You know, Tyrus. That’s how she fights. Information is her shield. And her sword. In that, you’re both the same. You just use different weapons.
But why was this her fight?
“Why her?” he asked again.
Gabriella sighed, and it was clear, even to Rechs, that she was a little exasperated with him. But she was still professional. Or maybe she wasn’t. Again, he was not good at this part.
“I think it was a signal, Rechs.”
He noticed she didn’t call him Tyrus again.
She let the sentence hang for a second because to her it was a pretty big stone to throw in the pond. A House of Reason delegate mixed up in the beheading of a legionnaire. That was tinfoil bucket conspiracy cuckoo tower stuff.
Then she took a deep breath and continued.
“I don’t think she’s there for all the reasons she’s telling everyone she’s there. To listen. To fact-find for the House of Reason. Yeah, from a political insider position, and I’ve got all the major networks weighing in on the streams, what she’s doing is blatantly politically opportunistic. As in, they think she sees a moment to push her career forward, using the disturbance for her own political gain. That’s what politicians do. But there’s more to this.”
“How?”
“Bear with me. I’m trying to get some more hard intel the Guild might have access to. It’s just that something didn’t sound right to me when she was speaking. The speech was too… I don’t know, set up. Too perfect. Ready to go. And she punched that last line too hard. I’m telling you, Tyrus. She was signaling them. She gave someone the go-ahead because the Soshies can’t break through the comms blockade the navy has in place.”
Rechs chewed but didn’t speak. He waited for Gabriella to fill in her own void.
“I know this sounds crazy, Tyrus, but what if she was the messenger sent in by the higher-ups who are most likely behind this whole mess to tell them to escalate it to the next level? To do something like… like…” She stumbled. “Like what they did?”
She paused, and he wondered about her. Who was she really? Why did this affect her compared to all the really dark, jacked-up stuff the Bronze Guild dealt with on a daily basis?
“She’s trying to light the galaxy on fire, Rechs. You’re not seeing the streams, but everyone is outraged. Everyone. At what the terrorists did, but also at what might be coming next. Everyone is worried the Legion is going to do something that will escalate the situation into a confrontation with the Republic itself… they’re talking about a repeat of the Sayed Massacre.”
Rechs digested this. He didn’t think the Legion would go out onto the streets and start indiscriminately killing every citizen of Detron until the Republic showed up to stop them. And that wasn’t what had actually happened at Sayed anyway.
He’d been at Sayed. But no one living knew the real story. Just the fiction the House of Reason had contrived to further their careers. And the lie the Legion had allowed to protect the galaxy from something it wasn’t ready for.
“What’re you finding?” he asked quietly as he finished up the nutrition bar.
“Dark stuff. On the surface she’s squeaky clean if you buy the advertising. Fresh out of the schools. Worked her way through. Champion of the downtrodden. Saying all the old things in a fresh exciting new way.”
Sarcasm.
“And?” he prompted.
“When you start to look closer, you see she’s been financed heavily from the get-go. Finances that don’t come from anywhere obvious. Loans mysteriously paid off. Very expensive high-profile team suddenly in place at just the right moment. Media opportunities not presented to local planetary politicians. She was swept from obscurity right into a junior delegate position. That doesn’t happen, Tyrus. They try to say it does by going way back in history, but it doesn’t. Not anymore. So now she’s a junior delegate with a sudden, massive presence within the streams. She’s everywhere and her social is dominating. It’s too convenient. And then it gets weird.”
“Weird how?”
“One of our bounty hunters, Loth Kador, normally very businesslike, ran into a guy Hamachi-Roi used to know from the schools. Rumor was the schoolmate was going to spill some very embarrassing dirt on her. So both Loth and the guy are on New Vega Cintron and the guy gets himself shot in a bar by Loth. The official story is they exchanged words and the guy pulled. Loth promptly shot him dead right there on the spot.”
“So why isn’t this believable?” asked Rechs.
“The schoolmate was an ardent anti-blaster supporter. Big on turn-in programs in the mid-core worlds. Advocate for a total ban. Only the local enforcement and military should carry. That type. As you can imagine, he’s not fond of personal sidearms. So why would this guy, whose degree by the way was in Non-Lethal Military Conflict Solutions, ever in the galaxy pull a blaster on an obvious killer like Loth? In a bar, no less?”
Rechs’s mind was still trying to grasp the fact that there was an actual field of study that had convinced itself that militaries could fight conflicts with non-lethal weapons. Sometimes the galaxy was so stupid he wondered why he was even bothering.
“Could just be a hypocrite. What does Loth say?”
“That’s where it got weird for us. Gone rogue. Can’t find him. Dropped his contracts. And believe me, Archangel wants him found. Suth and Noggs got assigned, and those two don’t mess around. They haven’t called in in thirty days.”
Rechs had heard of Archangel’s personal hunting dogs. Suth and Noggs were not to be messed with.
Gabriella made several compelling points. But none of this answered why she was taking this so personally. What was going on right now was Legion business. Not Guild. He wondered if it was maybe because she cared for him. But he suspected it was something else. Something far more personal.
The bucket chimed, indicating the encryption hack had been accomplished.
“Gotta go now, Gabriella.
