Chương 97: CDM 2, Chapter 33: Security Review

"Enforcer Gray, good to see you again," Investigator Dempson said, offering to shake my hand. For my part, I was excited to get to work with one of Enforcer McDouglas' mentors again. His office was a little bigger than McDouglas' but not by much. The view was better, though. I could see the Allegheny River if I leaned at just the right angle.

"I appreciate you thinking of me. How can I help?"

"Our techs are in the middle of processing a few terabytes of black market gate harvest data. Early analysis leads us to believe that the harvests were local, which is a bit of a gift for us. The rarer materials could only come out of a few select gates, so we have decent theories about where and when they originated." I nodded.

"That makes sense."

"The problem is we're missing the middle of that story. We don't know what happens between the gate and our distributors. Somehow, the materials are being smuggled out of gates and off of harvest sites without drones, on-site inspectors, or harvest analysts noticing anything amiss. The classic move is to simply underreport a haul, but our early digging hasn't turned anything up. The reports we have seem to match the hauls we can see leaving the gate and getting shipped out by truck.

Tracking what I'm saying so far, Gray?"

"Yes, sir."

"I asked for someone from RAID to help us review drone footage. There's too much of it for the investigation team to handle it alone, and I think there is value in tapping someone who has more practice watching the world from a drone's perspective. You might see something we missed simply because you're more accustomed to parsing what you're seeing from a drone feed."

"I'll get started right away," I said.

"I assumed you'd wait until tomorrow morning."

"If you have materials ready for me to review, I'd like to start now."

"I have approval to borrow you, but I don't have approval for overtime. I'll need at least a day to get that put through."

"I don't mind staying late on my own time," I replied.

"If we could let Enforcer Chapman know that I'm not angling for sneaky overtime hours, that would help me a lot." Dempson didn't hide his smirk. I took that to mean he understood my worries. The last thing I needed was Chapman discovering me at my desk when I wasn't scheduled to be. She would assume the worst of me and get pissed about my burning budget without permission. He turned to his keyboard. A few entries and mouse clicks later, I felt my phone buzz.

"The first batch is in your email. Thank you for your help."

"Thank you for thinking of me, sir." I immediately spotted a problem: RAID had only been live for a few months now, and the data Dempson flagged for me to investigate went back six. For example, the scarab shells that kicked off this entire investigation could be harvested from giant armored beetles that appeared in C, B, and A gates, primarily in desert environments but also in tombs. Their shells were desirable for their use in armor and other protective gear as well as high-activity industrial machines.

Something like a ball and socket would always experience some level of wear, but if both of those were coated with scarab shells, the parts that might need replaced every 4 years would last 20 to 30 instead. That reliability guarded against surprise breakdowns and dramatically reduced maintenance costs. Not only did they need fewer service checks, but machines didn't need to go offline for part swaps as often, saving a business several valuable hours.

In the last six months, the CDM logged eight gates with scarab spawns inside. Only one of those was within the window of when RAID was online. That gate was bought by the Allegheny Dungeon Extractors, and I spent four hours scrubbing through three and a half days of recorded drone footage, watching people and machines dart around the harvest site in fast forward.

Few items were large enough to hide scarab shells within them, but every time I saw something that was remotely capable, I put the footage on normal speed and watched where that item went and what happened to it. Industrial barrels went in and out of gates regularly. One could hold scarab shells if they were broken up a bit. A stack of scaffolding and tarps could hide something underneath. Another harvested material could serve a similar purpose as well.

For example, in the case of this gate in particular, three loads of ironwood came out. You might be able to hide scarab shells under that. I found nothing glaringly amiss, though. Harvesters were well aware that a CDM drone hovered over the job site, so I wasn't likely to catch someone with an armful of unclaimed loot casually strolling from place to place. They knew better. That was assuming this site was the origin point for the scarab shells.

It was very possible that they came from one of the unrecorded sites and no matter how hard I looked, there would always be nothing to find. At 2 a. m., I got a cup of tea from the breakroom and debated whether I should call it here for the night or if I should get a head start on another site review. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. I scrolled through the list of recordings Dempson sent me.

I had 39 harvest sites to review in this batch alone, which was 156 hours of review time in total if each harvest site took as long as the first to search through. His team wasn't done processing the evidence from the black market raid, so I expected this list to grow over the next few days. Then it would baloon again when they managed to salvage data from the hard drives the suspects attempted to destroy. The needle was too small, and the haystack was too big.

Dempson never said I had to review these in any particular order. What if I found a way to make the haystack smaller? To start, I set aside materials that were small enough to fit in a backpack. Yes, it's bad that pollen from suicide flowers was being extracted and sold without government oversight, but my chances of spotting a suspicious water bottle–because that's all the bigger a container you would need–were small. That reduced the number of harvest sites in my pool from 39 to 21.

Next, I filtered out materials where more than half of the harvests recorded in the last six months occurred outside the window of RAID being operational. That brought the pool down to 9. Then I adjusted that criteria again. Instead of more than half of the harvests occurring prior to RAID, I eliminated materials that had more than two-thirds of their harvests happening before RAID. That brought the pool down to 4. Two of those sites harvested drake wings. One harvested titanboa skin, and one harvested frost worms.

Frost worms were about the size of ghost salamanders, and the entirety of their bodies was valuable. Ground up, they were used in medicine to fight acute inflammation and were added to materials designed to be perpetually cold or to function in cold environments. That was 24 days in total of footage, which was still a lot. I would need three or four days of scrubbing through video to search all of it. Six or seven if I was exceptionally thorough. But 4 sites were far more manageable than 39.

If nothing came of it, I would continue through the rest of the videos just like I was assigned. I got home around 4: 30 a. m. and opened the apartment door at the exact moment Nathan tried to do the same from the other side. He yelped.

"Dude. Fuck. You scared the shit out of me."

"Sorry. I didn't mean to."

"Are you just getting home from work?"

"Yeah. I'm going to get a few hours of sleep and head back."

"Dinner tonight?"

"I may have to work late. Sorry."

"All good, bro. I'll see you when I see you." I locked the door behind him and crawled into bed. Cortez took another sick day. I texted him to see if he was alright, and he said, "all good." Given our recent conversations, I suspected he was taking interviews for potential crawler jobs abroad. He could have also been genuinely sick, but the timing was specific enough that I was suspicious. Not that I held it against him in any way.

He wasn't letting me down by missing work, and I didn't blame him for feeling frustrated with the state of the CDM. I had been back for almost a week now and hadn't drawn a single gate. Even with the boost from the Nad-Nade trip, I was irritated that the most attractive benefit for my joining the CDM had all but disappeared. At any rate, I resumed my research project, starting with the drake wing sites. One was another Allegheny Dungeon Extractors gate, and the other was the Dungeon Delvers.

Given that they were the two largest guilds in the region, their names appearing frequently in my records wasn't unusual. They cleared a lot of gates. Scrubbing through footage from the first site, I realized I didn't know all that much about drake wings. The echelon of society that owned a sailboat as a hobby used them for sails. They were also used in major organ repairs, most commonly for hearts and lungs.

A few startups explored using them in modern aviation, from jetliners to fighter planes, and at least one brand made very expensive wingsuits from the material. The times I had seen drake wings in person during an inspection, they were transported flat, stacked like sheets of paper. As I saw cylinders and pipes going in and out of gates, I wondered if, perhaps, they could be rolled up. That's what art thieves did with rare canvases. They cut them out of the frame and transported them in a tube.

Could the same be done with drake wings? I didn't know, so I made a note to look into that and took down the relevant timestamps. Around 6 p. m., I was still scrubbing through the first drake harvest footage. My four-hour estimate was atrociously optimistic, I realized, and it took an email ping from Investigator Dempson for me to realize how late it was. His overtime budget was approved, and he cleared everything else with Enforcer Chapman.

I could focus on this task exclusively for the foreseeable future and could work as late as I wanted, including on my scheduled days off. The extra money was a motivator for me, but I was more interested in demonstrating my value to the CDM. For as good as things seemed to be going with the Dungeon Divas channel, we weren't making enough where I felt comfortable quitting my job, so I didn't want to lose sight of my Unsung Heroes objective in the meantime. I sent Megan a message.

"I might not be able to make it to our next hunt. I got pulled into another project and don't know what the hours are like." The three dots representing Megan typing appeared and disappeared three times over. Finally, she said,"I understand. Would it bother you if we went and scouted the Banning Nest without you? Nathan wants to evaluate the site again before telling us his master plan."

"I don't mind."

"I promise we won't kill anything."

"You're all good. I'm not worried."

"Should we be worried about him? I mean, how practical should I expect a Nathan plan to be?"

"He's taking this seriously, so I don't think he'd suggest anything he didn't think would actually work. But I don't have any idea what direction he's headed."

"Me neither." Around that time, Dempson sent me a mess of new training modules, all on black market economics. What items were most sought after, what their rough value was in both legitimate and illegitimate sales, and an estimate of their rarity. Gate ranks were a decent benchmark for value. The higher the rank of the gate it came out of, the more it was worth, but from a quick scan, there seemed to be a good deal of nuance I needed to be aware of.

Too bad I couldn't take trainings and review drone footage at the same time. Canceling the next hunt was a good call. I definitely needed those extra hours if I was ever going to get anywhere with this project.