Chapter 45 - Compounding Errors

  Agent Torian Falk sat at the wide, steel desk in the dimly lit operations room. The room hummed with the soft buzz of equipment—monitors mounted on every wall displaying overlapping feeds of the city’s sectors, a map overlay of the garrison raid’s vicinity glowing faintly in the centre of the table.

  It was a far cry from the tiny office Station Commander Trask had assigned him when he first arrived. If Falk were the type of man to feel smug about such things, he might have taken quiet satisfaction in how quickly Trask’s dismissive attitude had evaporated.

  Alas, that was usually the way of things – Imperial Intelligence was mocked and derided, right up until everybody realised how essential they were. In some ways, it was an indication of how effective they were at their jobs – that so many people didn’t realise the sheer amount of work going on behind the scenes, the threats that were dealt with before anyone even knew about them.

  Oh, well. He didn’t join Imperial Intelligence because he wanted validation.

  The room was quiet except for the occasional tapping as Lieutenant Veris looked over her own work at a console on the opposite side of the room. Falk had to admit that the young Lieutenant was a pleasant surprise to find at a backwater like this, and he was intending to recommend her for Imperial Intelligence. She was hardly perfect, of course, and had yet to fully internalise the necessity of some of the more… extreme measures, but that would come with time.

  Falk shook his head slightly, refocusing his somewhat scattered thoughts. It had been… longer than he would have liked since he’d been able to get a good night’s sleep, and this raid on the sector 17 garrison had come just as he had managed to carve out a few hours for rest.

  He looked back at his screen, currently displaying a feed from the patrol vehicle that had pursued the Freeholders. The footage jittered slightly, the camera’s perspective fixed on the stolen van as it veered sharply down the garrison’s perimeter road.

  The back door of the van was hanging open, damaged from a near-miss of a grenade and allowing the occasional glimpse of the inside as the vehicle swerved back and forth across the road. Of particular interest was the limp and unmoving form of Darius Kallan, injured from the same blast that had damaged the doors, and the bulky combat drones.

  Falk scrubbed the playback back and forth, focusing on the exact moment when the drones’ weapons engaged. The camera caught the first flash of light, a burst of rapid-fire bullets slicing through the air. The shots didn’t come from drones in flight—there hadn’t been time to launch them—but from where they were swaying back and forth on a mobile transport rack. It was unwieldy and impractical. Slapdash.

  But effective.

  Falk paused the video and leaned closer to the screen, studying the drones’ status lights. Green. Operational. They shouldn’t have been active at all, much less targeting the pursuing vehicle with its Imperial transponder code. The combat drones were locked into an isolated control system. Access required physical contact with the processor units—units that would have to be pulled entirely to bypass standard protocols.

  Even the new technology that the Freeholders were fielding that allowed them to hack through layers of high-end encryption to devastating effect shouldn’t have worked. All evidence indicated that the technology required the use of a bypass kit – or, at least, every recorded instance had used a bypass kit. But without a physical port to connect the kit to, it should have been impossible to reprogram the drones.

  Not to mention that there was no indication in the footage that anything had happened. From the looks of things, the drones had just spontaneously decided to switch themselves on and start shooting.

  It didn’t add up.

  Falk exhaled slowly, a measured release of frustration, and resigned himself to the slow grind of answers. He would have to unravel this mystery one frame at a time. Starting at the moment the drones activated, he methodically began working his way backward through the footage.

  He traced the swaying motion of the drones on their transport rack, the scattered glints of shrapnel embedded in their housing, and the darkened interior of the stolen van. Darius Kallan’s body lay crumpled in the corner, limp and motionless. Injured. Unconscious.

  And yet, somehow, responsible.

  A few minutes into his frame-by-frame analysis, Veris’s voice cut through the quiet.

  “Sir,” she began, her tone cautious but insistent. “What’s that?”

  Falk paused the footage and glanced up, grateful for the distraction. He may pride himself on his discipline, but that didn’t make sticking to a tedious task any more fun. “What’s what?”

  Veris stepped closer, gesturing toward the screen. “Just in the lower left corner there, next to Kallan’s hand. It looks like… a liquid of some kind?”

  Falk turned back to the display. “I’d imagine that’s blood, Lieutenant,” he said dryly. “That tends to happen when you catch a face full of shrapnel.”

  Despite his words, he isolated the area and zoomed in on it, allowing the video to play forward in slow motion. Always best to be sure, after all. To his surprise, a few frames later the glow from a streetlight reflected off the liquid, revealing it to be a metallic silver.

  He squinted. “Or maybe just a coolant leak,” he said absently, continuing to manipulate the recording. Irritatingly, the van swerved a few seconds later, obscuring the view.

  “The drones don’t use a liquid coolant system,” Veris countered. “I checked.”

  Interesting.

  “What about the van?” Falk asked, his tone measured. “Anything else in the footage that might have a liquid system?”

  Veris shook her head. “No, sir. I checked that too. None of the equipment visible in the van uses liquid cooling—or anything liquid at all, for that matter. The van itself was reported stolen from a moving company a few hours ago, along with a second. They provided details about the vehicles, and there are no modifications listed that would explain anything like that.

  Even more interesting.

  Falk tapped away at the controls, scrolling through the footage until the van swerved back the other way, affording another clear view into the interior. The liquid was still present, but surprisingly, it wasn’t spilling out over the floor of the van in a natural pattern. Instead, it appeared to be running in a specific direction, almost like it was being… attracted to something.

  “Judging by the way the van is swerving around, it definitely shouldn’t be moving like that,” Veris noted, her voice tinged with curiosity and just a hint of excitement.

  Falk’s silence spoke volumes. He manipulated the feed, capturing each instance in which the liquid appeared and splicing them together for a clearer picture. The pattern became undeniable—the silver substance wasn’t just moving randomly. It was somehow, impossibly, purposeful.

  A terrible, impossible suspicion started brewing in the back of his mind.

  When the liquid reached the drone rack, it defied physics entirely, flowing upward against gravity along the rack’s support beams, only barely visible because of how it reflected the light. Falk’s stomach churned as the substance made contact with the drones. A second later, the drones’ status lights blinked green, and their weapons came to life, sending a rapid burst of fire at the pursuing vehicle.

  “Incredible,” Lieutenant Veris breathed, leaning in closer. “It’s… interfacing with the drones somehow? What is that, some kind of… nanite slurry? How did the Freeholders get their hands on something like that?”

  Under any other circumstances, Falk would have had some pointed questions about how Veris even knew enough about the possibility to suggest that. There was a reason they’d stunted the development of that branch of technology, after all, and it certainly wasn’t because it was fun or easy.

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  But right now, he was far too distracted to care, reaching almost desperately for his personal, heavily encrypted dataslate.

  His fingers moved with practised ease, bypassing the security layers faster than most could blink. The dataslate hummed to life, its display a stark white before resolving into a complex interface of folders and files, each labelled with innocuous designations that belied their contents.

  He navigated to a particular folder, its label unassuming: “Field Assessments - 9B.” Inside were encrypted video files, stored far from the prying eyes of even his superiors. This was Falk’s insurance, his ace in the hole. Regulations be damned—an Imperial Intelligence agent had to play their own game sometimes.

  The file he opened was labelled simply “CT-05 Incident.”

  He flicked it up onto the larger screen. The playback began. The footage was grainy, recorded from a discreetly hidden body cam sewn into Falk’s uniform. It showed a dimly lit corridor aboard a small, private luxury vessel. Around him, occasionally visible in the footage, were the blurry forms of his teammates, advanced countermeasures built into their armour distorting the video enough that details were hard to make out.

  They moved with practised precision, weapons drawn and ready. Each step was deliberate, every corner checked.

  Gunfire flashed as they moved through the ship, faint muffled pops coming through the tiny camera’s microphone. Falk’s voice barked orders, cold and steady. The audio was distorted and low quality, but such was the tradeoff of having a camera small enough to avoid notice.

  It was clinical. Efficient. Routine.

  He fast-forwarded to the part he needed, his lips pressed into a tight line. He paused on the image of a man lying face down, a richly embroidered coat marking him as someone of importance. Falk advanced the footage frame by frame, watching as his own arm lifted in the video, the barrel of his weapon centering on the man.

  The trigger pull was clean. The man jerked once and collapsed fully onto the floor.

  His blood was not red. Instead, it was a metallic silver, flowing unnaturally away from the body.

  Almost… fleeing.

  He let the footage play, advancing to the part where one of the enforcers stepped into view. The figure carried a bulky weapon rigged with a canister backpack, a tool designed for incinerating biological threats. The enforcer aimed it at the body, and with a hiss, a torrent of caustic liquid sprayed over the man, consuming him in a violent chemical reaction. Smoke and vapour obscured the scene, but the metallic liquid bubbled and dissolved with disturbing ease.

  Just as he remembered.

  The threat should have been contained. He’d been assured that the acidic compound would destroy it utterly, and there was no way that… wait.

  With a feeling almost but not entirely like dread, Falk isolated the corner of the screen, where, barely visible, a tiny stream of the substance slipped beneath the boot of an enforcer, escaping destruction. Falk froze the video there, leaning closer. He played the clip again, slower this time.

  When the enforcer lifted his foot, the liquid was gone.

  He leaned back in his seat, mind churning. Part of him was busy claiming that intel hadn’t told him that the target could… split off like that, that it wasn’t his fault for missing it. Falk dismissed the notion almost before it could form. He was the Agent on the ground; of course it was his fault for missing it.

  Understandable, perhaps – who could predict the thing would hitch a ride on his own man – but still his fault.

  Its presence also finally explained the malfunctions his ship had experienced – clearly, it had interfaced with his ship’s systems somehow, creating cascading errors that forced him to divert to a planetary outpost for repairs. That spoke of an uncomfortable level of intelligence, of planning.

  He hadn’t really paid much attention to the R&D department when they had been informing him of the target’s capabilities – didn’t really care, to be honest. He was there to destroy it; why would he care about how advanced the thing was? As long as he had enough practical information to do his job, the theoreticals were largely pointless.

  Except clearly, they weren’t.

  Falk didn’t waste much time lambasting himself for his mistake, beyond making a mental note to be more thorough in the future. Even if he hadn’t been cocky, he likely would have missed a portion of the target slipping away. Instead, he pulled up his personal notes on Darius Kallan, going over them again in light of this new information.

  Presumably, the target had made contact when the man wandered into the reactor room. That seemed to imply the target had limited mobility by itself – otherwise, it would be significantly less suspicious to hitch a ride from any other non-restricted location on the ship.

  It also implied that Kallan may well have been an unwitting accomplice – at least at first. It fit his personality profile better – the man had clearly had some negative experiences with the Empire before, so it was hardly surprising he had tried to run once he realised they would be hunting him, but it hadn’t made sense for him to have been an agent the entire time.

  In hindsight, Falk’s decision to scramble some of the local enforcers and head for the man’s home probably had been hasty. It may have been the final straw that drove the man into the arms of the Freeholders.

  Speaking of the Freeholders… how had Kallan known to contact them? It had been one of the larger inconsistencies with the man’s personality profile – he had an anti-authority streak a mile wide, and probable hatred for the Empire aside, the man just wasn’t driven enough to join a resistance movement. By all accounts, he was cynical and jaded - more the type to grumble about how bad life was than to actually do anything about it.

  Falk hummed distractedly to himself, making a note to follow that up later.

  “Sir?” Veris’s tentative voice broke through his thoughts, and he stiffened. In his haste at realising his mistake and finally finding the right thread to pull, he had somehow completely forgotten she was there.

  Very unlike him.

  Slowly, he turned his head to find her standing behind him, her expression cautious and curious. “Have you… found a lead, sir?” she asked tentatively, gesturing toward the screen. Clearly, she had some idea that what she had just seen was supposed to be classified. She almost certainly didn’t know the extent of how classified.

  Falk’s mind kicked into gear, weighing the risks. Disposing of the Lieutenant would be a shame – she was intelligent and meticulous, not to mention she had been the one to pick up on the target’s presence in the first place. Then again, he wasn’t one to let something as base as sentimentality get in the way of his job.

  Still… her disappearance would attract attention. May even limit his movements if Commander Trask was the suspicious sort. Doubtful, considering his read of the Commander was a washed-up officer who just barely had enough skill in politics to keep his position.

  Then again, considering how this whole situation had only come about because he had missed things, maybe it was worth the risk just to have a second set of eyes. A single failure could be explained away, but if he failed again…

  Well, Imperial Intelligence didn’t have much in the way of a retirement policy.

  Decision made, he pinned the Lieutenant with a hard glare, and his voice turned to ice. “Lieutenant Veris,” he began, every word deliberate, “if you value your life—if you value anything at all—you will never speak of what you just saw. Not to me. Not to anyone.”

  Veris froze, her eyes widening. He usually preferred to lead with the carrot, not the stick, but he could not afford another mistake. He leaned forward, his tone dropping lower. “Do you understand me, Lieutenant? If I hear so much as a whisper about this, you will disappear. Permanently. No one will know what happened to you, and no one will come looking.”

  She swallowed hard, her face pale. “Yes, sir,” she whispered.

  Falk held her gaze for a moment longer, ensuring his message had sunk in. Then he turned back to the dataslate, shutting it down with a sharp swipe. The room fell silent except for the hum of the equipment around them.

  “Return to your work,” he ordered curtly, not looking at her.

  Veris nodded and quickly retreated to her console. Falk remained seated, staring at the now-blank screen of his dataslate. His fingers tapped against the edge of the desk as his thoughts churned.

  He leaned back in his chair, his gaze drifting to the map overlay on the central monitor. It highlighted the area surrounding the garrison raid, but his focus was elsewhere.

  Darius Kallan, judging by the footage, was likely dead. The shrapnel wounds alone would have been enough, and the erratic swaying of his limp body in the van suggested he hadn’t been conscious for some time. But Falk knew better than to assume the target had died with him. No, the footage made it clear that this thing—whatever it was—was capable of transferring itself. It had jumped once before. It would jump again.

  That was the greatest risk now: losing the target. If it could keep transferring hosts, it could evade them indefinitely, becoming a phantom in the chaos of the Freeholders’ movements. Falk clenched his jaw. That couldn’t happen.

  He rose abruptly, his boots clicking sharply on the steel floor as he moved to the central console. His fingers danced across the controls, inputting his override codes. A notification flashed on the screen, demanding confirmation for his next action.

  “Suspend All Outgoing Traffic?”

  Falk pressed the confirmation without hesitation. It was a drastic step, one that would effectively grind the station’s operations to a halt. Mining and salvage ships would be grounded. Supply runs delayed. Even diplomatic and Imperial vessels would be held in place. The ripple effects would be immense—angry captains, financial losses, and questions Falk would eventually have to answer.

  Not to mention, it would show the full extent of Imperial Intelligence’s reach, something that had remained hidden for quite some time. He would have to answer to his superiors for this, exposing the hidden back doors in all Imperial systems.

  None of it mattered.

  “Lieutenant Veris,” he said sharply, his voice cutting through the hum of the room. “Issue a station-wide directive. All vessels are to remain docked until further notice. No exceptions.”

  Veris hesitated for the barest moment. “Sir, that will—”

  “Now,” Falk snapped. His glare left no room for argument.

  As Veris scrambled to relay the directive, Falk keyed into his secure comms line, connecting directly to his ship. “This is Falk. Take off and maintain a low geosynchronous orbit about the station. All outgoing traffic has been suspended. Any ship that attempts to leave is to be disabled or destroyed. Maintain orbital surveillance and prepare for interception.”

  “Yes, sir,” the comm officer replied, her tone brisk.

  Falk ended the call, his mind already racing ahead. There was another option, one far more drastic than suspending traffic. If the target continued to elude him, orbital bombardment would ensure its destruction. There would be an… unfortunate amount of collateral damage, but acceptable in the grander scheme.

  He glanced at the map overlay, mentally framing how to spin such an event. A Xeno attack. It would be believable, especially out here on the frontier. The Empire’s propaganda machine would take care of the rest.

  For now, he dismissed the thought as premature, but he filed it away. It was always best to have contingencies.