Remember when I talked about the advantages of publishing your investigation in real time? Well, there're some drawbacks, too. Estelle's been getting some threatening letters recently. Nothing illegal, unfortunately, or we'd pursue it, more the "we'll sue you for defamation!" kind. Well, that's okay. I was already planning on getting more into the Vasudan side of things, anyway.

I got lucky earlier, catching the communications between the missing senators and the Navy engineer who joined Holly. (He's never taken a Terran name that I could find, so I'm going to call him Buttmose, because it fits.) That only happened because they'd been communicating directly, and that was only possible because Buttmose hadn't publicly defected yet. That got me thinking. If there is a conspiracy between Terrans and Holly, they have to have communications channels, and to avoid getting caught, they'd need to be really sneaky - or really high-level. And when I pulled on that thread, I hit jackpot.

I'm writing this "in the field" in Sirius while I wait for my transport back home. See, it turns out that I've got a counterpart in the Imperium. He's been investigating high-level corruption and has contacts at most of the major telecom providers. He's been tracking some potentially suspicious outgoing communications from members of Parliament, but of course, the transmissions themselves are encrypted. He's only got metadata. I got in touch with an old friend who helped me expose the AEX Limited cover-up - we'll call them Taro. Taro was an engineer before getting into this line of work and actually worked on the Super Pulsar line of comm relays, which are still in use up in Sirius. I'm not going to go into the details, but we were able to get a whole bunch more metadata for my Vasudan colleague. Now, we weren't able to get anything as detailed as a specific station this time, and most of them went nowhere, but we were able to confirm direct communications between old Parliamentary offices - and the Regulus congressional office, dating back to before those Senators disappeared, spiking right before the Gulnara heist.

It seems crazy, doesn't it? Hoshi and Jacobsen worked with someone in the Vasudan Parliament to ship Shivan (and Ancient?) artifacts to Holly. Is the galaxy in a bad enough state that I'm willing to seriously entertain that theory?

