A news feed auto-activates, like the room itself wants to keep me informed.
A sleek anchor appears, Vakutan features softened for broad appeal, speaking with the kind of practiced calm that always precedes panic.
“—diplomatic tensions continue to escalate following reports of violence at the Yatori penal installation,” the anchor says. “The Alliance has denied involvement, calling the incident an ‘IHC fabrication designed to inflame interstellar distrust.’ The IHC has issued a formal demand for reparations and immediate Alliance cooperation?—”
The feed cuts to footage: Alliance council chambers, IHC press briefings, fleet images—ships in formation, thrusters flaring, the kind of visuals designed to remind everyone how easily peace can be punctured.
My stomach sinks.
“They’re already spinning it,” I mutter.
The anchor continues. “—Vakutan military representatives insist Alliance vessels were not present. However, leaked imagery circulating on the holonet appears to show an Alliance-marked cruiser in orbit above Yatori?—”
I freeze.
Leaked imagery.
So somebody got footage out.
Or somebody wants people to think it got out.
Either way, the narrative is moving without me.
I slam my compad onto the desk a little harder than necessary, then pull up the Kaijen server interface again. If the IHC won’t listen, I’ll build my case so airtight it can’t be ignored.
And if that fails…
I don’t let myself finish that thought.
I slot the archive drive into the Kaijen terminal and begin decrypting.
The Kaijen servers hum under my fingertips like a living thing—fast, powerful, arrogant. The holo projections sharpen, the data streams smoothing out as the system chews through encryption layers with the ease of a predator cracking bone.
Lonari wasn’t kidding. This place has infrastructure.
Criminal infrastructure, sure, but infrastructure nonetheless.
I pull up the biometric packets first, because those are clean, technical, difficult to argue with if you know what you’re looking at. I run them through a comparative model—Vakutan baseline, Alzhon baseline, human baseline, and a few others I can access in the Kaijen database.
The results bloom across the holo in hard, cold charts.
Not Vakutan.
Not even close.
The signatures cluster around something like human physiology with augmentations—cybernetic assistance, maybe, or chemical enhancements. Mercenary kit.
I tag the file with an internal note: False flag — Alliance armor used as costume.
Then I move to the financial chains.
This is where things get ugly, because money is always uglier than blood. Blood is honest. Money lies.
I trace the shell corporation layers again, this time with Kaijen computational power slicing through obfuscation like a knife through fabric. The shells unravel, revealing transfer dates, routing nodes, ledger fingerprints.
And there.
The Baragon intermediary tag emerges again, clearer now, like a signature someone thought was too buried to be found.
