Chapter Three
Orkhana, Alliance Production World
This facility is immense.
Intellectually, Sorilla had been aware of that from the start, of course. The specifications available to her before they landed on Orkhana had made that clear, but there was no real replacement for experiencing something for herself.
The lowest floor of the facility, a massive manufacturing floor, was thousands of square kilometers at the very least, and quite probably a good deal more.
While impressive, it did make for finding anything of use a great deal more difficult of course.
Sorilla quietly followed along with the Sentinel group led by Kriss, allowing the more knowledgeable Lucians to lead the way while she took the time to both examine the equipment and the body language of the workers.
Mostly she was examining equipment, something she really shouldn’t have been quite as surprised at as she was. There were certainly workers in the facility, quite a lot of them, but for a work floor of this sheer scale, it felt quite empty of personnel.
Earth had long since gone the same direction, of course, with everything from product manufacturing to food production being increasingly automated. The vast majority of people on Earth, and even more so those on Earth’s colonies, left almost all production to automated systems. Food, particularly on colonies, was grown in cultured tanks. Beef, Chicken, Pork, and other stock were produced entirely by chemical and biological process under the observation of computer systems. Humans didn’t get involved in the process until it came time for chow, and the same held true for the vast majority of other productions as well.
Some traditional groups still maintained the old skills, either for religious or cultural reasons, or just because they felt that the knowledge shouldn’t be lost, but by and large… Factories on Earth and the colonies were far emptier than she was seeing here.
But they are far smaller too.
That was where the Alliance and Earth’s technical development had branched apart. Earth, in the twenty-first century had moved away from centralized manufacture. As machines became more and more capable, community fabrication became the obvious way forward. The mega-factories became obsolete, first for the odds and ends often imported from countries that paid slave wages, and then increasingly more so for higher end products as well.
Every small community on the planet, practically, had a fabrication facility that sat like the old-time corner store, constantly churning out the majority of what that community needed. Anything too complicated was ordered in from specialty factories, of course, but with every passing year the list of what was ‘too complicated’ grew smaller and smaller.
The Alliance, they’d gone another direction. Doubling down, hell tripling, quadrupling, quintupling… and so forth… down on centralized manufacture.
Sorilla’s mind spun as she considered the implications of what she’d learned just thus far since opting to travel with the Lucians to see this mission through.
Worlds like Orkhana would be incredible strategic targets. Even crippling one of them, or blockading the system, would put a serious pinch into entire sectors of Alliance controlled territory.
They were also an example of a type of thinking that was currently considered anathema on Earth.
The disposable planet.
Though, not quite that if she understood it correctly. With so many worlds under their control, the Alliance seemed to be willing to utterly devastate production worlds like Orkhana in order to provide products for the rest. It was hard for her to put her head in that space, given the extremely strong environmental attitudes she’d grown up with.
They did have plans for what to do with the planet after, though, so disposable wasn’t exactly the right term. More… Use and re-use, recycling the world. The Alliance took a long view and were willing to work a world into utter environmental collapse, then sew a few seeds and wait centuries for the planet to recover before moving in with farming or other uses.
It left a bad taste in her mouth, but Sorilla could understand that attitude from a large multi-planet polity.
There was only one Earth and but a few colonies, of which Hayden was the most Earth-like. Protecting the worlds humans lived on had become first nature after the severe environmental issues humans had caused on the home world, and Sorilla couldn’t help but hope that the Alliance attitude never caught on with humans despite being able to understand the practicality of it.
She did find their machines fascinating, however.
I wonder if they sell fabricators like this on their open market?
Sorilla had to assume not, otherwise why bother with a central production planet in the first place?
She was still going to ask, though.
Her thoughts on the subject were derailed by movement in the corner of her eye, and Sorilla tilted her head just enough to center the source in her vision.
Sirhan. One of the grunts the Alliance brought in to work the machines.
The little alien was watching them while trying very hard not to look like he was watching them. Or she. Or it. Sorilla didn’t really have any idea if the species even had genders of course. It was an asymmetrically bipedal species with what looked like fairly thick and wiry fur or hair. Three eyes, or she thought they were eyes, and two likely ears. Not the most exotic species she had seen in recent years, but up there on the list.
This one was pacing them while trying to look busy with various bits of equipment, and she’d initially missed it for just that reason, but the odds were getting pretty slim that its work pattern just happened to be the same one that the Lucians’ were using to search the facility.
Nervous, scared of us… but also someone else? Ugh, reading alien body language is ridiculous. It’s up to something, though, that much I’m sure of.
Sorilla hesitated, informing Kriss, but ultimately there wasn’t much she could do with the information at the moment. The Lucian might have an idea of how to handle it, even if said idea was likely to be incredibly blunt and probably foolish.
She quietly nudged his arm and contorted her fingers into an approximation of Lucian combat signs when he turned to look at her.
Being followed. Single target. Options?
Kriss looked momentarily surprised, then settled so that the surprise was gone almost as quickly as it appeared.
Where? he signed back.
She shifted slightly, exposing the little alien to the Lucian’s gaze while still blocking most of his body from the Sirhan’s gaze in turn, gesturing subtly.
Kriss, while a fierce warrior, showed that he recognized the more subtle skills of the battlefield as he looked past her briefly to spot the alien then let his gaze move on as he naturally turned back around. Sorilla might almost have thought he’d opted to ignore her, if she hadn’t seen him begin signing to the other Lucians just as subtly.
Many of the signs she was seeing were beyond her current skill with their combat signs, but she caught a few here and there. Enough to recognize that Kriss was assigning countersurveillance and having word sent to Sienele for further orders.
That was interesting. Sorilla didn’t entirely understand the relationship between the Lucians and Sienele, or Sentinels and the Alliance. There were the obvious things, bits here and there that anyone could see such as them being the elite ground combat detachment of the Alliance forces, but there was more to it as well Sorilla suspected.
Kriss and the Lucians chafed under the restrictions that the Alliance clearly kept them on, yet she’d seen them willingly defer to Sienele with little hesitation, far less hesitation than she would have expected from a self identified warrior when dealing with a self professed intelligence handler.
Sorilla filed that away with then rest of the details she was gathering, knowing that she would need to work it out… or get the intelligence to someone else who could. Understanding the relationships within the Alliance military would be of vital importance to SOLCOM, Earth, and the Colonies.
For now, however, back to the task at hand.
The Sirhan continued to follow them, and Sorilla began a new file for this Alliance species, documenting body language and what she believed it to mean. Each furtive glance, unconscious movement to shield itself or something else, everything it did was dumped into a file in her processor as she began deconstructing all of it with an eye to how she would insert herself into the little creature’s culture if she were ever assigned to train them up to fight the Alliance.
It was unlikely she would ever be in such a position, of course, but Sorilla was very nearly certain that someone would be.
Unless someone… already has?
Sorilla caught something in his motion, a move that was too practiced, too unconscious, as the little alien spotted one of the Lucians looking in his direction and what appeared to be his dominant hand, a larger and more powerful limb, twitched to his thigh as though grasping for something.
A weapon? Is he military trained, civilian or police, just itchy… or… something else?
This was the hardest part of her job, divining a new culture on the fly and figuring out how to reach them. Not just communicate - that could be difficult enough - but really reaching a new culture took more than merely sharing a language. It meant understanding their motivation, how they trained their warriors and other professions, and all the little cultural nuances that made no sense to an outsider.
Approach a Christian like you would a Muslim, or vice versa, and you were burned from the start. Hell, even within each culture all sorts of deviations could and did set in, meaning that you couldn’t even trust general knowledge of a culture when dealing with any given subgroup within it.
Sometimes, in the field, figuring out on the fly if you were supposed to accept an offer for tea or not was literally the difference between mission success and failure.
And that was with humans.
She didn’t even know enough to know what she didn’t know when it came to Alliance species.
Not that Sorilla was going to let that stop her.
*****
Sienele frowned thoughtfully as he considered the information he received.
Followed by one of the Sirhan? Curious.
He wasn’t particularly aware of the Sirhan as a species, beyond the very basics. They were from a sector outside his general purview, and he’d not had much cause to interact with them in the past.
A minor species, only members of the alliance after we saved them from the Jara.
That had been a relatively minor war, though it had bordered on becoming a major conflict until the Ross had, for whatever inscrutable reason they might have, intervened and hammered the massive ships of the Jara into retreat.
Very little was known of the Jara as a result of it being over so quickly, though he was aware that the Pari’s considered them dangerous foes in space, a compliment rarely given by the Alliance’s premier fleet commanders.
The Sirhan… they were even more of an enigma to him, he hated to admit, but it was true. A barely space faring culture, he remembered that much, only notable for having been saved from destruction by the Alliance and granted membership as a result. Sienele was certain that there was in depth analysis of them in the files, but he didn’t have time to delve in depth for the moment.
“Very well,” He said into his communicator. “Do not allow him to know you have spotted him. I will bring my team about from the other side.”
One way or another, he was about to learn a little more about the species.
Hopefully enough to solve this little conundrum of ours once and for all.
*****
He’s nervous, but something else… curious? Driven, certainly. But Driven by what?
Sorilla didn’t quite know what to make of the little odd-looking alien as they continued along their search of the manufacturing floor, making it look good while they slowly maneuvered the small alien into a place where Sienele and his group could close the snare and keep him from bolting.
She thought she could probably run him down, at least in a straight race. Her power armor gave her considerable physical advantages over the majority of natural biological systems, but in a crowded factory floor she couldn’t be completely certain. If he got away, even for a short bit, he could lose them and vanish into the crowd of other workers.
Bad as it sounded to say or think, Sorilla was far from certain she’d be able to pick this little alien out of such a crowd, even with biometric scans available. His features were too alien for either her or her biometric software to properly pick out the subtle differences between individuals.
It might be racist to say they all looked alike, but it was also a biological and neurological fact of the human brain. Recognition patterns were optimized during formative years and took a fair amount of work to properly retrain as adults, even when dealing with minor genetic differences between human culture groups. Add alien biology to the mix and she might as well be trying to tell the difference between ants, at least until she had a chance to properly learn the distinctions.
So, we don’t let him get away, Sorilla determined, keeping a close eye on the alien without looking straight at him, a feat that would have been much easier if she had opted to wear her helmet during the inspection. That would have been too intelligent, I suppose.
She disliked interacting with others while wearing the full-face helmet. It made communication somewhat more difficult among humans and the habit had rolled over despite the fact that many of the subtleties of non-verbal discourse were lost on the Alliance races anyway. She supposed that she should consider wearing it more, but at the moment, it was a point to be considered later.
Kriss caught her eye and gestured a signal she recognized.
Get ready.
*****
Birchee of the Sirhan nervously shifted as he loped to the next machine and made a point of looking over the interface and inspecting the output.
Everything was running as it should, of course. The systems rarely did otherwise, and almost invariably would mount a warning if something had gone wrong. He was there just as a slightly more adaptive version of the automation system, filling in if something had gone just slightly awry to put it all back on the correct path, just like all the workers in the facility.
No, his real interest was the group of inspectors who had arrived on world a short time earlier. Another of the Sirhan employees had quickly sent word up to the line, bringing them to his attention, and he had quickly moved to the floor they were visiting to get a closer look in the hopes of determining just what they were here for.
Something has brought their attention, that much was clear to him. Just what it was had yet to be determined, but in either case it was not a good thing. If they were here for the operation, that was incredibly bad… but even if it was just some minor discrepancy caused by fools in the Administration, well that was nearly as bad.
Word had already been sent to the Saviors, and now the Sirhan were awaiting instructions on just what to do.
Birchee hoped they were issued quickly, because he doubted he could maintain surveillance for long without being spotted… not even with the dismissive attitude the Alliance showed to the junior members like the Sirhan.
He finished his fake examination of the machine as the group continued to move and made his way to the back of the rig while watching to be sure they weren’t paying any attention to him. Birchee completely missed the small group that had come up from around the other side of the fabricator, nearly running dead on into them as he came around the back.
He froze in place, staring wide eyed.
The tall one in the middle of the group of stocky figures smiled at him while holding up a scanner and glancing at it curiously.
“Birchee? Am I saying that correctly?” He asked conversationally. “I do hope so, however regardless, I believe that we need to have a… discussion.”
Birchee’s two hearts felt like they were going to drop out of his chest as he slumped, barely noticing the other group approaching from behind and closing off his escape path.
*****
Portal Ship, Location… Irrelevant
The members of the conclave were irritated when the urgent tagged report came in, forcing their attention to lesser matters.
Other species were difficult to communicate with at the best of times, and their idea of what constituted an urgent situation rarely, if ever, coincided with the definition of the conclave, but that did not mean that such notices could be ignored either.
This one was from one of the minor subject species that had been assigned an infiltration operation within the so-called alliance and its production facilities. The notice reported an inspection in process, which was actually somewhat close to what might be considered urgent.
The conclave called up the information and examined the data.
Ah. The brutes of the Alliance, and one of the spymasters.
Yes.
Options?
Cut off the operation, abandon it now.
Presumptuous. Perhaps they are not there for our actions?
Unlikely. Only so many things could possibly attract attention of this level.
Hold.
What is it?
Look at this member of the group.
The image slid in, focusing on a member of a species that was not part of the Alliance. It was, in fact, a species the conclave was well familiar with. A species they considered among the most dangerous they had ever encountered.
Worse, it was a member of said species that they personally recognized.
Entropy! What is that doing there?
The urgent flag had just become… an understatement.
*****