4 July 2100
A Steptoe-class Vacuum Cleaner Gleaner also contacts us; they believe they may have been an unknowing vector, in that they were carrying a satellite service crew several weeks ago; that crew was from Engineering Facilities Partnership: consisting of Tom Barnard, Lewis Kanjio and Alita Zorita. This appears to check out at the administrative level; they are being tracked down. Their logs show nothing exceptional. This mission did only two of the four orbital planes, so it’s clearly not a sole precipitating incident. We welcome this cooperation from the VC crew.
Cross-checking with the Kaga data we see no other physical access in the last three months.
Sophie Barnard and the police arrive at the site a few hours before we are due to enter orbit; the facility staff put up some resistance. We take up a plane with the dead satellite.
Barnard reckons that the virus came to the downside station from a recently-serviced satellite, buried itself until changed keys had worked through the backups, then activated.
We inspect the dead satellite. There is still power, but firmware has been deleted. There appears to be no lasting damage.
We cold-load a debug build of the firmware to observe the reinfection process. This happens in a sensible way.
Before we begin the process of deactivating and recovering all satellites, we want a memory dump of an infected machine. Such as the one we’re sitting next to, first.
We move to the next most available satellite, and bring in a microgravity RATS to make a connection and image its operating memory.
We clarify the situation with civilian authorities and prepare to shut down and reimage all satellites. Kaga will assist with physical access. This causes the satellites to jettison solar panels and attempt to deorbit themselves, but their thrusters are not sufficiently powerful to make this a fast process.