A young girl with long, straight pale-golden hair was slumped over a window-side table in a tiny dessert shop, apparently having fallen sound asleep after waiting too long. My attention was first drawn to what she was wearing: an Empire Army uniform, the light-duty outfit ordinary soldiers wore when not in combat. These clothes could be seen everywhere in the base. Judging by its style, it should have belonged to one of Pandora's direct combat regiments, though the girl's identity was obviously not that simple. I targeted the unfamiliar girl and queried the data network. The result was exactly as expected: no record found. She had never been registered in the Empire identification database.
However, when I ignored the error stating that she had no identification code and ordered the data network to continue searching for information about her, the system returned something astonishing: this stranger, who did not even have an identification code, possessed permission to travel freely through any area of the Empire. Note that it meant any place, including the command headquarters and the control center of the Garden of Departure! In those locations, her access level was listed directly as permanent!
I was very glad Sandora had ordered full Martial Law throughout all military districts in the Capital World. Otherwise, if we had merely raised access restrictions under normal emergency procedures, it would have had no effect on this stranger at all. Her permanent clearance could not be restricted by the access-control systems!
Yet after calming down from the information fed back by the data network and looking once more at the blonde woman sleeping like the dead before me, I was still dumbfounded: no information, permanent access clearance, appearing and disappearing without a trace, suspected infiltrator, perhaps even possessing an absurdly powerful mimicry ability—such as