Domus Publica
| Lost and Found: A Study in Corruption |
 |  |
| IV. |
Based on the information pul-Matté had given me, I knew that a briefcase had been brought under heavily armed guard into Milmach Hall, at
12 Navy Observatory Circle. I’d never been to Milmach Hall; the Navy doesn’t like anyone to know what went on in there, but rumor has it
that Section Nineteen has something to do with it. (Then again, rumor also has it that there’s a surviving recording somewhere of Brullian
Dyll’s last concert and that there’s a proof of Vermizli’s Last Theorem, so make of that what you will.) Purkins hadn’t given away too much,
but he had indicated subtly that Imperial Intelligence had gotten involved at some point. One of the civilians working in Milmach Hall, one
Jeras Xaviedie, had absconded with the briefcase under... unclear... circumstances.
My cigarette was burning low, so I deposited it in the ash tray next to my rack and lit another. Pul-Matté’d given me a few scant details
about Xaviedie, probably what he’d been able to scrounge out of the GAO. Mininav wasn’t known to be very free with details about its
civilians. Man was a white-collar worker, some sort of technical consultant. Details about that weren’t available. Not a Party member.
Average political and ideological ratings. Got his baccalaureate in applied science from the Deltranin University, and both his master’s and his
doctorate from Lobden Institute of Technology — both prestigious schools on Wukkar. No surprise there; LIT is a known grayshirt factory.
That’s not to say that it’s a diploma mill — no, it’s one of the finest schools of its kind in the galaxy, with a healthy rivalry with the
Magrody Institute. It’s just that there’s not much else you can call a school that has 90% of its graduates working for the Wukkaran or
Imperial governments.
One of the most important skills in my line of work is the ability to control curiosity. I’m not paid to find out my employers’ secrets, I’m
paid to recover their belongings or to find out secrets about someone else. Case in point: Was I curious about what was in the briefcase? I’m
mostly human, sure. There’s not a soul out there that’s more or less human that can hear about a forbidden secret and not feel the least
murmur of curiosity. Long years of experience squelched that murmur, leaving it stillborn somewhere deep inside of me. I wasn’t being paid
to wonder, so I wasn’t going to. Whatever was in the briefcase was none of my concern.
Not too much about Xaviedie’s politics, other than the Ideological Monitor’s ratings. Like I said, average across the board. That meant that he
was not regarded as a political malefactor or an ideological recusant, no ‘counterrevolutionary tendencies’ or the like, broadly supportive of
the New Order. Respectable credentials of loyalty, but not a noted partisan of Correct Thought and the principles of Palpatinism-Tarkinism.
Apparently at least one of his coworkers — no one knew exactly which one — hadn’t liked the way the investigation into the theft of the
briefcase was being handled, so he — or she, or it — had tipped off the Senate that something was up. Common enough; there’s lots of
grayshirts that are loyal to their homeworlds and the Senate rather than the various factions in the Imperial State. Republicans may not be as
common in the Civil Service as Monarchists, but they’re there. Like I said, everybody’s got his masters. Conflict of interest? Try status quo.
It might have ended there (as far as the Senate was concerned), but for the fact that the Ubiqtorate had put some I-men on it. Any time the
Isard family business shows an interest in something, my current employer — the Senate Intelligence Oversight Commission — sits up and
takes notice. Nobody outside the Imperial State likes the Ubiqtorate; hell, plenty of people inside the Imperial State don’t, either. Not
without good reason, I assure you. It’s a well known fact that the Ubiqtorate’s got spies and informers everywhere, including inside the
multistellar corporations and the Dominion governments. That always gets people’s hackles up. For one thing, nobody likes the thought that
their office mate or the local grocer might be an agent of the All-Seeing Eye. For another, the Krianelg-Mozphri Domestic/Internal Intelligence
Act contains strict prohibitions against the use of the Ubiqtorate to spy on Dominion governments and Dominion nationals, to include
artificial persons. The K-MD/IIA isn’t worth the flimsi it’s printed on, in case you didn’t know. The Empire spies on the Dominions, the
Dominions spy on the Empire. Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail, right? There are no gentlemen in the game of interstellar intrigue.
When the players shake hands, they’re not crossing their fingers behind their backs. They’re clutching long knives.
What followed was typical of this kind of thing. Naval Intelligence and the Ubiqtorate have a pretty cordial relationship, so it shouldn’t
surprise anyone that the I-men stepped in to help with damage-control. Even before the Ubiqtorate’s mortal enemies at the ISB could get
involved, the Commission had stepped in and made very clear that it knew something was up, and it expected the contents of the briefcase to
be recovered and handed over for its examination. Unity Gardens and the Panopticon made the necessary obeisance — “As you wish,
Senator!” — and promised to recover the briefcase as soon as possible and — of course — present it to the Commission. That usually means
the contents of the briefcase would never see the light of day again. The GAO, always eager to assert its authority, had stepped in and
demanded a full investigation. The whiteshirts of the ISB took this as an engraved invitation. Things snowballed from there. I’d have to move
fast if I was going to catch Xaviedie before the Empire’s packs of Neks did.
I took a long drag off my cigarette. The trick to finding someone on the lam is to consider things from his perspective. Sure, I know how I
would go about making sure I’m not found, but then, I’m a professional. I know things, I know people, and I know the tricks of the trade.
Most people don’t. You’ve got to consider how much your quarry knows, and what he’d do with that. Xaviedie was an academic type, a
scientist. He probably didn’t have too much experience with getting his hands dirty. He’d try to keep under the scopes, sure, but he’d be
direct and logical about it. Where he’d go, though, depended on what he was running from.
I thought about that for a second. Was he running from the Empire, per se? Did he take the briefcase because he wanted to keep the Empire
from having whatever was in it? Or did he want to turn it over to someone else, someone he trusted to handle it? Did he want to sell it to the
highest bidder? Not the first time some white-collar’s pulled that kind of stunt. The Empire’s not known to be very friendly about that kind
of thing, but when you’re looking at billions of credits from one of the multistellars, your judgment can get kind of impaired. Why was he
running? Had he been disillusioned, somehow? Seen something that broke his faith in the Empire, left him unwilling to work for it any longer?
What makes a man turn traitor?
Philosophizing again. Old habits die hard. I pressed the remnants of my cigarette into the ashtray and considered lighting a third. Not the
healthiest of habits to have, but it’s only cancer. Blaster bolt’ll probably kill me long before I need a new lung, anyway. I glanced at my
chrono and rubbed my eyes. I always chain smoke when I’m tired. I’d spent very long hours at the publicord building doing research. Not the
most glamorous part of the business, but I’m not paid to be glamorous. There’s a very old saying, from the distant past when space flight
was new: Not everyone grows up to be an astronaut.
My research had confirmed to me that Xaviedie had spent most of his life either in school or working for Mininav, which translated to
spending most of his life on Wukkar or on Coruscant, with the occasional trip to Anaxes. The upshot to that was that it meant that almost all
of his personal network of friends, coworkers, and acquaintances was to be found on those three worlds. That was good and bad. Good,
because it meant that he was almost totally incapable of operating outside of those worlds. He needed to get in touch with people on one of
those three worlds, and only an idiot with a death wish would try to hide from the Empire on Anaxes. The only things on Anaxes that don’t
work for the Empire are children, trees, and domesticated animals. Everybody else wears black jackboots to work. So that eliminated hiding
on the Defender of the Core, but had the unfortunate side effect of leaving only two options open — naturally, Coruscant and Wukkar.
The combined, permanent populations of Coruscant and Wukkar number somewhere between five to six trillion sapient beings, according to
the last Census. Numbers that big are hard to comprehend; they literally boggle the mind. Here’s a quick and dirty illustration: If you looked
at a different face every second, and you use the galactic standard time parts of 60 seconds per minute, sixty minutes per hour, twenty-four
hours per day, and 368 days per year, you’d be looking at faces for close to two thousand years nonstop before you even looked at everyone
who actually lives on Coruscant and Wukkar right now. That doesn’t take into consideration the enormous number of people who work there
but aren’t permanent residents, or the invisible populations not counted in the Census, or the birth and death rates. Not even the Empire’s
got the resources to do a comprehensive person-by-person search on that scale. It’d take nothing short of a bored deity to run that kind of
operation.
Still and all, it just wasn’t a good idea to try to remain on Coruscant. No way Xaviedie’d try that; he’d never be able to hang around the
upper levels, not with the number of two-way flatscreens, spy-eyes, and other means of surveillance. Never mind the fact that 1030
Glitannai, the Panopticon, Unity Gardens, and the Central Office almost certainly had every set of eyes at their disposal looking for him;
certainly never mind the fact that the Inquisitorius has an enormous number of people on Coruscant at any given moment, and nobody really
knows what they can and cannot do with their sorcerer’s tricks. Would they be keeping an eye out for Xaviedie? Impossible to say — not
even I know too much about the Inquisitorius. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of those men?
Likewise, the deeper part of the undercity’s strictly off-limits to an ivory-towered intellectual like Xaviedie. The man’d spent his entire life
in the luxury-liner parts of the Core; never spent even so much as a day in the seedier parts of the universe. There were things down in the
undercity that’d eat a man like him for breakfast — literally. Plus, his grooming, bearing, and accent would definitely set him apart as
someone who didn’t belong down there. The sublevel dwellers are pretty nonchalant, sure, but they don’t like having Imperial entanglements
any more than anybody else. Certainly the idea of Ubiqtorate spies or whiteshirts spending any length of time among them is unwelcome;
they’ve been known to turn over fugitives before, if for no better reason than to avoid official notice.
So, he’d probably make a run for Wukkar. Well, the first thing you’ve got to do if you’re on the run is to get cash, and lots of it. It’s entirely
too easy to track wired payments on a cred line, because they’re tied to particular locations or particular services. If you book passage on
line, all I’ve got to do is get a look at your payment history, and then I know who you’re paying to go where. From there, I can find out the
when and where of your arrival and departure — and believe me, if you’re running from the Empire, that’s about the last thing you want
people to know. This is simple stuff; the crime-drama holos point it out all the time.
Cash, though, is much harder to track. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so popular on the Invisible Market, or when making purchases you
don’t want other people to know about. Blue holos, controlled substances, paying off bookies or procurers, that sort of thing. In fact, some
of the more politically active Palpatinist-Tarkinists have advocated the total abolition of hard currency for years; it may be one of the only
issues on which 1030 Glitannai and the Central Office are in total agreement.
It looked as though Xaviedie were smart enough to realize that using a cred line was a bad idea.. While I’d been back at my office I’d pulled
up his financial records, which showed that he’d made a number of cash withdrawals shortly before his disappearance. In fact, he’d pushed
his accounts to the maximum currently allowed by law. Shortly before I’d left the office, I’d heard back from a contact of mine in the topmost
part of the undercity, who’d confirmed to me that Xaviedie had met with an ID forger, to whom I’d paid a brief visit on my way back to the
boat. One of the advantages to be being a private eye is that you can make offers grayshirts and whiteshirts can’t. In this case, I’d made the
forger an offer he couldn’t refuse. He’d answered my questions.
Xaviedie had spent a pretty cred on buying himself a new identity. He’d gotten the works — new fingerprints, new ocular patterns, new ID.
Not cheap. I don’t know what was more surprising at the time, that he’d known where to go for the procedure or that he’d had the money to
be able to afford it. In retrospect, his Wukkaran citizenship should’ve told me the latter. He must have done some research before he
absconded with the briefcase.
Still, you can’t get around in space without playing the Empire’s game. Practically the entire merchant marine’s in the Empire’s back pocket.
The Bureau of Ships and Services is an independent agency, sure, but it does so much business with the Empire that it really can’t afford to
alienate it. One out of every twenty ships along the main hyperroutes is a Customs cutter. Those aren’t good odds. There’s a one in five
chance that any spacer crew with ten or more hands has at least one Ubiqtorate agent or whiteshirt informer in it. Those odds are even worse.
Coruscant really is the ideal place to look for information if you know the right people. Thanks to my generous patron (who shall remain
nameless), I do. You’ve got to love a patron who can get you into the Empire’s files. I got onto my computer and spent a few hours snooping
through the Panopticon’s and Central Office’s secure networks, looking for the information I wanted. The manifests and passenger lists of
every liner and transport to pass through Imperial Center space are routed directly to the Panopticon, where the Ubiqtorate’s
supercomputers and analysts can scrutinize them at will. Meanwhile, the Central Office is obsessive about records-keeping, and has a
meticulously organized database of its informers’ tips. Someday somebody unscrupulous is going to get ahold of that database, and a whole
lot of snitches are going to rue the day the ISB decided to be anal-retentive.
Ah. Aha.
Got ’im. Leonard Sikinazs. Passage booked to Wukkar, paid by cred line. A glance at the line told me it was for a newly-established account
with Sixth/Fourth Bank, deposit in cash. Sixth/Fifth is a local operation, mostly only found in Sector Zero, but they’re working on expanding
their market share. To put it mildly, they’re not known for putting their clients’ credentials up to a great deal of scrutiny. “Respecting your
privacy” is their slogan, but in practice this amounts to “No questions asked.” So, ‘Mr. Sikinazs’ was on his way to Wukkar, eh? There was
little chance I’d beat him there. Nothing for that. I knew where he’d be and approximately when he’d be there. I’d have to pick up the trail
again once I got to Wukkar. No time to book space for my boat on a ferry. I’d have to leave it behind and catch the express from Coruscant to
Wukkar.
As I made the booking and left my boat, I reflected on the fact that the information I’d found was already in the Ubiqtorate’s and the
whiteshirts’ hands. They just didn’t know what they had, and they certainly wouldn’t share it with each other to put two and two the way I
had.
No wonder people are willing to pay me so much. I don’t spend half my budget trying to screw my coworkers.
12 Navy Observatory Circle. I’d never been to Milmach Hall; the Navy doesn’t like anyone to know what went on in there, but rumor has it
that Section Nineteen has something to do with it. (Then again, rumor also has it that there’s a surviving recording somewhere of Brullian
Dyll’s last concert and that there’s a proof of Vermizli’s Last Theorem, so make of that what you will.) Purkins hadn’t given away too much,
but he had indicated subtly that Imperial Intelligence had gotten involved at some point. One of the civilians working in Milmach Hall, one
Jeras Xaviedie, had absconded with the briefcase under... unclear... circumstances.
My cigarette was burning low, so I deposited it in the ash tray next to my rack and lit another. Pul-Matté’d given me a few scant details
about Xaviedie, probably what he’d been able to scrounge out of the GAO. Mininav wasn’t known to be very free with details about its
civilians. Man was a white-collar worker, some sort of technical consultant. Details about that weren’t available. Not a Party member.
Average political and ideological ratings. Got his baccalaureate in applied science from the Deltranin University, and both his master’s and his
doctorate from Lobden Institute of Technology — both prestigious schools on Wukkar. No surprise there; LIT is a known grayshirt factory.
That’s not to say that it’s a diploma mill — no, it’s one of the finest schools of its kind in the galaxy, with a healthy rivalry with the
Magrody Institute. It’s just that there’s not much else you can call a school that has 90% of its graduates working for the Wukkaran or
Imperial governments.
One of the most important skills in my line of work is the ability to control curiosity. I’m not paid to find out my employers’ secrets, I’m
paid to recover their belongings or to find out secrets about someone else. Case in point: Was I curious about what was in the briefcase? I’m
mostly human, sure. There’s not a soul out there that’s more or less human that can hear about a forbidden secret and not feel the least
murmur of curiosity. Long years of experience squelched that murmur, leaving it stillborn somewhere deep inside of me. I wasn’t being paid
to wonder, so I wasn’t going to. Whatever was in the briefcase was none of my concern.
Not too much about Xaviedie’s politics, other than the Ideological Monitor’s ratings. Like I said, average across the board. That meant that he
was not regarded as a political malefactor or an ideological recusant, no ‘counterrevolutionary tendencies’ or the like, broadly supportive of
the New Order. Respectable credentials of loyalty, but not a noted partisan of Correct Thought and the principles of Palpatinism-Tarkinism.
Apparently at least one of his coworkers — no one knew exactly which one — hadn’t liked the way the investigation into the theft of the
briefcase was being handled, so he — or she, or it — had tipped off the Senate that something was up. Common enough; there’s lots of
grayshirts that are loyal to their homeworlds and the Senate rather than the various factions in the Imperial State. Republicans may not be as
common in the Civil Service as Monarchists, but they’re there. Like I said, everybody’s got his masters. Conflict of interest? Try status quo.
It might have ended there (as far as the Senate was concerned), but for the fact that the Ubiqtorate had put some I-men on it. Any time the
Isard family business shows an interest in something, my current employer — the Senate Intelligence Oversight Commission — sits up and
takes notice. Nobody outside the Imperial State likes the Ubiqtorate; hell, plenty of people inside the Imperial State don’t, either. Not
without good reason, I assure you. It’s a well known fact that the Ubiqtorate’s got spies and informers everywhere, including inside the
multistellar corporations and the Dominion governments. That always gets people’s hackles up. For one thing, nobody likes the thought that
their office mate or the local grocer might be an agent of the All-Seeing Eye. For another, the Krianelg-Mozphri Domestic/Internal Intelligence
Act contains strict prohibitions against the use of the Ubiqtorate to spy on Dominion governments and Dominion nationals, to include
artificial persons. The K-MD/IIA isn’t worth the flimsi it’s printed on, in case you didn’t know. The Empire spies on the Dominions, the
Dominions spy on the Empire. Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail, right? There are no gentlemen in the game of interstellar intrigue.
When the players shake hands, they’re not crossing their fingers behind their backs. They’re clutching long knives.
What followed was typical of this kind of thing. Naval Intelligence and the Ubiqtorate have a pretty cordial relationship, so it shouldn’t
surprise anyone that the I-men stepped in to help with damage-control. Even before the Ubiqtorate’s mortal enemies at the ISB could get
involved, the Commission had stepped in and made very clear that it knew something was up, and it expected the contents of the briefcase to
be recovered and handed over for its examination. Unity Gardens and the Panopticon made the necessary obeisance — “As you wish,
Senator!” — and promised to recover the briefcase as soon as possible and — of course — present it to the Commission. That usually means
the contents of the briefcase would never see the light of day again. The GAO, always eager to assert its authority, had stepped in and
demanded a full investigation. The whiteshirts of the ISB took this as an engraved invitation. Things snowballed from there. I’d have to move
fast if I was going to catch Xaviedie before the Empire’s packs of Neks did.
I took a long drag off my cigarette. The trick to finding someone on the lam is to consider things from his perspective. Sure, I know how I
would go about making sure I’m not found, but then, I’m a professional. I know things, I know people, and I know the tricks of the trade.
Most people don’t. You’ve got to consider how much your quarry knows, and what he’d do with that. Xaviedie was an academic type, a
scientist. He probably didn’t have too much experience with getting his hands dirty. He’d try to keep under the scopes, sure, but he’d be
direct and logical about it. Where he’d go, though, depended on what he was running from.
I thought about that for a second. Was he running from the Empire, per se? Did he take the briefcase because he wanted to keep the Empire
from having whatever was in it? Or did he want to turn it over to someone else, someone he trusted to handle it? Did he want to sell it to the
highest bidder? Not the first time some white-collar’s pulled that kind of stunt. The Empire’s not known to be very friendly about that kind
of thing, but when you’re looking at billions of credits from one of the multistellars, your judgment can get kind of impaired. Why was he
running? Had he been disillusioned, somehow? Seen something that broke his faith in the Empire, left him unwilling to work for it any longer?
What makes a man turn traitor?
Philosophizing again. Old habits die hard. I pressed the remnants of my cigarette into the ashtray and considered lighting a third. Not the
healthiest of habits to have, but it’s only cancer. Blaster bolt’ll probably kill me long before I need a new lung, anyway. I glanced at my
chrono and rubbed my eyes. I always chain smoke when I’m tired. I’d spent very long hours at the publicord building doing research. Not the
most glamorous part of the business, but I’m not paid to be glamorous. There’s a very old saying, from the distant past when space flight
was new: Not everyone grows up to be an astronaut.
My research had confirmed to me that Xaviedie had spent most of his life either in school or working for Mininav, which translated to
spending most of his life on Wukkar or on Coruscant, with the occasional trip to Anaxes. The upshot to that was that it meant that almost all
of his personal network of friends, coworkers, and acquaintances was to be found on those three worlds. That was good and bad. Good,
because it meant that he was almost totally incapable of operating outside of those worlds. He needed to get in touch with people on one of
those three worlds, and only an idiot with a death wish would try to hide from the Empire on Anaxes. The only things on Anaxes that don’t
work for the Empire are children, trees, and domesticated animals. Everybody else wears black jackboots to work. So that eliminated hiding
on the Defender of the Core, but had the unfortunate side effect of leaving only two options open — naturally, Coruscant and Wukkar.
The combined, permanent populations of Coruscant and Wukkar number somewhere between five to six trillion sapient beings, according to
the last Census. Numbers that big are hard to comprehend; they literally boggle the mind. Here’s a quick and dirty illustration: If you looked
at a different face every second, and you use the galactic standard time parts of 60 seconds per minute, sixty minutes per hour, twenty-four
hours per day, and 368 days per year, you’d be looking at faces for close to two thousand years nonstop before you even looked at everyone
who actually lives on Coruscant and Wukkar right now. That doesn’t take into consideration the enormous number of people who work there
but aren’t permanent residents, or the invisible populations not counted in the Census, or the birth and death rates. Not even the Empire’s
got the resources to do a comprehensive person-by-person search on that scale. It’d take nothing short of a bored deity to run that kind of
operation.
Still and all, it just wasn’t a good idea to try to remain on Coruscant. No way Xaviedie’d try that; he’d never be able to hang around the
upper levels, not with the number of two-way flatscreens, spy-eyes, and other means of surveillance. Never mind the fact that 1030
Glitannai, the Panopticon, Unity Gardens, and the Central Office almost certainly had every set of eyes at their disposal looking for him;
certainly never mind the fact that the Inquisitorius has an enormous number of people on Coruscant at any given moment, and nobody really
knows what they can and cannot do with their sorcerer’s tricks. Would they be keeping an eye out for Xaviedie? Impossible to say — not
even I know too much about the Inquisitorius. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of those men?
Likewise, the deeper part of the undercity’s strictly off-limits to an ivory-towered intellectual like Xaviedie. The man’d spent his entire life
in the luxury-liner parts of the Core; never spent even so much as a day in the seedier parts of the universe. There were things down in the
undercity that’d eat a man like him for breakfast — literally. Plus, his grooming, bearing, and accent would definitely set him apart as
someone who didn’t belong down there. The sublevel dwellers are pretty nonchalant, sure, but they don’t like having Imperial entanglements
any more than anybody else. Certainly the idea of Ubiqtorate spies or whiteshirts spending any length of time among them is unwelcome;
they’ve been known to turn over fugitives before, if for no better reason than to avoid official notice.
So, he’d probably make a run for Wukkar. Well, the first thing you’ve got to do if you’re on the run is to get cash, and lots of it. It’s entirely
too easy to track wired payments on a cred line, because they’re tied to particular locations or particular services. If you book passage on
line, all I’ve got to do is get a look at your payment history, and then I know who you’re paying to go where. From there, I can find out the
when and where of your arrival and departure — and believe me, if you’re running from the Empire, that’s about the last thing you want
people to know. This is simple stuff; the crime-drama holos point it out all the time.
Cash, though, is much harder to track. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so popular on the Invisible Market, or when making purchases you
don’t want other people to know about. Blue holos, controlled substances, paying off bookies or procurers, that sort of thing. In fact, some
of the more politically active Palpatinist-Tarkinists have advocated the total abolition of hard currency for years; it may be one of the only
issues on which 1030 Glitannai and the Central Office are in total agreement.
It looked as though Xaviedie were smart enough to realize that using a cred line was a bad idea.. While I’d been back at my office I’d pulled
up his financial records, which showed that he’d made a number of cash withdrawals shortly before his disappearance. In fact, he’d pushed
his accounts to the maximum currently allowed by law. Shortly before I’d left the office, I’d heard back from a contact of mine in the topmost
part of the undercity, who’d confirmed to me that Xaviedie had met with an ID forger, to whom I’d paid a brief visit on my way back to the
boat. One of the advantages to be being a private eye is that you can make offers grayshirts and whiteshirts can’t. In this case, I’d made the
forger an offer he couldn’t refuse. He’d answered my questions.
Xaviedie had spent a pretty cred on buying himself a new identity. He’d gotten the works — new fingerprints, new ocular patterns, new ID.
Not cheap. I don’t know what was more surprising at the time, that he’d known where to go for the procedure or that he’d had the money to
be able to afford it. In retrospect, his Wukkaran citizenship should’ve told me the latter. He must have done some research before he
absconded with the briefcase.
Still, you can’t get around in space without playing the Empire’s game. Practically the entire merchant marine’s in the Empire’s back pocket.
The Bureau of Ships and Services is an independent agency, sure, but it does so much business with the Empire that it really can’t afford to
alienate it. One out of every twenty ships along the main hyperroutes is a Customs cutter. Those aren’t good odds. There’s a one in five
chance that any spacer crew with ten or more hands has at least one Ubiqtorate agent or whiteshirt informer in it. Those odds are even worse.
Coruscant really is the ideal place to look for information if you know the right people. Thanks to my generous patron (who shall remain
nameless), I do. You’ve got to love a patron who can get you into the Empire’s files. I got onto my computer and spent a few hours snooping
through the Panopticon’s and Central Office’s secure networks, looking for the information I wanted. The manifests and passenger lists of
every liner and transport to pass through Imperial Center space are routed directly to the Panopticon, where the Ubiqtorate’s
supercomputers and analysts can scrutinize them at will. Meanwhile, the Central Office is obsessive about records-keeping, and has a
meticulously organized database of its informers’ tips. Someday somebody unscrupulous is going to get ahold of that database, and a whole
lot of snitches are going to rue the day the ISB decided to be anal-retentive.
Ah. Aha.
Got ’im. Leonard Sikinazs. Passage booked to Wukkar, paid by cred line. A glance at the line told me it was for a newly-established account
with Sixth/Fourth Bank, deposit in cash. Sixth/Fifth is a local operation, mostly only found in Sector Zero, but they’re working on expanding
their market share. To put it mildly, they’re not known for putting their clients’ credentials up to a great deal of scrutiny. “Respecting your
privacy” is their slogan, but in practice this amounts to “No questions asked.” So, ‘Mr. Sikinazs’ was on his way to Wukkar, eh? There was
little chance I’d beat him there. Nothing for that. I knew where he’d be and approximately when he’d be there. I’d have to pick up the trail
again once I got to Wukkar. No time to book space for my boat on a ferry. I’d have to leave it behind and catch the express from Coruscant to
Wukkar.
As I made the booking and left my boat, I reflected on the fact that the information I’d found was already in the Ubiqtorate’s and the
whiteshirts’ hands. They just didn’t know what they had, and they certainly wouldn’t share it with each other to put two and two the way I
had.
No wonder people are willing to pay me so much. I don’t spend half my budget trying to screw my coworkers.
This short story was originally published (under the title “Lost and Found: A Study in Noir”) on 9 October 2006 as a post on Mr.
Michael Wong’s StarDestroyer.Net (SD.N) forums. It was republished on 2 February 2007.
Michael Wong’s StarDestroyer.Net (SD.N) forums. It was republished on 2 February 2007.
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