Ten minutes later our patience was rewarded. The door opened and a yawning major in a rumpled uniform walked out, letting the door close behind him. The drone darted through the gap, unnoticed.
The inside of the building was rundown, if clean. I watched the drone explore corridors with drop ceilings and fluorescent lights. Every door was closed, except for one. That had a fridge, a well-used coffee machine, and a few tables with chairs. The break room. This early in the morning, that officer might have been the last one in the building.
"What are you looking for, Brick?" Marty asked. I realized he was tuned into the drone feed as well.
"Physical access to the base network. The corridors don't have any network ports and the drone is unable to open doors."
I laughed. "Brick, you've obviously never worked in a cube farm. Just go up into the ceiling. The tiles are made of foam or something, just push one out of the way."
The drone rose and pushed on the corner of one of the ceiling tiles. It parted and admitted the drone into the maze of crossbeams, ducting, insulation, and cabling. The ceiling tile fell back into the groove afterward.
"Thank you, Jake, this is very promising."
Marty and I watched as Brick explored the space above the offices. As expected, network guys were the same everywhere. All the office's cabling was in the drop ceiling. It didn't take long for Brick to find a thick bundle. The drone delicately touched each one, using the sensors I had built into it, to determine what kind of cable it was.
"I have found what I need. Stand by while I interface with it."
The drone touched down in the nest of cables and stuck to the one Brick had found. It extended microscopic tentacles into the cable. They would let the drone connect to the cable without noticeably damaging it.
Marty and I were out of things to do on this mission, so it was lucky for us that internal security on this particular base sucked. It was minutes later when Brick reported back.
"I have found the hangar and the materials."
A label popped up on the map, pointing to an empty patch of desert just off the airstrip. It said "hangar."
"There's nothing there, Brick," I protested.
"As Marty suspected, it is underground. The door is hidden under a thin layer of sand. The controls to open the door are not accessible via the base network."
"How do you know it's there?" Marty asked.
"Through the internal surveillance network. The quality is low, but the information is useful nonetheless."
Grainy video began to appear in a window on my Interface. I was looking at the inside of an office. Brick highlighted something just barely visible on the desk, a black plastic thing that looked like a hockey puck.
"This is the music streaming device that led us to this base."
The next video he showed us was of a massive, shadowy space. Lights hung overhead, illuminating long rows of shelves filled with boxes.
"This is the hangar. There are five cameras here. I will switch to the camera with the best view of the materials described in our recording."
The camera switched again as he said that, showing a dim corner. Stacked there somewhat haphazardly was a collection of scrap metal. Ragged-edged plates were piled up next to several blue plastic crates full of shards of metal. A few of the pieces were more complex—one of them a simple box the size of a radiator, the other a sealed tube. None of it looked remarkable in any way.
"That looks like a bunch of junk," Marty said.
"It does," I said. "But Union materials look pretty normal too. It's not like they glow or something. We won't know until we get close enough to let the Interface label it for us."
"Can we just send the drones to look?" Marty asked.
"Good idea. Can you get a drone in there, Brick?"
"Unknown. Without a map of the base underground there is no way to know where to start. This hangar may not even connect to the rest of the base."
"Alright. We don't have time to screw around with this anyway. Worst case we can go in hot and try not to hurt anybody."
"I don't know about that, Jake," Marty said. "There are a lot of soldiers here, and you know they're going to shoot to kill. We'll be totally exposed in the middle of that field. Even the towers will have line of sight on us."
"Yeah, I agree that will suck. It's not a big deal though. In the Assault Armor there's nothing they've got that could hurt me."
Marty turned in his chair to face me. "You're going to load all that crap by yourself while they shoot at you?"
"Sure, why not?"
"Listen, man, I'm not a big fan of the soldiers that man bases like these. They're traitors hiding the truth from the people, and that pisses me off. That doesn't mean they're incompetent, though. When they figure out that you're basically invincible, they're not going to just give up and watch you rob them. They're going to do something else to screw you up and capture you unless you start shooting back. And if you do, you're going to kill a lot of them, aren't you?"
Marty was a smart guy, and he was right. I hadn't been thinking things through. This wasn't a video game where the guards would be dumb AI. I wouldn't be able to load the giant pile of scrap very fast by myself. They'd have plenty of time to close in and ruin my day.
"Point taken, Marty. We'll have to come up with another plan."
"Actually, I think I've got an idea that will work," Marty said, a smile covering his face. "We need a distraction."
"Tell
