Operation Christmas Scorpion (12-2021)
Blip…blip…blip…
What…is…that? The young Comstar communications technician fiddled with some dials and pressed some buttons, assuming the stray signal was noise generated by a local quasar. As he locked on and isolated it, a burst of data nearly burnt out his terminal…and then all was quiet.
Hesitantly, he called over Ivan, his wheezy supervisor. Ivan’s eyes went wide as he scanned the data, and he inserted his data fob into Max’s terminal, downloading the files to his personal cache before deleting them from the young man’s device. ‘Nothing for you to worry about…this never happened.’ A sense of menace came into the man’s watery gaze. ‘Is that understood?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Max said, his voice quavering less than it might have.
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Ivan stared at the data a long time, his mind swirling. He referenced and cross-referenced against Comstar historical records and logs. ‘It has to be,’ he muttered under his breath.
He knew if he did this wrong, some busy-body bureaucrat would fumble the whole thing. Checking his credit balance at Comstar bank, he pulled a crypto-rod from his supervisor’s safe. Using one for personal reasons could put him in jail on a backwater mining colony for the rest of his life, but he knew how to fix the records so it would never be missed.
Inserting the rod that would make tracing of his transmission impossible, he spoke slowly and clearly into the microphone.
‘I’ve found something…need to meet…yes, you can invest…hire mercenary company…beyond the rim…Lostech…’