I snapped off the light, froze, and waited for instructions. The one with the best data should make the call, and right now, that was definitely Lobo.
"Hold," he said. "Two exiting the basement." A few seconds passed in silence. "Heading to the front of the building. Abort?"
As long as those two weren't following up on an alarm, they had no reason to suspect anyone was inside with them. In a place this big and with Lobo feeding me their movements, staying away from them shouldn't be hard. "No," I said. "We wanted to know what they were hiding downstairs; this could be our chance to find out."
"You said you preferred to avoid killing hostiles."
"I don't have to kill them," I said, "to avoid them." Lobo was right, though, that if I went into the basement and the guards trapped me there, I'd almost certainly have to at least hurt them to escape. The secret room was too potentially interesting, however, to pass up.
"We'll use the rats," I said. I carefully and quietly took the one out of my pack and placed it on the floor next to my leg. "Arm both trank gas payloads and position them a meter on either side of the basement door. If the guards come back, knock 'em out." Though my nanomachines can handle any drug to which I've been exposed, I'd taken no chances and had Lobo give me the standard pre-mission inoculation against my own bio-weapons, so the gas in the rats shouldn't affect me even though it would buy me plenty of time to get out.
I felt motion against my leg and cranked my vision back to IR so I could watch the rats crawl soundlessly around the row of shelving to my right and out of sight.
Time dilated as I waited, every second suddenly long and dangerous. Being in the dark inside someone else's space always juices you with an emotional cocktail of fear, curiosity, and guilt, but when you're not alone adrenaline floods into the mixture and leaves you jacked and prone to the jitters. Breathing is the key, as it is in so many charged situations. I passed the seconds taking control of my breath, drawing air in through my nose in a slow inhalation, holding it for a moment, and then letting it leak ever so carefully out through my mouth.
I was inhaling for the third time when Lobo updated me.
"Data from the monitor system indicates the guards are eating in a front room."
"Any way to tell if more of them are below?"
"Negative," Lobo said. "As I said earlier, the main system doesn't cover that space."
"Send down one of the rats," I said, "and scan the area." I wanted to add "quickly," but that was stupid, so I stopped myself; Lobo knew what he was doing. "Show me a path to the closest safe hiding space to the open basement door. I want to be ready to go if the area is clean."
A schematic reappeared in my right contact. I crept along the glowing path. Take a step, pause, listen, wonder if I'm hearing the rat moving downward, repeat. When I reached the spot Lobo had chosen, I leaned against the shelving and concentrated again on managing my breathing. My every instinct screamed for action, but training overruled instinct and held me in silent, motionless position. I waited. Long, slow inhale. Hold it. Long, slow, leaking exhale.
I wondered why the adrenaline still came, all the years and all the actions since the first time I'd broken into a storage room on Aggro and hoped for escape. I'd failed then, and I'd failed on many occasions since then, but I'd also succeeded far more than I'd failed. The probability that I couldn't take these guards and get away safely was extremely low, and my mind knew that. Sometimes, though, what your mind knows isn't enough to let you relax.
"Basement clear," Lobo said. "Guards eating. Entrance is a three-meter-wide ramp sloping thirty degrees downward. Go. I'll withdraw the rat when you've made it down there."
A new schematic and path appeared on my right contact. I switched my vision to IR, but it added nothing to the information on the contact; the room was too cool. I followed Lobo's route around the end of the set of shelves that had been hiding me and then down a ramp. I stepped as quickly as I could while still staying silent, tracking myself and gauging my footfalls with the data from Lobo. I've never liked running in the dark with only displays to guide me, but training again overrode preference and kept me moving fast. Lobo's path ended at the bottom of the ramp, so I stopped there.
"Basement layout?" I said.
"Not enough data from the rats to create a reliable one," he said. "Guards are up front, so a small amount of light should be safe."
I pulled out a tiny glowstick and used it to scan the area. The basement appeared to run the length of the building, was about three meters high, and was only slightly narrower than the space above, though I couldn't be sure of its dimensions with the small amount of illumination I felt was safe. Two desks hunched end to end on either side of the ramp, a chair behind each one. The two chairs for the desks on my right were pushed back; it was a sloppy setup. The guards should have occupied opposite sides so they'd be in position for a safe crossfire on any intruder and also present separate targets. Their sloppiness wasn't new information, however; any good duo would never have taken their breaks at the same time. Their behavior suggested they were inexperienced, so they probably sat with the most valuable stuff behind them. I headed right.
The first set of shelves on both sides of the lengthwise aisle were empty, so I glided past them.
All the shelves in the second set appeared full. I'd planned to scan them rapidly and move on, but what I saw made me stop, put away the glowstick, and use a small flashlight.
From floor to ceiling and as far to each side as my light illuminated, weapons filled the shelves. Some sat naked, others were in standard reinforced plastic crates. Inventory tags, each bearing the stylized ziggurat logo of the Followers, helpfully illuminated themselves as I walked by and then winked off as I passed. That Dougat hadn't bothered to turn off those displays demonstrated an unwarranted degree of confidence in his security setup. I walked quickly up and down the aisles, knowing time was short but wanting to gather as much information as possible. SAMs, automatic rifles, squidlettes, hoppers, dusters, and on and on—the weapons ranged from anti-personnel to anti-tank to anti-aircraft to space-based and told no consistent story. I didn't spot enough of any one device to outfit more than a few troops or ships, but what the collection lacked in depth it made up in variety. Either Dougat was in the arms business, or he was buying everything he could find and hoping he could construct something sensible from the result. Or was I seeing only a little of his collection, and was he actually preparing a far larger arsenal?
None of this was directly my problem, of course, but it did suggest that if the meeting tomorrow turned bad, Dougat and the Followers might be far more formidable foes than I'd imagined. On the other hand, publicly revealing weapons like most of these would be sure to attract attention, attention he couldn't want because there was no chance he owned all of these devices legally.
What I wanted was more information, but even though I'd been in the basement only a couple of minutes, the weight of that time was pushing down on me. I had to get out.
I headed back to the ramp. As my light brushed across the desks opposite the guards', I noticed a rack of inventory checkers at the end of the farther desk. Maybe Lobo had forced his way into the warehouse's systems and I could collect more information from them.
"Have you hacked the inventory units?" I said.
"No," he said. "The security software is surprisingly resourceful, and I encountered serious barriers between the main system and the rest of the programs running the place."
"Will you finish before I pull out?"
"Unlikely," he said, "and once you do I must cut the links or risk leaving open a connection to me."
I looked longingly at the inventory units and the rest of the basement. I wanted to explore further, but it would be a bad choice.
I'd taken two steps up the ramp when Lobo cut in.
"Guards heading back."
A schematic winked into life and pointed me to the earlier hiding place. I ignored the instinct to run and forced myself to walk quickly and silently along the path Lobo had plotted and into the shadows of the shelves. A few seconds later, first one rat and then the other brushed against my left leg. I let them stay where they were and took one step backward so they wouldn't be underfoot if I had to move quickly.
In the silence the laughter of one of the guards rang loudly, the other's words lost in the noise. Their lights reached past my position, and I withdrew another couple of meters into the darkness. The beams swung by the shelves as the guards headed into the basement. A few seconds later, the floor sections covering that room snicked together.
"Clear to go," Lobo said.
I loaded the rats into the pack and walked quickly to the rear door, where I paused.
"External status?" I said.
"No humans visible for several hundred meters in either direction," Lobo said, "and your path to the pick-up point is clear."
I slipped outside and headed left, back to the empty loading area we'd used for the drop-off. The temperature in the warehouse had been fine, but the cool night air still struck me as refreshing and freeing. I was glad to be back in it. As I walked, I reflexively scanned left and right. Lobo was monitoring me, but I didn't want to rely exclusively on him, both because in some situations he has to be too far away to help and because I need to be able to take care of myself. Though I knew I should focus on the world around me, the stash of weapons kept diverting my attention. They represented both potential opportunity—knowing Dougat had something to hide could prove useful—and possible danger, because anyone with so many weapons of so many sorts could easily afford to arm his security staff well.
A block and a half from the warehouse, Lobo's voice shot me out of my reverie.
"Company dropping from a window that just opened above," he said. "Too late to run. I'm too far away to have a shot that could kill them without endangering you."
I stopped and cursed myself for letting the warehouse distract me and for thinking in two dimensions. A man touched down two meters in front of me. He held his drop cable in one hand and a pistol in the other. He pointed the gun at the center of my chest. I heard another man hit the ground a bit more roughly behind me. I didn't bother to check to see if he had a weapon.
"Good evening, good sir," the man in front of me said. "Our employer would appreciate a word."