The Neo-Metropol Heist

43: Jaeger

When the lasers suddenly flickered and died, Jaeger wasn't ready.
She'd stood awkwardly between them for several minutes, telling herself that she should simply trigger the alarm system and bring Garistag running, but unable to do so.
She cursed and berated herself, but she still couldn't do it. She didn't even know why anymore, either.
Was she really so determined to catch the two thieves that had trapped her there - Daniel Dismas, or Artem, whatever his name was? Did she even really care either way?
Was she going very slowly insane due to unresolved grief and stress? Well, that was always a possibility.
The entire room went dark momentarily, and with it the lasers died. The power came back on immediately and Jaeger knew she only had a moment to decide her path.
She could run back the way she had came, return to the party and pretend she hadn't seen a thing. Stewart was the only one who had seen her leave, but he would be her alibi. These thieves were talented, and they'd slipped everybody's notice.
That would cause her shit down the line, but apathy would win out, and maybe that was what she truly craved.
Instead, duty took hold of her, like her father grasping her by the arm and pulling her along, and she bolted towards where Artem had spoken to her from, all high and mighty.
She lurched forward and rolled to safety at the exact same moment the laser grid sprang back into life as its victim jumped free.
She climbed to her feet and brushed her dress off. It was not especially good professional wear for the job she had been asked to do, she noted for the fifteenth time that night.
She looked back across the laser field, somewhere deep inside her she felt some kind of regret. But she had made her decision, and now she was back on the trail. For better or for worse.
Outside the other end of the security office, she found herself in a maintenance corridor. Several dozen android workers lay dormant in the darkness, plugged in to battery ports along the wall. At the other end of the corridor, at least ten metres away, she saw a slightly ajar door, the security pad next to it flickering madly.
Jaeger padded quietly through the corridor, the metal flooring cold on her bare feet. The android workers were the newest models, which was to be expected from CastellsTech. They seemed to watch her through blank faceplates as she walked.
When she was closer to the door, something moved in the corner of her vision and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.
She glanced behind her, into the darkness. Nothing but the faces of a dozen sleeping workers that were never really alive anyway.
She told herself that even up until the point that one of them reached out and grasped her arm. She squealed inadvertently as the hand limply grasped her.
"Fuck," she gasped, swinging out instinctively with a right hook and shattering the faceplate of the robot that had grabbed her.
"May I be of assistance, madam?" The service droid asked politely, its voice broken and stuttering. Had she done that?
The robot deactivated and bowed tiredly as she moved towards the exit, faster than before. More androids came to life around her, but as they all blinked into consciousness, or whatever it was for them, she realised that they were all in the corridor for a reason.
Each one was defective - some had missing pieces, arms and legs, others simply spoke to her in garbled speech. One was so broken that its faceplate was hanging open, revealing the almost obscene innards of its brain, and spoke to her in a broken amalgamation of Spanish, English and what she assumed was Hindi.
The corridor was alive with the nattering polite speech of fifty broken service droids when the corridor spat her out into a maze of offices and boardrooms. Jaeger pushed the door shut behind her to block out the sound, leaning up against the door to catch her breath.
"Fucking robots," she whispered.
The boardrooms and offices reminded her of the upstairs of headquarters - where all the bureaucracy happened, scribing over figures and deadlines and targets. Stuffy old suits who'd lost their street sense long ago and spent their time selling out the force to the highest bidder.
Where would they go now? Jaeger asked herself, looking left to right. At the end of the corridor she was in, there was a direction board for the benefit of visitors - she was still in the part of the building that was meant to look legitimate.
She went up to the board and scanned the flickering words, sliding her finger across it as the did so. The board shuddered and flickered at the touch.
She was on the tenth floor now, and she knew she would have to keep going up. But these thieves won't take the stairs.
They would be heading to the very tip of the skyscraper, under the penthouse level. Jaeger thought back to the security blueprints Garistag had given her. The tower was essentially a different building once you got to floor fifty - from then on it was all R&D and black-budget projects.
Different clearance, different elevators. The elevator, then.
They would head up to the fiftieth floor, as high as the first elevator would go, and then cross to the other side of the building and then change tact to travel the rest of the way up. The maintenance shafts, most likely.
No, they wouldn't be using the elevators, that would set off the security, but it was the only way.
Jaeger's brain moved at a thousand miles per hour and her legs scrambled to move with it. She followed the pointed arrow down into the maze of corridors and found herself in the floor reception area.
A line of seven elevators made up the far wall, all sealed shut with an angry red security panel next to them, informing her that they were all out of service.
One of the doors, when she looked closer, was pulled slightly apart, a cold breeze blowing in from the shaft.
Jaeger pried the loose doors apart, wondering what kind of machinery they must have used to force their way through, and looked up.
At first she saw nothing in the shaft, an empty vertical abyss as far as the eye could see. So, she circumvented her eyes and activated her HUD, it snapped out across her eyes from the small chip in her temple, emphasising every detail of the shaft.
It analysed the mechanism and even told her the temperature, which she could have figured out herself by the way the goosebumps prickled up her arms.
After a couple of seconds, far up the shaft, further than it was possible to see, it detected two warm, human shaped objects hanging in the darkness. There was another shape with them that the device struggled to recognise.
She wouldn't have believed it without seeing it - they were scaling the elevator shaft - by hand.
These two are insane, Jaeger thought. Maybe she should just let them go, they were certainly working hard for their reward and that was something she could respect.
She slapped herself mentally and glanced around the shaft for something she could grip onto to follow after them, before her senses returned to her and informed her that unlike her prey, she could use the elevator like a normal human being.
She let the shaft door close and overrode the panel of the next elevator along with her security credentials.
A couple of moments later, the door pinged and opened.