Stepping away

My dislike of Mercenaries is well known.  My dislike of a certain, specific, mercenary group is also well known.  When they were shown the door after abandoning their contract, I was more than a little amused.  In fact, I was actually quite pleased with the development.  They were gone and we would no longer have to deal with their ass clownery.

That was, until they came back.

I should have known they would come back and interfere somehow, like trying to blockade the port facility or something equally stupid.  But their half assed-blockade wouldn't last.  The only question was whether Blue Sun would send in assets to deal with it, or whether the Alliance would divert a passing Patrol Frigate to clean up the mess.

In either case, the mercenaries would get their collective asses handed to them and, with any luck, would find their gene pool had been rather thoroughly chlorinated.  Regardless, it wasn't my problem.  I had places to be and even with one of their idiot pilots shooting at me, they were going to do little more than scratch the paint on my boat.

I'd bill them for it later.  Actually, I wouldn't.  I'd extract it from their funds somewhere along the line, though with their impending demise it seemed prudent to charge their existing accounts rather than put a lien against future contracts.  I had a feeling that there wouldn't be many future contracts.  In fact, once I took care of some personal matters I would put some effort into assuring the best contract they got was playing security guards to Uncle Ramsey's Traveling Medicine Show and Petting Zoo.

Amazing what happens to your contract base when all of the references list your performance as "Tāmen màorán bǐ hóuzi qiú" and the reviewers say "I ne budet nanimatʹ ikh dlya zashchity ot musornoy svalki."  Which was probably better than if I pursued my much deeper desire involving Haiku and a power stapler.  No, adding them to the list with Niska would have to suffice.

Annoyeth not a dragon.
For they are mysterious beasts, powerful and cranky.
And you are small and crunchy and taste good with Wasabi.

 Of course, even without my help the reputation they would gain for turning on their employer would more or less end it for them.  No one hires a mercenary unit with a reputation for betraying their clients.  No one.  Except the overwhelmingly desperate or the frightfully stupid.  This one they'd done themselves.  No need to intervene to assure their destruction.  Though there was no harm in helping the process, was there?

They, though, were not why I was stepping away from Dragon's Egg for a brief spell.

As I have every year since it happened, I am taking some time to pay respects to Caitlin's memory.  I always said a prayer for her on the anniversary of her death.  I suspect I always will.  My first true love.  My first tragic loss.  The event colored my decisions for years and led me down the path that brought me here.  The Ice Queen was born with her death, with dire consequences.

Where I had created a small Shinto shrine for the purpose on Hale's, and salvaged it when we evacuated, I'd never set it up here on Dragon's Egg.  Now, a month after the anniversary, it was time to find a proper place for it on this still near-pristine world.  Her memory deserved it. And, on some level, Dragon's Egg probably needed it.

The advantage on Dragon's Egg over Hale's Moon was the relative size of the world.  Where Hale's had been a marginally suitable moon, slightly below the minimum size for gravetic compression terraforming, Dragon's Egg was considered a full size world.  There were places I could go far, far, from the main colony and scattered settlements where I could place the shrine in peace and spend a few days with myself and her memory.

The O shiri no piero could look for me, but they'd never find Wave Equation on the ground.  The last thing they'd seen was my boat burning for orbit, leaving them in my wake.  They may have considered the possibility I'd turned and re-entered atmo on the far side, but their dorogaya igrushka grade sensor suite wouldn't have much chance of finding me.  Which was just how I wanted it.

You think you have won
We do not fight the same war
You will learn in time

Streaming reality

Once I got used to correcting the data streams on the fly and got my algorithms in place, covering for Lily's 'unacceptable' data became a manageable task, if not entirely routine.  Of course, It didn't hurt that I was able to tap a resource that was frighteningly good at manipulating numbers in real time.  Not that I had her doing it for me directly.  No. Just a few quick algorithms that would do the job I needed done and would run within the limits of the hardware I had at hand.

With the Lily situation more or less under control, I could turn some attention back to my own projects.  Not that my crew wasn't able to continue on their own.  They were capable and I'd trained them well.  I just wanted to be involved more.  Routine didn't really suit me.

I did have a number of irons in the fire, of course.  We were still gathering incriminating evidence against Niska.  At least incriminating evidence that was useful to our cause, rather than specific evidence the Justice Department would be interested in.  They weren't, after all, especially interested in Justice.  Just the Law and those it was written to benefit.  No.  Our interest in Niska and his operation were more subtle and more focused on his operations than any specific violations of Alliance or local laws.

On another side, we had our own counter-Intel operations.  We couldn't be especially effective if our project was widely known, so it behooved us to keep our operations as far below the radar as possible.  Which naturally lead to trying to get a twenty thousand meter view from down in the weeds.  Not impossible, but not especially easy.  But that was why the majority of our operation was SigInt rather than HumInt.  Can't stop the signal, or so the saying went.  And, where there was signal, we could tap into it with barely a whisper in the ether.

Listen.
Record.
Analyze.
Archive.

Wash.
Rinse.
Repeat.

I had live operatives, of course.  But not many, and only one or two who had any real idea who they worked for and what we did.  Unlike Mister Niska, for us, an individual Reputation was more of a Bad Thing(tm) than an asset.  For the organization, it was a different matter.  But that was more concerning making sure the information you sold was actually accurate, and secrets you were paid to keep stayed secret.  A task I had a unique perspective on from a previous life.

For the time being, we were just in Listen mode.  Tuned in to the ebb and flow of information through the 'Verse.  Measuring the data.  Scoping out the competition.  Developing sources and potential clients.  Learning how to scale to the volumes we were seeing.  It was taking time.  Perhaps more than I wanted it to.  But we knew going in what we were up against and how substantial the task was.

Of course, we weren't doing this cold.  People had been doing this for years and the Business Plan, such as it was, was familiar to anyone who reached management levels in any decent Intel organization. Processes and objectives I was well familiar with.

Work behind the scenes
As we build the perfect beast
Knowledge is power

And then the Mercenaries quit...

I've never pretended to like mercenaries.  They have their uses, sure.  A military force that can be deployed on short notice with little concern save the layout of coin.  They may not be cheap, but you're not having to worry about their long term care and feeding.  They're like construction workers, only in reverse.  Rather than coming in, putting up a structure, then leaving when the contract is over, they come in, tear down a structure or two, then leave when the contract is done.  Either way, once they've done the job, you don't really care what they do after that.

Though, to be sure, folk from the Carpenter's Craft Hall aren't likely to come back and shoot you later.  One of the several downsides of hiring mercenaries.  With no incentive save coin, there's little inherent trust and nothing to say they won't take a lucrative contract against you in the future.  Few will actually turn on an employer during a contract, as that would effectively destroy their reputation.  But once a job's finished?  It's accepted that they are free to take any contract they want.

Technically, I know why the Alliance hired Cerberus to provide security for Dragon's Egg and picked up the tab.  It was actually fairly common on the smaller Border and Rim colonies to hire Private Military Contractors to handle the day to day security duties where it was too expensive to deploy an actual Federal unit.  Some worlds, like Hale's Moon, had their own local Militia and Law, but they were the exception.   Dragon's Egg had a lot of folk who'd served in Hale's Militia, but they were willing to put up their guns and deal with something other than Reavers and a desert world trying to do them in.  Not that most of them didn't still have their arms, and a case or two of Blastite in the basement.

With the wedding and all, and looking after the feeds to keep Lily "useful," I hadn't been paying over much attention to the goings on surface side.  It came as a bit of a surprise, if not a shock, when Uncle Sobi sent a wave to inquire if I'd known whether Cerberus had actually dropped their contract, or whether their leader was just trying to get the unit fired for "Conduct not befitting a Security Officer."  Seemed Jet had gotten himself more than a little drunk and taken to threatening Sobi, Cody, Lily, and other patrons at The Signal.  Was proud of my little girl, how she handled it though.

I'd have to confirm the contract status officially with Lionheart, not that I couldn't extract the information myself.  It was polite to ask, and all.  But if they really had packed it up, we'd have a bit of a gap in coverage.  Blue Sun could easily, and likely would, dispatch a company security team to take over.  Thing was, the colony already felt too much like a Blue Sun company town.  Since KHI didn't have any assets here officially, I couldn't well call upon that resource.  Which left either seeing what we could do about reforming the local Militia and instating a Sheriff, or seeing if Lionheart could either hire on another security firm or convince District to put some Federals on the ground.

Fact was, a single Marshal could probably handle Law Enforcement for the whole colony, but he'd be hard pressed to fend off a real attack.  Though there were probably enough folk left with Militia training to deal with that, worse came to worse.

Just left a few questions hanging, and me without many answers.

Not short on ideas.  Just answers.