Kiwi's plan was to infiltrate the ship as it was leaving, incapacitate the crew and meet up with some seafaring Nomads, who might be better described as pirates, to offload the cargo and escape. This has to be done after the ship leaves the harbour but before it meets up with the other vessels in its convoy for the return trip to Asia. The payment to the Nomads was that they would be looting other containers on the ship, so it was a win-win for everyone except the company that owned this ship and the people sending the cargo we were going to be pilfering.
And well, the consumers at large who would end up paying more, and the insurance companies... well, it was a win-win for us two groups anyway, and in the short term, that was the only thing that mattered.
"Alright, park the vehicles here," Kiwi said on the tacnet, taking command of the operation now that it was underway and we were in a dangerous area. I wasn't entirely a supernumerary, I would be assisting, but I didn't want there to be questions about who was in command in a mission with as many moving parts as this one, so I was keeping quiet and playing the good little soldier. We were all wearing identical sets of armour, including full helmets that were somewhat similar to what I was issued in Trauma Team if a decade out of date. Still, we resembled less a group of criminals and more a corporate Spec Ops team.
All Kiwi had told her team about me was that I was one of her former teammates before she constituted this new team, which was true. When I arrived this evening, they were a little surprised to discover that I was actually the doctor that had put in most of their implants and was essentially their team's sponsor. They weren't stupid and could tell that a fair bit of the jobs they did had only one purpose, which was to make my clinic safer.
In that sense, this job was quite a bit out of the ordinary for them.
As the two vans rolled to a stop, we hopped out of the vehicles and gathered together. The area we stopped at was at the east end, abutting the port of Long Beach, which was totally shuttered. There were abandoned warehouses and decades-old abandoned steel shipping containers everywhere.
Even as dark as it was, it would be a balmy, uncomfortable heat if our armour didn't include an integrated cooling system. When I looked up to glance at the full moon, the sensors in my helmet couldn't decide whether to shift to low-light or infrared vision modes.
"Step one, we need to proceed one hundred and fifty metres west our present location and pacify a group of wreckers that are inhabiting a former abandoned maritime services company. They serviced tugboats or something," she shook her head, realising it didn't really matter what they did, "In any case, they're too close to our exfil point here, so they gotta go."
All six of us gathered together and slowly approached the set of buildings that the wreckers were holed up in, but about twenty metres from the largest one, Kiwi held up a closed fist in the universal non-verbal command to halt. "They actually have someone on watch," Kiwi said, sounding surprised. Then she glanced back, turning her helmet to look at me and used my call sign for the mission, " Assassin, can you take him out?"
I nodded, activated my stealth system and eased out of concealment, moving at a slow jog towards the building. There was clearly electricity running to the building because the man standing on a galvanised steel stairway was backlit by artificial light coming from inside the building, which was probably ruining his ability to see in the night unless he had some sort of vision augmentations.
He was standing there, looking stupid and smoking. Still, when he glanced in my direction, I stopped moving just in case he managed to see the distortion my stealth field produced when I was in motion. When he looked away, I continued jogging in his direction until I arrived at the foot of the stairs. There was no way I was going to walk up those without making a noise, so I just casually raised my silenced submachine gun and carefully aimed at the glowing embers of the mostly smoked cigarette. Firing twice, I heard the man's body slump against the guardrail of the stairs, sliding down several steps with a thud.
That was, of course, the main reason I thought he looked stupid. Perhaps he wasn't a guard but merely out here for a smoke. In either case, though, it gave someone a perfect aiming point. "Target neutralised," I said over the tacnet, channelling all of my hours of experiencing trashy action BDs.
I deactivated my stealth system as the rest approached me, and I glanced at Kiwi, who said, "Infiltrating the local subnet, running ping now... filtering... targets identified. Eight people inside." With that, a three-dimensional map of the structure, along with lightly pulsating grey dots for the unidentified people inside it was transmitted to all of our systems.
All of Kiwi's team, except for her and I, had SmartLink implants, and they also all had one of the brand-new Kang Tao smart submachineguns. I heard that Trauma Team was adopting this weapon as their standard for Security Specialists in the next year if online rumours could be believed. We all walked up the stairs to the second floor, with me nudging the dead wrecker off the ledge, falling the four metres or so to the ground below.
Most of the enemy was on the ground floor, and there wasn't really enough of them for me and Kiwi to have to do anything. Her guys just designated targets, and at some hidden signal that was common with trigger-pullers, all opened up together from the elevated position. After they had put three rounds or so into each enemy, we broke into two teams to search the building for any survivors.
We met back up outside, on the ground floor, with Kiwi looking out into the ocean. She asked over the tacnet, "You're sure these things are waterproof and designed for use underwater?"
I nodded, "Yes... I mean, that's what the seller said." I affirmed, paused and then quickly qualified, "Supposedly, these used to be the standard in the NUSA Navy SEAL twenty years ago, back in the early forties." I hadn't actually tested them underwater, but I did ensure that the included small LOX system worked, was charged and that the auxiliary rebreather was functioning.
They weren't diving suits, and even using LOX instead of gaseous oxygen, we'd only get ten or fifteen minutes, but that was more than enough for even my plans. Its main purpose was NBC protection, after all, and not diving necessarily.
One of the men pulled out six small devices, handing one to each of us. At first, they kind of looked like weird, bulky, dousing rods, but you yanked on each handle, and then they transformed into something that more resembled a bicycle's handlebars. They were motors, using batteries and simple waterjets, that would let us move at significant speed until the batteries died. Faster than flapping our armoured feet, anyway.
We weren't too far from our target containership, and we all hopped into the harbour without any further preamble. It took me a moment before the active buoyancy system in the armour stopped me from sinking like a stone and another moment for me to figure out the bicycle handlebars, but after that, we were moving at a good clip.
"I have some secondary objectives. Please leave a rope or ladder at the target," I radioed. Underwater like this, even at high transmitter powers, the range of our radios was abysmal, but I got a thumbs up from someone.
I pulled to the left and accelerated around the stern of the large ship and into the next slip over, where a similarly large container ship was parked. I didn't waste any time and quickly pulled out one of my limpets and affixed it to the hull near the stern, under about a metre of water. The devices had a built-in GPS system, but I had to yank a small plastic antenna out of the top about ten centimetres for it to have a workable signal.
I repeated this process two more times, with one more container ship and one ship that I would have called a tramp freighter, according to my net searches about its name. Its planned departure was going through the Panama Canal and onto Europe. That would have been an odd voyage back in my old world, but the middle part of the North American continent was still something of a no man's land in many areas, and it was safer to sail around it than use faster over-ground convoys.
I got back to the target ship with about three minutes of air left, and climbed up a stout nylon rope that was dangling in the water. I'm not entirely sure how the first guy got up the hull, but it had to be some sort of gadget like suction cups or magnetic grippers. At one time, I would have found it rather difficult to climb up this rope, but these days I could bench two hundred and fifty kilos, so pulling my own weight up a rope was nothing.
I found the rest of the team huddling out of sight in the void of a couple of containers. "I'm back. What now?" I asked.
"Now we wait," said Kiwi, "But let's go over the plans. This is a big ship, but if there are twenty crew aboard, I will be surprised. And half of those are going to be in the engineering spaces."
We all nodded, she had told us all this before, but it was good to review. She continued, "Once we're clear of the harbour, we will need to hit two places on the ship simultaneously. The bridge, and the security office. Although they only have twenty crewmembers, they do have some antipersonnel autonomous robots for anti-piracy duty, so we will need to disable them first. I will lead this team."
She glanced around, "Assassin will lead the team hitting the bridge. It is equally important to secure the comms station. Otherwise, they could call in help from either the Coast Guard or the convoy security service. I will give you a datashard which you will need to insert into either the comms station or the main computer terminal." I didn't know where the main computer terminal was, so it was going to get plugged into the comms station on the bridge. She had given us photos of the bridge of this class of ship, so I knew which station it was.
"Remember, the client wants no fatalities unless it is absolutely necessary to ensure your survival, so we will be switching to dart pistols. The agent in the darts should render a normal person unconscious in less than ten seconds and a highly augmented person in less than thirty," she reminded us. Since I was the client that wanted no fatalities, I nodded twice. These sailors were just doing their jobs, after all. They wouldn't work on borgs, but I doubted there were any in the ship's company, and if there were, they would definitely be amongst the engineering crew, which we were completely bypassing.
It took another hour for the ship to be pulled out of its slip by tugboats and then another hour before it ponderously meandered on its way. Still, we remained hidden. While we waited, I worked on some of the CAD files on my new cyberbrain system. I was modifying a general-purpose cyberbrain manufactured by MoorE Technologies for my purposes. A cyberbrain was basically a heavily armoured and reinforced skull, with included emergency life-support systems. It was, basically, a biopod designed to interface into organic bodies and not full-body replacements.
Only a few companies produced them, Raven and MoorE being the two best. The target demographic for their customers were well-to-do people who worried about what might happen. Preppers, paranoid executives, and rich housewives were the biggest customers. The latter was because you could either put your brain into a donor or cloned body easily and therefore look and be younger. You couldn't live forever just hopping from body to body like some demented bodysnatcher, though. Absent rejuvenation treatments, your brain did age, albeit slower than most people's bodies did.
The idea was that even in most incidents that would result in your permanent death, a cyberbrain could be recovered, and you could at least be put into a full-body replacement afterwards or possibly have your body cloned.
I needed something that had enough space to add both user-serviceable entangled comms units, as well as the brain scanner device I was building. I had been thinking about what NC-Taylor told me about Cranial, the memory tinker. I just couldn't wrap my head around something that could download memories like your brain was a computer. Not yet, anyway. But I could do something that was, for my purposes, superior.
While I couldn't download someone's memories discreetly, I could scan the whole brain. I had been thinking about the rumours of the supposed Soulkiller software for months now, maybe more than a year. When I first heard about it, there was no way I could build something similar, but now I could. And I could do it better, too.
Allegedly, Soulkiller killed the person that it took a brain scan of. There were many reasons this could happen, but I suspected it was because it used equipment that was never intended to scan someone's brain and shoehorned it into that purpose. Namely, a cyberdeck interface and this abuse of cybernetics in ways they were never designed to be used caused severe damage to parts of the user's brain, which proved fatal. That actually gave me a couple of ideas for really fatal Black ICE, actually. Maybe that was what the mythical "brain broiler" did.
In any event, my brain scanner would be running continuously, with every "node" in my network. In theory, combining this with the FTL comms system would mean that each important brain area would be completely synchronised at all times. One mind, not just many that were connected.
"Okay, it's time," Kiwi interrupted both my work and my daydreams. We all nodded, shouldered our lethal weapons and brought out the dart pistols. They weren't very fancy and, in fact, were what vets used to dart unruly animals but filled with my special anaesthetic instead, so they were single shot, but we could probably reload them fast enough.
My team followed our internal map and Kiwi's urgings to the bridge. She would hack a series of cameras, tell us to move, and then we'd wait while she hacked the next set. Our job was to wait until Kiwi disabled the security robots, and if the bridge was alerted to attack them before they could raise the alarm, otherwise we would wait and attack the bridge together in a classic pincer attack from two directions.
We sat there, next to the bridge door, for five minutes. Before Kiwi signalled us, the door opened, and a man walked out directly into the path of me and the two other men. He widened his eyes but got a dart to the chest before he could say anything or scream out. I reached out and stopped him from falling onto the floor and stashed him in the corner, giving the shooter a thumbs up.
