Domino

6 Allegiances

Ariana had been working on the flight suit that she'd retrieved from their secure storage, the data stored within the micro-computer on-board being corrupted as the suit had overloaded trying to protect its inhabitant from the main force of the explosion.

If their patient had not been wearing it, Ariana was pretty sure that they would have been discovering her charred remains amongst the rubble, but even with the protective ability of the suit she had endured severe injuries. For a brief moment, she quickly considered the fact that maybe their lives would be a little easier if the girl had perished under the rubble, and that maybe all the effort they were going to was simply destabilising a carefully established chain of events and by continuing down this path, they had no idea how the breakup of that chain would affect their future should unpleasant revelations come to light.

There was a flicker from the visor display which caught her attention.

Even though the transparent plasteel of the visor was cracked in places, there was still a ghostly image being looped within the areas unaffected by damage. With great care, Ariana adjusted her exterior connections to feed the output from the central core to the external screen, upon which that same ghostly image began looping continuously.

"Gotcha!" She shouted with elation, then quickly glanced about to see if there was anyone to witness her triumph. Thankfully there wasn't as it may have caused some awkward questions as to her efforts, but she quickly concentrated the diagnostics upon the segment of memory containing the imagery, hoping she had found at least one block of recoverable data.

Slowly and painstakingly, the fragments of data were reconstructed, providing her with an overlay display on the screen of thermal imaging overlays, coupled with imagery of the location in which they were taken.

"Interesting..." Ariana mused as more of the data began to compile from the damaged suit's data core. "Now where are you?" She asked of the crumpled flight suit before her, almost wishing it to give her a hint of the location in which the images and heat scans were performed. Almost as an afterthought, she slid along the workbench and activated a second screen, bringing up location data and reconnaissance imagery which had been taken before the area was devastated from the explosion.

It would have been much simpler for her to call up one of the garrison's computer interface personalities and instruct it to do a frame by frame match of the scenes depicted against the recorded imagery from the suit, but she quickly decided against it, heeding Lannister's warning that there could be spies within their own facility who may give up the very information they were seeking to recover and protect, providing it to those they desired to remain in the dark.

Her attention wandered back to the data re-compilation process, and the scene depicted of a long metal stairway, the sides of which were adorned with imagery.

"Whoa! Hang on a minute," she remarked feeling quite pleased, and deftly adjusted the controls on her terminal to roll back through the reconnaissance footage to the point at which the same images were depicted. "There!" She announced, once again chiding herself for out loud exclamations. She quickly noted that the scene was that of the route down to the platform level of the old mass transit system. Now she had that as a reference, the earlier imagery was notably of the exterior area around the entrance to the station itself.

Then she had a moment of sheer unadulterated joy. There was evidence of a vocal log, of which the diagnostic equipment was already busy attempting to retrieve.

It seemed like an eternity to wait for the equipment to work its magic, but once it signalled it had retrieved and recompiled the data bits, Ariana replayed the audio entry to hear a confident sounding voice, interspersed with interference and choppy playback, but most certainly that of their patient in the secure recovery suite.