This side-plot could take a long time; –have many parts that naturally intermix with other subplots or sideplots.

If you land in the new Kilrathi capital, Pasqual, you meet a Kilrathi fixer with small round glasses. He says he’s glad to meet a human privateer. That you might be able to help him a lot. He’s interested in Human History, and in particular PRESENT human history. He says he’s an ivestigative journalist. He says that Kilrathis have always been a society of clans that often plot against each other. But human history is made up of secret organizations that plot against each other and the entire human race. Kilrathis oppose each other in the open, whereas humans seem incredibly underhanded by comparison. And so efficient at it that he wonders how Terrans survived themselves.

And it’s not that Kilrathis are stranger to murder, but they ARE strangers to murder with the intent of framing. Secret government agencies, terrorist organizations, banking cabals, organized crime, sinister cults. There have been hundreds and hundreds of murders of Confed officials in the past year, and most of them since the end of the war. Your mission will probably be dangerous, and therefore he’s willing to pay you top money for your work. To begin with, he’ll pay you 30,000 credits just for you to find out the name of the organization that is behind all those murders. (Hint: “Belisarius Group”), plus another 20,000 credits for the names of any other organizations they are connected with (other than “Confed Military”, of course).

He’ll have many further missions after that. Some of the investigations you do should result in a trail of murders that follows you around.

In a way, the graph of research will be like a maze. And for a maze to be difficult, there have to be blind ways or dead ends. Dead ends in an investigation are either leads that don’t produce the expected bounty of info, or that lead to inaccurate information. It is therefore important that there be lies kicking around. Otherwise the research would be a simple linear search. Now, lies are intentional; and the beneficiaries need to hide evidence of their responsibility for those lies. One pretty clever way to spread lies is to, instead of killing opponents, to drive them mad with drugs and brainwash, then release them allowing them to speak against them, or even giving them support. They turn their opponents into obsessed and mentally ill people; then support their writing books.

A company called “Conspiracy Publishers”. All the books that all these crazy conspiracy writers write are published by it...

• One writer might talk about Mantu infiltrators in government.
• Another talks about a secret program to create a new race, half human half Kilrathi.
• Another talks about the Pilgrims amassing forces to invade the Terran Confederation, helped by the kats.

And so on, and so forth; all false stories. All published by Conspiracy Publishers. But if you research Conspiracy Publishers, you find that it is owned 5% by GNN; 7% by the other news network; and 88% by a numbered company registered in the Grovsner republic... Anyways, further research leads to a few names. Very gradually, those names are connected to key Belisarius people and front corporations.

At some point the investigation leads to finding human experimentation facility in a remote world, where humans are used to experiment with brainwash techniques, genetic engineering and stuff. As soon as you reach Pasqual to present the evidence for this kat to publish, the planet gets bombed from space, wiping out the research facility, and everyone in it, together with the evidence. The incident is reported as a weapons test, and the planet is reported as having been “uninhabited” before the test. At that point the kat gets scared, gives you a whole bunch of money, and says he’s going to go hiding for a while. He says you should stop the investigation for a while, then get back to it once you’ve lost your pursuers. And you should gather evidence of many kinds for a while, and later he’ll contact you. Above all, he wants to know who are the top people in the Belisarius Group, its founders, and its funders.