Ripples

[Raziel]

Raziel’s brow furrowed as he re-watched the holo-recording. He had sat there going over the footage for a while now, trying to pick out any further nuances of speech or body language that might provide him with further insight.

[member="Ket Van-Derveld"] stood between the two factions, encased in flames. It still amazed Raziel that he had the control to incinerate his shirt, yet leave his leather pants. If he had the ability to avoid becoming naked, then there had surely been no reason to burn off his shirt?

And then the recording reached the crux of the matter: “My own apprentice, [member="Marek Starchaser"].....”

The cameras recording the event were hardly holoflick quality, yet the look of shock plastered across Marek’s expression was clear. The holofeed was lost as the shuttles were pulled apart, to be replaced by the limited recordings from a number of droids that had accompanied to president on her excursion.

Starchaser had turned on Ket, requesting he back down. That was the end of his visual information, but verbal accounts of the events had indicated that the Moross crusade had been less than impressed and vacated the location quickly.

Had it all been an act? If it had Marek was particularly adept at feigning shock. It was all very interesting. At the least his extensive network of spies, assets and information gatherers could not corroborate Ket’s assertions that the Fringe was following his lead. He’d known Marek was a Force User, but the apprentice of a Sith Lord? That was new.

[member="Jared Ovmar"] [member="Rave Merrill"]

 

[Raziel]

Raziel had since been monitoring Marek’s communications, rather than taking any direct action. When you intelligence agency had taps across the ACA’s backbone network it was remarkably easy to isolate and extract all the data flowing to an organisation. Pulling out an individual’s information was a little trickier and his company were quite good at obfuscating their internal routing techniques.

However, Raziel had significant resource at his disposal. It had peaked his interest when they’d pulled out a range of encrypted messages being exchanged by Mr Starchaser. They’d carefully collected as many messages as possible and started analysing. They were high grade encryption and they’d identified some of the methods and protocols used. It was based on a pre-shared key, probably large and handed out offline. No obvious vulnerabilities. It could be broken into if the cyber warfare group devoted significant man time and computational resource into the problem, or Spynet conducted an operation to attempt to gain access through more traditional means. One of his senior agents had compiled some potential mission parameters and usefully placed a real term cost against each of them.

Before Raziel could consider taking further steps, they’d managed to trace the source on some of the messages. He had been quite disappointed. He’d hoped to uncover some secret cabal of Sith or Jedi that were pulling on Marek’s strings. How very droll to find business leaders, many based within the ACA were exchanging information. They were probably just manipulating the markets together.

He penned a reply to his agent. “Do not proceed with any follow-on activities. Expunge all records of operations to date.” It looked like he'd have to pursue another avenue to look more closely at the affairs of the power behind the ACA. Perhaps it would be prudent to work out where Ket had travelled to following the events on Morje.



/OOC Made some fairly standard assumptions about how you Tion members have been exchanging information, genericised from the method you've been using. Let me know if they need changing.

 

[Raziel]

Another interesting titbit of information was sent to Raziel's black terminal the following day. The analysts had been pouring over the imagery they'd received, looking for anything they may have missed. Images could never really provide more information than the original data they provided, but there were several techniques to try and make things more clear. Areas of the image could be de-convoluted using relatively straightforward algorithms. The technique relied upon having an idea of the shape of the function to de-convolute with the image. When something was out of focus on a three-dimensional holo-recording it was fairly straightforward to make some assumptions about the way the image had been affected.

Using these methods, Spynet had applied a fraction of its masses of databanks and processing centres to pick some words out of the tattoos on Ket's body:

Truden
Raaf
Karr
Diamonds
Padrun
Elaris
Eden
Olar

The names would be sent to the vast data centres of Spynet to try and identify any links. Unfortunately with several billion sentients on record, it was unlikely to make anything meaningful in the first pass. But there algorithms were brilliant. If they could feed them with more background on Ket, they might be able to pull something out.

Perhaps it was time for a quiet conversation with Mr Starchaser.