Risk Analysis (Draft 04 -- Reading Script)

by David Collins-Rivera

  That took me completely aback.

  "And what makes me so worthy?"

  "Do I have to deal with your false modesty too?!" She looked and sounded really upset then, and was wringing her mechanical hands in nervous anger. "You saved the ship! You have foresight, depth, and intelligence, all of which we'll need just to survive this. Stop your ego games, man, and get behind me already!"

  "I was! I am! Mavis...look, I'll support you all the way, whatever course you set. I won't engage in piracy, but beyond that, I've got your back. Anything you say. Fair?"

  Her regular breathing, in-out/in-out, was deceptive, because she took a long moment to regain her composure. Finally, though, she nodded and stood up straight, then keyed open the hatch. I got a glimpse of the others up in the Common Room, their owlish faces displaying complete wonder over all the shouting behind closed doors.

  "So long as we understand each other, Ejoq."

  Then she stepped out and moved on towards the cockpit with casual, mechanical grace: a potential for action and violence checked by character, necessity, and self-esteem.

  I keyed the hatch shut, more calm than before, but more worried than ever.

  ||||||||||

  The handle bore a button. After fumbling a bit, I pressed it, and turned.

  The hatch flew open with a whoosh!

  There was no airlock in this thing -- no room for one. No room, even, for the hatch to have a mechanical crank, which meant it had to open outwardly: the exact opposite of standard design. Without a mechanism to pull the door back against interior pressurization, it would be impossible for outside rescuers to get in the ship if it were in vacuum, or for someone inside to get out.

  I didn't think about any of that just then, because the door smacked into my deformable faceplate -- and therefore, my nose. That should have hurt, but I was screaming again, too scared to notice.

  Somehow, I held on to the handle.

  No, that's a lie. The sleeve of my simple pressure suit had caught on the hook of the J, and I just hung there, in another dimensional reality, by the fabric and rubberized plastic covering my arm.

  But there were rungs inside the hatchway, and with my free hand, I grabbed one...

  I grabbed one, and tried to pull myself up...

  I was caught on the handle!

  I yanked hard to ungather the sleeve, and suddenly felt my ears pop.

  I had a leak, right there from my cuff!

  Crap!

  At the level of the floor there was no increase in weight. This thing didn't have artificial gravity. That would have been extraneous, unrequired for the ship's intended purpose.

  I moved up easily now -- a fat weightless man.

  Huff-huff-huff...!

  Foggy helmet...!

  Hard to breathe, hard to breathe, hardtobreathe...!

  In! In! In! Head above the decking...

  I saw the man in the pilot's chair. The cockpit was so small, I was just looking straight up at him.

  He saw me too, looking down and back over his arm, but he was fighting with his harness or some cables or something, and couldn't seem to get loose.

  Something was wrong with his face...

  He didn't have a face! What?!

  Oh, God! He had no helmet either! He was asphyxiating!

  And with a hole in my suit, so was I!

  ||||||||||

  eleven

  * * *

  Within two hours, John and Stinna, free of their bickering for a time, had penetrated the temporary wireless security system installed on that big access tube.

  "This is live," SS1 informed us, as he brought up a feed from the cameras in the gantry.

  "It's as wide as a city street," Chris commented, impressed, while noting workers and loadbots walking back and forth.

  "They're awfully busy," I added. "What are they working on?"

  Without a word, Stinna brought up a list of parts requests and sign-offs.

  "This has been culled from the most recent decrypts," John explained. "There's a lot of radio talk, back and forth, but General Store is making plans to run a hardwired dataline to the station. Most of its chatter will get channeled through there, and we'll be cut out of the conversation."

  "Is there anything we can do about it?" Mavis asked from the cockpit. Her voice was steady and clear, all assurance, all business now. "We'll need to talk to their delivery officer to confirm the pick-up order for the parts. And at least one of us will have to get in there to receive them."

  "How do we even get them out of the station, let alone aboard Shady Lady?" Dieter asked, grunting, because he couldn't reach something deep inside the bulkhead. He was forward, in the short companionway between the cockpit and Common Room. Laying on his back with an access panel open and arm-deep in machinery, he was swapping out air filters. All he had to occupy himself with at the moment was life support, so he was under foot.

  "One problem at a time, please," the captain wrangled.

  "General Store must only have a crew of a few hundred," I observed.

  "Two-hundred eleven," Stinna put in.

  "Two-hundred eleven. That's nowhere near enough for one of us to walk around inside it anonymously. We'd be strangers, and the crew would spot us immediately. The only way to come at them is from inside the station, posing as freight handlers or something, sent to pick up the propagators."

  "We'll need fake clearance," Chris considered.

  "That's impossible without access to the station's personnel records," John said. "We can't create new identities, only modify existing ones."

  "Whoa now, this is sounding like spy work," I complained. Our ML shot me a glare, but SS1 shook his head in disagreement.

  "Placing one or more of us in the employee record of some company aboard this station is the only way to get security clearance to even walk around," he explained. "It's essentially a small city in there. I'm seeing the usual mixed bag of private and commercial radio data, including advertisements for small businesses, and public service announcements. There's a fair amount of project-related stuff, too, but very few details. Most of the sensitive information will probably be on hardwired networks."

  "Important things will be isolated," Stinna appended.

  "General Store will probably run that dataline through the access tube then," Dieter offered.

  "If that's true," I said, "we'll never be able to put a shunt in place. Security will be covering these very same vid feeds we're looking at. They'd see someone messing around with the data cables."

  "They will," Chris agreed, averting his eyes from me, which was just fine. On the captain's orders, we'd shaken hands like Real Men, and avoided contact thereafter.

  John waved at the image to bring one of the camera views forward and then he expanded it.

  "People have been moving through there steadily. From what I've overheard, active and passive bioscanners are everywhere on-station, laced throughout the bulkheads, floors, and ceilings. They sample everybody's physical specifications against their logged ID's, all day long. If you enter an area you aren't cleared for, the scanners pick it up immediately and alert security. There are no ID tags to forge or lose."

  "This is the work order about one of those security systems for the tube," Stinna added, bringing it up over John's feed. He gave her a dirty look and moved it aside, but didn't close it out-of-hand, which was an improvement.

  "Looks like we have two shifts before they start work," I mentioned, circling the scheduled time with a finger whirl in the air. "Can we get a crack in place before then?"

  "Not without a hardware connection to the station's data lines first," John reiterated firmly. "You can't see them on these feeds, but there's a temporary security post right at the airlock for this tube. Three Station Security officers with a portable IDent. No one goes in or out without going through them. The IDent is physically plugged into the station data system. Mylag Vernier is hardwired all throughout."

  "Really? That seems..."

  "P
rimitive?" John supplied, looking at me with a tight grin, "Inconvenient? Slow? It's all those things."

  "But there is a station net available wirelessly," I told him, gesturing for my retinals to bring up a home screen, which I then pushed to the Tri-D display above us. An ad for a coffee kiosk somewhere on the station appeared. It looked good. Much better than the powdered stuff we had on Shady Lady.

  "Of course there is -- but all data on this station is given a security ranking. The wireless net is designed to only transfer data within a very narrow set of rankings. Again, it's an old-fashioned method of doing things. Inefficient and probably cumbersome to use. It's also pretty much foolproof."

  "We can get in," Stinna supplied, with a neutral tone that made her point invisible.

  "Personnel records aren't showing up wirelessly," John said.

  "You need a hardware hack that will give you greater access?" I put to him.

  "Yes, and that's a problem," SS1 replied, "because I didn't bring any equipment for it. This wasn't going to be that kind of job."

  "No, of course not..." I muttered, thinking. Everyone else seemed to be doing the same, but I eventually got up, and went to my locker, amidships. Digging through my flight bag, I came up with a small plastic box containing some fine tools and small parts.

  "Can you use any of these?" I asked, as I came back to the group, tossing the box to John. He opened it, dumped the random contents on the table, and sorted through the prytools, twistgrips, and smaller bits and pieces.

  "Hmmm...I don't see how..."

  "What about those conpipes? I try to keep extras with me. What if we put one of those on the dataline, and shunt it that way? We could run a cable right back to here."

  John just stared at it.

  "Would that work?" Mavis asked him.

  "Well, in theory, maybe...but it would be an obvious hack. Anyone looking at it would see what we did, and anyone looking at the network traffic would see a delay in response times. They make special penetration equipment to get around those problems, but like I said, I don't have any with me. These conpipes weren't designed for that kind of job."

  "But they would give us access until security discovered them?" the captain pressed.

  "Sure, I guess. But if they can find the hack easily, what's the point?"

  "The point is," Chris injected, "we're working the problem. We go one step at a time, and solve each issue as it comes up. If the conpipe will give you guys a door into the personnel records, you'll also have an interface for the station's IDent database. Am I right? Those two have to be linked..."

  "Yeah, they would be," John complained, "but IDent is expressly built for privacy and security. It's a universal system across all the Territories. I wouldn't even know how to begin cracking it."

  "I can do it," Stinna repeated blandly, but gave John a look that might have been challenging. Or maybe she had gas.

  SS1 just tsked, and waved her off.

  "It's a plan, or the start of one, anyway," Mavis stated in a tone that left no doubt we were receiving our marching orders. "From this point on, we do whatever it takes to get inside that station."

  * * *

  John was far more experienced with physical hacks than was Stinna, and had more EVA time logged, so he got the job of overseeing Dieter's part of the operation. The engineer had to be quite hands-on here, because the cable we were targeting required the use of heavy cutting and prying tools to even lay bare. If we'd been strapped for talent, I think I might have been able to stand in for SS1 in this particular instance, since I'd been installing and using conpipes for years. They were useful for making a wide variety of Gunnery and ship data systems, on an even wider range of vessels, talk to each other with the kind of efficiency actual combat required. It was a simple-enough hack in the comfort of a ship, but I had no burning desire to be out there with them, clomping around on the inside ring of the station.

  *** "Maintenance, I'm not seeing the junction anywhere here -- are you sure this is the right section?" ***

  *** "Blue Unit, that's what's on the ticket." ***

  "You're almost there, Blue team," Chris responded, answering Dieter's query. There had been a question about whether the HUD in Shady Lady's pressure suit helmets could display the 3D hull terrain with recognizable navigation and tracking symbolism -- it looked like they were getting a good enough feedback to maintain their bearings.

  The exterior of any station was a wilderness of pipes, cables, protrusions, access panels, and many other unknowable things. This one was further heaped with hundreds of tall multi-spec antennae and sensor arrays of extreme precision, all dedicated to the freejump tests. Pinpointing a specific location without some sort of map or diagram of the station's upper hull required either intimate knowledge of the place, or blind luck. We had no maps, knowledge, or visually impaired fortune -- only a lot of reasoned deduction by a small but highly motivated team of experts.

  *** "Maintenance, we don't...oh wait! I see it! Proceeding with Assessment-Charlie." ***

  "Understood, Blue Unit. Update in ten."

  *** "Maintenance, roger that. Talk to you in one-zero minutes." ***

  After analyzing the terminology and operating procedures from the cracked radio transmissions of individual workers out on EVA (of which, there were at least a dozen at any one time, performing exterior repairs, maintenance, or inspections), we came up with the idea of sending our people out there using the station's standard encryptions. With a quick call for clearance to Pedestrian Control, using familiar lingo and the proper frequencies, we got a go-ahead to do an Inspection Class Three, referring, in this case, to a fictitious repair assessment for a series of pressurized drahlik lines, under a particular combing, somewhere out in those metallic woods.

  A small Sub-Department of Orbital Control, Pedestrian Control, or PC, was specifically dedicated to keeping tabs on any and all individuals walking about on the exterior of a space station. They didn't care about work orders, or even the exact job being performed -- only about who was out there, and where they'd be, just in case emergency responders needed to find them. The back-and-forth chatter between a repair team and its department was usually technical and tedious, and no one in PC ever bothered listening closely. It was all logged, however, so Dieter, John, and Chris kept to a script.

  Having been born and raised on a space settlement over in Jarden system, as well as having a mother who had been (and still was) a lifer in Orbital Control over there, I knew very well how this kind of office worked. PC was usually Orbital Control's dumping ground for stupid, unambitious managers, and the congenital screw-ups among their operators. It was a low-traffic, low-pressure kind of job, and tended to have people to match. Even though the ones on Mylag Vernier were probably a cut above the usual mixed-bag, it seemed likely to me that, if we were careful to follow standard procedures, and generally act like we knew what we were doing, they'd probably believe that we did.

  The really hard part of this EVA had been in the planning stage; specifically, in deciding where, exactly, our target lay, and which, exactly, of the dizzying number of inspection codes we were overhearing, should be used as a cover?

  John and Stinna finally settled on Inspection Class Three, which they determined was a Medium Priority Code, referring to an important, but non-emergency need to put human eyeballs on a particular piece of exterior equipment, and make any necessary repairs. In this case, to a junction of flexible drahlik lines that just so happened to run right next to a very specific data cable we had our greedy eyes on. Anyone who might have been listening in on our radio chatter, therefore, would have heard Chris pretending to be their manager inside the station, overseeing the work remotely via their suit mics and cams. This was the normal and expected way for exterior repairs to be performed.

  The only tricky piece of the con had been trumping up an airlock cycle for our fake repair crew's egress, since PC also had oversight of these.

  The normal EVA process began with someone from a departme
nt's management requesting permission from Pedestrian Control for exterior access for their team. This request had to include information such as the number of people going outside, the specific airlock they wanted to use, and the location on the hull where they would be working.

  If permission was granted (and it usually was, barring occasional safety issues), PC was then required to observe that the traversing crew used proper airlock procedures. This typically just amounted to someone in the control room verifying, via remote camera, that people were all wearing their pressure suits (vac suicides were not unknown, after all).

  Once the hatch was opened, the crew was then expected to acknowledge that they were, indeed, outside and in motion; to reaffirm their intended destination; and to announce when they'd finally reached it. If they needed to go anywhere else while out there, or, whenever they were ready to return, they had to relay that information to the PC controller, as well. The entrance cycle was then monitored in the same way the exit had been, including a head count which had to tally with the number of people who went out to begin with. Finally, the entire procedure was logged and archived for any future reference. It was an elaborate process, but a standardized one throughout settled space, and pretty fast and straightforward when everyone knew what to do.

  While we'd been coming up with this bit of theater, in the days prior, Dieter argued for sneaking out and running a bypass on a nearby airlock. We could then send a false confirmation of a cycle process to Pedestrian Control to convince them that we were inside and needed to go out. This wasn't a bad idea, but none of us could figure out how to fake the remote video of our people entering and leaving.

  In the end, Chris came up with a clever, if complex, idea.

  We waited for a legitimate maintenance team to acknowledge they were going out on the exterior (in this case, a crew sent to repair an electrical short Dieter had caused on a power lead to a gamma sensor). Chris then called PC on another channel, as if he was a manager from this same crew's department, to say that he was having two of them divert over from the gamma sensor to do some pressing repairs on a different airlock (specifically, the one nearest where our target data cable lay). These repairs, of course, would to be for this lock's vid system, which Chris would say was showing early signs of failure, and needed checking out.