“Repair crew’s here. Normal.”
“Accessing servers.”
The tip of my rearmost right leg splits open, physical input jack waiting for an entry point. I scan the server, and find one underneath. The jack slides in without a hitch. Data streams down one side of my view, an endless waterfall of incomprehensible bytes. I shift to a different mouth, reaching out for another listener.
“Jase, you getting this?”
“Yeah. Standard two fifty-six encryption, nothing I can’t handle. Gimme a few.”
I leave him to his cracking and switch back over to the main group.
“Anything on sensors, Wind?”
“No. Relax, Ash. We got this.”
I notice vitals are elevated, pulse twenty beats higher than normal back in the shell.
“…Sorry. Used to having a fourth.”
“Miss Brand,” Slend rumbles.
“Yeah, I miss her too,” I whisper back. A quick buzz in my ear draws my attention away. Jase.
“What’s up?”
“We’re in. Going through the shipping lists now. Hooo-weee, I didn’t know Golgbank was running tech for the Polers. Arctic might melt entirely once they get their hands on that heat.”
“They’re a bank, Jase, they’ll fuck anyone for a profit. Where are we in terms of the hoods?”
“Looking… There. Got it. Looks like the original plans came from a silkie hub in Calgon. Big arco, lots of upper shell corps. Downloading exact coordinates now…”
Another buzz.
“What is it, Slend?”
“Trouble. Response team. Two tanks and a bird. Spinning up now, ETA three minutes.”
“Shit,” Wind squawks. “There’s no reason for a response team to get here this quick.”
“Unless they anticipated a follow-up,” I reply. “Golgbank probably got word that their shipment into Ditchtown got hit. Figured someone might try and backtrace them. They couldn’t have been sure, though, otherwise they would’ve had them already here. How are we looking on exfil?”
“Interior bots are still on auto. Patterns haven’t changed. If that bird gets above the facility, though, getting out’s gonna suck. Sawyer says they’re Herc and Raven equivs.”
“Fucking dick. Of course there’re Game equivs. Fine. We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. Let me know if anything changes.”
I switch back over to Jase.
“Jase, do we have what we need?”
“Yeah, I got the location, but I still want to poke around. There’s all sorts of interesting stuff in he—”
“No time. A Golgbank crisis team is going to be here in less than two and a half minutes. If they catch us, we’re all dead.”
“Shit. What should I do?”
“Unless you can take down a hardened recon drone and two mainline battletanks, stay quiet and don’t distract me.”
“What model is it?”
“What?”
“The recon drone. What model is it?”
I roll my sensor cluster. While I’m sure Jase wants to help, we’ve been doing this a long time. No one hacks into a Raven without cheats, and this isn’t the Game.
“Recon Autonomous Vehicle edition nine, aka Raven. Built by Appho Technologies, a silkie mil-hardware sub, commonly sourced to larger corps and govs. Cruising altitude twenty-five thousand feet, loiter time thirty-six hours, infgathering in radar, lidar, infrared, and fifteen hundred different patents pending, though I don’t think that’s pertinent. Oh, and it also fires missiles. Fast ones. They’ll kill us before you can blink.”
“K. Gimme a sec.”
“Wait, what?”
Another buzz. I curse, and flip back over to the group.
“Talk to me.”
“Twenty-second warning on exfil.” Slend’s voice is calm, unhurried. If I didn’t know how to listen, hadn’t put my ass on the line with her for the past ten years, I’d never notice the thread of fear hiding in the background of her frequency.
“Shit. Okay, how are we looking on the inside, Wind?”
“Same as before. You’ll be able to frogger the drones, but there’s no way we’re making it out before that Raven gets overhead. Once it does, if it sees us, the Hercs aren’t far behind, and good luck dropping those with deuces.”
“One step at a time. Slend, time?”
“Three. Two. One. Go.”
I slide out of the door, senses taut. To my left, a drone trundles down the hallway, scanning the motionless walls. I step in behind it, my feet drifting across the floor like falling leaves. At the end of the hallway, I dart into another room, quickly shutting the door with a steady hand.
“Time?”
“Three. Two. One. Go.”
I open the door and slide back out, a different drone passing behind me. I ignore it and sprint around the corner, sensors focused on a cooling vent in the ceiling. Screws twist in their frames, as if by magic, and the grate swings down, a hand from above holding it into place. I leap for the opening, driving the servos in my legs almost past their thresholds in order to generate enough upward velocity, then tuck myself into a streamlined ovoid, hoping I calculated the arc correctly. The edges of the vent vanish behind, my belly scraping to a halt, legs tucked tight to my body, and Wind quickly swings the grate back into position, her hands already tightening the screws. The last one slots into place as another drone rounds the corner, salt shaker body scanning the hallway with a triangular beam of red light. No alarm sounds.
“Yesssss!” Wind crows over the command channel. “That’s what I’m talking about. Fucking perfectly executed frogger. Wait until the boardshits see—”
“Focus, Wind,” I snap, tapping her front. “We’re not out yet, and this is still the real. We can’t afford to fuck up.”
“Sorry, sorry,” she mumbles. “Got caught up in the moment.”
“How’re we looking outside, Slend?”
“Not good. Hercs’re here, one front, one behind. Raven’s overhead, full eyes. I move, it probably shoots. Local meat squad’ll be here in ten.”
“Shit. Any brilliant ideas on how to get from here to the truck?”
“Disable the Herc in front. Kill its sensors. Hope the Raven’s not looking.”
“That’s not gonna help,” Wind interjects. “They find our slugs in the Herc, they’ll know it was an op, and then game over, man. It’s gotta look like an accident.”
I share Slend’s vision. A Hercules class mainline battletank, stubby HV turret swiveling atop four articulated tread legs, secondary fléchette launchers bristling from each side of its body like spines, stands in front of the building, its left sensor suite covering our path to the carrier, its right painting the street it half straddles in strobes of infrared. Behind the building, another Herc scans the scrap-littered area. Above, a speck circles in a tight hourglass, sensor beams constantly probing in deadly sunbeam shafts.
Shit. Between the tanks and the bird, all routes out are covered. I groan.
“Well, crap. I know how to disable the front Herc, but unless we can hit that Raven, it doesn’t mean shit. We might be proper fucked this time, ladies.”
Sawyer doesn’t say a word, at least not to me, but then again, he won’t until the op is either over or truly busted. We’re not dead yet, but it doesn’t look good.
My ear buzzes again.
“What is it, Jase?”
“Uh, I have control of the Raven. If you can clear the front tank, you should probably be able to get out.”
I feel my eyes widening, an unfamiliar sensation itching at their corners, not like any of the sensor data I’m used to interpreting.
“What?”
“Well, turns out one of the VPs of Appho really likes old bootleg yaoi vids, and she, uh, happens to live in one of the dryburbs nearby, orbital commutes to Neo Frisco, and, uh, I may have cracked her comms while she was in Ditchtown waiting for m—for a grayhat to build her a bypass crack, kind of surprising, really, that someone in charge of a corp like that lives here, not to mention such shitty opsec, but her avatar codes were just sitting right there, and it’s not like—”