Chapter 17 - Chapter Seventeen

They started before sunrise because tailing a secure convoy in daylight is easier when you can disappear into traffic, so Maine had Dorio drive the boxy van that looked like any other courier rig while Rebecca and Pilar sat in the back with optics and Lucy rode shotgun, Kiwi on a silent line from a flat two districts over watching a grid of cameras she could touch without setting off alarms, and they parked on a cracked service road facing the abandoned mine everyone kept whispering about, the one with the reinforced round door sunk into rock like a vault from a history book; the door was closed, the fence was topped with passive electrics, the cameras were the small recessed kind that don't swing and give themselves away, and for an hour nothing moved until a rumble rolled down the cut and two armored transports eased out in single file with a white-and-black logo on the flanks—APERTURE SCIENCE in clean letters—escorted by a pair of small drones that hovered high and offset, not flashy, just eyes; Maine said, "That's our ride," and Dorio slipped the van into the lane with enough gap to look bored, Lucy marked the route on her slate without broadcasting, and Kiwi said in their ears, "RF quiet, they're running local mesh only, no exterior chatter," which meant anything that talked to those trucks did it on short leashes, not the net you could sniff from a block away. The transports took the old highway that cut through green patches where dust used to live, grass low and even on the shoulders, small trees getting a foothold, and pillared sun through broken overpasses; Pilar cracked that the desert was getting soft and Rebecca told him to shut it, and Maine told them both to focus because security convoys love tails that talk too much; they kept two cars between them when traffic allowed, faded back at the checkpoints where cameras watched lanes, closed the distance when the road opened up, and Lucy called turns before the trucks blinked because she was reading their speed the way you read footwork in a fight. After forty minutes the route bent toward the city again, not to the clinic district but toward a zone of tall commercial stacks where each building tried too hard to look important, and the trucks slid down a ramp into a freight artery that ran under a black-and-gray tower with a simple sign near the dock that read BLACK MESA in block letters with a small orange bar like a hazard stripe, no ad screens, no street-facing showroom, just steel, concrete, and doors that looked like they were rated for blasts; Dorio peeled off and went around the block while Maine watched the main dock in the mirror and Lucy snapped stills with a wrist camera, and Kiwi's voice stayed level, "Do not transmit from the curb, you can watch but you do not talk from there, they'll feel the ping." They found a slot in a faded parking structure across the service street with a sightline into the loading yard and backed in like a bored courier catching a nap, then rolled down the rear door a foot for air and sat on plastic crates with optics against the dock cutouts, and what they saw made even Pilar shut his mouth: security teams in armor that wasn't Corpo catalog, heavy plates that fit like they were made to measure, visors that ran dark without external glare, movement that screamed training, and on their backs and hips weapons that didn't match any public line, bullpup rifles with thick receivers and heat sinks tucked along the barrel, pistols with wide mouths and ridged housings that Rebecca whispered looked like the "green-melt cannons" from the story of the failed infiltration, and up on the catwalk above the yard two sentries walked slow with something the length of a short carbine but shaped wrong, thick at the grip, single-barrel heads with cable harnesses that ran into a back unit, the kind of thing that made your stomach drop if you knew what a robo-scorpion tail could do; a pair of forklifts rolled out with exo-assist frames strapped to the drivers' legs and backplates, slinging crates stamped with simple dry codes—ACTUATOR ASSEMBLY, BIOMIMETIC SUBSTRATE, COOLING LOOP, FIELD EVALUATOR—nothing that screamed illegal, everything that said advanced manufacturing, and a dock clerk in a clean jacket checked them off on a slate without ever breaking eye contact with the drivers like he'd been told not to get distracted. The Aperture trucks stayed fifteen minutes, enough to offload half a dozen pallets, reload with empties marked RETURNS, and sign an electronic pad held by a Black Mesa foreman who wore the same armor minus the helmet, jaw set, no jewelry, no tatters, no loose tells, and then the transports rolled out in sequence with the same two drones lifting to escort, which gave Dorio a clean excuse to pull out of the lot and slide back into the stream, and Maine let them go because they already had what they came for: confirmation that the mine fed this tower and that the tower was not a rumor but an armory and lab in one. Kiwi fed them little details in a slow drip from the camera grid she could grab legally—a public traffic cam that caught the tail end of an Aperture drone crossing a light, a parking garage feed they were already sitting in that stamped time down to the second, a commercial property registry that said the Black Mesa tower was owned by an asset manager with shells all the way down—but nothing that mattered operationally; what mattered was the way the guards moved, the way the vehicles flowed, the way the side doors sealed with a soft thud like they were closing vacuum rather than air, and the way a pair of roof turrets retracted into housings when a flock of birds passed too close, tracking without blinking but not firing, restraint built into the posture which is scarier than swagger because it tells you there are rules and the people with guns know exactly when they're allowed to break them. They watched another set of trucks arrive with no markings at all, smaller rigs with magnetic strip plates that flipped from black to blue at the gate, and those went to a side ramp that dropped out of sight, a freight elevator swallowing them whole, and Lucy said quietly, "Underground," and Maine just grunted because of course there was more under the tower than on top; Rebecca wanted to get closer and snap the gun markings because she likes to catalog things that can kill her, but Dorio shook her head, "Your lenses will flash on their grid and we'll be on the floor in five," and even Pilar didn't argue because the posture and the order and the clean lines screamed trap to anyone with self-preservation left. They stayed an hour and a half, long enough to see a change of guard, long enough to clock the shift leaders by the way they stood, long enough to notice that the workers carrying crates wore low-profile exos and heat-dispersing suits under their jackets, not sweat-shop gear but proper industrial kit, and long enough to realize there was no angle that didn't end in them being pinned and questioned if they tried a push; Kiwi kept a running note sheet open in their shared dead drop, timestamps, vehicle counts, crate tags, guard rotation intervals, and a short line at the end, "Jammers on the roof, spectrum sweeping wide, you will not keep a signal on a bug here," which meant they couldn't seed the yard and listen later, and Maine said, "We're done," and tapped Dorio's shoulder to roll. They didn't go straight back to the garage hideout; they ran three direction changes, a loop under the freeway, a stop at a crowded stall row to pick up food and let anyone who might be bored drift off, and only then did they park and pull the optics footage into Kiwi's slate to be stitched into a package, and nobody talked for a minute because sometimes saying it out loud makes it heavier; finally Rebecca said, "We're not cracking that without a war," and Maine said, "Correct," like a teacher, and Dorio added, "So we don't," and Pilar made a face and said, "Then what," and Lucy cut him with, "We keep working, we use what they'll sell us, we don't make enemies we don't need," which sounded a lot like the clinic consult from a week ago and made everyone stare at the floor because it was obvious now: the three names were a braid, separate faces, one posture. On the other side of the city a Corpo security team had been trying the same trick from a different roof and got less, their optics catching the trucks but not the yard details because their shooter flinched when the turret housings hummed, and their analyst wrote a note that repeated the word "unknown" too many times for the board's taste; the board still chose patience, not out of wisdom but fear, because any outfit that kept a tower that tight and rolled plasma pistols on the hips of dock guards could probably burn a scouting party in a heartbeat, and the board wanted deniability more than they wanted answers. The cops kept their noses in the clinic district and not in towers, their lieutenant writing another "monitor" memo and adding a line about how the cafeteria's public seating cut down on hallway fights in the afternoons, which made his captain grin in a tired way and scribble "keep eating" in the margin like a joke. David wasn't with the crew for any of this because he was running a double shift for Vera and stopping by his mother's room with a plastic container of soup and a cheap cartoon on his slate for the puppy to stare at, and when Lucy texted "busy late, don't wait," he just sent back "be safe" because he trusted her to handle her side without dragging him blind into it, and that trust was new enough to feel strange; he spent the evening after shift on the roof of his block watching a line of birds ride wind over a strip of green beyond the freeway and thought about how fast things change when you stop looking, and then he went to sleep with his jacket under his head and his shoes by the door like always because rituals keep you honest. The next morning Maine dropped printed stills on the garage table—yes, printed, because he didn't want hot files floating around—and pointed to things like a coach, "Guard rotation here, crate markings here, those pistols are not flash, that rifle is not in any catalog, those drones run quiet and sit high, that gate seals from both sides," and Kiwi added what matters, "They're air-gapped, they jam, they have redundancy on redundancy, and the only way in is through social, and even then you better be walking in with a white coat," which lined up too cleanly with David's clinic contacts for anyone's comfort; Maine didn't like depending on anyone but he liked dead ends less, so he said, "We keep the clinic path warm, we don't spook it, we buy what keeps knees from quitting, we don't ask for toys," and Rebecca groaned because she wanted toys, and Dorio told her she could live longer without them, and Pilar said he'd take the knee brace any day if it kept him on his feet. They agreed to share the stills only inside their four walls, no friends of friends, no bragging, no drunk leaks, and Lucy volunteered to hold the physical set because she was the least likely to show off and the most likely to burn them if things went sideways; Kiwi wiped the slate cache and then wiped the wipe, which is her way of sleeping at night. On the clinic side life stayed stable: patients kept coming, the field program kept ticking, David's dermal mesh kept wicking heat off his spine so his runs felt smoother, and the staff kept offering the same non-pushy contracts to anyone who met criteria, which meant most people still said no because no one trusts a good deal in Night City, and the few who said yes came back on time for checkups because the place didn't treat them like parts. Black Mesa did not open a store, did not put guns on shelves for street sale, did not take walk-ins, and the only civilians who touched their hardware did it with clinic badges on under supervision or with security vests as employees, which made rumors worse because scarcity writes its own story, and more than one crew asked Maine if he had a line and got the same answer, "No retail, stop asking," because he wasn't going to let anyone think his people were a back door. By the end of the week the crew had turned the stakeout into a boring pattern, slots on a schedule to sit in that same lot and watch the yard without getting greedy, change vantage points, count trucks, count guards, then leave, and their notes built a small book of "knowns" that looked professional because it was, and the last page had a sentence Maine wrote in block letters: WE'RE NOT KICKING THIS DOOR, WE'RE USING THE FRONT, which Rebecca underlined twice because she didn't want anyone blaming her when she got the itch. On a quiet evening after a run David and Lucy sat on a short wall eating skewers and she told him nothing about the tower because she didn't need him looking that way, she only said, "We're good with the clinic, keep it clean," and he said, "I do," and she nodded and flicked a napkin at him like a kid, and they both laughed for a second in a way that made the street look less sharp; later that night Maine sent a text to the crew chat, "Tomorrow we demo the tendon assist again, then we talk maintenance plans," and Dorio replied with a thumbs-up, Kiwi with a check mark, Rebecca with a burger photo like always, and Pilar with a dumb sticker, and Lucy just typed "k" because she'd already set the appointment at the clinic through the quiet line David had given them. Across the river, inside the Black Mesa tower, a guard shift logged out, passed clean weapons into a room with a counter that looked like a bar but wasn't, a quartermaster ticking serials, a tech in a gray coat scanning for heat residue like he'd learned that trick the hard way, and a supervisor checked a board that had no names on it, just unit numbers and status lights, and all the lights were green; in the Aperture mine a lift dropped with three more pallets of "substrate" that weren't illegal anywhere in any book, just impressive, and a foreman signed without a word; in the clinic, a nurse changed a bag for Gloria and Buddy wagged his tail, and David washed his hands and told his mother he'd bring soup again tomorrow, and she said, "Okay," with a voice that was stronger than last week, and he smiled because that word was enough to carry him through another day; and back in the garage, Maine pinned a printed still of the Black Mesa dock to a concrete pillar with a dull nail and said to nobody in particular, "We don't rush, we don't blink, we outlast," and for once everyone in the room nodded without a joke because they had seen what waited behind that gate and they weren't stupid.