The Azimuth of History
24 Nov 2022Iridium Nova
After all but giving up on my Azimuth investigation, I came across a rather interesting bit of information after seeing the Kingfisher off on it's historic voyage.It turns out Azimuth Biotech isn't just the spiritual successor to Azimuth Biochemicals, it's literally the same damn company, having done an epic 150 years hiatus and masquerading as an upstart mining and prospecting firm. This means that these guys are actually older than me...
Now, I barely remember Azimuth from when I was growing up. I remember hearing the name a couple of times when my parents talked about the news, but most of the controversial stuff they did was before I was born. By the time I was old enough to have enough of an understanding of society to even know what they were about, they were just another struggling frontier company trying to stave off bankruptcy for another year, probably because the controversial stuff they got involved in before I was born started them on a doom spiral they couldn't get out of.
Or so it seemed. What I've learned recently is that the whole thing was fabricated. Azimuth was publicly destroyed in order to throw off investigators and a big show was made of the company's remaining assets getting sold to Pharmasapien as a front company. This allowed Azimuth to retreat from the public eye and continue to work in secret on a great many more projects than they could have otherwise. Some of those projects involved INRA and the most interesting of them involved Thargoids. While they were working on this, they sponsored covert organizations whose goal was to brutally silence anyone who knew too much, hiding facts about the Thargoids from the public and potentially resulting in millions of deaths during the first war. And that's not all of it but I'd rather not turn this article into a slander piece. The truth about Azimuth isn't a secret anymore and you can find more information about them on the Galnet, at least until someone in power decides to rewrite history again.
Anyway, I took this information to the old Azimuth home system of Chukchan, where I've now started my next investigation. Now, I realize Azimuth hasn't been in this system for over 150 years, and anything they had has likely been removed, destroyed, salvaged, or otherwise eliminated by now, but on the other hand, the Adamastor is there, only because it recently returned via autopilot. I remember that Galnet article. Of course, that's been picked over and scoured clean by now too, but it's possible other things might have come back too, and not made as much news. Also, it's possible some bits that were plundered from the Adamastor when it arrived might still be in system, in the hands of whichever opportunistic locals were first to get their grubby hands on it before the swarm of pfed commanders came in on the heels of the Galnet report.
The set up was easy enough. A nearby system provides interstellar factors without Federation interference and another one provides a independent shipyard for me to base my fleet on. With the logistics sorted, I hopped in the Shadow of Mercury and jumped to Chukchan. Of course, I would be remiss not to visit the Adamastor. I didn't expect to find anything interesting there, at least anything that wasn't already common knowledge, but at least the approach triggered the automated message from Salvation. I'm no stranger to these things, after all in my line of work you tend to have associates who make use of the classic dead man switch. But I can't help but chuckle every time I get a message from a dead person. I dunno why, it just seems funny to me. Like talking to a ghost that doesn't know it's dead, except the ones who do, and then it's even more ironic and usually a bit awkward.
Anyway, with a cursory investigation of the Adamastor out of the way, I proceeded to follow up on a few leads I gathered on the way to the system. I will have to return to the Adamastor later when I have my hacking limpets since the Shadow isn't built for hacking. These leads provided, as usual, relatively mundane information about the current state of the system, connections and relationships between organizations and individuals of note, and opportunities to exploit various political and security weaknesses that you tend to find pretty much everywhere in civilized space.
It'll take some time to get anywhere. That's to be expected. I've already pissed off a bunch of people in the system by "liberating" some documents and valuable materials but I won't have to worry about backlash for a while since I greased a few palms going in. So far, this all looks like it'll be a pretty typical op. At least this time, I'm just doing my own investigation and don't have to worry about regime change or high level counter intel interference. My self-sufficient stealth ship will help with throwing off pesky interlopers as well. Not sure exactly how long this will take, but I'm not going to rush it either. Thing about covert ops is that you tend to get better results the slower you go. However, most of the time, you're under pressure from your employer so you have deadlines. I don't get to take my time often so I plan to do so this time.
If I'm lucky, I can reveal every secret this system still has without ruining everyone's lives or starting a civil war.