31

A quartet of Senate Guards met Paisen and Vence at the entrance to the Senate conference center. The two contractors were shown to a security center, where they had their faces and fingerprints scanned, and temporary ID badges printed. Paisen suppressed a smile – it seemed ridiculous to be getting badges for their cover identities, when they could easily shift them in a matter of seconds. She wondered if the Senate Guards knew who they were escorting, but based on their calm demeanor and the fact that their heart rates all sounded normal to her enhanced ears, she guessed that they had not been fully briefed in.

That’s a good sign.

Badges complete, the two women followed the police officers through the bowels of the conference center, riding an elevator that took them several levels up in the great battle cruiser at the heart of Anchorpoint. Their path took them down several more corridors, until the guards swiped them through into a meeting room with neither windows nor cameras. The five committee members stood talking quietly at one end of the large table in the room, but they stopped when Paisen and Vence entered. Lask smiled, and walked up to Paisen.

“Team leader, I presume?” he asked, holding his hand out.

She shook it. “Suli Potfin. It’s nice to see you again, Senator.”

“Mm,” he said, chuckling. “Hopefully I won’t embarrass myself again. And this is …?”

“Vivien Aikens,” Vence told him.

“Thank you for coming,” Lask replied. He turned to the four other senators. “Gentlemen, these are the … freelancers: Vivien Aikens, and Suli Potfin, our team leader. You’ll recall we asked them to look into the situation on Jokuan for us.”

The other senators nodded, taking their seats. Behind them, Paisen saw the four Senate Guards sit in chairs lining the back wall of the room. Lask gestured at the viewscreen. “We’re all ears, Miss Potfin.”

“Thank you, Senator.” She eyed the Senate Guards meaningfully. “Are they staying?” she asked.

“I’ve asked them to, yes,” Lask answered. “For our protection.” He gestured at his fellow senators, and smiled uncomfortably.

“How much do they know?” Paisen asked. Two of the Senate Guards traded a look.

“They know you’re freelance workers that we’ve hired to collect intelligence for us. That’s it.”

Paisen nodded. “If you insist ….”

“I do,” Lask said.

“Then they can stay. But keep in mind, Senator, that I don’t go anywhere without having a detailed exit plan. In this case, that plan would include a great deal of publicity for you and the members of this committee.” She cleared her throat. “That’s publicity that none of us want.”

“Point taken,” Lask said. “I appreciate you’re in an awkward situation, and the risks you’ve taken to come here. Please proceed.”

Vence plugged a data drive into the table’s computer jack, and Paisen walked toward the viewscreen at the front of the room. The lights dimmed automatically as the screen came on, showing a hierarchical diagram of a military organizational structure.

“Gentlemen, Jokuan’s ground-based military is composed of fourteen infantry divisions, four armored divisions, and assorted logistical support elements. The majority of these troops are conscripts, but they are veterans of the Jokuan civil war. Their morale is relatively high, coming off their recent victorious campaigns, despite rather strict disciplinary protocols within the ranks. Their training and leadership are average, at best – non-commissioned officers are decent, but any leaders above the company level live in fear that they’ll be executed for being too ambitious, so that limits their willingness to take risks. On the whole, their weapons and equipment are old and of inferior quality, and they lack standardization across units, so supply and maintenance is a bit of a nightmare. This means that any long-term campaign they launch may run into issues.”

She changed the slide, and a graphic showing drones and spacecraft appeared.

“From the aerospace perspective, they have upwards of six hundred fighter-bomber drones from various sources – enough to provide decent air support for their forces on the ground, but they’ll be spread thin if they fight on more than one geographic front. Their space fleet is a very mixed bag, but they do have enough deep space vessels to airlift the entire ground force, if they choose to do so. Only a handful of their spacecraft are armed and capable of defending themselves – the rest are transports only.”

Paisen cued a video that Tepper had shot, showing four large transports dropping from high altitude and then disgorging their troops across several landing zones. “By far the most concerning news is that they’ve spent the last few weeks rehearsing spaceborne invasions. They’re gearing up for war again, and it’s not going to be a war on Jokuan.”

“Jesus Christ,” Senator Herek said.

“How … how many divisions did you say?” Lask asked.

“Eighteen total,” Paisen told him.

“How many soldiers is that?” he asked.

“About a hundred and fifty thousand combat troops, sir. More if you count the support elements.”

“Good god,” Tsokel said. “Were you able to determine their target? Where they plan to invade?”

Paisen shook her head. “We’ve developed several sources, but none of them have that information. It could be that they don’t have access to it, but our sources are fairly highly placed. My estimate is that the target hasn’t been decided yet.”

“Wherever it is,” Vence added, “it’s a habitable world: breathable atmosphere, standard gravity, minimal radiation. They’re not training using any special life support equipment.”

Paisen pulled up another slide, which showed a star map of the galaxy, with a blinking dot at the center.

“There’s Jokuan, highlighted.” A red circle appeared around the blinking dot. “This first radius is everywhere their shortest-range vessels could reach without refueling. That includes twelve Territories and four Federacy planets. Here are their potential invasion sites if you add in a deep-space refuel en route.” Another circle appeared, larger this time. “… the list basically triples,” Paisen concluded.

“They must be targeting another Territory,” Herek noted. “It’s just unthinkable that they would challenge the Federacy.”

Lask frowned. “The key to understanding where they will attack lies in understanding why they are starting this war. What’s their motivation? What’s their president’s name, again?”

Paisen moved forward several slides, to a photo of a stern-looking older man in uniform. “President Mori is a sock-puppet. He’s a figurehead. This is General Yo-Tsai – he’s the real decision-maker.”

“And what does General Yo-Tsai want?” Lask asked.

“He wants what all men in power want: to stay in power,” Paisen said, smiling at the senators. “Yo-Tsai’s military spending has put the planet deep into debt. Their economy is heavily dependent on continued purchases by the government, so it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy: if he doesn’t want the government to collapse, he needs war.”

“To distract his population from the crumbling economy?” Senator Campos guessed.

“Partly,” Paisen said. “But mainly just to seize another planet’s assets. He needs to refill his coffers, and he’s gotta do it the old-fashioned way: plunder.”

“Rape, pillage, steal,” Lask mused. “How soon could they be ready to launch an invasion?”

“A few weeks … a month, at the outside,” Paisen said. “I’ve redistributed my team so they’re concentrated on the troop encampments. We’re keeping a close eye on them, so we’ll be able to give you as much advance warning as we can.”

Tsokel shook his head. “It’s not enough time. The Fleet Reaction Force would need at least two months to come online.”

“Best case scenario,” Campos told him. “The last time they ran a practice activation, it took nearly twice as long. And that was just a portion of the fleet.”

“And years ago,” Tsokel said.

Paisen narrowed her eyes. “Senators, there’s another option. My team could take a more active role.”

“You want to fight the whole Jokuan army?” Herek asked.

“No, sir,” Paisen said. “But we’re fully capable of sabotaging it.”

“How?” Lask asked.

“The most effective attacks hit the enemy on multiple fronts,” Paisen said. “My team would infiltrate their transports and damage critical components, effectively grounding their fleet. At the same time, we would introduce a virus into their military network that would limit communications and scramble files and documents, operational plans. We’d follow that by spreading a real virus amongst their personnel, a dysentery hybrid, something of that nature. Nothing lethal, just debilitating. None of the attacks would cause permanent damage, but they would delay them for months.”

“No,” Tsokel said. “No overt actions. We simply can’t afford to have this project exposed.”

“I have to reluctantly agree,” Lask said. “This news is troubling – it confirms our worst fears. But we’re treading on thin ice.”

“If we discover that their target is a Federacy planet, and we see evidence that they are preparing to launch their campaign, would you want us to initiate action at that point?” Paisen asked.

“Potentially,” Tsokel said, reluctantly. “But it would have to be very convincing evidence. And we would need to authorize any actions in advance.”

“Understood,” Paisen said. “Gentlemen, there’s one more item I wanted to show you.” She cued up the video Tepper had shot of the labor camp. “I’ll warn you: these images are disturbing.”

The senators watched in silence as footage from a micro-drone rolled, showing an aerial view of the camp Tepper had discovered.

“We discovered this several days ago,” Paisen narrated, her voice muted. “The people you see in the camp are members of the ethnic majority that rose up against Jokuan’s government during the civil war. They’ve been collected in this internment camp, and you can see that the conditions are … inhumane. It’s a death camp, essentially.”

She changed to another clip, in which a procession of exhausted prisoners carried bodies out of the camp and dumped them into the moat, before picking up their shovels to bury them.

Lask shuddered. “My god.”

“What are you suggesting that we do about this, Miss Potfin?” Tsokel asked.

“I don’t know,” Paisen admitted. “The camp’s too large for my team to handle – we could kill some of the guards, try to cover the prisoners while they escaped … but there are too many of them, and they’re in bad shape. They’d need medical attention. We wouldn’t be able to protect them, much less transport them …,” she trailed off. “Objectively, I don’t think there’s anything we can do for them right now. But I wanted to make you aware of the situation.”

Lask rubbed his chin. “If we leaked this footage to the press, it might create a public outcry. We could use it to build support for getting the FRF activated, and then the FRF would be able to free the prisoners as part of a preemptive strike.”

Tsokel shook his head sadly. “I don’t see that happening,” he said. “And the Jokuans would undoubtedly make the camp disappear the minute this video went public. While the FRF was activating, they’d kill everyone in the camp, and deny it ever existed. We’d just be signing their death warrants. It pains me to say it, but I don’t think there’s anything we can do for those people at this time.” He closed his datascroll, and stood up. “Thank you, Miss Potfin. Keep up the surveillance on Jokuan, and let us know of any new developments as soon as they happen.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Senate Guards escorted Paisen and Vence back through the winding corridors, to the building’s main entrance. Vence hailed a cab on her holophone, and the two climbed aboard when it arrived.

“Spaceport,” Paisen said. The vehicle pulled into the flow of traffic, weaving along the interior bays of the massive battleship that held the Federacy’s government headquarters.

I wonder if we’re going to drive past the spot where I crashed a car through a viewport a couple months back, Paisen wondered.

“Tepper sent us a message while we were in there,” Vence noted, interrupting Paisen’s reverie.

“Something new to report on Jokuan?” Paisen asked.

“No,” Vence said. “Scapa. They’re starting jury deliberations. All the experts are saying it’s going to be a guilty verdict.”

“Shit,” Paisen observed, chewing her lip in thought.

“If the jury moves fast, they could be executing him in a week,” Vence said.

“Hmm,” Paisen said. “He sent me a message while we were on Jokuan, but with everything going on, I didn’t get a chance to reply. He asked for my help. And I owe him a lot.”

“I thought you said he was a clumsy pain in the ass,” Vence noted.

“He is. But he’s a smart son-of-a-bitch, too … and he’s my friend.”

Vence checked her holophone, scrolling through several screens. “The flights would be tight, but we could be on Scapa in a week.” She cocked an eyebrow at Paisen.

Paisen studied the younger woman. “Yeah? Are you up for a detour on the way back to Jokuan?”