Page 145 of Glitched Fates & Stolen Mates

“It looks like it.” I switched to the port scanner results. “I’ve got internal IP ranges, high-bandwidth research equipment, industrial-level power consumption. This must be them.”

The wind howled above us, but under the coat, everything felt suddenly still. Too still.

“Right,” I said, steeling myself. “I need to get my laptop out.”

Rory blinked at me. “Are you joking? In this storm?”

“I’m seeing enterprise-grade encryption. That means I can’t crack it with just the tablet.” My tablet could detect and map networks, but serious penetration testing required my laptop’s full toolkit—Kali Linux, custom scripts, the processing power to crack encryption protocols.

“We’re going to be completely exposed,” Rory said. “And if that thing gets wet—”

“Then we’re screwed.” I was already shrugging off my pack. “But if we don’t find a way in, Kit’s the one who’s screwed.”

The weight of that settled between us, chillier than the storm. Kit, somewhere in the facility ahead, possibly being tortured or worse while we worried about protecting the laptop from snow.

I pulled it out with shaking hands. “You’re going to have to help me cover this thing while I work. And please stay close to me. If I get too cold, I won’t even be able to type.”

Rory nodded grimly, unfolding his emergency poncho. “How long will it take?”

“Could be anywhere from ten minutes to an hour, depending on their security.”

“An hour?! We’ll die! Or, you will at least.”

Ignoring him, I powered up the laptop, the screen casting an eerie blue glow across the snow. “I need to map their network topology first, find a weak entry point.”

“What kind of weak entry point?”

“Printers are good. Environmental monitoring systems. Anything with default credentials or poor security updates.” I pulled up my scanning tools, fingers already moving across the keyboard despite the cold. “Military facilities usually focus their security on the perimeter but leave internal networks poorly segmented.”

The laptop chimed as it detected the same networks my tablet had found, plus several more. My automated tools immediately began probing for vulnerabilities.

“There,” I breathed, watching the results populate. “Someone’s got an IoT device on the network with firmware that hasn’t been updated in two years.”

“Can you get in through that?”

“Give me fifteen minutes.” I hunched over the keyboard, already lost in the familiar rhythm of penetration testing. “Just keep the snow off the screen.”

But even as I worked, part of my mind remained focused on the mountain silence around us. We were close now—close enough to detect their networks, close enough to be detected ourselves.

Somewhere in the facility ahead, cameras might already be tracking our heat signatures through the storm.

My fingers flew across the keyboard, muscle memory taking over despite the cold. The IoT device had laughably weak security. Within minutes, I was inside their network perimeter.

“I’m in,” I said, barely containing my excitement. “Now for the fun part.”

“Fun?”

“Lateral movement.” I was already pivoting through their internal systems, escalating my privileges with each poorly configured connection. “Their network segmentation is awful. Whoever set this up clearly prioritised speed over security.”

A new window popped up on my screen—the security system interface. I could barely breathe.

“Felix,” Rory whispered. “What is it?”

“I can see everything.” The words came out in a rush. “Every camera, every sensor, every bloody access control in the facility.” I scrolled through the camera feeds. Corridors upon corridors. Rooms full of equipment, spaces that looked more like interrogation suites than offices. Uniformed men and women moving about, or standing around talking.

I switched to the outdoor perimeter cameras, cross-referencing their positions with the geodata I’d mapped earlier. My screen filled with overlapping coverage zones.

“Right, look at this.” I tilted the laptop towards Rory. “I can map us a route using camera blind spots. And where there isn’t any, I can loop a few feeds so they’ll show empty footage while we pass through.”