Beyond this point there were no reports of anything at all connected with him. Victor also got a fairly blurry photograph of the man, so at least they knew what he looked like at last!

The agents were very perplexed by the fact that Shimuusha had apparently returned his hire car and then gone ... somewhere. How did he get there? Certainly he'd not left the starport by conventional means.

Fox and Hum were assigned to stake out the house on Gegemin Street. Borrowing Jeremiah's remote sensor kit for the battle computers, they laid some around the target and settled at a table in a nearby coffee-shop, backed into the corner, with several movie holoslug containers left ostentatiously on the table around it.

Jeremiah and Vasquez, meanwhile, went off to investigate Venigaard's, the vendor from whom Shimuusha had bought his cold weather gear. The place was unremarkable and not showy; the clientele was obviously made up exclusively of locals, trappers and hunters, and was therefore a plain shop with good plain stock at realistic prices.

Entering seperately, the pair wandered for a while, before making contact with the sales staff. Two pretty girls and a young man were behind the counter, and Vasquez naturally gravitated towards the male salesman.

Her initial approach, packs of charm and a touch of flirt, worked fine, but then she tried the journalist approach, hinting at a desire to do a story on the disappearances on the Kerag Ice Sheet. Unfortunately, in the salesman's mind, the connections immediately lined up: "Disappearances in news - linked to our shop - implication of equipment failure - public impression Venigaard equipment isn't reliable - I lose my job" His manner immediately became far less friendly, and Vasquez was unable to get more than a sale of goods from him after that.

Jeremiah, meanwhile, was having rather better luck with the salesgirls. He started his approach by commenting the the place "was as good as he'd been told,". This went down well, and he spun a bit of a yarn about having Venigaard's recommended to him by his boss, who he was to meet out on the ice in a few days. He was careful to sound as ignorant of what equipment he needed as possible. The salesgirl began to help him choose items, holding them up to him for size with an approving expression.

Jeremiah brought up his "boss" again, saying he was a stickler but not such a bad old duffer once you got to know him. He said he wanted to get this right, so he didn't look bad on this new assignment. "Well," she said firmly, "we can't have you looking bad!"

"Perhaps," said Jeremiah, playing his masterstroke, "perhaps I should just take what he had? I think he came in on 022." The girl seemed doubtful. "Can you describe him?" Jeremiah did, and her eyes lit up; "I remember him! Just a moment."

She tapped into her till for a moment, and it emitted a list of his purchases.

"Right, I'll just check your measurements," she said with a grin. "I'll hold that if you like," responded Jeremiah quickly, taking the list and quickly scanning it as she enthusiastically wrapped her tape measure around his muscular body. "Oh!" she said at one point; she'd discovered he had a pistol on his belt.

The pile of equipment that was soon assembled was interesting; cold weather gear, survival rations, medical equipment, entertainment slugs, but none of the specialist gear required to operate deep on the ice sheets. Clearly, wherever he was going was away from civilization but not out on the ice.

Jeremiah thanked the girl, paid his bill (with a nice tip), and was on the way out when she called after him; "Don't forget to take a card!" and handed him one of the shop's address cards.

Her comm code was on the other side.

Loading all this into their rented crawler car, they next made the drive back out to the starport to collect their covert ops suits from the Nemesis. On the way back, a call came in from Fox. His date of the previous evening had called again, wanting to see him again tonight. If there was nothing serious going on, he wouldn't mind going, he said. Vasquez and Jeremiah looked at each other and chuckled; trust Fox. "We won't need him for this," said Jeremiah. "OK go ahead, keep in touch," said Vasquez to the pilot.

Gegemin Street, Shugaul, Ariel, 082/989 late night

As the first step of their entry to the house, they posted Hum in a garden two blocks away with his sniper's rifle, to cover the door in case of serious trouble. Then they called the house's comm code, getting an answering machine.

Victor was ready, aboard the Nemesis, plugged into the sensor and commo arrays via his repaired brain interface, monitoring the airwaves for signs of oncoming trouble.

The agents donned their covert suits for the first time, noting with pleasure that not only were they heated, but that they had chaemeleon surfaces like the battledress. As soon as they stepped out into the snow, the suits turned white. Strapping gauss pistols and energy blades to their belts, the pair moved quietly towards the house.

With professional skill they gained entry through the storm porch, bypassed the pressure pads in the doormat, and entered the lounge area. All seemed quiet, and they began to move deeper into the house to search it.

Suddenly, a beam of visible light appeared from the hall, sweeping the living room area in a swift semicircle and then disappearing again. Both agents dropped instantly, their combat-trained reflexes reacting without the need for thought.

A fusillade of near-silent gauss fire whipped across the lounge, tearing into the furnishings and shelves of possessions behind the two intruders. Both were hit. Jeremiah took only slight flesh wounds, but Vasquez felt a bone give in her knee as the steel slivers drove into it.

Both were already firing as they dived, and twelve bursts of gauss fire hammered into the shadowy form of their attacker - a security robot of some sort, hovering over the carpeted floor on grav modules. It got another shot off, winging Jeremiah again, before Vasquez was able to put another burst into it and bring it down.

Swearing, Vasquez opened the simple medikit provided with the covert suit, and patched herself up as best she could, while Jeremiah radioed Victor and asked him if there had been any alarms raised. Nothing seemed to have been, and they pressed on.

Nothing else untoward happened downstairs, so they crept carefully up the stairs. Sure enough, another biffo was waiting at the top. The magic suits and their stealth skills were enough for them to get the drop on this one, and they felled it without it getting a shot off.

Splitting up, they began to examine the resources now available to them.

Jeremiah searched the paper files, discovering a whole slew of useful evidence. Torvald Shimuusha was apparently assigned to a location known as Anardir Base, an Imperial installation concerned with research into communications in very adverse conditions (something Ariel had in plenty!). It was located on the Valos Peninsula, south of Shugaul. Victor confirmed it was not listed in any publicly available information anywhere on Ariel.

Vasquez, meanwhile, was trying to hack into the computer. She failed twice, and was beginning to despair when Jeremiah suggested linking the SolSec hand computer to it. She did this and it had her cracked in in no time flat.

The computer, although massive, didn't seem to have been used a lot, which fitted with the short space of time Shimuusha had spent here, but did have one interesting file; a comm code address book. Listed in there was the code for Shimuusha's own hand computer!

Tucking these useful bits away, the pair then went over the house, trashing it to look as if it had been burgled, and laying undetectable incendiaries to fire it once they'd been gone an hour.

Before doing anything to the computer, they used it to shut down the surveillance systems - allowing a chilled Hum to come into the warm - and to try to contact the hand computer they'd been chasing all this time. The call went through, the carrier came up, the signal confirmed connection - and the system at the other end went suddenly off the air. No amount of retrying could re-establish contact; but at least the brief connection had allowed Victor to pinpoint the machine's location on the Valos Peninsula.

Vasquez' wounds were becoming seriously painful now, and the trio decided to rest in the house overnight; no-one had been here for fifty days, another few hours wouldn't make much difference. An idea occurred and she dosed herself with a pinch of coke from the small pack she carried. As they settled in, a second comm call came in from Fox.

The pilot was in the washroom of a rather swish restaurant in Shugaul, the Eklismeriin Tower. He'd met Darla Hamil there, and she'd revealed that she actually represented an anti-Imperial, pro-Solomani terrorist group, the Sons of Earth, and wanted to recruit the services of Fox and 'his' starship for some sort of operation. She'd introduced several of her co-conspirators, and they seemed on the level, though unaware of Fox's true status as a SolSec agent.

Vasquez had heard of the Sons, in one of her assignments she'd brushed their edges and knew them to be a moderately effective but very radical group, not very well backed but capable of some serious operations at their best. She told Fox to go along, and see what happened.

An idea occurred to her; going back through the house, she aerosoled Sons of Earth on the walls in several places.

Gegemin Street, Shugaul, Ariel, 083/989 early morning

The next morning, the agents muffled up in coats from Shimuusha's storm porch and left the house. They reached the car without incident, and an hour later heard on the radio that reports of a house fire were coming in from the area they'd just left.

They met Fox at the hotel, and the pilot told them the rest of Darla's plan.

The Sons of Earth had apparently obtained five suits of Imperial battledress complete with drop capsules, by means of one of their members, Malcolm Cortez, who worked at the starport. Their target wasn't on Ariel at all, but on the small world Shienar, three orbits away. Public records listed this as a Scout base, but the SoE were convinced it was actually a base for the ISS, the Imperial Secret Service. They intended to perform a meteoric assault with the battledress, wipe the place out, and escape in vessels to be obtained locally.

What they needed was a friendly starship to drop them off as it headed for the gas giant to scoop fuel - and this was to be where Fox's ship came in.

While entertaining some doubts about the plan in general, the agents could see some benefits; agreeing might allow them to request reciprocal assistance from the SoE in their own operation, and success would mean one less ISS base - never a bad thing.

Two days later, the news broke in the papers that the Sons of Earth were implicated in the arson on Gegemin Street. A call to Darla demanding to know what was happening, responded to with the expected denial, was made to deflect any suspicions she might have had.

A couple more attempts to contact the hand computer had brought nothing.

Fox and Hum's surveilance sensors outside the house allowed the agents to monitor the authorities' response to the fire. A succession of investigators came and went, police, plain-clothes police, and Imperial security forces, but no-one who looked like ISS.