Chapter 18

A team breakfast the next morning was an odd experience. They seemed like normal, everyday people and not like the kind of people Kat remembered from her past. The smugglers she knew were shifty, nervous people who skulked and lurked. These people chatted and ate breakfast, talking about the day's plans, the next step in reviewing operations for several local plants and were, generally, nice folks.

Kat had to wonder if the game had changed of if her perceptions had altered over time. If that was true, that she was seeing things differently, she wondered what else she from her past that she may view differently.

Kat had been introduced to the team as Helios's new deputy, and she had received more than one sideways glance and measuring look. They welcomed her with a Kafe toast and made her feel right at home. After breakfast, the team split up in to smaller groups and went about their assignments. When not actively working on some emergency or other, they also performed quality assurance checks on the facilities that CCD had built and managed in the area.

The meeting with the Anson exec progressed much like Helios had hoped. He made much of new technology that had to be installed to meet stricter environmental guidelines and he held out for an unreasonable renewal fee. When Barsa balked, Helios said he was sorry, but he insisted on speaking to Barsa's superior. After several fruitless hours of negotiation, Helios was told that he would be contacted when an appointment slot could be found.

The interesting part of the process wasn't the negotiations, or that Helios had played his part to perfection, keeping the proposed fee just beyond the reach of Barsa's authority, it was the office in which the meeting was held.

While Helios and the exec were haggling, Kat sat silent and, to anyone observing the proceedings, it appeared that she was researching and pulling up data for Helios. She would, every now and again, lean forward and show the screen to Helios. He would then take a new tack in the negotiations and off they would go again.

What Kat was really doing was quite different. She had linked the functions and display of her Comm unit to that of her data pad. She could control the special functions of the Comm unit without revealing them to the casual observer. She had first activated the scanning function and had pinpointed no fewer than five surveillance sources in the room. There was a personal recorder in Helios's pocket, a similar, though larger, unit on the exec's desk. There were two video and sound units in the ceiling, probably part of corporate security, but the one that fascinated Kat was the one hidden inside a bit of sculpture on a sideboard behind the desk.

The sculpture was of a Mobius strip, being lifted by a pair of what looked like manacles slaves. There was something familiar about it, but Kat could not place where she had seen it before. Linking her data pad to the planetary library, she found several references to the original artwork and, in an old editorial, the link she had been looking for.

That particular sculpture was called 'Eden Rising' and was the work of a late 21st century sculptor turned philosopher, Gustav Dimavich. He founded a new religion, though it was not considered so at the time, based on the philosophy of Extropian Transhumanism. ExTran, as it was called today, preached the end to all controls on technology, the repeal of all laws which governed free action and free will, the free distribution of all knowledge and the search for the holy grail of human immortality.

It was not that far off from the early days of Extropian Transhumanism, but the ExTrans had changed the message, preaching anarchy where the early philosophers argued for peaceful change. As if anarchy wasn't enough, ExTrans insisted that the governments, specifically the Union but including the various system and planetary governments, were all involved in a massive conspiracy to keep knowledge from the masses. They claimed that the Union had conquered mortality and was hiding the truth from the people.

Kat had encountered some ExTrans, though briefly, when she was a teen-ager on Ovid. A small church had opened up in low town and was offering free meals along with a sermon to whomever was willing to sit through the often vitriolic ranting of the local priest. Kat had gone several times, when money was short, but could never grasp exactly what they thought would happen if everyone had unlimited access to any tech they could get their hands on. They seemed more anarchist than humanist and, while Kat had personal experience with corruptibility of government and the misuse of power, she wasn't sure she wanted to live in a world with no rules at all.

The church, or cult, depending on your point of view, had been linked to several attacks on scientific research centers and even a couple of science outposts over the years. The last decade had seen a resurgence of popularity with the church and the attacks had spread to government offices and even government employees.

Attacks on disparate worlds were not uncommon, but the slower speed of communication and the great distances between systems meant that even those people charged with watching for trends could miss the significance. Kat had read a report, while in training, by an analyst who had postulated that the explosion of new religious violence was connected so a single movement and it constituted a trend that bore closer scrutiny. The class had been on intelligence gathering and had focused on the techniques used to draw parallels between the events, and not on the events themselves.

When the meeting was over, and they were safely ensconced in their hotel suite, Kat told Helios about the sculpture and about the surveillance transmitter inside. She also told him, briefly, about why she had recognized it, her personal experience with the church and about her impromptu research. Helios wasn't convinced that this was linked to their case, but he agreed that it was odd and worth reporting back to the Intelligence section at the Citadel. Kat, when writing out her information request, suggested that they contact the analyst who had worked on the paper being studied in the Intelligence Gathering class.

Kat also place an order for an expensive, but very useful, bit of gear. It was a signal tracer, but unlike any tracer currently on the market. Most setups that allowed the tracing of a signal, whether it was a radio signal or a data path in a computer network, repied on several pieces of gear. You had the receiver component that actually identified the signal, a software component that processed the signal and either a person, or a very expensive heuristic computer program, to analyze the signal or path and draw conclusions. While the receiver could be as small as a grain of sand, the processing and analysis required much more power and, consequently, were almost always housed externally.