expression, as if she were looking for a fight.
That wasn’t surprising, given her personal background. According to the file she had grown up in the
Texan megapolis formed by the union of Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio; one of the poorer regions
on Earth. She was raised by a single mother, a factory worker making minimum wage. Enlisting with the Alliance had probably been her only chance to get a better life, though she hadn’t signed up until the age of twenty-two, shortly after her mother’s death.
Most recruits signed up before they were twenty. Anderson had joined the day he turned eighteen. But despite her late start, or maybe because of it, Kahlee Sanders had excelled at basic training. She was competent in hand-to-hand combat and weapons training, but her true aptitude had been in the technology fields.
According to her file she’d taken entry-level computing courses in the years leading up to her enlistment, and once she joined she threw herself into the study of advanced programming, data communication networks, and prototype systems architectures. She finished at the top of her class, completing a three-year program in only two.
Personality tests and psych evaluations showed she was intelligent, with a strong sense of personal identity and self-worth. Evaluations from peers and superior officers showed she was cooperative, popular, and an asset to any team she worked with. It was no wonder she’d been assigned to the Sidon project.
And that’s why none of this felt right. Anderson knew the difference between a good soldier and a bad
one. Kahlee Sanders was definitely a good soldier. She may have initially joined the Alliance as an escape, seeking a better life than the one she had on Earth. But she had found exactly what she was looking for. She’d experienced nothing but success, accolades, and rewards since joining the military. Plus, with her mother gone, she had no other family and no real friends outside her fellow soldiers.
Anderson couldn’t come up with a single reason she would turn against the Alliance. Even greed didn’t make sense: everyone at Sidon was pulling down a top salary. Besides, Anderson knew enough about human nature to understand that it took more than simple greed to convince a person to aid in the slaughter of the people they lived and worked with every day.
One more thing bothered him about this. If Sanders was the traitor, why had she disappeared the day before the attack and drawn attention to herself? All she had to do was show up for her regular shift and it would have been assumed that she was one of the bodies vaporized in the explosion. It felt like someone was setting her up.
But he couldn’t deny that her sudden disappearance was too suspicious to be dismissed as mere coincidence. He needed to figure out what was going on, and so far his only possible clue was what wasn’t in her file. Kahlee Sanders’s father was officially listed as “unknown.” In this day and age of universal birth control to deal with rising populations, as well as massive DNA data banks, it was virtually impossible not to know the identity of a child’s parents… unless it was being specifically hidden.
Digging deeper into official files had shown all references to Kahlee Sanders’s father had been purged: hospital records, immunization reports… everything. It was as if someone had actively tried to cut him out of her life. Someone with enough importance to falsify government documents.
Kahlee and her mother both had to be part of the cover-up. If her mother had wanted the father’s identity exposed, there would have been no way to stop her. And Kahlee could easily have gotten a DNA test anytime she wanted. They had to know, but for some reason they didn’t want anyone else knowing.
However, neither one of them had the kind of financial resources or political clout it would take to pull something like that off. Which meant someone else — probably the father — had also been involved. If Anderson could figure out who the father was, and why he’d been expunged from all official records, it might help him figure out how Kahlee Sanders was tied up in the attack on Sidon.
Unfortunately, he’d exhausted all official channels. Fortunately, there were other ways to dig up buried secrets. Which was why he was now standing in a dark alley in the wards, waiting to meet with an information broker.
He had shown up a few minutes early, eager to see what the broker’s search would turn up. Not surprisingly, his contact wasn’t here yet. He spent the next few minutes waiting, occasionally pacing back and forth as the seconds dragged by.
A figure stepped into view just as his watch beeped on the hour, materializing from the shadows. As she approached, it quickly became clear that she was a salarian. Shorter and thinner than humans, salarians resembled a cross between some kind of lizard or chameleon and the “grays” described by alleged victims during the rash of fictitious alien abductions reported back on Earth in the late twentieth century. Anderson wondered if she’d been there the whole time, observing him as she waited patiently for the moment of their appointed meeting to arrive.
“Did you find anything?” he asked the woman he had hired to scour the extranet for any clues as to the identity of Kahlee Sanders’s father.
Trillions of tetragigs of data were transmitted in bursts across the extranet every day; there had to be something useful buried in there. But searching a functionally infinite amount of data for a specific piece of information could be an exercise in pointless frustration. It would take days to collect, process, and scan every burst… and even then the output might be millions and millions of pages of hard copy.
That’s where information brokers came in — specialists who used complex algorithms and custom- designed search engines to limit and sort the data. Mastering the extranet was as much an art as a science, and salarians excelled at the art of gathering confidential information.
The salarian blinked her large eyes. “I warned you there might not be much to find,” she said, speaking quickly. Salarians always spoke quickly. “Records from before your species linked to the extranet are sporadic.”
Anderson had expected as much. Archives from the days predating the First Contact War were slowly being added to the extranet by various government agencies, but the input of old records was a minor priority for every administration. Given Sanders’s age, it was likely her father disappeared from her life long before humanity ever came into contact with the greater galactic community.
“So you’ve got nothing?”
The salarian smiled. “That’s not what I said. It was difficult to track down, but there was something. It seems the left hand of the Alliance is unaware of what the right is doing.”
She handed him a small optical storage disk.
“Make my life easier,” Anderson said, taking it from her and stuffing it into his pocket. “Just tell me what I’m going to find when I scan this thing.”
“The day Kahlee Sanders graduated from your military training academy at Arcturus, an encrypted message was forwarded through classified Alliance channels to an individual on one of your colonies in the Skyllian Verge. It was subsequently purged seconds after it was received.”
“How’d you get access to classified Alliance channels?” Anderson demanded.
The salarian laughed. “Your species has been transmitting data across the extranet for less than a decade. My species has been directing the primary espionage and intelligence operations for the Citadel Council for two thousand years.”
“Point taken. You said the message was purged?”
“True. Deleted and scrubbed from the records. But nothing is ever truly gone once it hits the extranet. There are always echoes and remnants for people like me to track down. The extranet works on a — ”
“I don’t need the details,” Anderson interrupted, holding up a hand to cut her off. “What did the message say?”
“It was brief. A single text file comprised of Kahlee Sanders’s name, final grades, and her class
standing. Very impressive. She could have a bright future in my field if she wanted to come work for — ”
Anderson cut her off again, growing impatient. “This was all in her personnel file. I didn’t pay you to get me her marks.”
“You didn’t pay me at all,” she pointed out. “This is being billed directly to your superiors at the
Alliance, remember? I doubt you could afford to hire me. That’s why you came to me in the first place.”
Anderson’s hands involuntarily went up and rubbed his temples. “Right. That’s not what I meant.” Salarians tended to talk in circles, changing topics with every breath. It gave him a headache, and it always seemed to take twice as long as it should to get what you needed out of them. “I hope to God you have something more than
