Blood Impulse

Part 41.4 - INDIGO AGENT

Cardioid Sector, HR-14 System, Battleship Singularity

An Indigo Agent. This corpse belonged to a spy, and not just any spy.

Indigo Agents specialized in long-term infiltration. They were the United Countries Space Command's eyes and ears. Command's intelligence network had massive reach. There was no question of that. Informants and spies fed information from all of humanity's worlds to Command, and Command deployed ships as necessary to 'keep the peace,' even when that meant ordering massacres.

Notorious loyalists, the Indigo Agents' original identities were killed off so completely that their infiltration mission effectively became their life. They were chameleons, altering their bodies, mannerisms and personalities to blend, eavesdrop and learn everything they could. Indigo Agents very, very rarely revealed themselves, and even as the Fleet Admiral, Gives had not been privy to the Indigo Agents' deployment. That knowledge was prized, held only between agent and handler.

In most cases, no one would know they had encountered an Indigo Agent. The existence of the spies' wrist implant would not be public knowledge, regardless of the implant's purpose. Any trait that would oust the Indigo Agents would be classified at the highest level, meaning he knew nothing about it, even if the ghost did. But, like most of Command's secrets, she had a history with these agents that couldn't be overlooked.

Tossing the corpse's hand back onto the deck, the Admiral stood. Zarrey gave him a glance, but continued his own examination of the body. The Colonel would be thorough, document everything from the origin and style of his clothes to the way his hair had been cut. That would yield some clue how long the man had been aboard Crimson Heart's station, and thus, how long he had been embedded there as a spy.

Stalking back over to the blood-stained sensor console, the Admiral began to query the ship's logs for any information on the Indigo Agent or their strange implants. It would have been before his time, during the Hydrian War. That was as much as the ghost would speak on the matter, and now was no exception. She had gone quiet, present yet mute. He had never quite been able to discern if that silence of hers was willing or if she'd been ordered to it and left unable to communicate on the subject.

Regardless, his query of ship's records returned no results. Any mention of an Indigo Agent's presence had been purged. The Admiral would have expected as much. They would have been poor spies to leave any mention of their presence. Even the ghost, a weapon of highly-clandestine nature, was not meant to recall anything about the Indigo Agents, but Command had always understood her poorly. They failed to comprehend the fact that she maintained an independent memory – one that remembered everything she had been ordered to forget.

His search through the ship's records pointless, the Admiral turned his attention instead to the internal sensors' data. The Singularity's internal sensors weren't particularly robust. They, coupled with data pulled from the life support systems, were primarily used for onboard atmospheric and temperature monitoring. They detected fires, hull breaches and other hazards. They weren't meant for in depth analysis, but he checked them anyway.

The Indigo Agent's implant... Something about it unnerved him. Something about it was familiar, or perhaps just wrong. The bulge on the corpse's wrist seemed too small to be an explosive device, but that didn't mean it was harmless. The death of the host could very well trigger a reaction – the release of some toxin or bioagent.

Still, there was nothing amiss in the ship's atmosphere. The air circulation systems hadn't found anything out of place, and they would have flagged a high concentration of unknown particulates in the air. The Admiral worked for another few minutes, checking for other anomalies in temperature or electro-magnetic fields, but the ship was reporting everything normal.