churbooseanon

A new job with his team leads to York getting himself into a spot of trouble with a menacing presence as its source.

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

Somehow, in all the time he’d lived on Adaptive, Miles hadn’t really gotten his head around just what he was looking for out here. Apparently the theory that he was looking for a mercenary among some small handful of them on the planet had been… way past faulty. What he was looking for was a needle in a haystack, truth be told, and that was almost scarier to his inner Connor than the fact that his inner Connor had become that. Miles was just becoming so much easier, so much more hardy, and definitely more attached to life on this planet than Connor had ever expected.

“York, are you paying attention or not?”

Miles looked up from the crossword puzzle book he’d propped up on his chest. When he’d first draped himself over his favorite armchair he’d actually had intentions on it, but then Madrid, Jakarta and Berlin had come in, flopping over the worn down couch with beers in hand and their intentions clearly on some televised sporting event. Given the fact that it was apparently roller derby season and the trio who did merc work every few nights were actually in an amateur league themselves. They would watch every game they could catch live, ponder over the ones they recorded while the four of them were out on jobs, and argued over techniques, gear, and tactics at every meal. Frankly, Miles was almost as tired of the damn idea of the sport as he was of the name they’d given him that night two months ago on the rooftop.

They’d given him more than that, of course. It had been Jakarta, the leader of their little team, who had taken his duffle and tossed it at Berlin, the ‘team heavy.’ The man, loaded up with an honest to god rocket launcher, had pawed through it and shown his compatriots the haul Miles had made that night. And Jakarta, intrigued, had started the questioning. She’d laughed off his question as to whether they knew ‘The Pyro,’ noting there had to be at least two mercs by that designation in Gulch alone, not to mention the other city states. And just like that, he’d learned that the mercenary business was alive and thriving in the city of Gulch. Hell, on the planet of Adaptive. It was almost a more legitimate line of work than signing up with the UNSC military branches.

Good thing for him they had seen a lot of use in a talented jewel thief being added to the combined skills of their group. Otherwise they could have taken his haul and left him dead behind them. Instead he had a roof over his head that didn’t leak, a secure door, a bed he shared with Jakarta, and three squares a day.

Truth be told, there was actually enough good to this deal, including the merc work and Madrid’s promise to get in touch with his contacts to see if they couldn’t find this ‘Pyro’ that had killed his family, to make the roller derby debate worth it.

“You’ve got your so-called sport on, so you can bet not,” he returned easily to his boss slash lover, the only woman in their group, who was stretched out across the laps of their other teammates. Jakarta was a lovely woman, with skin dark as the night, brilliant green eyes, and the broad nose and full lips that were considered the height of beauty back on Miles’s home world. The first time she’d taken off her helmet he’d definitely been caught staring and Madrid and Berlin had just shrugged to each other. Apparently the woman enjoying the company of her teammates was far from uncommon, and they had no problem sharing the time she so graciously gave them all.

“Yeah, well it’s a replay of a championship game from last year, and it’s just background noise for our planning for tomorrow.”

Miles actually winced in pain when his sudden motion to sit up found him slamming his heel into the bit of wood exposed just under the left arm of the chair he was in. But that was easily waved away as he sat up straighter and twisted so he could look. Sure enough Madrid was pushing things aside on the coffee table to roll out a set of blueprints. Blueprints meant B&E jobs, and Miles liked those over anything else they’d done since he’d been so kindly ‘asked’ to join the group. Sure, he’d been taught to handle the guns the group used for more hands on jobs, but when there was a B&E of any sort he was left mainly in charge of getting them in and out, and the need to kill was a bit less pressing.

Not that he couldn’t.

He’d learned a lot from these people, and they were kdkills Miles knew he needed to keep going on Adaptive. Especially now that he was a certified merc thanks to his new friends. Choosing not to live by the gun just meant it was far more likely you’d die by it. And Miles wasn’t going down until he had his justice. His vengeance. His truth.

“About fucking time. I was starting to get bored with you guys working on your damn uniforms.”

“Dude, off-season is about to end,” Madrid snapped in response. “Trust me, York, sooner or later we’re going to get your quick fucking feet on our side, and you’re going to love the rush of it all.”

“The rush I get off of, Madrid, is racing the timer for infiltration, so let’s get to it,” Miles smiled, slipping out of his seat to position himself on the floor and thus closer to the map. Work always made life easier, and fuck if this job wasn’t satisfying in its own way.

“It’s not going to be easy,” Jakarta said. “We’re going in for an information grab, and a smash up after. The problem? This place has seriously beefed up security and a brand new class of DSS security systems. Think you can handle it, York?”

He grinned up at his partners, eyes flashing with pleasure. Nothing better than being a stick in the craw of the new management of DSS. “There isn’t anything that company can make that will ever hold me back. Simple as that.”

* * * * * *

“So, York, can you handle it?”

His synthsense gloved fingers hovered just in front of the holographic display of the lock. Sure enough it was a newer offering by DSS, and it was nothing like the encrypted locks already offered on the market. It was more complex, in a way that had a strangely alluring elegance to the form. Yet there was something about the specific formation of it that was nagging at him, that put Miles on edge and had his fingers shaking just the littlest bit. Which was troublesome, because with a new lock and a time limit in which to explore it, he had to do this whole thing by touch. The slightest little shiver could set the thing off, which would bring guards down upon them rather than toward the distraction that Jakarta and Berlin were running near another entrance. Getting inside of the minor corporate research building where this Lethbridge Industries was working on a new, military grade helmet modification unit that would fetch a hefty price on the open market was one thing. Getting into the R&D room where the schematics and other things they intended to get away with was another thing entirely. It was this door they had to get through to get the prize.

Except there was something about this lock…?

“York? We’re sorta on a timer here…”

“I’ve got it, Madrid,” Miles insisted, flexing his fingers before setting them into the control points of the locks and letting the synthsense gloves tell him where and what he was doing even as the interface nodes on the gloves returned information on pressure, temperature, and other little details to the feedback mod displayed on his visor. And wow did this lock do it all. It read the slightest touch of his fingers for motion, picked up on their temperature and spread it through the system, and the slightest flex of his fingers showed that the lock was a series of nested interlocking rings.

“Whoever designed this,” he whispered in awe as he started to twist his way through the first level, “is a genius.”

The thing was… Miles had a pretty serious theory as to who the genius was.

“Yeah, and the genius is between us and the goods, and trust me, this employer of ours is not someone you disappoint,” Madrid sighed. “Can you do it?”

“Yeah,” Miles assured him, his confidence swelling up as the lock moved easily in a pattern he remembered from out of the shadows of his past. No one had ever figured they would be putting him on the opposite side of it. There was no way any degree of customization in the lock would ever keep the man who had once been Connor Danvers from getting through his own damn lock. “No problem at all.”

“Yeah right. You’re good, York, but even you can’t beat a new DSS system in less than…”

The first ring gave way and let Miles’s fingers slide into the second ring that with a careful twist and flick allowed him to return to the first level to get at the next pin. That seemed to silence Madrid for a moment, because there wasn’t another peep for the rest of the ten seconds it took to get Miles through another pin and then sink down into the third level to present his discovered frequency combination to the system’s review.

“Damn,” Madrid whispered, and Miles could hear the pleasure in his friend’s voice. “I stand corrected York. You’re a fucking miracle worker.”

“I prefer the term genius,” Miles answered as he pulled his hands from the lock and the door opened. He stood and strode easily into the room. “Come on. This employer of ours really wants the info, right? I’ll check the computer archives, you get the physical stuff, okay?”

He didn’t wait for confirmation, just moved into the R&D lab and glanced around. It took only a second for him to figure out which would be the work station of the person in charge of the lab. Their info said the man was a grandparent, and there was only one workstation with a picture of three generations of family on the desk, with all other workstations oriented to be easily seen from it. Miles flopped down into the desk chair and booted up the computer system, thrusting in the thumbdrive the employer had given them that would crack the security systems and download the information they were looking for. This was the easy part of the job. Already Miles had taken care of his big parts in the job, and while he waited for the automated program to run its course, he could spare a moment to think.

Or at least to acknowledge the way Connor was raging deep in his gut, a furious hatred burning in his chest. How could Dr. Gonzales have let them use his work, turn it into the new tool for the now evil overlords of his grandfather’s business? Of course being a fugitive on the run, suspected of murdering his own family and being too much of a failure to hide it, it wasn’t like the thing he had created was safe. It belonged to Danvers Security Systems anyway, and who was he to complain about it? If nothing else it was going to get them a lot of work until DSS could do an analysis of at least ten instances of him cracking this system to find the loophole they apparently hadn’t fixed during a proper QA process. He was going to be set for a while and that was useful for him and his team and would get them good money so he could…

One of the files being transferred over onto the drive caught his eye on the screen. Just the briefest flash of a name, and it sent chills into him. Made the burning of Connor jump higher. But the name was gone just as quickly as it had come, and with the system already occupied, all Miles could do was push the wheeled chair over to another workstation.

“Almost done here,” Madrid called from another part of the room, and Miles ignored the words as he booted up this computer as well. Maybe he wasn’t the best hacker but he thought he could get into this system and to that file he had briefly seen. A file with the DSS corporate locator as the origin point, and Dr. Gonzales’s name on it. “York? Dude, we’ve got to get moving soon, do you really need another terminal?”

“Yes,” Miles snapped. “Monitor that one and grab the drive when it’s done. Then move. I’ll be just behind you.”

He wasn’t sure that he would be, but at least Madrid didn’t argue as Miles’s fingers flew over the keyboard. Dammit there were walls everywhere he looked, and it didn’t matter how deep he got, there was always something blocking his route.

“York, two minutes let until we’ve got to move,” Madrid informed him.

“Bit busy here, Drid. So please shut up.”

Then, a few moments later, “A minute, York.”

Miles scooped up the paper weight from the desk and hurled it at his friend’s head. “Shut up.”

There was a tsking noise as Miles finally got through the last security barrier and pulled a spare datachip from the back of his helmet to feed it into the computer. Wouldn’t be too bad to copy this and a few more files for himself. But as the transfer went down he still had to watch. See that name, his mentor, the man he believed in the most, claiming credit for the design of Miles’s lock. See him named as a recent promotion to the head of R&D. Like that it all started to fit together didn’t it? Not that it was enough proof, or even a reason, but Connor thought he’d be sick in his stomach.

“We’ve got to go, York!” Madrid insisted, coming up and yanking Miles’s chair away from the desk. “Everyone else is expecting us.”

Miles cursed, grabbed his own datachip, and stored it back in his helmet. As he pushed to his feet to join Madrid in his break toward the door, something clattered loudly behind them. Instinct got York down behind a desk as a shot rang out in the room, and when he looked to see if Madrid had made it to safety, he instead found his gray and navy clad friend falling, face first, to the ground.

“What a shame,” a voice sighed in the back of the room, from where the clattering sound had come from. “You know, if you’d just left when he told you, I wouldn’t have had to do that. But you’re already cutting my window so small, and I’ve got to say, your little time is a lot less skilled than I’d been paying for. I’m starting to think the money wasn’t worth it at all. So sorry. Business and all of that.”

Miles peeked over the top of the desk he was sheltering behind, and found a man in a rich shade of blue with what looked like grenades string across his chest and waist, and an honest to god cape on his back. What the gold thing on his shoulder was, Miles didn’t have the slightest clue, but he could tell just by looking at the man that he’d gotten himself into some pretty serious trouble.

“So, York was it? What a lovely name. But no matter. Go to your friend and bring me his datachip and yours, and I might just let you carry him out of here. I only shot him in the shoulder. Consider his life your payment for all of this.”

Miles looked to Madrid, the spreading bit of blood on the floor, and considered the datachip in his helmet. The one that might give him the proof he needed.

With a sigh he pulled his shotgun from his back and forced himself to breathe evenly.

“Sorry, Madrid. But I can’t. I’m so sorry.”

Weapon in hand, Connor Danvers, known as Miles, York, or simply ‘the Thief’, stood and faced the man who had shot down his partner.

He refused to give this up. Not when he finally had a lead.

“If I die, the datachip automatically wipes. In fact, that failsafe is built into both of our helmets. And I’ve got a feeling you had to have put something dangerous onto the datachips if you’re demanding to have ours rather than doing the info grab yourself. What, the systems here going to format themselves? That means we’re your only chance at learning what you want, right?”

The man in blue tilted his head as if intrigued, and Miles had to hope that would be enough.