The next day, after speaking with the QG, Amos, we headed to a local bar to meet our contact for the gig we had accepted. We had gotten there slightly early to scout the place out, but now it was almost half an hour past our scheduled time already.

“Do you think someone is actually coming?” Thorne asked as he placed down his mug, his fourth of the night.

“Let’s wait it out some more. Amos is the one who wants this job done, so he should be more worried about it than us.”

I sent a quick message to Andrew to see how his team was doing on lookout duty before I resumed staring at the exit. It wasn’t as boring as it sounded when you could multitask, with the web pulled up on a section of my optics.

In just a couple of minutes, we spotted a young teen walking through the entrance, nervously looking around. When his eyes landed on us, he flinched back before resolving himself to approach. He slowed down and was about to grab a seat next to Thorne, but when the cyborg directed him a look, he reconsidered and walked past both of us to take the bar seat to my other side.

“Are you…the people the old man sent?”

I nodded.

“Umm…nice to meet you. I am Pino.” He awkwardly held out his hand to me.

“You can call me R, and this is T,” I replied, deciding it wasn’t worth giving out my name for this mission.

Once I shook hands with him, he moved on to Thorne, who looked impatiently down at him.

“We already waited long enough here for you. Let’s get right down to business. Can we speak here?”

He once again flinched back and took a brief moment to recollect himself before responding.

“...Sorry. Maybe we can change the scenery and talk while we drive around the area?”

“Let’s just talk in the car. We should be fine staying in the parking lot,” I replied. It wouldn’t do, leaving Andrew’s team behind, and we didn’t want to follow this random kid around when we were already on guard against the people from High Gate.

As soon as we slammed the car doors shut, Thorne immediately pressed the teen.

“So spit out the details for the gig. The old man said it was an extraction mission, but we haven’t gotten any details.”

“....Right. So, my—errr partner, she infiltrated Sanso Corp. She had managed to get access to their database with her identity as a researcher, but from all the information she had been feeding me, she won’t be able to complete the mission herself.”

“Does she need a cy-sec specialist or something?” I couldn’t help but interject.

“No, no. She can handle it already. It’s just that the database with the info we want is hard-wired to set off an alarm whenever it is tampered with and there’s no way around it. The moment she tries to do so, their entire security system will go online. We need you to go in and help bring her out once she tampers with the database.”

I exchanged glances with Thorne before beginning to look up information on this Sanso Corp. It wasn’t hard to find under the consortium’s network that they were a D-Class corporation. Their main business in space is to supply electronics to satisfy their own internal demand. They weren’t particularly remarkable or anything, but that meant they were a stable, traditional type of corporation.

They had a robust production chain that relied entirely on themselves and adequately decentralized to defend against corporate espionage. Their facility here in Aegis was only so-so, making this doable, as long as we didn’t leave behind any identifying information that led back to us.

The teenager watched us carefully as we thought it over and did our research. However, he had limited patience and soon couldn’t withstand the silence.

“I have their entire facility mapped, and I’ve used a model of their base to run numerous simulations on how you could approach this. This is definitely a doable gig.” He said before sending out a few files to us.

It seemed like this was the kid’s specialty, as the information he sent was pretty comprehensive. He had virtually modeled the entire facility his partner had infiltrated and had data from various simulations on how to infiltrate the place. His focus was mainly on how to time his partner’s data breach with a routine infiltration that required stealing uniforms before springing a frontal assault on their base to extract his partner. It wasn’t exactly how we’d like to approach it.

“Don’t worry, we’ll do the job, but we’ll do it our way.”

He looked at us, slightly confused.

“The plan I devised should have a high chance of success. What are you planning—-”

He cut off as I decided it was faster to show him by turning on my active camouflage.

“...You guys…you aren’t mercs. You’re corpos!”

“It doesn’t matter who we are. We can be mercs that got our hands on some fancy cybernetics or corpos. Either way, we’re here to complete the job, and that’s all you need to know.”

“You’re foreign corpos, too…”

“And why do you think that?”

“...There’re no mercs from around here that can hold on to stealth-type cybernetics for long. The corporations won’t allow it. We practically live in a cage up here in Aegis. It’s not possible to escape their monitoring for long.”

“Hmm, I guess that’s why the mercenary business isn’t booming up here, then.”

“We try…but unlike you people from Earth, we all have to stay low key and take on proper jobs as a front.”

“So you guys do merc work part-time?”

“Kind of…yes.”

Wow, the mercenaries up in Aegis sure have it rough. I guess their existence isn’t as needed when mostly bigger corporations operate up here. The amount of resources required to mess with medium and large corps just grows exponentially larger, and that is before we factor in the difficulty of doing so in space.

“I see…Anyway, let’s focus on refining a better plan to take advantage of our capabilities. I take it you have a way to coordinate with your partner?”

He nodded. “Yes, she may be under heavy surveillance, but we have our ways.”

 

---

 

Thorne - Halls Corporation

“Andrew, make sure you guys keep out of sight, especially Rollo.” Thorne glared at the man in question, who simply shrugged in response.

“Leave it to me. We’ll ensure our escape route is cleared.” Andrew replied, beating a fist on his chest.

Thorne nodded at the gesture before he turned to the other person in the power armor beside him, who was adjusting to the power armor he now wore.

“Everything okay there, Mark?”

“Can’t say I feel confident using something new in live combat, but the neural interface should make it easy.”

If only we had more time to train our men with the power armor. Everything has just been happening at such short notice…At least, Rollo agreed to leave it to someone else for this mission.

As Mark got used to operating the power armor, Thorne spent his time inspecting the thirty-story office building before him. There was a giant billboard that had some video playing and quite some activity in the lobby, despite being nighttime. The dome of Aegis followed the same time zone as Elevate City, meaning it matched its diurnal cycle.

Once the two in power armor were ready, they both turned on their active camouflage and disappeared into the night.

 

---

 

Tally (Miranda) - Mercenary

“Good evening, Miranda.” A woman greeted as the undercover mercenary clocked in for the day.

“Good morning, Kana.”

The greeting was kept short as Tally walked past her coworker and took a seat by her desk. The half a dozen corpos in the entire room each went on about their own work, paying little attention to each other. Tally could easily feel the tension every time anyone spoke to her as they regarded her cautiously because she was the new rising star in the company.

Thank god this will be the last day I will have to deal with this corpo politicking.

The room was silent as everyone worked on their terminal and kept to themselves. The only noise came from people drinking from the company-provided nutrient packets, which Tally suspected were laced with a cocktail of stimulants. It wasn’t uncommon, especially when you worked late shifts like they did.

To any spectator, Tally was diligently working away, but in truth, she was going over the plan she received just the day before. It would take place soon, so there wasn’t a lot of preparation time allotted, but that was common in her field of work. Only those who could think on their feet and adapt to new variables quickly could survive as a mercenary, and that went double during infiltration missions.

As the time approached, she grabbed her nutrient packet and got ready, paying full attention to the aisle leading out of the room from the corner of her vision. It didn’t take long before the woman from earlier got up from her seat and began her way out of the room as scheduled.

It’s now or never.

Tally stood up while pretending to be entirely absorbed with the terminal in her hand as she threw herself into her coworker’s path. As they collided, she squished the nutrient pack in her other hand to ensure it got all over the woman’s clothes.

“What the fuck?! Did your parents not teach you to use your optics, or what?” The woman screeched as the dark brown contents of the nutrient pack splashed all over her blouse.

“I’m so sorry, I wasn’t paying attention!”

“Well, fuck! How am I supposed to make my rounds while looking like this?”

“I truly didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.” Tally bowed and played the meek girl.

“You’re sorry? Can you do anything useful besides apologize?”

“Kana…Why don’t I take your rounds for you while you go get cleaned up?”

“You better! And you’re paying the bill for the dry cleaning!” The woman yelled before she shoved her keycard to Tally and stormed off toward the washroom.

Tally let out a sigh of relief now that the ordeal was over. She glanced around to find her other coworkers uncaring like mechanical robots before making her way out of the room. As programmers who maintained their company’s website and database, they had to occasionally diagnose their system for any errors. And some of those systems were only accessible from special terminals that were physically connected.

She went down the hallway that was surrounded by glass panels on both sides where she could see all the hardware that ran the systems. What she really focused her attention was on the automated turrets hidden in the ceiling every few paces, and the various security bots that patrolled across this floor.

She kept her head down and went straight toward the terminal that was placed just outside the entrance to the server room. It was specifically placed there to perform the diagnostics, without the need to enter into the more sensitive areas.

She hung around the terminal and began doing her job, albeit slowly, as she waited for her backup that she was informed about to arrive.

To tamper with the systems, she would need to enter the server room proper, but the moment the door was opened, even with the security card her coworker had given her, security would be alerted.

As she slowly operated the diagnostic program, she hoped whoever was watching the camera feed wasn’t paying that much attention to her. She felt like they would catch on at any moment when they noticed how long she took. Just as she moved to brush aside the sweat building up by her brow, a voice suddenly sounded shockingly close to her, and it took everything in her to stop herself from flinching back.

“Tally, right? You can begin doing your thing. We’ve got your back.”

She took a quick glance around and saw nothing there before immediately directing her gaze back to the terminal lest the cameramen noticed her strange behavior.

“Relax, I have someone else dealing with their security control room. Go on, get started.” The voice rang out again, even closer to her this time.

At this point, it was obvious whoever was speaking to her was invisible. She took a deep breath and cursed at her brother for somehow getting corpos involved.

“How are you going to deal with those turrets over there? The moment I walk in, they’ll shoot if the guys in the control room don’t rein them in within a few seconds of the security prompt.”

“Relax, your partner has told us of all the security features you informed him about. We know about the automated security systems.”

Tally quickly resolved herself as she had learned from over the years working as a mercenary and began the plan. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to leave the cage her corporate overlords had kept her along with the other employees who had access to sensitive information. And she just about had it with the corpo lifestyle. A few months was all she could take.

She decisively took bold steps toward the fortified door to the server room and plugged in the keycard before walking in.

She stared at the turrets the entire time that instantly came online and pointed toward her. She counted each second. She estimated she had five seconds at most before the system decided she was a threat and would then open fire.

“Five, four, three, two…”

Don’t shoot. Please don’t shoot!

Her prayers went unheard as a deafening gunshot reverberated throughout the room.