicious enough to be checking on me. Just possibly, the system was working.
Arriving at T&A without my normal clothes raised some eyebrows. Explaining why darkened the expressions into frowns. I dug out the instructions to T&A on what I was to look like. My former team would receive a new Senior Agent in a few days, but would still be under my oversight and needed to recognize me without too much effort. The changes were therefore small; reddish-blonde hair, paler skin, small changes to the nose and ears. The clothes would be suitable for a Chief Accountant. I had never been an accountant, but I had learned the basics of modern accounting as a crew member on a freighter, and upgraded my skills chasing drugs and arms through the system using ships manifests, corporate accounts and corporate financial statements. In the process, I had worked closely with many accountants, so I knew how they thought, dressed and acted. The instructions were correct and appropriate in every detail.
Too correct. I started getting worried again, with the feeling that I was being painted with an easily recognized uniform. Somebody wanted to know how to recognize me at a distance.
My new name seemed to be Scottish, Douglas Bruce. Nobody wore kilts in space (nor skirts) because they tended to float around in low gravity, so I added a plaid sash and a tam o’ shanter. I also added bulletproof, spidersteel body armour as underwear, and dark glasses that reflected the common forms of laser light. The classical brief
case, still popular on the Earth, was awkward in low-G, so most of the space-experienced accountants I had met used backpacks to hold the extra storage, communications and analytic tools they needed. I therefore rounded out my new kit with a customized backpack for the stuff that I normally carried. In addition to the accountant’s tools, my pack had knives concealed in the straps, a small blowgun and darts, and additional surveillance equipment. I would supplement that list the next time I could visit MI. I gather that in the ancient world, before the Final War, people used to take things in and out of their backpacks, but most of what I carried communicated directly with my implants. At the last moment I added a belt, scabbard and a tempered steel sword. In space, you really do not want a bullet to puncture the walls of the room you are in, so blades, poison and gas are often the weapons of choice.
None of these items were on the original list, but I had often found that it was easier to be invisible if you were one or two standard deviations away from normal. People would remember the oddness, but not the person who wore it. After a week or so, I could switch to regular clothes, toss on a wig, and be unrecognizable for a few hours.
It always took a day or two to recover from even minor adjustments, and the investigation had to proceed without interruption. So much to do, so little time! I passed a text message to Marya warning her about the perils of being painted as too normal. I filed the incident report about the unrecognized bugs with MI, sent a string of interim commands to my investigative team, booked an appointment with my MI supervisor, and headed in to get the CI alterations started. As soon as I was fitted into the surgical restraints, I was put under sedation and remained oblivious to everything for a few hours. That was what I hated most about T&A.
Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust Page 3