Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(99)
Eve nodded and wished him luck. Smitt finished his work and picked up his pace, walking a little faster out of the wing than he’d like. He would have to hurry if he was going to pull off data collection tonight. It was the middle of the night in Chicago, and the third shift was just about to switch over. This was the best time for him to hit up monitors who would be eager to get off duty.
He walked as fast as he dared back to his quarters and activated the paint band, impersonating one of the newer sysware techs he had painstakingly stalked. The guy, only a few months on the station, was a loner with a drinking problem, had no friends, and rarely left his quarters when off duty. He afforded Smitt the perfect cover for avoiding the watchful eyes the auditors probably had on him.
A few minutes later, Smitt, looking darker, bald, and more rotund, made his way to the west wing of Central, slowing down and changing his gait. The new sysware tech walked with a limp, and had a tendency to scratch his crotch and tuck his hands into his armpits. Smitt had spent an entire week following him, studying his every movement and habit, as he had had to do thousands of times before when prepping intelligence for James. Except now, it was Smitt running his own jobs. This was at the same time thrilling and frightening. He had failed the chronman tier for very specific reasons, after all.
Smitt entered the data-housing wing in the sub-basement of Central and inserted his doppelganger clearance hack into the security zone. This, too, was retrieved from the sysware tech when Smitt had found him semi-conscious at the bar one night and helped the guy back to his room. Swell guy, that Smitt, everyone had said. After he laid the guy onto his bunk, a swipe of the doppelganger and a copy of the paint band got all the clearance he needed. He grinned as the doors slid open. He made eye contact with the two monitors guarding a second set of doors and lumbered forward in his awkward gait.
“Another shift, Burke?” the monitor on the left said. “Just got here and already piling it on. You’re going to make the rest of the techs look bad.” Burke was actually scheduled for the fifth rotation.
“Just trying to double-shift my way off nights,” Smitt said gruffly. “Would be nice to see some sun once in a while.”
The monitor chuckled. “I hear you. I don’t know what daylight looks like anymore.”
The monitor on the other side of the door shook his head. “So you can burn under the ozone? Nah, I’m happy with nights. Can’t wait to transfer off this shit planet.”
The two let him into data housing without another glance. Smitt hurried to the rear terminals where the consoles hard-lined into the gigantic chron databases. No matter how much surveillance and security the auditors wanted to slap on him, all of it would have to be outside data housing. As long as Smitt accessed the information from inside this central core, he could bypass all the outer firewalls, sniffers, and bugs. Short of their injecting a bug directly into his head, he should be in the clear.
He connected his AI band to the console and began to retrieve the list of information James, the scientist, and the f*cking Mother of Time herself, Grace Priestly, wanted. From jump locations of natural gas deposits to food granaries to solar panel stockpiles, Smitt went down their shopping list and grabbed it all. What his friend was going to do with that information was up to him.
More recently, Grace Priestly—Smitt refused to call her by anything less than her full name—had started making requests directly. At first, he had balked at taking orders from anyone other than James, but no one said no to the Mother of Time. She didn’t seem like someone who took no for an answer. Bringing her back here was insanity. A part of Smitt still couldn’t believe James had the audacity to do that.
Smitt began poring over the chron database and operations logs, querying anything that could prove useful to James and that anomaly who was the root of all Smitt’s woes. He corrected himself; James had berated him for calling her that. It wasn’t her fault he was stupid enough to bring her back. That colossal blunder was all James. She was supposed to save humanity’s home world, after all. Smitt grunted. Fat chance of that.
An hour into his sleuthing, Smitt stumbled upon something interesting. “What’s this?” He frowned, and dug deeper. His fingers tingled with excitement at the possibility of making a breakthrough on one of James’s more difficult requests.
After chasing redacted reports for the past two shifts, he had finally come upon a pretty mundane operations report of a ChronoCom transport commissioned by Valta a week after James’s jump to Nutris. The transport’s mission was to rendezvous with one of the corporation’s ships just outside the asteroid Hygiea.
All this wouldn’t ring any alarms, except that the transport captain wrote in his logs that when he first reached the rendezvous point, he had raised his ship’s alert level, because he thought they were under attack by a heavily armed giant ship with no identifying signatures.
A week later, the ChronoCom Baligant outpost observed an unmarked Zeus-class warship heading toward the supposedly unpopulated Cassini Regio, the dark side of Iapetus, Saturn’s third-largest moon. Now, giant warships weren’t common. At least not anymore. A few more minutes of sleuthing showed that Valta had only four Zeus-class warships. Three of them were positioned along the Radicati militarized zone, and all three were marked.
“What’s an energy-guzzling warship doing where there’s no warring to be had?” Smitt asked, tapping his fingers along the console. He checked the time. “Oh crap.” He would have to continue this later. He had stayed too long. Smitt glanced back at the door and his hands began to sweat and shake. The real Burke should be heading down here soon. The longer Smitt stayed, the higher the odds of getting caught.