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Dramatis Personae

Elisha

In theory a person could stay in the sidereal for a long, long time without suffering any kind of adverse consequences. In practice the limit was a few hours. The biggest reason for that was a kind of physical stasis that made it impossible for people to metabolize anything new while turned towards the stars. Anything you ate or drank over there wasn’t actually integrated into your body. The academics had been arguing about why that might be the case for decades or centuries but weren’t really any closer to a solution. That didn’t usually have any impact on Elisha’s job.

However, after ninety minutes watching people talk to a very twisty, stubborn computer he’d gone through the rest of his pack of smokes without making a dent on his nicotine craving. He nearly jumped out of his skin at the chance to turn terrestrial and get a cigarette. The fact that his client was looking at people breaking down her doors and running roughshod through her place of business wasn’t ideal, to be sure but He wasn’t getting paid to guard BTL’s office. But at this point he was tied up in something a little bit beyond what Wen had originally contracted him for. Helping her out was probably the best way to get out of things unscathed.

When they returned to the office where they’d started and Elisha immediately fished in his overcoat for another carton of cigarettes. To his dismay he was out. He immediately started running a mental inventory. He’d smoked two staking out Carter’s apartment, another one after the fight and first meeting the kid, three while making his way to the BTL branch office…

After several seconds of careful accounting he realized he had, indeed, smoked all forty cigarettes in the two cartons he normally carried over the last two days. He glanced at his employer. “You got any vending or a canteen in this place?”

If the question struck her as strange in any way she didn’t comment on it. “Two levels down, why?”

“Gonna have to pay it a visit.” Elisha uncoiled his etheric lash and added, “Although if none of you are carrying we might want to find an armory first.”

“The Security armory is two doors down on the left,” his boss said, producing a key chain with a small lump of coral on it along with the normal keys. She led them to a room barely five meters by three, full of shelves and lockers. Once they were all in she locked the door behind them and the keys disappeared again.

To Elisha’s surprise both Wen’s pilot and academic were armed already. Lavanya carried a small knifer, just a holdout weapon to be fair, but as long as it had sharp fletchettes it would stop most folks. Malaki was carrying an etheric disruptor. Much more firepower on that one then Elisha had expected at first glance, although perhaps it wasn’t surprising given his attitude towards the University Pact. Wen didn’t appear to be armed nor did she take a weapon from any of the racks. He raised an eyebrow. “Not taking anything, Miss Wen?”

She shook her head ruefully. “The only time you want me armed is if you want to get shot by accident. Lavanya and I are going to head back to the Skybreak and get it ready to take off so we can leave in a hurry if we need to.”

“We need to leave regardless,” Elisha replied. “These OMNI folks are not going to just pack up and leave us alone of we kick them out today, they’re going to keep coming back. I doubt BaiTienLung will be happy with you bringing that kind of heat down on their offices, no matter how far up the heirarchy you are. Am I right?”

“There’s merit to that.” Wen grimmaced as she watched Carter looking over a heavy repeating lancer off a rack and work it over. He already had a bandoleer of fletchettes slung over one shoulder and a handheld disruptor in his belt. At a guess he was carrying eight thousand in weapons and ammunition. The man was going to put a one man hole in BTL’s security budget from the looks of things and Wen didn’t look happy about it. “Do you think we’ll do more for the office if we just make a break for space?”

“Not a good idea,” Carter said, slamming a fletchette magazine into his weapon and locking it in place. “93 tells me OMNI has nasty tricks up their sleeves. I doubt they can stop a ship once it’s in flight but they have a lot of etheric and computer tricks they can play while we’re still on the ground. It gave me some of them. We’ll try and keep them off your backs while you get the ship ready to lift. Miss Brahman, you’ll want this.”

Lavanya took the etheric device he’d used when they went to visit L-93 and turned it over in her hands. “Shouldn’t you hold on to it?”

“I have spares. If you plug that into your main coral array it will let 93 latch onto your ship and come with us when you jump.”

“It won’t do anything to my ship will it?”

“I don’t think so. But once it’s in your coral you should be able to contact 93 on comms and ask it directly.”

That didn’t seem to reassure her much but she let the matter drop.

Elisha rummaged through the gear BTL kept on hand. It took a few seconds but he managed to turn up a couple of flashbang grenades and drop them in his pockets. He considered a disruptor as well. A weapon with that level of lethality wasn’t permitted under theiftaker rules but he was pretty far outside normal theiftaker work at the moment. However Wen had a point about the danger posed to allies by using a weapon you weren’t proficient with. He’d stick to his lash for the moment.

Wen handed all of them small headsets with stubby little antenna and a small knob on one side, presumably to adjust the communication frequency. “These are keyed to the building intercom. I’ve set them to the main security channel and a private frequency so we can talk to the SPs or just each other. Malaki, you know the layout, yes?”

“I assume you kept the standard floor plan?” She nodded and Malaki sighed. “Of course, the building is too ugly for anything else. How did they sneak in?”

“Believe it or not…”

Tarn

They hit the front desk. Lucy was in a huge hurry for some reason, probably due to some nuance of University politics he hadn’t been informed about, and as soon as they hit the terrestrial on Wireburn she charged straight through the front door of the BTL office and marched up to one of the two receptionists. “I understand Regional Director Wen is here,” she snapped. “I need to speak to her.”

Unfortunately for Lucy the receptionist was a stern looking woman in her late forties, too old to be easily bulldozed by that kind of bluster. She just raised an eyebrow and said, “And who should I say is asking for her?”

Lucy slid a card across the desk for the woman to read. Tarn wasn’t at an angle where he could see everything it said but he was fairly certain the name on it wasn’t Lucy’s. So at least there was that. However he wasn’t a huge fan of this kind of approach. On past sorties with Lucy she’d proven a very deliberate, careful planner who tended to back away from situations where she didn’t have a good command of the variables. It was one reason he liked working with her. That restraint was nowhere in evidence now which suggested whatever prompted this sudden visit to BTL’s offices was a dire circumstance indeed.

The receptionist took the card and frowned. Hopefully Lucy had a plan to turn that card into some kind of advantage but she hadn’t explained it to him before they left so he would have to leave that part in her hands. He turned his attention to the rest of the lobby area. It was a pretty typical public facing section of a corporate office with large, outward facing windows, open seating areas and planters for local flora. Or some kind of flora, presumably a gas giant didn’t have a whole lot of local plantlife outside the huge vines that grew up out of the planet’s core.

Tarn spotted recesses for armored shutters to cover the windows. Cameras with good coverage of the lobby were in the corners of the room but there weren’t any guards in the room proper. Presumably there was a hidden guard post somewhere in the perimeter. It was a well defended room but by no means impenetrable.

The other receptionist glanced up and Tarn followed his line of sight back to the doorway, where two of the people Lucy had been talking to up on Coldstone had just arrived. One was a blonde woman in her late twenties, the other a dark haired man about five years younger. Tarn lightly touched his companion on the arm. He wasn’t sure what name she was going by now so he didn’t want to trip her up by calling her Lucy. When she glanced at him he pointed towards the newcomers.

“What are they doing,” she muttered.

Tarn noticed that the two of them kept a very measured distance between them. The man looked a bit annoyed but the woman practically crackled with hostility and they never looked directly at each other. It seemed like they’d come after Lucy for some reason while also unable to work with each other. Poor allocation of resources. One or the other of them should have stayed behind to finish whatever business they’d had with Lucy’s University.

“Can I help you?” The male receptionist said as the two of them came to a stop by the desk.

The woman ignored him, turning her glare to Lucy. The man started to speak to receptionist two but the woman cut him off, snapping, “Hector.”

The receptionists exchanged a worried look. There was some kind of byplay going on between Hector, the woman he arrived with and Lucy and Tarn could tell it wasn’t exactly friendly. BTL’s staff could see that as easily as Tarn could. They were clearly wondering whether they should call security to get the problem out of their hair before things went badly.

He sighed. “This is regrettable.” His etheric interdictor was in a jacket pocket and he reached in to flick it on. The BTL building had its own interdiction system, which was why Lucy had to jump them down to the streets outside, but he wanted a layer of insurance he had control over. Once he was sure it was in place his other hand reached into his coat and pulled his knifer out of its shoulder holster. Two fletchettes in each receptionist dealt with that complication. He vaulted over the desk and immediately slapped a chip containing a virus into each of the computers, dumping malicious programs that would crash the local network. “We’re past the gatekeepers, Lucy. What next?”

Hector stared at him with wide eyes. “Was that really necessary?”

“Not until two complications walked in and disrupted things to the point security may have gotten involved,” Tarn replied evenly. He looked over the two he’d just shot, making sure they were dead. There was some comfort in finding they were, at least he hadn’t left them in misery while carrying out his commission.

“Miss Luck,” the woman hissed, “what is the meaning of this?”

“It means my associate is correct, Miss Hutchinson,” Lucy snapped. “You’re not supposed to be here, you’re supposed to be up on Coldstone, finishing negotiations with the Professor. This is University business. The executive suite is on the fourth floor, Tarn, see if they have some kind of key card or other IF/F device and let’s get moving.”

“BTL favors transponder chips coupled with biometrics,” Tarn replied. “They implant the chip in the thumb and combine it with the thumbprint.” He was already wiping his knife off on the male receptionist’s shirt.

Lucy sighed. “This is going to be grisly, isn’t it?”

“Complicated jobs always are.” He got up, palming the receptionist’s thumbs, and moved over to the gate and opened it so she could join him behind the desk. Hector and the Hutchinson woman followed behind her. Tarn noted with grudging approval that Hector had drawn a small etheric disruptor and held it in a reasonably professional grip. “Are they coming with?”

“They wanted to see how we handle our security problems,” Lucy snarled. “Let them.”

Tarn figured they had two advantages on their side. The first was speed. They’d walked through the doors barely five minutes ago and already they were taking the back stairway towards the executive offices. There was a good chance security hadn’t realized they were there yet. The second was the audacity of it. The odds BTL had a contingency for this kind of attack were pretty low, since it was a very foolish way to raid a building.

However those advantages didn’t play out like he’d hoped. When they exited the stairwell they found themselves in a lounge for off duty employees. From the quality of the facilities Tarn guessed it wasn’t for the hourlies, either. A teak wood counter with brass fittings dominated one wall and the tables and chairs were of equal luxury. A computer terminal was built into each table and there was a wet bar with at least a dozen bottles behind the counter. A handful of decorative plants sat in the corners of the room.

Lucy ignored the room’s luxuries and started towards the the exit, saying, “The regional director will either be using the guest office or the supervisor’s office. Unfortunately they’re in different directions.”

“Where first?” Tarn asked, trailing behind and studying the tables. One had the remains of a meal still scattered about. But the room was empty. Not a good sign.

“They’ve called for an evacuation,” Hector said. He’d stopped and was reading off one of the computer terminals. “Looks like some kind of silent alarm.”

“Impossible,” Tarn said. “I dropped a Bahti-caste computer worm into their network. It should take their IT people hours to undo the damage it did.”

“The code was reasonably sophisticated,” a voice replied over the terminal’s speakers. “However deconstructing the basic functions and applying a brute force computational countermeasure locked it down long enough for me to isolate and dispose of it. Allow me to introduce myself. I am L-93, an artificial intelligence in service to the Evacuation Pact. Do I once again have the pleasure of addressing an OMNI terminal?”