Tuesday 06/09/61, Location: 35.32212, 126.74389, Time 13:00

"Keep an eye on the news, will you, Hunter?"

"Sure, Kai. I've got a little script just monitoring things. But in the meantime, I'm getting back to my studies." Kai leant over to look down at the screen, seeing a page of Korean text appearing with a guide on the meanings of the different characters, with Hunter leaning down to study them intently.

"I've been wondering about the facility – we've seen those vehicles wandering about at semi-random times. Might they be completely automated? No human operators at all, just a drone pilot? We've not seen anyone get in or out of one, and no sign of human operation."

"It is possible, Aswon. It would make sense even, in a facility like this. They are almost certainly going to have a number of riggers to operate the factory and maintain the internal systems. It would not be too much trouble to expand that out to cover the grounds as well." Marius turned his deck around, showing a map of the facility and a complex web of lines that covered the screen like someone had given hallucinogenic drugs to a spider. "I have been mapping the drone command and control networks, and cataloguing sources of transmissions, while studying their network, trying to break their encryption and determine the pattern they use for their frequency hopping as well. There are certainly transmissions to and from the vehicles on regular intervals."

"If you do break into their vehicle thingy, does that mean you can control the vehicles inside?" Tads asked him, getting a nod in return. "So you could get them to load up the sensors onto a truck and drive it over to us?" He nodded again. "Well… that would make life easier!"

"It would. I would also need to get Hunter to crack their logistics systems, though, I expect, to find out where the sensors are, and direct the equipment to the right part of the storage facility – so it might not be quite as simple as that."

"Oh."

"It'll be shift end soon. Let's get back up onto the ridge and in position. I want to be able to do some astral checks on the staff if we can. Security staff and the internal workforce, both…" They headed back up their cleared corridor, getting into position once again in their tree and setting up ready for the exodus of workers. "Maybe we can find out if the local town has a pizza delivery – or the local equivalent – and order the gate staff some takeout."

"What for?"

"It's unexpected, Kai. We'll see how they react to something unusual, but not threatening. And just how strong their security is, and maybe also how the locals see them."

"Ahh, fair enough. As long as we can launder the money cleanly and not leave a trace, I guess we could!"

They watched as the shift proceeded, assensing various of the security personnel and staff as they moved around the entrance way or from building to building, swapping from target to target to get a good mix of staff, all the while keeping an eye out for astral spirits, mages, adepts or anyone else that could detect them. It appeared however that the ETC facility was fairly light on their magical defences, and nobody interfered with these efforts, and they were able to watch uninterrupted and then get down off the ridgeline and discuss their findings.

"The security team have got a variety of cyberware in them – a lot of things around eyes and ears, and many of them have got the strange black tendrils down their spines, so that looks like combat reflexes and reaction boosters. Not massive replacements, I think they've gone for fairly low-end systems, but more than enough to give an edge against gangers or basic criminals. And it's likely they'll hear and see people coming in all kinds of weather, and maybe have things like thermographic vision or ultrasound. Their systems looked quite similar to the things I've seen in Hunter and Marius." Tads reported. She managed to get the description out without giving her usual shudder at the concept of implanting machinery into her body and polluting the soul.

"Many of the factory staff have some small amounts of cyber-ware implants, mostly datajacks and some other small systems." Shimazu spoke next, picking up with a description of the factory floor workers. "There are a few with extensive modifications – either complete limb replacements or things like a cyber-hand and forearm. Possibly the result of industrial accidents or medical replacements for issues to keep a worker employed, or possibly a reward or incentive for long-serving staff. But on the whole, everything I saw was functional and job-related, or at least seemed to be. No signs of body plating or utility systems."

"Same for me," Aswon reported. "A few more datajacks in the management guys, and I think some of them with skillwire systems – more stuff in the head, so possibly some communications or management gear, commlinks, maybe even implanted memory and system processors. But again all non-combat stuff, and I'd say entirely related to their job functions. Probably a chunk of them are going to be working off the costs for their surgery for the next three decades…"

"I have good news. While you were up on the ridge messing around with magic, I have broken the encryption system used for their communications and control system. While I have the right frequency, I can intercept and read all of their traffic, and implant our own, potentially."

"Oh – good going!" Kai grinned, but then his smile faded, as he thought about what Marius had said. "Does that mean you haven't got all the frequencies yet, though?"

"Nein. They use frequency hopping, and are jumping around the broadcast spectrum. When they jump, I need to hunt and find them, then try to analyse the jump. At the moment it has some patterns, but I have not determined the key or basis for those jumps, and they are not fully predictable. Without a solid lock, I cannot try to actively penetrate the enemy rigger network and strike against it. Speaking of which, I have determined that the majority of rigger signals are originating, or being processed in building eight – which we are fairly convinced is the storage warehouse."

"So that's where the computers are?"

"Perhaps, Kai. But that is where the rigger control centre is. The network for their computers may be co-located, or may be elsewhere. I actually would expect them to have a secondary control centre, possibly in building one or two, at the other side of site – just in case there is something wrong in building eight. But that is where the rigger transmissions are mostly handled, and the drones all report in to that area. I would expect them to have multiple riggers for a site of this size, to handle all of the production lines and control systems, cameras, security and other aspects of the organisation. They may have dedicated personnel – someone who does only building security, someone else who does only the conveyers and spot welders, and so on. But I would actually expect the team to be able to cover most of the functions adequately, with some people just showing more aptitude for certain jobs."

"Well, at least we know where they're based. If we did cut power to something like that, they'd flip over to the alternate control centre, I guess?" Aswon suggested, "meaning that we might have a few minutes of downtime on their systems, while we stage a breakout or getaway. Even if they have an automated failover, it's likely to cause at least a brief blip in service."

"Yes – it looks like an 'all eggs in one basket' approach – but that means they can defend and protect the basket quite well. It would not be easy to breach, and will have redundant power or be on an isolated part of their power grid, perhaps."

"And we've still not seen any of the building riggers or computer techs, or the security staff leaving. I'm wondering if they do something like work a month on the facility, then rotate off for a week or two. They might have dormitories or bunk-rooms onsite for them, and do something like twelve hours on, twelve hours off, all the time they're here."

"That is a possibility. However, what I need to stress is that with multiple riggers present in their network, my chance of being spotted trying to infiltrate their system is higher than usual, and if they do notice an intrusion, I would quickly find myself out-numbered and probably overwhelmed. Especially if I am coming in over the broadcast network, where the security is toughest. If we can find a hard-line we can tap, that would be better. But I am very wary about poking around in the network itself, due to the risk of being spotted and raising the alert level."

"Maybe we do want to follow someone home then, from the work-force, and see if we can get Tads to read their mind. It might be the best way to get internal information about the facility," Aswon looked over at the shaman, "assuming you're happy to do that, of course?"

"Yes. I don't want to hurt anyone, but if we can sneak into their house at night, I should be able to get the information we need – as long as they know it, of course."

"Good."

"But I need to remind you, Kai, everyone really – we've got the job to do for the old man. We don't know what it is, or where. But it's in about six weeks time, so we need to be ready."

"We've not forgotten," Kai said convincingly – despite the fact that he had in fact completely forgotten. That was the risk when you had someone like Marius with you, he thought – someone else could always remember stuff like that for you…

"And we did ask Spook to get in touch with what we're pretty sure is a dragon, to help us out with the strange mark. So we also need to be ready to look at that. So we don't have endless time here. We're not rushing – but there are things coming up."

They continued their surveillance until the shift ended, and Tads made sure she was ready, her body positioned comfortably safe and secure in the Broadsword, while her spirit hovered in the tree. As the cars left site at the end of the day, she found a target vehicle that had a mix of different grades of staff riding in it, and followed it, her body high up in the sky, materialising from time to time to follow the car as it headed out of the plant and then south, towards Gwangju. She returned to her body a while later, and filled in the rest of the team.

"It's more or less what we suspected, and not great news. The car I followed headed back to one of their massive tower block complexes, disappearing into the underground garage. Hugely built up area, and the tower blocks are thirty stories high, with multiple flats or apartments per floor. I can follow them up in the lift, but I'd have to be inside with them, and there's a good chance of our auras touching and giving them chills or something. I think most of the people from the factory are going to be based in a similar urban environment, rather than out in one of the rural villages. So no hearth spirits, but it's a very high-tech and sterile environment, and not great for doing surveillance on them, or trying to get in to do the mind-probe."

They continued to analyse the various bits of footage and observations they'd made, building up a better picture of how the company operated. Hunter broke off when his news alert pinged, telling the rest of the team about a weird story in Western Europe where an individual had been taken into hospital after having extruded spines all over his head. Unsurprisingly he was being dubbed 'the hedgehog man' by the media, and the story was circulating as minor spot on the end of the news updates, but it didn't seem to have any impact beyond that.

A quick discussion between them led to a tentative plan – to stay and do further observations overnight and confirm their findings from the previous night, building up a pattern of behaviour and timings, and allowing Marius further time to try and intercept the rigger signals that were still proving to be somewhat elusive, and in the morning after the shift had arrived and had gotten to work, they'd leave to go to another city, find somewhere safe to land and then get some shopping in – picking up items like boiler suits, hard-hats, bolt croppers and other tools that they might need to break into the facility.

In the morning, Marius had a satisfied and smug look on his face as the rest of the team woke up.

"I have managed to solve the issue with the frequency hopping. It was based on a pattern, which has now been discerned."

"Oh? What was it?" Kai yawned as he gently sipped at a hot cup of soy-kaf, wrinkling his nose a little as the bitter taste assaulted his tongue.

"If you take the Korean National anthem, and transpose the notes into a series of numbers, that then indicates the frequency hop between transmission bursts. It plays through the tune, then restarts – and that is how I managed to find the key to crack the code. It was a difficult hurdle, but ultimately with enough time, the repeating pattern can be discerned. Someone was clever, within reason. But now their system is wide open to us."

"Good work. And I can't see them wanting to change that anytime soon, will they?"

"No. They would need to find a new hopping algorithm, but then synchronise that new key with all the hardware on the network in one go, which means taking down all their drones and cycling them through for maintenance. Not a quick or simple job."

"Excellent. So there shouldn't be any changes if we do go away for a day to get this shopping in."

"No – none at all. And I think we have discovered most of the information we need from passive surveillance as well. The gardeners still circulate and feed the rabbits, and handle them. The drones patrol at regular intervals. We have most of the network traffic mapped from the patrolling drones to the control room, and know how often they report in. We should be good to go."

"The only thing that still bugs me is those rabbits…"

"We are planning on going in via the tunnels discovered, no? So we do not need to go near them."

"Unless we're breaking out Marius, and have to go through the fence. That's not the right time to discover that they explode on impact or something like that."

"I would have to say I agree with Marius – we should not be near the critters." Aswon added, "but I am also somewhat curious about them. They are clearly magical in some way, but it's not anything we've seen before."

"Can we shapechange Hunter into a bird, and get him to swoop down and grab one – make it look natural?"

"Not if we want it to look natural, no." Tads sighed. "Look, we've been over this before. When we did it last time, I had to turn Hunter and Shimazu into pretty much the biggest Albatrosses that you're going to find – but that was ok, because there are some birds out there with five or six metre wingspans. I doubt there are here. I can turn people into other creatures – like we did with Spook to get her out of the collar – but the thing I turn them into has to be roughly the same size as they are. I can go up and down a bit, but not that much. So unless you want a super rare and unusual Albatross suddenly appearing inland and hunting rabbits – then no. I could do it to myself, or you though, Kai, and make it look like a large buzzard or an eagle or something that would be native to this area. Probably best to do you, if that's what you're thinking, as I need to concentrate on holding the spell up."

"Oh, well maybe we shouldn't bother then…" Kai started, but immediately came under verbal assault from the rest of the team, pointing out that they were now fully in agreement with his concerns over the rabbits, and that their sudden agreement had nothing at all to do with the fact that it had to be him to undertake it. After a few minutes of relentless pressure, he caved, stripping down naked and then calming himself as he sat cross-legged on the ramp, waiting for Tads to transform him. A few moments later, a Steller's sea eagle hopped down to the forest floor, spread its two-metre-wide wings, then took off, circling the area for a few minutes as Kai remembered how to fly once more. That, at least, gave the rest of the team enough time to get into position up on the ridge before he headed that way himself, lining up parallel between the two fences and selecting a target.

The others watched as he dove down towards the target, the rabbits splitting up and fleeing in all directions as his shadow descended over them. As he reached a point about ten metres above the fence, Marius detected an alarm signal, watching as traffic on the network suddenly spiked. Moments later a rigger jumped into one of the patrolling drones, taking over manual control and directing it towards the area where Kai had just struck a rabbit, his talons spearing into its flesh before powerful wing-beats carried it up and away, flapping hard to carry the large rabbit which weighed several kilograms.

Less than twenty seconds later, they saw one of the security vehicles emerge from the building closest to where the rabbit had been taken, and head over towards the fence, accelerating quickly. It swayed slightly from side to side, confirming their observations about where the centre of gravity would be and how it would affect the handling of the vehicle, but the driver had a fairly straight run to get to the target point. The vehicle braked as sharply as it had accelerated, and the back doors opened, disgorging three troopers. They were dressed in heavier armour than the security teams at the main gate, their bulky armour giving them a slightly stiff motion as they moved towards the fence line abreast, weapons shouldered.

"Tactical movement, keeping each other in sight, advancing steadily but without hesitation." Aswon murmured. "Rifles shouldered tightly, and following their line of observation. Good discipline, and they look fluid and well trained."

"Helmets have got some gadgets on them too." Hunter noted. "Think they've got at least thermographic goggles and a radio on there, perhaps ultrasound too. Looks decent, and the helmet is wired up down into the armour, so they might be recording footage as well."

"Whatever the rabbits do, they started doing it more as Kai got near. I still can't tell what it is, or what it's done – no visible effects, no harm to Kai that I can see. No trail, nothing in his aura, still no idea…" Shimazu squinted down at the scene, his senses extended into the astral plane, watching Kai for a few seconds, then swapping his attention back to the panicked herd of rabbits which were still stampeding away from the position where Kai had swooped down. "The guards are very switched on though – serious, calm, but ready for trouble."

"Yeah, they're doing a check over the area now. One in the middle is doing a thorough examination, the two others are covering and observing." Aswon examined them carefully through his binoculars, watching as the security team examined the scene carefully.

"The rigger is maintaining overwatch, keeping an eye on the whole area. Has increased height to cover more area, and I think they are doing a grid search – focussing the sensors on the ground and doing a thorough sweep. Lots and lots of data flow." The pilot's voice was somewhat absent, relayed through the comms while he was jacked into his own systems, watching and intercepting the traffic while trying to stay undetected.

"Those guards are being thorough. There's clearly a procedure to follow in cases like this, but they're not phoning it in – they're following whatever their playbook is, but treating it like a life or death situation." Shimazu commented. "Good and bad news. We can't rely on them being slack or lazy. But if we can find out their procedures, we can predict what they're going to do – at least to start with."

They waited a while, watching the security troops survey the scene thoroughly, making a report to their vehicle before heading back to the building they had come from about fifteen minutes later. The drones returned to their programmed paths shortly afterwards and things settled down, back to the usual routine. Heading back towards the Broadsword, they found Kai waiting with the dead rabbit, hopping from foot to foot until Tads released her spell and returned him to his human form.

"I didn't want to take it back to the aircraft in case it had trackers or tags or something in it – but I thought you might want to examine it." Kai got dressed while Shimazu and Tads examined the rabbit, determining that whatever magical abilities the creature may have had, had faded with its death. They were no better off from a quick examination, so Shimazu settled himself down next to the rabbit, laying one hand gently on the mutilated corpse, the other holding his sword, and reached further down into its astral aura, attempting psychometric readings. He sat still for a minute, before violently shaking and losing his grip, rolling away from the corpse with sweat suddenly bursting from his skin. His eyes opened wide and he panted noisily for a moment, reacting in fear to movements around him.

"Sorry, sorry… was reading it, got to its death. It was a little traumatic." He composed himself, taking a few deep breaths and resetting his mind back to his own viewpoint, rather than trying to view things though the limited aspects of the critter. "It was hand-reared. Maybe even vat-grown. I got a sense of it being handled from as soon as it could see. Some kind of lab or facility, somewhere it was reared. Always handled, always hand fed. Never saw humans as a threat – nothing bad ever happened. They don't really have natural predators here, not even native falcons and things like that. I think the fence kept them pretty safe, and they lived a very peaceful life. Right up until the end, anyway…"

"Interesting. It's likely they've been gene-engineered then, or scientifically modified, and raised in some kind of production environment. So whatever it is they do, it must have a benefit for the corp – we've just not seen it yet." Aswon frowned, but nothing came to him and he felt as much in the dark now as when they'd started.

"Could we send a snake in, see what the reaction is from that?" Kai asked. "Not that I want to be a snake – I mean could we find one and you control its mind, Tads?"

"Won't work, Kai." Hunter interjected. "Nothing native around here that's sized to take a rabbit. I've checked on the local fauna, and there's a few snake species around here, but they're all sized to go for insects and small reptiles – nothing that big."

"Now that we've seen a response though, and more importantly, they've seen an eagle take a rabbit – perhaps Kai could go back in, but land on one of the buildings. Or find a nesting spot – see what they do?"

"I'm not sure I like the risks involved in that, Aswon!"

"I agree. It would be easier for me to find some native birds and control them, and get a flock of smaller birds to go land on the roof to see what happens – if we're wanting to do that. And I can probably get enough of them together to mimic the weight of one of us, if we need to – should tell us if there's weight sensors up there."

The team bounced ideas around a little more, then headed back up to the ridge to be ready for shift end – Tads once more following a couple of vehicles home to see where the staff ended up, and confirmed that everyone she saw ended up in one of the higher-tech urban blocks, not in any of the smaller villages or homesteads. She managed to track some cars north instead of south – but found that there was another small settlement that way, that also had the look of a planned development rather than organic growth – the towers seemed to be built to the same exact shape as the ones to the south, and the layout was also identical.

Overnight, they kept up their surveillance, and also started to pick up a few more news articles about strange things happening out in the world. A handful of weird cases had now been reported, with anything from someone apparently growing lustrous purple fur all over their body overnight, to someone growing a long and prehensile tail, or suddenly developing gills. The incidents were widely scattered, and the authorities or mainstream media hadn't made much of it yet, but some of the more subversive or conspiracy theory special interest groups on Shadowland were already abuzz, with many claiming that this was tied up with the imminent arrival of the comet, the return of Ibn Eisa, the second coming, sightings of Elvis or discovery of ancient man-made ruins on Mars.

On Thursday morning, having watched the arrival of the shift once more and added another day of records to their analysis of factory process and protocols, they headed back to the Broadsword and took off for the seventy-five kilometre hop to the north, heading for the port-city of Gunsan. It wasn't the biggest port, but it had a berth with deep-water capability and several container cranes, and a large service industry built up around the docks and transportation of goods. They were quickly able to get the supplies they wanted, procuring boiler suits, hard hats, bolt croppers and a horde of other items. They were even able to get hold of some supplies of chemicals, through Aswon had to tie them to one of his fake-SINs to authorise the purchase. But, Dr Chege Keanjaho appeared to the computers to be a valid employee of a private medical foundation that supported Doctors Without Borders, and a quick explanation of needing the burning and cutting chemicals for rescue of people in trapped vehicles, seemed entirely legitimate, and the bored worker behind the counter didn't seem to really care, as long as all of the boxes were completed on their sales system.

Suitably equipped, they headed back to their landing point west of the facility, sneaking back in just as smoothly as the first time, and then settling back down to continue their observations – at least until nightfall. Aswon worked at the far end of the clearing with his chemistry kit and the new supplies, mixing together materials to make some small thermite burning bars that would – he hoped – allow them to cut through any barriers or grills they might find down in the tunnels.

With that done, it was just a case of waiting for dusk to fall and the workers to head home, leaving the site with the skeleton staff of security officers, while the team double and triple checked their kit, getting ready to infiltrate the factory…