“So, these weren’t coffin shaped or anything, were they?” Ema asked during their next lunch meeting.
“Of course not,” said Aballa. “And, I mean, it could be a coincidence but… at this point there are far too many of those. A bunch of miners are moved to Segment 20, including the ones from here were questioned by the Void Brotherhood. A mine collapses the next day, supposedly killing forty people, including those from this Segment. Then forty containers are shipped off.”
Jenna nodded. “I got a feeling the more we look for connections here, the more we’re going to find them. So was this a prison break of some sort? Something we could replicate?”
Ema and Aballa both looked at her. Jenna raised her hands. “Hey, I’m just saying what we’re all thinking here.”
Ema shook her head. “It can’t be that easy.”
“Easy?” Jenna said. “All that sounded pretty complicated to me.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean… you do realize why there isn’t a ton of visible security around here, right? Why is there hardly any in the loading areas unless prisoners are incoming?”
Aballa shook her head. Jenna said, “I just figured they have cameras everywhere.”
Ema nodded. “Sure, they have those too. But not everywhere. There are dead zones and people know how to spoof them. You know what’s harder to spoof?”
Ema raised her arm and pointed to a spot on her arm that was a slightly darker blue. “Your ident. The moment you came here, your ident was logged and you’ve been tracked ever since, monitored by guards and computers.”
In the Protectorate, idents were not normally tracked, but it was possible so long as you had the right sensors everywhere. These sensors were highly regulated and used only in sensitive areas, such as a government office building, and even then consent was required.
Prisons in the Void didn’t tend to worry about such things.
“Okay, that raises more questions,” said Jenna. “You’re saying they’d know right away if forty people were hiding in crates to get off this prison planet.”
“Exactly.”
“And yet, the evidence suggests that’s what’s happening. Which would mean…”
“The warden is in on it,” said Aballa, her tone hard. “We know he’s corrupt, given his ties to the Physician.”
“This is feeling less and less like a breakout,” said Jenna.
“Especially when you add the Void Brotherhood to the mix,” said Aballa, then groaned. “What we need is information. If I had access to their network I we could figure out a lot more than talking to Stat and playing Comm Relay.[1]”
Jenna made a face, like she had been debating saying something, and had finally decided to bite the belt.[2]
“I might be able to help with that,” she said. “The Physician recently had me relay instructions through the local subnet to his cronies in the other Segments.”
“Where did you access it?” asked Aballa.
“The library terminals.”
That confused Aballa, because she’d tried that already. “ProNet access is highly restricted on those terminals. Wait, you said the subnet?”
Aballa nodded. “Exactly. The whole colony has its own little network for guards and administration. It’s normally only accessible from stations that are off limits to the prisoners, and even then require ident authorization to access. However, the library terminals are basically the same model, and have the same core operating system.
“It’s a legacy system back from when this was a colony, one which the Physician cracked and accessed when he first got here. He’s had a back door in every library ever since. And while I was running his errands for him, I made sure that door would stay open for me. For us.”
“What do you have access to?” asked Aballa.
“Nothing yet. Right now I just have some gum jammed in the lock, so to speak. You said you know your way around computers before. I figured we could work together to see how wide we can open that door.”
“Sounds great!” said Ema. “Can I help?”
“Do you know anything about hacking?”
“Computers are kind of boring.”
Jenna and Aballa shared a look. Jenna said, “Well, we can always use a lookout.”
“Yay!”
Aballa and Jenna sat side by side at twin terminals in the library during their next joint break. This was one of Aballa’s cover shifts for the Physician, which meant whoever was usually working here was needed elsewhere. This was good, since nobody would be questioning what they were doing, and with Ema ready to redirect unwanted attention or at least warn them if someone was coming, they were in as good a position as they were going to get.
Jenna clearly had more experience in hacking code, whereas Aballa’s skill lay in finding information in unintended roundabout ways. This proved to be a fortunate synergy.
Once Jenna reopened the back door, Aballa saw how the Subnet had kept the Physician’s little internal empire going. Each Segment was connected, as was every terminal. Those in the library had their access severely restricted, but the Subnet got around that locally. They still couldn’t access the greater ProNet, and there were a number of local systems that could only be accessed from Segment 21, the Administration district.
They looked for the boundaries of what they could and couldn’t access. Internal messaging was easily accessed, but mostly considered of admins of Segments contacting one another. These could be viewed, but sending anything would be logged, and Jenna wasn’t sure if she could prevent that.
Aballa found the work rotas for staff were available, which included those of prisoners. Jenna felt fairly certain she could alter those so long as she was discrete about it.
But the most useful information came when Aballa found the prisoner tracking system and Jenna found a way to access it. Because it not only showed where prisoners currently were, but kept a record of where they had been.
This made it easy for them to learn more about what had happened in Segment 20.
First, they backed it up to the day of the cave-in. Monitoring relays were set up in the mines roughly every ninety meters, and this included the portion that collapsed.
At the moment of the collapse, all the idents there froze, then faded to nothing. This might have been because the system still picked them up and faded as the dead bodies stopped powering the idents, or because it was their last known location and faded as they continued not to pick up the signals again.
Either way, it was a starting point. They now had the signals for all forty prisoners, and could backtrack their movements. When they did, the gut feeling Aballa had was proven correct.
All forty of the dead had come from other Segments, brought in groups of anywhere between two and five. But Segment 20 had only twenty empty cells, and so twenty of Segment 20’s prisoners had been relocated to other locations.
The forty transfers were divided up between twenty cells, though no two cells were in the same unit. Yet all forty were together for the mining shift the next day.
There was far too much going on here to be a coincidence.
“Wait, what was that?” asked Jenna.
Aballa leaned over to look at her display. “What was what?”
“I’m replaying the prisoner movements the night they arrived.” Night was subjective here. The planet was on the terminator line of a tidally locked planet, after all. Also, the prisoners were divided into three different work cycles, so only a third were sleeping at any given time. So ‘night’ referred to their own sleep cycle.
Aballa frowned. “I don’t see it.”
Jenna said, “I’ll slow it down.”
The forty whose movements they were tracking were highlighted in bright green while all the other blips were a dull grey, and guards and other staff were bright blue. Occasionally, a dull grey blip changed to bright red, and blue blips would converge on it, indicating some kind of problem going on, most likely a fight or something.
Aballa watched closely as the green blips were escorted to their cells and stayed stationary until they got up to go to the mines the next day.
“Did you see it?”
Aballa shook her head, so Jenna played it again, even slower.
This time she did see it. Something about the various movements seemed different, like everyone had changed their minds as to where they were going at the same time, and the green blips shifted ever so slightly in position.
“What just happened?” Aballa asked.
“It happens again an hour later,” said Jenna, fast-forwarding and showing her a similar shift occurred. “I think the records were tampered with at these points, with movements being faked for a while until eventually being brought back into alignment with their actual movements. Look carefully.” She pointed near the top of the display and replayed it. “Up here, almost no difference. Down here, tons of difference.”
“Play it again,” said Aballa.
Jenna did so. Aballa tried not to focus on the specifics, but tried to take it all in.
“Again.”
Jenna did so again. This time she was sure of what she saw.
“The distortion intensity moves,” said Aballa. “Down towards Manufacturing, and it becomes less intense in Residential.”
“I think you’re right,” said Jenna.
Aballa considered this. “Okay, so our idents can’t be faked or copied… but that doesn’t mean the monitoring system can’t be compromised. I think what we’re seeing is movement being hidden. The tracking system shifts movement around the affected idents and eventually gets them back in alignment.”
“Interesting,” said Jenna. “Seems a bit convoluted to me, but it’s the only scenario that fits.”
All the while, Ema had been at the end of a row of books, keeping an eye on the entrance. Now she waved a hand behind her back in warning, and Aballa and Jenna changed their displays to show something from the filtered ProNet offerings.
A couple of people came to use the terminals across from them. Jenna and Aballa gave one another a look, unsure what to do next. Jenna quickly started working at her terminal, and suddenly all four came up with an Out Of Service display in GalCom.
“Oh man, did I crash the system? Crap!” Jenna asked, then looked to Aballa. “Hey, you work here. How long will it take to get back up?”
Aballa caught on and said, “I’m only a temp. The regular guy won’t be back for an hour, I’m afraid.”
This seemed to be enough to discourage the interlopers, who went off to another part of the library.
Once they were alone, Aballa let out a sigh of relief. “Okay, you got any theories about all this?”
“Well, I’d say it was some kind of prison break except…”
“Except it makes no sense given what we know about those who were transferred,” said Aballa. “They’re not connected in any way. And why would the Brotherhood be looking for candidates for this ‘early release program’ and not use themselves?”
“And these alterations to the ident tracking?” Jenna shook her head. “That can’t be done remotely. It has to be done from the Admin Segment.”
“Which means some of the staff is in on it. Probably the Warden, given his ties to the Physician.”
Jenna frowned and brought up the internal messages. “I saw something odd here before… Yeah, here it is. A report on a delivery of kitchen appliances, just a few days ago. Forty units.”
Aballa frowned. “Kitchen appliances?”
Jenna looked to Aballa. “Stupid smugglers often mislabel cargo they’re carrying in a predictable way, either as a joke or with the hopes of being able to talk their way out of a problem if they’re caught by calling it a misunderstanding.”
Aballa thought about different types of kitchen appliances. “Freezers.”
Jenna nodded. “A common nickname for cryopods.”
The subcredit[3] dropped. “They’re smuggling out bondservants, and writing them off as dead.”
[1]Similar to the old Terran game known as Telephone. A message is passed from person to person, but the information tends to degrade the more “relays” it has to pass through.
[2]Terran equivalent – Bite the bullet, the origin comes from biting down on something readily available during a painful procedure in wartime. It is not practical to bite down on a plasma charge.
[3] A fraction of a standard Protectorate Credit, in this case the linguistic equivilent of “penny”
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