Molehunt (5 page)

‘As am I, sir,' said Maximus.

As are you,' agreed Viktus, steepling his fingers and gazing at Maximus over the top of them. Maximus had the uneasy feeling that Viktus could see right through him. He had never had that feeling before and he did not like it. He did not like Viktus either. ‘By the time you return to your quarters this entire agency will have upgraded its security protocol to SecCon Two.'

Maximus's eyes widened appropriately. ‘Security Condition Two, sir?'

‘You think that's overreacting, Cadet?'

Maximus knew he needed to turn this meeting to his advantage. Maybe that's what it was about. Viktus was testing him, not because he thought Maximus was the mole, but because he had other plans for him.

Maximus decided to bite the bullet, whatever that meant.

‘Sir, in my opinion, we should proceed immediately to SecCon One. Sir.'

It was the last thing he wanted, but it seemed the right response.

Viktus looked slightly startled. Whatever response he had been expecting, it wasn't that one.

‘Please explain, Cadet.'

‘Well, sir …' Black sat forward slightly on his chair, all boyish enthusiasm. ‘As you know, I've been standing watch in D-Branch, long range situation modelling. I've … taken it upon myself to process other sources of data and Intel –'

‘Other sources?' Viktus raised one eyebrow, but nodded for Maximus to continue.

‘Yessir. It's kind of a hobby of mine. It's just that I think we get too dependent on our normal sources of intelligence and field data. Worse, our enemies know this. One man's habit is another man's leverage.'

‘Interesting notion, Cadet. I'll take it up with Command Staff. Go on.'

‘I've been feeding data sets from a range of planetary and sector newszines, political rallies, company gossip, etc, into Oracle and correlating them with the disappearances of military transports, police actions, and the manoeuvrings of the Clans and Companies over the past five decades.'

‘Fifty years? That seems a rather long timeline, even taking account of anti-ageing therapies.'

‘Yessir, but the way I read it, the Clans and Companies, especially the Companies, have a vested interest in taking the long view.'

‘It's certainly a novel collection of data; I'll give you that. And what did you find?'

‘This, sir.'

Without asking permission he went to the wall and activated a view tank. A three dimensional image of the civilised galaxy appeared. It showed all nine galactic sectors, comprising some ten per cent of the Milky Way galaxy, including Delta Sector, which contained the main hub of human-populated worlds; Cygnus Sector, which was essentially uncharted and off-limits to law-abiding citizens; and the other more sparsely settled sectors. For a long time Black said nothing as he keyed in data,, colour-coding it, showing links and transitions. When he had finished he stood back.

Viktus frowned. He studied the view tank representation for several minutes without saying a word. Finally he said, ‘Give me your interpretation of this, Cadet.'

Maximus, always the consummate actor, took a deep breath. ‘Sir, the Companies are forming a
Majoris Corporate
, what used to be called an
oligarchy concordat
. In other words, they're secretly ganging up, forming pacts and relationships. You only have to look at the increased incidence of intermarriage of business in recent years. They intend to control all trade and military expenditure in and out of the Cygnus Sector. Add the fact that the companies have been paying rock-bottom rates for sanctioned assassinations, and you see that the Clans must be involved as well.'

‘Why the Cygnus Sector?'

‘I don't know, sir. The Cygnus Sector has been behind the Veil for two centuries now. Very few of our agents have gone in and come out alive.'

The Veil was an anomalous zone of space difficult to navigate with
n-space
drives, but which had also come to mean a self-imposed boundary designed to keep snooping law enforcers out.

Viktus gave Maximus an appraising look. ‘My daughter being one of the few.'

‘Yes, sir. Your daughter was there some nine months ago. However, the file on that mission is restricted.'

‘And you'd like to get a look at it and add it into your calculations?'

‘Yes, sir. I would, sir.'

‘You said we should go to SecCon One. You perceive the actions of the Companies and Clans, and the possibility that a
Majoris Corporata
is being planned, as a direct threat to RIM?'

‘I do, sir. As you know, they hold no love for us, resenting what they call our interference. Without us, they could pretty much do as they like.'

‘There are still the Sentinels.'

‘Yes, sir, but the Sentinels respond to the commission of corporate crime. They don't anticipate it, they don't work against it, by fair means or foul …'

‘The way we do.' Viktus smiled. Maximus averted his gaze, as if he had made a raw cadet's gaffe. ‘I think SecCon Two is sufficient for now, Cadet.' Viktus pursed his lips and returned to his chair. ‘Don't switch that thing off,' he said, indicating the view tank. ‘I want my people to take a look at it. Nice work, Maxim. I see you're wasted where you are. How would you like to join the Task Force? I like the way your mind works and I think we could use you. Mind you, I want you to keep working on this pet theory of yours.'

‘Thank you, sir. I will.' He hoped his eyes were sparkling.

‘That'll be all for now, Cadet.'

Maximus stood, saluted and headed for the door.

‘Oh, and Maxim?'

Maximus stopped at the door, a sudden chilly feeling gusting through him. ‘Yes, sir?'

‘Go and pick out quarters suitable for a Special Agent Level 4. Your promotion will reach you in a day or so. I'll also see to it that your clearance is upgraded. You can access the Anneke Longshadow case file; see what happened on her Cygnus mission. Let me have your thoughts on the matter as soon as you can. Well done, Maxim.'

Maximus nodded, inventing a dopey smile for his face. ‘Thank you, sir.' The door opened before him.

He made his way down the corridor, the picture of suppressed exhilaration. As he neared his old quarters, however, he turned left instead of right and was soon in an unused area of the station. He activated the interrupter he kept in his pocket to negate a gluon force field. He glanced up at the security eye. It was now vulnerable to his hack, as he had substituted a pre-recorded scene of an empty corridor into it.

Maximus entered a code on the pad beside a door marked ‘storage' and stepped inside, carefully locking the door behind him. At the back of the room, behind a pile of crates, was another smaller door leading into a maintenance shaft and to what the tech supervisors called a ‘cockpit'. This was a small operating room from which they could monitor the systems that kept the vast installation working – air, water, minerals, sewage, electrical, laser, gas and others. Here they could also sack out or goof off. This particular cockpit, however, had been unused for years, being in a section superseded by AI when Maximus was still in primary school.

This was Maximus's own headquarters. He had left the monitors and consoles intact and restored their coating of thick unbroken dust after each visit – specially constructed nanoants that did their work and turned into dust. He sat down in the ‘pilot's chair', as the maintenance jocks called it, and activated his systems.

He had already spliced one of these into the main communications net. He quickly found what he was looking for and activated a directed ear signal broadcast. Privately, he listened to the automatic recording his system had made in his absence; safe from any sentinel nanoparticles RIM or Oracle might have floating around.

‘Jake? Viktus here.'

‘You meet with the lad?'

‘Yep.'

‘And?'

‘He's an interesting kid.' Maximus snorted at the word ‘kid'. ‘He knows about the Cygnus Sector.'

‘He
what
–?'

‘Jake, Maxim put it together himself. Even showed me on my own view tank. Fact is, he added a few wrinkles that we missed.'

‘You don't say?'

‘I do.'

‘What about that other matter? You rule him out?'

‘About him being the mole? Yes. He's just a kid, excited at having found out something the grown-ups had missed.'

‘Makes sense to me. Unless –'

‘Unless that's what he wants us to think.'

There was a moment's silence, and then both burst out laughing. When the laughter subsided, Viktus snorted. ‘Listen to us. We've been in this business too long.'

‘You're telling me,' said Jake. ‘Yesterday I was convinced my mother was the mole.'

‘I've met your mother. I think you could be on to something.'

They both laughed again.

Jake said, ‘So what are you going to do with our pet genius?'

‘I've already promoted him and invited him to join the Task Force.'

‘Good thinking. Heck, if he were a few years younger I'd take him in like you did Anneke.'

‘You, a stepfather?' Viktus laughed throatily. ‘I'll be dead when that happens!'

The conversation moved onto other matters. Maximus relaxed for the first time since he'd been told to report to Viktus.

The fools suspected nothing. Now he could get on with his own priority program, which was the elimination of Anneke Longshadow.

The first thing Maximus did when he arrived on the Task Force assigned to find the mole – if there was one – was to construct a low-level smoke screen. What was once called a ‘red herring'.

The red herring's name was Harbage. Cadet Esprin Harbage. He was already, as they said in the business, ‘in play'.

One of Maximus's new jobs was to search personnel files and backgrounds, and review original application interviews and psych evaluations, searching for patterns others had missed. It became apparent that his brain was peculiarly wired to find patterns where sometimes Oracle could not perceive them. Maximus had secretly augmented his neural jack with several interesting features, including his ‘death code' instruction. Not only could he absorb advanced pattern matching algorithms, but if he thought about the colour yellow and repeated the death code sentence in his head ten times, the electrical stimulation of his brain's speech centre and related de Bono neural loops would trigger nanomechanical relays, releasing tiny but deadly microcapsules of prion X, the notorious ‘self-destruct' instruction the body used against cancer. A handy guard against torture, although the technology had cost the scientist who provided Maximus with it an arm and a leg prior to his newfound generosity. Literally. The limbs were re-grown from drench vats, of course, but there was little Maximus could do about that.

More than once Viktus had thrown up his hands in disgust. ‘Why do we have this trillion dollar pile of hardware, when Maximus here can out-think it twice before breakfast? Trillion, hell, it's worth five times that in Averaged Galactic Currency. Can anybody tell me why?'

This time they were in the main open-plan room of the Task Force headquarters. Floor to ceiling plasglass windows gazed out over a lava lake from which great geysers of fiery magma regularly erupted, shooting up to a thousand metres into the air. Above the lake, a vast artificial aquarium shaped like a curved band floated in the terraformed sky. Its exact colour was hard to place: somewhere between turquoise and magenta.

Viktus was perched on the edge of a desk holding a sheaf of notes, handed to him by Maximus. The notes were on e-paper, digitally ‘ink' capsulated paper that could be updated any time by electrically moving colours in each microcapsule.

Maximus had identified twenty-three agents who had concealed potential breaches of security during their recruitment interviews. Most were trivial: one had a brother serving a jail sentence on Sigma Gamma. While this wasn't cause for instant dismissal, and understandable in other times, such revelations took on a darker tone in these days that would become known as the Great Mole Hunt.