Project Charon 2 by Patty Jansen (brene brown rising strong .TXT) 📗

When she passed a narrow ladder going up, she took that option, and on the landing at the top of the stairs, she checked her map again.

From what she could gather, she was now on top of the main thoroughfare that she hadn’t been able to get into. The tubes that ran along here were likely to be filtered air coming from the recycling plant back in the “dark zone” and there should now be signs of people in the passage underneath her. She walked along, looking for a vent where sound would come up. When she found one, the air going through the duct made so much noise that any noise from the passage was drowned out. Well, that wasn’t much use.

She considered going back down the ladder, but that was just going to put her into the path of people looking for her.

The map told her that the passage underneath her led past several local authority establishments, like education and health care offices and after that past a primary school.

A station this size would have several schools, nothing like the small school at Project Charon that Evelle had attended, where most education was done remotely anyway.

The next sector was a medical precinct. The walkway zigzagged in between structures poking up from below, likely related to imaging equipment. She also came past a vent where she definitely heard voices. They were men, and it sounded like they were in some sort of heated discussion. No matter how much she listened, she couldn’t make out any words.

The next vent was closer to the source, and the discussion was clearer, but it was conducted in a language Tina didn’t understand, something like Transigian or Vertolian.

One man was not happy, though. Apart from his raised voice, there was also some banging, as if they were kicking a door or wall.

Someone else shouted, “Shut up!” which was followed by a heavy clang, like the shutting of a door.

What was the chance that this was where people were kept prisoner? Was there a way she could get in?

Tina looked around, but all she could find was a control panel.

Using Jens’ diagnostic tool, she managed to break into the local computer system. It showed the existence of several video inputs, likely to be security cameras, because she recognised the model numbers. Infrared cameras.

They showed her live images of dorm rooms, each occupied by a number of people. From the way they sat and walked Tina guessed they were all men. Not the crew from the Manila, but possibly captives from earlier missions.

Jens confirmed that the area had been a school and that the men were locked up in the classrooms. She asked if Jens could make the door locks malfunction.

He told her that since her last contact with him, he had managed to dig up an override routine that he could send if she thought she could use it.

Tina said she could. She didn’t know how good it was going to be. Most security systems were robust enough to have at least some resistance to these types of hacks but maybe bringing down the entire system was not what she wanted anyway.

So he sent the routine, and Tina recorded the specifics of the cameras and the locking mechanisms. They definitely seemed a little primitive. She presumed that a detailed security system had not been part of the original school.

She was working on a plan. Maybe she didn’t even need to go into the main part of the station. If this passage continued and led past all the now-closed institutions where the pirates kept prisoners, then maybe she could find out how their security systems worked and disable all of them at once.

If all the prisoners got out at the same time, the place would descend into utter chaos, and Tina could escape with Evelle, if she could find her, and the others still capable of escaping.

She would need help.

The big question was whether any Federacy ships were nearby that could pounce the moment riots broke out, and help them, or if there would be enough pirates at the station to deal with prisoners running riot in the station. She would like to answer the last question in the negative, but these strange modified people were said to be super-strong.

Any Federacy ships in the area wouldn’t advertise their presence so she was unlikely to find out if there were any until chaos in the station happened.

It was a gamble.

Tina sat down on the walkway and looked at Jens’ routine. It was indeed very simple and she didn’t think it would work, but then she remembered that she had a library of code snippets that she had written herself to overcome problems in clients’ systems.

If she took Jens’ code to break in and then appended some of her code and inserted the security passcodes she had just pilfered from the ex-school’s system, maybe the computers could be fooled into thinking that the break-in code was just a regular verification request.

Yes, that might work.

Tina tried it on the school system below her, and she got in all the way to the central command module. No, it clearly wasn’t a school anymore. She found lists of how many people were kept in which rooms.

Jens gave her an updated map which included observations she had passed to him. Ironically, she hadn’t ventured far from the agriculture plant, and this looked like a viable escape route, but if a whole bunch of people tromped through there, alarms would definitely start ringing. So they only got one chance going out that way, and there needed to be as many people as possible.

Tina kept going.

She found a couple of other places that had been turned into hostels or prisons: the high school, the administrative offices and the hospital. The latter was a multi-storey affair with a central atrium. The map showed it consisted of hundreds of rooms and Jens said that the concentration of people in that area appeared