Fic: Altered Trajectory (cont.)
Mr. Adams, damn you Mr. Adams.
Machiavelli stared up at the ceiling of his cell, reviewing his internal files. His cyber-glider system was more sophisticated, and an order of magnitude more expensive, than the commercial model favored by Cyber-Cor. The most important aspect was that he didn’t need an external computer to help data process when he was infiltrating a system. He actually had the equivalent of a very expensive laptop unit distributed throughout his body, carefully shielded to escape standard medical and security scans. He could close his eyes and look at everything in it, shuffling the data until it all made sense.
You're obnoxious and disliked; that cannot be denied.
Except that so very little of this mission made any sense at all. Damn that Farmer Noble half-wit Brushtail for making such a hash of the thing. There was no reason to have investigated Drisden’s little hole. He had figured the poor bastard was dead when Drisden had not answered the com call. They should have just bugged out and left, but now everything was compromised and the Cold and Dark was going to swallow the whole mission up.
Once again you stand between me and my lovely bride
The humans, admirable as they were in some ways, now knew what the Vulpine government knew. Which meant, if the pre-mission briefing Brushtail had given them could be believed (which he doubted), everything was botched and the Galapagos were now on the short list to be exterminated. And there was no particular reason to think the Federation might stop there. Which meant everybody in the universe was fragged, since even if they did stop the humans, word of what had happened to the ferin had to get out eventually, the GSA was going to fall to pieces. Meanwhile since everybody was going to be involved in a nice civil war the Ardies were going to take advantage and probably remove several species of mammals from the universe to make it nice and tidy.
Oh, Mr. Adams, you are driving me to homicide!
And the blame for this turn events fell squarely on one burned out Farmer Lord who was so desperate to play the hero that he didn’t give a damn about the consequences of his actions. Hurrah for noble codes of honor.
Homicide, homicide!
We may seeeee murrrrderrrrr yeeeeet!
He collated his notes on the whole affair into neat bullet points, stuck them in a folder and then code locked the whole thing on the offside chance someone might try and hack into his brain. Doubtful though. If anyone tried to capture him, the failsafes in his head were programmed to erase everything in his internal system, and as a secondary consequence it would also involve him suffering a very fatal brain aneurism. But he had known that risk might come when he had volunteered for cyber-glider installation.
TBC