Scene 26
Hunter had waited anxiously in New York's main terminal for the arrival of the Corrupt's jet coach, watching their progress on his handheld until they flew over the city. The red dot advanced over the streets of the eastern american metropolitan complex on his tracking device's overhead map, coming to rest over a large building out towards the edge of the southwestern edge of the developed area which the map identified as a depot for Liandri Corporation. Wasting no time, Hunter walked to the nearest translocation terminal available and entered the universal coordinates displayed on his tracker, selecting the option to be translocated into the nearest booth to his destination. The booth told him he could get within a block of it, and he hurriedly punched the option to confirm, walking into the translocation portal almost before it was activated.
He emerged from the translocation booth on a gritty street in a grim industrial neighborhood, the lamplights shining a dull yellow on broken cement sidewalks and weedy abandoned lots. Hunter, fixing his position on the tracker, saw that the building he was looking for was one block in front of him. He looked up. There it was, the outline of a huge warehouse looming dimly ahead through the sulfurous glow of the lamps. Even from this distance, he could read the whitish dully-lit words ¨Lia dri C rp.¨ on the front of the building.
Without hesitating, he jogged up the street towards the warehouse, taking more detailed stock of his surroundings as best he could as he moved. The area seemed pretty much uninhabited and barely worked, a few lights on in the windows of the old factories that lined the street, the night shift probably recycling the scrap of the day's work. The entire area was slowly recycling itself away into nothingness.
At the edge of the warehouse property he reached a tall, sturdy cyclone fence, clambering up it quickly before someone could spot him and hopping over with laughable ease. The only evidence of his passage were a few bent spots in the razor wire, newly decorated with grey scraps of cloth tugged off by the barbs that scraped and grabbed uselessly at his armor. As he landed agilely on the hard, bare ground beyond, Hunter did another quick but thorough scan of surroundings and noted that, although the grounds seemed to be quite deserted, the depot had a small gatehouse out front about 50 meters away. Its light was turned on and he thought he saw a figure seated inside, slumped down in a posture of comfortable rest.
Hunter snorted and jogged over to the main entryway, passing by the gatehouse and approaching the front of the building. There was a steel revolving door with an out-of-date Matcher which appeared to be the main pedestrian entryway, slightly up and to the right from the cargo entrance, a big ramp that dipped down to into the building. It was closed off by a set of gigantic steel shutters. Hunter paused and considered the problem. Would this place have a security system? Probably. But he might be able to avoid it cutting through certain parts of the shuttered cargo entrance, whereas that revolving door probably had a net of detectors too tight for a human body to pass through on the other side.
Jogging down the ramp, he pulled a mini-cutter out of his slim pack and tucked it into the neck of his armor, wishing not for the first time that his mouth were free to accomplish such tasks once in awhile. Upon reaching the shutter, Hunter stepped onto the handles near the bottom and reached up above his head with the mini-cutter, turning it on and carefully cutting out a narrow slot about three inches wide. When it was done, he reached up and lodged the fingers of his non-cutter hand firmly in the slot and reached as high as he could with the other, cutting another slot. Hunter pulled himself up to it by pure force of his ¨lodged¨ arm, and stuck the mini-cutter in the neck of his armor again, grabbing onto the slot with his free hand. He pulled himself up farther, beginning to cut another slot above his head as he hung on by one arm, trying to increasing his support as best he could by bracing his soft-soled boots against the shutter's metal.
After working with ghostly silence through four agonizingly difficult cuts, Hunter reached the top. He cut into the spool the shutter rolled around, now thin with the majority of its cargo unrolled below it, and hung gratefully by both hands for a moment, resting. When he felt strong enough to continue, he pulled the mini-cutter out again with one hand and cut a square aperture just big enough for his body to pass through near the top of the shutter, carefully leaving one of the lower corners attached so he could bend the sheet outwards without it falling off and clattering on the cement below. He stowed the mini-cutter again in his pack and carefully inserted his feet into the hole, grabbing the upper edge of it with one of his hands and pulling himself through until he was balanced on the edge, the sharp metal resting against the armor plates on his back. He twisted onto his stomach and continued through until he was hanging by his fingers again, on the inside.
Twisting his head around, Hunter looked into the darkened cargo bay. A light glimmered at the end of a smaller vehicle entrance up ahead that led deeper into the depot, but his immediate surroundings, once again, appeared deserted. He estimated the distance to the ground, lifted his feet up to chest level, bracing them against the shutter, and flung himself backwards as far as he could, seeking to pass over the range of any security sensors and land behind them. He flipped through the darkness, seeing in his mind's eye the ground coming up to greet him, and landed as softly as a cat. Hunter stayed crouched for a moment, listening for alarms, and when none came, he smiled to himself and turned, creeping deeper into the depot.
The smaller tunnel up ahead with the light in it appeared to be a rail line coming from the main center of the warehouse to the cargo bay. Hunter padded down it, hugging the walls as the light grew stronger and he began to distinguish details of the room at the end. It looked very large, and well-lit, but his view was partially blocked by a pile of boxes. The rails he was walking along curved to the left in front of the boxes and disappeared. If this was a place Liandri used for illicit activities, their strategy for defending it was brilliant. Stick your treasure in the middle of godforsaken nowhere where nobody would think to look, and defend the place like it contains nothing but a big pile of scrap, Hunter thought. Not too bad. Hell, that guard out front was probably supposed to be sleeping.
As he reached the entrance into what he could now see was the main storage room of the depot, Hunter spotted a good corner behind the pile of steel boxes and ducked over to it, stopping at his makeshift hiding spot to listen once more. Although there were no voices, he heard the faint footsteps of a few people nearby to his right, and the scraping sound of something dragging along the floor. He thought he had a pretty good idea what that thing was. The footsteps appeared to be receding farther away, so Hunter waited a few more seconds and then peered around the edge of the boxes. The room he was in was enormous, occupied by various stacks of steel boxes of all sizes and colors. In the direction of the footsteps he'd heard was a group of three Corrupt, standing around a lone translocation portal, eerily silent. One of them was entering a destination in the portal's console, and two more held Malcom's limp figure between them.
As Hunter watched, the portal flickered on and the Corrupt began to enter it, the first going through alone, then the second two tossing Malcom's body in and following behind it. Then the warehouse was empty again, and the lights suddenly turned off, the portal's glow dying. Hunter crept out from behind the boxes and padded over to it. He had a small portal-hacker with him which could probably retrieve the information about the Corrupts' destination and authorize the machine to take him there, but it would take quite a bit of time. The trail might grow cold by then, or he might unwittingly walk into an ambush they would have the time to arm.
He considered his options. Normally at this point, he'd give up the chase. There were too many unknowns on the other side of that portal and he hadn't succeeded this long in his fight against the Corrupt by being stupid. On the other hand… he'd never get another chance like this. Hunter knew it; instinctively felt that the reason he'd given up so many times in the past was to preserve himself for tonight. Pulling off his pack, he reached around inside for the slim plastic sheath of the portal-hacker.