Chapter One Hundred and Fifty-Two
Just One Tiny Thread
Colonel Austin Burnell
It's the early hours of the morning when I finally look up from my computer screen, closer to my usual wake-up time than my typical bedtime. When I sat down… Gods! …more than six hours ago, Marla Moore was doing a red-carpet broadcast on the wall-mounted monitor across from my desk. The Empire's movers and shakers were entering the Imperial Palace to attend the Grand Ball Celebrating the Tenth Anniversary of the Ascension of Her Most Imperial Majesty, Mother of the Fatherland, Overlord of Vulcan, Imperius of Tellar, Regina Andor, Hoshi Sato. I vaguely remember seeing Commodore Tucker and General Reed, both looking exceptionally dapper in their full dress uniforms complete with white gloves and all their ribbons, entering separately and thinking with equal parts resentment and relief that only weeks ago, I would have been attending in the general's place, sporting my dress uniform and bearing a gilded, embossed, hand-calligraphied, real cotton-rag paper, sealed with Imperial Red wax bearing the Empress's crest, invitation. Now, some other talking head is reading the day's headlines and a crawler at the bottom of the screen is advertising …Weather on the 8's…Financial Report at 20 minutes past the hour…Military news at 20 'til…Local traffic every fifteen minutes...
My alarm is due to go off in less than three hours, and while I know I won't be sleeping, I decide I should at least go to my quarters and lie down so my body can rest, however overloaded my brain might be. As I stagger through the corridors to my quarters, the events of the evening swirl through my mind.
It had all started with just a few seconds of surveillance footage, turned into an Alice's adventure down a rabbit hole, and now it's ended with my discovery of a conspiracy that could split the Empire wide open.
By all rights, I should wake Janice Crawley right now and have Commanders Rostov and Hess and Lieutenant Cutler escorted to the brig. Then I should call MACO headquarters and have Commodore Tucker, General Reed and Corporal Cole arrested. Next, I should sic the BII on half a dozen low-key prominent civilians, most of whom bear the name Tucker. Finally, once the gears of justice are in motion, presumably crushing the conspirators to a bloody pulp, I should report what I have learned to the Empress.
But there are several problems with handling this situation by the letter of the law.
Firstly, I don't think Empress Sato has the power to do much about it. She has her supporters, of course, but, as with everyone else in the Empire, they are only loyal as long as it's to their advantage. Some of them will undoubtedly find greater advantage to supporting Commodore Tucker, General Reed or both, or some other prominent personage against the Empress.
Secondly, I frankly don't want to report the conspiracy to anyone who would be able to deal with it appropriately. Even if they handled everything exactly as prescribed by law and did nothing to manipulate the situation to their own advantage, the void it would leave in both security and in military productivity is utterly unthinkable. Quite probably this was why Commodore Tucker kept Reed alive when he was in his weakened state; he needed someone to keep control of the MACOs and keep the balance of power in the Empire, rather than allowing the disappearance of the Triad to unleash mayhem. Reed was hated, but he had the skill and the knowledge to gather up the loose reins of power into his hands … although lately I've been forced to wonder just how many of them went into his hands and how many a certain Commodore Tucker was actually pulling.
On the security side, I may be SiC of the MACOs right now, but I don't command nearly the Pack loyalty I did prior to the general resuming his duties. I'm fairly certain the New Pack are mine, but the Old Pack? I'm not so sure. Commodore Tucker has no idea of the amount of resentment he created against me when he leapfrogged me over a handful of other senior officers to my current position. I wouldn't be surprised if even Jignesh came after me, if he thought he had a chance of succeeding. Worse yet, if the Old Pack realize the support I have among the New Pack, they would seek to remove those allies first, and the resulting civil war among the MACOs could decimate them, causing an unprecedented failure in Imperial Security that would open the door for the BII or Section 31 to step in and take over.
On the productivity side, well, I am sure we would recover much faster. There are probably half a dozen officers on the station that could step into Commodore Tucker's and Commanders Rostov and Hess's positions, if not their shoes, and do an adequate job. But in an ever-expanding empire that has grown accustomed to having superior ships and equipment roll out with the regularity of a Swiss watch, adequate will not be sufficient. Our success and survival against so many enemies pressing on our borders and conquered races resisting from within depends on numerical and technological superiority, and nobody has ever been able to produce the quantity and quality of ships that have come out of Jupiter Station under the command of Commodore Tucker.
Thirdly, while what the commodore and company are up to might be illegal, I'm not at all convinced it's morally wrong, and I'm reasonably certain that it's good for the Empire – at the very least, a lot of civilians would starve or die of exposure if not for the shenanigans I've discovered. Trying to view it from the commodore's point of view, I can also imagine he sees that reducing discontent will also reduce the breeding conditions for sedition; that ties in not only with his family trait of compassion, but with his engineering flair for efficiency. People with less reason to rebel will have less inclination to rebel, and therefore this redistribution of goods that would otherwise largely end up in waste disposal units is actually being made to serve the Empire's interests. Although I'd originally believed I'd uncovered a massive conspiracy to defraud, exhaustive checks failed to reveal one single penny of profit being made out of all of this. My original horrified disillusionment with the commodore was now proved incorrect, for not only is he not benefiting himself, his family or anyone else involved, he's actually risking all of them to carry out this essentially humanitarian operation that ultimately benefits the Empire.
It's the behaviour of a criminal, yes; but a traitor? Even a bad man, by any measure of morality, of humanity? No. Completely the opposite.
Not being an automaton functionary who performs my duties in lock-step precision with the rules, and being instead an individual who has a natural vested interest in self-advancement, I need to think about the legal, political, moral and personal ramifications of arresting those involved – but not so long that the opportunity passes me by, and certainly not so long that I get caught in the act of withholding my information from the Powers that Be.
Finally, I have no intention of letting opportunity pass me by again. The commodore and the general have set themselves a splendid trap, but I won't spring it until I'm absolutely ready to step into the void they create. To that end, I've already sent coded messages out to my loyal MACOs ensuring that I'll be notified the moment any ship makes a move against Jupiter Station. At least that way, if they move before I'm ready, I'll have time to put Plan B into action.
What Plan B might actually be, I haven't decided yet, though I sense the pressure of time; I daren't wait long enough for this conspiracy between Reed and Tucker to bear fruit – as it almost inevitably will, and soon – in a successful bid for the throne, or at least the power behind it. Every time it occurs to me that the Empress's anniversary celebration would be the perfect time for someone to capture them, with the commodore away from his allies and the general away from his ship, an alarm sounds in my mind, my adrenaline spikes, and my brain starts insisting, You must think of something. What will you do?
Wearily, I enter my quarters and begin to undress. My tactical vest, boots, and equipment belt go into my wardrobe before I stumble through to the bathroom. As I'm stuffing my uniform into the laundry chute, I decide a hot shower is what I need. It'll either revive me and allow me to put my thoughts into order before my duty shift starts or relax me and allow me to get an hour or two of sleep.
Standing under the shower with the hot water beating down on my aching neck and shoulders, I let my thoughts wander as they will, hoping they'll take some shape that will make sense.
I'd spent the evening pulling at various threads of the commodore's professional and personal life, but it was such a tightly woven tapestry that they would just pull tight and break off like the loose threads at the seams of a new garment. His family were brilliant, as were his friends. His finances were all in order. His military career had been exemplary; he'd enlisted at seventeen, just out of high school and sponsored by the late admiral Black, ascended the ranks apace, turned the tide of the war with the Defiant mission, and taken command of Jupiter Station soon after. Under his command, Jupiter Station started ticking over like clockwork. Collaboration rather than competition among the departments became the rule and projects were soon getting done ahead of schedule and under budget. Eventually, he was recognised as one of the Empress's darlings and now is arguably as influential as any of Starfleet's admirals. She granted him the authority to initiate pilot programs including revising safety protocols and revamping the training of Fleet engineers to make sure they all serve six weeks on the station before being deployed and all get called back regularly for refresher courses and training on the new tech. The whole place is now a model of efficiency, the crown jewel of the Empire's engineering facilities, populated by demonstrably happy people working hard to please their commander and setting the standard for the rest of the Empire.
It was, in fact, the beauty and order of Jupiter Station that helped me recognize the one tiny thread that would finally unravel the tapestry of the commodore's conspiracy when I pulled it. The discovery of his shuttle and its flight patterns wore it a little thin in the centre, and the identity of her most recent passengers certainly tore it badly, but the loss reports were its ultimate undoing.
I use an all-over body wash and shampoo combination product with a refreshing herbal scent and as I scrub it into my hair, my brain begins percolating again.
At first glance, the loss reports were exactly as I expected. Every department and every division within each department were well within (and often below) the Imperial allowances. Superior efficiency is not surprising on Jupiter Station, in fact, it seems to be standard procedure. But when I did a cross-department comparison, I finally, finally found a discrepancy.
Imperial loss tolerances routinely hover around four or five percent, depending on the routine functions of the department in question. Under Commodore Tucker, reported losses for Jupiter Station have seldom exceeded three percent, so an audit has never been triggered. But when I downloaded the data for the past five years into a statistical processing programme and rendered a line graph comparing the four departments – construction, salvage, sanitation, and maintenance – I suddenly knew exactly where to focus my investigation.
The salvage operation consistently reported higher losses than any other department on the station. The figure never approached, let alone exceeded, the Imperial allowance of five percent for similar reclamation operations, so it never sent up an alert in the automated monitoring program; but it was always one to two percent higher than any of the other departments on the station. Knowing the commodore as I do, I realized he would never accept one department routinely showing greater losses than the others unless there was a bloody good reason for it. If he didn't already know why the salvage department's losses were greater than everyone else's, he would have ordered a root cause analysis and implemented a corrective action plan. Moreover, Mike Rostov takes great pride in his work and he would strive to bring the figure in line with those reported by the other departments even without the commodore's involvement. The fact that they both let the discrepancy slide month after month and year after year told me they knew why the number was so comparatively high and were willing to let whatever was going on continue.
After that, everything came together and the whole scheme fell apart right before my eyes.
I scrub myself clean with the flannel, not that I'm particularly dirty, but the rough terry rubbing over my skin is invigorating.
I looked into the files for the monthly loss reports and made lists of the kinds of things that went missing. Expired medical supplies and expired ration packs disappeared at about three to five times the rate of non-consumables such as floor and bulkhead panels, door mechanisms, and hyperspanners. Blankets and heavy weather clothing and older portable medical equipment vanished nearly twice as often.
Then I went into the daily logs and found specific items that went missing. I called up CCTV footage of the commodore's daily visits to the salvage bay on the dates those items were processed, and saw him make changes to Mike Rostov's PADD. Three instances established a pattern. Five convinced me. Somehow, the two men were conspiring to steal food, medicine, and inclement weather gear from the Empire, almost certainly to sell on the black market.
Remembering the commodore's brother-in-law was a doctor with a charitable bent, I did a little research on some of the drugs that went missing and found many of them were useful for treating certain diseases that were prone to causing outbreaks in poor areas, diseases such as cholera, ebola, typhus, dysentery, influenza, and all sorts of food-borne illnesses common in areas that lack proper food storage and preservation facilities. A chronological search revealed that those specific drugs often vanished during an outbreak a week or two before the death toll began to taper off.
Heartbroken is perhaps too melodramatic a description for what I felt. Certainly, I was shocked, more than likely appalled. Over the years I had come to regard these men as models of integrity, perhaps even role models, and I can't deny feeling a certain amount of emotional upset over finding they had used their positions to become nothing better than thieves and smugglers. The disillusionment with people I'd come to admire was surprisingly painful.
Devastated? Not so much. My years in security have taught me nothing if not that everyone has a skeleton or two in the closet. More importantly, discovering the commodore's skeleton could take me one step closer to the throne. Whether I blackmail him to help me advance or arrest him to get him out of my way, I own him now and he doesn't even know it.
I rub myself dry with a towel and clean my teeth. I seem to be catching my second wind and decide to shave. I still intend to lie down for a bit and having the chore out of the way will give me a few extra minutes upon rising.
I was just putting aside the daily salvage logs, planning to come back to them later for a more thorough review, when a chirp from my computer let me know the search of sensor logs and video time stamps was complete. Working on the assumption that the commodore had been transporting to a ship not on the station's logs, I had set my search to look for three things – an audio transmission, a small gravitational anomaly (cause by the mass of the ship) and an energy signature featuring a brief spike (the ship's engineering plant registering the additional drain of the transport) – occurring simultaneously in the same few cubic meters in orbit of the station within ten seconds of the end of each timestamp on my video files. It worked like a charm, and I had a result for each video file.
The audio transmission was on a disused diplomatic frequency from the days when the Empire would offer worlds and systems the opportunity to negotiate terms for annexation rather than simply blitzing them with the full might of the Imperial Fleet. It's fortunate that I initiated my search late in the evening at the end of a busy day, otherwise I might have thought to narrow it to exclude such frequencies. Of course, if I'm ever asked to tell the tale of how I unravelled the commodore's black market conspiracy, I will put it down to my natural penchant for thoroughness rather than dumb luck.
The gravitational anomaly was too large for a shuttlepod but too small for anything else in the Imperial Fleet. It had to be either a very heavily (exceeding specs) loaded shuttle, an alien craft, or something experimental.
The energy signature didn't match anything in the database, supporting my assumption that the ship was either alien or experimental. It was also far weaker that one would expect for even the smallest and slowest of shuttles. It most closely resembled a cloaked Suliban cell ship, but the frequency was slightly off. It wasn't something we would ever notice unless we were specifically looking for it, but having found it, I realized it would be ridiculously easy to track.
One of the nice things about having one's own quarters is that it affords one the opportunity to wander about naked. As I'm only going to check my personal correspondence before getting into bed, there's little point in even slipping on my dressing gown. Sitting at my desk, I start up the computer and find a video message from my sister reminding me of our younger brother's upcoming 30th birthday, and I smile. She has taken on our mother's role of making sure the family stays in touch, never mind that my brother and I are grown men fully capable of maintaining communications on our own. I take a quick look at my diary and find I've already recorded a birthday greeting and scheduled it to be sent on the day in question. I've also ordered him a Scotch sampler with a charcuterie board and tasting notes advising which foods pair best with each liquor; the basket includes sufficient quantities for him to have a tasting party with ten to twelve friends.
I mark my sister's message for reply later, when I'm decent, skim the subject lines of my other messages, and power down the computer.
I stretch out on my bed, my brain still percolating even as my tired body sinks into the mattress. If the loss reports unravelled the conspiracy, the mystery ship's energy signature showed just how pervasive it was. Those ubiquitous passive sensors that have so often cracked cases for me record everything – and I do mean literally everything – they detect. Signals and data we typically scan for and analyse are filtered and sent to the appropriate monitoring stations while they're simultaneously stored in the appropriate data files on the chance that they might someday need to be reviewed – as often happens in cases of dereliction of duty. Signals the system fails to recognize are run through automatic analysis software. If they show any sort of coherence, which would usually indicate a communication signal or a power signature, the AAS diverts the reading to a display station manned by someone trained in analysing anomalous signals.
The network of security satellites that were put in place after the Xindi attack is part of the Empire's passive sensor system. Once I'd identified the power signature of the commodore's mystery ship, I called up their data files for the past three years and set a filter to display all the instances of its occurrence on a blue gradient from deepest indigo for the oldest flight paths to the brightest, nearly white for the newest. I don't know why the power signature was never sent to a manned display for analysis, but it's something I'll be investigating in the next day or so. A software glitch that ignores only that particular signal seems far too coincidental.
The display revealed that the ship travels from Jupiter Station to only one destination on Earth, a spot in the desert of the American Southwest. I made note of the co-ordinates to research later, but I suspect it's some sort of abandoned military facility or airport, but only because it's hard to imagine any other installation that could conceal the coming and going of a small spacecraft. From that facility, which appears to be the ship's home base, it travels to numerous different destinations on Earth, all of them centrally located in impoverished areas on all of the occupied continents. The timestamps show it started out making two or three trips a year and has escalated to an average of two trips a month over the past year and a half, with the most recent being less than two weeks ago.
Finally, I went back to my video footage of the dead zone. I checked more than a dozen files, and most of them were nearly identical, just a few words, just a few seconds long, just enough to hail the ship and get the commodore transported off the station. Then, I happened on one that knocked me right out of my socks. The commodore was not alone. He had two companions transporting with him: General Reed and Lieutenant Cutler, and their brief conversation displayed a warm camaraderie that belied all the displays of antipathy between the two men and the pitiless contempt the lieutenant was rumoured to have shown the commodore in the mess hall a few weeks ago over lunch.
After the three of them twinkled out of sight, I pulled up the display of the mystery ship's flight patterns and found a path that matched the date and time of the video file. They went from the station to the base on Earth, and then a few minutes later, they left the base and travelled to one of the few remaining patches of the South American rainforest. I pulled up satellite footage of the landing zone from that day. The ship was apparently cloaked because there were no visual images of it landing, but I did find a few images of a severe little wind storm consistent with a landing shuttle pod. Zooming out, I looked for traces of people moving through or toward the clearing, but they were smart enough to stay out of the gaps in the forest canopy. I switched to infrared, but the whole bloody jungle was so hot that almost nothing registered. Finally, I backed up twelve hours. It was night time, more than ten degrees cooler, and I saw red dots, two or three hundred of them from all directions on the compass, moving toward the clearing.
I made a note of the ship's various destinations on Earth and sent the list of co-ordinates to one of my resources on the planet with strict instructions to observe and record, but not to engage or interfere in any way. I already knew what was happening, but I needed proof.
So, I had a commodore and his colleagues stealing used, expired, and damaged goods from the Imperial Fleet; a mystery ship apparently transporting the stolen items; a secret base on Earth where the items were most likely stored and sorted; what appeared to be some sort of distribution network probably consisting of several members of the commodore's family and their friends and colleagues; and a general – the highest-ranking officer in the Empire, in fact – who was apparently covering for them all. I had no proof that anyone was making any profit off the operation, and substantial reason to believe that it was supporting the Empire by easing human suffering, stemming the spread of epidemic diseases, and providing food, medicines, and supplies that government programmes could not.
All of a sudden, my eyes pop open as my adrenaline spikes once again. Was I dozing? What are you going to do? You must do something. You must have a plan. A second opportunity like this is a miracle. A third one would be impossible. What are you going to do?
They are all clearly breaking any number of laws, and the Pack side of me says, Take them all out immediately, take command of Jupiter Station, and install yourself as head of the MACOs.
The practical side of me says, Wait, gather your strength. Ensure you have the necessary support in place to take and hold power. The general is probably the only other person in the Empire with ready access to the data I have gathered tonight, and I am the only one with any reason to review it. It's unlikely that anyone else knows what he and the commodore are up to. I have time, at least a little time, to get my ducks in a row.
The human side of me very quietly whispers, They aren't really doing anything wrong. They aren't hurting anybody. Do you really have to do anything?
For now, the only thing I can think of is to hold Jupiter Station, whatever the cost. If by some mechanism I haven't considered someone else is already wise to the scheme and Tucker and Reed are taken before they return to the station, I will seize command, throw Hess, Rostov, and Cutler in the brig, along with any others who resist, and put the senior remaining officers in charge of each department. I will keep Jupiter Station running under my command while I plan and execute my subsequent moves.
If, on the other hand, the commodore and the general survive the night to return to the station, I suspect I'll have at least a few more days, if not weeks, to consolidate my power, activate my agents within the Imperial Household and secure reliable transportation to Earth. Then, finally, I will be able to spring the trap, catch the hares, reach out and close my hand around their power, and use it to pull myself up and right into the Imperial throne.
One way or the other, I will have to act. Sooner or later, they will get caught. If I plan to advance, I must be the one to catch them.
My decision made, I finally let my eyes fall closed, and behind my lids, the shining path to power lies before me with all its many, convoluted branches beckoning.
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