Ultimately, the twins elect to break into one of the guard towers.

"Being able to get Kisha into their network makes it worth the effort," Lea notes absently, and Nea feels her ears twitch as her twin's mental voice ghosts through them.

"Mmh. We've got... Two guards. Watching…" Nea bites down on her gum as she peers through the scope of her rifle. "… Huh. It's Birtulon."

"Oh, nice. What episode?"

"The one where Captain Ramsey destroys an entire planet," Nea states flatly as she turns her attention to the screen the guards in the tower are laser-focused on.

"… Do you have the slightest idea how little that narrows it down?" Lea snarks. Nea chews on her gum, idly panning the scope of her rifle down, to where Lea's scaling the sheer concrete surface. With her bare hands. Nea can see how her twin's fingers leave indents in the concrete, where she's carving handholds out for herself...

Another of the perks of being Mistress Alice's specially chosen maids, perfectly tailored to be her daggers in the dark. Superhuman strength, durability, and sharpened fingernails capable of clawing through solid rock.

"The one where Captain Ramsey blows up a planet with a laser," Nea clarifies as she goes back to monitoring the guard tower.

"That still doesn't help, that happened five times in season 15," Lea complains.

"And twice in season 8, and once in season 3, I know," Nea rolls her eyes.

Lea huffs, even as she hauls herself up onto the roof of the guard tower. "Whatever. Am I clear?"

"Yep. You're clear sis. Go to town," Nea replies, watching as her twin slips onto the roof and makes for the access hatch.

"Cool. Activating convenient distraction… Now."

On cue, one of the twins' micro-drones buzzes into the air, hovering right outside the door. On cue, its speakers overload into screaming static, loud enough to get the guards' attention. Nea chews on her gum as she watches her quarry jerk to attention, startled out of watching their show.

"Nice," Nea notes as she continues to spy on the guards through her scope, watching as they leave the tower in search of whatever the hell's making that horrendous din. When the guards leave, Lea drops down from the rooftop hatch, moving with feline grace.

"What's nice?" Lea asks as she takes out another drone and plugs it into the computer the guards were using, giving Kisha direct access to the compound's computer network.

"… Your butt," Nea admits shamelessly.

"…" Lea's tail twitches as she shakes her hips, knowing full well Nea's still eyeballing her ass through the scope of her rifle. "… Pervert."

"Takes one to know one, sis," Nea replies before switching to comms. "Kisha, you in?"

--

In her comfortable seat, hundreds of kilometers away in her office, Kisha Stassov gropes around blindly for her anti-migraine pills. The transition from cyberspace to meatspace is just giving her the mother of all headaches...

"Kisha? Kisha, you there?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm still here, I'm just taking my pills," The catgirl winces, touching her fingers to her forehead… Then reaching to the back of her neck, grazing the contours of the spinal implant linking her to her chair.

It's a nice chair, to be sure. Let it be known that Alice Takanashi does not skimp on making her pets comfortable. Kisha's cyberjockey chair is a luxurious black leather recliner, complete with butt and back warmers, massagers, and petaflops of processing power buried beneath its chassis, complete with cushions custom-fit to Kisha's proportions.

Also, it comes with drink holders on the arms, a feature Kisha takes full advantage of as she grabs onto her anti-migraine medication and swallows a couple of pills, chasing them down with some cool, refreshing water.

"Hurry it up, Kisha," Kisha rolls her eyes as Nea's voice crackles in over the comms again. "They're gonna come back any minute-"

"Just gimme a sec, jeez," Kisha grumbles. Her vision briefly blacks out as she re-syncs her implants, restarting the neural link with her drones. "This isn't as easy as they make it look in the vids, you know? What, did you think I'd just push some buttons and hand you the keys to the base? That's not how hacking works."

Idly, Kisha pulls up some feeds on her AR overlay, mentally toggling through a few virtual screens. Regular police chatter and satellite feeds are all normal, no sign of any unwanted guests bearing down onto Lea and Nea's position, no more convoys on approach to this stupidly fortified compound…

Good. Kisha's fingers twitch in a mnemonic gesture, and the catgirl lets out a quiet breath as her implants activate, causing her limbs to seize, causing her eyelids to flutter shut…

… And when Kisha reopens her eyes, she finds herself in cyberspace. Or, well, an abstract representation of the raw torrents of data currently streaming into Kisha's brain from her implants, processed through her senses.

Cyberspace itself happens to be a dark, empty space. A black, endless desert underneath a blacker, emptier sky, lit only by distant fractal objects dotting the desolate landscape. Processing nodes, terminals, and computers linked to the Mendesdyn base's security network.

Behind Kisha, a yawning abyss stretches. The Mendesdyn base's network is air-gapped, and to Kisha's senses, that's represented by a physical gap in the world. In the distance, Kisha sees another massive chasm and frowns.

Two networks, air-gapped from each other? Well, that's to be expected, but it's still going to be a pain to have to deal with.

There's no time to waste, of course. Kisha sprints towards the terminals in the distance, queuing up her programs, and tags each fractal block as she moves.

Automated scripts send scanning data from the terminals into Kisha's storage devices in streams of glittering code. Not all at once from one workstation of course. The Mendesdyn base's cyber security team would instantly detect the storm of network traffic.

It's why Kisha's moving from terminal to terminal, to disguise her activity. First, pulling from a workstation in the security tower, then to an unsecured terminal in the compound's mess hall, then a secure terminal in some middle-manager's office space, a terminal with access to some of the more sensitive servers she can break into and pillage.

Access logs, internal memos and emails, CCTV footage, and accounting information – All promptly pilfered, packaged, and quietly sent to Kintsugi Biotech's servers for future perusal. A hapless security chief's terminal reveals personnel data, shame on him for not logging out. Kisha makes sure to flag that particular database for review…

Kisha pauses, her AR interface flashing before her face as she pulls up a particularly interesting memo. Oh, well… That's intriguing…

And something to bring up to the rest of the team right after Kisha sends those guards on a wild goose-chase down in the cafeteria. A few fake calls here, and some doctored help request forms there...

--

Back in real space, Nea finds herself drumming her fingers on the butt of her rifle as she waits for Kisha to do her thing-

"So!" Nea blinks as Kisha's voice chirps into her headset. "Good news, great news, bad news, and weird news."

"… Lay it on us."

"Good news, I'm in and currently sorting through their shit. And uh, there's a lot of it. I've set up scripts to copy and package all of this junk but-"

"Do you have control of the base's security system?"

"Oh yeah, that's the great news. Some idiot left his computer unlocked. That let me get full access here on this network. I'm in the cameras, the security shutters, the elevators, heck I've even got control of the ventilation system. If you gave me time I could probably hack into the turrets and start mucking with their IFF protocols. But, uh, that's where the bad news starts to come in."

And there it is. Nea closes her eyes wearily. "What's the bad news?"

"So, it turns out this base has multiple air-gapped networks. The one you plugged me in? That's the network for the exterior of the base. The ground level, the tower and the walls. Everything in the basement? Yeah, I can't touch that. I can get you into the base but after that the both of you would be on your own. And, uh, you'd be going up against a lot of dudes. I'm looking through the base's personnel files and there's a lot of people working here."

"… How many people?"

"Hundreds at least?" Kisha replies. "And that's just the security personnel. Worse news, all their seriously privileged data? That's on another network. So-"

"So, you don't have access to it."

"Yep."

"Sis, what do you think?" Nea sends to Lea.

"… I think if we're going any further today we're going to have to call in backup. And we'd have to go loud," Lea replies. "This base is just too well-defended."

"… I agree. Is it worth going any further today though?"

"… I don't know." Nea frowns.

"And that's where the weird news comes in," Kisha continues to explain. "So, I dug up this memo, and it looks like they're going to be upping security next week. Some Mendesdyn executive's moving here on a more permanent basis, apparently. I've got their convoy route and everything. I don't know who they are, but I know where they'll be in a week. Roughly, if they don't change it. You know, if we're leaving now."

Well, that does present some intriguing possibilities...

--