Run 03: Sixteen Hundred Tons

Mr. Johnson's Pitch#

Grant Whitaker, an Ares regional director, in a glass-walled meeting room in an Ares branch office, in the evening, on his feet. No broker and no cut-out: Ares hires directly here and he does not pretend to be anybody else.

What he says, and none of it is a lie:

• Shiawase Energy's Southern California region is preparing a submission to the Corporate Court. It concerns San Onofre, it concerns the years the contract was Ares', and Ares disputes it.
• Ares intends to answer it properly and needs time to do that. The submission's date is next month and Ares would like that date to slip.
• He hands over the payload: a sealed cartridge the size of a thumb. It goes into a terminal on the submissions floor at the AES El Segundo complex, and it corrupts the package rather than the archive. Shiawase will rebuild it. Ares will have answered by then.
• Nobody at that site needs to be hurt and he would take it badly if anybody were.

What it pays#

Complications so far#

• The job is done and the drive is wiped. Confirmed on the pocket secretary, at the terminal, with the general alarm going off in the same breath. Shiawase's submission misses its date.
• Three of their people are out cold and none of them will stay that way. Two folded over a conference table behind a door booked occupied until six, one slumped at desk 108. The coworkers on either side of him were jacked in and noticed nothing. Everybody involved should be more or less fine tomorrow, which is the only mercy on this list.
• Both IT badges walked out of the department. Dave's is on Trash and Dave 2's went downstairs on Vinnie. Two missing credentials, a booked room, and a junior decker last seen going upstairs because his manager asked him to.
• Lux took a meeting with Shiawase in the middle of the job. On the ground floor, three stories under the submissions desk, on the same afternoon, and about something with no connection to Whitaker's work at all: Adán Zepeda has been asked for explosive communications devices built discreetly, had a prototype on him inside two days, and priced the thing at 10,000¥ a device with forty per cent up front. Lux asked for the whole chain end to end into UCAS government offices and has taken the answer to the Director. Lux's own name is now on a Shiawase calendar for the week the filing died.
• The watchers noticed and did not stop us. Several looked. One went to the handler in the side passage, eagerly, while we were standing in front of him.
• We are still inside. Hellhounds and a handler between us and the way out.

Scene 1: Onto the coast#

Main Challenges: a live, staffed, badged industrial site inside a hazard cordon, reached either by a boat nobody logs or a bus ride on somebody else's reputation. Comms work fine and that is the trap: the complex logs traffic at its own fence.

The cordon is built to keep casual people out and to log vehicles, not to stop professionals. The plant fence is the opposite: its own perimeter, a real guard contract, and no interest in the cordon's paperwork.

We went in the front, on business, in daylight. A counseling slot at noon, a lunch at twelve thirty and a one o'clock with a general manager, all of them real and all of them made by us. Nothing about the way in was interesting, which was the point of the nine days spent arranging it.

Scene 2: A terminal on the submissions floor#

Main Challenges: a badge, a lobby, an elevator and a floor plan, at an office that has never been robbed. Getting in is a face and a credential problem; the payload itself is thirty seconds, and the alarm it raises is the rest of the night. The floor empties at night; the corridors do not.

It did not go into desk 108 the way anybody planned, and it went in twice before it took.

We had the department. Dave called his own decker up to a conference room and told him there was a critical security update that needed installing, and Dave 2 did what his boss asked: brought it up on his cyberdeck to read the instructions. He did not get as far as the instructions. Dave followed him down an hour later. The second cartridge went to Renato over lunch as the rough draft of an article, and Renato opened it at his own desk the same way, with coworkers jacked in on either side of him who never noticed a thing.

So we walked up on a stolen badge and did it by hand. Third floor, open plan, half the lights off, and the awake workstation at the end of the bay. The cartridge went into the terminal's flank and nothing visible happened at all. The wiped drive confirmed on the pocket secretary, and the general alarm in the same breath.

Three people are out cold in that building and the filing is dead on time.

Scene 3: Getting off the site#

Main Challenges: the same fence outward, on foot, with an alarm behind them, a filter running down and the wind deciding whether the walk is unpleasant or dangerous. Violence is available and never required: the wire is faster than the fight.

We have not got out yet. The elevator down, the lobby refused in favor of a side passage, and hellhounds on a handler's lead already in it. They were tense before they saw us. The handler looked at us the way a man looks at an answer he does not like, and one of the watchers came to him while we stood there, eagerly, and told him something.

What is still ahead, if we get past this: out through the plant gate or over the fence into the dead streets, and then either the boat off the sand at its stated hour or a bus at shift change. Twenty-eight miles of empty houses with the ground floors staved in, a debris line down the middle of every street that runs to the sand, and no power anywhere outside the plant fences.

People#

Four of these the job never introduced us to. Renato Buenaflor because his is the desk, Dave from IT because he is the one who can walk something to it, Dave 2 because Dave called him, and Adán Zepeda because Lux went and made himself an appointment on the ground floor of the same building, on the same afternoon, about something else entirely.

Efrén Sotelo is tagged unmet: Logistics names him as a way into the cordon on a vouch and Payout names him as a buyer for the evidence, and the crew have taken neither. The run has spent his name twice and never put him in a room, so his page stays the GM's.

Grant Whitaker

Ares regional director. The first Johnson to hand the crew a business card.

Hellhounds

Corporate security at kibble prices, housed better than the staff. The kennels breed them to the book; ash country breeds its own.

Fontaine

The crew's fixer, and has been for years. Takes ten per cent and earns it.

Dave from IT

Runs IT at the Shiawase complex in El Segundo. Lost their cat on company time and has not been the same since.

Dave 2

Decker, and the second man from IT. Came upstairs because his manager asked him to, and lost the afternoon for it.

Adán Zepeda

General manager at Shiawase, vendor side. Buys things his own company will not be shown buying.

Renato Buenaflor

Finance at Shiawase Energy. The one desk still awake on the submissions floor at night is his.