They left the wreck behind without ceremony. No cheering, no looking back—just the low thrum of bodies moving with purpose.
Back at the safehouse, they worked in silence for a few minutes that felt like a minute too long. V checked weapons, swapped magazines, and taped a few EMPs into place. Max fed Eidolon a fresh set of routing locks and tactical overlays; his constructs booted and settled into low-power standby around the perimeter. Lucy sat at the small kitchen table with her deck open and a mug of cold coffee gathering dust beside it. She scrolled the logs again, this time looking for pattern, not panic.
"Five left," she repeated, voice flat. She pinched the bridge of her nose until the headache eased. "They're not random. Nodes are laid out along high-capacity infrastructure—substation clusters, transit splice points, under old maintenance cavities. Whoever built this expected a war that would starve the city if the system broke."
V snorted. "Corporate paranoia with a paint job. You sure that helps us?"
"It does," Lucy said. "If they clustered around infrastructure, they had to put physical seams in—service shafts, maintenance ducts, swapping stations. We don't need to beat doors down. We pick seams nobody watches and we move like a whisper."
Max watched the map Lucy had pulled up on a holo. He traced the line of red dots with the tip of a gloved finger. "Node Three sits under the old river pump station—sealed concrete and a single maintenance entrance. It's heavy duty, but the seams line up with a freight conduit beneath the rail loop. Easy to mask if you go under."
Lucy looked up. "So we tunnel under a live rail line and hope the maintenance bots don't notice?"
Max nodded. Calm. "We don't tunnel blind. We use the freight conduit. It's supposed to carry inert material—old pumps, scrap. It gets checked less than utilities. You get into the junction, I drop a beacon to keep their watchers busy, V and I move in, you do the crawl, you plant the corruptor."
V cracked her knuckles with a grin. "Long as I get the fun part—shooting whatever looks like 'hardpoint'."
They split tasks. Lucy rewrote her corruptor for deeper hardware—Node Two had been slow, older tech. Node Three would be locked behind newer FPGA layers and hardened replication that expected an armed defender. She built traps in the code: sinkholes that looked like holes but would fold the node into a quarantined sandbox, and a surgical rot that erased replication keys in a way that couldn't be hot-fixed without a full shutdown. It was dirty work—no neat kills, only knives in nooks.
V took the van and staged it two blocks from the rail yard, adding decoy plates, a fake log, and a folded manifest that recorded a transporter run hitting the west gate at 03:30. She would drive the distraction if they needed to vanish in a hurry. Max prepped his kit: a lightweight rig for tight spaces, his rifle modified to accept Eidolon's feed directly through a tether. He loaded a set of black-market passes, fake indentures, and a stack of burner keys labeled to die on touch.
They left at dusk.
The freight yard smelled of oil and rain. Freight cars hissed brakes, and a night crew shouted over the sound of diesel. The conduit entrance was easy to find if you knew what to look for—an access hatch half-hidden by a stack of rejected pallets. V and Max stepped in first, quiet as smoke. Lucy followed, deck under her jacket, headset wired to a hardline battery. The conduit smelled like rust and old rubber; it was colder inside, and the sound of the city faded to a low thrum.
They moved like practiced thieves, elbows in, boots careful. Max glided along the metal walls with Eidolon's sensor feed overlaying his vision—thermal ghosts of maintenance bots, faint heartbeat pings of active surveillance nodes, an old cam loop with a blind spot timed to change every nine minutes. Lucy matched her heartbeat to the cadence of the blind spot as she crawled.
At the junction under the river pump station a maintenance hatch led down—heavy bolts, a factory seal, an access lock that needed an authorized key. Lucy crouched in the dark, fingers moving fast. She ran the deck's probe across the hatch's telemetry and laughed once, short and breathless.
"Not even patched," she murmured. "They forgot to close the lock after a midnight repair. Lucky us."
Max placed two clamps and pried. The hatch gave with a practiced twist. The room below smelled hotter—metal and warm oil. A single console glowed red across the far wall: NODE 3 — SECURE: ARMED.
They all froze. Max's optics narrowed, but his face didn't change. He spoke once, a line of calm that steadied them.
"No theatrics. We move clean. V, cover the aperture. Lucy, hardline only. I'm on point. If it reaches for you—cut and run."
V hunkered by the hatch, finger on the trigger. The corridor beyond the access delta hummed with power and the faint, clinical smell of server coolant. Lucy jacked in and the deck filled with active threads, gating rules, and the slow heartbeat of a host watching for crawlers.
On her screen a mirror of Node Three's processes scrolled—layered firewalls, watchdog services, a live port that flared once every twelve seconds like a blink. Lucy felt the same hush she'd felt at Node Two—this was not an empty tomb. It was an armed vault.
She set the sink. She set the bait. Her hands didn't tremble.
"Ready?" Max asked.
"Ready," she said.
He slid the hatch open a hair. The dim corridor beyond smelled like power and old water. Red light pulsed against the server racks inside, a slow machine heartbeat. They moved in.
V's whisper came, tight with adrenaline. "If we get caught, I'll make the alarm my problem."
Max offered no reply. His optics met Lucy's once, cold and bright. "Cut. Burn. Move."
Lucy slid the probe through, and the host's eye blinked open.
***
Support me at
patreon.com/boring_world
It's 22 chaps ahead