Dok and Filly came hurrying along the main passage as Rico was suiting up. Kevlar mask with integral headset, commando-style harness, flak jacket. Predator 2 heavy auto, Ingrain 20T submachine gun, both with integral smartlinks.
For tonight's special work, he and the rest of the team also carried Ares Special Service automatics, medium autos with silencers and extended fourteen-round clips. The clips held Armamax gel-stun rounds loaded with special chemical agents. If the impact of the round didn't disable the target, the chem agents would, absorbed directly into the bloodstream through armor, clothing, skin, and damn near anything else. Unconsciousness would result in about three seconds. Sometimes less. People with a dozen armor-piercing slugs in their meat sometimes went on shooting for longer than that, so the delay wasn't really an issue. No more than with any other bullet.
And the mortality issue took precedence, in any event. The Armamax slugs disabled without killing. Rico wasn't into wetwork, murder by another name. He and the rest of the team would switch to hard ammo if and when they had no other choice. When it became kill or be killed.
But only if it came to that.
The objective was to get in and out before anyone even knew they were there. Smooth as a teflon slide, painless as a razor's slice. Surgically precise. Leave the heavy bang-bang warfare scag to the amateurs out in the streets.
By the time Dok and Filly had their gear set and ready to go, Shank had dug a hole through the brick barrier almost big enough for a troll.
Rico fingered his headset. "Time check."
Piper replied, "Zero-one-zero-three hours."
"Right," Rico said, glancing around at the team. "Lock and load. Namecodes only. Stay alert."
Slides snapped and clicked. Spring-fed ammo clicked into firing chambers. Rico slipped past Bandit and motioned Shank into lead position. They advanced past the ruined barrier, keeping to intervals of about three meters, weapons at ready. Dok and Filly would handle rear-guard. That put Bandit right in the middle, right where he belonged.
This passage was just like the main one, but with one crucial difference. It led directly to the principal utility and engineering building of the Maas Intertech facility. The walls were seeded with vibration and motion sensors. Taking them out was part of Piper's job. She should be in the Maas Intertech computer nexus by now, doing her thing.
If she wasn't, the five of them in this tunnel were meat.
Every system cluster, like every individual system, had weaknesses, and those could be exploited.
Piper's map showed that the interconnected mainframes that composed the Maas Intertech computer cluster had one serious flaw. R D mainframes were the most vigorously protected, rated at Security Code Red-4. Intrusion Countermeasures guarding the access nodes to these systems would be black, as vicious as IC ever got. The corp knew where its most important assets were located and spared no expense in defending them. The primary security mainframe, however, was merely Code Orange, tough but by no means impenetrable. And the main engineering system, which monitored and controlled the facility's physical devices such as water, light, and heat, was only moderately defended by Code Green security. And that was the cluster's flaw.
Besides controlling heat and light, elevators, automatic doors, and the like, the primary engineering mainframe was also responsible for such operations as supplying power to security monitors and related devices. The flaw that Piper would exploit.
The sculpted interior of the engineering CPU had the look of a power station control room or maybe the bridge of a trideo starship. The heart of the node took the form of a chief engineer icon seated at an immense, semicircular control console. An array of huge display screens ranged across the walls facing this console. Data blazing like electric neon streamed continuously across the wall displays and the main console displays. From millisecond to millisecond, the chief engineer icon would reach out with a stark white hand to adjust some console control or to enter a brief series of commands via the console keyboard.
As Piper crossed the threshold of the CPU node, a window outlined in brilliant green opened directly in front of her face. The enormous eye of another Watcher IC access program faced her squarely. Her masking utility had already changed her iconic appearance. She now wore the dark gray zipsuit of a Maas Intertech exec. The identity card clipped to the lapel of her jacket read, in big bold print, PRIORITY USER, CLEARANCE AA. The window closed, the Watcher vanished. Piper stepped up behind the chief engineer icon. This icon ignored her. Representing the most crucial decision-making circuits at the core of the CPU, it relied on Intrusion Countermeasures to defend it from harm. It lacked both the ability to identify unauthorized intruders into the node and the capability to do anything about them.
Piper initialized a custom combat utility. She called it Power Play. In the consensual hallucination of the matrix, she drew an enormous, gleaming, chrome automatic pistol with a muzzle the size of her fist and put it against the back of the chief engineer's head. In another version of this reality, thirty megapulses of command/override program code infected and interpenetrated the firmware programming of the CPU.
The chief engineer icon hesitated, turning its head just slightly as if to look back at her.
"I'm in charge," she told it.
"Affirmative," the icon replied. "Instructions?"
"Continue normal functions. Do not interfere with any modifications I may make to system operations. Do not initiate any special activities or security alerts without my approval."
"Affirmative."
The chief engineer returned to making adjustments of the various controls. Piper reached out with her free hand and tapped a key on the console. One of the huge display screens on the walls facing the console went black, then blazed with light as the stark white iconic face of the security CPU came into view.
"Identify," the security CPU said.
"Engineering CPU," Piper replied.
"I don't recognize your icon."
"Manual override has been invoked. Authority assistant director Facility Engineering, code seven-seven-nine-four-nine, clearance double-A. Facility engineering is marking power systems microanomalies and is now beginning level-one manual and computer-directed diagnostic checks."
"I understand."
"Be advised that facility technicians will be performing unscheduled maintenance in utility passage One Main at zero-zero-four-five hours, and in other utility passages and service corridors throughout the facility. Disregard all sensor alerts from these locations until further notice. Engineering personnel are on site and will advise when the situation has been corrected."
"Acknowledged."
"End of line."
Piper broke the link with the security CPU, then spent something less than a millisecond shutting down the security sensors in utility passage One Main and other locations critical to Rico and the rest of the penetration team.
It was just a matter of pushing the right virtual keys.
From five thousand feet, the plex looked like a dark ocean of hazy orange, lit by the brilliant red strokes of fire at the top of chemplant stacks and the hundred million glinting, gleaming lights of towers, buildings, and plants.
The Hughes Stallion helo cruised smoothly through the spectral dark. Inside the chopper's command deck Thorvin kept his sensors moving, his throttle back. No need to rush. Not yet Direct-vision overlays cut up the terrain below into its discrete parts: Jersey City to the south, Newark to the southwest, Union City, the Hudson River, and Manhattan to the east, the Passaic-Ridgefield sprawl directly to the north. Thorvin noted that in passing. He had plotted a hexagonal course around the Secaucus industrial zone. He watched his course and kept his sensors searching for any suspicious air traffic.