TADJ14

==Chapter 14 - The Adjudicator==
KCGS Cham Nguoc
Sampan IV-Class Cutter
In Transit
Late 3159
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"... Devlin Stone were interned at the same camp as Dr. David Lear.  I'm going to ask the stupid question."  Chief Antonescu laid a card on the table so that the magnetic tabs made it stick.  "Why an easily escaped ground base?"
"You can do brainwashing and gaslighting on a mobile platform-House Amaris did it often enough, and having multiple high-value prisoners in the same facility only works if you're pretending the facility is a hotel and that they're guests being held for ransom."
"Well, the pre-civil war pictures of the site don't suggest a hotel. Most of it is still intact according to the Capellans."
"It's a compromised crime scene to be sure." Clarissa noted absently.  "I don't think they were actually being held there the whole time that Lear's memoirs and Stone's statements claimed.  They were put there to be released in a specific manner."
"Locals might know." suggests Chief Antonescu
"Anyone local to the area when it happened, sure-but how much do you want to bet a lot of witnesses were 'relocated'?" she sighed, "Fold."
"Dude, you-are these cards marked?" accuses Kreig.
"No, you've got a tell,  Kreig. I think you were just dealt a five of hearts, which is too rich for my blood.  The Republic's little forced relocation program probably didn't get everyone.  Somebody will know something....and if we don't find them, we might find something with the equipment."
"What were we loading anyway?"
"Seizmic sensors and ground penetrating radar." She said,  "We're looking for cavities in the surrounding terrain, could be sewers, could be bunkers, could be another facility entirely."
"Could be nothing." says the Chief
She nodded agreement, "Could be.  There's something about their methodology that suggests there's a something to find on Kittery and I'm willing to lay odds it won't be found before we get there."
"Why?"
She sipped bourbeer from a bulb, then let it float to the next player.  "It will be there for the same reason they have swiss cheese for a story." she said, "These guys rely on controlling the information, but so far they are shit with the physical evidence.  I've busted pervert serial rapists with more discretion about hiding their trace. The whole thing smells sloppy...orchestrated..brilliant even...but, Daoshen Liao saw through it for the same reasons I did."
"Because he was crazy paranoid?"
"That's because he bothered to look the gift horse in the mouth." she said.  "My great grandma Elizabeth saw through him too-for different reasons. She focused on policy and economics, but that was her Thuktun, diggit?  Stone's economic theories didn't work long-term, which is why his Republic had to run covert ops to keep everyone else's economy just as crippled."
"Huh?" responds Kreig.
She sighed, "We're going into the Capellan Confederation. Which has an enormous fascist welfare state...just like the Republic would have had if Stone got everything he said he wanted. They're building their ships with the Draconis Combine's money, because while they are sitting on a germanium surplus that would choke a boolong. Their economy goes from crisis, to crisis to crisis, only resolving by purge after purge.  Command Economies suck ass, it's the same reason the Wolves had to move out of their old OZ. They used up the easy resources in a generation with not a damn thing to show for it...it's why the Falcons went Mongol. They couldn't maintain in an actual competitive economy.  The Sea Foxes were giving them ship-work as Charity.  For the Republic's economy to be strong, they had to keep other realms disordered and in recession."
"So strength is only relative, right?"
"Where are we sitting?" Clarissa asked rhetorically, "We're sitting in a hull built on a shoestring budget, right? Of a type, that is descended from an emergency measure. She was built before Gray Monday, what did the Quarantine Zone's economy look like in spite of massive die-offs and strangled external trade?"
"Pretty good, all things considered, massive space-based industry expansion, internal trade was pretty strong..."
"NOT a command economy.  Even Hood IV with those welfare-island cities wasn't any worse than, say, Inarcs or New Capetown, and Arluna's credit rating after the zone opened with the new vaccines?" stated Clarissa
"Booming." 
"Yeah, less than a quarter billion people and Arluna's loaning money to worlds that were 'prosperous' in the thirty twenties and early thirties. It's the difference between investment and control.  Safety standards are a thing, because you can lose money if your rig's unsafe, health and welfare inspections keep margin-shippers from going pirate...it's not rocket-surgery. The Republic couldn't possibly achieve it, and we know for a damn fact they were using covert attacks, industrial espionage, and embezzlement to bring down anyone who was too strong a competitor for their shoddy Terran goods. Its just like they were using catspaws, blackmail, and bribery to cripple anyone except the Cappies when it came to serious military reforms.  now, who else did that?"
"Word of Blake...and OLD Comstar." said the Chief.
"Right." she stretched, "They were sloppy doing it too.  It's just that when you also run the phone and data services, you can fudge the numbers a bit to hide what you're doing.  White collar criminals aren't good at hiding physical evidence, ask the Davions about the attack on NAIS back in the Fourth war days..."
"Or ask your great-grandmother about Holy Shroud."
"Yah.  Great Grandma Liz, who really shoved a lot more into building up Nha Tranh University after we were isolated by the Quarantine."
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