Chapter LXIX: Empty Quiver, Part III
1100hrs, 26 December 2013, Socotra, Yemen.
"Take cover at once when you hear the attack sound. If you cannot reach home in ten minutes…try to find some solid cover…if you hear the fallout warning, seek the nearest and best cover as quickly as you can." Protect and Survive, Action After Warnings.
"But you tell me, Over and over and over again, my friend, Ah, you don't believe, We're on the eve of destruction." Barry McGuire, Eve of Destruction.
"Amy, Raye, go!"
Raye and Amy charged in, with Raye firing her grenade launcher off at a group of youma on the right of the hanger. They went up in flames. Amy snapped off accurate bursts from the M16, destroying a youma in front of her and sending another careening off course. Not as good as Raye, but it was something.
Wisely, 5 Golf 5 had stationed all of the UGVs toward the front of the hanger where the entrance was in order to prevent causalities among his own forces. From his count, ten youma remained, and they counterattacked against the two soldiers that had burst into the room.
"Serena, I'm losing the door!" Lita yelled. The steel door had given way at first, but now it fought back despite Lita's strength. "Fuck!" She couldn't hold any longer, and the door clanged shut.
"What was that?" Raye said loudly, over the din of gunfire. From what she could see, there were five cruise missiles at the front of the hanger, about two hundred meters away. Technicians scrambled for cover as the UGVs returned fire, blanketing the area in machine gun fire.
"Uh…the door! The door is shut!" Amy shouted.
"Lita, get this fucking door open!" Serena yelled.
"We have to get in there!" Mina screamed in panic. Her trigger finger twitched nervously as she thought about Amy in there, outnumbered and outgunned. They hadn't come all this way just to be killed, and Mina was not about to let that happen.
Lita remembered that she was holding onto one of Raye things…what was it? She felt around in her lower pants pocket and found the two bricks of C4. "Wait, I have Raye's C4!"
"Goddammit, use it on the door!" Mina yelled, almost hysterical.
"Calm down, Mina," Serena said. Although if someone I loved was on the other side of the door being shot at, I would be freaking out as well, she thought to herself. "Lita, use it."
"On it." Lita places the two bricks of C4 and quickly molded it to fit the area that the door met the ground. She placed the blasting caps in the explosive and attached them to the wires, which then led to the detonator.
"Guys, get out of the way." Serena and Mina went on the right side of the door while Lita took cover on the left, detonator in hand.
"Amy, Raye," Serena said over the radio.
"Yeah!" was the stressed response from Amy. A string of bullets snapped over her head, making her duck behind the destroyed youma she was using for cover.
"We're coming through the doors using explosives, you'd better get away from them," Serena told her.
"Got it. Raye!"
She had also heard the order. "I'm coming over to your position!" She fired a long burst from her Glock 18 before displacing to Amy's position on the right side of the hanger.
"Be advised, they're almost ready to launch," Luna reported, only adding to the drama at hand.
"Do it," Serena ordered, seeing that everything was in place.
"Fire in the hole!" Lita yelled. She pressed the detonator.
The electric shock from the detonator caused the normally stable C4 explosive to detonate at a speed of 8,092 meters a second, causing the door to buckle, then to finally break against the strain of the explosion. However, using two bricks of C4 explosive also caused part of the wall to give way, blasting that outward as well into the hanger.
"Jesus!" Raye exclaimed, getting her head down as debris rained everywhere.
"I thought you were only going to blow the door off!" Serena said irritably to Lita, her ears ringing.
"Sorry!"
There wasn't much time to argue, as Amy and Raye were still in deep shit.
"Move forward!" Lita charged through the newly formed entrance, firing her M249 on full auto, suppressing one of the squads in the hanger. Serena and Mina were next, with Mina sniping at everything that moved. Serena moved up to Lita, tapped her on the shoulder, which was the order for Lita to advance forward. She continued to do so, only stopping to toss a grenade at two soldiers hiding behind some sandbags. It blew up, sending them tumbling back, along with some dismembered limbs.
Raye and Amy moved up next on their side of the hanger, destroying the last of the youma and starting in on the remaining human soldiers.
"I got this!" Raye fired her shotgun repeatedly, hitting a soldier who tried to sprint from cover. He went down.
"5 Golf 5, these guys are killing us!" his XO reported before being hit with a 7.62mm round from Mina's battle rifle.
"Fuck!" 5 Golf 5 cursed, ducking behind the sandbags in front of the Tomahawks. He sure hoped that they would be able to get out the way before they launched.
"I need all fire focused on those two soldiers advancing on our left," he ordered, calmly. "4, 5, target the machine gunner on the right. Go!"
Three of the PMC soldiers engaged Raye and Amy, pinning them down with fire from their P90s. 5.7mm rounds zipped through the air, snapping all around them as they tried to advance forward. At the same time, two of the PMC machine gunners with their HK21s opened up, pinning down Serena, Lita and Mina on their side of the hanger.
"They've got us pinned!" Lita yelled, switching briefly to her shotgun as three more of the PMC troopers started to advance forward, their guns blazing away at her position. A slug shell quickly felled one of them, but the soldiers kept advancing.
"Come on girls!" Serena shouted encouragingly. "Push forward!"
That was enough. Amy and Raye broke from cover and fired from the hip, downing the advancing PMC troopers. Mina continued to engage hostiles from a distance with her battle rifle, and Serena and Lita lay down a withering suppression fire of their own to counteract the PMC's attack.
5 Golf 5 was killed almost immediately after the SAILOR team pushed forward to the Tomahawks. Several rounds from either Mina or Serena's guns probably did him in, but in the confusion, it was extremely hard to tell. The rest of the PMC unit was felled in a matter of seconds from the combined fire from the SAILOR team.
"Come out with your hands in the air!" Lita yelled at about five or six ground crew that had been hiding in a sandbag shelter near the back of the hanger.
"We'll shoot!" Raye added forcefully.
"Guys, you're speaking in Japanese. They can't understand you," Mina pointed out to them. "Hey, come out with your hands up!" she repeated. This time, the ground crew stepped out of the bunker, with their hands up.
"Disable the nuclear weapons!" Serena screamed at one of the captured technicians.
"I can't, they're going to launch!" the technician shouted back. The engines on the back of the Tomahawks sputtered, ready to fly off the rails.
"Luna, some help here!" Amy shouted into her radio, frantically looking over her tablet computer that she had whipped out from her rucksack.
"Beryl, launch procedures are complete and ready to go."
"Fire the weapons then," she ordered. "It's time to end this, once and for all." Kunzite went over to a special locker in the room and after a handprint and iris scan, the locker opened up to reveal two sets of keys, one for him, one for Beryl. He tossed one to her, and kept the other one as he walked over to a special panel that was right by where Beryl was sitting. On it sat two keyslots for the respective keys. This would launch the missiles, but only if both sets of keys were inserted and turned at the same time.
"Turn the keys in the five…four…three…two…one…"
"Serena, what are we going to do?!" Raye shouted in panic.
"SAILOR Moon, let me talk to Mercury, and I can talk her through it," Luna said over the radio, after hearing them panic for long enough.
"Do it!"
Luna switched gears, bringing up the directory of files that held the guidance software and programming.
"Okay, Amy, we're going to disable the guidance system and set so that it can't go anywhere," Luna calmly replied.
"Walk me through it, and we don't have much time!" Even Amy was starting to lose her cool; well, if you had a couple of nuclear missiles ready to launch, keeping one's patience was a tricky order.
"Okay, access the directory that I'm sending you, and then you should be able to do it from there."
Luna already had the directory up. Since the CIC was commanding the entire operation, it had the launch access command to remotely fire the missiles. If the guidance was set to zero or an invalid destination, they could buy some time while the team could disable the missiles and warheads.
Amy accessed the directory and reset the destination to an invalid location, forcing the onboard computer to reset and ask the host server for new directions.
"Why aren't the missiles launching?!" Beryl asked. Her rage was beyond the boiling point.
"Ma'am…the guidance systems…they've been set to an invalid range," the technician Sorenson reported. "They're asking for new directions."
"Well give them one then!" That would take another couple of minutes though. Enough time to send in another QRF force along with youma units.
"Okay, how are we going to shut down these nuclear weapons?" Lita asked, after that close encounter.
"We don't have to disable the nuclear weapons proper," Mina started to say, but was interrupted by Amy.
"They might be able to repair the launch vehicles, so we have to…"
Serena had to hold up her hand to keep them from talking over each other. "One thing at a time guys. Luna, what do you suggest?"
"Standby…okay, there's five of you, right? And five missiles there, right?"
"There's five missiles, but it doesn't appear that all of them have nuclear warheads." She turned to the captive group of technicians.
"Hey," Serena interrogated one of the technicians. "Which ones have the nuclear warheads?"
Like before, he pointed out the three in the center, with the ones on the periphery lacking the warheads. They were decoys, making sure that the nuclear armed ones got through.
"Okay, where's the other nuclear weapons?" Serena interrogated.
"In that storage facility over there," the captive technician pointed out. Serena looked at another room in the hanger, one that had a big "RESTRICTED ACCESS" sign on it.
"Bring them over here. Lita, watch these guys."
"We have to have clearance…" the technician started to protest, but was silenced when Amy remotely opened the door.
"Yeah, you should have better security," Lita winked. "Come on, we don't have all day." The ground crew reluctantly walked over to the storage room, not having understood what Lita had just said to them.
"Okay, Mina, Amy, Raye," Serena ordered. "Get up to those missiles and disable them."
"On it." The three of them found some step ladders that had been used by the ground crew and brought them over to the missiles.
"Luna, walk us through disabling the missiles," Amy said, standing by the ladder.
"Standby. I'm going to bring up schematics for that missile." Luna accessed the database for the specifics of the Tomahawk missile.
"Alright, here's where the fuel lines are," she reported. "Open up the access panel here and cut them at this point." Amy's HUD illuminated the point where Luna had indicated where the fuel lines were. A couple of seconds of bashing open the panel, the three of them had cut the fuel lines and TH-dimer fuel was leaking out everywhere.
"Gross," Mina said, watching the fuel spew all over the place. "How flammable is this stuff?"
"You have to get pretty hot to burn this. Sixty degrees is I think, the flashpoint," Amy said, quickly looking it up on her HUD. Luna's voice brought them back to the subject at hand.
"Next is the guidance system. Cut those wires there and break the onboard computer."
Again, there was some more unscrewing of access panels and tearing of wires.
"That should be good," Luna reported, looking at the damage the three girls had inflicted. "That'll slow them down for a little bit."
"Serena, we're done, here," Mina yelled out.
Serena turned around from what she was doing and yelled back to them. "Amy, Mina, work on the other missiles. Raye, come over here."
Serena and Lita were standing around the small boxes that Amy noted had been stored in here. Sure enough, they had been marked as "meat" containers.
"Do you know how to disable the nuclear warheads?" Serena asked in her somewhat passible English to their prisoners.
The ground crew shook their heads.
"Well, now that you're here, you can get those nuclear weapons out of those missiles there." Again, the ground crew reluctantly got to work unhooking the nuclear weapons from the missiles. Normally, it would take a lot longer for them to get the warheads off, but since they had armed and very trigger happy soldiers watching over them, they must have set a record in nuclear weapon removal.
"Serena, we've finished disabling the missiles," Mina reported. There was a little bit more grease and oil on Amy and her uniform, but they seemed satisfied with their work.
"I can take a look at the warheads," Amy volunteered, gesturing toward the warheads that the ground crew had just taken off of the missiles. They brought them over to where they had placed the other nuclear warheads.
"Okay, I don't think they're any more use to us," Serena said to Raye and Lita. "Guys, scram. Get out of here." She pointed toward the door. That didn't have to be translated; the ground crew went scrambling for the exit.
While the SAILOR team was doing that, Luna noted on the radio frequencies that the PMC was using that another attack was in progress. Took them long enough, Luna thought.
"Alert, there's another platoon of PMC soldiers heading your way. Suggest that you hurry up there and disable the warheads, over."
"Did we get rid of the QRF?" Serena griped, reloading her M4.
"Probably," Lita replied, making sure that her M249 was in good order. "We've inflicted a lot of casualties on them."
"Raye!" Amy's voice caught Raye's attention for a second.
"Yeah, what is it?" She jogged over to where Amy was standing by the nuclear weapons, examining them with her HUD.
"Here's your weapon back. Thanks for letting me use it." She gave the M16A4 back, unslinging it from her shoulder. Amy fumbled with her other weapon for a second before straightening that out.
"No problem," Raye said back, taking the weapon from her.
Serena saw Amy turn back to looking at the warheads on the trollies, with an intense look on her face. She walked over to her, keeping an eye on the entrance to hanger.
"How is it going?" she asked.
"Serena," Amy said, after looking over the warhead. "I don't know if I can disable it for you."
"But you did so in America," Serena replied, her eyes narrowing.
"I removed the jury-rigged remote detonation device, not the internal components," she protested. "I don't know how it'll go if I try to start playing around with things inside of it."
"Okay, this is what we'll do. Lita, give Raye your M249, and start taking those weapons over to the storage room over there."
"Why did you send the crew away then?" Lita grumbled.
"Sorry. It sounded like a good idea at the time," Serena shrugged, then turned her attention back to the hanger entrance. Lita bitched at Serena under her breath for her shortsightedness, but moved the W80 warheads on the trollies back toward the storage room.
8 Juliet 3 was just a rookie when it came to this soldiering stuff. Having gotten kicked out of the Ukrainian Militsiya for roughing up one too many civilians (which was saying something in an agency that routinely did such things), she joined up with the PMC after deciding that her "asskicking" skills (in her words) were going to waste for the local mob boss. It turned out that kneecapping random people who owed money to her boss wasn't exactly great experience for the PMC. Oh well. That's why she was transferred here for a little bit more training (and the extra money helped as well).
"Okay, all Juliet units, standby for dynamic entry," their team leader, 1 Juliet 3, said over the radio. Thirty PMC soldiers were stacked up by the now very large entrance, thanks to Lita's handiwork. To their sides, youma lined up to go into the breach, drawing fire from the flesh and blood soldiers.
"All units check in," Soshkin asked over the radio.
"1 Juliet 3 reporting in."
"1 Echo 9 reporting in."
"1 Tango 2 reporting."
"All callsigns, let the youma units go in first. Breach the hanger ten seconds after the youma enter."
"That's affirmative," 1 Juliet 3 said over the radio.
"Hey, Sofiya," another member of the squad, 7 Juliet 3, said to her. "You ready to do this?"
"Yeah," she replied in a very heavy accent. English did not come naturally to her, but it was a requirement of the PMC that it be spoken. "I'm ready. I'm just worried because the QRF almost got wiped out."
"Hey, we're going to get these guys."
"7 and 8, quiet," their squad leader ordered. "Command, send the word. We're ready."
"Sending the youma units in."
"Lita, you got the weapons in there?!" Serena yelled at her.
"Yeah, I've got the last of the nukes in here!" Lita yelled back. "Coming on out!"
"Just in time," Raye muttered. She could see some faces poking their heads in and out of the entrance to the hanger.
"Amy, lock that door down. Make sure that it's really hard to get into."
"Done." Amy locked the door remotely, then sealed it with the electromagnetic lock on the inside there. She then set a ridiculously long and complex password so that no one would be able to get in there without some serious cryptology work. The only way anyone was getting in there now if they blew it open with explosives.
"Okay Serena, it's done," Amy reported to her, putting the tablet computer away and getting out her MP5-PDW.
"Serena," Luna interrupted again. "PMC forces are sending in the youma units first so that they'll draw fire. Estimate size of youma units about fifteen to twenty five units."
"Ah shit," Lita said, sighting her M249 down toward the entrance. Maybe using that much plastic explosive was a bad idea, she thought to herself. Lita took stock of the ammo that she was carrying; of the munitions she had started out with, she only had one more full drum of ammo for the machine gun, two grenades, and a couple of flashbangs.
"Brace yourselves!" Serena screamed out to the SAILOR team. They were behind cover that the previous defenders had built, and hoped that they were going to be more useful to them than before.
"All callsigns, execute, execute!"
The youma units rolled in.
"Holy shit!" Raye shouted out. Five youma charged through the door, this time, armed with two machine guns each on their sides. One even had a grenade launcher like herself strapped on in place of the machine gun. Whatever half measures the Nakanishi Group had taken before, they weren't holding back on this one. She fired a couple of bursts from her M16 before switching to her Masterkey, firing off a couple of slug rounds. Three of the youma burst into flame or sputtered to a halt, but more of them charged in, guns blazing.
"Keep up the fire!" Serena yelled, depressing the trigger on her M4, this time on full auto. The entire magazine was emptied in under five seconds, but a youma was dead.
"Running low on ammo!" Lita screamed over the din of battle. She removed the spent bullet link from the feed, and reached for her last remaining drum of ammunition.
"Just keep firing!" was the reply from Serena.
Mina sighted down the HK417 on another youma that came blitzing through the entrance, the twin machine gun mounts firing wildly. Five rapid rounds from her weapon, targeted at the optics and weak spots of the UGV quickly brought it to a halt.
"Incoming hostiles!" Amy pointed out, highlighting them on their HUDs.
8 Juliet 3 charged in, along with the rest of her squad and immediately came under fire.
"You see them?!" 7 Juliet 3 yelled to her over the chatter of gunfire.
8 Juliet 3 slid into cover next to a destroyed youma; if nothing else, the relatively large UGVs provided excellent cover for advancing infantry. Even in death, they provided some sort of service. Unlike those fleshy humans. She peeked around the cover and saw a machine gunner firing in her direction. Several bullets pinged off of the metal, sending her back into hiding.
"Yeah! There's a machine gunner, 100 meters out, behind those sandbags!" 8 Juliet 3 swung out from cover and fired a couple bursts from her P90 at the machine gunner, causing the soldier to duck.
Not even a minute into the gunfight, there were already cries for help from people who had been hit by the enemy's fire.
"This is 2 Echo 9, 1 Echo 9 just got hit!" 1 Juliet 3 turned to see half of that squad get ripped apart by a stream of gunfire from a machine gun, assault rifles and a battle rifle. Even above the din of battle, he could tell weapons apart pretty easily. AKs made a distinctive sound, so they were out. He had been training with his own squad and the other PMC units on the island for awhile now, and could point out the specific weapons that the PMC liked to use. The P90 was a great weapon, along with the HK21s and occasional M16 weapon on their side. Sometimes they carried auto shotguns, but those had been given to the QRF, to which they were certainly not a part of. Not that it helped them in the first place it seemed.
"Goddamn," 1 Juliet 3, hissed to himself. "3 and 4, use your machine guns to suppress enemy positions. Does anyone see how many there are?!"
"Sir, there's five of them there!" 8 Juliet 3 reported to the squad leader. She had gotten a quick count after sticking her head out again. It almost cost her dearly, as several aimed shots flew past, hitting against the destroyed youma.
"Only five?!" 1 Juliet 3 had heard that this team was special, but only five members doing this much damage? What else did that fleet have out there that could do such a thing? He pushed his inner fears away and got back to commanding his squad. It was the least he could do in a situation rapidly falling apart.
"Keep advancing! Use the youma as cover!"
By now, there were husks of youma everywhere, littering the hanger turned battleground.
"Be advised," Soshkin in the CIC announced to all the PMC units there, "Watch your fire and do not destroy the Tomahawk missiles."
"Oh, thanks for that," 8 Juliet 3 muttered to herself. That's the last thing they needed, was the CIC trying to micromanage the battle from the safety of their protected room. She leaned around from cover again, but more incoming rounds made her back off from that course of action.
"PMC soldiers are fifty meters out!" Amy shouted, ducking down behind some sandbags. She could see them ducking and weaving throughout the hanger, advancing steadily against the SAILOR team.
"I can see that!" Serena yelled back, firing her M4. "Raye, how many grenades left?!"
Raye checked her ammunition pouches. There were no grenades left, but she remembered loading them into the MGL. "Only six left!"
"Well, use them!"
Raye fired the remaining grenades in her launcher off, spreading them out over the entire length of the hanger. Explosions shot up all across the advancing PMC forces, but was tempered by the fact that there were so many destroyed youma that they absorbed most of the explosions, rendering the attack ineffective.
"I'm out of grenades!" Raye reported, tossing the MGL aside, temporarily. She dropped to one knee and fired off a burst from her M16A4, almost hitting a PMC soldier near the back of the hanger.
Lita guesstimated that she had half a belt left in her machine gun. Not enough to keep the PMC soldiers off of them. There was no way that they could hold these guys off before being overrun. Not unless they took the initiative.
"Serena, I'm going to bluff an attack," Lita said over the radio.
"What?!" Serena yelled back. It was mostly due to the loudness of the battle and not surprise at Lita's suggestion.
"Serena, I'm going to fire a long burst with the machine gun!" Lita said back, louder this time. "Attack when I do so!"
"Got it!" Serena liked that plan. "Raye, get ready to move up!"
"Copy that."
Lita squeezed down the trigger on the M249 and let loose an extremely long burst of gunfire. It didn't need to kill a lot of people, just to scare the enemy into thinking that they were going to outright attack them. Serena and Raye charged forward from cover, firing their weapons from the hip and moving up to new positions in front of them. They dove behind some destroyed youma from before, and started to engage soldiers at close range, hitting a couple of them and causing the formation to waver in confidence.
1 Juliet 3 saw that they were taking too many causalities for this operation to succeed. All of their youma destroyed, along with almost half of their platoon taken out. The bluff attack by the SAILOR team was all it took to break them.
"This is 1 Juliet 3, situation is untenable, we need to fall back and regroup!" he yelled in to his radio, upon hearing Lita open up with her machine gun and seeing Serena and Raye charge forward.
"CIC, we need to get out of here!" another squad leader, 1 Tango 2 reported, panic in his voice.
Soshkin saw that this was going nowhere fast. He gave the order to retreat. "All callsigns, fall back, fall back!"
8 Juliet 3 was still hiding behind the destroyed youma when the call went out to retreat. She ran out of there as fast as she could, bullets snapping around her heels. She would later be captured by Marines and extradited back to the Ukraine, where she would end up working for the same mob boss.
"How many soldiers did we lose?" Beryl asked, dumbfound at what had just occurred.
"Only half of the force was lost," Kunzite said. "But all the youma were destroyed."
"Great. Just fucking great."
"Ma'am," Soshkin said to her. "I suggest that you get out of here immediately. They're closing in, and I don't want you to…"
"Thank you, Soshkin, but there's not going to be any running today," Beryl shot back. Except, maybe to my quarters for one last stand, she thought. If I'm going to die, then I'm going to be comfortable then.
"Is everyone okay?!" Serena yelled to the rest of the team. "Is anyone hit?"
"Nah, I'm still here," Lita said, standing up to one knee and surveying the scene around them.
"I'm good," Raye replied.
"We're both fine," Mina said back to Serena. Amy looked a bit shaken up, but it probably had been one of the largest gunfights they had been in since the Sudan, and one in the many they had just gone through today. It would be hard to find someone who wasn't incredibly stressed by recent events. Even for someone as stoic as Amy.
"Amy, get the President on the radio," Serena ordered.
"Luna…"
"I'm on it."
POTUS was watching the battle unfold when the COS ran into the room, holding her cell phone.
"Madame President," the COS said to her. "It's the SAILOR team for you."
"Give the phone here." She took the phone from the COS and answered it.
"Hello, Madame President?" Luna said to POTUS.
"Yes, Luna, isn't it? Good to hear from you. Have you dealt with the situation?"
"Yes Ma'am, the nuclear weapons cannot be launched from the facility. We've disabled the launch vehicles."
POTUS leaned back in her chair and breathed a sigh of relief.
"Can you put me in contact with the team there?"
"I can, but it'll be a little bit spotty."
"Do it."
Luna switched over from talking to POTUS to SAILOR Moon.
"Serena, the President wants to talk to you."
Serena didn't even have to say for Amy to translate. She just nodded her head in acknowledgement of the task that Serena wanted done.
"Madame President, uh…um…we've secured the nuclear weapons and have….uh…" Serena stumbled through the English phrases until Amy held up her hand, wanting to give a better rendition of what had just happened.
"Madame President, this is Amy. We've removed the nuclear weapons and have rendered them inaccessible to the enemy. The launch vehicles have been disabled as well. You may send in your special forces in, if they're not already on the island."
"Thank you so much," POTUS said to Amy. "Are you going after Beryl now?"
"That is affirmative. She is very close by, and we feel like we can get her."
"I'm sorry Madam President, but we really must be going," Serena interrupted. "We will report when we've dealt with Beryl."
"Understood. Good luck." POTUS ended the call.
"Serena, we also have to go after the data servers as well," Amy said after the call to the President had ended.
"Why can't you access it from here?" Serena asked.
"Serena, I've sent all the data I could from the Nakanishi servers to Luna, and there is no mention of the healing solution formula on there. It must be on a different, more secure intranet."
Serena had little idea what Amy was talking about, but she did understand that they could not get what they wanted.
"Goddammit…okay, Mina and Amy, go after the server room where that data is stored once we hit the CIC. Do you have it on your computer there?"
Amy nodded.
"Yes, I pulled up the full schematics on the base once I was able to go through all of the data you guys gave me. I've located the CIC and can direct you toward their position."
"Any other suggestions, Luna?" Serena asked.
Luna was about to say no, but then something caught her eye on the layout of the CIC.
"Wait, it looks like there's access to the servers from the CIC. They're on an intranet that is not linked to the main database."
"So we don't have to go after the server room then?" Amy wondered. She looked at her tablet computer and sure enough, there was a secure terminal location marked on one of the blueprints for extremely sensitive information that was not connected to the database proper.
"I don't think so. It would make things significantly easier. Plus, the destruct function must be in the CIC as well, so you might as well take the CIC out," Luna suggested.
Serena nodded. "Alright then, let's go after Beryl. We'll be able to access the data in the CIC as well. Two birds with one stone."