The group of four - consisting of Byron, Karina, Nathan, and Horace - left their base of operation in Byron’s muscle car.
There was a palpitating silence in the car as it seamlessly made its way through the various avenues and streets. Byron was tempted to break the silence, but he decided against it, thinking that everyone was in the zone. But the truth was far from it.
When the siblings entered the vehicle, Byron had handed them similar-looking, palm-sized containers. Within it, there was a new earpiece made by Simon. It appeared similar to their old model, but with an additional wire that snaked around the top of their ears and attached into the slot in their bio-implant.
Once they connected the wire, the siblings found out that apart from the regular communication method, the earpiece could directly transmit their thoughts. They could essentially talk with each other without making any noise.
“This is absolutely insane Simon!” Karina exclaimed. “You have no idea how much easier this will make my job.”
“It’s a good thing that we have a supercomputer that translates neural impulses into words inside our heads,” Simon commented over the earpiece.
“Wait a minute. Does this mean that everyone in the channel can hear my thoughts?” Horace swiftly removed the device from his ears in a panic.
Karina and Nathan chuckled, causing Byron to turn in surprise.
“Simon says that it only translates the signals that the programming only catches the signals that are supposed to be broadcasted. Unless you want your perverted thoughts to be heard, it won’t get sent through the device,” Karina clarified.
“It is one of those gadgets that translate thoughts into voice? I head those things can get expensive. How did Simon get his hands on them?” Byron asked.
“According to Simon, our implants do most of the backend tasks of extracting the neural impulses. This device just runs the signal-to-audio translation,” Nathan answered.
With an envious gaze, Byron remarked, “Y’all are so lucky. The first thing on my list after hitting it big is to get a cyber-implant that adds interfacing capability with vehicles.”
To that, the three siblings looked at each other and shared a cynical smile. Were they lucky? The jury was still out on that.
Their journey through the city was fairly uneventful. At this point, they were experts in navigating the streets.
Once they left the city’s vicinity and entered the endless desert, what followed was another three-hour-long drive to their external base of operation where they picked up the remainder of their gear for the job.
Karina usually ran light, preferring to carry equipment that would help her in infiltration, which was her forte. Nathan rarely carried additional gear apart from Tonya, and maybe extra attachments such as suppressors, compensators and so on. Horace preferred a heavier load-out. He was the official muscle of the group, literally. Due to his expertise in martial combat, his loadout almost always consisted of a pair of single-edged curved knives and high-calibre handguns. Funnily enough, to date, he hadn’t drawn either of his weapons. Or rather, he didn’t have to.
Apart from that, Horace also carried most of the miscellaneous gear and was the group’s unofficial pack mule.
After preparing all their gear, the group departed from the base and moved towards the interception point.
The group had perfected the process of infiltrating a moving transport down to a T. It was disturbing how efficient they were.
Gaiter Goods was only a local goods transportation corporation. They couldn’t afford the massive investment to attach a stringent security detail to their fleet of vehicles. However, their vehicles were armed with a single hidden turret platform to deter the occasional troublemakers that may attempt to highjack their manifests.
Nothing the crew hadn’t dealt with before.
The process was perfectly timed. The team marked off a stretch of land that the transport would pass through. They would have to accomplish everything within that time frame. While the distance from the starting point to the delivery was long, there were sections of the journey where the transport would come into close proximity with other agents. The stretch of land they marked off was short but free of any interference.
Awaiting a short distance away from the start of the marked stretch, the group were geared up, prepared, and ready to strike. Karina was donned in her cilia-layered black bodysuit with a breathable mask and goggles. Horace was wearing a jacket over his skin-tight shirt, with a mask and goggles similar to Karina’s. Just below his knees and elbows, there were electromagnetic devices used to adhere to metallic surfaces. Nathan had assembled Tonya and had attached the bug deployment barrel used during the previous Arc E&B convoy job.
Horace took out the binoculars and looked off into the distance behind them.
“Target approaching, in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 -”
Byron revved up the engines.
“5, 4, 3, 2 - ”
Nathan calmed his breathing and fired ahead at an angle veering towards the transport’s path. As he did so, the transport passed a distance away from them.
“1!”
The car lurched as it moved forward. While it accelerated, Nathan pressed a button in his hand. This caused the bullet to unfurl into the arachnid-line microbot. Following an arc trajectory, it decelerated and perfectly slid through an almost imperceivable opening in front of the transport.
Within a gap of 6 feet, the group’s car approached a metre distance behind the transport. Karina and Horace were in their positions on the hood of the car.
With a nimble leap, Karina bridged the gap between the car and the transport and stuck onto the back of the transport like a reptile.
"Stable and in position," said Karina over the communication channel, and extended an arm towards the car.
Horace sent an affirmative over the channel and prepared to follow her as well. Although his action wasn’t as nimble or graceful as Karina’s, Horace was efficient in his jump towards the moving transport.
With a tight grab, Horace held onto Karina’s extended arm at her shoulder and quickly activated the electromagnetic devices on him.
"Why are you so heavy," Karina grunted as she pulled Horace towards the transport.
"Muscle mass, baby!" Horace grinned. "Why can’t we get another one of those suits?" he grumbled.
"Do you know how much this thing costs? And it’s wasted on a brute like you!" Karina bellowed back through the comms.
Horace shrugged and carefully affixed himself to the transport’s back surface. With measured movements, he shuffled horizontally around the sides.
With the transport moving at around 100km/hr, Horace would have been blown off like a ragdoll if not for the EM devices. By only detaching one appendage at a time, Horace worked his way towards a near-flush panel on the transport’s side.
As he carefully positioned himself before the panel, he activated a feature in the EM devices attached to his elbows. The devices slid down his arm and stopped just above his wrists. Following that, they detached with only a thread connecting his wrist straps to the devices attached to the transport’s surface.
"In position," Horace signalled through the comms.
Almost immediately, the panel slid open revealing an inscrutable electric interface with various micro-scale wirings and integrated circuitries.
Horace closed his eyes, waited for a few seconds, and opened them abruptly.
The panel in front of him lit up, highlighting particular sections in specific colours. As Horace inspected them, he determined that they matched the instructions from the report everyone received before the job.
While Horace scanned the details in front of him, his eyes narrowed on one point, and his eyebrows furrowed. During his inspection, an additional section had lit up, which wasn’t present in the initial report.
"What’s this part here Simon?" Horace asked over the comms. One of the features the earpieces provided was the ability to broadcast their point-of-view. This reduced the number of gadgets the triplets had to wear on themselves by one.
"It takes control of the turret platform, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. I couldn’t know for sure what the internal wirings for the turret platform would be from their published reports," Simon replied.
Horace hummed, but he couldn’t separate the uneasiness and irritation from his voice.
"Well since you put it in, I HAVE to do it! You know how I hate all these last-minute surprises," he grunted.
Simon chuckled, "It’s probably time to get used to things like this."
Suppressing his discomfort, Horace began the meticulous task of rewiring the internals of the transport. They were multiple reasons for this. First, the group needed easy access to the manifest doors so that Karina could enter and exit the vehicle whenever she wanted to. Additionally, the transport doubled as a getaway vehicle for Karina since the group could not enter the facility. Finally, the highjacking of the turret platform was simple insurance. Should things go south, Karina would need a strategy to cut and run.
Horace finished his work quickly and ran a quick check to make sure that there wasn’t any oversight. With Simon watching over his work, Horace was confident in his handiwork, but a second look was never unwelcome.
"I’m finished," he said into the communication channel. As the panel slid to a close, Horace began his shimmy back to the vehicle’s rear. He couldn’t detach like Karina, from the sides of a fast-moving vehicle, since the EM devices weren’t as responsive as her suit. Furthermore, he was not accustomed to such acrobatics. He preferred to have his feet firmly planted on stable ground.
During his shuffle, Karina had already opened the doors to the manifest and entered through the narrow gap, preparing herself in a properly occluded position. While the first checkpoint wouldn’t tag her presence, she was more worried about any unplanned observers. The suit could scatter most sensor signals, but there were always exceptions, and she didn’t want to be caught like a deer in headlight. Based on her experience, tight corners and narrow gaps were perfect spots since most waves would diffract around them. While it wasn't substantial, the disturbance was sufficient, and the suit would take care of the rest.
Outside, Horace had returned to his initial position and was facing the car. It was about time to make the jump.
This wasn’t the first time for Horace. He’d been in this position one too many times to count. But regardless of the number of jumps he had made, he never got used to it. Moving from one object hurtling at inhuman speeds, onto another one while keeping his sanity in check was always a difficult task.
"I need a long vacation after this," Horace moaned over the communication channel.
Horace psyched himself, "here we go," and jumped, landing with the grace of a dog on ice on the hood of the trailing car.
“Moving to stand-by location. Good luck Karina!” Byron announced and turned the car away.
The Gaiter Goods transport followed its predetermined path unhindered. It was almost like any other day. Except, of course, for the unregistered passenger riding with the cargo.
As the transport approached the first checkpoint of the research facility, it began to slow down.
The vehicle approached cautiously, as its AI was programmed that way. It did not want to trigger the facility’s security protocols.
It was an unusual paradigm. The corporations did not want to disclose the security at their secret facilities. But unless they were willing to undertake all aspects, including the logistics related to operating it, they would have to concede ground to external agents.
In this particular case, Gaiter Goods unwittingly had an inkling of the kind of security the facility had on its periphery. This information, no matter how securely it was stored, was a breach ready to be exploited by malicious parties. It was ultimately impossible to isolate a system from the ever-expanding and all-encompassing QNet. Even if the system was completely isolated, there would always be strands expanding in the physical world that would, in the end, dip into the virtual realm.
Simon was particularly adept at pinpointing these vulnerabilities. The research facility essentially had two shells. The first, and peripheral, shell pertained to access to the facility. It spanned the external security systems, as well as the bio-signature sensors at the first checkpoint among other things.
Through Nathan’s astute observations, Simon had identified the peculiarities of the external security system to a certain degree. Following a successful infiltration by the SpyDer, the image was enhanced further. In fact, the SpyDer had already provided Simon with a backdoor into the facility's outer shell.
A backdoor, as the name implies, is a portal for an external agent to gain access to a secure system without alerting its owners. This allowed the agent to bypass all the security protocols and encryption they would typically face with a brute-force strategy. With advancements in cyber-security, planting secure backdoors were paramount to the success of hackers and specialists. It was no longer a simple task to weasel into remote servers and data points. It was not uncommon nowadays to see a horde of hackers working together to achieve such tasks. And that too was not a surefire strategy. With layers upon layers of security within the QNet itself, followed by the security protocols in the target systems, it was a gamble for these hackers to gain a foothold without alerting the victims.
Another problem they would have to worry about is an anchor point. The QNet was an amalgamation that would easily swallow an uninformed party. Without an anchor point, which could be in the form of an address or ID similar to the IP address of yore, the hackers would be essentially driving with a blindfold on.
The simple alternative to this was to physically plant a backdoor into the target system. This would also provide a stable anchor for the hackers. Simple, in this case, was a relative term. An agent would have to infiltrate into the target system physically, which was in no way an easy task.
The SpyDer did exactly this. Without a scanner running a search for unidentified non-biological lifeforms within the outer shell, the SpyDer had literal free reign. And thus it wasn’t difficult for it to interface with the outer shell’s system and provide Simon with an anchor point. The rest was an inevitability, as Simon wiggled in through the cracks and made himself at home.
And so as the transport made its way slowly through the first checkpoint, Karina didn’t bother to hold her breath. She was confident in Simon’s expertise.
A moving frame passed over the transport twice, before lighting up a signal to proceed.
"First checkpoint cleared!" Nathan updated through the communication channel, as he refocused the binoculars.
Back at mission control, Rhona breathed a sigh of relief and focused her attention on Simon’s screen, which was currently displaying Karina’s point of view.
