Chapter 89: Breaking first, entering second
Ripley’s Transcript of the Shandian Facility Heist debrief:
Missy: Shandian’s facilities may look small from the outside, but that’s because a majority of their real estate is underground. As you can all see from your digital overviews of the blueprints, each manufacturing facility has a massive network of subterranean factories dedicated to their product. Below the main production lines will be their security floor, where they have their guards live and sleep. Below that is the research and development layer, where we can expect there to be some form of evidence of Goliath.
Me: Soooo… we have to fight our way down past multiple floors of guards and scientists, then go alllll the way back up to escape.
Elsa: Yeah, if you can find a way to plug into their security system on the way down, my auto-cleaver might be able to grant you access to their elevators. Otherwise, you’ll have to go the difficult route. Figure out a way in and out, prior to entering.
Missy: Exactly as Mirage has said. On that note of the security system; when entering the facility we’ll have to disable our comms to avoid being detected, however, if you can establish yourselves in the communications network as non-traceable, then we can resume communications and coordinate ourselves.
R0N1N: Yes, assuming any of us find traces of Goliath in a specific facility, we are all to retreat and regroup at the Goliath-housed facility.
Ripley: Which… still involves us breaking out of the place we broke into.
Diamante: Yes. That much is obvious, dumbass.
Topaz: Eh… no problem for me. Sucks for the rest of you, though.
1:30 AM August 30th
Ripley (1 hour until the heist)
R0N1N… made for a poor conversationalist. He was a hard read, like… he seemed nice? Offered me that whole 1 million Shardyne package without hesitation, but there was a lot that was unsaid. How did he have so much money to throw around? Who made all of that Shardware of his? Why was he so anti-Yuzhou?
“Soooo… how’d you ever figure out about Goliath?” I leaned back in my seat.
“I do not give away details of my informants.” R0N1N answered quite professionally as he drove.
“Alright, fair. Uh, so how do you want to do this breaking in thing? I’ve looked through the facility, it’s airtight from the outside, we’ve got a whole lot of-”
“I’m going to cut through the walls.” His answer was simple, looks like he had a sense of humor.
“Right… funny.” I laughed.
“That wasn’t a joke.” He took a glance at me that… made me feel tiny.
“Uhhh… if you’re serious, those walls are a meter thick and-“ I looked through the blueprints again. “Made of titanium and carbon reinforced Yttrium steel. Wouldn’t it be easier to just find some ventilation? I could sneak my drone in and open up a nice window?”
“No. That will take too much time and depend on you. I will cut through the wall, besides, sneaking in ventillation is more noisy than it seems. Cutting through their security is simpler and more efficient.” Efficient was one way of putting it.
“Right, so where exactly are we going to cut this wall?” I opened up the floorplans, searching for a suitable location.
“Where it is closest to us.” Yeah, this guy can’t be serious.
I sighed. “I doubt that is stealthy.”
“I don’t require stealth. I can kill them before they blink.”
“Okay, if you meant that joke… it was kind of funny.” I admitted, but R0N1N barely moved a muscle. Sensing I wasn’t going to get a response, I moved to look through the map of the massive facility, even the ground level was huge and that only got bigger the further underground you went. You could probably spend days in there and still not see everything. The entire facility could probably have a thousand people working in and out. An estimated two hundred guards around the clock considering recent events from the hotel...
The outside would be guarded, but the facility itself was built to not gain too much attraction. It wasn’t absolutely brimming with security in and out, they were still putting up the appearance of a regular factory. The first few floors should reflect that.
”Alright…” I found a suitable place. “We’ll cut the walls into a restroom.”
”A restroom?” R0N1N actually looked at me.
“Yeah. No cameras in the stalls. Just need to figure out how to stay out of sight from the outside, what if I create a distraction with my dro-”
“They’ll catch it and trace the signal back to you.” R0N1N said, but not so bluntly like he normally did. “Very well, we will go into the washroom.”
”And I can use my drone to scout in the insi-“
“No.” Never mind, he was blunt again.
I grumbled in silence, playing the music up higher while I looked through the chunks of text and pictures of the information we’d gathered. My Scrapyard popped up a few times, building out the make-hows of their general security forces. The good thing was the Shandian operatives were all standardized, sure their general Shardware was far better than all of the gangs I’d faced, but everyone was the same. (Excluding their special operatives.)
Tier 0 Guards were mainly on observation duty, recent recruits, just a standard pistol and padded armor. Tier I Guards were slightly better armored up to Iron grade and had an Assault Rifle and a Pistol that could pierce Iron-Grade Shardware. Tier IIs had Bronze-grade armor with mobility-boosters, Assault rifles with ricochetting bullets, grenades and a pistol capable of altering between modes of fire, plus some neat utility items to reflect their Mutations and Features.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Tier IIIs all had unique weapons, but were known to have powerful armor that was entirely bulletproof to anything at Bronze Grade or even Silver Grade potential. The outliers we could face would be Exo-Suit wielders, named Exoguards, and Espers, Data Delvers, and automated drones and turrets.
Still, we were both Gold Grade. And R0N1N was known to be extraordinarily powerful, with an unparalleled experience in eliminating Yuzhou property.
“We’re getting off here.” R0N1N stopped the minivan about two-kilometers away from the facility. “If we park close by they can track down our vehicle and cut off our escape route.”
Ah so he wasn’t doing this entirely gung-ho… but then again, this was with the assumption that we weren’t going to this stealthy. I kept my mouth shut, but I was thinking of maybe using my motorbike kept in the back of the van to get closer, though I chose against it, any distance from the R0N1N was a step towards my grave.
We hopped and climbed onto the low rooftops, our stealth-suits activating and draining a steady dribble of our Warp Energy to make our forms less visible… It was a pseudo-invisibility that relied on precise light refraction that made us pretty see-through in the darkness.
My Arachne pulsed to life as we scaled buildings and worked our way to the facility, a thin crawl of the black material streamed up the angular curves of my spider-limbs lending them the semi-permeable invisibility. I really needed to learn how this suit worked.
Though, I couldn't lie, I would have to turn it off the second we got into combat. For one, bright lights made it useless, and the second reason was that it felt like a constrained collar was choking my Warp Energy — something it did so any sensors wouldn’t detect unregistered Shardware or Mutation usage. Quartz apparently had a suit which took the phenomenon to the extreme.
We landed in sight of the massive facility, I didn’t know what Missy was thinking calling this place tiny — it was about as wide as a mega-building and even had a Mass-Aerodyne hanger attached to it. The great walls were stone at the bottom and the fence rose up until it reached even up above these rooftops. They really didn’t want people breaking in.
“Can you jump it?” R0N1N turned to me, and I nodded wearily. He pointed down the exact position he wanted me to land out in a holographic marker far beyond the fence into a pit of shadows between some garbage dumps.
Searching up my current Mimicset Modules, I settled on the one I’d gained from Simenry.
Mimicset Modules [7/10]:
* Stabilize: [I+B] Sustain/Sustain
* Burn: [2B] Overclock/Overclock
* Insight: [2B] Analyze/Network
* Wield: [2B] Integration/Integration
* Databreak: [I+B] Dataweave/Jailbreak
* Hammer: [I+B] Accommodate/Overclock
* Overcome: [2B] Sustain/Database
Hammer. It’s Overclock Feature was a bit different than the others, I found it strange why Simenry had fairly minimal Shardware — focusing only on his legs and one arm. His Feature explained why. Most Overclock Features had the backlash of causing wear and tear to the Shardware due to it pushing beyond its limits. This variant, on the other hand, increased the Capacitance of Shardware to make it much more difficult to use at the expense of lower motor control. Switching it on really took a number on me.
Capacitance: 132.9%
Yeah imagine suddenly strapping weights to every cell of your body, that was how this felt. Still, it was like a thundering storm was brewing in my legs when I focused my Warp Energy into them… and as R0N1N disappeared from my sights, a whipping of air becoming all that remained of his position, I jumped after him.
I heard the concrete crack as I arose higher into the air, I calculated my aerial arc just about right, and prepared my four Arachne arms to soften my landing next to where I think R0N1N was.
They stretched, then crimped down as they contacted the earth with triple-pronged stabilizers on each arm. I still felt the thick clap of my legs sounding across the area, one of the nearby guards startled to our far left.
“What the hell?”
Looking to my right, I could see the vaguely shimmering form of R0N1N shaking his head at me, then the wind shook around me as a blink was all it took for him to vanish. I didn’t even hear his footsteps before he came across the corner with the Tier 0 guard slunk across his shoulder, a Parastim lodged in the neck.
Right, we only had 10 Iron Grades and 4 Bronze Grade Paralyzing vials each. So, in total 28 stealth takedowns were possible. This left us minus one Iron stim. R0N1N threw the body into an open garbage disposal, muttering softly under his mask. “I should have just cut the fence down.”
“Do you want to alert every Shandian guard here?” I whispered back, slightly annoyed.
“I could handle it.” He was all too serious, and even if I did believe him, I wasn’t going to just let myself go through a full shootout on my way to the bottom.
“Alright, follow me to the bathroom.” That sounded weird, but I was sure he didn’t care anyway, so we snuck down the side of the building, following the map towards the outside walls of the toilets. A couple of times, I had my Insight Module detect the Warpcode of cameras — a quick switch to Databreak and a use of my left claw’s new Datajammer Feature-Link disabled them. The purpose of the Link was simple; on any Bronze-Grade system or below, the flow of information would be jammed quickly enough that I could wield one or two seconds to manipulate the Warpcode of Shardware before the internal countermeasures popped up.
R0N1N actually gave me a hum of approval for that, it left me strangely proud.
We continued following the path until we reached the designated wall, though we took down two more Tier 0 guards putting us at 25 stims left. Watching the wall, I channeled energy into my newer eyes courtesy of my grandfather when I found them in the Enskel.
Both Feature Links were pretty fantastic: Shardware Scanner and Structure Analysis. One allowed me to instantly scan Shardware and store its diagnostic memory in my Neuroframe, while the other was fantastic for observing larger material layouts and determine a whole lot of properties — materials weight, tensile strength, faults and other fancy details.
I immediately used it to scan the wall R0N1N would be cutting through. ”Alright, so since you’re probably removing at least one cubic meter of this steel, we’re looking at nearly 8 tons of metal that you need to move. My claws should be able to penetrate it, but if the incisions you make are according to the diagrams I’m sending over to you, I can make a pulley system if I knot up my Livewire and have you-”
R0N1N slid his katana all the way through the metal to shut me up, then in a single smooth motion drew a circle wide enough for us both to comfortably fit in. He propped the blade back in his scabbard, stabbed both of his hands into the metal, casually pulled all eight tons out and carefully placed it on the ground.
“I appreciate the input.” He said with a nod. He didn’t sound mad… he just… said it. No particular emotion attached. He walked through the hole he made, and I followed suit.
There was a suited woman washing her hands, looking mildly terrified at the two of us men who’d just barged into the women’s washroom.
“Gua-!” Her mouth could barely open before a needle was stuck in her neck, her body slumping on the sink. I hadn’t even seen R0N1N move but it was precisely stuck in her subclavian vein with a surgeon’s precision.
We heard a muffled yelp in one of the stalls, to which R0N1N and I exchanged an awkward look at the prospect of… interrupting her business. I got first dibs. “I’m not entering-”
R0N1N disappeared for a single frame of my eyesight’s refresh rate and reappeared the next. Even though he had taken the fall, I was judging him very harshly.
“I don’t even like women.” He said it like it would justify barging into someone’s private time.
“Tch, no wonder you and Topaz went on a mission alone.” I joked, but there was a difference in this silence. A silence I chose to ignore. It was more important to focus on this mission, we were in the facility — and now it was time to dig deeper.
“Okay, wait!” I put my hand up in front of The R0N1N. “We’re using my drone first to scout!”
I pointed at the woman to make my point, and begrudgingly, he nodded.