The Condor had docked at station 470361. Standard operating procedure was to give it a maintenance overhaul before recrewing. As Marks disembarked, carrying his rucksack, along with the fusion engineers he pulled up the job board in his left eye using his communication implant.

A dozen candidates had applied for the monitoring job, and this shipboard morning he'd received a communication from Irven that one of his more skilled operatives had accepted his mission.

He reviewed and filtered the candidate files as he walked, standing a head over most of the staff he passed, crossing the hangar to the entryway kiddie corner from the ship, passing through the crowds of pilots, officers, engineers, hangar staff, and maintenance workers on his way to his quarters.

Stopping to grab a bagel from the cafeteria, he entered his room—a 25 meter by 18 meter by 8 meter space—kept the lights off, and sat down at his workstation by the foot of the bed, spreading the holographic display in his eyes over the space.

He'd narrowed it down to three profiles.

Floating to his left was a young officer named Carrie Sioux; he looked at her file first.

What he found was a clean record: she'd studied chemistry at the academy, explosive ordinance disposal career, brought into intelligence when she discovered and defused a bomb at meeting of senators she'd been designated security for, no drinking, no smoking—he was interested in her magnification implants.

He thought, then dismissed Carrie's profile; demo experts expected tension. She probably wouldn't align well to a surveillance job.

Profile two was Marley Jaeger. At the academy her focus had been intergalactic social studies and interpersonal engagement, going into the infiltration/exfiltration field upon graduation. She was inducted into intelligence when her suggestions—based on behavioral analysis—had picked out several contraband and terrorist actors. She could probably get a good psych report on the empress, but he didn't believe someone as seemingly socially engaged as her would survive sitting behind a screen for up to twenty hours a day carefully watching everything in the room.

Profile three was Mhari Rourke. An outside transfer, she'd completed her general coursework and then joined the intelligence academy track directly. Her scores on cipher- and hashwork, her experience in fields such as linear algebra—which had demonstrably allowed her to program her optical implants to translate ciphertext—and differential equations had placed her as an intelligence officer and gotten her fast-tracked for the new fleet-model test. She'd done spacewalks to do repairs and mock bomb defusions, she'd taken the behavioral analysis curriculum...Marks felt she was the best fit. Intelligence officers knew how to sit unblinking behind a screen for long periods when required.

Elevating her candidacy, he sent a private message requesting a video interview through their org's officer-reserved comms buoy system to her implant.

Elms was due back in two weeks. He reflected on his choice of contractor for her; the behavioral analysis mixed with Llew's experiences and Marks's figuring told him they'd get on pretty well. Elms might even leave her shell a little bit.

He paused and looked up at the ceiling, raising his arms behind his head. He hadn't been tasked with personnel review of any staff on this 40 km tall station, so he sat and thought what to do with himself until his next assignment.

He decided he would work out in a few hours. In the meantime, he opened and worked some linear algebra exercise books while monitoring messages in his left eye.

...

Durga Rao was reviewing reports from her logistics officers in her cabin, relaxing from an extended period of negotiations aboard a diplomatic ship.

She didn't have any implants; as far as her organization knew, and any of the organizations the औषधम् interacted with presented themselves as knowing, hackers couldn't read stored memory or thought patterns from the signals generated by her wetware—even with civilization's mathematical advancements in the past eighteen or so centuries. Consequently, with her well-developed memory and advanced critical decision making capacity, her mind was a steel trap lock box of state secrets and made deals. The lack of accessibility to her thoughts was part of the reason her organization had amassed so much influence.

It had been an intense three and three quarter ship side weeks, meeting with her largest collaborators in this cluster of one hundred and six sectors, jetting to several worlds core to their governments. First, she'd met with an assembly of senators from the Republic of Chartren, then a couple of monarchs—one from the M.I.N.O. (monarchy in name only) of Koran, one from from the constitutional monarchy of Allatava, three different boards of directors governing three different coporatocracies—NuMill, Grand Avenue, and Ontani, each board representing a conglomerated list of hundreds if not thousands of companies of varying size.

The republic of Chartren spanned forty-six sectors, and it's internal politics were somewhat twisty. She'd stood at the base of an amphitheater filled with forty senators at various points over a six solar day period. She knew none of them used AI in their implants or they wouldn't be senators; they'd be homeless, maybe jobless, if they did. VI on the other hand was a different story. Most of them likely kept an ever shifting list of priorities and details loaded up in their eyes pulled from nearby VI-administered databases. She knew they all had communication implants, and there were committees of the senate who would send each other and other committees messages during meetings like this. There had been a lot of sophistry, bluster, consistent attacks at around eighteen different targets—including Durga—and endless pontificating, but she had figured out early on the majority had wanted four things: support for discretely enforced abortions in eight of their sectors, security forces on the outer rims of their territory, a less costly option for general mass produced implant insertion, and less costly healthcare for their less wealthy sectors and colonies.

Part of her strategy for getting through this six day period was meeting with several senators outside the senate hall who were connected enough to start or already lead movements leading to marginally favorable negotiation terms for her organization, which added up over her stay at the senate; she also directly negotiated deals with the committees of senators responsible for moving the whole body on certain issues.

Her spies had given her information on the current senate deals, personalities, and committee subgroup efforts a fleet month in advance, and an update on the state of negotiations and logistics a ship day ahead of time, so when she met Senator Fen, the representative of the expansionist subgroup in the upper floors of one of the settlement's skyscrapers, she knew which levers to pull. The expansionist subgroup had a deal with a set of ten senators enforcing policies for population control in the outer colonies due to to uprisings from certain ethnic groups in the past. Fen had wanted fewer "accidental" abortions on the border colony worlds worlds in the lower right sectors of their empire, considering how physically robust the people were. She'd been informed about this set of deals and had prepared a solution which met Fen's committee needs without cluing in the popcontrol subset.

She'd then met with the set of twelve senators representing the security coalition in one of the city military installations. Her HUMINT reports on their troop movements and installation positions/construction had prepared her for their hedging and attempted misdirection. She'd arrived with a target set of security deployments in mind and negotiated a deal with the twelve allowing her to reveal her rollouts over time, to the colonies and settlements she knew would provide the most value to her organization, while letting them think they were dictating the terms of her engagement.

The fourteen senators responsible for overseeing the medical institutions and installations for the whole forty-six sector space needed commitments from her. If they were going to out produce the surrounding governments and grow their controlled space they needed the on-the-ground medical staff, colonists, and settlers to have effective, rugged, low-cost implants in their heads. Fortunately a partnership Rao had with an eight-sector coporatocracy one hundred and twenty six sectors up and to the left meant she could produce the implants they needed for relative pennies—and she had the staff to allocate for insertion operations. When the senators heard this and some of the specifics of the deal she gained a significant backing for her negotiations with the body as a whole.

Once the implant negotiations were complete, the same fourteen senators sidled into revealing their desire for lower-cost healthcare with quality capable of sustaining the populace on the wealthy inner worlds as well as some of the more dangerous colony planets. Durga's organization had the training capabilities and a staff budget for this, but she'd had to coordinate with her logistics teams to ensure she had enough to come close to meeting Chartren's needs. There'd been a break in the meeting, and forty five minutes city time later they reconvened. In that time she'd come up with a personnel and logistical target, and brought the fourteen senators within 3,000 staff of it.

These deals meant she had above lukewarm support when the entire assembly reconvened in the amphitheater. The committees she had deals with nudged the body as a whole to accepting her organization's efforts as part of an integration trial period. Several other committees, like the agrarian committee, the information security committee, were against her organization's involvement, but the old guard of the military viewed her as a political necessity even though they were against her involvement on the surface.

Ultimately, she'd been able to wrangle most of the resources they asked for in exchange for a permanent set of buildings in core districts on fourteen of their more populous planets, training for her security forces on their military installation colonies, provisional access to their mined minerals—palladium, cobalt, nickel, iron, copper, silicon, and phosphorous even though that wasn't a mineral—and manufacturing facilities on several different high-volume planets, as well as integration with 42,000 of their medical facilities on their core worlds. This was in addition to the 30,000 staff discretely enforcing political abortions on designated colony worlds.

Jetting to Koran over the course of two shipboard days she reviewed intelligence reports about its sector operations, drawing the patterns and conclusions she needed.

The dictator from the four-sector government had been predictably ostentatious. He'd wanted—and had been willing to pay for—high-spec implants for twelve of his top generals, eight divisions of her security forces, and 30,000 of her doctors, on his home planet, plus 60,000 kilograms of supplies. Really he'd wanted the clout of sharing a healthcare service with several local sector governments whose GDP was rapidly growing, so she took advantage of that fact over three days to negotiate him down to four high-spec implants for his generals, twenty-eight platoons of her forces, 22,000 kilograms of supplies, and about 9,000 of her doctors in exchange for introductions to his underworld ties—which she would have her staff establish inroads with later, and for whom she was saving the higher value wares—a percentage of his crop yield, and some limited access to his platinum mines. Having twelve generals with high spec implants would have given him too much power to survive retaliation.

Jetting four sectors up and eight sectors back over five shipboard days, she moved to Allatavan territory. The Allatavan monarch, in charge of nine sectors, had wanted doctors to care for cold weather illness and injuries for roughly 37,000 people on eight of his colonies, most of which were on ice planets, in addition to 11,000 kilograms of her organization's food production. During pauses in the day of negotiations, she'd conferred with her medical and agrarian—a category which had only existed for three cycles—logistics officers, then had come back to negotiate him down to 8,200 kilograms of foodstuffs and grains, in addition to 7,700 of her doctors and 12,000 nurses distributed across his planets—in exchange for 12,000 midsize to large facilities which belonged solely to her organization on every planet her staffed were stationed at for her to train, recruit, and grow herbs in, additionally intended to be storehouses for her material and troop stations.

Eleven sectors down and three sectors right over two shipboard days was NuMill territory.

NuMill, with influence and installations spanning seventeen sectors, had been straightforwardly willing to shell out quadrillions of credits for high class body modification facilities and staff to populate them. Their conglomerate was 41% security and mercenary groups, 22% standard implant production over several dozen brands, 12% baby care materials, 14% hover parts and maintenance, 6% portable housing research labs and sales, 5% book production. Durga knew why they needed body modifications, but her corps of body-mod doctors was relatively small. It had expanded to around 7,600 in the past two cycles from 5,000, and they were effective at training new recruits rapidly, giving her some room to negotiate staff over time agreements. She really only had 2,000 full-body prosthetists, but the employees who would use such modifications were generally limited to a set of specialized security corps and several of the mercenary groups under the conglomerate's umbrella, and her full-body prosthetists hardly ever saw any work; there shouldn't be a problem scheduling NuMill's operations on a timeframe that worked for them.

Following half a solar day of negotiations, she'd agreed to commit 78% of the requested staff, plus some of her legal corps, to these facilities once they'd agreed on the design, facility focuses, and instrumentation under the condition they allow her a priority line to fourteen of their mercenary organizations under specific conditions, in addition to a 46% price cut of their wares.

Seven sectors back and twelve sectors left over four shipboard days, cutting through pirate territory with her escort, she made her way to Grand Avenue territory.

Grand Avenue was a conglomerate consisting of 76% textile and fashion companies, many of which had their own agrarian arms and facilities, over fourteen sectors. The other twenty-four percent, also contained in the fourteen sectors was 10% small food production/preservation groups and 14% medical supply producers. Durga needed bandages and foodstuffs from Grand Avenue, which given how few of their companies focused on such wares severely limited how much she could get involved with the conglomerate—but on the bright side any resources she did allocate would technically put Grand Avenue in her debt and that was capital for building connections outside the sectors they controlled. After the three solar day negotiations she wound up committing around 4,200 staff to the relatively unpopulated agrarian planets that produced the wares she sought, with an outsize return of around 86,000 kilograms of gauze, sutures, operating equipment, laser limb modification devices, a few truckloads of organic cancer-killing nanobots, twelve protein-folding machines, solar exposure treating materials, and surgery training materials.

Fourteen sectors left, and six sectors down over eight shipboard days was Ontani.

Ontani was a conglomerate of 41% space suit production and sales, 38% ship production, 11% implant mod technology firms, and 10% mining companies, with branches and colonies in sixteen sectors. They were looking to extend the reach of their company colonies. Word of Rao's discretion, plus her organization's skill and information discipline, had caused them to reach out to her as a reliable, cheaper, widely established third party medical provider.

Their ask was 44,000 staff on seven newly established colonies as a trial period, in exchange for gratis access to 3% of their low-end ship stock and a 24% discount on implant modification tools/software/hardware. Over the two solar day negotiations she modified the deal to be 38,600 staff for 9% of their low-end ship stock gratis and a 33% discount on implant modification tools/software/hardware.

When she'd returned from the final negotiation with Ontani, she collapsed onto the luxury bed in her cabin aboard the diplomatic vessel. She was exhausted. Her escort had warded off several dozen groups of strange ships during their travels, for which she was profoundly grateful.

She'd slept.

Upon waking, twelve shipboard hours later, she'd showered and taken care of her ablutions using the utilities in her cabin, then dressed herself in a green chiffon robe, tied her long brown hair back, sat down in a luxury chair, and opened her logistics reports.

After reviewing the agreements, checking remaining resources for this cluster of sectors, seeing the scheduled logistical and personnel movements, and looking over gross receipts she determined she'd allocated 82% of her personnel "budget", including doctors, nurses, prosthetists, first responders, low-level logistics and procurement officers, plus a few thousand lawyers, for this cluster of sectors.

Durga relaxed in the luxury chair. She could have had several of her inner sanctum negotiate in her stead, but establishing and widening inroads in any given cluster of sectors generally fell to her. Chartren, Koran, Allatava, NuMill, Grand Avenue, and Ontani had all been new or relatively new relationships for the औषधम्.

One guarantee for her organization was that it had room to grow.

The औषधम् was a good leaping off point for any young doctor, nurse, bioengineer, or medical software professional within an 22,000 sector radius of her core base of operations—Durga had connections with over 20,000 sector governments, the number growing every day, and 80,000 prestigious medical institutions. The food her organization served wasn't generally great but for those dedicated to the craft—and those looking for a political leg up—the experience was second to none.

She compiled a list of notes and data about her completed negotiations and prepared it for entry to her isolated, encrypted VI once she returned to her main residence.

She prepared, then sipped black tea as her diplomatic vessel sped silently through the stars.

...

Yana was sitting at a seafood stall in a spaceport colony, chowing down on tank-grown grilled fish and seaweed.

Her two weeks were up. When her ostensibly merchant class vessel entered port, she disembarked with her rucksack and pullup bar, finding quarters for the night with one of her organization's shell companies.

It was an urban port on an asteroid; art and culinary culture had been thriving in the sectors her vessel had come home to, not to mention trade.

After leaving her room—dressed in a black jumpsuit, her hair tied back—to get food, she had passed a mini-star booth (really just controlled small balls of ignited hydrogen), bio-furniture stores, stores advertising the latest stories—accessible through implant, visual absorption, and earpiece—food of every variety from fatty to lean, protein, carbohydrates, sugar. The people she passed were walking slowly and taking in the sites from the atmosphere shield above and the white three story buildings over the majority of the station. She passed the performances of street actors and sculptors mimicking art both recent and millenia old, occasionally with their own twist. She'd come across the grilled fish stall and ducking under the green hanging rectangles of cloth took a seat at an imitation wooden bar with ceramic stools.

There was one other person there, a thirty-something man in a jumpsuit and blue pullover. She'd looked him over on the way in: not a killer. She looked at the stall proprietor—dressed in a green stain-resistant shirt, blue pants, and black shoes—as he whet his knives, then examined the fish tank along the back of the stall, and sat down, waiting.

The man finished whetting his knives and looked up. "What can I get you?" he asked in a pleasant baritone.

She looked at the menu over the bar, deciding quickly. "The seaweed-wrapped mahi-mahi, and the matcha green tea smoothie."

"Coming right up."

The man in the blue pullover to her left shot her a discrete look, which she noticed. She knew she was moderately attractive, but the line of work she found herself in didn't let her think about it much.

The proprieter fished the future meal out of the tank, beheading and fileting it, then cut some seaweed from a stalk winding its way up the stall behind the counter, placing it on a plate as he flame grilled the food up in front of her. He found time to chop ingredients for her smoothie and blend them as he grilled the fish. When the meat was ready he flipped it onto the seaweed plate and wrapped it, then poured the matcha green tea shake into a tall plastic cup, placing a paper straw into it and slid the whole meal to her over the counter.

"Thanks."

Yana picked up her chop sticks and enjoyed the meal slowly, savoring every bite. Over the twenty seven minutes she spent ripping, chewing, and swallowing, the man in the blue blazer paid and left.

At the end of the meal, Yana pushed back from the counter, satisfied.

She waited several minutes, thinking about her life and experiences.

"...Appreciate the meal," she said candidly.

The man, who was feeding the fish, turned and nodded at her.

She pulled out her portable credit store, transferring the payment for the meal through near field communication to the proprietor's payment reception pad, adding a 22% tip.

Yana left the store and headed to her assigned quarters, climbing the stairs to the small nested habitat.

As she lay on her bunk, she began sifting through what was known of the empress's compound and began to ready her mind for the job.