Lilliana could have done a lot more with Galatea’s help. It pained her to admit it, but when it came to computers she was a talented and imaginative amateur… she had a certain genius for breaking them down but was less knowledgeable about making them work. This made things difficult when she wanted to take someone else’s computer and make it work for herself.
Disabling the Finger networks might have given a net benefit to her side, but it would also effectively blind her and remove her ability to contribute anything more to her own rescue. The benefits would also likely be temporary, and she would be tipping her hand in the process.
She was not ready to throw her only card away like that, so instead she did what she could to access camera feeds and alerts and site status reports to gain a picture of the growing chaos, keeping her eyes out for an opportunity to do more. She would have loved to open a two-way text communication with Galatea, but she knew that Galatea’s responses would be intercepted and then they’d know to look for the other side of the conversation.
If anyone was keeping a watch on the Finger from a broader information security standpoint, though, they weren’t watching for the possibility of someone manipulating the system from the inside. As clumsy as Lilliana’s cracking could be, she still received no hostile response from within the system or at the level of meatspace.
She had a four-way split going on the tiny viewscreen. She would have liked to have more eyes open out on the station, but any smaller and the details became useless.
One quarter of the screen was her workspace. It was cramped as the viewer had never been intended to be used as a computer command console in the first place, even at full size.
The second quarter of the screen still showed the view of the office outside for several seconds, before flipping through several nearby vantage points. It was set to switch immediately to any cam in the sequence that registered anything interesting.
The third was running a cam search keyed to Cicada’s physical profile, which showed the view from the camera that had seen her last. She’d used the cyborg as she was the most distinctive… Nick Bradley’s exact profile recurred twice more throughout the system, and Dick’s features were fairly generic owing to his possession of a large number of off-the-shelf genes.
The final one was flipping to cameras that registered weapons fire, explosion, combustion, or injury flags, giving her a window into the internecine squabbles and civil wars that were breaking out.
Lilliana kept herself a short distance away so that the whole thing was in her proper field of vision. She couldn’t take in everything, but just as she’d set up her programs to respond to certain triggers, she could count on herself to respond if a host of armed men appeared in her early warning screen, or if her rescue squad encountered a problem that Cicada couldn’t blast her way out of…
…or if Fortunato appeared in the violence-trigger screen, zapping a man in a suit.
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