Chapter 9
The ration bar tasted like dried, compressed packing material, but the caff-stim was working, so Raaze kept chewing.
Cait had taken over the entire forward console.
Screens bloomed across every available surface, overlapping and cross-referencing each other in a way that made his eyes tired just looking at them.
Building schematics. Shipping manifests.
Traffic logs that shouldn’t have been publicly available but somehow were.
“How did you get all that?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Most of it’s in the public record, if you know where to look. Then it’s just a matter of cross-referencing.”
Raaze bit back his grunt of surprise.
Fred’s voice came through the speakers, smugly satisfied. “I should mention that while the manifests and schematics themselves are public, the cross-referenced utility access data required a certain amount of… creative retrieval.”
“He means hacking,” Cait said without looking up.
“I prefer ‘aggressive data acquisition.’ The Ithaan’Dor infrastructure board really should invest in better encryption. Their current system was almost insulting.”
Raaze took another sip of the terrible caff-stim, shaking his head. “You hacked an Imperial medical facility’s staffing records?”
“I hacked an Imperial medical facility’s supply chain, which is connected to their staffing records through a delivery scheduling system that was clearly designed by someone who thought firewalls were a type of building code violation. The staffing records were a bonus.”
“Fred, stop bragging,” Cait murmured, not looking up.
“I will never stop bragging. It is my defining trait.”
Cait was already pulling up new data, her fingers moving across the interface with the ease of long practise. His gaze snagged on her fingers as they danced over the interface, all that delicate precision making his throat tighten.
Draanth, he remembered exactly how those fingertips had felt against his jaw right before their mouths crashed together. Now his brain supplied a whole list of other places he wanted them, sliding over his chest, down his stomach, wrapping around his cock—
He cut that thought off right there.
She highlighted a pattern in the data. “See this? Deliveries are accepted between oh-six-hundred and fourteen-hundred, station time. But there’s a gap here…” She pointed. “Between eleven-thirty and twelve-fifteen. No deliveries logged.”
“Lunch break?”
“Yeah, and a shift change.” She pulled up another screen. “Look here, the morning crew clocks out at eleven-forty-five and the afternoon crew doesn’t clock in until twelve-ten. That’s a twenty-five-minute window where the loading bay is minimally staffed.”
He blinked. She was reading shift changes from delivery schedules. He’d never have thought of that. In fact, it wouldn’t even have occurred to him to look.
Pulling up traffic logs next, she started cross-referencing them with the floor plans.
Draanth, look at her. Little human’s reading logs and cycles like they’re a damn warball playbook while you sit there chewing protein sludge and wondering why the hell you never thought to check the obvious trall. Genius move, champ. Real former-celebrity behavior.
“These doors here and here are rated for cargo containers up to class-three. That means they’re wide enough for loading equipment, which means they’re wide enough for us. This one…” She highlighted a smaller entrance. “Staff access only. Biometric locks.”
“Can Fred get through those?”
“I could,” Fred said, “but it would trigger a security flag. The Healers’ Hall takes patient privacy seriously. Their internal systems are considerably more robust than the supply chain’s.”
“We don’t need to,” she said suddenly, looking at another screen filled with yet more numbers he couldn’t read. “Look here. Main shipment comes in every seven days, smaller stuff daily.”
He shook his head, sliding to the edge of his seat to look at the same screens as she was. But the answer didn’t jump out at him. He slid a glance sideways at her. “How do you know it’s every seven days?”
She leaned forward to tap part of the screen.
“Here, look. The supply vendor only invoices weekly, on a Tuesday. If we assume a day-one for day-three shipment schedule, then we’re looking at the main delivery on a Friday.
See where all the other daily deliveries drop off here about eleven in the morning?
Looks to me like they bring the main weekly delivery in then and…
” she flicked to another screen. “The size of this load, there’s no way to get all this in one class-three.
So that’s multiple ships. We can just slide on in the middle of them. ”
Draanth.
He’d watched coaches draw up set plays with chalk markers and the gleam of desperation in their eyes, and he’d watched warrior-trained berserkers in tactical briefings on Parac’Norr. But none of them had worked like this.
She wasn’t strategizing. She was reading and pulling information out of data other people would throw away, stitching it together into a picture so clear he could practically walk through it. It was so simple it was crazy.
“But won’t they know we’re not part of the same delivery and raise the alarm?”
“Uh-huh,” she shook her head. “Look at these registrations on deliveries for the last month. They’re all different companies. Latharian and other species. I see at least four human company reg’s that I recognize.”
She looked at him in expectation.
“Okay, talk to me like I’m a youngling,” he admitted. “What does that mean?”
“Chaos,” Fred chipped in. “Absolute fucking chaos.”
“Fred!” Cait gasped, twisting to glare at his cartridge. “Language!”
“Well, it will be,” the AI said grumpily. “And if we move right and ping with the right code for the delivery, we can just slide into a berth with no one being any the wiser.”
Raaze rubbed the skin between his brows. “Okay, stupid question. But won’t anyone query why we’re not… You know, offloading cargo?”
Cait and Fred both chuckled, the soft sound of her laughter mixing with Fred’s mechanical amusement.
“Oh, you have never seen chaos like this,” she grinned.
“Multiple ships, over two different shifts. Some ships will be held over for the afternoon shift to unload. So… if we get challenged in the morning, we tell them we have an afternoon unload slot. And if we get challenged in the afternoon… we tell them we were offloaded by the morning ship and we’re just waiting for POD before we leave. ”
“That’s…”
“Brilliant?” Fred cut in. “Yeah, we might have been doing this a while.”
It was brilliant. So draanthing brilliant he didn’t have words for it.
She’s smarter than you. So much smarter. Once your name is cleared, you need her as your manager. Better than that useless draanthic who let you walk into a dodgy medical.
The thought should have stung his pride. Instead, it just felt… true. She operated in a different field, with different tools, and she was good at it. Really draanthing good. He could watch her work all day.
“Okay, that’s us through the door. Now, who works there?” he asked, setting down his mug.
She looked up, surprised. “What?”
“You’ve got the building, the schedules, the entry points.
But who’s actually inside? What does the loader team rotation look like?
Is there a supervisor on the floor during that shift change window, or does everyone clear out at once?
” he asked. “I assume most delivery pilots and crew stay with their ships, so if we go wandering around, someone’s going to be asking questions? ”
She frowned as she pulled up more records on the screens in front of them. “Shit. Did we find personnel files, Fred?”
“No. They’re in the same data-protected area as the patient files.”
She lifted her head and frowned. “Can you decrypt them?”
Raaze shook his head before the AI could answer. “It’s unlikely. That encryption is likely to be B’Kaar-level, especially for Healer’s Hall records. But we don’t need them,” he added.
“You’ve got delivery schedules. How many signatures on the intake logs?
Are they the same names every time, or do they rotate?
If it’s the same names, that means they’re a small team…
tight, and they’ll probably know each other well, so they’ll notice a stranger.
If they rotate, that’s a larger pool… makes it easier to slip in unnoticed. ”
She pulled up the delivery logs and scrolled through the signature data. “Three names on the morning shift. Same three, every day.”
“Tight team. Bad for blending in.” He traced a path on the holographic map. “What about security checkpoints? Any place where one person controls access?”
“Here.” She highlighted a junction. “Main corridor to the records archive. Single security station here.”
He narrowed his eyes as he studied the schematic. “Just one guard?”
“Looks like it.”
Choke point. One guard meant one obstacle and one person to get past. But, he didn’t like it.
The situation felt off, and if he had Cait with him, she could easily get hurt if he had to take the guard down.
He frowned, studying the map closer. The records archive was deep in the building, past the security checkpoint, down a corridor with no alternate access points.
One way in, one way out. Unless…
“What’s this?” He pointed to a narrow shaft running parallel to the main corridor.
“Wait a moment,” she checked the codes on the schematic, a slender finger running down them until she found the one she needed. “It’s a ventilation system.”
“Big enough for a person?”
Checking the specification, she pursed her lips. “Barely. It’s designed for maintenance drones, not humanoids. We’d have to crawl.”
“But it bypasses the checkpoint.”
“And dumps you into the archive from above. If you can fit.” She eyed him skeptically. “You’re not exactly small.”
“I’m lean.” He shrugged. “Warball players don’t bulk up like warriors. Slows you down.”