Coven's Rebellion Chapter 6 (Patreon)

Rosa

Desmonia leaned forward in the dimly lit corner booth of the VR Exodus pub, her eyes glinting with excitement. The intelligence specialist SAI was obviously loving every moment of this mission. "Okay, ladies, let's get down to business," she said, her voice low and urgent.

May made a small sound of agreement and produced a holographic display with a wave of her hand. Pixels swirled in a tornado of colour for a brief moment, then coalesced into a 3D representation of a blocky skyscraper. Looking at individual elements would bring up tooltips with information.

"Turns out the architect for the target building plays CORA, and he managed to get the plans for the building," she said, passing the blueprints to Desmonia.

My eyebrows rose. Just casually asking for plans to a military manufacturing corp’s headquarters was sure to raise suspicions. “What did you tell him you needed it for?”

“Nothing,” she grinned. “He was in a death dream and chatting away to one of my subminds when I took control and asked him about his work. He was more than happy to show me all the buildings he’s worked on in the past, and I just nabbed the files when he summoned them into the VR enviro.”

“Damn, slick work, May,” Amelia murmured over her beer.

Desmonia, who had been scanning the blueprints, her eyes darting back and forth as she took it all in, said "Good work, May. We'll need details on their security too, and an idea of where the isotope is, but this is an excellent start."

“I think getting those will have to be on you,” May replied. “Anyone who has that kind of info will be a lot more tight-lipped than an overpaid architect with a pathological need to impress women, digital or not.”

“No worries,” Des said with a nod. “I have some ideas on that front.”

Turning to look at Ame and I, she said, “The biggest single factor deciding our success will be the new android bodies we’re designing for you. R&D wants to get in touch to begin testing virtual prototypes before they move to physical world prototypes.”

Ame nodded in agreement. "Right. We need to make sure the bodies are durable enough to withstand any potential threats. We don't want to get taken out before we even get close to the isotope."

I furrowed my brow in concern. "And what about the radiation? Won't that be a problem?"

Desmonia waved away my concerns. "No. It’s housed in a stasis container. If the case gets ruptured it’ll begin decaying anyway, so either way the operation will be over."

Nodding, I furrowed my brows in thought. “So it’s volatile?”

Desmonia snorted. “Very.”

Well, I guess I should be careful when I got my hands on it.

May tapped the holographic display, bringing up more details on the building's security. "So assuming there aren't any crazy surprises with security, what's the plan for getting in? Are we going to try to get in and out without them knowing?"

Desmonia shook her head. "We need to be subtle until we get our hands on the target. If I had to bet, I would say their high sec storage will have all sorts of failsafes in place that they can trigger if they think it’s in danger. Once you have it though, you can go as loud as you want."

“I’m not familiar with corps of this size, but won’t they have a ton of people?” I asked. “I’m still worried about security.”

“What if…” Ame began, then shook her head. “Nah, that’s insane.”

“No, tell us.” Desmonia urged.

“Okay, so what if we built a mech…”

— — —

“Rosa, I have a problem,” Amelia told me solemnly as the aircar bounced through the driving rain and wind of United Nations City.

Looking up from my hand—which looked like a normal human hand with a few basic augments—I asked, “What’s the problem?”

With equal parts guilt and lust, her gaze flicked down towards the alarmingly large gun in her lap. “I feel like I’m cheating on Jazz with Sprocket here…”

“Sprocket,” I asked in a deadpan. “You named it Sprocket?”

“Yes, and they’re beautiful, but they’re also not Jazz…” she explained.

“Maybe you should talk to Jazz about entering into a polyamorous relationship with Sprocket.”

Her big, convincingly human eyes began to water. “Maybe… but until I actually talk to Jazz, it’s considered cheating, right?”

Sprocket bounced lightly in her lap, betraying the ultra-light composite materials it was made of as being far more than the grey gunmetal they appeared to be. The gun was definitely something to behold. I could see why she called it— them beautiful. At six feet long and a foot and a half tall near the receiver, the railgun that my girlfriend had named Sprocket looked like it would be better served mounted to the aircar we were in, rather than in her hands. Normally, anyone who claimed as such would be correct, but not today.

Amelia and I were both wearing our newly created prototype combat bodies. Amelia’s was designed for strength and stability, which allowed her to use the still remarkably heavy Sprocket. My body, in contrast, was built to take full advantage of the processing speed my nanite-neurons could achieve. When I boosted my framerate, my body would respond in kind, and I would be able to move almost faster than the human eye could track.

As for my weapons, Des, Cerri, and the others had presented me with a truly lovely gift. Out of my forearms, two rope darts could be summoned. The tips were impossibly sharp and able to extend small barbs to anchor themselves in whatever material I threw them into. The ropes themselves were actually a sort of ceramic-fibre that could be heated to extreme temperatures. They were also thin and very very sharp.

I might not be able to disintegrate my body into mist outside of CORA, but I could definitely still do some very witchy, chainy things.

“Coming up on the Axile Industries building, you two. Get ready,” said Desmonia from her position within the car’s computer systems.

Amelia stood up, her previous playful mood replaced with a professional calm. It was hard to picture her in the border rangers sometimes, given her bubbly personality, but it was times like these that her past became abundantly clear.

The aircar hovered over a greenery ledge on the tower beside the Axile building, and Amelia leapt down into the dirt with her weapon held above her head. Soil and genetically engineered ferns sprayed out in all directions as she impacted the ground and knelt, then, she was out of sight.

United Nations City buildings had a lot of little nooks like the one we’d just dropped her off in. Completely inaccessible by everyone except the maintenance bots that took care of them, they served to clean the air of the city and provide relief for eyes that’d been staring at glass and concrete too often.

Desmonia flew the aircar onwards, but the door stayed open. “Joining air traffic now, Rosa. Jump whenever you’re ready.”

Walking up to the door, I pulled my arms down and hooked the flaps that were fitted to my hips, turning my jumpsuit into a wingsuit. After doing the same with my legs, I was ready and leapt from the aircar.

Wind and rain buffeted me, and I spun through the air, threatening to enter a death spiral almost immediately until the tiny attitude thrusters on my suit activated. Once I was stabilised, I veered away and headed for the target building.

Axile Industries was a drone swarm manufacturing corporation that was contracted to build drones by several UN members around the world. Their building was a thick, stubby thing by UNC standards, although it’d still tower over the buildings of most cities in Aotearoa. Also unlike many UNC buildings, it didn’t have many windows or even greenery ledges. Rather than being a glass monolith, it was constructed out of foam-grown steel imported from factories on Luna.

Just like the many many VR simulations we’d run of this heist, I angled myself down towards one of the small windows on the side of the building. It was a hell of a lot easier to gain entry to a place when you could survive the kind of velocities that these bodies could.

“Deploying the scavenger mech now,” Desmonia said over comms.

Sinking into a crouch, I pulled up the video feed from Des’ aircar just in time to see the cobbled together 12 foot tall robot crash to the pavement in a blast of flame and asphalt. It looked like some sort of ogre made of metal and rust, with one arm much larger than the other.

Within our comms channel, I heard Siyeapia giggling like a maniac. Her exuberance was infectious, and I grinned, watching her pilot the huge engine of tetanus and destruction. May’s friend was definitely the girl for the job. Who else would we tap to blaze a path of destruction through a corp’s headquarters but the woman who’d already done the same to a corporate mansion?

Alarms had begun wailing throughout the building before she even touched the ground, and the turrets had just finished deploying when she burst through the front door like a bull fired into a china shop at mach two.

“Rosa, go, go go!” Desmonia called, even as Siyeapia turned the beautiful wooden reception desk into kindling. “You have five minutes to reach the target before they decide to lock down the labs and high sec storage.”

“On it,” I replied succinctly and pushed up straight into a sprint. We’d determined during our intelligence gathering phase of the heist that Axile wouldn’t actually shut down operations throughout the rest of the building for as long as they could manage. Policy said that since the building was so massive, a localised crisis in one section shouldn’t stop anyone from working in other sections. Trust a corp to fuck up their basic security protocols in the name of profit margins.

I was in an office space that was on an off-shift, so no one saw when my raptor’s feet dug into the carpet as I dashed towards the elevators. My body was completely inhuman from the shoulders down, while still being humanoid in shape. My arms, legs, torso, and inbuilt helmet were streamlined as though I’d been designed by a company that creates nothing else but supercars.

As I reached the doors to the elevators, I heard a door handle turning. Cocking my head, I focused on my enhanced hearing and located the source of the noise. A man with a cleaning trolley was just laying eyes on me through the small rectangular window of the door. Shit.

Time hit a wall of pure steel when I rammed my mental finger down onto the frame boost button. All over my artificial body, vents opened and heatsinks partially extended themselves for better ventilation. Then, I exploded into action.

At speeds like this, moving through the air felt like I was pushing to run through water. Luckily for me, I more than had the power to do just that.

Grabbing the half-open door, I wrenched it all the way open and twisted, bringing my other arm up. My hand impacted his sternum with enough force to cause his heart to hiccup violently. A moment later, a small circular device with three claws pointing downwards popped out of my forearm and I slapped it to his chest. It sparked, causing his muscles to seize painfully. He was going nowhere.

I was back at the elevators in a flash and out of my wrists came my rope-darts. I whipped them up, then down, then up again, lashing the door with the superheated ceramic wires. Retracting the wires, I spun and punched the weakened doors inwards.

“I’m in the elevator shaft,” I told the rest of the team. “Going up.”