Imperial Industries Embassy to the Jekon Theocracy
Kacke
Special Investigator Vilden Smath took the embassy elevator all the way up to the surface to where the Ambassador held court. This was unusual, no one in Kacke came to the surface unless they had no other option but the Immortals lived by different rules. Rumour had it that the Ambassador had asked to be sent somewhere with weather and, as a nasty little joke of the type that was so common in the upper ranks of the Corporations, she’d been sent here, the planet with all the weather.
The elevator doors slid silently open and Vilden entered a chilly anteroom. An androgynous functionary, made chubby by all the layers they were wearing to keep warm, greeted Vilden cooly. With a practised eye from his years at Corporate HQ, Vilden guessed the functionary had recently had their second rejuv, and, even if it looked like it had been done on the cheap, it meant the functionary was well into their first century giving them at least seventy years superiority over Vilden.
“The Ambassador has requested your audience be private. It is highly irregular for one such as yourself to even be in the same room as her Excellency. Please do not disgrace yourself,” the functionary hissed.
“I have been transferred from HQ, I am well aware of how to conduct myself in the presence of my superiors,” Vilden said, making it clear that he didn’t regard the functionary in that number.
“You were transferred here due to your attitude towards your Superiors,” the functionary pointed out. It was true there had been complaints, but they were just a cover for him being sent here.
“My job involves getting citizens to answer questions they’d rather not answer. That tends to upset your average criminal, superior or not. Now, are you going to show me in or do you want to explain to Her Excellency why she was kept waiting,” Vilden replied. The functionary tutted but walked over to the big double doors at the far end of the antechamber, guarded by two ceremonial guards, and pulled them open.
“Special Agent Smath, as you requested ma’am,” the functionary said, and shut the doors behind them, leaving Vilden alone in the private office of the Ambassador. And what an office. The room must have been twenty metres square with an arched ceiling almost as high. The walls were painted in elaborate gold and royal blue patterns and the floor was some kind of blue stone with veins of gold in it. Huge windows in the walls and ceiling looked out over the city and the overcast sky.
The Ambassador was looking out the window at the clouds swirling over the city, or rather, the little of the city there was on the surface. After a tense few seconds for Vilden she turned and Vilden bowed. She was a tall thin woman with the pale waxy skin of someone who’d had multiple rejuvenations and the attitude of someone who intended to have a whole lot more.
“Welcome Special Agent, please take a seat. You are not in trouble, in fact, this little job I have for you could be the making of you,” she said with rather more warmth than the functionary had shown, waving Vilden to a seat in front of a polished timber desk larger than Vilden’s apartment. He waited for the Ambassador to seat herself before he sat down.
“What did you require of me, Your Excellency?” Vilden asked nervously.
“Unlike any of my other agents in my retinue, you have a proven track record and,” here the Ambassador actually cracked a smile, “a reputation for dangerously independent thought. I have a mission for you. The Theocracy has picked up potential activity on our embargoed station.”
“Has there been another escape, Your Excellency?” Vilden asked. The ambassador raised an eyebrow and Vilden held his breath. There were things he wasn’t supposed to know.
“Knowledge of those escapes is supposed to be highly classified… But I suppose Agents wouldn’t be Agents if they didn’t stick their noses where they weren’t supposed to, and it saves time with explanations,” the ambassador said and Vilden let out his breath as the Ambassador continued.
“Firstly, I remind you that officially no one has entered or left the station since it was embargoed under the agreement with this fair planet’s highly enlightened government nearly seventy-three years ago. And the station has certainly never housed a clandestine stash of deep-frozen political prisoners. I don’t need to tell you that If this gets out, our Corporation could be kicked off the planet for good, at the very least there would be a huge diplomatic incident” Vilden's eyes flickered to the grey skies outside and raised an eyebrow, “Well, okay, in the overall scheme of things it wouldn’t be any great loss but it would be extremely bad for my future within this Corporation,” the Ambassador said, unexpectedly candidly.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“And unofficially?” Vilden asked.
“Up until yesterday, there have been nine escapes, seven of the prisoners were quickly recaptured but now, we suspect, there has been a tenth escape.”
“Do you need me to try and get onto the station?” Vilden asked hesitantly. The Ambassador waved her hand in denial.
“We’ve already had a look around. Our hosts insisted on a joint investigative force to investigate unusual power fluctuations from the station. Fortunately for us it turned out one of the charging points in maintenance had malfunctioned and no sign of anyone was found, alive or dead.” The Ambassador smiled. “I will, of course, use this as a lever to get us allowed back on the station to make repairs, and once we’re back in residence I will make it extremely hard to dislodge us… but I digress. What you need to know is one of our members of the investigating team managed to confirm another one of the cold sleep pods was empty.”
“How can someone… No, how can ten people escape from cold sleep and then escape from a Galactic Court-embargoed space station? I thought nothing, not even data, got in or out,” Jaden asked, unable to keep the incredulity out of his voice. The Ambassador sighed.
“The best our techies have come up with is that the pods have a fail-safe that kicks the occupant out in the event of a pod malfunction… But as the pods were made over two hundred and fifty years ago by a Corporation that no longer exists we can’t confirm this. As to how the first nine got off the station, well,” the Ambassador shrugged, “there were nine escape pods left, seven pods dropped directly into our compound in Kacke as they were programmed to do. The other two, well, they could have only come down on the planet, but, as you are going to find out, it’s a huge planet out there with more hiding places than we have shareholders. There aren’t even records on the tens of thousands of legitimately stored spaceships that are stored here, let alone the ones that have been hidden here or just dumped.”
“I take it you have some intelligence on how the tenth prisoner got off the station and where they are now? Or are you just sending me out into the wilderness on the off chance I stumble on them,” Vilden asked acerbically. The Ambassador laughed.
“Whilst your attitude has not endeared you to many of your Superiors this is not a punishment assignment. One of the independent contractors tasked with keeping an eye on the upper atmosphere picked up an unidentified object falling to the planet shortly after the unusual power readings on the station were detected...”
“What sort of object?” Vilden interrupted, provoking a frown from the Ambassador who wasn’t used to being interrupted.
“A suit, or a very small spacecraft. Whatever it was, it made a controlled entry into the atmosphere and then disappeared into a Category 5 storm around the equator. We thought they’d disappeared without trace but then we had a bit of luck. One of the umm… ‘traders’ the Corporation has done business with in the past contacted us to tell us they’d been hired to recover a valuable spacesuit from an unexplored glacier near the equator…”
“And what do you want me to do?” Vilden asked, interrupting again. The Ambassador paused and Vilden realised he might have gone too far.
“I want you to meet this ‘trader’ at the agreed rendezvous point, recover this suit and take its inhabitant into custody. Then I want you to find out who’s hired this ‘trader’, find them, take them into custody, and see if they know anything about the two other escaped prisoners. Are those acceptable mission parameters Agent? Or do you plan to interrupt me again?” The Ambassador said coldly.
“I apologise, Your Excellency, I meant no disrespect. Do you have any information on the identity of any of the escaped prisoners?” Vilden asked.
The Ambassador gave the Agent a shark-like smile and slid a thin read-once drive over to the Agent who tapped it to his wrist com then quickly threw it back on the desk where it sparked before dissolving into dust.
“Those names probably mean nothing to you,” the ambassador said, brushing the dust off her desk as the Agent viewed the files.
“Commander Brandell Hawk and Maya Von Dack are notorious… umm… historical figures. I’ve never heard of the third person though,” Vilden said, not wanting to use the term 'legend' in front of the Ambassador. “There is currently a popular entertainment series about the White Rock Rebellion at the turn of the last century.”
“I am aware of that over-dramatised Free System shit. It should never have been allowed to get on to our networks. Those people are criminals and terrorists and their actions are being romanticised by the masses. That rebellion destroyed the White Rock corporation and cost us billions, not to mention the amount of influence we lost. Back in the old days, we’d never have been tiptoeing around a bunch of revolutionaries and religious freaks just because they are so-called legitimate governments,” the Ambassador spat.
“Why are all the prisoners still alive if they have been in our custody for all this time?” Vilden asked.
“Because the do-gooders at the Galactic Court are paying us to keep those scum on ice and not give them the slow, painful death they richly deserve.”
“So that means that at some point, the Court is going to want all of the prisoners on the embargoed space station returned and defrosted?”
“That is a problem for our glorious Sector Head and his lawyers. Not that he won’t try and spread the blame when it all falls apart, which is another reason why this conversation is not happening.” Vilden nodded as if this was news and not the reason why he was on Jeckon in the first place.
“Understood, Ma’am. So, how do I get to this rendezvous?”
“You will travel aboard the Corporation airship, Free Enterprise. Give this to Captain Jones. He’s an obstreperous old fart who should have been retired years ago but he won’t dare countermand a Special Agent bearing my Corporation Seal.”