On The Imperium’s Secret Service (Imperium Cicernus) (23 page)

“Because their world is dying,” Mariko said.  “Isn't there anything you can do for them?”

“I wish there was,” Fitz said.  He looked down at the deck for a long moment.  “It’s possible that the Slimes will revolt and that someone will decide that Archie and his friends have been poor stewards who should no longer remain in control of the planet.  Provoking an alien uprising is a serious offense...a few words in the right ear, and they might lose control of the planet.”

“You intend to suggest that,” Mariko said.

Fitz nodded.  “But it may not work.  Far too many people enjoy drinking Water of Life, or have money invested in its production and distribution.  But I could also invest in space habitats which provide proper farmland without destroying an entire planet’s biosphere.  Given a few hundred years, Archie will be ruined, and perhaps the terraforming of Greenland can be reversed.”

He shrugged. 

“Who knows?  Maybe the Secessionists would even give us some good press after we save the Slimes from extinction.”

“After pushing them to the brink in the first place,” Mariko said.  She hesitated, and then plunged on ahead.  “Thank you for saving my life.”

“After endangering it in the first place,” Fitz observed, dryly.  “I didn’t anticipate an IED – and I should have.  Auntie Jo clearly didn't even know the half of what was happening on Greenland.  And you owe Mai some thanks, too; if she hadn't come down with the shuttle, we would both have died on the planet’s surface.”

“I know,” Mariko said.  She looked at him, feeling an odd mixture of twisted emotions.  Part of her wanted to grab him and kiss him, even though she was technically his employee.  And part of her thought that she couldn't afford a relationship with him.  “Fitz...thank you for saving my life.”

She leaned forward and planted a kiss on his mouth.  For a moment, he kissed her back...and then broke contact. 

“I know how you’re feeling,” he said, softly.  He looked almost boyish in the light, slightly embarrassed.  “You survived – and you want to celebrate.  Ask me again after we have broken the Secessionists and prevented them from launching their planned uprising.”

Mariko blushed, so brightly that her face felt as if it had caught fire. 

“Are you always so...unemotional?”

“You should see me when I am trying to relax,” Fitz said.  “I just think that we would be better off avoiding emotional entanglements until after the mission is completed.”  He picked up one of the captured datachips and looked at it, pretending to ignore her embarrassment.  “I need to crack the protection on this baby and the others.  I don’t suppose you know anything about hacking datachips?”

“Nothing,” Mariko said, tightly.  She felt too embarrassed to even look at him – and to think she’d managed to seduce someone at his command!  “Mai’s the engineer, but I don’t think she knows much about computer hacking.  I thought that hackers were executed when they were caught.”

“Apart from the ones who go to work for Imperial Intelligence,” Fitz said.  “A computer hacker or two can be very helpful for the spooks.  But right now all I have to depend upon are my own little skills.”

“Good luck,” Mariko said.

Fitz reached out and took her hand.  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said, seriously.  “I felt the same way after my first mission.”

Mariko scowled. 

“And what did you do about it?”

“After I got home, I found a partner and partied for several days,” Fitz said.  “And then I went off on another troubleshooting mission.  Get some rest, Mariko, and I will see you at dinner.”

Mariko smiled, despite herself.  “Shouldn't you get some rest, too?”

“Rebellion never rests,” Fitz said.  “I have to know what’s on these chips before we can decide what to do next.”

***

Dinner was an oddly surreal affair.  Mai chatted happily about flying the shuttle to the rebel base and launching missiles at it, completely ignoring the threat of hidden antiaircraft missile launchers that could have taken out the shuttle before she could react.  Fitz seemed to listen politely, although his mind was clearly somewhere else; Mariko found it difficult to concentrate, despite taking several hours to sleep off the last remnants of their brief imprisonment and escape. 

The food tasted as good as ever, yet
it was dry in her mouth.  Every time she took a bite, she remembered what was happening to the Slimes and felt sick.  Fitz’s long-term plan to save their planet’s biosphere wouldn't work in time to save most of them from death, fighting an enemy they could neither comprehend nor match.

“I went through the chips,” Fitz said, once Mariko had cleared away the plates and dropped the remaining food in the recycler. 

The thought of recycled food – which included every other form of organic waste on a starship - made groundhogs feel sick, but she knew there might come a time when they were glad to have it.  Crews had lost their drives and had been forced to limp back to the nearest star system, eating recycled food all the time.  On
Happy Wanderer
, they had sometimes been so short of cash that they’d had to eat recycled foodstuffs until they picked up their next charter. 

“What was on them?” Mariko asked, interested despite herself.

“A couple of them are seemingly ruined,” Fitz told them. “I’ll have to hand them over to Imperial Intelligence researchers on Sumter to see if they can pull anything out of the damage.”

“It takes a great deal of punishment to ruin a datachip,” Mai pointed out with a  frown.  “They might have simply rigged them up to
look
ruined.”

“It’s a possibility, but the equipment I have onboard is not good enough to pick out and scan a handful of microscopic good sectors from the damaged parts of the chip,” Fitz admitted.  “Contacting the people on Sumter is a risk, yet it may be the only way to find out what’s on the chips.”

“You don’t want to talk to your friends in Imperial Intelligence?”  Mariko asked, dryly.  “Won’t they know you?”

“They
shouldn't
know me,” Fitz said, flatly.  “If I was the Rebel, plotting an uprising in the Sumter Sector, the first thing I’d do is try to compromise the Imperial Intelligence assets in this sector.  The whole idea of my role as a trouble-shooter is that I can visit places without alerting the local intelligence staffers.  I do have the ID to approach them, but they might talk amongst themselves and word might get back to the Secessionists.”

He grinned.  “But we may have had a stroke of luck to make up for the disaster on Greenland,” he added.  “One of the chips contained blackmail information.”

Fitz stood up, picked up a remote control and keyed a switch.  A picture appeared on the wall-mounted display, showing a human man making love to a green-skinned woman. 

Mai gasped out loud, while Mariko stared in disbelief.  The second picture was of the same man, naked beside a spidery creature that seemed to be pawing at him.

“There are five hundred of these pictures, all with the same human male,” Fitz said, professionally.  If he was bothered by the content, he didn't show it.  “I cut his face out and ran it through the computer records, comparing him to everyone working for the Imperium in the sector.”  He chuckled, rather unpleasantly.  “All that insistence on writing reports in triplicate may just have paid off.  Meet Data-Entry Clerk Gavin Richardson, a low-level operative in Sumter’s bureaucracy and the star of three pornographic movies, all of which would be on the banned list if they were ever uploaded onto the Imperial Net.”

Mariko stared at the last picture, profoundly shocked.  Interspecies sex wasn't exactly
banned
in the Imperium – with trillions of humans, it was likely that millions would be tempted to cross the species line – but it
was
heavily frowned upon.  Anyone exposed as an interracial fornicator was likely to feel the full weight of society’s disapproval, even if they hadn't committed any actual crime.  It wasn’t as if interracial sex could produce children, although someone like Tuff could presumably create a human-alien hybrid if that wasn't specifically banned by Imperial Law.

“I think that Richardson got into trouble in one of the multiracial brothels on Sumter,” Fitz said, quietly.  “He would have been filmed in a variety of compromising positions and then offered a choice between working for the Secessionists or being exposed to his superiors.  Even if his superior was a liberal-minded man, he would still have had to move Richardson somewhere harmless at the very least; someone who had been compromised so badly would be vulnerable to all kinds of pressure.  It looks to me as if Richardson preferred to work for the Secessionists than admit to his nightly activities.”

He shook his head.  “It’s an old trick. You find someone a prostitute, film him from all angles and then threaten to expose him if he refuses to play ball.  Sometimes it fails – I heard of a case where the victim laughed in their faces and thanked them for the holiday snaps – but mostly it works.  Anyone going to an interracial brothel probably has needs that can’t be met by purely human girls.”

Mariko grimaced at the thought.  She knew how humans mated with other humans, but with aliens...?  The very thought was repulsive.  How could anyone even match up the sexual organs between a human and someone from a humanoid race, let alone someone from a race that was utterly inhuman?  Weren’t there races where the female killed the male after mating?  Would that be murder, part of her mind wondered, or merely a crime of passion?  Or would it be buried by the authorities, who wouldn't want to admit that interspecies sex existed on such a scale?

“All right,” Mai said.  She seemed to have recovered quicker from looking at the pictures than Mariko.  “So they have a lowly clerk who's been blackmailed into following orders.  Just how much damage can he do?”

“According to the records, which were complete as of six months ago, Richardson works in both the starship tracking department and the personnel department,” Fitz said.  “That isn't uncommon on worlds out along the Rim, even the Sector Capital.  They can’t trust any alien with that position and trained humans from the Core Worlds don’t really want to migrate out here.  In that position, with the right access codes, he could cause a hell of a lot of damage.  Perhaps there’s someone the Secessionists want to recruit in the local Imperial Navy squadron.  They could get Richardson to copy his file so they could scan it for weaknesses they could use against him.  And then they can arrange for the files to claim that that officer died in a shuttle accident, hiding the fact that he was recruited by the Secessionists.  Any investigator looking for him would be misdirected, convinced that he was already dead.”

Fitz paced the compartment, snapping out points one by one. 

“You could do anything if you subverted the right people in the right department,” he added.  “All of a sudden, we don’t dare trust records that might have been fiddled with by Richardson.  At the very least, we would have to check them all thoroughly – and
that
would do wonders for our morale, I'm sure!”

Mariko understood.  The regulations covering the ownership and operation of freighters demanded that owners fill out endless forms before they could be given a licence to operate in the Imperium.  It would be even worse for military starships.  A sudden demand for all the paperwork to be resubmitted would not go down well with starship commanders, who would prefer to spend their time commanding their ships rather than filling in the damned paperwork. 

Fitz was right.  Morale would go right down the tubes. 

“So we know how they’ve been fiddling the records,” Mai said.  “Do you think that Richardson might have been quietly removing the warnings about the growing crisis on Greenland?”

“I wouldn't have thought that he had the access,” Fitz said, after a moment.  “And then there’s the minor detail that Auntie Jo has been sounding the alarm for years.  If she happened to get an interview with the Sector Admiral and demanded to know what had happened to her previous messages...well, blatant tampering would definitely expose Richardson to Imperial Intelligence.  I think they’d prefer to leave him in place, quietly cooking the books and passing on any intelligence that walked across his desk.”