Bitstream

11.2

The aerodyne cut east towards the Boulder District, and the stars followed.

The township below glowed in weak patches of sodium light broken up by long, dead stretches where the grid hadn't worked in years, if it ever had. Rhea sat near the hatch, her Chroma-Skin suit zipped up to the neck and no further. It was new tech, not something she'd expected from a run-of-the-mill station in a less-than-run-of-the-mill town. Impressive, even. Halcyon code, through and through. She zoomed in on the microfibres with her new optics, hoping to catch the nanomaterial, but the weave was too clean, too flawless, and if she stared any longer, she had the unsettling feeling it would start staring back.

"How far are we?" Vev asked the pilot, Cmdr. Strannik.

"Drop-off in ten minutes," Strannik yelled. "Somethin' tells me this'll be an interesting night. Nobody out. Dead quiet in sectors three through five. Never seen anything like it."

"Think they know we're comin'?"

"Not a chance," Strannik said. "We're running black, no chatter, no heat signatures. If they know we're coming, it means we've got a rat – and I'll be the first to cut that bastard loose. Until then, eyes open. Quiet drop, quick in and out. No cowboy shit. Grab the target, get gone. Anything goes wrong, we engage. Everyone clear on that? Everyone know their roles?"

They hummed in agreement.

It was a risky plan, and they would prefer to avoid open-arm conflict early on in the off-chance Priest escaped or, worse yet, ended up dead. Rhea and Vev would infiltrate the warehouse, find Priest, and secure him to the end of the balcony. He would be sedated, knocked out completely from a serum-dart embedded in Vev's projection rig. The Chroma Suits would give them a window – maybe thirty minutes tops – of near-perfect optical camouflage. They'd breach from the underground tunnels; a scan revealed a passageway beneath the compound, an old service conduit built decades ago for waste transfer and electrical grid maintenance back when the sector still had power. Most of the tunnels were collapsed, so Rhea heard, filled with sludge and exposed piping, but there was still a path, even if not the prettiest, that would lead straight into a disused storage bay by the main floor, and from there it was only a stairway up to the warehouse.

But the scan of the interior was old. Anything could be different now.

There was also the chance that some of Priest's men could be underground. If it came down to it, they would have no choice but to knock them out, too. The serum was pretty strong, so that wouldn't be too much of a problem. Could keep them down for over an hour if need be, but that didn't mean Rhea and Vev were going to be slow. There was still the possibility that someone could catch on, because although the suits were near-perfect in their disguise, there were still distortions, sometimes glitches, and some light sources caused the sensors to go off-kilter.

The warehouse wasn't some polished corporate fortress, which was another problem. Rebels like Priest didn't need clean walls or retinal scanners. They used scavenged tech, broken AI shells, and outdated security rigs that didn't play by any predictable rules. If a turret looked dead, it might just be waiting to wake up. If a drone looked fried, it might be running on a hacked power cell. From the aerial scans, the building was three storeys of ferrocrete and steel reinforcement, most of it bordering on dilapidated. The main floor was sectioned off into work bays, and Strannik suspected half of them were used for building custom weapon mods, the type you wouldn't find in your average arms' dealer. There were at least two heat signatures on the roof and six on the main floor, maybe more hidden by the walls. Priest would be in the command room, hooked up to whatever prototype tech he'd ripped off from black-market labs, thinking he was safe from the corporate eye.

Strannik's intel hadn't come from thin air either. For the last week, they'd run stealth drones over the Boulder District at night, mapping heat signatures and scanning for power spikes. The drones had picked up a consistent surge in the warehouse's second floor: something running hot, servers or prototype rigs. Combined with intercepted comm chatter from Priest's people, the pattern was clear. The underground tunnels and disused storage bays matched old municipal schematics Lucian had pulled from the city archives. Everything pointed to Priest being holed up in that building.

Rhea never thought she'd be taking on a leader so directly, but ever since she lost her arm, she'd grown a desire to protect people. She'd seen the full wrath the rebels were capable of. It was why she became an enforcer in the first place. That and the point that there weren't many jobs that didn't involve battering desperados into the ground; the market had gotten substantially worse since the innovation of Halcyon, but that was still no excuse to storm homes, wreck lives, or burn the city to the ground just to make a point.

The aerodyne descended two kilometres from the warehouse by a derelict substation. The whole place had burned to the ground years ago during one of the Syndicate's raids, but there were still the unruly remains of repurposed service bots and half-bodied android receptionists to foot through. Rhea and Vev hopped off and Strannik brought the aerodyne up again, heading farther east towards the warehouse to get everyone else in position; he couldn't get too close, not unless he wanted to blow everything out of the water.

Rhea and Vev headed deep into the substation, cracked the hatch preceding the tunnelwork, and zipped up their suits fully. Vev crouched, fingers tapping across the smooth patch on her wrist rig where her netrunner deck was integrated into the Chroma-Skin. "Suit sync's ready," she said. "Deck'll ride the skin once we cloak, so any signal trace I fire stays invisible with us. I'll keep the firewall tight."

"Right," Rhea said. She glanced down at the suit's weave again: all matte black now, but with a faint shimmer of embedded microfibres that hinted at what was coming. "Let's wait till we get a little further."

And they hurried through the tunnels at a fast-walking pace, following the map embedded in their neural displays. Eventually they were close enough to the warehouse that they could see the blue light pooling down the tunnel, but there were also voices, echoes of two men chatting in the distance.

Static played through the Cloud Room, and a third voice played through Rhea's head: "Steele, Vev, status report?" Strannik, of course.

Rhea pressed the echo chip embedded in her left temple. "Comin' up on two gonks," she said, careful not to be too loud. "Guessin' we're not the first people to try and infiltrate this base. Either that or – well, they're taking extra precautions."

"Looks like we'll have to engage, Boss," Vev said; she sounded as though she'd been looking forward to it.

"Stick 'em," Strannik said.

"Where do we hide the bodies?" Rhea asked. It was a question she hadn't considered up until now. Strannik didn't have much environmental context to go off at the time. Still didn't, it would turn out.

"Don't overthink it," Strannik said. "Hit 'em fast. Drag 'em somewhere dark. They won't be found till we're long gone."

Vev's grin was audible through comms. "Oh, I like this plan."

They pressed the rigs on their wrists, causing the suits to turn invisible. Rhea could barely make out the outline of Vev's body, of her own body, but when she squinted, the optics made things that little bit clearer. Thank you, Bens.

They followed the tunnel, listening as the voices grew louder. Up ahead, two men flanked the tunnel's final hatch, its hinges catching the spill of blue security light. They were dressed in glossy synth trousers, legs plated with carbon polymer, torsos wrapped up in bulky tactical harnesses, each one bristling with spare mags and shock grenades clipped to the front. No corporate-issued stuff, as expected: this was street armour. And their faces gave Rhea the chills: half-burned, half-rebuilt, metal wiring running through flesh, and their eyes were replaced by a scatter of glowing optics, blue and sharp as gun sights.

Disgusting.

"You think Boss'll live?" one man said, the voice harsh, no doubt catching on some odd vocal mods.

"Tech's from Quinsy," the other said. "But supposedly it needs a better host to work, someone with some really fucked-up past."

"Hope that bastard dies in his sleep. He's been in that chair too long."

"Doesn't matter if he does," the second said, shifting his rifle strap. "This was all planned. Someone upstairs wants it this way. Every broken mind they plug in just makes the system stronger. Heard a name floatin' around, though… someone funding this whole thing, pulling the strings."

"Yeah? Who?"

"Rather not say," the man replied. "Who knows who could be listenin'? Town's swarming with rats. I'll tell you over a beer someday—"

Thwip.

A dart slammed into his neck, another into his partner's. Both men collapsed before they could register what hit them. Rhea turned to see Vev's projection rig folding back into the mechanical housing on her forearm, a faint hiss of compressed air escaping as it locked in place. Vev blew across her fingertip as if she'd just pulled the trigger on a revolver.

They approached their bodies. Vev tried to grab one by the armpits but found that she didn't quite have the muscle power. Rhea, on the other hand, had no issue hauling one up over her shoulder. She spotted a dumpster on the far side of the tunnel, probably left there decades ago by city workers when this conduit still carried waste and power. She hurried over to it and dumped the body inside, then did the same with the other body.

"Been workin' out?" Vev hacked up a thick wad of phlegm, pressed her mouth, let the anti-fibre peel away, and spat it on the ground.

Rhea caught her breath. "You could say that." In truth, it was the strength augmentation that came as a result of installing mantisblades; they were pretty heavy, after all.

With the bodies dragged into the dark, they pushed on through the tunnel's final hatch and found a grated stairway leading to a steel door. But there was a snag: the door was locked tight behind an old dial-pad, its screen flashing as if it hadn't been updated in years.

"Shit," Rhea muttered. "Well, now what?"

"I got it." Vev stepped forward, her voice calm, almost smug. She pressed a finger to her temple, the faintest pulse of blue bleeding through the Chroma-Skin's shimmer where her visor flared to life beneath. Rhea could just make out the ghostly outlines of code running across the surface of the visor.

The keypad gave a strained beep. A second later, the steel door hissed and unlocked with a tired groan.

"After you," Vev said.

This wasn't the time to laugh, but Rhea couldn't help the short, sharp snicker that escaped her. Vev had that effect: too much confidence, too much bite.

They moved in. On the other side, the air changed. It was warmer, heavier, like the walls had been soaking in the stink of oil and sweat for years. The space opened into a wide maintenance corridor with exposed pipes running overhead and a hum of machinery that made the rounds somewhere deeper. Overhead lights painted the floor in pulses of pale yellow and shadow. But up ahead and to the right they found the stairway that led up into the storage bay. They snuck up, keeping low even with the invisibility active, and they heard the voices before they saw what was up there: gravelly men chatting, snores, subtle laughter. When they reached the top of the stairwell and looked through the entry point, they saw the warehouse in full. It was wide, with steel support beams spaced like the ribs of some ancient leviathan, and strips of yellow light hung crooked from the ceiling, some still buzzing, others dead completely. The floor was all crates, scaffolds, and mechanically engineered guts scattered in uneven heaps. It looked like a place that had been used hard, and by too many hands that didn't care how much blood or grease they left behind.

But what set Rhea's teeth on edge wasn't the mess or the sound of men's voices rolling out from somewhere near the far wall. It was what lay below the floor.

Directly beneath the grated walkways, sunk into the concrete, were massive circular tanks – ten of them, maybe more – all filled with a viscous green liquid that glowed and sloshed. Tubes as thick as her thigh ran from the tanks to the rest of the warehouse, snaking along the walls and into the machines on the upper floor. Each tank had a thick viewing panel, and through the murky liquid Rhea could swear she saw… something. Shapes. Maybe even people. But they weren't moving. Not yet.

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"Jesus," Vev whispered over the link, her voice lower than low. "This isn't a rebel base. It's a lab. They're cookin' something down there."

Rhea couldn't answer. Her throat was dry. It didn't look like anything from corporate labs or military research stations; this was cruder, uglier. Rust marked the tanks, and condensation dripped in slow, steady rivulets. Drip… drip… drip…. The air smelled of copper and chemical burns.

Some of the men were perched high, rifles and blades in hand, while others were sleeping on cots. She supposed it made sense. This was real early in the morning, and there was no tech out there that could make people's need for sleep obsolete; that was for damn sure.

"Explains the heat signatures," Strannik said. "I ran a scan on the upper floor. I'm pinging Priest's location on your neurals. Second floor, office level. If you're lucky, he'll be asleep like the rest of the bastards."

"And if he isn't?" Rhea said.

"Best knock him out fast," Strannik said. "That guy probably has an alarm embedded in his middle finger. Don't give him a chance to shove it right up our ass."

They began to step out, but Rhea pulled Vev back. There was a camera directly over the entryway, and not just any camera: infrared: she knew by the Halcyon design. It seemed not everything in this place was bootleg, but it still begged the question as to how they could afford it. Was someone really funding them? If so, who?

Vev disabled the camera, pinged the locations of all possible infrared cameras attached to the same server, and told Rhea to follow her lead. She did so without hesitation, and they crept through the ground floor of the warehouse, slipping past Priest's men who were deep into whatever fucked-up lab experiment they considered 'for the good of mankind'. But as they moved around the place, disabling cameras, avoiding both sleeping and armed guards, Rhea realised there was no direct stairway that led to the second floor, and they couldn't find any ladders anywhere; instead, there was a lift. It sat to the far left of the warehouse floor: a hulking cargo platform with iron rails and a chain-driven mechanism that looked older than Rhea's entire life. It was the kind of lift meant to drag up crates or barrels of whatever toxic shit the rebels were brewing in those glowing tanks. The steel plate at its base was scratched to hell, the paint stripped by years of hauling heavy loads. Grease stains pooled in the corners, and a control box jutted out from one side, the casing dented and patched together with crude solder lines. Zooming in, she saw that the button panel had only three settings: UP, DOWN, STOP. No security code, no lock. Just a big, dumb machine that groaned whenever someone touched it.

"Any ideas?" Vev whispered. "We're sittin' ducks here. Can't imagine our suits will last much longer unless we get a move on."

But Rhea did have an idea, although it was daring. She crouched behind a stack of metal drums, scanning the area. Four guards lingered nearby, two pacing lazily along the far side of the bay, while the other two sat on a crate, drinking something from tin mugs. None of them looked alert, but none of them were about to let someone waltz onto that lift, either.

She tapped Vev on the arm, whispering, "See that control box?"

Vev followed her line of sight. "Yeah. Real sophisticated piece of tech."

"Can you mess with it? Make it glitch?"

"Mess with it? Sweetheart, I can make that thing sing." She crouched low, fingers grazing the deck as she called up her netrunner suite. The faint shimmer of her visor blinked behind the Chroma-Skin as she ran a diagnostic ping through the lift's old circuitry. "What's the plan, egg-head?"

"They'll check it," Rhea said. "They have to if they're moving all that crap upstairs. When they do, we're already on it. They won't even know we're standing there."

Vev chuckled under her breath. "Smart girl. Alright, let's give this baby a little seizure."

The lift shuddered with a grating screech and then stopped halfway down its short rise, jerking like something had eaten through the gears. One of the guards glanced up at the sound, frowned, and barked something to the other three.

"What the hell now?" the one on the crate shouted. "That thing's always breaking down."

One of the pacing guards marched towards the control box and jabbed the UP button. Nothing. He jabbed again. Still nothing.

"Looks like it's stuck," the second guard said, setting his mug down.

"Get on and test the damn thing," the first replied, rolling his shoulders. "We need those crates upstairs."

The guards got onto the lift and started fiddling with the controls.

Rhea shot Vev a look, already moving. This was it. They slipped around the side, invisible, silent, timing their steps with the grinding noise of the lift mechanism. The guards didn't notice the subtle scuff of boots on steel as they climbed onto the platform, standing shoulder to shoulder.

After a moment, Vev released her control on the lift, and it began to rise, bit by bit, little by little.

"Somethin' smells funny," one of the guards said. "You been in the tunnels?"

Rhea's heart dropped; she gripped the railing, hand hovering over the holster skin.

"Nah," the other guard said. "But I get that scent too. Probably one of those dicks leavin' their mark around the place."

"Can say that again. Wouldn't trust those guys to guard a bee in a jar." An ugly laugh. He coughed harshly.

Rhea's grip relaxed, and her hand moved away from the holster.

"Whole way up and whole back down boys," the man on the ground floor yelled. "Don't want Boss chewing us to shit." Then, to himself, "Man my ass hurts!"

When the lift reached the second floor, an infrared camera blinked awake, but Vev shut it down before it could blink twice. They slid off the platform, careful not to make a sound. The walkway stretched out in a thin loop around the warehouse, rust clinging to its edges. Below, the guards rode the lift up to the third floor, none the wiser.

Rhea's neural display pulsed with a red ping, drawing her left towards a narrow hallway that ended in a paneled door. Beyond that hallway was the office: Priest's last known location. From there, the plan was simple: sedate him, haul his body to the balcony, call in the aerodyne, and vanish into the night. Easy on paper. Too easy. Things going smoothly always made Rhea's gut itch.

When they reached the office door, there was no dial-pad, no lock, no digital handshake to slow them down. The door slid open. Vev's projection rig snapped to life, a dart primed and waiting.

But Priest wasn't standing there with a weapon drawn.

No, Priest was strapped to a chair in the centre of the room, a heavy steel frame bolted into the concrete as if someone had wanted to make sure he'd never leave alive. His head was locked in a crown of wires and needles, each one stabbing into scalp and temple, feeding signals into a cluster of machines that hummed like a living thing. Screens jittered on the walls, showing ragged loops of imagery: screaming faces blurred by static, fire chewing through houses, the sound of children wailing through blown-out speakers. None of it looked real, but it was real enough to make Rhea's skin go cold.

And then she saw it.

A line of translucent tubing ran from the base of the machine into Priest's arm. Thick, green fluid pulsed through the line, inch by inch, as if something alive was crawling into him. It wasn't medicine. No way in hell. This was the same chemical from the bottom floor, whatever it was, dripping into his veins while his eyes flicked beneath closed lids. He was sleeping alright, but not in the 'sweet dreams' sort of way.

Static through the Cloud Room. Strannik said: "Steele, Vev. I see you've breached the ping. Is everything alright?"

"We're okay," Rhea said. "But our target… I'm not so sure about him."

"Fuck. Is he dead?"

"No," she said. "At least… I don't think he is. He's hooked up to some machine, and there's some videos – I – they're awful."

"Sedate him anyway," Strannik said. "Grab him, and make your way towards the back. I have men on standby. But ideally we want this to be a clean sweep. I'll bring the craft around the back when you're ready."

"We'll have to figure out how to unhook him first," Vev said. "Man, we could fry his brain if we're not careful."

"No button to shut things down?"

Rhea followed the cables and saw that they led into a computer terminal on the far left side. She approached it while Vev investigated the machine. She tapped a key on the terminal and saw lines of code, and they looked strikingly similar to the lines she'd seen as a child. Then it hit her. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. No way – impossible. Halcyon was locked, sealed, protected. No one outside of the upper tiers could access it, not without clearance from Corporate N.A. And yet here it was, chewing through lines of command, forcing itself into this man's head while the machine rattled like it was possessed.

"Rhea," Vev called sharply. "This thing's not just running a sim. It's writing something. Feeding him a script. You see a kill switch on that thing?"

Rhea's mouth was dry. She skimmed through the terminal, tabbing through directories, folders with names that made no sense: CHIMERA_1, SPINAL_LOGS, MOTHER_NODES. Her gut tightened as she clicked through them, searching for any shutoff sequence. Then, buried halfway down a subfolder labeled NEURAL_TEST, she saw it:

DEACT_PROTOCOL_07.

"Yes," she whispered. Her hand trembled as she moved the cursor towards it.

Then she saw something else: an email.

It was in the log window below the protocol, half-hidden behind cascading code. Her optics auto-highlighted the header:

"[Redacted]," Rhea murmured, unable to believe the words she was reading. [Redacted] was working with these people? The same people she promised to protect the city from? This was the same woman the force operated under, the same woman who controlled The Scrubs. The same woman her father had been working for.

This was all planned. Someone upstairs wants it this way. Every broken mind they plug in just makes the system stronger. Heard a name floatin' around, though… someone funding this whole thing, pulling the strings.

Rhea felt many things: anger, confusion, betrayal, but most of all she was curious, determined to find out more. Her eyes froze on an attachment at the bottom of the email:

FINAL_OVR_PROTOCOL.7z

The name sent a pulse through her chest, a crawling, hot sensation that made her want to look away but couldn't. She clicked it.

"Rhea," Vev said. "Hurry up. We don't have all fuckin' night."

The terminal hummed louder, as if the machine itself had just inhaled. A red bar swept across the screen – SCANNING USER… – and before she could even curse or back out, the scan had already finished.

The words blinked in angry red text. A sharp klaxon erupted in the room, loud enough to shake the glass panels. Rhea stumbled back, heart hammering, as a harsh synthetic voice screamed through the warehouse speakers: "Alert: Sector Seven Breach."

The door to the office slid shut. Everything started blinking red.

"What the fuck did you do?" Vev shouted, hurrying over to her.

"I don't know—"

"Goddamn it, Steele!" Vev said, grabbing her arm. "All you had to do was turn off the fucking machine!"

Rhea shoved her back and she nearly tripped. "Get the fuck off me!"

She found her footing, bore her projection rig. "You wanna try that shit again?" Vev rasped. "You've fucked us."

Static. Strannik said, "What's going on down there?"

Vev said, "Steele started playing with some files and—"

But she was cut off, not by the sound of men approaching the room, but by the sound of the machine switching off. They looked over at Priest and saw that he was beginning to pull the wires off his body, slowly.

"Shit!" Rhea shouted. She pulled out her pistol, kept it aimed.

Vev engaged her projection rig and fired a dart into Priest's neck. The dart fizzled, smoking against his skin as though burned out by some internal current.

"What the hell is he running on?" Vev yelled, stepping back.

Priest's jaw cracked sideways, a disturbing, mechanical grind, and two mantisblades erupted from his forearms with a sharp shhrrrraaaaaang! The green glow in his eyes intensified, the same shade as the fluid still dripping from the tubes.

"Don't fucking move!" Rhea yelled, lining up her sights.

Priest moved.

Fast. Too fast. He crossed the room in a flash, his blade catching Vev's side before she could blink. The sound was wet, tearing: a mix of steel and flesh. She screamed as her left arm came away at the elbow, blood splattering across the terminal.

"Vev!" Rhea lunged out of the way. Priest didn't stop. His other blade swung low, cleaving through her leg at the knee like it was nothing. Vev collapsed, writhing, her projection rig sparking on the floor beside her.

Rhea opened fire, but Priest flashed out of the way, nothing more than a blur of green. She kept firing, and he kept dodging. Eventually her pistol clicked. Out. And it was like her whole life flashed before her eyes.

Vev dropped to the floor, gagging on blood, her suit completely disengaged. She had no arms now, only stumps that blitzed out blood and sparks.

Then, with one final cut, Priest sliced Vev's head clean off her shoulders. It rolled across the floor with a dull, fleshy thud, her visor flickering and sputtering until it dimmed out completely. He didn't say a word. Not a grunt, not a hiss. Just stood there, dripping with her blood.

She was gone... Iced... Zeroed.

"You bastard!" Rhea picked herself up off the floor, heart thumping. She clenched her teeth so hard her jaw popped. Her fists balled. Snap. The mantisblades hissed out of her forearms with that familiar metallic sigh. "Come on!" she roared, adrenaline pumping through her body.

Priest turned to face her, arms hanging at his sides, blades primed. He tilted his head, almost like a predator sizing up the kill, then took one slow step forward. The green glow in his eyes pulsed brighter, almost mocking her, each flash like a clock counting down.

Rhea shifted her stance, blades angled, hands trembling but tight. The office door behind her unlocked with a grinding hiss. She didn't look. She didn't dare. Every muscle was taut and screaming at her to move, but she stayed.

Priest lunged.

So did she.