Frank Days made the drop by placing an envelope containing the codes, triple sealed in plastic bags, up onto the smoke shelf of the crumbling chimney in an old abandoned house. Two days later they received another dead drop code. When they opened the package in Days’ apartment, there were two packages of backdated stock certificates totaling 200,000 credits. Days and Little celebrated with beers.
In his triumph, Little completely forgot that becoming visible in those bars of interest to the counterintelligence detachment had made him of counterintelligence interest.
Pixie’s brainstorm worked. The Vigilant’s sniffers could detect the chemical signature of K’Rang bodily waste. Unfortunately, the Vigilant could not determine which ship contained the K’Rang in the orbital parking area holding over 200 ships without spooking the courier ship. Alistair did some magic with the planet’s servers and increased his computational power exponentially. He called up the ship’s logs for every ship that had entered Shepard’s space in the last four weeks. He let the combined computing power look for anomalies. In seven hours, the computer spit out three ships. One was an ore carrier, another was a cargo and passenger ship, and the third was a decommissioned military gunboat converted to civilian use.
Sensors plotted out the ships’ locations in the parking orbit. Kelly looked at how the three ships were parked in relation to each other and had navigation plot a course that would put the Vigilant in close proximity to all three ships. When plotted out, it looked very similar to a standard approach pattern, which gave Kelly an idea.
The Vigilant left orbit and looped around the next nearest planet. It came back lined up on the vector to pass all three ships and started a standard approach. Kelly called to Shepard Station and requested docking at the station, also on the same vector.
In sensors, Pixie jumped up and shouted, “Bingo!” when they passed the second ship, the combined cargo and passenger ship. She had found the K’Rang courier ship.
Kelly had them put the visual of the ship up on their main monitor. Kelly couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw the paint scheme, crimson red with an eagle’s head on the bow. It was so obvious that nobody would suspect it. He kept his ship on course for the station and docked long enough to send Connie and Cookie with a shopping list and a set amount of credits. They bought spices and delicacies and returned to the Vigilant.
Kelly departed the station and made a low angle approach to the planet. He kept them on this vector until they pushed beyond the spot where the K’Rang courier ship’s sensors could still range on them and had them climb back up to dock with Alistair.
Alistair spent the time that the Vigilant was away to break out more data on the cooking forum discussions. He found he could decipher more of the spoofed data and find out from which planet the reply messages came. The first reply originated on Tereshkova, to a recipient on Shepard. The second came from Shepard to a recipient on Gagarin. The third came from Shepard to a recipient on Earth. The first message was from four weeks ago and must have been from another courier ship or the one here on its transit in. Alistair deduced that the courier ship would need to leave here after it retrieved the first package and go to Earth and Gagarin to pick up those packages. Kelly agreed and proposed to move his ship out to the edge of the star system. There he would monitor the ship and follow it when it left to retrieve the data from its next stop.
Alistair composed a message to a counterintelligence office in Fleet Intel HQ. This office dealt with espionage cases involving compromised Fleet Intel officers. He provided all evidence he had so far gathered on the agent network. It was up to them to decide which individuals to roll up and which to turn, and which to continue to watch.
Cindy arranged another special lunch for Valeri. She was quite energetic about it and left him snoring on his couch. She had little sense of accomplishment from that. He had been working so hard on his weapon systems that he was one blink from falling asleep most days. She let him sleep.
She walked into the lab, without bothering to put on so much as her now signature lab coat, and sat down at the CAD/CAM terminal. She called up the complete designs for his hand weapon and an assault rifle that would use the disruptor technology. She included the large caliber shipborne weapon design, even though it still had the energy supply problem, and copied it all to a clean data device.
She put the data device into a compartment behind her pocket terminal and returned to her sleeping beauty. She knew just how to wake him.
Cindy did not hate Valeri. He was just a means to an end. She liked, no, loved fancy things and keeping herself beautiful. That required more credits than a lab assistant made. Her K’Rang friends had lots of credits, and all she had to do was move within the theoretical physics community and get hired to work on the latest technology. Her high grades from the Delosian Institute of Physical Sciences, plus her long legs and firm breasts, usually put her on the short list for hiring wherever she applied. Valeri was the first male to hire her that actually read her transcript and master’s thesis. It was so unusual that she blushed at her job interview. She thought that blush was one reason he hired her.
He had certainly never made any advances on her. He had assumed she and Ron were together, seeing as how she so strongly lobbied for him to be hired. Even her flirting with Valeri was never the cause of reciprocal flirting in response. She finally had to take matters into her own hands with their special lunches to get him to give her a tumble. Even that couldn’t cure him of his workaholic ways. She worked around him totally naked one afternoon and he never even noticed, while he tried to work out the power supply problem for the larger caliber guns. It was most frustrating.
She kneeled down beside where he lay on the couch and ran her lips and hands over his body until he stirred. Then she gave him one more gift, for her pleasure this time.
Alistair jumped when his console alarmed, signifying a new message on the cooking forum. He was so startled he almost dropped Connie off his lap. She stood up, allowing him to read out the latest message. This one was a beef stroganoff recipe from Gagarin. He would break out the IP address and location of the sender later. For now he waited for the fifth comment. It was from another housewife, asking for a picture of the completed dish.
Alistair had learned that it signified a call to place the data in a dead drop. He wished he had the technology to trace an IP address to a specific individual. The imaging technology on his ship could follow an individual on the ground from high orbit. It would be helpful to follow the package to the dead drop, and then follow the package after it was picked up, and make prosecutions easier when Fleet Intel counterintelligence rolled up the network. Oh, well, rolling up the network was someone else’s responsibility.
He pulled Connie back onto his lap. The airlock door sensors would give them plenty of warning.
Irina Bugarov toured the 4 Motion Electronics, Inc. plant on Shepard as the introduction to her first of ten subordinate firms. She saw a modern, efficient factory putting out three main components of the transport ring system. She made a point to look beyond where she was being guided. If the guide turned left at a hallway that also went right, she went down the right hall to see what she was being led away from. There were more than a few instances where her guide kept on walking and talking, while she was looking through storage closets and unoccupied workspaces. After this happened twice, the CEO had the plant manager inform her what was in the opposite direction and ask if she wished to confirm this. She didn’t. She just wanted to make the point to this manager and all the others she had yet to visit that she would look and go anywhere she pleased and wouldn’t be fooled by being led away from somewhere unpleasant. She knew this manager would be in a conference call with the other nine managers within seconds of her leaving the building.