The Neo-Metropol Heist

10: Artem

Artem strode up through the crowds of Midtown with Cad close at his heels, who was dressed in a shoulder-to-ankle black jacket and a hat not dissimilar to the ridiculous battered trilby that Helten insisted on wearing.
It didn't do much to stop him being recognised as an android, anybody looking closely could see that where there should be a face, there was a blank black faceplate. He caused the occasional spot of bother at checkpoints, but as far as the law was concerned, he wasn't illegal.
Originally a citizen assistance droid, Artem had accidentally damaged him during an early, clumsy escape, damaging his internal circuitry and command priority systems, and hadn't been able to shake him since.
At most, to anybody who was concerned enough to look close enough, he was a novelty, but unless they found themselves up against a particularly bureaucratic patrol officer, they were usually able to pass freely through checkpoints.
"Artem, I believe the entry to the Lair is around the next corner," Cad informed him helpfully.
Artem acknowledged the information and made the next left, out of the busy foot traffic and onto a quiet backstreet.
They were looking for the rather ominously named 'Lair', an almost mythical tunnel system built into the city's derelict sewer and underground system, populated in the main by criminals, who decided that they were better than Playa Perdido and required direct access to the city's power grid for nefarious means.
A day and a half after Artem, Harry and Edward had compiled their list, Harry informed them that he'd found a tech expert that fit the bill.
Tracking back through some of the most high-profile unsolved hacking cases and cross-referencing it with his extensive illicit contacts, Harry was quickly able to deduce the location of a person that referred to themselves only as Aphelion in the pompous, anonymous coded gloats that they released after each job.
Harry couldn't get much more than that, so Artem was basically walking blind into a warren of thieves and criminals, he didn't know if he was looking for a man or a woman, a kid or a guy Edward's age - he didn't even know if 'Aphelion' was a single person or a collective, they were commonplace.
All he had was a slightly fragile offer which essentially amounted to suicide and a plan that was more or less only slightly more developed than 'think of plan'.
That, and a highly advanced android with reaction times three times faster than the fittest human athlete, modified with enough firepower to break through a bank vault.
"Cad?" Artem asked, asking a whole question in one syllable.
Cad stopped for a moment, scanning the area carefully, a progress bar appearing on his faceplate bouncing up and down.
"Over there, the alleyway," he said carefully.
Artem followed his line of sight to an alleyway between two derelict old-style brick buildings, one had a boarded up front and a faded old sign that said 'Ee-Z-Wash', the other a blank, dirty façade. Buildings like this are a rare sight in this city, Artem thought to himself.
Artem walked to between the building, under an archway formed by a rusting chain link fence. He barely made it four steps before the wall to his left buzzed, the dirty bricks sliding away, and a disturbing glowing eye attached to a prehensile arm blocked his path, analysing him.
"Well that's especially creepy," Artem noted.
The eye suddenly froze in mid-air, the pupil obviously scanning him.
"Code?" It buzzed at him in a sharp monotone.
Artem blinked.
"The crow flies at midnight?" He said.
The eye blinked back at him humourlessly.
"You have thirty seconds to vacate," it said, a hatch popping open at the bottom of the sphere, a tiny laser pistol emerging and training in on him.
Artem sighed, planting his forehead into his palm and rubbing his eyes.
"I haven't got time for this," he said, "Cad?"
Cad nodded once, stepping forward purposefully. The eye immediately switched targets and fired at him with a loud 'pop'. The laser beam struck his shoulder, only to singe his jacket and ricochet away and striking a wall.
Cad grasped the eye and his hand flashed blue for a moment, the eye dropping to the floor as he released it with a pitiful electronic whine, the arm going limp.
Scanning the alleyway quickly, Cad stepped over the dead eye, leaning over and pressing his fist into an innocuous looking sewage hatch. There was another flash of azure from his jacket sleeve, and he began to pull the hatch from the ground, bringing the ground either side of it up with it, revealing a dim stairway leading into the ground.
Cad stepped away as the newly discovered secret entrance shuddered to a halt, obviously not designed to be forced open.
"After you, bud," Artem gestured to the dim stairway, a sickly neon-green light emanating from the darkness below.
Cad acknowledged and began to descend it. Artem glanced at the dead eye and followed after him.
The Lair was a strange amalgamation of small dens built into the walls of the ancient sewer and underground system beneath the city, and the section they found themselves in when they reached the bottom of the stairs most definitely still had a musk lingering from its former life.
They found themselves in a wide open cistern, on a rickety metal catwalk. Below them, huddled crowds of hooded men and women eyed them suspiciously.
"Did they see you wreck their pet... creepy floating eye thing?" Artem asked.
"The system was automated and it is doubtful that they have any kind of collective security agreement between them to stop us. Treading carefully is always good advice, though, Artem," Cad explained.
Artem laughed.
"Noted, are you still tracking the upload ping?" he asked.
Cad nodded, his faceplate presenting a detailed proximity counter of the origin of the upload ping that Harry had deduced as the source of 'Aphelion's' activity - a couple of hundred metres into the warren of tunnels, not too far.
They crossed the walkway to an open archway on the far side, worn smooth and dirty from years of cascading water now all but dried up, apart from the odd trickle from the ceiling above.
The place was dark apart from red strip-lights bolted to the ceiling in a slapdash manner. The tunnel was perfectly round, so the catwalks provided something to walk on. Every few metres it would spider off into other, identically dirty tunnels. The whole place was a labyrinth.
Over the years, the cubby holes in the walls, as well as some of the shorter tunnels, had been adapted into living spaces that were usually little more than hovels, sealed off with anything that had been to hand at the time, from moth-eaten old curtains to metal sheets.
"Next left, thirty metres ahead," Cad said.
Artem followed the instructions, taking the next left. A shifty looking man in a long coat with a collar that covered his cheeks brushed past them, glaring at them as he passed.
"If you can't find friendly folk fifty feet underground in the sewers then what hope do you have of finding them anywhere else?" Artem joked, glancing back at the man that had passed them.
"Here," Artem said, the proximity counter on his faceplate flickering to zero, indicating that they'd reached the right cubby hole.
It was tidier than most - at least from the outside, which wasn't saying much. Some bright spark had had the idea of fitting an actual door, made of thick metal sheeting obviously attached to hinges on the inside, a screen panel most likely programmed to the fingerprints of whoever was currently residing within set in the centre.
"Do you think our guy is inside?" Artem asked, cueing another scan from Cad.
"The upload ping is ongoing and a link to the city mainframe is still active," Cad explained, "I can detect several life-signs but there is no way to confirm if they are coming from this space specifically."
Artem grimaced.
"We have to make a note to stop jumping into things like this blind," he pondered, "crack it."
Artem had barely finished asking before Cad had pressed his spindly ceramic fingers against the glass and hacked his way through the apparently simple security system in seconds. The door creaked open.
"Not a great recommendation for a tech genius..." Artem said, his eyebrow raised.
"The security lock actually had a higher than average level of security layering," Cad explained, as if Artem had made another request, "I made almost three million four hundred thousand access requests using an electro-magnetic pulse to imitate the fingerprint traces left on the screen from previous use. No human could have easily bypassed it without the correct equipment."
Artem nodded like he understood anything Cad had just told him, opening the hatch the rest of the way and climbing inside.
Inside, the cubby was barely tall for Artem to stand up fully. Cad automatically adjusted to avoid scraping his head against the roof, leaning over awkwardly.
"Huh, so our hacker is apparently a hobbit," Artem observed - he could almost hear Cad compiling any information he could find on hobbits from the internet.
In the far corner, there was a mattress covered in a messy and coiled up duvet. The only light in the room came from a terminal on the far wall which displayed a progress bar that was slowly filling. Streams of information that Artem didn't understand but which probably looked like the world's greatest novel to Cad cascaded down the screen.
Whatever it was doing, this was the upload that they'd tracked, so they were definitely in the right place.
"On your knees, asshole," came a voice from behind them.
Artem didn't turn but Cad already had, his arm raised and the blaster inside his wrist retracted and buzzing angrily, the muzzle alight.
Artem heard the unmistakable sounds of a gun clattering to the floor and turned calmly, a grin across his face. Staring back at him, eyes wide with hands in the air, was a young woman, no older than him, with shocking red hair and a pair of dark computer glasses strapped across her face.
The woman twitched, glancing at Cad's gun and back to Artem.
"Aphelion?" Artem asked, his head cocked.
"What do you want?" The woman asked, inadvertently confirming that she was the person they were looking for.
Artem leaned over and picked up the gun from the floor, a small gadget designed for firing small electro-bolts, more a taser than a firearm. He snapped the chamber.
"There isn't even a battery in here," Artem half-chuckled.
'Aphelion' was rigid, like a deer in the headlights.
"Relax," Artem said, handing her the gun and gesturing for Cad to drop the guard dog act, "I'm Artem and this is Cad, we've got an offer for you."
Aphelion swallowed hard, then half-relaxed.
"You're the ones who've been tracking me?" She asked.
Artem was impressed - Harry wasn't as subtle as he thought he was.
"Actually, a friend of mine was doing the tracking, he thought he was being sneaky about it too," Artem told her, looking at the terminal.
"I'm hard to sneak up on," she said, half-reassured confidence finding its way into her voice, "I knew you were tracking the upload and mainframe connection so I didn't bother to mask it."
Artem was taken aback.
"You... let us find you?" He asked. She nodded.
"You wouldn't have found me if I hadn't, trust me," she said, her voice cocky now. She was obviously the sort that was fully confident in her own ability but less so with an angry robot pointing a gun in her face.
Aphelion kept glancing towards the progress bar on the terminal to Artem's right like she was already bored of talking to them and her mind was now on something else. Artem leaned into her eyesight and raised his eyebrows.
"Sorry, are we keeping you from something?" He asked.
Aphelion only nodded, still distracted, then glanced back at him.
"You said you had an offer for me?" She finally said.
Before Artem could open his mouth, there came a wave of shouting from the corridor outside. Then gunfire.
"They found me," Aphelion said, suddenly going into a trance and flicking her glasses on and tapping something wildly into the terminal.
"Who?" Artem asked, repeating it when she didn't answer.
"The NMPF," Aphelion told him like it was a tiring distraction, "maybe MetSec, I don't know."
Artem glanced at Cad.
"Cad, check it out, but don't let them see you," Cad disappeared out of the hatch.
"Maybe?" Artem asked, "why are they looking for you?"
Aphelion ignored him.
"Aphelion?" Artem repeated, "why?"
"Because that's what the police tend to do when you try and hack into the Neo-Met Banking mainframe," she finally said.
Artem had no words. Cad reappeared.
"Judging by the sound distortion they're still in the main cistern but spreading fast, at least three, no more than thirty," he explained promptly.
"Oh, well that's reassuring," Artem sniped, looking back to Aphelion. She held up a kind of slate that Artem had never seen before and the terminal screen transferred to it and switched off.
"I need another fifteen minutes to finish the transfer," she said, finally looking Artem in the eye, "you have a car?"
"What?" Artem asked. He'd understood the question but felt like he needed to hear it again.
Aphelion sighed angrily, like Artem was the most frustratingly stupid person she'd ever laid eyes on.
"A car," she repeated like he was a child, "you know, flies, takes people places?"
"I know what a car is," Artem told her, "yes, we have a car."
The gunfire and shouting was getting louder and closer, Aphelion glanced back to the hatch and then to the slate she held in her hand.
"Get me out of here and I'll listen to whatever you came here to say," Aphelion said, like it was the simplest of requests ever, "deal?"
Artem didn't even have to think about it.
"Deal."