Among Enemies, page 2
part #9 of On Silver Wings Series
She would, if she were in their position, after all.
Actually, I wouldn't have let me anywhere near this place, Sorilla thought with some suspicion of her own.
They knew her specialty now, and letting her have a map to a primary military supplier? That was just reckless foolishness, unless they had something in mind. Which, well, of course they did.
The question was, what did they have in mind?
It was possible that the Alliance was feeding her false intelligence, hoping she'd bring it back to SOLCOM. Possible, but unlikely. Anything that she could bring back was unlikely to be of much use unless SOLCOM was planning an immediate pre-emptive strike, which the Alliance had to know was incredibly unlikely.
They might not be intending to allow her to leave Alliance space at all.
A marginally less unlikely scenario, but while she had no illusions that the Alliance would shed any tears should she meet her fate while hunting her white whale within their borders, Sorilla didn't get quite get that vibe off the representatives she had been interacting with.
No, the most likely scenario was that they were giving her basic intelligence that, while accurate, was of limited value. In exchange they were availing themselves of her services, a minor thing but she liked to believe that she was competent in what she did, and also gaining more intelligence on her training and what they might have to expect from other SOLCOM units.
In the meanwhile, she was availing herself of their services... and permission to travel within Alliance borders... while also gathering similar intelligence on their spy craft, special operations, and other basic cultural norms.
Sorilla considered the trade to be heavily in her favor, assuming she managed to outplay the locals.
That was the game, after all.
At the moment, however, the game was incredibly boring.
The plant supervisors seemed genuine, as best she could read from their alien body language anyway. If she were reading Sienele correctly, and she had a better read on him than the administrators, he seemed to feel much the same.
The plant was, apparently, on the up and up.
What that meant, she was less than sure.
Sienele and Kriss seemed absolutely certain that there were no other facilities in operation that could produce the kit they'd found during their joint operations. She wasn't sure how that could be, but for the moment Sorilla was willing to assume they were correct.
What does that mean, then? That the gear had to come from this facility, yet the administrators are apparently and sincerely aghast at the possibility. The grunt workers?
Sorilla walked across the conference room they'd moved into during the overview of all the documentation, to where there was a large window overlooking what she might call a work floor.
It was nothing like any she'd seen on Earth, sprawling for miles from where she was standing, in all directions no less. The machinery was inscrutable for someone whose entire education was in other directions. The people, though, they were just people. They looked different, alien in appearance, but they moved like people. They milled around when they had nothing to do. She could see several groups doing what she assumed was the equivalent of water cooler chatting, for example. They went about their work and, as bizarre as some of that appeared to be, the vast majority was exactly what Sienele and Kriss had said about them.
Grunt work.
Those groups didn't matter.
Sorilla's retinal implants glowed as she focused on someone who didn't fit into any of the groups she'd spotted.
It was one of the grunt workers alright, alone. He was standing around, maybe a hundred meters down the work floor. She focused in on him through the liquid lenses floating over her pupil.
He keeps looking this way. Nervous. Interesting.
If you wanted to subvert a company, or any organization really, there were a couple basic approaches you could make.
Buying the top brass was always effective, but it tended to be expensive and, unless you were very, very careful, it was also terribly easy to spot on an audit. Administrative types had access, but they weren't generally very good at hiding their tracks. They tended to get clever, misfiling paperwork or hiding records by slipping them into other budgetary entries.
Effective enough against a light audit, certainly, but it had the problem of the information still being filed. A good enough deep audit would dig it all up, and while it might take a long while to properly unfuck the records, but it could be done.
Another option was to go for the lowest level workers.
They couldn't mask massive purchase orders - or hide production runs in the budget of another department - but they could list a machine as being out of order and down for repairs while it was actually working through the night, producing parts entirely off the record, with materials that had been listed as scrap disposal.
A shift's production run here, a couple more shifts there, and you could hide a lot of production in the margins of a large facilities normal waste numbers.
Sorilla silently crossed the room, coming to a stop just behind Sienele.
"There's a floor worker spending a lot of time staring at this room, he doesn't look happy," She whispered softly in English, knowing that the Alien had taken the time to learn the language some time ago.
Sienele didn't react, but as she stepped back Sorilla could see him flick his gaze to the large window.
"I believe that we will need a tour of the facility," Sienele said after a moment, eyes locked onto the administrator.
"A... a tour? Of course, we can show you the process..." The alien began, eager to please.
"No," Sienele held up a hand. "Not the process, the facility. All of it."
The administrator stared at him, uncomprehending for a moment before a look of abject horror bloomed across his features.
"But... Envoy," He stammered. "I am not sure you understand the sheer scale of the facility..."
Sienele just smiled darkly.
*****
The Administrator had a point about scale, Sorilla thought as they started on their 'tour'.
The facility was hundreds of miles square, with levels above and below ground multiplying the floor space significantly.
Earth production had moved away from large scale facilities for many things, as she expected the Alliance likely had as well. But certain types of production just benefitted too much from the economy of scale and apparently weapons manufacture was one of those when you were outfitting a galactic empire.
Sorilla ignored the information being given by the guide, though her implants were recording everything. She was most interested in the reactions they were receiving as they moved through the facility.
A lot of curious looks, some angry ones. She ignored those for the most part. Curiosity was normal, and one of the basic rights of anyone doing an honest day's work was griping about it, so the anger made sense too.
She was looking for fear.
There would always be someone up to some type of no good, of course. A little theft of office supplies, a bit of embezzlement, the sorts of things that companies both prosecuted firmly when caught but also expected and accounted for in their running budgets. What she was looking for was something deeper than that sort of casual corruption.
This is so much easier when I'm dealing with humans.
The Aliens of the Alliance were surprisingly human-like in many ways, she'd found. Sorilla wasn't sure what that meant really, perhaps certain traits were really universal. Fear, anger, basic emotions were recognizable with minimal adjustment for the species' differing biologies. A lot of the micro expressions were indecipherable, of course, which made some levels of cold reading all but impossible, but she could still get the gist of things.
The administrator playing tour guide was droning on about details of things, which Sorilla was dutifully recording to her implants, but her mind was elsewhere, focusing on those she could see hanging back and watching them.
Mostly it appeared to be curiosity, but it didn't take too long to spot someone watching them with clear apprehension.
It was one of the grunts, as Sienele and Kriss had described them.
Sirhan.
There were a lot of them, which made sense. A low-tech culture would value the simple pay that the Alliance would consider trivial, and be willing to do the heavy lifting that wasn't cost effective to automate.
It happened a lot on Earth, she knew. High tech gadgets tended to have a fast developmental cycle, and the cost of retooling automation was such that it was cheaper to just hire people willing to work for pennies rather than try to build robots to do the job only to have them become obsolete in six months when the next version came out.
People from lower tech cultures were easy enough to train up, and worked for a fraction of what their counterparts back in the World would demand.
They also didn't have the same loyalties, however, or even the concept of some of them.
Cultures were funny that way.
She spotted one of them looking at the group with undisguised nervousness, but what really caught her gaze was where else he was looking. Sorilla followed the alien's gaze and stared down that direction pensively.
Sorilla stopped Kriss with a tap to his lower arm, nodding her head down a corridor. He glanced at her, then in the direction she nodded, then grunted curtly before turning back to the group.
"What is in that direction?" He asked, gesturing pointedly.
Sienele and the Administrator looked back at him, then in the direction he'd pointed, both of them surprised by the interruption.
"Oh... Uh, stores mostly," The Administrator said, confused. "Components from other factories, raw materials, nothing of any particular import in terms of our process here."
Sienele was staring at Kriss, clearly wondering why the Sentinel had asked such a question, but a twitch from the Lucian caused him to shift his gaze and meet Sorilla eye to eye. He relaxed visibly, nodding.
"Why don't we take a look," He said. "A short detour, if you would."
"We... could," The Administrator nodded. "I'm not sure there is anything to warrant your attention, but very well."
The group changed direction, walking down a long length of the facility that quickly became a warehouse organization. As predicted by the administrator, there was nothing of any interest as they walked. Just walls and walls filled with stores positioned such that they could easily be accessed at need.
Sorilla, however, wasn't interested in the stores themselves. It was possible there was something of interest there. It would be easy enough to hide contraband in such a place, but if that was the secret being hidden, she didn't much care. She was hunting bigger game.
After nearly an hour of wandering, the Administrator looked to Sienele again.
"As you can see, it is not particularly interesting," He said, almost plaintive. "Merely storage."
Sienele nodded slowly, eyes looking over to Sorilla in quick darting glances.
"Yes, I can see that."
"Perhaps we should move on. A full tour will take long enough as it is," The Administrator said, obviously eager to be moving on though it did seem that he was just looking to get the entire ordeal over with.
"Very well," Sienele sighed, acquiescing as he saw nothing to be gained by wandering around the storerooms, "We'll return to the rest of the tour."
The group began to track back along the path they followed in. Sorrilla had her implants in pattern recognition mode, searching everything they passed for any hint of something out of place, but nothing was turning up as they began their return.
Then she paused, a feeling twisting in her gut, and she instantly brought up her hand with a closed fist.
The Lucians instantly stopped, fanning out slightly around her as they responded to the gesture, their weapons coming up. Kriss turned sharply to look at her, while Sienele merely stopped in place.
The Administrator was nearly shaking in fear as the armed group of soldiers made their vocation very evident from their actions.
"What is the meaning of..." He blustered.
Everyone ignored him.
"What is it?" Kriss asked.
"Ross."
One word was all it took. Kriss' own weapon cleared its holster and Sienele also reached for a small weapon concealed at the small of his back.
"Are you certain?" The spymaster demanded, eyes scanning the area for any signs of enemy action.
Sorilla nodded, "Their tech at least."
She slowly turned, then pointed deeper back into the warehouse. "There, but down. A long way down."
*****
Chapter Two
Sienele found himself staring at the floor for a long moment before he straightened and looked over at the Administrator again.
"How many floors did you say the facility descended?"
"Ten, but I am familiar with every floor. I assure you, there is nothing amiss below us."
"Mmm," Sienele nodded slowly, "And how far down is ten floors?"
"I would have to check the records to be precise, but roughly I would say a hundred to one hundred and thirty Lithomets."
Sorilla blinked at the term she wasn't familiar with, but based on the height of the floor they were in, she guessed it was somewhere on the order of a hundred meters, give or take a fair percentage. She frowned, "If a... lithomet is roughly what I am thinking, the signal is considerably deeper."
"Impossible, this planet was thoroughly surveyed before the facility was built. We would have discovered anything of that nature, and they certainly didn't install anything after the construction was complete."
She turned to give the Administrator a baleful glare. "Who conducted the survey?"
"Enough," Sienele cut in, casting a reproachful look in Sorilla's direction. "Remember you are a guest here."
Sorilla dipped her head, taking a step back and falling quiet, allowing Sienele to play the good guy role as he worked on the Administrator.
"My... friend is perhaps overly enthusiastic," He said charmingly. "But she does have a point, I'm afraid. Are you aware of who did conduct the survey?"
"No," The Administrator admitted. "It will be in the records, of course, but it was finished before I was brought into the project. I assume it was completed by the Development Corporation assigned to this sector."
Those words meant little to Sorilla, but she couldn't have missed the sudden exchange of looks between Sienele and Kriss if she were blind.
That meant a lot to them, but what?
"Of course," Sienele said smoothly. "I will investigate of course, but no doubt you are correct. For the moment, could you perhaps show us the way to the bottom floor."
The Administrator looked confused, and more than a little put out, but he acquiesced quickly enough, not that he had many other options of course.
"This way."
*****
The lifts were large, industrial constructions, Sorilla noted as she stepped into the machinery along with the Sentinels. They'd waited for the Administrator to step in first, exchanging mutually amused glances with one another as they recognized the unspoken decision for exactly what it was.
Still, the alien seemed to have no malicious intent despite being a paper pusher, and in moments they were all in the large lift and it began to descend.
Sorilla didn't feel the acceleration directly, but her sense of the Ross technology gave her an idea of just how quickly they were moving, and she was shocked by the speed. Only seconds after they had begun, the doors to the large lift opened on the tenth sub-floor and they stepped out.
The floor was an expanse of space, littered with what appeared to be fabrication facilities from what Sorilla could tell. She couldn't be entirely sure, of course. They bore no resemblance to her own little army of MOFABS back on Hayden, but the products being turned out by each did seem to make their application obvious.
She didn't see anywhere that raw materials were being put into the system, however.
"Fabrication tools?" She asked casually, glancing over to Kriss.
The Sentinel grunted. "Standard commercial fabricators, I believe you would call them."
"What do they use for raw materials?"
He looked over at her, an eyebone rising, "Energy. What else would they use?"
"Ah," Sorilla nodded.
Matter energy conversion?
Technically she knew it was possible. SOLCOM ships used the rather high level of power in their reactors to do the same thing, albeit on a very different scale. Slamming a few electrons, protons, and neutrons together into a hydrogen molecule, or an oxygen one, was a good emergency capacity for a ship to have, even if it was far more cost effective to just mine water ice from comets on your way into, or out of, a system.
Using nothing but energy to just turn out completed products like this, however? That was pure science fiction.
The power requirements alone must be insane.
Power was, in many ways, the most basic hallmark of a civilization. The most rudimentary meter by which any culture could be measured was through its power use. Cavemen, barely able to harness fire, were on the first rung of civilization. Harnessing the natural forces of nature, cracking the atom, production of anti-matter... these were what academics would rank a culture by.
Earth had done all of that, to varying degrees, and were considered to be effectively a Type One civilization by the most common scale in popular use, the Kardeshev Scale. But Sorilla was far too aware that nothing she knew of on Earth could possibly have provided the power to do what she was seeing in just this one, albeit massive, room.
How did we not lose the war instantly?
Now, more than ever, Sorilla desperately wanted to know more about what happened to Task Force Valkyrie. That they had been able to somehow stop an Alliance Fleet as they had, however they had, could be considered nothing short of miraculous.
