One thing that almost made all those weird missions worth doing was the real food Kaya got to eat. Sometahing she had never been able to do before...and something she feared getting accustomed to. But of course, that came with having to do some less than enjoyable things.

Like discovering that she was missing some apparently important information while trying to negotiate something she was ill formed to to do. “I'm sorry, I must be missing some context here.”

“I haven't been informed Fleet wanted to have a say in local matters. Beyond their normal tasks that is.” But maybe that was the point? Some other faction wanted to be involved, O'Bannon wanted to buff up the shipyard without any commitment on that, effectively preventing that other faction from reaching its goal?

But maybe she was getting paranoid.

“What kind of guarantees are you looking for?” She asked after a moment, almost as much to give herself some time to eat as because the question was an important one.

In reply to Kaya Wilden (msg # 539):

The Baron smirks and chuckles.  "Sorry.  Not trying to be ugly.  But it's just like Naval command to send someone out to talk to me without giving them all the details."

He gestures with his hand and servants start to clear the empty plates.  One offers you coffee...real coffee...and some kind of soft looking desert.

"I want a clear division between what I handle and what the Navy handles.  Internal matters are mine.  That includes citizen complaints, cargo ship escort, and the like.  More than willing to let the Navy deal with out of system issues like pirate raids.  Though of course, I will fire on any pirates that come near my people or my tankers."

He nods at the tart.  "You ever had bananas?  This is banana pudding.  You'll love it."

He picks up his coffee mug.  "Captain Ho-Shu keeps telling me the Navy should be responsible for escort of my water tankers.  And that the Navy should assume police duties on my settled world.  I disagree."

Kaya shrugged with a wry smile. “I suppose I'll get used to it.”

“Can't say that I have no.” She then answered about bananas. She spent a moment to think about all that, then shrugged fatalistically. “I'm afraid I will have to contact my hierarchy before I can say much more on the subject.”

“If nothing else,” she added with a grimace, “because any agreement we'd come to would need to be ratified by my superiors, and if it'd be something they wouldn't agree to it'd just be a loss of time for everyone involved.” And, more importantly... it gave her time to look at her real mission while she 'waited for instructions'.

In reply to Kaya Wilden (msg # 541):

The Baron nods.  "Thanks for not trying to talk me into something then.  You wouldn't be able to. And the loss of my time would just get me upset.

"Come talk to me again when you've heard from your superiors then.  Unless there was somethign else you needed to talk to me about?"

“Anything else would have hardly been productive.” Kaya shrugged, obviously not thinking much of it. If nothing else, she wouldn’t have had the arguments to convince him, even if she had wanted to.

“I will contact you again as soon as I know more.” She readily agreed then, then smiled wryly, “I hope you won’t take it out on me if I end up trying to convince you to let the Fleet do its thing.” Not wanting to talk too much about that, she asked, “As far as anything else, I’ve heard there’s some troubles between two local corporations? Is it something I should worry about?”

In reply to Kaya Wilden (msg # 543):

The Baron smiles back wryly.  "We all have jobs to do.  Whether we think there's a point in them or not."

The smile falls off when you ask about the corporate tensions.  "It's a headache and the answer is...I don't know.  Since I've already told Captain Ho-Shu, I'll tell you.  I've mobilized my troops.  If hostilities break out, I'm not going to let it affect my people or my trade.  If they want to kill each other on that side of the star, let 'em."

He has an odd look when he says this.  Like he's curious to see how you'll react.

Kaya didn’t seem particularly concerned. “Not only I’m a simple Lieutenant, but I hardly know everything there is to know about the current situation so I’m not really fit to have an opinion on the subject, am I?”

Kaya shook her head, not waiting for an answer, “But if there’s something we can do to help prevent things from going too far, don’t hesitate to tell me and I’ll see what I can do while I’m waiting for Fleet’s 'clarifications'.” While it wouldn’t do to tell him she was going to look into it, it was another thing to leave the initiative to him. If, and what, he requested would tell her a lot.

Hopefully anyway. She gave him a chance to say something on the subject, before nodding. “So if you don’t mind, I’ll go contact my superiors to clarify their instructions.”

In reply to Kaya Wilden (msg # 545):

He says nothing for a moment, then shrugs, standing up with you.  "I'll wait to hear back from you then.  Good day Lieutenant."

Rokzi waits until you're back in the shuttle.  "So whaddya think Boss?"

“Besides the fact that we're apparently once again in the middle of some Fleet politics?” Kaya shook her head. “His answers seem to be the right ones. Concerns for the safety of his subjects and all that. But wouldn't he take pre-emptive steps to ensure the situation doesn't worsen if he really wanted to protect them?”

“I'm not going to say he doesn't care at all,” Even though he would hardly be the first one, “But I don't think he intends to step in before things have blown up. The why remains to be seen.”

“If, or when, he comes to us for help on this will tell us quite a bit, but... Let's see what we can find by ourselves while I wait for 'updated' orders.” Which she wasn't sure she wanted, but she hadn't exactly join the fleet to get what she wanted had she? “Did you get anything else?”

In reply to Kaya Wilden (msg # 547):

Rokzi frowns.  "Not much more than you really.  I am really curious why he hasn't done anything up till now."

He seems thoughtful a moment.  "So now I guess we gotta figure out what to do now.  You wanted me to keep pushin' on the cops, right?  Or you want me to do somethin' else now?"

“Hmm.” Kaya didn’t sound too convinced. “I think we need to focus on those drones for now. So I guess, yes. The sooner you can 'convince' the local cops to request our help on the matter, the sooner Aarav and Peri can get their hands on it.”

“In the meantime,” she really grimaced there, “I’ll work with Rei to see if we can come up with a reasonable plan to get some information from the corps’s executives.”

In reply to Kaya Wilden (msg # 549):

"On it."

You find the rest of your crew eating a communal meal.  Not something they've been prone to do.  Aarav cooked apparently.  Mushrooms and squash curry.

Rei washes dishes afterwards.  "So how do you want to try to go about this?"

“I don’t?” Kaya rubbed the side of her neck tiredly, “The only outfit I’m comfortable in, is the uniform. I’m more likely to glare at anyone looking for too long, and smash someone’s privates if he even considered doing more than that.”

She looked up for a second, then sighed, long and hard. “So even before we consider the other risks, I’m not even sure we could come up with a plan that would work…” The young lieutenant looked at Rei, waiting to see if she had anything to say to that.

In reply to Kaya Wilden (msg # 551):

Rei considers.  "Well.  Could Peri and I do it?  I mean...Peri is kinda butch.  But she might be able to pull it off a little easier.

"Or maybe we could try a different tactic.  What exactly do we need to do here?  Get info from the corporate office?"

“At the moment,” Kaya answered, “we are...suspecting...that an...unidentified...third party is poking the two corps into a war by hacking their drones to 'accidentally' get turned around and land in the other's lands.”

“Note that we don't have anything to back that but it feels right to Rokzi and me.” She paused, tapping her lips pensively for a moment, before shaking her head. “Even if that's the case, it's likely that someone has been paid in both corps to incite things. Probably not too high in the hierarchy, someone who's disgruntled for one reason or another. Didn't get a promotion, wants to stick it to a stupid boss, things like that.”

“So,” she continued after a longer pause, “what we'd need is to find something that could point us in the right direction. People who could have done just that.”

In reply to Kaya Wilden (msg # 553):

The others are quiet a bit.

Rei taps a finger against the table top.  "If we can find internal incident reports from both corps on some of the incidents, we can cross reference the names involved maybe."

Peri considers.  "I can try to hack into the corporate databases.  But from what I saw, the security is real tight.  I can either try to ram through the security barriers, grab what I can, and get out before they put a tracker on us.  Or we can try to tap into a connectivity node.  That'd be a lot safer.  But I imagine we'd have to sneak into their corporate offices to do it."

Aarav cocks his head to one side.  "On an unrelated note, I'd like to take a look at those drones.  Do we have access to them yet?"

“Rokzi is working on that as we speak. Hopefully he'll convince the local police to ask for our expertise on the subject. Much better for them to ask than for us to offer.”

Turning to Peri she added, “Let's try to stay discreet for now. It'll keep our options open for one, and I'd rather not have anyone guarded against us just yet. I assume we'd need to do it twice, once for each corp?” That was asking for trouble, but well...

“Would there be one of those connectivity node outside of their HQ in the station? A local office or something?” She glanced at Rei, “I may consider an infiltration here for one of the two corps, but doing it twice... I don't want anyone to add two and two and get to right answer. Best muck things up as much as we can.”

In reply to Kaya Wilden (msg # 555):

Peri considers.  "I didn't think about an outside office.  Hmmm."

She turns and starts working on her console.  After a few minutes, she turns back.

"I think I can give us one better.  Both corps have offices planet side. Both below on Zhestkiy and one on the populated planet, CherVlaz.  We could hit one corp on Zhestkiy and one on CherVlaz.  Less chance of them tying it back to us."

Kaya nodded. “Sounds good.” She considered the information for a second or two, then continued, “We could go stealthy on Zhestkiy and more...well, 'social engineering' on CherVlaz.” Even though that didn't seem to please her too much. “the timing may draw some suspicion, but if we use two different means it may throw them off.”

“Peri, would you need to be on site for this, or can we plug a relay or something?”

In reply to Kaya Wilden (msg # 557):

Peri ponders that question as well, then finally shakes her head.

"No.  I think it would be better to run it as a relay.  If we want to pull as much intel as we can, quick as we can, the processing speed of the ship's onboard will be a lot better than a hand held computer at the scene."

She meets your eyes.  "But do I need to be the one running the computer here?  I'd like to do the field work on at least one of the locations."

“I don't have a problem with that, in principle.” Kaya answered Peri with a shrug, “but this is Rokzi's domain of expertise. He will have to be the one you need to convince.”

“For now, let's see what we can find on both locations. Then we'll come up with a tentative plan for both. So. What do we know about both locations?”

In reply to Kaya Wilden (msg # 559):

You and Peri move through data feeds.

Both corps have offices on the two locations.  You really have four choices, not two.  Each corporation has an office on the two locations: planet side near their mine and on the homeworld of CherVlaz

I'm going to give you the information for each "world" in seperate posts so as to lessen confusion and allow for questions.

First, let's deal with the planet side mining offices...

ESC has it's planet side office on Nervnyy.  It seems to serve as a focal point for the miners planet side, acting as both a company store and a trading post to purchase ore and materials the miners collect.  It's a large compound type operation, with about seventeen seperate buildings including a canteen, exchange, a bunker and field hospital, and a command post.  It looks well manned.

DriveCorp seems to take the opposite approach.  It's main planet side office is on Zhestkiy.  A smaller affair, it seems to serve mostly as an admin for the corporation's planet side space port.  There's a building to handle the traffic control and a building to handle audits on shipments coming in to  the port and out of the port.  Other than the port itself, which is more or less a couple of landing fields, that's it.

Both offices are connected to the main corporate computer from what you can tell.

“It sounds to me that the ESC’s planet-side offices would be the easiest to hit. It would be easier to disappear in the crowd, maybe by pretending to be mercenaries or something.” Kaya commented, “On the other hand, if we manage to go to the DriveCorp’s one without raising any red flag, there’s likely to be less security.”

“Could we, I don’t know, pretend to be an audit team or something like that?” She asked Peri, “Or would you need access to the computers first to add our authorizations for that?”

In reply to Kaya Wilden (msg # 561):

Peri shrugs.  "That's kind a' more a Rokzi question.  I guess we can fake some IDs.  But I'm not really sure how good a job I can do.  I didn't do so hot in the espionage courses at the Academy."

The CherVlaz offices for both corps are located a block from each other.  They're both in office complexes, ESC on the third floor and DriveCorp on the fifteenth.  Both seem to serve identical functions: personnel.  It's where they recruit miners, handle payroll, all the usual.

The only real difference in the offices are the sizes.  ESC's office occupies half the floor it's on.  DriveCorp takes the entire floor and it seems part of the floor above it.

Kaya nodded. “For now, let's assume we're going to go to ESC's side office on Nervnyy and for DriverCorp we'll do it on Chervaz.” Kaya looked at Peri, “Try to find whatever information you can on those two places, I'll com' Rokzi to see where he's at with the local and ask him to come for a chat when he can.”

“In the meantime, Arrav, try to look at the drones both corps are using for their claims. Hopefully that should give you an idea of how they might have been hacked.” Assuming it was what was happening of course...