Desperate Measures Chapter 41

Chapter Thirty-Nine

August 6, 2230, Alpha Centauri, Chiron, the Galley of the Argo

Erik liked Malcolm, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to slap some sense into the man.

Sometimes the tech was like a

yaoguai

squirrel engineered with too much energy. He was all but skipping back and forth in the galley, the bright white and red flower pictures on his shirt assaulting Erik’s eyes.

“Take a seat, Malcolm,” Erik offered, his voice low. He tried to keep the implied threat from scaring the man without stripping it all out.

Malcolm froze in place and nodded quickly before settling into a chair. Emma appeared next to him, her hair up with the help of a long blue pin. She was wearing a kimono of all things, the exterior patterned after Malcolm's shirt. Given the mocking smile aimed at Erik, she was doing it on purpose.

Erik was used to Jia understanding what he was thinking. After a while, a man expected that from a woman he spent all his time with. Emma always managed to surprise him.

The distinction in his mind between woman and machine was blurred, but she all but lived in his head, having been with him from his first months on Earth. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that she knew exactly how to annoy him.

Jia, Anne, and Kant were scattered around the table, bags under their eyes. Erik was the only one who had gotten a decent night’s rest. Jia and Anne had both pored over local records and news reports, and Kant had decided to spend a couple of hours checking out the sites at night. The man was goofy and friendly, but he was a hard worker.

Erik cleared his throat. “Let’s get to it. The clock’s still ticking. Even if they shipped out their toys, we might be able to follow the trail. I don’t care if we have to go into Zitark space if it means we can get our hands on some alien artifacts.”

Emma nodded at Malcolm and folded her hands neatly in her lap. She’d already informed Erik they’d found something an hour earlier, but he’d told her to wait until he could gather everyone. There was no point in wasting time by having her repeat herself.

“So.” Malcolm rubbed his hands together. “We’ve got two shipping companies that our mysterious Mr. Barbu’s records helped point us at, and they’ve done stuff recently. Emma and I hit city shipping records pretty deeply to check farther into it.”

Anne furrowed her brow. “How deeply? Did you leave a trail?”

“Us?” Malcolm threw his head back and tried a hearty laugh, but it came out strangled. His face red, he coughed into his hand to cover his mistake. “No, we covered our tracks. The thing is, this wasn’t a high-security system. This was just basic internal tracking, spaceport logistics, that kind of thing.”

“Mr. Constantine is correct,” Emma added. “The security here was in anonymity. It’d be highly unlikely anyone would know where to check and what to look for unless, like us, they already knew what they were looking for. When we were going through the records, we found that both of the target companies shipped through other companies until they started being handled by another local company. This was where things got a little more involved.”

“As if that’s not involved enough,” Malcom added.

Erik motioned for her to continue. “We know you two are ridiculously skilled at hacking and systems penetration. Let’s skip the details and get to the part we care about.”

Emma smirked. “Two additional local companies displayed related suspicious activity in the last week. One is ultimately a subsidiary of Stella Infinitas, but that ownership change didn’t occur until last month. Prior to that, it was independent. The other newly identified company is a subsidiary of Ceres Galactic.”

Jia sighed. “That’s consistent with what Alina found on Earth, but I wonder if there’s some special meaning to it.”

“Like what?” Kant asked, leaning forward, his face full of interest.

“It’s not good to accept that the conspiracy controls the main producer of HTPs in the UTC,” Jia explained, making a circle with her hand. “For all we know, those artifacts might have something to do with that, something dangerous. The scope of the problem keeps increasing.”

“Does it make a difference?” Anne asked, sounding dubious. “We know we have to take them out. If we do, their plans don’t matter.”

Jia put a finger in the air. “Ceres Galactic is so integrated into the economy of the UTC that there’s no way people won’t suffer if they go down. They make practically everything either directly or through subsidiaries, meaning the conspiracy can always get the parts and equipment they need.”

Erik shrugged. “Parts and equipment aren’t everything.”

Jia put up another finger. “Hermes. Their influence there means the conspiracy could potentially send hidden messages to anywhere in the galaxy, not only without low-level corporate oversight but also without CID or ID oversight. That means they have a tremendous advantage, even with our jump drive. We might be able to get places faster, but short of jumping there, we don’t necessarily get comm faster.”

“The more we know about it, the better we can take advantage of it when the time comes,” Malcolm exclaimed, excited. He didn’t look away when Jia stared at him. “I’m not an expert on war like Erik, but I know if you know how the enemy is communicating, you can figure out how to spy on that and take advantage of it.”

Erik nodded slowly. “Malcolm’s right. We might not be ready for the ID and CID to rain down fire, but the more we learn about where they are, the more we can start to account for that.”

Jia put up a third finger. “Which leaves us with Stella Infinitas. We do have an advantage right now in that if for some bizarre reason the conspiracy shut down every HTP in the UTC, we could still go to them.”

Kant shuddered. “You think they’d do something like that?”

“I don’t know, honestly. I don’t know what they were planning for that Hunter ship either, and I know they don’t mind killing a lot of people to get their way.” Jia shook her head. “There are far too many scenarios I can think of where it’d be advantageous to them to collect a force and then cut off reinforcements. For all we know, they’re planning some new Conspiracy Kingdom on the frontier.”

“It’s all supposition.” Anne’s face twitched. “You don’t have a clear insight into their motives.”

“I agree.” Jia shrugged. “Which makes them that much more dangerous to deal with. I do know they keep trying to build up dangerous armies without any sort of moral or ethical restraint. We need to keep hitting them and leaving them on defense because I have a feeling that if we let up, we won’t like the end result.”

“Then we should check out the new companies,” Erik declared. “It’s obvious to me from what you two found that they’ve already moved the goods. If we go busting into Three Daughters or New Lands, we might find something, but not what we’re looking for. We’ll need to penetrate the systems of the two new companies, and if you focus solely on messing with them, it’ll lower the chance of detection.” He nodded at Malcolm. “You check out the Ceres subsidiary. Emma should check out the other. Walk it slow, keep it subtle. Focus on finding the shipments from Earth. If we can take some artifacts from the conspiracy, that’ll be a nice kick in the balls.”

Kant grinned.

Boys

. Jia sighed.