long past. Once I dropped down into the office, I’d be stuck without help.
“I’m going with you,” he said.
I didn’t even try to argue. I wouldn’t win and it would just waste time. “Can you get us closer to the corner before we drop down?”
Ian nodded and started down a new crawl space. I waved at Ada and Loch, then followed him. The path didn’t make it all the way to the corner, but it got us to the far wall.
Ian said, “I’m dropping in.”
Loch grunted his assent. “Stairway is clear.”
“Ladies are still busy,” Ada said.
Ian lay on his stomach and pulled up one of the square, meter-wide plastech ceiling tiles from the wall side of the crawl space. He slid it over the tile next to it. The metal grating of the crawl space walkway hung over the opening by about a centimeter. Ian leaned down and peeked at the office. His head appeared on the video from Ada’s camera.
He must’ve been happy with what he saw because he gripped the walkway and slid into the opening head first. Before I could ask him what in the world he was doing, his legs came up and he pulled his upper body parallel to the ceiling. In a ridiculous show of both arm and core strength, his legs dropped down as he lowered his hips, until he hung straight down from the walkway.
He dropped lightly to the ground and grinned up at me. “Your turn.”
“Show-off,” I grumbled.
My descent was far less impressive, but I made it to the ground without breaking anything. Ian pulled the ceiling tile back into place while I set a timer for twenty minutes. The time counted down in the corner of my smart glasses. I needed to make these minutes count.
I chose the desk in the corner. A hand wave brought up the display and the embedded keyboard in the desk lit up. I turned the display brightness all the way down, but it was still bright as hell in the dark office.
“Do you have to use that?” Ian asked.
“It’ll be faster if I can get in.”
Users logged in to these terminals with their identity chips but that didn’t mean there weren’t other ways in. Chip readers failed and system administrators couldn’t always replace them immediately.
I brought up the admin log-in page and tried the most common options. All failed. Of course this had to be the one company with competent sysadmins. Tori had warned me, but I’d held out hope that maybe she was wrong.
She wasn’t.
I waved away the display and plugged one of my secondary coms into the diagnostic port underneath the desktop. Time to break out the big guns.
If the sysadmins were good, and I had every reason to believe they were, then trying to brute-force the admin password would set off all sorts of internal alarms. The terminal would automatically be quarantined and someone would alert security to physically check out what was happening.
But even well-run networks had to contend with users, and users didn’t care about security, they just wanted their stuff to work. By using the diagnostic port, I could access the internal network from my com. And according to Tori, those same users would be my ticket in.
I kicked off two scripts. The first looked for vulnerable services that would give me access to a terminal. I didn’t need a terminal to access my brother’s information, but leaving myself a back door so I could check again later from outside the office was worth the search. The second script looked for servers with open ports.
The secondary com wasn’t connected to my smart glasses, so I set it on the desk and used the projected keyboard to dive into the data. The world fell away as I finessed my way deeper into the network.
My first script found a trio of vulnerable terminals, so I kicked off a cracking script that would set up a remote back door in each of them. It was my own creation, designed to work around virus scanners.
I scoured fileservers and databases for any mention of Nando Black, the name Ferdinand had been sold under. I’d made it more than halfway through the list before I finally got a hit. I copied the file to my com and opened it. It was a spreadsheet of transactions. It showed that Ferdinand had indeed been sold to MineCorp, but not where he ended up.