Main Bridge, GCS Challenger
Outer Reaches of Ctesiphon System
February 4th, 2452
In the end, you're not sure the probe, while interesting and potentially a problem, isn't connected to your current mission. You file a contact report with both the locals and Expeditionary Command, and Gessica's got the probe in the secure hold if you need it, but it's time you moved on. You've reviewed the datafiles from your OSP contact, Special Agent Atticus Lee. There are a number of branches in the Commonwealth's Intelligence Department, from the Office of Electronic Intelligence and ONI to more esoteric branches like the Office of Future Threats, which attempts to categorize long-term threats to the Grid at large based on trends and grapevine intelligence on the Hypergrid. OSP is the Intelligence Departments "wetworks" branch, a title that blandly covers the Commonwealth's elite special forces and best field agents. OSP operates on the sharp edge, with a long leash, but they're expected to provide results. Lee is one of the best, an ordinary enough looking fellow of East African and Chinese extraction who'd been dealing with threats to civilization longer than you'd been alive. He was obviously enhanced to a significant degree, although the specifics were obviously extremely classified. Unlike most post-humans, he still looked human, which you suppose is the point. A secret agent who looks like an exotic transhuman likely gets a lot of attention.
You'd first run into him soon after getting command of Challenger, before the Hypergrid had opened up and when Expeditionary Command's survey missions were still fairly close to home. You were as likely to find a terraformable world as you were a freeport or pirate's nest and OSP had deployed teams to several places you and your comrades had found in the old days. Lee had help you clean out a nest of slavers who'd survived the Sack of Ross 148 and you two had been in semi-regular contact ever since.
Unfortunately, it seems like OSP didn't have a ton of information about the area. The gradual decline of organized piracy out of Golgotha and Epsilon Eridani, in favor of frankly easier targets out on the Hypergrid, had dried up a number of his contacts. Still he had some potential leads for you to follow.
There were three potential leads for you to follow. The first was an arms smuggler out at the independent world of Leahy's Lament. The Lament was lightly settled, but found itself as a sort of hiring point for many of the independent operators who stayed in the grayer areas of the law. The world as a result was home to some shipyards and production facilities. Nothing that could make antimatter in practical quantities, of course, but your quarry could well be buying arms to equip ships that suddenly had a much higher energy budget to play with.
The second was much more speculative, and based on long-range ARGUS Array data. A red dwarf about thirty light years towards the rim, lacking anything more than a catalog name, had entirely too much traffic coming and going. The frontier was always pushing out beyond the bounds of official exploration, of course, and even systems officially uncharted may well have free traders and prospectors visiting it, but a red dwarf not near anything valuable? Not so much.
Finally, and even Lee wasn't sure this was related, was the disappearance of one Doctor Andrew Wu. Dr. Wu was something of a polymath, not entirely uncommon in a time when people could easily live to be 200. A couple of PhDs in engineering and computer science had segued into a boutique electronics company that was sold after the Hypergrid opened up. Wu sold his business off and took to adventuring, touring several OPF tomb worlds and making a name for himself in the early days cracking OPF encryption. Once that became less of a Tomb Raider type job and more the work of entire universities, he was off chasing the next big thing. He'd last been seen on Ctesiphon about four months ago looking to hire a ship for some sort of mission before he'd fallen off of everyone's radar. Still, given the area, he figured it was something to include in the report.
Which lead will you follow?
[] Leahy's Lament and the arms trail
[] The uncharted red dwarf
[] Ctesiphon and this Dr. Wu.
