Kinnit sat on the floor in the hall, her face tucked between her knees, sobbing. Admiral Stonefist stood beside her, his arms crossed, his expression flat.

Emergency medics bustled around in Jorya's office, busy but unhurried. A covered gurney was wheeled out and slowly pushed down the hall.

"Why?" asked Kinnit, quietly. "Why would she do that?" She shook her head, trying to dislodge the images of Jorya in her final resting place on her desk, with her bulging eyes and her discolored face, the automatic cable tensioner still tight around her neck.

She knew that that image was going to be with her for a long, long time.

"Let's get back to the office," Admiral Stonefist said, helping her to her feet. "We're not needed here. Not any more."

They sat quietly in his office. Kinnit sat at her desk, no longer openly sobbing, but leaking and shuddering by turns.

"I... helped her, once," Grimthorn said.

"What?" Kinnit raised her tear-washed eyes to Grimthorn's stony face. He sat as rigidly as a man at confession.

"I helped her." He sighed and rubbed his eyes. "I set up her in her career. Her father was Captain Cohrmere. He was captain of the ISS Helix, one of our light attack craft. One of the ones lost in the jumphole collapse off Arcturus."

He scrubbed his hands through his hair, then settled down. The harsh white light in his office shadowed his face and gave his eyes a haunted look.

"I still wonder, sometimes... what if they're all still alive in there, in that jumphole? What if they've been trapped in that unending, non-Euclidian torment for the last thirty years?"

He shook his head.

"Doesn't matter. Can't do anything about it. Cohrmere was, uh, an acquaintance. A friend, I suppose, as much as I could manage. Jorya was about twelve at the time of the incident. I pulled some strings afterward, made sure she got an education and had a good track into a steady Navy career. She did well. But in her first year in the service, she was caught embezzling some funds."

He looked down at the table, ashamed.

"I... I covered it up. I yelled her ears off for three days straight, and she swore up and down it would never happen again. I kept a hard eye on her. For seven years, I watched her as closely as an unstable plasma canister. And then I stopped watching, because everything was fine. She was on the straight and narrow. Until she got mixed up with this Petty Officer, I suppose."

He slammed a fist on his desk.

"But to end things like this...! She didn't have to go that far! I don't understand why she would take her own life!" He stared at his desk, willing tears not to fall.

Kinnit took a deep, shuddering breath, placing her hands flat in her lap. Once she'd calmed a little, she was able to speak.

"I don't understand how she knew we were on to her. I didn't think I'd let any details of our investigation leak out."

Admiral Stonefist's expression slowly changed. First his wounded looked morphed into one of shock, then pure fury. He looked up and pinned Kinnit with a fierce look.

"Probably she was looking at access times on the quartermaster reports," he said slowly, "and realized that someone was auditing all the records."

"But, no, I--" Kinnit began, but Admiral Stonefist put a finger over his lips, still giving her that fierce look. "Oh, I mean... I suppose that's it."

He stood.

"Come, let's take a walk. Maybe a little exercise will help us calm down." His voice was light, casual, but his face was deadly serious. As serious as she'd ever seen him, and that was saying something.

"Y-yes, sir," she said. She scrubbed her eyes and followed him out of the office.

Once in the hallway, she had to scramble to keep up with his long strides.

"Sir? Where are we going?"

"We're going to the Data Archives," he said getting into the lift. Kinnit followed. "You accessed the quartermaster reports with admin priority, didn't you? So that nobody else would be able to see you'd accessed them, unless they also had priority access."

"Of course, sir. That's why I don't understand how she knew we were coming."

"She didn't." He stood dead still in the lift at it pulsed its humming noise and carried them into the belly of the ship. "She also didn't know her murderer was coming."

Kinnit gasped.

"You knew enough to investigate discreetly," he said. "Nobody else was privy to our investigation. Jorya was a sweet girl, but she was no OpSec specialist. She didn't have any special skills or insight."

His jaw set.

"But I'll bet she did have someone who found out about her problem. Someone who blackmailed her with that info. Made her do things. And when that person found out we were investigating, they... cut their losses."

"She didn't deserve that," Kinnit said, unconsciously pulling down on the hem of her uniform with bunched fists. "What she did was wrong, but she didn't deserve that."

"Honestly, Kinnit, we don't know that she didn't deserve that. Not for the stealing, no. But who knows how long she's been used by her blackmailer? Or what she's done at their command. We still don't know how the Qhall assassin got on board, for example."

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"But-- but it's not right, sir!" she cried.

"It's not. And we will get to the bottom of it. And whoever's behind this-- they will face justice. I owe Jorya that much.

Kinnit nodded quietly.

"Kinnit, there's something very bad going on in the Imperium. The only way anybody could have known about our investigation is if my console is tapped, or if there's a wire in my office."

"I'll tear that office apart! I'll find that bug and destroy it!"

"No."

"Sir?"

"A spy works for your enemy until you discover him. Then he works for you."

"I don't understand."

"We'll find the bug, or wire, or tap, whatever. But then we'll leave it alone. We'll only communicate things in the office that we want our enemies to know."

Kinnit's eyes lit with righteous fire. She saluted fiercely.

"Yes, sir!"

"Until then, we'll have to find some other place to work, and to communicate. Kinnit, be cautious what you say, and what you do. Be very, very cautious about who you trust."

"Who can I trust, sir?"

"Me. And, if worse comes to worst, reach out to Admiral Balia. Other than that, everyone is suspect."

The lift stopped, and they walked down the long hallway toward the Data Archive. They stopped in at the office, where a skinny tech wearing ill-fitting clothes was seated behind a desk, gently napping.

Admiral Stonefist stood before the desk and cleared his throat. The tech jangled awake. He recognized the Admiral and bolted to his feet, saluting.

"Admiral! Sir!"

"Sleeping on duty?"

The tech swallowed heavily.

"Yes, sir. I'm sorry, sir."

"Report yourself for disciplinary action after your shift."

"Yes, sir."

"For now, I need to access the archives directly."

"Directly, sir?"

"Yes. I don't want to go through my console. I need to look at security footage from today."

"Yes, sir."

The tech led them down the rows of blank gray monoliths before stopping at one that looked no different from the rest.

"This is unit that store's today's footage. After 24 hours, it gets cycled clean and the recordings are moved to long-term storage."

"I need to see the footage for today for the hallway outside quartermaster Jorya Cohrmere's office."

"Yes, sir." The tech pulled a tool off his belt and reached out for the monolith. The door swung open at his touch. "Strange," he said. "That shouldn't be open."

Grimthorn got a sinking feeling in his stomach.

"Let's just find the data," he said.

The tech nodded and plugged his specialized console into the monolith. A red light pulsed on the glossy black plate, and the tech frowned.

"Um, I'm sorry, sir," the tech said. "this data appears to be corrupted."

"I thought the tech in these things couldn't corrupt data."

The tech nervously scrubbed the back of his head.

"Yeah, it doesn't make sense. But we've been having some problems with corrupted data lately."

Admiral Stonefist pursed his lips. A dark aura surrounded him.

"And has this been reported?"

The tech seemed to shrink.

"No, sir, we were going to try to find the issue before it became a problem--"

Kinnit winced. That was not the right answer.

"Well, young man," Grimthorn said quietly, "it's a problem now. I want every tech and every data jockey in this Archive. You will all check every single byte of data, from one end of this Archive to the other, and give me a report of every single corrupted bank, and what data is supposed to be there."

"All of it?" the tech squeaked, looking up and down the long halls of monoliths. "But that could take months!"

"And you would have had months to do it, if you'd reported it right away. Now you have one week."

"But, sir!"

"And at the end of that week, we'll see how many court-martials are in order."

The tech paled, and his Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed heavily.

"W-we'll get started first thing in the morning, sir..."

Admiral Stonefist leaned over him.

"In the morning?" he said with deceptive quietness. "In the morning?" he blared, his voice hammering down the hallway. He blasted the hapless tech with his powerful voice. "You will immediately roust every person who knows even so much as how to plug in a scanner, and every one of you worthless roaches will scour this Archive, 24 hours a day, non-stop until that report is in my hands! Now move! Move! Move!"

The tech tumbled down the hall to fetch the rest of the techs, to start their long task.

"Sir," said Kinnit, "is that reasonable?"

"No, it's not reasonable that lazy techs of a bloated department have let their incompetence put a murder investigation at risk."

Kinnit's mouth twisted, and the face of Jorya surfaced in her memory again.

"Yes, sir. I agree fully."

----------------------------------------

Kennex Caltrel sat in the back of the prisoner transport, his wrists clasped in restraints that were chained to a loop welded to the floor of the vehicle. Cold, gray, windowless steel surrounded him on all sides. An impassive Imperium prison guard, clothed in full riot armor, sat on the bench across from him.

He was down on the surface of Ceon 12 in the city of Techterra, the home of Central Command. Which seemed like a long way to ship him for failing to respond to a distress call.

Which meant they knew. But how much did they know?

Caltrel was deep in thought, mentally preparing his defenses. He muttered as he went through his defenses.

"I only ever wanted to protect the Imperium," he said to himself. "I was keeping the fleet safe. I was acting in accordance with established protocols. It's the SS Assistant that was the problem. She's the criminal. She is."

He tried to stay focused, but his mind kept wandering back to the rumors that he'd been hearing. In spite of established guidelines, guards talked, and prisoners talked more. And the juicier the rumor, the faster it flew.

He desperately hoped the rumors weren't true, that they weren't going to send him to the Cryptographers. He'd face down a fleet of bugs, or wrestle a Nilian Saat. He'd even stand up to Admiral Stonefist if he had to. But the Cryptographers were another matter entirely.

And putting Caltrel in their hands was exactly the kind of thing Admiral Stonefist would do. He shuddered.

The prison transport bumped and rattled as it rolled through the rich city of bureaucracy.

"Do you know where we're going?" asked Caltrel.

The guard didn't respond. He didn't even turn his head. His featureless helmet stared blankly back at Caltrel.

"Charming conversationalist." Still no response.

The transport slowed, and finally stopped. The guard stood, opened the back doors, and hopped down.

"Hey! You gonna unlock me?" Caltrel called, jangling his chain.

He got an ugly premonition as he looked out the open doors. It didn't look like a prison out there, it looked like an abandoned factory.

"Hey! What is this?" He started yanking on the restraints in a panic. The chain held him firmly to the floor. The guard turned, looking back at Caltrel.

"You were one of us, Kennex," the guard said, his voice heavy with distortion. "You turned on us."

"Your stupid trap was going to kill me!"

"Your death would have have been a catalyst for a new age. You should have died as a hero to the cause. Now you'll just die as a problem."

Caltrel lunged at the man in the guard's armor. The effort tore the tendons in both of his shoulders, but he was held fast. He shrieked the vilest oaths he knew, emptying his lungs with rage. The man in the armor calmly took out a grenade, clicked the activation button, and tossed in into the back of the transport.

"Goodbye, Caltrel." And he slammed the doors shut.

Kennex Caltrel was still shrieking imprecations when the grenade went off, silencing him forever.