OK, Just got that ready. Commenting strongly encouraged, I need opinions
on this. Hopefully not to many mistakes in it, I didn't really do any
proof reading. Enjoy.
*****
With an almost inaudible hiss part of the ceiling raised and then slid
away to the side, giving way to a patch of darkness above. A few
seconds later a head appeared, a long plait extending from its back
like a scorpion's tail. Aya grabbed the edge of the access hatch and
pushed her body free of it, head first, doing a half turn once her
feet were clean, and only then let go. She dropped into the corridor,
gently landing on both feet at once, the soles of her boots muting any
sound.
She smirked. Flawless performance, ten out of ten points. When
she had nothing better to do and was in the mood she sometimes watched
gymnastics tournaments, but competing herself had never crossed Aya's
mind; far too boring it was. It did give her ideas, though - for
example how to get out of access shafts too narrow to turn around
without falling on her head. And a bit of style didn't hurt either, of
course.
Without haste she headed down the corridor, employing a gait
that was reminiscent of idle strolling and a cat's graceful sneaking
at the same time. She turned a corner and started counting the doors,
finally stopping before the fifth one to the left. For a moment she
glanced at the sign next to it, then gently pushed it. The door swung
open.
Tempering with the building's alarm system had easier than it
should have been, almost criminally easy. A couple of minutes physical
access and had been nothing the systems wasn't ready to do for her,
which in her case was disabling certain parts of the sensor grid,
shutting down a number of cameras and forgetting about it. She'd also
unlocked a number of doors for her convenience.
To be fair, security was enough to stop any dilettantes trying
to break in, and only dilettantes would try to break into an office
building in the first place. Besides the furniture and odd bits of
decorative art, there was nothing of value to be had and even those
didn't sell for much. It simply didn't pay for the pros. Normally.
Aya pulled the door shut behind her. The office positively
reeked of money, or, to be more precise, of real leather and wood.
Very likely air deodorant, but someone had definitely made an effort
here. Polished marble lookalike covered walls and floor, with a huge
company logo inlaid in the latter, and an enormous reception counter
extended over almost the whole width of the room, shielding a good
deal of the window front from the view - obviously someone had deemed
the counter more impressive. Maybe it even was on some level, but Aya
couldn't stand faux wood. Sure, it was very high quality and to the
bare eye probably indistinguishable from the real thing, but Aya's
night vision goggles showed it clearly for what it was.
The faux leather armchairs lining the walls weren't any
better, but at least there was the chance that they were at least
comfortable. Aya prodded one experimentally, but even allowing for the
fact that nobody ever sat on it in an office like this, the seat was
astonishingly hard. At what these things had to have cost you'd really
expect better. Oh well, she wasn't here for the furniture anyway.
Three doors connected the reception area with the adjacent
rooms. According to the building plans the two to the right of the
counter led to the toilet and a small kitchen area; the one she wanted
was on the left. It opened into a room almost twice as big than the
reception area, with carpet covered floor and wood panelled walls.
Faux wood. The same applied to the large desk, that was only sightly
smaller than the reception counter. At least they had gone for
different chairs, albeit in the same faux leather. Aya slumped herself
into the one behind the desk; it hugged her body comfortably. Now that
was a chair.
For a few moments she stared into the empty office, then
swivelled around. Aya shook her head. If she had a view like this, she
wouldn't sit with the back to it. She pulled the goggles off and the
world faded into an uniform blackness, that only gradually turned into
separated into different shades of black.
A sea of lights unfolded before her, like reflections on still
water. Here and there dark looming spires stood in the sea, only the
orange lights gleaming on their surface visible, like reflections of a
setting sun. Aya sighed. From up here even the position lights of the
skyscrapers had something poetic. From up here, you could almost like
the city. Almost.
Aya looked at the time piece on her arm and pushed herself out
of the chair. Time to get back to work. She donned her goggles and the
shades of black ebbed away, to replaced by colours, and every detail
of the room surfaced from the darkness.
A couple of man high display cases covered the wall opposite
the window front, filled with all kinds of tasteless junk that someone
somewhere probably called art, and a number of awards and trophies
just as tasteless. Not a single piece was worth more than the material
it was made from and if she wasn't completely mistaken even that was
hardly worth anything at all.
For some inexplicable reason the manufacturer had made the
locks much tougher than the actual cases, so Aya didn't bother with
those. She pulled a multitool the from the holster at her hip and set
it to cutter. The grey mass at the business end of the pencil like
grip wobbled a bit and then a knife blade formed on it. Nanotechnology
at its best - expensive, but still a lot cheaper than a complete tool
chest. Slightly more portable as well.
The blade cut through the case material as if it was made of
paper and in a couple of seconds Aya had cut out a complete circle,
still sitting at its place. She made another small cut beside it and
then used the blunt side of the small blade to lever it outside. She
slipped her hand into the hole and grabbed a transparent something. It
was a trophy for some obscure game she'd never heard before and it
looked even uglier in real life than it had on the picture.
Aya took down her backpack and produced a small cylinder from
it, some forty centimetres in length and fifteen in diameter. It was
mostly transparent, only the caps at the ends were opaque and grey.
She unscrewed the top and placed the trophy inside, then screwed it
back on and pushed a large button on the bottom portion. A lamp next
to it came to life, blinking furiously and the whole of the tube
filled with a kind of fog. In a matter of seconds the fog solidified
into white filaments, filling the complete tube and catching the
trophy within like a spider's net. The lamp switched from blinking to
continuous mode; object secured and ready to go.
Aya stuffed the tube back into her backpack and slung it over
her shoulders. Now that she had what she'd come for, the only thing
left to do was getting out unseen. She quickly crossed the office,
carefully opened the corridor door the tiniest of slits and listened.
Others wouldn't have bothered. With that many floors, the handful of
security personal in the building kept to the ground floors, but as
far as she was concerned there was no such thing as too much caution.
And double checking had saved her once already.
No sounds were coming from outside, however, and the only
things she heard were her own breath and heart beat. She slipped out
of the door and pulled it shut behind her once again. Aya tried the
handle; locked. That meant the security system was working her little
extra routines now. By the time she was out of the building only the
broken display case would prove anything had happened.
Navigating the corridors turned out even more difficult than
the floor plan had suggested. The original layout of the building had
been three rings of offices, separated from each other and the
building core by three rings of corridors and an additional sixteen
corridors perpendicular ones connecting them like the spokes of a
wheel. It was a nice, effective layout, but after trying desperately
to meet the clients expectations, it was a genuine maze. In which way
that was an improvement for the clients was beyond her. Maybe they
didn't want to be found, or maybe there were weekly floor competitions
who could get navigate it fastest or something. In any case studying
the floor plan in detail really paid off. Just one more turn and she
should be... Damn. Where did that wall come from? Aya closed her eyes
and tried to recall the plan. If her memory didn't betray her, that
particular wall had not been in there, but that didn't matter now.
Left, right, right? Unless there were more wall that weren't in the
plan, of course.
Fortunately there weren't. She didn't really mind stumbling
around in mazes that much, but she was on a schedule. Not a terribly
tight one, that would have been asking for trouble, but she preferred
not to waste what extra time she had on office layouts. You never knew
what you might need it for later on.
In the office the circular layout of the building had been
hardly visible, with only the slightest bend hinting at it, but that
close to the centre it was impossible to miss. The whole of the
corridor was only a little more than twenty five metres in length and
she could overlook almost half of it. Half a circle crammed with a
multitude of doors. Most of them provided access to the ducting and
cabling for the floor, and there were a couple of storage rooms as
well, but Aya wasn't interested in any of these.
She walked up to the door labelled 'Core Access' and pulled.
Even though it wasn't locked due to her tinkering with the security
system, it opened only reluctantly. From the outside it looked just
like any other door on the floor, but it was a lot heavier - solid
metal, blast proof. Aya didn't open it all the way up; she slipped
through as soon as the opening was wide enough to slip through and
then stared pulling it shut behind her. As soon as the door had
reached it's resting position the lock mechanism activated, the heavy
bolts sliding audibly into position.
To anyone with claustrophobia this place would have been hell,
to anyone with acrophobia more so. The width and height of the passage
way, if you could be call it that, matched those of the door, making
it about a half metre in width and two in height. Unlike a normal
passage way, however, it abruptly ended after a couple of steps. Not
in a wall, though - it opened into the core shaft itself. One hundred
and twenty floors of free fall, sublevels not included, and she wasn't
even that close to the top.
Free fall wasn't what she had planned, though. The height
wasn't a problem, at least none that a good rope couldn't deal with,
but at five metres in diameter the shaft didn't forgive any wrong move
and ending as a smear on the wall wasn't that enticing a prospect.
Where was that stupid service platform anyway? It should have
been waiting for her when he came in. Aya edged closer to the shaft,
to have a look around, carefully avoiding to get too close, however.
The elevator had enough power to rip her head clear off and no safe
guards to stop it from doing that.
It had no intentions of doing that, however. She could see the
metal grate hanging right above the current floor, exactly where she
had left it on her way up, and it was doing nothing. Great, and she
had though the job was too easy to be true. Served her right.
The walls of the shaft were too smooth to get any reliable
hold and none of the tubes lining them were close enough to reach from
her position. Besides, she didn't trust them to hold her weight. The
framework beneath the service platform, on the other hand, should do
just fine.
Aya took off her backpack and produced a grappling hook and a
belt from one of its side compartments. If this didn't work out, she
was in real trouble. It could take weeks for anyone to notice that the
platform wasn't where it ought to be and come investigating. If she
got really lucky, whoever was responsible to investigate the break in
would check on the shaft, but chances where she's either have to cause
some kind of damage in the shaft, so people came looking for the
problem, or disassemble the door from the inside, and it was unlikely
she managed either of these before it was too late. She should really
have checked on the damn elevator before closing the door.
Aya pulled a length of cable from the belt and attached it to
the hook. The hook was light weight, but if she missed... There was
nothing she could hold onto. If, on the other hand, the cable slipped
out from under her fingers... Absolutely magnificent options.
She fastened the belt around her waist and sat down directly
at the edge, pressing her back against one wall and her feet against
the other. Aya took a deep breath, and threw the hook.
It missed its target by a couple of centimetres. The hook
rebounded off the wall of the shaft and then dropped like a stone. Aya
braced herself. With an uncomfortably strong jerk the hook ended it's
fall, but didn't manage to pull her off balance. Aya exhaled audibly.
She had more luck with the second try, the hook caught on one
of the struts and stuck. Aya tucked at the cable, but it held. She
stood up and positioned herself at the edge of the shaft, then
shortened the cable until and grabbed it with both hands. Well, there
went nothing.
She drew up her legs. The moment the weight was off her feet,
the ground slipped away under her. Skidding over the edge like that
still wasn't one of her favourite sensations, but she wasn't going to
get a fit over it. After all this wasn't any different than the rope
swings she'd loved when she was little. Except for the distance to the
ground. And the far less solid fastening. There was absolutely no
reason to enjoy it. And she so wasn't trying to kid herself.
Swinging her body contrary to the cable, Aya quickly reduced
its momentum to the point where it was near still, then pushed a small
button on the belt. Slowly, painstakingly slowly, the micro winch
inside started to pull the cable in. There was nothing she could do
about that; the winch was meant for the cable only. Being able to lift
her was only an emergency feature, and quite an astonishing
considering its size.
If she could have climbed the cable, she'd already been up,
but unfortunately it was too thin for that; nowhere to get a grip on
it, even with the gloves. Instead this was turning out to become a
trial of patience. Not the 'overcome and get stronger' kind, the other
one - the 'suffer to until death' kind. Patience just wasn't her;
reputedly that ran in the family. Not that she couldn't spend hours
on, say, a jigsaw, she was fine with that, but waiting, especially
when she didn't know how long, was like playing harpsichord on her
nerves.
In the end it took a whole seven minutes for her to get into
range of the elevator's framework. Aya set the winch to stop and
grabbed the strut closest to her, then started to work her way towards
the centre of the grate, where a hatch was. Swinging forward and
backwards a couple of times she gained momentum, then folded her body
up and pushed though the hatch, which gave way without even bothering
to put up any resistance.
With the push of yet another button on her belt the cable
detached from the hook and, without having her weight to bear, quickly
retracted. She could have recovered the hook right away, but it was
far easier when the platform was in ground position, and as far as she
was concerned, she'd done enough acrobatics for that day.
She sat down cross legged in the middle of the platform and
flipped the control panel next to her open. She pushed a couple of
button, but the lift didn't budge. Instead the diagnostic display
sprung to live, greeting her with a jumble of status messages.
Terrific. She'd always wanted to debug a lift.
Well, things could be worse. Even if she couldn't get the
thing to move, she was in a much better position here, than she had
been before climbing up. From here, she could always get out of the
core shaft, and back onto the floor she had come from. She'd have to
break a couple of locks this time, and crawling through the cabling
floor twice a night wasn't exactly her idea of fun, but it sure beat
starving to death. Oh, wait, she'd actually die of thirst first.
Aya brought her train of thought to a halt and forced herself
to concentrate on the lift control. Most of the messages were
meaningless garbage, at least as far as she was concerned, but a few
words caught her attention. It claimed to have suffered a protocol
mismatch - probably when the building computer had tried to pass along
her orders - and now the stupid thing had gone into diagnostic mode.
There probably where ways to deal with that kind of thing amicably,
but she wasn't in the habit of carrying the lift maintainers manual
around with her. Besides she didn't feel very friendly about that
piece of junk anyway.
She produced one of her multitools from their holster and set
it to screwdriver, then placed the tip on the first screw. It
instantly hardened into the desired form. Reputedly there were still
people using interchangeable heads. She'd never get anything done if
she had to lug that kind of weight around with her. There, that was
the last one. Aya put it into her pocket to the others and removed the
panel. Yikes.
Whoever was responsible for that deserved to die - a slow,
painful death. She had seen hastily thrown together jury rigs better
than this... can of worms on a paint diet? Some were still dangling
from the panel she had lifted off, but most of them were sitting in a
despicable rubbery goo. Glue. Whatever. It was a wonder the elevator
had ever moved at all. Too bad she couldn't really file a complaint,
but what should she put in the form? Issuer: A thief? Might even be
fun.
Aya selected a pair a of wires that seemed marginally thicker
than the rest and searched for the place where they connected to the
circuit board. It turned out to be a small plug. Well, that looked
promising; she pulled it off. The display turned dark; so either she
had just cut the power, as intended, or fried the board. She plugged
it back in.
For a moment nothing happened, but then the display came to
life again, telling her to wait for self diagnostics to finish.
Instead she screwed the panel back on. She was almost done when the
test were finished and a reassuring 'Ready.' appeared. A few button
presses and the platform set obediently in motion, as if nothing had
ever happened, and of course nothing had happened as far as it was
concerned.
The air stream from below made Aya's eyes water as the
elevator picked up speed and she had to take off her goggles.
Instantly darkness enveloped her, but she didn't mind, simply closed
her eyes and imagined being outside, brilliant sunshine warming her
skin and a light breeze blowing. By the time the elevator had reached
the bottom of the shaft she had almost managed to trick herself in
believing it.
The platform came to halt with a jerk. Aya donned her goggles
and raised to her feet; time to get out of this place. She pulled the
hatch open and let herself drop into the space beneath the platform.
It was rather low, and Aya had to actually get on her knees, to avoid
hitting her head on the elevator's framework, as she retrieved her
hook.
A handful of steps led from the bottom of the shaft down into
a small tunnel, tubes and cables lining one side. Above she could hear
the gently hum of the transformers, supplying the whole of the
building with power.
After several meters the tunnel ended in a heavy door. Aya
pushed it open and stepped out of the building, though you would not
have been able to tell by the looks, but the staircase she was no in
belonged to the public infrastructure. With some afford she pushed the
door shut, then tapped something into keypad next to it. Creaking, the
heavy bars slid into locking position, and not for the first time Aya
wondered why they did that. No other doors she had come across did
creak, at least not like that, and she had come across a few really
heavy ones.
Anyway, from here it was a piece of cake. Just an unreasonably
large amount of stairs from the depths of the building's foundations
to the infrastructure tunnels near the surface and a little stroll
through said tunnels. Most people would probably have collapsed
halfway up the stairs, no matter what kind of 'improvements' they had
applied to their bodies; with all the lifts around, few ever felt the
need to walk more than a handful of stairs at a time. Aya, however,
was used to rely on her feet for moving around - and sometimes knees,
arms and hands. Even hurrying to make up for the time she had lost to
the elevator, she reached the top only somewhat out of breath.
She passed another door and then made her way into maze of
tunnels beyond. Their network spread under the whole of the city,
making it at least in theory possible to get anywhere within, without
being noticed by the surface world. Theory failed rather quickly when
you actually tried to do it. For one thing, all doors in and out of
the tunnels were secured by locks, that were not really hard to
bypass, but extremely hard to bypass without tripping the alarm. Then,
of course, there was the law enforcement. It was impossible, and
impractical, to control all the tunnels, but they did secure all the
major hubs of the system - with cameras, sensors, you name it.
Of course it did help, that through some strange quirk she had
ended up on the mailing list for the security digest. Getting all the
new codes directly from the source was definitely worth the afford she
had put into making exactly this quirk happen.
By now Aya had reached a door let into the side of the tunnel.
It looked a bit as if belonged into a ship rather than here, with its
rounded edges and the lower border that ended several centimetres
above the floor. That resemblance wasn't exactly coincidental, the
door did lead the storm sewer.
Before she tapped the code into the panel next to it, however,
she needed a change of clothes. She put down her backpack and produced
a pair of baggy pants and a sweater from it, pulling them over what
she liked to refer to as her 'business outfit'.
For one thing, someone might make the connection between a
woman in skin tight black apparel and a break-in in the neighbourhood,
but mostly because she'd die of embarrassment. The skin tight quality
was very literal, and while it allowed an unprecedented freedom of
movement, it also showed a great deal more than it concealed.
Some girls wore that kind of thing to the clubs for exactly
that reason, but there were usually of the kind whose reputation
couldn't suffer for that kind of thing anymore, to formulate it
diplomatically. Or how her father would put it: Slags. If her ever
found out she even possessed something like that... He didn't approve.
And neither did she.
Aya tapped the code into the panel, then stepped through the
door and into a different world. Where the tunnels had been dry and
clean, the air smelling of dust, the sewer was wet and thick with
dirt. Water was everywhere: Flowing down the canal in the middle as a
muddy stream, oozing from the walls, in the air. Algae grew
everywhere, covering the ground with slippery mucus, forcing her to
watch her step. Nevertheless Aya welcomed the change. At least the
place was alive, unlike the rest of the city; there was nothing
artificial about it. And since it only collected rain water it didn't
smell bad, not even of rats. And there were plenty.
Rats, the universal constant of life. They were anywhere. On
every planet, every station, every ship, adapting to the most adverse
environments and thriving in places that otherwise incapable of
supporting higher life. Not before the advent of genetical analysis
anyone had noticed that they weren't even native organisms, that good
they blended it. Even today, nobody knew where they came from
originally, only a few rumours that they originated from some
backwater planet, not even capable of space flight. Even mentioning
them could sent scientists over the edge. Aya didn't really mind, as
long as they didn't start crawling around on her. Actually, they
looked kinda cute.
Finally she reached a ladder. She pulled the hood of her
sweater deep into her face, but kept her goggles on. They looked
perfectly like sunglasses, so nobody would give them a second though.
She didn't get why anyone would want to wear sunglasses at night in
the first place, but if fashion allowed her to use night vision in
public, who was she to complain.
The manhole led into a back alley. In the actual streets there
were only drainage grates in the curbs, all the actual manholes had
been placed out of the way for practical and security reasons, which
served Aya well. After all climbing out of the sewer in the middle of
the road might have been just a tad suspicious.
She nonchalantly pushed the cover back onto the hole with her
foot and then walked off, as if climbing out of sewers was the most
natural thing in the world. There wasn't even much acting involved,
after all she did this all the time.
A couple of minutes later she was in the open road, diving
into the streams of people that even at this time ran through the
city. On of many, impossible to point out.
--
emmel <the_emmel*you-know-what-that's-for*@gmx.net>
(Don't forget to remove the ** bit)
story backlogs available at
http://ranira.wordpress.com
Official AGC feedback maniac
"God is playing creatures - and we're the norns."
"A hundred dead are a tragedy - a hundred thousand are statistics."
"I guess you can call yourself lucky." -
"I could, but Linda suits me a little better...
Things called lucky tend to get hit by trucks."
Proud owner of 1 (one) DISOBEDIENCE point.
Former owner of 1 (one) eating point (eaten, sigh).
Hi, I'm a .sig virus. Just copy me to your .signature. And don't worry.
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