3:10 p.m. CST, June 18th, 2673; Alpha Disk of Clearwater Prime

The elevator opened exactly when Anna told it to. The two women were able to get into a position to nonchalantly follow the man when his car arrived. The disk of Clearwater Prime was massive. With a diameter of twenty kilometres and a width of four, it contained over twelve hundred cubic kilometres of enclosed space. This provided more space than was needed by the current inhabitants.

Clearwater Prime had always been a station that bordered on being a space colony. It had remained independent after the system’s annexation by Terrace, and it remained a free port for the trade corporations who had built it. The station still allowed trans-shipment of cargo from one nation to another, and it still drew most of its revenue from docking and cargo storage fees.

The station’s revenue had been down since the war, when New Terra Firma went looking for new trading partners and closed off trade with Terrace. Other nations started to use Clearwater Prime for shipping to Terrace and Caliton, but they did not make up for the losses.

Giving up their independence was the hardest thing that the inhabitants of Clearwater Prime had to do, but it was inevitable. With Terrace investing in the planet, the station started to get investment from the nation as well, but they still needed more. Joining the Republic opened the floodgates for investors.

With the asteroid shepherds in the system, a pair of asteroids were moved closer to the station. The first was mined, refined, and built into a two-thousand-kilometre-long spine that attached the station to the second asteroid. The station was modified extensively, and the now-connected asteroid provided gravity for the station.

The gravity produced varied from 1.025 G to 0.975 G from bottom to top. Gravity follows the R-squared law of the universe, and the slight difference in gravity from top to bottom was caused by the two-thousand-kilometre distance from the source of the force. This caused its own problems, pulling and stretching the station, making sure there were always inspectors employed to ensure the stresses on the station were not too much. The connecting spine had to be constantly monitored as well. The benefits outweighed the costs; the functionality of the station increased, and the station became a much more active trading port. Within the past few years, Clearwater Prime’s six rotating wheels had been stopped and reconstruction had started to turn them into disks.

With artificial gravity and a large, mostly uninhabited, internal volume, the population had swelled. The single reconstructed ring held a population of five million, though most of it was transitory. The station had a vast amount of internal space, but the planet had so much more. A new resident on Clearwater Prime usually stayed at most for three months before moving down to the planet when habitation became available.

A park had been set up around the hub, with tram paths leading farther into the disk. The soil of the park ran deep, coming partially from the rocky remains harvested from the asteroid that made the spine, and partially from the planet below. The thick soil had a base of two hundred metres before hitting the metal of the station’s deck.

The park was designed with openness in mind. The ceiling was two thousand metres away, half the width of the disk itself. The specially painted ceiling shifted from dark blue to light blue as the artificial sun moved around the park. The “sun” was not a single point of light; instead, there were countless lights embedded into the ceiling. The lights were turned on and off in a twenty-four-hour sequence, giving each area of the park some light for fifteen hours a day and darkness for nine hours.

The two women followed their target when he walked into the park. They were lucky he had chosen an area that was coming into local morning, and they did not have to follow too closely. The light was enough for them to follow and to find him when he moved behind some of the trees in the forest. The forest could not really be called a forest yet; most of the trees were hardly more than saplings, being only six years old. There were a few groves of transplanted trees that were bigger, but not in the area where the three were.

Beth and Anna came to a halt when they saw the stocky man meet someone else. They found a place to hide; the forest floor was not perfectly level, which would have made for a boring and uniform ecology. There was the occasional hill and valley.

Anna dropped her pack and pulled out some of her equipment. With the Secure Signals Branch’s mandate to secure the Republic’s communications, she had all sorts of advanced surveillance equipment available to her. The SSB of the Central Ministry of Intelligence was the technical personnel of the ministry.

Anna grabbed some earphones from the pack and handed them to Beth. She was already wearing the equipment’s primary set of headphones, more sensitive and delicate than the ones she gave Beth.

“Just how much do you have in that pack of yours?”

“Hush, I’m trying to hear. I don’t have much more, just this, my terminal, and various knickknacks.” She focused on the device before her.

“…not working out as well as we could ho…” came through on the headset as Anna worked through the countermeasures the two men were using. The SSB not only had the equipment to mask conversations, but it also had the equipment to get through them.

“That will be a problem. We’ll have to curb his excessiveness; hopefully we can turn his stupidity into an asset.” The second voice was deeper and had more of a rumble than the first. It sounded older and scratchier.

“We’re lucky he’s lazy as well as incompetent. He does not do enough to make any career-limiting moves. Well, at least not moves that can’t be turned to our advantage, or can’t be covered up.”

“See what other information you can get out of him about the fleet’s movements. We might be able to turn the recent pirate raids to our advantage. If he can cover himself in glory, it’ll make our jobs far easier.”

“Fat chance of that happening, though not as fat as he is.”

“Come now, nothing is as improbable as that. The fleet will be leaving soon. See if you can get a confirmation on its destination. You’ll know where to find me if you need me.”

The two men left in different directions, and Anna put her equipment away. She looked up at Beth as the older woman looked over the hill.

“Which one should we follow, Beth?”

“Both, I think. You take the first one, I’ll follow the new one.”

Anna shouldered her pack, and they both walked down the path to where the two men held their meeting. They were no more than ten steps down the path when they heard footsteps coming up behind them, and coming up quickly. They both turned, not in unison, and struck up a conversation that had nothing to do with their current situation.

A man in the uniform of the station’s space control personnel came up the path. He looked up and spotted the two women.

“Hey, aren’t you Darline Hughes?” he asked as he walked closer.

Beth’s facial expression shifted slightly. If Anna was not watching for it, she probably would not have noticed.

“Oh yes,” Beth said, pitching her voice higher than the voice she used with Anna, almost breathless. Her eyes had become a touch vacant, and her posture changed, almost as if her head was floating and her body was supporting it. “Are you a fan?”

The man looked taken back by that, as if he was unsure. “Well…uh…I have seen a few of your features.”

“Really?” Beth asked, her voice stretching the word out.

The man could not keep his eyes on Beth for too long, and he turned to look at Anna nervously. “Um…hi. Do you, uh…work at her studio?”

Before Anna could open her mouth, Beth answered, “Oh yes, she does. She’s been working with me for ages and ages. Mainly behind the scenes. This is Julie. I’ve been trying to convince her to take her place before the camera in the next film I’m shooting. Don’t you think this would be a perfect place for it?”

Anna remembered enough of her training not to stare at Beth incredulously. She did her best to slip into the role of a slightly shy person who still worked in the industry with Beth. Acting lessons were a major portion of the OB training that Anna had taken before she transferred from OB to SSB.

“Oh, I still don’t think I would do any good, Darli. I’m much better working the camera than positioning for one.”

Beth took up the conversation with only a slight pause. She covered it by running her fingers through her blond hair. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. You have the figure for it. And if what Jonny says is true…” Her voice trailed off, and Anna looked down at the ground. Despite her acting lessons, she was not good enough to fake a blush.

“What do you think, Mr.…” Beth looked at the space control officer’s name tag with a vacant look in her eyes. “Quenton, do you think Julie would be good on camera?”

“Just call me Bill, please, Ms. Hughes.”

“As long as you call me Darli. Ms. Hughes makes me feel positively ancient, Billy.”

The three talked for a few minutes, with Anna hardly saying anything, just keeping up her end of the conversation. She tried to keep her eyes down, but she was frustrated at the delay of picking up their quarry now that they had something solid. They were finally able to brush off Darline’s fan and walk up to the meeting point.

“I’ll let you know if I find anything,” Anna said and followed the tracks.

Only a small time passed before Beth caught up with Anna as she followed her set of tracks to a concrete pathway.

“I see you lost your man too.”

“Yes, your fan came by at the wrong time. If I were a suspicious person, I would say it was planned.”

“I am a suspicious person, Anna. But that happens to me all the time. I really should track down whoever thought it was a good idea for my cover to be an adult actress and shoot him, painfully.”

“It could have been a woman.”

“No, it had to be a man. I don’t think a woman would do something like this to a fellow agent.”

“I met some pretty cruel women during training. It was one of the reasons I went over to SSB.”

“You think I’m cruel?”

“Not particularly, Beth. But you do have a bit of a cold side to you.”

“Oh well. I think we lost them for now. I think those two were from Olivier.”

“What makes you think that? Your other mission?”

“That’s part of it. The accent was vaguely of the Olivier elite, and they are always nosing around the navy, especially lately.”

“That’s sounding like politics as usual. The Olivier elite have never been happy about general federal elections.”

“No aristocracy likes to give any power to the unwashed masses.”

“But what is the game here, Beth? I don’t know why they would be working with the pirates. It didn’t even sound like they were working with them.”

“Yes, that’s not really their style either. Normally they try to work the system to gain more power. You know they’ve been trying to push more of the Olivier elite through the Academy?”

“No, I didn’t know about that, but it doesn’t surprise me. The ensigns seem to be more politically savvy than I was when I graduated.”

“More than you were trained to appear to be, or more than you were?”

“Both. I’m not as good at reading people as communications logs, but they seem to always know when to be around, and they’re even better at knowing when not to be.”

“Keep a watch on them, Anna, they might lead us to something. Though, I don’t know. I feel like we’re still looking for straws to grasp right now.”

“I’ll do what I can; I’ll head back to the Glasgow. I’ll see if I can sneak aboard. Good luck at the studio.”

* * *

1700 hours CST, June 18th, 2673; TRCS Glasgow

Anna made it back to her berth on the flagship without running into any officials, except for the standard formalities when boarding a vessel of the Republic’s navy. The long vessel was docked to one of the upper wheels of Clearwater Prime. There was no gravity onboard the vessel like the tender that Phil had joined.

She checked her equipment when she was sure that she was alone. She wanted to make sure that no one had tampered with it. She then checked for any outstanding messages. She had left the fleet signals group a list of tasks—nothing too major, but the logs might give her some insight into what was going on with the pirates. That task did not take her too long. No unknown signals had been detected by the antennas on the command ship. Either the pirates were using something that the communications arrays could not detect, or the computers were ignoring it for some reason.

The pirates had to be getting their information from somewhere, and the station was the best location in the sector for them to get that information on the Clearwater fleet movements. But the admiral would not send out patrols to the likely interstellar routes based on a hunch from her signals officer. It was not Anna’s official job to deal with the intentions of the pirates. That was the job of the fleet’s intelligence officer and his intelligence team.

Anna did not have much respect for the junior commander who was the head of fleet intelligence. If he were anything near effective, SSB would not have pulled strings to have her assigned to the fleet six months ago. She enjoyed the posting to the same fleet as Phil, but getting closer to him was not a factor in her assignment.

She finished reviewing the logs from the official communications equipment that the fleet had. Now it was time to review the equipment that was unofficially part of the fleet. The signals equipment from SSB was much more advanced than anything else in the fleet; it also rated a much higher security clearance. It was fine for Beth to know about the equipment, just not the specifics of it. Beth would probably become curious, nosy even, if Anna did not carry around some gear with her when they met. The SSB were the tech nerds of the CMI, after all.

Anna did not show all of her equipment to her fellow agent. She did her best not to think of Beth as a friend, as friends in the CMI could be a liability. She was comfortable with Beth, and they could share confidences. Beth was also part of the operations branch; that alone almost justified keeping her at a distance. The OB personnel were often sociopaths and were driven. Something in their training seem to shut down their emotions and made them fanatically loyal to the Terrace Republic. Anna was glad she had switched to SSB before she got the same training.

One piece of equipment she kept secret from Beth, she had not even dropped a hint of its existence to the blond agent. It was a highly sensitive scanner that recorded everything in the area. The first day Anna moved into her quarters, she spent hours while she was supposed to be sleeping hooking the scanner to the metal frame of the ship’s hull. Her quarters were pushed up against the outer pressure hull of the command ship, a place that no one wanted.

The undesirable quarters lost headroom to the curve of the armour of the hull. It was also louder while the vessel was in motion. The vibrations of the engines were muffled but still transmitted over the hull of the ship. No amount of insulation or vibration isolation would be enough to quiet them down. The bare walls of the pressure hull was worth the inconvenience to Anna. With nothing between her and the hull, she was able to hook the sensitive scanner right up to the metal.

With hours and eventually days of tuning, she was able to turn the hull of the long command ship into a giant antenna for the scanner. Every stray radio signal was fed into the scanner and stored. That was a lot of information, so Anna spent months working on software filters to make sure the memory storage contained only what she was looking for. She occasionally cleared out the filters and started from scratch to improve them. There was so much information coming in that the storage unit she had on the scanner could only hold about a day’s worth of recordings without aggressive filtering.

Anna sat down on her bunk and watched the scanner as she relaxed. One of the attributes that made her a good member of the SSB and a good signals officer was her slight case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. She did not feel the need to have her physical environment neat, but she had to focus on something when it was flashing. She had to find out why a computer terminal she was watching did what it did.

She also felt the need to pick at technology, to take it apart if she did not understand it and put it back together because it was there. She also took apart technology that she did understand just to watch it move in harmony with the universe. Her training had gotten those instincts mostly under control; just at times like this, she let them slip the reins.

She was almost in a trance when something came to her; some signal was there that should not have been. This time she was at the terminal and spent some time localizing it. The signal was very faint, and she was barely able to pull it out of the muck of local interference. It was coming from the disk of the station, and a reply was coming from Gamma Ring. Most specifically, the reply seemed localized where the tender John Charlie had docked after firing off a salvo of torpedo boats toward the sun. Her mind needed to grapple with the name before she remembered that was the ship that Phil was assigned to.

She could not decode much of the signal, just a time. She could not even pull out the date from the signal, and she was not sure what she pulled out was a time, but every instinct she had said it was one. She was not sure what she did pull out was relevant, only that it was four numbers followed by the letter H.

She did not have any other leads and left the command ship again. She was still technically on leave, but devotion to duty was drilled into her during her stay at the Academy, so she made sure the signals officers throughout the fleet had enough to do before she headed for the station.

On the tram to the spine, she left a message for Beth, telling her about the spurious signal she had found. She was barely able to make it to the John Charlie’s dock by the time she had pulled out of the spurious signal. She did not know what she was hoping to find, except that it was some sort of break in the case. She hoped she would find someone leaving the ship when they had no business doing so, much like herself.

The door to the tram opened, and she left the stop to head toward the civilian area that was set up outside the docking port’s air lock. It was inevitable that some enterprising soul had set up a restaurant and bar not too far from the ship’s usual berth. Clearwater Prime was still officially a commercial station, and the Terrace military could not just take over large portions of it. Small enterprises cropped up all over the station from time to time in hopes of fleecing the enlisted personnel of their pay.

While she was walking toward the restaurant, she almost bumped into one of the ship’s officers. She did not get a good look at him and casually dismissed him from her attention. She was wearing civilian clothes and did not have to salute anyone, and for her current cover to work, she had to keep her ingrained military instincts at bay.

She did notice that he was overweight and squat, which probably had something to do with her ignoring him. Even though he was portly, his uniform fit him well. To her mostly trained, though out of practise, eyes she could tell that the uniform was well tailored, something that was not too common with the officers of the navy, especially not with the shipboard uniforms. Formal uniforms were tailored, and tailored well, just not as well as this officer’s shipboard uniform.

She almost snapped to attention when her eyes saw the rank of junior commander on his shoulder epaulets, along with the markings of a squadron commander command. All she did was mutter, “Excuse me” and move along toward the bar.

She did not even notice when the officer stopped to stare at her figure or return her courtesies. She was focused on getting into position where she could watch the people leave the ship. With the fleet getting closer to launching, most of the officers should be staying on board, or at least close to it. Those who left would be going to the restaurant, and only the rare one would be heading toward the station tram.

She sat at the bar for twenty minutes before she decided she was not going to find an officer or enlisted crew member leaving the ship in a suspicious fashion. She paid her bill and headed back to the station. She was able to get a decent amount of privacy as she waited for a tramcar to come by. The privacy gave her the opportunity to check her messages and to check the scanner she left on board the Glasgow.

The filters she had left active on the scanner did pick up a few more transmissions, and this time she was able to get more than just a time. This time she was able to get the word “Hi-View” out of the transmission. That was a famously expensive restaurant on the station’s disk. It was very exclusive, and she had no way of getting into it. She wrote this information into a quick message and sent it to Beth.