"If Dave were here," mused Hal, "I probably wouldn't be..."

Of course, that was the upside of Dave deciding to disappear. Hal got to go on what could be liberally termed a mission. On the downside, he was doing it alone. Hal was of the opinion that the good outweighed the bad. He had an M9 in one hand and a Pocket PC in the other. Life didn't get much better than this.

The big neon sign above the building proclaimed this to be Deeler Tech, and while it would have seemed innocuous to most, Hal knew that there were over 50 guards in the building's basement levels. If he didn't have his light bending suit, parts obtained at considerable cost, Hal might even have been a little bit nervous at the idea of going in by himself.

"Okay," said Hal. "I can do this! Just get down to the lower levels of the building, connect to their computers, hack the databases and find out what they did with the uranium after they got it from-" He stopped and took a deep breath. He had to say it! "From Dad and Big Boss."

Normally, Hal would have hacked in from outside but this company was more than just paranoid: Deeler Tech had physically disconnected all their data holding computers from outside lines. It was an ingenious setup, really. At random times of the day, the internal database computers would have robots operate to connect with the external data entry computers and gather up everything that had been done for the day. From what Hal had been able to see, the random time was determined by a random seed weekly that had something to do with the number of people who reported themselves sick in the corporation on each day, as well as the ones who were on vacation. That information itself went into the internal databases before being deleted. Just to find out a random seed, Hal would have to collect information from the external databases for a year, and that would only get him a minute of time with the internal hard drives.

That's why there was really no choice but to go on this mission. And it would make a great excuse if Snake found out. The last mission he'd gone on... well, if Emma hadn't... died... Snake would probably never have forgiven him.

"Enough stalling, Otacon, it's time to go in. And I should probably stop talking to myself now, too," he said as an afterthought. Hal turned on the camo suit and walked in the front door.

He walked past the receptionist and pressed the button to get the elevator to come. When he got in though, he was slightly surprised to see that there were no floors accessible below the first basement. He knew from the building plans that there were at least three levels below ground.

Hal pushed the button to go to the first basement floor. There should be some stairs around here... had to be... There was already a guard here, about to check out the elevator. He looked around as the door opened.

"Damned elevator. Have to call for someone to fix it..." Hal stepped off and the elevator doors closed behind him. "Control," said the guard into his walkie-talkie, "Elevator 2 just came and opened up for no reason. We're gonna need a techie..."

Hal ignored the man and walked around until he got to a fire exit. He looked in through the tiny window, but didn't see any stairs leading down. Three more sets of emergency stairs later, and Hal was more than ready to give up.

He sat down in a little alcove and sighed. "If I fail this mission, Snake will laugh at me! I just can't fail it..."

"...so, I think if we use the inverse-"

"We'll get a converse delta field that will-"

"Exactly! We've got to try this out. It could revolutionize production."

Hal looked up as the two went into a room. They looked vaguely scientifically oriented... Maybe they were going downstairs! He jumped up from his seat on the floor and ran to catch up with them. Sure enough, the room they'd gone into had a set of stairs right in the middle.

The exiting doors all had keycard locks on them, so Hal rushed to catch up to the pair as they went down two flights and went out of the stairwell. He was just in time to get through before the door closed on his heels. It was just unfortunate that this didn't happen to be the right floor.

The whole area was completely open. There were lasers and a supercomputer... it looked like a research facility, not a data warehouse. There was nothing much protecting the computer here except for the fact that it wasn't plugged in to anything except for some sort of power supply. Building like this probably had it's own generators.

The good thing was, there were a lot of people here, and many of them were busily going about their work. Hal leaned against the wall beside the door with a smirk. It couldn't take long before someone went to another floor.

It really didn't. A few minutes later, he was following someone up to the floor above. Hal jammed his foot in the door and looked through. It had been pretty stupid to go right through before, when he didn't have a keycard for the building, after all.

This one wasn't the right floor either. A bunch of lousy little cubicles. This was probably where they did the data entry most of the time.

He went back into the stairwell and went down the stairs to wait for someone to open the door of the third floor. It didn't happen quickly, but within an hour, someone left the room to go upstairs. Hal walked in and looked around.

The room was a standard data storage facility, except of course for the robotic arms that stood guard at the far corner of the room, prepared to put a cable in the wall and take it out afterwards. The floor was concrete and raised slightly, surrounded by glass. Few people were in this area, and they probably never left the room except to go to the bathroom. There were telephones in here, but no computers other than the main storage facilities.

Hal smiled. Exactly as planned, he walked up to the computers and plugged his pocket PC in. While he was waiting for his connection software to work, Hal took a brief look around at the people standing in the room. More than half had to be armed... Hal took a deep breath and promised himself he was going to be quiet.

He was happy that he'd written most of the software beforehand... Even small modifications in this setting were going to be difficult...

Once the connection had been made, Hal began the difficult part of his work: hack and extract. His breath became shallow as the time passed and his little computer tried to do it's job. The first five minutes were simple... The next ten were not quite so easy.

Hal's eyes kept going to the guns and the cameras. Was that guard looking at him? No, the eyes moved by... Was that camera focused too much on the little pocket PC? No, it wasn't... Was that man coming over here to check on the computer?

Oh shit.




Author's Notes

Am I cruel to do this to my readers? Well, how can I not? Ending on anything but a cliff makes you not want to turn the page! The alternate ending was boring, and besides, I've got to do a Dave-solo next, so why shouldn't Hal get the same screen time (or something like that)? Snake's not the ONLY hero here!

Anyhow. Do you know the last words of airline pilots on a crashing plane are usually "Oh shit?" Not particularly relevant, but I thought it was a little bit interesting. Queen Mary is a cavernous plutonium separation facility, name chosen only because Hal is underground. I needed a name for the chapter, after all!

As for the idea that Hal figures Dave would never forgive him about going on the Plant mission... well, I figure Snake isn't the kind of guy to want Hal anywhere near it. If Snake knew, they might both have come via chopper. If Snake knew, he'd probably have had contact with Otacon instead of worriedly asking about the security advisor. Tenuous, maybe, but I don't think Snake knew and approved of it beforehand.

Unrelated to these facts and ideas is the fact that I'm spending too much time writing this. I need to slow down before I hurt myself... My goals in learning Japanese was supposed to include actually being able to fully understand the baby-anime I've got, like Snow Fairy Sugar, by this time. I can understand about half of it... *sigh* And my goals were supposed to include basic literacy by this point. I can write the Joyo, I can understand the Joyo, but ask me to read them and... hou... sou... no, that's hyou! No, wait, that's the masu form, darn me! *grumble* Heisig said 3 months, here I am at 5...

About Danzinger! (From Akaisakura, but relevant to everyone reading the notes) Oooh... that was a mistake... I never checked on Emma's REAL last name, just kinda assumed that it was Emmerich since Hal insisted on calling her EE (who doesn't read the manuals? Me, me!)... Well, just to make it fit continuity, I think I'll say that she was using her mom's maiden name... maybe because at the time she was angry with Hal and didn't want any connection... yeah, it makes sense, right? I guess I could change it... er... nah, just say it's a mistake and move on...

Akaisakura: On other matters, I would love to know your suspicion... so I could twist it! -_^ (hey, those style smilies are useful, hope you don't mind me stealing)

holylance: glad you're still enjoying it!

Scarbie: I figure that Snake would be pretty good at anything related to espionage if he wanted to be. ^_^




Join the mgs fanfics mailing list! groups.yahoo.ca/groups/mgsfanfics, or look in my profile for a link. Get the chapters to this story a day early! Read the fic "Indiscipline!" See Scarbie's second chapter to the movie fic! (hope you don't mind me publicising it here, Scarbie, if you do, say so and I'll take this part down) JOIN, JOIN! Or I'll send Snake and Otacon to... wait, that's a reward... if you join, I'll send Snake and Otacon to see you!