Path to Becoming the Greatest Space Mercenary

While Avery and Kasandra were participating in the competition to decide which major shipbuilding corporation would receive the contract with the Alliance Police, the rest of the team was busy focusing their efforts on the job presented to them by Regina.

Since it was her mother that had put the request forward, and she had the most experience when it came to investigations, Jasmine had naturally been made the leader of this assignment.

That meant she was coordinating their efforts, and at the same time, she had taken up one of the three positions that Esmeralda had prepared within the Dramid Alliance Department of Education.

"There are more records for you to look at a catalogue new girl. If you don't want to be here late into the evening, I'd recommend cutting your lunch break short."

Though she had only just sat down with her meal, one of her more senior coworkers came in and began berating Jasmine about more work that was piling up for her.

They wore a nasty sneer on their face, and she had to resist the urge to get up and punch them in the face. A move that would shatter their bones and likely kill them considering her immense physical strength.

'Just calm down, Jasmine. You're not going to be here for long, so just ignore these as*holes.'

As if they derived pleasure from others' misfortune, the section of the Department of Education Jasmine had ended up assigned to had a particularly nasty hazing ritual.

All of the tedious grunt work was being thrust onto her.

Thanks to her augmentations, she had been able to keep up, but the more she performed above expectations, the greater the workload she was given.

This made her realize why Esmeralda was able to secure three positions within this part of the Department of Education. No one would want to put up with this sort of thing for long. If she was not here on a completely different job, she would have already given her resignation.

"Thanks for the advice. I'll finish up quickly and get to it." Jasmine said, putting a slight smile on her face and responding in a neutral tone.

During her time with the Alliance Police, she had been faced with utterly unreasonable orders a few times. She was at least somewhat used to situations like this, although she had certainly become laxer since joining up with Avery. There was a lot more downtime being a mercenary than a member of the police.

Once she had finished eating her food at a breakneck pass, Jasmine headed back to the tiny room that had been provided to her.

All that was inside was a small desk, chair, and computer station. Honestly the room was more the size of a closet rather than what an office should have been. Still Jasmine was at least grateful that she had her own space.

"How many old files do they need to be compressed and sent to archival storage." Jasmine complained as she pulled up the work that had been given to her.

A lot of this work had already been done by programs specifically developed to locate old data that was no longer relevant and remove it from the Department's main storage and send it to an archive. Where it would likely remain forever, never to be seen by human eyes again.

However, some of this information had been flagged as possibly still being relevant, and it was required that a real person look through the files and send off what was no longer needed and make sure what was still resided within the Department's main network.

It was far from glamorous work, and not anywhere near what Jasmine really wanted to be looking into.

Sure, there was plenty of information pertaining to grants, but nearly all of them were out of date and had been discontinued. Hence why they had been brought for evaluation to be sent to the archives rather than continue taking up space on the main server.

"Trash, trash, trash, trash, needs to be refiled under its new name. Trash, trash…"

Jasmine's hands looked like blurs as she went through the files sent to her to be reviewed.

The work she was having to do was tedium at its finest. It was so mind-numbingly dull that she nearly missed something important.

"Wait! What was that?"

Before sending off the file she had just reviewed to the archives, she scrolled back up to the single line of text that had caught her eye.

The reason for most of the information on the grants she was going through being removed was either because they had been discontinued or had been made obsolete by newer grants.

Yet, the reason listed for the one that she had just gone through was, "terminated due to fraud".

Obviously, there was no guarantee that this had any connection to the case that Jasmine was working on. Especially since it happened over twenty-five years ago.

Still, it was the first thing she had found so far that was worth investigating and she was not going to pass up on the chance to do some real work.

From a hidden compartment in her left shoe, Jasmine pulled out a special data drive that Grito had prepared for her.

There were security systems in place to prevent information from being downloaded outside of the internal systems of the Department, but thanks to Grito's help, Jasmine had a way around this.

When he had worked for the Odium Syndicate, tricking Dramid Alliance systems had been a specialty of his. Considering that she was not accessing anything classified, the protections in place were easy enough to bypass using the right programs.

'There will still be a record of the information being copied, but it won't be flagged or reported. Seeing as how this information is about to be sent to the archives, I doubt anyone will ever try to access it again and notice what I've done.' Jasmine thought, plugging the data drive into the computer.

She felt a bit conflicted about doing this since it was technically illegal.

Still, this investigation was on the side of righteousness so far as she was concerned. And they had been hired by Azade's chancellor. In the worst-case scenario, her mother would smooth things over.

After she had downloaded the file she wanted, Jasmine sent it away to the archives and continued with the grunt work assigned to her.

"Finally finished."

With a heavy sigh, she shutdown her computer and gathered her things.

She had spent her first couple of days working in the Office of Finances and Operations within the Department of Education snooping around and building some repour with the other low-level workers in similar positions to her.

Her goal in doing so was getting their opinions of the people in management that would have been in a position to move the funds from the grant that should have been going towards specific programs on Azade.

Naturally, considering the work environment, there were a lot of spiteful comments going around.

'I've got a few preliminary suspects I want to look into. Hopefully I can find some connection to them with this old grant that turned out to be fraud.' Jasmine thought, glancing down at her left foot where the data drive was hidden.