Chapter Seventeen
Cross My Heart...
In his whole life Lupus had never seen so much green. It was everywhere. The fronds of the ferns, the leaves of the tree, the blades of the grass. He'd been to an arboretum. Once. And that had only been to steal flowers for his sister's birthday. It didn't compare to this though. Here on Zoness, the green that people on Macbeth only saw in a small, enclosed space, stretched on for thousands of miles to form colossal jungles and massive rainforests. If he hadn't been here, walking inside of it on his own two feet, Lupus might not have believed that such a place was possible.
There were downsides though. The heat was oppressive for one. The sun had gone down, but nights on Zoness were warm, and the dense canopy that stretched above them kept most of the day's heat from escaping. Down on the ground level the underbrush glittered with condensation, and the humidity made it feel like he'd just stepped out of a hot shower, an analogy he never would have thought to make before yesterday. Lupus was sweating his balls off inside his infiltration skin. Infiltration skin. I really am moving up in the world.
Sharington Arms, a mid range but high quality Cornerian military technology firm, produced the line of stealth infiltration suits that Cadman had provided them with for this mission. They masked heat signatures and other biosigns produced by the wearer, allowing them to avoid tripping most standard sensors. They wouldn't be enough to get them past Installation 214's more advanced scanners, but that was why they had the schematics and specifications for the installation's security systems on hand. Lupus had asked Cadman where he'd managed to get those, but the dane hadn't been willing to saying much more than, 'I have a contact'
Cadman's cryptic attitude didn't bother Lupus. Most people tended to be closed off and guarded around him, at least if they knew what he did for a living. As a professional thief, he had been involved with plenty of clients who preferred to remain anonymous. Lupus had also dealt with more than his fair share of middlemen in his all too short life. Though, considering the domineering, alpha male personality Lupus had observed in Cadman, it surprised him that the other canine would ever stoop so low as to be nothing more than a functionary. Whoever he worked for must have been powerful indeed.
Then there was what his sister had told him. He put it out of his mind, they'd deal with that when the job was done. For now they all needed to focus. Suffice it to say, he wished Cadman hadn't insisted Sarah go with him. There'd been no way to refuse without it look suspicious.
"I'm going to feel disgusting when I get out of this," whispered Jax, the lion walking behind Lupus, keeping an eye on their rear and running a masker over their trail, covering their footprints as they moved. The soft, moist dirt meant that every step created a noticeable indentation. In the jungle it would probably be gone a few hours after they'd left it, but no one was willing to take a chance on that. This had to go off without a hitch. Infiltrating a top secret Federation science facility demanded perfection, and so perfection was what Lupus aimed to provide.
"You can always take a shower," Lupus said, tail wagging behind him. That water shower had been incredible. Lupus couldn't wait to find out what other luxuries were commonplace in the rest of Lylat, now that he'd escaped that hell hole of a birthplace.
There was a smile in Jax's voice when he answered, "Yeah. Guess I can."
"If you two are going to chat, do it over a private channel."
Lupus arched an eyebrow and said, "Yes sir." The last word dripped with sarcasm. He would have done that, except that would mean cutting Sarah out of the conversation between him and Jax. Lupus didn't like keeping things from his sister, no matter how minor or banal. They had shared everything growing up, and Lupus intended to share everything with her until the day he died. Then again, I did promise perfection.
"Touchy, isn't he?" Jax muttered, the two of them switching over to a private channel. Jax brushed his shot tail against Lupus's scruffy lupine one.
"Controlling," Lupus agreed. I don't like taking orders. And I like that our handler is micromanaging even less.
Ten more minutes of trudging through the jungle and the underbrush started to clear. Lupus could see lights up ahead. Bright, white, artificial lights, the beams moving in a consistent pattern. He advanced a half dozen more meters, then hunkered down behind a bush, pulling Jax down with him. "Cadman," he said into his throat mic, switching back to the regular team channel. "This the place?"
"Yes. Sarah and I will move forward first and get the side door to the cargo bay unlocked. I'll signal when I want you to come in. In the meantime stay there, and keep quiet."
Jax snorted, and Lupus couldn't help but roll his eyes, even as he switched back to the private comm. Either Cadman thought they were amateurs, or whatever they were after was a lot more important to him and his mysterious, unnamed employer than he'd been letting on. Either way, the lupine could sense the tension in the dane's voice.
Lupus glanced to his left and blinked three times. A screen came up showing the position of Cadman and Sarah on his motion tracker. They appeared as two bright yellow dots, both of them moving towards the cargo entrance on the east side of the building. They stopped when they reached it, and Lupus smiled when he heard Sarah humming a few idle notes to herself on the commline, hacking away at the security for the entrance, and happy as a clam to be doing it. Nothing made his sister happier than picking a lock.
"Lupus." Jax tapped him on the shoulder.
"I see them," Lupus replied. A pair of red dots had just appeared on his motion tracker, doing a circuit around the compound. "Guards. They're patrol is ahead of schedule." Lupus bit the inside of his lip. They weren't all that far ahead. Probably just a fast watch. He didn't have time to worry about it. "Follow my lead," he told Jax. The lion nodded.
The two of them crouch-ran out of the bushes, keeping their heads down and dodging around the search lights. His helmet highlighted areas with laser fields, and he stepped gingerly by those as well. Security here was good, tight. But it had all the flaws inherent to Federation facilities. They didn't really expect to need it. They were prepared technologically for the worst, but not psychologically. The design tended to show that, with smaller, but no less obvious gaps that would never have been left unfilled by a more paranoid mind. I have a feeling we won't be able to rely on that for very long if we pull this off. Hell, even if we don't pull this off just the fact that we tried will be a wakeup call.
They reached a stack of containers and ducked behind it. Jax reached for his sidearm, but Lupus put a hand out to stop him. "We need to do this quiet. You remember how to snap a neck, right babe?"
"Yeah. I do." Jax nodded, his expression turning a bit more grim. It would be quick and painless, but Lupus knew killing wasn't always easy for Jax. In the heat of the moment, to protect Lupus or Sarah or himself, Jax could be an unstoppable killing machine. But he wasn't cold blooded about it. He'll do what needs to be done though. He knows better than to be my better half all the time, Lupus thought to himself.
Lupus held up three fingers, signaling that they would go on the count of three. 1.
The two red blips approached on his motion tracker. Lupus disengaged the filtration feature on his helmet, his nose twitching to pick up their scents. Sweat, deodorant, and that distinct odor dogs always seemed to carry with them. 2.
Lupus took a deep breath, steadying himself as the red blips moved past their hiding place. Neither of them stopped, and Lupus picked up the sound of idle conversation. Someone seemed to be having problems with his girlfriend. "...so I says to her, if you think I'm spending ninety creds on a damn toaster oven, you're outta your mind!"
The inanity of the conversation almost made Lupus laugh. Instead he brought that third finger down, and he and Jax burst from cover, quick and quiet. The two canine guards didn't have time to do more than let out strangled gurgles as the bones in their necks snapped in two. They were dead before Lupus or Jax caught them, keeping them from falling and making any sort of noise.
"I promise I'll buy you a toaster oven if you want one," Jax said, the two of them having deposited the still warm bodies in a darkened corner, out of sight of any cameras or search lights.
"I wouldn't know what do with it," Lupus said, a smirk playing on the edge of his muzzle. "But thanks doll." Matter of the toaster oven resolved, Lupus took a quick look around before expanding the range of his motion tracker. Once he was satisfied there would be no more unexpected blips to sneak up on them, he tapped his mic and said, "Sarah, how's the door coming?"
"Almost through. Problem?"
"We just ran into two security personnel. We neutralized them, but we're out of position now. Alright if we come to you?" Lupus asked, tapping his foot against the concrete ground.
"Fine with me."
"Copy. We're coming to you."
Lupine and feline broke cover again and dashed through the courtyard, nimbly avoiding the security measures for a second time. When they reached Cadman and Sarah Lupus crouched down in the darkness and caught his breath. "I assume the cameras are all non-functioning."
"Yes." Cadman looked over at him, looking somehow even more imposing in the form fitting infiltration skin. "They'll be playing looped footage. It won't trick anyone who's really paying attention, so we need to make this quick."
"Agreed." Lupus nodded. "Sarah?"
"Shut up."
Lupus snapped his muzzle shut and held a finger to his face plate. Sarah was in the zone, and he should have known better than to bother her. It would take her as long as it took her, and him asking for status updates every five seconds wouldn't change a damn thing.
It took her a few more moments, but Sarah broke through the lock's encryption with a smile and a fist pump. She tapped a button and the door opened. "Nice work, sis," Lupus said, patting her on the shoulder.
"I'll go first," Cadman said, moving to the front of the pack with a level of grace and economy of movement Lupus wouldn't have thought possible for someone as large as him. More than just muscle then.
"Be my guest," Lupus replied, pulling out his sidearm. Jax and Sarah did the same, and the four of them moved into the base.
They passed through the cargo loading and offloading area. The room was piled high with crates and barrels, all of them with various hazard symbols on them. Lupus was thankful for his rebreather when he noticed that several were marked 'biohazard.' There were two trucks in the garage as well, each of them heavily armored and marked with the symbol for the Zonessian branch of the Lylat Federation Security Forces. Whatever they transported in and out of here must have been valuable. Lupus had seen armored trucks for banks with less plating and fewer shield emitters.
Accessing the proper interior of the facility was easier than Lupus had been expecting. "Someone left the door unlocked," Sarah grumbled, looking disappointed that she wouldn't have the opportunity to pick another lock.
"That'd be our contact," Cadman explained, pushing the door open and checking the corners for any potential hostiles.
"Wish we'd had more contacts back home," Jax muttered, stepping through the door next, followed by Sarah. Lupus brought up the rear.
"Be glad you didn't," Cadman said, voice gruff as they started down the corridors. All of them were stark white, holographic signs showing where labs, scanners, decontamination rooms, and other areas of interest were. "They tend not to be reliable."
Lupus's ears perked at those words. He didn't like the sound of that. "Can we trust this one?"
Cadman snorted. "I trust her about as far as I can throw her."
So it is a her. Interesting. That's more than he told us at the briefing. And it confirms Sarah's story. Not that I didn't believe her. Some of the laboratories had glass windows to provide a look inside of them, and Lupus couldn't help but try and get a peek into this classified and forbidden realm. They were mostly just full of lab equipment and specimen vials. One thing that did catch his interest was a warning hologram flashing in the middle of one door that said, "Nanite Replication Project in Process, Do NOT Open Unless Cleared."
They were approaching an elevator. Lupus glanced at the reflective metal doors and asked, "How far down?"
Cadman typed in a security code and called the lift. The doors slid open and the group stepped in. He hit the button for one of the sublevels and the doors slid shut. With a slight jolt the lift kicked into motion, taking them deep below the facility's ground level. With a look of grim determination, Cadman said to Lupus, "Far."
Talia Swift sat in the Security Station at Installation 214, sipping coffee in a disposable cup, and watching the footage on the security cameras. Nothing but empty corridors this late at night. The science staff had all gone home, and there wasn't much more than a cleaning robot to be seen. Of course the footage was all looped, and no one realized that moving through the corridors were four heavily armed and lethal individuals intent on stealing one of the research facility's most precious secrets.
To be honest though, Talia was having second thoughts. She'd made a million credits doing this, more than enough to set her up comfortably with a new identity and a new life on any world in Lylat or beyond. A life of comfort and luxury. Something within her though just chafed at the knowledge of who had given her that money. The brute.
A million credits was a lot of money though. It was also already hers. Safely deposited in a secondary account that no one but her and the private Papetoonian bank knew about. Her mind kept flicking back to the night before, when the dane had arrived at her apartment, paid her, withheld the second half of the payment, and then assaulted her, finally leaving with the ominous promise of much, much more. ...Or something else.
Talia had spent a good deal of her life in the Zonessian Security Service. As idyllic as her world looked, she'd seen it's underbelly. She'd rescued plenty of helpless children from abusive conditions, and plenty of young women from slavery. She'd seen the results of letting a man like Dane have free run of the galaxy. He already paid you. It's not your problem. After tonight you'll never have to be on the same planet as him if you don't want to be.
There were other security staff sitting around her in the command post. Most of them weren't paying much attention, doing little more than giving the monitors a cursory glance every now and then. Except for one of them, a bulldog named Jake who looked almost too young to be drinking anything stronger than warm milk. When Talia looked over at him he had a troubled expression on his muzzle. Don't get involved. What if it's something you need to know about though?
Against her better judgement she walked over and set a hand on his shoulder. "There a problem Jake?"
The bulldog looked up at her and said, "It's Otis and Mark."
"What about them?" Talia asked, putting on a smile and trying to look reassuring.
"They should have passed by my monitors by now," Jake told her, giving his screens a suspicious look.
What? "They aren't scheduled to patrol for another..." she glanced at her own watch, "Ten minutes," Talia said, looking down at Jake with a curious eye, and trying to mask her worry.
"What?" Jake looked at her, confused. "My watch says..."
Talia felt something inside of her wilt and die. The kid was going off of his own watch. And the kid had been in charge of signaling patrols. Otis and Mark probably thought it was a random change in schedule, like the one I did last week. Oh fuck. "Let me see that."
Jake, looking embarrassed, took the watch off of his wrist and handed it to her. She glanced at it, compared it to hers, and shook her head. "Your watch is fast. Really fast. When did you set this?"
"Ummm..." Jake looked about ready to cry as every eye in the room settled on him. "I mean...I thought...oh shit. I uh...I set all my clocks ahead so that uh...well, so that I get to bed and wake up umm...early, you know? Kinda have..."
Talia would have felt bad for him if she weren't boiling over in rage. "Son of a bitch Jake," she bit out through a clenched beak, not caring at the fact that the expression in this case went from a simple insult of parenting to a racial slur. "You need to fucking tell me these things, got it?" Everyone in the room was looking between her and Jake, shocked at the outrage on their normally bored, dispassionate leader. Talia had never been prone to getting excited at work. It had been a sedentary, yawn inducing, pointless job that she'd taken to get her last five years in before she qualified for full retirement benefits. Taking a deep, calming breath, she said, "Someone contact those two and see what their position is. With any luck they've stuck to schedule." She knew that hadn't happened. If they'd stuck to schedule they would have told her that they'd been signaled early, and then she would have told them to stay put until the regular time. This is all going tits up. Fucking kids.
"Ma'am?"
"What is it?" Talia moved across the room to one of her other officers.
"Neither Mark nor Otis is responding," he said, looking up at her.
"Check their bio-monitors," Talia told him, following standard procedure. They better not be what I think they are.
The officer tapped in a command, and the bio-monitors in their uniform insignia popped up in holographic form. Talia stared at the flat lines for half a second before straightening up and saying, "Lockdown." Double cross it is then. Sorry Mr. Dane, but I think your luck just ran out.
"Wow," Lupus said as he stepped through the vault door. "I have never seen something so antiquated."
Lining three walls of the room were rows and rows of slots, each of them containing a single, rectangular, four centimeter long memory card. There must have been hundreds of them. Each of them contained information on classified research projects being conducted by the Federation government. All of them so secret that there could be no risk of a remote hack, and so the schematics and specifications of each one existed on a single, non networked, memory card.
"Antiquated maybe," Sarah said, walking up to one of the walls. She started scanning the labels, looking for the one marked "Project Reach." "But the only way they could be more secure would be writing it down and storing it on pen and paper."
"I suppose." Lupus and Cadman both went to the remaining two walls and started looking. This was not an ideal situation. They were trapped in an enclosed room, only one exit, and they would have to do a visual search among hundreds of different memory cards to find the one they were looking for. All the while, every second that passed was a second where someone in the security post might realize they were looking at footage of empty hallways being looped, and that two bio-signatures from their contingent were registering as flatlined. Our contact might have been able to game the system not to set the alarm off as soon as we offed those two guys, but if anyone decides to check on them...
"I wonder what all of these are," Sarah muttered, tacing her fingers a few centimeters above each label as she searched.
"Probably things we don't ever want to know about," Jax said from where he stood in the vault doorway. "You know government secrets. They're secret for a reason."
"Can't have the masses knowing too much, now can we?" Lupus said with a chuckle.
"Can it all of you," Cadman barked. "I found it."
Lupus bristled at Cadman's tone. His team might have been a little chatty, but it helped, rather than hindered, their focus. It calmed their nerves and kept everyone in sync. Eye on the prize. You won't be working for him much longer. "You sure?"
"Project Reach." Cadman held up the card, the memory storage device encased in light blue plastic. Cadman slipped it into his kit bag and said, "Alright, let's get out of here before..."
Oh honey don't say it, Lupus thought, just as the alarm klaxons began blaring all through the facility.