On the High Frontier

5. Nothing Special (part 8/10)

No filtering of the voice, Davina just doesn't care. "Do you know how long we've been hanging around out here?"

Do her some good. "You know patience is a virtue." Kimiko hasn't forgiven her for stuffing Sachi in a box. "I'm running ahead of schedule so don't complain." It's half an hour earlier than she told Marcus. "Talent takes time."

"Don't make me laugh." Kimiko never had trouble with Solomon at the bureau, but she is already fed up with her here. She should ask herself if it's a good idea to ride the person watching your back? "Just do your job, and Ferris'll keep your secret, Sayoko." Oh great, is Kervin sharing her shame?

"What I'm here for." Amongst other things. "Give me some traces and any objectives. Then I can start to run you in."

"Confirm." She receives three encrypted, colour tagged, LS traces and multiple target coordinates. The team are red, white, and blue; someone has a sense of humour. Kimiko plots them on the schematics and inventory data she's extracted from the vault catalogue. They're in a maintenance corridor near one of the vault's service entrances. Unheated and dark, a fun place to camp out. "Whenever you're ready." She's definitely had enough of that sneering tone.

There are multiple targets scattered around the storage facility. This is going to be a scavenger hunt. "Give me a moment, this is all new data."

Security for the vault is split into many small and significantly overlapping, independent zones. Each has to be individually compromised, and that second network has comparators monitoring the individual systems for inconsistencies. None of it is particularly strong, but there is just so much of it. The second network is the big problem so why wasn't it even mentioned in Marcus' original data?

"Are you busy?" James always the master of irrelevant politeness.

"No more than normal, why?" Hopefully he's found something useful.

"Fee got me a monitor on that relay."

"And?" Gods save her from chatty Brits.

"We have all their comms, and they are busy. Take a look." The traffic stats comes up and there are half a dozen high density connections. The hacks against the House core and her systems are there, but what are the others? There's a link to Davina's team, and another to the vault systems, the second network fromt he addressing. Her traffic analysis combined with this shows it is throughly compromised. They didn't want her to know about it, and she only spotted it because she's running correlation analysis for her new systems. They are god-mothering the run, and can stop whenever they want. That feels horribly like a target designator between her shoulder blades.

She passes her analysis back. "We're being painted. I will watch it at this end, but we need to know what those other links are." They shouldn't realise she knows about the second extent, and longer she can keep it that way the better.

"How long are you planning this moment to be?" And of course she has the delightful Davina and gang to deal with as well.

"Just about there." She links a map showing the vault layout, overlaid with the group's location, the target markers and security system detection perimeters. The zones around the maintenance hatch go from red to green as she flips them. "If you're ready to begin your tour, please proceed to the embarkation point. Keep all limbs within the monitor free zone and pay close attention to your guide at all times."

"Ha, ha. Is the hatch clear?" The red, white, and blue markers move forwards.

"Yes, but you need to open it manually." This is all straightforward so Kimiko looks to her other concerns. From the timings and sequence IDs on the intercepted comms it looks like Kervin has a single hacker with one system, and some of the message blocks look familiar. Hard hackers, hah, that's a BreezRok toolkit system. Back in the day Kimiko and her uncle hacked each other for fun. She still smarts from the memory of when Takeshi had shown her that BreezRok might be powerful, but was very brittle if you knew what you were doing. Let's see if it's improved.