AN: You lot reached another 400 stones last night. So here is a bonus chapter as per our agreement.
The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novice NottaTank.
Operative Thomas Bommel.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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"Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak."
- Rachel Zoe
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I'd say that getting inside the building was almost insulting. Moth led the way, with Torque following closely behind, flowing through the perimeter fence via a maintenance access gate on the facility's north face, which was secured with a lock I bypassed with a simple quickhack before they reached it. The lock disengaged without a sound, allowing Moth and Torque to slip right through the gap in the fence.
I followed with Patch a few seconds later, crossing the open ground between the fence and the loading dock, ducking to be just below the sightline of the single camera covering the area. Not that it mattered, anyway, since I had already looped the feed, giving it sixty seconds of recorded footage from its own archive on a seamless cycle that should hold for about twelve minutes before it became detectable.
The loading dock's service entrance was a reinforced steel door with a biometric panel that I probably could have gotten past, but Patch produced a spoofing module from her harness and pressed it against the sensor housing before I was even allowed to try. So I let her shine.
The device cycled through captured biometric profiles until it found one that matched an employee currently logged as off-shift. The door opened, and we had already made our way inside in under three minutes.
The ground floor was a one-to-one of what the building permits said it was supposed to be. There were rows of server cabinets running procurement databases, filing rooms with physical document storage, administrative offices with their screens turned off and chairs empty, and hallways lit by the soft blue lights of a building operating after hours in energy-saving mode.
I sent out a ping quickhack and found there to be two guards on this level. I quickly controlled the nearest camera and found them on the far side of the building near the main entrance, chilling without a care in the world as they watched "MAXTAC: LIVE" and ate some burritos.
I manipulated the building's HVAC via the surface network, triggering a maintenance notification for the environmental controls in the east wing. The alert was legitimate, and I had pulled it from the facility's own maintenance calendar and rescheduled to fire now instead of next Tuesday. Both guards would need to acknowledge it and log a response, which would keep them occupied for about four minutes and pull their attention away from the west corridor where we were moving.
"Service alert deployed," I said through our comms. "I bought us a four-minute window to make our way through the West corridor."
"Stairwell access is thirty meters ahead on the left," Patch said as she took a quick look at the floor plan. "Sub-level entry is a restricted elevator and a parallel service stairwell. But the stairwell needs a separate credential set."
As soon as she said that, I was on it. I began pulling the credential architecture and tracing the access control protocols. The stairwell appeared to run on a standalone authentication system that validated against an employee database, which I couldn't reach from the civilian network. However, the standalone system was connected to the building's power management grid for its backup battery monitoring, and the power management grid was connected to the surface network, which I was connected to.
I simply followed the connection to the standalone system's maintenance interface, which had probably been designed for technicians to test the battery backup without needing full authentication, and injected a temporary credential. If I did everything right, then the system should accept the temporary credential as a valid maintenance override for hopefully ninety seconds before the next validation cycle purges it.
"I have the stairwell credential up and running," I said. "We should have a ninety-second window."
"You heard the kid, move," Torque ordered.
We made it through the door just in time, with Moth taking the lead while I followed last, pulling the door shut behind me as the credential expired and the lock re-engaged.
The stairwell descended three levels, each landing marked with a painted designation that the facilities team hadn't considered worth removing.
SB-1
SB-2
SB-3
The temperature dropped more and more the lower we went. The climate control shifted from the energy-saving warmth of the above-ground floors to around fifty degrees meant for a data storage environment.
The first sub-level opened into a corridor with reinforced concrete walls and full-spectrum overhead panels. The corridor stretched for around forty meters to a junction that branched left and right. I sent out a ping and noticed two humanoid security drones docked at their charging stations, flanking the entrance. Their sensor arrays were powered down, most likely tied to the intrusion detection system.
Patch found the hardline terminal recessed into an access panel beside the stairwell door, and I plugged my link cable into it only to immediately be hit by a bucket of cold water. This was unlike anything I had seen before.
The ICE was extremely dense and layered. And if that wasn't enough, the shit was also adaptive. It had three distinct security architectures running in parallel, monitoring traffic patterns, analyzing access requests, and comparing everything against a behavioral baseline it had been building for months. That meant any deviation would trigger an escalating response protocol, which most likely began with passive monitoring, progressed to active containment, and then to a full facility lockdown with the deployment of the drones.
I couldn't just brute-force my way through this as I would usually do. It was time for me to use Dino's advice and add my own flair to this and convince it that there was no one here.
I spoofed my network presence as a scheduled diagnostic process, mimicking the system's own internal maintenance routines in timing, packet structure, and authentication headers. After a bit of toying around, the ICE acknowledged me as a legitimate system function and continued its baseline monitoring without flagging the activity, and I was inside the network like a fucking virus.
I accessed the drones' management subnet and inserted a delayed authentication request into their activation queue that would loop indefinitely without resolving, effectively preventing them from receiving a valid activation command even if the intrusion detection system triggered one.
"Aaaannndd drones are down," I said. "Let's move to the primary server."
"Already? That's how you fucking do it," Patch said as she slapped me on the back.
"That was fast," Torque complemented. "Well done, kid."
Moth stayed quiet, but they gave me a short nod of acknowledgment as well. I think now I understand what Dino was talking about. There's something exhilarating about doing shit right and being recognized for it.
We quickly made our way through the corridor with Moth leading the way, Patch with her ECM suite active in the middle, and me in the rear. Torque had split off and gone back upstairs to keep our exit clear.
The server room was behind a biometric door at the end of the left-branch corridor. I accessed the authentication system and injected a spoofed biometric profile matching that of the facility's chief data officer, a Korean woman named Bae Ji-Sung, whose credentials were stored in the employee database.
The door opened, and I was immediately met with an even harsher cold. The racks stretched floor to ceiling in four rows, their LED status indicators blinking in patterns I determined to be active processing or storage allocation. The extraction target was exactly where Dino's intel said it would be, a specific partition on the third rack from the left, designated with a project code that I confirmed to be the contracted file set.
I plugged into the nearest terminal and initiated the extraction, chewing through the ICE guarding the partition with a speed I had never achieved before. The three encryption layers cracked in sequence, and I used the MCU to feed pre-compiled decryption routines faster than the ICE could regenerate its keys.
Once I was through the ICE, I was able to get the data copied onto one of the shards in my pocket in under a minute.
"Alright, I've got the primary target," I announce, and that should have been it. Contract complete. Pack up, move out, and go home. But I was still connected, and my MCU was still indexing the surrounding directory structure when something caught my eye.
There was an additional storage partition that shouldn't exist. It wasn't exactly hidden, per se, but more like it had been forgotten. It was filed in a subdirectory the facility's data management system had stopped indexing a long time ago, and access logs showing no activity since 2052. The encryption was also generations behind the ICE protecting the contracted target, almost as if it had been purposefully forgotten.
What made it suspicious was how unsuspicious it really was. I mean, in a facility running mil-spec adaptive ICE on every active partition, this one sat pretty much unguarded and unmonitored. Either it was genuinely unimportant information, or it was so important that someone had decided the best security was making it look like it wasn't worth securing.
Curiosity got the best of me, and I opened it.
The partition unfolded across my overlay in a cascade of file directories that my MCU struggled to index in real time. And- HOLY MOTHERFUCKING SON OF A FUCK. MY eyes widened as I realized that I JUST HIT A FUCKING GOLDMINE!
These were black-budget project files carrying classification headers I had never encountered. There were some covert financial transaction records linking Militech procurement accounts to offshore entities that didn't appear in any registry, political correspondence between Militech executives and NUSA officials documenting in detail illegal manipulation that would end careers and trigger investigations at the very least, possibly even reshape the balance of power between the corporation and the government it was currently serving as a private army.
There was also procurement corruption, experimental neural interface research with test subject data carrying dates and casualty numbers, prototype cyberware architecture with manufacturing specifications worth millions to any competing corp, information about previous Blackwall-breaching sites and...
I felt my heart drop as I read.
Project BLACKGLASS
Project Lead: Alejandro Alfonso Lopez Reyes
Project Status: Terminated
Team Status: Terminated by Project Lead
Reason for Project Termination: Unidentified Blackwall AI breach.
I felt my blood run cold for a second as I read my Father's name and the apparent project he had led. But I couldn't just go through everything here, so I pulled one of my personal shards from my pocket and initiated a copy. The partition's contents were extensive, and the data flow required bandwidth that would, if sustained, eventually deviate from the baseline traffic pattern I'd been spoofing.
While the copy ran, my Paraline kept indexing the partition's structure, and somewhere in the deeper layers of the directory tree, I noticed something that made even less sense than what I had just seen.
There was a process running, yet it was consuming zero resources.
"That's impossible," I whispered. Every active process consumed computational resources. From CPU cycles to memory allocation to network bandwidth. That was just how computing worked. A process that executed without resource consumption was a contradiction in of itself, the digital equivalent of a fire that produced no heat.
I attempted to identify the process type, its function, and its origin. But the query returned as null. As if the process existed in a space I couldn't reach, occupying the partition without occupying the system, basically running without running.
I stared at it for maybe two seconds and logged the parameters before moving on, because the copy was nearing completion and the transfer had been running long enough that the bandwidth deviation was climbing toward the monitoring AI's detection threshold.
The second it finished copying, I disconnected.
"We need to move," I said. "I've been on the network longer than planned, and it's more than likely that the monitoring AI is going to flag the traffic deviation."
"How long?" Patch asked.
"The thing's been learning my spoofed pattern for the past six minutes, and the deviation between my actual bandwidth and the baseline I'm faking has been growing at a rate that'll cross the detection threshold in about..." I focused on the timer in my Kiroshis. "Eighty-three seconds."
"Then you three better get a move on, now," Torque said through comms. "Stairwell's clear. Get up here."
We moved and had barely even made it to the sub-level-one corridor before the alarms hit. The overhead lights shifted from white to amber, and my overlay exploded as the facility's security transitioned from passive monitoring to active containment.
The drones tried to activate, but thankfully my delayed authentication loop held...
"Fuck," I said. "The facility's security AI forced a hard reset on the drone management subnet and cleared my injected command. The drones are live."
As if confirming what I had just said, both drones powered up simultaneously, their sensor arrays coming online with a high-pitched whine, and they quickly began target acquisition.
I didn't even notice Moth move as I was focused on the drones, sending an optic reboot to both of them. The drones stood still for a second, allowing Moth to plant one hand on one of their chassis and drive a compact EMP charge into the sensor housing.
The EMP charge went off, and the drone dropped like a marionette with its strings cut. But the second drone managed to get its optics back up faster than anticipated, and began rotating toward Moth. I hit it with a Cyberware Malfunction and an Overheat quickhack that scrambled its motor control and forced it to spit out its upper body and snap a few lines, and Moth finished it off with another EMP charge.
We didn't waste our breaths and immediately took the stairs, ascending from sub-level one to the ground floor in under fifteen seconds, and emerged into a hallway flooding with amber lights.
I sent a ping out, and the guards who'd been eating and streaming on the far side were moving now. Though I didn't need a ping to know that, since their voices carried through the corridors as they coordinated with the security center. There were also an additional two moving toward the east wing.
"Main entrance has two more guards moving toward the east wing," I said through the comms. "We have three minutes, maybe less to delta the fuck out of here."
"Let's go out the way we came in," Torque said as he took point, leveling a suppressed Tsunami Kyubi while moving down the west corridor with controlled strides and a very military-esque stalking stance while jogging. We followed him while I used my Kerenzikov and quickly buried myself in the surface network, manipulating the facility's environmental controls and triggering the fire suppression in the east wing, flooding the corridor between us and the guards with halon gas, buying us forty-five seconds.
I also sealed the interior blast doors between the east and west wings, cutting the facility in half and blocking any reinforcements from reaching the loading dock corridor, and killed the lights in the west wing. I deactivated the Kerenzikov, and a split second later, our exit route was plunged into darkness. Since we all had cybereyes, making our way out would be rather easy.
A guard appeared at the end of the loading dock corridor, stepping out of a side office with his sidearm half-drawn, looking like he had just woken up from a nap.
Torque didn't break stride as a suppressed round left his weapon with the sound of dropping a water bottle on a carpet. The guard dropped, clutching his right shoulder, alive but no longer a factor in anyone's operational planning.
"Shoulder," I said, mostly to myself as I noted that wasn't the shot most solos took, as if he was trying to limit casualties.
"Bodies attract investigations," Torque said without turning around. "Wounded guards are akin to a report, but a dead one starts a manhunt."
He made a fair point, but it was still odd.
We reached the loading dock door, which was sealed. I hit the release through the surface network and the heavy panel began its slow, hydraulic climb. It was way too slow. "Patch, anything you can do about-"
"On it," she said as she walked past me and was at the manual override before the words had finished leaving my mouth, hauling the emergency release handle down with both hands and adding mechanical force to the hydraulic cycle, forcing the door to climb faster and allowing us to roll under it.
The van was about fifty meters from us, but I didn't want to risk much more. So I remote-started the engine and put it into autodrive to meet us at the gate. We crossed the open ground at a sprint and were just about to exit through where we'd come in just when the van pulled up.
I guess Torque activated his Sandy because one second he was by me and the next he was already in the driver's seat with the cargo doors open before the rest of us closed the distance. Patch and Moth dove in, and I dove in after them, shutting the cargo doors behind us.
Torque punched the accelerator without waiting for directions, almost taking us towards a dead-end.
"Take a left at the loading dock access road, through the service gate," I said.
Torque didn't answer, but we took a sharp left, throwing Patch on top of Moth, and blew through the service gate hard enough to tear the chain-link clean off its hinges and send the gate post spinning across the pavement behind us.
We were on the public road in under ten seconds. Torque turned on the lights, merged into traffic, and brought the van down to the posted speed limit. He relaxed a bit and checked the mirrors to ensure no one was following.
Some gonk in a Mizutani Shion Targa MZT roared past us, and we noticed a Militech Hellhound speeding behind us. I thought it was over for us, but thankfully they chased after the MZT. We took the first exit as the sound of gunfire echoed in the highway.
Patch let out a sigh of relief mixed with a chuckle. "Poor gonk just bought us our freedom."
"Dumbassess always attract the most attention," Torque said from the cab.
Moth closed their eyes and said nothing.
I rubbed my fingers over the two data shards in my pocket with a weight on my chest as I thought of the information I had seen, the questions in my head multiplying by the second.
After an hour of driving, we all split. I took a cab home for a quick shower and to decide how much I would give Dino by the time we met tomorrow.
I immediately made my way to my server room, sat on the terminal, and plugged into it. I pulled the second shard two from my pocket and slotted it into the terminal's port, and spent the next forty-five minutes processing it. Thanks to my new upgrades, I was able to ingest the file directories at a much higher rate than before, indexing each file by type, classification level, and potential value while I evaluated the content.
Most of it was Black-budget project files, covert financial transactions, and yadi-yada. A whole bunch of pullshit I didn't really care too much for.
What I wanted to go over were the things that had caught my eye. I pulled a blank data chip from the drawer beside the terminal and began copying the black-budget project files and what I could sell onto it.
Copying it took me eleven minutes, mostly because I was picking and choosing which data was going to be put onto it. Once I was done, I pulled the blank chip, encrypted it with my personal keys, and set it beside the shard containing the data I was contracted to retrieve, while I locked the second shard in a drawer beneath the terminal.
I went upstairs, took a shower, and knocked out for the night.
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AN: For those who didn't catch it, Torque is James Norris.
If you want more bonus chappies, then send stones, or go onto the infamous P@treon if you want to continue reading ahead during this hiatus.
patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don't be a gonk, remove the space)
They get around long-form chapters (4-6k words each)