Interlude Eleven - The Silly Spy
She was pacing in her office, trying very hard to keep the screams within herself, rather than yell out her frustrations aloud.
The office was hers, in a way. Well, it was more accurate to say that it was MINT's office and she was just borrowing it for the moment, but her name was on the front door. Peppermint's Party Planning! It was a small office run by MINT before the empress decided to shack up in Dirftwood station. MINT had converted it into an event planning organisation with three whole employees and a decently long made-up history around the Jovian system that no one ought to look too deeply into.
It was tight, and not in the nicest section of the amalgam station, but it wasn't in the worst either. She had a desk, a small apartment, and a few amenities that were a luxury when living in a station.
All things said and done, MINT was treating her as well as they could. She couldn't tell if that was because she'd threatened to rip her handler a new asshole or if it was because of her proximity to the Empress.
No, no, she could definitely tell which one really mattered to the intelligence agency.
Pepper sighed, but continued her pacing. She didn't have the time, let alone the mental energy, to waste thinking about stuff that didn't matter.
Her long-term career was in jeopardy, but she was also poised to launch that same career right up into the stratosphere. Handling the Empress was the not-so-secretive end-goal of MINT. She was Mars' greatest military asset and yet Mars had no real control over her. That was sometimes for the best, as her interests served as a counter to the political ambitions of some and the military ambitions of others.
If the navy had control over the Empress, Earth would be a barren husk and the entire system would be wearing the uniform by now. If a politician took control of her, then... well, that'd be horrific in strange and unique ways, certainly.
MINT served to curtail those attempts at control while also trying to establish their own methods.
They'd never been truly successful, but every step that ended with the Empress happy with MINT was a major accomplishment.
Pepper had studied the agency's history. The unaltered, real history. MINT had once been on the verge of collapse, but a few lucky strokes had them inadvertently helping the Empress, and she casually mentioned the fact in the hearing of the media and some important figures. It had entirely changed the tides that MINT was drowning in.
Right now, Pepper was the closest thing MINT had to a mouth poised next to the Empress' ear. For the first time in the organisation's history, they were the closest part of the Martian apparatus to the core of Mars' power.
MINT wasn't broadcasting the fact, because... well, they weren't that sort of people, but even Pepper could tell that the higher-ups were shifting anxiously, ready to make a few small, subtle moves with long-term potential tied to them.
It was a lot of pressure on Pepper's back, and she was quite certain that she wouldn't succeed at her primary objective.
It wasn't that she wasn't tempted by the Empress. Pepper licked her lips then shifted her shoulders a little. Ivil was undeniably attractive, both physically and in terms of power. Pepper would readily admit that in her current--single--state, she wouldn't mind spending more time with the woman.
But the Empress had her eyes locked upon others, and Pepper might be a spy and an informant and very, very single, but she wasn't a homewrecker, orders be damned. If she couldn't be part of whatever strange harem was going on, then she could at least be her imperial majesty's wingwoman.
Pepper glanced at her desk. There was a stack of papers laying upon it. Actual paper-paper. Unused these days except for when someone wanted to demonstrate their wealth or anachronistic tendencies, or when information had to be passed along in a very destructible form.
The sheets clearly ordered her to destroy them upon her having read them. They'd even been delivered with a small lighter. Pepper had abstained from that for the moment.
The pages were reports. Detailed to the point of nausea. Reports of movement across the solar system. Fleets of merchant ships that, when traced back to their origins, hinted at discrepancies.
One merchant fleet had nineteen ships within it. It had only had fourteen three months ago when a Martian patrol flew by. At some point, five more ships had joined the small fleet, but all of the previously noted appearances of that same fleet said that there were only fourteen.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
So either the long range sensors of the patrol were wrong, which was possible, or someone had added five new ships to their fleet and disguised the fact.
It wasn't the only strange happening. There was a small Earth-Alliance battlegroup that was going through war trials and war games. Small being the operative term, because it only had half as many vessels as the average war game would have.
Another area had some ships belonging to a small ship-weapons developer doing tests on the edge of the asteroid belt. They were firing rounds at rocks. Nothing too special. Only MINT had dug into that company's history and discovered deep links to the Earth Alliance.
There were a dozen more reports. Each was small, a drop in the bucket. A discrepancy that could be written off as coincidence, incompetence, or even subtle but not unusual enemy action. The Earth Alliance had their own intelligence apparatus and it too needed to move agents around.
But taken all together?
MINT admitted in the report that it was sheer coincidence that the several agents looking into various cases all happened to notice a pattern and started to compare notes.
The incidents, charted on a map of the system, drew a line.
A line from roughly where Earth sat at the moment, to right past the Jovian system and straight towards Uranus.
MINT was mobilising in a big way. Pepper imagined that if she wasn't in such a critical position, she might also be one of the lowly agents being tied to an outbound merchant ship with the goal of trying to spot some of the Earth Alliance elements moving further out towards the edge of the system.
At the moment, it seemed like the League of Free Moons was still unaware, or their intelligence apparatus had yet to kick things into gear.
So, MINT had stumbled across an Earth Alliance plot far from their own jurisdiction, and the blame for that could be placed on the Empress for moving to the area at a time where she really should have been around Mars.
The Earth Alliance was rarely this subtle, but their goal here was obvious.
The chase of new cores currently held around Uranus. It represented enough cores to catapult a nobody into the higher end of core-user rankings. That would mean one more individual capable of causing mass disruption.
Or, the new cores could be cultivated, reproduced, and disseminated throughout the Earth Alliance. In terms of short-term gains, it would mean little, but in two decades, when the thousand or so cores were suddenly twenty-thousand distributed across the alliance?
Or... or the Earth Alliance could consider giving all of those cores to a single person with a lot of cores already. One of their A-rankers, perhaps. It wouldn't be anywhere near enough to gain a second S-rank core user, but it would mean a second large threat.
The most horrific idea, of course, was giving those cores to their own S-ranker.
The Empress of Mars was one of three S-ranked individuals in the system. At the moment, she held a confirmed and rather important lead on the other two, the Emperor of Jupiter and the Emperor of Earth.
But this many new cores? That could, conceivably, be enough to cut that gap and narrow it down until the Empress was only as strong as the Emperor of Earth.
That was, quite simply, unacceptable.
The Emperor of Earth was a pissant, whiny man that liked to lord over others, but who was too stupid and easily distracted to notice that he was well and truly chained by the leadership of the Earth Alliance.
Given the opportunity, he would come to blows with Ivil Antagonist.
Someone had to tell the Empress. She was right here. So close to Uranus. She could grab those cores for herself. She could secure them and give them to the League of Free Moons and earn herself, and Mars, a lot of good will.
In any case, the Empress had to be informed, and the person so carefully chosen for the task was none other than Pepper Mint.
She had to go up to the Empress--currently having a dinner date where she was bullying that poor mercenary pilot--and inform her that her dating time was going to be cut short.
Pepper hoped she wouldn't take it out on her poor, silly spy.
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