Somnus IV - Chapter 12 (Patreon)

The jet engine roared, sending another rattle through its fuselage as it fought its way through turbulence.  Kat’s smartpanel pinged underneath her infiltration suit, indicating that their plane had reached the predetermined coordinates.

She looked over to Whip, nodding once at the faceless form of the other woman’s suit.  Whippoorwill nodded back, and Kat took a breath to steady herself before reaching down to grip the red lever that would open the door built into the plane’s body.

It resisted her for a half second before creaking downward. She pushed to the side, adn almost instantly the interior of the plane was filled with the deafening drone of engines as the night air whipped past them, pulling at Kat and Whip’s suits and sending any unattended material flying.

Kat took a step toward the opening, and something in her gut rebelled.  Realistically, she shouldn’t be afraid of heights.  She spent so much time manipulating gravity and flying that the open air was as familiar to her as solid ground.  Still, Kat’s stomach lurched as she looked out over the dark water below.  In the distance she could see the smear of light that was the Northstar Lumber and Dairy, LLC headquarters facility at the edge of the large bay.

With a shake of her head, Kat dismissed the lingering concerns.  She stepped out of the door.  Wind rushed past her as she plummeted out of the plane, gathering mana as she fell.  Her smartpanel pinged, indicating that Whippoorwill had exited the jet as well.

The spell took hold and Kat slowed down, rotating slowly onto her back as she scanned the night sky for Whip.  Her smartpanel connected wirelessly with the other woman’s highlighting her tumbling form.

Kat changed direction, flying upward toward where Whippoorwill had spread her arms akimbo, doing her best impression of the world’s least effective flying squirrel as she fell through the stormy night toward the choppy bay below.  Flight wasn’t as effective in the real world as it was in the Tower, but it still was an iron tier skill, and Kat’s target also wasn’t really trying to soar or dodge.

Above the two of them, their plane kept on its original flight path, ostensibly picking up a vice president from another one of GroCorp’s subsidiaries so that Kat could interview him for a position with the research branch tomorrow morning.  In all likelihood, the poor man was probably pooping his pants as he was told to make himself ready for a flight to Chiwaukee with almost zero notice, but when a shareholder requested your presence, you made yourself present.

Then Whippoorwill slammed into Kat, sending the two of them spinning in the air.  The smaller woman buried her head in Kat’s shoulder, giggling uncontrollably as Kats magic slowly righted the two of them.

Finally, after almost ten seconds of vertigo inducing spin-falling, Kat was able to bring their descent under control.  Whip slipped her arms around her arms around Kat, pulling her into a tight hug as she whispered, just audible over the droning of the distant jet.

“God we need to do that again sometime but without the suits.  I don’t think I’ve ever felt that much adrenaline all at once before, and I bet it’s even better with the wind whipping through my hair.”

Kat let the serious expression on her face crack, smiling back at the girl nestled in her arms as she redirected their flight toward the corporate headquarters.

“That sounds fun actually,” she replied, scanning the darkness as she looked for security systems.  “Maybe once everything calms down a little bit we can actually go skydiving for fun.”

Wind rushed past the two of them, rustling the fabric of their infiltration suits as they flew closer to the facility.  Kat leaned past Whippoorwill, squinting her eyes as she tried to spot the sensors and security cameras that might spot their approach.

“Don’t worry too much,” Whip said from the crook of Kat’s neck.  “All of their sensitive scanners are near ground level.  They scan the air for large objects and metal, but the network isn’t nearly as precise.  They didn’t want every flock of geese that passed through to set it off after all.”

“Anywhere in particular I should be aiming?”  Kat asked, shifting their course slightly as they soared over the dark water of the bay.

“Timber warehouse,” Whippoorwill replied immediately.  “Northwest corner.  I’ve only had a chance to look at the publicly available schematics for the complex, but it looks like they run machinery in there to strip limbs and bark from the lumber twenty four seven.  We’ll have to play things by ear once we land, but there’s no way they can be running sensors in there without constantly detecting their own machinery.”

She let her eyes drift around the headquarters.  The central area was a cluster of high rises made from gleaming glass, none of which would have been out of place in downtown Chiwaukee.  A river ran through the town, lined by what appeared to be housing for company employees as well as a trio of large processing plants.

That said, the general rule seemed to be that the further a building was from the central headquarters, the smaller it was.  Near the massive wall that ringed the complex, some of the structures were only three to four stories tall.

Whippoorwill reached up, touching a finger to the side of Kat’s head and a map showing a satellite display of the compound popped up in the left pane of her smartpanel, a red dot hovering over a squat metal building near the edge of the headquarters.

They drifted toward the target.  Kat could barely breathe.  Between Whip nestled tight around her neck and the constant fear that a random guard would glance up and somehow make out her silhouette against the night sky, anxiety dragged down on her like a pair of sandbags.

But no one saw her.  The sky was dark and the wind damp and cold.  Anyone outside was busy hurrying from one building to another, far too concerned with getting out of the weather to look up and notice a slightly blacker patch of sky.

Finally, she stopped over the warehouse, pausing for a second before she cut the mana to Flight entirely.  It was like Kat stepped off a platform.  One second she was floating gently and the next the two of them were plummeting toward a slightly rusted iron roof.

Whip’s hands, clenched against her infiltration suit, and for a second her entire body went stiff.  Kat held on tight, making sure she had a good grip on the woman before castling Levitation just above the roof, slowing their plummeting bodies almost to a stop.

Her toes tapped down, clanking slightly, but the sound was almost instantly absorbed by the hum and rattle of machinery that traveled upward through the building.  As soon as Whippoorwill was securely down, Kat scampered to the edge of the building, dropping to a crouch in order to minimize her silhouette against the cloudy night sky.

Rain began to patter down on the concrete streets between buildings.  Guards still moved in pairs, trusting in their bulky armored uniforms to keep themselves more or less dry, but the handful of ordinary employees pulled their jackets up and over their heads and sprinted for cover.

Kat discounted them.  Most employees would be too focused on staying out of the frigid storm to pay much attention to what was going on outside.  Even if they spotted her, they likely wouldn’t be able to see much through the rain.  Her only real concern was the fairly frequent patrols.

She leaned forward slightly, tracking the two nearest pairs in an attempt to make some sense of their routes and timing.  A frown grew on her face as a third pair entered her line of sight.  Whippoorwill and her were only in a small corner of the complex.  If guards filtered from section to section, there wouldn’t be any chance for Kat to map their route.

A sigh brushed past her lips.  That left another option.  Kat’s hand crept down toward the knife at her hip.  She had meant to keep this operation bloodless.  After all, she was technically raiding the property of her own company.  Still, it wouldn’t be the first time she killed a couple of corporate goons, and from the looks of things, Northstar didn’t exactly have the cleanest conscious.

Whip’s hand touched her shoulder, and the other woman shook her head, leaning close to whisper over the rain.

“Not yet, the factory is bound to have computers.  I’ll bet you five credits that they’re integrated into the entire headquarters local network.  We might not be able to get the specific answers we want, but I’m pretty sure that I’ll be able to figure out where we need to go to get those answers.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Kat replied, sheepishly removing her hand from her knife.  “Probably a better one than carving my way through a mountain of bodies.”

“You should still keep your knife out,” Whip said soothingly.  “After all, we don’t know whether or not there is anyone inside the lumber mill.  I might be able to defend myself from a street thug with a little bit of chrome, but I’d feel a lot more confident if you handled the people and let me focus on the computers.”

Kat snorted, smiling behind her infiltration suit’s mask.

“If I didn’t know any better Chiffon,” she responded, her voice amused.  “I would say that you don’t really need my help for this part of the mission, and that you’re trying to placate me.”

Whippoorwill giggled, turning away from Kat and practically skipping across the roof toward an access staircase.  Kat rolled her eyes, taking the lack of reply for the answer it was as she moved away from the edge of the building before standing up to follow Whip.

The door to the staircase was locked from the inside, but that was hardly a challenge.  Kat used penetrate to jam her knife through six times in a hexagon around the handle.  Then, with a sharp wrenching motion she pulled it free and stepped to the side to allow Whippoorwill through.

Whip went down to one knee, reaching into a pouch at her side to pull out a small electronic apparatus.  She undid a latch on the back of her infiltration suit, pulling a small cord out and plugging it into the hand sized chunk of metal, before sticking the machine through the hole in the door.

Kat scanned the roof, doing her best not to look useless while Whippoorwill did the actual work.  The rain was coming down a bit harder, impeding her vision, but all she could see were the oversized metal rectangles of machinery and HVAC units.  Beneath her feet, the factory itself hummed, the occasional rattle of the production lines audible over the constant drumming of rain on steel.

“The alarm is down.”

Whippoorwill’s quiet voice pulled Kat back to the door.  The other woman stood up, taking a step away so that Kat could lead them into the facility.

Securing her knife in her right hand, Kat reached into the hole where the latch had been, pulling the mechanism that secured the door out of the wall before grabbing the inside of the sharp metal and yanking the barrier out of the way.

“Stay close,” she whispered, casting Shadow on herself.  As Kat’s skill level in the spell had improved, so had her control over it.  It wasn’t as effective at bending light when she expanded its size to cover a second person, but it should be enough.  Theoretically, so long as the two of them were quiet and not in bright light it would survive casual scrutiny.  The key was to disable anyone that stopped long enough to give them a second glance.

The first floor after the stairwell was entirely abandoned, a cavernous open space filled with knee deep insulation.  Other than a couple dozen boxes of office supplies and spare parts, neither of them could find anything worth their time.

One floor down didn’t change the equation much.  It was barely an actual level of the warehouse, more a series of metal maintenance catwalks so that employees could repair powerlines and change the massive fluorescent light panels that illuminated the actual lumber mill and warehouse below.

Squinting, Kat could make out a single guard a couple hundred paces away slumped in a chair pressed up against the factory’s wall.  She couldn’t make out enough of his details to confirm anything, but as bet she could tell, his chest was rising and falling rhythmically, the steady breathing of a deep nap.

Whip tapped her on the shoulder, pointing down a level and toward the building’s walls.  Although most of the facility was open for about three stories down with nothing but conveyor belts and heavy machinery obstructing Kat’s view of its cement floor, the third story continued a ring of boxlike offices with large windows overlooking the production and storage areas.  The lights in the windows were off, but if there were anywhere with network access to the rest of the Northstar headquarters complex, it would almost assuredly be on that level.

Carefully, the two of them returned to the staircase and went down another level.  Whippoorwill stopped Kat for a moment, once again taking the wireless adapter and pressing it up against the door.  After about five seconds of silence, the lock clicked.

Modern security would stop this sort of remote intrusion dead in its tracks.  In fact, that was half of why they needed to sneak into the facility altogether rather than simply breaking in through public channels from outside the wall.  That said, nothing in the timber warehouse looked like it had been repaired or replaced recently.  From the rusty roof to the old, loud machinery, everything was in sore need of an update.  It wasn’t terribly surprising that their anti intrusion equipment was optimized to ward off local hooligans rather than a dedicated infiltration team.

Team.  Kat felt a slight flutter in her chest as the two of them scampered across a mostly open walkway and into the office complex.  Whippoorwill and her really were a team.  All of the places where her skills and abilities ended, Whip began.  The two of them fit together like a jigsaw puzzle complementing each other and creating a seamless whole that was infinitely more effective than the sum of its parts.

Warmth filled her as she pushed the unlocked door to the office open, using her Nightvision to peer into the black and white interior.  Spotting no one, she motioned Whip forward, and her girlfriend went to work, removing the plug from her intrusion hardware and directly jacking into one of the consoles.

Girlfriend.  Kat’s mouth curved into a happy smile.  That was another word she hadn’t expected to use.  There’s no way that Xander could have predicted that his two proteges would have ended up as partners in more way than one, but honestly it all made sense.  Looking back on her interactions with Whippoorwill, every word and action just screamed ‘unacknowledged crush.’

She stepped away from Whippoorwill, letting her partner work.  Through the window into the main building of the warehouse, she watched as logs were fed one by one into a conveyor belt where first their branches, and then their bark was stripped free.  Finally, the bare logs were deposited by an automated crane in a series of long tan pyramids.  Kat got as far as identifying the machinery that turned the excess bits into mulch and fertilizer when a yelp of triumph from Whip interrupted her thoughts.

“I found our ticket in Erinyes.”

“Mmm?” Kat questioned turning back to Whippoorwill, watching as she unhooked her cable from the computer and curled curled stowed it back away in the specially designed pouch in the neck of her infiltration suit.

“Steam tunnels,” Whip said excitedly.  “It gets cold during the winter, and between the Fox River and the lake there is plenty of water.  It’s more economical for Northstar to heat their buildings and manufacturing plants with steam from one central location, and then pump it around the complex underground.  The buildings are big enough that the tunnels need to be huge to compensate.  If you crouch, people can move through them on foot.”

Kat frowned, pursing her lips under her mask as she looked at Whippoorwill.  She bit back a pithy response as she mulled the prospect.

“Are you sure it’s safe?” She finally asked.  “I’m fine with tunnels, but these suits are only partially temperature controlled.  I’m not a big fan of getting scalded to death in some backwater tomb.”

“It’ll be fine,” Whippoorwill replied with a wave of her hand.  “They only really use the tunnels in winter.  This time of year they’ll be dry as a bone and probably cooler than the surface buildings.  They are underground after all.”

Twenty minutes later, Kat was cursing Whip under her breath, sweat dripping down her face.  The narrow metal tunnel was lined with pipes, all of them at least as big as her arm and pumping rivers worth of superheated water.

“I hate you,” Kat hissed, trying not to think of the fact that her infiltration suit was dripping.  It was going to take an entire team of dry cleaners days to get the piece of equipment back into working order.

“How was I supposed to know?” Whippoorwill asked desperately.  “I just read the description.  ‘Steam tunnels for heating.’  I assumed it would be tunnels full of steam, not a soup pot full of boiling water.”

“It might as well be steam,” Kut grumbled.  “Those pipes are giving off enough heat that I feel like I’m about to melt.  Seriously Chiffon, I know that I must sound like an exec lecturing you on business ethics right now, but next time please, please, PLEASE double check things like this.”

“I know,” Whip said sourly.  “I’m almost thinking of risking a stop at a water fountain.  It would be the dumbest way ever to get caught, but at this rate I might faint before I extract what we need from the database.”

“Bubbler,” Kat corrected.  “For some unfathomable reason, everyone at Northstar calls them bubblers.  Frankly I’ll take all that nonsense ‘chummer,’ ‘chiphead,’ ‘rigger,’ ‘ripperdoc,’ and ‘chromefiend’ slang from the Pacific Northwest any day.  At least it makes a sort of sense.”

“I don’t care if they call it a bidet buffet,” Whippoorwill replied.  “I’m thirsty, and if it dispenses water, I’m going to drink it.”

Kat scrunched her face into a tight frown, words leaking from her pursed lips.

“Gross.”

“Hush,” Whip said evenly.  “We’re almost to the data server.  There should be an access tunnel to the right in the next ten or so paces.  Then we can finally get out of this hellish dungeon.”

With a fervent nod, Kat sped up, and in less than a minute she was gasping in a sub basement filled with old machinery hidden under dust covers.  After the hike through the tunnels, the air was a welcome, ice cold respite.

Whippoorwill staggered to a nearby wall, slumping against it and panting for a second before removing an access panel and plugging her cable  in.  After about five minutes, Whip waved a hand weakly, and unplugged herself from the wall.

Kat was beginning to feel a little better even if her suit was a bit sticky on the inside as Whip led the way to a nearby service elevator.  It opened as they approached, and Whippoorwill ignored the keypad and id reader that should have required both a password and keycard in order for the device to function.  Instead, the lift immediately rumbled to life, carrying the two of them upward.

She cocked her head to the side in a silent question, and Whip shrugged before offering an explanation.

“It’s not like our lab Erinyes.  They only need enough security to keep the local street runners out.  Hell, most of the samurai in this area haven’t even earned names.  Northstar is modestly profitable, but there’s nothing exciting about stealing recipes for cheese and paper.  The more money they spend on security, the less their profits.”

The door opened on an empty hallway lit by fluorescent panels.  Whippoorwill led the way down the passage stopping at a metal door.  The lock clicked before she pushed it open to reveal a room filled with blissfully air conditioned servers.

Whippoorwill walked over to a nearby smartglass display, searching for a second before finding a port and jacking in.  The door shut with a hiss behind them, leaving them alone with hundreds of thousands of credits worth of sensitive electronics.

“That’s it?”  Kat asked.  “What about the guards?  There had to be guards somewhere around here.  Maybe we still have to sneak into another location or something?”

“That’s it,” Whippoorwill confirmed.  “I triggered a silent alarm for an ajar door.  All of the security on this floor is checking for intruders on the other side of the building.  When the time comes for us to leave, all I have to do is watch the security feed until the coast is clear and we can sneak back into the tunnels.  An hour later, all records of our visit will be gone.  The only hint anyone will have that something happened is the destroyed door in the timber warehouse.”

“This doesn’t seem right,” Kat grumbled.  “I barely saw anyone and all we did was fly around a bit and crouch in some miserable tunnels.  Seriously, I haven’t even used my knife or shot a gun today.  It’s just wrong.”

Despite Whippoorwill’s mask, Kat swore she could see the other woman rolling her eyes at her.

“That means it’s a successful mission Erinyes,” Whip replied dryly.  “We are here to infiltrate, not shoot an entertainment vid.  Seriously, you need to bring me on more of these with you, if only to keep you out of trouble.”