“Go on.”
“They’re up to something. Something big.” “What?”
“I… I don’t know,” the man stammered, wincing as if he expected to be shot for the admission. After the second it took him to realize he was still alive, he plowed forward, speaking quickly.
“That’s how we got in on this buy. The Blue Suns were supposed to take the shipment, but they pulled out. I heard they got a major job in the works. Something they didn’t want to risk by drawing the attention of a Spectre with a weapons buy.”
Saren was intrigued. Whatever they were up to had to be big: the Blue Suns almost never turned their backs on a deal they’d already negotiated. If they were trying that hard to keep Spectres out of the picture, it meant he damn well better find out what was going on.
“What else?”
“That’s all I know,” the man said. “I swear! If you want more you need to look at the Blue Suns.” “So… do we have a deal?”
Saren gave a derisive snort. “Deal?”
“You know… I give you information about the Blue Suns and you let me live.”
The Spectre raised his pistol again. “You should’ve negotiated before you spilled your guts. You’ve got nothing left to bargain with.”
“What? No, please! Don’t — ”
The pistol put an end to his protests, and Saren turned and walked calmly back outside, leaving the carnage of the warehouse behind. He’d alert the local authorities once he got back to Phend so they could retrieve the stolen weapons… and clean up the mess.
Saren’s mind was already on his next job. Initially he’d dismissed the news of Sidon’s destruction. He figured it would eventually lead back to some radical splinter group of batarian rebels, a retaliation against humanity’s efforts to push their main rivals out of the Verge. But if the attack wasn’t the work of political terrorists, then the Blue Suns were one of the few private security organizations with the capability to pull it off.
Saren had every intention of finding out who had hired them and why. And he knew just where to start his investigation.
Anderson had spent the better part of two days reviewing Kahlee Sanders’s personnel file, trying to make sense of it.
The physical data was straightforward: age, 26; height, 5 feet 5 inches; weight, 120 pounds. The ID picture in her file showed she had predominantly Caucasian features: complexion, fair; eyes, light brown; hair, dark blond. She was attractive, but Anderson doubted anyone would ever have called her cute. There was a hard edge to her expression, as if she were looking for a fight.
That wasn’t surprising, given her personal background. According to the file she had grown up in the
Texan megapolis formed by the union of Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio; one of the poorer regions
on Earth. She was raised by a single mother, a factory worker making minimum wage. Enlisting with the Alliance had probably been her only chance to get a better life, though she hadn’t signed up until the age of twenty-two, shortly after her mother’s death.
Most recruits signed up before they were twenty. Anderson had joined the day he turned eighteen. But despite her late start, or maybe because of it, Kahlee Sanders had excelled at basic training. She was competent in hand-to-hand combat and weapons training, but her true aptitude had been in the technology fields.
According to her file she’d taken entry-level computing courses in the years leading up to her enlistment, and once she joined she threw herself into the study of advanced programming, data communication networks, and prototype systems architectures. She finished at the top of her class, completing a three-year program in only two.
Personality tests and psych evaluations showed she was intelligent, with a strong sense of personal identity and self-worth. Evaluations from peers and superior officers showed she was cooperative, popular, and an asset to any team she worked with. It was no wonder she’d been assigned to the Sidon project.
And that’s why none of this felt right. Anderson knew the difference between a good soldier and a bad
one. Kahlee Sanders was definitely a good soldier. She may have initially joined the Alliance as an escape, seeking a better life than the one she had on Earth. But she had found exactly what she was looking for. She’d experienced nothing but success, accolades, and rewards since joining the military. Plus, with her mother gone, she had no other family and no real friends outside her fellow soldiers.
Anderson couldn’t come up with a single reason she would turn against the Alliance. Even greed didn’t make sense: everyone at Sidon was pulling down a top salary. Besides, Anderson knew enough about human nature to understand that it took more than simple greed to convince a person to aid in the slaughter of the people they lived and worked with every day.
One more thing bothered him about this. If Sanders was the traitor, why had she disappeared the day before the attack and drawn attention to herself? All she had to do was show up for her regular shift and it would have been assumed that she was one of the bodies vaporized in the explosion. It felt like someone was setting her up.
But he couldn’t deny that her sudden disappearance was too suspicious to be dismissed as mere coincidence. He needed to figure out what was going on, and so far his only possible clue was what wasn’t in her file. Kahlee Sanders’s father was officially listed as “unknown.” In this day and age of universal birth control to deal with rising populations, as well as massive DNA data banks, it was virtually impossible not to know the identity of a child’s parents… unless it was being specifically hidden.
Digging deeper into official files had shown all references to Kahlee Sanders’s father had been purged: hospital records, immunization reports… everything. It was as if someone had actively tried to cut him out of her life. Someone with enough importance to falsify government documents.
Kahlee and her mother both had to be part of the cover-up. If her mother had wanted the father’s identity exposed, there would have been no way to stop her. And Kahlee could easily have gotten a DNA test anytime she wanted. They had to know, but for some reason they didn’t want anyone else knowing.
However, neither one of them had the kind of financial resources or political clout it would take to pull something like that off. Which meant someone else — probably the father — had also been involved. If Anderson could figure out who the father was, and why he’d been expunged from all official records, it might help him figure out how Kahlee Sanders was tied up in the attack on Sidon.
Unfortunately, he’d exhausted all official channels. Fortunately, there were other ways to dig up buried secrets. Which was why he was now standing in a dark alley in the wards, waiting to meet with an information broker.
He had shown up a few minutes early, eager to see what the broker’s search would turn up. Not surprisingly, his contact wasn’t here yet. He spent the next few minutes waiting, occasionally pacing back and forth as the seconds dragged by.
A figure stepped into view just as his watch beeped on the hour, materializing from the shadows. As she approached, it quickly became clear that she was a salarian. Shorter and thinner than humans, salarians resembled a cross between some kind of lizard or chameleon and the “grays” described by alleged victims during the rash of fictitious alien abductions reported back on Earth in the late twentieth century. Anderson wondered if she’d been there the whole time, observing him as she waited patiently for the moment of their appointed meeting to arrive.
“Did you find anything?” he asked the woman he had hired to scour the extranet for any clues as to the identity of Kahlee Sanders’s father.
Trillions of tetragigs of data were transmitted in bursts across the extranet every day; there had to be something useful buried in there. But searching a functionally infinite amount of data for a specific piece of information could be an exercise in pointless frustration. It would take days to collect, process, and scan every burst… and even then the output might be millions and millions of pages of hard copy.