Mountain of Mars by Glynn Stewart

Author:Glynn Stewart [Stewart, Glynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faolan's Pen Publishing
Published: 2020-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

29

“It wasn’t as easy as it should have been,” Samara said grimly as she brought up a series of image feeds on the holoprojectors. “Even once we found unaltered footage, our target was only in the cameras for seventeen minutes.”

“I didn’t think we’d even get proof of alteration,” Damien pointed out. “Where did you find unedited footage?”

“At some point, the Royal Guard installed a secondary feed on every security system in the Mountain, feeding to a one-write-only archive hidden near the geothermal plants. Spader gave us access,” Romanov told him, the Royal Guard pacing the room behind Samara. “We confirmed our worst fears: not only were Hand codes used to allow access to rewrite the data, the software used to do so defeated our best detection tools.”

“We should be able to identify something now that we have access to an unedited copy of the data, right?” Damien asked.

“We’d need to read in a more advanced programmer than me for that,” Samara told him. “Once this is over, that will be necessary, but right now, I think secrecy trumps it.

“In any case, our target is good,” she noted, drawing their attention back to the footage they had retrieved. “Good enough, in fact, that I think the couple of unforced errors I’m seeing are because they knew the footage was going to be wiped.

“They’re using a digital-interface face-wrap and keeping their face away from cameras. All of that would draw attention, but as you can see in the footage, they avoid all contact with people on their way in and out.”

“What are they carrying?” Damien asked, studying the imagery.

“It’s a toolbox,” Samara replied. “Interestingly, it’s a toolbox they picked up inside the Mountain. Watching this, I don’t think there was a bomb. I think they used our tools plus some additional modules to rig up a device to sever the antimatter piping.”

“Is that possible?” he asked.

“We’d have to ask Chief Wattana,” Romanov told him. “I think so. The tools to work with those conduits are capable of severing them, after all. They just have multi-layer safeties to make sure they don’t sever an active conduit.”

“I doubt the cutter they rigged would be usable afterwards, but it didn’t need to be,” Samara told Damien. “Assembled from what was on hand. We’re looking at someone at the top of their trade, a professional determined to make it look like an accident.”

“And from what you’re saying, we don’t have an ID?”

“I didn’t say that,” Samara told him. “I said it should have been easier, but the target is very good. We have only two blips of footage that got us more than just eyes. Unfortunately for our target, my software is better at accounting for that interference face-wrap than he thinks.”

“Was it enough?” Damien asked.

She gestured. The imagery from the Mountain’s security systems vanished, replaced by six faces.

“It was enough to narrow it down to these six people in the Martian civil databases,” she concluded. “These two are actually sufficiently well known that I cross-verified against publicly available media records of them.

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