The windowless gray permacrete building that Dougat and the Followers used to store their artifacts filled most of a block in the middle of a couple square kilometers of similar structures. Major roads ran in front and along the back of the ten-meter-tall warehouse. The right half of the plain façade it presented the rare passersby was an awning-covered loading area with a long ramp that led down to the road from the work platform that stood two meters above the ground. A noodleria and a quick-mod body shop crowded either side of the freight deck and were the only bits of the block Dougat didn't own. From our aerial surveillance, the small human staff that ran the facility during the daytime must not have had much work to do, because they spent most of the day feeding on noodles or chatting up the body modders.
The rear was one enormous loading dock that handled the really big stuff. I couldn't imagine what Dougat collected that would require that much capacity; perhaps he'd acquired the warehouse from a previous owner and not bothered to customize it.
We watched the place all day. Only one shipment, four containers each no more than three meters on a side, entered the building through the front. Nothing went in through the rear. Nothing left.
The paved alleys that ran along the sides of the warehouse were little more than footpaths, barely wide enough for two large men to walk abreast. The entire shipping district followed this layout, as if the original designers had realized at the last moment that their clients would never agree to have their buildings share walls and added separating strips as afterthoughts. The buildings were tall enough that even during the day at least a part of every alley was in shadow except for the brief stretches when the sun blazed directly overhead.
Daylight had started fading hours ago, so the spot where I stood, about twenty meters down the left alley from the rear of the building, was dark enough that no one walking by either end of the warehouse would have a chance of seeing me. I'd dressed in mottled black and gray from cap to gloves, and I carried a similarly colored pack. From where Lobo had dropped me in a landing zone a klick or so away, I'd crept from building to building in shadows, pausing after each move to check for possible observers.
Now, after fifteen minutes of waiting silently beside the rapidly chilling wall, as best I could tell all that effort had been a waste. I'd seen no one; the warehouse district was a wasteland. No dealers, no hookers, no patrolmen, no guards—no one.
"Do you read any human IR signatures in the area?" I said to Lobo. Per our now standard policy, I traveled with a regular comm unit, an emergency broad-frequency transmitter woven into my clothing, and a tracker embedded in my arm. Though I'd initially doubted the value of this redundant setup, after needing Lobo to find me during a recent difficulty, I was happy to take the extra precautions.
"None in the roads or alleys within a block on either side of you," Lobo said. "I must caution again, however, that most of the buildings in this district are shielded, so I can't scan them."
"Understood," I said. "I'm going to send in the rats. Yell if you spot any transmissions."
"Of course," Lobo said. It was mission time, so he maintained a neutral tone, but I chided myself for repeating orders he'd never forget.
Dougat was bound to have outfitted the front and rear of the building with a variety of alarms, but for warehouses this basic and solid, few bothered to lace the permacrete with any electronic protections. The reasoning was obvious: Getting through one of the solid side walls would either require a lot of time or create enough noise that interior security systems would more than suffice to catch an intruder.
Fortunately, I had an option they had no way to anticipate. I spit in my hands, directed the nanomachines to decompose a growing cylindrical section of the wall, and rubbed the spit on the permacrete. Some combination of what Jennie did to fix me and the experiments the Aggro scientists ran on me granted me the ability to exert fine-grain control on the nanomachines that lace my cells. I switched my vision to IR—another gift, though I suspected an unintentional one, from Jennie—and watched as the nanomachines worked quickly and efficiently, the pace accelerating as they used the permacrete to create more copies of themselves, which in turn consumed more and more of the wall. The only signs of their work were the small IR signature of the energy expenditure and the slowly growing cloud of nanomachines where that portion of the wall once stood. I hunched over the small swarm to shield the activity from Lobo; we share a lot, but no one knows what happened on Aggro, and I intend to keep it that way. When the hole was about a third of a meter across, I instructed the nanomachines to disassemble themselves. In a few seconds, a pile of dust along the outside of the wall was all that remained of them. Dougat's people would wonder tomorrow how the intruder had so quietly ground away a section of the permacrete, but the only clue they'd find would be the dust itself.
I took the two customized gas rats out of the pack. I liked the rats because they had so many uses in urban conflicts and rarely aroused suspicion. Collapsed, each arm-sized cylinder would attract little attention from anyone who didn't know modern weapons. Activated, the cylinders sprouted legs and a coating of sensors that resembled thick, dark-brown hair. Each rat could carry a few kilos of any payload from gas to explosives, and each possessed a modest recon and analysis system.
The rats I gently lowered onto the warehouse floor were special. We'd customized them using Lobo's on-board, battlefield-ready, mini-fab, a small but powerful chamber that included full sets of waldos and 3D printers that either he or I could control. We'd added extensions for detecting and interfacing with both cable-carried and wireless security networks. I thumbed on each rat and pulled my arm out of the hole.
"You're on," I said to Lobo. "Patch me the feed."
Lobo took control of the rats. An IR image of the inside of the warehouse flickered to life on the contact on my left eye. A second, similar image on my right eye immediately followed. Lobo added trace lines that glowed red where cables ran and green where major wireless transmitters hung. The faintly glowing image of the inside of the building superimposed on the end of the alley I was watching, and my mind took a moment to adjust to dealing simultaneously with the two realities. It struck me then that I hadn't used a heads-up display in quite a while, and I was torn over whether the lack of action was a good thing, because it meant I'd managed to avoid violence for a time, or a bad sign, because it suggested that I was turning soft.
I gently shook my head and focused on the two images; the time for self-reflection is definitely not in the middle of a mission.
The rats scurried to the nearest cable carriers, sections of unshielded conduit that ran along the building's side walls about three meters off the floor—high enough that no one would normally bump them, but low enough to make maintenance easy. Each rat fired a small drill-dart that trailed a thin wire as it flew into the conduit and immediately burrowed inside.
I pulled a roll of gray cling from my pack and snapped it into shape. I held it against the wall until the combination of static electricity and embedded glue cemented it tightly to the permacrete. Useful in the field for everything from quick shelters to very temporary repairs, the patch wouldn't pass close inspection, but no one at either end of the alley would notice it. A wire mesh woven into the cling served as an antenna through which Lobo could monitor and enter the building's network.
"I'm live on the security net," Lobo said.
"How long to crack?" Guard networks in shielded buildings typically used relatively weak security protocols, so we figured Lobo's built-in, massively parallel computing infrastructure should be able to hack into this one in a few hours. More than nine hours of darkness remained, so we had plenty of time.
"Go to the rear door," Lobo said. "It's unlocked."
I sprinted to the end of the alley. The interior displays vanished from my vision. I paused long enough to check in both directions for company, then dashed to the staff door. It opened as I approached and closed quickly behind me.
"How did you do that?" I said. "Even if you lucked onto the encoding scheme immediately, unless they used the weakest possible passwords and no additional preventions that should have taken at least an hour or two."
"The security system runs a standard three-level protocol with industrial-level encryption and both password and biometric checks," Lobo said, "so it's fairly typical of this type of installation. You wanted speed, and now you're in. What's the problem?"
"I repeat: how did you do that?"
"I've told you many times that I constantly work to improve myself. That effort extends to my computing infrastructure."
"Fair enough," I said, "but to hack into any system of this caliber that quickly you must have a lot more capacity than I'd ever imagined. Just how does your computing system work, and how far do its capabilities extend?"
"It's a complex topic," Lobo said, "and now is hardly the time to discuss it. By the way, how did you make a hole in the wall for the gas rats? I didn't spot any tools."
Lobo was open and talkative on every topic except himself. In that way, we were similar. Someday, I'd have to demand more information from him; I did own him, after all. He was right that now was not the moment to do that, nor was I interested in explaining myself to him.
"That's also a complex subject," I said, "and I need to get moving. Are all alarms offline?"
"No," Lobo said. "Those circuits send status updates to both the Institute and the police building each time they go offline. Their sensors are detecting you, but the warning information they're sending is never making it to the control modules. The data begins the journey, but I delete it before the system can react to it. As far as this building is concerned, you're the invisible man."
"Am I alone?"
"Yes."
"That's odd," I said. "I would have expected Dougat to have guards as backup."
"No other building in the area appears to employ human security staff at night," Lobo said, "so Dougat would have drawn attention to the facility had he used any. More importantly, the building's system is not as weak as you seem to believe. What I hacked was the system for the main storage area. A second, much stronger processor grid with a tougher protocol protects the entrance to the basement area."
"Basement?"
"Fifteen point five meters east northeast of your position. The route's on your right display."
A schematic of the interior and a jagged blue path that started with me superimposed itself on the right half of my vision. Two rows of shelving separated me from the basement entrance.
"Nice layout diagram," I said. "Can you get any inventory info?"
"Negative," Lobo said. "The protection units need to know only the basics of the interior setup, so that's all they have. They don't even possess links to any outside systems beyond those at Institute and the police building."
"Basement layout?"
"Unavailable. As I said, it's on a separate system."
"Hack it."
"I'm working on it," Lobo said. "I told you it was stronger."
Though any area with a separate security system was inherently interesting, I was wrong to focus on it. My goals were first to set up the diversion and only then to explore if time permitted. Should we need the distraction, I wanted it to cause as little damage as possible, so I hoped to locate a small section of the warehouse with very little of value in it. If the place was packed with valuable goods, I'd live with the potential loss, but I hate senseless destruction. I crept to the nearest row of shelving, pulled a small light from my left front pocket, and started a quick inventory.
In less than two minutes I'd checked five large storage corridors and was all the way to the middle of the building. I needn't have worried about potential damage: the shelves were either empty or holding only basic supplies destined for the Institute: sealed snacks, souvenirs, staff uniforms, and all the other operating materiel of any museum. The labels on the few boxes scattered among the shelves might have been fakes, but from spot checks of the weights, I didn't think so.
The basement was suddenly a lot more interesting, but I had work to do.
If you're hitting a building and you want maximum external effect with minimum internal damage, shaped charges on the roof are just the ticket. You take out a small center section of the target area a fraction of a second before the rest, then angle the perimeter charges so the explosion shoots debris spectacularly skyward but also results in most of the blown bits falling back into the hole. I had five small charges with me, each wrapped around a short arrow with an active head that contained an extensible antenna and a signal repeater. I took the arrows and a small crossbow from my pack; sometimes old tech is the best tech. I shot the first arrow at a spot about midway from the building's sides and ten meters or so from the rear entrance. It stuck nicely. The ceiling was high enough that I couldn't tell if the arrow's tip was finishing the process by drilling until it could extend an antenna above the roof.
I learned it had worked when Lobo picked it up.
"First charge checked in," he said. "Main security systems remain under my control. Even when I pull out, they won't remember it."
"Excellent," I said.
I shot the remaining four arrows into the ceiling so they formed points on a rough circle with a radius of about five meters.
Lobo confirmed each was working as its antenna poked into the night. If we needed the diversion later, Lobo would trigger their primary payloads. If we got away safely, Lobo would set off the tiny secondary charges in the tips of each of the arrows. Each such charge would puncture an acid canister that sat behind its arrow's tip. The resulting corrosive flows would destroy the explosive material and enough of the casings to render the arrows both harmless and extremely difficult to trace.
"I've reconnected to the building net via the antennas," Lobo said, "and told the rats to withdraw their probes and head back to you."
The first rat bumped into my right leg. I picked it up and crammed it into my pack.
Before the other one could reach me, Lobo's voice rang sharp in my ear.
"You have company."