11:30 a.m. CST, June 19th, 2673; Clearwater Prime Alpha Disk

Water’s Bridge Detective Agency was in one of the more densely packed areas of the station. The area was away from the bright and open park and similarly spaced shopping and high-class commercial areas. The corridor was wide enough to let two ground vehicles pass each other, but vehicles were hardly ever seen in the corridors. Despite the size of the disk, there were not that many privately owned vehicles. Most people made do with the tram and other public transit options.

Ian Hoover was just getting into the office; it was early for him, with the clock striking eleven times just thirty minutes ago. Like most people who dealt with the shady underlife of the underworld, he worked better when most people had gone to bed. This had not changed despite the fact that on Clearwater Prime, simulated sunlight was at most an hours trip away.

The office was run-down and had not changed since the last time he had entered it. Ian was not the cleanest person around, and he had to maintain the profession’s reputation. He was shocked when he found he was not alone, and he reached into his industry-issued trench coat.

“I wouldn’t do that, Mr. Hoover,” a clear voice said from the side of the darkened room.

“Is this the part where I say you’ll never get away with this, or is that later in the conversation?”

“That’s later; this is the part where I say my partner wouldn’t like that.”

“You mean the partner who is sneaking up behind me? This partner?” he asked with a raised voice and made a punch to the side, where he thought the woman’s partner was. He was a good close-quarters combatant, since he had to be with the type of work he did. He had also been confronted by mysterious people in his office a few times before.

Ian was not totally surprised that he missed; he had a good chance of guessing wrong. He was expecting a muscular man, since that fit the situation. He was not expecting a short woman, and as it turned out, the woman was a heavy worlder who kept in shape and knew more about close-quarters fighting than someone like him, who picked it up along the way.

He found himself on the floor of his office faster than he thought gravity and air resistance would allow, and he was quickly pinned by the speaker’s partner.

“Are you sure we need him, Margaret?” he heard from above him.

“Yes, Helen, we need him, let him up,” the original speaker said, and the pressure on Ian’s back relaxed as the lights came on.

Both of the women were dressed similarly in black form-fitting jumpsuits, with brown undone jackets over the top of them. One was blond and well stacked, and the other had black hair and an Asian complexion. It was the Asian who pinned him, but his instincts told him the blonde was the dangerous one. She was wearing sunglasses, even in the dark. The Asian was wearing a pair of infrared goggles.

“You know, darling, those things aren’t fair,” he said to the one called Helen.

His only answer was a shrug from the shorter woman, so he turned back to the one known as Margaret. “So, Margaret, if that’s your real name, what brings you to Water’s Bridge Detective Agency?”

“It’s said that you have had some dealing with some less-than-shady people.”

“Are you calling me a criminal?”

“No, far from it, but you’ve had some dealing with them.”

“Well, everyone has to make a living. So, what do you want?”

“I need some surveillance work done and some information investigated.”

“Doesn’t everyone? My rates are two hundred cpc an hour.”

“Now who’s not playing fair, Mr. Hoover? Your rates in the contact database say one-fifty. But tell you what, if you get us the information, we’ll throw in the fifty cpc per hour as a bonus.” Fifty Clearwater Prime Credits went a long way. A decent meal went for less than three, a large evening meal went for around five, and a top-class meal at something like the Hi-View could be attained for a mere forty.

“Who do you want me to tail? And what information do you want?” There was no point in negotiation. The two did not seem to want to play the game, and he was already at a disadvantage.

“Do you know Martin Ashby?”

“Yeah, everyone knows him. He’s the chief commercial council from Olivier or something like that. They say he has fingers into every commercial enterprise that comes from there and through Clearwater Prime.”

“Yes he does. He’s also involved with the Clearwater raiders.”

“I hadn’t heard that. It would be bad for business. Not that I’m saying you’re wrong.”

“I could be wrong, but some recent business deals we had going were captured by the raiders. The strange thing was, a shipment of Olivier Spice was on that same ship, and it arrived safely at its destination.”

“So you think Mr. Ashby is behind it, and you want proof.”

“Bingo.”

“That’s a dangerous job; I want a retainer up front for it.”

An embargo chip fell into his hand. He was quick to hold on to it and look it over. The amount of credits on the chip could vary. It was very much like a deferred credit line, where a balance was paid at the end of each period. The difference was that an embargo chip actually contained the credits; they were much like printed bills and stamped coins that were still used in some economies. The chips were also almost completely untraceable.

Ian ran his finger over the studs at the bottom of the chip and almost gasped at the number that was displayed. Enough for twenty hours of work at the higher rate he quoted with no questions asked.

“This is legal, isn’t it?” he had to ask.

“Oh yes, it’s very legal,” the Asian said. “You could say it couldn’t get any more legal.”

He knew he was going to regret it, but the money would pay for the past rent on his office and meet the other bills he had outstanding. He had known private investigators were known to be chronically late with their bills when he got into the business; he had just assumed he would not be one of them.

“Fine. How do I contact you when I have the information?”

* * *

1300 hours CST, June 19th, 2673; TCRS Glasgow

Anna went back to the Glasgow. She was becoming more proficient at getting in and out without official notice. Again, the first thing she did was check on her equipment and then the cameras and audio bugs she had set by the John Charlie. The bugs had not caught Robertson leaving the ship, so she did not worry about him. She hated to admit it, but she enjoyed working with Beth, and hoped that the PI would find something useful.

She decided it was time to do some research, and since she had the fleet computers already at hand, she started her research in the personnel records. The SSB was in charge of securing the communications of the Republic; Anna’s assignment was to the Clearwater fleet, so she had all the encryption codes, and she had the password to one of the back doors memorized.

She followed a specific procedure when she entered the system. She looked at the honeypots and other traps that were set up. There were the usual hacking attempts that got nowhere—probably a group of bored teenagers or college students who thought they were smart by running a set of canned scripts.

The attacks all followed the same profile; SSB had actually written a lot of those scripts and released them “into the wild.” They usually went to the honeypots and the false information that was kept there. Secure Signals wrote the cracking scripts to pollute the hacking ecosystem and to keep the bored geniuses from inventing their own cracking tools.

Computer honeypots were there for the same reason some picnickers left open honeypots near their picnics. All the creepy-crawlies and flying bugs went for it and were satisfied with what they found, so they left the main picnic alone. A honeypot on a computer was there to make a cracker think she got something valuable and left the truly valuable stuff alone. Some computing power was lost to maintaining these traps, but if it kept the creepy-crawlies out of the important information, then it was well worth it. Unfortunately, honeypots did not always work.

The logs on the secured system showed only authorized access, but more importantly the hidden logs did not show any tampering, or neither did the other five levels of tamper detection. The SSB used several levels of detection, each level monitoring the others, in the hopes that a cracker could not find them all. SSB probably could not completely stop the crackers from getting into the military system, but it did its best to keep at least one step ahead of them. It was one of Anna’s duties to monitor the countermeasure systems and report on their findings. She was a communications specialist, not a computer specialist, and knew when she was out of league when it came to setting up new traps.

With her primary duties out of the way with regards to the fleet’s computers, she started to browse through the personnel records. She specifically went looking for Robertson’s and started to scan through it.

The record was definitely an interesting read. Who would have thought a parent would name their child Jacob June Robertson? He was from Olivier, and his family owned a shipping company that dealt with Olivier Spice. Olivier Spice was the generic name for any pharmaceutical materials and the other interesting things that were harvested from the jungles and swamps of the planet. The families of the original settlers owned most of the land on the planet, especially the land that was profitable. Merchants could make a healthy profit by hauling and selling the products that were produced.

Anna found the most interesting portions of the record to be the locked-out areas, not the bit about his family history. The locked-out sections of Robertson’s file were locked to such a high level that not even the admiral could open them. That meant that either Robertson did some work for the CMI, the Military Research Bureau, or some other highly classified projects.

Classified work did not fit the profile that Anna had formed of Robertson, so Anna opened the locked sections to have a peek. What she found interested her a great deal. Every single one of the secured sections contained a report of a screw-up or a report of massive incompetence. Those she marked down for further investigation; the officers who made the reports should have followed up on them. Something was definitely going on with Robertson’s file, and it pointed back to a powerful patron.

She could not report anything she found through official channels, at least not fleet official channels. She could report it through the channels she had open with SSB for the pirate investigation, but that would have to go all the way back to Terrace before anyone looked at it. Unfortunately, this type of record was not very rare in the navy these days, so even if she reported it to higher authority, the decision from the upper echelon of the CMI might be to drop the case. Anna felt that the waters needed to be stirred to help with the investigation. Maybe if she got something official going with Robertson, she could catch in the act whatever was going on and hopefully link him to the pirates.

Phil’s comments on Robertson made her biased against the junior commander. She had served on the front lines of the war, along with Phil, even though they were on different fronts. Even Beth had a six-month tour on a heavy cruiser before the CMI thought she would be more valuable in the propaganda offices, otherwise known as public relations.

She went after the training records for the John Charlie’s torpedo boat squadron, and there she found something that could be reported. The number of rounds expended during training exercises perfectly matched what should be fired. Gunners had almost exactly the right proficiency with their weapons in manual and assisted targeting modes. The numbers were just too right to be true.

John Charlie also showed that they requisitioned the right number of replacement rounds and other consumables. Anna went to the inventory computer on the tender and found that the official inquiry channels went to a crude honeypot. The computer trap was good enough to deal with the automated queries from the command ship, but did not deal with any of the hardly used commands.

Anna just used the SSB’s back door and went into the computers to see what was going on. She first checked out the honeypot and was shocked to see that it had no logging functions; whoever had put it together was not worried about anyone trying to hack in. She then went to the inventory on the tender. Torpedo boat consumables were at maximum, not just at wartime storage levels; every slot on the tender was filled with ammunition, parts, and other pieces of equipment that were consumed during normal operations. They should have been short at least fourteen torpedoes.

She needed to figure out what was happening on the tender and how far the knowledge went. That took a few more hours of digging through the logs, messages, and standard reports. The investigations led Anna to believe that the corruption was localized to the torpedo boat squadron and their supply officer. Now she had to think of what to do with the information and how to keep the disturbance she wanted to create localized. The fleet was about to launch, and she did not want to endanger it.