“Circumstantial,” I replied. “Or maybe it’s disinformation. Look, after Horatio, Ainsley decided to find out what was really going on. So we’ve been mounting a discreet surveillance on the Salvation of Life ever since.”

“And?” Kandara prompted.

“They aren’t being entirely honest with us; they are keeping secrets about themselves. But there’s no conspiracy.”

“You can’t know that. Not for certain.”

“I do.”

“How?”

“Because five years back I took point on a covert mission that broke into the Salvation of Life.”

Feriton Kayne’s Spy Mission

FERITON KAYNE’S SPY MISSION

THE SALVATION OF LIFE, AD 2199

I’d been living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for more than a year to physically inflate my cover story. Data-based legends are easy to install in solnet; these days you can basically be anyone you want to be, providing you have the money and expertise. Connexion Security had both in abundance. Even a G8Turing’s search would only turn up the cover history I’d been given. But if the Vatican or the Grand Ayatollah actually sent someone to Lancaster, they’d be able to verify what a great citizen I was and how my attendance at local Quaker meetings was top rate. Not that anyone in the office expected any cardinals or imams to physically turn up and run a deep check. But given where I was heading, office policy was to make that cover story as real as possible. So if some dark-ops agent did come checking in person, they’d swiftly get wearied talking to neighbors and colleagues and friends who would all tell them what a great (if moderately dull) guy I was, complete with the personal anecdotes I’d generated by actually living there.

Ainsley Zangari was very clear about getting the mission absolutely right. Funding for his Olyix Monitoring Office was already over three quarters of a billion wattdollars a year. A portion of that money was spent on G8Turings that scoured solnet for evidence of operatives like Cancer corroding and corrupting corporations and institutions, with emphasis on the defense sector. Deals like that were absurdly easy to set up anonymously through solnet. So whenever we did come across an op that had defense connotations, it was virtually impossible to backtrack.

Outside of that, the Olyix Monitoring Office had two main divisions with dedicated tasks. The first ran an operation devoted to watching the Olyix embassies, which we did mainly by planting our own operatives inside among the human staff. To be honest, I don’t think there was a single Olyix embassy employee who wasn’t reporting back to some intelligence agency or other. Our knowledge of their official trade deals and financial status was absolute.