The Neo-Metropol Heist

27: Artem

Sergeant Schwartz's office was on the opposite side of the ship than the direction they wanted to head in, a deck up.
Over the headset, Artem could hear Harry's slightly out of breath panting as he pushed the cargo crate along the corridor they were in. It was less a corridor and more a long viewing platform, with the entire starboard wall replaced with an impressive glass window.
The horizon stretched out beyond, blue sky uninterrupted above rolling clouds in strange funnel patterns.
"Pretty," Artem said quietly as the crate rumbled quietly on the dolly. If it had been an old, wheeled dolly then Harry probably wouldn't have been able to push it for more than a couple of metres.
"Shut up, kid," Harry grunted.
"I don't get why I need to come along, you could have just left me downstairs, you're going to put your back out."
The camera shuddered as Harry shook his head.
"If they catch us, it's better to be together," Harry said. Artem seriously doubted he'd be able to add anything particularly useful in a straight up confrontation with heavily armed marines, but he didn't say anything.
Next to him, Artem could hear Cad's cooling fans whirring mutedly, the limp, unconscious body of Private Aitken fitfully snoozing in between them.
"This is her office, I'll go in, get the code and be straight back out," Harry said into his hands in case anybody appeared from around the corner and caught him talking to himself, "if you hear anybody come near this door, send me a signal."
"Do we have a codeword?" Artem asked.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Kid."
"Can it be 'vanilla sky'?" Artem asked, "terrible movie, awesome codeword."
Harry didn't respond and Artem grinned to himself in the darkness as Harry stood in front of Schwartz's office door and hacked his way through the keypad. He was in after a couple of moments - with the right tools he was a competent hacker, nowhere near Aphelion's league or even Artem's for that matter, but smooth enough to get through a simple combo lock.
The door slid open and he stepped inside the vacant office carefully, scoping it out before blundering inside.
As offices went, it was plush, more like a small studio apartment in the city than a simple computer and desk deal. One half of the room was dedicated to work, the other half to comfort, with work taking the lion's share.
On one side of the room there was a computer interface terminal on a metal desk, datapads and flexi-paper piled high and scattered across it.
On the other side, there was a small bedroom area, a wall screen and a flight couch for emergencies. Next to the couch was a small plastic stand with a carefully aligned chessboard on top of it and a single white chair seated underneath.
"Well that's quite a uniquely depressing sight," Artem mused, trying to blot out the frustration he felt at being trapped inside the crate.
Harry immediately moved to the computer terminal and switched it on, a password lock screen greeting him with immediate effect. Interface locked, user: E_Schwartz. Please enter passcode.
"Is there a password hint?" Artem asked.
Harry took out his pocket terminal from his pocket and held it near to the interface, thumbing a few keys awkwardly.
Artem glanced to his left and saw Cad's faceplate change to a green 'syncing' icon and almost immediately he was inside Schwartz's terminal, bypassing code locks and encrypted file structures that would take a human decades to break.
A few second later, he'd found the necessary codes and his face returned to normal, blurred green in the blackness.
"I have the access codes," he informed them, "I have also planted a monitoring bug within the ship systems to monitor traffic and security alerts."
"Good job, Tin Man," Harry said, and for a moment Artem thought that Cad would take it upon himself to explain that he wasn't made of tin at all, but he stayed silent. Too silent.
Then, Artem realised why he had gone so still. Somewhere, a couple of metres or so outside of the crate, a woman's voice, annoyed and patronising, could be heard.
On his heads-up display, Artem quickly typed out a message on the VR keyboard. Schwartz.
His fingers were so tense, like the rest of his body, that he couldn't even bring himself to type 'vanilla sky'.
Harry had already heard, though, he gestured for the terminal to shut down and quickly looked around for somewhere to hide. There was only one door in and out of the office, and in less than a few seconds, a pissed off marine sergeant would walk through it.
On the other side of the room, there was a metal equipment locker, barely taller than Harry's full frame and definitely not wide enough. Without hesitation, Harry threw open the metal door and forced himself inside as the office door opened.
Artem realised he was holding his breath as he looked through Harry's eyes through a thin grate in the locker door.
Sergeant Schwartz was a tall woman, with broad shoulders and scraped back hair that pulled the skin around her forehead and eyes back with it.
She wore the full armour of the marines but carried her helmet in one hand, her other finger pressed to her ear. She had the face of a person that frowned a lot.
"... I don't give a fuck what Castells wants or needs," she growled in a clipped tone, "he can buy off as many fucking congressmen as he likes, we aren't his damn navy. You tell him that the military has first dibs on military craft, then he gets what's left over."
She signed off almost with a snarl to whoever she was speaking to and relaxed her shoulders with a sigh, dropping the helmet onto the desk and gesturing for her terminal to activate. The screens expanded and she froze at something unforeseen, like a deer in the headlights.
Her terminal was still logged in.
She raised one eyebrow and leaned over the desk, her face rife with suspicion.
"What the fuck..." she said quietly.
There were a few tense moments as she seemed to be trying to recall if she herself had left it logged in, and the camera shuddered as Harry shifted awkwardly and as quietly as possible within the locker.
Then, Schwartz shook her head and gestured for the screen to disappear.
"I'm going crazy," she mumbled, "it's just six months, it's just six months," she repeated, obviously a well worn mantra.
She began to unbuckle her armour and a door slid open on the wall behind her, leading into a bathroom behind her. The noise of a shower started as the door hissed shut and Harry clumsily stumbled out of the locker and left the office, grabbing the crate and pushing it away.
"Mr Cain, your heart rate is unusually high," Cad said, helpfully unhelpful.
Harry didn't reply.
They found the elevator at the end of the corridor and Cad confirmed that the ship's security systems were still completely unaware of their existence, and they descended to deck four.
The lower decks were specifically designed to allow for wider loads to be moved easily, more used to cargo than actual foot traffic.
It was a short walk through a series of corridors before they arrived at a tall, sealed door wide enough to fit two of Bessie through wing to wing.
"I have scrambled the nearest video cameras using the access point I established at Schwartz's computer, Artem," Cad said.
Artem looked at him through the darkness.
"Does that mean we can get out of the box?" Artem asked, already pushing the door of the crate open and climbing out into the slightly fresher recycled air and artificial lighting outside.
Flicking his head up display off and blinking to allow his eyes to adjust, Harry helped him to his feet and they both admired the sturdy looking door lock beside the huge hangar door.
"Cad, do your thing," Artem said. Cad appeared from the crate, leaving the quietly snoozing Aitken alone.
He stepped up to the lock and placed a flat, white palm against the screen. A few moments later, it changed with a ping from red to green, and the door began to open with a rumble.
For a moment, Artem was suddenly concerned that the bay would be staffed, but Harry didn't seem fazed, and when they stepped inside, they found the huge hangar reassuringly empty.
Empty, of course, other than the four sleek, impressive fighter ships parked in a semicircle in the centre of the room.
"You could probably buy warm meals for life for every poor bastard in Playa Perdido with the amount of money in this room," Harry growled. It wasn't anger, more disgust.
Artem stepped forward, admiring the mix of smooth and sharp lines in front of him. The ships had no visible windows, the design forsaking them to make the ship more streamlined.
The leviathans made Bessie seem like a dinosaur, and Artem had the feeling that flying in one of them would be an entirely different experience.
To their left, there was a console with several dormant terminal interfaces, on each one of them a stylised version of the RNS Navy logo. Harry stepped up to the console and removed his terminal from his pocket and began tapping at the screen.
"You're up, Tin Man," Harry said, the interfaces in front of him wrapping themselves around him in a film of muted red.
In a split second, and without a single movement, Cad sifted through a million virtual systems and subsystems, hacking data nodes and tracing information streams in the ship's main computer.
Then, there was a single ping and the screens around Harry changed from red to green.
"We're in," he said as Artem moved next to him, leaving Cad to close the hangar door behind them, "starting alert procedure."
In front of them, one of the ships began to click quietly, and then came to life. Veins of red light appeared in the VTOL wing joints like channels of fire in the deep carbon black. The ship started to hum as quiet as a morning breeze, barely any indication that it was even warming up.
"Cad, any security movement?" Artem asked.
Cad shook his head.
"Nothing at all, Artem," Cad replied, "we have given them no reason to suspect we are even on board."
Artem nodded, half-ecstatic and half concerned. Even he thought things were going too smoothly, and sometimes, that was worse than wall-to-wall drama.
He turned back to Harry, who was masterfully flicking between screens and loading bars. A complicated read-out of ship diagnostics floated around him.
"This is going to take longer than I thought," Harry muttered.
"Artem," Cad said.
"Hang on, buddy," Artem replied, looking at the read-out Harry was seeing, "how long?"
"I don't know, only a few more minutes but we're pushing our luck as it is," Harry said, focusing intently at the screens.
"Artem," Cad repeated.
"One second, Cad," Artem said again, still not turning to him, "can you speed it up?"
Harry shrugged, tapping in a string of code that caused the ship to ramp up the quiet hum to a barely audible growl.
"I'm cutting as many corners as I can, kid," Harry told him, "leave it with me."
"Artem," Cad said, short and serious this time, "I have encountered a security risk."
Artem exchanged glances with Harry, and then turned slowly to where Cad stood, looking past the semicircle of ships.
A grey cube sat on the far side of the room, apparently made of metal or ceramic. It had rounded edges and seemed to vibrate with a strange energy.
Artem stood next to Cad and narrowed his eyes.
"Cad, what is that?" Artem asked quietly.
The answer came before Cad could give it, though. With a hiss and a flash of light, the cube suddenly snapped open into segments, a metal skeleton expanding from inside and folding the segments out.
The top segment rose and from it, metal extensions that Artem realised were arms appeared. Then, from the bottom of the structure, two legs lifted the thing to a height of at least twenty feet.
With an angry buzz like a lawnmower screaming into life, the beast loomed over them and stepped forward, the entire floor-space shaking from the movement.
"Ah," Artem said, "there's the drama."
"Heavy lifting droid," Cad said quickly, a vocal read-out, "mark sixteen, model forty-six CastellsTech Cargoshifter. Capable of lifting forty-thousand pounds of weight under full power, and crushing half that with specially designed claws on its forearms. Basic friend or foe recognition system for unauthorised entry."
"Thanks for the update, knowing how efficiently it can kill me is really reassuring," Artem said as the cargo droid stepped forward again, snapping its clawed arms twice and roaring at them, "Harry?"
"Kid, if I step away from this console we aren't getting off this ship, you need to shut that thing down," Harry told him.
Artem turned back to Cad, who stepped forward to the cargo droid, gaining momentum and almost at a charge.
"Cad..." Artem said slowly.
Cad glanced back for a moment, then launched towards the cargo droid. As he reached it, plates on his ankles snapped open and jets of blue fired with a crackle, throwing him like a missile off the ground and into the centre mass of the robot.
They met with a scrape of metal on metal, the force sending the cargo droid staggering backwards, Cad still clinging to its chest, throwing punches that Artem could feel into its ceramic plating.
The monster roared and clawed at its chest awkwardly trying to pull Cad off.
Cad responded by slipping through its claws and bouncing away, turning in the air and firing off two rounds from his wrist-mounted rifle, striking the robot in the center of its body.
Cad rolled away and dodged another strike from the yellow lifting claws.
"Harry, how long?" Artem shouted over the noise of the battle.
"Another couple of minutes, but I've got an idea," he said, swiping at the interfaces.
With a groan, the floorspace the ships sat on shifted, the dormant ships moving out of the way and the ship they were planning on taking moving into the centre of the room, turning slowly on the turntable it sat on.
Cad immediately saw what Harry was planning and led the cargo droid to where the ship was facing, and with a swipe of his finger, Harry made the aft-laser that ran along the underside of the ship snap down and launch a barrage of laser shots as Cad bounced away.
The laser bursts sailed through the air and struck the robot in the shoulder and arm, tearing off one of its claws and sending it staggering backwards with a synthetic growl.
Harry laughed as the robot fell to one of its knees, before it seemed to catch a second wind, shaking the damage off and charging at Cad again.
Cad dodged one swipe, then another, and another, the robot swinging wildly at the air.
Then, Cad slipped under a strike, batting it away effortlessly, only for the arm to crane back around in a single movement and crush him.
Artem's blood ran cold, streaming from his heart, through his body and into his brain.
He stood there, quietly, unable to speak as the robot loomed over where Cad had once been, its clawed hands buried in the floor.
"Cad!" He managed to choke out, his throat feeling as though it was about to close.
Harry said nothing, the computer interfaces around him turning blue in a cascade with a helpful ping, informing them that the ship was fully operational. The thrusters at its wings burned with a dim blue light.
Artem stood there swaying, still unable to compute what had happened. Cad couldn't be gone, he'd seen off worse than a rampaging cargo droid before and come out with barely more than a scratch.
With a squeal, like metal being pulled apart and bent, the robot's clawed arms began to shake.
The cargo droid twitched with curiosity as its arm began to rise from the floor despite the immense pressure that it had driven it down with.
It lifted higher and higher from the ground, revealing Cad underneath, his arms raised and pushing the huge arm away.
Artem laughed with relief as the plucky android continued to push the claw away, and then ducked away.
Cad slipped behind with the grace of a ballet dancer, vaulting up the robot's spine and settling on its shoulders.
The Cargoshifter tried futilely to pull Cad away, but struggled to reach with its short, damaged claw.
"Please refrain from resisting," Cad said, tearing open an access panel and plunging his arm between the robot's shoulder blades, "thank you."
Cad launched himself into the air, somersaulting and landing with perfect posture a few feet away, as the Cargoshifter began to vibrate with a whine.
A split second later, its head exploded in a shower of sparks and flames.
The huge robot dropped to its knees with a heavy thud before tipping over, shuddering once before going silent.
Cad turned back to them and walked towards them, limping slightly having obviously taken some damage to the shock absorbers or the servo motors in his legs.
"I have dealt with the security threat, Artem," he said.
Artem grinned and put his hand on his shoulder. His casing was hot and he could smell the heat that his fans were working overtime to cool.
"Damn right you did," Artem said, "we ready to go, Harry?"
Before Harry could answer, the console came to life with a flashing alert icon.
"The destruction of the cargo droid alerted the security systems to our location," Cad said, "security teams are en-route."
"Looks like we don't have any other option," Harry growled, hitting a switch on the console the opened the entry hatch on the underside of the ship, and then another that killed the screens, replacing them with the stylised RNS logo.
"Cad, get the bay doors," Artem said, following Harry into the ship.
Inside, it was as streamlined as the outside, straight lines and smooth carbon. A cosy space designed to hold a small strike force (or a team of thieves) led to a single-seat cockpit. With no windows, the ship was almost completely dark.
Harry sat in the flight seat and the interface screens came to life around him, cameras on the outer hull feeding a 360 degree view of the ship's surroundings into the cockpit.
"Kid, get the robot and let's go," Harry said, swiping the screens around him and pulling the protective bars down around himself, buckling himself in.
Artem climbed back through the crew space and leaned out of the entry hatch. Cad was already ready.
On the far side of the room, Artem could hear the bay doors opening, the mid-morning light flooding into the hangar bay.
As Cad climbed into the ship, the door leading out into the ship proper began to shudder and somewhere the other side, somebody began to force it open.
The hatch began to close as Artem pulled himself into the ship, chuckling to himself as he saw the cargo crate that he had concealed himself in open up, Private Aitken stumbling out, half-naked and blinking in the light.
Artem saluted the bewildered soldier as the door behind him flew open, soldiers pouring in.
Artem heard the ship hatch seal with a hiss as he jumped into one of the free flight couches in the crew space next to Cad.
Pulling on one of the free flight masks but ignoring the flight suits most likely against every protocol in the navy handbook, he sat back and buckled himself in.
"Punch it, Harry," Artem said as something struck the side of the ship and bounced away.
"Fuck, they're shooting at us," Harry said, "I won't have that."
Ahead of them, the hangar bay door finished rolling open, revealing the blue sky stretching on for miles.
Harry gripped onto the flight control pad, the only piece of control hardware in the cockpit that wasn't virtual, then gestured with his hand.
Before Artem knew it was happening, the ship lurched forward at a speed Artem had never experienced before, leaving his heart back in the hangar.
Artem swore but the words didn't escape as anything more than a garbled gasp as the g-force pressed on his throat and face.
Imagining the aircraft carrier disappearing into the distance behind them, Artem half-relaxed, or at least as much as he could relax with gravity battering him with all the force it could muster.
But then Harry decided to shatter his relief.
"Ah shit, they're after us," Harry said, through the VR interface in the cockpit, the ship magnified the pursuing ships - two of them - and tagged them as glowing red hostiles, "taking evasive, hold onto your balls, kid."
With that mix of standard air force jargon and Harry's own flair, the ship barrel rolled violently and Artem's breakfast threatened to force its way out of his stomach.
"They're still on us," Harry growled.
"So much for them not being able to keep up, huh Harry?" Artem said, desperately trying to maintain his sarcasm under the g-force.
"Slight miscalculation," Harry said, "shit happens."
The screens in the cockpit began to flash and a siren blared from the console as the ship tagged what Artem realised were two missiles flying at incredible speed.
Harry reacted immediately, jamming the flight controls down, the ship following without hesitation and dropping almost vertically.
Artem's arms waved out around him and he had the feeling that if he wasn't buckled in, he'd be floating freely around the space around him.
The ship computer followed one of the missiles as it dropped below them, immediately responding with a deflector shot that turned the streak of black into a ball of fire.
The whole ship rocked as the explosion force hit it like a shockwave.
"Bogey two still in flight," the ship's synthetic voice said, relaxed and focused.
The ship rolled again without warning and Artem pulled his arms close to his chest so his elbow didn't hyper-extend and snap in half.
"Not for long," Harry said, his voice only audible through Artem's headset.
Harry yanked the flight stick back and the ship turned back on itself in a loop, landing behind the missile and tagging it before it could adjust.
"Bye-bye," Harry snarled as the ship fired another deflector missile that resulted in another sphere of light and shrapnel that the ship sailed through, "ships still in pursuit. Kid, any smart ideas? Because now is the time to share the wealth."
The ship shuddered as a spray of cluster missiles struck the side of the hull before Harry could react.
Artem instinctively turned to Cad, who seemed to think for a moment before snapping into action.
"Mr. Cain, this craft is capable of momentary suborbital flight. The pursuing ships are not," he said, apparently immune to the violent shaking of the ship.
Harry glanced back at Artem for a moment, the half of his face visible unsure.
"Up, Harry, fly up," Artem said.
Harry frowned, before pulling the flight stick back firmly.
The ship jolted, then turned completely vertical, flying straight up. An altimeter in the cockpit began to increase rapidly, so fast that Artem couldn't even keep track of the numbers.
On the screen in the cockpit, a power level indicator that Artem deduced was the shielding indicator turned red and flashed madly.
Still travelling vertically, the pursuing ships following, Artem's heart was in his throat.
The altimeter was a garbled mess as the ship ate sky, the horizon around it getting darker as they climbed higher and higher.
Warning messages and sirens flashed in the cockpit, illuminating the cabin with red light, but Harry ignored them.
The ships continued to climb after them, shaking violently against the pressure the higher they went. Artem could only hope that they began to pull away soon - a deadly game of chicken eighty-something-thousand feet above the earth.
Then, behind them, the lights on the closest jet died out and the ship slowed, disappearing into the distance as it froze over and fell away, reclaimed by gravity.
A few seconds later, the second ship followed suit as Harry kept the ship flying vertically. Then, as the last ship fell out of view, he jammed the flightstick down and the ship began to level out.
Before Harry could make the rushed descent, however, the lights in the cockpit suddenly died and the engine stopped. Artem felt sick.
A single warning light flashed in the cockpit as everything lurched upwards as the ship began to fall.
"Shit, we've stalled," Harry said, a spike of panic in his voice.
The ship hurtled down, no power to the engines, leaving the entire ship little more than an incredibly expensive wedge of metal thousands of feet in the sky.
The altimeter now raced in the opposite direction, flashing rapidly and angrily. Pull up, it said, unless you want to die.
Harry had reactivated the ship console system but the engines were still cold, obviously having taken serious damage from the altitude they had been forced to go to.
The sea below rushed up to meet them and Artem felt his palms tense, his nails digging into his skin.
Twenty-thousand feet, fifteen, ten. The ocean raced closer and closer as Harry fumbled at the console.
Artem could almost see the waves on the ocean when there finally came a click and a whirr as the ship engines burst back into life. Harry pulled up on the flight-stick a few seconds before the ship would have ploughed into the sea, the craft resisting at first before finally levelling out, meeting gravity in what felt like a punch to the face.
"Shit," Artem gasped, "just... shit."
Artem could see Harry's shoulders rising and falling as he tried to catch his breath. Next to him, Cad sat still, unmoving and unfazed.
"You know, Harry," Artem said between breaths, "I would really like to go home, now."
Harry nodded slowly, then began tapping away at the interface around him, plotting a course.
They would remove the tracer and send the navy a false satellite signal to track whilst they stored the ship safely away from any marine that might want to take it back.
They would be back in the safe, comfortable oppression of the city before the navy realised they were looking on the wrong side of the Atlantic.