The Stargazer's War - Chapter 2.16

Chapter 2.16: Negotiations

Inspector Samuel Scorne was about to blow this whole case wide open. He could feel it in his bones, in his soul, in his gut, the latter of which had steadily grown both in predictive capability and in circumference over his twenty-seven years at the Office of Criminal Investigation. It was those damn bear claws in the break room. It wasn’t his fault the admin higher-ups kept them so well-stocked, however Mrs. Scorne might’ve disagreed. That was a part of why, over the last decade, Sam had always found the bear claws to be the more inviting of the two.

Waving away thoughts of the woman who took to his last name better than he did, Sam reviewed the facts so far as he’d meticulously organized them on the holoboard at the back of his cramped office.

It’d all started innocuously enough, a false advertising claim sent in from some poor bloke—one James Ellwar—who’d shown up for a job interview only to find the listed address had been abandoned for six years. It would’ve ended then and there, with the listing taken down and Kelsor Logistics issued a small fine for the error, except the building in question had once served as a warehouse for a now-busted smuggling operation. That proved enough for the AI to flag it for manual review, and the strangeness only grew once Sam got his eyes on it.

Turned out, Kelsor Logistics had only existed for two weeks. The proof of that hadn’t been easy to find—a number of documents had been illegally backdated—but a meta-analysis of Commerce Office, Tax Office, and Import Office files showed nothing had actually been in their systems until very recently. For months now, Sam had pulled on that thread as it all unraveled, a conspiracy the likes of which he’d never seen.

He’d started with the smuggling ring. According to the six-year-old case file, the smugglers themselves had all been caught, but the folks down at Extraplanetary Investigations hadn’t managed to track down whomever it was they’d been selling to. Sam wasn’t surprised. Explin had had their heads up their own asses for as long as Sam had worked with them.

A holographic line connected a picture of the building with an image of the Right Eye, Sam’s personal theory for the people behind the smugglers. Some kind of attempt to revive the operation was the only idea he had to explain everything else he’d spent the past months uncovering.

Kelsor Logistics had eight registered employees, all of which checked out to every heuristic Sam could conjure, but none of which did he manage to get on the phone with. Either all eight of them had somehow been busy each of the five times he’d tried their holopads, or they were ducking his calls. Worse yet, they were registered to Grune, an inhospitable rock under Right Eye jurisdiction. Since Ilirian and thus Sam’s office had been under Left Eye control for the past few cycles now, he’d needed Explin’s help orchestrating a warrant to track down those employees, something they’d failed to do considering their heads hadn’t budged an inch since they’d bungled the smuggling operation six years ago.

With Kelsor Logistics a dead end, Sam had had no choice but to pursue more strenuous leads. That job listing hadn’t been an accident, which meant either somebody had wanted Sam looking into Kelsor Logistics, or someone had wanted James Ellwar at that abandoned building at that specific day and time.

Sam had spent three weeks combing through the mark’s life looking for the angle, but the man was squeaky clean, no drugs, no infidelity, no unexplained comings and goings, not even a file out of place. His involvement didn’t make sense. Sure, he worked at traffic control regulating planetary entry, but he was at such a low level that unless the seemingly incorruptible James Ellwar had managed to turn both of his shift-mates, Sam couldn’t fathom his role in this whole mess.

He’d nearly torn his hair out when he realized that was the point. James Ellwar wasn’t the mark; he was too clean for that. It hadn’t been about getting him to that building, it had been about getting him out of his usual building.

It’d taken twenty minutes of looking into James’ shift mates for Sam to realize Sia Lustor was cheating on her husband. It hadn’t been enough for a warrant, but she’d answered his call. She’d confessed before he’d even finished uttering the words “voluntary interview for the Office of Criminal Investigation.”

With a flick of his finger, Sam replayed the audio file, scrubbing past the bits with the crying and the pleading that he not lock her up or tell her husband, as if she were any more than an obvious victim in this whole scheme.

“He… he told me I had to let a ship through. WN-72762. He made me memorize it. I told him my coworkers wouldn’t just let me break protocol like that, but he’d… apparently he’d gotten to them too.”

“Tell me about this ship,” Sam’s voice crackled out of the recording. “Did you get a good look at it?”

“No,” Lustor replied. “The orbital cameras send us footage, but it came out weird. All I know is it was white and roughly the size of a landing shuttle.”

Sam cut off the file, his eyes drifting over to the still frame he’d taken from the orbital footage. Weird was right. The damn thing looked like a ghost. Weirder still, it couldn’t have been larger than a skiff, but he’d found no trace of a larger vessel it might’ve come from.

The other two victims hadn’t folded quite so easily, but simply uttering the designation WN-72762 worked like magic. Their stories were the same. A drug addiction and a secret gambling problem took the place of Lustor’s infidelity, but blackmail was blackmail in Sam’s book. More importantly, it was enough for a warrant for every call into and out of the compromised office.

The conspiracy exploded from there, Sam’s board a web of coconspirators and hapless patsies. Kelsor Logistics, Dark Horizon Freight, Starport Services LLC, dozens of people across six companies across four planets all working in tandem to pick apart a single shift of traffic control. Each and every one of them—at least those Sam could get on the phone with—had disavowed everything, either feigning or genuinely expressing ignorance of both the companies they supposedly worked for and the people Sam had a record of them calling.

This was big. This was bigger than big. This was an interplanetary conspiracy seemingly put together to sneak a single ship through customs. He’d tried to find the damn thing, of course, but “white skiff” just wasn’t enough to go off. There must’ve been tens of thousands of vessels matching that description in daily use. When he’d requested a location, the AI had given him an estimated calculation time of almost two years.

Sam had started it crunching anyway. This case was going to make his career, even if it took two years. He didn’t think it would. Something was bugging him, something at the periphery, something wrong about this whole thing that would break it right open if he could only find it.

It was too much effort for a single ship. There were better, safer ways for people with the kind of influence on display here to get planetside. If he could only figure out why…

A knock on his door interrupted Sam’s musings. Before he could answer, it swung open, slamming loudly into the corner of the desk that only just fit into the eight by eight office.

“Inspector,” Junior Detective Alicia Hannold started, “there’s been an unexplained explosion out in the northern jungle, way bigger than anything the fauna could’ve managed.”

Sam scowled up at his subordinate. “I’m busy, Alicia. This case is close to breaking. I can feel it.”

“You’re going to want to see this, sir,” she insisted. “The Forestry Office is already on site, and get this: there’s a white skiff parked in the crater.”

Sam leapt to his feet, his desk tipping forward as his gut brushed against it. “For fuck’s sake, Alicia. You should’ve led with that. Requisition a supersonic transport. We’re leaving. I swear to the gods if those forestry fucks take the credit for this…”

——

Sam’s temper may have cooled by the time their shuttle landed among the veritable fleet of transports that ringed the massive crater, but his ulcer certainly hadn’t. He popped an antacid, wishing he’d brought one of the zent’s his wife didn’t know he kept in his desk. From the looks of it, every office in the godsdamned admin had their fingers in this, and Sam couldn’t blame them. The crater was huge. Whatever had made it had either been throwing around military-grade ordinance or partaking in some especially insane form of cultivator bullshit.

Thankfully, nobody had set foot in the hole itself, seemingly content to establish a parameter while they bickered about jurisdiction and whether or not to preemptively strike the skiff at the center of it all.

Sam’s white whale—an apt name given it was both white and approximately the size of a whale—had landed right in the middle of the crater he could only assume was its creation if those pulse canons mounted under each wing was any indicator.

With an eye glued to the skiff and Alicia at his side, Sam marched through the mess of admin transports to the cluster of people who looked to be in charge. The moment he realized what they were, he snapped into a rigid salute.

“Inspector Samuel Scorne, Office of Criminal Investigation. I’ve been hunting this skiff for half a year now. It’s the center of a criminal conspiracy like—”

“Stand down, inspector,” one of the two women in Left Eye cultivator uniforms barked at him. “This is beyond mortal purview.”

Sam didn’t drop his salute. “With all due respect, ma’am, I have information that may prove pertinent to this situation. More so, whoever’s aboard that ship is of vital importance to my own investigation into—”

“That will be all, inspector,” the cultivator snapped. “That ship you’ve been hunting disappeared from orbit around Fyrion six months ago. The Dragon’s Right Eye won’t tell us whose it is or what it was doing there, but we know one thing for certain: that’s no ordinary skiff. That’s a soulship.”

Sam gulped. “Ma’am—”

“This is not an investigation, inspector. This is a diplomatic incident. Whoever’s skiff that is may well be the most powerful cultivator in the system. They’re either high up in the Black Maw or so powerful they can get away with operating in Black Maw territory. Under no circumstances are you to approach it, hail it, or in any insinuate anything about it isn’t perfectly on the up and up. Am I understood?”

Through clenched teeth, Sam responded, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Now step back. We’re about to commence negotiations.”

Sam obeyed. He hadn’t made it twenty-seven years as a detective by ignoring direct commands from sect members. Even as his blood boiled at his case evaporating in front of him, a part of him exulted in the revelation.

It was even bigger than he’d imagined! Someone powerful, someone immensely powerful had leveraged their influence to sneak a soulship to here. He couldn’t begin to fathom what sorts of geopolitical games were being played, but it was obviously several levels higher than the Dueling Stars themselves. Something was going down on Ilirian, something important, something involving at least one galactic-level entity, and he, Samuel motherfucking Scorne, had caught onto it five months before anyone else had.

Wait until Extraplanetary Investigations got a load of this.

The second cultivator finished whatever it was she was doing in her holopad and swiped to open a public connection. Into the crater, she broadcast. “Senior Inner Disciple Ming and Senior Inner Disciple Alba of the Dragon’s Left Eye offer our greetings to the venerable ancient, alongside our most sincere welcome to the planet Ilirian.”

A minute passed. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. No passengers walked down the soulship’s open gangway. Even the jungle around them seemed to respect the tense silence as it fell upon the gathered officials, though Sam thought the recent explosion might’ve had something to do with that.

Quiet whispers began to circulate. Disbelief, disappoint, and confusion alike spread through the crowd as time ticked by without a response. Senior Inner Disciple Ming flashed an uncertain look at Senior Inner Disciple Alba. The latter reached up to close the connection.

“Soulship LC-81535 humbly accepts your welcome.”

The line went quiet. Alba muted her end and entered a hushed discussion with Ming before issuing her reply.

“While we wouldn’t dare question the motives of one so august as yourself, our duty to the people and creatures of this world requires we ask why you deigned to discharge your weapons so.”

This time, Sam counted. Eight minutes, eight long, wretched minutes dragged on before the soulship responded.

“I encountered a void beast infestation at this location and acted appropriately.”

Another hushed conversation led to another carefully crafted question. “We are ashamed to admit we had no knowledge of a void beast infestation on Ilirian. Might we humbly request an image of the creatures in question for our records?”

Ten minutes passed this time.

“You might.”

The cultivators deliberated again. “If the venerable ancient would be so gracious, we request an image of the infestation you so magnanimously took care of for us.”

Eight minutes dragged on.

“Unfortunately, I kept no footage of the event.”

More deliberation.

“We’re afraid our duties demand a description of the infestation. We humbly ask you grace us with the number of void beasts you felled with your immense and incomparable might.”

Sam wanted to scream, but he was smarter than that. Instead he stood there silently, biting back his impatience as the cultivators wasted hours wringing a description of these supposed void beasts out of the skiff. It was all bullshit. It was all obviously bullshit, but the sect representatives didn’t dare call the soulship on it. Even worse, they’d only just confirmed which class of void beast it was when the suns started to dip beyond the horizon, and Alba uttered the most painful series of words Sam had heard in years.

“We prostrate our insignificant selves in thanks for your aid in eliminating the threat and fulfilling our requirement for adequate records. Come morning, we hope to continue our conversation in regards to how we might repay this debt by helping in whichever task your illustrious self has come to Ilirian to complete.”

A full thirty minutes passed before the holopad’s speakers came to life with a single word.

“Perhaps.”

The line went dead. Sam bit back a groan, wise enough to avoid angering the two cultivators in front of him. He turned to Alicia by his side. “Take the shuttle into town and come back with camping supplies.” He glanced down at the skiff, still perfectly still as twilight fell upon the crater, then back to the cultivators who’d managed to spend all day without asking a single meaningful question.  “We’re going to be here a while.”

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