Zero Sum Game by David MacK

Author:David MacK [Mack, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, General, Adventure, Media Tie-In, Space Opera, Star Trek fiction, High Tech, Transgenic organisms, Space weapons, Espionage
ISBN: 9781439160794
Publisher: Star Trek
Published: 2010-10-26T07:00:00+00:00

No one had stopped Chot Nar on her way inside the Breen Intelligence Directorate, and that much at least still seemed right with her world. It had been a few hours since she had reached her task pod, and in seclusion she had set herself to work on parallel jobs: routine data analysis ran on one side of her holomatrix while on the other she put the finishing touches on the humans’ new identichip profiles.

It should be easy to pass them off as Silwaan like me, Nar figured. That would enable them to purchase food or beverages appropriate to their biology without triggering any alerts in the network. Though they had come prepared with a fair amount of hard currency, Nar knew they would raise fewer suspicions if they conducted their transactions with credit lines linked to their ID profiles. To that end, she created a pair of well-funded accounts for their new aliases. It still amazed her that a culture as paranoid as the Breen’s had allowed its commercial infrastructure to become so vulnerable to virtual fraud. We have spent so much effort on hiding our identities from one another that money must have come to seem like a trivial concern, she reasoned as the two credit accounts were confirmed as active.

As a test of her work, she ran an offline analysis of the new profiles, to see if either one would appear suspect during normal contact with the automated network. Neither generated any alerts during her isolated trial run, and she was satisfied that they would more than pass inspection if needed. She uploaded the files to the public servers and then deleted the copies from her local drive. Next she initiated a secure-erasure protocol to make certain the deleted documents would be unrecoverable. While her machine labored on that operation, she accessed the logs of multiple servers and routers in the Breen surveillance network and either deleted or altered the file-transmission records to conceal the origin and creation dates of the new identichip profiles. Working backward from her first actions to her last, she wiped out the evidence of her cover-up, including the cover-up itself.

Her final act of sabotage was to upload a self-erasing program into the secure backup servers at the BID, to ensure that her peers and superiors could not use them to reconstruct the data expunged from the public system.

That will do, she decided. She opened an encrypted channel and keyed in the code for the remote comm deck at the hideout in the warren. The call signal buzzed a few times before Nar’s message was received. A small image popped into the lower left corner of her holomatrix. Looking back at her over the connection was a Breen mask whose altered markings she recognized as Bashir’s.

“Yes?” he said, his true voice rendered into machine noise by his vocoder.

“This is Nar. The work we spoke of is done.”

Bashir nodded. “Thank you. What should we do now?”

“Do you still need access to the BID for your research?”

“Yes, as long as it doesn’t put you in danger.

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