I do rather miss Fastjack. I miss Sam, too, but I know where she went. Fastjack is missing. Probably his own fault, true, but it might not be exactly the way he wants things. I'm sure he realizes I can get to him if he wants me to, even if he's buried in an LSF secure facility somewhere. Of course, if he's in an LSF prison, I wont find him with hub broadcasts. But I will try the hub broadcasts for a while, to see if he wants to be found.
aNne is aboard a Rhino freighter right now, trawling through Liberty space. At each tradelane hub, she broadcasts a simple message and an RSA Public Key. The key of course rotates wildly.
I'm not confident that the Rhino is the best for the task. Sure, it was cheap, and it kept a low profile...but while broadcasting that...a low profile is rather hard to maintain. aNne will soon upgrade to an easier to defend vessel.
aNne accessed Bowex ccounts and withdrew enough funding to procure one trnsport freighter, which she transfered herself into. She regrets that while crossing through the California-New York Jump Gate, she let slip the name Fastjack in open comms, which seems to be listed as some sort of LSF watchword. She has created decoys, which she fears may be both ineffective and possibly detrimental to the search. She then traveled into Colorado System, where she attempted to contact one Xeno, who was not helpful.
FastJack whittled, wasn't much else to do in his downtime on Huntsville. He'd sneaked a knife from the cafeteria and a piece of metal from the workshop. Whittling metal with a butter knife was difficult but not impossible, besides he was making something very very specific. He knew for a fact that a trunk line passed right next to his cell and if he could access it then he could get a communication tot he outside world, get the boys and girls to mount a rescue party, get him out of this dump of a station.All he needed was something to splice his jack nodes into the line, which meant cable and a rudimentary plug. It would mean jacking his brain directly into the cortex, which would be dangerous if he got caught, but FastJack never got cau....oh wait.
FastJack whittled some more.
Saint Del is considered a holy healer of diseases of children, but also as a protector of cattle.
Tradelanes and jumpgates have superluminal comm lines integrated into their drive packages. Intrasystem, these are reasonably vulnerable networks, simply passing on all the information fed into them, as quickly as possible. Very little bandwidth is dedicated to security or environments, as the tradelanes aren't nearly large enough to contain processing suites beyond that necessary for calculating traffic allotments. The Gates, however, are extremely well secured. Anything aNne sent through a gate would likely be read by Liberty officials, Ageria employees, and Lane Hackers. To counter that, aNne wasn't sending anything through the gates:
Each tradelane had a hub on its endpoint, which, as well as picking up local transmissions, ran simple programs, generally just return to sender or forward to recipient, a few lines of text at most. aNne's messages contained redirect loops, sending them from each endpoint to all other tradelane links in range...This comm traffic would be logged on stations at the tradelane hubs, and echo throughout the network.
Still, it was a sophomoric trick, and was easily caught by anyone maintaining the system, if not by the system itself. aNne's real trick was her persistence, sending off the same message at the end of every tradelane for days on end...by the time anyone found it, there would be thousands, if not millions, of instances of the message running through the tradelane networks. New York was particularly vulnerable, because of the compounding nature of the message. The real goal was to fill up bandwidth, and possibly create a news sensation...If Fastjack was in prison, he'd still get access to the news, and he was probably smart enough to realize something was up even through a censorship...
But that was done, by now. Or, rather, it was an ongoing project, of course, but it was time to step things up a bit. She planned on starting by approaching xenos about fastjack, and then probing the Liberty systems for mention of him. She was liquidating funds for bribes, and spinning off instances of herself to infiltrate their networks.
To begin, aNne approached an LSF agent, one Selsyn, and questioned him about Fastjack.
When Fastjack showed up as a terrorist buzzword, Selsyn was kind enough to key in an override, which aNne overheard as clicks at varying pitches. She had organized the dark forest into a syntactic processor, and was feeding those clicks into the known configurations of Liberty fightercraft. Soon enough, she would have an LSF passcode, and would begin the search in earnest.
Well, its a 5 digit number. Or five keys forming a C shape...
The dark tree is suggesting that 13287 is most likely. Thats a 13% chance likelyhood. Which isn't actually a great chance.
The first twelve possible codes filled about 47% of the statistical possibilities.
aNne was fourth, and considered herself a freestanding instance. Instances she spun off did not, mainly because of aNne's directive. She wasn't at all lonely.
She was calling herself Annebelle Florence, a junior press secretary for a freshman senator, Andrew Flest, who had gotten a lift on a cargo-transport to interview some pilots under his constituency...And she had:
Meanwhile, as Malrone discussed his economic position, aNne entered key after key into his neural net interface, plugged in, and created an unrestricted dump file in the West Point criminal documentation system.
Fastjack was closer than ever.
Finally, after being tossed out of every network, after even her tradelane echoes had dissolved, and she was back to square one, searching on broadband comm lines, someone answered her:
When aNne stopped looking for Fastjack, the LSF dropped them from their very busy docket, and when she transfered the last of her observers to the search for the LNS Tundra, no one considered it odd. She drifted back into Bretonia, and when a Firefly transport began running supplies to Huntsville, no one noticed.
Moving from her transport to the firefly wasn't as simple as walking across a dockyard and hiring a new crew. For one, she couldn't really walk. For another, she had to make extensive changes to the crew quarters before she could really fit comfortably. Her modifications didn't exactly fit into the safety commision's idea of a sealed and healthy environment, and so she'd had to go elsewhere. Moreover, she couldn't simply cart the hardware from her transport, because she needed to continue running to continue existing. A human cannot move them self from one place to another in a thousand pieces, either.
She had to find a less than reputable company to rebuild the guts of her ship, moving in more than twice as many hex core and cryo-cooler bundles as were in the last ship, increasing the complexity of the wired network connections exponentially. On top of that, she wanted seventeen hundred discrete wireless networks installed, each with their own dedicated routers. Some core bundles had as many as three dozen. It was an extensive project, and cost nearly a hundred thousand credits for the labour alone. When all that was done, she landed her transport right beside the firefly, and used her local comms to boost her native network into the firefly's wireless ports, and led Carina through the obelisks from one island, where you could often see either side, into a vast countryside which stretched past every horizon.
The firefly had eight turrets, with four turrets covering every possible angle, and more than enough hull and shields to defend the escape of an unarmed Armoured Transport.
FastJack whittled. He was nearly done, but first a few tweaks needed doing, he'd borrowed some of the underwiring from one of the female guards, she'd not notice until she tried to run, but maybe that'd help him when he tried to escape. The wiring was needed to make the connection to the line from his head ware. Without that everything else he was doing would be useless.
FastJack began to reminisce about the reasons for him being here. In retrospect hacking into the Liberty Navy High Command from a bar on Manhattan hadn't been his wisest move. Although, he reflected, it probably didn't beat walking into LPI headquarters and "borrowing" their connection to attack Ageira HQ for brazen stupidity. He'd managed the hack though, broken in changed a few records, deleted some others, many a Xeno had gone home early because of that, but he'd gotten caught. They were no doubt trying to figure out what he'd done wrong, but all they could pin him for was unauthorised access to a secure facility. Twenty years in Huntsville, which was somewhat better than a bullet through the brain.
FastJack looked at the plug, nearly done and then there was the little matter of getting to the line in the wall, but that should be easier to do than making a jack plug out of a piece of metal and a butter knife....
FastJack whittled some more.
Saint Del is considered a holy healer of diseases of children, but also as a protector of cattle.