For goodness Sake : You Never Know Who's Listening
27 Oct 2024Willow Thorn
Gravitational influence had been compensated for. The local star’s sola distortion had been muffled, and universal constants were applied to the calculations. There was nothing left to do, and nothing to look at other than the wake compiler program, and Willow could do that from her wrist computer. With all the complicated work recompiling the carriers wake done, Willow was restless. Bone carving had lost its appeal once she learned the guys were messing around riding limpets. That sounded like fun, and here was Willow looking out a god damn window on her own. On top of that, Summerland 8 and its moons were almost out of view now, leaving Willow out in the middle of nowhere, so pilots had started hailing the Barb to find out if she was in distress.
There was only so many times Willow could say she was surveying wreckage drift before some pirate came along to try their luck. Even in a well-armed ship, Willow was still a girl out in the dark on her own. With nothing constructive to the mission to do, Willow had used the ship computer to investigate the local installations as well as watch hollos.
Her own network search for the carrier that had taken Creamy away from Vengerfield’s megaship last year had scored a few leads worth following if the guys had no luck and the wake reconstruction lead to a dead end, but maybe someone local had registered their target leaving, and possibly where it went.
Out by Summerland 12, there was a megasip, Onyx Storm, and a couple of other instillations. One of them, Spartacus Fortification Division, sounded like it maybe that sort of place that kept an eye on what was happening in system. The Onyx was at least a place Willow could land, so she started her investigation there.
Keeping the wake recompiler on her wrist computer in case it needed Willows expertise to overcome a complication, she found a quiet place to grab a bite, and spoke to someone over coms from admin about the fight over by Summerland 8 a little while ago.
Being a registered salvage technician, and undertaker allowed Willow to charm a little more compliance out of an official, but Onyx Storm was still a military organization, and they didn’t share much information with civilians.
From one dead end to another, Willow wasn’t even allowed to land at Spartacus Fortification. The impressive cube like structure was an intimidating sight to behold. It looked like an ancient walled keep, built only to hold invaders at bay while Spartacus defences murdered them.
While the coms officer she talked with was cordial, the very Imperial sounding woman made it clear Willow had to leave now or they would stop being even slightly nice about saying no. Whatever, before leaving, Willow decided to do a close pass to see if there was anywhere a clever hacker like Maul could hook an uplink limpet to take the data they were after, should the need arise.
Accelerating to supercruise, Willow contemplated watching the progress bar on the recompiler slowly tick forwards for another few days, and the prospect of that forced an unintended eyeroll. Looking for anything to take her mind off her job, Willow was intrigued to find yet another orbital station in the rings of Summerland 12 not even 2 minuets flight away from the unfriendly space fortress.
“Golden Jackal huh?” said Willow looking up the station on her computer. It was a corporate retreat complex of some sort, but it did offer public access to casinos, arcades and spars and zero G parks.
“So, we’re like, messing around riding limpets Willow” she said doing her best man-voice “Why don’t you go relax and like, play some games while we totally get on with serios work”
“Hey thanks guys, like, I totally will. Like, that's real nice of you” she said dropping into Golden Jackal space.
The spindly looking station sat above the icy rings of Summerland 12, and the distant stars light bounced off the large whitish Ice Giant and its rings, lighting the Jackal from almost every direction. Whoever commissioned the station didn’t take natural light into consideration when they put this place together because there were a number of gigantic light rigs set up casting their silver beams all over the installation's long arms.
After a second look, Willow’s expert knowledge of sensors and scanners let here see this place was clearly a listening station. Those lighting rigs may look like there were just there for vanity, but a few of them looked like they had drifted off, and where just left to their own devices. To Willow it was clear they were placed carefully to gather signals going into and out of the system and direct them back to the stations 3 high powered antenna arrays.
“Oh, this place like, totally knows where the carrier went, and I bet they got a buffet with ribs too”
Taking her time to fly around the station assessing the data interception capabilities, Willow couldn’t help doing a few calculations on the apparently randomly places lighting rigs to see just how efficient this listening station was. Her homework was interrupted when her request for to come abord was granted. She'd have to take a shuttle from the local Coriolis Starport, Henry O'Hare's Hangar, but that would give Willow a change to get changed. Stomping about shopping mall in a Mav mechanics suit just wouldn’t feel right.
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Ambrose Palmer hadn’t had anything worth reporting to central since the pirate fight. Before that, there was only the Empire taking revenge on the mercs that had executed the abduction of the emperor to talk about. That was the last event that had changed his nice relaxed daily routine. Summerland had been a sweet, uneventful assignment for an agent that had enough of active service. Rubbing his hands over his high and tight flat top did nothing to mess up his hair, but the woman that had been asking questions had messed up his day.
This had been a nice quiet position in a nice quiet spy station, where the people he was watching knew he was watching them. As a result, nothing ever happened and he collected a phat pay check for telling central just how much nothing he had to report. Now, he had his boss in his ear asking how a scavenger managed to evaded 2 FIA agents sent to pick her up from a VR suite.
This Willow Thorn had been flagged by staff as soon as she started asking questions about how long Golden Jackal kept hold of its stella data. The concierge had played it smart, and comped Willow some credits for the casinos and restaurants while she “Went to find out” Thorn had bee-lined for the buffet, and taken a huge stack of snacks to the VR arcade, ignoring the offered hospitality.
The men he sent to apprehend her reported that she seemed unaware of her predicament until they reached for her arm. Thats when she bounced the VR headset off one guy’s face, and ran for the shopping mall. After ducking into a mega-mart, station surveillance lost her.
All Ambrose knew for sure is she had sent an audio message to the nav-network saying
“Guys, I’ve like, done fucked up”