Susan's Plague

Chapter 13 - Flight

Paladin One-Three held up on another landing, as per a com-linked order from Daniel. "I think we should get out of the stairwell." Daniel advised the group. "If they don't know we are in here already, they will soon. One more flight down there is a service door to the interstitial space between the floors and about 200 meters in are the effluent conduits, a pair. Only one is in use at any given time, we can get in there and work our way down to the sub-levels, it should be safer than this stairwell.

"Not another sewer." Miller lamented.

"Huh?" Daniel responded.

"Never mind."

Sean had never experience this level of panic before, he wondered if the others felt the same, judging by their faces, they did. The stairwell was claustrophobic and felt like a trap, getting out of them seemed like a good plan. "Let's do it, Daniel.  Anything is better than here."

"When we get in the conduit, I'll give Trey a break, and Nine will take over for Miller, you guys can get a brief rest." Daniel said, everyone was in agreement. "Let's move."

They made it without incident to the giant effluent conduits and found an access hatch, once inside they found themselves in a huge tunnel. It was nothing like the dirty, stinking sewers Miller imagined, the interior was shiny and spotless, chrome-like. Their footfalls echoed loudly as did their voices. Service lights at regular intervals provided enough light to see well enough and the tunnel appeared to go on for some distance. 

As promised, Daniel and Nine switched off with Trey and Miller, Daniel taking a moment to check his sister's vitals. She was still in some kind of coma from what he could tell. Daniel's worried look made Sean's heart sink, but both did their best to conceal their worry from the others.

"This tunnel runs horizontal for quite a ways," Daniel began explaining "but then it becomes a vertical shaft, there's no stairs, just a ladder, so we will have to be extremely careful."

"How far down?" Trey asked. He was not fond of heights.

"Far enough. Put it this way, if you fall, we won't hear you hit bottom." Daniel replied.

"Lovely."

* * * * *

Nic finally made a connection to the backdoor, he had almost given up, figuring the people who had disconnected the Netpod had also caught on to the compromised systems. There was no time to celebrate, time was still very much against him. Despite knowing where to go, it still took a bit of time to get back to the network with the quantum bridge interfaces. Once he regained access, he looked again at the list of bridge names.

"Which one?" He asked aloud, Katherine gave a click. "I'm leaning toward Q4 or Q5. I'm guessing that unauthorized use of these things could set off some kind of security alert, so I don't think I will be able to try both. These two appear to be the most locked down though." Nic rambled on. He looked at the stained glass window, the man with the sheep, wishing for an answer, but not expecting one.

"Katherine, Q4 or Q5? Can you give me a probability report?" Soon a chart came up on the display, according to Katherine's calculations, Q5 had a 50.0127% probability of being the correct choice. "Nice, Q4 it is. Katherine, run all the keys against Q4," he paused "Wait, no, that's a bad idea, we need more information. I'm going to see if I can dig up any documentation on using these quantum bridges. See if you can find any data on who might be the managers of these bridges, and lets start dumping the network traffic, see what is coming and going across these links."

Nic immediately got down to the business of learning how the bridges functioned in the hopes he could get across one and find Erik. He quickly checked the worms status, the count was still rising, Centreon systems continued to be infected en masse, a good indicator they had not been discovered yet. He still had some time.