Ten minutes passed before Brick spoke again. "Weapons disabled."
"Do your thing, Marty."
Despite the fact that I was sitting in a spaceship, we couldn't actually have flying saucers visit. We needed that to happen, but it just wasn't possible. The Redemption would never be mistaken for a flying saucer and we needed it to be completely unseen, anyway. Once again, Marty had found the answer for us, with Metra's help.
Most Union tech was about doing practical things. Killing Ferals. Making food and breathable air. That sort of thing. But sentients are much the same. Most of us need entertainment. The Union was no exception.
High in the air above the base, just past the fences, three invisible projectors hovered. They were fat and slow, so we'd had to roll them out of the hatch and let them make their way into position.
"Starting the show... now," Marty said, and with a flourish, pressed an invisible button on his Interface.
With a blur of motion, two lights streaked across the sky in formation. If you were looking closely enough, you could see they were saucers. The same two that had arrived late in our video. They streaked from the east to the west, from horizon to horizon, in the blink of an eye. The crowds quieted and then cheered as the light show began, every eye on the skies.
The saucers streaked back, stopping dead over the base, clearly in view of the camp. A titanic din rose from the True Believers. Cheers and screams of delight. Air horns and car horns. Fireworks popped and filled the air as all of the Believers’ dreams came true.
The soldiers in the base looked on in puzzlement and even a bit of fear. From their point of view, nothing was happening, and the Believers were going crazy for no reason. The projectors were set up to cover the camp and a bit past the fence, but no more. We couldn't have the soldiers looking in our direction, toward the saucers. They needed to be focused on the Believers and nothing else.
"Do your thing with the cameras, Brick. Take us down, Marty."
The third saucer arrived, streaking from high in the sky to stop dead between its two escorts. The massive banks of multicolored lights rotated slowly, pulsing to a hidden rhythm. Somehow, the noise from the True Believers got even louder. Groups of campers broke off and began sprinting toward the fence, or starting up their cars and driving. Patrols redeployed, moving toward the fence as their commander reacted to the situation. He didn't know what was happening, but he sure didn't like it.
The Redemption dropped straight down, and I knew Brick had spoofed all of the cameras looking in our direction. He completely owned their surveillance network, and now every camera only saw what we wanted them to see. In this case, it would see the empty desert instead of Regar and me. We leapt from the open hatch, landing in the soft sand covering the hangar door.
We still didn't know the proper way to get into this hangar, so we were going to do it the quick and dirty way.
"Regar, if you would?"
He nodded, and pulled a loop of cable from his belt. It was thick, black, and segmented, each segment more than two inches thick. He laid it down on the sand, forming a circle three feet wide. He stepped back quickly, and I did the same.
╠═╦╬╧╪
Breaching Ring V3, designed by Kiril
╠═╦╬╧╪
Making sure I was clear, he triggered the device.
There was a blinding flare of light as the entire ring got too bright to look at. Each segment of the ring became a miniature sun. The sand underneath turned liquid and burned off before it could be seen. The thick steel of the hangar door lasted no longer. With a clang the orphaned circle of steel fell free, opening a hole into darkness. The blinding light of the ring disappeared as it followed. The whole process took less than a second.
"Ferals, I told Kiril that was too much for this job," Regar said and jumped in after it. I followed.
Regar deactivated the ring before it could dig itself too deeply into the bedrock underneath the concrete. It had fallen and simply continued to burn through. We didn't know what was underneath us, so that was a good call.
We were standing on a long, shallow ramp underneath the overhead doors. Sand trickled in from the hole we had made, piling up on the scarred floor beneath the hole. Lights hung from the ceiling, leading down the ramp and into the hangar.
I ran down the ramp, looking around and trying to spot the controls that would open the massive doors above us. Theoretically, we may have been able to unload the hangar through the small hole we'd made, but that wasn't the plan. These doors needed to be open in order to empty out all the material quickly enough. Before base security personnel noticed that we were there, and that we were robbing them blind.
The hangar was pretty much as it looked on the video cameras. A large, high-ceilinged space filled with shelves. The overhead lights did a very poor job of illumination, and I had to assume that it was because people didn't come down here that often. If something was in here it was probably important once, but wasn't any longer.
Regar was right behind me and clanked down after me.
"Jake, go find the materials. I'll find the controls."
"All right, I'll call if I need you," I said.
I had a vague idea of where the materials were. They were in a corner. At least, that's what it looked like on the cameras. Despite Brick's total mastery of the base’s internal security system, not every camera was marked
