Sweating and wheezing, Jack struggled up the stairs while Urtiga waited at the top. She had been carefully studying the security guards throughout the evening and had chosen a good opportunity for them to slip away through a service corridor. From there, they were able to navigate to the building’s main maintenance stairwell to get to the top floor. Somehow her phone buzzed them through every security checkpoint, and now they had only to ascend the stairs. Urtiga, Jack painfully observed, didn’t struggle at all with the climb, while his legs felt like jelly.
“How are you so fit?” he asked as he collapsed at the final landing.
“Well,” Urtiga said patiently. “You take some difficult physical movements and do them repeatedly until you are tired. Then you rest a bit. Then you do it again the next day. Ad infinitum.”
“I never could get a workout program together,” Jack wheezed through heavy panting.
“Yeah, and now that you really need it, you don’t have it. And of course, if you didn’t have me here doing all the difficult things for you, you would be dead. And there would be nothing to stop the galaxy combusting like dry straw.”
“Okay, I get it. I should have worked out more.”
Urtiga nodded and calmly peered through the window of the maintenance access door.
“Are we waiting for something?” he asked.
“Yes,” Urtiga replied, adding nothing further.
She checked her watch. Suddenly, all the lights in the building went out. Reaching into her handbag, Urtiga produced a thick pair of glasses. She put them on, then reached for another device that unlocked the door.
“Stay with me,” she ordered, taking Jack’s hand as she led them confidently into the darkness of the executive floor. They wandered through what Jack assumed would be corridors until Urtiga pushed them through a heavy door. On the other side, the stars of the night sky shone brightly through large windows, illuminating the Research Director’s spacious office. Out in the distance, past the grandiose expanse of the VennZech campus, Jack saw the colorful lights of other resorts. He wondered how Urtiga—or her friend—had managed to cut both the main power and backup generator to the building.
She said nothing as they moved toward the director’s computer, producing a data stick from her handbag. Once she had powered up the machine under its own battery supply, she inserted the stick, waited a few minutes, then withdrew it. They left the office, returning to the service stairs.
“The thing about data breaches,” Urtiga said, speaking quietly as they descended, “Is that they can’t really be done undetected. All interactions with data get logged, and anyone carefully checking those logs will figure it out, eventually.”
“Right, so we have to move quickly before they relocate the bomb?”
“No—it would be impossible for us to get to it in time. However, there are alternatives.”
This time, she led them out onto the floor overlooking the lobby. Jack cringed as he caught sight of a security guard facing away from them. Urtiga motioned for him to wait, and he watched, horrified, as she walked calmly behind the unsuspecting guard, produced a pistol from her handbag, and cracked him over the head with it. He dropped unconscious to the floor, while Urtiga strode out to the railing, aimed her weapon, and fired two bullets into the chandelier, shattering glass down on the stunned party goers.
“Death to the oppressors!” She yelled. “Freedom for the workers!” She kept shooting, hitting glass and lights as the terrified guests fled the lobby, screaming and crying. A security guard shot back at her, and she took cover behind the banister, shooting bullets past his head until he lost his nerve and ran for an exit.
Once the lobby appeared to be empty, she returned to Jack, produced a small device with a button, and thumbed it. The lobby exploded with a flash of light and thunder that left Jack’s ears ringing.
“This way,” she said, leading them back to the stairwell.
They reached the parking lot where Urtiga searched carefully among the cars. She found an expensive, but unremarkable looking sedan with a red sticker on the windshield. She frowned. “Unsatisfactory, Gucci,” she said to herself.
The car unlocked and Urtiga went to the boot, producing a machine gun, which she stored by the driver’s seat. Then she drove them near to the closed gate, reversed into an empty space and waited.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Jack tried to pace his breathing, as Urtiga had shown him, but he couldn’t shake the feeling of shock. Lightning coursed through his nerves, and he found himself unable to focus. Even if he had known how to be useful to the plan, he doubted he would have been able to actually do anything. His imagination was filled completely with the scenes from the lobby, the gunfire, and explosions.
“Did… uh… did anyone…” he began, unable to finish the sentence.
“Apart from a few scratches, they’ll all be fine,” Urtiga said. “But the guests won’t be thinking about that—they’ll be freaking out about their near-death experience, and begging for someone to take action. As far as security is concerned, a terrorist attack is in progress, and they will respond per their training protocols. Of course, nobody will be looking at data logs from the executive network for months.”
“Why are we sitting here?”
“Well,” Urtiga explained patiently, “after the frontier war, most of the combat veterans had severe criticisms of the League’s tactics and procedures. But the army’s culture can’t handle disobedience or flexibility, so it pushed them out in favor of career focused yes-men and women. Once those officers gained political influence, they left to form private security forces for the upper classes.
“VennZech security contracts with Iron Fortress consulting, a rather unimaginative and inexperienced organization. They hire exclusively from among the core world’s military forces, who hardly ever interact with the cartels. Of course, they pride themselves on their ‘elite’ status, but what does that even mean when your job consists mostly of training exercises, crowd control, or humanitarian work?”
A sudden thought occurred to Jack. “This is why they work with Rayker, isn’t it? She can get stuff done, at least.”
“Exactly. Criminals have real world experience.”
A series of dull explosions reverberated through the ceiling of the garage.
“They’ll be breaching into the lobby now, through the side entrances on the first floor. Since the camera feed shows no movement in the garage, and they won’t have bothered to run the tape back…”
The main parking gate rolled open, letting black armored vehicles roll through and into the garage. They spread out in the underground space, and as the last vehicle rolled past, Urtiga hit the accelerator. The unremarkable looking car leaped forward with astonishing force, slipping through the closing gate and into the night.
Out on the campus grounds, they snaked between the milling crowds at appalling speed, smashed through a flimsy checkpoint, and disappeared onto the country roads. Urtiga drove using her night-vision glasses—no lights illuminated—and Jack could only hold on for dear life, trying not to vomit as they swung violently through turns he could feel but not see.
As morning approached, Jack saw that they were navigating mountain trails, until Urtiga turned off-road and drove them a good distance into the woods, where they hid the car in a ravine. Then they hiked for hours until the sun was overhead.
Jack felt both physically and mentally destroyed. The sheer amount of emotion and effort he had had to process in a short period left him almost braindead with exhaustion. He found his weakness shocking, as he had always expected he would be able to rise to any difficult occasion. But over the course of the evening, he hadn’t done anything but follow a crazy woman around, and he still couldn’t handle it.
By noon they emerged into a clearing, where Urtiga’s friend from the party was waiting with a small transport shuttle.
“How’s it going? Gucci, we all set?” Urtiga said, a stern look in her eyes.
“Yeah, good to go,” Gucci said and grinned. “Hey, that was an awesome display—you should have seen them running around like headless—”
“It was a bad call on the car. Those models are only used by the starport workers. Anyone checking the garage would have gotten suspicious.”
Gucci looked chastised and nodded. “Okay, check. Bad choice of vehicle.”
“Take more care with your research next time.”
Once they were airborne, Jack stared out at Ambrosia’s perfect blue sky as he fought to stay awake. He was surprised to see that a variety of sports craft were also visible.
“Didn’t they lock air traffic down?” he asked.
“Oh, they’re trying,” Gucci said as she flew the shuttle. “You should read the communication logs—it’ll turn your brain to mush.”
“There’s about a dozen corporate security services with responsibility for different zones of air traffic on Ambrosia,” Urtiga explained. “But no senior executive is going to have his daytrip interrupted because of a rival’s incompetence. And they don’t believe they’re in danger because, of course, their contractors are the best in the world. We’re in Frontier Corp’s territory now, and they have a particularly disgruntled relationship with VennZech—so we’ll pass without trouble.”
“Yeah, and all the chiefs are desperately trying to cover their backsides and pass the blame for why nothing is being done,” Gucci continued. “It’s like a schoolyard argument. Absolutely wild.”
“I always knew the border forces were a bit slow, but this is supposed to be the most well-protected planet—after Earth,” Jack observed in surprise.
“It’s crazy.” Gucci shook her head. “I’m stunned these people hold the keys to the galaxy. Like, any halfway capable warlord with resources and a bunch of solid dudes could knock these losers off the throne. But no-one wants to.”
“Because the system works for everyone,” Urtiga said. “Well, everyone with power, anyway.” Then she cocked her head and took on a thoughtful expression. “And us too, to be brutally honest. Gives us great freedom of action.”
She inserted her data stick into a laptop, and by the time they had reached orbit, she was examining the data stream.
“Fascinating—looks like our device is in a laboratory on Xīn lù. So, Jack, any ideas on how you are going to steal it?”
Jack looked at her in surprise. “Me…? Uh… I thought that…you—” he stammered.
“I just did the easy part. I told you—the real work is going to be all on you,” Urtiga said, her eyes gleaming.
Jack rubbed his temples and tried to suppress a yawn. His answer seemed almost inevitable, even as it made him shudder with dread to contemplate it. He did not see that he had much of a choice, however.
“Well,” he began, “You know how I told you that I’m not connected to the cartels?”