Tapping In

Slaiton was yelling at her. “What the hell are you thinking, casually chatting with that AI? Don’t you have an ounce of sense?”

Satasha thought she did. She used sense on quite a regular basis. Yet she was often accused of not having it. People seemed to have varying definitions of the word. A different ‘sense’ of it even! Hah!

Oh, right. He was probably expecting an answer.

“Sorry, sir,” she said. “It just surprised me. I had thought we’d tapped into the channel feeding into the illicit terminal in Hellard’s quarters. I thought he was streaming video or something.”

“His what?” Slaiton shouted. “How is he running a terminal when everything else is down?”

“Oh,” Satasha replied. “I just thought it was likely. Even if he wasn’t behind the outage, I thought the AI would want to keep a channel up to him. They might be talking. But I was wrong. Tapped straight into a Raid sim feed.”

The Secmaster looked sharply at her. Surprised, she thought. Maybe angry? Hard to tell. “You tapped into a Raid feed? That’s not even possible!”

“Apparently Hellard’s equipment allows it,” Satasha said. Seemed likely. Persephone was researching the Raids after all, right? “Or maybe it’s the AI interface to it. Could be both.” She shrugged and turned back to tapping at the strange interface.

“Hold on a second, missie,” Slaiton said. He was scowling again. Maybe more appropriate to say he stopped not-scowling, since the scowl was a more default state. “Can you get us through to Hellard or not?”

“Oh, are we still doing that?” Satasha asked. “I thought you’d be more interested in the fact that one the Raid feed is streaming directly from his sanctuary’s terminal line.”

The new expression on Slaiton’s face was really hard to figure out. There were a lot of creases and redness, but he turned around and left before Satasha got a good enough look.