Chapter 22. A Secret Facility
05 Feb 2021Black Llama
February 4, 3307Vaucanson Hub, Zandu system
I crossed my arms and leaned back on my chair. "What do you make of this?"
With a grim look on her face, Skinner watched the video feed in silence for a while before answering. "Of course, I know such places exist. I actually visited a couple of the Federation equivalents, back when I flew a transport for Fed Intelligence." She turned towards me with a hint of her usual sarcastic smile. "Maybe I should kill you, now that I've told you that."
I made a dismissive gesture with my hand. "You have told me about worse stuff. Y todavía estoy acá." Pointing at the screen, I continued: "It's even scarier considering that it's now essentially a sealed tomb. But the Empire claims this is a fabrication."
Skinner let out a sardonic laugh. "Ha ha ha sure. And I'm the Queen of all Londinium with my shiny hat. It's a big galaxy, with plenty of room for all powers to hide their dirty laundry. I'm actually surprised that stuff gets found, eventually." After a pause: "What would the Federation gain by building a fake prison and staging a fake breakout, then sending a faint distress call which was picked up by chance?" Turning towards me, she asked, "Were you able to access the prison logs?"
"Not from the outside", I replied. "There are four comm uplinks, which just give you access to a few of the prison commander's last logs, and a data point. I tried hacking from there into the prison records, but didn't get too far. And getting inside the compound will probably require the use of breaching charges, which I did not have."
"Are the logs genuine?"
I shrugged. "I couldn't say. To me they seem legit, but... I'm more of a hardware than a software guy." I started thinking about possible scenarios. "What if it actually was a Federal, or even Alliance prison, holding terrorists captured around the time of the bombing of Kepler Orbital? Something went horribly wrong, and they covered it up by fabricating data to make the Empire look bad before the Galactic Summit."
"These places aren't supposed to exist. When 'something wrong' happens, it's quietly dealt with. I do think the distress signal was an act of desperation - you just don't broadcast the location of your black ops facility for everbody to visit." She went on, pointing at the images: "The place looks completely abandoned: no security, no defenses. You couldn't break in, but somebody else will, eventually. Unless the Empire flattens the place with an orbital bombardment, or someone permit-locks the system, but that would look like an admission of guilt."
"Well, let's assume for now that the data is authentic. If it is, this is what we get: the assault team, whoever they were, went there to rescue only a group of NMLA agents and killed everybody else. They likely tortured the base commander to get information from him. One of the prisoners, the one called 'Theta Seven', could be directly involved in the creation of the enzyme bombs. And they were captured in LTT 1935, where they apparently had a hidden workshop." I thought for a moment. "LTT 1935 is a Federal system, but it's not impossible for an Imperial black ops team or mercenaries to infiltrate it and raid a hideout, then smuggle the prisoners off-system. Remember the data I got from a contact in the LTT 1935 Confederacy, back in November?"
"Right! The immigration biometric data for the Marlinist refugees", Skinner said. "You were going to run a face match against the Flammarion woman's picture. You never said how that turned out."
"I never did. The process took an entire month to run, and the results were destroyed together with my portable rig when my hotel room was bombed in the New Year." Skinner frowned, but I raised a hand and smiled. "Good thing that I kept a backup of the data... I ran the whole thing again, it finished a couple of days ago."
Skinner set both hands on the table: "Well, anything?" "Don't know yet... let's see", I replied, and with a gesture I sent the results to the smartboard on the wall. "Hmm. No full matches, but I expected that. Only 5 candidates with a partial match probability better than simple chance."
"Only 5?"
"I'm actually relieved. Imagine having to screen hundreds of possible partials. In a way, we got lucky; if this is a dead end, we'll know soon enough."
Skinner gave me a puzzled look. "But what's that got to do with this? Do you have any reason to believe this group of terrorists is in any way related to your search?" I had to admit that no, I did not have any reason. "What now?", she asked.
"First I want to explore LTT 1935. See if I can find any traces of this 'workshop'. After that, well, we're pledged to Sirius Corp now and they just helped the Marlinists, for whatever reason, to settle in their own systems. Our suspects have probably moved there. We'll have to ask the Corporation for help in tracking them down."
Skinner raised an eyebrow. "Suspects? Of what? Of being related to your girlfriend? And what makes you think the Corporation will help you with your personal stuff?"
"Well", I replied, "they are probably in high spirits after beating Utopia at organizing the summit. And I did make a significant contribution towards that. Let's hope our contacts are in the mood for sharing."
"Okay, but you need to explain." Skinner slumped onto a chair. "How does all this fit together? Your girlfriend, the encoded data, the Marlinists, the assassination attempts including getting shot at by a freakin' Imperial cap ship! You keep trying to connect the dots, but I suspect this is just a random collection of points. Perhaps you're trying to find a pattern that just isn't there."
I was getting annoyed, mainly because she was probably right. Maybe I was inventing a grand narrative out of what was only a series of unconnected things. Maybe I was just jumping after every particular event in the galaxy, hoping to find someone who did not want to be found.