KactusPunch
Crown Sage
MarshalSolgriev
SkyeOfStars
princess
Zeroth"Maybe ya be wantin sometin' eeeeeeeasy, yeah?...Well, mi tell ya, mi ent got nuttin like dat!...Big skids o' honest-to-Jah CDs, yeah? We be talkin' reeeal old-fashion biz. We dunna where dey goin to, where dey came from. But mi wanna know. Ya catch da plot mi hope. Ya boys get into da right warehouse, get dem CDs. Full price for a whoooooole skid, bonus nuyen for fudgin' da books a little, yeah?
Traction visibly sighed in irritation. Their Fixer was a fucking idiot.
It was always a given that a Fixer would always try to screw you over by withholding information. Occupational hazard, there never was a run where you went in knowing the whole of it. Most Fixers were smart enough to at least try and come across as honest. Gestures of good will, fake collateral, double bluffs, planted evidence, sweet talk. This drek-for-brains though had given away everything they hadn't wanted to say.
The job SOUNDED simple, but the first thing they had said indicated the job wasn't going to be easy. Wholesale palettes of actual CDs meant smuggling and illicit deals. Not usual fair for organized groups like the yak or mob but not unheard of, though it could just be an unusually resourceful gang sitting pretty on some decent talent. Either way it meant armed drek enforcers with itchy trigger fingers. Worse yet, although the Fix claimed not to know where they were from or where they were headed, they still knew the CDs existed and where they were. That meant the Fix might be slaved to someone else, that they had picked the intel up, or that they were on the inside. Which meant that other people also knew about the CDs and might be gunning with them, apart from whoever already owned them. The most infuriating part was the request to fudge the records - anybody who had ever cased and run a shipping warehouse before knew that when you fudged their manifests, you also had to fudge the manifest of the delivery vessel as well, and if you wanted to show off you also fudged the manifest of whatever was supposed to pick up the delivery later. The Fixer was asking them to do two jobs for the price of one, and the 'bonus' for doing it was just there to trick everyone else not familiar with running numbers that it was a fair game.
"Ex that drek chummer, fragin' unprofessional. Sposed' to be waiting on a call not tuned into some scam psychic."
'Even a broken clock is right twice a day.' Traction thought, smirking faintly as she opened her AR interface to open the message Damien had just sent her. She glanced at him and raised an eyebrow, but then figured it was to be expected. The older rigger was probably used to working with more thoroughly vetted contacts in familiar territory - it shouldn't have been surprising that even the most experienced member of the team (except perhaps the Elf, though most keebs never took anything they learnt to heart so she probably didn't count) was out of his element. She sent him a reply message.
'This fixer has obviously never hired a half-decent decker before, else she wouldn't have called the rest of you over all of your comms. Give me six seconds.'
And not even six VR seconds either. The task was so simple Traction could get everything she needed in AR alone. She gestured smoothly at the invisible interface for her ARO, running commands to her integral cyberdeck.
Their Fixer had left herself awfully exposed by contacting each of their commlinks - because all of them were slaved to Traction's cyberdeck (it hadn't necessarily been a matter of choice on the rest of the team's part). She could monitor every aspect of the incoming datastreams being sent to devices, and from that alone she could see the commcode for whatever device their Fixer was using to contact them. There was no promise the Fixer was using a device that actually belonged to them, but that was only one piece of the puzzle. Because they were sending multiple datastreams simultaneously, Traction didn't even have to run any sleaze programs - she just executed a simple trace action that sourced each datastream individually in order to triangulate the physical location of the sender. Their own setup, whatever it was, never got the chance to even detect the trace, since Traction's program had never probed it - it had only analyzed the connections and node bounces the datastream themselves were being sent through. Which was the exact reason professionals were a lot more careful about sending messages to multiple unsecured devices - they could be traced without ever knowing until it was too late.
Three seconds in and already Traction knew exactly where the Fixer was, what device she was using, and her commcode. Now it was time to actually start hacking. A slight and predatory smile broke across Traction's face as she leaned forward where she was sitting on the couch, hunching over her ARO with a devious sense of concentration as she focused on the information being displayed.
First she deployed an autonomous agent into the Matrix and had it run a few sleaze programs across a public grid search, plugging in the Fixer's commcode, coordinate location, and address - the low profile software letting it identify helpful information without ringing any alarms in case the Fixer was on the lookout for people pinging her through the Matrix. Then Traction ran a sleaze program across all the slaved commlinks, injecting a subtle probe into the datastream device transceivers. As the devices communicated back and forth, their software constantly fed status messages and code back and forth to each other, the equivalent of an electronic handshake to make sure both sides were still there and online. With the next handshake though, the Fixer's device would be instructed by the slaved commlinks to send an extra packet of verification data as part of the handshake protocol. Which meant that with the next active message the Fixer sent, Traction would gain a mark on her device. Once for each confirmation the Fixer's device sent back, for each of the commlinks receiving the message, which would give Traction effective administrative, owner-level access. If the other device didn't send the packet, the message wouldn't get through, and if it sent a packet containing anything other than the requested information, the sleaze program would purge the package.
Once that happened Traction could throw a wild rumpus in the Fixer's device without them ever the wiser, but it did depend on them sending another message. Thankfully, Caewil decided to ask the big dumb elephant of a question that had been hanging in the air, and so Traction primed a spoof command to reformat a targeted device. All she needed was for the Fixer to answer the question. Traction's hand hovered in the air, still and steady as a conductor's just before a composition began.