Key To The Truth - Part Three (a Guns for Hire fanfic)

[churbooseanon]

York adjusts to life on a new world, and learns a way to make his life work there. And sometimes that goes wrong.

 

Key To The Truth [Part Three] - (A Guns for Hire Fanfic)

    Time, he had heard it said, healed all wounds. It was a nice sentiment, really. The idea that with time any pain one had experienced would fade. The distance between one and an event would make said event more bearable. Yet here the man once known as Connor Danvers was, almost half a year after the incident, with no relief in sight. His rare contact with the people he had left behind held no hopeful tidbits. In fact, his absence from his home had only seemed to solidify the police’s case against him. And had given whoever had set him up even more of a chance to make their frame job believable. Six months and the burn on the back of his hand still ached in the worst way, and every time he took off his gloves and saw it he wanted to scream for how unfair the world was.

    Six months and still Connor Danvers was buried somewhere out in the infinitely cold and silent void of space, and a young man who had come to be known as Miles had taken his place. Stepped into his skin, stole his voice, and moved his body from day to day, while Connor could do nothing but remember and linger in the loss. 

    At least Miles knew how to move. At least Miles knew how to make use of everything Connor had learned, everything Connor had created, to survive. Connor was a rich idealist. Miles was a man surviving on the streets of one of the most dangerous planets Humanity had chosen to colonize. A backwards little shit hole where the weather itself was deadly not because of gale force winds or violent lightning storms or thick falls of snow, but because of the very clouds themselves. The way the moisture in the air stung and burned skin, melted eyes, burned brains or whatever else it was supposed to do. Miles knew how to survive, how to keep going, how to get what he needed. Connor was still paralyzed with grief, and so easily set aside by the thief Miles that it was almost scary.

    Almost made him wonder just how sane he was.

    Of course those sorts of thoughts weren’t really suited to the man ducked just inside of the alcove of a doorway at nearly three in the morning. It was early, sure, but these were the hours that Miles thrived in. Those times after the world had gone to sleep, and only the most questionable people walked the streets. Innocent people weren’t hurt at three in the morning, or so Connor let himself believe. No, whatever Miles would do would only hit insurance companies, so what should he care? Let their deep pockets provide for him in a way that the rest of the world thought beneath itself.

    Miles took a deep breath as he pulled on his pair of synthsense gloves. All the concerns of Connor had to be gone now, thanks brain, because the job was here and now. Well, job was probably a generous term. What this was, flat out, was a minor heist. A jewelry store he had noticed had sub-par security systems in about seventy percent of the ways that it mattered, and in the other thirty percent, there was a brand spanking new DSS-J32-B lock installed. The encrypted system was one of the newest DSS offerings, and damn secure against most methods of invasion. Unless, of course, you knew the little secrets to taking them out that DSS had never revealed to the public because it seemed too convoluted for anyone to ever come up with.

    He, of course, wasn’t just anyone.

    A light tap of a button on the back of his left glove activated the interaction between the gloves and the OS of his helmet, and Miles smirked as a variety of displays he’d taken the time to fine tune on the coding level came to life. Power readings on the lock’s data entry panel by the door popped up next to his schematics of the wiring systems of the lock. In a corner was his layout of the store, all the pieces he intended to take already marked off to help him do the run more efficiently. out of the store, all the pieces he intended to take already marked off to help him do the run more efficiently. Not that efficiency was too important. What he got away with he got away with, because the fence he’d gotten to know had never seemed to hesitate to take whatever Miles could get him, whether it was high quality or not.

    Good thing, Miles supposed as he cracked his knuckles, pulled out a pair of pliers and a length of mostly stripped wire, and set the timer running. The last thing he needed was to argue over someone because they thought he was some idiot who knew nothing about jewelry quality and gem ratings.

    The pliers had the cover off of the access panel in a wink, and from there Miles just had to carefully root through the systems. If he didn’t get the system disabled or the cover back on within thirty seconds then the alarms would be going and that would bring the police down on him. Which, he supposed, was why the company hadn’t worked too hard on this minor hole in the system. Someone would have to figure it out and pull it off in less than a minute and what were the chances of that?

    Well, seeing as this was the second place Miles was hitting tonight, pretty damn high. He allowed himself a minor chuckle as he isolated the wire that led to a secondary, internal battery that would keep the system going even in a power outage. Step one, check. Step two had him quickly stripping the insulation off of the feed from the main power. Step three, connect the wires to short out both. The great thing was that it burned the backup first, which left the active going off as well, and a small, holographic alert that something was wrong with the system flickering for half a second in front of his eyes before the whole thing died.

    First security system foiled. Miles grinned and snapped the face plate back on and put the tools away. Instead he pulled forth a few smaller pieces, traditional lockpicks. Thank god he’d learned to use these as a kid as part of the inherent familiarizing himself with the history of locks. Airlocks were an easy enough thing to get into once a security system was shorted. They were supposed to be, considering people had to duck into them frequently, and during a storm the store owners preferred to have customers in their shop rather than out of it. Granted there were special lockdown procedures that were far harder to get through when there was an actual storm, but outside of one most airlocks had a physical key setup that unlocked the outer door for business settings. It took only a moment to pop that so that he could pull the airlock door open and slip into that.

    Now came, ironically, the true hard part. Miles knew the actual security systems way better than the tech behind airlocks, their sensors, and things such as that. Even as he closed the door behind him and the system started to filter the air and set to equalizing to the internal atmosphere, he was pulling a third set of tools altogether out. These were the ones that were needed to hack the airlock itself, which brought up its own problems. Still, his study of them since landing on this planet and realizing that he sort of lacked the identity for a normal job, had paid off. This one took a few more minutes to get through, as well as several pretty impressive bits of active code alteration through power surges in the wiring as well as a good old fashioned cursing and kicking a power panel which just magically made everything obey him. But like that he was opening the inner door and damn, jewelry store open.

    “World is your fucking oyster,” Miles chuckled under his breath, certain the noise didn’t escape his helmet. There was still the internal security systems to deal with, but compared to the external stuff, he wasn’t worried at all. Because the poor owner hadn’t thought how bad of an idea it might be to tell his fifteen year old son the code, and the kid had bragged to friends and Miles had managed to hear the kids as they were walking out of the store one day, their voices at a hush.

    Triumphantly he punched the code into the display by the door and then he took his duffle over to the first case. Time to load up.

    Miles was halfway through the first case, one filled with expensive watches set with lovely jewels because people on Adaptive liked even gaudier jewelry than he’d ever dealt with back home, probably due to the whole helmet thing, when the alarm went off.

    “Or maybe the kid was bragging about the lockdown code,” he cursed under his breath. The timer on his helmet kept track as he smashed another case open and quickly threw a whole display of watches of a variety of qualities into his bag.

    Less than impressive amount of loot gained, Miles threw himself to the slowly closing airlock door. Good thing for him that his tampering with the airlock and external security systems meant that the traditional quick and complete lockdown wasn’t going to be put into play here. In fact, he wanted to smirk as he pulled the inner airlock door closed behind him and kicked the power access panel once more. Just for spite. Another quick bit of wiring had the external door opening despite the air processing not finishing, and just like that Miles was back out onto the street.

    Not that the streets were much better than being in the store itself. There were sirens closing in on his location and there was nothing good to come from them. If the cops got to him they’d fingerprint him, and if they did that then of course they would get the warrant for him that had no doubt put up on the Interstellar databases. That would get him sent back home, life in prison if he was lucky, and put him in reach of those people who had sought to bring his family down and that had set up some bullshit board of directors in their place that seemed intent on destroying everything Connor had ever believed in. The very thought of it all terrified Connor. So close to it all being for nothing.

    Miles, though, stripped his synthsense gloves off, shoved them into a pocket, and ran into the alley between the jewelry store and the bookstore next to it. Unlike Connor, he had a fucking exit plan, and it wasn’t going to be thrown off just because of some sounds in the distance. Instead he took a running start at a dumpster, vaulted on to it, and kept running just far enough to throw himself into the air and grab the bottom rung of the bookstore’s fire escape. His weight disengaged the lock and as the thing rolled down he jumped off, slinging the duffle onto his back. Once the ladder was down he was ascending quickly, pausing just long enough to get the ladder back up and locked. Then it was a sprint up spiralling stairs and onto the rooftop. From there he looked toward the nearest buildings, looked for the likeliest jump, and running at full speed, threw himself across the gap between buildings not once, but three times until he was a bit away from the scene of the crime.

    Finally deciding that his distance was more than enough for the less than impressive police force of the city of Gulch, Miles ducked down behind the wall of the roof he had taken refuge on and grinned to himself. He’d give it a few minutes to catch his breath before he took to putting more distance between himself and his crimes before doubling back to his fence.

    Miles had accounted for everything, and now he was away with a bag filled with his first store’s take, and supplemented with some of what he had taken from the second. With all of this he should be good for a few months, maybe even get a more secure residence and start building some of the gear he would need for more complicated locks. After all, someone on this planet had done the job against his family, and if he could just find them, he might be able to find the hand behind it all. That was all he wanted. True justice for the people he had loved.

    What he got instead was a gun in his face from a woman in gray and ochre, and two more men behind her looking menacing.

    “What have we got here?” the woman asked. “A little cat’s paw accidentally falling into our hands? Hand over the bag, thief.”

    Well fuck. Why couldn’t things just go right?