The Quarry

[Rage Menelas]

[font=Lucida Sans Unicode]Information was made immediately available; the Baeliwiks were idle to all outward appearances, which only meant that no-one had caught them in the act of doing anything illegal. Charlie was unimpressed, thought it would be a good idea to back-track a little, go to the source of the last mission. That was an agent for an obscure organization going by the innocuous name of The Society of Off-world Archaeological Research. This organization, while in the records, was quite unremarkable. The agent in question had popped up out of thin air. The starflyer had never heard of him before. He was not a native of Dalca'odge but rather hailed from a colony located several systems center-ward, i.e., toward the center of the galaxy relative to the location of Dalca'odge. He had returned there after some extended business on Dalca'odge.

“So...” Charlie was mulling over their options verbally, batting thoughts around while his apprentice leaned against the side of the ship, watching him install a new sensory node on the port side. “It looks like we need to make a trip to Faerdiste'a to talk to this fellow... find out who was really behind hiring us to take the archaeologists to Hei'a-12.”

“Why not just go back there instead... corner the archaeologists themselves... make them tell us what we need to know?” Ryan offered.

“Won't work. If they refuse to confess we will have no recourse... we don't have any evidence on which to arrest them. We need to get some information before we confront them. In any case I doubt this will be a short affair...”

“What makes you say that?”

“Experience... I have done several of these investigations before.”

“Ah... good to know I am with an old hand at it. So when do we leave...?”

“Tomorrow morning...”