Locking the Barn Doors

Getting into the Chairman of the Board was far easier than Portia thought. She donned the unflattering service uniform of the Corporation, a steely gray jumpsuit, and concocted an elaborate story about repairing the Communication Terminals. She forged a work order on her data pad, which was not hard. She used an existing template and filled in the Chairman of the Board as the requestor and her name as the technician.
Tools in her powdery blue satchel, she strode confidentially down the corridor to the Chairman of the Board.
Two Corporate Guards wearing lightweight armor jackets and dark tinted helmets were standing watch.
Portia smiled brightly, flashed her thumb at the scanner and proceeded to walk by.
“Excuse me, miss!”
Damn.
“Can I see your work order?”
Double damn.
“Certainly.” Portia handed over her data pad.
“It looks in order by we have no record of a work request being submitted.”
Portia readjusted the weight of the satchel strap on her shoulder. “That’s because the Communications Terminal is down. Can’t very well send a message now, can they?”
Her tone was condescending enough to be a genuine Technician, annoyed the guard for delaying her important work for even a moment.
The guard handed the data pad back with a crisp flourish. “What’s in the bag?”
Portia handed over the powdery blue satchel. The guard emptied it, passing quickly over the sonic screw driver, flashlight, the slim black case with chips and wireless cards, nutritional bars, bottled water, and pausing at the heavy wooden baseball bat Brick insisted she bring with her. For emergencies.
The Guard pointed to the baseball bat. “And this?”
“It’s for emergencies,” Portia replied honestly. “A girl never knows when she’ll need to defend herself. Did you hear what happened last week to Mary on the night shift? She was lucky she had a wrench. Not so lucky for the guy because she’s a pretty good aim with a wrench.”
“It’s a cudgel, a prohibited weapon.”
Portia couldn’t help looking surprised. “My boyfriend told me it was a baseball bat.” Fortunately, she wasn’t too surprised to lie. The lies continued, “I would never posses a weapon. I hate violence. I barely like baseball.”
The guard placed all the items back in the satchel with a slight chuckle. Clearly, Portia barely liked baseball if she could mistake a cudgel for a bat. “Proceed, citizen.”
Portia took the data pad back without a word.
The Chairman of the Board was docked at the Juno Access Station. Portia made her way through the airlocks. She was expecting to find herself in a wide-open corridor but discovered the corridor littered with boxes and heavy crates. Technician and other employees moved the crates on hover lifts, entering data about the cargo, and shouting orders. It was chaos. Excellent. Terribly easy to get aboard the Chairman of the Board.
It was virgin ship was still being outfitted and supplied. No crew aboard, yet. It was obvious why Martin Ang wanted this ship, no busy-bodied crew to get in the way of a good theft.
At a safe distance down the corridor, she squeezed the Pod and whispered, “I’m in.”
“Good job, Gizmo,” was the hushed reply. “Now get to work.”
Portia strode down the corridor confidently. The most important part of breaking and entering was acting like you belonged. What she needed was an access panel to the ship’s computer, somewhere she could set up shop and not be disturbed. There where lots of places she could do business but none of them offered privacy. Maybe if she clubbed some technicians on the head with the cudgel Brick gave her, but Portia wasn’t really looking forward to the idea of pummeling. No pummeling. She could stomach the idea of being a sneak thief but not violence. Plus, she might get blood on her boots and they were really nice boots.
She approached the door for a utility closet. She pressed her thumb against the lock and typed in a code. The door slid open with a hydraulic hiss.
The utility closet was three feet wide and three feet deep, square. The walls were panels for the operating system. This was good but not enough privacy.
Portia too the sonic screwdriver and stood on a crate. Head titled to the tiled ceiling, she slowly unscrewed the panel.
With panel loosened, she pushed it back into itself. The satchel was tossed into the ceiling. Portia then hoisted herself into the ceiling. She had done work like this before, crawling around in service passages to get at the terminals. Standard Corporate design had it that all machines could be accessed through a service passage, unpleasant and cramped corridors built into the walls of buildings and vessels. It wasn’t nice but it ensured that every machine could be serviced if it every developed an error. There was no profit in not maintaining equipment. And Portia was guaranteed all the privacy she needed inside the service passage.
It was dark. And warm. She made her way across the ceiling to the passage. It was not much more pleasant than the crawl space above the utility closet but she did have enough room to stand up.
Small blue dots illuminate the service passage but did not provide enough light to see easily by. Portia used the flashlight. She didn’t need the mainframe. She just needed an access panel. Bingo.
Portia lowered to the ground and spread out her toolkit. She unscrewed the panel and set it gently to one side. She took the wireless card from the black case and slipped it into the appropriate slot on the terminal. The terminals did not have wireless build in, to prevent easy security breaches, but they were wireless ready, so technicians would be able to work with them.
The terminal beeped. Card accepted.
She linked up the data pad. Convincing the terminal that she was a qualified service technician and she should unlimited access to the ship’s memory banks and files was not that difficult. She downloaded the schematics for the ship; the transfer took twenty five seconds.
Now, for the real test: convincing the ship’s terminal that the next time Portia’s Identity Signature appeared, she really would be six people. Portia know the flawed code would tip over the number if she attached it to her identity signature. A vigilant crewmember watching the closed circuit cameras for security would notice the small crew stealing aboard the ship, but the ship’s computer would think six was the new individual.
Done.
Portia packed up and shimmed her way back to the crawlspace and down through the hole in the ceiling. She reattached the ceiling tile and left the utility closet as pristine as she found it.
On her way back out, she was munching on a nutrition bar and waved brightly to the guards.