Date 07/01/2060, Location 39.70348, 54.32464

Kai took a deep breath, and then spread his hands before him, palms down. The gesture drew the team's attention and the chatter died away.

"Right then. Everything we've seen and discussed says that we really should avoid going anywhere near the terminal if we can help it. Looks like they have too much there in the way of both firepower and sensor coverage, which means we'll be struggling to get through as smoothly as we want, which means we have to over-compensate with firepower and snap decisions. Both of which are more likely to trigger some damage we don't want and cause a massive environmental problem. Anyone disagree?"

He looked from one to another, but nobody voiced an argument.

"So, that leaves targeting the crews, the oil wells, or the pipeline. I don't think anyone here wants to take out the people as a first choice, or even a second – so we've got to look at the well heads and the delivery network. The well heads are the source, but also a small number of locations, and likely guarded as well. The pipeline is spread out all over the place, and seems the most vulnerable, so let's have a look at that as our primary option. Aswon – what can you do in the way of explosives to target the pipe?"

Aswon shrugged a little, and mentally filed through the list of grenades and explosives available to them.

"Not ideal. We haven't really got any good plastic explosives or det cord – both of which would make this job pretty simple. We have got a whole bunch of grenades and RPGs though. I could have a look at using those and seeing if I can make some kind of improvised device? It'd help a lot to know how tough the pipe is though, will make the calculations much more precise."

Kai nodded and turned to Hunter.

"Sounds like another job for you, then. Can you fire up the link again, do your PVN thing and get us some data?"

Hunter winced slightly.

"Yeah. I'll use a VPN though, to hide my trail, more likely to be effective than whatever a PVN is. It's going to take a while though, trying to find out what they use, and then get the specs on it."

Kai smiled at Hunter, and watched as he pulled over the sat link and connected it up to his datajack, and then into the truck's power systems and took on the glassy-eyed look of someone staring at data with his mind, not his eyes. He glanced over at Marius, snoring gently on the front seat, then turned to Tadibya.

"Right, when you've rested enough, can you go have a quick look for the closest pipeline, have a look around, make sure it's clear then come back with directions? Then we can go examine some, if Hunter doesn't come up with the info."

"Don't worry, I'll get you the info you want," said the slumped form of Hunter. "These students have no idea about account security. Like lambs to the slaughter…."

Tadibya however nodded her head in understanding, relaxed back in her seat and then her body went floppy as her spirit leapt once more into the ether. Aswon climbed into the back and grabbed one of the RPG-7 warheads, and examined it closely, turning it over in his hands. After a few minutes of careful examination, he looked up and spoke to Kai and Shimazu.

"I'm going to go about twenty meters that a way", as he gestured to the broken ground to the east. "I'm going to take a toolkit and see if I can get one of these open and work out if we can get the actual explosives out and shape them to something we can use to crack the pipeline open."

Kai and Shimazu moved to opposite seats, so they could each keep watch over one side of the vehicle, and near-silence descended over the truck as they all got on with their tasks. Only the gentle, rhythmic snores of Marius could be heard as the sun climbed higher for another clear desert morning.

Hunter logged into a university in Denmark first of all, using an old student account he had a username and password for. From there, he fired up a virtual machine, and used that to connect to another machine, this time in the CAS city of Houston. He bounced around through two more shells, before he fired up a search bot, and started to feed in the parameters of his requirements. Slowly he worked his way through the mass of information in the matrix, filtering it down from the marketing dross and adverts, to scientific journals, known distributors, safety surveys and import orders. If he had his hands on a proper cyberdeck, he might have chanced doing a run on customs accounts or maybe even a corporate host – but without the highly illegal deck to help mask his trail and to let him sleaze his way past security, he was likely to trip alarms all over the place. He spent the next two and a half hours compiling information, comparing and cross checking it until he was reasonably certain that it was correct and relevant, before he started to back out from his search operations, closing down virtual machines and links behind him and clearing his data trail, wiping out temporary files or running spurious commands to disguise his activity in a mass of other data.

Tadibya flew out over the desert, flitting around quickly, her astral form travelling at thousands of miles per hour. Accelerate, stop, check around. Accelerate, stop, look. She repeated the pattern over and over, quartering the terrain as she checked for her targets. The earth was a softly glowing white mass, the biosphere of Gaia showing up as natural living material. Occasionally a black line crossed it – man made roads, or something else. She checked on anything man-made, finding a web of pipelines leading to well heads – which she stayed clear of to start with, not wanting to trip any astral alarms. As she was scouting around, she also noticed a squat black vehicle, a mass of highly processed material. She cautiously approached it, checking it out carefully for any betraying astral presence or barriers.

It seemed clear, though, so she inched closed and watched for a short while. Nothing. She flew up into the air, and manifested – her presence solidifying and becoming visible, but allowing her to see with her normal eyes, not just astral senses – and in turn be seen of course. But now with her "normal" eyes, she could see the long four-wheeled APC sitting in the defile. Most of the vehicle was screened by rocks on either side, with just the top of the vehicle – the turret and sensor pod, showing above the terrain. This seemed to match what Marius reported from the night before, so she allowed herself to fade back into the astral, and then flew down, sliding underneath the vehicle, and manifesting again. The underside of the vehicle was smooth, armoured or covered in a plate of some sort, and scuffed and marked by travel through the desert. But, there was no spigot or waste nozzle – so no onboard toilet that just dumped out.

She took a mental breath, and slowly started to press through the underside of the vehicle, trying to detect a magical ward – but there didn't seem to be one. Her head rose up through the floor, in the corner of the rearmost footwell. She manifested, her eyes quickly scanning around and then faded again, quickly, lest she be spotted. In the scant seconds she had been detectable, she had seen what looked like six people, lightly armoured and with weapons to hand. They looked distressingly normal – not bored, not asleep, not irritated with being stuck out here. Neither were they excited or alarmed – so they had not seen her, which was something. Deciding not to chance her luck, she headed back to the truck.

Aswon took the RPG warhead and his toolkit and went to find a rock that he could rest on. He found a smooth topped boulder about twenty-five metres from the truck, and set up there – far enough away that a mistake would only have fatal consequences for him, and not for anyone else. He turned over the warhead in his hands again, looking at the design and construction and commanded his hands to stop their minute tremors.

The design was typically Soviet – simple, crude, but effective. Someone with a genius flair for design had come up with a very simple, almost fool-proof tool that even the most stupid of conscripts could get their head around, yet that was simple enough to manufacture that even a low-tech plant could churn them out. He started to unscrew and jimmy open the warheads, struggling against the crude steel casing and rough workmanship. The top half was supposed to unscrew from the bottom, but the poor workmanship meant that it was just as likely to cross-thread when installed, and jam. It took him an hour of painstaking work, to try and work the head free from the main assembly, without subjecting it to sharp knocks or any other movements likely to upset the explosive. Eventually though, he got the device open and could peer into the internals. It was immediately obvious that this was a non-starter. The explosive content was probably poured into the bottom half in a liquid state, and they would have to heat the mixture gently – to just the right temperature – to get it out. Not something he was comfortable with out in the field, they were more likely to cook off the warhead inside the truck.

He carefully assembled the warhead again, more comfortable with the design now, and noting the internal measurements and thickness of the casing compared to the explosive charge. He pondered as he sat there… it might not be possible to take the explosive out – but he might be able to position the warhead specifically to reflect part of the blast wave against supports or rocks to increase the yield against the target. He sketched some ideas in the sand, trying to work out how the blast wave would propagate on detonation. If he used the spare "burner" mobile phones, he might be able to set them up for remote detonation even… then he checked his phone and found that there was a complete lack of signal out here. Meh.

Tadibya and Aswon returned and gave their reports, filling in details of what they had seen and discovered. Then they turned to Hunter to see what his matrix search had revealed.

"Right then," said Hunter, as he scrolled through the text he'd assembled, "it seems the oil industry in general uses a number of common bore pipes. They're all made out of R250 stainless steel, and come in 3.04m lengths. The pipes tend to have a screw thread on one end, and a flared coupler on the other end, allowing for changes in direction of a few degrees when attaching them together, without needing a special fitting." He stopped talking as Tadibya looked confused and waited to speak.

"Why 3.04? Why not three?"

Before Hunter could speak, the reclining form of Marius fidgeted and then spoke, his eyes still closed.

"Stupid Americans with their illogical Imperial system. They are relics of the past, hanging onto a crazy system of numbers. It is exactly ten feet."

"Oh, right. Ok then. Sorry, Hunter, carry on."

"Right – so yes, the pipe can flex and move around a little, but not too much. The steel is made with a high Chromium / Molybdenum mix, and is resistant to chemical erosion, for obvious reasons, but is also quite tough. They use something called NPS 10 pipe for small runs, which is about 3-4mm thick wall, and about 100-150mm diameter. It's going to be quite tough, but I think we can breach it with a charge, if Aswon can lay it just right. Once you move up to a large pipe, either for larger flows, or after several pipes consolidate, they use NPS 12 pipes. They have an outer wall between 4 and 5mm thick on a diameter of 200-250mm, but from a quick calculation between us, think we might need two charges to reliably breach them. The really big pipes, the stuff you normally see on the Trid is NPS 14, and has a thickness of 8-10mm, and diameters of 500 to 1500mm. I'm not sure that we can count on breaching that stuff at all, not with these grenades. We'd probably need dedicated plastic explosives."

Hunter sat back after he spoke, with a strangely smug look on his face, watching as the rest of the team digested his information.

They had a quick count up of the warheads and planned their strategy. They could count on taking out a good half a dozen of the small pipes, and possibly one or two of the bigger runs – more than that and they had no margin of error with their explosives. They could maybe, with some effort, rig up a phone with a basic countdown timer and try to use that as a detonator timer. They could get any devices that failed or were unusable and plant them on other pipelines – when discovered, the Dekita forces would have to take them as a viable risk, especially if they had bombs already going off elsewhere. Certainly they could take out production for a week or so, starving the terminal of oil and causing some reasonably major disruption.

Tadibya raised an idea of a seabourne assault on the harbour, saying that she could summon a spirit of the waves and ask it to physically carry an explosive device into the pier and attach it to the foundations or pumping mechanism. It was very unlikely to be detected, being a natural force – the only thing their sensors might pick up was the device itself. But the spirit could carry the device in, to the target and then fade into the astral plane itself – it didn't have to get out. What might be a suicide mission for a normal person could be a simple one way journey for a spirit. The only thing that could really stop it in time was an enemy mage or conjurer.

Kai considered this, but decided to keep this as a backup plan for the moment. He announced that he wanted Marius to spend a little time late in the afternoon with the drone, sending it north and covering the eastern end of the Dekita zone, looking for targets, starting from the village of Oglalnly and the new strike. Aswon could check and prepare the rest of the warheads, and make them ready for use as demo charges. The rest of the team, once their equipment was cleaned and sorted would relax for the rest of the day. At nightfall, with fresh intel from the drone, they would head north and close on the oil wells and do some recon.

Aswon had been looking at the peak to the east, and suggested they do a climb to the top of that, to get some visual info. The peak was mostly bare rock, and climbed incredibly sharply from the sloping land leading to the sea – in some cases rising at sixty to seventy degree angles. The peak rose to over 1400m in very little horizontal travel. Climbing it might be challenging – but it would give them a view over the massive Dekita area. The only downside was that it would also put them nearly 14km away from the Dekita land, and they might have problems getting usable image data at that range.

After studying the maps a little more closely, they discovered there was a great ridge, a fold in the land that rose to nearly six hundred metres before falling away sharply and then starting to rise inland again. It was just inside the Dekita border, so they would have to be careful – but if they could find a good vantage point, it would put them only a couple of kilometres away from the well, and they would be much more likely to get a decent result. They all agreed on this, and busied themselves with tasks for the rest of the afternoon, getting ready to move out at sunset.

When the drone was fully charged, it was sent north on a search pattern, flying high enough in the sky to be nigh invisible, and getting a map of the area. The sensors were pushed to pick up the pipes from height, but the wells and the pumping stations were obvious, and it was easy enough for the computer to sketch in the pipes between them from the partial data gathered. It also appeared that all of the pumping stations were identical, as were the drill rigs. Dekita obviously believed in pre-fabrication and modular assemblies.

Marius pulled out as the sun started to sink towards the western horizon, driving cross country at about ten miles an hour, keeping the speed and the revs down and not kicking up any kind of trail. Making use of the terrain, they slowly plodded north, keeping a watch out for any vehicles or drones in the air – but their journey was uneventful. An hour after dusk, Marius followed the example set by the Dekita APC earlier in the day, and snugged the truck in between two spurs of rock, rendering it invisible unless viewed from above or directly ahead.

Tadibya, Hunter and Aswon got out, and started the climb up the escarpment. The rock was fractured and jagged, with plenty of handholds – but it was also sandstone, liable to crumble and break when under load. The going was difficult, and soon Aswon was relying on his Gecko magic to keep him firmly anchored to the wall, and Hunter had popped his climbing claws again. Tadibya slipped once or twice, and then saw Aswon preparing a rope, so they could secure her and help her up the face. She shook her head at him, wedged her knees into a shallow chimney and leaned in, using her core muscles to keep her in place whilst she hurriedly worked through the spell. She muttered the last syllable just as a gust of wind blew at her hair, trying to push her away from the rock face, and ethereal force surrounded her. Relaxing her knees, she slowly let go of the rock face, bobbing up and down slightly, and then with a mental flick, she started to rise silently through the air after the other two. They reached the top safely, and Tadibya stopped concentrating on the spell, letting the magical energies drop from her mind as she ceased concentrating.

After moving to a series of sharp rocks, they pulled up their binoculars, and worked them through the trio, each taking a good luck at the scene before them. After they had each had a look, they cycled through again, this time making notes after their turn on the optical binoculars.

They could see down into the village, which looked like a typical cluster of third world buildings, single story for the main part, narrow and cramped, no gardens and opening into narrow and twisting streets. There was no sign of electrical lighting, and as the last rays of the sun fell below the horizon, the village quickly started to disappear into the darkness. There were no signs of vehicles or any advanced technology – it looked like subsistence farming was the main employer in the area. Certainly, they might have the skills and the technology to make things like the piers for a pipeline – but they certainly weren't providing any high tech assistance to Dekita. That meant that any crews they could either make busy, or take out of action represented a significant drain on a finite resource.

They also spotted a number of creatures moving around in the hills above the village. Tadibya also realised that they had especially bright auras, when she gazed at them astrally – they were critters of some kind. Watching with concern, they saw the goats perform similar acts of acrobatic madness, climbing near vertical rock faces, and wedging themselves into chimneys whilst their teeth pulled at the odd bits of moss growing in the wind and moisture traps. One almost looked to be running down what appeared to be a sheer surface, its hooves sticking to the wall like glue. Happy that they knew what was going on there, they swapped their attention to the oil well.

The well was a kilometre or two further on from the village, nestled on a small plateau on the rocky ground. As they examined it, they realised it was larger than the ones that Marius had reported from his drone flight earlier – in fact it was double the size. They had crammed two of the pre-fab bases onto the plateau, side by side. Maybe one was drilling, maybe they both were… but that possibly meant twice as much oil, and twice as many crew. And possibly, twice as many guards…

The derrick was about forty metres tall, indicating that they could stack multiple drill shafts at once, and drill rapidly. Multiple arc lights illuminated the compound, shining brightly down from the derrick and painting the ground with harsh white light. The occasional figure could be seen walking around – but at this range, there was no way to tell what they were doing. Hunter could also just – only just – see the fence around the compound, the chainlink fence about four metres high, with the faintest sliver of reflection from the uprights that held the fence upright, about five metres high. Nothing showed between the posts.

Hunter quickly explained that it was likely that this meant they were kitted out with monowire. It wasn't actually wire one molecule thick of course – that would make it far too flimsy to use. But it was a small number of molecules thick – enough to get long string carbon chains forming that gave it a strength equivalent to spider silk, weight for weight. Strung between two posts it relied on someone climbing the fence and putting their weight upon it – at which point it would slice through them like cheese wire and invariably end up with a trespasser lying half inside your fence and half outside – and no argument about who was climbing the fence. Tadibya and Aswon exchanged a look – Hunter sounded like he had some personal experience with this stuff, and there was an edge of bitterness to his voice.

As night fell and they lost all of the light except that from the arc lights, they climbed (or floated) back down the escarpment and to the truck, and then filled in the rest of the team with what they had seen. Aswon also raised an idea that had come to him during the climb – could Tadibya do not just one trid-phantasm spell over the vehicle, but two? A very convincing one to make them look like an Espirit vehicle, and a really bad one – likely to be penetrated – of them as a Maersk vehicle. Tadibya nodded – it was certainly possible, though she did not look sure.

Tadibya however did then make herself comfy and told the rest she would be back soon, and leapt out of her body, flying swiftly towards the oil well. She probed around the buildings, not spying anything other than the odd worker, and then slowly and carefully started to investigate the building. She pressed through the outside of the building, and detected a ward on the inside a split second before she would hit it. It was of a moderate force – she could batter her way through, she was sure –but it would definitely alert the mage who had built it, and sound the alarm.

Not wanting to risk setting of the alarm at this stage, she flew up, and then headed over to the main terminal. Again, the journey lasted only a second or two, as she crossed the landscape at thousands of kilometres per hour. She flew over the compound, and then spiralled down, examining the oil terminal closely. Fortunately, she was looking in just the right direction when the enemy mage erupted through the ceiling of one of the buildings, two large fire elementals in tow. She turned to flee at once, not wanting to engage at three to one odds. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him gathering magical power into his hands, forming it into a bolt of killing power. He shaped and compressed it, and then flung it at her – much to her surprise.

Casting spells on the physical world was taxing, and could over stretch the mental faculties of any mage if they threw too much into it. But, overdoing it normally led to a monstrous headache, nosebleeds and possibly passing out. Casting in astral space was a whole different thing. It required far more power to shape the energy and channel it, and the effect on the astral form was to tear it apart. Unless you were prepared for the backlash of power, and had your faculties ready to drain the effort, it would open physical wounds, rend flesh and could kill.

The mage was casting a bolt of mana at her, strong enough to kill her – but in doing so, was running the risk of killing himself as well. In the split second she had before the bolt hit, she dived to one side and then down into the water – risking whatever critters might be in there, but safe in the knowledge that those fire elementals would NOT follow her there, and hoping the mage would not risk a pursuit without his guards. She felt the bolt scorch into her astral form, and channelled all of her own power into defending against it. With a rush of adrenaline, she deflected and absorbed the power, disrupting the bolt of mana and sending shards of ethereal lightning in all directions.

She skimmed down to sea level and accelerated hard. Her astral form rocketed across the surface at maximum speed, heading arrow straight towards her destination. Somewhere she knew the exact location of, and somewhere with strong significance to her. Moments later she over-flew the Chechen camp, flying through the area next to her former prison, not caring if she set off any wards or was seen… mostly hoping that if anyone was following her they would draw exactly the wrong conclusion about where she was from.

She continued forward and around in a massive loop, stopping several times to check for pursuit, before arriving back at the truck about fifteen minutes later.

Tadibya explained why she'd been gone so long, drawing a few glances as she explained that she'd been to the terminal and been spotted. They were most interested in her description of the Chechen camp though – a burnt out ruined set of huts, with wooden gallows erected in the middle of the former clearing, on which hung over two dozen bodies. A number of ravens had been chattering, watching from the mountain side, obviously attracted by the smell of the flesh, but daring not approach.

And the huge white tiger sitting nonchalantly on the base of the gallows, gnawing on a body part. The tiger that had immediately looked up as her astral form approached and flew through the camp, and had watched her with emerald green eyes.