On the High Frontier

5. Nothing Special (part 2/10)

Nuts, that was careless. A moment and her full monitor and defence mesh arrays are deploying. He smirks at the delay and what it means. "Nice to see you too. Won't you take a seat." His avatar indicates the far side of the table opposite him. "Don't worry, it's just business."

She waits whilst the systems report in. "Yeah well, business has been a bit messy of late." There is nothing out of the ordinary. In fact there's a distinct lack of processing meshes and expired allocations in the area. Something purged this zone recently, and hard. "After our last business I'm surprised to see you." She doesn't spin anything out from her personal space, it will stick out like a sore thumb. That'll be the point. Marcus doesn't want her ambushing him again. He can learn after all. "No offence, but I'm not feeling a lot of trust here." She starts a passive analysis of all the shell traffic to see if there's anything else going on.

He leans back. "None taken. I'll admit I wouldn't be here if I didn't need you." His hand moves to one side and reveals a data token on the table. I have a simple job, nothing special, but I need strong cyber-support with no complicating allegiances, and that's you." The telltales indicate the token is non-executable, and no taints.

"And how do I know this isn't revenge for last time?" She indicates the token. "I mean, what's that?" She continues to scan. Marcus' shell doesn't show the tracker she'd hit him with previously. But there is a related hardware artifact. The normally random refresh tick is showing as on a specific very long pattern. A subtle change that takes a factory hardware reset to remove. It allows her to track hardware across IDs, but it's completely invisible unless you know the pattern.

"Basic details. No details until you agree, but I hope you will." He locks his avatar's eyes on hers. "Why would I want revenge? After all, I'd given you my volatiles, so nothing lost." Yeah, like she believed that. There was something going on here and she can't figure it out on her own. Should she call for backup?

Kimiko is about to run a hard link to James when she realises something weird is going on. There is a consistent but very small latency between her and the local mesh mills. The entire extent is running on some kind of emulation or authorisation layer. On a hunch she spins out a trackline process shell with an overly complex key link. There, a distinct speed mismatch across the VNode space. Something is running high granularity authorisation, and was caught out decrypting the extremely long key. Anything she runs out there will be ripped open. Any normal comms will have the keys compromised.

She puts a full hard shell around the token, run completely from her secured space. A cursory scan shows no hot code so it transfers to internal isolated and virtualised storage. "I notice you've hardened our little tryst."

Marcus gives another smirk. "Yeah well, after last time you can't blame me. The management were unamused when I pointed out how you'd abused their systems, and they agreed to allow me to use a safer environment."  So this is outside the Grifter's Rift systems.

It's true that Kimiko hadn't had time to brief GenKen before that incident. But she has an understanding about reasonable actions, and the privacy shield is her signal. What with her Mother, then Kervin and everything else, this is her first time actually back in the Rift since then. Yeah, he's probably annoyed with her. She'll have to deal with that later. "Nice work, you've matured."

The avatar makes a dismissive gesture. "I'm more on the physical side. I subcontracted."

Interesting. "Then why not use your subcontractor for the job?"

"As I said, allegiances. There could be issues if they were involved." Interesting, maybe she should look at the details before making judgement. The token in her dead store has scanned clean, so she accesses it. Marcus plans a raid on a private storage vault. He has a group to go in on the ground, but he needs someone to ride shotgun on the security and keep it off their back. The systems looks heavy. She'll need to be close up to reduce latency, but it's not that bad. There's more depth than complexity.