Once PC acknowledged this, Dieter and John, standing in readiness right outside the ship, would hustle over to the airlock. Dieter would then disable said vid feed while he supposedly worked on it and I, pretending to be him, added verbal authenticity.
Disabling the vid would be but a moment's work; Dieter and John would really be there to run a total bypass on the lock sensors themselves. This would allow them to send false signals regarding air cycles and hatch usage.
Once this part was accomplished, Chris would call with another request, this time for a different EVA team to go out and do urgent maintenance on some particular drahlik lines.
Dieter, now using his own voice piped to Pedestrian Control via our little switchboard system rolled together by Stinna, would announce they were already inside the very same airlock that was getting its vid repaired -- and could they please get permission to go outside already, because this could turn into a serious problem at any time, and they were all ready to cycle, and what was the delay for crying out loud?!
I, who was supposedly standing right there working on the camera, would then verbally confirm that I saw this crew enter the lock wearing their proper attire. Dieter, who was actually standing there, would then trip a fake cycle, which would indicate to PC that someone was opening the airlock from inside the station. Our engineer and John would then leave the vicinity of the lock, and proceed on as if they were the new EVA team, chugging across the face of the upper hull.
Meanwhile, Chris would keep up a fake dialog with me, as if I were still just standing there, fighting with the stubborn camera, and he was my micro-managing boss, sitting comfortably in his little office within the station somewhere, telling me how to do my job.
It was an exhilarating experience! A positive magic show.
Most of it was down to the imaginations and expertise of Chris and Dieter, both longtime freelancers who admitted to having experience with pulling short cons on disparate mercenary jobs in the past. I fancy my insight into what Pedestrian Control would be expecting to see and hear was integral, as was Stinna's expert wrangling of our communications. Really, it was a solid group collaboration, and everyone aboard Shady Lady, including the captain (who'd poked holes in more than a few shaky ideas with some fine logical thinking), contributed to this ballet of falsehoods.
After coming up with the idea, we rehearsed and rehearsed it. Over and over we went, running through the steps for two long days, until we all knew what it was we had to do, when and how we had to do it, and what we had to say to make it all sound mundane.
Easily, the most important part of the job had been in locating the right data cable to begin with. John's criticism the previous week, about the using a conpipe for data duplication and redirection, had been astute. Any shunt placed on a main trunk line could be detected quickly. The monitoring process for data flow through the line, if it was up to modern security specs (and there was no reason to assume it wasn't), would be comprehensive and responsive. Such an approach would undo all our hard work almost immediately.
For a few days, it was seeming impossible because of this, and morale was at an ebb.
Stinna eventually suggested tapping into one of the station's backup lines as a possible work-around, but most of the same problems still existed with that. Even though datalines dedicated to automated backups were not usually being monitored as closely for traffic delays as those running live data, intrusion detection on the network would be just as vigilant in other ways.
But what if other, unrelated systems failed out, requiring the backup data flow to be redirected for a time?
Dieter worked with our Sensor Specialists to come up with a logical area of interest when he was outside searching for this cabling system. He had to go outside anyway, to set up some small localized motion detectors around the patch of midnight that Shady Lady was hidden within. If any workers or soldiers ever approached us on foot, we had to know about it. He'd monkeyed-up a half-dozen tiny, passive sensors, which he placed here and there, on corners and struts surrounding the ship. These were wirelessly keyed to a simple audible alarm program that Stinna had put together in about five minutes flat.
After setting them all up and doing a little testing, he proceeded with some surreptitious EVA of a more extended nature. Within a few hours, Dieter was able to locate an armored conduit juncture he was certain held telecommunications lines. Just attempting to breach the intersecting box would set off alarms, but he was able to follow the conduit trail for a bit of distance. It mostly paralleled a power line of moderate voltage, and this proved the most useful part of the operation.
With a little engineering mojo, he induced a short in the electrical line which melted through the conduit and several temp sensors. He then gathered up his equipment, and scampered back to Shady Lady.
Naturally, this short was detectable inside the station, so, for a few shifts, there was a lot of EVA activity from station technicians to determine the nature of the problem. Wouldn't you know -- part of the cable would have to be replaced! As a standard precaution, any other lines, pipes, or services in the immediate vicinity had to be temporarily shut off or rerouted, in case they were accidentally damaged during the repair process.
That meant the backup data cable would be unused and unmonitored for a time. It also meant that a group of determined infiltrators could then target that same line with a conpipe/shunt further on -- say, fifty meters past the area of the induced short, and out of direct sight of the repair crew.
Dieter and John, having tramped out to their target spot from the airlock with the fake camera problem, were able to bypass some installed sensors, cut through an access cowling, and crawl inside the outer hull. From there it was simply a matter of locating the temporarily-dead data line, then install the conpipe and shunt, as well as a small communication system for sending and receiving digital information to and from Shady Lady.
The location of this hack was considerably far from the ship's hiding place, however -- too much for a hardwired connection -- and, solving this part had required some ingenuity. In the end, John suggested setting up a portable lasercomm, maybe mounted on a thin pole above human height, allowing back-and-forth point-to-point communications that couldn't be overheard without directly intercepting the invisible beam.
*** "Maintenance, this is Blue Team. Can you test the pressure on that drahlik line now?" ***
With a wave of the air, Stinna activated the lasercomm system, and, immediately, we had confirmation of a positive link up.
"Blue Team," Chris replied, barely able to keep the grin on his face out of his voice, "the pressure looks good. Repeat, everything is green on this end. Clean up the job site, and c'mon back in."
*** "Maintenance, roger your return order. See you in a few." ***
And, in a few, they arrived back at the station airlock, telling PC they were done for the day. I, still pretending to be inside there fixing the vid (and having kept up light camera-related banter all that time, which is a lot harder than you might think), told Pedestrian Control that the repair crew was now coming in, and that they all looked safe. Dieter then tripped the fake cycle once more, this time in reverse, all the while talking with John on the open channel as if they were happy to be done for the day. They signed off with PC and went silent, but remained right there in the airlock.
A few minutes later (to make it look good), I asked PC to check the camera.
No, they couldn't see anything.
How about now?
Still nothing.
Okay, what about now?
At this point Dieter reconnected the feed, and what do you know? It was fixed! He waved at the camera just as I said hi to the under-performers in Pedestrian Control.
After passing along some technical double-talk about the problem, I pronounced it fully repaired, and told them that we would now be rejoining our maintenance crew over at the site of the original short. Then Shady Lady's engineer and SS1 both walked off out of camera range.
&
nbsp; A few minutes later, they were back with us, hiding in the shadows.
The relief, and, I confess, professional pride over having pulled this off, was enough to propel Shady Lady's crew into a party mentality again. The next shift was one filled with laughter, more of John's music, and the making of amends between Chris and myself...again.
"No, no...!" Dieter was trying to say, looking tired, but a bit less hung over than usual, and definitely pleased with how things had gone, "I thought we were cooked when that lady came by on the scoot out there. But she just waved, and kept going!"
"Yeah!" John gleefully added, ugly guitar in one hand, a cup of my spooky punch in the other, "I didn't even see her until she was past us. I'm crouched there, cables in hand, and this shadow goes by! I almost had a heart attack!"
"You couldn't tell by the audio," I assured him. "You guys were smooth!"
"Will Pedestrian Control send a report to Maintenance about the camera problem?" Stinna asked, seemingly confused by the atmosphere aboard, but also enjoying it. I think. (Actually I have no idea.)
"Why would they?" I responded. "As far as PC is concerned, it was Maintenance, itself, that spotted the issue and fixed it. There's nothing to report."
It felt good to say that with confidence, and everyone was satisfied with a complex job, well executed. We only had to wait until Station Maintenance finished those legitimate repairs, and the backup line was returned to service.
It had been a fine day, and we were feeling like a fine crew. I laughed a lot, and enjoyed the smiles and good humor of all the others. Even Mavis relaxed a bit.
But I had an eye on our Mission Leader the whole time, and I'm pretty sure the captain had two -- bright blue, mechanical, and sharp.
I was counting pretty heavily on it being enough.
OOOOOOOOOO
"You don't care what we think, do you?" Emaross demanded at last.
"No, I really don't. I'm not yet done with my debriefs, which I've been strongly advised to conclude before talking out of turn. There's a procedure for this, and you are not following it. If legal action against me or my crewmates is ever considered in the future, the fact that your side of the table wanted to circumvent SOP will be brought up. I've had a rough time of it, and I'm in no mood for any more back-alley nonsense. People have died in this operation -- which was supposed to be all about maintaining peace! Team will be waiting for us on the other side of this jump, and they won't be in a good mood. If you aren't seeing the big picture yet, believe me, others are. They've spied and stolen and murdered for it. Shady Lady was right in the middle of that crap, so I won't be taking any more of it from you."
They didn't know what to do with me after that, and started wasting time going over my testimony thus far under debrief (those few pieces Route Management had been willing to part with, anyway), asking me to confirm things I'd already sworn to. It was stupid, and I said so while getting up to leave, ignoring the ineffectual wheedling of the arbiter.
Naturally-enough, this concluded the meeting.
OOOOOOOOOO
twelve
* * *
Within a shift, the backup line became active again -- first, with test packet transfers, then with speed and traffic tests to make sure it was really as good as new. Finally, they did a full bandwidth saturation assessment, that went on for a while. John assured us this was all normal procedure, and that the only cause for concern they might have is that our shunt created a slight drop in speed from before. It wasn't much, but would have definitely raised eyebrows had it happened while the line was in active use. Considering the circumstances, they were more likely to chalk it up to some loss of efficiency from the relays on either end, rather than an issue with the line itself. Indeed, by thirdshift, normal data traffic had returned, and we were getting it all piped directly to Shady Lady.
Departmental backups archiving through this line were performed at random times throughout each shift, varying from two, to as many as seven sessions per. We were, therefore, able to get this information, not in real time necessarily, but at least before it was strictly old news. Happily, while some of the data was protected, much of it was not. And, since this was considered a secure backup route all on its own, those encryptions that were in place weren't even up to the same standards as wireless comm.
That meant Shady Lady was able to read and write to their backup files, propagating changes to their redundant copies, and thereby cloning our activity across systems. This was vital, because all modern data storage configurations included fully automated tools for seeking out and fixing data corruption. By averaging any found discrepancies against a series of identical backup files containing that same information, the system was able to restore them to normal without any human intervention whatsoever. This could include reconfiguring databases, organizing and linking scattered code sheets, and copying over any bits and bobs that might have gone missing somewhere along the line.
It was in this fashion that our inserted files were placed within the station's various networks, and eventually, made live to realtime users. Not all these users were human, of course -- many were AI's, and dedicated systems such as the sensors in the companionways. Though our method was convoluted and slow, it was now possible to insert basic IDent information to allow one or more of us general station access. Entrance to more secure sections was far trickier, since there were other sensor networks in place that seemed wholly unconnected to the data line we had tapped.
"You don't have any access to those nets at all?" Chris questioned, sounding disappointed.
"They put in airgaps," Stinna told him.
We all looked at her in confusion, but John supplied, "She means there's no direct sharing of data between these systems. Total network isolation from regular users is a standard security design for restricted information. Anything above a certain classification will be run through one of those, not the general network that we're tapped into. So far, we do see people pulling over some classified information here and there, but it's in very small amounts, and highly encrypted -- probably just personal work. There's no way to clone back our info onto those restricted networks without another physical hack. And we don't even know where the cables and equipment for them are located, because that info is also restricted."
"I could write a script," his partner put in blandly. "Target restricted files on the regular net. When users plug their work back into the classified networks, the script would run and inject our information onto that system."
"Sounds risky," Mavis commented.
Stinna just shrugged.
"It's extremely risky," SS1 dismissed firmly, "and certain to fail even if the injection isn't caught, since we don't know anything about the actual structure of these classified networks. They can take a lot of forms, and be highly customized."
"We would need to know about that," SS2 agreed -- or intoned. (Monotoned?)
"Well, whatever, we're not after restricted tech," I commented, eying Chris, who eyed me back. "We just want to get our parts. How do we go about it?"
"We'll have to start by placing the order again," Chris announced, looking at a status update. "We missed our pickup time, and it's been marked as recycled."
This was not wonderful news.
So the conversation moved from strictly that of datalines and hacking, to datalines, hacking, and getting inside. A repeat of the faulty camera scam seemed like a bad idea to pull again right away, so we launched in to flights of fancy, none of which survived the rest of the crew's collective scrutiny. After a time it became repetitious, and I decided to take a break, retreating to Gunnery.
Much of the technical data about the loss of Jaybird was being discussed on networks we didn't have access to, but there were several general assessments on file, which a search of their copied information brought up.
From these details, I learned the ship had been a Model 11B Experimental Transgravity Dimensional Propagation Vehicle (but I liked freejump better). It had been developed by Co
ndiss Transport Technologies, Inc., a subcontractor with a substantial presence on Mylag Vernier.
Nowhere was a mention of any attack order being given to the freejump, nor even of a registered flight plan that would have sent it in Shady Lady's direction.
Nevertheless, it had come at us with port and starboard Class III 12Gw Spiraling Particle Lances. I shook my head in belated relief on seeing that, because those would have been plenty enough to take us down. It was currently listed as being Missing, Presumed Destroyed By Misadventure, but there was a reference to a classified report that didn't seem to exist anywhere in the backup data.
Just as mysteriously, there was no mention of the second freejump.
Again, what I was seeing were just simplified reports, designed for the consumption of nontechnical management types. As expected, hard science and engineering data on the new technologies were not included in these kinds of memos. Reports that did contain such information would be isolated entirely on closed, hardwired networks all their own. We had a tonne of peripheral conversation about the tech, and lots of evidence of its existence, but not one scrap of detail about how it worked. If this was frustrating to Christmas Giordano, he didn't let on. The fact that he maintained a solid poker face was telling, though, and I fully expected him to reach for that brass ring sooner or later.
And all of that aside, we still needed to get those darned parts somehow...
"Saying it over and over doesn't lend inspiration, Ejoq," the ML replied to my audible mumble.
Risk Analysis (Draft 04 -- Reading Script) Page 14
