~TPRN Offices~
As the largest and most watched video broadcasting company on Tamar, offering simulcasts in English, German, and Urdu to accommodate as much of Tamar's population as possible, the Tamar Planetarisches Rundfunknetz was considered a vital military installation by the world's clan Wolf Overlords, necessitating of a full time garrison of a conventional infantry point to provide site security, a mix of Solahmas and bondsmen (considered valid as long as they were not sent out to fight other warriors and were used only to maintain order over the lower castes). Such a force would make it a tough nut for a small team to crack cleanly, even an elite team might not be able to breach in broad daylight, get in, and get out again without raising an alarm and drawing too many reinforcements to overcome.
But with panic racing through the streets of Tamar City, the Wolf garrison needed troops in dozens of other places to chase the phantom insurgency that had suddenly sprung up in the city, and the only place to get them was from places not currently under threat. About fifteen minutes after the first explosions, most of the point defending the broadcast station was pulled out, split into squads to investigate reports of infiltrators on the east side of town.
Ten minutes after they were gone, the two guards left at the door were down. One was taken out by a rifle shot at range, the other, as he moved to investigate, was surprised and killed by a vibroblade wielding assailant.
Three men stormed in, all dressed in black, their faces covered by simple fabric masks, and armed with a mix of weapons. The apparent leader carried a massive, intimidating sternsnact gun, waving it wildly in the general direction of any of the panicked civilians who looked like they weren't sufficiently cowed, shouting in a thick rural Amirani accent as he kicked hiw way into the newsroom and discharged a shot into the ceiling.
"Any of you ****** move and we start lining you up like that collabi trash outside!" he shouted as one of his cohorts took potshots at the security cameras with a laser pistol, and the other just seemed to be randomly smashing or cutting up things with a vibroblade and a stun baton. "Which one of you brown ****** is in charge here!"
The news director stepped forward and was immediately pistol whipped for the trouble.
"The answer's nonayah!" the leader screamed at him and pressed the gun against his head. "I'm in charge here. Ya do what I say!" He pulled a disc out of his hip pocket. "You broadcast that, right now, or I start killing the loot of your worthless ****** hides."
The news director spat out a tooth and glared sullenly, but he took the disk and went to a computer. On a large monitor overlooking the director's station, a still image appeared, showing a crudely rendered emblem of the Lyran Fist with the logo "No Wolf is Safe" superimposed over it in red.
"That's it?!" The leader shouted, pressing his gun into the head of the news director again. "It's broadcasting?"
"Yes," the news director said, holding in his panic. "To every channel on the network."
"WOOOOO!!!!" the leader shouted, firing his gun into the ceiling again for emphasis. "Can't stop the revolution!" He waved his gun over the crowd. "I see one copper or wolf yiffer and we're gonna come back and put you all in the ground!" he declared, then motioned for his cohorts to follow as they left the newsroom.
They met the forth member of their team in the lobby. "We happy?" the leader, actually Lieutenant Harlan Lewis, THAF, asked.
"Virus is in the military network," Sergeant Ling said as she held up three cut bondcords, one of them splattered with blood. "Three more collabi bracelets for the collection, too. We should probably get moving, though."
To emphasize her point, fire alarms started ringing, and the team quickly made for the exit.
"How'd your side go?" Ling asked as they slipped back into the street through a side entrance in the building.
"The LT was positively chewing the scenery," Sergeant Kaplan said. "I think the hate crimes were probably a bit much."
"Artistic flourish," Lieutenant Lewis insisted. "'sides, I don't think those are even a thing here. That's more of a 'we used to systematically exploit an easily identifiable and exploitable segment of the population and we feel real bad about it' thing. Not a 'I'm angry at folk better off than me so I call them dumb names' thing."
As they vanished into the side streets discussing the finer points of race relations in the inner sphere, the employees so recently briefly their hostages flooded into the streets, the blaring fire alarms and the smell of smoke overcoming their fear at being shot by a gang of lunatics. The fire, started in the point commander's office, would spread quickly to eventually engulf the building, unchecked by emergency services so overloaded with calls that they wouldn't even learn of the attack for a couple hours, much less be in a position to intervene.
Between the fire gutting the building and the testimony of the witnesses to the downright comical behavior of the attackers, Clan Wolf forces wouldn't even know to suspect what the actual objective had been. Really what the whole point of all of this had been, as a small, virtually untraceable file went from the point commander's terminal and started spreading from system to system within the Wolf clan' military network, bypassing the immediate problems of two centuries of divergent architecture and file structure protocols with direct hardware access.
Within thirty minutes of the first explosion, the Wolves had locked down Tamar City, ordering residents to remain confined in place while elementals and battlemechs patrolled the streets and the warrior caste and Watch attempted to sift through ruins and wreckage for clues. But Captain Lee and his team had already hunkered down, their assignment complete, as their viral tap gradually permeated, unlocked, and copied the clan's military secrets. Though a major opportunity target had eluded them, Captain Lee and his team had every reason to regard this operation as a rousing success...
----
Niki saw the indicator light shift to blue on the FTL transmitter on the table before hearing her laptop ding to notify her of an inbound message.
Messages sent and received by the FTL transmitters were never fancy. The transmitter received the message, translated it into a simple text file, then could either print it out or forward it to a connected computer. KF physics dictated how big of a message you could send, with power requirements increasing and transmission quality decreasing as the amount of data increased.
The first thing Niki noticed was that the message their transmitter had received was too big. Too big by a wide margin. That was an immediate red flag. These transmitters were brand new, but they'd been rushed into production for this campaign based on very early abandoned prototypes. There hadn't been time to refine them. None of their transmitters could have sent this message.
She checked the physical connections and even went over the transmitter, looking for signs of tampering, and found none.
"What are you doing?" Captain Lee asked, noticing her behavior.
"Trying to figure out how much trouble we're in," Niki replied as she went back to her laptop.
Captain Lee looked at her expectantly. "You want to elaborate? Immediate threat? Someone need killing? Do we need to be running?"
"Sorry, working on it," Niki said. "Not an immediate threat, but someone might be seeing everything we send on the FTL." Diagnostics run on the file indicated it was a standard text file. No hidden scripts or executables within it. Just pages and pages of plain text.
Captain Lee had come over and was looking over her shoulder. "And how is that possible?"
Niki sighed. "You know how the higher ups told us that this was abandoned technology, something the Hegemony discarded hundreds of years ago, there were no copied left behind in the inner sphere, and there was no way anybody else was using it?"
Captain Lee mirrored her sigh. "The clans?"
"I don't think so," Niki said as she opened the file. "If they clans were using this technology, they'd be a lot more aware of us than they have been. I mean, we already own their comms, no mention of any of this."
The data was indeed pages and pages of unformatted text, by all appearance composed of gibberish. A quick command running it through their decryption system turned up just more gibberish. "Surprise surprise, they're using a different cipher than ours."
"They had a whole lot to say," Captain Lee said. "Any idea of what I'm looking at?"
Niki thought about it. "These things broadcast for everybody to see," she said. "It's probably a copy of every message our side has been trading since operations at Tamar began. They've probably been holding off on sending because they knew we'd see it, until they heard something they had to report."
"Taking out the clan war leader probably counts," Captain Lee said. "Well that's a massive security failure. How do we find and kill them?"
"No idea," Niki said. "A message this size is going to require some hefty power. I'll go dancing through the municipal networks and go looking for a sudden spike of juice, but that's iffy." Their own system used rechargeable power packs, that could recharge slowly using city power without creating an obvious spike. Anybody using one of these covertly would take similar precautions. "Speaking of iffy, there's one more thing I can try."
She opened up a new message, toggling off encryption. "The first of these transmitters were a secret project, of course," she explained. "So engineers designed the operating system so you could feed them admin commands in a message, in case they were compromised. The architecture of this one is similar in format to that. If they were copying rather than doing their own work..."
-----
Ashley Krentz wasn't sure what he was waiting for, but he was standing by the Fax system in anticipation and a touch of anxiety since it had finished transmitting their report.
Kruger, his team mate, seemed to share is anxiety, alternately pacing around the room and taking a moment to look out the window to see if Clan Wolf or whoever was about to come beating down their door, a small automatic pistol, their only weapon, clasped in his sweaty hand.
Ashley heard the FAX start spooling up, as though getting ready to print out a sheet of paper. Kruger, desperately on edge, almost jumped at the sudden sound.
Ashley picked up the sheet, and was immediately surprised that it was actually readable.
-//admin com 405 9927
If that didn't work, then sorry, I had to try
Realization dawned on him as he grabbed Kruger and pulled him to the other side of the room. The Fax didn't quiet down, only starting to whine louder as it started a message cycle. Except this time instead of drawing power briefly from the attached power pack to emit a pulse, it just kept drawing and drawing while every part of the system that could began overloading, pushing the core of the device, the external power pack, and even the print drum beyond tolerances.
Sparks began emitting from the connection port as the power pack caught fire, and smoke began to emit from the the printer output. Surprisingly, it was Kruger who was the first to react, quickly retrieving the extinguisher from the kitchen and dousing the device. Even pulling open the casing to give the internal mechanisms another dose.
Ashley came back to reality. "How bad is it?"
"Well I just killed any of the ancillary components that didn't roast themselves," Kruger said as he looked over the device. "But it looks like the power supply failed before the core could cook itself. We might be able to put this back together." The core was the true 'black box' of the Fax, the only part of it that the two of them didn't really understand well enough to put back together. New power connections and a printer would be simple by comparison, except...
"Under lockdown with the Wolves looking for terrorists and spies?" Ashley asked.
"I didn't say it'd be easy." Kruger acknowledged. "How'd they know the destruct code?" he asked.
"Maybe the same way we learned it," Ashley said. The NAIS had managed to learn a lot of the technology and refine its function, but some parts, such as the core control programming, were still a mystery. They could copy it from one system to another, but they didn't really understand it completely. There were literally dozens of administration level command codes that they hadn't figured out yet, and so far the only method to do so was trial and error. "That was an admin 405," he said. "A universal command. Every one of our transmitters in range of theirs just got orders to die in a fire. Whoever these guys are, I doubt they've got the same vulnerability."
"You're thinking of doing something stupid, aren't you?" Kruger asked.
"I'm thinking we've got not choice," Ashley said. "We've gotta know who these guys are."
