K-053: Live Session Summary Part 3, Gateway Surface

From the sky, Gateway is kind-of pretty, there is not a lot of green, but plenty of blue, slow-rolling waves and bits of rock jutting up for them to crash against. The shuttle flies down to a large island near the equator. The spaceport is on one side of the island and a city on the other. The shuttle lands and Oliver is escorted to a ground limousine where a driver chauffers he, Vern and the Militia guard.

“Pulling out all the stops,” Oliver mumbles to himself.

He is alert in case his hosts turn hostile, but they show no signs of doing do.

It’s a fair trip to the city – about 70km – because generally you don’t want shuttles landing too close to population centres. Approaching the city it looks to be constructed mostly of stone – buildings made of large stone blocks, a stone wall at the base of domes covering some of the buildings, while other buildings are outside – presumably sealed. It’s actually visually impressive, if a little bit primitive looking, giving off an ‘ancient temple’ vibe, except there is also traffic and streetlights.

The limousine enters a road-airlock and drives to a big building which is under one of the big domes. It turns off the street and down a ramp into a basement garage. The car pulls to a stop, where a woman wearing a long, flowing, blue dress is waiting for them.

    

Oliver meets Commissioner Justine Tower

  

The car stops and Vern exits first, holds open the door for Oliver, who debusses.

“Oliver, this is Parliamentary Commissioner Justine Tower. Commissioner, this is Stranger Forerunner from the Dominion, Oliver Star.”

“Nice to meet you,” he offers.

“Nice to meet you, Oliver.”

Her accent is different to Vern’s, she continues, “Vern says you’re a spy working for the Vizierate. Is that correct?”

“Allegedly.”

“Well, we might have an interesting conversation.”

“Yes.”

“We’ll go to my office and have a chat if that’s alright.”

“Sure.”

She leads them across the carpark, up some elevators to a foyer, where Vern says his goodbyes and he disappears through a side door.

The decor here is much more nicely appointed than the space station – carpets, views, big windows. Oliver notes a couple of Ground Militia security hanging around the floor, but they don’t follow when Commissioner Justine leads Oliver into a quite large, plush office.

Oliver reflects internally that suicide by cop is not, in any case, part of his plans.

She heads to a low coffee table arrangement – a couple of low, comfortablecomfortable chairs, slightly offset.

“Would you like something to eat? Something to drink. Did you have breakfast?” Justine asks.

“I could eat something now.”

“What would you like”

“Whatever. A coffee would be good.”

“We’ll get you something, and a coffee.”

“Yes. With sugars, please.”

The Commissioner diverts to her desk, speaks the request for food into a comms device before returning to the coffee table.

Oliver sits, and she joins him.

Justine begins, “So, I don’t know if you know much about how things work over here?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Alright, so, I am what is called a Parliamentary Commissioner. Which means I have a direct appointment – a commission – from the Parliament, which is our government unlike your Overlord, we have a government of many people.”

“I heard that much, that you elect representatives instead of inherited autocracy, or whatever we call it.”

“Yes. With that commission I have certain powers and certain responsibilities, and what I’ve been charged with is at the moment is to work here and exercise the oversight of the parliament with respect to foreign diplomats. The more interesting and more important migrants are also one of my responsibilities. So, you are most unusual, if you’ll allow me a moment of potentially rude scepticism, if what you say is true. But you do have a gold tag.”

“Yes.”

“Which in itself is unusual – we get mostly silvers, some coppers. Also, you say you work for the Vizierate. Then there’s the question of you being a Vizierate spy.

“Well, yes. Is that where you want to start or do you have any specific questions?”

“Are you a Vizierate spy?”

“Not in practice. I told the Vizierate that I was coming here to do their business as an excuse to leave Dominion instead of being their mandatory employee.”

“Tell me about the mandatory employee.”

Oliver zones out for a little bit – thousand-yard-stare, his photographic memory playing, “I used to operate with a revolutionary cell, a terrorist organisation that attempted to break into a secure facility and leak classified documents of several crimes that ended in mass murder, and some specific murders, various important people. We nearly got away with it until most of the people in the cell died. The Vizierate had a job they needed doing which they didn’t want to be too public about and they said I could do it or I could sit in a cell. Due to a string of coincidences and opportunities I managed to convince them that I was rather on board. I was part of a team who were in similar situations or pulled out of retirement and they gave me more and more trust and authority. I used that authority to tell the Vizierate that I was crossing the border in secret to chase after a defector.”

“And here you are.”

“And here I am.”

“Who was a defector?”

“Do you know what the Black Palace is?”

“I am aware that the Black Palace is the seat of government for the Dominion, yes.”

“He was a former security officer at the Black Palace who defected here with similar scepticism to my own, perhaps. Or some other personal tragedy that set him against the Dominion, and now he’s come here and I don’t know where he is personally.”

“What’s his name?”

“He’s got two. Willard Argyle was the one that we were given.”

Commissioner Justine watches Oliver closely as she says, “I’ve met Willard. He’s working with us.”

“I’m unsurprised, but yes, my initial job was to find a record of his intelligence. I’d already found it, and then I lied and said that I needed to come here to get it off him.”

“You’ve got it?”

“Yes.”

“Want to share?”

“Sure, why, does Willard want it back?”

The Commissioner pauses briefly, then apparently decides to share, “He doesn’t have a copy. He’s only got his memory of what he put in there.”

“I’m not hesitant about sharing it. Yeah, I’ve got a copy.”

“Well, that would be excellent.”

“He hid it in a vid.”

“He said that, and then according to him he deleted the wrong copy of the vid.”

“Oops.”

“So you may have a copy of what he’s been trying to reconstruct from memory for us.”

“I do. Although I could reconstruct it from memory for you if you prefer.”

Commissioner Justine nods, “Vizier.”

She pauses, then, “do you have any theories on why it is that the to be a Viziers, you have to have photographic memory?”

“I think it’s so that they don’t leave evidence and don’t have to write things down.”

“That makes sense. So you were an actual Vizier.”

“No. I wasn’t. If they knew as much as they said that they did, then they probably didn’t want me as one.”

She studies him for a bit, “the Vizierate is an interesting phenomenon that we have to deal with. There are a few here part of the diplomatic core.”

“Defectors?”

“No, the Dominion diplomatic core, ambassadors. So mostly Dominion ambassadors come from the Doinion Trade Bureau. There is an Overlordly Envoy who’s the chief ambassador and he has Dominion Legion and Vizierate advisers.

“Well, I think we should set you up with a suite and an office here if you’re agreeable to that. Initially we can look after you on the parliamentary vote. Then we can feel each other out and, then perhaps we could talk about formal employment. But for now, we’re happy to have you as a guest and to look after you. All we would need is for you to tell us everything you know. Do you have any questions?”

“Do you have an adapter for my charger?”

Justine laughs – it seems genuine – and their coffees arrive.

Oliver says, “Everything is on my PDA and my computer. I’m happy to share, I’d just rather be in the room while it happened.”

“If I brought in a technician, would you like to start now?”

“Sure.”

Justine does a bit of logistical work at her desk to organise a tech and Oliver to consume a breakfast muffin and some coffee. Justine has a coffee herself – black, sweet.

Oliver takes the opportunity to reach into his backpack, draw out his LDA and use the emergency wipe code Felicity showed him to clear the device. If it were to be physically disassembled the mini radio-transmitter/receiver it contains might arouse some suspicion, but as far as its software goes it is now completely innocuous.

The tech – civilian clothed and looking slightly under-dressed for a meeting with someone who seems to be the Separatist equivalent of an Overlordly Envoy – arrives and Oliver presents his PDA, LDA and his laptop. He claims his PDA is his ‘work one’ and the LDA his, “personal one – there’s not much on it.”

He pulls the file off his laptop onto a widget for them, the tech puts it into his own laptop that seems to have a Dominion widget socket built-in. Does tech-things with the file. Presently he turns his laptop screen to the Commissioner.

They look through it, look at each other with ‘wow faces’.

“Oliver, if this is a fake, it’s really very impressive, and if it’s not, it’s really very impressive.”

“Thanks.”

Oliver waits while they browse some more, asks, “Is Willard here on Gateway?”

“He’s here on Gateway,” Commissioner Justine responds.

“Think I can get a chance to meet him?”

“Well, I’d like to take a better look at your material and then I’ll see what we can arrange.”

Oliver recalls his brief first meeting with Argyle, face-to-face in the foyer of his isolated lodge on Pristine – Dicard doing the talking before Argyle ordered them out at auto turret-point.

“When he met me, he thought I was working for the Vizierate. He might need to be briefed.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Commissioner Justine says.

She arranges for Oliver’s office and sleeping quarters to be set up and he’s shown there and issued with a security pass. His quarters are a guest room in the same building, with a nearby rec room and a kitchen area. He is given a small office on the same floor as the Commissioner, and on another floor there’s a gym with a small laundry facility and a cafeteria he is free to use. It’s explained that Oliver is not strictly under house arrest, but they’d be happy to assign him a security escort if he’d like to go anywhere.