(Confederate Intelligence Service HQ, Somewhere on Dimiya)

Alok Paxisys was not pleased. The pressure from ‘on high’ for results was growing, and he had no results to show the important people who wanted to control Black Star. He’d already talked with Zumrora, and they were leaning on the military side as well. Fortunately, the military higher-ups had firmly quashed any ‘direct action’ against a Confederate company without direct written orders in triplicate and sealed with the President of the Confederation’s signature. Considering Mollen’s psych profile, that was probably a good thing.

So far, he’d managed to avoid having to send any of his own operatives against black star, instead contracting out the work to hired hackers and the bounties on the dark nets. The progress to date was more or less exactly as he thought it would be. There were some penetrations into the outer shell of Black Star’s networks, but everyone had known for ages that nothing good was kept there. According to his analysts, there were actually at least three networks in play. There was the public network, which was useless. Then there was an in-house network that only employees could access. Finally there was the military network, which only Black Star Military could access. Encryption on all three networks was impressive, but the two private nets were a cut above.

The obvious solution was to find a weak link, like an employee comm, and slip in through there. But Black Star employees were surprisingly vigilant in using separate commlinks for work and personal use, and Black Star commlinks were designed so that they locked after a few minutes of disuse, and had to have a password and biometric scan to unlock. A failed password attempt blocked the device itself until a system administrator unlocked it. Attempting to physically crack the encryption on the commlinks resulted in the destruction of the link, Black Star ‘security’ was dispatched. The fact that the system didn’t collapse under the paranoia involved astounded most of the analysts in his department. It was unbelievable that a whole company would go along with such measures without SOMEONE cheating! But Paxisys knew better. Until the hiring binge leading up to his expedition, the majority of Mollen’s people were at Jagloth. They’d seen what happened when someone didn’t take tech risks seriously. Information Security was practically the religion at Black Star.

None of this helped him with the problem of certain Senators on the Intelligence Oversight Committee wanting to ‘reign in’ Black Star. Those idiots on the Committee thought Black Star was like any other company. Company messing up your agenda? Find some leverage, and get them to change. Maybe you buy in enough to muddy the waters. Maybe you get some ‘accidents’ and shake consumer confidence. Maybe a scandal rocks the leadership to keep them distracted, or get some government oversight called in. Whatever methods you used, there were ways to deal with recalcitrant companies.

Those worked on normal companies, run by normal men. Black Star was privately owned, so there was no stock to manipulate. Most of their properties (and all the ones worth mentioning) were in space, so you couldn’t arrange for local ‘assets’ to cause sabotage or steal data. You couldn’t even get teams to the site usually because they had their own fleet guarding their facilities. The Owner was impossible to draw into a scandal, since he was an admitted playboy who openly enjoyed the affections of multiple partners. The one time someone tried to cry ‘rape’, he produced full video of the entire evening, from multiple viewpoints, including the woman in question propositioning him and the explicit sex tape that followed. After which the woman’s banking records were exposed to the public, showing that she had been paid by a competitor’s CEO, which opened a string of legal actions resulting in Black Star now owning the company that produced their commlinks.

Paxisys had shut down the idea of using mercenaries to attack Black Star. There was no way he’d throw people into that kind of meat grinder for no reason. When the Senator behind that suggestion got insistent, Paxisys showed him the spy probe footage of what happened in the Badlands, with the Black Star Fleet destroying ten criminal outposts as a message to those who simply encouraged an attack on their people, and the ‘battle’ to destroy the pirates at Booty Bay, wiping out 73% of the pirates in the entire sector in one fell swoop. He showed the of the ‘Pirate Queen’ being executed again in that meeting, when one of the Senators suggested taking some Black Star workers or their families into ‘protective custody’.

But the idiots were still insisting that he do something. Yes, Alok Paxisys was not pleased. Not in the least. Now he had to come up with a plan that would be more aggressive, but not lead back to him. Somehow.

(Eclipse Club, Shvehona City, Dimiya)

Interviewing prospective employees all day was tiring work, but when I talked with the various managers, all of them agreed that it may have been boring at times, but it was the best way to get some quality recruits from an underserved pool of applicants. The built in loyalty we’d get for recruiting directly from lower-income and less prestigious areas was a good thing.

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The art head and the egghead in chief had both decided to return to the orbital compound with their security teams after they finished their day’s interviews, but I had a more diverse crowd with me, and so we ended up heading out on the town for a bit of a ‘breather’. By which I meant ‘going to the club for drinks and dancing’. Thankfully, one of the more popular clubs in Shvehona City was nearby. Even better, Alais Loraric was performing that night, bringing her unique blend of knelfi technojazz to the people.

Liviana was actually excited to get out and see her fellow singer on stage, which the counselor agreed was a positive sign. Being out in public as herself, and going to a music venue on top of that, was more than she had done since before she’d been enslaved. Raven reserved the VIP section for us ahead of opening, so we could all relax and enjoy ourselves when we weren’t heading out into the club proper for drinks and fun.

Of course, it wasn’t all just fun and games. Oh sure, I had a drink in hand, and I looked relaxed, but Raven and I were busy subvocalizing a conversation as we went over the data on the bounties, and who might be behind them. We’d caught all the intruders before they could do anything, but I’d rather not wait until someone got lucky. Why wait when you could just go to the root of the problem and take care of the problem in a more permanent fashion? I didn’t need these kinds of distractions while I was rebuilding and planning my next moves.

M.Mollen: So, what do we know?

Raven: The majority of the hacking attempts are amateurs, probably only in it for the bounty. There’s a few who are ‘professionals’ but are in the mid-range of proficiency, and are known for being ‘hackers for hire’.

M.Mollen: So, definitely a concerted effort. But why are none of the heavy hitters in on this? Anyone going to the trouble of setting up an anonymous bounty on the dark nets would at least reach out to the big names? Maybe not the top 10%, but the fact that we aren’t seeing any takers in the top 40% is strange.

Raven: And the lack of Government or Organized Crime direct affiliates in the group of hackers?

M.Mollen: Well, the government groups wouldn’t be able to do anything legally, so they’re probably trying to stay ‘hands off’ unless there’s some orders coming down. We have close enough ties to the intel groups here on Dimiya that they know our abilities, and they wouldn’t care to push it. The organized crime groups, on the other hand, are still reeling from our ‘demonstration’ in the Badlands before heading to Nuevo Edo. We stomped the whole system for simply not telling those pirates that fucking with us was a bad idea. The two major syndicates here on the planet both have friendly relations with us, and we’ve worked to keep those relations friendly.

Raven: All right, so if we eliminate legitimate government action and organized crime as possible sources, we’re looking at a roughly 60% chance that the source of these attacks runs back to the corporate sector, and a 60% chance that it leads to a black or illegal government operation or rogue elements within the government playing their own agenda. There is a 30% overlap between the two, suggesting either an alliance or a government member with strong corporate ties. Remaining 10% is reserved for foreign polities, and Nomads who may be working against Black Star for their own reasons, possibly to manipulate us into attacking targets within the Confederacy in order to weaken us, or the Confederacy.

M.Mollen: Hmm. The three attacks that came back to associates of the Senator, where does that fit in with this?

Raven: Malon Adynore is one of the Senators for Iylia, a predominantly Human-Knelfi world in the border area between the Confederacy and the Terran Empire. She is also a member of the Shining Path faction. They are basically Unificationists, who believe that all Known Space should be unified into the Confederacy, for the good of all peoples, and to prevent war, blah blah blah. They’re war hawks, basically. According to the records, Senator Adynore was actively campaigning for the Confederacy to declare war on the Empire while the Civil War was going on, so they could grab territory from the Empire while they were fighting amongst themselves. She is also on public record saying that it is a shame that the fighting stopped so quickly. The hackers that her associates hired were quite proficient, probably in the top 25% of the hackers on Dimiya.

M.Mollen: We caught one of them, right?

Raven: Yes. Harry Shaw (hacker alias: 1/0, DivideByZero) was part of the team that broke into our Thelorious offices. They attempted direct access to the servers, hoping to get around the stand alone protocols which we’ve implemented on Black Star commlinks.

M.Mollen: They went for the dummy servers, right?

Raven: Yes, 1/0 had copies of the official building schematics on file with the Thelorious government, and his team proceeded directly to the room marked Internal Communications Servers. As designed, when he connected to the fake server farm without disengaging the physical overrides, the security system went off, sealing the room and dropping flash-bangs from concealed compartments in the ceiling. After detonation of the flash-bangs, the atmosphere in the room was ventilated to vacuum conditions. Once the team of five were rendered unconscious due to hypoxia, atmosphere was restored and security teams apprehended them. They are currently being held in the Black Star internal holding facility at the orbital compound.

M.Mollen: Hah! And did they ever come close to finding the real server room, Raven?

Raven: *sigh* No. In fact, they ran directly past the door marked ‘Secondary Waste Management Facility’.

M.Mollen: You owe me twenty credits, you know.

Raven: Yes, yes. It has already been added to your account.

M.Mollen: All right. Let me know when the interrogators start really getting to the good stuff. Tell them that all methods are authorized, these prisoners were never there, and never existed. Whether they continue their non-existence in life or as a posthumous reminder depends entirely on their cooperation.

Feeling good that we’d worked through at least one target for a ‘friendly chat’ whenever we could arrange a meeting, I turned my attention to the club again, just in time to see another familiar face heading our way. Elnaril Triswyn, leader of the Crystal Fang Syndicate, was heading our way. Considering his niece was playing here, and we were in his town, he probably owned this club. Given what we’d learned, I was glad he came, so I didn’t have to find him and confirm what I was beginning to suspect.

I signaled the bouncer to let Elnaril in moments before the elder knelfi could pull the ‘do you know who I am’ card. Elnaril looked to me and nodded slightly. I nodded in return, and motioned to an empty spot at our table. “This should prove interesting.”