Spying on Spies

Taranis Way Station, Nisinasha/Banasdan, 131/989

Leaving the house, the pair went back to the ship to collect Victor. As they rode the bus, Vasquez quietly doctored some more dog biscuits, ready for another operation.

A couple of hours later, Fox reported that Patricia Kennedy had left the Gladerooms as usual and headed homewards on foot. Jeremiah and Vasquez tried to time their movements to pass her as she neared home, but missed her twice. Their nerves were beginning to jangle when she appeared, carrying shopping. Aha!

Carrying a lot of shopping in point of fact. It wasn't enormously obvious, but a careful look noticed that she was carrying three large bags, clearly stuffed with groceries, a combined weight that a slight woman the wrong side of forty shouldn't be able to stride along the street with at such a pace. Vasquez and Victor both turned their enhanced optics on her, suspecting that she was a robot, or bionically enhanced; but her heat signature was perfectly normal. Carefully observing her enter her house, the pair then headed off to kill time until the evening.

Taranis Way Station, Nisinasha/Banasdan, 131/989

At 2 am the following morning, wearing heavy coats over their covert suits, the pair returned. The street was quiet, only a couple of people visible, and the target house was dark except for the living room.

Approaching quietly, Vasquez listened at the door, her skilled senses picking up the sound of Fido lapping at his water bowl and nothing else.

Very, very carefully, they opened the door lock, disarmed the canine intruder alarm, and entered the house. The hall was dark, but the doors to the kitchen and living room were open. Cautiously they crept down the hall, checking both rooms. Both were empty, but in the kitchen, Vasquez reckoned that one of the drugged wine bottles was signficicantly emptier.

Vasquez' Covert Suit. Rrrowr!

Very very carefully, Jeremiah slipped into the bedroom. A motionless shape was visible under the thick duvet, although its' heat signature was masked by the heavy covers. Jeremiah moved forwards. Something wasn't right... Just as the truth dawned - that this was not a sleeping form - he spotted a movement from the corner of his eye.

A figure dressed not dissimilarly to themselves lunged across the room at Jeremiah. He reacted instantly, hurling himself forward and over the bed, to crash down in a heap on the other side. Uncomfortable and undignified - but he didn't mind that... he was out of the firing line.

"Freeze!" snarled Vasquez, her twin gausspistols levelled. The figure stopped moving, spreading its' arms in a "no weapons" gesture, and started to turn towards Vasquez until it - she - Patricia Kennedy - met her eyes. Then the INSPO planner spoke one word, soft and level. The same word. "Freeze".

Vasquez felt her muscles start to lock all over her body. Her vision began to dim; her consciousness was beginning to fade.

Psionic attack!

Gritting her teeth, she fought back, and felt the effect drain away. Anger blossomed, and she brought her left-hand pistol back up, aimed with cruel accuracy at Kennedy's right knee, and fired.

The burst of 4mm needle bullets tore through Kennedy's lower leg, practically destroying it below the knee. The woman collapsed, and the two agents leaped on her with cries of "Gag her!" "Cover her eyes!". While not anywhere near as rabidly anti-psionic as the Imperials, Solomani citizens generally regarded the powers of the mind as frightening and strange. Neither Vasquez nor Jeremiah had ever knowingly encountered a psion before.

Not wanting to lose the opportunity to find out what was going on, Vasquez applied what first aid she could to the shattered leg; Kennedy passed out during this process. They peeled the suit off - inflicting more unavoidable damage in the process - and discovered a small, intricate pendant around the woman's neck. This they took off, and Vasquez' new optical enhancements could clearly see the tiny heat traces that betrayed it as some sort of electronic device.

Leaving Victor to watch the prisoner and still-sleeping Fido, the pair returned to the cellar and nervously presented the pendant to the door. Deep inside, the sound of massive lock bars sliding back was heard and then the door opened. Cautiously pushing it open with a brush, they ventured inside.

The first room in the cellar was equipped as a very comprehensive gym, with various excercise machines scattered around - and also a number of humanoid-shaped dummies, badly worn and damaged by weapons.

The far wall had a single door in it, even plainer than the first, and the talisman pendant had no effect on that. Perhaps it was some sort of mentally-operated switch? Still, there were options. Unclipping their energy blades, the pair made short work of two holes in the wall, only slightly put off by the strong smell of burning electronics from Jeremiah's side.

Through the wall, they discovered another set of top-quality computer systems (only slightly devalued by a football-sized hole through one of them) and several racks of assorted weapons; some straightforward, some distinctly unusual, and several with no visible means of operation at all.

At that moment a call from Victor came into Vasquez' commdot; "You will want to come and see this," he said.

Returning up the stairs, the agents were taken aback to find that "Patricia Kennedy" now looked like nothing of the kind. The woman now lying on the bed was around the same height and build, but twenty years younger, much better-looking, dark-featured and with long black hair. If it weren't for the wounds in her leg, they would never have believed it was the same person. It had to have been some sort of psionic shape-change, which had lapsed with the concussing of the manifester.

Sending Victor down to the cellars to have a go at hacking the computers, the pair settled down to consider this new development, while the robot tackled the system security.

IIt wasn't long before Victor had cracked the security, and more surprises were revealed. The data stored on these computers was in a language none of them had ever seen before...

Jeremiah voiced what all were thinking. "I think we've run into someone doing the same thing we were," he said. "I think she's another spy." Vasquez dumped a random selection of the data onto slugs, and transmiited a sample to Fox and Hum. Neither of them had ever seen it before either. She told them to hire a car ("Easy! I'm in an office after all," said Hum), and the pair set to erasing evidence of their presence.

Everything with any bloodstains was bundled up to be taken away, as were all the drugged groceries. The bedroom carpet was lifted and rolled. There was nothing they could do about the holes in the walls in the cellar, but there would be no reason for anyone to find them if they'd done the rest right.

An hour later, Hum arrived with a small g-car, and the prisoner, the carpet, and the bags of evidence were loaded in. Hum set off, and Jeremiah and Vasquez completed the clean up before taking a g-cab back.

Back at the ship, Vasquez wanted to question their prisoner immediately, but Victor warned against it. She was on the edge of death when she arrived, and hadn't been in the autodoc long enough to become stable. He recommended letting her sleep, and noted that Jeremiah and Vasquez could really do with some too.

Grudgingly, they agreed, and retired for five hours.

Taranis Way Station, Nisinasha/Banasdan, 132/989

The next morning, dressed in a simple pair of cotton trousers and tied to a chair, the spy was revived.

Yet another shock had surfaced during the night, as Victor's patient work through the starship's databases had identified the mystery language as Zhodani. The Zhodani had fought several wars with the Imperium since their borders met nearly a thousand years ago, but there was no conceivable reason for them to be operating here, so far from their own territory; nowhere did Solomani and Zhodani share borders.

The data itself had turned out to be very detailed files on INSPO, obviously collected by someone on the inside; of itself, exactly what the agents had come here hoping to get. Fox and Hum, once they realized exactly what was here, had promptly returned to the house to download the rest of it; the value of this in espionage circles was incalculable.

The others turned their attention to the prisoner, Victor informing them that he was newly-armed with the ability to speak the Zhodani language.

"Well," said Vasquez, "What should we call you?"

The woman's head lifted, and, although her eyes were filled with pain, she mustered a barb. "Call me Tes. You Imperial dead-heads have such trouble with our names."

"We're not Imperials. We're Solomani."

"I thought you were supposed to be good."

"We have the information we came for," answered Vasquez. "You blundered into it; I collected it," snapped Tes. "So what is going on?" demanded Vasquez.

Tes eyed her for a moment, and then shrugged and explained. Zhodani agents in Capital had learned that the new Emperor had changed his mind about an invasion of the Solomani Confederation after a series of dreadful nightmares of defeat. The Zhodani were well aware that a war to rimward would keep their frontiers peaceful for a hundred years or more; the idea of a change of heart was not one they welcomed.

Tes' mission was to infiltrate INSPO and wait for the critical moment, before assassinating them in a way likely to be blamed on Solomani agents. This would cause an outcry, and a backlash back into a war footing. The war would go ahead. And the Zhodani would have peace.

"Maybe we could work together," she suggested, "after all, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Your people want this war; want to throw the Imperium back out of the Confederation."

No, we don't, thought Vasquez.

At this point Jeremiah spotted something. Very slowly, but much, much faster than normal, the wounds in Tes' leg were healing themselves. Vasquez glanced down. "Can you finish that by three?" she asked. Tes expression brightened with hope; was this an offer? "Yes, with the aid of your equipment," she answered, "after I've done what I can do, put me back in the berth. You can take all the credit for this; all you have to do is nothing."

After an hour, she announced she'd done what she could, and they escorted her to the regrowth berth and sealed her inside. Then the decision had to be taken.

• Let her do it, accept the win of the damage caused by the destruction of INSPO?
• Kill her and leave the body, incriminating the Zhodani, and probably diverting the war to the Spinward frontier?
• Kill her, destroy everything, leave no trail, and hopefully let the nervous Emperor cancel the war?

.Kneeling down beside the regeneration berth, Vasquez took a deep breath, then opened a panel and took out two small red safety pins. Then she adjusted two small controls beyond their normal limits. Within ten minutes it was over; the Zhodani spy Teslabriatsliar was dead.

Three hours later, the Nemesis lifted out of Taranis Way station and refuelled before setting out for home. As she hurtled through the atmosphere of the gas giant, a fused lump of metal and other materials dropped away, beginning the long fall towards the unknowable core of the vast gas planet. A few hours later, the vessel made her first jump of the trip home.

Maybe a future return to the Edge of Darkness campaign will bring the answers. For now, that's the end of Jeremiah and Vasquez' adventures. I hope they were as much a pleasure to play, and to read for any lurkers, as they were to write and run!