“Older facilities operate at reduced overhead, reflecting their proven operational maturity.”— Bhavsar Inc., Facilities Investment Strategy
Naiche nodded. “Please tell me you at least tolerate Natalya.”
“Tolerate,” I said, and I tried not to wince. “Before we did the Aurelia op, she rerouted my commute to a luggage locker in Mahlangu, handed me a mask and a new earpiece through the locker door, and then cooked my old earpiece in my coat pocket while I stood on a platform, which she later described, without apparent guilt, as a demonstration.”
Regina’s boots were already off the table, and somehow she still found room to lean further back. “That’s Natalya for you.” She had an amused smile. “What was it this time?”
“That decline is a button on my band and not a thing that exists between me and her. Direct quote.”
“Incredible,” Regina told the ceiling. “She went easy on you; she’s learning.”
Naiche did not look as if he found it incredible or a learning process. “That was not on the slate,” he said, “though it is, regrettably, in character. You have history and she mentioned in her note you are ‘surprisingly pleasant’.”
He squared the two leather books on the wood and slid the top one a few inches clear of the other. “Which brings me to the part I need to fix before we go further. The report has a netrunner-shaped hole in it. Hellboop fingerprinted the orbital posture, but she’s a scout, not a runner, and the orbital is where this op lives or dies. I want Natalya in the room for the read. She hears what Hellboop saw, she tells us what she can actually do with it, and we plan against the real numbers instead of faith.”
“I have lots of faith,” Regina said.
“You have seventy pages.”
He laid his hand flat on the cover of the book he’d separated. It was the same scuffed leather as its twin; the gilt gone off the spine. Then the cover lifted on its own, the pages under it turned out not to be pages, and a holo climbed off the spine in a soft square of light. What a weird combo of magic and tech.
“I’ve already talked with her, and she agreed on a holo-call,” Naiche said.
Regina clasped his hand. “Wait, she did?”
Naiche nodded, and pressed the page in the book, which made a holo-call connect.
“Sakra, already?!” Natalya was swinging on her chair when the call connected. The room behind her ran in the wrong colors; a low magenta wash off something out of frame, a rack of holos stacked two high and curving past the edge of the projection, cables bundled and ziptied. The instant the holo caught, her hand shot to the left of frame and swept something off the desk, low, under the table line.
She looked younger than the voice had led me to assume. Dark hair shoved up off her face, a headset slung around her neck instead of over her ears.
“Ahoj,” she said. “Naiche. Dashi.” A small nod for each of us, and then a longer one for Regina. “Hellboop? Didn’t expect you here!”
Regina brightened. “Well, here I am. By the way, did you get the tempest?”
Natalya’s face darkened. “No. I was camped, but thankfully that was taken care of,” her eyes shot towards me, and then back. I kept waiting for the rest of it, explaining what the heck the tempest was, but she just sat there in her wrong-colored room, unsettlingly civil.
She caught me staring. “What.”
“Nothing. You’re being polite.”
“I am trying,” she said, flatly. Then it was gone, and she tipped her chair back at the same angle Regina had. “It is exhausting. Do not get used to it.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Naiche drew the loose summary sheet back toward himself and set two fingers on its corner. “Good. Everyone’s here. Everyone is, for the moment, behaving.” His glance touched both women with perfect impartiality. “So we go through the report properly. Top to bottom, every line. Natalya tells us what the orbital lets her do and what it doesn’t, and Dash—” he looked at me “—tells us what he can pay for.”
He turned the sheet face-up on the wood. “From the top.”
Regina took it as her cue.
“Before you read anything, some context, because the pages are dry and I am not. I did all four in one day; a few hours apiece, which is enough to learn what a building is, even if it’s not enough to learn how to rob it. They’re sorted by how hard they tried to keep me out. We start with the one that tried hardest.”
She peeled the top sheet off the little stack and slid it across the wood.
BVF-TG-01 — SOUTH FARMING DISTRICT Ninety-two-plus personnel per shift. Patrols every four minutes through back-of-house. Triple-redundant camera coverage. Vendor intake requires nine-day-advance scheduling and full escort. Vendor Records cross-checks badges against same-day photo capture.
Ninety-two-plus personnel were more people than I’d pictured a farm holding, and a four-minute patrol cycle through the back meant there was no four-minute window anywhere in the building where I’d be alone with my own thoughts.
“This is the newest of the four,” Regina said, watching me get to the camera line. “After they tore down the previous one, they built it last, and they built it scared, because it’s their Tago lab, the one where they figure out what Tago specifically wants to eat.”
She paused and clearly thought of food, because she licked her lips. “Which is apparently a science with a budget. Local palates, local nutrition, local everything. Which means—” she tapped the triple-redundant line “—that. They expect somebody to come. They’re correct that somebody might. It won’t be us.”
Naiche set the page to his left, started a discard pile, and waited.
Regina peeled off the next.
BVF-TG-02 — NEW CLEARWATER DISTRICT Showcase production. Press junkets, Sol Alliance regulatory tours, occasional school groups. Heavy legitimate foot traffic. Service-side is softer than BVF-TG-01 but every tour roster is reviewed within 24 hours of close, and any anomaly in foot-traffic logs triggers same-week security review. Service tunnels connect to the Clearwater utility grid. Accessible, not anonymous; the Clearwater side is camera-watched as a civic asset, which means tape goes to Tago PD rather than Bhavsar Internal, but Bhavsar pulls it on request. Viable for tour-cycle approaches. Not viable if you need to not exist on record.
“Now this one I got inside.” There was a brightness to it that hadn’t been there before. “Showcase site. They run press junkets and regulatory tours and the occasional gaggle of schoolkids through the public side, so the front door’s basically a turnstile, and I walked it like a tourist with too many questions. Took the full tour. Asked the guide things she didn’t know.” She leaned in. “And here’s the gift. It’s the same building. Germination floors, handoff bay, service spine; Bhavsar pours one mold many times across many cities, and everything I learned standing in the clean public one, I now know about the other three. For free.”
Natalya, who’d gone quiet enough that I’d half forgotten the call, surfaced. “Once you settle on a site, I pull the build file. I worked on the Bhavsar job once. They're stingy bastards, but even they have a parent template and vary it per address.”
“They’re clones,” Regina said. “Corpos don’t pay twice for the same drawing. Savings go into someone’s bonus.” She nudged the page toward the bottom line. “But I don’t recommend it. Soft to get into, sure. The problem is getting back out clean, given what you specifically need.”
I nodded and didn’t ask yet.
She slid the third across, and this time she kept two fingers on the corner after it left her hand.
BVF-TG-03 — DÄMMERGRUND DISTRICT Shares the building with Midorikawa Corp. Common-floor traffic is constant and inconsistently logged outside Bhavsar’s own floors. Physical security is the lightest of the upper three, but the tenant mix means any incident gets reviewed in parallel by Midorikawa Corp. Fallout exposure is wide.
“This one I read off the lobby and the building directory and almost nothing else,” she said.
“I said no risking,” Naiche said.
Regina rolled her eyes and leaned back. “I didn’t risk it. Bhavsar shares the tower. Mixed tenants, common floors, traffic, which would be lovely, except for who the neighbor is. Midorikawa keeps an office one door down, same Dämmergrund block, which means their security is also standing in that lobby. And Midorikawa security isn’t asking. They shoot and fill out the paperwork after.” She shrugged. “So I confirmed the layout matched the others, and I left. I didn’t poke. You don’t poke at Midorikawa.”
“And the one we’re here for.” She set this one flat in front of me and smoothed it with her palm.
BVF-TG-04 — WEST FARMING DISTRICT Standard facility, not elevated security, but only affiliated foot traffic, thanks to its isolation.Eleven years since the last major retrofit and visibly past schedule on the next. Foot patrols: thirty-one personnel total, cycling every twenty-two minutes.
One of the two overnight loading guards consistently breaks his rotation by ninety seconds to vape at the southeast loading dock, extending the southern service window to roughly twenty-three and a half minutes per cycle. The patrol partner has stopped flagging it.
I read down to the patrol numbers. “Huh, that’s neat, I guess?”
“He’s been at it long enough that the schedule has agreed to it,” Regina said. “Everyone adjusted, and now it’s just how the building just works at night. Standard security, isolated, so the only feet out there are feet that belong out there. It’s the oldest, the loneliest, and that’s the one.”
Natalya did one rotation in her chair and stopped at the same angle as before. “Obviously the fourth.”
I’d been about to agree, so the question came out before I’d fully asked it. “Why not the second? Soft service side and Hellboop already been there.”
“Too many people,” Natalya said.
“It’s a farm, not a—”
“Too many people,” she said again, “and I am not good with people.”
I blinked. Of every reason I’d expected, that one hadn’t been on the list. “What does that mean? You’re netrunning from—” I gestured at the wrong-colored space behind her. “—wherever that is. You won’t be in the building.”
She looked at Naiche.
“We’ll get to it,” Naiche said, not glancing up from the page.
Regina rescued the moment. “Anyway, yes, obviously the fourth, and I’ll spare you the suspense on why I’m so sure. I spent the next three days out there after the first pass, so when I say it’s the one, I’ve earned the opinion.”
“I wasn’t arguing,” I said. “I just wanted to hear why not the others, so I know what we’re walking away from.”
“Fair.” She fished the Clearwater note back out of the discard pile and held it up. “And honestly? If your whole problem weren’t that you can’t be seen, this one’s the easy day. You hit a showcase site, they cancel a week of tours, some schoolkids are sad, they post reels at Pulse, a regulator grumbles into a form. But you—” she put it back down “—you need to not exist out there. The showcase has too many eyes to not exist in front of. The lonely old farm has almost none. So.”
I nodded. “So. What do we have?”
Regina rocked her chair forward and got both elbows back on the wood.
“Easiest way in is the southern service corridor. Seven cameras, a handful of motion sensors, no surface dead zones, but my skill caught two thermal blind patches at the southwest corner where the array’s misaligned. Two arrays, slightly off true, leaning into the same wall and not seeing each other. So if you can dash through the one visible-light camera without panicking it—”
“Regina.” I dragged a hand down my face. “Did you have to—”
“Your name is literally Dash.”
She was already laughing. Naiche’s mouth corner moved. “Anyway,” Regina said, “one camera, visible light only. My skill didn’t trip it, so any rogue-type visible-spectrum cloak gets you through. That’s the door.”
She looked at me. “I can do that,” I said.
“Good. The access door’s a standard tumbler, swapped sometime in the last twenty-four months. Somebody at Bhavsar walked down the corridor, decided it needed a new lock, and bought the cheap one. If the blueprint is the same as in the second one, two flights down, is the germination floor entrance. Keycard, low-tier staff badge, standard Bhavsar issue. Replicable through the usual channels.”
Natalya rotated her chair and stopped at an angle. “Easy.”
“That’s me out,” Regina said. “Once you’re on the germination floor, you basically have the run of the building. Inside is a mess. Pipes everywhere, conduits everywhere, cheap overhead lights.”
Naiche slid the page into the discard pile. “Thank you, Regina. From here is the part Dash and I work out.”
“You’re welcome, Nailyboop.”
He put both hands flat on the wood and pulled a fresh page. “Germination floor is fully automated, sealed, climate-controlled. Seedlings spend about sixty hours under spectrum lighting and a nutrient feed before they ride up to the bays for human QC and transfer to the main growth halls.”
I snapped my fingers. “That’s our op!”
“Yes. We want the cycle to fail visibly enough that Bhavsar has to burn it down themselves. That means we contaminate the nutrient feed with something the seedlings drink without dying. They grow. The sensors stay happy. The seedlings just grow wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
“Whatever the chemist gives us. Could be color, could be malformation, could be a hundred other things. The point is that twelve to fifteen hours after the next QC pass, a human walks into the bay and sees a row of plants that look like a child drew them. Everything from that germination batch is suspect. Incinerate, sterilize, restart from a clean seed library.” He paused and couldn’t suppress a small smile. “And we have caused them a great deal of paperwork.”
“Paperwork, of course,” I said, and there was something satisfying about it.
Natalya leaned in. The angle didn’t match the rest of her body, and I had stopped trying to read it because I suspected she didn’t either.
“One problem,” she said. “Bhavsar runs an active netrunning connection from their orbital. Watching feeds, watching pressure, watching flow on the nutrient lines. The second anyone touches the device—” she pinched the air “—they know. There is no quiet version of the injection. Not without a runner on the other side eating their signal.”
I waited.
“That’s me. I have a skill that chews their monitoring. I can swallow a window long enough for Dashi to push the plunger. But I have to be near. Like, near. I cannot do this from home, kotě.”
“How near is near?”
“A few hundred meters. Less is better. Same block. Ugh.”
Naiche pulled another page in front of him. “We rent a car. Mobile rig. Park within range, you sit in it, you do the cover, we extract together.”
Natalya did the chair-rotation again, the full one this time.
“Ugh.”
“Sure,” I said.
Naiche slid the page onto the discard pile and pulled a fresh one. “Then we draft Natalya’s contract for the op, and—”
Regina sighed. The chair came forward, her boots came off stone, and she was on her feet before he finished the sentence. “Out. I do not need to be here for the boring half, and you do not need me for it. I have other contracts to close.”
Naiche did not argue.
Regina crossed to the door, opened it, and turned back with one hand on the handle. “Dash. Nice meeting you, nice working with you. Try to come back from the southern service corridor in one piece.”
“I’ll try.”
“Try harder.” She grinned, ducked out, and the door closed behind her.
Natalya rotated her chair. “Out, kotě. Going to queue something. Send me the contract when it is done. Naiche, don’t drag. Dash, don’t be stingy. We’ll talk about sols after I read it.”
The call cut off before we could acknowledge anything.
Naiche closed the cover of the holo-book. The light folded back into the spine. He squared the book against its twin, slid both an inch to clear his workspace, pulled a fresh page over, and clicked the pen.
“Contracts.” He drew a short line at the top of the page. “Van rental. Driver. Chemicals. Badge cloner. Four lines. Some are yours to source, some are mine.”
I sighed. “I have a friend who is a good driver. Can I ask her?”
He shrugged. “It is up to you to decide who you bring to your own op, Dash. I will draft the contract for whoever you name.”
“Then her. And I’ll ask Eddy about the chemicals and the badge cloner. He’s been good about parts before. Either he has them, or he knows who does.”
Naiche made two ticks down the margin. “Van?”
I ran through the people I knew with a van, or with a friend who had one. The list was alarmingly short. I shook my head.
He made a third mark and added a small annotation beside it I couldn’t read upside down. “I will look into it.” The pen capped. “One more thing. The moment the final plan is on paper, the System should present you the quest.”
“Got it.”
“And send me the budget for the van. I will need a number before I start making calls.”
I stood, picked the sword off the wall where it had been leaning, and slid it back into the scabbard. “I’ll ask Kallum.”
“Good.” He pulled a small card from the inside flap of his book and slid it across the wood. His handle, his hours, a holo-line. “Reach me on this when you have the number. Or before, if something comes up.”
“Thanks.”
We shook hands across the table.
I crossed to the door and let it close behind me.