[b]Black![/b]

Honestly the worst possible result. She was familiar with the ham-handed responses of local police and security but this was some intelligence agency shit. To have a site that was straight up airgapped from civilian circulation constricted the possibility space enormously. 

But the secrecy of the site meant she needed to start making some extremely big decisions about the shape of the operation without complete data. A mission to have an unrecorded conversation with Goat was very different from a jailbreak. Doing the first could massively complicate an attempt to do the second, doing the second could be massive overkill if somehow Goat didn't want to leave. 

Still, she decided on the second plan. When it came down to it she could not genuinely believe that he was being treated kindly in this hidden sector at the edge of the world. She would have the conversation once he was extracted and not before.

She hadn't covered her tracks digitally - on the contrary, she'd done it all from an internet cafe, though paid in cash and without easy links to her name or face. She even made a fairly predictable habit of running the searches she needed between 6.30 and 9pm - though this was done with a program rather than her physical presence. She was staking the place out on the side on the chance that an operative came by to investigate who was looking at them. Identifying and tailing a security agent would tell her a lot in its own way. 

But as to the facility infiltration itself - well, she still thought like an astrophysicist, and this was a rare opportunity to use those skills. Specifically, the site was near the asteroid defense batteries and so sparsely populated that a controlled impact would not risk fatalities. She sketched out the frame of a plan where she sabotaged one of the anti-asteroid lasers, resulting in a partial hit to the station. Aimed correctly, she could calculate a trajectory that would cause damage to a wide area, resulting in an emergency protocol being triggered - hundreds of damage control people and androids drawn to the section, moving around in unpredictable and unstructured ways, while also forcing out security personnel and forcing a pause on normal operations. It was a big move, but it was also a boring one. Impacts weren't unknown, people drilled for them, and it would provide enough cover for her to move out of the operational zone with a trolley full of quantum cores.

This was the next phase of her research, and she did not do [i]that [/i]from her public computer. For this she was using one of her new identities: Crimson Tower, a Crisis Response Agent with the SES. The Special Emergency Services was a mostly volunteer organization who responded to various disasters, most commonly flood response when the Cloud broke down in place. The character of Crimson was a more permanent member up in Prevention, assessing places for security flaws or building code violations. She foresaw a lot of use for an identity that spent a lot of time investigating stormwater channels, ventilation shafts, and other places in the world's hidden infrastructure.

[Cover: Crimson Tower 4]