Hello there! I'm "Hanako Yamada", a private investigator looking into the case of Senators Jacobsen and Hoshi. Last time Estelle let me borrow her column, I talked about evidence suggesting there might be some kind of false flag operation behind their disappearance. The problem is, how do you even start investigating a case like that? Well, with a little bit of magic private investigator juice*, I was able to get access to some of their official financial records. One name stood out - a Vasudan firm described as providing ship components for Regulus' security force. The numbers didn't quite add up, and when I ran it by a Vasudan colleague, I realized I'd struck gold. The name mixes linguistic registers in a way that no Vasudan dialect allows. It's gibberish. It's like naming your company Worm Food Funeral Services. Is that a smoking gun? No, but it was enough for Imperial regulators to check their records. If you guessed the company doesn't exist, you'd be correct.

With hard evidence that our friends are funneling money to a fictional front company, I pulled some strings and traced the transactions. Eventually, there was a real bank account on the other end - a former PVN gunnery engineer. The guy basically invented the school of thought behind the old Mekhet cruisers, so he's kind of a big deal... or he was, before he defected to Holly. That's around when the payments stopped. You can see his work in Holly's new warships, or so I'm told - their Newet and Selket cruisers use the same basic gun layout. (Also, there's a conspiracy theory that they've got Shivan systems on board, so that's fun.)

So what does that mean? Our friends from Regulus were secretly paying a high-profile soon-to-be HoL defector... why? Were they duped, or did they want a piece of the action? And what does it imply about their disappearance? Did a Vasudan conspiracy pay off Terran pilots to wrap up loose ends, or does it go even deeper than that? Just what were they playing at?

* Mx. Yamada insisted I leave this bit in.

