Chapter 02
Chapter 2
SECURITY MATTERS
Sitting in her office in the highest building of the Townsend, Inc., in the Terekhovna Dome of Syria Planum, Security Chief Deanna Shaw was reviewing the various reports of the day with scrutinizing eyes.
The political and economic situation in the past few weeks had been pretty tense, and her various teams had had an exceptional amount of work to keep up with. Peace was not an evident matter on Mars any more, not since the Separatist movement had decided to take more extreme actions against the Earthians. Now that the plague — “the Red”, as the media had started to call it — had appeared, first in Claritatis, next in Olympus, riots and panicked actions sprouted everywhere on an almost daily basis, and none of the Domes in Syria had been exempt from such outbursts.
On the desk in front of her, Marlla and Owenn were looking past her from the depths on the holo-pic, their hair as red and short as hers, pale faces and green eyes reflecting her own. The news from the Syrtis-Kepler dome were quiet ones at the moment; every time Deanna looked at the picture, she wished for them to remain this way. As far as she knew, the settlement in Syrtis Major had not had to cope with the illness yet.
On the screen behind her, Topher Sadowski from the Martian News Network announced the death of Trade Minister Ezras Winer, fallen victim to the Red early in the morning. He was only the most recent one in a line of over three thousand people, and would not be the last.
Sighing, the woman who once had been known under the code name of Ruby turned her head toward the door at the very moment it slid open. At a simple glance from her, Adrian Eberson, her second-in-command, stepped in, carrying a stack of documents in the form of a dozen of data-chips aligned in a small box, all sent by the teams operating today in Hawking, Merbold, Haishen and Terekhovna. He looked worried, which was not a good sign; she knew Adrian for his utter and everlasting calm, and him showing anything else than slight annoyance or amusement never bode well.
“Not so good news, I’m afraid,” he stated matter-of-factly. “We caught the hacker, but he had a partner, and this one has run away.”
“Run away?” Deanna said. She arched an eyebrow, staring at him with this steady gaze of hers she had learnt to use well over the four years spent as Security Chief. Nothing was more efficient to intimidate subordinates and make them understand she would not accept excuses.
“Berg and Allen have tracked her to Collins, on Level Two. She’s taken a cab using a unique credit card registered under the name of Chas Norris. This matches the genetic records of the corpse we’ve found in the room.”
“Interesting. I wasn’t under the impression that there had been two breaches in the server.”
“There weren’t. This is why it’s so weird.” Adrian carefully placed the chips on the deck. “The main problem is that she’s taken his cyber-deck. The logs indicate that copies of certain, well, sensitive files have been performed before the cut. It’d be a real problem if she could retrieve them.”
Deanna nodded, her mind racing toward the many hypotheses that could be formulated with so little information. The counter-intrusion measures used on this specific set of servers were among the deadliest ones the Corporation had ever developed; if two Wizards had been involved, the digital Hounds would have picked them, tracked them, and killed them both. The only way a hacker could survive one of their attacks would have been to log in using older and slower means than the neural interfaces ; no serious breach could ever be performed this way. The most likely solution was that Norris’ partner had not been wired into the Web when he had been, as the sys-admins put it, frazzled.
“Do you know who this woman is?”
“The gene-lab has sent preliminary data. We still need to check them against the ones gathered at the hotel’s entrance hall. Once this is done, we’ll know for sure who she is, unless, of course, she’s one of the unofficial Mavericks.”
“Yes… Yes, a Maverick. This would be very… inconvenient, isn’t it, Adrian?”