"You know, Chloe," Rain murmured between sips of scalding black coffee. "If this is all what you think it is, I've got to warn you about something."

Delgado smirked. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. If you say 'I told you so' I swear to god I'll shoot you in the face."

"I'll try and restrain myself."

Kirk tried and failed to stifle a laugh, earning a stern look from both women. They stood in Rain's apartment, in front of a trio of screens with a central display that dwarfed the two positioned to either side. A massive Kaysar Munitions logo glimmering in its centre. He tried not to look at the rest of the place too much in case he imploded with jealousy. His whole house could have fit in Rain's front room, every inch of it immaculate and clean. It smelled like pine trees.

At least that's what the air freshener said. Kirk had no idea what a real pine tree was meant to smell like.

Standing a little further back, Nevay was the personification of unease, the gangster's face set in an immovable grimace, her eyes constantly flickering left and right. He could hear the faint whirr of her synthetic as it hunted for targets in the shadows.

Her caution wasn't totally unwarranted. So far they had Delgado vouching for Rain Kaulitz, but he still wouldn't have been particularly surprised if a corp kill-team came smashing through the door and slaughtered the lot of them. He'd sort of resigned himself to the fact that he was probably going to get shot dead, and soon, but if he could see this through before that happened, it would be worth it.

Rain sighed, putting her mug down and bringing two hands to bear on the holographic interface. Her fingers flashed silently over keys made of cobalt light.

"Alright, have you got those prints?"

Kirk looked expectantly at Nevay. She hadn't let any of them go with her when she went to retrieve them, but to his immense relief, she did come back, the bundle of crumpled and partly torn prints held together by a circular metal clip.

She twitched, and after a couple of seconds she stomped reluctantly forward to deposit the blueprints on Rain's desk. Then she receded like an angry shadow, one hand resting against the handle of her knife.

"Okay then." Rain beckoned him forward. "Kid, hold these things flat and tell me what exactly you want me to try and find."

Kirk cleared his throat and stepped forward, catching Delgado's eye. She gave him a small nod of encouragement.

"These are plans of a Skiltron-AtomTech fabrication yard, from before the Schism," he explained as he flattened out the first of the prints and slid it over so she could see it. "We think some of your friends have built one. And that they've started building codewraiths."

"Yeah, Chloe told me that much. Sounds insane."

"Does it?"

Rain sighed. "Yes it does, except I can't think of any other way for those damned things to have gotten into Hadrian North. There've been no reported breaches at the bridge, and no sightings on the banks from any of our contract patrol team – nothing. Kaysar have direct security contracts with half the companies on the docks and I've not heard anything. And when you eliminate the impossible..." She threw up her hands resignedly.

"That's what we figured." Kirk nodded. "We need someone to trace the contracts that you would need to build something like this. It would be a ... compartmentalised contract."

Rain's eyes narrowed and she looked down at the plans, nodding slowly. "I guess it would have to be. Assuming you wanted to keep it a secret from some people."

"And you know about that kind of thing?" Kirk asked, trying to recall the web of contracts Arden had sketched out for him back at Delgado's hide out. God, how he wished she could have been here to help, but she'd chosen to go with her family.

He couldn't blame her for that, no matter how much he wanted to.

"I know a little." She examined the blueprint for a moment. "But I'm not an engineer."

"We don't really need an engineer," he replied with a wary smile. "More of a lawyer. We're trying to find contracts for the constituent parts. Individually, there would be nothing illegal, but when you put it all together you'll get... this." He gestured to the blueprint. "They'd need planning permission sign-off, haulage for the raw materials, construction orders, tech contracts, and on and on and on. They would also have security contracts in place to keep anybody from stumbling onto the site while it's under construction."

"Is that all?"

Kirk gave her an apologetic shrug. "It's not the kind of info someone outside the corporate world's going to have access to."

"Which is why you need me." Rain puffed out her cheeks in a sigh, one finger tracing the rim of her coffee mug. "Nothing like a little corporate espionage to wake you up in the morning. You all better settle in – this could take a while."

"You better be sure about this, Kirky boy," Nevay hissed. "I'm not waiting around forever." Her synthetic eye swivelled to fix on the back of Rain's head, her fingers twitching against the knife's pommel. "Corps and I have a score to settle."

Rain seemed to ignore the threat, but he saw the shift in Delgado's stance as the detective straightened up, one hand resting on the grip of her pistol as she fixed Nevay with an icy stare. Kirk took two slow, careful steps to place himself between them.

"You'll get your chance," he told Nevay, his voice hardening. "We've all got scores to settle. If you want to run off into the Heart, guns blazing until the corps kill you and mount your head on their fucking wall, that's your business. But if you want to actually get some payback and live to talk about it, you'll do this my way."

*

"Chloe, come take a look at this."

Delgado blinked and rubbed her eyes at the sound of Rain's voice. She'd been dozing on the couch, letting her aching body sink into the softness of the cushions for just a little while. Yawning, she swung her legs around and reluctantly shoved herself upright.

Stretching her neck from side to side, she trudged across the room to where Rain had been working for hours. The apartment smelled strongly of coffee now, and a heavy downpour had started, battering the windows with great sheets of water. Kirk and Nevay also came slinking through the apartment, summoned by the sound of Rain's voice. Kirk seemed like he'd managed to relax a little, but Cutter's niece had spent the intervening time prowling around the apartment like a caged animal.

"What've you got?" Delgado asked, leaning an elbow on the back of Rain's chair.

"I pulled these auxiliary contract files from our main server," Rain said, swiping a hand at the screen on her right. At the motion, the shimmering screensaver of a stylised Hadrian skyline vanished, replaced by a tranche of documentation.

Delgado eyed the files dubiously. Even the most basic corporate contract could tie your brain in knots. As a cop she'd dealt with more than most, and she could tell even from a quick glance that these looked like a complete labyrinth of legal bullshit.

"And what have you been contracting?" Nevay hissed.

"Kaysar do a lot of security ourselves, but for low level jobs we subcontract out to smaller firms – people who'll take a lower cryptload without asking any questions. From everything you've said, any security they've pulled for this job would've been done as a subcontract job to avoid liability." She shrugged. "It's what I'd do."

Ourselves.

There was still something gross about hearing Rain talk about herself as part of the corporate machine. Delgado could feel her face threatening to squirm itself in a sneer.

"So it's all just plausible deniability," she managed instead. "But this would be more than just your average subcontract. The people involved in this thing, they probably don't even know what they're guarding."

"Probably not." Rain grimaced. "But the bigger problem is that there are probably a thousand subcontracts active at any one time and a thousand more in the works. There's no way to tell which of them have any connection to this plant of yours."

"Classic fucking corps," Nevay sneered moodily. "Just spew enough red tape to choke a shark, and nobody'll take a closer look."

"Well we're taking a closer look." Kirk shot her an irritated glance. "Do you want to help or not?"

"I'm here aren't I?" Nevay made a dismissive gesture before folding her arms tight and subsiding into a petulant silence.

Delgado waited for a few seconds to make sure the woman's outburst was finished with. Then she returned her attention to Rain. "What about the other contracts Kirk mentioned?"

Rain gave a helpless struck. "It's too broad a search parameter. I've got dozens of fabrication contracts from four different corps that fit the specs, and that's just for the finished products. Doesn't even touch haulage, raw materials and city planning."

"Everything they're making, it's all got to go somewhere." Delgado tapped a finger against her chin, trying to put herself in the shoes of a corporate stooge trying to hide something from the rest of the world. She glanced at Kirk. "How long do these things take to make, do you reckon?"

"What, a codewraith?"

"Yeah."

His jaw flapped for a moment, eyes narrowing. "Err... I mean, a yard like the one we're looking for could turn out dozens of models every month. Physically. From what I've read it's the intelligence embedding that takes the real time."

"How much real time?"

"About three months if they're not cutting any corners." Kirk shrugged. "There's no way I can exactly check that though. This was all from stuff that leaked out of Hadrian South before the Schism. Corps keep the real data locked up tight these days." He glanced at Rain. "Right?"

"I just work security," she shot back. "So get off your high horse, kid."

"Okay, pull planning records for every major project completed in the last six months," Delgado said, casting a warning glance at Kirk.

"What?! Do you have any idea-,"

"Yes, I do." She inclined her head to the screen. "You're in with Kaysar – biggest security contractor in the city. I know you've got the access, so just do it."

Rain let out an affronted snort, but her fingers returned to the holokeys. After a few minutes the efficient security software on the Kaysar computer began compiling the required search terms. Across all three screens a series of planning confirmation applications began appearing, some of them shorter, some of them longer, all of them armoured in corporate legal jargon.

"Alright, now what?"

"Kirk?" Delgado beckoned him forward. "Take a look."

"What am I looking for?"

"Anything that would be big enough to cover for that big fucking factory we're looking for." It came out sharper than she wanted. God she wanted a cigar right now – wanted to sit down with a cold beer by the river and smoke away the night staring at the shadowy beauty of Hadrian South. She took a breath. "Sorry, just look at the contracts – see if there's something that's the right kind of size; that fits everything you and Arden were looking for."

"Err... alright, alright." He frowned and folded his arms tight like he was hugging himself. She could see the beads of sweat on his cheeks. "Can you filter this by region?"

"Yeah."

"Take out anything along the river bank. They wouldn't set up shop there. And you can take out the Heart as well. Corps wouldn't stick this thing under their own people – too dangerous and no plausible deniability if something goes wrong."

Rain did as he asked. The results narrowed. Delgado looked at Kirk again and saw him squinting at the contracts, looking more and more uncomfortable. She clenched her hands into fists and stuffed them into her pockets, fighting down impatience.

"It would have to be big." He glanced down at the blue print.

"How big?"

"If they're following the same specs as we've got ... I mean this thing would need to be at least 500,000 square feet to fit everything. They might have slimmed some of the gear down since then, so say 400,000 in change?"

"Jesus," Delgado murmured.

Rain let out an impressed whistle. "Well, that'll help." More filters were applied and bit by bit the list of completed projects tumbled down until they were looking at fifteen to twenty projects that could find.

"Can you mark them on the map?"

Rain didn't reply, but her fingers moved with spider-like speed. On the middle monitor a satellite map of Hadrian appeared with pins scattered across its dark mass to mark out the potential sites.

"Crap." Kirk bit his lip. "That's still a lot of ground to cover."

In the bleak silence that followed, Delgado was suddenly aware of Nevay standing right up beside her, the woman's eyes narrow as she stared at the map. The hostility of moments ago seemed to have evaporated. Nevay's mouth opened slightly her tongue running back and forth across her teeth and she squinted harder, as though willing an epiphany into existence.

It came a moment later.

"Shit, I think I know where they are!" The words exploded out of her.

"You know where they are?" Rain's voice was thick with incredulity.

"Yeah, I think do. I... damn it." Nevay pressed a fist against her mouth and closed her eyes. "Shit it was months ago – this one job. Cutter got us to rake a Prometheus freight convoy. It was meant to be just a normal job – just a smash and grab and go – but that convoy was armed to the fucking teeth. Thought somebody'd just been extra paranoid that day but..."

"What's your heist got to do with this?" Kirk asked.

"Because we couldn't shift the weird-ass tech we pulled off one of those trucks for love nor money. Goods were registered to some contractor, Hippolyta Fabrications."

"Hippolyta?" Kirk traded a bemused glance with Delgado. "Never heard of them."

"Me neither," she agreed. "Which probably makes them a good fit for keeping things discreet."

"I don't know what any of that shit was," Nevay continued, "but nobody would touch it. Not the dock techs, not the scrappers, not even the fucking mini-corp wannabes. But I remember the convoy was supposed to be heading north, right up the Fare Row 135. We had to jump them just before they hit the main transit artery."

Delgado's eyes lit up and she tapped Rain's shoulder lightly. "Mark that."

She did. A glowing blue line appeared on the screen, slicing neatly upward from its beginning near one of Hadrian's residential districts, up through the Heart, and spearing upwards until in merged with one of the gargantuan megaways that connected Hadrian to Pictavia in the north.

Only three of Kirk's potential prospects lay close to that route.

"There," Nevay breathed, pointing. "It's got to be one of them."

"Check the contracts," Kirk said quickly. "See if Hippolyta had any orders placed that match any of the addresses."

Rain hauled up the Hippolyta Fabrications contracts onto the secondary screen. With fearsome speed she had a cross-reference running against the three addresses marked out against route 135. A few seconds passed.

Two of the red squares on the map faded out, leaving one final location highlighted.

"There," Rain murmured.

Delgado tried to keep calm. "And what is 'there'?"

"According to official city planning logs there's a multi-corp battery plant constructed out there." Rain's fingers played; the screen danced and zoomed in on the area, right at Hadrian's northern edge. A quick adjustment of settings brought up streetside views on the adjacent monitors.

The landscape there was a jungle of solar collection towers and wind harvesters climbing high up from the barren earth, and hemmed in by tightly packed corporate office and R&D blocks. A blue square lit up where the supposed plant had been built, complete with an innocuous square of text spearing off of it detailing its functions.

"Work logs show that construction started three years ago, and finished... six months back." She gave an amused snort. "Pretty quick work by corporate standards, if we're being honest. Fits your window, kid."

"It's perfect," Kirk breathed, leaning in close over Rain's shoulder. Nevay edged closer her synthetic eye whirring and flaring with cobalt light. He looked at her and grinned. "Knew we brought you along for something.

"Oh, piss off, Balfour." She elbowed him in the side.

"This is all very nice," Rain said, her voice stern, "and very circumstantial. We don't know anything for sure yet. You don't have any proof."

"Guess that's the next job then, isn't it?"

Delgado took a sharp backwards step as Nevay slipped her knife from its sheathe, a manic expression on her face as she examined its cutting edge. After a moment she looked at them, grinning malevolently. She indicated the map with the point of her blade.

"Who wants to come take some pretty pictures with me?" she asked.

||