Chapter 9
Elena walked toward the media press box at the back of the courtroom, stepping carefully over puddles and debris. The automated cameras were dead, destroyed by her own hand earlier, but the central broadcast rack—housed in a secure, steel-reinforced media closet behind the press gallery—remained functional. It was an isolated local rig designed to feed live video signals directly to public access networks before routing them through corporate filters.
Sterling watched her from the floor, his breathing ragged. "You won't reach the public network," he rasped, coughing up a small amount of residual water. "That terminal is hard-wired to a proprietary satellite uplink. Without the root encryption certificate, attempting an unauthorized broadcast triggers an automatic system wipe."
Elena paused, looking down at the corporate executive with mild, unbothered curiosity. "Sterling, you still don't understand who you're dealing with. I didn't steal your files to ask permission. I stole them to steal your bandwidth."
She reached into a side pouch of her combat uniform and pulled out a small, modified fiber-optic tap—a black cylindrical device bearing the insignia of an independent investigative collective that had gone dark years ago. Without hesitation, she forced open the maintenance panel of the media closet, exposing the tangled mass of high-speed fiber cables inside.
Judge Vance walked up behind her, standing quietly as a silent guardian against any sudden moves from the prosecution table. The spectators watched in breathless anticipation, realizing that the chaotic courtroom drama was reaching its absolute climax.
Elena clipped the fiber-optic tap directly into the primary data trunk line, then inserted the titanium micro-encryption drive into the device's secondary port. A tiny blue LED light flickered once, twice, and then settled into a steady, pulsing amber rhythm. The terminal screen inside the rack flickered to life, displaying a cascade of rolling green code as the biometric scanner verified her identity against the encrypted dataset.
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"Bypassing corporate firewall," Elena muttered, her fingers dancing across the terminal's compact mechanical keyboard with practiced speed. "Routing decrypted packets through civilian open-source relays. Packet one... packet two... data stream active."
Across the room, the wall-mounted public display monitors—which had remained blank and unresponsive since the trial began—suddenly flared to life. Instead of corporate static, the massive screens began projecting raw, unedited financial ledgers, video transcripts, and operational orders bearing the unmistakable red stamp of Project Aegis.
