Blackhat

[Eugen Aker]

Abigail Dolsa, better known as "Switch" within Slicer circles. A brilliant Slicer by all accounts, if the dossier was to be believed, her computer talents only matched by her recklessness. Very recently, she had done a very bad thing in attempting to con a Hutt crime lord, and now that Hutt wanted very bad things to happen to her in return.

That's where Jihun came in, a man more than capable of making all the Hutt's twisted fantasies come to pass. In hunting down Switch, his first move was to simply wait. Time was a wonderful tool, breeding complacency, creating openings to exploit.

As the heat began to die down on her transgressions, he then tossed out the lure, coming in the form of a slicing job. Details were vague, but enough information was provided to hint at task revolving around corporate espionage and the promise of a big payout in the event of success. He figured the challenge and reward would enough to attract the attention of someone of Switch's caliber, it truly was a difficult task designed to weed out the script kiddies and the other rabble.

The job was posted over the dark networks of the Invisible Market under the alias of "Cardinam". From there, Jihun returned to waiting, looking for his prey to take the bait.

 

[Switch]

Switch sat cross legged at the foot of her bed, the blue light of her screen illuminating her fair features in the otherwise dim apartment. While she would normally assure that all lights were left on, the familiar glow of the terminal before her was harsh enough that she could forget the encroaching dark surrounding her. It made the room around her all but fade into inky blackness, allowing the slicer to truly focus on the task at hand. She was finally running out of credits.

If there was anything that most thinking beings in the galaxy could agree upon, it was that you never double crossed the Hutts. The infamous gangsters lived long lives, and seemed to hold even longer grudges. Their vengeance was the sort of thing a person heard horror stories about, the only thing about them more notorious being their gluttony. Switch was definitely beginning to regret her spur of the moment decision to rob one of them blind. While it had never exactly seemed like a good idea, the woman had always be both cursed and graced by a tendency to follow her whims. It had just been so much money!

Like all fortunes, however, it was bound to dry up eventually, a life on the run was an expensive one, after all. An expensive endeavor to fake her death had worked for a while, but the woman had been unable to leave well enough alone, putting herself in danger all over again for little more than the thrill of it. It was a testament to her talents, as well as a bit of the devil's on luck, that she was still moving about the galaxy with relative freedom.

Switch blinked her eyes, her reverie dissipating as a familiar tone from the datapad in her lap indicated a hit. Careful not to break the connection to her terminal, the slicer lifted the device up to swipe through the data presented. There was a steady network of bots being sent from the terminal before her to mask her location, but she needed to work externally like this to prevent the one in twenty chance some hunter guessed the right location. It was nothing groundbreaking in her line of work, but it kept the amateurs from bothering her during her down time.

She swept a slender finger across her screen, scanning the latest job identified by her feelers in the local dark networks. The fact that she had to delve at all was a good sign that the task would be worth her time, and the careful economy on details was a common indicator of an employer who new what they were doing.

She bit her lip, absently fingering the goggles hanging from her neck before getting to work typing on the glowing screen. People in her field knew better than to reply directly to a posting like this, since that would greatly compromise net security on their end. The trick was to trace the message back to the shell account it was issued from, cracking the security to leave a certain ping for the sender. There were no logos this deep in the web, but every slicer had a closely guarded signature they could key in to indicate their interest. Nobody knew each other personally, but a "marked" job was almost always respected.

There were further precautions the woman could take to be even safer, but she had always been just a little too cocky for her own good. With a flourish, she sent the ping to the source of the job, before allowing the datapad to plop back down in her lap.