By Other Means (14 page)

“How can she be missing, there are no other Terrans for her to hide among,” He said slowly, trying not to sound too much like he thought the people under him were morons.

“We’re not sure, there was a commotion in the promenade and we lost sight of her for a moment, then she was gone.”

Sienel chuckled, darkly but still with humor.

“Nicely played, Sentinel.” He acknowledged before turning to his subordinates, “Find her. Don’t approach, don’t be seen, but find her and contact me immediately.”

“Yes, Sir.”

They left in a hurry, but he ignored them as he turned to the computer displays and called up the recordings of procession.

There it is. She’s good, I can barely follow her motions…

The cameras covered the entire area, but it was clear that the Terran sentinel had counted on that and was using the crowd for cover. Sensors designed to track living movement inevitably became overwhelmed by crowds, and she was using that deftly to her advantage.

Sienel suspected that this was likely another test more than a serious attempt at infiltration, which was one reason he wasn’t significantly more concerned. At the moment there was a very firm limit on the damage a single Terran could cause, the worst case scenario being the destruction of the station itself and the deaths of everyone on board.

That was, however, a highly unlikely goal in his estimation.

No, Sienel expected that she was after more intelligence. Response times, how well their security coverage was, possible more information from the station’s networks. All information they expected the Terrans to seek and, ultimately, to acquire. It was one reason they’d chosen the station, there was little here of any tactical or strategic value.

Still, it was more than a little irksome to lose her so completely while she was under the watch of no less than thirty of his agents and every camera in the area.

He was reconsidering her official classification, actually. No Sentinel, in his experience, would be quite so subtle.

Kill everyone in the area before they saw anything? Certainly. Vanish without a trace in a crowd while being watched by skilled and trained security? Not their forte, to say the least.

So, she isn’t a Sentinel then… but she’s clearly not an Agent either. What are you, little Terran?

*****

The alien promenade was a different place when you had the time to observe it in motion without the influences of dozens of officials clogging up the system.

There was a buzzing trade in small items, almost entirely handmade or natural goods from what Sorilla could tell. In fact, she had yet to spot anything that looks manufactured in the entire area. It was an interesting dichotomy against the clearly manufactured station it was set on.

She wasn’t overly concerned with the knick knack trade at the moment, however, though she had to admit that some of the hand crafted blades she’d seen were enough to catch her eye. While not on par with a molecular edged blade, a good steel knife likely wouldn’t trip the alien scanners either, so it did bear considering.

For the moment, however, she was more focused on developing a contact the intelligence people had already begun to work on. The local criminal wasn’t hard to spot, he was clearly something of a cock of the walk in the area, in his own mind at least. She suspected that he was probably connected to the local law enforcement somehow, that was usually how someone in his position kept from getting rousted too often.

It was remotely possible that he was actually as good as he thought he was, but then if that were true she likely wouldn’t have spotted him in the first place.

So Sorilla mentally classified the man as more self-important than important, and went about her
shopping
trip while she waited for him to show up.

She bought some trinkets, the cheap stuff that was available from the public fabricators. Sorilla focused on items that she could acquire the source code for, nothing that would interest security if they caught her. She didn’t need anything classified yet, what she and SOLCOM needed was basic intelligence on just about every aspect of the Alliance culture they could get.

Honestly, I doubt we’d be able to properly understand anything classified just now anyway,
Sorilla thought, perhaps a little pessimistically.

The Alliance culture was unlike anything she’d ever encountered, it was unlike anything she’d even read about. It certainly didn’t fit any of the ‘perfect’ cultural patterns that had been imagined over the years.

There were strong aspects of core Communist doctrines that she could see, but it wasn’t clear how far those stretched. For certain, however, Sorilla hadn’t yet located anything that she could compare to Corporate culture on Earth. Most of the local economy was very small, often individualistic in nature.

That was in agreement with what she was reading on the local networks as well.

Few people had any use for the very
concept
of a corporation in the Alliance, near as she could tell. On Earth it took the economy power of a conglomerate of people to accomplish larger tasks, but from what she could tell the Alliance
crowdsourced
most, if not all, of that work.

Their primary economy was one of ideas, of designs.

And they sold those designs dirt cheap.

It made sense, however, since a design cost nothing to duplicate. Once you had it, it was free to copy as many times as you liked. From there you sent it out across the Alliance and sold it for pennies, or whatever the local equivalent was. One piece of important information she had located was that the estimated population of the Alliance worlds exceeded Nine hundred
trillion
sapients.

A billion sales was literally a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population, but it would be enough to make an Alliance civilian rich.

From there, the buyer simply sent the design to a local fabricator, if he or she didn’t own one themselves.

Sorilla had already located references to what she might term industrial fabricators, likely owned by planetary governments. Those were used to build crowdsourced
starships
and other more sizeable items.

It was mind boggling, but Sorilla quickly realized that she was looking at the tip of the iceberg and as stunning as it was, she suspected that the depths of the Alliance went very deep indeed.

It’s a workers paradise,
She realized.
A real one, not some imagined vision of perfection. You do your own work, and you’re rewarded for it… but it can’t be that simple.

Sorilla had studied every form of government ever proposed in human history, from tribal tyrants to democratic presidents and everything in between. Few of the ideals had ever been properly tried, reality tended to get in the way in those cases.

Communism, for all the twentieth century talk, was one that had never existed in history beyond small communes and, ironically, the family unit. Stalin and his ilk were little more than tyrants fooling the people into thinking they were serving some ideal of the common good. It was a good lesson to remember, in Sorilla’s mind, that you should always watch what a newly formed nation chooses to name itself.

The name they choose, always masks their weakness.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was a perfect example. They were not a union, most of them were not soviet, none of them were socialist, and they weren’t republics. They poorly attempted to hide their weakness by proclaiming the opposite in their names.

It never failed in her experience, people knew where they were weak and it was an instinct to try and mask that weakness. Sorilla often used the same basic technique to tear down her students so they could be rebuilt, or to get to the heart of an interrogation.

Of course,
Sorilla noted,
That tells me all I need to know about this
Alliance
.

Unless she deeply missed her guess, she would find that they were not so allied as they wanted humans to believe.

Sorilla’s mind was brought back to the present when her target made his first appearance.

*****

Soun should have known he was getting himself deeper than he wanted when he sold the aliens that first clean card. He would likely learn to regret it later, he supposed, but for the moment he couldn’t help but be impressed by the Terran that had just waylaid him and pulled him off into a semi-private area of the Promenade.

He glanced around, from her face to where the observation devices were, and had to be impressed again. She’d clearly spotted them and picked her area well.

“Terran,” He nodded in greeting.

“I apologize,” She said in stilted Alliance Standard, “I do not know your race.”

“I am Quero,” He said, “local to this arm, a few light lengths from this system.”

“Light lengths?” She seemed to be considering the term, “Light years?”

“Year?” Soun shrugged, “Don’t know the word. Light Length is the standard stellar measuring point. One hundred thousandth of the span across the disc of the galaxy.”

Sorilla frowned hard, thinking deeply about that.

The Galaxy is seventy thousand light years across, so a light length is roughly point seven of a light year?
She considered, thinking about before filing it for someone else to consider.

“How many other species are that close to this region?”

“Alliance or non-aligned?”

Sorilla actually had to struggle not to perk up at that bit of information, “There are non-aligned species nearby?”

“Other than your own? Several,” Soun said simply, “Few star faring ones, and none that earned the same recognition as your own from the Alliance, however. Normally negotiations are done over the homeworld of the species.”

Not so subtle intimidation factor there, pretty standard,
Sorilla thought to herself.
We do the same from Carrier decks back home.

So far she wasn’t learning anything she hadn’t expected, to one level or another, but it was good to confirm just the same.

“You’ve not snuck away from your handlers just to ask me about the locals, now have you?” Soun looked at her in what Sorilla could only presume was a skeptical way.

“Partly,” She said.

“And the rest?”

Sorilla held up a handful of cash cards she’d been issued for this specific reason.

“That I can help you with,” Soun admitted, “Clean cards, or services?”

“I want consumer tech,” Sorilla said, “sampling of whatever is popular will do, preferably that will suit my figure.”

He eyed her through the thick, and rather frumpy, robes. “How well suited?”

“General.”

“I can do that, anything else?”

Sorilla nodded, “The source code for anything you have fabricated.”

Soun frowned, few people wanted to code of what they were buying, unless they were planning on modifying it… or, of course, understanding it. He nodded, “Alright, I’ll use clear titled items then. That will limit what I can get you, though. Protected titles don’t release the code.”

Sorilla nodded, understanding, “How long do title protections last?”

“Alliance law gives protection for five years, but some of the best designers never release the code,” Soun answered, “if they’re good enough, they can keep it secure for longer.”

“Why would anyone ever release the code?”

“You have to if you want to qualify for the first five year protection offered by the alliance,” Soun said simply, “if you keep the code secret, you’re taking your chances that no one will crack it before at least the five years are up. It’s usually a fools bet, not one in a thousand is that good.”

“Got it,” Sorilla said, nodding, and she did.

The Alliance had an interesting take on intellectual property law, but it wasn’t that far removed from Earth’s. The five year limit was far stricter, of course, than life plus fifty that many ideas were protected for on Earth, but the basic gist wasn’t entirely alien. You had to make your money early on, or at least build a massive lead in the market, in the Alliance system, however.

Sorilla was willing to bet that innovation was the strength of the Alliance design, something that often seemed stilted by the ever increasingly complicated laws of Earth.

“I also want one more thing,” She said, before handing the cards over.

“Which is?”

“Keep an eye out, anything strange goes on on the station, let me or one of my people know,” Sorilla said.

It was always better to have friends in low places, often far better, than having them in high places. At least when it came to Sorilla’s line of work. Friends in high places tended to forget your name as soon as things got inconvenient, but she’d been consistently surprised by how loyal thugs and thieves could be in the right circumstances.

They might literally stab you in the back, true, but they’d never just forget your name and ignore you in a crisis. Sorilla learned a long time past that she preferred an honest betrayal over a political one.

“Alright,” Soun said, “I can do that. What do you consider strange?”

“You’ll know it if you see it,” Sorilla told him, “we had an assassination attempt already.”

Soun perked up, “I didn’t hear about that.”

“They’re keeping it quiet, I don’t care if it slips out.”

In point of fact, Sorilla wanted it to slip out. Rumors that the Alliance couldn’t secure their own station would open up a few cracks in the local façade. Maybe enough for her to get a decent idea of where those cracks were, maybe not, either way it wouldn’t hurt her or hers and it would likely cause her opponents a few headaches.

“I’ll put out the word,” Soun said after some thought, looking a little more upbeat than he had since she’d pulled him off out of the crowd.

Sorilla had to go with her gut, but she was putting the little league criminal in the category that self-important yet largely unimportant people often fit. They liked anything that made them feel more than they were. If she were right, she could play with that.

She had before.

“Good,” She said, handing him the cards. “I’ll see you in a few hours.”