Chapter 28Q - Where the Bodies should be...

[Agelastus]

The first thing I did when I got to a nice, remotely located, computer terminal, with all my equipment, was pop a stim. I couldn’t afford to sleep for a while. Not, of course, that sleeping in the dankness of a storage cubicle down in the maintenance levels below Engineering was a very appealing thought anyway. I’d sometimes wondered what a seemingly official terminal was doing there, but since few others seemed to know it existed I didn’t wonder for long. Just blessed my good fortune in being able to use it in apparently complete privacy.

The second thing I did was to expand the watch daggit’s remit. I instructed it to monitor for any unusual or unauthorized coded transmissions made between ships in the fleet. I paused at that, wishing I could set it up for the intra-ship channels as well, but I knew that would be pointless. The thing would just overload from its inability to tell a coded transmission from a set of engineering test data, or medical files, or almost anything.

Technology is a wonderful thing, but it’s not omniscient or omnipotent.

The third thing I did was set up for a long…”reading” session. I hooked up the portable screen I’d brought to supplement the actual shipboard terminal. On that screen, I began checking the public data on Turner. It made for interesting reading.

On the terminal itself, I sent a “rover” into the prison barge’s records looking for inmates with links to Turner, Brie or Pierce. Noting the last entry time code on Turner’s public record, I set the parameters to extend to more than a yahren before Turner’s death. I kept an eye on that program permanently. The data required was stored in several places, and accessing the prison barge’s records was more than a little dangerous. I had to be ready to yank the “rover” program at a micron’s notice.

I was mildly amused to see my own name come up during its’ initial search.

I wasn’t having much success though. The search was throwing up too many names, but with not enough information to start the winnowing. Pierce had put a lot of people in the barge, but none of them seemed to have links to the other two principals, Brie or Turner.

I turned my attention to Turner’s records. The major had been right. It seemed that almost all his files were now in the public record. The only sealed sections seemed to relate to the time of his death. High level codes as well. Too high. They would take a lot of time to breach.

Muttering, I moved to bring up the major’s file, and then paused. I could tell just from the public domain records that a large section of her file was sealed, but the codes were nowhere near as high level as Turner’s. I could look at it to my heart’s content. On the other hand the Major didn’t really want me too. In fact, would probably think that I had.

So, contrary as ever, I decided not to do it. Besides, I didn’t really need to. The clearances on Turner’s file suggested that that was where part of the puzzle lay. The major was more incidental.

I did spend a centon or so looking at the major’s medical records. They’d been unsealed for the trial, and the locks hadn’t yet been re-imposed. I’m not a medic though. It looked all too natural. Although I had a hard time seeing the major as she was now in the major as she was then.

It felt…too extreme. I paused, stretching.

Nothing yet. But it was still early in the hunt.

[Agelastus]

I mused over the problem of the final portions of Turner’s file. The public record stated that he was killed whilst on a patrol that encountered Cylons. Brief, blunt and brutal. Seemingly a dead-end as well.

Something was clearly wrong though. The major had been very adamant about Turner’s record. Adamant enough to convince me that she expected me to find nothing. Adamant enough to convince me that something was there. Maybe if I…

When people seal records, they tend to miss things. There’s always something left out, some pieces that can be put together. The mystery was centered around Turner’s death. I pulled up the patrol records for the relevant sectons. Some of them had been sealed. Interesting.

I paused, and then ran a search for other warriors whose records had last entries around the same time. Specifically not asking for warriors who’d died around the same time. I suspected that particular search criteria might have been flagged. Three other names appeared apart from Turner’s. Cal, Tyrtaeus and Hanno.

I brought up their records. And noticed something odd. Both Tyrtaeus and Hanno had a notation in their record “killed by Cylon action”. Cal and Turner’s record both had the notation “killed while on a patrol that encountered Cylon forces.” Not “killed by the Cylons”. Very, very odd.

I fed the three new names into the “rover”, and had it look for matches. One came up within microns. A family link between Tyrtaeus and a warrior called Archaeus. His record was under both military and council seal. It took more than a few centons to work through the protections.

While I was doing this, I started searching for peripheral information. A study of duty shifts and patrol rotations suggested that all four names were likely to have been due to participate in the same sweep. But the rosters and logs for the relevant time periods were sealed. Maintenance records were more illuminating. The assignment data listed at the end of each check file hadn’t been sealed. Nor had the cessation dates of the logs been locked. Four Vipers dropped off the maintenance schedules during the required time frame.

The last listed pilots were Turner, Cal, Tyrtaeus and Hanno. The listed loss time, based on the cessation of data transfers between the Vipers that had returned, were within two centars of each other…wait a minute? Two centars? They should be within centons! Battles don’t last that long.

I whistled, double checked the data, and then whistled again. Either there had been two encounters with the Cylons, which would have been more than unusual…or Turner and Cal’s Vipers had been destroyed before the patrol had ever met the Cylons. The curious wording at the end of their records was more than sufficient corroboration for me.

But what did that leave?

I studied Archaeus’ record. Pretty normal, ordinary even. Right up to the point where he was tried and convicted of…plotting to assassinate the president? Now that was kept quiet. Council security codes weren’t quite up to military standards, but apart from that one bombshell, there wasn’t much else. Just the names of two other co-conspirators, Marcian and Marcia. Twins. Well, the best conspiracies run in families. Easier to keep a secret…

Families…

Archaeus is tried and placed in the brig. His cousin Tyrtaeus is killed on the same patrol as Turner. A patrol where the Cylons were probably not responsible for Turner’s death. I smelled a rodent. A very smelly rodent. But all I had was a tenuous and circumstantial connection. There was nothing to link Archaeus and Turner. Nothing.

The evidence against the three warriors involved in the conspiracy had been placed anonymously. Mostly recordings, I saw. Rechecking patrol records, there seemed to be no out of the ordinary contact between Turner and any of the three. No rearrangement of rotas so patrols could be held together. Nothing to link Turner to the conspiracy. The three warriors tried and convicted had flown together more often than strictly necessary, which itself was a highly suggestive piece of data. Long patrols, when out of communications range of the home battlestar, are an ideal time for plotting. No one can hear you in space, and communication logs on Vipers are notoriously…fragile. But there was no evidence that any other pilots had pulled an unusual amount of flight time with any of the three, not merely no evidence that Turner had.

Frustrated, I started to put together a “links matrix”. Turner’s death, the trial of Archaeus, Brie’s breakdown…that was odd. It took me a good few microns to realize what was bothering me. Looking at it on a matrix, it suddenly struck me that Brie’s breakdown had not been immediate. In fact, it occurred right at the point where her own reports suddenly downgraded their classification. For a period from just before Turner’s death to a few sectons after it all of Brie’s reports, all, from her daily flight log to a number of unspecified depositions, were sealed to the highest levels of clearance I’d seen. Not even Brie could access them anymore.

Interesting.

Still no connections with Pierce though. Other than the very obvious fact of his vendetta against Brie.

By now, after several centars of hard work, I was convinced that I was starting to see the shape of a much bigger picture. If it looks like a Cylon, walks like a Cylon and talks like a Cylon, it’s probably a Cylon; if it looks like a conspiracy, walks like a conspiracy, and talks like a conspiracy, its’ probably a conspiracy.

[Agelastus]

Of course, a conspiracy requires conspirators who have a motive. One always has to look at where the cubits flow, be it measured in real money or power. And none of the warriors seemed to have a personal motive for wanting to kill the president. Nor would they have directly benefited from the president’s death. So at least one more conspirator, if there had been a conspiracy, had been missed.

Still, I was a lot closer now. As I’d said to Brie, even if the bodies were not there, one could always find where they should have been buried.

Out of curiosity, I fed my own name into the matrix of links that was developing. After all, my name had popped up quickly enough on the prison barge search…of course, that was due to where I served now.

A first-degree link with Brie. Obvious enough. She was my commander. Second degree links with Pierce and Brie. Pierce via Brie, and also Brie via Pierce. And…two second degree links with Turner? Who was that via? I’d never met the man. One link was via Brie, and the other was via…

Archaeus? Why Archaeus? The name was Sagitarran, I’ll admit, but he wasn’t family. Or clan, despite the ending form of his name. I searched a little further. The prison barge records had several reports linking my name with his. All from around the time of his death. I was listed as a primary witness. The other primary witness was…Marcia.

I’d forgotten. I’d actually completely and totally forgotten, He’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I hadn’t killed him. The men trying to kill me had. We’d never even spoken.

But all of a sudden, I was a lot closer to the events of that time than I’d ever expected to find myself.

Marcia and Marcian went into a matrix to search for links to Pierce. This was the easiest thing yet. Prison barge visits are a matter of public record. Well, most of them are. No first-degree link. He’d never visited them. No second degree link, so if there was one, he was really distancing himself.

But there was a third degree link. Marcian had been visited once, just once, by a man named Ielis. Ielis was a maintenance tech on the livestock shop, so one would be hard pressed to find a reason for such a visit. His first cousin was a woman named Fellis. Fellis and Ielis were listed as being members of the same society, an antiquarian group interested in early Colonial history. It occasionally met on the Galactica, unusual for such a group.

Maybe this was because Fellis worked in Opposer Pierce’s office. Had worked there in fact since just before Turner’s death.

Bingo…

[Agelastus]

Of course, what I had amounted to…nothing. Any Opposer wouldn’t have given you a micron’s attention if you brought evidence that amounted to “this inference goes with that inference”. Or, to put it more bluntly, “two plus two equals five…and three-quarters…and an eighth…and maybe a daggit as well.”

Moreover, I was certain that if I checked further, I’d find a record of the visit that showed a perfectly harmless and innocuous reason for the visit. An interest in common that was not in the records, a mutual acquaintance, or a favor for a friend. Almost anything. But it would be there.

I was certain of that. Pierce. The more I studied the files, the more certain I was that Pierce was very good at this game. The game of living on the both sides of the proverbial legal fence. He wouldn’t have missed something as obvious as that.

Moreover, even if Pierce was the Fleet’s biggest and most treasonous conspirator, that wouldn’t get Brie released. It might not even get the case reviewed. For that, either Pierce had to have broken protocol or the rules in some way at the trial, which given his experience I couldn’t honestly see him doing. Or he had to have had provable influence over one of the witnesses, influence that might have led to a…distortion, shall we say, of the witness’s testimony.

I input the names of the tribunal witnesses, and anyone else I could think of connected to this sorry affair, into the links matrix that was being generated. Pierce, Brie and Turner remained at the center of what was becoming a very, very intricate information tree.

As I waited, I began to wonder just why Pierce had chosen to act when he had. Was it simply that the opportunity was there? Or maybe…had the major suddenly become a danger?

But if the latter was true, why not have her killed…the Prison Barge! That reaction of the major’s – did Pierce plan to have her killed there? But then how would the major know about it? I didn’t think Pierce would be stupid enough to boast about it. Had she somehow intuited it? Maybe. The hostility from Pierce would have turned the very feel of the air rancid if this was a bad drama on IFB.

I chuckled. One of the characters would have commented on it, just to make the audience know what a bad man he was.

A pity we lived in real life.

[Agelastus]

I glanced at my chrono. Over four centars of work, and still not done. None of the witnesses at the trial seemed to have a close enough relationship with Pierce or any of the people identified as “suspicious” by my search to suggest the possibility of undue influence. None of them were connected by the time the program reached the fifth level…after that level, the sheer volume of matches rendered the matrix virtually useless.

I sat for a while, considering my next step.

The trial witnesses seemed to be a dead end. The trail between Pierce and the three imprisoned warriors was there, but it seemed unlikely that this link would pan out much more. The records of the antiquarian society itself showed that the members hadn’t held a meeting in almost a yahren; the group seemed to have dissolved.

I had a program performing a painstaking and time consuming search of the transit records of the inter-fleet shuttles to track their movements, but the data was scattered in so many places…combined with the fact that the information requests the program was making weren’t via the fastest official channels this meant that this whole process could take perhaps twice as many centars as I’d already spent on the project.

And I didn’t have the time to wait, at least not in this session. The stim was starting to wear off, and my body craved natural sleep. Moreover, I’d checked the rosters and realized I was scheduled for a perimeter patrol of the Fleet; nice easy duty to get a warrior back into the swing of things. Unwelcome duties at this time, of course.

The key to the whole mystery seemed to be Turner’s death; I turned my search back to the period around that fateful last patrol.

To my surprise I realized I’d been a little too lax in defining the parameters of the search of the patrol rosters. Turner and Cal should indeed have been flying with Tyrtaeus and Hanno around that time, but not on the same patrol. Actually, Cal should have been on the next shift, and Turner the one after. Given the sealing of the logs, I couldn’t easily access any reports that elucidated on the reason for this.

Of course, there were only so many possibilities. Most of them revolved around pilot injuries. I accessed the Fleet’s medical logs. Unfortunately, I had only the vaguest idea what I was looking for. I knew the specifics would be sealed, so what might show…

Medication usage! Drugs were strictly controlled and rationed, the levels in storage constantly monitored. If a certain drug or other chemical suddenly showed a boost in usage, then something had happened around that time.

The search took very little time. The results…there! A drug used to counter the effects of certain types of food poisoning, according to the Colonial medical encyclopedia. Specifically animal tissue related food poisoning.

Food poisoning…

Food poisoning…

Odd…

More than odd. Downright strange, in fact. Everything, absolutely everything in the Fleet went through so many checks and processes, was recycled and decontaminated to such an extent that it was virtually inconceivable for such an outbreak to occur on most ships of the Fleet. Oh, perhaps it was possible on a ship such as the Gemini, whose holds were still overcrowded and inadequately provided for in sanitary terms. But to have such an incident on a battlestar?

I uploaded the staffing list for the mess halls most likely to have catered for warriors, as it seemed very likely that the incapacity of certain individuals had resulted in Cal and Turner’s presence on that patrol. Then I fed it into the links matrix.

Nothing.

Oh, there was a connection. Trula, Boleman’s sealed, had been the head cook of one of the most suspect mess halls at the time. Still, there was no traceable connection to Pierce. Boleman had specialized in being a Protector for almost as long as Pierce had specialized in being an Opposer, so it was unlikely that Trula moved in the same circles as Pierce except at official functions.

Still, I filed this information away. Something might come from nothing. Something had come from nothing a lot of times in my experience.

I was tired. It was nearly time to rest.

First though, it was time to check the “watch daggit”. I sent the signal for it to transfer to my screen anything it had found. And then I groaned.

Just under five centars.

One hundred and seventeen “suspicious” messages. And that was just between the Callisto and other ships in the Fleet. It seemed that half the people in the Fleet were communicating in one form of code or another…

All of them would need analyzing. For now, I decided to chop certain messages from the crop.

Messages between the Callisto and…the Prison Barge, of course…the Aedina, one couldn’t ignore the Sorayama, of course…where else? I scrolled down the list of origin sources. I grinned. Eight messages in one direction, nine in the other, between the Callisto and the Rising Star. Sixth Millennium Aries merchant code, old and obsolete; it was almost readable in real time, in fact. I smiled as I read the messages between two long parted lovers – then fed it into another program for semantic analysis in case the exchange itself was a verbal code.

Then I got to the surprise. A message to the Callisto from the Galactica. Burst transmission as well, highly compressed. I brought it up, and ran it through the basic decoding routine I’d just used to read the lovers’ messages. And read gibberish.

Now this was interesting. At the least, that routine should have given a starting point. Colonial society was old, and certain habits, even with the creation of secret codes, tended to recur again and again. These “habits” formed a wedge into upwards of two-thirds of the entire repertory of Colonial codes.

On a sudden thought, I pulled a device out of my pocket and hooked it into the screen. Then I brought up a comparison analysis of the undecodable message and some of the program files of the chip. There were similarities. Strong similarities.

So at the least, the first level of the code was Cylon. There was the wedge.

I patted the coder, whispering my uncle’s name and those of the Lords of Kobol. Once again, I thanked him for the gift he’d left me, legacy of a long and intimate acquaintance with people on both sides of the Line. That coder could break any lock, Cylon or Colonial. And now it had perhaps broken the lock on one of the most complex puzzles I’d ever come across.

I hoped.

[Agelastus]

Still, it would take quite a while for the code to be cracked, even though my electronic helpers now had a starting point. It was time to get some sleep.

I tapped in some final instructions to the various programs. The watch daggit’s remit was refined to pay particular attention for non-Colonial based codes. The program that was analyzing the transit records of the inter-fleet shuttles was told where to transmit the results, following which it was to go dormant. The other programs I shut down.

The last thing I did before my session ended was to send a message via the Callisto’s internal com system. A text only file.

Disconnecting and folding up the portable screen, I found myself yawning.

Time for bed.

[Agelastus]

When her panel beeped, Quiver sighed.

She rarely received messages, work related or otherwise. So there was only one likely candidate to have sent her something during her off-duty period.

Text only, she saw. Uncoded, but small and easy to delete any records of...if one knew how.

She read the message, then sat and thought for a while. What Agelastus wanted would be time consuming...and quite possibly dangerous. But she didn't really have any choice in the matter. She couldn't refuse.

The message she sent back was one word only.

Then she lay back on her bed.

That son of a daggit, if I could, I'd kill him...