Petrol Hills

Lying on the back seats of the Toyota Land Cruiser, Miles nervously ran his beef jerky wrapping through his fingers in an effort to smooth it out. The mixture of sweat and constant anxious friction had erased the Slim Jim logo.

“Other than Mr. Turban, what are we going to find out there?” he asked. Done rolling the packaging into a ball, he tossed it in the door’s ashtray above his feet.

Zéphyr was sitting at the front. With her eyes closed and her arms crossed, the cyborg seemed to be asleep. But she was actually steering the vehicle by the short white cable connecting the dashboard to her temple. “The meager info Belvedere has been able to dig up about the collector indicates that it was also a data collection station,” she said through the speakers embedded in the doors. Meanwhile, the shifter moved by itself. “Edith effectively confirmed the complex was doubled with a study center for the effects of terraforming on hydrogen dioxide sources. And the influence of highly polluted water on the human body.”

“Sounds boring.”

Miles straightened to press his forehead to the left rear window. As far as his eye could see lay fields of dried mud and the tall derricks. Outside the burg, Saturn I became a petroleum desolation plunged into the darkness of its plastic orbit slowly being recycled as part of the war effort.

Following the fresh tracks of a Canarybike’s turbine, the vehicle left the main road and caught up with a path along the Herschel Sea. The black polluted waters shuddered as a burning Separatist League freighter entered the atmosphere before flying towards the city.

After passing through a tunnel unregistered on the Navstar GPS, the car stopped by itself at an automated checkpoint. After a brief moment, the red and white barrier rose without requiring Zéphyr to present a card or a FID.

“No security?” Miles asked. Glancing outside, he realized that none of the cameras over the fence were working.

“The road’s municipal,” Zéphyr informed him. “This place has never been a military complex. It’s a regular research mega-facility. We should be able to sneak closer with ease until we reach WarTech’s secret hideout.”

The Data-Maiden veered the SUV onto a new path, this time hidden by the sinister vegetation of the Petrol Hills. Fighting against veritable walls of brambles and a forest of ferns sclerosced by carbonaceous fallout, they climbed the bluff before coming to a stop on a ledge overlooking a huge tank of stagnant water. On the other side appeared a church’s spire.

Popping the door open, Miles jumped out and landed on his feet in a field of black nettles. The stalks were so tall that they caught on his belt buckle. Some of them even got under his pilot jacket. “You sure about this place?”

“Yes. We won’t take the entrance Poncho went in. Too dangerous. Belvedere sent me these coordinates instead.”

“Excellent…” he grunted as stinging leaves tickled his forearms. He then lost himself in a horticultural revenge kicking the wind.

“Why don’t you come help me instead of crusading against the local vegetation?” Zéphyr joked before disappearing into the middle of the Urticaceae.

“Easy for you to say. Your skin’s made of metal…” Miles complained as he joined her. “Those ferns hurt like hell.”

Crouching by a manhole covered in moss and clay, Zéphyr smiled as her burden of the day made a place for himself next to her. He helped her clean a case camouflaged under the duff.

“Mr. Turban came lookin’ for Fate with a regiment of MKs on New-Savannah. They probably tag along everywhere he crashes.”

“Mechanical Killers always follow their master’s footsteps.”

“You think you can get rid of them like those cyborgs in my hotel room?”

“No.”

“No?”

“We’ll find a way.”

Zéphyr unfurled the same cable he had used to pilot the car and clipped it to an outlet on the case after removing a snail shell. A few seconds later, there was a click and the plate lifted and opened. In the darkness. Miles heard a metal ladder unfolding and the echo of water. He also smells the pungent stench of stagnant fossil fuel.

“Ready, Red Swan?”

“Got a Geiger counter?”

Zéphyr pouted, before jumping in. “Inside my head, yes,” she said from below. “Do you really want Sievert involved?”

“Should I be worried, or something?”

Miles followed the suspiciously silent cyborg into the radioactive tunnels, where they walked for a hundred meters until a crossroads. There she indicated that they were just below the church and therefore close to the main entrance.

“Now what?” asked Miles, glancing back.

The Maiden turned to the right before descending a staircase leading to a dead end. There, she pointed to a slab from which light was filtering. She then stuck her fingers against the edge and pulled it with all her might, revealing a dimly lit room from which a warm wind blew.

“Working servers…” she whispered as she slid through the opening after removing the panel from her skin suckers. “We’re definitely in the right place.” She landed soundlessly on the linoleum, a feat for an almost all-metal body whose weight alone had creaked the shafts of the SUV.

Miles sloppily joined her in what looked like a maze. When he straightened up, massasing his bottom, the data thief was silently dismantling the cage protecting the nearest rack.

“I’m going to poke around in there,” she explained as he stuck to the rack for fear of being caught on camera. “See what I can find.”

“Understood.” On tiptoe, Miles searched for an exit to this maze over the rows of computer equipment. Several beads of sweat trickled down his cheeks. The room’s temperature would bake a sweet potato pie. “Hurry up or we’ll get baked. That place’s an oven. And we’re covered with oil.”

“I’m trying to. With any luck, I will find out where my target and where his MKs are hiding … and if your friend the mercenary with a sombrero is still around.”

“Can’t you also pinpoint where they’re keeping Fate?”

Once done with the protective rack, the Maiden lifted the small flap on her temple. She grabbed her hacking cable by its diamond-molded tip and plugged it in. “Cover me,” she said. Her voice sizzled. “I don’t know what response from the ICE my intrusion can trigger.”

She sat down behind a wall of U-shaped servers, and closed her eyes. When she jerked, Miles realized that she was no longer in the physical world, but started roaming the silicon fields of the local data-core.

“Damn full cyborgs don’t even need a VR helmet anymore…” he grumbled, turning his head in all directions. He expected that at any moment an alarm would sound, automatic turrets would pop out of the ceiling and walls, or a contingent of robots would burst in from a backdoor.

And something did show up, making Miles jump.

Between him and the U-shaped shelves, a tower of servers swung. Yet no mechanized killers with assault rifles emerged in the server chamber, but two technicians in blue coats and red hard hats. Just as surprised as him to find somebody in the room, they froze, dropping their Coke bottles on the floor. These went rolling to the feet of Zéphyr, still unconscious behind their backs.

“Howdy!” Miles said, reflexively stroking a dangling wire.

“T’es qui, connard?” inquired one of the techs, inspecting him up and down.

“Martians, eh?” Miles smiled before taking a hit of juice from the bare line. “I’m the new intern, you see. Kinda easy to lose your way beneath the Petrol Hills. Here’s my ID.”

“What?” the first techie responded before Miles landed a perfect right which sent her reeling backwards.

Reacting with only a hiccup, the second one tried to flee but Miles immediately grabbed her by the collar. Pulling with all his might, he tackled her to the ground before glancing down the hallway where the visitors had come from. Fortunately, the maintenance corridor appeared to be empty. No rubberneckers.

Miles turned around. The technician danced her fists forward like an amateur boxer. She went down even faster than her friend, and dropped unconscious next to the Maiden.

The cyborg opened her eyes. After removing the second engineer’s inert body from her laps, she disconnected herself and rewound her cable inside her skull. “Did we have visitors?” she asked, inspecting the engineer’s overalls. Immediately, her black catsuit changed color and mimicked the WarTech work coat with an impressive 3D rendering.

“Should I dress up too? The regular way.”

“‘No. It’s just in case. For a future operation.” And she resumed her civilian appearance before picking up the technician’s access badge.

“Found anythin’?”

Miles listened to the Maiden explanations as he hid the body of the first tech between the U-shaped servers before grabbing the badge that she threw at him. “A jackpot. WarTech is definitely using this disaffected part of the plant as some kind of data-node. A secret relay between their Martian headquarters and many Outer Worlds facilities,” she said. She then approached the same rack of servers while unscrewing her ring finger.

“What’s that?” Miles asked.

The metal member removed, a black wire went to plug itself against an exit, as if attracted by a magnetic force. The Maiden’s eyes turned red before returning to normal. Immediately afterwards, the server towers became silent. Like the lights on the ceiling, their fans had stopped working and the heat rose several degrees.

“My poison ring,” she joked, gesturing with her head to the dark corridor the techies came from. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

“You found Fate?”

The Maiden cracked her fingers. “The whole party you mean.”