Manipulations from the Deep Black

With her dampers deployed, Saule Silencieuse was effectively invisible.  Even floating in the middle of a gossamer parabolic dish five thousand meters across, the ELINT Corvette was a ghost.  She couldn't do much more than float there, of course, in a heliocentric orbit 3 AU out from Kalidasa, without increasing her signature.  But she didn't need to.  The big dish let her listen in to the Cortex, parsing the signal.  And, as they say, the signal went everywhere.

Getting to and from the ship was actually the biggest challenge.  Even Wave Equation, my ELINT Matagi, had to use some technical tricks to minimize my signature on approach and departure.  But it was all worth it.  An invisible cortex hub in the deep black.

Silent.

Watching.

I had crossed the New Year celebration here, aboard this little bubble of air in the void of space, surrounded by the flow of information and raw data that made up my trade now.  And the people.  The handful of men and women at the core of my operation, manning this ship, managing the feeds and the people, separated by several layers of abstraction, that did the field work and interfaced with other Intel organizations.

The web had grown since I started it.  The raw information was, ultimately, more than we could process aboard Saule Silencieuse.  While she was an enormously capable craft, dedicated to this sort of work, we'd outgrown even her exceptional capacity.  That was one of the reasons I was here now.  To plan for the future.  And, ultimately, to put some of the information we'd gleaned to use for a very special purpose.

The New Years party was . . . compact.  A bit of revelry, watching the 'ball drop' feeds from a dozen worlds, seeing my team enjoying the moment, even as I felt alone in their midst.  In a way it was funny.  We kept to the calendar of Earth that Was, though no world in the 'Verse actually shared its 365.25 standard 24 hour days.  It was just a tradition.  Like the Shepherd's "Holiday" celebrations having a winter theme, even though the local season might be something completely different.

That little celebration wasn't why I was here, of course.  Catching up on the projects was why I was here.  Getting updates on how we were warehousing our data off-board, securely and discretely, was a major theme.  That, and the acquisition of more working space for our future growth.  To that end, we had taken control of an abandoned transfer station and started the slow process of moving it to a better location, while at the same time removing it from the collective memory of the Cortex.

It helped that the facility had been mostly abandoned for decades.  Built to support trade between the Border and Rim colonies over a century ago, the changing face of interplanetary commerce had left it behind.  Literally.  Most navigational charts, if they even included it, showed it as "Abandoned: Non-operational.  No services."  During the war, it had served as a way point for refugees.  Since?  Nothing.  Which made it a perfect starting point for my project.

While I could have appropriated a modular station like the one we'd had above Hale's Moon, there would be a paper trail linking it to me.  The same would apply to any other modern facility we had to acquire and deploy.  By re-purposing an abandoned structure, we were both saving resources and making our actions harder to trace.

It would be some time before we were ready to occupy it with anything but the restoration crew, and several years before we managed to re-position it into a new orbit around Kalidasa with low signature tugs, but when it was done it would be perfect.  Large enough for our needs and completely off the radar.  My kind of place.

But that was a long term concern.  At the moment, I had something more personal to attend to.


Historically, we had let the data flow in from where it would.  Sometimes parsing down interesting trails to glean secrets that may prove useful, but often just gathering and cataloging.  Some of it, we sold to support the operation, but always with an eye to the effect it would have.  I wasn't doing this to get rich.  I was doing it because I wanted to do some right in the Verse.  Now, though, I had a purpose.  And a very specific effect in mind.

A right in the 'Verse.

Adelai Niska, in spite of his self proclaimed "reputation," was little more than a petty crime lord, and noted sadist, based in the Rim.  I'd dealt with his machinations before on Hale's Moon and sent a couple of his goons home in a box.  One box.  Saved on shipping.  He still drew breath because some people in power found him "useful" and I'd been specifically asked to let him keep breathing.  Since I didn't want to burn those particular bridges by ending the old goat, I'd acquiesced and let him be.

Now though, it was time to play the game a little differently.  First, I needed to know who found him useful, and why.  Then I could look to manipulating things to make him appear considerably less useful to his benefactors and, from there, proceed to grind his carefully groomed reputation to dust.

It was something specific to focus the team on.  Exercise our targeted information gathering and leverage our contacts, while practicing the fine arts of deception and obfuscation.  Information Ninja in the tangled webs of the Cortex.  It was something we'd been building for and, now, time to move into action.

He would expect me to fire a crowbar through his skyplex.

This, he would never see coming.
 
Meddle not in the affairs of Dragons.  
For they are subtle and quick to anger.
And you are small and crunchy and taste good with ketchup.