Revelations
Devoid region — Kisana constellation
Lisudeh system — Planet IV — Moon 4
Theology Council Tribunal station — Dr Canius’s office
12 September YC 127
I didn’t intend to have any more dealings with Doctor Canius, but there I was sitting in his office and patiently awaiting his advice. You see, the problem was that the only thing I could read on the document obtained from the scavengers was Dagan’s signature. Everything else was written in an alphabet I had never seen before. I had no choice but to turn to a specialist, and Canius was the only scholar I knew in Lisudeh.
“This is fascinating,” Doctor Canius mumbled. “See this character?” he pointed at a squiggle which looked like a drunken worm who couldn’t decide which way to crawl. “It’s Jovian! The words aren’t Jovian though. It looks like they used them as a kind of a cipher.”
“Can you decrypt it?” I asked.
“Pfft, easily,” scoffed the Doctor and started typing something on his datapad. “Let’s just apply phonetic transliteration and a reverse transcription lookup in common languages. Hmm… Doesn’t look like anything to me. Okay, let’s broaden the language scope. Right… Uh-huh! It turns out that they wrote in the ancient Amarrad language phonetically transcribed in Jovian alphabet. Smart! There aren’t many people who know both.”
“So, what does the document say?”
“Lemme see. Amarrad is not a problem — this is the language that every serious Amarrian archaeologist must know — but my Jovian is a but rusty. I’ll need to feed the whole text to the datapad.”
Doctor Canius took a photo of the document and ran the decryption program. A few seconds later we got another text which was as unreadable to me as the original but the Doctor was beaming like a man who had just won a lottery.
“A-ha, a-ha,” he muttered, tracing the lines of text with his finger. “O-ho!”
“What? What’s that?” I asked impatiently. “Does it say anything about Dagan’s whereabouts?”
“No, it doesn’t,” the Doctor said slowly, peering at the text.
Then he turned to me with a troubled expression on his face.
Canius took a deep breath and said, “It appears that Dagan had an ulterior motive for accepting the role of Mizara’s tutor.”
“You mean, he… um… corrupted the girl?”
“No, much worse. In this letter, Dagan reported that his mission went well and that he fully earned the mark’s — I assume Taphos’s — trust. The mark gave him a password and a clearance to access Imperial archives. Dagan found everything pertaining to the Empire’s knowledge of ‘pre-Jovian’ weapons and sent it to someone.”
“Pre-Jovian weapons? What are they?”
The Doctor shrugged, “I can’t say what qualifies as a ‘pre-Jovian’ weapon. Could be the stuff that Empress Jamyl used on the Elder Fleet. One thing that I know for sure is that Taphos had unwittingly provided Imperial secrets to a spy. My friend, you need to immediately deliver this information to him!”
“Not interested,” I said dejectedly. “Anselm made it clear that they didn’t know anything about Dagan’s location. And that’s the only information that could make me go back to Tanoo and meet that dried cod again. Let your counter-intelligence sort it out.”
“No, on the contrary,” cried Canius, “you don’t want the counter-intelligence to get involved! Listen, if you come to Taphos and tell him you have a proof that he gave access to Imperial archives to a spy, making it public will be the last thing Taphos wants. His preference will be to find the culprit and quietly make him disappear. That’s where your goals will align. They might not know Dagan’s location now but a man like Taphos can invest significant resources into finding it.”
“Why are you so eager to inform Taphos about it?” I asked suspiciously. “As a loyal Amarr citizen, you should inform authorities about this discovery.”
Doctor Canius looked away. When he turned back to me he looked… older, as if my question pierced the outer shell which deflated and exposed his tired, wrinkled visage.
“Authorities,” he said bitterly. “Who do you think those authorities are in Amarr empire?”
I didn’t answer feeling that it was an academic question.
“All the power here belongs to aristocracy. Do you think I enjoy being a distribution agent? I was a respected scholar when I had a misfortune to recommend Dagan to Taphos. When Mizara ran away with Dagan, Taphos blamed me for the debacle. After I lost his favour, I also lost my job and any prospect of being employed by a reputable academic institution. I had to find another job to get by. Now, I have a chance to redeem myself by helping Taphos to avoid the catastrophe. If you agree to deliver that message to him, I can arrange it as a paid mission for you.”
“Really?” I asked sardonically. “Another use of corporate money to achieve your own ends?”
“If you succeed and I am in Taphos’s good books again, it won’t matter.”
“And why don’t you deliver this message to Taphos yourself?”
Canius shifted uncomfortably, “I could but I am not sure that Taphos will even listen to me. Besides, it may look a bit a like a blackmail. If, on the other hand, you deliver the message and mention that I have helped you discover the truth, my role will be that of a loyal and modest servant.”
I sniggered, “A loyal and modest servant who keeps a secret that can ruin his master. Okay, how much?”
After a few rounds of argy-bargy I secured a very special delivery mission for 411,000 kredits.