Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(66)
Beck laughed, and the sound was not a pleasant one. “Of course it does. I don’t have nearly as much information as I’d need to pull this off perfectly. Even with months I doubt there’s much chance I could put together anything foolproof. The facility is designed to keep people out and hold its secrets. This is the best way I know how to get what we need. I give myself even odds of success. Since we’re already going to hit the cells, it’s worth making a little noise on the way out.”
Bowers watched the video play through, switching automatically to infrared in regular intervals. “Speaking of which, do you have an alternate escape route in case you trigger alarms when breaking into their network? I can’t imagine you’d be able to make it back to the warehouse, or that the doors would open for you.”
Beck glanced over at her armor, which she had spent her scant free time altering and tinkering with. The attached plates held many of the same automated storage compartments as a standard suit, but a few newer additions were custom built by her to contain...specialty items.
“Oh, I have a few thoughts on that, sir,” she said.
Bowers sighed in the long-suffering way only an old man used to overeager children can. “Then by all means, I’d like to hear them.”
Beck told him. By the end, Bowers stared at her with a mixture of new appreciation, disbelief, and a small measure of concern for her mental health.
31
The ride in the train car worked wonderfully. Slicing into the car’s simple computer system to make it believe it was empty took minutes, mostly because Beck planned ahead for it. Through her external sensor, she waited for the warehouse to empty as expected. It didn’t take very long. When the door shut behind the workers, Beck waited for another five minutes before easing the door open and moving.
Despite what she told Bowers, the first priority was moving along the paths through the crates that kept her out of camera view as much as possible. This was almost entirely guesswork; all she had to judge by were the angles of the cameras themselves. Keeping low, she worked her way to the stairwell running along the back wall over whatever break room the workers secreted themselves in.
Her footsteps were barely audible despite the weight of her armor. Days of fretting about how to move silently were solved all at once when she nervously brought up the subject during one of her scheduled conferences with Bowers.
“Pad your boots and any part of your armor that might scrape against something with thick fabric,” he had suggested. “Felt would be your best bet. I’ll requisition some and send it over.”
Which was how Beck, clad in technology that was once the subject of speculative fiction until enterprising scientists and engineers decided to make it real, padded silently up the stairs and into the maze of the research facility. A spot of her own research told her that centuries before, swordsmen and sailors would muffle the clank of armor and weapons the same way. Her only regret was not knowing that ahead of time so she could make a joke about Bowers being old enough to remember it personally.
The stairs were the safer bet because according to her observations, no one ever used them to reach the warehouse. Deliveries came via the lifts running the full height of the building, and at night she was almost certain very few actual researchers were present. Counting on it, in fact. Moving through the less-used portions of the building was all well and good, but Beck knew how she would manage network architecture if she were going for total secrecy, and that meant isolating systems within the larger framework.
Fortunately, the enemy had to work within the normal confines of Protectorate bureaucracy. Finding shipping labels for vials containing Fade B hadn’t been all that hard once she uncovered Mazur as one of the people responsible for spreading it. She knew what lab produced the stuff, where it was located, and roughly how to get there thanks to old public records about the building’s layout that predated its occupation by civilian Science.
She avoided going anywhere near the first floor above the warehouse, which was the only open space large enough to serve as a large-scale manufacturing center. Bypassing it by staying in the stairwell was simple enough, her suit’s passive sensors at maximum to detect any sign that another person might be on the stairs above her. Every sound was analyzed, the air sampled for human scent, the ambient temperature check and rechecked five times a second to see if the average went up by the fractions of a degree caused by another person breathing.
Once she was on the fourth floor, Beck had to go where there might be people. This was the most dangerous part since the main hallway leading off the staircase was a straight shot bisecting the floor. Any late-night workers who happened to be talking a trip to the bathroom or chatting while on a break could ruin everything. No matter how much planning went into any venture, chance was a hateful bastard that could turn on you at any moment.
Chance could, however, be managed.
Beck knelt by the door and popped open one of her specialty compartments, this one on the underside of her wrist. The thin coil within snaked out under her command, a fiber not much thicker than thread able to work itself through the thin space beneath the door. In a lock down even that gap, necessary for the sliding motion of the door to function, would vanish.
The tiny camera on the end of the appendage moved into position and her HUD flickered with the feed from its input. The hallway was rendered thermally, in far-infrared. There were no telltale hot spots showing recent movement by warm bodies. She watched for a solid ten minutes before deciding this was as safe as it was likely to get.