Interlude 4-EL
Speaker4thesilent
Crazed Deplorable
Yeah, I was busy getting this ready to post.Just a warning, chapter isn't threadmarked(although I don't know whether Yellowhammer can do it or not).
Interlude 4-EL
Olivetti Weaponry Campus, Hammarr, Sudeten
Tamar Domains, Tamar Pact, Lyran Commonwealth
April 13th, 3016
Elias Lehmann bit his lip and tried to look busy. Most people wouldn’t bother to interrupt a maintenance man at work. It was one of the fringe benefits of his position; as far as most people were concerned, he was just part of the scenery.
He wasn’t convinced that the suit-clad men and women with subtle earpieces and almost-hidden bulges fit into the category of ‘most people’, though. His work order was valid, but any in depth investigation into how he’d obtained it was unfortunately likely to discover that the authorization came from the wrong physical location on the network to have actually been assigned by the facility’s Chief of Maintenance, even if it was done with his credentials. Physical access to a computer network was an advantage that cut both ways.
Thus his need to be unremarkable. The cover identity he’d been given when his superiors had determined that they needed eyes inside the up and coming corporation restoring a Star League era factory was good, but nothing was perfect. Under sufficient scrutiny, even the best forgeries would become apparent.
In short, his position would be secure right up until it wasn’t.
Technically, what he was doing right now could be considered a violation of his orders to passively gather intelligence. Technically. But the sudden jump in LIC agents wandering the Hamarr campus of Olivetti Weaponry had immediately raised his hackles.
Something out of the ordinary was happening, and the little hairs on the back of his neck standing at attention had told him it was important.
It had taken a month of subtle investigative work to determine that Building C was the geographic center of the Lyran Intelligence Corp’s presence on the campus. At first, that had been a bit of a puzzler. Building C should have been of only moderate importance. If anything, he’d have expected them to be at Building E. Olivetti’s R&D department had been quietly but consistently stepping up their security for the past two years. He’d actually worked up several notional plans to get a look inside only to have to scrap them as security ratcheted tighter, sometimes on a weekly basis.
By contrast, Building C was largely administrative with only a handful of higher security rooms in the basement to house servers for the local network and databanks. That had been the clue that sparked his memory and made him realize what his subconscious had been telling him all along.
He recalled hearing one of the other maintenance personnel mention seeing a man in a suit with an attaché case cuffed to his wrist on the second or third day that LIC had been present. At the time, the statement hadn’t registered as important, but in retrospect that was exactly the sort of arrangement intelligence officials used for confidential documents.
It hadn’t been difficult to add two and two and get four. After years of secretive research, Olivetti had stumbled on something, and LIC was here to ensure copies were made before something unfortunate happened to that research.
The labs were still too hard a target to infiltrate, but the very fact that a bunch of new people were going in and out of Building C meant that security there wasn’t quite as tight as it might have been. More people and increased use of facilities meant an increased need for maintenance and repair.
It had been simple to use his carefully concealed access to his boss’s credentials to generate a handful of reports about overheating in one of the less secure server rooms and then assign himself to handle the inspection and repair of the HVAC system.
Which was how he found himself with his head and upper chest buried in a hot air return in a stuffy server room, fiddling with his probe.
Like the old saying went, ‘IT has the worst computers’. The servers that were running the local systems were actually somewhat older than the company, and had likely been acquired secondhand. Likewise, the building had not been designed from the ground up as a server farm, but less than professionally refitted for the purpose. Instead of multiple isolated and secure environments, each with separate self-contained cooling units, the basement was served by the building’s HVAC system.
One one level, that was a good thing for him because it meant he could theoretically get access to supposedly secure rooms via the ventilation system like something out of Immortal Warrior. The downside was that it complicated his cover story. A cooling unit failure wasn’t possible when there weren’t any cooling units, which meant he’d need to pretend that either an air vent or filter had gotten occluded or that a thermostat was broken.
Both were far from impossible, but either story could get messy. He couldn’t carry the usual complement of tools in his toolbox and still fit an infiltration kit as well, so he didn’t have everything he’d need to get at all the normal items on the checklist.
Even so, he considered as he advanced an infiltration rig with a small clipper and fiber optic camera through the vents, if I can at least figure out which of the more secure rooms they’re using, I’ll be in a better position. Best case, I can come up with a plan to get access to the data or even-
He finally got the head through the hole he’d cut in the latest filter and the camera’s advance hit the third grate along the path he’d charted. What he saw made him drop his datapad. He was so distracted, he only barely remembered to withdraw the camera a few inches as he swore.
“Dummkopf! Schweinearschlecker!” he chastised himself as he recovered his noteputer from the bottom of the ventilation duct.
“Having trouble up there?” A voice asked from below, and Elias felt himself freeze. For a half-second his brain spun its wheels trying to get traction.
“Ah, sorry about the language,” he said, setting the noteputer down and extracting himself from the vent to reveal a security guard looking up at him in amusement.
“I’ve heard worse,” the man responded genially. “Having trouble?”
“I think I found the problem, but it looks like one of the fasteners is stripped. Not that the angle or the tight space is helping,” he said, affecting disgust. Better to baffle someone with bullshit than extend the conversation. Sure enough, the guard nodded.
“Well, I was just doing my patrol and saw the lights were on in here. Thought I’d say hello. Hope it doesn’t take you too long,” the man said, clearly already mentally checked out on the conversation.
“I hope so too,” Elias said, and inserted himself back into the HVAC system. Pretending to fiddle with a tool gave the guard time to get out of the room. Listening carefully, he heard the door open, then a brief hint of a radio call.
“Yeah, just maintenance working on a-” before the door closed and cut the sound off. That had been entirely too close.
Picking his noteputer back up, he carefully advanced the camera again, just to confirm what he thought he’d seen. Sure enough, sitting on a desk in open view of the air vent two rooms over was an old-style high-speed data reading head with a Star League data core sitting in it.
Even in only the bare moments he’d had to think, he’d reassessed his earlier assumptions. That wasn’t a rig with a write head on it, so they weren’t recording data from Olivetti’s research department for distribution.
Olivetti’s R&D division was getting an influx of new data. Enough and important enough data to need to be stored on a Data Core. Even if it was something like the technical specs for a new Battlemech, the data would have normally been transported in a conventional ROM format with laminated paper or plastic for the physical blueprints.
That implied that the ‘limited production run’ of a Thunderbolt design with advanced technology … wasn’t. Rumor had it that the new Thud variant incorporated everything from EndoSteel and double-capacity heat sinks to an advanced autocannon and Ferro-Fibrous armor. If those rumors were correct ... then logically the Commonwealth at large had or would soon have the capacity to produce at least some Lostech. That … that would represent an enormous shift in both power and prestige among the great houses. Worse, if Olivetti was getting this data from LIC, that meant that the wider government had access to it, and had for some time. How far could the information have been distributed in even one month?
Too far.
His control needed to know about this Data Core and, if possible, what was on it.
A quick adjustment of his camera revealed that the core itself wasn’t hooked into the local systems at all.
On the other hand, if they’re making use of the data, then it has to be on the local servers somewhere.
Another shift of his camera gave him a look at the ceiling of the room, and now that he was looking for it, a bundle of cables stood out. The colors were much brighter than their counterparts, and there wasn’t any visible dust on them.
So, a parallel network? Definitely separate from the rest. Almost certainly air-gapped, he decided. That was a bit more difficult, but …
He could see where the bundle entered the wall, and it looked like whoever installed things had been in a hurry; they’d routed it through a new installation right above the old junction box. If he could tap the right cable …
A check with the camera showed him which one he was looking for, and he’d been trained to use a neat little gadget just in case he ran into a situation like this.
The problem was that nothing in life was free, and the MITM, affectionately referred to as a ‘Mit’ or ‘Mitten,’ caused a measurable spike in latency on any network it was used to access. The flip side was that once he’d established his place as the ‘man in the middle’, he could send data packets back to the server that looked exactly like legitimate packets and potentially extract quite a bit of information.
He took a moment to consider, and decided that it was worth the risk in this case. With newly installed hardware, their first thought probably wasn’t going to be ‘we’re being hacked!’ but rather ‘damn it, what’s gone wrong this time?’
That would leave him a short window to gather data and then get out. It was definitely in violation of his orders, but just knowing that the Commonwealth had access to a data core wasn’t enough in this case. Even his supposition that they could reproduce the components going into Olivetti’s new Thunderbolt was insufficient. If the Blessed Order was to prevent a recurrence of the violence of the first two Succession Wars, it would need hard data, not guesswork.
The problem would be accessing one of the junction boxes.
He’d managed to track down an old copy of the building’s layout including electrical, water, and other utilities, but it was just that. Old. It was, in fact, a copy of the plans filed when they got the permit to do the renovation that turned the basement into a server farm a couple decades ago. Any changes that had been made in the interim wouldn’t be included.
That meant that the only place he could be absolutely sure of finding the wires where he expected them to be was in that first junction box. That was a problem, because he was potentially working on limited time.
He wasn’t technically cleared to be in this building, even if he’d been able to make it look like he was, just as he wasn’t supposed to be assigned to a ticket that shouldn’t exist. All it would take was one person getting suspicious, and the junction box was located right between two rooms with some of the highest LIC presence on the entire planet.
He couldn’t afford to just block off a hallway to get access to the space above the drop ceiling; it was far too likely some spy would get nosy. That meant …
He studied the plans and then tapped the screen.
A heating duct passed right over the box. If he switched out the manual cutting head on his rig for the laser head, he could burn through the bottom of the duct, the top of the junction box, and have access to insert his Mitten. Theoretically.
He could also insert into the wrong cable, damage the interior workings of the junction box, set something on fire …
Any of those would be the end of his mission and quite possibly his life in the bargain. He didn’t mind giving his life for peace in the Inner Sphere, but if he was going to die he wanted to accomplish something by it. Or ideally not get caught at all.
He spent another couple minutes looking for a better option, but couldn’t find one. Not one that fit with his cover story anywhere near as well, anyway.
Gritting his teeth and trying not to focus on all the ways this could go horribly wrong, Elias packed up his tools and moved his ladder over to one of the nearby heating vents. If somebody asked, he suspected that a malfunctioning thermostat had the heater blowing hot air into the room.
Thankfully, nobody showed up to question him, because the excuse wouldn't hold up to much more than a curious or friendly security guard. He carefully advanced his infiltration rig through the heating vents towards the location he needed, making relatively quick work of the filters along the way. It was much more difficult to determine where he needed to be to make his cut.
While he pulled back the infiltration rig to swap out the cutting heads, he spent several minutes studying the video he’d taken of the room earlier and double-checking the distance from the nearest heating vent back to the location of the junction box. Only when he was sure he was in the right place did he slowly begin to pulse the laser cutter he’d just installed on the rig and laboriously begin to cut a square out of the floor of the duct.
It was a very touchy job, and the way the heat from the metal washed out the picture didn’t help speed up the process. Twice he was forced to go back and recut small sections that hadn’t burned all the way through, but eventually the bottom of the vent dropped down onto the top of the junction box.
Fortunately, it was cool enough that it didn’t melt then adhere to the plastic, but it took a little bit of work to brush it aside with his rig, and the faint noise it made as it fell off to the side seemed very loud in the quiet. That was deceptive, and he knew it; the vent bounced the sound right back at him.
But it was just another source of stress, and he found that he was holding his breath. He took a moment and backed out of the vent, worked his shoulders to loosen the tension, and wished for a water bottle. Somewhere along the line his mouth had gotten dry, but while working around the servers, any spill risk was verboten.
After a couple more deep breaths, he crawled back up into the heating vent, but he didn’t begin cutting through the junction box immediately. Instead, he double checked which port the cable he needed was plugged into, then referenced the manual for a good angled photo of the top and front of the box. The logo on the top made picking out where to cut much easier than it could have been, but it took him more than ten minutes to laboriously make the four cuts required.
Even then, he wasn’t sure he’d succeeded until his rig’s gripper lifted the rectangle of plastic aside to reveal undamaged innards.
“Now, the Mitten,” he muttered to himself as he cracked his knuckles. Both of his wrists were tense and he felt like he was trying to develop a writer’s cramp in his right hand’s fingers. He hadn’t used an infiltration rig for so long since his training more than a decade ago.
Thankfully the process of inserting the Mitten wasn’t complex. Unfortunately, that didn’t make it easy. One of the options was basically ‘jam it in the cable,’ but that still left the need to carefully manipulate the grippers and double check to make sure he was going to insert the damn thing in the correct orientation and into the center of the cable. He actually ended up burning a pockmark into the cable’s casing to hold one of the insertion pins.
After that it actually was fairly easy, just push and then switch over to the data monitoring program on his noteputer. It only took a moment before he started receiving data packets. A lot of data packets.
If they’d been encrypted, he would have been stuck there. Codebreaking was not one of his strengths. Luckily, it seemed somebody had scrimped a bit on security. They probably figured they didn’t need it on a newly installed, physically isolated network.
It took a couple minutes to identify for sure which network protocols they were using and start turning the packets back into useful data, but when he did he drew an involuntary gasp. The data being pulled from the Core wasn’t what he’d expected. It looked like they were pulling data related to ERPPCs!
That wasn’t something that Olivetti’s new Thunderbolt supposedly mounted. Was this an unrelated discovery or …
He didn’t have enough information to speculate accurately, so he tried as best he could to sit on the urge.
It seemed like the classified data wasn’t being permanently stored on the computers in the Research building, because over the next hour, several different segments of data were accessed. Everything from what appeared to be data on two different designs of BattleMechs to documentation on EndoSteel and Double Heat Sinks. If anything, it seemed like the Lyrans had access to even more than he’d suspected, and thanks to the intercepted packets, he had proof for his superiors.
Now he needed to get the information offworld.
Looking at the time it was … later than he’d intended to stay. It was almost an hour after what should have been quitting time. He … definitely needed to get everything packed up and head out. As it was, he’d have to intercept the automatic email his boss would get notifying him about the overtime.
That wasn’t his main concern; the major issue would be if a guard became suspicious. As it was, he could argue that he was just saving time in the long run by finishing up tonight instead of heading back over here for half an hour come morning, but if he’d taken much longer …
Note to self: next time you go data mining, set an alarm.
That thought was enough to bring a smile to his face as he finished packing up. A couple final movements collapsed the ladder he’d been using, and he quickly walked it back to the closet he’d taken it from in the first place. Then he was able to grab his toolbox and head for the exit. He nodded to one of the LIC suits as he was leaving and the man nodded back distractedly. He was the only other person Elias encountered on his way to the employee exit. A scan of his card unlocked the door and he was out. Now all he had to do was put a message together, encrypt it, and email it to the HPG station for transmission onward.
Then he could worry about securing his own trail and finding passage towards the Drac border to misdirect any efforts to track him. If everything came together, he might even make Precentor for this!
XXXXX
Brian Moore swept his eyes over the cameras as the previous shift’s guards packed their things up to head home for the evening. Nobody had reported anything out of the ordinary, so he was hoping for a quiet shift.
Of course, that’s when he noticed the guy in a maintenance uniform pass by one of the basement cameras.
“Hey, Eric, I thought you said day shift were all out?” he called as the other man was reaching for the door.
“Well, ye-” the other guard said before he stopped himself.
“Shit, forgot about the guy working on the HVAC in the basement. There was some sort of issue with the temperature in server room two,” he corrected himself.
Brian frowned. Eric was new as a shift manager, but this was basic shit he was fucking up.
“Okay, but next time you tell me it’s just the spooks left in the building, please be sure about that,” he said. It wasn’t worth taking to their supervisor, at least not yet. If the guy didn’t shape up, though …
He kept one eye on the camera near the rear exit, just to be sure that the maintenance guy was actually leaving, which is why he noticed the color of the toolbox as the man scanned his card and stepped out the door. It was red with black endcaps.
“Didn’t Eric say that guy was working on HVAC?” he asked Miles, the guard he was sharing the shift with.
“Yeah, he did,” Miles shot back from where he was inspecting their safety equipment.
“That’s what I thought,” he said and stood up to grab the maintenance logbook. Every morning the day’s maintenance tasks were sent out to each building so that they could match the guys who actually scanned in with the guys who were supposed to be there. He flipped the book open and ran his finger down the page. Sure enough, right there at the bottom: HVAC repair, Server Room 2, E. Lechmann.
Twisting in his swivel chair, he grabbed the phone and dialed maintenance’s phone. It rang once. Twice. Then the automated system answered.
“Thank you for calling the Maintenance Department! Your call is very important to us!”
Brian muttered darkly. It took nearly three minutes for him to navigate through the phone tree to talk to an actual person.
Even then, it was just the after-hours service dispatcher, not anyone from the department itself. He was tempted to just give her the message and be done with it, but he could just see some meeting four or five months down the road where his guys were getting blamed for letting maintenance into the building with another black toolbox after some fucktard zapped another fucking server. If he passed the damn message on to someone actually important in maintenance, then there was no way that they could claim the message got lost in translation or anything.
Finally, after five minutes of bullshit and a demand to speak to her manager, he was given the Maintenance Boss’s comm number.
He dialed.
The phone rang.
“You’ve got Travis-”
Brian was already in a bad mood. He hadn’t even been on shift fifteen minutes before he’d had to deal with two people fucking up.
“This is Brian Moore with security. I just caught your guy Lechmann on camera leaving my building after working in a server room all day with a fucking black toolbox! For the last fucking time, if they’re working in a server room, they’re supposed to be using the blue-capped toolboxes to prevent any more incidents. If one of your guys kills another fucking server, it’s on you!”
For a moment the line was quiet.
“The hell do you mean Lechmann was working in a server room? He was supposed to be over in Building G working on a sump pump. He isn’t even safety trained for working around servers!”
There was a half-second where none of that made sense, then both Brian and Travis erupted in expletives as Brian reached over and hit the silent alarm.
XXXXX
We found out later that Lehmann, if Lehmann was even his real name, had installed a tiny little security camera opposite his door. Small enough, and high enough that in the heat of the moment nobody noticed it.
That’s why the first warning we had that something was wrong were the bullets punching through the wall we were stacked up against to force entry.
Agent Camden went down right away; a bullet punched through the wall and caught him in the triceps, broke his humerus, and was only then caught by his vest. In a way it was fortunate, if the rifle-caliber bullet had hit him squarely instead of after it started to tumble his vest probably wouldn’t have stopped it.
The immediate consequences, however, were hell on the mission. Instead of rapidly forcing entry to the apartment, armed and armored LIC Agents and SWAT team members ducked for cover, returned fire, or moved to assist their injured fellows in a chaotic scramble. All the while, rifle-caliber bullets punched through the walls and caused friction between the two forces as SWAT officers tried to pull back and evacuate civilians while we demanded they push forward and take down the spy we were there to stop.
The end-result is that when we did finally manage to force entry, we found that Elias Lehmann had killed himself with a cyanide capsule after exhausting his modest supply of ammunition, but not before ruining his computer hard drive with what turned out to be acid, and destroying several unknown devices by throwing them in a metal trash can with a bottle of lighter fluid and most or all of a bottle of 190-proof liquor…
Excerpt of debriefing: Agent [Redacted]
April 15th, 3016
Hammarr, Sudeten.
April 15th, 3016
Hammarr, Sudeten.
XXXXX
Juragua, New Delos, New Delos System
The Protectorate, Free Worlds League
April 17th, 3016
Cordaro García was glad to be inside for the moment. Even if the air quality had finally evened out now that the fires set last year during the Revolt were all out, the summer sun baked down all the harder without the smoke to block some of it. And, of course, there was not a cloud in the sky to offer any shade either.
The heat of the day was, thus, the preferred time to get the day’s mail into the town’s post office boxes. The air conditioning kept him cool and the mail would be ready for everyone when they stopped by on their way home from work. It was a win-win.
As he was going through the mail, sliding letters into boxes, he came across a name he hadn’t seen much recently. Kristopher Kelly had gotten a lot of mail for several months and sent just as much mail back out. That, however, had stopped sometime last year.
A few letters or parcels still showed up for him, but the man hadn’t been in to pick anything up since that mess with the invasion.
If he’d been outside, Cordaro would have spit. A bad business all around. Certainly the Dragoons could have fought harder; their record showed that! Where were the sort of victories they’d won against the Capellans? But to murder a man’s brother and his family and not expect him to come looking for retribution? Foolish. And with the fires on top of that?
Cordaro shook his head and opened the box in question. It was pretty full with some letters postmarked more than a year ago now. That was … actually longer than the post office was supposed to keep any mail for a PO Box without a forwarding address.
A quick look showed no such address on file for Mr Kelly…
And now he was curious. Technically the letters and packages were to be destroyed, but surely no one would care if he looked inside one or two of them. After all, there might be something valuable in there! Or at least interesting.
He quickly emptied the box out into a bag and set it under his desk, then got back to filling the rest of the boxes. Later that evening, once he got home, he opened the bag and dumped it out on his table. There were a couple parcels, which he opened first, but they contained nothing but stacks of ROMs.
Grumbling to himself, he reached out and grabbed the letter that had come that day off the top of the pile. There’s been something tucked into the envelope, so he tore it open and dropped it out only to reveal another damn ROM! Then he looked at the letter, but it was just gibberish!
…
Wait. Why would someone get letters written in gibberish and dozens of ROMs in the mail… he wondered, and after he’d come up with the logical answer, he picked up his phone.
XXXXX
A/N: Thanks again to Seraviel, Lordsfire, and Yellowhammer for beta reading, idea bouncing, and canon compliance checking. This chapter is vastly improved by their efforts.