Chapter 24 - Places Nobody Should Go

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Jett smoothed down her headfur, took a full swallow of lasher and placed her emptied beaker down beside Karno, the full import of his words sinking in.

The dominant species in Wildhearth.

The phrase gave her a chill. Right now, as the largest single group, they formed the government in the Conclave, but there were enough seats occupied by the other kin that if they voted together, they could still block anything that was deemed to be too far. And the disregard for the Great Peace? The thought barely made sense to her. She wasn't a cleric and certainly wasn't a preacher, but the Peace was...everything. It was Wildhearth. It was the unspoken pact that their ancestors had laid down uncounted years ago that kept the city from tearing itself apart. To throw that away for the sake of petty ambition was simply insane.

She tried not to think about that, instead focusing on how in fangs and hellfire this all linked up. The puzzle felt tantalisingly close to completion, with just a few pieces hanging out of reach. Jett's heart fluttered with a mix of fear and a strange kind of excitement when she reasoned out the most likely place to find those pieces.

"So, what's your plan?" Karno asked after a moment.

You really don't want to know.

Jett smiled at him, trying to soften the impact of what she was about to suggest. "Everything tracks back to the enforcers."

"I'll buy that. So what is it you want to do?"

"I think I want to break into the enforcers' den." The simplicity of the statement almost made her laugh, but she stifled the impulse with an effort of will.

For the first time since she'd met him, Karno was struck dumb. She waited as he processed her words, his face pinching with disbelief. He closed his eyes for a moment; raised a paw. Opened his mouth.

Closed it again.

"You asked," she said, shrugging.

"I thought you'd have a smarter answer."

"Sorry to disappoint."

A short, hysterical laugh slipped from his mouth. "Alright then. So it's not enough that you have the wolfkin hunting you; now you want to deliver yourself straight to them? That's beyond crazy."

"I'm aware." A shrug. "But if you let me use your rig, I can do some prep work to give us an edge."

"And what, exactly, do you think you'll be able to do that will help you break into the most secure place in the city?"

"Maybe to you." She snorted. "But not to me. I don't know a lot about them, but I know the enforcer base has an entrance built into the Conclave's lower levels. I also know that the Conclave came first. The construction prints for that place are buried somewhere in that database, one I already have full access to—I'm in that system. There's nothing they can keep from me. I'm going to hack Conclave security, military—hell, I'll chop into the High Alpha's personal terminal if I have to—and find those prints. Once I have those, I'm going to find a way inside."

"You're a foxkin!" he exclaimed. "Jett, even if you could get in, if you're caught, they'll kill you on sight."

"They're already trying to kill me on sight." She fixed him with an expectant stare. "It's not too late to back out, you know. I'll do this on my own if I have to. I've managed so far."

Karno stared at her, his face oscillating between shock and anger, but he struggled to decide which one to commit to. In the end, he clapped his paws over his eyes and sucked in a long, exasperated breath through his teeth.

"I want to help, I just...this seems like a bad way to start."

"Have you got a better idea? Whatever is going on, the government doesn't even know. The enforcers are the ones calling the shots, so they're the ones we have to investigate."

"Peace and Fire," Karno cursed, leaning back in his chair with a scowl. "Okay, fine. Fine. Let's take a look and see if this will even be possible."

She almost deflated with relief when he relented. Her threat to go it alone had been genuine, but there wasn't a bone in her body that relished the prospect of trying to pull off the audacious scheme by herself.

Karno pushed out of the chair and caught her by the elbow. Before she could react, he was guiding her along with him into the back room of the tech den. His grip released when they were through the door, and she found herself staring out over a sprawling, cluttered space of work benches, half-constructed parts, gutted rigs, and square-shaped shelving units arrayed seemingly at random.

Her eyes were drawn through the clutter, however, to the back of the room where a colossal, heavily customised rig was embedded into the rear wall of the building. Wires splurged from walls in an ungainly tangle, connecting dozens of high-speed howl-net ports to the body of the machine itself. The main casing jutted out of the wall like a great grey brick, its monitor resting on a thick metal desk with a pair of auxiliary screens flanking it. A quartet of cooling stacks fizzed gently behind it, sloughing off faint coils of cobalt smoke.

He led her through the mess of the workspace towards it, and she peered close without even thinking about it, examining the huge machine as Karno slid into the tattered chair in front of it.

"It might not be up to your usual standard," he chuckled, sensing her scrutiny. "But she'll do the job."

"I didn't—it's a good rig!" she blurted quickly, feeling the fur on her cheeks prickle with embarrassment. "Just haven't seen the model before. I didn't think they made them this big anymore."

"The original was discontinued years ago," Karno explained as he rattled in his login credentials. "I've been upgrading this hulk for...fangs, I'm not sure how long. Long enough, at any rate. Doesn't look like much, but she'll fool you." The screen flicked into life with thick, startling white text on an oil black backdrop that made her squint.

"Can I...?" she let the question hang for a moment. Karno stood up, making a sweeping gesture to the seat. Jett sat down and took a deep breath, her eyes bouncing around the screen as she familiarised herself with the new system.

The backdoor she'd carved into the Conclave's databases still waited for her. It wasn't long before she'd shunted the pathways of Karno's rig through it, gaining access to the bulk of the government's information flow, the massive processing power of this beast of a machine speeding up the process immeasurably. She heard him make a faint noise of approval from behind her and smiled to herself. It was nice having someone around who could appreciate her unique skills.

"Alright..." she murmured. "So let's see what we can see."

A quick flick through directories, and she pulled up a three-dimensional annotated floor plan of the massive structure, the text currently too small to be properly legible as the image shrank to fit the whole building in frame.

"Not been messing about, have you?" Karno said, leaning in over her right shoulder to examine the diagram. "How long did this take you?"

"To get the access?" Jett winked at him. "Faster than you think."

"Well, since you're so smart, how about you tell me your genius scheme for using...this to break into enforcer headquarters?"

"The way I see it, the enforcers didn't use to have this much leeway," Jett said. "They're the government's cleaners. There must be some kind of oversight, or they wouldn't have been creeping around using dupes like Zanzihar and Fisker to authorise their dirty work. That means the Conclave must have information on them."

Karno nodded. "Officially, they are under the direct employ of the High Alpha and the ruling council. In theory, whoever was High Alpha would be in charge—wolfkin or not."

"I'll bet Hera doesn't like that idea."

"There's an understatement."

"Okay, that means there must be plans, blueprints—something—in the Conclave databases."

Another nod. "Not in the files you've got easy access to, though. Security and internal affairs run on their own internal servers, right here." He reached forward, pointing to one of the highest levels of the Conclave on the display. "If we want to get plans for the enforcer base, that's where we'll need to go."

"No problem."

"Excuse me?" Karno cast a beady eye over her. "That's the nexus of Conclave security—probably the most secure place in the city except the enforcer compound. How is that 'no problem?'"

"Because I have a plan to get access." Jett shot him a sickly sweet smile, relishing the look of bafflement in the wolfkin's eyes. "Karno, when you walk into the Conclave—in the front door—what do you have to do?"

"You have to scan your ID pass..." His eyes widened. "Oh, wait now—"

"Yep. We just need to rig a cloner into the ID checker. Leave it there for a day, and it'll clone the credentials of everyone who walks through that door. Pick it up at the end of the day, and presto—we can duplicate ourselves a couple of high-security passes."

"Hell of a scheme."

"It's the best way."

"How are you going to rig it to the scanner without getting caught?"

She smirked. "We just need to distract the guards for a couple of seconds." Jett glanced around the room. "You got a soldering iron and some spare overdrive modules around here?"

Karno looked at her blankly for a moment, then nodded and shuffled off, clanking around through the mess of his stock room for a few minutes until he returned with a bundle of modules in one paw and a soldering iron in the other. He looked at her questioningly, and she extended her paws, beckoning.

"We just need to get eyes off of the entrance," she said as he handed the equipment over. Plugging the soldering iron into a nearby socket, she examined two of the overdrive modules carefully. "If you destabilise the internal battery on one of these and let it fizz, we'll end up with a nice little smoke bomb."

"Yeah, I know how they work. So you want to pop one of these in the lobby?"

"It's one way to get attention." She put the modules down and shot him a mischievous grin. "I've already got myself an ID for the Conclave. I can whip up one for you too. I'll go through first and let off our diversion. When the guards are distracted, you follow and fit the cloner to the ID scanner. Once we have the security credentials from the cloner, I'll just upgrade our IDs with those permissions, and that will give us access to security. Simple."

"Very." Karno nodded approvingly, the glimmer of a smile tweaking the edges of his jaw. "I can see why they've had a hard time catching you."

***

When sunrise broke the following day, the lights in Karno's tech den remained dark. Dawn crept its fingers through the forest of Wildhearth's buildings, but Jett and her newfound ally were nowhere to be found in the smog of the Iolk district.

They were already rattling through the Silk on the morning tram carrier, joining the packs of well-dressed citykin commuting into their jobs in Wildhearth's beating heart. Some were government employees, and others bore the liveried uniforms of the different banking institutes that studded the Silk like glittering barnacles.

Jett focused on her breathing, just doing her best to remain calm as they hurtled towards their destination. In the grand scheme of things, what they were attempting shouldn't have been particularly difficult to pull off, but the wider implications filled her with anxiety. Get this wrong, and they might not make it back into the Conclave again, and there goes their best chance of gaining any access to the enforcer headquarters.

The doors to the Silk opened, spilling bodies onto the broad thoroughfare, Jett and Karno in their midst.

She strode towards the looming mass of the Conclave, clad in a fresh and suitably smart government attire—a midnight blue bodywrap, sleek black shawl, and a tight kilt, a fresh folder of suitably banal documents tucked under one arm. Hanging off the opposite shoulder was a shining bark-weave bag. Beside her, Karno had undergone his own transformation. Gone was the smeared, scorched jacket of his trade, replaced by a crisp, slim-fitting grey bodywrap, complete with a freshly purchased longkilt that gave him an almost regal look.

He did his best to hide it, but Jett could barely contain herself at how obviously uncomfortable he was. He kept fidgeting with the high collar of his bodywrap, tightening and loosening the belted kilt, twitching his backside awkwardly as he tried to get his tail into a comfortable spot.

"Stop messing with it," she told him quietly, fighting to keep the laughter out of her voice. "We're supposed to look like we belong here."

"Forgot how much I hate these things," he muttered back. Again he tugged at the tight throated bodywrap before letting out an exasperated sigh. "Right, let's just do this. You ready?"

"Of course."

"Alright then."

On cue, Karno dropped back slightly as the pair joined the steady stream of workers arriving for their shifts, opposite the trickle of night staff only now leaving for home. Jett held her head high, walking as naturally as she could, trying to channel the spirit of someone who was used to wearing this kind of trash. With her ID card in her free paw, she stepped confidently up to the entrance and the sensorclaws.

Ignoring the guard as though she did this every day, she swept the card through, and the machine bleeped its acceptance. Jett kept walking, feeling the guard's gaze follow her for a moment before his sharp eyes flicked to those behind her. She chanced a glance back over her shoulder. Karno approached four bodies back.

Counting down the seconds in her head, Jett made a show of rummaging through the voluminous bark-weave bag, closing a paw around the modified overdrive module and thumbing the trigger bolted to its side. A faint hissing filled her ears, not loud enough to overcome the steady hum of voices and footsteps in the Conclave's lobby. She started off towards one of the connecting doorways, joining a large group of kin of all shapes and sizes. As they moved, she deftly slipped the overloading module into a bin as she passed.

No one even paid her a glance.

She slowed down, peeling off from the group and looking back to see the first wisps of smoke beginning to coil out of the obsidian shell of the trash can. It took a little longer for others to notice it, but in a matter of seconds, a thick belch of grey smog spilled out of the bin, and the nearest employees recoiled away with a series of cries, shrieks, and yelps.

Jett added her own shrill exclamation of surprise as more smoke flowed and the guard watching the door finally dislodged from his post just as Karno approached the sensorclaws. The wolfkin guard darted forward, frantically waving the employees back from the smoke before barking a terse order into a howl-net port in the wall. She allowed herself to be swept back in the crush of bodies as kin around her surged away from the apparent danger.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Karno dip down, one paw flickering to the base of the sensorclaw. It only took a couple of seconds before he straightened up, unnoticed by other kin and security whose eyes had been snared by the smoke. Then he retreated to join the bottleneck of employees still outside the building, milling in confusion as they watched the scene unfold.

At last, a second guard, a vulkin, came pelting around the bend with a fire suppressor clutched in his paws. The black canister had a fat, shovel-shaped maw jutting out of its top, and from it blasted a jet of snowy foam that engulfed the bin from top to bottom, smothering out the smoke.

Calm reasserted itself, and Jett felt a surge of satisfaction as the guards began talking animatedly, corralling the employees in the lobby. Obediently she moved into place, catching Karno's eye and mouthing, "just wait" before the two guards started questioning those who'd been standing nearest the incident, a third coming onto the scene to start examining the half-melted structure of the bin itself.

But there would be nothing to find. The overdrive module would be reduced to nothing but an ashy powder, the core meltdown causing the little device to virtually evaporate in an intense surge of heat. She waited patiently, ready to lie her way through the questions, a single satisfied thought in her mind.

Stage one of the plan was complete.


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