Genos 'Harker'
[UNDERSTOOD.]
[INITIATING PASSIVE STRUCTURAL RECONNAISSANCE.]
[SEARCH EYE INITIATED.]
For several seconds, nothing happened that a human being standing beside me would have been capable of noticing.
No luminous pulse travelled across the warehouse yard, no helpful holographic blueprint unfolded over the structure, and none of the 6th Street gangoons patrolling its perimeter abruptly clutched their skulls while their implants leaked smoke.
I kept my optical sensors dark, deliberately avoiding active infrared or lidar sweeps. If Rex had a decent netrunner watching the building's digital perimeter, a sudden spike in thermal or laser telemetry would shine through the Arroyo smog like a flare gun.
Instead, a sequence of ultrasonic clicks passed through the emitters buried in my throat. Each pulse was too high for unaided human hearing, compressed into narrow acoustic beams that struck only the specific sections of the structure directly ahead of me. I shifted through the shadows of the container stack, tracking the perimeter, careful to keep out of the line of sight.
The sound waves travelled across Hargreaves Street, touched corrugated steel, vibrated against concrete supports, wrapped around rusted drainage pipes, and returned through the acoustic receivers built into my auditory systems. They carried minute, readable differences in timing, frequency, and wave distortion.
The first return identified the container wall beneath my boots. The second found the open asphalt separating the yard from the main facility. The third struck a heavy steel support column hidden behind the exterior siding, splitting against several internal surfaces before returning as a cluster of overlapping echoes distorted by running machinery and the heavy Night City rain.
MK began assembling those echoes into a wireframe approximation of the building's layout. Thin, green lines began to stitch themselves together in the lower-right corner of my vision, uncertain and pulsing at first, then sharpening as more sonic telemetry flooded the processors. Vertical planes resolved into walls. Breaks in those planes became windows or structural doorways. Hollow spaces appeared wherever the sound managed to bounce deeper than the exterior shell before returning.
The reconstruction was far from clean.
The warehouse had been thrown together from concrete, corrugated iron, and whatever cheap materials had been available across four decades of hasty renovations. Every ultrasonic pulse bounced through the architecture like a smart-bullet ricocheting inside a shipping container, echoes struck heavy industrial machinery, crossed one another's paths, returned from unpredictable angles, and carried enough background vibration from the gang's generators to turn the raw data into something resembling a blueprint drawn during a severe earthquake.
[EXTERIOR STRUCTURE PARTIALLY MAPPED.]
[ACOUSTIC INTERFERENCE: SIGNIFICANT.]
[INTERNAL RECONSTRUCTION CONFIDENCE: 31.4%.]
I remained crouched in the dark, watching the incomplete wireframe rotate on my retina.
'Thirty-one point four...'
[CORRECT.]
'What is contaminating the returns?
[THE STRUCTURE CONTAINS MULTIPLE HIGH-DENSITY METALLIC SURFACES, ACTIVE POWER GENERATORS, ROTATING COOLING FANS, LOOSE VENTILATION PANELS, AND UNSHIELDED INDUSTRIAL HUM.]
'Fine. We'll just keep pulsing the blind spots until we find a way in.'
The reality was, this would have been significantly easier if I had looked into netrunning properly before rolling into Santo Domingo. But I hadn't seen the utility of burning eddies on a proper cyberdeck—internal or otherwise—until I had gotten my Neuroprocessor. I also wasn't comfortable outsourcing a hundred percent of my coding to the VI, it was the same reason I hadn't even touched the R.A.B.I.D.S. source code yet; as long as Rex had a live runner floating around in his subnet, I wasn't going to try and fight them on their home turf.
The wireframe continued to expand, sluggishly resolving the southern loading bays, the administrative offices built against the eastern wall, and a network of overhead catwalks crossing the central floor. Several rooms beneath the warehouse layout appeared only as dark, solid voids where the reinforced foundation swallowed the ultrasonic returns entirely.
The basement. That's almost certainly where Rex had established his command post.
Going underground meant no street-facing windows for optical tracking, limited sniper exposure, and enough dense concrete between him and the surrounding blocks to frustrate most passive surveillance equipment. It also gave him controlled choke points, defensible corridors, and a central position from which he could coordinate every squad inside the warehouse without exposing his position to the initial breach.
It also made this a lot more work than I honestly thought it would be.
A sudden red marker flared inside the western half of the wireframe model, moving unsteadily through the ground floor before stopping near what MK had flagged as the loading area.
[SECONDARY RECONNAISSANCE SOURCE ACQUIRED.]
'Roberts. Our little Trojan Horse.'
[CONFIRMED.]
The active tracker I've got on him was still humming. I'd slipped my Agent into his jacket pocket when I had the gun pressed against his spine. The plan was to use him as a window into their local network, and it was already paying dividends; I'd caught every word of the desperate conversation he'd had with Rex right after I ended my own call.
'Can you access the warehouse network through his hardware?'
[ LOCAL INTRUSION DETECTION IS HIGHLY LIKELY TO EXPOSE ANY IMPROVISED EXPLOIT WE WRITE. ATTEMPTING DIRECT DATA HARVEST IS NOT RECOMMENDED AT THIS RANGE.]
I really should have looked into some common PING Daemons at least... I lamented again.
'Then don't force the breach, have the Agent emit a frequency instead. We'll use it to better map out place, maybe find something that they overlooked.'
[COMPLYING. FREQUENCY EMISSION ACTIVE.]
The moment the Agent started pinging, the wireframe map exploded with data. The interior rooms cleared of static, mapping out the corridors in real-time as Roberts moved through the facility.
Through the acoustic echoes bounced back by his hardware, the layout laid itself bare. He passed heavy industrial storage rooms packed to the ceilings with crates and makeshift armories. The sonar picked up distinct metallic signatures on the ground floor, heavy automated HMG turrets tracking the main entrances, their servos humming in standby mode.
Further down, the pulse mapped clusters of biological signatures. High-density heat signatures packed into defensive firing positions. A whole floor full of 6th Street soldiers waiting in the dark with rifles raised, expecting a frontal assault.
As the wireframe expanded upward, tracking the building's infrastructure toward the sky, it highlighted a narrow structural line climbing all the way to the top of the facility. An old industrial ventilation shaft. At the very peak of the roof, the acoustic return traced a maintenance hatch that opened directly into that vent line. The sonar model registered only a single biological signature stationed on the roof near that hatch.
'Perfect. We got our entry point. Lock onto his audio feed, MK. Let's keep listening to what they're saying.'
And so I make my way through the lot.
The closest exterior sentry moved along the northern wall, disappearing behind a bank of fuel tanks before returning to the open yard. His route was rectangular, but his pace varied slightly with every circuit, and he occasionally paused without an obvious pattern to scan the rooftops.
Professional enough not to move like an automated turret, but too lazy to change his route.
A second man occupied the roof, shifting between three observation points while his enhanced optics swept across the neighbouring buildings. He was the only thing standing between me and that maintenance hatch. The third sentry stood near the southern gate, where portable barricades and two elevated firing positions created overlapping fields of fire across the street.
Every obvious entrance had someone watching it. More importantly, every obvious entrance had been designed to look vulnerable enough to encourage an approach.
'Trap density?'
[UNKNOWN.]
'One way to find out.'
Stealth was often described as invisibility, probably because invisibility was easier to understand than the collection of small, deliberate choices required to move unnoticed through a defended environment.
I wasn't invisible, I knew what I looked like, there was nothing inherently subtle about me.
What I possessed instead of invisibility was control, control over exactly when my feet touched a surface, how much force travelled through it and how long the material had to vibrate afterward.
Control over the heat produced by my systems, the light emitted by my optics and the path my body followed through someone's peripheral vision. Control over the difference between a noise that sounded wrong and one that disappeared into the machinery, rain and traffic already surrounding it.
'Track the roof sentry's scan cycle.'
[TRACKING.]
His optic moved west, away from the machine shop and toward the highway supports.
I rose from behind the container, the roof ended six metres from the warehouse wall, with a narrow alley running between them. Two rusted conveyor rails reached out from the machine shop roof, remnants of an enclosed transport system that had once connected the buildings, but the central section had collapsed long enough ago that the exposed metal had become part of the scenery.
The rails stopped four metres short of the warehouse, they were wet, badly corroded and positioned directly beneath the peripheral vision of the man patrolling the roof.
It was not the worst route I had ever considered.
The LMG remained strapped to my back and the Overture remained beneath my coat, while the spare magazines and two grenades were secured tightly enough that nothing would rattle when I moved.
Then I dimmed my optics, the gold drained from the world's reflection until my eyes became black glass beneath the rain.
[ROOF SENTRY FACING SOUTH.]
I ran.
Three controlled steps carried me across the machine shop roof, each landing placed along structural supports that would transfer my weight into the walls rather than the thin surface panels. I reached the raised edge, planted my left foot and launched onto the nearest conveyor rail.
The rusted steel flexed beneath me.
I absorbed the landing through my ankle and knee assemblies before the force could travel down the length of the beam, then continued forward without allowing the rail enough time to snap back and announce that something heavy had landed on it.
One step, then another. My boots touched only the reinforced centre of the rail, following the line of rivets where the corroded metal remained strongest.
[VISUAL SWEEP RETURNING IN EST. 4.1 SECONDS.]
The intact section ended beneath my foot, ahead of me, four metres of empty air separated the rail from the warehouse wall. I increased speed.
The final length of steel bent beneath the push-off, but the creak disappeared beneath the mechanical growl of a freight truck changing gears on the elevated highway. I crossed the alley in a low, flat trajectory, my coat pressed tight against my back while my right hand reached for the thin concrete lip above the sealed transfer opening.
My fingers closed around it, rather than allowing my full weight to strike the wall, I bent my elbow and shoulder gradually, bleeding away momentum through the joints until my boots settled against the corrugated siding with no more noise than the rainwater running over it.
The sentry's predicted sightline swept across the alley beneath me. I remained suspended from one hand, my body pressed flat against the warehouse wall less than two metres below the roof.
His eyes paused.
The lens turned toward the neighbouring rooftops, its internal mechanism clicking softly as it adjusted from the glare of a distant sign to the darkness between the buildings.
The guard leaned over the edge, his face appeared above me, partly hidden behind a rain hood and reinforced tactical goggles. The tattoos visible along his jaw marked him as a War veteran.
He studied the alley for several seconds, I could hear his breathing through the rain.
...
The guard's head turned slightly as he answered a call I couldn't hear the other side of in this rain. "Nothing moving east side, thought I heard the conveyor shift, it's just the wind kicking up."
The roof guard looked down once more, his gaze passing over the wall directly beneath his boots without settling on me.
"East roof clear," he reported, then stepped back from the ledge.
[VISUAL CONTACT AVOIDED.]
I waited until the guard's footsteps moved away before reaching for the sheet-metal panel covering the old transfer channel.
I turned back to the maintenance hatch.
The opening had been welded shut at fourteen points, each connection weakened by years of oxidation. I could have torn the panel from the wall and thrown it into the alley without meaningful effort, but the resulting sound would have removed much of the purpose behind everything I had done so far.
I slipped my fingers beneath the first weld and separated it with a controlled twist.
The guard remained above me, but his attention had shifted toward an approaching vehicle and the conversation unfolding through his agent.
I continued removing the welds, timing each movement beneath footsteps, generator vibration and the constant industrial noise rolling from the highway. The final connection separated, and I held the sheet against the wall rather than allowing it to shift.
I paused, the iron hatch still raised a few inches in my grip. A cold prickle of paranoia flared in my processors.
Military veterans like Rex don't leave a gaping, vertical insertion point barely guarded on his roof unless he's a complete fucking idiot, and I wasn't willing to make that bet.
'MK. Run a close-range structural sweep inside the lip of the shaft.'
[COMPLYING. FLOODING SHAFT WITH HIGH-FREQUENCY ACOUSTIC RESONANCE.]
The wireframe in my vision flickered, zooming in on the dark interior of the vent line. The green lines stitched together, tracing the inner lining of the zinc ducts.
Two feet down, hidden completely in the shadow of the structural bend, a tiny, geometric silhouette resolved on my retina.
[WARNING: LASER-TRIPPED PROXIMITY MINE DETECTED.]
[ORDNANCE IDENTIFIED: MILITECH 'LAZARUS' FRAGMENTATION CHARGES.]
[TRAP STATE: ACTIVE.]
The bastards had rigged the whole drop.
I held my breath, frozen in the crawlspace, my fingers keeping the metal hatch perfectly still. Above me, the roof guard's boots crunched against the gravel again. He was pacing back toward the ledge, his silhouette casting a long shadow through the gap in the iron panel.
Then he sighed. It was a heavy, wet sound, thick with tobacco smoke. His went blank for a bit as he seemed to be initiating a local comms link.
I couldn't intercept his outgoing encrypted feed without a high-end cyberdeck, but his acoustic signature came through loud and clear.
"Yeah. Still nothing on the east side," the guard muttered, his voice dropping into a harsh, ragged whisper.
He went quiet for a few seconds, listening to whoever was on the other end of the line. Probably the gate sentry or one of the guys downstairs. He shifted his weight, his slung rifle clinking against his tactical vest.
"Man, fuck Rex's timetable," the guard snapped suddenly, spitting over the edge of the roof into the alley. "We're out here freezing our chrome off, treating this borg like he's a fucking Minotaur mech. It's one guy, choom. Just one stray solo. I don't give a squatting fuck how much chrome he's packing."
Another brief silence stretched over the line. The guard kicked a loose piece of gravel.
"I know what happened to Freddie, alright? I ain't a dick," he grumbled, his tone turning vicious. "But the boss ain't thinking straight. Grief's got his brain-pan shorting out. The runner found out where the bastard lived days ago, so what if it's in Claw turf? We knew exactly where the bastard was, we should've just packed into the heavy trucks, tracked him down, and gunned him down in his shoebox ourselves when we had the tactical advantage. Preem and simple."
He paused again, his jaw tightening as the voice on the other side apparently gave him a warning.
"Yeah, yeah, 'execute the protocol,' I copy," the guard muttered, rolling his shoulders. "Just saying, sitting here in the rain waiting for a boogeyman to trip a wire while the 'King' loses his goddamn mind... it's a gonk way to run an operation. Out."
At the end of his call, he leaned his back against the brick lining of the roof structure, completely oblivious to the fact that the 'Minotaur' he was complaining about was suspended less than two feet beneath his boots, staring at the military-grade explosives barring my way.
I didn't move a muscle. I just looked at the Militech Lazarus mines, trying to work out a way past them.
No time to guess. I blinked open an encrypted text channel to Regina Jones.
[GENOS]: Need the exact factory wiring schematic for a Militech Lazarus frag mine. Internal layout. Immediate transfer.
The reply came back 30 seconds later, dripping with her usual blunt, no-nonsense irritation.
[REGINA]: Sending, don't blow your hands off, and that's 200 eddies for pulling me away from actual business to look up basic infantry ordnance. Transfer cleared.
A data packet flashed on my HUD. MK immediately swallowed the schematic, unpacking the blueprint layers directly over my visual field. The internal wiring diagram of the Lazarus mine glowed in sharp orange lines.
'MK. Break down the sensor tripwire mechanism. Give me a vulnerability.'
...
[SCHEMATIC PARSED. LAZARUS SENSOR USES A STANDARD PHOTO-DIODE RECEIVER LOCKED TO A CONTINUOUS LIGHT EMISSION. CONSTANT CURRENT EQUALS ZERO ALARM STATE. DISRUPTION OF THE VALUE TRIGGERS THE FRAGMENTATION MATRIX.]
Assuming the mine was standard, it was a passive infrared laser trap. Slip down the shaft, break the invisible beam, and the fragmentation charges expand outward, turning the zinc duct into a giant shotgun barrel. Hacking them from out here was a no-go without a cyberdeck. Trying to manually defuse them by snapping the wiring was a risk, one wrong tension pull on military-grade hardware and the circuit completes anyway.
But traps are binary. They only understand 0 or 1. Intruder present, or intruder absent. They don't know the difference between a intruder and an unmapped blind spot.
'MK. Isolate the laser wave signature, what's the frequency?'
[INFRARED SPECTRUM FIXED. FREQUENCY: 905 NANOMETRES. PASSIVE EMISSION ACTIVE.]
'Good, open up our optical emitters. Match that frequency exactly, pulse for pulse, and project it directly back into the receiving lens on the mine.'
[COMPLYING. CALIBRATING OPTICAL OVERRIDE STACK.]
This was the benefit of having control over the light my eyes emitted. I didn't need to break the wire; I just needed to trick the sensor into thinking the beam was still hitting the receiver on the other side of the duct while my body passed through it. It was like painting over a security camera lens with a still image.
My optics pulsed once, blindingly fast, then settled into a low, invisible infrared emission. I held the light perfectly locked onto the mine's tiny glass eye, blinding it with its own code.
Slowly, carefully, I lowered my frame into the narrow gap, threading my limbs through the tight space between the brickwork and the zinc lining.
The guard was still leaning against the brickwork right above me, the heat from his boots radiating through the ceiling material. I could hear the slow, rhythmic sound of his breathing. If I scraped against the duct or let a hydraulic joint hiss, he'd look right down into the darkness.
I slipped my legs into the mouth of the shaft. My chest passed the mine, my optical override holding the beam steady until my torso cleared the lens, folding my heavy, metallic mass down into the pitch-black throat of the ventilation line like a piston sliding into a greased cylinder.
Binary code maintained. 0 remained 0, so luckily it did not go off in my face.
The air inside the duct was freezing, thick with dust and the smell of ancient grease. The wireframe model in my vision mapped the vertical drop.
I let go of the edge, sliding down the dark chute on the reinforced pads of my boots, applying just enough friction against the steel walls to control the descent without making a sound.
Below me, Roberts' bugged audio feed suddenly flared back to life in my auditory system, down in the basement, Rex was speaking.
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"Give me the loadout, Roberts," Rex's voice cut through the static, low and flat. "Every scrap of chrome you saw before you delta'd and left your squad to rot."
"I told you, boss... he tanked those LMG rounds like nothing," Roberts was sobbing, a wet, choking sound followed by a sharp crack, the sound of a fist hitting flesh. Roberts groaned, his body hitting the concrete floor.
"Don't give me vague statements fucker, give me tactical specs," Rex growled. "You're a soldier in my unit, and you ran from a single target. Now stand up and report like one, or I'll let the Valentinos have whatever's left of you."
"He... he didn't use a smart link," Roberts stammered, teeth chattering. "Carried an Overture...heavy caliber, and his movement... , he moved like nothing could hurt him cared more about scratching his ride then getting shot at. He walked straight through Pax's LMG drum like it was a warm breeze, didn't even do much but tear at his clothes."
"He had you dead to rights," Rex said. His voice dropped an octave, the dangerous register bleeding through the feed. "Had a barrel to your spine you said, and you gave him what he wanted. So tell me, Roberts... why are you still breathing? Why would a borg let a loose lip walk away?"
"He... he told me to run, boss! I swear to God, Rex—"
"Shut up," Rex snapped. "Val. Scan him, check his internal cyberware ports for any active remote links."
"I ain't no rat Rex!" He pleaded, only for another thud to sound out followed by a harsh:
"Shut the fuck up!"
A low electronic hum vibrated through the audio feed as his runner initiated the sweep. "Running a deep dive now," her flat drone echoed. "Checking his personal subnet... cache is clean, no unauthorized intrusions, no backdoors, zero signal transmission on his internal links. He's completely clear net-wise, there's no ghost in his shell."
"Then he didn't bug your chrome," Rex muttered. I could hear his heavy combat boots crunching across the concrete toward Roberts' position on the floor. "Get up. Empty your kit."
"Rex, please, I didn't take anything—"
"I said empty it."
Buckles snapped open, tactical webbing struck the steel table, and several loose objects followed in quick succession, each impact amplified by the cheap microphone inside the external Agent Roberts had unknowingly carried into the warehouse.
"Ammo counters," Rex said, apparently sorting through the pile one item at a time. "Two spare magazines, MaxDoc inhaler, loose eddies."
Something small scraped across the tabletop, then everything stopped.
"What the fuck is this?" A sharp pause. "Is this your Agent, Roberts?" Rex's voice was pure ice.
Rex picked up the Agent, the motion was quiet enough that I heard the slight plastic creak beneath his fingers.
A chair leg shrieked against concrete as Roberts tried to move away from the table.
"What? No! What am I, forty-nine?! I don't carry an external, Rex, you know I'm fully integrated! It ain't mine, I swear on my mother's grave, it ain't mine!"
Rex said nothing for several seconds.
Through the compromised Agent, I could hear the warehouse around him with uncomfortable clarity: the low whine of the server racks, the irregular clicking of 0J0's cooling unit and the muffled movement of armed men repositioning beyond the basement office.
When Rex finally spoke, his voice had become almost gentle.
"He bugged you." Roberts made a small sound that might have been an attempt to answer.
"He put a gun against your spine," Rex continued, each word measured carefully, "and you walked straight back here carrying his eyes into my fucking house."
"Rex, wait."
The chair scraped again.
"Please, I didn't know. I didn't—"
BLAM.
Soon after the pistol shot a crumbling noise ran through the Agent's microphone, transforming the basement into a burst of distorted noise before the feed collapsed into white static, then the connection vanished.
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[REMOTE SURVEILLANCE NODE OFFLINE.]
[YOUR AGENT HAS BEEN PHYSICALLY DESTROYED.]
I remained motionless inside the ventilation channel, one hand braced against the metal ahead of me while the last fragments of static faded from my auditory system, then a rapid hum of movement travelled through the factory.
It began beneath the ventilation shaft as a scattered series of boots striking steel grating. Weapon safeties clicking away from neutral positions. Doors opening in the corridors below, their hinges and locking mechanisms sending sharp vibrations through the walls.
[COMMUNICATION TRAFFIC SPIKE DETECTED.]
[PROBABLE COMMAND-WIDE SECURITY ALERT.]
Voices moved through the floor beneath me, muffled by the sheet metal and insulation but becoming clearer as men spread into the adjoining rooms.
"Check every access point!"
"Roof teams stay where you are!"
"Don't bunch up, keep your sectors!"
A rifle stock struck the wall below, followed by the crash of an office door being kicked open.
Someone was searching the rooms one at a time, someone else climbed onto the overhead catwalks.
The route MK had projected toward the stairs leading down to the elevator remained visible, but the moving markers had frozen at their last confirmed positions, turning what had been an active tactical map into a photograph of a battlefield that no longer existed.
[RECOMMENDATION: REMAIN CONCEALED UNTIL SEARCH PATTERN CAN BE RECONSTRUCTED.]
'They know the building better than I do, they also know the obvious hiding places, waiting makes their advantage larger.'
[YOUR ASSESSMENT IS REASONABLE.]
Ahead, the ventilation channel opened above the upper level of the warehouse, where an old maintenance platform connected the administrative block to the overhead machinery. The grille covering the exit was already loose, its lower screws missing and the upper hinge held in place by little more than corrosion.
I moved toward it while the search continued below, the metal beneath my hands was thin enough that normal movement would have carried through it, so I distributed my weight along the edges. Every shift came slowly, one limb accepting pressure before another released it, until my face reached the narrow grille.
The upper floor extended beyond it. It looked like it had once served as a control and maintenance level for the warehouse machinery, though most of the equipment had been removed or abandoned where it stood. Steel platforms surrounded the central open space in an uneven rectangle, connected by narrow walkways, ladders, and suspended service bridges.
The first guard was standing directly beneath the vent line, his attention fixed on the floor below. I didn't try to open the grille. I ran a quick, micro-second acoustic sweep through the surrounding drywall and structural beams to check for local surveillance hardware.
[EXTERNAL MONITOR DETECTED. POSITION: THREE METRES LOWER, INTERIOR CORNER REINFORCEMENT. ANGLE OF INCIDENCE DOES NOT COVER UPPER VENT GRILLE.]
Good, no eyes on me...
I slid my fingers through the gaps of the iron mesh, finding a firm hold on the interior frame. With a silent, pressurized click, my right forearm assembly uncoupled from my arm. I detached the limb entirely. The independent cybernetic hand dropped through the grate, using its micro-servo digits to crawl silently like a multi-legged drone across the dark steel girder toward the unsuspecting guard stationed on the high suspended bridge.
It launched itself upward from the dark, grabbing the back of his head in a dead-vice grip. Before a scream could clear his throat, the internal high-tension cables coiled within the detached arm exploded outward. The dark tendrils whipped forward, tightly wrapping around his mouth and face, sealing his jaw shut and completely blocking all sound, suffocating his breath in an instant.
I quietly pushed the loose grille aside, crawled out of the vent shaft, and dropped onto the catwalk behind him. I grabbed the detached forearm, snapping it back into my wrist port with a muted, pressurized hiss.
While the suffocating guard struggled blindly, his free hand desperately reached toward the pistol holstered beneath his tactical jacket. Before his fingers could even clear the fabric, my left arm shot forward, pressing two hundred kilograms of localized hydraulic pressure directly into his side.
The sheer kinetic force of the silent body punch caused his entire frame to flop. The massive shockwave turned his muscles to water, leaving him completely winded. The strength left his arms first, then his legs, his dead weight settling gradually against my chassis as his consciousness slipped away entirely.
One.
I lowered him gently onto the narrow lip of the vent I had just crawled out of, securing his rifle flat against his chest so nothing could clatter down through the iron grating to alert the security team below. After which, I slid over the ledge and positioned myself into the shadows under the platform to avoid being spotted by the sweep patterns below, my hands alone enough to hold my massive weight against the girders.
The patrolling guard on the maintenance level passed behind the nearest support column, his line of sight moving across the floor before disappearing beneath the maintenance platform. He had not seen his partner on the bridge vanish. He had, however, noticed the empty position.
"Ellis?" he asked.
No answer came. His rifle rose slightly as he approached the railing, careful enough not to call out again. I remained suspended beneath the platform, using my artificial grip to hang upside down from the structural frame.
The guard leaned over the edge. I saw his face between the gaps in the grating, his eyes narrowed behind crimson optics.
"Ellis?" he repeated, quieter this time. I reached up and unbuckled one of the large Overture bullets from my coat, holding the heavy piece of metal through the grating, I tossed it just a few inches behind him, allowing it to tap lightly on the far side of the bridge. The sound was small but close.
The guard turned toward the distraction, moving around the railing so he could look directly beneath the platform where the sound had originated.
The moment his back cleared my vector, I flipped my lower chassis upward, flowing over the opposite side of the steel platform railing with fluid, hydraulic precision. I rose behind him like a shadow, at the sight of my shadow over him he rose quickly and attempted to aim the gun at me.
Before he could fire a shot off, I caught the weapon's barrel and pulled it sharply sideways, drawing his upper body past the edge before his feet had time to adjust. My other hand closed around the back of his neck, using his own forward momentum to bring him down without allowing his heavy armour to strike the iron framework.
His mouth opened. I pressed my synthetic forearm beneath his jaw and cut the sound off before it could form, applying precise pressure until his struggling became slower, then ceased entirely.
I placed him on the floor and made my way down carefully.
Two.
The man guarding the western stairwell shifted behind the electrical cabinet, his attention moving toward the missing men.
"Bishop?" His voice remained low, but the guard beside the freight lift heard it and looked across the platform.
"What's going on?"
"Lost Ellis and Bishop."
The lift guard raised his rifle. "Fuck, you think maybe they're checking the vents?"
"The both of them?" Both men stared toward the central machinery, the guard at the eastern window turned away from the glass, while the remaining sentry below stopped moving. Four sets of eyes now watched the area where I was hiding.
The room had changed, the first two removals had been easy, I had a feeling the remaining four would not be.
I moved along the underside of the maintenance platform, using the horizontal I-beams like a ladder, keeping my body pressed close to the structural steel while the men below spread apart. Their caution improved their coverage, but it also pulled their attention inward, away from the exterior entry routes they had originally been assigned to watch.
"Ellis," the lift guard called, no longer attempting to remain quiet. "Sound off."
Silence answered him, the stairwell guard left the protection of the cabinet and advanced toward the platform, rifle shouldered and muzzle tracking the shadows below. The window guard covered him from the east.
I eventually reached the western end of the platform directly beneath the stairwell guard's path. He stepped over me, the steel grating flexed and groaned beneath his weight.
I extended one metallic hand through the gap behind his trailing foot, caught the back of his tactical harness, and pulled sharply downward. His balance disappeared instantly. Before he could fall and crash against the floor, I drove my other arm through the space between the grating and the support rail, locking it across his throat and chest in a choking vice. From across the room, the obstacle of the electrical cabinet blocked the line of sight; to the others, it looked as though he had simply dropped to one knee to check a low angle.
He struck my forearm with the stock of his rifle. The impact rang through my chassis plating but never reached the platform because I caught the stock before it could rebound. His body twisted, trying to bring the muzzle downward through the grating to shoot me.
I tightened my hold, cutting off the blood flow to his brain, his breath stopped.
The lift guard saw him kneeling and frowned. "Grant?"
I lowered Grant gently behind the cabinet, leaving his body completely concealed from the eastern window as I rounded around to it.
Three.
The lift guard began moving toward him. "Grant, answer me."
The window guard stepped away from his position to provide a clearer covering angle, completely exposing his back to the dark glass behind him.
I released my grip on the underside of the platform and dropped three meters to the narrow path running beneath the eastern windows. My boots settled onto the heavy support beam without a single vibration, leaving me crouched perfectly outside the window guard's peripheral vision. He was entirely focused on the lift guard across the room.
I rose behind him and caught the rear sling of his rifle, pulling it tight against his chest before his hands could bring the weapon around. His head snapped backward, striking my reinforced shoulder rather than the noisy steel shelving beside him.
He tried to shout, my hand covered his mouth.
His eyes widened at the reflection in the wet window pane. For one brief second, he saw both of us clearly: his own frightened face, my blackened optics behind it, and the pale shape of my hand covering his reflection.
He drove his heel backward toward my knee. I shifted my leg, allowed the human kick to pass harmlessly, and squeezed harder, his body went slack while his reflection continued staring blankly at me.
I lowered him behind the window console.
Four.
The lift guard reached Grant's position and discovered the unconscious body behind the cabinet. His posture changed instantly, his eye's going blank.
"I th—"
I threw another bullet, it crossed the open platform and struck the interior brick wall beside the freight lift, producing a sharp, echoing bell.
The guard's head turned toward the distraction before he could complete the verbal transmission.
I crossed the distance while his rifle followed the sound. Three silent, hydraulic-assisted steps carried me behind his control cabinet. I caught his extended weapon barrel and drove it downward against the padded section of his own tactical vest. The movement folded his arms across his chest and pulled him completely off balance, allowing me to rotate behind him before he could reverse direction.
He released the rifle and reached for a survival knife at his waist. I trapped his wrist against his ribs, locking it in place.
His other hand struck the side of my face—once, then again—the desperate blows carrying nothing to the skin like plating along my cheek.
The third strike never landed. I caught his fist, twisted his shoulders away from the open platform, and slammed him face-first against the control cabinet. The thin metal threatened to ring beneath the impact.
His eyes rolled back, finding Grant lying unconscious beyond the cabinet just as his own world went black.
Five.
With the last one dispatched, the upper level was completely secure. I stepped over the unconscious gangoons, my golden optics scanning the shadows as I made my way toward where the industrial freight lift was situated. Two floors down and this whole miserable business would be over with.
I paused at the edge of the lift shaft, tracking the mechanical pan-and-tilt cycle of the security camera mounted just below the rafters. Bypassing its sweep pattern took less than three seconds. I pressed my back into the blind spot, reached out a heavy metallic finger, and slammed the call button.
The heavy iron doors parted with a low, rusty groan. I stepped inside the metal cage, my heavy chassis causing the suspension cables to groan in protest. I hit the button marked -3 on the dented control panel.
With a deep structural rumble, the doors slid shut and the lift began its slow, grinding descent into the subterranean levels of the warehouse.
I didn't even make it ten seconds before the elevator stopped with a violent, hydraulic jolt, the overhead utility lights flickered twice and died, plunging the cage into absolute darkness. Before my night vision could adjust, a loud spike of audio static hissed through the intercom speaker mounted above the console.
Rex's voice cut through the dark.
"You're quiet, I'll give you that," Rex said, his tone flat, "Snuck in and cleaned out my upper perimeter without a single round going off, but if you expected me to just sit in a basement while people start to go offline one by one... you're dumber than the scrap metal you're built out of."
The intercom snapped off with a sharp click. Immediately, the lift's mechanical brakes disengaged with a terrifying screech of metal. The cage plunged downward, dropping rapidly before slamming to a hard, shuddering halt on the second floor.
The heavy iron doors violently hissed open.
Standing in the glaring, fluorescent light of the sub-level corridor was a firing squad. Six 6th Street soldiers stood lined up in perfect defensive formation, their heavy rifles and smart-guns already levied directly at the open elevator cage.
Before I could even fire my internal elbow boosters, a small, metallic cylinder bounced across the concrete floor and rolled directly between my boots. A bright blue ring of electrical energy was pulsing rapidly along its casing. An EMP grenade.
I looked down at the blinking device.
"Damn...I really liked this jacket...."
The grenade detonated in a blinding, silent flash of blue distortion. A massive spike of electromagnetic energy slammed into my chassis, blinding my optical sensors with pure white static.
Then, the firing squad opened fire, a deafening wall of lead slamming into the elevator shaft.
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Authors Note: That's it for chapter 16! I hoped you like it one more chapter on this arc left, tell me what you think, some people might ask why he tried and to this quietly, the reason is he is smack dab in 6th Street territory he wanted to sneak in kill Rex and get out with as little casualties as possible.
I wanted to call this chapter the seven of swords but I already used that so I just reversed it, it fit better anyway, he reversed Seven of Swords has a slightly different meaning. It is the ultimate "caught red-handed" card. Upright, the thief slips away with the swords; reversed, he trips over his own feet on the way out. It represents a deception beginning to unravel, a hidden truth being dragged into the light, or a clever plan failing because the person carrying it out became careless or overconfident.
See you in the next one.