I Saw Design
21 Jul 2022User319792
I watched Emerald come into view from the viewing deck of N.O.S. as it exited hyperspace. The moon resembled Cubeo 3 inasmuch as any earth-like planet would resemble another. Despite its distance from her base of power, orbiting the planet Jade in the Cemiess system, on its surface was the personal residence of the Empress. With her tendency to buck Imperial norms, in addition to the system’s history as a site of contestation between the Federation and the Empire, it seemed an appropriate home for the princess. Having spent the last few months in California Sector Nebula, with Coral conducting The Run, I was surprised to see Imperial Senator Bluecrash’ invitation to her art opening. I mentioned it to Orion and he thought it might be a good idea to place ourselves in The Empress’ presence, especially with our current Imperial sponsor, in the off-chance that another of her constituencies should begin to exert its presence in the Imperial hierarchy.
Captain McClean, receiving my orders to plot a course back toward Imperial space, suggested we might look into matters in Andowatye, in light of our current investigations into Mr. Rackham, and I ran the idea back through Orion and the man in the black suit.
“I fail to see the connection between our interests in Mr. Rackham and a cartel situated in Federation space, Cadence. There are mafias, anarchies, and cartels throughout the galaxy that have far more influence and power to spare. With Coral conducting The Run, we’re already a brain short and the moment we set-up shop in Cemiess we’re going to be overrun by Princess Aisling’s propaganda machines. We’re going to need to be flexible for Coral, in the off-chance that she runs into any trouble and a cartel is the least of our concern.”
I looked toward the man in the black suit, trying to figure out if he was being overly cautious about Coral or if he actually had concerns about the Empress’ propaganda programmers. Neither had concerned him all that much, prior to The Run. I squinted at him, my lips tightening at the corners,
“The Red Family’s been tied to Maddox Hurd, of Herculean Machines.”
The man in the black suit’s gaze never shifted, darting once to the right and back to me, and he lowered his head slightly. His wrists quickly opened the flaps. I stared back for a moment, looking at Orion, who met my eyes with a plaintive look of anticipation,
“... who at one point was under investigation for receiving financial support from organizations, including the Red Family, during the formation of Herculean Machines. The company, along with Supratech, has made appearances at the Rackham Ultratech Expo, during which Mr. Rackham tested one of Herculean Machines’ Duradrives.”
The man in the black suit blinked and looked away from me at the mention of Supratech and I took his cue,
“Supratech was saved from bankruptcy recently by Lexi October, of Joker’s Deck and the Winking Cat’s recent fame. The company’s Torc unit’s failure to make an impression on the Expo audience was widely noted, but it's Artemis suits have been widely adopted by pilots of the Pilots Federation”
Orion looked away, squinting at a corner of the room, and I continued,
“One might surmise that the current Federation push to eliminate the Red Family might have some ties to Mr. Rackham’s current Presidential aspirations. With both he and Supratech being major contributors to Winking Cat’s notoriety, and both the former having ties to the Kumo Crew, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility that Mr. Rackham is expanding his generosity in preparation for his anticipated inauguration, would it?”
Orion took a long pause, before turning and looking squarely at the man in the black suit,
“No. No it wouldn’t,” he intoned, before turning to me, “Take us there.”
I turned on my heels to make my way from my Captain’s quarters, hearing the man in the black suit mumble something to Orion that caught my attention, and I froze at the door.
“I ran them through our processors and these are all that came out.”
I peered around the bulkhead separating my quarters’ main compartment from my entryway and saw the man in the black suit hand Orion a series of printouts, making a note to myself to question Orion on the matter after I completing my part in investigating the Red Family connection.
The information came few a far between, a trade mission from an independent pilot aligned with the United Democrats of Andowatye named “Ariel” for seventy-four tons of Natural Fabrics to Bosch Station, a black-box recovery mission that never materialized, and the vast majority of bounties being placed on pilots operating in alignment with factions with a political presence in the system.
One bounty caught my attention: a pilot aligned with the 896 Wolf Crimson Crew, a smaller independent faction located in 896 Wolf, that carried a larger bounty on his ship than even some of the Lavigny’s Legion ships in the system. Briefing a relatively inattentive Orion on the matter as Captain McClean prepped N.O.S. for the jump to Cemiess, the group resided in a contested system just under seventy light-years from Andowatye. Contested by Yuri Grom and President Hudson, it was a relatively inane independent feudal system with an M-class star and a population of twenty-seven million surviving on an industrial/refinery economy. Intelligence indicated that the group counted upward of 250k supporters, which was less than one-percent of the system’s population, which might explain the pilot’s drifting toward a region currently under FIA lockdown.
After the briefing, Orion called up a series of images on the briefing room screens, including an FMV of Coral that was edited to play at 500x speed.
“Her progress through The Run has stalled,” his voice was monotonous and hollow and the man in the black suit sat across from me, staring a thousand miles past the bulkheads, “She’s been orbiting 2MASS J03290896+3126239 for the past week, and as been seated at her desk in front of her potato with her communications tablet.”
I looked toward the screen playing Coral’s video, which compressed hours into a matter of seconds, and she sat as though in a trance, occasionally murmuring something to the potato. The captions may have been inaccurate but they resembled no language with which I’d been made familiar; little more than syllables and half-recognizable figures of speech. All the while she tapped on her comms tablet, which had been sending comms to Orion, in violation of the Novus Ordo Siderum communications transmissions protocols. The communications themselves were strings of simple binary that went on for pages when printed. The man in the black suit had been pouring through the transmissions with Orion and his communications crew for days, looking for patterns in what they initially believed to be a cypher, only to have one suggest plugging the strings into the organization’s computers to run various encoding translations.
The resulting outputs left them with the choice between increasingly complex strings of code that, in the end, were translatable codes that were internally coherent within their own relations but still meaningless in any way that could convey what Coral was attempting to communicate or the images on our screens. Not a one of us could decide which of the options were the better and Coral’s beacon in Keystone remained still as our appointment with the Emerald security team, tasked with clearing us for escort to the Imperial Senator’s exhibit, quickly approached.
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