Lilliana decided to be a little bit bold and bring Fortunato’s progress to the attention of as many of the security squads as she could, inserting her messages in the guise of high priority security alerts. With the competing forces within the station splitting into more mutually hostile factions than the Californias of Old Earth, her use of the internal comm system to sound the alert about an armed presence who seemed hostile to everyone was not like to be met with suspicion even if its source was not immediately apparent.
Some of her forged alerts were canceled as soon as they were received, with an air of “we have more pressing problems”, but a few hospitality squads that had been moving into position to engage with the Rebellion crew diverted to meet the new challenger.
Shifting some obstacles out of her allies’ way and into Fortunato’s was an excellent start, but she was sure she could use the ongoing californication of the Finger to her further advantage. She let her own fingers do the walking until she found a directory of communication subsystems for each individual branch of the Hospitality Ambassadors. She sent a message to a few of them, addressed as if from a member of another squad, claiming that a third squad had broken out kinetic ammunition and was attacking the other squads on Fortunato’s orders. There was enough confusion and in-fighting that this just might seem plausible… and anyone who didn’t believe it might be taken by surprise when someone who had bought into one of her memos started shooting KEGs at them.
She was more in her element in this than she had been simply traipsing around the back alleys of the computer system. She was a communicator, a social engineer, not a computer one. Words had always been her weapon of choice. Wielded properly, they could be just as deadly as flying metal or toxic chemicals or explosive force, and even when they could be traced back to their source, few people considered the one who had issued them to be fully culpable in the damage they caused. The men she manipulated into shooting at each other would blame each other first.
Of course, social engineering relied on soft science and so it was harder to predict the results on the fly. The mathematics needed to chart the trajectory of an inflammatory word were well beyond the capabilities of casual computation. One of the bigger side effects of her meddling came about as Lilliana’s hallway cams registered activity just outside the security cell… she couldn’t make out the audio so she turned on real time captioning and found that Fortunato’s paid goons were withdrawing from the area to go and provide him with reinforcements… evidently his entry into the fray had been enough to get them off the fence and get them moving.
That’s not good, Lilliana thought, alerting a few personnel in key locations as to the treachery of HAVOC Squad. The last thing she wanted was to send her ex-lover reinforcements.
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