Chapter 14 (Patreon)

“What are we looking at?”  Kat asked, shifting slightly as she crouched behind a dumpster.  Dawn was only a couple of hours away and she’d been wearing her infiltration suit all night.  The same properties that prevented her from leaving behind DNA evidence meant that the watertight outfit literally didn’t breathe.  In short, she smelled like a lockerroom that had been left to bake in the sun after a long day of exercise.

“At least four independent networks that aren’t actually connected to each other,” Whip grunted back.  “This security isn’t any joke either.  Some of these counter-intrusion programs will scramble my brain if I’m not careful.”

Kat contemplated the building across the street.  Its windows were unlit and boarded up and its concrete facade was crumbling.  For all the world, it looked like an abandoned warehouse.  If she didn’t have access to Copper Spook’s files, Kat could have walked past the structure a dozen times without noticing that there was anyone inside.

She turned back to Whippoorwill.  The other girl brushed her pink hair out of her face, gaze vacant as she sat cross legged next to the smartpanel terminal that Kat had unplugged some ten minutes ago.

“So are we going in completely blind, mostly blind, or with just one eye closed?”  Kat nudged her friend.

The other girl just waved a hand at Kat dismissively, her face still lined with concentration as she focused on her connection to the information network.

Kat leaned backward, opening up her own wireless connection to the local entertainment networks.  The reception wasn’t great, but it was more than enough for her to catch up on Chrome Cowboy recaps while she waited for Whippoorwill to finish.

“Good enough.”  Whip’s voice startled Kat out of a pop culture induced stupor almost five minutes later.  “I’ve only managed to worm my way into some of their peripheral systems, but I can confirm that this is the place.”

“Do you have the layout?”  Kat quirked an eyebrow under her mask.  “Do you know anything about the security systems they’re using? The number of people involved?  I want to take them down, but as much as I want to lash out, I’d prefer to avoid kicking a steel plate.”

Whippoorwill’s eyes glazed for a second as she slipped back into the network.   She turned back to Kat with a brief grimace.

“I couldn’t find full floor plans or any sort of roster.  If that sort of thing exists it's on one of the internal networks I don’t have access to.”

“That said,”  Whippoorwill continued.  “The actual black site is buried in the warehouse’s basement.  It uses a lot of power siphoned from neighboring buildings, but it’s only about forty feet by forty feet and the keypads to get in were last used about fifteen minutes ago.  The compound might have defenses, but I’d be surprised if there are active traps while it's occupied.”

“How do the nearby buildings not notice a power draw?”  Kat asked, peeking her head up above the dumpster she was hiding behind to scope out the ‘abandoned’ building once more.  “I feel like they should notice something like that when they check their monthly statements.  Eventually someone would have said something.”

“I’m pretty sure the remnants of Millenium own everything on this block,” Whip replied, shrugging helplessly.  “Every business is owned by four to five layers of holding companies, but everything in this area changed hands a couple of months ago.  It looks like most of the other shops are more or less legitimate.  If they’re doing anything untoward, it’s probably just laundering money made by Millenium’s more clandestine activities.”

“So we’ve been on their turf for the last half hour without knowing it?”  Kat responded unhappily.  “How do we know that they haven’t been watching us through security cameras as we drove in?  Hell, for all we know there’s a bomb waiting for us under your car when we decide to leave.”

“Maybe,” Whip shrugged sheepishly.  “But I don’t think so.  The black site is barely connected to the outside world, and I definitely didn’t find any sort of direct feed from local security to it.  Honestly, I don’t think that I would have even been able to find it without Copper Spook’s records and using traffic cameras to track the strike team.”

“Seriously,” she continued.  “The entrance is a false maintenance closet attached to the building’s far North wall.  This isn’t the sort of place you find unless someone gets sloppy, or you devote serious resources to unearthing it.  We just got lucky.”

“Or it’s a trap,” Kat mused, chewing her lip as she kept scanning the ‘abandoned’ building.  “Millenium wasn’t the type to slip up like this, and we already know that they want me in the ground.  They’re more than ruthless enough to sacrifice a dead ender like Copper Spook to lure me into an ambush.”

“True,” Whippoorwill sighed.  “I honestly think they just got jumpy when you made contact with Otto.  If they were going to ambush you, that would have been the time and location.  They had you in a building with an unreliable contact with a light loadout.  Rather than make a serious attempt, they silenced Otto and ran.  I might be wrong, but as dangerous as going in blind is, I think it’s our best bet.”

“Fuck.”  Kat stood up, checking both of her pistol holsters as well as her knife sheath.  “Dawn is coming and we could argue until noon about what maybe possibly could happen.  Either I dive in, or both of us go home and get a nice night’s sleep.  Enough of this hemming and hawing.”

Whippoorwill unplugged her cranial jack and stood up beside Kat, hands clenched tightly around the grip of her submachinegun.

“No time like the present,” Whip’s voice cracked slightly as she shifted from foot to foot.

A smile blossomed on Kat’s face as she turned around and put a hand on her friend's shoulder.  She shook her head gently while responding.

“I appreciate the sentiment Chiffon, but as much as another samurai would help, this doesn’t sound like the sort of mission where it would be a good idea to break in a beginner.  Stray shots have a tendency to hit friends and vital equipment.  Once we work on your accuracy a little more, then you can hit a target with me.”

“Erinyes,” Whip pouted back.  “I’ve managed to complete a dungeon in The Tower of Somnus.  I’m not completely helpless.”

“Really?”  Kat couldn’t help but smile under her mask.  “How is all of that working out?”

“Pretty well.”  Whippoorwill perked up.  “A couple of four armed lizard-aliens came up to me on my second day and offered to help me out.  Right now I have an artificer class and a crossbow skill.  According to Paatek my class skill will let me create temporary modifications for the crossbow and my bolts once I practice it a little more.”

“Paatek?” She prompted.

“Oh she’s- sorry. They’re one of the aliens,” the other girl caught herself before continuing excitedly.  “Paatek has been helping me a lot.  They say that they’re doing a favor for someone, but I honestly don’t know if I’d be able to manage getting a class let alone conquering a dungeon without their help.”

“I’m glad someone is helping you,” Kat turned back to the warehouse.  “I have some people looking to party up with you once you reach the second level, but it sounds like you’re in good hands until then.”

“Great,” Whip responded, nodding eagerly.  “If I can handle myself in the tower, I can handle myself in there.  You don’t know what it's like watching you run off into danger, to be stuck and unable to do anything while your best friend is risking her life.  This time you’re not leaving me behind.”

“Yes I am,” Kat let her voice soften as she put a hand on her friend’s shoulder.  “I don’t want to lose you either.  I’m ready for this and I have training.  Once you have a level or two, range time, and some hand to hand experience, you’ll be ready too.”

“But-” Whippoorwill began only for Kat to silence her with a squeeze of her shoulder.

“Next time Chiffon,” Kat cut her off, shaking her head.

Kat turned away from Whippoorwill before the other girl could restart the argument and began jogging across the street.  Nothing moved in the early morning.  All of the other shops on the street were shuttered, and the only real lighting came from some sputtering neon signs that clung to the poorly maintained walls of the nearby buildings.

She didn’t even try the barred and boarded front door, instead hurrying past it en route to the back of the building.  Kat peeked her head around the corner first, taking in the quartet of SUVS under camouflage tarps before sneaking toward the rear entrance.

This door had modern security, cameras carefully hidden around its frame and a state of the art keypad concealed under a loose piece of siding.  Rather than try her luck, Kat made sure to stay out of the camera’s line of sight as she worked her way along the building’s wall.

One story under a barred window, she activated Levitation and Leapt upward.  The combination of magic and skill brought her smoothly up to the next level of the building.  She grabbed onto one of the bars, wedging it into the crook of her elbow.

The gentle tug of gravity pulled her back against the building as Kat drew her knife and activated Penetration.  The blade glowed a dull red as, one by one, she began popping bars from the window.

The chunks of metal clanged off the cement below, rolling off into the night.  Kat shoved her knife back into its sheath before prying the second to last bar free.

Gritting her teeth, she put her elbow through the window.  A couple seconds later, she was crawling through the opening, careful to compress her body as much as possible to avoid the glass shards clinging to the frame.

The interior of the building was almost as decrepit as the outside.  Empty shelves covered in dust decorated the walls and empty half-rusted metal desks graced the center of the room.  At a glance, it looked like a storage room that had been abandoned for at least a couple of years.

Still, a discerning eye could see through the illusion.  Junkies hadn’t torn apart the walls looking for metal wiring and piping to sell for another hit.  Rather than graffiti, dust covered all of the equipment.  No vacant building its size should have survived unmolested in Chiwaukee for more than a handful of weeks.

Kat drew her pistol, and after ensuring that her surroundings were empty, let out a long held breath.  It was time to start moving.

She passed room after room en route to the stairwell.  Quick sweeps slowed her progress but ensured that surprises weren’t waiting for her as she moved through the conspicuously empty halls.  Finally, almost ten minutes later she found herself in front of a metal door with the word ‘maintenance’ engraved into its surface in fading yellow ink.

Whip was quiet in her earpiece, likely sulking after Kat’s sudden exit, but it was obvious that this was the place.  The corridor leading up to the doorway was clear of the dust that filled the rest of the building, the tile floor shiny and worn from the passage of hundreds of boots.

“I’m here Chiffon,” she whispered.  “Have you been able to find anything new?”

“No,” Whippoorwill huffed back.  “Just… be careful Erinyes.  There are people inside and Millenium went through a lot of effort to keep this place hidden.  Even if the samurai aren’t ready for you, I don’t think they’ll be happy to see you.”

“You know me,” Kat couldn’t stop herself from smiling behind her mask.  “I’m plenty stealthy and careful.  After all, if there isn’t anyone left to sound the alarm, it’s basically the same thing as going unseen.”

“And that’s why I told you to be careful,” Whip chuckled weakly.

Kat shook her head ruefully.  She could see where Whippoorwill was coming from.  Attacking an enemy base blind and alone was the height of stupidity.  At the same time, an untrained liability spraying bullets would only make a bad situation worse.

Bad decision or no, Kat mused, eyeing the suspiciously dust covered doorknob to the maintenance room dubiously, daylight was coming.  Once Millenium’s analysts went over the fight at Otto’s, they’d be able to piece together her involvement.  There wasn’t a guarantee that the black site would even be in the same spot this time tomorrow if she didn’t act now.

She searched the hallway, nodding in satisfaction a minute or so later when she noticed the thermostat.  On the same wall as the door, its paint was still fresh and dust free from frequent use.  Kat flipped back its cover, revealing a keypad rather than a console for the building’s heating and cooling system.

Fiddling with her pack for a second, Kat pulled out a plate of translucent film.  Carefully, she pressed it against the keypad.  It glimmered as the tiny computers embedded in the pliable layer of plastic sprang into motion.  Seconds later, her smartpanel pinged as the film finished its analysis of the lock.

Kat peeled the film off, gingerly wrapping it in tissue paper before returning it to her pack.  Steeling herself, she held her pistol with her right hand while entering the five digit code that her smartpanel indicated was the ‘most likely’ password for the lock with her left.

For a moment, nothing happened.  Then the keypad blinked green and the entire doorway hissed before it began sinking into the ground.

“Are we expecting anyone?”  A male voice asked in confusion.  “I thought Michaels said that everyone else from the strike team bought it.”

“Maybe there were survivors?” Another man responded only to catch himself.  “Wait!  No one came in through the back door.  Get P’rell, I think-”

Kat didn’t let him finish, triggering Dazzle as she tucked her knees to her chest to jump over the slowly lowering doorway.  As soon as the strobe of lights faded enough for her to make out the reeling forms of two guards standing in front of a smartglass display that took up an entire wall of the tiny room, her pistol jerked in her hand.

The bullet meant for the back of her first target’s head struck his shoulder, spinning the unarmored man just enough that the second shot took him square in the chest.  The other samurai brought his rifle to his shoulder, wavering barrel pointing somewhere in Kat’s general direction as he tried to blink the afterimages from his eyes.

Her third shot took him in the forehead, killing him instantly and rendering her final, missed bullet superfluous as it shattered the display behind the two of them.  Almost immediately shouts erupted from deeper inside the complex as the gunshots alerted the rest of the Millenium team.

Kat fired a final shot from her pistol into the gasping survivor before discarding the weapon and picking up his rifle.  Her unsilenced pistol packed more of a punch than the gun she normally used, but against modern chrome, it wasn’t up to the task.

She poured mana into Gravity Plane, creating a wall of force angled to her right just in front of her face, and kicked open the door into the main room.  Time seemed to slow as she took in three women and a man in a rectangular room with gleaming stainless steel walls and a single door on one of the side walls.

One of them had a gun at her shoulder while another two frantically tried to bring their own rifles up.  Near the back of the room, The final woman scrambled for a handgun atop her computer console in front of a trio of familiar cylinders that glowed a dull, eerie green.

Kat threw herself to the side, frantically trying to bring her rifle to bear on the woman in the center of the room before her counterpart could fire.

She almost made it.

The rifle barked, and wind whipped at Kat’s infiltration suit as a trio of bullets slammed into the wall a hair's breadth above her, barely redirected by the shimmering magical field that sprang into being in front of her

Kat fired back, her three shot burst striking her target square in the chest.  The woman jerked backward and fell bonelessly just as Kat’s left shoulder slammed into the polished steel floor, knocking her rifle out of her hands.

The man and woman in the center of the room scattered, looking for cover amongst the tables and bunks that littered the room while the woman by the tanks and console leapt over the electronics.

Kat rolled with the momentum of her fall, smoothly returning to her feet just in time to spot the man’s rifle muzzle poking over the top of a metal table, pressing past a bowl of dinner rolls and a pile of playing cards.

She pulled her knife from its sheath, flipping her grip so that she held it by the flat of its blade before burning stamina and Throwing it with enough force to pin her target’s hand to the table.

He screamed even as Kat drew her final pistol, firing a trio of shots at the remaining two samurai to keep their heads down while she Cat Stepped across the room toward her injured target.

The woman fired back blindly, not even coming close to Kat.  A moment later her elbow met the trapped man’s temple with a wet thud.  His eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed next to the table, letting Kat scoop up his rifle.

She flipped the selector to full automatic and lined the weapon up on the glowing green tubes.  Kat sprayed them with fire, shattering two of the glass cylinders and splashing the viscous liquid filling them all over a third of the room.

With a scream, the woman hiding behind the console burst from cover, large patches of her flesh and clothing missing as the corrosive liquid burned into her.  Kat did her best to not think of the vaguely child-shaped sacks of pale green flesh flopping on the floor by the shattered tubes as she fired the last two shots from her rifle into the fleeing samurai.

The gun’s slide locked open as Kat ripped her knife from the table with a wet squelch.  Dismissing Gravity Plane, she channeled her mana into Pseudopod as she ran across the room toward her last opponent.

The tentacle of water sprang into being just as the woman stood up, wrapping itself around the muzzle of her rifle and jerking it away from Kat.

Then the side door slammed open, a soft violet light spilling out past the massive silhouette filling it.  Without looking, Kat redirected her victim’s rifle in the figure’s general direction.

The gun flinched in the woman’s hand, barrel flashing as it opened fire.  An inhuman bellow erupted from the doorway, pouring icewater through Kat’s veins.

The hair on the back of her neck stood on end, and every instinct in Kat’s body screamed at her to get down.  WIthout questioning, she dove for the floor.

Before she even managed to hit the ground, a wave of heat washed over her as a wall of overpressurized air tossed her to the side.  A fraction of a second later, two bass thumps assaulted her hearing.

In front of her, the table her enemy had been hiding behind exploded, spraying Kat with shards of metal that shredded her infiltration suit.  The samurai she had been charging simply evaporated.  Her body exploded into wet pulp and red mist as Kat bounced off of the metal ground and slid into the room’s wall.

Filling almost the entirety of the doorway, the mole-like face of a stallesp sat atop a massive and well muscled human body.  Dwarfed by the chimera’s massive hand was a sleek purple pistol, forged from what looked like plastic.

The stallesp snarled angrily at Kat, blossoms of blood staining its shirt from two bullet holes in its chest.  The friendly fire injury would have been fatal on an actual human, but it barely slowed the alien as their pistol swung across the room to track Kat, its tip glowing an angry yellow-red.

Without thinking, Kat whipped her knife across the room, burning stamina on Throwing to bury the blade up to its hilt in the alien’s knee.

This time the stallesp stumbled, throwing off their aim.  The pistol thumped and the ceiling above the alien detonated, raining metal and cement down on them as their gun left a beach ball sized crater in the solid steel.

They staggered under the weight of the falling cement, injured leg partially giving out under them.  Kat cut off the mana to Pseudopod, instead dumping all of her focus into Overpessure.  Blood sprayed from the alien’s chest and leg.

Finally, they fell to the ground, just in time for Kat to recast the spell.  This time their pistol slipped from their hand as even more blood soaked her collapsed enemy.

Kat cast the spell a final time as she stood up.  The alien drunkenly planted a hand on the ground and tried to pull themselves to their feet only to slip on the blood slick floor once again.

She winced at the stinging pain in her chest and face, doing her best to ignore the tattered remnants of her suit as she limped over to the downed chimera.  They fumbled weakly on the floor, insensible to Kat’s approach.

Almost out of mana, Kat reached down and picked up the discarded alien weapon.  She couldn’t see any visible sight or safety, but the single button where the trigger would be on a normal pistol was self-evident.

She pointed the gun at the downed stallesp and pushed the button.  The pistol jumped in her hand, kicking harder than any weapon Kat had ever fired.  With a thump, most of the chimera’s chest transformed into a smear of red pulp and gristle.

Kat stepped over the corpse, wiping the alien’s blood from her face and chest as meat plopped to the floor around her.  Entering the next room she stopped in her tracks.

The chamber was about half the size of the one she’d just exited, lit by a gentle purple light emanating from a wall mounted rack of six troughs.  Dirt was packed tight in each of the basins, a variety of foreign plants in various states of growth sprouting from them.

An entire wall was occupied with a massive computer console, illegible glowing writing floating above the computer next to pictures of various structures and landmarks from across the world.

Kat grimaced as she stepped fully into the room, walking past what looked like a cross between a hyperbaric chamber and a bed as she approached the floating images.  She squinted at the sharp and angular script hovering in the air as if focusing on it would force it to make some kind of sense, before finally giving up and turning to the images.

Her breath caught in her throat.  Front and center were pictures of the Field Tower along with the Beloit prison complex.  Kat only recognized a couple of other pictures from the Chiwaukee area, the Racine Industrial Warrens and one of the Lake Michigan aquaculture sites, but as she walked in around the console, she was able to make out almost a hundred pictures.

“Whip,” she croaked, setting her smartpanel to record and send what she was seeing with a flick of her pupils.  “Get in here.  It looks like Millenium was busy.  Worse, I think news of their organization’s demise has been greatly overstated.  We’re going to need out of town help to get to the bottom of this.  A lot of it.”