She regretted not leaving the torch on until the last moment when she stepped into the brightly lit corridor and had to blink away tears as she tried to adjust to it after the darkness. It had seemed like a clever idea at the time, to take away light so she could focus entirely on sound. If anyone turned the corner now, however, they would have found a strange young woman blundering blindly about with an open door behind her which was marked with a prominent sign, “KEEP SEALED. DANGEROUS CORRIDORS BEYOND THIS POINT.” Katya’s cover story was not likely to survive such a spectacle.
The corridor remained obligingly empty for the minute it took her vision to clear, however. She closed and locked the door, quickly checked that she hadn’t got any dirt on her fresh clothes that might mark her out as somebody who had recently been in the DANGEROUS CORRIDORS, hoped her short blonde hair didn’t look like a pipe brush, and mentally retuned herself to be somebody who had every right to be in that hall.
In one sense, she did. Every person on that level had at least a Beta grade security pass. Kane had been grudgingly complimentary about the standard of the passes.
“Gammas are easy to fake, and Gamma Pluses not much more so. There’s a huge jump in the standard between Gamma Plus and Beta, though. Nanoscale identifiers, unique polymer tagging, even some fancy business with quantum encipherment. What that all means is that Beta passes and upwards cannot be forged. Not by us, or even by the Yagizban and, believe me, we’ve tried. We can come up with something that fools the eye easily enough but, as soon as it gets scanned, the game is over. Where you’re going, you can’t operate a console or even open a door unless your card’s in a reader. Borrowing yours or stealing one is no good, either. There is a variety of biometric tests to confirm the user is who it’s supposed to be. I’m sorry, Katya — you’re the only person we know who could walk those corridors and stand any chance of getting away with it.”
Lucky me, thought Katya as she walked the Beta security level corridors.
From the door she walked coolly and confidently right, first left, second right, up a short set of steps leading to a section that was slightly offset to the rest of the maze, turned right, first left, all the way along to the end of the corridor where it opened out into a round chamber.
Katya knew that the lack of bulkheads meant that she was well inside the mountain into which Atlantis was built. This was fortunate, as she could guarantee that every bulkhead would require her ID before allowing her to proceed. The further she could go without using it, the better her chances.
The whole episode of the disused corridors had been to avoid her having to enter the Beta graded section by the usual routes, all of which involved an ID check. Her card was authentic, but she had no reason to be here. Attention would have been called to her and that would have been the end of that. Her Beta Plus was like her medaclass="underline" an honour of no practical use.
Until now. Right at that exact moment, the entry database was disconnected from the internal usage logs. Usually, the facility computer logged people into the site when they entered, and off it when they left. If a card was used on site that had not been logged in, there would have been a security alert. Currently, however, a small piece of computer code that had begun life in a Yagizban espionage sciences facility had separated the two and would continue to do so for another twelve hours. During that time, anybody with a Beta grade or above could wander around the place whether they had been logged in at an entrance or not. The security failure would only be discovered if and when somebody decided to go through the usage logs themselves.
Katya thought it was very likely that some poor soul would end up doing exactly that when the FMA discovered what she had done. Assuming she had a chance to do it.
The chamber was in the form of a hemisphere with its floor lower than the entry corridor. In the centre was the group of computers that handled traffic control and communications. They rose high, embraced with coolant systems, and ringed with a mesh walkway. Destroying them would cause the Federal forces perhaps a day of disruption before the workload could be fully assumed by the multiple redundancy back-ups dispersed elsewhere in the mountain. Katya, however, was not there to do anything as mundane as simple sabotage.
The situation was complicated by the discovery that the room was not unmanned. This was a surprise — the computers were very low maintenance, and would be left entirely alone for days at a time. It was just her lousy luck to walk in on one of the rare occasions when somebody else was working on something there.
A technician in white coveralls, his Beta card clipped to his pocket, was checking the valves feeding the coolant system. He looked up in surprise when Katya entered. “Oh! You made me jump,” he said. “I thought I was alone.” He smiled awkwardly.
Katya didn’t smile at all. “This is the traffic control and communications hub, yes?” she said curtly. She nodded at the open doorway. “I’m surprised there’s no secure access to this room. Why is that?” She said it as if it was his idea not to bother installing a pass-locked door.
“I… don’t know. I could ask?” The technician was in his twenties, possibly ten years older than Katya, but two wars had made such a mess of Russalka’s demographic spread, it was unsurprising to find seniority was not necessarily attached to age.
“Don’t bother,” she said. “I shall include it in my report.”
“Your report?” He looked her up and down, trying to decide who she might be. “Pardon me for asking, but may I see your identification?” Katya looked at him icily, trying to mimic the marrow-freezing effect that Tasya managed so well. “Please?” added the technician.
With an expression that indicated she was now sure she was talking to the facility idiot, she smoothly withdrew her pass from her breast pocket. There was no indication of job on it, but it did contain an entry for “Domicile.” Hers was marked “None.” On a Gamma card this wouldn’t have earned it a second glance; lots of submariners lived like Katya aboard their boats with the occasional night in rented rooms or a capsule hotel. Beta card holders didn’t live that sort of life, and a Beta Plus definitely wouldn’t. “Domicile: None” meant a senior grade that travelled constantly, and there weren’t many reasons for that.
All these thoughts had run through the technician’s head so obviously that Katya felt like a mind reader. He licked his lips nervously. “May I ask what your role is, please? Ma’am?”
“You may,” she conceded. “But do you really want to know?”
In a small psychological coup that she had not entirely understood until now, Tasya had ensured that Katya’s replacement coveralls would be dark grey, a shade not formally used by any section of the Federal apparatus. The impression thus created screamed, “Secor field agent” to all.
“No, ma’am,” he said meekly.
“I am merely having a look around. That, for example,” she pointed at a spiral metal staircase that ascended to a sealed hatch in the ceiling. “What’s up there?” Of course, she knew full well what was up there.
“Uh, nothing. Well, something, but nothing very important. Not really important. Just the data lines to the comms arrays.”
“Show me.”
“I can’t, ma’am. It’s a Beta Plus lock. But,” he waved vaguely at her left breast pocket, trying to indicate her card and not the breast. “But you can.”
Inwardly, she quailed. This would be the first time she had actually used the card here, and this would be the point where she discovered whether the Yagizban computer exploit had worked. If not, she would have armed company very quickly.