Stray Cat Strut - 6Chapter 5

Chapter Five – Funny Business

“Security, good security, is all about obscurity. If the enemy doesn’t know, then whatever you want to keep secured is at its most secure. After lack of knowledge comes obfuscation, then misinformation, then, after all that, comes physical security.”

–A Guard’s Guide to CorpoSec, 2031

***

We dropped out under the city and right into that dark, cavernous world beneath the megabuildings, where massive pillars held the city in place and where the only light came as small glows from the holes above or from flashing red warning lights.

Coco leaned forward, and Jerusalem reached up, flicking off the cabin light, as if that little bit less light would make us that much less noticeable.

Fortunately, we didn’t go far. Coco turned the van around and we started to rise. “Sub-two,” she said as we crossed up past a large wall painted with the letters S3 and into another section with S2 stencilled on it. “Going to find a place to park, or do you want us right at the door?” she asked.

Garter licked his lips. “Right up to the door. The street kids will be waiting near already. Should be clear.”

Coco nodded, and the van came to a hovering stop before a grated metal door.

Jerusalem leaned back in his seat, pulled out a wire from around his neck, then plugged it into a small device with a couple of blinking lights. The lights flickered, then the grate started to rise, opening up into a long corridor wide enough for a pair of trucks to slip past each other, if only barely.

Coco’s van touched down, and we continued to roll forwards, the hover engine humming to a stop. “I hate these places,” she said as we rode down a tunnel lit only every twenty metres or so by some recessed lights above.

“No one likes these,” Rac said. “They’re dangerous.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Corpo routes,” she said. “They carry corpo cargo. They sweep through these tunnels every so often. If you’re caught in them, you’re either gunned down, or worse, cleaned up.”

“Cleaned up?” I asked.

“Trucks that spray acid on everything, to sanitise things,” Rac explained. “It’ll melt your clothes to your skin. Then it’ll just melt your skin.”

“Polyesters and plastics and hair,” Garter said. “Real materials, leathers and the like, are fine. Metals too. They’ll burn your eyes right out. And the water’s hot. Very hot. But don’t worry. Street kids wouldn’t be here if they knew a clean truck was coming by. And besides, we’re in a van, we’re fine.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

Myalis helpfully added the tunnel to my map, then highlighted the entire network while zooming out. It travelled across the entirety of the city, a spiderweb of passages just under the city’s skyscrapers. Or… no, it was in the spaces between them. Were the tunnels built into the seams between the plates of the city? Weird.

The van turned a corner, and Garter jumped up and grabbed onto the seat behind Coco. “That’s them,” he said.

I looked over his shoulder as well, a hand pressing to the ceiling to stay up. There were several small hoverbikes parked ahead, a few of them with trailers, and a single van not too dissimilar to Coco’s, if a bit rustier.

Accompanying those were about a dozen punks.

The oldest in the bunch looked like he was only a year or two older than me. The rest all ranged from about Rac’s age to mine. Teenagers in ratty clothes that only looked like a uniform of sorts because they all wore an uncomfortably large number of spikes.

The leader’s face was a mess of spikes. On his lower lip, his chin, across the bridge of his nose and eyebrows, and strangest of all, on his eyelids, so that when he closed his eyes there were two little needle spikes that covered his eyes.

Spider: Who in the fuck are these guys?

Garter glanced towards Jerusalem, clearly having received the same message. “They’re nobodies. But they’re nobodies who paid. Come on, let’s look like the pros we are. New girl…” He paused and looked me up and down. “Just keep to yourself, don’t ask questions, and try to just fade into the background.”

“Alright,” I said while resisting a smile.

Garter nodded, then opened the side-door of the van.

We loaded out, Rac having grabbed her plasma rifle so that it was slung low by her side. Coco was only armed with her… well, her very large arms, and Jerusalem stepped out of the van while loading a magazine into a little compact SMG. Then he loaded a second into another identical gun.

Spike-face walked over to us, doing that guy-nod that men do when they’re greeting each other. “You the people Millenium sent?” he asked.

“We are,” Garter said. “Just here to go in and out. No funny business.”

“We transferred the credits already,” Spike-face said. “You’ll get your pay once the job’s done.” He reached into his mouth and fiddled with one of his piercings.

“Right,” Garter said. “Where’s the warehouse?”

Spike-face nodded his head to the side, towards a closed garage-like door with a bubbled camera above it. Someone clever had sprayed the camera down already.

“Got it,” Garter said. “Jeru, get the door. Coco, Raccoon, new girl, standby for trouble.”

“And here I thought we weren’t expecting any,” I said. I checked my Trenchmaker, making sure it was nice and loose in its holster. I knew it was loaded and otherwise ready to go.

Garter shot me a look, but didn’t say anything until we were close to the door. “Some jobs are easy, so you make them look hard. Some jobs are hard. Those you make look easy.”

“He read Sun Tzu once,” Coco said over her shoulder.

Garter rolled his eyes, then tugged out his own gun. A little handgun, without anything real fancy about it.

Jerusalem walked over to the side of the door and started to fiddle with a panel there. He paused, then turned towards Coco.

Spider: Rip.

Coco chuckled, walked over, then grabbed the plastic cover on the edge. She grunted, and the entire panel ripped out.

Jerusalem bobbed his head in a nod, then tossed the cover aside, revealing a panel filled with connected wires and electrical doohickies. He pulled out a small wire from his pocket, connected two parts together, then pressed on a small button labelled ‘reset.’ A press later and the door started to rumble open.

Then Garter sniffed at the air. “Fuck. Masks,” he said.

Coco tugged out a small rebreather from a pocket and shoved it on while Garter grabbed a mask from a pocket and slid it on, just a simple two-filter mask, slim enough to tuck away.

Rac set her gun down and tugged a much bigger mask from her backpack, a proper full-face thing which looked very cold-warish.

I sent a quick text to Myalis. “Mask?”

One moment, I’ll get you something cheap but functional. It’s in your right-side pocket, and you’re down fifteen points.

I reached into my pocket and felt something rubbery and hard in there. Pulling it out revealed… a mask. Though the front of it was moulded to look like a cat’s nose, and it had teeny-tiny whiskers.

I rolled my eyes as I pressed it in place and the mask sucked onto my face then held. It was clearly designed to fit perfectly onto my face, even as I wiggled my nose and jaw.

“Hey!” Garter called back to the street kids. “Got deterrent gas. Mask up or shut up.”

That sent Spike-face and his less-spikey friends scurrying for masks of their own. “Is this normal?” I asked.

Garter glanced at me, then stared at my mask for a moment. “So-so. Just typical corpo shit,” he said.

The door was fully opened by then, and I couldn’t see any signs of any sort of gas, just a decently sized room, with a loading bay at the back and another garage door at about the right height for a truck to back into.

“Anything?” Garter asked Jerusalem.

The man shook his head, then stepped into the room. We followed.

“Myalis,” I muttered real low. “What’s the gas?”

I’m detecting nothing. The air is slightly stale, and there are trace particulates, but fewer than what you’d find on street-level.

Then what the hell was all of that about? Then I glanced over to the street kids, cowering away while we walked in like big damned heroes and I caught on. Garter was putting on a show. The clever little bastard, he was making sure that the client felt like his crew earned their cost.

Jerusalem was the first to the door, checking it up and down and obviously looking for something that he didn’t find.

Spider: Can’t find anything

Spider: Looks like a new door

Spider: No exterior way to open it.

“Going to need to do things the old fashioned way, then,” Coco said.

Everyone ran to the side, and Coco rammed her fingers into and through the sheet metal of the door. Then she grunted, and the entire thing crumpled in the middle.

“Raccoon, get in there,” Garter said.

I tensed up, but then Raccoon tossed me her rifle and I caught it out of the air while she dropped to all fours and scurried under the door before I could protest.

***