“Register with neighborhood safety officials when you get accommodations.” The snake droned the standard phrase, tossing the documents back at Morgan.
Feeling slightly miffed that her excellent forging job on the documents had been wasted on a snake too dumb to really examine them, Morgan merged with the flow of workers heading for the general seating cabin of the shuttle. Once inside, she wormed her way against a bulkhead, not apparently watching anyone as she slumped in a bare metal seat. Syndicate shuttles didn’t waste money on worker comforts. Morgan did her best to continue looking unremarkable, knowing that the snakes would have sensors monitoring this cabin just as they did nearly every public place.
Without any first-class passengers aboard in the special, luxurious cabin reserved for them, the shuttle didn’t bother with gentle maneuvering. The entry into atmosphere was even more uncomfortable than a combat drop. When the shuttle had finally grounded and dropped its ramp, Morgan once again merged with the crowd. There was another security checkpoint before the terminal, naturally, and another snake who smiled unpleasantly at an attractive worker in the throng as he waved Morgan through without a glance. She passed down a long hallway, pretending she wasn’t aware of the many sensors scanning her and her bag as she walked.
Once outside of the terminal, Morgan adjusted her gait to a purposeful but not hurried walk. She looked like someone who had somewhere to go, a worker on assignment or heading to her job. Not enthusiastically. Not reluctantly. Just going. None of the police or other security personnel she passed gave her a second look.
Morgan had once thought about the irony that it took a tremendous amount of effort and concentration to look like someone who was completely uninteresting, but when actually doing that, she could not afford the distraction of extraneous thoughts. Any focus not directed at personal monotony was aimed outward at those around her. Morgan remained aware of every cop and every possible snake near her. She didn’t give the slightest sign of that awareness, but every time one of those people twitched, Morgan knew it.
She didn’t worry about looking much at the buildings, though. Syndicate cities, following central planning guidelines and approved architecture, tended to a drab sameness except for the occasional grandiose civic folly commissioned by a CEO who wanted a personal monument. After a while, even the undisciplined and erratic architecture of Alliance cities started to look the same. To Morgan, after her years of combat, all that mattered was that some buildings and some cities were broken and burning as you fought through them, and some weren’t. This city wasn’t broken or burning (yet), which made traveling through it a bit easier.
Morgan chose a hotel suitable for a worker with just enough funds to afford a private room. Inside, she found and “accidentally” blocked a hidden surveillance unit, then underwent a swift transformation using supplies and one of the two spare outfits in her bag. Within a short time, she had changed into nice clothes that emphasized her figure, washed out the drab hair tint and washed in a subtle glow effect for her hair, recombed it to look slightly exotic, scrubbed her face free of the first tinting and replaced it with a shade darker than her natural one, and popped the contacts in favor of another set that gave her green eyes. A small prosthesis at the bridge of her nose and two more on her cheekbones, blending invisibly into her real features, would totally throw off facial-recognition software trying to identify her. Every time she varied the undetectable facial camouflage, she would appear to be a totally different person to the artificial-intelligence routines trying to get facial matches.
Leaving nothing in the room, Morgan walked again, this time a little more briskly, her shoulders back, one hip popped out whenever she paused at a crossing signal, a slight smile on her lips, pretending not to notice the occasional looks that lingered on her new appearance. It didn’t take her long to spot the sort of bar that snakes frequented. Snakes didn’t have official hangouts, but they tended to lay claim to certain places for as long as it amused them, driving away other patrons who didn’t want to risk being noticed by security personnel with a few drinks under their belts. Such places were easy to spot because of the way citizens familiar with the area avoided even looking at them as they walked past.
Morgan strolled inside, gazing around with feigned uncertainty, looking every inch like someone unfamiliar with the neighborhood who was just searching for a place to get a drink. In a minute, she was at the bar, where the tender served her with a warning glance around the room that Morgan ignored.
Two minutes after that, a male snake slid onto the seat next to hers, the ISS agent smiling in welcome. “New in town?”
Morgan nodded, smiling back. “I just came in from Gosport,” she said, naming another, smaller, city on the planet. “New assignment.”
“You must be lonely, then.”
Morgan smiled wider. “Yes. I am.”
Ten minutes afterward, they were entering a hastily rented room at a much better hotel than Morgan had visited earlier. She pointed around with a worried expression as the door closed. “I… don’t want anybody knowing about this.”
The snake laughed and brought out a palm-sized device. “Me, neither. There. It’s on. All surveillance sensors in this room are blocked. Nothing can see or hear what we—”
Morgan caught his body before it hit the floor and lowered it gently the rest of the way. She shook her hand, wincing at a mild twinge. “I must be getting old,” she told the dead snake as she knelt beside his body. “Death strokes aren’t as easy as they used to be.”
She checked him over carefully for other security gear or protective devices before pulling out his data pad. Her own data pad, outwardly an old, barely functional model, concealed an inner heart of the latest hacking and cracking software as well as the fastest hardware available.
Linking the two, Morgan swiftly broke into the ISS planetary central file system using the dead snake’s pad as a Trojan horse. She went to internal files first, locating and downloading files on every citizen tagged as a likely security risk. Four times her data pad blurped as it ate and discarded security programs from the snake systems that were trying to infect Morgan’s gear. Three other times the data pad bleeped to report it had blocked covert downloads of pigeon programs that would have secretly reported back her exact position to the snakes at every opportunity.
She checked the time. Six minutes elapsed since the snake had died. It would be another twenty minutes before ISS security systems would begin wondering why his remote monitors weren’t updating his physical location and status.
Morgan switched to another section of the database and began downloading the ISS records on Supreme CEO Haris’s armed forces. Since the ISS regarded the military as just another form of potential internal security threat, they always kept detailed files on local forces. Information on every weapon, man, woman, ship, and shuttle available to Haris poured into Morgan’s data pad. She tapped in another command, sending back her own malware to infect the ISS systems. Most of the malware would probably be spotted and eliminated, but anything that survived would be very useful in the future.
A different alert sounded from her data pad. Morgan eyed the warning that system security sharks were closing in on her tap, checked the status of the armed forces information download and malware uploads, waited another ten seconds for those to complete, then broke the connection.
She knelt again, pulled out the hand weapon the snake agent had concealed under his coat, hacked the settings to cause it to catastrophically overheat, then laid it carefully on top of the snake’s data pad, where it now rested on the floor next to the body. After rolling the dead snake on top of both, she picked up her bag, hid away her data pad, then strode out of the room with a satisfied smile on her face, ensuring the door was firmly closed behind her. The security cams in the hotel would notice nothing unexpected as she left. By the time fire alarms sounded, Morgan would be blocks away. The overheating weapon would reduce the snake’s data pad to slag and do enough damage to the snake’s body to make it unclear what had killed him, while that body blocked evidence of heat and smoke long enough for the destruction to be far along before any alarms tripped.