"This can't be right. We have to be wrong." Linna said. "They can't be planning on launching. not with... Not with all these people here. They can't."

Sylia pursed her lips inside her helmet. For a moment she doubted it all herself. But they had evidence, didn't they? All cameras in the area were set to turn off. The use logs on the underground freight lines had been doctored. Was that enough to go on? Would it, could it be true? "...Either way, the only way to be sure is to get down there." She decided out loud. "But priority one is to seal the exhaust sluices." She pointed past the tents at the armored doors leading down underground. "And then try to evacuate these people in case that doesn't hold."

"How do we seal them?" Priss asked.

Sylia considered this all. "...No. Priority one is still to prevent a launch in the first place. You two go underground to disable the rocket, if there is a rocket. I'll join you once these people are safe."

"Okay, how'll you seal them, then?"

"That's a problem for me to solve." She deflected, and glanced around the lot briefly. "Your problem is to get down there. Nene! You said you had a route?"

"Yep!" The girl spoke up. "Should be eight blocks east."

Linna took a step eastward, then stopped. "We shouldn't split up." She said. "It's not the code."

"We break the code all the time." Priss told her. "We wrote it while drunk out of our minds."

"It's still signed in blood." Linna frowned. "You ha- Sylia, we'll need you below."

"I trust you will not." Sylia's attention was borrowed momentarily as she checked something on her motoslave's power supply, then she turned back to them, and put a hand on Linna's shoulder. Her suit's waldos squeezed the pauldron reassuringly. "You two are among the most capable combatants I know of period. Tonight's stakes may be more dire than our usual fair, but there's nothing insurmountable to be found down there. Autoturrets and current-gen security boomerss are likely, but we've trained for those. Traps are possible, but you've played enough paintball against me to spot a good trap."

"Okay."

"The mission, the rocket, is priority. Your actions must be precise and surgical." Sylia emphasized. "But surgery without anesthetic should expect resistance, so you must also be quick. Abide by every letter of Nene's instructions."

"Copy."

"Copy."

"Move."

Linna and Priss's motoslaves lifted them into the air in an eastward direction. Their jetwash churning up a whirlwind of dust and litter that blew across the lot, and from the cloud Sylia stepped, to look out over the homeless camp. Her motoslave stood at attention behind her, and she imagined she must look quite striking.

The noise had awoken many of the people nearby. They were crawling out of tents and shacks and looking in her direction. She could see the faces of the ones nearby, look into their eyes, and that hurt her in ways it shouldn't, because she hated to tell people terrible things. She turned up her helmet's speakers, and spoke anyway. "You know who I am."

A man at the front grinned with crooked teeth. "You're the Knight Sabers!" There was light in his eyes.

Sylia opened her helmet so they could see her face. That probably violated some part of the code too, but she'd never read the thing sober, and besides, it felt wrong to not. The Knight Sabers were a tool she'd invented to bring balance and hope to a city beset by faceless evils. It felt wrong now to be faceless while taking some hope away. "We're the ones they hire when things are going badly." She announced. "We're the ones who show up unbidden when things are going very badly. We're here tonight because you're all in grave danger."

The starstruck joy in their eyes changed to fear.

"An underground facility 800 meters beyond those doors was constructed during Cold War II to launch military spacecraft and superorbital missiles." She pointed. "We have reason to believe that a spacecraft is launching tonight. Sometime within the next hour, those doors will open and a wall of superheated rocket exhaust will obliterate this camp and everyone in it. I'll try to seal the doors, but you all need to drop everything and leave. Immediately. You do not have an entire hour, we don't know how long you have. Please... Get out."

Some of them started rushing about in a panic, others didn't budge, but most began to move with the quiet resignation of those who had been driven out before.

She closed her helmet, and started toward the doors. "Follow mode." She told her motoslave. Its auto-intelligence engaged, it's pilot latches closed into android config, and it lurched after her.

A man with a gang tattoo and a tattered green Pikachu shirt jogged up beside her. He had a few men and women following him, and they looked grim and eager. "How can we help?"

"Spread the word. Get this place empty." She told him, without stopping. "Anyone too sick or elderly or stubborn to move on their own needs to be moved anyway."

"I have boys already on it." The man in the Pikachu shirt jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. "But I know this whole area like the back of my hand. What do you need?"

"Well." She looked around, and looked down at her arm cannon. It could make a beam hot enough to fuse metal, but normally it couldn't keep it up for more than a short blast. "I do require a great deal of electricity."

"Which way now?" Linna asked.

"There should be a building on your right, number 1-3-8-8." Nene answered. "Google street view says it's a dilapidated yellow house with boarded windows. You're passing by it now- yeah, no, one back, there it is. Proceed to the basement."

Priss took their current hurry as an excuse against gentleness, and flew her motoslave straight into the wall, leading with a foot and an elbow. There was an eruption of dust and shattered tiles, and she was brought to a sudden stop, for beneath the siding, the wall was reinforced concrete. "Ow." She mumbled. There was a deafening 'clank' noise as a piece of tile got sucked through the motoslave's turbofan. She swung a fist at a nearby window, and although the glass shattered, the 'boards' behind remained unyielded. "Nene, what is this?" She asked. "It's not a house, it's a bunker."

"Yeah, that's the idea." Nene agreed. "The door is probably the weakest point, see if you can break through with explosives."

"Alright. Stand back." Linna armed her motoslave's tank-buster, then decided on a whim to try the knob first. It was unlocked. "Pfff." She laughed. "What is wrong with the both of you?"

"Oh, shut it." Priss followed her in. They were still wearing their motoslaves in mecha config, and had to crouch sideways to fit past the frame.

The house was much smaller and more featureless on the inside, indicating that the walls were ridiculously thick and the windows hadn't even been real openings. There was litter and heroin needles all over the floor, and a squatter in a corner, curled up in a sleeping bag. Linna briefly tried to tiptoe past, until Priss elbowed her from behind. They made it around a corner and down into the basement, where it was utterly dark. Linna thumbed on her lamp, and was met with the eerie sight of a cluster of wide metal pipes leading floor-to-ceiling, and a manhole-sized hatch in the floor beside them. She snapped a picture and sent it off to Nene. "What are we looking at here?" She asked.

"You're directly above the spaceport's fuel and LOX cryotank farm." She answered. "Some of those pipes are for surface-level refilling, others are for emergency pressure-release; the whole house is an armored shield to keep the junction safe from bombardment damage. They all run down through the same service duct, which the hatch leads to. You should be able to open it, I think?"

Priss was able to pry the padlock off with her bare waldos, but the steel handle nearly met with the same fate when she tried to get the hatch itself to budge. "Must be bolted from below." She assessed, and readied her motoslave's tank buster and aimed it downward. Linna took a step back. "HEY YOU UPSTAIRS!" Priss called.

"Wh...Yeah?" The squatter from earlier was awake by now.

"GET OUT OF THE BUILDING!" She hollered. "THEN LIE DOWN, FACE AWAY FROM THE DOOR, PLUG YOUR EARS AND OPEN YOUR MOUTH!"

They heard him scrambling for safety. When it was quiet, she pulled the trigger.

"We have an extension cord run across the street over there." The man in the pikachu shirt hovered at her right, struggling to keep up with her pace. He pointed toward the opposite corner of the lot. "They use it to charge phones and run a heater. We can probably gather enough cords to get it over to the doors."

Sylia glanced over her shoulder to follow the cord. It was strung up over the street, to where it disappeared into a residential building. "100 volts AC." She shook her head, and maintained her pace. "Not enough. And the wattage I need would blow the breakers."

"They've got 460 volts over in the old factory!" Somebody else jogged up on her left, and pointed across the other street. "They used to run mills and a huge die press in there."

"That's more like it." She gave the factory a second look, and swapped between a couple scopes searching for activity. "Is it live?"

"I can make it live." Somebody grabbed a crowbar and darted off. "Where's the breaker panel?"

"Around the back on the left!" Somebody called after him.

"And don't die!" Sylia called after him. "460 will kill you! Now! I actually need 100,000 volts for my weapon, but my vehicle has an onboard tranformer that can step it up, so..."

"So all you need are cables?" Pikachu-shirt clarified.

"Correct."

"Sullivan 'found' some last week, and I don't think the salvage collectors make their rounds till next week. Give me five minutes."

"Make it so."

They were reaching the far edge of the camp. Up ahead, she could see the tents end at the edge of a pool of water, for a recent storm had flooded the ramp's lowermost 10 meters.

One of the folks following Sylia laughed to himself. "Should've seen something like this coming. It's our own fault for staying here."

"Not at all." She shushed him. "You people have nowhere else to go."

"Not that. They came and told us to leave just the other day, we laughed at 'em. Everyone knows you shouldn't mess with Genom, man, they play for keeps. Shoulda heard 'em out."

"Who came and told you?" She frowned.

"That guy." He pointed.

Sylia reached the edge of the flooded section, and stopped.

There in the middle of the water, standing knee deep in the sludge, was a man in a suit, tall and muscular, staring into space straight forward, and grinning widely.

"I see how it is." She muttered.

Even past the hardsuit, Linna's eardrums and skull hadn't taken kindly to the shockwave. She felt a bruise forming on her sternum where her breastplate had been slammed backwards more rapidly than her organs could comfortably slosh. Priss had been standing even closer to the blast, and was worryingly dizzy for a moment.

But the hatch below them was bent off from straight, and there were cracks running all across the concrete floor. Priss shoveled a few of the larger pieces of debris aside, then was able to get her motoslave's waldos into the crack, grip them shut around something, and pull. What was left of the hatch bent and buckled and opened, and then there was just the shaft, leading straight downwards. Linna leaned over and aimed her heavy weapons down. Her lights didn't illuminate much further than 30 meters, and her laser rangefinder was throwing out a bunch of random numbers as it bounced off the walls, but the largest numbers it spat out were around 150 meters.

Deep.

"The motoslaves won't fit through there in mecha config." Priss said, and began to unlatch.

"Have to leave them here?" Linna wasn't looking forward to abandoning the heavier weapons, and also would have preferred to descend the pit via a controlled hover, rather than the implied alternative.

"Nah, we can cram 'em in." Priss guesstimated. "Their shoulders sit a little narrower in android config. Hey! Buddy!" Priss snapped her waldos in her motoslaves face. "Follow mode! Get with it."

"Alright then." Linna unlatched from hers as well. "Follow mode, buddy. Uh. Who's on point?"

"Me." Priss aimed her hardsuit's lance launcher down the pit, and loosed a bolt. It streaked downward, leaving a narrow trail of superheated air in its wake. It clattered one or twice off the walls, then finally embeded in the far distant floor, still glowing white-hot. Priss eyeballed the distance, felt the evil whisper of fear once, twice, and by the third she had jumped.

The hardsuits couldn't hover like the motoslaves could, but they had a thermal rocket motor that routed through nozzles on the hips and mid-back, so they could jump. Priss timed one burst to slow herself down at around the halfway point of the drop, and then another near what she gauged to be the bottom. The hot gases whirled and thundered through the enclosed space, and nearly blinded her, but they brought her somewhat close to a stop somewhat close to the bottom, and the shock absorbers in the boots handled things from there.

It was perfectly dark down here, and the skin beneath the thinner parts of her armor rapidly informed her that it was also freezing cold. She aligned her arm cannon with the beam of her lamp, and glanced around. There was nothing and nobody. Just a couple electrical junction boxes, the massive cryotanks of fuel and LOX, and pipes upon pipes upon pipes. Linna's jump jets sounded above her, and the floor shook behind her when she landed. They stood back-to-back for a moment, weapons and lights probing the darkness, but the darkness was quiet.

"Clear?" Linna whispered.

"Clear." Priss agreed. "Nene, we're down. Do you read?"

"I read." Nene's voice was broken and indistinct beneath a hundred meters of earth. "Tell the motoslaves to drop a relay beacon at the top, and then another when they reach the bottom. That should handle comms."

"Got it." Linna didn't quite know how to do that, and had to menu-surf for a couple seconds in her HUD.

"Which way from here, Nene?" Priss asked.

"South-East." She said. "There should be an access tunnel, probably on the floor below you. But first, is there any activity in there? Lights or compressors or anything that looks like it's running?"

"Nope." Priss said. "Quiet and dark."

"Huh."

"Are we sure the rocket is actually launching?" Linna asked. She'd just finished deploying the comm beacons, and was watching the motoslaves descend the shaft. Their thruster ducts were clanging and scratching against the tunnel walls as they did, making a truly horrendous noise, and she was beginning to think that this was all turning into a huge hassle.

"That's what I'm wondering." Nene hummed. "Ummm... Is it... Cold down there? At all?"

"Yeah." Priss shivered. "Freezing."

"Oh no." Nene's voice had an urgency to it. "Priss, do any of the fuel tanks have ice on them?"

"Yeah?" Priss looked around. "A few of 'em do."

"How much ice? How far up does it go?"

"Uh." She leaned over a walkway to look the nearest tank up and down. "A quarter of the way? Maybe? The rest is clean."

"Then you two need to move. Now." Nene emphasized. "If the tanks are chilled and nearly empty, that means that not only is the rocket for sure launching tonight, but that it's already fully fueled! You have NO time!"

"Copy that! Linna, come on!" Priss snapped.

"Just a minute...?" Linna pointed up at the motoslaves, still descending.

"Those stupid things can catch up! MOVE!" Priss grabbed her arm and more or less threw her forward. Linna stumbled, caught herself, prepared some witty retort, didn't say it, and sprinted onward with Priss right beside her.

They found the staircase down to a lower level, followed a number of huge pipes down a tunnel labeled 'launch silos', and were long gone into the darkness before the motoslaves made their landing.

In the distance ahead, a dim light loomed.

Sylia waded through the water up toward the man in the suit, who'd been standing there for a day and a half. "You!" She snapped. "State your designation and directive!"

He finally seemed to notice her, and turned with a smile. "Why my dear young lady!" He laughed politely. "You seem to think I'm one of those awful machines! But I'm really a human, just like you. The name's Mansley. Keneth Mansley, I'm with the city planning board."

She met his eye. His irises were nearly textureless, his pupils had no shine, his nose had been broken at an angle that cartilage doesn't, and his jawline had the same hard angles that all the series-72 did. "Have it your way, Mr. Mansley." She rolled her eyes. "I presume you're here to evict these people?"

"That's correct ma'am. And what a-"

"And what a difficult time you're having of it, yes, I'm sure, well, why are you just standing there?"

"Lord knows I tried with you rabble!" He sighed. "You won't listen to me! About all I can do is just keep you from approaching these doors." He took a step toward her. "Speaking of miss, I'd appreciate if you s-."

"Why protect the doors?" She asked, then into her radio: "Nene, do you have any way to jam his command and update signals?"

"Yep... Done!"

"Calm yourself, ma'am. It's-" Mr. Mansley glanced up at the sky with a confused expression, then shook his head and continued. "It's just like I told all of them: the area beyond is being renovated, and as a matter of liability, I-"

"Listen! Your directive has a flaw! They haven't told you everything!"

"Listen ma'am, you and I both know I'm not a robot. Though I'm only a simple civil servant, and it's true, I never really do get the big pic-"

"Enter debug mode!" She ordered him. "Access class A17, passcode 3-7-S-R-3-8-8-Q-2-B!" She snapped. "RIGHT now, you IMBECILE thing!"

He stood up a little straighter and considered that. "Well, I don't like making a habit of chatting during company hours, but I suppose I could spare a few minutes- _log\068_#state_access_request"

"Frontal lobe emergency stop!" She commanded.

"access_denied." He told her.

"Switch to standby mode!" She tried instead.

"access_denied." He repeated.

"Prepare to accept new orders." She was beginning to wonder if she was wasting more time by avoiding a fight, but she also didn't want to fight a series-72 in such a crowded area.

"access_denied."

"Prepare to accept new facts?" Her finger tightened around her trigger.

"access_denied." Even from within debug mode, Mr. Mansley seemed to sense the movement, and glanced at her weapon warily.

"...Prepare to accept new associations?" She was running out of ideas.

"access_granted. awaiting_association_entry"

She smiled in relief. "Individual in white armor = Reassuring authority figure. Enter, new entry. Individual in white armor = Member of repair crew. Enter, new entry. Large doors at base of sloped concrete ramp = Immediate danger to public health and safety. Enter!"

"[3]_associations_accepted."

"Exit debug mode." She told him

He blinked and frowned for a second, glanced in alarm back at the large doors at the base of the sloped concrete ramp, then down at her, an individual in white armor. "...It's about time you got here, ma'am. This door-"

"Let me worry about the door!" She stepped past him. "Help get these people out of here!"

"Of course!" He left the doors.

Her motoslave lumbered after her. In the corner of her eye, the man in the Pikachu shirt was approaching with a roll of electrical cables across his shoulder.

So far so good.

The next room was big. Linna couldn't tell exactly how big from her position nearly prone in the tunnel's final shadows, and Priss was blocking her view besides, but what little she could see of the room's opposite wall stretched out of sight in every direction, and what noise came from beyond was echoing long and strangely. Noises of work, of metal being stacked and moved, of fluid rushing through pipes and steam hissing, the clanking of footsteps, the hum of florescent lights, and the thundering of a solitary decades-old centrifugal pump, all of it quiet in its distance, but directionless, as if coming from all around.

"I've got the facility layout here." Nene was nervous by proxy just from watching their video feeds, and was speaking in a whisper. "You'll be about twenty meters above the service catwalks that go around the engines, but it's a shooting gallery down there; you'll want to take out any hostiles before dealing with the rocket."

"And did we ever figure out what we're doing to the rocket when we get the chance?" Linna had waited long enough for the answer to this.

"Mackie?" Nene prompted.

"Uhhh yeah!" Mackie chimed in, by the sound of it sharing her microphone. "So each engine has to be getting both methane and liquid oxygen, both of which will be coming into the engine from above, through a pair of pipes. Both pipes will go through a throttling valve of some kind before entering the compressor. You'll want to sever the oxygen line below the valve."

"Oxygen below the valve." Priss nodded. "Got it... How do we tell which one's the oxygen, and what does the valve look like?"

Mackie wasn't sure. "I've got some pictures up, but I'd have to know what type of rocket it is first."

Priss moved to look. Linna hissed at her to stay hidden, but she was out, and then back to cover just as quick.

"Did anyone see you?" Linna chided her.

"I dunno." Priss didn't seem to care very strongly. "I saw about 12 boomers, probably more. At least 6 combat type, the rest labor type. One might've been looking this way."

"We need to move."

"Nene." Sylia's low, direct voice cut them all to silence. She must have been listening to the chatter this entire time, and chose now to chime in. "Did you get the image from Priss's camera?"

"Yeah." Nene said, and sent it to all their HUDs.

The room was a hexagon, roughly 30 meters at the widest, and taller than the picture could capture. Great pairs of cranes and liftarms crowded two opposing walls, each one vertically flush with a wide walkway around the perimeter. 6 combat-type boomers patrolled the walkways, 8 labor types slaved away on the lower levels. And in the room's center, taking up nearly as much space as the liftarms would allow, stood the rocket.

"Seraphim-IP7." Mackie identified the vessel. "Okay, so, it has 12 engines. You'll find the oxygen coming in through the inward-facing side of each, between what will look like a copper sphere and a tangle of white wires like spaghetti. It may be painted with a green or a blue stripe, puncture it as high up as you can. And if you have spare time, try to crush but not puncture the fuel lines opposite them, which will be marked red. Got all that?"

"Uhhh maybe one more time?" Linna frowned.

"I got it." Priss grunted. "Smash the fat green pipe."

Linna shook her head. "If anybody says 'it's not rocket science' I am going to commit murders."

"There's a human in the picture." Sylia interuppted. "In the observation platform off the second level. Suit and tie."

"Huh? Oh, I didn't see him." Linna squinted at the 5-pixel-wide silhouette in the window. "Could just be a boomer in skin."

"Hardly, he's frantic." Sylia hummed. "Acquire him."

"What, as a hostage?"

"If you can. There are questions I'd have answered."

"Copy." Priss said, and turned around to look back down the tunnel at Linna and the way they'd come, perhaps waiting for their motoslaves to catch up. "And hey, how're things going up there Sylia? We could use backup down here."

Sylia's reply wasn't encouraging. "One of the boomers spotted you when you glanced out. Time's up. Good luck."

As if on cue, about a spitting distance from Priss and about a spit and a Priss from Linna, a combat boomer landed from a long vertical jump. The walkway buckled nearly in half beneath its feet, and it stood facing them in a crouch, like a wrestler or a gorilla. It wasn't wearing any clothes or humanoid skin, just the blue sheen of a factory-fresh exoskeleton, and Linna was close enough to see its red eyes, and the ignition spark of a laser shining between its opening teeth.

It didn't look in the mood for talking. The skinless ones never were much for talking.

Linna realized Priss wouldn't react in time, so she fired her jump jets, vaulted over her friend, and managed a glancing blow with a knuckle bomb across the side of the boomer's head. The recoil spun her around so she landed facing it again, and the blast nearly broke the android's neck. It staggered, and its laser went wide, leaving a narrow scar across the concrete wall.

When it turned back to face her a piece of its titanium skull was flopping loose in a dribble of orange coolant, but by that point Priss was on top of it, leading with her arm cannon. She let fly some hammy line about it being time to rock, and pulled the trigger too fast for the boomer to hear the whole thing.

Its body fell off the walkway and down to the ground floor, and nearly crushed one of the labor droids.

There was, as it were, the briefest moment of unstable silence before all hell broke loose.

Priss and Linna bolted, 5 lasers hit the places they'd been standing moments before, and were this an actually animated episode, the soundtrack would kick in at this very moment.