She saw nothing that shocked her.
The Surgeon had promised answers: the processes, the algorithms, the databases that the Emperor’s Messenger had used to find monsters who’d kill whole planets for a dead man’s spite. Everything the Messenger had required to select Operation Cinder’s executioners.
She read through it all, even trying to solve the equations at the calculation’s heart the way the Messenger might. Quell had always had an aptitude for math, but she shuddered as she read formulas to assess an individual’s loyalty (to the Empire, to Emperor Palpatine personally), resourcefulness, conscience; recognized variables accounting for past kills (during and outside of military service), disciplinary actions, family trauma, education, genetic predispositions, species predispositions, personal associations, history of obedience to unlawful commands, involvement (including nonparticipatory exposure) in physical interrogation, and something called MDC-count. Line by line, she studied the code for how to identify not an unflaggingly loyal person, but a corrupt and broken one. Or one who was primed to be corrupted and broken.
She studied further formulas that assessed individuals as parts of units and judged those units as a whole, determining the moral character of a battalion or a fighter wing based on its leaders and recruits and all its history. The calculations gave the most weight to a unit’s worst members, tracing their corrupting influence on all around them.
Quell was confident she’d passed the Messenger’s test along with the rest of the 204th.
None of it shocked her. It chilled her profoundly, forced her to lean against the kiosk wall as she trembled. But the answers weren’t surprising.
She found what she was looking for—what, she knew in her bones, Soran Keize was looking for—in a list of functions the Surgeon had compiled. The Messenger was an analytical tool, a search algorithm, but it could do nothing to identify its targets without a well of information to draw from. The Surgeon had laughed when it had promised her databases, and now she understood why: She recognized secondary sources, military access clearances, but all were supplements to a single data bank referred to only by codes and coordinates—one grand source to fuel the Messenger’s assessments. She studied the coordinates until they were etched into her brain, useless alone but ready to be cross-checked and interpreted.
She realized she had a choice to make, then, and her own certainty frightened her. Keize had sent her to learn the truth, and she had—but only in part, and there were implications she couldn’t decipher on her own.
She’d betrayed Shadow Wing and the Empire, but she still needed her mentor. She prayed he was alive and that somehow, Chadawa lived, too.
The kiosk had no way to reach the Yadeez. Instead she opened a connection to her ship. Once the data was transferred she tore the chip from the computer, placed it on the console, and fired her blaster three times to incinerate the evidence.
She released a long, ragged breath into scorched and greasy air and leaned against the booth again, closing her eyes. She would rest just a moment, she decided, before returning to the fray. Before making the next trying decision, and the next.
Her hand still gripped her blaster when the door slammed opened and Chass na Chadic spat obscenities.