Outer Olympus

Outer Olympus: Chapter 20

There was an extravagance to the parties of the nobility that set January Jade's stomach on edge. She was someone who had to spend a significant amount of her salary staying up to date on fashion trends simply to remain employed; she had to look her finest at all times or it would reflect poorly on her employer. But here, she could hardly walk a few feet without tripping over a dress worth more than her entire wardrobe. If she spilled a drink on someone's suit, she'd be in debt for the rest of her life. This was not a fashion show. The couture weren't the reason anyone was here, nor was the extravagant jewelry, or the fine art brought out on display; that was all just the baseline of an event like this. She was invisible amongst these people, who all somehow managed to know each other despite the fact that half of them had flown in from colonies on the other side of Rockwater if not neighboring star systems to attend the soiree. She was a secretary, so keeping her eye on the party was technically not in her job description, but what she was hired to do, legally speaking, didn't matter if the Magistrate simply gave her a task.

The grand hallway of the Magistrate's mansion was pulsing with the synthetic rhythms of Populi Rhodes, Rockwater's premier futurist-rebirth artist. They had managed to get her on short notice for only a million and a half credits. It was a style that had grown popular with Hegemony Loyalists in Outer Olympus after a war; music that promised from the might of the Hegemony's plasma cannons (the sounds of which were sampled liberally in Rhodes' work) a new, greater future would arrive. Played over the extensive sound system of the mansion, January could feel the sounds echoing in her bones. People danced to it, chatted over it, wined and dined and let the artist she had spent the past week desperately negotiating with fade into the background of their experience. She sighed, walking towards the catering table, as the track High Orbit Beam Cannon began playing.

There was food on the table, free for her to take, that she hadn't seen in years. Lamb chops. Steak, pork, all sorts of genuine meat, covered in rare spices and seasonings, next to wine vintages and champagne that purported to have been bottled all the way on the Hegemony's capital of High Olympia. She bit down onto a lamb chop, savouring the flavour. Livestock were too space inefficient to be cultivated on an agricultural colony, yielding maybe a fifth of the calories per acre of a staple crop like wheat or corn. This meant that meat either was grown on luxury colonies to be exported at exorbitant prices, or planetside, where there was more of a surplus of space with which to raise them. On Rockwater, however, all the farmland that might conceivably be used for this had been scorched to glass in the very orbital bombardment Populi Rhodes was singing about right now. Fire in the sky, the past will burn and die. Like Populi, January had lived on Rockwater through the bombardment, had seen the sky turn orange and green as plasma bolts had rained down on the riverbeds. She had also barely made it through the resulting famine. It was no wonder that Populi's music was more popular with those who had moved into the system after the war than those who were long term inhabitants. She took another bite. This lamb was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted.

Beside her, the cousin of Rockwater's planetary financial minister was talking about potential tax breaks to give a Count's son's crossball team if they relocate to Shaharazad. An executive from the Stylus Shipyards was complaining about the cost of aluminum to a real estate magnate who never had given much thought to what the homes on his estates were made out of. A clerk from the Ministery of the Past talked up the artwork to some socialites who wanted to look cultured. It was so hot in here, and January found it hard to breathe in the crowd. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Marcus levitating his glass of punch to impress some nobles, looking thoroughly bored out of his mind and hiding it behind concentrating on his powers. He caught her eye, and she sighed, now knowing she would not be able to avoid talking to him. She grabbed some champagne and made her way over.

"Hey, January," he said, freeing himself from playing out party tricks for people he'd never meet before and he hoped he'd never met again, "enjoying yourself?"

"About as much as you are," she replied, and they shared a little grin in the noisy room. It was maybe the first time the two had ever felt they had something in common.

"I was never too good at the telepathy or sensing stuff part of being a Lightbringer," Marcus began, and January raised an eyebrow, "but I know I just sensed another mystic nearby. Do you know who that might be?" January shrugged.

"There are so many people here. Someone else might have brought a Lightbringer advisor. Not too uncommon at these types of things. I'll ask around."

"Thanks, Jan," Marcus smiled, as a hundred feet below, the mystic he sensed stepped out of a hacked military railcar.

The railcar infiltration had been simple, with the level of control Taroh had of the internal infrastructure of the line. It was a blisteringly fast hover train, moving between the stripes of the station in under a minute through "underground" lines that appeared as panel edges in the massive glass sections between the stripes. The hard part, Taroh had said, was not getting on the train, nor moving it to their destination, but making it not sound anyone's alarms that a train was moving. Unlike the many other pedestrian railcars that were one of the primary forms of transportation on Maintenance Six, the military railcar wasn't on a regular schedule; it moved as needed, immediately when needed, and so any unscheduled trips would be immediate evidence of a security breach. While Taroh could theoretically make the train they were on invisible to the computers, the machine was huge and loud, so anyone approximate to it at any point in its path would immediately notice it and spoil the whole operation. Th question then, was what excuse to put into the database for why the train was moving that wouldn't cause anyone to investigate further? It had been Viola's suggestion in the end to simply disguise it as a patrol transfer for the party; nobody would pay that close attention to the movements of four more enforcers to notice none had arrived as promised.

Rune was the first off of the train, moving quickly from the doors to behind an ornate pillar in the station to keep the security cameras' eyes off her. Taroh and Geode identified the cameras from a distance guiding her as she moved. Taroh had prepared dozens of his override tools for this heist, but Rune could use them in a way that he never had; she threw the tiny little gizmo forward, reached out a hand, and telekinetically guided it into place on the camera she was targeting. Repeated a few times, and she in minutes had accomplished what would have taken Geode and Taroh together half an hour; complete control of the platform's surveillance. They nodded at each other; phase two was accomplished. From here, they'd split into three groups.

Viola would take to the floor of the party, blending in with the crowd in disguise as some rich businessman's pampered daughter. She'd pick pockets, overhear rumours, and attempt to find the Archetemy Chalice, then regroup with the others to figure out a retrieval plan. It was the part of the mission with the highest chance of exposure, but Viola was confident in her ability to blend in, and even Geode accepted she'd be in her element on the floor of a party.

Geode, on the other hand, would be moving to secure any possible other escape routes; tending to the garage, footpaths, hotwiring cars for escape or to cause distractions later as needed. If everything went right, Geode's role would be superfluous, but contingency planning was a crucial element of any high-risk operation.

Rune and Taroh would seize control of internal security through a security flaw they had detected in the blueprints they had stolen; all of the actual computers that handled the building's security were stored in a separate room from the actual guard post, so nobody had their physical eyes on the computers. A combination of picked locks, crawling through vents, and telekinetic brute force should be enough to find their way inside, at which point Taroh could work his magic. With security under control, the chalice located, they'd nab it, return to whichever point of exfiltration they had chosen, and be on their merry way. Wordlessly, they made their separate ways into the mansion.