36 - A good conspiracy

We’ve been fooled.

We were too focused on the Black Door.

We checked any new relics before they reached the Vault, and made sure anything of real power found its way to the Library. We thought that would be enough.

But clearly, something important slipped under our noses. And what’s even worse, other factions are ahead of us in retrieving it.

I take full blame. Semejon, for all his talent, is young and inexperienced, and trusted my assumptions.

I’m two hundred years old. I shouldn’t be fooled easily. And yet, a couple of kids with barely any power managed to pull off a heist in my university.

* Doctor Adavert, report composed for the Black Library

“So, let me get this right,” Althea asks, sliding her hand under my night robe. My whole body shivers as her fingers run along my spine. “Instead of starting the weekend by fucking each other senseless, or playing sim games, or both, we’re going to join the nerds in the workshop, so we can commit the most boring treason ever?”

She’s sitting next to me in my bunk, and we’re alone in the room. I seriously consider asking her to lock the door with magic, tell Sorivel we’ll be late, and indulge in unprofessional behavior.

What stops me is the thought of Quicksilver. They trusted me with classified information. Missing an encounter with a key informant, because I’m busy having sex with a mage, looks like a swift way to prove them wrong.

“It won’t take us all day,” I tell Althea. “And we’ll have the whole room for ourselves tomorrow. Kaelich and Sorivel will spend the day at the Officers’ Temple, because Kaelich is a twelve-year-old and seems to find a baby seal endlessly intriguing. Also, it’s not treason. Just a friendly chat.”

Althea sighs. “We have a perfectly nice hot pool for friendly chats,” she says, leaning bonelessly against me. “But we’re going to meet Aeniki, the least friendly person on Refuge, in a drone workshop. And she warned us to leave our electronics and come in small groups. That doesn’t sound like a friendly chat.”

“It still doesn’t make it treason,” I repeat. “We’d simply prefer to keep this chat private. But we’re not breaking any regulation.”

Althea laughs. “If you had personally broken the Moon, you’d come back from Selenopolis saying don’t worry, it’s fine, I didn’t break any regulation. But whatever. I always wanted to be part of a conspiracy.”

“I hope that isn’t what Aeniki has in mind,” I say. Even if it isn’t entirely true - Liege of Shadows, help me, I love secrets. And I love secret clubs even more.

Althea disentangles from me, her expression becoming serious. “But if it comes to that, and she has some secret to share - how much do we trust our fellow conspirators?” she says. “We’re pretty sure someone in our base is working for the magical factions, after all.”

“Isn’t that always the problem, with conspiracies?” I sigh. “I definitely trust Kaelich, xe might be dense, but xe’s honest to a fault. Sorivel can be a pain in the ass, but ThauCon is a holy cause for him, so I trust that he has not betrayed us.”

“What about Aeniki herself? What if she’s setting up some trap for us?” Althea asks.

Good point, and one I have mulled over since she wrote us asking for a private conversation about sensitive issues. “I’ve no idea what’s up with her,” I answer, carefully. “But she tried to warn me about Korentis, when xe used magic against us. And she’s the reason we were suspicious about xem in the first place. She’s not helping the rogue mages, that at least I’m sure of.”

“So, what about me?” Althea asks, with no hint of joking. “Why are you confident I’m not the mole?”

I stumble for a moment. I hadn’t actually considered it - that my smart, passionate and driven girlfriend could be playing her own game.

That was sloppy of me, of course. What intelligence officer trusts people just because they’re sleeping together?

“You’re not the subtle kind,” I improvise on the spot. “If you were a traitor, you’d burn the base and fly to the moon or something like that”

Althea seems to think about it for a moment, then she nods.

“Yeah, I’m fine with a bit of conspiracy,” she says. “But I don’t have the patience for shadowy plots. I just want you to point me at the enemy so I can kick their asses.” She grins. “Get dressed and let’s go, then. Let’s get the treason done by noon, and we’ll have the afternoon for ourselves.”

I fight a split second of reluctance, as part of me wants to stay in bed, next to Althea. That’s surprising - I was always an early riser, and staying in bed is slovenly behavior. I must be careful - all this romance and socialization could make me develop bad habits.

I get dressed - Althea rolls her yes at my request to look away, but she complies - and we walk to the workshop. The base is even emptier and more silent than usual on Scienday, since half its few residents have left for the weekend. We encounter only cleaning drones as we walk through the concrete corridors, and the only sounds are their buzzing and the annoying plink of water leaking from the ceiling.

I’ve seen the workshop only twice - during my survey for Quicksilver, and the one time I had to physically drag Sorivel out for training.

Like everything else in the base, it’s way too big, meant for a much larger and less sloppy garrison. There are four long workbenches, and Sorivel basically claimed one for himself, while a second one is used by everyone else. The last two are covered in dust and machine parts.

When we enter, Sorivel is working at his bench, wearing an oil-smeared Zelenian style shirt. In front of him is a partly disassembled drone - the large quad-copter he uses for long-range scouting, I think it’s called Curiosity. Half of its casing has been opened, revealing bewildering chaos of internal mechanisms, connected by what looks like a tangled spiderweb of optical fiber.

Sorivel is grinning widely as he works. It’s strange to see him so openly cheerful. At his side, Aeniki looks at the drone, frowning with concentration. Her biological eye is closed, while the mechanical one is wide open, shining white.

As for Kaelich, xe’s standing next to Sorivel, too, with a smile plastered on xir face, but xe’s staring at nothingness and xir eyes are twitchy. Xe’s definitely playing a movie on xir implants.

“That’s a lot of additional memory banks, and most of the fiber is self-growing,” Aenikisays, with something that sounds like admiration. “You did a good job, but is this compliant to the AI suppression act?”

Sorivel’s smile immediately disappears.

“Of course!” He says, his tone distinctly defensive. “I checked carefully. I don’t want my drones to be possessed by demons, and I’m not stupid. There’s no real issue as long as they can’t iteratively change their own programming, and I made sure the self-adjusting hardware doesn’t interact with the core command module. It’s just enough adaptability to give them some personality.”

“Hm,” Aeniki says, with a little smile on her lips. Then she opens her biological eye and looks at us. “Well, you can continue later. Against my own predictions, our lovebirds have managed to leave the room and join us. Let’s sit down and have a talk.”

She pinches Kaelich as she says that, and xe jolts back to reality, looking around in confusion for a moment, before smiling at us. Sorivel looks at the drone, sighs, and takes off his gloves, sitting on a nearby chair.

We join the three of them, sitting in a rather cramped circle between Sorivel’s bench and the wall.

“Is your Stemlink off?” Aeniki asks as soon as we sit. The one refreshing thing about the sour techie is that she’s not into chit-chat.

“Yes, we followed your directions,” I say. “We’re carrying no electronics beside my implants.”

Althea nods. “I even left my amazing color-changing bracelets in my bunk, and they barely qualify as electronics. So, spill the beans - what crime are we planning?”

Kaelich shifts on xir chair. “Come on, it’s just a chat,” xe says, looking uncomfortable. Xe’s as good a person as I’ve ever met in my life, but xe doesn’t have a suspicious bone in xir body, and doesn’t like going behind the officers’ backs. What will xe do, if we have to choose between doing our job by the book, or upholding the spirit of our oaths?

Well, xe breaks regulations easily enough when xe wants to fuck people. So, xe can do that to stop a Mage War - or whatever disaster Quicksilver and Za Ruik are afraid of.

“If I wanted just a chat, we’d be in my nice, warm server room,” Aeniki says, annoyed. “But there are too many eyes there. I could blind them, but that, in turn, would attract attention… and I lost you already. Why do I even bother keeping you around, Corporal?”

“Because I make great muffins,” Kaelich smiles, xir mood instantly brightening. “I’ll bake you a full tray tomorrow, I swear.”

“There’s that,” Aeniki says, sounding a bit mollified. “Well, let’s get to it, then. I analized what happened when you confronted Mage Korentis at the University. To be clear, I don’t give a fuck whether or not you catch a twenty-years-old rogue mage. But something serious, something bad is going on in this city, and in our base.”

I ache to tell her about Quicksilver’s warnings. But they swore me to secrecy. If it’s necessary to make her take Korentis seriously, however, I’ll have to tell her something. Korentis might be a two-credits rogue of no major concern, despite with extraordinarily disturbing powers and an extraordinarily annoying attitude. But xe’s working for someone much more dangerous.

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“Whatever shit is going on,” Aeniki continues, “it’s putting you all in danger. We should have had a decent warning about Korentis. And someone attacked Jaeleri in the mages’ apartment. If someone in the base, or above us, is helping those rogue mages, we can’t ignore that.”

“Are you sure someone is helping the mages?” Kaelich asks, biting xir lower lip white. “Like, CivInt sucks. The captain barely reads our reports. And Jaeleri, uh, probably isn’t suited to field operations?”

Xe means Jaeleri is a useless idiot, of course, but this is the Aeniki-friendly version. Kaelich is good at this kind of thing. I should ask xem to procure me a list of euphemisms, so I can refer to it when I talk about other people’s shortcomings.

“There’s incompetence, and then there’s this,” Aeniki says.

She fishes a tablet out of her shoulder bag - an old, clunky model, kept together by literal duct tape on one side. The screen shows some kind of densely written log.

Althea leans over the tablet, frowning. “Err, could you explain this in words we can understand? Maybe with bullet points?” she says. “Just because CivInt sucks, it doesn’t mean I can do their job.”

She can’t, but I can, kind of. I scan the log lines in silence, and it’s clear that Aeniki has been keeping tabs on the communications going in and out from Rakavdon Base. Even the supposedly secure ones.

“Long story short,” Aeniki explains, “this shows Inspector Malartis repeatedly sent long text messages outside the base, to one-time supposedly secure addresses.”

She scoffs and makes air quotes at the word secure. Lord of Sands, I hope Quicksilver took security very seriously when they set up our channel.

“Fortunately,” Aeniki goes on, “Malartis might or might not be a traitor, but she’s definitely terrible at her job, so she didn’t cover her tracks properly. I can’t read the content of the messages, but she left enough metadata that I can figure out most of it. Basically, she sent everything we have about the Rakavdon University. Theta readings, our work schedules, our authorizations, even recordings from your field suits. I don’t know who the recipient was, but sure as the Abyss it wasn’t ThauCon.”

Lady of Pain. That’s quite a bit worse than I expected. But reassuring, in a way - Malartis is a traitor, and a fairly incompetent one.

Except it can’t end with her - I remember Za Ruik’s words. The Faceless, the Black Library, the Vermillion Fortress – their fingerprints are all over this base already, we’re all tangled in their games.

Aeneki’s expression grows even more sour. “I also found other unexplained outbound communications from the base. Better hidden, with proper quantum encryption and proper cleanup, so I couldn’t discover their content. The best I can say is that they happened. There’s a lot of secret chit-chat going out from Rakavdon Base.”

She stares right at me, as she says that, and I use all my will to avoid showing any reaction.

Did she trace Quicksilver’s calls? Was she looking at me because I’m a suspect, or because she wants my opinion?

I nod, thoughtfully, as if I were assuming the latter. I have to be doubly careful during this conversation, because Sorivel will know if I tell a direct lie.

“So,” I say, “either CivInt talks to multiple contacts, some of which take infosec more seriously, or we have multiple moles. Or less likely, both.”

Aeniki considers my words for a second. “I’d guess the latter,” she says. “Which is doubly concerning, because it means we have multiple traitors, and that multiple magical factions care enough about Rakavdon to infiltrate this base. In case you still hoped that the train station attack was a fluke, and Korentis just an idiot who wanted a relic as a knick knack - forget that. Something big is going on.”

She looks affronted, as if the magical factions were acting up in Rakavdon to personally offend her.

“Anyway,” she continues, “bad as they are, the data leaks aren’t even the worst thing I found. Look at this,” she taps her screen, which now shows signal charts that I can’t make sense of. “It’s a graph of theta activity, around the time Jaeleri was hit by the Fold-mine.”

I frown. “I thought you said we couldn’t get a theta signature from that?”

“Not quickly, and not with the standard signature-matching algorithm,” Aeniki says, dismissively. “But a decent signal analyst can squeeze a lot out of raw data, knowing where to look.” The way she says it, it doesn’t even sound like a boast. Makes me appreciate her even more. “And guess what: we’d already encountered that signature. It’s the one I detected twice at the University, the one whitelisted by the ThauCon database.”

One more thing Quicksilver got right - that signature isn’t from an undercover Council agent.

“Unmaker’s tits,” Kaelich curses, and Sorivel quickly makes the Officers’ sign. “Didn’t we agree that was a council agent?”

Aeniki shakes her head. “That was my thought at first, but now I’m far less sure. I can buy the theory of a Council black op, but leaving a Fold-mine? In a place ThauCon would definitely storm? That’s too risky, if an official inquiry found that out, there would be calls to nuke the Glass Tower.”

Althea’s fingers clench around my arm, but she says nothing.

“Plus,” Aeniki continues, “it’s clear by now we have a major infiltration problem going on. It could go even beyond our base. Captain Meirres can’t whitelist a signature by her own authority, but someone in regional HQ could.”

Should I use some excuse to deliver to my team some of the information Quicksilver gave me? No, there’s no need, Aeniki is leading them to all the right conclusions anyway.

“So… there could be a whitelisted rogue mage?” Althea asks, brimming with outrage. “Like, they can do magic and our Theta detector thinks nothing to see here, we’re friends?” She scoffs. “Isn’t the mage certification database supposed to be super controlled?”

“It is. So it must be someone with powerful friends,” Aeniki says.

Kaelich shifts xir position slightly, it’s clear this conversation is making xem uncomfortable. “Can’t you bring all of this to the Captain?” xe asks. “She can’t ignore it!”

“What if she does?” Aeniki says. “It’s not like I got this in entirely legal ways, you know. Or worse, what if she is a mole? She must realize CivInt sucks, at the very least, and she did nothing about it. As for the rest of the brass, I don’t trust any of them - Sareas seemed disproportionately angry after the operation, and he keeps hindering our mages. If I told Comarch, at best she’d look up ‘how to deal with infiltrators’ in the Agency guidelines, make a report to regional HQ or whatever bullshit the guidelines require, and call it a day. I tried to report anomalies to regional HQ myself in the past, and their answer was to go through my direct superiors.”

Sorivel leans over, elbows on his knees and hands crossed over his mouth. “May the Navigator guide us,” he says, his gaze distant. “This is bad, isn’t it? If we can’t trust our command chain, we have no by-the-book way out of this.”

“It sucks,” Aeniki agrees. “But then again, there’s something I think I must point out - we have an easy way out, I think. Whoever is fucking with our base, it looks like they’re protecting the mages, not trying to get us hurt or killed. We could drop this. If we pretended to trust Investigations and follow orders, I think you’d never meet Korentis nor xir companions again, and you won’t end up victims of some secret mage feud.”

Yes, we could ignore all of this, do the bare minimum and stay out of trouble. And let Korentis, or some other pawn of the factions, find a mysterious key that opened the way to the Moonbreaking. Let them deliver it to the Syndicates, or the Faceless, or some other bloodthirsty magical faction. And the storm will come, and the whole world might well suffer from it. Lady of Life, help me, the world might end for it.

We can’t let this go. But I can’t tell my friends why.

What excuse should I make up? I could point out the long-term danger of… no, wait, people don’t give a shit about enormous problems unless there’s a kitten in danger or something like that. How can I turn this into an emotional sob story?

“ThauCon didn’t stop the factions in Valanes,” I say. “And look how it ended. Maybe someone knew, in Valanes. Maybe they decided that the Syndicates fighting the Faceless wasn’t their problem. We can’t let the same thing happen here. Not if we can do something about it.”

My voice trembles as I mention Valanes, and I don’t even do that on purpose. I remember a building sliced in two, and remember the terror of facing a much weaker mage, in the train Station. When I pictured myself fighting the Factions, I always thought about sifting data for clues and taking part in large operations, with military backup.

I didn’t think I’d face reality-warping, mind-invading enemies with only my sword and a few green recruits at my side. Relying not on the vast information network of Intelligence, but shadows summoned by a mad mage, reports from a mysterious contact, and one strange hacker girl.

And yet, there’s no backup coming, and I swore my oath.

“I’m not super-happy about going around the officers’ backs,” Kaelich mumbles. “But… Ceri is right, of course. Something magical and bad is happening, and bad magical things are our job. If CivInt won’t deal with it, and neither will our officers, then it’s up to us.”

Xe’s surprisingly confident as xe says that. Xe rubs a green, metallic tattoo on xir left cheek. It says soldier.

“But,” Kaelich adds, “we must all agree on this. So, do we do… whatever cloak-and-dagger bullshit Aeniki has in mind? Or do we forget about all of this and go visit an adorable puppy seal together? Ceri has made her choice pretty clear. Althea, Sorivel?”

Althea straightens her back. “The Glass Tower stands against all those who threaten Refuge, and so do I,” she says, with no hesitation. “I never took the easier path, and I won’t start now. If we ignore what we know, we’ll be complicit in whatever horrible thing the rebel factions are planning.”

For all her complaints about wasting a weekend morning, her voice burns with passion as she speaks. Of course she wouldn’t just let the factions be. I like this girl so much, I decide to let myself be a little improper - I reach toward her and lightly squeeze her arm.

Everyone looks at Sorivel, who looks at Kaelich. Then he lowers his gaze, seeming torn.

“I’d prefer to follow my orders and trust the Agency,” he says. “I hate lies, I hate secrets, and I’m not enthusiastic about becoming a direct threat to the Syndicates, or the Faceless army. But I’ve taken an oath to stand against the Dark Power, and all that. May the Heavenly Captain help us all, Rakavdon base is apparently staffed with idiots and traitors, except one veteran team that could die of old age halfway through an operation. We can only trust the five of us, and let’s face it, we’re green recruits. How are we supposed to deal with this? But we still must do our part. Until the war is won, and the sky is mended.”

There’s a moment of heavy silence, as the weight of Sorivel’s words settle in.

“So, what can we do?” Althea asks, arguably a bit too enthusiastic about basically going rogue inside our agency.

“I made copies of all the files Investigation has about this case,” Aeniki says. “And I’ve already set up way more surveillance algorithms than I’ve told anyone else about. I think we should find Korentis - or anyone trying to enter the relic Vault - by ourselves, and then make the information pop up on the official channels, probably through an anonymous citizen report. If one of you pretends to see the report and alerts the officers, no mole can brush the whole thing away.”

Kaelich purses xir lips, thinking. “But this way, the mole can still warn their contacts, if we deploy on a raid” xe says, which is surprisingly a smart observation on xir part. “A mage who knows you’re coming is a very dangerous target.”

“I’ll do what I can to prevent that,” Aeniki reassures xem. “I’ll attempt to intercept any outbound communication that looks even vaguely suspicious. Anyway, the mages will probably just flee, if they get advanced warning. Korentis and xir known associates are high first or low second level mages - powerful, but no match for a team in full silver armor. Even the most powerful mage we dealt with so far was third level. There’s no indication rogue Masters are involved yet, and if we unearth whatever operation is going on, hopefully the factions will give up - or at least, the Agency will intervene with massive resources.”

“If the Officers will it,” Sorivel says, looking grim.

Althea grins. “Oh, don’t worry,” she says. “I’ve learned a lot from that mess at the train station. You nerds find where the villains are, and I’ll kill them.”