Tunnel Rat

Chapter 20: Accidents

Several alarms were going off as Milo got out of the pod. Most were simply steady beeps, directing his attention to problems, but one was an insistent sound coupled with a red strobe light. A quick check showed the obvious problem of no power for many of the systems.

Power wasn't cheap, and one of the huge costs of keeping the habitats going was a steady supply of energy. The government supplied a minimum amount needed to keep things going. Any industry or business setting up paid for the additional power they needed. A sudden drop in power could be any number of things, from someone pirating the power in E section, the supply being rationed from the city, or a breakdown in distribution. Milo eliminated most of these immediately. E section had plenty of power coming in, the problem was someone tapping into it illegally.

From the location, Milo immediately suspected Kaminski. Sure enough, several more industrial bays were now housing his operation. The amount of power he was using was more than was allocated to Section E, and other machinery was being shut down to compensate. Food processing hadn't worked for an hour, air was moving sluggishly in the whole system.

Milo started trickling power into the system from the storage system to compensate. That would buy him time, but he knew things were just going to get worse and worse. Kaminski must be bribing someone. A lot of someone’s. It was obvious to Milo that he would have to do something.

He had been undecided about trying to notify someone about Kaminski before. Now it had to happen. Whether or not it brought inquisitive people into Section E was a moot point. They'd be here sooner or later when the systems started failing. Better to somehow get him kicked out of here before then.

Security cameras showed Milo what was new. The first was another shipment of the old defective pods, and space to accommodate more people working in them. But the main power hogs were the row upon row of servers and the cooling systems they needed. Cryptocurrencies were one of the main monetary systems in the world. Two of the industrial bays were being set up to house a massive server farm. The combined power drain, heat pollution, and water needs for the workers would all overload what was left of Section E's mechanical systems.

Milo started observing Kaminski in real time, while running the security tapes, looking for information on what he was setting up. Kaminski seemed to be constantly on his phone. Before every call he was punching in codes, often cursing when he got them wrong. Three times he ran a cable from his phone to one of the computers or to the MKVII pod. He was obviously trying to set up a link to his systems from somewhere else.

Milo couldn't access his phone, but he'd long ago hacked Kaminski's computers. Looking at it from that end he could see that in order to access information on another network, the pod and his computers needed to be connected to his phone for the access codes. Kaminski wasn't good at this, but didn't trust his techs to do the work. He fumbled with it for hours before he got things set up correctly. Milo could see a huge amount of information coming from...somewhere. Kaminski's employers? Their main network?

Milo needed that phone. Which currently was sitting on a small table next to the MarkVII pod, in a room with twenty people, some of which were heavily armed. A diversion was needed. A messy one.

Carbon Monoxide monitors were a very common safety device in the habitats, especially in industrial areas. The colorless, odorless gas could kill hundreds of people if it went undetected too long. At 10:38, about an hour after Milo exited his pod, 47 separate CO sensors started blaring their alarms in the rooms that housed the MK3 pods, and the sleeping quarters of the off-duty workers. Techs raced to find the problem, and some of the guards accompanied them to keep the mob of workers under control. The gas was detected, but the source wasn't found. If anything, it was coming from several places.

Things got worse when something hot started a small fire in a trash receptacle, which triggered sprinkler systems. Water sprayed out in several rooms, one of which was the newly installed server center. Several machines were total losses as they shorted out before power could be turned off.

A minute later one of the jury-rigged coolant lines that had been hastily installed in the ceiling came uncoupled. Someone hadn't tightened the clamps holding two hoses together correctly and the pressure broke the joint. High pressure cooling fluid sprayed all over the area below it, which included the MK7 pod. By some luck, as the hose jerked around from the spewing fluid, the pod itself wasn't hit, but the area around it burst into flames. Cooling fluid is highly flammable. Something must have caused a spark.

In the heavy smoke and flames, no one noticed a metal cable about an inch wide snake out of the ceiling, uncouple Kaminski's phone, and then drag the item back into the ceiling above the pod. The tendril reappeared a moment later with what might have been a duplicate of the phone, but was actually a quickly made plastic casing filled with easily melted electronic components. The sacrificial duplicate was placed in the phone’s location, and a moment later burst into flames as coolant fluid sprayed down on it.

Before the emergencies had been dealt with, Milo had the real phone in his workshop and was carefully taking it apart, bypassing its security, and making it a part of his system. He had logs of all the calls placed in the last year, all of the codes and passwords. By tomorrow he would know more about who Kaminski was working for, and what he had been trying to set up.

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Kaminski was furious, screaming at everyone. How the hell could people be so stupid. Yes, he'd wanted things set up as fast as they could. And yes, he may have ignored a few recommendations the technicians had made, but still, they should have been more careful. They had days of clean up to do. He'd lose at least a week getting things back to normal. But no one had died. The authorities didn't even know anything had happened, and nothing essential had been destroyed.

Until one of the techs handed him a blackened bit of plastic and metal that he recognized as the high tech communications device his employers had trusted him with. He screamed at the techs to fix it, but even he knew that wasn't happening. It was falling to pieces, the circuitry totally fried and crumbling. Things couldn't get any worse.