The room was spacious, with vaulted walls. More than a dozen people were sitting before banks of computers with flashing readouts and indicators. Vid monitor screens displayed incomprehensible images, probably from the alleys of the Pits. The cool semidarkness of the whole place hummed with the subdued beeping of machines and the quiet murmur of comm-techs communicating with other villes and Magistrates out in the field.
Kane’s gaze shifted to the left, and he spotted the man he was looking for. He waited until the vid spy-eye lens was no longer focused on the door, then he strode over to Morales and clapped him on the shoulder. “How are you?”
Morales looked up from his deck of computers, hard drives and monitor screens and forced a smile, trying to wipe away the look of boredom on his swart face.
“Fine,” he said. “Working late, are you?”
“Just a little. I wonder if you would like doing a little favor for me.”
Morales suddenly sat up straighter in his chair. When a hard-contact Magistrate asked a support tech for a favor, there was no option but to grant it. No matter how it was worded, a request from a Magistrate was always a command. Kane knew that and how to exploit it.
Turning his back to the vid camera on the ceiling, he fished the compact disk from his pocket and handed it to Morales. “Put this through a read program, please.”
Morales eyed the disk warily. Normally computer-time demands came through the duty officer, but the likelihood was that the tech wasn’t inclined to point this out. He inserted the disk into the input port and tapped a few keys on the board. The triangle-and-lines symbol flashed onto the screen, accompanied by the legend, “Disk is locked. Access denied. Encryption key required.”
Morales frowned. “Do you have the key?”
“No,” Kane replied casually. “Just run it through the Syne, why don’t you?”
Nodding, Morales popped out the disk and plucked a small metal device from a hook beneath his desk. The Mnemosyne, or Syne as commonly called, was a lock decrypter, shaped like an elongated circle divided down the center by a thread-thin slit. He placed the edge of the disk into the slit and thumbed a stud on the instrument’s surface. It produced a faint, very high-pitched whine.
After ten seconds, the noise ceased, Morales removed the disk from the decryption device and pushed the disk back into the hard drive. His fingers danced over the keyboard. The monitor screen lit up with the red triangle again, as well as with the words, “Disk is locked. Access denied. Encryption key required.”
Both Kane and Morales made sounds of surprise. Morales muttered, “What the fuck? This shouldn’t happen the encryption lock should have been overridden.”
Kane was only moderately familiar with computers. To him, they were simply sometimes useful machines, and their more arcane workings held little interest for him. However, he knew the Syne was designed to perform only one functionto sidestep security lockouts and make digital memory accessible and available.
Morales worked the keys again, but the image and the words on the screen remained unchanged.
“This is something you don’t see every day,” he said, irritated and enthralled at the same time. “Whoever wrote the program knew how to safeguard it against the Syne.”
“Who would have that knowledge?”
Morales shrugged. “Nobody I know or ever heard of, that’s for sure.” He paused, chewing on his lower lip. “Want my best guess? Whoever wrote the program either helped to engineer the Syne or had access to the specs.”
He slid out the disk and handed it back to Kane. “The thing’s useless unless you stumble onto the encryption key. I suggest you take it up to archives. Somebody there might have an idea of how to unlock it.”
Pocketing the disk, still sounding casual, Kane said, “Thanks. By the way”
“Yeah?”
“This never happened. You never saw me. We never had this conversation.” Kane folded his arms over his chest, allowing Morales the briefest of glimpses of the Sin Eater under his right sleeve.
The tech’s expression didn’t alter. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anything about encryption codes. I’m just a key-tapper.”