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Central Station
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That's done, Achelous thought ruefully. He’d taken a certain step into an uncertain future. Like walking in a thick fog, able to see only a few yards at a time, each foot forward exposed new grey shapes looming in the mist. He'd submitted his IDB resignation. What came next surprised him. Settling into Clienen’s office, he’d told the director he was tendering his resignation and fully expected that would be the end. Instead, Clienen talked him out of it, citing, among other points, compulsory war service, something Achelous never dwelled upon. Under the Articles of War, all able-bodied men and women between the ages of twenty and ninety must be fully employed unless on approved sabbatical. Moreover, if the manner of employment was not directly linked to the war effort, able-bodied men and women of the specified age group must be assigned a war-related activity for a minimum of thirty days a year. Such was the dire state of the Turboii War. Thoughts of compulsory war service had eluded him because a career in the IDB was considered in direct support of the war effort. He had never planned to leave the IDB.
Sitting in his cramped Central Station office, he scanned the long, hand-written list — he couldn’t risk keeping an electronic copy on his multi-func—of things he needed to do. At the top of it was resigning from the IDB.
Clienen had reasoned with him: why resign from the IDB when he’d just have to find another job or be assigned one? It was better to take a sabbatical and, when the period expired, then consider resigning. Sadly, Achelous didn’t believe the two-and-a-half years of leave would be long enough for what he needed to accomplish. Under the Articles of War, as compensation for being denied career intermissions or outright retirement, people of war service age were allowed to take a six-month sabbatical for every five years of service. He’d never taken a sabbatical, so the time had accrued, and he was due two and a half years. A more immediate problem was that Baryy's five years of service entitled him to only six months of sabbatical. Another nuisance, however, had been solved, and he crossed it off his list. Clienen had provided the solution. Achelous replayed the conversation in his head. “My heart’s just not into going to Dominicus III. Not while there is so much to do here. It may be selfish, but I don't see how the provincials on Dominicus III are more important than those on Dianis.” The conversation from ten minutes ago was vivid in Achelous’s mind, and he went over it and over it, analyzing every detail, assessing the implications of the change in his plans.
“So how is quitting the IDB going to help?” Clienen had asked with concern. “I can understand going on a sabbatical; spirits know you deserve a break, but quitting the IDB?”
Achelous chafed in his chair. The conversation was not going the way he’d planned.
“And how is quitting the IDB going to solve the problems on Dianis?”
Achelous framed his answer. At least this part of the conversation he was prepared for, but it was still rife with risk. “I want to pursue my own investigations of Nordarken Mining without interference from the IDB.”
The director sat back.
Going over the meeting in his mind, Achelous saw Clienen’s stunned reaction. On the director’s hologrid, the decoded message from Water Survey, as authorized by Internal Security, was displayed, the message that triggered Achelous’s suspicions when he first met with the director. It was sent from Water Survey to someone at Tangent Assets, and it read, Article of strategic interest found on Dianis, Isuelt continent. Specific location is unknown. Will provide report. Request Lamp meeting, 4007.2.57.
To Achelous, it meant the spy had met with a contact just five days after Achelous had filed the initial field report and that the spy passed the report to their contact. The meeting date of 4007.2.57 was three months ago.
“Are you concerned someone may try to stop you? Or are you worried the Water Survey spy may track your activities?” Clienen asked. “Because if you are, Internal Security has narrowed down the Water Survey suspect list to three people. All of which are under surveillance. To take it any further, they’d have to make more overt inquiries, and you and I both agreed not to do that until after we seeded the precise coordinates.”
“Fine. I think it’s time to file a new field report with an update on the aquamarine-5 finds listing a second and richer deposit, and in this report, we’ll include exact coordinates.” Achelous smiled. It was like dabbing a cherry on top of whipped cream.
Clienen appreciated the idea. “So if we do this, and Internal Security catches the mole, and we can track the information back to their contacts, will you still want to conduct your own investigation without interference from the IDB? Or, should I say, would you then be willing to go to Dominicus III?”
A deep frown set on his visage as Achelous became impatient. “It depends on who the mole is and who those contacts are. Clienen, busting one of Nordarken Mining’s spy rings is not going to stop them. You and I both know their intelligence network has firewalls to maintain plausible deniability. We’ll never tie this leak to anyone important at Nordarken headquarters. We’ll eliminate the mole, which is good, but it does not change the fact that the IDB is leaving Dianis, that Dianis has aquamarine-5, and Nordarken Mining knows it.”
“Okay, so what can you possibly do to stop them? Assuming, and it is a big assumption, they intend to launch a corsair operation once we pull out.”
Achelous’s frustration boiled over. He made a snap decision, reached into his satchel, and pulled out five sheets of paper. “I conducted a field trial experiment on one of the Timberkeep sensitives. A dreamer.” It was a ruse to dress up his unsanctioned, interventionist interview with Cordelei, portraying it as an innocent evaluation of emerging native sixthsense capabilities. With anyone other than Clienen, the story would make plausible sense.
As expected, Clienen appeared skeptical.
“I showed her this logo and asked her if there was any relationship between it and Dianis.” He slid the first sheet across the desk.
The director turned it over, peered at it, and then shook his head. “What is it?”
“The company logo of an obscure equipment manufacturer. Of course, I used parchment and hand-sketched the logo. The sensitive came up cold.”
Clienen nodded at the other sheets, and Achelous handed them to him. The director flipped each page, in turn, asking questions about what turned out to be stylized glyphs, some of logos for Avarian entities. When they came to Nordarken Mining, the director grunted. Then he saw the IDB glyph and asked, “What did she say about this?”
“I wasn’t going to show it to her. It was face down, and when I tried to retrieve it, she stuck her finger on it and glared at me, quite angry. She wanted to know if I thought I’d be alive to fight the Nordarks. And—” he paused for emphasis, “Clienen, neither Baryy nor I had mentioned any names up to that point. She picked Nordarken Mining out of the ether.”
“What do you mean, live to fight the Nordarks?”
Having nothing to say, Achelous shrugged.
“She prophesied you’re going to die before the Nordarks arrive, and they are coming soon?”
He grimaced at Clienen taking the prediction to the extreme. "There may be a situation where my life is in danger, but I think she wanted me to ask the question just to see me squirm.”
The director shuffled the papers then handed them back. “You shot her with Probuteral?”
“Via nanobot.”
A faint smile creased Clienen’s lips. “Nasty little bug. Never know when you’re going to get stung and forget what you’re doing.”
Achelous smiled himself. “They’re so focused on you they don’t worry about flying insects.”
The director took a deep breath. He sighed, then idly tapped the hologrid, his mental wheels spinning. “This adds a new dimension. I could ask the Matrincy to send a team to do their own evaluation, perhaps even cross-verify the visions of this Cordelei Greenleaf. But what would that get us? You did the test correctly. The veracity of the Timber prescients is documented and proven. The Matrincy would want to know why you performed the test in the first place. Which would lead us down a muddy hill greased with pig shit. Aside from possible accusations of interventionism, we'd get into your theories of why the IDB is really being pulled out of Dianis.” He let the unvoiced suspicion hang between them. Was the Matrincy involved in clearing the way for extrasolar intervention on Dianis? The possibility was far-fetched. It was the Matrincy that championed the rights of indigenous peoples. Yet...
Clienen continued to tap his finger. Achelous and now Baryy were willing to invest their own time investigating the Nordarken threat, and they clearly would rather do that than go to Dominicus III. The only way they could continue their investigations was to either resign from the IDB or go on sabbatical. In any case, they would not be planet-side to monitor—Then, clarity of the situation rolled over Clienen like a wave. He thought it through. He didn’t know whether to be angry or admire them.
Achelous watched the director as he pondered something. Clienen stopped tapping his finger on the table, his face alternating between a distant look and a piercing glare that made Achelous want to squirm. Achelous held himself still, waiting.
Imperial Sanctum. Clienen thought back to the brief, sole meeting he’d ever had with the Matriarch herself. She had asked him a simple riddle, and at the time, he wondered why she asked it: "If you had to do what was right and it was wrong, would you do it?" In retrospect, he realized she had been referring to the concept of Ultimate Cause, whose official term in the federate legal system was Imperial Sanctum. It was a high-risk defense used when an entity broke the law, usually an archaic, helplessly obsolete law, in favor of the future good. Unfortunately for the defendants, the courts rarely agreed with people who arbitrarily declared a law obsolete.
Conflicted, Clienen settled on a pragmatic approach. Neither Achelous nor Baryy were guilty of anything yet. If they should violate ULUP, then they’d have to defend themselves, perhaps with Ultimate Cause. By then, Clienen would be at his new post at IDB headquarters. Both Achelous and Baryy were scheduled for transfer to IDB Dominicus within sixty days unless they took leave, but their Dianis charters would expire, nonetheless. Staring at Achelous, he was tempted to ask him what he intended to do in the next two and a half years. It would be an awkward moment, and Clienen didn’t really need to know, not professionally. Instead, he pursued a tangent. “So, is there anything I can do for you while you are on sabbatical?”
Achelous eased. “Well, I do have one thing you could help with.”
“Yes?”
For what he planned to do, he needed the use of the recombinant crystal chip embedded in his thigh. He could make do without it, if it were removed, but it would mean procuring a commercial embed and a few other gadgets to replace lost critical functionality. He still wouldn’t have all of his existing capabilities, the most crucial being he could not interface with IDB facilities or CivMon field assets. “When I’m on leave, I’d like to think I was, you know, off the radar.”
“Oh?” Clienen didn't have a clue where this was going.
“That means not being on the tracking leash twenty-six hours a day.”
“Oh—” now Clienen had a clue.
“Can you have the locator transponder turned off?” Achelous could turn off the aural transmitter in the embed that signaled his position to Solar Surveillance satellites and ground monitoring equipment, but he could not turn off the signal responder that would send back a response should it get pinged by a search array.
Clienen rubbed his jaw. “Sure, but do you think that is safe? If you are incapacitated...”
“Yes, well, it may not be the IDB that does the pinging.”
Clienen sniffed. The implication was with the transponder enabled anyone with access to the secret transponder codes, the Matrincy, Internal Security, IDB Affairs, or an industrial spy, could learn exactly where he was.
“Fine, your transponder will be disabled the day you go on leave. But I have a different question. Do you want an AI? Jeremy will be either archived or his servers replicated elsewhere. Dianis Central Station will be dark. Will you need an AI?”
Shocked, Achelous asked, “Are you offering me the use of Jeremy?”
“Hmm,” Clienen hedged. “I need to check my authorizations, but I might be able to get you a specialized clone of Jeremy.”
Achelous cocked his head. “What sort of specialization?”
“Counter espionage?”
