Chapter 5: The Dawn of Intent

Adam. 3

It had been three days since the news had broken. Adam only usually came into the office for one or two days per week, working from home instead for the rest of it. It was a routine that had worked well for him - and more importantly, for his family - for the entire time he had been head of the ISD Investigation Division, and under normal circumstances, spending this amount of time in Caracas would have left him physically and mentally drained from the exertion of having to maintain his ‘bad guy’ facade for this long. But these were not normal circumstances.

Jenny had understood. She had been at his side through the entirety of his meteoric rise up the chain of command, and she knew most of the people in his inner circle as well as he did. So she had been just as heartbroken on learning of Frank’s death as everyone else had been. She was an intelligent, observant woman, one who didn’t need to have things spelled out for her to be able to read the context between the lines, and Adam’s nightly preoccupation, his look of concern, and the fact that he was voluntarily choosing to head into the office every day was more than enough for her to understand that something was wrong with the whole situation, that Adam was heading up the investigation and was he was very worried about what he might find.

The girls had been less understanding. Lucy had cried, and Natasha - entering the dreaded teenaged phase of her adolescence, complete with the hormones and mood swings - had huffed and spent the last few evenings in her bedroom. They were used to having Daddy around, and with him not being able to give them even the simplest of explanations why he wasn’t, they had taken it as a display that he didn’t want to be anymore. That damned near broke him. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to work so closely with his team, but the last time was when his daughters were too young to even notice and the hurt looks in their eyes when he had to cancel his plans had haunted every single spare thought he had.

Being preoccupied with thoughts of home, however, was less than conducive to an investigation of this seriousness. Still, they were thoughts he simply couldn’t shake, even now as he re-read the preliminary findings from his team.

He sighed and leaned back into his chair before he reached into his pocket for his personal phone. The widespread use of comms channels had rendered the humble phone almost obsolete; comms channels were faster, had massively more bandwidth for the transfer of data, and were free. Phones were less so, even though they basically used the same frequencies. What all but the criminal element of the population didn’t know, however, was that every single call made on every single comm channel was logged by one of the departments downstairs. On the other hand, it was fairly easy to modify this simple handset to be invisible to the network, and he had no intention of letting anyone ... anyone at all ... use his calls to find out where he and his family lived.

Some people would call him paranoid, or at least hypocritical, for taking precautions against the instruments of surveillance that he ran or for fearing the very agency he worked for, but their opinions meant less than nothing compared to the safety of his family. Perhaps they were precautions that would never prove needed; perhaps the “just in case” would never come to pass, but there was no way he was going to take that chance. Not with them.

He tapped a few buttons on the handset’s screen - typing in the frequency number from memory - and held it to his ear. It only took a few moments for his wife to answer.

“Hey, you,” Jenny’s wonderful voice came through the earpiece. It was her standard greeting, one he had loved for the years she had used it, but that little surge of relief hit him extra hard today. She knew that if she was in trouble, and he happened to call, she was to answer the call with “Hey, Darling.” He had never heard it yet, but with everything going on at the moment ... he sighed and shook the thought off.

“Hey, babe,” he smiled. “Just checking in.”

“How’s it going there?” her warm, affection-filled voice asked.

“Slowly,” he answered. “It was never going to be quick, but ... yeah.”

“I just ... can’t believe he’s gone.” he sighed back.

“I’m sorry about all this,” he sunk into his chair.

“Don’t be,” her voice came back quickly. “I know you have to be sure that it really was an accident, and I know what it’s doing to you, not knowing. We’ll be fine, and we’ll still be here to make you feel better when this is all over.”

“But, the girls...”

“Will be fine,” she reassured him. “Adam, I love you, and I know you keep the details of your work secret from me to protect me. It’s one of the things I love the most about you. But if you feel the need to protect me from them, then I can’t imagine you ever wanting the girls to know.”

“God, no,” he answered without thinking.

“Then they are not ever going to be able to understand, my love. They have questions, and you can’t answer them, so they are taking it personally. If it were about anything else, then I would feel the same way. They’re just too young to understand.”

“What about you?

There was a pause, “I know enough to understand why you can’t tell me.”

He huffed a sad laugh. “You missed your calling as a diplomat.”

“I’m juggling two pre-pubescent girls and a sullen husband. I missed nothing,” she laughed for a moment before her voice turned serious again. “I will admit, I sometimes wonder if you keep these things away from me because you’re trying to protect me or because you don’t trust me.”

“Jenny, I...”

“I know,” she cut him off. “They are fleeting thoughts when I miss you. And maybe this whole thing is making me see how much you feel you need to protect me from.”

“What do you mean?”

Another pause. “You aren’t sure if Frank’s death was an accident, and if someone got to him, you are worried they could get to you ... or to us. So you have to be sure.” He tried to answer, but the words wouldn’t come out. “I need to know, Adam,” she said. “Not the details; I don’t need to know what you do day-to-day, but I need to know that if you find something ... less than ideal ... you will do whatever it takes to keep our girls safe.”

“Jenny, I don’t think you know what you’re asking,” Adam finally answered after a brief, stunned pause.

“No, I don’t,” she said softly, the loving reassurance thick in her gentle voice. “And I don’t need to know. But, whatever it is... whatever it takes...” the emphasis was clear, “ ... if you tell me that it was to keep our girls safe, I’ll trust you.”

He sighed and nodded, even though she couldn’t see him. “You are the love of my life.” he almost whispered into the phone.

“And you are my everything,” her normal answer came back. “Are you going to be home for food tonight?”

He smiled at the rapid change of subject—a breeze of normality in these less-than-normal times. “Yeah, I should be if nothing new comes up.”

“I’ll make sure the girls are in a good mood when you get here, then.”

“Thank you, love ... for everything.” he smiled.

“We are a team,” he could hear the smile in her voice. “We’re in this together.”

“Always.”

“See you later, hubs.”

“Later, Wife.” He chuckled at the nicknames they had used for each other since their wedding night twenty years earlier and disconnected the call.

He turned in his chair and looked out of the window and over the world beyond it. In keeping with his mood, the outskirts of Caracas we blanketed in grey, miserable-looking clouds today, the sort that threatened rain but could never summon up the enthusiasm to actually provide any. It was totally at odds with the feeling inside him. He wanted the raging storm; he craved the howling winds that would blow away the bullshit that was stacked so high; he wanted the lightning to banish the shadows from his sight and the rain to wash everything to the sea. Everything about this case was wrong.

Not because it was Frank, not because it was too close to home not to have him thinking about his family, but because it was wrong. None of his team had said anything, but they didn’t need to; he could see it in their eyes. This had been a hit, not by some terrorist or rebel organization, not by some alien power, and not by some criminal enterprise. This had come from within. It had been done with just enough finesse to show that whoever had carried it out had known how the state really did its more underhanded business but lacked the experience and know-how to pull it off properly. They had missed things, little things, things that casual observers like the local Police force were in no way trained or equipped to detect.

Things that no professional would ever leave behind.

He turned his eyes back to his terminal and re-read the police report for at least the sixth time. He had to give them credit where it was due; they had been thorough, at least insofar as their legal abilities allowed them to be. They had immediately recognized the rarity of accidents like this; hovercars had all kinds of safety devices built into them to prevent their collision with damned near anything, especially pedestrians. At street level, they traveled five feet above the ground, meaning that the fender was head height for the vast majority of the adult population, and even an impact at moderate speeds proved fatal more often than not. The Ministry of Colonial Affairs could be argued to be an overly bureaucratic institution by almost anyone, but some of the laws they came out with were occasionally to the benefit of all of society, so making these safety measures compulsory in all hovercars alone should have stopped this kind of accident from being possible.

The only way Frank could have been killed by a car was if those devices had been faulty or purposefully disabled. One was a case of gross negligence, either by the car’s owner or manufacturer - and the fact the driver had fled the scene certainly pointed to the former. The other was a simple case of murder. Disabling those devices had turned a hovercar into a three-ton blunt-force weapon, and the damage that Fender had done to Frank’s head had been catastrophic.

But here was where the public knowledge faltered against that of the police, let alone the ISD. Another of the laws passed down by MoCA dictated that each car manufacturer put a special isotope into the paint of every single one of their models, each one differing slightly from the other. It meant that law enforcement agencies had the ability to identify the make and model of any vehicle involved in any form of accident. Safety measures had been implemented to prevent collisions, but it had been years before those measures bore fruit; in the meantime, analyzing paint transfer samples had been used to identify vehicles involved. That law had just never been repealed, even after it was no longer needed.

The car that had hit Frank, according to the autopsy report, would have been traveling at something close to fifty miles per hour, which was evidenced in dramatic fashion by the damage done to his skull. But it also meant that tiny flecks of paint had been transferred from the car and onto Frank’s body by the violence of the impact. That paint had been analyzed and came back with a result: a late model, red, Bryham Dynamics GX-5. The simple next step was to scan through the security cameras in the area and track down any red GX-5s found near the scene of the crime around the time it happened.

Except there weren’t any.

Not GX-5s. As one of the more popular vehicles on the market, there were probably dozens of them in the area. There were no cameras. That happened; contrary to popular opinion, the government didn’t have every square inch of the globe under constant surveillance. People weren’t that interesting, and the cost of implementing it, let alone manning it, was enormously prohibitive, but to have no cameras at all was a red flag. There were cameras everywhere, even if they didn’t belong to the security services. Security cameras in businesses or watching people’s homes, dash cams in the cars of other drivers, traffic and traffic-light cameras, the things were everywhere. Imagining that none of them picked up the collision itself was not a huge leap of imagination, but to not have anything at all in the entire area was inconceivable.

Frank wasn’t killed out in the sticks. He wasn’t like Adam, who lived in the middle of nowhere; Frank lived in Chicago, maybe not in the city center, but close enough to it to make a lack of cameras a laughably unlikely scenario. The police had caught onto that, too, but - unlike Adam - they had seen the hit coming at the exact time that the traffic management system was down for maintenance as an unfortunate coincidence. Adam wasn’t naive enough to believe that coincidence never happened, but this certainly wasn’t one of them. Frank lived in a highly populated, built-up area, and not a single camera from any business or public service had caught anything ... To the police, that was just unlucky. To Adam, that was evidence that the drivers knew exactly where they were and planned their escape route accordingly. The ones that they couldn’t avoid - traffic lights, for example - had been switched off under the guise of routine maintenance by someone with the power to do that.

And there really weren’t many people with that sort of authority.

But this got him into the area of the law where the Police were vastly more limited in their abilities than the ISD. The independence of the judiciary was a cornerstone of modern society, and its primary function was to protect the people. Protect them from themselves, protect them from each other, and protect them from the government. This meant that to gain access to cameras owned by private citizens, the police needed a warrant. He could just imagine how that conversation would have gone between the police and the local circuit judge.

“We need access to the cameras of every private citizen within X amount of distance from the scene of the crime.”

“Do you have reason to believe their cameras recorded the crime?”

“We don’t know. That’s why we need them.”

“So you want access to the private data of X amount of citizens, and you don’t even know if you are going to find anything. Are you even sure a crime took place? This could have been an accident.”

“Umm ... That is true, your honor. But the driver still fled the scene, so a crime was committed, even if the collision itself was an accident.”

“Okay, and what route did the driver take to leave the area?”

“We don’t know.”

“Where was the suspect’s car next picked up on cameras?”

“It wasn’t.”

“So you don’t even know what direction the car traveled?? Meaning you want the camera footage from every citizen within a radius of X amount???”

“Yes, please.”

“Nope, not gonna happen, government overreach and blah blah blah...”

The very little information that police could have found would have been blocked by the judge’s fairly understandable duty to protect the people. What the police didn’t understand, and possibly the judge didn’t either, was all that nonsense about protecting the rights of the people was just that ... nonsense. The people had no rights, at least none that protected them from the government, and the courts’ only real purpose was to hand out pre-ordained sentences when police proved a crime, keep order in the courtroom, and - most importantly - provide a smokescreen behind which the people in power could do their work. The courts had no real, meaningful legal authority, their job was to distract the population away from the people who did.

People like Adam.

It had taken Steph - one of his more gifted technical analysts - less than an hour to hack into every private camera within ten city blocks of Frank’s house, and by the time she had come back from making herself a coffee, the computer had already pulled up more than a hundred sightings of red GX-5s from their footage. Fifteen minutes later, she had identified the vehicle responsible and tracked it all the way out of the city before losing track of it in a real dead zone - another piece of information the drivers shouldn’t have known. That is what Adam was staring at now—a still frame of the car that had killed a member of his inner circle, his friend.

The damage on the front passenger side bumper was obvious. Even the cheapest of cameras recorded in more than enough detail to be able to zoom in on the drivers’ faces, but Adam’s eyes were inevitably pulled to the mess on the front of the car. The indentations in the metalwork, the blood spatter ... so much blood spatter ... the skull fragments, and pieces of hair stuck to the car’s shell. It was a gruesome reminder of the horrific nature of Frank’s death. The only hollow consolation from all of it was the fact that the impact was clearly hard enough and fast enough to have killed him instantly. There would have been no pain. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

Then, there were the faces of the two men inside the car. The windows had been tinted, but the computer had been able to get a good enough look at them to run the most advanced facial recognition programs. Ones that would cross reference them against every piece of official documentation on record and also against every other camera on the planet, only for that to come back with nothing. But nothing was something...

For those programs to come back empty meant only one thing. They had been deleted.

Being deleted was a term used by black ops agents. Adam himself had been deleted for years. It basically meant that every single time a computer picked up a deleted person’s face from any source, that information was not recorded ... At all. As far as any computer was concerned, it was not even a face. It didn’t exist, and although the owner of said face would have had all the documents and paperwork needed to live a normal life, they were isolated from the system and had no bearing on real details at all. Adam’s own passport, for example, would not link to his actual identification in any way whatsoever; it would only give enough information to get him through a customs check. If his face were picked up on a camera, as it had doubtlessly been hundreds of times just on the commute to work that morning, a search would bring up neither his real identification nor any reference to his fake passport or any other form of identification. It was a complete system wipe of anything even remotely connected to him ... and apparently, the men in the car had been the recipients of the same treatment.

And therein lay the problem. There were only a few branches of government that could provide that level of hidden cover ... and all of them were located in this building.

But ultimately, all of them answered to one person, the only person powerful enough to make Adam think that she had threatened him. Minister of Internal Security, Sandra White.

“What did you do, Frank?” He whispered to himself. He had personally ordered Frank to destroy the documents from his last investigation, and Frank was no idiot. He knew there would have been reasons for that order to be given and had worked in ISD long enough to understand that curiosity killed a hell of a lot bigger prey than cats. Adam found it utterly inconceivable that Frank would have ignored his order. So if he hadn’t kept those files - and even an in-depth look on his system, part of the process of the investigation, had shown that he hadn’t, nor did he have any other files on there he shouldn’t have, nor was there even the slightest hint that he had sent anything to anybody else - then why had he been marked for death?

If Frank had been acting off-book, if he had been doing things he wasn’t supposed to do, if he had been caught betraying or abusing his post, if he had committed treason against the Imperium, he would have understood the hit. He would have hated it, he would have been angry, he may have even been a little embarrassed, but he would have understood. But Adam had conducted the investigation in Frank’s terminal personally. There was nothing there. As far as Adam could tell, Frank hadn’t done anything wrong; he hadn’t even accessed the files long enough to be suspected of memorizing them. Yet he was deemed as enough of a threat to be murdered. And that sent a whole new tendril of fear working up his spine.

Because if Frank could not be considered a liability, the only other explanation was that he had been considered an expendable but effective way to send a message.

There were not many possibilities when it came to guessing who the intended recipient of that message was.

He reached over and tapped the button for the intercom. “Gather the troops, Ben,” he said to the still-distraught-looking man when he answered. “Same meeting room, one hour.”

Laura 5.

She snarled in frustration at her wrist-mounted computer. Of all the things to go fucking wrong ... here, of all places, after a discovery of this magnitude, why did it have to be her comms? She had spent a few hours hopping over the desiccated husks of the former crew, skipping giddily between one console after another, deciphering what little she could from the graphical representations of their systems, but it was enough to know that they were all not only active but in near pristine condition. Just to be absolutely sure, she had spent a day ... an entire day ... walking the full twenty-something kilometers to the bowels of the opposite end of the ship to check engineering - the ship itself was twenty-four kilometers long, but that in no way correlated to the length of the walk. Not a single hallway led straight from point A to point B, and she had no idea how long that actual journey was. Everything was working there, too. She couldn’t even begin to understand how that was possible, not after the amount of time this ship must have been buried here, and yet they were.

It had also confirmed that slowly dawning realization that there was no way she could complete her mission, at least not alone. Her original mandate had been to enter the vault - the ship, in this case - before finding and extracting anything of value. Well, the entire ship was of such enormous value that leaving anything from the running lights to the reactor core was too stupid of a notion to entertain. Stripping it all out was also out of the question, even if it had been possible - which it wasn’t - and moving the ship was beyond the capabilities of even the most highly acclaimed Mariner scientists, let alone her. And that was before the whole “Digging the thing out” part came into consideration. She was massively and woefully in over her head...

So, if Mohammed couldn’t move the mountain...

Or at least that had been the plan. Her vambrace-mounted interface was linked to The Seren’s ship-board computer, meaning that it was in continuous communication with her ship. From it, she could do everything from accessing her personal logs right up to entering commands into the ship nav computer and autopilot system. It should also have allowed her to use the Seren’s powerful comms array.

But it wasn’t.

To be accurate, her computer was allowing her to access the comms system, record a message, encrypt it, and then select a channel from her list of contacts within the Mariner high command to whom to send it, except whenever she tapped the icon to actually send the message, an error code that she had never seen before today would flash across the screen instead and the array would shut itself down.

To make matters worse, the computer was functioning well enough for her even to be able to look up what that error code meant, an act that left her with an even deeper frown of frustrated confusion on her face.

“Communication system not-responding”

“Of course, it’s fucking responding!!” she screamed at it. “It let me record the message! It let me find the fleet commander’s channel! You just won’t send the fucking thing!!” The whole thing was getting more and more ridiculous. If the comms array weren’t responding, she wouldn’t have even been able to select that system from the main interface, let alone do anything else. More than that, if the comms system weren’t working, the entire link between her personal computer and the ship would be non-functioning, and she wouldn’t be able to do anything at all. She couldn’t even blame the fact she was now several miles underground, and that was, somehow, blocking the signal ... because, and she couldn’t stress this enough, the computer was still fucking working!!

She growled again as the same error code reappeared on her screen. At this rate, she would be seeing that damned code in her dreams! Whatever the real cause of the system failure, she was being rapidly reminded of the fact that there was absolutely nothing she could do about it from here ... Nothing, Nada, Sweet Fuck all! And it was pissing her off.

Not because there was nothing she could do about it - this wasn’t the first time something had gone wrong with her ship while she had been away from it, and it was probably going to be an infuriatingly simple fix - It was more because she would have to trek all the way back to the hatch, another day’s walk away, and then climb back to the tunnel, in that thrice-damned fucking suit, to get to the surface, board her ship and fix whatever the hell was going wrong so she could report her findings. All things considered, she would much rather the computer not be a total asshole and let her just do that from here.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fucking Fuck!” she grumbled to herself as she dropped her arm in frustration - the equivalent of throwing the computer at the wall if it hadn’t been attached to her - took one more longing look at the happily humming equipment around her, turned, and stormed out of engineering.

Or at least she tried to. She frowned and looked at the door. Every single one of them had opened automatically for her as she approached before now and she was sure this one had done the same when she had arrived in engineering. But now it stayed defiantly closed. She reached out, tapped the icon beside the door, and watched it slide open. She stepped through it quickly, inexplicably concerned that it would change its mind before she made it over the threshold...

And tripped straight over a body on the ground outside the door.

She huffed out a grunt as she hit the deck plates, rolling over to look at the obstacle. She was damned near certain it hadn’t been there when she arrived. There had been bodies everywhere on her trip down from the bridge; hundreds, maybe thousands of them dotted at various points along the hallway. Most had been on their own, but there had been groups of as many as eight of them in some places. Walking the length of the ship, not to mention her time surrounded by the former crew on the bridge and down here, had made her antsy. It was like walking through a crypt, and she just couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched. But for the most part, she had gotten used to seeing them. That, however, didn’t extend as far as literally having to step over one to get into engineering, which she would have had to do. Was she that blase about death to have forgotten individual bodies already?

Well, apparently, the answer to that was yes because the only other alternative was that the very, very dead body upped and put itself in her way while she was busy checking the reactor core. As creepy as this whole ship was, she wasn’t about to start entertaining the existence of ghosts or fucking zombies.

She gave it a nudge with her foot, just in case.

Its arm fell off, but it otherwise remained completely dead.

Well, that was a relief. The day had started out so well with the vastness of the scale of her find, but the malfunctioning computer was the first in a growing list of things going wrong today. So far, that was limited to about eight hours of walking, putting on that fucking suit, climbing to the surface through that very claustrophobic tunnel, traversing the wreckage outside, through the compound cloud, climbing onto her ship, and finally troubleshooting the problem before she could make her call. Adding the presence of reanimated corpses would have been a step too far. She cocked another eyebrow at the dried out body, pulled herself back to her feet, and turned toward the hallway that would take her back to the hatch, letting out a long, weary sigh in the process.

Seriously, if she was assigned to this ship for any period of time during the inevitable research efforts, she was bringing her damned hoverbike.

Stevo. 19

He had been part of loading and unloading operations more times than he could count. From his first days of basic - a lifetime ago - when all the raw recruits had been transported en-masse to the Marine Corps training facility on the moon of Kefler VII, or for his first real deployment as part of the occupation force on Sigmus IV, to the much more recent loading operations that brought them here from Fort Fortitude. Being ferried into an atmosphere in a dropship was an exhilarating experience - unless you were doing it under fire, in which case it was beyond words like terrifying - but it never quite gave the sheer sense of scale of what he was looking at now.