Chapter 2-46

LOCATION: O.M.N.I. HEADQUARTERSSYSTEM: TAU CETI

DATE: 2400

Theodore Pembrooke was not having a good time. Ever since returning from that disastrous arbitration on Petrov Station, that he had been in charge of, his rank had been stripped away, and he had been relegated to a position as a mindless drone. Now he was just another faceless fixer in Omni's reconciliation team. The bottom of the bottom and where he had gotten his start nearly a decade earlier.

All for some unknown slight against someone above him.

The fact that he was older than everyone else on the team made him stand out, and not in a good way. All anyone had to do was look at him to know he had screwed up majorly to get sent back here. So trying to make new connections was an effort in futility. Nobody wanted to hook themselves to a sinking ship.

Theo had almost thrown in the towel when he realized it would be nearly impossible to get back to his previous position, let alone rise above it. His innate desire to prove them all wrong kept him going though. His perseverance had finally paid off with a report from an unlikely source.

Theo didn't know how many informants and spies Omni had, but he knew their reach extended well beyond STO space and even to some of the pirate havens. This wasn't from a contact outside of STO space, thankfully. Those would have been routed to far more important agents than him, even if he was in his previous position within the organization. This report came from some low-level noble out of Malis. The man was so low on the totem pole that he had been forced to join the STO Navy to keep his affiliation as nobility.

He pulled up Captain Willard's file. It was nothing special.

The man was your typical spoiled rich kid who only managed his position through connections. And even those must have been poor because he didn't earn a captaincy until he was sixty, despite having the qualifications for over twenty years. The Omni report included his family connections, an incident involving espionage, for Omni, that got him nearly court-martialed, and his current posting in Varlen.

Theo was familiar with the Navy's shipyards in Varlen. It was his duty to know stuff like that. That wasn't what interested him about Willard's report. His mention of one, Alexander Kane, in an offhand comment, is what caught Theo's attention.

There was no way he could have forgotten the name of the individual who had caused the end of his career.

Theo wasn't stupid, nor was he seeking revenge. He knew Kane wasn't ultimately responsible for his situation. To blame him would be silly. If Theo could recruit the man or report all his secrets back to HQ… Well, maybe he could earn his position back. It was a long shot, but it was better than wasting away on this floor for the rest of his life.

It was going to take some maneuvering to make this happen though. First, he needed to send a message to Willard to tell him to go dark. He couldn't have the man sending in more reports while he was out looking for Kane. He also marked the original report as trivial. He would love to erase it, but that would bring more attention to the document by the AIs that monitored those sorts of things. Sёarᴄh the Novelƒire(.)ne*t website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

The next issue was getting transportation to Varlen to speak with Willard face-to-face. That was easy enough, Theo had dozens of non-Omni contacts he could reach out to to get him there. The biggest issue would be changing this report in the archive. To do that he needed a higher level of access.

Theo grabbed his coffee mug and got up from his cubical. He didn't furtively glance around or make a big production of leaving, he simply did.

Omni was such a large corporation that the break rooms were always busy, all day every day. They were massive areas that usually spanned multiple floors of the monolithic building that covered an area of roughly sixteen square kilometers on the ground and rose over a thousand meters into the air.

Theo had made it up to the one-hundredth floor in his previous position. A far cry from the lofty heights of the top floor, number two hundred, but a fair sight better than his current position on the twentieth floor.

As he made his way into the busy cafeteria, he scanned the crowd for his target. It didn't take him long to find one of the lower-level, overworked engineers. He slightly adjusted his path so it would have him brushing past the tired-looking young man.

They soon came into contact and Theo bumped into him, making him drop his tablet. "I'm terribly sorry. I wasn't paying attention. Here, let me grab that for you. Could you hold this for a second?" without waiting, Theo thrust his half-empty coffee mug into the man's surprised hand and reached down to pick up the tablet and also lift the man's badge from his lanyard.

He made a token effort to brush the tablet off before handing it back to the man and taking his coffee mug back, careful to only grab it by the handle. "Have a good day," he said with a smile as he turned around and made his way to the beverage area.

Theo set the output temperature on the machine to a little above human normal. It would cool slightly by the time he made it to the archive room. Once the mug was full, he made his way to the elevator and took it to sub-basement seven.

Worker traffic quickly dwindled the father down he got, but it wasn't empty. Nobody down here bothered glancing up though as they hurried about their work. These were the people on their last gasp at the company or those who simply liked being in records. Theo couldn't understand that, but he wasn't here to learn about why the archivists were the way they were.

He simply walked to the archive room with the slightly warm cup of water in his hand and the engineer's badge in his pocket. When he got to the room, he pulled out the badge, careful to hide his now gloved hand as he pressed it against the bio reader along with the outside of his warm cup.

This was a trick Theo had learned in his youth and kept in his back pocket for situations such as this. The reality was that most bio-readers were easy to fool. They checked for a biomarker, the one conveniently left behind by the engineer when he held his cup, and a certain temperature range. Hence the warm liquid inside.

The door gave a satisfied beep and he pushed the handle down and walked inside. The archive server room was freezing cold, but also loud as hell. He hated coming down here. A few technicians were wandering through the aisles of servers, but nobody batted an eye about him being there. Who in their right mind would break into the Omni archives, in the most heavily defended facility on the planet, on the most heavily defended planet in the entire STO? Theo, that's who. He would do anything to get his position back, even if that meant burning this entire facility to the ground.

He repeated his trick with the badge at the closest unused terminal and accessed the archives for Captain Willard's file. He didn't erase the report, that would be too suspicious. He simply modified one letter in Kane's last name. Now it read Alexander Pane, a nice little inside joke. The AI might flag it as an error in a few years, but by then it wouldn't matter. He would have either recruited Kane or gotten rid of him. Despite what happened at Petrov, Theo still believed Kane was important and the report Willard filed seemed to corroborate that assumption.

The man's report was light on details since Willard had to be circumspect about what he sent out, but Theo had been doing this sort of thing most of his life and he knew how to read between the lines. Just the fact that Willard thought the encounter was important enough to report it was enough for him, but the fact that a Vice Admiral had met with the man personally meant something important was going on.

After securing the terminal, Theo left the archive and made his way back upstairs. He ditched the purloined badge in an out-of-the-way spot, making sure it was on the same path the Engineer had taken as he came into the cafeteria. With the evidence disposed of, he went back to his cubicle and finished his day.

***

LOCATION: ASGARD

SYSTEM: YGGDRASIL'S EYE

Katalynn Char heaved in a deep gulp of air, leaning heavily on her bloody sword. She had come out victorious in the latest claim against her worthiness to rule, but it hadn't been without injury. Jarl Bergson lived up to his name. The man had towered over even her, pushing her to her limit and leaving a large bleeding gash on her arm before she finally managed to drive her sword into him and end the contest.

She wished it had been the first challenge or even the last, but she knew the other Jarls were waiting to challenge her as well. They had united in their anger over her calling off the attack on Haven.

The injury would make them wait, as none wanted to be seen as winning against the infirm. That would only invite others to challenge them after they won. She had hoped beating Bergson would have ended it, but that would only have happened if she did so without injury. Her injury was like blood in the water, it would only bolster her detractors who thought her too weak to rule.

She rose to her feet and flicked the blood off her sword, sending it splattering across the hard sand and the corpse of Jarl Bergson. "Such a waste," she muttered under her breath.

An attendant ran out and she handed the sword to them to be cleaned. Other attendants ran out to prepare the body for the funerary rights. While Katalynn thought the man's death was a waste, she would never begrudge them for fighting for what they believed in and dying honorably for it.

She would attend as custom dictated.

Another attendant rushed out with a medical kit and began wrapping the still-bleeding wound she had. If the man's strike had been half an inch to the left, it would have been a fatal blow. Once it healed, the scar would be a good reminder not to underestimate the speed of larger opponents.

She stood there while the young woman wrapped her arm. "This will slow the bleeding, Lagertha, but you will need to see the healer to have it properly closed."

"I'm aware," she gestured for the woman to leave after she tied off the bandage.

Katalynn glanced over at a man who was trying to remain inconspicuous. She nodded to him and headed down the hall toward the medical facility. He met up with her not long after she entered the hallway. "You better have a good reason for appearing right after a challenge. I don't need people gossiping that I invoked a Loki to win through underhanded means."

The man took the rebuke in stride. "I apologize for appearing when I did, Lagertha, but the Lokis thought it was important enough that we speak with you right away."

She grunted at that. "Then speak."

"We have news of Harlow Anazi. He has captured more STO systems, and even broken some of the STO fleets. Reports are still scarce, but it seems he has a new ship as well as a new weapon."

She clenched her jaw and fists at that, nearly gasping in pain as she forgot about her injured arm. Katelynn glanced at the spymaster, but the man had pretended not to notice her grimace.

"While that news is upsetting, it isn't immediately relevant. The man is on the other side of STO space. So what other news do you have for me?"

"You mentioned a man by the name of Alexander Kane spoke with you at Eden's End. The Lokis have dug up what little information we could on this individual. He seems to own a company called Blue Star Enterprises that doesn't appear to sell anything and had a run-in with Omni a few years ago."

"Is that name supposed to be useful to me?" she growled, growing annoyed at the man. "Quit dancing around the real reason you are here."

"Someone recorded your loss at Y6X-3H2. They sold that recording to the Xin."

"Dammit! Who?" she demanded.

"We are not entirely certain. The video was recorded from outside the system."

"Find out. Is that all?"

"I'm afraid not, Lagertha. The Xin have already taken a few of your stations near their border. We believe they are probing for a response. If we don't react, they will continue pushing."

She hated the damn Xin. They were the worst of the pirate clans. Unlike hers or even the detested Anazi, the Xin was made up of Coalition defectors. Grand Admiral Xin had seen the writing on the wall well before the Coalition war turned. The man had gathered his loyalist forces and abandoned his post. Then he flew far outside STO space to set up his own little fiefdom.

Katalynn despised the man on principle alone but there were far more reasons to hate the man.

After leaving STO space, Grand Admiral Xin turned into the greatest despot in human history. The vulgar and depraved acts his people did in his name made the Anazi clan look civilized in comparison. It was like his thin veneer of civility had vanished once he had power. Then again, maybe the man had never had any civility to begin with. Katalynn had watched recordings of his battles against the STO during the war. Xin had been notorious for throwing Coalition ships to their deaths or using them as living battering rams if it meant winning.

Other than his track record for victories over the STO during the war, she believed the only other reason the STO didn't bother going after that psychopath was because he kept Anazi, and her from expanding. And now he could smell weakness.