Inferno Snippet 3

 In Chapter 2:

Chapter 2

 

Sol

 

Captain Junior Grade Fenton Resa settled into his new office chair and stared at the spreadsheet before him. The numbers didn't lie, or so they said.

There were teams doing searches for specific bioforms all across the Federation. The team in the capital coordinated those searches and the various branches involved. The most famous search was of course the search for the Captain Takao-Irons clones. Since he had been the one to figure out the changelings were infiltrating their society he'd been kept on the team. He'd done his best but he'd felt like a third wheel for a time. He had asked and received approval to take a step back and do a deeper think on the situation.

He was starting to regret his impulsiveness.

He had decided to start from the beginning. Security had the number of people and identities of who returned to the Milky Way from the moment the gate opened. It was funny what people kept track of. In this case it was a good thing.

He did have to wonder about the validity of the later data however. From all reports the ansible connection on both ends had been under the control of the enemy. He had no idea if they had reported accurate information or not.

Still, what he did have was a starting point. He had a team running down each individual, preferably by actually finding the person in question and running a check on them.

He had found out something, they could filter out anyone who had returned to the Milky Way before Endurance had been lost. That had given him a hard timeline to base things off of. It had also eliminated thousands of suspects.

Leaving tens of thousands more still on it.

Well, an A.I. had run a comparison chart on gender and species. Since the Xenos seemed to prefer humans over other bioforms they had prioritized that list.

It was still a lot of people to track down. They had scattered of course, going their separate ways. EEC had started running down their personnel. That was good. The FBI had tracked the known clones. There were still gaps in their timelines, but they had traced back to specific times when a ship had come through with a clone.

Unfortunately, his team didn't have access to all of the security footage and biometric data of people moving in and out of spaceports. But they did know what ships went where from Crellis. He flat out refused to cull anything between the loss of Endurance and the first known arrival of a changeling. That was complicating the search a little. Until someone confirmed when the first changelings had arrived he wasn't going to take anything for granted.

He made a puttering sound as he rocked his chair from side to side and then spun in it.

They had discovered something in the search, that in the latter time period some of the people from Home Base had come back to Crellis to either take positions there or to move on. Two had been identified as clone baseline forms. That gave them a general timeline on when Crellis had been invaded and the data compromised.

Of course, someone could have performed a hack and altered the data later too. But the A.I. insisted all known copies of the data were consistent. So, at least there was that.

There was another spreadsheet, everyone who had gone to the Canis galaxy. There were versions broken down by species and gender. He wrote a note to look into breaking down the spreadsheet by age and doing a comparison there.

Could the Xenos alter a baseline's gender? They seemed to only do the minimum cosmetic changes before turning a changeling loose. According to all reports they had made minor changes to hair color, length, fur, chitten color, that sort of thing. They had not altered facial recognition marks... yet.

There was of course something else to consider. Since they had taken Crellis they had to have instituted some sort of changeling production line there. It was the only thing that made sense.

He frowned and wrote a memo to look for when people started to notice something wrong in any correspondence they had access to. Theoretically they had it all, or, at least everything that passed through the ansible.

He paused and winced. Could there be an alien A.I. lurking in there? He hoped not, but wrote a memo for someone to check that. There had to be a reason why someone didn't notice and do something sooner. He hoped he wasn't kicking off any witch hunts, but damn it, they needed to know.

His frown deepened. The very worst thing he'd considered and wrote out was that the Xenos might be making more clones from people they captured in the Milky Way now, ones based on new bloodlines, not the known compromised people. That was a damn scary thought and one he'd been specifically warned to not brood about with anyone.

He had to wonder if they would continue the fifth column infiltration model or if they'd disband it. Or would they take the deep infiltration path? He had no idea; no one knew how the damn aliens thought. Their best models had too much variety to be used.

But, they had to start somewhere, with what they knew, or at least suspected, he thought. He went back to the spreadsheet and then stared at it before writing a script to filter for age for human females and then see what he could glean from that.