Chapter 39

We were both motionless and prone, our bodies low to the ground and hidden by the fence line and wind-tangled foliage.

Sam had edged toward the fence's base for a better vantage point. Her fingers curled around the rusted links, claw-like, until the metal gave a sharp and far too loud metallic groan. The sound jolted me awake, more effective than a gallon of caf.

"Shit, Rob." She whispered breathlessly. "What the hell are you doing?"

That, more than anything, gave me a sliver of fear.

Is Sam just as confused about this as I am?

I dialed up my optics and immediately felt nauseous. Shock and nerves conspired to leave a bitter and copper-tinged taste on my tongue. Bile from my empty and overworked stomach. McCreed came into focus, and another jolt of adrenaline hit me like a press-stim, cold and violent from my toes to the tips of my hair. His back was to me. His face was obscured.

I couldn't fathom why he was here, but here we were, in full zoom and clarity.

As I eased back on the magnification, I caught sight of Rob's hands, which moved purposefully and gestured emphatically to punctuate some silent argument. McCreed didn't flinch. He answered with a pointed finger in a very measured and deliberate way. There was tension, but no more than I would've expected between a supervisor and manager during a shift at the Port.

It didn't sit right with me. Something felt...off.

I continued my surveillance. Rob dismissed McCreed's reply with a sharp wave, then enunciated another point in the unheard conversation with another round of gestures. His eyes burned with a suppressed anger.

Wait.

Eyes. Plural.

A slow, sick squirm began in the pit of my stomach. A worm tethered to a terrible thought, plucked forth by a curious, jagged-edged beak.

"Rob's right eye is normal," I blurted out before I could stop myself.

"What?"

"His eye," I clarified, voice lower this time. "It's not roaming around. McCreed shouldn't know about it; at least that's what Rob told me." I reset magnification and blinked until Sam's face sharpened back into focus. Her brows were drawn tight, frustration etched into her expression as I looked at her worriedly.

"Sam?" I asked, as I kept my voice steady, though uncertainty pressed from just beneath the surface.

She didn't answer immediately. Her gaze flicked between me and the figures beyond the fence. Calculating. I felt a trill of fear.

The faint scent of rain and metal became stronger as the wind shifted. Sam's jaw tightened. I was suddenly very aware of the rifle they'd given me. It was wedged awkwardly under my side, heavy and as useless as the rock that'd bruised my tailbone. Hers was beside her, ready. Just within reach.

I was almost afraid to continue. "McCreed doesn't seem fazed by Rob's presence here either. Is that...normal?"

Below, the exchange had deepened somehow. More back-and-forth dialogue. Rob seemed firm, almost combative. McCreed, in contrast, had grown cautious. Wary, but still composed.

"Not exactly, no," Sam finally said. "Not unless it's been prearranged, and Rob was adamant McCreed never know he was involved. Normally it was Frank and some stooge named Golrich."

I didn't ease into it. Now wasn't the time for subtlety.

"Is Rob working with McCreed?" I asked. "Against us, I mean?"

Sam's head snapped over so fast it made me flinch. Her iris rings spun violently, like a data platter riffling through an archive of damaged files.

"What?!" she barked; her voice was filled with disbelief and denial. "No! Why would you even say that?" Her reaction had been immediate and instinctual, but something in her tone made me hesitate as she looked away, jaw clenched even harder. Her eyes scanned the ground like it might offer a better answer, and we settled into an uncomfortable silence.

The smell of rain intensified. The worst of the storm hadn't reached us yet but poured over the view beneath us. "There's no way," she said, softer now. "Not Rob. He's been in this game too long. He knows what's at stake."

Her voice faltered near the end and trailed off into a silence that felt uncharacteristically uncertain. She looked up at me, but her eyes didn't reassure me as much as I would've liked.

"You're not wrong to ask," She said with finality, though I noted she wouldn't look me in the eye. "I trust him, Owen. But what if he was compromised somehow? We'd already be too late; we're in too deep."

She turned. Rob and McCreed were still the only two figures visible in the entire yard. Their bodies were turned. Rob faced us, but McCreed's back was still presented to us. It felt planned. Like they'd done it to block off one half of their discussion from the outside world in a junior exec mockery of a drum meeting. The rain continued to make a mess of the landscape and obscure our vision. Everything around them seemed like it was coated in water. A world of mire and puddles. Despite it all, the two still stood out there, Rob with his hood deployed and McCreed, entirely unfazed by the wetness or torrential rain.

"I think he's been trying to convince McCreed he's part of the hierarchy, but it's hard to tell. I can only transpose what Rob is saying, not McCreed, and so far it's been a bunch of phrasing around being a superior and dealings."

Dealings?

"Wait," I said. "You've got a transposal suite?" I was surprised, shocked even. While the concept of a translation suite was simple, a transposing suite wasn't.

The process for translations? Take one language and spit a word out into another. Easy. So easy, port-sign translation suites were, for example, burned into almost all Corpo-registered optical systems, even ones as dated as mine. They were as common as scrit, so long as you worked for one of the Corps.

But transposal suites? The key difference from a simple translator was what was called an O-Gram, short for "Observational GRAMmar" construct. A transposal suite configured with one could connect dots and spot patterns centered around a construct subject. It all summarized into fancy words for "a simulation." With a proper O-Gram, you could guess the words, sounds, or notes someone might make based off established behaviors and patterns. Gestures. Expressions. Even body language and biometric data could be analyzed by a co-processor to give you a somewhat realistic simulation of what they might say, mean, or do in relative real-time.

There were claims their design drew heavily from specialized hunter drone protocols. Input a target's behavioral patterns, preferences, even a partial psychological profile, and "highly illegal" didn't even cover it. At one point during The War, their deployment was classified as a war crime.

So that's...interesting.

"Yes," Sam murmured, eyes fixed ahead. "But it's not giving me much right now. They keep shifting positions, and I can't get a stable lock for the O-Gram to sink in. It's something Rob is doing to change something. Throwing it off. I can still catch his lips to read what he's saying when they're visible, but they're coming through wrong somehow."

She grunted in frustration. "I can't get a clear visual from here, but..."

She leaned forward, eyes narrowed. "Their sides are to us now," she said, voice clipped and analytical. "McCreed can't see us, Owen. We have to move. Now. We're running out of time until the next blink-out window."

"Wh—move?!" I said, but she hadn't actually given me a chance to respond.

She'd sliced a thin line through the fence in near silence. Her talons parted the thick links as if they were no more than cobwebs in a forgotten crawlspace. It was honestly scary just how sharp they were. By the time I registered fully what she'd done, she was already halfway down to the next level with the same grace she'd demonstrated before.

Like some kind of mountain animal, she leapt effortlessly from level to level. I fought to catch up, breathless as I scrambled behind her. I hadn't even registered I'd reached the nearest Lock's maintenance field until I was already sprawled across the slick plastcrete and metal surface. My heart thundered within my chest, a bass drum of tension, as I scanned the rain-drenched terrain, desperate to catch sight of Sam's figure. It was a blind, panicky moment when I realized I was alone and exposed. She was gone. I'd lost her among the jagged silhouettes and labyrinthine angles of the walkways and feed lines and hadn't anticipated how much more intimidating the entire structure was at ground level than from above.

Relief surged through me at the sound of her voice.

"Owen!" She hissed. She gave me a sharp and impatient wave. "This way!"

She was below ground; only her head was visible as I sprinted to close the gap between us. She pulled me into a niche with a set of molded stairs. The doorway at the base of those stairs looked remarkably familiar. A heavy door. One protected by an access code. Plain and unlabeled, but with a hollowed data-contact spot in the middle.

Sam pressed her right index finger into the contact node, and a soft pulse of amber flashed through the concentric rings of her irises. The door opened wordlessly, but instead of a tunnel, we were met by a small utility room occupied by a low ceiling and cluttered machinery that looked anciently out of date.

Banks of consoles and analog readouts lined the walls, their surfaces mottled with corrosion and lined with dust. The smell of rust and mildew was very strong. It felt like a relic. Abandoned to hibernate, undisturbed.

Sam hurried over to a cluster of optical monitors of the like I'd only ever seen in war documentaries. They were slim by design but limited to flat, two-dimensional displays of text and imagery. As the doorway sealed shut behind us with a swift, soundless motion, their faint illumination was the room's only source of light.

With the two of us, the space inside felt oppressively tight. The shallow alcove felt more like a forgotten cleaner closet than a functional chamber. A single, very worn chair sat in front of the primary monitor bank, which Sam shoved aside to get a clearer view of the closest screen.

She suddenly kicked the side of a cabinet and caused me to jump.

"It's locked out!" She snapped. The frustration was clear in her voice. "We missed the activation window to use the feed. Dammit!"

"What's locked out?" I asked as I tried to make sense of this tiny room tucked somewhere in the maze of equipment and feed lines. "Is it a control room of some sort?"

She leaned her back against the wall and wiped a hand across her face to clear her eyes. "It's a monitoring station." She replied. Water streamed off her in thin rivulets, and I suddenly became very conscious of how much I'd soaked through to the grated floor beneath us. The water collected before it slipped away into some hidden drain. My skin itched from the damp muskiness.

"There are a few closed-loop feeds here," she continued forlornly, still focused on the monitors. "They're used to check if it's safe to move. But we missed the activation window where we could use it."

She began to pace. Her hands were braced on her hips as she tried to breathe.

"We need to make a decision," she said. She was anxious and upset, her voice tight with frustration as her fingers brushed the grip of her rifle. She glanced up and to the right at her chrono.

I did the same: 0813.

“We’re already behind,” she added. “And we need to decide, very quickly, whether we stay hidden or make a break for it somehow. Rob wanted us to go, but...” Her voice trailed off, swallowed by whatever calculations her brain worked on as we sat in a tense silence.

I mulled over the possibilities. There were fragments of context I wasn't given. More I wasn't apprised of, or simply didn't understand. As I always did in these times, I defaulted to habit: I let my mind go free and allowed it to wander. It was easier to ignore how uncomfortable I was, wet in a dry room.

The aging machinery around us hummed quietly as command code scrolled by in steady order: left to right. Top to bottom. Hidden mechanisms, ancient scripts, and unknown checks ran in operational routines. If the style of the signs and equipment were anything to judge by, they'd likely been done for much longer than I'd even been alive.

I studied a sign mounted above the monitor bank, its faded letters quiet despite the exclamations.

[MAINTENANCE]
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY!
RISK OF TERMINATION AND FORFEITURE
FOR FAILURE TO COMPLY!

A dry snort escaped me before I could stop it. Sam shot me a brief glance, then resumed her pace without further comment.

The flash of a familiar CIDENT caught my eye as the chrono clicked over to 0815.

>> CIDENT#45-17-1138 AUTH CHECK CONFIRMED.
>> Writing initialization log to ./sysroot/...complete!

I stared at the screen, stunned. No way.

On the angled edge of the worksurface sat a single contact node. It was the only semblance of an interface in the entire room. An idea began to form, like clouds as they brewed into the outside storm. It was a long shot, but so far? Long shots had paid off for me...in spades.

"Hey, Sam." I said. I'd already unstrapped my pack as the idea took a more defined shape.

"Yeah?" she replied. She halted her pace and joined me as I dug into my bag to find what I needed, the few parts Dora had forgotten, and others from my old Outerall Rob had insisted I keep I'd stuffed into pockets of my loaned jacket.

"You ever try to log in manually?"

AH HA!

There they were. Power pack, interface interpreter, data module, LinC cable.  Bingo.

Sam frowned, "What's the point? We don't have the access code. The whole thing's automated. What're you thinking?"

With practiced hands, I laid out the components. The power pack slotted into the interface interpreter's aux intake, the LinC feed cable seated firmly into its own port, and I connected the other end to the base of my skull. I shivered as it snicked into place.

"So," I said, as I adjusted the suit's power pack to provide the necessary amperage to power the circuit of the interpreter, then extended a probe from the data module and recalibrated it for a contact feed. "You guys don't actually know how or why the system was modified; you just used it without understanding the architecture. Correct?"

Sam turned toward me, and I saw the slow bloom of realization in her eyes as it unfolded.

"Rob told me never to worry about it. It was set a long time ago and hadn't been discovered. You know something...don't you?"

I made a small "mmhmm" noise as I focused on making the data module work. The contact point set in the worksurface was an older variant but could still be utilized with some minor adjustments.

A muscly action star, deathly stealthy assassin, or devastatingly smooth character I was definitely not. However? I did know this...

My optical link was rewarded by an interpreter prompt, projected mid-air within my implant's heads-up display.

ACCESS REQUEST INITIATED: INVOKE CODE.

I pumped my fist once in victory. "Delta, Four Three, Twenty One Alpha, One, One, Three, Eight," I subvocalized quietly and allowed my implants to convert the spoken words into one the interpreter could relay.

Sam looked at me like I was insane.

"Owen..." Sam began to say but jumped when the monitors all came to life around us. Visual feeds, the first of which showed the monitor station doorway and parts of the nearest lock, which appeared clear of anyone or anything that could stop us.

"Bingo!" I said with a grin.

"HOW?!" Sam's mouth was wide open in shock, but she quickly regained composure and slugged my arm painfully. "Well done!!!"

There were only a few more of the feeds below the first, but they were not good news. Corridors and tunnels were occupied by uniformed security within tiny frames. While the surface was clear, the subterranean complex, which I hadn't realized had been so extensive, was filled with people we did not want to meet.

"Hey Sam." I asked, "You know what that is?" I pointed to a tiny icon on the bottom right corner.

She leaned in to examine it. "No?"

I activated it, and it brought up a map of the Lock complex. Sam gasped.

"Owen. Stop there, open this one." She pointed, and I obliged.

A new feed list came up, this time of areas that had previously been marked as unavailable. "Scheduled for maintenance."

Sam seemed in awe. "I never knew we could see more..." she said as her eyes roamed. "This entire time we were only using a few of them. How did you get this?"

I knew she meant the access code.

"One VERY long story," I said, but something else caught my eye before I could expand upon it. "Hey! Is that Rob?!"

I opened the feed, and sure enough, Rob and McCreed were there, not exactly close, but closer than we had been up on the hill. For McCreed, his bearing took on a classic "absolute authority" stance I knew all too well. A deliberate display of power and presence over someone beneath you.

Of sudden and absolute confidence.

Crap.

A graph at the bottom of the feed jumped and spiked as it moved from left to right. An audio spectralizer.

"Are all of these wired for sound?" I said, and shook my head at myself for the idiocy of a voiced question when I could've just easily checked. Sam only looked on worriedly, fingers absentmindedly on her lip as she watched me poke around the interface.

I found a toggle, and Rob's gruff and sharp voice crackled through ancient speakers hidden in the ceiling. It sounded alien to me, like someone else.

"... and those two idiots up on the hill? I've told them to hold off so they wouldn't figure it out. Even now they think they can read what we're saying because one of them has a transposal suite, but I gave them a false O-Gram. Garbage in, garbage out. They'll never suspect a thing unless I tell them what I want to tell them. You got me?"

At the mention of the transposal suite, McCreed's usual aloofness, so polished it bordered on the unreal, fractured. Though he still faced away from wherever the feed originated, the shift was visible in his posture. His movements had become rigid, locked in a purely corporate stance: shoulders squared, spine straight, every angle taken into account to project control as he tried to hide his initial reaction.

He's intrigued.

"So..." he said. The word drawn out like a snake's forked tongue. "You claim you and your...handlers? Have access to such tech? Transposal suites and others of their level?" He was dangerously curious now. A predator uncertain if it needed to flee or bare its fangs.

Something shifted in me then, possibly for good. The glass-fragile crack of final innocence as Rob spoke. His arms were crossed across his muscled chest, and his brow was set into an insulted, unfamiliar scowl.

"I don't claim," he said. His voice was molten as he leaned forward, "The Internal Investigation Bureau has assets you wouldn't begin to imagine, but none of it is yours if you don't get rid of those two over there."