Eagle X, Mission 21: CTRL

Part 17: Patricia

"Refill, ma'am?" asked the chubby barista at the Sector E faux coffee café.

Patricia finished off the contents of her mug and nodded. She smiled and thanked the young man as he filled her mug with steaming hot brew. Only beans grown on Earth Prime could be considered true coffee. Beans grown on Earth 2 or any of the agricultural colonies have to legally be called faux coffee. Patricia actually liked the faux coffee better than the real stuff, but she would never tell that to a coffee snob like Liam.

Once the mug was full and the barista moved on, Patricia removed the privacy screen from her datapad and set back to work.

Chilly: We're ready on our end.

"Good. I hope Thing 1 was helpful."

Chilly: Very, my knowledge of computer programming is rudimentary at best.

"And Thing 2?"

Chilly: She went off to stash some supplies at your other safe house.

"Perfect."

Patricia looked up from her datapad. Across the road, a squat office building sat at the corner overlooking the artificial canal and a garden reserved for the executives who work inside. In front, two men in overly expensive business suits laughed fake laughs at a joke told by a slightly older business woman. From her cold smug expression, Patricia was sure the woman was their boss. Neither man was the one Patricia came there for. That would be too easy. Sal Muun was going to make her go inside and get him.

With a stretch of her fingers and a sip of her faux coffee, Patricia tapped a key on her pad and dove into the building's system code. Mastermind-308 had given her the name, seeded a trap she would walk right into. There was no doubt in her mind that the purpose of his big announcement was to flush out Chillard and anyone working with him. This didn't deter her though. If anything, it acted as an incentive. A carrot for a horse who could never pass up a challenge for her considerable intellect.

Scott would say they'd inherited the desire to prove themselves from their father. Patricia suspected it was their natural response to the shame Arthur Felinus had brought upon their family name. Deep down, his children lived to prove they were better than him, that his immense shadow was no match for their prowess. Scott chose any battlefield where death was on the line. Patricia chose digital warzones.

Anyone could access a building's nodes and utilize its basic utilities, but the more secure functions like plumbing, emergency door locks, and security cameras required administrative passwords. Patricia smiled. One might call her datapad a universal key. The initial urge would be to go straight for the cameras, but Patricia was patient. If she was reckless, or misstepped the machine would have her. Patricia refused to let him win.

The initial plan was to shadow the man, crack his datapad and access the personal files that Mastermind-308 had already removed from the public and private servers. Patricia wanted to know the man and know why the Core AI had taken an interest in him. Unfortunately, Mr. Muun had been spotted just after Patricia set up shop at the café. According to a dozen anonymous tips, Sal Muun was in the building. Security would be on their way soon. She had to switch to plan B: access the man's datapad through the building's wireless network and take the files she wanted.

All she needed was line of sight. That's where the security cameras came in.

She snooped around the central heating subroutines then the water pressure. She cracked the window shade controls and shuttered two of the three conference rooms for a few minutes then opened them back up to the station's artificial lighting. When she backtracked to the heating she found an odd packet of code that wasn't there before. Giving it a wide berth she jumped to a new system and, as she'd expected, the code packet appeared in the directory a few moments later.