Transom City, Mimiis/Banasdan, 062/989

The next morning the agents were up and moving earlier. This proved to be a better choice, as the station was much busier in the rush hour, and they managed to buy tickets and slip onto the train for Versquel without being intercepted. The facilities on the train were reasonably good, and they breakfasted in their seats as the cerametal torpedo climbed steeply out of the depths of Transom city, passed through an automatic airlock, and emerged onto the surface of Mimiis. Gathering speed, the train bulleted through the barren, airless rocks of the surface.

After three hours of eventless travel, the train suddenly dived into another tunnel, passed through an airlock and drew up at Versquel main MagLev station.

Versquel City, Mimiis/Banasdan, 062/989

The station here was if anything slightly smaller than Transom's, and far less cosmopolitain; the vast majority of the people in it were citizens using the smaller inter-sector MagLev trains. The planetary police were nowhere in evidence, and to be fair there were fewer K-Secure as well; everything was orderly, businesslike, peaceful.

A little research on noticeboards was enough to guide them to the correct G-Bus for Sector 51, and an hour later they were outside the district morgue.

The receptionist was calm and professional, and clearly used to dealing with bereaved relatives. She took their details, and checked carefully over the letter describing 'Meliina' as the deceased's relative. Jeremiah's trained eyes raked the reception area as she did so, noting the surveillance cameras and plastiglass panels protecting the receptionists. After entering it all into her workstation, the receptionist gently informed them that the clearance for access to personal effects would take a couple of days to process, and asked for contact information to notify them. She sounded sincere, so they gave the hotel in Transom's codes, and left.

Vasquez staged a brief weepy fit, allowing them to surreptitiously examine the exterior of the building and the ones opposite for more cameras, but there were none.

Next they took another g-bus to sector 38, location of Milan's workplace. This they found to be a ten-mile-square jumble of factories, machinery and transit systems. Little was labeled and there were no maps; people in this area were supposed to know where they were going.

There were some breaks in the industrial monotony, however, and they stopped at one of these, a sausage-and-coffee bar.

Several workers were gathered about, eating and drinking their morning snack, and some had "Factory KL-19" on their jumpsuits. Victor silently recorded images of them and their ID badges.

Vasquez started to enquire where Factory KV-98 was to be found, and immediately triggered suspicion and some hostility. Resorting (again) to tears, she explained their quest to collect up her dead uncle's possessions. Expressions cleared, and the workers became sympathetic and helpful. "Oh, you want the local police station. Any personal effects will have been handed over to the cops to store with the body for claiming," they explained. Helpfully they provided directions to the local police station, and pretending gratitude, the pair set off in that direction.

Finally, they managed to locate the factory, and boarded the local MagLev that went there.

Arriving, they stepped off onto a smallish platform with five exits, all in the wall facing the train. There were two personnel-sized doors, marked Employee Entrance, each equipped with an ID card swipe reader and a camera of some sort; a large hangar-door affair, clearly for loading or unloading cargo; an office-block with another secured door, and a relatively friendly looking rounded building with steps leading up to a revolving door marked Admin.

This they entered, and found a reception desk with another brisk and efficient receptionist. She was clearly moved by 'Meliina's' story, and hastened to check some records, but was quite adamant that any personal effects of the late Viator Milan had already been passed to the morgue. Nothing remained in his office for them to claim, and in any case access for non-employees was quite impossible; health and safety regulations. HazMat cargo was just that - hazardous - and the Combine wouldn't want an accident.

Balked again, the pair and Victor returned to the Shawcross Hotel in Transom to await developments. There they stayed, and Victor continued his training sessions while they did.

They also utilized this waiting time in examining local public records on the g-bus crash which had killed Viator Milan.

Apparently, the bus had been passing through a section of the tunnels wherein the atmosphere pressure had failed, and suffered a terminal gravitics fault, causing it to crash. The crash wasn't nearly severe enough to kill anyone, but the hull was breached, and that was quite enough to kill everyone on board. There were nearly fifty casualties.

This looked and sounded suspicious, but further research revealed that the pressure did sometimes fail in some of the tunnels, and a system of similar airlocks to the exterior ones existed to contain the effects. The busses were all old, bought from a wealthier world nearby as a job lot nearly fifty years ago, and failures did happen from time to time, although not always this severe. The kicker here had been the coincidence of the failure happening in a depressurised tunnel.

There had been an 'inquest', conducted by the local Combine Accident Investigation Bureau, which had decided 'driver error' was the cause of the crash (somehow overloading the grav plates) and recommending more investment from Central Finance in the Tunnel Repairs Service. A typical bureaucratic whitewash.

Two days later, rather to their surprise, a call came in from the Sector 51 morgue. Even more to their surprise, it announced that Ms. Kesserin could come and claim the effects of the deceased Viator Milan and make his funeral arrangements.

On arrival, they were escorted to the interview room, where a rather elegant woman greeted them and introduced herself as Carla Jones. She explained that the authorization had been given as requested, and then very carefully and tactfully worked around to breaking the news that, as he'd died in a depressurization accident, Milan's corpse was unlikely to be a pretty sight.

Then she led them through another office - occupied by two desks, an automated lift, and a deskbot - and into the freezer room. Another robot had already rolled out the freezer in question, and a single glance was enough to show the agents that they'd found the SolSec operative for Mimiis V.

Vasquez put on a fetching show of grief, and then they left the freezer room for the comparative comfort of the adjoining office. Carla Jones asked for formal confirmation that this was indeed Viator Milan's body, and for a signature on the forms accepting his possessions. Finally she requested a decision on his final disposal. Struck by an idea, Vasquez chose none of them, electing instead to have his body shipped off-world to be taken "home" for burial. This took Jones off-balance; it wasn't a normal approach, she said, and she'd have to check, but it shouldn't be a problem.

While they spoke, a crate emerged from the lift behind, and she picked this up and passed it to Jeremiah. Taking this, they returned to their hotel.

Inside the box they discovered the following:·

• Clothes; suit, underwear, socks, shoes.
• Wristwatch. Close examination showed it to be the same model as issued to the agents, capable of covert talisman functions
• Briefcase, with papers (airway bills etc), newsfleck, a rather pungent packed lunch, indigestion pills, pens and pencils.
• Koburg Combine ID pass for the Sector 38 factory, name & photo of Viator Milan.
• Hand computer; entirely standard local Koburg issue, with no covert features at all. It did have both his work and home address and commo numbers listed in it. Careful checking located a dataslip on it, which contained Milan's agent log, listing his surveillance of Imperial military figures passing through the system. Mundane mostly, but the last entries depicted Milan's identifying one Torvald Shimuusha as a diplomat connected with the probable planning of the invasion of the Confederation, and his discovery of an OS bug in the system on Shimuusha's personal computer. Unfortunately, Shimuusha had left Mimiis for Ariel before Milan could act on the information. The codes were not listed.
• GravBus ticket, with from and to stops listed, further narrowing down locations for work and home.

The first and most frustrating thing they noticed about all this was that while it was a pretty thorough collection of things he might have  been carrying en route to work, there was absolutely nothing here that  could have come from his office.

Vasquez placed a comm call to the factory, introducing herself and explaining that there seemed to have been some mistake; none of Viator Milan's personal effects from his office were present in the collection at the morgue. She met with a stone wall of resistance; "if there was anything to pass over it was passed over; if there's nothing there it's because there was nothing here," was the response.

An office, worked in for more than two years by the same person, and there were no personal possessions there at all? This sounded most unrealistic to the agents.

They were definitely going to have to get in there and have a look.

There being little chance of negotiating 'Meliina's' way in on compassionate grounds, the only other option appeared to be some sort of covert penetration. The first requirement for that would be a clear idea of where the HazMat Cargo Admin office actually was.

Their thoughts turned to computer systems. If they could hack into the Combine computers sufficiently to reach the Human Resources system, they could use Milan's payroll number, secured from his flat, to look up his workplace.

This shouldn't be tracable, so they repaired to a local cybercafe and gathered around a public access terminal. Victor jacked directly in, giving him a much more immediate connection with the system, while Jeremiah and Vasquez used their SolSec hand computers to work through.

Computer systems of the 57th century bore little resemblance to the clumsy, text-based systems of 21st century Terra. Processes like moving between security levels were represented as guiding a representative avatar down conceptual "passages", wherein lurked "monsters" and "traps" (intrusion countermeasure security subsystems) guarding "doors" (access gateways to more secure systems).

The combination of their skills worked well; Victor's massive information store and rapid processing of data, coupled with the humans' natural wariness and intutition, gave them fairly easy access to the first levels of the Koburg computer network.

However, when they reached a "junction" and turned down it towards the HR "rooms", they were confronted by a vast monster of terrifying aspect; the Black Ice (IC granted complete retalliation authority) that guarded it.

It was clear that the game was up. They could either stand and 'fight', risking exposure and possibly damage to the equipment directly connected in (including Victor!), or retreat. They retreated. The humans unplugged their computers, and Victor unplugged his data interface - nearly quickly enough; the connector on the end slumped into a small blob of smoking ruin as it melted. He eyed it for a moment with what in a human would be taken as surprise, and then commented, "It will be easily replaced."

Already sirens were howling a couple of blocks away, as the K-Secure, alerted to a data intrusion from these premises, closed in. It was time to go, and the agents quickly lost themselves in the crowd.

Another idea had occurred to them in the meantime. Cautiously, they returned to Viator Milan's flat, and searched it again, this time with the talisman watch recovered from his personal effects.

A secret panel popped open in the side of Milan's computer monitor, and inside they discovered a Koburg ID pass, made out for access to Factory KV-98, in the name of one Davin Helmsley, and with a subtly different picture of Viator Milan  displayed on the front. Useful! Tidying up again, they returned to the hotel to examine their options.

It ocurred to Vasquez that Jeremiah wasn't a million miles from looking like Viator Milan. Unpacking the disguise kit, she had a try, and produced a result that - if they smudged the photo on the pass and didn't attract detailed examination - should get the tall agent past a basic security check as either Viator Milan or Davin Helmsley.

The next question was - how often had Viator used this pass? Who was Davin Helmsley?

Another search of the planetary datanet was launched, and rather surprisingly returned an address, a comm code, date of birth and so on. Viator had done his work well cooking up this fake identity.

They called the comm code, and were connected to an answering service which offered to take a message. Dead end.

They turned their attention to the address, but as they did so Victor spoke up, telling them that there had been an encoded secondary message transmitted along with the basic audible one, several octaves below the human hearing threshold. There was a brief pause, and then he played it back.

It was a contact message placed for other SolSec agents to make contact through, with instructions to go to a certain shopping mall at a certain time of day, buy two cans of Pepsi and put both into a certain dustbin.

Interesting but not very useful.

Versquel City, Mimiis/Banasdan, 066/989

Over the next two days they staked out Davin Helmsley's flat, watching it carefully. Early evening on 066 they saw a man get off the local g-bus, walk up to the flat door, and let himself in.

Vasquez adjusted her 'Meliina' outfit to make herself a bit more distracting, and the pair went up to the door and knocked. Footsteps sounded on the other side, and then the door was opened a cautious crack and a face - not Helmsley's - appeared.

Instantly, Jeremiah shoulder-charged the door, bulldozing it half open. Vasquez added her own rather lesser mass to the effort and the door was forced open; Jeremiah tackled the occupant while Vasquez spun around, closed the door again and locked it.

Behind her, Jeremiah had hurled himself on the startled occupant of the flat, preparing to use his bulk to pin the man. It appeared, however, that his victim had had some training in unarmed combat himself, as Jeremiah found himself on the receiving end of an incoming punch. Angling his body, he took it on his shoulder, and the next moment his considerable weight had hurled the man backwards off his feet and onto the carpet.

Vasquez joined the fray at this point, armed with a length of flex from a standard lamp with which she proceeded to immobilize their victim.

With that done, the pair interrogated him, not gently, discovering that he was a K-Secure captain named Brant Scott, had no idea who Davin Helmsley was, and had a completely different commo code. He'd rented the flat a month ago after being promoted.

There was no way they could leave this man alive after what he'd seen, and so they despatched him in such a way to make it look as if he'd been entertaining and that the evening had ended in murder. A table laid for two, two glasses of wine - one with lipstick marks -  and so on.

Then they searched the flat. They took his wallet and K-Secure ID. But there was nothing else of particular interest, until it occurred to Jeremiah to trigger Milan's talisman watch, at which point a secret panel identical to the first one popped open in the side of the monitor.

Inside was a rough sketch map of factory KV-98, showing the MagLev, GravLev and the HazMat warehouse and admin office.

As they left the block of flats, Vasquez pitched the lipstick she'd used in the plant into a nearby bin.

Now, at least, they knew where they were going.

.