Chapter 16 - Chapter Sixteen

Three weeks before Gloria's eyes fluttered open, Maine and the crew minus David sat in their garage hideout, the smell of solder and oil clinging to the air, trading rumors and scraps of info about the trio of names that kept circling in their conversations—Vault-Tec Medical, Aperture Science, and Black Mesa—because every attempt to dig into them ended in the same dead ends, public-facing clinic records that showed clean, Aperture labs that had no listed employees, Black Mesa shipments that looked like ghost manifests, and Kiwi leaned back from her slate with a sharp tone, "This isn't sloppy, this is deliberate, someone built these walls on purpose," and Maine growled back, "Then break them," but she shook her head, "No nets, no entry, they're air-gapped like old-world bunkers," which made Pilar snort, "So what, they run on typewriters?" and Dorio snapped, "Shut it, Pilar, they're smarter than you," and Rebecca just muttered around a toothpick, "Too clean, makes me itchy," because in Night City every outfit had dirt somewhere, and when you couldn't find any it meant the dirt was buried deep. Maine had one angle left, the street, and he asked Lucy, "Anything from your friend?" meaning David, and she shook her head, "He doesn't know more than we do, all he sees is the clinic floor, regular staff, regular patients, no back doors," and Maine rubbed at his temple because that meant they were blind, and he hated blind. At the same time, in a high tower not far away, a Corpo boardroom filled with glass and silence had its own conversation, the chief analyst presenting a short slide deck of images taken from long lenses—Aperture-marked transports rolling out of an old mine shaft reinforced with a vault door like something from a history book, convoys guarded by soldiers in armor that wasn't standard issue, and Black Mesa-labeled crates being offloaded in a yard with gun barrels sticking out that didn't match any cataloged design—and the board murmured in low tones, one voice saying, "This is not Biotechnica," another, "Too sophisticated for Aldecaldo hacks," and a third, "We wait, we watch," but not all of them agreed because sitting still meant losing the initiative. The cops had their own file too, thinner, focused only on the clinic side, and one lieutenant said flatly, "Public trust in Vault-Tec Medical is rising, citizens in the district are reporting lower incidents of botched ripperdoc jobs, food quality in the cafeteria is drawing in off-the-clock officers, morale is improved," and his captain groaned, "So we've got a clinic making us look bad," but signed the report "monitor only" because picking a fight with a clean clinic was suicide in the press. Maine didn't care about Corpo patience or precinct politics, he wanted answers, and after three more weeks of sniffing, all they had was the abandoned mine, word from a Nomad cousin of Dorio's that "the place is wrapped up tighter than a Corpo vault," and Lucy's quiet confirmation that transports came and went on schedule but nobody ever saw where they ended, and when Kiwi pulled up the few grainy shots that made it out they all stared at the same thing: the massive Aperture vault door sunk into rock, a mouth that no one without clearance could ever walk through, and Pilar muttered, "We should just crack it," and Maine shot him a look sharp enough to shut him up, "We don't poke nests we can't burn, not yet." At the same time, Corpo surveillance caught the same images, their analysts whispering to their bosses about "possible heavy manufacturing" and "unknown weapons development," but every time the suggestion to probe further came up, someone cooler said, "Not yet, not until we know who's backing them," because the last thing any Corpo wanted was to stumble blind into a war with an unknown that could hit back with plasma bolts. Night City citizens saw nothing of this except the results: cleaner air, streams outside the walls, wild rabbits and deer showing up near the highways, food stalls selling real cuts instead of paste, and gossip about a "new city" out in the green, but behind those walls the gears of curiosity and fear were grinding, Corpo directors measuring risk in silence, Maine's crew muttering in back rooms, and in the middle of it all David was still just running deliveries, visiting his recovering mother, and wondering how long the peace could last.