Chapter 11: Penetration
Secondary Characters
Tomas Ruiz (Meridian Federation)
A mid-level IT technician for NorthStar Services, Tomas is a burned-out and cynical "colony kid" who resents the Federation bureaucracy and the privileged FIA personnel he services. His frustration and disillusionment make him an ideal first contact for Sean, who easily earns his trust by fixing his technical problems and sharing a sense of cynical camaraderie. Tomas unwittingly becomes Sean's first stepping stone to gaining deeper access.
Elena Vasquez (Meridian Federation)
A sharp, dedicated, but frustrated FIA IT auditor from a family of Federation bureaucrats. Tasked with ensuring compliance between internal FIA systems and third-party vendors, she is caught between her belief in "the rules" and the reality of a system where the powerful ignore them. She is intelligent and competent, but her loneliness and professional frustration make her vulnerable to the sense of partnership and respect offered by "Samir," making her Sean's most important, and most guilt-inducing, unwitting accomplice.
Hunting
The NorthStar warehouse hummed with the constant, monotonous beep of scanners and the low rumble of forklifts. The break room was a temporary oasis of quiet despair—faded workplace safety posters on the walls, a vending machine that spat out bitter, lukewarm coffee, and a few battered tables where contractors like Sean caught their breath. It was his fourth day on the job, and he was already mapping the social terrain. He wasn't just moving boxes; he was cataloging weaknesses. Who complained loudest, whose access badge dangled with a little too much pride, who was the weak link in the chain.
Tomas Ruiz was a flashing red light on Sean's internal scanner. Mid-thirties, with a perpetually rumpled shirt and the dark, hollowed-out eyes of a man who had given up, he was hunched over a tablet, jabbing at the screen like it had personally offended him. Sean had overheard him earlier, muttering curses about "glitchy FIA requisitions." The man's profile was almost too perfect.
A mid-level IT technician for NorthStar, born on a gritty Meridian colony where his parents had assembled drone parts for the Federation's endless war machine. He'd clawed his way to a network admin degree, only to end up in vendor purgatory: six years of thankless, low-clearance work fixing the databases for the Agency's cafeteria logistics. He was burned out, and Sean saw an opportunity in the ashes of his ambition. A disgruntled grunt was an open door.
Carrying two steaming cups of vending-machine sludge that passed for coffee, Sean approached casually. "Looks like that tablet's winning the fight," he said, his Sironan accent thick but warm, practiced from the stories of the refugees. He slid one cup across the table.
Tomas looked up, blinking in surprise, but the offer of caffeine was a universal peace treaty. He took the cup with a tired grin. "You read my mind, man. This requisition database is a fossil. Crashes every time I try to pull a headcount from the detention block." He gestured with his head. "You new?"
"Samir Halabi," Sean replied, extending a hand. "Started Monday. Refugee from Al-Rashid. I used to fix terminals for a produce wholesaler back home." He nodded at the tablet. "Mind if I take a look?"
Tomas shrugged, pushing the device over with a sigh of defeat. "Knock yourself out. If you brick it, at least I'll have an excuse to go home early. Tomas Ruiz, by the way—IT grunt extraordinaire."
Sean's fingers moved with practiced ease. It was nothing complex—a simple cache clear, a query tweak to bypass a corrupted index. The screen refreshed smoothly. "There. Old legacy system. The indexes get bogged down."
Tomas's eyes widened in genuine surprise. "No kidding. That was fast. So, Al-Rashid, huh? Rough place after Corvus fell."
Sean nodded, taking a slow sip of the bitter coffee to let the moment land. "The warlords burned everything. You learned to improvise with the tech, or you didn't eat. You? You sound like you've seen a few battles yourself."
Tomas let out a short, humorless laugh. "Colony kid. My parents built drones for the Federation out on the Epsilon Rim. I got a degree thinking I could escape the factory floor, but here I am." He waved a hand around the dingy break room. "Stuck fixing messes for the Agency's cafeteria. The pay is okay, but the real FIA folks? They treat us contractors like disposable parts."
"A universal problem," Sean said with a sympathetic nod, filing away the detail. "Power is the same everywhere. The connected get favors, the rest of us get the work." He stood up. "Glad I could help with the small stuff."
Tomas clapped him on the shoulder, a gesture of newfound camaraderie. "Hey, you're alright, Samir. Stick around. We could use more guys like you who can actually make the machines work."
The door was open.
A Stepping Stone
By mid-week, Sean had made himself indispensable in the small ecosystem of Warehouse 7B. He wasn't just "Samir the refugee"; he was "Samir the fixer." He optimized spreadsheets, debugged jammed printers, and untangled the messes left by the ancient logistics software. His casual alliance with Tomas Ruiz solidified over soggy sandwiches and vending-machine drinks in the break room, a space where shared frustrations became a form of currency.
"Samir! My man," Tomas called out, waving him over to their usual table. "You saved my ass with that script yesterday. The system hasn't crashed once. Pull up a chair."
Sean sat, unpacking his modest lunch—a refugee ration bar. "No problem, Tomas. These systems are dinosaurs. Reminds me of the ones we had to patch together back in Al-Rashid."
Tomas chuckled. "You ever miss it? The colony life taught me one thing: fix things fast or get left behind. My parents slaved away in those drone factories on the Epsilon Rim. The Federation promised them prosperity and delivered a planet full of dust. Now I'm here, debugging cafeteria orders for the Agency. Same grind, different planet."
"Sounds tough," Sean said, leaning in with practiced empathy. He saw his opening. "I hear you mention audits sometimes. You have to deal with the FIA bigwigs directly?"
Tomas rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I'm the designated liaison for their logistics people. It's endless compliance checks and listening to them complain about VIP requisitions skipping the line." He lowered his voice. "Got this one auditor, Elena. She's sharp, but she's buried in the bureaucracy and hates it."
"Bureaucracy is the real enemy," Sean nodded thoughtfully. "Maybe I could help with her tech issues sometime? If it's not stepping on your toes."
Tomas grinned, relieved. "Stepping on them? Hell, she'd probably give you a medal. She's in tomorrow for a data sync. Tag along. I'll make the intro. Us grunts gotta watch each other's backs."
The next morning, Tomas led Sean to a cluttered workstation in the office annex. Elena Vasquez was exactly as Sean had pictured: late thirties, hair in a ruthlessly practical bun, her sharp suit a stark contrast to the surrounding chaos. She was scrolling through a tablet with a focused intensity that bordered on anger. She was a product of the Federation's bureaucratic class—her father, a Ministry clerk who had drilled the mantra of "follow the rules" into her since birth. With a degree in systems compliance, she'd risen to IT auditor, the bridge between internal FIA networks and third-party vendors like NorthStar. It was a dead-end job with Level 2 clearance: just enough access to be useful, but no glory. Just endless, thankless scrutiny.
"Elena, this is Samir Halabi, our new data whiz," Tomas said. "Samir, Elena Vasquez, FIA logistics."
Elena looked up, her professional smile not quite reaching her tired eyes. "Nice to meet you, Samir. Tomas sings your praises. You're the refugee from Sirona?"
"Al-Rashid," Sean confirmed, shaking her hand. "It was a rough road, but I'm here now. Tomas mentioned you were having manifest issues? If it's a database problem, I might be able to help."
She slid the tablet over, her skepticism barely concealed. "Be my guest. This headcount query for the support staff has been hanging for an hour."
Sean took the tablet. The fix was simple, but he made it look methodical. As he worked, he caught a glimpse of Level 2 security tags in the database schema—access to the detention blocks. "Optimized the join and re-indexed the query," he said, handing it back. "Should run smooth now."
Elena's surprise was genuine. "Impressive. You have a knack for this. Most contractors just pass the buck."
"Learned the hard way," Sean replied, his gaze distant. "In Al-Rashid, when the systems failed, people went hungry. Glad I could help."
By the end of the week, he was her go-to fixer. She pulled him into an overtime huddle, pointing at her own laptop. "Samir, you're a godsend. This VIP requisition is glitching the whole system. Something about special comms relays to Cygnus tying up bandwidth."
As he "debugged" the issue, he made a quiet observation. "Sounds frustrating. Your father in the Ministry—he must have prepared you for this kind of bureaucracy."
Elena leaned back, running a hand through her hair. "He taught me the rules, not how to deal with people who think the rules don't apply to them. The 'clients' get their own channels, their own privileges. If you complain, you get sidelined." She gave him a small, tired smile. "You're easy to talk to, Samir. Not like the others."
A pang of guilt hit Sean. She was a cog in the machine, just like him, and he was using her. He pushed it down. "We all have our battles," he said softly. "I'm happy to listen. And fix what I can."
She pushed her laptop towards him. "Here. See if you can streamline the diagnostic scripts. And don't tell Tomas—he'll get jealous."
Sean smiled. "Our secret."
He had his second stepping stone.
The Cloning
The warehouse corridors were quiet after hours, the hum of forklifts replaced by the distant, lonely whir of ventilation fans. Sean—still "Samir" to everyone—had timed it perfectly. Over lunch, Elena had vented her frustration about another "VIP requisition glitch," and he had casually offered to stay late and help. It was a sign of the trust he had so carefully cultivated, but guilt gnawed at him. Elena wasn't a mark like Voss; she was just another decent person being ground down by the system he was trying to break.
They worked side-by-side at her cluttered workstation, the only light coming from their glowing screens. Elena rubbed her eyes, scrolling endlessly. "I don't know how you do it, Samir. These headcount reports keep erroring out. The system ties into the detention block logs, but on the Agency side, it's just a black box."
Sean leaned in, his voice calm and steady. "Let me see. It's probably a sync issue with the federated databases." As he moved behind her to look at the screen, he positioned himself, ready for the pivot. This was his one shot.
"You're a lifesaver," she sighed, leaning back to give him access. "Tomas was right. I wish I had more help like this. The higher-ups don't care if our systems are broken, as long as their VIP channels are running."
As she spoke, she peeled the wrapper from a sticky energy bar, her fingers leaving clear, perfect prints on the foil. A moment later, Sean did the same with the one she offered him, discreetly pocketing his own wrapper for the lift he would make later.
Then came the "accident."
As Elena reached for her laptop, Sean "stumbled" over a loose power cable he had noted earlier, knocking the device from her desk. It clattered to the floor.
"Oh no—Elena, I am so sorry!" he exclaimed, kneeling instantly. In the brief, flustered scramble to retrieve it, he palmed the optical sync link he had bought on the Dunfeld black market. Disguised as a standard Federation photonic charger, it was capable of terabit-speed data dumps.
"It's okay, Samir, it's okay," she said, flustered but not angry. "These floors are a death trap. Is it damaged?"
"Let me check," Sean said, his voice a mask of concern. He held the laptop, and under the guise of inspecting the ports for damage, he connected the link. The payload auto-ran silently, booting the device's diagnostic bus into a stealth mode. A targeted script began its work—not a full disk image, which was too slow and risky, but a surgical dump of key user folders: profiles, browser data, VPN configs, and manifest caches. At optical speeds, the transfer would take three to four minutes. An eternity.
"Anything broken?" Elena asked, her concern growing. "The screen looks fine."
"Just running a quick diagnostic," Sean assured her, angling the laptop so she couldn't see the faint, rhythmic light pulse from the link. To distract her, he returned to her frustration. "You mentioned the VIPs. It must be difficult, auditing their special privileges."
She crossed her arms, the bait taken. "You have no idea. They get special relays to Cygnus that bypass all compliance checks, but if I miss a single headcount on a prisoner manifest, it's my career. My father was a Ministry clerk. He always said, 'The rules keep us safe.' I guess I should have listened and picked a quieter job."
The progress bar on his hidden display ticked past 80%. He nodded sympathetically. "It sounds like integrity runs in your family. But someone has to be there to keep the system honest."
"Honest? In this place?" Her laugh was tired and brittle. "You're an optimist, Samir."
The script finished. The data was his. Sean cleanly "rebooted" the system from its stealth state. "All set," he announced, handing the laptop back. "No physical damage. Just needed a hard reset to clear the memory."
Her relief was palpable. "You are incredible. I owe you big time. Coffee is on me tomorrow?"
"Deal," Sean said, the knot in his stomach tightening. She was a good person. She didn't deserve this. But the faces of the Revenants—of Leo, of the Rostovas—pushed the guilt away.
Back in the sterile anonymity of his dorm, Sean connected the link to his burner tablet and decrypted the data. It was a partial mirror of her system, but it was enough. He molded a gelatin print from the foil wrapper, warmed it for liveness, and pressed it to the biometric reader. Her laptop's virtual instance unlocked.
He was in. He navigated through the cached files, his eyes scanning for keywords. Detention manifests... prisoner transfers... VIP anomalies... He felt a jolt. There, buried in a logistics file, was the name of one of the captured embassy doctors, flagged with a special travel authorization. The destination tag was a simple, three-letter code: C-Y-G.
Cygnus.
The pieces were starting to connect. He was one step closer.
Hacking Gear
The dorm room in Dunfeld's refugee district was a world away from the pristine labs of the Combine Air Force Academy. It was a cramped, metallic box with flickering lights and the constant, low hum of the rail yards outside. But it was anonymous, and for Sean's purposes, secure. A scavenged burner tablet was hooked to a virtual machine, running a partial mirror of Elena's system—a perfect sandbox to test his creations without ever pinging a live FIA network.
He worked late into the night, the parts spread across his narrow bunk like the dissected carcass of some strange electronic beast. These were his new weapons, acquired from Dunfeld's black market underbelly: a compact signal booster, photonic modulators, and a handful of quantum-secure chips that had likely "fallen off a truck" from a Federation supplier.
"Start with the basics," he muttered to himself, the tip of the soldering iron glowing in the dim light. "SSID mimicry first. Make the honeypot look like the real thing."
The device slowly took shape in his hands—a palm-sized rogue access point, a "Pineapple" in old-world hacking parlance, but far more advanced. It was designed not just to listen, but to create a brief, targeted dead zone, forcing higher-clearance devices to automatically roam and connect to his stronger, fraudulent signal.
He ran a simulation on the virtual machine. "DNS poison injected... rerouting test traffic." The sandbox network lit up. No alerts. The data flowed exactly where he wanted it to go. "Good. Now for the certificate forge. Mimic their CA without breaking the chain of trust."
As he debugged the encryption handshake, Elena's voice echoed in his mind. You're a lifesaver. The guilt was a physical weight. He was using her trust, her kindness, as a weapon. He paused, rubbing his tired eyes. "Am I?" he whispered to the empty room. Then he thought of Rostova's stubborn integrity, of Eva's righteous fury, of Leo's grin. They're counting on a ghost. He pushed the guilt down and focused.
By Day 18, the toolkit was complete. The rogue access point, its photonic core pulsing with a faint, predatory light. The custom AI agents—stealthy machine-learning scripts he would inject to sniff traffic, analyze patterns, and exfiltrate data in encrypted, microscopic bursts that would disappear into the network's normal noise.
He ran a final simulation: a deauthentication flood to force the target device to disconnect, a seamless re-connection to his rogue AP, and a phishing-style captive portal splash—a simple "Network Update: Accept and Continue" prompt that a distracted user would click without a second thought. It was a perfect man-in-the-middle attack.
"One slip," he murmured, holding the device in his palm, "and it's all over."
A message had come through on his work comms earlier. It was from Elena. Thanks again for the fix on that query! System's running smoother than ever. He had replied with a neutral, professional thank you. But the lie felt heavier this time.
Resolve hardened the lines of his face. This was just one more phase. For the people who were worth saving, he would become whatever the mission required.
Deployment
The invitation came late in the day via the internal work comms. A simple message from Elena: Another VIP sync is lagging the whole system. Care to work some late-night magic?
Sean arrived at the office annex, his custom-built rogue access point concealed in the bottom of his toolkit. Elena was already there, scrolling through manifests with a frustrated sigh. "Samir, thank God you're here. This is driving me insane."
"Let's get it sorted," Sean replied, offering a reassuring smile as he knelt to "inspect" a floor-level network panel near her workstation. While her attention was on the screen, his movements were swift and precise. He slipped the small, dark device through a ventilation grate, its magnetic clamps engaging with a soft click. Camouflaged as a standard environmental sensor module, it was now perfectly placed.
He retreated to a quiet corner of the office, pulling up a diagnostic interface on his burner tablet. It was time.
He activated the device. It began broadcasting a powerful, spoofed signal, perfectly mimicking the official "FIAGUESTLVL2" network ID. Then, he triggered the deauthentication flood—a short, targeted burst of electronic noise that would cause a fleeting, localized outage of the real network, forcing nearby devices to automatically search for a stronger signal.
Elena's tablet beeped. "Network connection dipped," she said, annoyed. "Did you get that?"
"Just a flicker," Sean said casually, his eyes fixed on his own screen. He watched as a cascade of devices, including Elena's, disconnected and then immediately roamed to his rogue AP. Her traffic was now flowing through him. "Probably just routine maintenance. It'll pass."
As predicted, it did. His device seamlessly redirected her data stream to the legitimate network, but not before poisoning the DNS requests. When a routine "Network Security Update" prompt appeared on her screen—a captive portal he had designed—she clicked "Accept" without a second thought, too focused on her work to notice the deception.
The sudden echo of footsteps made Sean's blood run cold. A uniformed Federation guard appeared at the end of the corridor, his hand resting on his sidearm. "Everything alright here? Got a network alert for this sector."
Sean's heart hammered against his ribs. He forced himself to stay calm, letting Elena handle it.
She waved the guard off, her tone exasperated. "It's fine. Just another system hiccup. My tech guy is helping me sort it out."
The guard gave Sean a long, indifferent look, then nodded. "Carry on." He disappeared down the hall. Sean let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding.
Now for the final piece. He knew from Elena's cached manifest data that a campus-wide OS update for her clearance level and above was scheduled for that night. When the update cycle began, he poisoned the DNS for the Federation's primary update server. Any device in his vicinity that pinged the server—including those of higher-level personnel working late—was redirected to his own controlled endpoint. His server delivered a malicious patch, disguised as a legitimate security update, to dozens of targets. The patch installed his custom AI agents deep within their systems.
The "infections" were seeded. His stealthy scripts were now spreading through the campus network, silently sniffing traffic, analyzing patterns, and waiting for his command.
As they packed up to leave, Elena gave him a genuinely grateful smile. "Thanks again for staying late, Samir. You're the only one around here who actually gets it."
The guilt twisted in his stomach like a knife. He was using this kind, overworked woman as a key to unlock a prison. "We have to help each other," he heard himself say, the words feeling hollow and distant.
Harvest
The infections took root like weeds in cracked pavement—silent, deep, and relentless. In his cramped dorm room, Sean monitored the harvest. His AI agents, now seeded across dozens of high-clearance devices, siphoned data in microscopic, encrypted bursts. Not raw, clumsy dumps that would trigger alarms, but targeted extracts—a line from a log file, a single cell from a spreadsheet, a cached email—all analyzed offline by his burner tablet.
Slowly, a mosaic of Port Elara's secret life began to form, each piece slotting into the blueprint for his impossible rescue.
First, he got the floor plans. An FIA Level 3 analyst had carelessly cached the full schematics for the detention block's Sub-Level 3. Sean traced the holographic lines with his finger in the dark. "Ventilation access here," he murmured, "a maintenance shaft that runs directly into the wing. A complete blind spot." He cross-referenced it with guard patrol routes pulled from a shift supervisor's manifest. "Avoid Sector C—automated drones patrol every fifteen minutes. But the 0200 shift change... there's a seven-minute window." The fortress was becoming a navigable maze.
Next came the eyes. He pulled camera positions and network IDs from a security technician's log. "Full 360-degree coverage in the main corridors," he noted, "but the maintenance shafts... they're on a legacy system. Exploitable." He could loop the feeds, create a digital ghost. He saw the path: disable the primary cameras, extract the team, and be gone before the system even registered the anomaly.
The daily operational data filled in the rest. Staff manifests gave him names and rotation schedules. He found vulnerabilities in the routines of the guards themselves—one man's habitual, unsanctioned smoke break created a predictable two-minute window at a key junction. He cross-referenced prisoner headcounts and located his targets: Major Rostova was in an isolated medical observation cell—Pod 7. Captain Rostova and the rest of the military team were in a communal high-security block. The embassy staff were nearby. The plan sharpened: Hit Pod 7 first. Use the digital manifests to spoof the headcounts during the escape, buying precious time.
Finally, there was the leverage. The wild card. His agents, scanning for patterns of unusual behavior, had unearthed the quiet, damning secrets of the men who held the keys. Nothing spectacular, just the mundane corruption that greased the wheels of any bureaucracy. A senior guard siphoning aid funds to a private account in Cygnus. An intelligence analyst leaking shipping manifests to a bookie to cover his gambling debts.
"Enough to coerce," Sean whispered, compiling the digital dossiers. He wouldn't have to break every door down. He could get one unlocked just by threatening to burn a man's life to the ground. It was an ugly, brutal tactic, but in the world the Combine had made, leverage was survival.
The guilt was a constant, low hum. One intercepted message from the embezzling guard to a colleague read: Covered the shortfall. The transfer from Cygnus cleared. Don't tell the boss. The reply: You're playing with fire. If the auditors ever see this...
Sean leaned back, the holographic blueprint of the prison flickering before him. Fire? he thought. You haven't seen anything yet.
But then Elena’s voice would echo in his mind: You're easy to talk to, Samir. Not like the others. Was he any better than the men he was blackmailing? Using people, turning their secrets into weapons? He pushed the thought away, focusing instead on the faces of his team. Rostova's stand in that courtroom. Eva's charge to save a village. Leo's grin.
They deserved to be free. This ugly, dirty work was what would make it possible. The rescue was no longer a desperate gamble. It was a calculated, three-dimensional strike plan.
"For the ones worth saving," he whispered, shutting down the display and plunging the room into darkness.
Scene from this Chapter:
Scene of Elena's Confession Elena leaned back, running a hand through her hair. "He taught me the rules, not how to deal with people who think the rules don't apply to them. The 'clients' get their own channels, their own privileges. If you complain, you get sidelined." She gave him a small, tired smile. "You're easy to talk to, Samir. Not like the others."
Scene of The Holographic Blueprint First, he got the floor plans. An FIA Level 3 analyst had carelessly cached the full schematics for the detention block's Sub-Level 3. Sean traced the holographic lines with his finger in the dark. "Ventilation access here," he murmured, "a maintenance shaft that runs directly into the wing. A complete blind spot."