HOME | DD

Description

Papers rustled, typewriters clicked and rang, pencils scribbled, the radiators occasionally thumped and there was a faint murmur of conversation. This was the constant background noise for Maja Tomenko's office as she poured over her usual pile of paperwork. In general these were banal: copies of employee timekeeping records and receiving records made up the bulk of it. She was more interested in the marginalia that had been added. Most of which pointed out irregularities in accounting or anomalies, with most of them being fairly mundane. Only in the context of various written procurement reports and Enforcement inquiries could they be parsed out, and even then it was imperfect. Fairly regularly, she scribbled an addendum onto an older note relating to a potential lead which could either strengthen, weaken or invalidate it. At the end of the day, she'd file her notes and submit a list of the strongest leads to her staff for future investigation.

"Inspector Tomenko?" A voice said, drawing her out of her little world.

"Hey Ulf." She turned to face him with a grin. "Good news or bad?"

"That's depends on your perspective, ma'am." Ulf said formally with a folder in hand. "But we have managed to find a hard connection between Daisy, Rose and Bluebell."

"And what of the rest of the bouquet?" She'd been the one to suggest floral code-names for a number of suspects.

"Lily, Tulip, Pansy, Daffodil, Marigold and Orchid are not involved with this connection so far as we can tell."

"Oh Poot." She spat the mock profanity. "Still it makes sense, they have been pretty smart about this so far. May I?"

"Of course." Ulf said as he handed the folder over.

"Thank you." Maja said sweetly as she received it and opened it up. In short, it contained reports on one Roskara Shelepov, a fifty three year old cleaning lady who fairly regularly worked for subjects Daisy, Rose and Bluebell, along with a few other clients. Normally she'd charged 1.2 credits an hour, pretty much the going rate for basic domestic cleaning services. Such an income was modest, but Even so she'd owned a fairly substantial house in the Southeastern Dev-Zone. She apparently had some investments in rental properties and dividends would cover some of the discrepancies, but that begged the question as to where she got the capital. Her family was not rich, especially given her father's debts and her brother had been a rebel who died in the Battle of Daagsgrad. This was not unusual in of itself and she had a solid alibi for her ignorance of that plot given that the core Rebels were almost exclusively male and she'd spent the siege in a friends' basement well away from the fighting. But that did not rule out anti-Infrastructural sympathies.

Over the last four decades, workshops to the west had begun to make duplicates and derivatives of Infrastructural weaponry, tools and technology. You could understand the desire and their were some benefits to it, even though they got much of the raw info to do so through traitors, abductors, extortionists and thieves to try to prop up their own faltering feudal (or worse) Societal Machinery. Their attempts at probing the Coldlands for their secrets ranged from comedically incompetent to those both well funded and fiendishly subtle. Local Enforcement and the IBME could and would catch individuals engaged in industrial espionage, but against the more serious ventures and State level actors you needed something more. The pertinent data was out there if you knew where to look and how to find it. Many of her colleagues were involved with informants or interrogation, but Maja mostly worked with paperwork and accounting finding it just as productive.

Few people who knew her as a child would think that Maja would take up her career. The petite daughter of a bakery manager and a secretary who alternated between shy and bubbly. Her interest in jigsaws and crosswords were the earliest signs of this, as was a fondness for cards. She attended Administrative Prep, but she did not go down the Bureaucratic path or settle into a cozy clerk's posting. Instead she signed up for the Internal Monitoring Directorate, which was definitely a demanding job with a lot of responsibilities, but the puzzles it offered were formidable indeed. And the professional and financial activities of Ms Shelepov was a piece around which others would fall into place.

From the Beginning...

Previous: Infrastructure: Part Three Hundred and Eighty Six
Next: Infrastructure: Part Three Hundred and Eighty Seven

Description

Papers rustled, typewriters clicked and rang, pencils scribbled, the radiators occasionally thumped and there was a faint murmur of conversation. This was the constant background noise for Maja Tomenko's office as she poured over her usual pile of paperwork. In general these were banal: copies of employee timekeeping records and receiving records made up the bulk of it. She was more interested in the marginalia that had been added. Most of which pointed out irregularities in accounting or anomalies, with most of them being fairly mundane. Only in the context of various written procurement reports and Enforcement inquiries could they be parsed out, and even then it was imperfect. Fairly regularly, she scribbled an addendum onto an older note relating to a potential lead which could either strengthen, weaken or invalidate it. At the end of the day, she'd file her notes and submit a list of the strongest leads to her staff for future investigation.

"Inspector Tomenko?" A voice said, drawing her out of her little world.

"Hey Ulf." She turned to face him with a grin. "Good news or bad?"

"That's depends on your perspective, ma'am." Ulf said formally with a folder in hand. "But we have managed to find a hard connection between Daisy, Rose and Bluebell."

"And what of the rest of the bouquet?" She'd been the one to suggest floral code-names for a number of suspects.

"Lily, Tulip, Pansy, Daffodil, Marigold and Orchid are not involved with this connection so far as we can tell."

"Oh Poot." She spat the mock profanity. "Still it makes sense, they have been pretty smart about this so far. May I?"

"Of course." Ulf said as he handed the folder over.

"Thank you." Maja said sweetly as she received it and opened it up. In short, it contained reports on one Roskara Shelepov, a fifty three year old cleaning lady who fairly regularly worked for subjects Daisy, Rose and Bluebell, along with a few other clients. Normally she'd charged 1.2 credits an hour, pretty much the going rate for basic domestic cleaning services. Such an income was modest, but Even so she'd owned a fairly substantial house in the Southeastern Dev-Zone. She apparently had some investments in rental properties and dividends would cover some of the discrepancies, but that begged the question as to where she got the capital. Her family was not rich, especially given her father's debts and her brother had been a rebel who died in the Battle of Daagsgrad. This was not unusual in of itself and she had a solid alibi for her ignorance of that plot given that the core Rebels were almost exclusively male and she'd spent the siege in a friends' basement well away from the fighting. But that did not rule out anti-Infrastructural sympathies.

Over the last four decades, workshops to the west had begun to make duplicates and derivatives of Infrastructural weaponry, tools and technology. You could understand the desire and their were some benefits to it, even though they got much of the raw info to do so through traitors, abductors, extortionists and thieves to try to prop up their own faltering feudal (or worse) Societal Machinery. Their attempts at probing the Coldlands for their secrets ranged from comedically incompetent to those both well funded and fiendishly subtle. Local Enforcement and the IBME could and would catch individuals engaged in industrial espionage, but against the more serious ventures and State level actors you needed something more. The pertinent data was out there if you knew where to look and how to find it. Many of her colleagues were involved with informants or interrogation, but Maja mostly worked with paperwork and accounting finding it just as productive.

Few people who knew her as a child would think that Maja would take up her career. The petite daughter of a bakery manager and a secretary who alternated between shy and bubbly. Her interest in jigsaws and crosswords were the earliest signs of this, as was a fondness for cards. She attended Administrative Prep, but she did not go down the Bureaucratic path or settle into a cozy clerk's posting. Instead she signed up for the Internal Monitoring Directorate, which was definitely a demanding job with a lot of responsibilities, but the puzzles it offered were formidable indeed. And the professional and financial activities of Ms Shelepov was a piece around which others would fall into place.

From the Beginning...

Previous: Infrastructure: Part Three Hundred and Eighty Six
Next: Infrastructure: Part Three Hundred and Eighty Seven