Lilliana was not one to sit back passively and allow others to rescue her… she preferred to take a more active hand in that. Sure, she was temporarily deafened, unarmed, and in the custody of the Hospitality Ambassadors with Regan and an unconscious catman, but she’d made do with less before. She’d done some of her best work from behind a locked door.
As her head cleared from the auditory barrage, she began to think: Fortunato was not in control of the station. If he was fighting as hard as she imagined he would to regain it, then it was possible that no one was truly in control for the moment.
If that were the case, would anybody still be watching the detention cell?
Making the assumption that the two squads of guards who had been squabbling over their fate might have been distracted or even pulled into a battle was a bit of a gamble, but then, she was in the right place for a bit of gambling.
She went over to the door. The communication console next to it remained inert, its screen dark and its status lights unchanging. She put her fingers on its speaker and felt nothing.
She pulled a metal pin from her hair, then unfolded it into a slender wand-like omnitool. There was no response from the console, and she didn’t discern any garbled noises behind the ringing in her ears. She used the wand to manipulate the screws beneath the con’s faceplate to gain access to its guts.
The room was a secure holding cell… there were no controls to open or close the door from the inside. The console was locked into only communicating with the one on the other side and other select points in the security system, and that was only set up to be initiated in one direction. It couldn’t call out.
But she was in a temporary holding cell, not a prison. It was not intended to hold in a resourceful person who was left unwatched and unsupervised. For instance, the console was a standard model. Its limitations were software settings. Instead of having a direct physical connection to the matching console on the other side, they were both tied into the station-wide network.
It only took a little effort for Lilliana to spoof a request from the outside console for a voice and video connection, giving her a view of the office outside… it was almost empty. There was an armored guard at the doorway, but his back was to the detention cell. He was positioned to stop people getting in, not out.
After a little work convincing the computer network that she was not a console inside a security cell, she gained access to the internal administrative network. She kept the view of the security office in a spiltscreen as she pulled up the station’s communication traffic and ran a filtered search. She was both relieved and disappointed to see an open data stream coming from the Rebellion… hadn’t she told them that all local communications were routed through the Finger’s systems? Hadn’t they realized that would be SOP for a casino complex?
Whatever it was that was being fed over it would be visible to the operators on the casino’s side, if they were paying enough attention… and when she pulled up the details, she could see that they were paying attention. The original stream of tracking info from the Ambassadors’ armor was being interrupted and replaced with phony data.
Lilliana could have undone that, but that would likely have raised too many alarms and they’d start tracing where the commands were coming from. Instead she inserted a brief text message: “Your communications are compromised, casino controls routing. Do not acknowledge this message. Lilliana.” That done, she started poking around some more, looking for ways into stationwide surveillance so she could get up to speed on what was happening and any environmental or security controls she could manipulate to try to help her people get to her.
It would have taken quite a bit of leapfrogging over connections for Lilliana to get access to her own door’s controls, but with the guard right there she preferred to stay where she was.
She’d done some of her best work from behind a locked door.
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