Calibration

Traffic in our part of space has been picking up recently. Strangely, perhaps, we've seen more boats in and out of the small colonies like ours, and MacLaren's Drift, since the incident with Sentry and Mikie and the loss of Caliban. Par for the course, perhaps. Though we're so far from either of those worlds that incidents there are more a footnote in the evening Cortex News report than a cause for increased traffic. Can't complain though. Some of them have taken advantage of the new maintenance platform, and more than a few of them have left some extra coin at Fooks. Would make more for landing and transshipment fees, that is if we charged much more than cost. Assuming anyone bothered to collect the fees in the first place.

Intel was still coming in, albeit slowly, from multiple points. Someone back in the Core was taking their sweet time with the analysis and dissemination of pertinent data. That, or they were ignoring requests from field commands. Again. Realistically, it was probably a combination of information overload and priority dispatch. There wasn't just one monolithic Intel unit in the Alliance. It was called the Intelligence Community for a reason. There were a lot of us. Local and regional law enforcement units. Military units for different branches, commands, even specializations within the different branches. SigInt and ImageRecon. Personnel. Criminal versus Military versus 'Government'.

And none of them talked to each other.

An exaggeration, perhaps. There was actually an entire unit, several of them in fact, who's entire job was to try and coordinate and distribute relevant information between the different Intel services. The problem was, not surprisingly, there was just too much information to handle and disseminate in a reasonable amount of time. And of course, there was still compartmentalization, 'need to know', and territorial conflicts to content with. Even though we were, at least in theory, positioned to avoid most of that, there were still insane logistics and uncooperative personnel to deal with.

Which meant I was still waiting for Intel requests to get processed and sent out my way. Tag never asked why I wanted to know anything. He never had. Even when I was a trainer and not a field agent. If I'd asked for information on something, it was never questioned. It was just taking longer than it used to.

The funny thing, perhaps, was that I probably had a better idea where Sentry, at least, was than anyone in the Core Intel community. Not that I planned to tell them anything about that. Though Tag did support my assertion that the Londinium nuke was a False Flag event and that how I handled the fugitives, if I found them, was at my discretion.

I was going to discretely pretend I didn't know where they were.

I'd even gotten an encrypted wave from Sentry the other day. He apologized for any risk he'd put the colony at when he'd been by with the injured JJ, and thanked me for reminding him of that very risk. You're welcome, Sentry. Though I'm going to skip sending a reply on the off chance someone picks it off. No sense putting him at further risk.

Thing was, someone had been paying attention to the feeds. Someone in Alliance command had spotted hum, but had also spotted him boarding a boat to boost off Hale's. The patrol that showed up a day later was a little more thorough than they had been in the past couple months, but they were still polite. Asked a few questions about the fugitives, then went their way without so much as overturning a storage crate.

Might have been the Blue Sun and KHI presence here, or a polite word whispered up the chain of command to back off, or maybe just Silvermane being rational about the whole situation. In any case, they didn't raise much fuss in spite of Sentry being spotted. Something I couldn't rightly complain about.

Still. While recent events didn't bode well for Year's End, there was always hoping it would get better.