The Easy Part
“Bullying bastards and beating on beats, sounds like a day at the beach. PREACH.”
-"Legend Has It" by Run the Jewelz.
“Good Mornings are overrated, skip the greetings,” a voice far too curated in it’s tone to be natural snapped at an otherwise empty room. Standing atop a pillar whose stairs rose a few stories up in the air, the man stood in near cave darkness, the sort of dark where you’d wave your hands in your own face and see nothing. If he weren’t the type of person who spent a significant chunk of his time in this type of dark already, it would be suffocating. Ever present no matter where you look. With a snap of his fingers, several monitors floating about the cavernous room all activated at once.
On each screen a different person, some silhouetted, some almost inhuman in how much of their bodies had been changed from human to something else, came into view. Unnatural eye colors, metal teeth, chrome where skin should be… some were just for aesthetics, some medical, and some because why not?
Any reason to transcend their humanity was enough.
“I’ll start,” one of the men, his eyes compounded like an mantis, boomed in an unnatural voice. “The Wastes remain a hotbed of activity as usual, between the Scrap Pack, the US government, and our competitors. I’ve sunk another small nation’s worth in money into shoring up our testing sites and the compounds housing the less stable experiments.” Overlaying the black space on the wall behind his monitor, a map of the south and southwest of the United States flickered into view with several red dots representing various threats scattered amidst large swaths of color denoting the different spheres of influence that belong to the bigger players in the least stable stretch of the United States.
“So business as usual,” the man in the center of it all confirmed boredly.
“Biz is good,” compound eyes grinned with enough devious glee to scare away a grizzly bear.
“As for the west coast, things are quiet but thanks to Halogen, the White Spiders have been smuggling people and weapons into the country,” one of the dark silhouettes said all the more meek for the normal voice he spoke with.
“Not to worry, senator,” a woman responded. “I’ve got it in hand.”
“Yes,” the man in the middle spoke into the dark, waving a hand, which made the various displays shrink so Halogen could take center stage. The mocha skinned, curly haired woman smiled, a flash of yellow through her otherwise human eyes betraying that she was anything but normal. “How fares the defense of Kento?”
“Safe and sound in a compound in the heart of New Detroit,” she spoke and the computer changed the map on display behind the floating display to show Detroit. A red dot in the center of downtown marked the location in question. “This is a building that used to be called One Campus Martius before the FORGE acquired it to turn into a tech firm specializing in biomedical and biomechanical research. I saw to it, personally, that the building would be safe enough to house it.”
The man in the middle eyed her, ever wary of the loose cannon he himself had loaded, oiled and pointed at the world nearly 3 decades prior. She hadn’t aged much past the second one.
“Is that so?” yet another voice answered. This one, a blonde woman with red lipstick painting far too perfectly curved lips offered. “I can’t imagine it’s any safer than, say, the bottom of the Atlantic, but it’ll do.”
“We need Kento,” the man in the middle cut in as Halogen’s gaze shifted to where the woman’s display would be in relation to her own face and he saw the tell that, behind the calm facade, a hurricane was fixing to unleash itself.
“Just until we find a way to extract the data,” compound eyes almost hungrily boomed. “Are you sure we can’t house it in one of the safehouses in The Wastes? Hell, even a tower high up in New York has to be better than New Detroit. It’s still in developmental hell, and we don’t have anywhere near as much-”
“Control?” Halogen spoke. “Like you control the Wastes? Ha, the Scrappers would hear word of us putting something in, and there’s no way someone wouldn’t see or hear something no matter how we do it, and then the heat would turn up on everything down there. New York might as well already be a beacon for a hundred mercenaries to take up residence. Stop second guessin’ me, lil nigga, before I start taking offense. Don’t forget what happened last time one of you thought yourselves my better.”
And there went the room.
“Keep your thug on a leash, Amnesia,” the Blonde woman cut in addressing the middle-man by name, who didn’t even flinch.
“One of you is going to be dead by the end of the week if this doesn’t stop,” a different silhouette chimed in. “Let’s cut back before someone says something they don’t think they can let slide.”
“Agreed, I apologize if offense was given, Halogen. All for the better future,” compound eyes spoke, though he didn’t sound the least bit contrite.
“Accepted, and I apologize for my aggression,” she replied, and the lie never quite reached her expression.
The blonde woman accepted a chalice with red liquid inside too thick to be wine and took a sip before handing it off and replying. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you in such a manner. I’ll endeavor to do better.”
Amnesia, waving his hands to reduce Halogen’s screen, noted that one, two or perhaps even three spots on the Board of Directors in the FORGE was about to be open in the coming months now that the gauntlet had been so obviously thrown on the ground. He sighed, nigh inaudible, and addressed the room. Time to pick it back up and refocus.
“With Kento dead, we are halting a few areas of research and development, but the rest will be business as usual. Halogen, see to it that he remains safe while we work out either a suitable storage unit or means of extraction.” She offered only a nod, and a quirk of the lips that lasted only a split second told him more than a million words.
He addressed the dozen or so others, most whom wouldn’t need to speak. “We will be moving forward with Operation Umbra in the next 2 years. Prepare your assets, batten down the hatches, or whatever else it is you need to have handled in the coming months. Halogen’s eyes narrowed, and the Blonde woman wore a look of shock. Immediately, only after he’d had a few seconds for Amnesia to nod, compound eyes disconnected as was expected with such a bomb dropped on him.
“Karlton, status of our European assets?”
The man, shrouded like so many others, gave his report. “Camelot is go, at your command.”
“Remain on standby.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Emilio, the Americas?”
“Rebellions are sparking up again across the whole of Latin and South America. I’m not sure what’s galvanizing them, but I can handle it.”
“Be swift and brutal. We can hardly afford distractions at this juncture. I don’t want further unrest. Throw concern of optics to the wind. Tighten up on them.”
“Thought you’d never ask, mijo…” the older man trailed off, and then his screen went dark.
“As for the rest of you, as I said. Start tying off loose ends. The hour of reckoning is upon us.”
He closed the call, darkening the room a bit, and allowed his eyes to focus on the full map of the US.
Many things were in motion that would end up needing attending to, but with Halogen cranking up her antics, and more importantly him not knowing exactly why she was doing it now… he was reminded of a day nigh on 5 years ago when he made a risky call that cost him nothing, but irrevocably changed the course of the lives of five others.
He wondered, to himself, if it had, perhaps, been a mistake to entrust Halogen with Kento, but it occurred to him that, just maybe, this would end up turning itself into an advantage.
In chaos, there is always calculation, after all, and if the particularly nasty error he’d once made was going to come back, then perhaps he should let it handle his problems for him.
To that end, he focused the map with a wave of his hands. Detroit.
In bright red, an overlay appeared, giving him more information to work with in the darkness of the room where he stood, alone atop his pillar.
KNOWN ELEMENTS:
DAYWALKERS
HALOGEN
ASSASSIN 67, ESCAPED EXPERIMENT 42, “MARAUDER,” AND “UPGRADE”
He “touched '' Upgrade's name in his minds eye, and a blurry image, older than the technology used to display it, was the only visual aid he had of what the boy looked like. Unknown age, unknown base of operations, and only one motivation marked: anti-FORGE interests. Amnesia knew his real name was Kendrick Carter, that he was something of a mechanical and computer engineering savant and that he was the ward of an unfortunate traitor-turned-casualty. He also, at one time, had needed that particular child for an experiment due to his potent psionic ability… but he was in the wind now, and an antagonist of his designs.
Importantly, he was exactly the kind of element that Halogen was apt to underestimate, and that meant that things were about to blow, whether he wanted them to or not. He could intervene, but he wouldn’t. He could straight up stop Halogen from pulling at whatever strings she was tying into her webs and schemes, but he wouldn’t. He could, if it came down to it, make this entire mess disappear. But he wouldn’t. There was no point.
One way or another, after all, the House always wins.
----------------------------------------
“How long?” an impatient woman’s voice buzzes in my ear through a communicator so small it’s a wonder it doesn’t get lost in my ear canal. Simultaneously, I hear her right next to me too, and then I look at my watch, and tap my foot unconsciously. The question isn’t directed at me, but nonetheless it’s important for this whole thing to work that I know the answer too. Beside me, the woman, Hyobin “Prodigy” Park, maintains a staunch poker face, steely eyes on target but the rest of her body language relaxed. We were, functionally, on opposite sides of that spectrum.
“Give me two minutes and I’ll be set up and ready,” comes the response, this time a man’s voice. I took my cue from that, flickering my eyes up to the streetlight holding me up from crossing the street. Busy-ass Woodward avenue stops for no man or heist, not even in New Detroit.
Well, maybe for one.
A minor task, accessing the city's traffic mainframe. “Impenetrable” was how it had been advertised when the idea to bring every single streetlight, crossing signal and traffic cam in the city onto a single, “secure” network was pitched. For me it was childsplay to pierce the various firewalls. Invading something this redundant and simple, even operating across an entire city, doesn’t take me more than a few seconds. This system wasn’t designed with technopathy as a factor, though, so I’ll give them a bit of a pass. The smallest bit of prodding from my mental command, and a green light flickers to yellow, then red. Prodigy walks forward a step ahead of me, eager to get going as always, but it’s clear in how she steps that the oversized outfit isn’t the most comfortable thing.
1:59 before Marauder was ready. I had precious little time to get in position, and the walk from the opposite side of the street into one of the most easily recognizable buildings in the whole city would only take about a minute. Precision didn’t matter as much as I had pretended it would when I laid out this plan to my team. Still, no need to lolligag.
The contacts in my eyes were itchy and uncomfortable, but going undercover required that I wear them to hide the black sclera and bright green irises. As soon as I was in, I could throw them away and get to work; the same went for the jumpsuit over my gear and toolbox in my hands. All the more reason to get going. The front of the building was made to look appealing, to match the New Detroit aesthetic; abstract art spilling water into a pool where it was infinitely recycled, massive glass walls surrounding huge revolving doors styled so sharp I wasn’t sure it wasn’t, itself, a massive weapon.
Tacky. Overly showy. Superficial. A lie, just like the organization it served as a satellite for.
Once inside the revolving doors, a quick scan of the lobby gave me a veritable information overload.
“Upgrade, Prodigy, I got eyes on you,” a second woman’s voice came over clearly, even though she whispered it. That would be Shift, Sileena McArthur, teasing us from… wherever she happened to be. “Upstairs bathrooms are all clear, and from what I can tell the guard schedule here is on a tight loop. Also, I’m suuuuuper pleased that part one of this heist is going so well, but man those jumpers are ugly.”
“I did not pick the disguise. Upgrade did,” Prodigy comments quietly. “I just beat the guys up so we could steal them. By the way, they do not fit, just like you were worried they wouldn’t.”
“Well, yeah I’m far from surprised about that. I mean, it would be strange if two random mechanical engineers were as drastically differing in height and size, but exactly the same as you two. Almost comical in how statistically improbable it is.”
“Almost ready,” Marauder cuts incessantly. The sharpness of it gets us all focused again, which I’m thankful for. His was the fun part of this, and while he’d volunteered I imagined being faced with what he had to do might have his anxiety higher than usual.
We stepped to the front counter, myself nearly a tower over the 5 '5 Prodigy, but letting
her speak first while I expanded my consciousness a little bit.
“We are from United Engineering Corp,” she said, and the receptionist looked us over. I barely glanced back, but greeted her with a quick smile. “We were scheduled to work on the internal network today?”
“Hmm. Right, let’s see,” she said, tapping away at the keyboard. All the while, I was looking beyond what normal eyes could see. Something akin to a heads up display lit up my vision, permeating anything sending or receiving signals primarily in bright blue. Anything hardlined was colored in a dulled yellow. Where overlap existed, I could still clearly define the difference. This entire room was linked into the very internal network we were going to be infiltrating today. Unlike the traffic system, however, the room I was clocked into was anything but an easy infiltration. Even with all of the intricacy of a human brain and complexity of my powers, and a cyberdeck is personally built to bridge the gap, I had a limit to how much I could do before an intrusion alert broadcasted and the plan was ruined.
That meant cameras could see Hyobin and Sileena, and would pick up Gabe if we weren’t fast in our part of all of this. It also meant a fuck up here would see security, internal and external, swarming us, and that was far from the ideal. Even if I could erase my presence from security systems in the seconds after I was recorded, or sometimes even faster than that, it was much harder to do for others.
Limited application of technology was a constant problem for everyone. Everyone but me, anyway. If I had more time to work before this plan was set in motion, I probably could have made something that could project my Shade Tech’s basic applications. As I thought about it, schematics and ideas ran across my sight, somehow unobstructive in the same way your own imagination typically is. Ideas. A lot of them.
“Ah,” the woman spoke delightedly, interrupting my less than productive stream of consciousness and almost making me jump. “Yes, welcome back. Always a pleasure to have United as a partner to the FORGE. Will you be needing directions?”
“Nah, we got a good earful at home base about being unobstructive and such. We got directions,” I replied so I wouldn’t float off in my own head again. She smiled at me cordially, and handed us a pair of visitor passes. “Thanks. Have a lovely day.” With nary another word, we passed the reception desk, a small kiosk compared to the rather massive foyer, always open to the public. With a couple of small business fronts, the building could be busy or empty depending on the time of year, month, week and day. Knowing how insidious the FORGE actually was kept me from actually seeing things here as any less than predatory.
“Alright. I’ll be waiting for you guys to get control before I come down,” Shift chimed in, and that made me glance upward. Sure enough, with a glowing outline coming from my second-sight due to a bit of tech she was carrying, was Shift. She’d perched comfortably atop a light fixture about 40 feet up, close to the ceiling.
Her powers were extremely useful for situations like this one. Where I was a master of technology, she was a technological, and logical, anomaly. The only thing I knew for sure was that she had the power to switch places with things, and otherwise teleport objects to switch their places as well. That, on top of the peculiar ability to move almost supersonic fast with some notable drawbacks. How she got herself up there was beyond me. Still, she was hidden by the light casting its oppressive brightness down and away for now, alongside the black bodysuit and goggles hiding her eyes. Besides the security guards posted near the elevators and patrolling about, she had little to worry about.
“Okay. Scarcely a minute and thirty left,” I told Prodigy, adjusting the hat that was keeping my dreadlocks together and out of the way. We walked with purpose, which kept most of the people who’d otherwise be in the way out of it. Another fountain inside the foyer, casting a small mist as we passed by and almost- almost- luring me into a somewhat invited feeling. Man it would be nice to just start smashing this whole building up.
In due time.
For now we had business to handle as quickly and quietly as we could.
The visitors passes allowed us access to the elevators, but security stopped us before we could get to them. “Passes?” the first of the two asked while the other reached for my toolbox. We flashed the passes, Prodigy a little impatiently since it was around our necks attached to lanyards. “Right,” he answered. Inside the toolbox: screw driver, some cables, a couple of wrenches, and some handheld tech somewhere between Gameboy and tablet. He, none the wiser, just shrugged and handed it back with a nod. “What floor are you headed to?”
“17,” Prodigy answered, and he looked at his company issued smartphone like he needed a reminder. A fun application of my power? I could intercept and read the signals within the device, just to see what he was seeing in what I can only describe as my mind’s eye. Sure enough, floor 17 was the floor with both the security center and internal network server rooms within, right at the midpoint of the 34-floor compound. A quick check to another window on the phone was the schedule. There we were, Lamont and Jo. The names of the United engineers currently unconscious in their cars, a little worse for wear after Prodigy had gotten her hands on them, but alive.
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“Alright. Go straight there and back out the way you went up when you’re finished.”
“Yep, there and back,” Hyobin said, reaching out and pressing the button. The man looked like he wanted to say something, but “Jo” simply flashed a smile as we waited ten seconds for the elevator to arrive. Once it did land, I stepped in quickly, hating that it was one of those glass elevators you could see yourself rising in until it reached a certain floor. The second the door closed, I chuckled. “What?” she inquired, pushing my shoulder.
“Couldn’t help yourself huh?”
“I only pressed a button.”
“Right that’s all you did. We’re super lucky we managed to swipe the United Maintenance schedules and get these damn costumes. Don’t push it.”
“Yes of course , though I cannot help but remember you once telling us a good plan trumps the need for luck, or something approximating this,” she brushed me off, trying really hard not to squirm in the uniform, at least a size too big for her. I could tell it was tearing her apart, but she’d have to deal just a little longer. The elevator spit us out on a floor much different in feeling than the others. Narrow hallway, server room one way, and security center the other with two guards at either side. The easy part of this, we knew, would be getting into the security center without raising suspicion. We were doing maintenance on the servers and fixing a latency issue in some of the more delicate systems, as far as anyone knew: we didn’t rightly need to be in the security system for that. I could see two cameras, and my second-sight clued me in to the heat these security guards were packing. Stun batons, tasers on a stick, as well as firearms of a less technical and more ballistic nature. Somewhat frustrating, but accounted for.
That would be why Prodigy was with me at all. I walked to the server room, passing several doors on the way that I could sense were storage closets hiding miscellaneous tech. The security here held up a hand, eyed our badges, and then stepped aside. “Thanks,” I said, but they didn’t seem interested in speaking..
Sensory overload hit me like a truck as I entered the server room and put down the toolbox. So many signals coming in to each one and being sent out, filtering information, encoding and decoding it at the same time. I focused for half a second and everything fell into place. My brain wasn’t like the average gray matter: I was born a technopath which meant I was, in a way, telepathic. My power was focused on machines, which is where the techno part comes in. It also gave me incredible multitasking skills and the handy ability to split my perception between normal vision and the second-sight seemlessly. In essence, I could process at the speed of a supercomputer. For a brief few seconds I stared blankly, falling on more of the tech oriented side of my mind. Harshly, I made note of how messy everything was from a computer engineering standpoint. Hyobin tapping my shoulder brought me back, aiding in my focus. “Don’t zone out on me now.”
“Right yeah. Lots of information in this room alone, my bad,” I replied, shaking my head. I slid the screwdriver and smallest wrench into the front pocket of the jumper while Hyobin tied up her medium length hair and pretended to look into something. The fake tablet in the toolbox blipped on at a small expression of my power, and I walked to the back of the room while it booted up. On the screen my personal calling card, an Omega symbol flipped upside down to make a stylized U, appeared, and I pressed the button fully aware that the men behind me were peeking in to see what I was doing. Thankfully the distance gave me a bit of cover as I plugged one end of the cables in the toolbox into the bottom of it, and ran the other into one of the server switches. The tablet flickered, and so did my vision of it. Once inside of that, in a few seconds I had what I needed to get into the security center.
My vision showed me the same stream of information: reds and yellows, floating packets of data traveling through wires like streams of water. Even for me, it would take time that I didn’t want to risk given everything that was on the line, so I’d prepared something over the week. The tablet was running a program I’d written myself to act as something of a second brain and allow me much finer control over things. It was an old trick I’d picked up. Making a virtual intelligence that could do rudimentary shit like unbarring my mind’s pathway through the noise was easy. That freed me to do what I needed to. I could intercept some of the signals with my power. From there I could stop them in their tracks, repurpose them, or erase them. For this little gamble of ours, I had a better idea.
Sending a small signal of my own, I gummed everything up for just a few seconds. I watched everything begin lagging a little bit more than before, and disconnected from the server, holding the tablet which was now displaying a cascade of numbers and letters. This was the kind of sci-fi nonsense that a security guard would believe. I walked out of the room, following the false-fire I’d sent straight to the security center. Once I reached the door, I held the tablet close to the walls, pretending to scan along the hardline connections behind the wall. “Scuse me friend, I think the issue is actually larger than you all thought.”
“What?” the guard responded, looking at the tablet completely confused. It turned red as soon as he looked, which was a cute little trick that I used as an excuse.
“Yeah, I’m following the wires, seeing the problem we came to fix literally traveling down towards the security center.”
“So, what, you need to go there to fix… whatever you’re here to fix? United never has had to go in there before today…” he trailed off. If he wanted to be that way I could make this more believable.
“It’ll be on you if the lights start flickering,” I said just before intruding on the system via that small bit of data I’d infected the network with and causing the hallway lights to immediately flicker. For good measure, I jumped, and Prodigy shook her head in the doorway behind me. “See, it’s a damn good thing I’m here.” The two guards relented a little, speaking into walkie talkies mounted to their shoulders. I kept walking, holding up the tablet, all the while until I was at the security room door.
“What are you going to need?” one of the next two golems asked me, and I held up the wires.
“Just plugging into one of the terminals and getting a readout on the system’s latency, and then I’ll run a noninvasive diagnostic. Take in some readings, process some data, bit of troubleshooting...” I kept going until it looked like I lost him.
“God, they’re all idiots huh?” Marauder said in my ear. “Waiting for your go. It’s cold, man, get a move on.” I almost snickered a little.
“Alright alright, go ahead, just… hurry it up and come right out,” he ushered, letting me pass him by stepping out of the way. With resolve, I made a B line for the back wall, opposite a collection of screens, terminals and a few guards with their feet kicked up watching the goings on with little interest.
A few regarded me, 3 of the 4 men inside the room in fact, but they all got back to work when I showed them my visitor pass. “Just gonna work quietly, don’t mind me,” I said, plugging the tablet into a terminal at the back wall. Advantage of pretending you work somewhere? Even security scarcely bats an eye at you as long as you look like you're working.
The very second the tablet was plugged in, I felt that pull away at my consciousness that always came whenever I was using my powers with all my focus. I had precious little time before the intrusion-detection software on the network realized what I was doing, and under normal circumstances it’d take me too long to perform what could only be described as a hostile takeover of the security system. The tablet helped: I’d written several programs with my own hands for this purpose. I could take control of computer systems at a rudimentary level with a bit of time and effort. Usually it took anywhere from a literal half a second to a minute depending on the complexity of the system and how well defended it was. Even closed networks weren’t safe when you acted as a living computer, with the human brain itself working as your processor.
And a few upgrades therein.
But countermeasures existed against intrusion, and I was far from a native to this network. Still, far be it from me to be stopped that easily. The tablet software acted as a second mind, and once it was plugged into a network it was as if two of me were working together. I also reached into my mind palace and grabbed an access key I’d swiped from the HBIC of the FORGE interests in the region. That unlocked quite a lot of doors, but they’d been smart and rotated some of the more delicate systems.
With the tablet active, though, I broadcasted twice the data at twice the speed, I could read information and break through firewalls twice as efficiently, all the while covering my tracks. In my second sight, red alerts continually popped up, permeating the room around me, and as they did they were either shattered, or slowly faded to green. Slowly, relative to how quickly this was happening.
Scarcely 5 seconds of dedicatedly fighting against the system, and it was mine. I Unplugged the tablet, and closed my eyes. All at once I was aware of every camera in the network, seeing with dozens of eyes, hearing with dozens of ears. A thought left my mind, and all the footage gathered of Hyobin was erased entirely. Another, and the system was isolated from the FORGE’s greater security network. Quietly, the building became a security dark zone, which itself would gather attention had I not been so careful about it. Quietly cutting off outside signals, and redirecting the inbound ones to other buildings virtually networked in would only work so long, but more than long enough, if my guess was right.
“Marauder, you’re good to go,” I told him, turning around and reaching for the screwdriver I’d pocketed. One of the four men watching the cameras turned his head at the sound of my footsteps, but he didn’t have the wherewithal to stop me as I slammed the butt end of it into his skull. On impact, a jolt of electricity rammed through his entire body, and he made a sound between a grunt and gag as he fell over in his seat. I stepped over his terminal quickly, aiming the other end of the weapon at the farthest of the security guards. I pressed a button that fired off a second payload of electricity right into his chest.
He wasn’t even done convulsing before my knee, padded under the jumpsuit, collided with the skull of the third man and drove his face into the screen in front of him. I wasn’t as graceful as I wanted to be on the landing, but I rolled with my momentum over the last row and grabbed the wrench from my suit. No technology hiding in this one, just hard metal swung into the arm, and then jaw of the last one who was just seconds from grabbing his gun.
All the while, via cameras all over the floor, I watched Prodigy pull her trigger the moment I said I was good.
Where I lacked in style she made up for in the dozens. Precision was key for her, with the fist of a martial arts master driving into the skull of one guard, and the same arm’s elbow kicking back into the temple of the other. She was moving again before either of them fell, unzipping the oversized costume and sliding out of it in a flourish she couldn’t possibly have practiced, and yet. The poor idiots at the other end had turned to see what the commotion was in the security room, and she’d ran them down before either of them knew she was there. She slid low, taking their legs out from under them. She was up again in a heartbeat, ferocious as she descended upon them, one deft punch to either of their chins to put them to sleep.
“Not bad,” I complimented looking through the collection of camera displays now.
“Not bad? What you did was not bad, I was flawless. Did you find it?” she asked me just as I located our prize. A little black box, no bigger than a suitcase, in the centermost room 10 floors above us. A heavily guarded secret, one they didn’t even trust to be carried around by the highest of FORGE operators. Inside was something out of a scifi horror film, and I was going to be leaving with it.
Easier said than done however. It was behind a vault door with a security system far more complicated than the one this building was “protected” by. Automated defenses, inside and out, emp shielding, I even heard these paranoid dickheads had invested in some sort of supernatural protection with metahuman powers in mind too. Worst to worst the entire room could detonate, taking us and the secret all at once.
All things I’d gleaned from taking a dive through their network. This building had been chosen specifically because laying siege to it would be nigh impossible without a swarm of cops and other law enforcement being alerted, and also because once you’ve made your way there, where exactly would you go? Out to the river? On a chase through downtown Detroit? The city was easy to lock down. Combine a naturally well suited location with advanced tech and security systems? It’d be damn hard to crack this one open for anyone else.
Related, I’ve been underestimated my entire life.
From one of the perimeter cameras, a man with a backpack and two large duffle bags was in view. Erasing his pesence from the footage was as easy as an afterthought. First thing first, he had to setup his gear across the street, in this case a grappling hook launched from a small cannon he’d made himself. I’d offered to make it better, but time constrained us a bit so he had to be a few floors above us and fire down. The hook drilled into the wall, and rooted further in from there the very second he hit it. All that was left was to drop the rather large gun. Once he’d done so, the proverbial cannon screwed into the floor, rooting reliably in place. Marauder wasn’t the most meticulous or patient anyway, so at this point it was do or die for him. With one less duffle bag and the backpack on his back, he got a running start and flung himself off the roof, grabbing the wire last second and sliding across it faster than I was comfortable with.
I had to ping another camera to get a better angle, but he evidently hit the wall harder than he meant to. The black sunglasses on his face fell, but nonetheless he was against the wall. No window above or below, no real visible access point, but this wasn’t just a random spot. The digits poking through fingerless gloves glowed, and he pressed them against the wall. Quickly the wall dissolved, starting with the concrete making up the outer walls breaking apart into something like sand, and then everything between him and the open space started to come apart. It went from a steady pace to rapid, and he removed his hands once he could swing himself in.
And of course, his power went off the rails and caused the hook holding him suspended in the air to break free. If he didn’t recover, well, it was a hell of a fall, and he was no more sturdy even if he did have super powers.
“Mierda!” he breathed, catching himself on the floor with nary an inch between him and pancake-land. “Man, not our best work, Upgrade,” he told me, walking past all the server towers and down the hall. In that time I’d disrobed the disguise, now in just a black, longsleeved shirt and matching pants. Marauder opted for track pants. We met him halfway, and he tossed me the backpack as soon as he could get it off. I stuffed the tablet inside while Hyobin took the duffle off his shoulders.
“Yeah, I’ll remember to account for your unstable ass powers next time,” I jabbed at him. He ran his hands through his hair a few times, getting the matte black more into place, after his near-death experience. He was of a rare breed indeed.
Marauder - Gabriel dos Santos. Between him and Shift I wasn’t sure which of them was more strange. He wasn’t a chemical accident or the result of a radiation exposure that could kill a man; his powers were natural insofar as I had ever been able to tell. And they were wildly inconsistent. With some focus he could restrict it to just his hands so as not to destroy his clothing. Occasionally however he’d fuck that up entirely. Practice helped, but it didn’t do much for the fact that the results were never the same either. For example, he may break down a wooden table into smaller splinters of wood, knock the screws out of it and separate each individual board, or sometimes atomize the whole thing. The only thing he DID have control over was when it activated.
Nevertheless, invaluable, a little vulgar, highly competitive, and my best friend. Certainly one of the most dangerous men in the world. I ruffled through the stuff in the bag, grabbing out all the things I knew for a fact I’d be needing to get us into that vault and out of the building. All of it was stuff I could hardly justify bringing in to clean up a network.
“Okay. So the easy part is getting in, right?” He asked me. Between the shoulder-holsters and my utility belt, for lack of a better name for it, I was ready to get to work. Prodigy pulled a mask, white and featureless, over her face, and twirled a kama, something between an ice pick, axe and dagger, in one hand. A peer through the cameras showed me Shift was already making her way up, shifting with objects along the way as quickly as she could to avoid being noticed in a way that would make her hard to track if I couldn’t see it all at once. As for us, we ran up ten flights of stairs, and the moment the doors opened we each sprang into action.
Prodigy flung herself through the doors as soon as she could fit with a bit of direction from me as to where anyone was, shuriken knocking weapons out of hands, and a flurry of movement setting her up to dispatch them. Marauder and I were less methodical, popping out in the scarce moments following. All I had on me to help with was a set of shock pistols that we’d fiddled with the night before. Hoping it wouldn’t just blow up, I pulled the trigger on one at the pair of men at the far side of the hallway, and a dense ball of electricity flung itself free like a bullet, striking one of them and imparting a high voltage, mid level amperage shock that chained to the two dudes near him. They all dropped, and I tossed the one of 4 back into the toolbox. “Alright, that one clearly worked,” I exhaled, turning around as Marauder finished beating down the two men he’d run down with the shock value we’d given him cover with.
Prodigy had 6 men downed without a hair out of place on her head. “Still at the easy part?”
“Yeah, that’s certainly still the easy part,” I told her as we approached the door. The security system it operated on was isolated from the rest, which meant I’d need to break through it’s firewall and take control of it as well. Otherwise the rifles mounted on either side of the thick steel would open fire once we got too close. I held up a finger, already focusing on the task at hand once we were at the proverbial line in the sand. The guns came to life as soon as my mind accessed it’s firewall. The whole room turned red, and I bit my lip.
Basically, as soon as I had intruded on it I snapped a tripwire. The guns aimed at us, head on, and it was all I could do to hold the “fire” command from coming down the line. Marauder took cover behind me, which would have been funny if it weren’t ME, and before I could slip up again, Hyo hand thrown a knife at one, and her Kama at the other, striking both at angles that would render them useless. A few seconds later, I’d turned off the emergency kill order and the normal lighting returned. “The hell Kendrick,” Marauder lauded, punching my shoulder, harder than was comfortable.
“Don’t even, you almost fell how many stories to your death a few minutes ago?” I teased back. Hyobin recovered the Kama and shuriken as he placed a hand on the door, presumably to try and deconstruct it.
“Hermano, you just almost killed all three of us with your dumb brain magic,” he replied. “What happened?”
“If you don’t have the proper credentials, accessing the security system puts it on Code Red. It’s a failsafe against intrusion. Since I hop past any sort of login screens when I do my thing, it triggered. Clever, and annoying.”
“Right, well, maybe give us warning that something like that can happen?” he poked again. When I didn’t immediately respond, he got back on track. “Yeah, not sure what the deal is, but I can’t break open this material. It feels like my powers are being neutralized by it.”
“Fuck, okay. So we do this the harder way,” I almost complained, crossing the space and closing my eyes.
In my mind’s eye, I could work much better. Intruding on the system meant I’d have a hell of a fight on my hands, and any distractions might cause me to falter, visual especially. It was like standing in a black room, completely empty and infinite. The second I started trying to breach it again, it was like a million piece puzzle sprawled out in front of me. It wasn’t about trying to solve everything, either. It was more about putting all the pieces together just enough that I had a pathway. That said, a million pieces is a lot of pieces, so a few cheats could help. Creating a false intrusion to stretch out the security, and several thousand distractions and walls go away. A show of brute force through sheer willpower could smash another several hundred pieces into nonexistence. More of the latter than the former, usually, but it would take a bit of effort in this case. Several cascading piles of “puzzle pieces” all around me, each one needing attention. The issue here was the longer I fought, the better the chance that I would end up overwhelmed.
As if.
I could tell this was an expensive and more importantly a tailored, and anti-technopathic, measure for sure. The amount of resistance I was encountering made me wish I’d brought out the tablet. Nothing I couldn’t handle, but it was far from easy goings. Vaguely, I felt creepting annoyance in the back of my mind that they’d thought this would be enough when they had every reason to believe I’d be coming for them.
It felt like hours, but in truth it only took a few minutes for me to get the door itself electronically unlocked, and the weapons on the inside shut down. Following that, I-
“Fuck,” I exhaled opening my eyes, blinking away a bit of stars from over working myself a bit. “Alright, power dampening is down, but that’s only half the battle.”
“Right, the rest is what you need us for?” Shift spoke as Maurader put his fingertips on the door again. First, the vault’s crank fell to the floor with a loud clatter, and then several sounds inside the door itself echoed inside of it before it started to turn red.
“Yeah, might wanna back up,” he warned us as the energy building up started to make the door rattle and groan. We took cautious steps away, Shift fiddling with one of the downed guard’s weapons behind us at about a safe distance. Marauder grunted and pushed, and the door fell in on itself, reduced to a pile of rapidly cooling metals less in the shape of a door, and more in the shape of several shards of metal. And, it was fucking loud. Louder than we’d accounted for, but that was an issue for later. “Keep watch, Hyo.”
“These things don’t really have a ‘set phasors to stun’ setting,” Shift commented as if she had expected the door to crash like it did. I could imagine a few uses for the weapon, but now wasn’t the time for that. We climbed in over the safely cooled metal, with me taking point thanks to my second sight. Inside, the guns were turned off, and any kinds of invisible lasers or tripmines weren’t immediately pinging in my vision. It was cold and dark, with another layer of glass planes surrounding a podium.
“That black box is the target,” I spoke, stating the obvious. “That glass is probably not gonna serve to be an issue, but I’d rather not deal with the likelihood it falls on Maurauder’s head. He’d never let me hear the end of it.” He pushed my shoulder, but looked at Shift nonetheless. She, chuckling all the while, stepped forward and held the gun in her hand out with her eyes focused on the box.
It was almost like watching a computer glitch out for a second, but overlaid over real life. She audibly gritted her teeth, straining as her body, the box, and the gun all blurred, flickered and snapped in and out of place. As quick as it started it stopped, and the gun was gone, replaced by a cube no bigger than a coffee cup. Inside of the glass, the gun had taken it’s place. “That easy,” she spoke. “Well, not easy. This vault has some weird tech that makes it tough to translocate things.” She shrugged, climbing out of the vault and stopping when she saw Hyobin staring down the hallway at the opposite end of the room.
Before I could ask Shift what she meant, or before Hyobin could answer I felt a sudden spike in my awareness, like something in my subconscious barreled it’s way to the front. Something else in the security system? Something I’d missed… or something that had only just now made itself aware.
“Fuck,” was all I could say as I realized a failsafe had been built in. The very moment I started sending false positives to keep the building safely isolated I’d tripped a wire.
“Que tal?” Marauder asked as we approached Hyo and I could see her grip on her Kama was tight.
“What was the exit plan again?” she asked without taking her eyes off of whatever she was staring at like a hawk. Slowly, I made my way over, a pit born of irritation forming in my belly.
“Rappel out to the building across the street, break through the window and sneak out?”
“That isn’t going to work, I think.” We crowded around her, and I almost faceplamed as I saw straight ahead through a window in the hall. Marauder actually did.
Shutters were closing over the window, and something told me just having Marauder melt his way through it wasn’t going to work. Just like with Shift and the translocation issue.
“Okay, this is fine,” I began. The plan to rappel back out was wishful thinking, especially after the week we’d had. “It’s just the hard part now.”